09:39 – I just made a pot of Earl Grey tea. Our highs over the next few days are to be around 18C, with lows around 10C. That’s cool enough to be drinking tea.
The other night I tried to play a YouTube video. It worked fine, except there was no sound. At first, I though it was just me. But then I tried with two different browsers on my system and on Barbara’s. None of them had sound on YouTube, although sound worked fine on everything else. As it turns out, the problem is YouTube’s. They’ve screwed things up, and there are numerous complaints about it all over the web. Each time I start a new video, the sound level in the YouTube player is turned down to zero. It’s easy enough to fix for that video, but the fix is not persistent. YouTube says they’re working on it.
We’re in pretty good shape on kit inventory, so I’m devoting some time to working on the earth science kit manual. I’m going to design it so that it can be used for a middle-school level earth & space science lab course or as a high-school level physical geology and astronomy lab course. I already have samples of rock, mineral, and fossil specimens on the way in, and I hope we’ll be able to ship the first batch of 30 or 60 kits in time for summer session 2014.
I had a friend I visited regularly in England, who—on the hottest day of the year—would observe tea time with homemade shortbread, and declare, “There’s nothing like a good cup of hot tea on a warm day.”
I thought I was the only one with YouTube sound problems; it started happening when I was running them in Chrome and then in FF, which I could re-set OK. About a week now with this. I had come to the conclusions that it wasn’t my sound, my browsers or my internet connection so it must be YouTube.
51 here this morning and gorgeous. We had some kind of storm reside blow through here over the past 36 hours, with winds gusting to 50MPH and horizontal torrential downpours. Turns out that all the emergency response vehicles and personnel yesterday was for a woman presumed in the water after her sailboat capsized. She had made it to shore on her own but her husband didn’t see her and dialed 911 and then went out in a rowboat to look for her. The water yesterday was very rough and choppy, with whitecaps and surf on the shore and no one should have been out in anything smaller than a big-ass motorboat or a schooner. Allegedly she is an experienced sailboat operator but what prompted her to be out there yesterday boggles the mind. I thought maybe people not from around here, but she lives in town.
Wow, Dave, thanks for the Linux Mint advice. I installed last night and I must say, it is very impressive. Ubuntu has become very minimalist, installing hardly any software other than Thunderbird, Firefox, a minimalist Libre Office, plus audio and video players. Mint, on the other hand, installs Gimp, Audacity, Pidgin, Skype, full Libre Office, and just about every tool I need except video editing.
In Ubuntu, I spent about a half-hour trying to connect to other computers on the local network. Never got to first base. With Mint, I clicked on the Network icon, and immediately saw what was really out there, and successfully connected and transferred files. Disk management that I previously berated? There’s a thing in the tools called “Disk Manager” which shows all connected drives and USB storage, partitions and the ability to change them, formatting info and ability to format, and how much data is on each drive. Wow. I cannot believe Ubuntu is so worthless comparatively.
Mint uses a desktop system called Cinnamon, and so far, no problem modifying the type so I can read it without a magnifying glass. It handles that in an entirely different way than Gnome and Unity, and so far, it has not left any tiny, unreadable print anywhere. I have wanted to get away from M$ for a long time, and I am pretty sure this distro will do it. The look and mechanics are very similar to XP, and IMO, that is what Linux should be building on.
I have never understood this crap that all OS’es must be the same across all platforms and that tiny screens should overrule desktop OS’es. My car does not work like my washing machine, and I can cope just fine. In fact, my Smartphone has Android and my computers are mostly Windows with Linux creeping in. I have no trouble using either—although the Android fails on many fronts. It refuses to connect automatically to any Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, and there are no settings I can find to tell it to do that. One forum I mistakenly asked about that, told me to just write an app to make it do that.
“I just made a pot of Earl Grey tea. Our highs over the next few days are to be around 18C, with lows around 10C. That’s cool enough to be drinking tea.”
Any time of day, any temperature is good for tea. (Even prancer’s tea.) It’s one of the things that goes well with spicy Indian food, along with yoghurt and (IIRC) cucumber.
Which reminds me, I think I should go off and make a mug of Dilmah. You say you make a pot. Just for yourself? Or does Colin like some too? A large pot of tea might be too much even for me.
The thing that bothers me about Youtube is that they’ve found a way to stop downloads of songs from working. You have to play it from the site. Download Helper used to allow you to download and save stuff from Youtube but it no longer works consistently.
Yes, I make a whole pot (12 cups) for myself. On very cold days, I’ll make two or three pots over the course of a day.
As to music downloads, I assume you’re using Windows. I haven’t had any problem with Linux grabbing the whole video or just the audio from YouTube.
“Open Letter”
http://xkcd.com/1274/
As usual, freaking awesome!
So what if they shut down 17% of the USA Federal Government and nobody noticed?
Yep, using Wndows XP. There seems to be an arms race going on between Download Helper and Youtube. The latter want me to d/l the music every time, I want to save the stuff I like. I hate them.
That’s a lot of tea. You’re more civilised than I thought, I thought you were a 10 litre a day Coke man. I just make individual mugs of tea using tea bags. Four per day would usually be my maximum.
Don’t know if you all saw this: “Roll Over Plan: Treasury Needed to Pay Off Record $7.5T in Maturing Debt in FY 2013, Issued $8.3T New Debt; Increased Net Debt $777B”
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/roll-over-plan-treasury-needed-pay-record-75t-maturing-debt-fy-2013
“The Treasury’s medium- and short-term low-interest notes and bills accounted for about $9,278,245,000,000—or 80 percent—of the government’s $11,577,400,000,000 debt held by the public.”
I am fascinated by how much of the debt is in low interest tbills. This means to me that should the Fed lose control over the USA interest rates, the accompanying rise in the cost of financing the debt will spiral out of payable means quickly. Very quickly.
And, I guess my question is, can the Fed lose control over the USA interest rates? My answer is yes, given external forces.
No, I seldom drink more than two liters of Coke a day, and I stop drinking it in the afternoon and switch over to uncaffeinated Sprite. Up until maybe ten years ago, caffeine didn’t bother me, so I’d drink regular Coke right up until bedtime. Of course, I used to consider a three-liter bottle of Coke a convenient single-serving size. Literally.
In theory, there’s no way the fed could lose control of interest rates. They can simply loosen or tighten money to put the rates where they want them. In practice, that freedom is obviously not absolute. If they loosen (or tighten) too much, the markets will take that into account.
Of course, it’s not just the fed that can create money. Your local bank does it every time they lend money that’s not backed by a time deposit. The real answer is to eliminate the fed and eliminate fractional-reserve banking.
I was thinking about the situation where somebody did a fire sale on USA securities. Say, dump a trillion dollars worth on the market. That would cause the USA interest rates to zoom, possibly temporarily.
Only if the federal government didn’t buy up the securities as fast as they were offered. In that case, the price of the bonds would plummet, thereby increasing the yield on *those* bonds. It would have no direct effect on the prices (and therefore the yields) on newly issued bonds, except that investors would prefer to buy the lower-priced old bonds rather than the newly-issued ones because the effective yield on the old ones would be higher. All the feds would need to do to elimate that increase in interest rate is buy up those older bonds as fast as they came on the market, using newly created dollars. Long-term, that would increase true interest rates because the market factors in inflation, although usually not at anything like the true rate.
I’m using the “Video Downloader Pure 1.97.7” firefox
add-on to download / capture YouTube videos as either
“flv” or “mp4” files. Then I can use the Windows Live
Movie Maker software that came with my Windows 7
system to convert it to a DVD to share with others.
Last one I did was “The Host” (Stephenie Meyer) …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyTVmYHyBYM
FASCINATING SciFi movie !!! Check it out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Host_%28novel%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Host_%282013_film%29
Sam
I love living in the Great State of Texas: “All-glass restrooms in Texas town up for national award”
http://blog.chron.com/thetexican/2013/10/all-glass-restrooms-in-texas-town-up-for-national-award/
“Public restrooms are usually ugly,” says Maxwell. “These are like art pieces.”
The “rest room” capital of the world is Turkey. You have to pay to go in but they are real works of art. Or at least the ones tourists use are.
“No, I seldom drink more than two liters of Coke a day, and I stop drinking it in the afternoon and switch over to uncaffeinated Sprite. Up until maybe ten years ago, caffeine didn’t bother me, so I’d drink regular Coke right up until bedtime. Of course, I used to consider a three-liter bottle of Coke a convenient single-serving size. Literally.”
Even in summer I’d rarely drink more than three litres of cola a day. What’s wrong with caffeine? I have endless arguments with one of my relatives about the supposed evils of coke, and diet soft drinks.
I prefer drinking straight from a 1.25 litre bottle, or pouring it in to a mug. A 2 litre bottle is just too unwieldy, and I’ve never seen a three litre one.
There haven’t been 3-liter bottles of name-brand softdrinks on the supermarket shelves around here for probably 10 years. Some of the house-brand/generics are still sold in 3-liter bottles. I think the main problem was that 3-liter bottles don’t fit many refrigerators very well.
Wonder where your tax dollars are spent?
Our public tax monies fund academic research—often related to science, medical, and similar research. Then more public money is paid to research journals for the “privilege” of publishing that research, which journals are—in turn—sold by the privately-owned publishers to other academic and research institutions for peer review and educational purposes of keeping up with current research. It is big business. Reed Elsevier made over $1 billion in 2011, and has 35% profit margins (what TV stations used to have before cable TV entered the scene and pushed them down to grocery store margins).
Academics are now balking in big numbers at this. My son is on the periphery of one such ongoing battle, as he works in academics. A couple of government initiatives supported ‘open-sourcing’ this information, but Elsevier spent more than $1 million in 2012 lobbying your legislators and mine against permitting such free access to research.
Here is an article that explains the situation, and shows just how our legislators are being influenced to do things that will force us all to be paying more in taxes to academic institutions to buy the journals (“University of California San Francisco Library spends 85 percent of their collection budget on journal subscriptions….”) and for research funding.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/03/03/1633451/reed-elsevier-lobbying-academic-publishing/
I am beginning to believe that there just is no way to stop our legislators from perpetuating this kind of money-sucking crap.
Shoot, shovel, shut up.
I have endless arguments with one of my relatives about the supposed evils of coke, and diet soft drinks.
The problem with most sodas is the sugar. For most people, the carbs are harmful.
Dentists will tell you that the acidity in soft drinks is worse for your teeth than the sugar. Canned/Bottled tea can be bad too as they add citric acid to it for “tartness.”
I gave up soda completely about 15 months ago and don’t really miss it at all. I keep a pitcher of Luzianne fresh made sun tea (unsweetened) in the fridge and love it. I drink hot tea when the weather cools and puts me in the mood for it. Outside of tea and water, the only other things I drink contain alcohol. 🙂
Thanks Sam, I’ll have a look at that.
In “sodas” I drink mainly diet drinks, such as Coke Zero, Pepsi Max, and the like. I like apple, orange, pineapple and grape juice but don’t drink nearly as much of that as I used to. I asked my endocrinologist about it last week, he said that fruit juice was potentially worse for teeth than just about anything else. Perhaps rinsing the mouth with hydrogen hydroxide after would help.
I’m not overly fond of coffee, I average one cappuccino per day, but I really like tea, even during heatwaves. Not really fond of iced tea.
I have good old Typhoo English Breakfast every day at breakfast. Sometimes at tea time, too (16:00 for those who don’t know tea time). I used to have to import my own Typhoo, but the Meijer grocery chain in the Midwest now carries it. The Typhoo made for Canada is not the same as the British stuff from Merseyside.
Cola I do not drink except with Chinese food, or when I am doing voice work. An early speech teacher encouraged us to drink cola as it “coats the throat” as she said, and keeps the throat from getting dry while talking. I have found that to be quite true—Coke and Pepsi only.
Chuck, EB is for little old ladies with blue rinses in their hair. Is there something you’ve been hiding from us? 🙂
“Tea”, as a meal, meant the evening meal, served between 5 and 7 PM. Lunch was lunch and dinner could be the midday meal or late afternoon/early evening, depending on context.
There are times when I really need something with fiz, especially when I have a throat that sorta gunky with mucus. Other times it’s gotta be milk, or fruit juice. Tea is welcome at any time. So is water.
My endocrinologist recommended last week that I investigate getting a soda fountain. I think that’s what he called it. You fill some sort of container with water, get a compressed air?/CO2 capsule and attach it. Press the lever and out comes fizzy water. I haven’t seen one of them for 40 years.
When I visited Austria in 1995 I was caught out when I bought bottled water. I wasn’t aware that Austrians really like fizzy water, and didn’t carry the bottle carefully enough. When I opened it water went everywhere, much to the tour guide’s amusement.
My endocrinologist recommended last week that I investigate getting a soda fountain.
Look into SodaStream to create one bottle at a time. You can exchange the CO2 containers at a wide range of stores now.
Acidity in drink – it must depend on your teeth. My wife and I both drank a lot of soda. The dentist never had a problem with my teeth, but told my wife that here fillings were now all higher that the tooth surfaces, because the soda was dissolving her tooth enamel. So we’ve made an effort to change to mineral water, except with meals.
Acidity in drink – it must depend on your teeth.
It is more dependent on your mouth chemistry and youth years. I am constantly fighting plaque yet my wife has almost none. Same basic diet. She also has cavities, where I have few. Same diet.
What is different are our growing up years. That is when teeth are formed and my dentist says that the environment when you are really young, like embryo to about 10 years has a marked impact on how your teeth behave in adulthood.
Both of my grandparents wore false teeth for as far back as I can remember. They lost their teeth probably in their late 40’s. With the technology of today there are few reasons that anyone needs false teeth.
Mum got false teeth as a teenager in the Thirties. Lately, the dental hygienist I see has been congratulating me on the comparatively good condition of my teeth. I’m more careful now than I used to be, and use Pixters to clean off plaque before it becomes calculus.
“Tea”, as a meal, meant the evening meal, served between 5 and 7 PM.
That is what my British relatives call “High Tea”. Tea time is at 16:00, and my aunt said there used to be ladies who wheeled tea trolleys through London Transport, where she worked, and provided everyone with tea. Always seemed a weird time to me, as she finished work at 17:00. But, of course, supper in England was not until 19:00 or later, so I guess one needs something to tide them over.
“Elevensies” was coffee at 11:00. You can see both taking place in many British series—like “Lipstick on Your Collar”.
Lunch was lunch and dinner could be the midday meal or late afternoon/early evening, depending on context.
Same here in the US, although most Europeans do not understand how dinner could be either at noon or evening. However, a reference to Sunday dinner around here, always means the noon meal on Sunday. Practice in the US is to eat something quick for lunch, then have the big meal in the evening. It is the opposite in the places I have been in Europe, with people taking whatever time it takes at noon for a decent-sized meal, then hardly anything for supper. Our family had mostly soup, bread, and fruit for supper in Germany. I have never been able to go back to the US practice of the big meal at supper. I eat my main meal at noon, unless work prevents eating lunch—which is another thing Americans suffer, but Europeans would never put up with.
Chuck, EB is for little old ladies with blue rinses in their hair.
If it does not have orange pekoe in it, it is not tea, IMO; it is just colored water.
I have never understood the attraction of fizz in drinks—nor ice. May be my own constitution, but carbonated beverages give me gastric pains; they certainly do not aid my health in any way. Back when I first started spending time in the UK, Coke had hardly any fizz, and that was great. They have upped that to the same as the US over the years. Why anyone would willingly inject a gas of any kind into the stomach is beyond me. But in Germany, if you ask for water—which you will pay for—the norm is that they will deliver carbonated water, unless you specifically ask for “stille Wasser”.
Same for ice. I have NEVER seen any sober person drink refrigerated or iced drinks continuously until their thirst is quenched. It is impossible for a normal person to do. They sip for hours because they cannot drink it continuously that cold. Liquid at room temperature (around 70F/21C) is still about 30F/17C colder than body temperature. And Americans call beer or wine at that temp “warm”!
Tell anybody serving you around here that you want a cola with no ice, and they will NEVER deliver it to you like that. It just isn’t in their psyche that anyone could EVER want a drink without ice. Makes them really mad when I return it and demand that they give it to me without ice. Even McD gets it wrong around here over 50% of the time, even though the little order screen says “NO ICE”.
I do have to admit that I took some glee while in Germany, over the fact that you simply cannot get ice in most restaurants in Germany. They have no need to even make ice cubes—and most do not. At all. Americans visiting us were just astounded that life could possibly exist without ice. And no one living there would ever use their tiny freezers to make or store ice.
First time I drank room temperature soft drink was in France in 1990. I asked for a Coke and was given a can off the shelf, unrefrigerated. If you think I was incredulous you’re dead right. I don’t usually add ice to refrigerated drinks but accept it if it is served that way.
Beer, milk, water, soft drink, fruit juice don’t have to be served ice cold but I do like them cool. Once, when my parents were visiting, mum wanted to free up some space in the fridge and asked if she could remove a six-pack of beer stubbies. My father and I were outraged, and I told mum there was nothing so disgusting as warm beer, and my father wholeheartedly agreed with me. (She was a teetotaler so she didn’t know.)
There’s a soft drink here called Solo, and years ago the low/no fizz aspect was trumped in ads: “Low on fizz so you can get it down fast”. I don’t care for soft drink without fizz because I’m used to it now, but low fizz is okay. Just about everyone I know likes refrigerated drinks (except that room temperature water is okay) and I can tell you that after mowing the lawn on a hot summer day a couple of refrigerated VBs don’t touch the sides on the way down. Lots of people don’t like ice in their drinks at restaurants because they feel that they’re being cheated. I tend to agree.
I do have to admit that I took some glee while in Germany, over the fact that you simply cannot get ice in most restaurants in Germany.
Yeh, shocked me my first time in Germany. But on my last trip I found more places that would give you ice. Some I chuckled at as there would only be one cube in the glass. I also had to be careful when asking for water as I don’t like the carbonated stuff.
All of our exchange students have converted to wanting ice in their drinks. They come over here not wanting ice and by the time they leave we have ruined them and they enjoy ice in their drink. Eventually they convert back to the German way when they return.
What they do not like in Germany is that refills are not free. They all enjoyed that over here and were quite astounded at the practice.
I have NEVER seen any sober person drink refrigerated or iced drinks continuously until their thirst is quenched.
I can easily do that when I am really thirsty. I can down 16 ounces of ice cold drink, just above freezing, without pausing. Some of that comes from my training in the military where we were given two minutes to eat. You learn to not swallow, just open the throat and shovel or pour. Teeth are only for eliminating any sharp corners.
“…my training in the military where we were given two minutes to eat. You learn to not swallow, just open the throat and shovel or pour. Teeth are only for eliminating any sharp corners.”
Roger that; in boot camp we had a whole fifteen minutes, but the time spent in line and finding a table to sit at (you couldn’t sit until four people were there) was included, so yeah, about two minutes to shovel it all in. Overseas on base I took my time but in the field was always a rush. My assignment in northern Kalifornia was the lap of luxury; took all the time we wanted and the cooks gave us the run of the chow hall.
in boot camp we had a whole fifteen minutes, but the time spent in line and finding a table to sit at (you couldn’t sit until four people were there)
I remember it well. And you all had to leave the table at the same time and no talking. I made that mistake, just once, by asking for someone to hand me the salt. The DI dumped the entire container of salt on my head and down my shirt (front and back). Good thing I did not ask for sugar which was a much larger container.
Amazing how things that happened 44 years ago stick with you. Sgt. Zuck you are an asshole.
Did you have to do “square meals? Moving yoir fork only horizontally or vertically, with right angle turns? Or was that idiocy reserved for officer training?
Even as an ucciffer I was rushed in the chow hall. Except for jump school, there we got an hour and all the chow you could shovel in. You needed it.
Did you have to do “square meals?
No. That was only reserved for the service academies, freshmen at the academies. Tradition I guess. Which really means the seniors imposed it on the freshmen because the seniors had to do it while they were freshmen. Supposed to instill discipline. Stupidity in my opinion, treating people like children.
After exiting the chow hall we formed up at-ease outside and were supposed to study our little recruit manuals. Then when the DI’s came out, we hadda snap to and then get marched somewhere. One time on the way back to the barracks the half-Apache-half-Mexican DI said “I got a leetle sooprise for you girls…” All our uniforms were in a big pile on the first floor of the barracks; we had thirty minutes to get ours out and on the racks, hangars spaced one inch apart and all Inspected By tags removed, because he allegedly found one in someone’s pocket. Amazingly we did it and thus learned the values of teamwork, accuracy and speed.
Another day the senior DI, a mean-ass redneck and Korean War vet from Georgia had us fall out repeatedly in all our different uniforms all afternoon in 100-degree heat and 200% humidity because we hadn’t fallen out into formation fast enough earlier. After we finally met his specs, he had us fall out in our PT gear for more hours at the drill pad with calisthenics and running. You could throw up while running but were not allowed to stop running.
Assistant DI: SSgt. Pedro Ramirez
Senior DI: TSgt. Thomas Pike
Overall Son-of-a-Bitch NCO: MSgt. Alfonso Rocamontes
Oh yeah I remember those fuckers like it was yesterday.