07:58 – UPS showed up yesterday with two cases of 15 mL centrifuge tubes, a case of 50 mL centrifuge tubes, a case of test tubes, and a case of 24-well reaction plates. Those were the only items we lacked for building more kits, and with what we have on hand, that’s enough for another 120+ kits.
I just had Colin out for his morning sniff. Every morning, as soon as he finishes his breakfast, he insists on going out and sniffing the front yard thoroughly, presumably to discover what had been out there overnight. I’ve often thought we should have trained him as a tracking dog. He’d have been an excellent one. Border Collies are often used for tracking and search & rescue. Their noses aren’t quite as sensitive as a bloodhound’s, but sensitive enough. BCs are also much, much smarter than bloodhounds and are capable of independent action.
Wow, the website is a LOT faster today. Somebody must have rebooted the server.
Yup, very fast compared to the past few days.
31 and overcast here today with no wind, for a change.
Home mail deliveries stopping in Canukistan…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-12-12/canada-to-phase-out-home-mail-delivery-to-cut-big-losses/5151336
The future of postal services will be interesting indeed. Here, they seem to be trying desperate measures: You walk into a post office, and you think you’ve walked into an office supply store. I find it actually kind of irritating, having to weave through the displays to get to the darned counter.
We still get a fair amount of physical mail, but it is decreasing monotonically. Get rid of glossy catalogs, which will happen all by itself over the next few years, and what’s left? Mostly official documents, bank statements (but those are increasingly electronic), plus a smattering of random stuff. It won’t be long before home delivery of mail won’t be worth it anywhere.
I’ve taken a Post Office Box in southern Adelaide (redirecting my mail from my home here) and gave them my e-mail address. My first e-mail from them was for a pizza company they thought I’d be interested in. Sheesh.
Most of the mail we get is from charitable organizations asking my mother to donate.
Last Christmas I got about a dozen requests to donate to charities, some very obscure. I strongly suspect that one of the two charities I willingly support traded my details. If I knew which I’d cut them dead. Hasn’t happened this year.
I think something may be going on with the volume of mail my mother gets from charities. Although she gets it year round, not just at Christmas.
I really don’t understand why charities, churches, hospitals, private schools and colleges, and other “non-profits” are treated any differently from any other organization. Why should I, for example, be forced to subsidize the RCC by paying higher taxes so that they don’t have to pay taxes? Or why should Dave, for example, have to pay higher taxes so that an atheist non-profit doesn’t have to pay taxes? If we must have taxes, they should be applied equally.
The Canada Post decision will really only affect the elderly. I get very little actual mail. My Municipal taxes and my water bill being about the only two that are important, and I can pay those online. Everything else I get electronically. I get a few packages delivered, but I would be happier if they could just email me and let me know I can pick it up.
I had a bit of a shock when I heard that Deepak Chopra was the President and CEO of Canada Post. Then I realized that Deepak Chopra is probably as common as John Smith is. Still, the end result seems the same. The patient dies from alternatives that don’t actually work.
The US will be interesting. Mail started out as a losing proposition in the US, and it may become so again, but is mandated in the US Constitution (for whatever that is currently worth). It should be a cold day in International Falls before the US Post Office ceases deliveries.
I really don’t understand why charities, churches, hospitals, private schools and colleges, and other “non-profits” are treated any differently from any other organization.
That battle is starting here in Houston. The city of Houston has a new flood improvement tax XXX fee that all entities have to pay regardless of their status. Harris County is refusing to pay the flood improvement tax but is contributing an equivalent amount to the program. Several churches and the medical center are refusing to pay and Houston is thinking about suing them.
The flood improvement tax is a considerable amount of money over the three million inhabitants of Houston. They have already started on building $300 million of flood improvements including retention ponds and widening bayous. The flooding in Houston has been getting significantly worse due to overbuilding and land subsidence (water, oil and gas removal from the ground).
I must use computers for a lot more than most people, because I run into problems that other people around me just cannot comprehend. I use Gimp a lot, for various things, but am not a power-user like Ray or a graphics person would be. Since the 1970’s, I have been making my own yearly appointment calendar, using a combination of tools. One of the things I come up with is a 3 page Word document that chronologically lists everyone’s birthday, anniversaries, all holidays where the immediate family has relatives—US, Canada, Germany, and Belgium,—and other relevant stuff and deadlines.
Before computers, I took those pages, reduced them with a photocopier, pasted them side-by-side landscape, then photocopied again so everything for the year was on one easy-to-read page. When Gimp appeared, I started using it to manipulate the images into that side-by-side arrangement. Well, during the past year, Gimp did a major upgrade, and without testing, I unthinkingly upgraded to v2.8. Problem is that this year, nothing I did would allow my creation to be printed the full 11 inch width of a landscape page. It would expand only to a width of 8.5 inches.
Some googling indicated lots of other people were having this same problem, but they described the problem as not printing a full page in landscape. They had not realized it was something to do with not being able to pass 8.5 inches dimension on landscape page width.
I found a workaround: print to PDF and use the printer properties dialog to expand the image by 130%. But still not sure if the image quality would be better if I printed directly from Gimp to paper, I discovered that Gimp had advanced to v2.8.10 for Windows. So figuring I had nothing to lose, I upgraded. That fixed the problem. Not sure where the limitation was, as there are several places where dimension can be adjusted, but in File > Page Setup, I could—for the first time—correctly enter 11 inches as the width and 8.5 as the print height. Finally, I could print directly from Gimp to printer in the correct dimensions.
Bottom line is that I cannot discern a difference in image sharpness from the expanded PDF print and the Gimp direct to printer. But I do recommend an upgrade to Gimp v2.8.10 if you use it in Windows.
By the way, in getting the Word document to an image layer in Gimp, I have found that only printing to the Microsoft Image Writer yields acceptable high-resolution results. Other means are just totally NFG.
The flooding in Houston has been getting significantly worse due to overbuilding and land subsidence (water, oil and gas removal from the ground).
The building out West, which is “uphill” from the rest of Houston is a major culprit. The fee is long overdue. My house went from being in the 500 yr floodplain to the 100 and my flood insurance went very high. Fortunately, one of the first projects completed is a retention pond/park on Braes Bayou. They bought a bunch of run-down apartments that were falling apart and mostly abandoned plus a proposed landfill site that was having approval problems (due to being in a floodplain) and did a demolish and excavation. The land is now a park – that will be flooded at the next major storm. A win/win, IMHO. The landfill will be built farther out.
@Chuck, regarding the printing problem. I never print from GIMP, not because of any particular bugs, but it just always struck me as awkward. I just save an image to a file (usually png), open my word processor, set up the document, insert the picture and print. Word processors (in my case, LibreOffice) have good control of printing, margins, etc.
It’s a couple of extra steps, but worth it for having better control over the document setup.
My house went from being in the 500 yr floodplain to the 100 and my flood insurance went very high. Fortunately, one of the first projects completed is a retention pond/park on Braes Bayou. They bought a bunch of run-down apartments that were falling apart and mostly abandoned plus a proposed landfill site that was having approval problems (due to being in a floodplain) and did a demolish and excavation. The land is now a park – that will be flooded at the next major storm. A win/win, IMHO. The landfill will be built farther out.
Yes, my office property in Fort Bend County just got remapped from the 500 year flood plain to the 100 year flood plane. They raised the flood plain by four feet last summer. Many of the subdivisions in Fort Bend County had to have their levees raised plus the Royal Lakes subdivision now needs a levee where they did not before. They are in total denial about it.
My son lives off Hiram Clarke at Main (90) street. His house is new and was built on land raised by four feet. His street does not flood but Hiram Clarke floods so he cannot leave or go home during major rain storms. Those old neighborhoods down Hiram Clarke have always flooded badly since we lived there back in the early 1970s. They are widening Sims bayou finally to reduce the flooding in that area.
And we lived one block off Braes Bayou at 610 in the middle 1970s. A year after we moved in 1977, that house got flooded with three feet of water in it.
And yes, the idea is good as long as they spend the flood fee money on flood improvements. All improved areas need water retainment ponds sized to handle 15 inches of rain in a day in this area of the world.