20111105

• Andy Rooney has died.  :-(
• There is a product called Boogie wipes.
• One suggested method for trying to get data off a dying hard drive is to stick it in the freezer.

20111104

• The musician Kenna had trouble getting his career started because record label execs and others in the business loved him but focus groups didn't.
• St. Martha, St. Barnabus, and St. Pius have had to merge their gradeshcools because of enrollment and costs.
• A core i5 with 16gB of RAM benchmarks nicely.  5+ on Cinemark.

I feel like this day's posting needs lots of side notes, so here we go.  Probably because his music is hard to catagorize, but he's recorded 2 albums and been nominated for a Grammy, so he's doing OK.  How did I not know this?  I went to grade school at St. Martha.  My desktop at home scored a 2.2 on the same benchmark.

20111103

• There is a device known as a jiggleometer for measuring how much someone squirms in a chair.
• When making jambalaya, you must over season the sauce so that when you add the rice the flavor is in balance.
• The Greek government's plan to hold a referendum on accepting more bailout money seems to have been scrapped.

20111102

• There are a few species of mosquito that don't need to drink blood in order to lay eggs.
• My insurance paid for almost 90% of my hospital stay!!  (Hopefully there isn't some ancillary bill that comes in a few days from now to spoil my mood.)
• UN predictions for world population in the year 2100 range from between 5.5 billion and 14 billion.  (Note that the 5.5 billion is 1.5 billion lower than today, so that would indicate some sort of disaster should that end up being the case.)

20111101

• It is hard to restart something you stop doing.
• Kim Kardashian filed for divorce after 72 days of marriage.
• Roger Waters is scheduled to play the Yum Center on June 10, 2012.

On a side note, I stopped updating this blog when I landed in the hospital for a 4 day night stay with a nasty skin infection.  That plus another 13 days of IV antibiotics at home cleared up the infection.  It wasn't that I didn't learn anything in October, but after the hospital stay, I took a break from blogging about it.

20110922

• Danny Sugarman died of lung cancer in 2005.
• Erin Morgenstern's book The Night Circus is selling well and drawing comparisons to Harry Potter.  http://erinmorgenstern.com/tag/night-circus/
• A judge ruled that Bloomberg didn't break any laws by not promoting women who took time off for maternity leave.

20110921

• The Band REM is calling it quits
• The Devil's daughter (Not really, but actress Elizabeth Harnois played her on Point Pleasant.) is joining the cast of CSI.  (On the other hand, she's Eckley's daughter, so it might still apply.)
• Dermatitis is really gross, just trust me on this one.

20110920

• There is an apparant bug in DB2 9.7 that allows you to trim an integer, which also casts the result to a string in the process.
• The 6 Star Wars movies on Blu-ray have been released at a price of $89.
• The Empress of China has changed ownership, and it looks like it will offer more buffet style dining.  Very sad :-(

20110919

• My chess rating went back over 1600 for finishing tied for 3rd in the under 1600 section of the Louisville Open.  (I had expected it to go to 1595, not 1603.)
• Warhammer is up to the 8th edition of it's rulebook.  (I think I have a copy of the 5th edition.)
• One way to look at the Greek debt crisis is not that it's a Greek failure to budget, but a market failure in loaning money to Greece as if they were as dependable as Germany.

20110918

• According to the graffitti in the men's restroom of the Bearnos pizza on Dixie, the devil was there on 5/1/2011.
• There is no 3rd St. exit if you're heading west on 64.
• According to a founding member of the Tallinn, the organization formed to try to restore order to Afghanistan and never managed to relinquish power to an official Government.

20110917

• Niel Stephenson has a new book out, Reamde, but the plot description sounds silly.
• Bearnos pizza on Dixie is now open Sundays.
• My ability to pick out shades of color is pretty good, I got a score of 7 (0 is perfect) on a test of 100 shades of color.

20110916

• One of my friends is quitting the regular job to run her publishing company full time.
• A Kentucky Marine Corps member is the first living recipient of a Medal of Honor since the Viet Nam war.
• There was a firefight between members of the Syrian and Lebanese armed forces when Syrian forces crossed the border recently.

20110915

• Using supercomputers, researchers have shown diamond is the hardest possible form of carbon, but some researchers working on this believe that carbon nitride compounds have the capacity to surpass diamond hardness.
• David Jones has offered $10,000,000 to start an East End bridge now.
• A dam removal project on the Elwha river in Washington has started. (Although the removal was 1st approved in 1992.)

20110914

• Libyan bankers delayed and stalled old regime supporters from withdrawing state assets during the Libyan uprising.
• Lily Cole is in a vampire movie called the Moth Diaries.
• Voting by tea party representatives is indistinguishable on a graph from other representatives.

20110913

• Syncsort got its start sorting files on IBM mainframes.
• Caroline is heading to Scotland tomorrow.
• My computer and Chip's benchmark almost identically despite having hardware that is quite a bit different.

20110912

• Samantha Stosur and Novak Djokovic are the US Open Tennis Champions for 2011.  (Yes I know the women’s match was played on the 11th, but I didn’t check the score until after midnight.)
• Phoronix is a benchmarking suite for Linux and other UX OSes.
• There was a business owner who worked in one of the upper floors of the WTC who drilled for stairwell evacuations after the bombing attack in the parking garage.  Because of this, he was able to evacuate over 95% of his employees on 9/11.

20110911

• You have to enable BIOS support of both IDE and SATA at the same time on the MS6678 motherboard from MSI.  (Really, why isn’t this the default?  You should only go in and turn support for one or the other off if you know you don’t need it.)
• A 3.0 GB/sec SATA drive will not overwhelm a motherboard that only supports 1.5 GB/s.
• Cinebench is a free benchmarking tool for testing total system performance, especially on multi-core systems.

In a side note, 10 years ago I was driving into work thinking that it was someone in a Cessna who had crashed into one of the WTC Towers incompetently, not hijackers in a jumbo jet deliberately.

20110910

• There is an implement known as a hay saw that was used for sawing into a haystack.
• The college of Wooster, located in the city of Wooster OH is named after revolutionary war general David Wooster.
• Applying stain with a rag is a partially self correcting process.  (Unfortunately, I didn’t realize things weren’t going as intended soon enough.)

20110909

• A drunk elk was found in a tree in Sweden.
• Mercurial is an open source version control software.
• The stock market was down (again) over worries of European debt.

20110908

• Fedder beat Tsonga in straight sets as US Open play resumed today after serious rain delays the last 2 days.
• Peyton Manning out for the season, not just the 1st 6 games.
• I aim much better with an open bridge than a closed bridge.

20110907

• The end of Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters seemed unsatisfying from the seamonster side.
• The US Open Tennis tournament was mostly rained out again today.
• There was a high school run by Jesuits in Iraq back in the 50s & 60s that taught Muslims and Christians.

20110906

• The official hunk of metal that is the standard for the kilogram is loosing mass. (Polishing?)
• The replacement proposal is to fix the Kg at the mass of a certain number of carbon atoms.
• The portions at El Nopal in the mall are such that 1 order is really 2 meals.

20110905

• When pausing at the end of a pool stroke (as Butch Croft does) it is important that the pause be of reasonable length and not shoot too quickly.
• Testors doesn’t seem to sell a purple suited to my Dark Elves.
• Lucy Steele has a tramp stamp in Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters.

20110904

• The Monna Lisa has suffered damage through stupidity (Napolean hung it in his bathroom where it got water damage an an Italian house painter who “liberated” the painting back to Italy in the early 1900’s got a speck of orange paint on it.) and malice. (The bottom of the painting has been doused with acid and someone threw a rock at it the same year.)
• There is a confederate dead statue in Louisville.
• Using the XP setup utilty to format a partition you don’t want Windows leads to a VERY annoying dual boot situation which will probably require editing the boot.ini file.

20110903

• Dillon park in Indy is very nice.
• Mr. Rumbold on AYBS is the great uncle of one of Holly Hirst’s friends.
• Regan is going to learn to play the flute.

20110902

• The Force Concept Inventory was designed to measure understanding of Newtonian physics concepts.
• The UN review of the Israel’s interception of a flotilla trying to get supplies to Gaza was legal, but that they used excessive force.
• A black walnut tree can sell for $20,000.

20110901

• Between 40 and 60 Highly convincing style forgeries of expressionist paintings said to have been hidden during WWII have created a huge art scandal.
• The solar power company, Solyndra , Obama spoke at and called part of the green economy has gone bankrupt.
• A San Francisco design team has created a USB powered vibrator called the Crave.