Tim's Bloglet - Thursday 27 August 2009

Japanese knotweed, taken from a bicycle while late for work. The thought goes something like this: good pictures are boring. What I actually enjoy is trying to find something interesting in bad photos. So, to that end, I set the shutter speed to ISO 1600 and cycled down the bikepath taking pictures. Of non-people, because I'm a coward. But I also wanted a picture of the knotweed, which is glorious this week. It's also absolutely full of bees. Hundreds of bees. Yesterday I reached out my hand when cycling past to touch it, and came away with a bee. Today, a bee blundered into me, and for the next 15 minutes, my ear kept being like, 'keep still, I'm pretty sure there's a bee on me'. And I was like, 'look, I stopped, I checked in the mirror, I rubbed my ear all over, there's no bee. It's a hair.' But did it listen? Stupid ear. _
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10:03:45 PM, Thursday 27 August 2009

There is a BRP Spyder in the parking lot. Think a snowmobile with wheels. I don't mind the idea, but it looks like it was designed by the guys who gave us the PT cruiser. It's even more absurdly overdone in person. _
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05:29:45 PM, Thursday 27 August 2009

same idea, different photo, more pixels _
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07:53:48 PM, Wednesday 26 August 2009

So much for depoliticking: this senate race is going to be exciting. _
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02:53:29 PM, Wednesday 26 August 2009

There was also a seal and a flock of unhappy looking eider. _
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11:10:32 PM, Tuesday 25 August 2009

There was a pretty big crowd at Halibut Point, watching the surf from Hurricane Bill. No wind to speak of. The waves were impressive, but pictures of big waves look more or less the same as pictures of little waves, and the whole vast heaving ocean thing just doesn't come across at all. _
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11:09:28 PM, Tuesday 25 August 2009

Glorious Bustards _
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03:56:31 PM, Tuesday 25 August 2009

Mortgages are sneaky. By keeping the payment fixed, even if you pay down the principal, they take away the immediate gratification of paying down the loan. It's easy to fall into thinking about it as something akin to rent. You're paying interest on a pile of debt, but it doesn't feel like it. By pushing the reward out theoretically by decades, they make it comfortable to sit in debt, paying vast sums of interest. Actually, from a completely short term perspective, all you're doing by paying down early is reducing your tax deduction by reducing the amount of interest you're paying. This is a painfully backwards way of thinking, where debt becomes an asset, and people cherish their interest payments, but you see it all over. _
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11:15:02 AM, Monday 24 August 2009

My new computer is on the internet! It is very quiet and somewhat intimidating, so I have named it Wentworth. _
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10:21:27 PM, Friday 21 August 2009

Okay, so some time ago I stopped rearranging my keyboards: I'm typing Dvorak on QWERTY. It's fine, most of the time. But occasionally, like today, when I try to type passwords into blinded boxes, and I'm exhausted, I look at the keyboard, and then I start shifting ever so slightly, and it's a bad scene. In particular, one password had Aug in it. My U key is actually G. So because I was looking at the (completely useless) keyboard while typing, I typed Agu instead. My fingers knew which keys to hit, but I could see a U key, and my finger was on it, so I just kind of assumed it should be second. This is all, in a roundabout way, the fault of FIPS 140-2. We don't have enough licenses for the silly compliant zip program, so I end up zipping other people's files, and it really isn't one of my core competencies, as they say. _
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02:04:38 PM, Friday 21 August 2009

Pimp My Ride is profoundly geeky, in the sense that is unabashedly pro-eccentric. I've been feeling glum about the staid conformity to be seen in parking lots lately. I doubt I'm going to do anything about it, though. _
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02:23:04 PM, Wednesday 19 August 2009

I am starting to become one of these people who blames the idiocy of our government on the media's search for narrative and video clips. Okay, sorry, depoliticking... depoliticking... _
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12:42:52 PM, Wednesday 19 August 2009

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