Real Americans are anti-social, stand-offish, grouches - who don't let other people tell them what in the hell constitutes a "real American", dammit.Tam quoting a comment by Bram written i

Sometimes I will start looking into a subject, and I will start collecting pictures. If you find a web site that has several pictures you want, I find it is quicker to simply save the entire web page than to download each individual picture. Maybe it's just my browser, I don't know.In any case if you do this fro

Occasionally I will make up a list of stuff using a spreadsheet. Each item in the list will have a number which will go in the first column. I don't like typing in long lists of individual numbers, so I will put the number one in the first cell at the top, and then I will use a formula like =A1+1, which I can t

Steve sent me this video clip of a Mercedes doing a barrel roll.Very cool, but for all those guys with their laptops, lab coats, headphones, clipboards. What a lot of BS. Especially since Top Gear did the same stunt in a real car in a real situation.OK, it's not any more a real situ

My wife and I drove up to Orcas Island for a couple of days last week. We think it's only the third time we have been away from the kids since we started this family. We stayed at the Kangaroo House B & B. We had a

Steve sent me some of these pictures. I thought they were pretty cool. I was just going to post them, but the explanation that he sent got scrambled by the email demons, so I thought I would see if I could find one that wasn't. The explanation Steve sent claimed these pictures are of

Ever since Reagan there has been this incessant cry about business this and business that. Business needs less regulation, less government interference. Business provides more benefits to more people if we just let the force of the market dictate which businesses shall succeed and which shall fail.By and large I

I found this on Sipsey Street Irregulars. As near as I can tell, the numbers are all conjecture, but they do sound reasonable.During the American Revolution, the active forces in the field against the King's tyranny never amounted to more than 3% of

Fantastic Plastic!The Virtual Museum of Flying Wonders! Amazing Aircraft and Spacecraft Model Kits from the 20th and 21st Centuries

I’m not a fan of gas at all. In fact an apt I rented once had a gas stove, and I bought an electric hot plate. I think it’s a phobia from growing up with an extended family of Italian drama queens in the 50′s who were always talking about sticking their heads in the oven. -

I have come up with yet another excuse for a public works project to put all the unemployed to work: Civilization depends on it!Look at the Ancient Egyptians. Their civilization lasted for thousands of years. And look at the Roman Empire. It lasted for thousands of years, too, or at least hundreds. What were the

We have E-mail! The Windows XP installation on the old Dell system went smoothly. Had to install some drivers from a second CD. I picked up the old laptop's hard drive from the repair shop this afternoon. They were pleased to get my check. I left the laptop

Michigan Mike goes for cruise.

The laptop is dead. I complained about the problem with copying entire directories under Windows to my friend Jack and he recommended I use the Windows backup program ntbackup, which supposedly comes with

"Sit in reverie, and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind." - Henry Wadsworth LongfellowFrom Ned

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter. -

The girls flew back from Europe on a big Airbus jetliner that had the restrooms on a lower floor. You took stairs to get to it. Once you got downstairs there was a small room, perhaps 5 feet by 10 feet with doors on all sides that led to the restrooms. There were a number of people standing in this anteroom. Supposedly some

Jack and I went shooting up in the Coast Range yesterday. We drove around on the logg

Pravda R us. Is it just me, or is it really getting harder to tell the "real news" from parodies like this and The Onion?The Daily Show With Jon Stewa

I originally wrote this a month ago, but I started to expand on the politics and got bogged down. Now I'm trying to clean up my files, so I decided to cut the political commentary and just post this.Watched this with my daughter this week. What a fantastic movie! Someone sure put a lot of work into it, creating

Marc told this one at lunch today. Some time ago a friend of his bought a used car, nothing special, it was cheap enough and drove well enough. Everything was fine. And then one day it developed a leak in the gas tank. That's kind of odd, but no big deal, drain the gas, disconnect the fuel lines and undo the straps holding

My wife's laptop has died. I have a couple of old computers lying around, so I thought I would resurrect one so she would have something to use until we get the laptop sorted out. I fired up the best of the lot and it booted the Windows install CD just fine (which only takes an eon), but it c

I collected some pics off the net showing various aspects of Zeolites. (Link to earlier post that tells how I got started wandering down this path.)Here's some drawings of the molecular structure, and one micrograph of a seed used for growing zeoli