Month: March 2006

I’ve been ordering a bunch of servers from Dell lately, and the huge shipping boxes have been piling up in the basement. The kids, seeing an opportunity, asked if they could have (1) the boxes, (2) my pocketknife, and (3) some masking tape.

The result: Alex built a car (complete with a steering wheel made from the packing foam) and Kyra built a trailer. Although they look pretty much like… Dell server boxes. But they do have windows, and the kids love them. Hey, who am I to complain? I think I’ll order a few more servers and see if they can build a spaceship too.

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would
be a merrier world.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien

Dang… I could save about twenty-five bucks in taxes every year if I was as creative as this guy in Portland. He made a handwritten registration sticker for his car!

(Look closely: the best part is the bar code from a book at the Portland Public Library.)

The world is full of creative people.

I was discussing the economic disaster that’s whipping around Washington earlier today, and I just read another news article about the looming D-Day when the U.S. will default on its debt unless Congress takes action to push the debt ceiling higher.

We’re pushing up against the $8.2 trillion (with a “T”, holy cow) limit and will apparently hit it sometime in the next two weeks. The feds have already tapped $15 billion from the Exchange Stabilization Fund, as well as a huge government pension fund, and have nowhere else to turn.

I read that the total deficit has increased by $3 trillion under the Bush administration. That means it was roughly $5 trillion when he hit office, and doing the math his fiscal policies have increased the overall deficit by 40%. Holy pocket calculators, Batman!

What a disaster.

“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the grocery store, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

— Douglas Adams

“Civil liberties do not mean much when you are dead.”

— Sen. James Bunning (R-KY)

It looks like the Patriot Act is going to become permanent, since the Senate just approved the latest bill. The only significant changes deal with warrantless searches in libraries and the ability for people to challenge a national security letter gag order. Everything else– all the horrors and stupidity– will be extended indefinitely.

As evidenced by Sen. Bunning’s comment, Congress apparently thinks there are only two possible futures for our country: a police state, or a massive terrorist invasion. Scary.

As I’m working and rocking to tunes on Friday afternoon, I just hit U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”, which is one of my all-time favorite songs.

Good stuff.

For some reason this photo reminds me of the time me and the Magnificent Seven filmed a ten-minute video for Mr. Ricker’s history class, in which we traveled through the mysterious forest to speak with the Oracle of Delphi… who was, not surprisingly, dressed like a hippie.

The best part was when the magic candles almost set the forest on fire, and there was screaming and shouting in the background of the video.

Good times.

I had a surreal e-mail message in my box this morning. In it, some woman I don’t know wrote to me asking if I could help her buy a home computer. Quoting from part of her note:

Wow. Such glowing recommendations from… people I don’t know. Brad, the conductor for the railroad? Mike, the furniture guy in Willis? Where the heck is Willis?

But, since I’m generally a nice guy, I wrote back explaining that’s just not what I do, gave a few recommendations about how she should go about finding a nice cheap home computer, and wished her luck. Hopefully she’ll end up with a great system, and hopefully Brad, Mike, and Gene will stop recommending me…