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In no particular order (no matter what the numbers may imply):
1. ( About water desalination... )
2. Bees swarm over airplane.
Just an odd news story I came across. Thousands of bees landed on the wing of an airplane parked at a small airport in Massachusetts. They had to call in a bee removal expert, who got rid of them with a sort of giant specialized vacuum cleaner. I can't help but think of Wallace & Grommit's BunVac 6000 (Brief wiki entry, Video clip).
Best guess from the expert is that it was a queen moving her swarm to a new site. Happens this time of year. But the queens aren't used to long flights and have to stop to rest. So she probably set down on the wing of the plane for a breather, and the rest of the swarm, acting as the not-so-secret service, landed with her. (Though I prefer the proposed explanation that they were looking to hitch a ride and shorten their flight time.)
Not surprisingly, the bee removal expert owns an apiary (as well as an aviary, since he also raises exotic birds). As it happens, eight of his hives had been destroyed by a bear in April, so this works out rather neatly.
3. My grandfather was diabetic. In the later years of his life, he had a low appetite. It was a continual struggle to get him to eat enough. There were times when he and our large and somewhat overweight dog were separated by less than 10 lbs. One day, I came across a "motivational cereal bowl." It was oversized and painted with encouraging slogans like "CHOW THOSE WHEATIES!" and "EAT THE ENEMY FOR BREAKFAST!" I bought it for him, and he loved it. The size made his portion less intimidating, and the slogans amused him. He ate from it pretty much every morning, and it turned the daily struggle into almost a pleasure. We have it on the kitchen counter to this day. I think of him every time I see him.
Recently, it occurred to me that the artist might like to hear the story. Looking on the bottom of the bowl, I found her name and company. Our Name Is Mud. I sent an email through the site's webform with a slightly longer version of the story. She was so touched by the story that she offered to send me any item I wanted from her store. I was a little reluctant, since I'd been writing to thank her and it seemed kind of silly to accept a thank you gift in return. I told her so, but she kept the offer open. And so today I received a handwritten thank you note and a lovely oversized mug decorated with pawprints and bearing the slogan, "BARK LESS. WAG MORE." Words to live by.
4. Speaking of nifty presents... I'm getting a Kindle 2 for my birthday! (I was hesitant after the whole Amazonfail thing, but what I learned from my research into the aftermath was encouraging.) But I'm not getting mine from Amazon. It came from an online auction to support diabetes research. I learned about it from author C. E. Murphy, who writes the Take A Chance comic book series I've mentioned here before. Ended up costing about 10 bucks more than retail price, but just about all the money (a small percentage is taken out for operating costs) goes to the Diabetes Research Institute and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. So... w00t!
5. The battery on my spiffy video watch is dying. It won't hold a charge for even an hour now before shutting down. I was rather peeved about this. At first, when I complained, they told me that it's normal. Now they've got a whole page up about battery life. They told me they could get me a new battery for $3, but that I'd have to ship the watch back to them. I'm trying to get them just to send me the battery. We'll see how that goes. In the meantime, I've got a backup battery. It (currently) holds enough of a charge to power the watch for more than a whole day, and it's got a solar panel that can (supposedly) recharge it on the go. We'll see how well it holds up over time. (Yes, I know it's kind of stupid to get another battery from them after all that, but I was getting these binoculars for my niece's birthday - they run on AAA batteries - and it seemed worth a try. Cheaper than getting a new watch, anyway.)
6. I was never much of a fan of Oprah, but the cover article in this week's Newsweek showed me that it's worse than I thought. Clearly, Oprah needs a lesson from Spider-Man. "With great power there must come great responsibility."
(If you search the site, you'll turn up several supplemental pages. Mainly, a 9-minute podcast which covers much of the same material, this blog post.)
In short, the problem is that she's routinely spotlighted questionable (at best) medical practices without taking the time to point out the risks or downsides and without giving experts a fair say.
7. What the heck is it with the grocer's apostrophe? I run into it more and more these days, and it's starting to drive me nuts. It's long been a pet peeve of mine, but now I'm finding it in places that should darn well have people who know better. An apostrophe indicates a possessive, the plural of an acronym (but only if spelled with periods), a contraction, or part of a word left off due to an accent. That's it. If you're not looking at one of those situations, leave the apostrophe out. Okay?
8. My comp, which had been acting more or less okay, refused to boot up today. hal.dll. Again. Still no idea what's causing it. Or what I can do to fix it if reinstalling Windows won't do the trick. I do not want to have to format the hard drive and start over. But having to go through the whole process of booting to the recovery disk, rewriting the boot.ini file, and rebooting every time I want to boot up isn't exactly a desirable option, either. Might have to try a system restore, but I don't know if that'll work and I just finally got one of the more difficult programs to reinstall. *sigh*
9. I'm not really sure how or if to use cuts on this entry. For now, I've put item 1 under a cut, since that's long (and quite possibly not of interest). The others are short, but there ended up being a lot of them. What do you guys prefer? Cuts are for you, after all...
1. ( About water desalination... )
2. Bees swarm over airplane.
Just an odd news story I came across. Thousands of bees landed on the wing of an airplane parked at a small airport in Massachusetts. They had to call in a bee removal expert, who got rid of them with a sort of giant specialized vacuum cleaner. I can't help but think of Wallace & Grommit's BunVac 6000 (Brief wiki entry, Video clip).
Best guess from the expert is that it was a queen moving her swarm to a new site. Happens this time of year. But the queens aren't used to long flights and have to stop to rest. So she probably set down on the wing of the plane for a breather, and the rest of the swarm, acting as the not-so-secret service, landed with her. (Though I prefer the proposed explanation that they were looking to hitch a ride and shorten their flight time.)
Not surprisingly, the bee removal expert owns an apiary (as well as an aviary, since he also raises exotic birds). As it happens, eight of his hives had been destroyed by a bear in April, so this works out rather neatly.
3. My grandfather was diabetic. In the later years of his life, he had a low appetite. It was a continual struggle to get him to eat enough. There were times when he and our large and somewhat overweight dog were separated by less than 10 lbs. One day, I came across a "motivational cereal bowl." It was oversized and painted with encouraging slogans like "CHOW THOSE WHEATIES!" and "EAT THE ENEMY FOR BREAKFAST!" I bought it for him, and he loved it. The size made his portion less intimidating, and the slogans amused him. He ate from it pretty much every morning, and it turned the daily struggle into almost a pleasure. We have it on the kitchen counter to this day. I think of him every time I see him.
Recently, it occurred to me that the artist might like to hear the story. Looking on the bottom of the bowl, I found her name and company. Our Name Is Mud. I sent an email through the site's webform with a slightly longer version of the story. She was so touched by the story that she offered to send me any item I wanted from her store. I was a little reluctant, since I'd been writing to thank her and it seemed kind of silly to accept a thank you gift in return. I told her so, but she kept the offer open. And so today I received a handwritten thank you note and a lovely oversized mug decorated with pawprints and bearing the slogan, "BARK LESS. WAG MORE." Words to live by.
4. Speaking of nifty presents... I'm getting a Kindle 2 for my birthday! (I was hesitant after the whole Amazonfail thing, but what I learned from my research into the aftermath was encouraging.) But I'm not getting mine from Amazon. It came from an online auction to support diabetes research. I learned about it from author C. E. Murphy, who writes the Take A Chance comic book series I've mentioned here before. Ended up costing about 10 bucks more than retail price, but just about all the money (a small percentage is taken out for operating costs) goes to the Diabetes Research Institute and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. So... w00t!
5. The battery on my spiffy video watch is dying. It won't hold a charge for even an hour now before shutting down. I was rather peeved about this. At first, when I complained, they told me that it's normal. Now they've got a whole page up about battery life. They told me they could get me a new battery for $3, but that I'd have to ship the watch back to them. I'm trying to get them just to send me the battery. We'll see how that goes. In the meantime, I've got a backup battery. It (currently) holds enough of a charge to power the watch for more than a whole day, and it's got a solar panel that can (supposedly) recharge it on the go. We'll see how well it holds up over time. (Yes, I know it's kind of stupid to get another battery from them after all that, but I was getting these binoculars for my niece's birthday - they run on AAA batteries - and it seemed worth a try. Cheaper than getting a new watch, anyway.)
6. I was never much of a fan of Oprah, but the cover article in this week's Newsweek showed me that it's worse than I thought. Clearly, Oprah needs a lesson from Spider-Man. "With great power there must come great responsibility."
(If you search the site, you'll turn up several supplemental pages. Mainly, a 9-minute podcast which covers much of the same material, this blog post.)
In short, the problem is that she's routinely spotlighted questionable (at best) medical practices without taking the time to point out the risks or downsides and without giving experts a fair say.
7. What the heck is it with the grocer's apostrophe? I run into it more and more these days, and it's starting to drive me nuts. It's long been a pet peeve of mine, but now I'm finding it in places that should darn well have people who know better. An apostrophe indicates a possessive, the plural of an acronym (but only if spelled with periods), a contraction, or part of a word left off due to an accent. That's it. If you're not looking at one of those situations, leave the apostrophe out. Okay?
8. My comp, which had been acting more or less okay, refused to boot up today. hal.dll. Again. Still no idea what's causing it. Or what I can do to fix it if reinstalling Windows won't do the trick. I do not want to have to format the hard drive and start over. But having to go through the whole process of booting to the recovery disk, rewriting the boot.ini file, and rebooting every time I want to boot up isn't exactly a desirable option, either. Might have to try a system restore, but I don't know if that'll work and I just finally got one of the more difficult programs to reinstall. *sigh*
9. I'm not really sure how or if to use cuts on this entry. For now, I've put item 1 under a cut, since that's long (and quite possibly not of interest). The others are short, but there ended up being a lot of them. What do you guys prefer? Cuts are for you, after all...