Lazy Blogger

I saw this and thought it was cool. I just had to copy some code to show it to you.

December 2010 Blizzard Timelapse from Michael Black on Vimeo.

!!!Happy New Year!!!

Early Snow

We got some early snow in Chapel Hill today. While my lovely wife and I were at the Carolina game today, it started snowing. It snowed a fair amount. Oh yea, also, Carolina beat #10 Kentucky.

Snow in Chapel Hill

Pictures from Thanksgiving

I uploaded the pictures that I took at Thanksgiving to Picassa. I think you can see them here.

Thanksgiving 2010

Broke Mah Jong

Wow!, two post in one day.

Tonight I was playing Mahjong. Mahjong is a tile game, usually played on a computer these days, introduced into the west by Asian forces in an attempt to lull westerners into wasting incredible amounts of time so that when the time comes to conquer them, there will be no resistance.

Little did they know that we would hit them back with the even more powerful time waster, Free Cell, loaded into every copy of Windows since Win 95. I'd call it a draw so far, but with the way iPhones are selling in the east, we may yet come out ahead.

Anyhow, I was playing Mah Jong and listening to Pandora and just as I was about to declare victory, the program told me there were no more moves. I copied a picture of the screen for you to see and, damn it, there are more moves.

There are just enough moves for me to win. So, in an attempt to regain the high ground, they've decided to cheat. I'm very disappointed. But I'll probably keep playing.

Inspection

Recently, after an nice meal in downtown Chapel Hill, on the way home a policeman waved to my wife and asked her to roll down her window. He told her that our car registration, signified by the sticker on our license plate, was out of date. Yikes! When we got home we realized that, indeed, it was September and the registration expired in June. But the worse part was that on looking at the other car, YIKES!!, we realized that it's registration expired last December. Having gotten caught by this a couple of times in the past, I know that it can cost around $250/car.

It's funny how I hadn't noticed before, but there a cops everywhere. And they're always looking at people's license plates. Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

Anyhow, I dutifully got the cars inspected ($35 ea.), one day at a time, since my wife was out of town for a week. And then I was able to register them online ($33 ea.). After about a week, the new stickers arrived in the mail and now I'm a law abiding citizen again. And I managed to not get caught in the process.

Unfortunately, you don't get credit for going a year without registration. So I'll be getting one of the cars inspected again in about 2 months. This time it's on my calendar.

Where Do Your Taxes Go?

I haven't written in a while for a number of reasons, none of them real good. I started a new job in August, which severely impinges on my free time. After almost 2 years, I'd almost forgotten that. And that leads us into today's post.

One usually has a job for two reasons. You make money and, if you didn't work, your wife would find even worse things for you to do around the house. This money making part is pretty important cause that's how you eat good food and have shelter from the elements. It also allows you to do other important things like watch "Dancing with the Stars" in HD on your 1080p 46" LCD TV, if that's what turns you on.

One of the challenges associated with making money is hanging on to it. In many jobs, before you even see a check or a direct deposit in your bank account, a big chunk of your money is taken away by the Fed and the state. I recently came across a blog that had a chart of where the average taxpayer's money goes and I found it somewhat enlightening. So I'll share it with you. I took the liberty of downloading the data and putting it into a spreadsheet so I could add the percentage column. Click on the chart to make it larger.


I found it pretty interesting. If you're worried about where your government is spending your money, this gives you an idea. If you have a pet peeve about how the money is spent and you think that if they would not spend so much on "So and So", you can see if your plan to save money would amount to anything substantial.

Here are the credits. I originally found this on a blog I read regularly called PharmaGossip, which got it from a different blog called Third Way, which would probably be called a somewhat liberal blog, given it's contributors, though there doesn't seem to be any political bias in the article. And the original article can be found here.

If you are interested in a bit more detail on the budget, look here.

Bye!

The Spy

Chapel Hill has a nice bus system. It's free and can get you about anywhere in town at a reasonable speed. I always thought it would be nice to have a job and a house on the bus route. You just walk out in the morning, get on the bus, ride to work and get off. Then you do the same thing again in the afternoon. You would have no worries about car payments or maintenance or traffic. You can read the paper or your Kindle or iPad and let someone else worry about getting you where you want to be. I've been paying for this nice bus system for a while and for a long time, I'd never taken advantage of it.

Recently, however, we changed where we get our autos serviced (the Volvo Dealership closed and the Honda dealership moved out of town) and because it's in Carrboro and on the bus route, I decided that when I take the cars in for service, rather than have someone follow me to take me back home, I can just take the bus. That way, I can get to know the bus service in case I find a job in town and I can let my wife sleep if I have to get the car in early.

But the bus service isn't what this is about. It's about one of the bus drivers. On the last trip to the AutoLogic, I took the bus home and recognized the bus driver. I hadn't seen him about town for a while. His name is Felix Bloch. I think he's been quietly driving a bus in Chapel Hill for a number of years. Felix made the news back in the late 80's. He had a long career in the diplomatic service and maybe left in 1989 under what might be called suspicious circumstances. There were suspicions that he had worked both sides of the fence, but no charges were ever brought against him. Afterward, around 1993, he moved to Chapel Hill to avoid the limelight and took jobs as a bagboy/checkout guy at the Harris Teeter and as a city bus driver. He got caught shoplifting at the Harris Teeter and was fired from there. Apparently, he was loading up his car with groceries, gratis, each night after work. The Independent, a very liberal rag out of Durham, had a nice writeup on the whole affair back in 2001. You can read it here or you can read about him on Wikipedia here.

Here's a picture of Felix in court in 1995. I think he was answering to shoplifting charges.


Apparently, he hasn't tried to take a bus home with him and has managed to hang on to that job for around 16 or 17 years.

So all of this got me to thinking. How the hell is it that the Harris Teeter Grocery chain was able to catch this James Bond like guy when he was able to slip by the CIA and the FBI and a host of other federal agencies? Makes you wonder about government bureaucracies. Perhaps we should have Harris Teeter run the CIA and have the CIA sell groceries. I'm afraid I might worry less about national security and more about the quality of the deli meat.

Which way to go?

As you get older, you might start to think about how you will go. Well, if you're willing to wait for fate to do the work, here are the odds. You might want to click on the image to see it better.


Kinda puts things in perspective.

Sad Blue Bird Update

I am saddened to report an unfortunate Blue Bird update. As of Friday morning, a pair of bluebirds had settled into the birdhouse, laid 5 eggs and hatched 5 little baby birds. The pair were dutifully raising their little ones, with frequent feedings. Around noon on Friday, the wife and I went out of town overnight to pick up our daughter from a week in Montreat. When we returned on Saturday around 1:30, I looked out into the back yard and saw that the critter barrier was on the ground and the door to the bird house was opened up and the entire contents spilled out on the ground. No babies in sight. Darn. The barrier was quite tight on the post so we feel like it was the work of a raccoon, though we don't know for sure. It could have been one of the cats. This was a pretty depressing sight to see.

It's time to look into plan B.

Depressing

This was kind of depressing. It arrived in the mail addressed to me. I'm not ready.

I guess this is what happens when you join AARP and they sell your name to mailing lists. Actually, I'll bet that you could get rid of a body for $255 if you wanted to.

Sermon Videos

The following is not meant to be read as much as it is to document some of what I've been up to over the last year or so.

I'm gonna talk a little about a small project that I've been working on for the last couple of years. It has turned out to be a bit more complicated than I thought it might be and I'm still working to make it better. It has to do with putting video on the web and, in this case specifically, video of sermons. That's church sermons for you heathens out there, not the sermons you get when your wife catches you drinking milk directly from the carton instead of using a glass.

Anyhow, a little over two years ago, after I became an elder at our church and somehow got conned into being chairman of the Worship & Music (W&M) committee, a panel was set up at the church to figure out what the church might do in the event of a pandemic. Bird flu was the scare at the time. Our committee (W&M) was instructed to respond to the Pandemic panel with recommendations of what we might do, as related to the worship service. We decided that we would probably do whatever the University did, since they were smarter than us and we didn't want to spend a lot of time thinking about it. However, our preacher said that he would keep on preaching even if no one came. At about that same time, we had the Fall "request for proposals" from the endowment committee and our preacher decided that if he was going to keep on preaching and no one was gonna be there to see him, we might just record the service and figure out how to get it to the people suffering from bird flu, who were skipping church. Maybe we would use the internet for distribution. So I wrote a proposal and asked the endowment committee for some money for a camera and recording setup so we could get started. We asked for three and a half grand and they gave us most of it. My estimates said that this should be enough.

Basically, we wanted a PTZ (pan, tilt, zoom) camera, a DVD recorder, a monitor and installation which would involve integrating the church sound system with the DVD recorder. A PTZ camera is capable, via a remote control or computer control, of moving around and zooming in and out. Most allow presets so that you can go from one position to the next by pushing a numbered button.

So with money in hand, I went looking for quotes. I asked the guy who owns the company that handles the sound system for the church and I asked a company in Durham that I had talked to briefly when writing the proposal. Both came back at around six to seven grand. Ouch! So I went back to both of them. The sound system guy wasn't ready to talk about changing things and had different ideas on how we might be using this setup. The guy from Durham was more flexible and said that his quote was for a high definition camera and that for a standard camera it would be about three grand. So we went with him. By the time I decided to go with the guy from Durham, I probably knew these camera systems as well as most people alive and I still didn't have a good handle on this stuff.

One thing that I was interested in was, rather than recording to DVD, I wanted to record directly to a computer. Neither company had much idea about how to do this or interest in figuring it out. Most modern (read digital) video cameras like mom and dad take to the soccer match will do this, but as it turns out, none of the PTZ cameras, which are almost all analogue will. So for a start, we just record to DVD using a DVD recorder. The DVD recorder takes the analog signal and digitizes it and writes it to a DVD in a format that everyone can play on their DVD player, but that is not easy to edit.

Anyhow, after a number of delays from me doing extensive research and the guy in Durham having hernia surgery, we signed the deal and got the camera installed. We installed the camera on the wall of the balcony on the opposite side of the church from the pulpit. Someone (I think he was retired from Kodak) told me you should never point the camera directly at your subject but at a slight angle. I had done a little research and figured with 18x optical, I could get a decent shot of the pulpit without going into the digital zoom range. As we all know, digital zoom is not zoom at all. The camera we installed is a Sony EVID70/W, shown here:

It's actually mounted upside-down. Some little wires run from the camera into a closet in the balcony. One wire sends power to the camera. Another wire allows one to aim the remote at a little box which sends the remote instructions to the camera from within the closet and another wire sends the camera's video signal into the closet. In the closet is a little table on which sits a Toshiba, DVD recorder shown here:
The wire carrying the video signal from the camera and the wire carrying the audio signal from the sound equipment at the other end of the church connect to the DVD recorder. To monitor it all, the DVD recorder sends out audio and video to a Polaroid LCD TV like this:

I can't figure out why they used a Polaroid TV. I didn't even know they existed. Maybe it was cheap.

I was capturing the sermons on DVD for a couple of months and storing them away. Occasionally I would get someone to move the camera around as the service proceeded, but it was hard to get anyone regular so I mostly just left the camera aimed at the pulpit. I sing in the choir so I can't do it. After a few months, the preacher asked me about putting the sermons on the internet. So I looked into it. As it turns out, there are a few problems doing this. The biggest problems are video file size and video format, which are related to each other and impact cost. I was determined to do this as cheaply as possible and still get as high a quality as possible.

The first problem with putting sermons or any video on the web is file size and the length of time that it runs. Currently, Youtube has an eleven minute time limit. So to use Youtube to store and present the files would require watching a 20 minute sermon in 2 parts. You would also lose control of the content. Not acceptable, even for free. There are now some new places that will host video, but you still lose control and have extraneous logos showing up with your videos. So I decided to look into finding a hosting company that would allow the big files.

Before I could actually look for a hosting site, I needed to figure out just how big the files might be and, to do that, I needed to figure out how to handle them. Or, what kind of format or file type would I use. As it turns out, this is extremely complex and all you can do is make some decisions and compromises based on what you can read and find out. The bottom line is that raw video takes up huge amounts of space (1 min of Std TV = ~3 GB) and to store it or transmit it, you have to compress it somehow. The way compression works is that you start with a picture and only save the changes from frame to frame. But to really get the file size down, the compression also has to toss out a lot of data without horribly degrading the quality. The compression tries to throw away as much as it can without you noticing. Finding the best way to do it is insanely complicated. The computer algorithms used to do this compression are called codecs. If you want to know more you can read about it here. I decided to store the files in an MPEG-4 (.mp4) container and compress them using the h.264 codec. Why? It's too hard to explain except to say that I thought this approach would work the best for the future. As browsers become more standards compliant, this approach would continue to work. This approach also is more likely to come from a Mac fan than a PC fan. There are a number of Microsoft approaches that sort of lock you in to Microsoft. I wanted something a little more open that would run on all computers.

So I looked up how to get video files off of DVD's and into a format that you can use on the web. There are some very expensive programs that will do this but it turns out that there are a few popular free programs that will also do the job. The two best are "MPEG Streamclip" and "Handbrake". I downloaded them both and couldn't get either one of them to work. Turns out that you need a license to read a DVD at the bit level. However, you can buy a license from Apple for $20. I don't think Apple owns the license. I think it's owned by a consortium that Apple is a part of and so most of that money to license the codec that allows you to read the MPEG-2 files (container and codec) on the DVD, goes back to the consortium. I think it might be the same consortium that owns the h.264 codec mentioned above. Anyhow, once you buy it (the license is a little piece of software) from Apple, they keep a record of your purchase and if you lose it, you can always go back and download it again without charge.

As an aside, the licensing and ownership of these compression codecs is a real big deal to anybody associated with the internet such as all hardware and software companies but also includes the communications and entertainment industries. It's a big hairy complicated deal, which means it involves a lot of money. But enough of that.

So I started playing with the MPEG Streamclip program. I pulled sermons off the DVDs and played around with the size (how big on the screen) and the amount of compression. Basically, this is all about the art of compromise. The program has this vague slider labeled quality. The higher the quality, the larger the file size.


There are lots of other parameters to set and each button opens up a whole bunch more parameters to play with before you hit "Make MP4". What I do is this. I import the sermon off the DVD, then I export a .mp4 file at 640 x 480 (standard NTSC TV video) with 50% quality setting. I change the audio to mono (since that's what I started with), lower the bit-rate and boost the volume by 10 db. I save these files (~120-180 MB) for posterity and then run them back through to get a 320 x 240 size file which is usually around 45 to 60 MB. So that's a small picture that still looks OK. The .mp4 files contain audio and video. While I'm at it, I also export a .mp3 audio file (20 MB). It takes something like about half real time to do each step. So it takes about 10 minutes for each pass on a 20 minute sermon. That's with a 2007 iMac (2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo).

If you look at a lot of videos on Youtube, the compression is often substantially greater than I'm doing and the videos show it. However, you might notice that newer videos are showing up with a higher quality option. This is because disc space is getting cheaper and internet speeds are getting faster for a lot of people.

So now I know that I want to store around 75 MB (audio and video) a week. And I'd like to have about a year available online. So do some math and that's 3.9 GB/yr. I own a small company and it has a website. The company that hosts my site also hosted the Obama campaign. They're pretty reliable. With my cheapo account, at $10/mo, they only allow 250 MB. The $50/mo plan allows 4 GB. That's expensive. I looked at the hosting company that the church uses for its website. They were more expensive and now they don't even list prices. Call us they say. So managed hosting with good support is out. I think they charge a lot because they can and they assume that you're gonna get a lot of hits (bandwidth). Actually I need lots of space and, probably not much bandwidth.

So now we're back to the art of compromise. There are a lot of cheap sites out there that say unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage. They all have little asterisks on their ads. So I look at a lot of them. There's a large variety but one thing they have in common is that they all look shady or maybe fly-by-night. The wording around "unlimited" is all kinda wishy-washy. However, about this time, I was unemployed and taking some computer courses so that I could start getting unemployment. I was taking courses on "PHP and MySQL" and needed a hosting company that allowed me to play with and learn both of these. PHP is a programming language for web sites that runs on the server and MySQL is a database that also runs on a server. They're often taught together. Anyhow, I thought about this hosting thing a lot and finally, I decided to go with the biggest of them all, GoDaddy.com. At $6.99/mo, I got the Deluxe Plan with only 150 GB of storage. The unlimited plan was $14.99. You've probably seen the really tacky GoDaddy ads on TV. They had a couple during the Super Bowl. Lots of tacky sophomoric T&A stuff. I think they were voted the worst of the lot. I already had an account with GoDaddy because I had used them to register some domain names that we were thinking of using for the company that never quite came to be. So all I had to do was add on the hosting. So I did. Part of the compromise is using a company with such tacky ads to host church sermons. But I do like the irony.

I used the Godaddy account to learn a bit of PHP and MySQL as I was taking a couple of online courses from Durham Tech. I did a couple of web sites for practice. One was a recipe exchange site that was part of the PHP/MySQL training and another was a rewrite of a friend's web site. I did a lot of work on it but he never got around to using it, which was a little annoying. I also rewrote my company web site using PHP and added a chemistry reaction calculator which utilized PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and CSS and XHTML. But that's all an aside for now.

As I mentioned, I was collecting the services on DVD every week. I have the DVD automatically record the 11 AM service each Sunday and after three services, when the disk is full, I take the disk home and pull out the sermons, convert them to regular size .mp4's and then exported the smaller .mp4's and .mp3's. The video camera stays on the pulpit for the entire service. With the video in hand, I bought the domain name of our church with the ".com" rather than the ".org", which they already owned, and carved out a place on my GoDaddy server for the church stuff. As it turns out, uploading big files from home is a bit of a pain. Three services of audio and video comes to around 200+ MB. If your ISP (internet service provider) is a cable company like mine (Time Warner's Road Runner), you get substantially faster download speeds than upload speeds. It's about thirty times as fast coming down as going up. You can check it out for yourself. What that means is that videos upload slower than real time and for some reason, maxing out your uploading capacity maxes out your internet connection. In other words, I have to wait till everyone else quits using the internet to do the uploads. I usually send them off as I go to bed. But my wife and son both tend to stay up later than I do, so even that causes problems. I need to find a much faster way to upload the files.

I've gotten tired of writing about this so I'm gonna wrap it up soon with a very condensed version of the last steps. Once I got the videos on the GoDaddy server, I would tell the lady at the church who handles the web site that they were there and she would set up a link. To play them it required that the viewer have QuickTime installed on their computer at home. This wasn't perfect. Eventually, using PHP and a bit of code that allows one to play an .mp4 file inside of Flash, I was able to simplify the experience. Just about everybody has the Flash plugin in their browser. So now you just hit the button on the church site and it loads up the file. And more recently, I've started uploading the larger video files instead of the smaller ones. Anyhow, the final result can be seen at the church's site or at my site.

Eventually, I may flesh out this last paragraph with some detail about how the battle between Apple and Adobe is raging over HTML5 and Adobe Flash with Google and Microsoft and everybody else chiming in and how this will impact everything we watch and listen to in the next 10 years. But not today.

Roller Coaster Ride

The last couple of years have been a little worrisome. As it turns out, the career path that I chose for myself about 35 years ago has just about evaporated over the last 10 years. Two things have happened. There has been tremendous consolidation in the pharmaceutical industry and there has been a wholesale swapping out of the chemistry research labor force from an fairly diverse American base to a less diverse Chinese base at about 1/5 the cost per person. As a chemistry researcher, I got consolidated and swapped over a year ago. But that's not what this is about.

I recently found a part-time, work-at-home job as a Scientific Review Officer. I work for a company that manages the review of proposals submitted for research grants issued by a federal program run through the Department of Defense. Most of the funding is related to breast cancer research. Anyhow, what that means is that I'm at my computer a lot during the day. But that's not what this is about.

Not being from the landed gentry, over the years it became apparent that If I didn't want to eat dog food for the last few years of my life, I needed to save a bit. So I have tried. As it turns out, I've tried to take a long view of things and rather than put all my savings into mattresses or mason jars, I've put a good chunk of it into the stock market. I'd say it's about 2/3's in indexed mutual funds of various kinds including broad market, small cap, international etc. About a 1/3 is in various stocks that I or my wife have picked up over the years. Warren Buffet is handling about 8%. A little investment in Apple 21 years ago has grown to about 10%. There is a spattering of bonds and cash thrown in for good measure.

So, I watch it. Daily. And I track it. And I measure it against other indicators. I look for correlations and causes and effects. I am a scientist after all. The one thing that seems to remain fairly constant is the ratio of my net worth to the Dow. I guess it makes sense.

So the point of this story is that I was sitting at home at the computer yesterday, working at recruiting scientific reviewers as part of my part-time job and watching the stock market every once in a while. It's not been so good for the last week or two. Quite volatile and mostly down. I follow the market on the Google Finance page. Around 2:30 it was looking like another bad day with all the leading indicators pointing down. To get the latest numbers, I often hit the refresh button. Around 2:40 I hit the refresh button. Wow! It dropped from -300 to -400! I hit refresh again. Down another 100! Again. 150 more! Again. Another 150 or so. The market was in free fall! This was crazy. While this was happening, Apple was also dropping like a rock, only faster. Then I got excited. Buying Opportunity!!! Well, as the Dow hit down about a 1000 points, and Apple dropped below 200, everything basically quit working. It took forever to log into Fidelity and even the Google Finance page was refreshing real slow. And just like a rubber ball hitting pavement, all the indicators started moving up again. And unfortunately, just like a rubber ball, they never came back up to where they were dropped from. So the bottom line is that I didn't do anything. I just went along for an exciting ride.

Bird Update

Time for a bird update. Look down to see previous posts on this subject.

There was some discussion between me and the wife about whether my new varmint barrier was far enough out on the post to deter would-be predators from getting to our new bluebird house on the swing set. We hadn't seen the original bluebird family around for a while. After a few days of inactivity, my wife ventured out and opened up the birdhouse. Inside was an empty crushed egg. After a few minutes on the web, she determined that squirrels do indeed eat bird eggs and that a squirrel was the culprit. So she removed the nest and cleaned out the house. I came out and took the hammer to the barrier to loosen it. I then moved it further out on the post so that an animal would have to be a bit more adventurous to get to the house.

And after a few days, we were back in the bluebird family business. I sneaked out and caught a few pictures. It's hard to get close enough to get a good picture of daddy bluebird before he flies away, but I finally got one this morning. Here tis:


Notice that the critter barrier is further out on the post. As I tried to get closer, he flew away but I got another shot of him in the tree.


We'll keep you posted.

note: Since I posted this, my wife told me she has seen a squirrel on top of the birdhouse since I moved the barrier. Hmmm!

Visitor

This guy landed on our doorbell last night and he seems content to stay there. So I took a picture of him this morning. Click on the picture to get a closer view.


As of about 4 PM, today he's still hanging out and hasn't moved a lot if any. Maybe he's dead. Dead or not, he (or maybe she) is pretty cool looking.

OK, I'm back. This guy is a Luna moth. I looked it up. Actually, my picture is better than the one in Wikipedia. More colorful. Anyhow, they live in this stage only for about 1 week. Their only reason to be at this stage is to mate. They don't even have a mouth to eat with. Talk about single-minded.

The Fix is In

If we go back about 4 posts, we get to a story about how I put up a new bird house which we hoped would attract a family of bluebirds. The story was actually more about how easy it was for the cat to get to the birdhouse and leisurely wait for prey to show up.

This, obviously, was not going to work so we decided that a fix was needed. My wife suggested going to Lowe's and getting some kind of thin metal pole and attaching the birdhouse. I couldn't quite figure out how to do that and I liked where it was and, apparently, so did the birds, except when there was a cat paw stuck through the opening. So I decided that a cat barrier would be a better fix.

I went out to the garage and found a thin sheet of wood and took it out to the swing set and marked the width. I brought the wood sheet back into the garage and cut out a notch to fit it on the upper swing set bar. Then I took it back out and slid it onto the bar. It was such a tight fit that I couldn't easily move it once I got it on. So I left it where it is. Here's a picture:


There is some debate as to whether the position of the sheet is adequate to keep the cat away from the birdhouse. I haven't seen the cat back up there since, but... An added attraction is that the bluebirds like to sit on top of the piece of wood and get a good view of their surroundings. I may eventually go out and move the barrier farther out on the post but, until I deem it necessary, given it's tightness, I'll probably leave it where it is.

I'd like to get a picture of the bluebirds at home. If I do, I'll post it here.

That's all for now.

Singin'

Not to be outdone by my daughter, I sang a duet for the Good Friday service with another choir member. He's the baritone with the better sounding voice. I'm the tenor. I thought it sounded OK, maybe a bit dark. You can hear it here. I think I need to keep my day job. Wait a minute, I don't have a day job.

Mixed Metaphor Fun

The other morning my wife was talking about a small company that was having some pains dealing with a recent change. She said that the change had "thrown them a wrench".

I'd never heard that before but it sounded vaguely familiar. I thought about it for a few minutes and eventually figured out that it came from a combination of two rather common metaphors. Can you guess what two metaphors she mixed?

Answer to come later after I find some web site about metaphors to link to.

Update 12/3/2012

"Thrown for a loop" and "Throw a wrench in the works"

!!Go Big Red!!

This has been an interesting year for me as a college basketball fan. My favorite team, my alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) has been struggling a bit this year and is currently enjoying a winning streak in the NIT tournament. The NIT is sometimes known as the loser's tournament. This is a big disappointment to me and all those other fans who saw us win it all last year and figure that a trip to the NCAA tournament is a birthright. Humbling.

But maybe this year I was pulling for the wrong alma mater. My other alma mater, where I went to graduate school, is doing surprisingly well. Amazingly well, in fact. Cornell University will play Kentucky tonight, in Syracuse, in the first round of the sweet sixteen of the NCAA tournament. This is the first time in 30 years that an Ivy League team has made it this far. And historically it's always been Princeton or Penn, that made it. If memory serves me correctly, Princeton knocked off UNC to get there back in '79.

Anyhow, for the first time this season, I'll be watching and pulling for my other alma mater as they take on the highly favored Kentucky Wildcats. Maybe it will turn out to be a better basketball season that I thought.

!!Go Big Red!!

Update: It didn't happen (62-45). Cornell started good and played them respectable but it didn't happen. Oh well, back to the NIT.

Bad Idea

My wife recently noticed a blue bird flitting around the back yard and decided that maybe we should encourage their presence. So while out shopping one day she bought a little bird house to encourage the blue birds to take up residence in our yard. We looked around in the back yard and thought we found a pretty good place for the house, right on the end of the swing set. No one swings on the swing set anymore and it looked like a pretty good height. We often see birds perched there, including the occasional hawk. So I pulled out the ladder and attached the bird house to the end of the swing set with the included screws.

About a week later, well, you can see what happened. Lucy, the fat one that rarely climbs anything anymore, had made her way up to scratch the edge of her cheek on the bird house. I didn't catch the picture, but yesterday she had her paw in the hole rooting around inside. As she pulled her paw out, a little bird flew out and away, barely missing mealtime.


You can see one of the omnipresent deer in the bottom right corner looking on as I snapped the picture. Here's a closer picture so you can actually tell that Lucy is a cat.


Note: add to to-do list, move bird house!

Singin'

My daughter and another young girl sang a duet at church last Sunday. I thought it sounded pretty good. You can hear and see it here. Hit the arrow to start.

Canadian Humor

I came across this picture. It's the retort of a Canadian to the Canadian men's hockey team losing to the US. As someone who is now paying for health insurance rather than having a company pick up the bill, I put this in the ironic humor class.


OOOPs! We lost to Canada so that can't be right. I don't know what this was all about. Maybe it was women's hockey. Who knows? I still like the sign.

My daughter just told me that we beat Canada the first time we played them and that there ain't no stinkin' women's hockey. So maybe I was right the first time.

Snow

It snowed in Chapel Hill this weekend. It started around 7 PM on Friday night and snowed off and on for the entire night. When we got up the next morning we had around 6 inches of snow. Precipitation was still coming down, though as the morning went on, it turned into mostly sleet. That was a bit disappointing given that it was only 26° F outside. The weatherman said that a warm mass of air had inserted itself between the upper moisture containing layer and the colder air on the ground. This had the effect of turning our nice snow into hard sleet as it passed through the warm layer on its way down. As the sleet fell it actually pounded down the snow to some degree. Anyhow, the sleet mixed in with some snow continued to fall all day until around midnight. Everything was canceled through Monday. Here's some pictures.

The House


Looking down the driveway.


Snow measured on top of the Weber Grill.


Neighbors dropping in to munch on the shrubberies.



It got down to 16° F last night, it's 27° F right now and it's supposed to hit 44° F today, so the snow will be around for a few more days.

Osprey

I was sitting in the house today and would occasionally hear some high-powered noise outside like jets or helicopters or whatever. You know, military type noises. We live near a little airport but about the only thing that makes a lot of noise are the private jets that fly in for a big UNC football or basketball game. A bit later I heard a loud noise again and this time I ran outside. The noise got louder and suddenly over the house appeared one of those V-22 Ospreys. You know, the half-helicopter half-plane that Boeing has been trying to get to fly for over last 25-30 years. I don't know how much it costs the taxpayers, but I can attest that they eventually figured it out cause I saw one fly over my house. Here's a picture of one I got off the internet.


The one flying over the house had it's propellers aimed straight ahead so I didn't get to see it do the stuff we paid so much for.

Deer

When I came down for lunch today I looked in the back yard and saw not one or two deer coming into the yard to eat the shrubberies, but eight. I ran back upstairs to get the camera and managed to get seven in the picture. Here they are.



I tried to number them on the picture but it's hard to see. There are way too many deer around here and they're starting to behave like gang members. It's time for the deer to die. Death to Bambi!!