Sand Castles

This year's offering.  The tide was going out so I didn't see how it ended.

Scintillating scotoma

A few years ago, I was working in the lab when I noticed that my vision was going wacky. I wrote all about it on my blog which you can read here. Well, today I was reading In the Pipeline and one commenter mentioned fortifications hallucination. So I looked that up and found the wikipedia article, scintillating scotoma, which pretty exactly describes what I was seeing.  The Wiki article even has some pretty good graphics.

Now I have a little better idea of what was going on. I never did get a migraine and this never happened again.

Castles Made of Sand

I recently spent a week at the beach. After a week of distractions, I finally got a day to build a sand castle. Notice the windows in some of the towers. I build hollow castles. Here it is:

After a couple of hours, the tide returned, just like I planned.

And eventually did its work.

And I managed to get sunburned.

Deer Here

On the way home from the grocery store, as I stopped at the light in front of Whole Foods store, I noticed a different looking animal crossing the street. We have zillions of these bastards around the house constantly eating the shrubberies but something was different about this one.  So when the light turned green I crossed the road and turned into the church parking lot where it looked like it went. At first I didn't see it and then I turned to the left and there it was.  I took a picture with the window up first, in case it ran away and then I rolled down the window and took a couple more.  Here it is.

Flowers Blooming

I've always been intrigued by those movies that speed up action by taking a lot of pictures over a long time and cram them together. They're usually something like plants growing. So I made one.

Let's go back a bit. I recently agreed to do an interview for a company and provided feedback on their new website design. For a fee, of course. They paid me $200 for my lunch hour in the form of an Amazon credit. This money was burning my pockets (as my dad used to say), so I spent some of it on a wireless camera that you link via WiFi and can control and view over the web.  I bought this one. I'll put in a picture cause the link will quit working some day. It costs $110.  Of course, as soon as I bought it, it went down to $99.

I can't figure out what to do with it exactly. We originally mounted it in the garage and pointed it at my wife's tomatoes to see if we could figure out what was eating them. Turned out it was birds.

It doesn't have the highest quality picture but there are a lot of nifty things you can do with it after spending days reading the instructions which you actually have to go looking for on the web. One thing you can do is have it take a picture at regular intervals and send them by ftp to some server if you have an account. I happen to have a GoDaddy account that I use for all kinds of crap like this. Then I take all the pictures and cram them into a movie.

Recently my wife got these neat flowers from the guy who does our next-door neighbors yard. They're big white flowers that bloom when it gets dark and collapse the next day around 10 in the morning. After making sure that I had an adequate WiFi signal in the yard, I set up the camera near sundown and pointed it at the flowers. I set it to take a picture every minute and then left it alone. This is my first shot at it. You have to look fast.

The flowers are definitely cooler than my movie making.

A Peep in the MicroWave

So, just what happens when you put an Easter Peep in the microwave?  I decided to find out.  And I decided to record it.  It was necessary to do this pretty soon as the Peeps the I bought at Roses were disappearing one at a time.  So here's what happens.

Cool, Huh?

Samuel L. Jackson or Laurence Fishburne

Recently a reporter was interviewing Samuel L. Jackson and asked him about his role in a Super Bowl ad. Unfortunately for the reporter, the ad had Laurence Fishburne in it and not Jackson. So Jackson proceeds to mercilessly pound the reporter for quite some time over his mistake. I felt bad for the reporter because I am always getting those two confused. I understand. And I don't get either of them confused with Morgan Freeman.

Which is which?

Miracles Do Happen

This morning a minor miracle happened. About two thirds of the way into work, I realized that I had not been stopped by a single red light. And the trend continued all the way to the parking deck. I copied a picture of my route and pasted little stoplights on the route where the lights actually are to give you an idea of what a miracle this was.

It wasn't a perfect miracle. I did take a right on red without having to wait onto Erwin and I slipped through the light on Garrett on yellow fading to red as I passed under it. Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket on the way home.

The Apple Macintosh is 30 Today

As most people who know me know, I've been an Apple "fanboy" for much of my life.  When people have asked me what computer to buy, I always say "Get a Mac".  Anyhow, on the 30th Anniversary of the Mac's introduction, I thought I would put up a list of the Macs I've had over the Years.

The first one was the original Macintosh.  In September, 1984, wife got some friends to get it for me with their college discount, which made it it about half the cost of retail.  I think it was an anniversary gift.  In 1989 I made my best Apple purchase ever.  I bought 100 shares of AAPL at $35 each.

We got our next Mac, a Mac IIsi, seven years later in 1991.  This was purchased with the Princeton college discount.  We also got the 13 inch color display.

After another seven years, in 1998, we got a new G3 desktop with a new 21 inch display.  No college discount but the college discount had pretty much gone away by then.

Seven years later, in 2005, I decided that the computer and the monitor should be separate, so rather than buy an iMac, I purchased a Mac mini and got a Dell monitor to go with it.  After 2 years, I attempted to upgrade the RAM and damaged it such that the fans ran wide open all the time.  Luckily, after a couple of months of loud fan noise, a lightning strike put it out of it's misery.

And so, in 2007, we bought a new Aluminum 20 inch iMac.  This machine was a disaster because it kept shutting down unannounced. After a lot of complaining and phone calls, I got Apple to replace the motherboard and power supply and all was good in the world.  In 2012, I replaced an increasingly flaky internal hard drive with a new 1T drive.

Rather than wait the full seven years, and still feeling a bit guilty about the indulgence since the old one was working fine, I treated myself to a new 27 inch iMac for Christmas 2013.  I reasoned that the stock was doing good enough and I was getting old and it was time and the new one would be a lot faster and, blah, blah, blah.  So I'm just getting it up to speed.  It's a nice toy for an old boy.

So this picture sort of summarizes my Apple Macintosh journey.

Fortunately, the little Apple stock I bought back in 1989 has appreciated nicely enough to cover these purchases along with all the other Apple do-dads we've bought along the way.

Raked the Yard

Goodness!  It's been months since I posted something on my blog.  So, today I will post something that, maybe, will get me back into the habit.  This morning started slow.  There was a report last week in the news where some sleep researchers proposed that the reason we need sleep is to clean out the crap that builds up in our brains during the day as a result of the mental activity that we engage in.  During sleep is when our bodies clean up.  This morning was Saturday and I didn't have to go to work so I spent a lot of time this morning cleaning out the mess in my brain.

Then around 10 or so, I got up.  I had some breakfast, coffee and a poptart as usual, and then after brushing my teeth, I went outside to clean up the yard.  Specifically, this means raking.  Of all the crappy chores one does around the house, I seem to actually mind raking the least.  In fact I may even enjoy it.  Especially if it's a nice cool, not cold, day.  Actually it's not just raking.  It's raking and blowing.  You rake the big stuff and put it in a big bag to empty in the woods behind the house and then you blow the little stuff around to make things look complete.

Here's the yard when I got started around 11 this morning:

I raked for about an hour or so, carrying off two loads of leaves into the woods in the back.  And here's the yard when I got through.

Look at all that lovely grass coming up after Bill Merkel seeded it so nice a couple of weeks ago and after I raked it this morning.  You can see the blower in the yard after I blew around the smaller stuff.

So there, I've blogged again.  Maybe it won't be another 8 months till I do it again.

Sold my 1999 Volvo S70 this Morning

A few years ago I bought a used navy blue 1999 Volvo S70 to replace the red 1996 Volvo 850 that got destroyed in an accident.  I drove it for a number of years until in 2008 we bought my wife a new car and I inherited her Honda Odyssey and my son inherited my Volvo.  He didn't take real good care of it but it served him fairly well for a number of years.  It was getting a bit quirky and on occasion would stall in stop-and-go traffic.  He put up with the annoyances until he had options.  Last June he got a real job that pays reasonable money and after stalling a few times too many, he decided that it was time for a new car.  So he bought an economical Toyota Prius C.  And he delivered the Volvo back to me.  "Thanks Dad", he said as he drove off.  Actually, I had to go to Charlotte and get it.

We didn't really need the car and it was in the way so finally, after buying a new battery ($174) and killing it and buying a charger ($36) and trying to resurrect it and failing and finally going and getting yet another battery (this one was free), I put the car on Craig's List for $1000.00.

I put it up around noon.  Very soon I got an email from a guy named Mike who wanted to buy it.  We made arrangements for him to come by the next day to see it and take it for a test drive.  I may not have asked enough for the car.  While I was on the phone talking to him, I looked over at my email account and noticed that there were five more emails in my in-box.  By the time I was off the phone, there were 11.  I quickly replied to the first few that I had made arrangements with the first caller and that I would work  through the list until I sold the car.  By the time I had done this for a few, there were even more emails.  

So I changed the ad and said that due to the large number of responses I might not get back to everyone who inquired.  Then my cell phone rang.  It was the second emailer.  He had gotten my name from the email and looked up my phone number, called home and my wife had given him my cell number.  I told him that if the first guy didn't want it, he was next.  He thought the first guy would buy it for sure and offered me more money.  I told him I'd already given the first guy a shot.  He seemed bothered by my bout of ethics, but said he understood.

Meanwhile, the emails continued.  By the time I went to bed after midnight there were around 55 emails.  Most said, "I want the car, call me at 919-blah-blah."  When I got up the next morning, there were 4 or 5 more and one from Mike saying he was on the way and should be there by 9:00.

Mike arrived with a friend soon after nine and looked the car over.  I kept pointing out the little problems and Mike kept telling me all the positive things about the car.  Eventually we went for a drive and as I kept pointing out all the little ticks and oddities about the car, Mike was becoming more and more convinced that he was going to buy it. When we got back to the house, he gave my wife 10 C-notes, swapped the plates and off we went to the bank to find a notary.  Sun Trust didn't have one but Wells Fargo did.  We chatted a bit while we waited for the notary to get finished with the people ahead of us.  Then we went in and I signed over the title.  I shook Mike's hand and left him with the Volvo and drove home.  After about 16 years, there is no longer a Volvo in my life and, hopefully,  I won't ever have a Volvo nightmare again.

Mischief in the Apple Store

This summer my daughter and I went into the Apple store at the Streets of Southpoint Mall.  I thought it  would be cool to see how many devices upon which I could put an Elvis face before we got thrown out of the store.  I managed to only do two before my daughter put a stop to it.

20 Years of Thanksgiving at Sunset Beach

Since the year after my folks passed away, my family has been getting together with my sisters and my brother and two of my cousins and my uncle along with kids and wives and husbands and extended families and friends over the years.  This year marked the 20th year we've done this.  More pictures can be seen by clicking on the picture above including the creepy doll at the mailbox.

Odd Juxtaposition

Recently, my wife and I ventured to Iowa for a wedding and the annual visit with the in-laws.  On the morning of the wedding, we went over to the church in Hull, Iowa to help set up some things for the wedding.  On the way my wife noticed a sign placed in a rather odd place.  Later in the evening, on the way to the wedding, I rolled down the window and took a picture.  Kind of let's you know how they feel about their dead out in Iowa.

As it turns out, there is a dumping place for yard waste just behind the graveyard.

 

Visit to the ER

It was an interesting day.  Monday morning I went over to the Toone lab to use their prep HPLC. It was bright outside.  After injecting my compound and coming back to the lab, I walked over to Dave's hood and looked at his computer.  I mentioned that the other Dave downstairs had sent him a text message.  Upstairs Dave said that he was ignoring downstairs Dave.  Then I went over to my desk to check email and look at a journal article on my computer screen.
As I sat down and looked at the screen, I noticed something wrong, or WTF, as they say.  I couldn't read the screen.  There was this weird distortion on the screen.  I immediately rubbed my eyes and it didn't go away.  Being a scientist, I immediately started doing experiments to see what the hell was happening.  Close one eye, distorted!  Close the other eye, still distorted.  There seemed to be a ring of distortion with a clear undistorted space in the middle.  OK, that's weird.  So I close my eyes and cover my face with my hands to keep out the light.  Damn, it's still there.  Except that everything is black and there's this ring of small scintillating polygonal shapes.  It's somewhat like what happens when you look a a bright light and then look away and the image stays with you.  Except that it was different.  More defined by distortion and less by intensity.  And it wasn't going away.
I open my eyes and tell Yazan, a grad student standing by my desk that there's something wrong with my vision.  He looks at me with that what the heck are you talking about look.  In the meantime, I'm doing this constant check of the rest of my body.  Did I just have a stroke?  Numbness, weakness, pain?  Nothing unusual.
So, focusing the clear center of the distorted ring on the computer, I look up webMD and start typing in symptoms.  First head, then eyes, then blurriness, no drugs, no infection, sudden onset.  WebMD tells me to call 911 and get my ass to a doctor.
So I call on Brittany, another grad student in the lab.  Brittany volunteers as an EMT with a local emergency services organization, so she's seen a lot of stuff and anything she hasn't seen, she's had.  She basically tells me to "Man up" and quit whining.  Not getting any sympathy in the lab, I call my wife and tell her about it.  She insists that I go see a doctor, maybe via a first trip to the optometrist.  About this time Tim walks in and I tell him what's going on.  He seems concerned and walks away.  Then Dave walks over and asks what's going on.  I tell him my eyes are doing weird shit and it won't go away, sort of like a visual version of his ear ringing that showed up after his nose job.  Brittany and Dave run me through the stroke assessment routine that they learned from EMT training.  I seem to pass.  Tim shows back up.  He called his wife, a doctor, and she thought I should see a doctor  maybe via my GP first.  I can't get anyone to answer the phone at the optometrist and my GP just retired and the one I was thinking of going to can't get me in this afternoon and suggest going to Urgent Care.  My wife calls and says she talked to Amy, another doctor, and she thought I should do something but not to bother with Urgent Care.  Just go to the emergency room.  Urgent care would send me there anyway.  Dave, whose head got smashed with a soccer ball about a year ago and who wasted two hours at Urgent Care, only to be sent to the emergency room anyhow, concurred.  By this time, the distortion was starting to go away and everyone had arrived at some diagnosis.  The favorite seemed to be a psychedelic flashback from drug use in my youth and an intense inquisition on my drug use in high school ensued.  The final opinion was that I should go see a doctor and that the fastest way was to go to the emergency room.
Brittany, who has visited the ER on numerous occasions, usually to deliver people, volunteered to go with me.  So we took off for the ER.  We tried to get there by only going through air conditioned buildings but eventually we had to go outside and around to the back of the other side of the hospital to get into the ER.  Entering the ER is a lot like going onto a plane.  The first thing you see on entering is a conveyer belt and a walk-through metal detector.  We toss our stuff into the box on the conveyor and the guy asks if we have any knives.  I give him my knife and he gives me a receipt.  "Use this to get your knife on the way out", he says.  That's different from the plane.  You never see your knife again.
We got in line and when it was my turn I told the person at the desk that I had a sudden attack of blurry vision.  It seemed kind of puny.  I would have felt more like I belonged there if blood was spurting out of me.  She told us to have a seat and wait for my name to be called.  Brittany knew the routine pretty good and kept me informed of what was going on.  While we were waiting, she mentioned that maybe I had a TIA.
Eventually, I got called to a Triage room where they got my vitals and asked a few questions about why I was there.  I related the vision thing and what webMD told me.  One of the nurses said "I hate webMD. It causes half the visits to the ER. Anybody that looks at webMD suddenly thinks they're suffering from everything imaginable."  Now I felt even worse about coming.  Why couldn't I be holding a severed limb or something?  My bp was 130/80, a bit high for me. 
When they got through, they sent us out the other side of the room into a hall and led us to an eye exam room.  On the way Brittany ran into a guy she knew from EMT work.  "Are you OK?" he asked.  "Yea, I'm fine.  I brought over a coworker."
In the eye room, two ladies, a nurse and a nurses assistant came in.  The nurses assistant walks in and looks at me and then says "Hey Brittany. Are you OK?" "Yea, I'm fine.  I brought over a coworker."  They ask a few more questions and I relate the vision thing again.  Then they leave and nobody comes in for about an hour.
Out in the hall, a janitor is relating some story about a big fight he had with somebody, maybe a girlfriend.  It's difficult to tell just what he's saying but he's pretty pissed about something.  As his story builds to a loud, though largely unintelligible crescendo,  a young intern walks in and closes the door.  Oddly enough, he doesn't know Brittany.
"So, what's up?" he asks.  I go through the vision thing again and he does a thorough stroke exam, having me push and pull with all my limbs and watching fingers move.  I think he's trying to see if something works better on one side compared to the other, a sure sign of stroke.  But nothing.  Next comes and eye exam.  20/30 in both eyes. It used to be a lot better when I was younger.  Then he leaves the room to get some numbing drops to do an eye pressure test, a test for glaucoma.  While he's gone, a woman comes in to explain the charges and get my insurance info and credit card.  I should have looked before coming.  $250 deductible for an ER visit.  The intern comes back after a while and does the eye pressure test and, some time in there, the nursing assistant gets another bp and a drop of blood for glucose levels.  So far, all normal.  Then everyone leaves the room again.
After a few minutes, the intern comes back in with the attending physician.  The attending physician looks at me and then looks at Brittany and says "Hey Brittany. Are you OK?" She replies, "Yea, I'm fine.  I brought over a coworker."  He then explains that they don't see anything wrong with my eyes and yet, I don't seem to have symptoms that suggests a neurological problem.  "Maybe it was a TIA," he says.
They suggested that, for sure, I should schedule an eye exam and maybe, but not necessarily unless it happened again, I should see a neurologist.  They gave me a number to call if I needed it.
The lady with my credit card came back in and I signed the sheet just like in a nice restaurant.  The original nurse came back in and went over everything again and they took my blood pressure one more time and told me I could go.
So Brittany and I said good bye to everyone, dropped by on the way out to pick up my knife and walked back to lab just in time to go home.
I haven't seen the fuzzy stuff again, so far.

Correlation

This map of  North Carolina was recently published by WRAL on its web site.  On the real map, you could roll your cursor over the county and see the actual number.  I'll just say that that the burgundy counties were less than 50% YES and the Green were more than 50% YES.  My current county was 85:15 NO, the highest NO vote county.  The county where I grew up was 85:15 YES, the third highest YES vote county.

Maybe that's why I moved.

Flying Around

Recently I had some troubles with my computer.  It would occasionally just quit working.  It was like the hard disk quit working.  So I would reboot it and sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn't.  It always did eventually.  But the failures kept getting more frequent.  Eventually I convinced myself that it was the hard disk.  So I made an appointment with the Apple store and took the computer in for a chat.  It's long out of warranty so they told me it would cost $250 for a new 500 GB hard drive and another $99 to transfer my files.  Not a horrible price for the work.  However, the guy at the genius bar suggested, sort of under his breath, that I could probably do it myself.  I knew I could get a 1 TB drive for about $100 and I was up for the adventure.

I borrowed some suction cups from my boss.  You need suction cups to remove the front glass and he has broken the screen of his iMac twice.  So he invested in suction cups to avoid the expense of having Apple do it.  I eventually convinced him to buy a mac mini and quit hauling his 27" iMac back and forth to his beach house.  That's when it got broken.  Anyhow, I looked up about 5 different instructions on how to swap out the hard drive, purchased a set of small torx screw drivers and after about an hour had the job done.  I'd show a picture but it looks just the same.

So I put in the Install Disk from the last OS and verified that the installation went OK and set out to install all the old stuff back.  I won't go into all the details but it was a nightmare.  It had to do with messing up the permissions when bringing in old data using Time Machine.  Anyhow, after a lot of work installing all the old stuff again and figuring out the permissions thing, I decided to install my old flight simulator and take some time with a tutorial and learn to fly again.  I had a bigger hard drive now (1,000 GB vs. 320 GB before) so I installed all the scenery (6 DVDs worth).

Tonight I was practicing turns somewhere off the sourthern coast of Spain when I spied an aircraft carrier just off shore.  So I decided to land on it.  Just as I was about to land it took a sharp 90 degree turn, but having learned how to do turns without losing altitude, I whipped the plane around and got back in line to land.  I dropped the flaps and slowly ascended down to the deck of the carrier.  As the radio was shouting "wave off", which means "get lost", I neatly touch down on the deck.  While I was there I got a picture.   Here it is.  As you can see, the plane has the markings from the flight training school.  OK, maybe you can't see them.

Last Post on my Old Radio

I never got around to doing an autopsy on my old radio, the Advent Model 400.  So today, when I was making a trip to the recycle center to toss out some cardboard and paint, I decided it was time for it to go.  It will probably be bundled up and sent to Asia where some poor street urchin will tear out anything worthwhile to be smelted down to release it's valuable heavy metals.  Here it is saying goodbye from the electronics recycle bin.

So long old friend.  Bon Voyage.

Jobs for Chemists

Over the last decade, long before the recession hit, the job situation for organic chemists, especially those who ply their trade in the pharmaceutical industry, has been miserable.  Outsourcing and off-shoring have been the order of the day.  And, of course, when you try to outsource the most creative part of your enterprise, you get the expected results.

 I've lived a sort of nomad career during that time, having been laid off with two site closings by the big pharmaceutical companies Lilly and Pfizer.  So I was somewhat interested when I got an email from the ACS (American Chemical Society) Medicinal Chemistry division via Linked-In with the title "3 Jobs".  However, when I opened the email....  well a picture sort of says it all.

Perspective

I saw this graphic and thought it gave a pretty good perspective on the return on investment that we got with the Bush administration.  That's all for now.

A New Friend

The only thing I can say is that if I die, I hope my wife grieves a little longer before replacing me.

Anyhow, the good news is that I replaced my old friend with a close copy.  In the last blog I lamented the death of an old friend, my Model 400 Advent radio.  I still haven't performed a full autopsy on the old boy but the silence in the garage was too much for me to wait.  So I did some research again.  I typed "best radio" into Google and the Tivoli Model Two showed up.  It was more than I wanted to spend so I went hunting and found the Tivoli Model One for $149.  And guess what?  It was designed by the same Henry Kloss that designed my old Advent Model 400.  So I ordered one from Crutchfield and when it came in, I put it in the garage.  It sounds great.  You might notice that it looks similar to the other radio.  It has that same 5:1 analog Vernier dial for the tuner.  And, of course it has only one speaker.  It's got a real wood cabinet too.  Kinda Retro, don't you think?

Here's another shot of it in the garage and a picture of Henry. He died about 10 years ago.  Do a Google Image search of "Henry Kloss" to see a lot of his inventions.

And finally, here's close-up of that Tiki god that watches over all the going-ons in the garage.

Death of an Old Friend

Yesterday, I lost an old friend. I had known him for almost 34 years. He had served me faithfully for all those years. And just like that, he was gone. He was fine in the morning, delivering Car Talk with his old familiar clarity. But when I returned in the afternoon, there was only silence. There was nothing I could do to revive him. I guess after 34 years it was time to let go. What am I talking about? Why, my old Advent Model 400 FM radio.


First a little history. Back in 1978, I was just starting graduate school in chemistry at Cornell and in need of a radio for my lab space. I had acquired something of a poor man's golden ear by that time and so I was looking for good sound for not a lot of money. So, being in graduate school, I did some research. The Advent Model 400 was a mono, not stereo, FM radio that consisted of a little receiver unit and a separate speaker. It was somewhat reminiscent of the KLH Model 20 stereo, probably because it was designed by Henry Kloss, the stereo pioneer who had gone on to start Advent and introduced the famous Advent Loudspeaker. Anyhow, all the reviews said that it was probably better, in the price range, to have one good speaker than two crappy ones and almost all agreed that Kloss had designed the perfect radio, with no more and no less than was absolutely necessary.

At that time, I had worked for a couple of years as a chemist and so I had saved a little money before going back to school. Early in the fall of 1978, I still had some of the money left, having not yet blown it all on beer. So I sprang the $139 for the Advent Model 400. Back then it was still a good deal of money for a radio, especially one with only one speaker. Remember, we were just getting over the quadraphonic binge of a few years earlier. However, everyone who heard it agreed that it sounded better than their crappy stereos with 2 speakers. I've kept it for all these years and it has served me well. It has spent the last 21 years on the shelf in the garage, blasting out NPR on Saturdays as I puttered around the garage or as I grilled hamburgers for supper.


I haven't figured out what I'll do with it yet. Maybe I'll take it apart and see if I can figure out what's wrong with it. Is it the speaker or the tuner/amp that died? I can get the electronic schematics on line along with some other info. Maybe I'll get out the volt meter and do a little diagnostic work. Maybe a simple repair with the soldering iron will bring it back. Or maybe I'll just say a little prayer for a dearly departed, faithful old friend and bury it in the back yard.

Another New Lawnmower

About two and a half years ago, I put up a blog post about buying a new lawnmower. I had the old one for over eighteen years and did essentially no maintenance and yet, it continued to run until it didn't. So I bought a new mower. If you look back at the old post, you'll see a picture of the old mower next to my new one.



Well, the new mower didn't last nearly so long as the last one. On Monday, while mowing the lawn, I hit a low lying tree stump and completely stopped the mower. Hmmm? So I started it back up and it was making a rubbing sound like the blade was hitting the deck. If I held it just right the sound went away and if I held it just wrong, it made a lot of scraping noise. So I finished the front yard with the occasional odd noise and started on the back. As I went across the back yard, the mower hit a root hard enough to stop again. Hmmm? That shouldn't have happened. So I started again and then I hit a root that was lower than the grass and this time I bent the crap out of the blade. As I dragged the lawn mower toward the garage, the blade was digging into the dirt. On close inspection, it appears that the first collision with the stump had actually warped the deck or tore the engine loose from the deck and the blade was actually at a rather bad tilt. I surveyed the damage and saw that the motor was no longer firmly attached to the deck. It was ruined. Maybe the motor is still good, but the lawnmower as a unit is toast.

What to do? Get it fixed or buy a new one. I decided to buy a new one just like the old one. So I looked on the Sears web site and found that same old mower for $159.98. Unfortunately, they didn't have one in stock at the Southpoint Mall Sears but they did have two in stock at Northgate Mall. Since Northgate mall is a bit further away, my wife suggested that I pick one up on the way home from work.

The next day I checked on the web to see if they were still in stock at Northgate and the web site said no. But they said that you should check the store just in case they were wrong. So I called and after the usual horror of phoning a company and going through their series of robots, I got a human who obviously looked up my question on Sear's web site, just like I did. I asked him if that was what he did and he said yes so he transferred me to the Sears store itself where I got an answering machine. The heck with that.

So I just left work and decided to go to the store and see for myself. When I got there, they told me that the model I was looking for was discontinued and the price was a closeout price and they wouldn't get anymore in. It's odd that on the exact day that I want to buy a mower, the previous day they sold the last mower of a line they've been selling for more than 20 years.

So I asked about the next model up at $179.99. There were a couple of guys waiting that also wanted that model. The sales guy said they only had one in stock, but would get a new shipment tomorrow. I said I couldn't come the next day, but maybe later in the week. The other guys said they would drop by tomorrow and get one. I thanked them. So the sales guy goes into the back and comes out and said that, no, he was wrong and they don't have anymore of that model either. OK, so what about the next model up at $199.99? Yes, they seem to have that one. And unlike the bland grey and black mowers of the past, this one is fire engine red.

When I said salesman earlier, I actually meant three salesmen. There were about 4 or 5 customers with questions about lawnmowers and three different salesmen were dealing with all of us simultaneously. There was one who seemed to be the most knowledgeable, one who kinda knew what was going on and one who might have been a trainee. So the middle guy goes back into the back and checks and, yes, they do have that one in stock. So I go through the check out process and he sends me around to the back to pick it up. I scan the receipt and after a while a guy comes out with the lawn mower in a beat up box. There is another guy waiting for a pickup and the guy with my lawnmower tells him that, as it turns out, the item he just purchased is not in stock after all. So he needs to go back to the sales guy and cancel the purchase.

Sears was bought a few years ago by some super rich business guy who also owns K-mart and is slowly destroying the company by starving it for cash. I think he's taking all the money home for himself. It's kind of sad to watch. I'm not sure how this works, but I suspect these types of financial shenanigans are a part of the problem rather than a part of the solution.

Anyhow, I took the mower home and followed the 5-step instructions (raise handle, tighten a couple of bolts, add oil, add gas) to get it ready. I drug out the old mower for a picture and then cranked the new mower. It quickly roared to life. It seemed a lot quieter and smoother than the last mower and didn't shake as much. Right now I'm thinking that maybe the extra $40 was worth it. My wife, who thought maybe Sears had bait and switched me up a couple of models, did like the red color. I finished off the yard.

So there. Hopefully I won't have to write about mowers for another 18 years.

The War in Iraq

The War in Iraq is officially over today. Thank goodness. There are a number of regrets associated with this little skirmish. The first one I notice is that Iraq is a proper name and therefore unusable in Scrabble or that other word game that got Alec Baldwin kicked off a plane last week. It would be really nice if there were more words with "q" that didn't require a "u". Of course, my cousins and sisters would know them before me and I'd actually lose out in the long run.

The second thing is that we prefer to call it the "War in Iraq", rather than the "Iraq War". There's an extra word in there which seems useless unless you believe that it is actually the "Oil War" and it is important to know that this part of the Oil War is being fought in Iraq.

But maybe the biggest regret is the amount of money spent and how poorly it was spent. The war in Iraq cost 800 billion dollars. That's a lot of money and maybe the cause of the current recession. You just can't spend that amount of money blowing things up and not see an impact. That's 800 billion dollars/32 million Iraqis = 25,000 dollars/person. The Iraqi gdp = $82 billion which puts the per capita income around $2500. That's ten years of income for every man woman and child in the country of Iraq. The real tragedy is that so many people died or were maimed and injured. With that kind of money, it's hard to imagine that it couldn't have been spent better. We could have walked in and said, "Look Sadam, here's a bunch of billions. Go have yourself a great life." We could have said to the insurgents, "Here's ten years salary, go have a coffee and chill for ten years. We'll take care of stuff for you." We could have bribed the crap out of everybody and made it a real happy place. We could have even built a mosque or five, planted some grass and trees, and given everybody an iPhone and an iPad with cell phone and internet accounts. We could have built a few Disney Lands. It's mighty damn hard to imagine any way that money could have been thrown away more efficiently than we did it in Iraq. And with 32,000 injured veterans, we're going to be paying for this war for a long time with more than just money. I don't know if I should be more ashamed of my country for its moral failure or for its stupid inefficiency.

I'm a fan of Barack's. He's doing all he can. He's gotten us out of Iraq, he was in charge when Bin Laden was taken out, and I hope he's gonna soon realize the futility of trying to do anything in Afghanistan. When we quit expending so much American capital on stupid missions, we're also gonna see the economy get better.

Well, that's all for now.

Added note: I got a comment that suggested that I was in Iraq. I wasn't. Also, I just missed Vietnam.

Blog Update

Two things - the economy and the spam situation.

First, I'll give a little update on the economy. Since I wrote a few weeks ago on the economy, a few birds have come home to roost. As predicted, the unemployment rate in NC has risen. Gov. Bev Perdue announced that the unemployment rate in NC had risen to 10.7% after sitting sluggishly around the 9.5% for most of the "recovery". This is primarily the result of the increase in the number of workers released by the public sector. This coincides with what may, or may not, be the start of the second dip of the double dip recession. I think it's just a stumble and we're going to come out of this real slowly. The problem is that it will be so slow that a drop in the relative standard of living in the US is already in progress.

Spam update. I still keep all my spam and the daily rate has dropped to just below 60/day.