Tom’s occasional rambling thoughts

Or at least almost.  The kids are going crazy! Bouncing, noise, general rambunctiousness. For the record, their last day of school is Thursday the 22nd.

Jeb Bush said the following recently in response to a decision by the Supreme Court regarding administering the death penalty: “Whether we have the death penalty or not seems moot. People are spending all of their natural lives on death row rather than having the sentence complete…” These people performed heinous acts and were sentenced…

So we spent this earth day in an interesting way.  We have been piling up brush for eventual disposal and today was when we finally put the torch to it. So in order to redeem this destruction we pulled out the dutch oven and filled it with stew then buried it in the coals to…

At least a week away from work, it quite nice just to hang around the house and relax. Especially nice not to have be at that office. The best part of the week was over the weekend we went up to White Pass. A fabulous two days of skiing, the weather was fairly good and…

This Lego creation is just amazing. I would play lego a lot as a kid but never created anything this neat.

I am trying my first trackback here, we’ll see how it works. In defense of AJAX, there are places where it can very useful. It is currently being used by the washington state dept of transportation for displaying the traffic camera images (http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/traffic/seattle). Click on a camera and just the image changes, very quick and…

A disturbing trend has been happening for a number of years. I saw a review of this book that talks about how mathematical theories are being patented. This will certainly stifle any future innovation, not a good thing.

I have been getting the updates that The Nation for a while now, they carry some interesting articles.  When reading their message today in firefox there was a link to download pictures which sort of confused me.  Typically these messages are plain text, no images to be seen.  So I checked the source of the…

I had been looking around for the political cartoons which have been causing such an uproar and finally found some copies of them here. I don’t see quite see what the big deal is. Muslim extremists can kill thousands of people, Bush can order a war that kills thousands of people and the muslim reacts…

I had been looking around for the political cartoons which have been causing such an uproar and finally found some copies of them here. I don’t see quite see what the big deal is. Muslim extremists can kill thousands of people, Bush can order a war that kills thousands of people and the muslim reacts…

I started receiving the error 1706 after wiping my machine and then reinstalling office 2000 SP3 on Windows 2000. It was quite annoying and I could not figure out how to get it to stop. Giving the installer the disk did not help and searching the internet turned up various methods of fixing that sounded…

Well, I guess a building a new city elsewhere would be a bit difficult. Certainly though it should not be too difficult to comprehend that rebuilding the areas that flooded so badly would be throwing good money after bad. Another flood will happen someday and it will all be destroyed again. Rebuild but do it…

The quote is found in this cartoon at the Nation’s web site. I realize that I just lost 50% of you with reference to this magazine but open your minds anyway and read the quote, even though it was made about 60 years ago it does apply to today.

Just saw news that there was a big earthquake in the Kashmir area. Those poor people, having to put up with the stuff between India and Pakistan and now this. My heart goes out to them. One thing that struck me was that a representative for the president of Pakistan flew over the area immediately…

Another nerd test:

I have been thinking about the disaster down South a bit this past week, who hasn’t really. When you get right down to it the best thing to do would be to call the city a loss and rebuild further upstream on a piece of land that is actually above the level of the surrounding…

Cool, see different sorting algorithms working. The first ones in the list are amazingly inefficient. The Improved Sorting Algorithm Demo

Take Back The Media Bush Knew – An American Requiem22

Some very poignant observations in this article. I have never thought that moving all the jobs overseas is a good thing, for one who are the companies supposed to sell to if everyone is working low wage jobs or not at all? And, of course, the health care system in the US stinks, sure those…