Author: David

Over-educated Curmudgeon, Bit-Bucket Tuner and Budding Brewmeister.
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Just a Lil Geekiness

I have used some form of the OpenOffice suite as my usual office apps collection for personal use for several years now, actually since Sun offered StarOffice for free, early on. Oh, I’ve used the progressively-upgraded M$Office suite (now with Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 on various Windows boxes, “real” and virtual) just because I need to maintain familiarity for troubleshooting or tutoring others’ use, but that’s just about it for me and M$Office apps.

Now, though, the scene’s a bit complicated since LibreOffice has forked (sort of) from OpenOffice. So, OK, I uninstalled OpenOffice on this lil 15.6″ toy Asus and installed LibreOffice. Most things seem about the same, except… killer feature: natively editing PDF files. Very nice. I liked being able to create PDf files in OpenOffice, but opening and editing PDF files is a very cool feature. Kudos, LibreOffice guys n gals.

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Effecting Subliteracy, One Headline at a Time

Headline on local weather report:

Weather Effecting Superbowl

Really?

When “effect” is used as a verb, it means “cause something to happen” so that headline-written-by-an-idiot means, “Weather Causing Superbowl”.

Of course, the idiot who wrote that meant “Weather Affecting Superbowl” but, because he* is a subliterate idiot, apparently working for and with other subliterate idiots, that headline made it onto a local weather report.

Insert fork, twirl in brain.

*Yes, I eschew the “he or she” or “s/he” or whatever current abortion of good English is in current vogue in favor of the long usage of “he” to mean a non-specific person. I have little time or energy (and no respect) for that politically correct crap.

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Pay Attention: Our Society Has Already Failed The Test Once….

Jerry Pournelle:

“What is so Special about the 30 Year Mortgage” by Peter Williams in today’s [Feb 1, 2011] Wall Street Journal dispels some myths and raises interesting questions. The United States has for a long time encouraged people to buy their homes. This is a good idea: rule by the middle class, ‘those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation’ (Aristotle) requires that there be a middle class, and that they have property. Alas, the implementation did not leave them much of a property stake. People who owe more than the property is worth not only do not own property, but have a strong motive to shed themselves of the very idea that they ever owned it. The long time mortgages with low down payments do not build property ownerships.

Now, our home is paid for. Was a fifteen year mortgage to begin with, and we had EVERY intention of making it wholly ours from the beginning. Paid it off early. And when we bought, we bought a home that was less than we could have gotten, deliberately. Indeed, we’ve mostly, for quite some time now, made it a practice, in general, to live under our means, providing a greater cushion for emergencies and potential income losses or other changes of circumstances.

Major purchases, other than this house–cars, appliances, electronics, whatever: saved for and paid for in cash or cash equivalent (check or debit card).

“[T]he goods of fortune in moderation” is key to a solid middle class, and a solid middle class is even key to long-term wealth for the putative upper class, for without such a middle class, the means to assure long-term wealth become shaky in a republic. Of course, our republic is trending toward an oligarchy (rule by an elite) with a veneer of democracy (rule by mob), and the oligarchs seem to have little interest in even their own grandchildren’s future, “planning” ahead only so far as their next short-term “killing”.

Well, as usual I’ve wandered off the reservation a bit. *heh* Pournelle’s original comment, and his recommended reading material (I fixed his link to point to a non-registration reproduction of the article) are worth reading.

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What’s the Matter With Kids Today?

*heh*

Okay, so my topic’s not the same as the Bye Bye Birdie tune’s. Here’s a switcheroo. A recent (well, 2007) book on school reform and what can go dreadfully wrong with reform efforts had one comment that made me hoot til I almost cried. “Oh, what was it?” you ask. Praising the intent of the “New Math” era and how it breathed life into Math curriculum.

Yeh, right. If anything were deliberately designed to wreck budding students’ interest in or understanding of math, it was New Math. Either it was a conspiracy of evil persons to completely screw kids up or it was a conspiracy of dunces who were too stupid for words… completely screwing kids up. That is, if their “intent” was good, the people who designed and implemented “new math” were monumentally stupid people.

4th Grade: “new math” screwed me up so badly, it wasn’t until I had a high school geometry teacher who was teaching just for the joy of it (her family was in Big Bucks City) that my head started to come unscrewed from “new math” so the threads could be reworked and I could have the thing screwed on right (as to math). From there, calculus, stat, whatever, was fun.

What’s the matter with kids today? A lot of it is remote educrats having screwed up public education for decades (with the complicity of lazy, dumbed down by their own school years, parents and stupid, compliant pubschool administrators).

[great story excised to protect the innocent]

Asshats.

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Quick Cocoa

1/2C Cream
1/2C 2% milk
1 heaping tablespoon of evaporated condensed milk
2Tbs sucralose
1/4Tsp vanilla extract
1 heaping tablespoon unsweetened cocoa.

Heat the liquids by your fav method.

Combine everything in a blender. Serves 1, so make double if you are making some for yourself in the presence of a Significant Other. Or else. *heh*

Yum.

Just the thing on a “snowed in day”.

Meanwhile, a pot of beef stew is cooking away in the Wolfgang Puck Rice Cooker and a pot of chili’s makin’ on the stove. Whatever comes, we’ll have plenty of fare to face being snowed in or power outaged. Or both.

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Gad!

And people get paid to write mind-numbing crap like this!

“A large and potential [sic] historic winter storm is bringing blizzard conditions to the central Plains as it spreads north and east into Midwest and Great Lakes.”

The guy who wrote the sentence above ought to have “Butt Stupid” tattooed on his forehead in red lettering. Just how freakin’ hard would it be to add two letters to make that sentence’s grammar correct?

“A large and potentially historic winter storm is bringing blizzard conditions to the central Plains as it spreads north and east into Midwest and Great Lakes.”

See? Not hard at all, but some dumbass actually got paid to encourage subliterate morons to stick a (metaphorical, folks) fork behind their eyeballs and stir vigorously. *feh* At least the offenses against English I commit here aren’t paid, so I’m not a thief as well as being occasionally grammar-challenged.

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Hoist With Their Own Petard

Nanny-nanny-boo-boo@The Zero, “Nazi Pelozi” and “Hairy Reed”.

😛

*heh*

I noted this on FB yesterday, but it’s worth a “real” post.

Health Judge Uses Obama’s Words Against Him

“I note that in 2008, then-Senator Obama supported a health care reform proposal that did not include an individual mandate because he was at that time strongly opposed to the idea, stating that, ‘If a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house,’” Judge Vinson wrote in a footnote toward the end of his 78-page ruling Monday.

Not only that, but the dumbasses Reid and Pelosi failed to put a severability clause in their multi-thousand-page monstrosity, so,

“Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire Act must be declared void.”

Hoist with their own petard, indeed.

Play and repeat twice:

[audio: What-a-maroon.mp3]
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Angel Dandruff

I don’t have a camera that’s fast enough to catch the snow that’s coming down except as a kinda foggy look, but it’s coming down to beat the band… and covering the inch or so of ice that’s acting as a base.

UPDATE: Now almost 10″ of the white stuff on top of an ice base and still coming. I’m not goin’ out there! Well, not in a car.)

UPDATE 2: It’s now after sundown. Temp’s about 16°F (about -9°C). Supposed to be 10°-13°F colder overnight and even colder (by another 10°F) tomorrow night. MODOT (Missouri Department of Transportation) says, “Most of y’all should just hunker down and stay warm,” or some such.

Purple=covered in snow & ice.
Red=closed.

The smaller state “highways” near the purple and red are worse than the main roads by a lot, if past experience is any indication.

We can’t get out of our drive, because the street in front of our house is too deeply covered. I ain’t a-shovelin’ the whole street by hand with my 30+ year old snow shovel. One street over is the main route for the county ambulance service, so it (alone) in the area has been plowed and sanded by a city-contracted service out to the nearest highway… which is in worse shape than the access road to the ambulance service.

I’m pooped out just walkin’ in this stuff to do a survey of nearby streets/roads–and I just went far enough to be able to get a look–about 1.5 blocks, walking most of the way in a track Son&Heir had broken earlier.

UPDATE 3:

The “best” road in America’s Third World County:

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So, Chuck’s an Uncle

Chuck hasn’t been as consistently watchable as I’d have liked, but the idea of a geeky dude playing spy has been fun, off and on. Tonight, Chuck became an uncle, but… *sigh* They named the poor (fictional, OK) kid, Clara. For someone of my generation, the first “TV Generation”, that immediately invoked images:

Yep. Either Clarabell Clown or Clarabelle Cow.

Who’s the funniest clown we know?
Clarabell!
Who’s the clown on Howdy’s show?
Clarabell!
His feet are big, his tummy’s stout,
But we could never do without,
Clara, Clara, Clarabell!

Who has fuzzy-wuzzy hair?
Clarabell!
It’s partly red but mostly bare.
Clarabell!
And since the day that he was born,
He’s honked and honked and honked his horn.
Clara, Clara, Clarabell!

Come on! You can sing along!

Sad. *sigh*