Tag: Thursday Thirteen

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T-13, 2.X: To-Do List

“2.X” cos I’ve lost track of where I am in this thing… 🙂

Today could be a lazy day. No clients to see and cool, overcast: lay back and nap weather.
Or, I could

1. Move some volunteer flowers (bluebells and daffodils)

2. Spring tuneup on the lawn mower

3. Mow the lawn

4. Clean up/out the flower beds

5. Saw some deadfalls into usable/disposable chunks

6. Move a (very) small tree (another volunteer)

7. Change the oil in my car

8. Do some maintenance on the gear shift linkage

9. Do laundry

10. Do some more laundry (yeh, kinda let it pile up while my Wonder Woman was at a librarians’ conference–my bad, my to-do)

11. Walk the dogs

12. (Rest, watch my latest beer wort bubble away, check my pulse–yep, still alive)

13. Clean out the Augean Stable (my office)

That is, of course, if I don’t just take a long nap… Anywho, if you see nothing else here @twc today, you’ll know I’m either on my to-do list or… napping.

*heh*

TPed to the Thursday Thirteen Hub

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Dodging a bullet, twc style

Once again, strong and long Spring rains have offered a look at a new high water mark here at twc central. The small, usually dry, creek that is a tributary to another creek that offers tribute to a small river much further downstream approached our back door closer than at any other time since we moved here, prompting

13 Water “Names”

1. Creek

2. Stream

3. Cascade

4. Rain

5. Lake

6. Sea

7. Ocean

8. Swamp (what I dearly hope our basement will NOT become :-))

9. Fountain

10. Freshet

11. Spring

12. Flood

And how can one neglect

13. Dihydrogen monoxide, of course. *heh*

The dread “dihydrogen monoxide” has abated a bit, the rain stopped (for now) and things may well be on their way back to normal here at twc central. I hope. 🙂

Tacked up over at the Thursday Thirteen Hub.

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T-13; 2.03: Thirteen Health Benefits of… Coffee

Coffee, THE number one Holy Brew has a bad rap among the twittering masses. Here are a few of the many ways coffee is a blessing:

1.) Lowers risk of diabetes1

2.) Lowers risk of Parkinson’s1

3. Lowers risk of colon cancer1

4.) Mood enhancer1

5.) Headache treatment1 (“…a single dose of pain reliever such as Anacin or Excedrin contains up to 120 milligrams” of caffeine. *heh*)

6.) Useful as a paliative in Adult ADD/ADHD2 (medicating children out of their right minds is another issue entirely *sigh*).

7.) Some research indicates drinking coffee helps prevent dental caries3

8.) Helps in asthma management.1

9.) Enhances athletic performance. 4 (Of course, for me that means the ability to walk briskly to the network closet to reset a router… :-))

10.) Coffee with milk daily=less childhood depression.4 (But of course! Who wouldn’t have (had) a better childhood with a daily dose of The Holy Brew #1? *heh*)

11.) Oops. Left out lowers risk of breast, liver and rectal cancer.5

12.) With over four times the active anti-oxidants found in tea, coffee is better at providing the heart-health benefits often touted for that beverage.6

13.) Despite what you may have heard (even from so-called medical professionals) the evidence is that coffee does NOT cause elevated blood pressure and poses no risk for those who have high blood pressure.5. Oh, and coffee is no more diuretic than plain old everyday water.6

I could go on, but I think you get the point,

O Blessed, Holy Caffeine Tree!

O Blessed Holy Caffeine Tree

Midi File:

Mp3 File (Courtesy of the Morning Coffee and Afternoon Tea Singers):

Go ahead; sing along. 🙂

(This mp3 is a lower-sampling-rate version of trhe one at the Morning Coffee and Afternoon Tea link above.)

Oh, and here’s another verse, not included in the verses above:

O Blessed Holy Caffeine Tree,
In gratitude I sing of thee,
For all the ways you give life zest,
O Caffeine Tree, you are the best!

N.B.–The graphic above has a word-switch in the second verse that I need to get around to editing. First one to spot it gets two brownie points, redeemable for absolutely nothing but a pat on the back and a hearty “Attaboy/girl!”

🙂

If you wish to use this song for your personal amusement, just print it out and/or download or record the MIDI file. Do NOT remove the copyright information and do NOT reproduce multiple copies for use by a group unless

1.) You credit me and
2.) Notify me of its use in a group/choral setting and
3.) Provide me with a recording of any performance

Do NOT download or otherwise reproduce the mp3 recording Christine of Morning Coffee and Afternoon Tea made without contacting HER and asking HER permission to do so.

Do not use this material in any way to produce income or for sale or distribution without my permission. Period. Ever. Clear?

If you have any questions just email me at mnmus@thirdworldcounty.us

Noted at The Thursday Thirteen Hub and Trackposted to The Virtuous Republic, Rosemary’s Thoughts, The Random Yak, Right Truth, Shadowscope, Pirate’s Cove, Big Dog’s Weblog, Cao’s Blog, Leaning Straight Up, The Pet Haven, A Newt One, Conservative Cat, Adeline and Hazel, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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T-13, 2.03: 13 Things Off the Top of My Head

13 Things Off the Top of My Head… some from the dregs of my soul. *sigh*

1. My hat. Only on my head when I’m outdoors.

2. Why is it that when I clean things up–my desk for example–within 15 minutes, whatever I’ve cleaned is messier than it was before cleaning? Is it some universal law of the universe… or just my lil pocket of it?

3. I may as well write this day off as eaten by locusts. From the gitgo, “Whatever can go wrong [has gone] wrong.” Looking for silver linings. Any help here? 😉 Comments from Murphy not allowed.

4. The thing about growing older is that I don’t feel as old as I am. Until I wake up. Still tired, as usual.

5. Ever notice that some things proliferate beyond all reason? Ragweed, politicians *spit*, bureaucraps. All part of the Curse of Adam, I suppose…

A short string (could easily have become a T-13 of its own, but I’m in full ADHD mode today and short on coffee. Blame Murphy) of related items:

6. IF (and despite the Chicken Littles the jury is out, hung only by the paltry few scientists who owe more to politics than to science) AGW were a fact, we’d have more to be thankful for than to bemoan. After all, the earth is overdue for an ice age…

7. So, despite the fact that it appears that Anthropogenic Global Warming is a crock (it appears global climate change is largely due to solar influence, mediated or exacerbated by orbital mechanics and a few other factors beyond man’s ability to influence), and we nevertheless seem to be in a very minor uptick in global temperatures, who’s unhappy with slightly warmer winters besides ski resort operators? Who’s sorry to see slightly longer growing seasons and slightly larger growing areas? Oh, right. Socialist tinkerers and nannystaters who want to use “global warming” to restrict capitalism and your freedoms…

8. Another benefit: maybe–just maybe–the sheeple who’ve been gulled by the lies of AGW Chicken Littles will wake up and smell the coffee when the doom and gloom doomsday scenarios do not come to pass. Maybe. But I don’t hold out much hope. After all, if they weren’t self-lobotomized dummies, they wouldn’t be sheeple to begin with, now would they?

9. On a cheerier note (and leaving AGW behind for now), the cold snap that’s been around for a few days here in America’s Third World County™ seems to be on its way out, and warmer weather is in the offing for this weekend. Nice. Gotta love that global warming… (Oops. Slipped there.)

10. What is it with trifocals? Some days, I feel like one of those bobbleheads.

11. If Mass Media Podpeople and politicians *spit* could all be dosed with an effective truth serum… they’d be out of work the next day. Heck, they’d likely all (or as darned close as to make almost no difference whatsoever) find engraved invitations to necktie parties hosted by Dr. Tarr and Mr. Fether in their hands.

12. Well, with Fred Thompson out of it, there’s no longer anyone worth voting for in the presidential election. The offerings all come down to, “How fast do you want to drive the country off a cliff?” *sigh* (“American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward to perdition.” Preach it, brother… *profound sigh*)

13. I truly believe that, since States control what actually goes on their ballots in elections–or should–we as a country need grassroots movements in every state of the (dis)Union to get state constitutional amendments enacted to place “None of the Above” as an option for every elective office, such amendments to provide that if “None of the Above” recieves a plurality of the vote then ALL listed candidates should be disqualified from running for that office and a new election with a completely new slate of candidates offered to the electorate. Ditto for the federal Constitution, just to cover the bases. For presidential races, keep the electoral college, but allow it the same option.

Noted at the Thursday Thirteen Hub and Trackposted to Pet’s Garden Blog, Outside the Beltway, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, The Virtuous Republic, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Allie is Wired, Right Truth, Shadowscope, The Pet Haven Blog, The Pink Flamingo, Big Dog’s Weblog, A Newt One, Conservative Cat, Pursuing Holiness, Adeline and Hazel, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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T-13, 2.02: A Love-Hate Relationship

(*heh* Bet you were expecting something about politics. Nope, politics isn’t a love-hate relationship for me. *sigh* You work it out… )

Regular readers probably know by now that I have a love-hate relationship with Me$$y$oft’$ products: I kinda love to hate ’em. *heh* Oh, I use Me$$y$oft’$ products pretty regularly (in fact, I’m writing this post on a Windows 2000 machine–that’s one of only two versions of Windows I don’t habitually think of as “Windoze”), and I do like some features of more than a few of Me$$y$oft’$ products, but… there are more than 13 things to hate about Me$$y$oft’$ products and practices. In no particular order until the last:

13. Feature creep. Oh, every software publisher does it, but with Me$$y$oft’$ products it’s a major element of every “upgrade”: how many unecessary “features” can be added to clutter up the interface and contribute to

12. Bloating. Example: Windows 95 could comfortably (safely, with the full needs of the OS considered) be installed on a hard drive with as little as 100MB free space (by contrast, my first Win3.1 system only had a 100MB hard drive and only about 1/10 of that was the OS). Windows 98 needed 2-2.5 times as much space for a comfortable installation and Win2KPro, nearly 10X as much! XP? 2 gigs of hard drive space is just about right. Have the OSes been 10X-100X better? Nope (although THE sweet spot, Windows 2000 Pro, was many, many, many times better than the old Win 3.1 or Win95 OSes, IMO). The same applies across the board to M$ applications, for example…

11. FrontPage. Vermeer FrontPage 1.0 was pretty good. Nice interface, decent web page output, etc. Bought by M$ and “twiddled with” to brand as M$ Frontpage 1.1. Still pretty good output, easy WYSIWYG editing. Not all that bad. Then M$ began to “tweak” it and add features. By the time FrontPage 98 was out, it was full of “features” that bloated the product and…

10. Fixed things that weren’t broken until they were. Yep. M$’s goal seems to be to remake the web in its own image, and so FrontPage, by FP98, was putting out all kindsa non standards-compliant gibberish (just the kind of thing M$’s non-standards-compliant browser likes). Pretty much ditto with M$ Office: M$ kept adding “features” and changing file formats (probably just to frustrate folks who were using other companies’ products that’d learned to “play well” with M$ Office and inconvenience users of those products). Result: bloatware that did NOT play nicely with others.

9. Active X. Hate it, hate it, hate it. I could do a T-13 just on things to hate about Active X. Start with the security nightmares and extend on to and through its sluggishness, memory footprint and on and on. Hate it.

8. Internet Exploder: the world’s crappiest browser (and that’s exactly how any copy of IE I install or manage is branded: “Internet Exploder, the world’s crappiest browser” *heh*). Heck, I even like Lynx better, and it’s command line only. At least it is pretty safe to use, unlike–still!–Internet Exploder. And is there ANY other modern browser that’s LESS standards-compliant? No. (Yes, I keep copies around just so I can help the poor benighted souls who still use it regularly.) Even in its latest “Me Too!” interation, it’s at least a generation behind modern browsers in both features and standards-compliance. Crappy browser, simply crappy.

7. OS “activation”. Can you say, “We think ALL of our customers are crooks, thieves and liars”? Does it stop piracy? Nope. Scemes to avoid activation abound. All M$’s activation scheme has done is inconvenience ethical users. Hmmm, seems M$ has finally (after what, seven or so years?) twigged to the fact that its activation scheme is stupid: WinXP SP3 will relax it a lot and when Vista shipped, it offered a way to avoid it altogether… Still, it’s a pain in the neck (although my real opinion is that the pain is actually located somewhere south of there) and a slap in the face to millions of honest users.

6. Sloppy code. It’s a well-earned meme: buying M$ “gold code” final products is simply buying “shrink-wrapped betaware” complete with a plethora of bugs and traps and security holes, Oh! My! Only fools (and folks who test software until it breaks on purpose) buy the first iteration of a M$ product version “upgrade,” because it WILL break something on your machine. Count on it. Shrink wrap beta. Wait for the first few patches to come through. Patch one will fix security holes M$ is willing to admit they know about (but not willing to admit they already knew about before they shipped the product, even it it’s true). Patch two will fix the things patch one broke, etc. *heh* Maybe.

5. Speaking of which, how long does it take to fix all those security holes? Take Internet Exploder, for example. Dozens more known security holes uncovered every year and M$ almost always takes months and months and months to get around to patching the damned thing (now, that wasn’t a theological assessment of the thing but a fervent wish). Other browsers, maintained by more ethical support and development staffs, usually plug security holes within a day (or days, maybe in extreme cases weeks) or so of discovery. M$ products in general vs. products from other sources: pretty comparable time scale on plugging security holes. Why? M$ just doesn’t seem to care until and unless enough poressure’s brought to bear to force it to patch its products. See #1

4. Crappy websites. M$-run websites. *sigh* Active X. See #9. Buggy, broken, messy non-compliant html and xhtml. (Yeh, I’m not much better any more, but their coders do this stuff for a,living. You’d think they’d at least try to get it right! Instead of doing it the M$ way. *heh*)

3. Cluelessness. Vista. Need I say more? The most useless downgrade of OS I have seen since Windows Muppet Edition (ME). Extravagant resource hog. Almost all the real feature upgrades promised by M$ missing (cos M$ couldn’t implement ’em and make its marketing schedule for milking the cattle of more $$). And Vista’s just the most recent example oif M$’s cluelessness. For a company with so many really smart people involved, dumb, really dumb.

2. A lot of the above boils down to the fact that M$ does things three ways: the right way (surprisingly often. Seriously), the wrong way and the M$ way. The last two are prevalent enough to seem almost overwhelming, though. *sigh*

And number 1?

Attitude: arrogance. It’s the “Do things the M$ way or screw you,” attitude that really chaps me off. It’s almost as bad as Apple that way. Not quite, but almost. *heh*

Tracked back to the Thursday Thirteen Hub and Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Virtuous Republic, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Woman Honor Thyself, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, Shadowscope, Pirate’s Cove, Celebrity Smack, The Pink Flamingo, The Amboy Times, Big Dog’s Weblog, Leaning Straight Up, Dumb Ox Daily News, Conservative Cat, and Adeline and Hazel, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.