Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Big Travel Weekend

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Obviously I’ve been slacking on the posting; I apologize for that. The last week has been busy at work, busy at home, and . . . well just busy in general.

This weekend is our big travel weekend: Melissa and I are going to New York, NY. Lots of you might be surprised to learn that, while I’ve traveled all over the United States, I’ve never been to New York City. It should be an interesting experience. I hate crowds of people, and I don’t like rudeness, so it should be a great time ;-).

Melissa has a thing up there, which is why we’re going now, but we’re also making a long weekend of it as an early anniversary trip. We’re taking the train up this afternoon (so it’ll also be my first time on Amtrak) and staying until Tuesday.

I will try to post some stuff now and then. I’m not sure if the hotel has Internet access or not, but Verizon has kindly made mobile hot-spot free for Palm Pre Plus owners with a standard data plan . . . so up to five computers can surf over the phone’s 3G connection. Now I can be online anywhere without having to pay for access at hotels that aren’t enlightened enough to offer free Internet. Nice.

Where Is Money Mike?

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Where is money Mike?

The anonymous apartment building bulletin board would like to know.

There are many questions about this mysterious screed. So many of them would be easier to answer if there had been any punctuation whatsoever.

Where is money Mike?

Where, indeed?

Time For Some Instability

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In the United States Presidential election of 1848, Whig candidate Zachary Taylor emerged victorious over Democratic candidate Lewis Cass with a 163/127 vote in the Electoral College. Taylor was the last elected Whig President, and Millard Fillmore—the Vice president who finished Taylor’s term after he died in 1850—was the last Whig to serve in the office at all.  In 1852, Democratic Party candidate Franklin Pierce trounced his Whig opponent, Winfield Scott, with a resounding 254/42 vote in the Electoral College.

By the next election in 1856, the upstart Republican Party—established in opposition to slavery—made an impressive showing for a newcomer. Democratic candidate James Buchanan took 174 electors, winning the election, but Republican candidate John Frémont took an impressive 114. Millard Fillmore, now with the ‘Know-Nothing’ party (successor to the already-defunct Whig party) carried one state (Maryland) and took only 8 electors.

Since the election of 1852 went to the Democrats, our system has been dominated by the same two parties: Republican and Democrat. Other parties have fielded candidates, even winning electors sometimes, but have never won election to the Presidency. Very few high political offices at either the federal or state levels have gone to people outside of these two parties in well over 150 years now. Third parties are, essentially, a minor distraction and an occasional force in local politics.

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My Sister’s Spring Showcase Solo Dances

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Spent the weekend down in Roanoke with my sister, Kristen, who had her Spring Showcase. She danced a solo Foxtrot and Rumba. She also did three dances as ‘mini-matches’ with other dancers, but I had some technical difficulties capturing the video. My dad also got some (higher quality) video of both her solo routines and the mini-matches. Here’s the video I got of her solos (from my Palm Pre Plus phone with some cleanup/editing in iMovie):

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Posted in: Life, Videos

Why I Have No Kindle (nor Nook, nor iPad)

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I’ve always been a bit anachronistic. I’m a computer guy and run my own home server with a redundant RAID array to store my data, but my wrist watch and most of the clocks around the house are analog. My music collection is completely digitized and I carry it all around in an iPod, but I also have a collection of typewriters and mechanical switch keyboards. I am very interested in both space travel and dirigibles. I like fountain pens and I like high-end smart-phones. In general, I like both old and new . . . especially when the two meet.

As such, it would seem that I would be really interested in some sort of e-book device like the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, or the new Apple iPad. I do a lot of reading today, and I have bookshelves full of novels, textbooks, reference books, and more. While I get my news from the Internet (as opposed to an old-fashioned newspaper), I still do my more serious reading from actual, physical, paper books. I have not jumped on the e-book bandwagon, and I doubt I will any time soon . . . though I would like to.

The reason is simple. To contrast, I switched to the digital music ecosystem very early and haven’t looked back. I buy most of my music online, and when I have to buy physical CDs (usually because a particular album isn’t available digitally) I immediately ‘rip’ the music into my computer and the CD goes into archives that I have never really needed. Instead of juggling many hundreds of CDs, I carry around one iPod. This is extremely convenient, and I’m totally on-board with it. But this system works for me, in large part, because my iPod and computer have all my music—including CDs I bought well before I had a computer with a big enough hard drive to hold them.

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Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.