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):
Why I Have No Kindle (nor Nook, nor iPad)
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.
Taxes and Census Forms
So the United States government seems to have woken up; we finally got our census form today, and I also got a letter from the IRS about my taxes.
The tax letter was a nice little request for our signatures. According to the letter, our ‘Form 1040 doesn’t show [our] original signature(s).” That would be fine, if it were true. Our Form 1040 did show our original signatures . . . we checked, several times, before sending it. The letter also explained on the back that, “The delay resulting from this request for additional information may have been avoided if you had electronically filed your tax return.” That would be fine too, except that people filing for the home buyer’s tax credit weren’t allowed to file electronically.
Boy, they’re really on the ball over there at the IRS’s Kansas City processing center! I’m starting to wonder if they really want to return our money to us (ha ha ha).
As for the census form, well, it had our street address and ZIP code correct, but named the wrong city for some reason . . . and I still don’t understand why ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are two separate questions, or why the only possible ethnicities are Hispanic and . . . not Hispanic.
Who Knew? I’m a Militiaman!
There’s been a lot in the news lately about militias (the anti-government, criminal type), which got me thinking about militias (the ‘fought the British and gained our independence’ type). That led me to some research about the Virginia militia, and that led me to an interesting fact:
I’m in a militia.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to blow up a federal building or anything. I knew I was in a militia under the original meaning of the term which, as George Mason so succinctly explained, is a military force made up of “all men.” It turns out that, in Virginia at least, this original meaning is actually codified in state law. Under the Code of Virginia §44.1:
The militia of the Commonwealth of Virginia shall consist of all able-bodied citizens of this Commonwealth and all other able-bodied persons resident in this Commonwealth who have declared their intention to become citizens of the United States, who are at least sixteen years of age and, except as hereinafter provided, not more than fifty-five years of age. [Emphasis added.]
We Virginia militiamen are broken into four classes under the code:
Electronic Destruction Field (EDF)
Apparently I’ve picked up a magnetic field of some sort that causes inexplicable equipment failure.
First, my doorbell blew up on Friday. I mentioned it briefly as a Facebook status update but here’s a little more detail: I got home on Friday to an annoying buzzing sound and the smell of burnt plastic. After searching around, it turned out to be the doorbell ringer—which didn’t really do anything when I tried to ring it. I cut the power from the breaker box and disconnected it until somebody can come fix it (under the new home warranty). I’m hoping this will be the worst thing that happens with the house ;-). It hasn’t given us any other trouble.
Then, today, I was feeding a whole crap-load of coins into a CoinStar machine at our local grocery store. It occasionally told me to stop and let it catch up, which I did when it told me to, and then I resumed feeding it coins when it told me to. About 3/4 of the way through our coin pile, it started to tell me to stop much more often (like every few coins, instead of every few hundred). Then it stopped counting coins entirely and told me to seek assistance. The clerk came over and cleaned out the coin back-up, but the machine’s computer kept complaining about its ‘self diagnostics’ and eventually they said, apologetically, that they couldn’t fix it. I got a receipt for the coins it had processed already, and the rest will have to wait.
What mysterious piece of electronics will fail next when I come near it? I’m betting on . . . hm . . . clock radio, followed by a traffic light.
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.