Alkahest

We moved into our current house a little over four years ago (already?!). Over the past few years, we’ve found that the people who built it made some interesting choices. Some things were done very nicely and they cheaped out on other things. One of the places they cheaped out was the [...]

Few people have been on top of the extension of FISA like Glenn Greenwald. As a quick overview for folks that haven’t been paying attention to the issue:

Late last year a real potential problem with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) (as written in the 70s and amended after Sept 11) was recognized. [...]

Interesting. Shortly after posting about power companies, I received a comment from Progress Energy correcting me about the plans. It seems [pure speculation here] that Progress has some sort of “blog response” team up in Maryland or northern Virginia. Anyway, I misnamed the program that I had been offered, as the comment [...]

It was a rough night to try to get any pictures of last night’s total lunar eclipse. For long durations of the evening, you couldn’t even see the moon for all of the cloud cover. I did manage to get a few pictures. Most of them were slightly blurred because of the [...]

When K and I got home today, we had not one, but two different offers from the local power company (Progress Energy) to enroll in their equal payment plan program. The first was a generic flier touting the benefits of having a consistent power bill. You sign up and based on your past [...]

One of the things I dislike about blogs (and actually most webpages) is that the static content is formatted very nicely using different fonts, etc., but the dynamic content is all pure text.  And since there are only a few fonts you will find on every computer, the text all looks pretty much the same: [...]

About eight months ago, a gentleman with the same first and last name as mine started using gmail. Not a big deal except that the difference between our gmail addresses is fairly small and hard to notice. So every once in a while, I receive email intended for him and I’ll point that [...]

The ISP move went reasonably well.  There were a couple of minor glitches.  One was a character set problem when I tried to take the most recent database snapshot from Linksky.  I’m not entirely certain what happened, but I wound up with extra characters after some punctuation marks.  Rather than spend too much time with [...]

Saturday is moving day. Nope, we haven’t bought a new house. We hope not to have to do that for a long time. It’s time to change ISPs. After only 10 months with Linksky, I’ve had enough. In the past year, between working on the non-profit’s website and [...]

There’s something about the idea of global warming that seems to drive people of a certain mindset completely insane. You start seeing things like: “the planet’s not warming up!” “Okay, maybe it is warming, but humans couldn’t possibly be causing it.” “Fine. We are causing global warming, but we can’t [...]