It has been a cool, crisp sunny couple of days to go with the couple of days of rain before them.
After Sunday dinner, I transported to my house an armchair that my folks were getting rid of. It is a rather ugly orange color that clashes with the general bland color of my house’s interior. But I needed a chair for the bedroom, as I had nowhere else to sit in there apart from the bed.
My sister the editor helped me carry the chair and navigate it around the narrow thresholds of my house. In return, I helped her put up her storm windows, put new glazing putty on some of them. (For those of you in newer houses, a storm window is a removable outer window that serves the purpose of a double-glazed window in old houses. It is used during the colder months to protect the house windows from storm and snow.)
This month I decided to go with a series of minor projects instead of the big project during the summer.
I striped out the existing pegboard in the shed and put up new pegboard. I also installed a shelf near the ceiling to store cardboard on its way to the recycling place.
I also got some spring-loaded curtain rods to fit in the sills of the upper room windows, and some curtains to go with the rods. That way, I can get both outside light and privacy.
Along with the standard yard work on Saturday, I took a saw to the maple tree in front, removing the lowest branches that were drooping onto the ground and whose leaves were showing brown/black blotches. I am hoping pruning the tree to keep the branches off the ground, and from swacking my car as I drive to the mail box, will make the tree grow more.
I visited Kennedy’s, the HVAC folks who installed the furnace for the house’s previous owner a year before I bought the house. It has been three years now since the furnace had any maintenance, and it is high time the furnace got it. I will see if I can get the HVAC folks to look over the furnace this coming Friday afternoon, and if I can get time off to attend to it.
During the next couple of weeks, I will study for the Apple Certified Service Professional exam on the last Wednesday of this month. I have worked on Macs and Mac OS X for the past five years, and it is time I have something to prove this. I will take a half-day vacation time to take it, at the new Ivy Tech campus on State Road 18.
I am not the only one who finds the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barach Obama incredible; who thinks that he does not deserve it (even he thinks thus); and who believes the Prize will make every goal Obama plans to achieve all that much harder.
Obama has been president for only ten months. The fact that both Arabs and Israelis look upon Obama with incredulity means that a Middle East peace will be task far more difficult for him than any other post-WWII president. And he has two Middle Eastern wars of his own, inherited from Bush the Younger, which he has promised to wind down but which, for some reason, he refuses to end. And there are other conflicts, both active and smoldering, in the world (Darfur, the Somali tribes, Abkhazia/Georgia, Iran, Burma, North Korea) that demand his attention. As it is said, he has nothing yet. All that presenting the Nobel Peace Prize has done is to make it the Nobel Wishful Thinking of Some Norwegians Prize in the eyes of the many.
After commenting about this on Slashdot, only to get a -1 hit, I decided to create for my account a password of twenty randomly-generated characters that I cannot — and will not — remember. This is the best I can do to disable my Slashdot account, since it cannot be deleted. I have had enough of this moderation crap. I will keep on reading Slashdot; but active participation is an obvious waste of my time, and I will have no more to do with it.
Finally, from the depths of a media summit
in the gathering hall of the world’s most media-repressive nation, the great enemy of the BBC and the Anglophone world, Rupert Murdoch, utters his mantra that the Aggregators, the parasites that suck content from his news Web sites, are out to steal his money. We will make them pay and pay and pay, he grumpled from the depths of the hall. Here’s a good idea from Slashdot: [S]imply stop Google from linking to their news stories by going to his Web site’s robot.txt file and adding
Disallow.
I have a better idea: Why don’t you just shut down all your Web sites and stick to printed and televised media, where your customers have no choice but to pay? And leave the Web alone, you damn apeling!