Three thoughts...

Three thoughts...  Not in any particular order:

1. I wish we had more reporters like Megyn Kelly.  If we did, I might even watch television news on occasion.  
2. The response to this incident by both the Trump campaign and his lapdog media Breitbart is disgusting.  This isn't the first time we've seen this sort of thing in the U.S., but it's scary every time we do.  
3. Andrew Breitbart must be rolling in his grave at the actions of organization now using his name.

I hear knocking.  What could it be?  Why, it's the doom, at the front door...

A note on doing taxes...

A note on doing taxes...  One of the less delightful parts of doing taxes for me has been, in years past, having to find all the #&*^@$%#! receipts (especially for charitable contributions and tax payments).  That's because all I'd have would be a shoe-box full of slips of paper, in totally unorganized form.  What a pain!

This year it was a breeze – because all I had to do was to type a few key words into DevonThink (the software that organizes the scans I now make of all my receipts) and in well under a second it found each and every receipt I was looking for.  It's almost unbelievable how big a difference it is for me between now and then, and at negligible cost in terms of my effort.  It's way easier than a manual filing system, which takes considerable effort throughout the year.  This is more like a shoe-box with a magical “find it!” capability.

I can't believe I didn't do this five years ago, when it first started to look practicable.  Dang it!

Bumper snicker of the day...

Bumper snicker of the day...  Via my lovely bride:

Want more evidence...

Want more evidence ... that our government is completely out of control?  I'm not sure why anyone would need that at this point, but just in case: the FDA is cracking down on using manure on farms.  Yes, really.

Several historians have suggested that human societies really need to be tossed out periodically, and rebuilt from the ground up.  Sometimes I'm not sure that's actually enough, and that maybe my dad had the right idea: use a few nukes to glass things over, then wait a few million years for the soil to reform.  Maybe the radiation will induce a few beneficial mutations, too...

Jaguar in action...

Jaguar in action... 

What he said!

What he said!  This guy says, eloquently, what I've been feeling about modern art for many years now...

Paradise tutoring...

Paradise tutoring...  Well, I'm down to two kids (from three): Sarah had to drop out because she's already got too heavy a load.  Her mom listed all that she's got, and I have to agree – that slip of a girl has way too much on her plate.  So now I've got Nicholas (11 years old, 4th grade, budding robotics engineer) and Abby (around 13 years old, I think in 7th grade, budding scientist). 

Both of them did fairly well on their homework.  The concept of tens-complement arithmetic had escaped them, and decimal-to-binary conversions as well, so we worked on them for a while.  Then I gave them a concentrated hour on twos-complement arithmetic and the basic binary operators (inversion, addition, AND, OR, and XOR).  Their homework has some hard problems on it; it will be interesting to see how they do :)

Each time Abby got the idea about how something worked, you could see her light right up – she gets joy from understanding.  That's why I called her a budding scientist :)

I sent them home with a printout of a very simple HTML page (source code) that will serve as our first playground for messing about with code.  I'm going to start them with JavaScript, with Chrome's developer tools (which are excellent!) as their IDE...

Paradise kids...

Paradise kids ... are refusing to admit that winter is over.  They want to sled!  These are my neighbor's kids plus a couple they're babysitting.  The building in the background is our shed.  The “mountains” (their term:) that they're sledding on are made from the dirt we dug out of the field to make the shed's foundation.

The kids played on the “mountains” for about four hours.  One of the little blonde girls came over to the house later, and her face was ... not clean.  I'd have given a lot to see her mom's face when she went home :)