Posted inWeb/Tech

Nuvi 285W replaces Nuvi 350 as my GPS friend

Yeah, I'm fickle. If something more desirable comes along, I'll break up in an instant with an attractive piece of technology even if I've had great times with it. So goodbye venerable Nuvi 350, who's been a part of my life since November 2006. Thanks to an after-Christmas Amazon sale, I'm now in an increasingly intimate relationship with a younger Nuvi, the 285W.Lots of people, including me, love the Nuvi 350 -- as evidenced by 3,140 mostly glowing reviews on Amazon.My only significant gripe with the 350 was how she mispronounced basic names, like "drive." We live on Lake Drive,…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Money market account redemption hysteria

A friend recently emailed me some links that warn of impending financial disaster. He noted that I don't often write about economics, which is true. So I took a look at a couple of the sky is falling posts and will report on my impression of them. Which is, in a word, yawn. I don't feel a pressing need to invest in an umbrella to protect against sky pieces.My first stop was "Is the US Goverment Preparing the Lifeboats for the Next Financial Disaster?" I guess this title is supposed to be critical of the (misspelled) government. But isn't it…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Dick Cheney is a liar (as if that’s news)

Not only a liar, a pants on fire liar. That's how the independent fact-checking PolitiFact rated Cheney's claim that President Obama won't admit the nation is at war against terrorists. I wish Cheney would go back to doing stupid things while hunting, like shooting a friend, instead of shooting his mouth off with completely erroneous idiocies.
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Posted inScience Web/Tech

I don’t feel oppressed by technology

I love gadgets. They make me happy. Amazon just sent me a snazzier Garmin Nuvi. Trying it out while driving around yesterday, I had a great time. Really. I'm a believer that money spent on technological innovations actually can buy happiness, especially if what I've bought is made by Apple. So I found quite a bit to disagree with in a recent New Scientist article by Yair Amichai-Hamburger, "Free yourself from oppression by technology." (Yes, that's a real name; he's director of an Internet Psychology research center in Israel.)Such as...The other factor is relatedness: our need to feel close to other…
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Posted inWriting/Weblogs

I win my own 2009 blog post awards!

This is why I love to blog. Winning awards is so much fun! Sure, I've awarded them to myself, but isn't this what blogging is all about, self-absorption?Appropriately, I'll answer my own question. Yes, Brian, you're right. As always.So after browsing through my 2009 blog creations, I declare the following winners. I've included excerpts from my prose to justify, if only to me, why these posts are champions.Best Human-Related Question"A rose cleavage tattoo: to stare or not to stare?"Given a choice between being helped by a busty young thing with a rose tattoo showing in her cleavage, and -- gosh,…
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Posted inHome life

Hope our Samsung nano-particle washer doesn’t kill us

Oh, she's beautiful. But there are reports she could be deadly. Still, we've brought this high-tech Samsung washer into our laundry room, along with her non-malevolent dryer sister. Our nine-year old Maytag washer stopped working about a week ago. This kicked off an intense washing machine research effort, led by Laurel.She's the designated washer in our household, elevated to that position by virtue of (1) my incompetence in choosing the correct settings for washing and drying various types of clothes, and the related (2), Laurel's emphatic "just let me do it" when I offer to wash something that she values.So…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Airport screening is scarier than a terrorist attack

Ah, deja vu all over again. There's an attempted terrorist attack on an airplane. Whatever method was used, the not-so-brilliant authorities figure will be used again. So innocent passengers have to suffer through screening procedures aimed at preventing an attack that has already happened.Because the latest attack happened near the end of a flight, now passengers on international flights have to stay in their seats for the last hour.Idiotic. Irritating. Insane. You can bet that if the attack had occurred in the first hour of a flight, that's when the non-geniuses in charge of airplane security would have ordered people…
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Posted inHome life

Here’s our disastrous 2009 Christmas letter

It's December 25. A perfect time to share our 2009 Christmas letter, the theme of which this year is disasters.Download 2009 Christmas Letter (its a PDF file)Actually, I always title our letter "Holiday Greetings." Laurel and I are, after all, politically correct Prius-driving latte-sipping progressive-voting vegetarian denizens of considerably godless Oregon, so the Christ part of Christmas is irrelevant to us.I do, though, worship the Great God Google. As noted on the blog post where my collected Christmas letters are located, I suffered a cyberspace shock five years ago when my "Christmas letter" Google search ranking dropped markedly after I…
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Posted inSalem

Marion County to vote on enlarging county commission

Today's Salem Statesman Journal reported that voters in my county, Marion, will have a chance to vastly improve our Board of Commissioners setup. Download County Commissioners articleMarion County voters in May will be asked if they want to increase the number of county commissioners to five from the current three and make the seats geographically based.The Marion County Clerk's office confirmed that the group "Have A Voice Everyone" collected enough valid signatures — 5,828 — to get the initiative, Measure 24-292, on the May 18 ballot.This is a great idea. Marion is the only county of its size in Oregon…
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Posted inEntertainment

Russell didn’t win Survivor Samoa. Unfair?

After the first episode of Survivor Samoa I hated Russell Hantz, this season's evil genius. Watching last night's finale, I almost (but not quite) hoped he'd win. At the end of this post you'll find a comment interchange between me, Brian, and Tucson -- a regular commenter on my blogs and a fellow Survivor fan. Since this interchange occurred on a post unrelated to the show, I wanted to copy it to this post-finale pondering about Russell's unexpected second place finish.Tucson and I ended up in basic agreement with a thoughtful NPR blog analysis by Linda Holmes: Russell blew it,…
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Posted inFamily

My sister died today

"In memory of my sister." "An unexpected death." How do I title a blog post that is so painfully unexpected, but which I have to write --- because that's what I do when I hurt, and when I don't hurt: write.You say it like it is. My sister died today. I got the call from my brother-in-law, Bob, a few hours ago. He said that Carol Ann, who was 71, went into a room to look something up on her computer that they had been talking about. When she didn't come back after a while, Bob went to look for…
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Posted inHome life

Christmas letters — a comforting reminder of simpler times

Political junkie that I am, sometimes I feel like my head is going to explode from WTF craziness."I can't support the health care bill because it doesn't reduce costs enough," says one Senator -- who vigorously opposed the public option that would have saved Americans lots of money. Thankfully, Christmas letters are helping me preserve my sanity. They're a connection to the good old days (OK, maybe they didn't seem so good at the time, but now they do) when life seemed slower, simpler, less filled with aggravations.I hardly ever get actual letters in the mail anymore. Nor do I…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

How depressed should a progressive be about health care reform?

It's looking like the Senate health care reform bill won't have either a public option or Medicare buy-in for people under 65. That's disturbing. It sure isn't what I and other progressives expected when Obama was elected president and the Democrats won solid majorities in both houses of Congress.I was looking forward to change I could believe in. Not change that I have to try to talk myself into feeling somewhat good about through the therapy of this blog post.This morning I clicked in succession on two of my favorite political web sites. Over on FiveThirtyEight Nate Silver opined that…
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Posted inHome life Web/Tech

Dell customer service: horrible, frustrating, outrageously bad

Canceling an order for a laser printer cartridge should be easy. With Amazon and other competent online retailers it is. But with Dell, it's insanely difficult. This morning I spent well over an hour trying to do something that should have taken me a minute. There's no excuse for this, Dell. Either you're trying to make it extremely hard for customers to cancel an order, or you are a mismanaged company.I don't use my Dell 3000cn color laser printer very much any more. I've flown the PC coop and use a Mac now. Dell doesn't offer a Macintosh driver for…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Science

Climate scientist emails show no fraud

Yes, I was right! Three weeks ago I said that the climate research email hack shows global warming is real, because the furor over the stolen messages was a big ado about nothing.Now AP reporters have read every email repeatedly. They discussed what the emails mean with experts in climate science and scientific methodology.The AP found that the emails show pettiness, not fraud. Scientists are human, just like the rest of us. They get irked at global warming deniers who try to play fast and loose with facts. Otherwise, the emails show that climate change science is solid. No big…
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Posted inHome life

XM Skydock — another reason I love my iPhone

I've been using "love" and "happiness" a lot in conjunction with "iPhone." (see here, here, and here)Just did it again in this post. I'm loving XM satellite radio's Skydock for the iPhone. It makes me so happy to no longer have to listen to a handful of Portland stations in my car.Aside from Oregon Public Broadcasting, they're all filled with commercials. And most feature right-wing talk radio at the times I'm usually driving around. Plus, they don't come in very well here in the south Salem hills, especially after nightfall. My wife and I had been thinking we should get satellite…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Sustainability

Global warming: Sarah Palin wrong, scientists right

Gosh, what a choice. Should I believe Sarah Palin, who says that global warming is a fiction, or the world's top scientists and scientific organizations, who say that it is a fact?I'll go with science, since Palin has lousy credentials when it comes to facts. She doesn't believe in evolution either, which makes her take on global warming even less credible.Yesterday my daughter asked me what book she should get me for Christmas. I told her, "Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity" by James Hansen, a NASA scientist…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Sustainability

Global warming deniers show craziness of conservatives

Conservatism used to be intellectually respectable. As a teenager in the early 1960s I regularly read serious stuff by William F. Buckley and other deep thinkers in National Review. My mother was a die hard Republican. I shared her commitment to conservatism until I went to college. Back then, there wasn't any conflict between "conservation" and "conservatism." But now, right-wingers have a well-deserved reputation for being anti-scientific, dedicated not to reasoned arguments and facts, but to shrill sound bites with no substance.Today the Copenhagen summit on climate change kicked off, encouraged by the EPA's conclusion that greenhouse gases threaten public…
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Posted inScootering

Scootering at 40 degrees. Loving it. Must be addicted.

Let's consider the evidence for a man (let's call him Brian, for lack of a less realistic name) being addicted to riding his oh-so-beloved Suzuki Burgman scooter.It's December 5 in western Oregon. The temperature is forty degrees, and falling. He's sitting in a south Salem coffee house, enjoying a nonfat vanilla latte after riding eight rather frigid miles so he can use the French Press wi fi to blog about scootering in forty degree weather.Makes perfect sense to me. (Of course, I'm he.) I can't think of a better way to spend a sunny afternoon than riding my scooter. Cold,…
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