In case you missed it yesterday, Mariel Zagunis became the first American in a century to win an Olympic medal in fencing. She’s also starting at Notre Dame in a couple of weeks. The fight is on…
Not bad for a guy who doesn’t know the alphabet
Lately Andrew has taken to “reading” his favorite book to us, and the other night we finally got it on tape. Here it is for your viewing pleasure in QuickTime (7.5MB) or WMV (4.0 MB) format. My QT codec is somewhat lousy so in that version it’s hard to tell that he’s actually doing a good job of parroting the words on the page. At least we know he’s paying attention.
Today was a rough day for the little guy, he’s got a pretty bad cough so we spent the whole day on the couch. History Channel was running a “Hands on History” marathon so we got to see how Mack trucks, John Deere tractors and Honda Gold Wing motorcycles are made…maybe cable ain’t so bad after all.
Following the money
I know of two sites with more information on campaign finance than you’ll ever need. The first, opensecrets.org, takes a top-down view of political donations and expenditures, showing things such as the employers of top donors. I especially like the page describing donations and ambassadorships.
In contrast, fundrace.org shreds its data a bit more finely and has a GIS bent to it. One feature allows a user to search for individual donors by address or name. The “top addresses” feature is cool – how else would I know that people who claim the address of 975 Memorial Drive in Cambridge, MA (including someone who’s either unemployed or a housewife and another who’s a clergy spiritual counselor), have donated more than $100,000 to the DNC and Democratic candidates?
These are two more fine examples of the Internet giving new meaning to the term “publicly available data.” Maybe we can’t remove money’s influence from the process, but at least now we can see who’s buying access.
New toys for the boys
| Andrew received a box from his Gammy today and very much enjoyed playing with the contents. I had just as much fun taking pictures of him with my new digicam, and one turned out well enough for me to actually post. This is an unretouched image from my Konica Minolta Dimage X31, which is about the size of a deck of cards. I think at some point I’m going to want a camera that provides creative control in the form of manual exposure control, but I also wanted to try a subcompact that would be easily portable on the bike. My research led me to conclude that those two sets of cameras are pretty much disjoint. So I decided to go for the tiny one first and see how it goes. |
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I wish I’d thought of that…I think
For some lame humor, check out this rec.bicycles.racing thread on Bissell vacuum cleaners (a minor sponsor of the USPS team). See especially Stewart Fleming’s post on Vladimir Karpets, which is really the one I wish I’d thought of.
Karpets, in my opinion, has the best name in the peloton since Joop Zoetemelk.
Reunion ’04 Pictures
Reunion was back in June and I’m just now getting around to posting the pictures. I blame the USA PATRIOT act (seems popular) and the fact that I’m still using a film camera. Takes us forever to use up a roll and remember to get it developed. This time around, all of the pictures were upside down on the Photo CD and the transfer was really noisy – the digital image quality isn’t great, but the film prints look pretty good. I’m shopping for a digital camera now so I don’t think I’ll have to put up with that again.
Here’s my original blog entry on reunion that links that great video clip. I swear I’m gonna pull that one out when he comes around the house with his prom date.
That way lies Sherborn. And madness. But you should get to Sherborn first.
Had a miserable four-hour ride in the rain last weekend. When I met the club at 6am, the air was thick enough to chew – 75°F and humid as can be. We chatted briefly about routes and return times while we eyed the bulging, leaden clouds uneasily. We rode for about half an hour before the first spatters appeared on our sunglasses. Those few drops rapidly became a shower as the sky unzipped and dumped its load.
Andrew-ism of the week
This is pretty advanced stuff for a not-quite-two-and-a-half-year-old.
A: “I want a kitty!”
E: “We can’t get a kitty, I’m allergic.”
A: “I not ‘lergic, Daddy not ‘lergic…”
I suppose it’s going to get worse from here.
Murphy’s Laws of Cycling
This past week on the bike hasn’t been everything I hoped it would be. With the club’s trip to Wachusett Mountain coming up next weekend, I scheduled a long ride for last Saturday as a final tuneup. Unfortunately, instead of getting a nice long ride in, I had an Educational Experience.
Joe Ottinger and the JDJ
In his blog entry explaining “Why I resigned from JDJ (epesh.blog-city.com)“, Joe describes some of the issues he had with JDJ management. I must say that my recent experience as an author didn’t leave me begging for more, and I was thinking of writing to Joe to explain why I was going to take my next article idea elsewhere when I found his resignation. I’m sorry to see him go but I sympathize with his situation.
Since this was my first time writing for a print publication, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. The revision process went smoothly once the staff found my submission, which had evidently been misplaced after the earlier resignation of editor Jason Bell. The one thing that really got under my skin was what happened after my article was published. I understood from the start that there would be no cash compensation for my work, and while that wasn’t my ideal arrangement I accepted it. After the issue went out, the only contact I had from the magazine staff was an offer for reprints at a “heavily discounted” rate but with a “free” PDF version of my article that I could post or distribute. The minimum quantity for reprints was far beyond any need I could imagine, but I was interested in the PDF so I asked them to quote a price. The quote was in the middle hundreds of dollars, which I found outrageous. That was it – no “thanks,” no “we look forward to your next proposal,” just trying to extract revenue from one of the people who made that issue possible.
That pretty much decided it for me – in my limited interaction with Joe I had judged him a right guy and looked forward to working with him again, but the magazine needs to improve the way it treats its authors. Until I see some evidence of that, I’ll take my work elsewhere.
http://epesh.blog-city.com/read/trackback/645152.htm