This morning is a big 'catchup' post. Apologies if the topics wander all over the place.
BC - Seen in today's BC comic:
Blameless - A person who has obviously never been married.
Ba-dum-bum!
Dinner - Late yesterday afternoon I got a pleasant surprise at work. Michelle called and said that Sarah had agreed (on pretty short notice) to watch the kids that night. So shortly after getting home from work, I helped Michelle put the boys to bed and we headed out. Being the uncreative types that we are, we went to Milford's Pasta Loft. Michelle thinks it's one of the best kept secrets of the area -- nice atmosphere, rarely a wait, good food and good service. I must admit that it's hard to find a dairy free meal though. It would take a lot of lactase pills to overcome manicotti! Afterwards we stalled for time and head over to Toadstool Books to browse for a little while.
Stove - Well we've used our wood stove pretty regularly now and have just finished our first ton of pellets. A ton of pellets equates to roughly a cord and a half of stacked wood. The guys came to deliver another ton yesterday. Unfortunately due to mechanical problems, they didn't get to use their regular truck and thus couldn't unload the whole pallet at once. The poor guys had to stack it on our existing (empty) pallet one bag at a time. They really earned their delivery fee that day! Michelle has said that she'd like to shift to just running the stove during the day since it heats the lower portion of the house well. Then at night she'd like to put the fire out and rely on the furnace, which does a better job of keeping the upstairs warm.
An analysis I saw last week surprised me. It claimed that burning wood pellets was carbon dioxide friendly compared to heating with electricity, oil, natural gas and propane. Seems somewhat hard to believe. I wonder whether they are including all the energy costs involved by the time the wood is delivered to your house: converting the scrap wood into pellets, packaging, delivering them, etc. What really amazed me were the differences compared to electic heat. So many environmentalists want to shift energy usage to central power plants where they can theoretically better monitor and control emissions. I'll have to do more research on this. Global warming was the least of my concerns when we had the stove put in.
Photos - I've been lazy about bringing my image files over to Photographix for printing. Last week I dropped off a CD with 117 images going back to September. You tend to rack up a big bill doing double 4x6s with that many images. In a geeky twist I found out that I can drop a directory of images onto my iPod, bring it in to Photographix, mount the iPod, and copy the directory to their computers. Perhaps that'll lower the barriers compared to burning a CD. Our CD burner is rather flakey, likely due to its age.
Day by Day - A little over a year ago I started to get into reading comics via the internet. Nearly all syndicated comics you see in the newspapers are available either at ucomics.com (Creative Syndicate) or comics.com (United Features Syndicate), but there are also some independent ones I like. User Friendly is one example that, like Dilbert, tends to appeal to computer nerds who work in cubicles. One comic that I used to enjoy was Day by Day. Unfortunately it had to go offline for several months, but now it's back. Who-hoo! It's a little less geeky than Dilbert, but full of office culture and often jokes about politics and current events. It tends to approach politics from the right, but not as viciously as Doonesbury does from the left.
Books - I've been trying to be more diligent about minimizing television and finishing more books the past few months. I can't keep up with the volume that Tom reads, but I'm doing better. On Halloween I finished the very interesting but dully titled, Applied Economics. I took economics in college and it was nowhere near this interesting. Last week I finished the original Cheaper by the Dozen. It was a nice piece of humor to balance out the serious nature of the economics book. I started it last year but then put it down about a third of the way into it. I think for December I'm going to use the time to dust off my geekier skills and read Programming Perl. Perl is a high level computer language that I've used on and off since 1992. I read the earlier edition of the book (considered the 'bible' of perl) back then, but the language has developed a bunch since then with some powerful and elegant new idioms of expression. Unfortunately my use of perl still tends to look like it did in '92.
del.icio.us - I wanted to put in a plug for a web service I've been using since June. It's called del.icio.us. There's a good review and introduction to it here. It is fundamentally a way to keep web bookmarks online. Saying that is like saying a DVD is a digital storage medium. Read the intro to get a better understanding. Not that you'll find them interesting, but I keep my bookmarks here and my inbox is here. An inbox is an autogenerated list of bookmarks based on other users bookmarks and filters you create. For instance you could define an inbox that finds others recent bookmarks about parenting, exercise, and education. Del.icio.us inboxes (and their other many features) help you discover web pages and developments related to your interests. I give it two thumbs up.
Contraception - Professional Catholic apologist and weblogger, Jimmy Akin, recently did a good post on the many misunderstandings of the Church's position on contraception, sterilization, and NFP. He clears up many myths and discusses some of (to quote John Kerry) "the nuances" that come up when contrarians say "yeah, well, what if you have a case of..." or "yeah, but how is that different from...". Considering how many misunderstandings there are, even amongst Catholics, I recommend it.
Got to go for now. The kids are all awake and I need to give Michelle a hand. Hope you all had a nice week after your Thanksgiving holiday.