Saturday, May 10, 2008

Before all else, a heavy dose of congratulations to Cap'n Mike, who today became Master Mike when he graduated with his Degree in Family Counseling - I may have the degree wrong, but it's graduate level, he's prepared to do the work he wants to do, and he's done, which is all the important stuff. Congratulations good sir - you are neither a loser nor a chump!

3 miles today for totals of 10 and 93. It felt good, too - I'm hoping I can get into a regular habit of 2+ miles almost every day. I actually worked out a schedule to try to get specific amounts of Newsweek and ScienceNews read each day - it's the first Content-Based Workout Plan! Newsweek gets split into first half, third quarter, and final quarter. For my next issue, that comes out to 19, 14, and 12 pages once ads and letters and other stuff are taken out. And those 19 are pretty sparse with lots of photos so it's close to equal. ScienceNews just changed its format so I'll have to try it out to figure out numbers.

I like to calculate too much. You all know this.

I've been watching Battlestar Galactica 4th season (no spoilers - just generalities that grow from the first three seasons), and my main concern storywise is where are they going with all the religion/metaphysics storylines? Is one religion true and the other complete snake oil? Will we snarkily dismiss all unobservationally verifiable beliefs? It's confusing and seems to slow down the main story rather than advance it. Of course I've thought this about other plots and they've worked out well - I will trust the writers' magic for now.

Saw a sign for a "Pfabulous Sale!" this morning. Yep, I'm a pfloser.

According to the election results I was able to find, 2 of 3 bond propositions in Pflugerville failed (pfailed?) today. The library will be expanded, but the new City Hall was nixed (although the board's already approved necessity bond funding if the election didn't work out so the vote was irrelevant), and the new Rec Center down the street from me was voted down. I really wanted that new Center - walking distance is almost as good to me as lots of improved facilities. If people generally didn't want to spend tax money on it, that's fine, but I'm afraid a negative campaign by someone who'd gotten investments to build an overpriced private center swayed the voters. If so, that's sad, because people will now have the "option" of paying $42/month instead of an average of $10 at the new Rec Center - no wonder they expect lower turnout than the current Rec Center (which costs $6/month) gets. I hope this individual's investment goes belly-up in spectacular fashion, which I'm betting it will, as he apparently didn't know the city was planning a new expanded Rec Center. Frackin idiot.

On a side note, the word frackin' might by itself justify the entire Battlestar Galactica series. It's that cool.

I've been working on designing a contacts database for UrbanConnection - it's fun trying to think of all the possible uses for and protections of contact, demographic, and skill/interest data. I'm probably overdesigning it, but as long as I also write the code modules or stored procs to populate/query them, I figure it's my own grave I'm digging. For those afraid I'm going to be supporting junk mail, I'm getting promises from the group that all communications will be opt-in and all data will be securely protected from any user who doesn't need it. Now I just have to make sure that's how the product works. If anyone has suggestions for how to build a data entry/simple reporting interface to this MySQL database (there's no funding for this project so it needs to be free or pretty cheap), I'm all ears. It's for fairly few users, and the data scale will be very moderate.

On the book front, Jack the Bodiless has given way to Diamond Mask, and I'm enjoying this series more every bit I move through it. An excellent description of man's intellectual and social evolution tying into God's revelation to a select people and then through incarnation makes a lot of sense - I get the feeling I might enjoy more Jesuit literature, which seems to be one source of inspiration for this series. Sadly only 2 books left - I will have to try Julian May's other series, and see if this was a one-shot chef d'oeuvre, or indicative of her overall talent.
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