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Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Civics

Today and tomorrow are important days for my family. The oldest two daughters are eligible to vote. In fact, they insisted on getting registered on their birthdays. To say I was overcome with pride about that little fact would be an understatement.
Tonight I'm going to flex my Google-fu muscles and come up with a list of candidates, who endorses them, and their political voting record.
Yes, voting in the Presidential elections are important. You have to vote in the primaries in order to vote in the election. What's more important is voting in the state and local elections.
Despite it's name, the Texas Railroad commission does not have control over the railroads and commerce. It has a more important role: jurisdiction over the oil and gas industries. All the pipelines of natural gas, surface mining, and utilities to name a few. They have regulatory and enforcement responsibilities under the Clean Water Act and the Resource Conservation Recovery Act.
These guys are the ones who control how much my utilities bill is going to be as well as the quality of water coming out of the tap. So yes, I want to be familiar with them.
When I talk to my friends about voting, the typical response is, 'Oh, that's today?'
That's why I try and get in on early voting as much as possible.
If you don't vote, you can't bitch.
On the other hand, I think it's an awareness problem. People are honestly too busy running in a circle. Work, home, sleep. Wash, rinse, repeat.
"I have to do what differently today?"
When I first heard the idea of making voting day a holiday, I thought; 'Why not?' We'd certainly get better turnouts. I know far too many people who are afraid to take time off their job to go vote. Scary, no? It's like going to the dentist. People don't go out of their way unless there is a problem. The same mentality applies here.
If you don't vote, you are letting someone else decide your future. There is a part of me that is thinking my children are trying to take control of their lives by being active participants.
Really, I couldn't care who they vote for. It's a bit personal. I want someone who reflects my ideals and who I feel will represent me in a responsible manner.
Not only do I pay attention to who's running in the election, I get the news letters and e-mails from my senators and representatives. When they do screw up, I make a note of it and stick it in the back of my mind for when that person is up for re-election.

One of my rules is I don't do fear. That's not to say I'm never scared or afraid. I've faced my personal demons, stared them down even. When some politician tries to incite fear and paranoia in me, I know this is a person not worthy of my time. When he demonizes whole populations with broad strokes, I know this person is dangerous. More to the point: He's a waste of oxygen.

Don't trust a man who doesn't know how to play a musical instrument or create something by hand: He doesn't have patience or discipline. Beware of soft men who have no callouses on their hands. They don't know the meaning of work. That goes for scars too.
Most of all watch out for the guy who says; 'God wants me to run for office.' It's curious that his personal beliefs are exactly what he claims God wants.
No matter what color on the political spectrum you fall, get out and vote. 

Sunday, February 14, 2016

Deaf movie review, no spoilers

Come April it will be anniversary number 25 with my gal and main squeeze Carolyn. Seriously, she's the only woman who will put up with me. But that's not what I'm writing about. The girls gave us (mostly) an afternoon off to enjoy Valentines day. So the two of us went and saw Deadpool. We enjoyed the movie. A combination of snark, humor and cartoon violence. Enough about that though, don't take the kids.
Long time readers know I've had a running battle with Regal cinemas and their spotty record at captioning movies. In my book, they're 4 in 10. Even if the captioning worked, the device I had to wear gave me a headache and pinched my nose and temples to the point where I was useless after the movie. For having to endure such torture, I have six or seven free movie passes from them. If anyone wants them, let me know. Gee, go back to a theater that causes you pain and there is a more than 60/40 chance they're going botch things up. No thanks.
So I did the smart thing: voted with my wallet. The wife and I went to the Rialto Santikos theater off of Perrin-Bietel on loop 410. I hope I'm spelling it right, because it's giving spell check a run for it's money.
The listening device had a round puck on one end that went into the armchair cupholder. From there a flexible cable arm snaked out with a box on the end of it. It resembled a desk lamp or one of those viewfinder toys we had as kids. I never wanted to make a Star Trek joke so badly before. It resembled that thing Sulu peered into while steering the Enterprise.
That said, I was able to follow the movie. I positioned the device so it was just below the screen, allowing me to glance up/ glance down. It's a good thing I can read fast.
They served beer. Sure the nachos and draft beer were way overpriced, but come on, it's a movie theater we're talking about. In all honesty, I've seen worse price gouging and the food wasn't bad. Nothing to write home about, mind you, but it didn't come with a free case of salmonella. A plus in my book. 
So, no headache. I enjoyed a movie with my sweetheart. Didn't have to sneak a beer into the theater. There wasn't really a downside to this.
The deaf guy says check it out.

The trend I've noticed


Mankind has a tendency to imagine possibilities before they become fact or reality. Was that sentence vague enough? Last week, scientists detected gravitational waves first predicted by Einstein one hundred years ago. There's a fair amount of science stuff that might go over people's heads in this next link, but skip down to the paragraph entitled 'Relativity'. The whole article is worth a read. I'm still trying to comprehend how dense a neutron star is. The scale is quite staggering to my meager imagination.
What does that mean for us? Well for starters, we are understanding our universe a bit better. Seeing things that were previously invisible to us. Gravity is invisible, but now we are bringing it to a visible spectrum. A picture we can see, quantify and relate to.
This reminds me of when Voyager 1 flew past Io, one of Jupiter's moons. Before the flyby, it was generally believed the moons were dead rocks floating in space. Oh how wrong we were. A scientist at JPL flipped a switch and viewed the Jovian moon in an infrared spectrum, something we couldn't do until a short time before. In that one moment we had to re-write what we thought about the solar system. All that from being able to view the universe in an otherwise invisible spectrum. Now that we know what to look for, I imagine a few more books are going to need editing.


First we imagine it, then we do it.
Da Vinci imagined the parachute and helicopter, among other ideas. Those were the first two inventions that sprang to my mind.
Jules Verne wrote about going to the moon and under the sea. Now we have submarines and rockets. I don't think the originators of the ideas they imagined would be done in just such a way. 
The original helicopter 'screw'

seems almost comical compared to this


The concept of the spinning rotor is the same, but everything else...
Different, but tied together.
You might recognize this equation: E=mc2. Think about those two black holes in the article above. The emitted energy when they collided and we can finally detect, measure and understand what happened. A quote from Tesla springs to mind: "If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration."
Sound waves, light waves and now, gravity waves. Infrared, ultra violet, X-ray and visible light. I see the connections and others more knowledgeable than myself understand it better. I'm humbled by the possibilities this brings. 

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Spring, sort of

In a little while I'm going to be calling in to work. The cold that I've been trying to shake all week finally caught up to me. Slight fever, can't breathe and I'm coughing up all sorts of nasty stuff. I want to blame it on the weather, but it's actually been on the mild side lately. This is supposed to be my last week of visiting every store in the area, but we're 98% done with that. Getting up before sunrise and getting home after sunset can be considered burning the candles at both ends. I'm sure that factored in health-wise too.
But my biological clock is temporarily(?) set to wake me now so here I am, filling in the blank spaces. More than likely I'll get a nap in today.
Cleaning all those stores made me take a look at my living space. Now that I'm about to have more time to do stuff, I think there's going to be a purge, perhaps a garage sale. A neighbor lent me her power washer and I've started to do the sidewalk/driveway. The difference is astounding. Truly, I was unaware of how dirty the walk was.
Night and day, huh?

So I got started on the driveway last night and kinda, sorta pressure washed the street curb numbers off. They needed to be redone anyway. One project leads to another. Break out the stencils...

Saturday, February 6, 2016

Projects

My 'special assignment' is almost complete. For the last two months or so I've been driving to all the Lowe's in the city and outlying areas. What do I do there? In short, we clean. Officially it's been called the downstocking initiative. We bring merchandise off the top shelves and fill the nooks and crannies. Twenty-odd people including myself descend on a store to do what's called zone, front, and left justify. That is retail speak for fill the shelves, present the merchandise at the front of the shelf, and neatly organize and label stuff. There is also a lot of dusting. 
I've been gifted with a fairly robust immune system. Some family will dispute that, however I've noticed that I suffer less from colds and allergies. The dust in these stores challenges that notion. Lately I've come to think of it not in the terms of allergens, but of tolerance levels. After cleaning all those stores, I've almost reached my limit. Fortunately there is only one more store to go. We also do it very early in the morning. 6 AM finds me at work getting a morning briefing and because the store is on the far side of town or in another town all together, most of the time I'm on the road anywhere between 30 minutes to an  hour.
Side note: Texans measure distance in time. In full disclosure, the store of the week can be anywhere between 20 and 40 miles away. At five AM there isn't that much traffic and some routes I manage to catch a lot of green lights.
People don't appreciate how abrasive dust is. Even with constant washing and skin  lotion, my hands feel like rough grade sand paper, and we all know how that can kill your love life. 
So this is starting to come off as a bit of whining, having a few hours sleep, having to get up before the crack of dawn and drive to places you only have heard about in passing. I'm at the point where I wonder what I did before my travelling adventures.