The Seattle PI writes about Microsoft’s obeisity benifit, I qualified a little over two years ago and used the Pro Club’s 20/20 program to go from 253 down to 178. I’m back up to 188 right now, but did STP in one day this summer and haven’t been good about working out daily recently.
Category: Journal
Laptop Rebuid
Ever flatten your machine and rebuild the OS only to discover two unknown devices sitting in the device manager? I have no idea what they are but they have PNP ids that on goggle lead to two useless links in some asian language. It’s a lot like fixing your car and ending up with extra parts.
Organization Day
Today is going to be an organization day. A day that I tidy up a couple of things so that I can stay sane and productive. My inbox will get emptied, tasks will be defined and accumulate. Unread blog entries will get read or ignored. All my test boxen will get recovered from whatever random state they ended up in and stress will run.
Times article about Rob Moore and Battlestar Galatica
The New York Times has a great article about Rob Moore and the creation of the new Battlestar Galactica series:
To be fair, though, there are androids. As in the original show, the humans of the Galactica and its fleet are relentlessly pursued by evil robots called Cylons. But in the current version, conceived by Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, most of the evil Cylons look like people and have found God. Ruthlessly principled and deeply religious, the Cylons have been compared by fans and critics both to Al Qaeda and to the evangelical right. And the humans they are relentlessly pursuing are fallible and complex. Their shirts are not clingy or color-coded; the men of space wear neckties. They are led by Edward James Olmos as the Galactica’s commander and Mary McDonnell as the president of the humans, and their stories revolve as much around the tensions within — between the military and civil leadership of the fleet — as they do around the Cylon threat. As Eick described the show to me last month with evident, subversive pleasure, ”The bad guys are all beautiful and believe in God, and the good guys all [expletive] each other over.” Moore, who is also the show’s head writer, put it more simply: ”They are us.”
Carrie and Keshav were nice enough to host for the Season 2 Priemere last friday night and this might quickly become a rotating house (or just my house?) thing for the length of the season. Special props for the Battlestar Galatica theme’d drinks Carrie put together.
Party platforms
After feuding with my wife about what vacation we are going to do this year before the baby is born, I found myself reading a Left2Right blog entry about the Oklahoma Republican Party’s Platform. Since it seems way out wack, I got curious to see what the local Washington State Republican Party Platform looks like.
Things that I like:
· The defense of Israel statement has a coexisting Palestinian state piece.
Things that I like but don’t trust the Republican Party to actually do (or do right):
· Property owners implementing environmental practices that are supported by sound, peer-reviewed scientific method are a model of responsible natural resource stewardship
· Increasing competition among health care providers to promote accountability to patients
· All people are entitled to be treated equally by government.
Things that I don’t like:
· The protection of innocent human life born or pre-born through natural death.
· An amendment to the United States Constitution defining marriage as the union between a man and a woman.
· A policy that public schools not promote or identify homosexuality as a healthy, morally acceptable, or alternative lifestyle.
· Research of adult and placenta stem cells and oppose human cloning.
· Compensating property owners when government actions reduce the value of their land secures our right to own property.
Stuff I found cute:
· Support President Bush‘s Energy Bill to reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign crude oil. This is immediately followed by the ANWR drilling platform element, I guess foreign is the keyword there.
While there is a couple things that I find off for me, it sounds like the more tolerable form of the republican party. Let us see how the democrats do: (-1 to start with by making me open a pdf)
Things that I like:
· Oppose the “Corporations are people too“ Supreme court ruling
· reinstatement of I-728 that calls for reduction of class sizes;
· enforcement of sunshine laws and transparency in sessions that discuss and make policy
· the separation of church and state, and we oppose organized prayer in publicly funded schools
· the right for medically assisted death with dignity with suitable safeguards for terminally ill patients;
· a woman’s right to choose as protected by Roe vs. Wade and the Washington State Reproductive Freedom Act;
· the right to confidentiality of medical records and genetic information.
· that the state should not interfere with couples who choose to marry and share fully and equally in the rights, responsibilities, and commitment of civil marriage, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.
· property forfeiture should be permitted only after criminal conviction, not on arrest or by seizure
Things that I like but don’t trust the Democratic Party to actually do (or do right):
· Supporting diversity of ownership in broadcast media
· dedicating tobacco settlement monies only to tobacco-related health care programs and tobacco use prevention;
Things that I don’t like:
· Proclaim the executive and legislative branches of government shall abandon the doctrine of pre-emptive warfare and shall make nonviolence the primary organizing principle of foreign policy.
Stuff I found cute:
· Supporting Kyoto, but against marketplace pollution credits
Overall, the Republican Platform avoids specific actions and tries to go with general principals. The problem is that while it is easier to agree with the Republican principals, I know a number of the actions they actually have in mind behind some of the principals and I generally don’t agree with the actions. The more specific the Republican Platform is the more I have a tendency to disagree with it.
The Democratic Platform has a huge laundry list of ideas and like a rainstorm; you can’t avoid getting hit by a few drops. There is going to be some that I like, while also have a large number that I just don’t care about or in some case dislike. As a whole it looks impossibly expensive to do all of them.
A quick scan pretty much sizes me up as socially liberal on all the big conservative causes, and since that has always been such a defining aspect to that party I believe I’m pretty much lost to them. But aside from a couple pet causes the democrat one isn’t all that much better. I wonder if the Democrat Platform in a heavily republican state would be more appealing to me, but that’s for another blog entry.
The reason I'm intrested in baby names….
Week 5 day 6: 
Week 6 day 5:
Week 11, day 5:
April
Random stuff from last week:
- John Williams at Benaroya Hall (the guitar player)
- I’m going to be a daddy
- Did pacelining 101 with cascade cycle (50 mi loop around lake washington)
- Did a 65 mi ride with 3500 feet of elevation climb. It was a loop from renton up onto the hills above Kent, over to Black Diamond and then to Issaquah by way of Tiger Mt Road and Ravensdale, return by following 90 and 405 to Renton.
Also, KC’s blog points me to Baby Name Voyager.
Busy Week
Last week was quite busy at work because of preparation for another feature RI. Code Coverage especially was a focus. I missed my Tuesday night ride and Monday night spinning because of it. I was feeling pretty hard core because of a really fast 50 mile ride to Black Diamond from Renton last Saturday. This weekend I did a quite loop around Lake Sammamish against a nasty little headwind and 50 mile ride with Sue where we went from Carnation up past North Bend and back. The back road in that valley with Carnation and Fall City is just ideal biking right now especially with the weather in the 60s.
Pam and I hung out with Misha Friday night along with Ben, Becky and Mark S at the Teapot a kosher vegetarian restaurant near work next to the Malay Satay Hut. They have excellent dishes, and even the skeptical Misha was impressed with their “chicken”. Saturday, I held a BBQ with my employees. It was low key but the food was good. Sunday, we had dinner again with the Goldmans and Julie, except this weekend instead of a limo ride and dinner out, we had a turkey dinner with Stephanie at the Goldman’s house. The girls were into remembering children songs, and were singing them all night.
Chilly Hilly Weekend
I started up my cycling training in full force last week. Spinning class on Monday, Tuesday ride with cascade cycle, Thursday warmup ride with Seano, Saturday ride around lake Sammamish with Ben and then Chilly Hilly on Sunday again with Seano. That mon-sun week totaled 99 miles. This week on Monday I did another spinning class with Pam and Ben and last night was another cascade ride. We did 26 miles hitting hollywood hill, norway hill, and one other I don’t know the name of. I also learned the cycle cross that goes from hollywood hill over to Keshav’s neighborhood. The ride leaders have talked me into doing thier RAMROD training series and also enterining into the RAMROD lottery. Today is going to be a well desereved recovery day as I’ve biked every day for the last four.
Sunday evening Pam and I got in a nice dinner with the Goldmans at theMediterranean Kitchen in Bellevue. I’ve got at least two more meals in the leftovers.
The security system pitch
Last night Pamela and I sat through a sales pitch for a security system for the house form Monotronic’s local reseller Spot Security. Having no background or experience in such things, I was expecting to get the information and then poke around a bit and learn more about the industry. Unfortunatly for them, this was a pressure sales technique where you either decide at that momemnt or don’t get the “deal”. I didn’t respond well to that, nor when she left out the 3 year commitment part while we were talking price (I insisted on doing some web searchs once I had a company name and found some poeple complaining about that). One of the books that Tim let me borrow goes through all the sales techniques that she was using. It even went as far that she made the call to her boss in my kitchen to let him know that we weren’t intrested, so that she could come back to offer some more discounts. I offered to make a decision by tommorow after I could ask around, but that wasn’t good enough, so she evenutually left.
These folks might be the best secuity and value in the buissness, but if they feel the need to use this type of sales technique, I think I’d rather not do buissness with them.
Doubt's Blog 