Crime in suburbia

From The Landmark (subscription required):

Holden

Monday, August 25

1:31 p.m. Suspicious person sleeping on side of Mason Rd.; OK, waiting to go to appointment

Tuesday, August 26

9:33 a.m. Several reports of male in vehicle yelling, Mason Rd.

5:12 p.m. Individual with items for sale taking up part of roadway, Mason Rd.

Paxton

Friday, August 29

12:15 p.m. Large swarm of bees, Holden Rd.

Sunday, August 31

6:17 p.m. Dog in fight with skunk, Indian Hill Rd

Sterling

Monday, August 25

5:50 p.m. Caller found carrier pigeon sitting under vehicle in yard, Birch Dr.

6:01 p.m. Puppy (Scruffy) ran off again, Beaman Rd.

Saturday, August 30

3:30 a.m. Report that someone put a scarecrow in road that looks like a person, Redemption Rock Trl.

Sunday, August 31

9:10 a.m. Caller has sick rabbit and wants to know where to bring it for proper care, Leominster Rd.

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More on modern pharmacies

I've written about the goofiness of adding a third national chain pharmacy to our fair town. The competition among these chains is fierce. It's even more intense because most health insurance plans strongly encourage clients to use mail-order pharmacies for prescriptions that treat chronic conditions. The cost of mail-order prescriptions is typically a third of the cost that you'd pay at the retail stores, even with insurance coverage. So, the pharmacies are having trouble making money on their primary business, selling prescription medications, and have to find new and different products and services to entice customers into their stores.
CVS, for example, has added Minute Clinics, allowing customer to come in and see a doctor or nurse practitioner about minor ailments - sore throat, rashes, and such.
Other chains, such as Rite Aid, offer new and different products at steep discounts:

These times have been good for some

The Wall Street Journal reports that the number of ultraweathly, those with a net worth of $20 million or more, grew by more than 50% between 1998 and 2004. The total wealth of this group grew by two-thirds.

There was a similar jump in the number of people worth between $10 million and $20 million during that same time.

Remember, these numbers reflect growth from a time starting with the Internet bubble and ending after the bubble burst. The biggest asset for these folks was in publicly-traded stock.

How'd you do during those years?

By the way, here are the results of a CBS?New York Times poll in which the delegates to the Republican 2008 convention describe themselves:

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Austin Human Society’s Reading-to-Cats Program

A few years ago, I wrote about Thompson, a friend's Yellow Lab who was part of a children's reading program at a town library. It turns out that Austin, Texas has a similar program, abeit for cats. I'll let you add your own cat jokes here.

RoasterBoy's playlist

September 3, 2008

iTunes shuffle playlist

I Hear A Rhapsody - Bill Evans
Bill Evans - "Montreux II"

Banquet Hall - Loreena McKennitt
To Drive The Cold Winter Away

Anu - Adrian Legg
Guitar For Mortals

Take My Hand, Precious Lord - Thomas A. Dorsey
Say Amen, Somebody

And - Grateful Dead
Terrapin Station (Capital Centre, Landover, MD 3/15/90) (Disc 3)

Treacherous Cretins - Frank Zappa
Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar (Disc 1)

Help Me - Elvis Presley
Amazing Grace: Elvis (Disc 2)

Buzzard Keep On Flyin' Over... - Simon Rattle cond.
Porgy And Bess Disk 2/3

Cousin Mary (Alternate Take) - John Coltrane
Giant Steps

Shango (Chant to the God of Thunder) - Babatunde Olatunji
Drums Of Passion 2 Minutes ago

September 2, 2008

YouTube - U2 BAD Live Aid 1985

There was so much great music at the Live Aid concert. No doubt, a lot of the energy came from the worthiness of the cause. Also, though, many bands were at the top of their games. Even the long vamp at the end of this one, while Bono dives into the crowd, adds to the haunting sharpness of the tune. 1 Day ago

Before the Republicans start chantng Country First, they might want to check their domain names.

Republicans have embraced the phrase Country First as a call to arms and a call to responsibility. It's an admirable sentiment, exhorting us set aside our parochial differences and think of solutions that are best for our nation, rather than those that might benefit our group, region, or selves.

As a strategy, however, the Country First campaign seems to have overlooked one of the basics of 21st marketing: register the domain before you utter a word.

CountryFirst.com is a parked domain, meaning that someone bought the name and is willing to sell it to you. In this case, the name is owned by a company in Australia.

It turns out that Country First is an Asian Indian movement that is championing "Respect and Dignity for all Indians," focusing on responsibility, anti-corruption, and  electoral reform in India. http://www.countryfirst.org/

Maybe, the Republicans meant America First. Oops, the domain name americafirst.org is owned by a credit union in Utah. They don't have have a web site, yet.

The America First party owns AmericanFirstParty.org:

AmericaFirstParty.com is also for sale.

Pillar Six - test links before deploying web site

Yesterday, friend C. sent me a pointer to a white paper entitled The Five Pillars of Engineering Document Management. While this topic might seem like an extra-strength dose of Nappien for most of you, it's closely related to the kind of work that I've done.
So, I followed the link to the company's site and filled out the request form. While waiting for the company to send me PDF file, I nosed around the web site a bit.
Imagine, then, what a potential customer might have to say when, after clicking on one of the links, this page shows up:


Nice, huh? And, when I click on the link that says Contact Us, I get the same error page.

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I'll be glad when WGBH (our local PBS station) stops airing Viewers' Favorites and starts showing programs that we want to watch.
---
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Reflections on John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin

Jane Swift

RoasterBoy Playlist

Aug 27, 2008 1:52pm

18 years ago today, the sky was crying & created a Texas flood when Stevie Ray Vaughn left us

Stevie Ray Vaughan - Texas Flood

Aug 21, 2008 6:03pm

The Archive - Music Videos | thevine.com.au

The Archive - Music Videos | thevine.com.au

Over the years Paul Mawhinney has amassed what has become the world's largest record collection. Due to a struggling record industry Paul is being forced to sell his collection. This is his story.

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If you're lost in the rain in Juarez ...

You can use a herd of cows as your compass. According to the BBC, images from Google Earth show that cows tend to align themselves on a north-south axis.
 Of course, cows won't tell you if it's going to rain. You'll need a weatherman to tell you the way the wind blows.
(With apologies to Bob Dylan's Tom Thumb's Blues and Subterranean Homesick Blues)

Cutting costs in the most annoying ways

[I've got a feeling that this is going to be regular feature....]

• Air Canada Jazz, a regional affiliate of the national carrier, is eliminating inflatable life vests. You can use your seat cushion as a flotation device. (And, if you're traveling with a child, well, how well can Junior swim?)
  
• Colleges are removing cafeteria trays.

In the meantime, it costs more than a penny to make a penny.

I took college.

It's college ranking time again. Although I never buy the magazine, I don't mind noting that US News and World Report once again rates my alma mater at the top of liberal arts colleges in the nation. (It's ok that we're tied with the other guys; we were slightly more selective among applicants.)



It's also important to remember that, as the Wall Street Journal tells us, for most people, college is a waste of time. Only once did my college degree come up in a job interview. That was during my first interview for a job in high tech. The interview was long and rambling, with only a little bit of discussion about the specific work that I'd be doing (editing and proofreading) and the skills that I would need to do the job.

It's also important to note that college can be a great big waste of money, too. Radar reports on the worst colleges in America. The biggest rip-off, for example, is that other college in Amherst: Hampshire College. "If college is an investment, Hampshire is a commemorative pewter tankard from the Franklin Mint."

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Commencing to beginulate

One of the regular characters on the Simpsons is Professor John I.Q. Nerdelbaum Frink, Jr.. The professor is pretty much an animated version of Jerry Lewis's Nutty Professor.

It's then a bit weird to see Frinkspeak in a real, commercial software product. Mozy backs up files on your computer to a server. The files are backed up when your computer is inactive, so you need only set it and forget it. We've been using it for quite a while and have been pleased with its ease of use. This afternoon, however, I wanted to check on the status of the backups and so launched Mozy as a foreground process:

According to the Urban Dictionary,"reticulating splines"is "the process of combining many short lines and curves into longer, interpolated ones called 'splines'." That's really helpful, isn't it?

My goodness, I've been redorkulated.

A lot of people are at home

The other day, I was trimming a couple of branches that had been taken over by tent caterpillars. To do so, I had walk along the stone wall in front of our house. All of my steps were careful except for the last one. So, I've been hobbled by a mild sprained ankle which has slowed me to the same pace as Marley when we're on our three-mile walk.
In an informal survey, I noticed that slightly more than half of the homes we passed had at least one car in the driveway, this during the mid-morning on a workday. It's interesting to think that, even during these hectic times, there's someone likely at home at your neighbors' houses. There are few people in their yards, even on a delightful, late summer's day. Most houses also have the curtains drawn, at least in the street-facing windows. (He says, writing from his upstairs room where the shades are drawn to keep the room cool.) Ah, well. Suburbia is what it is. People are at home and yet ambulances can come and go from a neighbor's house and we would know what or why.
What we do know is that, because it's late summer, some yards are full to overflowing with all kinds of growth. In one stretch of sidewalk, you'd barely know that there was a sidewalk:

Naturally, an old dog will notice some very compelling smell deep in the thicket and will anchor his nose on that spot until he's inhaling dirt. Come winter, all of that will fall back and we'll have an open sidewalk once again.

Some jokes pretty much write themselves...

Apparently, during the Olympics, Chinese authorities regarded bagpipes as "some kind of weapon." -- BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | South of Scotland | Bagpipes provoked Olympic alarm

New Orleans getting ready for a big storm. Thanks, SCOTUS.

The Gun Shots: Hunting, Shooting, Politics, Entertainment, Guns, Rifles: “I just left a sporting goods store and you would think that the number-one selling item would be plywood or potable water or gasoline right now,” he said. “Apparently it is AR-15s and .223 ammo. I watched at least 20 people buy AR-15s and cases of .223.”

* SCOTUS - Supreme Court of the United States. See the Court's ruling in Washington, D.C. v. Heller (PDF file).

These times have been good for some

The Wall Street Journal reports that the number of ultraweathly, those with a net worth of $20 million or more, grew by more than 50% between 1998 and 2004. The total wealth of this group grew by two-thirds.

There was a similar jump in the number of people worth between $10 million and $20 million during that same time.

Remember, these numbers reflect growth from a time starting with the Internet bubble and ending after the bubble burst. The biggest asset for these folks was in publicly-traded stock.

How'd you do during those years?

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Two's complement shift

So, in the downtown of our fair 'burb, Walgreen's is building a new store. There are lots of things silly about this:

• We already have two chain drug stores, Rite-Aid (formerly Brooks) and CVS. 
• They're building on the wrong side of the street. Route 122A is the major route through town, bringing traffic to and from Worcester and the Interstate highways. Traffic is bumper-to-bumper southbound in the morning and bumper-to-bumper northbound in the afternoon. (At the point that 122A goes through down, it's more of a northwest-southeast road.)
  The new pharmacy is on the southwest side of the road. Homeward bound traffic, then, has to make a left turn to get into the store, slowing the already traffic, and then cross the lanes again to resume the trip. Locating the pharmacy on the right side of the road (the northeast side) would ease the impact on the traffic flow.

Nevertheless, they're going ahead with the construction. The new store will take up three lots for the building and parking. Two buildings will be knocked down. A third, a funeral home, will be moved a few hundred feet up the road.

In its new location, the former funeral home will have businesses on the first floor and apartments on the second. (You can add your own jokes about living in a former funeral home.)

Does a town of sixteen and half thousand people need three chain pharmacies with the third one on the wrong side of the road for the traffic flow? Walgreen's seems to be doing ok, business-wise, so we might think that they know what they're doing. It seems to me, however, that this is a lot of expense and a lot of noise to solve a problem that we really don't have. In addition, it will make the ride through the center of town even more difficult, pushing more traffic onto narrow side roads.

Cats and dogs living together. What's this world coming to?

The Cat House on the Kings is a no kill, no cage shelter for homeless cats. Lynea Lattanzio has cared for 16,000 cats since 1992. (via Neatorama).

At one point, we had five cats and three dogs. We wound up putting a screen door on my mother's room so that she could have fresh air, but not have a cat sitting on her head at night.