Thoughts On A Sunday

It was an early evening for this member of the WP team last night. Don't know what it was that caused me to poop out earlier than usual, but I was headed to bed at 10:15 last night.

Then again, maybe it was that I spent a good portion of the day yesterday wandering around the Deerfield Fairgrounds.

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The fall foliage will be arriving over the next 10 days, with color almost at peak in the North Country of New Hampshire. I expect peak colors here in the Lakes Region to occur sometime next weekend. Hopefully I'll be able to get some decent pictures of this year's foliage and post them here.

If nothing else I will be out on the lake to take in the fall colors next weekend, weather permitting.

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Now this is shameful. But then again, we're talking California. Is it any surprise?

Or maybe not....

Then again, it has been confirmed to be true.

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We've got visitors for the next week or so.

The WP In Laws are on the road and we've taken in the feline members of their household until they get back.

I expect that Bagheera the Magnificent will have something to say about that.

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Upon reading this earlier in the week, my thought was “How effin' dumb can our youth become?”

Then Jay Tea deconstructs the politically correct Pledge of Allegiance put forward by one of those selfsame deluded and dumbed down teens, which proves they can become extremely dumb when it comes to the realities of this world.

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Here's an interesting, but lengthy British documentary that puts forward the idea that the global warming hysteria being stirred up is nothing more than a swindle. It takes a number of swipes at Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth by poking holes in the conclusions made in that film and the 'science' used to come to those conclusions.

The documentary claims that almost all of the global climate change we're seeing is driven by the sun and not by human activity.

I've been one of those that believes it is solar activity that is the main driver of our climate and that human activity has some effect on it as well, but not the level claimed by many of the “We're all DOOMED!” cultists out there saying their It's-All-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans™ mantra.

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Another page from the book of selling stuff to the public that Just Ain't So from James Hudnall.

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Bad motivational posters also via James Hudnall.

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Newt Gingrich was in Laconia, NH yesterday, spreading the message of his American Solutions project. Full coverage of his visit can be found here.

As Doug at GraniteGrok wrote:

Newt Gingrich pulled the rug out from under the cynics that called his effort at creating and connecting local grass-roots activism nothing more than a veiled front for a presidential campaign.

[...]

As Newt says, we have a world that works-- WalMart, Fedex, and UPS, to name a few examples-- and a world that doesn't- FEMA, the INS, etc. If enough people rise up and demand change, armed with examples and solutions, change will happen. We need enough people to tell each and every one of the over 500,000 elected officials here in America:

If you're not for real change, you shouldn't come back.

Amen! And that goes for ALL politicians- Republican, or Democrat.

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The New England Patriots won't be playing until tomorrow night. sigh

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I can't say I know anything about other parts of the US, but here in central New Hampshire we've seen considerable growth over the past 30 years, with some towns doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling in size over that time.

Even now that the real estate market has cooled off and homes aren't selling anywhere near the rate of two years ago, many of the towns here are still dealing with the effects of the last burst of rapid growth between 2000 and 2006.

Some towns have tried to get a grasp on their growth by declaring a moratorium on new building permits for a year, allowing them some time adapt to what growth has already occurred and to plan for what will come in the future.

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With the home-heating season rapidly approaching, many people here in the Northeast are faced with a dilemma: pre-buy to lock in a price now, or gamble that the prices will not change drastically upwards or will go down over the winter.

Many of those that lock in a price are also gambling that the prices will not go down, because even if they do, they will still pay at the price they locked in unless they spent a little extra on their pre-buy for price protection.

Here at the WP Manse we haven't done any kind of pre-buy because we're heating with wood. We'll still use propane for hot water and the clothes dryer, but very little (hopefully) to actually heat The Manse. There may still be those below zero days/nights where we'll need to bump up the thermostat because the wood stove we have won't carry the full heating load, but those days are rare.

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A few people have asked my how my experimenting with Linux has gone. Honestly, I really like what I see, both on the Dell laptop (Inspiron 3800, w/600MHz PIII and 320MB of RAM) and the Epiq (900MHz Athlon w/768MB of RAM). While there are a few small conventions that take a little getting used to, I find I can do 95% of what I want to do using Linux. The last 5% that won't work on Linux are business related applications that require Windows 2000/XP. Still, I think that's pretty good.

BeezleBub has been using the laptop and, other than a couple of small tweaks needed to configure a Linux app or two, he's been able to do everything he's wanted to do.

Total cost of the Ubuntu distribution of Linux: 10¢ (cost of the blank CD-R).
Total cost of the Dell Inspiron: $79.87 (256 MB of RAM and a 3COM PCMCIA Ethernet adapter)
Total cost of the Epiq tower: $0.00

So for two machines that I got for free and $79.97 for a few additional parts, I got two fast Linux machines that will do everything that 90% of home users would ever need.

Both machines boot quickly as compared to when W2K or XP was loaded on them. The laptop in particular took up to 10 minutes to boot to usability, even with the additional 256M of RAM. Linux boots in less than a minute.

Very cool.

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How does one move a boat that has become landlocked?

It's not a question that we normally hear around here, but it's being asked now.

The water level in Lake Winnipesaukee is lower than normal for this time of year and it's been causing problems for some folks trying to get their boats away from their docks and put away for the winter. Their boats are stranded at their docks with no way to them out. That's not good.

Even I've noticed the problem when coming into the marina where we dock the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout. Returning from our latest trip out on the lake the skeg on the stern drive dragged on something in the channel leading to our slip. The water is supposed to be at least 6 feet deep through there yet I hit something that should not have been there.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where summer weather is trying to hang on, fall colors are starting to appear, and where the lake level is too damn low.