Courtesy of a comment posted on redstate.com is a link to this youtube video by congressman Schweikert that if fully understood, pretty much explains why congress is having trouble getting its act together with the debt limit.
Courtesy of a comment posted on redstate.com is a link to this youtube video by congressman Schweikert that if fully understood, pretty much explains why congress is having trouble getting its act together with the debt limit.
Posted at 08:50 PM in Civics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
The last time I had any sustained interactions with pools was roughly 30 years ago when one of my growing up chores was maintaining the family pool, including constantly monitoring p/h, learning about pumps, and skimming/cleaning so that it would be spotless when everyone wanted to get in.
Still, it's a great family activity and now that I'm a dad, the kids/wife have been constant users of a large pool located at a sports resort a few miles from our house, but with their membership rates rising and all the activities the kids are involved in....it's becoming less and less desirable to keep that up. We just don't have the time to drive there.
So, in the interest of ensuring that everyone stays in shape, the decision was made to convert our backyard into a family pool.
All great, but apparently there is _alot_ of horrible details that have to be worked out when designing a pool - especially in San Diego, where a new pool could easily exceed $100K in construction if you aren't careful in limiting the scope of a backyard renovation. Not to mention break the monthly budget if one isn't careful about heating costs.
No, I am not seriously considering building it myself...we'll be going with a pool company, but even getting a full spec detailing what we want to receive for our budget has easily taken ~2 weeks of my time.
Important decisions - we will be getting an automated electric safety cover with an embedded track within the pool foundation and a walk on lid plus overflow reservoir. I'm wincing whenever I think about it as the offered price for the cover alone is a whopping ~$13K, but the cover has the advantage of a) being safe enough that kids/dogs can continue to make use of the rest of the backyard w/o supervision, b) not being an ugly gate, c) substantially reducing pool pump filtering time as the pool is only uncovered during use, and d) saving quite a bit in long term heating due to reduced evaporation.
We'll also be putting in 550 sq ft of heliocool solar panels on the roof with a supplementary heat pump to support an extended swimming season.
I'll try to remember to post pictures of the construction here.
In other news -- who knew? "Patton" makes an excellent kids movie...at least if you have boys. I'll see if they like "MacArthur" next....I suspect they are just intrigued about the concept of people who live to fight and who never appear to be afraid - regardless of what the world sends their way.
Posted at 11:40 PM in Civics, Film, Kids, Life | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted at 01:34 PM in Kids, Music | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Mike Frysinger sent an interesting email to gentoo-dev this afternoon:
historically, glibc provided all the ugly rpc support (while not nearly as
relevant today, it still is used by way of nfs support). the glibc
maintainers have opted to stop supporting this. at first they declined to
accept new features, but now they've started removing support for new code to
build against it.
libtirpc started off to support the new features (namely ipv6 support), but
has now taken on a new roll of supporting all the rpc code.
so if you have a build bug due to glibc-2.14 due to missing rpc/ or rpcsvc/
header, you're going to have to convert over to libtirpc.
something like:
inherit toolchain-funcs
...
append-cppflags $($(tc-getPKG_CONFIG) libtirpc --cflags)
export LIBS+=" $($(tc-getPKG_CONFIG) libtirpc --libs)"
obviously the LIBS part will need tweaking based on your package.
Yes, I appreciate that RPC is deservedly a dead protocol, but anything that impacts NFS is a serious candidate for masking (at least until sufficiently tested and interoperability worked out). NFS may not be the newest protocol, but v4 was a major improvement and has kept it worth using/supporting.
Posted at 05:44 PM in Linux | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I'm not nearly as pessimistic as the guy in this article: http://pajamasmedia.com/zombie/2011/06/08/how-a-teachers-rally-made-me-anti-education/?singlepage=true
However, I do have two simple questions that need to be answered before I would increase donations or approve of higher taxes to pay for greater educational resources...
a) prove that existing funds are being spent conservatively, well, and smartly on those things that have the greatest impact on student achievement. Also, graph the percentage of overall revenue going to school overhead versus teaching over time, and that the overhead is not growing or consuming an unhealthy percentage (in overhead, one should also include the costs of any benefits/etc given to staff that are above/beyond required to find quality teachers in a non-union environment).
b) Quantify the benefits of each additional $ donated/taxed versus student achievement - show that adding $ to the system the way it is will have greater results than otherwise reorganizing where existing funds are being spent. Are we already at the point where additional donations is on the diminishing returns side of achievement?
Posted at 08:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I'm falling behind the rest of the gentoo userbase in applying desktop/workstation updates....finally getting around to bumping to glibc 2.12.2, still avoiding kde/baselayout bumps and my package.mask is crowded.
update: masked glibc update , apparently there are some concerns w/ lvm.
update: kde update complete
update: still holding out on rc/baselayout changes
Posted at 03:48 AM in SysAdmin, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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