November, 16, 2005 archives

the pasadena doo dah parade, the chaotic spoof of the annual new year’s day rose parade, is coming up this sunday. like hexod.us, i have never been and may just have to rectify that. i should have my new zoom lens to play around with by then, too.

GO!

here’s a little more fun with my new zoom lens, tripod, and the nearly-full moon.

the image processing of the human eye and brain is pretty impressive when you compare it to how much fiddling you have to do just to get a simple static picture like this from a sophistimicated digital camera.

but i can’t upload what my eyes and brain see to flickr.

the treasury direct service has been re-launched, and it’s now even easier to get an account set up to buy treasuries directly. last week i signed up, and on monday my first t-bill purchase was processed. the interest rate (it was a little over 4%) isn’t quite as good as the everbank cd, but because the interest on a t-bill is exempt from state and local taxes, the effective rate is better.

and it’s nice to have at least some money invested in a way that can’t possibly lose value. (assuming inflation doesn’t go raging out of control over the next three months.)

i always review the movies i get from netflix, but i haven’t usually done that for the television shows. yesterday i finished watching veronica mars — the complete first season. i had actually watched about half of the season when it was broadcast, but stopped watching for some reason. i think it became the third show in its time slot that i was recording.

anyway, while each episode pretty much stands on its own, the whole season also had a unifying mystery that veronica was trying to unravel. when i heard it was actually resolved at the end of the season, and satisfyingly so, i decided i had to catch what i had missed. i wasn’t disappointed.

it is amazing how much effort must go into a good television series. strung together, each season is like a seventeen hour movie.

and this bit of dialogue killed me: “If you haven't even tried Ubuntu how can you say you don't like it? It had the 2.6 kernel and Gnome 2 on the day Warty Warthog was released.”