Tuesday, July 31, 2007

More progress.

On the first floor I was able to get an electrician to do the rough in and on the second floor I have the mantle base finished. I will try and get the mantle finished this week sometime this week and start hanging drywall downstairs next week. Here are some pictures:

Friday, July 27, 2007

Why are there so many songs about rainbows?

Why are there so many songs about rainbows
And what's on the other side?
Rainbows are visions, but only illusions,
And rainbows have nothing to hide.
So we've been told and some choose to believe it
I know they're wrong, wait and see.
Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection,
The lovers, the dreamers and me.



Who said that every wish would be heard and answered
when wished on the morning star?
Somebody thought of that
and someone believed it,
and look what it's done so far.
What's so amazing that keeps us stargazing?
And what do we think we might see?
Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection,
the lovers, the dreamers and me.



All of us under its spell,
we know that it's probably magic....



Have you been half asleep
and have you heard voices?
I've heard them calling my name.
Is this the sweet sound that calls the young sailors?
The voice might be one and the same.
I've heard it too many times to ignore it.
It's something that I'm supposed to be.
Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection,
the lovers, the dreamers and me.
La, la la, La, la la la, La Laa, la la, La, La la laaaaaaa



I ran across a version of rainbow connection today and it brought back memories of my youth. I actually got choked up a little bit thinking about it. Someday we'll find it.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Jesus Christ I feel like shit

I don't know what is wrong with me. Whenever I get a cold it is never one of those whoppers that just takes you out for a couple of days. The colds I get are those where you just feel like you stayed up all night drinking and fell down a flight of stairs. Nothing that would excuse not going in to work, but certainly not well enough to do anything fun. I've felt like this for the last couple of days. Please, please, please go away Mr. Cold. RICOLA!!!!

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Unknown

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.

Unknown

Any system that depends on reliability is unreliable.

Red O'Donnell

Sometimes the best way to convince someone he is wrong is to let him have his way.

Adlai Stevenson

It is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.

Steve Allen

If you can walk through life with a smile, you are probably not paying attention.

Groucho Marx

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

Chinese Proverb

He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.

La Rouchefoucauld

Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.

Oscar Wilde

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

Olivier

Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.

Henry Ford

An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous.

Mark Twain

Always tell the truth. That way, you don't have to remember what you said.

Montaigne

A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.

Unknown

Real programmers don't write in BASIC. Actually, no programmers write in BASIC after reaching puberty.

Unknown

Cult: (n) a small, unpopular religion. Religion: (n) a large, popular cult.

Unknown

You think Oedipus had a problem, Adam was Eve's mother.

Unknown

A person is just about as big as the things that make them angry.

Unknown

An American's a person who isn't afraid to criticize the President but is always polite to traffic cops.

Albanian Proverb

When you have given nothing, ask for nothing.

Unknown

A priest advised Voltaire on his death bed to renounce the devil. Replied Voltaire, "This is no time to make new enemies."

Jewish Proverb

Don't be sweet, lest you be eaten up; don't be bitter, lest you be spewed out.

Unknown

Science and religion are in full accord but science and faith are in complete discord.

Thomas Carlyle

The greatest of faults is to be conscious of none.

Irish Toast

May those who love you, love you... and those who don't, may God turn their heart, and if he cannot turn their heart, may he turn their ankle so that you will know them by their limp

Unknown

Low Brow is the man who can fart the national anthem.
High Brow is the man who stands and puts his hand over his heart.

Eleanor Powell

What we Are is God's gift to us. What we Become is our gift to God.

Thomas Szasz

The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.

MIT Assasination Club

To err is human; to forgive is simply not our policy.

Unknown

Democracy is a government where you can say what you think even if you don't think.

Unknown

A society without religion is like a crazed psychopath without a .45.

Scandinavian Proverb

Go often to the house of thy friend; for weeds soon choke up the unused path.

Joseph Joubert

He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.

Czech proverb

Do not protect yourself by a fence, but rather by your friends.

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Umberto Eco

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Terry Pratchett

Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.

Richard P. Feynman

Of course you only live one life and you make all your mistakes and learn what not to do and that's the end of you.

Richard P. Feynman

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

Raymond Chandler

Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.

Philip K. Dick

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away

Peter Ustinov

It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously

Mahatma Gandhi

Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.

Lady Macbeth (William Shakespeare)

Things without all remedy should be without regard: what's done is done.

Harry S. Truman

If you can't convince them, confuse them.

Gore Vidal

I'm a born-again atheist

Friedrich Nietzsche

It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right - especially when one is right.

Elbert Hubbard

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

Dr. Seuss

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.

Douglas Adams

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

Dan Barker

If the answers to prayer are merely what God wills all along, then why pray?

Clint Eastwood

There's only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I'll get married again.

Bertrand Russell

It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.

Arnold Lobel

Books to the ceiling, Books to the Sky, My pile of books is a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I'll have a long beard by the time I read them

Philip K. Dick

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away

Steven Weinberg

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

Stephen Jay Gould

In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Sir Julian Huxley

Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.

Noam Chomsky

Regarding censorship: It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers.

Kate Sheppard

All that separates, whether of race, class, creed, or sex, is inhuman, and must be overcome.

John Cage

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

Andre Malraux

The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.

WC Fields

A thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.

Thomas Szasz

When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.

Thomas Jefferson

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

Robert A. Heinlein

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Roald Dahl

A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men.

Paul Dirac

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

Oscar Wilde

Only the shallow know themselves.

Norm Papernick

Those who can laugh without cause have either found the true meaning of happiness or have gone stark raving mad.

Noam Chompsky

Freedom without opportunity is a devil's gift.

Nadine Gordimer

The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

Kurt Vonnegut

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

Kurt Vonnegut

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

Ken Kesey

I've never seen anybody really find the answer, they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.

George Bernard Shaw

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.

George Bernard Shaw

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Doug Larson

There must be a happy medium somewhere between being totally informed and blissfully unaware.

Don Juan Manuel

He who praises you for what you lack wishes to take from you what you have.

Burt Bacharach

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of.

Akira Kurosawa

In a mad world only the mad are sane.

Albert Einstein

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

Monday, July 16, 2007

Tideland

I've been a fan of Terry Gilliam for quite a while. From Monty Python, through Brazil, to 12 Monkeys. I find his vision and sense for the absurd to be amazing. He never fails to make me laugh. The first time I heard that he was adapting Don Quixote for the screen I was elated. When I heard that it had fizzled a week into production I was crushed. I watched enthralled as he knowingly became a reflection of Quixote in the documentary of that film Lost in La Mancha. I am a Gilliam fan because I know that he consistently swings for the fence. Whether he knocks it out of the park or strikes out, you never know, but I don't think he's ever just "phoned it in". I was surprised when I came across Tideland. He made it in 2005. I'd never even heard about it. Like me it seemed to only be popular in Asia. Well, I decided to give it a try. It is the story of a girl (Jeliza-Rose) of about 8 or 9 whose been raised by her abusive and neglectful junkie parents. It starts with a scene where Jeliza-Rose cooks up a dose of heroine for her father (Jeff Bridges) to shoot up. This got my attention. A few scenes later Jeliza's mother (Jennifer Tilly) dies. Jeliza's father panics and flees with Jeliza. They go to his dead mother's abandoned farm house. There they setup house. Not two scenes later, you see him shooting up again. Jeliza goes off and plays by herself while he quietly overdoses. He was such a neglectful parent to begin with that she fails to realize or at least acknowledge this for the rest of the movie. The next 30 minutes of the movie involves her interacting with and trying to gain the attention of his rotting corpse. That gets us about 45 minutes into the movie. Things only get weirder from there. Let me just say that the events of the rest of the movie are hard to describe. Her father is eventually taxidermied by the neighbors and she is rescued when the train that runs by her house is dynamited by those same neighbors.

Gilliam begins the movie with what feels like a plea to be understood. He says that the story is told through the eyes of a child and he asks that we set aside the qualms and prejudices that we may have built up since we were her age. He then admits that for those who view the movie, there will be three groups. Those of love it, those who hate it and those who don't really know what to think of it. I guess I fall into each of those categories. I love it because it is so Gilliam, and you can tell that he is swinging for the fence in this one. I'm not sure I hate it, but it isn't his best work. Finally, I am a little confused, but that may just be that it was late and I was sleepy and distracted while watching it. Anyway, if you are a Gilliam fan this might be one for you. If you aren't a Gilliam fan you will hate this. Finally, if you don't know who Terry Gilliam is, please watch Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Twelve Monkeys or Brazil or Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail first.

Russian Proverb

The church is near but the road is icy; the bar is far away but I will walk carefully.

Henry David Thoreau

Do not despair of life. You have no doubt force enough to overcome your obstacles. Think of the fox prowling through wood and field in a winter night for something to satisfy his hunger. Notwithstanding cold and hounds and traps, his race survives. I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide.

Carl Sagan

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

Vauvenargues

Patience is the art of hoping.

Tom Waits

I like to walk out of a restaurant with enough gas to open a Mobil station.

Robert A. Heinlein

Wisdom includes not getting angry unnecessarily. The Law ignores trifles and the wise man does, too.

Robert A. Heinlein

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Robert A. Heinlein

Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.

Robert A. Heinlein

Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense

Robert A. Heinlein

The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.

Robert A. Heinlein

I now define "moral behavior" as "behavior that tends toward survival." I won't argue with philosophers or theologians who choose to use the word "moral" to mean something else, but I do not think anyone can define "behavior that tends toward extinction" as being "moral" without stretching the word "moral" all out of shape.

Kurt Vonnegut

Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!

Isaac Asimov

I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance

Confucius

By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart.

Bob Dylan

Disillusioned words like bullets bark, As human gods aim for their mark, Make everything from toy guns that spark To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark. It's easy to see without looking too far That not much is really sacred.

Albert Einstein

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts

Nelson Algren

Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never play cards with a man named Doc. And never lie down with a woman who's got more troubles than you.

Matt Groening

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra, which suddenly flips over, pinning you underneath. At night the ice weasels come.

James Baldwin

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

J. W. Nienhuys

It is the creationists who blasphemously are claiming that God is cheating us in a stupid way.

George Bernard Shaw

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

Albert Einstein

The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.

Aristotle

I have gained this by philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

Will Durant

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

Vladimir Nabokov

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

Ted Koppel

History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions.

Sir William Drummond

He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.

Robert G. Ingersoll

Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows.

Plutarch

The very spring and root of honesty and virtue lie in good education.

Plutarch

Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.

Mark Twain

The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

Mark Twain

They spell it "da Vinci" and pronounce it "da Vinchy". Foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.

Hermann Hesse

People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.

George Santayana

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.

Friedrich Nietzsche

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche

At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.

Frank Herbert

The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.

Blaise Pascal

Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.

Blaise Pascal

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.

Bertrand Russell

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

Bertrand Russell

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.

Artemus Ward aka Charles Farrar Brown

It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us in trouble. It's the things we know that ain't so.

Adolf Hitler

What luck for rulers that men do not think.

Voltaire

Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.

Voltaire

It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

Voltaire

Judge of a man by his questions rather than by his answers.

Voltaire

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Slowly removing each of the roadblocks

Bit by bit I'm getting each of the million little tasks out of the way that are part of the remodel on the first floor. This weekend, I got the underlayment in the bathroom finished. At this point there is a total of 2 inches of plywood covering the joists in the bathroom. Why so much? Well, the floors are so uneven in this house that there was a 3/4 inch difference between the living room and the bathroom. That leaves the following things:
  • Hang bathroom door
  • Rewiring of the spaghetti mess that goes into the three breaker boxes in our basement.
  • Rough wiring for the bathroom, kitchen, laundry and new fixtures in the dining room
  • Rough plumbing in the bathroom, kitchen and laundry
  • Hang drywall
  • Finish drywall
  • Install new windows
  • Install trim
  • Install cabinets
  • Install dish washer
  • Install counter tops
  • Finish plumbing
  • Finish electrical
  • Paint
  • Install hardwoods
I'm going to try and do the things in red. Well, that's it for now.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

George F. Will

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.

Voltaire

God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

Voltaire

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

Thomas Jefferson

In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.

Harlan Ellison

The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity.

William Reece Smith, Jr.

We must remember that a right lost to one is lost to all.

Wernher von Braun

Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.

Walter Kerr

Half the world is composed of idiots, the other half of people clever enough to take indecent advantage of them.

Voltaire

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly, that is the first law of nature.

Thomas Jefferson

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.

Terry Pratchett

Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

Stephen King

When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why me?" and the thundering voice of God answered, "There's just something about you that pisses me off."

Stephen King

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window.

Robert A. Heinlein

Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.

Quintus Ennius

No sooner said than done, so acts your man of worth.

Patrick Henry

Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.

Messiah's Handbook : Reminders for the Advanced Soul

Every person, all the events in your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.

Marquis D.A.F. de Sade

The mirror sees the man as beautiful, the mirror loves the man; another mirror sees the man as frightful and hates him; and it is always the same being who produces the impressions.

Leonard Brandwein

Beware of computer programmers that carry screwdrivers.

Hunter S. Thompson

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.

Emo Philips

When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.

Dennis Ritchie

//UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

Dalai Lama

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

Chapman Cohen

Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.

Bernard Berenson

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.

Benjamin Franklin

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

Ambrose Bierce

Disobedience: The silver lining to the cloud of servitude.

Ambrose Bierce

Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

Ambrose Bierce

Pray: To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

Alexai Sayle

Americans have different ways of saying things. They say "elevator", we say "lift" ... they say "President", we say "stupid psychopathic git".

Albert Einstein

You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I've only ever had one.

Albert Einstein

The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.

William Ellery Channing

The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war and they are screened at once from scrutiny ... In war, then, as in peace, assert the freedom of speech and of the press. Cling to this as the bulwark of all our rights and privileges.

Voltarine de Cleyre

... so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrranize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas

The right to revolt has sources deep in our history.

Poul Anderson

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way, did not become still more complicated.

Pope John Paul I

If someone had told me I would be Pope one day, I would have studied harder.

Mario Cuomo

The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday they might force their beliefs on us.

Haile Selassie

Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.

Galileo Galilei

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.

Frederick Douglass

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters.

Benjamin Franklin

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Stephen Jay Gould

I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Publius Terentius Afer (Terence)

While there's life, there's hope.

Sunday, July 08, 2007

R. Buckminster Fuller

Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering.

Evan Esar

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and Jill a rich widow.

Harry Golden

The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.

Monday, July 02, 2007