Let’s see, it’s been about 5 (?!) years since I’ve written anything here. Since then, I’ve gotten married and nowhave a two year old daughter. My old company was acquired by a large defense contractor, I left a few months ago and I’m now working on machine learning for a medical device company. This space may wind up being used to make machine learning notes to myself.
Almost three months ago to the day, I wrote about the senate health care reform (HCR) bill, how they had achieved cloture and would vote on Christmas eve. Since December, things haven’t looked all that good for HCR. A weak candidate in Massachusetts lost to a republican underwear model (not that there’s anything wrong with that), and the Democrats started doing the Democratic thing, which mostly consists of herding all of the cats into a circle and giving them guns to take shots at each other [1]. At one point in late January, the chances of any sort of HCR passing were very close to zero (Intrade was giving it around 22%). ...
Just a reminder of that it’s the 23rd. Bring on the feast and the airing of grievances! After dinner, all of the pets in the house will have to try to pin me in the feats of strength :-)
I’m officially boycotting any retailer using “ Santa Baby” in their commercials. Yeah, it’s an empty threat since I wasn’t going to the mall anyway, but there you are. Now to get the idiotic song out of my head. Maybe the Mighty Mighty Bosstones? Failing that, a power drill may be my best bet.
If only we could get Carol Burnett to highlight the plight of the lonely possums on the muppet show. Of course, she would get all interupted by Gonzo’s dance marathon, but hey, rehabbers will take what they can get. K got in a solitary young opossum last night. Sad little girl (the possum, not K… at least to my knowledge). Dehydrated (definitely the possum) and underweight (both actually!). Hopefully she’ll make it (both again): ...
A while back, Luis Villa asked about a script to add creative commons licensing information to an image. My first thought was to just use ImageMagick. That works pretty well, but assumes a command line, image magick, etc. My next thought was a piece of javascript that you could include on a webpage. The javascript would scan all tags and for each that were of the class “cc-license”, it would grab the “license” and “attrib” attributes. The img would be replaced with a canvas that had a transparent license image and the attribution in the corner. That worked pretty well, but again, didn’t really change the image, so if you were loading it into a presentation, etc., you were out of luck. ...
Welcome to the new socialist state… comrade. From Propublica, an inflation adjusted comparison of bailouts.
Oh, on an entirely unrelated note, the U.S. Constitution was signed 221 years ago today – happy birthday! Okay, it wasn’t ratified for a couple of years after that, but still… If you’ve got some time, take a read. It’s still the most impressive government document I’ve ever read. A few years ago, I wanted to start a project that took the individual clauses of the constitution and traced the arguments for and against them back to the original sources or at least to the debates between the signing and ratification. The Federalist Papers, Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison and many of the documents collected in the two volume Library of America’s Debate on the Consitution would have featured prominantly. Never did have the time to kick that off.
So, one more update on Gustav in Baton Rouge and then I’ll return you to your regularly scheduled odd musings, rants and wildlife pictures. First, the good news – I got a text message from my mother last week. They got power back! Only 10 days without power. I suppose that’s not too bad. No word from K’s parents, but they had moved into K’s sister’s condo that did have power, so I’m guessing they’re still there. ...