iMess with your messages

Merriam-Webster has released the The Official SCRABBLE® Players Dictionary, Fifth Edition. Although they list it for $25.95, Amazon currently has it at $6.83. I plan to purchase one soon.

NASPA, the North American SCRABBLE Players Association, has the The Official Tournament and Club Word List, 2014 Edition for $22 until Aug 13, then it goes up to $24.95. However, you have to be a member to purchase it, meaning it costs $30 more. Though, a trial membership should be good enough, which is a cheaper $15.

The difference between the two is twofold. One, the dictionary has been purged of offensive words whereas the full list has all words. Two, the dictionary includes definitions and other forms, whereas the list does not.

Getting the dictionary and printing up the delta might be the best option to all the word on the cheap, nice as an "official" version may be.

Speaking of lists, there are many. I have two and three letter word lists printed up, besides the 70% vowel list and a few bingo lists based on RETINA and the like. They are all grossly out of date, so i'll probably print up new ones when i'm sure they are using the new words. Last time i printed up two copies of everything except the longer three word list. My brother and i play with the lists and the dictionary available. It's just so much more fun that way.

NASPA has the long list, words of ten to fifteen letters, available. I'd like to print that up too, though i'd like to find an easy way to wrap it for more efficient use of the paper.

It is rather hard to do anything else when you dedicate all your time to it.

I had one package that caused some warning but it was really out of date so I just removed it. It was VLMC and I'm not going to be using it on that machine anyway.
 
I finally got my taxes done. Life was so crazy this year that I just kept not getting around to it. Which is stupid on my part as I'm just leaving money sitting with the government that I could be using. I had a really odd thing this year, my Foreign Earned Income Exclusion was smaller than it has been in the past. I don't know why- but I doubt it's worth the time and cost to find someone who would know. With 3 kids and our income not too high, my tax liability is very, very low. And so it's all pretty small amounts involved.
 
We've been back a couple weeks now and I'm back to the weight I was before we went to the US. For that 6.5 weeks we visited we ate out a lot. There were a lot of places we missed that we wanted to eat at. And of course lots of good Mexican. That's pretty much impossible to get here. And in general we just consumed more. I think the first time we went out, they gave me my huge glass of diet coke that they would refill the moment it was empty and I must have gone through like 6 of those before we had even finished the appetizer. So funny.
 
Anyway, if we lived back home we wouldn't eat like we did when just visiting. The one thing that really struck me is how much more expensive fast food has become in the 3 years since we left. It used to be around 20 bucks for our family to go to McDonalds/Burger King. Now it's more like 30.
 
Of course gas and milk still felt ridiculously cheap compared to here in Hungary. I know why gas costs so much here, not sure why milk is so much. Probably due to the same reasons though - government choices. Just not sure which government, in which direction. Are Hungarian dairy prices inflated or does the USDA (or whoever manages dairy in the US) keep US milk prices artificially low? It was also fun to be able to buy milk in a gallon container. Buying it a liter at a time is a pain. Our kids go through them quickly.
 
That's all for today, more tomorrow.

I haven't written a journal in a while. We spent a good chunk of this summer in the U.S.A. It was a pretty full/busy time. We came back and then left again for a couple days hiking in Austria. Now we are home for a bit. I don't plan on going anywhere until next month.

I'm upgrading my Dell to Fedora 20 right now and trying to clean up my office. It's funny. It's a Latitude D620 and when I got it in 2006 it was the most powerful computer I had ever owned. It's got a dual core processor and has 2 gig of ram. At the time that blew me away and now I just use it for stuff where I don't mind how slow it is.

It is nice and sunny out. I brought a hammock back from Arizona - now I need to figure out how I'm going to put it up. Today would be a perfect day to take a nap in the sun.

No True Scotsman.

Take the example of a Scotsman. A Scotsman is defined how? By being Scottish, of course. No action makes one a Scotsman, nor does any action disqualify one from being one. One is not a Scotsman by choice but rather by birth.

Conversely take the example of being a Socialist. A Socialist is defined how? By Socialist beliefs and actions. One is not born a Socialist but rather makes a choice at some point to be one.

Hence saying that a Socialist would not endorse the Health Insurance Industry Bailout Act of 2010 (or "Obamacare" as some like to call it) is not a No True Scotsman argument, it is a statement of what a Socialist is . Similarly saying that a Socialist would not sign off on extensions of the world's most regressive system of taxation is also a statement of what it means to be a Socialist.

not that it will work, but the new GOP party mantra is to pretend that nobody from their camp was calling for impeachment. Even more so, try desperately to convince people that this who impeachment bit was cooked up by ... wait for it ...

The Obama administration themselves!

That's right! If the GOP lies about it enough they will eventually wear out the thinking public and get them to believe that Obama (perhaps in cooperation with the high reptoids from the illuminati) actually cooked this whole thing up just to ...

just to ...

just to ...

just ...

Well, shit the GOP forgot to write that part. Take your pick, they have no shortage of conspiracy theories that the like to keep pumping into the media. Clearly this somehow advances his agenda of giving pentillions of dollars worth of socialized medicine, education, ponies, communist mantras, and rent-controlled mansions to illegal immigrants by way of ACORN, Jeremiah Wright, and trade unions. Or something.

Just check a news site or two. They all seem formatted for handheld devices.

So, first we had pages with no formatting, which was ok, kind of. Except for the large moving images.
It got ugly. So they discovered TABLE. which formatted thing pretty well.
Then came different browsers and super complex code. So, they invented CSS.
CSS suffered the same fate, so they enhanced it and added stuff to HTML5.
Which means, now we have pretty advanced formatting, daunting to the beginner.
So, we must have beautiful pages, right?
Actually, we have pages designed for handhelds, and large moving images.

Something is definitely wrong here. I move for HTML1, Generation 2. We can get some Hollywood director to lead the remake.

--
How shall i spell "Mini Rant"? Shamefully, i have been inconsistent!

1. Mini Rant:1 2
2. Mini rant: 1 2 3
3. Mini-Rant: 1

I like the first and want to edit all the others accordingly. :)

My apartment has carpet save the kitchen that has tile. When i moved in, i was given a checklist to note what was not perfect. Figuring that's what they would fix, i verbally mentioned the cracks in the kitchen floor and perhaps something else, and moved on. I really had no idea what the checklist was for. Besides, it looked daunting.

A friend mentioned that carpet was not right, but i didn't care until summer when i realized how bad it was. Over the weekends i would lay on the floor to play games with friends and the like, and it felt grimy. That friend reminded me of what he originally noticed.

I spoke to the apartment manager about it, but he replied that the carpet was new. He bade me feel the carpet in the office, but in the end, i asked him to come by to humor me and that then he could call me an idiot. He told me he didn't need to go to the apartment to do that...:). But, come by he did and was surprised.

The apartment clearly had old carpet, which he admitted was grimy, and my friend who was by, showed him holes in the carpet too. He said he would look into it. I told him, i wouldn't mind if he waited until the yearly renewal (which has more likely a chance to get things done with the carpet.) That was a couple months away or so.

This past week, about a month later, i bugged him again. He told me that he misunderstood the note that the apartment has new carpet, which meant that one room's carpet was replaced. So, on lease renewal i would get a new carpet. As to the kitchen floor which has cracks and scuff marks, that would be too much at once, and he didn't want to push the central office. He then explained to me the issue with not having filled out the form when i moved it and thus how "Central" would see it.

Well, i mentioned how bad the kitchen floor is again, but told him i didn't want to cause problems. Nonetheless, i would like him to ask, but not to "push". He then said he would take it up with his supervisor, who was just a few feet away from us talking to his (the person i was talking to) secretary on a walk they would soon take. After that, i left, and i hope to pick it up again when i get the renewal notice.

I heard about the launch of The Sarah Palin Channel online today. Apparently for just under $10 / month she'll tell you regularly how Obama is colluding with the "lamestream media" to ruin our country.

I cautiously looked at the page. For me the main attraction was that I read they had a "countdown clock" on it counting down the days left in the Lawnchair Administration. I thought this might have meant that someone finally showed her a calendar and broke the news to her that impeachment is really no longer on the table as it is not realistically capable of ending the current administration before it reaches it's natural end in 2017.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, the maverick is trying to have it both ways. Yes, there is a clock (which I'll point out has the headline word "days" in it and then proceeds to give you days, hours, minutes, and seconds), but there is also plenty of stuff calling for impeachment. And if impeachment were to end with removal of the POTUS, then the clock as it is currently set up would not make sense.

But then again, most of what is on there doesn't make sense either.

Mod points again, which i prefer to spend in JEs. Last time i had points, i could not find the moderate button. Now i see that of you have javascript turned on it is automatic.

• Automatic mod point application is amazingly stupid.
• What if i make a mistake?
• What if i see a post later that was unfairly modded down but now i have no points left?
• The FAQ says, "Do you still have any moderator points left? You only got 5..." I got 15.
• Why doesn't it mention the auto update somewhere?
• After moderating it reports how many points you have left. Messages end up conflicting.

Overall, the heralded new age of Slashdot is being designed by morons.

he shot the woman twice in the back while the male accomplice ran away.

Does the right to self-defense really extend all the way outside your house, into the alleyway, and into the back of the person who is running away from you?

These two numbers show why impeachment talk is trouble for the GOP

What I find most interesting about the impeachment coverage, though is that nobody is bringing up the biggest thing that makes impeachment a total losing proposition for the GOP:

They can't remove Obama before his term is up

Even if they started the impeachment process this afternoon, it would take far more than 2 years to get all the way through it. Republicans getting on board with impeachment now or before election 2016 are writing their own obituaries.

So, there was a JDRF sale at the company. Or rather, the sale benefited the JDRF. With company themed items, i was interested, for whatever reason.

The sale was Thursday, the email Wednesday (well, after 5 on Tueday), declaring a company "sample merchandise sale". "Pre-Sale 8:00 am - 9:00 am ($10 donation to get in) Sale 9:10 am - 3:00 pm (No charge to get in)".

I sent an email to the sender:

Please excuse my ignorance.

What is a presale?

Which got her response

Pretty much gets you in before the big rush and you have a better chance getting something you really want. Kind of like getting to meet a movie star and get an autograph before having to stand in line and not getting it.

I sent a thank you, and a little later:

I'm sorry to bother you again. I spoke to a couple people and realized I didn't understand two things.

1) Are things able to be purchased during the pre-sale?
2) What is a Sample Merchandise Sale? Specifically, what is meant by "sample"?

to which i received no response. Oh well.

A friend encouraged me to go and to just spend the $10, so i did. I found out a few things:

• Samples are samples of branded items from other companies. That is, the other companies want to sell stuff with this company's logo.
• Almost everything is sold within 2-3 hours.
• You can purchase items during the pre-sale.
• Very few people show up to the presale.
• They have the sale once a year.

The prices were on the board, i wasn't sure what was what. There were a number of tables, a few people, and stuff lying here and there. Model cars of all sorts, Playstation games, shirts, caps, pants, wallets, and more. I found some police trucks on the "dollar table" and grabbed all eight. At first i hesitated from taking them all, but they encouraged me to do so and brought me a box to hold them. I also got a Captain America snap together model truck (Round2 AMT AMT857) and a cap and shirt. I went to pay and they had forgotten to charge me the extra $10, but after i reminded them, my price was $33.

The truck is fun. It's a KiNSMART KT5365, though it is a police truck. The doors open and the spring loaded action lets me pull it back and it rolls forward. It's not a small car, but is about the size of my hand ("Scale 1/46"). It happens to be a F-150, prompting me to ask, "Have you played with a Ford, lately?"

Back to the office, the lady who sits next to me showed no special interest in the truck. That is, until she saw the doors opened and the spring loaded action. All of a sudden she wanted one for her son. Her son is in his twenties and lives out of state. But who's counting? Two other people wanted it for their children. Heh. I find the whole thing amusing.

When my erstwhile boss asked me to meet him downstairs around lunchtime, i came down with the truck to show it to him. It was he that encouraged me to go in the first place and i thought he might want one. No interest. On my way back up, i was toying with it in the elevator. Two people were there of which the woman was eying me strangely. So, i asked with feigned surprise, "What?! You didn't go to the sale this morning?" There might have been a smile or a "what sale?", but it was all over soon. That is kind of out of character for me, but it sure felt good. :) For now at least, one of the trucks is being left at my desk.

At the register, i was asked if an emailed recipt was ok. Sure it was. My email address? I used a plus sign to help identify it. The program wouldn't take it. I hate stupid programmers.

I replied to the email with a thank you and then:

Hope i'm not spamming you. I just have to let it out.

I _really_ should have bought more models.

There aren't any left, are there?

A few minutes later she responded

Not spamming at all. Unfortunately, there aren't. I can follow up and see if any come up in the future though. What kinds are you interested in?

Really? There's a chance? I sent a response starting with:

Thanx for replying. I know i am hoping against hope. :) But it doesn't hurt to ask.

Who knows where that will go?

The Captain America truck is being sold on ebay for around $20. $5 was a pretty deal.

I bought an Oster steamer some time ago (looks like this one with the lcd from this one) to steam corn. Eventually, i used it to make rice, after figuring out that the tray holding the rice needs water too; the steam isn't enough. Silly me.

Although i still love the look of the corn, i no longer eat it as often, now that i have satisfied my craving for folate with a supplement. This supplement is not the usual folic acid. That does not seem to do the trick for me. It is Metafolin which "is the pure stable crystalline form of the naturally-occurring predominant form of folate." Whatever it is, it does the trick for me.

But, i still make corn and offer it to others and sometimes eat a bit myself. Regardless, i use it for rice and brown rice, which is probably my favorite food(s). Other than parboiled rice, i find steaming superior to cooking, whether due to the amount of water or agitation hurting the kernels.

Now, years later, the steamer is showing some age. The plastic lid is chipped, the drip tray doesn't get all the drips, and the coating over the heating element is cracking off. Mind you, it still works well. Though, i feel it might hit its end of life some time (not necessarily too) soon.

Concurrent with my steamer observations, i have been hearing about the rice cooker. These have been around for a while but have gained popularity in recent years. The word rice alone was enough to catch my interest. But then i would wonder why i needed a specialized steamer. Well, between wanting rice, gadgets, and having tasted rice from other people (which may have been higher quality rice), i began to covet a rice cooker to call my own.

Of late that got stronger, aided by my ailing steamer, so i searched for (something like) rice steamer reviews. I must have read a few articles but was most impressed by this one, which recomended a cheaper Hamilton Beach model and also a more expensive Zojirushi model, depending on intended use.

After going going back and forth, reading the reviews, and really asking myself what size i needed, i ended up purchasing a Zojirushi NS-LAC05XA on Amazon. I went with the Zojirushi because i want it for brown rice, and have been happy when buying more expensive appliances from companies with known for quality which end up working well and that for a while. You really do get what you pay for.

I taste tested some Della white basmati i purchased at a local Kroger, making a cup in the steamer and another cup in the rice cooker. I had made it in the rice cooker a few times already.

I filled two bowls, some on this side and some on that side, i knew which was which and my friend did not. He chose the steamed rice calling it sweeter and therefore determining it was from the cooker. I also chose the steamed because it was more watery which was better than the drier stuff from the cooker. Well, not dry, but it looks like a little more water might have helped. Though, i went back and forth on whether the steamed rice tasted watery and if i truly liked it or not. In any case, the rice cooker is much easier to clean and dry off.

More tasting with other brands and varieties may follow.