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 They are all grossly out of date, so i'll probably print up new ones when i'm sure they are using the new words.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.

I had one package that caused some warning but it was really out of date so I just removed it.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.

France

I'll give half credit here. Conservative do believe in national defense, but the Wilsonian craving for Team America: World Police is a Progressive notion.

Oh, I keep forgetting that 'profit' is the new 'bestiality'. Got me there. Can I say 50 "I H8 capitalisms" on my condom rosary for penance?

When people support "equality of opportunity", not the Socialist "equality of condition", how do you even construct this statement? Is that from the widely discredited Piketty?

Let's expand that. Doesn't this really mean "suppression of worker's rights to pay dues to a union, so that corrupt union bosses can buy politicians to further jack things through the roof"?
What workers really need is fewer regulations, so that they can go start their own businesses.
That said, it's understood that Socialism is truly anti-individual, and it's deemed better that worker's souls be warmed by a few more thousand pages of regulations there on the plantation, as opposed to enjoying the liberty to succeed or fail on their own merit.

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.

One of my favorite /. rivers of effluent enjoys contending that Pres'ent Obama, in spite of every straight-line Progressive/Democrat/Socialist play in the feckless rodeo clown's book, is a "conservative".
This /.er seems to contend that, as the owner of the definition of Socialism, (s)he can refute the empirical truth that Obama's collapse into authoritarianism is the inevitable end-state of sucking all power into the State.
An example of the kind of derangement of which I speak (to paraphrase) is: "Obama must be a conservative, because if John McCain had won in 2008, McCain would have signed the Affordable Care Act with gusto."
Conversely, the empirical reality that Obama's magical thinking (e.g. that the mere repetition of the word "jobs" would beget employment) which would work if Obama were actually a Socialist, has failed, so Obama must no be a Socialist.
I guess my /. buddy, by demonstrating such intellectual clutter, underscores h(er|is) personal Socialist purity.

I'm going to open up a small restaurant that specializes in finger foods -- ham and cheese crackers, small BLTs, etc. with an extensive wine and liquor list.

I'm going to call it the Allahu Snack Bar.

Once one grasps that #OccupyResoluteDesk is, was, and shall remained totally phoned-in, these seemingly counter-intuitive results become obvious.
Not that the GOP effort to don anything different will rise above shag-all.

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5491981&cid=47605147
Couldn't actually work in any facial hair reference this time. It's hard to be topical, work in shaving, rhyme something, and keep it terse. I forgive myself.

ESR:

I'm mostly an ESR fan; he at least can argue rationally, and calls it like he sees it. This is a respectable style.
The only problem I have with the "Rabbit" characterization is that actual rabbits tend to reproduce, whereas these degenerate statist creeps tend toward confusion about the genitals in particular, beside life in general. When these intellectual dead heads have gone on, we can look back on the rubble of this day and (hopefully) communicate the Rabbit fallacies to the young, minimizing their idiotic impact.

My question is: Given the thorough, systemic, nonstop falsehood involved in all stages of ObamaCare, from wee intellectual tumor through full bureaucratic metastasis, how does anyone expect any good to come of this? How does it begin to be possible to trust these clowns to do anything whatsoever, including delivering any aspect of health care? When they are done, and give it all a "My bad", and then peddle their real goal, Single Payer, by what miracle shall they have become trustworthy?

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/07/31/the-russians-are-openly-mocking-obama-on-twitter-now/

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.

http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5463985&cid=47555743
Liked it so much, I shaved my head. (Actually, the HeadBlade action preceded logging in.)