I made an animated gif

Look! Ernie's skiing across the dirt!

A very interesting website

I found this website http://www.measuringworth.com/ and it's very cool tool http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/ which allows you to compare the purchasing power of a dollar from today and any time in history back to 1774.

I was making an argument about how purchasing power is more important than dollar value when it comes to income. Here's the quoted argument:

That inflation rate is compounding each year. It doesn't take long, even at 1.6% annually, to start being "real money".

One 1960 dollar equates to about 7.59 of purchasing power in today's dollars. That's a pretty significant loss of purchasing power in just 53 years. About 1.30 of that loss has been added since 2008. And a bit less than half of the loss in purchasing power has been added since 2000. Seems pretty precipitous to me.

So that's awesome that our money has lost like 40% of its purchasing power in the last 13 years relative to the a dollar in 1960.

Uh, I can't tell the difference between these jokers

It appears to me that there's essentially no difference between Obama and Romney on most issues that a president can actually directly do anything about and here's a video demonstrating that using their own words :-)

Sorry partisans.



There's this game called Deus Ex Invisible War that's pretty terrible but there's a series of side missions involving corporate espionage between two competing coffee chains, Pequod's and Queequeg's. Toward the end of the quest line you discover that both companies are owned by a third company and the "Two different coffee chains were created to conquer different tastes of customers; the rivalry between the coffee chains is intended to stimulate public interest in their products all the while bringing profit for one monopolistic corporation". (quoted from here http://deusex.wikia.com/wiki/Pequod's ) Divide and conquer. The classics never go out of style.

So, Romney campaigns to the rich military loving folks and Obama campaigns to the not-rich social program loving folks and in substance their actual policies are identical. Who's the winner here? Cause it sure ain't us.

What google knows

So, you may or may not know that if you are a google user, google uses an algorithm to sort your use and guess at your interests, age and sex. You can look yours up by going to this address http://www.google.com/ads/preferences

Google thinks I am a 65+ year old man who is interested in

Finance - Investing

Internet & Telecom - Web Apps & Online Tools

News - Business News - Fiscal Policy News

Now that I think about it, that profile more-or-less describes my dad perfectly.

It actually got Angela figured out pretty well though. Lots of knitting stuff. But it pegged her age too low and it thinks she's a man. Even though all of the interests that it identified as hers, except comics, are more or less stereotypical lady interests like skin care, fashion, and knitting.

Interesting!

But pointless.

--Abe

FUD

So, tonight for dinner, I made a weird made-up mexican inspired thingy. It's refried beans, chunks of chicken breast, cheese, lettuce, sour cream and salsa on a small corn tortilla. They were Delicious :-)

The image has an unfortunate blue cast to it as a result of the light coming from the monitor and the led on teh back of my mouse. You can see it in the highlights on the salsa and in the plate itself. Unfortunately when I removed the blue the rest of the picture turned yellow (funny that) and looked even more unattractive.

--Abe

Ernie and a pond!

Howdy, here are a few pics of Ernie I took this afternoon for a school assignment.

"Window Light". I like the black and white version a lot. Ernie's colorings don't distract from his expression like they do in the color version. Ernie is just as sweet as he looks in this picture.

I used a dialog in Adobe Photoshop I learned about in school today called Shadows/Highlights to bring out the details around his right eye and his white fur on his left side. The eye was lost in shadow and the fur was over exposed and was basically just a huge blob of white. The colors still look a little weird to me but my monitor was last calibrated three months ago so who knows what they "really" look like. Isn't Ernie the CUTEST?!?

This is the pond at Angela's moms place. I'm at that point where I mostly just try to get the picture in focus and maybe get the exposure more or less right. Still, this one has a sort of nice composition. Also, frozen ponds are pretty rare in western Washington.

More snow pics!

We got a few inches of snow this morning. I have a cold and am stuck in the house but I took some pictures of the dogs running around the backyard and a few of the cool pine trees all covered with snow.

Nisa won the cuteness award today as evidenced by the three pictures she has to Ernie's one. Of course, he has snow on his nose in his so ...

These two were taken through my bedroom window :-) 

This is the bigger tree in our back yard.

Our recycle bin!