The aggression radius of squirrels is about 7 feet. I know this because Plagioclase dumped a bunch of seed along a long arc (as he is wont to do), and five squirrels are more-or-less equally spaced along it, munching away happily, until one strays too close to his neighbor, then the chase ensues.
(caveats: Squirrels in our backyard who happen to like the taste of old sunflower seeds and eat in the morning after it’s snowed a couple of inches. In January.)
Doppelganger links to a post about “breaking your Amazon cherry.” Since I seldom order from Amazon using my own account (usually I use Plagioclase’s), I logged in to look at his order history.
And as far as I can tell, it’s incorrect. It may be that he was using a different account name before 1997 (since that is the earliest order in their system — Oct 6, Evolution of Physics) or they changed their system sometime in their first two years, but this order was placed after we returned from abroad — and I distinctly remember getting (and using!) amazon.com swag while we lived out of the US.
So I suppose the take away from this story is: buying at Amazon isn’t as good as having sex, because if you can’t remember your first time, it wasn’t too special.
We’ve been trying to revamp our breakfast habits lately — since I’m taking meds that shouldn’t be ingested on an empty stomach, I’m having food shortly after I get up. This is unusual for me, since I used to wait until mid-morning (after 10) to have my first meal. (When I eat at 7:30 or whenever, I’m hungry again at 10 anyway, so I may as well wait until 10.)
It turns out that this is probably caused by what I eat for breakfast. I’m big on the cinnamon toast, or toaster waffles, or cereal, or something like that. Grain with sugar, basically. But it makes me sleepy, and then I get really hungry like I’m going to faint unless I get something to eat Right NOW! Plagioclase has a similar response, with the added bonus of sour stomach.
So we’ve started a little experiment, based on some experiences we had in Germany — eat a little meat and cheese on bread for breakfast. Of course, you know us, it’s not packaged bologna and American slices. At least not for the first round. We’ll see how it goes. If it seems to work, we might expand our repertoire to boiled eggs. I always liked those cute hen cozies on the breakfast tables in German hotels.
A phrase that made me do a double-take (New York Times):
…the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls, where kids learn to play punk-rock standards.
Punk rock standards? Sheesh.
(The article itself is pretty cool. I like the name of one of the bands mentioned: This Moment in Black History.)
I think I mentioned once that the drive that holds our entire music library had a meltdown. This was more than a year ago (maybe even two?), but I haven’t really been paying too much attention to the music collection here at the Rock Pile for even longer than that.
Now that I have this iMac with a 250GB drive, though, I’ve been rethinking our local music situation — and realizing that we have a lot of CDs that I haven’t heard in far too long.
Part of this is influenced by a local station we listen to when we’re working on Mom’s house. It proudly proclaims that it’s “not ClearChannel” — it plays the music of my later youth, with new stuff and local stuff mixed in, so it’s not just all Nirvana all the time.
Anyway, I’ve spent Way Too Long importing stuff from my laptop and getting it just right (what with this newfangled artwork thingy there is there in the corner of iTunes), and then loading in 15 CDs and getting them just right… At this rate, I’ll lose this drive before I get everything imported.
‘Cause you know, you can’t just use the data that CDDB gives you for the tags. Things might be spelled or capitalized wrong, or the other person missed an accented character, or you just don’t like how they handled the various artists thingy. And then there’s the problem of artwork. We’ve got a pretty eclectic bunch of cds (at least these first 15), and not all of them are on iTunes, so I’ve got to go elsewhere to find images. Amazon (not unexpectedly) is a pretty good source, but even they don’t have everything. So I’m stuck trying to get anything other than the default black box with 8th notes on it.
If I had the scanner nearby, I’d probably scan the cover, but that would be a bit nerdy, don’t you think?
