Major Mike's Musings

Kindle

A Christmas gift from Mrs. Major and Sweet Dau Major and birthday gift from Old Dad, my Kindle finally shipped today.

In case you don’t know what a Kindle is, it’s an electronic book. Kindle users can download books from Amazon.com or upload files to be read from their own computers.

Sweet Dau gave me an appropriately decorated Visa debit gift card with “KINDLE FUND O’ DADNESS” emblazoned on it. I couldn’t figure out how to apply that card as a partial payment for the Kindle so I pre bought a bunch of books. Here’s the list:

• Rusty Nail — J.A. Konrath
• Night Fire — Catherine Coulter
• The Motive — John Lescroart
• Valdez Is Coming — Elmore Leonard
• The Millionaires — Brad Meltzer
• Farewell, My Lovely — Raymond Chandler
• The Big Sleep — Raymond Chandler
• Black and Blue — Ian Rankin
• The Prince of Beverly Hills — Stuart Woods
• Third Person Singular — Kj Erickson
• Death of a Charming Man — M. C. Beaton
• Thr3e — Ted Dekker
• Shakespeare’s Landlord — Charlaine Harris
• Killing Floor — Lee Child
• Total Recall — Sara Paretsky
• Tunnel Vision — Sara Paretsky
• Hard Time — Sara Paretsky

Thanks Mrs. Major, Sweet Dau, and Old Dad.

Robellini Palm

Rats! For the fourth time we will have to cover our plants this winter. This is double the number of times per winter since we’ve moved to Florida in February 2004. In addition, the total number of freeze nights so far (including tonight) are 13. We usually have two. Whatever happened to global warming?

Of course it’s my fault. If we hadn’t bought two Robellini palms and had kept the hibiscus potted and indoors, I wouldn’t have to cover anything. Despite plant covers, the poinsettias are trash. Too late to cover them now.

I know all you folks who live north of the frost line are saying, “Whine, whine, whine.” But, hey, we moved south to get away from all that.

Hey Folks, in case you’re interested in the government’s massive bailout, there’s a website available. Here’s a quote from Recovery.gov:

Recovery.gov is a website that lets you, the taxpayer, figure out where the money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going. There are going to be a few different ways to search for information. The money is being distributed by Federal agencies, and soon you’ll be able to see where it’s going — to which states, to which congressional districts, even to which Federal contractors. As soon as we are able to, we’ll display that information visually in maps, charts, and graphics.

There’s even a link to the actual bill that President Obama signed today.

Ok, time for some reading.

When oil prices are going down (around $34 a barrel Friday) how come gas prices keep going up ($.35 since Jan 1)? Turns out that the $34 per barrel is for West Texas crude and they’re not making much gas from it. Instead, we’re getting gas from inferior oil imported from Canada, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and others. That oil is much more expensive, about $7 more per barrel not counting transportation cast, than West Texas crude. Why are we using foreign oil instead of West Texas crude? We don’t have pipelines in place to transport the oil out of the Southwest.

Is there any money in the massive bailout bill to build pipelines?

Looks like the market today didn’t believe the hype about the bailout stimulating the economy. Or was it something else?

Da da da.

I changed the disk drive, loaded the original operating system, booted it up and it worked.

I decided to upgrade the operating system and in the process, the upgrade failed because the DVD quit reading the OS 10.4 DVD. After that I couldn’t boot the iBook. I tried everything, which I won’t go into here. I even booted the iBook in target mode, booted using the iBook’s drive on my very old iMac and it worked. 

Looks like the iBook is dead. It’s old enough that it would not be worth it to take to Apple dudes for them to fix.

Da da da. Oh, well.