Category Archives: Random Access

Random Access, the op-ed.

Pants on Fire, Part Umpty-Seven point Three

Posted on by

The Post Office is going to sue Lance Armstrong for running “the most sophisticated, professionalized, and successful doping program” that the world has ever seen which apparently hurts postal customers’ essential concept of the Post Office.

Yeah, I’d hate ever to think the Post Office might have the most sophisticated, professionalized, and successful program for anything. That would definitely give us the wrong idea about the Post Office.

The Postal’s Services own studies show that the service benefitted tremendously from its sponsorship — benefits totaling more than $100 million in sales.

Speaking of sophisticated, professionalized, and successful doping programs: Sequestration? Budget cuts?

I’ve been looking for a straight answer on how much will be cut from actual Federal spending this week. Best I can tell, the boogeyman will slice about $85 billion from the federal budget. And also, best as I can tell, total Federal spending for fiscal year 2012 reached $3.6 trillion and is due to rise for fiscal 2013. What do you bet the increase will be more than $85 billion? For the record, fiscal year 2012 marked the fourth consecutive year of trillion dollar deficits.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: everyone is afraid that their personal ox will get gored.

Wow. That never happens in business.

Texas Instruments laid off 1,700 people. NBC dumped 500. Solel fired 140 of their remaining 430 workers. Xerox restructured 2,500 current employees into former employees. Stryker closed their facility in New York and plans to counter the medical device tax in Obamacare by slashing 1,170 jobs, some 5% of their global workforce. And those were just some of the announcements last November alone.

Nobody said boo when Citigroup slashed 11,000 jobs, when Dow “retired” Rufus, or when Motorola did the same for Liz Arden, but the Feds can’t handle a 2% cut in money they haven’t even spent yet?

Yesterday, Governor Martin O’Malley (D-MD) said, “We can’t cut our way to prosperity.” Perhaps not, but the stock market is up on news of the layoffs and faith in government is down on news of higher spending.

As Gail Collins wrote in the NYTimes, “Did you know one of the most popular TV shows in Norway was about firewood? Maybe you should have this discussion with a Norwegian.” Better yet, maybe we should have this discussion in Norwegian.

Today is the 100th anniversary of the certification of the 16th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

From ourdocuments.gov: “In 1909 progressives in Congress again attached a provision for an income tax to a tariff bill. Conservatives, hoping to kill the idea for good, proposed a constitutional amendment enacting such a tax; they believed an amendment would never received ratification by three-fourths of the states. Much to their surprise, the amendment was ratified by one state legislature after another, and on February 25, 1913, with the certification by Secretary of State Philander C. Knox, the 16th amendment took effect. Yet in 1913, due to generous exemptions and deductions, less than 1 percent of the population paid income taxes at the rate of only 1 percent of net income.”

My, how things have changed.

Brrrrrrrrrr

Posted on by

I had a blissfully hot shower this morning. I closed the bathroom door and kept all that hot, moist air inside. Ahhh.

Winter has come to South Puffin.

Wind chill advisories went up on Saturday night for “feels like” temps of 28-32°F. In South Florida.

winter feetsThat was up in the United States so it never actually dropped that low here. But it has been that windy. I put the blanket on the bed Saturday night and laid out my flannel shirt for Sunday.

Most houses in the Keys don’t have central heat so when the outside temperature drops, the inside temp follows. Up to North Puffin it was 9° Sunday morning and partly cloudy with a 30% chance of snow, although all the snow on the radar was over New Hampshire and Maine. The forecast 19° high temp there was not a warming trend.

It was 52° here after a couple hours of solar heating and the Wind Advisory stayed in effect for winds from the North at 15-25 mph with gusts to 35-40. Same 10° thermometer climb here Sunday as up north. We went all the way to 63°.

We broke our fast at the Cracked Conch. The old fogies who gather there on Sunday mornings always take over the “Crank Corner,” a counter out on the deck.

Noooooooo.

Everybody moved inside. The Conch doesn’t have air conditioning but they do have windows. All the windows were shut. And, it turns out, they have heat which was turned on!

Whoda thunk it?

I spent the day yesterday in the living room, reading and poking the ‘puter. Having the patio stone1 in my actual lap was quite nice. I did cover my feet with a blanket although the temp rose to 56° outside and 60°(!) on the porch.

My next door neighbor has company. They had all the doors open there when he got up yesterday morning; he was seriously cold. He complained a bit about that when he came over to warm up. “I’ll do outside when it drops to 70°,” he said. “I don’t do 68°!”

My lap blanket felt pretty good.

It got even colder overnight. I woke sometime in the darkest hours and thought about getting up for the second blankie. I didn’t because it was all the way at the other end of the house. I guess I didn’t need it but it surely was cold this morning. 60° here in the sunroom first thing. It was 54° and mostly clear when I arose at sunrise. We’re allegedly headed for a high of 70° but with a windchill as low as about 45° on breezes from the NNE at 20-25 mph. 16 mph “breeze” right now.

I don’t understand why my friends in North Puffin aren’t more sympathetic.

lonely boot in the snow

1Patio Stone: Liz Arden’s pet name for my 26 pound square, black, laptop with its 17″ screen. It puts out a fair dinkum amount of heat.

Monetized

Posted on by

First rule of writing: write what you know.

I write a blog which means I do occasionally read OPB (Other People’s Blogs). And when I read, I often comment.

order screenSo.

I seem to have a couple-three logins at different blogging softwares but they all come back to the gmail account associated with the No Puffin Perspective™. They display my own name and everything, since I don’t snipe anonymously.

A friend sent me a link to a LiveJournal blog today. It started an interesting discussion about ownership and privilege; I logged in to make a comment. LiveJournal gave me a couple of options: LiveJournal itself, Facebook, Twitter, Openid, Google, MailRu, Vkontakte, or Anonymously. I won’t autolink my blogging to Facebook or Twitter because you never know what might end up tweeted on your wall. MailRu, founded by Yuri Milner, is the largest Internet company in the Russian-speaking world. I don’t speak Russian. Ditto for Vkontakte. I’ve never bothered to get an Openid because, well, I have gmail.

So I clicked the GooglePaw and gave LiveJournal my email address, fully expecting to see my name and the North Puffin avatar show up. I saw “ext_1649750” and a crash test dummy.

Went looking for a way to change the avatar. Did so.

Google Plus now probably has a low res bird on my page instead of my smiling mug.

Went looking for a way to change the user name. And that’s where the story gets interesting. LiveJournal is perfectly happy to change my public name from what they assigned to what every other account uses. For $15.

I have a better idea.

I deleted my LiveJournal account and I recommend everyone else do the same.

First World Problem

Posted on by

Did you ever wonder why your stick of margarine comes out of the waxed paper broken in the middle?

margarineWe don’t use a lot of margarine but every stick in the last few pounds out of the freezer has looked like this.

I tried Googling for the answer. Out of about 6,290,000 results, 6,289,004 came back that “No insect will touch margarine and neither should any human.”

I don’t care about the butter aisle wars. Butter was a no-no. Saturated fats are a no-no. Now trans fats are a no-no. Butter is “all-natural.”

Pfui. According to the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 21, butter and margarine each must contain a minimum of 80% fat. The difference between them is simply the source of the fat: butter is made from cream (moo), and margarine is made from vegetable oil. (“For the purpose of this subpart P ‘butter’ means the food product usually known as butter…”)

Margarine can be used just like “butter” in most types of baking. Since margarine is softer than butter, you probably should not use it pastries and candy made from a boiled syrup. For the record, Anne makes excellent pie crusts but she uses lard.

This is a slippery slope and I don’t care what’s at the bottom. I just want to know why the stick is broken.

Heh. Slippery.

The Pennsy1 still ran when my mother and grandmother were at Swarthmore College but that train station is now part of SEPTA. The fare to and from Central Philadelphia is currently $4.25 during off-peak hours, about the cost of two pounds of butter on sale. Despite the fact that butter comes from cows, this is not the story of the cow in Parrish (cows will climb up but can’t come back down the stairs).

It seems a group of students who shall remain nameless because their legacies might still want admission saved their butter from the dining hall for most of a term. Freezers weren’t available then, so I’m not sure I want to know its condition when that same group wandered down to the Media Local tracks and slathered and slathered and slathered. As you might expect, the train rushed into the station and rushed right on through, much to the surprise of everyone aboard.

College students are one reason butter costs so much more than margarine.

Can I freeze margarine?
Yes, but probably not the whipped style or the low-fat brands which charge you to replace about half the fat with water. Place the package in an air-tight container or freezer bag. Freeze before the use-by date on the package, and store frozen up to six months. The limit is mostly to inhibit freezer smells.

I don’t think freezing had anything to do with the broken sticks I have. We’ve been buying margarine on sale and freezing it for most of my semi-adult life. The sticks sometimes come out a little bent at the corners but they rarely look licked and never have been so consistently pre-divided.

The floor is open for suggestions or scientific proofs.

Me? I think someone dropped the entire pallet of margarine off the top rack of the warehouse.

1“The Pennsy” was the affectionate name for the Pennsylvania Railroad, the largest railroad by both traffic and revenue in the U.S. for the first half of the twentieth century. It was at one time the largest publicly traded corporation in the world.

Cropping Issues

Posted on by

If you came here expecting a discussion of the corn used to make fine Kentucky whisky, move along. This is about photography.

A recent Miami Herald article about a West Palm Beach museum includes a shot of photographer annie leibovitzAnnie Leibovitz aiming a point-and-shoot camera at the reader. Kind of reminds us that a great photographer can take a magnificent picture with pretty much any box with a hole in one end.

But she still has to print it. That’s where I run into difficulty.

If Ms. Leibovitz printed her photos to fit in a standard frame with a pre-cut mat, (most) arts and crafts stores carry frames and mats with openings in only these sizes:

Frame Size Mat Opening Image Size Aspect Ratio
5″ x 7″ 3.5″ x 5.5″ 4″ x 6″ 1.5
8″ x 10″ 4.5″ x 6.5″ 5″ x 7″ 1.4
11″ x 14″ 7.5″ x 9.5″ 8″ x 10″ 1.25 (about 5:4)
16″ x 20″ 10.5″ x 13.5″ 11″ x 14″ 1.27
20″ x 24″ 15.5″ x 19.5″ 16″ x 20″ 1.25
24″ x 36″ 19.5″ x 29.5″ 20″ x 30″ 1.5 (exactly 3:2)
30″ x 40″ 21.5″ x 31.5″ 22″ x 32″ 1.45

(Frame and mat openings vary from manufacturer to manufacturer.)

Most digital point & shoot cameras had an aspect ratio of 1.33 (4:3), the same as analog television or early movies. However, a 35 mm picture’s aspect ratio is 1.5 (3:2). This means that the long side is 1.5 times as long as the short side. Several digital cameras take photos in either ratio, and nearly all digital SLRs take pictures in a 3:2 ratio, as most can use lenses designed for 35 mm film.

The Advanced Photo System (APS) film, a now-discontinued film format for still photography, has about a 7:4 aspect ratio, coincidentally almost perfect for HDTV except for how lousy an enlargement APS film yields. In 2005 Panasonic launched the first consumer digital camera with the very similar aspect ratio of 16:9; that matches HDTV and is the same as Ms. Leibovitz’ Canon G-15. 16:9 is the same as 1.77 which you might notice matches none of the standards in the table above.

Confused yet? Me, too.

I’ve taken thousands of photos with either a Kodak or Minolta digital. The Kodak has a 1/1.76″ (7.3 x 5.5 mm) CCD sensor, the Minolta a slightly larger 2/3″ (8.8 x 6.6 mm) sensor. Both are on the sweet spot 1.33 aspect ratio which means I had to throw away part of the picture for all their 8 x 10″ and 11 x 14″ prints in the gallery.

That’s one reason I changed to a full format digital for most shoots.

All these different aspect ratios is why everyone has cropping issues when printing photos. An aspect ratio of 4:3 translates to a print size of 4.5″ x 6.0″. This loses half an inch when printing on the “standard” of 4″ x 6″ with its aspect ratio of 3:2. Similar cropping occurs when printing on other sizes, i.e., 5″ x 7″, 8″ x 10″, or 11″ x 14″. In fact, the only two “standard” print sizes that capture all of the frame of a full frame digital or its 35mm uncle are 4″ x 6″ and 24″ x 30″.

There’s not much market for 4″ x 6″ or 24″ x 30″.

On the other hand, there’s a lot more market for 16″ x 20″ or 24 x 30″ than for a post card size print and I couldn’t reliably enlarge my early work to those sizes.

I want to compose in the viewfinder so I want to print what I saw. I’m homing in on 10″ x 15″ and 14″ x 21″ as the “usual” enlargements in my own gallery. The first is perfectly sized for the standard 16″ x 20″ mat; the latter for a 20″ x 28″ which is fairly large. Now all I need is a processor who can print them. And a mat cutter ditto.

Of course, every photographer has great photos in some odd-ball format, so I’ll print that palm tree with the sap bucket at 10:1 and frame it vertically. I’m working on an interesting 3:1 panorama that I will probably print on canvas and display as a loooooooooooooooog horizontal triptych.

I hope you’ll buy them anyway.


sugar beach