Methinks neither a latte nor a liter of Wild Turkey will help at this point.

Be afraid. Be VERY afraid. Please panic. Please sell all your stocks.

I think I will wait a week or so before I buy back in. If I only had more cash to work with I could probably retire in a few years...
But I think I will be able to cover a few latte's at least... stick around super-glue fans...

It seems like such a nice day, temp in the low 80s, blue skies... and then this...

blackness... darkness... fear... panic... latte... brightness again.

The biggest one-day drop in the history of the market. OK so my stocks (both of them) lost about 8% today. on paper. but it will come back...

Right?

Mommy... mommy?

Trees are heavy. No. I mean REALLY heavy.

Yesterday and today I rolled a few more of the large rounds part of the way up the lawn. Mostly I wanted to move some of them so we could begin cleaning up the smaller branches underneath, and figure out what to do about the huge holes in what used to be the lawn. We'll have to make a concerted effort to spend an hour or two a day for the next few days rolling all these things up the hill so we can park them all for the winter. Looks like we'll have pretty warm weather though tomorrow... supposed to be 85. Only got up to 65 today, so that was nice and cool for log rolling.

we have at last count around 90 pieces of these, and they weigh between 40lb for the smaller ones to about 200lb for the ones from the base of the tree. I figure each round will split into about 10 decent sized pieces of firewood, so that's about 900 pieces. Should be enough from this tree alone to keep us warm for the entire winter of 2009. Not to mention that we already have a cord split from other down trees that we're burning this year, and about 2 cords more still unsplit from other trees. Hopefully we'll get to it all before the termites eat it completely.

Today I finally was able to locate and purchase the bluetooth accessory for my phone I've been looking for for a while. It doesn't fit in my pocket as well as it does let me talk on the phone hands-free on the road.

Hopefully it's in as good mechanical condition as it's outward appearance. It's got kind of high miles for a 2006, but seems to be in pretty good shape. Traded in the '01 330i on this one and didn't do too bad I think. Perhaps I may pay a visit to the local dealership to have it checked out and see if there's anything amis lurking under the hood.

Today we had a tree trimmer come out and do some work for us. He did a good job, taking down one tree completely and trimming limbs off another up to about the 100' height. Here we see the guy in the tree at about the 80' level, after he had taken off all the limbs for the whole tree, and cut off about the top third already.

Can you tell from the picture that the tree is actually leaning toward the house? That's the only reason we would cut down a beautiful healthy tree like this. And, it's on the south side of the house which is the direction from which the high winds always blow.

He dropped pieces of the trunk in about 10' sections (about 700Lb each). Here is one falling to the ground. It makes quite a thud (and an indent) when it hits the ground.


So, now we have about 90 pieces of tree on the lawn (ok it used to be a lawn), which at least have been cut into firewood sized rounds. However, I will mention that at the base, this tree is 31" in diameter, and I estimate that the base rounds each weigh between 150 to 200Lb... We'll have to escort each of these beauties up the hill behind the house to stack them someplace out of the way that we can cover them so they dry out until next year.

As it is visible in the background, I will mention that the treehouse is now covered with a tarp for the winter. I'll start in on it next Spring I think.

Seattle, WA

The Park Service today began cracking down on advertising and posters put up on bulletin boards in several of the state parks. There have been numerous complaints about local businesses posting bills and advertisements in the parks. Particularly they said they are removing all posters for local growers and flower shops. They have a new program that they have started, using the Smokey Bear logo, enlisting the public's help in removing the advertisements.

"Only you can prevent Florist Flyers."

 

Commute times as we all know, are a function of distance, and traffic resistance. Resistance to the vector of forward flow can be represented fairly easily, once a few variables are determined and accounted for. Fortunately for us, there are a number of analyses done for us of data from various traffic monitoring stations, from which we can deduce a pattern and corresponding algorithms.

Resistance amplitude varies as a function of time due to traffic, and can be represented by a simple sine wave:

1 - cos(Θ) where Θ =  (2 + h) · π / 6, h being the hour from 0 to 23.

However, there other factors involved as well. Stop lights and stop signs also play a factor. Going by current city statistics, these can be represented as a relative constant:

resistance factor: √2 / 2

Street size (the number of lanes in the direction of travel) also can factor into the equation. In the city, this factor is almost constant at about 1.4, or:

√2

When we attribute fine tuning to factors such as weather, traffic signal timing errors, road maintenance, general city worker incompetence and the like, we have this:

HRF · π / (TSE + RM + CWI), where HRF is hourly rainfall in inches, TSE, RM, and CWI all approximating 1.

When we also contribute the velocity vector of the number of Microsoft employees that are aggressive drivers divided by the number of police officers on duty at any given time, we have the function:

MSAD / 5 where MSAD = (#MS employees) / 2

Then, there are random occurrences such as accidents or head-up-ass drivers which are small but significant:

π / 4 (π / 3 on Mondays)

Thus, when we put it all together, it makes a simple equation. To get anywhere in Redmond to any place else in Redmond takes 25 minutes.