Between finishing up end-of-the-month work, teaching Latin class, getting ready for the soup dinner, shoveling snow, and recovering from shoveling snow, I haven’t managed to post anything here for about a week.  Today isn’t any better, so I’ll just post this announcement about the soup dinner at St. Rose on Sunday, from 11-2:30.  We’re having 5 different kinds of soup, plus cream-turkey sandwiches, desserts, and drinks.  Further details at that link.

We’ve also got a pretty excellent raffle going, with a grand prize of a $200 gift certificate from the Butcher Block, and several other prizes of gift cards from local businesses.  Tickets will be available at the dinner for $1 each or 6 for $5.

See you there!

I wonder sometimes what makes us like the music we like.  I’ve tried to like classical music, but most of it leaves me cold unless I’m listening to an orchestra play it live.  Jazz is the same way: great live, but puts me to sleep anywhere else.  It’s great if you’ve got a talented singer who’s fun to watch as well as listen to, or if you’re at a party where the music isn’t the only thing going on, but take those things away, and the music isn’t enough.  Organ music and chant are similar: great in the context of church, but they don’t hold my attention by themselves elsewhere.  The only music I like by itself out of context is pop and rock.  I wish that wasn’t the case, but there it is. Read more »

Lent starts tomorrow with Ash Wednesday — don’t forget to stock up on fish! — so here’s a cute story about a boy who decided to spend all of Lent in a tent.

And here’s why Pepper won’t go anywhere near the cows when we take her to the farm:

image from icanhascheezburger.com

Cows are mean critters where dogs are concerned.

Latin class has been pretty fun so far.  The class isn’t very big, but that’s probably not a bad thing.  We’ve only covered punctuation and the first lesson on the first declension, so it’s not too late for more people to get in on it if they want to.

I’m surprised by how much I enjoy teaching.  It’s even got me thinking I might want to expand into teaching other skills, like programming or webmaster work.  I always thought I’d hate teaching because I hate getting up and talking in front of people.  I’m sure I would hate the lecture-hall kind of teaching, but this isn’t like that.  It’s more like a lab setting or a conversation, with a lot of feedback, so it doesn’t feel like giving a speech at all.  I’m still a little nervous about it, but that’s because these people are trusting me to know what the heck I’m doing, and I don’t want to let them down.  And I don’t have the subject down cold 100% myself, so that’s a bit nervous-making too. Read more »

Sitting tends to be hard on my back, and I do a lot of it since I work at a keyboard.  So I’ve been interested in alternative ways to work for a while.  I looked into those kneeling chairs where you sort of half kneel and half sit, but people who tried them said they felt good at first but eventually just transferred the pain to other places.  The chairs where you sit on a beach ball sounded the same way.  The only way to try either of those long enough to really test it is to buy one, and then you’re stuck with it. Read more »

This is just too funny not to share:

From icanhascheezburger.com

Tom Naughton has a good post today about raw milk.  He looked up the regulations for raw milk in a bunch of different states, and had some fun with how stupid they are.  My favorite is Nevada:

Raw milk sales are legal but, in practice, there are no raw milk sales in the state. In order for a farmer to obtain a permit from the state dairy commission to produce and distribute raw milk, the county milk commission must first certify the farm for the production of raw milk or a raw milk product. There has never been a county milk commission in existence at any time, so to this point, there has been a de facto prohibition of raw milk sales.

Most of us who saw “Brazil” took it as a warning.  Apparently some government folks took it as an inspiration.

And here’s a very good article from a raw milk drinker, telling the story of how they had to work their way through a chain of confidences to contact the raw milk “underground” so they could start getting some.  It also covers the evidence that raw milk is safe and healthy, and why that’s the case.  As the author says, it’s amazing that milk is the only food that you can’t buy unprocessed in most states.  You can buy everything else raw—meat, vegetables, fruit, grain, etc.—and decide for yourself how much you want to cook or process it, but not milk.  Once upon a time, it was sort of about safety, but that’s not what it’s about now at all.  It’s inertia and corporate protectionism, plain and simple.

We drink raw milk and cream and make yogurt from it, but unfortunately we mostly still eat pasteurized cheese.  Hard cheeses like cheddar are just a lot of work, but one of these days I’ll give cheesemaking another shot.

Unlike a lot of the people of my generation who got into computers and programming, I didn’t grow up with one.  Home computers were still kind of an oddity then, and the price tags made them seem about as accessible to me as having my own jet plane.  So my first programming experiences were fairly short and pointless: some character graphics stuff on Apple systems at College for Kids at QU; fiddling with Pascal on a visit to Purdue when I was 16; and finally some real Z-80 programming on the Sanyo CP/M machines we got at St. Thomas in my senior year.  Computer class focused on word processing in Wordstar and saving our work to disk, but somewhere I managed to run down some info on the Z-80s registers and assembly language, and did some simple programming like a tic-tac-toe game.  I even remember programming on paper, writing out the lists of instructions that I’d type in later when I got access to the systems again. Read more »

GraphJam.com

I just had to share this one, for all the times I’ve heard, “Wow, you’re left-handed?”  I’ve heard it so many times that I came up with a snappy comeback:  “All the best people are.”

You’d think it’s something rare, the way people say it like, “Wow, you’ve got a Super Bowl ring?”  About 8% of people—1 in 12—are left-handed, so if you work at a checkout counter or somewhere where people write checks and sign their name, you’re bound to see several every day.  It really shouldn’t seem that weird.

Fun left-hander fact: the Latin word for ‘left’ is sinister.

On a search engine marketing forum I frequent, there was a discussion about a TV documentary about the Internet, which claimed that the Internet used to be this egalitarian place where everyone shared ideas in a spirit of love and understanding, and now it’s dominated by big corporations that only care about the bottom line and probably hate baby seals and the little guy doesn’t have a voice anymore.  (Or words to that effect.) Read more »