Why is it that the media always uses “detained” instead of “arrested”, “jailed”, “tortured”, etc? Jordan isn’t delaying terrorists from reaching their destination… they’re putting them in jail. Let’s call it what it is.
All posts by John Goerzen
Sometimes, when you least expect it…
Google Adsense sometimes serves up some, well, unexpected advertisements.
Here is a real screenshot from this site that I took on March 29. Note the second advertisement at the top of this screenshot. Note the amazing correlation with the topic of ducting, the catchy prose, and, well, need I say more?
Scanning Slides & 35mm Negatives
It’s recently become apparent that I need to scan a bunch of slides and 35mm negatives into digital form. My church has a bunch of very nice slides from the 60s, my parents and grandparents have quite a few as well, and I have a bunch of 35mm negatives that I’d like to get digital.
It’s also quite obvious that flatbed scanners aren’t going to do the trick for me.
Scanners that start to approach the quality I’m after seem to start at about $1000. Does anybody know of a good scanning service? Or have some other ideas? Ideally, I’d like to scan hundreds of photos, but the $1000 is a bit tough.
I found this service, which looks decent.
He was doing a heck of a job at Amtrak, so he was fired
That’s the title of an editorial in the Austin-American Statesman, which begins:
David Gunn, a noted railroad-turnaround specialist who was making solid progress in putting Amtrak, the national rail-passenger system, on the road to financial stability, was unceremoniously fired last week.
Astonishingly enough, Gunn was canned not for doing a bad job, but for doing a good one. Apparently he thought his assignment was to make a success of Amtrak, while the Bush administration seeks Amtrak’s collapse.
And this is my last post on this topic.
More on David Gunn and Amtrak
Here’s an interesting read: Where Was Brownie When We Needed Him? David Gunn, Amtrak and Bush’s Culture of Incompetence. This article makes the point about David Gunn better than I did, and is written by someone that saw how David Gunn has improved things.
Stop the credit card solicitations
If you’re like me, you get credit card solicitations in the mail almost every day. I really don’t care to have a card other than the one I have. Most of these solicitations arrive because credit bureaus sell lists of customers with specific credit attributes.
I’ve known for awhile that you can call 888-5-OPT-OUT to get the credit bureaus to stop sending you these things. But it’s annoying.
There’s a new feature now: you can go to their website at www.optoutprescreen.com and opt out there. Well, maybe it’s not new, but it’s new to me anyway.
New console gaming system
Thanks to everyone that responded to my earlier post looking for suggestions for a video game console.
I wound up choosing a Playstation 2, and the game that tipped the balance was Ico. I’ve only spent a few minutes with it, but it looks great. I especially like that it has no on-screen status displays, messages, etc. whatsoever. A refreshing change.
I am a little disappointed with the lack of 16:9 games available on any console.
Also picked up a nice Logitech wireless controller from the local GameStop. Very nice little unit.
Amtrak’s Best President in Years Fired
Yesterday, Amtrak’s board of directors fired Amtrak president David Gunn.
Here’s something unusual about this firing. David Gunn actually was the best thing to happen to Amtrak in years. He improved the physical condition of the railroad’s equipment, raised ridership, cut costs, and even ended this year with a net surplus despite a crippling brake problem on Amtrak’s high-speed Acela equipment that took the entire fleet out of commision for most of the summer.
The Amtrak board knew this too, and even testified to that fact before Congress a few months ago.
The board, though, is made up of Bush appointees. You might remember that Bush’s budget proposal contained a plan to bankrupt Amtrak as a way of “reforming” it. That failed to pass Congress, and David Gunn failed to be incompetant.
So you have the odd case of firing David Gunn for improving things on the railroad.
Yikes. I will be so glad when this administration is gone.
Video Game Consoles
I’m thinking of getting a video game console system. Trouble is, I haven’t really followed the market since the days of the original Nintendo. I do own a N64, but I didn’t really research it before I bought it, and it looks pretty bad on our HDTV.
So I’m hoping someone out there can give me some advice, or some links to sites that could give me some advice. I have no idea at all where to start.
My criteria to begin with are:
- Support for HDTV systems. Are there any widescreen (16:9) game systems or games out there? That would be ideal.
- Not about to be end-of-lifed. I want it to be able to play new releases for awhile yet.
It pays to be a pack rat
I am excited this evening. I just found a CD that I burned back in 1996 or 1997 or so.
On this CD is some data I thought I had lost. It has copies of information on some floppies that can’t be read anymore.
But it also has the PowerPoint presentation I did as an 8th grader that got me to National History Day in Washington, DC. Not only that, but also the original high-resolution scans of the photos I used in that presentation. Some of these scans are of photos that date back to the early 1900s, whose owners may not be easily reachable today. I had been hoping to find this for years. I knew it was buried somewhere.
And YES — stumbled across it tonight.
I will be posting some photos on this blog in the coming days.
But first, I have to find a way to convert this ancient PowerPoint file to a format that OpenOffice can read — so I get the correct story behind each photo.
The scans were saved back in the days when a person got 8 characters to name a file. Not very descriptive.
(And I remember how much space it took up on the hard drive I had back then, and how much I wanted to just delete those big picture files. Glad I didn’t.)