Posted By RichC on December 1, 2011
I’ve posted on Yves Rossy and the Breitling team since his original flights over the Swiss Alps and here’s his “new feat: Flying in formation at full throttle together with 2 jets from the Breitling Jet Team … at their minimum speed. Beautiful images for an outstanding achievement!”
Posted By RichC on November 30, 2011
A very impressive day on Wall Street after the central banking news this morning. Many expected an end of day weakening, but buyers continued to pick up shares of companies who’s stock has recently been beaten back. The positive move continued the trend of volatility that has marked nearly the entire year.
After an “off to the races” start in the morning, the Dow, Nasdaq and S&P500 all landed gains of over 4% today and putting the averages back in positive territory for the year. After a few days ulcer kind of news last week, yesterday and today’s medicine should help … but can’t the gains hold?
Posted By RichC on November 30, 2011
The financial markets woke up to a jolt this morning as several central banks including the U.S. Federal Reserve unified to shore up the global financial system. The debt crisis in Europe has continued to put downward stress on world markets and economies; the cheaper U.S. denominated loans available to European banks is expected to make them more liquid. According to Wednesday’s Fed statement, "The purpose of these actions is to ease strains in financial markets and thereby mitigate the effects of such strains on the supply of 
credit to households and businesses and so help foster economic activity." (my read … “kick the can down the road” … but I’m hoping it works)
The financial markets opened strong this morning on the news seeing the Dow up over 400 points by mid morning. I suspect a significant portion of the jump may have been short covering, since the mood has been relatively sour as the U.S. economy doesn’t exhibit growth or many signs that confidence has returned. Optimistically though, even with our problems here in this country, we are much better off than entitlement burdened Europeans or countries believing nationally controlled industries can compete with the efficiently and innovation inspired by free markets and capitalism.
Posted By RichC on November 30, 2011
Its good to archive a few photos from a family gathering … in this case Thanksgiving at my brother’s house last week. Besides enjoying the time with family, we checked out the new man-toy in Ron’s barn – a new John Deere mower. A few new markers for the 2011 Thanksgiving holiday: the “no shave” November for my son Taylor (above) and meeting my niece’s boyfriend Ben. (very nice to meet him, below right)
Dinner was excellent and the work to prepare it most appreciated … thanks Claire and Ron. Mom was able to enjoy the day, although she is in pain and nervous about her upcoming back surgery. It is definitely needed as she is tried all other treatment options since the injury in May — the pain doesn’t ease much. We are confident that surgery is the best option to put her on the road to good health.
We had a great time together and I’m thankful to have such a close and caring family.
Posted By RichC on November 29, 2011
Question Mark ?
Origin: When early scholars wrote in Latin, they would place the word questio – meaning “question” – at the end of a sentence to indicate a query. To conserve valuable space, writing it was soon shortened to qo, which caused another problem – readers might mistake it for the ending of a word. So they squashed the letters into a symbol: a lowercased q on top of an o. Over time the o shrank to a dot and the q to a squiggle, giving us our current question mark.Exclamation Point !
Origin: Like the question mark, the exclamation point was invented by stacking letters. The mark comes from the Latin word io, meaning “exclamation of joy.” Written vertically, with the i above the o, it forms the exclamation point we use today.Equal Sign =
Origin: Invented by Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde in 1557, with this rationale: “I will settle as I doe often in woorke use, a paire of paralleles, or Gmowe [i.e., twin] lines of one length, thus : , bicause noe 2 thynges, can be more equalle.” His equal signs were about five times as long as the current ones, and it took more than a century for his sign to be accepted over its rival: a strange curly symbol invented by Descartes.Ampersand &
Origin: This symbol is stylized et, Latin for “and.” Although it was invented by the Roman scribe Marcus Tullius Tiro in the first century B.C., it didn’t get its strange name until centuries later. In the early 1800s, schoolchildren learned this symbol as the 27th letter of the alphabet: X, Y, Z, &. But the symbol had no name. So, they ended their ABCs with “and, per se, and” meaning “&, which means ‘and.’” This phrase was slurred into one garbled word that eventually caught on with everyone: ampersand.Octothorp #
Origin: The odd name for this ancient sign for numbering derives from thorpe, the Old Norse word for a village or farm that is often seen in British placenames. The symbol was originally used in mapmaking, representing a village surrounded by eight fields, so it was named the octothorp.
Posted By RichC on November 28, 2011
No wonder I instinctively avoid I-75 downtown Cincinnati during rush hour.
Two stretches of I-75 in the Cincinnati area have been identified as being among the 328 most seriously congested in the country in a recent report by the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University.
The single most congested stretch of highway in the area is southbound I-75, from the Interstate 74 exit to West Seventh Street, or exit 1.The 3.4-mile stretch of road connects the area known as Pill Hill, where many of the region’s largest medical centers and universities are located, to downtown Cincinnati.That stretch of road ranked 21st nationally in terms of being unreliable.
Posted By RichC on November 27, 2011
Most Volkswagen Jetta owners have experienced the “low front valance” problem with their cars (probably other models too) … be it a bump in the road, steep drive or the infamous parking curb. In my daughter’s case, it was a parking curb with the steel hold-down rebar protruding way too high and catching enough to give the entire valance and bumper a good yank when she backed out. Low and behold the damage was more than just snapping off the valance.
The “yank” pulled the bumper cover, tore the valance in half and split the front fender where rust had weakened it at the top of the wheel well. My project for the Thanksgiving day weekend was to shore up the valance (added aluminum backing with airplane rivets), refastened the valance with small stainless steel bolts and nuts to the bumper cover, added a new reinforcement for the cover and added new metal and body filler to her fender. Unfortunately there wasn’t enough time to do much more than prime the repair … still it is sturdy and should prevent any additional rust. (thought of my friend Jacob who owns my old TDI and was “just” dealing with a similar rust problem this past week)
Posted By RichC on November 26, 2011
I not the only one with indigestion … and it isn’t from the Thanksgiving day eating or the leftovers (or even the Black Friday frenzy) … but the crushing financial markets that have haunted investors since Halloween.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average has turned in its “worst Thanksgiving week performance since markets began observing the holiday in 1942, falling 4.8% to 11231.78, capped by a 25.77-point slide on Friday.” In fact, “the Dow has fallen 7.6% over the last two weeks and is now down 3% for the year amid increasing uneasiness over Europe’s sovereign-debt problems and the failure of U.S. lawmakers to reach a deal on reducing the budget deficit.” (LINK) It is debatable, but markets would be far better IF politicians on both sides of the Atlantic could come together and address the debs and deficits … or at least in our country come up with an economic plan that is encouraging. Are we really in for trouble or is there something positive on the horizon? (a little positive cheerleading from the Whitehouse would be helpful)
Posted By RichC on November 25, 2011
My daughter tested the Glympse app on her Android phone on her way home to Cincinnati for Thanksgiving this past week. She sent the link to my phone and shockingly I was able to open the moving map based web page perfectly on my aging Palm Pre smartphone. As her progress closed in on home, I decided to record a short video which illustrates the accuracy of the realtime updates and travel speed.
Although the video shot with a handheld Kodak Playsport Zx5 in “macro focus mode” is less than stellar, it demonstrates how well Glympse works.
If you watch the “silent” clip to the end, you’ll see Katelyn’s VW Jetta TDI drive around the neighborhood and up our driveways as the arrow on the map updates a few seconds behind.
MISC:
Speaking of real time locating and tracking, check out the Wolfram Alpha search and locating airliners and “flights overhead” – hmm, I’m not sure why I really need to know this??? (be sure to click on flight link for more information than most of us need to know)
Posted By RichC on November 24, 2011
Who would have thought that we would adopt the folksy term Turkey Day for Thanksgiving considering the first pilgrims and Wampanoaq Indians most likely didn’t serve turkey. I figured there might have been Wild Turkey? Perhaps not according to most historians.
The account we have of the feast — Mourt’s Relation by Edward Winslow and William Bradford – is a journal chronicling the first settlers in Plymouth; it sort of indicates what was being served. The journal reveals that four of the settlers went “fowling,” likely for ducks and geese (noted from reports of previous hunts), and that the native Americans brought deer … “five” to be exact. Besides the missing turkey … there weren’t any potatoes as they were suspected of being poisonous. What was likely served with the “fowl and venison” were onions, cabbage, squash and corn. One classic that we do retain is pumpkin, although at my house it is served as pie (doubtful in that form at the first Thanksgiving).
You shall understand, that in this little time, that a few of us have been here, we have built seven dwelling-houses, and four for the use of the plantation, and have made preparation for divers others. We set the last spring some twenty acres of Indian corn, and sowed some six acres of barley and peas, and according to the manner of the Indians, we manured our ground with herrings or rather shads, which we have in great abundance, and take with great ease at our doors. Our corn did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good, but our peas not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown, they came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom.
Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after have a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the company almost a week, at which time amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain, and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.
After pondering that the first settlers were “thankful” for far less of a scrumptious feast in Massachusetts … all of us Americans should be “extremely thankful” for what we have … even in this difficult economy.
Have a Happy Thanksgiving and enjoy Turkey Day, of which 40-million will be served today … and be thankful for our many blessings we have in the United States of America.
An interesting controversy:
For some scholars, the jury is still out on whether the feast at Plymouth really constituted the first Thanksgiving in the United States. Indeed, historians have recorded other ceremonies of thanks among European settlers in North America that predate the Pilgrims’ celebration. In 1565, for instance, the Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilé invited members of the local Timucua tribe to a dinner in St. Augustine, Florida, after holding a mass to thank God for his crew’s safe arrival. On December 4, 1619, when 38 British settlers reached a site known as Berkeley Hundred on the banks of Virginia’s James River, they read a proclamation designating the date as “a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.”
Some Native Americans and others take issue with how the Thanksgiving story is presented to the American public, and especially to schoolchildren. In their view, the traditional narrative paints a deceptively sunny portrait of relations between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag people, masking the long and bloody history of conflict between Native Americans and European settlers that resulted in the deaths of millions. Since 1970, protesters have gathered on the day designated as Thanksgiving at the top of Cole’s Hill, which overlooks Plymouth Rock, to commemorate a “National Day of Mourning.” Similar events are held in other parts of the country.