daylight savings time – good or bad?

Being an “evening person”, a golfer and a Canadian — I’ve always liked Daylight Savings Time.

(For 10 years I lived in Saskatchewan where we did not have DST and suffered some confusion because everyone else in the country was.)

On the internet, however, the consensus seems to be that the benefits are not worth the bother.

For example:

… assuming you use the same amount of lighting in the morning that you normally do, how much can you expect to save thanks to an extra hour of evening daylight for four weeks? Not much. Let’s do the math, assuming you have five 60-watt light bulbs you regularly use every evening:

28 days * 1 hour * 5 light bulbs * 60 watts = 8.4 kilowatt-hours (kWh)

Using the average residential cost per kilowatt-hour of 10.22 cents from November 2006, here’s how much you’d save:

8.4 kWh * $0.1022/kWh = $0.86

So after an act of Congress, millions spent in computer reprogramming and schedule adjusting, and kids waiting for buses in pitch dark, you can expect to save 86 cents a year thanks to the extension of Daylight Saving Time. And if your house already made the switch to energy-saving CFL bulbs like we did, cut that savings to 19 cents.

How Much Will You Save With the Longer Daylight Saving Time? About 86 Cents. | Punny Money

book – John Hodgman

Rockin’ tipped me off to the hilarious John Hodgman book, The Areas of My Expertise.

An Almanac of Complete World Knowledge Compiled with Instructive Annotation and Arranged in Useful Order by Me, John Hodgman, a Professional Writer, in the Areas of My Expertise, which Include: Matters Historical; Matters Literary; Matters Cryptozoological; Hobo Matters; Food, Drink, & Cheese (a Kind of Food); Squirrels & Lobsters & Eels; Haircuts; Utopia; What Will Happen in the Future; and Most Other Subjects; Illustrated with a Reasonable Number of Tables and Figures, and Featuring the Best of “Were You Aware of It?”, John Hodgman’s Long-Running Newspaper Novelty Column of Strange Facts and Oddities of the Bizarre.

The Areas of My Expertise – Wikipedia

Very original.

Actually, I downloaded it for free (email address required) from iTunes as an audio book with accompaniment by frequent collaborator Jonathan Coulton.

The Areas of My Expertise

retirement – the cruise ship plan

Dave Adlard is considering his options. The cruise ship plan appeals:

Unique retirement plan:

About 2 years ago my wife and I were on a cruise through the western
Mediterranean aboard a Princess liner. At dinner we noticed an elderly lady
sitting alone along the rail of the grand stairway in the main dining room.
I also noticed that all the staff, ships officers, waiters, busboys, etc.,
all seemed very familiar with this lady. I asked our waiter who the lady
was, expecting to be told that she owned the line, but he said he only knew
that she had been on board for the last four cruises, back-to-back.

As we left the dining room one evening I caught her eye and stopped to say
hello. We chatted and I said, "I understand you’ve been on this ship for
the last four cruises." She replied, "Yes, that’s true." I stated, "I don’t
understand," and she replied, without a pause, "It’s cheaper than a nursing
home."

So, there will be no nursing home in my future. When I get old and feeble,
I am going to get on a Princess Cruise Ship. The average cost for a nursing
home is $200 per day. I have checked on reservations on a Princess and I
can get a long-term discount and senior discount price of $135 per day.
That leaves $65 a day for:

1. Gratuities which will only be $10 per day.

2. I will have as many as 10 meals a day if I can waddle to the restaurant,
or I can have room service (which means I can have breakfast-in-bed every
day of the week).

3. Princess has as many as three swimming pools, a workout room, free
washers and dryers, and shows every night.

4. They have free toothpaste, razors, soap, and shampoo.

5. They will even treat you like a customer, not a patient. An extra $5
worth of tips will have the entire staff scrambling to help you.

6. I will get to meet new people every 7 or 14 days.

7. T.V. broken? Light bulb need changing? Need to have the mattress
replaced? No Problem! They will fix everything and apologize for your
inconvenience.

8. Clean sheets and towels every day, and you don’t even have to ask for
them.

9. If you fall in the nursing home and break a hip you are on Medicare; if
you fall and break a hip on the Princess ship they will upgrade you to a
suite for the rest of your life.

Now hold on for the best! Do you want to see South America, the Panama
Canal, Tahiti, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, or name where you want to go?

Princess will have a ship ready to go. So don’t look for me in a nursing
home, just call shore to ship.

ps: And don’t forget, when you die, they just dump you over the side — at
no charge !!!

South Coast Track, Tasmania

My final few days in Australia I spent on the southern beaches. On a clear day (on a flat planet) I could have seen both New Zealand and Antarctica from my campsite.

I was on the easy part of a fantastic difficult, muddy trek called the South Coast Track.

Rick-South-Coast-Track.jpg

trip report and photos

Next travelogue on this trip >> San Francisco … XLNT !

happy Chinese New Year

Congratulations and be prosperous!

I’m in Chinatown, San Francisco. The fireworks are exploding outside.

Chinese New Year celebrations are marked by visits to kin, relatives and friends, and the liberal use of the color red.

And seems to me I’m supposed to be paying old debts by today. (It’s coming Jane.)

Wikipedia

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Stephen Colbert – 2006 Media Person of the Year

I’m agree.

Colbert hits the nail on the head night after night with rarely a misstep.

He has far surpassed mentor Jon Stewart.

Stephen Colbert, the host of “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central, is the 2006 Media Person of the Year, according to the annual online poll held by I Want Media.

… The winner last year was CNN newsman Anderson Cooper, who followed Jon Stewart, Colbert’s partner in “fake news,” in 2004.

The popularity of Colbert’s spot-on, satirical cable-news pundit character already led him to be honored as of one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2006.

The Comedy Central star sent shock waves through the news media early in the year when he keynoted the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner and skewered President Bush to his face: “I believe in this president. Guys like us … know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in ‘reality.’ And reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

Colbert’s routine “unplugged the Bush myth machine — and left the clueless D.C. press corps gaping,” wrote Michael Scherer of Salon.com.

A clip of Colbert’s speech instantly became a viral video hit on the Web. New York Times columnist Frank Rich later described Colbert’s performance as the “defining moment” of the 2006 midterm elections.

Stephen Colbert – 2006 Media Person of the Year

Representative Press thought Colbert should have been Time magazine Person of the Year, as well. Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

1000 blog posts … so far

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Some of them must have been interesting.

Blogs like this grow steadily and organically. Automatically aggregated, one topic is instantly linked to other blogs on the same topic.

When will the blogosphere take over the world?

a skeptical environmentalist – that’s me

I had a feeling I was doing some good NOT owning a motor vehicle. That was before I found out my airline flights do far more damage.

Just watched a Penn and Teller Bullsh*t video debunking environmental hysteria. It’s not nearly as good as the others I’ve seen so I didn’t link to it here.

But Penn did have some very good points.

Some environmentalists are embarrassingly naive and uninformed. It was not difficult for Penn to film them. And cry BS.

(Turns out he was one of the protesters in the 1970s.)

The vague fear people have in 2006 regarding global warming, ozone depletion, species extinction — reminds me of the uneasy, ill-informed fear of Islam that the right wing is so quick to foster.

I’d better get schooled. I could read Al Gore.

But instead I’ll start with this book: The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World

Measuring the Real State of the World

Center of India Tower – world’s largest building

Center of India Tower (CoIT), also known as Center of Vedic Science, is a proposed structure which when completed would be the tallest building in India and second tallest in the world behind Burj Dubai.

The planned site for this building is Katangi, Madhya Pradesh.

Besides being among the tallest structures, the building is set to become the largest structure in the world by mass …. The construction of the building is being financed by Hindu spiritual leader, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (Beatles guru). The building’s design is greatly influenced by Hindu temple architecture.

Center of India Tower – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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