Looking for high paying job requiring little to no effort.  Willing to consider offer that doesn’t require consistent attendance.  Applicant has 15 years quality experience.  Serious offers only.

It is my birthday after all.  Feel free to send me stuffs as well.

Barackery:  The act of completely rejecting someone’s views while continuing to consider them one of your most trusted advisers.

ie  That speech about his pastor was a load of barackery.

Anti-Terror Plans Found In Garbage

Pamela Anderson’s marriage to be annulled

Seems the planet isn’t exactly getting warmer.

Maybe it’s relevant maybe it isn’t. Mostly I think it’s not simply because it’s too short of a time frame to really be worth discussing.

From Realclimate , check out the graph, use it to impress your friends.

The first point to make (and indeed the first point we always make) is that the climate system has enormous amounts of variability on day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year and decade-to-decade periods.

I admit to being pretty much a skeptic to all of this. I’m that way with just about anything that involves some version of the sky falling…mostly because the sky rarely falls. I also think there is a bit of a modeling problem in that mother nature hasn’t provided a complete list of the relevant variables. I searched for a reference and couldn’t find it before I lost interest, but it involved a recent warming trend due to solar irradiation and a current cooling trend with a decrease in that radiation. Once that returns to “normal”, we’ll see temperatures starting to increase again with a rise in greenhouse gas. I mention that because I’ve seen it used to explain rising temperatures, but rarely used to explain falling ones, and I think many global warming skeptics are guilty of dancing around the topic. And it is after all, a completely separate issue from CO2 warming.

No matter what you think about all of this, RealClimate has this part right:

…the question should be, are there analyses that will be made over the next few years that will improve the evaluation of climate models? There the answer is likely to be yes. There will be better estimates of long term trends in precipitation, cloudiness, winds, storm intensity, ice thickness, glacial retreat, ocean warming etc. We have expectations of what those trends should be, but in many cases the ‘noise’ is still too large for those metrics to be a useful constraint. As time goes on, the noise in ever-longer trends diminishes, and what gets revealed then will determine how well we understand what’s happening.

Just for the phrase…

a Picasso of asininity, a Mona Lisa of moronic imbecility

but duct tape is silver…

or if you prefer duck tape, although that conjures up an entirely new train of thought…

This computer=good reviews, and Best Buy’s version has some pretty good ones as well.

So I thought to myself, I shall buy one. After finishing that thought, and a healthy pause to make sure that it was finished, I get in my very own car, and drive to the nearest Best Buy only to be told that yes, it is a very good computer but they don’t have any. After checking the fancy Best Buy inventory computer, I learn there isn’t one at any store in the Dallas Fort Worth area. But at least it’s a good computer, it’s not like I wasted a trip or anything only to return home without a crappy computer. No I came home without a very good computer.

Feeling quite proud of my ability to select a high quality computer, I ponder my options.

A nicer computer would be better, I’m fuzzy on a lot of things but in general I understand that better is better so I decide to just buy the fancier version from the website. Expected shipping date in a week. I order it, only to find out in the rarely used Gateway Calendar one week is actually 21 days. It is however negotiable so we negotiate. I spend some more money but Gateway promises their new calendar has special 10 day weeks just for me.

I become enamored with the really helpful order status page they have. So useful. I use it.

It never changes, remaining committed to the original 21 day week. When I call the helpful help line, they tell me not to worry, they have a different calendar they are using for my order and they will stick to the agreed 10 day week (just for me, don’t tell anyone or everyone will want 10 day weeks). So not only am I brilliant, I qualify for special treatment.

Yesterday, the day before the delivery date, I call and inquire as to what is really going on since I no longer am confident in my ability to interpret the Gateway Calendar as displayed on the order status page. The helpful person answering the help line phone informs me that yes, everything is as scheduled and my computer should ship to arrive here today.

Sweet.

We apologize for being unable to ship your items as planned. We expect to ship your items by 04/03/2008

Gateway via Email

Best Buy still doesn’t have any computers either. I’m not exactly sure what it is that Gateway is trying to do here since it obviously doesn’t involve actually providing any computers for purchase. Perhaps this is merely a plan to revise the calendar to some sort of 30 day cycle, thereby reducing the number of weekends.

Order cancelled, I want my weekends back.  Guess I’ll get in my very own car and take a trip to Fry’s.

Crazy woman