The same Republicans in Congress who have driven the US and US economy into a ditch by refusing to do anything whatsoever which might hint that Obama was not just dirt in the gears. They demanded budget cuts and refused to tax the greed heads who milk our systems and fail to pay significant taxes.
Consequently, parks are being closed and Air Traffic Controllers are being put on leave. And, wonder of wonders that slows down air travel and aggravates air travelers or airport sitters and waiters. Jumping right on this are the same Republicans who made this mess suddenly discovering the woes of travelers and starting congressional inquiries. I guess they can't remember what they did a few months and years ago.
But, the ultimate GOP hypocrisy is attacking Obama and his administration for long waits and even possible cancellations in the wake of a wave of furloughs hitting air traffic controllers. I guess these GOP hypocrites have forgotten that Ronald Reagan, patron saint of GOP economic mythology, fired all the air traffic controllers when he was President.
GOP conservatives only want to remember part of the story. They forget the glorious failures consequent to their glorious imposition of their economic and anti-labor mythology.
*** Stay tuned ..you might as well, flying anywhere is a pain--- Doug Wiken.
Most of us in rural Tripp County are tied to Golden West Technology for wired phones and internet service. They charge too much, but they are what is available and phone and internet service from them have both been levels of magnitude better than when US West had a monopoly.
Earlier this spring GWTC had engineering contractors out getting easements for the new fiber-optic lines. GWTC wants to get as much of it as possible off highway right-of-ways.
Anyway, a few days ago I got a call from GWTC. They are starting to install the routers and powers supplies that will be used when the fiber optic line is installed later this year. I assume the power is to run the modem and the interface between fiber and wire and the analog phones since no power will be conducted with the fiber-optic line.
Below is a photo of the inside part of the system. Another box outside for the interface with the buried fiber optic line..
Click on image for slightly larger version. Actual device total size about 10" wide by about 15 inches top to bottom.
It was installed level and plumb, but my cellphone was obviously not level and plumb.
That's the news from Lake Waytoolate.
Years ago when GWTC put in line to replace the very troublesome system US West had, I asked a rep from GWTC why they weren't installing fiber optic in same trench since it might only ad 5 cents per foot. Even if it was dark fiber for a few years it would have made sense, His response, "What would farmers ever need that kind of bandwideth for?"
So, now that we have that bandwidth, I wonder if GWTC will allow us to stream video or audio. There old contracts banned that.
*** Stay tuned for more on this in the coming months--- Doug Wiken
Microsoft keeps making software more complicated with ever-changing commands and a learning curve tortured by obtuse twists and turns. Windows explorer is OK for a lot of people, but a few "double directory" programs can make moving files and storing to flash drives, etc much, much easier and also more intuitive...at least from my perspective.
If the above makes sense to you, take a look at Briggs File Maven..demo available, but not freeware and System Commander from Marek Jasinski.
I make no guarantees on these programs, but I think most of you can find good uses for the software above and prices are reasonable.
And if you have a digital camera, and you need a free program to view or do primitive editing on, bulk resizing or renaming, etc. The freeware Irfanview program is a favorite of many thousands of users. Not a dual-drive file manager, but two instances of the program can be loaded which makes some editing easier. Download Irfan Skiljan's Irfanview and add-ons.
These are not in the PC World 101 list of sites. More on that in a week or so.
*** Stay tuned even if the rain is not removing the snow where you reside--- Doug Wiken
I noticed a post by Woster at the RC Journal's Mt. Blogmore. With the Journal charging to post more than once or twice a month at Mt. Blogmore, it has become a bit like an abandoned car on the information highway. Woster's post indicated Mt. Blogmore was not your father's Blogmobile and that including any links in comments would mean they would be deleted. I tried to post the comment below:
No links? That seems kind of silly and vain in the vanity direction as well as in further diminishing Blogmore.. If 12 people are working on this blog, it sure isn't obvious.
TypePad just found a few links to the RC Journal weather reports which I tacked on to my nonsense at Dakota Today. Weather has sure messed up the US mail. I am still missing a few of the RC Journals but three Daily Republic papers showed up today.
I can however understand why you might resist allowing any political porn like ALEC, the RNC, Conservative "think" tanks, etc. They are kind of stomach-churning.
More seriously, I will dig back a few hundred e-mails and see if I can find the discount price for your online digital content and then I can regularly NOT submit links to good sites like Dakota Today, Madville Times, SD War College, David Montgomery, Bob Mercer, news at other papers, news and opinion at NPR and PBS, KELO and KOTA TV, local weather, etc. I won't even suggest that you should get the EARL cowboy cartoons into the the Journal.
I was a bit surprised when the fine Blogmore filter rejected the above comment because "It contains profanity". So, you are reading it here. Let me know if you can find the profanity in the comment. :You will notice I did not include a link to Blogmore or the Journal here. Sauce for the goose and gander I guess.
.The weather has warmed up and much of the slush and ice has gone from highways around here. Winner city streets are even getting better. God is doing his or her job by allowing a warm sun to pop out. Of course, that same God might be responsible for the weather mess too. You could see what you can find about all this at the God Checker Site recently recommended by PC World as one of the 101 sites they found. I will next have a post with a few of those 101 that seemed as if they might also interest me and possibly the dozen readers of Dakota Today.
*** Stay tuned for links you will never see at Mt. Blogmore--- Doug Wiken
Watching snow fall around here and shoveling and then shoveling again and again gave me the impression we must have had a foot or so, and today KELO weather indicated Winner had a foot of snow. It was wet snow too. Shoveling it was literally a pain in the back.
But, Rapid City had nearly two feet of snow or perhaps more dumped on it. Below is a photo via cellphone showing a pile of snow. We probably had about half that much on everything. Wind was pretty vicious however, so hard to tell. Power was off in Winner when a blast of wind and snow blew through just before midnight two days ago. I don't know if that noisy blast of wind right before power went out was caught by data recorders. The National Weather 3-day report shows a lot of wind at a number of times in the past few days..
This afternoon, we finally got some sunshine and a respite from the wind...and some more snow that was closer to rain because of the temperature.
Anyway, take a look at the photo below. It gives an idea of the snow that piled into Rapid City. Some city streets in Rapid still are single lane right down the center where a snow plow made one pass.
Snow is on the trunk of a 30 year old Mercedes diesel car.
Well, that is enough on the weather. Whenever we get a bunch of snow like this I am reminded of two things. The year the Oklahoma Federal Building was bombed, our two children where home from school because we had something between 20 and 40 inches of snow with Winner, SD right in the middle of a snow oval about 50 miles long and 20 miles wide. Wet and ground was wet. Pretty well wiped out pheasants around here for a few years. So, The Oklahoma bombing is something I remember, and I also remember that Winner City has never really figured out how to handle more than a few inches of snow.
A city streets supervisor here 20 or 30 years told my mother-in-law when she griped about the icy streets, that "God would take care of the ice." Sometimes they got by with that, but one year, my MIL took off to Phoenix to visit her daughter there and was gone for about 30 days. The ice on the streets when she left was still there when she got back from sunny Arizona. The last few winters have not been quite that vicious.
And Pavlov got dogs to drool by ringing a bell. Power outages and snow are like a bell ringing to remind me of the days when all roads went uphill and snow drifts were way, way over our heads. Today, almost everybody may be griping about the shoveling, but also nearly everybody is happy to see some snow with significant moisture in it and enough of it still on fields to do some good in helping with dry soil conditions here..
*** Stay tuned and I hope your local street department can handle snow removal without the assistance of God.--- Doug Wiken
I'm sure it is just a safety measure so that nobody parachutes in to rob the homes abandoned because of the crude oil spill.
South Dakota legislature needs to hold a special session so they can quickly write legislation preventing anybody from looking at a pipeline oil leak...never mind the beautiful nude sunbathing with the Capitol geese.
Just kidding about the Capitol geese, I think we can still take pictures of them as long as their isn't a pipeline leak in the Capitol Goose Crap Seep System.
*** Stay tuned, but does a blog post exist if you don't read it?
Bob Mercer has the wingnut circle at Pat Power's DWC all stirred up. Mercer apparently proposed that Hillary Clinton should move to South Dakota to run for the seat currently held by Tim Johnson.
I'd like to see Nancy Pelosi do it, but I am a few days late for the April 1 hijinks.
Grass is getting green around here, but it is barely enough for even sick cats to nibble on. South Dakota needs rain more then we need Hillary or Nancy...unfortunately. Maybe Daugaard could pray for rain in public. Might do as much as good as a Catholic governor doint it or some redneck Southern Babtist baying at the moon.
*** Stay tuned, summer is yet young and April showers have not yet begun---Doug Wiken
Sports addiction may be some kind of something close to mental illness like having an unnatural attraction to a concrete block. Maybe somebody at the Smithsonian has found the reason for this ailment which troubles thousand of TV broadcasters and viewers.
The Smithsonian is even getting in on the action. Eric Simons, author of the book, "The Secret Lives of Sports Fans," tells writer Megan Gambino:
"In the case of sports, there is compelling evidence that
this is basically a real relationship in your brain. In a very real
sense, the sports team becomes a part of you. You just feel like
whatever success it achieves is a personal success, and whatever failure
it has is a personal failure. You can’t cut the team off without
cutting off a part of yourself. Even if the team is losing, you have so
much of yourself wrapped up in it that you can’t just walk away. To do
so is to give up on a part of yourself."
If, like me, you recognize just a little bit of yourself in Simons'
comments above, don't you feel just a little sadder about your life? Find more at IT-Sports Addiction.
Nope. And I don't spend any time cheering for General Motors, or Chrysler, or Ford or even for the star executives who pay themselves $millions per year. I am also not a fan of big pharma even if their executives get $20 million or more per year.
Sports lunacy is destroying education in South Dakota and warping education priorities. It is time for legislation that prevents SD State Universities from mandating that students must pay athletic fees. My guess is that the Universities and the Regents would soon learn that about 75% of the students could not care less if the jocks and their coaches disappeared from the campus if they could shave their college costs by several thousand dollars.
Time for one more initiated law.
*** Stay tuned even if slam-dunk posts are rare birds here--- Doug Wiken
I suspect some of this kind of post is found very boring for some people. My wife finds it amusing that "nerds" can get so interested in this kind of stuff. Anyway... below is an image of a heater warning label I have not seen here in South Dakota on electric heaters. It is from my friend John in California and for all I know may be a sensible California requirement. Click on the image for a larger version.
Above is actually info from front and back of warning tag. Click on image for a more readable size.
John included more information which one might expect from an electrical engineer. I will put that information into SD Science Junction. It is the kind of information that conveys a message of the actual importance of science and engineering knowledge in general daily life..or possibly death if knowledge is absent or unavailable.
I also received more information from the SD Fire Marshall's office which parallels the above warning, but is not quite so easy to insert here. You can download the PDF below.
Thanks to Doug Hinkle of the SD Office and thanks to John for the information of his own experience with overheated connectors and his analysis of it.
I have looked at all stores selling cords and heaters here in Winner, SD again last week and checked my own connectors and cords and have found a huge gap between the data in the marketplace and the info from fire authorities. More caution than suggested by product labeling here in South Dakota is warranted by experience here and elsewhere.
*** Stay tuned and be careful both out there and in there--- Doug Wiken
The annual Winner Farm and Home show is on today and for a few more hours tomorrow on Saturday. Take a look at the WOW..or Window on Winner link in menu above for more information.
And, take a look at Daily Koz who has noticed that Trans Canada on behalf of the XL Pipeline has influenced a number of legislatures to pass pro-XL resolutions. You really didn't think the boneheads in the SD legislature came up with a resolution for XL on their own did you.
Guess the SD legislators don't care if the primary intent of the XL: pipeline is to increase gasoline and diesel prices in the midwest and suck tar sand and Bakken crude out of here for export to China and elsewhere. Guess they also don't care very much about water resources and water purity here either. Guess they really mostly don't represent us, but care a lot about a foreign corporation and ALEC.
Anyway, most of the usual snow for opening of Farm and Home show and the Shopko garden tent has already melted from the streets, but maybe more tonight if weather in Rapid City is any indicator;
*** Stay tuned for more weather and other follies-- Doug Wiken
Residents of South Dakota. Check your broadband speed with the SD Speedtest. Your test will both let you know how speedy is your ISP and also help get us better service in South Dakota.
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