I got myself an Agri-Fab 42 inch lawn sweeper, and I am very glad I did so. I bought mine when it was still properly summertime, and I ended up saving more than $50 compared to the current price. Fallen leaf season is upon us, apparently.

Yeah, it fills up pretty quick, but you can sweep your lawn in circles, looping back to the grass-pile to dump every one or two passes.

It even picked up walnuts. Not all of them, for sure, but I didn’t expect it to pick up any.

Sailing on Tuesday, if the current plan holds up.

The boat is ready to sail.

Seriously, though, the GOP has been claiming that reducing spending (mixed with, what, Unicorn farts?) would bring the economy back around for months now. Why the shift? Oh, right, because cutting spending has done the exact opposite. It is, like, actual economics or something.

• All of the blocks have been set up and the sheets have been rove through and are ready to use.
• I finally set up the little bungee hangers (similar to these) to keep all the sheet-tails tidy (including the leeboard hauls).
• I re-assembled the Shipmate kerosene cabin heater (but was unable to re-mount it to the bulkhead; that’s a two-person job).

My car developed a coolant leak on the way home, but I made it to work and was able to get a ride home from there.
Update: The coolant leak was just a hole in a hose where the fan was hitting it (!). New hose (that will be more carefully installed) is on the way.

Poor little fried powerstrip. I hope nothing downstream got fried. I guess I’ll know in a minute.

Some lights got really bright and some others went dim. Some lights stopped working at all, and the ‘fancier’ electronics went haywire. (Power adaptors started giving off bizarre smells, other appliances started buzzing, etc..)

I called Consumers, and they said that someone would be by in the morning to sort everything out, and that I didn’t have to be here for that. The lady I talked to seem to have an idea as to what had happened here.

Reassured, I went outside to see what had happened and I saw a large, fallen, walnut-tree branch sitting on the wire that runs from our side of the street to the house on the other side of Henrietta. Yikes! the fallen branch had bent the wires down to about car-radiator height. I ran back to the phone and told Consumers about this and was told that it would be dealt with right away.

I actually stood guard outside for quite a while to make sure nobody got electrocuted. Eventually (near midnight) I gave up and called 911 to get a cop out to watch the wires. A nice one showed up and spelled me. (He even had flares to replace my expiring, pathetic candles.)

Later, a CE truck showed up and moved the fallen lumber off the wires. Cool, I figured (the activity woke me up). Not so much, actually, as I awoke the next morning to the same electrical problems as the night before. Rats. Figuring that the info I had gotten the night before was still operative, I went to work (without a shower or coffee).

Ok, so I get home from work Thursday night to find everything still fucked up. Apparently nobody from CE came by to fix our wires. Frustrated, I drove back to Ann Arbor for a shower in a hotel room. I did try and call CE again, but they were no longer in ‘storm’ mode and weren’t going to take that call. Slept at the hotel.

The next day I called CE again, and was told that ‘power was retored’ at 11pm the previous night (while I was sleeping in a hotel room in Ann Arbor). Cool! I’ll go home and turn the mains back on.

Um, nope. Got home tonight (Friday) to find everything just like I left it (just as fucked up).

Called CE around 6 pm to, er, complain a little (I was very polite), and was told that someone was ‘on the way’.

Called back at 9:20 to get a clearer definition of ‘on the way’, but the person I talked to had no access to any info on the service call (though she could see it in the system). We’ll see, I guess.

Update: Power was back to normal on Saturday morning when I returned from Laundry. Yay!

Tendulkar fell 9 short of his 100th century.

The new battery seems to do the job; the engine fired right up and ran fine (as long as the the engine cover was open; it will still choke on its own exhaust unless the cover is open or the boat is underway).

We bent the mizzen, so now we just have to run the sheets and safety the shrouds and we could go sailing.

The electrical system becomes more familiar with every hour spent puzzling over it. The only thing that doesn’t want to work right now is the adorable little engine fan, and it’s neither legally required nor terribly likely to help much.

We may end up using the old battery again as well. It’s a pretty fancy one (much nicer than what I replaced it with).

And it is still August, so that makes this the best effort we’ve ever made.

Normally it is just one side of the debate that insists on being ignorant of economics and history, and, when the idiotic side wins, everyone can look back and say “boy, what were we thinking. Those other guys were right the whole time!”

Well, we had that chance in 2008, but we elected a Democrat as President who seems not to have learned anything from the disaster that was 2000-2008. Nope. He’s just piling on.

Do you remember the collective exhale we enjoyed back in November 2008? That was premature. We’re still on the same carnival ride (to hell).

We had a chance to whip out the public credit card and put the economy back on a sane footing, but we’re going to bury it instead. We had a chance to say “unregulated banking and finance leads to disaster after disaster that we end up having to pay for (and the malefactors always walk away rich)”, but that ain’t gonna happen. We had a chance to enforce the rule of law, but someone (hint: his initials are Barack Hussein Obama) didn’t wan’t to seem ‘petty’. Etc.

We are, I’m sorry to say, fucked.

The oligarchs have captured the system, and they’re not gonna want to give it up anytime soon.

I was screwing around with my Pentax Optio W20 (a waterproof point-and-shoot that is, apparently, worth more now than what I payed for it a few years ago), and I rediscovered its time-lapse functionality.

The above movie was shot from pre-dawn to post-dusk from the balcony of the condo we’re staying in near Dillon, Colorado.

A note on the camera: this movie was made from over 500 pictures taken using the W20′s ‘interval shoot’ feature. At the end of the shoot, the camera’s battery is reporting itself as fully charged. Whatever Pentax did when they designed this feature, they did a good job.

A note on the movie: The 500+ photos were imported into Apple’s iMovie ’11 (9.0.4) and exported as a movie (at 0.2 seconds per picture). That movie was imported into a new iMovie ‘project’ and sped up by 150%, which smoothed out the transitions a little, and re-exported.

They think that history will somehow prove them to be prescient. They think that the Democratic party’s approach to economic problems will leave the US in a ditch (and that the voters will blame the Democrats for getting us there).

The problem they are going to have with that is that their economic ‘plan’ is a dishonest one, and only works politically, not economically. They claim that cutting taxes and spending lead to a great America, but history (and textbook economics) disagrees.

We’re in a ditch now because Reagan’s Big Ideas (which Reagan was lucky and/or smart enough not to force into law) were actually forced into law by George W. Bush. And here we are.

If we can, now, increase spending enough to get the economy going again, we will, later, be in a position to balance the books and get on with things.

(Which, historically, is when the Republicans will come back and screw everything up again.)

The gist of what McConnell is saying: ‘We [Republicans] can’t get you to see this our way, so you can have your stupid debt ceiling raised. But we’re warning you: you’ll have to face the consequences!’

The funny part is that they think government spending is actually the problem, and that if America doesn’t control spending right now, everything is going to go to hell — and that voters will blame the Democrats.

The reality is that reducing government spending right now will only make things worse. They are actually just saving themselves from ending up holding the bag on that possible extremely likely disaster.

This could end up OK, which wasn’t my predicted outcome as recently as, oh, lunchtime today.

Josh Marshall sums it up nicely:

At the end of the day though, McConnell’s “evil genius” move seems like all it does is make the Democrats go to the public with what they believe is best for the country and be accountable for it. I have a hard time seeing that as being a meaningful threat. Since that’s what people who are given the power to govern are supposed to do.

UPDATE: Apparently it was the Democrats who were holding the debt ceiling hostage. Who knew? Seriously, if you hear this meme getting any traction in the media-sphere, immediately cross the person pushing it off of your list of credible sources.

Now we’ve learned that there is a third reason that the $2 trillion gambit is ridiculous: They haven’t found $2 trillion to cut. It’s just a made-up number. If they had an actual plan, we could ask them: “OK, which things are we going to cut to get $2 trillion out of the budget?” They don’t have an actual plan.

Fuckers.

Here is a rough but accurate diagram (click to enlarge) of the Centennial’s electrical system.

The A/B/Both/Off selector can connect or disconnect the two batteries (A, engine, and B, house) to the switch panel.

Set to ‘A’, the engine battery would run everything, and would also be the only battery connected (for charging) to either the solar panel or the trickle charger. Note: those two charging methods will not be used at the same time.

Set to ‘B’, the house battery would be the only battery available to charge or use as a power source.

Set to ‘Both’, everything in the diagram is connected to everything else.

The electrical output of the engine (from its alternator) is only connected to the to the A (engine) battery. That means that the alternator will only charge the B (house) battery when the A/B/Both/Off selector is set to ‘Both’.

Currently, the engine battery is dead, and the wires that connect it to the A/B/Both/Off selector are broken (due to corrosion at the battery). I’ll have to get a new battery (easy) and spend some time crawling around in the storage space under the cockpit seats (a drag) to get everything hooked up again.

The shore-power hookup, by the way, was put in by me, and quite cheaply. The single most expensive part was the yellow cable that runs from the boat to the outlet on the dock.

This is the battery that is supposed to start the engine. It had died and gotten so badly corroded that it has lost its connection to the boat’s charging system (the wires just corroded right through and separated).

It will need to be replaced before the engine will start, and it will need its connection the ‘house’ electrical system sorted out. (That will allow us to charge it at the dock, and it will allow the engine to charge the ‘house’ battery.) This would all be dead easy, except that it is located in a pretty tight spot. Rats.

Centennial is back in the water. July 3rd, 2011. We’re all kinda tired, but the thing is done.

Over time, I would get emails asking me to join my ‘friends’ ‘professional networks’, and I usually would. It felt, well, sort of pointless to do so, but I would (usually) do it.

My initial unease with LinkedIn was caused by my being unable to grasp any sense of the meaning of it all. Was it just a case of digital Pog collecting, or was there an actual point to it? If there was a point, was it a good one?

Additionally, I did not enjoy making the decisions I was being asked to make. And not just because I couldn’t really figure out what it meant to decide one way or the other, but because I didn’t like having to choose, on each request, between a simple yes or no. Frendo or no frendo? This lacks nuance, and the choice often left me feeling queasy.

I had been thinking, generally, about what is valuable on the Internet last fall. And it occurs to me the LinkedIn is gathering a lot of valuable information at almost no cost to itself. Well, good for them. A ton of websites are trying to do the same thing, in sort of an underpants gnomes kind of way. The usual deal, though, is that people want to contribute all kinds of free data and meta-data because they get some added value back (tell Netflix which movies you already like; Netflix tells you which other movies you might like, for example). LinkedIn wasn’t holding up its end of that bargain for me.

All this time, additionally, I was picking up a hum in the media background about how LinkedIn was being used (and, in some cases, being misused) by companies and their HR departments. And the feeling I was getting from that hum was unpleasant.

In the end, I took the easy way out and deleted my LinkedIn, er, account? Whatever it was, I deleted it. I am given the impression that doing this has lowered the value of LinkedIn for some people, and I apologize for that if that’s the case for you. The fact that LinkedIn was of no value to me and, simultaneously, causing me some (almost spiritual) distress, led me to my decision.