Friday, November 1, 2013

Jahar is back amongst his buddies...

Jahar is back amongst his buddies...  You may recall Jahar, our Savannah cat who decided that eating a 12” piece of ribbon was a good idea, despite the inevitable surgical consequences of this act.

Well, this morning I took him back in to see the vet for his two week post-operative checkup and stitches removal.  The vet pronounced him to have made an excellent recovery, and removed all restrictions on his movement and diet.  That means Jahar can move from the little pen where I've been taking care of him, out to the “general population” of his dog and cat buddies – and the dry food bowl.  For the past two weeks he's been eating nothing but canned cat food, which he doesn't particularly like.

Upon returning home from the vet and escaping from his carrier, Jahar had two priorities: (1) to say “hi” to all his buddies (the photo shows him greeting two of our dogs), and (2) to spend some quality time with the bowl of dry cat food.

He looks very happy :)

Abstract art, of a certain kind...

Abstract art, of a certain kind...  Reader Jim M. forwarded this:
Early one morning I hollered to my wife:  “Honey! Come see what I created. It’s an abstract panorama depicting the five years of the Obama Presidency!”

She yelled back: “Flush the toilet and come eat your breakfast.”

Six...

Six.  That's how many people actually managed to enroll in ObamaCare on October 1 – though (apparently) 4.7 million people visited the web site. 

No wonder The One and his minions don't want to tell us how the program is doing.

Of note: this is being reported by CBS News, a charter member of the Obama lapdog wing of the lamestream media.  Amazing!

Look out below!

Look out below!

This photo came at a steep price...

This photo came at a steep price...  In this age of satellite imagery and the Internet, it's shocking to realize just how difficult it was to obtain an image like the one at right was in World War II.  This particular image shows the Japanese air strip at Buka, Bougainville.  To get it, a volunteer crew had to fly a reconnaissance plane over the base, which was of course full of Japanese fighter planes.

Today, I can just dial it up on Google Maps (though of course the image is probably several years old).  Military planners today can get an up-to-date photo of anywhere on earth in very short order.

Ah, Maxine...

Ah, Maxine...  My mom passed these along:


Texas police do care...

Texas police do care...  Reader Jim M. (a Texas native) passes this uplifting story along:
I get irritated when people come down on our police officers, saying that they don't care about or respect others. Well, here is a story that clearly shows not all cops are in that category.

This story involves the police department in the small hill country town of Kerrville, TX who reported finding a man's body last Saturday in the early evening in the Pedernales River near the State Highway 87 bridge. The dead man's name would not be released until his family had been notified.

The victim apparently drowned due to excessive beer consumption while visiting "someone" in Fredericksburg. He was wearing black fishnet stockings, 10 inch spiked heels, a red garter belt, a pink G-string, purple lipstick, dazzle dust on his eyelids, 2 1/2 inch false eyelashes and an Obama T-shirt.

The police removed the Obama T-shirt to spare his family any unnecessary embarrassment.

Daylight Saving time, explained...

Daylight Saving time, explained...  This video is not technical, and is actually quite entertaining.  It does a fine job explaining the complexities of Daylight Saving time at a high level.

I once had the thankless job of writing some software that could take an arbitrary date and time in any time zone and figure out the equivalent date and time in any other time zone.  There were two things that made this job difficult: Daylight Saving time and time zones.  Both are far, far more complex than most people understand (just look at the time zone map at left!).  When I finally finished that software, I had almost 10,000 lines of code – and I was making changes on a weekly basis just to keep up with the changes various countries made in their Daylight Saving or time zone rules.  Just finding out about these changes was hard (it's a little better today).