A short list of the shoes yet to drop as the ACA disaster unfolds over the next year ( Read more... )

Some really good reporting from WaPo on why the Federal exchange was such an expensive failure here. I haven't written much about it because the press is now on the case and digging into the story.

Administration spinmeisters are trying to plug the leaks when real people report their premiums have increased for less coverage. One of the half- ( Read more... )

Breaking Bad is a classic tragedy told across 5 seasons of high-quality TV. The anti-hero, Walter White, is a Caltech-degreed chemist who mysteriously ends up teaching high school chemistry to ingrates in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which acts as a seedy and naturally-beautiful backdrop to the chains of events and moral failures that destroy his world ( Read more... )

Morning reading. I have tended to avoid political commentary since most people aren't ready to hear anything that doesn't agree with their morally superior, Daily Show-viewing, bien pensant groupthink, but we're reaching an interesting juncture here, with the Syrian situation possibly being the last straw that loosens the grip of the Democrat- ( Read more... )

The Hive-Mind of The Gays is again demonstrating its willingness to thoughtlessly damage others by boycotting Stoli vodka, a symbol of Russia in American minds but whose owners have already tangled with the Putin fascists and barely survived; the Stoli sold here is currently bottled in Latvia. The Russian government already expropriated the brand ( Read more... )

Memorial Day came and went, with excessor and Gary visiting, three pool parties, and way too much socializing. Settling into the quieter season of summer. My cold has turned into weeks of coughing, not unusual but it's kept me from getting out in public much. Meanwhile, our real estate agent managed to get a little bidding war going, ultimately with three ( Read more... )

For a long time most of the public who knows anything about it has bought the propaganda (from DRAM manufacturers colluding with AMD) that Rambus went to JEDEC meetings, secretly patented what they saw there, then tried to profit by suing makers of JEDEC-standard parts. Completely false, and shown to be so in court case after court case. So the ( Read more... )

My 8-core Mac Pro c. early 2008 (now just 3.5 years old!) started acting flaky, crashing whenever I plugged in a cable, revving up its fan to takeoff speed, etc. Disturbing but it mostly worked. Read up online, opened it up and cleaned out (minimal) dust accumulations, reseated the memory cards. It had failed the one time I got it to run the memory ( Read more... )

Temperatures are rising here. I started looking at alternative methods for cooling in December -- I thought it would take a few months. After dropping one contracting team for incompetence, found a good one with JR's help -- but they have been very very slow to get going, largely because the owner doubted the newfangled two-stage evaporative cooler ( Read more... )

So I stumbled upon this reminder of Norumbega, now a little district around the shore of the Charles in Watertown and Newton, later a park and an amusement park, now what's left being a canoe rental facility ( Read more... )