A beautiful, warm (62 outside yesterday!) weekend. The snow is almost entirely gone, except for the pile from shovelling the driveway and the now-frozen lake dammed up behind it. But rather than getting out to enjoy the weather, I spent the weekend with some upper-respiratory crud that seems to be going around now, and slept a ton. I’m not positive, but I believe my duty-cycle was around forty-percent awake for the weekend. Today, and the rest of the week, it will be much colder outside, just as I’m starting to think I might be getting better sometime soon. Nice timing, eh?
It’s probably just as well, though. I’ve got a lot of work to do. Some of it paying work, and some of it work to get new work. Not surprisingly, cold weather keeps me indoors more, and I really need to stay in and get work lined up for the spring before the weather turns nice enough that I’m spending hours outside puttering in the yard or just going for long walks.
- Tyler Cowen asks Why are all movies the same price? I wonder about this sometimes, too. Not so much anymore, now that almost all of my movie viewing is done at home, watching things on DVD, but I found a perfect example on Friday. I bought The Glimmer Man, not because it’s especially good, but because I got it for four bucks, out the door. It’s worth that for watching Stephen Segal wreck shit and shutting off my brain for a few hours. [kottke]
- Over at Only Baseball Matters, there’s a lesson in Hypocrisy 101, specifically talking about Bud Selig and steroid use. If I were more interested in MLB, I’d probably spend more time ranting about this, but the level of baseball I spend my summers watching is unlikely to have much in the way of steroid use, if only because there’s no way the players could afford it on their salaries. [instapundit]
- As the Senate debates whether to make declaring bankruptcy more difficult, Credit Card Penalties, Fees Bury Debtors. As the article points out, one of the biggest problems when you find yourself in credit trouble is that if you’re late on even a single payment, your interest rate skyrockets (as high as 29.9%!? Didn’t it used to be capped around 21%?) and that makes it just that much harder to get caught up. As the article also points out, once you’ve fallen behind, the best choice is to simply stop paying, and wait for it to go to a collection agency. Yes, your credit rating will suffer, but the interest and penalties will be more reasonable since the original lender will have written off the debt, and the collection agency wants to encourage you to pay things off. Looking at the big picture, I find myself wondering why it is that the most heavily regulated industries are always the ones that seem to have the biggest problems. [instapundit]
- Michael Crichton: Aliens Cause Global Warning. A lecture on how the pseudo-science (aka wild-ass guesses) that began with SETI is influencing the debate on global warming. [claire]
- An essay saying that Telephoto Is For Cowards when shooting portraits. I guess I agree with most of what’s said, but I still prefer having a long lens available over taking pictures until people forget about me. [kottke]