Steaming Turd

The Wall Street Journal reports that people in the United States have given over $300 billion in charitable donations in 2007.

A quick look at the Oracle of All Knowledge indicates that this makes Americans’ charitable giving equivalent to the 29th highest national GDP in the world. (It’s also roughly $1000 in charitable donations per capita, which makes our charitable giving equivalent to the 120th or 130th highest GDP per capita in the world, depending on whom you ask.)

As part of my employment at the USPTO, I have to go through a background check. The form (SF-85P, Questionnaire for Public Trust Positions, not to be confused with SF-86 for National Security positions) is now filled out online (apparently, it was already a hugely cumbersome form before, so now that it’s online it should be a lot easier).

One of the first things you have to do is set up “golden questions”. These are three questions about yourself that you would know the answers to, but that someone who doesn’t know you really well wouldn’t. You can choose any three questions and appropriate answers that you want.

I’m at that screen right now, and you wouldn’t believe how difficult it is not to put these in:

• What is your name?
• What is your quest?
• What is your favorite color?

Ground beef in Cleveland, Ohio: $2.19 per pound

Ground beef in Burke, Virginia: $3.69 per pound

Ground beef in Burke with one of those stupid “track everything you buy for marketing purposes” cards: $1.99 per pound

Somehow I feel ripped off.

Several days ago, I posted a contest to guess how many Arizona iced tea bottles I had hoarded in my old apartment. Well, I’m sure you’re all anxiously awaiting the answer:

736.

Yes, that was a lot of bottles, but I managed to get them all carried to the recycling bin in only two trips in the car. I had initially feared that it would be a tremendous hassle taking care of them, and since I got rid of them fairly early on in the moving process, it did seem like a big hassle at the time. But after carrying the stuff I kept up two flights of stairs (as opposed to, and in addition to, down one flight), taking care of the bottles was a cinch.

Not that I plan on doing that again anytime soon, mind you.

Anyway, there were four people who entered the “contest”, and there are two ways of determining a winner. One is “Price is Right” rules, in which case Marcus! wins with his guess in the 400s. The other way is “whoever’s closest” rules, in which case Jill was extremely close - perhaps even psychic - with her guess of 748. Congrats to both! Don Pardo, tell them what they’ve won!

My mind to your mind… my thoughts to your thoughts…

(AP photo, seen and deep-linked from here).

if I ever found one that looked good atop my melon.

Yes, folks, I have successfully completed the move to Burke, Virginia. And boy, are my arms tired!

On Saturday, Marcus! and Bachmann went with me down into da hood to pick up the U-Haul truck, where we found that the local tire shop is apparently a hang-out spot for a bunch of older folks. I don’t know if they actually work there or not, but hey, who am I to tell old people where to hang out? Also, the guy who rang up the fees for the truck was a fan of Dean Koontz, somewhat of Stephen King, and described someone else whose name I don’t remember (but probably would if someone mentioned the name) as “my man”.

The rest of Saturday was an exhausting session of loading up the truck, followed by a trip to Skyline Chili. Not too too bad, but that’s only because Sunday was worse.

Sunday was a nearly eight-hour drive from Cleveland to Burke in the U-Haul truck. Bachmann was kind enough to go with me as a road trip, although it probably wasn’t as fun as he had hoped. And when we got there, of course, we had to move everything into the apartment. This is everything that was in the old apartment and had been carried down one flight of stairs into the truck, except now it was being carried up two flights. On top of that, we walked for about a mile back to the apartment from the U-Haul dropoff place, but that walk was actually pretty relaxing compared to the torture of moving all that stuff.

On Monday, we took what was in my opinion a very relaxing trip. Maybe it was just because I was so tired, and any chance to relax was a good thing, but Monday’s trip - despite being inordinately complicated - was one of the smoothest trips I’ve ever taken.

We took the VRE (commuter rail between DC and the areas west and southwest of DC, and not the Metro, for the bazillionth time) into DC (going over the Potomac and giving us a chance to see the Washington Memorial and the Capitol dome from afar) to Union Station. That’s a marvelous building, by the way - it has dozens of statues of soldiers standing around the ceiling perimeter (I described them as the Roman Praetorian guard, but I’m not really sure who they’re supposed to be), and even aside from that, the architecture is really nice.

From there, we took the MARC train (also not the Metro) toward Baltimore, deboarding at BWI airport. We were originally going to take the 8:45 express train, but instead we decided that since we were already there ready to go, we’d just board the 8:15 normal train. That gave us plenty of time at BWI to relax and get something for breakfast before boarding the plane and arriving about an hour later in Cleveland.

Then, of course, it was a short wait to ride the Rapid and a quick walk up the hill after that. I found out that the landlady had told her handyman to start cleaning the leftover mess that I was planning on cleaning up. I was annoyed at first, but after talking with the handyman for a bit, I eventually decided that it was unlikely that I’d finish in time, and it would be money well-spent to have them help out with that. They did a good job, too.

Tuesday - today - I took the car and the last few items I wanted to keep, and headed down to Virginia in a seven-hour drive. And here I am.

Oh, I did have to make a trip to Target (pronounced the French way, of course) to pick up some light sources (torches and sunrods, er, I mean, lamps) since the builders of this apartment apparently considers seeing at night to be optional. I have a feeling I’ll be making numerous visits there over the coming weeks, now that I’ll actually have money to spend on things like tables or trash cans instead of just finding a suitable-sized box to serve the same purpose.

More about the area and the apartment later!

Well, this is the big weekend. I’ll say my farewells to Cleveland as I make the move to Burke, Virginia. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that I’ve spent fourteen years here, nine of which were in this same apartment. It’s been fun, but at the same time, I feel like I need the change of scenery and the change of pace.

Even though I don’t actually head out until Sunday (and I’ll be back in town Monday and leaving for the final time Tuesday), I’m posting this now because I’m going to pack up the computer. (I’ll miss you, e-mail! Don’t get too full while we’re apart!) I should have things set up Tuesday evening, and my Intarweb access should already be awaiting my arrival, so I’ll post an update about the move then.

Fourteen years. Even though Cleveland is kind of a hole in a lot of places, I’ll miss it. It’s what I know. I mean, I’ll learn Burke, Fairfax, and Alexandria, and the touristy parts of DC, too, but I’ll always feel a connection here.

Hello, everyone, and it’s time to play Guess Those Bottles!

A while back, I used to be a big fan of a particular flavor/brand of iced tea. Actually, I’m still a big fan of it, but I don’t go to Sam’s for all my bulk grocery needs anymore, so I don’t have occasion to pick these up in bottled 12-packs. Anyway, month after month, I would go to Sam’s, buy about three 12-packs of this tea, bottled, and then not bother disposing of the bottles after I was done with them. (I’m lazy like that.)

After a while, the bottles had really piled up. And rather than do the sane thing - take a few bags’ worth out week by week to be recycled - I instead built an entertainment center out of them (really just a glorified shelf for my TV, receiver, and DVD player).

Now that I’m moving out, I have to get rid of these bottles. Fortunately, there are numerous recycling stations in Cleveland where I can take these - where by “station” I mean “dumpster” - and I even found one that was easy to get to and not in the ‘hood.

Soooo, the game of Guess Those Bottles works like this: You guess how many bottles I’ve accumulated, counting only this particular brand (although I do have some shorter 16-ounce bottles in addition to the normal 20-ounce ones, and the smaller ones count, too), and whoever’s closest (without going over?) wins. I should warn you - in addition to the almost-better-than-Ikea entertainment center, I also have a bunch of loose bottles sitting around in two rooms that were left over.

Get to guessing!

I’m in the process of disconnecting and connecting the various utilities for my old and new apartments. I just finished the call to get my electric service connected in Virginia, and they had a rather swank way of handling at least the second part of the call. The first part was simply a guy at a desk typing on a computer, normal stuff. The second part was ostensibly to verify my account activation, but was actually a fairly thinly-veiled attempt to harvest an e-mail address (I have a Hotmail account for this purpose) and to eventually try to sell me something.

But it was how that part worked that was interesting. We’ve all dealt with automated phone systems before, and they’re becoming more sophisticated all the time. For example, the “OMG my power is out!!1″ number that FirstEnergy uses can all be done via spoken commands (mostly “yes” and “no”). Dominion’s front-end system for handling service requests is more sophisticated than that, allowing you to say your phone number or account number fairly rapidly before transferring you to a CSR.

But their tail-end system, the one that’s involved in additional sales, is even more sophisticated - so much so that I’m fairly certain it’s not automated at all, but is actually a computer-generated voice backed up by a guy at a keyboard in some far-off country where they can understand American-accented English but can’t speak it well enough or clearly enough to hold a conversation.

Part of what was amusing about the recording was that when the voice was repeating my new address, it decided that it didn’t know how to pronounce the street name. The voice says, “Your address is - I don’t know how to pronounce the street name, so I’m going to spell it,” and then proceeds to spell just the street name (it was able to say the rest of it). Of course, it’s also clear that the voice wasn’t computer-synthesized - all of the messages, street names, cities, states, etc., were pre-recorded. Even more amusing, they had a cheesy fake keyboard sound in between things where a CSR would normally be typing stuff in (and where, presumably, the guy in the far-off country actually was typing stuff in).

Anyway, I have one more call to make, and then it’s back to packing things up and throwing other things out for the rest of the week. Let’s hope this call is as amusing as the last one

Edit: Ahh, convenience! Finally, a company that actually lets you disconnect service over teh Intarweb. Thanks, FirstEnergy!

An energy thinktank called the International Energy Agency has released a report describing the cost and methods for upgrading the world’s energy production facilities to reverse global warming trends. Unlike American environmental groups, who frequently approach the issue with a Luddite scorched-infrastructure attitude, these folks are embracing a multifaceted technology plan for moving to non-carbon-emissive methods of power generation.

In addition to fitting coal-, oil-, and gas-based plants with carbon recapture and sequestration equipment, they advocate the construction of nuclear plants (32 new ones annually worldwide) and wind turbines (17000 a year worldwide). They estimate the total cost of upgrading the world’s power generation infrastructure to be about $45 trillion, with roughly 60% of that being borne by “developing nations” (though it’s not clear whether that term is meant to include China and India). Implementing their plan would reduce global oil consumption by 75%.

This is exactly the right way to go. Any updated power generation scheme must include nuclear power as a large portion of base load generation, with wind, solar, and other technologies added in to supply peak load. In the US, coal is plentiful enough that, if we can make it work, carbon sequestration for coal plants is another viable option. We may also need to consider recycling nuclear fuel, something we haven’t done since Jimmy Carter outlawed it in the US since plutonium is a byproduct.

The French generate nearly 80% of their electricity by nuclear power, and they recycle their fuel. Much as it pains any red-stated Amrrrican to say, we really need to follow their lead on this.