Ice

Woke up to a lot of ice outside this morning. Here are a couple pics of the icy deck.

Man pays bill with spider drawing

I don't know if this is real or not, but it's still funny: read it.

Hawk

We've got a couple of hawks living in the trees around our house, they're good size suckers. I've been trying to get a decent picture of one for a few weeks now, but they're always way up in the trees. I did manage to get this shot yesterday. The quality's not great, since he was about 200 feet away.

DVR

With our new Verizon service we have free DVR and premium channels for a short period. DVR is pretty neat, I'm a big fan of pausing the TV. One thing that surprised me though is that when you set it up to record a certain show at a certain time, it simply records whatever is on the channel at that time, regardless of whether the show you want is on. For example, we set it to record the Survivor finale on Sunday night, but it was delayed 30 minutes by football. I thought the DVR would adjust and start recording when Survivor started, but it just turned on at 8 and recorded until 10. We did catch the end of Survivor, since we also recorded the reunion show. DVR is cool, but we don't really watch enough TV to justify the expense.

We've checked out some movies on the premium channels. Michael Clayton (good), The Simpsons (not funny), Talladega Nights (sometimes funny), Edward Scissorhands (better than I remember).

Exam day

Today is my first final--food and drug law. The course focused mainly on regulation of pharmaceuticals and the drug industry. Next up tomorrow is trusts and estates, followed by securities regulation on Monday and then political and civil rights later that week.

First-year students have their big torts exam today. I remember being in that position just a couple of years ago, being so nervous and having memorized all of my notes. Now in my third and final year, the jitters are still there but the fear is not.

Checks and balances

Some people on the left are upset that Obama hasn't appointed many liberals to his cabinet yet. That's exactly why I voted for him--although some want to label him as a wild liberal, he's generally a pragmatic person who wants to make rational, informed decisions. He doesn't base his choices on party orthodoxy, and he's willing to work with Republicans to get things done.

The fact that Democrats control both Congress and the White House isn't a good thing in my view. There's a real danger that they'll ram through legislation just because they can; the party that's in total power often seems to end up self-destructing through corruption and hubris. Hopefully Obama will be a check on that.

More history

I finished reading 1776 over the weekend--fantastic book. You may not think you're interested in the Revolutionary War or George Washington, but after reading this book you will be. McCullough's retelling of the dramatic events of that year is the main draw, but I also couldn't get enough of his descriptions of 18th century America. He's just a great storyteller.

Following up on this, next up on the reading list is Angel in the Whirlwind.

Is this copyright infringement?

Guitarist Joe Satriani has sued Coldplay for copyright infringement. You be the judge.




They're obviously very similar, but the melody is so generic it's hard to believe Satriani can win this.

Where there's a will...

It's just about time for finals here. I really liked my Trusts & Estates class--I can see myself settling down in a few years and opening up small firm to just make wills.

History

I've been on kind of a history kick lately. Just finished reading Miracle at Philadelphia, which is a blow-by-blow account of the constitutional convention in 1787, based upon correspondence from the participants and records kept by James Madison and others. Now I'm reading 1776, which, as you might guess, is about the beginning of the Revolutionary War.

I've also become interested in antique maps. We recently ordered an original 1926 map of Springfield township, which includes a depiction of our lot with the original owner's name written by hand. The original owner built the house himself, housing his family in the garage while he and his brother completed construction.

This town dates back to at least 1686 (there was recently a house from 1688 for sale!), so there's plenty of history to explore. I'm really interested in learning more.

FIOS in the house

We recently switched over to Verizon FIOS from Comcast. Comcast was just too expensive--and they just raised their rates again. The guy was here to install FIOS today, it took him a couple of hours but so far so good. The internet is much faster; haven't watched TV yet so we'll see about that. The best part is that it's 35% cheaper than Comcast. After the first year the rate will increase when all the promotions expire, but even then it'll be cheaper.

Switched our cell phones too, no complaints so far. The rate was the same as AT&T but Michele gets 17% off each month because of working at Temple. Nice.

Movies and games

Watched Be Kind Rewind over the weekend--pretty good movie, not hilarious or anything but still funny at times. In a nutshell, it's about two guys who accidentally erase all the videos in a movie store and decide to recreate them on their own.

Played some Wii this weekend. Dr. Mario is still good fun, and now you can play it online against someone else with a Wii. Melinda when are we playing you? Also been playing World of Goo, which is a neat puzzle game where you build structures out of balls of goo in order to get the other goo balls to the end of the level. It sounds weird but trust me it's fun.

First snow

Got our first snow of the season today. It started overnight and there was only a little bit on the ground this morning, but we're supposed to get an inch or two.

You have any weekend plans? We're going out to watch the Flyers/Sabres game tonight with a friend, but then nothing else all weekend. Nice to have a quiet, do-nothing weekend for a change. Then all of a sudden it's Thanksgiving, and that weekend big sister and two NYC friends are visiting. Fun stuff!

Door results

When the guys installed our garage doors last week we had a webcam set up to watch. I saved a bunch of the pictures and made this slideshow of the progress. Pretty neat. We still have to paint the new wood they put up around the door on the right side.

Cold

It's only November 19, but man is it cold outside. It's 28 right now. I guess it's payback for the 70 degree day we had last Saturday.

Pals

Kitchen Nightmares

Anyone watch Kitchen Nightmares? It's on Thursdays at 9. Great stuff. Gordon Ramsay, British celebrity chef, visits failing restaurants and turns them around. The restaurants usually have some massive sanitary problems, or the cooks can't cook, etc. It's worth watching just to see Ramsay explode at the owners after finding out the kitchen's full of roaches or the cooks don't know how to make rice.

The UK version is apparently less confrontational and more about the inner workings of a restaurant, which also sounds pretty neat.

Doors are done

The new garage doors are installed. Took them more than one day, but they look pretty nice. I'll post a before and after this weekend.

New garage doors

Not the most fascinating topic, I know, but today we're having new garage doors installed. We're using the Overhead Door Corporation, and so far we are not pleased. They were supposed to do it last Wednesday, so me and Michele took the day off and my dad came up, so we could do some work on the house while they did the doors. Well, they called that morning to say the doors hadn't arrived at the warehouse and they couldn't do it that day. We had scheduled it almost a month prior! So Michele wasted a day off. We must get a better deal because they messed up, right? Wrong. Not even a measly $50 to show that they were sorry and were acting in good faith.

Then I have to call them repeatedly just to talk to the installation guy, who never calls me back. We didn't know they were coming today until he called me at 7:45am, while we're on the train.

Anyway, we have the webcam set up to watch the installation. Check it out.

The offseason

Funny article by a former MLB player on what they do in the offseason.

Testing out the photo album feature. This is from a zoo trip a few months back.

A new era

Hey all, this is my new blog. Moved over from TypePad, which was super slow and not worth the cost. This is free. My goal is to just write short little posts, not the long ones I did at the old site. That way I'll post more often. Sometimes I might just post a link to a news article or some other website, with minimal comments. We'll see how this goes.