June 11, 2016

Clinton/Obama 2016

It would be worth it just to listen to Republican heads exploding like a fire in a popcorn warehouse.

Michelle Obama: strong, smart as hell, knows exactly where the levers of power connect in DC after eight years as first spouse, has Barack Obama as a literal kitchen cabinet and elegantly attractive as well.

What's not to love?

June 11, 2016

The Philosophical Musings of the Man Who Has Everything

June 10, 2016

"Bye Felicia"

The grandnephew and his sister are four and seven I think, been here a week or so and were getting ready to go home with their Nana, nice kids I like them and we get along well.

So Nana is taking them home in the car and as they walk to it nephew turns to me and the four year old says "Bye Felicia", my jaw dropped and I looked at him a moment and then cracked up. We were waving like crazy.

The only reason I had any idea what the hell he was talking about was DU, thank you for making my day and his, sister was listening to us and trying not to laugh at me cracking up.

Bye Felicia.

June 7, 2016

Larkin Poe, Hey Sinner/Black Betty

June 7, 2016

I have a renovation project I want to finish off so: Call it Skinner!

DU is a black hole for time right now, I sit down to read a thread and before I know it an hour is gone, I have to pee, my mouse is gently smoking and my butt is getting numb.

Actually I just got the AC unit for my renovation so this is a great time for DU to become less attractive for me. Now that it has come to Hillary vs Trump I already know what I'm going to do and I've already said my piece about both of them. My Trump OP got 76 recs and a lot of laughs but it's like whacking a vulgar short fingered orange pinata with no blindfold, hardly a challenge.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027324124

So yeah, call it Skinner and let me get some shit done around here.

And to all my DU friends and frenemies let me say Happy Trails to you...

June 5, 2016

They once inhabited a vast swath of North America but their numbers have been greatly reduced

June 5, 2016

There's an old saying in racing, if you want to finish first first you have to finish

I think it applies to elections as much as it does to racing, pulling off the racetrack before the leader crosses the finish line is foolish and short sighted, engines have been known to blow leading the final lap and horses to falter when leading the home stretch.

Remember when Gore conceded the 2000 election and then took it back?

You don't have to get snippy about it.

May 30, 2016

This gave me a chuckle, I wonder what the offspring will look like? Mowstangs?

May 29, 2016

History often turns on small things, there's a famous proverb about for the want of a nail

Ever since Hillary lost the nomination to Obama in 2008 I have thought that the one single thing she could have done differently in her career that would have reversed that loss was to oppose giving George W Bush authority to invade Iraq.

The majority of elected Democrats in Congress voted against the IWR, if Hillary had joined the majority of the Democrats in that time of need in my opinion we would be finishing up the second term of the HRC administration, Clinton II Corporate Boogaloo, which would have been somewhat similar to the Obama administration but with a more muscular foreign policy and a less hostile and oppressive attitude toward big business.

Ironic that a vote made most likely out of political calculation should backfire so badly on someone. Who could possibly have known that Bush and Cheney would screw up so badly in Iraq and create a quagmire?

May 28, 2016

Jupiter last night, Mars this morning

I've been doing my photography stuff on an an astronomy oriented board but I thought y'all here might like to see my latest efforts, this is the best I've done so far and it's taken some time to get here. Had an evening and morning of tolerable to fair seeing and so so clarity which is about as good as it gets here and decided to try my latest planetary setup, 1050mm FL 95mm dia Maksutov Cassegrain with an ASI120MC camera (basically a higher end webcam made for astronomy) and a 26mm Erfle eyepiece set up for magnified projection onto the CMOS chip, each shot is the "best" 4,500 of 5,000 frames of video, aligned, stacked and sharpened in software. If you are interested in details I'll be glad to share more.

I actually have 25,000 frames of each planet but I'm going to have to combine the files and then run it with a clean boot on my computer when I'm either asleep or gone or it will crash, results should be a bit better than this with that many more frames.

Looking at the original video and then what I get out of it I'm nearly shocked at how good the results are, it's almost impossible to see anything at all in the Mars Video and the Jupiter one you can tell it has two dark belts but that's about it..

I think my rig is probably capable of about twice as good as this if I perfect my technique and manage to find those rare moments when clarity and seeing are both good to make the image captures.