I'll be honest, I don't know a lot about first aid, and I need to rectify that, but a kit with supplies is part of it. I figured it was about time I got one.

What I do know about camping and hunting is that most of what happens isn't life threatening. Minor cuts, scrapes, chafing, blisters, sprains, etc. I think I can handle that.

I got some quick clot as well. I like to shoot and hunt, and often we're well away from the nearest emergency room. I hope to hell I never have to use it, but it's in my kit.

I added a couple of extras besides the quick clot because they seemed like they could be useful. Emergency blankets, water purification tablets, and a fire starter.

It's tempting to go nuts and pack the kitchen sink, but I figured something small and light is far more likely to be taken on trips than something huge and cumbersome. It's not much bigger than a shaving kit, and can easily be thrown in a range bag or what have you. It's even got a little detachable mini kit for carrying on your person if you are away from camp.

I got to use LINQ for the first time in a project today. I spend a lot of time writing SQL queries, so the ability to query pretty much anything using a SQL-like grammar is pretty appealing. I haven't had a chance to use it until now because our main application is written in C# 2.0 and we haven't had the time to see what's going to blow up if we change platforms. I'm working on something new though, so that didn't apply.

It took me some googling to figure out exactly how to do it, but what I need isn't very complex so the learning curve wasn't too steep. If you're querying a list of objects, there's some machinations to do if your list doesn't implement IQueryable, but other than that if you know SQL, you should be able to figure out the basics of querying fairly quickly.

I couldn't help but think, you know self, we could have done in this in 2 minutes with a foreach loop, and it does appear that your list has to implement IEnumerable so I suspect it basically does that under the covers.

Still, I'm thinking about some of my previous projects and how much cleaner they would be using LINQ. I don't think performance would be much different given that it's still looping through everything, but the code should be a lot faster to write and maintain.

This is just wrong.

I was watching the State of the Union address tonight, and at one point during the speech Obama said he was open to other ideas, and looked over at the Republicans and said something like "where are they?"

Personally, I'm tried of this whole Democrat vs. Republican bullshit. They all need to be tarred and feathered and run out of town, but I digress ...

I personally believe about 90% of what the Federal Government does is not only unnecessary, but unconstitutional as well, but let's just assume for a moment that the government can be involved in the delivery of any service it wants to get involved in, and put those concerns aside. Furthermore let's assume a "progressive" policy is just hunkydory, and it's ok for the government to nanny us.

Let's stop worrying about health care, and worry about health. Subsidizing health care insurance is in reality subsidizing insurance companies, and why in the hell would we want to do that?

I propose that we start subsidizing people's actual health instead. Let's get people involved in their health. We're a nation of fatties, let's encourage people to lose weight. (Even better would be to encourage people not to get fat in the first place.) Let's reward people for making good choices.

In addition, let's discourage people from making bad choices, choices which make us unhealthy.

How would we do that?

If you tax something, you get less of it. If you subsidize it, you get more of it.

There's a lot that could be done, and the specifics can be left to someone else to come up with, as far as I'm concerned, but here's a few.

Subsidize:
Weight loss
Healthy foods
Exercise facilities
Maybe throw some tax credits to employers for giving employees time during the work day to exercise.
Running shoes

Tax:
Fast food
Trans fats
High-fructose corn syrup (stop subsiding corn production while we're at it)
Tobacco
Laziness

Obviously there would still be sick people, but we could make a big dent in avoidable illnesses that cost us all.

While I'm at it. Let's tax people that waste health care resources, and reward those who use them judiciously but not to the point that we discourage the truly sick from seeking care, or we encourage people to skip checkups.

MadTV spoofed the iPad before the iPad even existed.



The Apple Ipad for Women - Watch more Funny Videos

I am using Windows 7 for work for the first time this week. I've been stuck on XP forever ...

I like how if you install Outlook 2007 after installing Visual Studio 2008 that when you click the Toolbox in VS2008, you don't see a message that says "Initializing Toolbox" and then get a crash. I like that you don't have uninstall and re-install VS2008, a process that takes over 2 hours, to get it to work again after spending 4 hours googling for solutions.

I like how it sets Windows updates to reboot your computer at 3 am, and that the default power settings don't cause it to hibernate well before then causing it to never install updates. I also like that it doesn't nag you all gawdammed day when you start work in the morning, after those two features worked so well together.

I like how when you install the VS2008 Service Pack 1 that it doesn't wait until after you spent 30 minutes installing it to tell you that it can't install correctly without Administrator privileges, and that you don't have to run it again wasting another 30 minutes.

They say two things in life are guaranteed: death and taxes.

Well I say there's one thing that's guaranteed after death: your children will fight over your stuff.

I got some bad news today. My grandparents, Jack and Pearl Cobb died today. Apparently they were driving and a young woman fell asleep at the wheel, crossed into their lane and collided with their car.

I don't have much other information. I hope it was quick and painless.

I'll miss you. I love you.

Update:

Apparently the young woman, was on her way back from a church retreat, and for some reason I'm glad that she wasn't drunk and/or texting.

Jack and Pearl were getting into their feeble years. Pearl fell and bumped her head during our Christmas visit, and I felt like it wouldn't be too long before we would have to have a family talk about what kind of care they needed. So, in some sense, I am glad that they won't have to languish in a nursing home or what have you.

That doesn't excuse this woman's negligence, but I forgive her.

She will have a very heavy burden to bear for the rest of her life.

If you couldn't get to the blog for a while, it is because I switched ISPs. I was hoping I could run side by side for a while, but it didn't work out that way.

Perhaps I have a touch of schizo going on but I recently read these two articles and couldn't help but think they might be related.

Retirement Accounts and Treasury Bonds - America's Unprecedented Money and Power Grab

Anarchy in the UK (and US, too)?

I'm currently reading "Chapterhouse: Dune" by Frank Herbert, and found this quote from Reverend Mother Lucilla intriguing:

"A top-heavy bureaucracy the electorate cannot touch always expands to the system's limit of energy. Steal it from the aged, from the retired, from anyone. Especially from those we once called the middle-class because that's where most of the energy originates."

This mentat's primary projection is that we're fucked.