We went to Houston this year, for Poppy’s first Christmas and spent almost a week with my family. Everyone loved and was amazed by Poppy, of course and she did splendidly. She traveled quite well, sleeping for the first part of both flights and playing quietly for the second. She also did a remarkably good job dealing with all the people she didn’t really know and the back and forth craziness of going from house to house to house.
Helping to Write History
By Eli Saslow
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 18, 2008; Page A01
During the campaign, the buzz-cut 27-year-old at the corner table helped write and edit some of the most memorable speeches of any recent presidential candidate. When Obama moves to the White House next month, Favreau will join his staff as the youngest person ever to be selected as chief speechwriter. He helps shape almost every word Obama says, yet the two men have formed a concert so harmonized that Favreau’s own voice disappears.
We have refinanced (or at least started the process) and locked in at 4.96 after paying a point (it was 5.6 without the point, lenders wanting up-front money and assurance in today’s market). We are rolling in the point and closing costs into the new loan and we’ll still be saving $140/month over our current loan (and if we hadn’t rolled in the costs, it would only have saved us $21/month more).
A very funny post for the programming nerds out there:
If programming languages were religions…
By amz – Monday, December 15, 2008 at 14:52
PHP would be Cafeteria Christianity – Fights with Java for the web market. It draws a few concepts from C and Java, but only those that it really likes. Maybe it’s not as coherent as other languages, but at least it leaves you with much more freedom and ostensibly keeps the core idea of the whole thing.
So there’s no going back… Though she’s still holding on to fingers when offered (or when produced after her sometimes insistent request) she is walking all the way across rooms without assistance and often without falling. For the most part, when she does fall, it’s fairly controlled and without incident.
All of our childproofing is being reassessed now. It’s a best effort thing anyway – for the most part, she’s going to get into whatever she can, we just try to remove the most dangerous and delicate things from 4 feet or lower.
An excellent article on Walmart being evil or not – a fairly objective seeming overview of the major points of discussion for the different camps on Walmart.
That’s a good thing, right? If a company achieves its lower prices by finding better and smarter ways of doing things, then yes, everybody wins. But if it cuts costs by cutting pay and benefits–or by sending production to China–then not everybody wins. And here’s where the story of Good Wal-Mart starts to falter.
I thought this was a very interesting article
Birth Control Pills Affect Women’s Taste in Men
It’s all about scent. Hidden in a man’s smell are clues about his major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes, which play an important role in immune system surveillance. Studies suggest that females prefer the scent of males whose MHC genes differ from their own, a preference that has probably evolved because it helps offspring survive: couples with different MHC genes are less likely to be related to each other than couples with similar genes are, and their children are born with more varied MHC profiles and thus more robust immune systems.
I have never developed a taste for coffee, personally, but I love the smell and I do love all the sugary-icey-foo-foo drinks. Here’s an entertaining story about coffee from Christoph Niemann, an illustrator at The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine and American Illustration.
I’m one of the first to speak out against the current (soon-to-change-thank-god) US government, but this video really does make me sad. I have little to say positive toward G.W.Bush and have certainly complained about him (often) when really complaining about the actions of many many people… but I don’t think I’d go so far as to refuse to shake his hand. I mean, he’s still a person.
On the otherhand, I myself have toyed with the idea of considering him a mass murderer… so from that perspective, I wouldn’t want to shake his hand or be in the same room with him.