Actually, no. The stuff's dense enough it doesn't burn fast, and it's so freakin' thick it takes forever to burn through. Plus you've got a concrete or stucco or (less often) drywall coating, so it's not like your houseguests can toss smoldering cigarettes into the bales or anything.
Straw bale homes often have chicken wire laid over the straw as reinforcement for the facing, though.
(We just got _Serious Straw Bale_, since we're looking at putting together a cohousing project and straw bale seems ideal. You got your sweat equity potential, you got your *really* good sound insulation between units. And we're in Kansas, so there's plenty of wheat straw around.)
Oh, there's crossover. I'm a Perl programmer by choice (left VB over a decade ago), but I presently have a contract job programming Delphi (which is as close to VB's environment as makes no difference).
I don't think the "can" is the rarity. I think it's more the "will." There's prejudice on both sides.
What *he* said... I've noticed on Bloglines that I can tell exactly when my husband has picked up a new feed because it shows up in my recommendations.
Getting up early for, here... the lo cal science museum is doing live coverage in the CyberDome (though somehow I doubt the projection is actually going to be in the round, more's the pity). 5 am local time.
I almost feel like I should get up early for it, it being one of the few astronomical events we don't have to worry about cloud cover for. (If not for the four-year-old, we might. He's a proto-geek, but that'd be pushing it.)
Oh, I don't doubt that that's what the law is *capable* of, I just rather suspect that this case won't go that way... if only because it would get jumped on as a poster child for those (rightly, I think) who want to take appeals all the way to the SCOTUS.
They've found some guy who was playing with his laser pointer and they're going to fry him.
Naw, they found some guy and they're going to make a lot of noise to the press about frying him.
You'll notice all the hand-wringing in the article is all "maximum" and "could" and so forth. Dollars to donuts he ends up getting off with a slap on the wrist... which will then be unworthy of even a backpage followup article. Message sent.
Well, yeah, I was figuring west I-70. I've gotten stranded in Goodland, I think it was (truck stop next to a KFC is all I remember), with temperatures in the high 40's, and a supposed blizzard condition five miles down the road.
Well, the only problem with that is that in this climate, we have snowblower-worthy snow maybe once every three years (I only mentioned a snowblower at all because the previous post did). Otherwise, yeah, that would make sense.
(They keep telling me it's just a drought, but I've lived here in Kansas over twenty years now, and I'm *still* waiting for those Little House on the Prairie type snows up to the rafters and all. Near as I can figure, all the snow is attracted to I-70 these days.)
Plenty of people have "rediscovered" the barter system, hell, many never forgot it.
'Struth. Especially at the poverty level, there's a *lot* of that going on. I've been working with a very-low-income couple through our church, and I now find myself with a dozen fresh brown eggs every now and again, which they get from a neighbor in exchange for lawn work, and which I get "in exchange" for providing rides. And my van gets worked on gratis, and things like that. Pretty much, you do what you have to to get by, and precious-and-rare cash is reserved for use outside the informal network (since the bank won't take eggs as a mortgage payment, oddly enough). And there seems to be an interesting ethic of generosity, too, at that level... if these people could afford snowblowers, they *would* take care of your driveway, I have no doubt.
I worked as a secretarial temp in college, and let me tell you: executives have *never* been terribly literate (well, at least since the 80's; I assume it wasn't much different before that). It's only that they used to have secretaries type their correspondence, so nobody knew.
I'm of mixed feelings on that. I have the obligatory bookshelf dedicated to books with woodcuts on the cover, but I'm not happy with some of the ones I've gotten recently (I won't say "recent ones" since I think the Postfix book, at least, isn't all that recent). The New Riders books I have (both Paul duBois, I believe) I'm pretty happy with.
I'd not trust Apress until I hear the whole story on thisissue and see how it settles out, though. Probably fine, but...
And given the putrid mess of The Matrix sequels i can't be bothered considering them...
It might be time to resurrect the watch-a-movie-trilogy tradition for our New Year's Eve party. And maybe the Matrix stuff *is* the right thing for that... in past years we've watched the Cannonball Run movies, things like that. (Being that we usually played board games and whatnot too, the movies have to be something that don't *require* actually watching, just laughing at occasionally.)
... when figuring company budgets is base salary plus 50%. That accounts (roughly... it *is* only a rule of thumb) for taxes, insurance, vacation/sick leave and all the little bits that fall under the general "compensation" category. That's *not* covering other expenses like office furniture and all that, of course.
I'm in the process of taking on a part-time contracting job myself, though it's a real contract job - not full-time, paid by the item rather than time or whatever, that kind of thing. It's going to run between 25% and 50% over the typical full-time salary rate, but then again I have some advantages in that it'll be a secondary household income, and expensive bennies like insurance are already covered for us.
Most of the major outages I know of are caused by debris. Tree limbs, mostly... this is the land of the cottonwood, which deals with wind damage by shedding branches. (And growing them back. Although technically hardwoods, cottonwoods are very soft and quick-growing.) We had a really impressive dent put in steel guttering by a tree branch... fifty feet from the closest tree, and by wind direction that was probably *not* the tree that did it.
I dunno. Conduit would help, certainly, but it would also be slower to repair, right? Around here it seems that the power and phone wires follow the cottonwood principle: build it cheap, because it'll just blow apart, then repair it quick and dirty. Works pretty well, at least if you live near the business district (as I do) or in one of the wealthy suburbs... outages last a few hours, max.
Underground conduit is best, where you can get it (aside from sandiness here and there, we're in good land for it, low water table and shallow frost line), but unfortunately our utilities are fairly screwed up here (as everywhere). We'd pay for the conduit, and Kansas City would be the ones who got it, if history is any guide.
And crawler robot? Why not just leave a fishtape in all of them?
debris hitting the wires. This could be solved with conduit.
Overhead conduit?
I don't get it... I'm not seeing how this would be any less susceptible to debris, nor how it would be at all practical when we (in Kansas) have 60mph winds every spring and most autumns, even when we don't have tornadoes. And hail, don't forget the hail. No rains of frogs and/or fishes as of yet, but those wouldn't surprise me either.
On the other hand, our water and sewer lines are buried six feet down (if memory serves; we replaced a line a few years back), and the frost line is much higher than that, so the only thing they'd be hitting would be their own phone lines. Or power lines (mostly overhead, but we've got an underground line connecting the house and garage, for instance), but those are easy to detect, *and* a self-correcting problem.
And to go with the iPod-o-lantern...
on
Halloween Fun
·
· Score: 1
That's always amused me, since it can't help but apply to KU as well, which makes it a rather poor insult. Unless you're, say, an Oklahoma State fan, I suppose.
(I'm quite possibly the only person in Kansas to not have chosen a side. I nearly went to K-State, until Tulsa offered me a better scholarship, and I like purple better than red-yellow-blue, but my four-year-old has a Blue Wings Rising poster (State Fair swag) on his door because his uncle works at KUMed here in town and has taught him to holler "Go Jayhawks!" whenever he sees the bird-in-lab-coat on the KU Med building. So I'm pretty equal-opportunity.)
In the early 90's, the FSLIC (savings and loans) were bailed out because of shennagins like Whitewater in Arkansas, and the remainder was merged into the FDIC (I think).
I know naught about the structure, but I know that the entity that governed the community bank (formerly a S&L) that I worked for was still *called* FSLIC, though it may have been part of the FDIC. For whatever that's worth.
So, you contend that Federal Reserve regulation is effective in preventing server deployment fuck-ups?
They do try.
My last job before the sigified one was managing MIS Operations for a regional community bank. Now, this was during Y2K preparation, so it was somewhat atypical, but there is certainly a lot of FSLIC regulation in place to prevent, as you say, fuck-ups, be they server deployment or darn near anything else.
Now, the bank I worked for was also atypical (top in its class as far as compliance), so I don't know exactly how "effective" it really is industry-wide, but as I say, they *do* try.
On the other hand, if eBay/PayPal is getting socked with Sarbaines-Oxley (which I doubtless just misspelled) requirements, they may well have to jump through the same sort of hoops the FSLIC and FDIC put real banks through. I got out of the bidness altogether before SOx, so I can't speak to that authoritatively.
Can someone tell me why it is that a business should end up using paypal for payment services as opposed to getting a merchant account through a bank with Visa/MC/Amex?
A number of reasons, including: The business doesn't have to mess with running their own secure server. Its customers don't have to worry about giving their CC numbers to YA unknown Internet entity. Things like that.
Slashdot Mirror
We're in Wichita, too.
It's all still in the blue-sky stages right now, though.
Actually, no. The stuff's dense enough it doesn't burn fast, and it's so freakin' thick it takes forever to burn through. Plus you've got a concrete or stucco or (less often) drywall coating, so it's not like your houseguests can toss smoldering cigarettes into the bales or anything.
Straw bale homes often have chicken wire laid over the straw as reinforcement for the facing, though.
(We just got _Serious Straw Bale_, since we're looking at putting together a cohousing project and straw bale seems ideal. You got your sweat equity potential, you got your *really* good sound insulation between units. And we're in Kansas, so there's plenty of wheat straw around.)
Oh, there's crossover. I'm a Perl programmer by choice (left VB over a decade ago), but I presently have a contract job programming Delphi (which is as close to VB's environment as makes no difference).
I don't think the "can" is the rarity. I think it's more the "will." There's prejudice on both sides.
What *he* said... I've noticed on Bloglines that I can tell exactly when my husband has picked up a new feed because it shows up in my recommendations.
Getting up early for, here... the lo cal science museum is doing live coverage in the CyberDome (though somehow I doubt the projection is actually going to be in the round, more's the pity). 5 am local time.
I almost feel like I should get up early for it, it being one of the few astronomical events we don't have to worry about cloud cover for. (If not for the four-year-old, we might. He's a proto-geek, but that'd be pushing it.)
Oh, I don't doubt that that's what the law is *capable* of, I just rather suspect that this case won't go that way... if only because it would get jumped on as a poster child for those (rightly, I think) who want to take appeals all the way to the SCOTUS.
They've found some guy who was playing with his laser pointer and they're going to fry him.
Naw, they found some guy and they're going to make a lot of noise to the press about frying him.
You'll notice all the hand-wringing in the article is all "maximum" and "could" and so forth. Dollars to donuts he ends up getting off with a slap on the wrist... which will then be unworthy of even a backpage followup article. Message sent.
The comet does not thake a few days off, it's going to be just as visable on January 3rd and 4th as on January 2nd and January 5th.
Well, unless it's supposed to be overcast on the 3rd and 4th, anyhow.
(Here, the comet's gonna be a few days late in arriving for that reason. Le sigh.)
Well, yeah, I was figuring west I-70. I've gotten stranded in Goodland, I think it was (truck stop next to a KFC is all I remember), with temperatures in the high 40's, and a supposed blizzard condition five miles down the road.
Well, the only problem with that is that in this climate, we have snowblower-worthy snow maybe once every three years (I only mentioned a snowblower at all because the previous post did). Otherwise, yeah, that would make sense.
(They keep telling me it's just a drought, but I've lived here in Kansas over twenty years now, and I'm *still* waiting for those Little House on the Prairie type snows up to the rafters and all. Near as I can figure, all the snow is attracted to I-70 these days.)
Plenty of people have "rediscovered" the barter system, hell, many never forgot it.
'Struth. Especially at the poverty level, there's a *lot* of that going on. I've been working with a very-low-income couple through our church, and I now find myself with a dozen fresh brown eggs every now and again, which they get from a neighbor in exchange for lawn work, and which I get "in exchange" for providing rides. And my van gets worked on gratis, and things like that. Pretty much, you do what you have to to get by, and precious-and-rare cash is reserved for use outside the informal network (since the bank won't take eggs as a mortgage payment, oddly enough). And there seems to be an interesting ethic of generosity, too, at that level... if these people could afford snowblowers, they *would* take care of your driveway, I have no doubt.
I worked as a secretarial temp in college, and let me tell you: executives have *never* been terribly literate (well, at least since the 80's; I assume it wasn't much different before that). It's only that they used to have secretaries type their correspondence, so nobody knew.
I'm of mixed feelings on that. I have the obligatory bookshelf dedicated to books with woodcuts on the cover, but I'm not happy with some of the ones I've gotten recently (I won't say "recent ones" since I think the Postfix book, at least, isn't all that recent). The New Riders books I have (both Paul duBois, I believe) I'm pretty happy with.
I'd not trust Apress until I hear the whole story on this issue and see how it settles out, though. Probably fine, but...
And given the putrid mess of The Matrix sequels i can't be bothered considering them...
It might be time to resurrect the watch-a-movie-trilogy tradition for our New Year's Eve party. And maybe the Matrix stuff *is* the right thing for that... in past years we've watched the Cannonball Run movies, things like that. (Being that we usually played board games and whatnot too, the movies have to be something that don't *require* actually watching, just laughing at occasionally.)
A patched Windows 2000 Machine
A patched Windows XP SP1 Machine
A patched Windows XP Machine
A patched Windows 98 Machine
What about Win95, you insensitive clod? Hmph.
(Note that I'm *not* volunteering to try it out, though I'm typing this on a 95 box. With Firefox, mind.)
... when figuring company budgets is base salary plus 50%. That accounts (roughly... it *is* only a rule of thumb) for taxes, insurance, vacation/sick leave and all the little bits that fall under the general "compensation" category. That's *not* covering other expenses like office furniture and all that, of course.
I'm in the process of taking on a part-time contracting job myself, though it's a real contract job - not full-time, paid by the item rather than time or whatever, that kind of thing. It's going to run between 25% and 50% over the typical full-time salary rate, but then again I have some advantages in that it'll be a secondary household income, and expensive bennies like insurance are already covered for us.
Most of the major outages I know of are caused by debris. Tree limbs, mostly... this is the land of the cottonwood, which deals with wind damage by shedding branches. (And growing them back. Although technically hardwoods, cottonwoods are very soft and quick-growing.) We had a really impressive dent put in steel guttering by a tree branch... fifty feet from the closest tree, and by wind direction that was probably *not* the tree that did it.
I dunno. Conduit would help, certainly, but it would also be slower to repair, right? Around here it seems that the power and phone wires follow the cottonwood principle: build it cheap, because it'll just blow apart, then repair it quick and dirty. Works pretty well, at least if you live near the business district (as I do) or in one of the wealthy suburbs... outages last a few hours, max.
Underground conduit is best, where you can get it (aside from sandiness here and there, we're in good land for it, low water table and shallow frost line), but unfortunately our utilities are fairly screwed up here (as everywhere). We'd pay for the conduit, and Kansas City would be the ones who got it, if history is any guide.
And crawler robot? Why not just leave a fishtape in all of them?
debris hitting the wires. This could be solved with conduit.
Overhead conduit?
I don't get it... I'm not seeing how this would be any less susceptible to debris, nor how it would be at all practical when we (in Kansas) have 60mph winds every spring and most autumns, even when we don't have tornadoes. And hail, don't forget the hail. No rains of frogs and/or fishes as of yet, but those wouldn't surprise me either.
On the other hand, our water and sewer lines are buried six feet down (if memory serves; we replaced a line a few years back), and the frost line is much higher than that, so the only thing they'd be hitting would be their own phone lines. Or power lines (mostly overhead, but we've got an underground line connecting the house and garage, for instance), but those are easy to detect, *and* a self-correcting problem.
... the iPod-o-costume.
As Gizmodo put it, "No, really. Just hit 'menu.'"
that's wickET
No, that was an Ewok. Those weren't robots, though perhaps you're thinking of a dagget, which sort of looks like a cyborged Ewok.
You can't spell SUCKS without KSU.
That's always amused me, since it can't help but apply to KU as well, which makes it a rather poor insult. Unless you're, say, an Oklahoma State fan, I suppose.
(I'm quite possibly the only person in Kansas to not have chosen a side. I nearly went to K-State, until Tulsa offered me a better scholarship, and I like purple better than red-yellow-blue, but my four-year-old has a Blue Wings Rising poster (State Fair swag) on his door because his uncle works at KUMed here in town and has taught him to holler "Go Jayhawks!" whenever he sees the bird-in-lab-coat on the KU Med building. So I'm pretty equal-opportunity.)
In the early 90's, the FSLIC (savings and loans) were bailed out because of shennagins like Whitewater in Arkansas, and the remainder was merged into the FDIC (I think).
I know naught about the structure, but I know that the entity that governed the community bank (formerly a S&L) that I worked for was still *called* FSLIC, though it may have been part of the FDIC. For whatever that's worth.
So, you contend that Federal Reserve regulation is effective in preventing server deployment fuck-ups?
They do try.
My last job before the sigified one was managing MIS Operations for a regional community bank. Now, this was during Y2K preparation, so it was somewhat atypical, but there is certainly a lot of FSLIC regulation in place to prevent, as you say, fuck-ups, be they server deployment or darn near anything else.
Now, the bank I worked for was also atypical (top in its class as far as compliance), so I don't know exactly how "effective" it really is industry-wide, but as I say, they *do* try.
On the other hand, if eBay/PayPal is getting socked with Sarbaines-Oxley (which I doubtless just misspelled) requirements, they may well have to jump through the same sort of hoops the FSLIC and FDIC put real banks through. I got out of the bidness altogether before SOx, so I can't speak to that authoritatively.
Can someone tell me why it is that a business should end up using paypal for payment services as opposed to getting a merchant account through a bank with Visa/MC/Amex?
A number of reasons, including: The business doesn't have to mess with running their own secure server. Its customers don't have to worry about giving their CC numbers to YA unknown Internet entity. Things like that.