I am planning (actually have retired now) on retiring before or on my 65th birthday, so when a client wanted a countdown timer I checked one out. Since I am now retired it shows the time since I stopped working.
Retirement
Read more ↗
From the personal collection
Author: Bob
Nephew Phil and his son Aiden
Nolan and Chrysta Milojevich
Click on image to view animated gif
Distressed Type
I love old weathered type
Hummingbird
.gif)
New camera – Olympus OM-D
Just bought a new camera, an Olympus OM-D. In 1974 I bought one of the first OM-1 cameras and loved it. It went around the world with me. Eventually I bought a Canon EOS 35mm, and then an Canon 1D digital. But my first love was always the OM-1. So now I have returned to the Olympus brand. Here are some comparison photos.
My OM-1 on the left, the new OM-D on the right.
Back view
and top view. The OM-D is a bit thinner and narrower than the OM-1 but it feels much the same in the hands.
Budgets
One of my web sites that I frequently read relating to politics is PolitiFact.com. It serves to remind me that what politicians say has to be taken with, not a grain of salt, but a barge load of salt. I was reading it the other day and saw this 100{f21b2e9c886449ccfd883f06fb77471a0806c5f3cb16ac6af4e8bda5ea93c311} truthful statement from President Obama:
President Barack Obama says, "Exxon pocketed nearly $4.7 million every hour"
This was talking about 2011. Now I found this interesting, so I wondered, in comparison how much did the US spend per hour in 2011. So I googled and found this site: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/. According to them, government spending in 2011 amounted to 6.1 trillion dollars. So dividing 6.1 trillion by 365 days per year, then by 24 hours per day gives the hourly spending rate during 2011 of approximately 696 million dollars per hour.
Hmmm, perspective is an interesting thing. It seems to me that this country has more of a spending problem than a revenue problem.
Now if you take the current US population according to the Census bureau (2011) as 311,591,917, then if everyone paid their fair share (fair being defined as equal in this case) then it is only (approximately) 2.23 dollars per hour or about 52 dollars a day every man, woman and child needs to pony up. Thats about 19.5 thousand per year.
Learning French
I am attempting to learn French once again. It was many years ago that I took a first term college class. it is amazing how many more resources we have today thanks to the internet. I am using the following tools:
Rosettastone software – While the product comes with CD’s, once you are registered you can access the on-line courses.
Babbel.com – Wow. For the money this is hard to beat. Six months for $40. Similar methodology to Rosettastone. I especially like the vocabuary review.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/french/
This site is not as good as babbel.com but it is free. It has learning games and some good lessons including “Basic French in 12 Weeks”
Google Translate. French to English and English to French
French verb conjugater test – very good. Both regular and irregular verbs.
French radio streamed from the internet. I listen to France Bleu Azur
JavaScript programing
I recently bought a Barnes and Nobel Color Nook e-book reader and promptly hacked it into an Android tablet (http://www.cyanogenmod.com/). One of the games I then download to the tablet was "Word Game" by Craig Hart. It is basicly a Scrabble(tm) like game, single player, played against the clock.
It is a fun game, but in playing it I realized I needed a practice tool to help me learn longer words and to help me get better at anagraming. So I wrote one in JavaScript. It randomly shows seven tiles (from the standard Scrabble letter tiles). You try to find the longest word you can.
You can play it at http://bob.hanlonbrown.com/wordgame
Also at the bottom of the box
It looks like Mom and Ted spent a couple of nights together in San Franciso at the St. Francis Hotel.
