Dad’s Blog
Power to the Meeple » The economy must be improving
Wow, the credit market must be improving. I just got the first personal loan offer I’ve seen in months. And we used to get 2 of those a when things were better. I suppose that’s a good sign.
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Power to the Meeple » As if I wasn’t embarrassed enough to live in Illinois
Apparently the Illinois State Senate has been hard at work for the people of Illinois. Throwing caution, science, and common sense to the wind, they have passed a resolution stating that Pluto is now again a planet. (If you recall, in 2006, the scientific community declared that Pluto was not actually a planet.) It just sounds so goofy that I didn’t believe it until I actually read the resolution from the Illinois General Assembly website.
So it’s good to see that our state legislature has plenty of time to take care of ridiculous things like declaring Pluto is a planet. Maybe on the bright side, it means they’re doing that instead of doing something to screw up the state even more.
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Power to the Meeple » Some good news?
I’ve tried to follow Jessie’s example and not talk about work so much in my blog. I thought I’d make an exception for some potentially good news about work given all the problems with the economic outlook right now.
If this article (http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS3370500835.html) is right, it could mean good news for me. According to the article, a recent study found that the market share for smartphones among handsets will continue to increase despite an economic downturn. Maybe Android will also turn out to be the cost-saving measure that Motorola hopes it to be.
Being a developer for smartphones, I hope they’re right. 
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Power to the Meeple » Mythweb blank after an upgrade
I recently did a standard upgrade of my mythbuntu system with a simple “sudo apt-get upgrade” to pick up the latest packages. Unfortunately, after that upgrade, my Mythweb plug-in stopped working. After a bit of searching, I came across this Ubuntu forum post about it. In case you’re also searching around for a solution as to why your Mythweb stopped working, the solution in post #9 seemed to work for me. I guess we’ll see if there are any side-effects.
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Power to the Meeple » Cat vs. EULA
Not that I think this would ever hold up in court if for some reason it came to that, but this is hilarious none-the-less.
http://www.ohesso.com/essays/essay006.htm
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Power to the Meeple » Let’s hope some people go to jail over this
It’s an odd feeling getting a sense of relief that your kid has an allergy to peanuts, but that’s actually what has happened. As I’m sure you’ve heard, there’s a huge recall of peanut butter products. (You can find the list at the FDA website.) Now I just read this article this evening and found out that for the last 2 years, this company has been knowingly shipping products they suspected to be tainted with salmonella. Strangely enough, that same 2 year period is about how long Hannah has been allergic to peanuts. I can only hope that some people are thrown in jail for this.
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Power to the Meeple » Happy Saturnalia!
It’s that time of year again. The time when it starts taking twice as long to drive to work because of the road conditions, snow plows run over gas mains in your neighborhood, and the time when I can be pulled into discussions about the origins of Christmas about as easily as I can be pulled into an ice cream shop on a warm, sunny day. Since I already wrote about this last year around the same time, I won’t bore you again with the same ramblings. (But you can still go back and read the post from last year if you’re interested.) As a side note, I’m not sure when Christmas Unwrapped will be on this year. I still have the recording from last year to watch again.
And to any ancient Romans reading my blog – Happy Saturnalia!
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Power to the Meeple » At least the neighborhood didn’t blow up 
You’d think that they wouldn’t put a gas main in an area where a snow plow would even have a chance of running into it. Apparently that wasn’t the case here. So I guess it’s good that we didn’t have an explosion in our neighborhood this morning.
http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2008/12/hanover-park-gas-main-street-closing.html
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Power to the Meeple » The frowny face in the sky
I’ve been looking forward to the frowny face in the sky for about a week (since I found out there was going to be one). What stinks is that it’s now cloudy on the night I’d actually be able to see it. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, Venus, Jupiter, and a crescent moon were going to align in just the right order to make a frown in the sky. At least I got to see several days of the cool “planetary conjuction” with Venus and Jupiter over the last week.
I also found an article about the event. (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/12/081201-jupiter-venus.html) What I found most interesting about the article is that apparently, an event very similar to this one where Venus and Jupiter were extremely close in the sky (and visible) occurred around 2 B.C. – making it a potential source for the star of Bethlehem story from the Bible.
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Power to the Meeple » Colin Powell sums it up in 7 minutes
I think Colin Powell sums up my feelings pretty well in 7 minutes. Okay, so 7 minutes isn’t much of a summary, but he does a good job anyway.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/10/powell-obama-en.html
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