Wednesday, August 30, 2006

OK Go

Months after they were hot, I wanted to pass along two fun music videos self-produced by the band "OK Go". (I heard about them on NPR if that's any clue how out of the loop I am when if comes to these things.) The first video is fun but the second one gets the award for "Best Use of Treadmills In a Music Video".

Seriously, whoever choreographed this deserves a medal.

Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fe196bnpmY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWCSGGrU9MA

I'm Healed!

Well, not entirely.

Today was my last physical therapy session for a while. The physical therapist said that she had pretty much done everything she could for me and that if I continued with the exercise regimen she had developed, my back would continue to improve. And my back has been improving these past few weeks, albeit slowly. She gave me some guidance for future exercises including a recommendation to do some pilates. (Boy, I don't know if I'm secure enough in my masculinity to do something like that. Maybe I'll just get a ball and DVD and do them at home.) The best part, though, is that I got a free exercise band; all I had to do was ask!

So what now?

Well, I'll continue with my exercises, plan on doing my third and final steroid injection in the near future, and we'll see what happens from there.

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Death of the 24-hour Kinkos?

It appears that there are NO Kinkos open 24-hours-a-day here in Wichita. I checked the website and they all open at 7am and close at 11pm on most days. Kind of sad? What about the Kinkos in your area? If there are no longer any 24-hour Kinkos then I feel we have truly lost something as a society. I can't say exactly what that might be but it is something.

(This has come about because I am dropping my wife off at the airport this morning at 5am and need to make a photocopy of a maintenance request to our landlord before I submit it. The ceiling in our kitchen is dripping water onto the floor. Quite a thing to discover at 4:00am as you're getting ready for work. Hopefully the craziness of today ends when I get her to the airport.)

Friday, August 04, 2006

Doing nothing

UPDATES

-The Wichita water test is going much slower than I expected. The pan of water finally evaporated off and I'm afraid the results are inconclusive. There is a lot of particulate stuff (including dried blades of grass) that I think got into the water when it was out in my car and the landscaping people mowed the lawn.

I think I'm going to try this again but put some kind of cover over the pan to prevent stuff like this from getting into the water. The tricky part is that the cover will still need to allow water vapor to get out. Saran wrap with a bunch of small holes in it?

-Scooter riding is still going great. Getting 80+ mpg and enjoying the rides.

-Katie and I are looking into getting a scanner so that we can electronicazationify some of our paper documents. I found out that the IRS does accept electronic versions of tax documents; this could save us a ton of filing cabinet space. We could do the same with much of the paper documentation we are hanging onto right now. As to when we are getting said scanner, well, it could be a while. We'll let you know.

-My latest exploration topic: nuclear breeder reactors. Pretty interesting stuff. In ways that I don't fully understand, it is possible to reprocess a large percentage of most nuclear waste to both reclaim/recreate some of the fuel and produce a by-product with a half-life of a century or so (vs 20,000 years). From what it sounds like, the process can be made to generate more fuel than you put in. (Don't ask me how, I don't understand the details yet.) The US has outlawed such reactors in an attempt to prevent nuclear proliferation but there are rumblings that if nuclear energy takes off in the US, such a ban might be lifted.

Why might the US embrace nuclear power after several decades of shunning it? Zero carbon emissions. In fact, more than a few environmentalists are getting on-board the nuclear bandwagon because it is so much "cleaner" than coal/natural gas power plants.

-Lastly, Katie and I got some neat folding bookcases to replace the particle-board deathtraps we've had. Literally our old ones were falling apart (and may have done so on top of us). We'll see how these new ones hold up. They fold up in a way that is kind of hard to explain in writing but, hopefully, this will make moving easier.