Sunday, January 31, 2010

 
I'm all moved out of my office as of today. The move Thursday went well and my stuff is safely stored in temporary space in the 5/3 building. Henry and I went down today to move a bunch of legal books that our attorney in Cleveland wants. He was a great helper so afterwards I took him to a new hotdog joint downtown for lunch. Then we went to Target to get some gifts for Jack's birthday.

I'm not sure when my new office will be ready so I'll be working at home the next few weeks. No sense in working out of my temp space because I don't have any phone or internet service. But I do have business downtown so I'll probably make the Capital Club my place of business for the next couple weeks. They have wireless so I can always plug in there.

The in-laws were in town the last two days on their way to Florida. I'm looking forward to next month when we go down to visit. I've had enough of this weather.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

 
I'm moving my work office on Thursday.  I've worked in the same building, same office since I came to Columbus in 1995.  A few years ago, building management took away my indoor parking space and I wasn't happy about it.  This year, when my lease was up, it was time to move closer to Capitol Square.  My new office is smaller but will overlook the Capitol Building.  It also has indoor parking.  It's been a pain packing up stuff but I'm looking forward to something new.  Unfortunately, I have to move after hours so I'll be working late on Thursday. 

Monday, January 25, 2010

 

seriously?

President Barack Obama, accompanied by Education Secretary Arne ... A teleprompter for an elementary class?  Seriously?  How about just speaking from memory at some point? 

Saturday, January 23, 2010

 
Another basket for Henry.

 
Henry's first basketball game. He had 4 of his teams 12 points but they lost. He plays great defense and has a nice shot. We'll have to work on his rebounding though.

Friday, January 22, 2010

 

Boat update

The orange 2008 Yamaha is back in play, the guy who put the deposit is going with another boat.  Allegedly.  It's like any other big purchase, I feel like everyone is playing a game.  The place in Mansfield where I stopped today said that Yamaha has offered to buy back their 2009 inventory so their price has actually gone up a bit from what it was this morning.  I only half believe them because of course they'll still sell me a boat.  Then there's the crazy prices in Dayton which make no sense to me, the regular boats are the same price as the limited edition price.  We like the limited edition but probably not for a few thousand more.  Oh, and I found out yesterday that covers aren't included but could be installed for almost a thousand bucks.  It comes with a bimini top when you are on the water but the cover it comes with isn't really conducive to keeping a boat in the water, which we obviously plan to do.  Add all this along with the fact that I just found out that our local Columbus dealer has two 2008 boats and things are getting tiresome. We are going to look at the one or ones in Columbus tomorrow but they are $1000 more than the ones up near Cleveland; if the guy deals he might just have a sale. 

Thursday, January 21, 2010

 

Life update

My orange boat sold so it looks like we are moving on to 2009 models.  No biggie, just gonna cost a bit more.  I'm going to stop by a marina tomorrow right off Rt. 71 on my way to Cleveland.
 
I'm headed to the lake Sunday and will stay overnight again. The DirectTv people are coming on Monday morning so I should get some work done with the two days.  Weather is supposed to be 49 on Sunday so I shouldn't be as cold.  Looking forward to moving along, after stringing the electric and cable and speaker wire we can insulate and begin putting up the walls. 

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

 

Interesting, I love the DOW close

Highlights of Obama's first year, by the numbers:

___

7,949.09—Dow Jones Industrial Average close on Jan. 20, 2009.

10,609.65—Dow Jones Industrial Average close on Jan. 15, 2010.

13 million—Number of people 16 and older unemployed as of January 2009.

14.7 million—Number of people 16 and older unemployed as of December 2009.

7.7 percent—Unemployment rate January 2009

$787 billion—Cost of economic stimulus approved by Congress.

$10.6 trillion—Outstanding public debt Jan. 20, 2009.

$12.3 trillion—Outstanding public debt Jan. 14, 2009.

$296.4 billion—Federal spending from the financial crisis bailout fund before Jan. 20, 2009.

$173 billion—Federal spending from the financial crisis bailout fund after Jan. 20, 2009.

$165 billion—Amount of bailout funds repaid by banks and automakers.

139—Bank failures between Jan. 20, 2009, and Jan. 14, 2010.

274,399—Number of properties that received forclosure-related notices in January 2009.

349,519—Number of properties that received forclosure-related notices in December 2009.

34,400—U.S. troops in Afghanistan in January 2009.

70,000—U.S. troops in Afghanistan as of Jan. 12, 2010.

319—U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan from January 2009 through Jan. 15, 2010.

139,500—U.S. troops in Iraq in January 2009.

111,000—U.S. troops in Iraq as of Jan. 12, 2010.

152—U.S. military deaths in Iraq from January 2009 through Jan. 15, 2010.

539—Appointments to top federal policy positions submitted to the Senate

352—Appointments confirmed by the Senate.

180—Appointments in top policy positions carried over from the Bush administration.

12—Formal news conferences.

21—Foreign countries visited.

29—States visited.

10—Visits to Camp David.

2—Vacations.


Sunday, January 17, 2010

 
There's not a lot more to say about the following article. It's incredible.

Oops: IPCC to withdraw claim that AGW will wipe out Himalayan glaciers by 2035
posted at 1:30 pm on January 17, 2010 by Ed Morrissey Share on Facebook printer-friendly
The UN agency for “climate change” will withdraw a years-old claim that man-made climate change will destroy the Himalayan glaciers within 25 years — after its highly unscientific method of reaching this conclusion got exposed this week. Instead of conducting actual science themselves, with open and transparent methods, the IPCC apparently just read the claim in an interview and decided to adopt it. Now the original reporter in the interview claims that not only did the IPCC simply lift the claim without any investigation, they didn’t understand it correctly in the first place:
A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.
Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.
In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.
The Times of London makes a mistake in this opening. The blunders weren’t “scientific” in nature — in other words, the errors did not stem from bad modeling, data, or assumptions in a scientific inquiry. The IPCC adopted the claim without doing any science on their own at all. They never tested the hypothesis that they read in the New Scientist. It matched their politics, not any kind of science they conducted or reviewed.
On top of that, it seems that the IPCC has some reading-comprehension problems:
The IPCC’s reliance on Hasnain’s 1999 interview has been highlighted by Fred Pearce, the journalist who carried out the original interview for the New Scientist. Pearce said he rang Hasnain in India in 1999 after spotting his claims in an Indian magazine. Pearce said: “Hasnain told me then that he was bringing a report containing those numbers to Britain. The report had not been peer reviewed or formally published in a scientific journal and it had no formal status so I reported his work on that basis.
“Since then I have obtained a copy and it does not say what Hasnain said. In other words it does not mention 2035 as a date by which any Himalayan glaciers will melt. However, he did make clear that his comments related only to part of the Himalayan glaciers. not the whole massif.”
Um, okay. So the IPCC read the interview in which Hasnain speculated — with no scientific evidence whatsoever — that a portion of the Himalayan glaciers would melt at some indeterminate time, and concluded that the entirety of the massif would evaporate by 2035. They never even bothered to wait for Hasnain’s report to see exactly what he claimed, and why. Instead, they just inflated the unsubstantiated speculation with a zeppelin of greenhouse-gas hyperbole and stated categorically that the entire glacial structure in the Himalayas would be gone in a quarter-century.
This is what passes for science at the UN. This is what passes for science at the IPCC. It’s also what passed for science at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit.
And AGW hysterics like to call skeptics deniers, in what is clearly the most obvious case of projection on the global stage.
On the plus side, I believe I’ve found the basis for the next IPCC report and AGW hysteria. I want to warn you before you click on this that the video is extremely sensitive: it cost a fortune to produce and only a few people have been foolish enough to watch it all the way through. View at your own risk!

Saturday, January 16, 2010

 

Sarah and I went to the Cleveland boat show yesterday and came away disappointed. It was half what it was last year, the economy has really hurt the boat industry. But we did find a boat that we like so now its just a matter of figuring out when to buy it and hope its still available. That's tough because they could sell it today to tomorrow so I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I was hoping to buy it at the end of March when we (hopefully) get our bonus but I don't think I can wait that long. I'll probably buy it soon and just pay down the loan in March.
The boat is a brand new 2008 Yamaha 23 footer. The photo above is the boat, I was sold on it when I saw it was orange. It has a wakeboard tower, which I'm not sure we need now but will someday and its a nice boat. Yamaha boats don't have a propeller, they are powered by two internal motors with essentially a jet stream. They are quick to plane and easy to maneuver. Not sure what else I can say. There are some new 2009 boats out there that we would also buy if the 2008 is purchased before I pull the trigger.
So, the boat show in the end was a success as far as us finding a boat. We even got to eat at the Skyway in Mansfield on the way home since the neighbors were watching the boys. It was great.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

 






Some photos of the frozen lake yesterday.

 

Here's a photo of the new fireplace insert. It looks great, I'm very happy with it. I'm not happy that we had to put it upstairs though instead of downstairs where I wanted it. Unfortunately, there is an issue with the flu downstairs and we won't be able to put an insert in there because the flu lining won't fit.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

 
Heading down to the lake tomorrow night to finish up the fireplace hearth before the fireplace guy comes on Thursday. Since there is no heat there, I'm hopeful that a) the electricity doesn't go out in the middle of the night and b) someone doesn't find my frozen body this weekend. I'll be fine in our bedroom with the heater and electric mattress pad and just have to hope that I don't have to get up in the middle of the night to use the john. Especially since its frozen right now.

 
Henry's first basketball practice tonight. The coach told me he was a really good shooter. I think he's the best one on the team, great dribbler, nice shot.

Monday, January 11, 2010

 
I'm happy to report everything was fine with my test today. I was out during it but it wasn't bad at all. The prep wasn't any fun though. I'm not even showing any ill effects, I feel fine.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

 
Mini ice age now? Great.

The mini ice age starts here
By David RoseLast updated at 11:17 AM on 10th January 2010
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The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.
Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in summer by 2013.
According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.

The scientists’ predictions also undermine the standard climate computer models, which assert that the warming of the Earth since 1900 has been driven solely by man-made greenhouse gas emissions and will continue as long as carbon dioxide levels rise.

More...
£150 to get frozen car back: Recovery firm tows away vehicles abandoned the night before, then charges drivers
They say that their research shows that much of the warming was caused by oceanic cycles when they were in a ‘warm mode’ as opposed to the present ‘cold mode’.
This challenge to the widespread view that the planet is on the brink of an irreversible catastrophe is all the greater because the scientists could never be described as global warming ‘deniers’ or sceptics.
However, both main British political parties continue to insist that the world is facing imminent disaster without drastic cuts in CO2.

This image of the UK taken from NASA's multi-national Terra satellite on Thursday shows the extent of the freezing weather
Last week, as Britain froze, Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband maintained in a parliamentary answer that the science of global warming was ‘settled’.
Among the most prominent of the scientists is Professor Mojib Latif, a leading member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has been pushing the issue of man-made global warming on to the international political agenda since it was formed 22 years ago.
Prof Latif, who leads a research team at the renowned Leibniz Institute at Germany’s Kiel University, has developed new methods for measuring ocean temperatures 3,000ft beneath the surface, where the cooling and warming cycles start.
He and his colleagues predicted the new cooling trend in a paper published in 2008 and warned of it again at an IPCC conference in Geneva last September.
Last night he told The Mail on Sunday: ‘A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles – perhaps as much as 50 per cent.
'They have now gone into reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer.
‘The extreme retreats that we have seen in glaciers and sea ice will come to a halt. For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.’
As Europe, Asia and North America froze last week, conventional wisdom insisted that this was merely a ‘blip’ of no long-term significance.
Though record lows were experienced as far south as Cuba, where the daily maximum on beaches normally used for winter bathing was just 4.5C, the BBC assured viewers that the big chill was merely short-term ‘weather’ that had nothing to do with ‘climate’, which was still warming.
The work of Prof Latif and the other scientists refutes that view.
On the one hand, it is true that the current freeze is the product of the ‘Arctic oscillation’ – a weather pattern that sees the development of huge ‘blocking’ areas of high pressure in northern latitudes, driving polar winds far to the south.
Meteorologists say that this is at its strongest for at least 60 years.
As a result, the jetstream – the high-altitude wind that circles the globe from west to east and normally pushes a series of wet but mild Atlantic lows across Britain – is currently running not over the English Channel but the Strait of Gibraltar.

A composite photograph released last year to highlight the issue of melting ice and global warming
However, according to Prof Latif and his colleagues, this in turn relates to much longer-term shifts – what are known as the Pacific and Atlantic ‘multi-decadal oscillations’ (MDOs).
For Europe, the crucial factor here is the temperature of the water in the middle of the North Atlantic, now several degrees below its average when the world was still warming.
But the effects are not confined to the Northern Hemisphere. Prof Anastasios Tsonis, head of the University of Wisconsin Atmospheric Sciences Group, has recently shown that these MDOs move together in a synchronised way across the globe, abruptly flipping the world’s climate from a ‘warm mode’ to a ‘cold mode’ and back again in 20 to 30-year cycles.
'They amount to massive rearrangements in the dominant patterns of the weather,’ he said yesterday, ‘and their shifts explain all the major changes in world temperatures during the 20th and 21st Centuries.
'We have such a change now and can therefore expect 20 or 30 years of cooler temperatures.’
Prof Tsonis said that the period from 1915 to 1940 saw a strong warm mode, reflected in rising temperatures.

Pictures of the snow in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, last week show the city is the coldest it has been since 1970
But from 1940 until the late Seventies, the last MDO cold-mode era, the world cooled, despite the fact that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continued to rise.
Many of the consequences of the recent warm mode were also observed 90 years ago.
For example, in 1922, the Washington Post reported that Greenland’s glaciers were fast disappearing, while Arctic seals were ‘finding the water too hot’.
It interviewed a Captain Martin Ingebrigsten, who had been sailing the eastern Arctic for 54 years: ‘He says that he first noted warmer conditions in 1918, and since that time it has gotten steadily warmer.
'Where formerly great masses of ice were found, there are now moraines, accumulations of earth and stones. At many points where glaciers formerly extended into the sea they have entirely disappeared.’
As a result, the shoals of fish that used to live in these waters had vanished, while the sea ice beyond the north coast of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean had melted.
Warm Gulf Stream water was still detectable within a few hundred miles of the Pole.In contrast, Prof Tsonis said, last week 56 per cent of the surface of the United States was covered by snow.
‘That hasn’t happened for several decades,’ he pointed out. ‘It just isn’t true to say this is a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while.’
He recalled that towards the end of the last cold mode, the world’s media were preoccupied by fears of freezing.
For example, in 1974, a Time magazine cover story predicted ‘Another Ice Age’, saying: ‘Man may be somewhat responsible – as a result of farming and fuel burning [which is] blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the Earth.’
Prof Tsonis said: ‘Perhaps we will see talk of an ice age again by the early 2030s, just as the MDOs shift once more and temperatures begin to rise.’
Like Prof Latif, Prof Tsonis is not a climate change ‘denier’. There is, he said, a measure of additional ‘background’ warming due to human activity and greenhouse gases that runs across the MDO cycles.
'This isn't just a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while'
But he added: ‘I do not believe in catastrophe theories. Man-made warming is balanced by the natural cycles, and I do not trust the computer models which state that if CO2 reaches a particular level then temperatures and sea levels will rise by a given amount.
'These models cannot be trusted to predict the weather for a week, yet they are running them to give readings for 100 years.’
Prof Tsonis said that when he published his work in the highly respected journal Geophysical Research Letters, he was deluged with ‘hate emails’.
He added: ‘People were accusing me of wanting to destroy the climate, yet all I’m interested in is the truth.’
He said he also received hate mail from climate change sceptics, accusing him of not going far enough to attack the theory of man-made warming.
The work of Profs Latif, Tsonis and their teams raises a crucial question: If some of the late 20th Century warming was caused not by carbon dioxide but by MDOs, then how much?
Tsonis did not give a figure; Latif suggested it could be anything between ten and 50 per cent.
Other critics of the warming orthodoxy say the role played by MDOs is even greater.
William Gray, emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University, said that while he believed there had been some background rise caused by greenhouse gases, the computer models used by advocates of man-made warming had hugely exaggerated their effect.

Dr David Viner stands by his claim that snow will become an 'increasingly rare event'
According to Prof Gray, these distort the way the atmosphere works. ‘Most of the rise in temperature from the Seventies to the Nineties was natural,’ he said. ‘Very little was down to CO2 – in my view, as little as five to ten per cent.’
But last week, die-hard warming advocates were refusing to admit that MDOs were having any impact.
In March 2000, Dr David Viner, then a member of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the body now being investigated over the notorious ‘Warmergate’ leaked emails, said that within a few years snowfall would become ‘a very rare and exciting event’ in Britain, and that ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is’.
Now the head of a British Council programme with an annual £10 million budget that raises awareness of global warming among young people abroad, Dr Viner last week said he still stood by that prediction: ‘We’ve had three weeks of relatively cold weather, and that doesn’t change anything.
'This winter is just a little cooler than average, and I still think that snow will become an increasingly rare event.’
The longer the cold spell lasts, the harder it may be to persuade the public of that assertion.Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1242011/DAVID-ROSE-The-mini-ice-age-starts-here.html#ixzz0cGJwjr9e

Saturday, January 09, 2010

 
Not feeling all that great right now about life. Boat show was a bit of a bust although we did find a great deal on a brand new 2007 boat. But there were only two dealers, it was mostly RVs, campers and bass boats.

The Bengals lost today. And now I'm getting ready to mix up my drink for my colonoscopy on Monday, which means I'll be drinking nasty stuff tomorrow and going the whole day without eating. I have no trepidation about the actual procedure but I'm not thrilled about the preparation.

If I wasn't getting that done on Monday I could probably go down to the lake and get the fireplace hearth ready for the new insert. Since that can't happen, I'm probably stuck with going down on Wednesday and then perhaps staying overnight, in a house that's probably as cold as it is outside. I'm not really sure that's an option so I'm not sure what I'm going to do. Add in the fact that I'm worried about the plumbing down there and its a wonder if I'll get any sleep. Speaking of sleep, there are two little boys in my bed right now because we watched a somewhat scary movie tonight. I'm going to blame it on Sarah although she's out; I think she thought this movie was okay for the boys.

I guess I still have my health. Well, let's get the results of the colonoscopy first before I say that.

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

 
Jack's first sports camp at the YMCA.

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

 


This was Christmas Eve dinner: lobster tails, filet mignon, salmon and lamb chops. Oh, and a couple hot dogs for good measure. It was delicious, I'm hungry just looking at it.

Monday, January 04, 2010

 
Okay, enough with the cold and snow.  I would say I'm ready for Florida but that doesn't look too much better right now. 
 
I'm a little concerned about the lakehouse because I don't think I weatherized it well enough because of my problems with the plumber.  Mike says the toilets are frozen even though there was anti-freeze in them.  That could cause cracks so I'll worry about that until the spring.  And the fireplace guy is supposed to come next week to install the new insert but I really doubt he's going to get up on our roof if its full of snow. 
 
I may go down on Friday and start building it out but then again, I'm really not sure what needs to be done before the insert guy comes down.  Lots of unanswered questions and most are revolving around this colder than normal weather. 

Saturday, January 02, 2010

 






















Friday, January 01, 2010

 
New Year's Eve. I'm not sure we should let the kids stay up until midnight but we do.

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