Rainbow Six

Pirates rock, but Navy Seals killing Somali pirates rocks even more. Congrats on a successful intervention! If I could only make that shot from that distance on rough seas, I would have beaten Rainbow Six long ago.

Work and pleasure

I am currently teaching a graduate class on research methods. While I should be grading one of their assignments, I have chosen instead to do some preparatory work for a future class on internet surveys. I decided to create a survey not on anything relevant, but rather, on a subject of my own interest. You will have to guess what question is important to me. If you would like to take the survey and help me pretest it, I would appreciate your help. It is an anonymous survey that has not gone through human subject approval, and the results will not be made public.Click Here to take the survey

Please make any suggestions on how to improve the survey as comments here.

Pirate quote

I have never been a big fan of Hilary Clinton... Bill maybe, but not Hilary. But I do love piracy (a long story for another post). Hilary finally said something worth quoting "we think the world must come together to end the scourge of piracy." It would have only been better if she would have said "methinks the world must join together in the scourge of piracy" with a pirate accent.

Facebook migration post

Since not all of my readers (the millions of you) are my facebook friends, I decided to migrate this post to my blog. Initially I had intended to place it here, but I got lazy and posted it there. Blogging is much better than using facebook, but most sites have facebook links readily available.

The narcotraficantes are seemingly running roughshod over the Mexican police. Earlier in the year, there were reports that Mexico was on the verge of collapse and the USA might have to rescue the government in order to preserve peace. I thought that it might be opportunism on our part to be able to literally control 75% of North America. "If you read through the article, it says that these assault rifles come in part from Los Angeles and San Francisco... two cities where it is already illegal to purchase these weapons. You can't trace the legal sale of these guns back to California when it is illegal to sell them there. I can see them coming from Arizona and Texas where gun laws are lax, but you can't say that more laws are needed to control cross border flow of assault rifles if the guns are coming from states where it is illegal to purchase them." How do you track illegally purchased guns? If you can track them, why not stop them?

Wild words

Occasionally, I hear the English language butchered by people who should know better. Yesterday it was a wild old lady who introduced me to "stababilities." It has to do with stability and ability, but I am not sure how. She wasn't clear about that.

8 days a week

The last 8 days in review (more like 10 days, but a nod to the Beatles could never hurt).

I flew to Vancouver B.C. for the Western Political Science Association meetings. I met few people that I have wanted to meet for some time, and I learned a lot about myself. Mostly that I have great research projects and little writing prowess. I plan on fixing that.


I had a scheduled dentist appointment to fix a tooth with an onlay. A simple procedure to drill the decay out of your tooth and replace the lost material with a durable cnc-ed machined piece of porcelain. It hurt later that day, but I figured it was not big deal. I took some advil.


We have had some problems with our DVD player in the Volvo, so I took it to work on wednesday. I dropped it off at the shop and caught a ride to school. I taught my wednesday classes in a little pain. We had planned on going camping in O.C. so I stayed at work until I had to recover the car. At some point during the day I called me wife and told her I needed pain meds, badly. I rushed back to and from the dealership and then on to pick up camping supplies and meet my family. Camping was fun. I would have never guessed that we were in a heavily populated area of O.C. (O'Neil regional park).

During our camping trip I called the dentist about my pain. He said, "you probably need a root canal." GREAT! Friday I canceled classes and went in for a root canal. They couldn't get it all done, so I am scheduled to return for another round. Hurray!

Saturady, in an early morning effort to quiet our loud toilet, me wife accidentally broke the overflow tube. This left us to one bathroom for the weekend. Not a big thing, but I have to take advantage of any opportunity to put a picture of a toilet on my blog.

Saturday was full of the Riverside Air Show. My favorite was the A-10. We watched the afternoon portion from my front lawn.

Sunday was the normal routine. I got to take a nap, which is not normal. I decided to try superglue on the overflow tube. It worked. The toilet was back in business.

Today is monday. I am at the Volvo dealership getting the DVD player fixed.

It should only take 3 hours. I have a laptop and internet access. Why not blog?

Simple yet effective

This is a very nice, short explanation of the credit crisis. It is probably oversimplified, but very effective.


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.