Weekender []
Well, its the weekend. We’ve battles the squirrels once so far, and the scratching seems to have stopped, which I take as a victory. I don’t think they’ve settled on moving into the attic for sure just yet, so we stand a chance of keeping them at bay for a while I think. On Friday I went to Kennedy’s Stamps again. I picked up a 1935 Scott’s album, partially filled, for $40. I figured it was a good price, given 99% of the stamps were stuck in in the mid to late 30’s. Sure enough, my 2004/2005 Scott guides agree – the first half dozen stamps I looked up added up to more than the value I paid for the book. Definitely a good find 
Today’s wrap up covers yesterday and today, i.e. the weekend. Seems like a lot of my feed sources die down during the weekend, hence the low number of things to write about. Or on the weekend I’m less interested in stuff, either way. Last week was fun starting the day off with the round up, and it sure beats how I used to keep track of interesting feeds.
- Over on Epublishers Weekly, they are listing the 30 best reasons to use ebooks. Personally, I’m not convinced – when reading, nothing beats the feel of that compact tome of knowledge in your hand. Ebook readers just aren’t there yet – at least not for me. But I’m smelling a trend, because SciFi publisher Tor has launched “Watch the Skies,” a sign-up to receive free electronic copies of some of their books. I know at least one of the titles coming up, and its neither old nor bad, so this might be a good way to get some reading done, or at least expand your purchasing list (if Tor publishes the kind of books you’d like, and you know if they do or not).
- It’s only appropriate that Art of Manliness has a post on How to Shave Like Your Grandpa, what with men.msn running a story on the return of the mustache (Anyone else notice that there is a men.msn.com, but women.msn.com takes you to lifestyle.msn.com? Meh.)
- Knowing some python heads in my time, this article on “How not to write Python code” was nicely cheeky.
- It’s usually a bit depressing to see what the US is number one in the world for, so it was kind of nice to stumble on this chart of countries ordered by beer consumption per capita and realize we only ranked 14 – yay us! Of course, as some will know, I don’t drink beer, not after the tragic incident with the two llamas…well, ok, truth is I can’t stand the taste, and I have no moral or ethical objection to its consumption, but the llama story sounds better when you’re trying to be all manly and what not.
- Modern Mechanix has a great article from February, 1934, France, where the world’s greatest underground fortifications were being built. Alas, if the Nazi’s had only held to WWI or earlier tactics, agreed on a proper time and place for the battlefields, and obeyed the rules of chivalry. Ironically, on the same page there is an article about German rockets being tested. Oh, the irony of it all.
I wish I had more inciteful posts to share. Something about the petition to ban Blair as EU President? Nah. Guess it was kind of a slow weekend.
Michael is happily married and the proud father of three girls. He acknowledges that that means that as soon as they hit their teens, the bathroom will be lost forever and his hypertension will go through the roof as he hunts down a shotgun. In the meantime, he enjoys tinkering with Linux (former Gentoo dev, w00t), fixing his frankenparts PC, and attempting to write stories that are worthy of reading (a ways to go on that one). Its nice to have aspirations at least :)
