April 3, 2005

Spring ahead. Man I hate daylight savings time. I think that that is the dumbest thing in the world. What idiot ever thought of that? Okay, I looked it up and it was Benjamin Franklin. We didn’t implement the ruling until 1966, however, when we enacted the Uniform Time Act. This act didn’t actually force us to change the clocks, it just required that people be uniform about whatever they do. Now if that isn’t confusing. Usually I think that old Ben Franklin is a pretty bright guy, but has no one ever noticed that the effects of Daylight Savings Time would simply be redundant if people did things at a logical time of day anyway? All we are doing is making idiots more likely to do things at a certain time because the television schedule changes. I wouldn’t be surprised if the US government didn’t make some deal with big broadcast media conglomerates to be sure that they were going to honor DST. If I owned Time Warner or Cox Cable, let me tell you, I would keep the schedule rock steady all year long and let the world try to change around me. Maybe I would move all of the programming to a more logical time if that is the real issue. But I wouldn’t go changing it forward and back every six months like a looney. Apparently, the purpose of the whole deal (as originally stated by old BF himself and reiterated later by the feds) is that DST is used to reduce the total electricity consumed by 1%. Okay. So what they are saying is that the time of day that people choose to do certain activities is inappropriate but since Americans are generally idiots, they can just shift the official clocks and we will shift right along with them and solve the issues. Seems to me that the real issue here is a poor education system if people are having that much of a problem doing activities during daylight if that is what they really prefer. Me, I prefer to do a lot of work at night. I also prefer, most of the time, not to have a whole bunch of extra lights on for no reason. And just to save electricity, I make sure that all of my house lights are florescent (of course, then they are full of mercury – I guess we can’t win, can we?) If we were just teaching our kids how to use less power or how to do activities at logical times, none of this would be necessary at all. But since schools HAVE to run on a certain schedule (classes begin at 7:45am) we figure that we can just set our clocks to make 7:45 at the most convenient “time” and the education system will never figure out what hit it. Now teachers are teaching home room at what is actually 8:45 but apparently, they don’t realize that. And all of those businesses that keep making people come to work too early – they will never notice that the overseas contacts that they are trying to call are not available when they used to be. No, that doesn’t have an impact on anyone. Hello Mr. Congressman, we live in a global economy, we work with people from all over the world. DST makes us look like idiots. I have tried to explain DST to a friend in Singapore and she honestly thought I was off my rocker. She couldn’t believe that our country would be so backward. It is amazing that we use time zones at all, really. Why not run the whole world on GMT and have everyone know what everyone else is talking about all of the time. Sure there are downsides, but not many. Most everything would be REALLY straightforward – all of the time.

Tony went with Min and I to church this morning. It was his first time going down to LaGrange. He seem to have a good time and enjoy the service. Pastor Dan wasn’t speaking today. That has happened to us almost every time that someone comes with us to visit the church. I think that our friends all think that we make him up.

As we were leaving church, Dave Marsh stopped me and told me that he had been doing a search on the web for information about finding a good Indian restaurant in Rochester. In doing his search he found, you guessed it, Sheep Guarding Llama! He read the site for a little while because it was SO interesting (I am paraphrasing there) and eventually figured out that he knew who I was. How funny is that. Imagine how many people must read this site and not know who I am. There must be millions of people reading SGL. Okay, but over a hundred at least.

After church was lunch in Perry. No surprises there. Then Min was off to work and Tony took some more tests. I did some reading and Andy worked on his video game engine some more. Only four more weeks until he is done with work.

Tony hung around for a little while this afternoon taking more tests. Eventually I ran out of reading to do and set up a computer to do a test myself. Might as well take advantage of the quiet in the house. After my test I ran Tony home to Avon. He has school tomorrow. I stopped at Walmart on the way home and picked up Mulholland Falls, Once Upon A Time in the West, Roxanne and Closer which just released with Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Jude Law and Clive Owen. I have been wanting to see that.

Like all Sunday evenings, I reclused to me office to get some “me” time. I did some catching up no the blog(s) since the earlier part of the weekend is always rough. Earlier I had discovered what I thought might have been a mouse dropping in the other room. “Oh great” I thought. “Just what I need.” But it wasn’t enough to convince me that that was what it was. Every so often I think that I might see something or hear something moving in the basement but I always manage to convince myself that it is just my imagination. Well, tonight, while sitting quietly and writing the daily, some animal in the piles on the other side of the office decided to move stuff around. Maybe it is a mouse. I hope that it is a mouse. It made so much noise that I am afraid that it could be something larger. It was a lot of noise. Not like a raccoon or anything. But maybe a rat. The dropping really was tiny, though, much smaller than a hamster dropping. I guess that it is time to put out the mouse cubes again. I hope that this eventually comes to an end. Of course, I was supposed to have put cement into the holes around the house and didn’t do that. So that is going to be one of my tasks the moment that the weather is remotely warm again.

Well, I put out two mouse cubes tonight with peanut butter on crackers in them. Hopefully the mice will go for them right away. Hopefully they will be little cute mice like before and not huge rats that don’t fit into the cubes. That would be bad.

I wasn’t tired at all tonight so I decided to try my hand at the Brainbench VB.NET certification. Andy is ranked No. 2 in New York on that one and Tony had given it a shot yesterday. Having never written anything more than a simple Hello World in VB.NET and only having used VB6 a tiny bit some five or six years ago, I figured that I would have a pretty tough time with this one. It was really hard but I passed with a 3.24. Not bad for my first time going after that exam. I ranked number 28 in New York.

I really must not have been tired because at 4:00 in the morning I was still playing with the hamster. And dad is coming at 8:00 for breakfast. Min actually signed off at work and I was still up. Around 5:30 I decided that I wasn’t going to get the chance to get any sleep and since I would be working the overnight (presumably) in two nights, I might as well stay up all night and be able to sleep in with Min in the morning. That seemed like a plan.

Aroung a quarter till six I decided to take another Brainbench to keep myself awake. There can only be so many worth taking so I figure that I will get as many out of the way as possible. There are a bunch of really dumb ones that I have to take because they are part of the bigger job roles. Things like spelling, vocabulary and written English. I decided to try the .Net Framework exam. That one was pretty tough. And I had an especially hard time taking it because I kept nodding off while I was taking it. I fell asleep completely at least twice but luckily woke up quickly enough to be able to answer the questions. I made number 31 in New York. Of course, it is a really weird test to ranked on but at least I am on the list.

I am afraid that I am getting a little bit delirious at this point in the morning and I am probably not making very much sense. I have been up for almost twenty-four hours at this point. Of course, Min does this every week and I am starting to do it on Wednesday nights now and will be doing it more soon – but still. Well, it is 7:00am. Anything that happens after this point should be considered tomorrow anyway. The sun is up and streaming into my basement office. I might as well go upstairs and get my shower out of the way so that Andy can take his later and have hot water.

Good morning, everyone!

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