barnson.org Half-baked opinions, served lukewarm.

I have been using MythTV for several years at home. My family loves the DVR; it's easy-to-use, mostly bug-free, and has allowed us to enjoy television at our leisure rather than at the broadcaster's schedule.

Ben posted an interesting link on Facebook to a NY Times editorial piece: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24sun4.html?_r=1&ref=to...

Basically, roughly 60% of the deficit from 2001 on was caused by Bush's tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan/Iraq. The rest is the stimulus, TARP, medicare-drug relief, and non-defense discretionary spending.

I now have two teenage children. As most parents of teens can attest, this is often a cause for introspection. Therefore, without further ado, here's a list of things I wished I'd known when I was a teenager.

A man named Tom Ball burned himself alive on the courthouse steps in Keene County, NH. on Thursday morning.
This guy was not a complete loony, He was actually a very reasonable man put into an unreasonable situation,

Yet another interesting article with relatively reliable citations crept up.
http://collapsetheblog.typepad.com/blog/2011/06/biological-determinism-a...
It presents an interesting parallel between how well you process glucose and self-control. When researching ways to maintain stable glucose levels. I constantly kept coming across the same information:

Some guys over on the spearhead have an interesting article on Why men are not getting married anymore.
http://www.the-spearhead.com/2011/05/27/comment-of-the-week-why-men-are-...
There's a couple of cuss words, but on the whole it makes a lot of sense.

In years past we've kicked off summer by scribing our armchair methods for saving gas. Now that 100% of us remaining Barnsonites are child-rearing, Republican-fearing, SUV-wheeling road warriors, please allow me to inaugurate the 2011 summer season with a friendly list of ways to save on gas.

http://tinyurl.com/43eweet

So I have a guy who's the IT resource in our DC office. That office has a manager who's bristling at our deployment of Sharepoint, but it's also has basic internet connectivity issues that the ISP, the LEC, and we've gone around and around on.

I've been using Python for a few years, but mostly for extremely simple and short stuff. By and large, truly, I've mainly just referenced someone else's libraries in Python to do something that I couldn't do easily in Bash.

Tonight, i wrote the following essay for my entrance assessment to Western Governors University. I hope you might find it informative and entertaining. It was fun to write!