Thoughts

I took advantage of the most recent failure of my ailing iBook to replace it; so now I have a new iBook: 14", 1.33GHz, 768MB RAM, 60GB HDD, SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW). I'm not sure what I'll do with the old one, once I get around to having it repaired. What I do know is that I should have grabbed a Firewire cable while I was at the Apple store so that I could migrate the files from the old laptop to the new one. Oh well; maybe this afternoon.

I did a very stupid thing last night and didn't go to bed until almost 11 PM, which meant that not only did I not wake up early like I usually do, but I actually slept through my alarm for about five minutes. (Which is surprising, frankly, since apparently it was Crappy High-School Bands Hour on WHFS; you'd think the sheer badness would have woken me.) Tonight: sleep.

I've been seeing various election maps flying around, with states or counties colored in various shades of purple to denote how the voting skewed. Kevin Drum's map uses shades of purple if a single candidate received up to 70% of the vote in a county and pure red or blue if the respective candidate got more than 70% of the vote, but Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman, at the University of Michigan, do Kevin one better and rescale the map so that counties are sized based on population rather than geographic area. The results are interesting. (Minor caveat: Kevin says he's using solid colors for more than 70%, and Gastner, Shalizi, and Newman are apparently using solid colors, in the maps at the bottom of the page, for 70% or more. It doesn't skew things that much - if at all - but I thought I'd point it out.)

I keep thinking that temperatures are abnormally warm here, but I just thought about it and realized that we don't actually usually get our first snow until around Thanksgiving. So maybe the temperatures are right on track. There's still nothing quite as bracing as stepping out of a warm house on a pre-dawn November morning.

Speaking of pre-dawn, I was kicking myself the entire drive down to work this morning for not having a camera; the moon and what I believe were Jupiter and Venus were beautiful this morning, and the sky was crisp enough that there was almost no visual distortion. A few times I seriously thought about turning around and going home so I could take a few photographs.

I'm not sure I answered this correctly for letiwolf...

( Memery! No images, though. )

Augh.

Someone in the office is heating up spaghetti and garlic bread. (At this hour?) Good Lord, but it makes me hungry. Haven't had good spaghetti with tomato and meat sauce in too long. (Since kathornus was in town, I think.)

Currently loading music onto the new iBook from the three CDs I have handy - The Incredibles Original Score; Rufus Wainwright's eponymous album; and Assemblage 23, Storm. Sometime today I'll start copying music from my work computer to the iBook (which I'm going to have to do via CD, unfortunately).

And now for something completely different: Man, 43, arrested for kicking boy, 5

When I arrived, I spoke with the mother of the child and she told me that while her son was standing in line for one of the rides, that he was sitting on a chain fence swinging back and forth.

VI had lost his balance and accidentally kicked another man in line, later identified as AR. At which time the man turned around to the kid and was very upset.

Then the man said to the child, "Why did you kick me. Come on, kick me again." At which time the child did. The man then kicked the child in the right leg around the shin. Then the man said, "I dare you to kick me again." So the child did. The man then kicked the child in the right leg again.

Conjunction junction

I might not have managed to get photos of the moon-Jupiter-Venus near-conjunction this morning, but canyoncat did.