Yekrats.com: Scotto’s Seafud Shanty

Well, folks… I finally made the plunge. I am now “officially” an Esperantist. I just joined Esperanto-USA, which is the national Esperanto club. I did it mostly because this year’s national Esperanto convention will be within driving distance: St. Louis. I’ve been wanting to go to an E-o convention for - well - the last 10 years since I’ve started doing Esperanto.

I’m a bit nervous about it. I’ll probably do just fine, but I’ve never had the chance to speak the language before. Most of my interactions in the language are eyeball-to-keyboard. I can express myself now without going to a dictionary. However, when I listen to verbal Esperanto, I listen with difficulty because I haven’t yet trained that part of my brain much. (Sometimes I hear a word in a podcast and think, “Oh, that’s how that word is pronounced!” which is really stupid, because the pronunciation in Esperanto is exactly how the word looks. I’ve just never spoken or heard the word being pronounced, so the hearing/translating part of my brain is encountering it for the first time.

I’ve been fiddling around with Google’s Gmail swanky features.

Firstly, I added a Ninja theme. I thought it was weird that it asked me my city where I lived (not my state). It made me wonder that there was some law against ninja themes or something.

I am now importing my emails from yekrats.com into gmail, and letting it deal with the spam. My Yekrats account gets a LOT of spam, and I was filtering it out with a whitelist and a Boxspammer program which sent an email to people that were not on the whitelist, inviting them to respond to get on the whitelist. The problem is, not everyone responded to that, and ended up being filtered out. With my business, that was bad. Gmail’s spam filtering is as good as Spamcop, which I paid for a few years ago.

C had been using Gmail’s colored labelling system for many months now, and I had her show me how to do it. Now I have bright colorful categories for many of my emails. I did one better, though. I found Gmail’s “filtering” system, which allows me to tag emails as they come in based on certain criteria. So everything Dogtown-related gets a special tag, and so on.

Since going to Vegas last month, I’ve kinda got a renewed interest in magic. (Illusion, sleight-of-hand, etc.) Vegas is a Mecca of magic, and I visited a real magic store. (I didn’t get a chance to see a magic show I was planning to see because I was strung out and a little sickly.)

Since then I’ve (re)tought myself the “Twisting the Aces” trick knowing a few sleights from my “Purdue Magic Club” days. I’m also working on a “Three Fly” routine (also called “Coins Across”) which makes coins magically travel from one hand to another. It requires some tricky finger gyrations that my hands are not used to doing. So that’s taking a lot of practice to learn a new motor skill.

I needed to upgrade my WordPress to version 2.7, so I thought I might as well update the theme of my blog. I’ve never done that before! I found out it’s pretty easy in WP, but you need to download the file, and upload it to a special directory, and Voila!

I’ve been accused of having a boring blog, but I don’t think this helps much.

This past week I switched my Masonic affiliation from my childhood city of Hillsboro to my local city of Dayton. It was a difference between driving nearly an hour to go to a lodge meeting, and going three (small city) blocks, which I could usually walk.

(Please note that if you are a good buddy of mine and gave me a good recommendation, thank you. I never expected them to call on my references, but I guess they might have. I heard that “two of my references were called.” I’m sorry for any inconvenience. Those guys were thorough, I guess.)

This is and was a very painful decision for me. Hillsboro was the lodge that I “grew up” in. I was Master of the lodge in Hillsboro three times over the past 8 years, and I really learned a lot, mostly under the tutelage of my father-in-law, who is also a member there. I was also a member with at least two of my former scoutmasters, who saw me through to my Eagle Scout award.

I was a dedicated member, and all those miles were really adding up. We had 12 regular meetings a year, then add in an inspection/audit/instructional lodge meeting, plus the Fountain County-wide all-day ceremony, plus a few extra meetings to induct new members — well, it all really added up. Even more frustrating was the fact that (though I hate to admit it) my former lodge was moribund. Every once in a while I went to a meeting, and a quorum of 7 members was not able to be reached, and no meeting was able to be conducted. I drove an hour to show up, but the regular members who were local could not? (sigh) During this summer, I figured that I was paying about $15 per month on gas to show up to a meeting which sometimes didn’t occur.

All of those are great reasons, but I know that without me, it’s going to be even harder for them to make a quorum. So, I feel guilty for having to leave. But guilt was not a good enough reason to keep me there.

Hey folks.

I’m sorry about the long bit of nothing coming out of this blog. I’ve been surprisingly busy lately. You know how time just gets away from you?

In November I took a business trip to Vegas for more training. I had a bit of fun, but not too much. I learned that all casinos that I’ve been to seem to have a smell. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first: Sweet, but not tobacco or purfume, because I smell that too. Then I finally figured it out: whiskey. (I ordered an Irish whiskey from an authentic Irish bar which had been shipped over brick by brick, and then it hit me what the smell was. Also in Vegas I got to see the Dancing Waters of the Belaggio, and paid a visit to a magic store, and made a return visit to the Pinball Hall of Fame museum.  I noted that the casino-hotel I stayed at seemed strangely dead and quiet. Maybe it’s the economy.

I’ve also been wasting some free time playing a game on Brettspielwelt (German Internet board game site). I’ve been playing a lot of “Dominion” which has a really nice interface. I played it at Gencon, and thought it was OK, but playing on-line (having the computer take care of the counting and shuffling) really kicks it up a notch.

I’ve also got some biggie art projects for Protospiel geeks which has been taking up much of my free blogging time in mornings. But I think that is coming to an end nearing the end of the year. Ahhh, more time to loaf and blog.

Folks, I’m cautiously optimistic about Senator Obama’s chances coming up at the November 4 election. If you’re out there reading this, I ask you to get out and vote. (And if you also support Obama, I ask you to vote early, if you can in your state.)

During the past few weeks, I’ve racked up a few hours doing phone-banking for the Obama campaign, because the thought of a McCain/Palin presidency is almost unfathomable for me. If you press me for details outside of this blog, I’ll gladly share a few.

I did see where the Big Ten Poll puts Obama with a substantial lead in Indiana today, as well as all of the Big-Ten states. (Although I possibly regard it as an outlier.)

However, if you want the top-notch super-duper MUTHUH OF ALL POLLING SITES, then I suggest you pay a visit to http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/. The proprietor of the site (Nate Silver) is a statistician who created an algorithm to predict baseball games to a high degree of accuracy by plugging in the stats into his computerized election simulation program, which he calls “the model”. It’s funny because he anthropomorphizes the model, speculating what it thinks, and sometimes wonders why it’s giving the answers it does.

So, this past year, he’s reprogrammed the baseball simulation and done the same with the political stats (the polls) and predicted the primaries, and presumably the national election, to a high degree of accuracy.  In the primaries, for example, he correctly predicted that Indiana would be too close to call. He takes the percentage chance of winning each state, and then runs 10000 simulations of the country voting every day to guess what the outcome will be. Right now he has Senator Obama winning in 93.5% of the simulations. He also rates the different polls as to their past accuracy and their sample size, to give us non-statisticians some idea which polls are bunk and which are good, and why. (For example, he openly mocks the right-leaning Drudge Report who front-paged a poll showing a 51%-49% narrow Obama lead in a Nickalodeon Kids’ poll.)

This past week, I’ve been playing Mr. Mom as my wife gets a much-deserved vacation. She’s been gone for a little less than a week, but gets back tonight. I’m glad she takes little vacations like this, because it puts things in perspective, and gives me new appreciation for everything my wife does around this place!

As George Bush might say, “It’s HARD WORK!” I do indeed love my kids, don’t get me wrong. I also start out the day with great aspirations, before I know it, it’s after 3:00 and the kids are home, and then it’s crazy time: shuttling kids to evening events, making dinner, cleaning, organizing homework, showers, and bed!

I keep dreading a situation like the last scene in the Cat in the Hat, where the Cat (plus Thing 1 and Thing 2) completely trashes the place, but then the Cat has a special machine to put everything away quickly. (As the Cat, I forgot to find one of those machines last time I was at the store.)

So, I’m newly appreciative of my dear wife, and I’m looking forward to seeing her again this evening!

Despite it being one of my categories, I don’t like going political in my blog. I’ve noticed that there are two things can really get under people’s skin even talking about disagreements, and one of them is politics. (The other being religion.) So if you disagree with this, I apologize in advance. However, I think it’s important that I let my friends know what I’m doing and the reasons I’m doing them.

That being said, I was really dismayed at McCain selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate. Is a former Miss Congeniality/small-time mayor/18-month governor really the most qualified person for the VP job? Would she have been offered the job if she was a man? I highly doubt it. Furthermore, if she’s refusing interviews with the press, is she ready to do her primary duty: to take over for the president if he chokes on a pretzel on day 1?

I was so annoyed at the selection, I decided to volunteer for the Obama/Biden phone bank. Yes, last week I went to the Obama headquarters and called Lafayette residents on their behalf. I plan on continuing to volunteer until the election.

Indiana is close this year. The last poll has Indiana within 2 percentage points of McCain. The current electoral map shows the Obama/Biden ticket with 260 electoral votes with leaners. So, it might just take one little bump to make a significant difference. If I help a little, Indiana’s 11 electoral votes might make the difference.

I encourage everyone to decide on the issues that are important to them, and then look at the sites of the candidates to see how they match up to those issues. I did. Look at the issues page of both candidates. You might think that’s a wise idea for any voter to look over the issues, but not according to the McCain campaign manager, who said the election is “not about issues.”

I think McCain’s selection of Palin, who he only met once and looked at her background only cursorly, show that McCain shoots from the hip. However unqualified Palin is, the fact that McCain made that pandering decision, shows an even greater flaw with him.

I had been trying to achieve the goal of 100 push-ups, as suggested by HundredPushups.com. Well, I did have the question whether I’ve kept up with the push-up routine. The answer, “Yes and no.”

Between Week 2 and Week 3, the site asks you to do as many as you can and do as a test. Unfortunately, the minimum number for ranking is 16. I could do only 10 maximum at the time. So what to do? Well, the site is not exactly clear about that. It says to repeat the weak that you’re having problems with, which is significantly less than 16 pushups at a time. (Fact is, I still can’t do 16 push-ups.)

That being said, I’ve kinda invented my own 3-times-a-week routine. I’ve done a number of pushups, taking from where Week two left off, and gradually increasing it. I am getting stronger, and can now do 15 pushups in a stretch. Right now I’m doing about 5 sets of 10.

The way I figure, if I can do 5 sets of 20, that’s 100. Then I would just need to decrease my rest times in between sets, and that’s 100, right? I think doing 100 pushups is possible for me, but just not within the 6-week window that the site suggested.