Fodder for my Tank Abbott: Birthday Clown screenplay!
Heh. I have often thought fondly of our childhood/teenage pool parties, which inevitably turned into Extreme Water Polo. Well into adulthood, I took for granted that everyone got out of the pool after a game of water polo with bleeding claw marks all over their bodies. (We played can't-touch-bottom, no-holds-barred.)
Do they need a trophy for the winners?
They're playing Wii now, which seems safer. Newt has retreated to his room as a defensible position.
Did Sally invite Megan? Keep an eye on your couches.
I have a couple of extra teenagers here tonight, as they're going to see Glee Live tomorrow. Their evening has been spent making cakes and Born This Way T-shirts.
And Happy Birthday Sally! I look forward to the cake photo.
She's actually not twelve for a month yet, but it's hard having a party in the middle of the summer.
Keep an eye on your couches.
"Throw pillows? DON'T MIND IF I DO!"
This reminds me that my sisters and I used to spend hours playing rock-paper-scissors-with-torture. The loser or losers got smacked (with two fingers only)on the inner arm.
Fucking birthday parties. Thing 2 is at this moment in the emergency room after a mishap on the uneven bars at a party at a children's gym this afternoon. At the second of their own parties back in February, the dishwasher caught fire. Commemoration of another year of their lives is shaving several off mine.
When the second gets hurt, something's gone very wrong with the duel.
For real, I hope everything's okay.
Lego fights are safe hospitalization-wise, if you have rules about how many pieces you can stick together and nobody tries to make a blow gun and then gets careless about inhaling.
Stories like this make me realize what a sedate childhood I had. If I had kids, I'd probably be a very negligent parent, and my kids would die in a fiery dishwasher accident.
We were very lucky that our regular gymnastics tournament (what with its highlight being the trampoline-aided vault directly at the sliding glass door) never resulted in emergency room treatment. And we used to have lots of fun spinning each other around in the dryer, which my mother only discovered over a decade afterwards when she wondered why the door was so loose and the barrel so off-kilter.
My best wishes to Jesus's offspring!
16: The dryer lasted ten years after that?
My brother (five years younger) and I just beat each other up from time to time once he was 10 or so and I was 15. Or, we tried to.
May Jesus's second come out of the uneven bars okay.
And everyone has now gone home, barring a couple of old friends sleeping over. Pleasant children, but raucous when taken as a group.
Happy birthday to the baby lizards and Christs.
17.--At least technically. Ours was a frugal (read: cheapsake) household.
The most raucous thing I remember doing was ordering pizzas to the neighbor's house, which was hilarious, plus, then, we got pizza, because my friend's dad was in on the joke and wandered over to save the pizza guy and pay for the pizzas (with a handsome tip, I hope) after the initial awkward moment at the door with the neighbor. Though, actually, now that I think about it, the neighbor was probably in on the joke, too. So, really, we were just being mean to the pizza guy.
What a buncha little jerks we were.
This reminds me that my sisters and I used to spend hours playing rock-paper-scissors-with-torture. The loser or losers got smacked (with two fingers only)on the inner arm.
In school we used to play Thief, Cop, Judge, Executioner: you write each of those roles down on a piece of paper and then hand them out to four people. The cop has to announce who he is, and then has to guess who the thief is. If he guesses right, the thief is punished, and if not, then he is. The Judge decides how much the punishment is, in number of two-finger-inner-arm smacks, and Executioner executes. Then you shuffle and redeal.
This reminds me that my sisters and I used to spend hours playing rock-paper-scissors-with-torture. The loser or losers got smacked (with two fingers only)on the inner arm.
At school we used to play Thief, Cop, Judge, Executioner: you write each of those roles down on a piece of paper and then hand them out to four people. The cop has to announce who he is, and then has to guess who the thief is. If he guesses right, the thief is punished, and if not, then he is. The Judge decides how much the punishment is, in number of two-finger-inner-arm smacks, and Executioner executes. Then you shuffle and redeal.
This reminds me that my sisters and I used to spend hours playing rock-paper-scissors-with-torture.
I knew Bad Machinery was a documentary.
I knew Bad Machinery was a documentary.
WASH FOX!
Update: they performed a cashectomy on my wallet and told Thing 2 to take some painkillers. She's fine. Thanks for the good wishes.
I put this here because hey: this American exceptionalism is frightening.
A post from elsewhere quoting the NYT explaining that:
One high-definition DVR and one high-definition cable box use an average of 446 kilowatt hours a year, about 10 percent more than a 21-cubic-foot energy-efficient refrigerator, a recent study found.
These set-top boxes are energy hogs mostly because their drives, tuners and other components are generally running full tilt, or nearly so, 24 hours a day, even when not in active use.
What's that you say? They're constantly on?
Did you know ALL THE ELECTRICITY is used by printers left on overnight?
Sounds like bullshit. We had this drivel fest about standby appliances a few years ago in the UK.
Evidently, though, DVR boxes don't actually go on "standby" in any meaningful sense.
Nothing hooked to a TV is meaningful.
It all leak out of the sockets that don't have plugs in them.
That would explain the higher electric bills. I'll have to throw the power strip's switch at night.
The annoying thing is, functionally having on-demand streaming of previously-aired TV shows to my TV screen would be equivalent to having a DVR. I don't really need to have the shows stored on a drive in my own apartment. But I don't really know a good currently-available option at a comparable price that replaces the DVR with something that streams.
They've been $10 month higher and I was blaming the fridge, but we did just get a DVR box.
30: Alex, did you read the linked NYT article?
It's bullshit. PVRs do go on standby. Also, I have one of those electricity monitors, that real-time monitors kWh usage, and all of my things on standby use about 1/4 the power of a single halogen bulb.
The NYT article pointed out that European DVR boxes have standby features built in that the US ones lack.
Read the article! It refers to European and British products that do go into standby mode, and says that many/most American manufacturers decline to take up the offer.
Americans don't have a standby mode, laydeez.
I should probably get one of those electricity monitors, but I'm kind of afraid that the monitors will turn out to be made from baby seal hearts and to use enough electricity to light PNC Park.
Ah, OK. Stupid then, that they don't. The standby hysteria here was completely overplayed, though, as Alex says. Once I realised how little my stuff uses, I stopped worrying. Much easier ways to save that piddling amount of energy.
I still find it hard to believe PVR HDs run all the time. Piss-poor.
44.last: Pathetic, yes, that we apparently can't get our shit together in the US over something like this.
I still find it hard to believe PVR HDs run all the time. Piss-poor.
Cable companies don't pay your power bills, so they don't care, and most consumers don't know, so what's the motivation?
I gather the software design is no better than the hardware design.
Not just the energy saving aspect. PVR drives are noisy. I hear mine firing up. If it ran all the time It'd drive you crazy. Listening to quiet music or reading a book with constant disk whine in the background, no thanks.
My TV when you put it in stand by waits about 5 minutes then shuts off into an ultra low power standby mode that only uses tiny fractions of a watt more than when it is hard powered off.
33: It all leak out of the sockets that don't have plugs in them.
From Thurber's "The Car We Had to Push"
She came naturally by her confused and groundless fears, for her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house. It leaked, she contended, out of empty sockets if the wall switch had been left on. She would go around screwing in bulbs, and if they lighted up she would hastily and fearfully turn off the wall switch and go back to her Pearson's or Everybody's, happy in the satisfaction that she had stopped not only a costly but a dangerous leakage. Nothing could ever clear this up for her.
I think that was already quoted on Standpipe's blog.
I still find it hard to believe PVR HDs run all the time. Piss-poor.
Presumably it's for the "rewind the last 30 minutes of live TV feature" or equivalent. If they're not in standby, or have the feature manually switched off, they're going to be constantly recording whichever channel they're tuned to.
re: 50
Yeah, I suppose that's it. You have to actively choose to pause live TV with mine, so the HD only fires up when you do so.
GY, you around on Thursday? [as per the London meet-up thread, which is currently off the front-page]
One high-definition DVR and one high-definition cable box use an average of 446 kilowatt hours a year, about 10 percent more than a 21-cubic-foot energy-efficient refrigerator, a recent study found
I still think that this is telling you more about the extremely high quality of modern energy-efficient fridges than it is about DVRs. One of these things is basically spinning a wheel and heating a chipset. The other is trying to freeze water by compressing gas. Even if it's constantly running and has no standby mode at all, I don't see how a hard disk drive can use more power than a 21 cubic foot fridge.
Although I suppose if you had a really stupidly designed fridge that opened and shut itself every five minutes, it would have much higher energy consumption. Is this what's going on in the comparison?
I know from our electricity monitor that my PC on standby, UPS, hi-fi pre-amp and tuner,* PVR, DVD player, TV, timers for hot-water, chargers for our land-line and mobile phones, the wifi/ethernet router, my wife's laptop, and the fridge freezer, all combined, use approximately 150watts per hour. Which is what, a little over 1300kw/h per year? I'd guess that the fridge-freezer is a significant part of that as ours is old and not very energy efficient. The PVR, TV and DVD player, all of which have efficient standy modes, are basically noise in that 150watts per hour. Powering them off at the plug makes virtually no difference. That's 1300kw/h a year, which isn't negligible, but hard-powering off the devices that can be would make very little different to the total.
* which are designed to run in standby, but are old and aren't, I don't think, very efficient. They (intentionally) stay warm all the time.
52: Yeah, I should be available. What's the venue?
re: 56
Don't think it's been decided yet. Charlie, iirc, had a suggestion and tierce has been canvasing for venues handy for Central Line [which also suits me].
It all leaks out of the sockets that don't have plugs in them
Poison Sockets!
I would come to a London meetup five years ago.
Thurber taught me all I know about power.
49, 59: I think that was already quoted on Standpipe's blog.
Thurber taught me all I know about cars.
I'm always willing to make Thurber explicit even in the face of subtle allusion. And if it gets someone to read a story like the "Car We Had to Push" for the first time, that's all to the good.
I had a great-grandfather who lived in a small city not too far from Thurberville who came to cars quite late in life and had a few interesting driving quirks of his own. Among the most thrilling for his passengers was creeping up to traffic lights in fear that it would change and when it did speeding up and flying through the intersection.