Tira's only been in Virginia for a week but in that time we've had three people pull their vehicles over (two were driving down the main road) and say how good looking she was and ask about her. She's also had dozens of people stop us on the sidewalk and ask about her. This is while the temperature's hovering near or below freezing...

We need to keep an eye on her and make sure she's not being stalked...

During one of her daily walks, Tira darted into a yard and killed a gopher. Here's the new tally of things she's caught:

Birds	Bugs	Gophers	Lizards	Moles	Squirrels
8	Lots	3	1	2	6

I had this story buried within my site and I wanted to bring it to light. It's my favorite story taken from Backpacker Magazine. I hope you like it as much as I did. Click on the .pdf icon below to view the story...

trapped.pdf (143KB)

This is a reprint of Gerrit Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons which is a classic environmental report on how we all share certain environmental conditions. Click on the .pdf icon below to view the story...

traagedyofthecommons.pdf (86KB)

I've migrated all the blogs from the style built into RapidWeaver to http://blogger.com This gives me more options and makes it easier to organize the blogs. Plus I can add, edit, or delete blogs away from my computer which is something I'll probably never use :)

A coworker sent this to me and I think it’s pretty clever:

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had once failed an entire class.

That class had insisted that Obama's socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan".

All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.  

As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.   The second test average was a D! No one was happy.

When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.  

All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

Could not be any simpler than that.

I've been asked what toold I use to create this site so I'd like to list the software I use. If you have any questions about anything, please let me know.

I use RapidWeaver for the following pages:

• Home
• About
• Contact
• Gallery Selection Page
• Recipes
• Thoughts
• Tira's Movie

The theme is a heavily modified version of Blueball Design's High-Def Color theme which was modded using CSSEdit

The photo galleries are stored in iPhoto; taken from my digital camera or scanned via XSane; edited by Gimp, Pixelmator, Acorn, and/or Picturesque; generated by iWeb; and linked via RapidWeaver.

The movies are taken from my digital camera and converted to .flv using ffmpeg (CLI) or VideoFlashConverter.

All files are FTP'ed either by RapidWeaver or Forklift. Seems like a lot of work but I want things to look a certain way and am willing to take some time to do it right. I had tried to migrate the entire site to Drupal or Joomla (server-side content management system) but didn't want to learn PHP and thought the site was slower.