SoylentNews

Tooooo much fun!
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/q/blog/watching-this-8-year-old-girl-play-led-zeppelin-on-drums-will-make-your-day-1.4704537

If I only had money to invest with (hey SoylentGreens (it's people!!!); anyone want to buy me a share?

https://www.startengine.com/mycroft-ai

I can't even afford to get a Mycroft-box, though my raspi Mycroft works fine...love the fem-voice.

But yeah...if I had spare cash, I'd love to get in on this (but currently Canadians can't invest anyways due to startengine goofs).

"Hey mister, buy me this, I sucky sucky so good, me so horny!"

My wife and I have been looking to get a campervan for a couple months. We have been keeping an eye on Kajiji for vans, and looked at a couple.

The first was a 1986 28' motorhome. $4,500. We drove 1/2 way across the city to go take a look one evening. This thing was in great condition. Diesel. Nice kitchen, small bathroom with shower, and enough beds to sleep 6.

I poked around and we took it for a test drive. Brakes were a little sketchy and this thing was slow. I think it could do highway speeds on a flat road with no wind. It was pretty awesome. My daughter loved it. She liked looking in all the little cupboards and sitting in the back while we drove around.

It was a really good deal, so we were really thinking about buying it, but it was too big to store at our house comfortably, so we ended up passing on it.

Last Thursday, we looked at an actual campervan on the other side of the city and we ended up buying that one. She's a 1985 Dodge B250. We are pretty excited! It's in pretty good condition. The interior is 80's brown plaid. It's got a stove, oven, fridge, heater, small solar panels, and a little toilet in the back. It's got a high roof so I can fully stand without banging my head on the ceiling. Yesterday I was out trying all the stuff out to make sure everything worked. I got everything working except for the oven. The pilot would light fine, but the burner would not turn on. I think the thermostat needs replacing on that.

I need to take the van into a mechanic to get the shocks replaced. Also, the brakes pulse, so I want to get the front pads and discs replaced. The van doesn't warm up, so the thermostat needs to also be replaced.

So, she needs a little work, but she's almost as old as I am, so that's understandable. We paid $8,700, and I'm pretty happy. I can't wait to load her up with all our stuff and take her out camping!

I've been spending a lot of time swinging lately. I have a small park across the street from my house and my daughter (now 1.5 years old) could spend all day in the swing. "Outside!", she says to me. "Schwing!" She grabs onto one of my fingers and together we walk across the street to the park. It's adorable.

I've met more of my neighbors in the last 2 months than I have the last 9 years living in my house. There is a woman and her little boy who is 2 who lives on the other side of the park who I run into frequently. There is also a rough looking guy (who is a total softie with his kid) who also has a 2 year old I've run into a couple times. I've been going to the park with my girl to swing almost every night after dinner. It seems to help get all her energy out before bed.

We are still having major sleeping problems. She is still waking up 3-5 times per night. My wife sleeps with her and I sleep alone in the computer room. It's not ideal. We are hoping to get my computer moved somewhere else, and my daughter will take the computer room as her room and I will move back in with my wife. My house is very small, so space is at a premium. I don't want to give up my computer room, but it has to happen. We have been trying to get her room ready for a while now, but it has been really tough to find free time to get it done.

I also have a quick update on my dating life... I've largely quit looking for dates. It takes a lot of effort to get a date and I just don't have the energy. However, last winter I was at an indoor playground and I wound up chatting with a lady. She ended up giving me her business card and I followed up with her. We met again at the indoor playground a couple months later and chatted some more. She has a pretty important job and travels a lot so we haven't been able to meet up since but we have a date scheduled for next week.

She is married and we haven't discussed open marriages or anything like that. I'm not 100% that our meetup next week is a date, but it sure seems like a date to me. I asked if she would meet for drinks, she said yes, I suggested a couple pubs, she countered with a fancy/classy bar downtown. She said that they have live music later in the night, so we are meeting there at 8:30 next friday.

It's going to be interesting. Is it actually a date? Does her husband know? Is she in an open marriage?

Find out in the coming weeks.

-- Snow

****should have a 'Politics' section for Journal Topics!

There is an election coming in Ontario, June 7th (though I usually try to vote in the early polls in case I'm sick on election Day (and lines are non-existent!)

The Liberal party in power, currently, have pretty much blown their welcome for a lot of people but the Conservative party looks like Trump 2.0 (Doug Ford won't give interviews because he's afraid to blow his lead by opening his mouth).

With our voting system, I may be 'wasting' a vote by voting green but it's not a wasted vote for $$$ (each vote brings the party $$$), so my vote will matter $wise.

I'm just tired of status quo, corruption and favouring big business because of money (although parties in Ontario (Canada too???? Not sure) aren't allowed to accept donations from companies, only individuals and up to $1000ish per person WHICH IS AMAZING!!!)

So, I'm going green and Gaaark is becoming Kermit.

Hoping the conservatives don't get a majority, but I want to keep helping the green numbers grow.
The more they grow, the more people may see them as an option.

If you don't know Doug Ford, you may remember his brother Rob Ford...made a scene on (Letterman???) a few years back, lol. Our loveable bum-fuck Rob. :)

There was a post on reddit recently about small events that changed your life. I was wondering if I had any events like that in my life, and realized I did.

I'm sure it's not that uncommon for people to find their partners based on a chance meeting or a simple thing like that.

This story starts in the fall of 2001. I had recently been hired at Future Shop as a salesperson. For you that don't live in Canada, or don't rememeber Future Shop was essentially a Best Buy (Best Buy would end up buying Future Shop a year later). One of the first days on the new job, I saw one of the most beautiful girls working at the customer service desk. She had dyed red hair in a pixie type cut, and bit of a nouveau hippie vibe.

I worked at Future shop for about a year and a half. During that time, we would have many friendly work conversations, but I never received any signals that she had any interest in me at all. There were a couple of times where I tried to ask her out, and she brushed me off with lame excuses (She would say she was busy), but never gave me a hard rejection, so I remained hopeful that one day she would say yes. I ended up working there for about a year and a half. I worked through 2 Christmas seasons, and after the second Christmas was all wrapped up, I was let go in early January as part of the spring purge.

That Christmas, my mom and her partner had gotten us a DVD player as a Christmas present. My brothers and I were REALLY hoping that the DVD player that was under the tree was really a PS2. We were slightly disappointed that it was not, but we came up with a plan to return the DVD player and pitch in some money and upgrade that DVD player to a PS2.

My brother and I went back to future shop to return the DVD player, and as we were nearing the front of the line, my future wife said hi, and then made sure that she was the CSR that ended up helping us. (She just wanted to talk about me getting let go). We did the return, and at the end I tried asking er out again, and she actually said yes and gave me her number. It was a busy day with lots of people returning Christmas gifts, and I caught her in a moment of weakness. She would tell me years later that she didn't really know what had happened until later in the day when she clued in that she had agreed to a date.

We ended up going on that date a couple days later. Me, being the classy guy that I am, I took her to Pizza Hut. We shared a pizza, unlimited refill drinks, and I even splurged for the dessert bar -- so basically the perfect first date. I asked if she wanted to come back home with me (to my mom's basement) and 'watch a movie'. She did. We watched Dazed and Confused (I still have that VHS in my sentimental things collection), and fooled around.

Things progressed quickly. We were almost immediately spending all our free time together. Her roommate had moved out recently and she needed someone to help pay rent, so I moved in. I was 19 and we had been dating for something like 4 months. My parents were not all that impressed.

Months turned into years and now we are married with a toddler. It all started with receiving a DVD player instead of a PS2 for Christmas.

*****

On a side note, my little girl is such a cutie now. She's walking really good now and walks like a quick little penguin around the house. She is still a terrible sleeper though. She loves going to the park now that the weather is good and swinging in the swing. She's also starting to do the slide.

Her vocabulary is growing so quickly. She doesn't do sentences yet, but says quite a few words -- probably around 500. She has the most beautiful red curly hair and a smile that melts my heart.

She understands quite a lot of things you tell her. I'm sure she understands more than I realize. Yesterday I was pretty excited when I asked her to get the cat treats and she found them and brought them to me.

Right now, her favorite thing to eat is probably blueberries. We go though a couple packages a week.

This weekend I'm taking her to a nearby amusement park. We'll ride some of the kiddie rides together. I'm really exited for that!

-- Snow

Do you want free energy?
Do you want Star Trek replicators?

QI got funding...over a $million!

https://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.ca

What's dark matter done for YOU lately?

Can I buy stock in this guy?

So a galaxy has been found that contains NO dark matter (all the matter seen is all the matter it needs).
"The astronomers realised something about DF2 was amiss when telescope observations revealed that 10 clusters of stars within it were moving far slower than would normally be expected."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/distant-galaxy-dark-matter-universe-understanding-theories-wrong-space-yale-a8277951.html

Could it not need 'dark matter' because the stars aren't rotating fast enough for inertial effects to kick in?
http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.ca/2014/01/mihsc-101.html

Dark matter is dead. Please leave the corpse alone.
Close snark.

My wife had her surgery today: everything went well and she'll be in the hospital for a day or two or more.

Now that all is fine, I'm left wondering how much it would have cost us if our health care wasn't free. Enough to bankrupt us? Huh.....

As an aside, while waiting (we got up at 4am to be there for 6am for her surgery at 8am and she was in her room at 2pm) I was reading Isaac Asimovs 'study' of the old testament.

According to him, In The Beginning the Bible talked about, basically, polytheism:

"God
The Bible centers about God, and God is brought into the tale at once:
Genesis 1:1
  In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

The Hebrew word, translated here as God, is "Elohim" andthat
is a plural form which would ordinarily (if tradition were defied) -be
translated "gods." It is possible that in the very earliest traditions on
which the Bible is based, the creation was- indeed the work of a
plurality of gods. The firmly monotheistic Biblical writers would carefully have eliminated such polytheism, but could not perhaps do any-
thing with the firmly ingrained term "Elohim." It was too familiar
to change.
. Some hints of polytheism seem to have survived the editing. Thus,
after the first created man disobeys God's injunction not to eat of the
tree of knowledge, God is quoted as saying:
Genesis 3:22. . . . Behold, the man is become as one of us, to
know good and evil.. . Then too, still later, when God is concerned over mankind's ar-
rogance in attempting to build a tower that would reach to heaven,
He is quoted as saying:
Genesis 11:7. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their
language . . . It is possible to argue that this is not true evidence of early poly-
theism. God might be viewed as using the royal "we"; or as speaking
to an angelic audience; or even, in the Christian view, as speaking in
the persons of the Trinity.
Nevertheless, as far as we know the history of religion outside the
Bible, early beliefs were always polytheistic and monotheism was a
late development in the history of ideas."

I didn't know this. Interesting. (Copy/pasta from pdf is problematic: it seems to go through OCR which is not perfect. Hoping I didn't miss any fixes).

To me, the only 'true' word of God we have are the ten commandments. Why would anyone try to seek the word of God(s) in the Bible (written by imperfect people long after the events) when you just have to look at the Ten (taken down by an imperfect person and translated by imperfect people).

To me, the Bible just boils down to "be a good person". The ten commandments lay out a guide how to do that.

My wife's surgeons and anaesthesiologists were good. Very good.
Or, at least, good enough, thank god(s).
;)

So, my last entry was about Annie, a girl at my coffee shop that gave me her number. I also mentioned that she has a sister that works there too and that I /cannot/ for the life of me tell the two apart.

They are identical twins, so that makes me feel better. I didn't just want to be a white guy that can't tell Asians apart. (I feel vindicated!).

I was in there this weekend, and I tried to ask her sister what her name was. Turns out, this was Annie, the one that have me her phone number. Well fuck... Anyways, I chat her up, and find out her sister's name is Anna. Anna and Annie, identical twins.

They are Chinese, and these are their chosen western names. Their actual, Chinese, names are boy names because somehow it's lucky to their grandparents?

Bizarre... I think I would hate having a basically identical name to my identical twin.