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Today was one of those days we get in winter when high pressure pushes out all the clouds and the day is bright and clear, but it is cold in the shade.
TopBut the downside is that the air is clear and still and at night the heat of the day radiates away and it gets cold, down to freezing and below. Most peeple out east would laugh at what we out here call cold, here. but we are not accoustomed to freezing weather. Our homes aren't insulated as well as places that get snow and ice in winter and humidity and heat together in Summer, and the crops out here are vulnerable to extreme weather, cold, and rain at the wrong time of the harvest cycle, such as wine grapes.
TopI am using a two column style with links from a Table of Contents to the section headings, with links back to the top of the page. I am testing this to see that it works correctly as it is an enchancement to a two column which did work correctly, it split the text so that it is always close to being evenly balanced between the two columns with whatever content. The only bad thing about the design is that one has to maintain the links.
This page has enough content so that all the features of this style can be verified. One bug is that sometimes the header is split from the paragraph it is for.
TopI went to Cafe Barrone and paid the $1.80 for a small coffee in the Starbucks take-out cup I bought early this year, it is eqivalent to a "tall" at Starbucks which is the smallest size of drink they serve, so at $1.40 it is the same size. I went to Cafe Barrone on Sunday and found the brew to be weak, so I complained to Jeff about it. I was over there today, but I did not buy a coffee. If you sit outside they don't hassle you.
TopI have been listening to another set of Bach Cantatas and am quite impressed at how much I recognize from the earlier cycle. I have the same problem as before that the BWV numbers aren't always displayed, I did see Cantata 97, and I recalled that Cantata 42 is a familiar Simphonia and lovely alto solo with oboe due accompanyment.
TopI have been holding off wanting an iPad because I worry about its performance due to being based on flash memory and the cost of apps running on a closed OS. One application I can see is that becausee merely rotating the iPad causes its display to go from landscape to portrat mode has use when viewing PDFs of music scores. I have PDFs of the Bach Geselleschaft containing the Cantatas, and although I have the same in pocket scores, having them loaded on a iPad would be useful if the PDF app can load files quickly and rotate the display without stuttering. I could keep my MP3s on CDR and play with my Walkman CD player and find the score of a given cantata and display it on an iPad. On my desktop and my Mac Mini the displays are too inflexible for display of such PDFs. There either isn't enough resolution to render the music or the display is too small to read comfortably or one has to scroll to view it. Any of these is an impediment for using scaned scores on a computer. The iPad may have the screen resolution and form factor, the only concerns I have are performance and effective resolution. If the price dropps to a couple of hundered dollars, it might be worth the risk,
TopIn Contrast to yesterday today brings high cirris clouds which cause a ring and tangent arc around the sun. The ring was a complete 23 degree circle and a tangent arc was visible at its highest point. There are no sun dogs.
TopThere is a move to get a law like Airizona has to detain people who are in this country illegally when law enforcement has reasonable cause. Dispite the profiling argument against this, most of the illegals here are from Latin America and easy to identify as having come from south of the border, the argument has been made that because they can't work here legally they are in effect slave labor working in very unsecure employment, below minimum wage and without any protection against fraud or exploitation. The reason the illegals have been tolerated at all is due to economics, the same hidden message on the Statue of Liberty, that America has always welcomed immigrants as a source of cheap labor and more, that there is a double standard that still exists in human rights vs. human trafficing. Many of the opponants to such a law are agribusiness and other parts of the economy that use illegals to do unskilled jobs that it is claimed U.S. Citizens won't do.
The economics of this is brought home, literally, several times a week by what I call the "Mexican Noise Machine", more properly "Latin", the seeming hoards of garderners with noisy tools that are paid by the property managers in this neighborhood of apartments to groom the lawns and gardens with power mowers, leaf blowers, and worst of all chain saw trimmers. There are here like clockwork every week and every day at nearby properties creating annoyance because they are paid cheaply and use power tools. If there were a leaf blower or power tool ban, they could not keep up, if even they had to use broom and rake in place of leaf-blowers. Most of these guys don't speak English and I am sure that if the law that now exists were enforced every property manager in this area would be libel for big fines for employing illegals. In fact all that needs to happen is to say "ice" and a couple of these gardeners lay low for a couple of days. Of course the owners of the landscaping companies have promoted these services even if it might be easy for ICE to catch them employing undocumented workers. One wonders why there haven't been raids if this is low hanging fruit? This is one more example of legislation that isn't enforced. It is also an example of how unwise it is to attract attention and ire to yourself if you are doing something illegal. Being annoying is no way to stay out of sight, and it doesn't help your cause if you seek sympathy for a cause.
The most vocal opposition to these proposals are ethnic advocates who want to give people from Latin America easy access to benefits of living in America whether legally or not. I have nothing against Latin Americans or Americans of that ethnic origin per se, only against criminal activity, organized crime, exploitation of undocumented people, and forms of economic favoritism. I am sure that the hoards of landscapers are possible because of the exploitation of undocumented people, I am also sure that anyone who wants to become an American should apply for citizenship.
That said, I don't think that Congress or the states will do the right thing and that the problem will fester until either the Federal Government is forced to fortify the border to keep out the insurgancy or Congress figures out that it has to clerify the alien situation and spends money to prevent illegal entry and provide a path to citizenship for people who are already here and want to stay. Learning English should be a requirement. We should discourage ethnic enclaves created by language barriers, which may mean doing away with multilingual ballots, but that is unlikely, still we must encourage people to adopt English as a second language if they are going to stay here.
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