You may have noticed the images overlapping with the right-sidebar. That’s because I tend to write my posts ahead of time and I was expecting to have Wordpress 3.6 and the new, wider theme by now. But I’ll keep going things this way because while it might be a bit uglier now, it’ll look nicer in a few weeks when the new theme is finally out.

Additionally, I’m making some changes in my screenshots page to make use of galleries. Hope you find the new method a bit more organized-looking.

[caption id=“attachment_6232” align=“aligncenter” width=“683”] The Capitol[/caption]

I keep hearing that the gun bill was killed in the Houses of Congress despite 90% of Americans wanting it to pass. Now, we know that polls can be rigged based on how the questions are asked. But, if we take as a starting point that this poll is accurate, what does that mean about our representative democracy system? There are basically two types of democracy - representative and direct. In a direct democracy we’d all vote on all the issues. In the representative democracy that we have, we vote on issues by proxy. We believe that Democrats or Republicans will vote a certain way on certain issues and we know where our candidates agree and disagree with their parties. So we elect them and expect them to vote as we would vote. So what does it mean when 90% of us want something and we still don’t get it? Is the system working correctly? Are we effectively saying they know better than us even though they were elected by us to serve as our proxy? And if it’s broken do we have any recourse short of the reprehensible idea of revolution?

[caption id=“attachment_6229” align=“aligncenter” width=“683”] Tony Hangs On[/caption]

This photo is a great example of the magic moments you can capture when you’re not focused on getting kids to say “cheese”. Just hang back and go to the most telephoto you can and you’ll capture some magical moments.

At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although I enjoyed Bill Bryson’s other book A Short History of Nearly Everything, I actually didn’t know that when I picked this book up. I had heard the other book as an audio book so I didn’t remember the author’s name. Also, it was nearly 10 years ago. My interest in Bryson’s book came from the media blitz he did to promote it - including NPR’s Fresh Air and, if I’m not mistaken, The Colbert Report. I put it on my TO READ list here on GoodReads and waited for a chance to read the book. That chance came when I flew to Florida for a family visit. However, now that I know it was written by him, it explains the style of the book.

[caption id=“attachment_6217” align=“aligncenter” width=“496”] German Kids using inflationary money as blocks in 1923 - Bitcoin is supposed to be immune to this[/caption]

Boing Boing pointed me to a few Bitcoin articles and then there was another one on Ars on 6 May. I’d be pretty surprised if you haven’t heard about Bitcoin; it’s been all over the news because of the crazy bubble the Bitcoin exchange rate was having recently. But, just in case, Bitcoin is a currency that exists entirely electronically. This is true of nearly all currencies nowadays (none of them are backed by anything but faith in the countries that issue them). The supply of Bitcoins is only increasing to a certain amount and then no more, preventing inflation. It’s main benefit is supposed to be that it’s completely anonymous. So is cash, but you can’t use cash online.

When I wrote my second fatherhood post, the one about Disney Princesses, I speculated that perhaps the problem most people had with the Disney Princesses was not the movies, but how the company marketed to kids. Since Scarlett is only one, my only exposure to the princesses has been through my own childhood and adulthood love of Disney movies. This Boing Boing post about the princess from Brave, Merida, proves the point - it’s the marketing that gets under everyone’s skin. Here’s the change from the movie version on the left to the marketing version on the right:

In response to the fact that most of the spam comments on my site are on older articles and given that historically no one has commented on posts older than a couple years anyway, I’m enabling Wordpress’ auto-close on comments for posts older than 2 years.

Remember earlier this week when I said the gun control debate was now pointless? Apparently the State Department wants to pretend that what I said isn’t true. In a complete misunderstanding of how the Internet works, they have compelled the website holding the CAD designs for the 3D gun to remove the CAD file.  The reasoning is that leaving it up would be exporting munitions (since everyone all over the world can go to a web page) This, of course, ignores the fact that it was already obtained over 100 000 times and is already on Bit Torrent. Oh well. I guess pointless moves are better than nothing in their eyes.

One of the biggest trends on flickr is to start a 365 Project. This usually means taking one self-portrait a day for an entire year. This project is often misunderstood by those outside of flickr, especially since they’re used to the selfie-culture of MySpace and Facebook. It’s not a vanity project. A 365 Project is about taking the adage about becoming a better writer through writing every day to photography. It also has a special bonus of teaching the photographer what it’s like to be the subject. Many of us photo-geeks are behind the camera way more often than we’re in front of it. Sometimes we struggle with how to communicate to our subjects how to achieve the vision we have in our head. By being both the photographer and the subject, we learn to appreciate both points of view.

On 30 April of this year I came across an article on Eater about how restaurants can deal with No-Shows.  I didn’t even know this was a big enough thing that restaurants have multiple strategies to deal with it. Every time I’ve made a reservation to a restaurant, I’ve gone. I set reservations because I (or I and my wife and whoever else is involved) have decided to go out to eat and want to be sure we’ll not have to wait too long to be seated.  Or, in the of exclusive restaurants, ensure we’ll actually get a table.  I could understand people not showing up because of a life event - someone gets sick or dies. But I don’t understand the mindset of making a reservation without an intention to attend. Additionally, the biggest reason I make reservations is, as stated above, to ensure I get a table in a reasonable amount of time. Nearly every place I’ve ever made reservations at has a line out the door and even with a reservation I sometimes have to wait 15-30 minutes for my table. That said, they wouldn’t write this whole article if there weren’t a bunch of people skipping out on reservations so I wanted to answer their suggestions.