This one is my new favorite, I think…an ornate home, large for its time, which was at one time lined with brick outside. This front window overlooks a particularly scenic little valley. I noticed the remnants of an old chair parked by the front picture window. The drab and delapidated interior is an amazing contrast to the colorful glory of the valley outside and the summer sky.
Here’s a little more information about binary code. It’s basically a way of breaking down letters and numbers to the simplest form, combinations of ones and zeros. “10” means 2, which is why I made the joke in the title.
I actually spent way more of my time as an old Apple II geek using hexadecimal numbers and can still convert it to regular numbers in my head (although not quite as quickly as I could back during the Reagan era). It’s commonly used to program website colors, which is why I like the joke “Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base, are belong to you.” That’s also only funny if you get the corny 80s video game reference.
Okay, now I’ve illustrated my geekdom. No, it’s not my car. 🙂
Then I got my new camera and have had a very hard time finding some night skies. Usually when they were clear, the moon would pollute the scene with unwanted light. That or I just wasn’t able to break away at night to try for some cool shots. This weekend I did get a chance to hang out with the new camera and some other gear. One of the reasons I wanted to upgrade my camera was for the new one’s better performance in low light, and I was not disappointed.
This isn’t the same stretch of road as my original Dakota Roads post from 2006, but if my memory serves me right I believe they may both be Highway 1.
A beautiful black road like this is not a common site in North Dakota, since various transportation and road departments have a chip-seal fetish that I can’t explain. Actually, as a motorcyclist, I resent it. It seems a shame to cover a beautifully smooth, sticky stretch of blacktop with a damaging abrasive, one especially hazardous when it’s first applied and left to sit for a week or two. As a result, a nice black road like this one is particularly noticeable and wonderful to me.
Not only is this bill a total disaster for North Dakota and the nation at large, but it has another few interesting flaws:
The “Renewable Energy World” website, which is vested in the sorts of “green energy technology” bandied about by liberals bent on killing the energy industry, has an article titled “American Power Act Contains Little Direct Support for Renewables.”
The “World Climate Report” website, which purports to be “the Web’s longest-running climate change blog”, has an article posted which calls the American Power Act “climatologically meaningless.” For instance, even if this bill worked like clockwork (which never happens), they might lower temperatures by a couple hundredths of a degree over the next hundred years!
The folks at American Thinker have an article posted which points out that the Act is merely “a sugar coated version of Cap and Trade.”
That web address actually bounces you to the servers of DemocracyInAction.org, a liberal activist group that apparently hosts all kinds of different websites for “progressive” causes. Here’s how they describe themselves:
“DemocracyInAction, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization itself, believes technology can be a decisive force for social change. We exist to empower those who share our values of ecological and social justice to advance the progressive agenda.”
Operated by a company called Salsa Labs, and oriented around the same sort of “community organizing” as our hapless President. Here’s a list of their clients, which includes a bunch of liberal nonprofits like Code Pink and a bunch of liberal Democrat political campaigns.
That’s really interesting. The City “owns” the boulevard and sidealks in front of my property, but I have yet to see someone come by and mow or maintain it for me. When someone throws trash on it, I don’t see a city worker come by to pick it up. When the snow flies in the winter, I’m the one driving the snowblower around to clear my sidewalk, driveways, and those of my neighbors. This includes rental property that I own. That’s fine; I’d rather take care of it myself…and I expect the rest of the property owners in Bismarck, including downtown businesses, to abide by the same standard! Is that so wrong?
If the DBA wants downtown Bismarck to be maintained, I respectfully submit that they look in the mirror. The property owners are responsible for the sidewalks and boulevards in front of their property. Isn’t it enough that the costs of beautification efforts for the downtown area have been spread out among all Bismarck citizens? If the businesses downtown don’t have the time to maintain the sidewalks adjoining their property, it’s time to hire someone to do so.
This comes from an organization that told the Boy Scouts and other charitable organizations that they couldn’t sell beverages with concessions at the annual street fair. When the no-beverages policy first started, I heard from Boy Scout parents who were floored and feared how that would impact their fundraising efforts for the Scouts.
So, after taking money from the Scouts and other non-profits, the Downtowners want the violins of sympathy to start playing for them because we taxpayers aren’t paying to have someone clean their sidewalks for them? Are they serious? I guess we’ll see. I think it takes a serious lapse in judgement to even suggest such a thing. In any case, I think they may have a hard time getting people to sympathize with them.
Here’s one for you, Downtowners: the next time I see a City employee cleaning or maintaining my sidewalks or boulevards, I’ll ask them to take a trip downtown and perform the maintenance downtown Bismarck businesses are apparently unwilling to do…or think they’re entitled to have someone else do for them for free.
