Halloween

So this year for Halloween, Alex went as Super Grover:

Nathan was Matt Smith's Doctor Who:

I gave out candy as Cookie Monster:

Jenn created a pumpkin Dalek for the front of the house:

...as well as the usual pepper-o-lanterns, this one a cyber-man pepper-o-lantern:

...and I added the popular disco lights over the garage (they spin, and are very popular with the kids when they come up) and a black light at the front porch. Jenn did the front door up as a Tardis, which was neat too.

Preparations

Nathan takes charge of decorating the front window for Halloween.

OMG

What is this with this white crap on my car!

Hot Air Vent

Hot vent air is kitty filtered for your safety and comfort.

School Bus Collection

Alex has always been obsessed with busses. His school busses are some of his favourite toys. One of the things he keeps going back to on YouTube is a video where an older collector has assembled some static shots of his collection, so Alex likes to line his school busses up the same way and hum the music to himself. It will be interesting to see if Alex can manage to collect more "realistic" busses without destroying them as he gets older.

No More Cancer

Yesterday my oncologist discharged me from his care, changing me from a cancer survivor back into just one more guy to hit up for donations periodically. Blood is normal, the last round of ultrasounds showed no growth in the post-operative scar structures, and everything else looks good.

Maybe news like this is supposed to get a bigger post, but I can't think of anything else to say. Except that I'm glad I no longer have to wait an hour after my scheduled appointment time to see the doctor for five minutes.

Lunch Special

This is what Alex orders for lunch every day: "Peanut butter sandwich and croissant and naan bread and baby bell!" We should call it the Alex Plate.

Fancy Meal

Out at the Fall Evening for Autism. The generous doners raised around $40000 for Quickstart Autism. Thanks to them for coming out and thanks to NeXT in Stittsville for hosting.

Post-Carbon Economy -- A Thought

Has there ever been any kind of economy not based on carbon?

I think the first time I asked this question on Twitter I added a "non-trivial" qualifier to it, but the more I think about it the less I think the question needs qualification.

And it isn't just energy -- there is a gigantic amount of plastic and other polymers in the environment. I'm looking at my desk and I don't think I can find anything on it that didn't involve carbon in its makeup or creation.

Fall TV: What is it with time travel this year?

To wit:

• The Flash. Episode one and we're on our third reality of the season.
• Legends Of Tomorrow. Time travel is the whole schitck, although it will probably take some kind of left turn this year.
• Timeless. Personally if I was in this boat I'd ask Homeland Security to write up a dossier of my complete life so that it would be the first thing I read when I got back. Nothing like getting blindsided by (A) a missing sister and (B) a fiance.
• Travellers. Hasn't started yet, but I understand it too is a time travel gig.

Odds are at least one of the latter two won't make it to Christmas.

Hat Thief

Waiting for the truck this morning, and I see that Alex has somehow acquired his grandfather's favourite hat. Not sure how he managed that, his grandfather has had and worn that hat for as long as I've known him.

Saturday at Tiggy Winkles

Nathan checking out the train action at Tiggy Winkle's at Bayshore. Nathan and I went out there for lunch, and afterwards did some window shopping. Plus some actual shopping at Wal-Mart.

Portable Power

So for the usual no-good reason I decided my laptop needed to have 16GB of memory. Well actually it is a good reason, since Win8/Win10 VMs require at least 4GB of RAM, I can't run more than one on a 8GB system. And frequently I do want to run more than one. Or I want to run one and a linux VM. Or whatever. Who knew that one day I'd be missing XP, and it's willingness to run in a 1GB VM?... ahh, good times, good times...

Anyways, I went off to Canada Computers and got the required memory, and here we are:

But it occurred to me that this laptop is now almost more powerful than the lab system I have at home, a Dell 1950 with 16GB of RAM and 2x1TB drives in a RAID.

The laptop has fewer cores (2+hyperthreading vs 8) but it has a SSD, is much lighter, and would consume soooo much less electricity under full load than the 1950.

This keeps happening, that my business-issued computer ends up being more powerful than anything I have in the house.

Maybe it is time to go looking for a better lab system. I've already come up against the RAM limit a couple of times, and once I get going with things I'm going to probably want more CPU than just 8, since the Windows Server VM I have installed takes so many cores. And finding something that uses less power would be good too.

The wife won't like that idea one bit.

Carbon Pricing -- Wait Just One Damn Minute

OK, so the theory behind carbon pricing is that the consumption of carbon is priced artificially low, because there is no way to apply the communal costs of that pollution back to the consumer, right? So the whole point of carbon pricing is to apply a price to that externality, causing the cost of consuming carbon to go up. This makes other, non-carbon-consuming uses more economical, and it collects money on the theory that today's consumption causes damage to tomorrow.

So my question: how can you justify spending the money you are collecting as a tax on tomorrows damages on anything other than those damages, at any other time than this nebulous tomorrow? Otherwise you'll end up in the same boat in the future -- with a damaged tomorrow with no revenues extracted from the past to cover it. In essence, it double-taxes the damages on tomorrow, since future governments will still have to raise revenues to deal with said damages.

I'm not very clear this morning, there's probably a way to put this better.

Fall TV: Pitch

One of Jenn's picks. Maybe I'm sexist/racist/stick-and-ball-ist, but the heart-warming story of a young black woman making her way through the big leagues of professional baseball does nothing for me on any of those three levels.

Fall TV: Gotham

We resisted going back to this, it just seemed too... much. Jim Gordon has turned into an anti-hero and it is hard to see how we'll end up where we allegedly are going with the Batman universe, I'm just not so big on these fallen-good-guys stories. But Jenn likes Fish Mooney so we're back on it.

Artificial Forest

The view of my wood farm that I made in support of the Site B warehouse. The farm is much bigger than it has to be now, it kind of got out of hand.

Nervous Weekend

Ceili hates it when things change. This weekend we pulled all the furniture out of Nathan's room so that Jenn could build a new bed and desk. When we pulled the new mattress upstairs, Ceili spent 20 minutes nervously supervising things. She's calmed down now that the build is finished and the debris removed.