Random Acts

Here we go again with Cornhusker Football. Big Red is likely in a better position at this point than any comparable year with Bo Pelini as head coach... 8-1 is fine. You'd think they are sitting pretty. But... six years in a row with exactly four losses since Pelini started guiding the team... EXACTLY FOUR LOSSES. Not being a complete college football junky, I don't know if that level of consistency has ever been achieved by a head coach, anywhere. I doubt it. What are the chances that Big Red could end up in that spot for a seventh straight season?

Some years ago I subscribed to Esquire out of curiosity and, in way, desperation. A couple of favorite magazines had fallen victim to the Internet, and closed up shop, leaving me little in the way of bathroom reading. At $10 a year I figured why not check it out. Turns out that once past the advertising, you can find some good interviews and well written stories on current events. The regular feature I like most, and read almost every time, is a brief one page interview called "What I've Learned".

A few months ago, I was taking Phoebe on her walk. These days, this isn't much of a walk at all but she enjoys it. She's coming up on 15.5 years old and getting a quarter mile out of her can be a challenge, often requiring a stop about two-thirds the way through. As we reached the last (and slowest) leg of Phoebe's stroll, I wondered about the common assumption that a dog year is the equivalent of seven human years (making Phoebe something like 110). Where did this come from?

Lately, I've been boxing up some books for a few reasons: to keep Fianna from destroying the nice hardbacks, to make room for other "stuff", and the expectation that we'll move soon and have to do so anyway. In an indicator of how pampered modern life has become (not just me), I'm running across several books that I planned to read but never did... because I bought a Kindle roughly two years ago. With an ereader on hand, the prospect of prying open poorly binded books to read all the text comfortably, squinting at small type, or propping up a one-pound hardback for extended periods... sort of... lost its appeal.

I've been tossing out PC-related junk over the last year.... obsolete keybords, mice, cords, etc. Anyone who's worked with PC hardware over the years has tales of the unbelievably inadequate hardware they used to work with... at least by today's standards. External Data storage is one the most easily quantifiable areas of change with which to bring home how far things have come.

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