two kingdoms, hundreds of thousands of miles
Probably the creepiest government office in central Ohio is the Office of Vital Statistics in downtown Columbus. I have the utmost respect for everyone who works there, and it’s mostly not their fault. I had to go there this afternoon to get a copy of a birth certificate.
It took me a while to figure out why, but here goes:
Facebook isn’t normally the place for deep, meaningful conversation. I did have the privilege yesterday evening of chatting with someone with some seriously twisted theology. He held that:
So, that was an interesting conversation. Among my better comments were:
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Monday AppleInsider reported on last Thursday’s internal letter From the President of my employer, Halliburton Company. We are moving from BlackBerry phones to Apple devices.
Apple may be a hardware business, but in my opinion this is a purely software issue. BlackBerry developers are in a bit of a mess. Current phones are running a Java-based operating system that is on its last legs. The new BlackBerry 10 QNX-based operating system is coming late, and more importantly, it will not support applications written for the current BlackBerry operating system. Who would want to contribute resources to developing programs that will go away in a year or so? Not Big Red, apparently. I understand the move.
You walk into a restaurant.
You’re seated. The manager comes out and starts telling you how awesome this restaurant is that you so often frequent. He tells you that the kids not only enjoy the food but have a hand in making it. He brags on the fact that the portions are so large–not only are you fed but that they give food to people who don’t have any. And, not only is there so much food, he tells you, but the food is of a quality beyond comparison with everyone else’s. You are doing yourselves right just by coming here. He goes on to talk about the food itself, how it will satisfy you, how it will build you up and make you strong, and how you are going to enjoy it. Finishing his speech, he announces the service is concluded.
For a week in southeast Pennsylvania I stayed at the Hampton Inn in Indiana, PA.
The hotel packed a large curved desk, a TV stand with three ample drawers, a luggage stand, and a cabinet with a half-height refrigerator and microwave along with two queen beds in my room. There wasn’t much room for exercising. The walls seemed pretty thin; conversations from the next room could be heard.
The beds were nearly perfect in firmness, and I woke up just before my alarm on most days. Each bed had three pillows that varied in their firmness.
Outlets were in good supply. Four were available at the desk, and another four were in reach of a bed. Internet service was provided by Ethernet and strong wireless, though at times download speed suffered. YouTube buffered way too frequently. The code they gave me didn’t work, but the system also takes one’s HHonors username and password.
There are appropriate uses for using hydraulic fracturing to get more oil and gas out of the ground. If a reservoir engineer believes that the earth around a well is solid, and in most cases it is, he may recommend hydraulic fracturing as a way to put cracks in the ground around an oil well so that oil and gas may flow more easily to a wellbore.
A hammer has good uses and bad uses; yet we should not ban hammers. Likewise, hydraulic fracturing.
