Hal O'Brien

akirlu has left me on my own recognizance for the weekend, as she's gone off to Spokane on fannish business.

So, I'm going to Café Vignole tonight at 7pm for dinner, and would enjoy it if I had some company. I'm fairly sure, even at this remove, that if you can see this, it'd be great to see you.

Vignole is at Rainier and 57th down in Rainier Beach. Here's my enthusiastic review on Yelp. I really like this place.

Cut the price of a widget, and demand for that widget increases. Cut taxes for state services, and what happens to demand for those services? Sell at a price (that is, a tax rate) that doesn't cover costs, and what happens to deficits in the face of that increased demand?

Grover Norquist has done more to expand government than anyone else alive in America today. (The all time record, of course, belongs to Howard Jarvis.)

We went to see Suzanne Vega at this high school down the street from us. Go figure.

I guess the Seahawks are advancing in the NFL playoffs, 8-9 record or not.

Get this late run, with even the quarterback, Matt Hasselbeck chipping in for coverage of the runner:

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I have successfully been able to move all 1500+ entries from this LiveJournal to my site at http://www.halobrien.com/ I've also been able to do the same with my ~40 posts from my business blog, Not That Kind of Operation (NTKO). With my archives intact and grand unification achieved, that means this will probably be a read-friends-and-comment-sometimes LJ. New posts from me are much more likely to be there than here. (Today's "Dick Cheney has no pulse," for example.)

In related news, given how LJ seems to have just about quarterly crises of confidence somehow, I can report WordPress can import an LJ, comments and all, just fine. Ditto from Blogger. I mean, if you're thinking about such a thing, and have the hosting to match.

This is our "new" dog, freshly brought down from Mariposa, shown with Kaylee for scale.

Definitely an independent character.

The roses were my gift to Ulrika for our anniversary.

More can be seen at: http://www.stefanounterthiner.com/photo-stories-/view/5.html

The thing is, Fred's expression here reminds me a lot of our now-gone cat Lefty.

"At Apple, we reward excellence -- as long as you're excellently white, and excellently one of the guys."


More at my journal. But let's just say this has been a longstanding problem at Apple.

I was driving home on Friday and heard this piece on NPR, all about the "Kilkenomics" festival.

"Mr. DAVID McWILLIAMS (Economist): What we've done is we've taken together Ireland's finest standup comedians and some of the world's finest economists. And we've come together for the first of its kind, which is an economics festival where the comedians ask the questions of the economists."

Sounds good, doesn't it? Economics, the neverending recesssion, comedy... What's not to like?

Well... Why isn't Yoram Bauman involved? Ph.D from the University of Washington, author of The Cartoon Introduction to Economics, Volume 1: Microeconomics, and, oh yeah, a comedic translation of Mankiw's principles so sharp and pointed Mankiw himself linked to a video interview of Bauman?

Why, indeed? It's not like Bauman is obscure in this field. If you google "economics comedy", the results are full of references to Bauman.

So... What happened? You wuz robbed, Yoram!

{originally posted at my journal.}