Two years later, iTunes is my friend again. The newest version was released yesterday incorporating iTunes+. This is a sub-section of the store which offers higher bitrate tracks with no copy protection or digital rights management. They cost a little more, but that suits me fine since I get a better bitrate out of it.
One [...]

Posted in Technology 3 Comments »

Our due date is around July 1. When we lived in Arlington we planned to have the baby born a separate birth center run by Certified Nurse Midwives. A home birth was out of the question there. It would be too difficult to get to a hospital in an emergency, too difficult for assistance to [...]

Posted in Daddyblog 6 Comments »

You know, the big reason for the move was “quality of life.” A lot of people said “the quality of life here is much better.” I spoke to another Northern Virginia transplant — she’s been here five years — and she said “I wake up every day and thank God I’m not in Northern Virginia.” [...]

Posted in Diary 4 Comments »

Here is something to watch. When people hear “de-regulation,” what they hear is “get rid of stupid regulations that don’t make any sense.”
What they actually get is quite different. Those regulations never go away. The ones that go away are the smart ones, the ones that keep us safe, healthy, and relatively unencumbered by corporate [...]

Posted in Politics 2 Comments »

One of the advantages of Blacksburg I didn’t appreciate before I got here was how far buffalo had penetrated the local food market. I’ve cornered friends and relatives many times and extolled the virtues of buffalo, often more than once to the same person, boring them to tears.
(For the uninitiated: bison require far less [...]

Posted in Diary 3 Comments »