Brief May Miscellany
In no particular order:
- The Writer’s Guild of America strike continues
- Network television line-ups for the fall are increasingly becoming mixes of “unscripted” and foreign acquisitions.
- I am going to be clearing my Big Finish backlog as well as my comic book backlog and my graphic novel backlog.
- I will be teaching for the summer term
- This gives me a two week gap between my current term and the summer term
- Yes, I am still teaching the same class
- I am exploring the creation of SCORM content
- SCORM stands for Shareable Content Object Reference Model
- Right now I am using eXeLearning for authoring
- I have to look into the copyright and license status of the sounds effects archive recently highlighted by the Internet Archive
- The debt ceiling crisis continues
- It looks like X-Date may hit before June 1st
- On Friday the departmental offices at 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue indicated that USD$92 billion remain under “extraordinary measures”
- That’s the amount of money the federal government basically has left on-hand
- It has no authority to borrow more
- At a cash burn rate of USD$10-15 billion per day that leaves about 6-9 days of operating cash
- Any major disaster would accelerate the burn rate on operating cash
- Atlantic hurricane season starts June 1st and even though predictions are for a below average season it only takes one bad storm to cause major impact
- Further wildfires, an earthquake, a “civil disturbance”, or other situation could also be a major disaster
- Negotiations appear to still be going poorly
- If I ever managed to start building a data center in Ashtabula County, I would probably be using several of these as the core compute capacity
- This article on how genetics determines our life choices had one part that bothered me when it came to mate selection. That line stated in pertinent part: “…we tend to form attachments with people who have certain physical similarities to ourselves.” What if you have a certain physical distinctiveness that is shared with at most fifty thousand other people on this planet?