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
  • 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?