Percussion Tryouts for Wind Ensemble This Thursday

UPDATE: Eric has accomplished his two big band goals. He has successfully auditioned for both the WPHS Wind Ensemble and made the marching band drum line on snare. Good job Eric. Look forward to the duet with the elephant.

Wish Eric well. The competition is huge.

What the Future of American Motoring Will Look Like

Special Bonus Peek at future Diversity Training meets Global Warming

Home Prices in U.S. Drop Most on Record in Quarter

Home Prices in U.S. Drop Most on Record in Quarter (Update3) - Bloomberg.com

Home prices in the U.S. dropped the most on record in the first quarter from a year earlier, led by California and Florida, as banks sold foreclosed properties.

Prices dropped in 134 of 152 metropolitan areas, with the deepest declines in Cape Coral and Ft. Myers, Florida...
“In areas with the biggest price declines, we also see much higher levels of distressed sales which are distorting the data,” he said.
The steepest price decline was in Cape Coral-Fort Myers, down 59 percent from a year ago, followed by Saginaw, Michigan, with a 54 percent drop. The next biggest decreases were Akron, Ohio, with a 48 percent decline; San Francisco, down 43 percent; and San Jose, California, with a 42 percent drop.
The largest sales gain from a year ago was in Nevada, up 117 percent; followed by California which rose 81 percent; Arizona up 50 percent; and Florida with a 25 percent increase.
Those four states accounted for the 26 highest foreclosure rates in the first quarter among U.S. cities with a population of 200,000 or more, according to RealtyTrac Inc., an Irvine, California-based seller of real estate data.

David's Birthday Present

Amazon.com: Garmin nuvi 265WT 4.3-Inch Portable GPS Navigator with Bluetooth & Integrated Traffic Receiver: Electronics



It features:

> Both speed limit and current speed on the front screen
> BlueTooth so I can answer my phone on the way to work
> Can acquire satellites in less than 20 minutes
> Includes all US maps so I don't have to keep downloading them when I travel.

The Swine Flu Has Us All On Edge

Obama Spending Cuts Demonstrated

Ford Fusion hybrid hypermiles, goes 1,445 miles on a single tank

Ford Fusion hybrid hypermiles, goes 1,445 miles on a single tank

While not nearly as fun as fast high g-force acceleration, here are tips for saving on fuel from the article:

CleanMPG.com founder Wayne Gerdes, an engineer from Illinois who coined the term "hypermiling" to describe the mileage-maximizing techniques, provided the pointers. They include:

* Slowing down and maintaining even throttle pressure;
* Gradually accelerating and smoothly braking;
* Maintaining a safe distance between vehicles and anticipating traffic conditions;
* Coasting up to red lights and stop signs to avoid fuel waste and brake wear;
* Minimize use of heater and air conditioning to reduce the load on the engine;
* Close windows at high speeds to reduce aerodynamic drag;
* Applying the "Pulse and Glide" technique while maintaining the flow of traffic;
* Minimize excessive engine workload by using the vehicle's kinetic forward motion to climb hills, and use downhill momentum to build speed; and
* Avoiding bumps and potholes that can reduce momentum

Source of Swine Flu Identified

Government Says Economy Down 1.74%, but Tax Receipts are down 14%?

BizzyBlog » When Will the Press Catch On to Uncle Sam’s Collections Meltdown?

This year, it’s shaping up to be the “Bailout Year Bummer.” Uncle Sam’s fiscal year began on October 1 of last year, mere days before Congress passed the legislation that has come to be known as TARP, and a bit more than three months after Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Harry Reid promised to starve the economy of energy and punitively tax its highest producers, creating what I have since called the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy.

Through March, federal receipts were running 14% behind the previous year. Each month during the fiscal year has trailed the previous year, and degree of the difference has steadily increased.

Read the whole thing. As Maggie Thatcher once said, "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money [to spend]."

Welcome Back Carter

If there were one person responsible for awakening my conservative views (As opposed to Ronald Reagan who confirmed them) it was Jimmy Carter. I was in high school at the time and loved to argue with anyone about what a lousy president "Jimmah" made.

I never thought I would live to see someone as bad, let alone worse.

Foreclosures 46% higher in March than a year ago - USATODAY.com

Foreclosures 46% higher in March than a year ago - USATODAY.com

Foreclosure filings — default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions — were reported on 341,180 properties in March, 46% more than a year ago and 17% above February's total, RealtyTrac reports today.

Tax Time

Is it o.k. to call the bottom 50% of taxpayers unpatriotic?

Mortgage delinquencies soar in the U.S.

Mortgage delinquencies soar in the U.S. | Special Coverage | Reuters

Equifax Inc, reported that 7 percent of homeowners with mortgages were at least 30 days late on their loans in February, an increase of more than 50 percent from a year earlier.
39.8 percent of subprime borrowers were at least 30 days behind on their home mortgage loans, up 23.7 percent from last year.
Adams said the continued increase in mortgage delinquencies revealed in his data foreshadows more foreclosures, short sales and home price declines as homeowners default and banks then repossess the homes to sell them at deep discounts.
Credit Cards:

Banks closed 8 million credit card accounts in February, reducing the number of open cards to 400 million from a July 2008 peak of 483 million, according to Equifax data.

Credit limits fell as well, to $3.27 trillion in February from a July 2008 peak of $3.59 trillion.

"Limits are falling because lenders are trying to minimize their losses," Adams said.

The data shows that lenders have good reason to be wary. Bank card delinquency is at its highest level in the past five years. Some 4.5 percent of total balances on bank-issued credit cards were at 60 days past due in February, a 32.7 percent increase from a year earlier.

Capturing YouTube Videos to your iPod using FireFox and Windows

Step 1. Open Firefox and follow the DownloadHelper link then click on the "Install the extension !" link

DownloadHelper - Media download Firefox extension

After you restart Firefox, go to Youtube, find a video to watch and click on it. While it is playing, click on the DownloadHelper icon on your Firefox toolbar. This will open a dialog box that will allow you to save the YouTube flash video file to you hard drive.

Step 2. Go to cnet download and download the FLV Player 2.0 Install this player. You can then click on your download .flv files and watch them on your PC. But this still does not put them into your iPod.

Step 3. Click HERE to download the Videora iPod converter. Once downloaded, install the software. You can use Videora to covert your flash files to MPEG4 format that will play on your iPod. Videora can be used to convert the file, then add it to iTunes. Use iTunes to move the files onto your iPod.

Don't Worry We're From the Government and we're here to help... repair your GM car...

Spokane Bans Clean Dishes

Spokane residents smuggle suds over green brands

Forces residents to drive out of state to obtain Cascade or Electrosol.

Our governments are in the very best of hands.

The Country's In the Very Best of Hands

Human Achievement Hour” Announced for March 28

Press Release here: CEI Announces “Human Achievement Hour” to Coincide with “Earth Hour” | CEI

Make sure to keep the lights on.

Now Everyone has a blog

Even Obama's Teleprompter has one:

Barack Obama's Teleprompter's Blog

AtlasShrugged - Now More Than Ever

Atlas raised his eyebrows - Megan McArdle:

"Perhaps predictibly, Ayn Rand is making a comeback on the right, with Congressmen handing out her books, and loose talk of rich people 'Going Galt'.

I don't think that we will see a mass exodus of productive people to secret hideouts. I look to Atlas Shrugged more for conveniently totable beach reading than an economic blueprint. What's interesting to me, though, is how many details Rand did get right--like the markets in 'unfreezing' Ukrainian bank deposits, so similar to the frozen railroad bonds of Atlas Shrugged. Or the cascading and unanticipated failures, with government officials racing to slap another fix on to fix the last failing solution.

She was able to describe these things so well, of course, because she'd seen what an economy looked like while it was being wrecked. All of Rand's writing is dominated by the fact that she lived through the birth pangs of Soviet Russia, and saw her family's business destroyed by Lenin's ideology, and extraordinarily incompetent economic management. Her philosophy does not work, at least if by work we mean generate a framework by which a person or society can order itself. But she was actually a really very gifted observer, and she had a quite subtle understanding of how all the interconnected elements of an industrial economy fit together.

Keep reading the book, son.

These signs are popping up all over America as people come out to protest the Trillion dollar generational theft being propagated by Congress. And please, stop talking about it being "inherited". These thieves have run Congress and the Senate for the past two years, and failed to work on a 2009 budget until Obama came to power. They now own the 2009 1.5 Trillion dollar deficit.

Bumper Sticker of the Day

Laugh of the day

Iranian Air Defense Radar: “Unknown aircraft you are in Iranian airspace. Identify yourself.”

Pilot: “This is a United States aircraft. I am in Iraqi airspace.”

Air Defense Radar: “You are in Iranian airspace. If you do not depart our airspace we will launch interceptor aircraft!”

Pilot: “This is a United States Marine Corps FA-18 fighter. Send ‘em up, I’ll wait!”

Air Defense Radar: (no response… total silence)

****************

overheard recently on the VHF Guard (emergency) frequency 121.5 MHz while flying from Europe to Dubai .

Photo from the NYC "Tea Party" Deficit Protests

Keep reading Eric. The book is 52 years old and still very relevant.

Dilbert