Simplify spelling

This blog is in response to an msnbc article about protesters to the spelling bee. I did not write this, but it is clever and really pushes the point. I did find some similar posts at the Spelling Society.

Having chosen English as the preferred language in the EEC (now
officially the European Union, or EU), the European Parliament has
commissioned a feasibility study in ways of improving efficiency in
communications between Government departments.

European officials have often pointed out that English spelling is
unnecessarily difficult. For example: cough, plough, here, hear, bow,
bough, through and thorough. What is clearly needed is a phased
program of changes to iron out these anomalies. The program would be administered by a committee of top level staff chosen by the participating nations.

In the first year, for example, the committee might suggest using "s"
instead of the soft "c". Sertainly, sivil servants in all sities would
resieve this news with joy. The hard "c" could then be replased by "k"
sinse both letters are pronounsed alike. This would not only klear up
konfusion in the minds of klerikal workers, but typewriters and
keyboards kould be made with one less letter, a signifikant savings.

In the sekond year, bekause of growing enthusiasm, it will be
announsed that the troublesome "ph" would henseforth be written "f".
This would make words like "fotograf" twenty persent shorter in print.

In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be
expekted to reash the stage where more komplikated shanges are
possible. Governments would enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. We would al agre that the horible mes of silent "e"'s in the languag is disgrasful. Therefor, we kould drop thes and kontinu to read and writ as though nothing had hapend.

By this tim it would be four years sins the skem began and peopl would be reseptiv to steps sush as replasing "th" by "z". Perhaps zen ze funktion of "w" kould be taken on by "v", vitsh is, after al, half a "w".

Finaly, ze unesesary "o" kuld be dropd from words kontaining "ou".
Similar arguments vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

Kontinuing zis proses yer aftr yer, ve vud eventuli hav a reli
sensibl riten stil. Aftr tventi yers zer vud be no mor trubls or
difikultis and evrion vud fin it ezi tu understan esh ozer. Ze drems
of ze E.U. vud finali kum tru.

Jehovah's witness education

Jehovah's witnesses missed Isaiah 51:6, ... and the earth will wear out like a garment... After thumbing through their bibles, and coming up with some beautiful passages, they failed to realize this was in scriptures. Let's get the message out to them.

One of the passages they brought up was Isaiah 65:17 ... Behold I will make a new heavens a new earth... But they insisted it was this same earth. They were a bit frantic because I told them the kingdom of God was not of this world. Jesus said that if his kingdom was of this world, his servants would be fighting to save him. John 18:36

Pool time

With all the heat this weekend (Fri, 5/21/2010), I decided to open up the pool. I bought some solar panels for it. Hooked them up Saturday, only to lose 1/2 of the pool water when a hose popped off. If I didn't have bottom drains, I would have run the pump dry.

So, topped off the pool with 5000 gallons of tap water (probably 50F?). 91 Ambient Sunday and sunny brought the temperature up from 62 to 67. Monday saw the temperature go from 67 to 76. Today (Tuesday), with 91 ambient and sunny, the pool went from 76 to 82F. That was enough to go in the water.

I went into the water to hook up the inside stairs. I dropped a screw and had to look for it. I don't want to step on it and have it poke through the liner. That was nice to be back in the water again. I had to go to the bottom and look for a while. It turns out the screw fell under the stairs. It was fun diving for the screw, though.

I will probably un-hook the solar panels until the pool water gets cool again. Even when the valve is bypassing the solar panels, all of the tubing and piping makes the pressure go from 14 psi to 20 psi on the system. I know the pump will be a lot happier without all that tubing.

blogging from the kindle

I can blog from my kindle, but it is a slo and painful process. nice to know it can be done, though.

Editing an existing blog from the kindle is even more painful, but it can be done.

chirunning barefoot injury free

There is an article in USA Today which supports my recent blogs about barefoot running. I suppose I could have built up the callouses more gently if I ran in the grass, but at 45 F and wet grass, my feet were too numb. I will stick to the sidewalk, thank you.

Twitter tools

I found some twitter tools. They can be found on my social and communication page. I will highlight them here.

For general posting and viewing, I like tweetree. Seesmic is pretty good, too. The advantage of tweetree is that it shows some content of links inline and offers threading of replies. Two other threading mentions are twonvo and tweet convo.

Hash tags are those words which begin with "#". To find hash tag definitions, I like to use tagdef.

Finally, to see what everyone is talking about, you can use a tag cloud map, or "listorious", a list of popular lists.

A web site for posting pictures to twitter is twitpic. To share music on twitter, go to blip fm.

That's all for now. If you know anything useful, leave a comment.

Running farther

Today I ran 2 miles (barefoot). But it took 17:41. Slow. Got to keep trying. The new callouses are holding out very well.