Sliding into April

Greetings to you my readers. The few and the many of you. Some want more while others don't. Good thing for them that I don't post everything I write. Actually I post very little of it here, just the late night Ramblings mostly, hence the name of this Blog. One needs to be a bit careful in this say and age of electronic monitoring and snooping. The First amendment has had enough holes drilled into it that it now looks like a sieve. And then there are those who spend all their time seeking out people using certain words. You gotta be careful which words you use, even more than how you use them. But I'm not going on about that today. Maybe another day.
Right now;
I am wondering. Hydrogen is the smallest, the simplest, element. Helium is next but also a lot bigger, heavier, in comparison. Which is why they both provide lift for Balloons and Blimps; Air Ships depending on lift assist for flotation. Because they are the lightest of all the gases, lighter, and smaller too, and they float upwards. The air pressure diminishes as the altitude increases. How much is needed and is more or less better for lift.
I got to pondering what ifs. What if you built an airplane with a large bubble, or empty space, self supporting hard surface, for which carbon fiber is the choice material today, on the top and under the bottom of the craft. Pump all the air out until you have created a vacuum. Then slowly add Hydrogen, or the safer Helium gas. The idea is to assist the lift not produce all of it. The plane would still have engines to push it forward, well it wouldn't be much of a plane if it didn't. This isn't a new idea, but the materials are new and the key to making it feasible. Because if you could reduce the lift required by flight then pushing would be so very much easier. And easier equates to less fuel needed. It would also help if speed was not a factor in the equation. Sell people on the adventure and enjoyment of flying. Not everyone needs to get somewhere as fast as possible. Faster everything is recent change for mankind brought about by the internal combustion engine for ground transportation, and the Jet engines for flying the skies. You only need to be at 30,000 feet if you have jet engines, they work better up there for some reason. But you don't really have the whole experience of flying. Sure you can see a long way but very few details. I love the view from way up high don't get me wrong. I always ask for a window seat and can spend the whole time looking out of it, even if it's at night. Day is better of course but there is still a lot to see at night.
But at say just a mile up [5280 feet] you can see a lot more of what's on the ground. And at 2500' you are twice as close and you see even more detail. You can also see a long ways off in the distance, pretty much anywhere you are above the tallest thing in sight, trees, buildings, hills and such, with mountains excepted. I forget it now but there is a formula to calculate how far you can see, before the horizon becomes a factor, you just can't see over it. Just a couple hundred feet off the ground lets you see a long ways before the horizon kicks in. Of course if the elevations is growing in the direction you're looking that extends the distance you can see, only at the lower altitudes. There are a lot of factors to consider. Like smog, dust, sand, rain, snow, fog, clouds, Jet planes leave a lot of exhaust in the air, massive amounts in fact. I've read more than one report by People that noticed how clear the sky was during the 911 grounding of all aircraft. They wrote that they had never seen the sky that clear, that blue.

I think it would be a real experience to take a long flight at low altitude from coast to coast or even just a few states. This would be better than a train which also lets you see country you can't see from any road. And certainly better than the bus. You could build these huge and incorporate lots of windows. And they could be good windows. You don't need a pressurized cabin. Meaning windows would be like the ones in your average car, easy to see out of. And that's a good thing. You could book tours, sightseeing tours. Line up towns like ships do ports of call. Left off a couple hundred tourists and their money into a small town a few times and week and they'll reap the profits. They can build a nicer town, nicer parks, stylish buildings. The time for plain box stores is over. Buildings need to not only serve function but they should last a very long time and if they are going to then pleasing to the eye is a must.
Besides we should be building for the long term. Bring back building in Stone. Carved ornate stone. Yes it will cost more to construct. But it will be tremendously cheaper over time. Think in hundreds of years. And if they are deigned right any retrofitting along the way will be easy to accomplish.
Just now dawned on me this is April 1, and it's 2010 to boot. Doesn't mean much when you live alone, nobody to pull pranks on or have them pulled on you by someone else.
This new plane idea could spawn a whole new industry. Well not industry, it's basically a tourism thing. But it could be a big business if done right. And it would provide a lot of jobs beyond itself, the ones in the towns of call and destination. You could have large and smaller planes. Two basic divisions, for up to 25 and up to 200. Cruisers and Luxury Liners; both having tourist and first class subdivisions. I wouldn't mix both on the same plane. Better for helping ordinary people to feel special.
Would you spend a dollar to buy back your country? Would you spend a Dollar a week? If we all did just think of what we could accomplish. What if we got a Dollar from every single person in the country once a week for a year. I would also be hoping that those who don't have kids or are rich enough would kick in a few extra, or a lot once in a while to make up for the larger families at the lower end of the economic ladder. Business that make a profit should kick in a few too, big corporations that rake in millions or billions should kick a nice percentage. All the Politicians could really help by just spending 10% less than they take in from all sources.
I would use the money to fund businesses, preferably new ones, aimed at putting everyone back to work. And bring back the worker owned business. If a company is on the rocks or going under. I would consider buying out the owners in favor of the workers. And I think there should be some in or around the bigger cities where the people who can't really hold down a steady job. Hey, there are lots of good and valid reasons why that just is for some people; everyone has their quirks faults and flaws. So why not have a place they could go and put in a days work for pay when they were hungry or just needed some money for what ever. Would probably need to be some sort of manufacturing scenario, products with lots of hands on work. Better yet something that could be either assembly lined or built by one person. We also need to start shifting our focus back on agriculture. 300 plus million people need a lot of food and a lot of clothing. We need to be growing as much of our own as possible. Even more so we can trade with other nations for the things they have. And we can grow a lot of, or all of, the raw materials we need to build many things. Which also means i's time to bring back Hemp, the industrial kind which should never have been included as a drug; IT ISN”T!
That's a whole other longer discussion. Go read Jack Herrer's book The Emperor Wears No Clothes if you want to know the whole truth about the history of that plant. It should eventually go down a big fat black mark on this whole country. First and foremost on the brain dead politicians that did it in the first place and next on all the people for letting it happen and for continuing to be ok with it. There are hundreds of product now being made out of that plant. Some right here in this country. We just can't grow our own raw materials. And why not? Because it looks like it's cousin Cannabis Indica Hemp, that one is in the drug family. Has been used by Physicians for thousands of years. Right up until the phobia ridden nut cases in this country were allowed to run free.
Have you seen the United States of Tara? It's one of the Showtime half hour series. At first I thought it was going to be something totally different, history, comedy and travel or something. The States are referred to as Alter states, as in other personalities, she's got a huge personality disorder and several Alters. /And a not so ordinary family on top of all that. It takes a few episodes to get a handle on all that's going on. It has comedy, funny moments, but it also spends a lot of time on the darker side of living like that and with someone that has multiple personalities, and all the other things a family brings to the table. Season two just started, two weeks ago. Anyway I'm enjoying it. John Corbet, AKA Chris of Northern Exposure, is the husband. I got to liking him from the northern exposure reruns. I went to Roslyn one time, the town where it was shot, the only time actually, while it was still on the air. It's just over the mountains, bit more than a hundred miles from here, Didn't go to the Brick, didn't know and it's not the same on the inside anyway. But at that point I had only tried to watch one or two and couldn't get into it at the time, other things going on, no DVR back then, no Satellite or cable either where I was. Sat dishes were huge things and expensive back then. I finally bought one but never got to use it. Frackin' tweakers stole the receiver. I've still got the dish, I call it my big birdbath which is about all it's good for now. I would like to find another receiver some year, hook it up and see what kind of frequencies I could tune into. My own little SETI station maybe. Anyway I always thought it would be kinda interesting to listen to the universe. So, I'm watching the second episode of Season two. Well I'll let you watch it on your own. I always hated people that like to tell you everything, or talk all the way through a show or movie.

Obama is giving another one of his speeches at a North Carolina battery factory.
If they guy didn't lie so much, wasn't a word game player like Slick Wilie I might even like him a little. The big lie that just irks me to no end is the not raising taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year. Yeah right, now if he had limited that to income tax it might hold. But he didn't he said and keeps saying taxes. And that means any an all taxes. Well there is one group, and they are for the greatest part the poorest of the poor in this country and he signed a TAX increase of from hundreds to thousands of percent. I know because I happen to buy some of the things he jacked the tax on. One item used to cost from 8 or 9 dollars to maybe 15 or 20 tops. Today it costs $70 minimum and the difference is ALL tax. He should either change his way of saying it to reflect the truth, that he has always been just talking about the Income Tax, or stop his lying by never saying it again. Maybe Lying is something Politicians just can't help doing. Personally i think they are more concerned with re-election than anything else. And that once in they spend more time on trying to say things they can point back to in election speeches than actually doing a better job each year. Should not the primary goal of all politicians be to make things better, to refine the system each year, not to do more at greater cost, but to improve the doing of their prime functions. And the prime function of government is protection. But not from every tiny little thing. Their prime purpose is the Protection of the Rights of the Individual, as well as protection of the people in their territory, what geographic area they are responsible for, to protect all individuals from invasion, from harm and damage by others, be those others foreign or domestic.
It's just too bad that we still need any politicians. But we do, we just need to find a better way of picking them out of the group and far better controls over their power and authority. Some of them should be held criminally liable for what they have done while in office. The real tragedy is they all fear being found out for an affair, or just having sex, far more than for any wrong they do in their job. Talk about an imbalance, their sexual escapades doesn't harm anyone outside of their immediate family, mostly just a spouse. But the harm from doing a lousy job touches thousands or millions of people. But they don't know those people. They have have never met nor even seen the greater portion of them and probably never will. They have a small circle of friends relatives and cronies, and could care less about all the rest, except during election years; Of course.
Spring is here and I'm getting excited about the garden again. I was going to do a bit of work on it today. Until an even bigger storm blew in last night. The last one dumped a good 5” of rain on my in a couple of days. This one is supposed to be bigger and badder. That means floods in the same old places. You would think people would learn to stop living in places that always flood. Or at least to build on stilts or something that keeps the buildings high and dry. That's just common sense don't you think?
Ok, I'm gonna post this one.
Keep tuned in because another one will follow eventually.
So, you thought any about my Buy the country back for a Dollar a Week idea?

Been a while

Well it's been a while, three years. And it took me hours to get back in here. And I'm not 100% sure how I did it. Finding the passwords from old dead computers is tricky at best.
And more recent things I have to say are found here, http://ramblingsfromho.wordpress.com/
I do want to thank my Brother for keeping the link to this alive on his web site, www.journaled.com he has lots of interesting things for you to take a look at, especially if you like Martial Arts.
I'm going to leave this now, mostly to see if this posts and IF I can get back in as easy as I once did.
Later Dudes and Dudettes

Update for June and why it's been so long

Hi there, it's June, almost halfway through in fact.
I've been having some real computer troubles, I lost the whole thing more than once. I have found there are certain buttons you do not want to push and certain areas where you do not want to check the wrong box. There are no warnings before or after.
I learned that windows can delete a while hard drive without being told or even asking if you want to.
I've learned a lot about things not to do in Windows XP.
I spent hours and days and weeks searching the web for fixes to the troubles the problems I had.

There was something else that got my attention in the middle of all these problems and that is that Goggle and Yahoo are not what they used to be, not as good at returning search results on topic.

I believe it has to do with money more than anything, with the people who buy show my site first. And I am sick and tired of seeing no matter what I type in show up in a side column for some company who can sell me whatever by having what ever it was I typed in to search for inserted into the blank space in their standard line, and I am really tired of those links never working, producing nothing but a blank page; when I look at what is in the browser address space it is never the site address I supposedly clicked on.


Anyone else notice this problem?
Well friends, it's very late, I'm very tired so I'm going to bed now. I'll get back here as soon as I can and tell you the rest of the story about what's been going on around here lately.

Some Good News for a Change and a bit of bad news too

I have good news, well and some bad news, to report today.

First the Good news, I was laying in bed last night when it finally dawned on me that even though my docs, my 92 page brief and all the supporting evidence, got deleted, I still have printouts of a lot of things from the previous years. All I have to do is scan them back in, or just make copies.
The other good news is I finally located some web sites, pages and documents, that have the much needed "fair value is not fair market value" phrase within them, I had originally found only one, a court case out of Colorado, today I am happy to announce I found several, and counting, pages using Gahoo/Yoogle, which if you don't know about it has a split screen with yahoo results on one side and Google results on the other, and yes most times there is a difference.
Here is the link WWW.gahooyoogle.com go ahead and try it out.

So things are moving forward.

I got a letter from the State Tax Appeal Board last week, it seems I forgot to include the notice from the county board when I filed for the appeal. They gave me 10 days [from the day they mailed it; May 1, 2006] to return it to them, I'm hoping that weekends don't count. I don't go to the post office everyday, sometimes only once a week or less. So I had only two days, if weekends count, to get it back to them. I sent a note explaining that I didn't get the letter until the 5th, didn't open it until the 6th and mailed it back the next possible day, Monday the 8th, it could get there by the 10th if it goes right through. I'm only maybe 25 miles give or take as the crow flies from Olympia, but 60 miles or more by road, the mail from out here on the other hand goes first to Portland Oregon and then back to Washington. I'm hoping it took the fast route.


The other Bad News, is I am still trying to recover the lost/deleted files. I got one program I could at least understand, plus it was Freeware, it found over 41,000 lost files. The problem is few of them were saved on a different drive, it recommends not trying to save on the same drive the lost files are on, and most of those found either won't open or are blank. I got a couple to open, they appear to be program files, like sample pages and such. I am almost ready to give up and start all over again, but I won't do that yet, there is way to much to get back, too much time involved, like the years it took me to create and collect them all. Not to mention some files that I actually bought.

More Good News

I got busy yesterday and did some dirt plowing and then planting, not to mention filtering out a lot of sticks and roots inbetween. It is going to take me a really long time to create the new garden plus. This old body is in loud rebellion with the digging and stick finding, throwing out, part. But with no one else left around here to share the chores I get to do ALL of them myself. So I now have corn [which is showing] green beans, edible pea pods, tomatoes [ several kinds], dill, cucumbers, pumpkins, radishes, zucchini [I got nuts and planted a whole row of the stuff], onions, and more to come. Plus there are the berries and grapes and the rhubarb here and there. Then the trees, apple, pear, and peach, so far only the three apple trees are producing, the others need a year or three more before fruit will grow. Now I need to prepare and figure out what else to plant in the acre plus of bare dirt still out there; maybe next year.

So keep tuned for updates, and if you read this let me know, if you are interested in my appeal let me know.

Beware what you do in Windows XP

I had the ultimate bad experience the other day. I have been changing hard drives around in this machine, got two inside it and one external hard drive. But I made a real goof, not knowing it could happen and Windows didn't even give me a notice or a chance to not do it or anything.

I had to send one of the drives back because I couldn't get the system to recognize it as being there, more on that later.
So when I got it back I pulled one out and put it in, it was an 80 gig the one I pulled was a 160 gig, my original and still C: drive is only a 40 gig. Anyway, the computer was shut down, asleep hibernating whatever it does on its own, enough so that I have to push the power button to get it to revive. I had a brief thought that I should wake it up and then shut it down, but I didn't thinking it wouldn't matter I just pulled the plug and opened it up and swapped the drive out, put the 160 gig back in.
BUT when I turned it back on Windows deleted all the contents of that drive, which just happened to contain all of my docs, music, videos, programs and way more things. It was my back up in fact.
But due to other problems I had to dump everything I lost from the C: drive in an attempt to defrag it. By the way I couldn't even defrag after removing a lot of things, it said that google earth was the problem, it had files that couldn't be defragged, I don't understand that but that's what it said.
So there I was with the drives all installed, the external hooked up and formatted and all my data gone in the blink of an eye, well a few seconds longer. The Documents folder was only a measly 4.7 gigs
This was not something I had even an inkling of an idea could happen.
So beware of XP, it makes decisions all on its own and won't even ask you for permission.

In the old DOS days I had a program, from either Norton or PC-Tools that did some great things, one of them was to undelete files. Back then a file only got the first letter of its name changed to a symbol, the computer seeing that symbol would ignore the file, not show it as being there and all you had to do was change the first letter back and it would show the file again.
I don't know how XP works but I'm hoping it is still the same way.
I am hoping that it is still possible to recover everything.
I looked at a couple of so called undelete programs for sale these days, but they looked way over my head and due to the amount of data lost I don't want to take a chance on really losing it forever. The greatest loss is the 4 years of data collecting I did on my property tax case. I have a not too good print out of the 92 page brief so I can scan a lot of it, but there was so much more I had that was a part of the findings.
The good news, the hopeful news is my youngest has a friend she tells me who knows how to do things like undelete lost files. I told her to find him that I would buy the software if needed and pay him for his time. I'm still waiting but I have high hopes she will find him.
The notice came today from the State Tax Appeal board, I've not open it yet.
If I need to type everything all over again from scratch I can do it but it's the web pages I had logged in that are the greatest loss. Mostly from legal sites and such, things that supported my position that True and Fair value is not Fair Market Value, things that took years to find.
Well just wanted to give you a little warning to not do what I did.

I said I would add more on the system not seeing the drive as being there. It did see it but not openly, seems if you delve deep into windows there is a place where it will show up, but not as an active drive, it shows a small red X in a circle like icon, how was I supposed to know all you had to do was click on it and follow the directions. It was a Hitachi drive I emailed them and they sent back how to do it instructions, which made me wonder if the one I had sent back wasn't actually good. You see when I installed the 160 gig, it was a Seagate it just showed up as being there and windows asked me if I wanted to format it, simple easy no problems. I expected the same thing, so at least I learned something new about XP. And that is XP I think has far too many hidden areas, areas within areas, within areas, of controls.

May 2006 arrives

Thought I would add a bit here on local events.
A nice big bull dozer arrived last week and spent the next 5 days moving dirt around, burning a stump pile bigger than the house, it raged for at least 5 days and now sits there with only one stump left, that one was dug up as an after the fact find so it arrived too late to burn as the fire was only a pile of coals. But not to worry there is an acre or two of bare dirt now chock full of roots and branches all bone dry as the trees were logged back in 92. So for the whole of this summer and maybe next summer small bon fires are the name of the game, which also means lots of hotdogs and marshmallows on sticks.
It is great to finally look out on that bare dirt because after almost 30 years I can finally start planting fruit trees, flowers, vegetables, grapes, berries and whatever else I can find to create a visual treat to the eyes.
For now I'm going to seed most of it in either red clover or alf-alpha, both are in the green manure category, meaning they enrich the soil as they grow. It will depend on which seeds I can find and of course the cost per acre because after the dozer bill comes in there won't be a lot left this month. I was lucky in that Leon the dozer owner takes payments, plus he only charges $60 and hour with an operator. For those of you that don't know that is far cheaper than I could rent a smaller one for and I would need to run it myself.

The other good news is I finally got the rhododendron bushes off eh truck. They were sitting there for 4 weeks exactly. I picked them up off of freecycle. Each was some 5' tall and about as wide. Took 4 of us just to slide them up the ramp onto the truck, took my back a week plus to recover from it, but well worth the effort. One bloomed on the truck, a brilliant red, the other is just now blooming a bright pink. They certainly add something to all the green of the forest around me.
And while doing all of this we happened to notice one dead tree, there are several dozen of them from an ice storm a few years back, this one stands about 20 feet high or more and about 15" thick, there is a nice round hole in the side about 5 feet from the broken top, inside that hole is a woodpecker, working up a frenzy pecking away clearing out space for a nest.
I've only seen the hen so far but I did notice last year a huge red headed woodpecker working the trees in that area, so I'm having hopes that this will be their nest. I need to look them up and see if they keep a nest for years, I hope they do as it will be fun to watch the young ones grow.


So now I finally have cleared space enough to build my woodshop which is a life long dream since childhood, and plenty of good dirt to plant things in, things to eat that is, and a few flowers for color here and there, stripes and patches of them, what ever I feel like doing, I could even create pictures if I wanted. I've seen that done in magazines and books, you just plant different colors according to a graph plan and when they bloom you see the picture. I've spent the last 20 years drawing plans for this property, all sorts of designs so it will be interesting to see what finally emerges.

Why do printers quit working at the worst possible moments?

I attempted to print out one of my replies to the assessors office. To separate out the request for the law he claims requires him to assess your property at 100% of its Fair market Value. I have been requesting for some 4 to 5 year now that he tell me which law it is, so I can look it up and read it for myself. Up until last week the question was never acknowledged. Now I get a reply stating they have no obligation to enter into any debate or discussion over the law. I don't want a discussion or debate either I just want him to "show me the law" as is my right.
So I get this letter of reply written, after 5 days of editing and redoing it again and again, only to find my printer won't print it.
I was starting to get the feeling maybe I wasn't supposed to send it, but then I figured it was just some hex put on me by the Evil Prince stopping me, it would however print out in color, so I printed it out in dark blue and sent it off.
After two days of trying to figure out the problem, it was an almost new cartridge, well one of the recycled ones at half cost, I came to the conclusion it had arrived with not very much ink inside.
I put in another of the "new" ones and bingo it now prints just fine in black. Go figure.

At least I can now print away until it too runs dry. So I get to send in my other letter, the one for disclosure of his methods. I had to separate the issues of show me the law and show me the method as they are playing word games.

And I still need to get my appeal to the State Tax Board in ASAP.

Oh the Fun of it all.

By the way if anyone who reads this would like to get involved in fighting to have your property tax taken to the proper level just drop me a note, I think my email is posted on the page for replies, I'm still learning about how this Blog thing works, I'll get better as time goes by.

County Board of Equalization [property tax] Decision

I got my property tax appeal decision in the mail yesterday. If this wasn't such a serious matter I would have laughed until I fell down on the ground and rolled all over the place .

If you remember I mentioned that the 5 member board admitted that none of them had read all of what I presented as evidence; I got the impression, I could see it in their eyes, read it in their faces, that none had read more than a page or two if that. And I would lay odds none had bothered to read it all after the hearing. Which makes the decision I got in the mail a joke.

They wrote in their notice, their decision, that due to the lack of any clear and concise evidence they had to find in favor of the assessor, never mind that he didn't really present any evidence, just a note with three addresses on it, those were supposed to be the comps I guess. You see the law here says that the assessor is given the presumption of correctness. Meaning he is trusted to have done his job and he need not offer any actual proof that he did.

I also got a letter yesterday from the assessors office about my request for disclosure. At the bottom of the letter was a short paragraph that said they would not get into any discussion or debate over the law with a Citizen.
To quote" In regards to the issue of the use of verbiage fair market value, The Assessor-Treasurer, or any of his staff, are not required to enter into a debate about interpretation of the laws, court findings, legal options and written directions from the State of Washington that govern the assessment of properties in Pierce County in response to a public record or information request." Now isn't that interesting?
I was not opening a discussion or debate but simply asking that the Assessor provide me with a copy of the law he advertises both orally and in print he claims requires him to assess property at 100% of its Fair Market Value.

He won't answer my question, he won't disclose or provide a copy of that law because there is no such law. So instead of admitting the mistake he is clouding the whole issue, ducking and dodging it with smoke and mirrors. But never fear my fellow Citizens because I will not give up on this quest. I don't give up once I have sunk my teeth into something like this. In fact it now has my dander up that they are playing games and refusing to make disclosure, as required by law, freedom of information and all that.
So in keeping with the Game he is creating I am going to make it a whole separate issue, all on its own, under the Freedom of Information requirements and see how he responds to that form of a request.


So I am off to file a next level appeal to the State Tax Board. And start preparing next years appeal, it has to be filed by the end of June. It is going to be filed every year for the rest of my life, well as long as I own property. I keep hopes that someday the rest of you will rise up, wake up, and join me. After all as the assessor says, and prints in his literature, you should be paying, Not a Penny More, than you are legally required.