All posts by Jack

Jack’s Ice Tea Recipe

By popular request:

Start by Boiling a gallon of water in a pressure cooker. (this is to help ensure that all the water molecules get heated) (takes about 20 minutes to come to a boil)

Relieve the pressure, remove the lid.

Put 3 large decaf ice tea bags in to brew for 5 minutes.

Remove tea bags.

Add 4 tablespoons of sugar

Add 1/4 cup of concentrated lemon juice (1/4 cup equals 4 tablespoons)

Stir well.

Put the tea in the refrigerator to cool down.

Decant into pouring vessel.

Serve on ice.

 

I am Published!

I am a published author! at least a writer…

The Colorado Springs Independent published my response to an earlier letter.

For some reason my WordPress isn’t letting me add the links where they should be.

http://www.csindy.com/colorado/letters/Content?oid=2334442

http://www.csindy.com/colorado/letters/Content?oid=2306503

 

Drifting without a landline

Well, we jumped off the deep end today and dropped our landline connection. We got the Ooma Telo a few weeks ago, tried it out and thought it worked and sounded OK.  Then we requested to port our current phone number to Ooma. I figure that the Ooma will pay for itself in less than a year if we dropped Qwest.   Today I went out to the box on the side of the house and disconnected from the phone network. I plugged Ooma into the house wiring and now all the phones in the house are running through Ooma.

After a lifetime wired into the network, it will be interesting to see what happens. We are on a MMDS broadband wireless connection to the internet  so the only physical connection to the grid is the electricity. Ooma will redirect calls to our cell phone if the network connection is down so I am expecting a some redundant connectivity. Of course, if a power loss drops our MMDS tower, it may drop the cell phone tower as well, and then where would we be?  And all the electricity in the phone lines will be laughing at us.

If you don’t hear anything more from me on this then everything is going so smoothly I have forgotten all about it.

 

Selling US Short

Short finance – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

I often get the feeling that Republicans are trying to short the United States. Something about their attitude that a nation is like a corporation. So it is in their interest to lower the overall value of the US so they can make a profit.

Of course, a nation is not a corporation, it does not have stock, it has people, and selling them short will quickly lower the value of the nation.