On Supreme Court Justice confirmations

One of my U.S. Senators, in reply to a protest about the coddling of Neil Gorsuch versus the snubbing of Merrick Garland in their respective nominations to sit on the Supreme Court, said this:

". . . the Senate traditionally does not confirm a Supreme
Court nominee in the final year of a president’s term."

So I researched it and found at least these cases:

• Anthony Kennedy was confirmed on 1988/2/3, in the final year of Ronald Reagan's second term. 
• Benjamin Cardozo was confirmed on 1932/2/24, in the final year of Herbert Hoover's presidency. 
• John Clarke was confirmed on 1916/7/24, in what could have been the final year of Woodrow Wilson's presidency. 
• Louis Brandeis was confirmed on 1916/6/1, in what could have been the final year of Woodrow Wilson's presidency. 
• Mahlon Pinney was confirmed on 1912/3/13, in the final year of William Howard Taft's presidency. 
• George Shiras, Jr. was confirmed on 1892/7/26, in the final year of Benjamin Harrison's presidency. 
• Melville Fuller was confirmed on 1888/7/20, in the final year of Grover Cleveland's first presidency. 
• William Burnham Woods was confirmed on 1880/12/21, in the final year of the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes. 
• Roger B. Taney and Philip Pendleton Barbour were confirmed on 1836/3/15, in the final year of Andrew Jackson's presidency.
• William Johnson was confirmed on 1804/3/24, in what could have been the final year of Thomas Jefferson's presidency. 
• Oliver Ellsworth was confirmed on 1796/3/4, on the cusp of the final year of George Washington's presidency. 

Reading Tolkien

More years ago than I care to admit, I bought a boxed set of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. A bit over a year ago I finally started reading them.

I'm now through The Two Towers and will soon start on The Return of the King. I'm glad to have read them, but Tolkien's prose is still a slog for me.

At a recent book fair, I bought a copy of The Silmarillion. . . .

On moving

We've (mostly) moved to a new (to us) residence.

Getting out of the old house has been slow, but we do have a deadline, as the old house is under contract to sell at a substantial discount under what it would be worth if fixed up. Nearly everything is out. We're left with gardening tools and supplies, hand tools and a few odds and ends. The rest we'll likely leave behind because the contract allows that.

At this point I think all of our books are out. About half the artwork is out.

We're still getting things sorted in the new place, still painting here and there, still finding new places to put old things.

I'd like to carve out more time for the life-enriching things I consider important. I have ten things on my list. I'd like to touch on more than three each day.

We gave up on AT&T for DSL. We gave up on AT&T altogether, because they botched the move order for the analog land line and after spending hours trying to get someone who both cared and knew what they were doing, I gave up on them. Now we're with Cox (😐) for internet, at the lowest pricing tier. They haven't introduced hard data caps here, but since they sort of talk of having a 1TB cap, what's the point of having faster service if it's possible to hit the cap at the lowest tier of service if one were to run it flat-out for a whole month? I hope that having Cox for internet is a better experience than having them for cable TV was.

We're still a cut-cord household - we had an antenna installed and it's hard to be happier with it. All the local channels we care about come through splendidly.

We giving up AT&T we also gave up the landline number I'd had for a long time. With all the junk calls it received, this isn't that much of a loss. It does mean relying more on mobile phones and the attendant per-minute charges, but even with a pay-for-what-one-uses plan (yay Ting!), we pay less than we would with an "unlimited" plan with one of the big carriers. VoIP like Google Voice fills part of the gap.

With Cox internet, OpenWRT would panic reboot when starting WoW. I haven't yet determined why. Connecting our actual WiFi access point directly to the cable modem was fine, though.

Ekster estas varmeta

Ekster estas varmeta. Hodiaŭ estas mardo kaj mia edzino kaj la katinoj dormas.

Mi ankoraŭ estas komencanto en Esperanto.

Mi bezonas paroli kun aliaj homoj.

---

Outside is warm. Today is Tuesday and my spouse and the cats are sleeping.

I am still a beginner in Esperanto.

I need to talk with other people.

OpenWRT Chaos Calmer 15.05.1

A few weeks ago I updated my Linksys WRT600N to OpenWRT Chaos Calmer 15.05.1. I wrote first about using OpenWRT on a WRT600N back in October 2015.

First I downloaded the bundle most appropriate for my model of router, then updated through the OpenWRT web interface. The only downside was that my custom-installed packages went away, so I lost my stats reporting installation. I reinstalled most of the packages I'd had installed prior to the update, but didn't recreate the stats setup.

Note to self: record the list of installed packages before the next update.

The router itself is running swimmingly. I wish I could say the same for the DSL (which I get through a reseller, so I don't have to deal directly with the ILEC's terrible customer service), which has a hiccup every few days and has to renegotiate a connection. I wish we had a choice here of something other than DSL or the cable TV company for wired Internet.

I promised to discuss the features I use most.

I have the router configured to NAT the public connection. What I use most is the realtime traffic monitor display, to show overall bandwidth usage and high traffic targets. I also have swap configured on a USB thumb drive in case of memory shortfall, as the WRT600N doesn't have much RAM.

Recognizing roots in Esperanto

In a previous post I noted that I had begun studying Esperanto. Now, several weeks into the effort, I find parts of the language easy to understand, without having to refer to word lists or mousing over the newly-presented words. I attribute this to having studied German (most, in high school and in the last year), Russian (next most, in high school and community college) and Spanish (some, years after high school). Many of the root words in Esperanto derive from Romance, Germanic or Slavic vocabulary.

Other words leave me puzzled until I learn them, then usually they click and I recognize the origin. A few I don't know the roots, but probably will eventually.

Hodiaŭ estas vendredo. La katinoj dormas. Ekster estas varma.

In search of . . .

. . . affordable housing that I can, in good conscience, purchase.

One story, three or more bedrooms, 1.5+ baths, not a slab foundation, not in an HOA, with a simple roof line, and where the property taxes won't eat us alive.

It's a challenge and my dear spouse is working hard to find one that meets our needs and is within our ability to make the down payment.

Stargate Atlantis

Last year I posted a blog entry mentioning the journey from beginning to end of Stargate SG-1 for me. I thought I might finish the remaining live-action shows by year-end.

I didn't make it.

I did finish Stargate Atlantis a few months ago, but still have the bulk of Stargate Universe to go. The last few episodes of Atlantis were pleasing, but the finale seemed rushed.

I've been watching Person of Interest and Law & Order, as those recordings on my DVR are bigger and I wanted to reclaim space.

Hodiaŭ estas dimanĉo

Hodiaŭ estas dimanĉo. Hieraŭ estis sabato. Morgaŭ estos lundo.

Lernu Esperanton! Vizitu http://www.duolingo.com.

I'm not sure when or where I first learned of Esperanto. It could have been the Stainless Steel Rat books of Harry Harrison, or the Riverworld books of Philip José Farmer. Back then the best resources were obtainable only by mail.

A few months ago I restarted it in earnest when I discovered that Duolingo, a web site devoted to free language learning tools, had a course for English speakers. I've also joined a few Facebook groups devoted to it, where I can be exposed to the language on a daily basis.

So far I've had fun.

Person of Interest

Nearly five years ago I began a journey. You might not think of watching a television show as a journey, but if a show has a compelling story, you might.

Such was with Person of Interest, created by Jonathan Nolan, noted for screenwriting on The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar, and for the short story "Memento Mori" which was turned into the movie Memento.

Person of Interest starts fairly episodic, then dives into lengthy story arcs around the Machine, a government surveillance system that has also been turned to good purpose by our protagonists.

There's really not much more to say except that it worked, despite the technical overreach typical of TV crime shows, and I recommend it.