E.J. Svoboda

I just finished a major project at work a few weeks ago and thought I would reward myself with a new watch.  Lately, I have found that keeping all of the vintage automatics and manual wind watches in good running order is making the watchmaker wealthy and me less so.  I have also found that I really like accurate watches.  I guess I am slowing moving towards more high end quartz movements and less automatic or manual movements.  With that in mind I set out to find a cool looking watch.  As fate would have it I wasn’t overly impressed with the $1300 Oris I saw at Macy’s.  It was a decent looking watch but it was only rated for 30 meters and for that price I could easily jump into an Omega, Citizen Chronomaster, or even a used Grand Seiko.  Each would have a better depth rating and quite frankly be better watches.  I also wasn’t in the mood to spend that much on a watch so I felt lucky when I noticed a Citizen Nighthawk for 50% off.  Citizen just released a new version with eco-drive and syncing to the atomic clock.  I like the looks on the older model better so a purchase was made.

Here’s a shot of the watch:

The watch is interesting in that it has a slide rule in the bezel and was designed for pilots.  I once had a vague idea how to use a slide rule but those days are long past.  My initial impressions of that watch is that it looks very nice.  I’ve received a few compliments on it so far and look forward to wearing it more.  It is pretty comfortable and seems to gain about 4 seconds a month.  Not bad.  My only concern is that the crystal is not sapphire and that the metal ring around the bezel is going to be prone to dings.  I would have also liked a little better finishing on the case itself.  Small things that most people won’t notice.

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What happens when you plan to do work in your kitchen?  You clean your garage.

Made some space on the shelves I built last year since they’re already filled.  I then sub-divided one of the cubes by adding more shelves.  Tomorrow I am planning on splitting one of the other cubes by putting in another 24×48 piece of wood along with supports (each shelf is 24 inches deep and 96 inches wide but there’s a support column in the middle so each shelf looks like it is 48 inches wide).

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It appears that the efforts of the government of China that were aimed at reducing the pollution in Bejing have come up short.  The American swim team arrived the other day wearing pollution masks.  I firmly believe that the IOC is going to regret putting the summer games in China and I believe that future host cities will have to prove that they can provide a healthy and safe environment for the games.

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I generally try to stay away from politics but there’s something about McCain that has bothered me for some time.  He’s a luddite.  When asked what kind of computer he uses he gave the answer of “Cindy McCain”.  According to the candidate, he doesn’t know how to use a computer and doesn’t.  Some people might wonder why our President should have even rudimentary knowedge of how to use a computer.  Here’s why: a number of technology issues that are going to require astute decisions will become important within legislation over the next four years.  These issues include electronic voting, the net neutrality act, increased personal privacy concerns as they relate to data collection, and copyright/file sharing issues.  It should also be noted that the Bush Administration made a concerted effort to avoid following statutes that relate to how e-mail correspondence is handled within the white house.  As a result of their efforts they “lost” millions of e-mails that they were entrusted with preserving for history.  Some of these e-mails relate specifically to a number of the scandals that they have been embroiled in over the years.

A President doesn’t need to understand the finer points of TCP/IP or even FTP but they should understand the concept of e-mail and how data integrity/recovery procedures need to be structured so that their administration can follow the existing statutes.  They also need to be able to understand the limitations of electronic voting machines in order to help insure that legislation enacted allows for our elections to decrease the possibility of voting fraud committed by those who are entrusted with conducting and supervising fair elections.

Filed under: Politics, Technology by Ed - 1 Comment →