Yesterday was a good day, but a bit rough on the body. The schedule?
6:00a Wake up. Give dean a bottle, get dressed, pack tools, lunches and such.
7:15a Out the door, drop TBWITWW off at work
8:30a Drop Dean off at day care
9:00a Park the car at the train station and take the train downtown
10:00a Work at the MCA. The good kind, not so hard as to be exhausting, but hard enough that you don't feel like you're wasting time.
8:00p Head north for Wine and Pie, Pie and Wine with Katrina
9:00p Arrive at the party
2:00a Head for home
3:00a Back in bed.

I'm too old for this. But it was fun even though I'm moving a bit slow today.

Last weekend was TBWITWW and my seven year anniversary. To which you might say "Holy crap! Has it been that long. Damn I'm old." Or at least that's what I say.

To celebrate, my mom generously arranged a night at a hotel, a fantastic dinner, some money to spend at the casino, and a night away from Dean. And we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

Starting with dinner at "The Reserve", the casino's steak house, we went all out. For our appetizer we got the "Shrimp Three Ways" which were cocktail, pancetta wrapped and garlic and herb. TBWITWW had the Filet "Oscar" which came with crab, asparagus and hollandaise (she has a thing for hollandaise sauce) and I had the trio of crusted filets (blue cheese, garlic parmesan, and horseradish). As sides we had the artichoke and spinach gratin and the truffled steak fries. All of these were quite good, although the fries weren't as fantastic as we'd hoped. The horseradish filet was my favorite. We each had a flight of 3 wines with our meal. As the price for the flight wasn't much more than the price of single glasses, it seemed like being able to sample 6 wines was definitely the way to go. For desert I had Creme Brulee and a glass of port. TBWITWW had the cheese plate and an ice wine. It was a lovely way to end a great meal. We can't afford to eat like this often, but I think we would if we had the money.

After dinner, we went to the Casino floor. Following my mother's advice, we each signed up for the casino's rewards program. Then we went in search of games that looked promising. We went to the $0.02 slot machines first, and each started with a $20 bill. TBWITWW went through hers fairly quickly, while mine took a bit longer. Those machines didn't seem to be paying so we got bored quickly and moved on to video poker. A little more skill was involved here, and the machines were paying better (or at least burning through the money more slowly). Again, TBWITWW burned through her second twenty in about the time it took me to use up the $7 remaining from my first. Still, it took a while and was more fun than the two-penny slots. We decided to try our luck at some other slots, and we each started with another twenty. By my count, this meant I was ahead by $20. We found some promising looking machines (nickel slots with actual handles!) and went to work. Before too long, TBWITWW was up almost $40. I didn't do as well, never going much above my original $20. The woman at the machine next to me won about $45 on a single pull at one point, which isn't too bad for nickel slots. Finally, when my $20 was gone, TBWITWW cashed out with $20.35 remaining. I had a penny. We were then able to cash in our "points" for the evening and each got $10 back. Fun! In the end, we fed $100 to the machines and walked away with $40. Respectable I think and we got a lot of fun for our $60. Granted, I don't think I would have enjoyed it quite as much if it had been our own money rather than a gift, but at the same time, I can see going back. I'd still like to try my hand at the table games, just for the experience. But on a Saturday night it was too crowded for me to be comfortable just jumping in as a beginner, and the limits on the tables were too high to get much playing time out of it, so that will have to wait for another day.

After we were done on the casino floor, we headed back up to our room with no diapers or bottles to worry about.

...

Then we went to bed and didn't get up until after 9am. Ahhh, luxury. We then poked around the room, drank some coffee, packed and checked out. Then we hit the buffet for brunch and topped off our decadent weekend in classic style.

All in all we had a great weekend that was well beyond our normal means. It was a lot of fun and very relaxing, and I'd like to do it again sometime, but it's not something I'm in any hurry for. We missed our boy though and by time we got back to my mom's place were ready to spend the rest of the day with him. We'll post about that soon.

I have some ideas for things I may post about, but I thought I'd ask for some quick feedback.

Would you prefer more frequent, but shorter and possibly less substantive entries (ie, reviews of TV shows and "aside" type posts) longer than Twitter messages, but shorter than my typical paragraphs? Or would you prefer I carry on as I have been?

Ramadan starts today, and as I was looking at information about it for a possible blog post, I saw mentioned that one of the traditions in Islam is the recitation of entire Koran over the course of the 30 days. I haven't read more than a few verses here and there since college in my copy of the Koran, and one of my 101 in 1001 goals was to read the entire Koran, so I thought that this seemed like a good thing to try. My copy of the Koran from college is about 425 pages, this works out to roughly 15 pages per day. Although I'm not reading at the rate I used to, 15 pages a day should be no problem.

So, for the next 30 days, I'm going to read about 15 pages of the Koran each day and post some of the verses that I find interesting. I'm not Muslim, and I'm not going to try to do any deep interpretation of the scriptures or comparisons to other scriptures. That's simply not something I'd be comfortable doing on a first reading of scripture in any case. However, I'd be happy to discuss, in the comments or in future posts, any ideas that people have regarding what I've read. If anyone cares to join me in this project I'll try to post my next-day reading plan each day as well.

So... Day 1 (1:1 - 2:141)

1. The Exordium
The first Chapter, only a few verses long, offers praises to God and asks for guidance.

2. The Cow
The first half of this chapter seems to focus on interactions with those who don't follow Islam. The general idea seems to be that God has revealed himself to various prophets and discounting any of them is wrong.

Notable verses:
(2:62) Believers, Jews, Christians, and Sabaeans -- whoever believes in God and the Last Day and does what is right -- shall be rewarded by their Lord; they have nothing to fear or regret.
(2:87) To Moses We gave the Scriptures and after him We sent other apostles. We gave Jesus son of Mary veritable signs and strengthened him with the Holy Spirit. Will you then scorn each apostle whose message does not suit your fancies, charging some with imposture and slaying others?

So, I'm thinking of compiling my own list of "Books You Should Read". It will likely be as skewed towards my own reading habits as the so-called BBC Book Meme is towards the reading habits of whoever compiled that list. But I'm taking nominations for my list of the 100-ish Books You Should Read. I'd prefer to know what books you think should be read by most people but commonly aren't included on these sorts of lists. Also, unlike the other list, I won't include a series or compilation and one of the titles included in that series.

By the way. Anything by Hemingway or any of the Brontes or Dan Brown is explicitly forbidden from appearing on this list. Seriously, why do people read that crap?

Here's my entry on the book meme that's been running around. Books in bold are ones I've read. Looks like 35 of the 100. But I have a hard time believing this list came from the BBC. There's too much Cannon mixed with pop fiction and way to damn much Austen to represent anything like a reasonable sample of English-Language Lit.

"The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?"

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (The whole Bronte clan bores the crap out of me)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (actually 3 books)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (see #1)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (Actually 7 books, hey look I'm up to 10 books on the first 4 entries)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (See #1)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis(Again, 7 books)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (Ummm... #33 includes this)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (but why?)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (Do I get to count this whole series too?)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo ( I saw the musical )

A significant percentage of the energy in household use (by my unscientific and guess-heavy research) goes into low-voltage items. Computers, charging phones and batteries and media players and the like. Pretty much anything with a wall-wart is using a good sized chunk of it's power to convert from 120VAC to 6-12VDC (or whatever voltage is required. And, many of those things have batteries that they're charging. They don't need always-on power, and they don't need 120VAC.

So here's what I envision...

A parallel wiring setup that distributes low-voltage DC power throughout a home could power a lot electronic equipment more efficiently and cheaply. Instead of transformers all over the place, you could have one large one that provided low-voltage power more efficiently. Even better, you could hook this system up to an on-site generator. Solar and wind are more effective at generating low voltage DC than at generating AC power, so it would be the ideal way to start getting some of the power load off the grid. And the generator I'd like to see is the WindBelt.

I'm obsessed with this thing. From what I've seen, it's scalable, durable and has a minimum of moving parts. They're smaller than a turbine and cheaper than solar panels. You could mount them on your roof line and it wouldn't change the appearance of your house very much at all.

Of course there are issues with this idea. Electronics manufacturers would have to standardize on voltages and connectors, but the fact that they don't is stupid anyway. Homes would need to be rewired, but I don't see that as being substantially more complex than adding cable outlets. And, of course, someone needs to build the technology and market it. But this could be a big first step. If it worked, I can see many people thinking "What else can I move to this system?" We'd probably see an upsurge in demand for things that could run low-voltage, like LED lighting.

Would you buy a system like this if it were available? How would you improve this idea?