Cox Crow

COLD SPRING   $434,000   914-271-4433
3BR, 1Full Bath ranch, beautiful 1acre property. Move in condition! HW floors throughout. Basement easily finished. Easily expanded to your dream home. Close to shopping, town and railroad. (2509823) HOULIHAN LAWRENCE CROTON-ON-HUDSON www.houlihanlawrence.com

For $50,000 more you can get this duplex in the village.

Last year around this time, prices in Cold Spring, New York, were about $100,000 cheaper. Prices in this side of Putnam County have not gone up as quickly as those on the Hudson, which to my mind, is to be expected. Location is everything.

We just voted down the proposed budget for the Mahopac Central School District, because of the 9.95% property tax increase involved. 2,593 persons voted, with 1,728 against and 865 for the proposed budget. 5,289 students were enrolled in the district for the 2003-2004 school year. Most of the budget increase was blamed on things beyond our immediate control: pensions, health plans, and fuel.

In an essay in the American School Board Journal, Deborah Meier writes,

In1930 there were 200,000 school boards in the United States. Today, with twice as many citizens and three times as many students in our public schools, we have only 15,000. Once one of every 500 citizens sat on a school board; today it’s one out of nearly 20,000. Once most of us knew a school board member personally; today it’s rare to know one.

When the cell reaches a certain size, it divides, and multiplies. In some organisms, cell division stops, and the organism deteriorates and dies.

Perhaps these big school districts need to do the same.

I have never been able to convince Excel to draw the graphs that I expect it should draw. I have a set of data which I want to use for the values of x, and another set that I want to use for y, and a third set to graph which shows the relation of x to y. Is this too much to ask?

The particular application in this case is to show how the cost of a house changes in relation to changes in the rate of taxation and in the financed price of the property, with the mortgage rate being a fixed value. The curve should be relatively flat; that is, as the price goes down, and the taxes go up, the costs remain similar.

So what am I missing?

The Yahoo! Music Engine description says,

Transfer music to your portable player in seconds; it’s compatible with the most popular devices (Rio, Sony, Phillips, Zen, and more)

That statement is misleading, as the antecedent Yahoo! refers to by “it” is Windows Media Audio wrapped in Microsoft’s DRM, which is not compatible with the most popular device. While I wonder how much success Yahoo will have by restricting themselves to the small portion of the portable music device market not owned by Apple, some other player could come out of nowhere and take that share, but it must be both easier and cheaper.

Meanwhile, my Panasonic RP-HS41 headphones have a short in them, so I’ll have to mosey on over to Radio Shack and pick up a new set.

Jenny asks

So what are you doing to help the iPod*-owning-soccer-moms in your community? Are you thinking that far ahead? As a profession, we’d better start figuring out how to circulate digital music files to patron players.

As of last week, the Big Sister is playing soccer, so that officially makes us soccer parents. And as of Sunday, D has a pink iPod Mini. I suppose this makes us the exact patrons to whom Mahopac Library needs to cater. After all, the girls are already there twice a week for story time and such.

Meanwhile, Y! Music has launched some sort of thing that I’m not too interested in, seeing as how it doesn’t use any of my equipment, and This Sort of Thing is not welcome on the Company’s equipment. They’re welcome to use all the DRM they want: I hope it costs them an arm and a leg.

* the iPod is an MP3 player.

In a discussion on UNIX’s uid, which is a 32-bit unsigned integer unique only within a certain namespace, usually defined by the /etc/passwd file. These namespaces collide when one uses NFS.

That’s not very intelligent, is it?

No, it’s evolutionary. It’s an argument against Intelligent Design.

Phil Ringnalda’s simile comparing GET and POST with light switches and firealarms, reminds me of the situation at the head of our stairs.

Making the fire alarm look just like a light switch isn’t an example of daring and innovative design; it’s just dangerous.

At the head of our stairs are two switches. One, a light switch, turns the lights on and off. The other, with a red faceplate, turns the oil furnace on and off. The only difference between the two, aside from the label on the furnace switch, is the color. They both switch things between two states, but the effect of the latter is somewhat more impressive during the winter. I could stand there and flip either switch all day, and the effect would not vary. Somehow I don’t think you can say the same of launching the nuclear weapons.

(I find it somewhat amusing that the same folks we’ve had to bludgeon into using GET instead of POST have finally realized that the URI is a fantastic thing, and now want to shove things properly POSTed into the URI.)

Bonjour?