The Wandering Minstrel

Pan-seared, oven roasted beef rib roast, Danish stuffed baked potatoes, savory bacon Brussels sprouts with cheddar-topped broccoli and cauliflower. We hope everyone had as wonderful a Christmas holiday.

The Better Half and I have made an early New Year’s resolution; we will be going to the range on Fridays (weather permitting). We were there two Fridays ago but missed last week doing pre-Christmas chores. We went today and had a great time.

Clickable Image - A Great Day at the Range

We brought our 9mm and .357 guns today. The Better Half brought her S&W 908S 9mm pistol while I brought both “Little Boy” and “Jerry Lee,” my Glock 26 pistol and S&W 686 revolver, respectively. In the image above, she is shooting “Little Boy” and I am getting ready to shoot her 608. We each shot about 50 rounds of 9mm and we both shot about 50 rounds of .38 special ammo. We stayed about an hour at the range before heading back to our nice little house.

I usually post Ramirez’ cartoons on the other blog but we already posted there when I saw this priceless accounting of the accomplishments of the Obamination. Clickable image (if you want to read the fine print).

I use a fairly effective WordPress plug in called “Spam Karma” to filter out the spam bullshit. Very rarely will I have to moderate a spam or delete ones that happen to get through the filter. However, just for the sake of laughing at the idiocy, I will go into the database and see what is there. Today, I got one that originated in the US but whose IP address is licensed to (Amsterdam) Deepak Mehta Fie - obviously not someone who uses English as their primary language. The following gibberish was blocked as a comment on my post, “Draining the Spa:”

Unquestionably imagine that which you stated. Your favourite reason appeared to be on the web the easiest factor to remember of. I say to you, I definitely get irked even as other people think about issues that they plainly don’t know about. You controlled to hit the nail upon the top as well as outlined out the whole thing with no need side effect, other folks could take a signal. Will likely be back to get more. Thanks!

Before I retired, I wrote a solar ephemeris widget for the sidebar in our family blog. Earlier this year, I copied that code into the sidebar of “The Wandering Minstrel.” All was well until daylight savings time ended and then the ephemeris here was an hour off. I checked the other site and the ephemeris there was correct - it appeared that the same identical code worked there and not here. I removed the widget from here and vowed that I would fix it - someday.

I started digging into the problem a few days ago. After a lot of double checking and head scratching, I consulted the date() object and related time/date functions to see if there was some hidden property. I wrote some diagnostic code and discovered that the default date_default_timezone_set(timezone) was set to America/Los_Angeles here and America/Phoenix on the other site. Both Arizona and Los Angeles are on Mountain Standard Time (GMT -7) during daylight savings time. Arizona never goes to DST so that explained the one-hour error after LA went on standard time (GMT -8).

I fixed the problem (for both sites) by explicitly setting the PHP timezone object date_default_timezone_set(timezone) to America/Phoenix. The ephemeris widget is near the bottom of the left sidebar. Note that as winter solstice is tomorrow the daylight value is less than ten hours (sunup to sundown).

Click on the image to view the changes to our Arizona property between about October 2010 and June 2011. The 2010 image source is the Maricopa County Assessor’s website. The 2011 image is taken from Google Maps.

We officially moved in to our new house on January 8th of this year so this will be our first Christmas and New Year’s Celebrations here. We were in Wickenburg last Christmas, but staying in the Super 8 about a mile from here.

We also stayed overnight on Christmas Eve at an RV park southeast of town three years ago. That’s when we started having designs about moving to Arizona at that time. We are very glad that we are here now.

Two-hundred and twenty years ago on this date, the founders ratified the Bill of Rights. Take a moment to reflect on how the antis and others see this document as nothing more than old toilet paper. It, and the rest of the constitution, stands in their way as they pursue the quest to make us subjects as opposed to free men.

Note: We will be posting at a rate of less than one per day for a few weeks.