Four Cats, One Dog, and a Birdfeeder Habit

The original owners of this house lit the basement with 4 naked-bulb "fixtures" like you'd expect to find hanging down in an unfinished basement or a garage.  Rather than hanging, the lights are mounted horizontally between the rafters.  Aluminum foil is nailed to the sub-floor and surrounding timbers.  Transparent prismatic sheeting replaces the drop-ceiling "tile" that would be below the bulb.

This doesn't work as well as I'd like.  The light source is above the ceiling.  Little of the light falls directly into the room, most hits the aluminum foil.  The foil is old, badly crinkled, and mounted to flat surfaces -- so most of the reflected light doesn't even make it into the room.  Quite a bit of it goes to illuminate the area above the ceiling.

Naturally, I've been trying to address this for some time.  Tried reforming the foil.  It's harder to shape multiple pieces of old, beat-up aluminum into a bowl shape than you might think.  The best I was able to make resembled a tassel-less fez with a wire frame.  Even then, I had trouble hanging it in such a way as to direct the light where I wanted.  I looked at various clamp-on worklights, but the bowl-shaped ones all have the bulb entering through the center, not the edge.  With the horizontally-mounted fixtures, these would direct even more of the light away from room.  The metal reflector from a trouble-light would work.  But I couldn't find just the reflector for sale, only new, complete lights.  Those are too expensive to sacrifice for just the one part.

Went to the Livingston County Habit for Humanity ReStore today, looking for a hot glue gun and a heat gun.  (Great place to look for tools, if you're not too specific and willing to root-around in dusty, dirty boxes.)  I picked up a couple of double-bulb fixtures, on my way to the tool section.  Figured I could at least double the light if I couldn't direct what light I already had.  Then I saw 2 of these.

Received the LED replacement for the microscope's old, presumed tungsten, bulb.  It's the silver-color bulb in the left-center of this image:

New Tool/Project/Thing!

This is a Green Heron (affectionately known around my house as "Sparty").  (It might also be an American Bittern.  Not really sure.)

Kind of the exact opposite of the previous post.

Northern Cardinals, the males, anyway, leave me dumbfounded.  I don't understand how any prey-animal (other than poisonous ones) can be that red and not eaten to extinction.  Which led me to dubbing them, some years ago, the "Oh, please come here and eat me!" bird.  This was after I spotted one from 80 yards away.  Without my binoculars.  Recently, Nicole shortened it to "Eat Me! Bird."  That confused me because, initially, I thought she was saying EepyBird.  :-)

These are excerpted from an entry in Charles Stross's blog.  He's a Science Fiction author, has published through Macmillan, and, until very recently, referred readers to Amazon.  These passages are most relevant to what I want to say (emphasis his, in all cases):

Publishing is made out of pipes. Traditionally the supply chain ran: author -> publisher -> wholesaler -> bookstore -> consumer.

Then the internet came along, a communications medium the main effect of which is to disintermediate indirect relationships, for example by collapsing supply chains with lots of middle-men.

From the point of view of the public, to whom they sell, Amazon is a bookstore.

From the point of view of the publishers, from whom they buy, Amazon is a wholesaler.

From the point of view of Jeff Bezos' bank account, Amazon is the entire supply chain and should take that share of the cake that formerly went to both wholesalers and booksellers.

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The agency model Apple proposed -- and that publishers like Macmillan enthusiastically endorse -- collapses the supply chain in a different direction, so it looks like: author -> publisher -> fixed-price distributor -> reader. In this model Amazon is shoved back into the box labelled 'fixed-price distributor' and get to take the retail cut only. Meanwhile: fewer supply chain links mean lower overheads and, ultimately, cheaper books without cutting into the authors or publishers profits.

    The point, in a nutshell, is that Amazon wants to keep the current supply chain.  Amazon does not want to go back to a world in which Amazon is only tail-end-Charlie, the book-seller.
    That's an untenable situation, because in an ebook market, there really isn't anything to "wholesale."  That part of the supply chain is unnecessary.  There's no reason to pay for it.  Obviously, Amazon's not going to shrug and say "Oh, well.  Guess we'll just have to get used to less money."  This fight isn't about what we pay to Amazon, it's about what Amazon pays to Macmillan.  Everybody understands that ebooks will cost less (both to produce, and at the retail counter).  Amazon & Macmillan are trying to decide who has to absorb the loss.
    If that's the case, then why is the fight ostensibly about the consumer price of an ebook?  The short answer is that Amazon uses that "extra" slice-of-the-pie to fund discounted prices for Kindle editions.  Amazon's strategy was to discount Kindle editions, acquiring the same sort of lock on ebooks that Amazon has on paper-books.  Then Apple came along with the iPad/iBookstore.  Apple is the kind of company that can sell enough devices to make iPad an "overnight" competitor to Kindle.  Or make the iBookstore a serious alternative to purchasing ebooks from Amazon.  No lock on the ebook market means Amazon can't dictate terms to Macmillan, et al.  No ability to dictate terms means Amazon eats part/all of the reduced profits in an ebook-future.
    So what does this mean for us, the consumers?  Not much.  Ebooks will be less-expensive than paper-books.  But right now, they account for 1% of book sales (according to the estimate I read today, anyway).  They are a niche, luxury market -- like limited editions.  As they become more mainstream, they'll conform to a pricing model that we all know: they'll be more-expensive when first published, and gradually decrease in price to some floor that reflects the minimum cost of availability.  The initial prices will be something like $15, not $10 (nor $25).  But, remember, Amazon offered that $10 price to serve a purpose.  There is no doubt in my mind that it would have increased, substantially, had Amazon captured control of the ebook market.

Oh, and one more thing, for anyone thinking Amazon doesn't do this sort of thing: http://www.thebookseller.com/news/59533-hachette-clashes-with-amazon.html.

This is a Griffin iTrip FM transmitter (older model).  I used it, daily, when I was driving 600 miles per week.  The gold thing is the mini-USB connector.  It came loose inside the case.  The transmitter still works, but there was no way to charge the iPod while using it.