Uliana said her first monosyllabic sounds today – “Ga de de de de!” in protest to being fed her oatmeal/puree food today.

Google is, thankfully, celebrating Dr. L.L. Zamenhof’s birthday today with a Doodle, since it is Zamenhof Day. Right about now you are probably wondering who this Dr. Zamenhof is that Google would take the time to recognize him? There was a lot of speculation within the Esperanto community as to whether or not Google would do recognize him or not, but it looks like Google heard our call and the importance of Esperanto to the world

Dr. Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof

In case you do not know who Dr. Zamenhof is, he was a Polish Jew born in Byaliastock Poland during Russia’s occupation. He, throughout a decade or so, created the constructed language Esperanto to be the worlds primary secondary-language to facilitate communication between the disparate languages. I write at length about Esperanto and his wonderful and easy to learn language in my Esperanto pages here at Arion’s Home..

What does a green flag have to do with Zamenhof or Esperanto, well a green flag with a white star, or a green star are the symbols of the Esperanto movement.

More Coverage on National Geographic News and CBS News via the Associated Press.

Get more info at “A Woman is not a Pre-existing condition.

Vote for catching up to the rest of the world and move to the metric system at Change.org’s cause ‘Twenty-First Century Metric America’

Nobel Prize

Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize (Obama: Nobel Peace Prize is ‘call to action’ [CNN], I was really, really shocked when I read this, especially as I read over the time-frame that this had to have happened – the first 12 days of his taking office. I think that this might have been a little bit premature of them, but I also find it a powerful and telling message of how much the change that Obama is the impetus for, and how much it is really, really needed not only for the United States as a country, but for the world to have faith in us as a a beacon of freedom and progress again.

Obama is powerful speaker and he is bringing that change to us that is sorely needed. He is moving in wonderful directions correcting problems that our country has had for a very long time, and just putting out a mandate of ’solve it’ where congress and the senate are working together to make it happen. This is such a wonderful thing. Hopefully, they will not screw it up too much. =)

Obama Speaks at the Human Rights Campaign

His message was powerful and affirming. For a while gay rights activists (such as me) have been not quite so sure where Obama has stood on the gay rights issue, but as of October 10th we shall no longer have any doubts. Our President is against discrimination and hate crimes and shall work tirelessly towards the passing of the Matthew Shepard Act, and the repealing of the the Defense of Marriage Act and the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell act too. This is a wonderful day that can have us looking forward to the end of discrimination, prejudice, and bigotry in the laws of our great country.

Now that is change I can believe in.

HRC Speech – Part 1

HRC Speech – Part 2

HRC Speech – Part 3

I have posted a new article for the Milwaukee Examiner titled “My faith (part V) – The influence of micronationalism and Esperanto.

I will write more later, but last after noon Tanya gave birth after 24 hours of labor via a C-Section to our daughter, Uliana (ool-liana) O’Neill. Everyone is fine and still at the hospital. =)

Pregnancy

So, here we are about a week or so before Tanya’s due date. She is so ready for this pregnancy to be over with. Her feet are in pain from carrying so much extra weight. Some good things about it is that during this pregnancy her body tempurature has been warmer than normal, which puts her at being comfortable most of the time. Normally she is always chilly or cold, but not now, so that has been a nice change for her.

We are getting the emergency pregnancy bag together are making sure we have everything we need to get this scary and throroughly exciting new era of our lives started. We have most everything we need from a crib, bassinet, diaper genie and a whole host of other things mostly donated or given as gifts by the wonderful people in our lives. =)

My mother is excited beyond all belief, especially after fearing that I may never have children since I have waited so long. I am currently 35 =O and not getting any younger. =)

Hopefully, in the next week we will be able to post that our new daughter has been born.

Immigrating Family

Tanya’s brother and his wife have one a Green Card through the US’ Green Card Lottery and have been here for a few weeks. We have been able to get a lot done. We have their Social Security Cards\Numbers and Green Cards, as well as having a job for her and a car for them, plus back accounts and debit cards setup. We have some thoughts on work for him. He is a mechanic and are working towards those jobs. We are currently working towards getting their divers licenses and finding and getting them an apartment.

The primary issue we have is their English knowledge. Neither learned a lot of English in school back in Belarus. They are now really  just starting to learn English so that is going to slow their progress down. They are learning it each day. They have MP3 based lessons as well as books that they are working with so things are progressing. Yea!

Father’s Day

Fathers day was a combo of 2 days. My father wanted to have a cook-out and fire so we arranged to have a cook-out at our house on Saturday. My parents brought over most of the food and stuff so Tanya would not have to worry about things so much. I had to work at First Weber in the morning until about 14:30 (2:30pm) or so. After that we prepared things for them to come over.

I have 3 used grills and will be looking forward to buying a new grill some day. My wife prefer’s the flavor of food cook over fire instead of gas or charcoal, so after talking with my Dad and Tanya we started the grill with charcoal and then added some wood on top of it. Now, of course the wood would put the flame right at the grills surface and cook/burn things too quickly and make it really hard to control, so I brought out the metal cooking griddle that I bought for camping and placed that comfortably over the grill. It fit right on the edge allowing the heat from the flame to more evenly heat the griddle to cook. That seemed to work really well. The only issues with it were that the mesquite chips we used were not effective in imparting their flavor and the griddle was too small to cook a lot quickly, other than that, it seemed to work really well.

We ate and drank and enjoyed ourselves. It was a good time.

Sunday, was more my day. We went to church at the Free Congregation where we discussed Evolutionary Creationism which is a pet topic of mine, so I found it really enlightening and enjoyable. Our speaker, Andrew Kerr is always a delight to listen to. He is quite intellectual and challenging.

New friends

After that we stopped by a couple that contacted us, since Tanya was Russian and so was the wife. We made plans to meet for the first time and it was a pleasure, especially for me. The husband was an American who was a geek as well as a former US Navy nuke, so we had a lot in common there. The wife was Russian, and was an English as a Second Language teacher and has a degree in Linguistics which I found interesting since I am reading a little bit about it due to my interest in Esperanto.

Dugeons and Dragons

D&D Sunday was great, We got together with the group and killed a few things but spent most of our time in an puzzle/trap room and a Skill Challenge with a long dead adventuring party. A good time. =)

All-in-all a good Fathers Day weekend.

I strongly advocate everyone learning using the 24 Hour clock verses our normal 12 hour clock.

I was in the military for 6 years and I am quite comfortable with it. My father was a pilot and he taught me the the 24 clock as well as the Phonetic Alphabet (which I also advocate), so I was familiar enough with it prior to entering into the military. It is simple enough to learn with a little diligent practice.

Problems With the 12 Hour Clock

The current problems we have with our 12 hour clock is that you always have to ask or wonder is this person meaning AM or PM, morning or afternoon, if they speak or write the time lazily or you catch the conversation out or context. Unless they specifically say AM or PM, or morning or afternoon or the contxt is quite clear, then this thought or annoying ponderance is there in the back of your mind. If I say 7 o’clock you need to know AM or PM in order to know what time a person is referring to, whereas if they say 19:00 you know it is at night.

There only a few countries left that use the 12 hour clock: the United States, Canada, and a few others.

Why Use the 24 Hour Clock

The 24 hour clock, conversely, is clear by the spoken or written numbers: 17:31 is 5:31pm or 03:35 is 3:35am. There is no potential alpha or numeric ambiguity possible with the time. It is easy to read and for your mind to parse instead of parsing both alpha and numeric characters, there are just a single set of numbers for your mind to interpret.

Much of Europe has moved to the 24 clock. Airlines, military, trains and other similar emergency and international and public services use the 24 hour clock for its simplicity, ease of use, and lack of ambiguity.

Learning the 24 Hour Clock

Learning the 24 Hour Clock is not so hard. Times from 1:00am to 12:00pm (noon) are written basically the same. It is written as follows: 2:30am = 02:30 (or 0230); 4:15pm = 16:15 (or 1615). See, it is not really that different.

After noon time things get a little trickier though. The hours after noon increase incrementally by 1 numerical hour from 1:00pm up until 12:00am (midnight), so you have 1:00pm is 13:00, 2:00pm is 14;00, and 3:00pm is 15:00… all the way up to 11:59pm which is 23:59. See! =)

Midnight Conventions

There are some conventions for telling the midnight hour. They are not really important since they all point to the same time. Use either and you will be understood.

If you are talking about the ending of a day or time period on midnight, it would be 24:00 since it would continue the day’s counting process. If you start a day at midnight they it would be 00:00 which shows a new day starting and not a continuance from the previous day’s activities or period.

That is about it. Both refer to the same time, so either way there will be no real confusion. Some use one and not the other.

Speaking 24 Hour Time

24 hour time is spoken as such: 02:00 would be said ‘oh two hundred hours’; 02:30 would be said ‘oh two hundred thirty hours’ or just ‘twenty two thirty’.

Telling 24 Hour Time On-The-Fly

This method is a little more difficult (in my humble opinion), but it will suffice until your get more familiar with it and then the following potentially simpler method may serve you better:

For hours greater than 12:00 you just subtract 2:00 from the time, and since the hour is automatically going to be a twelve or less you drop the first digit. Such as the following: 21:00 – you forget about the 20:00 portion of the time and just subtract the 02:00 from the hour leaving you 9:00 pm.

For times of 22:00 or greater you will remember they are a derivitive of 10:00 so you just add the 10:00 to the 0:00 and you have your time:

• 22:04 = 2:04 – 2:00 = 0:04 + 10:00 = 10:04pm
• 18:16 = 8:16 – 2:00 = 6:16pm
• 23:45 = 3:45 – 2:00 = 1:45 + 10:00 = 11:45pm
• 15:33 = 5:33 – 2:00 = 3:33pm

If you have any questions or comments feel free to add them here. If you have any resources or methods that simplify this process I would also like to hear it.  Below are some other resources that may assist you in learning the 24 hour clock including some study tools and a flash application or two.

References

Here are some references to help you to learn more about the 24 Clock as well as learn how to start telling time using the 24 hour clock. If you have found better resources please let me know.

• 24 Hour Clock (Absolute Astronomy)
• Military (Universal) Time Conversion
• Learn to Easily Interpret Military Time (Raam Dev’s Blog)
• 24 Hour Clock (Wikipedia)
• Time AM/PM vs the 24 Hour Clock (Math Is Fun)
• The 24 Hour Clock (Flash Application)
• Time Tools: 24hour to the Minute (The Learning Federation) – This is more aimed at children learning the 12 and 24 hour clocks, but it works with both.
• 24 Hour Clock (Study Stack)
• 12 Hour and 24 Hour Clocks

“Oh! My! God! (OMG)” is all I can say to this. I never thought I would see a video on How To Shave Your Groin (embedded video follows) from a large company like Gillette to promote something like this, especially in this way… Wow! With our sex-negative and rather prudish society in general I find this rather refreshing. =)

I really, really, really want to sign up for the Personal Genome Project. This makes me want to squeal with delight….. I need help. I know. =)

An interesting diet link titled All Medical Science is Wrong within a 95 % Confidence Interval
or: A Review of Taubes’ “Good Calories, Bad Calories”.

Baby Shower

We had a baby shower on Sunday with great turnout. Laura was of tremendous help in organizing this with Tanya. The party was at her house in Baraboo. I would like to send a special thank you to her! =)

The attendees were mostly those of the Yoga persuasion. Many were able to make it and it was a lot of fun. There was plenty of food, especially Tanya’s favorite Russian dishes which are always a hit. There was also the painting of Tanya’s belly which had a lot of neat designs. My contribution was a red outline of a heart with a Mountain Dew/Irish green center.

The Hunt for Gollum

A Tolkien Estate sanctioned 40 minute fan film called “The Hunt for Gollum” went live Sunday. I cannot wait to find the time to watch this.

Refinancing our Home

The best option I have (and that we are pursuing) is what is called a Veteran’s Streamline of my existing Veteran backed mortgage. We are planning on paying for all of the expenses to make this happen, in the area of $2,500 so we do not loose what little equity we have accrued so far, and this will reduce our mortgage payment by a little over $100 a month. Yea! More money!

I am currently with GMAC Mortgage and through them they will charge and additional $2,000 in lenders fees on top of the other standard fees to originate this. I am going with Wells Fargo which has a branch in Baraboo here due to the low base cost of the refinance, and they also have the Equity Rewards credit card that helps to buy down your mortgage principle. All-in-all, a good deal. =)

This will be especially important due to Tanya giving birth to our first child in July. We are going to need to extra money. =)

So, the following week shall be fun. My sister’s kids will be here at my parents house until Thursday, I think, and they are a 15,16 and 7′ish. There will be a lot of racquetball and eating going on. The last time they came I played so hard that my back and neck were out of wack for a week. I have to play really hard to have a chance to beat that athletic punk. We will also be celebrating Easter this Sunday and my mother’s birthday on Monday. I have a lot to look forward to over this next week. =) I just hope that I have the energy to survive

Now something that does come to mind to this not-so-interesting uncle, is I really want to expose them to the different books that have really changed the way that I see the world. Books such as “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”, “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, “Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters”, “The Jeffereson Bible”, “Introduction to Linguistics” and things of that nature, but I myself thinking that I would be overstepping my bounds as an uncle. I do not think that my sister would mind at all, but still, the hesitation is there. I know that I will have this luxury when our daughter is born.

I know their minds are young and they still lack perspective, but perhaps reading these will plant the seeds of a greater understanding and appreciation in the world for things that most would not have. I also want to introduce them to Esperanto, plus topics such as globalization and comparative religion, but that makes me not-so-interesting to spend time with. =( They are still kids and are more interested in having fun, which is what they come here for.

I remember when I was alone with Sammy at a water park and I was talking about such not-so-interesting topics and I felt sorry for her. She was a trooper and stood through it all hoping that the line would go faster so the end would come really soon. Good kids they are. =) I wish I could just open my brain and poor some of my perspective and experience into their little heads to give them that extra headstart in understanding this crazy and sometimes dangerous place we live in. 

In some ways I feel sorry for our daughter for the things we will subject her too like all of the things I mentioned above plus Russian, Yoga, and Martial Arts. =) 

I think I have rambled enough for now. I know I do not normally post about such personal stuff, but I felt compelled to do so today. =)

CRON support from Oprah: Dr. Oz: Extreme Life Extension.