Oh - now I get it. Also, I made something else.

CHRIST, I'm an idiot. I finally figured out why the dollar didn't fall as much as 30% last year as I (and, in my own defense, boatloads of other people including Warren Buffett) expected it to do. It's so obvious that I feel very dumb.

Oil price - in real value - soared last year, as everyone knows. Oil sales - internationally, anyway - are universally denominated in dollars. Every country that has to import oil has to buy that oil with US dollars, so, obviously, they had to buy many more dollars than the year before, thus floating the value of the currency.

Really, the 30% the dollar arguably should have fallen plus the amount it actually rose against major industrial currencies is very close to the end-of-year oil price percentage increase in absolute terms, and the end of year oil price was down significantly below the earlier highs, so it about evens out for the earlier parts of the year, before oil took off.

This, by the way, all but guarantees some form of action against Iran this year, probably before June. All but guarantees it. Iran's oil bourse is opening in March, in theory, and will be denominated in Euros, in theory. Assuming that happens, it kicks the last major support peg out from underneath the current valuation of the dollar. It would be smarter for the US to allow that bourse to open and accept a dual-currency system for oil, because, geopolitically and militarily, the second option - military action - would be much worse. (The third option, sanctions, is probably not going to fly unless China (and India, but mostly China) get to opt out of it for oil. That could happen.)

On the good side, the pain of increased import prices will be at least partially offset by the increased capability of American exporters to compete, and will be limited by the distance between Chinese production costs and wholesale; there's still room for profit erosion, if competition holds up. But at this point I'm getting well ahead of my knowledge, so I should STFU before I look too much like a talky jerk.

In other news, I made a journal aggregator that shows various views of my journal (most recent, most recent flowers, most recent leaves, most recent boring essays like this one ^_^ ), and linked it in to my personal arty website so anybody going to my art site can see some of my nattering on here without so obviously hopping sites. I also updated the text page quite a bit; it points to some of my professional writing.

I wanted to do more clever and more transparent things than the iframes approach I ended up using, but if you've got an S1 journal, you can't do the transparent kind of embedding I wanted to do and also filter on tags. It's one or the other. I am sad! But not sad enough to learn a whole @#$*&(!!! programming language just to duplicate a buttload of work and then some more work to pull that trick off. The barrier to entry is too damn high for too little reward. And this does work. So la!

( Quizzie! )

very, very wet

annathepiper and I went out to Woodinville yesterday, mostly because we know they had the right kind of liner bags for Polly's new litterbox, and it started raining - and I mean raining raining - while we were out, and my umbrella broke, so that all made for an unexpectedly cold and messy lot of walking around and waiting for the bus on the way back, which is where we noticed that part of the parking lot next to the bus stop had already flooded.

That rain hasn't stopped yet. In fact, it has gotten much harder. The south side of the yard is now flooding - and we live at the top of a rather steep chunk of hill, so I don't even want to guess what the bottom of the hill must be like. We also noticed that the Sammamish River was still well above normal level even before the rains started yesterday.

Also, it's quite dark, which makes me very happy that I got those true-daylight bulbs for the living room overhead light, which makes it about twice as bright as it would be otherwise right now. (68W of CF, about the same as 250W of incandescent, I suppose.) Having watched it for the last couple of weeks, I'm pleased to say that the light from the bulbs blends extremely well with actual daylight, so it just looks like it's brighter than it actually is, which is what I wanted.

Oh, look, it's let up a bit. It's raining, but back to normal. Unfortunately, we still have a tiny pond next to the house. Hrmmmmmmm.

Saturday's token: 0.1 miles
Sunday's miles: 2.0, in the wind and rain
Miles out of Hobbiton: 585.2
Miles out of Rivendell: 125.3
Miles to Lothlórien: 341

ETA: I'm not nervous because of the water, much; I'm nervous because of politics. You'll see it in tonight's CWU. Also, corrected river name after spaz.