Just a quick update to my earlier posts from June and September on how many laws have been enacted by the 113th Congress in comparison to the 111th and 112th Congresses. From August 9th to November 6th, a period of 90 days, the 113th had actually enacted more laws than the 112th Congress had at a comparable time in the 2 year cycle. But Starting November 7th, the 113th fell behind the 112th again. As of the most recent legislation congress-summary.com lists as having been passed (extending the Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988 for 10 years, signed by the president on December 9th) the 113th has enacted 57 laws compared to the 63 the 112th had passed. (The 111th was up to 115 at this point.) The 113th is a little behind the 112th at the moment, but actually they have been tracking each other pretty closely so far. It will be interesting to see if the gap widens in the next three months, or if the 113th catches up with the 112th again. Anyway, this isn’t perhaps the best measure of Congressional productivity in the world, and depending on who you talk to, Congress passing fewer laws might be either bad or good. But it is still a fun data series to track. Here are the charts:
So, last evening as I do many times each week, I made sure Alex was hanging on to my iPad (which he had been using, as he often does) and I unstrapped him and pulled him out of my car. I completely forgot that the iPad had been low on batteries, so I’d plugged it in. So when I pulled Alex out of the car, since the iPad was plugged in, and iPads don’t have MagSafe like Apple laptops do, the iPad was basically violently yanked out of his hands. From there it of course went flying in a nice arc constrained by the cord, smashed against the side of the car, then onto the asphalt parking lot face down. Alex looked shocked. I said “Oh no!”. Then when I picked it up, of course the whole front face was shattered. I told Alex it was completely my fault (it was) and that I was very sorry, but it was broken. He immediately started bawling inconsolably. For the next 15 minutes or so. It is “my” iPad, but he uses it all the time and loves it. I told him we would take it in right away and get it fixed or replaced. He was still inconsolable. He was worried that we might lose some of his games. Not just the games themselves, but the saved levels he has been accumulating. For the last month or so he has been carefully building new worlds and train arrangements in Trainz Simulator and saving dozens and dozens of them. I told him I would make sure everything was all backed up and that we wouldn’t lose anything. Normally I would have been very upset myself about this, but he was so upset I didn’t have time to be upset for myself. So right now I’m going through the process of making sure I have triple redundant backups of the iPad (both on iCloud and a couple copies on my computer) so that Brandy can take it in to the Apple store later today, where it will get swapped out for a new one I am sure. Then when I get home from work I’ll do a restore from the encrypted local backup so that hopefully EVERYTHING will be restore to exactly the current state. (It is now on airplane mode to ensure nothing comes into it to change the state after the backup currently in progress.) Thank goodness for AppleCare+. This is my second screen smashing incident in just under 12 months though, so I’ve used up my allowance after this time. Next time it gets smashed, the cost to deal with it will be just a TAD more. Oops.
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