Recently in life Category

I recalled today that a while ago I mentioned that I was going to do a very bad imitation of the Big Mac Index seeing I haven't been scanning books for a little while. Well, to make the short story shorter, it was a fee comparison for marriage licences between Pennsylvania counties. In all the madness about moving, I forgot that I had this for over six months now lying on my computer's desktop. (It's like adding everything one browses to one's favourites and then forgetting where one put the important link to one's university calendar. Somewhat.)

It may well not be complete, and so on, so, yeah, but it's now uploaded.

The main reason this started my interest is that when I got married in Pennsylvania I was told that any county could issue a marriage licence valid for anywhere in the state. (As an aside, the licensed celebrant need not be domiciled in the county of issue or marriage either, I thought I was also told.) Now, of course one is almost certainly going to go to their nearest marriage clerk (which, for example, in Centre County is the Clerk of Orphans' Court and Register of Wills -- a dual elected position -- in Bellefonte, and in Allegheny County is some non-elected office).

Naturally, costs are going to vary by the cost of living (paying the clerks), cost of the office (the rent or whatever) and the volume of applicants (of both licences and certificates), so I'm not berating the counties that are most expensive, I want to make clear. This was just purely for interest.

The short points are the following, as of roughly June last year:

  • Allegheny County (Pittsburgh, and then some) and Philadelphia City at $75 and $80 respectively are the most 'expensive' counties.
  • The counties of Clearfield and Forest are the cheapest, with both charging $25.
  • If one is thinking long term, sealed copies of a marriage licence that are good for women taking their husband's name -- I never checked if a man could do it -- vary greatly as well. For example, Northampton County throws in a free certified copy after the used licence is returned, whereas to me it appears that Bucks County wants $20. (The married couples, at least in one county, get to keep an 'original' in the form of half of the licence that they keep, that said, but that's not replaceable, so a certified copy is always useful.)
  • Some counties have 'volume discounts' of sorts if one orders more than one sealed certificate at a time, in addition to the counties that bundle a free sealed certificate upon the celebrant filing the completed licence.
  • Some also ask for a stamped, self-addressed envelope, while others build the cost in to their fees.

The spreadsheet, to add a further warning to the disclaimers, is definitely out of date already; I get the feeling, for example, that the fee for the first sealed certificate is incorrect for Butler County. That said, I have no guarantees with my busy life nowadays that I will update the list, but I shall attempt to.

As of right now, http://ngeru.info/eUDaxI here at ibiblio is where you'll find the current June 2010 version of the spreadsheet. It's in Microsoft Excel .xlsx, because that's the easiest format for me to manipulate the data with (so no you-should-have-used-OpenOffice.org, please, which I would have used had it what I wanted). The undated .xlsx files are symlinks to the current file, in case I do upload this. [Update: I forgot about the Google Spreadsheets option, but loading the 'last update' symlink in read-only mode on Google Docs gets rid of basically all of the nice formatting from Excel, not to mention the column sorting that Excel does.]

Um, so, yeah. Enjoy!

Missing DC...

| No Comments | No TrackBacks

One sign that I am missing the District of Columbia would be other people's photographs of cherry blossoms and random buildings like the Jefferson Memorial. Oh, Flickr...

This would be the photograph of both the abovementioned things in question, the Jefferson Memorial and some cherry blossoms.

The photo, of course, isn't mine. But it is nice.

... It is, well, snowing, right now, still:

Or, earlier this morning, it was this bad.

It is, now that it is the early evening, far worse.

In the meantime, I am still mesmerised by the Sirocco Kākāpō incident:

My original post: http://www.jessicalind.org/blog-posts/windowsvistacontinuestosuprise-unboundlimit at jessicalind.org (or the one where the spouse talks her way on to her husband's online diary slash journal slash blog thing)

I have been suffering with my computer lately with my screen going black and then claiming that my drivers are having problems. My husband says this is probably from something called "kernel panic". All I know is that my C:/ drive had started to fill up rapidly. I take lots of pictures so I thought it was my fault but it was starting to get ridiculous. My C:/ drive went from about 100 GB to only having 2 GB left at 287 GB. I tried to figure out what could possibly be wrong. I had a feeling that it had a problem with the System Restore points but I couldn't be sure. So we logged onto my computer's dos prompt and found a startling issue:


I felt like Strong Bad in the virus episode on Homestarrunner.com, "Holy Crap. That's a big number!" What this means for those who have no idea what this is: Vista system restore had filled up my computer with 120 GB of restore points. I had heard on the internet about this problem that Vista should naturally have a 15% of drive limit. My computer had no such limit, thus being unbounded. It could have potentially gone on and on if there was unlimited space. This makes me think of my calculus courses where I could make a word problem about this. I wonder though if I get the award for most storage space used up by the system restore points.

How could this have happened? Thank goodness I have IT knowledge and knew to look for this but this was difficult to figure out what the problem was and it was making my computer crash in kernel panic. 

I want to thank How to Geek for his recommendation for solving this problem at http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/reduce-system-restores-disk-usage-in-vista/

So, tonight I look back at the directions that I wrote to the venue for my wedding (the Catholic ceremony, that is, for those who must know), which included a Google Maps pointer for the church, naturally.

To cut a long story short, not only is the smallest incorporated place (population 29, that is) in Ohio now in Google Street View's coverage (all five or so streets and two intersections in the town limits, albeit just an intersection view of side streets from the main road of the town), the said church can be seen. And there's the church hall across the road, too.

It's a massacre!

| No Comments | No TrackBacks

Time for some alarmist titles, methinks. Well, first some disappointing news from my university, then something possibly a bit happier.

And after some more marital bliss-inspired absenses from tph, I wake up to discover that the 2009 papers catalogue for GEND at the teachers' college/university that I graduated from (twice, even) is basically empty. Really. Take a look. (Thanks, Kerry. She's a fellow GradDipArts graduate in GEND.) Trying to finish the undergraduate major might be amusing, let alone an honours year or graduate diploma. Sigh.

And in far more cheerful (possibly) news, Kiwibank now have a Visa debit card with prettier designs than Westpac New Zealand's offering -- and, at first look, cheaper fees, too, especially with regards to the foreign currency fee; 2% versus Westpac's 2.5% might well be worth it. Sigh. Again.

I wonder if I will qualify to receive a card...

Or even if it is worth it. I will have to think about it.

I hear some other queues in Ferguson Township, Centre County, Pennsylvania's polling places are better, and much better at that. But walking past the same local precinct (that I was standing outside of earlier, waiting with my wife for her turn to vote), Mike's Video, TV & Appliance, shortly before (hence the bad photographic quality of the Motorola V325), I came across the following:

Basically, I saw a queue that went in to a neighbouring bank's carpark.

But that was just a preview of the rest of the line:

The queue then went around part of the polling place's carpark quite happily, then past the front of the building ... where it finally went through a really narrow front door.

I write this at around 7.08, with a shade under an hour left. I passed by in a car just about 5 minutes ago, and the queue was about 5 metres shorter at that point.

So I turn up at the local polling booth with my wife. Basically, she's previously been half an hour or so late and is usually the first (give or take) to vote. This year she was voter number 63 and we waited an hour.

While she was inside, I decided it was safer to wait outside and have fun (as much as can be had by a resident waiting for their citizen spouse to finish voting) watching the queue snake around the booth, while I sat there hoping the embassy will actually count my vote in the NZ elections later this week.

Voted

| No Comments | No TrackBacks

And the said overseas ballot papers (having become available this afternoon) are now about to make their way through the postal system to the embassy in DC.

Thank goodness that is all over.

For now.

(And no, I'm not going to tell you whom I voted for.)

No, not the current round of elections in the United States. Polls open tomorrow for New Zealand's overseas voters in the 2008 general elections, if I have my time zones right. Unfortunately, I haven't exactly decided whom to vote for with my electorate vote, yet (even though it seems that I know a large proportion of the Workers Party candidates). Worse, I nearly forgot someone (this being Helen Clark) actually called this said election not too long ago.

An attempt to help with this indecision by vainly e-mailing the major parties (and where possible, local electorate candidates) yielded only one response from a party I hadn't exactly put down on my short list. Maybe this is why I'm finding the television commericals that Barack Obama and John McCain are putting up here in Centre County and the surrounding area rather mild compared to what I hear about the apparently dirty New Zealand campaigns.

Thank goodness that I've decided what to do with my electorate vote.

Now, all I have to do once I download, print and fill out the ballot papers is to find somewhere with a fax machine...

About this Archive

This page is an archive of recent entries in the life category.

esoterica is the previous category.

photography is the next category.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.