Personal on Alkahest

What a week...

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 17:41:17 +0000

The past week has been a series of ups and downs, culminating in the saga for the last half of the week. My car. My Celica. The first new car I ever owned started making a noise on Wednesday. The noise was due to extremely low engine oil (hypothetical question - what’s the point of an oil pressure light if it doesn’t come on until after the car is making noise?). The good folks at Jiffy Lube wouldn’t actually work on the car, but were kind enough to fill up the oil and suggested that I take it to an automotive shop immediately. I called up Wasp Automotive and made an appointment for the next day. I had heard a lot of good things about Wasp and even had that confirmed after I made the appointment.

Navel gazing - new furniture

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 20:01:18 +0000

So, I’ve been in my apartment for an entire two weeks now. Sadly, it’s been a bit sparse. There’s a bedroom set, a recliner sitting in front of a television which is resting on my stereo. But fortunately, that should all start changing. Yesterday I placed a fairly large furniture order. For the first time in my life, I’m going to have new furniture! Not a hand me down, nothing 20 (30?) years old, but honest to god new furniture.

The Sounds of Science

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 02:07:37 +0000

Last Friday, hsarik pointed out an interesting web site: Echo Nest. They provide a web service that allows you to analyze and remix music. The API also can provide information (meta-data) about music, artists, songs etc. and has Python bindings. If you’ve seen the “More Cowbell” website where you can upload an mp3 and have more cowbell (and more Christopher Walken) added to it, well that site uses Echo Nest and if you download the python bindings for their API, you can see the script that adds the sounds. Personally, I’m fond of “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da” with 80% cowbell and 20% Christopher Walken.

Distilled essence of me

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 04:21:56 +0000

K’s out of town this week. IIRC, this is the first week since we’ve been married that she’s out of town and I’m still at the house. I figure that’s gotta give me a good sense of what I’m actually like without her, um, civilizing influences. Helpfully summarized in the table below:

Behavior****ChangeTelevision watchingdecreasedComputer useincreasedWork while at homeincreasedBowling averagesway upMini-golf scoresway downAlcohol consumptionslightly increasedNews consumptiongreatly decreasedFood varietydecreasedFood qualityno changeFood healthinessno changeTime spent preparing food

42 and sunny...

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 22:47:23 +0000

42 ° and sunny, perfect for turning:

10273

into:
10270

into: 10276

and then: 10267

Back from the dead

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 21:01:08 +0000

Okay, I wasn’t really dead, I had the flu, but I was wishing that I was dead for a while there. Five days is too long for a massive headache and very high fever. I’m finally recovering and doing some self-imposed quarantine after getting on Tamaflu Monday. Tuesday afternoon was somewhat interesting. My doctor’s office had given me a little trick - you can take full doses of acetaminophen and full doses of ibuprofen. They’ll both contribute to lowering fever and reducing pain, but their side effects are different and you don’t risk ulcers or your liver as if you had doubled up on one.

Sierra and the case of the uncomfortable pillow

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:18:53 +0000

One of our dogs, Darwin, likes sleeping on the floor. He’ll occasionally sleep on the couch or on his dog bed, but then he gets too hot and moves to the floor. The other dog, Sierra (named after either the Sierra Nevada Mountains as beautifully described by John Muir or the brewery named after the same mountains, depending on whom you ask), doesn’t get so hot and prefers sleeping on pillows or couches… my spot in the bed if I’m not currently occupying it, etc. One of her sleeping spots is on an old pillow in the bedroom. But apparently, it’s not always that comfortable. When we went to bed last night, this was the scene that greeted us.

Toy!

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 04:04:36 +0000

For a guy who uses computers as much as I do, you would think that I would have better machines at home. But really, no. Our last desktop was eight years old before we replaced it. My laptop was an old Thinkpad X31 - maybe six or seven years old. So, for a combination birthday/Christmas present, I got a new (sort of) laptop. I picked up a refurbished thinkpad X200s from the Lenovo outlet. So far it’s a nice machine: good processor, lots of high speed memory, and a big LED backlit screen. Lenovo sent me notice that they were shipping the laptop today and the next thing I knew, it arrived at the office. The advantages of working 5 miles from the outlet. The only problem is that they didn’t ship all of the parts. I’ve contacted them and they’ll send the dock/dvd.

Dragged kicking and screaming into the century of the fruitbat

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:35:41 +0000

With apologies to Terry Prachett, I feel like I being dragged (dragging myself?) into the Century of the Fruitbat. As I mentioned a long time ago, I don’t care for Facebook. I prefer my blog. That said, many of my friends and most of my family use Facebook. So I’m going to start a bit of an experiment. I’ve downloaded and installed the Wordbook plugin for my blog software (wordpress). Starting with this post, in theory anything that’s published on the blog gets cross-posted to fb.

Peter Piper picked . . .

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:25:02 +0000

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers; A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked; If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, Where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

When I planted the garden, I put in a couple of banana pepper plants. I seem to recall that my thinking was along the lines of, “I’ve got a great idea, I’ll plant some banana peppers - I love ’em.” Great in abstract, but I don’t actually have any recipes that call for banana peppers. I only seem to eat them pickled.

It's official!

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 03:09:56 +0000

I managed to get into the office a bit early this morning, which meant that I also got to leave a bit early (working as a federal contractor definitely has its perks). The only reason I mention this is because I beat K to the mail and when I reached into the mailbox, there was a rather thick envelope with the non-profit’s name (C/O me). It was from the IRS. Well, the only thing that we have out-standing with the feds is our non-profit status. So, I was a bit nervous in opening it. It felt a bit like opening a college application letter. I was really hoping that, like with the college letter, a thick envelop was a good sign. After all, if you’ve been turned down, they send you a one page letter. If you’ve been accepted, they send you a packet of information.

Communication and learning styles

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 02:58:03 +0000

A while back I mentioned that K, some associates and I had started up a new non-profit. Things are going reasonably well. People have been more supportive than I had thought. We’ve had about 70 patients so far and we’ve got the systems set up so that patients entered into the database post up to Twitter, along with any Facebook updates.

One thing that I have noticed in working with the others on the non-profit is that learning styles and communication styles seem to be closely related. You can divide learning styles (among other ways) into verbal vs visual learners. Verbal learners prefer to hear things explained to them. whereas visual learners prefer things to be written down. Based on some of our recent experiences, I think that this plays into communication styles. And it’s communication styles which are (occasionally) biting us.

just saying. . .

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 01:35:57 +0000

if i ever do get around to filking the Pilgrim’s Progress, there’s a good chance it’ll feature a “Slough of Sake” and a “Carnival of Sangria.”

Garden produce

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 21:23:08 +0000

I’ve mentioned before that this is the first year that we’ve had a garden, and it’s been going great. In the early spring we had lots of spinach, arugula, turnips, lettuce, etc. Now that we’re in the summer, it’s time for a whole new type of produce. Last night, I went out to the garden and picked a bunch of tomatoes (yes, I prefer the cherry tomatoes), banana peppers and green beans. Later this week, I’ll pick some of the eggplant and we’ll do eggplant croquettes. Hopefully, we’ll also get some regular peppers, zucchini and maybe even a small watermelon or two.

The universe hates me, part 37

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:47:08 +0000

or Adventures in Home Repair;

or How I Spent My Sunday.

For reasons best left unspecified, I found myself in need of a new exterior door - a replacement for the one that keeps my utility room from being a part of the outdoors. Last weekend, I went out to the local home improvement store and after spending two hours, I realized that I couldn’t simply replace the door, but instead, had to replace the entire door, prehung in its frame.

the importance of verifying backups

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 02:58:46 +0000

I was using my personal laptop at a meeting yesterday and grabbed about a gig of files from someone’s usb key. While I was taking minutes, I noticed a lovely new icon that popped up… your hard disk drive is failing. Eeek! Not cool. So, last night I got home and started backing up my files. A few of the new files and a couple unimportant old files didn’t transfer properly. Fine, I could live without them.

Back from Galts Gulch

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:22:14 +0000

Yes, because I’m a mighty industrialist (aka Ubermensch) and the world will fall down if I stop writing. ;-) Okay, enough picking on the Randians. Sorry for the radio silence. A quick update:

I got back from Des Moines last month and the next day had a board meeting for the non-profit I work with. As treasurer, I went to review the financial situation based on the projections we finally received. Sure enough, the detailed projections were in line with the back-of-a-napkin ones that I had presented earlier, i.e., dire. The only real solution was to close a significant portion of our operations, which we did. Unfortunately, that was also the part of operations that K cares most about.

Eulogy for a grandfather never well known

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 04:42:22 +0000

Drafting out a few words for grandpa’s funeral tomorrow… feel free to ignore.

I never felt that I knew Dick very well. Of course, growing up, we didn’t call him that. We always called him Grandpa S. We saw him once every few years, but with a thousand miles between Baton Rouge and Des Moines, I suppose that wasn’t too surprising. While it came 20 years later than I would have liked, I have appreciated being here today and at the visitation yesterday, hearing everyone’s impressions of the man that my grandfather was.

Richard S., rest in peace

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 02:56:03 +0000

I heard from my mom today that my grandfather died this afternoon. It wasn’t a complete shock. He never fully recovered from a stroke a few years ago, was recently suffering bouts of ventricular tachycardia, had just this week been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (which recently claimed Randy Pausch - go watch his “last lecture”), and had signed a DNR order.

I never did know my grandfather that well. Of my five grandparents, he was the one whom we visited least while growing up. There’s also the difficulty of understanding someone 50+ years older than you. And his general Norwegian disposition, a silent doer, made it difficult to know what was in his head. I suspect you got to know my grandfather more by working with him than talking to him.

Vacation notes (3 of N)

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 01:58:22 +0000

May 24: Memorial day weekend is in full swing and there are idiots everywhere. I swear that the older I get, the more I sympathize with my father’s dislike of crowds. We braved a bit of the crowd (keeping in mind that we’re already in the least crowded part of the park) and went up to Floating Island Lake to see if the sandhill cranes were nesting. When we got there, a coyote was crossing behind the lake and the cranes, who were on the shore at the time, were putting on quite a display: loud squawks (or whatever noise cranes make), spread wings, raised heads, etc. Basically, everything a crane can do to tell a coyote to go away… which he did. There weren’t any eggs in the nest yet, so we left and decided to get away from everybody by hiking the Lamar Trail. That was a very nice hike, we only saw one other group of people, but we did see many hawks and bluebirds. We got down to Cache Creek and stayed for a while. The rain didn’t start until we were a mile and a half down the trail home. That would be great, except that it left us another 2 miles back. We did have rain gear, but it isn’t very good and doesn’t breathe well, so we didn’t put it on. Between the lack of rain gear and my putting my hat on the camera, we arrived back to the car tired and soaked, but happy. A wet day of hiking is still better than crowds.

Vacation notes (2 of N)

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 01:54:57 +0000

May 20: In the morning, we saw a small herd of bighorn sheep near the Yellowstone Picnic Area. Later on, we saw a grizzly bear hanging out in the Lamar Valley: sleeping, grazing and hanging out. Heading back into the cabin for dinner, we talk to our host. He’s going through a nasty divorce which may wind up causing them to lose their business (for reasons I shouldn’t get into). Helpful hint: if you’re going into business with someone, even a spouse, set up an LLC. You don’t want everything to be owned jointly. In the evening we see still more grizzly. It’s apparently a grizzly year - it looks like we’re going to have to cruise the Tower Junction area if we want to see any black bears. On the way home that evening, we saw three moose by the side of the road. I got out and took a few pictures which were (at best) okay given the lack of light. Neater than the pictures though, was hearing them tear off the plants and chewing them. That was very cool.

Vacation notes (1 of N)

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 02:33:37 +0000

As mentioned previously, K and I have been out on vacation for the past two weeks - no phone (okay, there was voicemail), no email, and really very little in the way of computers. I did take some notes, because, unfortunately, my memory is exactly what it used to be: bad.

May 16: An inauspicious start to a vacation. Neither K nor I were particularly in the mood for heading out of town. We were seriously contemplating not going next year and possibly even forgoing the plane fare this year and bailing. I had been putting in too many hours working on a project for work, and K was have some difficult times with her rehab. That said, we dropped of the dogs and headed out to RDU. Unfortunately, the Delta/Northwest merger meant that instead of taking RDU->MSP->BZN flights, we were taking RDU->ATL->MSP->BZN (yes, 3 flights) and upon checking in, it seemed that we were going to be delayed in getting to Atlanta :-( Well, that worked out okay. We got into ATL at 5:30 and our MSP flight left at 6:35. Oh wait, no - it, too, was late and left at 8:00pm. That meant that in spite of the assurances of several Delta and Northwest agents, we landed at MSP at 9:30 - the same time the BZN flight left. Well, it turns out that we weren’t the only ones in that situation (‘and if you ever find yourself in that situation, there’s only one thing you can do: sing a few bars of “Alice’s Restaurant”’). Delta left 17 of us stranded in MSP, while their computers showed that they were only stranding 3. Delta proposed routing many of us to Salt Lake City (SLC?) where we could catch a flight to BZN in the morning. Of course, unless we were flying first class, we would have to eat the costs of staying in SLC. One woman vociferously complained (though it later turned out that she had already been booked for a morning flight to SLC). When we arrived at SLC, they had hotel and meal vouchers waiting for us (score!). So a night at a very gracious Comfort Suites capped the day. FWIW, on the IT front, the Delta/NW merger has been pathetic - at every point where a user interacts with their computers, they have a front-end which redirects you to the appropriate computer system: Delta or Northwest. It’s no wonder they can’t figure out that they stranded 17 people, they can’t even make good sense of their different flight numbers!
May 17: Relatively uneventful. We grabbed the shuttle to the airport. SLC is apparently one of the few airports now invading your privacy by looking at your privates through millimeter radar. They redirected our line through the system where they had you enter the scanner. They proceeded to use the Twister spinners to dictate how you place your hands above your head while performing a pelvic thrust for the sensors, then getting annoyed when you didn’t understand the first time that you should pretend to be flashing teenage school girls in order to get the posture correct. Once it was done, they had to fondle your pocket regions. No, that’s not a euphemism. The wavelength of the radar is apparently too short to penetrate the pockets on (men’s?) pants and they then have a pissy highschool educated TSA weenie with delusions of grandeur frisk your pockets. FWIW, I’m equally pissed at myself that I went through the damn thing. I should have insisted on a pat-down. If someone is going to violate my person, I want to get a good look at ’em while they are doing it. Having the person sit in an anonymous room getting their jollies just isn’t cool. So, once we got through the faux-security checkpoint, we ran into the woman who complained in MSP (and got us free lodging)! We made it to BZN - though our luggage didn’t, rented a RAV4 and went to our hotel. The luggage showed up around 5pm. Lucky for Delta, otherwise, they could have had it delivered to our final destination, Cooke City - 3 hours away.
May 18: bought supplies and headed into Yellowstone. We didn’t see much on the drive in and we didn’t go out to the park in the evening: too tired. The beds were great (pillowtop mattresses) and the kitchen was very nice. I wasn’t too sure about having a TV in the room, but having a phone that we could use after hours was nice.
May 19: First real day in the Park. We did get a late start in the morning, but the viewing was great. We saw a wolf on the northern ridge above the Lamar valley. People were saying that he was a part of the same group that killed several coyote pups in the valley the night before. We saw a grizzly bear, a coyote, a bald eagle and a golden eagle (on a old kill). That evening we went out again, we saw two grizzly and lots of bison with their young calves, also a very nice scenic view, complete with DRAMATIC LIGHTING. (* all of the images in this series are original jpegs without the color correction, etc. that will be applied later)

Weather is here, wish you were beautiful

Sun, 31 May 2009 01:25:39 +0000

K and I just got back from vacation - your regular, intermitant blogging will resume shortly. I don’t think there has been anything new posted since late April. The first couple of weeks of May, I was tied up at work, getting ready for the last two weeks when we were to be in Yellowstone. So, having left Bozeman, MT this morning on a 6am flight, we’re back in NC. I’m sorry for the lack of warning up front, I just hate announcing to the world that I won’t be in town for two weeks. :-)

Memento mori

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:06:46 +0000

It’s definitive - we are having a 20th year high school reunion. I’m not entirely certain how I feel about the whole thing. Thinking back, I don’t have too many fond memories of high school. In fairness, I don’t do well with event-type recollection, so I don’t have too many memories in general from that period, but my overall sense is that the past 20 years have been much better than the 3 at CLA. I will admit to a certain morbid curiousity about the reunion and my high school classmates. General predictions: 1) the correlation of popularity to success is less than or equal to zero; 2) while we are all adults and more than twice our age at graduation, cliques will reform immediately at the reunion; 3) people who enjoyed high school will have a better time at the reunion than those who didn’t; and 4) I’m one of, if not the most, liberal members of our . :-)

Harvest time!

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 04:32:03 +0000

For the first time in about 10 years I planted a garden. We are always drawn to shaded lots, so we’ve never had a place for one before. Even here we’ve got five acres… and they are all wooded. Normally? Great. For a garden, it’s kinda the suck. This year, I decided to plant a garden in the right-of-way/frontage and the heck with what the neighbors think. So, raised beds to avoid the clay soil problems, fencing to keep the deer out (btw - know any bow hunters? I may be a vegetarian, but the deer are getting on my nerves), and we’re set to go.

Eeek!

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:06:54 +0000

Some of the more social people from my high school class in Louisiana are apparently putting together a reunion. They’ve managed to track down maybe 90+% of the class and have just sent out a (scanned?) copy of the senior class photo. I defy you to find more 80’s hair in a picture. The sad thing is that I can’t put names to the majority of people here. Maybe 10 at most. I guess that either means there’s no point in going to the reunion or that I really, really need to go.

April Fools Day

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 14:44:29 +0000

I’m never a big fan of April Fools day, mostly because I’m too guilible for my own good. That said, on occasion I get in the mood. This year, a colleague and I discussed sending out an email to the staff of our company, regarding the IT infrastructure. We got permission from the boss, because, well just because. Here’s the text that we sent out:

April 1, 2009

Dear Employees of XXX,

just sayin

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:03:40 +0000

free association Wednesday

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 01:59:25 +0000

I guess it’s a good thing that the Treasury department is releasing more details on the banking “stress tests.” That said, the engineer (or the circuits lab TA) in me can’t help but hear “smoke test” any time someone says stress test. In engineering, you wire up your design and power it up for the smoke test. If it doesn’t start smoking, there’s no guarantee that the design (or wiring) is right, but if you do release the magic smoke, then you’ve definitely done something wrong. Because, of course, the magic smoke is what makes all electronic components from resistors to microprocessors run. Maxwell with his electro-magnetic equations was full of it. Every thing runs on magic smoke. If you let the magic smoke out of a device, it’ll never run again. I do wonder what is the magic smoke analog that gets validated in a banking stress test. Do you wire up the bank and see how much money it leaks? Can you put the magic green stuff back in a bank which fails a stress test? Well, presumably some banks will survive, which is probably a good thing. If for no other reason than banking is a more diverse field than engineering. After spending a day with 200+ engineers I can tell you that, too a first approximation, we’ve only got one gender. The workshop was a giant sausagefest in all of three ethnicities: caucasian, asian and indian. As a profession we’ve got to do something about this.

notes from a workshop

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:56:35 +0000

I’m over at the Compressive Sensing Workshop today. I wasn’t too sure about compressive sensing as a topic, but after reading the abstracts, it seems to have a lot of application to basic image processing. Or at least the same concepts are applicable.

One logistics note. Attention conference centers everywhere: speaking as a tea drinker, it would be very nice if you would reserve a carafe for hot water only. Never put coffee in this carafe - ever. No matter how well it is washed, coffee will leave an aftertaste that will sneak into the hot water and ruin even the best tea.

Adventures in vegetarian cooking

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 23:56:06 +0000

K and I don’t eat much meat - no red meat, no poultry, etc. Theoretically, we still eat fish, but since I won’t cook it…

This weekend, we experimented with a couple of new recipes that, in hindsight, were even vegan:

Vegetarian Mac and Cheese. Like a lot of people (I suppose), I love macaroni and cheese. Not the Kraft, out of the box, kind, but one made with onion, garlic, mustard powder in a homemade cheese sauce. Unfortunately, K (okay, me too) isn’t supposed to eat that much high-fat cheese. I’ve been making it with low-fat cheese, but well, that’s a little lame. Last week, a guy at my office gave me a recipe that eliminated the cheese sauce and turned out to be (possibly) tastier than the original. Start by sautéing an onion in a little olive oil. Add a drained, rinsed can of cannellini (other beans work, but cannellini are wonderfully creamy), 1.75 cups of water (or vege broth), 1 tbsp of miso paste (I used soy sauce), a little dry mustard and a half cup of raw cashews. Puree, then add a package of cooked spinach and use as the cheese sauce. It’s wonderful.
We also made seitan which, as near as I can figure, is pronounced satan. It’s wheat meat - wheat gluten (which means it’s also pronounced “death to etselec and hlf”) and water (or broth) which is cooked and then used as if it was regular meat. We made ours with water, soy sauce and some Italian seasonings. Once it was cooked, we sliced it up, braised it and served it with a wine/mushroom sauce. It was great and a *lot* easier than I thought it would be.

small town values

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 13:50:54 +0000

One of the phrases that bothered me the most during last year’s election (indeed, during all elections), is “small town values.” That elevation of the mores of small communities that make them better than the rest of us who, by virtue of living in larger metro areas, apparently don’t have any values.

I’ve never lived in a small town. Currently, we live in a rural-ish area on the outskirts of a medium sized metropolitan area. Prior to that, I’ve lived in medium sized cities (maybe 150-300,000 people). That said, I’ve known people who lived in small towns and overall, I wasn’t too impressed by the values of those small towns. On an individual level, the people in small towns don’t really seem all that different from anyone else, they certainly aren’t bastions of moral virtue. That said, there is one thing that is different about small towns, and which is that they are small [ tautology for the win!].

such a dork

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 02:02:57 +0000

So K just asks me if it’s raining. My response was to go online instead of going outside.

I’m such a

Snow pictures

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 21:39:51 +0000

Last week (on Inauguration Day no less), we got about 7" of snow out at the house. I just uploaded the pictures this morning. Some of my favorites are below, the rest are in the gallery.

If nothing else, the dogs sure did seem to enjoy the snow. :-)

Happy inauguration day!

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 17:00:10 +0000

It’s noon - congratulations to President Obama!!

life in the south

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 02:52:07 +0000

It looks like we’re going to get our first real snowfall in about five years. “Real” if you count 2-4 inches, which I do since K and I are from Louisiana.

Unfortunately, while I was grocery shopping this weekend, I forgot a few things and needed to go pick ’em up on my way home from work. Even more unfortunately, among the things I forgot were a quart of milk for tea at the office and a dozen eggs. So there I am, the evening before the snow falls buying milk and eggs. Hell, if I had forgotten bread this weekend I would have hit the Southern snowfall French Toast

so the stakes aren't always that small

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 17:04:54 +0000

I’m not certain if I’ve joked about it here or not, but recently I’ve taken to commenting that if academic politics are so petty because the stakes are so small, then what does that say about non-profit politics. The implication is that non-profit politics are even more petty because the stakes are even smaller. Well, after a rough couple of weeks with the non-profit I work with, I can confirm that the politics are definitely petty, I’m just no longer certain that the stakes are small. In one sense, sure - the budget for the non-profit I work with is smaller than any other budget I’ve dealt with in a work situation. But at the same time, the politics most often affects people’s livelihoods. It’s one thing to have a layoff due to lack of funds. It’s another thing for poor management and personal vendettas leading to a firing.

at home in the (technical) universe

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:11:26 +0000

Some recent (somewhat) technical notes:

A while back, I swapped the dead harddrive from my ipod with a compact flash card. Unfortunately, at the time, the biggest (affordable) compact flash was 16 GB, so I lost about half the capacity from my ipod. Not a huge problem, but it became more of one as I added more music. Yesterday, a shiny new 32 GB compact flash arrived and now I’m back to the nominal amount of space on my ipod, except that it’s all solid state and cool. From the technical standpoint, this was something of a PITA, since I didn’t have a windows or mac machine around to reinstall the firmware. My ultimate solution: 1) back up /dev/sdb (boot record and partition table) and /dev/sdb1 (firmware) from the ipod using dd; 2) put the CF in my laptop and format it (a camera would work just as well), this just normalizes the card; 3) put the CF in the ipod (or in the laptop); 4) write the patition table using dd; 5) edit the partition table using fdisk, set the size of sdb2 to be 32 rather than 16 GB; 6) write out the firmware to sdb1; 7) format sdb2 using mkfs.vfat. Voila - a 32 GB ipod CF
If you haven’t seen it already, check out projecteuler.net. They’ve got a bunch of mathematically oriented programming problems online of varying difficulty. Good solutions should all run in 1 minute or less and generally take 100 lines of code or so. It’s a good way to get familiar with a new programming language and to exercise your brain. So far, I’ve done the first 70 or so problems - they don’t take too long, maybe a half hour each on average.
Finally, I got the clutch in my car replaced yesterday. The mechanic said that it was in pretty bad shape and that the (plastic?) bearing the clutch uses had worn completely away. This probably explains why I’ve had no acceleration for the past year (or more?). I had forgotten what it was like to drive a decent car :-)

New guitar

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:38:25 +0000

Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking about getting a new guitar. I’ve been heading up to High Strung in Durham and have played with maybe a dozen different models, but the one I kept coming back to was a Blueridge BR-243. It’s got a beautiful sound and it’s very comfortable for me to play. The body size is “000” as opposed to the more common dreadnought size (like my first guitar) which means it’s easier to get my arms around and the shorter neck makes it easier to reach all of the chords. The back and sides of the guitar are mahogany

President Obama and race

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:17:11 +0000

My mother tells a story about my first day in first grade (and sadly, I’m more likely to remember stories of my childhood than the actual childhood). I go off to school, probably all 70s style - plaid pants, mop haircut, etc., and when I come home she asks me about school. In particular, how did I like my new teacher (Mrs. Smith?)? I told my mom that she would like the teacher, that Mrs. Smith was just like her.

President Obama

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 04:13:02 +0000

Polls just closed on the West coast. With that, everyone calls Washington, Oregon and California for Obama - Obama wins! And I’m heading to bed. I would still like to see who wins NC. It looks like it’ll be close, but we should know in the morning. If I’m doing really good, I might stay up for a McCain concession. We’ll see.

Go vote!

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:56:45 +0000

I headed over to the polling place to vote this morning. As of 8:30am or so, there were no lines at our precinct. But then, that’s not too surprising for a small precinct in a non-populous county. Chronological observations:

There were a fair number of cars parked at the polling place. I took one of only about 4 or 5 free spots
The Obama people were prepared for the rain - they had decent sized open sided tents set up to stand under while handing out literature and talking to voters
There were about 10-15 people voting when I arrived
The elections officials were prepared for crowds. Instead of the usual split of the alphabet into 3 or 4 lines, I think there were 6. They also seemed to have extra help on hand, including some high school students.
The folks handing out the ballots mentioned that polling had been steady so far.
When I left around 8:45/8:50, I was only the 161st voter :-)

I suspect that across NC, things will be similar. We had such a huge number of people cast ballots early (some 35-40% of all registered voters) that I would imagine we won’t have too many problems with lines, etc.

Anxiety

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 01:43:10 +0000

I haven’t been in much of a writing mood recently. I blame it on a high state of anxiety: the economy, the stock market (and therefore my retirement accounts), the health of the small business I work for, and of course the election. As a good Democrat (actually, an independent with Democratic leanings), I’m constantly concerned that in spite of all the polling and all available evidence, Obama will lose. Not certain how, but…

Pictures from Geek Beer

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 19:20:17 +0000

So Hunter is planning on being at GB tonight too. But as of last week, we thought this was his last GB and so of course, everyone brought cameras.

Sample pictures:

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Gustav (updated)

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:28:45 +0000

Both K’s and I are from Louisiana, Baton Rouge to be specific, so we kept a close eye on Hurricane Gustav over Labor Day weekend. Fortunately, it looks like the storm weakened and the damage wasn’t as bad as it could have been. There were a couple of levees in New Orleans that were topped (a good thing the storm surge wasn’t any higher or there would have been major flooding).

Weekend enjoyment

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:25:39 +0000

Things making this weekend more enjoyable:

Seeing a “Republicans for Obama bumper sticker on the car in front of me
Finding that 5th Season is starting to carry beer and wine making supplies
Gardening (more or less)
Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks
Receiving ~1.5″ of rain Sunday night… after taking the dogs on a walk
Getting TurboGears to work through fastcgi
Knowing that it’s only a four day work week coming up

Presumably there were other things, but these are the ones that come immediately to mind 🙂

Louisiana, setting the standard in science education . . .

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 13:58:53 +0000

It’s things like this that embarrass me when I tell someone I’m from Louisiana. The Louisiana House has voted overwhelmingly to pass the Louisiana Science Education Act which allows science teachers to use supplemental materials when teaching controversial subjects. For those who haven’t been there, in Louisiana, controversial subjects include: evolution, global warming, Keplerian astronomy and the round earth theory. Okay, I made the last one up – at least 85% of Louisiana households do believe that the earth is round.

Management, leadership and information technology

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:34:53 +0000

A few years ago, I participated in a six month program to train leaders in information technology. I learned a fair amount, perhaps enough to be disillusioned, and ever since the program, I can’t help but look at organizations in terms of their leadership. Case in point, the grapevine of ex-employees from my former workplace says that three employee resignations were announced last week. One person only gave one week notice. By my rough count, that’s about 20 people leaving since January – or approximately 8-10% of the work force. Ouch!

new computer

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:28:26 +0000

Over vacation, I managed to convince K that we should get a new computer. Our old one was bought just after I started my last new job, so… February 2001? For most things, it worked pretty well: email, word processing and spreadsheets, etc were fine. It didn’t hurt that we were running Linux, so there was minimal pain for upgrading the OS (it originally came with Windows 98… can you imagine trying to run XP or god forbid Vista?). But given that it was reasonable for desktop use, it still had a few problems for some of the purposes I had. It was using USB 1.1, so a max of 12 Mb/s off to an external disk (instead of 480 Mb/s for USB 2). The hard drive was small and not mirrored, so if it died, we were in trouble. No DVD burner, only a 4x CDROM writer. Finally, you couldn’t do much photo editing because of the small amount of RAM and the slow speeds.

Back online

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:24:21 +0000

Testing, testing, is this thing on? “My fellow Americans. I’m pleased to announce that I’ve signed legislation outlawing the Soviet Union. We begin bombing in five minutes. Er, wait, sorry – wrong decade.

Sorry for the lack of posting for the past few weeks. K and I were out in Yellowstone and just got back last night (or was it this morning?). The advantage of Yellowstone is no news. No television, no computer, no phone. I suppose there was a newspaper, but we didn’t read it. So what’s been going on while we’ve been away? Has Clinton conceded yet? Have gas prices dropped yet? Is it still fashionable to conserve water in North Carolina? I guess I already know the answer about Clinton and gasoline. Since we’re on a well, I think water conservation is going to be a way of life for now on, so that doesn’t matter either.

E-book blogging

Wed, 07 May 2008 01:49:39 +0000

I’ve had the Sony Reader now for about a week. In that time, I’ve taken it on a plane trip, read three full books, multiple days worth of the NY Times and I’m in the middle of two books right now. Observations so far:

The electronic paper is very readable. On my plane trip, I must have read for several hours straight with no more eye strain than if I had been reading a paper book. The legibility is good regardless of font size. You might still want to increase the font size if your eyes are tired, but otherwise, there is no need.
The menus and button layouts are pretty reasonable. You can page forward or back. There’s a up-down-left-right cursor that is used to move around on a page. Using the number buttons on the right, you can jump to an arbitrary page in the book. These buttons double as a quick jump to a menu item on the Reader’s standard menus. One gripe, you can only move to different links using up/down on the cursor, left/right don’t do anything. At GB, paideka mentioned that it would be interesting to see what Apple did with the layout and look and feel of a reader. Agreed
Battery life appears to be as advertised: 7,500 page turns per charge. Keep in mind that a page on the reader contains only about half the content of a standard paper back (depending on page layout and font size). Still, around 3,500 pages of paper back text is still pretty good.
Updating the screen is slow. It takes about .5 – .75 seconds to update the screen. A few ramifications: 1) this is almost un-noticeable while reading text; and 2) using the cursor keys is painful, you deal with the update time for each cursor pressed – where ever possible I use the numeric shortcuts.
A third ramification of the slow update time is that the Reader, and almost certainly any other reader using this generation of e-paper, is unusable as a reference book. When I use a reference book, I flip around quite a bit. Forward to the index, back to the text, forward many pages to the next topic, etc. I suppose if the reference book had a really good index, it might be better, but for the most part, this is still not a good tool for referencing which is a real shame.
The bookmarking system is good. Each book keeps your place in the book. The top level of the reader keeps up with the last book you’ve read and your place in that book. You can set any number of bookmarks in each book and then access the bookmarks on a global or a per book basis. It would be nice if the reader also kept a list of most recently read, rather than just the single most recently read book; but that’s a small issue. Typically, I’ll just set a bookmark when I pause in reading, then delete it when I pick the book back up.
PDF conversion still leaves something to be desired. I’ve looked into this a bit. The converter I’m using converts PDF -> HTML -> LRF. The PDF -> HTML conversion uses pdftohtml (surprised?) which is good in some ways, but still leaves off certain things (like images!), at least as used by the reader’s converter. Part of this is due to conceptual differences between PDF and HTML. HTML marks up text, flagging paragraphs, noting images, etc. Ideally, all of this is passed to the browser which handles the layout. PDF will have none of that. PDF consists of a set of primitives that indicate what text (in which font and size) should go in which location on the page. There is no markup of paragraphs, instead, each line of text is described individually. There is no easy way to reconstruct paragraphs from a PDF file (as a research note, I wonder if you could use a partially observable markov decision process?). That said, minus the missing images, the LRF result is definitely readable.

So overall, I’m pretty happy with the reader. The biggest issue is the refresh time on the electronic paper and I hope that will improve over the next couple of years.

If you love something, set it free . . .

Tue, 06 May 2008 02:58:16 +0000

About a year and a half ago (November 2006), the wildlife clinic K volunteers with transfered a water turtle (yellow bellied slider) to her. A cute little guy, just over 7 grams and about the size of a quarter. Yesterday, weighing in at 125 g and with a shell about 4 inches long, we released her into the nearby lake. It’s easy to fall for a lot of the animals K rehabs. Their cute and tiny or just plain helpless and on the mend, but the turtles are particularly hard because K keeps them for so long. The following are a handful of the pictures we’ve taken of the turtle:

Book lover + nerd = ebook

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:45:51 +0000

Yesterday, I bought a Sony Reader – the electronic book reader that uses E Ink’s electronic paper. The electronic paper display on the reader is very nice. It uses encapsulated white and black pigments that can be brought to the surface of the page. The only power consumption involved happens when you make a change. Once the change is made, it requires no power to keep the image. The upshot is that you’ve got a very long battery life, a decent contrast ration and a display that can be read in any light – in fact, the more the better since it’s reflective (like paper) rather than backlit (like a monitor). Moreover, because it’s not backlit, it’s easier on the eyes when reading for a long time. I read for a couple of hours last night and it was no different than reading a paper book.

tracks 1.5

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 02:46:29 +0000

Thanks to Luis, I find out last week that Tracks 1.5 has been released. Tracks is the implementation of the “getting things done methodology which I prefer. 1.5 is pretty nice. In particular, I look forward to hiding actions until a particular date. In the past, I’ve wanted to track a todo some six months in the future. I put it on the list and had to watch it for 180+ days.

The problem of evil

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 02:18:55 +0000

One advantage of being in IT is that you often at least hear of cool things before other people do. You may or may not choose to adopt them, but at least you’ve got a choice. Thanks to Mr. Icon, I got an early gmail account, firstname.lastname@gmail.com. Great, unfortunately, I don’t have an uncommon name. Starting about a year ago, I began receiving email for a moderately important newsman. Last week, for a pastor in Michigan. In both cases, people apparently know the person has a gmail account, but they can’t remember the permutation of the person’s name. I always let the sender know that they’ve got the wrong person, but now I’m starting to think that either: a) I need to create a disambiguation auto-response that goes out if I’ve never seen your email address before; or b) we should just give up and form our own knockoff of the Village People. We’ve got an engineer, a newsman and a minister. Now we just need a fireman and a cowboy. Any volunteers?

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:37:16 +0000

For as long as I can remember, any time I spent more than an hour or so walking (or hiking), my legs and feet have felt sore and tired. Never having been very athletic, I assumed that I was out of shape or needed to exercise more. But even with as much exercise as I’ve been getting recently, I’ve still have still had the same problem. I’ve tried various inserts and shoes for people who over pronate, but not much seemed to help. So finally, I went to see the podiatrist.

New roof

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:30:08 +0000

The roofers finally finished our new roof last week. They started on February 28th and finished on April 2nd – five weeks. I’m pretty certain they only expected it to take about three weeks, but between the rain and the level of detail on the roof, it didn’t quite work out that way. Everything seemed to take longer than expected. On the bright side, all of you in central North Carolina owe us for the rain. I’m convinced that March would not have been so rainy except for our roof. For example, the first major rains came right after they pulled off the old shingles; and the rains last Monday and Tuesday postponed the completion. Coincidence? I don’t think so. You might say I’m falling victim to the logical fallacy, post hoc, ergo propter hoc. I say, screw that, I’m still taking credit for the rain.

Lessons learned

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:13:27 +0000

For the most part, the old roof has been ripped off and we’re looking to start laying down the new roofing on Thursday.

Several lessons learned so far in getting the roof replaced:

all contractors have different prices, shop around
drought is bad for roofers (and for that matter gravel driveway repair folks)
having your roof torn off is LOUD. Between the guys tearing shingles off to the dogs barking like crazy, I had a splitting headache when I stayed home
metal ridge vent covers from 20 years ago suck
the leak we had in the den actually had its own pool of standing water under the ridge vent cover

Looks like it’s going to rain tonight. Hopefully we won’t be learning the lesson about the maximum wind speed that roofing underlayment can take before blowing off.

Roof replacement

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 03:42:31 +0000

We moved into our current house a little over four years ago (already?!). Over the past few years, we’ve found that the people who built it made some interesting choices. Some things were done very nicely and they cheaped out on other things. One of the places they cheaped out was the roof. It wasn’t bad enough to force them to replace it when we moved in, but we did have to get them to do some minor work. Since then I’ve had to go up there a few times a year and add some roofing tar or replace a vent boot. We’ve known that we’ll have to replace it some day for a couple of years now.

Power companies

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 02:08:40 +0000

When K and I got home today, we had not one, but two different offers from the local power company (Progress Energy) to enroll in their equal payment plan program. The first was a generic flier touting the benefits of having a consistent power bill. You sign up and based on your past two years of power consumption, they compute your monthly bill and that’s what you’ll pay all year long. They’ll recompute a new amount 12 months later. We had something like that with Duke Power in Durham. They computed your recent average. You paid that for 11 months and then settled up on the 12th month, paying less or more depending on actual use.

Vicarious sadness

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 16:11:47 +0000

About eight months ago, a gentleman with the same first and last name as mine started using gmail. Not a big deal except that the difference between our gmail addresses is fairly small and hard to notice. So every once in a while, I receive email intended for him and I’ll point that person in the right direction. Beyond that, my only real contact with him has been some minimal email communication, usually after I’ve pointed someone new his way.

Moving day update

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 20:57:32 +0000

The ISP move went reasonably well. There were a couple of minor glitches. One was a character set problem when I tried to take the most recent database snapshot from Linksky. I’m not entirely certain what happened, but I wound up with extra characters after some punctuation marks. Rather than spend too much time with it, I just grabbed the latest post and dumped it into the Dreamhost site and changed the time.

Moving day

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 04:05:45 +0000

Saturday is moving day. Nope, we haven’t bought a new house. We hope not to have to do that for a long time. It’s time to change ISPs. After only 10 months with Linksky, I’ve had enough. In the past year, between working on the non-profit’s website and my own, I’ve had the following issues:

arbitrary version changes with no notification
random breakage due to “security upgrades – like the time w e couldn’t do anything with a friend’s account or email because his last name contained the letters “curl
random lockouts of service
insults from the security “guru because he thinks he knows more about Unix and IT security than anyone else around
etc.

The last straw for me came earlier this year when a gallery page broke. I tried to login to diagnose the problem and found that they had removed my SSH access. When I emailed, I was to ld there is a “security issue that makes sites with SSH more vulnerable and that they were looking for a workaround and would re-enable SSH by the weekend. Outside of dictionary attacks on passwords, this is really complete BS. Of course, the weekend came and nope, no SSH. Another week rolled around, no SSH. Forget this.

Edwards

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 02:41:20 +0000

So, John Edwards dropped out of the Democratic primaries today. It’s a shame. In one sense, I was more excited about Obama or Clinton as president(ial candidates). Their candidacies would be a) history making for their race/gender respectively; and b) about freaking time! Hell, Turkey and Pakistan have had female heads of state for well over a decade, it’s just embarrassing that the United States hasn’t had a viable black or female candidate until now.

Possum pictures

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 03:48:23 +0000

Back in August I wrote about a rehab possum that K was taking care of – she was very much a cutie. I was looking through some pictures on the camera and realized that I had a few more of her. Now that she’s all grown up and has been released, I thought folks might like to see them:

Here she was back in August:

A month later, in September:

Work blogging

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 03:37:53 +0000

Last week at work was pretty interesting. On Tuesday, L and I flew up to Dayton for the day to meet with our sponsors. That meant a 6am flight out and originally a 11pm return flight. Fortunately, we wrapped it up a bit early and landed home back around 8:30pm. The meeting went well. We were presenting some ideas that I had to the sponsors and they seemed to like them. Strangely enough, in talking to L, he said that he hadn’t really understood what I was proposing until the meeting. Not bad for a guy who wrote a short paper for the sponsors that described what he didn’t understand! But then, I guess that’s why L’s a full professor 🙂

K wins!

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 02:56:58 +0000

Okay, slight confession time. I’m something of a closet political junkie. Not so much the “who’s up, who’s down campaigning politics, but the questions of policy, who supports what, what makes sense kind of thing. If I were involved in politics directly, I suppose that would make me a wonk, not a hack.

Anyway, K and I were having a discussion last week about the presidential primaries. K’s position was that if Huckabee wins the GOP primaries, we’re all in serious danger because the man holds positions that are bad for women, minorities, basically everyone that’s not a middle class white heterosexual male. I, on the other hand, maintained the position that a Huckabee win in the primaries would be hysterical. 🙂

Is this thing on?

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 02:25:28 +0000

Is this thing still on?

Okay, it’s been about three weeks since I’ve blogged anything. As I’ve stated before, this tends to happen when I’m too involved in living life to actually write about it. Fortunately (unfortunately?) it’s nothing terribly exciting. Let’s see:

Guitar: my guitar playing has been scientifically shown to have 10% less suck than it did a month ago. However, with such a large amount of suck to begin with, we’re still not at anything that looks like good. I’m getting more fluent with the open chords and can switch between them reasonably well. I’m just starting to learn barre chords – the E barre chord to start with. There are still vast tracts of untouched suck in the barre chords. Also, I’m actually thinking of picking up some lessons – the ones at jamplay.com seem pretty good.
Work: still going well. There’s enough to do. I’m still not entirely used to billing by the (tenth of an) hour. Also, not really looking forward to flying to Ohio next week. I’ll only be gone for a day, but, ugh – who wants a 6am flight to Dayton!
Break-in update: nothing much new here. Still looking to make it harder for someone to break in. Had a neighborhood watch meeting last weekend – that’ll be good. Turns out this may be neither contractors nor kids. There are apparently some professional (stretching that word a bit) thieves working this area. There have been some eight different break-ins near by.
Non-profit work: I’m convinced that whomever coined the phrase “academic politics are so sorted because the stakes are so small never worked with a non-profit. It’s just amazing the degree to which politics enters into the smallest damned thing.
New year’s resolutions: didn’t make any – never do. That said, I am trying to exercise more and cut down on my use of vulgarities. Profanity and cursing can wait until another year 🙂

I think that’s about it for now.

Chop wood, haul water

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 03:04:43 +0000

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, haul water. After enlightenment, chop wood, haul water, is one of my favorite zen aphorisms. Okay, so no hauling water for me – at least not unless the drought gets worse, but there’s going to be a lot of wood chopping in my future.

On Saturday, margaretc’ s husband, ‘A’, came by and took out two of the trees that have been worrying me. They border our drivway and both had holes in their bases. Since they’re not small trees (40-50+ feet tall), I was worried that they would either come down on the house, the 500 gallon propane tank, the cars, the well, the power lines – you get the idea. It seemed better to take them out on our own terms.

Break-in Update

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 21:43:33 +0000

It’s been about a week and a half since the attempted break-in.

On Tuesday, I replaced the window they broke out. I called around to a couple of different places and everyone said that they could send someone out to give an estimate, but it would take a few days and then the part would be on order for another 3-5 days. Fortunately, on local glass shop said that if I brought them the sill in the morning, they would be able to replace the glass that afternoon. So I spent the morning taking apart the window. It turned out to be easier than I thought, but I did have to take off the lower sill to get to the upper.

Attempted break-in

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 03:00:21 +0000

Some weeks it just doesn’t pay to leave the house. As K and I were getting ready for bed last night she noticed that the bathroom window was broken. Being a wildlife rehabilitator, her first thought was that some bird (maybe a hawk) had smashed into the window. I went out to check. Nope – someone had removed the screen and smashed the window with some junk they found on the deck.

What a week

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 04:51:33 +0000

Okay, it’s only Monday, but it’s been about a week since wrote anything here. In that time:

The non-profit I work with and on whose board I serve has gone bat-shit crazy. They say that academic politics are so petty because the stakes are so small. Trust me, academic politics haven’t got anything on non-profit politics
A friend at the university has announced her resignation to move on to a different job. This is probably good for her – she’ll be happier, but it means that half the people I know took it hard.
I got a call last week from a lawyer representing my old employer, letting me know that I am a witness in a case against them. Go me! *grumble*
The thing at my new job did go through and I now do people management for six staff members. Oh, and their performance evaluations were due in November, can we finish those soon? They’ll be done and signed tomorrow, but what a pain.
Finally, I went to (sort of crashed) a holiday party for the school of arts and sciences at my former employer. That was a lot fun, but odd. Particularly when I ran into my old boss and then the woman who inherited part of my responsibilities when I left. Theoretically, she was doing the job until they hired my replacement. It’s been four months – I don’t think the position’s been posted yet. Regardless, I talked to a lot of people and confirmed my original statement – the thing I miss most is the people.

Now if I can only get through this week: finish up the last part of a project and put the presentation together, I’ll be in good shape for taking some time off.

Calendar pictures

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 17:27:25 +0000

To forestall my mother’s nagging polite and subtle reminders, I took some time yesterday to select pictures for a 2008 Yellowstone calendar. I tried to limit myself to pictures taken on this year’s trip and was happy to see that I could 🙂

The ones I finally selected are shown below. They start with the cover image and then go from January through December:

To print them, I’m going with Lulu instead of Kodak. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is price 🙂 The other is that Lulu will do a full 8.5″x11″ edge to edge print whereas Kodak always puts a border. The images above are all scaled/cropped to a 8.5×11 aspect ratio, so hopefully, I’ll end up with a pretty nice result.

Tango uniform

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 03:29:34 +0000

Looks like my ipod died today. As I was packing up to head home it slid off of my bag and onto the floor. Not a bad fall – it’s had worse. It seemed fine when I started it back up, played a couple of songs. But apparently, those were in the memory cache. Once it was done with those, it locked up and the hard drive started clicking

I guess my options are to either replace the hard drive or buy a new one. I’ll probably replace the drive. I don’t think I care enough about the magical features of the new ipods. At least not enough to justify blowing three to four hundred dollars.

Guitar was the case

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 04:08:27 +0000

Maybe random Monopuff songs aren’t the best blog post titles, but what the heck.

K asked me what I wanted for my birthday (fwiw, I’m either very easy or very hard to shop for depending on whether or not you want to get me a gift certificate to a bookstore – thanks Mom!). From what I’m sure was out of the blue for her, I asked for a guitar – hey, I’ve always wanted to learn.

Update

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 03:55:41 +0000

I started thinking through why I didn’t care for management at my last job and as is often the case, I wrote it down to help me think it through. It’s probably not worth posting the reasoning, but I did decide that most of the things I disliked about my most recent management job were due to the environment and not management itself. Don’t get me wrong, management’s not something I enjoy, mostly because it’s a lot of hard work – at least if you are conscientious about it.

Just when I thought that I was out they pull me back in.

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 01:42:51 +0000

I’m not Michael Corleone and the places I’ve worked at could hardly be compared to the mob; but I did have an interesting, brief discussion this afternoon with the president of the company for which I’m working. For the record, I don’t think that any discussion which begins, “you used to be management, right? can be characterized as anything but interesting.

It seems that the company (like the family, only smaller, legal and less profitable) might have a need for some management and there is some interest in me filling the role. Unfortunately, in taking this job, one of the big pluses for me was that it was not a management position. On the other hand, there are some good things about management and the company is much smaller than the university. I would still be expected to do technical work and the management is anticipated to be about 5-10% of my time (if I did it).

It's bicycle^Wlight fixture repair man!

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 03:58:53 +0000

Ok, maybe not as exciting as bicycle repair man, but we did spend some quality time this evening with light fixtures. For reasons that neither K nor I can fathom, the breakfast room had a fan attached to a nondescript light fixture. K found a new fixture in the pottery barn catalog and it fits pretty well with the house.

Since I didn’t have much else to do this evening, I installed it. Pictures below. The first two are the original fixture: when we first moved in (3 years ago) and the fixture on the floor after removal. The next two are the new fixture.

well that was nice

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 02:56:57 +0000

I’m up at the university yesterday, tying up some loose ends from my job there when I ran into the executive vice president. Essentially, this is the guy under the president who runs everything administrative for the campus. I used to see him every month or so as a part of my job responsibilities and we always got along reasonably well.

So, I’m talking to him and he tells me that whenever he sees someone who has left the university, he always tells them that he hopes they made the right decision… because they aren’t coming back (implying that he will prevent them from returning). He then goes on to say, but you are welcome back if you ever want to return and that this puts me in a very small group – three in twelve years.

Drought update

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:30:13 +0000

(odd: i thought i had submitted this last night. i guess i just saved it in draft)

It’s been raining today which is good. The forecasters are predicting rain tomorrow and Friday which is even better. However, I’m still worried. It’s been over a month since the last real rain and close to six months since we’ve had normal rainfall. Raleigh i s down to about 3 months worth of water supply in the reservoirs – Atlanta’s not any better. What happens when cities actually run out of water? Do they evacuate?

TaskFreak!

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 00:28:02 +0000

About a year ago, I mentioned installing Tracks a “Getting Things Done application written in RubyOnRails. That was great when I had my always online desktop at the office. I could run a RoR app without a problem. Unfortunately, since I’ve left the university, I don’t have a computer I leave on all the time and my ISP doesn’t offer Rails. I started feeling the need for some sort of online task tracker, so I looked around for things that run on my ISP. Last night I found and installed gtd-php.

Left or right brain?

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:17:45 +0000

etselec, suggested I take the Brainworks Left/Right Brain Test. Results below:

Auditory : 23% Visual : 76% Left : 52% Right : 47%

Full details:

you exhibit an even balance between left- and right- hemisphere dominance and a slight preference for visual over auditory processing. With a score this balanced, it is likely that you would have slightly different results each time you complete this self-assessment quiz. You are a well-rounded person, distinctly individualistic and artistic, an active and multidimensional learner. At the same time, you are logical and disciplined, can operate well within an organization, and are sensitive towards others without losing objectivity. You are organized and goal-directed. Although a “thinking individual, you “take in entire situations readily and can act on intuition. You sometimes tend to vacillate in your learning styles. Learning might take you longer than someone of equal intellect, but you will tend to be more thorough and retain the material longer than those other individuals. You will alternate between logic and impulse. This vacillation will not normally be intentional or deliberate, so you may experience anxiety in situations where you are not certain which aspect of yourself will be called on. With a slight preference for visual processing, you tend to be encompassing in your perceptions, process along multidimensional paths and be active in your attacking of situations or learning. Overall, you should feel content with your life and yourself. You are, perhaps, a little too critical of yourself — and of others — while maintaining an “openness which tempers that tendency. Indecisiveness is a problem and your creativity may not be in keeping with your potential. Being a pragmatist, you downplay this aspect of yourself and focus on the more immediate, obvious and the more functional.

are there no good ISPs?

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:19:49 +0000

I’m starting to think that there aren’t any good Internet service providers. hsarik had troubles with Rimu Hosting. My own ISP seems to be far more focused on (their own version of) security than on usability. At work we’ve been using Pair. I’ve been pretty happy with them until this afternoon around 5pm when our project went dead while we had some 50 people using it.

When we first developed the project, Pair was using php4 (yeah, I know – it’s my own fault for using php 🙂 ). Fortunately, they also provided phpwrap to allow cgi access. Okay, that’s not great, but it at least let our project which required php5 go live. Sometime recently, they made the default php5 without phpwrap. If I had known, well great – but I didn’t see any mention of it. Today, right after I went home they broke phpwrap. Easy enough to fix, but still irritating.

power management and Linux

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 01:12:41 +0000

From skvidal.

If you haven’t seen powertop yet, you’ve got to look into it. Arjan van de Ven, one of the linux kernel hackers and an employee of Intel, released powertop back in May. What is powertop? Think of the Unix “top, but monitoring power, not CPU, usage. It tells you how long you are spending in different CPU states, how long at different CPU frequencies, what is waking up the CPU most frequently, and best of all, it makes recommendations for saving power.

notes from a transition

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 00:59:39 +0000

It’s been a bit strange changing jobs. My former responsibilities as the security officer for a university are so different from what I’m doing now. A few idle thoughts:

Life at the university, particularly for management, is entirely interrupt driven. Between the phone calls, urgent emails and meetings, I seldom had time to stop and think. Unfortunately, that meant that a lot of work was done at home. At the new place, work is nowhere near as disruptive. I’m in the office for eight hours and I get eight hours worth of work done. No meetings. No phone calls. Few emails – none urgent. The change has been a little jarring. The biggest advantage is that I’m not trying to actually do all of my work at the end of the day, so I’m leaving and getting home at a reasonable time.
The university structures its benefits to the advantage of the highest paid. Everyone has to pay for a share of their health insurance. The 403b, which is incredible, pays progressively more for people at the high end of the pay scale. IIRC, if you put in 3%, they put in ~8% for the first $50k of salary and then ~13% for anything above that – assuming that you are in the better paid category of staff. Hourly employees receive less contribution and have a 5 year vesting period. At the new place, they cap at 4% of your salary, so it’s nowhere near as much in retirement. However, they also pay full health and dental. The upshot is that everyone receives health benefits, regardless of income. Retirement benefits which are typically only used by people at the high end of the income scale are less generous. Overall, a far more equitable system.
I’m finding that I’m much more relaxed. I am responsible for the implementation of a decent sized project, but because it’s only one project, there is much less stress and I’m not working in the evenings. Which gives me time to find great things online. Like the following from Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s: “via ovicipitum dura est or “the way of the eggheads is hard.

fini

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 04:29:08 +0000

Done. Finished. That’s all she wrote. Yesterday was my last day at the university.

Sometime before I left, I started thinking about what, if anything, I wanted to leave on my whiteboard. The obvious came to mind: “So long and thanks for all the fish. But that’s a little too obvious. My next thought was to crib a few lines from Jonathan Coulton:

I fear nothing

Anymore

See you all in hell

Too much to do, not enough time or motivation

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 20:24:55 +0000

I’ve got about three weeks to go. Unfortunately, my list of projects or things to get done seems to be growing longer, not shorter and I’m losing my motivation :-/

I think the hardest thing about leaving is resisting the urge to tell people the truth about what I think of their ideas, or their meetings, or the organization in general. Resisting that urge gets harder every day, even though I know that it would be entirely pointless. It might make me feel better to vent for a bit, but what would it accomplish? I would aggravate some people off, burn some bridges and no one would actually listen to what I was saying – no matter how well reasoned or explained.

New job

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 01:17:10 +0000

Well, it’s official now. I’m leaving the university to go work for a private company – my last day will be August 10th which gives me all of a 4 day weekend before starting full time for the new place. FWIW, I’m definitely looking forward to the change. I’ve been in my current job for about 6.5 years and in the tradition of my family, that means that I’ve been doing the same thing a year and a half too long.

Deconstructionists, atheism and religion

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 03:03:24 +0000

Browsing the New York Times website, I ran across the blog of Stanley Fish. Fish, if you’ve never heard of him (lucky you), is an academic star. He is an English professor specializing in deconstruction. In other words, he is not interested in truth; he is only interested in being right by proving that nothing is true.

The blog posts which caught my eye were a series describing Fish’s analysis of three recent books on atheism. Those of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchen. Sparing you the arguments, Fish concludes in his first post, The Three Atheists, that Harris, Dawkins and Hitchen are not contributing anything new. Unfortunately, he does not come to this conclusion by examining the what the books say, but only by applying some of the key principles of the books to religious arguments that he knows have already been made within the context of religion and then assuming he knows how the authors would respond. This is a neat trick that allows him to suggest that there is nothing new in the books without actually engaging in the arguments the books make.

Happy July 4th

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 03:04:35 +0000

I hope everyone had a good 4th of July and if you had the day off, you enjoyed it.

I spent my day doing a little of this and a little of that. I picked up a low water use irrigation system that I’ve run to the flowers and the blueberry bushes. I’ll need a few hundred more feet of pipe to run it out to all of the trees, but this is a good start.

Vacation pictures v0.2

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 03:04:08 +0000

Okay, I’ve made some updates to my Yellowstone pictures

Changelog:

I’ve added my favorites (which had been stuck in another directory and didn’t get in the first release)
I’ve cleaned up the brightness on the first 8 shots (the camera had set itself to an exposure compensation of -0.7 for some reason)
I’ve fixed the gallery problem that etselec noted

To do:

Fix the stupid lens smudge in some of the wide angle shots near the end of the trip
Add some minimal captions
Go back to the original, larger shots and crop out tight images on some of the birds (like the sandhill cranes with their chicks and the peregrine falcons)

Yellowstone pictures

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 16:53:23 +0000

When we came back from Yellowstone this year, I had about 1,800 pictures to go through. I’ve finally selected the best 200 or so. Some of them need a bit of cleanup in terms of brightness and in a few cases, getting rid of a mark that was on the back of a lens which shows up when the camera is stopped down. Using the open source principle of release early and often, I’ve put these images online in their current form. I’ve also got a few more that I put in my “best category that I haven’t done yet, but will tonight.

It's official...

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 02:27:02 +0000

K thinks I’m a freak. In her defense, I’m not certain that she would have ordered a $70 keyboard, so she may be right. In my defense, I bought my first IBM-clone in 1990 and have kept the keyboard I chose since then. The company I bought it from, Formosa Computing (for those of you in NC, think Intrex), assembled parts and sold white-box computers. The keyboard that they originally gave me was awful. I didn’t like the mushy keys, so I went back, tried a dozen different keyboards and finally exchanged it for something with a bit more tactile response. With every new computer I bought, I used this keyboard. At one point, it had an AT to PS/2 to USB adapter in order to get it working.

Amish Technology

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 14:09:12 +0000

As a member of the IEEE, I participate (loosely) in a a couple of societies: IEEE’s Computer Society and the Society on the Social Implications of Technology (SSIT). I was reading SSIT’s magazine this weekend and ran across an article on Amish technology (no jokes please). The article was particularly interesting to me because my grandmother’s mother was a Mennonite and her father was Amish.

While reading the article, I ran into a sentence that caught my eye. The article noted that Issac Glick in Lancaster County Pennsylvania was the first Amish to use electricity in 1910. He hooked a generator up to an electric light. Shortly after that, all of the Amish communities banned the use of electricity except in certain controlled circumstances. What caught my eye was the name and the place. My great grandfather was named Glick – in fact, both my father and I have the “Glick nose (what can I say, it’s somewhat unique 🙂 ).

A mental sigh of relief

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 02:40:45 +0000

Working in IT, one of the things that is often on my mind is backing up my data. It’s often on my mind, but I seldom do anything about it. A few years ago, K and I bought an external USB drive to which we occasionally sync our desktop. That made me a bit more comfortable, we’re now covered if the drive crashes. Of course, I then started worrying about a fire in the house. Since my external drive is sitting on top of the computer itself, anything that destroys the one will likely destroy the other.

Weekend cooking

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 00:34:30 +0000

I made a few things I’ve never made before for dinner last night, including lemon pizza and two kinds of ice cream.

The lemon pizza recipe is from the Wednesday Chef and was mentioned by someone on an IRC channel (etselec? I can’t remember – sorry). K and I don’t eat salmon roe, so I substituted finely chopped capers. Overall, it was pretty good, but we didn’t slice the lemons thin enough and they over powered the pizza. If you’re going to do this, try to get the lemon slices down to about 1mm.

Back home

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 02:41:32 +0000

Sorry I’ve been absent for a bit. I got sick the Sunday before we left on vacation and didn’t even start feeling better until Thursday morning. The we headed out to Yellowstone for two weeks on Saturday.

The vacation was great, although yesterday’s trip home was a nightmare. We got diverted from our connecting airport to Rochester, MN. That meant that we didn’t get to Minneapolis until an hour after our connection was supposed to leave. Fortunately, the connection itself had been diverted to Deluth, so we still beat it by an hour. We did make it home, but rather than the plane landing in NC at 10pm, it didn’t get in until 12:30am. We didn’t get home until after 2am. With getting the dogs from boarding and doing some shopping so that we would be able to eat, I haven’t had a chance to write up much about the vacation.

Waaaaaa... I want my Velvia 50

Thu, 10 May 2007 11:47:31 +0000

K and I are going through the preparations for our trip out to Yellowstone and I was looking into the photography setup. I headed over to B&H, found the circular polarizer for the lens of my new digital camera, then went over to the film section. For a number of reasons, I still think that landscape shots should be taken using slide film, preferably slow slide film, ideally Velvia 50. It does things with greens and browns that make my heart all fluttery (yes, I know this makes me a big photography nerd). But when I got to the slide film section, I couldn’t find Velvia 50. Velvia 100, yes, but no Velvia 50 – it has been discontinued. Now, Velvia 100 is a nice film, but it’s really just not the same as Velvia 50. For landscapes, it’s too fast – I would rather have the slower speed. After all, my digital can imitate 100 speed film, I want something slower. I bought the 100 speed anyway – I still think that slide film is better than digital for landscapes.

Vegetarianism

Tue, 08 May 2007 01:36:41 +0000

Technically, K and I are not vegetarians. We’re pesco-vegetarians: we’ll eat fish and I’ll eat shellfish (K just doesn’t like shellfish 🙂 ). We didn’t become pesco-vegetarians overnight. We started by getting rid of red meat, so no pork, beef, lamb, etc. More recently, we stopped making chicken at home (we seldom eat out) and then stopped eating it at all.

One of the more challenging things about changing your diet is finding food that is interesting and still meets your dietary requirements. While we’ll try new recipes when we find them, we’ve also done a lot with substitutions. This has gotten a lot easier with all of the new meat substitutes that are out there, but even without them, there are still some things you can do.

A couple of wildlife rehab notes

Mon, 07 May 2007 01:28:44 +0000

We finished the protective boxes we are going to use for cage cameras. They are pretty basic with hinged tops (where the cameras are mounted) and plexiglass fronts to shoot through. We’ve mounted them in the cages and run the 300′ of wire back to the house. K will need to angle them so they point in the right direction, but other than that, we’re done!
K also had someone call today who had a cat-mauled bunny. They’ve dropped it off and K has it set up in a cage upstairs with a heating pad. Assuming it makes it through the night, we’ll take it up to the clinic tomorrow for antibiotics, etc.

Consulting

Mon, 07 May 2007 01:18:52 +0000

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, a professor from my old department contacted me about some work. I went to the company, talked to them for a few hours and then later had lunch with the president of the company (whom I’ve known for a while). Last week we agreed that I would start as a part time consultant and see how it goes. Thursday and Friday we negotiated salary and tomorrow I’m heading over there.

Weekend update (updated)

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 21:49:03 +0000

Not a whole lot going on this weekend. A little shopping, a little work around the house, etc. Saturday, Bryn’s husband, Adam, came by and took a look at some trees that were worrying me. Having a master arborist tell you that, while they are dying, they won’t come down immediately was reassuring. I had this fear that they were going to come down any minute. We’ll probably still want to take them down this fall, but at least we get to pick the times 🙂

Moving to an ISP

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 01:32:24 +0000

After migrating two other sites off of my desktop, it was time to move the main site. I’ve now got fenris.org running on the LinkSky ISP. So far I’ve been very happy with them. I still need to turn on ssh access, but I am thrilled that they offer it. If anyone runs into any problems on fenris.org, please let me know.

99 Luftballons

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 00:43:03 +0000

etselec has her dreams to help her figure out what’s going on in her subconscious. I don’t dream. Okay, for all of you pedants, I do dream – I just never remember my dreams. Instead I have music. I find that almost any time I ear worm myself with a song that I haven’t heard recently, it’s my subconscious trying to tell me something.

So what does it mean when you start thinking about a song where the protagonist is singing about her country turning into a war zone and being accidentally nuked by it’s ally, the U.S.? It probably means that I have reservations about forming a business relationship with a company that gets most a good chunk of its business from the DoD, DARPA and the Air Force.

Duke LAX

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:48:07 +0000

I never planned to comment on the Duke Lacrosse rape case, but one observation keeps running through my head and it’s probably best to get it out.

Back when I was in high school, I remember being told that, in a Shakespearean sense, tragedies were uplifting and comedies were depressing. That struck me as backwards for a while until I had watched/read more plays and understood that the tragedies, where the protagonist dies, often display the best elements of human character. There is nobility or love or honor in the characters as they face a universe that is, not hostile, but merely indifferent to the concerns of mankind. On the other hand, a comedy, where the main characters survive the play, often shows the pettiness of people: the bitterness, the backstabbing, the prejudice, the lying, etc.

It's quiet, too quiet...

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 14:26:56 +0000

I haven’t been so much with the blogging lately. For me, that is generally a sign that things are busy enough that I’m living life rather than blogging it [ed note: For all of you young readers, this is what is known as irony. When I have the most to say, I have the least time to say it in; conversely, when I write the most, I have the least to say].

Icon Rules!

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 02:32:13 +0000

Okay, this is too cool. Icon has put together an audio clip of the old Sesame Street Martians listening/responding to the telephone. For the first time ever, I’ve actually put a ringtone on my phone instead of using the boring default!

Thanks Icon!

John W. Backus dies

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 02:45:43 +0000

Back when I was a postdoc, I was studying FFTs. Okay, actually, I’m not enough of a mathematician to study FFTs, I was studying the efficient implementation of FFTs on parallel computational clusters. One of the graduate students I was working with on the project penned the following:

If there’s a working FFT That’s not in FORTRAN but in C Alas it twice as slow will go And that (as always) goes to show If speed is your greatest asset, Then what you C is what you get. -V.V. (Mony) Iyers

K's birthday

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:58:03 +0000

It was K’s birthday today and I decided to take the day off. In part, I needed to because I had to work on her present. It’s hard these days knowing what to get each other. I could have gotten her jewelry – again. Instead, I decided to clear out one of the beds that the previous owners had planted (fancy) grass in, and plant flowers instead. I’ve never been a big flower person, so most of the things I’ve planted have been fruit trees or vegetables or herbs (big basil fan!), but this was for her, so flowers it was.

No water for you!

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 02:51:09 +0000

Yep, it has been a few months since we’ve had major water issues, so we were due. We had water before dinner, but when I went to rinse the dishes, we had no water. It seemed like the pump wasn’t working. I checked the breaker box, the breaker was fine. I went under the house with a multimeter and found that the pump controller was working and was sending power to the pump. So either the power is not reaching the pump, e.g., a root grew through the power line; or more likely, the well pump itself died.

Weekend update

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 02:20:48 +0000

Finished up a lot of little things this weekend. Nothing too terribly exciting:

Planted some herbs and covered them with hardware cloth to keep the squirrels out. Basil (lots of basil), thyme and rosemary. I was looking for sage, but couldn’t find any.
Fixed the water softener – the backwash drain hose was so old that it was leaking onto the floor every time the water softener ran. Unfortunately, I can’t find where the new hose should connect under the hose, so for now it’s draining into the utility sink.
Finished painting the upstairs hall. Back in October/November, K and I pulled off all of the 80’s-style wall paper. It’s been sitting bear for months, but for the past two weekends, I’ve been smoothing out the wall and painting. I’ve got the switch plates back up and it looks pretty nice. K’s already planning where she’ll start taking down wall paper next.
I’ve discovered a Heisenberg-like principle of plumbing: you can accurately identify either the source or the effects of a water leak, but not both at the same time. This week, I identified a musty smell and the mold that was causing it. Unfortunately, I could only identify the dishwasher as the source of the water. After running the dishwasher without the sound proofing at the bottom, so I could see the leak, I found that it didn’t seem to be leaking. My new theory is that a small leak, not near the mold, was creating excess humidity due to the heat of the dishwasher that was trapped by the sound proofing – but how to test? It’s like Schrodinger’s Cat.
Finally, I realized that my laptop hadn’t updated for DST, which is rather uncool. Poking at it a bit, I found out that yum was bombing out before completing the upgrade. The reason is that I did a ‘yum update’ instead of a ‘yum upgrade’ in order to go from FC5 to FC6. So I had a lot of FC5 packages lying around which then broke dependencies. After doing a bit of manual cleanup, I was able to run ‘yum update’ only to find that I had over 600 MB worth of packages that needed downloading. On the plus side, I went ahead and upgraded to the latest development version of yum which has a lot of the new optimizations. That at least made the 363 packages worth of dependencies saner to check.

Work is also okay. I ran a proposal for a lightweight authentication mechanism by the technical team and nobody found any major holes in it. It’s nice to have your ideas validated by the experts 🙂 . Next week kicks off my month with internal audit. I’m not really looking forward to that one, but then I suppose somebody needs to keep us honest. Besides, anything they tell us can only help get support for the policies we know we need.

Lessons learned

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 03:51:13 +0000

A few years ago, I participated in Group 1 of a new leadership program geared toward the IT profession. The program usually has four schools per group, each school sending a number of participants. The group meets four times over a six month period, each time at a different, participating school. Each meeting lasts about two and a half days, for a total of 80 hours of training. Our university is participating in Group 7 and they will be coming to campus in April. The Group 1 alumni (and a Group 2 alum) have been asked to attend a half hour session with Group 7 in order to share what the program taught us. I still need to work out the details of this, but as an exercise in working out my thoughts, I am inclined to go with something like the following:

Pirate culture

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 00:59:41 +0000

Can someone tell me when our political experts decided that everyday is Talk Like a Pirate Day? I’m sure it’s just me, but if I hear the formulation that Iraq has cost us in “blood and treasure, one more time, I may have to make the cur walk the plank.

"Strapped"

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 13:28:05 +0000

Last summer, while visiting my grandfather for his 80th birthday, I got into a discussion with my father about the state of the economy and the structural changes that had taken place which served to increase the gap between rich and poor. I noted that statistical measures of income inequality, such as the gini coefficient, were higher in the U.S. than in other industrialized countries; and that the there is less inter-generational class mobility now than there used to be. My father countered that there were several counter examples to that at the table where we were sitting – that all of his children were doing better than he had at our ages. That is true, but a cluster of data points does not make for a valid statistic and the facts are that mine is the first generation that is not likely to be significantly better off than its parents.

Life as the handyman for a wildlife rehabber

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 03:04:59 +0000

A few weeks ago, K took over the outdoor rehab of a pair of possums from a friend who was heading out of town. One of the possums wasn’t doing so well and so they decided to split them up when her friend got back in town. The very next day, the animal K kept would barely wake up and was in terrible shape. K rushed her to the clinic where she died shortly of the “major ick. Don’t look at me, that’s apparently the technical term for it.

Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 03:39:17 +0000

K’s mom just sent us a King Cake for Mardi Gras. Okay, technically, Mardi Gras isn’t for a couple more weeks, but it’s definitely the King Cake season. It’s been a while since I’ve had a King Cake.

The last was a few years ago and I made it: a straight forward sweet bread with traditional almond cream frosting and colored sugar. For those who are interested, the colors mean different things: Purple for justice, Gold for power and Green for faith. The cake we just received from Gambino’s in Louisiana was much like the ones I’ve made. The only difference: praline filling. It’s not traditional, but it tastes great. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a sugar high to burn through. dsc_0453_m.JPG

Puns

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 03:03:58 +0000

Some folks I know were talking about puns today. I’ll admit to not getting puns or at best, getting them and not finding them funny. For example, a friend of mine who is a master punster once wrote on a white board “What’s in the monitoring wells? … Hg. I didn’t get it at all, I was thinking – well, sure they could easily be monitoring for mercury. The H.G. Wells connection just didn’t occur to me.

Miscellany

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 02:25:36 +0000

The acid neutralizer has been in place for over a week – no problems yet. That said, I did manage to break a holding clip on my water softener while trying to figure out why there was extra water in it. Not a big deal, new clips are on order and the broken clip holds for now.
Spinach Quesadillas! My standard quesadilla recipe calls for shredded Mexican cheese with a filling stuffed into a folded over tortilla and pan fried. I just tried a new filling: I took frozen spinach, defrosted it in the microwave and squeezed the water out of it. I then took a few table spoons of butter (okay, smart balance) and lightly sauteed some garlic. Then I added the spinach and used the result as the quesidilla filling. Yum!
I’ve got a couple of extra posts coming tonight: sorry for the drive by blogging.

Memo to the world...

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 01:27:35 +0000

A memo to the world…

I don’t care about your hierarchical BS. I know that hierarchy seems to be important to people because we have kept it around from the time we roamed as east African plains apes (h/t Brad DeLong) to today’s corporations, but frankly, I don’t care. The fact that a person occupies a higher position in the hierarchy does not mean that they are necessarily better, smarter or more deserving of respect than anyone else. Hierarchies may seem like a good idea if you want to keep people in their place; but they are based on intimidation and are undemocratic and destructive. If you feel differently, and are concerned, then it might be best if I was kept away from people you worry might take offense to my treating them like I treat everyone else. That is all.

Tempting fate

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 03:52:10 +0000

So, I’m going to tempt fate here and follow up on a post I made a few weeks ago. Last week, I received the replacement tank for my acid neutralizer. It didn’t look quite like the same tank I had, so I emailed the company. Turns out they had upgraded the tank to the slightly better molded polyglass as opposed to the wrapped resin tank. The big advantage is that the threads are machined, not made by wrapping around a mold.

Myers-Briggs

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 02:48:59 +0000

Last week, I was having a discussion with someone who mentioned that a mutual acquaintance is an INTJ. I think she knew that I was familiar with Myers-Briggs, but regardless, it was one of the most helpful remarks she could have made. I’ve been interested in Myers-Briggs for quite some time. I find it to be a very helpful, descriptive (as opposed to predictive) tool for understanding how different people perceive the world.

SOTU

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 04:03:39 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything, mostly because, for the first time in 5+ years, I’ve gotten somewhat addicted to a video game. Some friends are leaving for CA soon and they were giving away things they didn’t want to bring. This included a handful of games. I grabbed “Neverwinter Nights since I knew it would run under linux. Since I installed it, I’ve been spending way too much time playing (to K’s annoyance, I’m sure).

Cheese sausages

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 01:52:14 +0000

A few weeks ago, I was talking to some folks at lunch and mentioned that I had a recipe for cheese sausages. I meant to give it to them, but never wrote it up. Since others might find it interesting…

For the record, I got the recipe from “Classic Home Cooking which is a great cookbook, but since you can’t copyright facts (like instructions or a recipe), I think I’m pretty safe writing it up here.

bah! - updated

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 01:20:26 +0000

so Saturday night around 11:30pm, the acid neutralizer I just installed, exploded. Okay, it didn’t really explode, but the top popped off again. Spoke to the customer support, looked around a bit more and it seems that the threads on the tank were stripped. I’ll call tomorrow and see about getting a replacement tank

Update: I just received a call from the folks that sold me the acid neutralizer (I didn’t even have to call them back). Two interesting things: 1) apparently, the tank head they sent is a down flow head and the system I’ve got is designed to be upflow. Not a big deal, except that I have to reverse the inlet and outlet plumb lines as compared to what’s labeled on the head. Normally they send a note along those lines – this time they didn’t. 2) Given that one of the threads is stripped, they’re going to send me a new tank and an RMA to return the old one.

Web related notes

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 03:19:32 +0000

Two web-related notes:

I’ve just migrated the Piedmont Wildlife Center’s website from a bunch of php webpages (the only reason for the php was to include the template) to the Drupal content management system. I’ve also added in the Coppermine photo gallery to keep our pictures. I would have used gallery2, but it kept dying due to memory errors with the database. I’m guessing our ISP has the ulimit set to small. Overall, the updates went pretty well, the biggest headaches were taking us out of a table based layout into the (more) modern world of CSS. I kept the current look and feel, but the CMS should make it easier to change in the future. But for now, at least I can distribute the web updating responsibilities to others 🙂
Does anyone know how to get WordPress to do better detection/blocking of comment spam? It’s killing me. Fine, I’ll go google for it.

the right tool for the job

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 21:17:28 +0000

Back in September, I was doing a fair amount of plumbing. I installed a water filter, new hot water heater and an acid neutralizer. I never mentioned it, mostly because I couldn’t bear to think about it, but the stupid neutralizer never did work right and I finally just bypassed it in the water line. The problem seemed to be that I couldn’t get the fittings right, so they leaked and filled the neutralizer completely up with water. The instantaneous pressure in the line caused by turning off faucets in the house would then create a huge amount of pressure in the neutralizer and the top would pop off.

two signs that you need a week off work

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 01:13:02 +0000

you get home from the office Christmas party and are in a mood to see the movie, Office Space
you go to sleep and dream about co-workers

gah – i really can’t wait to get through the next two days

New books

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 22:56:11 +0000

I had a chance last week to read a few books, all of which I would recommend in some fashion or another:

National Geographic’s “The Ultimate Field Guide to Photography This is a very good, basic field guide to photography. It covers a huge range of subjects and, not surprisingly, has some beautiful photographs. The book covers both film and digital photography, editing, archiving, composition, and has a great inspirational chapter describing Robert Clark’s photographic travelogue using only the camera in a cell phone. My only complaint about the book is that it covers too many topics, but not much in depth. It’s a great book for a beginner, but there wasn’t too much I hadn’t seen already.

that's just not right

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 01:30:39 +0000

The new dog (Sierra) seems to be fitting in well. She’s looking up to the older dog (Darwin) and learning all sorts of new things. The cutest is something we call “kicky foot, where she’ll periodically stretch all of her legs by kicking them back one at a time.

The one I didn’t expect to see was her lifting her leg to pee. I’ve never seen a female dog do that before. Dog owners – is that normal? or is it (as we suspect), just not right?

2007 Yellowstone Calendar

Tue, 12 Dec 2006 23:53:57 +0000

For the past few years, I’ve put together a calendar using pictures I took in Yellowstone. In 2004 (for the 2005 calendar), I was very excited about the project and used only photos I took that year. Last year, I had to raid prior years (it wasn’t the best Yellowstone trip for pictures). This year I think I can pull enough decent pictures from our 2006 trip.

The pictures I’m going to use for the 2007 calendar are posted here. I need to crop a couple of the bird pictures, but the rest should be okay.

i blame etselec

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 14:19:06 +0000

it’s probably not fair to blame etselec, but i do. You scored as Friedrich Nietzsche. Well you’re an egotistical maniac, and you are so very iconoclastic that you probably are currently lost in a post-modern Jupiter, I mean jungle of self-definition. Don’t let it get you down though, someday, through a willful onslaught of reinterpretation of dated forms and ideas, you will strike on something that passes as remotely new, and people WILL be into it on the basis of how hip it is alone. Also, the average espresso drinker looks up to you. Friedrich Nietzsche83%Dante Alighieri75%Miyamoto Musashi67%Stephen Hawking58%Jesus Christ42%Sigmund Freud42%Elvis Presley42%O.J. Simpson33%Hugh Hefner25%Charles Manson17%C.G. Jung17%Mother Teresa17%Steven Morrissey17%Adolf Hitler0%What Pseudo Historical Figure Best Suits You? created with QuizFarm.comYou Belong in San Francisco You crave an eclectic, urban environment. You’re half California, half NYC. You’re open minded, tolerant, and secretly think you’re the best. People may dismiss you as a hippie, but you’re also progressive, interesting, and rich!

Setting up a Christmas tree

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 02:34:45 +0000

One last comment on the day – K and I went out to get a Christmas tree this afternoon. The place we usually go was just about out of trees. In fact, they had run out, but spoke to another tree seller who hadn’t sold all of his trees yet and they bought a good chunk of his stock. Even still, there were only five 7 foot trees, a bunch of 6 foot trees and an 8 foot tree. Unfortunately, the only decent tree was the 8 foot one. Fortunately, we’ve got high ceilings 🙂

looking on the bright side

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 01:48:50 +0000

Turns out that there is at least one advantage of having constant plumbing problems – you often have the part you need. I had been noticing a leak under the kitchen sink. In checking it out, I found that the nut holding the drain in place was lose. As I tried to tighten it, the nut broke up in my hand.

Resigned to not having one of the dual kitchen sinks, I put a bucket under it and blocked it up. After dinner, we went on our walk and on the way back in, it occurred to me that I had a spare drain segment with a plastic nut. Installed the new nut and no more leak!

The Tragic Treasury

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 03:53:31 +0000

Why didn’t someone tell me about this sooner? Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) and Stephin Merritt are the Gothic Archies who’s new CD is the Tragic Treasury: “Music for a Series of Unfortunate Events.

For a sample, see Funtime OK (a mp3 blog), or Youtube:

My favorite so far is “Shipwrecked.

Luke's eating again!

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 03:54:09 +0000

I hadn’t mentioned this, but it had been about 5 weeks since Luke (the boa) last ate. For the first three weeks, I didn’t worry. He had just shed, he’s a snake and it’s winter, etc. By week 5, I was getting concerned. Last Saturday, two days after finishing his cage, which upped the daytime temperature to ~80 degrees, he finally got interested in food. Now he’s prowling the cage, looking for another rat. 🙂

Happy Thanksgiving! [updated]

Thu, 23 Nov 2006 22:05:24 +0000

I hope everyone’s having a good Thanksgiving. So far, ours has been great. K’s parents are in town which means: a) her father gets to see the house for the first time; b) we’ve got help cooking dinner; and c) we’ve got a reason to cook more food!

I started off the morning by (finally!) finishing the snake cage. I put the frames around the vents and put glass in about 3/4 of each vent (losing too much heat otherwise). I installed track lighting in the top and put two 75 watt grow bulbs in it. After they were on for an hour or so, the temperature rose to 81 degrees. Just about perfect. Eventually, we’ll replace the grow bulbs with heat lamps that produce no light, only heat; but for now, these are great. Luke’s basking right now and seems to be enjoying it.

Still need to finish the snake cage

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 15:51:53 +0000

The snake’s been in the cage for a few months, but I’ve held off posting pictures until I finished the last little bit – the frames around the window. But as pointed out in this comment, it would be good to get some pictures with Luke in his cage. So, hopefully I’ll finish up the frames this week, while I’m away from the office, but in the meantime, here are some pictures:

things to be thankful for

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 15:17:47 +0000

K’s parents are in town and staying with us. Okay, that’s not a typical thing to be thankful for :-), but I like her parents and this gives me a great excuse to take most of this week off. I lost 54 minutes of vacation last month, I would like to avoid a repeat.

Hopefully, I can get caught up on a few things while I’m out of the office

Not a bad birthday at all...

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 02:58:49 +0000

I took the day off for my birthday. I got to sleep in late and get some things done around the house. I managed, I think, to get rid of whatever was smelling up one of our air ducts, I tarred up part of the roof and repaired the fence where the dog kept getting out. After that, I headed up for the Poindexter small group meeting and then his talk (more on these later). On my way home, I picked up some take out from the local Mexican restaurant. We ate dinner, made a cheesecake and walked the dogs. I opened presents when I got back. K got me a hand full of things I had wanted: the Library of America Writings of Washington and the Writings of Thoreau, Jared Bernstein’s All Together Now: Common Sense for a Fair Economy, and the Pinky and the Brain DVD 🙂 Tim Powers’s On Stranger Tides is still being shipped.

/me grumbles

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 02:20:31 +0000

bah – the past few nights, my website/blog keeps getting screwed up because all of the disk space on the drive is consumed. the first night, i freed up some space, but didn’t pay attention to how much was free. it happened last night and again i freed up space, noting that i had about 700 MB free. Tonight, it happened again and I finally tracked down what happened. I do an rsync backup to an external drive every day. A couple of days ago, I rebooted the machine and the external drive didn’t mount back up. So I wound up doing a backup of my home directory and root partition to the root partition. Of course the partition filled up. Oh well, problem solved now. I just need to be more careful in the future

Accents

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 04:16:52 +0000

I just saw and took the American Accent online quiz and got a result that surprised me (sorry, i can’t get the results blob working in wordpress). It claims that my result is “The Inland North:

You may think you speak “Standard English straight out of the dictionary but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like “Are you from Wisconsin? or “Are you from Chicago? Chances are you call carbonated drinks “pop.

NaNoWriMo - oops, missed it again

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 03:37:49 +0000

I keep meaning to try National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), but once again forget to do the prep work. I suppose that’s the whole point, give yourself a deadline and just do it. Well, maybe next year.

a quick update

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 01:34:20 +0000

I haven’t done much blogging recently, mostly, and somewhat ironically, it’s because things have been too busy to actually write about them.

Sierra’s doing well. She and Darwin are getting along great. They’ll run around the yard, the house or even the couch, if given the chance. There is much mouth fencing. She’s still very curious about the cats – poor cats. Our house has turned in to baby/puppy-gate central. Sierra went to the vet on Saturday. She’s in great health, although it seems that she’s about 50 pounds (from her size, I had guessed 30 – 40). Right now she’s sound asleep, snoring on the couch. Work is busier than usual. I did manage to interview a couple of candidates for an open position. One did very well, so I’m hoping to get approval to extend an offer next week.

and we have a winner

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 13:52:33 +0000

K’s mom suggested “Sierra as a name for the new dog. That works for both of us, so Sierra it is.

YAD - yet another dog

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 02:23:42 +0000

We’ve been needing to get another dog as a friend for Darwin. Today we drove out to Wake Forrest to meet a rescue dog that needed a home. She and Darwin hit it off and so we’ve brought her home with us. Her name is currently Holloway, but she doesn’t know it and we don’t really care for it. We need to come up with something different. We thought about “Goodall, but it doesn’t really roll of the tongue. I’m sure we’ll come up with something, but we’re open to suggestions if anyone has any.

Release the squirrels!

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 02:16:14 +0000

I haven’t posted pictures of the squirrels in quite a while. Here are some from mid-September when they got big enough to move out of the aquarium and into a wire cage…

Two or three weeks ago, we put them in the outside cage. Today we opened up the release door, we’ll see if they’re there in the morning.

170 too many

Sat, 21 Oct 2006 16:47:48 +0000

Statistically speaking, there are apparently 171 people with my name:

HowManyOfMe.comThere are:171people with my name in the U.S.A.How many have your name?

That sounds like 170 too many to me. On the other hand, K statistically doesn’t seem to exist. Once again demonstrating the problem with statistics:

HowManyOfMe.comThere are:0people with my name in the U.S.A.How many have your name?

Gumbo Recipe

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 01:09:30 +0000

For HeatherS…

First you make a roux [1]:

~1/2 cup oil
~1/2 cup flour

Mix the flour and oil into a large pot and turn the heat on low to medium, depending on how often you want to stir. Stir while on heat until a dark brown.

While the roux is browning, finely chop:

one onion
a couple of stalks of celery
1/2 bell pepper

You can use a cuisinart, but don’t puree the trinity (inside Louisiana joke). Once the roux is dark brown, add the vegetable mixture and stir for about a minute. Then add:

Vegetarian gumbo

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 02:16:25 +0000

My father once told me about a military training exercise that took place for a month in Egypt. The only available food was early generation MREs. Everyone lost weight except for the cajuns – who all put on 10-15 pounds. Their secret was combining their MREs into a communal pot, add the seasonings they brought from home and produce something that you wanted to eat. Since MREs have 4000-6000 calories, eating the whole thing could easily make you gain weight.

this is so wrong

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 17:27:32 +0000

How White and Nerdy Are You?

Piled higher and deeper

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 02:14:09 +0000

Last week a friend pointed me to a comic that accurately described my life for four and a half years. Piled Higher and Deeper is a PhD comic strip. After reading just a few, I couldn’t help but think, “how did I miss this for all these years? It turns out that the comic started publishing just before I graduated and by the time it became (relatively) popular I was out of grad school. Anyway, a few of my favorite strips from the archives so far:

Presentation

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 01:14:14 +0000

I survived giving my presentation today – in spite of the fact that I showed up to the wrong hotel, in the wrong part of the city. I blame my boss. I mentioned that the talk was at the Sheraton Imperial (although I hadn’t looked to see where that was yet) and he said, oh yeah, the one down on Campus Walk road. Get to the hotel on Campus Walk – oops, that’s the Millenium. Call my administrative assistant, she looks up the location and it’s 15 miles away.

Oops...

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 01:22:30 +0000

Checking my schedule for tomorrow, I realized that I have to give a talk at a major “human studies conference about security risks in web-based surveys. Unfortunately, I haven’t actually prepared anything. I’ve got my slides from the last time I did the talk, but I really wanted to do something more interesting and interactive this time – preferably with audience volunteers wearing silly hats. I may still try to put something together in the morning. I have an idea – but no sense of the feasibility.

Rad cat

Sun, 24 Sep 2006 02:45:36 +0000

Just picked up our cat Whisper from the vet today. She’s been over at the Carrboro Animal Hospital in their RadCats facility for the past two weeks getting her thyroid treated. It seems that cats are prone to tumors on their thyroids. The tumors produce excess hormones which cause them problems.

The treatment is a dose of radioactive iodine (I-131) injected under the skin. She then had to stay in isolation for three days and at the vet’s facility for another week and a half. Technically, we brought her home early and we still need to take precautions, but it’s good to have her home.

Wildlife rehab notes

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 02:50:55 +0000

I haven’t put up the baby squirrels’ seven week pictures yet – I’ll do that tomorrow. They’re getting huge (~150g each, up another 40g from last week)
Just had a guy drop off a flying squirrel to K. Apparently, it swooped down on him at the intersection of 15-501 and Europa and he (not his fault) hit it with his truck. Fortunately, he wasn’t going that fast. Assuming the squirrel makes it through the night, I’ll post some pictures. Since s/he’s a full grown adult and still only about 4″ long – he’s adorable.
Just registered a new site for K and a friend. They’re planning on posting box turtle rehabilitation information there as well as information about a box turtle re-establishment project for which they are seeking approval. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you www.boxturtleheadstart.org

memo to K

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 01:24:37 +0000

Dear K,

In the 13 years that we’ve been married, there has been one constant in our life – plumbing problems. Last night’s 3am catastrophic water heater failure coupled with the emergency reinstallation I had to perform this morning was the final straw. This memo is to inform you that if we ever buy another house, it is my intention to find a structure without indoor plumbing.

I recognize that this may limit our choices and may not be preferable from your perspective, however, after 13 years of water troubles, I see no alternative.

baby squirrel pictures - 6 weeks

Sun, 10 Sep 2006 21:50:40 +0000

1 week later, 30g heavier.

i'm still here - sort of

Sun, 10 Sep 2006 21:27:24 +0000

Not much blogging over the past week. Mostly because I’m still dealing with slight water issues

After I hooked up the pH neutralizer, I found that it leaked. I had a 1 drip per 5 second leak where I connected the QEST gray connectors to the neutralizer. I tried tightening it. That didn’t work. I shut off the water in order to re-tape it and disaster. When I turned off the water, the transient increase in preasure blew a seal on the neutralizer. Not happy. How the heck do you return something w/ 150# of rock in it.

the promised baby rat, er, squirrel pictures

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 17:53:06 +0000

food coma – from 4 hours ago feeding Oh, and one very sad dog – feeling left out because he doesn’t get to play with the squirrels. Darwin, say “cheese

mmmm, pH neutral water (and it's filtered)

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 01:16:44 +0000

It actually worked. I mmanaged to install a shutoff valve, sediment filter and pH neutralizer without too many trips to the hardware store (only 2). So far it seems to be working, the pH is somewhere between 7 and 7.5. Now maybe I can replace the hot water heater and have it last for more than a year or two.

Q: what do you get when you add high winds to a late summer day?

Sun, 03 Sep 2006 17:20:33 +0000

A: baby squirrels blown out of their nest.

We’ve got two here that were brought to us yesterday. They’re just now opening their eyes, so they are probably 5 or 6 weeks old. I know squirrels are tree rats. I know they aren’t threatened or endangered. I know that there are a host of animals that could use the extra protein. But let’s face it. Baby squirrels are adorable.

Pictures later.

water world

Sat, 02 Sep 2006 03:03:54 +0000

I think I need a whole new blog category for water troubles.

The pH neutralizer arrived today, along with 150# of premium chalk and 25 pounds of “clean gravel. I guess I know what I’ll be doing tomorrow – first stop Lowe’s, then home to install it. Fortunately, it doesn’t look too bad.

Too much water in my name, part 3: too much acid in my water

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 02:57:47 +0000

Since we’re on the subject of water (again), had yet another fun experience. Earlier this week, K noticed a couple of inches of water in the pan under our hot water heater. Yep, it seems to be leaking. This is the water heater that I installed one year ago. It was a replacement for a water heater installed 4 years before by the previous owner.

The tendency of our appliances to rust, particularly the water heaters led me to test the pH. Ideally, it should be between 7.0 and 8.0 (or just neutral to slightly basic). Ours was around 5.5 or somewhat acidic. This is a reasonably common problem for people with well water and it causes all of the symptoms we’ve seen (including the degredation of all brass plumbing fittings).

Too much water in my name - part deux

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 02:46:00 +0000

We had a batch of thunder showers come through last night. We got about 2, maybe 3, inches here. Sometime during the evening, K and I ask each other, “what’s that noise? Turns out we had a leak in the roof that was dripping down (and through) the second story wall, onto one of the logs making up the first story and into the breakfast room. From there it was splashing onto the door to the deck and making the noise we heard.

carrier thermidistat design - let's put it in the category of needs to be fixed

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 02:56:16 +0000

Back when I was a grad student and just about to finish up, the school of engineering turned a class of 60 freshman over to me to teach intro to numerical methods for engineers. I tried to liven things up by emailing the occassional engineering funny to my students who even reciprocated. The following is a brief excerpt from an engineer identification test that was sent to me by a student.

a small request of the NC-DOT

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 12:55:30 +0000

I have a small request to make of the NC-DOT, if there are accidents on the interstate at I-40 and I-540 which backs traffic up 10 miles to NC-751, can we please, please make use of the expensive electronic information signs on the interstate to warn people? There’s a difference between a small traffic slowdown that you will soon get past and one that means you’ll be driving 5-10 miles at an average speed of 10-15 mph.

Friday, er, Thursday Snake Blogging

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 01:39:05 +0000

Took the day off and spent most of it working on the snake terrarium. Watching him pace (hmm, that doesn’t seem like the right word for a snake) his cage today made me particularly sad and motivated me to get about 95% finished. He could actually move in now – the only things missing are the decorative frames around the side vents. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the terrarium. There are a number of things that I would do differently next time, but some things will definitely stay the same. For example, I used plexiglass for the front which made the whole thing significantly lighter. The plexiglass was about $20 more expensive but definitely worth it. And here’s the (near) finished terrarium. Next time I post about this, we’ll be completely done and have the snake moved in.

Memo to the left hand

Sun, 13 Aug 2006 22:01:46 +0000

To the left hand: It is clear that you no longer know what the right hand is doing. This weekend’s “accidental dremeling was eerily similar to the wood carving incident in grade school where a supposed “art project resulted in losing a chunk of left index finger. Combined with the great butcher knife massacre where we almost lost left thumb’s nail when it “supposedly looked like a carrot, we have a pattern that can not be ignored.

Get your woodworking geek on

Sun, 13 Aug 2006 01:09:44 +0000

Just so you don’t think that I’m just a computer and photography geek, I wanted to update folks on another project. As I’ve said before, my wife does wildlife rehabilitation and managed to get conned talked into taking home a boa constrictor. Since they’re not native, he couldn’t be released once he was patched up.

For the past eight months, he’s been living in a smallish (75 gallon?) aquarium. Okay, that’s not really small unless you’re a 6.5′ snake whose looking to get to be 8’+. This presented a great chance to do some woodworking. For the past couple of weekends, I’ve been building a 5.5′ x 2′ x 3′ terrarium for the snake. I’ve got the main walls, floor and top cut, stained and coated with many layers of polyurethane. Today, I put the cabinet together, caulked it (the caulk is still fresh, it will dry clear) and started working on the door.

Plagiarism in engineering

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 12:03:18 +0000

There’s an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (sorry, the link is behind the subscription firewall), about a mechanical engineering graduate student at Ohio University. After being invited to stay on after his masters and persue a Ph.D., he started having difficulty with his advisor. To help resolve his difficulties, he went to speak with the university ombudsman who advised him to examine disertations in the university library so that he might see where he was going wrong and what his advisor might want.

Vacation pictures

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 22:55:04 +0000

The vacation pictures checklist from earlier:

Get 22 rolls of slide film back from the developer [Check – received mid June]
Put 800 slides into transparancy holders so they are easy to look at on the light box [Check – took two nights]
Go through 800 slides to determine which are worth scanning [Check – took another two days]
Scan 120 or so “good slides [Check – finished tonight after three nights of scanning]
Color correct the images in the GIMP [done]
Remove dust from scans because my slide scanner doesn’t have an infrared channel [done]
Upload the results and put ’em online [finished today]

Everything is done! Pictures online finally. For the record, I’m not thrilled with them. My biggest complaint is that there aren’t really any good animal shots. This is different from prior years. I blame oversleeping.

Tracks for getting things done

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 20:50:09 +0000

I read Getting Things Done about a year and a half ago. There’s a lot of good information in there, but frankly keeping all of the lists got to be too much. So I backed off a bit and started keeping lists for some things that came in via email, but that’s about it. Then luis posts about Tracks – a GTD web application. It looked fairly nifty, so I installed it and will give it a shot for awhile.

Plumbing issues resolved

Sun, 30 Jul 2006 21:41:35 +0000

Went to the hardware store, couldn’t find the precisely the right single plumbing connector and had to get three separate pieces instead. Meaning, of course, that I now have twice as many joins and twice as many opportunities to leak. I put the pieces together, connected them to the filter, and no leaks!

Apparently, plumbing is like my day job. The solution to most problems is a hardware upgrade.

Too much water in my name?

Sun, 30 Jul 2006 18:05:17 +0000

In graduate school, I had a Chinese friend who used to say that he was destined to have plumbing problems because there was too much water in his name. Both his family name and his given name referenced water. This excess of water meant that he would always have plumbing problems.

I sympathize with this notion. A few years ago, when I moved into my house, I installed a reverse osmosis filter in our kitchen for drinking water. When we came back from vacation, we found that the connection to the water tank was leaking. I spent a bit of time tightening up the connection, but it still leaked. This weekend, I got back to trying to fix it. So far, I’ve been to the hardware store twice, replaced the compression fitting three times and still it leaks. I’m heading to a larger hardware store this afternoon to find a replacement for the entire fitting – we’ll see if that works. If it doesn’t, then I may have to replace the entire tank.

Run for your lives!

Wed, 26 Jul 2006 02:56:30 +0000

Run for your lives! This is not a drill. My mother is loose in the blogosphere (hi mom!). To friends of mine noticing random, anonymous comments in their blogs, it’s not my fault – I swear.

That is all. I now return you to your regularly scheduled Internet slack.

Blueberries!

Tue, 18 Jul 2006 19:46:09 +0000

Took the morning off and went blueberry picking. An hour and a half later and we had about 8 pounds. Perfect for making blueberry pancakes, muffins, etc. Now the only question: “are 5 quarts of blueberries enough?