Personal

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.

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: ...

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.

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. ...

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. ...

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

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. ...

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.

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.

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. ...