Alkahest

Migrating to Hugo

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 13:31:37 -0400

For the past 20(?!) years, I’ve run this blog on wordpress, which is overkill for what I need and something of a security risk. Maybe 10+ years ago, wordpress had a security hole where a bunch of spam was being inserted into all of the posts and while cleaning it up, a lot of strange unicode was injected into the site.

Anyway, I’m not sure how much blogging I’ll do (maybe some trip photos), but I’m cleaning things up and migrating to a static site that’s generated by Hugo. The general setup is:

Costa Rica 2023

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 18:15:47 -0400

In December of 2023, we went to Costa Rica! Here are some of my favorite photos from the trip

240mm f/6.3 1/250sec ISO 200" >

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47mm f/5.6 1/15sec ISO 100" >

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212mm f/6.3 1/250sec ISO 1000" >

187mm f/6.3 1/200sec ISO 1600" >

94mm f/5.6 1/100sec ISO 320" >

178mm f/6.3 1/200sec ISO 160" >

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144mm f/6.3 1/160sec ISO 800" >

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85mm f/5.6 1/160sec ISO 1600" >

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240mm f/6.3 1/500sec ISO 100" >

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146mm f/6.3 1/160sec ISO 125" >

90mm f/5.6 1/160sec ISO 1000" >

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66mm f/5.6 1/125sec ISO 400" >

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118mm f/6.3 1/160sec ISO 4000" >

48mm f/5.6 1/60sec ISO 400" >

52mm f/4.5 1/160sec ISO 2000" >

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80mm f/5.6 1/160sec ISO 2500" >

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72mm f/5.6 1/60sec ISO 6400" >

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240mm f/6.3 1/80sec ISO 400" >

240mm f/6.3 1/60sec ISO 800" >

163mm f/6.3 1/60sec ISO 6400" >

240mm f/6.3 1/125sec ISO 6400" >

112mm f/6.3 1/160sec ISO 1250" >

240mm f/6.3 1/60sec ISO 6400" >

240mm f/11.0 1/100sec ISO 400" >

113mm f/6.3 1/160sec ISO 2500" >

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144mm f/6.3 1/160sec ISO 1000" >

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184mm f/6.3 1/200sec ISO 5000" >

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69mm f/5.0 1/160sec ISO 640" >

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beer

Tue, 09 Aug 2022 19:47:20 +0000

... and logistic regression

Tue, 08 Mar 2016 02:14:50 +0000

A follow-up on the collaborative filter, it occurs to me that it should be possible to add a logistic regression layer in Keras. The following is a regularized multinomial logistic regression model:

from keras.models import Sequential
from keras.layers.core import Dense, Activation
from keras.regularizers import l2

model = Sequential()
model.add(Dense(numClasses, input_shape=(numFeatures, ), \
    init='zero', W_regularizer=l2(0.01)))
model.add(Activation('softmax'))
model.compile(loss='binary_crossentropy', optimizer='sgd')

As with the collaborative filter, you can easily modify the code to use multiple regularizers and different learning algorithms, say Adamax or adam instead of SGD.

Collaborative filtering in Keras

Mon, 07 Mar 2016 14:56:20 +0000

Ten years ago, Netflix started the Netflix challenge. A contest to see if the community could come up with a movie recommendation approach that beat their own by 10%. One of the primary modeling techniques that came out of the contest was a set of sparse matrix factoring models whose earliest description can be found at Simon Funk’s website. The basic idea is that the actual ratings of movies for each user can be represented by a matrix, say of users on the rows and movies along the columns. We don’t have the full rating matrix, instead, we have a very sparse set of entries. But if we could factor the rating matrix into two separate matrices, say one that was Users by Latent Factors, and one that was Latent Factors by Movies, then we could find the user’s rating for any movie by taking the dot product of the User row and the Movie column.

Is this thing on?

Mon, 07 Mar 2016 13:51:43 +0000

Let’s see, it’s been about 5 (?!) years since I’ve written anything here. Since then, I’ve gotten married and nowhave a two year old daughter. My old company was acquired by a large defense contractor, I left a few months ago and I’m now working on machine learning for a medical device company. This space may wind up being used to make machine learning notes to myself.

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.

Ramadan

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 15:19:02 +0000

My local paper kindly reminds me that tomorrow’s moon rise begins the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and that the associated fasting and prayers begin on Wednesday.

Recently, I was talking to my neighbor, the very kind, interesting and extremely conservative Glenn Beck viewer. While we were talking, he brought up Muslims and his fear that they were trying to take over the country (apparently, religious appropriation of a country is only okay if it’s Christian - but that’s another story). According to my neighbor, no religious Muslim could ever possibly be up to any good. I don’t explicitly recall him calling Islam a false religion, but he very much believed that you couldn’t trust “them,” that they were all radicalized and out to destroy “our” way of life.

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.

Photography workflow

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 20:47:54 +0000

Four years ago, I made the switch to digital SLR photography. The primary reason was the workflow. When I shot slide film, I would have to get the film developed, look at each image, scan the ones I liked, correct the color balance and then manually remove the dust spots from the scanned images.

When I first got the digital camera, the workflow became: auto-correct the color balance using the Nikon’s color profile, then select the images I liked. Great!

What, ahem, WTF is wrong with Arizona?

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 01:35:40 +0000

Presumably, most people have now heard that Arizona has passed a new law respecting immigration enforcement. Reactions, as one might expect, are mixed depending on one’s thoughts on immigration, and more specifically, the potential for illegal immigration. Mexico has issued a travel warning for its citizens, advising them not to visit the state. Various AZ mayors have decried the law. Some right wingers love it, while others hate it, and of course George Will is still an asshole. And finally, even though the law doesn’t go into effect for another three months or so, we can already see what the future will be like for Hispanics in Arizona.

Trust me, I'm bearded; or

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 01:39:14 +0000

“I’m the bearded lady! Who are you, one of the freaks?”

This explains everything. Apparently those of us that are blessed with beards are deemed to be more credible than our clean shaven brethren. At least that seems to be the case for neat, medium length beards. And unless we’re trying to sell underwear… go figure.

I wonder if there’s trust-worthiness scale for beard-type? Inter-webz to the rescue:

Please note that my full beard is very trustworthy. My father’s “cop mustache” aka “The Burt Reynolds” is mildly trustworthy. And my brother’s, circa 2000, soul patch put him somewhere between threatening and dangerous.

Damn liberals

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:16:43 +0000

and their elitist spelling and grammar

In which my denial of free will receives support from Science [tm]

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 20:56:01 +0000

I’ve long maintained that free will is an illusion. That the mind arises from the physicality of the brain and that there is no room for an active will separate from the physical processes of the brain. That’s not to say that I’m a fatalist. I don’t believe that thoughts are deterministic, let alone subject to perfect prediction. My position boils down to the brain as a (gigantic) black box containing an uncountable number of states. Input from the senses changes the state of the brain and occasionally results in actions.

Crap... I'm the pig

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 13:30:00 +0000

Old bit of folk wisdom that has served me well over the years: never wrestle a pig; you both get dirty and the pig enjoys it. Keeping that in mind has kept me out of all sorts of trouble over the years. The only problem? I’m apparently the pig in debates about the new health reform law 🙂

Model update (updated!, updated again)

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 01:09:45 +0000

Earlier, I posted my current model for predicting the NCAA tournament. Since the whole thing is probabilistic, I figured that I would test it out against the current NCAA standings. I considered four models:

The one that I described
A random selection of which team would win (50/50 chance)
Always picking the top seeded team
A model suggested by a colleague at work

For each model, I ran 10,000 tests and compared them to the current NCAA tournament results, counting the scores for each test. Results are:

They laughed at my theories!

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 19:09:59 +0000

They laughed at my theories. They threw tomatoes when I presented my paper at the academy! Tomatoes I tell you! My minions cower in terror, shrinking in fright from the very ideas contained herein! But I will show them! I will PROVE IT TO THEM ONCE AND FOR ALL. The FOOLS, I WILL DESTROY THEM!! MWAHAHAHAAAA!(ask me how)

Oh, sorry. Where was I? Apparently, there’s this basketball thing going on. Some sort of NCAA tournament that will prove who has the best basketball team. But what if it doesn’t? What if it’s all just arbitrary? Could it be that the chances of any team winning a game are not deterministic, but rather stochastic? I’ll admit that I don’t know that much about basketball. I mean, I played the sport in junior high. I do know the rules. And I even think that it’s a pretty game. But I don’t follow the ins and outs of a particular season.

Holy crap... yes we did!

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:33:38 +0000

Almost three months ago to the day, I wrote about the senate health care reform (HCR) bill, how they had achieved cloture and would vote on Christmas eve. Since December, things haven’t looked all that good for HCR. A weak candidate in Massachusetts lost to a republican underwear model (not that there’s anything wrong with that), and the Democrats started doing the Democratic thing, which mostly consists of herding all of the cats into a circle and giving them guns to take shots at each other [1]. At one point in late January, the chances of any sort of HCR passing were very close to zero (Intrade was giving it around 22%).

hooray for water!

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 01:58:32 +0000

The plumbers finally got out late Monday, in time to find out that the well pump needed replacing, and no they don’t keep a 3/4 hp pump on hand… why do you ask? After the supply store opened back up, they came by around 9:30 this morning and replaced the pump. The bad news? Ouch, replacing a well pump is expensive. The good news? It was $800 less than I was dreading. :-/

and the weekend started off so well...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:24:11 +0000

It started off as a good weekend. I swear it did. I was up late Friday (technically, early Saturday) talking to a friend from high school, catching up on this and that. Woke up late, played a bit with the dogs and went out to Celebrity Dairy’s open house. I got to pet the baby goats [note: need to add pictures here] and look around the inn. When I left, I had 3 logs of goat cheese, a pint of blueberry preserves and a half pint of hot pepper jelly.

Turn about and all that

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 02:38:53 +0000

So maybe in my last post, I was a bit hard on Louisiana because it’s the state I’ve left. It’s not like we don’t have our own wackos in NC. Two examples:

One of NC’s representatives, Patrick McHenry (R) has proposed that we put Reagan’s face on the $50 bill. Maybe for his work on voodootinkle on trickle down economics? Although there is some appropriate irony to giving Reagan the $50… it’s a bill that most people don’t use. Personally, I’m not rich enough to deal in $50s, $20s maybe. Hey, if we’re redesigning money, why don’t we give more important presidents more prominent spots. Jefferson definitely outranks Reagan and he’s on the never used $2 bill. What about Madison? The dude practically wrote the Constitution. Shouldn’t those of who don’t use $5,000 bills get a chance to see him?
And closer to home, the newly minted republican majority on the Wake county school board has succeeded in rolling back a nationally recognized program to improve educational outcomes by ensuring socio-economic diversity. Sure, I was bussed in elementary school. It wasn’t the most enjoyable experience of my life, but at the same time, I think that it was good for me as a person to be exposed to other socio-economic groups at school. Moreover, the program in Wake has demonstrated that it reduces the achievement gap between poor/minority students and rich/white students. That’s gotta be worth a little time on the bus.

Music for the evening: Danger Mouse’s and Sparklehorse’s Dark Night of the Soul and Titus Andronicus’s The Airing of Grievances. They seem to capture the mood.

Seriously, W... T... F?

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 02:15:08 +0000

Every once in a while, something from Louisiana will catch the national attention, or at least the political bits that I care about, and I’m once again reminded of why I’m happy to have left. The latest? Apparently, the Bossier Parish sheriff is creating himself a militia. No really. It’s called “Operation Exodus,” which according to the sheriff’s press release is an allusion to the biblical Book of Exodus. I’m not certain if that worries me or makes me happy that it’s not a reference to secession. I think I’ll go with worry since it’s a biblical reference to secession.

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

Heathcare reform: a Festivus miracle!

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 04:03:16 +0000

Speaking of Festivus, I should note a recent sighting of a genuine Festivus miracle… they still had a quart of Maple View Farms eggnog at the grocery store!

Er, actually, a better Festivus miracle is that today the senate democratic caucus reached the 60 votes needed for their final cloture vote and will vote on healthcare reform tomorrow. FWIW, the vote could have been held today, but Vitter (R-LA) objected. The bill also could have been held up until 8pm tomorrow, but republicans couldn’t quite bring themselves to wait that long to get out of town. So instead, the vote (needing only 50 ayes plus Biden) will happen at 7am tomorrow morning.

Happy Festivus!

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 19:37:16 +0000

Just a reminder of that it’s the 23rd. Bring on the feast and the airing of grievances! After dinner, all of the pets in the house will have to try to pin me in the feats of strength :-)

All the old favorites

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 02:36:22 +0000

Now I want to be professor Claus when I grow up. I wonder where you can find Nietzsche sweaters?

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

"Hacking" predator drones

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 18:05:08 +0000

This just makes me sad. Two articles, one in the WSJ, the other on CNN, describing how insurgents in Iraq are hacking predator drones and receiving the video feeds that the drones are sending back to U.S. ground stations. First things first, let’s fix the headlines. Both are running something like “Iraqi insurgents hacked Predator drone feeds.” That should more clearly read: “Iraqi insurgents watching the videos that the Predator drone sends out unencrypted.” Or maybe “Iraqi insurgents watch Predator drone feeds on TV.”

Boycott!

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 23:37:04 +0000

I’m officially boycotting any retailer using “ Santa Baby” in their commercials. Yeah, it’s an empty threat since I wasn’t going to the mall anyway, but there you are. Now to get the idiotic song out of my head. Maybe the Mighty Mighty Bosstones? Failing that, a power drill may be my best bet.

Calendar update

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 21:19:42 +0000

K and I received our copies of the Yellowstone calendar and they look great. I’m happy with both the images we selected and also the printing - which was great. As I mentioned earlier, we went with Zazzle for doing the printing and couldn’t be happier. My mom got the ones for the folks in Louisiana and she also thought they looked good. But hey, your mom is supposed to think everything you do looks good, so I was even happier to see that someone I don’t know in Illinois bought a copy on the Zazzle marketplace. I didn’t expect that, but it was nice to see :-)

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.

Trash heap of programming history

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 18:08:23 +0000

When we put in the massive wall-eating bookcase, I thought that we had enough book space for the next 10,000 years! Or at least the next 10. Unfortunately, things were filling up a bit too fast, so I grabbed some of the books that I know I’ll never use again and will send them to recycling. Most are completely out of date (from bottom to top, these are from the mid-80s to the late 90s). Linux Application Development is probably still relevant, but a little too basic. Linux Device Drivers goes all the way through the 2.0 kernel series (and may be relevant for the experimental 2.1 series)! Switched LANs (snicker) and In Search of Clusters were given to me by vendors. And if I ever have to program native X-Windows again, I’ll kill myself. I kept the books on C/C++, Python, Perl and PHP - though I’ll probably never buy another programming book. Maybe Celeste is right, I should just get a Safari account… Google works pretty well too. If there’s anything you want in here, let me know… 10258

Allman Brothers Band

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:31:14 +0000

10256 It’s a good day for the Allman Brothers. Great southern rock without the confederate overtones and segregationist dog whistles in Lynard Skynyrd.

Yellowstone calendar pictures

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:27:15 +0000

Time to assemble the annual Yellowstone calendar. This year I had a bit of a deadline (and not the shipping deadline this year!). The company I ordered from (Zazzle) was having a 44% off deal, which expires around 3am. Unfortunately, because of my grandfather’s death, I never did get around to processing the pictures from this year’s trip, so I didn’t have anything ready to go. Fortunately, it didn’t take that long to find 10… 18… 26… 28… 29 pictures. It took a bit longer to color correct and prune them back down to the 13 below:

Canning

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:44:25 +0000

and that’s the last of the summer veggies: pickled green (and unripe red) tomatoes (mostly cherry), bannana peppers, a couple of small eggplant (can you pickle eggplant?) and an okra that I hadn’t noticed. I’ll crack one of these open in a month or so and see how they taste. FWIW, the pickled bannana peppers from September are great.

cec's day off

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:02:02 +0000

I thought about titling this “VD Day” for reasons explained below, but as K pointed out, my mom reads this blog. More to the point, as I noted, my mom has a dirty mind - which is where most of her children got our sense of humor, so she would absolutely get it. Anyway, I took today off work, because a) I recently had a birthday and wanted a three day weekend, and b) there were a number of little things around the house that needed doing. In rough chronological order, I

Sounds about right to me

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:21:00 +0000

Courtesy of xkcd:

Mr. Deity

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:18:04 +0000

For all of your theological questions, the deity is now on YouTube. Two of my favorite questions are the problem of evil and how do you explain the trinity. Respectively answered in the “Mr. Deity and the Evil” and “Mr. Deity and the Identity Crisis,” below:

and

Great moments in . . .

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 01:39:44 +0000

Minor notes, none worth their own post.

Traffic management: I get a call from K around 5:30. She’s stuck behind an accident and the cops on the scene, a) don’t tell people to take a detour until they’ve been there for a half hour; and b) once the ambulance has left the scene, don’t direct traffic around the one remaining open lane. So, after waiting a half hour, K has to take a 20+ minute detour home.
Memory: Once she gets in, K and I are fixing leftovers for dinner. C: “Hey, where are the mashed potatoes?” K: “Where did you put them?” “In the fridge, but I can’t find them.” “Maybe they’re in the freezer.” “Nope, not there either.” Ten minutes of looking for the potatoes. Did we throw them out on Sunday? Nope, not in the trash. Did C put them in the pantry? Nope. Can’t find ’em, can’t find ’em. Finally, K says, “wait, we fixed rice on Sunday.” There weren’t any potatoes. I would attribute it to getting old, but I’ve always been this way.
FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt): we’re testing some things at the office – will our authentication system (active directory) honor password failure lockouts when using LDAP authentication? I ask our windows consultant to either a) answer the question, or b) enable an account lockout policy so we can test. He responds back that he can do that, but with the warning that “many Linux services aren’t well-designed for this, and repeatedly try a cached or user-provided password, so that users or service accounts may be mysteriously locked out after one attempt or at some future time when passwords change.” Which is complete and utter B.S. Signs that it’s BS? He references Linux services as opposed to open source, i.e. attempted linux dig. And I used to “own” identity management services, including authentication at a large university and if this was the case, things would have blown up within 10 minutes. I thanked him for the advice and noted that I’ve never seen this, but that it’s why we test.
OS Performance: we’re looking into some new ideas at the office. Things that could be useful as a preprocessor for a host based intrusion detection system. As part of my testing, I told my laptop to audit all syscalls made to the kernel, by all processes on the system. CPU load spiked, system performance went through the floor, the windowing system became almost completely non-responsive. In the two minutes it took to get access to a terminal, I logged 150 MB of audit logs. On the plus side, all of the information we need can be collected. Now I just need to figure out how to keep a usable system.
Self aggrandizement: talking to my technical manager, we need to write up two journal papers based on our recent work. Cool!

I hope everyone had a good Veteran’s Day and remembered to thank the veterans in their lives.

gop hcr doa

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:02:31 +0000

In the most awesome [1] display of legislative ineptitude since they presented a budget with no numbers on April Fool’s Day, the republicans have released their plan for health care reform. Now, keep in mind that as scored by the CBO, the democratic plan will increase coverage from 83% to 96% of the legal population in the U.S. by 2019 and will reduce the deficit by $104 billion over the same ten years. Of course, the republican plan was going to be “much better.” And was it? Not so much. Under the republican plan, coverage will increase from, wait for it, drum roll please 83% to a whopping, um, 83% by 2019. Well, hey, at least it’ll do more to improve the deficit, right? Well, not exactly. According to the CBO’s initial analysis, there would be a $68 billion dollar reduction in the deficit over the next ten years.

Facebook security vulnerabilities

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:32:19 +0000

and this is why I like cross-posting to facebook from my blog. It’s a healthy reminder that nothing on fb is actually private. If it’s online - it’ll be exposed eventually, whether through a new exploit, or just because you “friend” someone in the future that you had written about in the past.

h/t hsarik

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.

Always with the water

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:05:00 +0000

Welcome to my Amish rural paradise, water problems are no extra charge.

In this month’s exciting installment, K and I note that we are lacking in water pressure on Saturday night before we go to bed. Sunday rolls around and sure enough, no water. My guess was that either the well pump or the pressure switch had gone bad. We weren’t going to be too happy if it was the pump, since we replaced it less than three years ago. I went out and bought some drinking water, checked the rain barrels to see if we had water for toilets and called the plumber.

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.

Bee space

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:28:00 +0000

I need another hobby about like I need a(nother) hole in my head. But at the same time, ya gotta keep life interesting. Several times over the past few years, K and I have talked about keeping bees. I think that next year we’ll finally do it. We’re interested in the bees themselves (hive mind! hive mind!), the pollination and the honey, so why not. I’ve read a couple of books and was originally planning to take a class, but the one I wanted isn’t offered until 2011. But hey why let that stop us.

Now I am feeling inadequate

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:57:30 +0000

I went out to the garden on Sunday and took a look at how the okra was doing. Now I’m feeling somewhat, um, inadequate…

as a gardener.

Really, who lets okra get that big. I should have been picking them every two or three days so that the maximum size was only 3-5 inches, not 8-12.

In other gardening news, I opened one jar of the pickled peppers early (they should still be pickling for another 3-4 weeks), and they are delicious.

Always with the water problems

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:33:06 +0000

I’ve mentioned before that I (we? maybe it’s K’s fault!) seem to be cursed with water problems. Since we like our current house, and the well is drawing very acidic water, we’ll probably continue to have water problems. Two of the more recent ones:

Two months ago, we started noticing that the average daily water usage (as shown on the water softener) had gone from 60 gal/day to over 100 gal/day in a very short period of time, maybe two days. Needless to say, K and I were more than a little concerned with where all that water was going. So I ducked under the house and heard the water pump quick cycling: on, off, on, off… Well that’s not supposed to happen. It’s supposed to kick on when the house pressure drops to 30psi, and turn off when it hits 40. We called a plumber, because I’ll do a lot of plumbing, but anything like the water pump that combines water, electricity and problems underground is way out of my league. Turned out that we needed a new pressure tank (my guess: the acidic water ate away at the inner lining of the air bladder). Joy.
The next month, the power bill came in very high. Our first thought was, “well, the pump was on a lot last month, so maybe that’s the problem.” It came in high again the next month. We started looking for the source, keeping a log of power use and finally, on Sunday resorted to shutting off all power in the house and adding the breakers back one at a time. I should have guessed - the pump was using a lot of power. Went under the house, watched the pressure build to 40psi, the pump cut off and all the pressure drained back out of the lines until the pump came on again. The cycle repeated on maybe a 30 second period with a 50% duty cycle. Yay! my pump was running half the day. This time, the plumber found that there was a leak at the pump itself and all the water was being dumped back down the well. On the bright side, we weren’t wasting water - just power. :-(

One fun thing did come out of all of this, we bought a digital, in-house electricity meter.

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.

Ph34r t3h cut3 0n3s

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:27:27 +0000

Last night, I realized that K had quite a few baby animals around the house and that I hadn’t posted any pictures. So, without further ado, may I present the cute ones:

The first picture is of a young opossum. He and his siblings were in one of our outdoor enclosures, but he didn’t seem to be doing too well, so he’s back inside for a bit.

The next set is a group of baby (week old) snapping turtles - note the remnants of the yolk sack. This is sort of an interesting story. The old non-profit had a snapper that died. However, we knew that the turtle had eggs. So we sent the body over to the vet school’s turtle team where they extracted and incubated her eggs until they hatched in August. These are the her babies.

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.

So, this is important

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 03:14:27 +0000

I’m not a big baseball fan. For that matter, there are few ball sports that interest me. But, this is important. If you recall, a few years ago (2004), there was a big furor over steroids in baseball. The government searched BALCO and found evidence of rampant steroid use by baseball players. Now I hadn’t been paying attention to this, but there has been an ongoing legal dispute over that search and how it was conducted.

DDoS-ing good policy

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 02:08:48 +0000

In computer security, one of the most difficult and annoying problems is the distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). The idea behind a DDoS attack is straight forward: the attacker tries to prevent legitimate use of the service by using a large number of other computers. Usually these other computers have been compromised (hacked) and are following the commands of the attacker. Such computers are usually called “zombies.”

There are a number of ways to conduct a DDoS attack, but they are typically variations on the following theme. The attacker instructs the zombies to request access to the service. But the zombies have no intention of actually using the service, instead, they often forge network traffic so that it’s impossible to tell who is making the request. Because the zombies don’t want to use the service, they can make thousands of requests without slowing down. The poor computer hosting the service then sees tens of thousands of requests for access, tries to fulfill the requests and eventually becomes overloaded and dies. The zombies win.

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.”

Ted Kennedy

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:11:44 +0000

:-(

also, I’m glad I’m not the only one who went there

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.

Palins resignation speech

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:39:36 +0000

I haven’t paid much attention to Sarah Palin in the year since I first heard of her. Okay, periodically I’ve laughed at her. And Palin As President was pretty funny. But last night I was commenting to K that this line from her resignation speech was pure Zen:

“In the winter time it’s the frozen road that is competing with the view of ice fogged frigid beauty, the cold though, doesn’t it split the Cheechakos from the Sourdoughs?”

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 . :-)

Specter (D-Pa.)

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:14:13 +0000

It looks like the average IQ of democratic senators and the average IQ of republican senators have both declined today. Hopefully there will be a 2010 challenger in the PA democratic primaries.

The lonely possum sketch

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 02:13:05 +0000

If only we could get Carol Burnett to highlight the plight of the lonely possums on the muppet show. Of course, she would get all interupted by Gonzo’s dance marathon, but hey, rehabbers will take what they can get.

K got in a solitary young opossum last night. Sad little girl (the possum, not K… at least to my knowledge). Dehydrated (definitely the possum) and underweight (both actually!). Hopefully she’ll make it (both again):

Vint Cerf called . . .

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 01:58:23 +0000

… and he and Tim Berners-Lee want you to stop breaking the Internet.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had several occasions to be invited into someone’s walled garden on the internet. You know the places. Lovely little sites that are entirely self-contained and which you can’t access unless you are a member? In the old days, Compuserve and AOL were the big walled gardens. These days, it’s Facebook and Linked-In.

William Wallace on wildlife releases

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 05:30:53 +0000

They may take our rehabilitation bins, but they’ll never take… our FREEDOM!

On Sunday, K release some baby water turtles that she had been over-wintering. Fortunately, we’re all of a mile from a good place at which to release turtles, Jordan Lake, so we didn’t have to drive too far.

The big one in the image set is a male (note the long nails for better, um, gripping) slider and the other three are painted turtles (you can see the orange on the underside of the shells in the images in the gallery).

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.

Chatham tea party

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 01:32:07 +0000

Tomorrow is April 15th, tax day. And in case you’ve missed it, republicans, flat taxers, gold fetishists, racists, defense nuts and other extreme conservatives are planning to host tea parties tomorrow. Tea parties? Yep. Protests, harkening back to the days of the Boston Tea Party when proto-American patriots dumped tea into Boston harbor to protest taxation without representation. Tomorrow’s tea parties appear to be a bit less principaled. Some protestors are objecting to the Bush tax cuts on the top 2% expiring in 2010… as they were scheduled to do by republican law makers. Some protestors seem to object to having lost the election in 2008. Others object to bailouts of home owners… or is it bailouts of banks… or is it bailouts that don’t help their bottom line? Some seem to object to having a black president. Others are Ron Paulites who seek to restore the gold standard?!

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

Recessions don't have hidden virtues

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 21:25:09 +0000

I wasn’t originally going to write about the Michael Gerson piece from the other week where he talks about the “hidden virtues” of a recession. Leaving aside the irony of a relatively well off speech writer for George W. Bush telling us how the recession caused by his boss’s policies will be good for us, I just assumed that the idea of a virtuous recession was self-obviously wrong and wouldn’t be taken seriously. But since then, I’ve heard other people, even more liberal people, make the same arguments. In several of those cases, the argument is that a recession will help (force?) Americans to lead simpler lives, to save more and to focus on what is really important. I’m offended by that sentiment because, while I have often thought, and said, that people need to focus on what’s important and that they should save more, there is a huge difference between doing so as a choice and being forced into it due to scarcity.

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. :-)

Rant

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:42:36 +0000

Can anyone please explain to me, what the hell is John Boener doing on my TV and in my newspapers talking about the stimulus plan? For 8 years, we liberal types were told that “elections had consequences” and that we should STFU and clap louder. Fine, now that republicans have been repudiated in a full election cycle, suffering major losses in both 2006 and 2008 after running on the same policies that they now advocate will save us from the mess that their policies got us into, will they please STFU?

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

told ya so

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 23:47:33 +0000

A couple of weeks ago at a Geek Beer, we were discussing Roland Burris and the likelihood of him being seated by the senate. My take was that of course he would be seated. No one has ever paid a price for going against Harry Reid.

Told ya so.

front yard birding

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:06:32 +0000

Using a bit of leftover birthday money, I bought some new camera equipment. Nothing particularly sexy like a big long lens (what do you mean by homoerotic?). I bought a set of carbon fiber tripod legs that weigh about 3 pounds instead of the 6 pounds of my old tripod legs - that should make hiking easier. They can also hold more weight which is good since my biggest lens tops out what you should put on the old legs. I also bought a new tripod head. Instead of a ball head (ahem), I got a gimbal head that balances the weight of the camera so that you can easily point it anywhere and it stays put. Moreover, the new head is far more stable than the old one when using long lenses.

Blaming the pushers?

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 06:45:11 +0000

Okay, commenting on global finance is really not my usual shtick, but I’ve got to agree with Barry Ritholtz that there’s something odd in this NY Times article on China’s role in the U.S. housing bubble. The article describes Ben Bernanke’s 2005 theory that a savings “glut” is driving up the demand for American to borrow from foreign countries. The article extends the theory to suggest that the financial mess that we are currently in the middle of was, essentially, caused by the Chinese.

A simple suggestion

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 05:40:04 +0000

I wonder if the N&O would print this?

Dear Editors,

I have read with some alarm your recent stories describing a dramatic change to our way of life. Specifically, I refer to those stories of our poor benighted multi-millionaires and billionaires who are having to downgrade their lifestyle in response to the crash of the financial markets and the banking industry.

As we all know, what has made America great over the past 30 years is the increasing increasing income inequality whereby those at the top of the income ladder make an ever increasing amount of money while the median income has stagnated. Without these top income earners, all motivation and striving goes out of our populous; leaving us a nation of whiners. And yet, every day, we hear stories of high powered financiers, who had been making millions each year, now contemplating the need to sell that third vacation home in order to make ends meet.

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.

blog your type?

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:44:47 +0000

This is neat. Typealyzer claims to examine a blog (or presumably any webpage) in order to identify the Myers-Briggs type of the author. It correctly identifies me as an INTP, but doesn’t seem to get etselec.

robert johnson

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:57:08 +0000

Dear Amazon.com:

After buying the collected works of Robert Johnson, blues guitarist from the 1930s, the man who was reputed to have sold his soul to the devil to become the greatest blues guitarist ever, I really don’t think I want albums by Robert Johnson the 70s power pop musician. I know they have the same name, but trust me, they aren’t the same person.

kthxbai

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 :-)

A real threat to marriage

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:28:23 +0000

Two weeks ago as Obama won a resounding victory both in the country as a whole and even more decisively in California, Californians also passed Proposition 8. Prop 8 was an amendment to the California constitution that defined marriage as an institution between one man and one woman. With the passage of Prop 8, 18,000 couples had their legal marriages dissolved.

Supporters of Proposition 8 claim that the act was necessary to help defend the traditional institution of marriage. Specifically, they looked to the Bible and its condemnation of homosexuality. They claimed that recognizing homosexual marriage undermined the biblical concept of marriage.

Thinking about camera equipment

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:54:50 +0000

I started taking photography more seriously about ten years ago. I put down my cheap point and shoot film camera and bought an SLR body, a few lenses and some slide film. The great thing about shooting film (slide or print) is that you aren’t constrained by the quality of your camera. My first SLR was a used Olympus OM-1n, circa 1975. The OM-1n was fully manual - no auto-focus, no auto-exposure. If you didn’t want to use the exposure meter then you didn’t even need a battery. It was a beautiful piece of equipment, but it was also about as basic as you could get outside of a pinhole camera. It was a dark box that held and advanced film with a mount to hold a lens open for a set period of time. That’s it.

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

Blue NC

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:09:11 +0000

Still not official from the Election Board, but the AP has canvased all of the counties and found that there aren’t enough provisional ballots for McCain to overcome Obama’s 13000+ vote lead.

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…

Computer maps

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:17:51 +0000

A few years ago, K was taking some GIS (geographic information systems) classes. That was a lot of fun for me since GIS is something I’ve poked at on and off for quite some time. Back when I was first playing with GIS, GRASS was probably the best (and may still be) open-source GIS system out there, but it wasn’t too user friendly. So it was a lot of fun playing with ESRI’s ArcGIS.

Another successful repair

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 02:07:08 +0000

As I mentioned earlier, we were having problems with the water softener and when your well water is as hard as ours is (“how hard is it?” “that’s a rather personal question sir” “no you git, how hard is the water?”) the water softener is pretty important.

So the venturi gasket looked okay, but I ordered a new one since it’s a bit sensitive. I also ordered some new internal gaskets that go in the valve. The parts arrived on Saturday. Replacing the venturi gasket didn’t help, so I opened up the valve and found that I had the wrong sized internal gasket :-( . Turns out that all of the brand name softeners (GE, Sears, Kenmore, Home Depot, etc.) all use the same valve, but in two differrent sizes, a common smaller size and then the rarer large size. I’ll give you one guess as to which we own. Of course, if I had paid attention, I would have noticed that the gasket had two sizes, but oh no… Anyway, so I figure I’ve got to return the gasket, but then I google around a bit and find that in addition to the gaskets (which ironically allow the softener to suck), sometimes the symptoms we were seeing are caused by a blocked drain plug or blocked rotor. I pull out the drain plug and sure enough - it’s blocked. But even after I clear the blockage it still doesn’t suck - but in an entirely different failure mode. I clean the rotor - now it works. I still had some issues with leaks, but reseating the rotor and the whole valve has fixed those. I think we’re back in business.

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:

151815471553156215651580

Wildlife rehab porn

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 13:50:29 +0000

It’s okay to look, I promise that there are no shots of me doing naked cage construction. *shudder*

A couple of months ago, K got a call about a squirrel. When the folks brought it over, it turned out to be rather small, but pretty far along in its development. Well, that’s because it was a flying squirrel. They tend to be a lot smaller, a lot sweeter and just darn cute. Because they live in colonies, K found someone with another flying squirrel and has been raising them together. They just recently went outside, so hopefully they’ll be releasable before winter. Here are some of the pictures from when they were still inside.

Too good to last

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 19:00:43 +0000

It’s been a while since we’ve had plumbing issues. Okay, sure, we replaced the RO faucet in the kitchen six months ago, but other than that…

So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that yet another water oriented appliance has broken down. This time it’s the water softener, again. When we first moved into the house, five years ago, the water softener didn’t seem to work. The first problem was a salt bridge that kept it from operating correctly. Once we figured that one out, it was easy enough to fix. Then a year or so later, the tank filled up and wouldn’t drain. That one turned out to be the venturi gasket - part of a clever device that uses pressure differentials to move water around. That one was a bit more annoying since you can’t just order the 1.5" gasket, you have to replace both the nozzle and gasket which costs about $20 + shipping.

Brief political interlude

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:19:39 +0000

Like a lot of other people, I’ve been pretty stressed out recently. Nothing too terrible is going on for me personally, but I’m concerned about the U.S. financial situation, I’m concerned about how that will affect me and my company (if at all) and I’m concerned about the current political happenings in part since I think that they will have the biggest affect on the first two issues. I’ve been obsessing over politics and polls for the past few months when I would probably be better off “drink[ing] herb tea and play[ing] with [my] screensavers.” At this point, I’m fairly confident that Obama will win (yay!), but watching the McCain campaign’s negative attacks is annoying - in particular since the negative ads are aimed at Obama personally and not his policies (as opposed to Obama’s negative ads which appear to be aimed at McCain’s policies).

Annotate Flickr

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 02:59:54 +0000

A while back, Luis Villa asked about a script to add creative commons licensing information to an image. I just wrapped up a first cut at a GreaseMonkey script to do exactly that. Hopefully someone will find it useful.

Annotate Flickr

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 02:45:15 +0000

A while back, Luis Villa asked about a script to add creative commons licensing information to an image. My first thought was to just use ImageMagick. That works pretty well, but assumes a command line, image magick, etc. My next thought was a piece of javascript that you could include on a webpage. The javascript would scan all tags and for each that were of the class “cc-license”, it would grab the “license” and “attrib” attributes. The img would be replaced with a canvas that had a transparent license image and the attribution in the corner. That worked pretty well, but again, didn’t really change the image, so if you were loading it into a presentation, etc., you were out of luck.

Projects

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 02:31:01 +0000

Idle bailout thoughts

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 17:30:56 +0000

Okay, this is probably the last of the foreseeable posts on the Wallstreet bailout – and probably the most serious.

I spend the last week extremely pissed off about the bailout. Here were a bunch of idiots absurdly inflating the price of housing, with other idiots actually loaning them money to do so, more idiots treating the bad loans as assets and still more idiots insuring them against loss under ridiculous assumptions. It’s not really a surprise that the whole thing blew up. The only surprise is that it took as long as it did. Hell – 5 years ago in late 2003 when K and I bought our current place, we were worried that there was a housing bubble inflating prices beyond what the properties were really worth. And this was in North Carolina which didn’t have the hottest housing market.

We are all socialists now

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 01:18:30 +0000

Welcome to the new socialist state… comrade.

From Propublica, an inflation adjusted comparison of bailouts.

Public service announcement

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 01:14:59 +0000

As a public service announcement, I am hereby warning the people I know that in light of the bailouts of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, and the entire freaking banking system, all of which will cost tax payers about $1 trillion, the next person that tells me that deregulating markets will provide a solution to anything will be asked to STFU.

thank you and good night

Happy birthday to the U.S. Constitution

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:22:19 +0000

Oh, on an entirely unrelated note, the U.S. Constitution was signed 221 years ago today – happy birthday! Okay, it wasn’t ratified for a couple of years after that, but still…

If you’ve got some time, take a read. It’s still the most impressive government document I’ve ever read.

A few years ago, I wanted to start a project that took the individual clauses of the constitution and traced the arguments for and against them back to the original sources or at least to the debates between the signing and ratification. The Federalist Papers, Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison and many of the documents collected in the two volume Library of America’s Debate on the Consitution would have featured prominantly. Never did have the time to kick that off.

Baton Rouge - good news, bad news

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:58:30 +0000

So, one more update on Gustav in Baton Rouge and then I’ll return you to your regularly scheduled odd musings, rants and wildlife pictures.

First, the good news – I got a text message from my mother last week. They got power back! Only 10 days without power. I suppose that’s not too bad. No word from K’s parents, but they had moved into K’s sister’s condo that did have power, so I’m guessing they’re still there.

Baton Rouge . . . disaster area

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 02:58:42 +0000

I spoke to my mom for a little while this evening and got an update on where things stand in Baton Rouge or at least in her corner of it. A summery for those of you interested in Baton Rouge:

The news keeps talking about how mild things were in New Orleans, but the only time you hear about Baton Rouge is in passing. For example, I’ve heard at least two NO evacuees mention that things are better in NO than in the shelters in BR. That is, in part, what’s driving the exodus back south.
While the winds weren’t as bad in BR as they were in NO, they were (near) record winds for the city. BR has more trees and they haven’t experienced winds like this, so there were a lot of trees that fell down.
The local power company is estimating six to eight weeks before they get power to everywhere in the city. There are major grids in the city that don’t have power and then once those major sections are restored, they will still have to restore to the local homes/offices.
My parents did find a plumber to get the water line fixed. They are on the waiting list for a tree guy that can cut up a tree trunk as large as the one that fell in their yard (3′?) – it’s not really a do it yourself job.
Almost every yard in my parents’ neighbourhood has a tree down.
Most of the houses have experienced some damage.
Probably 20% of the houses have trees through the roofs.
There are a large number of cars that were struck by falling trees.
Many of the power poles on the main road outside of the neighbourhood are down. In the neighbourhood, there are few intact sections of power line more than 3 to 4 houses long. Entergy will probably have to replace many poles and string a lot of new line.
There is a curfew in effect. The National Guard did fire shots (in the air?) when some people tried to break into a FEMA trailer full of tarps.
Good news: there is fuel in many gas stations. Bad news: there’s no power to pump it with. Stations with fuel and power have long lines, in some cases backing up down the road.
My parents underestimated the amount of gasoline their generator requires (about 5 gallons a day) and are trying to find more 5 gallon cans.
It’s still raining and there’s little power, so some underpasses are flooding.
The humidity is very high. To the point where my parents’ wood floors are damp and are occasionally collecting puddles. Oh, and the mosquitoes are breeding, so the health authorities are warning people about West Nile.
There aren’t too many stores open, those that are open can’t accept credit cards (no phone lines) and so are requiring cash.

Taken as a whole, it reminds you of a post-apocalyptic distopian movie with people stocking up on water, fuel, food, guns, cash and gold. Maybe Mad Max, The Stand or The Postman. I suppose a comparison to Water World would be in poor taste…

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).

notes from a Cramer mini-reunion

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:50:00 +0000

Just got back from a mini-reunion of Cramers in Tennessee. This was all of my uncles and cousins on my father’s side with the exception of my sister who has a three-week old baby at home. To answer the obvious question, no. No one lives in Tennessee, it’s just a more or less central place. We came in from Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, North Carolina, Washington D.C. and New Jersey.

A few notes:

Oil makes you stupid. . . news at 11

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:05:16 +0000

I knew that there were a lot of chemicals that when ingested could make you stupid. Drugs, sure. Lead and mercury, definitely. But apparently even thinking about oil makes people stupid. Consider the following:

For weeks, republicans have been pushing the idea that either a) the Cubans are drilling in Cuban waters off the coast of Florida; or b) that the Chinese are drilling for oil in Cuban waters off the coast of Florida. The only problem of course is that this is demonstrably false.

Happy 4th of July

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 01:41:33 +0000

I hope everyone’s having a great 4th of July (at least those of us in the States, folks from other countries can be forgiven for not thinking too much of it).

July 4th, along with Thanksgiving, is one of my favourite holidays. That may surprise some folks. It’s not like the house is decorated in red, white and blue. I’m not wearing a flag pin, the Pledge of Allegiance makes me uncomfortable and I’m not that into fireworks. But external trappings aside, I consider myself to be a very patriotic person. I just don’t define patriotism as being synonymous with “flag waving.

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 🙂

Yellowstone pictures - part 2 of 2 (updated)

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 23:38:45 +0000

update: and for those that prefer a better interface, all of the pictures in gallery

Telecom immunity passes the House. sigh . . .

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:09:42 +0000

Yellowstone pictures - part 1 of 2

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:19:44 +0000

I haven’t finished processing all of the Yellowstone pictures – it takes a bit of work to get the color balance set right. (THM – that’s why I always shoot raw on the D80. It gives me more freedom to get the image “right later.) But at least the first half is done. I’ll post the second half this weekend sometime.

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.

Notes for a short story

Sat, 17 May 2008 02:49:04 +0000

Vice cop tells story in first person (think Mike Hammer), something of a diary interspesed with dialog

Talks about guy getting busted for bringing in a bag of grass seed from south america

genetics labs are small and cheap

criminal south american geneticists work to increase strength and potency of grass

busts the guy in the airport. sends to jail. sends seeds off to lab for testing

mentally talks about how grass has gotten stronger. destroys whole neighborhoods. ruins the lives of mothers, fathers and children. people become slave to the grass.

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.

Musical fortune telling

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:59:49 +0000

From etselec and because it amused me, my fortune as told by a random selection of my music with interpretive accompaniment by yours truly:

1. How does the world see me? Lightnin’ Hopkins – No Education

Ouch. Apparently the world sees me as an academic poseur. I guess I can live with that, but it’s a bit rough to see.

2. Will I have a happy life? R.E.M. – Exhuming McCarthy

Genetic discrimination

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 03:11:42 +0000

Oh, and an ironic follow-up to the republican filibuster of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act: apparently, the senate unanimously voted for a bill barring genetic discrimination in hiring and insurance. I wonder if anyone’s told them that your gender is based on your genes. Not that I would accuse senate republicans of being misogynistic in their concern over discrimination. Well, okay, yes I would.

Workplace discrimination

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 03:06:30 +0000

Yesterday, the U.S. Senate took up the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act which the House had already passed. The act was pretty reasonable. It essentially clarified the 1964 civil rights act to say that if you are being discriminated in terms of salary equity, you have 180 days from the date of each paycheck to file a claim. So, essentially it defines the act of discrimination as occurring with each short changed paycheck and not just with the initial salary setting.

Baby opossum pictures

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 01:10:33 +0000

When it rains it pours. A month into spring and K hadn’t received any calls about rehabilitating animals until today when she got two. The first was about baby bunnies. K doesn’t take baby rabbits because too many of the stories end with “and then they died. For example, “I was rehabbing some bunnies in the spare room, the dogs barked, the rabbits got scared and then they died; or “I successfully rehabbed the bunnies, but they got stressed out while I was releasing them, they stroked out and then they died. You get the idea. The other call was for a litter of opossums whose mother had died. She took those.

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?

Web 2.0 and trusting the users

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 13:31:47 +0000

The CTO Project makes an interesting observation that faculty are a bit like some corporations. They feel obligated to use Web 2.0 technologies in order to engage student interest and actually make some token effort to be up to date. But that they only want these technologies if they can exert complete control.

Trust me, I can relate. We’re currently contracting with a part of the government that wants to do something similar. They want to make use of the knowledge of a number of experts to produce an encyclopedia of a given technology. Of course, this has been dubbed the FOOpedia (where FOO is the technology).

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.

Digital Amway

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 02:22:52 +0000

A few years ago, I was accused of using the word “interesting in subtle ways. Sometimes it means a truly novel idea that I would like to learn more about, other times, it’s a novel idea of which I’m more than a little skeptical. In both cases, I stand by the description, to me, both are interesting – but it can make it a little hard to know what I’m really thinking. So take it with a grain of salt that I just read an interesting article in the February 2008 issue of IEEE Computer on how to turn music lovers (particularly teenagers) into music distributors.

Beat up the economists

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 18:19:41 +0000

It’s apparently “beat up the economists week and no one thought to tell me in advance. Over at Crooked Timber, Daniel Davies posts about Greg Mankiw’s recent NY Times editorial and suggests that the reason economists are so patronizing is bitterness over being stuck in a low paying academic job whose sole purpose is to justify the inequities in a capitalist system.

In Scientific American, we have Rober Nadeau’s editorial on the problems with the views of economists. Nadeau notes that economics is a social science that tried to pattern itself after physics. Unfortunately, a) it used 19th century physics and never updated itself as the physics changed; and b) economists never realized that they can’t treat people as elemental particles. Nadeau goes on to note some of the basic assumptions made in economics that don’t stand up.

Pros and Cons of VoIP

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:45:46 +0000

We’ve got voice over IP phones at the office. For the most part, they are a very smart way to handle our communications. We’re too large to want to use individual analog lines through the local telephone company – their rates would be prohibitively expensive. We’re too small to make a private branch exchange (PBX) worthwhile. So sending our voice data over the internet is a good approach. When the phones work, the sound quality is excellent, the cost is relatively inexpensive and the system is fairly reliable. Unfortunately, when the phones don’t work the challenges begin.

Power company balanced bill plans - banned

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:43:04 +0000

As mentioned last month, the North Carolina Utilities Commission has banned the expansion of Progress Energy’s Balanced Billing Plan and Duke Power’s Fixed Payment Plan. These are the plans that charge you roughly 11% in order to have a guaranteed power bill. Unfortunately, it’s not a full ban, it’s just a prohibition against enrolling any new participants. The reason for the ban? [drum roll please] The plans encourage participants to increase their power consumption.

Welcome to your crappy low-rent future

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:37:54 +0000

Last week I was having lunch with a colleague (of sorts) and we were on the topic of the economy, outsourcing of jobs, etc. I mentioned that we were living in, what I’ve taken to calling, a crappy low-rent future *. He pointed out, and I agree, that this is largely because corporations have broken the social contract. It turns out he had been reading Robert Reich’s “Super Capitalism while I had been reading “The Global Class War. In their own ways, each of these books tells the story of how corporations from the end of the WWII with the New Deal until the late 1970s were bound by something of a social contract. Corporations recognized that their customer base was their employee base and that while you might not want to pay your employees, not doing so would spiral out of control so that your own customers couldn’t afford your products. Corporations began to slip the social contract in the late 70s with the Regan Revolution. The trend continued in the 80s and 90s as companies began to achieve transnational status: i.e., their customer base and their employee base were no longer the same. NAFTA and the follow-up “free trade agreements accelerated this trend by allowing companies to shift labor and production to the places where it was cheapest without actually requiring labor or environmental standards that would level the playing field.

Who could have guessed?

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:27:36 +0000

Gee, nobody could have predicted this I suppose:

The FBI improperly used national security letters in 2006 to obtain personal data on Americans during terror and spy investigations, Director Robert Mueller said Wednesday.

Admittedly, Mueller goes on to say that the reports were prior to new policies being put into place, but somehow that doesn’t make me feel much better. It’s things like this that have always made me very nervous about partnerships between law enforcement and industry. I’ll try to post something about InfraGard one of these days. It’s a little scary in its own right.

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.

FISA extension and telecom amnesty

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 04:10:27 +0000

Few people have been on top of the extension of FISA like Glenn Greenwald. As a quick overview for folks that haven’t been paying attention to the issue:

Late last year a real potential problem with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) (as written in the 70s and amended after Sept 11) was recognized. Namely, communication between two foreign entities that was routed through the US was subject to the law’s requirements for a court order. This was never the intent of the law and largely crept in due to the routing of Internet traffic through major US networking hubs
In addition to correcting this, the Whitehouse and the Republican congress pushed for a change to FISA that went beyond correcting the oversight and significantly extended the ability of the government to spy on citizens.
Congress couldn’t pass this permanently, but did pass a six month bill before the August recess, in large part because of scare tactics used by the FBI (releasing warnings of predicted attacks in DC)
Six months was up last week and the Whitehouse was pushing to: a) correct the known oversight, b) extend its ability to spy on US citizens without court order, and now they’ve added c) grant retro-active immunity to the telecommunications companies for illegally helping the government spy both before and after Sept 11th. And of course, if they don’t get all of this, we’ll die in our sleep, murdered by terrorists.
The Senate caved and gave the Whitehouse everything it asked for.
Surprisingly, the House didn’t and we’re now seeing extra pressure claiming that we’ll all die and it’ll be their fault. This is of course BS, but that’s the state of discourse in the country.

I don’t have much to add on the spying per se, but I will admit to being particularly offended and disturbed by the telecom immunity issue. Essentially, these companies started helping law enforcement to monitor calls, read emails, etc. well before September 11th. Their actions were not scared or patriotic, they were largely motivated by greed.

Power companies - update

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 17:19:14 +0000

Interesting. Shortly after posting about power companies, I received a comment from Progress Energy correcting me about the plans. It seems [pure speculation here] that Progress has some sort of “blog response team up in Maryland or northern Virginia. Anyway, I misnamed the program that I had been offered, as the comment says, it was indeed the “Balanced Bill payment plan where you wind up spending some 11% more over the course of the year for the privilege of knowing that your bill will be 1/12th of a fixed amount. There is (apparently) a different equal payment plan which is comparable to what we had with Duke Power. However, it’s not the money maker that the Balanced Bill program is and so it is not heavily advertised. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find details of the plan online. The closest I can get is here, which seems to be lacking in specifics.

Total eclipse of the heart, um moon

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:48:13 +0000

It was a rough night to try to get any pictures of last night’s total lunar eclipse. For long durations of the evening, you couldn’t even see the moon for all of the cloud cover. I did manage to get a few pictures. Most of them were slightly blurred because of the long exposure time and the 900 mm of focal length. However, some came out quite nice. The general process I used was:

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.

Wordpress title plugin

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 16:01:01 +0000

One of the things I dislike about blogs (and actually most webpages) is that the static content is formatted very nicely using different fonts, etc., but the dynamic content is all pure text. And since there are only a few fonts you will find on every computer, the text all looks pretty much the same: sans or serif. On my own blog, I find that particularly annoying. I’ve got, what I think, is a nice clean looking theme that reminds me of a Victorian-era journal (except perhaps not that fancy). But all of the titles and dynamic content are plain text.

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.

CO2 emissions and compact fluorescent bulbs (updated)

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 19:37:08 +0000

There’s something about the idea of global warming that seems to drive people of a certain mindset completely insane. You start seeing things like: “the planet’s not warming up! “Okay, maybe it is warming, but humans couldn’t possibly be causing it. “Fine. We are causing global warming, but we can’t do anything about it. “What, we can? Well it’ll destroy our economy. “You mean it won’t? Well, you must be French.

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.

Diagnostics

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 02:26:42 +0000

An interesting conversation at work today. I was talking with the guy, L (no – a different one), who has been responsible for our IT for the past 3.5 years. L isn’t the guy that always does the work, although he can. His real job is as an engineer in the company and that’s his primary focus. However, he does handle the technology strategy and monitors the folks that do the IT work. (He and I are talking quite a bit since I’m trying to take some of the load off in this area).

Macro photography

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 02:34:59 +0000

I was talking to hunter last Friday about macro photography and a great, relatively inexpensive, device to take macro pictures with almost any lens. Essentially, the ability of a lens to focus on a close object is related to the focal length and the distance between the inflection point of the lens (point inside the lens where the image flips) and the film plane. It’s something of a funny relationship for modern lenses with multiple internal pieces of glass. However, the important thing to remember is that your ability to close focus depends on those two factors.

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.

Information markets

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 22:32:53 +0000

One of my projects at work involves information markets: tools to extract aggregate knowledge from groups of people. For example, at Intrade, you can buy and sell contracts on questions like, “who will be the democratic nominee for president? or “how likely is it that the US economy will slip into recession? The market price reflects the cumulative belief that a given event has a certain probability.

IEEE Spectrum also recently did a piece on information markets which talked about Microsoft’s use of a market in 2004 to predict the likelihood of an internal product meeting its production schedule. By opening the market to its employees, who presumably had knowledge of the issues with the product, Microsoft predicted that it would ship three months late – which it did.

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.

New faucet

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 23:11:42 +0000

I picked up a new kitchen faucet at Lowe’s today. As usual with this sort of thing, removing the old faucet was the worst part. The nuts holding the old faucet on to the sink were standard plastic nuts – attached to badly rusted screws. After 30 minutes of trying: first by hand, then with a towel by hand, then with a wrench, then oiling the screw and trying the wrench, I gave up. Thinking about it for a few minutes I realized that I have a 1″ drill bit for putting holes into a sink. I got the drill and just drilled through the plastic nuts. Victory!

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.

Time for a new kitchen faucet

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 01:28:25 +0000

It’s been 7 months since we’ve done plumbing renovations, so we’re apparently due. This time I have to replace the kitchen faucet. It’s started leaking badly. “But wait, you say, “a leaking faucet doesn’t require replacement, you can just replace the gaskets. Unfortunately no.

I’ve mentioned before that our water is acidic with a pH of about 5.5. We’ve got the acid neutralizer in place, but many things have corroded over the years. In the case of this faucet, the weld/join between the base of the faucet and the spigot itself has developed pinhole leaks. You turn on the faucet and you get shot in the eye with water.

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.

It lives

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 04:02:37 +0000

Right before Thanksgiving my iPod went to that great electronics superstore in the sky. More specifically, the cute little 1.8″ hard drive died. Having looked around, I figured the best (or at least most interesting) fix was to replace the drive with a compact flash card. The connector part finally came in today and we had a lovely (and to spare you the suspense, successful) operation.

We started with a 30 GB 5th generation iPod video showing the unhappy ipod symbol:

Calendar update update

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 03:51:44 +0000

In response to the two comments on my last post about the calendar:

etselec: I’m not certain if you were kidding or not. FWIW, I don’t usually think of the calendar as something people outside of my family would be interested in. I think that’s a pretty usual INTP trait 🙂 If anyone is interested in the calendar, it’s available at Lulu at the baseline cost of $11.29 each. I didn’t put a markup on it, because it’s a fun thing rather than a plan to take over the world make money.

Calendar update

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 02:20:33 +0000

As I mentioned earlier, I’m printing the Yellowstone calendar using Lulu instead of Kodak. I got back my sample and all in all, I’m happy with it. I like that the image is the full size of the page (no border). The print quality is pretty good – it’s not as good as Kodak’s but that’s not a big surprise. The paper is also a bit lighter weight than Kodak’s card stock. But hey, it’s about 45% cheaper! 🙂

Making vegetarian food tastier; or

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 04:05:46 +0000

Cooking with the world’s most dangerous* additive; or How I stopped worrying and learned to love MSG.

A few weeks ago, I heard Robert Krulwich on NPR talking about umami – the fifth taste. If you didn’t hear it, go to the link above. As always, Krulwich makes the story very engaging. He describes how the Greek philosopher Democritus hypothesized the existence of four tastes: sweet, sour, bitter and salty. Everything you eat is made up of a combination of those four tastes (plus the 10,000 various smells your nose can sense).

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.

Rebuilding an iPod

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 04:08:48 +0000

Over the holiday (I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving!) I spent some time figuring out what to do about my broken iPod hard drive. The simplest/cheapest thing is to replace the drive with another 30 GB 1.8″ drive. The problem is that this is boring. Okay, next thought – up the drive size. I can get a 40 GB drive that’s the same size and is a drop-in replacement. Only problem is that this isn’t very cost effective in terms of dollars per GB. Apparently the wide-spread use of 30 GB drives in iPods has lowered the price point here. What about a 60 GB? It looks like that’s doable too and at a good price point. Downside is that I need a new back to accommodate the thicker drive. Hrm, that’s no good either.

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.

progress - such as it is

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:49:50 +0000

Five years ago, I did a lot of Tai Chi. My teacher at the time constantly related the encouraging (?) story of a tai chi student who went to his teacher and asked, “teacher, when will my knees stop hurting? The teacher told him that his knees would stop hurting, “when he stopped learning.

If the guitar is anything like tai chi, then I’m definitely still learning 🙂

Observations after a week of practice:

I call BS

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:58:24 +0000

I missed on Sunday, but under the theory of better late than never…

Donald Kerr is the principal deputy director of national intelligence, so presumably he speaks with some authority regarding the government’s view of privacy. In a recent Associated Press article he made several remarks which I find exceedingly scary, misleading or both. First up:

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information.

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).

Two factor authentication

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 02:05:42 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, Hunter and I were talking about passwords. More to the point, the inadequacy of passwords and why we haven’t moved beyond them yet. This touches on several points that I made last year. Specifically, that a password that is secure enough starts to restrict its usability.

In a nutshell, authentication is proving that you are who you claim to be. The standard ways of authenticating yourself are through: something you know (e.g., a password), something you have (e.g., a token) or something you are (e.g., biometrics, facial recognition, etc.). So the claim here is that the human brain is not good enough at remembering things to make “something you know secure. Unfortunately, it’s cheap and easy to implement. Two things which are always important.

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.

are you my mommy?

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 01:28:50 +0000

you are my mommy

Three or four weeks ago, K received a call about a baby possum. It seemed that the mother had died and the finders could only locate this one baby. They brought it to the house and K’s been raising it ever since. Apparently, she’s doing a good job. She (the possum, not K) started off at 23g and is now around 80g. The picture above is her clinging to K while sleeping. Note, this is not good rehab practice, but an individual baby possum is a lonely animal. Fortunately, the possum should “re-wild as it grows up.

I'll take a doll, some jacks and a dose of lead poisoning, please

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 00:59:41 +0000

In the wake of the most recent recall of toys from China due to lead paint, we find that the administration has been fighting the regulation of lead in imports. According to McClatchy,

Consumer advocates say the Bush administration has hindered regulation on two fronts. It stalled efforts to press for greater inspections of imported children’s products, and it altered the focus of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, moving it from aggressive protection of consumers to a more manufacturer-friendly approach.

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

Home made sourdough bread

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 02:49:32 +0000

One of my favorite things is really good bread. Back when I was in school, I bought a book on making bread. It started from a home made sourdough starter that had no commercial yeast. It was basically water and flour with a few grapes tied in a bag to give it some extra yeast. The bread itself also called for no commercial yeast. So the whole loaf was made using whatever yeasts happened to be in the air. A friend of mine, a German woman named Margrid Krueger, made similar bread a gave me a few of her tips on how to solve bread problems, etc.

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.

Wildlife from the front porch

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 03:04:52 +0000

When I was taking the dogs out last night, I noticed that we had a visitor. A bat had decided to hang out on the front porch. I’m guessing he was resting before going to work eating the insects in the area. I called K, let the dogs do their thing and came back in for the camera. Fortunately, he stayed put while I took a few pictures. From our field guide to mammals, I would guess that he’s the Little Brown Myotis, but it’s not clear that they live in this area. I guess we’ll look a bit more.

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.

More possum cuteness

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 03:09:36 +0000

So K’s possums got a big brother recently:

The whole family. Note the little sores on the small one? That’s where their whiskers are coming in.

Here’s the biggest one by himself. He needs a bit more enrichment, so he gets to hang out with us on occassion.

I didn’t quite capture the possum tongue, but he was licking me. Very cute 🙂

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.

reason #27 for staying off the computer after GB...

Sat, 07 Jul 2007 02:39:19 +0000

you think LOL Possums is a good idea:

I’ll take some more pictures tomorrow, including a few of their new-ish, big brother. All of these guys are going back to their regular care taker Monday. They’ve been cute to have around, but I don’t think K is looking for more.

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.

Possum husbandry...

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 01:32:20 +0000

K is taking care of some baby possums for the next week. They are about 16 grams (1/2 oz) each. Obligatory pictures included…

minor updates

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 17:56:26 +0000

Just a couple of minor updates:

my keyboard came in yesterday and it’s everything that I hoped it would be. I feel sorry for the folk in my office suite. It is a bit loud
I cropped some of the photos using the original sized images, so all that’s left are captions and fixing the lens smudge

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)

Fun with aphorisms

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 02:22:43 +0000

I was in a longish meeting today when it occurred to me that it is a military truism that “no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Moreover, as Walt Kelly’s Pogo noted, “we have met the enemy and he is us. This suggests that no plan survives first contact with its creators.

Most of my meetings bear this out.

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.

HDR

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 03:23:59 +0000

Last year, I mentioned High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography, where you combine multiple pictures taken at different exposures to create a single picture where all of image is properly exposed. I didn’t do much with it at the time because, a) it’s not really possible when you shoot slide film, and b) there didn’t seem to be a good hdr program for linux.

a) was resolved when I went digital in November

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.

That's too cool

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 00:46:09 +0000

Okay, thanks to Jag, I’ve seen the coolest thing ever. The steampunk keyboard + monitor:

Now all I need is a few dozen hours of free time to build my own.

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.

Periodical cicada

Wed, 02 May 2007 02:43:19 +0000

I was taking the dogs out last night and saw a periodical cicada emerging from it’s nymph stage. Kind of cool – definitely an interesting picture:

Now I wonder if I have to worry about my fruit trees :-/

Which is worse - the cheating or the commentary?

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 15:52:00 +0000

The Chronicle of Higher Education (and others) are reporting the largest cheating incident ever at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke. 34 students were caught having very similar answers on a take home exam. 33 were convicted of cheating, one of lying to the judicial board and four were exonerated.

Cheating by students always amazes me. Back when I started college, an old engineering professor explained to the class that the most benefit you were likely to receive from cheating was, maybe, an increase of one letter grade. However, if he caught you, and he was likely to catch you, you would receive an F and be suspended from school. He encouraged us to “do the math and understand that it wasn’t worth it. I think this may be the right approach. Rather than trying to drill an honor code into students, we need to do two things: 1) encourage them to think about it as a risk management exercise; and 2) have all students grade a set of 30 papers.

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.

Javascript and Form Saves

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 11:06:00 +0000

As I’ve been working on the web front end for the PWC database, we ran into an interesting problem. Our patient records are implemented w/ a “tab style for the display of different parts of the record. Unfortunately, the folks using the database kept tabbing over to a different part of the record which wound up not saving any of the changes they made. My original quick fix for this was to have the tab buttons also save. But that made me nervous. I worried that if someone accidentally changed things or if I was giving a demo, a change to a new tab would save bad data.

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!

Copyright infringement on campus

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 15:33:05 +0000

I can’t turn around anymore without hearing something new about how colleges and universities are public enemy number 1 with the copyright industry. In early February, the Recording Industry Association of America released a top 25 list of the schools to which they have sent notices of alleged copyright infringement. Right after that, they started announced that they would start suing students and that they were going to send “pre-subpoena and “settlement notices to campuses.

Wolverines!!

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 01:03:49 +0000

er, sorry just a minor Red Dawn reference – it’s not my fault, I grew up in the 80s.

Now that I’ve got that out of my system, a note on a new toy. As I mentioned before, I’m going to go (mostly) digital on my trip to Yellowstone. I bought 8 GB of memory cards which is only 800 or so pictures in raw format. For the past several years, I’ve shot around 800 pictures in film. On the one hand, I suspect I’ll take more pictures in digital since the marginal cost is basically zero. On the other hand, I’ll have the ability to prune out any bad shots. Still, I suspect that I’ll wind up wanting more memory cards.

New blog category: plumbing

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 02:53:45 +0000

It felt like I was griping a lot about plumbing here, so I thought I would make it a new category and go back and classify old posts as “plumbing if they were water related. So far, I’ve found 14 posts on plumbing problems – more than I’ve written about photography :-(. That’s depressing.

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.

Bob Ross

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 20:54:24 +0000

Created by “ the Robot Economist, and for hsarik, it’s Bob Ross and the Joy of Painting Missiles. Click the picture for the full sized image with rotating scenery.

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:

The FBI's national security letters

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 02:55:19 +0000

Sometime in late September or early October of 2001, I received a call from an individual identifying himself as an agent of the FBI and asking for information about the owner of an email account from the place I worked. He stated that he believed the account was relevant to a terrorist investigation. Of course, this was in the immediate aftermath of September 11th and everyone had security concerns, but I was also certain that I didn’t want to give away information to someone who shouldn’t have it. Following a fairly standard procedure, I requested his phone number, badge number and locale so that I could contact the FBI to confirm his identity. The agent gave me a lot of grief about this, noted that I was putting lives at risk by not immediately complying, etc., but I assured him that I would call right back.

immigration update

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 02:39:58 +0000

Back in August, I wrote a brief summary of a conversation I had with my mother on immigration as well as a longer summary of a great NY Times article on immigration. In general, I don’t have a problem with immigrants. I think that they add a lot to the country and they don’t cause nearly the harm to wages that people attribute to them. While I wouldn’t accuse anyone of racism, it wouldn’t surprise me if xenophobia is behind most of the opposition to immigrants. Interestingly, as this LA Times article discusses, two new California studies indicate a) that immigrants boost the wages of native born citizens by an average of 4%; and b) that immigrants have significantly lower incarceration rates than native born citizens.

and people wonder why the change to DST worries me...

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 23:38:06 +0000

In 2005, congress mandated a change to daylight savings time, essentially, starting it three weeks earlier (March 11th, this year) and ending it three weeks later. Our local paper is requesting suggestions for what people will do with their 22 extra hours of daylight. Here’s my suggestion: spend the time fixing all of the computer problems caused by the DST change.

Essentially, a change to DST is very similar to a self-inflicted Y2K problem. If you want to get a sense of how time/date issues can affect computer systems that aren’t prepared, take a look at this article regarding the new F-22 Raptor and it’s problems with the International Date Line. I wasn’t worried about Y2K because we knew about the issue for years and most modern operating systems and software had already addressed it. With the DST changes, we haven’t had nearly enough notice or preparation. Now, I’m not stocking up on canned goods, but I’m pretty certain that March 11th is going to bring about extra work.

A subversive proposal

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 20:45:31 +0000

A few years ago, I was an assistant research professor in a department whose college was undergoing its accreditation process. This happened, I believe, every five years or so and was a generally grueling process. Faculty were asked to maintain student work and submit it, anonymously, to the accreditation committee. We were asked to keep track of a representative set of students considered to be good, middle and poor performers. Labs spaces were evaluated. The process for determining curriculum was examined, etc., etc.

subject: "electronics question"

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 19:22:01 +0000

If the subject of the email is “electronics question, then it’s extremely ironic spam or yet another question from an undergraduate looking for someone to do their homework:

Subject: electronics question

with the aid of a clearly labelled diagram explain briefly the movement and type of charges involved in the formatiion of an unbaised pn junction. 2)draw the diagram of a self-bais circuit using the npn transistor. 3a) for what voltage will the reverse current in a pn junction silicon diode reach 95% of its saturation value at room temperature? b) what is the ratio of the current for a forward bais of 0.2v to the current for the same magnitude of reverse bais? c)if the reverse saturation current is 10pA, what are the forward currents for voltages of 0.5, 0.6 and 0.7v respectively.

Looks like the later to me. Silly Swedish kids.

I know he's a professor of economics, but...

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 03:49:21 +0000

I know he’s a professor of economics, but does that mean Russell Roberts gets to lie in nearly every paragraph of his editorial, “ Workers are fine with fewer unions? I guess it does. Okay, in fairness, he may not be lying, but an editorial this bad means it’s either that or the author is incompetent.

I’m not going to tackle every single incorrect statement here, but there are a few that really stand out:

those wacky students

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 01:20:22 +0000

I love email like this:

sir/madam plz if u can send me aticles on image compression and neural networks for my thesis reserach work. thanks XXXXX

I always want to respond back that I’ll jump right on it since I have nothing better to do.

This is in direct contrast to a very nice email I received from an instructor at an Indian university asking to get a pdf copy of a lab manual that one of my old professors and I wrote 10 years ago. That one, I’ll go to the archives and retrieve to send on.

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.

World Domination Battle

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 19:25:53 +0000

If you haven’t seen World Domination Battle yet, you really need to. I could try to write something profound about how nice it is to see the Internet as a platform for game delivery, but instead I’ll just say that it’s a lot of fun. No matter who your favorite (or least favorite) world leader is – they’re made fun of.

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

The limits of education

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 03:57:05 +0000

There’s a saying about education (I would call it a joke, but it hits too close to home for that), the process of education is learning more and more about less and less until finally, you know absolutely everything about absolutely nothing. This is pretty close to the truth. For a period of time in the 90s, I was one of the world’s foremost expert on the subject of using artificial neural networks for image and video compression – talk about your niche subjects. If you read the titles of dissertations, they are all extremely specific. For the most part, PhDs are specialists and generalists are few and far between. In fact, I was once approached to interview at Sandia National Labs because I was one of the few PhDs they had a resume for who was a generalist (I turned down the interview since I had just started in my current position).

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.

more like this please...

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 14:23:15 +0000

I mentioned several months ago how academic journals were mostly a scam perpetrate by the publishers on universities. One of the things that I briefly discussed was how the entire editorial staff of the journal Topology had announced their resignation. Well, 2006 wrapped up and the former editors of Topology have announced that they will create a new journal called the Journal of Topology (not very creative, but what do you want, they’re mathematicians, not writers).

Regulation vs Legislation

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 02:12:23 +0000

Last week, the president signed an executive order that changes the way that regulations are made. The order establishes a new standard for creating regulations: the agency must show that the market has failed to correct the problem. Most consumer advocates are upset by the move which will make it harder to regulate business that harm the public.

I agree that the order will end up harming the public; however, I also think that the president does have the right to issue the order. Our government is divided into three branches, two are relevant here: congress (the legislative branch) and the presidency (the executive branch). The executive is the only branch with a single outlook – that of the president. All of the executive agencies report to him through the cabinet.

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.

Yellowstone 3

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 16:22:54 +0000

Yellowstone 2

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 16:22:45 +0000

Yellowstone 1

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 16:22:36 +0000

Photography

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 16:22:24 +0000

I don't know why I do it

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 04:05:55 +0000

I listened to the president’s speech tonight on the radio and then on the television when I got home. I don’t know why I do it. Listening to the president makes my ears want to explode, my eyes want to pop out of my head and my foot want to go through the television.

As near as I can tell, the “new way forward is essentially what we claim we’ve been trying to do all along. The only difference seems to be that this time we’ll succeed [insert eye roll here]. Why? Not because we’re doing anything different, only because we’ll be sending 20,000 more targets, er troops, to the region. Of course, 20,000 troops is no where near enough to help – we would need ten to twenty times that number. 20,000 is just enough to claim we’re trying something new, but likely not enough to actually accomplish anything.

Copyright advocacy

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 01:49:15 +0000

I had lunch yesterday with our scholarly communications officer – basically, copyright guru. We were meeting because I (and apparently a few other people in IT) had commented that we were looking for the scholarly communications officer to take the lead in positioning the university on different copyright issues. He thought that was interesting because that’s what he thought he had been doing.

We discussed a number of issues, only a few of which he had been working on. From memory, the following are the copyright concerns that I have and that I would like the university to take a position on:

another example of not getting by in America

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 01:56:32 +0000

If you’ve read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, it’ll be pretty obvious why Walmart’s continued quest for efficiency is bad for employees and workers. The latest example? High-tech scheduling software designed to dynamically tune employee schedules to meet real-time fluctuations in the number of customers. The result will be low wage workers on-call to meet customer surges and the possibility of being asked to go home during lulls. This will make paychecks even less stable. Add to that, dynamic checks on whether an employee is reaching full-time status or overtime so that their schedule can be scaled back, and you have the makings of an increasingly unfair workplace – regardless of value of the minimum wage.

Pat Robertson

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 01:38:04 +0000

Pat Robertson’s almost 77 years old. Unfortunately, I don’t think the lord will call him home any time soon because it’s just too much fun to lie to him.

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.

From the department of "the more things change, the more they stay the same"

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 02:57:47 +0000

I’m reading the collected writings of Ben Franklin from the Library of America (yes, all 1600 or so pages of it), and I ran across the following passage:

It is remarkable that soldiers by profession, men truly and unquestionably brave, seldom advise war but in cases of extream [sic] necessity. While mere rhetoricians, tongue-pads and scribes, timid by nature, or from their little bodily exercise deficient in those spirits that give real courage, are ever bawling for war on the most trifling occasions, and seem the most blood-thirsty of mankind.

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.

HR should be so proud

Mon, 25 Dec 2006 22:31:18 +0000

HR should be so proud

if only I had known...

Mon, 25 Dec 2006 22:29:57 +0000

Wow – the 10 most dangerous toys of all time. If only I had known, I would have had Christmas presents for my nieces (just kidding mom).

The scary thing is that I remember most of these. The disappointing thing is that we never owned any of them.

Light

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 02:54:19 +0000

Some mornings I should just plan to be late for work. This morning was probably one of them. While driving in, I kept getting distracted by how beautiful everything looked. No, I wasn’t high, it’s just that the light was so gorgeous that the most mundane, and even ugly, objects looked beautiful.

Perhaps I should explain. When you’re interested in photography, you quickly learn that it’s all about light. The amount, the color, the quality, the reaction of your film to it – it’s all about light. The ISO number for your film is all about light, go from ISO 50 to ISO 100 and you half the amount of light you need to make an image (aka, you can use a faster shutter or smaller aperture). Open your lens up one stop, e.g., from f/11 to f/8 and you’ve just doubled the amount of light reaching the film (f-stops go up by the square root of 2, but they related to the ration of lens diameter to focal length so the area of the lens doubles). Change the speed of the shutter and you affect how much light reaches the film. By working all of the doubles and halves, you can attempt to achieve the effect you want given the limits of the light you have. For example, when I shoot water, I often want a slow shutter speed which necessitates a small lens aperture. But sometimes when there is too much light, even the smallest aperture won’t get you a slow enough shutter.

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 🙂

pictures from the new camera

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 02:16:45 +0000

I haven’t posted any pictures from the new camera yet – mostly because they’ve been throw away shots where I’ve tried to get a sense of the new camera. But here are a handful. Only the picture of Luke (the snake) is full sized (3872 x 2592), the rest have been reduced. Oh, and the red bellied woodpecker was taken using my 300mm lens with the doubler and the 1.5x magnifying factor of the digital. He was probably 30 feet up in the tree, so I’m not too unhappy with the shot – now I need to get a shot of the pair of pileated woodpeckers that hang out in the back yard.

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!

going digital

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 17:10:03 +0000

Okay, I’m taking the plunge. A Nikon D80 with 18-135mm lens and 8 GB worth of SDHC cards arrived on my doorstep yesterday. The D80 body was a Christmas present from K’s parents! I used extra birthday money to get the memory and the lens kit.

I’ve got a number of reasons for going digital. There’s finally enough resolution in an affordable camera. The D80 is a 10.2 megapixel camera. That’s about 1/2 as much as I can pull off of a slide using a 4k dpi scanner, but about twice what I usually do scan – good compromise. The SLR body will use (almost) all of my current lenses. I tend to take more nature photography images than other types, the D80 gives you a 1.5X increase in focal length as compared to my film cameras. Last night I tested it with a doubler and a 300mm lens. That took me out to 600mm of glass, plus the 1.5X factor – 900mm equivalent in something I can hike with! The ISO adjustment means that even the 2 f-stop loss of light from using the doubler is manageable.

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.

follow-up to "cyber monday"

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 03:10:54 +0000

It’s nice to have one’s predictions shown to be right.

But perhaps the scariest paragraph stated:

Overall, the study concluded that 37% of consumers were shopping in stores on Black Friday – and 41% of those were out between midnight and 8 am. 80% mentioned special as their motivation to go on a shopping tour, while 28% said that the “tradition of Black Friday was a factor in their decision to spend money that day. Despite long lines, 64% indicated that they enjoyed their Black Friday experience and said they would do it again next year.

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. 🙂

predictions... "Cyber Monday"

Mon, 27 Nov 2006 16:40:30 +0000

Let me get a prediction in here before the data come out tonight or tomorrow. “Cyber Monday will be a disappointment to retailers. They will do more electronic business than they did last year, but not significantly more than they did last Friday or next Monday. Any uptick is going to be small and due to people paying extra attention to online sales.

“Cyber Monday (sorry, I can’t help but put it in quotes) is yet another marketing ploy. The theory is that when people go back to the office, they’ll use the high-speed connection to shop online. The problem is that the majority of people who shop online already have a high-speed connection at home. Add to that the companies that are cracking down on online shopping (and game playing and general web surfing) from the office and I’m guessing that it’ll be a non-event.

Poindexter

Fri, 24 Nov 2006 17:55:40 +0000

It’s taken me a bit to write about Admiral Poindexter’s visit and the small group talk we had with him. Let me start by reminding folks that here’s a guy who was convicted of lying to congress. The conviction was later overturned on a technicality. He’s also very politically savvy. I once asked my father if he would ever pursue becoming a general in the army. He told me that he was hoping to make full colonel (he later retired as a lt. colonel), but that becoming a general required a literal act of congress and that you needed to become a politician. I would assume the same thing is the case with an admiral and doubly so in the case of Poindexter who managed to become the highest ranking geek in government. All of which is to say take my impressions with a grain of salt.

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

why i love the internet - reason 768

Sat, 18 Nov 2006 02:38:28 +0000

The Disney illustrated Communist Manifesto…

p.s. fwiw, some of this is Warner Bros. and Hannah Barbara (but who’s keeping score)

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

Admiral John Poindexter to speak at Duke University

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 04:06:24 +0000

In case you are looking for something interesting to do next week, go to Love Auditorium at Duke University on November 15th at 5pm. Admiral John Poindexter will be giving a talk: “ A Vision for Countering Terrorism Through Information and Privacy Protection Technologies for the 21st Century. It should be an interesting and thought provoking discussion of where Poindexter draws the line between security and privacy.

I’ll be meeting with Poindexter and a small group at 3pm – quite the birthday present.

"A plan, a plan, my kingdom for a plan!"

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 17:47:55 +0000

Now that the Democratic Party has won congress, a result I am thrilled to see, there will be increasing cries for them to present “A Plan for Iraq. Leaving aside the constitutional issues, i.e., the executive branch is responsible for military operations, while congress controls the purse strings and provides oversight, asking for a plan at this point is a complete exercise in futility. There were a number of plans presented or endorse by Democrats over the past four years and all of them were ignored. At this point, Republicans are basically saying, “we’ve ignored you for years, but now that it’s completely fubar’d what do you intend to do about it?

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.

why only two political parties

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 04:16:48 +0000

The votes are cast, the results are coming in. There’s not much more to do on the political front, other than wait for the final results. While I’m waiting for that to happen, a few remarks on a conversation that I recently saw too late to comment on.

The question was why is it so hard to get third party candidates on the ballot (e.g., libertarians, greens, etc.)? One person noted that even the Iraqis and Afghanis have more choices than we do in the U.S. where you have to decide between the Democratic and Republican parties.

North Korean nuclear test

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 00:03:14 +0000

Well, it seems that we finally know what happened with the North Korean nuclear test that fizzled. They apparently mistranslated the Arabic documents the U.S. posted online.

Okay, so neither of those is really very funny. On the one hand, the U.S. posted a whole host of Arabic documents from Iraq that had never been examined before in the vague hope that someone would be able to find evidence that Iraq had a WMD program before we invaded. This was idiotic. It’s equivalent to my posting an entire database of personal information in the hopes that someone online could determine if there were social security numbers in it.

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.

the high cost of academic journals

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 02:52:56 +0000

Publishers of academic journals have a sweet deal going. The content is written by researchers. The publisher hires a few academics to edit the journal. The editors then identify reviewers in the academic community. The reviewers cull the wheat from the chaff and make suggestions to help turn the later into the former. For the papers that are finally selected, the researchers/authors sign over the copyright to the publisher, so they now own the intellectual property. The publisher solicits ads and then prints the whole thing. Once printed, the publisher sells the journal to everyone involved and their schools.

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.

Women faculty at Harvard

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 13:31:45 +0000

The Chronicle of Higher Education today notes a report from Harvard regarding the number of women being offered tenure track faculty positions and the number accepting. In 2005-2006, women were offered 39% of the tenure track faculty positions. Unfortunately, only 20% of those accepting positions were female. This compares to 2004-2005 when 40% of those accepting tenure track faculty positions were female.

There are two conclusions you can draw from this:

Biometrics - fingerprint scanners

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 14:00:05 +0000

I recently had a small argument with a vendor selling biometric fingerprint scanners tied to your credit card number. He said that they were the greatest and most secure thing ever; I said that there weren’t any standards and that the security of the devices was questionable.

I wish I had seen this earlier.

and speaking of population statistics

Sat, 21 Oct 2006 17:00:25 +0000

last week saw the 300 millionth American. I happened to be online about that time and saw the U.S. census office’s population clock hit 3×10^8:

I don’t have too much to say about hitting 300 million people. It seems like something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, population growth helps increase the level productivity in the economy. On the other hand, it already seems like we’ve got too many people, particularly at the U.S. level of per capita consumption.

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?

Things that make you go blind

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 20:42:07 +0000

No, not that – Programming.

I need to do some statistical work to test a theory. The best approach in order to compare my results is to do the work in R. But it looks like I’ll need to extend a package. I download the package from CRAN (the Comprehensive R Archive Network), unpack it and start trying to figure out how it all works. Unfortunately, it is written in Fortran, C and R. Untangling it will take forever.

Thinking about security and usability

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 03:06:24 +0000

IT security (and for that matter, other security concerns too) are often seen as conflicting with usability. There is something to that. If you take any given technology and turn up the level of security it provides, you will almost always decrease the usability of the system.

Consider passwords. If people are allowed to choose their own passwords, they will typically choose something very usable for them. They’ll pick their dog’s name, their wife’s name, their userid, etc. These passwords don’t provide much security. To compensate, we often turn up the security knob and require “stronger passwords, e.g., minimum of six characters with no dictionary words and multiple “character classes.

Separation of church and state (updated below ~4:30pm)

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 14:31:02 +0000

I’ve never understood why the separation of church and state is still debated in this country. I have an even harder time understanding why people would try to undermine the separation of church and state, but as this article in the New York Times shows, they do.

Keeping religion out of politics and politics out of religion has a long history in this country. Our first amendment has a clause which states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. This clearly states that congress may not create a national religion. But, may congress write laws with respect to a religion? Can congress financially support or encourage a religion? Supporters of the separation of church and state say, “no, while many religious advocates say “yes.

Free hugs!

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 02:15:30 +0000

and if you haven’t seen this, you should – it’s very good.

a letter from Iraq

Sun, 08 Oct 2006 16:49:38 +0000

Time Magazine publishes a letter from a Marine officer in Iraq – read it.

daily dose of the surreal...

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 23:52:48 +0000

When your day is lacking surrealism, visit the Nietzsche Family Circus

Identity vs. Equality of Opportunity

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 02:43:42 +0000

Brad DeLong discussing why we like diversity and identitity notes that in addition to prefering to discuss diversity because it is easier than tackling the hard problem of a lack of equality in opportunity, we like identity and diversity because they are inherently a good thing:

Now normally–in my usual mind–I am an enthusiastic supporter of what I take to be Walter Benn Michaels’s central point: that we have collectively gotten ourselves off balance because we are responding to the fact that celebrating diversity is easy and doing something about upward mobility and the intergenerational reproduction of economic and social inequality is hard.

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.

workplace culture

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 01:51:02 +0000

Caveat lector – this is not a fully formed thought, I’m just trying to get some ideas down.

I worked with a guy (not a friend) who was obsessed by workplace culture. As near as I could tell, he came from an environment with an entirely different culture and didn’t care for the one we had. At one point, he and another person (a friend) gave a talk on culture. They described different aspects of culture, including appearance and behavior.

for the record, Kip Hawley is an idiot

Sun, 01 Oct 2006 18:05:43 +0000

I missed this when it came out last week, but apparently, a gentleman named Ryan Bird was detained at the airport last week for writing “ Kip Hawley is an idiot on his plastic baggie filled with toiletries. Apparently, the security trolls highly educated and diligent TSA employees took the statement to be a threat or at least behavior that they didn’t approve of and detained Mr. Bird – while telling him that he didn’t have 1st Amendment Rights at the TSA checkpoint.

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.

Stock spam

Sun, 24 Sep 2006 22:26:26 +0000

One of the disadvantages of having so many email accounts is the number of spam you get. Recently, I’ve been noticing an increase in stock spam making it through my spam filters. I’ve been wondering how effective the spam is and whether or not one could make money shorting these stocks.

Apparently, I’m not the only one. The local paper carried a NYT article titled “ Many people fall for stock spam. In the article, the author describes the work of Frieder and Zittrain. Frieder and Zittrain found that pink sheet stocks that were heavily touted in spam were significantly more likely to be traded than non-touted stocks. Purchasing these stocks would lead a 5.25% loss within two days. For the most heavily touted stocks, the average loss was almost 8% in two days.

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.

:-(

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 18:29:20 +0000

just heard from K – the flying squirrel didn’t make it through the night. She’s guessing that the impact of the truck caused internal bleeding. unfortunately, there wasn’t much she could do

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

Dr. Strange-Opinions: or how I stopped thinking and learned to attack the straw

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 01:53:03 +0000

You can bet that any article written by a conservative that starts with “Liberals don’t value a college education? will be full of crap. The only relevant question is “what kind of crap will it be full of? In the September 22nd issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Chronicle Review, Anthony P. Carnevale writes an opinion piece titled “ Discounting Education’s Value. The first couple of paragraphs give you a flavor of his arguments:

i apparently picked the wrong profession

Sun, 17 Sep 2006 17:51:03 +0000

As I read the newspaper this morning, I came across Charles Krauthammer’s latest piece on how Iran is in the crosshairs of a U.S. decision. In the opinion piece, he lays out the costs of action and the costs of inaction and concludes that the U.S. has less than a year to decide how to handle Iran.

Leave aside the callousness of someone whose costs do not include tens or hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. The thing that struck me most is why do we let this man write a column at all?! He been wrong about everything he’s written in the past five years. He’s been wrong about how to fight terrorism, he’s been wrong about the war in Iraq. He hasn’t gotten a thing right in all the years I’ve seen him in the paper.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - chemistry teacher?

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 00:52:29 +0000

According to Manolo’s critique Ahmadinejad dresses like a high school chemistry teacher:

Briefly and remarkably, the President of the Iran wears the same khaki windbreaker, wrinkled trousers, cheap oxford shirts, scruffy beard and wild eyes favored by the aging high school chemistry teachers everywhere.

Yes, in his youth he was the firebrand who would shake the very foundations of the society, but today he is content to expound upon his paranoid conspiracy theories while exercising his petty autocratic powers over the dull kids who sit in the back of the class.

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.

i may have a new theme song

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 11:18:26 +0000

you just gotta love weird al. not sure who made the video piece, but that’s pretty cute too.

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.

i am such a nerd...

Sat, 02 Sep 2006 02:58:56 +0000

Okay, I’m a bigger nerd than I thought. The latest book that I’m dying to get when it comes out on Monday… “The State of Working America from the Economic Policy Institute. 350+ pages of analysis on wages, health care, wealth and productivity in America. How can you resist.

If that doesn’t sound appealing, at least read the executive summary. It’s only 14 pages, it’s online, and it’s free.

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.

Dropping SAT Scores

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 01:43:04 +0000

Matt Yglesias sees the recent Washington Post article describing the fall in SAT scores after the most recent test changes and asks what’s the big deal. On the face of it, Matt makes some good points. Scores are only down 7 points (5 in reading and 2 in math) and for any given student, that really isn’t a big deal. The Washington Post article, while suggesting that there may be some underlying causes (e.g. the test changes or students not learning enough) also notes that it could be a one year blip.

"Real wages fail to match a rise in productivity"

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 02:17:25 +0000

An article today in the New York Times titled “Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity takes a look at how wages have risen, or more to the point failed to rise, during the most recent economic expansion. At a time when productivity (the monetary value of an hour of labor) has risen dramatically, increasing corporate profits, employee wages are basically falling. If you include benefits such as health insurance, they are rising – but nowhere near as fast as productivity.

It's official - the government does consider evolutionary biology to be a science

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 12:08:38 +0000

Last week there was a minor uproar in the academic world when the government presented the list of majors that qualified for money under the National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent (SMART) Grant program. The problem was that evolutionary biology was left off of the list. The feds claim that this was an oversight and on Friday added evolutionary biology back to the list of qualifying majors.

So, even I am not so paranoid as to think that this was a conspiracy to keep students from studying evolution. But at the same time, I am not so dumb as to think this was accidental. The list of majors comes straight from the Classification of Instructional Programs codes. In the biology section, there are ten biology related programs. Of those ten, only one was missing – evolutionary biology.

The social life of the a Duke undergraduate (as seen in the press)

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 03:17:15 +0000

The Dallas Morning News recently published an editorial by Thomas Hibbs entitled “ College Kids Get Brain, No Soul. In the editorial, Hibbs references the exceedingly disturbing article in Rolling Stone called “ Sex & Scandal at Duke.

The Rolling Stone article discusses the social scene at Duke where “work hard, play hard has always been a motto. According to the article, in recent years, the “work hard portion has morphed into an obsessive desire to please faculty, working to produce high quality papers which will be accepted by professors in order to get good grades, graduate with honors and get a good job. The “play hard portion of the motto has turned into an obsession with alcohol and casual sex, bleeding back into “working hard to maintain the perfect body, social connections, etc.

Update on the Ohio University plagiarism

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 01:20:12 +0000

In reference to my previous comments on the plagiarism scandal in the school of engineering at Ohio Universtity, yesterday the university announced a set of “ comprehensive strategies to address academic honesty. Among the steps being taken is to examine 55 theses for signs of plagiarism. From these, they have found 35 incidents that will require a hearing. Punishments handed out could include the revocation of the former student’s degree. Furthermore, the two professors whom have been implicated have been relieved of their advising duties.

"The Body Hunters" by Sonia Shah

Thu, 24 Aug 2006 02:22:46 +0000

There’s nothing I love more than a good book, unless it’s a free good book. Last week I was sent “The Body Hunters by Sonia Shah. I’ve been sent free books based on my job before (either as a research professor or as security officer), but I’ve never been sent a book on the ethics of the pharmacutical industry before. It took me a bit to figure out, then I realized that I’m presenting at a Human Subjects conference. I’m sure they sent the book to all of the presenters.

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.

racial profiling for terrorism

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 22:53:26 +0000

I’ve heard and read a number of people saying “political correctness be damned, we should use racial profiling to identify terrorists. The problem I’ve always had with this is that it makes no sense. Try the following test, identify the terrorist:

young muslim male
young muslim female
asian male or female
caucasian male or female
black male or female
hispanic male or female

If you said that 1 and 2 have been terrorists and therefore we should profile them, you are partially right. However, what about all of the asian terrorists (e.g. Fillipinos)? Caucasians? Hmm, the IRA, David Koresh, Timmothy McVeigh, etc. As near as I can guess, the only racial groups that shouldn’t be profiled would be blacks and hispanics. This can’t work.

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.

a sign of the apocalypse?

Sat, 19 Aug 2006 16:29:40 +0000

Hmm, someone should go check the “ rapture index, I’m about to link to an article at Cato Unbound – the Cato Institute’s Blog. Richard Rodriguez write’s a beautiful article regarding Mexican Immigrants, their coming to America and what the clash of cultures means to second and third generation Mexican-American immigrants.

The response article by Victor Davis Hanson, restores my belief in the general silliness of the Cato Institute. For example, Hanson notes:

Only six out of ten second-generation Mexican Americans on average graduate from high school in four years; and less than ten percent have a BA degree—the legacy not of racism or America’s “cold heart,?? but of millions arriving from Mexico without English, education, and legality.

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.

frustrations (social security, not work)

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 03:16:01 +0000

Some days, I just can’t write about work frustrations. Not that I don’t want to or that I don’t think they’re interesting, just that it’s part and parcel of the whole confidentiality thing.

On days like today, it’s important to write about other frustrations (trust me on this). Today’s topic: scare tactics in government funded letters. I received my social security statement the other day and it has a lovely section on the front page entitled “About Social Security’s future…

things that make a security officer cry

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 19:33:35 +0000

I spent a lot of time last week looking at an application in order to assess its security. The thing that was troubling me was that this is a web application and the primary form for data entry was defined like:

form name=foo method=post action=

This means that the nothing happens when you hit submit on the form – at least not in the html world. So, I took a closer look and found that each of the buttons (submit and clear) actually had a field “onclick=’doSomething();’ attribute.

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.

a nomenclature question

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 16:49:29 +0000

given that the vulnerability and the patches haven’t yet been released, does this constitute a “-1 day exploit?

High dynamic range photography

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 02:59:42 +0000

Okay, now I’m just embarassed. I just heard about high dynamic range (HDR) photography from a NY Times article. I plead that it’s mostly just a trick and, hey, I primarily shoot slide film anyway.

So for others who haven’t heard of HDR photography, it’s a technical work around for one of the more difficult photographic problems – the problem of the dynamic range of film vs that of the eye. In a nutshell, the human eye has an enormous dynamic range. It can distinguish between two different very bright shades while simultaneously distinguishing between two very dark shades. It’s dynamic range, IIRC, is somewhere around 10. On the other hand, slide film and prints from print film have a dynamic range of 5, maybe 6. That doesn’t sound like much difference, except that this is a logarithmic scale.

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.

homework on the question of immigration

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 02:18:39 +0000

About a month ago, I was in Des Moines and talking with my mother. She asked me what I thought about immigration and I noted that I didn’t consider it a particular problem because immigration is natural and pretty much unstoppable. Due to my poor recollection, I can’t recall if I also noted that the U.S. has historically had a fairly decent view of immigration, much better than the proposals being floated around in congress. These proposals, ironically, are similar to the policies in Europe that recently led to rioting in France.

A few weeks after I got back, the NY Times published a lengthy article on the economics of immigration which fairly summarized my views and even brought up some great information I hadn’t heard before. I sent it to my mother, and being the former English teacher that she is, she asked me to summarize it (aka, write a book report). So, here we go – a bit out of order from the original in order to better present the material, but basically a summary of “The Immigration Equation by Roger Lowenstein.

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.

Time to switch to digital?

Wed, 26 Jul 2006 02:44:24 +0000

I like taking pictures. When it comes to outdoor/wildlife photography, I like taking lots of pictures. K and I went on vacation to Yellowstone for two weeks, getting back at the beginning of June. I wound up with 22 rolls of 36 exposure slide film. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s almost 800 slides. Considering the number of “37 exposure rolls I took, I feel safe calling it 800.

I get the strangest email...

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 13:52:08 +0000

After 5+ years of doing image compression research back in the 90s, I get the strangest email requests. These usually come from students who are trying to get out of doing their own homework. Today’s example came with the subject line “plz help me. I almost deleted it as spam, but decided to take a look.

hi respected sir, i am ******** **** and i am student of final year of electronics engineering i have given a project of image compression using JPEG and DCT in MATLAB if u can help me plz help me in this matter i shall be very thankful to u in this regard ihave just given very short time i have just left 3 days for it.if u can plz help me if u have code of the image compression plz give me i shall be very thankful to u.my email address is ********@gmail.com. if u know abt or u have than plz help me.plz.me will wait 4 ur response.plz help me.if u have some report on it plz do forward to me.i shall be very thankful to u in this regad. i realy need the code and REPORT or some documentation abt it plz do forward me.plz help me.plz

Password security question

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 15:00:21 +0000

I wonder if these folks have read the recent article in the NY Times regarding prosopagnosia?

The company Passfaces has a password replacement technology that uses the brain’s ability to recognize faces. The idea is that the user selects a set of faces. They are then presented with a series of options where each of their faces is hidden in a group of other faces. By correctly selecting their faces, they authenticate themselves. The company says that using Passfaces will reduce calls to a help desk because people can remember faces for years without seeing them. There’s a demo which allows you to test how easy the system is.

somehow i'm not surprised...

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 02:53:29 +0000

So, a “Which Tarot card are you quiz isn’t my usual thing. I blame labrownThe magician You scored 59 change, 74 wellbeing, 71 wisdom, and 87 truthThe magician represents the conscious mind. With focus on an idea or goal, the conscious mind sets into action these ideas and brings them forth to the material world. The magicians hands are stretched forth, one to the sky holding a wand, and the other pointing to the ground below. This is suggestive that as is “as above, so below. The table in front of him has all the tools to make this possible. The wand, cup, sword, and pentacle, which are representative of all the suits to the tarot cards. The mage has an undergarment of pure white, showing his pure wisdom and is held shut by the serpent around his waist. The outer garment is red, symbolic of desire and passion, which has no belt holding it shut so it can be removed if necessary. The flowers in the garden represent things as well. The red roses are symbolic of desires, and the white lilies represent pure thought, untainted by desire. This card is under the vibration of the number 1.

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?

Random recent pictures

Fri, 14 Jul 2006 02:57:51 +0000

My life as the husband of a wildlife rehabilitator… A client…

A client turned pet (don’t ask)…

Pyramid of baby turtles (no, this isn’t posed)…

A recent delivery – I wonder what the poor driver thought…

but at least it had dry ice in it…

About Alkahest

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 00:44:21 +0000

Why Alkahest?

It’s mainly a joke, but on a couple of different levels. Alkahest is a mythical substance, thought by alchemists to be the universal solvent. The universal solvent was the one substance that could dissolve anything (which leads of course to the obvious question about what you keep it in). It was also thought to either be or be useful in making the philosopher’s stone. Calling a blog Alkahest implies at least that you are willing to take on a large number of different subjects as opposed to specializing. In modern chemistry, water is known as the universal solvent. Given the number of water/plumbing related problems (and therefore posts) I have, this amuses me. Finally, a blog really needs some title other than its URL.