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. ...

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.

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 ...

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. ...

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. ...

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.

Finished up a lot of little things this weekend. Nothing too terribly exciting: Planted some herbs and covered them with hardware cloth to keep the squirrels out. Basil (lots of basil), thyme and rosemary. I was looking for sage, but couldn’t find any. Fixed the water softener – the backwash drain hose was so old that it was leaking onto the floor every time the water softener ran. Unfortunately, I can’t find where the new hose should connect under the hose, so for now it’s draining into the utility sink. Finished painting the upstairs hall. Back in October/November, K and I pulled off all of the 80’s-style wall paper. It’s been sitting bear for months, but for the past two weekends, I’ve been smoothing out the wall and painting. I’ve got the switch plates back up and it looks pretty nice. K’s already planning where she’ll start taking down wall paper next. I’ve discovered a Heisenberg-like principle of plumbing: you can accurately identify either the source or the effects of a water leak, but not both at the same time. This week, I identified a musty smell and the mold that was causing it. Unfortunately, I could only identify the dishwasher as the source of the water. After running the dishwasher without the sound proofing at the bottom, so I could see the leak, I found that it didn’t seem to be leaking. My new theory is that a small leak, not near the mold, was creating excess humidity due to the heat of the dishwasher that was trapped by the sound proofing – but how to test? It’s like Schrodinger’s Cat. Finally, I realized that my laptop hadn’t updated for DST, which is rather uncool. Poking at it a bit, I found out that yum was bombing out before completing the upgrade. The reason is that I did a ‘yum update’ instead of a ‘yum upgrade’ in order to go from FC5 to FC6. So I had a lot of FC5 packages lying around which then broke dependencies. After doing a bit of manual cleanup, I was able to run ‘yum update’ only to find that I had over 600 MB worth of packages that needed downloading. On the plus side, I went ahead and upgraded to the latest development version of yum which has a lot of the new optimizations. That at least made the 363 packages worth of dependencies saner to check. Work is also okay. I ran a proposal for a lightweight authentication mechanism by the technical team and nobody found any major holes in it. It’s nice to have your ideas validated by the experts 🙂 . Next week kicks off my month with internal audit. I’m not really looking forward to that one, but then I suppose somebody needs to keep us honest. Besides, anything they tell us can only help get support for the policies we know we need.

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

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. ...

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. ...