Teleidoscope

Sun, Dec 31, 2006

Power 4: Shaman (Twilight)

Posted at 10:20 pm MST to Net of Mirrors

Alternate Image Izanagi returning from the halls of death pursued by 8 thunder serpents.

Interpretation He is the Dreamer, the wise man, the horned hunter of souls: Odin and Herne, the Autumn God of the West. Hunter and Deer, sacrificer and sacrificed for wisdom's sake, rider of the world tree. He wanders as he wills among the abodes of the living and the dead and the Powers, and not as others journey, and his own dwelling place is hidden, but he may serve as a guide, or a rescuer.

Reversal Wisdom is sought and not found. The gates between the worlds are locked. Neither a guide nor a rescue is available.

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Key 8 of Wood: Completion of the Wood, Completion of Consciousness (Bright)

Posted at 10:19 pm MST to Net of Mirrors

Alternate Image A thicket of branches. If you look closely, the branches make the shapes of deer and wolves and other forest creatures

Interpretation All of the forests are part of the Forest, all of the small ecological niches are meshes of the web of Life. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The deer and wolves keep the Forest healthy.

Reversal

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Sat, Dec 30, 2006

Shoveling

Posted at 1:43 pm MST to Technology

The first time my back went out badly enough to need actual medical care was a day after I had been shovelling snow. I did the classic lean over to pick something up off the coffee table, and something popped. That's about 18 years ago now.

The problem is actually with the iliosacral joint, and also my left hip. The actual shape of the left hip socket is not the same as the other one, and the right (or wrong) kind of stress can lever the joint out of position.

One of the things I did to try to protect my back after that first event was invest in one of the fancy snow shovels with the curvy handles and a light-weight plastic shovel part. It worked very well for about 15 years.

I never had back problems after shoveling with it, right up to the time the plastic shovel part broke when I was digging out after a spring storm that left unusually wet, heavy snow. At the time, I was not able to get another shovel with a curvy handle: it was so late in the season that the stores were selling spring gardening stuff. But I was able to buy an ordinary snow shovel with an aluminum blade and a straight handle. I got a new curvy-handled plastic shovel at the beginning of the next snow season.

I am very glad I did.

From my front door to the end of the driveway, where I usually leave my truck when I expect the snow to be drifty, is probably a bit over 150 feet. I have opened that path 3 times in the past week and a half: once after the first blizzard, once after the Christmas winds drifted the path closed, and now again today, after the latest blizzard.

I did part of my Boxing Day shoveling with the plain shovel, because I had made the mistake of leaving the good shovel in the truck. But I could feel it pulling at my back and hip, so once I was past the big drift that always forms near the house I waded out to the truck through the drifts and then shoveled my way back toward the house.

Today I spent about an hour shoveling the 1-shovel-width path from the house to the truck with the good shovel. (Done as two half-hour-ish bouts of shoveling, with a 15 minute break.) The biggest problem was trying to find where the old path had been, so that I was shoveling fluffy new drifted snow instead of crusty old snow.

I strongly recommend the shovels with curvy handles, even if (or maybe especially if) you only occasionally need to shovel.

The remaining mystery about these blizzards is... Why to the wild bunnies come up onto my porch and deck when it snows and leave tracks right up to my front door? I suppose it is possible they come up on the porch all the time, and I only notice when the snow comes from strange directions and shows their tracks. But I have never noticed rabbit tracks on the deck in previous years. They may have gotten brave while the house was empty, or they really like the new porch I had built last spring. (I can see dog tracks in the yard, too, but not on the porch or deck. Perhaps the dog won't follow the bunnies up onto a porch that isn't its home?)

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Fri, Dec 29, 2006

Tea and Gadgets

Posted at 11:01 am MST to Technology

I'm snowed in again by the new storm. I should probably be careful where I surf on the web: last week when I was snowed in I ended up ordering some high-tech tea gadgets I don't really need. They arrived during the lull in the snow, so I may try them out this afternoon.

When Whole Foods first opened in Boulder, they used to carry lots of different teas from The Republic of Tea, both loose teas, which are really very good, and tea bags, which are really very lame. More recently Whole Foods have tended to stock mostly the tea bags, especially for the herbal teas and decaf varieties, which are the ones I'm supposed to drink.

I've ordered teas and equipment directly from The Republic of Tea in the past, so I'm on their email list even though it has been four years since I ordered anything. (The ship-to address attached to my account was still the corporate housing address in Oregon, which I left at Thanksgiving 2002.) Last week, while checking my ISP's spam filters for false positives, I found an ad from The Republic of Tea so I spent some time browsing thier web-site.

I ended up ordering a half dozen tins of tea: several of my favorites and a few new ones that looked interesting. I also browsed their tea equipment and my inner geek took over. In addition to various imported teapots from japan and China, Republic of Tea sells Bodum tea presses and other Bodum tea equipment. I bought a pair of hand-blown tea glasses that don't need handles because they are double-walled, and a tea trivet/warmer with a place to put a tea-light candle to its proper use, and a high-end Bodum Tea Press that is all glass and stainless steel.

A Tea press is a teapot equipped with a central brewing basket with solid sides at the bottom, and a plunger. When your tea has brewed long enough, you use the plunger to squeeze the leaves down into the bottom section, where they are trapped and no longer able to affect the brewed tea.

I have an older Bodum tea press in my corp-housing equipment stash that has plastic handles and plastic brewing basket, etc. It works well, but after a while the basket has gotten stained and dingy looking, and I always hesitate to run it through the dishwasher, which is probably what it needs. The new one with the metal brewing basket, which I'll keep for home use, is dishwasher safe.

I also got out a box I had been hoarding of Sassafras Tea, which the local King Soopers used to carry until a year or so ago, and searched for it online. It turns out that I could order the boxes of teabags through Amazon. But I also found another source, San Francisco Bay Coffee Company, which offers the loose tea as well as the teabags, in 4 ounce packages or by the pound. That order did not arrive before I got snowed in again, but at least I can drink my last rootbeer teabags knowing that I will soon have more sassafras tea available.

I love the internet.

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Thu, Dec 28, 2006

North Korea and the US Military

Posted at 2:18 pm MST to Current Events

OK, bear with me here..

The blog MakingLight has an article titled "January 2007: United States Conquered by Canada; Pockets of Resistance Quickly Suppressed" in response to a news article "Currently there are no active or reserve Army combat units outside of Iraq and Afghanistan that are rated as 'combat ready.'". Some of the comments are very funny, with people having sarcastic fun with the idea of the US being conquered by Canada, or partitioned between Canada and Mexico, (or even Canada, Mexico and Jamaica).

One of the more serious comments worried about North Korean responses to any weakening of US military strength in Korea, and Charlie Stross responded:

Kid: you don't need to worry about North Korea, their foreign policy is entirely sane and perfectly rational ... once you understand that the USA isn't the centre of their world, or even particularly important to them.

NK is economically weak and surrounded by enemies that have territorial claims to their land -- SK, China, Russia, Japan (over the water) and so on. Therefore, NK foreign policy is predicated on the need to maintain a strong outside military presence in the peninsula as a stabilizing force. That outside military presence is conveniently provided by the USA, which has no territorial claim on NK and can be led around by the nose if you simply threaten to test a missile or refine some uranium. As long as the USA is present in force, nobody else dares to make a move. So whenever it looks as if the level of tension is dropping too low and the USA might start to think about disengaging, the NK government does something whacky like releasing a video of Kim Jong-Il foaming at the mouth or biting the heads off a live cobra, or lobbing a rocket at the Tsushima Straits.

Basically, the USA is in the peninsula because the North Koreans want the USA there, in order to deter the Chinese/Russians/Japanese/South Koreans from starting something.

Clear?

This makes a lot of sense.

Charlie Stross is one of the best current SF writers, and until recently he was a journalist (mostly technology-related). He pays attention to the way things inter-relate, and, being British, he has a usefully different perspective than US commentators. So he often has very illuminating ideas about world affairs.

I wonder where one gets multiheaded cobras, though.

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Wed, Dec 27, 2006

Gate 8: Already accomplished [I Ching 63](Twilight)

Posted at 10:37 pm MST to Net of Mirrors

Alternate Image A mechanical bird in a cage with a spring sticking out.

Interpretation When you stop, you die. You cannot have perfection, only growth or decay, so what looks like an ending or stopping place is preparation for the next stage.
Fire illuminating the abyss. Chaos and change always lie in wait.

Reversal Be careful of the flaws in supposed perfection, and wary of a search for stasis.

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Key 8 Flames: Fellowship with Men, Community, Sameness with People [I Ching 13] (Twilight)

Posted at 10:37 pm MST to Net of Mirrors

Alternate Image Dancers with very different costumes in a circle dance.

Interpretation Alliance with outsiders, not just close kin. Look for the commonalities, not the differences in people and things: all people laugh and weep.
The light supports the heavens. Understanding supports creativity.

Reversal Misunderstandings and divisions. Disruptions of alliances.

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Key 9 of Storms: Seeress in the Storm -- The Librarian (Bright)

Posted at 10:36 pm MST to Net of Mirrors

Alternate Image A woman holding a book or scroll stands beside a rack of other books or scrolls.

Interpretation The importance of Knowledge for its own sake. The Librarian: as a scholar she gathers knowledge, as a curator she preserves it.

Reversal Needed information is hidden or lost.

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Tue, Dec 26, 2006

Key 3 Flames: Stable Fire, Stable Action (Bright)

Posted at 10:14 pm MST to Net of Mirrors

Alternate Image A person (with back to the viewer, or face obscured) juggles 3 stars while balanced on one toe on a rock or mountain peak. The stars have faint comet tails to make their motions mor apparent.

Interpretation Three points can define an ellipse. The sun and stars burn and move forever, in their spirograph orbits. Motive, means and opportunity all are present, permitting deeds that may be famous or infamous. The dance continues.

Reversal Erratic actions. The fires gutter and flare. Things are being dropped.

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Gate 23: Rebirth (Bright)

Posted at 10:13 pm MST to Net of Mirrors

Alternate Image A landscape with a boundary. One side of the boundary is a twilight moss garden, the other sunbaked gravel, like a Zen garden. A humanoid figure congeals from smoke at the boundary.

Interpretation This mirror reflects a time of resurrection and transformation. The kali yuga when a cycle ends and a new and different one begins, an old world ends and a new one is born. The spirit finds its proper place in the new realm. The energy here is not unlike the Judgment in the Tarot.

Reversal A refusal to progress. A cycle that is stuck. Or an inability to find the correct path.

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Mon, Dec 25, 2006

The Gulf Stream and Climate

Posted at 11:23 am MST to Current Events

Interesting. Investigating climate change on USENET rec.arts.sf.science (where some professional atmospheric scientists were posting).

• As of June 2005 the Gulf Stream had already been pushed as far south as Madrid in what had been predicted as the intermediate shutdown pattern.
• The North Atlantic Current is also vulnerable to thermohaline shutdown.
• According to George William Herbert, posting June 20, 2005:

  In other cheerful news, the largest former downwelling
  area in the North Atlantic, off Greenland, seems to have
  turned off as well, according to breaking field reports
  which remain unconfirmed and unpublished as of yet.

• According Keith Morrison, same date:

  Latest research is that it's an atmospheric effect caused by the
  Rockies that's the main reason for a warmer European climate. That,
  and that its on the west side of a continent in the northern
  hemisphere.
  
  So they shouldn't be too bad off until we decide to dismantle
  Colorado.

I'm sure Colorado is glad to be of service...

There is apparently some debate about whether the Gulf Stream intermediate shutdown pattern is related to the Little Ice Age climate pattern in Europe. There are worries about the effect on Indian Ocean monsoons, and the forecast for Africa is apparently "hot and dry": just what's needed in places where desertification is already advancing.

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Sun, Dec 24, 2006

Techlands: The Storm

Posted at 10:54 pm MST to Creative Work

The second Techlands installment, The Storm is up.

I would like to note that the first few paragraphs of this segment were written December 14, well before the blizzard hit Denver.

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Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...

Posted at 7:32 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Some place else. Please.

It's a good thing I left the truck at the foot of the driveway when I got home from Nanette's party last night. This morning I had very strong winds that blew snow back into the places that had been shoveled out. This afternoon it started snowing again.

This isn't a major problem because I had planned a quiet Christmas Eve and Christmas. But this weather is getting a bit old.

I hope everyone is warm and safe tonight and well supplied with goodies for tomorrow.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

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Sat, Dec 23, 2006

Kitchen Toys

Posted at 5:25 pm MST to Technology

After the months of exile in corporate housing, I have been revelling in the availability of my well-equipped kitchen with moderate (as opposed to minuscule) counter space

I am making a stollen to take to my friend Nanette's holiday party. This has become traditional, and her husband and kids were very disappointed the year I was out-of-state for Christmas.

I have made ginger snaps because I love them, and it wouldn't be Christmas without them.

The Stollen and Ginger Snaps recipes are on my recipes page. I think I'm going to do Frittura Dousa and Eggnog on Christmas, and possibly an Apple Cake (all also in the recipes). I may unlimber the pasta machine and try a version of Nonna's Ravioli for New Year's.

I haven't made the usual cookie-cutter Christmas cookies (yet) because I have been playing with some of my more exotic kitchen toys. I may play with cookie cutters and icing tomorrow.

I have made shortbread in my fancy shortbread mold.

I have made anisette pizzelles, with my pizzelle maker.

And I have made a batch of chocolate-peppermint cookies with my cookie press (which looks rather like a raygun).

I'm running out of fruitcake tins to store the cookies in...

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Fri, Dec 22, 2006

Pickup Truck

Posted at 11:55 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Some people in New England think it is strange that I drive a Dodge Dakota Sport pickup truck with a stick shift. This month has provided two examples of why it makes sense for me to do so. First, two weeks ago I loaded it with stuff from the corporate housing apartment in Boston to haul it all home (after hauling most of the stuff from Colorado to Boston last May). And this afternoon I put it in 4-wheel drive mode and let it swim through the drifts to the end of my driveway. High-4 worked better than the low range, but the back of the truck was mostly empty. Putting on the chains probably wouldn't have helped much (and I hate putting on chains).

I got hung up in a drift when I tried to make the 90 degree turn uphill onto the gravel road. My neighbor very kindly dug me out with his garden tractor and gave me a plowed path as far as the end of his driveway, so I didn't need to shovel the drift at the road myself this time, but in general this is the way I have always dealt with drifted snow up here. Put the vehicle into 4 wheel drive and go forward until it stops, back up if possible and try again, and dig it out if it's high-centered. Play games with the clutch and get the rhytm just right: I don't think cars with automatic transmissions can swim through snow drifts. I usually only end up shovelling a small fraction of the distance from my house to the nearest place where other people are breaking trail.

My so-called driveway is more than a hundred feet long. For several years there has been another house whose driveway faces mine (it was built several years after I bought this place) but it seems to be empty this winter so I am alone at the end of the road. My neighbor with the tractor reorganized his driveway a few years ago so that it is now a semicircle with the nearer end only about 50 feet from mine, which helps. In my earliest years in this place, it was more than a hundred fifty feet from the end of my driveway to the nearest piece of road the served any house but mine.

Getting to my house counts as off-road driving in bad weather. And my driveway and the branch of the gravel nearest it isn't the reason I bought a Subaru station wagon the first November after I bought this house. The stretch of gravel road that leads from the paved road up onto the mesa (which does get plowed by the county) is so steep that it CANNOT be paved: it would have insufficient traction when wet or snowy. The first icy day in November after I bought this house, I realized my Escort hatchback didn't have the weight nor traction to climb that hill reliably in bad weather.

This is actually my second pickup truck -- when I got the first one I used to joke that I was having a midlife crisis that led me to buy a bright red 2-seater vehicle with 4 on the floor and a big engine. But, actually, a 4-wheel drive pickup is cheaper than a 4-wheel drive station wagon, even after you add a topper on the back. And it is has more cargo space and MUCH better clearance than a wagon, and generally better gas mileage than an SUV built on the same chassis would have, because it weighs less. That first truck was a Dodge Ram 50 labeled Mitsubishi everywhere except the tail gate and no frills at all.

The "Sport" Dakota means it has frills: air conditioning, cruise control and a bunch of other upgrades in the cab, so it's more like a car than a truck there. And I found a place that sells carpeted bed liners, so with the liner and a fancy fiberglas topper it is a lot like a cut-rate SUV.

The Dakota is another red truck, like the Ram 50. That was the first color on my list that showed up at the dealership after I told them I wanted a new truck. I won't willingly buy a vehicle that's white, gray or very pale blue (and I'm annoyed by the fact that standard rental cars seem to be overwhelmingly white or grey). My parents had two pale blue cars at one time -- a Plymouth Valiant and a Volkswagon Beetle -- and they complained that the cars tended to be invisible in bad weather, and said they would not get that color again. I agree: there is nothing harder to see in a slush storm than a slush colored car, even if the driver turns the lights on. And black and dark blue cars also have problems with visibility, and with heat on sunny days (and would show the dust terribly off the pavement here). So the vehicles I have owned have been, in order: medium green, a medium blue Escort, an "Aztec gold" Subaru wagon, and the two red trucks.

I think I'd like green or gold again next time, but the Dakota is in good shape and fairly low-mileage, and paid for. So unless I wreck it somehow, I plan to keep for a few more years.

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Thu, Dec 21, 2006

Snowbound

Posted at 8:29 pm MST to Current Events

I live on Davidson Mesa, near the town of Superior just outside Boulder. The snow stopped falling about noon today, but we may get more tomorrow night or early Saturday, after highs of 40 tomorrow. The wind was very strong during this storm so there was a lot of drifting, and I'm not going to be going anywhere for a while.

My landline phone is out, even though my DSL is working. My cellphone is fine, and the line that the DSL is on might work if I plugged a phone into it. Power going out is not usually a problem here except during thunderstorms, and if it went out I'd still be ok: I have a woodstove, a full cord of wood, and plenty of candles, oil lamps and lamp oil (also lighters). I also have a month's supply of bottled water (my well water makes good oven cleaner) and plenty of food and other supplies.

I'm a little low on dry catfood, but I have canned tuna and salmon and chicken (not to mention mice, ick), so Dinah won't starve, though she may get grumpy at having to eat people food. Actually, it might be a bad thing for her to decide that tuna and salmon are good to eat, so I hope I can get to the store by Saturday.

There are a half mile of 3-foot drifts between me and the nearest paved road that has been plowed.
I say "has been plowed", not "might have been plowed" because the snowplow garage is just half a mile farther down the paved road and half of the snowplows have to go past the end of our gravel road to get to wherever else they need to plow. About half of the gravel road distance should eventually be plowed by the county, but we are very far down the priority list. Especially since school is out for the holidays and the school buses don't need to get up onto the mesa (I'm not sure there are any school age kids in the neighborhood this year, anyway).

My neighbor has a small garden tractor that has a snowplow blade. The drifts are a bit much for it, but we will get out eventually. We all drive 4-wheel drive vehicles here on the mesa, so we'll be ok once we get the drifts chopped down enough (or melted enough) that we don't high-center every 10 seconds.

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Dealing with the Spam

Posted at 7:38 pm MST to Code

Comment spam is very stupid. Aside from the fact that very few people read this blog, the spam comments keep showing up on one particular message from the first day of the blog, where people would have to dif for it to see it.

So far I've had spam for sex, meds, gambling, dentistry, real estate and home-based businesses. The filters should keep most of those from re-occurring, but I've added a step to the comment-posting process that should be easy for humans and hard for bots (or at least not included in the standard bot script) so that additional kinds of spam should not get as far as the filters.

The category of a blog post is displayed at the top of the Comments display page. If you want to post a comment, you need to copy the first word of the category into the proper field of the comment form. (Caps or small letters don't matter). This is a compromise variation of the CAPTCHA images that make you try to read squiggly letters: Instead of testing your image processing I am testing reading comprehension.

Please email me if you have any unexpected problems.

I'm also looking into some code to lock out commenting on blog-posts that are more than a certain number of days old, or explicitly lock specific posts. But that will take a while.

In the meantime, if anyone has been exposed to offensive comment spam before I got it cleaned out, I apologize.

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Wed, Dec 20, 2006

Blizzard

Posted at 12:03 pm MST to Current Events

We are having a blizzard today: they are predicting a couple of feet of snow by noon tomorrow. At the moment it's kind of hard to tell how much accumulation we are getting: the snow I see outside my windows is mostly moving sideways.

Schools not already out for the holidays are closed. The major highways to Kansas and New Mexico are closed, and I'm not sure about I-70 through the mountains. Most airline flights are being cancelled. Government offices are closing early. Stores are closing at noon at some big shopping centers. On December 20th.

This is actually fairly rare for the Denver area. In the years I have been here, I'm pretty sure we have had more White Halloweens than White Christmases. (Late December tends to be dry.) And I think White Thanksgivings and White Easters fall somewhere in the middle. We get most of our moisture in March and April in normal winters, so Easter can be high-risk.

I wonder if El Nino is affecting things... the weather pattern this year, both in Colorado and in Boston, has been very strange.

They say this blizzard may be as bad as the Christmas Blizzard of 1982. I remember that one. I ended up going to Aunt Irma's place in Florida for New Year's instead of Christmas because everything was shut down.

My holiday visit only overlapped with my brother Larry's by one day or so, but that was a great day. We went to Epcot, which was brand new, on New Year's Day and were able to get into everything we wanted to see very easily. There were no lines to speak of until mid-afternoon.

Fortunately, this year I don't need to go anywhere for the holiday. And I postponed a short gig at Bell Labs Denver until after the blizzard. My projects for today include:

• Clean the last lower cupboard in the kitchen, which the mice don't seem to have gotten to too badly, since it was mostly pots and pans, and too open for nest building. That will finish the kitchen and pantry. But the dishwasher is getting another major workout.
• De-mousify the dining room hutch, which I discovered yesterday had been very popular with the mice. Yuck.
• Finish putting ornaments on the Christmas tree. (I did the lights, garlands and about half the ornaments last night).
• Bake cookies in my nice clean kitchen.
• Make a batch of Nonna's bean soup. This is soup weather, and I have all the ingredients.

I think I may have had a Christmas mouse in the house while I was gone. Or else they were really desperate. When I have had mice get in in the past, they usually didn't eat white sugar or hard candy. But there were some candy canes in both the pantry and the dining room hutch that are gone now.

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Tue, Dec 19, 2006

Joseph Barbera

Posted at 8:01 pm MST to Media

Joe Barbera, half of Hanna-Barbera, died yesterday. His works were a big part of my childhood, and not just Saturday mornings, though I was a devoted Saturday morning cartoon watcher.

Oddly enough, I don't remember ever watching Scooby-Doo until the past few years, when Cartoon Network seems to go through phases of all Scooby all the time. But there was plenty of other Hanna-Barbera material to watch.

I remember when "The Flintstones" was shown in the evenings. I think there were a couple of other evening cartoon shows before the Saturday morning programming block really developed.

My first exposure to Huckleberry Hound and company was "The Ranger Station" with Ranger Andy, which was an afternoon show for kids on WTIC-TV in Hartford (at Broadcast House at Constitution Plaza where they have the Festival of Lights). Yogi Bear cartoons always seemed to belong on the Ranger Station show.

I think my brother Larry and I were in the studio audience for Ranger Andy once -- or maybe the Ranger Station with Ranger Andy's successor -- when one of the neighborhood kids had a TV trip instead of a birthday party. I think that was when I found out Huckleberry Hound was blue: our TV was black and white, and I hadn't encountered any color pictures of him previously. I seem to remember that the sets looked much more fake in real life than they did on TV.

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Mon, Dec 18, 2006

Jury Duty

Posted at 10:47 pm MST to Current Events

I was called for jury duty today. I was in the final group of 22 prospective jurors, but one of the lawyers used one of his peremptory challenges to dismiss me. I was not terribly surprised: I was fairly sure they had me on the dismissal list because neither of the lawyers ever asked me any direct questions. Apparently they didn't want a spinster librarian, software engineering consultant, with two masters degrees, who used to sell Tarot cards at science fiction conventions and is addicted to the Groklaw website.

The case I was called for was a domestic violence case.

If it was the defense attorney who blackballed me, he was being smart. He spent most of his 30 minutes of questioning time lecturing the jury pool about how hard it is to be a juror in a criminal case and how high the burden of proof should be. What this suggested to me (especially when combined with the facial expressions and body language of the defendent) was that the defendent was most likely guilty but his lawyer hoped to find enough wiggle room in the evidence to get him off.

I imagine my own body language and facial expression made it clear that I was not favorably impressed by the lawyer's comments.

I should check later in the week to see how the trial turned out.

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Sun, Dec 17, 2006

James Nicoll stories

Posted at 8:55 pm MST to Media

James Nicoll has been posting on rec.arts.sf.written for years and has a blog I read regularly.

He is the originator of a quote that has appeared in Linguistics textbooks:

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

David Dyer-Bennett and Cally Soukup have put together a collection of James' anecdotes about his cats and his extremely accident-prone life and family.

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Sat, Dec 16, 2006

Spam. Oh, Joy

Posted at 4:12 pm MST to Technology

Well, registering with technorati seems to have made the greater web aware of this blog. I've started getting comment spam.

I'll clean it out when I see it, and I've added a spam blocker (which will need tuning).

Does getting comment spam mean that this is a real blog, now?

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Fri, Dec 15, 2006

Hartford

Posted at 10:03 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I can just barely remember when there were shade tobacco tents along the Connecticut River. The leaves were used for cigar wrappers. I think a lot of that land is super-highways now.

I don't remember whether my Father ever worked tobacco in the summers growing up, but I know that my Mother worked in the tents at least one summer. I don't think the summer work was picking the tobacco. I think it was pruning the plants (cutting off sucker shoots) and weeding. She described working in the tents as horribly hot and sticky and smelly.

About the time the shade tobacco was disappearing and the highways were being built, downtown Hartford got redeveloped with some new buildings and a raised pedestrian mall that connected various buildings above street level, called Constitution Plaza. One building was named Broadcast House, originally home to WTIC TV and radio, and in its lobby was a statue of a man sowing grain from a shallow tray: Broadcasting it. The picture of the statue was the WTIC logo for many years.

The first year after the pedestrian mall was more or less complete they had a Festival of Lights for the holidays, which became an annual event. (According to the website, this year they will use more than a quarter of a million lights.) Our family went into the city to see the decorations the first year because they were new and special. The decorations were mostly sculptures made of wire and little twinkly lights, not the greenery and lightbulbs that were common public decorations. And they were very impressive, especially that first year: I don't think the little twinkly lights were available for home use yet. (Now, of course, you can buy animated reindeer made from twinkly lights at any hardware store and some supermarkets.)

We went to see the lights sometimes in later years, too, depending on the weather and our schedules.

For the first several years that we lived in Manchester my Father worked as a watchmaker in a department store in Hartford named something like "Brown Thompson's". The building had escalators, and was the first place I ever encountered them. He took the Silver Lane bus to work, so in those days our family only needed one car.

I have a vague impression that the Brown Thompson building went away at some point during the redevelopment. The company went away earlier: they were outcompeted by Fox's, the other Hartford department store. I believe Fox's is now owned by the conglomerate that owns Macy's.

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Thu, Dec 14, 2006

Technorati

Posted at 8:13 pm MST to Technology

I am linking this blog to Technorati, so that I can begin joining the greater blogging community.

This is the claiming link that will let Technorati find the blog and recognize it as mine.

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Wed, Dec 13, 2006

Names in the Family

Posted at 11:55 pm MST to Miscellaneous

There is something odd about naming in my family.

My father's given names were Remo Samuel, and the priest at the christening complained because neither one of them was a New Testament name. Samuel is from the Old Testament, and, while there is a Saint Remo, the name is derived from Remus. As in Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome.

My mother's father's name was James Robichaud on the birth certificate, but the baptismal record may have read Jacques, because the priest (being a good New Brunswick Acadian) disapproved of using the English form of the name. Grandpa came from Neguac, New Brunswick, or actually from Riviere du Cache, but Neguac was big enough to show up in the World Atlas.

My Mother was Janet Anne Robichaud, so her initials were JAR before her marriage and JAG after it. For some reason she was very annoyed that her initials spelled words (perhaps she was teased about it at school). She made a point of making sure that none of her children had initials that spelled anything, and that my initials after I married would not spell anything.

Despite the spelling taboo, our names did relate to other names in the family. My brother Lawrence Peter Grasso ended up with the same initials as our grandfather Louis Pasqual Grasso, and inherited a couple of pieces of monogrammed jewelry as a result.

My name was chosen while the Grasso grandparents were out of the country, and when they returned and learned that I was named Elise Marie, they said "How wonderful, you named her after two of her great aunts, Elisa and Maria." (I started using the spelling Elyse in 1977, when I got my first apartment and had to change my papers anyway, because I was tired of people -- like check printers-- transposing the letters and spelling my name Elsie).

My father's mother was christened Felicina Pasqualina Maria Morello. She was usually known as Pasqualina. Both she and my grandfather got their middle names because they were born at or near Easter.

My mother's mother was Gertrude Breault. That's pronounced "Bro", and when I get annoyed at bureaucrats and telemarketers I sometimes contemplate changing my name to Breault just to complicate things. Her mother was Honoria, who may have been born a Martine. There are Martines in the mix somewhere: I've heard them mentioned at weddings and funerals. Someone did a family tree for the Martines tracing them back to France.

I remember Greatgrandma (Honoria) a little, she lived with Grandma and Grandpa Robichaud for a while when I was very small. And I got taken to see her in the nursing home once or twice, and I attended her funeral: I still have the remembrance card with her name on it somewhere. That's actually how I learned about the Breault name and how it was spelled.

I don't know greatgrandfather Breault's given name, and tracking him might be difficult. There was apparently some useful doubt about whether he was born in Vermont or on the Canadian side of the border

We never had much contact with Grandpa's Canadian relatives. Just Christmas cards, and some of them stopped by once or twice when they were vacationing in the States.

It happened that the Roots TV series had been on not long before Grandpa Robichaud ended up in the hospital for the final time. When I visited him, I asked about his family, and I still have the notes packed away somewhere. I do remember that he said the Native American in our family background mostly came in through "Granny Scott" (or possibly Scot). Grandpa had the bone structure and hair texture of a Native American.

My Mother and brother Larry both got the hair texture from Grandpa Robichaud.

People have always told me that I looked like my mother, but I don't think that is quite accurate. I may have a Robichaud jaw, but from the mouth up I look like my Father and his Mother, but mirror-reversed (the natural hair parting is on my left, but their right). I first realized this when I was in highschool or college, and happened to see a picture taken at my father's christening, when Nonna's face was still framed by hair that was dark, not white. The face in the picture was what I was used to seeing in the mirror, except at the jawline. I was not surprised when my hair started graying early, which was a Grasso pattern.

Nonno, Louis P Grasso, had one brother, John, which was probably originally Giovanni, but everyone always referred to him as John. They came to America (from Asti) early in the 20th century with their father, whose given name I don't know. I never heard their mother mentioned at all.

Nonna (Felicina Pasqualina) had many siblings. Sisters included Teresa, Elisa and Maria and probably Virgina.

Grandma (Gertrude) also had many siblings, including a sister Germaine and a brother Roman.

I'm not sure whether Grandpa (James) had any actual siblings. There was an adoption of step-relationship involved somewhere. Tracking Robichauds in French Canada is pretty hopeless: it is a very common name.

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Tue, Dec 12, 2006

Call Him Lord?

Posted at 11:23 pm MST to Miscellaneous

It seems to me that in American religious discourse the word "Lord" has become semantically denatured. In current practice, it is effectively just a synonym for "God", with no other weight. Or else the preachers aren't really thinking about what they are saying.

It might be interesting to take a few sermons by well-known preachers and replace every occurence of the word "Lord" with the word "Master". And then do the same thing with the word "Boss" as the replacement.

I pay attention to words. And texts. I own translations of primary and secondary religious texts from lots of religions and cultures: Buddhist, Hindu, Norse, Confucian, Shinto, Judaism, Islam, various flavors of Christianity, and others. The semantics of divinity are complicated, and do not translate well across languages and cultures.

I own four different translations of the Bible. I had read our family Bible from cover to cover before I finished high school (not something Catholics were particularly encouraged to do in those days). And one of the things that finally severed my emotional attachment to the Catholic church was parish priests who essentially lied about scripture in their sermons in ways that could not be explained by translation problems.

My copy of the Koran is printed in Arabic and English on facing pages. I think the Arabic is considered to be the Koran proper, while the English translation is technically considered commentary. The Koran is always supposed to be transmitted in the original language. This addresses some of the problems with having divergent translations of scriptural texts. But I don't think it addresses the problem of cultural semantic shifts.

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Mon, Dec 11, 2006

Cross-Country Radio

Posted at 10:13 pm MST to Media

Damn, Gary Puckett had a great set of pipes. I wonder if he had classical voice training...

I have occasionally commented on the fact that because I was born in 1954, I don't really remember a time when there were no computers or space satellites. It is equally true that I do not remember a time when there was no rock-and-roll.

This can be useful when driving across the country, especially on major trucking routes. Every market has one or more stations that I find listenable, because Oldies and Classic Rock and most other flavors of Rock are the music of my lifetime. And I also like folk and world music and many flavors of Classical. (And at this time of year there are a lot of stations switched to pure Holiday formats, though some have a really strange definition of holiday music.)

Sometimes I need to stretch things a little: the early morning show of the Portland Oregon Oldies station in 2002 was almost completely pre-British Invasion, which is really about 5 or 10 years to early for me, but I didn't mind waking up to it.

My favorite radio station in Boston is WCRB, which is a rarity: a commercial Classical station. With commercials for things like retirement communities and investment brokers and polo tournaments. I listened to it all the way to the Connecticut border.

Crossing Connecticut, I listened to WDRC, which claims to be Connecticut's first FM station. It was the Top 40 station we listened to in high school and college. I'm not sure what they call their current format, but they are still (or again) using the same music library I remember from the old days.

I think the neatest station I came across while I drove across the country this past weekend was what I assume was a public access channel in Pennsylvania. I never heard call letters mentioned that I noticed. I heard about 45 minutes of Christmas Polka music (I came in after the start of the program) followed by some fascinating music from the Middle East. I was sorry to move out of range of that one.

The one stretch of the trip where there was little music I found listenable was northeastern Colorado, where the tumbleweeds tumble and the deer and the antelope play --or at least chow down -- but apparently don't provide much of a radio audience. The first clear music station I hit north of Denver was 101.5 "Martini on the Rockies", which plays standards and some stuff that might be called urban eclectic. It also played an advertisement for my credit union, which somehow struck me as a bit surreal.

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Sun, Dec 10, 2006

Home, and wireless problems

Posted at 8:48 pm MST to Technology

I'm home -- the trip took 36 hours door to door, and most of my stuff is still in the truck because it was dark when I arrived, and the "gravel" driveway is a sea of mud. I'll unload in the morning when I can see what I am doing.

Dinah is still upset at me. After she spent 36 hours in her kitty crate, I don't blame her a bit. The crate is actually a medium-sized dog crate, so she had room to move around a bit, and she had food and water, but the sanitary facilities were hardly what a civilized cat expects.

I'm having electronic annoyances bringing the house back online.

The satellite dish receiver for the TV was hung in some strange state, but came back after I cycled the main breaker for the living room. It seemed like a good idea to make sure the whole AV stack was cold-booted: the TV was complaining that it's clock wasn't set so there was evidently a power glitch some time while I was gone.

This computer's keyboard was refusing to type 'f' for a while, but started behaving better after I shook it hard. I should get one of those little computer vacuums and make sure there an no crumbs or cat hairs blocking things inside.

My router and DSL modem came back up after being unplugged and replugged in. However, I had disabled the wireless modem on this PC through the operating system a couple of weeks ago because it was interfering with the hardwired network connection, and now it won't re-enable. Very annoying. And ubuntu organizes its admin stuff differently from either SuSE or Fedora, so I haven't yet found out where I need to tweak it. And all of the live-disks are still out in the truck... I suspect I need to force it to go back to loading a module during powerup, and if one of the live disks will come up running wireless it will tell me which one.

Oh well, that's a project for tomorrow, after the truck is unloaded.

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Fri, Dec 08, 2006

Homeward Bound

Posted at 8:22 pm MST to Miscellaneous

The truck is packed with everything that can be packed before tomorrow morning, and it looks like there will be room for what I need to add in the morning. (Refrigerated items, blankets and pillows for tonight, the cat and her equipment, the duffle bag with my travleing clothes and toiletries.)

I expect to get home sometime Sunday, but I know I need to reconfigure my DSL modem and router, so it will probably be Monday before the next blog posting.

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Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog

Posted at 4:18 pm MST to Media

I have not had time to read as much of it as I would like. The blend of modernity and Middle English is wonderful.

Accidia, the mortal sin the which signifieth slownesse to act and hopelessness - sum tyme on Englisshe it ys ycleped 'Sloth,' yet it nis nat mere laziness of body but a couch-potato-ness of soule.

Fans of SF should especially take note of The Ochs Men and Battlestar Ecclesiastica.

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Thu, Dec 07, 2006

Tired

Posted at 6:59 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I hope I'm not catching the crud that has been going around at work. Or maybe the double shift last weekend took more out of me than I realized. I'm feeling exhausted for no particular reason.

I'm not packing much tonight... there isn't a lot left to pack and I can't leave until Saturday morning. Well, I could leave as soon as the truck is packed tomorrow, but it wouldn't be safe or sensible, especially the way I've been getting tired early the past few evenings.

The weather predictions for Wilkes Barre and Buffalo continue neck-and-neck. I'm leaning toward the Pennsylvania route because I don't trust the lake effect.

Once I post this, I need to start the disk backups.

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Wed, Dec 06, 2006

Charities

Posted at 8:15 pm MST to Current Events

It's amazing how difficult some charities make it to donate. I have some canned goods and unopened packages of non-perishable food that I would rather not haul back to Colorado with me. They would take up space that could be better filled by something more interesting. The local emergency food place is only open on weekdays from 9:30 to 3:30. And you need to fill out a form.

I think I need to save space in the truck for canned goods.

Charities I have donated to so far this year or will donate to are listed below. I recommend any or all of them.

• United Way
• Wesleyan University Alumni Fund
• Boulder Philharmonic
• Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF)
• Free Software Foundation (FSF)
• The Heifer Project
• Habitat for Humanity
• Amnesty International
• Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres
• The Women's Bean Project (and I love their 10 Bean Soup)
• Denver Art Museum
• Denver Zoo
• Denver Museum of Nature and Science
• (Boulder) Community FoodShare

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Tue, Dec 05, 2006

Lurking

Posted at 10:00 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Over on Making Light, ones of the blogs I read regularly, there was a recent article about businesses that are trying to rent commenters to bloggers who want to attract people to their blogs. People supposedly don't like to be the only commenters at a site, so the bloggers hire claques to make the place look busy.

I can almost understand the temptation: it's hard to write without an audience (and the site here is quiet enough to hear crickets) but the thought of a paid audience is just creepy.

I don't really have a right to complain about the lack of comments here, since I follow all sorts of forums and discussion groups and mailing lists and usenet groups and blogs and rarely comment myself. If there is a lively discussion going on, it somehow feels rude to stick my comment in. I need to work on that.

I also need to get a LiveJournal account so that I can comment on the blogs that are hosted there. There are supposed to be ways to sync this Blosxom blog with the Live Journal account, which I should investigate.

One thing happened this past week that I am very pleased about. I have been reading the rec.arts.sf.written Usenet group (and its predecessor, rec.arts.sflovers) for more than 20 years now, but have posted to it only very rarely. For the past several months I have been making an effort to post regularly, or at least occasionally, on the Girl Genius discussion group on Yahoo. (That effort turned out to be part of the ramping up to the creation of this blog). Last week one of my comments on the Yahoo forum was quoted by someone on rec.arts.sf.written. Someone thought what I wrote was articulate enough to be worth quoting.

I kept going back to look at it. But I didn't comment directly on rec.arts.sf.written. I really need to work on this. I can't expect anyone to comment here if I don't take part inthe greater community.

But I can't imagine what it would feel like to have someone quote me or write about my stuff and know that I had paid them to do it. Ewww. What an odd mix of whoremongering and exhibitionism you'd need.

Move Status: Packing of things like clothes, and kitchen and bathroom stuff is about as far as it can go while leaving the apartment livable for the next few days. Papers still need to be sorted and computer-related stuff needs to be organized: something to do tomorrow evening, with backups to be done Thursday evening after I print out the maps and pack the printer.

The weather in Pennsylvania is looking better for the weekend than Buffalo.

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Mon, Dec 04, 2006

Packing

Posted at 5:54 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Too much packing. Not enough sleep.

I have found a place to donate excess canned goods, which will save some space in the truck. Also mailed out the spare key to the guy who needs to come take away the furniture, and put in change of address notices.

I'm actually making reasonable progress. All the books and most of the DVDs and CDs are packed, and the knick-knacks, and all the clothes not needed for this week or for the travel days.

If you need to pack lots of clothing and linens, Pack-Mate vacuum storage bags are wonderful. I've had consistently bad luck with the ones where you use a vacuum cleaner to suck out the air. But the actual Pack-Mate brand, which I get at either Sharper Image or Brookstone, works very well.

But the kitchen is in the stage of taking everything out of the cupboards so I can see what I need to play 3-D jigsaws with. Have I mentioned I really and truly hate kitchens that lack counter space?

And there are people in my head that want their stories written.

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Sun, Dec 03, 2006

SCO versus Everybody

Posted at 10:09 pm MST to Current Events

For the past several years a company calling itself SCO has been involved in court cases with IBM, Red Hat, Novell and several other companies claiming that it has proprietary rights for material included in the Linux/GNU free operating systems. (One of the lawsuits for misuse was against a company that hadn't even been a SCO software customer for several years before the suit. That one was tossed out by the judge .)

The free software community has wanted to know what material was supposedly involved, so that the actual provenance of the material could be determined: Linux is developed in public, in front of God and the whole internet, and there are records of where every line of it comes from, but with millions of lines of code provided by thousands of developers, it seemed possible that something might have been contributed that shouldn't have been.

SCO delayed and refused to provide even a specific explanation of their claims (which IBM needed in order to know what they were being accused of) despite court orders and the rules of civil court procedures. Finally, almost 3 years into the case, the judges set a deadline of Dec 22, 2005 for SCO to specify what it was actually claiming.

SCO provided a list of about 300 items at the deadline, and IBM complained that most of them were too vague to serve as evidence of a legal claim, and the judge agreed and threw out 2/3 of the "evidence" for not meeting the specificity requirements of the court orders and court procedures. SCO appealed this decision.

SCO also provided documents after the deadline in which they tried to claim all sorts of things not included in the original definition of the lawsuit nor in the papers they filed by the deadline. IBM complained about that too.

On Wednesday this week, SCO's appeal about the 300 was denied: 2/3 of their "evidence" is hot air that has blown away.

On Thursday this week, there was a hearing about SCO's attempt to change what the case is about after the deadline. They lost.

The combined effect of these two court decisions is that SCO is effectively suing over 324 lines (out of millions) in Linux, which is not enough to count as a copyright violation even if SCO really owns them (which is being debated in both the IBM and Novell cases).

On Friday Novell brought a motion for the court to acknowledge that a contract between them and a company that SCO bought some assets from is binding on SCO and means what the words written in the contract say. If none of the (vague) evidence that SCO has presented in the Novell case contradicts this, the judge will agree with Novell. The particular contract item in question would gut SCO's cases against both IBM and Novell if it accepted by the judge.

This has not been a good week for SCO, but for those of us who have been following the court filings, and watched as SCO's lawyers told conflicting stories in different courtrooms and used every slimy trick they could think of, it has been very satisfying. The chickens are finally coming home to roost.

There are a lot of people who have been following the cases on the Groklaw weblog and discussing and analysing the legal and technical issues involved. It's sort of like reality TV for geeks.

Groklaw also covers other points of interest along the intersection of technology and law. I'm seriously addicted.

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Some people don't need a software engineer ...

Posted at 7:52 am MST to Technology

They need an exorcist. And a lot more attention to the KISS principle.

There was no post yesterday because I left the house a lttle after 5am and got home a little before 10pm, and I reached the point where I couldn't click reliably, much less type. The weekend's project blew up in several different directions not covered by the excruciatingly detailed plans that were thrashed around all week. And the recovery didn't follow the detailed recovery plan either.

There's a site called Holidailies where people promise to update their sites everyday for the month of December. I didn't sign up because I knew I would be on the road for more than 28 hours next weekend, and I need to reconfigure my DSL connection when I get home. Turns out to be a good decision.

I am planning to do a second post this evening to catch up.

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Fri, Dec 01, 2006

"Where are we going and why are we in this handbasket?"

Posted at 7:34 pm MST to Miscellaneous

The above is a quote from a button and/or bumpersticker I've seen sold as science fiction conventions.

Some people never learn that trying to micro-manage things actually leads to more things falling through the cracks.

I have spent much of this week in meetings thrashing around a project plan for this weekend. And my evening is being killed with conference calls. When last I heard, I am still scheduled for a 6 am start tomorrow, (which means getting up at or before 5) but I need to check at the next conference call (at 11 pm) to make sure they haven't pushed things out, since things are currently running 2 and a half hours behind where we had hoped to be.

Yesterday I spent half the day in meetings with someone with a ferocious cold and I think I may be catching it.

I really need to do some packing, which at the moment I have no energy for.

The one bright point is that yesterday the 10 day weather forecasts for both Wilkes Barre PA and Buffalo NY were very ominous, with snow and rain predicted along both routes. Today Wilkes Barre and Cleveland look ok for next weekend, and Buffalo NY looks ok for next saturday. Des Moines and Omaha look ok, too. I have weather.com bookmarked for 7 cities, now, so I can check back daily.

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Thu, Nov 30, 2006

Bacon Cat

Posted at 8:50 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I know that combinations of cats and bacon have a certain notoriety on the net. I am one of those who who found John Scalzi's excellent and consistently interesting blog due to the notoriousbacon-cat incident. Today I had a different kind of bacon-cat incident.

Dave Barry once wrote that he thought little boys must have pointed their fingers at each other and said "bang" for generations before guns were invented and made sense of the gesture. I wonder if there is something similar involving cats and cans.

My cat, Dinah, has strange ideas of what constitutes proper food. Dinah comes running when she hears me open any can except a soda can. It doesn't matter whether I use a rotary canopener or the can has a builtin opener. However, Dinah does not like to eat anything that comes in cans. Jars do not attract her attention.

She is quite a good mouser and often eats the mice she catches. Or parts of the mice, anyway. It would be less annoying if she would finish them off. She has one particular meow --generally slightly muffled -- that means "I have caught a mouse", and I have leaned to be careful walking after I have heard that meow. She very often leaves one particular organ (which may be the stomach or the gall-bladder) and quite often leaves larger parts of the mouse uneaten. I sometimes wonder why on some mice the front end gets eaten and on others the back end.

Other than the occasional mouse, she eats Iams dry catfood. And that is pretty much all she will eat.

When my old cat Little Kitty was very old and I was trying to encourage her to eat, I served her canned cat food and never needed to worry about Dinah taking it. I don't think it was just because Little Kitty was the alpha: I've tried using fancy canned foods as Christmas presents and special treats after Little Kitty was no longer around to own it, and Dinah wouldn't eat it.

When I open cans of tuna or salmon or chicken Dinah appears promptly and begs shamelessly, but she doesn't want the meat, and won't eat it if I give her some. She just wants the juice or broth from the cans.

Similarly, she begs for turkey at the holidays, but if I give her some, she just licks the juice off.

This evening I dropped half a strip of cooked bacon, and Dinah surprised me by eating the whole thing. After 7 months without real mice, she may be missing some variety in her diet, but bacon seems like an odd choice for an addition to her diet.

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Wed, Nov 29, 2006

Routes

Posted at 6:56 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I've been holding off, because living in an apartment that was mostly packed would be annoying and make me more homesick, but tonight I have officially begun to pack for the trip home 10 days from now.

I have also gone online to the AAA website and started generating alternative triptiks. The shortest quickest route involves I90 thorugh Massachusetts and New York, eventually connecting to I80 at Cleveland. Then it's I80 across the Midwest and through Nebraska to I76, to Denver.

I really dislike the NY State Thruway.

In nice weather I prefer an alternate route that takes I84 through Connecticut and lower New York to I81, then I81 through Wilkes Barre to pick up I80 in Pennsylvania. But there are some steep spots on I81 in the Appalachians that were twisty and single lane (because of construction) when I came through last spring on the trip west.

Some of the I81 scariness may have been because I was tired after driving 1700 miles. But the AAA charts show LOTS of construstion through Pennsylvania on I80, so I don't think cutting south to I80 even farther east will help.

I've saved both triptiks. As we get closer to travel time I'll check the weather predictions for Wilkes Barre and Buffalo NY, and decide which route to take depending on the weather.

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Tue, Nov 28, 2006

Kitsunebi

Posted at 6:35 pm MST to Te