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 Technology

I am very frustrated at the moment. I suddenly have lots of creative energy, and it wants to go in every direction at once. Writing this blog feels good. There are stories that want to be written. And lots of other projects that were planned or started and then set aside seem to want attention.

And I really should start cleaning the apartment and packing and generally getting ready to move home 10 days from now.

Among the set aside projects:

• lots of needlework kits of various sorts
• trying to learn watercolor pencils so that I can create the images I want for the net of mirrors
• my two original cross stitch designs
• figuring out and writing out the music for Wilde Jagd

I need to prioritize.

I am going to keep up with this blog. So far I have averaged one post per day since the second day of posting, after the big batch of initial posts, and I hope to keep to that.

I need to start writing the stories out, because if I don't I will fall back into writer's block.

And I will plan to return to occasional work on my original cross-stitch pieces.

The smaller of the original designs is called "Kitsunebi", which is the Japanese word for foxfire. It is a picture of a Japanese nine-tailed spirit-fox which I created using a free software package called Kxstitch to generate the stitching chart.

I had stitched the fox's body and a couple of the tails before my medical problems in 2005. I set it aside then, when the mammogram came back questionable, and somehow have never gotten back to working on it. Now I'm finding myself annoyed by the fact that it's stalled, which isn't quite the same as wanting to work on it, but close.

One of the nice things about my shift from SuSE to Kubuntu Linux was that Kxstitch comes prepackaged for Debian/Ubuntu: when I originally ran it (on RedHat/Fedora on my previous laptop) I had to build it myself, and I never quite got around to building a 64-bit SuSe version. Now I have my design tool back without having to fuss with it.

My other original design is too large to be portable, or to have any hope of finishing it in a reasonable amount of time when I'm also working on other projects. But I will write about it and show the design at an appropriate time next month.

The Kitsunebi design is shown below the cut.

See more ...

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Mon, Nov 27, 2006

Parking space

Posted at 6:42 pm MST to Current Events

This morning the radio news announcer mentioned that someone has just paid $250,000 -- yes, one quarter of a million dollars -- for a parking space in a Boston alley.

I hope he got the mineral rights with that.

I find this especially amazing because, as US cities go, Boston has an amazing public transit system which is actually useful. By useful, I mean that it it probably possible to use the MBTA to get from point A to point B almost anywhere in the greater Boston area. And there are tentacles of commuter rail stretching out in all directions.

There have GOT to be more sensible alternatives than spending a quarter mil for a piece of an alley... and I wonder how the purchaser plans to stop other people from parking in 'his' place/

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Sun, Nov 26, 2006

Techlands

Posted at 1:38 pm MST to Creative Work

As threatened previously, I seem to be in the mood to write fiction again. I use the Astral Trading Company website as a gateway for any fiction I put online, and the stories with related settings will be accessible through the Techlands contents page.

The first installment, Perspective is a sort of prologue explaining a bit about the environment that provides the settings and props for the stories.

Please note that this piece is meant as fiction, not prediction. I extrapolated current trends in semi-plausible directions that would give me lots of neat material to play with, not always in directions I think are likely. (Honest predictions would probably involve nastier climate changes in Europe and nastier political situations everywhere.)

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Sat, Nov 25, 2006

The Vondish Ambassador

Posted at 11:01 am MST to Media

I've enjoyed Lawrence Watt-Evans novels for about as long as they have been published. I think I 'm missing one trilogy about alternate worlds, but believe I own all the other he has written.

His first fantasy series had a main character who was not human (which was very refreshing at the time) and lots of other interesting ideas and details. It also had a feline warsteed, and I'm a sucker for neat cats.

The fantasy series he started second is set in a world containing several cities named Ethshar and focuses more on ordinary people in the world, not the great and powerful. It has been quite popular, but not quite popular enough for the publishing company, so Mr. Watt-Evans is taking advantage of the internet to experiment with alternative publishing methods.

The first draft of the most recently completed Ethshar novel, "The Spriggan Mirror" was published online as a serial, with direct donations from fans paying for each chapter. These donations took the place of the advance that the author would usually receive from a publisher. The finished novel will appear soon from a small press (it has been delayed slightly but should be in book stores before Christmas) and people who donated more than a certain amount will receive a physical copy, plus a chapbook of an additional story.

I'm just as glad "The Spriggan Mirror" has been delayed: having my mail forwarded makes things messy, and this way it should not arrive until I am back in Colorado.

The current, 10th, Ethshar novel is currently being serialized. It is called "The Vondish Ambassador" and can be read for free online, with a 25 dollar donation guaranteeing receipt of a hard copy as well. The first eleven chapters are currently online and the story of political and magical complications, from the viewpoint of a guy who just wants to make an honest living, is getting to the exciting parts. Assassins!

I've donated enough to get my hard copy but I'm going to make another donation. Experiments in stopping the big conglomerates from homogenizing everything and blocking the channels for interesting stuff between artists and audience need to be encouraged.

Lawrence Watt-Evans is also editor of an online donation-based "magazine" publishing the shorter lengths of speculative fiction

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Fri, Nov 24, 2006

Stuffed Celery

Posted at 3:44 pm MST to Technology

I do a decent turkey dinner, even though I have lived alone since college. My Mom always did big Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners (New Years was ravioli at Nonna's) and I started helping from the age of seven or eight with things like the stuffing for the turkey and stuffed celery, and stirring the (packaged) filling for the lemon meringue pie.

This year, being in New England I went to my brother Larry's (where I assembled the stuffed celery). I stopped at my Aunt Irma's on the way back to Boston and ended up spending the night, since the weather and traffic were both and staring at headlights through pouring rain was threatening to trigger a migraine.

My Aunt Bev and cousin Karen were at my brother's for dinner (Aunt Bev made the pies) and my cousin Tom and his wife Mary and son Michael were staying at Aunt Irma's, so I saw all of my New England relatives this trip except my Uncle Tom, who is still in the nursing home after falling off the roof, but seems to be making progress.

There is a leak in the roof he fell off, so he may have been examining the situation at the time of his fall.

Stuffed Celery

cream cheese
milk 
celery, trimmed and washed
Worcestershire sauce
pimento-stuffed green olives

Put the cream cheese into a bowl with a little milk
mash it with a fork until smooth and stirrable
add some Worcestershire sauce and stir it in
(if the cheese turns brown after you mix it in, you
have used too much sauce)
slice lots of green olives (1) and 
stir them into the cheese mixture

Use the fork you have been stirring things with to 
load the celery stalks with the cheese mixture. 

Don't make these too far ahead, 
the cheese gets tries to dry out and get nasty. 
On the other hand, the cheese mixture keeps well 
in the fridge in a sealed plastic tub.

The cheese mixture is also nice between crackers 
and wonderful on hot toast. 

Note:

1. When you get tired of slicing olives, do another dozen.
You want bits of olive in every bite of cheese and celery. 

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Thu, Nov 23, 2006

Christmas List

Posted at 5:58 am MST to Miscellaneous

I know I'm terrible to buy for: I own literally thousands of books and hundreds of DVDs (and buy more constantly) and my tastes are geeky and strange. And I'm always buying craft stuff that I never have time to do anything with.

I have all but one or two of the 630-odd DVDs cataloged in ReaderWare, but the approximately 1300 books that are cataloged so far are only a small fraction of the total. I thought I had scanned all the music CDs, but I can tell I'm missing at least one rack of them from the Readerware list. (This is annoying. I need to fix that when I get home.)

I honestly don't know what I need for the kitchen or the house (except to get rid of the mice): I haven't been there enough for too long. And I don't really want clothes until my weight is back under better control.

Things I've considered getting but haven't gotten around to:

Books:

• P.G Wodehouse (I've read some from libraries, but don't think I own any)
• Lymond series by Dorothy Dunnett (mine are a disintegrating small paperback edition)
• Niccolo series by Dorothy Dunnett (I haven't finished this series, might own the first volume, though I think I read a library copy)
• Dorothy Sayers (another set of disintegrating favorites)
• a book on horses, etc. with lots of technical details about harnesses and saddles and how they were used, not just pretty pictures of horse breeds or other miscellaneous equines

Objets d'art:

• a coffee-table grade kaleidoscope (with colored crystals) or teleidoscope (where you see the world broken up and reflected) or one of each
• a nice Japanese fan with a display stand

Music:

• folk music from Europe (other than British and Celtic, which I have a fair amount of)
• or the Middle East or Asia (other than Japanese, which I have a fair amount)
• or Africa, or
• medieval or Renaissance music
• I only have "Passage in Time" by Dead Can Dance
• I only have "Book of Secrets" by Loreena McKinnit

Note:I can't remember if I own Kitaro's Silk Road album. I already have a lot of Krishna Das, and Supreme Collection vol 1 by Nusrat Fatah Ali Khan (which is similar in style despite the religious difference. I prefer Krishna Das). I would love some more Hardanger fiddle music -- that's what was used for the Riders of Rohan theme in Lord of the Rings. I have a CD of reconstructed Ancient Egyptian music, and one of Javanese Court Gamelan, and one of "Edda: Medieval Myths from Iceland". I have a couple of operas by Purcell, and the Chant CD that everyone has, but most of my classical CDs are for later periods.

Other:

• The Goddess Dancing Belly Dancing DVD. (Reference material, and I need something more active than yoga and less boring than walking the treadmill to try occasionally.)
• A good book on folk dances or the history of dance would fill a reference gap, too. I have books on music, books and printing, and the theater but I don't have a good reference on dance

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Wed, Nov 22, 2006

Climate and Ecological Change

Posted at 7:11 pm MST to Current Events

Getting ready to work on the story that has been growing in my head.

In the past day or so I've done Google searches for pictures and information on mules, donkeys, Asian Wild Asses (onagers) and Morgan horses, Turkish and Armenian given names, and possible future coastline changes due to the icecaps melting. Also the old Silk Road overland trade routes. (I'm not sure the overland routes will be in the story.)

Europe must have steep coasts except for the Netherlands and Venice and a few localized spots elsewhere (London, for example) Even a 6 meter increase in ocean depth doesn't make a lot of difference there, while it prety much wipes out the Eastern Seabord of North America.

Of course, if the Gulf Stream shuts down when the Arctic Ocean goes ice-free, Europe is going to have another set of problems. I'm glad I saw Venice when there was only a few inches of water on St. Mark's Square at high tide... and I kind of hate to think of Greece and Istanbul dealing with Newfoundland winters.

It's really hard to judge things from orbital distances, so I may be misreading things. When Google Earth first came out, I looked at my house, and the Denver/Boulder area, and it looked inhabited. (I could see my birdbath! No one else would know what that teeny white spec was, but I knew.)

I also looked at the area of Connecticut where I grew up, and all I saw was trees. I remember walking in the Connecticut woods and seeing stone walls everywhere, because the woods were cornfields 100 to 150 years ago and they needed to do something with all the rocks. And now it's all turning back to scrubby forest.

And the deer are taking over the place, and coyotes are moving in fromn the west...

A bit of trivia: in those fountains in Japanese gardens where water fills up a piece of bamboo until it tips and spills out, and the bamboo falls back down with a "bonk" sound, part of the original reason for the noise-maker was to scare the deer away. I wonder if it would work in Colorado. (I wonder if it worked in Japan: it may be like squirrel-proof bird-feeders, where making the effort makes you feel good but the squirrels don't usually go hungry).

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Tue, Nov 21, 2006

RIP Robert Altman

Posted at 6:38 pm MST to Media

When I move into corporate housing for the duration of a contract, Gosford Park is one of the DVDs that always comes with me.

At the moment I also have A Prairie Home Companion on hand: I had missed it in the theaters and picked it up when it came out on DVD.

I think I like "Gosford Park" better (the cowboys telling bad jokes in Prairie Home Companion goes on waaay too long) but it's still very good. I may need to watch more of the extras on Prairie Home Companion to really appreciate it. I think I actually like some of the commentaries on Gosford Park as much or more than the main story track. I appreciate the mix of anthropological detail and skewering of standard literary tropes (which Prairie Home Companion also does with its noir detective theme instead of Gosford Park's Agatha Christie).

Whe I get home I will check my copies of Roger Ebert's reference books for reviews of Altman's work to figure out what else of his I might like. My DVD collection runs heavily to anime, and movies with lots of special effects and CGI, (and, to be honest, fairly high body counts) but I like richly detailed world-building as much or more than the flash, and I believe that more of Altman's work might fit my tastes.

"A Prairie Home Companion" feels like something Jimmy Stewart should have been in... which is good, though I'm not quite sure what I mean by that.

Is there a recent trend toward what might be called "cast of dozens" movies? Or is that just that I have ended up watching things with large ensemble casts instead of a tight focus on just a few characters?

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Mon, Nov 20, 2006

Access to More Weblog Entries

Posted at 7:12 pm MST to Code

The main page of the weblog was showing 40 entries, which is a bit long. I have shortened it to 25 and added clicky buttons at the bottom to access previous/next pages of entries.

I want to add "Return to main" clickies to the by-category and by-date and search results pages, but other than that, I think I have implemented most of the standard weblog features now.

If there begin to be conversations (or spam) in the Comments, I'll need to turn on some more features, but I can't judge what's needed in that area yet.

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Sun, Nov 19, 2006

Family and Recipes

Posted at 7:57 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Yesterday I visited Aunt Irma and Uncle Tom, who is now in a nursing home recovering after his fall from the roof. My cousin Tom (known as "Skip" in the family) and his wife Mary were there, and so were my second cousins (Aunt Irma's first cousins) Angela (Chi-chi) and Carol, whom I had not seen in years.

Uncle Tom.

ChiChi and Carol

Skip spent several hours working on the heating systems in the building -- a matter of relays and steam pipe valves and complicated wiring.

During lunch, I mentioned the collection of family recipes I put together last Christmas, and promised to send copies to Tom and Mary, and ChiChi and Carol. I'lll do that once I get home. In the meantime, I have added the Recipes to the Data-Raptors website.

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Sat, Nov 18, 2006

What Tarot Card are You

Posted at 6:31 am MST to Media

I found the link to this in James Nicholl's Live Journal.

The site has several decks to choose from for your image. I chose "The Chinese Tarot", which is one that I have at home.

See more ...

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Fri, Nov 17, 2006

Valid, Standard, Web Site

Posted at 9:22 pm MST to Technology

Everything on the sites except the Mirrors first edition stuff is now valid XHTML. Which means Internet Explorer may choke on it, but any browser that follows international standards should have no problems.

I was able to clean things up faster than I had feared because I remembered that there is an XML validation plugin module available for the KATE editor that comes with KDE. It turned out that I can even feed it the weblog (which is generated, not HTML static text) so my turnaround cycle on tweaking things and seeing how much progress I was making toward cleaning things up was very rapid.

I've been doing format tweaks because it is still too hot here to do anything that needs actual thinking. There is something just wrong about having an apartment be 80 degrees Fahrenheit in late November. At least the rain has stopped, so I can open the windows wider and possibly cool things down over night.

I hope we get a cold snap soon. I think I'm like the trolls in Terry Pratchett's books: my brain turns off when it gets too warm. As long as it stays this hot in here I'm not going to make much progress writing fiction.

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Thu, Nov 16, 2006

Apartment

Posted at 3:41 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Arrgh. 23 more nights in this apartment. That sounds shorter than 3 and a half weeks, which is important right now.

They have turned off the airconditioning for the whole building. Unfortunately, I am in an apartment on the top floor, so I get all the heat that rises from the floors below. This is fine when the weather is cold, but the weather at the moment is unseasonably warm and humid from a week of rain.

And my windows face the bus station, so if I open the ventilators I will get 1) noise (which is bad enough with the windows closed) and 2) diesel fumes instead of fresh air.

I want to be in my own house, where I control the HVAC systems and the nearest paved road is a quarter of a mile away as the crow flies.

I want Colorado, where the weather doesn't stay cloudy and rainy and humid for a week at a time.

I want my kitchen with the fan that actually vents to the outside and windows that can be opened to give cross-ventilation (even though it has been over-run by mice since the cat has been here with me). I was going to bake for a potluck at work tomorrow, but I am not sure I can stand to do it with the AC dead. This place is warm enough right now.

Tonight I'm going to finish the website cleanup I started earlier in the week for everything except the Net of Mirrors first edition pages. Those were generated by Microsoft Publisher and are both hideous and so far from standards-compliant I could spend weeks just dinking with the formatting without doing anything about the content. Oh, well, knowing how hideous they are gives me some more incentive to work on the rewrite.

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Wed, Nov 15, 2006

Plans for the Next Few Weeks

Posted at 8:14 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Things are getting hectic all of a sudden. I have 3 and a half weeks left before I head home to Colorado.

This Saturday I will visit Aunt Irma and Uncle Tom, who has just progressed from the hospital to a nursing home after his accident.

I am scheduled to spend Thanksgiving at my brother Larry's.

I will have the Friday after Thanksgiving off, but will be working the following Saturday (Dec 2) instead.

And the following weekend (after packing during the previous week) I will be driving across the country, home to Boulder, to reclaim my house from the mice (ick).

The frustrating thing in all this is that I think I have a story that wants to start being written, and I'm not sure when I'll actually have time to work on it. Writing this blog has been good exercise: it has gotten me back into the habit of writing, for the first time in years, and I don't want to give up the daily updates.

I may start writing this week and hope that I have some momentum built up before the break for the move.

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Tue, Nov 14, 2006

W3C Validators

Posted at 8:22 pm MST to Technology

I've been testing various aspects of my sites against the official markup Validators provided by the W3C. My RSS and Atom feeds are valid, so they should work for any one who tries to use them.

The actual web markup is another matter: the home pages, which were originally created using Microsoft tools (insert ritual gesture against the evil eye) were a mess, but are now valid international standard XHTML. Which means that MS Internet Explorer will probably choke on it anyway, but that's Microsoft (repeat gesture).

The Cherani pages are fairly clean except for some typos in the markup, which will be fixed shortly: I generated those files myself.

The first edition Mirrors book pages were dumped from a Microsoft tool (repeat ritual gesture... I realy need an official icon for this).

What I need is a validator I can run against the local copy of the websites on my laptop, so I don't need to be constantly uploading to check the progress of my fixes.

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Mon, Nov 13, 2006

Website Cleanup

Posted at 8:56 pm MST to Code

I've been doing a lot of miscellaneous cleanup on the websites.

The display problem in the Target layouts should be fixed.

The really hideous html generated for the Data-Raptors and Astral Trading home pages by Microsoft Publisher has been cleaned up and made standards compliant. The Data-Raptors Links and Resume pages have also been cleaned up.

Some of the text on the Data-Raptors headings has been replaced by images, so it actually looks like it is supposed to on machines that don't have my fonts loaded. However, it seems to be loading very slowly now. I will probably switch it to a single complex image, like the one used for the Astral Trading logo and contact info.

The next rounds of cleanup will get all of the other pages (the Cherani pages, the Tarot and Mirrors layouts, and the weblog) to a point where they are generating standards-compliant xhtml code. Then I can make a pass to switch everything to stylesheets and get a look that is consistent (and consistently modifiable)across the sites.

Items to be addressed: "browser friendly" colors that should look the same on differnet browsers, crowding of the left margin in the generated layouts. Resized logos etc. for the non-home-pages.

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Sun, Nov 12, 2006

Category Icons and other upgrades

Posted at 2:21 pm MST to Code

I have now turned on icons for the different categories, as promised.

I've also done some other tweaks to the software that runs the weblog

Please let me know if there are any problems with the blog, or additional features that would be helpful.

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Sat, Nov 11, 2006

Tarot and Mirrors Tool

Posted at 8:24 pm MST to Code

This should also be under the Mirrors category.

If you go to the Astral Trading Company website, you can get a reading for the Mirrors using any of the Taget, 10 Gates or Celtic Cross layouts. You can also get a Tarot reading using either the Rider-Waite deck or Nanette's deck, in any of the three layouts.

Be sure to enter your name or a topic in the text box. It will be used in the randomization (i.e. shuffling).

The icons for the tarot cards are placeholders.

I will eventually lay the Crossing cards in the Celtic layout on their sides, but that requires another 160 images for the Mirrors and another 78 images for each Tarot deck, and working on images (even just rotations) kills my mousing hand.

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In Flanders Fields

Posted at 8:18 am MST to Miscellaneous

Remembrance Day

This was an important day for my family. My parents were active in the VFW, so every year at this time we had bunches of those little red artificial poppies in the house, waiting to be distributed.

On a more cheerful note, this is also the birthday of my cousin Tom. Our family seems to have a thing about birthdays and holidays: besides Tom, my youngest brother was born on July 4, our father was born on January 6 (Epiphany, Twelfth Night), and both of HIS parents were born at Easter. I think my other brother was aiming for a New Years Day birth, but the doctor made other arrangements.

My 6th grade teacher was Miss Glassbrenner, an old-fashioned lady who had us memorize and recite poems for the different holidays. The only one I can still recite from memory is the one for Veterans Day. When I checked it online just now, I had only one word wrong: I had remembered "blow" in the first line as "grow"...

See more ...

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Fri, Nov 10, 2006

Key Ace of the Storm: Thunderbird [I Ching 51, The Arousing] (Twilight)

Posted at 9:21 pm MST to Net of Mirrors

Alternate ImageThe Garuda, divine warrior, enemy of serpents, herald

InterpretationThe shock of alarm, or of laughter, that provides the energy to accomplish great things. The "Eureka" moment of understanding that changes everything.

From the I Ching: Thunder over thunder. A sudden impulse to accomplishment.

Reversal A word or idea that distracts, scatters energy, prevents progress. Dust devils and bewilderment.

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Thu, Nov 09, 2006

RT Computer Graphics

Posted at 10:08 pm MST to Media

Or why the Mirrors are Southwestern art when so much of the philosophy is Asian and European.

When I was first creating the Net of Mirrors, more than a dozen years ago, I needed to have images to put on the cards. I can do an adequate job of design and layout, but I have no particular skill at any representational art.

I was willing to pay reasonable amounts of money for materials for what was effectively a hobby, not a business. I like books and typography, so I bought real licensed fonts from Adobe and other professional type-foundries and spent serious money for a laser printer with PostScript capability (which cost 10 times as much as my current laser printer, even ignoring inflation). I also bought various Adobe Type Manager tools for OS/2 and Windows, so between that and the fonts I ended up on some professional-graphics-designer customer.

I love the Publishing Perfection catalog. I just can't often justify buying from it, especially since my home systems have generally been OS/2 and Linux and most of the products they carry are aimed at the PC and Mac. (My wallet is glad there are good open-source fonts these days...)

Willingness to buy doesn't help if there is nothing to be bought, even with sources for professional grade clipart and tools. The vast majority of the clipart that was available in the early 90s seemed to be either business-related or (mostly Protestant) Christian religious, which wasn't much help to me for illustratng the Mirrors. (I thought that much of it was hideous, too, but that was a separate problem.)

The major exception was the Santa Fe Collection from RT Computer Graphics www.rtcomputer.com in New Mexico, a set of Southwestern and Native American images and motifs that supported the richness of symbolism and abstration that I needed.

The original edition of the Santa Fe collection came on floppies and was, I think, all black and white.

The second edition came on a CD and included color versions, and GIFs for use on websites, since the web was becoming important by then. They added other packages added to the product line over the years: one of Plains Indian art, one of Petroglyphs and art inspired by petroglyphs, one of Cowboy images.

Their most recent addition is the Santa Fe Collection II, about half of which is business-related and holiday clipart with a Southwestern and Native American skew. I found this a little disappointing, but my uses for clipart are fairly peculiar.

I now own all but the Cowboy package. The Santa Fe II and Petroglyph Collections just arrived a few days ago.

Expect to see little petroglyph people doing strange things around the blog and website in the future.

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Wed, Nov 08, 2006

Election 2006

Posted at 8:16 pm MST to Current Events

The Democrats are in and Rumsfeld is out.

Time for a reading. Lots of illusion and trickery. Lots of diplomacy. And "The Army" (I Ching 7) in the Future is hidden pressures and the possibility for progress through working together, which isn't too bad.

See more ...

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Tue, Nov 07, 2006

Falling Off a Roof

Posted at 9:16 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I got a call from my sister-in-law this evening. She wondered if I knew that my Uncle Tom was badly injured about a month ago. He fell off a high roof onto the roof of a lower wing of the building, and suffered serious internal damage. There were no broken bones, but it sounds like most of his vital organs were damaged by the impact and internal bleeding. I had't previously heard of the accident, and called my Aunt Irma immediately.

Uncle Tom is elderly, and diabetic, so he doesn't recuperate well any more. Things keep going wrong that the doctors don't expect or understand, and he has spent most of his time in the hospital since the accident.

The roofs where the accident took place were part of an old historic factory building he owns in Willington, CT. He has beautifully restored the main building into office suites with lovely exposed brick and beams, and created a gorgeous multilevel apartment in what was a small annex. There is a large pond just outside the apartment, with a dam next to the factory building, which originally used water power for spinning thread. About 10 years ago, Tom built a redwood deck over the dam, so that on one side you can look down the waterfall, and on the other you look into the millpond. I'm not good at estimating sizes of things, but the deck is at least 12 feet bt 20, and Tom did most or all of the work hmself. That was when he was 72.

Uncle Tom fell from the roof of the living room part of the annex onto the roof of the kitchen: either a two story fall or a very long one-story fall due to the high ceilings of the old factory space. (Even at the age of 83 he was still doing some of the maintenance on the building, which is how he came to fall.) He got down off the roof himself and was trying to take a bath when my aunt found him and called the EMTs, who arrived just barely in time to save his life.

A couple of my Aunt's cousins have come to stay with her and try to help out, and my cousin Tom is able to come some weekends to help. Aunt Irma always disliked driving, and I don't think she drives at all any more.

Willington is in Northeastern Connecticut, not particularly far from where I am in Quincy MA, so I may go down on the weekend, if Aunt Irma needs me or won't find my presence an added burden.

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Mon, Nov 06, 2006

Kubuntu

Posted at 9:16 pm MST to Technology

The operating system seems to be working, although KDE is acting a little strange. I think some of the settings that got copied over from SuSE in my home directory are conflicting with the way Kubuntu wants things. I have a feeling I'm going to be spending some time exploring the KDE config files.

I've got the following important non-KDE applications usable:
apache2 (for the local website development), ReaderWare, GnuCash, VMWare. I haven't attacked reloading Oracle yet. That will be a project for after I get the main environment tuned a little better.

Considering that apache is a mature a widely used and well-documented package with fairly straightforward configuration, I would like to know why every Linux distro wants to screw up the config files in their own unique way so the standard docs won't quite apply. I think the Linux Standard Base should consider standardizing the apache config files.

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Sun, Nov 05, 2006

OS Change

Posted at 7:47 pm MST to Technology

The laptop I work on is now running Kubuntu. The absence of normal Linux access to root is being annoying, as I expected. And it will take a few days to get back to the full configuration I had previously... I'll need to reinstall Oracle and VMWare, among other packages.

At the moment, I'm still restoring my /home partition. It took 7 and a half hours to back up, so I suppose I can't complain when it takes a similar amount of time to restore. I'm giving home its own partition this time, though, so if I decide I can't stand Kubuntu after all, I can just nuke the system space and load something different. I'd need to back up /home, to be safe, but unless something went wrong I wouldn't need to do the restore.

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Sat, Nov 04, 2006

Betrayals of Principles

Posted at 4:29 pm MST to Current Events

Two cases of betrayal of principles are holding my attention today.

One is the Haggard case, which is mostly amusing (especially since I am 2000 miles from Colorado Springs Conservatives). I liked John Scalzi's followup entry "In other words, he didn't inhale. Either time." and some of the discussion on that blog entry is very amusing, too.

I am also looking forward to Mr. Scalzi's comments on the election. His blog is one of my favorites, lately. (But I am embarrassed to admit that I am one of those who who found his excellent and consistently interesting blog due to the notoriousbacon-cat incident.) I haven't tried making a schadenfreude pie because I don't do pies even when I have an adequate kitchen (which the one in this corp-housing apartment isn't) but I may try talking my friend Nanette into attempting one.

The second case of betrayals of principles is the announcement on thursday by Novell that they are allying with Microsoft and will be paying them royalties. Don't these people pay attention to history? I don't mean world history, I mean industry history, the kind that is covered by trade papers like Infoworld and Computerworld. Anyone who shakes hands with Microsoft draws back a bloody stump... it just sometimes takes them a while to notice that they are bleeding out. alliance. And making vague claims of IP infractions in Linux while violating the spirit (if possibly not the strict letter) of the GPL has done real well for SCO. Groklaw in general seems to be doing a good job of following this mess, while the outrage of the free software community is reverberating across the web.

One effect of this is that I spent several hours today trying to decide which non-Novell Linux version will replace SuSE 10.0 on the laptop where I am writing this. I'd been reluctant to upgrade to 10.1 or beyond (10.2 is almost out and I want some of the newer packages) because I didn't like reports of some of the technical directions they were taking. Now I have an added incentive to go another direction entirely.

It will probably be Kubuntu because Ubuntu is an officially supported host platform for VMWare. Kubuntu instead of vanilla Ubuntu because I strongly prefer KDE to Gnome for my desktop (the main reason I was driven away from Red Hat/Fedora, which I used for several years).

I'll start the backups before I go to bed, and plan to make the OS switch tomorrow.

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Fri, Nov 03, 2006

Mirror layouts for everyone

Posted at 8:10 pm MST to Code

Working versions of the mirrors layout tool can now be accessed from the Astral Trading Co. website

Or directly from here:

Get a 10 Gates Mirrors layout.

Get a Target Mirrors layout.

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Thu, Nov 02, 2006

Literary Wills

Posted at 5:58 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Author John M. Ford, who died recently, apparently didn't put his intentions for his literary estate into writing.

This happens far too often, and Neil Gaiman is actively trying to prevent future problems. He got a lawyer to write up a sample literary will and has posted it on his site, with instructions, and is offering to host sample wills for jurisdictions outside the US as well.

I need to pay attention to this when I update my will, which I really should do when I get back to Colorado next month (It's November now! I can talk about going home 'next month'). My current will dates from before I owned part of a business. I can't remember if the current will mentioned my writing and other creative work: I know it made special provision for my pets and collections of books, etc.

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Wed, Nov 01, 2006

Divination Tool Projects

Posted at 5:46 pm MST to Code

I now have two scripting projects running in parallel. The perl program that does Net of Mirrors layouts is coming along nicely: it will now organize the icons correctly to display the 10 Gates layout, and I know how to do the other layouts I want as options.

My other project is a related program that will do layouts of tarot decks. It will currently 'know' about two different decks: the standard Rider-Waite and one being developed by my friend Nanette. I haven't figured out what to do about icons for it, though. (It took me 3 days and some serious RSI to generate the icons for the Mirrors, but I had the image files from the original cards to work from for those.)

Actually, at the moment, I'm too tired to work on much. I've been staying up too late working on my projects, and it has caught up with me. At the moment I am incapable of typing a list of the Major Arcana (from either deck) and having it come out right, even with a list to copy from. It's like trying to balance a checkbook and having it never come out the same way twice.

And I know beeter than to try to program when I'm this groggy. Tonight will have to be an early night.

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Tue, Oct 31, 2006

A Halloween layout

Posted at 7:58 pm MST to Net of Mirrors

Water, Storms and Gates. Interesting.

This has icons for the cards, with the html for the layout automatically generated by my program. The output still needs a fair amount of work. Putting the cards in the right locations related to each other would obviously be helpful. (I'm going to try something sneaky with tables in the CGI code).

Eventually there will be a push button on the Astral Trading Company website that will give you a nice layout with interpretation texts for the cards and locations, and do everything automatically.

See more ...

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Mon, Oct 30, 2006

Voting Complications

Posted at 5:52 pm MST to Current Events

My absentee ballot arrived at the county clerk's office, but I had missed a place where my signature was required. I think the guy who designs Publisher's Clearinghouse forms moonlighted on the design of the ballot package, though they didn' have any stickers that put you in a raffle for a new car (Maybe they should consider adding one: it might improve voter turnout.

The elections board sent me a letter explaining the problem, which arrived Friday. It said I could stop by their office to sign the form any time before Nov 15, which wasn't going to work since I'm stuck on the East Coast until December. I callled them to ask if there were any alternatives (the 2 hour time difference is sometimes useful), and they said they would figure something out and get back to me today at the latest.

I love modern technology, and I really appreciate government officials who actually go out of their way to be helpful. Ms. Patricia Stahl at the elections office called promptly as promised, and emailed me a PDF of a scan of the form I needed to sign. I printed it out, signed it, and made a photocopy of my driver's licence and faxed the form and the license copy to her.

Tomorrow I'll mail out the hardcopy originals, so she will have them for the official records.

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Sat, Oct 28, 2006

Fixing the time

Posted at 11:34 am MDT to Technology

I think I may finally have the timestamps working the way I want.

This is a good day for tinkering with things: its raining buckets out, and supposed to get windy. I'm playing "Another Land Made of Water" a musical story by Gordon Bok which fits well with East Coast storms, and working on some icons for the Mirrors.

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Fri, Oct 27, 2006

New Yorker

Posted at 7:05 pm MDT to Media

I have been a member of the Science Fiction Book Club for more than twice as long as Andrew Wheeler has been their senior editor. I've long enjoyed his comments in rec.arts.sf.written, and eventually found my way to his blog, which is full of wonderful book reviews and is also tweaking my long-dormant comic book addiction (as opposed to my virulently active manga addiction).

A recent entry contains the following quote from a 10/16 New Yorker review by Jill Lepore:

Thomas Paine is, at best, a lesser Founder. In the comic-book version of history that serves as our national heritage, where the Founding Fathers are like the Hanna-Barbera Super Friends, Paine is Aquaman to Washington's Superman and Jefferson's Batman; we never find out how he got his superpowers, and he only shows up when they need someone who can swim.

I love wit and articulate writing. It's enough to make me wish the New Yorker as a whole was less provincial (solipsistic? divorced from the world west of the Hudson, much less the Mississippi?), or less prone to publishing fiction about people who are stupid or boring or both. I like their cartoons and some of their columns and articles, but I can't justify a subscription because the proportion of stuff I end up skipping is too great.

Too much to read, too little time. Too many magazine subscriptions, though I'm dropping many of those as my attention focusses more and more online.

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Thu, Oct 26, 2006

Layouts 10/26/2006

Posted at 7:22 pm MDT to Net of Mirrors

Below the cut are two layouts of the Net of Mirrors generated by my little random-card-choosing program. This is just the raw output of two passes of the program, without interpretations.

At least they seem fairly hopeful. The second layout is especially interesting, with I Ching 1 (Yang) showing up in the direction of Yin.

Eventually, I'd like to have a page where you can click a button and have a layout generated with little icons of the cards in the correct locations, with links to the card texts.

But first I need to re-write the card texts.

And create mirror-card icons that are compact but meaningful.

See more ...

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Network Difficulties

Posted at 6:17 pm MDT to Technology

I now have Comcast instead of Abbott for TV cable and Internet Broadband. Comcast really needs to get some tech support people who know more than how tell Windows users to put the CD into their drive and click on the little icons. And I wonder how the installer managed to leave the cable-modem in a state where it needed a hard reset before it would serve DHCP to my computer.

The last time I had to deal with them I had a dual-boot laptop. These days Windows is a virtual guest installation, so using it to wake up the modem wasn't an option: it can't access the hardware that directly.

The more I hear about the Windows Vista EULA, License and configuration, the more I dread having to put that turkey on any machine I work with. Fortunately, most of my clients are big companies who are slow to roll out new configurations (some are still using Win2K) so my WinXP installation should be adequate for a while.

And with any luck, Vista will tank so badly that MS will have to replace it with something more civilized.

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Tue, Oct 24, 2006

Saint Triceratops

Posted at 7:31 pm MDT to Media

I found this link at Making Light.

I think Saint Triceratops is delightful, but I can see that it might not have the same resonance for those not raised Catholic.

At the moment I'd actually prefer some assistance from something toothier and more militant than a triceratops. Think coffee cups with little concentric ripples. I was hoping to get to bed early tonight, but the college students in the apartment next door have a sound system that really more than adequate for the size of these apartments and the amount of insulation in the walls.

For some reason, for the past week I've been alternating Pete Townsend's "All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes" and Warren Zevon's "Excitable Boy" in my CD player.(My travelling stero system is a walkman with computer speakers plugged into the headphone port -- at home I have a serious AV stack.) I think when Pete finishes 'Slit Skirts' it's going to be time for some 'Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner' and 'Lawyers, Guns and MOney'. And the maybe the 'Gladiator' soundtrack.

It might be better for my soul and my blood pressure to pay some Krishna Das instead, but I don't think it would cover up the rappers unless I cranked the volume too much.

Six and a half more weeks. I get to go home the weekend of December 9.

I've been called for jury duty December 18th... a nice long trial would mean I get to sleep in my own bed for a while, but I suspect I'm too much of a geek to get picked for a jury, even in Boulder, Colorado.

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Mon, Oct 23, 2006

Colors, Elements and Suits

Posted at 9:19 pm MDT to Net of Mirrors

The Suits of the Net of Mirrors are derived more from the Five Chinese Elements, which are traditionally viewed as transformational, than from the European elements, which are traditionally viewed as static. The European elements are present to some extent as echoes or overlays, with the overlay of swords/air/metal producing the suit of Storms (with additional relationships to electriticity, ideas, communications, computers, tools) and the overlay of spirit and wood producing the suit of the Woods (with relationships to living things and ecosystems, not carpentry).

Traditional "pure" colors are used for the suits in the original cards I laid out in the early 90s: Black for Metal, White for Wood, Red for Fire, Yellow for Earth, and Blue for Water, with gray overlays on the Twilight cards. The Storm cards were printed silver on black stock, and the other cards were printed in black on colored stock, with the Gates and Powers on off-white stock to help differentiate them from the Wood cards.

Properly speaking, there should be different symbolic colors for the Bright and Twilight aspects of the elements. I'm sure that Twilight Wood is green and the Twilight Storm is violet.

The Bright and Twilight Waters are approximately turquoise and indigo. I suspect those colors map better in Russian, but I never really got a good feel for how the two Russian words that are both translated 'blue' are applied to the visible world.

The red of Bright Flame is the pure red of fresh blood. I suspected at one time that the Twilight Flame (transitions and boundaries) might be a sort of burgundy, but I think I had the phase reversed: Twilight Flame is the red-orange of embers and bonfires.

Earth is ... hard to describe, partly because so much of the yellow part of the spectrum gets named as variants of brown in English. Neither shade is as lightweight as dandelion, nor as shiny and metallic as gold. Standard goldenrod printing stock is just about right for Bright Earth. I'm not sure what the color is for Twilight Earth. I suspect I'll know it when I see it.

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Sun, Oct 22, 2006

Mirror cards tool

Posted at 9:45 pm MDT to Code

I've got a script now that will perform two functions related to the Net of Mirrors cards.

One option will select a random mirror image that has not yet been blogged about and initialize the blog file for me to write about it in.

The other option will select a list of 10 unique card sides for a 10 card layout. Each card can occur only once in each layout, and if the 'head' image appears the 'tail' image cannot also appear.

There will be a choice of at least 3 sets of layout labels that can be attached to the selected cards: labels for the standard Celtic Cross tarot layout and the Target and 10 Gates layouts described along with the Net of Mirrors.

If I get really ambitious, there will eventually be a page on the astraltrading.com web site where visitors can generate and display layouts. Interpretations will be another matter.

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Sat, Oct 21, 2006

Technical Difficulties

Posted at 1:36 pm MDT to Technology

Note to self: do not plan vacations to the unwebbified hinterlands of anywhere, anytime. The network connection here at the apartment was down much of yesterday and it was very disorienting. The main reason I can stand being thousands of miles from my books is that so much information is available online. Without google. I'm crippled.

If the link was still down this morning, I was going to look for connectivity elsewhere. I think the Starbucks on the first floor may have Wifi, and if not, there are probably other sources nearby. There are so many colleges and universities in the Boston area, it's a wonder they have room for anything else . (Starbucks don't have decaf chai, which is probably a good thing for both my wallet and my waistline, or I'd know whether they have wifi.)

In other techy news, one of the new features I've added to this blog seems to have shifted the posting time displays to GMT instead of the local time. I don't really post things in the middle of the night. The change may be related to the upgraded RSS and Atom feeds. If I can't switch things back without breaking something, I will at least label the times as GMT.

I'm still working on weblog pings and a few other features for the site.

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Fri, Oct 20, 2006

Titles of the Keys

Posted at 9:25 pm MDT to Net of Mirrors

Each suit of the Keys, or Minor Arcana, has 10 bright and 10 twilight images. The numbers are loosely mapped with the following themes.

• Ace -- The Essence or Beginning of the Element
• Two -- The Element in Balance
• Three -- The Element in Stability
• Four -- The Element Incomplete
• Five -- The Element Transformed
• Six -- The Element in Harmony
• Seven -- The Element in Diversity
• Eight -- The Element in Completion
• Nine -- The Element in the Abstract:
  • Bright -- Knowledge
  • Twilight -- Communication
• Ten -- The Element in the Concrete:
  • Bright -- Creation
  • Twilight -- Action

Note that the nines and tens double as the 'face' or 'court' cards (nines are female, tens are male for court card purposes). The twilight versions of the lower numbers are mapped to the 40 remaining I Ching hexagrams (24 are used in the Twilight Gates).

The full list of the old titles is below the cut.

See more ...

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Thu, Oct 19, 2006

The Bots have found me.

Posted at 6:58 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I've been adding features to the weblog -- making the comment pages look like they belong to the rest of it, and turning on logging. It still needs a formal copyright notice and a way to get back from Comments mode to normal mode, and some other things (suggestions welcome).

I've only had the log turned on for a couple of days, and its fun to know that people have actually looked at the blog, and that the bots are busily weaving it into the web. In the past day or so I've been scanned by Yahoo Slurp and Googlebots and Moreover.com bots. This probably happened before I got the log going, too, but now I know about it. Makes this whole thing feel more real somehow.

But it's annoying that Yahoo doesn't seem to use the same IP address twice. It seems wasteful somehow. Google used two IPs, one for the main blog and one hitting the rss feed (which I really hope works) which seems more reasonable.

There are widgets I could add that would ping weblogs.com when the site gets updated, too, but I need to find one that won't lock up my site if weblogs.com is not responding.

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Wed, Oct 18, 2006

Linux Distributions

Posted at 8:58 pm MDT to Technology

I now have 5 operating systems loaded on my laptop, and thanks to the wonders of VMWare I can run them in various combinations.

My host system is SuSE 10.0 with KDE upgraded to 3.5

I have a Windows XP Pro installation that I need for work. I don't let it talk to the network directly, and don't boot it very often. I let it do one round of security updates when I first set it up, and I should probably figure out how to download Microsoft upgrades using Linux and safe browsers. So I can keep it isolated.

I have a live-disk image of hikarunix, which is a little Linux distribution devoted to the game of Go.

I have just loaded Fedora Core 5 and the current Kubuntu from the live CD. Fedora is familiar and sort of comfortable to administer -- I used Fedora 4 on my previous laptop. But it looks like they have removed even more of the good KDE stuff, and I think SuSE has spoiled me

I don't think I'm the target market for Kubuntu: I was trained on UNIX internals and the C programming language in AT&T inhouse training classes in the late 80s. A UNIX-ish install that doesn't require creating a root password is just perverse. And the current installation feels sort of light-weight and Microsofty. I'm downloading the DVD distribution now, to see if I can spec a more solid-feeling configuration.

I hope openSuSE keeps solid KDE support, and fixes the admin problems from 10.1. I think I've gotten spoiled. It would be nice if it turned out like the early Star Trek movies, where the even numbered ones were the good ones.

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Tue, Oct 17, 2006

Romance Novels

Posted at 8:20 pm MDT to Media

I generally don't read romance novels. Most of my genre reading is mysteries, science fiction, or fantasy, though I also like well-done historical fiction. (By well-done I mean researched, or at least plausible and internally consistent.)

The last time I tried reading a romance novel with a modern setting, I stalled a couple of chapters in. It was not so much because of Dorothy Heydt's 8 deadly words (I don't care WHAT happens to these people) as it was because of a strong desire to slap some sense into the heroine. The traditions of romance being what they are, I saw little reason to hope that she would either grow up in any meaningful way or come to a satisfyingly nasty end, so I gave the book back unfinished to the friend I had borrowed it from.

I think it's the girl geek/spinster librarian thing: the important things in my life are ideas and autonomy, to a level that is antithetical to the basic value structure in romances... The Music Man is one of the movies I bring with me when I'm going to be stuck in corporate housing for a while, but part of me thinks Marian wimped out (but can be excused due to the culture and historical period).

However...

I followed a link about the Fred Head Texas political fiasco from Making Light to Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Novels and I'm finding the site a lote of fun. Especially the series of articles being snarky about bad romance novel cover art. I will probably explore some of their reviews, too. I wouldn't mind finding something moderately steamy about competent people, preferably with a plot that isn't an idiot plot.

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Mon, Oct 16, 2006

Mirror Titles

Posted at 7:51 pm MDT to Net of Mirrors

There are three categories of Mirrors. The Powers and Gates are essentially the Major Arcana. And the Keys are the five suits of the Minor Arcana.

Stone: Yellow. The World of Form, The Center or Beginning of Things.
Water: Blue. The World of Perception, the East.
Storm (Air/Metal): Black. The World of Knowledge, the North.
Flame: Red. The World of Action, the South.
The Wood: White. The World of Consciousness, the West.

They are divided into two classes: Bright mirrors that reflect states and essences, and Twilight Mirrors that reflect boundaries and transitions.

The full list of the Powers and Gates appears after the cut.

See more ...

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Sun, Oct 15, 2006

Unpopular Technology Choices

Posted at 9:50 pm MDT to Technology

I have a Beta format VCR stored in my basement. I think it technically would still work if I plugged it in, so I can't quite bring myself to throw it out.

I have a couple of old, tiny hard drives installed in one of my computers at home that still have HPFS partitions on them, from the days when I used OS/2 as my operating system on my home machines. (I even ran OS/2 on the first laptop I ever owned.)

These days, I seem to be falling on the wrong side of the KDE/Gnome divide. I like KDE and Gnome just rubs me the wrong way, though I generally load the Gnome modules so programs based on Gnome will run. I like KOffice and a lot of the other KDE-based programs, too.

Until last spring, my Linux machines ran KRUD distributions, which were tweaked Red Hat/Fedora, but KDE support there began to be more and more crippled over time.

SuSE had a good reputation for KDE support, and for AMD64 support, so when I got my current travelling system, I ordered it with SuSe installed instead of Fedora. I'm currently running 10.0 (upgraded to KDE 3.5), and I like its KDE configuration. But I'm concerned for the future, since reviews I've seen seem to indicate that Novell may be backing away from KDE support. And the SuSE admin tools, which are really slick in 10.0 seem to have to have gone to hell in a handbasket in Novell's newer Enterprise products, which are 10.1 based.

And whoever decided on the AV support configuration for SuSE just needs to be slapped. I'm running the for-cash version -- got a printed manual and a DVD with a lizard on it and everything -- and trying to do basic stuff like play sound files or write stuff (even data files) to CDs and DVD has had so many gotchas it makes me nostalgic for Fedora, where that stuff mostly just worked.

I'm trying to load Kubuntu into one of my VMWare clients, to get some experience with it just in case I decide Novell won't provide the combination of current software versions, and KDE, and viable backups to 4.7 Gig DVDs that I want. But I'm pretty sure some of the software I need to install for work doesn't support Debian/Ubuntu -- it's more commercial oriented.

At least on this laptop, Windows is isolated in a VMWare jail, and can be run at the same time as Linux. The old laptop was configured dual-boot. I'm really NOT looking forward to Vista/Longhorn.

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Sat, Oct 14, 2006

Tweaks and General Information

Posted at 8:10 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I've been tuning the actual blog software a bit.

Please let me know if you try to Subscribe or Add a Comment and it doesn't work.

Clicking the link at My Name over on the left should pop up an email form, if you have your browser configured to talk to your email application. Clicking the domain name Data-Raptors.com should take you to the Home page.

If there are features you think the blog should have, or if you have problems with the color scheme, please let me know that, too. Teleidoscope will get fancier once I am back in Colorado. My XHTML references are all 2000 miles away at the moment.

I have also cleaned up some odds and end on the rest of the Data-Raptors site (what little of it there is). At least the posted resume is no longer from 2003.

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Fri, Oct 13, 2006

A General Introduction

Posted at 10:11 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Who I am and where I am...

I am a geek. Female. Solitary.

INTP (in spades) if you are into Meyers-Briggs.

I am technically a spinster librarian. I have an MLS and worked as a librarian for four years, and I own a working spinning wheel and a couple of drop spindles which I know how to use.

But I've spent most of my professional life working on software and I currently make my living as a software engineering consultant.

I used to go to SF cons and Worldcons regularly. I attended some of the huge Star Trek conventions in New York in the early to mid-seventies, and attended the very first ever filk-con. I was a member of the SCA for several years through about 1982. I was involved in anime APAs in the late 80s and early 90s and sold Tarot cards and other divination tools at Worldcons in the the middle and late 90s (Astral Trading Company). I've been lurking on rec.arts.sf.written since 1985, with occasional gaps when I lost USENET access.

My education includes a linguistics major, an astronomy minor, WAAAYY too much reading on every subject under the sun (except modern professional sports, blech) and some formal classes in the Japanese language during my first
round of anime addiction during the late 80s and early 90s.

My house is in Boulder, Colorado, and holds several thousand books, about 5000 comic books, several hundred dvds, a well equipped kitchen, and my fiber-arts stash and craft supplies. I have only spent about half of my time there since the tech bubble popped: right now I'm in corporate housing in Quincy, Massachusetts, 5 months into a 7 month consulting gig. The kitchens in corporate housing are never designed for actually cooking anything real in. I brought a bookcase with me. (I've run out of places to put bookcases at home, and they are all shelved two and three books deep.)

My life for the past 5 years has been depressingly mundane and routine because of being away from home so much, except for buying books and dvds (Anime -- crack would be cheaper) and a couple of GeekCruises.

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Categories

Posted at 10:11 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

The posts in this weblog will be assigned to several categories.

Technology This will include articles about computers and software. Also fiber arts, cooking, and possibly gear clocks and pipe organs. Some science articles will probably end up here, since I tend to be more interested in how the pieces fit together in practice than in the details of theory.

Code Software I'm working on. I've done most of my recent work in perl. (Complaints about customers making me write Visual Basic belong in technology.)

Media Comments, reviews or links about text, music, videos, images, comics, games, etc. created by people other than me.

Creative work Text, images, etc. etc. created by me. This will probably be mostly text pieces (the longer ones will be represented by links to other places on the website), but I'm working (sporadically) on a couple of original cross-stitch designs, and if I ever finish them they will be displayed here.

Current Events State of the union. State of the world. Occasional gossip. Legal matters, even when they involve tech companies.

Net of Mirrors The Net of Mirrors is a divination tool I created years ago. The original edition of the pamphlet I wrote about it is available online here. There are 160 image descriptions that need to be expanded and revised. 320 if you count reversals. (640 if you count rotations, but I don't think I have the energy to think about going there.) When the mood strikes (or I can't think of anything else to write about) I will select one of the Mirrors and write aboout it. I may program a way for the blog to tell me what image to write about next, but I need to get the rest of this blog working first.

Miscellaneous Anything (like this introduction) that doesn't fit one of the specific categories.

New categories will be added if I decide I need them.

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Net of Mirrors Intro poem

Posted at 10:09 pm MDT to Net of Mirrors

Thought and action spark
Time's current through spirit glow --
Light and shadows dance
Within a net of mirrors
ripples on a moonlit stream.

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Womanly technology: From braided rugs to hand-built computer

Posted at 10:01 pm MDT to Technology

My mother used to make wonderful hand-braided rugs while she watched TV in the evenings. My paternal grandmother worked in a coat factory and provided pre-sliced two-inch wide strips of scrap wool in various colors, so the rugs were actually made from strong new cloth, not worn out clothes. Rugs done in red, white, blue and camel look quite nice against hardwood floors.

I've played with various fiber arts myself, over the years. I haven't made any rugs, but I own a loom and a working spinning wheel, and I've taken classes in how to use both of them. And I've completed projects in macrame and crewel and counted cross-stitch and hardanger and needlepoint and latch-hook, and wirewrap.

I have tried to learn knitting and tatting and crocheting but I've never finished a project in any of those three crafts. I find there is something disorienting about them, and I don't think it's just the righthanded/lefthanded thing. Perhaps they trigger my output rotational dyslexia in some way that the other textile arts don't. I'll need to think about this.

The wirewrap project produced the first computer I ever owned. When I worked on my computer science degree, I had a choice of doing a regular written thesis or a design project. I chose to do a design project partly to get practical experience.

I spent many contented hours watching TV and wirewrapping the connections between the processor (Motorola 6809) and the video chip (6847) and the 16 kilobytes of regular ram and the 32 k of video ram and the 2k eprom containing the monitor program I wrote, and the few other chips that were needed to make the thing accept input from a keyboard and display stuff on a tv screen. I used multiple cards and a standard bus and backplane, too. It wasn't just an arbitrary layout on a single board.

About the time I finished my project, Radio Shack came out with their first Color Computer, which used the same chip set and generally functioned for more than the 30 seconds I needed to demonstrate to my advisor that my design actually worked (on reflection, naming the machine 'Eris' was just asking for trouble). I think the CoCos cost less than what I spent on my little project, too. And they almost certainly used less copper.

But the fact that I had created something in 6809 assembly language that worked got me my first techy job.

I've still got my little wirewrap project somewhere at home. Once I'm actually in my own home again, in 8 weeks or so, I will put a picture or two up on the data-raptors.com website.

Putting computers together with soldering irons (or by just plugging things together) isn't nearly as much fun. Even though the computers built that way usually keep working after you breathe on them.

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"Confessions of a Failed Clown" by Stephan Zielinski

Posted at 9:59 pm MDT to Media

It's not often I laugh out loud when I'm reading something. Actually, it's very seldom that I laugh hard at something at all, not to laugh so hard it hurts. This was painfully funny.

I will add Mr. Zielinski's book, "Bad Magic", sampled on his site, here, to my next Amazon order.

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Absentee Ballot

Posted at 9:58 pm MDT to Current Events

One advantage of being stuck 2000 miles from home, is that I get to use a paper Absentee Ballot. This is not. of course, a guarantee that my vote will actually be counted But at least I'm sure my selections will actually be recorded somewhere.

My new printer is also a copier. I'm tempted to photocopy my ballot before I send it out, just because.

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"Wilde Jagd"

Posted at 9:58 pm MDT to Creative Work

A March that Isn't

3/4 time
Phrygian or Phrygian Dominant mode
(The asterisks indicate drums only, or silence)

The high summons calls
Wind-driven souls
To the old contract.
Answering,
We yell! * *

Across the wild hills
With fire and steel,
Breaking mortals' peace,
Untiring,
We ride! * *

As sparks trail the torch
Of the Lord's will,
Through moon-dappled woods,
Unfading,
We rush! * *

With War's grinning face
To mock the foe,
Through terror and blood
Together,
Kinsmen, We Hunt!

7/31/2006
Inspired by GirlGenius by Phil and Kaja Foglio, folklore, and the wild geese

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This Blog

Posted at 9:57 pm MDT to Code

This blog is actually code I'm working on: blosxom is written in perl and some of the modules I'm using wouldn't be recognized by their original writer. I may translate pieces of it, or the whole thing, to perl 6 as a training exercise at some point

I'll try to report the time I spend dinking with the site code, once it goes live.

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