Teleidoscope

Sun, Dec 30, 2007

Work You Love

Posted at 11:25 am MST to Miscellaneous

There is a link on Making Light to a great essay on doing work you love.

It strikes me that I have done a fair job of finding something I love to do, annoying though it is at times. My work is productive: I help people to get things done that they often could not do without my help. And my arms would be in a lot better shape if I didn't like playing with computers so much that I do it on my own time as well as during the time I'm paid for.

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Weight Bench

Posted at 10:38 am MST to Exercise

I got the weight bench cleared off yesterday. I still need to make more open floor space by moving the tubs of manga down to the basement.

Today's exercise:

AM Yoga for Beginners: 20 minutes. The twists went a lot better: Marti's work made a noticeable difference. My hamstrings are horribly tight (they always are unless I work on them regularly).

Whatever the arm equivalents of hamstrings are, are also horribly tight. Lying on the floor with my arms straight out to the sides, I feel a lot of pull in a strip just below my collar bones (worse on the right, where the surgery and radiation tightened things up, to the point of being painful) that goes away if I bend my arms at the elbows.

Lifting my arms over my head works OK when I'm standing, but not when I'm laying flat. But that's due to a different set of things being stiff.

Abs Yoga for Beginners: about a quarter of the 20 minute tape. I did more of it on Friday, but I'm still sore from then. Strengthening my abs is good for my back and bad hip, but I need to take it slow so I don't throw something out while the joints are relatively unsupported. Being as overweight as I am adds to the danger (my scale says I'm more than 40% body fat) because the weight distribution is off, and it pulls on my spine in the wrong ways.

Free weights: I just used 5 pound weights in each hand, more to check the range of motion than to really stress things. But I'm sure I'll be stiff in the morning, which will give me some incentive to do my AM Yoga.

I can't do a decent butterfly, due to the tightness mentioned above. But at least that means I know something to use to work on that tightness below my collar bones. There's another weight move (I'll have to look up the name) that should help the overhead stretches, too.

I didn't try any squats or lunges, even without weights. I think I want my abs and lower back a little more stable before I try those. I really don't trust the left leg and hip at the moment. I need to find a place in this cluttered house to do leg-up-the-wall stretches and get my hamstrings to extend a bit before I try squats.

My weight has been stable lately: I might have gained a pound over the holidays, but my weight is still within the range where it has been hovering for the past several months. I don't really eat very much, and my diet is fairly healthy since I do most of my own cooking. I'm not going to try to lose weight while I ramp up this exercise program. I mostly want to reorganize the weight I've got. But if some of it wants to go away completely, I won't complain.

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Sat, Dec 29, 2007

XP Recovery

Posted at 10:31 pm MST to Technology

Earlier this week I updated VMWare to a newer version, and browsing from my XP virtual image stopped locking up my laptop. Today I restored my XP image (which had been rolled back to a snapshot from August) from a recent backup that includes most of the stuff I've been working on recently, including ClearConn and the eclipse installations. Microsoft Windows update is actually running instead of locking up the whole laptop instantly.

It took a long time to get things reset: I had to shuffle huge (12 Gig) tar files back and forth between the laptop and the server so that I didn't risk losing the working-but-old XP image in case the restored image still locked up. I think I need to clean out the older snapshots for the virtual image (since they are backed up anyway) and make a new one once the Windows update completes.

I really need to get to work recreating that lost ClearConn CGI script, though I have to admit a week of relatively little computing has been good for my eyes and arms.

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Fri, Dec 28, 2007

Salt Cellar and Spices

Posted at 5:59 pm MST to Technology

After my massage therapy appointment this morning, I went over to the Pearl Street pedestrian mall (Boulder's 'Main Street' shopping area). Many of the locally owned shops that used to be there have been replaced by national chains. Or Nepali and Tibetan importers: I sometimes think someone passed an ordinance that there needs to be a Nepali shop in every block of the mall.

But some of the old shops are still around. Hurdle's, a jeweler, is celebrating its 60th anniversary and had a copy of the two-page spread that announced their Grand Opening in their window, along with a photo of their original store.

The 'Boulder Art Cooperative' is still cooperating. And 'El Loro: Clogs and Jewelry', which hasn't changed much from its roots as a head shop. The Boulder Army Surplus Store is down-playing the 'army' in its signage, but it's still in the Odd Fellows' building.

I spent some time in 'Peppercorn' which sells kitchenware, gourmet ingredients, dinnerware, linens and such. I was really looking for a free-standing pot rack to fit one nook in my kitchen but they didn't have one in the size I wanted and a color I liked.

However, I did find a salt cellar like the one that Alton Brown uses, half-hidden on the back of a shelf. (I was amused to note that the product code on the register receipt was ALTN.) My existing salt cellar was a ceramic thing meant to hold a container of ParKay, but there is a small chip on one edge, and the lid sat down inside the edges of the bowl so that it did not always protect the salt from drips. I was glad to be able to replace it with un-chipped container with an over-hanging lid and a rubber gasket. My salt will be much safer. And more accessible, since the new salt cellar has a fliptop, not a separate lid that needs to be removed and ends up wandering around the kitchen.

My Italian grandmother, Nonna, had two cut-glass sugar bowls in her kitchen. One was clear, pinkish glass, and the other was clear greenish glass. I don't remember, after all these years, which one had the salt. It was kind of tricky to make coffee or tea in that kitchen if you were a stranger.

My own kitchen is a bit dangerous for strangers these days, too. I used to use a sugar bowl and creamer (I keep powdered milk in it) that matched my Corelle dishes, but the lids were very light-weight and the mice got into them along with almost everything else in the kitchen when Dinah Kitty was with me in Boston. Ick. Now I have three 12 ounce canning jars on the counter, with the plastic storage lids that are available for them. Two are Ball jelly jars with quilted sides: one for sugar and one for the powdered milk.

The third canning jar is a Kerr jelly jar with smoother, curved sides. That one has pickling salt in it, for baking and other uses where I want salt that will dissolve more quickly than the large kosher crystals. (I got tired of lifting the salt canister down from the top shelf of the spice cupboard.)

The spice cupboard is getting re-organized, too. I've ordered a bunch of opaque, air-tight tins in various sizes, a grinder, and some bulk whole spices from a place that has the option of selling them in bags, not always in fancy clear jars that are 1) expensive and 2) unable to protect the spices from light. Even the 'chili powder' and 'curry powder' were available as whole spices, so they won't lose strength as quickly, especially sealed in the tins.

When the new spices arrive, I'll toss out the spices in the cupboard and on my spice rack that are very old. The Italian herbs get used and replaced regularly, but I can't remember which year I experimented with Indian cooking, so I'm sure the ground cardamom is thoroughly deceased...

I may replace the rack that holds some of my existing herbs and spices with a Velcro mounting system for the tins: it's in a handy location, but too bright for stuff in the existing clear jars.

And I need to stop at McGuckins or Michael's and get something to label the tins. (I think I'm going to label the tins, not the lids: much safer that way.)

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Ankle

Posted at 3:19 pm MST to Exercise

I had a session with my massage therapist this morning for the first time in far too long. When she moved from working on my left leg to the right one, Marti said "Hey, you have an ankle on this side."

It's true. My left leg is stiff and bloated compared to the right one. And, Marti says it is shorter, too, which it didn't used to be -- which is partly the result of the muscles being all clenchednon that side, but partly a sign that my hip is going wonky again. Which will mess up my lower back.

My hip and left arm (which is also a mess compared to the right one, though even the right arm isn't in great shape) are both sore now, but that's partly because the blood is getting into places that had beenlocked tight.

I was in good shape in 2001, before I started travelling so much and had my exercise routines disrupted, and before the surgery and radiation treatments.

It's a good thing I started the yoga again. And I haven't been doing much computing this week: I can imagine what Marti would say about the shape my arms were in last weekend.

This weekend I'm going to excavate my weight bench, which turned into an auxiliary bookshelf during the years I was travelling, like every other horizontal surface in the house. I'm going to have have to start slowly or the range of motion problems will mess up my form enough that I may do more harm than good.

I've also prepaid for a series of bi-weekly massage sessions. With Marti working on my circulation and range of motion from the outside every two weeks, and the weights and yoga working on the inside, maybe I can get my limbs working properly again before I end up crippled.

I also need to contemplate furniture: working from home, I need to pay more attention to ergonomics.

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Thu, Dec 27, 2007

OLPC

Posted at 1:42 pm MST to Technology

While rummaging in my ISP's spam filters, looking for an email that might have been delayed, I found a notice from the One Laptop Per Child project about my laptop: it should arrive before January 15. They apologized for it not arriving before Christmas Eve and provided a link to a special IOU gift card to use if the laptop had been intended as a gift.

The laptops donated through the G1G1 program will be going to Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia and Rwanda. I approve of all of those destinations.

Especially Mongolia. Somewhere I have some brochures that the Mongolian embassy to the UN sent me about 20 years ago when I was thinking of writing a Mongol character in a space story.

I'm not sure why I have this thing about central Asia, but I've had it for a long time, and it seems to have cropped up again recently: Tosun Bekdeli, in the Techlands, stories is Turkmen with some Mongol ancestry. And Rakkas the tri-mule is part khulan, a wild equid not yet extinct in Turkmenistan and Mongolia.

Just for fun, a picture of a khulan is after the cut.

See more ...

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Wed, Dec 26, 2007

Yoga and Other Exercise

Posted at 4:25 pm MST to Exercise

For several years I exercised regularly: yoga, walking and free weights. Even when I started living in corporate housing in far away places (and gaining weight) I tried to keep up with the yoga and free weights. Then I had some surgery and radiation treatments, and between the loss of range of motion and the weight gain, the exercises I was used to became too awkward and painful.

In the year I've been home, my weight seems to have stabilized: I haven't lost any weight, but I haven't gained any either. I haven't been trying to limit my intake particularly, either, and my exercise patterns have been about as minimal as they can get for someone who isn't bedridden.

I've noticed in the past that scars seem to take about two years to settle down: my throat looked like Frankensteins's monster for about two years after my thyroid surgery, and then the scar faded and flattened out. It's now over two years since the end of the radiation treatments.

I've been trying to use my right arm to stretch and reach for things (high shelf in the baking cabinet for example), and I think the range of motion coming back.

Today I got out my favorite yoga DVD and a strap and mat, and the result was very encouraging. I was stiff, especially where the scars are, and the fat that wasn't there 6 years ago still got in the way, but I was mostly able to attempt the abdominal twists. And my right arm was able to do its share in downward-dog, unlike the last time I tried.

I'm going to try to get back in the habit of starting my day with yoga stretches or some other exercise. If I exercise at least as often as I update this blog, my over-all health should improve and I may have fewer problems with arms pain and leg cramps. I'm adding a new blog category for exercise data.

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Tue, Dec 25, 2007

Christmas 2007

Posted at 8:42 am MST to Miscellaneous

Merry Christmas!

Yesterday was sunny and almost warm, with a dusting of last week's snow left on the grass and shaded places. This morning I woke up to find the weather White Christmassing all over everything. My those who need to travel today journey safely and arrive intact.

I actually put my presents under the tree this year. Dinah Kitty has been very good about no bothering the presents of the tree.

Gifts received:

Nanette (Yule)

a quartz Crystal mounted to hang as a pendant
chocolate truffles
a Borders gift card (there is a special Borders edition of the movie Stardust that I have in mind)

Jan (Yule) 

a candle shaped like a deer

Lori (Yule)

a tree-ornament sized stocking containing:
	an evergreen scented votive candle 
	and a small glittery ornament

Nanette (Christmas)

Festive Wine -- a pretty book of translated ancient Japanese poetry illustrated with calligraphic art and block prints, with an essay on ancient Japanese poetry and commentaries on the poems
a sparkly 'jeweled' owl figure

Shawn (Christmas)

a selection of teas in a photo storage box.

Tom (Skip), Mary and Michael

500 Soups cookbook. Some of the recipes look very interesting... and I've been thinking that I should probably eat more soups since my swallowing muscles usually cooperate when I'm eating them.

Aunt Irma and Uncle Tom

a check that will turn into part of the saucier pan that I want

Chris and family

peppermint ribbon candy
little peppermint candies
a chocolate nutcracker candy
complete First Season of the Original StartTrek (which I did not have) in the fancy storage case

Larry and family

The Annotated Wizard of Oz Centennial Edition
The Oz Chronicles (vols 1 and 2) the 14 original L. Frank Baum stories in very nice leather bindings with gold leaf and ribbon book marks

I'm going to re-watch the excellent film version of Pratchett's Hogfather while I eat holiday bread and make some eggnog. The film is supposed to come out on DVD in this country in March -- silly time for a Christmas story to come out.

Then later I'll go all surreal by playing my recording of the "Tin Man" mini-series while reading the Annotated Wizard. I don't know when "Tin Man" will be out on DVD, but it is staying on my DVR until it does.

Dinah Kitty got a (yet another) catnip mouse in her stocking... what do you get a cat that has everything? It seems to have good strong catnip in it: she's playing with it now. When I clean up after the holidays I should discard some of the older toys that are being ignored because the catnip is worn out

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Mon, Dec 24, 2007

Salt

Posted at 1:15 pm MST to Technology

Salt densities, for use in adjusting recipes:

Kosher salt (large grains): 5 grams per teaspoon

Table salt: 6 grams per teaspoon (I found some in an old saltshaker, since I haven't bought any in a while)

Pickling salt (tiny grains that pack with less air between them): 7 grams per teaspoon.

I haven't measured the big salt crystals in my salt grinder: it has three grind settings, and I don't think I want to grind a teaspoon of each. I generally don't use the salt in the grinder in recipes, anyway.

I'll be using the salt and pepper grinders for dinner tomorrow. I had been planning to make frittura dousa, but with big front burner on my stove still broken, making breaded-and-fried stuff would be too annoying. Maybe I'll make frittura dousa for New Year's.

I've taken a sirloin buffalo steak out of the freezer to cook in my George Forman grill, and I've got potatoes and carrots, and several winter squashes to choose from for sides.

I've been looking at new kitchen ranges... but I'm still trying to decide whether to get the kitchen plumbed for gas. There's a KitchenAid range with decent reviews on-line that isn't hideously expensive, comes in white, and has choices of electric, gas or mixed fuel, (Mixed fuel is an electric oven with gas cooktop burners) but I haven't found a live one in any of the stores to look at.

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Sun, Dec 23, 2007

Holiday Bread

Posted at 12:38 pm MST to Technology

I've got two batches of bread rising. One is the first batch of bread made with the new sourdough starter. The other is a holiday bread.

Nonna used to make a holiday bread with rains and citron, but I never knew the recipe for that one. I know it was kneaded and didn't have an over night rise, and the texture was more breadlike than some holiday breads. So I'm improvising based on stollen and recipes I've found for panettone..

My recipe so far:

Put 1/4 cup warm water, a pinch of sugar and about 2.25 teaspoons of dry yest in a custard cup and let it proof.

Cream 1/2 cup each room temperature butter and sugar.

Mix in three eggs

Add 1/5 teaspoons pickling salt, the yeast mixture, 1 teaspoon lemon peel,and 1/2 teaspoon each vanilla and fiori di sicilia.

(Note 1: Fiori di sicilia is a flavoring blending citrus oil and vanilla, but I wanted more vanilla in the balance.)

(Note 2: Pickling salt is very pure and fine-grained, but like kosher salt, the quantities need to differ from table salt. I suspect I will need to adjust the salt in the future.)

Mix in about 1.5 cups of flour and leave the mixer on medium high for a few minutes to stretch the gluten.

Put about a half or three quarters cup each of citron and raisins in a bowl with about three quarters of a cup of flour and stir so that the fruit and coated, add to the mixer bowl, blend it in, then switch to the dough hook.

Keep mixing in flour until the dough ball cleans the sides of the bowl, then turn it out and finish kneading by hand.

I'm going to give it two room-temperature rises plus the one after the loaf is shaped. (The plain bread will get only one rising before shaping: the sourdough critters tend to digest some of the gluten so the dough has less spring.) Maybe I should try a holiday bread using the starter later in the week.

I'm pretty sure this is a richer dough than my grandmother used...I may back off on the eggs, butter and sugar if I make it again. I should ask my Aunt whether she remembers any of the details. But Aunt Irma was never really into cooking.

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Sat, Dec 22, 2007

Yule 2007

Posted at 10:13 pm MST to Miscellaneous

The stollen came out well and was very popular at Nanette's party. I took some ginger-snaps and pizzelles along to Nanette's, too, which was useful since she has been too busy to bake. Galen had made a buche de noel with meringe mushrooms on it, which was delicious.

Nanette. Me. Galen. Jan. Linda. Lori. Marti. Nanette's husband and her four daughters were in and out.

There is light from a nearly full moon shining on the snow and lighting up the hills to the west.

Tomorrow will be another baking day: the new sourdough starter arrived this morning and I am breeding the culture up to full potency. It should be ready by then. There is something neat about starting a new strain of sourdough at Yule, though the symbolic resonances were unintentional.

It was nice to have an audience for my cooking. I think I really like the process more than eating the food. It's a geek thing.

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Thu, Dec 20, 2007

Cookie Tech Notes

Posted at 10:04 pm MST to Technology

It is officially Christmas time: I just made a batch of Ginger Snaps.

My Kitchenaid mixer turned out to be strong enough to stir the dough after the last dry ingredients were added, at least as well I ever did it by hand.

And the cookies turn out well when cooked on baking parchment instead of a lightly greased pan. The pans don't get dirty and it is easier to move the cookies from the pan to the cooling rack: I just slid the whole sheet onto the rack. No spatula-mangled cookies. (And none that tried to fall through the wires of the rack: the paper was in the way.

Tomorrow I will start the dough for a Stollen to take to Nanette's Yule gathering on Saturday, since the dough needs to rise over night.

I will also make another kind of cookie, probably something more festive than chocolate chip. I have lots of choices: a cookie gun (with recipes), a shortbread mold (with recipes), a pizzelle baker (I can't find the recipe book for that one in my kitchen, but I found it on-line).

I will probably do the pizzelles, because the traditional recipe includes anise, which I love. Neither my Mom nor Nonna had a pizzelle baker. And I don't think Aunt Irma ever had one, but I remember having home-made pizzelles on special occasions, usually at Irma's house. I think either Magna Irma had a pizzelle baker (the wife of my Grandfather's brother John) or someone in my Uncle Tom's family made them.

I asked for and received a pizzelle baker for Christmas one year, and make them most Christmases when I'm not stuck in some remote city without the baker, and occasionally at other times

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Stuck Garbage Truck

Posted at 8:33 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Today I went over to Nanette's farm at lunch time to get some eggs for baking. That was just as well: when I got home, my driveway was blocked by a stuck garbage truck. I parked at my neighbors, walked home to put the eggs in the fridge, walked back out and got to work a bit late. Which turned out not to matter because the guys who need to let me in had forgotten that I arrive at 1pm on thursdays, not 1:30.

The stuck truck was very impressive. It was one of the very long ones with one axle in front and two axles in back. It looked like the front wheels had sunk into the dirt that was stirred up for burying the electric cable. The wheels on the rear-most axle were lifted up so they were no longer touching the ground, and the other rear wheels were on ice/hardpacked snow. When I left to go to work, the truck driver was crawling under the truck trying to install chains.

When I got home after 5:30, he was gone. I wonder how long it took him to get out?

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UPS

Posted at 9:08 am MST to Miscellaneous

I need to praise UPS.

Last week, when I was insanely stressed, with three simultaneous part-time gigs that were all going badly, I shipped out some Christmas presents to the wrong street address. (I need to reorganize my address book.)

I realized the problem on the following day, and got in touch with the UPS store. For a handling fee they were able to re-direct the packages to the correct address.

I verified today that the packages had arrived safely.

I can't imagine trying to get the Post Office to redirect packages en route... it's no wonder they say they are losing business.

One reason I use UPS is that they are convenient for me. There is a UPS Store near Costco, on my way to and from home to anywhere. The USPS refuses to build a Post Office in Superior, Colorado. (Or even give it a zip code, which makes sales tax collection complicated for the town of Superior.) If there was a Superior Post Office, my address and zip code might be Superior rather than Boulder. Or maybe not, since I'm outside the city limits.

There isn't even a blue mail box anywhere in the big-box sales district that includes the Costco -- when I have outgoing bill payments and won't be going to the office, I drop them at the UPS Store. I don't like putting outgoing mail with checks in my rural mailbox, which is on a busy road 1/2 mile from my house.

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Wed, Dec 19, 2007

Dressed Tree, and Baking

Posted at 9:49 pm MST to Technology

I finally decorated my Christmas tree this evening. It is a small tree, so I only used two strings of lights and two tinsel garlands. I didn't put up all of the ornaments, but most of the special ones are up.

I may add some more of the ornaments by daylight tomorrow, or move some around to fill empty spots, but for tonight, lit mostly by its own lights, the tree looks fine except for the star on top. The tree is very fresh and the top is bendy and the star is heavy. I think I need some cable ties to strap the star to the top of the tree instead of trying to perch it up there. Another project for daylight...

I have been buying bread for the past couple of weeks (a sign that I have been over-stressed). I overstressed my sourdough starter to a skunky point where I decided it was best to discard it and order a fresh batch rather than trying to recover it to a point where it would rise well. People with families to bake for can keep starters going for years and years, but one person cannot (or should not) eat that much carbs. I can generally keep a culture going for three or four years, and this one was about that old.

I like the sourdough starter from King Arthur Flour's Baker's Catalog. I suspect that is partly because they are a New England company and I am a New Englander. I'm not really fond of west coast sourdoughs.

When I bake with whole wheat flour (I usually blend it with unbleached flour when baking bread), I use King Arthur White Whole Wheat. It has less tannin than the usual whole wheat flour made from red wheat and gives a smoother flavor. I don't mail-order flour. When Whole Foods opened in Boulder several years ago they carried the King Arthur flours, and these days even the big super market chains sometimes carry King Arthur unbleached, and sometimes their newer Organic varieties.. I usually need to shop at Whole Foods or Wild Oats to get King Arthur White Whole Wheat here, though some of the Boston area Stop & Shops carry it (King Arthur being a regional supplier for them.

The package including the new starter has not arrived yet, shipping being what it is at this time of year, so tonight I baked bread using packaged yeast. And I used only unbleached flour, no whole wheat. This was proper bread by Italian and French law: the ingredient list is: water, yeast, salt flour.

I forget how fast bread rises using packaged yeast instead of culture and without wholewheat flour weighing it down. (Setting it on a stool over a heat register helped, since I keep the house fairly cool. If I get a new stove I definitely want a proofing drawer.) It made a nice change to knead something so springy.

At least it demonstrated that my yeast was still alive: the jar was a bit beyond its use-by date, but the bread puffed up nicely.

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Good News, Bad News

Posted at 7:28 pm MST to Travel

The bad news is that my client will not be sending me all over the world. (I suspect somebody calculated what the travel expenses would add up to.)

The good news is that they have signed up for a 6-month contract beginning mid-January, and I will mostly be working from my living room couch again.

International travel would have been nice, but I wasn't looking forward to spending a ot of time in airports and on airplanes.

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Tue, Dec 18, 2007

Java 64 bit support

Posted at 11:22 am MST to Technology

Does not exist. It does not work on Windows XP and it does not work on any flavor of Linux I have tried. Seems damned flakey on 32-bit Linux, too. So much for Sun's ambition to provide "run anywhere" development support.

Java-based apps for key enterprise finctions? Not if you want your enterprise to function!

The repeated hangs and crashes are making all of my environments unreliable. At this point, trying to run ANY browser in the Windows locks the whole laptop so hard that I have to use the power button to kill and restart it. (Oddly enough, the mouse cursor still moves, but everything else is dead, includig network connections.)

I think I'm going to save everything I care about from that space, then see if I can get Windows to update. Maybe going to IE 7.0 (ick) will fix the breakage I'm seeing.

It doesn't help that IBM requires an antique version of java... the chances of everything working right are a lot lower. Big software companies need to support modern hardware and software.

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Sun, Dec 16, 2007

Revels 2007

Posted at 8:40 pm MST to Media

The concert/event was very nicely done. The local Revels company has made great strides over the years: we attended a performance the first or second year they had them here, and it was a bit rough around the edges. Last year's version (Scottish music) was fun, but this year's version (Irish music and 1890s texts, with step dancers) was well staged and performed and just clicked.

They brought a guest artist in from out of state this year -- a first for the local Revels group, I think. And the local soloists and dancers were impressive, too.

For next year they are trying to do an original Revels based on early settlers in Colorado 150 years ago, not one based on Revelses (I don't think there is a good plural for a Revels) that have been done elsewhere. It will be interesting to see how that turns out.

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Naked Tree

Posted at 9:33 am MST to Code

Yesterday I tok a break in the afternoon and went out to do a little shopping. I ran into Nanette and our friend Susan at a store that sells Christmas Village pieces, which was fun.

I now have my third building: Scrooge and Marleys Counting House (too bd modern accounting companies don't call them selves Counting Houses) and some landscaping pieces. And I totally need to reorganize my village to fit the new pieces in.

Both places I know of in town that seel Department 56 are sold out of Dickensian street lamps. I'll have to shop for them early next year.

I also have a small, naked Christmas tree sitting in my living room. I don't know when it will be decorated: this weekend that I had planned to spend on Christmas stuff is being eaten by software. No baking. Naked tree.

I will go to a concert with Nanette this afternoon, but can't really spend time before and afterward just having fun..

The normal mode of the package I'm trying to recreate is getting close to working right. The CGI package is going to be a problem. There is one key subroutine mentioned in a truncated file that doesn't exist anywhere and probably hasn't for 25 months. Gaaah.

I wish I'd noticed the truncations 2 years ago when all of this was fresh in my mind.

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Fri, Dec 14, 2007

Brain on Strike

Posted at 8:53 pm MST to Code

I'm not at the concert tonight. The weather is being messy enough that driving home would have been a a little scary, especially since I was up past midnight coding.

About two years ago, I made some major modifications to a program that the company sold to a couple of our customers. When I shifted over to other projects I zipped up a package of the software and it sat on the metaphorical shelf.

This year, unexpectedly, a customer asked to buy the package (which we were not actively marketing) so we gave them a copy of the package, which turned out to be corrupt. The newest versions of some of the files in the package were truncated.

All of my newest archival copies had the same truncation. The laptop I was using at the time had some memory problems and was sort of limping along: I suspect that was how the code got eaten.

Fortunately, I had a set of working files for a slightly older version of the package that had not been truncated (and were copied onto this laptop when I started using it).
So I've been working on recreating the package we thought we had for sale from the truncated pieces patched with chunks of the older code.

I worked on it this afternoon, too. (My on-site client only wants me in the mornings on Fridays.) I've done some tweaking and tuning while I was at it.

I should be working on it now, but my brain went on strike a couple of hours ago. I can be very productive with a very tight focus for long hours, but eventually I hit a wall and need a change of pace.

I'll get back to actual coding tomorrow, in between buying and setting up a Christmas tree if the weather cooperates. Most of the primary functionality is there: the bits I know I still need to work on are error handling, and a secondary operation mode that uses CGI.

Maybe I'll at least inventory the CGI scripts this evening and review the docs on how they are supposed to work.

One reaction I had to this mess: yesterday I used rsync to back up the home partition of this laptop to my server. It took all day, but future backups will be faster: I don't change that much from day to day, or even week to week. (And some of the changes I make are effectively backed up on my ISP's web server...)

Note: I make my /home partition large and I have data that needs to be backed up stored on the /home tree even if that isn't its normal home. For example: the data for the local web site I use when developing web apps is at /var/www (the normal location), but most of the directories that actually hold data are linked form /home/www.

I also have a /home/images, where my photos, etc., live and a /home/fonts directory for the good Adobe fonts and other commercial fonts I bought years ago. The fonts migrate from PC to PC as the machines die. If I ever needed to reload them from floppy, I would need to buy a floppy drive for one of my current machines, and hope that the floppies are still good.

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Wed, Dec 12, 2007

Pratchett is ill

Posted at 10:33 pm MST to Media

Damn.

Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with a rare form of early-onset Alzheimers.

I hope some of the recent advances in treatment turn out to be useful for him. It hurts to think of a mind like that disintegrating slowly.

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Christmas Revels

Posted at 10:23 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Today was cleaning lady day. I left them cards and small cash presents. Some years I leave them cookies, too. but I haven't done any baking yet this year. The next cleaning day is the day after Christmas: less than two weeks to go.

All of my out of town presents have been wrapped and shipped, or ordered for direct delivery, and most of my Christmas cards have been sent (I don't send many cards). All of the local gifts are bought and ready to wrap.

I hope the weather is decent on Friday evening and Sunday afternoon. Nanette and I want to attend a concert involving a friend of ours on Friday evening.

And we have tickets for the Christmas Revels (Rocky Mountain Edition) on Sunday afternoon. They are doing an Irish theme this year, with step dancers. Last year the Rocky Mountain Revels were Scottish themed.

In 2004, when I was stuck living in Boston, I was able to attend the Christmas Revels with the founding Revels company (on Yule, which was neat), with a performance on the Harvard campus. That one had a Quebecois theme with lots of fiddling and dancing and Canadian folktales.

The Boston Revels troupe puts on Revels at Midsummer and in spring and fall as well as at Christmas. It might be nice to attend some of the other kinds of Revels, some day, but not if it means living in Boston again for any length of time. Maybe the Rocky Mountain group will branch out and do a spring or harvest festival some time as they get more established. I think they are scheduled for more performances this year than last year, which is a good sign.

The Revels organization was founded in 1971 and they are doing 18 performances this Christams season.

I used to have the original Christmas Revels album on vinyl, then tape: now I have almost all of the Revels CDs, I think. Maybe they will have a new one available on Sunday. (I wouldn't mind one with the Quebecois music I saw live.)

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Mon, Dec 10, 2007

TurboTax 2007

Posted at 8:15 pm MST to Technology

Last tax season was the first time in many years that I did not use TurboTax to do my taxes.

Today I received a TurboTax CD in the mail. "Pay only when you are 100% satisfied". I suspect that means you have to pay for it before it will let you print or e-file your taxes.

Of course, anyone who enters their tax data into one program is unlikely to bother re-entering the data elsewhere...

I'm not really tempted. The disk has the same characteristic that drove me away in the first place: it's Windows-only. I'm not sure what Tax software I'm going to use this year, but it probably won't be TurboTax.

Maybe this year there will be a tax package with actual Linux support, instead of the half-measures I had to use last year.

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Sun, Dec 09, 2007

Pinecone Wreath

Posted at 7:15 pm MST to Miscellaneous

My Mom did a lot of arts and crafts stuff. She made a lot of the clothes we both wore, filled the house with hand-braided rugs and did all sorts of other projects. Slipcovers. Lampshades. Painting on glass: I still have a mirror she made for me in a frame with a painting on glass of a castle in an upper panel.

One of the crafts she worked on was pinecone wreaths. I think she might have learned to make them from her Aunt Blanche, like the braided rugs, but I'm not sure.

We had a 30 or 36-inch round mirror in the living room, and one of the wreaths always went on the mirror. She had given it a colored backing, so the mirror did not relfect the framework and wires.

There was another pinecone wreath that often went on the front door. I remember her gathering green things in the woods (that were actually a kind of moss or fern) that were added to wreaths and garlands, too.

The year my brother Larry and I got our first apartments, Mom made us each a pinecone wreath.
I still have mine:

She used to give each of us kids a Christmas ornament every year, so we would have ornaments with histories for our own trees when we went out on our own, not just boxes of commercial ornaments. I don't have all of those -- some have broken over the years. But I've kept up the tradition of giving ornaments each year to my brothers and their kids (I get one for myself at the same time).

Here's a picture of my village, too. It's on the top shelf of the stereo stack next to the TV, where I can see it all the time. I need to tweak the layout some more. The package of trees included a piece of 'road' that was rolled up and doesn't want to lay flat yet.

The layout is deeper and less two-dimensional than it looks in the picture, too. I need to work on that. Something under the snow blanket to add some slopes might help.

The buildings light up at night. But it really needs some street lamps or something to illuminate the little groupings of people.

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Fri, Dec 07, 2007

Beginning to look a lot like...

Posted at 9:37 pm MST to Weather

My schedule has been very hectic this week, since I was working for both my on-site customer, and mornings and evenings for a remote customer. And I had a dental appointment Monday evening and a user group meeting last night that ran long: I didn't get home until after 10pm.

Today there was snow on the ground at dawn but the roads didn't turn out to be too bad when I drove to my on-site customer. When I drove home at noon time, the snow had mostly stopped, but the snow clouds were sitting on the ridge here, so it was very foggy.

I have to be escorted when I'm on the site and they were having their holiday party, so I had the afternoon off. It was nice to have a little time off. But it is frustrating only being able to work on the on-site project in occasional 3 hour chunks: it seems like I just get some momentum when I have to leave.

After lunch I went over to Nanette's for a cup of tea and a nice long chat. They have the farm decorated with lots of lights, and they already have their Christmas tree up and a gingerbread house on the coffee table. I think that combined with the snow to finally put me into a holiday mood.

I've done a little already: I brought holiday cards and stocking-stuffer presents for Shawn and our employees to the meeting yesterday, and I've bought some gifts...

I stopped at a couple of stores after leaving Nanette's and made some more progress on the shopping, even though the snow never really stopped and actually picked up a bit after dark. One of the stores was McGuckins Hardware, which has a wonderful Christmas ornament department and great kitchen stuff as well things you'd expect to find in a hardware store.

They are predicting more snow for tomorrow and Sunday, and I still need to buy a few more things. But if the weather is bad for the weekend I can spend the time decorating the house and wrapping the presents I've already bought. If I can get the out-of-state stuff shipped Tuesday morning (I can't be on-site until after lunch) I'll be in good shape.

I need to reorganize the house to make room for the decorations, too. Buying a tree next weekend isn't going to work if there in no place to put it.

And I've added some pieces to my winter Village, so I'll need a larger space for it. I added a blacksmith for my blacksmith shop, and a waiting customer and horse, and some carolers for the Dickens' Christmas Carol side of things. I also got a sparkly white 'snow' mat and some trees so it will look a little more like a landscape and less like a bunch of stuff on a shelf.

All of my pieces are by a company called Department 56, but I'm mixing pieces from their Dickens Village and New England Village lines. So far I have:

HollyBerry Cottage
Chas. Hoyt Blacksmith (that's the smithy)
A Christmas Carol Visit (Scrooge and the 3 ghosts)
Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim
The Big Prize Turkey (Poulterer's stall, with man holding the turkey and a boy)

The Hitching Post (Horse and owner)
Town Blacksmith (hammering a horse shoe)
Christmas Carolers
Village accessories (that's the trees)
The snow mat.

I may eventually get some more landscaping stuff: they make little shrubs and paving and bits of stone walls and street lamps and such. They make a Halloween Village that might have some gravestones for the Ghost of Christmas Future to lurk among. A horse and sleigh or horse and carriage might be nice. too, but I'm not sure I have room for them. I really need to find a better place for the village than I had last year. Especially if I ever want to add any more buildings.

Another piece I need to add this year is a big tub to store all the village piece in their big styrofoam coffins. They won't really fit into my other ornament-storage tubs, and they deserve a home of their own so they won't be lost or damaged in the off season, or colonized by the dratted mice.

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Wed, Dec 05, 2007

Cookware

Posted at 7:21 pm MST to Technology

A while back, while reorganizing my kitchen I gave my glass Visions cookware to the DAV: I hadn't used it much since I began watching Food Network regularly, since Visions cookware on an electric stove is very slow to make temperature adjustments. But it would have been handy to have the extra pots when I was cooking on Thanksgiving. Maybe -- I still haven't gotten that broken burner fixed on my stove.

I got an unusually good deal at Costco tonight. A floor-sample 10 piece set of very heavy duty stainless steel cookware, at an extra $10 off an already discounted price. It's Kitchen-Aid branded, so it is reasonable quality -- not professional grade, but better than the non-stick supermarket saucepans I've been using. (My skillets are good, respectable cast iron.)

Christmas cooking will be easier with the new saucepans.

The one additional pot that I would really like to have is a 2.5 quart saucier: like a sauce-pan, but with curved sides for whisking, and because the sides are curved, one large one can also be used for small batches.

One of the pretty enameled cast-iron Dutch or French ovens (about a 5 quart size) would be nice to replace the Visons one that I gave away. But the good ones are expensive. I currently use my Crock Pot for most recipes that size.

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UPS

Posted at 6:49 pm MST to Technology

Monday Dec 3

I bought the server a serious UPS made by APC. It's staying in the truck until daylight because it is a bit heavier than I can easily lift, and the path from the truck to the porch got churned up pretty badly when the wires were put underground.

I'm not due at my regular current gig until 1 (though I have another paying job I also need to work on) so I've got a bit of time to figure out how to get the UPS into the house without damaging it, or me. (I had guys from the store help me get it out to the truck.

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Tue, Dec 04, 2007

Tin Man

Posted at 10:31 pm MST to Media

The Tin Man mini-series on SciFi network is over. I'm sure Oz purists hated it, but I thought it was pretty good. The credits called it "Based on the Wizard of OZ" but I think "inspired by" would be more accurate: the adaptation is very loose, and different enough to not be predictable.

Actually, I think it was inspired by the Oz books in general. I don't think I have read all of them, and it has been years since I read any of them, but some of the environments and plot points seemed familiar, just not from the first book.

This was one of the Halmi and Halmi productions that worked. Beautiful and imaginative.

It was also well acted and directed, I think. At least, I found I liked the characters and I felt that they had some depth and complexity. The actresses who played the 'sorceress' who was the main villain were very impressive in a complex role, but I also liked 'DG' and her companions.

I find myself wanting to revisit the OZ books, if only to see what correspondences I can spot. According to Amazon there are a couple of different annotated Wizard of Oz books, which might be fun. And there is a 15-in-1 omnibus of all the Baum OZ books...

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Sun, Dec 02, 2007

Stuff Not Working

Posted at 8:29 am MST to Technology

I spent yesterday updating software on the server and trying to get it to talk to the UPS and to the outside world.

I found two different packages that might handle the UPS, but the server can't seem to see the serial port. I'll reboot it sometime today and see if the bios is blocking the serial port. If it isn't, I may buy a new UPS with a USB port instead of serial, and a much larger battery. The current UPS can go on the AV stack in the living room, to bridge power glitches.

I'll need to open up the server case, too. One of the fans isn't working. Not a major problem since that case is heavily ventilated and the server is not heavily used (one of the 4 processors cores stays in the 35 to 40 degrees C range, the other three are usually under 30) but annoying. The case came with 3 fans and I'm only using two, so I may be able to swap out the one that isn't working. Or it may just be stuck because a cable has fouled the fan blades.

The outside world problem is a software problem, but very frustrating. My Zoom DSL modem has very complex NAT and firewall capabilities, and fairly poor documentation, and no tech support available for anything but the factory settings. As currently set up, it lets my home network connect outward, but nothing outside can connect to anything but the modem itself.

At least I don't need to worry about my network being hacked. In its current state, even I can't get into it from outside. I'm sure the problem is the modem and not the router: I've tested and verified the router is doing what I want it to.

I want to set things up so that I can ssh (at least) into my server when I'm at the office or on the road, without disrupting the ability of other systems (i.e. the laptop) to connect outward when I am at home. And without letting the whole internet connect into the server and network.

I'm going to completely stop using the port-shifting NAPT mode that comes from the factory, as a first step. The documentation implies (I think -- it's very disjointed) that you can forward some ports and let NAPT take care of everything else, but that doesn't seem to be how things are actually behaving.

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Fri, Nov 30, 2007

Tinman

Posted at 3:21 pm MST to Media

I just got an email from Amazon reminding me that the 'Tinman' series on the SciFi Channel (an adaptation of Wizard of OZ) starts on Sunday. I think that's the first email I've ever gotten from Amazon that wasn't about a specific order or trying to sell me something. This email just had a picture and a couple of links to Tinman sites. Interesting marketing.

Monday morning, when I was sitting in the Dodge service center waiting room, a 'Making of' special on Tinman was playing on one of the TVs. It looked like the design work and special effects are going to be impressive. The redesigned "flying monkeys" are hideous.

I'll probably give it a try. Sunday evening TV is pretty lame...

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Thu, Nov 29, 2007

Power Company

Posted at 7:45 pm MST to Technology

This morning at 9 someone from the power company showed up to check the work that needs to be done. Maybe they will actually get the changeover from overhead to underground power lines done before the first major blizzard of the year.

I turned off the server so it won't crash if I'm not home when they disconnect the power to make the changeover. I really need to find usable software so that the UPS can tell the server to shut itself down cleanly. Ubuntu seems to have a set of packages available that might handle it, but I need to find a set for Fedora. Time to google.

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Wed, Nov 28, 2007

Wednesday Snow

Posted at 9:31 pm MST to Weather

This week we had snow on Wednesday morning for the second week in a row. I hope this is not a trend.

Fortunately, the storms have moved through quickly and did not leave a lot of snow. Today's storm also seems to have gone north and south and mostly skipped Boulder. The radio this morning told horror stories about the highways north of Boulder and south and west of Denver, and some of our employees were stuck in traffic for hours trying to get to the office.

I left home about 9 and got to the office by 9:30, which is about my usual transit time. I was feeling grateful that I'd gotten the 4WD fixed on Monday, but once I reached the paved roads, they were mostly dry and I didn't need it.

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Tue, Nov 27, 2007

Upgrade bug Kubuntu 7.10

Posted at 5:49 pm MST to Technology

Since the standard upgrade tool crashed on me (It was very unhappy with cupsys.) and I was using other tools to do the upgrade, I ran in to a known bug (#115616) in the Ubuntu upgrade process. An obsolete package called evms was not deleted.

It spewed error messages on the reboot.

Fortunately, I re-customized kdmrc to allow root logins before I rebooted, since the bug prevented my home directory from mounting. Once I managed to get the machine to boot, I logged in as root and googled for the fix.

apt-get remove evms

Followed by a reboot fixed things.

I had to uninstall cupsys, finish the upgrade and re-install it to get things to work. It seems to be working now, at least for the laser printer, so the problem isn't with the main app. I may need to reload the driver for the HP color printer, though it might make sense to attach that one via the server now: a direct connection to a computer (instead of a network connection) might let it work as a scanner as well as a printer and copier.

VMWare is working with no more hassles than I have been dealing with for months. I'm downloading version 5.5.5 (I've been using 5.5.4) to see if it behaves any better. I don't think I'll need to pay for the upgrade to 6.x.

Once VMWare is stable, I'll see about updates for the Windows image. There are nasty reports about recent Microsoft updates trashing peoples' systems, but they seem to involve more complex environments than mine. I think I'll take a fresh snapshot of the image before I upgrade it, just in case.

Updating this blog is being a problem I'm getting messages like

500 Illegal PORT command
ftp: bind: Address already in use

when I try to connect using plain ftp on the command line. Something changed in the default configuration. I need to activate passive mode by using pftp or ftp -p to get it to work.

The web server on the laptop seems to be working, which is a relief. apache was another area the upgrade tools were a bit cranky about.

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Upgrade to Kubuntu 7.10

Posted at 11:39 am MST to Technology

I had been holding off on some upgrades on my laptop because I didn't want to break anything in the various virtual layers while I was relying on it for my remote client. I decided that today, since I don't have any billable work to do, would be a good day to get everything upgraded and then working again.

The host OS comes first. Then, probably, a (paid) upgrade to VMWare workstation 6.x, since I've been kind of nursing along the 5.x versions with strange 3rd party patch downloads and other workarounds.

I think the Windows XP image I was using probably also needs a couple of updates, too. I've been loading only the most urgent security updates because I didn't want to risk disrupting the layers of virtualization I was using for my remote work.

The main version update tool for Ubuntu stalled (there seem to be a lot of people on-line with the same problem). But it got far enough to update the list of software repositories.

One of the nice things about Linux is that there is almost always more than one tool for doing anything. I'm using one called Synaptic to download the new software. It tells me that I have 1594 packages currently loaded, of which 1259 are being upgraded and 15, now obsolete, are being removed. 150 packages will be added to support various dependencies.

1. packages sounds like a lot, but there are 23051 packages available for Kubuntu 7.10, because it is derived from the Debian repositories, so I'm only using a fraction of them.

Once the laptop is stabilized, I'll see about bringing the server images up to date. I don't want to risk killing both machines at once. I also need to reconfigure the DSL-modem and router so I can reach the server from the external network.

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4 Wheel Drive

Posted at 11:04 am MST to Miscellaneous

Yesterday morning I went to my new customer site. They said they are having a security crackdown and can't let me near their computers until the paperwork is done, which will take a few days. They will let the company know when things are set up.

They are a couple of blocks from office, in what used to be the AT&T building when I was consulting for them, 20 years ago. I stopped at the office briefly, then at the credit union, which is handy (I joined it when I was working at AT&T: in those days the CU actually had an office inside the AT&T plant).

Then, since I was near, I took the truck over to the Northglen Dodge service department to have the 4 wheel drive (which was flaky last Wednesday) checked out. I spent about half the day in their waiting room, but I had a couple of books with me and the have some TVs in the waiting room.

It's almost too bad that I'm planning to get a different brand of truck next spring. I'm very favorably impressed by this service department.

They suggested getting a tune-up while I was there, but after pulling the plugs they decided that I didn't really need one. So I didn't end up paying for the tune-up.

When I had the truck Jiffy-Lubed a few weeks ago they suggested replacing the serpentine belt, so I asked the Northglen guys to check it. They said it should last another 8000 miles, so I didn't end up paying for that either.

They replaced a vacuum valve in the 4-wheel-drive system, so I should be ready for the next round of bad weather.

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Mon, Nov 26, 2007

Xcel Bozos

Posted at 5:05 pm MST to Technology

I finally got through to Ross and he did some digging and found out why my electrical project is still not complete.

In 1999 when the county changed my street address, I sent a copy of the order to the power company. They apparently changed the billing address, but none of their other records. Even though I specifically gave instructions that the identity of the property had changed.

So the work orders came up TILT because they didn't match a location in the Xcel records. And were simply ignored.

When I called Xcel to get the address fixed, so the work could be done, they said it would take a month. I kept pushing and they are trying to set things up to do the work despite the address mismatch (the order to update the property address is at least in the system).

And extemely high winds are forecast for Wednesday. Which the current 'temporary' setup of my powerlines is not really intended for.

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RSI

Posted at 6:37 am MST to Miscellaneous

My mousing hand and arm have been giving me hell for weeks. I have stayed off of the computer since Thursday afternoon, and this morning, Monday, was the first day in ages I woke up wihtout pain in that arm.

I don't get carpal tunnel inflammation -- I know how to hold my arm and hand to avoid it. A spot in the back of my hand gets sore, and a spot in my upper arm gets painful. In the last couple of weeks, very painful.

I'm going to have to spend less time on the computer for a while to try to give tings time to heal more

I'm just glad the rest made a differnce. Saturday morning, after two nights sleep and nearly two days without mousing, I still wasn't noticing much improvement.

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Thu, Nov 22, 2007

Pie Crust Notes

Posted at 11:57 am MST to Technology

I made Mom's Water Whip Piecrust with Nanette's Pumpkin Pie filling recipe, using a Scarlet Kabocha squash. (Went a little easier on the spices than last time.) I've still got about 3/4 of the squash puree to use for soup and side-dishes.

Note 1: 2 cups of sifted flour is 325 grams. Next time I make pie crust, I'll weigh it and 'sift' it in the food processor.

Note 2: I used more water than the recipe called for. I think the recipe was intended for a moister climate. Flour here drinks liquid amazingly.

Note 3: Rolling the crust inside a 2.5 gallon zip-lock bag (a trick from the Food Network) works really well for a novice pie-maker. The crust can't stick to the rolling pin and tear. And when it's ready, you just need to slit the bag up the sides, peel the top layer of plastic off the dough, place the inverted pie plate on the dough, flip the whole thing over, and peel off the other layer of plastic.

The pies just came out of the oven and the turkey just went in. I made exactly the right amount of stuffing. which is unusual. I learned to make stuffing for the 24 pound birds my Mom cooked at holidays, and generally make too much for the 12 pound birds i Cook for myself.

I don't have guests coming, and I'm used to having my big meal late in the day. The turkey should be ready about three.

In the mean time, I had homemade eggnog and cream-cheese-stuffed celery for breakfast. I'll be having squash pie for lunch once they cool enough to eat

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Wed, Nov 21, 2007

Thanksgiving Snow

Posted at 8:21 pm MST to Weather

We didn't really have a white Halloween this year, though they predicted one. But we are really getting a white Thanksgiving.

There were three inches of snow on the ground when I left to go to work this morning. And it was drizzling tiny snowflakes when I drove home about 2pm, though the paved roads were mostly dry by then.

They aren't predicting much more snow for the next few days, but they are predicting very cold weather (seasonally cold, but a big contrast to the unseasonable warmth we've been having this Fall). So what is out there may not melt soon, at least in the shady areas.

I am annoyed: the little light that is supposed to come on when I put the truck into 4-wheel drive did not come on this morning. So there is something still (or again) wrong with it, though it felt more or less like it was in 4-wheel drive (the steering feels different). I will probably see about getting someone to look at it on Friday or Saturday.

The roads I had to drive on were wet and slushy this morning, not icy, and the traffic in my direction was light, but I was glad to have the new tires. The radio was reporting lots of serious accidents on all of the major highways through Denver. And the Boulder-bound lanes of Route 36 looked like a parking lot: if I had been going that way I would have taken a back road.

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Tue, Nov 20, 2007

Drat

Posted at 5:21 pm MST to Miscellaneous

The uploads for the past few days glitched. I've re-uploaded the files to the proper locations, with date stamps.

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Tires

Posted at 5:20 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Monday Nov 19, 2007

Five years ago at Thanksgiving I drove home from a 6-month gig in Portland, Oregon on Thanksgiving and the day before. I had leftovers at Nanette's for supper.

I put new tires on the truck in the week before the trip. Today I replaced those tires with the same brand and model (TRX All-Terrain): they are pricey, but they have lasted well, and they have always worked well when weather was bad.

I'm now in pretty good shape for the winter: Jiffy-Lubed and with tires that have serious tread, and the tire guy says the front brakes (at least) are new. Now that he mentions it, I vaguely remember the guy at the Dodge service center suggesting that the brakes might as well be done while all the other work was going on.

The Jiffy-Lube guys recommended replacing the serpentine belt sometime soon, though.

I took a couple of books with me to the Jiffy-Lube place on Saturday, but ended up spending the whole time chatting with the owner of a Dodge Durango a little younger than my Dakota. (Small world: he sometimes does computer work for my nearest neighbors, so he knew where I live when I tried to explain.) He said that like me, he had had several years without problems, and then suddenly this year he's had to spend thousands of dollars on repairs. He is thinkng of trading the Durango in on something new... probably something Japanese, since he has had good luck with Japanese vehicles lasting well.

Having just put new tires on, I'll probably drive the truck at least until spring, unless it decides to start eating money again. But I looked at the Toyota website (which doesn't work with any browser I can find on Linux) and from what I could make out, the Tacoma has many of the features I want. But not quite in the combination I would prefer. The Ford Ranger (their website is not very cooperative, but much better than Toyota) seems to have a better mix.

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Myspace Suicide

Posted at 5:19 pm MST to Current Events

Sunday Nov 18, 2007

The media and blogoverse have been full of a story about some evil people who drove a 13-year old girl to suicide. The Making Light entry has a lot of useful links to articles for anyone who hasn't seen them yet.

The people who tormented me in junior high school didn't have the internet available, but they did what they could with fake phone calls and notes left in my locker.

Looking back, I don't think I was quite sane, and certainly not 'normal' (whatever normal means) in junior high school, but some of that was a reaction to the way I was being harassed. Years of never quite feeling safe takes its toll...

In the first few years that I lived here in Colorado I took a bunch of odd evening courses on verious topics: spinning, weaving, tarot, herblore. A woman I had been in high-school with showed up at the first session of one of the courses (I think it was the herb course). After class she took me aside and apologized for the way I had been treated in high school, and never returned for the next session.

(I haven't taken any evening classes in ages. I took one phase of a course on Hardanger needlework when I was working in Minneapolis, but the second phase's schedule slipped so that my contract would have ended before the class would end. )

After the Columbine shootings, Slashdot ran a series of articles called Voices From The Hellmouth about people who were tormented in school for being different.

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Time Warp

Posted at 5:19 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Saturday Nov 17, 2007

There was a period of several years when I spent a lot of time at the Time Warp comic store in Boulder. When I had a housewarming party the summer I bought this house, the owner and some of the staff were among the attendees. And I implemented the first database package for the store (using a spreadsheet package from Borland, I think, which is what I used for my own finances for a while).

I kind of drifted away after Timewarp moved to a shopping center that was really annoying to get in and out of (it's too close to a major intersection and getting across the right-turn lane to the lane I actually needed was scary) and the the focus of my daily routine shifted south from Boulder as work moved south and shopping south of Boulder became possible.

In the last year or so, I noticed that Time Warp wasn't in that shopping center, and today I happened to ask Nanette where they had gone. (Time Warp was originally the Mile High Comics Boulder store and still part of the distribution network.)

They are in a more accessible location, so I stopped in after getting the truck Jiffy-Lubed for the winter. Wayne (the owner) looks much the same, and was glad to see me. Steve, the manager, died unexpectedly in September of a cold that went bad.

It's been 10 or 15 years since I collected mainstream comics, and I've lost touch with the cover art: I think most of the current issues are really ugly. But Wayne had a couple of indie graphic novels I've been watching for after encountering them or seeing them mentioned on-line, and his selection of manga was inpressive.

I think I need to stop by there occasionally. Borders and Barnes & Noble have fairly good selections of recent manga and graphic novels, but Wayne's back volume selection is more complete. Especially for the GNs.

And Time Warp is another piece of my life that had gotten lost in recent years.

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Fri, Nov 16, 2007

Flicker

Posted at 10:08 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Today at lunch time I looked out the kitchen window and saw two birds perched on the front porch railing. One bird was a very elegant flicker. I've seen it around a few times before. It inspected the new porch railing a few days after the new construction.

If the flicker is still hanging around, I should see about getting a suet feeder. I wonder where I could hang one where the birds can get at it and I can at it to fill it, without having it raided by raccoons or coyotes.

The other bird was one of the scruffy little grackles that nest in the porch roof, which are a little annoying but not nearly as messy as barn swallows. I had barn swallows nesting in the porch roof beams for several seasons after I first bought this house, and they made an awful mess: their nest was directly above the center of the porch, too.

I haven't had barn swallows for years, or even seen any around the neighborhood. I think having the farm next door torn down and turned back into prairie has decreased the bug population enough that this is no longer a prime nesting territory for them.

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Wed, Nov 14, 2007

Stove

Posted at 10:14 pm MST to Technology

When I stopped by the Appliance store at the mall last week, they had their new floor models in. The last time I stopped they were clearing out the old season models and the floor was pretty empty, and there were oddly naked-looking holes in the sample kitchens where sample builtin ovens and dishwashers and cooktops had been sold.

It's going to be tempting to wander by there again this weekend. The flakey burner on my stove seems to be giving up the ghost.

The cleaning ladies were here today, and I had to re-seat the large front burner on the stove three times in its socket before it would heat. That's normal after they have unplugged the burner to clean under it: it's tricky to get it back in, and they never get it right.

What isn't normal is that at some point after the burner had been working for a while (the water was boiling nicely when I dropped the pasta in) it stopped heating. The pasta finished cooking on pure momentum, I think. When the timer rang and I went to check it the water was still and the noodles were just sitting on the bottom, but the burner control knob was still set on high.

Tomorrow, I'll call Leo's Appliance repair (which is not a guy named Leo) and see if he can come out and take a look at it. It would be nice to get it repaired at some reasonable price: after this year's expenses for auto repairs and the septic system and electrical work, it would be nice to hold off on replacing a major appliance.

Having that burner stop working a week before Thanksgiving is really annoying.

I'm still contemplating gas vs electric stoves for a replacement.

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Mon, Nov 12, 2007

mlocate

Posted at 10:51 pm MST to Code

Notes from setting up the server:

The installation package for ClearCase on RedHat/Centos 5.0 has a glitch: it doesn't configure mlocate properly, so it gets into an infinite loop in the /view directory tree and eats up all the available disk space.

According to an IBM technote the workaround is to edit /etc/updatedb.conf, and add 'mvfs' and 'nfs' to the PRUNEFS variable and '/view' and '/vobs' to the PRUNEPATHS variable.

I also needed to clean out the 32 Gig file that had built up in /var/lib/mlocate, and reboot the image to make it realize it had available disk space again.

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Give One Get One

Posted at 10:33 pm MST to Current Events

The One Laptop Per Child project has developed rugged, inexpensive laptop computers for use in schools where technology is otherwise unavailable. In the process they have made technological advances in both hardware and software. Special low-power swivel displays that are still legible in sunlight. Mesh networking. Extreme power efficiency. New ways of handling security to make them harder to hack.

The first generation of the laptops are now in production. They are a bright lime green, partly to make them readily identifiable, so it will be trickier to put them on the black market, partly to make them fun for the kids. I imagine later generations of them may be done in different colors so that the feature mix can be told apart.

I'm not sure which countries the first million or so are scheduled for -- Microsoft has been trying to bribe and strongarm countries into not taking them, because they don't run Windows -- so the list keeps mutating.

Geeks in the developed world have been frustrated because they couldn't get samples of the hardware to experiment with. But just now, for a 14 days period the Foundation is making a limited number of the PCs available on a "get one give one" basis: you pay for two laptops, and one is shipped to you and the other to a child somewhere in the third world.

I ordered mine today. I'm glad I have small hands, since the keyboards are designed for children.

The original goal was to create a $100 laptop. Economies of scale haven't kicked in yet, and the dollar has tanked, so the current price for two laptops, for purposes of the program, is just under $400, plus shipping. I think the price of the donated laptop is tax deductible.

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Sat, Nov 10, 2007

Fall Bunnies

Posted at 8:54 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I think the bunnies are beginning to get used to my new driveway. They were eating grass along the edge, today. And napping in the hollow of one of the ruts that are already forming.
And chasing each other around in circles: I can never decide if they are playing, or having territorial fights. I think the two today were just playing: after running around they settled down not far from each other.

The bunnies looked huge, but I think that is mostly because their winter coats have come in. That is just as well: the weather is still amazingly warm for the time of year, but that could change at any time. Of course, most of the little bunnies from earlier in the season have grown up by now, and probably moved away to find territories of their own.

I'm a little worried about the bunnies this year. My neighbors have mowed down all of the tall grass and weeds in the field next to my driveway, and my yard has been all dug up and is mostly bare dirt. I hope they will be able to find food and hiding places for the winter.

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Fri, Nov 09, 2007

Signs of the Times

Posted at 6:45 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I leave the radio on when I work (except when I'm on the phone). It helps blur the sound of this laptop's fan, which is quite loud very annoying.

A few months ago, it seemed that half of the ads were for housing developments and mortgage re-financing. Now there are occasional real estate and mortgage ads, but there are a lot of for various methods for decreasing your credit card debt, and for companies promising to help you buy a computer no matter how bad your credit is.

I find it a little ironic that the debt-reduction and computer-sales ads are sometimes -- even frequently -- adjacent to each other.

On the other hand -- it is interesting too have computers portrayed as critical necessities of modern life, with a man who can't provide one for his wife (to do the family finances) and children (to do their homework) shown as guilty and ashamed. The fellow should obviously talk to his wife before getting involved in a transaction involving credit, And it's probably just as well that he is not the one do the finances. I also wonder what he is going to use the computer (oh, no, it's not for him. It's for the family.)

It's as bad as the swath of ads that showed up on TV and radio back at the beginning of the semester offering loans of up to 40,000/year (without government involvement-- i.e guarantees) to students and their parents.

And then people wonder why so many in this country are in financial trouble.

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Thu, Nov 08, 2007

Doctor Who Season 3

Posted at 9:10 pm MST to Media

Doctor Who (New version) Season 3 is out on DVD. So is The Dresden Files. And Robin of Sherwood Part 2. And the Looney Toons Golden Collection Set 5. And Ratatouille and the Transformers Movie (both of which I missed on the big screen.

Excuse me while I wallow in wonderfulness. I'll come back later and add links.

David Tennant, the current Doctor, looks surprisingly like a young Clint Eastwood from certain angles (especially in the 1953 episode when he had his hair combed back. And he is very Scottish in the commentaries: his vowels are much more generic when he is being the Doctor.

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Wed, Nov 07, 2007

Weight and Health

Posted at 9:33 pm MST to Miscellaneous

There are reports of studies showing that people that are a bit overweight (the amount quoted is 'up to 30 pounds over a target weight') have slightly longer life expectancies than people of 'normal weight'.

Now they are reporting that even though fatter people are more likely to die of some kinds of cancer, diabetes and some kinds of heart disease, they have a decreased tendency to die of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, infections, and lung disease that more than compensates in terms of death rates.

I wonder if the lung disease thing is related to the fact that a lot of people gain weight after giving up smoking. I assume the researchers controlled for that in their analysis, but it might be interesting to look up the original report to check.

Underweight people die more too.

I am outside the long life-expectancy range (max target BMI of 30), but only by a few pounds. If I fire up the treadmill on a more regular basis or excavate my weight bench, I could probably get down into the heavy-but-long-lived range. That's a much less intimidating goal than getting my weight back to where it was in 2001...

And to be honest, I dread Alzheimer's more than just about anything... they can do things about cancer these days, but my mind is me and both of my grandmothers left their bodies long before they died. If being a little heavy may stave off Alzheimer's, good.

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Tue, Nov 06, 2007

Drought

Posted at 10:37 pm MST to Weather

Drought maps for the southeastern US are scary. Atlanta is in acute danger of running out of water.

It's a sad think to regret the lack of hurricanes landing tis year which might at least have brought them some precipitation.

On the other hand, despite our dry summer and autumn, Colorado is in pretty good shape. The weird winter we had was good for that much, at least.

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Mon, Nov 05, 2007

Time Change Jet Lag

Posted at 8:47 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Clock-change time always leaves me a little jet-lagged: my rhythms are off. I feel a bit groggy and I'm not hungry at 'meal times' or for proper meals. I just nibble on bread and cheese and fruit.

Some of the grogginess is because I was very tightly focussed most of the day. The VPN connection to my customer is finally back up and I'm trying to catch up with things. I cleared up a lot of odds and ends today and got things fairly well sorted out.

It would have helped if people had actually sent things to my regular work email address last week, as requested, instead of to my email address on the customer's internal site that I couldn't access. A few things in the emails in the back-log were about things I could have taken care of last week if I had known about them.

With access to the customer site available again, I don't need to push so hard to load the server. The Customer Portal website work is back at top priority.

But not tonight.

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Sun, Nov 04, 2007

Gershwin Jazz

Posted at 12:27 pm MST to Media

The second concert in this year's Boulder Philharmonic season has a theme of pieces of music inspired or affected by other music.

The first piece was composed in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Phil by a local composer, Luis Gonzales,who is a Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Colorado. It was adequate music, but I thought it was much too ponderous, especially the third section, which was supposed to be a dance tune inspired by the city. If Boulder has a 'dance' it is the Boulder Bolder 5K race. Or maybe Kinetics. Something quick, or even frenetic, with a bit of drive and maybe a touch of strangeness.

The second piece was amazing: Gershwin's 'Piano Concerto in F', with the usual piano soloist replaced by a jazz trio (the Marcus Roberts Trio: piano, bass and drums) playing real jazz, with improvisations, not just a fixed score. Gershwin's work was inspired by jazz, but sort of squished it into a classical box -- the object of the performance was to take it back out of the box.

The drummer looked familiar: he was Jason Marsalis, of the great family of jazz musicians. I don't think I've seen him perform before, but I've seen his relatives on TV.

The pieces after the intermission were both quite good.. Brahms' "Variations on a Theme by Haydn" and Hindemith's "Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes by Carl Maria von Weber".

The new conductor/music director of the Boulder Philharmonic has given it a different feel. The previous conductor was more traditional in some ways. This season's programs are eccentric, but a lot of fun.

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Operation: Immortal Servitude

Posted at 10:26 am MST to Media

As previously mentioned, at MileHiCon last week I attended a talk about vampires by Tony Ruggiero.

I have now finished his vampire book Operation: Immortal Servitude, the first of a planned series of 4 books. I will definitely be on the lookout for the other volumes in the series.

The characters are nicely three dimensional, except for a few who are given in-story reasons for being flat (a nice trick for handling spear-carriers -- I'll need to remember that one). I want to read more about both the vampires and the main human character. And the ending provides a nice hook for the next volume in the series.

The story moves well and the military details have a nice authentic rhythm. Mr. Ruggiero was in the Navy for 23 years and obviously paid attention to the people around him. The world builds on traditional vampire stories and adds some interesting twists of its own.

My only minor complaint is that the text could have used a little more human copy-editing. There were a few sentences that weren't, and a couple of instances of the wrong real word, especially a few instances of 'then' that should have been 'than'. But even books from major publishers show occasional copy-editing glitches, and this is from a fairly small press.

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Sat, Nov 03, 2007

Owl

Posted at 11:14 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

This evening as I left the house a huge owl flew up and perched on the power pole by my driveway. I couldn't see details: it was mostly a silhouette against the twilight sky, but I could tell that it was turning its head this way and that, looking around. Probably looking and listening for mice and bunnies.

It must have been a Great Horned Owl. There is nothing else that big. And horned. The pole is about 20 feet tall and the owl was at least a couple of feet from the tips of its 'ears' to the end of its tail.

It flew away when I started the truck.

I've never seen an owl before in all the years I've lived here, though I've heard them occasionally. I'm not outside much after dark.

I've seen plenty of hawks and eagles and ravens over the years. And skeins of wild geese flying over, yelping like the Gabriel Hounds.

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Fri, Nov 02, 2007

Clementine Season

Posted at 8:16 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Clementine Season is here. Yay. I bought a box when I was stocking up at Costco, and the ones I've had so far were all delicious. (Sometimes they are kind of lame at the beginning or end of the season.)

I lucked out on the timimg of my shopping trip: I had forgotten the flu shot schedule, and today was the last session they were doing flu shots at Costco this season. My arm is already sore, and lifting squash at the farmers' market tomorrow may be interesting.

It's going to be a busy day tomorrow: the second Philharmnic Concert is in the evening. I got a letter warning that I should plan to arrive early because parking is going to be messy due to a sporting event on campus. I'm supposed to have a reserved parking place. This week I will need to figure out where it is.

It will all be a nice change from wrestling with technology: I've been working on the laptop and server from 6 am to midnight pretty much since Monday. At least I'm finally making progress: the Centos5 image is actually beginning to be useful.

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Thu, Nov 01, 2007

Extra Payday

Posted at 11:19 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Since I am paid bi-weekly, there are 26 pay periods each year. Yesterday was the extra payday for this half of the year: the third payday in the same month. It will make a nice dent in the bills from the electrical work and the server.

I should do some serious grocery shopping, too. I need to restock the pantry and freezer before the bad weather comes. I hope I won't get snowed in again this year, but it would be best to be prepared.

I should replace the truck's tires before the bad weather, too.

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Wed, Oct 31, 2007

Tech Notes

Posted at 9:38 pm MDT to Technology

Either VMWare or Centos 4.5 doesn't like the DVD reader (maybe I'm connecting to the SATA interface wrong). The install of the guest OS kept dying with a bogus message about being out of disk space. After some googling and after many re-tries tweaking various parameters, I finally was able to get Centos to load from an ISO image on the hard drive.

So I now have two machines running on the server: quadriga itself is Fedora 7 and q-centos is Centos 4.5. Unfortunately, ClearCase (even the latest version, 7.0.1) will still not load its mvfs piece on Centos 4.5. It seems to want actual 4.0, which is archaic by Linux standards: 5.0 is current for Centos, and still old compared to the Fedora (which admittedly leans toward the bleeding-edge).

There are no DVD images of 4.0 left on the web, only sets of four CD images. I'll try loading from those from the hard drive, once they download. If that doesn't work, I have found instructions for building a DVD image out of the 4 smaller ones.

I think I am going to load a 32-bit guest image instead of the 64 bit one, just in case that is part of what clearcase is whining about. This has gotten very old.

I think I won't nuke the q-centos image right away. It took so much trouble to get it installed. And I think I should get VNC working on q-centos and whatever I call the new image: at the moment I'm working from the laptop through a VNC connection to quadriga and using the vmware console to access q-centos, which makes the screen real estate available for q-centos a bit limited.

On another front, DB2 has finally consented to install into sophia2, the Windows image on my laptop. And I have it licensed, too. I'm not sure I have it configured right, and ClearQuest is being cranky about connecting to it. But yesterday DB2 was refusing to install at all, so this counts as progress. I'm not sure what changed, but this is a Windows image, so shutting the laptop down over night (to give it a chance to cool down) and rebooting it this morning, may have slapped some sense into it.

(The spell checker thinks VMWare should maybe be Vampire: seems appropriate for Halloween.)

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Halloween Snow

Posted at 6:49 am MDT to Weather

Halloween in Colorado. There is a dusting of snow on the truck and a few other smooth surfaces. Not enough to show anywhere else especially as dark as it is this morning.

The radio says there is a little scattered snow still falling in some parts of the area, but the high should be near 50, so it shouldn't stick. They are predicting cold, damp, drizzly weather but not actual snow for the rest of the day. Just enough to make the trick-or-treaters miserable.

It is very dark in the mornings this week because daylight savings time has not yet ended this year (unlike previous years when it ended the weekend before Halloween, this year they moved the change out a week).

It is possible for gadgets to be too smart for their own good, but not quite smart enough. I overslept on Monday because my clock radio thought daylight savings time had started. This is annoying: the clock syncs to the Bureau of Standards and is supposed to never need setting. But since they changed the law and it is programmed for the old time change dates, I need to change it 4 times a year -- undo the time changes at the old time change dates and make the change at the new time change dates -- instead of just two.

The alarm clock was not an expensive one. I may decide to replace it with one with up-to-date programming or no programming. It was a good thing on Monday that my commute consists of walking to the livingroom.

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Tue, Oct 30, 2007

World Business

Posted at 9:55 pm MDT to Travel

My current customer is talking about a follow-on project to integrate a lot of their subsidiaries into their standard methods and procedures. This will involve analyzing and mentoring their remote sites in Europe and the Pacific Rim, and may include putting me on-site for a week or two in various places.

Places on the Pacific Rim like Australia, Hong Kong, Bei Jing. Possibly Japan.

Places in Europe like London and Moscow and Ireland. And Belgium... or is it France.

This could be an exciting year. Much better than getting stuck in Boston or wherever for 6 months.

I'll need to shop for new business clothes. Yuck. And shoes.

And probably immunizations. (That reminds me, I haven't had my flu shot yet this year.)

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Mon, Oct 29, 2007

VPN Down

Posted at 11:14 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

The VPN that lets me connects to my coustomer's computers went down Friday. It turned out my account had been deleted due to some confusion about th eend date of my contract.

It was handy on Friday: it gave me a good reason to leave work a little early so I missed the rush hour traffic through Denver when I drove to the convention. But today was frustrating because I am not really getting things done.

I'm loading software onto my laptop and the new server, but I'm going to need licenses before I can actually do anything with it.

There is a chance that the VPN [a[erwork will be sorted out by tomorrow, which will be quicker than I can get the rather complicated environment I need built up, configured and working on my own systems.

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Sun, Oct 28, 2007

MileHiCon 39

Posted at 7:56 pm MDT to Travel

The convention was a lot of fun. I spent two days away from computers, ate some very good food, and saw people I hadn't seen in years (because I only ever saw them at cons).

I bought some books, all by authors who were at the convention, so they are autographed. I got a free book too: A hard-cover copy of Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber (the guest of honor) was given to each attendee... but I didn't get that one autographed because it was too big and clunky to carry around.

Some of the books I bought were from very small presses/POD publishers. There was a meet-and-greet Friday evening with about 30 writers, some of whom were selling their books directly. I bought a few books then, and others in the dealers' room. I will review the small press books here as I read them, to put more mentions of them onto the internet.

Besides the books, I bought a couple of T-shirts by artists I like, and two sessions of chair-massage. My left arm and shoulder feel better than they have in ages. I really need to schedule a session with my regular massage therapist. I need to start doing yoga stretches again, too, to help keep things unlocked. My range of motion sucks, these days.

I spent a lot of time in the anime room, with Mike Odell and Barb Edmunds, one of the people who first got me hooked on anime in the old days. The other person who did most to get me hooked and was a good friend of Barb, was Patricia Munson-Siter. Neither of us has heard from Pat for years: she moved to New Jersey after her husband retired from the Air Force back around the turn of the millennium and dropped out of touch. She seems not to be on-line, when I've googled, which is worrying: she had been active in fandom for years, though generally in print fandom, not on-line. (I just tried googling once more: no sign of a web-site, but she seems to be currently active in the New Jersey DAR.)

Panels I attended included:

"Memories of DonnerCon": DonnerCon is the nickname of the 1997 MileHiCon, when the blizzard happened (more than a foot of snow on the Friday and Saturday) and people were snowed into the con, or snowed away from the con, and by Sunday the hotel was serving strange buffets made of leftovers. Ten years ago already. Wow.

"Greek Mythology and the Constellations" I could probably give this one myself. I was mostly waiting for:

"The Anthropology of Lord of the Rings": but the scheduled speaker did not appear (possibly stuck in California: flights from SanDiego are iffy due to the wildfires) so there was a general discussion led by a few longtime Denver-area fans.

"Role of the Modern Day Vampire" This was excellent. A review of the changing portrayal of the vampire in books and films since 1643, by an author, Tony Ruggiero, who did his masters thesis on Frankenstein and Dracula. A version of the talk was previously given at the Library of Congress. I later bought all three of his books that were available in the dealers' room, just as he happened to be at the booth, so I got them autographed. I'm about halfway through Operation: Immortal Servitude, about vampires and Navy SEALs. (Mr. Ruggiero is an ex-SEAL.)

"Kitty Carrie and the Midnight Hour" this was also wonderful: live improv theater. Carrie Vaughn is the author of a series about a werewolf radio talk-show host beginning with Kitty and the Midnight Hour. She played the role of the talk-show host and took 'calls' about the supernatural from various people. It was very, very well done and funny.

And a panel on "Tech and other Geeky Delights" (what can I say...)

The convention was in the Tech Center Hyatt-Regency: fancier than the places I stay when travelling on business and with the food -- while excellent -- priced accordingly. Though they could do with a few more items on their dinner menu without chile peppers in them. Note to self: ask about lettuce in things -- people don't bother mentioning it on menus.

The bed was amazing: nearly as tall as my waterbed with the double underdresser, but just all mattress. I suspect it was a Tempurpedic or something similar. It was a kingsize, with 6 bed pillows and a couple of big, square occasional pillows, and a sort of long cylindrical pillow.

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Thu, Oct 25, 2007

Reorganizing

Posted at 11:50 pm MDT to Technology

I reorganized the study and the server today. The two old desktop machines and some associated equipment are now disconnected and stored in the closet. I should gather up the spare keyboards and mice and shove them in there, too, along with the extra speakers.

The rats' nest of power cords under the desk has been sorted out for the first time in ages. There was one power cord for a piece of equipment that no longer exists still plugged into a surge protector because the cables were too tangled to remove it. Now the server, router and DSL modem are all plugged into the UPS, so they should all survive brief power glitches better. Both printers and their network servers are plugged into one surge protector,(which still has available sockets) and the other surge suppressor is mostly empty.

Note: there is also a big, honking whole-house surge suppressor attached to the new breaker box. This is lightning country. (I once had half my A/V stack, a couple of phones, and a Kitchenaid mixer fried by a near miss. Since then, I plug everything into surge suppressors, including the phone and tv lines: I think it was comms rather than power that lett in the surge that fried things.)

I have a serial cable between the UPS and the server, and I've downloaded the latest version of the power management software, which isn't wanting to install at the moment. Once I get the software package working, the UPS will be able to tell the server that it is running out of power and needs to shut itself down.

The server itself has been reinstalled with LVM over RAID for the root partition, a RAIDed /boot partition and an amount of swap space that matches documented recommendations (the default install I had before was kind of skimpy). It also has a fixed IP address on my internal network, so with a little tweaking of my modem and router settings I should be able to admin it from outside.

Note: this weekend is MileHiCon. I will not post again until Sunday evening or Monday. Now I need to pack.

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Wed, Oct 24, 2007

Inspector

Posted at 9:35 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

The inspector finally came today. This time they sent someone who found the house without difficulty. He found a couple of things that needed to be tweaked, so the electricians will come out early next week to fix them. Then we need to set up a followup inspection (I wonder how long that will take), and some time after that the overhead lines go away and the underground power lines become active. At this rate, the project may finally be done by Thanksgiving.

The inspector asked about the house that is scheduled to be openspace. Everyone asks about the house that is going to be openspace. If they are going to tear it down I wish they would get it over with, so people would stop asking me about it.

I also received a notice in the mail that another of the neighboring houses is going to be remodeled. It was built in the 70s as a solar house with a long slanted roof for the solar collectors (which stopped working properly long ago). The interior spaces are interesting, but not particularly practical: a lot of the floor space isn't really usable. From the looks of the paperwork, they are replacing the slant with an actual, usable second floor area, with full height ceilings on the whole first floor beneath it.

I don't envy them having to deal with the Land Use department.

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Tue, Oct 23, 2007

Liars

Posted at 10:22 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

There is a reason the Boulder county authorities are widely despised by the people who here. Especially anyone who needs to deal with permits and inspections.

This morning I called the electricians to inquire about yesterday's non-inspection. The answer I eventually got contained some interesting bits.

1. They were going to bring the permit with them, They had repeatedly told us that it was mailed, but that story seems to have changed now. It was never sent. So if I had waited until it arrived to set up the inspection, I would still be waiting.

2. "The house isn't marked." In fact, there have been 4-inch tall numbers nailed to the house since the house number was changed in 1999. (And the old house number was nailed up before then.) And there is an (admittedly faded) number sign on the fencepost at the foot of the driveway as well. The problem is, you have to know how to find my cul-de-sac to see them. Which I can't really do much about: I used to have signs nailed to some of the telephone poles on the way in, but the county or the power company took them down.

And one would think that employees of a division of the county land use department would have access to... you know... those things ... what are they called? Oh, yes... maps?

Mapquest and company know where my house is, oddly enough... And there is a property-values website Shawn showed me, where if you type in my address it will show you an aerial photo of my house and land, with information about estimated property sale values and tax assessments and such.

Google Earth doesn't work on 64-bit Linux, last time I checked, but it knows exactly where I am located, too. (I should check into that again, actually: there are some areas in Eastern Europe where I should look at the terrain for the Techlands stories. Maybe it will work on Firefox (or Iceweasel if Fedora relabelled it due to the trademark thing) even if it doesn't work with Konqueror, my usual browser.)

3. "They called and left a message." That is an outright lie. They had both of my phone numbers -- cell and landline -- and I spent all of Monday within arm's reach of both phones. Neither phone rang, and neither voicemail had a message or evidence of a missed call.

They are supposed to come tomorrow. I'll believe that when I see it.

May those who provide these bureaucrats with needed services, when the time comes, be as diligent and effective as the bureaucrats are themselves.

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Mon, Oct 22, 2007

Non-Inspection

Posted at 5:50 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

The inspection of the electrical work that was supposed to happen today, didn't. And I'm sure it was supposed to be today, because I checked my blog about when it was scheduled... (Actually, I checked the development copy of the blog, which lives on my laptop, not the live blog.)

I wonder if the inspector went to wherever they sent the paperwork to? He certainly didn't come here.

This is very annoying. I really want to get the hole in the roof that the overhead lines go through filled in before the weather turns soggy. I'll call the electricians again in the morning: they were the ones who were supposed to set up the appointment. I want stable power.

Quadriga the server is downloading a bunch of files from the server at work. Once that finishes, I'm going to need to power down for a while so that I can hook the server to the UPS. I should attach the router and DSL-modem to the UPS, too. Power glitches tend to lock up one or both of them, and modern computers are crippled if they can't talk to the net.

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Sun, Oct 21, 2007

It's Alive

Posted at 5:09 pm MDT to Technology

(Cue maniacal laughter, mad scientist style.) The server lives. It's very quiet.

It actually has 4 processor cores (2 in each package). I think its name will be Quadriga.

Now I need to look up RAID configuration, so that I can finish loading Linux in the configuration I want..

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Thunder-Snow

Posted at 10:41 am MDT to Weather

I awakened this morning to snow, and the sound of thunder. Followed by sirens out on thehighway: people were apparently being stupid.

Things settled down pretty quickly, and for the past few hours we've just had snow and wind. This is a day for staying in, baking (I have an apple upside-down cake in the oven and may do a poundcake later) and getting the server working.

The most surprising thing about this weather is that this is the first real hard frost we have had this year. Most years we start getting overnight freezes in September. Late October snow is fairly normal -- because of the moisture patterns we get more white Halloweens than white Christmases.

One year in the late 90s we had a blizzard the weekend before Halloween that dumped a couple of feet of snow on the Denver area. MileHiCon is always the weekend before Halloween, and I remember being snowed in at the hotel and looking out to see huge earth-moving machines piling snow in a nearby field because there was no place else to put it. The hotel fed us strange buffets made of whatever leftovers were in the kitchen because there was no way for supplies or staff to get in.

MileHiCon (in a different hotel) is next weekend. I hope the weather will get this out of its system, and driving, at least will be OK next weekend.

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Sat, Oct 20, 2007

CPU Coolers

Posted at 9:39 pm MDT to Technology

Shawn came over for a little while this evening with his son Shane He got the cooler clip unjammed in the server, which took a while: I'm feeling a ltiile less empabraased about not being able to do it my self.

Then the two of us, with Shane occasionally helping out by aiming flashlights and passing tools, eventually managed to get the two coolers installed. It was definitely a three-handed task, or a task designed for people whose hands are thin but strong, or both.

I will say, I don't think I need to worry about those coolers ever coming loose. I really hope I don't need to replace those processors before I replace the whole motherboard.

I haven't plugged in the server yet. I still need to route and anchor some of the wires before the fans can be turned on safely, and that will require more time standing than I really want to engage in this evening. Farmer's Market wears me out, and leaves me very stiff and makes standing kind of painful.

We had rubber mats to stand on at market today, not just concrete, so my feet don't hurt as much as they did a few weeks ago, when we forget to use the mats. But my feet are still not happy with me. Seven hours standing and walking on concrete and rubber mats (and lifting squash) left my legs and back stiff and my feet very sore. I don't wear shoes in the house (and I've spent most of the past 11 months in the house), and do wear shoes at market, which doesn't help.

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Fri, Oct 19, 2007

State of the Blog

Posted at 11:10 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

This blog was first published October 13, 2006, so it has been running for a little over a year now. I have posted 397 articles so far (this will be 398) so the 400th article should be posted by Sunday, the 21st.

The blog originally had two main purposes: to get me into the habit of writing again, and to provide me with at least a notional audience, since I can't seem to write without readers.

I think it has succeeded fairly well at both tasks: writing 398 articles in 361 days is not bad (even if some of them were a bit short). I've posted regularly enough that after one weekend when I left the computer turned off, Shawn sent an email asking if I was all right.

As far as the audience goes, I seem to average at least a dozen or so readers who are probably not bots. And even some of the multitude of bots who crawl through might have an occasional reader behind them... from the access logs I can safely say that this blog is very thoroughly indexed.

The blog gets few comments, but that's only fair: I read a bunch of blogs regularly and very rarely post comments on them.

The experiment seems to be working, so it might as well continue.

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Thu, Oct 18, 2007

Permit

Posted at 11:47 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I still haven't received the permit that was supposed to be mailed to me by the county. I called th eelectricians again a couple of days ago and they finally got back to me today.

Since the permit was officially issued, they are setting up the inspection for Monday. I hope that the inspector will actually show up, and that there are no more weird delays. I'd like to get the overhead power lines out of here before the weather gets much worse: the weather is turning cold and windy and I had a strange power outage yesterday.

I'm not sure if the power outage was is related to the powerlines being in a strange, temporary state, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was a contributing factor.

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Wed, Oct 17, 2007

Kernel Makefiles

Posted at 10:58 pm MDT to Code

I'm looking at the makefiles and tools that are used to build the Linux kernel. Lovely stuff.

There's a small tweak to the format of the generated config files that was mentioned on the kernel mailing list. I'm going to try to implement it.

Even if someone else ends up doing it first, exploring the change gives me a goal in exploring the files. I find that new software is opaque unless I have something in particular that I'm looking for

And if no one else makes the change before I figure things out, maybe I'll be able to make my first contribution to Linux development.

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Tue, Oct 16, 2007

Dr. Who

Posted at 10:22 pm MDT to Media

I have been watching the new season of the new 'Dr. Who' on BBC America, along with 'Torchwood', but this weekend I decided I wanted to see what happens next in the second half of the season ( which I had picked up on DVD a few weeks ago).

It's very well done, both the show and the DVD's. They have commentaries on every episode and other extras, so I have ended up re-watching the episodes I have already seen. I will probably watch the extras on the season 1 DVDs next.

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Sun, Oct 14, 2007

CPU Coolers

Posted at 3:23 pm MDT to Technology

Arg.

These fancy Zalman CPU coolers have clips that are very stiff, too stiff for my fingers to operate. At this point I have one latched in place, but without the cooler. I was trying to see how it needed to line up without the fan in the way... Now I can't get it to unhook so I can add the cooler to the installation. I don't want to flex the motherborad too much

And when the cooler is in place, I can not get the clip to bend far enough to latch into place.

It doesn't help that my fingers and thumbs have joints that hyper-extend. When I try to put pressure on things, my thumbs bend back.

I'm going back to working on the Customer Portal.

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Sat, Oct 13, 2007

Concert

Posted at 10:53 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Tonight's concert was the first in the Boulder Philharmonic's 50th Anniversary season. It was a theme concert: music about pictures and pictures about music. The guest artist was an artist: a painter who created a painting while Strauss' "Death and Transfiguration" was performed. The piece after the intermission was a new orchectration of "Pictures at an Exhibition" by Mussorgsky, and the first piece of the evening was "Tritych" by Respighi, which is inspired by three pictures by Botticelli.

I've had season tickets at the Phil for years, but in recent years my attendence has been pretty sporadic because of all the business travel. Between travel and the weather I missed the entire 2006-2007 season.

Attending tonight feels like rebuilding a piece of my life. Attending MileHiCon the weekend after next will bring back another piece, I hope. I've gotten too disconnected from anything outside of work and Nannette's farm.

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Fri, Oct 12, 2007

Al Gore and the Nobel

Posted at 10:40 pm MDT to Current Events

Someone pointed out that Al Gore is the first person to get an Oscar and a Nobel Prize, in the same year and for roughly the same body of work. Also an Emmy, and a David Attenborough Award for Excellence in Nature Filmmaking, and a Spanish award.

I think he is running out of different awards to win.

There is satiric article online about the Supreme Court awarding the Nobel to Shrub instead. (Molly Irvin would have loved this.)

There is one other person who won both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize: George Bernard Shaw won the Nobel for Literature in 1925. But he did not win his Oscar until 1938.

People are speculating that the Nobel committee were sending messages this year: the Medical Nobel was for stem-cell research, and the Peace Prize is for global warming.

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Thu, Oct 11, 2007

Patent Trolls

Posted at 10:27 pm MDT to Current Events

Patent trolls are companies that buy up old patents for the purpose of using them for extortion, not creation or manufacturing. According to the latest article at Groklaw, a patent troll has filed suit against Redhat and Novell.

Funny thing, that. Last week Steve Ballmer, head of Microsoft (a company that averages payments of a billion dollars a year for violating other peoples patents) stated that someone would sue "Linux" over patents. People pointed out that there had never been a patent suit against Linux or FOSS (Free and Open Source Software).

And now, lo and behold, it happens.

The problem with patents is that they are mostly used these days as weapons of mutually assured destruction for each others' product lines, and patent trolls have no products except litigation. Things could get expensive before this is over.

But they seem to have picked a bad patent for their opening bid: people are already mentioning prior art. And there is also the question of why they sued Redhat and Novell, neither of whom were major players in the development of the software that supposedly infringes. Both companies are mostly distributors.

Groklaw is going to be busy... and I hope the MoFos of Morrison & Foerster have a strong patent division. It seems that SCO has just been a warm-up.

May they all be judged.
May their actions be publicly weighed against truth and fairness.

May those who act out of greed watch the treasures they reach for turn to dust and ash as they grasp for them. (Earth)
May those who scheme to twist justice and equity be drowned in their own corruption. (Water)
May those who act out of arrogance be driven forth into a blaze of public scorn. (Flame)
May those who seek to profit without recompense from the ideas of others find their hopes swept away as by hurricanes. (Storm)
May those who deal falsely see the fruits of their own actions turn to rend them like wolves. (The Wood)

May they be judged in their acts and in their words and in their hearts, in their going out and their coming in. May they be judged.

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Wed, Oct 10, 2007

Pratchett

Posted at 8:25 pm MDT to Media

The new Terry Pratchett arrived today. Making Money", involves banks and economics and is a sequel to Going Postal -- bbout postal and communications systems and techies -- which involved the same nominal main character.

However, as the book itself states "It's all about the city."

I can't review this. I have two thirds of this book to go, and I can't remember encountering a bad Pratchett book: the thirty or so of his books that I have read range from good through excellent to astounding. This is one of the ones I like: as much about ideas as people and jokes.

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Tue, Oct 09, 2007

TV Fly

Posted at 9:17 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

For the past couple of days there has been a small fly wandering around inside the screen of my big projection TV. It is very distracting and I wish it would either come out of there or wander into some place where it is not visible when the TV is on. One advantage of the newer flatscreen technologies is that they are solid: there is no way for insects to get inside the screen (bugs may be another matter...), but I got this TV in 2002, just before I started being sent out of town all the time.

I had sworn that my next TV would be one that bolted to the wall, not sat in the room, but the older TV was losing the color blue, and the newer flat panels were still too expensive.

The old TV got moved to the bedroom. I very rarely watch it there, only occasionally when I am sick, so it will probably last for years before it dies completely. I am very prone to insomnia, and I have heard that it can be harmful to get into the habit of doing things like reading or watching TV in bed: you need to train yourself that beds are for falling asleep in.

I have a lot of old electronic stuff around here: partly because you aren't supposed to put it in the trash: it counts at toxic waste because of the heavy metals and other nasty chemicals in the circuit boards and tubes.

There is a free electronic dropoff day at the trash company on Saturday. I need to do some sorting in the computer room this week, clear out some defunct equipment and free up some space..

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Mon, Oct 08, 2007

Fedora 7

Posted at 9:44 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

'Heroes' was on this evening. Star Trek Classic remains an influence. They killed off George Takei's character a couple of weeks ago, but have now added a character played by Nichelle Nicholls. And they continue the pattern of using non-English dialog, subtitled. It was mostly Spanish and Japanese in this episode: both languages I can follow along side the subtitles.

I burned a Fedora 7 DVD, a rescue CD and the F7 KDE Live Disk (which I could do while watching TV) and made sure they all boot on my laptop. The laptop is a single, single-core 64-bit AMD processor and the server will have dual, dual-core 64-bit AMD processors, but they use the same installation disks. The Fedora KDE spin is very pretty.

I did not disturb the Kubuntu Linux installation on the laptop hard-drive. I need it for work to much to risk messing around with it. Especially on a week night. One of these weekends, I really need to upgrade VMWare to the current patch level, but I can't risk doing that on a week night either: it took me a couple of hours of work and googling to get things working again after the last patch. I should probably upgrade to version 6, which officially supports Kubuntu.

Tomorrow I will install the server processors, memory and graphics card and start trying to decipher the instructions for the cpu coolers (I wonder if the Korean instructions are as ... terse ... as the English ones are.) I suspect the directions will make a bit more sense when I can compare the installed processors in their sockets with the sketches. I think I'm going to do some Googling...

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Squash Soup

Posted at 4:36 pm MDT to Technology

The squash I cooked last week produced much more puree as I needed for the pies. I had to run it through the food processor in 3 batches. The kabocha squash was so sweet all by itself that I ate some of the extra puree plain: just nuked it to heat it up and sprinkled it with a little salt.

Today I made the last of it into soup: about a cup and a half of the squash, two cups of chicken broth (from a box -- Costco carries cases of organic chicken broth these days), 1/4 teaspoon each of curry powder and kosher salt. It made enough for two bowls of soup: I had one today for lunch, and I'll finish it tomorrow.

The curry powder isn't really noticeable as such: it just brightens the flavor of the squash and chicken.

Then it will be time to bake another squash. I have three assorted small squashes to play with: a small Kabocha, a white acorn, and a tiny butternut. I should look up some recipes for things to do with them other than pies, soup and a plain side dish.

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Sun, Oct 07, 2007

Insomnia

Posted at 8:37 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I have been going to bed at reasonable times, but it hasn't done much good. Last night, for example, I went to bed before 11, but I was awake most of the time between 1:30 am and 6. Dinah Kitty was very annoyed at how much thrashing around I did.

Then I finally fell asleep for most of the time between 6 and 10. So I'm not quite totally exhausted today. But I can't do that on work days.

I actually got a bit accomplished today.

I tidied up the porch, and took some bottles, pop cans, and about four years of phone books to the recycle center. Some old newspapers remain neatly stacked in the recycle bins on the porch: I no longer subscribe, so I need to save these papers for starting fires in the woodstove. I did a little tidying in the basement, too, and changed the furnace filter and replaced the battery in the smoke detector.

I stopped at Computer City: they sell my model of power supply, and their technician said I can just use a molex connector on one of the other power lines with the 4 pin connector on the mother board. The model of CPU cooler I bought from Newegg is also the one they sell for use with my processors' model, so I guess they should fit, after all.

I stopped at McGuckins Hardware and bought a good 8-inch chef's knife for the kitchen, a case of furnace filters and some daylight-spectrum lightbulbs and 9-volt batteries for some of my smoke detectors for the house, and a package of bungee cords, an emergency tool and a couple of emergency flashers for the truck.

I reorganized the power cables in the server based on the advice from the Computer City guy, but I dropped tools three times doing that much, and decided to wait before handling the processors and memory. (The Xacto knife just barely missed my foot: this is a sign.)

I tried three times, unsuccessfully, carefully following the directions on the side of the unit, to re-light the pilot on the water heater. Then I decided that it can wait until the HVAC guy comes tomorrow to reconnect the airconditioner. I think it went out because of all the faffing around with the power overt he past several days. The heater has probably been out since Friday, if not Thursday when the electricity was turned off for hours, but the tank is large enough that the water wasn't noticeably cold until this morning.

I don't think I like these new-fangled electronic pilot starters: I have terrible luck getting them to start once the flame goes out. The propane furnace that was in this house when I bought it had the kind of pilot you light by sticking in a long-nosed butane lighter, and I was always able to get that started. The gas furnace I replaced it with lasted about 10 years then started eating electronic starters. The current furnace has done a good job of staying lit.

I should probably get the HVAC guy to show me how to restart the furnace pilot, too, for future reference. And maybe I should reconsider my thoughts about switching to a gas stove...

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Sat, Oct 06, 2007

Server Building

Posted at 9:14 pm MDT to Technology

In between dealing with the house construction stuff, I started putting the server together today. I've got the case up, which is lovely and beautifully made. The power supply and drives and motherboard are installed, and the drives are hooked to the power suppply and motherboard.

I haven't installed the CPUS, memory, graphics card or coolers yet, or hooked the power supply to the motherboard yet. I'll do the cpus, memory and graphics card tomorrow, but I'm not sure what I'm going to do about the coolers and motherboard power.

The motherboard wants three power connections: 24 pin, 8 pin and 4 pin. The power supply provides a 24 pin cable, an 8 pin cable and a 4 pin cable. However. The 24 pin and 8 pin connectors match. But the 4 pin connector has 4 pins in a line on the motherboard, and the pins are in a two by two square with a different style of connector on the power supply cable. I need to find an adapter. I'll try McGuckins and Computer City tomorrow.

I may need to look for different CPU coolers, too. The ones I bought are HUGE -- much larger than I expected -- and I'm not sure they will fit in the case along with everything else. I'll see how it goes after the processors, memory and graphics card are installed.

On the construction front: the porch is rebuilt, the driveway is done, the pile of trash has been hauled away (in a dumptruck that was practically antique), and the power lines are waiting for the power company to condescend to make the actual change. There are a few final bits that need to be finished on Monday besides the power line switchover (which may not happen until later in the week): mostly the replacement for the broken porch post and reconnecting the airconditioner in its new spot. The house will be quiet tomorrow.

Things cost a bit more than originally bid: Ross and his assistant worked all day today, when there were only two days in the original plan, and they kept the backhoe longer than they expected. And there was the dumptruck, and the extra two load of roadbase. But some of this work has been needed for a long time.

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Fri, Oct 05, 2007

Porch and Driveway

Posted at 9:30 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Yesterday I made the mistake of telling Beth, at work, that I was impressed that Ross had been able to use the backhoe under the porch roof without damaging it. I think I jinxed him. Today he kind of mangled one of the posts that holds up the roof. He was yanking out the rotten wooden posts that made up the original retaining wall around the basement door well when the damage happened: there was a crosspiece or something that he didn't notice that got hung up on the support post. (Ross has promised to replace the post.)

There's a huge pile of stuff that Ross has demolished for me because it was adjacent to the front porch where they needed to work, and he had the backhoe, anyway. In the next couple of weeks I'll have to get someone to haul it away. We didn't expect such a huge pile of crap, so I didn't order a big dumpster. I'm really glad I have never done any ambitious landscaping in my front yard -- I always knew I was going to need heavy equipment to deal with that stupid wooden retaining wall. I'm thinking buffalo grass in the yard, once the pile of crap is removed, and some low shrubs, or raised planter beds out of materials that match the new stairs and retaining walls, just outside the line of the porch roof.

Next spring I'll get the basement steps and retaining walls replaced in rock, or cement paver stones and blocks. I haven't used those steps in several years because of the failing retaining walls (and I've been out of town so much). And I 'll get a railing put on the bedroom balcony to match the one that is now on the front porch: the balcony railing is long dead, and on the same side of the house, so it needs to visually match the front porch rail.

I just hope the washer and dryer hang in there until I get the basement steps replaced: having appliances hauled in the front door through the house and down the inside basement stairs would be a pain.

Ross and his helpers finished the new part of the porch, and the railing at 7 PM (they did the last couple of planks of the railing with very little light). The porch is now about half again as big as it was a couple of days ago, and there is a kick plate around the edge so the wind will be less likely to blow things down into the basement door well. I'm impressed.

I've ordered another couple of truckloads of roadbase. Aside from Volkswagen-eating potholes swallowing so much of the roadbase that the first two loads weren't enough, the driveway is starting to look pretty good. The roadbase I've bought is recycled asphalt: the dealer recommended it. He said it helps melt the snow in the winter because it is black, and tends to stick together and make potholes less than the dirt and gravel kind of roadbase. And I like the Idea of using a recycled material.

From a distance, the driveway almost looks paved, but it seems strange to look out of my house and see the dark expanse. I may add a layer of gravel on top at some point as camouflage.

The new breaker box is in place, waiting for the guy from the power company to show up and make the switch from the overhead lines to the underground ones. The airconditioner is waiting to be reattached now that it has a new corner of the porch to live in... that should happen tomorrow morning.

I've been taking before and during pictures. I'll put up some before, during, and after images once the driveway is done and the overhead line is gone.

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Thu, Oct 04, 2007

Gas Line

Posted at 6:31 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I spent half the day at the office while they were moving the wires from the old breaker box to the new breaker box. So I missed the big excitement for the day. This is probably just as well. I am not quite as prone to anxiety attacks as my Aunt Irma, but I do tend to get stressed out... and this week is already stressful.

Yesterday a man came out to mark the underground gas and phone lines so the backhoe would know where NOT to dig. But Ross hit it anyway. (The hissing was not a good sign.) They sent away a truck that was bringing roadbase for the driveway.

Ross said that at the place where he ran into trouble, there was only six inches of dirt above the gas line. I suspect the power company did not bother to bury it as deeply as it should have. But there is also a huge deep puddle that always forms there at the end of my driveway when things are wet, and cars and trucks going through the puddle have probably splashed away a lot of the dirt over the years.

By the time I arrived home at 4:30, the power company had reset the gasline, and there was a huge deep trench the front of my house to the pole with the transformer. The new breaker box is in place (though still attached to the overhead lines at this point). The deck has not been modified yet, and the airconditioner is still disconnected.

Ross says he should still finish tomorrow easily. This is good. There is nasty weather predicted for Saturday afternoon, and there are already some clouds beginning to move in.

I hope there are no more surprises or delays.

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'Heirloom' Pie Tins

Posted at 6:31 pm MDT to Technology

The pans I used when I baked the squash pies earlier in the week are actual pie tins made of tinned steel. They have "New England Pie Company 5 ¢ Deposit" molded into their bottoms. They are quite shallow, like the modern disposable aluminum foil pie pans that have replaced them in commercial use. But unlike other pie pans I've seen, they have some small holes in the bottoms so that a little steam can escape.

I am fairly certain my Grandma had a pile of these stashed in her basement and I acquired them when I got my first apartment. She must have had a lot of them. I've tossed out a few over the years that got scraped and rusty (or disgustingly mouse-contaminated) and I still have half a dozen or so of the tins. And I don't think I got the full stash.

Turning them in for the deposit must have been a real nuisance. And the New England Pie Company must have made really yummy pies.

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Tue, Oct 02, 2007

Electricity

Posted at 7:34 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

On Thursday and Friday, people and equipment are going to arrive here. By Saturday, I should have a new breaker panel, my power lines will be underground, half of my front porch will be rebuilt and a guardrail added, and my driveway will be filled in with stone chips and road base and re-graded.

This should leave me in pretty good shape for the winter.

In other news, the CustomerPortal was turned over late last night for the users to review.

And I have two pies in the oven. Sort of. It's a good thing I am the only one who will see them: I really can't do decent pie crusts. Though I suspect part of the problem is that my Mom's pie crust recipe was made for a much more humid climate. If I made pies every week for a couple of months, I might figure out the proportion of liquid needed to get a rollable crust. Not going to happen unless I go on a pot-pie diet with pie for desert...

I will probably look at the manuals for the server components later, or maybe read some of the admin manual I bought last week. I need to get to be early tonight for a change, and if I start building the server tonight I will probably a. stay up too late and b. make mistakes. Possibly expensive mistakes. Besides, building computers always involves a blood sacrifice, but there's no sense volunteering for anything worse than skinned knuckles or a sheet metal papercut. I'll start assembly tomorrow -- after the cleaning ladies have been through -- and leave everything safely in their packages until then.

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Mon, Oct 01, 2007

Boxes

Posted at 5:57 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

The rest of the server parts arrived about 3:30pm today. Everything arrived apparently intact, though I had to search through the packing peanuts in one large box for a while to find the tube of silver heat-transfer gunk. The tube is about 2 inches long and a third of an inch in diameter and was not attached to a card or anything that would make it easier to find.

Schedule for this evening: make the squash pie, and finish the admin mode of the CustomerPortal so that I can hand it off to the users for review. If I get started assembling the server before the pie and software are done, I'll never finish them. (Maybe I'll just pull out the manuals for the case and motherboard .... No. No, that is the thin edge of the wedge.)

I need to dig out my list of electrical problems and upgrades for the house, too. The electrical contractor is coming over tomorrow to give me a bid on changing out the breaker box for something up to current specs. There are a few quirks in the wiring that should probably be addressed at the same time the box is upgraded.

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Sun, Sep 30, 2007

Too Many Projects

Posted at 9:14 pm MDT to Technology

I've made a lot of progress on the CustomerPortal this weekend, though not quite as much as I had hoped. If I can get all of the main screens working in admin mode I'll load it onto the office server so the people who asked for this program can look at it and decide how they really want it to work. The requirements I've been working from are pretty vague.

I have bread rising in the kitchen.

The rest of the server parts should be here tomorrow. According to UPS, the combined shipping weight of the 4 packages is 38 + 26 + 3 + 3 = 70 pounds. Some of that is shipping materials. But probably not as much as one might hope. I have the desktop in the computer cleared for work space, and Shawn has promised to help me lower the beast to the floor once it is assembled...

And I have baked and pureed a Crimson Kabocha squash, dug out my Mom's pie crust recipe, and acquired Nanette's pumpkin pie filling recipe. I was going to try making a 'pumpkin' pie from the squash this evening, but the coding was on a roll and really needs to get to a good pausing point before I get too busy on the server, so the squash is in the fridge until tomorrow.

I have started to investigate some Linux kernel-related work (one of the things I plan to use the server for is kernel builds. I'm actually looking at working on some of the tools used in building the kernel.

And I would really like to work on one or another of my cross-stitch projects at some point.

And of course, there is the fiction writing. There is an annual challenge -- NaNoWriMo -- for writing 50,000 words of fiction in the month of November. I would need to drop all of my other projects (including blogging) to do that. I have finished one novel in my life (unsellable -- I may put it up on the website one of these days) which was more than twice the size of the NaNoWriMo goal, so I know that I can write that much. 50,000 publishers' words is 300,000 characters, so the goal is an average of 10,000 characters per day for the month. I tend to average 1200 to 1500 on this blog. I don't think it is possible to do NaNoWriMo and also have a life.

.

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Sat, Sep 29, 2007

Vegetable Topology

Posted at 5:27 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I sold squash at the market again today. Next week Nanette will be out of town, so I will probably stay home and play with my new computer.

At the end of the market day, I pack the unsold squash and pumpkins into logs and tubs. It can be a little tricky because the veggies must not be allowed to stab each other with their stems, and if they stick out above the topp of the lug at all, they will be damaged when the lugs are stacked.

And the squash are all sorts of lumpy shapes and sizes. Butternut squash, which are often very long with a lump at one end, are especially annoying to pack. Delicata are handy: they are rather like multicolored, slightly lumpy cucumbers, and fit nicely into various nooks and crannies.

I'm fairly good at filling the crates without wasting space. It's a little like a sort of three-dimensional Tetris game, but with time to fiddle with the packing. Today there were 10 filled crates and two partially filled tubs when I finished packing. (Tubs are slightly larger than crates, but not as strongly constructed. Squash are heavy.) This was more than I needed to pack on either of the past two Saturdays, but we were restocked with more squash halfway through the market.

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Fri, Sep 28, 2007

Portal

Posted at 5:06 pm MDT to Code

The package from Dallas (processors and video card) arrived on my porch at 10 AM. The packages from Memphis arrived at the Colorado terminal at 10:41, so they should be delivered Monday morning.

The package from California seems to have been strapped to a turtle: it hasn't reached Commerce City yet (5 pm). Maybe they are taking the scenic route.

It is probably just as well that the case, motherboard and power supply (some assembly required) have not arrived yet. This gives me some incentive to make some serious progress on the CustomerPortal program this weekend, so I'll be free to play with my new toys when they arrive next week.

I've been dinking around most of this week trying to get the login process to behave the way I think it should. I think I'm going to drop back to the mechanism I used in the IncentivePoints program, which is less elegant but doesn't chase its tail down a hole if someone clicks in an unexpected direction. Once I get the main functionality working I can play with the login stuff in phase 2.

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Thu, Sep 27, 2007

Tech Books

Posted at 11:37 pm MDT to Media

I went into the office briefly and stopped at Borders on the way home. I picked up two technical books, spending nearly $100.00. I don't buy as many technical books as I did a few years ago: on-line information is generally much more current, and technical books are too heavy and bulky to take with me when I am travelling.

But reference books are still useful when you may need to check a lot of related facts and flip back and forth between them. Computers don't really yet provide a functional equivalent of little slips of paper with notes on them stuck in as bookmarks in a reference book.

One book I picked up was MySQL in a Nutshell, which will be useful in setting up the database side of the CustomerPortal project. It's an O'Reilly book: according to the colophon, the animal on the cover is a pied kingfisher, the largest bird capable of a hover in still air.

The other book is Fedora 7 & RedHat Enterprise Linux: The Complete Reference. Not an O'Reiily book, so it doesn't have a totemic critter: The cover is just boring text.

This one is for the server project: it includes coverage of the tools used in setting up and monitoring modern enterprise-grade Linux servers. This way I won't need to have the laptop on the table where I am trying to set up the server so that I can look up settings and parameters. (Much safer not to overcrowd the work space with things that will break if they are dropped... or have things dropped on them.) I'll still supplement the text with a bit of Googling, but sometimes you just can't beat 972 pages of reference materials inscribed on a dead tree.

According to the tracker numbers, all of the pieces of the server have Commerce City, Colorado as their next stop. The 'from-vendor' package turns out to be coming from Dallas. The packages coming from Memphis have passed through Kansas City and Salina Kansas And the California package left form Baldwin Park CA.

Part of the server may arrive tomorrow, after all.

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Wed, Sep 26, 2007

Server Packages Are On Their Way

Posted at 10:56 pm MDT to Technology

When I ordered the server components, Newegg split it into two orders. The processors and video card in one order, and everything else in the other, even though one of the processors is part of a discount deal with the motherboard which is in the other order.

I now have the UPS tracker numbers for everything. The 'everything else' is divided into 3 packages.

The case is in a package by itself. This makes sense: it is large and heavy. This is a Detroit iron kind of a case: it gets some of its quiet from being solid enough not to vibrate: triple layer metal side-walls. More than 30 pounds empty, more than 35 pounds in its retail box and shipping materials, probably close to 40 as shipped through UPS.

The power supply, hard drives, mother board, cooler gunk and coolers are all together in one package.

And just the memory sticks and DVD burner are in the third package. They are being shipped from California, while the other two packages are coming from Memphis.

I wonder where the processors and video card are shipping from? Their package is listed as 'shipped from vendor', whatever that means.

Today is Wednesday and the shipping was supposed to be 3rd day UPS. I might have some of my new toys by the weekend, but Monday is probably more likely.

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Tue, Sep 25, 2007

Server Spec

Posted at 8:13 pm MDT to Technology

It's been a long time since I built a PC from parts. And most of th eparts I built Igor from have been obsolete for ages. But I 've been wanting a home server machine for a while, and I decided that I need to learn some of the high end hardware and admin. So I have specced out and ordered the parts for a serious enterprise grade machine with lots of redundancy and error correction and high availability components.

I will probably need to invest in a few more fans and drive cables, but most of the system is all in this one order. I may harvest a floppy drive from one of my old systems...

• Antec P140 Silver rolled steel case. No windows, no blinky lights. Just a clean metal case designed to be quiet and keep the parts insode cool.
• Antec 850 Watt ATX12V/EPS12V high efficiency power supply
• Tyan S2928 Dual ATX Motherboard
• 2 Dual Core AMD Opteron 2210 Processors
• 4 1 Gig sticks of DDR2 ECC Registered RAM, providing separate dual channel, error correcting ram for each processor, to allow a NUMA SMP configuration
• PNY NVS 285 video card (the official specs say it supports Linux)
• a Samsung 20X SATA DVD burner
• 4 Samsung 500Gb SATA Hard Drives -- this will be configured as a 1+0 RAID array, so it really isn't two Terabytes of available storage
• a tube of fancy Thermal compound for connecting the CPU Coolers to the procesors
• 2 Zalman 9500 CPU Coolers

The Newegg.com order page said it would take them a couple of days for them to fill the order, and it will be sent standard 3-day UPS, so everything should arrive some time next week.

I think I'll download Fedora 7 some time this week, to . I don't think I want to try to deal with NUMA SMP and RAID in Kubuntu's screwy admin environment.

In the meantime I need to think of a name for the new machine. My previous home machines' names were vlad, igor, soteris, xerxes, bast, ulysses, and thoth. And the current laptop is sophia. Since the new server will have two processors, I should find a mythological character with two heads ... or two faces, but Janus feels wrong. Maybe a pair of twins.

Something to think about while I wait for the hardware.

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Mon, Sep 24, 2007

Rainy Monday

Posted at 9:32 pm MDT to Weather

It started raining last night. It rained pretty steadily all day, with occasional thunder in mid-afternoon. And I don't think it has completely stopped yet.

This is strange weather for Colorado iin September. I was glad I didn't have to be out on the roads. The radio was reporting all sorts of problems.

I should bring in some firewood so it will be dry the next time it rains. This would have been a good day for a fire in the woodstove, to fight the dampness and gloom.

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Sun, Sep 23, 2007

Beauty and the Beast (TV 1987-89)

Posted at 12:22 pm MDT to Media

I can't watch subtitled anime while I'm coding (I can't multitask quite that well). So I'm watching the DVDs of the Beauty and the Beast TV show -- the Ron Perlman/Linda Hamilton series -- while I work on the Customer Portal software for the company website. I'm not bothering with season three, after Linda Hamilton left... killing off the heroine of a romance really doesn't work.

It's hard to believe it has already been 20 years...

It's hard to believe people actually thought the fashions in 1987 looked good.

It's worth watching again just for the costumes and sets in the underground world. And Ron Perlman's voice. I see from IMDB that Mr. Perlman has done a LOT of voice acting over the years in cartoons and video games, which is not surprising.

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Sat, Sep 22, 2007

Clients

Posted at 11:36 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I may not travel to Boston before the end of this contract. Until this week, the customer manager who was supposed to be signing off on my time sheets was not bothering to do so. And We have been informed that the soonest we will see any money, now that the timesheets are finally signed off, is the beginning of November, which is after the end of the contract.

Until we get paid for the work I did when I travelled to Boston in August, we don't have resources available for me to travel to Boston again.

We have constant problems getting our customers to pay us the money they owe anywhere close to on time. One reason for the company's existence is that it turns out we need a person working nearly full time just to get our customers to pay us.

We can't even borrow against our receivables to smooth out the cash flow. Even though all of actual clients are corporations, they make us bill through middle-man companies. Brokers who would deal with receivables from BigCorp are a lot less interested when the paperwork says we are owed the money from two guys from Mumbai working out of a Silicon Valley condo.

Yet I am sure the same people who don't mind delaying our payments would be outraged if their own paychecks and expense checks were delayed 6 or 8 weeks at the whim of the people who should be paying them. And even when they are not following the payments terms in the contracts we signed, they want us to live up to our side of the contract.

It is VERY annoying to have no money coming in, or expected any time soon, when I have been working steadily for more than a month. I think we need to propose non-payment penalties if the current folks want to extend the contract. (We won't get them. Big companies never agree to terms that would give us any leverage.) But we need to do something to give these arrogant bozos some incentive to actually live up to their side of the contracts.

I don't think pushing back on the next Boston trip is going be enough. I really hope some other job comes through for me for November even if the current lot wants to extend. I think they have lost their priority claim on my services.

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Fri, Sep 21, 2007

Velociraptor Feathers

Posted at 5:31 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Ooh, neat. According to Pharyngula, scientists have found some velociraptor bones with fine details preserved. They can see the places where 14 big feathers attached to each arm of the velociraptor.

So they didn't just have downy fuzz to keep warm, they had big heavy feathers that needed anchoring, too.

The big question now is: "What did they do with their big feathers?"

I vote for dancing like grouse.

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Thu, Sep 20, 2007

Virtualization

Posted at 9:19 pm MDT to Technology

My 'Windows" laptop is actually a VMWare virtual image on my Linux laptop. Today things got a bit silly. At one point I was logged into my laptop, then logged into the virtual Windows machine, which was connected by Remote Desktop to a Windows machine in my customer's lab (another login) which was running VMWare to provide the actual Windows image (yet another login) that I am going to set up and use for my testing.

It's a good thing that this laptop has a large screen: every layer of indirection wants its own max/min/close buttons, status bars and other controls. With enough layers of indirection, you could run out of screen real estate for actually doing stuff.

Tonight, I'm playing with my virtualization settings to try to get sound working in the virtualized images. For some reason, sound is not getting shared between the host and guest system. Everything else is working fine.

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Wed, Sep 19, 2007

Paving

Posted at 6:40 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I went out to the main road to get my mail this afternoon, and decided I did not need to run any other errands after all.

They are paving the paved road that goes by the border of my little neighborhood and have it closed down to a single lane in each direction. The road gets a fair amount of traffic around rush hour, so things are backed up pretty badly.

They are using actual asphalt this time, not just a layer of oil and sand. I think it had gotten past the point where chip-sealing was going to survive the next winter. When the actual road starts cracking and crumbling in fairly long strips, it's time to get serious.

They did the part of the road near Marshall, closer to the mountains, earlier in the summer. That stretch was so full of potholes and crumbled spots it wouldn't have survived the summer without repaving, much less the winter. It's also comparatively hilly and curvy -- not by New England standards, or the Colorado mountains, but by the standards of the flatter parts of Colorado Marshall Road has a fair amount of character where it actually approaches Marshall.

Tomorrow, I need to go out to the CRUG meeting. I'll have to allow time for the paving delays.

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Mon, Sep 17, 2007

MOFOS

Posted at 10:50 pm MDT to Current Events

Novell's litigation lawfirm is Morrison & Foerster www.mofo.com. They are switching in the special team for the SCO bankruptcy hearing tomorrow. Five attorneys (possibly in addition to others that are already registered for the Delaware courts). Two full partners, three associates. Four of them are bankruptcy specialists (including a member of the American Bar Association Bankruptcy and Chapter 11 Committee and the head of the Mofo New York office Business department, who has published articles on bankruptcy.

And the fifth member of the team has some interesting expertise:

Ms. Dyas earned her J.D. from the University of Texas Law School in 2002, and her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. Her doctoral research analyzed the linguistic features of deception under oath in English and certain romance languages.

Lawyers with Attitude.

There are a bunch of people from the Groklaw readership attending the hearing tomorrow. This should be interesting.

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Backups

Posted at 5:07 pm MDT to Technology

I seem to be hearing about a lot of drive failures lately, so I decided to back up my laptop.

The backup tool I really like, KDar, is no longer supported on Kubuntu, but it was a front end to another tool, Dar, and I had exported the Dar scripts a couple of times last spring. So I was able to generate the backup file I wanted: 15 2Gig files: seven and a half DVDs worth.

Now I just need to finish burning the DVDs. (I'm on number 6).

I should probably look up how to restore from Dar files and throw that information on the last DVD, since there is plenty of space. Trying to look things up online with a dead computer turns into a chicken and egg situation.

I'm spoiled by broadband.

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Sun, Sep 16, 2007

Nanette's Birthday Party

Posted at 10:05 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Nanette's birthday was Friday, which is picking day. And Saturday was Market, which leaves us all exhausted. So we celebrated today. About a half a dozen of her friends attended: Linda and Jan and Galen and Susan and Caroline and me, and we had a good time talking and eating. Chuck's friend Douglas was there for a while, too, and took part in the ceremonial singing and cake eating.

We did a lot of talking about Alton Brown and 'Good Eats' and various kinds of cooking that we are good at or hopeless at. (I can do breads and soups, Nanette is great at pies but hopeless at soups...Galen made a wonderful cake for the party).

I know and like all of the other ladies who were at the party. I know them all through Nanette, and seldom see them except when she is also present. It seems that in recent years Nanette has become more and more my primary social anchor outside work. All the travelling and long term re-locations have pretty much destroyed any opportunity for what little social life I used to have.

I haven't been to a science fiction convention in years, and I've lost touch with my SF and anime fandom friends. I'm hoping to re-connect with that part of my life a little by attending MileHiCon this year and worldcon next year.

I can't really count on being around anywhere for club meetings or classes. When I was in Minneapolis for 6 months I attended a book signing and took a needlework class... but then the contract ended in what would have been the middle of the second phase of the class, so it gave me some activities outside work, but not really social contacts.

I've lost touch with other friends and acquaintances over the years.

But Nanette and I have been friends for about 25 years now. She is my sister even though we are not blood relations. People who see us together often think we are real sisters.

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Sat, Sep 15, 2007

Winter Squash

Posted at 8:52 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I sold squash at the Farmers Market today for 6 hours. Some summer squash: Zucchini and patty pans. But most was winter squash varieties: scarlet Kabocha, and buttercup kabocha, and spaghetti squash, and butternut squash, and acorn squash, and white acorn squash. Also pie pumpkins, which are technically a variety of winter squash. Two dollars a pound.

I put a lot of squash on the scales. I put a lot of individual squashes on the scales more than once: winter squashes tend to be both large and dense, and people got sticker shock and bailed when they found out the prices of the squash they initially selected.

And I think a lot of people don't realize the difference between pie pumpkins, which are meant to be eaten and have thick flesh and small hollows in the center, and jack-o-lantern pumpkins which are thin-fleshed and hollow.

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Fri, Sep 14, 2007

SCO Declares Bankruptcy

Posted at 8:14 pm MDT to Current Events

The trial in the SCO vs. Novell case was due take place (finally) on Monday. The main purpose was to determine how much money SCO owes Novell.

Today SCO declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which puts all court proceedings on hold. They didn't even mention Novell in their list of creditors, even though the expected judgemment is undoubtably the cause of the backruptcy action. The SCO/Novell court has already determined that SCO converted -- stole -- funds belonging to Novell. Possibly as much as twice the current value of the company. The trial Monday was supposed to determine the exact amount.

So there will be no trial in Salt Lake City next week. But I suspect that the motion practice will be flying fast and thick. And I suspect Judge Kimball out in Utah is pretty thoroughly annoyed. (If he wasn't already annoyed by SCO's shenanigans.)

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Thu, Sep 13, 2007

HTML::Template and CSS Files

Posted at 10:07 pm MDT to Code

The IncentivePoints application for the company website is now both functional and a partial visual match for the rest of the website.

It turns out that relative paths to CSS files don't work well with HTML::Template, but absolute paths are fine.

So I had to change

  <LINK REL=Stylesheet HREF="./site.css" TYPE=text/css>

to

 <LINK REL=Stylesheet 
 HREF="http://releaseteam.com/site.css" TYPE=text/css>

to get the web pages to see the css file.

This is not entirely surprising: HTML::Template is putting the pages together from files in several different directories, so it is questionable what the path is relative to. I was a little surprised that when Apache stopped complaining about not being able to find the CSS file, the generated html files still did not use the CSS.

Very odd.

But at least it is working now, and the displays are adequate.

I did some rather kludgey stuff to make my menus look good while still keeping them consistent with the standard formats in the CSS. I'll eventually fix that and clean up the CSS in the templates. For now, I just need to package everything up and copy it onto the office server, so the admins can start entering data.

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Wed, Sep 12, 2007

CSS and CGI::Application

Posted at 11:55 pm MDT to Code

I've got the functionality for IncentivePoints, and a good start at the data structures for CustomerPortal, which is turning out to want a much more complicated design than IncentivePoints, so it's a good thing I'm doing them in this order.

All I really need to do now on Incentive Points is get it to use the css file so it will match the look of the rest of the website. It's not being cooperative.

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Tue, Sep 11, 2007

Jo Walton Poems

Posted at 9:16 pm MDT to Media

A link in the comments on James Nicoll's LiveJournal led me to some poems that author Jo Walton posted on her LiveJournal.

The first one brought tears to my eyes. It's a librarian/bookworm thing.

Now I need to go write code, and wait for my cake to finish baking. (This is a multitasking evening.) I'm very close to finishing the functionality of the IncentivePoints thing.

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Mon, Sep 10, 2007

Heating Season

Posted at 4:44 pm MDT to Weather

This morning when I got up it was 60 degrees F in the house and about 40 outdoors. It was cold and rainy until well after noon, tough it is sunny (but still chilly) now. Today is the first day since the spring that I have had the HVAC system in Heat mode all day.

I got up in the middle of the night to put on warmer pajamas and jack up the thermostat on my waterbed, and I think I need to put the bed into its winter configuration: shake the feathers in the comforter back up to the top, add a blanket, check the waterbed heater...

If the heater is dead (the thermostat works, but I'm not sure about the heater coil), it may be nature's way of telling me I should move my thoughts about getting a new bed higher on the priority list. I would have to drain the waterbed most of the way in order to install a new heater, and the mattress is more than 25 years old and not likely to survive the process.

Today I'm going to make macaroni and cheese for supper. It's good cold weather food, and Food Network had a Mac and Cheese challenge yesterday, which put me in the mood. The winner of the challenge (and $10,000) was a chef from a Denver restaurant named "Mizuna" (which is a Japanese salad green we sell at the farmers' market). His winning specialty, from the menu at his restaurant, was lobster macaroni and cheese. Looked delicious.

Let's see...according to the on-line yellow pages Mizuna is at 225 E 7th Ave Denver, CO 80203-3504. So it's right downtown, where I hardly ever go. Oh, well, something to keep in mind for the next time I need to go downtown.

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Sun, Sep 09, 2007

Looking Back

Posted at 8:23 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

It has been 9 months since I left the apartment in Boston. I think my body and subconscious are just finally beginning to trust that I am home and safe. (being snowed in all winter didn't really help.

I think the house is beginning to believe it's a home again too. The problem with travelling so much when you live alone is that there is no one to keep the household running in the meantime. I still haven't thoroughly de-mousified the basement: it was disgusting enough cleaning out the main level. Gah.

From Mid-August 2004 to Memorial Day weekend 2005 I was in the Boston area, mostly in corporate housing.

I had surgery a few day after I got back, and took a couple of weeks to recover. Then I flew to Albuquerque every week (fly out Sunday fly home Friday) for a month or so, followed by 7 or 8 weeks of working remotely with Albuquerque while I had radiation treatments.

Then I flew to California every week for a month. Then Atlanta every week for a month.

Then, with breaks for the Christmas/New Year holidays, I flew to California every week to the end of April.

Drove to Boston again and lived in corporate housing until the weekend of Dec 8. 9 months ago.

I still get tired just thinking about being out of town that much.

I think if they offer me a gig that is full-time out of town again in corporate housing, I'm going to put my resume out. I'm too old for this shit.

And flying every week is going become impossible if the airports get any more stupid with their security theater.

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Sat, Sep 08, 2007

West Nile

Posted at 5:47 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Nanette's husband had West Nile a few years ago. The disease did some damage to his central nervous system, then apparently went into remission.

That remission has apparently ended now. He is in very bad shape and spent the night in the hospital with what may be a West Nile-related meningitis. They are running tests, but not finding anything unexpected.

This is bad. They own a company in additon to their farm, and Chuck is the CEO and idea man. If his congitive capacities are permanently damaged, things will fall apart.

The CEO of my company is not in the best of health. I worry. Our other partner has basically abandoned us, and I don't really have the skills or personality to run the company myself. I can handle the administrative side of things but a lot of what our CEO does for the company involves his skill at networking and marketing, skill I completely lack. If there is such a thing as negative networking skills, I have them.

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Fri, Sep 07, 2007

Stuff

Posted at 11:25 pm MDT to Code

Note: author Madeleine L'Engle has died at the age of 88.

I'm making progress on the software I'm working on for the office. I'm hoping to have the IncentivePoints functionality done by the end of this weekend: I'm accessing the 4th table type now, and creating entries in it, and just need to clean up it's display formats and interactions with the other 3 tables.

The second program for the office should go a bit faster, since I'll be building on the development and problem-solving I've done for IncentivePoints. I've made a fair amount of progress on getting the perl modules that access MySQL and the HTML::Template and CGI::Application modules to talk to each other inthe ways that I need.

I need a break after that: working on software day (for my client) and night (for the office) is screwing up my sleep cycles. I'm not decompressing enough, I think.

I want to get back to some fiction writing, too. I just had to look up the last name of the viewpoint character in Techlands (the accounting department head, Demeter) because I couldn't remember it. Very annoying since he's been living in my head for months.

I may not blog much this weekend unless something really interesting comes up. I expect to be buried in code.

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Thu, Sep 06, 2007

ACLU

Posted at 4:30 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

In the Patriot Act Congress created National Security Letters, which the FBI could use to demand information from ISPs, financial organizations, librarians, and others. There was no court supervision, and it included an automatic gag order, so that people who received these letters could not mention that they had received them, or even discuss the program.

A report that came out in March from the Inspector General of the Justice department found serious abuses by the FBI and reported that more than 143,000 NSLs were issued between 2003 and 2005.

Today NSLs were declared un-Constitutional by a Federal District court in a case brought by the ACLU on behalf of an NSL recipient who was referred to as John Doe because of the gag order. More court cases and various levels of appeals are ongoing.

I joined the ACLU, today. I gave them about enough to pay for 1 hour of a decent lawyer. (Note to self: this is not a tax deductible donation.)

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Wed, Sep 05, 2007

ISO and Microsoft

Posted at 9:59 pm MDT to Current Events

Microsoft has been trying to force approval by the ISO of a standard for online documents they proposed. They have been blatantly stuffing the ballot box, and got caught engaging in outright bribes.

For now, the ISO has refused to fast-track the proposed standard. (The vote was September 2nd.)

The final vote is in February. More sleaze is expected.

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Tue, Sep 04, 2007

More Robin

Posted at 10:01 pm MDT to Media

One of the speakers on the commentary tracks mentioned (during a scene of heavy drinking and the aftermath) that the cast and crew were very well rehearsed for such a scene. "Banned from every pub in Bristol".

About twelve or fifteen years ago there was a very small convention in Denver for fans of British SF and Fantasy television. It was held in January or February. I don't remember the name of the convention now, and it was never repeated (there were rumors of financial irregularities on the part of the organizer). The two special guests were Danny John-Jules ('Cat' on Red Dwarf) and Marc Ryan, who played the Saracen Nasir on Robin of Sherwood. (The character who was ripped off for the Morgan Freeman character in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves).

Both actors were wonderful speakers, especially when they were on stage at the same time. Apparently almost all British performers of their generation spent time (on their way up) working in the music halls on the various piers (Brighton and so on that were holiday destinations. So they had a great deal of experience in common. And very good timing.

I remember Marc Ryan mentioning the after-hours activities of the Robin of Sherwood cast and crew, though I don't remember many details after all this time. He did have an advantage of playing a very taciturn character (he had exactly one line in the first 6 episodes) so he didn't need to worry about learning (or forgetting) his lines.

One thing I remember that Marc Ryan said is that the reason Michael Praed's eyes always looked a bit odd was that he could not wear contact lenses, and his vision was very poor without his glasses. It didn't stop him from running around in the woods, doing many of his own stunts and doing sword fights and such, but apparently it occasionally made things ... interesting. I'm not sure which would be scarier: seeing what I was doing, or not being able to see it.

And I'm quite sure I wouldn't want to be a stunt man having a sword or quarterstaff fight with someone who can't really see what he is doing. Or what I'm doing.

One thing that has been mentioned in the commentary tracks and that really shows up now that I know to look for it: the extras in the crowd scenes aren't just people in costume standing around. The costumers and Assistant Directors provided names and character descriptions with all of the costumes, so the actors knew who they were and who their relatives were and what they did for a living and a little of their life history. So the people in the backgrounds of scenes are going about their lives and doing little meaningful things and reacting to each other, not just standing around. People buy and sell things in the markets and gossip with specific other people. There are communities on screen, not just bodies.

They also managed to have a lot of children on camera in non-speaking parts by encouraging the cast and crew to bring their kids to the sets and putting them into costume when an appropriate scene was being shot. This made the village demographics less peculiar.

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Mon, Sep 03, 2007

Robin of Sherwood

Posted at 1:53 pm MDT to Media

The first set of DVDs of 'Robin of Sherwood' turned up at BestBuy. It seems like yesterday that the shows were new, but the copyrights read 1983. These are the good episodes: all the ones with Michael Praed as Robin.

The DVDs lack some of the crystal clarity that we expect in newer shows but the stories and music (by Clannad) are still wonderful

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Sun, Sep 02, 2007

Company Website

Posted at 9:07 pm MDT to Code

I'm working on two new features for the company website, one for customers and one for employees. Both of them need account logins and profiles, and a number of other similar features, which is why I am working on them in parallel.

Once I get a function working in one place, I can replicate it in the other, and test both while I have the code fresh in mind.

One advantage of having Linux on my laptop is that I can have a full local Apache webserver right on this box. Speeds up the testing and troubleshooting enormously.

I hope to have a lot of it working by the end of this long weekend.

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Sat, Sep 01, 2007

Hugo Awards 2007

Posted at 8:14 pm MDT to Media

From the Hugo Awards website.

Best Novel: Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge [Tor, 2006]

Best Novella: “A Billion Eves” by Robert Reed [Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2006]

Best Novelette: “The Djinn’s Wife” by Ian McDonald [Asimov’s July 2006]

Best Short Story: “Impossible Dreams” by Tim Pratt [Asimov’s July 2006]

Best Related Non-Fiction Book: James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B Sheldon by Julie Phillips [St. Martin’s Press, 2006]

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) Screenplay by Guillermo del Toro. Directed by Guillermo del Toro [Picturehouse]

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Doctor Who - “Girl in the Fireplace” (2006) Written by Steven Moffat. Directed by Euros Lyn [BBC Wales/BBC1]

Best Editor, Long Form: Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Best Editor, Short Form: Gordon Van Gelder

Best Professional Artist: Donato Giancola

Best Semiprozine: Locus ed. by Charles N. Brown, Kirsten Gong-Wong and Liza Groen Trombi

Best Fanzine: Science-Fiction Five-Yearly ed. by Lee Hoffman, Geri Sullivan, and Randy Byers

Best Fan Writer: Dave Langford

Best Fan Artist: Frank Wu

The winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, sponsored by Dell Magazines and administered on their behalf by the World Science Fiction Society, is:
Naomi Novik

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Fri, Aug 31, 2007

Luddites at SFWA

Posted at 5:22 pm MDT to Current Events

The officers of the SF Writers Association have done something very stupid and illegal. They sent DMCA takedown notices to a site called scribd.com for every document on the site that mentioned Asimov or Silverberg (not just documents that were written BY Asimov or Silverberg). This included book reviews and a course syllabus.

DMCA takedown notices can legally only be sent by the copyright owners or their legal representatives. They did not own or represent the owners of most of the documents

And forcing takedowns of reviews and such (and books that had been uploaded by their own authors) is kind of counter-productive if you want to pull in new readers for SF.

The current officers of SFWA seem to hate electronic media. To think that I once dreamed of becoming a paid SF writer and being able to join that organization.

Also discussed at Making Light.

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Thu, Aug 30, 2007

Birds. And Concerts

Posted at 10:50 pm MDT to Weather

Fall is arriving even though the Equinox is a few months away.

It's getting noticeably cooler at night, and the sun is rising later: mornings are dark. There are other signs of the changing season, too.

This morning I went out to pull the trash can to the end of the driveway, and as I stepped out on the porch there was a sort of chirpy whoosh and a cloud of a gazillion little birds flew up into the air from my roof and the tree near my bedroom. They settled for a moment on the power lines in front of my neighbor's yard. Several hundred feet of power lines, if you count all of the strands... And then they moved on.

I've gotten my season tickets for the Philharmonic, too. (I've been a member for years) This year I hope to actually attend some of the concerts. Last year, between the Boston gig and the weather and just not feeling like going out in the evenings, I missed all of the concerts.

Most of the concerts are Saturday evenings at 7:30pm.

Looks like it's a multimedia year. Should be fun...

Saturday Oct 13 Nyla Whitmore (a Painter) guest artist for 'Pictures at an Exhibition' This could be fun. Like the NASA video accompanying the Planets a few years ago.

Saturday Nov 3 Marcus Roberts Trio. Gershwin, Hindemith, Brahms, and a special composition for the Phil's 50th Anniversary.

Friday November 23, 4PM the Nutcracker, a Thanksgiving tradition in Boulder. I try to go every couple of years.

Saturday February 16 Judith Ingolfsson, violin and Ars Nova singers. Copland, Korngold (the violin) and Prokofiev (Alexander Nevsky Cantata, with the singers) with videos of the Eisenberg film. Ooooh.

Saturday March 22 Contemporary Ballet, and Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances

Saturday April 26 Colorado Shakespeare Festival actors and the St. Martin's Chamber Choir. Berlioz (Beatrice and Benedict Overture), Mendelssohn (Midsummer Night's Suite),Vaughan Williams (Serenade to Music, with the choir), Walton (Henry V)

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Wed, Aug 29, 2007

Ubuntu

Posted at 8:31 pm MDT to Technology

I'm getting annoyed at Ubuntu. I had more or less gotten used to their admin oddities, I thought.

But last night I learned (the hard way) that they have /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash instead of /usr/bin/bash which is used by all the other Linux distributions. They are even sneaky about it: they use bash in user environments, but dash behind the scenes. And the two sheels are NOT functionally interchangeable. This means that software packages set up for generic Linux will often mysteriously fail to install or run properly.

I'm not sure they haven't also done something odd to their perl installation. I know perl, and I've seen a couple of different perl scripts acting out-of-spec in ways that break things. I was blaming my code, but I have my doubts, now, since the VMWare config utility is also acting up..

I downloaded vanilla perl source from perl.org and built it, and I've been downloading loading perl modules this evening. Tomorrow I'll see whether things behave any better. If not, I'll load a VMWare image of Fedora or Centos and see if I get the same behavior there as I do on Ubuntu.

I'm using this laptop for the remote access for my current gig, so I can't redo the operating system until November, but if Fedora is really providing decent KDE support in thier new releases, I may switch to Fedora instead of upgrading to the next version of Ubuntu.

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Tue, Aug 28, 2007

Throat Infections

Posted at 10:33 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I spent too much time in airplanes and airports last week. And too much time in New England.

I had a low grade throat infection with occasional coughing most of the time I was in Boston and I still have swollen glands and some scratchiness, though it seems to be improving.

I have a long history of weird throat infections. In college I went to the clinic once (sophomore or junior year) with a throat infection that was causing a bad earache. The doctor looked at my chart and said "Yes, you were in with this a week ago, too. And we gave you a strep test."

I said, "No, that was last year."

So they gave me another strep test...

I don't bother going to the doctor unless these throat infections start spreading out and causing earaches. (The strep tests never come back positive and there isn't much the doctors can do about viruses.) At the moment my ears are making crackly noises when I move my jaw but still pressure equalizing

If I ever really get strep, it will probably kill me, because I won't do anything about it, after all of the negative strep tests I've had over the years.

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Mon, Aug 27, 2007

Olympia

Posted at 9:21 pm MDT to Current Events

Olympia in Greece is being threatened by forest fires that are burning up a lot of the country and have already killed more than 60 people. Some of the fires are believed to be the result of arson.

I visited Olympia during the Mediterranean cruise I took a few years ago. It was wonderful. They had fixed up Olympia for the Olympic Games earlier that year.

I hope they can at least save the museum.

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Sun, Aug 26, 2007

Atlanta Lightning

Posted at 9:26 pm MDT to Travel

I got up Friday morning at 6am Boston time, which is 4 am Colorado time. I collapsed into bed at 4am Saturday morning when I finally arrived home. I'm glad I had a couple of the Larabars left: they were all I had to eat (except a few airline pretzels) after I left Boston.

My flight from Boston left on time, but then we spent an hour in a holding pattern because of a spectacular storm over Atlanta that had shut down the airport. The pilot landed us, more or less between the storm clouds, just before lack of fuel would have forced us to divert to Charlotte.

By the time I got into the terminal, my connecting flight to Denver should have already been in the air. I was relieved to see that it had been delayed a bit because of the storm. But it kept being pushed back and pushed back. The flight that was originally supposed to leave at 8:15pm did not leave until 1:15am.

I've spent the rest of the weekend relaxing.

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Thu, Aug 23, 2007

My Own Bed

Posted at 7:05 pm MDT to Travel

I have woken up at about 2 hour intervals every night on this trip. One way and another, hotels are too noisy... or the wrong kind of noisy. And I'm a light sleeper and prone to insomnia at the best of times. I'm looking forward to sleeping in my own bed.

But before that happens, I have a half day of work tomorrow, and a long day of travel. Assuming my connections work and there are no delays, I should be landing in Denver at about 9:30pm Colorado time, which is 11:30pm Boston time. If I'm lucky I should be home by 10:30 or 11:00.

In the mean time, I think I'll leave the airconditioner on tonight: it's noisy, but it blocks out other noises.

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Wed, Aug 22, 2007

Lobster Time

Posted at 6:04 pm MDT to Weather

Today I had my New England lobster dinner. I think the lobster had molted recently: the claw shells were a lot bigger than the meat inside. But that's just as well. I'm so full that I feel like a snake that swallowed a goat. The meal included a cup of clam chowder, mashed potatoes, veggies, and cornbread.

At least the carbs are warming.

When I packed for this trip, I thought about packing a light jacket. And then I thought: "it's August". Famous last words...

Highs here have been reaching 68 in the afternoons and temperatures are a good bit cooler in the mornings when I walk to work. The news this evenings said that temperatures are running 12 degrees below normal, and today's high would be more normal for September 30.

Fortunately, walking briskly while carrying my laptop bag (about 25 pounds including all of the stuff in it) has been keeping me warm enough. And it hasn't rained on me yet.

Tomorrow is supposed to be a little warmer, with only a 20% chance of rain. Friday is supposed to be closer to 'normal' temperatures, but a day or so ago they were saying that about Thursday.

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Tue, Aug 21, 2007

Lärabars

Posted at 5:56 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Last week at Costco I noticed some boxes of Lärabar fruit and nut bars. I bought a box and tossed some into my suitcase so I wouldn't be tempted to hit the junk food machines in the evenings. According to the labels, the bars are: No Added Sugar, Unprocessed, Raw, Non-GMO, Gluten Free, Dairy Free, Vegan, Kosher, Cholesterol free and Low sodium. They are also peanut free: I checked the ingredients before I bought them.

So much for the list of things they are not. What they are is ground fruit and nuts formed into nice solid bars that don't get smushed in luggage, and pretty darn tasty.

They are also well wrapped, and don't need refrigeration the way string cheese does.

The box I bought had three varieties in it:

Apple Pie: Dates, Almonds, Unsweetened Apples, Walnuts, Raisins, Cinnamon

Lemon: Dates, Cashews, Almonds, Lemon juice concentrate, Natural Lemon flavor

Cherry Pie: Dates, Almonds, Unsweetened Cherries

I haven't tried the Cherry ones yet, but I'm sure they will be as delicious as the other two varieties. I think I have found a new addition to my packing routine.

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Mon, Aug 20, 2007

Adams Inn

Posted at 5:21 pm MDT to Travel

It was a long day of travel, yesterday, but fortunately uneventful.

The hotel is not quite as close to my worksite as advertised, but it is quite nice: one side is on the water. They are just coming to the end of some major renovations so most of the hotel is freshly painted and clean.

They have a free continental breakfast in a little pub/restaurant that serves real food for lunch and dinner. I had a cup of excellent clam chowder and 1/2 of a seafood salad sandwich for dinner, and I am contemplating lobster for later in the week. (I won't expense it if I decide to splurge.)

The walk is not bad (and I can use the exercise) but I hope it doesn't decide to rain hard tomorrow. The sky looks a bit threatening at the moment.

I wonder if I should have packed an umbrella and checked my bag through...the no-umbrellas-in-carry-on rule is a pain.

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Sat, Aug 18, 2007

Zombie Day

Posted at 9:22 pm MDT to Travel

My brain turned off sometime yesterday evening. I spent most of today relaxing and reading, and now I'm about to tidy the house and pack (and possibly eat some supper).

I have an 11:20am flight tomorrow (which means leaving the house before 9:00), and a four hour layover in Atlanta before continuing to Boston. I think I'm tired just thinking about it. I've been stockpiling paperbacks to read in the airports.

The flight home has only an hour layover. I think I'm going to check some baggage for that one, and let the airline worry about getting my suitcase moved between the planes. The long layover on the trip out is less of a problem even if the planes end up being at opposite ends of the airport and the shuttles trains are out (which I have known to happen. It can be a long walk).

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Fri, Aug 17, 2007

Elevations

Posted at 5:43 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

A month or so ago when my credit union's website was being annoying, I looked around for an alternative. Today I stopped in to the office of Elevations (I think they used to be the University of Colorado Credit Union) and opened a checking and savings account. It took a while, but I walked out with the new bank accounts opened.

I also walked out with my new credit and debit cards: apparently they have machines that can emboss the cards with the user name and account number right in the (fairly small) branch office. I'm impressed.

The checks will still take a week or two (tsk ... these archaic technologies).

The Visa credit card is part of the overdraft protection on the checking account. They gave me their lowest interest rate, which has a high credit limit. My total available credit is just silly these days

I'm not going to transfer all of my banking to Elevations just yet (though the next time my savings CD matures I may move that money over to a CD at Elevations). I've got too many online payments set up to pull from Bellco. To make any kind of quick changeover practical. I think I'm going use the Elevations accounts to save up for the next car I buy: I want to pay cash for my next vehicle.

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Thu, Aug 16, 2007

Time Share

Posted at 8:22 am MDT to Travel

Because I have been on cruises and have hotel and airline frequent flyer miles, I get lots of brochures for vacation stuff. Last December I filled out a survey that was supposed to put me in a drawing for a prize. Tuesday I got a call that I had won a prize provided I would listen to a pitch for timeshares. The list of possible prizes included $2400 cash, a wide screen TV, a vacation based in Florida or Las Vegas and a Cadillac, and I was guaranteed to win one of them.

I'd been thinking that I might like to own a vacation timeshare (that autonomy thing), but wasn't sure where in particular I would want one. It turns out they have a solution for that.

I have bought a Time Share that had been foreclosed on and was being resold by the homeowners association. It isn't the traditional kind of timeshare where you are prescheduled for one week per year in a particular location, but a newer 'Points' timeshare.

It is theoretically still based on partial ownership of a piece of real estate somewhere, but the actual times and locations of the vacations I take are fungible. Sort of vacations backed by real estate like paper money is notionally backed by gold. In practice, it amounts to a prepaid vacation with some potential resale value.

The points can be used at resorts all over the world and for things like cruises. They don't necessarily need to be for a week at a time unless I want to use them for a 'week' style timeshare. I can use them at 'Points' resorts for long weekends or on weekly schedules that are not Friday to Firday. And they can be carried over for one year (but not two) if I want to save up for something big.

They said the timeshare still qualifies as a second home for tax purposes, so the interest may be deductible. I will look into that.

And I can rent (more or less) my points to other people who want a vacation somewhere. Anywhere. So its a little like when my grandparents were part owners of their beach cottage, but without the maintenance work.

They gave me so many points as a signing bonus (more than half a year's worth) that I am looking at spending some time in Japan in the next year or so. Or maybe some time in England. Foreign sites are more expensive, naturally, but I have a lot of points to use.

Oh, and the prize I won was a cruise through the Bahamas. I need to schedule it some time in the next 30 days and take it some time in the next year. I'm thinking that January might be nice. Things at the company are often slow in the beginning of January. And that's about as far from hurricane season as you can get. It's a trip for two, so maybe I'll see if Nanette or one of my other friend's can come. Or I'll get the luxury of a cabin all to myself.

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Wed, Aug 15, 2007

Potato Chip Code

Posted at 10:36 am MDT to Code

I'm developing a new section for the company's internal website using the Perl HTML::Template and CGI::Application Packages and various plugins for
CGI::Application. I haven't used any of these powerful and flexible modules before, so I'm learning as I go. The documentation on some of the modules is a little sketchy, but things are beginning to shape up well.

I've got authentication (login/logout) and authorization (different people can do different things) in place, display modules for three of the four main data tables and infrastructure for a lot of the rest. This application is going to have about 25 functions accessible from various menus, but most of them involve doing similar things to various DB tables, so development goes fairly quickly. Once I get something working for one data type, adding the same function for the other three databases goes fairly quickly.

Yesterday I started work at about 9:00 AM and stopped at 2:00am, so I am fairly groggy today. A couple of hours of that was dealing with the phone company when my DSL went down, but a lot of it was googling for information and coding. I find developing code is like eating potato chips: There is always one more tweak to try. And until there is a reason to stop, I don't. It doesn't matter that I'm disrupting my sleep cyclethis week, since I'll be in Boston next week: disrupting my cycle now may actually decrease the effects of jet lag.

This is one reason I prefer being a consultant: the contracts put sane limits on how many hours I end up working in a day or week, so I don't burn myself out when I'm working on an interesting project.

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Tue, Aug 14, 2007

Phone Company: Aaargh

Posted at 1:17 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Qwest really needs to do a better job of letting its left hand know what its right hand is doing.

My DSL dropped again at about 11:40 am. When I called to find out why, they told me that everything should still be working fine, and that the switch back of my ISP to FRII has been postponed from tomorrow to the 20th. After an hour of thrashing (including a lot of time listening to their on-hold advertisements) they finally decided that the ISP change was not really postponed to the 20th, it was happening today. Without any notice to me or FRII.

I called FRII tech support and we eventually got the connection back up. They needed to reconfigure some things at their end now that Qwest is connecting me to them again.

I wish I could get my underlying DSL from someone other than Qwest. If I could, I would change phone providers. Unfortunately, none of the alternatives to Qwest do residential DSL. And the ones that do business DSL are a little too pricey.

Some other observations:

When a connection drops without any changes to the modem settings, it is not likely to come back up again if all you do is tweak the modem settings.

On-Hold messages that recommend using the website support mechanism are likely to produce homicidal impulses in people whose web access is down. Messages bragging about the quality of your High-Speed Broadband just rub salt in the wounds.

I am enjoying the faster DSL, though. Things are noticeably snappier and YouTube is actually usable, which it wasn't before.

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Mon, Aug 13, 2007

Blosxom

Posted at 10:53 pm MDT to Code

The websites for the Blosxom tool (which I use for this blog) have changed. Most of the content from the www.blosxom.com site has moved to blosxom.sourceforge.net. Some resources are also available at The Unofficial Blosxom User Group. I have updated my 'Powered by' widgets.

The old URL seems to be completely dead.

There are discussions of a new version under way on the developers mailing list. At this point they are discussing bugs that need to be fixed and new features that might be added.

I'm fairly happy with the way Blosxom has been working for me, so I don't plan to rock the boat.

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Sun, Aug 12, 2007

Big Companies

Posted at 2:42 pm MDT to Current Events

Our company, as a small suppplier, has had problems with big companies that try to dictate outrageous terms or retroactively chnage deals on us. But I don't think we have ever had to deal with outright extortion. We should probably consider ourselves lucky.

Teresa Neilsen Hayden at Making Light has a commentary on an exchange of letters between an officer of a large Australian book store chain and the head of a small publishing company. Some of the comments are a lot of fun, too.

This weekend seems to be full of examples on how not to do business:

1. (SCO) Don't sue your customers.

2. (A&R) Don't try to extort money from your suppliers at usurious interest rates. Especially, don't do it in writing.

I wonder if going to Business School sonehow destroys common sense.

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SCO PSJ

Posted at 1:32 pm MDT to Current Events

A quick recap:

SCO is the company that sued IBM for billions of dollars, claiming that Linux violated some of their UNIX copyrights. Then they sued Novell for saying that the copyrights in question actually belong to Novell. Redhat sued SCO, more or less for slandering Linux. And SCO sued some of their own customers, more or less for switching from SCO UNIX to Linux and claimed that all Linux users should pay them lots of money for the copyrighted material that was supposedly in Linux. There were also counterclaims all over the place.

After years of litigation SCO was never able to identify the copyrighted material of theirs that was supposedly in Linux.

On Friday the judge in the SCO/Novell case (same judge as for SCO/IBM) published a 110 page Preliminary Summary Judgment that Novell did own the copyrights, and decided a number of other contractual questions in Novell's favor as well. See the Groklaw report for more details.

SCO's claims against Novell are basically gone. Novell's counterclaims mostly stand, including one for conversion (i.e. theft) of license fees that SCO should have handed over to Novell.

SCO probably doesn't have the cash to pay the license fees that were withheld, much less damages asked for in Novell's counterclaims.

SCO's side of the IBM case mostly falls apart because if they didn't have the copyrights, they had no standing to sue. Some of IBM's counterclaims don't make sense any more, but others (like a Lanham act claim that SCO was engaged in the business equivalent of libel) become basically a slam-dunk.

This coming week could be very entertaining as the repercussions of the PSJ begin to take effect.

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Sat, Aug 11, 2007

Pound Cake

Posted at 8:56 pm MDT to Technology

Baking cakes from scratch was not a skill that I learned from my Mother. She always used cake mixes. Sometimes they were modified in various ways -- I remember making lemon cakes with packages of lemon pudding added, before they became so popular that Duncan Hines started producing lemon cake mixes with the pudding already included.

The cake pans my mother used for making layer cakes were unlike any I have ever seen for sale (I suspect she received them as a wedding present). Each pan had a rivet in the center of the bottom, to which was attached a flat, narrow strip of metal that went to the side of the pan, up the side, and ended in a sort of tab. When you were ready to take the cake out of the pan, you pushed the tab all the way around the pan, and the metal strip sliced the cake away from the sides and bottom of the pan. We always greased the pans with shortening (moving the tab to make sure we greased the area under the blade) but the greasing wasn't really functional, and I don't think I learned to do it properly. I have a long history of baked goods breaking when I try to get them out of the pan.

I am not really fond of most kinds of cake. I don't like frosting. When I eat a piece of frosted birthday cake, I generally leave behind a frosting skeleton: squishy frosting that won't hold its shape is disappointing. Mom used to make a frosted cake for my youngest brother, whose birthday is two days away from mine and on a holiday, so we always ended up having family picnics as combined celebrations. For me she made an angelfood cake with a thin whipped cream coating, meant to be eaten with strawberries (my birthday was prime strawberry season).

I love fruitcake (and fruitcake fruit: I stockpile it and eat it raw as a snack. I love strong citrus flavors) and I like poundcake. But in general, given a choice between a rich, frosted cake and a chunk of good artisanal bread, I'll choose the bread. That's part of why I've been baking bread every week or two for years, and haven't baked a cake in ages.

Before I moved to Colorado, I occasionally baked cakes from mixes, but after I moved here, I found that cake mixes designed for sealevel don't really work well, even if you make the recommended altitude adjustments. And they stick in the pans even worse than they do at sealevel.

Food Network recently had a Cake Week: most of the episodes of the various shows were cake related. I found myself in the mood to bake a cake as a technical project.

Yesterday I baked the first cake I have made in probably 15 years, and, I believe, the first one I have ever baked from scratch in my life.

I used the Pound Cake recipe from Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking and I think it came out fairly well. It's not too sweet, or too oily the way some store-bought poundcakes are. I gave some of the cake to some of my friends at the Farmers' Market today and they said it was good, which is encouraging.

I also made a batch of Alton's Pan Lube -- a cup and a half of allpurpose flour thoroughly beaten into two cups of shortening -- and used some to to grease the pan, which seemed to work well.

Alton being a southern boy, there is buttermilk in a lot of his recipes, including this one. I may try buttermilk biscuits tomorrow, to use up some more of the quart. Biscuits are neither New England/Canuck nor Italian, so when I was growing up they were usually "Poppin' Fresh" when they appeared at all. I actually learned to like biscuits at a restaurant chain where biscuits and honey were one of the bread options, and I tried them because biscuits were exotic. I have made biscuits occasionally over the years, but I generally lean toward yeast instead of chemical leaveners for breadish baked goods: the last time few times I made biscuits (this is talking about a timespan of ten or fifteen years) they were sourdough biscuits, not southern-style.

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Fri, Aug 10, 2007

Phone Company: Qwest -- Still Bozos After All These Years

Posted at 9:59 am MDT to Miscellaneous

If there was a way to get DSL at home without going through QWEST, I would switch all of my phone service to someone else.

I knew they would manage to screw up the speed increase on my line, and they did an excellent job of living down to my expectations. This morning, my internet connection was down again.

It turns out that when they switched the DSL rate, they also made themselves my ISP without my knowledge or consent. And they can't switch it back until the 15th. They gave me credentials so that I could get back on line until then, so I am currently using two ISPs: FRII for hosting and DNS, and MSN (insert ritual sign against the evil eye) for connectivity.

I knew that rep I talked to earlier in the week sounded incompetent...

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Thu, Aug 09, 2007

Costco Pharmacy

Posted at 9:52 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I get my prescription medicines at Costco. Their prices are good, their hours are reasonable, they are the closest pharmacy to my house (by a few hundred feet: the SuperTarget in the same complex also has a pharmacy) and they have a nationwide network, so when I get stuck in corporate housing somewhere I can get my prescriptions forwarded easily.

Today they did something I found really impressive.

I've been taking a brand-name thyroid replacement called Synthroid at various dosages since 1986, when I had half my thyroid removed. For the past year I've been taking the same, fairly high, dosage I used before 2001. The doctor's office kind of wanted to push me back down last fall, but I kind of ignored them until I used up the prescription because I felt less depressed and stopped gaining weight at the higher dosage. (I didn't lose weight, but I stopped gaining weight without making a particular effort.)

This week I was coming to the end of the old prescription, so I got my thyroid levels tested, and, as I expected, they are lowering my dosage again to the dose I took from 2001 to 2006.

However, when the nurse called to tell me about the dosage change she asked whether I wanted to try the 'generic' version of the drug (levothyroxine). I knew from on-line thyroid support forums that (unlike most drugs) people often react a bit differently to the brand name and generic versions of thyroid medicine. They are not exactly chemically identical. That is one reason my prescription has always specified brandname-only.

I decided that it would make sense to see if I feel better with the generic at the lower dosage (since I know I feel about a quarter dead on the lower dose of the brandname drug). I told the nurse to send in the prescription for the generic. I'm supposed to be retested 6 weeks after the dosage change in either case, so if the generic isn't working out we can make a change.

An hour or so after I spoke to my doctor's office, I got a call from the Costco pharmacy. They had received the new prescription and wanted to make sure I knew about the change from brand-name only to generic, and agreed with it. I told them yes.

I'm very pleased that they noticed the change and bothered to call me instead of just filling the prescription as sent over by the doctor's office. It gives me a good feeling that if I ever get multiple prescriptions that have conflicts, they might notice and warn me about them.

I should probably read the little booklets about my prescription drugs that they print out and give me (every time I refill a prescription) more often. Something may have changed since the last time I read them.

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No Broadband, Working Print Server

Posted at 8:00 pm MDT to Technology

Yesterday about 2PM my broadband died. Qwest promised to call when it came back up. But, being the phone company, they didn't.

This morning the connection was back up.

I need to figure out how to get the Sprint cellular modem working: being cut off from the internet is very disorienting.

I got my second print server (a D-Link DPR-1260), working while I was disconnected from the net and finished the setup today with aid from the internet. (The instructions ignored all OSs not manufactured by Microsoft, and Ubuntu does something weird to the CUPS admin). So I can now use both the color printer and the BW laser from the laptop in the livingroom.

This server is multiport, while the older one is single-port, so if I run low on network ports on my router I can put both printers on the new router and free up a line. And I'll need to make sure that any future printers I buy are on the supported list.

The new server has WiFi (with a profoundly stupid default configuration) but I turned that off. I really prefer hard-wired connections when they are available.

The HP Photosmart C3100 has a scanner function, but I've never used that even in Boston when it was directly attached to the laptop. It is handy to have a working copier in the house, though.

If I had it to do over again, I would pay the extra price for a machine with builtin fax capabilities, besides the scanner/copier/printer. I may invest in one anyway if the 3100 gets cranky (or starts eating ink: HP ink is expensive).

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Tue, Aug 07, 2007

Phone Company

Posted at 1:32 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I just spent 20 minutes on the phone with the phone company (Qwest). It's amazing that they don't supply decent lines to their customer support personnel I could hardly hear the guy I spoke to and had to keep asking him to speak louder. The problem was not on my end, because the advertisements they played when I was on hold were very loud.

They also need to fix their computer system so it accepts email addresses with hyphens in them, which are perfectly legal by internet standards even though Microsoft sometimes doesn't support them well.

The main reason I called them was that I happened to notice that my white pages entry still has my house's old street address (even though the county changed it in 1999) and I told Qwest to update their records when it happened. Maybe someday they will get their databases to be consistent: even though the white pages and billing address should now match, I'll bet their repair database will still be wrong. I've only told the repair guys to fix their listing every couple of years, when the mice chew on the lines.

While I was on the line, the rep offered to improve the speed of my internet connection (at an increased cost, of course). That change is supposed to go in Friday.

It will be interesting to see if You-tube and other streamed media become usable instead of pausing every few seconds. If the DSL change doesn't help, I'll take a look at my DSL modem and router to see if they are choking the connections. Since I have to run Flash to get at my bank's site, I might as well be able to take advantage of it.

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Mon, Aug 06, 2007

Vanishing Companies

Posted at 7:45 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Considering the fact that I have worked in software since 1981, I have worked for very few companies. My current company is only my fifth employer. Proving that is a little trickier, though I have documentary evidence: I have W2s (somewhere) going all the way back. But verifying it could be a problem.

The first three companies I worked for (1981 to 1984, 1985 to 1993, 1993 to 1996) no longer exist. The first one just died a while after I left. The second one (my first period as a consultant) got merged. The third one went through a series of mergers and takeovers and ended up inside IBM, but I doubt that IBM has the employment records available.

The fourth company, at the time I resigned, had been swallowed by a very large corporation in its industry. The signs on the buildings had been changed by the time I left, but my W2 for 2000 still reflects the corporate name from the previous round of mergers. (My employer had 4 names during the 4 years I worked there because of mergers.)

The big corporation has a process that prospective employers can use to find out if you worked for them in the past. Very handy. Unfortunately, I am told, the merging of the payroll systems was not completely successful, so people who left the company that was swallowed before about 2002 are not reported properly. I left n the summer of 2000.

The existence of gaps in the coverage of the official process is not mentioned anywhere official. The paperwork for my next gig was stalled, because the process came up empty when they tried to verify my previous employment. I called HR at the location where I worked (which fortunately still exists) who told me about the problem with the official system, and they are supposed to be sorting things out.

I wonder if employment records for the next employer back still exist in the depths of IBM somewhere? My 401K eventually ended up in an IBM program...

The first two companies are probably untraceable.

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Sat, Aug 04, 2007

Day Length

Posted at 7:32 pm MDT to Weather

The days are noticeably shortening.

Sunrise is just after 6 am. This is helpful in one respect: Dinah does not try to get me to feed her breakfast before sunrise.

Sunset is earlier, too. Today it is supposed to be at 8:11 PM, but it feels darkish already. We are in the middle of the North American Monsoon and the skies are clouding up every afternoon.

Today is no exception. My satellite dish dropped out for a while at 6:20 PM because there was a thunderhead and heavy rain between my house and the satellite.

Even in the mornings, when the sky is clear, the air is positively damp, which feels very strange. The Farmers' Market was very uncomfortable today.

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Fri, Aug 03, 2007

Delays

Posted at 10:36 pm MDT to Travel

I was expectng to fly to Boston this coming Sunday. But my customer is still getting their red tape sorted out. It will probably happen the following week.

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Thu, Aug 02, 2007

Stoves

Posted at 8:39 pm MDT to Technology

Still contemplating stoves.

Nonna always had gas stoves. There was a hurricane or something that hit the Hartford area -- must have been 1956, probably not as late as 1957 -- and knocked out the power for a day or so. We all went over to Nonna and Nonno's house because they had a gas stove available for heating baby bottles. The baby involved was probably my brother Larry, who is about 18 months younger than I am. If it was a different baby, it might have been later.

My Mom's first (or maybe second) stove had a built in deep fat fryer. She hardly ever used it: she said it was messy to use, and fried food was not a huge part of the traditional cuisine on either side of the family. But I remember she made homemade doughnuts at least once, maybe more often. When we moved to Montville, the stove that was built into the house was just ordinary.

Looking at the options on stoves on-line, I'm still trying to decide if I want to go to the trouble and expense of switching my kitchen over to a gas stove (or what they call a mixed fuel: gas stove top with electric ovens). It really looks to me like in the stoves with high end oven features, the ones with gas cooktops are made for cooking and the smoothtop electric ones are made to be pretty and fairly useless. Electric stoves with burner coils and bowls to catch spillovers don't seem to have the serious ovens.

I rarely use more than two burners at a time on the top of the stove, except when I'm canning or doing Thanksgiving. But I definitely want a stovetop that will survive a canning kettle. Also castiron skillets and the chickenfryer (a very deep skillet-like cast iron pan that I use for making risotto).

What I am definitely lusting after in the way of upscale oven features is a warming drawer/bread proofer or a bread proofing cycle. A stove that will hold things at 85 to 90 F for hours, while the house is at about 70 would be wonderful. Most regular ovens have 150, or at best 120, as their lowest setting. And most methods I've tried to warm things just a little have no thermostatic control so they end up too cold or too hot. (Generally too hot. It's amazing how much heat an oven light puts out if you leave it on for a few hours.)

A sealed coil oven (if the oven is electric) would be nice to have, so the coil is not in the open getting dripped on by spills and the oven stone could sit on the bottom of the oven instead of on a rack. Three racks would be nice to have, more for the flexibility of more rack location options than a need for baking three batches at once.

The oven I had in Boston would ring an alarm when it finished preheating to the temperature you set, and it had a nice precise digital oven thermostat so I didn't have to guess whether 350 was at the 3 or the 0 on the dial. That oven was the only thing I kind of miss about that apartment, which was quite annoying otherwise.

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Wed, Aug 01, 2007

I35W

Posted at 11:53 pm MDT to Current Events

A chunk of I35W in Minneapolis has fallen into the Mississippi during rush hour. It's playing hell with communications, as well as killing at least 7 people and injuring at least 60... there are about 50 vehicles still being searched for, and a freight train was crushed when the bridge fell on it.

I think the piece of the highway that fell was farther north than I have ever driven on 35W. When I worked in North Minneapolis and lived in Minnetonka, I used 494 and 694, which go around the outside of the city, for commuting, not 35 where it goes through the center. When I drove back and forth between Denver and Minneapolis I used 35W and 35 for the stretch from Minneapolis to Des Moines, but I'm fairly certain from the reports that the fallen bridge was farther north (or the reporters are confused about Twin Cities geography, which is also possible).

I hope my niece Anna is OK. I don't know what her commute is like.

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McGee's On Food and Cooking

Posted at 10:51 pm MDT to Media

The first edition of Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (1984) was one of the first books aimed at general readers that discussed the scientific aspects of why recipes work the way they do. I read it and enjoyed it a number of years ago, as well as his later book The Curious Cook.

The 2004 revised edition of On Food and Cooking is expanded to include sections on fish and ingredients from all over the world, as well as updating and expanding the earlier information on European and American ingredients and recipes. I'm just working my way into the early chapters on dairy and eggs, but the new edition is as impressive as the first edition.

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Rome

Posted at 10:51 pm MDT to Media

I spent most of yesterday watching the first 9 episodes of Rome, the HBO series, plus the commentaries of episodes that have them. It's a wonderful show and deserves all its awards and nominations. But it is very intense and I think I overdosed slightly: I'm going to wait a few days before I watch the last three episodes of the season. The writer's have done a wonderful job of wrapping people around the events of Caesar's rise to power.

The details in the sets and costumes and props are amazing: interior scenes are lit by extra flames in addition to the ones that are visible, but they don't use regular electric lights when filming the interiors (though I have the feeling that they are showing too many candles vs. olive-oil lamps).

The casting and acting are wonderful, too. And strip well: this show makes I, Claudius (which I need to rewatch when I'm done with Rome) look puritanical. The ancient Romans would consider the depictions of sex, nudity and killing perfectly respectable -- which is part of the point -- but they are a bit stronger than I am used to.

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Mon, Jul 30, 2007

Pesto

Posted at 10:46 pm MDT to Technology

Nanette raises and sells a lot of basil. As well as dill and mint: a customer last Saturday told me we have the best smelling booth at the Farmers' Market. And that day we didn't have the mint on sale, and only three kinds of basil: standard sweet basil, lemon basil and cinnamon basil. Other weeks this year we have had spicy globe basil and holy basil on sale as well, but the Thai basil didn't come up this year.

Purple basil is more of an ornamental (though it makes ugly pesto). I think Nanette and Chuck raised it one year, but it never sold well for culinary use. (I think the flavor is off, too.)

Pesto is not something that I ate growing up: I never had any until I started selling basil.

Living near Costco is handy for making pesto, too: they sell large bags of nuts at reasonable prices, and serious quantities of grated cheese.

The first batch of pesto I ever made, years ago, was sweet basil and walnuts and Parmesan and garlic and olive oil. Over the years I have decided that pine nuts go better with sweet basil and walnuts go better with lemon basil.

I made a lot of lemon basil/walnut pesto yesterday: three batches in my food processor. Two batches went directly into the freezer: one batch was divided into a plastic-wrap-lined icecube tray, and the second was smooshed thin in a ziplock bag with as much air squeezed out as possible. I'm hoping to be able to break off chunks...

The third batch is in the fridge in a sealed plastic container, with a layer of extra-virgin olive oil poured over the top and a layer of plastic wrap pressed into the oil to keep out oxygen. This is another storage experiment. It seems to be working so far: I scooped out some pesto for a sandwich this noon and poured on another thin layer of oil before I replaced the plastic. The extra layer of oil doesn't make the top of the pesto too oily, just thins it out a little. My pesto comes out of the processor very thick (it's mostly basil, nuts and cheese, with just enough oil added to make it ball up in the food processor) and really needs more oil added to make it spread easier and adhere to pasta better. So I think this storage method may work out well.

My lunch sandwich was just two pieces of toast with a thick layer of the oiled but otherwise undiluted pesto between them. I think tomorrow I will try creamcheese and pesto, to make a nice texture contrast. I had pesto on pasta for supper yesterday, but that gets old.

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Sun, Jul 29, 2007

Grass

Posted at 4:26 pm MDT to Technology

I just read The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.

I was struck by the description of grass farming in the second section: the use of livestock to improve the soil while actually producing as much food as an intensively farmed Iowa cornfield. Looking out at the weeds and bare dirt in my yard is just depressing. It is probably too late to do much about the thistles this year, but I think that next year I'm going to hire a herd of goats to clear the weeds here.

I'm not here enough to keep any pets or livestock besides my cat, but the grass here really needs to be grazed by more than the wild rabbits. I wonder if some of my neighbors would be interested in getting their yards done at the same time.

And I think I'm going to start contacting local companies to get bids on planting native grasses and wildflowers on top of the new septic system and leach field. As dry as it has been, this is probably the wrong time to try to plant grass, but I'd rather have something other than thistles and invasive species.

I am reluctant to do much gardening that would require long-term irrigation: my well water makes good oven cleaner out of the tap. It is a bit less alkaline than the cartoon waterholes with cow skulls that say "You'll be sorry", but not by much.

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Fri, Jul 27, 2007

History Comics

Posted at 10:47 pm MDT to Media

Two web comics with historical settings, both well researched.

The first one, SPQR Blues is set in Herculaneum shortly before Vesuvius blew up (People keep keep asking "Is it true what they say about girls from Pompei?") and has very accurate art. Some of the characters are inspire dby people mentioned in legal documents that survived the eruption. Probably not suitable for really young kids, though it's a lot more reticent about sex and death than the Romans themselves would have been.

It's not often you encounter a comic with dialog in Etruscan (or maybe it was Samnian).

The second comic, Get Medieval involves human-looking space aliens who get stuck in France during the time of the Black Prince and is much lighter. Lots of culture shock. (Also malevolent waterfowl.) It has a cute, cartoony, art style.

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Thu, Jul 26, 2007

CRUG -- Colorado Rational Users' Group

Posted at 9:37 pm MDT to Technology

This afternoon I went in to the office to take care of some paperwork, and Shawn reminded me that this evening was the CRUG meeting. ReleaseTEAM sponsors the group, which is a gathering of people interested in the ClearCase and ClearQuest software tools we specialize in, and related tools. Martina Reidel, one of our consultants, was this session's speaker.

The meeting site (not one we have previously used) was much closer to the office than to home, so I hung out for a couple of hours and then went to the meeting. It went fairly well. And I ate too much pizza.

One attendee came all the way from Sidney, Nebraska for a meeting that took much less time than the drive. He said that he would have flown in his small plane but there are too many thunderstorm cells around at the moment.

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Wed, Jul 25, 2007

Autonomy

Posted at 11:45 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Someone in the Harry Potter comment thread at Making Light pointed out that Harry tries to do too much himself because his childhood in the Dursleys' household had taught him that he could not expect help from others.

The lessons I learned during my adolescence were that I was not safe except in my own place with the door locked, and that the people who supposedly had the power and responsibility to help me were useless, at best, and could not be trusted for support.

I never had a roommate in college, in the usual sense. I spent all of the four years living in a building that had clusters of single rooms.

And the only time I have shared a house or apartment for any amount of time, since I first left my parents home to go to college, was when I shared a house with another student during the year I worked on my library science degree. We shared the kitchen and bathroom, but otherwise, she had one end of the house, and I had the other.

Looking back, I wonder what would have happened if I had not successfully avoided undergraduate housing involving an actual roommate in shared space. As it is, I had a bout of what I suspect, looking back, was undiagnosed clinical depression, but pulled out of it

Would having to deal with a lack of my own space have relaxed some of my barriers? Or would it have led to a complete meltdown? I suppose it would have depended on the hypothetical roommate.

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Mon, Jul 23, 2007

Harry Potter

Posted at 11:01 pm MDT to Media

I went down to Costco after lunch to buy fresh fruit and cheese and "Deathly Hallows", which I just finished reading. I read the last half dozen chapters twice: some of the logic of Voldemort's defeat made more sense the second time around, when I was paying more attention to how things fit together and less attention to what was happening.

I think, on the whole, the series ended well... it came full circle on many of the major images from Harry's introduction to the wizarding world. And the magics from the beginning -- Lilly Potter's protective spell and the magic of wands -- are the keys to the resolution.

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Sun, Jul 22, 2007

Dreams

Posted at 9:10 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I tried to sleep late today, but had some very weird dreams. I'm not sure why my dreams almost always include strange architecture, and today was no exception. At least this time I wasn't searching for a particular room or building. What I can remember of the plot involved an academic environment... and explicit betrayal of trust But it was not clear whether I was one of the victims or merely an observer. The way dreams work, I may have been both.

My swallowing muscles are still not working right, either.

I may start taking St. John's Wort again. My stress levels are not behaving sensibly, and probably need a nudge. But I haven't been taking my vitamins and supplements regularly, either, because they seem to set off the esophaheal spasms.

I need to decompress.

I have started doing yoga again, but it will take a while for that to take much of the edge off. This week, while I have some time to work on the house, I'll see about getting my weight bench and treadmill set up and working again. Exercise is uncomfortable when I'm this much overweight and have so little energy, but I have to do something to get re-balanced.

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Fri, Jul 20, 2007

Moon and Buzz

Posted at 9:27 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Thirty-eight years ago today, I was watching people land on the moon for the first time.

The next day my family bought a dog and named him Buzz, in honor of the moon-landing. (Neil Armstrong's name did not work as a dog name.) I think his registered name was actually Buzz of Apollo.

Buzz was a pedigreed toy fox terrier, but the size genes had recombined: when he was 3 months old he was already bigger than his mom. He had one ear that stood up like a chihuahua's ear and one with the tip flipped down, so he looked a lot like the dog on the old RCA labels. (He was a smooth fox terrier, not the fuzzy kind.)

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Thu, Jul 19, 2007

Stardust

Posted at 9:52 pm MDT to Media

Ohhh. I just saw a TV ad for the movie version of Neil Gaiman's Stardust, due out August 10) and it looks very good. Something to look forward to. Neil Gaiman seems quite happy with it in his blog, and this is not a minor production. The cast include Michelle Pfeiffer, Claire Danes, Robert De Niro, Ricky Gervais, Peter O’Toole, Rupert Everett, Sienna Miller and Charlie Cox.

The commercial was on the Food Network, which seems a little odd...

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Wed, Jul 18, 2007

Real Estate

Posted at 9:57 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

This afternoon someone knocked on my door to ask about the ownership of the house whose driveway faces mine. (This is about the third time this has happened in the past few months.) I made my usual speech about how the property has been bought for open space and the house will be torn down.

We chatted for a few minutes and he insisted on giving me his card. He told me to call him if I ever decided to sell this place, even years from now.

This feels a little weird.

I wish the county (or city, I can't remember which government bought Ron Campbell's place) would do the demolition and fencing they supposedly have planned.

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Tue, Jul 17, 2007

Truck is Home

Posted at 7:48 pm MDT to Technology

It was two weeks ago exactly that my truck overheated in downtown Denver. Even allowing for inflation, I think these repairs cost more than I paid for the first car I ever owned.

The dealership repaired everything they could find that could possibly need repairing, including some pending recall work. The engine sounds better than it has in ages. I think the front end felt better too: I really wonder if the mechanic that worked on it in April got it right.

Now I waiting to see what my gas milage looks like. For the first few years I owned the truck, the gas milage was pretty consistent. Then it dropped by about 10%, and stayed at the new level consistently. With all the bits and pieces that have been replaced in the engine compartment, it would be nice if the milage went back up to the old level.

This truck is the fifth vehicle I have owned in my life.

The first one was a used Ford Maverick I bought in 1977. It was green and sunfaded, and when I tried to paint over some rust spots I was unable to match the color, so it had a sort of camo look. It had no trunk space to speak of.

The Maverick overheated once when I was driving home from an SCA event in Providence, Rhode Island (I lived in Danbury Connecticut it the time). Fortunately, I was only a few miles from Aunt Irma and Uncle Tom's, so my friend Diane Thome and I spent the rest of the night there. In the morning a friend of Tom's got the car working again -- it was just a thermostat -- even though it was Sunday morning. I think Irma and Tom were still in the house across the street from the mill building in those days.

My second vehicle, purchased in 1982, I think, was a blue Ford Escort hatchback. That was a nice little car, and I drove it back and forth dozens of times between my condo and the house on the ridge here when I was moving. I moved everything in that little car except a few of the largest, heaviest objects like my Mom's piano, the waterbed and dresser and sofabed, and the safe.

Then November came, and I learned that if I wanted to get home in the winter time, here on the mesa, I would need something with a little more heft. I traded it in on a used Subaru station wagon (note how the available storage space is increasing from one vehicle to the next).

That Subaru was a lemon, but I drove it for 7 years because I couldn't really afford a new vehicle. I even drove it for a couple of years after an accident that pretty thoroughly wrecked the front end: the insurance company didn't admit that it should have been totalled. But I did like the four-wheel drive.

In 1992 I finally traded the Subaru in for my first pickup: a 4 wheel drive Dodge Ram50, which was really a Mitsubishi truck with Dodge on the tailgate. (It turned out that a new 4WD pickup was much less expensive than any kind of new 4wd station wagon.)

I liked that truck enough that I replaced it with my current Dakota (which was the follow-on model from Dodge) in December 2000 when I decided it was time for a newer vehicle.

I wish Mitsubishi still sold trucks in the US.

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Mon, Jul 16, 2007

Iguana Social Structures

Posted at 10:48 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

A fascinating article at Tetrapod Zoology. The mother iguanas don't stay arounf until their babies hatch, but the siblings take care of each other. Way more complicated social behavior than we usually think of for lizards.

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Sun, Jul 15, 2007

Projects and Appliances

Posted at 11:17 am MDT to Technology

Now that the septic system project is done, the next really big project around this house needs to be the electrical service and driveway. The truck is doing its best to eat the money that I was expecting to use for that, but I shouldn't put it off too long put it off too long.

After the house electrical system upgrade -- or during it -- I may replace some of my appliances.

My washer and dryer are 20 years old, and the dryer has developed a funny rattle. I will have someone take a look at it, but it may not be worth repairing. If I replace one, I will probably replace both: the modern appliances are supposed to use water and power more efficiently.

The first built-in dishwasher I installed in this kitchen was an upper-mid-range Kenmore. It worked well for years, then began to leak slightly and short out. I replaced it during one of my brief periods home with another upper-mid-range Kenmore, but this one is either badly designed or a lemon. It doesn't clean well: after a few months of use, tea mugs are showing stains that were never left by the old machine, and my Corelle and Corningware are showing stains, which should not happen, even to 30 year-old Correlle. I think the sprays are feeble, or not aimed properly or both. The Salvation Army has been advertising that they will take working appliances... It would be nice to have a dishwasher that actually works again.

My refrigerator is even newer than the dishwasher. It is another case of a hasty replacement of an old, reliable, machine at the end of its life: the old one started making strange noises and cycling oddly last year when I was only home on weekends, and I replaced it because I worried about coming home to a refrigerator that had been dead for a week. It is moderately annoying. It is loud when it cycles. And the vegetable crispers are deceptively tiny and useless --I think there is a motor behind them taking up most of their space. The new freezer-on-the-bottom refrigerators are very tempting, but the current one is usable, so it will probably be the last my current appliances to be replaced.

The stove and range hood are about fifteen years old, I think. The large front burner has gotten very erratic, and the problem is not the coil. And I'm not sure I trust the oven thermostat any more. If I get Leo's Appliance Repair to check the dryer, I may have him take a look at the stove as well. My problem with replacing the stove is that I want one designed for serious cooking. The new electric models with high-end oven features all seem to have those stupid smooth cooktops which cannot be used with cast iron skillets ... or canning kettles ... or enameled stockpots ... instead of proper burner coils.

I have had piped natural gas in the house since my second to latest furnace was installed. The original furnace used propane. One winter the delivery company delayed a delivery because of the holidays and a blizzard, and I ran out of fuel. And one summer, the delivery truck set my yard on fire. The newest furnace installation, besides adding the central air-conditioning, included a new water heater that is gas rather than electric.

I should probably investigate the cost-benefit ratio of getting the house plumbed for a gas stove (and dryer, while I am at it). I know that the electrical circuits for the stove and dryer use aluminum wires instead of copper, which is marginal according to code, and something of a safety hazard. Those aluminum wires are supposed to be replaced as part of the big electrical project, anyway, and it might not be a lot more expensive to switch to gas.

A gas stove would be an adventure. I have never cooked on a gas stove except a few times when I was visiting Nonna (my paternal grandmother). My Mother and Aunts always had electric stoves. And I have had electric stoves everywhere I have lived.

Grandma (my maternal grandmother) always had electric stoves because her sense of smell was destroyed by an illness when she was young. You have not known boring food until you have eaten traditional New England cuisine (boiled everything) cooked by someone with no sense of smell. We used to visit Nonna for Sunday dinner, then Grandma and Grandpa for supper: Grandpa had been a cook in a logging camp when he was young in Canada, and he made great pancakes.

I think, between the appliances and the fact that I am thinking of replacing the truck next year, that I should probably invest in a subscription to "Consumer Reports". "Cooks Illustrated", which I read occasionally, only does kitchen gadgets and small appliances.

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Fri, Jul 13, 2007

"Wess'har Wars" by Karen Traviss

Posted at 7:19 pm MDT to Media

I just finished reading the first three books of this series, City of Pearl, Crossing the Line and The World Before, which make a story arc that comes to a fair amount of closure at the personal level for the central character. .

The science is fairly hard: no faster-than-light travel. The aliens peoples and ecologies are interesting, and quite alien. The human characters are varied and three-dimensional. The politics, unfortunately, are believable... and in a state of flux at the end of the trilogy.

I'm glad that there is a second trilogy "Matriarch", "Ally", and "Judge", (the final book comes out in 2008) addressing the larger problems, and I'm looking forward to reading them.

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Thu, Jul 12, 2007

Milking Robot

Posted at 10:07 pm MDT to Technology

Oh, neat. A program on Food Network just did a sequence about an advanced robotic milking machine.

The cow walks into the booth and the machine identifies her by a chip in her collar. Then it gives her a snack to eat while she is being milked, cleans off the udder, and uses a laser-sighted control system to locate the teats and attach the milkers. It does the milking and immediately disconnects, so the cow does not need to wait for the farmer to get around to disconnecting her.

The cows can get milked whenever they want (unless the machine is busy with another cow), and some of them choose to get milked as many as 6 times a day (even during the night), not just the twice daily milking they get when humans need to set up and remove the milking equipment.

And the farmer is not the prisoner of morning and evening milkings either. He commented that the cost ( about $160,000) is cheaper in the long run than the combination of regular milking equipment and a hired hand.

Somehow it makes sense that the machine was invented by the Dutch.

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Financial Safety

Posted at 9:47 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

First, a handy link I found at the blog of author Andrew Dennis. This site, GetHuman gives phone numbers and instructions for how to reach an actual human customer service rep -- instead of getting stuck in phone-menu-hell --for many major corporations. My link is to the US page. Andrew (who is British) also has a link to the UK site.

My credit union has been breaking their website login functions again, and they changed the site so that if you can't log in, there is no way to send them a message oneline: no more support email address. Fortunately, their phone tree is not also broken: I was able to get to a live person.

Not that the live person did anything. I called yesterday and today and both times was promised a callback by the end of the workday. Next payday I'm going to open an account at another credit union so I have options the next time the Bellco bozos decide to make their website unusable for non-Windows users.

I have not received the promised calls, but when I retried the website at lunchtime I was finally able to log in and move the money from my savings account to checking so that I could write the check for the Septic System rebuild.

Today I wrote the largest check I have ever written that was all my own money, not derived from a bank loan. This was like paying cash for a well-equipped new car. And until that check clears, my checking account balance is huge. It won't be wiped out even after the check clears: I have enough to cover my usual expenses for this pay cycle, including the mortgage, and the unusual expense of 6 months of car insurance which is due this month without coming near the minimum balance on the account.

And my savings are not wiped out, : I didn't touch my non-IRA CD (much less any of the retirement funds) and there is still some money in regular savings too.

I don't have quite enough cash before next payday to pay cash for the truck repairs that are going to be coming due any day now without hitting the CD, but that isn't a problem since I have plenty of headspace on my credit cards: high limits and low balances. I can spread paying for the truck repairs for a few months without a problem.

This is the first time in my life that I have been in such a stable place financially. I can handle financial emergencies without counting pennies to pay my utility bills this months, or worrying that the next thing that goes expensively wrong will wipe me out, or leave me facing the need to take out a bank loan or cash in my retirement funds.

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Wed, Jul 11, 2007

Tapioca

Posted at 7:01 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

The first time I ate tapioca pudding was when I was 7 years old, when my youngest brother was born. My other brother and I spent a few days at my maternal grandmother's house, and she made tapioca pudding one day. I think there were raisins in it.

That was also the first time I read a book that wasn't a picture book for myself: Grandma had given me the first Bobbsey Twins book for Christmas and I took it with me. At Christmas in the middle of first grade I hadn't had the vocabulary to manage it, but by July 4th between first and second grade, I read it fairly easily. My parents refused to let me learn to read before the school started teaching me, so i was a comparatively slow starter.

I soon made up for lost time when it came to reading...

I'm thinking about tapioca because I bought some ready-made tapioca pudding at Costco this evening. I wanted some comfort food. I haven't been sleeping well or swallowing properly (choking on well-chewed grapes is not a good sign... fruit doesn't usually get stuck). It's just as well I'm such a hermit -- between lack of sleep and esophageal spasms, I'm feeling really cranky.

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Tue, Jul 10, 2007

Bozos 3: The Consultant's Mantra

Posted at 4:48 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

My current customer backed out of a contract they had agreed to because they said they couldn't afford me, then found a tiny bit more funding under the sofa cushions and contracted for two more weeks of my time.

So naturally they are loading me with work to take maximum advantage of my skills and expertise while they have them available...

And if you believe that, can I interest you in some land in Florida? Or possibly a very nice bridge?

I am mostly finding things to do that are moderately productive, but it is clear that no one is doing any planning at the strategic level, or if they are, their plans are not being conveyed to the team leads and line managers.

If my time is such an extravagance I should not be asking for meaningful work to do, and I should not be given assignments that don't mesh well with the areas of expertise they are supposedly paying for.

Ah, well, time for the consultant's mantra:

It's not my company.

It's not my company.

It's not my company.

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Mon, Jul 09, 2007

Meyers-Briggs

Posted at 10:15 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Years ago, when I was consulting at AT&T (roughly 1985 to 1990) they decided to do something about the really toxic social dynamics in the group I was working in. So they put us through a two-day professionally-run team communications building program that included serious Meyers-Briggs analysis.

It didn't help the group much, that I recall, but there were corporate political stresses keeping the whole situation dysfunctional. (Polishing mud doesn't get you very far.)

But it means that I have a Meyers-Briggs rating that was determined by a professional psychologist.

I am INTP, quite strongly. The scales ran from 0 to about 60 points in every direction, and I was in the mid 40s on my side of all four axes. The paperwork we were given said that INTP is the rarest combination in North American society, and didn't even bother to give a female example because they (we) are so rare. The male example was the classic absent-minded professor.

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Cheese

Posted at 8:17 pm MDT to Technology

I buy lots of cheese. Sometimes I think I live on fruit and cheese. But I can't remember a time I had trouble swallowing cheese or fruit, and there aren't many other foods I can say that about.

I took a class on cheesemaking once, but I've never made cheese at home. I don't buy actual liquid milk (I use instant powdered milk in my tea) so I don't have the basic ingredients for cheese around.

My tastes in cheese are fairly limited because I have mold allergies and penicillin allergies. I avoid bleu cheeses and others with penicillin related molds, like brie. Having my tongue start swelling is disconcerting. And dangerous.

At the moment, I'm annoyed. I like grilled cheese sandwiches made with thick slices of American cheese (NOT Velveeta, which is all rubbery even when it is cold) and it appears that my local Safeway has stopped carrying the blue boxes of Kraft American.

I tried buying a box of their house brand, and it turned out to be fake Velveeta, not American cheese. It makes horrible cheese sandwiches -- if I put a non-trivial amount of cheese between the bread slices, it runs and dribbles all over the place and makes a mess.

I used a chunk of the 'cheese' in some barely edible mac and cheese this evening: I've been having swallowing problems and at least this is a way to make something swallowable while I try to use the stuff up.

I hope I can find a good source of blocks of American cheese.

(I went to my acupuncturist today, and he could not insert the needles in a couple of key points because the throat muscle tension was so high. And the other swallowing-related points were very zingy. Not a good sign. Especially when I just finished a week of vacation and should be fairly relaxed.)

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Fri, Jul 06, 2007

Moths

Posted at 10:45 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

The weird weather this year may have had one advantage. Some years we are afflicted by a plague of miller moths in May and June, but this year there haven't been very many yet. I've got a couple fluttering around in the house, but it makes a refreshing change fromt e years when there were thousands outside and dozens inside.

I had a cat, Shadow, who looked like the grey tabbies that wore little red smeakers in the art of R Kliban. He used to stare up at the moths and make little frustrated noises because he couldn't get at them. If he did manage to catch a few, he ate them, and then gagged horribly. They are called miller moths because they have lots of loose powder on their wings.

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Thu, Jul 05, 2007

Visitors from Out-of-State

Posted at 11:16 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

My younger brother the accounting professor (as opposed to my youngest brother the history professor) was here in Colorado for a conference last weekend. His wife joined him after the conference, and they have been hiking in the mountains up near Estes Park. This evening they came down into Boulder. We met for dinner at my favorite Mexican Restaurant, Casa Alvarez, and then strolled for a while on the Pearl Street pedestrian mall. We began our stroll at the Boulder Bookstore.

It was a very nice evening, and made a break from dealing with the dead truck (which is now at a Dodge dealership being investigated) and the new septic system (which is now fully covered up and graded).

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Wed, Jul 04, 2007

Olbermann's Commentary

Posted at 9:12 pm MDT to Current Events

Link found on Making Light: Olbermann's commentary on MSNBC. Titled "Bush, Cheney should resign".

I'm faintly relieved to see something like this in a mainstream news outlet. I honestly have very little hope for the near future of this country's political processes. But it is good to see that revulsion is being expressed in the official media, not just the blogosphere.

Happy Independence Day.

Sigh.

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Tue, Jul 03, 2007

Dead Truck

Posted at 10:20 pm MDT to Travel

I have Nanette's youngest daughter's car sitting in my driveway at the moment. Elsbeth is away for a 'semester at sea', and my truck is sitting in the parking lot of a Midas Auto Service place in central Denver, waiting to be looked at after the holiday.

This is really annoying.

I drove in to Denver to visit the Denver Art Museum, and when I got off the highway and stopped at the first light, the truck overheated again. I nursed it across downtown to the museum parking garage and left it to cool for several hours while I went through the museum.

I hadn't been to the DAM since before they built their new addition. It's an interesting space, with no perpendicular walls. I got a bit dizzy at one point in a narrow space -- the diagonals were disorienting -- but the large display areas were fine.

I had a wonderful late lunch in one of the museum restaurants. This was my second great restaurant meal in two days: Nanette took me out to the Brasserie Ten-Ten, a French restaurant in Boulder with great food and equally great service, for my birthday last night.

When I went back to the truck, it seemed OK, but it overheated again after only a few blocks. I found a parking place and called AAA (again) and Nanette. AAA recommended the Midas place as an AAA approved mechanic reasonably close to where I was stuck.

Nanette's husband Chuck, who was at work at their warehouse on the outskirts of Denver, picked me up at the Midas parking lot and took me back with him to the Mile High Comics warehouse, where some of his acquaintances from the New Mexico pueblos had come to sell him some new pieces for his huge and wonderful collection of pottery.

Some of the collection (only 4327 of the pieces) can be seen online at www.pueblotreasures.com. I tagged along as Chuck gave his guests a guided tour of the many display cases at the warehouse. It's been about 9 months since I visited the collection, and there were many new pieces.

I ended up buying a wonderful pottery bear, directly from the artist, Gilbert Sanchez. I don't think I can put up pictures that will do it justice: there are glazed medallions on the sides (most of the bear is unglazed clay ranging from gray to reddish) with images incised with very fine lines: heaven on one side (sun, stars and a comet) and earth on the other (a landscape including Black Mesa, which is near the pueblo where Gilbert lives).

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Mon, Jul 02, 2007

Microsoft Snooping

Posted at 11:55 am MDT to Technology

More reasonsfor not loading Microsoft Vista (besides the fact that it runs like a pig on most known hardware). Lots of the software components included in it periodically phone home to MS with information about your system and activites And you aren't allowed to turn off the reporting. Others collect data but only send it when you trigger a transmission by doing something like running the program.

I wonder what happens if you try to run it behind a firewall?

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Sun, Jul 01, 2007

Allies

Posted at 10:56 pm MDT to Current Events

There is a thread on MakingLight pointing out that official reports by US forces are now labelling all dead Iraqis as members of Al-Qaeda. One of the comments pointed out at least one case reported by the BBC where there are reports that the people actually killed were in fact allies of the Iraqi government. I won't insult the dead by describing them as allies of the US forces, since apparently the US authorities no longer recognize allies.

I am beyond being appalled by this evil war and the administration that instigated and administers it.

A line that has not yet made it into the posted bits of Techlands comes to mind: "If [he] was an animal, someone would shoot him so they could check for rabies."

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Sat, Jun 30, 2007

Dinah Kitty

Posted at 9:44 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

John Scalzi says cat pictures are mandatory in blogs,so I'm putting a picture of Dinah after the cut.

Last week, when I was out of town, my cat sitter came to refill the feeder Wednesday eveing instead of Wednesday morning, and Dinah met her in the kitchen and gave her a severe talking to. Dinah has a voice that is very penetrating because she has a lot of Siamese in her ancestry, but she usually hides when people come into the house.

Last night she caught two mice (or one mouse twice) and brought them to show me with her special 'I am a mighty hunter' meow.

See more ...

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Summer Clothes (written 6/14/2007 and misposted)

Posted at 9:43 pm MDT to Travel

I'm traveling to Silicon Valley next week, and I may need to visit the mall on Saturday and invest in some more seasonal Left Coast office clothes. Weather.com is predicting highs in the 80s Fahrenheit all week.

I've gotten spoiled, working at home where I don't need to dress up. The clothes I wore in Boston were all right in California during the cooler weather (maybe a touch more formal than they needed to be)

My usual office wear is dress slacks and a colored Oxford cloth shirt with open collar over a t-shirt in a coordinating color. I don't usually wear short sleeves in office buildings because I freeze if I do. But I should probably look for some summer weight T-shirts in my current size. And weather in the 80s calls for khakis, not wool blend slacks.

I hate buying clothes. I have a petite body with tall arms and legs, so nothing ever fits. The weight I've put on since 2001 (when I was reasonably fit and regularly walking, lifting weights and doing yoga) doesn't help. Nor does the fact that my extra weight seems to be organized in ways the clothing designers and manufacturers don't expect or cater for. It would be nice to find some clothes that are made for adults, not adolescents.

At least, since I got the doctor to raise my thyroid medicine dosage last summer, I've stopped gaining weight. But I'm well over the weight range at which I exercise. (I've never heard of people having exercise setpoint weights, but I seem to: below a certain weight I feel like exercising, above it, I don't.) I think part of me doesn't believe that exercise will do any good: I kept exercising every weekday through the first 20 or 25 pounds of the weight gain, and it never seemed to make a difference and the exercising just got more and more awkward and uncomfortable until it sort of gradually faded out of my routine.

When I was young, I was always underweight, so being overweight seems weird to me, even though I've probably been overweight more than half my life at this point, and I tend not to see myself as fat. I suppose it is the same kind of body-image delusion that anorexics get caught in, but in the opposite direction.

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Fri, Jun 29, 2007

White Sourdough Bread, and Toasting

Posted at 10:10 pm MDT to Technology

I made a loaf of white bread today that came out really well. It helps if I don't forget it during the rises and let it over-do things. The acid in sourdough damages the proteins needed for the rise if you let it go too long.

White bread also rises better than whole wheat because the wholeness of the wheat doesn't weigh down the springiness.

1 cup moderately frisky sourdough starter (bubbly and liquid, but not showing hooch on the surface)
1 cup water 
1.5 tsp pickling salt (very pure, fine-grained, and not iodized)
a tablespoon or two of light olive oil (I kind of eyeball the oil)
about 2 cups King Arthur All Purpose Flour

about another 1/4 or 1/3 cup of water
about another cup of flour

Put the first five ingredients in the bowl and
Give the Kitchenaid doughhook a workout until the doughball pulls away from the bowl.

Decide the loaf is coming out too small. Add the rest of the water and swoosh it around a little with the doughball. Add flour until the bowl cleans again.

Hand knead thouroughly on a board to make sure the outer layer of mostly flour and water is well mixed into the ball. (I have a special large board that is used only for baking, NEVER as a cutting board. It has a lip in the front so it won't slide back from the edge of the counter, and its own backsplash so the dough can't run away.)

Let the dough rise until doubled, and the dent doesn't disappear immediately when you tap it with a finger.

Return to the board and punch down, briefly knead and shape the bread, squishing or popping any large bubbles just under the surface.

Place in pan. Let rise in a warm moist place (I use my oven with the light on and a baking pan of hot water on the other rack) until not quite double and the dent is not quite staying when you poke it.

Preheat oven to about 350 (maybe a little higher: I set it at the 3 in the 350 on the dial). Bake for 35 minutes, then check it. Let cool on a rack until only slightly warm, then get it out of the pan to finish cooling on the rack.

Today's result was a tall loaf with a nice crust and a mild crumb with a nice body. It would make a good non-disintegrating sandwich bread.

I may need to toast it twice to make toast. I have found that toasters don't handle my homemade bread well. I think the adjustments I've made (like the olive oil) so that the loaf will stay edible until I finish it may increase the moisture content enough that toasting is delayed. I use a toaster-oven at home, which is helpful in dealing with non-industrial loaf sizes, but the regular toaster in Boston also lightly toasted homemade bread on settings that charcoaled store bread.

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Bozos 2: the Saga Continues

Posted at 7:36 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I got everything I was working on wrapped up, cleaned up, and ready to hand over. I found out where they wanted their laptop shipped to, and how they wanted it shipped (which I planned to do on Monday).

Then around lunchtime today I got a call. The client decided they can afford two more weeks of my time. So I have next week off while their plant is shut down, then two more weeks on contract.

I'm not sure what I'm going to work on on the morning of Monday the 9th, since the features I was working on have been assigned to other people.

And I'm not sure management bothered to mention the contract change to the people actually running the project. They didn't inform people that my contract had been canceled: I had to take care of that. I could have just let the clock run out and vanished, instead of organizing the handoff of the stuff I was working on.

I won't be shipping out the laptop until Monday the 23rd...

Unless they change their minds again. I'm not holding my breath.

It is really too bad. I generally trusted the manager and technical manager I've been dealing with for the past couple of years, before this recent re-organization. But I'm not at all sure that the new manager is dealing in good faith. I just 'met' the new technical manager for the first time today in a morning conference call before I knew I was not leaving immediately, so he's still a mystery.

---

On a totally unrelated note, except that it involves my schedule...

I have bought memberships in MileHiCon 39 (October 26-28,2007) and Denvention 3, the 2008 World Science Fiction Convention (August 4-10 2008.

Note to anyone interested in attending: the rates for SF conventions increase over time. I paid $34 for MileHiCon, which increases to $36 July 1, $38 September 1, and $40 at the door. Denvention is currently $175 for the 5 days. I don't know when the next break point for Denvention memberships is.

I have also reserved my hotel room for MileHiCon. I haven't been to any SF Cons since 2001, but for many years SF Cons were my regular vacation. I know from experience that they are 24 hour multitrack events, and an available hotel is a necessity.

It will be strange, but nice, not to be stuck in the Dealer's Room during MileHiCon and WorldCon.

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Thu, Jun 28, 2007

Bozos

Posted at 8:32 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

A few weeks ago an extension was negotiated for my current contract that moved my end date from the end of June to the end of September. We were assured that everything was agreeable, and the paperwork had been signed.

Last Thursday, the new senior manager who is taking over the project told me to my face that my extension to September was firm but they were hoping to renegotiate the rate beyond that. The offer that was made to the company did not match what I was told.

We declined the offer of the new rate, which was half the rate I've been getting for the past few years.

Yesterday, mid to late afternoon, we got a call and were informed that they had decided to cancel the extension. So my end date is suddenly tomorrow.

The project manager (whom I've worked with on and off for a couple of years now) had refused to talk to our business side and referred us to the senior manager. He may not have wanted to be the one who broke the news that they were repudiating the deal.

I'm trying to think of a word that adequately expresses my opinion of this double-dealing manager. I'm tempted to tell the sales people to add a 10% bozo fee to our bid the next time this customer comes asking us for help.

I'm just glad that I've been working from home, not from corporate housing.

And I think there is an untrustworthy negotiator who's due to show up in TechLands who may end up with a different name.

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Wed, Jun 27, 2007

Truck is Home

Posted at 10:38 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Lots of progress in various directions.

It is very nice to have my own truck back. Shawn's van is very tall, so it is hard to get in and out, and it felt tippy to me, even though it is a much heavier vehicle than my truck and there was probably no danger.

Now I just need to keep an eye on it for a while to see if it needs a new head gasket..

The new septic system has passed at least one inspection and I have received the paperwork.

My client company is closed next week, so I have the week off. I may try to do a little billable work, and there is a coding project I've been asked to do for the ReleaseTEAM, but my time will be very flexible.

My brother and sister-in-law will be in Colorado for a conference and we will get together at some point.

And Monday is my birthday. I was thinking about going down to the Denver Art Museum, which I haven't visited since before they built the new wing, but they are closed on Mondays. Maybe I'll go to a movie on Monday and do the Museum trip on Tuesday.

They've been advertising the Zoo on the radio a lot, and it has been a while since I visited the zoo, but I made the mistake of going to the Zoo on my birthday once several years ago. All of the animals were very sensibly hiding from the heat. and I should have done the same. I think I'll go to the zoo sometime in the fall when the weather is nicer.

I'm a member of the Zoo and the Art Museum. Also the "Museum of Nature and Science" which used to be the Museum of Natural History. I haven't been to the science museum in years either, but their current big exhibition is about the Titanic which doens't particulaarly interest me.

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Tue, Jun 26, 2007

Alternator

Posted at 10:21 pm MDT to Technology

Apparently, my truck died because the alternator died, which killed the fanbelt, which flailed around and destroyed the fan and some other things (shrapnel from the fan didn't help the situation). The truck overheated because the fan died, and stalled at the stoplight because the alternator was dead.

I'm not surprised by the fanbelt: I heard a funny thwack-thwack sound just before things went south that I didn't think came from the radio.

I'm told that I should watch for signs of leaking from the head gasket (the mechanic can't tell if it was damaged by the overheating). But other than that, the radiator and most of the engine survived.

The mechanic is going to change the oil (it was due anyway, and I'd rather not have the engine full of cooked oil). Then, sometime tomorrow, I'll have my truck back.

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Mon, Jun 25, 2007

Plan of Battle

Posted at 10:11 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

They say no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

Looked at in daylight, my new septic system isn't laid out quite the way the engineer designed it. The contractor says the original design wouldn't quite work in the actual space (they may have been sloppy about measuring). He says that he cleared the actual layout with the engineer and the county, and the city of Louisville whose water main crosses my lot and makes things complicated.

They delivered at least three more huge truckloads of dirt today. There were already some big piles in the yard.

The installation is supposed to be inspected tomorrow, and if it passes they would be able to start pushing the dirt over the top of the holes and gravel bed. Except that the contractor had an accident in his workshop and ended up with a piece of metal in his eye and can't drive yet.

So things are going to be delayed a bit. At least the system is usable even while it is uncovered.

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Sun, Jun 24, 2007

Van

Posted at 9:00 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

My business partner Shawn has very kindly loaned me his van to use until I have my truck back. This gave me the chance to stop at Safeway and stock up on fresh fruit and veggies and dairy and a few other odds and ends. I haven't shopped for perishables for a while because I knew I was going to be out of town.

I somewhat regret that the combination of work and lack of a vehicle meant that I couldn't make a quick run to the Farmers' Market yesterday. They have a Wednesday market, which I never visit, but I may go down in to town this week. I need to stop at McGuckins Hardware at some point and get a new battery for one on my kitchen scales, too.

It's nice to have the option of leaving the house...

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Sat, Jun 23, 2007

Working Saturday

Posted at 10:32 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

We had the code release today. I spent all day checking email and a little time sanity checking the stuff that wound up in production. One piece never quite made it as far as I can tell, but it may have just been put somewhere weird by the guy who propagated it.

I'm exhausted after yesterday, and haven't really had time to do much about the house and car. Shawn's offered me the use of his van again. I may take him up on it tomorrow. I need to buy groceries and run some other errands.

The new septic system, which is still open for inspection, is very impressive. I'll take some pictures tomorrow, before it gets inspected and covered up with dirt.

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Fri, Jun 22, 2007

Dead Truck

Posted at 11:58 pm MDT to Travel

Well, I arrived home,about an hour and half later than I should have.

As I was driving along the tollway home from the airport (speed limit 70, minimum speed 50) I may have lost a fanbelt or something. I heard a brief thwap and the engine started overheating, and when I got to the stoplight at the end of the toll way it just died. A lot of smoke or fumes came out of the engine compartment.

I put on the flashers and called AAA and 911 and Nanette (Cell phones are a wonderful invention) and spent about an hour directing traffic so people would go around the truck. I didn't want to stay in the truck in case it got rear-ended by some idiot, and breathing those fumes didn't seem likely to be very healthy. Waving cars into the other lane gave me something to do while I stood there next to the walk/don't-walk light.

Ater it got dark, I remembered that I now have a crank flashlight in the truck (I actually have a regular flashlight and a package of batteries in there too, but the new, cranked model was easily accessible. So I had that to wave at the cars.

There were a lot of very nice people who stopped to ask if I needed help.

There were a lot of very stupid people who came right up to the tailgate of the truck even with the flashers going and me waving them around. One car came so close it had to back up when the driver finally woke up and realized that my truck was