Teleidoscope

Wed, Jan 31, 2007

RIP Molly Ivins 1944-2007

Posted at 9:18 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Damn. She was a good, witty, writer and a compassionate human being.

She was also only 10 years older than me. These days 63 seems awfully young for someone to die.

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Merry Maids

Posted at 7:53 pm MST to Miscellaneous

It's snowing today (again) but some heroic cleaning ladies slogged through the snow carrying thier vacuum cleaner and supplies. This is the first time they have made it through since early December (the snowblower path made it feasible for them to at least try). They had to dig their car out of a drift when they went to leave.

My cat Dinah (who is very shy) was really funny. At one point she was sitting in the middle of the living room floor with a totally appalled expression on her face, looking back and forth between the two cleaning ladies who were standing in the two exits of the room. When one of the ladies came a little way into the room away from the doorway, Dinah zipped around her and ran to the other end of the house. The last time she saw them was last April, which is a long time for a cat. And I think she doesn't like the sound of vacuum cleaners.

It is so nice to have a clean house. Now if the snow would only melt enough so that the bottled water guy and trash removal trucks could get somewhere near my driveway...

Unfortunately, there isn't likely to be any melting any time soon. The high temperature today was well below freezing, with the same forecast for tomorrow, and more snow in the forecast for tomorrow and Friday.

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Tue, Jan 30, 2007

New Kitchen Grill

Posted at 11:22 pm MST to Technology

I actually bought my newest kitchen toy, a fancy George Foreman grill, a few weeks ago, but it stayed in exile in my truck at the end of the driveway until I was heading to the airport for my trip to California. Getting stuff from the truck to the house is still a bit of an adventure. I thought it would be inviting trouble to leave it in the back of the truck while the truck was parked in the airport garage, so I hauled the grill into the house before I left.

This isn't my first Foreman grill. I had a medium sized one that I abandoned in the apartment in Boston (it had previously travelled back and forth to Minneapolis and my previous Boston gig as well as being used in Colorado). It had lost some of its non-stick coating and become hard to clean, and was developing a crack in one control button. And I had seen ads for the new grills, which had features I wanted.

The new grill has variable amount of tilt, so it can cook things flat as well as at the classic GF fat-draining angle. It has removable interchangeable grill plates that can go in the dishwasher, and a variable heat control. One of the 'plates' is a shallow pan for baking or cooking things like eggs.

Two of the plates are wafflers, so if I get sent out of town again and take the grill, I will be able to cook different things even in a poorly equipped corp-housing kitchen. Hauling a waffle iron across the country would feel ... extravagant, somehow, and a waste of space. Hauling a couple of spare plates for a multipurpose tool doesn't.

I selected the high end grill model for the washable grill plates and multiple options, but I think the variable heat control will turn out to be one of my favorite features. My favorite thing to grill is salmon filet chunks (which are available at Costco in very convenient packages and at reasonable prices) and the old single-temperature grill tended to overcook the thinner parts of the fish before the heat had time to penetrate the thicker parts. I cooked a salmon chunk for supper last night to try out the new grill, and the medium heat setting cooked it to perfection: tender and juicy throughout, and the cracked pepper wasn't turned scorched and bitter.

This weekend I'll try making waffles using the waffle plates instead of my old waffle iron to see how they do.

And I need to try making panini and using some of the other grill options. I love quesadillas, but I've never made them at home. And grilled cheese that's actually grilled instead of baked in a toaster oven might be nice.

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Mon, Jan 29, 2007

Candy Helm's Deep

Posted at 10:41 pm MST to Media

Not your mother's gingerbread house... I found this link at MakingLight.

One of the wonderful things about the internet is that the strange and wonderful things that people do can be seen, instead of vanishing.

This is amazing. The Battle of Helm's Deep. I am in awe of these people's artistry. And their candy budget.

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Sun, Jan 28, 2007

TV Spam

Posted at 11:52 pm MST to Media

I've been watching the Biography channel -- Midsomer Murders, Poirot and Sherlock Holmes -- while I work on the next installment of Techlands (which should be ready for posting in another day or two).

I have been struck by the fact that a large number of the advertisements that appear on cable channels, expecially late at night by East Coast standards, bear a strong resemblance to the slimier varieties of spam. Get rich quick scams. Advertisements for possibly dodgy software. Ambulance chasing lawyers trying to get clients for class-action suits.

Ewww.

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Sat, Jan 27, 2007

Anime and HD

Posted at 9:54 pm MST to Media

I hooked up the new cables I bought in California, so now I have true 1080 HD from the satellite dish displaying on my TV, and I have the DVD player reconnected to the system. This was not a trivial operation: the new cable connections were very stiff. And the TV is close to the wall and too big to be moved and I needed to plug the new video cables into the back. It's a good thing I have small hands. And once I had the cables attached, I needed to refer to the manuals for the various components to get all the menu settings right.

I played one of the DVDs I bought this week: volume 13 of "FullMetal Alchemist". These were the final episodes of the series that were played in English on Cartoon Network a few months ago, but I wanted to see them in subtitled Japanese.

Once I had refreshed my memory of the series' finale, I finally watched the FullMetal Alchemist movie, "FullMetal Alchemist: Conquerors of Shamballa" which I had bought on DVD a few months ago. The movie resolves a number of plot threads which were left open by the series, and it does it in a very satisfactory way.

FullMetal Alchemist is one of my favorite series of recent years. It is full of complex plot threads and characters who are three-dimensional and compelling. A professor of Literature at Radford wrote essays of commentary on most of the episodes on rec.arts.anime.misc on Usenet, which she is now republishing on her LiveJournal. I'm going to have to look into some of the other series that she is discussing: based on her comments on series I'm familiar with, I should also like the other manga and anime that she thinks are worth while.

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Fri, Jan 26, 2007

Snowblower

Posted at 10:01 pm MST to Technology

It's the weekend in the Denver Metro area, so snow is predicted. Today was sunny. Tomorrow is not supposed to be. Last weekend they predicted an inch or two, and I got at least 6 at my house. This week they are predicting an inch or two...

At least, unless we get another actual blizzard, I will be feeling a bit less trapped. I came home to a nice surprise. My business partner Shawn and Robert from the office, bless them, spent the morning with shovels and a new snowblower widening the path from my house to the place in the road where I've been parking the truck.

Actually clearing my driveway would have required heavy equipment, or possibly high explosives: after days of thawing and re-freezing the drifts in my driveway are making a good attempt at replacing the glaciers that are being lost to global warming. If there were still mammoths around, they would be right at home.

The drifts are still more than a foot deep on each side of the path for most of its length, but having a path that is a few feet wide, instead of one snow-shovel-width, for a hundred fifty feet or so is much less claustrophobic. The wider path made it much easier to carry my luggage in from the truck. Also some groceries and more than a week of mail.

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Thu, Jan 25, 2007

Usenet and Google

Posted at 10:42 pm MST to Technology

Before there was the Web, there was Usenet: a vast set of online discussion groups. I've been following some of them fro more than 20 years. In recent years I have used Google Groups (they bought out DejaNews, which was a much more uasable service), but I think I may need to look for an alternative. Google's latest re-design of group access seems to be designed to make Usenet unusable.

This is extremely annoying. Things were fine and perfectly readable two days ago. I am tired of trying to re-configure their misbegotten layout into something readable in my browser on Linux. I have already sent them an email about the problem.

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Wed, Jan 24, 2007

Bible Quiz

Posted at 8:38 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Andrew Wheeler's blog had a link to a Bible quiz. On a whim, I gave it a shot. It has been more than 25 years since I considered myself a Christian or read the Bible except to look up an occasional quote.

I think the results (copied below) say more about how easy the quiz was than anything. (Or else, as I have long suspected, most people don't pay attention to or remember what they read.)

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Tue, Jan 23, 2007

Fry's

Posted at 10:31 pm MST to Technology

One advantage of spending some time in Silicon Valley, is access to Fry's Electronics. Considering what I just spent there this evening, it's probably just as well that we don't have Fry's in Colorado.

Actually, it's not as bad as all that. I haven't bought any anime DVDs in a couple of months because of moving and being snowbound, and Fry's has a good anime section. And I need decent audio and video cables for my upgraded satellite dish (so I can give the ones it's using back to the DVD player). Aside from that, I bought some snacks and an MP3 player.

The MP3 player ($70, with a $25 mail-in rebate) is the one minor extravagance. But it is labelled as compatible with Linux. In a pinch, I can use it as a 2 gig backup drive. And I think it is about time I joined the 21st Century...I don't own an MP3 player, and it would be handy to have my music when I travel.

In Boston, I had a few dozen of my CDs with me, which I played on my "travelling stereo", which consists of a Sony Walkman with computer speakers plugged into the headphone jack. The speakers are larger enough to have decent bass response.

The new MP3 player, which is about the size and shape of a large pocket knife, will allow a lot more listening variety, once I get it loaded.

And once I get the package opened: it's in one of those plastic packages that need nuclear weapons to open, and since I was travelling by air and not checking baggage, I don't have a usable knife or scissors with me.

I should probably take the AV cables and MP3 player to work tomorrow and find some scissors to open all three packages. They will fit into my luggage much better without the lumpy plastic blister packs.

Even without the packaging, I'll be opening the expansion zipper on my roller bag and checking it through, instead of carrying it on. Fry's had a 5 DVD subtitled boxed set of some supernatural anime I have (unsubtitled) on nth generation video tape from when I was collecting anmie in the late 80's and early 90's. It was only $30 for the set, and I've been trying to replaced the old tapes with legal copies as stuff gets released in the US, so it was hard to resist. But it makes a big lump in my suitcase.

It's a good thing I'll be able to give the DVD player its cables back when I get home.

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Mon, Jan 22, 2007

Hotel

Posted at 9:47 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I'm out of the habit of sleeping in hotel beds, and I got in very late last night, thanks to the weather delays, so my sleep cycle is a mess.

I feel very groggy, but I know from experience that if I go to sleep too early, I will wake up in the middle of the night and lay awake for hours. Somehow this makes it even more annoying that this hotel room has a broken alarm clock. (I had to arrange for a wake-up call.) It's disorienting enough to wake up in the middle of the night in a strange place. Having the wrong time glowing at you, and not being able to fix it, is worse.

I'd invest in a travel alarm clock, but I haul too much electronic stuff through the airports as it is. Sudden thought: When I'm more awake, I should probably find out if my cell phone can play alarm clock.

I'm really not pleased with this hotel at the moment, even though it's the same one I lived in for months last year. The manager who was here all last winter doesn't seem to be here any more, and I'm not impressed by the new people at the desk. They messed up my reservation. They keep promising to do something about the alarm clock and not doing anything. And their attitude is annoying.

Time to read some blogs before bed. I hope John Scalzi and James Nicoll are feeling snarky. I'm too tired to deal with Groklaw.

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Sun, Jan 21, 2007

Coyotes

Posted at 1:52 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Last night (or rather, very early this morning) I heard the coyotes singing. I heard the neighbor's dogs howling in answer, too, it's a very different sound. I don't usually hear them at this time of year, with all of the windows closed. They must have been closer than usual, or the wind was coming from an odd direction.

It's nice to hear them: one more proof that I'm home.

I assume they are now curled up warmly in their dens: it has been snowing since not long after I heard them. (The forecasts said flurries. This is not what I call a flurry.)

I hope that this "flurry" is hugging the foothills and not affecting the airport much. They do that sometimes: it can be handy having the airport so far out on the plains that it's in a different microclimate from Boulder. I'm scheduled to fly out this evening, and of course the airline still claims its evening flights are all on schedule. Getting to the airport may be something of an adventure.

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Sat, Jan 20, 2007

Strange Views of the World

Posted at 4:15 pm MST to Media

A link on Neil Gaiman's blog led me to a livejournal entry by John Crowley listing books about very different human cultures. It's intended to help decrease the monotony of created worlds in classes on writing science fiction and fantasy.

I've read about a third of the books in the list, and plan to look into the others. I've just ordered one from the Quality Paperback Bookclub.

It has been years since I read Crowley's "Little,Big", which I remember as excellent. Apparently, 24 or 25 years, since I would have read the paperback or book-club edition (or in those days I might have read a library copy) and they are apparently bringing out a deluxe, illustrated, anniversary edition. I should find my copy, and order a new one if I can't.

"Little,Big" is a book where magic simply is, a subtle part of the warp and weft of the world, and things are stranger the people normally expect. I remember being impressed by the prose and imagery.

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Fri, Jan 19, 2007

Kung Fu Fighters

Posted at 10:37 pm MST to Media

I'm having fun.

The HD channels on the new satellite dish include one called Kung Fu, which so far has been everything but -- For example, this evening I've watched a Jet Li wu xia film with sorcerors and sword fighting. And a Shinsengumi samurai film with Toshiro Mifune in a sort of elder statesman fencing instructor role: someone else played the young hotheads, but he had a star turn in a street fight against 30 guys in a snow storm.

And now they're showing another Japanese period piece, with yakuza and samurai and starving villagers. And theme music reminsicent of from cheap westerns (it's really amusing the way samurai films and Westerns influenced each other over the years).

So far, the Chinese pieces have been dubbed and the Japanese pieces have been subtitled. This generally suits me very well: I can't follow Mandarin at all, but with subtitles that I can crib, I can follow enough of the Japanese to hear the politeness levels and other things that usually get lost in translation. But some of the dubbing voices are kind of silly.

The midnight show will really be a kung fu movie, for a change: "Fists of Fury" with Bruce Lee. I assume it will be dubbed.

I wonder what the Chinese station near San Jose is showing these days... last year at this time they were showing "The Epic of Tai Zu" a wonderful long (50 episodes or so) historical drama series, subtitled in Mandarin and English, about Nuerhachi of the Aixinjueluo, the founder of what became the Qing (Manchu) dynasty. Kind of like "The Six Wives of Henry VIII", but Nuerhachi had his wives in parallel, which made the politics a lot more complicated.

In a few days, I'll find out what they are showing now.

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Thu, Jan 18, 2007

Weapons

Posted at 10:05 pm MST to Technology

One thing I have observed over the years in SF fandom is that blades and guns are like cats and dogs. Some people really like one, some people really like the other, some people like both. I have always believed that one reason Star Wars clicked as well as it did was that it included both blade fights and gun fights.

I've been researching weapons for the Techlands stories I'm writing, both blades and guns. With mixed success.

I like blades. I own several, and a number of reference books about them, both European and general (reference books from my SCA days) and Japanese. I even took a quarter of fencing in college.

On the other hand, I have never really been into guns, especially handguns. I do own one gun (which belonged to my father), but it would need a flint to be functional, and I wouldn't particularly trust it not to explode if fired. It's a blunderbuss with a foot-long barrel: sort of a 17th century riot gun. Not exactly what I need for Techlands.

I own some reference material on shotguns, but not much else on modern weapons, much less post-modern, which is what I really need for at least some of the Techlands weapons. Thank goodness for the web.

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Wed, Jan 17, 2007

Unkind and Exhausting Weather

Posted at 10:42 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Highway 93, between Boulder and Golden was closed for most of the day because of very strong winds and blowing snow. The sky was blue and the sun was shining, but there is plenty of snow on the ground for the wind to push around. Highway 93 is just a few miles to the west of me, up against the foot of the mountains.

Here on the mesa, we got wind and blowing snow, too. I had a form to fax, so I took an early lunch and shoveled the accumulating drift out of the path to the end of the driveway. When I got back from the UPS Store and Wild Oats Supermarket less than an hour later, the snow in the path was more than twice as deep as what I had shoveled on the way out.

I don't think the drifts will get as deep as they did a week and a half ago (a noticeable amount of the snow has melted away since then, so there is less to pile up) but I'm going to have another round of shoveling to do once the wind dies down.

At least the new satellite setup doesn't glitch in the wind the way the old one did.

I first moved to Boulder in the summer of '81, and I bought this house in '85, and I don't remember a winter being this continuously obnoxious. I spent the winter before last in Boston (just in time for the worst blizzard since the big one in '78 and the worst spring nor'easter they'd had in years) and the winter before that I was in Minnetoka, which was actually quite pleasant, though cold, so I was mostly away for those two winters. But both of those were dry winters here in Colorado.

This year we have had snow and snow and wind and windy snow and snowy wind. Any one week of the weather we've had in the past 5 weeks would not have been out of place in a normal year. What's weird is that it has been so continuous and we haven't had enough of a thaw to take the snow off most places around here.

There are two times we can count on nasty weather for the Denver area. One is the Broncos playing Monday Night Football. The other is during the National Western Stock Show, which runs for a few weeks in late January. It's running now, so I don't really expect nice weather any time soon. I just hope we get the usual post-stock-show thaw. But since we missed the normal pre-stock-show thaw I'm not optimistic.

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Tue, Jan 16, 2007

HDTV

Posted at 10:18 pm MST to Technology

I live a couple of miles from anywhere with cable TV hookups and it would cost the cable company too much to run cables to our little scattered neighborhood of a dozen houses. On the other hand, I'm on a ridge close to the Boulder rock formations called the Flatirons. If I try to watch Denver stations over the air, I get a ghost for each Flatiron.

For several years I used a microwave TV service, but it didn't have very many channels (and none of the local ones) and the connection was pretty flaky. Once the local channels became available from the Satellite dishes, I upgraded to a fairly high-end DishNetwork system.

In 2002 just before I began spending most of my time on the road I upgraded my TV to a big Mitsubishi, and upgraded some of my other AV components to support it. Ironically, my satellite dish receiver which was a high-end model, died as I was re-cabling the AV stack, so my fancy high-end system ended up including a base model Dish receiver I picked up in a hurry at Costco. The base model unit didn't work with the VCR nearly as well as the better model it replaced, which was annoying.

But it was just temporary... then I started spending a lot of time out of town.

A couple of weeks ago, the Dish system started getting really flaky. Some of it was high winds rattling the dish and messing up the focus, but I think most of it was the receiver starting to fail. Last week the sound started to fade out almost completely, but only from the dish signal -- the DVD player and radio tuner sound were fine.

Upgrading to the HD involves replacing both the receiver and the dish, and HD is becoming more common, so it seemed the equipment had decided it was time for a change.

My new toy was delivered and installed this evening. My TV turns out to be sort of borderline HD, despite the HD 1050i on the front: I'm going to need some new cables and a bit of tweaking of the settings to get the full effect.

But it's nice to have good sound and a stable picture, after what I've been dealing with for the past month... and an excuse to play with techie stuff.

I got the high-end receiver: it can do picture in picture or drive two different TVs. (I'll eventually run a line to the bedroom TV.) It also has a built-in digital video recorder (like a Tivo).

So I should be able to record the shows I want to watch while I'm away next week without needing to try to sync the timers on the dish receiver and a VCR. Naturally, now that I have the new toy, I'm going out of town again. At least it is only for a week.

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Mon, Jan 15, 2007

RSS Feed Fixed

Posted at 6:33 pm MST to Code

This was fun. It turned out that the dates that were going nuts were for the first 9 days of the month: the days with single digits. I must have originally validated the feed format late in the month, when all of the articles on the front page had two digit days.

Once I figured out the pattern of the problem, it was not difficult to fix the date parsing and printing.

The W3C validator for RSS is happy now.

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Atom Syndication Feed

Posted at 8:17 am MST to Code

It looks like the Atom syndication feed has been broken for a while. I think I have the problem fixed now.

The RSS feed seems to be picking up insane dates, so it is broken, too. This may be a side effect of the reformatting last week, though I don't think I changed anything that should affect RSS. I'll try to fix that this evening.

I had both of these feeds validating at W3C at one point, and plan to get there again.

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Sun, Jan 14, 2007

Techlands: At the Gathering II

Posted at 4:07 pm MST to Creative Work

The next Techlands scene has been uploaded to the website at At the Gathering II.

Please post any comments or questions about the story as comments on this blog post.

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Sat, Jan 13, 2007

Technorati and LiveJournal

Posted at 3:20 pm MST to Technology

I'm trying to set up a LiveJournal mirror of this blog. For that I need Technorati to really admit I exist.

So here is a link for the Technorati Profile.

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Fri, Jan 12, 2007

Rogue Nation

Posted at 8:50 pm MST to Current Events

Ye Gods and little fishes!

The US has invaded an Iranian consulate in the Northern Iraqi city of Irbil and taken some of the staff prisoner as well as confiscating papers and computers. No wonder people are firing rockets at our embassies.

According to NPR: The Kurds, our allies who run that part of Iraq, have expressed "concern and condemnation" over the violation of the region's sovereignty and of international immunity laws.

I think someone is trying to start World War III, and it isn't anyone in the Middle East. Invading consulates is traditionally considered a just cause for war. Apparently, someone decided that giving Iran a cause for war would be a nice change of pace after manufacturing a cause for war with Iraq.

I hope we can survive until January 2008.

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Thu, Jan 11, 2007

Back to Work

Posted at 10:26 pm MST to Technology

After a few weeks of mostly paying attention to snow and mice (the kind with fur), I'm back to working for my living. The nice thing about this current contract is that it mostly doesn't matter if I get snowbound: through the wonders of the modern network, I can work from home across a VPN and wiith conference calls. Once we get everything talking to everything else, that is.

I think we are most of the way there... finally. I can access the databases I need to script schema changes for, I just can't access the one with the spec for the changes I'm supposed to make. Tomorrow I should have the specs, one way or another and I should be able to start making the changes.

The week after next I go to Silicon Valley for some face-to-face work at the client site, but I'm only suppposed to need to go out of town one week out of three or four.

Ah the wonders of the web. This should be much better than flying out every week, or being stuck away from home for months at a time.

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Wed, Jan 10, 2007

Shopping

Posted at 11:26 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I am not a recreational shopper, but after being snowed-in for most of the past week it was refreshing to get out for a while today.

I had to go into Boulder to the Post Office to pick up a package, so I went by McGuckin's Hardware while I was down there. McGuckin's is allied with one of the big hardware chains (Ace, maybe?) but it still run the same way it was when it was still a family business. Their motto is "If we don't have it, you don't need it" and they are full of very helpful people to help you a) figure out what you need and b) find it. And occasional dogs on leashes.

McGuckin's has a wonderful Christmas section every year, (I always spend a lot there. This year I bought Christmas ornaments for my relatives at Indochine, which shares McGuckin's parking lot, but I bought a lot of other stuff at McGuckin's.) They have live music during the holiday shopping season, too: flutists or harpists.

Today I bought shovels. My nice ergonomic shovel is developing cracks in the blade, and I don't want to risk being stuck with just the flat snowshovel. They were out of most garden shovels and just restocking a few models of snow shovels, but I was able to get a garden spade (for breaking through crusty snow) and a grain-scoop-style snowshovel for the light fluffy stuff.

After I put the shovels in the truck, I went back into the store and attacked the kitchen department: McGuckins is probably the best place in Boulder to buy kitchen stuff like small appliances, cast iron cookware, good knives and odd kitchen utensils at decent prices. (There are restaurant supply places in Denver for the really hard-core that are probably even more economical, but less convenient for Boulderites). I bought a half-sheet pan, a large loaf pan, and a new muffin tin, to replace old ones I discarded during the de-mousification of the kitchen last month (ick). I'm coming to the end of the Christmas baked-goods, and in the mood to do some more baking. And Alton Brown of Good Eats recommends cooking bacon on a rack on a half-sheet pan in the oven, and I want to give that a try.

Then I headed back up across the mesa to the shopping center nearest my house. When I bought the house in '85 the nearest gas station was 9 miles away, and it was a big relief a few years later when a 7-11 with gas pumps was built a few miles from here on the other side of the highway. Now I have have a big-box center just south of the mesa.

I picked up some drycleaning that was ready last friday, then bought flour and perishable groceries at Wild Oats Natural Food Market, which is actually my closest grocery store, though I sometimes pick up more mundane grocery items at SuperTarget nearby

Then I went to Costco (which is actually the store that is closest to my house), to refill my prescriptions and stock up on paper towels, cheese and a few canned staples. I spent a lot longer in Costco than I had planned: I think half the rest of the county must have also been refilling their prescriptions before the next storm. While I was killing time, I noted that the tables where books are sold were very empty: the AMS bankruptcy is emptying the distribution channel.

I went over to SuperTarget for a few items I couldn't find at Wild Oats or Costco (which have some odd gaps), then, on the way home, stopped at the Costco gas pumps, just a mile and a half from my house: quite a change from nine miles, and some of the cheapest gas in the county besides.

It's nice to be able to buy most of what I need so close to home these days. There'a a Petsmart (source of my cat's preferred kitty-litter), Michael's Arts and Craft Store, and OfficeMax in the complex, as well as many smaller stores including branches of unique Boulder stores like Lighthouse (esoteric books and objets d'art) and GrandRabbit's Toy Store. And a UPS store, which was very helpful at Christmas time.

Half the stuff I bought is still out in the truck at the end of the driveway. The path from the truck to the house is long and narrow and slippery. I brought the shovels and perishable groceries up to the house. It will give me some incentive to get back out to the truck...

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Tue, Jan 09, 2007

Bad Times for US Publishers

Posted at 3:36 pm MST to Current Events

There is word on the web of small book publishers laying off their entire staffs, and large book publishers in meetings to discuss their options and worry greatly about thier cash flow.

The biggest distributor in the country AMS (Advanced Marketing Systems) went into Chapter 11 at the end of December, and took its subsidiary Publishers Group (which served the smaller publishers) with it. This puts the publishers' income for September through December into limbo, and apparently the unsold books in the distribution chain are also stuck. And on top of that, the contracts in place will make it difficult for some (or most?) publishers to make alternative distribution arrangements.

Assuming there is someone to make the arrangements with: hard-copy book distribution has gotten very monolithic in recent years.

Some relevant links (which have links to still more links): BoingBoing and Mediabistro and another Mediabistro.

Just what the publishing industry (and all the authors, who won't get paid until the publishers get paid) doesn't need.

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Mon, Jan 08, 2007

Wind

Posted at 7:57 pm MST to Miscellaneous

It's just as well that I didn't try to shovel out yesterday. Last night the winds were strong enough to shake the house and blow gravel off the flat part of the roof. I need one of those joke windspeed guages that are made from a piece of heavy scrap metal on a chain. BUt I'd need to hang it somewhere well away from the house so the weight doesn't go though a window when the chain breaks, which means serious post-hole digging to put up a support for it.

The first year after I bought this place I bought a wonderful windchime made of tuned metal pipes at the Colorado Renaissance Festival. On "moderately" windy days it used to spin like a helicopter blade, and I was worried about getting a pipe through the kitchen window if the metal sawed through the fishing line that held the pieces together in a high wind. So I eventually took it down, even though the sound was beautiful.

The shallow drifts are even deeper than yesterday: plants that were sticking up are now completely buried. And the deep drifts moved a couple of feet closer to the house. I can be sure of that because I left my snow shovel sticking up from the pile of snow where I tried shoveling, and this morning I had use a garden spade to dig through two horizontal feet of the drift to rescue the snow shovel. The snow was still very hard this morning: the shovel rescue took half an hour.

Today was sunny and about 20 degrees warmer than yesterday, so the moderate winds started eating away at the sides of the drifts and the top of the snow softened a bit. After lunch the wind died down or a while, so I was able to shovel from the house nearly to where the driveway would be if it weren't buried in about an hour. Then the wind picked up and started making things difficult. The deepest drift right near the house was about 4 feet deep and the shallowest snow I dug through was about 2 feet.

After resting and waiting for the wind to slack off again, I shoveled for another hour -- until the wind turned really nasty. I reached the driveway and part way down it.

I think I've reached a point about a third of the way from my front door to my truck at the end of my driveway, but that's kind of moot, because the road beyond the driveway has not yet been plowed. My neighbor has a three-rail fence along the road, and the drifts across the road are up to the middle rail.

I hope that tomorrow I will be able to get to the truck and get the truck to the main road. I need to get some stuff from the office so I can start work on my next consulting gig. Weather.com is predicting 42 degree highs and less wind (10 to 20 mph instead of 25 to 35 for down in Boulder, probably a bit higher here on the ridge) so the snow should be shovelable, but heavy.

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Sun, Jan 07, 2007

Windy Sunday

Posted at 8:01 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Well, the ground is bare for a dozen feet or so from the front of the house. Then the four-foot drifts start, with hard packed-powder snow that is not really shovelable. And of course there are no snowblowers available in the area, even if i had any hope of getting out to buy one. My business partners are trying to locate one (they need one too, though they aren't snowed in).

And the wind is still blowing the snow around.

And they are predicting more snow for Wednesday or Thursday.

It's going to be a while until I get out.

On the other hand, I think the blog is looking nicer. And the underpinnings are mostly clean CSS, so it should be easier to change the look in the future.

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Sat, Jan 06, 2007

Site Design Changes

Posted at 10:34 pm MST to Code

I have started to make some changes to the looks of this blog and the Techlands pages. If anything turns out hideous or unreadable in whatever brower you use, please let me know.

The new background color for the weblog posts is supposed to be a sort of cream color. I hope it doesn't come out mustard yellow on anyone's monitor. If it doesn't work, I'll switch to a lighter green.

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The Torment of Sisyphus

Posted at 3:08 pm MST to Miscellaneous

The snowstorm yesterday dropped another 15 to 18 inches of snow on my yard. This morning I dug out, which wasn't too difficult, since the snow was still light and fluffy. I swam the truck to the end of the driveway, leaving skid-plate marks on the snow the whole way, so I must have been very close to high-centering. Then I swam it up the hill to the nearest place that had been plowed, and drove out to the paved road to get my mail.

About an hour later, the winds picked up in a howling ground blizzard, blowing around all of the snow that was laying around. The drifts are getting impressive. The only sign of my work is the fact that the truck is at the end of the driveway again, not midway up where it spent the past couple of days. I can't see it at the moment because there is so much snow blowing, even though this is a bright, sunny day.

Tomorrow, if the winds die down, I'll have to shovel a path all the way to the end of the driveway. Again. The part of the "path" closest to the house has drifts that are 4 feet deep already. Fortunately, the deep drifts, being generated by the house's wind shadow, are fairly narrow.

Looking out the window the other way (at 2:45pm), I can see that US 36, the main route between Boulder and Denver, is totally clogged with cars at a dead stop in the Denver-bound lanes. The wind and blowing snow must have caused one or more bad accidents. I can see wreckers stuck in the jam, and a couple that are crosswise to the traffic... the accident must be just beyond them, where the cut slope hides the highway from me. The Boulder-bound lanes are clear and empty: I saw an ambulance going down the hill toward town. But their emptiness suggests there are more problems on the other side of the mesa.

I should probably point out that Davidson Mesa is not a straight-sided butte like you see in Roadrunner cartoons. But the road is quite steep for a mile or two on the Boulder side, and there is a deceptively long slope on the Denver side. The little road that comes up into the mesa to the flat part where my neighborhood is can not be paved because it is too steep, and I suspect the long slope of 36 up from Boulder may near the boundaries of what is considered appropriate for highways. It is straight, not twisty, but that doesn't help much when blowing snow is killing visibility and making the roads slippery, and gusts of wind are tossing high-profile vehicles around.

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Fri, Jan 05, 2007

Techlands: ISEC

Posted at 10:22 pm MST to Creative Work

A new item about the Independent Security and Engineering Company has been posted to the Techlands area.

I was tempted to title it "ISEC: Geeks with Guns", but that would not fit the tone of the article, which seems to be excerpted from someone's intel or news analysis.

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Thu, Jan 04, 2007

Upgrading Kubuntu from 6.06 to 6.10

Posted at 9:50 pm MST to Technology

I generally like Kubuntu. The weird stuff they've done to the root userid still drives me crazy from time to time, but in general it's a nice distribution.

However...

The so-called upgrade mechanism for moving from 6.06 to 6.10 for Kubuntu users is appallingly bad. (I can't speak to the mechanisms provided for the other Ubuntu flavors). It took me 13 hours to get my system upgraded and back into the configuration I prefer, and a user who isn't an experienced Linux or UNIX admin would probably have panicked or ended up with a broken system, or both.

They really can't have it both ways: if they are going to aim at "inexperienced" users by mangling the root user and hide a lot of the admin info at boot time, etc. they need to make sure they put in place admin tools that don't require expertise, especially for something like an upgrade that might leave the user with a broken system and unable to get on-line to look for fixes.

Accurate upgrade instructions would help, too. The preferred method on the "How to Upgrade Ubuntu" page doesn't work with Kubuntu.

I suspect I broke the configuration for the debian font manager, but I'm not sure KDE cares about it. I'll fix it if I have problems viewing or printing special fonts. I suspect it handles primarily TTF fonts, and I prefer Type1.

The instructions I tried to follow were:

• Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change all instances of dapper to edgy.
• In the console run: sudo apt-get update
• In the console run: sudo apt-get dist-upgrade and follow the prompts to upgrade
• In the console run: sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop python-qt3 python-kde3 ubuntu-minimal and follow the prompts to install
• Reboot your computer.

which are the officially recommended steps for Kubuntu upgrades.

The first run of dist-upgrade failed to download some files.

The second run of dist-update spewed out a zillion warnings about

perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = "en",
LC_ALL = (unset),
LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").

which were quite bogus. They happened because the locales did not get defined until near the end of the process.

The first run of install complained that there were unmet dependencies in the files that should have been updated in the previous step. So I re-ran 'update', re-ran 'dist-upgrade' with a -f option to get it to fix the dependencies, then ran them both again to make sure they reported clean. Then I re-ran the install step.

Finally I re-ran all three apt-get steps to make sure none of them found anything left to upgrade.

Then I rebooted the machine and held my breath. I spent all day yesterday doing a full backup and burning it to DVD, so if I would not have lost anything but a LOT of time. I never bothered with full backups when I upgraded between versions of RedHat and Fedora, and never had a problem, but the lack of a real update utility for Kubuntu had me worried.

Kubuntu 6.10 came up, but my widescreen display needed tweaking.

And then I went on-line looking for the FAQ howto's for fixing some of the "admin for dummies" misfeatures that Ubuntu and Kubuntu insist on: turning boot messages back on, putting my desktop icons back on the Desktop where they belong, and setting Konqueror back to the default configuration to get rid of the stupid, intrusive, and BROKEN 'Recent sites' item in the View menu. That Konqueror menu item was broken in 6.06 and I'm amazed they still have it there in 6.10. Maybe so many people just go back to the defaults that there is no pressure to get it fixed.

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Chinook

Posted at 7:57 am MST to Technology

The word 'chinook' means "snow-eater". There is a species of salmon called the chinook, but the use of the word that is important in Boulder is as the name of a kind of wind.

When the Front Range of Colorado gets heavy precipitation it is usually because wet air comes in from the East, and the water is too heavy to go over the mountains, so it falls on us.

A chinook is just the opposite: winds from the West that have dropped all their moisture on the Western slope. As the winds cross the peaks, and the air in them sinks, it also compresses and warms up.

The winds speed up, too: people in Boulder learn to be careful about leaving things out in their yards because we get hundred mile an hour winds a few times each year. These winds are (usually) less damaging than hurricanes because chinooks are dry and not pusshing the weight of water that is carried by a hurricane.

Sometimes the snow just evaporates without even really melting to any noticeable degree first.

Sometimes 100 mph is the low end of the wind speeds: there is a reason the National Center for Atmospheric Research is located on a mesa above Boulder. The Boulder winds break the windspeed gauges at NCAR fairly regularly.

My house is also on a mesa above Boulder, with about 10 miles of empty air between me and NCAR. Last night the wind was fairly noisy.

A chinook started at about noon yesterday. The high was about 50 degrees Fahrenheit and the overnight low (during the howling winds) never went below about 38, so this morning there are barepatches on the ground where the snow had drifted shallow. The places where the snow had drifted deep still have snow on them, but it is a lot shallower than it was yesterday morning.

My truck is actually in my driveway, not sitting at the end of it, for the first time in two weeks. This is good: they are predicting snow for tonight and tomorrow.

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Wed, Jan 03, 2007

I Want a Tail

Posted at 7:52 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I think I want a proper tail. The prehensile kind that can grab things might be useful, but a nice long balancing tail like a cat's tail would be fine, and much more elegant than the current human butt design.

Tails might make clothing design a little trickier, of course. I was never quite happy with the ideas I came up with for the tailed characters in the Cherani world. But I have very little sense of fashion and the world's most boring wardrobe. Someone who actually pays attention to clothes design might come up with something interesting.

I slipped and fell on some ice while carrying some stuff in from the truck after shoveling snow on the day after Christmas. I don't think I would have fallen if humans had tails to balance with. Or maybe I would have fallen differently: at least I might not have cracked my tailbone, which is what I suspect happened.

As it is, I have spent the past ten days extremely aware of all of the muscles that are connected to the human tail bone. Standing up after sitting down for a while is... interesting. Standing up after kneeling down to do housework or add water to the Christmas tree requires something solid to hold on to, so that upper body muscles are used for the lifting instead of the tail muscles. And it is really surprising to discover how much the human tail is involved in carrying a full laundry basket.

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Tue, Jan 02, 2007

Status of the Weblog: 2006 - 2007

Posted at 10:30 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Hello. Welcome.

I know there are readers out there. Please feel free to make real (as opposed to spam) comments. And email me using the link at the upper left of the blog if the commenting mechanisms aren't working right.

According to the logs, the weblog was accessed in 2006 on 74 separate days by 150 users who weren't bots, out of a total of 491 userids. The number of 150 is probably a bit high: at least 2 of the users are me (with different access points for Boulder and Boston) and the filter doesn't quite recognize all of the bot varieties, and a couple of those userids were the spammers I was struggling with last month.

The number 491 is inflated by the fact that the Yahoo indexing bots use a gazillion different ip addresses, unlike the indexers for most other sites, which I tend to think is a little obnoxious and probably inefficient.

Two of the bots that are still included in the 150 are YodaoBot, which seems to be a Chinese indexer, and wadaino.jp-crawler which is Japanese. I think it's neat that my sites are being indexed all overt he world, but tend to wonder how useful my ramblings will be to non-English speakers.

Checking the logs for the January 1, and January 2 up to about 9:30 pm, I see 19 non-bot visits on the first, and 17 non-bot visits for the second (so far), spread out over 11 non-bot users.

This makes me very happy: I need an audience in order to write, and knowing there are people reading my stuff helps keep the writer's block away.

So Thank You All. And once again, welcome.

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Mon, Jan 01, 2007

Techlands: At the Gathering I

Posted at 11:35 pm MST to Creative Work

The next Techlands installment has been uploaded to the website at At the Gathering I.

Notes:

1. Rakkas' keywords are Turkish infinitive verbs and singular nouns. This should probably be fixed in a future draft.
2. The phrase "ominous hum" (or in the original, "omminous hummm") is a reference to "Schlock Mercenary", a webcomic about SF mercenaries by Howard Tayler.

Please post any comments or questions about the story as comments on this blog post.

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Happy New Year!

Posted at 4:32 pm MST to Current Events

The following is a public service announcement:

This is a new year! If you have a website or blog that displays copyright messages, please look at your copyright messages NOW.

Do you have recent material on web pages where the most recent date mentioned is, say, 2003? If so, your copyright notice may be doing more harm than good. (Besides looking dumb and driving nitpickers like me crazy.)

In any case, this should be "update your copyright template" week. Happy editing!

Thank you.

Best wishes for the New Year!

(Now I need to upload some edited templates and webpages before I post this.)

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