Teleidoscope

Wed, Feb 28, 2007

Swallowing

Posted at 11:28 pm MST to Miscellaneous

When most people take a bite of something and chew and swallow it, they can be reasonably certain that it will travel from mouth to stomach without undue delays or unpleasantness. I unfortunately do not have that luxury: my esophagus doesn't work quite right, and sometimes locks up while food is in transit. I think the mechanism that is designed to keep you from inhaling your food is also somewhat wonky.

This was very embarrassing last year when I was living in hotels and eating in restaurants almost full time. I spent a lot of time in restrooms trying to get my swallowing muscles unlocked. If I was less overweight people would probably have suspected that I am bulimic.

Back in September a gastroenterologist shoved a tube down my throat while I was sedated to look around and try to unkink things. I was very sore for a few days: the official report said that they had trouble putting in the tube and required "extra drugs and personnel" to get it past my gag reflex. (I have visions of large orderlies who were former jocks...)

The treatment was not completely effective, but at least the bad spells seem to have decreased from occurring several times per week to several times per month, which is a relief. And the spells seem to be a bit less severe when they do occur.

This week I have a slight sore throat, and my esophagus seems to be using that as an excuse to be annoyingly persnickety.

I've learned to be careful about what I try to eat, and to have cold liquids available, which sometimes shocks the muscles back into working. I've about given up on red meat. But sometimes it is hard to predict what will get stuck...I mean, honestly, ramen noodles? They're all skinny and slippery with broth, and it wasn't even a big clump of them that got locked up when the muscles spasmed yesterday.

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Tue, Feb 27, 2007

Weirdness

Posted at 11:41 pm MST to Current Events

Today is a day for reports about odd things. Jesus' grave. Lesbian koalas. Hunting deer with civil war cannons. Very peculiar.

There's a lunar eclipse this weekend, starting over Iran. I wonder if it's related to the apparent silly season. I hope no one uses it as an excuse to do something stupid.

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Mon, Feb 26, 2007

Recent Books

Posted at 11:52 pm MST to Media

People who know me well (or who have seen the inside of my house) will be shocked to hear that I have done comparatively little reading of actual dead-tree books since I came home from Boston. I have been spending so much time writing, and reading blogs and such on-line, that I have not been reading much hardcopy text.

That changed this past weekend. I got received my copy of Deliverer, the latest book in C.J Cherryh's Foreigner series, from the Science Fiction Book Club on Thursday and inhaled it in two evenings. Last spring, when volume 8 came out, I bought paperbacks of all the previous volumes and used them as airplane reading for a few weeks. I don't think I have time to re-read all three trilogies if I want to continue writing, but I may reread the current trilogy, now that the story arc is complete. The mixture of alien aliens, adventure and comedy of manners in these books is wonderful, but the small slices of politics and social complications that can fit into single volumes are a little frustrating.

By the time I finished "Deliverer" I was on a roll and pulled some of last month's arrivals off the to-be-read stack. Between supper time Thursday and bedtime Sunday, I read about 1600 pages of dead-tree fiction. I also read all my usual blogs and webcomics (though Groklaw is a bit light with PJ on vacation) and browsed a few linked sites, and watched a fair amount of TV (I can read books and watch TV in parallel as long as it isn't subtitled).

One nice thing about dead-tree editions is there's no download lag time. And book club omnibus editions are handy because they collect series that can be hard to find the separate pieces of, or haven't been around for a while.

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Sat, Feb 24, 2007

Kaze no Uta (Wind Song)

Posted at 7:09 pm MST to Creative Work

Winds howl down the heights:
Snow vanishes, ice bonds fade,
Frozen sleepers wake.
Chinook frees imprisoned lands,
Shaping mud back to the world.

[The classic Japanese poetic form is the tanka: 5 7 5 7 7, not the shorter haiku that was more recently derived from it.]

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Thu, Feb 22, 2007

I Have a Driveway

Posted at 5:34 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Mind you, it bears more than a passing resemblance to a hog-wallow at the moment. I have got to get it filled and re-graded this summer.

And the truck's skid plate left marks on the top of the remains of the drift near the dumpster.

But my truck is actually parked 10 steps from the front porch for the first time in what seems like forever.

They are predicting snow and wind for tomorrow, so the respite may be brief, but this is the first time in the month of February that the truck has been parked in its proper place. I need water softener salt pretty badly (and I can't carry 40 or 50 pound bags the length of the driveway) so I may go over to Home Depot early tomorrow while the weather is still good and stock up before the front moves in later in the day.

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Whole Foods and Wild Oats

Posted at 8:19 am MST to Current Events

It has been announced that Whole Foods is buying the Wild Oats grocry chain.

I have mixed feelings about this. I hope they don't close the store in Superior, where I do so much of my shopping.
On the other hand, I really prefer the Whole Foods mix of products. I have spent a fair amount of time being annoyed that my local Wild Oats does not carry something I know I would be able to get at the Whole Foods 10 miles away n central Boulder.

And the Boulder Whole Foods store has a great, well run, produce department (Hi, Bob.) Maybe the buyout will eventually result in some improvements in the store here.

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Giant Squid

Posted at 8:09 am MST to Current Events

A New Zealand fishing boat has caught a colossal squid (as opposed to a giant squid, which is a different species) and brought the (dead) creature back for scientific study. It's reported to be 10 meters (33 feet) long and 450 kilograms (990 pounds). That's a lot of squid.

It was caught and pulled up from the deep ocean because it was eating a fish caught by a fishing line.

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Wed, Feb 21, 2007

Cuisines

Posted at 11:04 pm MST to Technology

Most Europeans and North Americans have a genetic trait that limits their sensitivity to bitter flavors. People without the mutation are called. I'm fairly sure I'm one of the exceptions. I find most of the bitter flavors that are popular in modern American cuisine unbearable.

Beer. Bitter salad greens. American wines. Coffee (too bad it doesn't taste as good as it smells). Yuck. I suppose it keeps my overall alkaloid intake down despite the tea and chocolate.

Combine bitter-avoidance with moderate lactose intolerance, what seems to be a mild allergy to lettuce, and a serious allergy to moldy cheeses like brie and bleu, and eating out at trendy kinds of places gets really tricky.

When I do eat out my choices lean toward "ethnic" cuisines: Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, Indian (including Nepali and Tibetan which we have here), Mediterranean (Greek, Lebanese, Moroccan) or central or eastern European like the German place I ate at with my friend David last week.

There used to be a couple of good Russian places in the area, but the one in Boulder closed a few years ago and I don't know whether the one in Denver is still there. Mataam Fez, which was a wonderful Moroccan place, just recently closed after being a Boulder landmark for years.

My favorite Japanese restaurant is Mori, which is in the Nisei American Legion Post in Denver. (They do the weddings and such for the Japanese community.) They aren't likely to go out of business because the baseball stadium was built about 2 blocks from them and the whole area has taken off.

When I say Mexican, I mean Mexican, not Tex-Mex. Places where the recipes come from actual Mexican states, and there is something with mole on the menu. And the mole is edible.

I don't eat generally eat at Italian places in Colorado because that is more or less what I cook at home. When I'm living in hotels, I eat sometimes eat Italian restaurant food. There was one place in San Jose that was wonderful.

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Tue, Feb 20, 2007

Dry Wind

Posted at 11:42 pm MST to Miscellaneous

In the seasonal flow of permutations of wind and snow, we are now in a phase of warm, very dry chinook winds (leading up to the next predicted snow on Friday).

They are melting the snow and trying to dry out the morass of gluey mud that is theoretically my driveway.

They are also stirring up dust and doing nasty things to my sinuses. At least, at Colorado's altitude, I don't generally get full-blown migraines developing from my sinus headaches

I'm a little surprised that I didn't have worse problems with migraines when I was in Boston. Air conditioned bedrooms make a big difference, I think: I never slept in places that were air conditioned when I lived in New England before I first moved out here. And the only times I went anywhere noisy and crowded this past year in Boston were subway rides short enough not to trigger anything.

I think that Advil heads off migraines better than aspirin ever did in the old days, too, or even the prescription pain killers i was given. It won't stop a migraine that's fully arrived, but it seems to knock down the trigger if I catch it soon enough.

When I was in highschool my mother used to take me to 6 AM mass in the summer (the rest of the family went to church later) because I couldn't take the heat and crowding. I passed out once, when the family was still all attending at the same time, and my father pretty much dragged me out of the church to get me into the fresher air.

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Mon, Feb 19, 2007

Virgin Earth

Posted at 8:05 pm MST to Current Events

Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Group (Virgin Air and some British Rail Lines. I don't know if they still have th eVirgin MegaStores) has announced a $25 million prize, the "Vigin Earth Challenge", for a commercially viable method of removing green house gasses from the atmosphere.

He has also reportedly pledged $3 billion for the development of biofuels. And all of his air and rails profits for the next 10 years to address climate change. And he is pushing to improve air travel CO2 output by 25%.

I think that's called putting your money where your mouth is.

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Sun, Feb 18, 2007

Girl Scout Cookies

Posted at 10:40 pm MST to Miscellaneous

My business partner Shawn and his teenaged son Shane came over this afternoon and dug a slot through the Davidson Mesa glacier that my truck could fit through. It took them several hours of very hard work. The snow was so slushy the snowblower kept clogging and they did a lot of hand shovelling. I tried to help, but I kept having odd dizzy spells (I slept 12 hours last night which is very rare for me -- I hope I'm not coming down with something).

Once I was able to get the truck out to the main road, I went shopping. First Wild Oats, then SuperTarget for a few things Wild Oats doesn't carry, like non-virgin (promiscuous?) olive oil and powdered milk. I use Extra Virgin Olive Oil for some things, but prefer the Light Olive Oil for situations where I want oil but not the olive flavor. (The two varieties of olive oil is the only vegetable oil I keep in my kitchen.)

I also got some organic fruits and vegetables at SuperTarget rather than at Wild Oats, which is a little perverse since Wild Oats is a specialty and natural-foods grocer. But I've had bad luck with the produce at that Wild Oats store and generally good luck at SuperTarget for produce I want in smaller quantities than Costco sells. Today I was impressed by how much of SuperTarget's produce was labeled organic, possibly a reaction to being in the same shopping complex as Wild Oats.

SuperTarget was out of the particular style of Iams cat food that Dinah eats, so I looped over to the Petsmart store (also in the same complex), and arrived just as some Girl Scouts were packing up their cookies and card table, preparing to end their day of sales. I bought some Thin Mints out of the car.

I have sold Girl Scout Cookies myself. I was a Girl Scout in 4th through 6th grade, and even attended day camp one summer. I never earned many badges because I was compulsive about fulfilling all of the official requirements before I claimed a badge, and a lot of the requirements were really boring. (I have the distinct impression that many of my colleagues were less picky about filling the requirements before they claimed their badges.) A lot of the badges were really boring too.

I had my mother's old Girl Scout Handbook, and it had more interesting badges and badge requirements than the ones in my own Handbook. Actually, my being a Girl Scout was her idea, not mine. I'm too anti-social to do well in that sort of organized activity. I was more relieved than anything that there was no Troop available at the Seventh grade level.

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Sat, Feb 17, 2007

Historical Fiction

Posted at 8:32 pm MST to Media

James Nicoll's LiveJournal provided a link to some sets of 'rules' (i.e. really bad and inaccurate cliches) for various types of historical fiction. I think I 've read some of these.

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Fri, Feb 16, 2007

Monotony

Posted at 8:06 pm MST to Current Events

There's something just wrong about being bored by hundred mile per hours winds. But the way this winter has been going, with snow and snow and wind and snow and more wind and more snow and even more wind, I'm just getting tired of it to a point where it is hard to get excited.

This week, we didn't get anything to serious in the way of snow: I shoveled the path from the house to the truck down to bare dirt in about half an hour at lunch time yesterday. So it was the wind's turn to get serious.

Last night a wind gust was clocked at more than 100 miles per hour at Rocky Flats, which is a few miles south of here, and one was clocked at about 80 miles an hour down the hill in Boulder a few miles north of here. And a lot of skiers and ski areas are unhappy because I-70 from Denver into the mountains in closed on the Friday before a 3-day weekend.

Some of my weariness today may be because the wind was noisy and shaking the house all last night. It makes it hard to sleep soundly.

I'm just glad the serious wind didn't start until about 9:30 last night. I had dinner with an old friend and got safely home a little while before the weather got rambunctious. It was the first time since Christmas that I got out of the house for something that was neither work-related nor emergency shopping. And it was great seeing David, and the food (at a German reataurant called Golden Europe) was excellent.

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Thu, Feb 15, 2007

More Kitchen Toys

Posted at 5:28 pm MST to Technology

When I ventured out to Costco last week, I arrived just when the pharmacy closed for lunch, so I had to hang out for a while waiting for them. This is always dangerous.

In addition to my meds and groceries, I ended up buying some kitchen equipment. (I've been watching Food Network a lot lately. Also dangerous. 'Good Eats' is on about 15 times a week.)

I got a computerized "smart" rice cooker out of geek curiosity, to see whether it can handle the altitude any better than the old ones. The lower boiling point of water here at 6000 feet makes cooking rice a little tricky.

And I got a serious metal mandoline slicer. My little plastic one can go into the travel kitchen supplies permanently, now.

This weekend I need to figure out some menus that will require a lot of slicing, and probably some rice. Then I need to shop for the ingredients so that I will have something to slice.

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Wed, Feb 14, 2007

A Cell Phone Battery Dying ...

Posted at 8:09 pm MST to Technology

Is nature's way of telling you your conference call has been going on too long. I didn't pay attention: I called back in using my land line. The combined call was 3 and a half hours.

At least it was a productive meeting. And attending the meeting in my own living room was more comfortable than sitting in a conference room.

This has been a good winter to be working from home. It has been snowing again intermittently for the past day or so, though it was sunny for a little while this afternoon. It's just a few inches of fluffy accumulation (so far), so it shouldn't be too much of a problem unless the wind picks up and rebuilds the drifts.

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Tue, Feb 13, 2007

Plain Text Script

Posted at 10:32 pm MST to Code

I've joined Critters, a writers' on-line workshop and critiquing group that has a good reputation. I read a lot of blogs by writers, professional editors and such. I saw Critters mentioned several places before I visited the site.

The deal is that if I critique other people's stories, at least one a week, three weeks out of four on the average, when I have a complete story I can have it put into the queue and lots of other people will critique it.

The kicker is that submissions need to be plain text, and the Techlands stories don't exist in plain text. They are typed and revised directly in xhtml-transitional format, using a text editor that leaves all of the tags visible and can validate the formatting.

I don't mind HTML tags... before I found my niche in Configuration Management I worked on bug fixes, new features and technical support for an SGML editor. HTML tags and entities make sense to me: no worse than extra punctuation (though a little bulkier) at least when dealing with something that doesn't involve complex tables.

The editor was written in C and ran on both Windows and OS/2. That job was where I was introduced to OS/2, which I ran on my home machines for several years, until general software and device drivers were too hard to find, and Linux became available.

Where most people write text and then need to wrap it in HTML tags (often using various tools to do it), I've been writing HTML and needed a tool to clean out the tags. So my latest non-work-related coding has been a Perl tool to strip and translate the tags and put the resulting text into a reasonable plain-text format, with hard linefeeds inside the paragraphs, blank lines between paragraphs, etc.

I threw in a wordcount routine while I was at it. Two of them, actually: one count is actual words -- as in pieces of text with white-space on each side -- and the other is closer to the standard word count that publishers use: character count divided by 6.

I'm not generating manuscript submission format, yet. The Critters style is a bit different and aimed a bit more to on-line rather than hardcopy readers. But if or when I want to generate submission format from HTML, this provides a base to work from.

The truly geeky way to do the reformatting would probably be to generate an alternate printing CSS format for the HTML that would make it print out in the standard format. Maybe I'll eventually use that as a project to seriously learn CSS. I want to pick up the new 3rd edition of CSS: The Definitive Guide from O'Reilly, first, though.

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Mon, Feb 12, 2007

Another Blogoverse Meme

Posted at 4:17 pm MST to Miscellaneous

World Leader Quiz

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Sun, Feb 11, 2007

Power Outage

Posted at 1:34 pm MST to Technology

In the past several weeks we have had snow, blizzards, gale force winds, fog, and every kind of bad weather. My lights didn't even blink.

This morning was a bright, sunny morning with no wind. My power went out a few minutes after 10AM. I called it in to the automated line, which estimated 4 hours to fix. Fortunately, the power came back on in less than an hour.

When I lived down in the city of Boulder instead of up here on the ridge I had lots of power outages. They have been quite rare since I moved up here, especially in the winter. In the summer we get a lot of thunderstorms and the lightning sometimes takes out the power. But I am well supplied just in case.

I have gas heat, but modern heating systems all need electricity. This isn't a huge problem even if the power goes out in cold weather as long as I am home: I have a woodstove in the livingroom. It will keep things comfortable there, and keep the rest of the house warm enough that the pipes don't break, as long as I keep the fire tended.

I bought a new cord of wood about a year ago, and I have lots of long-snouted lighters. I also have lots of candles, oil lamps, and a fair stock of lamp oil.

My water comes from a well with an electric pump, but it has huge amounts of minerals in it, so I stock bottled water that I use for drinking and cooking.

I have occasionally considered putting solar panels on the roof, or getting an emergency generator: I'm enough of a geek that power interruptions are enormously frustrating, and the furnace and water-pump make a nice excuse.
There are government subsidies available to cover about half the cost of solar.

I may look into some of the newer solar systems, I've read on-line that the costs are dropping and the efficiency has improved a lot in the past few years.

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Sat, Feb 10, 2007

I Have a Road (Sort Of)

Posted at 3:53 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Feb 10 2007 22:51 GMT

I made a run to Costco this afternoon. When I got back I examined the snow it what should be the road leading to my driveway, and the drifts at the end of my neighbor's driveway. There was a gap between the drifts and his new split rail fence that I thought the truck could fit through, and the snow on the road seemed slushy, and shallow enough the I wouldn't high-center.

After I unloaded some of my groceries and schlepped them the length of my driveway to the house, I drove out and back without detouring through my neighbor's driveway for the first time in several weeks.

And I parked my truck, nose out, in what is technically my own driveway, not the road. It's at the very end of the driveway: there is still a drift farther in that is 20 inches deep where the snowblowered foot-path goes through it.

Of course, all of the melting snow is also causing problems. We have had morning fog three days in a row because there is so much moisture in the air and it freezes down over night. On Thursday, the fog was so dense that a woman gave birth in a vehicle on the side of the highway because they missed the exit for the hospital.

The melting snow has also turned my 'gravel' driveway (which is mostly clay) to slippery, gluey mud. Schlepping the groceries up the driveway to the house was annoying. The footing was bad and the mud kept trying to pull my boots off my feet. This summer I'll need to put in a load of stone chips and roadbase and get it graded. It's just as well that I didn't spend the money to do it last summer: the conditions this winter would be ripping it to pieces.

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Sourdough

Posted at 11:26 am MST to Technology

I will be baking later today or tomorrow, so my jug of sourdough starter is sitting out on the kitchen counter, warming up to room temperature for its feeding. My culture is derived from one supplied by the King Arthur Flour Baker's Catalog.

It's actually the second culture I've had from that source: I managed to let the previous one starve while I was travelling. Before that I used a homemade starter for a while, but it didn't rise well: I don't think I ended up with a good strain of yeast, and I think the non-yeast bacteria were too aggressive, so it tended to get unbalanced and funky easily.

The King Arthur starter rises nicely and seems to be fairly stable. This culture even migrated to Boston and back with me and survived well. And I think having a New England derived starter works well for my palate, since I grew up in the east.

I think part of what killed off the previous batch was that I tried to migrate it over to living on wholewheat flour instead of All-Purpose. I think that unbalanced things. And even though I was using white wholewheat flour, not the usual darker 'red' stuff, the starter turned hideous: sort of dark and muddy looking, with dark gray hooch collecting on top. Not appetizing. Maybe useful for a movie special effect, though.

I do like the White WholeWheat flour in bread, but I include it in the main recipe, not the starter culture. Plain flour based starter can be used in more different recipes, too.

And King Arthur flour definitely works better than the big supermarket brands. I first encountered it at Whole Foods, but now it is available even at the many of the big general supermarkets. I still sometimes need to get the White WholeWheat at Whole Foods or Wild Oats, but since Wild Oats is my nearest grocery store these days, that's no longer a problem. They even have 100% Organic White WholeWheat now.

I don't really use a written recipe when I make bread any more. My bread is about a cup each of water and starter, some salt, a little olive oil, and add flour (plain and whole wheat) until the texture is right. It's nice to be able to use the Kitchenaid to do the combining, now that I'm home again. Then knead it a little by hand, set it to rise until double, knead it again to punch it down and shape it, let it rise again and bake.

My sourdough pancake/waffle recipe is based on one from a book about Sourdough I got at the supermarket years ago when I first started playing with starter. (I've cut the quantities to 1 egg's worth.)

Sourdough pancakes or Waffles

Dry
1 1/4 cups flour
2 tsp Bakng powder (1.5ish at Boulder's altitude)
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

Wet
1 cup starter
1 cup milk (3/4 cup for waffles)
3 Tbsp vegetable oil
1 egg
1 Tbsp sugar

Stir dry together. Stir wet together. Add wet to dry. Blend until just moistened.
Cook.

I'm going to try waffling with the George Foreman grill again this weekend: last week's experiment result was ... edible. But I used a mix I had in the cupboard, not my sourdough recipe.

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Fri, Feb 09, 2007

Scripting languages

Posted at 9:14 pm MST to Code

My normal working language is perl. I've used it for more than a decade, and I can make it jump through hoops.

Before I switched to perl, I did most of my scripting in korn shell, including some large and complicated scripts. I can still remember when I translated one to perl for the first time and it sped up emormously because I was able to store arrays in memory.

I'm currently working with some large scripts (one is 2500 lines) written in cshell which is not considered optimal for scripting, though it is a good interactive shell. I need to pull the functionality into korn shell scripts on the front end scripts and perl on the server side.

I am putting as much functionality as possible into the backend script because I have been spoiled by the power of perl, and I think that if they want more pulled back into the front end it will be easier for me to translate from perl to korn shell than from cshell directly to korn shell.

One of the things that's driving me nuts trying to write korn shell again it the fact that it is fussy about white space in a way that perl is not. It's coming back fairly quickly, but my fingers need to remember the syntax.

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Thu, Feb 08, 2007

Credit Union Follow-up

Posted at 6:00 pm MST to Technology

I pasted a copy of my previous Credit Union related post into an email and sent it to their contact address. Talking about them behind their back wouldn't give them a chance to fix things.

Today I got a phone call from an account manager at Bellco, who apologized for the mess with my credit card account and assured me they would try to improve. Note that I am now providing a link to their site.

We discussed a number of aspects of the site, including the credit card company's new security measures involving little pictures, which seem to be a case of security theater: something done for the sake of doing something, not because it is effective. Frankly I have additional doubts about the system: when I tried to configure it, it would NOT allow me to select anything but the default image. So I have no limited defense against a phishing site that can find out what the default image is.

Another financial site authentication method I encountered is also very lame. (It may have been the same bozo credit card site.) You have to select five questions to answer from specific groups of questions that they provide. The questions are not designed for childless spinsters with deceased parents and various other outlier characteristics. I suspect that if I ever need to re-authenticate at that site, I am doomed. A site that asks for Mother's maiden name should not also insist on a value with more than 3 characters. And there was at least one question where all but one of the options would have needed "Not Applicable" as an honest answer (which I didn't think to try at the time).

Security theater. Feh.

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Wed, Feb 07, 2007

Oven-cooked Bacon

Posted at 8:56 pm MST to Technology

I tried Alton Brown's bacon cooking method, where you put the bacon on a rack on a sheet pan in a cold oven. Set the thermostat to 400 degree Fahrenheit, turn on the oven and let it heat. The bacon is supposed to be ready in 12 to 15 minutes, and stay flat instead of crinkling up.

The bacon came out nice and flat, but I don't think it rendered well, and many of the drops of bacon fat on the sheet pan scorched. It also took a lot longer than it should have...

If I try it again I will take my pizza stone out of the oven first. I think it slowed the heating of the oven too much.

I may also think about looking at a new stove. The kitchen in the apartment in Boston was pretty useless, but it had a very nice high-tech oven, and I think I got spoiled. Digital temperature settings. Fancy timers. Heated fast and kept a fairly steady temperature (it cycled often for small amount of time each cycle, which is a good sign). When I set it to preheat and it reached the set temperature, it beeped.

Of course, it's been weeks since I or anyone else was able to drive into my driveway. Nothing large is going to be delivered any time soon: the bottled water guy wimped out yesterday, but I don't blame him a bit since the drifts are still pretty silly and his truck is heavy.

Actually, I need to get my truck in for repairs before I think about any other expenses. The front end has occasionally been making horrible noises when it is in 4-wheel drive, and I've been using 4-wheel drive a lot. I need to find a mechanic: it's been ages since I needed anything other than routine maintenance I can get done at Jiffy-Lube.

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Tue, Feb 06, 2007

RealClimate

Posted at 9:08 pm MST to Technology

There is a blog run by serious climatologists called www.realclimate.org which is currently discussing the IPCC report on global warming and its detractors. I think I found it from links in several of the blogs I read.

I need to page back through their older postings. Partly to try to make sense of this truly appalling winter (We've just had two very warm days, so the snowdrifts in my yard are shrinking. I haven't checked to see whether they are shrinking into my basement. It's too depressing.) And partly because I want data about near future climate and sealevels for the Techlands story background.

I should be thinking more about future politics for Techlands, but harder sciences are more congenial than people ones for me.

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Mon, Feb 05, 2007

Techlands: At the Gathering III

Posted at 10:35 pm MST to Creative Work

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

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

I have also added a picture to the Techlands homepage, more or less in honor of Rakkas, although he is not exactly a horse.

This is an alabaster Zuni Horse fetish with turquoise eyes. The artist is Hubert Pincion, who is unusual in using only hand tools in carving his fetishes.

This photo is a little out of focus: the original statue is only about 3 inches tall, and it's hard to photograph something that small with my camera. I plan to experiment with different camera settings and eventually replace this with a better picture.

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Sabertoothed Kitties

Posted at 7:43 pm MST to Technology

There is a show about sabertooths on the Science channel this evening. One of the odd things about saberteeth is that they have happened a number of times independently in feline evolution (so they are obviously useful), and scientists are having so much trouble figuring out what they were for and how they were used.

I think it would be neat if someone bred little mini-sabertoothed-kitties. They are breeding cats with wild-cat fur patterns these days (some of the breeds have wild species genes, some are pure Felis domesticus carefully selected) and saberteeth should be possible too.

I had a cat who had the beginnings of saberteeth: she was dark gray and the white fang-tips sticking down when her mouth was closed were clearly visible. She was an outdoor cat that came in for a few years. She went out one summer evening and never came back. I suspect a coyote got her.

During the first few years I owned this house, there was a farm next door, and some of the farm cats colonized my yard. I used to put out food and water for them and watch out the windows, like observing a little pride of lions. I could tell when there was a hawk around because the cats would duck and hide. And once when the mama cat had a litter she was teaching to hunt, she hauled a small snake the length of my long driveway for them to practice hunting with.

I don't think the sabertoothed kitty was one of the farm cats them because she had been neutered, and she understood English like a housecat (the farm-cat clan didn't: one of the things I learned from them that surprised me). She might have been an abandoned pet, I suppose, but that would be very cruel... my little neighborhood is very isolated (by the standards of something the size of a cat) and there are a LOT of predators around. Outdoor cats don't last very long without shelter and, probably, dogs.

If someone found a few un-neutered alley-cats with little sabers like my kitty had, it should be possible to breed little sabertooths. It might be really interesting to see what, and how, they hunt. A wild bunny might be the equivalent scale prey for a sabertoothed kitty that a bison was for a smilodon.

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Sat, Feb 03, 2007

Snow and Wind

Posted at 11:30 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Below the cut, I am putting two pictures I took this week out from my porch and windows. The first one shows the snow in my yard and the path after Thursday's snow had fallen but before the wind kicked up.

The second one shows the path after a couple of hours of wind yesterday. That swirly thing in the hollow is a horizontal vortex in the snow. It went away over night.

Fair warning: they are each between 400,00 and 500,00 bytes.

See more ...

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Fri, Feb 02, 2007

Credit Union and Credit card Security Department Bozos!

Posted at 8:36 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I am NOT linking to the Bellco websites because I don't want to steer anyone toward them. Quite the contrary, at the moment.

Last week when I was in California I spent a few hundred dollars at Fry's on Tuesday evening and put it on my Bellco Visa, which had a zero balance and has a fairly high limit. I couldn't buy a new car with it, maybe a halfway decent used car: I have very good credit

On Thursday or Friday morning I got a call (at 7am California time) asking whether I had made the purchase. I told them the amount and location of the transaction before they told me, and said that I was in California on business. I was annoyed by the timing of the call, but my cell phone has a Colorado number so they didn't know how early it was for me. And I figured they were doing their job.

Today I tried to charge $30 to clear a bill that was messed up -- I think the post office may have eaten the bill when I was in Boston and having my mail forwarded. The card was declined, locked as suspected lost or stolen. It took 3 phone calls to and a lot of time on hold to get it unlocked. Coming after the phone the previous week, I found it seriously annoying.

A little later, I went to check my credit card account online. They added some really mickey-mouse 'security' procedures to the login process a month or so ago, but I don't think that is the problem. The site says my account doesn't have access to the service, which is interesting given that I have been using that website to get check my statements and pay my bill while traveling for several years. When I called about that, they said that my card was definitely unlocked and there was no reason the site should not be working for me. 6 hours later, the site is still not working.

I have really, really good credit: I could buy an SUV with a bunch of options with the credit limit on one of my other cards. I am sure there are plenty of companies that would be glad to give me a card. Maybe I should sign up for one associated with a charity I like, or an organization I belong to. I wouldn't even need to worry about rolling the balance, since the Fry's charge is basically all that's on the card.

I wouldn't bother with a Visa at all, but the banks make sure you can't survive on the road without a Visa or MasterCard. I prefer AMEX and Discover, and I have never had problems using either of them while travelling I wish I had used one of them last week.

If I have to pay the Bellco Visa bill by check, that will definitely be the last Visa payment they get from me.

Maybe I should look for a different credit union. I've been a Bellco customer for more than 20 years, and I have to say, in recent years I think they have developed a habit of being incompetent in ways that harass and raise costs for their credit customers. I paid off my car and refinanced my mortgages away from them because they were being 'incompetent' and charging me fees because of their failure to process their own paperwork correctly.

I absolutely will never finance another car through Bellco because of their repeated (mis-)handling of the car insurance paperwork for the loan the last time.

I've been spammed (snail-mail) by other Credit Unions lately, I should look into one of them. There's a CU about 3 miles from me, instead of 30 minutes for the nearest Bellco office. I wonder if I qualify as a member, and what their online banking site is like.

Maybe I'm getting cranky from being snowed in so much (60 mph winds today: the path is drifted shut again). But things like online credit card payments are what make being snowed in for weeks (and spending half off my life on the road) less of a hassle.

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Thu, Feb 01, 2007

Browsers and Blogs

Posted at 8:54 pm MST to Technology

I've discovered that my usual browsing is missing a lot. My business partner Shawn has created a blog Shawn's Weblog and I have discovered that it looks very different in Konqueror (my usual browser) and Firefox.

Some of what I'm missing is Flash, which isn't supported for AMD64 Linux, but I'm not really sure what settings are filtering the ads and other widgets Shawn has installed. I should probably experiment -- some of the settings might also what makes my bank dislike Konqueror and work ok with Firefox.

Mind you, I'm not sure I really miss seeing advertisements on websites.

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