Teleidoscope

Wed, Dec 31, 2008

Roundabout

Posted at 5:49 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I hate traffic rotaries, roundabouts and other traffic control devices that depend on people knowing how to merge properly and understanding the concept of yielding.

This afternoon I went out to get my mail and pick up a few things in the Costco shopping center, which has a roundabout instead of a 4-way stop at an intersection in the middle of the parking lots. I encountered someone who did not understand that the vehicle in the roundabout is not supposed to stop to let others enter.

One advantage of driving a pickup is that the bumpers are actually designed to bump: I came out of the accident with a scuffed bumper. The other vehicle ended up fairly crunched.

And the other driver, who started out claiming that I hit her, got a ticket.

Cell phones are really handy in these situations. I called 911 and my insurance company from the accident site. And I did NOT move my vehicle from where it came to rest until a sheriff's deputy had seen exactly where the accident occurred.

Not the greatest way to end the year...

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Tue, Dec 30, 2008

Wind Speed Chart

Posted at 9:04 am MST to Weather

I have found a site with the weather from NCAR. This should be a close match to conditions at my house, since there is nothing but a few miles of empty air between us.

The wind speed chart for the past 24 hours looked like this at 9 am:

The peak gust shown is over 70 mph.

If my house was an airplane, the 'Fasten seatbelt' sign would have been on for the past 12 hours. Needless to say, I did not sleep well.

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Mon, Dec 29, 2008

HD Radio

Posted at 5:58 pm MST to Technology

My Christmas techie toy is a new clock radio.

My brothers joined together to get me an HD clock radio for Christmas. It has a separate second speaker for true stereo, good deep bass, up to two alarm settings, and digital tuning and station presets.

This is great: my favorite station, KBCO is at 97.3 and there is a Christian station at 97.5 that grabs analog tuners and tries really hard to interfere even with digital FM, but they don't have HD. My existing cheap clock-radio is annoying and tinny (it cost about $15 several years ago when I was in Boston or Minneapolis in corp housing) and hard to change the settings on. But it has digital tuning, and I found after the Christian channel started up that I could not use my other clock radio that has better sound and get the station I wanted reliably.

The new radio has controls that make sense: I won't need to google for the user's manual every time we go into or out of daylight savings time.

KBCO also has an HD side-channel that has won awards as the best in the country -- it plays all live performances from the station's 'Studio C' programs. And the local public FM station has its classical music feed on a side channnel, too.

I should probably test the AM NPR channels: AM HD with digital tuning might be clear enough to be worth adding to the presets. One problem with being on this ridge is that I have line of sight to so many stations that I get all kinds of strange interference. And which stations get interfered with vary a lot with weather consditions.

I haven't tried recently, but I used to be able to pick up the over-the-air CBS TV station in Cheyenne Wyoming just using half-way decent rabbit ears.

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Sun, Dec 28, 2008

Unknown Host

Posted at 11:11 am MST to Technology

Weird. I'm getting 'unknown host' errors for a random bunch of internet addresses this morning. And some of the sites that are accessible are not loading correctly. I wonder what is wrong with the net.

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Capri Mac

Posted at 11:11 am MST to Technology

Goat Macaroni and Cheese

4 T oil
4+ T flour
8 oz elbow noodles
2 cups goat milk
1/2 package Chevrie
1 1/2 cup grated goat cheddar
1/ tsp powdered mustard
salt 
pepper
bread crumbs

Preheat oven to 400 F. Spray baking dish with PAM.

Cook noodles al dente.

While noodles are cooking, mix oil and flour until there are no lumps over low heat, then add milk, cheeses and flavorings. Raise heat to medium high and cook, stirring constantly, until mixture begins to thicken.

Put the noodles into the baking dish. Add the cheese sauce and stir through to let the air out of the noodles. Top with bread crumbs and bake until the bread crumbs are dark and crunchy. (Time depends on shape of baking dish.)

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Thu, Dec 25, 2008

Roast Beast

Posted at 6:00 pm MST to Technology

I cooked my fancy buffalo raost using a variant on an Alton Brown recipe.

Let the roast come to room temperature. Mix salt and pepper in a flat dish and roll the roast in it so that it is coated all over. (Alton's recipe also used ground cumin.)

Put olive oil in a large cast iron skillet and heat it very hot. Brown the roast all over, 2 minutes on each side. As much as possible, use fresh, hot parts of the skillet for each new side.

Set the roast aside to cool for 15 minutes. Preheat oven to 250.

Insert the remote probe of a meat thermometer and set the tempalarm for 135. Place the cooled roast on the roasting rack and place it in the oven.

When the alarm sounds, remove from the oven and put it on a plat or cutting board and cover it fairly tightly with aluminum foil. Let rest at least 20 minutes before cutting.

The meat came out an even dark pink all the way through, except for the very outer crust. There was no grey at all in the meat. It was tender and juicy and amazing.

I didn't try to make gravy because only a few drops of juice leaked out during the cooking: it stayed inside the roast. A little more leaked out while the roast was resting, but still not enough to make gravy from.

While the roast rested, I roasted some fingerling potatoes and sauteed some fresh mushrooms.

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Wed, Dec 24, 2008

Rosemary Tree

Posted at 4:50 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I went down to Whole Foods yesterday to restock on produce to accompany my Christmas roast (buffalo top sirloin). They have been selling 18 inch 'Christmas trees' in 6 inch pots that are actually dense rosemary plants sheared into pinetree shapes.

I decided to get one. I have had no luck with house plants since I moved to Colorado years ago: it is very hard to keep them from drying out too much in this climate, especially in a house woth forced-air heat. But the little rosemary trees are only 10 dollars, and they charge 3 dollars for a little package of a couple of sprigs of fresh rosemary.

If I harvest some rosemary for cooking a few times before I manage to kill the plant, and then save the dried branches, too, I think I will at least be breaking even.

And it is possible that starting with a dense plant with lots of branches instead of a seedling will make the plant harder to kill. I should probably try to get one of those automatic plant-watering siphons...or one of those dry-soil alarms. I would really like to have some houseplants that lasted for a while. Herbs for cooking -- which wouldn't be a problem if the cat tries to nibble them -- especially.

I wonder if I could turn my old fish tank into an herb terrarium? Google is our friend...

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Tue, Dec 23, 2008

Yule 2008

Posted at 2:52 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I made my stollen for the year and took it to Nanette's Sunday evening. Some of our other friends -- Galen, Jann and Susan -- were also able to attend. It was a very nice evening. Jann left at a sensible hour, but the rest of us stayed up talking until well past our bedtimes.

I have been having stollen for breakfast and snacks for the past couple of days. I am beginning to figure out how I could have had food allergies for years without realizing that was what was causing my problems. At the time that I eat something I am sensitive to I don't get an immediate reaction. But over the course of a couple of hours the sore throat and cough develops, and then, if I stay away from other irritants, subsides.

If I eat something else I'm sensitive to before things settle down, the symptoms will continue or -- hours after I ate whatever it was -- get worse.

I never figured out that I was having food allergies because the symptoms were not closely associated with meals.

A little margarine (which contains whey) on plain toasted bread does not seems to cause a serious reaction.

The holiday bread I made last week had eggs, but not margarine in it. It was a little iffy, especially when I toasted it and put margarine on it, but it did not seem to give me swallowing problems or coughing fits.

The stollen contains eggs and margarine all through it. It does seem to cause coughing (but I'm still experimenting carefully.)

I'm also wondering if part of the reason goat cheese is a little disappointing is that I was used to a 'kick' from cow's milk cheeses that was actually the allergic reaction.

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Madoff

Posted at 2:25 pm MST to Current Events

Crap.

I just got an email from the ACLU. Two foundations that had pledged massive (a combined amount of 850,000.00) support for the ACLU for 2009 have been wiped out by the unravelling of the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. That money is gone.

So the ACLU is taking a major hit even though they weren't the ones who were careless or duped. They are asking for contributions to help make up the shortfall.

I've already finished my budgeted charitable giving for the 2008, but I may send them some money after the first of the year. I'm going to try to spread my charitable giving out through the year better than I have in the past, so less of it hits right at the same time as Christmas shopping.

Maybe I'll make the ACLU one of the first 'charities of the month' for 2009. I think Obama is less slimy than most politicians, but with the wars and the economy I think it will be easy for the powers that be in Washington to let the recent constitutional abuses continue unless someone continues to make a fuss about the problems.

I wonder if any of my other charities got hit by Madoff's shenanigans.

I just hate it when people who have been dealing in good faith get screwed.

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Sat, Dec 20, 2008

Balance 2008

Posted at 5:37 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Kind of battening down the hatches and taking stock given the state of the economy. The company sent out the last paystub of the year early because they are switching over to email delivery of paystubs and wanted to test it, so I was able to do some calculations.

Net decrease in loan principal balances for the year, including credit cards and mortgage, was just over 25% of my gross pay and just under 40% of net pay. Total remaining non-mortgage debt is about equal to the decrease in non-mortgage debt this year.

Charitable giving was 10% of net, so about half my net pay went to debt reduction and charity. (Planned Parenthood and Energy Outreach Colorado need to be added to the list of charities for the year.)

Minimal monthly runrate, cutting most charities and with minimum loan and mortgage payments, is slightly less than one paycheck per month.

Non-retirement savings is about 6 months of runrate. Lower than I would really prefer in this economy. But I'm expecting a large tax refund (I'm just adjusting my W-4 this week), which I think I will add to savings rather than paying down loans as I had previously planned -- having an extended emergency buffer is worth the difference in interest between the savings accounts and the credit card accounts.

Savings CD rates are low at the moment, but I get good rates on my credit cards because I have pristine credit. (I just took advantage of a link from one of my credit unions to get annual free copies of my credit reports, and there were no surprises.) My highest rated card is below 14% and most of my balances are at 10% or below (some is way below: I migrated some to a 2% balance transfer rate a couple of months ago). And I just realized I need to switch which Visa card I use by default for online purchases and such: the card from the backup credit union has a rate that's 3 points lower than the card from my primary credit union. Everything above 10% will be paid off by the end of January.

The mortgage is a 15 year loan at a low rate. Refinancing again wouldn't make sense unless the rates get down below 4.5 % with low fees.

I think my hatches are pretty well battened down.

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Fri, Dec 19, 2008

Cat Language

Posted at 8:14 am MST to Miscellaneous

Dinah has a bunch of different meows. She is part Siamese and has a very loud voice when she is upset, but her normal voice is quieter.

The "I want my breakfast" meow is a loud "MRAA" with a lot of stridence.

The "Oh boy, catnip" meow when she sees me taking the catnip out of the cupboard is a softer "Meow" without stridence.

"Give me a treat" is a quieter "MRAA" with less stridence, when I am opening a can of tuna or chicken or salmon and she wants the juice. She never eats any little bits of meat that may be in it.

The "I am a mighty huntress and I have a mouse" meow is a multisyllabic meow with a long trill in it.

"Where are you?" is loud but not strident, repeated, and the syllables have a rising tone.

"I don't want to move" is a sharp "mrr" with stridence.

I have been giving her little bits of turkey as I work my way through the leftovers from Thanksgiving. I was surprised she would eat it: the only other thing I've found that she would eat besides dry catfood and mice is bacon. Maybe she likes the flavor added by the brining. I think turkey must count as honorary mice: I noticed yesterday that her "Give me some of that turkey" meow is a combination of the "I want my breakfast" MRAA with the trill that annouces mice.

Or the trill may have something to do with sharing food.

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Thu, Dec 18, 2008

Tree

Posted at 3:00 pm MST to Weather

The weather monday and Tuesday was bitterly cold, and they are predicting snow this evening and tomorrow and more bitter cold for the weekend. I ran out an hour ago to get my mail and finally buy my Christmas tree, and I seem to have timed it just right. I had dry roads, but now, half an hour after I put the tree into its stand, it is snowing pretty determinedly.

I bought my tree (a 6 foot Colorado Balsam) from the Big M Janitorial lot, where I have been getting my trees for years. I think they have their own tree farm: the trees have always been very fresh and held their needles well.

They seem to have a lot of trees left considering it is less than a week until Christmas. Last year I bought my tree earlier and the lot was more picked over: either I'm not the only one running late, or people aren't buying trees.

The weather this December has been unusually cold and snowy, though so far it is the mountains that are getting hammered. I hope we're not in for another winter like two years ago, when I had 5 foot drifts across my driveway for months.

I'm glad I decided not to get a ticket for the Revels show: if Sunday is as cold as they predict, I am not going to want to go out.

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Tue, Dec 16, 2008

Charities 2008

Posted at 1:22 pm MST to Current Events

It's amazing how difficult some charities still make it to donate.

Rocky Mountain Revels puts on a very nice show of holiday music, and I donated to them last year. But they don't seem to take donations on their website, and I don't think I will be attending the show this year, so I won't get a donation envelope. Looks like they are out of luck.

I've added some addtional charities this year, and changed amounts to give more locally. This year's list so far is below. I recommend any or all of them.

• United Way
• Wesleyan University Alumni Fund
• Boulder Philharmonic
• Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF)
• Free Software Foundation (FSF)
• The Heifer Project
• Habitat for Humanity
• Amnesty International
• ACLU
• Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres
• Alzheimer's Association There was a fund drive in honor of Terry Pratchett this spring
• The Women's Bean Project (and I love their 10 Bean Soup)
• Denver Art Museum
• Denver Zoo
• Denver Museum of Nature and Science
• (Boulder) Community FoodShare
• (Boulder) Boulder Shelter for the Homeless

I am trying to tithe my net pay, which is a hefty amount of donations, so I end up on the charity hot-prospect lists and I get letters from every charity imaginable. I set some of the letters aside for further investigation and I'll be reviewing some of them since I haven't reached my goal yet this year. There was one microbank (like Heifer project but for businesses other than livestock raising) that looked interesting if they seem reputable after I google them. And the right wing has been attacking Planned Parenthood's funding in various ways. I'd like one more local charity that actually helps people, too. There's a fund to help Colorado people heat their houses this winter that might be a candidate.

I will not be giving to the Salvation Army -- their national organization has been being stupid about gays again this year, after showing signs of improvement since the bad days of the early AIDS epidemic. They have a right to follow their own beliefs, and I have a right to not give my money to an organization with a history of being bigots. Maybe I'll give some money to the Boulder County Aids Project instead.

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Mon, Dec 15, 2008

New Holiday Bread

Posted at 8:04 pm MST to Technology

No dairy, but I can have eggs now (I'll see how it goes. I used brown sugar to add back some flavor, since the oil has ver little compared to butter.

1 cup well-fed (not too sour) sourdough starter
1 1/2 tsp pickling salt
1/2 tsp fiori di sicilia
1/2 tsp vanilla
2/3 cup light brown sugar
1/3 cup light olive oil
3 eggs
raisins
fruitcake fruit
orange and lemon peel
all purpose flour

Dredge raisins and fruit in flour before adding to the dough.

First rise in the mixing bowl.

Second rise in the ceramic pandoro pan.

1. minutes at 350, lower heat to 300 and cook another 45 minutes or until it reaches a temp of 190+ in the center. I am pleased: it rose well and the outside didn't burn despite the long baking time.

Let it rest 15 minutes in the pan, then turn out onto the cooling rack to finish cooling. Sprinkle with powdered sugar. It came out of the pan nicely -- I used PAM for Baking.

Tastes good. It will be good for breakfasts and snacks, maybe with some strawberry or apricot preserves thinned with a little water, nuked, and drizzled on.

Real pandoro would have butter, and more eggs, and longer, slower rises.

I love the bread proofing feature of the new oven: I keep the house fairly cold and sourdough rises slower than commercial yeast, so the rises took forever took forever.

In related news, the shipping fees for the broiler pan set from Whirlpool have finally hit my credit card, so it appears that the pan and racks have reached this continent, at least. I should plan to broil or roast something for Christmas dinner, to celebrate.

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Sun, Dec 14, 2008

Wrapping

Posted at 7:21 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Note to self: Borders has nice boxes of holiday cards at buy 2 get one free EVERY YEAR. I do not need 3 boxes of Christmas cards a year. I still have many of the cards I bought last year, in addition to the ones I got this year, and writing this year's cards will not use them up. Try to remember to skip buying cards next year.

On the other hand, having refilliable tape dispensers in the wrapping paper box doesn't do much good unless you actually buy some tape refills. I'll buy some tomorrow when I ship out the packages I wrapped today (just barely enough tape) so I have tape towrap things for the local people. I should also check my crate of traveling office stuff: I may have more tape in there, unless

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Slow Boat

Posted at 1:30 pm MST to Miscellaneous

(written 11/29, the day after Thanksgiving, but didn't upload properly)

I spent today celebrating National Clean the Kitchen Day. I really need more counter space for dealing with a project as big as a turkey. Cleaning up starts loooking like a Towers of Hanoi algorithm: in order to get at anything I need to move three other things, and then move them someplace else to get at what they were stacked on.

I also called Kitchenaid about the broiler pan and roasting rack set I ordered in September. They said it was still backordered.

One of 5000 sets that are backordered... I wonder if the reason the oven came with a coupon instead of a broiler pan and rack was because they were out of stock and delaying their order for the pans and racks. In any case, someone is obviously not handling the JIT ordering properly. Being out of stock on things at the start of the holiday buying season is stupid, never mind having 5000 units backordered.

They said they are expecting a delivery next week, so I assume there is a shipping container of broiler pan sets somewhere between here and China.

The customer service rep said I could track the order on their website, but the site apparently does not include rebate department orders. And the rebate department is not answering their phone today because of the holiday weekend.

I'm having pasta with red sauce for supper. Turkey for dinner and supper yesterday and lunch today is enough.

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Finance Files

Posted at 1:29 pm MST to Miscellaneous

This is weird. Most years I am eager to get out the Christmas ornaments and do the baking and wrap stuff. And I love listening to Christmas music. This year, except for the Christmas music, I can't get in the mood.

Yesterday I found myself reorganizing kitchen cupboards and the pantry instead of wrapping the presents that MUST ship tomorrow.

And I stayed up until 5 am working on tidying my (online) financial files. (And then didn't sleep long or well, so now I have no energy for wrapping...) There was always one more little thing to tweak.

It's a sad day when housework and bookkeeping are used to procrastinate about doing Christmas stuff.

It isn't even current bookkeeping: the stuff from the past year or two is in pretty good shape. But it is hard to see it, because I have about 95% of my data since 1992 online (with data for some accounts going back to 1990), including data from long-closed credit cards, old mortgages and car loans, etc. And some of the older data is a bit messy in part because I have used GnuCash for the past few years, and used Quicken before that.

GnuCash enforces something a lot closer to proper double entry bookkeeping than Quicken requires. I had already been doing extra double-entryish work in Quicken. (Before Quicken I used a spreadsheet/database product from Borland to do my own semi-double-entry account tracking, and I kind of imported the system into Quicken.) So the import was fairly clean, but there were missing balance values that Quicken hadn't caught, and some of the ways GnuCash adjusted things just look weird to me.

I have created some folders called Closed Credit Cards, Closed Liabilities, Closed Investments (for the 401Ks I just rolled over), etc. I moved old, inactive accounts with zero balances into the various Closed folders so they won't clutter up the top level Accounts list. I also cleaned up some redundant accounts that had been generated during the import because of typos and inconsistencies that Quicken didn't care about.

Then I started figuring out why some old, inactive accounts that should have zero balances didn't. The redundant accounts were a big part of that, but some of the data entry had also gone squirrelly during the years I was traveling and stressed out. Some things that should be transfers ended up as redundant entries, and some statements for less active accounts never got properly entered.

Now that I have noticed these discrepancies, it will give me some incentive to attack my project of cleaning up my hardcopy files to get things to actually balance.

There is one redundant account that I made by mistake which needs to have some paperwork checked to figure out where its single entry should really be transferring from.

There is an account 'Unspecified' that GnuCash generated during the import that needs to have its entries moved to the proper accounts (I took care of most of them last night, but the remaining entries need research.)

There is an account Imbalance-USD that results from changing values in splits that aren't updated when, for example, I didn't (or couldn't) accurately record how much of a car payment went to interest vs principle.

There is an account Retained Earnings that needs to be scrutinized. Some of the values in it are because my financial life started before the earliest values in the online files. Some of the values are just GnuCash guessing wrong about things during the import, or not being able to tell that the asset that balances a car loan liability is a car (so there are two opposed records in the Retained Earnings account). Some records are Retained Earnings of zero created when new accounts are created, which I find annoying clutter and will probably nuke.

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Sat, Dec 13, 2008

Lack of Progress

Posted at 4:17 pm MST to Miscellaneous

This has been a slow week.

I finally have the server all the way back up: vmware would not run on fully updated Fedora 9 earlier in the week but today I loaded some new updates and it started working again.

Christmas shopping was very annoying. The malls were full but the stores were very poorly stocked. I have finally finished offline shopping, but I still need to wrap everything. I'll ship things out on Monday. I had hoped to ship today, but didn't find everything in time to get it wrapped... I think the UPS Store closes early on Saturday, too.

On Wednesday our company had our holiday dinner at Texas de Brazil, a Brazilian style Churrascaria, which mostly serves vast quantities and varieties of grilled meats. I can eat meat, and so can Shawn, who is currently doing Atkins. The food was delicious: beef and pork and lamb and chicken and sausage.

On Thursday, we sponsored the local IBM Rational Users' Group meeting. Another late evening with lots of food. I risked allergies a little, eating a roll and a couple of Christmas cookies, but I avoided the cheese, and the dips that probably all contained dairy. I need to experiment with mayonnaise some time when I am not pushing my luck woth other things.

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Fri, Dec 05, 2008

Hard Drive Hell

Posted at 3:56 pm MST to Technology

Two of the new hard drives in quadriga (my big server that I just upgraded with new drives) died over the long weekend. I've been working on reconfiguring things and restoring the data from the 1 Tbyte backup drive. And learning a lot about RAIDs and LVMs. sigh.

I'll have to arrange to get them returned and replaced. And then reconfigure everything again to a 5-drive RAID 10+spare instead of the 3-drive RAID 1+spare I'm using at the moment.

I also need to make sure my ISP's spam filter doesn't block the status emails from the server: after things failed, I discovered that the server had been trying to send me emails warning that the drives were dying.

Yesterday, one of our servers at the office failed. I went over to the office to see if I could get it back up, and found another drive failure.

Shawn is working on recovering data from the drives of the failing system while I am reformatting and running bad-blocks checks on the 500 Gig drives I took out of my server, so they can be used at the office.

One of those drives was definitely getting bad block errors before I got the new drives, but all 4 of them reformatted. I hope the e2fsck -c -f commands that I am running will either identify the bad drives or make it usable if the bad blocks are localized enough.

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Tue, Dec 02, 2008

Oh, Canada!

Posted at 12:56 pm MST to Current Events

There are 4 parties and a couple of independent representatives in the Canadian Parliament. They just had a federal election a few weeks ago, and in the aftermath the Conservative Prime Minister announced some policies that were considered overly heavy-handed (and in some cases outrageous) for a party that had about 30 percent of the electorate, not an outright majority.

The other parties have gotten together and are forming a coalition government composed of everybody else (give or take the couple of independents): representatives of more than 60 % of the Canadian population.

Th Conservatives are calling it a 'coup' even though it is a perfectly proper process in the parliamentary system. But the Canadian Conservatives seem to have a lot in common with the Republicans in terms of stupidity, arrogance, economic obliviousness and a willingness to play fast and loose with the Constitution (which is what drove three parties that don't much like each other to make common cause).

The Governor General is returning from a trip outside the country. If she doesn't go along with the Conservatives who want to torpedo the change of government, the Conservative regime will have lasted a record-setting 3 weeks from election to dissolution.

Th ability to throw the bums out in short order seems very attractive after the last 8 years.

And their election process lasted a couple of months, not a couple of years.

But it may be interesting watching the Liberals, New Democratic Party and Parti Quebecois trying to cooperate.

If nothing else, some of these guys have style: at one point while the coalition was still just rumors, former Prime Minister Jan Chretien (NDP) answered a reporter's questions "Je ne comprends pas anglais".

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Sat, Nov 29, 2008

Experiment

Posted at 4:11 pm MST to Technology

Today I had toast for breakfast, spread with Fleischman's original margarine. It tastes and behaves much better than the Spectrum spread I have been using, and I don't seem to be reacting badly to it. Like the ricotta cheese that I didn't react to in September, real margarine is made from the whey, not the curds.

'I Can't Believe It's Not Butter' has buttermilk, which I know I am allergic to -- I spotted that reaction last spring even before the official allergy tests. But it looks like actual margarine, like egg yolks, may be in the 'don't over-do it' category.

It looks like I will be able to make my stollen this Christmas and eat some of it.

I found some goats'-milk butter at Whole Foods, but it is very pricey. I'll try some tomorrow to see if it very different in flavor. The label says European style, so it is cultured butter, not American-style sweet cream butter. That may make a difference in recipes.

An advertisement a few days ago said that Hellman's/Best Foods Real Mayonnaise is made with 3 main ingredients: eggs, oil, and vinegar. I've never been much of a mayo fan, but I suppose that can go into the "small amounts Used with care' category too.

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Thu, Nov 27, 2008

Turkey Followup

Posted at 8:09 pm MST to Technology

The turkey came out nice and juicy, with a crispy brown skin, but this recipe really needs a wide flat pan, not the oval speckleware roaster I used. I also need to drop the starting temp to 450 or decrease the time (I had already dropped it from what the Alton recommended, but this oven runs fast because of the convection fan). Maybe the same temp for 20 minutes, then check it? Or Wrap the wing tips.

Also add water to the drippings more often during the slow phase so they won't try to burn as much.

I need to complain to Kitchenaid because they haven't sent the broiler pan and roasting rack that go with the oven. I'll do that tomorrow, when there should be sales people available to answer the phones.

Now everything is in the fridge except the carcass, which is in the slow cooker being rendered down for stock. A 14-ish pound turkey carcass just fits into the slowcooker once the limbs and big chunks of meat are removed and the skeleton is broken into two chinks at the waist. The stock should come out clearer than other years usual, because it won't have remnants of stuffing in it.

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Thanksgiving 08

Posted at 10:08 am MST to Technology

I'm trying Altn Brown's recipe (more or less) for roasted brined turkey. So I started yesterday.

Brine



In about a quart of water, 

heat the following to a full boil 



3/4 cup kosher salt

1/2 cup light brown sugar

Tb black peppercorns

1/2 Tb  allspice berries
Tb candied ginger




cool to room temp

then refrigerate

When I was ready to brine the turkey, late yesterday evening, I rinsed the turkey thoroughly (and removed and reserved the neck and giblet bag) and carefully slid it into a 2.5 gallon ziplock bag in my 12 quart stock pot. It just barely fit into the bag, and stuck out a little above the top of the pot. If the turkey was any bigger I would have needed to use a canning kettle, invest in a custom turkey brining bag, and chill it somewhere other than the fridge. As it was, I removed one half-shelf from the fridge and the pot fit in there nicely (those split shelves are really handy in situations like this).

I added 2 quarts of vegetable broth, the chilled brine-spice mixture and about another quart of water, which is all the bag would hold. A little squirted out when I zipped the bag shut: there was just one small bubble of air in the bag.

Early in the morning, I put the neck in a saucepan of water an began simmering it to make broth.

I rough chopped 3 stalks of celery and half a medium-large onion and added them to a hot skillet with a couple of tablespoons of extra-light olive oil and 1/2 pound of breakfast sausage, broken into chunks. When the celery and onion were starting to soften I added the organ meats, cut up small.

While the sausage/giblet mixture was cooking down I experimented with goat cheese stuffed celery. I used Chevrie, which is not quite the right replacement for a recipe originally designed for cream cheese or Neuchatel. It turned too drippy when the Worchestershire sauce and sliced green olives were added: I need to try a stiffer cheese next time. But my breakfast was a couple of stalks of stuffed celery and a sandwich of the olive/cheese misture between two slices of toast, so my Thanksgiving custom has been upheld despite the new dietary restrictions.

When the sausage giblet mixture was thoroughly cooked, I stirred in some fresh ground black pepper and poultry seasoning and ran it through the food grinder attachment of my Kitchenaid into a bowl of torn up bread -- about half a loaf of 100% whole wheat (no malt!). I wiped out the skillet with a slice of the bread and ran that through the grinder at after the meat and veggies, followed by a slice or two of just bread. That's the best way to make sure all of the good stuff is out of the grinder.

I poured the broth from the turkey neck into the stuffing bowl and began tasting. Added salt, more pepper, and more poultry seasoning, and a dash of ground allspice to tie it to the flavor of the brined turkey, and a little plain water to get the texture right. If I were cooking the stuffing inside the turkey I would have made it last night, so I would be putting cold stuffing into a cold bird, but I am following Alton's advice and cooking it separately as a dressing.

I will put Alton's aromatics inside the bird.

Aromatics



cinnamon stick
red apple sliced

1/2 onion, sliced
cup water



heat on high in microwave 5 minutes

Then add to the cavity with 4 sprigs of rosemary and some sage. Rub outside of turkey with oil and roast on rack in a shallow pan in 475 degree oven for 30 minutes.

Remove from oven, insert probe thermometer into deepest past of breast and cover breast with double layer of aluminum foil. Set thermometer alarm for 161 degrees and return turkey to 325 degree oven. Should take about 2 to 2.5 hours roasting time. After an hour, put the casserole dish of sausage-giblet dressing in the oven too.

Other stuff I will be eating: sauteed carrots, roasted potatoes, squash, boiled onions. Mulled cider.

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Wed, Nov 26, 2008

KRDC

Posted at 1:03 pm MST to Technology

Cool.

KDE, my preferred desktop environment on Linux, now has an application, KRDC, that can be a client for multiple remote VNC and RBP(Windows Remote Desktop) connections.

This will make life much easier when I am working with the various virtual machines on my laptop and server.

I think I need to adjust the monitor settings for the server, though. The old ViewSonic monitor in the study (which is going to last forever because I use it so rarely) needs to be set to 96 dpi unless I want to use a magnifying glass, but the setting needs to be 75 or 60 for the VNC text and images to not be huge when they show up on the remote screen.

To set up VNC server on Fedora/RedHat machines I set VNCSERVERS and VNCSERVERARGS values in /etc/sysconfig/vncservers. I don't think VNCSERVERARGS has a dpi setting, but Google is not being cooperative.

To get kde in the VNC clients, I use a ~/.vnc/xstartup that ends with

startkde &

instead of the deafult

twm &

.
Some machines need to have the full path of startkde.

I need to do a little digging in the config files of the various virtual machines: I'm not sure why the Centos 5 image video is acting different from the RHEL image video. Probably something in the X11 settings is different. Fortunately, since Centos and RHEL are almost identical, I can probably make the RHEL behavior match Centos (which is much more cooperative at the moment) by copying some settings over.

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Mon, Nov 24, 2008

Restoring

Posted at 11:30 am MST to Technology

Man! The initial sync of a big RAID array takes FOR EV ER. But It finally finished and before I went to bed early this morning I had the OS fully updated and the /data and /home partitions restored from the external drive.

My backup routine includes dumping the full list of installed packages to a file (rpms or dpkgs, depending on the flavor of Linux) so I was able to determine which packages I needed to add to the installation to get closer to my original configuration. This doesn't include major applications like clearcase and vmware that were installed using other mechanisms, but it helps me remember packages like apcupsd (which lets the server communicate with the UPS).

I don't want to trample my clean install with the aftermath of a fairly rocky upgrade, so I won't be doing a full direct restore of root and etc. But I have all the old config files saved, so I can recover specific configuration information.

It's nice to be working from a full backup, which I don't usually bother with. When I just do a /home and /data backup (the more usual case) I copy /etc to /home/etc_sav before doing the main backup, so I don't lose all the settings.

On the laptop, I have the vmware virtual machines under /home/vmware, and /var/www is softlinked from /home/www, so everything that can be backed up usefully is in or copied to the one partition. While I'm restoring the server, I'm going to relocate a few things to /home and /data to consolidate things that need to be backed up (like the vmware virtual machines) away from things I don't want stepped on during a restore (like the logs and other debugging info in /var).

Stuff to do today:

restore the configs for the following:
   apcupsd
   dnsmasq (including /etc/hosts)
   networking (fixed IPs instead of the DHCP from the install)
   mysql?
   vnc
   GUI login screens (I prefer KDM, and like to have root able to log in directly)
restore data from backup
   www
   vmware
   clearcase
   mysql?
reinstall and reconfigure
   clearcase
   vmware

I'm really glad that the external drive has a firewire connection, not just the slower USB.

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Sun, Nov 23, 2008

New Drive Setup

Posted at 6:23 pm MST to Technology

I had forgotten how well-designed the interior of the server case is. There are two drive cages for 3.5 inch drives that came out smoothly so I could unmount the old drives from them and install the new drives.

I think I'm beginning to understand what happened to the old drives, and why I had problems booting after the update.

Three of the old drives had similar partitioning, but one had an additional partiton for swap space. I am quite certain I would have put swap on the first drive (sda) when I installed, but after the upgrade from FC7 to FC8 and 9, the drive with swap space was sdb. The boot failed until I reinstalled grub into the new sda.

Then one of the drives started to fail. I suspect that may have been the old sda drive: anaconda may have moved it to sdb because it was responding more slowly to the configuration tool.

When I first powered up the server with the new drives, it could only see 4 of them: 1 in the upper drive cage and three in the lower drive cage. When I rechecked the power connections, it turned out that the plastic shroud around one of the power connectors I was using in the lower drive cage was broken, so the leads weren't making a solid connection. Switching to a different power connector brought all of the drives up.

It is possible the drive was failing because its power had gone flakey. We'll need to test the old drives before we install them into the office servers: it is possible they are all usable provided they have clean power.

The old configuration was 3 drives in the lower chamber drive cage, using 3 SATA connectors on a single power cable, with one hard drive and a DVD-RAM drive in the upper chamber on a different power cable.

I had a power-to-dual-SATA power splitter (I think it came with the motherboard, actually) that is long enough to give me power for two additional drives in the lower chamber. So the new configuration has 4 drives in the lower drive cage (filling it) using two different power cables, and 1 in the upper chamber in the 3.5 inch cage, with the DVD still in the 5.5 inch cage. The motherboard supports 6 SATAs, so with 5 DHs and the DVD, that is now maxed out.

In researching Linux soft RAID, I learned that you need to wait for the RAID to fully sync after the first boot before you do anything else.

Then

grub-install /dev/md0

should prep all of the physical drives to be fully bootable in case sda fails.

The new disk configuration is

/dev/md0 RAID1 /boot (/dev/sd*1) 100 meg each
swap (/dev/sd*2) 1 gig each, not raided
/dev/md1 RAID10 LVMGroup00 (/dev/sd*3)

/dev/sde1 and /dev/sde3 are the RAID hot spares

LVG00:
root  /      10%
home  /home  20%
var   /var   20%
data  /data  50%

Once everything is stable I give low priority to the swap on /dev/sde2 so it won't be accessed except in emergencies. I set the other 4 swap spaces to equal priority:

# /dev/sda2
UUID=             swap    swap      pri=2        0       0
# /dev/sdb2
UUID=             swap    swap      pri=2        0       0
# /dev/sdc2
UUID=             swap    swap      pri=2        0       0
# /dev/sdd2
UUID=             swap    swap      pri=2        0       0
# /dev/sde2
UUID=             swap    swap      pri=1        0       0

(Updated to fix fstab syntax: it was wrongin the article I copied from.)

Then I set all the drives to spin down after 15 minutes of inactivity to save power and wear on the drives. The spare should be hardly ever be spun up.

Note: use

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid

to determine which partition goes with which UUID in the fstab.

# hdparm -S 180 /dev/[sh]d[a-z]

and add the command to the end of /etc/rc.d/rc.local so it will happen on every reboot.

And once I get the OS updated and configured I need to make sure any RAID or drive failure notices (from SMARTD) get forwarded to my regular email address.

I also need to create a couple of mount points for external drives: one for the firewire Tbyte drive and at least one for a thumb drive or other miscellaneous drive.

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New Drive Setup

Posted at 1:42 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I had forgotten how well-designed the interior of the server case is. There are two drive cages for 3.5 inch drives that came out smoothly so I could unmount the old drives from them and install the new drives.

I think I'm beginning to understand what happened to the old drives, and why I had problems booting after the update.

Three of the old drives had similar partitioning, but one had an additional partiton for swap space. I am quite certain I would have put swap on the first drive (sda) when I installed, but after the upgrade from FC7 to FC8 and 9, the drive with swap space was sdb. The boot failed until I reinstalled grub into the new sda.

Then one of the drives started to fail. I suspect that may have been the old sda drive: anaconda may have moved it to sdb because it was responding more slowly to the configuration tool.

When I first powered up the server with the new drives, it could only see 4 of them: 1 in the upper drive cage and three in the lower drive cage. When I rechecked the power connections, it turned out that the plastic shroud around one of the power connectors I was using in the lower drive cage was broken, so the leads weren't making a solid connection. Switching to a different power connector brought all of the drives up.

It is possible the drive was failing because its power had gone flakey. We'll need to test the old drives before we install them into the office servers: it is possible they are all usable provided they have clean power.

The old configuration was 3 drives in the lower chamber drive cage, using 3 SATA connectors on a single power cable, with one hard drive and a DVD-RAM drive in the upper chamber on a different power cable.

I had a power-to-dual-SATA power splitter (I think it came with the motherboard, actually) that is long enough to give me power for two additional drives in the lower chamber. So the new configuration has 4 drives in the lower drive cage (filling it) using two different power cables, and 1 in the upper chamber in the 3.5 inch cage, with the DVD still in the 5.5 inch cage. The motherboard supports 6 SATAs, so with 5 DHs and the DVD, that is now maxed out.

In researching Linux soft RAID, I learned that you need to wait for the RAID to fully sync after the first boot before you do anything else.

Then

grub-install /dev/md0

should prep all of the physical drives to be fully bootable in case sda fails.

The new disk configuration is

/dev/md0 RAID1 /boot (/dev/sd*1) 100 meg each
swap (/dev/sd*2) 1 gig each, not raided
/dev/md1 RAID10 LVMGroup00 (/dev/sd*3)

/dev/sde1 and /dev/sde3 are the RAID hot spares

LVG00:
root  /      10%
home  /home  20%
var   /var   20%
data  /data  50%

Once everything is stable I give low priority to the swap on /dev/sde2 so it won't be accessed except in emergencies. I set the other 4 swap spaces to equal priority:

# /dev/sda2
UUID= pri=1            swap    sw              0       0
# /dev/sdb2
UUID= pri=1            swap    sw              0       0
# /dev/sdc2
UUID= pri=1            swap    sw              0       0
# /dev/sdd2
UUID= pri=1            swap    sw              0       0
# /dev/sde2
UUID= pri=2            swap    sw              0       0

The I set all the drives to spin down after 15 minutes of inactivity to save power and wear on the drives. The spare should be hardly ever be spun up.

Note: use

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid

to determine which partition goes with which UUID in the fstab.

# hdparm -S 180 /dev/[sh]d[a-z]

and add the command to the end of /etc/rc.d/rc.local so it will happen on every reboot.

And once I get the OS updated and configured I need to make sure any RAID or drive failure notices (from SMARTD) get forwarded to my regular email address.

I also need to create a couple of mount points for external drives: one for the firewire Tbyte drive and at least one for a thumb drive or other miscellaneous drive.

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Sat, Nov 22, 2008

Sub 2 Dollar Gas

Posted at 1:03 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I ran some errands at the big box stores before settling down to work on the server. I needed printer ink and label-maker tape from Office Max, and while I have the server open I might as well use some canned air to clean the dust off the CPU-cooler fins.

Costco has Foster Farms turkeys -- fresh and minimally processed -- for 87 cents/pound and they even had a couple of small ones left. I got a 14.8 pounder. Now I need to figure out if I want to try brining it. And what to have with it. I've got a business meeting Wednesday afternoon, so I can pick up any ingredients I'm missing on the way home. No eggnog this year -- raw egg might be pushing it and I think goat's milk would make it taste funny. Maybe I'll mull some cider instead.

Costco Gas had gas under 2 dollars even for Premium. Regular unleaded was 1.769. I can't remember the last time I paid so little for gas. This is good for people in the East who heat their houses with fuel oil: fuel prices this winter should be a lot more reasonable than people were predicting even a couple of months ago.

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ETFs and Stocks

Posted at 12:33 am MST to Miscellaneous

The money from my old IRAs and 401Ks is now all consolidated and invested. We went for a 60/40 split between stocks and cash&bonds, but actually most of the cash and bonds money is going into a 6 month CD. Hopefully the bond markets will be more stable by the time it matures, 4 months into the new presidency: the current bond market is pretty horrible.

My new stock holdings are a mix of individual stocks and funds, including ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds) which are supposed to be a more flexible kind of mutual fund. I like funds because they let me invest in areas I think should do well in the future (like 'clean energy' or 'biotech and genome') without having to guess which specific company in the area is most likely to take off (or least likely to fail). I don't have enough money to invest to get as much diversity as I'd like without using funds.

On the down side, investing in funds means I now have small positions in some companies I would really rather avoid, like Microsoft. But at least I don't directly own Microsoft stock. They may be able to change course and reinvent themselves as ethical and competent software creators but I haven't seen any signs of it yet. And there are signs that the monopolistis super-tanker is heading for the rocks.

I'm not a day-trader: I expect to hold the stocks I buy for months or years, so when choosing between stocks that seem to be good buys, I prefer to spend my money on stocks that I feel glad about owning.

I do own Apple directly now, in addition to what is in the funds. Also Cisco and AT&T, and the shares of McKesson I acquired via the employee stock purchase plan from when I worked for the company they eventually bought. And I have invested in RedHat (at about 100 points less than its price at the peak of the dot-com bubble, but that's why I could afford to buy some) and a company that makes silicon wafers for chips and photovoltaics (WFR), and in stocks from a few other small companies. There are advantages to buying in a week when the market has been bottoming out.

I did not buy gold: it is too expensive and it feels too much like speculation as opposed to investing. Companies do things (admittedly often stupid things, but not always), gold just sits there. It is overvalued for an industrial material, and I don't think the people who flee to it as a hedge realize that its value other than as a material is as arbitrary as the value of paper money or the electrons in a bank computer. Unless you actually have the physical gold buried in your backyard or where ever, you are just playing market games with something that can't even be productive.

I did not buy XCel, because I can't see directly owning a company that can't process a change-of-address in nine years.

I did not buy VMWare: I like their products, but the virtualization market has gone squirrelly in the past year or two and I want to see it shake out a little before I put money into that niche.

I did not buy Archer Daniel Midlands directly (I think it is included in one of the funds). I don't think I need to be more strongly associated with drowning the country in corn and soybeans.

As a food stock I bought HainCelestial (organic foods and tea), which sells stuff I buy and is more or less a local stock. My transportation stock is UNFI, a company which hauls organic food to supermarkets. And my heavy industrial/infrastructure stock is a company that makes cranes for building bridges and things.

My holdings are tech heavy -- forward-looking tech, I hope -- because tech is what I know, and light on financials because no one sane is doing fresh investing in financials until things stabilize. At this point I'm going to leave things alone at least until after the holidays and the inauguration, and probably until that CD matures in May

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Thu, Nov 20, 2008

New Drives

Posted at 12:37 pm MST to Technology

The new drives just arrived. I'm letting them come up to room temperature and evaporate any condensation(it's very cold and damp out today) before I install them. But it looks like I know what I will be doing this evening...

In the meantime, I need to review some docs on how to set up RAID10 with a hot spare and auto-notification of failures.

The drives were shipped yesterday from Memphis, by way of Rockford, Illinois. Newegg just didn't inform me that they had shipped until this morning.

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Wed, Nov 19, 2008

Feh

Posted at 11:57 pm MST to Technology

Having the server down seems to have made my whole test environment go squirrelly.

The Newegg order has not shipped yet.

The registration on my astraltrading.com domain is screwed up because my ISP's spam filter ate the renewal notices from Domain Direct. And they have raised their prices. A lot, considering that I am using a minimal service from them. Or their renewal process is rigged to force me into a different, higher priced service than I used to have. I renewed for one year while I decide whether to find another registrar.

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Tue, Nov 18, 2008

Raid Drives

Posted at 9:40 am MST to Technology

The Raid arrays in the server have been working fine for a week, but now I think there is a problem on one of the physical drives. The /var partition is on an LVM partition on top of a RAID 10 built on sections of four drives, and one of them is reporting hard errors.

The other partitions on the same drives seem to be OK for the moment, and I backed everything up to the external terabyte drive Sunday evening, so I'm not actually missing any data. But The server won't boot without a functional /var.

I have one more SATA controller slot available in the server, so I should be able to build a hot spare into the arrays, then pull out and replace the drive that is failing. (I may need a SATA power splitter cable to get power to the additional drive.) That assumes that I can figure out which of the current physical drives is the one that is failing, which can be a little tricky.

It looks like Newegg has 1.5.Terabyte Samsung drives for $150 ($100/Terabyte!!) with free shipping. I think I need to order 5 of them to get a full RAID-plus-hot-spare configuration for the future.

When they arrive, I'll need to decide whether to try rebuilding the arrays in place, which would give me a mixed array of 3 small and two larger drives once the dying one is identified and replaced. Since I have a very current full backup it might be simpler and quicker to swap out all of the drives and set up clean partitions when I reload the operating system, then restore from the backup.

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Fri, Nov 14, 2008

First Snow 2008

Posted at 7:26 am MST to Weather

There is snow on the ground this morning. The high country is getting hammered, but down here it's just enough to whiten the grass and make the morning commute a mess. Not enough, unfortunately, to give us any appreciable moisture.

They are predicting a warm weekend and a high of 70 on Tuesday.

I thought I saw a little snow on the ground Wednesday evening, but a chinook came in and by yesterday morning everything had dried out.

Including my sinuses. This is the second day of a sinus headache which is getting annoying.

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Thu, Nov 13, 2008

Long Term Care Insurance

Posted at 7:08 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Lots of future planning these past few weeks.

My parents died young, but in general I come from long-lived families. My grandmothers died at 93 and 98, after years in nursing homes, and my aunts are 80 and 84 and still going strong, but starting to fade a bit.

I've been getting offers of information about long term care insurance from credit unions and professional organizations, and finally decided that I should see about getting some insurance while I'm young and healthy enough to get decent rates. I sent in one of the credit union cards last month and spoke to an insurance agent a few weeks ago.

Today he came back with word that I was accepted for the John Hancock plan I had applied for. He said the application went through faster than he had ever seen.

So now I am making what are effectively monthly pre-payments for future long term care. The coverage compounds to cover future inflation.

The money from T. Rowe Price finally came in -- a lot less than there was when we first asked them for it. I need to check the mailbox, too, in case the money from the IBM 401K has arrived from Fidelity.

And our company is looking at 401K plans again. We haven't had one for a few years because we got to a point where the management fees were too high and the number of employees we had involved were too few. I'll need to coordinate my 401K selections with Tom, the broker who is helping me manage the IRA money.

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Temple

Posted at 6:34 pm MST to Current Events

By way of Slashdot and Smithsonian: archaeologists have found a huge 11000 year old temple site in Turkey. That means it was built before there was writing or cities or most agriculture.

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Planet Pictures

Posted at 6:14 pm MST to Current Events

Wow. Scientists have taken pictures of planets in two different solar systems.

They have a picture from Hubble of a single planet about 4 times as far from Fomalhaut as Neptune is from the Sun. Fomalhaut is 25 light years from here.

They also have a picture from one of the big infrared telescopes of TWO planets orbiting HR8799, which is 130 light years from earth. (A third planet has been located in that system.)

Somebody needs to start giving planets we actually have pictures of better names than Fomalhaut B and HR8799b and HR8799c.

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Mon, Nov 10, 2008

Investment Companies

Posted at 5:30 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I'm still working on consolidating management of my various IRAa and 401Ks under one account at RBC Wealth Management, where I will have an actual live broker, Tom Fitzgerald (Hi, Tom) helping me keep track of things and make decisions.

Of the consolidations:

My primary credit union, Bellco was good about transferring the money promptly from my IRA account. They even transfered the money directly to RBC so I didn't have to deal with carrying the check over to Tom's office. I still have some money in a CD there which might as well stay there until the certificate matures.

I had two accounts with Fidelity.

The 401K/IRA money from when I worked for Access Health, which was acquired by McKesson, was rolled over promptly. (I had to drive the check over to Tom's office when I received it, though.) And the stock certificate for the stock I bought through the Employee Stock Purchase Plan arrived while I was in Boston, so I was able take that to Tom this afternoon. I don't think I've ever held the actual stock certificate for stock I owned before.

The 401K money from Unidata had ended up as an IBM 401K after a series of mergers. I must have done a good job of picking the funds I invested in, and Fidelity did a good job of taking care of my money: I lost track of that money for several years during some of the mergers, but there is a lot of money there. The transfer was delayed for a couple of weeks while they changed the account to my house's new (since 1999) address because I hadn't noticed that the notices from the IBM 401K were still using the old address. But they seem to be processing things promptly now.

Unlike the companies that have been cooperative and professional about handling the rollovers, T. Rowe Price has been a total pain. We faxed in copies of the signed request forms in mid-October, but first they wanted requests for each individual fund, and now they are saying they never received the signed document. They said they had no record of receiving the fax we re-sent this afternoon an hour and a half after it was sent. And they take FOREVER to answer their phones. They seem to be very understaffed. Not a comforting situation. I'll be very happy to get my money out of there. I'm beginning to wonder if the foot-dragging is due to more than incompetence and understaffing. Unfortunately, it's the single biggest chunk of my money. Fotunately, it is not the majority of my money.

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Without Bread

Posted at 8:20 am MST to Miscellaneous

Home again. It's good to be home with my own bed and my own stuff. And the oven, which didn't want to work last Tuesday, seems to be fine now. I'll be able to make bread later. I'm hungry for bread after 5 days when I mostly couldn't risk eating it.

The tree surgeon came while I was gone and cleaned the dead and broken branches out of my trees. They look very nice, and should be less prone to breakage this winter. I suspect they will do well next growing season, too, especially the big tree near my bedroom, which now has a lot less top to be supported by the same root mass.

It was nice seeing my family -- Aunt Bev will be 80 next birthday and Aunt Irma and Uncle Tom will be 84 and 85, so I really need to get back to see them more often. Uncle Tom is a bit shaky these days, but he looks very good. Especially considering that he is an 85 year old man who fell off a roof two years ago.

My brother Larry and his family are also doing well. Larry will be a department head next year, so he will be teaching fewer classes and attending more meetings. They are planning to build their retirement/vacation home probably beginning sometime after the first of the year. (Larry is younger than me. Yikes.)

It felt like I was eating constantly on this trip, but I think it was just that I was paying so much attention to food. My weight is just up about a pound, and my body-fat percentage is down about a point and a half, which suggests the gain is muscle or water.

I was careful at the buffets at the conference, avoiding all baked goods for fear of malt and selecting other items carefully. I did eat eggs -- even scrambled eggs -- without any problems, which is going to make life a lot easier.

I think I really don't eat that much when I am on my own. Both of the actual restaurant meals I ate seemed HUGE, and the meals my sister-in-law served me seemed adequate or almost too much, though she worried I wasn't getting enough to eat.

I ate 4 meals at Irma and Tom's and barely managed to keep them from being huge: Irma hardly eats anything herself, but she follows the family tradition and serves huge portions to everyone else, and starts offering snacks 10 minutes after a huge meal. There are advantages to being allergic to most commercial baked goods...

When we used to go over to Nonna's (Irma's mother) we would always fill up on her wonderful soup or pasta, and then when we said we were too full for the meat course, she would say "Eat it without bread." I was eating without bread this weekend.

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Thu, Nov 06, 2008

Sprint PCS

Posted at 5:47 am MST to Travel

My laptop now has a working cell modem. This is good, because the hotel charges obscenely for its broadband service.

The modem doesn't officilly support Linux, but it is working well. I just need to reset the default route manually after I bring up PPP.

route (to get the existing table)
sudo route del default
sudo route dd default gw 

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Tue, Nov 04, 2008

Uncanny Valley and John McCain

Posted at 4:02 pm MST to Media

One odd thing I noticed about many of McCain's advertisements was that he seemed to be falling into the uncanny valley where things that are close to human but not quite really human look really creepy. In some of his ads, he looked like a stiff puppet with shoe-button eyes and very chalky, weird-textured skin. There were a couple of ads that showed stills that were especially bad for this. And these were Republican ads, not Democratic ones that might have been deliberately trying to make him look bad subliminally. Is it Chucky that is the evil doll in the horror movies?

It occurs to me that I do much of my TV watching in HD these days. It's possible that images intended for regular definition didn't get processed properly for HD. Or they got the makeup wrong.

Or his lighting crew sucked.

Or they were using very heavy makeup to cover ill-health and couldn't hide it from the HD. I really wonder if he will be alive in 2012.

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Election Day

Posted at 10:52 am MST to Current Events

Gah.

Stress and anxiety attacks. I was going to blog about past elections (the first one I remember was Kennedy/Nixon) but I'm too jittery. I don't think voting early has helped my stress levels as much as I had hoped. It's one disadvantage of working at home: I've been bombarded with radio ads all day every day, and having already voted means there was nothing more I could do about them.

Today is the election. Less than 5 and a half hours until results start coming in.

I just got off the phone with my broker (I'm consolidating 401k and IRA money from various places, and we were discussing investing the first third or so of it.)

Tomorrow I travel to Boston on an 8:15am flight. Returning Sunday. I may or may not blog between now and Monday. I'll be staying two nights with relatives who don't have an active net presence.

My oven is not working right. I will try it again later, and if it still doesn't behave right, I'll give the repair guys a call so that I can have an appointment early next week.

I need to make a quick shopping trip to stock up on St. John's Wort before the trip. Possibly with a quick trip into town if more IRA checks arrive in today's mail to be rolled over.

The server is backed up, but I feel too jittery to be safe reconfiguring it. I think this evening I will do a direct backup of the laptop to the terabyte drive, and wait until I get back to play with the drive settings of the server.

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Mon, Nov 03, 2008

Terabyte

Posted at 9:55 am MST to Technology

The new external Terabyte drive (a myBook from Western Digital) came with cables for Firewire and USB, and has connectors for Firewire, USB and eSATA. The server's Firewire on the motherboard is working nicely, so at least the backup will run faster than USB speeds.

The drive comes up as a Windows file system, so I'd lose the permissions and symbolic links if I didn't reformat it. It is now ext3, and the backup is running.

I should eventually be able to set the drive up as eSATA: my motherboard has 6 SATA channnels, of which I am using 5 (4 hard drives and the DVD-ROM). But I will need another cable for that, and an internal-to-external adapter.

I'll look into that after I get back from Boston. I don't want to order anything that might be delivered while I am gone. Getting at that other motherboard SATA connector is going to be a pain -- it is pretty well buried -- so I may look at putitng an eSATA card into one of my empty slots. They seem to be reasonably priced, depending on how many ports I decide to get (a one port card would be silly).

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Sun, Nov 02, 2008

Mozart

Posted at 6:56 pm MST to Media

Yesterday was the last farmers' market for the season. The weather was beautiful -- like early September -- and unlike some past years when we froze at the last market. But it was hard getting up in the dark to get there in time to help set up.

In the evening I attended the second Boulder Philharmonic concert of the season, which had a pure Mozart program.

According to the program, Mozart wrote a letter describing one of his concerts in 1787. He started with the first movement of his 35th symphony, played some music from various operas, including arias with soloists, then a violin concerto, more opera music, some dance music, and finally the rest of Symphony 35.

The concert last night followed the pattern of Mozart's concert, which made a fun contrast to the structure of modern concerts. The vocalists (a soprano and a mezzo) were very good and the violinist seemed to be having fun, which I think always improves the energy of a performance. And, possibly because it was Mozart, the energy levels were high enough that I did not fade out, despite being tired from working at Market. The concert itself was excellent.

The theater, on the other hand, seemed to be having a meltdown: there were problems with the restrooms, they didn't start letting people into the theater until about 15 minutes before the performance was supposed to start so things started late, and there were odd delays at both ends of intermission. I wonder if someone who usually manages the theater was unavailable last night.

There were, as usual, people who left at intermission and did not return. I have to say I don't understand doing this: it seems very rude to the orchestra to leave right after the guest artist performs. Also wasteful: if you have spent the money for the seat (and my seat is in an expensive area so the seats in my row that get abandoned midway through most concerts aren't cheap ones) and taken the trouble to drive to the concert, why not stay for the whole thing? I say this even though is was convenient for me not to have people moving past me into the row -- my seat is near the aisle.

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Fri, Oct 31, 2008

Prices

Posted at 9:17 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I made a Costco run today and bought a 1 Terabyte external drive to use while I try to get my server working again. It cost less than 200 dollars. The first hard drive I ever bought was 20 Megabytes and cost around 300 dollars. And dollars bought more in those days... except in the area of electronics.

I also topped up my truck with gas, in case prices go back up after election day. 12.5 gallons for just under $30. Even though it was only 2/3 of a tank, it's been a long time since I was able to spend so little on filling up the truck.

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Thu, Oct 30, 2008

Autumn Couscous

Posted at 12:05 pm MDT to Technology

At this time of year the Whole Foods deli sells Autumn Couscous: Israeli-style couscous, butternut squash, dried cranberries, currants, canola oil, fennel, shallots, sherry vinegar, apple juice, parsley, sage, salt and pepper. (Israeli-style couscous is the BB-size kind.)

It's delicious, and I keep meaning to try to make something similar, but just buying it is easier. At least now I have a list of the ingredients where I won't lose it.

I've got bread rising in the oven's bread-proofing cycle, and this evening I'm going to make a batch of chicken and mushroom risotto.

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Tue, Oct 28, 2008

Entropy

Posted at 2:31 pm MDT to Technology

"Things fall apart, the center does not hold..."

My oven has now been fixed (and sealed so that it won't drown and short out again). And the little doorstop plate on my refrigerator has now been moved to the side where it may actually make a difference -- the installers had left it on the wrong side when they swapped the sides of the handle and hinges.

Maybe I'll bake a meatloaf or something to celebrate. That may involve shopping, since I didn't expect to have a usable oven this soon and have been avoiding ingredients that needbaking.

Unfortunately, the net amount of working equipment in my life has not really improved. Yesterday I updated the OS on my server and the RAID config tables got stepped on somehow: I can see all the data in rescue mode, but the machine won't boot until I can find out how to regenerate the configuration data. Which I don't really have time to do at the moment because I am testing our product for the official release.

The test environment is taking a lot of handholding at the moment, too. The Primary Domain Controller keeps flaking out on me to the point where I had to power-cycle the whole test environment a couple of times and bring things back up in different orders to get everything talking again.

Gah.

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Sun, Oct 26, 2008

Chard Noodles

Posted at 6:52 pm MDT to Technology

I need to remember this one. It turned out well.

Take a small bunch of chard, remove the stems, chop them up and start softening them in a couple of teaspoons of bacon grease.

Chop and salad spin the greens, add to the stems. When they have wilted, stir in a small can of sliced mushrooms.

Cook one cup of elbow noodles al dente. Stir into the chard/mushroom mixture with about 1/2 tablespoon of Dijon mustard and half a package of Chevrie soft goat cheese.

Season with salt and fresh ground pepper.

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New Bed

Posted at 3:29 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

The new mattress arrived and got plunked into the waterbed frame. I sprayed it with the fabric protector stuff and let it dry for an hour, then added the poofy mattress pad and made up the bed with clean linens.

I switched duvet covers, too, in honor of the new setup. I have two similar ones, so I can easily switch off to a clean one when the cat hair (or cat barf) gets annoying.

My bed was already tall, being a waterbed with a double underdresser, but the new mattress is what I think is called a European top, so it's a couple of inches higher than the frame is deep. With the duvet and poofy mattress pad the top of the bed is about waist high. I'll need to be careful getting out of bed until I'm used to the new height.

One of these years, I may need to pay someone to help me take the bed frame apart and remove one level of the underdresser.

I had wondered whether I should get some new padded side rails, since the vinyl on the old ones shows scars from 27 years of cats climbing onto them, but the new mattress sticks up far enough that I may not need them. I haven't put the old ones back on the bed yet, and making the bed with them in place might be a little tricky. I'll see how it goes -- Dinah would miss having them to perch on, I think, but having a solid mattress to walk on might make up for it.

I may end up investing in some new sheets though. My existing nice sheets that I bought when I got back from Minneapolis include deep pocket fitted sheets (so I have high-threadcount sheets that would stay on the water matteress) but they just barely fit on the deep Euro-topped mattress, with a lot of pulling. I don't think there is a risk of the sheet popping off, but I'm not sure how many times the fabric and elastic will survive being stretched that much.

The water mattress is out on the bedroom deck, still draining a little. I'll eventually haul it out to the dumpster.

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Sat, Oct 25, 2008

Drill Pump

Posted at 9:48 pm MDT to Technology

I couldn't get a siphon going from the waterbed, and all of my sinks are too far from the bedroom for the little plastic bernoulli pumps sold for draining waterbeds to work. Also my hoses have spent too long in high altitude sun and I don't particularly trust them for inside work.

I went over to Home Depot and got a couple of new hoses and a drill pump, which is a little pump that attaches to a power drill.

This is going to take a while: I checked online and a queen-sized waterbed has about 187 gallons of water. I think I've drained about 1/3 to 1/2 so far, in small bursts. I don't want to burn out the drill by running it too long at one time, and the vibration and noise get to me after a while.

The guys delivering the new conventional mattress are due between 11 and 1 tomorrow.

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Global Electoral College

Posted at 9:27 pm MDT to Current Events

The Economist has created a Global Electoral College map based on a poll of people from all over the world, with each country getting a certain number of electoral votes out of a total of 9875. (Every country get at least 3 votes, like the states.)

Their current projection is that McCain/Palin would get 278 electoral votes (Cuba, Macedonia, ex-Soviet Georgia, Iraq, Algeria, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Namibia).

Suriname, Papua New Guinea, Madagascar, Pacific Islands like Fiji, Yemen, Somalia, and some Saharan and West African countries are undecided.

Obama/Biden has 9009 electoral votes on their map.

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Fri, Oct 24, 2008

Gap

Posted at 10:15 pm MDT to Current Events

According to the evening news, a third of the Colorado electorate has already voted and Obama has a 13% lead in that portion of the voting. They say it is already unlikely that McCain can carry Colorado unless he can somehow manage a landslide among the remaining voters, which seems unlikely based on current opinion polls.

Mind you, the McCain campaign appears to have gone collectively insane at this point (the lynch mob behavior at their rallies and that twit who lied about being attacked by a black Obama supporter being cases in point).

I expect things to get even nastier over the next 10 days.

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Mon, Oct 20, 2008

Flu Shot and Eggs

Posted at 12:50 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I went to my allergists office this morning to get my flu shot: they wanted to test my sensitivity before giving me the actual vaccine because of the egg allergy.

They did scratch tests that tested the actual vaccine and retested my reaction to whole eggs, egg yolks, egg whites, too. I did not react to any of the tests. Yay.

The allergic reaction to eggs in June was real, so I suspect I have a mild sensitivity that kicks in when my system is already under a heavy histamine load. I should probably continue to avoid actual meals of eggs (scrambled eggs, omelettes, custards...) especially during hayfever season. But individual whole eggs as components in larger recipes may be safe to experiment with.

This makes the coming holiday season look a lot less depressing. I'll need to stick to mulled cider instead of eggnog, and make my own bread for stuffing so I know what's in the flour. But the only dairy in my Mom's pie crust recipe is a tablespoon of milk, which can be goats' milk, so I can make pies that don't have eggs or dairy int he fillings. And it looks like my gingersnap recipe should be ok if I don't pig out on them.

The stollen recipe may need some thought.

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Sat, Oct 18, 2008

Denver Mattress

Posted at 6:46 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Nanette did not go to the Farmers' Market today, she stayed at the farm to sell pumpkins and squaxsh at the farm stand (Rowan, who usually tends the stand, was taking part in the state finals with her billiards team). I went over and kept her company for a couple of hours, then dropped some stuff at the recycle center and did some shopping.

At McGuckins I bought mousetraps and kitchen gadgets, including bamboo spoons to replace some wooden ones that the dratted mice have chewed on. I may need a few more silicone spatulas, too. I think that even when they are clean, the spatulas and wooden spoons smell like food to the mice. Very annoying.

I stopped at Bed Bath and Beyond to get some new curtains for the bathroom window -- the existing ones are not going to survive washing. I got a new shower curtain last week, so the bathroom is now updated for the winter.

And I went back to McGuckins to get a waterbed drain and fill kit.

I stopped at the Denver Mattress store in the same shopping center as the Bed Bath and Beyond and found that (unlike the mattress store near the Costco) they are able to supply a regular mattress that is properly sized to fit int oa queen-sized waterbed. And at quite a reasonable price.

My waterbed mattress needs to either have a lot of water added to it, or it needs to be replaced. I am not sure it would survive having the water added: it is 27 years old and the vinyl may not be trustworthy. And the plastic valve where the water hose attaches to the mattress has gotten very stiff and may be getting brittle.

My new mattress will be delivered next Sunday. Getting the old mattress out of the bed is going to be ... interesting. This water mattress model has a fiber mat in it to reduce sloshing, and, like a sponge once it has been wetted, it is impossible to get all of the water out of it. At best you end up with something like a boneless corpse.

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Fri, Oct 17, 2008

Crusoe

Posted at 9:11 pm MDT to Media

Best. Treehouse. Ever.

I watched the new Crusoe TV show this evening on NBC. It's not bad, in a sort of McGyver/Pirates of the Carribean/Indiana Jones kind of way. Both the actor playing Crusoe (Philip Winchester) and the one playing Friday (Tongai Arnold Chirisa) are quite good (and decorative). Good guest stars, too: Sam Neill plays continuing character and Sean Bean played Crusoe's father in various flashbacks to England.

Lovely accents all around.

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Thu, Oct 16, 2008

Rabbit

Posted at 10:21 pm MDT to Technology

I think it was a fricasseein' rabbit.

I used a Mario Batali recipe for a rabbit cacchiatore, with white wine and orange juice and mushrooms in the sauce, with tomatoes and onions and one red Hatch chile. It came out quite well. Which is good, since I'll probably be eating it for the next week.

I'm sure Mario would have browned the rabbit more. He always says home cooks don't brown things as much as restaurant chefs.

And I need to remember to use the splatter screen next time I make it.

It makes a nice change from chicken and buffalo, though.

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Wed, Oct 15, 2008

Refrigerator

Posted at 9:37 pm MDT to Technology

My new refrigerator was delivered today, so now I have matching appliances in my kitchen.

The new fridge is much quieter than the old one -- it doesn't have any visible external coils to vibrate, which helps. According to the energy guide card, it is also very inexpensive to run.

It has the freezer on the bottom (with its own bright light in it), and the meat drawer at the bottom of the refrigerator (which is the recommended location). Then the two humidity-controlled crispers with the storage shelves above those.

I have a single door on the refrigerator part of mine, but it is also available (for more money) with French doors, and that shows in the internal organization: all of the adjustable shelves on the door and in the main compartment are half width.

I never realize how much a refrigerator holds until I have to empty one. I had coolers filled with frozen food and meat and dairy stuff, and my entire (fairly small) kitchen counter was covered with stuff that came out of the old refrigerator and (eventually) went back into the new one.

The owner's manual says not to trust the refrigerator and freezer to be at the correct temperature until it has been chilling for 24 hours, but the coolers kept the frozen food solid (I have some ice packs containing actual water ice that hadn't gotten soft at all in the coolers). The main refrigerator compartment may take a while to get down to the proper temperature (most of the stuff that went into it was at or near room temperature) but the frozen food is fine.

I aalso had a visit from the appliance repairman today. On Sunday I spilled some water on the top of my stove and it found a place where a gasket wasn't quite sealed properly and dripped inside and shorted out the electtronic control panel for my wonderful new oven. The repairman looked at it and called to order a replacement circuit board. He said it might be as much as ten days before the replacement part arrives, but he will do what he can to expedite things.

At least the cooktop burners still work. Since I can't play with the oven, I may get an actual round-bottomed wok at one of the asian stores in the area and experiment with the wok-burner feature of the stove. But tomorrow I need to do something with a rabbit that I have been defrosting. Time to google.

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Tue, Oct 14, 2008

Teddy Roosevelt Speech

Posted at 8:32 pm MDT to Current Events

On The Edge of the American West there is a great article about an assassination attempt on Teddy Roosevelt on this day in 1912.

The article's title is "I am all right, and you cannot escape listening to my speech either." That's a quote from TR's hour-long speech, which he made after being shot and before going for medical treatment: he showed off his bloody shirt.

In the speech, he said that the nastiness of the rhetoric in the current political campaign (he was a 3rd party candidate and that election was really nasty) was partly responsible for the assassination attempt,

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Mon, Oct 13, 2008

Two Years

Posted at 9:47 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I posted the first articles on this blog on Oct 13, 2006, so I have been blogging for two years now. I haven't posted quite every day, but I have done enough extra posts that it averages out to about one per day.

I have spent most of these two years working from my own home (yay).

Today is a day for double celebration: I just delivered the feature-complete version of my software release to QA. Except for bugfixes and document revisions for things that come up during testing, it is done.

Now I can start ramping up for work on the new architecture.

And I was informed today that the new fridge, which had been back-ordered, has arrived in-state, and will be delivered on Wednesday.

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Sun, Oct 12, 2008

Homemade Breadcrumbs

Posted at 9:32 am MDT to Technology

I made another meatloaf yesterday, with homemade breadcrumbs (made from some of my previous batch of sourdough bread) and horseradish that ultimately came from Nanette's farm. Food processors are really handy for things like making breadcrumbs. I should remember to use mine more.

I do NOT have a cough, vicious sore throat or problems swallowing this morning, so it looks like the commercial breadcrumbs were the problem last Monday.

I need to remember that fresh ground pepper is stronger than the packaged pepper most recipes expect, though. And also to cut back the water when using fresh breadcrumbs.

A little Pam on the inside of the Roemertopf, and a little shorter cooking time, made it easier to get the meatloaf out of the pan intact.

While looking up something about my new stove (easier to google than to open the hardcopy manual) I realized that my new "Kitchenaid" are produced by Whirlpool. Both the oven and the dishwasher have more capacity than the old ones: the doors' hinges are much closer to the floor.

My new matching fridge should be showing up soon: the delivery paperwork for the appliances said that the delivery guys should expect to handle it sometime after October 15.

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Perl Modules

Posted at 9:31 am MDT to Technology

I've been reviewing the structure of the product I'm working on, to see whether it is feasible to transition to Perl 6 for the next major release, which is being massively re-architected. It looks like the answer is 'yes'.

Perl 6 is not quite complete yet, and doesn't have its own version of the CPAN module repository yet. But our product was originally written against IBM Rational ClearCase and ClearQuest 2002.05, which shipped with a version of perl that had a very limited set of modules and was locked down so it was very hard to add others.

Our whole product is written in core Perl 5, except that the CGI transport option uses the Socket module, the install/configuration tool uses Cwd and File::Copy, and we interface to the proprietary IBM Rational CQPerlExt.pm module. I will also want an XML parser (and DTD validator) for the new architecture, preferably with "tree" and "xpath" access modes, and it would be nice to do the CGI interface with CGI instead of Socket.

I may need to create some kind of wrapper to access CQPerlExt.pm: I suspect the same problems that kept us locked into the limited cqperl in 2002.05 will limit our ability to use the the perl6 "use perl5:Module" mechanism.

The non-proprietary modules should not be a problem: one of the design goals of Perl 6 is to support XML better than Perl 5 did, and the other modules should be straightforward to port if they haven't been ported already.

There are existing Perl 6 examples for CGI and a CGI.pm.

There are existing Perl 6 examples for XML and I see files in the source trees that mention xpath and reading and writing XML. I may need to contribute some work to get things cooked enough to be stable for production work. Not a problem: it would be good to have my name and the company's attached to some open-source work.

If Cwd and File::Copy are not ported yet, I'll do them. They are both pretty basic, and might be a good place to get my feet wet in Perl 6 -- both the programming language and the open source project.

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Sat, Oct 11, 2008

Brrrr

Posted at 10:54 am MDT to Weather

We haven't had the snow they were warning about yet, but this morning is cold -- just a lttle above freezing -- and rainy. It feels like New England weather, not Colorado.

I lasted only two hours at the farmers'market (instead of my usual 7-ish) because there were no customers to speak of and I wasn't wearing enough layers of clothing. Nanette said she was wearing 6 layers and I only had 3.

I also had only one glove (the other one may be in the truck somewhere) and the toes of my left foot, where the circulation is a little iffy, were going numb.

I did get some horseradish from the canning company that processed the horseradish from Nanette's farm, so I'm going to try meatloaf with functional horseradish and homemade breadcrumbs for supper.

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Tue, Oct 07, 2008

Election Ads

Posted at 8:44 pm MDT to Current Events

We're doing voting-by-mail in Colorado. I got my ballot on Saturday.

I filled out the ballot yesterday and dropped it off at the County Clerk's office today. So I have now voted, 4 weeks ahead of schedule. (I wasn't likely to change my mind about any of the candidates and issues.)

I'm finding that election ads are even more annoying now that I have already voted. It's hard to believe that is possible. I listen to the radio all day while I am working, so I hear a lot of them.

Man, there are some nasty campaigns this year.

I hope everyone else listening has their teeth set on edge as much as I do by the people doing the commercials against the repeal of the oil and gas subsidy. But I'm afraid that with the oil and gas companies pouring $25 million into the ads and mailings, I suspect it will probably fail.

After I dropped off the ballot and ran a couple of other errands, I spent some time walking on the Pearl Street Mall. The weather was beautiful --shirtsleeve weather -- and may be some of the last really nice weather for a while. They say we may have our first snow flurry of the season later this week.

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Mon, Oct 06, 2008

Evil Breadcrumbs

Posted at 12:12 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

For the past few months I have been very careful to avoid eating things I am allergic to. In the past week I have slipped up a couple of times and not read ingredients lists carefully enough, and it really makes a noticeable difference.

Last Friday I ate a packaged rice bowl for lunch that turned out to have green beans in it. The next morning I was coughing, and swallowing felt wrong.

Yesterday, without thinking, I used some commercial breadcrumbs from my cupboard in the meatloaf I made. Today I was coughing and swallowing was feeling wrong again. I checked the breadcrumb package and sure enough, it had malt flour in it. So much for meatloaf sandwiches for lunch this week. Drat. (I almost followed Mario Batali's recommendation to make homemade bread crumbs, but I thought I should use up the ones in the cupboard first...)

At least this answers the question of whether the fairly mild food allergies I tested with were really causing my problems last spring. And the answer is yes. A year ago, or even 6 months, I wouldn't have noticed the increased inflammation in my mouth and esophagus because it was so chronic: every meal and most snacks included one or more things that I'm mildly allergic to.

I guess it's good to know that these annoying dietary changes are really having a beneficial effect. And avoiding malt flour (which is a major nuisance) really makes a difference.

Enemies List

Lobster
Oysters
Green Beans
Cow and sheep's milk
Chicken egg yolks
Malt

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Sun, Oct 05, 2008

Meatloaf

Posted at 9:35 pm MDT to Technology

My new oven preheats and cooks faster than the old one did. When it cycles it makes a "snap-whoomp" sound. There is no pilot light. The snap is the sound of the elextronic lighter, and the whoomp if the gas catching fire.

The cooking speed is nice, actually. I'll just need to remember to make allowances.

So far I've made roast chicken with apricot/couscous stuffing, bread and meatloaf, and heated a frozen vegan apple pie.

Meatloaf

1 1/2 pounds ground buffalo
1 cup fine bread crumbs
2 lightly packed scoops dried goatmilk
1 cup water
3 Tbsp eggwhites
1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil 
2 Tbsp dried, minced onion
2 Tbsp tomato paste
1 Tbsp horseradish
1 1/2 tsp kosher salt
1 1/2 tsp pepper

Soak the Romertopf clay baker and it lid in cold water.

Whisk together the breadcrumbs and goatmilk powder. Add the other (non-meat) ingredients and whisk to blend well. Let sit for 10 to 15 minutes to let things hydrate.

Add the meat and form into a loaf. Place in pot and cover. Place pot in a cold oven and turn on at 450 degrees.

I checked at one hour and the center of the meatloaf was already over 180. It was nice and crusty but still moist inside. (One advantage of cooking in the Romertopf.)

I need to buy some of the horseradish from the canning booth at the Farmers' Market. What I had in the fridge (from the last time I made meatloaf, I don't remember how long ago) was badly faded.

I added the olive oil to the recipe because buffalo tends to be cut lean, and to compensate for the lack of richness from the egg yolk. A little more probably would not hurt.

And I need some new, heavier duty potholders. My old ones seem to be wimping out.

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Birdfeed

Posted at 4:57 pm MDT to Weather

I was cleaning out the pantry a few days ago and dumped some wild bird food from several years ago out onto the scraped-bare part of what used to be my lawn. I thought that if any of it evaded the wildlife it might either sprout or at least add some organic matter to that space.

It took a few days for the wildlife to notice, but they are really going to town now. A little while ago there was only one magpie walking around examining the situation, but he is gone now. Maybe ancient stale seeds are beneath him.

I just looked out and there were a half dozen pigeons and about a hundred small dark birds spread out over the lawn chowing down. When they fly, I can see that many of the smaller birds are redwinged blackbirds: their wing patches aren't noticeable when the wings are folded at this time of year.

There is also a squirrel with cheek-pouches so full his head is at least twice as wide as usual.

Oh well, maybe the critters will fertilise the soil a bit, before they leave. They are dining in the damp -- there was a huge long roll of thunder and a brief cloudburst (enough to leave puddles on the driveway) an hour ago, which is a little odd for this time of year. It may be the seeds were not noticeable or interesting to the birds until they got wet.

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Pulse

Posted at 4:54 pm MDT to Media

Last night was the first Boulder Philharmonic concert of the season. The theme was "Awakening the Pulse".

Maestro Butterman has a nice habit of talking to the audience for a few minutes before each piece describing aspects of the work or the performance that he thinks are cool. His enthusiasm is refreshing. And his themed concerts are fun.

Last night there were three pieces played and an encore.

The first piece, in honor of what would have been Leonard Bernstein's 90th birthday, was "Fancy Free", the ballet Bernstein wrote for Jerome Robbins that first made his reputation as a composer.

The second piece was "The Glory and the Grandeur" a conceto for orchestra and precussion trio by contempory composer Russell Peck. There were percussion instruments all across the front of the stage: marimbas and drums and xylophones and chimes and gongs and cymbals and rattles, and the players had to move from station to station as they played. (One of the precussionists was a woman who was a) tiny and b) 37 weeks pregnant. )

The third piece was Symphony #3 ("Organ Symphony") by Saint-Seans, another barn-burner. And I love organ music.

And after the symphony, the organist, Kenrick Mervine, played Bach's Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor. It's a cliche of organ music, but I don't think I have ever heard it performed live before, with the rumble of the big pipes (which can't be recorded) resonating in the room.

The people on each side of me left before the encore: too bad for them. They missed a treat, racing for their cars.

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Fri, Oct 03, 2008

Amendments 2008

Posted at 12:09 pm MDT to Current Events

Interesting. Business and labor organizations have joined forces to remove four proposed amnedments from the ballot in NOvember (they will still appear, but votes for them will be ignored). They are also allying to fight 3 others which are seen as both bad for unions and for the state economy.

The ones removed from the ballot are:

Amendment 53 A "corporate fraud" initiative that would have made an executive criminally liable for fraudulent activity they know about but fail to report within their businesses.

Amendment 55 A ban on firing employees without a specific reason and the ability for them to sue if they decide they've been improperly let go.

Amendment 56 A proposed requirement that employers with 20 or more employees pay for 80 percent of an individual's health care premiums or 70 percent of dependent coverage.

Amendment 57 A safe workplace measure that would have allowed injured employees to seek additional damages in court beyond workers compensation benefits. (Which kind of defeats to purpose of workmen's comp, which is to keep workers and employers out of court.)

The ones unions and business will fight together are:

Amendment 47 A "right-to-work" amendment messing with union vote procedures.

Amendment 49 Preventing governments in Colorado from taking union dues, etc. as part of the employees withholdings, which makes the employees pay their dues as a separate bill.

Amendment 54 A proposed ban on sole-source government contractors contributing to political candidates which apparently written to squelch contributions from unions with government contracts. Possibly union members, too?

That leaves us with 48, 50 and 58 that have been getting lots of radio ads.

Amendment 48 is stupid and evil. It defines fertilized eggs as human beings, effectively outlawing all abortions and many kinds of birth control. I haven't heard it mentioned, but this would logically also criminalize miscarriages. Including natural failures of the egg to implant, which are very, very common but not (currently) detectable.

Amendment 50 lets the gambling towns in the mountains raise their stakes limits in return for a cut of the take being given to community colleges. I will probably vote for that one.

Amendment 58 repeals tax breaks for oil and gas companies, in this time of record profits. The energy companies are fighting it tooth and nail, which leads me to believe that it is probably a good idea. About 60% of the money would be used for scholarships to state colleges and universities, and the rest is earmarked for clean energy projects and cleaning up environmental damage from previous oil and gas projects (especially ground water cleanup). I really think that's a better use for the money than shoring up the profits of out-of-state conglomerates.

The other items on the ballot don't seem to be controversial.

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Thu, Oct 02, 2008

Clathrates

Posted at 5:17 pm MDT to Weather

Clathrates are solid deposits of methane (methane ice, basically) that have been sealed under the permafrost and in the oceans since before the last ice age. Scientists have sailed the whole north coast of Siberia this year, and the news is not good. The warming of the Arctic Ocean has melted the permafrost on the Siberian continental shelf, and a lot of sea water is getting fizzy.

Methane is an even stronger greenhouse gas than CO2. As in 20 times stronger. So as the Arctic warms up, more methane gets into the air and things warm up even faster, releasing more methane faster. And so on.

Making Light had a link to a good overview -> here.

We are so screwed.

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Tue, Sep 30, 2008

Eureka

Posted at 3:49 am MDT to Code

One nice thing about not bbilling at the moment is that I can work the hours my brain wants. I woke up at 2:30 knowing how to make a functional change we want in our company's product, and since my brain refuses to go back to sleep, I might as well go ahead and start making the code changes and get them out of my brain. I don't need to wait for normal working hours to get this stuff out of my head and into the computer.

I'll sleep later.

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Sun, Sep 28, 2008

Popcorn

Posted at 1:32 pm MDT to Technology

This morning I woke up with the chills again, and a digestive system that was very unhappy. My esophagus and stomach seem to like the new allergen-free regime, but the rest of the gut seems less happy about it. This is a problem, because I need to cook in order to have food in the house that I can eat, but when my guts are tied in knots I don't feel like cooking.

My breakfast was a handful of "Olde Cape Cod Oyster Crackers", which are the only saltine-like crackers I've been able to find without malt in the flour.

For lunch I made popcorn. The work on the kitchen this week uncovered my stove-top corn popper with the twirly handle, (and an ancient container of Orville Redenbacher's, which needed to be discarded) and yesterday at Farmers' Market I invested in some Boulder Popcorn.

The Boulder Popcorn kernels are old varieties: 3 different colors (red, yellow and blue) before popping and very flavorful. The three varieties are available separately, but I couldn't make up my mind, so I bought the blend. The kernels are smaller, both unpopped and popped, than more commercial varieties, but they popped very well. I had only a few unpopped kernels left out of the half cup I used.

The stove-top popper is perfect for the way I like popcorn. Popping in oil gives just a little extra moisture, so some salt can stick (the fine grains of pickling salt work well for this) without coating the kernels in slime. And with such flavorful kernel varieties no other flavoring is needed (yellow variety in the Boulder mix almost has a buttery flavor without any butter being used.

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Fri, Sep 26, 2008

Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov

Posted at 9:36 pm MDT to Current Events

Charlie Stross has an article about Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov, who probably saved civilization 25 years ago today in 1983.

In this time of arrogant slime in high places, it is good to remember that there are people of sense, goodwill and true, quiet heroism in the world.

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White Kitchen

Posted at 7:40 pm MDT to Technology

The new dishwasher is amazingly quiet.

The new range hood is now installed. It has two bright, halogen lights (with two settings) and a stronger fan than the old one. Its filter screens go the full width of the stove, and can be cleaned in the dishwasher.

The kitchen looks very clean with all white appliances replacing the almond range and hood. It will look even nicer when the matching fridge finally arrives.

I have a chicken breast with apricot-cashew-fennel-couscous stuffing in the oven.

The stove rings a chime when it finishes preheating, and seems to cycle frequently when maintaining temperature, so the temperature swings should be shallow.

I don't know whether I am using the convection feature or not. (I think probably not, this time.) I need to reread the owner's manual, which is huge because of all the features. Besides the breadproofing mode and baking and broiling with and without convection, the oven can act as a food dehydrator: I think that is basically a combination of breadproofing temps with the convection fan turned on.

There is a complicated feature called sabbath mode which I will never need. And a section on the oven control panel will calculate the time and temperature changes for convection cooking.

I bought some egg whites at Whole Foods today, so this weekend I will try pancakes or waffles made with eggwhites instead of shole eggs. I think I'll add some vanilla to compensate for the missing richness from the yolks.

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Gyrotonics

Posted at 8:28 am MDT to Exercise

Nanette goes to an exercise program called Gyrotonics on Thursday afternoons. She gave me a coupon for a free session, so I went with her yesterday. We went to a late lunch afterward, and then walked the meditation labyrinth at one of the local churches

Gyrotonics is supposed to be non-strenuous, and aimed at allignment and range of motion. I may have done something wrong: this morning when I got up, my left shoulderblade and hip both had muscle knots and my left kneecap hurt when I stressed it at all.

I did my PT exercises to put my hip back into the right place, and then AM Yoga. When I was doing the chakra work at the beginning of the yoga routine, my left shoulderblade adjusted with an almost audible click, and the kneecap stopped hurting.

I suspect my shoulder blade has just popped back into its normal wrong position, but I'm glad the kneecap has stopped hurting. My left hip and leg still feel a little off, but that may just be the muscles complaining about being in a different configuration than they were in overnight.

I'll need to think about whether to try gyrotonics again. It might be beneficial in the long run, but midday on a work day isn't going to cut it.

I think I might be better off finding new massage therapist (maybe one who does adhesions work). And continuing to work on the yoga. It's possible that what pulled the left shoulderblade out is the right collarbone being pinned by that band of scar tissue, so things were pivoting wrong.

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Wed, Sep 24, 2008

New Appliances

Posted at 1:32 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I like the Boulder Appliance Center. They called yesterday and said that the stove and dishwasher would be delivered and installed between 11 and 1 today. They called a few minutes after 11 to say they were on the way, and they finished up and left just before 1.

No live mice were seen during operations, but one recently dead one was under the dishwasher. I wonder what killed it? I vacuumed places that haven't been vacuumed in a long time.

Later today I will spend some time reviewing the owner's manuals (especially for the stove, which has a lot of options and special features). And then I will prepare my first meal cooking with gas.

My next step is to call an electrician to install the new range hood and adjust the electrical sockats by the stove. Its electrical parts don't use the 240 volt socket that the old electric stove used, and I may need adjustments to the electric outlets that are reachable from the stove. (For some reason, the outlet for the fridge is 5 feet up, where the cord from the stove can't reach it. I may just have the electrician put another outlet lower on that wall.)

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Tue, Sep 23, 2008

Meeses

Posted at 4:52 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

There was a cartoon cat, Mr Jinks, whose catch phrase was "I hate meeses to pieces".

I've been having a war against mice in my kitchen for the past few months. I've caught a few with various traps and Dinah has been catching some.

A couple of nights ago she caught a little one that I think was one of the kitchen mice: it was too small and light to trip the triggers of the traps. If so, it got careless and came out from behind the appliances.

Tomorrow any mice that are still in there are going to get a shock. The new stove and dishwasher are supposed to be delivered and installed between 11 AM and one PM.

I plane to vacuum up some of the disgustingness while things are opened up.

In the meantime, I need to clean and vaccuum under the sink (which I have been trying to ignore) before the installers come, and run everything from the storage drawer of the current stove through a pots and pans cycle of the dishwasher. Yuck.

Tomorrow, for supper, I will be cooking with gas for the first time in my life. And the stove will give me some cool cooking options. It's got a high-power burner with a sturdy rack for round- bottomed woks and a breadproofing mode. And the lower compartment is a warming drawer, not just a storage drawer, so it may even seal out the mice.

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Mon, Sep 22, 2008

Backups are good

Posted at 12:13 pm MDT to Technology

Friday night into Saturday morning, I did a full backup of my /home partition, which includes all of the virtual machine images for vmware.

I also copy /etc into /home/etc_sav at the start of a backup, and dump the list of installed packages into it, so I should be able to recreate my current configuration from bare iron and a Kubuntu iso if I need to.

It's a goog thing I backed up. Something I did yesterday trashed the Win 2003 image. It worked fine until I shut it down, but won't boot this morning. Most of the files are still there: I can get at them by booting a Linux live disk if I need to. In any case, my ClearQuest database is hosted on the host machine and the ClearCase vobs are hosted on a different virtual image, so I haven't lost all the work I did yesterday, just the time to pull the 20Gig VM image back from the server.

If you have not backed up your stuff lately, do it now. This has been a public service announcement.

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Fri, Sep 19, 2008

Anti-Fever

Posted at 11:40 am MDT to Miscellaneous

This is annoying. I just spent most of the morning in bed, with an extra blanket and the heat on in the house, alternating spells of being awake and shivering and having weird dreams.

It was not a return of the fever. My temperature at 6:30 was 96.6. When I finally got up -- I was having a hot flash -- it was all the way up to 97.9, but I still feel wiped out.

Yesterday was a small break in routine: I went over to the office for a while, and stayed on for the Colorado Rational Users' Group meeting in the evening. But I didn't do anything strenuous, and I brought my own dinner. (All of the rest of the attendees ate pizza. Just from Pizza Hut, but it smelled wonderful.)

I've been having milder bouts of these morning chills all week.

I don't eat a lot, but I nibble on snacks frequently during the day because my blood sugar feels like it is tanking. Maybe this problem -- being cold in the mornings after a night without eating -- is related to that.

With my metabolism this hosed, it's no wonder I'm not losing weight: I'm not burning as many calories as I should be, and I'm not buring stored ones. It's almost tempting to look at some of those products that are supposed to help you metabolize body fat -- there might be some that are not completely snake oil. But that's probably wishful thinking.

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Thu, Sep 18, 2008

Scars

Posted at 12:04 am MDT to Exercise

The place where I ripped loose the radiation scars along my lower ribs is still occasionally a little tender, but, oddly, not when I'm doing yoga. The other patch of radiation scarring is still tight enough to be annoying, but after two full weeks of doing AM Yoga every wee day, I seem to have a most of the range of motion I ever had -- enough that I can sometimes feel the actual surgical scars pulling and stretching, too. Being able to stretch enough to involve the surgical scars is new this week.

Some of the difference in range of motion is because I weigh 35 more ppounds than I did in 2001, my fitness peak. I've been focussing on the yoga (I wanted to make sure the stuff that was pulled loose didn't tighten up again), but now I need to add the treadmill back into my routine, and possibly the free weights, to try to burn off some weight.

It isn't just the scar tissue that I've been working on stretching. My heels still aren't on the ground in downward dog, but they are getting closer, and this morning, in my shower, I was nearly able to touch my toes.

There have been very few times in my life when I could touch my toes, partly due to tight hamstrings, and partly because I have a petite body and tall arms and legs. If I had the extra two or three inches of torso length that I am missing between my hips and shoulders, touching my toes would be easy.

If I start treadmilling and weight-lifting, the muscles will tighten up, and touching my toes will get harder again

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Tue, Sep 16, 2008

Plumber

Posted at 9:33 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I'm psyched. My new kitchen appliances (range,fridge and dish washer) have been ordered and the house is now plumbed for a gas stove and gas clothes dryer.

James the Plumber even brought the job in way under his original bid: he said it went better than he expected, and he was able to reuse some material that was already in my basement. There were some pipes from when the house had a propane furnace instead of natural gas that were still in good condition and not being used for anything.

He fixed my dryer vent, too, which had been misbehaving and sending lint and hot air out into the basement instead of outdoors.

The cost for the appliances also turned out to be less than the original bid. This is partly because the original bid had two different stove options accidentally included into the total, of which I only need one, and partly because I chose a smaller refrigerator -- 30 inches wide instead of 36. One person should not need a huge refrigerator (especially since I have a chest freezer in the basement), and I don't really have room for the larger fridge in my kitchen.

The range and dishwasher are supposed to be delivered next Wednesday or Thursday. The refrigerator is backordered for four or five weeks, but that's OK. Changing all of the appliances in my small kitchen at the same time would be ... logistically interesting.

And the laundry room is ready, so that I can buy a gas dryer if and when the existing appliances die. I'm hoping they will hang in there for at least another few months, but really can't complain if they die at any time: I bought them soon after I bought the house in 1985.

The current washer and dryer are Kenmore, but I don't think I will buy Kenmore again. My old dishwasher was a Kenmore that cleaned beautifully for years until it developed a leak through the motor, but the Kenmore I replaced it with doesn't clean well at all. After years of buying appliances from Sears (my first apartment was largely furnished out of Sears), they have lost my trust.

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Mon, Sep 15, 2008

IHOP

Posted at 10:04 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

There are a number of restaurants in the shopping area around Costco and my local Whole Foods. One of them was an IHOP for several years after it was first built. Then it was empty for a while.

Then it was Mama's Cafe for at least a few years. It is right next to the the main road that goes through the shopping area and leads to my house in one direction and to the main road and highway in the other, so I drove past it many times. Every time I drove past, I wondered if the proverbial advice to "never eat at a place called Mom's" applies to a place called Mama's Cafe.

I suspect it does, or lots of other people had the same concern: recently, the building has been empty again.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that it is, once again, open as an IHOP. Now I'm wondering why they think it will do any better than the previous incarnation. I haven't eaten at an IHOP in years, and with my new dietary restrictions I'm not likely to ever do so again, so I won't be joining their clientele.

It's actually a fairly boring IHOP: the architecture was required to blend in with the rest of the shopping center. For years there was an IHOP in Boulder with a tall, A-Frame shape and a bright turquoise roof. The sail-plane pilots taking advantage of the updrafts along the front range used to use it as a landmark because it was visible from a long way away.

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Sun, Sep 14, 2008

Nanette's Birthday (2008)

Posted at 6:19 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Happy Birthday, Nanette!

The celebration was a very nice lunch at Brasserie Ten Ten with Nanette's husband, two of her daughters and a number of her friends. Lots of good food and good conversation.

The menus were brunch and desserts, which was a little frustrating, but at least there were a few items without eggs and dairy. Most people had variations on eggs benedict. Nanette had crepes with goat cheese and duck filling. (I wonder if it is possible to do crepes without egg yolks.)

I wonder if I'm allergic to duck eggs? If I had ever seen duck eggs for sale in the Boulder area I would see about getting tested. Ducks and chickens are not very closely related, and since I seem to have very narrow allergies -- cow and sheep milk but not goat, egg yolks but not the whites -- it might be worth checking.

Not that being able to eat duck eggs would be any help for eating breakfast while travelling. When you eliminate commercial baked goods, eggs, and dairy products there isn't much left on most hotel's breakfast menus.

James the plumber was at the brunch, and we finally scheduled a time for him to work on my kitchen and laundry room. He is coming on Tuesday morning. I need to do some cleaning before then, and call the Appliance store to tell them I want my new appliances some time in the next few weeks. Yay.

On the way home I stopped at my local Whole Foods (ex Wild Oats) to pick up a few things.They have just done a major reorganization of where things are shelved -- probably an aftershock from the change of control. Nothing is where it used to be. but at least now that the rearrangement is done they have restocked the shelves. Things were bit sparse last week.

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Sat, Sep 13, 2008

Nap

Posted at 7:10 pm MDT to Weather

Nanette was out of town for most of the past month, and I was sick the one weekend in August that she was in town, so today was the first time in about 6 weeks that I have worked a full farmers' market.

The weather was beautiful. Also very scenic: the pouring rain we had on Thursday through Friday morning was snow in the high country, so the taller mountains of the back range are all white and shining above the tree line.

I am wiped out. My feet were very sore by the end of the market, and I fell asleep on the couch while reading email after I got home. (Fortunately, my lapdesk and laptop were in a stable position.)

Sleeping in the daytime is fairly rare for me, unless I am very sick. I hope this is just unaccustomed exercise and not yet another virus sneaking up on me. I seem to have no resistance this year.

Tomorrow will be a social day for me -- it is Nanette's birthday, and a number of her friends are gathering for a birthday lunch. Her second daughter Aleta even flew in from California for the occasion. The two youngest girls are studying in Europe and will not attend.

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Thu, Sep 11, 2008

Elk

Posted at 7:12 pm MDT to Technology

Elk steak is a little bland compared with buffalo, but the one I made tonight was cooked just right. I took it out of the fridge and let it set on the counter for a half hour or so to take some of the chill off but didn't let it come all the way up to room temperature. Meanwhile I turned the George Foreman grill on high and let it preheat.

I put the steak in for exactly 3 minutes and let it rest for a few minutes before I cut into it. It was beautiful: brown on the outside, but almost entirely medium-rare all through the inside.

I'll cook the other steak from that package tomorrow, and maybe hit it with some Worchestershire sauce to give the flavor a little more bite.

Next time I buy elk it will be stew meat -- I like venison stew. But I think I'll stick to buffalo for my steaks.

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DB2 on Linux

Posted at 8:52 am MDT to Technology

Pullling the DB2 installation out to the host environment, which is non-Windows, has made ClearQuest response actually snappy.

But getting it working was a pain: too much information wan't in the official docs about prerequisites, only by googling and finding messages in obscure usergroup forums.

Prerequisites: libaio.so.1 and libstdc++.so.5

Needed to get the installer to work: set environment variables LIBXCB_ALLOW_SLOPPY_LOCK=1, AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit.

Syscontrol settings to make the databases actually usable:

kernel.shmmax = 1610612736
kernel.sem = 250 256000 32 2048
 kernel.msgmnb = 65536
 kernel.msgmni = 16384
 kernel.msgmax = 65536
 kernel.shmmni = 4096
 kernel.shmall = 3774873

These values were compiled from a couple of different forums. I'm sure they are not optimal, but they seem to work.

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Yoga Mats

Posted at 8:52 am MDT to Exercise

I have now done the AM Yoga 6 of the past 8 days, so it is becoming routine again. There was a time not too many years ago when it was normal for me to do yoga every weekday: AM yoga followed by other yoga tapes or treadmill work or weightlifting. Today I did a mile on the treadmill.

I did enough yoga -- back before the surgery in 2005 -- that I actually wore out my first yoga mat. (The idea of me wearing out any kind exercise equipment is a little mind-boggling.)

The sore spot where I ripped loose the adhesions is mostly gone now, finally, and that ribbon of tightness running from my collarbone to my armpit seems to be stretching a little, but it is still annoying. Triangle pose (which I was never good at) is at least not unthinkable now. I should pull out the DVD with the routine I used for upper body yoga.

Time to think about starting some free-weight work again, too.

And I really need to work on getting my hamstrings stretched out. Straighter legs with my heels somewhere near the ground would help in downward dog and a lot of other yoga asanas. I can't imagine how women who regularly wear heels adjust to exercise programs.

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Wed, Sep 10, 2008

DB2

Posted at 2:21 pm MDT to Technology

I have to say I'm not overly impressed with current implementations of DB2, IBM's database, as a competitor for Oracle and mySQL, etc.

On a Windows 2003 VMWare image it tends to peg the CPU usage at 99% and lock everything up. When I googled for the problem and solution I found reports of the problems going back several years, with no comprehensible explanation of the problem.

The reported solution (at least temporarily) is to kill the pegged db2syscs process, restart DB2, and open the Control Center. Then select all of the tables in each database, right click, select Run Statistics and select Collect statistics on all columns with distribution.

Doing that mysteriously made the database usable for about an hour, but now it is pegging the CPU again.

I'm trying to switch to a Linux installation of DB2 on my host system, but db2setup just hangs without doing anything or giving any indication of what the problem might be. And it isn't as if it was unsupported on Ubuntu: the distribution has been certified for DB2 for a couple of years.

It isn't a processor or memory problem.

I'm going to kill the pegged process again, shutdown VMWare, and see if I can get the db system to load. If I can't, I'll see about downloading the public version of Oracle. I really need to be spending my time doing things other than debugging infrastructure.

Feh.

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Mon, Sep 08, 2008

Cold Morning

Posted at 10:49 am MDT to Weather

Someone must have told the weather tha it was after Labor Day: last week was chilly most of the week, with cold rain on Friday. Today is cold and rainy again. I just got back at 10:30 from my allergist appointment and my outdoor thermometer reads 40 F.

Dinah approves of the change of weather. She doesn't really approve of the cold air that comes oout of the floor vents during AC season, and now a couple of her favorite spots are nice and warm again.

The results of the allergy tests today were odd, but useful. I seem to be allergic to oysters and lobsters, but not to crab, shrimp, clams or scallops. And I reacted to both Parmiggiano Reggiano and Pecorino Romano (darn), but not to a sheeps' milk Ricotta Salata.

I wonder why the two sheeps' milk cheeses reacted differently. Pecorino Romano is an aged grating cheese, like the Parm, while the Ricotta Salata is a young cheese. But the Ricotta is also made from whey, not curds. I wonder how I would react to a cows' milk ricotta, or whey in general.

My next regular allergy appointment isn't until March. Maybe I'll see about whey and ricotta then.

I'll be seeing the allergist again next month, but just for my flu shot. Since I have an allergy to eggs, she wants to be carefull about it -- though I've had a flu shot every year for about 15 years and it hasn't killed me yet. I definitely want a flu shot: the way I've been catching every virus that comes along this year is not a good sign.

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Tue, Sep 02, 2008

Fever End Finally

Posted at 9:14 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I think I am finally over that virus that knocked me out last week. The fever and associated headache have stayed gone for a whole day, finally, and my appetite is mostly back to normal. I spent most of the long weekend sleeping and reading, working on my jigsaw puzzle, and avoiding the computer.

Avoiding the computer helped the headache I think: my eye muscles get jittery after a day of looking at the screen, and I start seeing double. Adding the fever-headache on top of that was a little excessive. I'm still having bursts of twitchiness in my right eyelid, which are really annoying, but seem to be fading.

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Thu, Aug 28, 2008

Abs

Posted at 10:19 am MDT to Exercise

I still have abs, under the fat! I did the AM Yoga routine again today, and most of the 12 minute, shortened Abs yoga routine I used to do, and they both worked!

I can lay flat on my yoga mat and do a straight leg lift. The result is kind of sloppy, but that's because of my usual problems with tight hamstrings, not weakness through the abs. And twists work as well as they ever did, allowing for the extra belly volume.

Marti said that the core muscles along my spine were still in petty good shape -- probably why having my hip out last winter didn't take the illiosacral joint with it, the way it would have 10 years ago.

Things are still a bit sore from the aftermath of the fall so I didn't push the abs work too hard. I expect it will be at least a week before the muscle patch that was locked stops being tender (I suspect it's getting more blood than it's had in ages), and the other areas that were stressed in the fall really settle down.

Once I can't feel the stressed patches any more, I'll break out the free weights and try to build back some upper body strength. With the muscles actually moving agross the ribs the way they are supposed to, lifting should work again too.

It's nice to have a body that mostly does what I tell it to again, instead of stalling. Having that patch along the lower ribs be just sore, instead of locked rigid, makes an amazing difference.

If there are places that are still stiff in a week or two, I may look into myofascial therapy to break loose any places that are still locked in the aftermath of the radiation. I really can't tell at this point how much of what I'm feeling is remaining long-term problems, and how much is the aftermath of the fall. I think a lot of it is from the fall: I mostly feel the tight and tender spots when I happen to lean my weight on my right hand.

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Wed, Aug 27, 2008

Accidental Therapy

Posted at 7:46 am MDT to Exercise

Last night I kind of got tangled in myself and fell in my living room. I managed to avoid smashing my face open on the metal frame of the coffee table by pushing away from the floor with my right arm -- not quite straightarming it -- and I felt something rip along my lower ribs.

This is actually a good thing. The sore spot corresponds to a patch of muscle that has been locked immobile since the radiation treatment 3 years ago, and the force of the fall seems to have broken it loose. It was kind of weird: I could feel the surrounding muscles stretching and contracting to absorb the shock of the fall, while that patch just sort of exploded.

I just did a little yoga this morning and had equal range of motion for spinal twists on both sides for the first time in ages. Not a lot of range of motion because of the overweight, but there was no more pain or stiffness on one side than the other. This is wonderful.

There is another stiff place up near the collar bone, but I can attack that with yoga and free weights now that the second anchor point is gone. I can already feel that the strain patterns are different.

The second spot is in a place where a massage therapist can make better progress, too. I wish Marty had not left town. I should find another massage therapist.

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Mon, Aug 25, 2008

Chard

Posted at 3:51 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

It's weird to be relieved at having a fever, but that is where I am at the moment. From Saturday evening through this morning I have felt horrible, and I was wondering if I need to have them test for allergy to Swiss chard when I go back to the allergist. Most of the symptoms I was having yesterday might possibly be allergic responses. But I don't think my current fever (especially after most of the other symptoms have faded) is an allergic reaction.

This is weird: I don't know where I caught whatever it is. I have had minimal contact with the outside world for the past couple of weeks because the county guys are repaving the paved road and getting in and out is a hassle.

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Sat, Aug 23, 2008

Jigsaw

Posted at 6:43 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I need to let my brain recharge. Since I got home from Denvention I have been totally immersed in getting this computer set up -- I haven't even read more than a few chapters of the many books I have acquired recently.

Nanette has been out of town, so I haven't been working at the farmers' market. I was glad to skip last week because the weather was cold and rainy, but the last time I worked was 3 weeks ago and I needed to restock, so I went down to market this morning to shop.

Peaches are now in season. And eggplant. And peppers are starting to come in. I also stocked up on goat cheese, mushrooms, chicken breasts, and buffalo and elk steaks. This was a good week to buy expensive meat, since I was leaving the market right away, and would be going home before the meat had time to defrost.

I just had chard (sauteed in bacon grease with garlic) for supper, and tomorrow I will do something with the eggplant and peppers and cucumbers. (Cucumber yogurt sauce for the felafels I have in the freezer. Yum.)

After I got home I got out a jigsaw puzzle I bought last year and have never assembled and spent several hours working on it: I needed to do something non-verbal for a while.

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Wed, Aug 20, 2008

Magpies

Posted at 12:31 pm MDT to Current Events

This is cool. There are only a few species that are known to recognise themselves in mirrors (as opposed to thinking they are seeing another animal). Humans, apes, dolphins and elephants are all large brained mammals.

Now scientists have shown that european magpies can recognise themselves in mirrors, even though they have very small brains by mammalian standards, and a very different brain organization.

The test was pretty straightforward. They put little stickers on the birds, on their necks under their chins where they could not see them directly. If there was no mirror, the birds did nothing. If the sticker was black, and blended into the feathers, the birds did nothing. If the sticker was a contrasting color that the bird could notice in the mirror, it pecked or scratched it off, then stopped pecking or scratching.

So they clearly knew the bird in the mirror was them.

I wonder if magpies have a way to tell each other: "Hey, dude. You have a shmutz on your chin"?

Equally cool: there are links in the comments of the item I linked that lead to scientific records of magpies (both european and american) having funerals when their neighbors die.

The aliens are among us.

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Mon, Aug 18, 2008

DNS Hell

Posted at 9:47 pm MDT to Technology

I spent most of the weekend fighting what turned out to be some really annoying interactions between VMWare, DHCP-Client on Linux, and the resolver DNS functionality. But I have finally achieved a state where all four of the 'machines' are linked by smb and the two Linux 'machines' are linked by NFS.

I also spent an unpleasantly large of yesterday evening, early this morning and later this morning (after sleeping) repairing a major deletion of installed packages on my host system (due to my clicking yes at the wrong time because I was tired). Fortunately, I did a full backup of the current /home, and /etc over Saturday night/Sunday morning, including a capture of the installed package list, so recovery was straightforward, just slow.

Some of my attempted fixes had domino effects. At the moment, yrhel5 (the RedHat image), is just running off its hosts file, not real DNS, but that is enough for it to connect to the other test images. The fact that it joined the domain before its DNS went down seems to be enough for Samba to communicate.

The original problem I was struggling with was that network configuration information in the environment hosting my vmware installation kept getting stepped on and reverting to bad values, usually at boot time, but also at other times. Because of this, the machine was reporting an incomplete value for its own ID, and this was preventing it from joining the Active directory domain. I now have the IP addresses of my ISP's DNS servers memorized, becaues I have typed them so many times.

Setting the IP to static instead of DCHP didn't help: the resolv.conf and hosts data just got cleared instead of set to bad values. I am not entirely sure where all of the places are that this is coming from, but I strongly suspect that vmware is treating the host system as a dhcp client even though it has a fixed IP address, and then the dhcp client software on ykchaua fills in the files with the (empty) data from the vmware dhcp servers.

I have installed two packages that seem to be helping with this. One is called resolvconf and is supposed to handle the resolv.conf file in a more structured way. I'm not sure at this point whether it is doing any good, but it does not seem to be making things any worse.

The second package, which does seem to be helping, is called dnsmasq. It sets up a small cacheing DNS server in a Linux system, using /etc/hosts as data, and you can tell it to ignore resolve.conf and use a different file to define the upstream DNS servers. It can also act as a DHCP server, and the DNS piece knows about (and can provide DNS mappings for) any machines that get their IP addresses from the DHCP server side. I'm not using the DHCP server piece at the moment: I'm trying very hard to get DHCP out of the picture as much as possible to get things stabilized.

I am going to shut down everything tonight. It will be interesting to see what breaks when I boot back up in the morning. Once all the images are talking to each other again, I will load the Rational tools from the release areas I set up today and actually begin developing and testing the software I need to be working on.

In the meantime, I'm going to google for more information about dnsmasq. Maybe there are hints about using it with VMWare.

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Sat, Aug 16, 2008

Development Platform

Posted at 10:45 am MDT to Technology

My development platform. I haven't decided where the DB2 server is going to live, preferably one of the Linux servers. I may need to rework things I am trying to as much as possible of the configuration be supported platforms.

My next step is to get the NTP server set up on ykchaua and get everything syncing, and attack the problem of the clocks running too fast in the VMware clients: Samba and NFS are not happy with the wicked clock skew I'm currently seeing. Once Samba and NFS are connecting cleanly, I'll load the Rational Tools.

• ykchaua
  • 2.96 Gigs physical ram
  • 9620 MB root partition, 175029 MB /home/partiton, plus swap space
  • Dual core nominal 2 GHz Intel T7300 processor
  • direct net connection outbound, NAT connection to VMWare guests
  • Kubuntu 8.04
  • VMWare host
  • Samba file server
  • Backup AD Domain Master
  • LDAP server
  • NFS file server
  • NTP server
  • firewall
  • ClearCase Web and CCRC client
  • ClearQuest Web Client
  • Web server for CGI development
  • Rational Release areas
  • MySQL server
  • DB2 server?>
• sophia2
  • 512 Megs virtual ram
  • 16 Gig virtual drive
  • NAT network connection
  • Windows XP Pro
  • vmware guest.
  • Clearcase View server and client
  • ClearQuest client and schema designer
  • Web client
• ywin2k3svr
  • 512 Megs virtual ram
  • 20 Gig virtual drive
  • NAT network connection
  • Windows 2003 Server R2
  • vmware guest.
  • AD Domain Master
  • DNS server
  • Clearcase View server
  • ClearCase VOB server
  • ClearQuest client
  • ClearQuest license server
  • ClearQuest Web Host if necessary
  • Web client
  • DB2 server if necessary
• yrhel5
  • 512 Megs virtual ram
  • 16 Gig virtual drive
  • NAT network connection
  • RHEL 5.2
  • vmware guest.
  • ClearCase VOB Server, license and Registry
  • Clearcase View server and client
  • ClearQuest client
  • ClearQuest Web Host if possible
  • ClearCase Web Host
  • Web client
  • MySQL server
  • DB2 server (2nd choice)
  • Note: Make sure Virtualization is de-selected during installation of RedHat as a vmware guest.
• quadriga
  • Physical system with two dual core processors and a RAIDED disk array.
  • Backup server
  • Note: if I can get bridged networking working in the vmware on ykchaua, I will added some test configurations in the vmware guests on quadriga, but bridged may not work through ykchaua's wireless connection.

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GParted LiveDisc and vmware-vdiskmanager

Posted at 9:23 am MDT to Technology

I used VMWare Workstation on the old laptop, sophia, but I want VMWare Server on the new one, ykchaua, so I'm not going to migrate the license. Server allows functionality I need (like multiple guests running at the same time) but it doesn't support some features of Workstation, in particular multiple snapshots.

The XP guest image that I migrated over from sophia had some old snapshots, so it was taking up 37 Gigs of space to provide 10 Gigs of usable disk. And 10 Gigs had gotten a bit tight. (My first ever hard drive held 20 Megabytes.)

Rather than push everything back to sophia and clean out the backups, then pull everything back to ykchaua, I googled and found some tricks that let me do the cleanup at drive speeds rather than network speeds. And I was able to expand the virtual disk, too.

1. Back up all the guest files to another directory.
2. Verify the guest can be booted in vmware from the new location.
3. Identify the .vmdk file that is the head of the latest snapshot. It's visible but grayed out in the settings for the guest in the vmware console.
4. Run as root

   vmware-vdiskmanager -r snapshothead.vmdk -t3 newname.vmdk

   Use quotation marks around the names if they have spaces in them.
5. Go into the vmware console, bring up the settings for this guest and remove the existing 'hard disk'. Note any settings like "IDE 0/0" before you do the remove.
6. Create a new hard disk using the newname.vmdk file and the same settings as the previous disk.
7. Verify that the guest is bootable with the new 'drive'.
8. Delete all of the local copies of the old vmdk files and files with Snapshot in their names. Also remove the *.vmsd file, since there is no longer a snapshot chain.
9. Verify that the guest is bootable.
10. Delete the copy of the old guest configuration from the backup location.

This brought the disk usage from 37 Gigs down to 10 by way of a process where maximum disk usage was 84 gigs. Obviously some planning (and possibly an external drive) is needed when doing this.

Increasing the size of the virtual disk was comparatively straightforward, but it required an additinal (and very neat) tool.

I downloaded the GParted Live Disk from its site. This is a tiny iso image that will fit on a credit-card sized cdrom, or a regular cdrom. There are optional versions for usb drives available too. Vmware has a handy feature of being able to treat an iso file as a virtual cdrom, so I didn't need to burn a disk.

This Live CD is not configured as an operating system, it comes up as a partition manager tool. And because it does not boot from your usual system drive, it is easy for it to resize a system partition. To increase the size of my virtual disk I used the following steps.

1. Copy the vmdk files to the backup space
2. Run the following command.

   vmware-vdiskmanager -x <new>GB myDisk.vmdk

   where <new> is the new total size for the virtual disk. Use quotation marks around the vmdk name if it has spaces in it.
3. Verify that the guest boots with the modified disk file.
4. Shutdown the guest.
5. In the guest settings, swich the CDROM to use the Gparted iso instead of the physical drive.
6. Restart the guest. As it comes up, very quickly hit the F2 key.
7. Tab over to Boot, move cdrom higher in the list than the harddisk. Save the changes and quit.
8. Boot the guest.
9. Accept all the GParted defaults until it shows you a display of your drive partitions.
10. Click on the partition you want to grow to highlight it.
11. Click the Resize/Move button
12. On the Resize/Move Popup, drag the right handle on the partition image as far tothe right as it will go and click Resize/Move.
13. Click the Apply button, and select OK in the verification window, and wait a few seconds while the resize is completed.
14. Close the operations window.
15. Bring up the guest settings in the vmware console and set the CDROM back to the physical device. It will complain that it can't find the device. Tell it OK, and to scan for the device everytime it boots.
16. Exit from GParted. The big red Exit button did not seem to work. Right clicking on the desktop and selecting 'Exit/shutdown menu' worked once for me, but there is nothing open on the 'hard drive' so it is also safe to just shutdown the guest. It may complain about not finding the cdrom drive: just click OK.
17. Restart the guest.
18. If the guest is a Windows image, it will scan the disk for problems after boot, and after you log in it will say that it needs to reboot to record the new configuration. Let it.
19. Verify that the new disk size is visible inside the guest.
20. Delete the obsolete vmdk files from the backup space.

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Fri, Aug 15, 2008

Rain, Finally

Posted at 8:32 am MDT to Weather

We are having a rainy day for the first time in months. This is good. The radio said we are 5 inches below normal for the year.

Normal precipitation for the Denver area is only 15.81 inches per year, so this is a serious drought.

The high temperature is predicted to be 56 F, which is about 30 degrees lower than it was a couple of days ago. I switched the HVAC from AC to heat to take the edge off the dampness.

They are predicting snow for the high country.

I'm going to take it easy today: no walking on the treadmill. I'll do my PT exercises and maybe some yoga instead. I spent a day and half in the office using Shawn's desk and chair (he was at a customer site) and I think the ergonomic mismatch pulled my bad hip out of line. The hip feels off, and the skin on my left heel went leathery and split again, which seems to be a sign that the circulation is off in that leg.

I'm going to take it a little easy on the computer work, too. I figured out that because of working until midnight on Monday and Tuesday I had already done more than 40 hours of work related stuff by noon yesterday, and I haven't been sleeping well. I really don't need to run myself into a wall and wreck my health again.

One advantage of doing billable work is that the contract puts a limit on the hours of tight Focused work I do each day: I need to relearn to pace myself when I don't have that external limit. Though I was never good at doing that -- probably one reason I've done well as a contractor and consultant.

Paying attention to that bad leg may give me an indicator of when I'm pushing things too much.

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Thu, Aug 14, 2008

Shoes

Posted at 10:05 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I realized last week that the heel of my right shoe was totally worn down and starting to self-destruct. I didn't shop for shoes then because I knew that we would be doing a lot of walking at the convention, and wearing shoes that my feet were used to was a better idea than wearing new shoes.

Today I went shopping for shoes at the Flatirons Crossing Mall and the surrounding big-box stores. My pair of brown shoes died 6 months ago and the black ones I've been wearing are not really fit for customer meetings, and wouldn't be even if I got them professionallly polished. I do have a pair of dressier shoes in the closet, but they have higher heels than I really prefer.

The store that used to be a DSW is now a Famous Footwear and has no inventory to speak of, and what it has is hdeous. That whole block of big-box buildings is almost empty, and Linens 'n Things, the largest remaining store in the block is having a store-closing sale. I saw for sale and for lease signs in some of the neighboring blocks, too.

The Flatirons Village outdoor adjunct to the main mall is empty. There is Borders and one other store and the cinema at the end away from the mall, and a few big resaturants at each end of the Village, but everything else is empty. I think I heard somewhere that they had discovered some structural problems in the buildings, and needed to reconstruct things. If that's true, the lawsuits must be mindboggling.

The shoes in the main mall were as hideous as the Famous Footwear ones.

There were a couple of stores that were empty or being reconstructed, but not many. But I noticed that some of the existing stores had a lot more empty floor space and a lot few display racks than one would expect. That can't be a good sign. Radio Shack was so empty that I asked if they were planning to close, And Eddie Bauer was surprisingly sparse.

But I bought a new purse at the luggage store (Eagle Creek makes purses and beltpacks, now, not just luggage. Yay!) and some zipper pouches to help me organize things in my Eagle Creek briefcase.

I also encountered some neat items that will be useful Christmas gifts. I don't think I've ever done this much of my Christmas shopping this early.

And I picked up the latest manga in some series I've been following at Borders on my way out of the mall.

I found the DSW: they are in a different clump of big-box stores on the other side of the mall now, and managed to find shoes that fit me and did'nt make me want to gag. I got two pairs of Naturalizer shoes -- the same plain style of flat in black and brown, so I have something presentable.

I also picked up a pair of Sketchers so I have something other than the good shoes to wear for working farmers' market and shopping, and around the house and yard. I will probably use them on the treadmill, too. I've been using the same old rubber-soled black loafers I've worn for everything because the official walking shoes are uncomfortable. I seem to have lower ankle bones than the designers expect: the sides of most sports shoes rub against places they shouldn't. The Skechers are cut lower on the sides, with sport-shoe style soles and decorative, not athletic, uppers.

The clerk at DSW asked if I had their preference card. I told her that since I only buy shoes about every three years, it wouldn't do either of us any good to put me on their list.

At least the massage and exercise has reduced the bloating in my left leg and foot so its back to being a reasonable 9 1/2 medium. Buying shoes 6 months ago would have been problematic.

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Wed, Aug 13, 2008

Ykchaua

Posted at 9:12 am MDT to Technology

Ykchaua is the name of the new laptop: named after the Mayan god of chocolate and merchants because it is brown.

I just verified that I have the ability to print to my laser printer, so the infrastructure seems solid. There is nothing worse than trying to do development on a machine that is going flakey: when something breaks there is no way to tell whether the problem is due to something you have done, or because of a problem with the system.

In a little while I will go over to the office to start loading Windows images and Rational software that I need for my development project

Out of curiosity, I weighed the ykchaua and its power cord and sophia (the old laptop) and its cord and power brick this morning.

Sophia plus AC adapter: 10.4 pounds

Ykchaua plus AC adapter: 6.6 pounds

That is a big improvement, especially for hauling it through airports.

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Primary Results

Posted at 9:12 am MDT to Current Events

The state primaries were yesterday.

Jared Polis won for the Democrats in my district. I am pleased that we have avoided both the surrogate Republican and the Democratic machine candidate.

And the good people of Colorado Springs seem to have experienced a rush of brains to the head, since they declined to nominate wingnut Douglas Bruce (the only man ever censured by the state senate) for another term.

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Tue, Aug 12, 2008

Denvention and Marrakesh

Posted at 9:56 pm MDT to Travel

The panel discussions at Denvention were wonderful, but I have to admit that we weren't impressed by some other aspects of the convention. The art show and Masquerade were disappointing compared even to some regional conventions I've been to in the past. And the Dealers' room was small compared to the ones I remember from past conventions, though that didn't stop me from spending a lot of money on filk CDs and book from smaller publishing companies.

Food was a problem, too. What was available in the Convention Center was limited in variety and hideously over-priced. And even at a good deli, I had trouble finding anything I could eat for breakfast Friday morning.

Saturday we made a quick trip back to my house to fill Dinah's cat-feeder and to run an errand for Nanette's husband, so I ate breakfast at home. Sunday breakfast for Nanette was a capucchino and for me was a mediocre smoothie.

We got the the convention near lunchtime, which we skipped on Thursday, We had hotdog cart hotdogs on Friday (discarding the bun and Saturday, and real food at my house on Sunday afer we left the convention.

For dinners we went out: to Z Cuisine for our memorable meal on Thursday and for a quick meal at QDoba before the Masquerade on Friday.

On Saturday evening, we spent some time exploring the LoDo end of the 16th Street Mall, and found a very nice Moroccan place: Marrakesh Restaurant. The food was excellent and there were plenty of dishes for me to choose from (I clearly need to learn more Mediterranean cooking). And Saturday is one of the evenings they have a belly dancer: she was very good too.

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Migration 2

Posted at 8:40 pm MDT to Technology

It has taken a long day, but I now have VMWare and the LAMP (Linux, Apache, Mysql, Perl) stack working on the new laptop. My development copies of my blog and the CGI programs I have worked on for the company website are now accessible using the new laptop's local web server.

I really wish Debian and Ubuntu would leave the apache2 config files the way they are described in the actual apache documentation. And I'm not sure why the configuration that was working on the old laptop (Ubuntu 8.04 that got there by way of upgrades) doesn't quite work on the new laptop, which started out as Ubuntu 8.04.

And they really need a reliable way to configure apparmor so that mysql can have its data in a non-default location. I had to block apparmor from affecting mysql to get things to work.

I have all the data that is likely to change and needs to be backed up in /home: /home/mysql, /home/www, /home/vmware, but the config files aren't nearly as cooperative as they should be about setting things up that way.

Tomorrow I'll go into the office and load the Windows images I will need for testing the new application I need to develop.

Tonight I'm going to download a 32bit Centos image for the UNIX side of the development and testing and get that loaded into VMWare. I'm also going to rsync /home and /etc back up to the server, so I have a record of things in a working state. I should dump a list of the installed packages, and back that up to0.

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Mon, Aug 11, 2008

Migration

Posted at 9:10 pm MDT to Technology

If you can read this, it means that I have nearly completed my migration from the old laptop to the new laptop.

Everything was backed up from /home on the old laptop to my server, which was pretty quick because I have been using rsync for backups. Then I copied everything from the backups into a staging directory and did some cleanup (so the full backup still exists). I renamed .kde and .mozilla to .kde.old and .mozilla.old so they would be available for reference and cleaned out most of the other config files so they would not step on the clean ones on the new machine.

The staging files are still downloading (rsync again) to the /home partition on the new laptop, but things have gotten far enough that I have my emails accessible here, and my Konqueror bookmarks are set up and working.

Next I attack Firefox, which is a different set of bookmarks, mostly ones that need Flash. I probably need to redownload the Flash plugins, but they should work better since the new machine is 32bit.

VMWare will need to wait until tomorrow, and I need to decide whether to load VMWare Workstation or VMWare Server.

This keyboard is driving me nuts: I am used to the old one, which had only one Control key, with the Delete key in an odd place. It will take some time to adjust to a more normal layout.

Other than that, I really like this machine. The screen is a little smaller than the previous one, but not enough to be annoying (I think it may be a similar screen layout with smaller dots) and having the screen shiny instead of matte is less of a glare problem that I had feared, at least so far.

The new machine is enormously quieter: if it has fans, I can't hear them, and the drives are silent, too. I haven't tested the sound system yet, but it can't be worse than the previous one. It would be nice to have speakers that actually speak again.

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Sun, Aug 10, 2008

Denvention day 1 and Z Cuisine

Posted at 10:05 pm MDT to Travel

On Thursday Nanette and I drove down to Denver to the 66th World Science Fiction Convention, Denvention 3. We checked into our hotel and spent the afternoon in the art show, dealers' room and panel discussions.

In the dealers' room, Howard Tayler, creator of the Schlock Mercenary webcomic, drew a caricature of me, while we were talking to him and gave it to me for free. I stocked up on the hard-copy editions of the comic and got Nanette interested in Schlock over the course of the convention.

That evening, we went to dinner at Z Cuisine a restaurant that buys vegetables from Nanette's farm. It is a beautiful little place divided in two sections, with great original art by local artists.

We started in the wine bar during happy hour, where Chef Patrick (a chef from France) recognized Nanette and comped us each a glass of wine. Along with the wine we had the Assiette de Charcuterie Maison (what I think of as an antipasto tray): pickles, roasted peppers, olives, a little paté, a tiny crème brûlée (which Nanette had to herself due to my new dietary limitations) and cheese. It turned out that the cheese was Haystack Mountain goat cheese, so I was able to have some of it.

Later we went next door to the Bistrot. We both had the Cassoulet de la Maison: duck leg confit with garlic and sausage and beans ragout, with wilted greens (kale, I think). It was amazingly wonderful. Probably the most expensive meal I've had in -- possibly forever. But it was wonderful.

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Thu, Aug 07, 2008

Denvention

Posted at 8:42 am MDT to Miscellaneous

In about an hour, Nanette will stop by to pick me up for our trip to Denvention, the World Science Fiction Convention.

The laptop is staying home. It will be Sunday or Monday before I post again.

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Sweet Potato

Posted at 8:42 am MDT to Miscellaneous

Oh. My. God.

I found this link on matociquala's (Elizabeth Bear's) live journal, and I was laughing so hard I had trouble seeing to read most of it.

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Wed, Aug 06, 2008

Monsoon

Posted at 7:12 pm MDT to Weather

After a record-breaking streak of hot dry weather, it looks like the southwestern monsoon is finally arriving.

This is the second day in a row that I've gotten a little precipitation and a storm cell has gone by that was dense enough to block my TV satellite signal. The cells are still small: Nanette got no rain yesterday and the farm is only 15 minutes away.

At least this indicates that the weather pattern is starting the change.

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Good news, Bad News

Posted at 4:59 pm MDT to Current Events

Sometimes it seems like every time there is evidence of civilization in this country, it comes along with evidence of bigoted idiots.

Acording to a link on Language log the union at the Tyson Foods poultry plant in Shelbyville, Tennesee recently signed a new contract that provides 8 holidays including Eid-al-Fitr, the last day of Ramadan (the eighth holiday was previously Labor Day. The other holidays are New Year's, MLK, Memorial Day, July 4, Thanksgiving, Christmas and the employee's birthday). There are only 250 Muslims among the 1200 members of the union, so I think that union includes some nice civilized people: the new contract was approved by 80% of the members.

On the other hand, the Executive Director of "English First" denounced the contract as "multiculturalism run amok".

Hmmm. I wonder if the union knows that because Muslims don't use a leap month like the Jewish and Chinese calendars, Eid-al_fitr should happen 13 times in 12 Gregorian years? I wonder if Tyson knows?

In other news, according to John Scalzi on tor.com, scientists have found a lot of lowland gorillas in a previously unexplored swamp in Africa.

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Tor Freebies

Posted at 2:46 pm MDT to Media

Tor Books has started a new website with a lot of cool bloggers on various topics (John Scalzi has the science desk) and occasional short fiction. So far that includes short stories by Scalzi and Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow and a web comic by Wesley Allsbrook.

Note that the tor.com online magazine is not the same as the Tor corporate site, which uses a clunky aspx interface. They really need a competent web admin on that one to work on getting the menus and directory defaults to work reliably.

In the run-up to the site going live, they posted (at weekly intervals) electronic versions of a dozen Tor novels. I downloaded the pdf versions.

Some of them were books I had already read, or that already existed in hardcopy in my to-be-read pile, but some were initial books of series that were new to me. In my case at least, the free books are going to result in additional sales for Tor. The books I have read so far are very good, with engaging characters and very well constructed worlds>.

In the past few days I have read two and a half of these. (I have also discovered that the KDE pdf reader remembers where you were in a file, so that when I re-open a book I left in the middle, it puts me on the correct page. This is very handy.)

The first one I finished was A Shadow in Summer, the first book of "The Long Price Quartet" by Daniel Abraham. (It looks like the next two volumes, Betrayal in Winter and An Autumn War are out or scheduled). The magic system in the story is unique and well thought out, the culture where most of the action in the first volume occurs is nicely and consistently alien, with an intricate formalised use of body language as well as speech, and the events of the plot grow organically out of the chanracters and the environment. And there is something to be said for a fantasy book where a major viewpoint character is a middle-aged female accountant.

The second was Crystal Rain by Tobias Buckell. He has another book out, Ragamuffin, set in the same universe, and another, Sly Mongoose that is due out in a couple of weeks, both of which I will be on the lookout for. I love the use of langauage in this book. The author is from the Caribbean and uses dialect beautifully in all of the dialogue. And his world-building is very solid. This feels like a Caribbean Poul Anderson to me: the combination of adventure and solid worldbuilding scratches that itch, and I think the non-whitebread speech rhythms are giving me echoes of Nicholas van Rijn, even though the actual accents involved are very different.

I need to find out what cultural ideas are attached to Ragamuffins and mongooses in the Caribbean. I have a definite impression that there are resonances that I am missing.

I am still in the middle of Kate Elliott's Spirit Gate. After WorldCon I will pick it up in hardcopy, along with the sequel Shadow Gate. I may also look into her series for another publisher. I like the characters and the world (refreshingly not-Central-Asia as well as not-Europe), but it is quite long, and my energy for dealing with things going wrong even in narrative is limited these days. Ironically, if I liked the characters less, my patience for dealing with the on-going tightening of the screws might be better. The cultural and religious details hold together nicely.

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Mon, Aug 04, 2008

Swallowing Problem Again

Posted at 1:48 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Drat. Lunch sort of ricocheted on me today.

Oh, well, at least it's been a couple of months since I had my esophagus lock up. I'm out of practice clearing the blockage. On the good side, it's been a couple of months since this happened, so the dietary changes have definitely made a difference.

I just wish I had some idea what set it off. I hadn't eaten anything in the past 12 hours that I haven't eaten since the food allergies were diagnosed. I'd be surprised if stuff I ate longer ago than that was still causing irritation.

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DSL Down Yesterday

Posted at 1:47 pm MDT to Technology

DSL was down yesterday for several hours. After listening to hold music for a while I finally reached a recording that said my ISP had a failure of a major piece of equipment.

It's amazing how addicted to net access I've become. I spent all evening thinking "I should look this up on the web" about one thing or another.

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Fri, Aug 01, 2008

Falafel

Posted at 2:52 pm MDT to Technology

This noon I made falafel balls (from a mix) with grapeseed oil as the frying medium. They came out pretty well, probably vecause I invested in a good frying/candy thermometer a while back and was careful to let the oil come back to 350 before I added each new batch of falafels.

My 1 teaspoon cookie disher makes a good size of falafel, but if it isn't firmly packed they fall apart or turn to little octopus shaped things.

Next time I fry, I'll use the friedchicken pan: the cast iron will hold the heat better. It will need more oil than the saucepan I used today, but it will fit more balls at a time, so things will go faster. And if I'm careful about the temperature, the oil will be reusable.

Googling says they freeze well and can be reheated in a 350 oven (I will probably use my toaster oven), which is good since the package made a big batch. I'll need to look for a recipe for yogurt dressing: I can make some with goat-milk yogurt.

According to one site I found, I could make scratch falafel from chickpeas with the meatgrinder attachment for my stand mixer. I may try that some time.

I wonder if it is possible to make non-dairy baklava? Store-bought phyllo dough seems to have stuff I'm allergic to, but maybe I could make something like it with my pasta machine. I should probably do some more googling.

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Thu, Jul 31, 2008

Semi-Ept

Posted at 1:43 pm MDT to Current Events

Interesting.

The Shafroth campaign has enough awareness of the blogoverse to have someone scanning for mentions of him in blogs, but they respond to what they say are inaccuracies in an email.

Apparently my little 'add a comment' link is merely decorative. Or else maybe they don't want to commit to a public discussion?

They included an offer of a followup phone-call, if I will provide them with a number to call. I think not. I am sufficiently unimpressed by their website, and I have no intention of getting on a list consenting to incoming spam-calls.

I'm not going to quote from the email either: I assume if they wanted a public discussion they would have used the comments, so I am going to respect their privacy.

Somehow this reminds me of those bozos who were claimed to be representing the blogging world in negotiations with the AP, but you needed to use email or the telephone to get information about them.

I should probably check my logs and find out if anyone is actually reading this blog these days besides the handful I more or less know about.

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Democratic Primary

Posted at 9:07 am MDT to Current Events

There are three Democrats in the race for my local Congressional District: Jared Polis, Joan Fitz-Gerald, and Will Shafroth.

A few weeks ago I was called by a political poll about the race. As far as I could tell from the questions they asked, Will Shafroth was running on a platform of having a wife and kids, not on policy matters. I found that a little odd and suspicious until this morning, when I checked wikipedia on all three candidates. The article on Jared Polis describes him as 'openly gay'. Suddenly all the 'family' questions made sense. Shafroth was running on a "I am a man and not gay' platform". Ewww.

According to Shafroth's website, he has been endorsed by both Denver newspapers, which swing much farther to the right than the Boulder area that the Representative will actually be representing. This would suggest to me that he is the surrogate Republican in the race (this is a fairly solid Democratic seat) even if the push-poll questions had not made me suspicious.

I'm having trouble deciding between Polis and Fitz-Gerald.

I like Jared Polis' policies on various issues, and his website seems to address more of them and in more detail than Fitz-Gerald does. He has been a successful creator of several businesses and worked as head of the State Board of Education (an elected post), and created a foundation that, among other educational endeavors, supports education for immigrant children and homeless and at-risk children. He has also pledged not to take PAC money.

He seems competent (unlike Shrub's business background of repeated failures), and I like his ideas. He has a well-done personal website and one for his educational foundation as well as the political one that's tied to the campaign, so he seems to be a resident of the 21st century. But he does lack legislative experience.

Fitz-Gerald was the first woman President of the Colorado State Senate, and is very plugged into the old-style Democratic organization. She was previously a County Clerk (in a strongly Republican county) who introduced Vote-by-Mail to Colorado. She has most of the big endorsements from Democratic politicians and unions.

Legislative experience is desirable, but I am very disappointed with the way the organization Democrats in Congress have failed to do the things we elected them to do in 2006. They threw away two years in which they could have made corrections to the appalling course this country has been on. Legislative experience is way too likely to mean 'business as usual' in all of the worst ways.

I think I am going to vote for Polis in the primary.

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Mon, Jul 28, 2008

Blood Test Results

Posted at 11:49 am MDT to Miscellaneous

The results are coming in from the various medical tests I had last week.

From Wednesday's tests, I am immune to measles. This is good: the DTP injection site it still tender, and this means I don't need to have another shot. I'll see if they can test for mumps immunity the next time I get my thyroid levels checked.

From Friday's tests, my hormone levels are not yet post-menopausal. This means I stay on tamoxifen instead of switching to one of the alternative therapies. (Perhaps the tamoxifen is why my external symptoms of menopause are more advanced?) It also means my hormone levels will be staving off osteoporosis for a while yet, which is good.

Friday's tests also indicated I'm still testing as anemic, even though I take a multi-vitamin/mineral supplement with iron in it. Not sure what to do about that. Now that the swallowing problems seem to be mostly under control, I should probably try to switch more red meat back into my diet.

There is organic elk and bison, and grass-fed beef available at the farmers' market, besides the chicken and lamb. I should clean the ancient stuff out of my chest freezer that freezer-burned during the years I was mostly out of town, and restock with fresh food. (I was mostly coming to the end of the side of lamb and pork, and quarter of beef I had before I started travelling, and needing to think about restocking, so it isn't a huge waste.) If I had meat red meat in the house, I would probably eat it.

I should probably invest in one of those food vaccuum sealers, too, to prevent freezer-burn in the future.

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Sun, Jul 27, 2008

Chard

Posted at 5:48 pm MDT to Technology

Man, that immunization really knocked me out. I've been a slug for the past few days, and after 4 days I still have a noticeable bump where the injection happened, though at least it has gotten smaller and less itchy.

I worked farmer's market yesterday. Rowan was in San Diego for the big comic convention, so it was just Nanette who did the picking and the two of us setting up. I went over to Nanette's for a little while afterward, and stopped at my local Whole Foods (that used to be Wild Oats) on the way home, and I was exhausted when I got home.

I brought home some zucchini (which I need to do something with tomorrow) and chard. I made the chard for dinner today.

My traditional use for chard is in a frittata, but it is kind of hard to make a frittata without eggs, so I experimented a bit.

I stripped the stems out of the chard, chopped them, and started them sauteing in a little olive oil while I chopped the leaves, then added the leaves to the skillet and put on the lid, so the leaves would partly steam in their own moisture.

While that was cooking, I chopped up some thin-sliced cooked salami and added it to the pan to render out some of its fat blend the flavors a little.

After cooking another minute or so, I grated a little hard goat cheese --'Sunlight' from Haystack Dairy -- on top. Stirred it through, and added a little more on top when I dished it up. (I got the cheese at the market last week from the Haystack Dairy folks, but the local Whole Foods carry it too, so I can get it in the off season.)

The mixture was interesting but a little strong, and the proportions were a little off. I stirred some into some cooked and cooled elbow noodles, with a little more cheese. and I think I've got the beginnings of an interesting pasta salad, once I get the proportions balanced. The mouth-feel was rich enough to satisfy some of the craving for mac and cheese that's been attacking me when I shop.

The next batch needs to be a bunch of chard, an ounce or so of chopped salami, a quarter to half a cup of grated cheese (I didn't have nearly that much this time) to about a half pound of pasta.

I'm starting to watch some of my cooking shows so I can clear them off my DVR, and I encountered the concept of a veloute, which is like a bechamel but based on stock instead of milk. I wonder if I could do a chicken veloute-based mac and cheese casserole with some goat cheese. Maybe when the weather gets cooler.

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Thu, Jul 24, 2008

Vaccines

Posted at 4:16 pm MDT to Technology

I went to the doctor replacing my previous internist to get my thyroid levels checked yesterday. She seems OK, so I may stay with her instead of looking for a new doctor.

While I was there I mentioned that I thought I was due for a tetanus shot, and she suggested I get the DTP (diptheria, tetanus, pertussis) shot they give to little kids. It seems the ones people my age got as children are wearing off, and there are outbreaks of whooping cough (pertussis) these days because idiots are not getting their children immunized, so the diseases are able to spread. The DTP shot sounded fine to me: I don't need more crud in my lungs after the winter I had.

There have been recent outbreaks of measles, too, so they are going to test some of my blood they took for antibodies. The vaccine was after my time, but I never had the measles even though they were prevalent in the grammar schools I attended.

I should probably get tested for mumps antibodies next time, if they have a test for mumps antibodies: I missed them too. The only one of the 'standard' childhood diseases I actually experienced was chicken pox.

My Mom made sure I got immunized for German Measles when I was in junior high, since I had never had them, because they would cause birth defects if I caught the later in life while pregnant. And I think my youngest brother might have gotten the full set of measles immunizations: Chris is 7 years younger than me, and measles immunization was commoner by the time he reached school age.

I really don't understand people who don't get their kids immunized. But then, I'm old enough to remember when mumps and measles were things you hoped would come through your neighborhood without any of the nastier effects for you or your classmates.

Polio vaccines (both Salk and Sabin) were new and wonderful lifesaving treatments that stopped parents' nightmares and opened the public swimming pools in the summer time in my lifetime. I don't remember the pools being closed, but I remember my parents talking about the change. I was very sick with something when I was one year old, in the summer of 1955, and polio was one of the things they worried about. That was the year the Salk vaccine first became widely available, so I had not been immunized before I was sick. I'm sure I was immunized not long after, and I remember being re-immunized with the oral vaccine later.

And I've read about the European 'childhood diseases' wiping out the Mississippi valley civilizations. We really don't want to have an unexposed, un-immunized population.

I received the actual original 'vaccination' -- against smallpox -- twice that I know of. Once as a small child and once in high-school or junior-high.

Googling, it looks like there is a West Nile vaccine for horses, though it needs to be renewed every year. And West Nile vaccines for humans are in clinical trials in Hawaii and elsewhere. That's one I'd definitely be interested in getting when it becomes available.

And if tropical diseases move north as the climate shifts, we will eventually need to be immunized for some of them on a regular basis, not just when we travel.

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Choices

Posted at 2:34 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Cool.

Found via a link on matociquala's LiveJournal. An article from Scientific American about how the decision-making part of the brain can get worn out.

No wonder programming and writing stories are both tiring: they both involve a constant choosing of details.

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Wed, Jul 23, 2008

Graham Cracker Packaging

Posted at 1:13 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

It seems that the marketing guys have been playing games with the HoneyMaid Graham Cracker packages.

The boxes are still the traditional size, and there are still three packages of crackers per box, and the crackers are still the same size. But the 3 packages no longer fill the box completely as they once did.

Judging by the amount of empty air space in the box, I suspect the packages used to hold 12 crackers each. Now they only hold 9 each.

I'm glad to have any graham crackers -- most other crackers seem to have one or more ingredients I can no longer eat -- but if they are going to skimp on the package contents, they should reduce the amount of packaging. Or fill the box and raise the price. Just be honest about it.

Insert ritual comments about the good old days here....

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Christian the Lion

Posted at 12:19 pm MDT to Media

This video was linked by Lori Coulson in the Making Light comments (#88). It is wonderful. The availability of thing is one of the wonders of the internet.

If I'm being a little quiet this week, it is because I am on vacation, and as the pressure of work came off, I found myself able to write fiction again. Which means I am not getting as much done around the house as I had planned, but I am not complaining.

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Mon, Jul 21, 2008

Digital XRays

Posted at 11:30 am MDT to Technology

The locally available medical technology has taken a jump in the past year. Both my dentist and the mammography department at the local hospital are now using digital x-ray camera instead of film. This gives them much clearer images: the computer can get the focus exactly right. The new mammography system is supposed to see through fibrocystic tissue a lot better than the old one, too.

It also gives faster turnaround on the images, of course. At the end of my mammogram this morning the technician showed me the pictures she had taken, after she emailed them to the radiologist. They looked nice and clear to me. This is good. They should not need followup untrasounds or whatever to decide on my status.

The technician was very nice. She did the right-side lateral imaging in two shots instead of one to allow for the fact that the tissue on that side is stiff from being cooked by the radiation treatments. That side just doesn't compress well.

My dentist showed me the images from the digital bite-wings, too, when he was discussing what they had found. He just swung the screen he was using to view them around so I could look at it too.

I still want vise-free Star Trek medical scanners for mammograms, though. The new systems don't hurt quite as badly as the old ones did, but that is not saying a whole lot.

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Sun, Jul 20, 2008

Blogroll

Posted at 1:35 pm MDT to Miscellaneous


I regularly read two forums: Shadow Unit and the Girl Genius Yahoo forum. I'm occasionally active on the Shadow Unit forum, but I get GG by email and seldom post: the moderators on that forum are fairly obnoxious and the forum software doesn't work that well with Konqueror. I was more active on GG a couple of years ago.

Some of the sites I follow live in a strange limbo between fiction and the 'real' internet.

Othar Trygvassen (Gentleman Adventurer), a character from Girl Genius has a Twitter account, where his adventures are reported more or less daily. There is a portal and archive available.

Four of the characters from Shadow Unit have LiveJournals, where the Shadow Unit story has been continuing over the summer in the journals and comments. Hafidha Gates is 0metotchtli, Daphne Worth (who just announced that she is getting married to her girlfriend) is trollcatz and Chaz Villette, who is usually the most active blogger, is cvillette. Solomon Todd is ace-cub-reportr, but he doesn't usually use his account for posting. He just comments on the other characters' LJs.

The actual blogroll:

People I 'met' through the Shadow Unit forums and character blogs

Elizabeth Bear matociquala on LiveJournal

Emma Bull coffeeem on LiveJournal

Sarah Monette truepennyon LiveJournal

Amanda Downum stillsostrange on Livejournal

The Mad Gastronomer at inaurolillium and Ask Zombie Chef, both on LiveJournal. She was very supportive when I was freaking out about my new dietary restrictions.

And txanne, a real person (I think), with a fun LJ, who commented in the character blogs and ended up with a cameo in a Shadow Unit episode.

As you can see the Shadow Unit fourth wall is kind of porous in both directions.

The rest of these sites I check regularly.

Tech

Groklaw

Slashdot (I very very rarely read comments here, but the articles link to interesting places.)

Literature, Science and Culture

Making LightLiterature, publishing, politics, poetry, puns, emergency medicine. A ferociously civilized community of commenters.

More Words, Deeper HoleLive Journal of James D. Nicoll, whom I first encountered on rec.arts.sf.written. Cats, books, lnguage, SF and miscellaneous commentary, politics with a Canadian POV

Antick MusingsBlog of Andrew Wheeler, who used to be an editor of the Science Fiction Book Club, and used to post on rec.arts.sf.written. Publishing industry, books reviews and miscellaneous

WhateverSF author John Scalzi's blog had a million visitors in June (I was 30 of them). Pets, photos, music and movie and book reviews, guest interviews with other authors, politics and miscellaneous essays. Scalzi does a great rant when he is on a roll.

Language LogLinguistics

C. J. Cherryh - Progress ReportThis gets updated once every few weeks with the SF author's diary for the preceding time.

Neil GaimanNews about Neil and his professional acquaintances and activities, also his family and pets and bees. No comments on this blog, but he answers questions frm email in the articles.

WWdN: In ExileWil Wheaton: actor, geek and big-time blogger. He was on one of the Geek Cruises I took a few years ago, and the blog has kept me reading since then.

Charlie's DiaryCharles Stross, British SF author and former technology journalist. SF, politics and technology

Dynamics of CatsSteinn Sigurðsson, Icelandic born astrophysicist and former poster on rec.arts.sf.written. Science, politics, Icelandic culture, the iPod I Ching

Fullmetal AnalystA literature professor and fan of manga and anime. I first encountered her writing on rec.arts.anime.misc. I wish she had time to post more often.

Shawn's WeblogMy business partner. We talk back and forth in comments to our blogs.

Tetrapod ZoologyScience blog by paleontologist Darren Naish. Extinct species, extant species, endangered species and occasional species that probably don't exit. With illos and footnotes and links to the primary scientific articles.

PharyngulaScience blog by PZ Meyers. Atheism, biology, evo-devo, cephalopods and politics, especially fighting against creationism and Intelligent Design in schools and religous influences in government. I don't read most of the comments here (some of the atheism and political posts get a LOT of comments, but the articles are interesting.

HiggaionStudies in Biblical Hebrew. Hard to describe. Hasn't been updated much this summer, but it had some interesting articles during the school year.

Sing a Song of Sixpence Live Journal of an Emergency Department Physician in 'City X' (which may be somewhere in Michigan). Updates very occasionally, but the stories from the hospital are amazing when they occur.

Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the WeekArticles by three paleontologists, including Darren Naish of Tetrapod Zoology

SF NovelistsWriters discussing writing in the articles and the comments

The Daily CoyotePhotos of Charlie the coyote. He's beautiful, and Shreve Stockton is a wonderful photographer.

The Edge of the American WestArticles about American politics, history and culture by history professors and guests

Robin McKinleySF writer Robin McKinley. American expatriot in England. Sf, writing, music, horses, hellhounds, gardens (especially roses),recipes, bell-ringing

There are other blogs I visit occasionally.

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Sat, Jul 19, 2008

A Crossover of DOOM

Posted at 7:06 pm MDT to Media

On fmanalysts's live journal I found a link to The Royal Society (a crossover of DOOM).

This is a crssover fanfic for: "deep breath Torchwood/Discworld/Nero Wolfe/Lord Peter/Harry Potter/SGA/Jeeves&Wooster/Sherlock Holmes.".

While on the subject of fanfic crossovers, there are a couple of stories online that crossover Bertie Wooster and Lord Peter Wimsey. The suggestion is that Bertie Wooster's odd world, where World War I never happened, is the world-view of a former officer with massive PTSD. It works very well. The first story is Green Ice. There is the beginning of a sequel Armistice which is just heartbreaking. (Now I have them linked I will be able to find them again without googling.)

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Dr. Horrible

Posted at 6:26 pm MDT to Media

Joss Whedon spent the writers' strike writing a superhero musical: Dr.Horrible's Sing Along Blog. It stars Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible, Nathan Filion as Captain Hammer, his nemesis and Felicia Day as Penny, thir mutual love interest, and it has been posted this week for free, one chapter at a time. Starting tomorrow it will be available on iTunes, and eventually there will be a DVD with extras.

I finally watched it today: I needed to plug phones into my laptop to hear it. The speakers on this laptop suck royally. I hope the new laptop has a better sound system... my previous laptop had speakers that I could actually hear.

The music is great.

I want to see the adventures of Bad Horse, maybe as an online comic. The head of the super-villain group that Dr. Horrible wants to join (the Evil League of Evil) is a horse. An evil horse with henchmen in western clothes.

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Thu, Jul 17, 2008

Sean Tevis for Kansas

Posted at 7:52 pm MDT to Current Events

A liberal inhabitant of the 21st Century and the Internet is running for State Representative in Kansas against an incumbent, who is anti-choice, anti-gay marriage, pro-censorship and pro-'intelligent design in schools'. He has a fundraising website in the style of the XKCD comic, and is trying to get 3000 donors by July 28 (according to the site, no candidate for State Representative has ever had more than 644 donors) partly because setting a record will get him publicity.

He was told he needed $26000. And calculated that $500 from two people he knew plus an average $8.34 each would put him over the top

According to the website, he currently has just under 2900 donors.

I think Kansas would benefit from having someone to counterbalance the creationists.

I recommend clicking through to see the website, even if you don't donate.

I also recommend XKCD.

I heard about this on Pharyngula, a science/liberal/atheist blog.

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Tue, Jul 15, 2008

Chirp

Posted at 10:34 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Years ago when I had my back porch built and the back door installed on my house, the inspector refused to sign off on the permit unless I had smoke detectors on each level (which I had) and in each bedroom, which I didn't at that time.

So I have 5 smoke detectors in the house. Two of them are new last fall: the original upstairs and downstairs ones finally bit the dust. And I replaced all the batteries this past winter.

So it is doubly annoying that one of them is chirping at intervals. Its battery is apparently dying. Or it is. And the chirps are far enough apart that it is difficult to tell which one is complaining. They never seem to chirp when I am standing near one.

I suspect it is the one in the basement which is one of the next ones. I'll try changing that battery in the morning. I will be very annoyed if the problem turns out to be with the detector.

At least it isn't the one in my bedroom, so it won't drive me completely crazy over night.

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Mon, Jul 14, 2008

Marinated Mushrooms I

Posted at 9:24 pm MDT to Technology

These came out very strong. Maybe change the ratio of oil to vinegar next time. Also, red wine vinegar makes them dark: invest in some white wine vinegar, if possible, for the next batch.

Some recipes call for cooking the mushrooms, etc. in vinegar, draining them, then adding oil to the mason jar to cover. That might give a mellower result, too.

Lots of recipes call for red chile flakes. I might stir in a tiny bit after the cooking, just before the mixture goes from the pan to the jar.

Some of the extra kick maybe from including wine vinegar and extra virgin olive oil instead of the less flavorful varieties they use in the marinated mushrooms from the store.

I used an oil-packed roasted pepper. A fresh, or freshly roasted, red bell pepper would be nice.

1 pound fresh mushrooms 
    halved or quartered depending on size
1 roasted sweet pepper chopped into shreds
cloves from one head of garlic, sliced thin
1/2 tsp pickling salt
1/2 cup each light and extra virgin olive oil
1 cup red wine vinegar
dried marjoram and other herbs
dried parsley

Put ingredients in a saucepan. Mix together. Add equal parts oil and vinegar to barely cover the mushrooms. Bring to a boil and cook 5 to 10 minutes.

Allow to cool slightly, then ladle solids and enough liquid to cover into a mason jar. Add oil if needed to cover the solids (this batch there was a little extra liquid left in the pan). Refrigerate at least over night before serving.

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Sun, Jul 13, 2008

Annoyances

Posted at 5:03 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I received a letter from my internist, who is my primary care physician. He's leaving his practice. This is the third or fourth internist I've outlasted, the second or third at this clinic, depending on whether you count the temp who covered between when my first doctor there left and the current one took over my care.

Now I need to decide whether to stick with this same clinic (which at least has years and years of my records: I started seeing my first doctor at Internal Medicine Associates in 1999) or go looking for another internist. If I knew anyone who was happy with their doctors I might be inclined to make a change.

Another annoyance:

The Readerware software I use to catalog my books, CDs and DVDs has stopped working. It may be a problem with using Java on a 64 bit Linux system.

I've been holding out on the migration to the new laptop (which is 32 bit) because some of the files and apps I need for my current contract are configured on this one in 64bit. But since the contract is up in a week I should start migrating things over. It may not be worth it to fuss about getting Readerware working again on this box.

But I really don't understand Sun. They claimed to want Java to be a cross-platform system, but even though 64 bit machines have been around long enough for me to wear out a 64bit laptop, they still don't have official support for Java on 64bit.

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Sat, Jul 12, 2008

Goat milk

Posted at 3:53 pm MDT to Technology

At Farmers' Market today I had Sisters' Pantry Dumplings for breakfast. Yay. I also bought two kinds of goat-milk cheese.

On the way home I stopped at Whole Foods. They had powered and canned goats' milk. I got some powdered: tomorrow I'll make a batch of waffles with goats' milk and egg replacer, and vanilla to compensate for some of the missing richness of the eggs. I hope this batch will be less lame than the pancakes I made with the egg replacer a few weeks ago.

Whole Foods also had goat yogurt. It's very expensive, but at least it is there. So it is available for use as an ingredient.

And they carry lots of kinds of goat and sheep milk cheeses (including cheese from the farm I buy from at the market, so I can keep buying it over the winter). I'll get a sample of sheep cheese to be tested with before my next allergist appointment.

I bought some meringue cookies, too. Sugar and egg whites, with no dairy or egg yolks. It's nice to buy some regular things. it would be even nicer to find a brand of hotdog and hamburger buns without malt in them, but I think that quest is hopeless.

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Thu, Jul 10, 2008

Long Day, Short Night

Posted at 8:34 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Next week is my last week on this contract, so we are rolling out script changes to production, which needs to be done after hours, Boston time.

I worked 10:30 AM my time to 8 PM to day, with a meal break. That made up the time from the doctor's appointment yesterday.

And I need to be available at 8am Boston time (6 am Colorado time) in case there are problems in the rollout aftermath. Sometimes it's really handy to have a commute that runs from the bedroom to the living room.

We'll do some more rollouts early next week, probaly Tuesday/Wednesday so my schedule will be strange again. But by Friday evening this contract will be done.

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Wed, Jul 09, 2008

Mediterranean Food

Posted at 7:57 pm MDT to Technology

The allergist's office hadn't been planning to do more skin tests today but they did three: olives, Russian olive pollen, and goat's milk. They all came back negative.

The Russian olive is interesting: I was pretty sure i was allergic to it in the early 90s. Either it was something else that pollinates at the same time (like ragweed and goldenrod) or I've adapted to it over the years.

The olives and goat's milk are a big relief. I can have goat cheese, in small quantities. And olive oil I've been using in place of butter should not be a problem. (I suspect that means I need a fresher bottle of extra virgin olive oil) I can eat some Greek food, or Moroccan. As long as I stay away from eggs and butter... and maybe find a source of goat milk yogurt. I don't think I've ever seen goat butter for sale.

The Doctor also agreed that I can add small amounts of egg whites back into my diet, since I tested negative for them last month. I can have Sisters' Pantry dumplings for breakfast at Farmers' Market!

My next appointment is scheduled for September 8, and this time they have scheduled more skin tests. I think there is still something occasionally triggering allergic reactions, so I'll be trying to keep track of what kinds of things I've been eating before I have swallowing problems.

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Tue, Jul 08, 2008

Ingredients

Posted at 11:13 pm MDT to Technology

I got another piece of birthday present from work today: a set of Mario Batali utensils to accompany the cookbooks.

I went down to Salvaggio's deli to see if they had any Pecorino Romano cheese, but it was very disappointing. It's just a sandwich shop. (Years ago it had some actual imported stuff.)

Herb's Meats, which I visited last week, does a better job of being an Italian deli. But it didn't have imported cheeses. I have a rabbit from Herb's in the freezer.

I think there is an Italian deli in downtown Louisville, but I didn't go there. Instead I explored some of the other international markets in Boulder, to see what other ingredients are available.

Next door to Salvaggio's is the Mediterranean Market and Deli. Arab rather than Greek: they sell halal meat, along with a lot of other interesting stuff. I bought some orange blossom water (they had rose water but only in large bottles) and pomegranate concentrate. I suspect there may be a kosher deli somewhere in town... I should explore. Probably starting with the yellow pages.

A few blocks away there is a strip mall with a deli/sandwich shop and three sources of international food. I didn't go into the Panaderia Mexican bakery. But I bought rice, tapioca (pearls and flour), fresh ginger and soba noodles at the Asian market (which also stocks Mexican ingredients).

The Indian market was more sparse, but smelled wonderful. Incense and curry. I mentioned to the shopkeeper that I was recently diagnosed with allergies to milk and eggs (many of the packages did not have English ingredient lists), and he said he was a nutritionist who had spent some time in medical school, and had experience dealing with allergies and Ayurveda. I think I need to look up Ayurveda cuisine... I got some bake-at-home naan bread, and a curry sauce mix for chicken to try. The shopkeeper said he has 65 different sauce mixes.

I came home the long way, and picked up (finally) the Mario Batali lasagna pan I've been thinking about. Now I need to figure out how to make a dairy-free lasagna. Or buy a roasting chicken. I need to check the allergy cookbooks I got for my birthday.

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Mon, Jul 07, 2008

Rest

Posted at 11:24 pm MDT to Exercise

I spent most of the four-day weekend resting and relaxing, but it doesn't seem to have done me much good. Today I felt like I was coming down with something again, though I don't know where I would have caught it.

No walking today.

I hope I can edge back a little way toward a more normal diet after my appointment with the allergist on Wednesday. It's nice to be able to swallow most of the time, but the rest of my digestive system does not seem to like the new dietary balance, even after a full month.

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Sat, Jul 05, 2008

Annoying

Posted at 11:11 am MDT to Exercise

For the past few days, my weight has been up and my daily mileage has been down.

My left shin and ankle are getting sore very quickly, so I'm only doing a mile a day. But the pattern of the soreness is like what I felt in the right shin the first week I started walking, so I hope it is a sign that the left leg is beginning to function more normally. That foot and ankle are still thicker than the right one, but they are showing more definition, so they may be flexing more now.

Walking a mile doesn't make the right leg sore at all now, which is a good sign. Once the left leg muscles get used to actually working, I'll increase the milage again.

The weight re-gain of the few pounds I had lost is annoying, but may be partly due to an increase of muscle mass. Body fat percentage is down slightly, rather than going up. This would be good in the long run: muscle burns calories better than fat. My ring fits a little better than it did at this weight previously -- another sign that I may be swapping bloat for muscle. There are a couple of pairs of jeans that are fine through the thighs and hips now, but I'll still need to lose or rearrange a few pounds of belly fat to button them.

I was trying to taper off the St. John's Wort dosage this weekend, since I'm on a mini-vacation and should be less stressed. But I'm going to put the dosage back up in case that is interacting with the weight loss and energy for exercise. Weight gain is a known side effect of depression. And the restlessness that led to the beginning of the walking happened when I was on the higher dose. If the higher dose lets me lose weight and gain muscle, I'll stay on the higher dose. St. John's Wort is cheaper than buying clothes, and much cheaper than the prescription alternatives, with fewer side effects.

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Thu, Jul 03, 2008

Cool Stuff

Posted at 12:41 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I've gotten some deliveries of cool stuff. (It's a good thing the driveway is usable.)

First, on Tuesday, I received a package from an order I made to Crate and Barrel. I've been wanting a free-standing pot-rack since I started acquiring good cookware, and their summer catalog had a bamboo and steel one on sale for under $200. I received the second box of the shipment today, and just finished putting the rack together. I need to reorganize things in the kitchen a little to make room for it, but I think it will be very useful, and look nice, too.

The wood-tone of the bamboo is a pretty good match for my light oak kitchen. And 6 shelves of storage space will be great to have. The bottom shelf space is tall enough for the catfood canister, which I had been a little worried about.

Yesterday I received a Shadow Unit lined windbreaker I had ordered. A similar jacket can be seen here, modeled by author Emma Bull.

Those were both expected deliveries.

The surprise was a delivery from Amazon: my company sent me three allergy cookbooks. Probably in lieu of a birthday lunch, which is just as well: I had a hard time finding something to eat at the nice restaurant Nanette took me to last night. The meal I finally selected was very nice, though the dessert menu was hopeless.

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Wed, Jul 02, 2008

Birthday

Posted at 7:34 am MDT to Exercise

I have survived another year.

It's a good thing I din't make any bets about the powerline work being finished before my birthday, but I think everything is done now except patching the hole in the porch roof. The pole and the backhoe are gone. The house looks strangely detached, from a distance, without the dark lines of the powerlines connecting it to anything.

1. mile today, beginning the second day of Bilbo's journey. My legs were sore, but I think that was from tension because I had a dental appointment yesterday

I stopped at the big King Soopers on the way home and spent quite a while reading labels, looking for things I can eat. I really hope it turns out I can have goat cheese, when I see the allergist again next week.

At least, between the dietary change and the walking, my weight is trending downward slowly. I'm actually tracking the sum of my body-fat percentage and my weight. This tends to compensate for weight fluctuations due to hydration differences.

My brother Larry called last night, and I'm having a birthday dinner with Nanette.

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Mon, Jun 30, 2008

Powerlines, Final Chapter

Posted at 9:07 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

The recycled asphalt gravel was delivered today and spread out. I have an all-weather driveway again. Mind you, my idea of a one lane wide driveway os a lot narrower than the backhoe operators. And they got careless about the property lines at the end of my driveway. I made them scrape the asphalt back onto my side of the boundary.

The power company trucks came back today to take down the last of the old power lines, which were left dangling from the pole like copper, lightning-attracting, maypole ribbons.
They drove across my neighbor's property to do it.

This evening I walked over to apologize to my neighbors for the power company trucks and the bozos with the backhoe. When I get my demolished front yard reconstructed, I'll have the landscapers put some topsoil and grass seed on the scraped place.

Once the backhoe goes away, I am almost done with Mr. Sparky. They are going to hire a roofer to patch the hole in my porch roof where the overhead lines used to go through, to keep out the weather and the critters.

And by way of apology for some of the hassle, Lori at the power company offered to have them take down the naked pole by my driveway for no charge. So that will be gone soon. (I have a suspicion that they want the pole for something, though one reason for putting the power lines underground was that the pole if too short for code, and cutting it off at ground level will make it even shorter.

I have a Mr. Tran of Green Mountain Landscaping stopping by tomorrow to look things over and give some estimates. I need to find a couple of other possible sources. I want multiple bids this time.

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Fri, Jun 27, 2008

Electric Contractor

Posted at 7:06 am MDT to Miscellaneous

I couldn't sleep last night, I was so upset about what they did to my yard, after all this delay and hassle.

I got up at 2:30 and wrote the note below, which I posted on both the 'Contact us' page on Mr. Sparky's web site, and also on the Tom Martino, Troubleshooter website. I am fed to the back teeth with listening to commercials where Mr. Martino (a consumer advocate) praises Mr. Sparky and its associated companies. I have heard them a lot because Mr. Sparky runs them on a loop instead of playing "On Hold" music.

---

I have had a horrible time with Mr. Sparky /Candlelight Electric. A major project that was supposed to take a week at the beginning of October 2007 remains an ongoing nightmare in the last week of June 2008, although it appears to be finally reaching a (fairly unsatisfactory) conclusion.

The original project was moderately complex. It involved moving my breaker box outside and bringing it up to code, as recommended by a Mr. Sparky inspector, as well as moving my power lines underground, which was also recommended, because the inspector said that the overhead lines were too low to meet code, and the pole in the driveay was too short to raise them high enough. Subsidiary projects included rebuilding part of my front porch to provide access to the new breaker box and grading and spreading roadbase on my driveway once the powerline trench was filled in.

I was assured that Mr. Sparky would coordinate everything with the power company (Excel) and the county building inspectors. That turned out not to be the case. The only reason the county ever inspected the new breaker box and closed the permit was because I kept calling both the Mr. Sparky office and the county for weeks several times a week, trying to find out what was going on. Mr. Sparky showed no interest or capacity for following through on the status of the project to bring it to completion.

The actual construction work was adequately done. They broke and repaired one of the pillars that support my porch roof, and cut th egas line while digging the trench for th epower lines, but I was happy with my newly expanded porch and the re-surfaced driveway, and the digging had carefully minimized the damage done by the trench to areas of my yard other than the driveway. The driveway itself had grown a bit larger than I expected, and there was some churned dirt running from the driveway to the house, but most of the places that had been grassy still were.

The only problem seemed to be that XCel had not yet switched the power from the overhead to the underground lines. I spent 3 months occasionally calling Mr Sparky to find out what the status of the changeover was, and getting the run-around from various departments at XCel. I eventually got in touch with the correct department at Xcel, or they got in touch with me.

At the beginning of March a representative from XCel informed me that the powerline project had not followed standard procedures and the trench would need to be re-done. They also were not happy with the location of the new breaker box.

I put XCel in touch with Mr. Sparky (which I should not have needed to do: Mr. Sparky should have been the ones dealing with XCel, not me) and the two companies spent several weeks arguing about what needed to be done. And then several more weeks trying to schedule the work.

I was assured that my yard and driveway would only remain dug up and unusable for a few days, when digging started on Thursday, June 13th. In fact, it was a week before the trench satisfied XCel and another week before XCel actually did the changeover, on Wednesday June 25.

A crew from Mr. Sparky arrived on the morning of June 26 to fill in the trench. I was working from home and available to answer questions, but they did not consult me. By the time they stopped for lunch, the trench was filled in, and they said they just needed to finish a few things. Those few things appear to include destroying my yard.

Before they left, they showed me the state of my yard, and I was too shocked to say much. Later, after my own workday ended, I pulled my truck into the place where my driveway is supposed to be and noticed a number of additions problems that had not been initially apparent.

Outstanding and problem items:

The backhoe crossed the property line onto my neighbor's property and the boundary is obscured at the end of the driveway.

A large drain pipe that was removed from under my driveway when the trench was being dug is still out of the ground and laying in my neighbor's yard.

Areas that were grassy even two days ago (while the trench and its dirt piles still existed) have been scraped down to bare soil, and probably to bare subsoil.

A 'berm' of subsoil (which I did NOT ask for) has been dumped on top of the topsoil directly in front of my house. Or possibly the topsoil was buried in the trench first. It is hard to tell. The visible soil is clearly not able to support life.

A ten to fifteen foot long section of an existing berm, which had been covered with grass and wild flowers, is just gone. There is a vertical cut in the berm as if someone had used a knife, showing clay and gravel under the grass. The berm was parallel to the driveway and several feet from the trench, and should not have been affected by the work.

The support post for the new section of porch built by the Mr. Sparky crew in October has been undermined, so that corner of the porch is no longer suported.

The holes through the porch roof where the overhead power cables came through are still open (and possibly inhabited by birds, which would not have happened if the changeover had occured last fall as previously scheduled).

I have ordered more roadbase to re-resurface the driveway. Mr. Sparky has promised to reimburse me. They said they would spread it on Monday (when it is due to be delivered), but considering the current state of my property after their most recent work, I am hesitant to let them do it.

I am very unlikely to renew my support contract with Candlelight, despite its convenience. And I will seek alternative electrical contractors for the interior electrical projects I have been postponing until the external project was done. I wish I knew whether Ross Munro was still in the area. He did an excellent job in October on the actual construction.

---

Two miles on the treadmill this morning even on basically no sleep. I guess being angry can be useful. 390 miles to Rivendell

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Thu, Jun 26, 2008

Powerlines, penultimate episode, I hope.

Posted at 6:17 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

The trench is filled in and my truck is parked in the barren expanse of dirt that used to be my driveway and front yard. I have ordered three more truckloads of recycled asphalt, for Monday delivery, to resurface the driveway. The electrical contractor has promised to reimburse me.

I will need to keep an eye on where they put it: the guys today used their backhoe to scrape bare a section adjacent to the driveway that I did not expect them to touch. They might have asked, instead of flattening stuff and wiping out one of the few patches of fertile dirt I had.

At least I'm no longer trapped behind the trench.

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Farewell Massage

Posted at 7:23 am MDT to Exercise

Marti, my massage therapist, is unexpectedly moving to Oklahoma next week to deal with a family medical situation, so last night was our last session. (At least for the foreseeable future.) It was a good session.

I can feel some soreness in my left butt, but Marti didn't feel heat in there, which is a very good sign. The soreness is probably not my hip trying to go out again. What I'm feeling is probably the workout soreness that accompanies muscle tissue growth.

The rest of the leg is also doing very well: there is a small patch at the front of my ankle and top of the foot that is still tender and swollen, but the rest of the leg is now a good match for the other one.

My arms were also in much better shape last night than 4 weeks ago, when they were such a mess that I could hardly let Marti work on them.

Marti gave me the name and number of another massage therapist. I'll need to make some appointments.

5 miles from Bag End on the road to Rivendell. I've met the dwarves at the inn. 392 miles to go.

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Wed, Jun 25, 2008

Power Lines episode 14

Posted at 4:19 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I no longer have a long empty trench running the length of where my driveway should be.

Now I have a long trench with a live electric cable running down it. And the birds don't have a power line to sit on any more.

The electrical contractor is supposed to come tomorrow to fill things in. I assume they will also haul away the old overhead cable that still sitting in my yard.

I'm glad it stays light until late this week: I have a massage appointment this evening, and getting back to the house may be a bit of a challenge. I desperately need to do some grocery shopping, but I think that will wait until tomorrow, when the driveway should be usable.

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Tue, Jun 24, 2008

Powerlines 13

Posted at 5:45 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

According to the contractor (when I called them yesterday) the power company was supposed to make the powerline switch today.

When they hadn't shown up by midafternoon, I called the contractor (who did not get back to me) and the power company rep (who did). I really was on the schedule for today, but they had a transformer blow up this morning, so they may not get to me until tomorrow.

I'm glad I canceled the cleaning ladies for tomorrow: they wouldn't be able to get to the house with the driveway still dug up. I'm amazed the water delivery guy put two 5 gallon jugs on my porch... and I'm glad he didn't kill himself doing it

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Sun, Jun 22, 2008

Walking to Rivendell

Posted at 11:22 am MDT to Exercise

On this date in 2001 I weighed 40 pounds less than I do today, and my body fat percentage (I have a smart scale) was about 10 points lower.

Some of the reasons for the weight gain are medical: they took Propulsid off the market and my Synthroid dosage was lowered. Some of the weight gain was due to travelling, though my exercise journal indicates I kept up with my weight lifting and yoga pretty steadily for at least the first 20 pounds of the gain.

My weight has been pretty stable for the past year even without any exercise to speak of. I think it would start to drop if I added some exercise to my routine, especially with these diet changes.

In the past, walking has been what got my weight down to the ranges where yoga worked and weightlifting was... feasible. I need to do a lot more walking, but walking without a goal is boring.

In college I used to walk an extra mile or two most days, over and above the walking that was needed to go to classes and the library and the dining hall (the campus was quite hilly). I had a loop that went across campus, then down the hill to the public library, then farther down the hill to Main Street. Along Main Street there were two stops: a used book store and a news stand that sold comic books. Then back up the hill, but at the other end of campus, with a stop half-way up the hill at the University book store.

Now there is nowhere useful or interesting to walk to. I have a treadmill but that is the essence of goalless walking, though it decreases my exposure to heat and hayfever.

On the Eowyn's Challenge website, they have the travel mileages for the journeys in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Some people use them to track their exercise progress. I heard about it on Elizabeth Bear's LiveJournal matociquala. She's currently somewhere in the mines of Moria.

I decided to do the Hobbit routes first. Bilbo and the dwarves only travelled about 12 miles a day. As of this morning I'm one mile on the way from Bag End to Rivendell. I have crossed the bridge across the Water, and I am on the road to The Green Dragon in Bywater to meet the dwarves. 396 miles to go to Rivendell.

I may do some more walking later today. I need to do more than 1 mile a day if I'm going to get to Rivendell in less than a year.

And if I'm stiff tomorrow morning, it will give me the incentive to do some yoga.

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Sat, Jun 21, 2008

Midsummer 2008

Posted at 8:08 pm MDT to Weather

The summer solstice was historically called Midsummer because the solstices and equinoxes used to be considered the middles of the seasons, not the beginnings of them. May Day was the old beginning of summer.

Today was a slow day at the Farmers' Market, but the weather was beautiful.

Nanette's strawberries were in, for the first time this season. Store strawberries taste like plastic by comparison, even the organic ones. I think the store ones must be picked too early so they will survive shipping.

I asked the people at the Laudisio booth if they could make me a dairy-free pizza, and they were really nice about it. They loaded it with veggies and some sausage, making sure I could have everything before they added it. The flavor was a little strange without cheese, and stuff tended to fall off the crust without cheese to glue it on, but the pizza was delicious. It's hard to beat pizza crust baked in a wood-fired brick oven.

I may be begining to recover some balance... I'm beginning to be able to watch cooking shows again.

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Thu, Jun 19, 2008

Sunset

Posted at 8:00 pm MDT to Weather

Sunset today is supposed to be at 8:33 pm. It will actually be a little earlier here: weather.com doesn't take mountains on the western horizon into account.

This is important because I need to get up at 4:30 for a 5am to 1 pm work shift and I doubt I will be able to get to sleep before sunset.

According to the schedule I was originally given, there are five weeks left on the contract after tomorrow, but the customer has decided they want a break for a while after next week (I'm very productive and they are running out of things for me to do).

I'm not sure what they expect to do with four weeks of my time sometime in the indefinite future. On past experience it takes them a month, after an interruption, to get me set up with working logins and such so that I'm actually doing useful work. I'm not sure I care, either.

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Wed, Jun 18, 2008

Powerlines 12

Posted at 10:47 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Long day.

My DSL went out at 8 am so I went in to the office to work, after an hour and a half getting through to FRII and Qwest. The electrical contractors were working on the trench when I left.

It didn't look much different when I got home at 6:30 pm, but I assume they made progress. It would be nice to know what is supposed to happen next.

The office staff went out to lunch. I didn't go because i was on the clock and busy with a project for my client. Just as well: finding something to eat at the restaurant would have been annoying. My lunch was chips from the break room: it turns out Fritos, Ruffles and Lays Potato chips are pure products -- corn or potato, salt, corn oil.

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Tue, Jun 17, 2008

Power Lines

Posted at 4:49 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Early yesterday morning I thought I saw a power company truck driving away. Apparently I was right.

The power company doesn't like the trench the contractor dug. Among other things, they want it two feet deep, no more, no less, and the backhoe dug some parts of the trench deeper.

So tomorrow the guys from the contractor are coming back to work on it some more.

My birthday is two weeks from tomorrow. I am not taking bets on whether this will be done by then.

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Mon, Jun 16, 2008

Apricot stuffing

Posted at 11:11 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Yesterday I had a whole chicken breast to cook (both sides stll attached, and decided to try oven-roasting it. America's Test Kitchen has a recipe where they butterfly a chicken and roast it over a bed of stuffing, and I thought that would be adaptable to an articulated breast.

When I checked their website for oven temperature, etc. I found a recipe for stuffing that used ingredients I mostly had on hand. Tweakable to work around my new diet restrictions.

My version:

Dissolve 1/2 cup salt in two cups water, 
brine chicken for one hour

Preheat oven to 450 degrees

2 Tbs olive oil heated in skillet
1 cup fennel, chopped, cooked until softening

Add
1 clove garlic, pressed
1/3 cup chopped dried apricots
1/8 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp fresh ground black pepper
2 cups chicken broth
and bring to boiling

Stir in
1.5 cups wholewheat couscous
1/8 cup dried parsley
take of heat, and cover, allow couscous to absorb liquid

Take chicken out of brine, 
pat dry and spread skin with oil and pepper

Make an aluminum foil boat, spray with Pam, fill with stuffing  
Place in roasting pan, arrange chicken on top

Roast until 160+ degrees in thickest part of breast
check occasionally and add broth if couscous is drying out too much
Let chicken rest 10 minutes before serving


The original recipe called for 1/4 cup chopped unsalted toasted cashews, stirred in after the couscous is hydrated. I usually have cashews in the house, but I haven't been to Costco since I finished the last jar. Cashews would be good. I've noticed they have organic ones now at Costco.

The couscous needed more liquid so I kept adding chicken broth both before and during the roasting. A full butterflied chicken would have covered more of the stuffing and helped keep it from drying out, but whole wheat couscous also needs more liquid than plain.

I need to make a smaller batch of stuffing next time. A good small roasting pan would be nice, too. I used a 9x9 inch baking dish but metal would be better. The Mario Batali lasagna pan is enameled castiron, 9x13 by 3 inches deep. I've been thinking of getting one to match my Dutch oven ... It might be useful for this.

I may try a whole butterflied chicken someday, but I'd be eating it forever: it looks like I'll get 4 meals out of just this double breast.

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Sun, Jun 15, 2008

Cider Raisin Tapioca Pudding

Posted at 10:10 am MDT to Technology

2 cups organic cider
1.5 Tbs Minute Tapioca
allspice
raisins
.5 tsp vanilla

Mix everything but the raisins and vanilla. Let sit for a while. Add the raisins. Let sit for longer. Heat while stirring to a very full rolling boil. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla.

Cool 20 minutes and put into desert cups. Serve at room temperature or cooler.

Notes: Needs more Tapioca next time, probably because it doesn't have eggs or dairy to help bind it. I also didn't use enough raisins, since I didn't want to waste them if it turned out inedible.

I think I'm craving textures and mouth-feel as much or more than flavors, when it comes to missing the dairy stuff. This pudding makes a change from dry, oily or grainy. And it's smoother and less pulpy than apple sauce.

By grainy I don't mean gritty. There is a difference in mouth-feel between real milk and veggie milks like soy or almond: the tongue can tell the difference between a solution and a suspension. Or maybe between starch and protein.

I'm sure rice milk will have the same effect, since I also noticed it in the dairy-free risotto the other night. Using stock instead of broth might help applications like the risotto, or possibly adding a little unflavored gelatin.

The starch vs. protein thing may also be part of the problem with the Egg Replacer stuff. I don't think gelatin will work in pancakes. But adding vanilla might help with the boring, cardboardy flavor. (It's a good thing Costco sells real vanilla in industrial quantities at reasonable prices. I have a feeling I'm going to be using a lot of it.)

Additional Notes:

I should get tested for cinnamon when I go back to the allergist.

A lemon-honey or lemon-orgeat tapioca pudding might be interesting.

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Floods

Posted at 8:41 am MDT to Current Events

Teresa Nielsen Hayden of Making Lighton the Iowa floods:

You know another big difference between this and Katrina? In New Orleans, the official hurricane evacuation plan was "Everyone who has a car, use it to get out of town." The ones who stayed were the poor, the helpless, the stubborn, the tourists, and some emergency personnel. In Iowa, you've got the whole community and its resources.

The thread has some great comments, and links to some wonderful/horrible photos of the flooding. Also an interesting playlist.

The odd thing about the saturday photos is that it was a bright, sunny day with a blue sky, and still the water was rising. It makes for a moment of cognitive dissonance: I think movie/TV visual shorthand may tie clouds and flooding more tightly together than is really the case. And of course, in a snow-melt flood, sun would be exactly what you didn't want.

---

And while I'm doing current events links, John Scalzi on "Whatever" had a wonderful rant on Fox News stupidity on Thursday that has been linked far and wide. (But that doesn't make it any less wonderful.)

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Sat, Jun 14, 2008

Power Lines... the ongoing saga, episode 10

Posted at 3:47 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I got home from Farmers' Market a little after 2pm to find some power company trucks and equipment here in addition to the contractor guys. This surprised me, since the power company is not supposed to do their thing until Monday.

It turned out that they broke the gas line again. It was lucky that I got home before the power company guys left: one of them came into the house and made sure the furnace and water heater were burning. So I won't run out of hot water early next week the way I did after the last time the line was cut.

I'm just as glad I wan't here when they broke the li.ne. Not knowing about it until it was fixed is a lot less stressful, and I have NO energy available for handling additional stess at the moment.

I will be so glad when this is over. If it ever is

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Fri, Jun 13, 2008

Risotto

Posted at 8:44 pm MDT to Technology

Risotto just means 'rice' in Italian. What I'm making tonight isn't a classic risotto, since I can't use the usual small amount of butter nor the grated cheese, but a lot of the 'creaminess' of a good risotto actually comes from the starches in the rice.

I'm trying to add some layers of flavor to make up for the lack of cheese.

Ingredients

EV Olive Oil
chopped onion
minced garlic
a few strands of ancient saffron
chicken
dash of red pepper flakes
pinch dry basil flakes
pinch dry marjoram
pinch dry rosemary
dried porcini mushrooms, rehydrated
dried shitake mushrooms, rehydrated
canned mushrooms
white wine
tomato paste (enough to make the sauce very slightly pink)
anchovy paste (1/2 tsp?)
chicken broth
salt

It's OK. I'll add black pepper and a little more salt when I eat it. Maybe go a little heavier on the red pepper and anchovy paste next time.

Needs cheese.

Also needs the dried mushrooms cut smaller.

At least it's a change from cauliflower and salmon. (Eating alone means there are almost always leftovers. Someone needs to invent mini-cauliflowers) At least risotto freezes tolerably.

Capers. Adding capers at the end might be interesting... Maybe I'll try adding some to one of the leftover servings when I reheat it to see how they go with chicken/mushroom... stuff.

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Thu, Jun 12, 2008

Power Lines Yet Again, a Little Progress

Posted at 8:02 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Judson, from the electrical contractor, showed up this morning to start digging the trench needed for the power company bozos, who insist on redoing the work that was already done last fall.

He made very little progress, and stopped early because he was worried about breaking the trencher on my so-called soil and the rocks therein.

First thing tomorrow morning the equipment company is supposed to swap out the trencher in favor of a full-sized backhoe like the one Ross used last fall. Judson will come back with helpers and try to make some actual progress.

I've been assured that the trench will be ready to suit the power company's scheduled visit on Monday. I hope that is the case: Xcel seems to allow a very small window for availability for this project, and if we slip again it will probably be another month before we can get them back up here..

I assume they will hand-dig where they need to cross the gas line, so they don't break it again.

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Wed, Jun 11, 2008

Spike

Posted at 10:22 pm MDT to Media

I emailed in sick yesterday. This cold is a really nasty one -- we're sure it is a cold: Nanette developed the same symptoms at the same time I did, so we probably caught it at the same time from someone at market.

I think I'm getting a little better: my eyes are still watery enough to make reading a nuisance, but the pressure in my sinuses has eased enough that I hope to make it through the night without using any more Advil. Yesterday and earlier today the sinus pressure was so bad it was making my teeth hurt.

I'm coughing a lot, but I think that is because I have been breathing so much sludge. With the drainage slacking off, I hope the coghing will ease off too.

In the evenings I've been watching reruns of CSI (the Las Vegas one). They are new to me, since I have never watched the show in the past. Cartoon Network seems to be in one of its occasional cycles of very lame programming, and watching Food Network, my other usual selection, just makes me sad at the moment. On Monday Altom Brown made popovers: milk, eggs, sugar, and a small amount of flour.

The CSI reruns are on a cable channel called Spike, and I am outside their target demographic (males under 35? redneck males in general?) to a degree that makes the ads they run quite surreal.

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Mon, Jun 09, 2008

Summer Cold

Posted at 4:26 pm MDT to Weather

It was chilly and windy all weekend -- on Saturday at market I only shed the outermost layer of what I was wearing from 7am to 2 pm, and yesterday I left the heat on in the house all day and never switched the system over to A/C.

Today is nice, but I have either caught a cold or I'm having an allergic attack from hell. Sore throat. Major sneezing. Watery eyes. Congested and draining sinuses with a sort of seeping nose bleed (I think the sneezing ruptured some capillaries) that makes everything smell and taste like blood.

At least I'm not coughing. Much. And swallowing seems to be working, not that I have much appetite.

I hope this is a cold, actually. It would be depressing to totally disrupt my eating patterns to avoid food allergies and immediately get hammered by hay fever. It feels more like a cold: the sore throat hit first, which isn't a hay fever pattern.

Now I need to find something Ican eat that will cut through the sludge enough to be appetizing.

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Sun, Jun 08, 2008

Pancake Experiment

Posted at 1:43 pm MDT to Technology

One advantage of the powdered Egg Replacer is that you can make a half-egg's worth batch of things.

I made a 1/2 batch of my usual sourdough pancake/waffle recipe using egg replacer and almond milk. The texture was ok, but the flavor of the plain pancakes left a lot to be desired. (Fortunately, good maple syrup will cover a multitude of sins.) I think the rest of the batch is going to be donated to the wild birds.

They seemed to cook slowly. I wonder if the dairy and egg proteins affect the rate of browning. Need to review On Food and Cooking on maillot reactions.

The egg replacer seems to work all right as a binder, but it doesn't add any of the richness you get from milk and eggs. Cooking in bacon fat might help -- I've got some in the fridge.

Or schmaltz (rendered chicken fat). Can you buy actual schmaltz? I'd think places with serious kosher departments might have it. But I don't really know whether it has any flavor.

Maybe I should consider roasting a duck.

And I really need to figure out how to add some protein into the pancakes. You'd think, with almonds being nuts, the milk would have non-trivial amounts of protein. But it seems not. I'll need to check the protein in the different brands of non-dairy, non-soy milks next time I'm shopping for them. There were some actual nut 'flours' in the Whole Foods baking aisle, too. It might be worth checking the nutritional content on those.

The batter was too thick for the first pancake I made, but the way it puffed up makes me think it would do OK in the waffle iron, if I can get some flavor into it that isn't totally bland and boring.

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Egg Replacer

Posted at 10:08 am MDT to Technology

Yesterday at farmers' market was depressing: there is almost nothing in the food court that I should eat. Even the oriental dumplings have eggwhites and the tamales have butter.

I had teriyaki chicken with rice from the fusion booth for breakfast after we were set up. (Which had soy sauce, but the brewed soy products have less active phyto-estrogens than something like tofu does.)

I also bought a vegan cookie and brownie to take home (fortunately, Boulder is the kind of place that has a vegan bakery that shows up at the farmers' market) and a loaf of rosemary bread to nibble on for lunch.

But I'm hungry for protein and there are depressingly few prepared veggies that don't include eggs or dairy or both.

It's going to be a good thing my neighborhood grocery store is a Whole Foods. I stopped in the big Whole Foods in Boulder before I came home, bought some stuff and did some scouting.

Unlike Costco, they carry pitas and flour tortillas without anything I'm allergic to. They have a big selection of rice and almond milks, too. I got one of each to try. Vanilla flavored, not plain: I used to eat cheerios with vanilla soymilk and got used to the flavor combination. If one of them works, I will at least have something to have for breakfast -- toast with extra virgin olive oil just tastes wrong at that time of day, and I really want something besides plain carbs and tea.

The problem with both kinds of non-dairy milks is that they are meant for drinking, not as ingredients while my use of milk has for years been more as an ingredient than for drinking.

Their gluten-free aisle had two varieties of egg replacer. The store employee who showed me where they were said she found the one that is called for in most of the vegan baking recipes on-line has a baking soda aftertaste, and the ingredient list for it contains leavening agents which I think would throw off recipes, especially at this altitude. And it is recommended only for baking, probably because of the leavening agent.

The alternative product is from Orgran in Australia. The ingredients are just potato starch, tapioca flour, vegetable gum, methylcellulose, calcium carbonate and citric acid. And the recipes on the box (in several languages including Italian!) include lemon pie filling and batter for pan frying stuff. (Also a 'custard', but that needs milk.) This looked a lot more useful as a general binder, which is what I really wanted it for. I'm going to try making pancakes for brunch, since I need to toss the last couple of waffles from the last batch I made, and I want something to put maple syrup on.

I forgot to look for margarines (I was sort of flinching away from the dairy aisle) or lemons, but I can stop at my neighborhood Whole Foods on my way home from Nanette's this afternoon. I'm bringing her the dairy good from my fridge and freezer, and also the whiskey from my liquor cabinet because of the malt allergy.

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Fri, Jun 06, 2008

They're Mocking Me

Posted at 7:34 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Mocking me, I tell you. :-) Whenever I go to the refrigerator! 8 kinds of cheese, or more. Chicken-and-cheese sausages. Eggs. Butter. Yogurt. And all sorts of other stuff I'm not supposed to eat.

Even the salami has milk in it.

I think Nanette is going to get a cooler of dairy stuff this weekend (as well as the return of the dozen eggs I got from her last week). If only to make room in the fridge for stuff I can eat. Once I figure out what that is.

Non-perishables will go to Community Foodshare or something similar, but those are less urgent..

My red sauce tastes kind of flat without parmesan. Maybe I should add a tiny bit of hot sauce or red pepper flake.

I know I'm obsessing about food, but I'm in cheese withdrawal: going from an average of a few ounces a day to nothing I need to look up what other than dairy has calcium in it: I was in NO danger of calcium deficiency before now.

I asked for help on the Shadow Unit forum (where every discussion thread is about food eventually) and got some useful suggestions. Which help. And sympathy, which also helps.

I also asked inaurolilliumthe MadGastronomerthe Zombie Chef, who is a food industry professional and has a food advice column (the Ask Zombie Chef site).

(I think LiveJournal is paranoid about Zombies. They have Zombie Chef flagged for adult content for no reason that I can see.)

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Thu, Jun 05, 2008

Malt

Posted at 7:01 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

The full list of things I tested as being allergic to is

Cow's Milk
Whole eggs
Shellfish mix
Egg yolk (with a note from the doctor that I should avoid egg whites too)
Malt
String bean

Kentucky Blue Grass
Timothy
Ragweed Mix

I just got back from wandering through Costco, and those first five items on the list pretty well rule out everything they sell that I like to eat. (Especially since I'm also supposed to avoid soy as long as I'm on the Tamoxifen).

Most commercial baked goods contain malt, even if they don't have eggs or dairy (or soy), so it's a good thing I like doing my own baking.

I bought: Kosher Franks, Bush's Baked beans, Dried Mangoes, and Satsuma Mandarins from Peru (which is contrary to the buy local rule, but I need to have something edible in the house).

There is hope, however. I can probably plan to use egg white for special occasions like holiday baking. And I tested negative for egg-white, cow casein and cow lactalbumin, and I wasn't tested for goats' milk or sheeps' milk.

When I go back to the doctor next month I'm going to negotiate for narrowing the prohibitions. In particular, I'm going to ask to be tested for goats milk, and I'm going bring samples of a good aged Parmigiano Reggiano and an aged sheep's milk cheese (maybe a Pecorino Romano) and ask to have them tested specifically. Maybe I can find cheeses to use as ingredients even if I can't eat cheese itself any more. (Until yesterday I ate cheese every day. Make that, until today: I had cheese for lunch yesterday.)

I should probably be tested for chocolate and olives, too, though I don't know what I'm going to do if olives and extra-virgin olive oil get added to the forbidden list.

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Wed, Jun 04, 2008

Lent Forever

Posted at 6:45 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I have some doubts about this allergy testing. It didn't seems to pick up things like peanuts that have a history of making my tongue swell up. The doctor gave me a prescription for an epipen, which is probably a good thing to have around in general, in case of those kinds of reactions. Or someone getting stung by a bee, I suppose.

Some of the things the test did pick up made sense, like grasses and ragweed.

It didn't pick up penicillin, which is kind of a relief (though also kind of moot, which I will get to). My vitamins and St. Johns Wort are OK, too.

Things I have been told to stay away from: shellfish, green beans (but peas and kidney beans are OK) and milk (including butter, yogurt, and cheese products) and eggs. So even though I turn out to not be officially allergic to penicillin molds, I can't try French cheeses.

I need to look up some recipes for meals for Lent. Giving up milk and eggs forever is going to be really hard: I love cheese. I pretty well live on cheese. Cheese is something I can swallow when nothing else wants to go down.

I suppose I won't need to worry about lactose intolerance.

Eggs are a little less of a problem: at least when I'm at home I don't use that many of them. Or I didn't use many eggs until I started baking pound cakes. I guess the pound cake I made for Nanette and Elsbeth is the last one. Maybe there are actual Lenten hot-cross bun recipes that don't use eggs or milk -- I like hot cross buns.

No eggs means no mayonnaise, so no potato or macaroni salads this summer. And Ranch dressing has egg and buttermilk.

I checked the label: the brand of pasta I'm using is 100% semolina, so I can eat it as long as I don't put on any cheese. I think that's going to be supper tonight.

No more risotto (damn, I'm glad I hadn't gotten around to making a batch this week). Maybe I can make something risotto-ish without the butter and cheese, just olive oil. Nonna's Bean Soup will be strange without the cheese and butter, too.

The homemade soft pretzel recipe has butter, but maybe I can substitute olive oil.

Holiday breads and cookies and stollens are going to be frustrating: I can make them, but I can't eat them because of the eggs. Maybe by then I will have figured out some alternatives.

No more boxed puddings (which I have a lot of in my cupboard): lemon calls for eggs and chocolate uses milk.

I have two Chocolove bars in the house "may contain traces of milk and nuts" but milk is not an actual ingredient, so I guess I can still eat them, but probably not buy any more.

Ghirardelli bittersweet morsels have milkfat. Darn. Not sure what I am going to do about those.

I should check whether the Mayan Cocoa from World Spice Merchants has milk powder in it. It may still be usable where a supermarket cocoa mix is not.

I wonder if the eggs and dairy thing is why I have never been fond of frosting?

And if I'm not technically allergic to lettuce, why does it always, ALWAYS give me heartburn?

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Mouser

Posted at 6:43 am MDT to Miscellaneous

Dinah caught a mouse at 4:30 am and insisted on discussing the fact at length. And when a siamese discusses something, you don't ignore it. Her "I am a mighty huntress" meow is distinctive. And loud.

She must have eaten the whole mouse, for a change. I didn't find any remains.

At least today will be a short workday: I've got the appointment with the allergist this afternoon.

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Mon, Jun 02, 2008

Earth-sized Extrasolar Planet Detected

Posted at 5:35 pm MDT to Current Events

According to Stein at the Dynamics of Cats Sci Blog, there has been a report at the AAS meeting of a small planet orbiting a very small star about 3000 light years from here. The reported probable size is 3.3 Earth masses (With a range of probable size from 1.7 Earth masses to 8.2. The gravtity lensing was pretty fuzzy.).

If someone had told me when I was taking astronomy classes back in college that we would be detecting Earth-sized planets 3000 lightyears away in my lifetime, I would have thought they were nuts.

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Powerlines -- the Saga Continues

Posted at 4:33 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Gaahh.

Friday I got a call from the electrical contractor company. From the boss. He wanted to know if they could come dig up my driveway today, with the expectation that Xcel would do their thing tomorrow and the hole would be filled back in Wednesday.

I was psyched. I thought I would finally get those stupid power lines done and then be able to get some other work done around the house and yard.

This morning I got a call from Art at the electrical contractor. He wasn't able to get the equipment delivered for this morning, and would I be home at 4 pm to sign for the equipment when it is delivered.

I said, "Fine. I'll be home and I can sign for it."

At 3 pm I got another call from Art. XCel has decided they can't do their thing until the 16th. Which means the trench is now scheduled to be dug on the 13th (Friday the Thirteenth) and my driveway will be unusable over the weekend.

Xcel keeps contacting me, wanting me to let them install a gadget that lets them control my AC remotely on the hottest days in return for a $25 dollar per year credit. Considering that as far as I know they still after 9 years don't have location of my house in their records correctly, and they seem to be incapable of scheduling and finishing a job where their part should only take a couple of hours, there is NO way I am letting them any closer to my equipment than I have to. Give them control. I think not. Bozos.

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Sun, Jun 01, 2008

Guests

Posted at 10:08 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Nanette and her youngest daughter Elsbeth came over to watch Stonehenge Decoded on the National Geographic channel. This was the first time I have had guests in a couple of years (since December 2005, I think) and in general the evening went very well.

The satellite image broke up a couple of times, which was annoying, but the narration stayed clear. The only other annoyance was the show referred you to their web site for the production credits (which should include Nanette's daughter Aleta) and I cannot find the credits anywhere on the site.

It was nice to have guests for a change (usually I go over to Nanette's.)

I baked a classic pound cake in my new bundt pan, and it came out very well (which was a relief) except that the recipe was a little too big for the pan. (I think next time I will make a 3/4 pound cake.) I sent sections of cake home with Nanette and Elsbeth, so I won't be eating all of it myself.

I seem to have become a reliable baker of poundcake, in addition to breads and cookies. Maybe one of these years I will actually get pie-crusts down.

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Shadow Unit Season 1 Finale -- Aftermath

Posted at 5:55 am MDT to Media

Man, do I need a vacation!

I awoke very early this morning out of an anxiety dream that I am sure was triggered by the Shadow Unit finale, which was amazing and shattering. But the context of the dream was someone doing something stupid and annoying in ClearCase, the software tool I work with in my day job.

Eight more weeks on this contract.

Sigh.

I don't think I've had a real vacation since the Geek Cruise I took in October 2004 -- benchtime between contracts doesn't really count. Neither does recuperation time after surgery, which covers a trip to Santa Fe with Nanette and her husband in June 2005, and Which is still 3 years ago.

No wonder I'm so burned out.

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Thu, May 29, 2008

Mama Fish

Posted at 6:08 pm MDT to Current Events

Another link to a blog with a link to a cool scienctific paper with wonderful illos.

PZ Myers at Pharyngula discusses a report on Materpiscis attenboroughi, a fossil fish from the Devonian (417 to 354 million years ago) that's so completely preserved thereis an identifiable embryonic fish complete with umbilical cord preserved inside it.

There's an artist's rendition of the fish giving birth, besides a photograph of the fossil and dsome diagrams showing what you are looking at.

And in the comments there is a neat explanation of why a retrovirus (ERV3) being present in our genome (built into our chromosomes) makes viviparity possible: the genes from the retrovirus are what keep the mother's immune system from attacking the father's genetic material in the baby. (Mostly: my Mom was RH negative and my Dad was RH positive, in the days when about all they could do was worry about babies after the first one... )

It seems that genes from retroviruses are also involved in creating the structure of the placenta.

And there is a family of asexual fishes called bdelloids that has hijacked genes from all kinds of other creatures (funguses! plants!) other bdelloids (which sounds like sex the long way around).

Biology and evolution are weird and wonderful.

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Wed, May 28, 2008

Shadow Unit Season 1 Finale

Posted at 9:24 pm MDT to Media

The Shadow Unit creators are uploading their final "episode" for this season in "real time": the chapters that were uploaded yesterday describe events that took place May 25 through May 27, 2008. The chapters that were uploaded today describe events that happen today. This is going to continue for the next three days, with the finale of the finale scheduled for uploading on Saturday.

This makes quite a contrast of five-part Memorial Day stories. There have been seven previous episodes uploaded at two-week intervals. Five of the off weeks have had uploads of sections of a story about a potluck picnic held Memorial Day 2007 (the WTF BBQ).

The upload time is 7 pm Central time, 6 pm Mountain time. I was late reading today's chapters because I had a massage therapy appointment.

The Shadow Unit folks are also now selling mugs and teeshirts and such through Cafe Press, and one of the fans is setting up an order for FBI-style windbreakers with WTF on the back.

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Azhdarchids

Posted at 4:29 pm MDT to Current Events

Azhdarchids were huge pterosaurs: as tall a giraffes when they were standing on all fours. Darren Naish, who writes Tetrapod Zoology, ones of my favorite blogs, has just published a formal article about how Azhdarchids lived. He has blogged about it, but the formal article is also available on-line, for free, at PLoS ONE, which is an online open-access journal.

It has free pictures, which is great: the articles co-author Mark Witton, is one of the best current dinosaur artists. Who has a great Flickr site with lots of his paintings and commentary.

They got written up in New Scientist. Also the Sun, a British tabloid that tweaked their human vs. azhdarchid size comparison drawing to have the human be a recognizable (I assume) British soccer star.

These critters weighed 250 kg and were able to fly, but Naish and Witton believe they did most of their hunting walking around like storks.

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Mon, May 26, 2008

Move

Posted at 4:34 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

In 1981 I came to Boulder the week of Memorial Day. By the time I flew back to Connecticut at the end of the week, I had a programming job offer -- for much better pay than I had been making as a librarian --and a contract on a condo.

That was twentyseven years ago. Half my lifetime ago: I'll be turning 54 in a few weeks.

The week I turned twentyseven, I moved from Connecticut to Colorado. And I began living in a place that was mine, not just rented.

It was 2000 miles from my Mother, who had terminal cancer, but my access to her other than by phone had been decreasing for months, and phones work as well form Colorado as they do from the other side of Connecticut. And waiting for her to die before I moved would have felt even more ghoulish.

It was 2000 miles from my Father, and that was just as well. One big problem with living a two-hour drive away was that I couldn't just drop by for an afternoon or an evening. When I went home for a visit I ended up spending the night. 2000 miles was a very good reason for not trying to sleep in my parents' house when my Mother wasn't there, or wasn't effectively there. Sleeping in my parents' house was always problematic.

It was also 2000 miles from a guy at work I had been dating. I made sure not to give him a forwarding address or phone number. He was a geek and generally a nice guy, but he had started reminding me of my father in some ways, and he was WAY too clingy. I really didn't appreciate phone calls half an hour after I got home from work (where we had both been all day) asking what I was doing.

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Sat, May 24, 2008

Laudisio

Posted at 7:29 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

There is an Italian restaurant in Boulder called Lausidio's. I've never actually eaten there: when I eat out I tend to choose cuisines I don't cook myself. But I have eaten their food.

Laudisio's has a booth in the Farmers' Market food court. They serve pizza, baked in a wood-fired pizza oven they bring to the site. It's built on a trailer.

They actually have a couple of these trailer-mounted ovens, available for catering parties. The web-site says two, but they may have added one since the site was updated last. The guy who traded for our onions and garlic at the market said today that they have three.

It's hard to beat pizza cooked in a wood-fired brick oven and made with the freshest ingredients available.

The restaurant menu says they use local, organic ingredients as much as possible. I should probably try them some time, though they look a bit pricy..

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Blogging is Good for You

Posted at 4:42 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Just a link to a Science Blog entry that links to a report on the medical effects of blogging.

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Fri, May 23, 2008

Robert Asprin, RIP (1946-2008)

Posted at 4:38 pm MDT to Current Events

Besides being a good writer, Robert Asprin was an acquaintance of mine. Though I'm not sure I was an acquaintance of his. I suspect there are a lot of people in that situation.

I remember him more as a filker than an author, and I think he was mostly out of the SCA before I joined it.

I first encountered him at the first WorldCon I attended, Iguanacon in Phoenix in 1978. He was one of a group of filkers singing in the main lobby of the con hotel. (This was before conventions started programming space and time for filkers to perform in.)

I hung out with the filkers at several other cons where Bob held court. He was amazing, able to sing and talk through the night. And he made an excellent de facto master of ceremonies, making sure that anyone who looked like they might have a song got their chance to perform.

He had something to do with setting up the first Filk Con (which I attended), too. I think that was more as instigator than actual organizer. If Bob had real genius, it was in his ability to catalyze communities. Filkers. The SCA Dark Horde. Thieves' World shared fiction. He was one of those people who networks the universe.

The world is smaller with him gone. And quieter.

I learned to drink Irish whisky while hanging around with Bob and his crowd of filkers. I'm glad it's possible to get Tullamore Dew again (half the distillery burned down, and they weren't exporting it for a number of years). Nothing else would be appropriate to toast Bob's passing.

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Thu, May 22, 2008

Foxes

Posted at 5:05 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

When I was about four years old we went to some sort of fair or carnival, and my parents made sure to take me to an area where there were some animals in cages, including foxes. They did this because they were convinced I was terrified of foxes. I felt embarrassed and guilty, because I wasn't really terrified of foxes, but they probably interpreted that as being embarrassed because foxes turned out to be little and not scary.

The reason my parents believed I was terrified of foxes was because I used to sometimes start screaming in the middle of the night. After waking me up, they WOULD NOT leave me alone until I told them what I had been dreaming about. So on top of being terrified in my sleep, I was interrogated and bullied when I woke up. At night. In the dark.

I assume there was some belief that talking about bad dreams would de-fuse them. The problem was, I don't think there were usually dreams involved. I suspect, looking back, that the problem was night terrors rather than nightmares. Certainly, I rarely remembered anything that I was capable of explaining, though expecting a 3-year old to articulate something as vague as a dream, in the middle of the night, after being terrified, doesn't make a lot of sense in any case.

But "I don't remember" was not an acceptable answer.

On one of the rare occasions when I did remember part of a dream, there were foxes in it. Which my parents jumped on as the explanation for what had frightened me without listening to the whole dream. "Foxes" was an acceptable reason for screaming in my sleep

So from then on, whenever they asked what I had been dreaming about that made me scream, I said, "Foxes." I didn't really mean "Foxes". I meant "Go away and leave me alone".

I think this is when I began to be skeptical about the ability and willingness of adults to deal with unpleasant things. (A skepticism that was thoroughly validated in later years.)

They even got the one dream that really included foxes backwards. I seem to recall the foxes were allies or bystanders in that one. They were not the scary part.

And later, when my parents thought they were promising to protect me from the "foxes", it was the "foxes" that were protecting me from my parents.

I do remember what I think is another dream from a few years later, where I was running away from something terrible along with some foxes (and possibly other animals) that had escaped from circus cages. I don't remember whether I let them out, but the foxes were definitely my friends in that dream. They waited for me at the bottom of a hill because they could run faster than I could. I woke up when I reached them, and I don't remember what we were running from: it wasn't just the circus, there was something chasing us.

I'm pretty sure I knew that foxes were small even before I saw those poor, caged foxes at the fair, because there were ladies who wore dead foxes to church. (That might be a later memory, but it seems to be from the church that matches the house where I was dealing with the night terrors.) If I had ever been really afraid of foxes, it might have been because of those dead ones looking at me at church, not the live ones I had never really seen, being in the city.

I remember when I first saw a picture of a mink stole (and knew what it was) I was very surprised that it didn't have the heads and feet and stuff. Fur pieces were supposed to have the heads.

Looking back, the weirdest thing about all this is the way I was so absolutely desperate to be left alone after I woke up terrified. It seems wrong that a little kid waking up scared should not want to be with her parents.

It makes me a little worried about what I might not be able to remember, though I suppose those middle-of-the-night interrogations were bad enough to convince me I was better off alone.

I also wonder if my nervousness around dogs is an aftermath of this. The grownups around me expected me to be afraid of dogs, so I learned to be? My Aunt and Uncle, who lived downstairs (it was a 3-family house) had a boxer named Tina, who I don't remember one way or the other. I'm not entirely sure our lifespans overlapped.

I need to go over to the Boulder Zuni Fetish store (that's not what it is called, but it's what it is) and look at fox fetishes, I think.

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Wed, May 21, 2008

Upgrade to 8.04 status

Posted at 6:17 am MDT to Technology

Aaaand... we have wifi this morning! Yay.

I'm going to celebrate by doing yoga, and eating breakfast and, you know, doing other stuff that doesn't involve a computer keyboard before I need to go on the clock.

I wonder what I did yesterday that made it start working?

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Tue, May 20, 2008

My Joke

Posted at 8:29 pm MDT to Technology

This is not my joke because I made it up -- I originally heard it during a filk session at a World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago about 20 years ago.

It is my joke because it is the only joke I know where I can reliably remember both the setup and the punchline.

---

One day an electrical engineer (EE) died and went to hell. And the devil took him down the hall and opened a door and said, "This is where you will be."

And the EE went into the room and looked around. It was a huge room, full of acres of lab tables full of state of the art -- no beyond state of the art -- test and diagnostic equipment. And along one side were racks and racks full of every kind of spare part imaginable.

The EE turned to the devil and said, "But, I don't understand! This is an EE's dream. Just look at all this stuff! This is an EE's dream!"

But the devil just smiled and answered, "You don't understand. The problem ... is intermittent."

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Upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 continued

Posted at 4:57 pm MDT to Technology

Last night the wifi was working fine with a 2.6.22 kernel, which is what I was running vmware on top of all day yesterday.

This morning neither the wifi nor vmware would work with 2.6.22.

After two hours of thrashing I hauled the laptop into my computer room and set up a cabled ether net connection. When I rebooted, the wifi came up too.

Arggh. Having something work for no known reason is only slightly less annoying than having something not work for no known reason.

I got vmware working (with only NATed internet, not the bridging I was able to use with Ubuntu 7.10) and spent the day in the computer room. With the 4 fans in the big server a few feet from my ear.

Now I have come out to the living room, and the wifi is still working after a reboot. I wonder if whatever is going on is partially temperature dependent.

I wonder what will work or not work tomorrow. I'm not going to change anything in this laptop's configuration this evening.

In the meantime, I'm going to get vmware working on the new laptop, which has completely opensource wifi drivers. I'm still having tool chain problems. VMware server is now happy with gcc4.3, but the client piece seems to want a library from 4.0, which I don't think is even available for Ubuntu.

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Mon, May 19, 2008

Upgrade to Kubuntu 8.04

Posted at 6:59 am MDT to Technology

Arg. The upgrade went smoothly except that Ubuntu has doone something to the way they handle driver modules. I cannot seem to generate a current driver for the wifi that will also let VMWare work.

And I need VMWare for work. I had one configuration working last night with and older kernel, but the shutdown and reboot over night seems to have chanes things just enough that it won't work.

I'm running an even older kernel, but I can't get the newest VMWare to load against it. Toolchain inconsistency problems.

I tried setting up the new laptop (which has a different wifi driver) but I'm having problems with toolchain inconsistencies there too. I may upgrade that machine to 8.04 to try to fix those.

I may need to work in my computer room today, so I can use an ethernet cable.

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Four-Lobed Bread

Posted at 6:47 am MDT to Technology

When Nonna made bread she used to make two pieces that were sort of dumbell shaped, and cross them to make a four-lobed loaf. I tried that this weekend, but there is a trick for getting the bread to come out in four lobes instead of just sort of cross-shaped that I do not quite remember. I think the neck needs to be twisted to keep the two ends from pullin back together.

I think the dough may need to be drier, too.

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Pop

Posted at 6:40 am MDT to Exercise

On Friday I managed to put my bad hip out pretty thoroughly. I could feel the lump of soreness in my butt where it was in the wrong place. I did some yoga and my PT exercises, which at least kept it from getting worse.

Saturday, other than the time I spent a Farmers' Market, I spent a lot of time asleep. I took a nap in the afternoon and went to bed early.

I took some ibuprofin before the second time I went to bed, to knock down the swelling that might be holding the hip out of position, and it worked.

I woke up in the middle of the night and stretched my leg through the heel, and I could feel the joint move back into position and pop back into its socket.

That is the weirdest sensation.

In the morning I did more PT exercises and yoga to help seat it firmly.

I need to do more yoga and start free weights again to try to stabilize it. (I've been takig it easy because exercise give me coughing fits.)

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Fri, May 16, 2008

Stamps

Posted at 9:58 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I never did buy any 41 cent stamps. I bought a roll of a hundred stamps back when first-class postage was 39 cents, and because I shifted to online bill-payments for most things during my years on the road it has taken me a long time to use them. They have already raised the rates again, and I still have several months worth of stamps left.

Today I counted the stamps that were left on the roll, and the 2-cent stamps I had left. When I went to the post office to send out a bill payment, I bought 2 1-cent stamps, and 14 3-cent stamps to use in finishing out the roll.

I also bought a book of 'forever' stamps. I really don't need to buy rolls of stamps any more. With mortgage, utilities and credit card payments all on line, that's 84 stamps less that I use each year.

I suppose people like me are part of the reason the post office is going broke.

It's probably too much to hope that the rising rates will cause a cutback in junk mail...

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Thu, May 15, 2008

Disasters

Posted at 5:42 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

This week was a payday, so I sent some money to Medecins Sans Frontiers, on the theory that they might have ways to get help to the Burmese population despite the evil men running the country.

Failing that, there is the aftermath of the earthquake in China, and no doubt plenty of other places where the money would be useful.

I'm just watching BBC World News America, (reportedly watered down from the REAL BBC World News, but still better than most of the alternatives I have available) and they had a long segment on both disasters.

The Burmese government is still not allowing aid in, two weeks after the typhoon.

It's not clear whether China is accepting foreign aid, but the proportion of their country that was affected was smaller, and they are taking serious steps to try to get h