Teleidoscope

I will also be notifying the [name]-Federal Credit Union that they are a party to
a fraudulent transaction.

The credit union is in Florida, RCI is headquartered in Indiana, the corporate headquarters of VRG, the brokerage that sold me the timeshare, is in Illinois, and I am in Colorado. Even if the bank transaction wouldn't qualify as interstate wire fraud (which I suspect it might) the diversity of jurisdictions should qualify this as a federal case.

I just received a call from the corporate office promising to straighten out the problem and offering compensation for the delay. It remains to be seen whether they actually get it fixed, but the woman I spoke to seemed quite motivated to avoid involvement by attorneys. So I am cautiously optimistic.

I suspect the response might have been less prompt if I had only talked about small claims court... and if the Indiana Attorney General weren't on a crusade against timeshare scams.

I still need to set up an appointment with a lawyer: my will is outdated, and these aren't the only bozos I've had to deal with recently.

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Mon, Apr 21, 2008

Doctor Appointment

Posted at 10:36 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I'm going to set up an appointment with an allergist. And I've been given an inhaler to try for a couple of weeks.

The doctor said he could hear some wheezing when I breathe and didn't see other signs of an infection or other cause for the coughing. He seems to think it might be a coughing mode of asthma.

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Sun, Apr 20, 2008

George and the pound cake recipes

Posted at 12:39 pm MDT to Technology

Having named my sourdough starter George, I am now finding myself talking to it. "Come on, George, time to get that batch of bread put together."

Well, I suppose it is a sort of pet, and people talk to their pets.

On a more annoying note, I have pretty well established a pattern where eating plain bread (water, white flour, starter and salt) does not usually give me coughing fits unless it gets stuck. Eating my homemade pound cake (flour, sugar, butter, eggs, salt, baking soda, vanilla, buttermilk) generates major coughing fits later even if it doesn't get stuck on the way down.

I've still got a question mark against bread with whole wheat flour, though I had some whole wheat tortillas last week that didn't cause problems. I'm making bread this week, with George's assistance, with a mix of white flour stored at room temperature and wheat flour that has been kept refrigerated instead of stored at room temperature. I used 1 tablespoon of pickling salt, which seems a little high, but whole wheat bread that is undersalted tastes cardboardy, so I would rather aim high.

Apple strudel from the Farmers' Market was no problem at all.

I should probably look for a cake recipe that does not use buttermilk to check whether that is the problem. I wouldn't mind losing buttermilk as an ingredient. It's not part of my cultural background, no pun intended. The King Arthur Flour 200th Anniversary Cookbook has a recipe for the original pound cake (start with one pound each of flour, sugar, eggs and butter...) with no buttermilk that I may try. Maybe cut in half so it won't feel so wastefull to add it to the compost bin if I start coughing my

I don't think it can be the actual butter that's the problem, even though I do have some strange sensitivities to dairy. I'm not a huge butter fan, but I do use it in cooking and baking. I hope it is not the problem. It's hard to replace butter's chemical and mechanical properties for baking.

I should get a referral to an allergist so I can get a lot of things tested and ruled in or out, instead of just figuring out things by trial and error.

The King Arthur Flour 200th Anniversary Cookbook has a recipe for the original pound cake (start with one pound each of flour, sugar, eggs and butter...) with no buttermilk that I may try. Maybe make a half batch so it won't feel so wastefull to add it to the compost bin if I start coughing my guts out again. Time to get some butter and eggs out so they can come to room temperature.

Lately Nanette's chickens have been laying huge eggs in the extra large (more than 27 ounces per dozen) and jumbo (more than 30 ounces per dozen) range. Finding 4 eggs in the dozen that added up to less than 9 ounces including their shells was tricky, but I couldn't quite get 8 ounces out of any combination of three eggs, either. Considering how dry flour is here, I think a little extra moisture from the eggs is better than too little.

If this doesn't work, maybe I can find a dairy-free cake recipe on-line to try. Boxed poundcake mixes use oil and no milk, unless there is powdered milk in the mix.

1/2 Poundcake (proposed recipe)

preheat oven to 350
cream 
8 ounces (2 sticks)room temperature unsalted butter with 
8 ounces by weight sugar
very thoroughly

beat together 1 teaspoon vanilla 
8 ounces eggs by weight

add to butter/sugar slowly while beating and 
beat thoroughly

sift together (in food processor)
8 ounces all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder, note: adjusted for altitude 
(1/2 orig recipe would be 1.5 tsp) 

add dry mixture alternately with 1/2 cup milk (maybe more, for altitude)

I'll try this recipe this evening -- the unsalted butter was in the freezer, so it will take a long time to come to room temperature.

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Sat, Apr 19, 2008

Another Short Market

Posted at 7:18 pm MDT to Weather

The weather was gorgeous today, if occasionally breezy, and the Farmers' Market was very crowded. It was nearly 9 o'clock before we got signs on the veggie bins because we were too buy selling, and by then we were already sold out of chard and spinach, and didn't need all of the signs.

I think we are getting spoiled. This is the third week in a row that we sold out of fresh produce well before the official end of market. We packed up the truck at 12:30 and I took Nanette home to the farm. where we had a cup of tea and a chat.

After 2, when the road used for the market reopens, I drove her back to the market so she could drive the truck home.

Next week we are going to bring our tarot decks, in case we run out of things to sell before the last customers with preorders arrive to pick up their veggies. (This week we were down to a few bunches of onions, one bunch of beet greens and the dried herbs and chiles before the last preorder.) We'll set up on an empty table at the back of the booth while we wait.

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Fri, Apr 18, 2008

Run Rate

Posted at 10:23 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

This week was a pay week and I also received my tax refunds, so I have been paying bills and paying down credit balances. I also put a bit more than half of the tax refund into savings: my non-retirement balances are still a little lower than I like because of all the big expenses for the house and truck last year. I've only got a bit more than 2 months take-home pay in regular, non-retirement savings accounts.

My basic monthly run rate -- monthly bills, food, minimum payents on the cards, and setting aside something for occasional expenses like property taxes and insurance -- is currently about one paycheck per month. I get two paychecks per month, most months. Three paychecks twice a year (this is a three paycheck month). So I have about one paycheck per month to pay off stuff, buy large items and make serious donations to charity.

So my 2+ months in savings is more than 4 months minimum run-rate.

My credit limits on my credit cards are ridiculously high (nearly equal to my total take home pay for last year), but my balances and interest rates aren't too bad. Actually, by the end of this month I will have only one card with a carried over balance. That balance is fairly high, but the interest rate on that card is decent, and once the other cards are paid off the balance should drop quickly. It will help when I get reimbursed for some money from my company. My available credit is so many times my run rate that it is silly.

I should have that last credit card paid off in a few months. Then that extra paycheck per month will go into savings to save for a new truck. I've hardly driven the old truck this winter, so it should last a while yet, and I'm planning to pay cash for my next vehicle.

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Thu, Apr 17, 2008

Powerlines 5

Posted at 10:03 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

The electrical contractor and the power company reps showed up on time and looked around for about half an hour. It would have been nice if they had told me what the next step is going to be before they left. I'll call one or both tomorrow to find out status.

A funny thing happened yesterday: a woman came to he door who works for the city of Lousiville (a nearby suburb) marking underground power lines and such. She was looking for 6967 and I couldn't remember which house that was. The county has taken advantage of requests for building permits to force acceptance of the new house numbers on some properties that refused to accept the new numbers back in 1999, and the house she needed is no longer marked as 6967 even though that is what is on the mailbox down at the main road.

After she left, I thought to check the phone book and found that she had needed the house with the chain link fence on the corner -- the former owners are still listed in last year's white pages, with the house number. (The house that was the other possibility has renters I don't know.) But it was too late to give her that information.

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Tue, Apr 15, 2008

Power Lines, the ongoing saga

Posted at 4:55 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I got a call today from a woman named Lori at the power company. She has been assigned to get my project taken care of. She is coming out Thursday morning at 9:00am, and so is Art, from the electrical contractor company.

I don't expect anything real to happen this week, but I now have some hope that I will finally be running on undergound power lines sometime before my birthday (which is the first week of July).

In other exciting news, Lori actually found the paper from the county Land Use department that I sent them in 1999 saying that the street address was being officially changed. She is faxing it to the people who are supposed to take note of such things, so there is a chance that in less than 10 years after the notice they will actually fix their records to match the real world.

I had an electrician and a HVAC guy out here today, too. My maintenance contract with Candlelight gives me free annual inspections of the electrical and HVAC stuff. Of course, they always try to sell you stuff while they are on an inspection, but that is OK. The whole point of the annual inspections is to catch things before they become dangerous or expensive emergencies.

The electrician installed a GFI on the kitchen outlet between the sink and stove, which is a place that really needs onee. I had a GFI on that circuit several years ago, but the refrigerator is on that circuit, and the fridge and the GFI interfered with each other. The electrician knew an alternative way of wiring the GFI so it would just affect the outlet without interfering with the fridge. So now my kitchen is safer.

The HVAC guy found that the AC compressor was pulling too many amps when it started up. 77 when it is rated for a max of 72. This explains why it occasionally blew the breaker last summer if it came on when I was running the microwave and coffee maker. Considering that the breaker box is now outdoors and harder to get at, I'm glad to get that fixed. He added a package that includes a big capacitor that charges between bursts to kickstart the compressor, and said that the two cycles he tested after adding the package peaked at 25 and 17 amps.

I don't think much of the Candlelight office (dis-)organization, but they seem to have very competent field techs. And they are very prompt. And its nice to have someone under contract in case of emergencies. I may give them some more real work if the powerlines ever get finished outside.

The phone lines in this house are pretty marginal (I think they are wired with intercom wire instead of actual phone cable). I'd like to run ethernet to the same locations as most of the phone jacks, and get some speaker wires put inside the livingroom walls, and the coax run from the dish receiver in the livingroom to the bedroom TV. And the exhaust fans for both the kitchen and the bathroom really need ot be replaced.

At least fixing the GFI and probably stopping the AC breaker hits check off two items on the list.

And now

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Mon, Apr 14, 2008

RPM Hell

Posted at 5:20 pm MDT to Technology

I spent part of yesterday trying to get an LDAP server working on quadriga, my big server. Quadrica runs Centos, which is equivalent to RedHat Enterprise Linux. I'm running into what look like software dependency problems.

I think I have been spoiled by the software package management on Ubuntu, which is derived from the Debian package handling and handles dependencies beautifully. It also seems to handle the existence of similar packages for 32 and 64 bits more sensibly.

I was going to try to cleanout all the packages related to SASL and LDAP and reload them cleanly, but so many things depend on them that I would lose half my OS. It doesn't seem to pay attention to the fact that the 64 bit versions of the modules are being added at the same time that 32 bit versions are being removed.

I think I'm going to switch to the command line.

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Sun, Apr 13, 2008

Dry Buttermilk

Posted at 11:54 pm MDT to Technology

Today was a baking day. I made bread and a pound cake that was a slight variation on the recipe from Alton Brown I've used before. Instead of using liquid buttermilk (which is annoying because most of the quart usually gets wasted) I tried some powdered buttermilk. It worked pretty well. I think the step of food-processing the dry ingredients is beneficial in this case since the buttermilk powder wants to be clumpy.

I added some lemon peel, too. The kind from the supermarket spice section, not fresh. I may try fresh lemon zest next time.

I also tried a baking spray on the pan (Pam with flour) as recommended by the America's Test Kitchen testers, and the cake actually came out of the bundt pan intact, which was nice change.

The new little Mario Batali prep bowls were very useful, too, since I was setting up two mise en place arrays in parallel.

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Sat, Apr 12, 2008

Herbs Online and Off

Posted at 6:16 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

After Farmers' Market I stopped at a Walgreen's, the only local place I have found the brand of St. John's Wort I trust. I was able to get a small bottle, but there was a sign on the shelf saying 'last chance'. I checked with the pharmacist, and they are stopping carrying NatureMade St. John's Wort: "but you can bring the bottle back in and special order it".

Hah.

I might be willing to make a special trip to a store I don't usually patronize to pick up something they have in stock. But in this century, I don't need to make two special trips to a store to get something they don't even carry.

Google is our friend.

Amazon came up as the first hit when I did a search for "NatureMade St. John's Wort" and their prices and available quantities looked good. So I ordered the herbs. And a manga issue I had missed. And a package of DVDs I wanted (for much less than they would have cost off the shelf at Best Buy: Amazon was having a sale). This is as much fun as the time I bought freeweights, clothes, bread and bananas at SuperTarget...

Farmers' Market itself was cold and windy. And we didn't have much to sell because we sold so much last week and the plants have spent the past week shivering instead of growing. We sold out of greens early, then sort of limped along selling garlic and onions and dried chiles from last season, and herbs. Dill, dried catnip, and dried epazote.

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Fri, Apr 11, 2008

Brown

Posted at 7:19 pm MDT to Technology

The new laptop arrived at 11:30, fortunately. I think being interrupted during the conference call would have wiped me out. I opened the package after I came off the clock at 4pm, and it booted into Ubuntu

It's brown. Not tan or beige. Brown. With interesting grooved textured strips near the hinge that will make it less slippery than smooth metal would be. I find myself wondering which Mac model inspired it: it is very sleek and designed.

The power brick for it is about 1/4 of the size of sophia's. I hope this means it will be less of a space heater.

This weekend I will get it configured: KDE and my standard apps. And I'm going to make it an LDAP client with userids and passwords served from my big server.

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3 AM Rant

Posted at 6:46 am MDT to Miscellaneous

I went to bed at a reasonable hour, and woke up at two AM. At three, I decided I need to explain while I'm alert and coherent, which I was then and am unlikely to be at noon due to lack of sleep. At about four am I sent the following to my bosses at my company and the client, and too our sales manager.

One key requirement of this current contract is that I am supposed to mentor
various technical teams in the practical applications of various [client]
standards and procedures, in addition to mentoring them in the use of
ClearCase and ClearQuest per se. This implies that the standards and
procedures must exist at the practical level and that they must be
communicated to me in a usable form. This is not the case.

When I ask technical questions about the application of [client] policies and
procedures to specific real world situations, I occasionally receive a direct
answer. Experience indicates that if I perform tasks based on that answer,
the results will often turn out not to be what was actually desired, so I
need to re-do the tasks.

Repeatedly asking for verification and clarification, with paraphrases of my
understanding of the instructions I have been given, does not prevent
problems. I will be repeatedly assured that what I am planning or doing is
correct, until it is done, and wrong. (The same pattern affects instructions
I am given for specific individual tasks.)

If I am not given a direct answer, but instead receive a pointer to a document
or real world example, the document or example that I am directed to will
usually not, in fact, address the specific technical question I originally
asked. When I attempt to generalize from the simple cases that are actually
discussed or the examples I am given, to determine a rule that fits my
particular technical case, the result will be wrong.

Through trial and error, I have managed to determine some procedures and
standards at the practical level that apply to the specific cases I have
encountered. This has been a slow process, and I have no confidence that the
rules I have derived are applicable to any other specific cases (quite the
contrary: the policies as applied seem to exist as a disjoint enumerated set
rather than as a system of general rules with specific exceptions).

It is difficult to approach providing mentoring about something that does not
appear to exist in an articulable form.

It is difficult to complete specific tasks when the requirements provided turn
out to have been imprecise, or simply wrong, and requests for clarification
provide either no additional information or inaccurate information, or
information that is subject to change without advance notice.

When I am really upset, I don't go to four-letter words as much as four-syllable ones.

I'm glad tomorrow is Farmers' Market day. At least lettuce and onions are solid and tangible. I am so tired of chasing smoke with a butterfly net.

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Thu, Apr 10, 2008

Magic Trick

Posted at 9:10 pm MDT to Weather

This snow storm was like a magic trick. It snowed and snowed and snowed, but there was never more than an inch on the ground here. It was cold enough that it was usually snow falling rather than rain, but warm enough that it melted almost as fast as it fell.

They are predicting highs of 50s for tomorrow, 60s for the weekend (so market should be comfortable) and 70s for most of next week. There's no guarantee that we won't still have more snow this season (one of the nastiest blizzards I can remember in the Denver area was in late April) but really cold weather is getting less and less likely.

Tomorrow is kind of a good news/bad news joke.

The good news is, the new laptop should be delivered some time tomorrow.

The bad news is that I have a conference call with the VP in charge at my current project, who tends to be a micromanager and a bully. Our sales manager will be sitting in on the call, which is probably prudent. The temptation for me to suggest an obvious solution if they are unhappy with my progress is going to be very strong.

I'm sure they are unhappy with my progress -- I am very unhappy with my progress. I seem to spend more time doing re-work than doing actual tasks, so nothing actually gets finished. I state what I am going to be doing verbally in conference calls, and also in emails, in detail, and get what appears to be buy-in from the the people I am working with. But somehow what I have done is never right, never what they really wanted, and I end up having to re-do things.

I do not feel up for this conference: I need plenty of sleep tonight and plenty of herbs tomorrow so I'll be coherent during the call. Of course, it doesn't need a lot of coherence to say, "OK then, I quit." This is why it is good that our sales manager is sitting in: the company can't really afford to have me on the bench between assignments just now.

But it is not a good sign that I know exactly how many billable hours there are between now and the end of the contract. There are 592 hours left on this contract. By the time of the conference call it will be 588.

I will never work for these people again.

I usually get deliveries late in the day, because I am out away from business centers, but I'd be willing to bet that the laptop will arrive (and need to be signed for) between noon and one during the conference call.

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Wed, Apr 09, 2008

Threats

Posted at 10:11 pm MDT to Weather

The forecasters are predicting 3 to 5 inches of snow for tonight. The high country is already getting hammered. Snow for Denver is about 20 inches below normal for the season, but it is way above average in the mountains. The transportation department is way over budget for plowing for the year.

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Tue, Apr 08, 2008

Errands

Posted at 10:25 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

After work today I ran some errands. I stopped at Costco to refill my prescriptions, then went up to Nanette's to say hello and pick up a dozen eggs.

We ended up going out to dinner at the "Maharaja" restaurant on 28th Street in Boulder, where we had the dinner buffet. All of the food was excellent, with well-balanced spices (and good spices rather than just heat). The naan that came with the meal was tasty, and the chai was very good: nicely balanced spices again (lots of chai blends have more cardamom than I prefer, or maybe more pepper) and nicely sweet without being sticky.

Then I began my quest for King Arthur Flour and vitamins and St. John's Wort.

I found the Bluebonnet Vitamins that I can actually swallow at the Boulder Whole Foods. They are quite expensive, but they replace three additional supplements besides the other multivitamins I was taking, and they have iron, which I need.

But it looks like Whole Foods are no longer carrying regular All-Purpose King Arthur Flour, just the 100% Organic variety, which is much more expensive. The only regular All-Purpose flour they offered was their house brand, which I don't want.

And they don't carry NatureMade St. John's Wort -- I suppose as a national brand it is too mundane for them.

Vitamin Cottage stocks only an occasional token bag of flour, and doesn't stock NatureMade herbs.

The Barnes & Noble between Whole Foods and Vitamin Cottage in the same shopping center had a couple of books I'd been waiting for: including the third book in Karen Traviss' second trilogy.

The big Boulder King Soopers a few blocks from Whole Foods had both organic and regular King Arthur Flour. I hope they are not just finishing off theirNext time I get low

They also had NatureMade herbs, but only the time-release kind, which I don't trust for herbs.

I think I am going to find an on-line source of the NatureMade St. John's Wort. The postage won't be any more expensive than gas for special trips to Walgreen's where I don't usually shop.

On my way home I stopped at my mailbox, which is 1/2 mile from my house. There was a package from Amazon in it, which I didn't remember ordering. It turned out to be a gift of a Mario Batali cookbook that I didn't already have, and some cute little Mario Batali brand mixing bowls. This was a total surprise and very nice.

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Not a Good Sign

Posted at 10:25 pm MDT to Technology

Today my big laptop, sophia, overheated and shut itself down a little before noon. I don't think the processor fan was working: that part of the case was very hot to the touch. When I rebooted it, the fan must have started up, because a little while later parts of the case that had been too hot to touch were back down close to room temperature.

I immediately started a full backup of my /home partition to the big server.

The last time I had a laptop motherboard start flaking out, I tried to nurse it along for a few months before I finally replaced it. We discovered last fall that the master copies of some programs I had written were corrupted by the memory problems in that failing laptop. I still need to recreate those one of these days...

I did my taxes yesterday, and expect a fairly hefty refund in the next 10 days or so (electronic filing and direct deposit), so I ordered a new laptop, with second day delivery, from LinuxCertified. (They were having a sale until 4/12.) This will be my third laptop from them.

The new laptop will be a little smaller than sophia, for easier travelling. Actually, I think it is the follow-on model for 'bastet', the laptop sophia replaced, which was a nice little machine, and good for multimedia. (Sophia's speakers are hopelessly inadequate.)

It will have a dual core Intel T7300, which will be handy for running virtual systems. A 32 bit operating system instead of 64-bit will be useful,too: I seem to be running into more and more business needs for Java which is very poorly supported on 64 bit Linux. I ordered Ubuntu 7.10, which is what I've become used to, but may reconfigure to Fedora 8 after the machine arrives.

I didn't competely max out the processor this time, (the T7300 was about midrange of what was offered for the chassis I chose) so maybe I can avoid frying this motherboard quite as soon as usual. (Running the poor things 18 hours a day doesn't help...) I did max out the memory and hard drive, and get a dvd-writer and wifi.

I also ordered a spare power supply. If I didn't suspect that sophia's days are numbered, I would have inquired about a extra power supply for it, too. The pinout on the power connecter is peculiar, and not supported by my Targus emergency laptop supply. The power connector on the new machine may turn out to be a standard plug like bastet's was (so the Targus connectors would work, but I don't want to gamble on that.

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Mon, Apr 07, 2008

April Snow

Posted at 9:52 pm MDT to Weather

I woke up this morning to a white world: fog, and just an inch or so of snow to make the moutains pretty and the roads ugly for the commute. All of the tree branches and power lines were coated.

It continued to precipitate occasionally into early afternoon, but some of what feel was rain (more or less), and by sunset so much of the snow had melted that even most of the grass was bare.

I'm sure the plants appreciated the moisture. We just finished the third driest March on record, and I noticed over the weekend that even the sprinkling of rain we got last week was enough to turn the grass green.

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Sun, Apr 06, 2008

Mixer

Posted at 9:37 pm MDT to Technology

I think my Kitchenaid mixer may be dying. It was making horrible grinding noises while kneading this week's batch of bread.

This mixer is about 10 years old, and I think it was refurbished when I got it: my original mixer that I bought new was killed by a power surge from a nearby lightning strike within the initial warranty period. And it's mostly been used to make bread dough over the years, which has to count as heavy-duty use.

Today has been a cooking day: besides sourdough waffles and the bread, I made a batch of chicken and mushroom risotto (with fresh mushrooms and free range chicken breast from the Farmers' Market) and boxed organic chicken broth.

Flavorings were kosher salt, dried marjoram and thyme, and fresh ground black pepper and a couple of grinds of nutmeg. Plus grated parmesan, of course. Maybe a little too much salt, given the saltiness of the cheese.

I practiced my knife skills on the onions and garlic for the risotto (also the chicken) but I followed Alton Brown's advice and used an egg-slicer for the mushrooms. Actually, I've never used it to slice eggs... maybe if I make a macaroni salad this summer, I'll put it to its intended use.

I had been thinking of baking a cake, but I'm completely out of all-purpose flour. I went over to the mall this afternoon and stopped at my local Whole Foods (that used to be Wild Oats) on the way home, but they were out of both regular all-purpose King Arthur and the white whole-wheat. I bought some other stuff -- elbow noodles for mac-and-cheese and some stuff from the fresh dairy section -- but made a point about complaining about the out-of-stock flour at the customer service counter since that is what I had stopped in for.

Maybe tomorrow after work I'll go over to Nanette's to get some fresh eggs, and stop at the Boulder Whole Foods on the way home to stock up on flour and the vitamins I'm taking (ex-Wild Oats hasn't started stocking them yet).

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Sat, Apr 05, 2008

Piranhas

Posted at 3:32 pm MDT to Weather

The weather was wonderful for today's initial Farmers' Market. It was mostly sunny, 60 degrees F, and a little breezy. The customers came out in droves. And they weren't just enjoying the nice weather: they wanted to buy.

The market opened at 8 am, and we were getting very low on fresh vegetables by 10. Rowan (Nanette's oldest daughter who is mostly running the farm with Nanette these days) went back to the farm to do some more picking.

People mobbed us each time we got restock. It was a good thing that Rowan's friend Erin was helping with the selling. We needed three people during the feeding frenzies.

By noon we had re-stocked twice, there was nothing left at the farm that was close to being ready to pick this week, and we had nothing left on the tables but some dried chile peppers, packets of dried herbs from last season, and some bunches of green garlic.

After the other fresh veggies sold out for the third time, people who came to our booth continued to buy the garlic bunches. I'm convinced some of them didn't even really want garlic, they just wanted to buy stuff.

We packed everything up at noon (with one solitary unsold bundle of garlic, plus the dried stuff) even though the market doesn't close until 2 pm. Then Nanette and Rowan and I walked a couple of blocks to Rowan's favorite bar for lunch. (The truck couldn't be moved until the market closed, so Nanette couldn't just go home.)

This was a very nice introduction to this year's market. We didn't freeze or bake or get rained or snowed on. We had good sales. We certainly weren't bored. And we had a shorter workday than expected.

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Fri, Apr 04, 2008

Da Vinci's Face

Posted at 9:33 pm MDT to Media

Neil Gaiman has posted a link on his blog to a wonderful discussion of what Leonardo Da Vinci looked like, by an artist who has drawn 1100 portraits and caricatures for newspapers.

I love the internet. It's full of such wonderful things.

I have only been outside of North America twice, both times on Geek Cruises (now InSight Cruises). The second cruise (October 2004) started and ended in Venice, and I spent a couple of days in the city before and after the actual cruise.

While walking around the city, I came across a church that was hosting a display of mechanisms that had been built based on designs from Da Vinci's notebooks, with pictures of the notebook pages they were based on. It was a working church (I was raised Catholic: I can recognize an active altar when I see one) but most of the floor space inside the church was taken up by the displays. Some of the more complicated mechanisms were marked "Please don't touch", but many of them were set up so you could move the various parts and really see how they worked.

The architecture of the church itself was lovely, too. And there were some nice pintings (probably frescoes) on the walls.

I will put a couple of pictures below the cut. I took more than 20 of the different gadgets. (I am such a geek.) I love digital cameras, too: if I had been carrying film I certainly would not have taken so many near the end of my trip. And I wouldn't have been able to take pictures indoors without a flash: the camera is smart enough to figure out the time it needs to make the image.

See more ...

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Thu, Apr 03, 2008

Stupid Banks

Posted at 10:38 pm MDT to Media

I can tell I'm a little better this week. Last week during working hours I couldn't stand to listen to the radio, only to one of the Dish Network Classical channels that has only pure wall to wall instrumental music with no DJs. This week I am listening to the radio.

But listening to the radio is a little annoying . There seem to be a lot of advertisements for bank loans against people's houses, which is surprising given the state of the local economy. Also for car deals with what sound to me like really iffy terms.

On the other hand, there seem to be a lot fewer ads for companies that claim they can fix your credit than I remember from a couple of months ago. Possibly they are being overwhelmed.

I happened to watch the late local news yesterday evening, and the opening segment was about foreclosures. On the average one family in 45 in Colorado has had their house foreclosed, and there are areas around Denver where it's running 1 in 30, including a couple of developments where almost every block has at least one foreclosed home (I suspect a collusion by scummy bankers and scammy developers).

One of the houses in my little neighborhood had a sign in front of it from the 'Get It Gone' real estate agency for a few weeks a while back. I suspect that means that we're running one in ten, here. (I can't tell if there is anyone currently living in the house: it is too far from the road and on the other side of the mesa from me.)

I had an ARM for the first couple of years after I bought this house. (It was a complicated deal -- I was making payments directly to the previous owners for a while to cover the down payment, on top of the main loan.) There was one year when interest rates went up from high to obscene (this was in the late 80s), and my payments went up and I spent a year paying basically nothing but interest. I got really good at budgeting, and ate really cheap for a while. And some major repairs (replacing the roof, which was leaking badly... jacking the foundation...) got put off until interest rates came down.

Since I paid off the previous owners (ahead of schedule) and got into a fixed mortgage, I have generally had 15 year fixed mortgages. I have refinanced a couple of times to do major home repairs and improvements and put money into the company, so the end date of my current mortgage is out a ways, but still before the end of my probable working span, and a reasonable chunk of my payment goes to principal, not interest.

I pay a little extra principal every month, too, rounding my payment up to the next hundred. Since June of last year more than half of my actual payment has gone for principal, a few dollars more every month thanks to the winders of compounding. Since January of this year, the interest in each payment has been less than half of my scheduled payment, so even if I cut back to my scheduled payment, more than half of it would be going to principal. It's nice to be on the down-hill slope, so to speak.

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Tue, Apr 01, 2008

Norse Three Bears

Posted at 10:52 pm MDT to Media

I have known of Jo Walton for years: she was a regular poster on rec.arts.sf.written before she became a published writer.

She has created a retelling of Goldilocks and the Three Bears in the style of Norse poetry that is wonderful, and seems like a suitable topic for April 1. I found the link on Making Light, where abi (one of the local poets) has been giving tourist directions to Amsterdam in the Norse mode...

I love the internet. It's full of amazing stuff.

And at the moment I'm feeling very pleased because James Nicoll, one of my favorite writers from rec.arts.sf.written, and more recently on LiveJournal, has friended me on Live Journal. I'm not entirely sure how that works in this case, since I do my active blogging here rwith a link into LJ. I do hope the LJ feed of Teleidoscope is working.

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