Teleidoscope

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 help to people who have been cut off by landslides.

There were films of paratroopers jumping into mountain valleys and people shoving cases of food and bottled water out of low flying planes. And it is reported that the Chinese government has sent 100,000 thousand troops to the affected area to help digging out and dealing with the destruction.

The latest reports, three days after the quake, are that all the areas that were cut off have been contacted, that 60,000 people have been dug out and rescued from the rubble of collapsed buildings so far, and 20,000 are known dead. (I expect both numbers

I don't generally approve of the Chinese government, but at least they do not seem to be skimping on helping their people. They look really good compared to the Burmese, who have shown no sign of trying to help their people and have been blocking offers by others to help them.

Actually, the Chinese government looks pretty good compared to the Bushies' response to Katrina, too. That's a depressing thought.

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Tue, May 13, 2008

Dead Phone

Posted at 6:45 pm MDT to Technology

Qwest is doing their best to challenge XCel for bureaucratic stupidity. I have two voice lines, one of which also carries the DSL.

The DSL line is permanently hooked to the Dish receiver, which for the past couple of days has been complaining that it couldn't phone home. Today I tested the lines and discovered i have no dial tone on that line, even though DSL has been working with only occasional minor glitches.

I carried my most protable phone around and plugged it into various jacks and determined that the no-dial-tone startsat the network box outside the house.

When I called Qwest tech support, the first technician I spoke to said that I wasn't supposed to have a dial tone on that line, just the DSL. When I insisted that the phone had been working a few days ago, she switched me to customer service, who said that the line is supposed to have a dial tone and switched me back to tech support.

According to the second tech support person I talked to, there is a problem on the line about a mile from the house, and someone will come out tomorrow to fix it. The tech support department still had the wrong address (though I have been telling them about the change of address -- and they have been promising to update it -- a few times a year since 1999) so it isn't just XCel that is incapable of updating its database.

The only surprising thing about this is that it is usually my other line that goes out when the line gets flakey. That's one reason I still pay for dialtone on both lines

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Shivering Lilacs

Posted at 6:38 am MDT to Weather

Today is May 13, and they were predicting that we would have an inch of snow on the ground this morning. It didn't happen: the temperatures here didn't get much below freezing over night, so my yard is just just cold and wet.

I am so tired of this teasing weather with alternating days of 70s and snow. I am ready for spring to actually stay.

My poor lilac bush has lots of buds on it this year, but we have had so many late freezes that I am afraid I will not see many blooms. I looked out this morning and its leaves looked sort of clenched and shivering.

I wonder how the orchards are doing. Last year was a bad year for fruit because the buds froze. This year the winter was warmer, but dry, but the spring has been obnoxious.

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Sun, May 11, 2008

Apple Rhubarb Cake

Posted at 4:35 pm MDT to Technology

preheat oven to 350

grease or cooking-spray a 9x9 inch baking dish

slice 1 pound of rhubarb into 1/4 inch slices

Toss in a large bowl with 

2 large Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored, sectioned and cut into 1/4 inch slices

2/3 cup sugar

1/2 tsp allspice

1 Tbsp minute tapioca

and spread in the baking dish.

Beat 2 eggs thoroughly with 1/2 cup sugar

Slowly add 1/2 cup cooled melted butter while beating, 

then beat in 1 cup of flour

Spread dough on top of the fruit

Bake for 45 minutes. 

This came out really well, and let me practice my knife skills. I found that the apples responded better to a paring knife than to a peeler.

The apples were so old that they were starting to shrivel a little, but they were not at all bruised or rotten: I bought them a long time ago at Costco in one of those plastic carriers that have 12 little individual plastic spheres for the fruit, and just left them on the bottom shelf of the fridge with light things piled on top of the carrier, instead of taking the fruit out and putting it into the crisper. I'm going to keep that carrier and use it for storing fruit from the Farmers' Market this summer. Apples seem to do really well in it, and it's heavy enough to be hand washable. Maybe I'll take the carrier to market in fruit season and load it there, to minimize bruising of the fruit.

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Sat, May 10, 2008

Boxty

Posted at 6:50 pm MDT to Weather

Farmers' Market today was cold and windy and it snowed at us. Not flakes, but little white lumps, as if it couldn't quite make up its mind whether to be snow or hail. Despite the weather, we had a good day and sold out by 12:30, so we loaded everything back into the truck, locked it, and walked over into downtown Boulder to find lunch somewhere warm.

Nanette had a coupon for Conor O'Neills Traditional Irish Pub and Restaurant, which is two blocks from the market, so we went there.

I ordered the lunch boxty plate with chicken filling, which turned out to be very like an Irish burrito: meat, veggies and sauce wrapped in a flat tortilla shaped thing, garnished with bits of tomato and green onion, and served with sour cream on the side. The 'tortilla' was the boxty, a sort of fine potato pancake, almost a crepe. The filling in my meal was tender chicken, big chunks of mushrooms and peas in a sherry cream and tomato sauce that was mildly but wonderfully seasoned.

I made a good choice I think. I loved the boxty. Nanette had the "Shepherd's Pie" (which would have been my alternate choice) and we swapped tastes of our meals. The Shepherd's Pie was spicier than I would have preferred.

Their on-line menu indicates that the fillings with beef, salmon, and veggies have different kinds of sauces. It would be interesting to try them. I don't eat out very often when I am in Boulder, but Conor O'Neills is going on my short list of places to go when I do eat out.

I just had a toasted cheese sandwich for supper: the boxty was a big meal, and for breakfast, after setting up our market tables, we had "Mediterranean Breakfasts" from the Greek place in the market Food Court. Eggs scrambled with spinach, served on a pita bed with gyro bits (lamb for us), cheese (feta for me, cheddar for Nanette) and a little cucumber dressing. Market days, for me, tend to mean good eating as well as work and fresh veggies to take home.

I'm not going to make a pound cake this weekend after all... rhubarb is in, so I'm going to make an apple/rhubarb cake, like the ones I made last year. I'm feeling hungry for fruit, anyway.

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Fri, May 09, 2008

New Bundt Pan

Posted at 8:09 pm MDT to Technology

Costco is selling sets consisting of a very heavy cast-aluminum bundt pan and a bundt-shaped and -sized cake carrier. The pans come in several fancy patterns. I got one called a star, though it doesn't look very starlike to me. This shape is fairly simple. Some of the other options had lots of fiddly little details and I have a bad track record getting cakes out of bundt pans unbroken. There was also a simple 'party' shape, but that was totally boring. The star is a reasonable compromise.

The Costco sets are quite inexpensive -- about $12.00. so either the carrier or the pan is basically free. More than free: the pan alone is $35 on Amazon, and the carrier/keeper runs about $20.

I'll be baking another poundcake this weekend to try out my new toys. I think I'm going to try another non-buttermilk recipe or modify the half-pound cake I used last time. I

I'm not really fond of the gooey kinds of bundt cakes. Plain pound cake with just a little powdered sugar instead of frosting is probably my favorite kind of cake that doesn't have fruit in it. When I eat frosted cakes I tend to leave little frosting skeletons behind.

I have considered trying a spice cake recipe -- I found one for an applesauce spice cake that looks interesting -- but that has tactical problems. I can eat small pieces of plain pound cake for breakfast for a week. I think spice cake or other fancy cakes would get old fast.

I suppose I could cut a recipe in half and make one small loaf pan of spice cake, but bundt pans are more fun

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Wed, May 07, 2008

Sun/Rain

Posted at 10:28 pm MDT to Weather

After work I went over to Costco to buy a few things. It was sunny, with blue sky over head, though there were clouds in the area, and I heard thunder once while I was in the store.

It still managed to rain on me. The upper winds must have been blowing pretty fiercely.

There are more lines of showers moving in from the west: we are definitely out of the winter weather pattern.

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Night Thunder

Posted at 6:38 am MDT to Weather

It look like we have finally shifted out of the winter weather pattern that gave us snow on May Day.

Spring/Summer weather patterns here include thunderstorms, usually in the afternoons.

Last night we had rain -- with special effects -- instead of snow, which is a refreshing change. It was noisy enough to wake me a couple of times. But the worst of the storms seem to have been south of Denver: reports say that the morning rush is being complicated by parts of the interstates that are flooded out.

We need the moisture -- March and April, which are usually our wettest months, set records for dryness. This is not exactly a drought, though, because even though we were dry, the mountains got buried in snow, and most of our water comes from runoff from the snowmelt.

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Mon, May 05, 2008

Powerlines 7

Posted at 6:42 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

They were supposed to (finally) finish the work on my power lines this week. I was expecting technicians and machinery to show up at 9:00am tomorrow.

Today I got a call: the power company had announced that they would not be available to do their piece of the work for a couple of weeks. So rather than leave m driveway dug up (again) until the XCel decides they are available, my contractor is postponing the diggin.

Why am I not surprised?

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Sun, May 04, 2008

Derby

Posted at 10:04 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

The finale of this year's Kentucky Derby was horrible and sad. I would say that something needs to be done about breeders who breed their animals to unhealthy extremes, but I suspect any substantive change in the behavior of the human breeders would require breeding of humans.

The fact of the Kentucky Derby reminded me... the first show I ever watched on a TV that I, personally, owned, was a Kentucky Derby.

It was the end of my junior or senior year at Wesleyan (I don't remember which) and I had been saving all year for it. I walked down the steep hill from campus to Main Street -- which had actual stores where you could buy things like TVs in those days -- and bought a small black and white TV with a yellow plastic case. It had a 10 or 12 inch screen.

I carried the TV (which was heavy even though it was small) back up the hill to my dorm room and plugged it in. I was able to pick up a couple of channels on the rabbit ears, which was about as good as you could expect on the first weekend of May in 1975 or 1976. And because it was Saturday afternoon of the first weekend in May, what I found to watch was the Kentucky Derby.

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Sat, May 03, 2008

Big Wedding

Posted at 9:45 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Our office manager got married today. It has been many years since I attended a full formal wedding. And I'm sure I have never attended a wedding reception in an aircraft hangar before (it was a small hanagar, but still --). There were 10 seat per table, and there were a LOT of tables: I wasn't quite geeky enough to count the tables, but there were probably 300 or 400 hundred guests.

The ceremony, gowns and food at the reception were all very nice. Heather's gown was magnificent, and the bridesmaid gowns were also quite pretty in several pastel colors. The groomsmen wore black tuxes and black shirts, with ties and vests that coordiated with their partners among the bridesmaids. It made a very elegant effect.

They've changed the rules for Catholic weddings: it no longer involves a full Mass including the consecration and communion.

And I was amazed by the number of women who wore pure black to a formal wedding. My generation and subculture tended to skip the big church weddings with the princess gown and huge reception and gift registry, but wearing black at a wedding is just... ewww.

I left a little while after the dancing started. "Dutch Hop" music is very similar to polka music. The live band was keyboards, accordion, trombone and hammered dulcimer, and overly amped.

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Fri, May 02, 2008

SCFD

Posted at 4:49 pm MDT to Media

SCFD (Scientific and Cultural Facilities District) is a fund in the Denver area, supported by earmarked local sales taxes, that provides funding to museums and orchestras and such.

Last weekend at the concert, they announced that the Boulder Philharmonic was within $30,000 of donations of qualifying for tier II SCFD support ($100,000) instead of tier III ($20,000).

I usually make two donations a year: half when I buy my season tickets and half in December, and I bought my season tickets for next season several weeks ago. Because of the possibility of matching funds, it made sense to make the second donation now, when it would have leverage, instead of waiting until December.

I just received a phone call thanking me for the donation. They reached the goal and will get the additional funding. This is very good: funding for cultural organizations dropped dramatically after 9/11 and the Phil has been cutting back and cutting back to try to stay solvent. Maybe now they can start growing again. Or at least stop shrinking.

The orchestra has also been named Best Classical Music in Boulder by one of the local papers.

I may make another donation to the Philharmonic in December anyway. Last year my charitable donations were roughly 10% of my takehome pay. This year I would like to aim for midway between 10% of gross and 10% of net. I'm adding charities -- the Match-it for Pratchett movement got me to donate to the Alzheimer's Association -- but I may also increase donations to some of my usual targets.

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Thu, May 01, 2008

Powerlines 6, the ongoing saga

Posted at 9:02 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I got a call from the electrical contractor. Next week they are going to dig up my yard again so the power company can redo the underground lines and be happy. This will be a nuisance, but there will be no cost to me. Supposedly. I suspect I will need to put some more roadbase on the driveway.

I didn't ask whether they were going to dig all the way down so they could remove the cables they buried last year.

Yesterday was busy: after work I went shopping for a wedding present for out office manager, who is getting married on Saturday. Then I had my massage therapy appointment.

Supper was a pizza slice at the pizzeria downstairs from my massage therapist's office.

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