Teleidoscope

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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