Teleidoscope

Wed, Dec 31, 2008

Roundabout

Posted at 5:49 pm MST to Miscellaneous

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

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

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

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

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

Not the greatest way to end the year...

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Tue, Dec 30, 2008

Wind Speed Chart

Posted at 9:04 am MST to Weather

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

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

The peak gust shown is over 70 mph.

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

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Mon, Dec 29, 2008

HD Radio

Posted at 5:58 pm MST to Technology

My Christmas techie toy is a new clock radio.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sun, Dec 28, 2008

Unknown Host

Posted at 11:11 am MST to Technology

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

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Capri Mac

Posted at 11:11 am MST to Technology

Goat Macaroni and Cheese

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

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

Cook noodles al dente.

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

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

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Thu, Dec 25, 2008

Roast Beast

Posted at 6:00 pm MST to Technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wed, Dec 24, 2008

Rosemary Tree

Posted at 4:50 pm MST to Miscellaneous

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

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

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

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

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

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Tue, Dec 23, 2008

Yule 2008

Posted at 2:52 pm MST to Miscellaneous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Madoff

Posted at 2:25 pm MST to Current Events

Crap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sat, Dec 20, 2008

Balance 2008

Posted at 5:37 pm MST to Miscellaneous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think my hatches are pretty well battened down.

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Fri, Dec 19, 2008

Cat Language

Posted at 8:14 am MST to Miscellaneous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Thu, Dec 18, 2008

Tree

Posted at 3:00 pm MST to Weather

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

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

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

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

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

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Tue, Dec 16, 2008

Charities 2008

Posted at 1:22 pm MST to Current Events

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mon, Dec 15, 2008

New Holiday Bread

Posted at 8:04 pm MST to Technology

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

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

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

First rise in the mixing bowl.

Second rise in the ceramic pandoro pan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sun, Dec 14, 2008

Wrapping

Posted at 7:21 pm MST to Miscellaneous

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

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

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Slow Boat

Posted at 1:30 pm MST to Miscellaneous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Finance Files

Posted at 1:29 pm MST to Miscellaneous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sat, Dec 13, 2008

Lack of Progress

Posted at 4:17 pm MST to Miscellaneous

This has been a slow week.

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

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

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

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

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Fri, Dec 05, 2008

Hard Drive Hell

Posted at 3:56 pm MST to Technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tue, Dec 02, 2008

Oh, Canada!

Posted at 12:56 pm MST to Current Events

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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