Teleidoscope

Sat, Jan 31, 2009

How Screwed We are

Posted at 12:33 pm MST to Current Events

The Calculated Risk economics blog has a lovely summary of the economic results that have been reported in January.

CR does wonderful graphs. Very depressing at the moment, but very thorough. There have been a lot of headlines lately about things cliff-diving or falling off cliffs. Or setting nasty records.

Another ongoing series at CR is Four Bad Bears, which compares the progress of the stock market in the current (S&P 500 values) recession (-51.9 percent at the bottom about 300 trading days in, currently -47.2 about 360 days in) with the 1973-1974 (-48.2 at the bottom, 420 trading days in) and 2000-2002 recessions (-49.1 at the bottom, 660 days in) (S&P 500 values) and the Great Depression of the 20th Century (-89.2% 840 days in)(DJIA values).

Those weren't the only recessions we've had, of course. Just some of the bad bear markets.

Can I just say "Arrrrgggh."

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On the Road Again

Posted at 8:41 am MST to Travel

This has been a busy week. Monday was slow, but since then I had 2 and a half days of billable work, 2 long business meetings about the direction of the company, and a phone interview and conference call follow-up about an out-of-state gig. And a dentist appointment.

It looks like I will be spending 3 to 4 months on a gig in Mobile, Alabama. It's a good thing I never broke up the crates of kitchen gear, etc. I used the last time I was in corporate housing. (I came home from Boston almost 26 months ago. Wow. It's been nice to be home this long.)

My taxes are done for the year. The car registration and insurance have been renewed. The property tax bill for the year is in and I will pay it this week. House insurance doesn't hit until June, and second half car insurance gets billed in August, so those bills should not hit until after I am back.

I'll need to put bottled water deliveries and trash pickup on hold, but I don't get hard copy newspapers any more, so I don't need to worry about them.

I do all my regular bill paying online these days. Even the water and trash -- which had been the last holdouts -- as of the past few months. (If other people are like me, no wonder the post office is going broke. I used to use about 10 stamps a month and now it's down to basically none except at Christmas time.) I'll have my incoming mail forwarded to the office, and Heather, our office manager can forward anything that looks urgent on to Mobile. The rest I can sort through when I fly home every few weeks.

My semi-annual appointment with my oncologist is this week. I should get Dinah into the vet for a checkup before we leave. And the dentist said I have two fillings that need to be repaired, which I will try to have done this week, too. I may also get my eyes checked -- there's a potential complication from the tamoxifen the doctor is on the watch for and I think I'm about due for the next checkup. My next thyroid checkup doesn't need to happen until July. I have an appointment with my allergist the morning of Monday March 9, that will need to be rescheduled or built into my travel schedule.

I may need to do some clothes shopping. I should email the client's representative and ask what their dress code is. I think I'm OK on shirts and t-shirts, and such, but my office slacks are geared for Boston, not Mobile, and I may need another weight of coat or jacket, and a raincoat. And Casual Corner went out of business a couple of years ago. Drat. I should email the client's representative and ask what their dress code is. Maybe I should wait and shop in Mobile: it may be easier to find clothes appropriate to the local climate.

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Wed, Jan 21, 2009

Cute

Posted at 3:12 pm MST to Current Events

This image of Obama fighting Darth Vader reminds me of a couple of jokes that were going around yesterday.

People kept comparing Dick Cheney in his wheelchair to Dr. Strangelove.

And political blogger atrios asked "Who invited Mr. Potter?" referring to the wheelchair-ridden villain of It's a Wonderful Life. People were making separated at birth jokes even before Cheney ended up in the wheelchair.

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Charity of the Month -- Jan 09 -- ACLU

Posted at 11:08 am MST to Miscellaneous

President Obama's (ooh that feels good to type) inaugural address was very encouraging. So was the fact that one of his first official acts was to request a 120 day suspension of military tribunal hearings at Guantanamo.

This seems to be a propitious time to renew my membership.

Membership in the ACLU is not tax deductible, which allows them more freedom of action. They also have an American Civil Liberties Foundation that is tax deductible. I may send some money to that later in the year.

And I hope the courts eventually do something really unpleasant to Bernie Madoff.

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Tue, Jan 20, 2009

Helicopter

Posted at 11:09 am MST to Current Events

I took a break to watch the inauguration...

Shrub is gone. Finally. He is on the helicopter and leaving Washington. The news guys are saying that people were cheering him, but I think it is likely that many of them were cheering the fact that he was leaving.

Last night in Dupont Circle people were throwing shoes at a giant inflated effigy of GWB.

President Obama's inauguration address was impressive, and well-delivered, which is still refreshing.(Talking Points Memo has the full text.) I hope that he follows through on cleaning up corruption and inequity (and iniquity) as he claimed he would.

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Mon, Jan 19, 2009

Fiat Chrysler

Posted at 11:40 pm MST to Current Events

Fiat is reported to be buying a chunk of Chrysler.

But that's not what I came here to talk about today.

The cars my parents owned that I remember the makes of were a Fiat, two Plymouth Valiants and a Volkswagen Beetle (a real one, not one of these remakes they sell now) which overlapped with the two Valiants.

The Fiat was white, the first Valiant and the Beetle were very light blue, and the car before the Fiat was a light blue and white station wagon. The second Valiant was gold with a darker top because after 15 years or so of driving pale colored cars my parents finally realized that pale cars tend to disappear in the snow fogs mist and drizzle that make up a lot of Connecticut weather.

I hate the fact that rental cars are very often white, and I've never owned a vehicle that was weather-colored. (Medium green Maverick, medium blue Escort, gold Subaru, red Dodge Ram 50 with a white topper, red Dakota with a red topper.)

But that's not what I came here to talk about either.

I don't know if it still happens now that everything is built up, but I can remember when a moose would occasionally wander down the Connecticut River into the Hartford area. It usually ended up in among the big gas and oil storage tanks near Hartford, and the Fish and Game people would shoot it with a tranq and it would drop dead because its heart couldn't take the stress.

I suspect it doesn't happen as often now that the river is lined by roads and urban and suburban construction instead of farms. I can (dimly) remember when there were fields of shade tobacco growing where a lot of the highway interchanges around Hartford are now. Before the interstates and their surrounding development came in, the gas and oil tanks were the first complete break from woods and agricultural land a moose wandering down from Vermont through Massachusetts would encounter along the river.

Of course, we would never have heard about the moose that came down the river, took one look a the city and turned around and went north again.

The particular moose I have in mind came wandering down in the spring of '64 or maybe the fall of '63.

There was a period of several months before the new house was finished and we moved to southeastern Connecticut when my Dad was driving the little white Fiat every morning from Manchester CT, across the river from Hartford, to New London where his job was. He left very early in the mornings (five-ish?), and at that time of year in Connecticut he was driving in the dark.

One day Dad came home from work and told us about a close call he had that morning. I t had been foggy that morning, and he had nearly hit a huge dark animal, too big to be a horse or cow, that loomed up out of the mist ahead of him.

That day or the next there was a newspaper article about a moose among the oil tanks again and we realized that was what Dad almost hit. Or vice versa: that moose probably weighed as much as the Fiat. Considering the damage that hitting a deer can do to a car, I think the Fiat would have lost the fight with a moose completely.

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Taxes 2008

Posted at 12:02 am MST to Miscellaneous

I'm getting my taxes done early this year. My W-2 has already arrived, and I have the tax and interest info, so I filled in the federal forms.

The TaxACT State tax package for Colorado is supposed to be finalized and ready for download later this week. Once I have it, I'll fill it in and check everything, and e-file both returns.

With e-filing and direct deposit of the refunds everything should be done by the end of this month or early in February.

I've got my car registration for the year, and paid the first half car insurance taken care of already. The property tax bill for the year hasn't shown up yet: should arrive by the end of the month. House insurance doesn't hit until June.

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Sat, Jan 17, 2009

Not Sinatra

Posted at 10:43 pm MST to Media

Actually, the title of tonight's pops concert by the Boulder Phil was "Simply Sinatra", but I like my version better. I was never a big Sinatra fan, but I grew up hearing his music and seeing him on TV, and this tribute concert wasn't quite as solid as the Beatles one the Phil did last January.

The vocalist, Steve Lippia, has a voice that strongly resembles Sinatra's and he mostly uses Sinatra's arrangements and phrasing (I think he uses phrasing from fairly late in Sinatra's career: a lot of longer notes were cut off rather than sustained).

But I kept having a nagging feeling that the tempo was very slightly too slow. It was oddly distracting. I kept feeling like someone needed to get out and push.

I think people forget how FAST the musical 'standards' of the mid-twentieth century were performed. Which is silly because it was all recorded. There was a rock cover of "Get out you're rocking the boat" a couple of years ago that drove me nuts because they slowed the song down so much compared to.the version performed in the movie of "Guys and Dolls". (There is something wrong when a rock cover is a lot slower than the original.)

Despite my minor quibbles with the performance, the concert made a nice change of pace: I've been struggling with reluctant downloads and software installs the past few days and needed the break in routine. Watched pots may not boil but at least they don't have progress indicators so that you can see they really are slowing down, for no apparent reason. Grr.

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Mon, Jan 12, 2009

Compiz

Posted at 2:45 pm MST to Technology

I have been having problems with the video on my laptop getting hung, generally when it is trying to run a screensaver. When it happened today I was able to ssh in from the server to look at what was going on. Killing the compiz.real process loosened things up enough that I was able to save my work and do a clean reboot.

There are some references in google to problems with compiz on KDE4 Kubuntu systems. I don't really do anything that needs fancy 3d compositing (which may be why it only died in screensavers: they are often designed to show off fancy video effects) so unless there are odd dependencies I should be able to eliminate the entire module.

I disabled desktop effects and removed compiz from the system completely, then logged out, restarted X, and logged back in. It doesn't seem to have broken anything. In fact, some of my desktop config settings that had been ignored now seem to be working as specified.

It remains to be seen whether this has really fixed the hangs. I may experiment with enabling the screensavers that seemed most prone to lock up. I may be travelling to a gig in Mobile soon, and it would be nice to have a stable system.

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Squall

Posted at 10:12 am MST to Weather

This is one of the days I'm glad to be working from home.

There were no forecasts of snow for today, but we got about an inch an hour for about 4 hours beginning at 4 am. The snow was fluffy enough and the wind was strong enough that the plows weren't ablle to deal with it well: it kept blowing back across the roads .

The morning rush hour traffic reports were amazingly bad.

We need the moisture badly, as shown by last week's wildfires. This has been a very, very dry winter along the Foothills, though the high country has been getting plenty of snow.

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Sat, Jan 10, 2009

Spanish Test

Posted at 10:01 pm MST to Miscellaneous

There is an online Spanish test.

Take The Spanish Test at Hello Quizzy.com

I got 85 %, but it uses pretty basic vocabulary. I took Spanish in high school 40 years ago, but I figured out a few of them etymologically.

Actually, I can still read some Spanish, but I can't understand my cleaning ladies at all when they talk to each other. Some of that may be dialectal, though. Local Hispanics are Mexican, but I grew up in the Northeast, where the Spanish is more Puerto Rican (And I had a Panamanian Spanish teacher for a few years.)

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Freezer Stash

Posted at 4:47 pm MST to Technology

I think I am going to hold off on ordering any meat. There was more left in the chest freezer than I had remembered. (I think I loaded everything from the upstairs freezer into the chest freezer before one of the times I got transferred out of town.)

I discarded stuff that I now know I am allergic to, and fruits and veggies that were clearly freezer burned. That leaves a lot of frozen pesto, a couple of canning jars with soup or stew in them, and a fair amount of meat. I'll need to thaw the pesto to salvage the canning jars it was packed in -- most of it was made with cows' milk cheeses.

Some of the meat may be freezer burned, but some of it may not be: most of it was purchased in bulk and better packed than supermarket meat. I've got a couple of stewing hens in there that may render adequate stock if I trim off the freezer burned wingtips. And the other meats may be salvageable for soups or stews after trimming off the freezer-burned bits, even if I decide against grilling or roasting it. I'll explore the meat packages over the next few months: it doesn't make sense to toss the meat without thawing and investigating it.

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Fri, Jan 09, 2009

MidWinter Market

Posted at 8:44 pm MST to Technology

It's now about halfway between the end of the 2008 farmers' markets (first week of November) and the beginning of the 2009 farmers' markets (first week of April). But I'm having a sort of farmers' market weekend.

While I was out running errands, I stopped at Nanette's farm to pick up some eggs and veggies. The chard and onions weren't really in sellable condition, even in the greenhouse, but I count as staff (and don't need a full-sized bunch of chard just for me) so Rowan was able to let me have some.

And when I stopped at Whole Foods I got some Haystack Mountain goat cheeses -- varieties I get at the market in the summer -- and some Sisters' Pantry chicken-basil dumplings.

I've got some Sisters' Pantry Vinaigrette in the fridge, so tomorrow I can have a brunch of dumplings, which are my favorite breakfast on market days.

And I've got chard and Egyptian Bunching Onions and eggs to make a chard frittata, which is my favorite after-market supper. (I haven't had a frittata since last spring before my allergies were diagnosed, but my experiment yesterday was very encouraging.)

And I don't need to spend 6 hours out in the cold selling veggies...

On Sunday I'm going to make a buffalo meatloaf with some of the horseradish packed and sold by the guys at the market who bought the horseradish from Nanette's farm.

Tomorrow I'm going to start cleaning out and defrosting my chest freezer. Next payday I'll order some buffalo meat from HighWire Ranch, another market vendor: they have a deal for 100 pounds of meat for $650: ground meat prices, but the meat you get includes steaks and roasts. They call it a "buffalo quarter", but I am sure they get more than 4 of them off one buffalo: their bulls were 1400 pounds, live weight at the age of 18 months.

A hundred pounds of meat will last me a long time, but in the current state of the economy, high quality food feels like a good investment.

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Thu, Jan 08, 2009

Experiment 1

Posted at 1:07 pm MST to Exercise

When I was at the conference in November I didn't think I was having allergic reactions to the eggs I ate. But that was before I figured out the delayed reaction effects -- the couching and swallowing problems are not really noticeable until a few hours after I eat the offending food.

I just made scrambled eggs (cooked in light olive oil) for lunch, and I'm going to be very careful not to challenge my system with anything else today.

Breakfast was cheerios and almond milk, which I have been having for months without problems.

I'm only drinking water today. No tea or juice.

The only other thing I ate for lunch was some plain bread I made yesterday evening. I had a slice in the late evening, and it did not cause a reaction within 12 hours, so if I react to lunch it will be the egg yolks.

I'm not sure what I will have for supper. Maybe a grilled salmon fillet and some steamed or sauteed veggies, with more fresh bread.

My diet is carb-heavy, very low-fat by American standards, and moderate protein, but I think my metabolism is weird. I ate very carefully for several years -- complex carbs and veggies and protein, and 'sensible' meals, and serious portion control -- and gained weight the whole time even when I was exercising daily. My weight stabilized when I switched back from wholewheat pasta to regular and from all whole grain bread to some white bread and some whole grain.

I'm stuck about 20 pounds above the point where my body usually wants to start exercising. I kept exercising above that weight on the way up --though less regularly -- until the surgery in 2005. Now I'm recovered from the surgery, mostly, but I can't seem to get the momentum or habit of exercise going at this weight. I'm going to try free weights again, to see if that will break things loose.

If not, I may look at Atkins and South Beach, to see if either of them is workable with my food allergies. my weight stayed stable or dropped slightly during the week when I was eating my buffalo roast, and before that when I was working on the turkey. Shifting my diet toward more protein might help the exercise, too:

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Wed, Jan 07, 2009

State Of ...

Posted at 11:15 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Bumper sticker I once saw: "Where are we going and what are we doing in this handbasket?"

Less than 2 weeks until the regime change in Washington ... and maybe there is a chance the entire global economy won't have melted down by the time the bozos in Congress produce the legislation to try to slow the collapse. I really hope they do something sensible about health care funding while they are at it. The current state of things really doesn't work for doctors or hospitals or patients or employers or just about anyone except the executives of insurance companies who want to make profits.

It's been windy on and off for days. Today was bad: 100 mph gusts, and there was a fire in north Boulder, so they were evacuating people and doing reverse 911s, and a stretch of Route 36 was closed north of town. You know it's bad when they start making radio announcements that no one should call 911 or the Sheriff's dispatch center in Boulder county except for major emergencies.

First payday of the new year. I've got my GNUCash files updated through the end of the year and reconciled. And I ordered this year's tax software. As soon as they finalize it and I get my W-2, I'll be able to file my taxes.

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Mon, Jan 05, 2009

New Teeth

Posted at 10:02 pm MST to Current Events

I inherited fairly bad teeth from my Mom's family. The original biting surfaces of my molars had lots of little branching valleys on top, instead of the few big ones that are normal. The biting surfaces I've had for years have been metal (7 molars) and fancier materials (1 molar). But all of my teeth have live roots-- it was just the top surfaces that went.

I'm supposed to get one of the gold crowns replaced soon. It was the last one that went in, and I think the dentist waited to long to replace the surface of the adjoining tooth, which is the one with the spaceage crown instead of gold.

Based on an article linked from Slashdot, it now looks like scientists are about a year from regrowing new living teeth-roots from tooth stem cells for people who have lost the real ones. They are predicting 5 to 10 years until they are able to grow teeth on demand to replace missing ones in adults.

I never knew my mother's parents when they had their own teeth. I only remember them with dentures.

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