The Powell Triangle

I Was Going To Write About...

2012-01-07T08:55:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, for the umpteenth time, I thought about writing up a blog post thanks to what I'd been doing.

It was to be titled "90 MPH Dog Poo" and discuss what happens when you take a string trimmer into a not quite completely cleaned up (despite your best efforts) dog run.

But I changed my mind.

You can all thank me now.

Have a nice day!

When A Well Pump Dies - Part I

2012-01-05T15:47:00.000-08:00

Apparently our well pump stopped working a few weeks back. It takes a while to notice this, though, at least for us. I have to note the water level in the storage tank dropping. Also, in this case, and elevated PG&E bill was a giveaway too, though I didn't know that at the time it arrived.

I called our preferred well guy and had him do some diagnosis. I had already verified that we had power getting to the top of the well and that the pump should have been running, but no water was coming out. He was able to duplicate my results and noted that the current flowing in the wires meant the pump was probably running. He bypassed the pump controller and the problem continued, so whatever the issue was it was in the well pump, 380 feet below ground. Oh joy.

Today he came back with his truck to pull the pump and find out what was going on. These pictures document that little voyage of discovery.

First, here's what the well head looked like before things got started:

The line on the right (with the gray box) is the electrical supply that drives the pump. The line in the middle going into the ground is the water discharge. That goes off to our storage tanks. The strange looking plastic pipe on the left is a home made sulfur discharge vent, since the old metal one corroded and goobered up the threads it was screwed into. The first 50 feet of the well is surrounded by concrete to keep ground water from contaminating the well. Most of that 50 feet has only a couple of inches around it, but the cap has a much wider pad to protect the well head from lawn mowers and the like.

And here we see what it looks like with the well seal opened up and the first couple of feet of pipe extracted:

The electrical was disconnected, the sulfur vent removed, and the union in the water line opened up. At this point all 380 feet of pipe are hanging from a cable on a truck designed for this purpose. It looks like this:

That picture was taken a bit later. You can see a 20' length of schedule 80 PVC pipe hanging from the rig. The pipes are threaded and attached with brass couplings. An odd looking device is used to clamp the pipe in place while the section above is disconnected and set aside. Here's a closer view of that:

The metal thing sitting crosswise at the bottom is the above mentioned clamp. The technician is using the lift to pull the pipe up. His assistant is pulling the electrical wires and a safety rope off to the side to keep them out of the way. (Note that those wires and rope are taped to the pipe at regular intervals, so the tape has to be cut and removed as each pipe is pulled up too.) Also as the pipe comes up the technician wipes the accumulated slime off of it. And in our case there is a lot of that slime. Some combination of iron and sulfur bacteria make for a nasty thick layer of gunk all over everything. (And there will be a better picture of that later.)

As the end of the 19th section of pipe comes out of the ground, we see the well pump emerge, and just before that, a surprise:

OK... this may not look like much to the uninitiated but that's bad. Most of the PVC pipe above the pump is 1" diameter. The last two sections are 1.25" for some technical reason, but they do NOT bow out like that. That's bad. That's very bad.

What it means is that sometime a month or more ago the pump ran, pumped all the water out of the well, but then did not turn off. As it kept running it got hot, since water is the usual coolant for the motor. As the pump got hot it heated the pipe above the pump got too, and the plastic softened. Eventually it got so hot - despite there being water inside the pipe - that a hole opened up in the pipe and the water drained out.

So that bowed out area just above the pump is a bad thing. It means that something is wrong with the pump, the pump controller, or both. Now, as it happens, we had a long brownout or two just over a month ago during a big wind storm. For one of them I was home and awake and ran around turning off breakers, though I honestly don't remember if I got the breaker for the well pump or not. I should have, but who knows. The other brownout, if it affected us, hit while I was asleep, or so I gather from a neighbor. The first was something like 20 minutes long and I have no idea about the other, but either might have caused a fault that could result in this sort of behavior.

Or there might be other causes. Time will tell.

Here's a picture of the entire well pump sitting on the pad around the well:

The top half is the impeller, the bottom half is the motor. Water enters through the grid in the middle and we can see that isn't too blocked up.

Here's a closer view of the slime from the well and the bottom of the pump. I hope you haven't eaten recently:

Yeah. Sorry about that.

And finally, here's the pipe from the well laid out ready to go back in once the problem is fully diagnosed:

The bulge in the last pipe is pretty obvious there. The large, black, football shaped thing two pipes over from the left is a torque arrestor, to keep the pipes from twisting and banging around when the motor kicks in. It fits just inside the six inch plastic pipe that lines the well.

My well guy took the pump and controller off with him today. He will clean up the pump, bench test it all, and find the problem. If the controller is bad he will replace it. In addition - since this is the second time we've seen that pipe bulge up due to a hot pump - he may replace the last 20' section of PVC with stainless steel, to reduce the chances of that happening again. (Of course, if it does happen the stainless will conduct heat better, and it might just move the problem, or it might cause the pump to burn out once it has run too long.)

Hopefully tomorrow he will be able to tell me exactly what failed, and we can start looking to avoid the root cause of the problem. That may mean trying to find some way to protect our entire home from brownouts. We already have a whole house surge protector installed, but nothing keeps a brownout from crippling us.

More when we know it. Whee.

CSA 48 - County Fire Funding Around My Home

2011-12-13T20:05:00.000-08:00

Today I attended a Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors Meeting. What fun. Not.

I did so to keep tabs on an issue near and dear to my heart... maintaining fire and EMS response service in my area during the non-fire season. I've mentioned that on Facebook and in a couple of other places, and people were curious, so I wrote up my thoughts on the meeting this evening and am posting them here.

I don't claim this is complete, correct, or consistent. It's the best I could do given the situation, the contents of the meeting, and my temperament. I hope it isn't entirely wrong, and I will try to correct it somehow if I find I am wrong about things.

With that disclaimer...

Board Of Supervisors Meeting - Partial Writeup - Dec 13, 2011
A somewhat inflammatory and editorialized document by Jeff Powell.
These are my impressions and opinions. Your mileage may vary.
Remember, though, that government is like making sausage, in a very big and slow factory.

8:15 am: park car in 3 hour free parking lot across the river from the county building.

In the meeting room I pick up a copy of the official agenda, which lists our item as #56. Seems like it will be forever before we discuss funding for County Fire, but that doesn't do justice to what really happened. In any case, for reference, here is what we were at the meeting to discuss, word-for-word from the agenda:

56. Consider report on the state budge and associated impacts on the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) and further discussion of County Fire Service Area 48 (CSA 48) service delivery options for changing the contracted level of service with CAL FIRE commencing in the fiscal year 2013-2014, and taking related actions.

All clear now? Hope so. But I have NO idea what that really means.

8:30 am: meeting begins.

A sea of red shirted citizens (numbering 50 or so) concerned about CSA 48 is present, but that doesn't matter yet. First we get some technical preliminaries followed by open comments from the public about things not on the agenda. During the preliminaries at least one agenda item related to PG&E smart meters was removed from the "consent agenda" (things that are just "accepted" but not commented upon by the board or the public as far as I can tell) and moved to the "regular agenda", which allows for comment by anyone that can fog a mirror when they exhale. Despite that, quite a few members of the public wanted to discuss smart meter related issues during the comment period allotted to things not on the agenda, and wasted a lot of time as a result. In addition concerns were raised about Occupy Santa Cruz and the county's recent moves towards it, and there were many requests for a moratorium on foreclosures in the county. Oh, and some comments about a program that helped people working for the county make better choices about food and lifestyle.

Then we had 15 minutes or so of thanking a retiring county employee.

Then the Board of Supervisors recessed to run a second meeting - one related Zone 5 of the Santa Cruz Flood and Water Conservation district to happen. No, really... they stopped one meeting and changed it to another one, just like that. The BOS members are also members of this new group along with a few others, but there wasn't much happening here. Done in 15 minutes.

10:30 am, give or take: morning break. During this time I go move my car since it is clear that 11:15 is going to come and go before we're done. I put it in the 2 hour lot in front of the county building. After all, we should be done by 12:30, right? (Hint: not.)

10:45 am-ish: They start up again and immediately recess for a different flood control meeting: this one about zone 7 instead of zone 5. This one was much more contentious and went on for nearly an hour. However, in the end, I think nothing of great import happened - everything they voted on passed unanimously - and the project they want to do (to improve flood control down near Watsonville) wasn't impeded or slowed down as far as I can tell.

Editorial comment: by this point there are quite a few people I think should never be allowed to speak in public, and I am pondering how to make choking some of those people to death legal. But I digress.

It is important to note, however, that for over 3 hours the group of people that had come to speak and hear about the County Fire issue is dwindling. People have - gasp! - lives and jobs and commitments. Three hours after the meeting started we hadn't gotten to our issue despite being told we'd be "first" by someone. Go figure.

Approximately 11:45 am now, and we finally get to the County Fire related issue. Surprisingly I have not gnawed off any of my own limbs in a desperate attempt to keep myself awake.

Chief Ferriera and someone else (didn't catch her name) made some initial comments about the situation. As far as I can remember these were the high points (for me) of the discussion that ensued:

County fire will run out of money sometime around the summer of 2013 - 18 months or so from now.
Funding for County Fire comes from two primary sources, both tied to home values: 1.x million per year from property taxes directly; 2.x million per year from CSA 48 tax that is also paid via the property tax bill. I don't have exact numbers, sadly.
The county has done polling and (surprise, surprise!) when they ask people something like "Are you willing to pay more for the fire service you already get?" the answer has only 60% of people saying yes, and we'd need 66% to pass a tax increase. Argh! I'm honestly surprised support is that high. Clearly a lot of education is needed, and not just of the voters. How about a poll question like: "The dedicated fund that pays for your County Fire service is running out of money and it will shut down completely during the off season in the fall of 2013 as a result. Would you support an increase in a dedicated tax or fee to keep it running instead of shutting down? And note that if you don't have fire service you probably can't sell your home and its value will be less than that of dog spit." Oddly I suspect that support would be a bit higher than just 60% if the question is phrased properly. I apologize if I have misrepresented the polling work, but in reality polling is just about as close to a black art as you are going to find, and the answers you get are inescapably related to the exact wording of the question you ask.
Governor Jerry Brown is looking to impose an additional fee on home owners in SRA (state responsibility area) land of $180 per year to make up other lost funding sources. There may be a $30 reduction in that fee for those who are covered by another fire protection district like CSA 48. That fee, however, would probably not come back to County Fire in any way to support their activities as far as I can tell. Many of those living in CSA 48 will wind up paying that fee to the state, making many wonder about the public's willingness to stomach a tax increase in addition to that fee.
There are a few ways to save some money other than shutting down county fire entirely. As with everything (except the agenda itself) I have nothing in writing, so I am doing my best from memory to remember these. They might move some people around from administrative jobs to fire fighting roles. They might offload the program to name driveways and renumber houses to some other department. They might shut down a single station. They might shut down all of County Fire. Remember, this is off-season only... during the summer the state picks up the tab for the entire thing. (Editorial comment: the program to name driveways and renumber houses is the least liked - and possibly most stupid - program in existence. Why it still gets any funding is beyond me entirely. It should have been killed years ago. Technically it should never have been started.)
During discussion Chief Ferriera says something about costs vs. income. This was off the cuff, and so I wouldn't hold his feet to the fire, but what he indicated was that costs (for personnel and so on) have gone up about 3% over the last 3 years, but home values have gone down substantially during that same period thanks to the economy and housing crisis, dropping revenues. (I can confirm that last from deep, personal, and costly experience.) That may explain some or all of the reason that CSA 48 funds haven't kept up with the expenses of County Fire, though I would like a real accounting of that, and I may ask John Leopold for that information separately. We'll need it to justify any tax or fee increase to homeowners eventually in any case.
There was no discussion of how (or if) the volunteer fire department would continue to operate with Cal Fire shut down.

Then the public was then allowed to speak. I think those that were still left present, alive, and in possession of their full faculties made comments were reasonable and on point, suggesting to the supervisors that shutting down County Fire during the off season was not something we wanted to see. (I, personally, expressed the hope that we could actually improve our situation and get 4 fire fighters back on each engine in the off season, not just 3. Then I fled to purchase a parking pass to avoid a ticket and returned to the meeting only when that was done.) On my return I heard one nearly incoherent comment about not building cell phone antennas on top of fire stations, but I don't think that person was with "us" per-se. The last comment was from Alex Leman. He thanked those of us that were still there - and those that had arrived earlier but had to leave - and indicated that we all knew there was a long road ahead. He also provided an order on some of the proposed cost saving measures from the FDAC (Fire Department Advisory Committee?).

With the public comments ended the supervisors made more comments themselves. John Leopold thanked us for showing up en-mass and indicated he would help champion the cause. Supervisor Pirie took pains to point out where the public comments were wrong or misleading in various ways, but she did also ask someone else (name unknown to me) to discuss where county funds come from and go to. That was interesting, at least to me. Summarizing that and a few other things that were said leads to this:

Proposition 13 froze property tax revenues where they were when it was passed. So Santa Cruz County gets $0.13 per dollar of property taxes collected put into its general fund. Santa Clara county, by contrast, gets over $0.60 per dollar collected put into its general fund. This sort of inequity has never been addressed, and years later is causing all kinds of pain.
Of the $400 million or so dollars that Santa Cruz County spends per year, something like 90% comes with strings, requiring it to be spent in certain ways. Thus the supervisors are left with 10% or less that they supposedly control.
Of that 10%, though, there are all kinds of mandated spending that has to happen, which means there is substantially less flexibility in how they can spend money in general.
In short, there isn't enough money in the general fund - or anywhere else the county supervisors can get at - to "fix" this funding problem for County Fire. We have to pay for this ourselves, somehow, and to do that we're going to have to pass a tax measure of some sort in the next 18 months.

Then we came the actual voting. On the original agenda item. That blob of text up top that didn't mean anything I could understand.

With one change - asking Chief Ferriera and/or others to tell the state folks that the County of Santa Cruz needs some of that $150/$180 annual fee back somehow, or at least mention the possibility - the supervisors voted "aye" on the agenda item.

I honestly don't know what that means. As I say, the agenda item almost isn't actually written in English, and I am not at all sure what was accomplished today in any formal sense.

Less formally, though, I think the supervisors saw a lot of people from the Loma Prieta area show up on their door step and say "this sucks". How (or if) that will translate into fixes and plans over the longer term I don't know. We will, however, have to do this again and again and again. We'll have to continue to show up at these meetings and telling them that shutting County Fire down during the off season is not an option.

We will also have to campaign for whatever tax or fee finally comes out of this. We'll have to lobby our friends and neighbors over this issue, trying to get 66% of those that live in the CSA 48 area to vote yes and pay a small tax instead of paying huge fire insurance premiums and finding our houses worth next to nothing.

I hope you're all ready for more work. It's coming, whether you want it to or not.

Dumber than a box of rocks...

2011-11-20T09:40:00.001-08:00

Yes, I am. Really.

In this post I discussed some surprising rainfall numbers. Turns out, though, I totally misread the official rain gauge. It seems that 0.20" and 0.02" are very different numbers. Go figure.

sigh

So... overall, this means that things are more-or-less normal with the gauges. The evaporation issue is still real, and the butterfly gauge still reads a lot more than the others.

I will go hide now. Well, once I get a disclaimer on that original post. The spreadsheet has been updated to reflect reality.

Unexpected Rainfall Numbers

2011-11-19T10:16:00.001-08:00

UPDATE ON 11/20/11: this post contains an error of vast and troubling proportion: 0.20" is not the same as 0.02". Yours truly apologizes and retracts it here.

We had something that might have been called rain yesterday. It was very tiny drops, off and on, for hours. My wife might have called it "measurable fog." It was still going after dark so I left reading the gauges for this morning. The results, though, are a surprise:

The "official" gauge - the one I trust the most so far - read 0.20". That seemed to make sense to me on the level of gut feel. Everything was wet for some time yesterday.
The old yellow, weather.com, and wedge gauges, though, were all either empty or showed just a trace. Nothing measurable in any of them.
The butterfly gauge - which usually reads at least twice what the others claim - contained just 0.10".

How to explain that?

Well, my best guess is that we had plenty of evaporation overnight. Things were dryish this morning, which means the water went somewhere. And the three gauges that had only a trace also have the largest openings, making it easy for evaporating water to escape.

The butterfly gauge had more in it earlier in the day, yesterday, than 0.10". I noted it in the afternoon when I picked up the mail, but I wasn't taking readings as it was still raining at the time. So it must have evaporated out of there. No one emptied it, I know that.

The official gauge is interesting. Because it is a small cylinder enclosed in (and protected by) a larger cylinder, and since there is a funnel covering most of the interior cylinder and all of the outer cylinder, I suspect evaporation is slower. It's a pretty small hole for the water to evaporate out of in any case, so while it can happen, it takes more time.

In short, though it seems counter intuitive, I think the official gauge wins again, and that it is design flaws in all the others that made them read too low this time around.

Not what I anticipated - particularly with the butterfly gauge - but it makes sense.

The spreadsheet has been updated with the new numbers.

Rain Data Now Available

2011-11-16T13:00:00.001-08:00

So... just because a few may be interested, I have added a link to get a PDF version of the current rain totals for my home to the right hand column of this blog. I keep the data in google docs and Google claims it gets updated within five minutes of any of my changes to the underlying spreadsheet.

This way you don't have to ask if you care. Just go to http://powelltriangle.blogspot.com/ and click on the link. You can see how the various gauges compare and what the total rainfall for the season is so far. Interesting, eh?

That link, by the way, is also right here.

I should also link to the two earlier posts about this silliness:

Those posts document what I am doing and why. Necessary background material if you are going to understand this particular oddity of my behavior.

Rain Gauges - actual data from actual rain

2011-11-12T10:39:00.001-08:00

As per the earlier post about rain gauges we are testing several to see how they compare. While this isn't a scientific test, it is fun, and some people even expressed interest in it. We had some rain yesterday, so I took pictures of the gauges this morning as I read them, and figured I'd write that up. In summary, and in order of apparent accuracy, the gauges read:

0.33" - official gauge
0.32" - wedge shaped gauge
0.3" - old yellow gauge
0.3" - weather.com gauge
0.8" - butterfly gauge

Below are the pictures of each one with some comments.

The "official" gauge, which I keep wanting to (incorrectly) call the NOAA gauge:

What you see here is the easiest gauge of all to read if the total amount of rain is less than one inch. I didn't even remove it from the mounting bracket or pull out the central tube. All I did was wipe the outside of the big cylinder to get rid of the condensation, point the camera, and click. 0.33" is pretty simple to read, don't you think?

Note the bird dropping in the bottom of the tube. That might add a tiny bit too much to the total, but much less than the accuracy of 0.01", so I ignored it. The funnel has a diameter of three or four inches, so stuff like this will fall in from time to time.

Also note that the scale on the central tube is simple and linear. Very easy to read, and the meniscus is easy to see, even through the outer tube.

The only problem with this gauge is what happens when you have more than one inch of rainfall. It overflows into the outer tube and you have to pour it into the central tube in portions to get the total amount. Accuracy is still good, but convenience is not. Then again, it can measure up to 12 inches of rain in one shot that way, which is better than anything else I've found so far.

The wedge gauge:

This is the bottom of the wedge shaped gauge. I'm not quite holding it vertically in the picture, but it claims 0.32" of rain when held properly.

Looks a bit hard to read, don't you think? It is, for a few reasons.

First, the embossed numbers are pretty small. If you need reading glasses in general, you will need them to read this gauge. Not so nice if it's still raining when you're trying to read it.

Second, the embossing isn't all that pronounced. Getting it to show in the picture was tough. (You can click on the picture to see the full sized view, which helps, but it still isn't easy to read.)

Third, there is no paint on the embossing. that would make this a lot easier to read, but also add to the manufacturing costs.

Finally, and most critically in my opinion, the scale on this gauge is not linear. Since it is wedge shaped there are places where the embossed numbers change from what you might expect.

Here's the same picture that I have hand edited in an image editor to make the English scale more obvious.

Note the numbers getting closer together as you head up the gauge. Also note that we go from increments of 0.05" to 0.1" after the 0.2" mark. And there are other places where similar changes happen farther up the gauge.

Reading this one isn't nearly as simple as it should be.

Accuracy is probably pretty good. The difference between 0.33" and 0.32" is pretty much in the noise range. Most if not all of this rain fell yesterday and in the evening, but the gauges sat out in the fog all night before they were read. If the wedge gauge collects less fog than the official gauge, it might read slightly less just for that reason, for example.

Anyway, some paint would sure help this one.

The Old Yellow gauge:

This is the 19 year old gauge we've been using all along. It's nice and simple, but as you can see it's a bit hard to read.

If you remember your chemistry class, though, you read the bottom of the meniscus, so that (when held vertically) is about 0.3" of rain.

The embossing is easier to read on this one than on the wedge, but still no paint.

And don't plan on reading this to anything more accurate than 0.05". Even that is a guess in most cases, since even the slightest tilt of your hand will move the meniscus around a fair bit.

The weather.com gauge:

This gauge has a strange combination of things that make me wonder about it.

The large numbers on the front (1, 2, etc) are painted and embossed, but useless for anything except to remember which inch you're "in" when reading the thing.

The lines on the sides are painted only - not embossed - which means that they will flake off and the gauge will be unreadable as soon as the sun does it in.

When held vertically - which I am not quite doing in the picture - the meniscus was right at 0.3". Like the yellow gauge, though, reading anything other than 0.05" increments isn't going to happen.

In all I am not sure why weather.com put their name on this thing. I suspect a season or two and it will be unreadable, and I wonder about its accuracy. Determining that will require a storm that gives us 3 or 4 inches of rain, so the linearity of the scale and the accuracy of the painted lines can be compared with the official and wedge gauges.

The butterfly gauge:

This is the last - and least accurate - gauge. Though it is hard to tell from the image that tube is held just about vertically, and yes it really claims we got 0.8" of rain, where the others all said 0.3" - 0.33".

Like the weather.com gauge, the marks on the tube are only painted on, not embossed. That, however, is because the tube is made of glass, not plastic. Kind hard to emboss glass like this on the cheap.

The paint will, no doubt, come off with enough UV exposure, so it would probably be useless in a couple of seasons, even it it wasn't wildly inaccurate, which makes it effectively useless now.

But why is it inaccurate? Simple... look at the top of the tube, which is what it is hung from in that brass holder:

See that lip? Much of the rain that lands on it runs into the gauge, but the scale is calibrated only for the inner diameter of the tube. The net result is that the gauge collects a lot more water than it should given the scale, and the numbers are way off.

And since that lip is curved, I suspect wind has interesting affects too. If there is no wind as the rain falls it is possible that more of the water that hits the lip winds up in the tube. if there is wind, though, some may blow off the lip and result in a different - though still inaccurate - reading. This is speculation on my part, but so far this gauge doesn't consistently read as a multiple of any other gauge, so there is something odd going on.

Anyway, good rain gauges have a knife-like edge at the top to clearly define the collection area, not a hazy, rounded boundary like this one.

I will keep this gauge in the set and collecting data from it though I know it is useless for real record keeping. It is actually kind of fun to see just how far off it can be. More than 2X in this rain, obviously, but the range of differences is fascinating to a nerd like me.

There you have it... some information on the various gauges so far. Interesting to me, at least. Hopefully you too.

A Man With One Watch...

2011-11-07T14:34:00.000-08:00

How many rain gauges does one person need?

Good question, eh? We are currently comparing five. Yes, really.

Why?

Well... The amount of rain we get during the rainy season matters to us, since it helps us anticipate how much water we can expect our well to produce during the following Summer and Fall.

In the picture above you can see the yellow plastic one that we have been using for about 19 years. It is starting to degrade due to constant UV exposure over the years, so it will only last so much longer. In addition, it's only good to 5" rain before it overflows. Believe it or not we get storm systems that dump more than that on us in 24 or 48 hours regularly, and that makes it inconvenient to deal with on occasion.

My wife bought the 8" rain gauge (with the decorative butterfly) on the right some time back in the hopes that it would give us a better reading on things, but the first few rains it saw - a couple last season and the first two this season - caused us to suspect it is wildly inaccurate. It regularly read twice what the yellow gauge showed, which caused me to start researching these things.

Eventually I settled on the other three gauges:

The one in the middle is a wedge shape, capable of measuring 6" of rain, with (apparently) high accuracy. However, accuracy drops as the amount of rain being measured in one shot goes up.

The 6" gauge with bronze numbers is from weather.com, and while it doesn't look any more accurate than the old yellow gauge, the actual accuracy remains to be seen.

And finally the large cylinder on the left is the official gauge that every weather reporting station in the country uses. It is capable of measuring 12" of rain, snow, or hail with (apparent) great accuracy, but it is harder to read if the total amount is over 1". A funnel directs rainfall into an interior cylinder, which overflows into the outer cylinder. The inner cylinder measures amounts up to 1" - easy to read down to 0.01" amounts - but you have to pour out the inner cylinder after reading it, pour the overflow into it, read, add to the total, and repeat until the outer cylinder is empty. So it is accurate, but not simple to use in a bigger storm.

Anyway, none of these is especially expensive, so I am testing them all, right next to each other, until I know which one(s) we like the most. Then I will get rid of the others and reduce the set.

Yes, I am insane. Yes, I am a data nut. But the only way to know what is going on is to have data, and unless all five gauges are wildly off, I will know in another few weeks which ones I like and why. I'll provide a detailed report - with numbers - and links to suppliers at that time.

Living With A Chromebook, Part 3

2011-09-25T16:37:00.000-07:00

My other posts about the Chromebook are available here:

This post contains some additional notes on my Chromebook experience and isn't quite as upbeat as the others, I am sad to say.

Yes, I am still using my Chromebook heavily, but some flaws are more obvious to me now.

The single biggest problem for me is the feature that make the Chromebook more useful than any tablet: the keyboard. I continue to get key bounce - duplicate letters, numbers, or symbols entered when I am sure I typed only one. I cannot figure out the cause of this problem, and I am perpetually backspacing to delete the second appearance of whatever character it happened to this time.

Additionally there are issues with the trackpad. I've mentioned before that the button built into the trackpad is hard to click, so I turned on tap-to-click, which helps usability overall. That setting, however, may be the source of another problem, or it may just be my own sloppiness, but I regularly find myself staring at a screen in which large chunks of just entered text have gone away. Perhaps one or both of my thumbs (or wrists) hit the track pad as I was typing, but whatever I did, suddenly one or more paragraphs of text just vanish, as if I had selected an area and then replaced it with my continued typing. Except I didn't do that, at least not deliberately.

On top of all that, there is the keyboard feel itself. The Samsung Chromebooks have a keyboard similar to the newer Apple keyboards, with flat keys and limited key travel. Now that I have lived on it for a couple of months I know that it is not an acceptable substitute for a "real" keyboard, at least for me. The action is wrong, the feedback is poor, and my typing is worse on it than on a normal keyboard.

Yes, I could plug any USB keyboard into the Chromebook, but that reduces portability, and would require a mouse as well. The combination would probably eliminate the issues mentioned above, but then I might as well use my desktop machine, which, in fact, I find myself doing when I have substantial text to type.

The combination of those issues gets old. Perhaps some other Chromebook design will have a different keyboard and trackpad combination that works better, but I cannot claim to be happy with what Samsung built into my machine.

Another physical issue is display size. I need a bigger screen when I am doing anything complicated, and that just isn't an option with a Chromebook. Then again I think I would have the same problem with any laptop, so we can chalk that one up as my own issue, not one specific to the machine.

One place I can point to the machine and/or OS as having a real issue is in powering down. The Chromebook has a very nice feature that just lets you shut the cover to turn it off, and open the cover to restart it, right where you were. It's a sleep mode, effectively, and while it isn't new (many laptops have done it for years in other operating systems) it is very much faster than any other system I have used in this way. But sometimes - maybe 1 out of 20 - when I close the cover it doesn't shut down. Instead it continues to run as if nothing happened, and reopening doesn't prompt for a password, since it missed the shutdown signal entirely. Very odd.

A work around is to actually power down, which is still quick, though not as quick as shutting the cover. The boot is fast - another good Chromebook feature - but still not as quick as the restart, so while it will shut down this way it isn't as nice in all cases.

I continue to see some memory leaks, I think, and so I reboot once a week or so, at a minimum. Whether that helps or not is less than clear to me.

The machine also slows down at times that make no sense to me. My Internet connection isn't exactly speedy, so why is it that sometimes I cannot scroll a web page in one tab - possibly for two or three seconds - while the only other open tab is buffering a paused YouTube video? It's like interrupts for incoming network traffic - or perhaps memory allocation to buffer the incoming data - are heavy enough to slow the entire system way down. I can see this when loading non-video pages as well, but in those cases the pages I am loading tend to be large and complex, with lots of items for Chrome to fetch. These slowdowns aren't crippling, but they do cause irritation. I would be curious to know if others are seeing them, or if they are an artifact of my slow network connection in some way.

Finally, I think Google needs to add at least a few visual indicators to the system. I'd like a way to know if I am getting network traffic or not, how busy the CPU is, and whether or not a reboot is required to get updates to Chrome OS installed and running. As things stand there are no blinking lights or system monitors available, which means I don't have the feedback I need to know where problems are, or if a reboot would be a good idea. I can't even tell if the system is in the middle of downloading an OS update when I shut down. Not good design.

Despite the above issues I still use the Chromebook for most of my online activities. I don't have many apps installed, but that's my usage pattern. Overall it is quiet and adequately fast, and certainly good enough for handling email, social networking, blog reading, and the like. That's where most home users spend their time, and I think it will work well for that audience, but there are still some rough edges and I'd really like to see Google address them.

Up on the roof

2011-08-28T17:47:00.000-07:00

When we had our house painted - last January, for reasons I won't go into here - we had all the seams in the vertical siding caulked up. (Vertical siding is a PITA. Yet another lesson learned only after buying a house with that particular "feature". But I digress.... ) When the spring came, though, and the siding dried back out, a lot of the seams popped open, which looked ugly and was going to let water into places I didn't want it. So a major project to complete before the rains return is to recaulk and repaint all the seams that opened up.

Most of that effort involves only paint, a brush, and a ladder of one sort or another, but there is one wall over a fairly steeply pitched roof which took a bit more care.

That roof is shingled with Hardishake (another product that sounds a lot better than it actually works out to be, sadly, and another lesson learned only after buying a house using it, but again I digress. Oh, and the picture shows day two of the effort. I have already been up there to recaulk the seams, but yet again I digress.) Hardishake is slippery and fragile, so climbing on that slope without safety gear seemed like a bad idea. The above picture shows the roof with that gear in place. Here's what it looked like to my wife, from the ground, while I was working up there:

That's about a 10 foot fall off the roof onto concrete - if it happens - and I really wanted to avoid that particular fate. Alas I am not a professional climber of any kind and my gear is pretty limited. I have two good - but not locking - carabiners, some cheap rope, some nylon webbing, and I bought a climbing harness specifically for this job. That's it.

The rest of this writeup is for Chief Alex, who wanted to see pictures of what inanity I was doing to keep myself from being his next 911 response. The rest of you may wander off or read on as you see fit now that you've seen the above pictures.

First, I anchored my safety rig to the house, around a half inch threaded rod that is exposed and goes through multiple redwood beams before being held in with nuts & washers. Two independent webbing anchors (orange and yellow in the picture below) are tied with doubled webbing on either side of the beam. Each terminates in a loop tied with something similar to, but not actually, a figure 8 knot and several safety knots. Through those two loops I tied in my safety ropes. I had only one, but it is 100' long, so I doubled it, and tied a figure 8 knot - the world's ugliest, I admit - with a loop that went through the loops in the webbing, and then a safety not or two and then tape. Here's the resulting mess:

The webbing anchors look like this up close:

It's not obvious - our house is an architectural oddity - but the beam and threaded rod seen above are about eight feet above a flat roof, so I can easily get there to do the setup. Then the lines go up and over onto the roof you cannot see from those pictures, and trail down on the shingled side as seen in the first picture above. A pad is put over the corner of the roof just above the beam to protect the ropes. Next I put on my climbing harness and clipped in like this:

Note that each rope is paired, and that each pair ends in a figure 8 knot with a loop and a safety knot. The white and green tape seen above was for me to track which was which if needed, and each loop is really a pair of loops, so it's all redundant. The carabiners clip each of the loops to the harness independently.

The goal was that for nearly all the time I was working any one thing could fail and nothing bad would happen. If I lost a webbing anchor, I had a spare. If I lost a single rope, it was doubled to the harness. If I lost both ropes in a pair, I had a spare pair to catch me.

As the second picture shows, the risk was that I could slip, fall, and slide off the roof. What I needed was something to stop my slide if that happened, rather than catch my full weight on a vertical drop. The rig I arranged managed to do exactly that, and gave me an extra bit of leverage to move around on the roof with.

A challenge was that I had 15 feet of wall I am painting, and I had to move up or down the length of the wall as I worked on it. I managed that with the dual, paired lines. When needed I could move uphill a bit, unclip one of the lines, tie a temporary knot with a loop in it, and clip back in on that loop as well as the end loop. That let me keep the rope short so that if I fell I would only slide a foot or two before stopping. And, of course, I could work the other way, starting at the top with two shorter, temporary attachment points, work, then lengthen the ropes one at a time, always being clipped in to one or the other while doing so, then moving down the roof and working some more.

The biggest risk - I think - is that I was using non-locking carabiners, and that when I unclipped from one line to reset the length I was left on a single carabiner. At all other times I think everything was at least doubled up. Well, I suppose the harness itself counts as a single point of failure, but it's built to take some strain.

Anyway, the work on the sloped roof is done now except for putting a ladder up to sweep the debris down with a broom. No more walking on fragile shingles. I already had to glue a bunch back together as a result of this excursion and numerous others that have been done by painters, roofers, Internet connection installers, and exterminators over the years.

Thanks to Chief Alex for his training when I was part of the VFD - even if I only remember a fraction of it now - so that I could setup a system that let me get this job done with confidence and some measure of safety. He would have done it very differently, I know, but given what I had to work with I think I did OK.

Lots more projects remain to be done before the rains get here, but I don't think anything will require this sort of rig again.

On Passwords

2011-08-22T14:07:00.000-07:00

Multiple people have recently asked for information about how to create, use, and protect passwords. We all have them, but - oddly - no one teaches us anything useful about them. Some of us figure these things out, but most people never do. And if you don't think about it, it is very easy to get into real trouble.

My goal is to help you avoid having your accounts hacked and your identity stolen. There is a lot of information here, I know, but the topic is important. Please read on.

First, the obligatory disclaimer: I am not a security expert, and would never claim to be one, though I have spent enough time in high tech to be able to discuss this issue in some depth. Hopefully I can make it clearer to you, but the subject is much deeper than even I know. If you are interested there is a lot more to learn. It's also important to note that even if you follow all of the best practices you can still have a password stolen or cracked. Sorry, but that's the truth.

Please consider this entire piece my opinion only, and note that your mileage may vary.

Begin At The Beginning:

The first problem with passwords is their very name: "password". Many people think a "password" has to be a word because that's what it says. Nope. And, in fact, a single word - any single word - is just about the least secure thing you can use for a password. To explain why, and eventually get to how to create and protect good passwords, I will cover the following things:

How Passwords Work - A short overview of how a simple password system actually works.
How Passwords Are Compromised - How the bad guys get them without much work, without even having to guess or decrypt them, and how to protect yourself from at least some of those issues.
How Passwords Are Cracked - How a password is actually figured out "the hard way".
How To Create Good Passwords - What makes one strong and another weak. How to create good ones reliably.
How To Manage Too Many Passwords - How do you remember 50 different passwords?
Other Thoughts on Passwords - Some other things to note in the world of passwords and security.
In Summary - A very quick recap.

Here we go...

How Passwords Work:

On any well designed system, passwords are stored in a text file or database table that contains your login name and an encrypted version of your password, among other things. Here's a made up example table with those two fields separated by a colon.

bob:7y+kj8hs
jeff:IY67kH_1
jeffa:9jHg=ih1
mary:khy8ue4_
susan:iop74rf3

Part of a password system involves some complicated program code to encrypt passwords. An encryption routine takes a string as input and returns a different string as output, with the intent that the output string cannot easily be associated with the input string. In the example, we can see that jeff's encrypted password is "IY67kH_1".

I won't bother with the math behind encryption, mostly because it is way beyond me. Suffice it to say that it is very, very complicated, and there are many ways it can be done. The goals, though, are easy to understand:

No one should be able to look at an encrypted string and find out what the original string was. Even with a super computer capable of doing math very quickly and knowing the code used for the encryption, the problem - going backwards from the encrypted string to the original password - should take hundreds of years. Incidentally, this is why you can't just get someone to look up and tell you your password on a well designed system. It's encrypted in such a way that no one can practically reverse it.
The encrypted output needs to be in some standard format. The simple example above has the output string limited to 8 characters, and allows both alphanumeric and a few special characters.

With that background, here's how a very simple password system works. First, the system looks in its table for the user name. If it doesn't find it, it emits an error of some kind (usually saying it's an "invalid user") and lets the user try again. If it finds the user, it takes the password that was entered, encrypts it, and compares the result with the encrypted password that user has in the table. If they match, the user is logged in. If they don't match, an error is emitted saying something like "bad user name or password", and the user gets to try again.

As an example, we'll use my made up login - "jeff" - and the corresponding made up (and very poor) password "obvious".

If I enter "julie" and "bad_password", I get "invalid user" because there is no user named "julie" in the password table. Note that the system didn't even both doing anything with the password I entered because there was no matching user.

If I enter "jeff" and "bad_password", I get an "invalid user or password" error message. The system isn't sure if I entered the wrong user name or the wrong password. (It is true that I entered a valid user name, but I might have entered the wrong one. Perhaps I meant to enter "jeffa" and didn't type the final 'a' in the user name.)

if I enter "jeff" and "obvious" the user name matches a valid name, and the password, once encrypted to "IY67kH_1" matches the entry in the table, so I am allowed into the system.

Note that you cannot enter the encrypted string as your password. If I enter "IY67kH_1" as my password when I log in, that string will be encrypted to something else, and the result won't match, so my login attempt will fail.

That's it, a very simplified version of how a password system works. There are many wrinkles, or course: how to create a new user and their password, how to change a password, and various ways to make passwords more secure, among others, but the core of the system is there. Your password gets encrypted into a string that can be safely stored in the system, and that string is compared with the encrypted version of the password you enter when you want to log in. Most importantly, no one can read or see your actual password.

How Passwords Are Compromised:

The first and biggest risk most of us suffer from is making our unencrypted passwords readily available to the bad guys. Hopefully a lot of this is just review, but the following are some of the common errors people make when dealing with passwords

We give our passwords to the wrong people.
We let others see us enter our passwords.
We write our passwords down.
Even worse, we send our passwords to others in email.
We use insecure computers where malware has been installed.
We respond to phishing attacks.
We enter our passwords into insecure systems or use insecure protocols to send our passwords to systems.
We use the same password for many systems.

These are all common sense things, but they turn out to be ways that passwords are regularly stolen by people who aren't above doing bad things with them. Note that none of these cases talk about what your password actually is. Though there are important issues related to password selection, the first thing you have to do is develop good "password hygiene".

The most important, and yet simplest rule of password management is never, ever, tell your password to someone you don't trust, 100%. Period. Can you count on that person to keep it a secret, and not let it out? Even accidentally? Probably not. Even for a friend or a spouse the chances of letting it slip are high, particularly given the above list of issues. The best way to protect yourself is to keep all your passwords private all the time.

This isn't always obvious, though. An example: someone calls from your phone company, claiming they are doing some system maintenance on your account and asking for the password you use to get into their online system. Do not give it to them. They should not need it. Ever. If for some reason you are inclined to believe them, hang up, call the company yourself, and ask someone in customer service about it. If you make the call - to the company's 800 number - and the new person you talk to says the request is legitimate - and they do need the password - it is safer. It's still stupid, but safer. After all, you are about to tell your password to another human, who could easily write it down and do bad things with it later. Any well designed system should never require a user to divulge a password to a human, particularly via some non-secure route, like over the phone.

Note that you cannot just ask the original caller for a phone number to verify things. They could give you a number for a collaborator who will tell you exactly what they want you to hear. Get the phone number for yourself - from the company web site, perhaps - and call that. Only when you initiate the call to a known good phone number and are told that the request is legitimate should you consider complying. And even then you should ask to speak to a manager and tell them that their systems are poorly designed and they should not be requiring their customers to give their passwords to strangers over the phone.

Assuming you are keeping your passwords to yourself, the next step is to avoid having others see you enter them.

When you go to the ATM you look over your shoulder before entering your PIN, right? That's the idea, but you have to think about it all the time. When you enter a password into your smart phone - even just to unlock it - while standing in the terminal at an airport, how many people just saw you enter that number? And if your phone is stolen 10 minutes later, they have access to everything on it, right? If you're in the library using a computer and someone watches you login, that account is compromised. Your boss watches over your shoulder as you login at work... compromised. And so on.

Those who are paranoid about these things might seem crazy. That ATM on the street in town is risky because someone standing at a window 3 floors up across the street with a pair of binoculars and a good digital camera can read the account number off your ATM card as you put it into the machine, and see your PIN as you enter it. Yes, really.

You have to be certain that when you enter your password - for any system - no one sees you do so. While that sounds simple, most people don't think about it much, and the results are all around us.

Next: do you write your passwords down? You might have dozens of them, for various sites at work and on the Internet. Can you remember them all? Of course not, so you write them down. And where is that paper with the passwords save? Under your keyboard? In the pencil drawer of your desk at work? Taped to your monitor? Any passwords that are written down are, by definition, already compromised. If you have to write them down, at least put them someplace no one can see through your windows or passing by your office door, and where they won't ever be looked for, even by a determined thief with time to kill. But, in truth, a written password is a compromised password, and you should never write them down if you can avoid it. There will be more on how to manage large numbers of passwords later on.

By extension, sometimes people or systems put passwords in email. The problems with that are much, much worse than just telling the recipient the password, or writing it down. Unless you do something special - which most people never figure out - email isn't encrypted, and it can be routed through many different computers between you and the recipient. It can be copied, left on disks along the way, and read by various people with access to those computers along the route. Any password in an email should be assumed to be compromised. If you encounter an online system that sends your password out in email, first change it immediately, then send the site a note complaining about it. Better yet, cancel your account with the site and tell them why you did so.

An exception to passwords in email is if you are resetting a forgotten password. The site may send you a new password in email in this case. When they do, login IMMEDIATELY and change that password to something new that was never in an email. There are limited options in a password recovery setting, and emailing out a new password - often one that will expire quickly or that can only be used once - is acceptable, but you must follow through and change it quickly to reduce the risk that someone will get into your account with that new password before you do.

Assuming you're careful about all of those risks, then you must consider the computers you are using.

Computer viruses, key loggers, and other malware are a significant threat, and probably account for the bulk of compromised passwords. These risks are more severe for any computer running Windows simply because there are so many of them in the world. Some argue that Windows itself has more security holes for various reasons, and so is inherently unsafe. My opinion is that was demonstrably true years ago, but it may be changing for the better lately. Still, if you want access to a lot of passwords you go where they are, right? That's Windows. Macs are starting to get attacked as well, though, so don't rest on your laurels if you're a Mac user. And other operating systems will eventually have the same problem if they don't already, so use caution.

As a rule, don't do anything critical on a public computer, or one whose status you don't know. Library computers are handy, but do you know they are up to date, virus scanned, and free of malware? Probably not, so don't do your banking there. Always exit and restart the web browser completely before using it on a public computer, and check to see that the operating system and anti-virus software are up to date as well. If you can't tell it is up to date, I wouldn't enter any passwords - or do anything personally identifiable - while using that computer.

On your own computers you should always keep the operating system up to date and install patches as they come out, since they fix vulnerabilities that can make your machine open to viruses, key loggers, and other malware.

A key logger is a program that runs in the background and stores all of your key strokes, sending them off to someone else when something interesting happens. If it sees a request from your web browser to a bank, stores the next 500 key strokes you enter along with the URL it saw, and sends it all to the bad guys, your bank account could be empty in the morning.

To avoid this, always run a good anti-virus program. These can help reduce the risk that you are compromised, though they cannot completely eliminate it. New viruses - ones not yet recognized by anti-virus software - are always popping up, so while they are a good defense, they are not perfect. Still, they are a requirement.

Keeping your software up to date is critical. Anyone still running IE6 or Windows XP is in serious jeopardy of having their identity stolen. Old versions of any browser or operating system have similar issues, though. If you are running Windows, consider running any browser other than Internet Explorer. For a long time IE was the most used browser out there, and therefore the biggest target. Security problems were often found in IE as a result of that market dominant role. There are security problems in FireFox, Chrome and Opera as well, but they are different, generally less commonly encountered, and less likely to be taken advantage of. Install one of those other browsers, keep it up to date, and use it for anything critical - like online banking - at least. In my opinion, IE has improved, but not enough that I would trust it yet.

Another layer of protection comes from practicing "safe software". That's an old term for being careful about how you handle data and move it between computers. If you get an attachment in an email, don't open or run it, even if it comes from someone you know. The sender might have an infected computer that sent you that email without his knowledge, and it could easily contain a virus. If it is important that you view or run it, save it to disk, scan it with your up to date anti-virus software, and only proceed if it is clean. (Some anti-virus software scans email attachments as they arrive, which is great, but caution is always best.) If you are given a disk or thumb drive, scan all files on it for viruses too, before running or opening any one of them, for the same reason. In fact, if you move a thumb drive or disk from a computer you don't trust to one you do, scan it for viruses before running or opening anything. There are viruses that travel via thumb drives, for example, and can hide on the drive without affecting the files on it.

This may seem like overkill, but the number of infected computers is huge, and the number of security holes in any operating system or program is high. You have to be as careful as possible to avoid infecting your computer with something that will give your passwords - and your identity - to someone else. As a bonus it helps avoid viruses that do damage to your computer and files, so it is good practice in any case.

And while we're talking about these things, be extra careful about email. Never "click through" an email to get to a website and login, even if you think it looks OK. This is particularly critical for banking related sites. The specific attack is called "phishing", and it is deceptively simple.

The bad guy sends you (and 10 million other people) an email that looks like it comes from your bank. The return address is your bank, all the usual graphics are there, and so on. You click on a link in the email and wind up at a web page that looks just like your bank's login page, so you enter your name and password. What happens next doesn't matter, though, because you've just given your login details to the bad guys. The email was a fake, and the web site didn't really belong to your bank. You can bet they will be getting into your account quickly, though, and taking all the money they can get from you. Or they might wait six months and hack you then, when you've totally forgotten about this incident.

To avoid this, do not click on links in an email, or at least don't login from pages your get to by clicking on links in email. Bring up a browser window and enter the URL for your bank manually, then login and do whatever the email said you need to. If you have any concerns about the validity of the email call the company in question on the phone - using a known number you got from someplace other than the email you're not sure of - and ask about it.

Sadly, there are other ways passwords are compromised, and some are harder for the average user to notice.

Some programs don't encrypt passwords when they go over the Internet. Such systems are nearly as bad as putting your password in an email. And if you use such a system on a wifi network you're totally hosed. Reading packets on a wired network is pretty simple, and snooping other users on an open wifi network isn't hard either. In short, know where your passwords are going, and be sure you are using HTTPS or other secure protocols to send them over the network. Your browser will show you a lock icon if it is sure the site you are connecting to is using HTTPS. If it isn't secure, be careful about entering your login and password.

Sadly, some sites use HTTP - an insecure protocol - for the login page, but use HTTPS to send the user name and password. Thus, the page you appear to enter the login data into isn't shown to be secure by your browser, but the connection made to send the data to the server actually is secure. I generally find these sites have a second login page that is fully delivered in HTTPS, and thus easier to recognize as secure. Look for a link labelled "login" or something similar on the non-secure main page and see what you find when you click on that. Complain to sites that don't obviously use HTTPS for their login page, so they will fix things to be more obviously secure.

Finally, in the realm of things that weaken your security, don't use the same password for multiple accounts. If you do, and it gets compromised, you have a major problem. If the login and password you used for your yahoo email account can get the bad guys into your bank, or the account you have to manage your airline rewards program, well, you brought the trouble upon yourself. Using different passwords is critical. Yes, it is a problem to manage and remember all those passwords, but it is a critical step to keep your data - and identity - secure.

Security of any type begins by keeping your important login information safe. How paranoid you want to be is up to you, but the risks described here have gotten people in trouble - in real life - for years. How many spam emails have you gotten from someone you know? The password for some email account they have was compromised - probably in a way described above - and was used to send that spam. It happens all the time, and sending spam is probably the least bad of the things that might happen as a result.

Even if you're careful about who you share your passwords with, the computers you work on, and so on, an account can still get stolen. At this point we're talking about passwords themselves and how they get cracked, which is a whole different kettle of fish.

How Passwords Get Cracked:

A cracked password is one that someone figures out in some technical way, possibly by reversing the encryption, or (more likely) by guessing likely passwords until they find one that works.

In general it isn't the NSA (or some similar foreign government agency with a zillion dollars and lots of time) who wants into your account. Instead it's some kid in the Ukraine who wants to empty your bank account, or some "friend" who wants to ruin your day. These people have no budget to speak of, and won't bother to wait 250 years for a computer program to reverse your password. So they go after the simple stuff and hope to get lucky. It turns out there are lots of simple things they can do to get into your accounts, and your choices can make things easier or harder for them.

Some of these methods won't look easy to you, but they are actually pretty simple. In many cases you can get programs to do these things for free - or very little money - in the darker corners of the Internet, and the good guys use very similar tools to check the security if networks, computers, and passwords all the time. Also note that some are used in combination, but for simplicity I describe them individually.

The first approach is to try obvious passwords. Many studies report that lots of people use really simple passwords, which means the hacker can try a few dozen passwords and often find a way in. Some examples of bad passwords include: "abcdef", "password", "qwerty", "12345678", and so on. It turns out that any simple thing for you to type or remember is just as simple for someone else to guess. In any given system a large percentage of accounts are vulnerable to this sort of attack. If 20% of gmail users have really obvious passwords, the only real problem is figuring out which of those gmail accounts the bad guys want to break into, right?

Another thing they can try is a dictionary attack. It is easy to get a list of words - a dictionary - and try them all. The bad guys try logging in with your user name and each word in the dictionary as the password until it works. The chances of success are high because so many people use real words as their passwords.   Near the top of this article I said that any single, real word is a weak password. Now you know why.   It can take a while to break in if they are logging in from a remote computer, but they don't do it by hand. Instead they use a computer program to do it. This kind of attack is disturbingly simple and effective.

There are tricks to make a dictionary style attack work faster. If the bad guy can get the list of user names and encrypted passwords, for example, then he can look for weak passwords much more quickly. An insider can get that data for him, a security bug might expose the data, or a poorly secured computer system might make the password table available to an earlier attack. Once they have the table, they simply encrypt an entire dictionary once and compare the results with all the encrypted passwords in the table. Any matches they find become hacked accounts because they know both the login name and the original password. I am simplifying a lot, but this does happen.

If someone wants to get into your account specifically, and not just any account on a system, they can try things related to you in particular. If they know your birthday or anniversary, the names of your spouse, children, and pets, the kind of car you drive, and things like that, those turn out to be likely passwords. Trying a bunch of them may get them into your account because so many people use things related to themselves as passwords. Also, many of those things are regularly used as answers to security questions, which are asked when you forget your password and want to reset it. More on that later, but if the bad guy can get the system he's hacking to reset your password to something new, he's gotten in (or kept you out), so keeping personally identifying information private is always a good idea.

If someone is really serious they might try calling you and claiming to be from the company whose site they are interested in, and ask you for your password directly, as part of some security check. If you fall for it, you might give them the password yourself. Or they might claim to be doing a survey and ask for the number of people who live with you, their genders and first names. Now they have additional passwords to try. They might call your friends and associates at work and ask questions about you, again leading to possible passwords. They could also call your system administrator at work, pretend to be you, and ask that the password be reset, at which time they can get into your computer because they are told (or even pick) the new password. This is called a social attack, and while it isn't common to do this to get into someone's Facebook account, it is often used to get into more important systems. Corporate or government espionage can happen this way, as can people trying to get data from the police or other organizations with information that isn't publicly available. Celebrities suffer these sorts of attacks as well.

To avoid most of these issues, the best defense is a good, strong, password, one that you've told no one else, that isn't associated with you in any way, and which is hard for a computer to figure out. Any particular system may impose limits on your password choices, but the basic ways in which you can create strong passwords are pretty simple.

How To Create Good Passwords:

The best passwords are hard for computer programs to guess or figure out, but easy for humans to remember. That leads to some obvious choices in password selection. The longer the string, the harder it will be for a computer to reverse the encryption process, for example, so longer passwords are better. Non-words are always better than using a single word, but multiple words is good, particularly if they are unrelated. Using special characters, numbers, and mixing case makes the password that much harder to guess - or reverse - too.

The system you are working with may impose limits, though, many of which are particularly stupid. Maximum length limits are a problem; older systems often limit passwords to 8 characters, for example. Some systems won't allow spaces or non-alphanumeric characters in passwords, or perhaps just a few special characters are possible. These sorts of systems are making your life less secure, so consider just how much you need to use them at all and avoid them if you can. Where you have to use them, though, you have to work within their rules.

If the system has no length or character limits of any significance, you can create long passwords by using multiple real words strung together: "zebra goldfish piano golf". While that is just four real words, all in lower case, that phrase of 25 characters is not in any dictionary, so it isn't subject to a dictionary attack, and it isn't associated with me in any way, so it cannot be guessed from my personal information. In addition, even though it uses only lower case letters, it's long enough that reversing the encryption on it will be very hard. This technique - stringing together a few normal words that you can easily remember - is a powerful one, and it is recommended if the system you are using supports it. Note that you should not use words related to the system in question, either; "password for yahoo mail" is a poor choice for your yahoo mail account.   Also note that the spaces are optional: "PeanutSystemFlagCthulhu" is a perfectly good password.

If the system you're using requires shorter passwords, the best technique I have encountered is to use the first letters of a phrase, often with some substitutions or case changes. For example, if I remember the phrase: "This is my password. It should be longer." I can use the first letters to create my password: "TimpIsbl". If I want to I can substitute something like a number 1 for an i, and perhaps a $ for an s, creating: "T1mpI$bl". These kinds of passwords work well on systems with limitations on length and/or characters allowed. They are not easily guessed, provided the phrase is well chosen and unrelated to you in any way, and can contain as much character diversity as whatever system you're using allows. Pick a phrase that you will remember easily, make a couple of substitutions in it, and you're done.

Whatever you do, don't use a single, real word as a password, and don't use anything easily associated with yourself, your family, your history, or the system or company the password is related to.

Here are some other things to avoid while creating passwords:

Managing multiple passwords is a challenge, so some people use passwords that are related in some way to help remember things. This can work, but can also introduce risks, so be careful. If all of my multi-word passwords are of the same form:

        password 4 email
        password 4 bank
        password 4 shopping

they are much less secure. If one gets compromised, the bad guys might start guessing at the other passwords I use with some success. Thus, patterns in your passwords should be avoided.

Some systems require you to change your password regularly. In my opinion this is a really poor choice on the part of the system administrators, but it does happen. Many people using these systems can't remember their passwords since they change so often, so they do one of a few things to help remember them. Often they write them down somewhere, resulting in a list of passwords that they just add to as they change, and making their password available to anyone finding the list. Alternately they may use change some part of the password each time but leave the rest the same. This can result in much less secure passwords, commonly involving dates:

        MayPassword
        JunePassword
        JulyPassword

and so on for a system requiring monthly changes. These sorts of passwords are less secure than a good password that is unrelated in any way to the user (even if that password changes much less often) and they regularly get written down too.

Telling your system administrators that password rotation is a bad idea will probably get you nowhere, though, so be a good citizen and pick a new, good, password each time, preferably using one of the methods given above, and read on to learn a bit more about how to manage large numbers of passwords.

How To Manage Too Many Passwords:

I don't know about you, but I am lucky to be able to remember the number of my own cell phone, so a huge list of passwords is a real problem. And in this day and age that huge list is all too real. Keeping them straight is a significant challenge, one that I am not certain we have resolved just yet.

Still, there are at least a couple of approaches for this sort of thing.

The first is to avoid passwords entirely whenever possible. If an online shopping site gives you the choice, don't create an account with them. Yes, it means you'll have to enter your data every time you come back, but you also won't have to remember another password. An added benefit is that they may not keep any permanently stored data about you, which means there is less chance of having your data compromised if their servers get hacked.

The alternative is to create a throw-away login every time you use a site, and never come back to it. You can use a random string as your password and not remember it at all. If they need an email address, remember that many email systems let you add a dash and additional characters to your email address, so you can give them something unique, and later filter out all email from that site if they start sending you spam. For example, if your email address is foobar@gmail.com, you can tell a website that your email address is foobar-xyz@gmail.com. Then, after your business with the site is finished, you can add a filter in gmail to get rid of anything sent to foobar-xyz@gmail.com.

If you really want to sever the connection between you and the site, though, create a whole new email address with any of the free email systems, use it for one or a few transactions or sites, and then delete it.

And while you're thinking about this, you don't have to give most sites on the Internet real data about you. They want your birthday? Tell them you were born on January 1, 1902 and are thus well over 100 years old. How will they know it isn't true? Remember that any personal data you let out is something that can be used against you, to hack any less than perfect passwords, or as part of a concerted identity theft effort. If there isn't a good reason for the site to have that data, don't give them anything real.

But even using those tactics we still have too many logins and passwords to remember. The list is long: banks, shopping sites we use a lot, places we pay bills to, information sources, and so on, not to mention the inevitable systems at work. In these cases you cannot create a new account each time, and thus an alternative is needed, and that alternative is called password management software.

Password management software gives you a way to store all your passwords in a safe, encrypted format. You get at them using a master password, and then once that system is running you can copy your user names and passwords and paste them into the login pages of websites you use. When you exit your password management system it locks up your list of passwords in an encrypted format that, in theory, only you can get at.

The security of all password management software requires that your computers are up to date and virus free. Anything that can run at will on your computer and/or log your keystrokes means you have no security, so always, ALWAYS, patch your computers and keep your virus scanner up to date.

There are at least 2 kinds of password management software:

It may be installed on your computer
It may be a service you use over the Internet

Software installed on your computer means that no one other than those with access to your machine has any chance of getting your passwords, so it is potentially safer. On the other hand, you can't get to your passwords from multiple computers, so if you use more than one it may be less useful. Do an Internet search for "password manager" to find programs available that do this sort of job. Compare them for features and read reviews before making a choice.

An online password manager does the same job as one you install on your local computer, but it is a service provided by a company, and it requires an Internet connection to use. That may seem like a drawback, but remember that if you need passwords you're probably online already, so it generally doesn't matter. Online services of this type let you access your passwords from more than one computer - you just need to remember your master password to get in - but your data is stored on their servers, not your local machine. I suggest looking for services where all encryption is done on your local computer before any data is sent to the servers. That makes the data more secure, but it usually means that the service provider cannot recover your data if you forget your master password. A search for "online password manager" will find these services. Again, compare carefully before making a choice.

Both locally installed and online password managers let you save user names, passwords, URLs, and often other data associated with each login you're storing. They have user interfaces that let you copy a password without displaying it, making it impossible for someone looking over your shoulder to see what your passwords are. Many have tools to generate new, strong, random passwords for you, so that you can create unique passwords for each site you use. Some have the ability to automatically log you in to sites as well. Once you store the URL and the needed login data, you can get the tool to bring up a new browser window automatically logged in to the site of your choice, usually with just one mouse click.

Password management tools are important if you have to manage many different accounts, but they all suffer from the same weakness: the master password. If that password gets compromised, all the passwords you have stored in the service or software are at risk. For that reason it is critical that you treat that master password with care, and that it is as strong as you can possibly make it. Never, under any circumstances, share it with anyone, and don't write it down.

I'm not going to recommend a password manager program. Doing so is beyond the scope of this document, and individual requirements vary substantially, but there are quite a few choices available.

Other Thoughts On Passwords:

Many online systems make use of so called "security questions" as part of a password reset system. Basically they let you select one or more questions and tell them what answer to expect when they know who you are, and then later - if you forget your password - they ask you one or more of those questions and will do the reset if you provide the expected answer(s). The problem with these systems is that they are inherently weak as most users deal with them. Maybe you're given a choice of the following questions:

What is your mother's maiden name?
What was the name of your first pet?
Where were you born?
The last 4 digits of your social security number

And you give them answers like:

Marx
Groucho
Tuskaloosa
1234

The problem, of course, is that none of that data is secure in the modern world, and yet each one of those answers is, effectively, a password, and should be treated like one. Of course that data is easy to remember, but by this point in your life how many people know where you were born, or the answers to any of those other questions? If you're like most of us the answer is a lot of people know these sorts of things, and many of the rest of those answers can be searched for on the Internet for little or no money.

For some reason it seems like almost every company I deal with uses the last 4 digits of my SSN to confirm my identity, and with genealogical web sites abounding, mother's maiden names are common knowledge. In fact, the answers to most of the usual security questions are a very simple social attack away from being compromised, if they aren't already commonly known or easily searchable.

What to do? Treat those questions just like they ask for a password, not as a request for specific data. The computer will never know that your mother's maiden name isn't really "Cg6y_t@$fg", but the bad guys won't know that was what you answered that question with either. Of course, now you have yet another password to remember, and this one is going to get even less use than the regular password you use to get into the site, but if you're using a password management system which lets you take notes, you can log the security questions and your chosen - nonsense - answers there, for lookup when you need them for some reason.

This may seem like a lot of effort, but it is easy to disrupt people's lives - and sometimes steal their money or identity - using password recovery systems. Don't treat them lightly.

Another place where we get lazy - and risk compromise - is by letting our web browsers store passwords for us. This is very convenient, of course, and at times it is just fine. If your browser remembers your password for the local newspaper, perhaps, and it gets compromised, someone can read articles and maybe post comments as if they were you. Not necessarily a big deal. Things get worse, though, if your browser remembers your amazon.com password. Now a thief can login and order things using the credit card numbers you have saved there, possibly costing you real money and time. And if your banking passwords are stored in your browser, well, you might just as well leave your keys in the car and the engine running all the time.

Browser based password storage is fine for sites with essentially no risk as a result of a stolen computer. But if there is anything important on a web site, don't ever let any browser store the password for you. You have to remember it yourself, or use your password management system to keep track of it. Anything else is asking for trouble.

And, of course, never use browser stored passwords on a shared or public computer.

ATM PINs are among the worst possible passwords in existence. If they're limited to 4 digits there are only 10,000 possible PINs, which is way too tiny a set. Sadly, though, ATM networks often don't deal with longer PINs. I encountered this once, years ago, while travelling overseas. My ATM card worked just fine in the US with my longer PIN, but was useless in ATMs where I was. I only figured this out once I was over there, of course, and I had to go into banks to get cash. Hopefully the banks will get a handle on this, but always be extremely careful with your ATM card. Once lost it is a high speed route to an empty bank account.

In Summary:

Create good, strong passwords using the initial letters of a phrase or several unrelated words strung together. In either case additional security comes with some character substitutions into upper case, numbers and special characters. Be sure your selected phrase or words aren't related to you or the system in question too.
Never share your passwords with anyone, deliberately or otherwise.
Never use the same password for multiple sites.
Consider using password management software if you have too many passwords to remember.

Welcome to the modern world. Ain't it fun?

Update 9/26/11: my friend David Clunie posted a blog post about this video, that discusses some of what I talk about above. Thanks David!

Living With A Chromebook, Part 2

2011-07-30T11:48:00.000-07:00

In my previous post on this topic - Living With a Chromebook, Part 1 - I discussed my initial impressions of my Chromebook after about a week. I've now had 2 more weeks on it, and have a few more things to say about it.

In general I continue to be very happy with this device. Battery life continues to be great, and the ability to just shut the cover to shut down is wonderful. My power bill will, no doubt, be a few dollars smaller in the coming months since I am not running the big machine all day anymore.

A few things stand out that didn't get discussed last time, or that I have additional thoughts on:

As I previously mentioned, I keep an encrypted file of all my passwords on the big machine, and so far I have found no way to do that on the Chromebook. Encrypted data, in general, is probably the weak link of this device. I am not yet aware of any Google docs encryption options, for example, so if you're storing medical records, financial data, or anything else particularly private and important you may have concerns about using your Chromebook for that purpose, and I understand the issues. For passwords, though, I may have a solution: passpack.com.

I am not yet 100% certain about this, but it looks very promising so far. Passpack gives you the ability to store passwords on their servers. Encryption is done on your end - in your browser - and they claim even they cannot recover your data if your packing key is lost. They have a reasonable UI which works well with the cut/paste facilities on the Chromebook, so you can click a single button to copy a password into your buffer, then Ctrl-V to paste it into the website you're logging into. It's never visible or readable. They store user name, email, password, URL, and a general notes field with each record, among other things, so you have lots of choices. They can recommend new passwords for your sites, and have a 1-click login facility that I have not yet played with. Their free account lets you have up to 100 password records, and their paid accounts are not all that expensive. As I say, this is looking very promising, and gets around the inability to store encrypted passwords on the Chromebook, at least for me. In a few weeks I will probably be fully converted to passpack and have played with more features. At that time I may have more to say about it.
A happy discovery of a few days ago: crosh, a command line shell built into the system. It's not a fully featured Unix command line, but it has a few nice built in commands (like top) and an ssh subsystem, which means those of us who want to connect to remove servers using ssh can do so without adding browser extensions or using other machines. Ctrl-Alt-T will get you a crosh command prompt, and from there 'help" gets you a list of commands, and 'exit' gets you out. Alt-Tab moves between your crosh session and the browser window. Inside crosh you can type 'ssh' to get into the ssh subsystem, and again 'help' will get you a list of ssh related commands. For example, you can type 'user foobar' to set the user name, 'host foobar.com' to set the host name, and 'connect' to get an ssh connection to that host. Login with whatever your remote password is and from there it's all familiar. This is a major win for me, though most users will never bother with it.
If the Chromebook has a weak spot so far it is printing. Google won't install printer drivers on the Chromebook, so you cannot talk to a printer directly. Printing, therefore, requires a different solution... a cloud based solution. Google has a start on this - cloudprint - but it isn't quite ready for me just yet. The general idea is that your local printer is connected to a computer and that you can register that printer with their cloud and then print to it from the Chromebook. Sounds good, but, the local computer has to be powered up to make that work, and the software running on that computer is currently only available for Windows and MacOS, though they say Linux support is coming. I really don't want to have to turn on another computer to print, though. If I do that I might just as well login to Google docs (or whatever) from there and print directly to my local printer, right? And leaving a computer running all the time for the rare times I want to print something seems silly.

HP has a partial solution for this issue: network connected printers that are already cloudprint aware. They are always on and can be printed to (so I am told) by sending an email to the right address. Don't ask me exactly how that works... I haven't printed anything from the Chromebook just yet, and it won't be happening any time soon. I don't happen to own one of these magic printers from HP, and I don't run Windows or Macs at home, so I have no suitable servers. In the meantime I can just fire up the big machine and print from it when I need to, I guess, but a better printing solution would be nice. Mind you, I print rarely, perhaps a couple pages a month. It happens so rarely, in fact, that we destroyed 4 different ink jet printers with gummed up print heads. Ink jets need to be used to continue to work, and we simply don't print often enough to make them last. At the moment we have a cheap color laser printer, which seems to be fine, but isn't capable of talking to Google's cloudprint service on its own. Oh well.
Another minor issue is keybounce. As I type I see regular appearances of repeated letters, but I'm not sure what is causing it. I cannot force it to happen when I try, probably because I am paying attention more closely - so I rather suspect it is me, doing something a tad odd. My old keyboard has keys that are about 18mm wide, but the tops are only 12mm wide, or so. The Chromebook has keys that are 15mm wide with gaps between keys. I suspect I am a sloppy typist and often hit keys less than straight on. On my old keyboard a miss like that might matter less than it does here, where hitting off center probably means bouncing off the gap filler and (possibly) hitting the key a second time. The newish Mac keyboards are very similar, and I could easily have the same issue there as well. In any case I continue to watch this and try to figure it out.
Finally, for this post anyway, Spotify is the newest oddity, but it is symptomatic of a general issue. During the past two weeks several people I know have started using Spotify, a music subscription service that seems to be all the rage. To make it work you need to download and install an application, for Windows or Mac, naturally, but I am told the Windows version does run under Wine on Linux. As you can guess, though, I cannot run such an application on the Chromebook, so using Spotify would mean turning on the big machine or getting out a "real" laptop. Thus far I have resisted. I love the portability of the Chromebook, my laptop isn't all that great in general, being ancient, and the desktop, while plenty adequate, is stuck in the den.

What is needed is a chrome browser app for Spotify, or any similar service you might be interested in using. I saw a couple of things that claimed to be Spotify related in the Chrome Web Store, but nothing from the Spotify service itself, and random apps always make me wonder about security issues. So, for now at least, I am not Spotified, which may be a good thing. However, if the available web app list grows up a bit I will probably find it available, and then maybe I will give it a shot.

That's my list of Chromebook comments for this time around. It's still living up to my expectations - and then some, actually - but there are a few things people need to know before jumping in with both feet. I love it, but as with all things, your mileage may vary. Feel free to ask questions or leave comments. I will do my best to answer them.

My other Chromebook related posts are available here:

Trying the new version of blogger

2011-07-28T13:47:00.000-07:00

The next few posts I write - here and in my other blogs, as they come up - are something of an experiment. I'm trying the new (draft) version of blogger, just to see what is coming.

If you want to try it, login to www.blogger.com as usual, then go to "draft.blogger.com" and you can see what it looks like. From there you can also make it your default version if you so choose.

Not sure what to make of it just yet, but I am keeping an open mind.

Living With A Chromebook, Part 1

2011-07-18T14:48:00.000-07:00

For a bit over a week now I have been using a Chromebook - specifically a Samsung with both Wifi and 3G - because I am sick and tired of big clunky laptops and desktop machines. In this post - and possibly some others that follow (thus "Part 1") - I will do my best to document the good, the bad, and the ugly of this experience.

First, a bit about me, just to set the stage and my own expectations. I have done software development for 25 years now, with a couple of breaks when I was deliberately jobless. I have used computers starting with a TRS-80 model 1, then on to a Compaq Deskpro, innumerable different machines at college, from mainframes on down, then DOS, OS/2, Windows, and Apple machines at work. Then I abandoned Windows and Apple and went to Unix via a different series of jobs. My home machines now - other than the Chromebook - all run Linux of one sort or another.

In terms of what I do with computers, I am one or two steps above most users in terms of complexity, but I am not among what I would consider the elite power users. I don't generally write programs for fun, but I do maintain my own website, for example. The place where I probably do the oddest thing at home involves maintaining an encrypted file system that can be mounted (or not) in which I store a list of the jillions of passwords I have around the internet.

Most of what I do, like others, is done in a web browser. I read email, watch a few videos, use a few social networks, and consume news and other media. You, your mom, and maybe your grandmother do the same things on their computers. The things that we also share that generally happen outside the browser - word processing, spreadsheets, etc. - are also things that are happening inside the browser now, and which I have been doing there for some time.

Games are another matter entirely. Mostly I don't bother as I find a lot of them boring and/or repetitious. Still, a few hold my interest for a while.

With that all stated up front, this post will list out the things I consider good and bad about the Chromebook so far. Here we go...

The Good

The Chromebook is small and light. That turns out to be very nice. Nicer than I expected, in fact. The screen is large enough to be easy to use, but overall this device is quite capable. I am not yet certain if I could use it as an eReader, though. Reading with it in bed might be a challenge as it pretty large in comparison to a kindle or ipad, and the dedicated keyboard I wanted so much (see below) would be a hindrance for that application. Or so I suspect. I'll have to try that at some point, but in the mean time I am quite happy with its size, shape, and weight.
Good Screen. Nice and bright, easily read, etc. I am pleased with it.
A Real Keyboard. I didn't want a tablet because I wanted a real keyboard. Imagine trying to write this blog entry on an on-screen keyboard. No thanks. And while an outboard keyboard is possible for a tablet, it makes it two separate things and thus rather hard to hold onto while sitting in a comfy chair, or whatever. For me a built in keyboard was a requirement, and this one has good key feel, though it appears the key spacing may be different from what I am used to. (Lots of typos that I have to fix. Will get over that with more time.)
The apps just work, mostly. I am not a big app user. My G1 has just a few loaded onto it, and I've only paid for one app ever over there. I am still mostly living in the web itself (rather than in apps running withing the browser) on the Chromebook, but I see there are apps here - I've even poked at a couple - and I am certain they will continue to grow and thrive. In fact, the offline aspects of the Chromebook will require more apps over time, so seeing them is a good thing. The only issue I see so far is that at least some of the apps I have looked at in the Web Store indicate they won't run on the Chromebook. I am guessing there are some differences between the Chrome browser as it runs here and on a "real" computer. Everything I have installed so far has been fine, but that isn't a guarantee they will all work.
Fantastic battery life. I am getting 8 hours or so out of a charge, and I pretty mush just ignore it until the warning pops up to tell me I have 15 to 20 minutes left. Then I plug it in and let it charge while continuing to work. Simple, and quite nice to be unplugged for so long.
Amazingly quick start up. A cold boot really is 10 seconds or less. (My linux boxes boot in 50-70 seconds, depending on what you count as boot time. I discounted login time but did include time to launch X and start the browser, to make it a fair comparison with what the Chromebook does.) Even better, though, is sleep mode. Close the cover and it's off. Open it up again and within 2 seconds it's at the login prompt, waiting for your password. For me this is a game changer. I no longer have to leave a computer running all day to have access quickly when I want it. Just open the lid, enter my password, and I'm there. Nice, but it does require changing some habits. No need to set the machine aside - lid open - when I go do something else. Close it. Open when done. Easy, but different.

The Bad (or at least not so good):

Touchy trackpad - it's huge and easy to tap accidentally. I find that at times my cursor has suddenly moved elsewhere thanks to a stray finger or palm grazing the track pad. This is a learning thing, and (to be honest) I have never liked track pads before, but this one is growing on me. It's large enough to let me accomplish quite a bit with one or two gestures, which is good. But it is really sensitive, and click-to-tap, which I have enabled for another reason, makes it more so. I expect to be past this in another week or two and just using it like it was completely normal. I could plug in a USB mouse simply enough, but I really want to keep this to be just the one thing, not something I have to have dedicated space to use.
The mouse button in the track pad is stiff. There is a single mouse button built into the trackpad, and if you push down hard enough on it you will hear it click. I wanted to use it (as opposed to tap-to-click) but it is so stiff as to make that difficult. I've resorted to tap-to-click and the corresponding risk of accidental mouse clicks when fingers stray. So far it's working, but a slightly less stiff button would have made me happier.
Unknown keyboard shortcuts and unexpected happenings (like tabs opening). Another thing I have to get used to (and figure out) rather than a real problem. If you're prone to typos, these things happen. Just a few minutes ago I figured out that the key with a magnifying glass on it - where the caps lock key would normally be - opens a new window, and also closes an unused window. (Or maybe it closes the current window... I don't really know which it does yet.) Between hitting that when going for 'a' and the occasional stray mouse movement as described above, I find that a few times a day I am wondering what the heck just happened and have to take my hands off the keyboard and undo whatever I just did. There is a map of the various keyboard shortcuts available, and I looked at it once from an online tutorial I read a week ago, but I have no idea where it is now. (Keyboard shortcuts bug me in general, though. Having them is fine, but make them really, REALLY easy to find out about, OK? Both Windows and MacOS have zillions of these things now and I never seem to know what they are. I can navigate my way around inside vi, though, so go figure.)
Occasional glitches in video. On my first day I was going through Google's tutorials and there were some videos. Loading them was simple, and they mostly worked, but on one page there were just black boxes where YouTube videos should have been. On another the video played but without sound. In both cases I reloaded the page and everything worked, and I haven't see the issue since, so I don't know what it was I saw.
A fan. I was hoping for a totally fanless computer, finally. No such luck. There is a CPU fan on this puppy and it varies in speed depending on what you're doing, though it is pretty quiet overall. There are also vents on the bottom of the case that bug me. Setting this machine on your lap won't make you sterile, but I don't know if it will overheat if those vents are blocked by your clothing.
Oddities in 3G registration. I have barely tried 3G yet. WiFi in my house works fine, and it has also worked at at local restaurant just as well. But I did register for 3G and had two glitches in the process. The first was that registration would not work at my home. I am in a rural area, but we have Verizon service here and it should have worked. In fact, once I registered it elsewhere it does work at home, but I had to do the registration in town. The second glitch was that the registration form was designed by someone whose elevator didn't go all the way to the top. It kept bouncing back to me saying my credit card information wasn't accepted, and I kept looking it over and it was fine. Eventually it dawned on my that I had to remove the spaces from the CC number. Why they couldn't remove them while processing the form data - particularly since they let me enter them in the first place - I don't know. But once I deleted the spaces everything went through. A nit, I know, but user experience matters, and this was just stupid.

That's my list, at least for now. I clearly have to make some changes in my life, like move my passwords out of my encrypted file system and into some sort of online password repository. I am researching those and may have an answer for that soon.

I'd like to see a command line here so I can ssh to to remote machines. That would make things much simpler for me when I work on my web sites. I'd also like to see some blinking lights on the menu bar when it's doing network access. It would be nice to know if any bottle necks are related to data not moving at all, or just moving slowly.

I expect these sorts of issues will be resolved with time, and I have every reason to think that Google's Chromebook idea is going to work out well in the end. Having my data stored in the cloud doesn't bother me. If I have private data of some sort, though, I'd like a way to encrypt it here before it goes to the cloud. I expect that is coming someday, from some cloud based service provider.

In the meantime, google docs is a great set of apps for all kinds of work, and the so called limitation of having to be online while working isn't really that big a deal, at least not to me.

If you have questions, feel free to post them here as comments or email them to me (jrpstonecarver at gmail dot com) and I will answer them in the next Chromebook related post, if there is one.

I have other posts about the Chromebook available:

Long time gone

2011-07-13T20:05:00.000-07:00

Boy have I been away for a while. Busy is too polite a word for it, but whatever the name it's not been much fun.

At the moment, though, things appear to be settling down a bit. The next couple of weeks will be rocky as a result of visitors in town, but after that things may be calmer, which means I might have time to write more. (And even as I say that the phone across the room warbles to tell me that a new text message has arrived. Yay.)

In any case I have a new toy that may make writing a bit more interesting, or possible. A new Chromebook has arrived, and it has a few interesting features that I am starting to figure out. Hopefully the next month or three will see it getting substantial use, and this blog - and other things - will benefit.

That said, the next two weeks will not be filled with posts, so give me a little time to get past other commitments first.

Have a great summer!

On A More Serious Note

2011-03-22T11:31:00.000-07:00

I don't know what to make of the US's recent work in Libya.

First of all, please don't get me wrong. From what I can tell Gaddafi is a complete nitwit. He's dangerous and loony, I know. Getting him out of power, should that happen, is likely to be a good thing. And keeping him from killing innocents is definitely good as well.

But, where does it all end?

We're currently involved in three simultaneous wars, which has to be some kind of record.

And the costs of such things are staggering. I hear so many politicians complaining about the budget these days. The single fastest way to reduce the short term deficit would be to get out of Iraq, Afghanistan, and (now) Libya. The cruise missiles we're firing at Libya are awfully expensive things, not to mention planes and pilots.

More interesting to me than costs, though, is our reputation. The US was already seen by far too many as a bully. Some countries want us to continue in our role as "world policeman" while others are terrified of that very same thing. I can't yet find a way that our involvement in Libya does much good for our reputation overall, even if in the end it benefits the Libyan people. Just wait until there are a few confirmed civilian casualties as a result of coalition air strikes, for example, to see how badly things might go, even in Libya itself.

And we pick our battles so carefully. We intervene in Iraq and Libya, but not in North Korea, nor China during the Tiananmen Square uprising? Why or why not? What about the other middle east countries currently seeing varying levels of protest? Should we help the Yemenese people if things take an ugly turn there? How about Bahrain? Or Saudi Arabia, where recent descriptions of the overwhelming response to a possible protest astounded me.

I suspect we gave up the moral high ground a long, long time ago, and now all the decisions are simply pragmatic in nature. We can intervene in Libya because we have cover from the UN, and the Arab League, but can't do anything against North Korea or China because they have nukes. Libya has oil we want, by the way, as does Saudi Arabia. The calculus around whether intervention helps or hinders our oil habit must be very interesting at the highest levels of power.

I'd rather we stepped back and honesty answered the questions: Should we be intervening? Why or why not?

I don't claim to know the answers in any given case. These are complicated issues, and there are arguments on all sides, but it appears to me as if the US is getting involved in far too many conflicts of late, to our own detriment in various ways. It's like the default is to start shooting.

Something about that feels wrong.

Humans in Groups: not good

2011-03-20T19:37:00.000-07:00

I went to a concert last night. I do this regularly. My wife plays in a symphony, you see, so I find myself in concert halls with several hundred - perhaps a couple thousand, I dunno - total strangers, trying to listen to music played by humans without amplification. Not fun.

Last night was cough night. The music would get quiet and an entirely different symphony of coughing would appear. Why? Maybe it's flu season. Maybe the audience doesn't care. They're mostly old enough that they might not even be capable of hearing each other cough. Whatever, I found it annoying.

I also hate going to movies in theaters. Even a small audience is distracting. Someone will suddenly have an unimaginably difficult time opening some candy wrapper at exactly the wrong moment, for example. And several times young, white, male individuals between the ages of 15 and 25 have been extremely disruptive - read "stupid" - at movies I have been at, even when the total audience numbered less than 20.

I am fast becoming a hermit where shared experiences are the goal. As if that sentence made any sense. If a bunch of people watch the same DVD separately, have they had a shared experience? Maybe, but they definitely haven't been disturbed by the rest of the people in the theater (or whatever) while trying to enjoy it.

Recently I went to a Roger Waters concert, where he performed The Wall live. It was an amazing show, with video to die for, sound to drown out everything, and so on. It was, in fact, the best concert I have ever been to. But guess what... I didn't get to lose myself in the show. People around us were doing all kinds of distracting (and stupid) things, and the fact that the music was so loud I needed earplugs didn't mean I couldn't hear the idiots around me.

We've lost something, somewhere. The idea that civility meant not bugging your neighbor seems to be gone. And not even the oldest among us (who still get out and about, anyway) understand that.

Of course I probably bug those around me at concerts too. I can't sit that still for that long - my limbs fall asleep - and I wind up having to shift around a bit. I apologize to those who have had to sit near me. At least I try to be quiet, though.

Anyway, there isn't anything to be done about this. It's a shame, though. If you'd only sit down, shut up, and pay attention you might learn something, or at least enjoy the show. But that'll never happen.

Podcasts Stink

2011-02-28T09:45:00.000-08:00

All kinds of people I know are listening to podcasts these days, and I keep wondering why.

This morning I tripped over a link to a podcast with someone I wanted to hear more from, so I decided to listen to it. This one, at least, I wanted to hear, right?

Wrong.

Yes, there are aspects to recorded speech that don't show up in the written word, which is interesting at some level, but there are all kinds of cruft in there too. Cruft that gets removed in a written presentation. More importantly, though, podcasts fall into a gray area regarding how much attention they require.

If you're actually listening to them, it's hard to do something else, like work, at the same time, but that's one of the supposed benefits of podcasts - the ability to listen whenever you want and when you have the ability to do so. Yet if it's actually interesting it still demands more attention than I can give it if I want to do something else. And this is why I don't want to listen to podcasts or audio books while driving. It's also probably the reason that cell phones are so dangerous when used by drivers. We're not paying full attention to the job at hand. For the record, I have the same issue with radio news and similar format shows. If I am really paying attention to them, nothing else is - or should - be going on.

Then again, podcasts are not as immersive as a video of some sort. There's nothing to watch while I'm listening, so I'm slightly bored, looking for something else to do, even if I am interested in the content. It's only engaging half my brain, or something like that.

The resulting mental confusion drives me nuts. The podcast idea sounds so simple and yet it really doesn't work.

But wait, I hear you cry, what about music? Don't you listen to music the same way? The answer is "yes", but with caveats. As with a podcast, if I am actually paying attention to the music I can't really to much of anything else. But beyond that, I suspect music uses a different part of the brain. Podcasts are using the speech centers extensively, music not so much. Yes, I know, vocal music does to some extent, but once you've heard it once or twice and know the lyrics, they fade a bit and you process them more as music and less as speech. Or at least it seems that way to me. The first time I hear a piece of vocal music, I have to listen closely and parse the lyrics out, thus consuming more attention, and making it more difficult to do other things. Later times it takes less effort and I can ignore it much more easily.

In any case, even if that theory is complete hogwash (which it might well be), music doesn't demand the same kind of (or amount of) attention from me that a podcast does. Even so, when doing something that requires thought - writing, etc. - I typically turn the music off (or way down) so I can focus exclusively on what I am doing.

Another objection to podcasts is their horrible inefficiency. Let's say I really need the information in a 30 minute podcast. I can burn the 30 minutes and listen to it, or, if the alternative is available I could download the text contents and read it. The download would be very quick - there isn't that much speech in 30 minutes of real time - and reading it would be much faster than 30 minutes too. Plus, I can reread and find interesting bits quickly in text, something that a podcast makes difficult at best.

As a vehicle for moving information around, podcasts stink. This morning's attempt was a total flop. I abandoned it after about 15 minutes. It was, sadly, a waste of time. Give me the contents in text form, please. Really.

Thoughts on Stress

2011-02-25T14:20:00.000-08:00

Many things can mess with your head, of course, and we're all different in terms of what affects us, but for me stress is a killer.

The house remodel isn't done yet. In fact, though it is nearing completion, it may be another month before we can do the final sign off with the county. I hope it is faster than that, but it may take that long or longer for reasons that are entirely out of my control.

Oddly, despite the fact that the vast majority of the time remaining is spent waiting for things to get done, not with people actively working at the house, it is still very stressful for me. Very stressful. And that stress just cripples me in other ways.

I'd like to do some serious fiction writing, but just finding the energy is hard. I'd like to carve more stone, but the same issues apply, along with cold weather making things tougher to do. I'd like to go back to the gym twice a week, but the vagaries of scheduling the times when the contractors are here makes me hesitate to do even that.

In all, there are a lot of things that keep me from moving forward with life, and I find it all very frustrating.

One of these days it will be done, and I will move on. I just hope that day comes sooner rather than later. I need this project to end.

On Driving Across Country

2011-01-12T10:57:00.000-08:00

Yes, I've been gone a long time. Sorry. Many things got in the way: work, life, and so on. I hope that is changing, but back to the topic at hand.

We recently completed yet another drive from California to Illinois for the purposes of seeing family over the holidays and I have a few awards to give out as a result.

But first, "Why drive instead of fly?" I hear you ask. Well, because it's a lot cheaper.

Tickets for two from SJC to ORD would cost, oh, $800 or so. Then add the cost of putting two dogs in a kennel for two weeks. That's a big total. It's a lot cheaper to drive, bring the dogs, and pay for gas and hotels than it is to fly. And we once had a dog lose over 10% of her body weight in a kennel because she wouldn't eat. We didn't like that.

Anyway... on to the awards:

To Iowa, for having the least technically competent drivers anywhere along I80 between California and Chicago. Over the holidays of 2009 we saw a vast number of wrecks in Iowa after an ice storm. I am happy to say that this year, though there was no ice storm, the state of Iowa continues to impress with their total lack of driving ability. Either these folks don't teach driving at all, or they have all collectively forgotten what they were taught. Driving in Iowa is not for the weak of heart.

To Illinois, for having the most self centered drivers on the road. Rest assured that when driving in the Chicago area or on 88 between Iowa and Chicago there isn't a single other driver on the road who cares about you, your goals, or your safety. All they care about is getting to their destination as quickly as possible, regardless of what that may do to anyone else on the road. Turn signals? Fugetaboutit. Following room? No one needs that. Speed limits? Ha! Just get there baby... ASAP. Other places might classify lots of what we saw as reckless driving. Not Illinois. There it's just the usual stuff. Yawn.

To Wyoming, for having the worst stretch of road we have ever driven on. On 12/30/2010, I80 west of Green River was an unbroken sheet of ice, from side to side of the road including both shoulders, and continuing for 20 solid miles. We'd had blowing snow and blizzard conditions - nearing white out fairly often - through all of Wyoming, and the road wasn't great, but they were trying. Plows were out with sand or salt, and the road was OK. We stopped in Green River for gas and decided, since the road had been passable, to continue. What we found just outside of town really made us wonder about the Wyoming department of transportation. I am not exaggerating: 20 uninterrupted miles of ice. Plus the wonder of trucks flying past us at 50 or 60 MPH on that surface. We saw several wrecked big rigs, but all had been traveling in the other direction that morning. Why none of the nitwits that passed us as we limped along didn't die in fiery wrecks we really don't know.

To the I80 drivers just west of Sparks NV, for the best impersonation of a Mad Max movie we have ever seen. On our outbound trip we stopped in Sparks for the night. We got moving the next morning only to find both lanes of the interstate completely stopped for nearly two hours. Lots of emergency equipment drove by on the shoulder, east bound, most of which we never saw again once we finally did get moving. But we did see a lot of wrecks: overturns, collisions, solo spin outs, a jack-knifed big rig, and so on. Most of these had no emergency equipment present and appeared recent, which was a challenge given the road wasn't in particularly bad shape. And this wasn't a chain reaction thing. These were all separate wrecks, scattered over several miles. We never did find the actual cause of the stoppage so we'll never know what was really going on. Some might argue that Nevada should get the award for least competent drivers as a result of this little event, but experience tells us that Iowans are still the ones to beat.

And there you have it. The 2010/2011 holiday driving awards from yours truly. I hope to avoid this next year by staying home.

Rumours of my Death are Greatly Exaggerated

2010-07-31T13:49:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since I wrote here. Or at least it feels like I long time. I started work on June 14th, I think, and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride hasn't ended since.

What to tell you?

Well, firstly, work is, well... work. My employer and I are both equally surprised to learn that they wound up hiring me for an operations job, not really (in my mind, anyway) a release engineering position.

Yes, technically it is release engineering, but the reality is that for the foreseeable future I am doing support and debugging of applications and the existing release process. Without intending to slight him, the person who used to do this work, and who has now moved on, had a very high tolerance for pain, errors, unexplicable behavior, and so on. As I figure things out I need to spend time fixing things just to keep sane. Adding simple things like, oh, error handling, would be good in a lot of places.

The house remodel project continues. Slowly. The original estimate was 8 weeks. We're at 16 now and still going strong. There is visible progress and not only has demolition ended, but construction has happened. We have a new kitchen roof, for example, and the main deck is being put into place now, though that is taking plenty of time too, and has not been without surprises.

I hope we actually get things done this year. At this point, though there are still 5 months left, I cannot say with certainty it will happen.

There isn't much else to report right now, and until the house is done and I get to feeling like I have enough of a clue at the office there probably won't be. I appreciate your patience in the meantime.

Gone over a month... sigh

2010-05-18T14:08:00.001-07:00

Life has gotten really complicated. Too many projects that destroy any ability to think.

This blog is not dead. I will return, but probably not for another couple of months. At least not with any regularity.

Sorry!

Without a Shred of Remorse...

2010-04-11T19:28:00.000-07:00

For very different reasons, I am following in the footsteps, to some degree, of my friend Merikay. She is cleaning out a lot of the stuff in her life over time because she is hoping to RV for a while. I, on the other hand, just feel weighed down by the stuff of life and am gradually trying to reduce it.

Now, however, I find myself confronted with a larger issue. we're going to get some repair work done on the drywall in our den and guest bedroom. Some of you may remember the issues we encountered this winter.

Well, we're going to get that fixed, along with another little water/drywall issue that cropped up when the typhoon remnant came through last year.

But doing that means getting the den and guest bedroom emptied out so contractors can work in there. That isn't as simple as it sounds.

The result is a mutli-hour effort involving relocating, condensing, and (in some large measure) getting rid of things we no longer need or want or use. There is also a whole subplot about wireless routers and repeating bridges that hasn't resolved itself just yet, thanks to problems on the part of Netgear. But I digress.

I have finally pitched a bunch of cassettes that no one will ever listen to again, equipment for cleaning and demagnetizing cassette playback and record heads, an inline dimmer switch of unknown provenance, a bunch of toys I haven't looked at in years, and so on. The net result was some six linear feet of cabinet and drawer space opened up so I could hide the stuff we need to keep and keep it safe from people wielding plaster and drywall. Fun. Not.

In any case, eventually the house was made ready for the great contractor invasion, which should happen tomorrow at 9am, and I have now collapsed in a heap.

I'll write up the bit about wireless networking when I have a resolution. As of now I don't know how that plays out.

Merikay, at least you know you're not the only one getting rid of things.

Embrace the Cloud

2010-03-30T14:21:00.000-07:00

I've got multiple friends who hate the entire idea of cloud computing. They despise storing their data on the servers maintained by someone else, particularly Google.

I am rapidly coming to the opposite conclusion, and that's despite having a less than optimal ISP and a connection that rarely gets any faster than about 850kbps.

As I have used the cloud I keep finding things it makes better or simpler. The first - and most obvious - is backup. If my cloud providers are backing up the data for me, I don't need to worry about disk failures. And as I am one who has suffered traumatic data loss in the past - at work, in an environment where there was no automated backup of desktop systems - I really appreciate letting someone else worry about the safety of my data.

There are a couple of obvious counters to that argument. The first is that my cloud provider might disappear - probably by going bankrupt - taking my data with it, or their backup processes might be less than optimal. For that reason I tend to use major companies as my providers. Yes, bad things could happen, but it isn't likely, and the chances of my laptop being dropped or suffering a disk failure are much higher. And for anything critical I can always download a copy, right?

Another obvious objection is that the cloud provider might decide my data is evil in some way, as when a blogging site shuts down a particular blog for containing spam, even if it really doesn't. Recovery in that case is problematic, but it is possible if your provider has a system in place to review those decisions. My own documents and content are pretty tame, and definitely not spammy or copyrighted by anyone else, so the odds on hitting this issue are slim at worst.

Data security is another objection I hear. "I don't want X to have my data." And I get that to some degree. Some people hate the idea of their cloud provider scanning their data to better target ads, or whatever. At some point, though, it is important to step back and assess the nature of your data usage. An absolute minimum is really private. Financial information needs to be kept safe, of course. Health records might need that kind of protection, but as the nation limps towards electronic storage for that data it might make sense to put what I have online somewhere that my doctor can see it and add to it, right? I suppose the occasional letter or some such should be private too, but in all honesty, who is going to read such things? Who would even want to?

If I had something to hide I can imagine feeling very differently about this, but the vast majority of us are law abiding people who value convenience over that level of security, at least as far as trivial data goes. Yes, I'd love to see something legal that prevents ISPs and cloud service providers from examining your data without your express consent, but until then it's a simple matter of keeping the few things I really care about out of the cloud. The rest can go there, in theory. It's convenient.

And make no mistake about it, convenience is what matters. I like being able to edit documents online and know that they will be there when I change computers, without any complex data migration issues. I like being able to share some of those documents with others too.

Picking the right cloud supplier, though, also requires examining their systems and polices to see what it takes to get your data out if you need to. Here, so far, Google is a star. All the services I use with Google (except Blogger, amusingly) make it easy to get my data out in useful formats. Google docs, in particular, lets me export to my local disk in several ways that can easily be imported into other applications.

I'm sure there will be replies to this post from those who disagree, and I'll be accused of being simple minded about these things. But for me, at least for now, the cloud is looking better and better. Bring on Chrome-OS, too. Something small and fast would be great. Even better than Linux.

An Awful Malaise

2010-03-18T10:01:00.000-07:00

I seem to be suffering from a serious case of, well, something that makes me incapable of doing much of anything. It's all mental, I know. I have a long list of things to work on but am completely unmotivated.

Two nights in a row I've been up at odd hours, and I suppose that might have something to do with it. Tuesday night it was a dog waking me up. Twice. Last night the dogs were fine, but I still woke up at 2am and was mostly awake until at least 4am. I don't know why.

Maybe part of it is still lingering muck from the time change. Daylight savings time is a bad idea in my opinion, and as I get older the adjustment gets harder.

Maybe some of it is leftover stress from events a couple of weeks ago. There certainly was (and to some extent still is) plenty of stress to go around. The death of a family member is never easy to handle.

Maybe it's waiting for the contractor to get back to us on remodeling issues, and getting our permits with the county straightened out. Add the cost of the (much needed) remodel the the pile as well.

Perhaps some of it is watching quite a few of my friends struggle to find work in the current environment. These are good people - I've worked with and trusted them for many years - who can't yet find jobs, some since November when we were layed off.

In any case, whatever the cause - or causes - the last few days have not been fun, and I feel a bit like a beached whale waiting for the tide to come in and hoping it happens before I bake to death in the sun.

Government Stupidity (Redundant, I Know)

2010-03-12T08:50:00.000-08:00

Today I found a link to www.broadband.gov, where you can find a new speed test tool for broadband connections. I thought it might be interesting to play with it, so I ran the test.

And my browser hung using 100% of my CPU during the latency test.

After killing Firefox off I went and read the fine print:

Users are randomly assigned the Ookla or M-Lab application.

Note: the M-Lab application currently does not work with Safari, Chrome, and Opera web browsers.

That's right. Our beloved feds are randomly assigning a speed test application, but one of the two possibilities only works with IE.

Excuse me? Why would you even do that? What sort of idiot let that go live?

Yet Another Reason Not To Be A Verizon Customer

2010-03-12T08:36:00.000-08:00

Here's a link to a story about Verizon. Eventually I am sure the link will go bad, but in a nutshell, their customer service reps wouldn't shut down the account of a dead man because his family didn't have his PIN. Really. Read it for yourself.

I wish I had an alternative to them for our land line. Their business practices stink (ask me about their minimum of $10 per month on long distance charges some day) and their cellular customer service was awful, as was their choice of phones. Oh, and did I mention their pricing?

Yes, I know none of the other phone companies is any better, though T-Mobile has done well by me so far. Still, my awful experiences were with Verizon, and I would love to get them entirely out of my life.

It's Been an Eventful Time

2010-03-12T08:30:00.000-08:00

We're back home, now, after the funeral for my father-in-law. It's been a rough few weeks, but Anne and I find ourselves moving forward. Many thanks to everyone for their support. It's meant a lot to us both.

Don't Be On The Roads At...

2010-02-28T18:46:00.000-08:00

If you walk, ride, or are otherwise out, have you noted when it's safest to be on your local roads?

In my neighborhood, the roads I walk my dogs on give access to perhaps 75 houses in something like six miles. In addition, they hold a winery and a church. Over the years that we've been regularly walking our dogs I have tried to figure out when it is safest and most dangerous to walk.

I admit this is an entirely subjective assessment. I am not taking notes or using a radar gun. And besides, all it takes is one nitwit who is busy dialing his cell phone (which is illegal in CA now... hands free is the law) to kill someone, regardless of the time of day. But it's still an interesting exercise.

The winery wants to expand its hours and open a tasting room on weekends. That would, no doubt, add more cars to our twisty mountain roads. I'm not in favor of that, but as I've already argued my point before the county (and apparently lost) I see no reason to waste time going to the next county meeting. The supervisors will do whatever they damn well please and it doesn't matter what I think.

In any case, it turns out winery customers tend to be afternoon and evening people, on weekends. I can mostly avoid them by walking the dogs in the morning those days.

Then we have rush hour. It's easy to see why it would be bad to be on the roads when people are late for work. And, in truth, I can see that in the traffic. There are always a few people rocketing down these tiny little roads at 9:10am, trying to get to their office by 10, or whatever. In general, it's best not to walk on week days before 10am, just to avoid them. But - and this is important - rush hour folks are oddly spread out. Late for one might be anytime after 9am. Late for a software engineer might be "after lunch". I see a few, but it's not like 8:45 - 9:15am turns our roads into a superhighway. No, in fact, since we haven't got all that many homes here, it's not that many people who speed in the mornings. A few, yes, but not many.

Other possible bad times are school related. Opening more-or-less coincides with rush hour in the mornings, and I do see a few people scrambling to get their kid to school on time. Correspondingly there's a rush around 3pm to see them picked up. Usually those doing the pickup - mostly mothers - are in a horrible hurry to get to the school, but are less panicked on their way home. So, avoiding the hour from 2:30-3:30pm seems intelligent, at least on week days. Again, though, it turns out that we haven't got that many school age kids in the area I walk, so it's a limited problem to some degree.

There's another, more random class of individual that is a real menace, but is entirely unpredictable: the teenage visitor. I usually hear these kids coming from miles away and get off the road well before they are anywhere nearby. Occasionally, though, that isn't possible, and something low slung goes whizzing past me at a high rate of speed. I've nearly been hit several times - we have no sidewalks here, of course - by teenagers driving way too fast. In truth though, that's relatively rare. Once every couple of weeks I hear them coming, and perhaps once every few months I am at risk.

The worst time to be on the roads, without a doubt, is when people on on their way to worship God. Sunday mornings turn our little road into a race track for the devout. Our local church has services at 10:30am, and sometimes the choir meets to practice an hour earlier. Do NOT make the mistake of being on the local roads between 15 minutes before and 15 minutes after those times on a Sunday morning. Doing so is asking for trouble. Possibly death.

Those people are on a mission - the Lord's mission, apparently - and will not be delayed. I am often waved at cheerily - as I try to reel my dogs in and leap off the road - but oddly no one ever slows down. They drive as if their very life depends on getting to the church on time, even if they are already late, and perhaps it does.

Maybe God hates you more for being late to service than for killing someone on your way to that same service.

Just a thought.

Life Is Throwing Curve Balls Lately

2010-02-20T14:35:00.000-08:00

I had planned a blog post about Google today. Half of it was going to be something of a rant about how Google has screwed a few things up lately and needs to straighten up and fly right, in line with their motto. The other half was going to be directed at the people and pundits who have been spouting off about how evil Google is, without looking at the big picture, and thus missing a number of interesting points, particularly comparisons with other companies and their actions.

I had it mostly written in my head last night as I was falling asleep. It was going to be a good post.

That all changed this morning with a phone call. Now my wife is on her way to her parent's house. Her father is seriously ill, and it is not clear he will survive.

Such news - yet another slap in the face by the cosmos - puts the Google issues into perspective. They're trivia, entirely unimportant.

At least to me.

Safe travels, Anne. I wish your dad all the best, and I will do whatever I can for you as we go forward. I love you.

Spelling Woes

2010-02-10T20:13:00.000-08:00

OK... I give up. Clearly English is going to be a problem for me. Maybe I should write in Perl.

Why is it "usable" and not "useable" (the latter is apparently British) while "replaceable" has the 'e' left in?

But then why is it "judgment" and not "judgement"? We remove the 'e' in that one.

I can see an argument for stripping the 'e' from the end of "use" before adding a suffix, and apparently we do. And apparently we do it to "judge" too.

But, before you become complacent, it's "judgeable" with the 'e'. So we remove it for "jugdment" but not for "judgeable"?

I think it's a plot to make us all (or at least me) feel incompetent.

For a long while I was horribly confused because Firefox (as installed by Ubuntu 8.04 LTS) defaulted to the British English dictionary for its spelling checker. Given the fact that I moved around a lot as a kid and as a result never stayed in one school's English program for more than a couple of years, my spelling is hopeless, but the confusion caused by that Firefox default dictionary may cripple me for life.

An Open Letter To Charities

2010-02-06T17:22:00.000-08:00

So, you run a charity of some sort. And for some reason I am on your list of potential sponsors.

Let me make something perfectly clear: If you call my home you will not be given any money. In fact, I will instruct the poor person on the other end to remove us from your calling list, tell them we never give money to anyone who calls us on the phone, and hang up.

I do the same thing to surveys and political solicitations.

You have a million ways into the life of the average American: ads by direct mail, billboard, TV, Internet, wrapped cars, buses, and a million other surfaces; do good works resulting in news coverage; civil disobedience resulting in news coverage; buy your news coverage outright, and on and on. Heck, half the charities in the world attempt to buy legislation to do what they want. You do not need to use my phone to reach me.

Calling me on the phone is offensive. It wastes my time and assumes I am willing to accept the call, which I can assure you 100% of the time is not the case.

I don't care if I've given you money before or not, do not call me. If you do, your contributions will dry up.

If we all did that, imagine how much quieter dinner time would be.

Looking for Writers...

2010-02-04T15:33:00.000-08:00

Are any of my (few) readers interested in writing? If so, I'm looking for help of a sort.

A long time back my friend Doug mentioned in a book review that he liked Steering The Craft, by Ursula K. Le Guin. It's a book on writing that (so far, anyway) avoids the obvious idiocies of many of the writing books I've seen I've read perhaps a third of it and I'm really enjoying it.

Now, here's the problem: STC has a bunch of exercises in it that I really should do, but finding the motivation to do them when my life is full of distractions is hard. If I had people who, like me, were committed to doing these exercises (and/or writing other things) for each other, it would be a lot simpler for me to make progress. Surely I can't be the only one who is motivated by external deadlines.

So, I'm contemplating forming some kind of writing group. If you want to write and are willing to get a copy of this book, it seems like a good place to start. If you're in the bay area we could get together irregularly to share exercise results. If we're farther apart we can form an Internet based writing group, sharing results via email, at least.

So, is anyone interested? If so, please speak up. I'm serious about this - I have a number of writing projects I want to tackle, and a writing group that is open to just about anything (fiction, non-fiction, excercises like this, etc.) could be very useful.

Drop me an email, reply to this post, or in some way get in touch if you're interested. Thanks much!

Oh, here's a link to Steering The Craft on Amazon.

Of Herself, A Friend Says...

2010-01-29T17:46:00.000-08:00

"I have a richly minimalist fantasy life."

I really like that phrase. Intrinsically at odds with itself, it nevertheless makes complete sense.

Thoughts on the iPad

2010-01-28T09:05:00.000-08:00

I'm not a Mac fanboy. I bought two Macs in the dim and distant past and both had serious problems. More recently I find that Apple's prices are too high and their products - while they work very well if you're doing exactly what Apple anticipated - are problematic if you're trying to do something Apple's engineers didn't plan for.

All that aside, I find the iPad interesting, at least as a concept. I am unlikely to buy that specific product from Apple. The cost is actually OK, as far as I can tell, but...

I hate ATT as a network provider. (And no, Verizon isn't any better. Currently I'm on T-Mobile, which has much better customer service than either. Their network, I know, isn't nearly as good, but then again I don't travel all that much, so it's OK for me.)
It has no multitasking.
Battery life may not be long enough to be a good e-book reader.

What the iPad does, though, is whet my appetite for something similar. The vast majority of what I do on a computer could be done on such a device, though I'm not entirely sure about the keyboard without trying it. Still, a fanless, lightweight, general purpose computer of that form factor could be very handy.

Imagine something of the general size and shape to the iPad running Chrome OS or a similar Linux variant. (Such a device needs a lightweight OS, not Windows or MacOS, but something specifically designed for this environment.) It should have a good integration with the Internet - essentially providing a cloud computing environment - but I also want both local data storage and locally run applications.

Being fanless is important to me. My existing laptop is just fine until I am sitting in a quiet room trying to think and the fan clicks on because FireFox is using too much CPU. That's deafening and silly.

I also want a customer replaceable battery. I know that will add to cost, weight, and thickness, but it's simply a requirement.

I just read a rumor that Google and HTC may be working on a tablet style computer. That's what actually made me write this. That's a device I'd love to see, and if they did a good enough job I'd buy it.

This is all just idle speculation on my part, but the age of the tablet computer may be coming. I look forward to seeing what it looks like.

Hmmm...

2010-01-27T12:55:00.001-08:00

What is that big shiny thing above my head? The one against the blue background? And why didn't I get soaking wet while walking the dogs?

Something very strange is going on...

Exercise for a Cause

2010-01-26T10:54:00.000-08:00

Somone I know works for this startup:

Plus 3 Network

It's a social networking site that allows those of us that exercise to raise money for charitable causes at the same time. Signing up is free and the results are cool.

If you regularly walk, ride, run, hike, do yoga, or any of a number of other activities, you can raise money for a good cause simply by logging your workouts.

Check it out, and if you sign up search for me on the site and we'll connect, something like Facebook's friend concept. That way we can watch each other's workouts and encourage each other along the way.

Robert Burns Day

2010-01-25T21:18:00.000-08:00

Today is Robert Burns Day... a celebration of Scotland and Robert Burns, composer of Address to a Haggis, among other things.

Alas it falls on a Monday this year, which makes it difficult to celebrate in the style it should be and still get up on Tuesday morning ready to face the world. Thus, some friends invited us over for Burns Supper last night, which was a bit better, though still not perfect. (I guess there are lower expectations for Monday morning than Tuesday morning, which makes an odd sort of sense.) We ate home made haggis, neeps, and tatties, among other things. Most importantly we toasted Robert Burns, Scotland, each other, and absent friends with a couple of good single malt whiskeys.

As an aside, we decided that since it wasn't really Robert Burns' birthday we were probably celebrating something else, which we decided was Montgomery Burns Day, which is entirely different, but still (in your best and most appropriate Simpson's voice) excellent.

A couple of years ago I spent a few days in Scotland and met a bunch of wonderful people. Islay was particularly amazing, and I think I could live there, though my wife needs a bit more in the way of civilization. Still, we both dearly loved it and would happily go back.

In any case, wherever you are, take a moment to think about Robert Burns, Scotland, and your friends, both present and gone. And make the time to thank those you have for being there for you.

Cheers!

Tax Prep Time... Whee

2010-01-22T10:23:00.000-08:00

While the weather stinks and keeps me from doing a project I have lined up, it's time to start the tax preparation. For us, this involves an entire day or two spent going through the filing cabinet and extracting everything for 2009, getting it all lined up and organized to go when we see our accountant.

As to why we have an accountant, I suppose I could do it on my own. I suppose I'd have a hope (just barely) of getting it right, too. But in truth I want someone else to do it. The ability to give her the data and have the results without the effort and worry about getting things in the proper place is worth the cost.

Those who know me well know I don't mind paying my fair share of the tax burden in the US, as I think we get value for our money. I do, however, object to the outrageously complex way those taxes are collected and documented. I have no problem with a progressive tax system - I even think it's fair - but surely there's a way for it to be simpler, so that someone like me (a college educated software engineer) could be confident that he's filled out the forms properly?

Apparently not.

So I have an accountant. My life isn't really that complicated, but I guess the government wants it to be, or thinks it is, or something.

Anyway, I need to start working on the filing. See you again in a day or two.

Just waiting for the power to go out

2010-01-18T10:28:00.000-08:00

I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the combination of wind, rain, and PG&E causes us to lose power. But that's yet another result of living on the edges of civilization, rather than in the thick of it.

On a barely related note, why is it that the six year old Siberian Husky with the incredibly thick, luxurious coat is the total wuss and won't go out in the rain? "No, dad, I can hold it until at least Thursday" seems to be his response to any thought of going outdoors to relieve himself when the ground is wet. Very strange.

Anyway, I hope you're dry and warm and happy, wherever you are.

Just saw Avatar

2010-01-14T08:35:00.000-08:00

Went out last night and watched Avatar. Some thoughts, but no spoilers...

First, we saw it in 3D, and while it was nice, I'm not sure it needs the 3D treatment. In fact, at a few points I found the glasses somewhat bothersome as they induced a bit of haze. (Yes, they were clean. I checked.) In any case, they didn't play with the 3D all that much in Avatar. They used it, but didn't bang it over your head that much.

What? A special effects movie that doesn't concentrate only on the effects? Well, not that particular special effect anyway.

It was pretty. The cinematography (well... animation, I guess) was quite nice.

The story was, as my wife said, "well worn". I'd call it predictable. In fact, just a few days ago I wrote a review of The Word For World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin, which gives her take on the same kind of situation. My copy of that book has a 1972 copyright, and the first blurb on the first page says "it tells an old story in a new way". I guess Avatar tells essentially the same old story in a somewhat new way.

Overall I enjoyed the film. It isn't something that changed my life, but it was fun.

Things you don't expect

2010-01-12T08:57:00.000-08:00

How about a water leak when it isn't raining? And no, a pipe didn't burst.

Apparently some time back - no one is sure how long ago, but probably back in mid-December before we left on vacation - one of us left a hose valve just slightly open. The water dripped out once every couple of seconds. Normally this would not be a problem, but we live in a house with a flat roof. An 18 year old flat roof with a deck over it.

Well, apparently the part of that roof right against the house where the hose was dripping slopes the wrong way. Water had pooled up against the house there over the years and rusted through the steel roofing. That rust may have been exacerbated by nails driven through the wall just above the roof line, into something vaguely like but not really flashing.

Anyway, the water runs into the house there, drips down through the ceiling and into the guest bedroom. But it's not really that simple. The entire house is shear-sheeted with plywood - on the inside even - so that soaks up and holds a TON of water before it drips down onto the drywall.

We discover the mess in the guest bedroom a week after getting home. I got some advice from friends and tore out a lot of water soaked sheet rock. Now we run fans in that room all the time trying to dry it out (which is working) and I've opened up the deck and put a bunch of goo into the area of the leak which I hope will prevent additional water intrusion.

What a mess. I have a garage full of busted up drywall and muck to haul to the dump and need to give everything a long time to dry out before we close it back up. Fortunately we have little or no mold in there, which is good.

Oh, and I did note dry water stains on the back of some of the drywall as I pulled it out. That means there was previous leakage that we never saw. This could have gone on for years.

I guess this summer we get a new roof/deck. What fun.

Facebook vs. Holiday Cards

2010-01-08T10:12:00.000-08:00

Thanks to our trip this year (and this is the last post even loosely based on the trip, I promise) we never got around to sending out Christmas cards. I felt - and still feel - kind of bad about that. One friend I know is always late and wound up sending out Martin Luther King Day cards one year. I doubt I'll do that, but I suppose it is possible.

On our return I got the huge pile of mail from the post office and found lots of cards in there. As usual, quite a few had letters in them too, and it suddenly occurred to me that holiday cards are, in many cases, an early version of social networking.

Without wanting to offend any of my friends on Facebook, one of the things about that community is that it is largely made up of people I don't see regularly. Of course, there are exceptions, but in large measure my Facebook friends are more distant in terms of space or accessiblity. Many of my former co-workers are there, for example, and our paths simply don't cross anymore. There are even a few people on that list whom I know but have actually never met in person.

Status updates from those more distant connections are a lot like those annual letters from family and friends that you never actually get to see in person. Great Aunt Betty telling you about her year - the good and the bad - without a lot of context looks a lot like a Facebook newsfeed.

There are minor differences. Facebook is a bit closer to real time, so I don't get an entire years worth of news all at once, for example, and most of the holiday cards and letters I get don't comment on things political or social, but I found the similarities quite interesting. If I took all the posts from some physically distant Facebook friend, removed the political and social commentary, strung them together and printed them, I'll bet I'd come disturbingly close to a holiday letter.

Food for thought. I keep reading articles about the wonder of social networking, how new and different it is. Not so. Rolodexes used to do on paper what Facebook and LinkedIn do online, and now I realize that even the status update that goes to a bunch of people is far from a new idea.

Perhaps there really is nothing new under the sun.

Reactions To Coming Home

2010-01-07T09:39:00.000-08:00

As we neared home on our recent trip I found myself noting what I was thinking and comparing that with how the dogs were reacting. Yes, it was totally silly, but it was amusing.

I, for example, was worried. All the worst possible things go through my mind. What if the house has burned down and no one called to tell us? What if someone broke in and robbed us blind while we were gone? What if someone is doing that just as we arrive? Yes, I suppose these things are possible, but they don't merit concern until you discover they have happened, and why the heck do I only worry about them as we approach home, instead of for the entire two weeks we've been gone? I worry about them none the less. In some ways I am a compulsive worrier.

Then, as we get closer and we're on roads I drive often enough to know well, I start noting the things haven't changed. We were only gone two weeks, but I still have to note that "the store is still there, right where it was when we left." I try not to voice these idiocies out loud (google "My you're very tall" in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams for why not) but they do run through my head. What kind of neurosis is that?

Dogs, on the other hand, are a lot simpler in their reactions.

Having spent almost three days in the car, they are tired of it and want a change. Our older dog - Leah - started sitting up nearly an hour from the house. Something must have smelled right as it was dark by then and there wasn't much to see. Still, she was alert to our arrival early on, even before we were on roads she knows from experience. She watched out the windows and then pushed in to sit between the front seats and look forward as we hit familiar roads.

Danno, our younger (and dumber) dog, was mostly oblivious until we were only about fifteen minutes from home. It was probably only after he picked up on something from Leah's actions that he, too, had to sit up and pay attention.

Both dogs exuded a kind of calm anticipation at this point. They knew what was coming and looked forward to it, but there wasn't much celebration yet. Some years ago a similar return home with Leah included barking with happiness for the last four miles. I guess age - she's roughly ten - has mellowed her.

Once the car actually stops, of course, both dogs are dying to get into the house and back into territory they actually know. The excitement is profound, though still relatively quiet. By then, however, my own anticipation is basically over. The house is still there, unchanged, and what faces me are the tasks that go with arriving at home: turn on the water heater, start the heat pump, unpack the stuff we have to have tonight, and so on. I'm already in task mode while the dogs are romping and enjoying the return of familiar surroundings.

All of this only goes to show that our dogs are smarter than me, at least. My wife would tell you that's an obvious conclusion.

Two More Trip Pictures - One With A Question

2010-01-05T09:56:00.000-08:00

Some worried about road conditions while we were on our recent trip. In truth, the roads were mostly fine. We hit a few snow flurries, but nothing heavy in terms of new snowfall. Worse, though, was blowing snow, particularly in Wyoming. Anne drew the short straw for the worst case of blowing snow. The picture below shows a mild case of what we were dealing with... 45 MPH wind gusts and a fair amount of snow can make for an awful mess on the road. As I say, though, this picture is a less severe instance of the problem:

This next picture leads to a question I've had for something like 15 years, since the first time we did this drive:

What are those groups of three marks in the right lane? They span what might be expansion joints in the pavement, and each group of three appears roughly where the tires of vehicles in that lane would be. I only see these in Wyoming and a bit in Nebraska. Just once this trip I saw a similar things with groups of four similar marks.

I haven't been able to figure out what these marks are for, but they've been on I80 in Wyoming for a long time. If anyone knows, please drop me an email and explain it to me. Thanks!

Holiday Excursion

2010-01-04T20:19:00.000-08:00

I'm back from our semi-regular holiday excursion. At odd intervals we pack ourselves and our dogs into a car and drive from our home in the San Francisco Bay Area to Chicago to visit family. To many this sounds insane, particularly when done during the middle of Winter. For us, though, it's the only way to do it that makes sense.

Gas, hotels, and food for the trip winds up costing a bit over $1000 the way we do it. (It's 2250 miles one way, and while I'd love to do it in a more fuel efficient vehicle, our Honda Element is the one that can haul us, two big dogs, and our stuff. Our 2000 Insight could do it for a less than half the gas used by the Element but there's no room for the dogs in there.) Anyway, we make the trip in three days, weather permitting, and thus stay in two hotels in either direction.

Now, imagine purchasing two tickets from SFO to ORD, renting a car, and kenneling two dogs for that same duration. The total cost is a lot more than driving. Heck, just kenneling costs more than our entire trip.

And for those who claim that six days of driving seems like a waste I can only say that I'd rather drive for three days than wait in even one security line at an airport. Traveling by plane used to be glamorous, or at least fun. Now it's just insulting drudgery. I'm not worried about safety - even after the recent scare - but being treated like dirt for that long and then being packed into a metal tube for several hours with a couple hundred total strangers just doesn't appeal to me.

Anyway, we do the trip, visit with two sets of in-laws, and return. We change drivers roughly every two hours, which makes it possible to go 800 or 900 miles in a day without too much trouble. That's how we can do the entire trip in just three days.

We get to see some really pretty country (Wyoming and eastern Utah come to mind) as well as some staggeringly boring terrain (most of Nebraska). We also see some oddities.

This trip we noted that drivers in central Iowa were the craziest, weaving and speeding like they couldn't die, and that was despite a string of wrecks all across the state after a recent snowstorm. We counted a dozen once we started, and we're certain we passed more than that before we started counting. I guess Iowans simply aren't worried about their personal safety.

But the award for the place where people speed the most still goes to Chicago. 70 MPH on a freeway posted at 55 will get you run over, even when it is snowing. There were fewer crazy drivers in our experience there than in Iowa, but it's clear that every car sold in Chicago comes with a brick on the accelerator pedal. Oddly, the Illinois police seem just fine with this and never seem to pull anyone over for "just" being 15 or 20 MPH over the limit. Go figure.

I have a few other observations that came from this trip as well. I'll post them in coming days.

This time, though, I'll leave you with a picture taken at 75 MPH on I80 in Utah's western salt flats. In places the surface water was frozen and rugged, and in others - like this one - it was almost mirror smooth.

I hope the holidays were good to you and yours, and may 2010 be better for us all than 2009 was.

Snow, Snow, Snow...

2009-12-26T14:02:00.000-08:00

Four inches at least here in the Chicago suburbs. Streets are a mess, still, and though the forecast said it was going to be only sporadic snow today, it's basically been continuous. Yet another example of the inability of anyone to predict the weather with any accuracy.

I hope whatever you're doing for the holidays you're comfortable and happy. Cheers!

Happy Holidays, Everyone!

2009-12-23T09:01:00.001-08:00

For those who don't know, I'm traveling this holiday season and thus not spending much time on the computer.

I wish you all the best, and I'll be back here with new posts in early January.

Take care!

Initial Experience with Google's Chrome Browser for Linux

2009-12-09T10:16:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I installed the first generally available beta release of the Chrome browser for Linux. Initially it seemed OK, and a friend asked for a review, so here it is. Sadly, however, I am back to using FireFox. Chrome isn't ready to displace FireFox yet. At least not for me. Maybe someday.

The issues I encountered include:

There is no "Open All in Tabs" option in the bookmark menus. This may just be something I do, but every morning I use:
Bookmarks | morning links | open all in tabs
to bring up at least a dozen web sites that I read while I wake up and get ready to face the day. I find it handy to have that ability, but that feature is not present on Chrome. For me, while this isn't a deal breaker, it does make it less likely I'll stay with the browser.
Java didn't work for me at installation. Javascript is fine, I think, but Java is dead. Chrome attempted to pull all of the configuration information from my FireFox installation, but apparently there is something about the Java config on my Linux machine (running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and FireFox 3.0.15) that it didn't understand or like. I posted this problem to the Google Chrome Help forum and so far the only response has been several other people saying they have the same issue. Maybe there is a fix for this, but if so I don't yet know it. For now, this is a serious issue.
This isn't a big deal, but there isn't as much control over fonts with Chrome as there is with FireFox. That's a blessing and a curse, of course. It's easy to screw up someone's CSS based website by telling FireFox that sites cannot override your font choices and/or selecting font sizes different from those the site expects, but I live with it and make use of it regularly. I could live with what Chrome offers, but it's an irritant.
I cannot yet tell if Chrome is actually faster or more stable than FireFox. My network connection isn't stellar, so delays are often the result of that rather than anything going on in the browser. Plus, one of the major speed ups is supposed to be the way it runs local scripts, but Java isn't working, so...
I cannot get Chrome to display PDF files in the browser. This is a significant problem, and once again FireFox handles it just fine. If a link points to a PDF file FireFox opens it up in Acrobat (which I installed myself a long time ago, and whose configuration Chrome should have imported). When this happens I get the Acrobat tool bar inside the browser window and can look at the document. Sadly, however, Chrome just downloads the PDF file and then stares at me. I was able to right click and save a copy of the PDF, but that's not as useful as viewing the document in the browser in many cases. For me, Chrome for Linux strikes out there. That said it's still a beta, and there might be something odd about my Linux install that keeps it from working out of the box. Still, this is a problem I cannot work around.
At least one site doesn't work with Chrome that I know of, and my testing is pretty limited in that regard so far. Now, I admit the site - a registration site for a non-profit I am affiliated with - is not setup to deal with FireFox all that well either, but it generates PDF files in some cases, and that breaks down as mentioned above. Beyond that, however, after encountering the PDF load failure I was unable to get Chrome to download the PDF for external viewing. It might have been user error, but it bugged me. I had to switch back to FireFox to check on something because of it.
Finally, they've done some odd things with a menu and the way new tabs are opened up. I think they've missed the UI boat as a result. First, the menu issue: in FireFox if I put the cursor over a link and right click the top two menu choices are "Open in a New Window" followed by "Open in a New Tab" in that order. Chrome reverses those menu options, so I was perpetually opening new windows with it when I meant to open new tabs. That's an irritation that I could get over, though. Yes, it's different, but yes, the most common option should be first. And I suspect most of us actually open more things in tabs than windows these days. With time I am sure it would become natural.

It's what happens when I actually manage to get a new tab to open, though, that bugs me. Say you're in FireFox and have 3 pages open, in tab1, tab2, and tab3. You're currently viewing tab2 and you open two more pages (in tab4 & tab5) via the right click, "open in new tab" menu option. When you're done you wind up with tabs arranged like this:

tab1 tab2* tab3 tab4 tab5

(Tab2 is starred because it is the current tab.) And that arrangement makes logical sense. New tabs open on the rightmost end of the list, and they open in the order I make it happen. If you do the exact same thing in Chrome for Linux, though, you get this arrangement:

tab1 tab2* tab5 tab4 tab3

In Chrome new tabs open immediately to the right of the tab containing the current page, and they shift all other tabs to the right in the process. That's just wrong, at least for me. My brain is (more or less) wired to think of things linearly. if I open tabs I expect them to appear in the order I open them, not the reverse of that order, and I expect to find them on the end of the list for easy access.

I'm afraid Google just got this one wrong. The FireFox behavior here is actually the right one. As with some of these other issues, though, it is something I could probably live with given time.

That's the list of issues so far, and it's enough to have moved me back to FireFox for the forseeable future. I'll look at later betas of Chrome and see if it improves, but for now I have to say there are a couple of serious issues and a number of nits that bug me. It's not worth changing.

Google gets a lot of things right in my view, but not with Chrome for Linux. At least not yet.

What To Do Next... What To Do?

2009-11-29T21:26:00.000-08:00

I am overwhelmed with choices these days, and I am hitting something that we used to call "vapor lock" in a co-worker back at my first job in 1986 or so. The inability to pick something and work on it leads to a lack of progress on everything.

The major tasks on my list include (but are not limited to):

Write a carving document that has been on my to-do list for months now.
Add a bunch of things to my personal web site.
Learn MySQL and php so I can do some interesting things with book review indexing and searching.
Carve stone.
Write fiction.
Learn Java so I can figure out how to write Android applications.

And, of course, on top of all that sits the overhead of life.

I am starting to think nothing major will get accomplished until the new year begins, if then. I wish it were otherwise.

Maybe the thing to do is spend a couple of hours on just one or two things each day. Have to try that. I certainly need to get something moving on all these fronts eventually.

I have to say it, though. Work provided a focal point that removed some of the decision making process. That may or may not be good in any given case, but it was real.

Transitions

2009-11-25T10:30:00.000-08:00

Last night as I drove to the stone carving class I teach I had a thought.

I've been unemployed for almost two weeks now, and I am noting some things about my own behavior and expecations that are interesting, at least to me. Conversation at the class expanded on the issues as well.

Four years ago, when I stopped working the first time, I transitioned out of my job carefully. I documented what I did for my co-workers extensively and handed off the tasking to others. In addition, the nature of my work was somewhat different then. While I worked on big, important systems with hundreds of thousands of users, I wasn't generally on call for support. At least not regularly. In a pinch I might get a call but I wasn't on the hot seat on a day to day basis.

During the last year things were different, and my exit was more abrupt.

This time I was working on systems that required more supervision and manual intervention. That meant I was on call - 24x7 - for problems that customers, support, or automated tools might find. In addition, every time I opened up my email I first looked for notifications about anything that might have gone wrong or that customers needed assistance with. Those always took priority and required fixing.

Living like that meant there was always a level of adrenaline in my bloodstream. Even now, just writing about it, I can feel it. Keeping the system working and the customers happy was, effectively, a constant, low level engagement of my fight or flight reflex. For the last year my body has been adjusting itself to that level of stress. Now I have to become adjusted to a much lower level of stress and that's taking longer than I'd like.

There are behavioral things that go with this change too. While working, my morning ritual was to get up, throw on some clothes, and check email to see what (if anything) needed work. If something needed attention it got it, before breakfast or a shower, and well before driving to the office. Correspondingly I'd check email several times a night while at home for the same reason, and deal with anything that came up then too.
Now, of course, there's no reason to check email that often, but I still do. Maybe that will change with time.

Last night, as I mentioned, those at my class pointed out other things that go with a high stress job, things that are missing now. The feeling of being needed and the status that goes with being the one others turn to, for example. And yes, I am vain enough to care about those things - just about all of us are - and their absence is another thing I have to adjust to.

It turns out that being RIFed is very different from quitting on your own. I know I've mentioned that before, but two weeks later the difference still looms large. I couldn't discuss my departure in advance with anyone at the office, of course, so there was no ability to plan and hand things off carefully, as I would have liked. That leaves me with guilt about what those who remain are dealing with, and a lack of resolution on my side.

I suspect this level of discomfort will go on for some time, no matter how much I wish I could get past it more quickly. Just about everyone who is let go from any job probably suffers similar issues. For me it only drives home the point that many companies should treat their employees a whole lot better than they do. Letting people go should be the very last resort. And if it really becomes neccessary, involving them in the process and giving them time to make the transition would be smarter for everyone involved.

At least, that's how it looks to me. I'd much rather have taken a couple of weeks at the office to hand off my work to others and make sure - as best I could - that they knew what they were getting into. Instead I was walked to the door because that was company policy. Not good. For me or the company. Oh well.

The Most Social Thing You Do...

2009-11-23T10:22:00.000-08:00

If you're like many people there is a high probability that the most social thing you do in any given day isn't something you expect. In fact, the thing that causes you to interact with the most people - potentially making them happy, upset, or angry, and in which they can have the same impacts on you - is something you think you do when you think you're entirely alone. Any ideas?

It's driving.

A typical commute to work involves interacting with hundreds of people through a set of mostly agreed upon rules, but with a faceless anonymity that lets everyone violate those rules without feeling the repercussions in the way they would if they did something similar in person.

How many of us willingly cut in front of others in line at the store? If we turn a corner and nearly walk into someone we apologize, right? Even if it isn't our fault. These habits help keep society working relatively smoothly. They reduce tension and lessen hostility.

But we all do stupid things while we're driving - both inadvertently and deliberately - with astounding regularity. And those actions affect others. Don't believe me? Just look at how others impact your driving. When was the last time you got through a commute and weren't frustrated by someone? Perhaps they were too slow or too fast, weaving in and around traffic, lane splitting on a motorcycle while traffic was moving at the speed limit, or just in your way while you were in a hurry. You get the idea. Almost every day I commuted to work I remarked to myself on someone doing something that annoyed me, and I know I'm not alone.

In truth I'm sure that some of the time I was equally annoying to others. I also was moving at the wrong speed for someone else's taste, and so on. Statistically it has to happen, and as a practical matter I know it did. How many times have you looked in your rear view mirror to find someone sitting just inches off your bumper, impatient to get around you? Regardless of whose fault it really is, you know they're blaming you.

So, the next time you're behind the wheel, think for a moment. Ask yourself if something you're doing - while you're "alone" in the car - is something you'd do in person, where you'd have to talk to others as a result. It's an interesting exercise.

That awareness won't fix conditions on the road, of course. We're all human after all, and we all do stupid things, but it may give you a bit more patience with others and let you arrive at your destination less stressed out.

Well, That Was a Week of Work

2009-11-21T20:00:00.000-08:00

Finally finished setting up my book review blog. All the ancient posts are there, they've been spell checked, re-read, some tweaked, some commented upon, and the infrastructure in blogger worked to my satisfaction.

At this point all I need are a few hundred thousand readers.

More to the point (for this blog, anyway) is that I have more time for other things now. Tomorrow I direct at a fencing tournament. Next week I will bathe dogs, something they will hate with a passion. And I can read again, instead of just working on creating a place to write about what I read.

Changing topics, next week will be the first time I see my former co-workers since I was let go. I'm already wondering how that will make me feel. I've got a certain amount of guilt about the entire situation there. I hope no one is holding anything against me.

Book Review Blog Is Up And Running

2009-11-15T22:13:00.000-08:00

Since sometime in 2005 I have been writing book reviews and posting them on the web. The location they've been posted has changed over time, but I've now decided to create a blog where those reviews will get posted as they happen. For various reasons it's simpler than what I had been doing.

If you'd like to check it out, the URL is: http://jrpbookreviews.blogspot.com. As of now I have all my reviews written in 2009 put into the blog. That caught me up on something that was way overdue since I went back to work. Reviews from 2005 - 2008 will appear over time.

Your feedback about the reviews and/or the site itself is encouraged and appreciated.

Note that I don't claim these are good reviews. They're just my thoughts about what I am reading, and I read a fair bit.

Thanks much for your interest!

Revamped Blog Format

2009-11-14T14:59:00.000-08:00

Just made some significant changes to the way this blog is displayed by blogger, but I hope they are mostly invisible to you.

If anyone has trouble reading this now, or thinks a change that is visible is a problem, please let me know. It looks OK on my browsers, but I run neither a Windows nor a Mac, so I represent a tiny fraction of the actual reading audience in terms of my technology choices.

You can send your comments directly to me via my personal website's contact page, or leave a reply here.

Thanks for any feedback!

So many little things change...

2009-11-14T09:50:00.000-08:00

One of my former coworkers said something like the following yesterday: "Changing all of my contacts from 'co-worker' to 'former co-worker' is a drag." He's right, but that's just the beginning.

There are so many little things that need revision when you change jobs. In my case it extends to odd things. I had all kinds of bookmarks in my web browser for work related sites. Those can go. I moved my websites from my employer to another hosting provider, which means all kinds of things change.

My morning rituals change too. Until Friday morning I got up and logged in to work to see if anything needed my attention immediately. Then I went off and got ready for work. It's very different now, of course.

None of these things is a big deal all by itself, but they add up to something that I can imagine being depressing. I'll be fine. I wanted out, in fact, but my exit was actually involuntary. (About 1/3rd of a very small staff that had already seen significant reductions in size through attrition was let go. The implications of that are ugly for those left behind.) Still, the fact that I was let go, rather than choosing to leave on my own, gives some things an odd twist.

In any case, Now when I sit down in front of the computer my tasking is very different. In a week or two it will all feel natural again, I'm sure, but it's still a bit off.

Endings and Beginnings

2009-11-13T11:22:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the company I worked for followed through on things that had been going on for a long time. From my perspective things started going down hill some months back, when we had two consultants come in to evaluate the organization. (Anyone else remember "The Bobs" from Office Space? Yes, it was something like that.) Others tell me strange things were going on before I even hired back in, but most didn't know or note them at the time.

In any case, yesterday I was let go. The technical term for this kind of job action is "Reduction In Force" (aka, a RIF). As I understand these things, there is a legal difference between a layoff and a RIF. In a layoff, the company is obligated to hire the employees back preferentially if their jobs become available. In a RIF the company has decided these jobs are being eliminated permanently, and as a result no one will be hired for a similar job for some period of time.

In my case, the company is clearly not going to be hiring more people like me for a long, long time. Probably never again, in fact. They're taking a hammer to the organization that was Concentric and sucking it into XO completely. Those of us who did Concentric specific things are on the chopping block, now and probably in the future, though (of course) no one in charge anywhere would say or admit that.

As a result of these events I begin a new part of my life today. A life once again without work, at least for now. I don't know how long that will last. I might have to (or even want to) go back again. I might do some contract work, or not. For the moment I am taking a wait and see attitude, and using the time to catch up on a lot of things that have been put off over the last year.

There will be some changes in this blog and more changes to my sculpture web site. There will be additional posts in the new art blog, and I think I'm going to start a third blog as a place to put my personal book reviews, since that'll be simpler than the way I am currently publishing them. I probably need to spend some serious time learning web design more than I now know it, and I have a web site to play with for my fencing club for that little effort.

On top of all of that there are lots of projects around the house that have been put off for months, and a lot of stone carving to do too. I want to do some fiction writing as well. Maybe some of that will make it's way onto the web if I like the results.

In all, I have no shortage of things to do, and now I have a lot more time to do them. I'll keep you updated on things here too, of course.

Many thanks to the support I have received from friends who already knew about the RIF. I am amazed at the support I get from all of you. It means a great deal to me.

And so, on with day one.

New ISP In Use...

2009-10-25T19:03:00.000-07:00

This is today's final blog post... I promise.

As mentioned a while back, I was moving my web site to a new ISP. That's done, and it seems to be working. In fact I've moved 3 sites to the new ISP. I'm not going to give the name away just yet since I don't honestly know if I will like them yet or not. If I do, I'll share that information here later. If not, I'll get to move again at some point. That'll be barrels of fun, let me tell you.

There are still a few back end nits on the website that aren't working, but nothing that should be visible to anyone reading this blog post. Still, if you find something out of place or that doesn't work please let me know.

Oh, wait. The contact form doesn't work yet, I'll bet. That's the first thing I need to fix. Whee.

Anyway, the website can be found at the old URL: http://www.bangtherockstogether.com/ or the new one: http://www.jrpstonecarver.com/. Either should take you to exactly the same content.

Thanks in advance for any bug reports!

I Don't Twitter Part II

2009-10-25T18:51:00.000-07:00

In a post from some time back (July 31, 2000, in fact) I said that I don't use (or much appreciate) Twitter. I got quite a few comments at the time, and a long response from Paul some time later.

Paul's points are well taken - you can read them here yourself - but I continue to be frustrated by both Facebook and Twitter. Of course discussing that frustration in a blog post probably isn't all that original. Or intelligent.

I'm still considering shutting down my Facebook account. The only reason I don't is that it does - as Paul suggests - keep me somewhat up to date on the lives of friends that I otherwise would lose touch with completely. That may be more important For Paul than me, being as he's separated from so many by an ocean. To me it's only something nice to have, not something critical to my life.

Some time back - after the July post that started this - I began using FB's new "lite" user interface: lite.facebook.com. It's not perfect but it has greatly reduced the distractions that come with the standard FB site. That's helped somewhat, and is probably the reason I haven't left Facebook for good. Time will tell if it's enough, or if they change it to enable the silly applications and things that only annoyed me. My take on FB is still evolving.

Twitter, however, has proven less useful to me every time I am exposed to it. Paul's comments on it are quite good, but let me give you a counter example. Today's Loma Fire near my home lead to some digging on the web for information. Some places had links to Twitter, and eventually I chased them, mostly to see if there was anything useful out there. Eventually I found the keyword #loma that seems to be related to tweets about the fire.

And what do you suppose I found there? Not much, actually. Chase the link to see it yourself, assuming it's still valid. It was mostly (lots of) repeats of information it was simpler to find in other places, like the official CalFire site and local news organizations. There were a few comments and a couple links to pictures too, but nothing all that useful or interesting. That said, about the sixth time I read "Problem: water and lunches are 3 hours late" though, I was starting to wonder.

In any case it turned out to be essentially useless, and this was a real time case where Twitter is supposed to stand out. It didn't.

Going back to my premise, if someone wants to pontificate about what they are eating or where they are traveling, etc. in a medium like Twitter or FB, I'm pretty sure I'd rather not know. If that same someone wants to make a cohesive narrative out of that part of their life, that's great. Such things are called many things: articles, blog posts, short stories, even books. A series of tweets, however, is not remotely cohesive, at least not to me, and without the context from one to another I feel as if I am watching a feature length film by viewing only every 10,000th frame.

So, for now, my opinion on Twitter stands: I don't get it, and I don't find it useful - or interesting - when I am exposed to it. Facebook may get a pass, or not. I reserve judgement for now, but only thanks to the new lite UI.

May your experiences be better.

Blog News...

2009-10-25T17:17:00.000-07:00

The next bit of news... I've got twins. Well, not really, but it sounded good.

What is going on is that I've decided to create a second blog. It will focus solely on my artwork (when I have any time to do any artwork) and related things. Anyone who's subscribed to The Powell Triangle (or just winds up here on occasion) specifically for news about art can now look here instead: http://jrpstonecarver.blogspot.com/. There you'll find whatever I have to say about art - my own (mostly) - as it comes up. It's still very much in its infancy - it's not even formatted properly yet, and my website doesn't even link to it at this point - but it is coming.

The Powell Triangle will continue in the same way it has, with me telling you about fires in my area, announcing weather events that seem out of place, spouting off half baked opinions about things political (and non-political), and generally chewing up disk space and Internet bandwidth to little or no gain.

You may want to revise your RSS subscriptions accordingly, depending on exactly what you do and do not want to hear from me.

Finally, both of these blogs have comments enabled but moderated. In the past it has been the case that I didn't moderate comments in this blog, but I've decided I should do so. It's not like I'm so popular that I get many spam comments, but it seems better to avoid them up front than to delete them after the fact. So now your comments have to be read and approved by me before they're posted. I apologize now for any delays and/or mistakes on my part in dealing with your input.

That's the blog news this time around. Thanks for your attention!

Another Fire Near My Home

2009-10-25T16:04:00.000-07:00

Despite over 13 inches of rain just a bit over a week ago, fire season is definitely not over. Very early this morning a fire broke out near the site of the Summit Fire that caused so much grief and damage last year.

As of this writing the fire is listed at 800 acres in size and either 0% or 5% contained, depending on the source you're reading. The local school just a mile or two north of us is being used as a helipad, so we've had a constant stream of helicopters landing and taking off there all afternoon.

Like last year, the fire is east of us by a few miles. Based on the smoke I can see, the prevailing winds are blowing south, also like last time. However, unlike last time, I've seen written reports that the first is moving west. If it is doing so it is moving slowly, and it's happening because of terrain, not wind. Still, west is towards us, and those reports have me slightly worried.

The bigger worry, though, is wind. I've got an email from the weather service saying the entire bay area is going under a high wind watch on Monday night. They're expecting northerly winds of some speed. That would not drive the fire towards our home, but it would be nasty for those in the path and those working the blaze.

In any case Anne and I are just fine at the moment, and we're keeping a careful eye on things. If I was responding with the VFD I'd probably be at the station, ready to respond to any other incidents that come up, though it is possible I'd be on the fire line itself. When the pager goes off at 3:30am you do what you're told, and I have no way of predicting exactly where I'd be.

For those wanting more information, the best sources of news I've found so far appear to be:

http://calfire.blogspot.com/

and

http://cdfdata.fire.ca.gov/incidents/incidents_details_info?incident_id=402

The former appears to be updated more often, but isn't official. The latter is definitely official, but only gets updated once or twice a day.

This one is called the Loma Fire. If I get any major news about it I'll share it here. Hopefully, though, things are under control relatively quickly and things get back to normal.

Several Posts Coming Today...

2009-10-25T16:01:00.000-07:00

Thanks to various events I have several things to write about. Each is going to go into its own separate post, so be prepared to read a few things over the next few hours. And thank you for doing so!

Nothing is simple...

2009-10-18T17:39:00.000-07:00

The title says it all.

I wanted to replace the filters in my reverse osmosis unit, but what I got from the store wasn't the right ones. Another trip back tomorrow.

And now I am going through moving my website to a new hosting service. So far it's going just fine, but I expect there will be a lot of rework as part of the move. Whee.

For the moment I am moving my blog back to to publishing directly on google, just to get make the migration to a new host easier. I might move it to my new host later, but then again maybe not.

In any event, you can be sure - since I am doing it - that nothing will go smoothly during all of this. Not much has gone smoothly at all lately, which partly explains why posts have been so few and far between here. Something will have to give at some point, but for now I just cover my head and try to hold on.

In the meantime, it's back to the old hosting provider where I will attempt to put redirects into place for my old blog so it can still be found by anyone searching for it. Then, once that is done, I can try moving the site to the new host.

Fun. Or something vaguely like it.

On Hold with Verizon Again...

2009-09-07T10:52:00.001-07:00

It's a holiday, but Verizon's phone system claims their billing department is open, or at least it's happy to let me sit on hold for 20 minutes waiting to talk to someone, I am rapidly coming to the conclusion, however, that no one is going to answer the call today.

All I wanted to do was ask an innocent question.

A couple of months ago I switched my cell phone service to T-Mobile (and, by the way, the couple of times I've called their customer service I've been very happy with the results). When I switched I reduced my land line charges as much as I could, even discontinuing long distance service with Verizon because I hate them so much.

Finally I got a bill that doesn't have all kinds of funky charges and credits on it as a result of the switch and I see this:

Interstate Subscriber Line Charge $6.50

Now, let's just pause and consider that for a moment. They're charging me $6.50 for the ability to call interstate, when I have disabled long distance calling? We don't live anywhere near another state, so there is no way for me to call one one my dime without long distance service, so why am I paying this charge?

Technically, yes, I can call toll free numbers and yes, technically those may be out of state, but someone else is paying for those calls, not me.

I think this is pretty weird, and I wanted to ask them about it. But now - after far too much awful hold music and no indication that anyone will ever answer - I have hung up. I will try again tomorrow, perhaps. A real work day, when maybe - just maybe - someone will actually answer.

There's a reason I left Verizon. Frankly, a couple of tin cans and some string would be just as reliable as they are in my area, and for data I'd get far more bandwidth on that setup than I would on their crappy phone lines. Their lousy charging schemes, awful customer service, and astounding inability to even answer their own phones are just icing on the cake. We only keep the land line because we need an alternative to the cell phones in an emergency. If we lived in town I wouldn't bother with one.

Maybe tomorrow I'll get somewhere with this. Anyone want to bet they cannot remove that charge from my bill? I'm guessing they will say it is "mandatory" or "government required". Any takers?

It's Fire Season Again...

2009-08-13T08:16:00.000-07:00

Major fire - 2000+ acres, or so I read this morning - over near the Lockheed plant in the Santa Cruz Mountains, west of highway 17. Evacuations, big smoke column, etc.

I found out about this late last night. It's not good.

No, I don't "Tweet"

2009-07-31T20:04:00.001-07:00

Here's another in a series of posts that will almost certainly offend some of my readers. I apologize up front, but I stand by my premise...

Yes, I am something of a Luddite, but that doesn't mean I'm completely nuts. Lately I am starting to think certain uses of technology are simply a bad idea. Consider:

Twitter
Facebook
Power Point in the school

All of these suffer from a single major issue: they encourage tiny thinking.

Yes, I know that Twitter has become a major news source, and yes that's a good thing. It may even be a democratizing influence, but all kinds of technologies with a few good uses suffer from huge drawbacks. I'm not going to make a list by way of example. If you can't come up with a few genies that did both harm and good when let out of the bottle you're not trying.

Put plainly, Twitter actively discourages complex thought. Far too many Americans can't string even a few words together. If the current generation grows up communicating in ultra compressed text snippets I really don't want to think about where we'll be. I am certain I won't like it though.

Facebook looked interesting to me after I started using it, and there are a lot of people I simply don't see that often. Our hectic lifestyles mean I'd never know what they are up to without Facebook or something like it. Lately, though, I've encountered something I don't like: people are mirroring their incomprehensible twitter feeds into their Facebook status updates.

Maybe I'd understand them if I did nothing but follow Twitter and/or their lives in depth, but I have a wife, a job, dogs to take care of, and things to to in the real world. Trying to understand these cryptic messages typed in on phone keyboards from the middle of nowhere isn't going down well with me. In truth I could probably ignore those - possibly by disabling the feeds from the guilty - but there's a related trend, and it's just as disturbing: short, pointless, repeated Facebook status messages.

How often do I need to know that someone is tired, or is going to bed? The minutia of daily life is just that: minutia. Tell me about the important things - or even the semi important things. Did you get a new job? A new house? Get engaged or divorced? Celebrating something important or had an epiphany of some sort? Great! Share away. Tell me about your kids, the things that made you whoop for joy or scream in despair. I'm fine with all that, and I will whoop or cry with you. I'll even do my best to support you when you're down. Just please don't use the vast resources of the Internet to tell me you're home from work.

Years ago I heard a story on the radio about a pathological diarist. He documented every little thing in his life: what he had for lunch, at what time, where he sat while he was eating it, what he was going to next (after updating his diary), and so on. As I recall he was in his 40s or 50s and his diary was many, many books, all full of hand written, pointless drivel about nothing. I pitied the guy, and I suspect that vast diary will be thrown in the trash when he dies. No one is going to care, and all that effort is wasted.

I feel somewhat similar about people I know telling me (and all their other Facebook friends) they had green beans with dinner. Part of what causes these kinds of status updates - besides most of us (myself included!) having nothing important, relevant, or useful to say the vast majority of the time - is that the silly status box is so small. Facebook doesn't limit you to a tiny comment like Twitter, but the interface encourages it, and recent design changes at Facebook indicate they're moving farther in that direction. Yet again a powerful tool is helping make all of us - or at least its users - less capable of complex thought.

I must admit I've posted pointless status updates myself many times, but I am trying to stop it now. Actively working at it. Feel free to tell me this blog post qualifies as the same kind of inane babble, but at least I am trying to address a complex topic - something I care about - and am doing so in whole paragraphs, with real thought behind them. (Or the closest analog to real thought I can achieve.)

The last item on my list - Power Point use in schools - is just as bad, and just as dangerous to the future. An entire generation is growing up thinking that the best possible communication path is animated bullet points that slide into place on a screen with sound effects. "The Panama Canal is in South America. Click! Ships go through it. Click! The US helped build it. Click! And that's my presentation. Can I get my 'A' now? No? But I wrote the right number of bullet points and I had pictures and everything!"

How many avid readers do you know? How many of them are kids?

What about writing? Does anyone you know write more than a hundred characters with regularity? Probably not.

Nothing encourages thoughtful, intelligent communication anymore, and the technologies listed here are radically changing the way we communicate whether we like it or not. I am not optimistic about the direction of that change.

Why I Left Verizon

2009-07-22T04:05:00.000-07:00

I love it. About a month ago we left Verizon Wireless for a series of reasons: cost, lousy handset choices, and what they do have are hacked to bits to keep you from using the good features.

Today I got an email asking me to take a survey about why we left.

So I tried it. "500 Server Error" on the first page. OK, I think. Their server must be down. I'll try later, because I really want to unload on these nitwits and tell them how much I hate what they do to their customers.

Can't sleep and am up at 3am. Time to try again. I Got 3 pages into the survey before I encountered the "500 Server Error" again.

So that's how incompetent Verizon is: they can't even run the web server that collects data about why their former customers left them.

I give up. They can go rot for all I care now.

2:45am, Dog, Skunk(?) and Limited Water

2009-07-18T09:43:00.000-07:00

Given that title you've probably anticipated things correctly.

Early this morning our very pretty - but not so bright - male, husky needed to go out. Given he'd forgotten to eat until we went bed at something after 11pm, this was no surprise. I let him out, but kept the spotted, barking dog in so she wouldn't wake up the entire mountain. That last detail turns out to have been a mistake. Had I let her out to bark at the world this might have all been avoided.

(Aside: what is it, do you think, that makes the phrase "not so bright male husky" repetitive? Is it that all huskies or all makes aren't all that smart? Clearly it can't be that all huskies are male, as I have actually seen a female husky. Anyway, back to our narrative...)

Leah - the spotted dog - was miffed. She wanted to get out there and make things move, but I stood my ground. Our neighbors really didn't need to be woken at that hour. A couple of minutes later I called Danno back in.

Immediately upon his entrance I knew something was off. He brought with him a foul odor of something... chemicals and burning hair, perhaps? It was definitely not the usual skunk scent, though in all honesty I don't know what else it could be.

Investigation left me at a loss. The dog smelled generally, but not in specific spots. It was like he'd been sprayed with an aerosol can from a distance instead of shot at with a spray bottle. Very odd.

In any case, he stunk. So, at 3am, I had to bathe an 85 pound husky who hates water. It actually went moderately well - he didn't even howl in protest - except that tonight was the time that the float switch that protects our water pressure pump decided to turn things off. Thankfully I figured that out before I started and installed a quick workaround. The bath helped remove much of the odor, but not all of it. (Again, this doesn't feel quite like normal skunk as a result. The skunk scent I am used to lingers forever, and - being oil based - is very difficult to remove.)

Right now I am washing the second load of sheets we keep on the floor of the bedroom to reduce tracked in dirt. There's a lingering odor in there that I have not yet been able to find and eliminate, but I'm trying.

To make matters worse, the predicted high temperature today is 97 degrees. Usually I'd turn on the air conditioning in such a case, but with the odor of skunk (or something) in the house, that seems like a bad idea.

The question of whether or not it really was a skunk is still open. Perhaps it was a juvenile, or had some strange medical condition that changed the scent. Another odd thing is that if you go outside right now there is no indication of where the skunk was. If it sprayed last night I'd expect to smell it even now, but I don't.

I have ordered a water delivery, of course. The well can't quite keep up after 2.5 years of drought. I sure hope we get a really rainy winter this year. It can't arrive too soon.

Anyway, there you have it. I've had an eventful night. Hope yours was better.

A Sad Day

2009-06-30T21:33:00.000-07:00

This week someone I work with announced his resignation and I'm not happy.

Over roughly 20 years in high tech and 4 years in college I've worked for several companies, and with some truly brilliant people. I hope none of those people will be offended when I say that no one I have ever worked with or known - anywhere - is as amazing as David Schairer.

The experience of working with David is unlike any other I have had. I once likened working with someone else to drinking from a fire hose. That individual was a source of amazing amounts of information in his field, but there was no ability to control the rate at which the information came out. He could do his job well, but teaching was not something you wanted him to try.

David is entirely different.

First, he's a true polymath, astoundingly well versed in a huge number of topics, ranging all over the technical map and going beyond into classics, languages - both modern and ancient - and vast realms between. British naval history, whiskey, oddball web comics, and any number of other things are stored in his head. In depth. Every conversation with David is a new window on the world, full of twists and turns, unexpected connections, and an amazing variety of facts.

Beyond that, David has the ability to read others and throttle back if he's overwhelming those he's talking with. Truth be told he doesn't always do so - he's so far beyond most of us that it's hard for him to slow down - but he can present just about any information in clear and concise ways, keeping it interesting, lively and relevant. He can entertain, enthrall and teach all at the same time. This ability makes him an powerful mentor, even if he's not thinking of himself in that role at a given moment.

Of course there are some things that David doesn't know, and when those come up he's honest and says so. It doesn't stop him from contributing to a discussion, but you always know where he stands. This particular trait is related to - and probably springs from - an underlying honesty I find particularly appealing.

Another of David's abilities is idea generation. Present him with a problem - "How do we do X?" - and he will supply multiple approaches before anyone else has come to grips with the problem. His ability to see solutions to the kinds of issues we encounter is second to none.

On a personal level, David has been someone I can ask questions of at work - almost regardless of the topic - for my entire time at Concentric. He's one of a core of supremely gifted individuals that make working here so interesting, and who keep me on my toes all the time.

Now, I'm sad to say, David has decided to move on. My job will not be the same, and we who remain will miss him, both professionally and personally.

There are still brilliant people here. That was one of the attractions of Concentric, and why I came back here when I returned to work, but David's departure will leave a gaping hole to fill, and it will not be easy.

I look forward to following David's exploits in the future. And if it should come to pass that I can work with him again, I will be thrilled. He's one of a group that created a level of personal loyalty and intellectual challenge that I have never found anywhere else.

All the best in your future endeavors, David. I'll miss you.

New Tech

2009-06-24T21:36:00.000-07:00

So just days before HTC introduces 2 new Android based cell phones we bought new G1 phones from T-Mobile. So far we're very pleased even if we missed the latest and greatest.

I love the integration with gmail, google calendar, and google contacts. It means I don't have to back anything up and I can see my wife's calendar without any effort at all. That's really good. The built in web browser is perfect for the inevitable lookup of something while out somewhere and away from a "real computer".

In addition, though, the phones just seem to work, with nice features - particularly once the 1.5 version of the firmware got installed. They integrate well with all kinds of networks including our home wi-fi.

Some of you will know that I have no love of Apple or Microsoft. With the G1 I get a nice alternative that lets me do what we want, and which gives us an excellent user experience to boot.

Sorry if this post comes across as an ad. I'm just happy to finally have something that lets me carry my address book, calendar, and what-not in a single device that simply works. I used to be able to do this with a Palm Treo, but this puts those old Palms to shame.

The new Palm Pre looked nice, but for me the keyboard was too small and the Sprint sales guys weren't hungry enough. The G1 had a nicer keyboard and an great UI too.

Anyone considering taking the smart phone plunge should at least consider the G1. I can't claim it will change your life, but it could, and it's awfully nice in any case.

On Old Dogs

2009-06-14T09:26:00.001-07:00

I just read a lovely article about old dogs that should be shared. Please read it.

To those words can add only one thought. Weingarten mentions people who "seem unmoved by the deaths of tens of thousands through war or natural disaster will nonetheless grieve inconsolably over the loss of the family dog." He goes on to suggest a reason for this seemingly odd behavior. And I agree with him, but I want to add a second reason.

We all do this to some degree, though not necessarily over the family pet. The loss of someone close to us - a spouse or child, a close friend or relative - affects us much more than the deaths of those farther away. It's simple human nature, and those of us who are close to our dogs have simply included them in the circle of companions we'll miss more intensely when they're gone.

I've got some familiarity with old dogs, and they often have a certain accepting dignity about them. I hope I can show some of that as I age.

Fire Department BBQ

2009-06-05T19:28:00.000-07:00

I honestly don't know how many readers this blog has but it's already proven to be more than I expected, so I'm going to take a moment and plug a generic cause that I believe in.

Until a couple of months ago I was an active member of my local volunteer fire department. Right now I'm on leave, but that's beside the point. I joined the department - and support it still - because what it does is incredibly important.

While I was responding I went to innumerable vehicle accidents and on many medical aid calls. Those were the day-to-day events we saw. Less frequently we went looking for smoke or fire when someone thought something was out of place and called 911. Sometimes we found fire and did the arduous work of putting it out. A few of those fires were in houses or garages, more were outdoors - wildland fires. Most were small but every single one had the potential to get away. One finally did last year, before anyone even knew it had started: the Summit Fire, the event that prompted me to start this blog in the first place.

I don't tell you this to brag - in truth I was a small part of a team, and nothing I did by itself was of particular consequence - but instead to show you the nature of things that your fire fighters do, every day, for you.

I know that many places - in the US at least - have paid fire fighters, and I appreciate them. I worked with paid professionals all the time, and loved doing so. But here in California - with the budget woes and financial crisis - volunteer fire fighters save our counties money as they save lives and property. They give back to the community every single day in ways large and small, and they deserve your support. Who else do you know that gives their time, money and effort to make you and your neighbors safer, occasionally risking their lives in the process?

On Sunday, June 7th, my local volunteer fire department is hosting its annual BBQ fundraiser. it's the only fund raising activity we do, and the proceeds help fund the department for another year, buy equipment, hire trainers, and so on. Yes, we get county funding too, but money in our accounts stays in our community, and it directly helps you, the residents.

If you live in the Summit area and are served by Loma Prieta Volunteer Fire and Rescue, please come join us on Sunday, July 7th, at the gazebo on Summit Road for lunch, a chance to meet your fire fighters, see the equipment they use, and thank them for their service. I'll be there somewhere, helping keep people fed and happy.

If you don't live in my area, you may have a volunteer fire department where you live, and they will, no doubt, have fundraising activities. Please support them. Their work is important and you're better off for their efforts.

This is a cause I really believe in. Your volunteer fire department might save your life someday, but I am certain they are working to make you, your family, and your friends safer every day.

Thanks for reading this. I hope you can support your local volunteers.

An art related post. No, really!

2009-05-30T17:48:00.000-07:00

Last weekend found me installing and unveiling a garden sculpture for Jenny Yamate. This piece has a great history. At the art show we did last Fall at Jenny's gym I had another pumice sculpture that sold to one of her clients. But before it left it was at the gym for some time and Jenny got attached to it.

Well, a bunch of her clients got together and commissioned another stone from me to go where the first one had been.

I had the raw materials already, and needed only the time. Going back to work made things slip, but the piece was done something like two months ago. In an interesting twist, this piece got it's name - Flexibility - before it was even complete. Usually I wait until it's done to name something, but this one clearly had a name right away.

Jenny wanted to have a party for the unveiling, so we did that last weekend. I had a great time, and I hope everyone else did too. Big thanks to everyone who helped make this possible, and to Jenny for being both patient and appreciative!

Here are a couple of pictures courtesy of Neil Wiley, Mountain Network News. That's me and Jenny in the first one.

Politics Again. Sure to Upset Everyone Somehow.

2009-05-27T10:39:00.000-07:00

This morning as I was leaving for work the phone rang. I picked up only to hear a robo-call from some (I assume) right wing lunatic asking me if I was aware of the tea parties and "what was happening with our government." It closed by asking me to "pay attention."

Well, I have been paying attention. There are many things going on at both the state and federal level, and I have opinions about some of them. Mostly I'm disgusted.

At the state level the recent news is the CA supreme court upholding Prop 8. I've seen blog posts and Facebook status updates from people - including friends - on both sides of this issue, and I'm afraid I have to come down on the side against prop 8. Strongly. I know this may upset some of my friends and coworkers, but here's the thing. I know several gay couples, and marriage - real marriage, with all the attendant rights and responsibilities - matters to them. And you know what? They deserve it.

These people are just as much a part of America as any other citizen, and they are - or should be - the equals of any of us. But no, they're not. Not here in California. Instead of equality we get a slim majority voting away the rights of a minority, and that is appalling. This nation's founding fathers were afraid of the tyranny of the majority, and here we have a textbook example of the principle, in one of the (supposedly) most progressive states in the union.

Here's a thought: next time around let's modify the constitution so that left handed people can't get married. It's a nice narrow subclass - much like gays & lesbians - so the supreme court should have no problem upholding that too. And then, the election after that, we'll stop bald people from getting married. Don't want them to raise children. And then brown eyed people, after all, you can't trust people with brown eyes. And after that? Jews? Non-whites? Gee, for some reason this is starting to sound familiar.

There is no threat to anyone in gay marriage. All prop 8 does is legalize discrimination. So much for the land of the free.

And as if that wasn't bad enough the state's economy continues to crumble. There isn't enough money to go around and there aren't any places to cut without hurting people - a lot of people. California has been ungovernable for a long time and it's only going to get worse in the coming years. I am not optimistic, but I don't know what to do about it. Moving - thanks to our jobs and the roots we've put down in the community - is not an option we like thinking about. I suppose it could come to that, though.

On the federal level - which is what this morning's stupid robo-call was about, I guess - the picture is slightly more mixed. President Obama has changed a number of policies from the Bush administration for the better, and I appreciate that. Even better, the Republicans are being forced to call themselves a "regional party" now, and their falling support is something I can only call a "good thing."

On the other hand I'm not so sure I like the government owning large chunks of major banks and auto manufacturers, but that might have been inevitable. Or not. The bailout is an enormously complicated thing and I can see arguments on all sides of it. I can even appreciate and agree with many of them, and I have to admit that I don't know what the "correct" solution is, or if there even is such a thing.

What disturbs me is we're starting to hear that the Obama administration is doing some things in the way that the Bush administration did. In the most recent example I know of, they are essentially following a Bush administration policy of denying that the list of visitors to the White House is public knowledge.

Excuse me? Didn't we have screaming lawsuits about this when Cheney didn't want to release his list of visitors while he was setting up his "energy policy"? And don't I recall Obama saying he was going to do things differently, starting with a reversal of the "don't disclose it if you don't have to" crap that the Bush administration was doing? They were going to be more open, or so we were told.

Well, it appears the Obama administration isn't quite living up to it's own ideals in all cases. But then again we knew that already, didn't we? We were told "no lobbyists", but there were all those exceptions for key positions. And then there were all the appointments of people who had "tax issues" discovered only after their selections were announced.

How completely unsurprising. People in power abuse that power, regardless of their party affiliation. We saw it - in spades - in the Bush administration and now we're starting to see it in the current crop of politicians as well.

The Obama administration may be more to my liking - on any number of fronts - but they're still politicians, and we should all know what that means by now. Cynicism, I'm sad to say, is the only defensible position when it comes to politics.

And with that I've probably alienated the last three friends I had. That's a shame, but I have this honesty problem...

I'm About Not To Vote...

2009-05-18T21:51:00.000-07:00

I think this will be the first time I haven't gone to the polls since moving to California.

I kind of hate myself for not voting, but I've got my reasons.

First of all I live in something of a media vacuum, and so the dire predictions of disaster if the various things on this special election fail have only slowly been getting to me. This has been made worse by my local NPR station - which has been in pledge hell for the last 1.5 weeks, which means I turn it off immediately after hearing it - so I'm less informed than usual.

But beyond that, I'm truly of mixed mind about the mess we're in.

I may be the only person in the state who think the legislators aren't responsible for this mess. No, we, the citizens are, and I can sum up why quite simply:

We hate paying taxes
We don't want to give up services
We keep tying our legislator's hands with rules and initiatives
We require that every decision of consequence be encoded in the constitution and therefore go before the people for a vote

That set of choices - and they are (or were) choices - leads to disaster every time.

So here we sit staring at a huge budget deficit. If we pass these silly measures it's going to be bad. If we don't pass them it's going to be worse.

Some claim the measures were all written at the last minute with no review. Maybe true. Some claim we'll be letting child rapists out of prison if we don't pass them. Also possibly true.

All I know is that I'm sick of the games. If we haven't got the money to pay for things there are only a few valid choices:

Pay for less
Pay less for what you get
Get more money to pay for what you need

That's it, people. Nothing else is sustainable in the long term. Either you spend less in some way or bring in more money. It really, really, (REALLY!) is that simple.

From my - admittedly too brief thanks to work - review, every last one of these measures is a shell game. We're moving money from one year to the next or borrowing now and will have to pay it back later (with interest), or something similar. Frankly it's crap.

It is basically impossible to look at any one state program and say "that's a waste of money." It's possible I feel that way about some programs, but others will always legitimately disagree. I assure you that no one ever said "here's a really stupid way to spend the state's money!" and then we all voted for it. No, it never happens that way. The expenses are all good in and of themselves. There may be some unintended consequences of these things, but actual fraud of intent at the creation of a given law or bill is exceptionally rare.

And of course no one ever wants to admit that they get any value for their tax dollar. "I pay too much in taxes" is all I hear - from everyone, nominally on the left or the right. And then the complaints follow. "Have you noticed the roads? They stink! So many potholes! And my kid's teacher has 43 students in her 4th grade classroom. And my friend just lost his unemployment benefits because he still can't find a job. What kind of system lets those things happen? They must be wasting all our money somewhere." Oh the irony of it all.

In any case we're stuck with it. The economy sucks, people are hurting, and we're being dragged back to the polls to vote on a series of measures that are so complicated no one can predict what they will mean for the budget just a couple of years from now.

Well, I've had it. I am no expert at this, and I can't make informed decisions about it, and for that reason I am not going to vote tomorrow. Part of me wants to avoid damage to the system, but part of me also wants the state to see some shock therapy.

That said, the people that really, really need to get zapped are the voters. The initiative process has gotten entirely out of hand and we've handcuffed our legislators at every turn. They have no money to play with, people. X% for K-14 education (prop 98, right?). No, you can't raise property taxes (prop 13). Y% for roads (some other proposition that was approved a few years back). And so on.

We, collectively, deserve everything that goes wrong as a result of this budget crisis. A smarter electorate would have given their legislators the tools to solve the problem and let them do it, not actively prevented it.

The next few years are going to be ugly. There will be fewer police, fire fighters, teachers, and so on. Taxes will be high and services will be low. The standard of living is going to go down.

Maybe that's necessary, though. Maybe - just maybe - if we all suffer enough someone will start telling people the truth: this is our fault, people. Get it through your thick skulls. We need to spend less or take in more money. Anything else just causes the kind of issues we're seeing now.

Happy suffering.

A Conversation You Don't Want To Have

2009-05-17T23:21:00.000-07:00

Paraphrased a bit, but more or less accurate, and the gist is definitely real:

Hey Jeff.

Hey Name.

You have a pickup, right?

Yeah.

Any chance I could borrow it?

Uh, sure, but when? I've got some commitments and...

This afternoon?

Well, I'm using it right now, but maybe when I am done. What's up?

I've gotta pack up all my stuff and get it into storage.

You're moving?

Yeah, but I don't know where I'm going yet.

I am not making this up. Someone I know is moving out - with no place to go - thanks to the economy and the loss of a job some time ago.

I'm hearing noise about how things may be bottoming out. I sure hope so. This sort of thing is getting really depressing.

A rough time...

2009-05-10T19:18:00.000-07:00

Yes, I've been away for a while again. Sorry about that.

Have you ever had to interrupt some one's vacation to give them awful news? When they were travelling? In another country? With a nine hour time difference? Well, I hadn't either until just a couple of weeks ago.

My other grandmother died. It's been a hard year for my family on that front, as that makes two.

The first to die, however, had been in poor health for some time and it was mostly a relief to have it finally end. This one, though, was another matter entirely. A completely unexpected event in a woman of reasonable health for her age of 90. And her son - my father - was travelling in Europe with my mom when things started to go bad.

They managed to talk to her on the phone before she died, but they couldn't get back fast enough. Aortic dissection can do that, and it's actually pretty good they talked to her at all.

I found myself travelling as a result, assisting with funeral arrangements, helping clean out her apartment, and so on. Not a fun way to spend a week, but necessary.

I cannot claim that's the only reason I haven't written here lately. There are other factors.

First and foremost it seems that all I do these days is work or come home so tired I have no energy left for anything else. As a programmer you know it isn't physical exhaustion that's the problem, but rather mental stress. I wish I could write about that, but I can't. It's enough to know that it's a job and the checks still clear.

In addition there aren't many mundane things to write about lately. The overhead of life rarely makes for good blog posts. The few interesting things that happen tend to wind up in Facebook lately. Of course that's a totally different format. Assuming you're someone I know - and why else would you be reading this? - if you're also Facebook user and we haven't "friended" (I hate that word) each other yet, please do so.

One bit of recent news is that I am embarking on a writing project with some of my stone carving students to document what we teach in our classes. This will wind up online one of these days, and there are at least two of us working on it, so maybe we'll keep each other going and it will actually get finished.

If there's something you think I should be writing about, please let me know. I know I still owe the next post in the water saga, and I will get to it one of these days. But other than that suggestions are welcome.

Geeze... gone nearly a month

2009-04-12T09:01:00.000-07:00

Sorry folks. I've been busy with life for the last few weeks and, unfortunately, it's that part of life that doesn't get blogged about. It seems unlikely anyone reading this will want to know about my doing laundry or mowing the yard (well, that might be worth mentioning, actually), and the actual contents of my work life are off limits these days for various reasons.

In general, we (Anne and I) are just fine. We got our income tax rebate checks, had dinner guests over one night, and continue to get by. It's just that there hasn't been much excitement lately. I can't even get that worked up about anything political right now. It appears (based on news.google.com) the most exciting political story this weekend is that the Obamas are getting a Portuguese Water Dog. Oh joy. Can't we, as a country, worry about something else?

I guess it's finally OK for me to mention one significant thing: I've had to withdraw from the volunteer fire department. Technically I'm on a 6 month leave of absence, but unfortunately I'd guess the odds of going back within that time are really small. I don't know if the chief has announced this yet - probably not, as he's even busier than I am - but I don't think anyone from the department reads this. (If you do, please let me know, OK?)

I left because I simply couldn't make the time - mentally - to both work and be a VFD member. The time required isn't that large, but the simple fact is that I wasn't going on calls since going back to work. It seemed more than a bit silly of me to stay on the department without actually going on calls, so I did the honest thing and said so. The six month leave is at the request of the chief, who says if I can come back in that time there's nothing lost. We'll see, but as I say it seems unlikely. They way I am wired, work takes over on just about every front.

I suppose I should mention that we got through the great ATT cable cut of 2009 without much issue. Our Sprint EVDO connection went down, but amazingly Surfnet stayed up. Both are working now, though the Surfnet connection still only "works" in the most generous sense of the word possible. They claim they're installing new equipment to help improve things for us, but we see no change yet. Oh well.

There. One big bit of (not so happy) news and the rest is trivia. That's all I've got to show since the last post. Sorry.

Living With New Glasses

2009-03-22T18:34:00.000-07:00

This is an interesting change in my life. I've had reading glasses before - that I used when working on computers, mostly - but not glasses that I've worn all the time. Making the adjustment is not as simple as I'd like.

I was told that these new glasses would make driving at night easier, and - so far - perhaps they do reduce eye strain from oncoming headlights, but they also give me lots of "spikes" from bright point sources that I find irritating.

Certain lighting conditions seem to result in light bouncing off the edges of the lenses and give things a slightly foggy look, too. I noted this most strongly while watching a concert last night. Depending on the angle I held my head at, the light off the stage caused the issue. But, of course, looking at the lenses directly against a uniformly colored background shows they are perfectly clear.

Condensation and rain clearly don't mix well with glasses either, and I've already experienced both of those, though not to any huge degree yet.

The most irritating thing, though, as to be learning to turn my head instead of just moving my eyes. The "sweet spot" with these lenses isn't always in the right place, particularly when I am reading. I find that I have to adjust the position of the book because my head can't comfortably point any farther down.

It's while reading that I am doing most of my experiments with what is and isn't in focus, and I'm wondering a little bit about that too. Sometimes, while reading I think that one eye - generally the left - is in focus, while the other is slightly out of whack. I move things around - head, eyes, reading material - and play games. (Close one eye, bring the reading material into focus with the open eye by moving reading material and/or head around. Switch to the other eye being open and see if things are in focus for it, doing the best I can not to move during the process.) I wish I had something conclusive on this issue, but I don't yet. Just an odd feeling that things might not be quite right, but it could just as easily be that I'm not yet adjusted to how to hold my head while using these new glasses.

I'm sure I'll work this out eventually, but it gives me new appreciation for the difficulties of full time lens wearers.

New Glasses

2009-03-19T19:42:00.000-07:00

I'm getting old.

New glasses.

And not just any new glasses, but bifocals. (Well, technically, they aren't bifocals - they're progressive lenses.)

These are going to to take some getting used to.

On The Stupidity of Employer Provided Healthcare

2009-03-08T14:59:00.000-07:00

Time for a rant. Sorry.

I've been hearing and reading a lot of crap lately. All kinds of people are up in arms about the fact that Obama wants to do something about health care. There's all kinds of FUD being spread around as a result. I'm no health care expert and I would never claim to be one, but I do have an opinion or two, and a couple of facts to state:

1) I personally know too many people who don't have and cannot afford health insurance. I'm not talking about bums living under overpasses either, but good, hard working people - some with jobs, some who've lost jobs in the economic crash. And if a working software engineer is seeing these problems regularly, they're going to be a lot worse among people whose incomes are lower.

2) Getting health coverage through one's employer is stupid. Even in the best of cases it means that things can change in nasty ways during a job change, but much worse is possible. Lose your job, lose your insurance. Have a serious medical condition requiring ongoing treatment? Too bad. Got a family that depends on you? Too bad for them too. If it really was the case that everyone who lost his or her job deserved to lose it you might make an argument in favor of this turn of events, but I think you'd lose it when others - dependants of one sort or another - are considered.

3) A lot of vitriol is thrown around about the government being a lousy solution. How it is inefficient or corrupt. But no one ever stops and says "compared to what?" Recent events in the financial system - multiple ponzi schemes and billions of dollars lot - should be enough to make everyone take a step back and realize that there is no group of people that isn't subject to corruption and the effects of greed. Not one. The government is no worse than any business in this regard, and (in fact) it might be better, since much of our government is supposed to be open and accountable. The same cannot be said for the innards of most corporations.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I have a solution for health care in mind. I don't even know to what extent the government should be involved. In truth, I haven't a clue what a real solution will look like, but I do know that anything that continues to tie health care to employment is a problem. I've also come to the conclusion that insurance as we currently do it is a bad idea. Insurance companies are supposed to spread risk around. Everyone pays a little in and the company pays out when people experience the insured risk. But if they limit themselves to only insuring those at little or no risk, they aren't performing the service for which they were created and have instead become money making machines. In the process those who cannot get coverage are hurt. I find that unconscionable.

It may be un-American, but I actually think we get something for our taxes. Things like roads, courts, national defense, police, fire & EMS services, environmental protection, and (when it works) regulation to keep the most greedy among us from taking advantage of everyone else. My list is a good deal too short, but you get the idea. My taxes get me something in return. The life I lead is better because I pay them.

Specifically on health care, I would love to see a day when someone who is sick or injured doesn't face death, bankruptcy, or poor quality treatment for lack of money. To be honest, I'm willing to see my own taxes go up to make that happen. I've seen enough people worry about whether or not to go to a doctor or hospital already in my short life. That is not a choice anyone should have to make for financial reasons. Ever.

To this day I think a society can best be judged by how it treats the least fortunate among its members. On that front the US stinks. It needs to be fixed.

Something Complicated Actually Worked!

2009-03-01T14:02:00.000-08:00

I've been so busy lately I haven't been posting much. I apologize to each of my three readers for leaving them in suspense too often.

Today I get to report on a bit of good technology news. As you may know, my recent luck with tech - particularly computers - has not been stellar, but just this once I have something to share that seems to be OK.

My ISP - a no name outfit that does wireless connections here the in the Santa Cruz Mountains where Verizon and cable companies dare not provide reasonable service - has been giving me fits lately. The connection has been poor at best, and sometimes didn't work at all. They've been out for a couple of visits (one of which they've billed me for, which I will be complaining about to them soon) but in the end had to admit that they were simply unable to get me a reasonable signal. Not good.

In desperation I've searched for alternatives, and finally settled on something that seems to work. It's not lightning fast, but it works. It's an EVDO connection provided by Sprint in my case, though others can get something similar from Verizon.

I ordered an EVDO modem from Verizon and a Kyocera KR2 EVDO router. The modem arrived on Friday and I began playing with it. There, I appeared to hit a wall. Initializing it required a Windows machine which I lack. Thankfully I managed borrow one from a friend and did the initialization there. Once done, I could simply plug the EVDO modem into my Ubuntu 8.10 system and connect to the network from the network connection tool. It just worked. Amazing.

Even more amazing was the fact that the router arrived before I visited the friend who loaned me the Windows machine. Once I had initialized the modem and tested it in my Ubuntu 8.10 laptop, I removed the KR2 from the box, plugged the USB modem into it, connected the router to the laptop, and plugged in the router's power supply. Once everyone's POST had completed and the EVDO modem had said "hello" again to Sprint, I was back online, this time through the router, which also acts as a WiFi hotspot.

In other words, except for the silly requirement that my EVDO modem be initialized under Windows (or a Mac), it all just worked. Perfectly. First time.

That never happens.

So now I get to do some speed testing with it and see how it actually performs. So far we know it is an acceptable alternative, but we've done no optimization about placing the modem, etc. I may also need to add an external antenna to increase the bandwidth, but I'll learn that with time.

Right now what I have is something we can use when my regular ISP's connection isn't working properly. And if we can live with the data rate and the 5GB/month cap, I may be able to say good-bye to my old ISP permanently. Give me a couple of months to figure all of that out. I promise to report on it here eventually.

How Much Rain?

2009-02-24T08:56:00.000-08:00

As many of my readers know, California is in the midst of a three year long drought. Between that and recent economics and politics, it appears to me that everyone is about to die of a massive heart attack. So I thought I'd keep this post light.

This morning we clawed our way to 33" of rainfall so far for the rainy season, which runs from July 1 through June 30 out here. 33" may sound like a lot to some of you, but it's not. If we have no more rain it would be our fourth lowest rain year on record since we moved in back in 1992.

Anyway, as I was writing the numbers down this morning I realized that the only place we have a record of them is on a beat up 3x5 card held to the fridge door with a magnet. That seemed kind of silly. So I put them into a spreadsheet, and actually figured out what the average rainfall in our area has been for 1992 - 2008: 49.59" at our home rain gauge.

So, as you can see, 33" is still well below average, and given we're near the end of February already it's going to be hard to get back to average before the season ends.

Anyway, here are the actual numbers:

1992-1993: 45.75"
1993-1994: 28.80"
1994-1995: 74.50"
1995-1996: 53.55"
1996-1997: 54.70"
1997-1998: 74.70"
1998-1999: 40.85"
1999-2000: 52.70"
2000-2001: 38.85"
2001-2002: 48.95"
2002-2003: 50.80"
2003-2004: 38.80"
2004-2005: 63.00"
2005-2006: 67.80"
2006-2007: 25.35"
2007-2008: 34.35"

May you stay out of drought wherever you live.

Mountain Living - Water Part XI

2009-02-19T22:21:00.000-08:00

Another in the ongoing saga of our water woes...

Now we have a 5000 gallon tank full of mud.

Well, that's a bit hyperbolic, but still somewhat factual. The other day I noted that the water in the dog's dish was slightly brown. Wondering about that I did some research and discovered that all the water in the house was that color except what comes from the RO unit.

So I wandered out to the water tanks to see if anything was up out there. Oh yeah. Suspended silt in the water. Probably the result of two years of drought and then finally getting some water into the water table this year. Cruft is getting dislodged and washed out into our well. Fun!

Eventually I think it will settle out, but it will take time. And in the meantime it's ugly. I backwashed the filters and things are better now, but it's not pretty out there.

Once again I repeat for those who hate city water: you have no idea how good you've got it. Just pay your bill and quit complaining.

At the moment I am waiting for referral information on how to build my own sand based turbidity filter that might help with this (and other) water quality problems. We'll see if that ever shows up or not. And in the meantime I'll keep asking the oracle.

I hate computers...

2009-02-08T15:59:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's true, I despise computers, despite having programmed them for nearly 20 years and continuing to earn a living from the silly things.

I have a nice big rant building up inside me about how Linux is only the lesser evil among a selection of evils ranging all over the map in power and degree of vileness (is that even a word?), but for now, let's just say I hate computers in general. Every beeping one of them.

Why, you ask?

I've been trying to setup a new computer for 2 days now. Not much luck.

Oh, it runs, sort of. But I can't get the device driver for my graphics card to work, and the sound drivers completely fail too. But my OS is from April of 2008, so clearly it's just too old. The proprietary video driver is only supported by the latest version, and it appears that version may have better support for the open source driver too.

So far today the only thing that has gone right on the computer is this: I managed to replace the busted keyboard in my laptop with one that works. The stupid little trackpoint thing was causing the mouse cursor to move whenever I typed on the keyboard, and since I use focus-follows-mouse, that was a bit of a problem. Plus, once it started moving it was sometimes 30 seconds or so before it stopped being wedged in a corner of the display. Very irritating.

So at least that's working again, which is an improvement. It's actually possible to use it as a laptop again.

So, while I continue waiting for Surfnet's lousy network (don't get started... don't get started...) to download an ISO image of the latest Linux version - in the desperate hope it will deal with the video and sound options in my new computer a bit better, even though it will have bugs too, some of which I am already familiar with from other installations - I am going to go do something much less painful: tax preparation.

That should give you some idea of just how screwed up my weekend has been thanks to these infernal "labor saving" devices.

Mountain Living - Water Part X

2009-02-03T15:26:00.001-08:00

This isn't the water related post I expected it would be.

As those following the water saga know, we've been buying water lately as the production from the well has tapered off. Not fun, but necessary.

Well, sometime in the last week or two, that changed. The tanks are now full. On their own. I just talked to my wife who told me that they are "full, full", not just "full". Interesting.

This sort of thing has happened in the past thanks to minor earthquakes which - I think - break up the silt and calcification that clog up the paths the water takes to get into the well. But we haven't had any quakes I know of in our area recently. A few 4.x sized things down near Hollister and Gilroy, maybe, but nothing in our neck of the woods.

Perhaps some of our highly limited rain has finally made its way into the water table, and thus is now available as water in our well. Who knows.

In any event it appears we won't have to buy more water for a while. Go figure.

On The Nature Of Commitments

2009-02-01T09:27:00.000-08:00

I've been pondering commitments lately. I haven't had an epiphany, but I thought I might ramble about them a bit and see if anything interesting falls out.

My thinking about commitments is caused by the fact that I find myself shedding them right and left since I went back to work. There aren't enough hours in any given day to let me do now what I did when I wasn't working. Of course, I didn't manage to keep all my commitments then, either. I did better, though.

Commitments seem to come in a few forms, for me at least. This list may not be exhaustive, but it includes:

Unbreakable commitments made to others. These are rare: wedding vows, deathbed promises and the like. And clearly what is unbreakable for some isn't inviolate for others.

'Breakable' commitments made to others. These are more common. We make them all the time in work and personal life.

Commitments made to oneself. I chose not to split this into two categories out of personal experience. For me, at least, commitments to myself are pretty slippery. if I tell someone else about them, though, they become much harder to break than if I keep them inside.

As my available time has dropped and my workload has increased, I find that the nature of the commitments I make (and keep) is changing. More and more are related to the office, while those that were made before I went back to work are being set aside.

That's perfectly normal and understandable, of course, but it still frustrates me. Planning on doing something and then not doing it is not my style. Particularly if I told someone else I'd do it. It happens to us all, of course. We all bite off more than we can chew at times, but it feels like a weakness in me that should be overcome, if only I could figure out how.

I suspect I'll be in this state for quite a while. As I recall, when I quit working nearly four years ago, one of the hardest things about doing so was all the commitments I'd made to my coworkers at the office. Letting those go was not a simple task, and now I am setting myself up for that again someday.

But for now I suffer the opposite, sort of. I'm having to let go of the commitments I made when I wasn't working. There's less time for the fire department and friends. There's less time for me, to do things like go to the gym. There's less time to walk the dogs, even.

Still, it has to be done, and it was a choice. My choice.

Something tells me I need to go think about something else for a while.

The Printer Works

2009-01-25T16:28:00.000-08:00

Small miracle: the Xerox Phaser 6130n that I bought works with Linux.

My version of Ubuntu (8.04) didn't want to support it initially. It didn't have a driver available and recommended a driver for a different Xerox model. That did not work. It spat out a few pages with gibberish on them instead of a test page.

I grubbed around on the CD that came with the printer and found a directory named "Linux". What? A major manufacturer supplying something for Linux right out of the box? Great! But what was in there was a .rpm file for a driver. Ubuntu doesn't use .rpm files for packages, it uses .deb files.

There is a way to convert between .rp and .deb package formats, and I started down that path, but simultaneously I went to the Xerox web site to see what they had out there. I hoped they'd have a pre-built .deb file I could download, since Ubuntu is pretty popular.

What I found, though, was a bit different. They had PPD files available, and PPD files allow the CUPS system to work with a printer just like a driver does. (Or so I gather, since my choices were to install a driver or a PPD file.)

So I downloaded the archive full of PPD files, extracted the one for the 6130, and installed it.

Like magic, the printer worked. It prints in color, prints images, etc. This is great news.

Every ink jet printer I've ever owned has ended its life with print heads full of dried up ink that will not be removed and prevents clear printing. The most recent one, while it was suffering from a clogged print head too, actually died a horrible mechanical death when something went "POP!" inside it one day. It never printed again.

I hope this new Xerox 6130 works out well. I've been without a printer for months now, trying to figure out what laser printer would work with Linux.

So far, so good!

Today I am a Follower

2009-01-25T09:45:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Steve added my blog to the published list of blogs he reads. I'm honored. A bit scared - for the reasons I mentioned in yesterday's post - but definitely honored.

But it was that action on his part that got me to thinking about blog etiquette and whether or not I was doing things properly. I wasn't.

There are about 20 things in my RSS reader at this point. Some are just silly, some I am more seriously interested in, some are from businesses, and others - the most important ones to me - are written by people I know.

I feel no obligation to give regular link space to the business blogs I follow. They may get mentioned from time to time, as appropriate, but the nature of my relationship with them isn't one that requires me to advertise for them.

Nor do I feel obliged to provide regular link space to those blogs that are written by people I don't know. There are several of those, mostly artists writing about their experiences. These are valuable to me, but since the writers don't know me from anyone, there seems to be no obligation on my part to advertise for them. (I might choose give them links, though, and as with business blogs, I may mention them where appropriate.)

The last category - and the one where I realized I was falling down on the job - is blogs of people I know. I had a few listed on my site, but the full list I follow wasn't up there. That, I decided, needed to change.

These are my friends, and through the web of connections that is the Internet it is entirely possible that someone who finds me will realize they also know someone whose blog I follow. By not giving them links, I was actively doing them a disservice.

So this morning I revised the link list. I added four blogs written by people I know to the sidebar. I also added the blog of one person I don't know, but whose work I admire so much I felt that the chance of exposing others to him was worthwhile.

So once again, thanks Steve. It appears that getting in touch with you was good for me in several ways.

And for anyone else out there whom I know and who keeps a blog, consider sending me a link. If you're not on the list I probably don't know about it, and that's no good. I want to keep up to date on my friends.

Things I Hate: My Own Typos

2009-01-24T21:01:00.000-08:00

I apologize, sincerely and completely, to everyone who has read this blog. Every last one of you deserves a medal for slogging through the forest of typos that result from my vague attempts at communication in English. (If I stuck to my native Gibberish I'd probably be just fine.)

Typos are my bane. There are probably still a few in this post that I haven't found. Yet.

Let me tell you a story...

An hour ago I exchanged email with a friend (hi Steve!) and former coworker - a technical writer - with whom I hadn't conversed in a long time. It turns out he has a blog. Naturally I read through some of his blog in the process of this communication. His writing is good. I've added his blog to my RSS reader.

With some trepidation I told him that I, too, kept a blog. A few minutes later he told me that he'd added my blog to his RSS tool. (The main attraction being the picture of me with a fork suspended from my nose.) Uh-oh. Now Steve's a nice guy, but look at it from my point of view: I've got a professional writer reading my blog. This'll be "interesting". I'd better go look at it real quick. From the outside.

And the first thing I noted was that I hadn't posted in 12 days. Even without Steve there as a motivator, that was not good, and I needed to remedy that. The previous - basically content free - post was the result. OK, fine. At least you know I'm still alive.

Then I went back and re-read the post I'd just written and published. Typos. Typo city! And Steve is out there lurking. He really is a nice guy, and I probably won't get email telling me that I have used "it's" where I meant "its" for the 10,000th time. But I could get that email. If not from him then from a few others that have been known to "express themselves" to me in the past. (Hi David.)

So I edited the post and fixed the typos I could find, including the gross spelling errors that spell check was warning me about when I typed the thing up in the first place. sigh.

Then I checked a few of the older posts, just to see how I'd been doing on the typo front.

Suffice it to say that if this was a war between me and the typos, they'd overrun my position years ago, taken my HQ, sacked my supply houses, moved in, married, had kids, and sent them to college. There were a LOT of typos out there.

So I fixed what I found in various older posts. I didn't get to them all, alas, and I probably missed some in the posts I did review. What can I say, though. I don't have hours and hours to spend at it right now, and finding my own typos is just about as easy as performing brain surgery on myself.

But once again I must apologize to all of you who risk reading my words. I'm not nearly as illiterate as they make me look. Honestly! Please accept this blog entry - even if it too is crawling with grammatical boo-boos - in the spirit of contrition in which it is intended.

Special thanks to Steve for causing this, even if it was entirely unintentional on his part. If you want a link to your blog in here, Steve, just ask.

I guess there was one benefit to finding all those typos: I got to add another post to my "Things I Hate" series.

(Now to proofread this before hitting the "publish post" button... shudder.)

Strange Silence

2009-01-24T20:08:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's been 12 days since my last post here. Or something like that.

You'd think - with the inauguration and all - I'd have something interesting to say. Not really, and that's why I haven't written.

In all honestly, I was happy to see our new president take office. So far he's kept to the script as I envisioned he would, and I agree with the things he's done, at least to the extent that I understand them. But he's still human, as is his staff, and the mistakes and issues will inevitably come.

And that's where I peter out. Happy, but wary. Not much there.

I could write about my own life, right? After all that's not getting any simpler. There's a new printer sitting on the table behind me that hasn't been setup in the week since it arrived. There's the DMV testing I need to finish to finalize the drivers license that will let me drive fire engines. There's work, which brings with it a whole slew of things I need to do and understand. And there are friends and commitments that I need to keep up with. There are dogs to pet, sculptures to carve, and so on.

Mostly, though, it's overwhelming and I'm tired. That's not where I want to be, and it makes for lousy blog entries.

Slowly, however, I can see things changing. I'm actually less exhausted now than I was a month ago. The schedule that came with going back to work is getting a bit easier, and I've ordered a new computer that will make it simpler to work from home a bit, letting me dodge the worst of rush hour, at least.

But that's all pretty mundane stuff. As you can see, I haven't got anything of substance driving this post. Mostly I'm just writing so my readers - and there are a couple of you out there - know that I am still here. Oh, and Paul, I really will write that next update on the water system one of these days.

High Class Dinners and Cutlery

2009-01-12T20:08:00.001-08:00

Yes, that's me. And that's my lovely wife on the left side of the picture. We were at a gathering of good friends who all live nearby. This happened just the other day, and (despite the photographic evidence) we hope to be invited back.

And what, you may ask, is wrong with my nose?

The first response is that the photographer (who will remain nameless, to protect the guilty) is using only an iPhone, and as we all know those don't contain the best quality cameras on the planet. That makes it a bit hard to tell.

But despite that, the full size image just barely reveals that I am doing something few have tried. I've suspended a fork from my nose.

No, really, a fork. Not a spoon. And I did it without glues or adhesives, and without injuring myself in any way. The tines of the fork are distinctly visible on the outside of my honker.

In truth, this photo tells you less about my amazing cutlery suspension abilities than it does about the kinds of people I hang out with.

In any event, we had a wonderful dinner, and we celebrated getting together a bunch of good friends who couldn't - for one reason or another - see each other over the holidays.

May you enjoy such silliness with people you love many times in your life.

I Hate Dental Tools

2009-01-07T21:14:00.000-08:00

I went to the dentist today for my thrice a year teeth cleaning. (Yes, 3 times a year I suffer through this. My teeth have "issues".)

What I want to know is, why doesn't someone with a clue design dental tools?

Forget the drill. No, it's not nice, but I'm generally numb when it is used, and its use is irregular at best.

No, the real problems are the tools I see every four months:

the sonic cleaner
the polisher
the spit sucker

These are the bread and butter of hygienists, and they are all my bane. The hand scaling tools are bad when the hygienist concentrates in one place for too long, but these things - the powered tools, if you will - are much worse. Let's examine each briefly, shall we?

There is a special place in hell reserved for the person who invented the sonic tooth cleaner, and I don't even remotely believe in hell. This thing causes pain at a level that is hard to imagine. Supposedly this is because I have exposed roots, but in reality all a hygienist has to do is leave this thing in a single place for more than a fraction of a second and I am writhing, even where my teeth are in excellent condition. It's a deep ache that spreads out from the point of contact on the tooth. If left in one place for more than about 5 seconds I am convinced I would black out. I'd probably confess to anything the Bush administration wanted me to confess to as well, but then I'd lose consciousness.

The polisher seems benign enough, I know, and most of you probably think it's harmless. However, if you visited my dentist you might discover your mistake. The polisher I am subjected to is air driven, and it exhausts the air right into my mouth, right onto my teeth. If I had perfectly normal teeth this might not be a problem, but I don't. Instead I have teeth that lack enamel on various surfaces, and cold air blowing out of the polisher actually hurts. Once again I think some tool designer needs to spend eternity in pain as a result of this bit of work. It would have been pretty simple to capture the exhaust air and route it somewhere else. Even just a foot or two back down along the incoming air line would have kept it out of my mouth and from causing pain, but no. If you designed a polisher that exhausts into my mouth, and we meet, and I figure out what you did, you may be missing some of your own teeth before our conversation is entirely complete.

And finally the spit sucker. This has the low tech version of the polisher problem. It draws air across my teeth in ways that I do not approve of or appreciate. This one I do my best to control during my visit, but today I found myself being pinned down by my hygienist as she polished my teeth and used the spit sucker at the same time. So I had two sources of drafty nastiness in my mouth. I was not a happy camper. Not at all.

When a dog needs to have its teeth cleaned they knock it out entirely. I am starting to think that maybe I should go to the vet to get my teeth cleaned simply to get knocked out first.

And if you're a budding young dental tool designer, please keep in mind that avoiding pain is a good idea. Find a way to make your tools pain free and I will be in your debt. But if you continue on in the grand tradition of existing dental tool designers, i will be your implacable foe for the rest of my life.

The March of the Undertakers

2009-01-05T18:15:00.001-08:00

Now that I live - er - work in downtown San Jose, I get to see a different group of people a bit more closely than I used to. As a result of that observation I want to know what it is with the working stiffs down here and all the black they wear.

I may be guilty of a tiny exaggeration. A few other colors are allowed: brown, dark blue, and dark gray. But clearly the closer any of those colors is to black, the better.

And this isn't just goth kids. This is people going to work at 8:30 in the morning. As I get off the freeway and wait at a light there is inevitably a stream of somber individuals all dressed in black, hiking from their parking places to their office buildings. It looks like a casting call for another remake of The Adams Family. Every morning. Dark coats and jackets, suits, etc. It's depressing.

And, of course, I stick out like a sore thumb when I wander around. I wear a bright red jacket, and I just ordered a new one in bright orange.

Years ago I visited Germany and Italy for a week each. Just walking around town in my red raincoat it was clear I did not belong. The only other person I saw wearing anything nearly that bright in color was a female Japanese tourist. Everyone else was in black or brown. Everyone.

It's not quite that bad in San Jose, but it's close.

This is California, not New York. When did it become so uptight?

Happy New Year!

2009-01-01T16:01:00.001-08:00

It's January 1, and I'm feeling somewhat mellow. Well, sick actually, but as a description "mellow" will do.

Last night we didn't even manage to stay up until midnight. Instead we crashed at 11 and went right to sleep. I'm recovering from a cold and Anne's just coming down with it, so we're excused.

The one thing we did manage to do last night - that's as close to a NYE tradition as we have - is watch the Tim Burton film Mars Attacks. Anne says we started doing this many years ago when we were driving home after a holiday visit and wound up in Laramie on New Years Eve. We found Mars Attacks was on TV at the hotel and watched it. For some reason it's been what we do ever since.

Regardless of what your NYE traditions are, I wish you all the best in 2009. Thanks for reading and commenting here.

Oh, and as of yesterday I'm on Facebook too. You can find me there if you're a Facebook user. I can't promise my updates there will occur more often than they do here here, but we'll see.

Another in the Things I Hate Series

2008-12-28T18:20:00.000-08:00

I hate the flu. 'nuff said.

What is it with the word "Disruptive"?

2008-12-21T17:50:00.000-08:00

Have you noticed that everything is "disrputive" lately? I've seen "disruptive" technologies all over. I've even seen some that claim to be both disruptive and supportive. Huh? To make things even more amusing our local PBS radio station has an underwriter that claims to be a "disruptive financial services firm", or something like that. Again I say, huh?

What is it about the word "disruptive" that has turned it into a marketing favorite lately? Doug H, if you're reading this, marketing is your bread and butter. Can you explain it?

From my perspective the term "disruptive" is generally bad, full of negative connotations. If someone is disruptive at a party you throw them out or call the police. If some bit of software I am working on is "disruptive" I am going to figure out how to shut it up (or down) so I can get on with the work I am trying to do.

This new use of disruptive probably started on the east coast somewhere and moved west. By now I suspect New Yorkers no longer use it... it's so last month. And the sooner it falls out of favor around here the better. If you claim to be a disruptive company, I'm not going to do business with you. Put that in your marketing pipe and smoke it!

I Hate Gutters

2008-11-30T21:30:00.000-08:00

I'm thinking of creating a new series of sporadic posts about things I despise. No one but me will find it interesting or amusing, but what the heck. If you can't talk to yourself on the Internet, where can you? I'll start with:

Gutters

There must be something better than gutters, as there certainly can't be anything worse. It's pouring rain and the water is streaming down your roof, carrying with it dirt and debris, leaves, and who knows what else. And what do we do with all this water and its payload? Here's an idea: let's funnel it into something that will catch all that muck and clog up, forcing water to go in new and unusual directions in the process.

We're in the situation of having gutters on multiple levels of roof. In addition. some of our gutters are effectively under a deck, making cleaning - or even seeing - them a challenge. During a recent storm, we had one gutter get stopped up and overflow. Because the water was no longer going down the proper downspout, it slammed into a second gutter under a deck. The unexpected deluge and accumulated gunk caused a backup there too, which overflowed and came down on the inside of a sliding glass door. I spent an hour getting things back into shape, and though I don't think any real damage was done, it was very irritating.

To be clear, I do understand the point of gutters. Having the water drip off the eaves can cause problems of various sorts, the most obvious of which is getting soaked when stepping out the front door during a rainstorm.

But they cause other problems too. Ice dams are a nasty issue in cold climates, and plants can actually grow in gutters. Even more fun, in the summer they make a nice place to catch both things that burn and flying embers to get them burning. That's great fun in fire country.

So, all you inventors out there, please help. There must be an alternative to gutters that works without causing problems. Something that cannot clog up, needs no maintenance, and still keeps me dry when I walk under an eve.

Anyone got an answer? If so, leave a response here so I can get rid of the gutters that make my life miserable every chance they get.

Yes I'm Still Working

2008-11-12T21:32:00.000-08:00

It's 1.5 weeks since I started working full time again. My thoughts on the experience are a bit muddled at this point. That's all thanks to the difficulty of the schedule adjustment, and probably to the reduction in exercise.

I used to sleep in - something my body is much happier with. Now I get up right when the alarm goes off and get moving.

I used to get 2.5 miles or more or walking in each day. Now I get to drive 40 minutes each day instead.

Please don't misunderstand me. These aren't complaints. I chose to go back to work, and I'm lucky to do so in this economy. But it's going to be a while before the adjustment to a regular schedule is done and I'm back fully in the swing of things.

This weekend I will be taking a class on driving fire engines, all day, both days. That should be fun, but it will keep me busy on a weekend when I should be doing other things, like carving.

Oh well. There are other weekends coming, and I'll get things done as time allows.

I hope you're all doing well, whatever adjustments are going on in your lives.

Mountain Living - Water Part IX

2008-11-12T21:31:00.000-08:00

The water heater is finally working again.

No, you haven't missed any earlier articles about the problem. I've been pretty busy of late, as this came to light as I was getting ready to go back to work.

We have an all electric house, so (of course) our water heater is electric. Years ago we replaced a standard unit with a non-metallic one, as that keeps the sulphur bacteria from growing in the tank. I like that choice, but may get a tankless unit later. Time will tell.

In any event, things got interesting with the water heater a couple of weeks ago. It stopped producing hot water, and eventually I found that it was tripping the circuit breaker at odd intervals.

Eventually I determined that one thermostat was bad, as it was only passing 120 volts (instead of 240) to the lower heating element. I ordered replacement thermostats - both upper and lower - installed them, and found that didn't solve things. Additional research convinced me that the lower heating element was also bad and shorting out. Then my friend Alan figured out that the new upper thermostat I'd been sent was bad too.

While I waited for parts to arrive I disconnected the lower heating element to avoid the short, used one of the broken upper thermostats, and turned the water heater on with the circuit breaker only when we needed it. That wasn't exactly an approved - or convenient - solution, but it worked. Thankfully we didn't have to do it for long.

In the end - two heating elements and a replacement for the replacement thermostat later - I've finally got it working properly. It turns out the lower heating element had corroded to the point that it had sheared off entirely inside the tank. That caused the short that tripped the breaker, so all the obvious failures are explained now.

A less than obvious thing is also explained. For some time we had a lot of air in the hot water lines. I couldn't figure out why that was, but now I know that the broken heating element was turning water into hydrogen and oxygen gas right there inside the tank. Exciting, eh?

At this point I can assure you that a functioning water heater is a very good thing, and I'm glad to finally have one again.