Philip's Blog

2011-12-15T07:42:00.010-05:00

The War in Iraq

The War in Iraq is officially over today. Thank goodness. There are a number of regrets associated with this little skirmish. The first one I notice is that Iraq is a proper name and therefore unusable in Scrabble or that other word game that got Alec Baldwin kicked off a plane last week. It would be really nice if there were more words with "q" that didn't require a "u". Of course, my cousins and sisters would know them before me and I'd actually lose out in the long run.

The second thing is that we prefer to call it the "War in Iraq", rather than the "Iraq War". There's an extra word in there which seems useless unless you believe that it is actually the "Oil War" and it is important to know that this part of the Oil War is being fought in Iraq.

But maybe the biggest regret is the amount of money spent and how poorly it was spent. The war in Iraq cost 800 billion dollars. That's a lot of money and maybe the cause of the current recession. You just can't spend that amount of money blowing things up and not see an impact. That's 800 billion dollars/32 million Iraqis = 25,000 dollars/person. The Iraqi gdp = $82 billion which puts the per capita income around $2500. That's ten years of income for every man woman and child in the country of Iraq. The real tragedy is that so many people died or were maimed and injured. With that kind of money, it's hard to imagine that it couldn't have been spent better. We could have walked in and said, "Look Sadam, here's a bunch of billions. Go have yourself a great life." We could have said to the insurgents, "Here's ten years salary, go have a coffee and chill for ten years. We'll take care of stuff for you." We could have bribed the crap out of everybody and made it a real happy place. We could have even built a mosque or five, planted some grass and trees, and given everybody an iPhone and an iPad with cell phone and internet accounts. We could have built a few Disney Lands. It's mighty damn hard to imagine any way that money could have been thrown away more efficiently than we did it in Iraq. And with 32,000 injured veterans, we're going to be paying for this war for a long time with more than just money. I don't know if I should be more ashamed of my country for its moral failure or for its stupid inefficiency.

I'm a fan of Barack's. He's doing all he can. He's gotten us out of Iraq, he was in charge when Bin Laden was taken out, and I hope he's gonna soon realize the futility of trying to do anything in Afghanistan. When we quit expending so much American capital on stupid missions, we're also gonna see the economy get better.

Well, that's all for now.

Added note: I got a comment that suggested that I was in Iraq. I wasn't. Also, I just missed Vietnam.

2011-08-20T08:42:00.003-04:00

Blog Update

Two things - the economy and the spam situation.

First, I'll give a little update on the economy. Since I wrote a few weeks ago on the economy, a few birds have come home to roost. As predicted, the unemployment rate in NC has risen. Gov. Bev Perdue announced that the unemployment rate in NC had risen to 10.7% after sitting sluggishly around the 9.5% for most of the "recovery". This is primarily the result of the increase in the number of workers released by the public sector. This coincides with what may, or may not, be the start of the second dip of the double dip recession. I think it's just a stumble and we're going to come out of this real slowly. The problem is that it will be so slow that a drop in the relative standard of living in the US is already in progress.

Spam update. I still keep all my spam and the daily rate has dropped to just below 60/day.

2011-07-30T16:06:00.002-04:00

Spam Update

Well, a number of days have passed and I'm still saving my spam. Google is dutifully deleting it after 30 or so days. I say "30 or so" because the spam doesn't disappear exactly on day 31 but usually after a variable number of days, varying from 30 to 33. Anyhow, I calculate the daily rate from time to time and it seems to be stuck around 64/day. I get a nice variety including regular ads, online pharmacies, credit cards, credit help, alcohol rehab, Christian dating, etc. The pron and male enhancement stuff seems a lot rarer these days, though not gone completely. I got an ad from Hooters for

Happy National Chicken Wing Day!

I'll probably continue to keep saving the spam for a while longer and then I'll go back to deleting it with regularity.

2011-07-09T11:47:00.002-04:00

I'm not an Economist, but....

I'm not an economist but I've been watching the economy like everyone else and I'm starting to see something happen that I predicted a while back. Only, no one was really listening. So I'll talk a little bit about it here. It has to do with the nasty loss of jobs coming in the public sector.

Here's a few baseline beliefs that I hold. The housing bubble and sloppy banking had a lot to do with the recession. And no, it's not even close to over. It may never be over. But I suspect that a bigger problem is the two high tech wars that we're fighting. It's just not a very good idea to spend a lot of money making very expensive things and then blowing them up when you could be making other things and selling them. So the convergence of those things got us going downhill.

Unfortunately, to avoid a complete free fall and it's resulting catastrophic crash, the government stepped in and softened the blow with a bunch of money. The problem is that we were spending money like we were getting it before the crash. And now it's coming in a lot slower since fewer are working and they're working for less and the rich are paying less in taxes (Thanks, George). The people working in the private sector took the brunt of the job loss for the first two years. I think that's stabilizing. My prediction some time ago was that the public sector, which was largely spared from job loss early in the recession, is now gonna get whacked big time. I think we're seeing it now, especially in education. We'll probably downsize the postal service soon and a host of other federal, state and local services will start to lose employees. This will stretch out the recession for a few more years.

OK, here's the good news, maybe. I think that as we wind down the two wars and try to avoid getting into any more (think Libya and the like), the economy will slowly improve. I think services will deteriorate to the point that we realize that we're not taxing the rich people appropriately and the tax structure will slowly change back to something reasonable as Warren Buffet suggests. The wholesale destruction of the public sector will allow it to be rebuilt with better efficiency and a lot of useless agencies will disappear or at least get more efficient and do useful things. Maybe we'll actually see the benefit of and be forced to implement universal health care.

Overall, I think that bailing out the country was the best thing to do. It kept us out of a depression but substantially extended the time for recovery. Maybe it spread the pain out a bit more but lessened it's intensity for many. I think the wholesale exit of the manufacturing sector and it's associated support (like R & D) will stop and will return to America, though it will be through a nasty global wage normalization (nasty for us, good for the poorer countries). No more predictions for now. Should be an interesting ride.

2011-07-03T20:56:00.002-04:00

Going in Circles

I am currently working at Duke and so I have a parking place on the Duke campus in a parking deck not too far away from where I work. Of course, I have to pay for it. It seems that everyone who works in our lab rolls into work around 9, and so I do also. However, it also seems that everyone else at Duke gets to work a bit earlier. So I have to drive up to the sixth or seventh floor to find an open parking space. When the weather is nice (i.e. not so hot) I just drive up to the seventh floor. I like the view. The drive up or down can be a bit dizzying. I made a movie of the drive down one day and I decided that I would share it with you. Enjoy. Don't stand up quickly after viewing.

2011-07-02T08:02:00.005-04:00

Spam Experiment

I recently started a spam experiment. I currently use a free email account from a pretty big company that is associated with searching. One of the nice things about this email client is that it allows you to capture email from numerous accounts besides just theirs. So I get email addressed to my accounts from my employer, my small company, my cable company and my primary account along with a few aliases that I've set up. I've had some of these accounts for a while and I've registered on a variety of websites over the years. So I get a lot of spam. The spam filter is pretty good and so most goes in the spam box. The only mail that slips through that I shouldn't get is the stuff where somebody types in the wrong email address. I've written about this on occasion. I usually empty the spam box a couple of times a day with a quick scan first to make sure nothing important shows up there. I did this because I just didn't like the spam in my mail client. It made me feel icky.

Recently, I decided to see what happened if I let it just accumulate. My email account keeps it for 30 days and then tosses it. After 30 days, the amount of spam should reach some steady state and I can watch and tell if there is a spam surge or spam drop by following the total. They say that most of the spam comes from just a few places and if a spammer is shut down, there is a global drop in the amount of spam that one gets. Word is that spam and porn are using about 60% of the internet bandwidth, with spam using about 85% of the email traffic.

I've been doing this for 16 days so far. At midnight, I had 1038 spams which works out to 64.875 spams a day. So I'm on track to reach somewhere around 2000 spams at steady state. I'll let you know when I reach steady-state.

As I was typing this, a question arose in my mind. Should I be talking about "spams" or "pieces of spam." In other words, does the word "spam" describe an individual piece of email or does it describe the entire body of work. If you're down on your luck and eating cheaply, you don't ask for another spam, you ask for another piece of spam. Or not. Anyhow, I leave you with this:

2011-06-15T20:52:00.005-04:00

Computer Setup

Recently, in order to get a bit more room on my desk, I rearranged my computer network so that all the peripherals would go on my lovely wife's desk rather than on mine. Her desk is about 4 times the size of mine to begin with. But first, I had to get some more room on the desk. There was the problem of this old Mac computer taking up space. We bought it in 1998 and it still ran fine. Unfortunately, most of the internet browsers that would run on it tend to crash a lot due to a lack of compatibility with current web standards. But it had served us well for a number of years. I wanted to give it to a good home. So it went on Craig's list for $5. Basically I was trying to avoid a trip to the dump.

After no bites for a couple of days, I finally got an email. I arranged for the guy to pick it up. He showed up in an AT&T service truck. He worked for them and kept old computers running for fun and occasionally donated them to his church for various functions.

So with more room on the desk, I drew up plans for how the new arrangement would all look. The most important thing was to figure out how to accommodate all the little black power converter boxes on the power strip. Here's the layout:

And here's how it all looks,

and here's my more roomy desk ready for my new hobby of building little electronic thingys.

Don't ask me why I have so many printers. Suffice it to say that they practically give them away and rob you blind when you try to fill them with ink.

2011-05-21T21:21:00.006-04:00

New Lights

I think it is a wife's job in life to adsorb any free time a man finds. That's what my wife said when I told her that I had finally finished up the task of the day and added, "Well, there goes a Saturday."

Anyhow, earlier today, as we were puttering around the yard doing a variety of things, my lovely wife decided that it was time to replace the lovely lights lining the driveway with some that actually lighted up. We bought one of those solar panel with 6 lights packs from Costco a few years ago. It worked fair for a while, though it was never very bright. Eventually, a couple of the lights got run over and the lights got dimmer and dimmer.

I thought it was a reasonable idea but this time we were gonna run real electricity from the house. I figured it wouldn't be technically difficult, but it was going to be an all afternoon job digging a trench to run and hide the wire. So we went to Lowe's, found a light kit (6 lights, a transformer and 50' of wire) that we liked and bought it. We needed to get more wire (100 ft) cause the lights were gonna be far from the house. We also bought three more lights so if someone runs over one, we can replace it.

It took all afternoon to dig the trench for the wire. I got some help from my daughter. She shoved wire into the ground as I split the dirt with a square spade. I started it one way and realized I grabbed the 50 ft wire instead of the 100 ft wire. Pull it up start over. Redid it with the longer wire and realized that the path we were taking wouldn't reach the bottom. Pull it up and start over. So I went straight across the yard. Once I got to the bottom of the driveway, where the lights go, my wife came out and helped a bit with planning and assembly. With the 100 ft wire, we had about one foot to spare. Eventually as the sun was setting, I got through just in time to start the charcoal for supper.

As it got dark, the lights came on. Well, four of the seven that we set up, came on. So I went back out and did a bit of troubleshooting. The little doodads that stick into the wire, missed on a couple because we were using a larger guage wire and had to cut off the little guide thingies. So I fixed that and wiggled the light on the other and, voila, all the lights are on and the job is done and the day is gone.

Maybe, I'll stick in a picture some day.

And there it is.

2011-05-20T21:37:00.005-04:00

It Weren't Me !!!!

As I've mentioned before on this blog, a number of years ago I got a gmail account and, because I was early on gmail, I got a simple account name, my first initial and my last name (e.g. flastname@gmail.com). I've gotten a lot of mail from people who meant to send it to somebody else whose email was like mine except that it had a number or three after the name (e.g. flastname47@gmail.com). I usually write back and point out the mistake and usually people write back and thank me for catching it. Not today. I'll post the exchange for your amusement.

I got up this morning and saw this in my inbox from Patco Lamp:

So I'd like to know why

1. Your e mailing my wife Sherry?
2. Why does she have your phone number and why would she want to call you to say Howdy and
3. Why are you addressing my wife as "Sweet Lady"?

I'd just like to know before we meet so you can give me a good explanation.......

So I wrote back:

Hi Mr. Lamp, I don't know who you are. I don't know your wife. I haven't called your wife nor have I addressed her in any way. You have the wrong email address. This email sounds pretty threatening to me. I suggest that in the future you don't put threats in writing. It looks real bad in a courtroom.

the wrong guy

To which he replied:

Thats real funny, because your name and your e mail address are on her phone from where you e mailed her. They dont just pop up there on there own.

By now you've figured out that this guy is pissed and he doesn't know how to use an apostrophe and he doesn't know the difference between you're and your or there and they're. So I write back:

Sorry, you got the wrong guy. There are thousands of phughes's out there and I get an email for them about once a day. Usually someone forgets to add some numbers onto the email address. I get emails for Phyllis in Cary, Paul in Toronto, Patricia in Minnesota, Padma in California, Patrick and Peter in England and some hardware store in Australia sends me emails addressed to Paul whenever they have a sale. There's also that pitcher for the NY Yankees. I get a few emails meant for him too. I only know one Sherry and she's a judge. I haven't talked to her in about 7 years when she came to my 50th birthday.

When I get an email clearly intended for someone else, I usually reply because I know the intended person probably didn't get it. Most people write back and thank me for letting them know. You're the first that has answered with a tone of hostility.

Good luck with your quest. You're barking up the wrong tree.

Finally, after about three hours, I get a reply:

Sorry, I do have the wrong Phil, thanks for the info about adding a digit. Sorry for the inconvienence.

I think he spelled "inconvenience" wrong. Anyhow, I showed this to my coworkers and before we get the last email, we do a little research. It is a research lab after all. As it turns out, "Patco Lamp" isn't his name. It's the name of a "Christian" lighting store, in Fort Worth, Texas. And if you look at who runs the place, you'll find that it's run by three Patterson's (hence Patco), a man, John, and two women, one of whom is named Sherry and the other named Janet.

We were trying to think of some way to get back at whoever sent the rather threatening email. Maybe we could tell Sherry that her husband was snooping in her phone. We could call all the Philip Hughes' in the Fort Worth area and tell them that they were in trouble. Tim, imagining some right wing, religious, gun nut getting into his F150 and driving up from Texas to shoot us all, was urging that we let it drop. And then the final email came and we decided that might be a good idea.

Though I did think of asking for a lamp for my troubles.

2011-05-17T20:27:00.003-04:00

New Post

OK, I haven't posted in quite a while and my fan base is starting to erode. In fact, there have been complaints. So I'm gonna try to start writing more and messing around less with pictures since they are the reason that I don't post so often. I feel like I need a picture to go with the blog entry and if I don't have something eye-catching, then I don't post. So no more of that.

I have two things to talk about tonight, a tribute and a rant.

Harmon Killebrew passed away today. I don't follow baseball much but this made the news. Why do I care? When I was a kid, I played little league baseball. I was terrible at it. I didn't really like it a whole lot either but there wasn't much else to do. Part of the problem was that I couldn't throw. I couldn't catch either and I was piss poor at bat to boot. One other problem that I had was that I couldn't see. It was always too bright outside for me. I could see better than anyone alive at night, but what that meant was that a bright sunny day blinded me. Still does. And it makes me sneeze too. But on a nice cloudy day when things were going right I could occasionally get a hit. The reason was that I used a Harmon Killebrew bat. No other bat felt as good to me as the Harmon Killebrew. It had the right balance of size and weight that perfectly fit my attitude. If I didn't use the Killebrew, I struck out for sure. So I've always had fond memories of the guy even though I never knew much about him. He was 74 and died of esophageal cancer. May he rest in peace.

The other thing I want to talk about has to do with computers and their peripherals. I'm the guy in the house that everybody screams at when things go wrong. We have a fairly complex setup here in the house. We have, from time to time, up to 8 computers that can connect to the internal network and also have 4 printers. The 8 computers include a computer for each person in the house plus two older ones plus an iPod touch and an iPad. Actually, my son's computer isn't usually here and the two older ones aren't usually on the network. We also have 4 printers. Why? Well, I bought one for my company that makes no money a long time ago. I keep it going even though it makes horrible noises, because it also will do faxes. We have one that I got from work when we closed down a couple of years ago and we have two wireless ones that we got for free (after the rebate) when we got my wife and my daughter's Macbook Pros. I also have a bunch of external hard disc and a small server disk that I've had for years. And it's all hooked up to a router that's hooked up to a modem that connects to the cable. So things go wrong all the time and I have to figure out what the problem is and fix it.

So here's my rant. You can do a million things to try to make things work again. You can play with the software, you can read the manual, you can change a zillion parameters, you can change the connections, you can try wireless or ethernet or USB but nothing works quite as well as unplugging something and plugging it back in. Somehow that cathartic purge does more to help recalcitrant electronics than anything else you might try.

So here's my rant. Why don't the people that make this crap just admit to it and make it easy to turn this stuff off. It's a real pain to get to the plug on a lot of this stuff. Yesterday, the internet went down. I tried a bunch of stuff. Finally I pulled out the modem, with it's 3 thick attached cables and blindly pulled out the power cord. I spent a minute trying to get that stupid cable back in. Once I did, everything worked again. This morning my daughter couldn't get the printer to work. I don't think she was aware there were 3 more on line. I switched her to another one and got her stuff printed. Anyhow, I spent 20 minutes trying to get the router to see the printer. It never happened. Finally, I reached around and pulled the plug on the printer. This one even had a little clicky thing to make it a pain to get out. After pulling the plug, I had to pull the printer away from the wall to see how to plug it back in. And when I did, Presto! the computer that had been hiding was now visible again.

I wish every piece of computer equipment that I own came with it's own ugly power switch, not those wimpy things that merely put your equipment on standby, but a real switch with exposed wires so you could be sure the electricity no longer flowed. Something like this:

2010-12-30T08:55:00.002-05:00

Lazy Blogger

I saw this and thought it was cool. I just had to copy some code to show it to you.

December 2010 Blizzard Timelapse from Michael Black on Vimeo.

!!!Happy New Year!!!

2010-12-04T17:00:00.002-05:00

Early Snow

We got some early snow in Chapel Hill today. While my lovely wife and I were at the Carolina game today, it started snowing. It snowed a fair amount. Oh yea, also, Carolina beat #10 Kentucky.

Snow in Chapel Hill

2010-12-04T16:56:00.002-05:00

Pictures from Thanksgiving

I uploaded the pictures that I took at Thanksgiving to Picassa. I think you can see them here.

Thanksgiving 2010

2010-10-09T21:41:00.004-04:00

Broke Mah Jong

Wow!, two post in one day.

Tonight I was playing Mahjong. Mahjong is a tile game, usually played on a computer these days, introduced into the west by Asian forces in an attempt to lull westerners into wasting incredible amounts of time so that when the time comes to conquer them, there will be no resistance.

Little did they know that we would hit them back with the even more powerful time waster, Free Cell, loaded into every copy of Windows since Win 95. I'd call it a draw so far, but with the way iPhones are selling in the east, we may yet come out ahead.

Anyhow, I was playing Mah Jong and listening to Pandora and just as I was about to declare victory, the program told me there were no more moves. I copied a picture of the screen for you to see and, damn it, there are more moves.

There are just enough moves for me to win. So, in an attempt to regain the high ground, they've decided to cheat. I'm very disappointed. But I'll probably keep playing.

2010-10-09T10:54:00.004-04:00

Inspection

Recently, after an nice meal in downtown Chapel Hill, on the way home a policeman waved to my wife and asked her to roll down her window. He told her that our car registration, signified by the sticker on our license plate, was out of date. Yikes! When we got home we realized that, indeed, it was September and the registration expired in June. But the worse part was that on looking at the other car, YIKES!!, we realized that it's registration expired last December. Having gotten caught by this a couple of times in the past, I know that it can cost around $250/car.

It's funny how I hadn't noticed before, but there a cops everywhere. And they're always looking at people's license plates. Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

Anyhow, I dutifully got the cars inspected ($35 ea.), one day at a time, since my wife was out of town for a week. And then I was able to register them online ($33 ea.). After about a week, the new stickers arrived in the mail and now I'm a law abiding citizen again. And I managed to not get caught in the process.

Unfortunately, you don't get credit for going a year without registration. So I'll be getting one of the cars inspected again in about 2 months. This time it's on my calendar.

2010-10-02T10:07:00.009-04:00

Where Do Your Taxes Go?

I haven't written in a while for a number of reasons, none of them real good. I started a new job in August, which severely impinges on my free time. After almost 2 years, I'd almost forgotten that. And that leads us into today's post.

One usually has a job for two reasons. You make money and, if you didn't work, your wife would find even worse things for you to do around the house. This money making part is pretty important cause that's how you eat good food and have shelter from the elements. It also allows you to do other important things like watch "Dancing with the Stars" in HD on your 1080p 46" LCD TV, if that's what turns you on.

One of the challenges associated with making money is hanging on to it. In many jobs, before you even see a check or a direct deposit in your bank account, a big chunk of your money is taken away by the Fed and the state. I recently came across a blog that had a chart of where the average taxpayer's money goes and I found it somewhat enlightening. So I'll share it with you. I took the liberty of downloading the data and putting it into a spreadsheet so I could add the percentage column. Click on the chart to make it larger.

I found it pretty interesting. If you're worried about where your government is spending your money, this gives you an idea. If you have a pet peeve about how the money is spent and you think that if they would not spend so much on "So and So", you can see if your plan to save money would amount to anything substantial.

Here are the credits. I originally found this on a blog I read regularly called PharmaGossip, which got it from a different blog called Third Way, which would probably be called a somewhat liberal blog, given it's contributors, though there doesn't seem to be any political bias in the article. And the original article can be found here.

If you are interested in a bit more detail on the budget, look here.

Bye!

2010-07-30T13:50:00.007-04:00

The Spy

Chapel Hill has a nice bus system. It's free and can get you about anywhere in town at a reasonable speed. I always thought it would be nice to have a job and a house on the bus route. You just walk out in the morning, get on the bus, ride to work and get off. Then you do the same thing again in the afternoon. You would have no worries about car payments or maintenance or traffic. You can read the paper or your Kindle or iPad and let someone else worry about getting you where you want to be. I've been paying for this nice bus system for a while and for a long time, I'd never taken advantage of it.

Recently, however, we changed where we get our autos serviced (the Volvo Dealership closed and the Honda dealership moved out of town) and because it's in Carrboro and on the bus route, I decided that when I take the cars in for service, rather than have someone follow me to take me back home, I can just take the bus. That way, I can get to know the bus service in case I find a job in town and I can let my wife sleep if I have to get the car in early.

But the bus service isn't what this is about. It's about one of the bus drivers. On the last trip to the AutoLogic, I took the bus home and recognized the bus driver. I hadn't seen him about town for a while. His name is Felix Bloch. I think he's been quietly driving a bus in Chapel Hill for a number of years. Felix made the news back in the late 80's. He had a long career in the diplomatic service and maybe left in 1989 under what might be called suspicious circumstances. There were suspicions that he had worked both sides of the fence, but no charges were ever brought against him. Afterward, around 1993, he moved to Chapel Hill to avoid the limelight and took jobs as a bagboy/checkout guy at the Harris Teeter and as a city bus driver. He got caught shoplifting at the Harris Teeter and was fired from there. Apparently, he was loading up his car with groceries, gratis, each night after work. The Independent, a very liberal rag out of Durham, had a nice writeup on the whole affair back in 2001. You can read it here or you can read about him on Wikipedia here.

Here's a picture of Felix in court in 1995. I think he was answering to shoplifting charges.

Apparently, he hasn't tried to take a bus home with him and has managed to hang on to that job for around 16 or 17 years.

So all of this got me to thinking. How the hell is it that the Harris Teeter Grocery chain was able to catch this James Bond like guy when he was able to slip by the CIA and the FBI and a host of other federal agencies? Makes you wonder about government bureaucracies. Perhaps we should have Harris Teeter run the CIA and have the CIA sell groceries. I'm afraid I might worry less about national security and more about the quality of the deli meat.

2010-06-30T10:35:00.005-04:00

Which way to go?

As you get older, you might start to think about how you will go. Well, if you're willing to wait for fate to do the work, here are the odds. You might want to click on the image to see it better.

Kinda puts things in perspective.

2010-06-27T09:37:00.003-04:00

Sad Blue Bird Update

I am saddened to report an unfortunate Blue Bird update. As of Friday morning, a pair of bluebirds had settled into the birdhouse, laid 5 eggs and hatched 5 little baby birds. The pair were dutifully raising their little ones, with frequent feedings. Around noon on Friday, the wife and I went out of town overnight to pick up our daughter from a week in Montreat. When we returned on Saturday around 1:30, I looked out into the back yard and saw that the critter barrier was on the ground and the door to the bird house was opened up and the entire contents spilled out on the ground. No babies in sight. Darn. The barrier was quite tight on the post so we feel like it was the work of a raccoon, though we don't know for sure. It could have been one of the cats. This was a pretty depressing sight to see.

It's time to look into plan B.

2010-05-25T23:34:00.003-04:00

Depressing

This was kind of depressing. It arrived in the mail addressed to me. I'm not ready.

I guess this is what happens when you join AARP and they sell your name to mailing lists. Actually, I'll bet that you could get rid of a body for $255 if you wanted to.

2010-05-11T11:00:00.003-04:00

Sermon Videos

The following is not meant to be read as much as it is to document some of what I've been up to over the last year or so.

I'm gonna talk a little about a small project that I've been working on for the last couple of years. It has turned out to be a bit more complicated than I thought it might be and I'm still working to make it better. It has to do with putting video on the web and, in this case specifically, video of sermons. That's church sermons for you heathens out there, not the sermons you get when your wife catches you drinking milk directly from the carton instead of using a glass.

Anyhow, a little over two years ago, after I became an elder at our church and somehow got conned into being chairman of the Worship & Music (W&M) committee, a panel was set up at the church to figure out what the church might do in the event of a pandemic. Bird flu was the scare at the time. Our committee (W&M) was instructed to respond to the Pandemic panel with recommendations of what we might do, as related to the worship service. We decided that we would probably do whatever the University did, since they were smarter than us and we didn't want to spend a lot of time thinking about it. However, our preacher said that he would keep on preaching even if no one came. At about that same time, we had the Fall "request for proposals" from the endowment committee and our preacher decided that if he was going to keep on preaching and no one was gonna be there to see him, we might just record the service and figure out how to get it to the people suffering from bird flu, who were skipping church. Maybe we would use the internet for distribution. So I wrote a proposal and asked the endowment committee for some money for a camera and recording setup so we could get started. We asked for three and a half grand and they gave us most of it. My estimates said that this should be enough.

Basically, we wanted a PTZ (pan, tilt, zoom) camera, a DVD recorder, a monitor and installation which would involve integrating the church sound system with the DVD recorder. A PTZ camera is capable, via a remote control or computer control, of moving around and zooming in and out. Most allow presets so that you can go from one position to the next by pushing a numbered button.

So with money in hand, I went looking for quotes. I asked the guy who owns the company that handles the sound system for the church and I asked a company in Durham that I had talked to briefly when writing the proposal. Both came back at around six to seven grand. Ouch! So I went back to both of them. The sound system guy wasn't ready to talk about changing things and had different ideas on how we might be using this setup. The guy from Durham was more flexible and said that his quote was for a high definition camera and that for a standard camera it would be about three grand. So we went with him. By the time I decided to go with the guy from Durham, I probably knew these camera systems as well as most people alive and I still didn't have a good handle on this stuff.

One thing that I was interested in was, rather than recording to DVD, I wanted to record directly to a computer. Neither company had much idea about how to do this or interest in figuring it out. Most modern (read digital) video cameras like mom and dad take to the soccer match will do this, but as it turns out, none of the PTZ cameras, which are almost all analogue will. So for a start, we just record to DVD using a DVD recorder. The DVD recorder takes the analog signal and digitizes it and writes it to a DVD in a format that everyone can play on their DVD player, but that is not easy to edit.

Anyhow, after a number of delays from me doing extensive research and the guy in Durham having hernia surgery, we signed the deal and got the camera installed. We installed the camera on the wall of the balcony on the opposite side of the church from the pulpit. Someone (I think he was retired from Kodak) told me you should never point the camera directly at your subject but at a slight angle. I had done a little research and figured with 18x optical, I could get a decent shot of the pulpit without going into the digital zoom range. As we all know, digital zoom is not zoom at all. The camera we installed is a Sony EVID70/W, shown here:

It's actually mounted upside-down. Some little wires run from the camera into a closet in the balcony. One wire sends power to the camera. Another wire allows one to aim the remote at a little box which sends the remote instructions to the camera from within the closet and another wire sends the camera's video signal into the closet. In the closet is a little table on which sits a Toshiba, DVD recorder shown here:
The wire carrying the video signal from the camera and the wire carrying the audio signal from the sound equipment at the other end of the church connect to the DVD recorder. To monitor it all, the DVD recorder sends out audio and video to a Polaroid LCD TV like this:

I can't figure out why they used a Polaroid TV. I didn't even know they existed. Maybe it was cheap.

I was capturing the sermons on DVD for a couple of months and storing them away. Occasionally I would get someone to move the camera around as the service proceeded, but it was hard to get anyone regular so I mostly just left the camera aimed at the pulpit. I sing in the choir so I can't do it. After a few months, the preacher asked me about putting the sermons on the internet. So I looked into it. As it turns out, there are a few problems doing this. The biggest problems are video file size and video format, which are related to each other and impact cost. I was determined to do this as cheaply as possible and still get as high a quality as possible.

The first problem with putting sermons or any video on the web is file size and the length of time that it runs. Currently, Youtube has an eleven minute time limit. So to use Youtube to store and present the files would require watching a 20 minute sermon in 2 parts. You would also lose control of the content. Not acceptable, even for free. There are now some new places that will host video, but you still lose control and have extraneous logos showing up with your videos. So I decided to look into finding a hosting company that would allow the big files.

Before I could actually look for a hosting site, I needed to figure out just how big the files might be and, to do that, I needed to figure out how to handle them. Or, what kind of format or file type would I use. As it turns out, this is extremely complex and all you can do is make some decisions and compromises based on what you can read and find out. The bottom line is that raw video takes up huge amounts of space (1 min of Std TV = ~3 GB) and to store it or transmit it, you have to compress it somehow. The way compression works is that you start with a picture and only save the changes from frame to frame. But to really get the file size down, the compression also has to toss out a lot of data without horribly degrading the quality. The compression tries to throw away as much as it can without you noticing. Finding the best way to do it is insanely complicated. The computer algorithms used to do this compression are called codecs. If you want to know more you can read about it here. I decided to store the files in an MPEG-4 (.mp4) container and compress them using the h.264 codec. Why? It's too hard to explain except to say that I thought this approach would work the best for the future. As browsers become more standards compliant, this approach would continue to work. This approach also is more likely to come from a Mac fan than a PC fan. There are a number of Microsoft approaches that sort of lock you in to Microsoft. I wanted something a little more open that would run on all computers.

So I looked up how to get video files off of DVD's and into a format that you can use on the web. There are some very expensive programs that will do this but it turns out that there are a few popular free programs that will also do the job. The two best are "MPEG Streamclip" and "Handbrake". I downloaded them both and couldn't get either one of them to work. Turns out that you need a license to read a DVD at the bit level. However, you can buy a license from Apple for $20. I don't think Apple owns the license. I think it's owned by a consortium that Apple is a part of and so most of that money to license the codec that allows you to read the MPEG-2 files (container and codec) on the DVD, goes back to the consortium. I think it might be the same consortium that owns the h.264 codec mentioned above. Anyhow, once you buy it (the license is a little piece of software) from Apple, they keep a record of your purchase and if you lose it, you can always go back and download it again without charge.

As an aside, the licensing and ownership of these compression codecs is a real big deal to anybody associated with the internet such as all hardware and software companies but also includes the communications and entertainment industries. It's a big hairy complicated deal, which means it involves a lot of money. But enough of that.

So I started playing with the MPEG Streamclip program. I pulled sermons off the DVDs and played around with the size (how big on the screen) and the amount of compression. Basically, this is all about the art of compromise. The program has this vague slider labeled quality. The higher the quality, the larger the file size.

There are lots of other parameters to set and each button opens up a whole bunch more parameters to play with before you hit "Make MP4". What I do is this. I import the sermon off the DVD, then I export a .mp4 file at 640 x 480 (standard NTSC TV video) with 50% quality setting. I change the audio to mono (since that's what I started with), lower the bit-rate and boost the volume by 10 db. I save these files (~120-180 MB) for posterity and then run them back through to get a 320 x 240 size file which is usually around 45 to 60 MB. So that's a small picture that still looks OK. The .mp4 files contain audio and video. While I'm at it, I also export a .mp3 audio file (20 MB). It takes something like about half real time to do each step. So it takes about 10 minutes for each pass on a 20 minute sermon. That's with a 2007 iMac (2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo).

If you look at a lot of videos on Youtube, the compression is often substantially greater than I'm doing and the videos show it. However, you might notice that newer videos are showing up with a higher quality option. This is because disc space is getting cheaper and internet speeds are getting faster for a lot of people.

So now I know that I want to store around 75 MB (audio and video) a week. And I'd like to have about a year available online. So do some math and that's 3.9 GB/yr. I own a small company and it has a website. The company that hosts my site also hosted the Obama campaign. They're pretty reliable. With my cheapo account, at $10/mo, they only allow 250 MB. The $50/mo plan allows 4 GB. That's expensive. I looked at the hosting company that the church uses for its website. They were more expensive and now they don't even list prices. Call us they say. So managed hosting with good support is out. I think they charge a lot because they can and they assume that you're gonna get a lot of hits (bandwidth). Actually I need lots of space and, probably not much bandwidth.

So now we're back to the art of compromise. There are a lot of cheap sites out there that say unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage. They all have little asterisks on their ads. So I look at a lot of them. There's a large variety but one thing they have in common is that they all look shady or maybe fly-by-night. The wording around "unlimited" is all kinda wishy-washy. However, about this time, I was unemployed and taking some computer courses so that I could start getting unemployment. I was taking courses on "PHP and MySQL" and needed a hosting company that allowed me to play with and learn both of these. PHP is a programming language for web sites that runs on the server and MySQL is a database that also runs on a server. They're often taught together. Anyhow, I thought about this hosting thing a lot and finally, I decided to go with the biggest of them all, GoDaddy.com. At $6.99/mo, I got the Deluxe Plan with only 150 GB of storage. The unlimited plan was $14.99. You've probably seen the really tacky GoDaddy ads on TV. They had a couple during the Super Bowl. Lots of tacky sophomoric T&A stuff. I think they were voted the worst of the lot. I already had an account with GoDaddy because I had used them to register some domain names that we were thinking of using for the company that never quite came to be. So all I had to do was add on the hosting. So I did. Part of the compromise is using a company with such tacky ads to host church sermons. But I do like the irony.

I used the Godaddy account to learn a bit of PHP and MySQL as I was taking a couple of online courses from Durham Tech. I did a couple of web sites for practice. One was a recipe exchange site that was part of the PHP/MySQL training and another was a rewrite of a friend's web site. I did a lot of work on it but he never got around to using it, which was a little annoying. I also rewrote my company web site using PHP and added a chemistry reaction calculator which utilized PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and CSS and XHTML. But that's all an aside for now.

As I mentioned, I was collecting the services on DVD every week. I have the DVD automatically record the 11 AM service each Sunday and after three services, when the disk is full, I take the disk home and pull out the sermons, convert them to regular size .mp4's and then exported the smaller .mp4's and .mp3's. The video camera stays on the pulpit for the entire service. With the video in hand, I bought the domain name of our church with the ".com" rather than the ".org", which they already owned, and carved out a place on my GoDaddy server for the church stuff. As it turns out, uploading big files from home is a bit of a pain. Three services of audio and video comes to around 200+ MB. If your ISP (internet service provider) is a cable company like mine (Time Warner's Road Runner), you get substantially faster download speeds than upload speeds. It's about thirty times as fast coming down as going up. You can check it out for yourself. What that means is that videos upload slower than real time and for some reason, maxing out your uploading capacity maxes out your internet connection. In other words, I have to wait till everyone else quits using the internet to do the uploads. I usually send them off as I go to bed. But my wife and son both tend to stay up later than I do, so even that causes problems. I need to find a much faster way to upload the files.

I've gotten tired of writing about this so I'm gonna wrap it up soon with a very condensed version of the last steps. Once I got the videos on the GoDaddy server, I would tell the lady at the church who handles the web site that they were there and she would set up a link. To play them it required that the viewer have QuickTime installed on their computer at home. This wasn't perfect. Eventually, using PHP and a bit of code that allows one to play an .mp4 file inside of Flash, I was able to simplify the experience. Just about everybody has the Flash plugin in their browser. So now you just hit the button on the church site and it loads up the file. And more recently, I've started uploading the larger video files instead of the smaller ones. Anyhow, the final result can be seen at the church's site or at my site.

Eventually, I may flesh out this last paragraph with some detail about how the battle between Apple and Adobe is raging over HTML5 and Adobe Flash with Google and Microsoft and everybody else chiming in and how this will impact everything we watch and listen to in the next 10 years. But not today.

2010-05-07T08:17:00.009-04:00

Roller Coaster Ride

The last couple of years have been a little worrisome. As it turns out, the career path that I chose for myself about 35 years ago has just about evaporated over the last 10 years. Two things have happened. There has been tremendous consolidation in the pharmaceutical industry and there has been a wholesale swapping out of the chemistry research labor force from an fairly diverse American base to a less diverse Chinese base at about 1/5 the cost per person. As a chemistry researcher, I got consolidated and swapped over a year ago. But that's not what this is about.

I recently found a part-time, work-at-home job as a Scientific Review Officer. I work for a company that manages the review of proposals submitted for research grants issued by a federal program run through the Department of Defense. Most of the funding is related to breast cancer research. Anyhow, what that means is that I'm at my computer a lot during the day. But that's not what this is about.

Not being from the landed gentry, over the years it became apparent that If I didn't want to eat dog food for the last few years of my life, I needed to save a bit. So I have tried. As it turns out, I've tried to take a long view of things and rather than put all my savings into mattresses or mason jars, I've put a good chunk of it into the stock market. I'd say it's about 2/3's in indexed mutual funds of various kinds including broad market, small cap, international etc. About a 1/3 is in various stocks that I or my wife have picked up over the years. Warren Buffet is handling about 8%. A little investment in Apple 21 years ago has grown to about 10%. There is a spattering of bonds and cash thrown in for good measure.

So, I watch it. Daily. And I track it. And I measure it against other indicators. I look for correlations and causes and effects. I am a scientist after all. The one thing that seems to remain fairly constant is the ratio of my net worth to the Dow. I guess it makes sense.

So the point of this story is that I was sitting at home at the computer yesterday, working at recruiting scientific reviewers as part of my part-time job and watching the stock market every once in a while. It's not been so good for the last week or two. Quite volatile and mostly down. I follow the market on the Google Finance page. Around 2:30 it was looking like another bad day with all the leading indicators pointing down. To get the latest numbers, I often hit the refresh button. Around 2:40 I hit the refresh button. Wow! It dropped from -300 to -400! I hit refresh again. Down another 100! Again. 150 more! Again. Another 150 or so. The market was in free fall! This was crazy. While this was happening, Apple was also dropping like a rock, only faster. Then I got excited. Buying Opportunity!!! Well, as the Dow hit down about a 1000 points, and Apple dropped below 200, everything basically quit working. It took forever to log into Fidelity and even the Google Finance page was refreshing real slow. And just like a rubber ball hitting pavement, all the indicators started moving up again. And unfortunately, just like a rubber ball, they never came back up to where they were dropped from. So the bottom line is that I didn't do anything. I just went along for an exciting ride.

2010-05-01T09:36:00.008-04:00

Bird Update

Time for a bird update. Look down to see previous posts on this subject.

There was some discussion between me and the wife about whether my new varmint barrier was far enough out on the post to deter would-be predators from getting to our new bluebird house on the swing set. We hadn't seen the original bluebird family around for a while. After a few days of inactivity, my wife ventured out and opened up the birdhouse. Inside was an empty crushed egg. After a few minutes on the web, she determined that squirrels do indeed eat bird eggs and that a squirrel was the culprit. So she removed the nest and cleaned out the house. I came out and took the hammer to the barrier to loosen it. I then moved it further out on the post so that an animal would have to be a bit more adventurous to get to the house.

And after a few days, we were back in the bluebird family business. I sneaked out and caught a few pictures. It's hard to get close enough to get a good picture of daddy bluebird before he flies away, but I finally got one this morning. Here tis:

Notice that the critter barrier is further out on the post. As I tried to get closer, he flew away but I got another shot of him in the tree.

We'll keep you posted.

note: Since I posted this, my wife told me she has seen a squirrel on top of the birdhouse since I moved the barrier. Hmmm!

2010-04-23T16:05:00.004-04:00

Visitor

This guy landed on our doorbell last night and he seems content to stay there. So I took a picture of him this morning. Click on the picture to get a closer view.

As of about 4 PM, today he's still hanging out and hasn't moved a lot if any. Maybe he's dead. Dead or not, he (or maybe she) is pretty cool looking.

OK, I'm back. This guy is a Luna moth. I looked it up. Actually, my picture is better than the one in Wikipedia. More colorful. Anyhow, they live in this stage only for about 1 week. Their only reason to be at this stage is to mate. They don't even have a mouth to eat with. Talk about single-minded.

2010-04-15T10:10:00.003-04:00

The Fix is In

If we go back about 4 posts, we get to a story about how I put up a new bird house which we hoped would attract a family of bluebirds. The story was actually more about how easy it was for the cat to get to the birdhouse and leisurely wait for prey to show up.

This, obviously, was not going to work so we decided that a fix was needed. My wife suggested going to Lowe's and getting some kind of thin metal pole and attaching the birdhouse. I couldn't quite figure out how to do that and I liked where it was and, apparently, so did the birds, except when there was a cat paw stuck through the opening. So I decided that a cat barrier would be a better fix.

I went out to the garage and found a thin sheet of wood and took it out to the swing set and marked the width. I brought the wood sheet back into the garage and cut out a notch to fit it on the upper swing set bar. Then I took it back out and slid it onto the bar. It was such a tight fit that I couldn't easily move it once I got it on. So I left it where it is. Here's a picture:

There is some debate as to whether the position of the sheet is adequate to keep the cat away from the birdhouse. I haven't seen the cat back up there since, but... An added attraction is that the bluebirds like to sit on top of the piece of wood and get a good view of their surroundings. I may eventually go out and move the barrier farther out on the post but, until I deem it necessary, given it's tightness, I'll probably leave it where it is.

I'd like to get a picture of the bluebirds at home. If I do, I'll post it here.

That's all for now.

2010-04-03T13:32:00.002-04:00

Singin'

Not to be outdone by my daughter, I sang a duet for the Good Friday service with another choir member. He's the baritone with the better sounding voice. I'm the tenor. I thought it sounded OK, maybe a bit dark. You can hear it here. I think I need to keep my day job. Wait a minute, I don't have a day job.

2010-03-27T10:19:00.003-04:00

Mixed Metaphor Fun

The other morning my wife was talking about a small company that was having some pains dealing with a recent change. She said that the change had "thrown them a wrench".

I'd never heard that before but it sounded vaguely familiar. I thought about it for a few minutes and eventually figured out that it came from a combination of two rather common metaphors. Can you guess what two metaphors she mixed?

Answer to come later after I find some web site about metaphors to link to.

2010-03-25T10:50:00.005-04:00

!!Go Big Red!!

This has been an interesting year for me as a college basketball fan. My favorite team, my alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) has been struggling a bit this year and is currently enjoying a winning streak in the NIT tournament. The NIT is sometimes known as the loser's tournament. This is a big disappointment to me and all those other fans who saw us win it all last year and figure that a trip to the NCAA tournament is a birthright. Humbling.

But maybe this year I was pulling for the wrong alma mater. My other alma mater, where I went to graduate school, is doing surprisingly well. Amazingly well, in fact. Cornell University will play Kentucky tonight, in Syracuse, in the first round of the sweet sixteen of the NCAA tournament. This is the first time in 30 years that an Ivy League team has made it this far. And historically it's always been Princeton or Penn, that made it. If memory serves me correctly, Princeton knocked off UNC to get there back in '79.

Anyhow, for the first time this season, I'll be watching and pulling for my other alma mater as they take on the highly favored Kentucky Wildcats. Maybe it will turn out to be a better basketball season that I thought.

!!Go Big Red!!

Update: It didn't happen (62-45). Cornell started good and played them respectable but it didn't happen. Oh well, back to the NIT.

2010-03-17T10:20:00.006-04:00

Bad Idea

My wife recently noticed a blue bird flitting around the back yard and decided that maybe we should encourage their presence. So while out shopping one day she bought a little bird house to encourage the blue birds to take up residence in our yard. We looked around in the back yard and thought we found a pretty good place for the house, right on the end of the swing set. No one swings on the swing set anymore and it looked like a pretty good height. We often see birds perched there, including the occasional hawk. So I pulled out the ladder and attached the bird house to the end of the swing set with the included screws.

About a week later, well, you can see what happened. Lucy, the fat one that rarely climbs anything anymore, had made her way up to scratch the edge of her cheek on the bird house. I didn't catch the picture, but yesterday she had her paw in the hole rooting around inside. As she pulled her paw out, a little bird flew out and away, barely missing mealtime.

You can see one of the omnipresent deer in the bottom right corner looking on as I snapped the picture. Here's a closer picture so you can actually tell that Lucy is a cat.

Note: add to to-do list, move bird house!

2010-03-08T21:45:00.002-05:00

Singin'

My daughter and another young girl sang a duet at church last Sunday. I thought it sounded pretty good. You can hear and see it here. Hit the arrow to start.

2010-02-26T10:48:00.006-05:00

Canadian Humor

I came across this picture. It's the retort of a Canadian to the Canadian men's hockey team losing to the US. As someone who is now paying for health insurance rather than having a company pick up the bill, I put this in the ironic humor class.

OOOPs! We lost to Canada so that can't be right. I don't know what this was all about. Maybe it was women's hockey. Who knows? I still like the sign.

My daughter just told me that we beat Canada the first time we played them and that there ain't no stinkin' women's hockey. So maybe I was right the first time.

2010-02-01T09:31:00.002-05:00

Snow

It snowed in Chapel Hill this weekend. It started around 7 PM on Friday night and snowed off and on for the entire night. When we got up the next morning we had around 6 inches of snow. Precipitation was still coming down, though as the morning went on, it turned into mostly sleet. That was a bit disappointing given that it was only 26° F outside. The weatherman said that a warm mass of air had inserted itself between the upper moisture containing layer and the colder air on the ground. This had the effect of turning our nice snow into hard sleet as it passed through the warm layer on its way down. As the sleet fell it actually pounded down the snow to some degree. Anyhow, the sleet mixed in with some snow continued to fall all day until around midnight. Everything was canceled through Monday. Here's some pictures.

The House

Looking down the driveway.

Snow measured on top of the Weber Grill.

Neighbors dropping in to munch on the shrubberies.

It got down to 16° F last night, it's 27° F right now and it's supposed to hit 44° F today, so the snow will be around for a few more days.

2010-01-26T14:44:00.004-05:00

Osprey

I was sitting in the house today and would occasionally hear some high-powered noise outside like jets or helicopters or whatever. You know, military type noises. We live near a little airport but about the only thing that makes a lot of noise are the private jets that fly in for a big UNC football or basketball game. A bit later I heard a loud noise again and this time I ran outside. The noise got louder and suddenly over the house appeared one of those V-22 Ospreys. You know, the half-helicopter half-plane that Boeing has been trying to get to fly for over last 25-30 years. I don't know how much it costs the taxpayers, but I can attest that they eventually figured it out cause I saw one fly over my house. Here's a picture of one I got off the internet.

The one flying over the house had it's propellers aimed straight ahead so I didn't get to see it do the stuff we paid so much for.

2010-01-05T20:08:00.003-05:00

Deer

When I came down for lunch today I looked in the back yard and saw not one or two deer coming into the yard to eat the shrubberies, but eight. I ran back upstairs to get the camera and managed to get seven in the picture. Here they are.

I tried to number them on the picture but it's hard to see. There are way too many deer around here and they're starting to behave like gang members. It's time for the deer to die. Death to Bambi!!

2009-12-19T09:37:00.010-05:00

Name Popularity

Have you ever noticed that some names seem to be very popular and some names seem just downright old and dated. Well, recently I found a tool that lets you chart just how crusty and cobwebbed your name actually is. It's called Wolfram Alpha. Now that's not what the tool is intended to be, but, so far, that's all I can figure out to do with it. Wolfram Alpha is a web site/search engine that was created by Stephen Wolfram, the guy who also developed the mathematical tool "Mathematica". You have to be a freakin' genius to understand how to use any of his tools and Mathematica is kind of expensive if all you want to do is play. Wolfram is a certified genius, having won one of those MacArthur genius awards. But for now, back to names.

One of the things that Alpha can do is look up statistical data on names, real fast. For example, if you type "Philip" into the search engine, you get a lot of stuff on the name "Philip", more than you really wanted to know. Like it's currently 378th in popularity, that 1 in 2681 (0.037%) or 802 people born in the US in 2008, were named "Philip". Also, the average age of a "Philip" is 56. You even get a graph that shows you just how dated your name is.

Pretty bad, huh? But if you feel outdated, you can always try two names for comparison.

"Donna", which used to be a really popular name, no doubt because of Donna Reed, has really fallen out of favor. Lets try another. Here's a graph of me, my wife and two of my many blog followers. As you can see, we're all has-beens. Albert is a real 19th century kind of guy.

For one last example, a friend of mine has a daughter, "Sophia", who turned five yesterday.

And just to see how she compares with the old fogeys.

What's really freaky is just how susceptible to popular culture we are when we name our kids. Try out a few yourself and see what I mean. Till next time.....

Merry Christmas!

2009-11-03T10:40:00.003-05:00

Neat things in North Carolina

I grew up in North Carolina and I'm over 50 so I, of course, watched the Andy Griffith show a lot when I was younger. It's part of who I am. One of the things that made the show more special was that occasionally, some specific part of North Carolina was mentioned. Few nationally shown TV shows seemed to be aware that the south even existed and for us to hear about somewhere we'd actually been was a treat.

Every once in a while Andy went to Raleigh. I'd been to Raleigh. I connected. Of course, they also talked about Mt. Pilot. But growing up on the other side of the state, I never had an opportunity to go there or to it's real equivalent, Pilot Mountain, until I was much older. What I didn't realize, and they never mentioned it on the show, is that Pilot Mountain is a weird beast. It's not a huge mountain, but it sort of sticks out of a relative flat area and on the top it has this lovely carbuncle. It's just really odd looking.

Pilot Mountain is a state park and you can go visit and walk around on some of the trails. Unfortunately, you can't go up on top of the carbuncle. I think you could a long time ago but I suspect that expense, liability concerns, nature preservation and all those other things of that nature have put a stop to it. That's really too bad. If I had a ton of money, I'd approach the State about figuring out how to make it accessible. Maybe drill a tunnel into the side that led to an elevator or set of steps that took you up to the top. That would be cool.

If you haven't done it you should take out an afternoon or day and visit the park sometime. Especially if you're a North Carolinian.

2009-09-30T22:34:00.002-04:00

More Organ and Piano Music

As I mentioned in a recent post, I've been helping my friend Tom get some music loaded up on his web site. It's now in place and can be found here. Hit the listen link to hear some of his music.

2009-09-17T08:46:00.003-04:00

Getting Dissed

So basically, Taylor Swift isn't gonna have all the fun. Anybody can get dissed by Kayne West. Even my web site. Click here.

2009-09-13T23:59:00.006-04:00

Organ and Piano Music

Over the last few months I've been trying to help our church organist get some of his recorded music up on his personal web site. This mostly included converting a lot of CD music into .mp3's, editing out some of the noise and coughs and adding extensive applause to the ends of all the tracks. Just kidding. I work a lot faster on these things than he does, so I got it all ready while waiting for him to figure out how he wants to lay it out. The titles are a bit cryptic but sort of name the piece and the composer. Have a listen if you like. If you don't listen to anything else, try the Vierne_Naiades.

Here's a few pieces recorded on our church organ.

Sonata_I_FirstMovMend

Sonata_I_SecondMovMend

Sonata_I_ThirdMovMend

Sonata_I_FourthMovMend

Naiades_Vierne

O_Gott_du_frommer_Gott

WenWir_Bach

In_dulci_jubilo_Bach

And here are a few recorded around the world.

50th_Chopin_Scherzo

Bach_Concerto_1st_mvt

Bach_Concerto_2nd_mvt

Bach_Concerto_3rd_mvt

Bach_Fugue

Bach_Trio

Bovet

Brahms_1

Brahms_Rhapsodie

Couperin_1&_Fugue

Couperin_Offertoire

Couperin_TenTaille

Debussy_L'Isle

Dupre_Finale

Durufle_Scherzo

Durufle_Toccata

Gigout2

Griffes

Lex_Chopin_Scherzo

Mendelssohn_Songs

Rachmaninoff_Prelude

Reger

Saint-Saens_Chorale

Saint-Saens_Scherzo

Vierne_Naiades

Widor

willan

2009-09-02T19:57:00.003-04:00

New Lawnmower

Not too long ago I wrote about my lawnmower. I wrote about how, even though it was largely abused, mostly through neglect, that it kept on running for 19 or so years. Well, on Monday I cranked her up and started mowing the yard. After a couple of spins around the yard, it stopped running. It just died. I tried restarting the thing but I got nothing. It was like there was no spark at the plug. So I went ot the garage and found a pack of 4 spark plugs that I bought 100 years or so ago for something and never used them. I pulled one out and replaced the badly fouled one in the lawnmower with the shiny, never used old one. I pulled the cord and nothing happened. So I decided, after consulting with the wife, that it was time for a new lawnmower.

Having bought a cheap lawnmower from Sears that lasted for 19 years, I decided that it wouldn't hurt to try that route again. I looked on the web and saw that they had one that was about the same for $149.99. So I went off to Sears and came back with a big box containing my new lawnmower. Today, Wednesday, I pulled it out of the box and set it up. All I needed to do was raise the handlebars, pour in the bottle of oil that came with it and fill it with gas. After a few pulls on the cord, it came to life and I was able to finish mowing the front dirt, I mean, yard.

To prepare the old mower for the junk yard, I removed the gas and turned it upside down to drain the oil. Funny, after an hour standing upside down, no oil drained out of the mower. Here's a side by side of the old mower and the new one before I got it dirty.

Ain't it cute?

2009-05-27T09:14:00.003-04:00

Interesting

As you may or may not know, Google owns the company (blogspot) that runs the blogging service that I use. Google also has an email service called "gmail", which came along after the blogging service. The first "gmail" accounts were offered to users of other Google services before they were offered to the general public. In fact, "gmail" may still be available by invitation only.

Anyhow, being early to the table allowed me to get an unfettered email address. So instead of "jsmith30437@gmail.com", I got the equivalent of "jsmith@gmail.com." That's pretty cool. The problem is that every Paul, Phyllis, Patricia, Peter, Padma, Pamela and a few Phils and Philips, who share my last name, will, on occasion, give out my email address as theirs, forgetting to add in that extra stuff that makes their email unique and different from mine.

So I get a lot of real email intended for other people. I often write back to straighten them out, which is usually appreciated.

The other interesting thing that happens is that I share a name with a famous NY Yankees pitcher. I get some email intended for him. Here's an example from a fan.

About a year ago another fan noticed that "I" was on injured reserve, and wondered if I could show up at his son's Bar Mitzvah, since I wasn't playing at the time. I told him I was a chemist. He said that if I could pull it off, he'd hire me. He was sure I'd be cheaper.

So that's all for now. Bye

2009-04-30T09:36:00.006-04:00

Cheaper Ways to Do It

Recently, some moron in the US Air Force thought it would be kind of cute to get a picture or two of Air Force One, the president's plane, flying past the Statue of Liberty with a jet escort. So they fueled up Air Force Two, which looks a lot like Air Force One and flew it low past the Statue of Liberty and New York City. Not surprising, the people of New York City completely freaked out and evacuated buildings and went running in the streets and the Mayor was ticked off in a big way. Word is the whole thing probably cost us around half a million, not counting the lost wages in NYC. The White House, sensing a PR disaster, apologized and expressed ignorance of and outrage over the whole affair. This kind of spending looks really bad during a recession.

The problem I have with the whole thing is that with today's modern computer graphics technology, they could have left the planes on the ground and still worked up some nice images.

Here's a picture of me at the Wright Brother's Memorial with Air Force One flying over behind me.

2009-04-14T15:27:00.005-04:00

Something that Bothered Me, that got Fixed

One of the big problems of being a nit-picker like myself is that, on occasion, I see an error so glaring that I squirm in my seat and rant at the wife and kids but I can't do a damn thing about it. This is such a story.

For a long time Exxon ran a bunch of ads that talked about what a wonderful company Exxon is, especially with respect to the environment. When I looked up Exxon ads in Google, there were a whole lot of people screaming about how hypocritical the ads were. But for me there was a bigger problem. The ads featured this lovely glass molecule rotating in space with science sounding music playing in the background and a narrator talking about Exxon's work saving the environment. The problem is, the structure of the glass molecule is all wrong. The molecule is cyclohexane. Now if you're an organic chemist or even if you were slightly exposed to organic chemistry, you know that cyclohexane is a ring of six carbon atoms with two hydrogens attached to each carbon. The other thing that you know is that the carbon ring has a distinct pucker to it. It's called a chair conformation and cyclohexane's shape even has it's own wikipedia page. Here's a screen shot from one of the ads.

You can see the ring flatness even better if you watch the ad itself. This flat abomination showed up in a lot of places including the front cover of their 2008 annual report to stockholders.

My wife used to work at Exxon Research a long time ago and I got to know a few of the organic chemists who worked there, some who are still there. This had to be driving them crazy, too. Well guess what? They fixed it. The newer ads actually have the structure of the molecule correct. Here is a screen shot,

and you can view the ad to get a better sense of the pucker. At first I thought that they had to get their glass blower to go back and make another pretty glass molecule with all the right angles but I suspect the whole thing was done with computer graphics. I did write Exxon and ask if they would tell me how they came to find out about the error and fix it. I'm haven't heard back from them yet.

Anyhow, that's one less thing in the world that I have to worry about.

2009-04-07T08:35:00.003-04:00

Forty Years Ago

The local high school drama class at East Chapel Hill High put on the play, "Once Upon a Mattress" this spring. My daughter and I went to see the show. It brought back memories of when our high school chorus put on the same play my freshman year at Tabor City High School. I was in the chorus and so I had a minor role, standing around in crowds and singing the occasional choral backup. I was also part of the stage crew and recently someone sent me a copy of a picture of the stage crew from the local paper. It was in one of those, "Do you remember and can you name the participants?" features that you often find in local papers. Here it is. Give it a try if you are from those parts in that era.

Oh, I'm the skinny guy on the far right.

2009-03-25T09:23:00.004-04:00

The Nature of Spam

I just noticed an interesting phenomena. I'm wondering if one could use this phenomena as a measure of the health of the economy. Here it is:

I use Google's "Gmail" for my email reading. I use it to capture emails from lots of sources. Gmail, of course, grabs my Gmail account, but it also captures the email from my ISP based email as well as my little company's email. So I get all of my email accounts in one place that I can get to anywhere. As you might guess, I also capture a lot of spam. Gmail is very good about recognizing the spam for what it is and putting it in a folder called "Spam", much to Hormel's dismay. I get maybe 100 to 200 spam a day. I usually look in the spam folder once or twice a day and empty out the contents. I've never found anything valuable in there though I've never looked for more than 3 -5 seconds.

So here's what I've noticed. If you looked into my spam folder a year ago, you would have seen lots of ads for male enhancement products, a decent sampling of weight loss schemes, a good dose of porn offerings and, of course, ads for cheap replica watches. There were also a lot of online pharmacies, but they were primarily hawking Viagra, so I'd put them in the male enhancement catagory.

When I looked at the spam this morning, there was almost none of the usual stuff. The spam was almost entirely focused on "How to Make Money, Easy and Quick", or some variant thereof. Out of the first 50, there was only one spam related to something sexual. The rest were all about making or saving money the quick and easy way. I think this is a sign of the times. Here's an example.

I'll continue to monitor this phenomena and try to see if I can ascertain some insight as to when to get back into the stock market. When I do, well, maybe I'll have something to help you learn "How to Make Money, Easy and Quick". Unfortunately, I suspect that all this is a trailing rather than a leading indicator.

If you're bored, try strolling through your spam folder and see if you notice the same thing.

Bye for now.

2009-02-08T21:31:00.030-05:00

Triangle Problem - The Solution and More than You Ever Cared to Know

This is for those who worked on the puzzle that I posted two weeks ago.

OK, so you gave it a shot and finally figured it out. Good for you. Let's see, did you do it the same way that I did? When I tried to solve this problem, one thing that I did was draw a lot of lines on this triangle. I drew bisectors and perpendiculars and arcs and lots of other stuff and looked for a thousand relationships that would give me the answer. Finally, for reasons I can't remember, I constructed a equilateral triangle on one of the lines from the corner to the middle. Then I drew a line from the tip of the new equilateral triangle to the tip of the old equilateral triangle and formed some new triangles. It looked like this:

It was then that I noticed that angle α, cut out the same piece of the little equilateral triangle (aaa) as it did the big equilateral triangle (xxx). In both cases, it leaves the angle 60 - α. The magnitude isn't so important as the fact that they are the same. Now we go back to 10th grade geometry and remember that two triangles are congruent (identical) if they have the same side-angle-side (SAS) pattern. So we see that the external triangle (a,60-α,x) is the same as the internal triangle (a,60-α,x). And that means that the last line that I drew in the new construction is going to be the same length as "c". So now we're done. All we have to do now is fill in the math.

When I first did this, I didn't have the internet and I didn't know the "Law of Cosines". But I did know that if you have a triangle and you know all the sides, there must be a way to figure out the angles. By doing a bunch of construction, I spent a day coming up with the law on my own only to find out that any real math nerd knew it already and it was clearly laid out in my own CRC Handbook of Standard Math Tables. Anyhow, if you have a triangle with sides a, b and c, then the angle (γ) opposite c is given by:

So now the internal triangle axc can now be described. The angle opposite x in triangle abx is γ + 60 and by the law of cosines again:

And now we plug in for γ:

OK, the formula for the area of an equilateral triangle is:

And then swapping out the X squared we get finally:

So I haven't even bothered to calculate the answer with a, b and c equal to 200, 300 and 400 ft., respectively. But maybe I will someday.

I will mention that I have always been bothered by that arccos and cos stuff in the answer. You have to have a calculator or some tables to arrive at the answer and I never liked that. Recently, while I was drawing up these pictures, I came across another solution. Of course, it's related to the construction above. It uses Heron's formula. You might have seen it on the wikipedia page on triangles. Heron's formula gives the area of a scalene triangle with sides a, b and c and one form is:

OK, here goes. As you did in the first step, construct two more equilateral triangles using the b line and the c line. What you will end up with looks like this:

The greens are the constructed equilateral triangles and the pink are 3 identical abc triangles. Now you can calculate the total area of this hexagonal blob as being equal to the three different equilateral triangles and three times the area of the abc triangle. Now look at it a different way:

In this view, you see that in the process you have managed to reproduce all the internal triangles on the outside and therefore the area of the triangle xxx is half the area of the hexagonal blob. So the area of triangle xxx, which was the original question, can also be given as:

And that's enough of that. If you're wondering how I made the equations, go to CodeCogs and open up the LaTex Equation Editor

2009-02-06T13:08:00.002-05:00

Triangle Problem - A Hint

OK, here's a hint to the triangle problem if you want one.

2009-01-31T23:49:00.003-05:00

Triangle Problem

A number of years (about 31) ago, when I used to work at RTI in the Research Triangle Park, there was an organization called the Triangle Universities Computational Center. They used to put out a newsletter and, on the last page, they often had a nerdy little math problem. I'd often work through the problem because, well, I was a nerdy kind of guy.

One problem proved to be particularly difficult and, oddly enough, it was about triangles. Just for kicks, I'll give it to you.

Farmer Jones had a big field that had the shape of an equilateral triangle. When it came time to spread fertilizer, he needed to know how big his field was so that he would know how much to buy. Problem was, he didn't know the dimensions of his field. All he knew was that there was a natural spring inside the field and that it was 200, 300 and 400 ft from the corners of his field. So how big was Farmer Jones' field? Help him out so he won't waste money buying too much fertilizer.

Or, if you like, given an equilateral triangle with sides x, and internal distances a, b and c, what is the area of the triangle in terms of a, b and c?

I figured out the answer pretty quick using an iterative approach, where I assumed a value for x and calculated the internal angles, which have to add up to 360 degrees. You just vary x until the sum is 360. I even wrote a computer program to do the calculations for me. But I wasn't real happy with that. I wanted an analytical solution. It took me about two weeks of intensive work in the evening and on a couple of weekends before I came up with a pretty solution.

I've shown this problem to a lot of people and only one other person has figured it out. Maybe he was the only one to try. He was a guy I worked with who handled shipping and receiving but had formerly worked in surveying. Actually, one other person figured it out using the iterative approach. I told him that it wasn't a very elegant solution. He disagreed.

Anyhow, give it a try and let me know if you find a cool solution. I'll post an answer someday.

2009-01-20T09:11:00.004-05:00

Snow

We haven't had much in the way of snow in about nine years. The last big snow was in 2000 and it was a doozy. At about 14 inches, it set an all time record. And we've been in a snow drought ever since. Well, its snowing right now and we've got about an inch and a half. That may be the most we've had since 2000. It's supposed to snow all morning, though it's not coming down real heavy.

I went out to take a walk this morning, but the driveway and roads were a bit slick so I decided against it. But I did move one of our cars down to the bottom of the neighborhood cul-de-sac so we could get out if we needed to. It was a bit of a struggle getting back up the hill.

I think we were all beginning to take this global warming stuff a bit more seriously. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Although global warming might be a problem, I worry a lot more about the nasty political and economic implications of our energy economy. Although no one seems to be mentioning it, I suspect that the freakish rise in gas prices this summer was instrumental in tossing us into this recession. But enough of that.

Here's an early morning picture of our house in the snow.

2008-12-26T09:30:00.016-05:00

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Greetings to all. Welcome to our genericized Christmas letter. We're hoping the end of 2008 finds you happy and healthy, if not wealthy. So, let's see what's happening in our Family. The real dilemma in this sort of letter is whether to relate the last year's events chronologically or by family member. We'll try a mixture.

Daughter is now a junior in high school. She's taking the standard college prep classes and continues to play the French horn in the school band and the orchestra. She's singing in the school Treble Ensemble and the youth choir at church, and also takes private singing lessons. She traveled to Boston with the Treble Ensemble last spring to do a little singing. We're starting to think about college a little but not too much. Daughter continues to like to draw, has discovered Facebook and is still fighting getting her driver's license. Go figure.

Son is a senior at Earlham College. After three years, he's decided that maybe he doesn't want to be an economist after all and has decided to double major in math and economics. I think he liked math better all along. He was thinking about graduate school but lately, he's been thinking about working for a while first. He continues to sing in the Concert Choir at Earlham. He also traded off his old girlfriend for a new one, so you can cut out the picture in last year's Christmas letter. This past summer, he worked for local property manager and in the process took over his dad's old Volvo S70, which he took back to college.

Wife continues to use the skill set she obtained in graduate school. She started the year sewing costumes for the church's youth choir spring musical. Then she helped do taxes for her sister-in-law's CPA firm. After April 15, it was back to sewing - this time it was costumes for a Professional Salsa Dance Troupe. Besides getting paid, she and hubby were given VIP treatment at the Salsa Dancing Extravaganza in Durham. In the meantime, she's on the PTA Board, has taken up knitting, vacation planning (see below), and is tutoring math to a Burmese high schooler whose family our church helped relocate from a refugee camp. She does all this and also tries to keep her husband in line. No small feat!

Husband is enjoying another bit of time off. In January we learned that there was a good chance that the small biotech (Serenex) where he worked, might be acquired. Sure enough, in April they were acquired by Pfizer. Pfizer took the intellectual property and dismissed the whole lot of them with some nice parting gifts. We used some of the funds to buy a new car to replace the one that Son took. That was a milestone in our lives since, for the first time in many years, our primary family car is not a minivan. Husband helped with the shutdown at Serenex and left work for good in September. He's enjoying the break but needs to go back to work before too long. He has a few nibbles in a pretty bad job market but nothing for sure yet. He continues to enjoy singing in the church choir and will soon finish his term as a church elder.

To celebrate losing his job, the impending recession and 25 years of marital bliss, husband and wife took off to Europe for two weeks. Wife planned the trip which included BudaPest in Hungary, Vienna, Melk, Salzburg and Zel-am-see in Austria and Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Germany. We had a great time and enjoyed a nice mix of history, art, architecture and nature. We also enjoyed our annual summer and Thanksgiving trips down to Sunset Beach.

Finally, as we close out another year, we thank God for Life, Health and the Joys of friends and family. We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Very Merry New Year.

Husband, Wife, Son and Daughter

Daughter in her Prom Dress

Sunset at Thanksgiving

Hiking near Zell Am See with strangers from Isreal

Our Inn in Garmisch-Partenkirchen

Some Links:

Ladies in Wife's outfits

Pfizer buys Serenex

2008-11-25T09:25:00.004-05:00

Deer Eating Shrubberies

This morning I was upstairs "working" on the computer when I noticed that my coffee cup was empty. So I ran downstairs to the kitchen to get a cup. And what do I see? Four deer directly behind the house, maybe ten feet away, happily munching down on my shrubberies. I ran upstairs and got the camera, took a few pictures, then went outside and shot at them with the BB gun as they were scurrying away. Here's a couple chewing up an azalea. The other two were even closer to the house dining on a camellia.

2008-11-19T22:25:00.002-05:00

Something Not Seen in a While

My wife and I jumped in the car today and rode over to visit my sister in Raleigh at her work place. We bought my sister some chocolates in Garmish-Partenkirchen when we were in Europe a few weeks ago as a token of our appreciation for taking care of our daughter for a night while we were gone and it was past time to deliver them. As we left our house, I noticed that the gas was low. My wife said let's wait till Raleigh and see if their gas prices are better than Chapel Hill (ave. 2.0899/gal.). Soon after we got off I-540 and headed into Raleigh on Fall of the Neuse Road, we saw prices a bit lower and then we saw this place with gas for 1.9699/gal. We turned in and I filled up (and took a picture) while my wife went in and bought some chicken salad at Tookies.

After that we went by my sister's place of work and visited for a while. Then we left and went by Costco on the way home. And guess what. Costco had regular for 1.8599/gal. Crap!

2008-11-18T08:11:00.005-05:00

Mormon Coke

A few weeks ago a case of cokes in the can showed up in the kitchen on the floor over in a corner. It just sat there. I looked at it and maybe noticed that it had a different color than normal cokes, but I mostly just ignored it. I guess I figured that my wife bought them for some school or church function.

After a number of weeks, the case was still there so I asked my wife where they were going. "Oh, I bought the wrong thing. I guess it's been too long to take it back," she said. So it looks like the case of cokes is ours. It was then that I actually looked at the case. They were regular cokes without the caffeine. "What's the point?" I wondered. Then it hit me. They're cokes for Mormons. So I call it "Mormon Coke." Given that they contain sugar and not an artificial sweetener means that I have to drink them and not my wife. I've been working on them slowly for a couple of weeks and they're about gone. They're not bad, about the same as regular, or should I say, Classic coke.

I wonder if the Mormons are aware of these things.

ps As it turns out, the Mormon view on coffee is not universally held to be about caffeine. Type "Mormon Coke" into Google and have a read (or just hit the link).

2008-09-22T13:14:00.009-04:00

Uber Fans

My church is located in downtown Chapel Hill, right across from campus. The pitiful amount of parking that we have, is very valuable. This is especially true on UNC Football Game Days. Being prudent Presbyterians, we sell parking spaces to those out-of-towners who come to the game. The proceeds go to the youth program for various activities. Parents and youth are asked to volunteer to manage the parking and collect money on game days.

I signed up to do the game last Saturday. We were playing Virginia Tech. The youth leader told me that people start showing up as early as 8:30, even for a 3:30 game. Early Saturday morning, I spared my daughter and left her sleeping and headed off for the church. I got there about 8:15. When I arrived, I noticed four cars already in the parking lot. I went into the church and got the signs, which say there is parking at the church and that it's for the youth program and that it cost $15. The $15 dollar part is clearly a sheet of paper with $15 on it taped over the old $10. I also picked up the money bag with change and found some sheets of paper and a marker. I wrote "Tow This Car" in big letters on the sheets of paper and placed one on each of the cars in the parking lot. Then I set up the signs, and sat down and went to work.

Around 8:45, the first customer showed up. A big black Ford Expedition drove up with a bit of Hokie paraphernalia (flags, decals, etc.) attached to the outside and a man and his wife hopped out followed by their daughter. They were dressed in the required glaring burgundy and orange clothing required of Virginia Tech fans. I took their money and sent them off to Franklin street in search of breakfast and shopping.

Next came the first of a regular crowd of Carolina fans. They've been driving from the mountains and setting up shop in the church parking lot for many years. The first ones there buy one parking space and put out chairs to reserve a bunch of spaces for their friends coming later.

Then, as I was going to check on the signs which kept blowing over in the wind, the Uber fans showed up. I think it was a big black GMC Yukon Denali. And it was pulling a big trailer that can only be called a party machine, a big folded up Sports Bar. Before they park, a guy hops out of the SUV and says he needs four spots. He gives me $20 each. "Keep the change, give it to the Church," he says. So they pull in and a bunch of people (six men and four women) hop out and start setting up. Some may have been in another car.

First, they open it up and reveal two large LCD screens, one on either side. Then out come the speakers and associated sound equipment. A long coffin sized stainless steel grill slides out from the middle of the trailer and is wheeled over and set up on one side. Two small LCD screens are bolted from the ceiling on the back above the bright orange bar that folds out from the inside. This is followed by an assortment of flags, tables, chairs, awnings and cabanas, all in that dark burgundy or bright orange color. In the meantime, one guy, who I think is the owner comes over and buys two more parking slots, again for $20 each. Finally, they set up the satellite dish and we're watching ESPN on all four LCD screens.

I walk over to the Carolina crowd, who used to think they had an impressive setup, and tell them they need to up their game. They have a pretty nice functional setup including a little motorized scooter but, well, just look for yourself.

And they do. A lot of Carolina Blue roams over to the Virginia Tech party machine/sports bar. They ask a lot of questions, take a few pictures, and shoot the breeze.

By around 12:30, all the spots are sold out and there's a pretty serious party going on in the church parking lot. The Carolina fans and the Virginia Tech fans are blasting music at each other. One young lady has turned ESPN off one of the LCD's and is playing a game of Wii bowling. It's a pretty festive atmosphere. A lot of people are enjoying a beer and watching the NC State - ECU game on one of the LCDs.

The first family to arrive came back from shopping and set up their station. They said that they met Alexander Julian in his store. They offer me a beer. Since I'm done with parking, I say sure and they give me a beer in burgandy beer jacket with orange dots and fuzzy orange stuff around the bottom. I enjoy the beer, shoot the breeze for a while, watch the State-ECU game and relax for a bit. After a while, I decide it's time to head home. I tell everyone it's last call on the church bathrooms, pick up the signs and the traffic cones, hide the money in the church, then lock up the church and head out. Not a bad job for a Saturday morning.

2008-09-14T19:40:00.007-04:00

Lemonade for Obama

Today, I took my daughter to a little party on campus. On the way home, I noticed a group of people gathered at a corner near our house. I thought it was a bunch of kids selling lemonade to make a buck for who knows what. Then I saw the sign:

Lemonade
for
Obama

I drove on home but an hour later, on the way back to pick up my daughter, I stopped. There were a number of mothers and kids. They had run out of lemonade but a new batch arrived just after I did. I asked a few of the kids involved if I could take a picture and they quickly posed for me. I also bought a cup of lemonade and a brownie. I gave them $5 for the cause.

I hope similar things are happening in your neighborhood.

2008-08-31T22:02:00.002-04:00

Slow Drying Out

Well it's been about a month since we made the solid balls of g00. As I said, it may take a while for all the acetone to dry out. I began to wonder just how long it would take, so I took a hacksaw and went at the big ball. I cut out a little wedge to get a little cross section of the drying process. As you can see in the picture, the big blob has dried out about 3/8 of an inch from the surface.

Considering that the rate of evaporation will probably slow down, I estimate that it will take about 7o years for this process to finish. That's a real seat-of-the-pants estimate. After that, I took the hacksaw to one of the smaller blobs. I sawed that sucker in half. It's interesting cutting this stuff. When you're cutting through the hard stuff, it cuts well. As you get into the center, it's more like cutting through a squid. It's arduous. Anyhow, just like the big blob, the smaller blob was still pretty acetone rich in the center. In other words, it still reeked of acetone.

So this got me to thinking about mailing off the plastic challa bread to it's maker. I hope the trace of leaking acetone fumes won't set off some alarms and send the Homeland Security guys down on my ass.

By the way, that white bucket with the red lid in the first picture has a fresh batch of melted polystyrene foam for my entertainment.

Bye for now.

2008-08-06T21:37:00.011-04:00

Making Blobs

One of the things you do when you lose your job but you haven't quite lost it yet is try to find things to fill your time. You're getting paid but after a while you get tired of sitting on your butt, surfing the web.

One of the neatest things one can do, which fills time and has little or no value, is melt styrofoam with acetone. Actually, it isn't really styrofoam but is instead "expanded polystyrene foam", which everyone who doesn't respect Dow Chemical's trademark, calls styrofoam anyhow. You know it as that white stuff used in coolers and packing material and coffee cups. What it is, is a little polystyrene and a lot of air. By adding acetone, you start to partially dissolve the polystyrene and release a lot of air. It's not really dissolution so much as solvation. No chemisty takes place in the process.

I guess one could argue that melting it makes the "expanded polystyrene foam" take up less space in the landfills and it does that remarkably well. But the real reason to do this is to have fun.

So I decided to do a little. First I enlisted the help of my humble but able assistant. She's always up for something a little off the wall. We started collecting a lot of the stuff. There was the stuff in the solvent boxes, which cushions the glass bottles during shipment. There were lots of coolers from the bio guys and gals. There was a variety of packaging for syringes and tubes and who know what else. Let's just say there's no shortage of "expanded polystyrene foam" to be found in a lab environment.

We gathered up a lot of this white stuff. Then, to get a nice visual effect, we eviscerated a number of Sharpie pens of different colors and dropped the inky insides of each into acetone squirt bottles. This gave us a variety of colored acetone solutions to shoot at the various "expanded polystyrene foam" products. When acetone hits the "expanded polystyrene foam", it melts to a goo, much like the faces in "Raider of the Lost Ark", when they opened up the Ark. If you use colored acetone, you get colored goo. Cool!!

We got a big plastic (polypropylene) tub and poured in a bit of acetone. We then started stuffing the white stuff into the acetone and watched it disappear into goo. After a while we had a good base and the melting slowed up a bit, so we started spraying down the pieces with the squirt bottles of colored acetone. This elicited squeals of glee from some in attendance. Then we squirted designs in the coolers and as they melted, we stuck pieces together to make a variety of creations. If something didn't look quite right, we shoved it into the acetone vat and reduced it to goo.

This process went on for a few weeks. If you got bored, you went down to the lab and melted more "expanded polystyrene foam" into a growing ball of goo. Eventually, this got to be boring, so we stopped and let a lot of the acetone evaporate while my assistant took a few days off. When she returned we had a nice workable blob. All the colors combined gave a dark green hue to the acetone wet goo.

When I say workable, it's important to remember that you're dealing with a ball of goo that resembles taffy but reeks of acetone. So it's important to wear good solvent resistant gloves and work in a hood. After a while, I decided to try something different. I poured off any excess acetone and added a lot of water. This dramatically lowered the acetone fumes and seemed to semi-seal up the surface so the vapors went down a bit and the surface turned into a greyish green. If you squeezed a bit on the goo, you could expose fresh dark green acetone soaked surface. So we pinched off a few bits of the big goo ball to play with. My assistant took one small blob and fashioned a piece of challah bread. I took a couple of small pieces and mushed them around. Right before I went on vacation (see below), I dropped the two smaller blobs into water and filled the vat with the rest of the big blob with water and left them for ten days. I left the challah bread out on the hood surface. When I came back, the two small pieces that I was playing with had hardened and the smell of acetone was essentially gone. The big blob still reeked of acetone. Here's how they looked (click on the pictures for higher resolution):

Although these things look kinda mushy, they're really quite hard at this stage. And here's a closeup on the big blob:

And here's the challah bread:

The challah bread was interesting because it was sitting on the bench instead of in water. Over the week I was at the beach the top got hard but the acetone couldn't escape from the bottom and so it stayed soft and supple. Here's a picture of the bottom:

It almost looks like one of those geode things. When it dries out, I'm going to send it off to it's maker.

And that's all I have to say for now about melting "expanded polystyrene foam". Maybe one day I'll calculate the volume of material that actually went into the big ball but I'll have to wait for all the acetone to escape. That could take a while.

2008-08-03T12:40:00.003-04:00

Beach Pictures

We recently went to Sunset Beach for a week. We took some pictures. Here they are:

Beach August 2008

2008-06-30T21:15:00.004-04:00

A New Career

Earlier this year, back in February or March, our church's youth group put on a play called the Cotton Patch Gospel. It's a musical that retells the story of Jesus as if in modern day, rural Georgia. In one scene, Jesus is telling a modern version of the Good Samaritan story. One of the groups that comes upon the man recently beat up by robbers and left on the side of the road is a hot gospel singing group, called the Quintessentials. That's because there's five of em. Anyhow, they drafted 5 of us older gentlemen to play the part. This is what it looked like.

It's not hard to tell which of this group is more comfortable performing.

2008-06-10T20:52:00.004-04:00

New Car, Old Job

I haven't written in my blog in quite a while. So for a quick update to those who occasionally read it, here's what's happening.

The company where I work got bought by a big pharmaceutical company whose logo appears below. They liked what we had, but they didn't think it would be worthwhile keeping us around so somewhere around August 31, I will be out of work. We'll get a nice severance and some other parting gifts, so if I'm not out of work too long, it won't be a bad thing. If I am, it will.

In the meantime, my son came home and got a job and needed a car. We've already got 2 cars with over 100,000 miles on them so we decided to get an new car with no miles on it. My son gets to use my old car. For the reasons mentioned above, we didn't want to spent too much money and we wanted reasonable gas mileage so we got a new Honda Accord. It looks like the picture below.
And that's all the news I have for now.

2008-02-02T10:32:00.000-05:00

Some Art from Philip

Often this blog is about technical things in my life. For example, I recently wrote in detail about the wiring that goes into my computer setup. One thing I didn't write up more recently (OK, back in August 07), was that we got a new computer. Maybe I'll talk about that some day. The new purchase was precipitated by some pretty stupid moves on my part in which I destroyed the Mac Mini.

OK, this blog is about my initial forays into computer art. My daughter likes to draw and she often scans in her artwork so that she can colorize it on the computer. So we got her a new Wacom Intuos3 pen tablet. They sort of let you write or draw or paint or whatever in a more natural way using a pen and the tablet captures your input and puts it into a computer picture. Here's a picture of it.

So I decided to try it out and do a little artwork. First, I did a still life.

It's not bad. I think the fruit is a bit out of proportion. I kind of liked this picture and I use it as a desktop for my computer.

Next I tried a man. Here he is:

My daughter thought he looked a bit creepy. It was something about his eyes.

Finally, I did a beach scene. It's pretty clear that I was getting bored by this point.

Maybe I'll get inspired again some day and embellish this beach scene or try a bit more to hone my skills.

Bye-bye for now.

2007-12-22T07:51:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas!

(Adapted from my wife's annual Christmas letter)

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire; Jack Frost nipping at my nose, Yuletide carols ……….

Seems I’ve been hearing those carols being played since Labor Day but it didn’t feel like Christmas until the weather finally turned cold this week. Suddenly, Christmas is less than a week away! I went out for 3 hours today and got all my shopping done. Now, I’ve given myself a day to get out these cards before I start the baking for teachers/neighbors/friends.

It’s been another rather uneventful year and that is a real blessing. Locally, weather has dominated the news as our drought conditions have gone from mild to moderate to severe to extreme to exceptional. For the past few months, a drop of rain generates the kind of excitement usually reserved for snow! We have all learned to take much shorter showers, surrounded by 3 large buckets. I have managed to keep most of my perennials and bushes alive with that collected water. We also have been following the mantra “If it’s yellow, let in mellow….” . They are talking about mandating that even for public restrooms! Between the drought and all the high-temp records broken this year, there are only a few die-hard global climate change skeptics remaining in this area.

Phil has had a good year at work and he’s still employed. For a chemist these days, that’s certainly not a given. He continues to enjoy singing in the church choir. He’s also serving as an elder and chair of the music and worship committee - which means he spends many an evening on the phone trying to round up smiling faces to greet or usher. He recently joined AARP to get reduced hotel rates for a business trip and had the gall to sign me up too. We can’t possibly be that old, can we? We do, however, enjoy being able to excuse the occasional odd mishap as “a senior moment”.

I started the year by turning the house into a sewing factory as a friend and I made 125 costumes for our youth choir production of “The Wizard of Oz”. Later, I actually made some money sewing a few costumes for a small, professional salsa dance company. Then I started a project that seemed to go on forever. I decided to turn the ugly, pie shaped slope at the front of our property into a terraced perennial garden. I (with help from my wonderful hubby) began by digging out a foot deep of the heavy, hard, rooty, rocky clay soil. Then I terraced it by building stone walls, moving 4 ½ tons of stone. It turned out to be a great way to get to know the neighbors better, as they would often stop by to chat (and give me kind encouragement). I’ve now turned my attention to the inside of the house. We have lived here for 16 years now, and most rooms are in need of an update.

Blake is in his junior year at Earlham, double majoring in math and economics. He’s having a great year and really appreciates his single room this year after being in a triple last year. He works as a teaching assistant/tutor for the math department, and seems to enjoy that. He took a semester break from concert choir , but will start back in January. This past summer, we were happy to have him at home. He spent the summer baking bread at Great Harvest Bread Company. His 5 AM start time was a wonderful incentive to do well in college. He has been dating a very nice young woman, Hannah, for about 2 years now. She came home with him for spring break and we look forward to her coming again this year. He, in turn, will be spending the last week of his Christmas break with her family is Seattle. Could this be getting serious?

Whitney is now a sophomore in high school. Music keeps her busy and happy. She is in the treble ensemble and band this year, and also plays in the small wind section with the orchestra (we had 3 concerts in one week - full of wonderful Christmas music!) She also sings in the church youth choir and is on their leadership team. In addition, she continues to take tap dance lessons - and has absolutely no interest in any other sporty endeavor. She’s a typical, lovely 16 year old girl, spending hours chatting with her friends, not on the phone but on the web. She is in no hurry to learn to drive and has yet to take drivers ed. It feels rather strange as a parent to be pushing a child to start driving!

As a family, we’ve continued several wonderful traditions this year. We had our 20th annual summer week at Sunset Beach with Phil’s extended family and were joined this year by our good friends Jay, Sue and Haley from Pa. In Nov., it was back to the beach for our 15th annual Thanksgiving celebration. During Whitney’s spring break, we headed down to Charleston, SC. We took some wonderful tours (I highly recommend the Gullah tour if you are ever in the area) and ate some great food. We also managed a quick trip to Iowa after dropping Blake off at college in Indiana, and managed to catch up with family and friends.

We hope you and your family are well and find time to enjoy the blessings of this wonderful time of year.

……Glad tidings we bring to you and your kin; Glad tidings for Christmas and a happy New Year!

And now some pictures.

The Thanskgiving Bunch

Parts of the Beach Crowd

Blake and Hannah

Whitney and cousins, Joni and Paige

Donna's Project (before plants)

2007-12-15T08:32:00.000-05:00

Nightmare

About a week ago I woke up early, shaken by a horrible nightmare. First, some background: I have a 1999 Volvo S70. Now to the nightmare, it's short. I took my car to the dealer to have it worked on, maybe it was a tune-up, that wasn't really part of the dream. The bad dream was picking it up. I went up to the cashier and asked how much it would be. She casually said "Fourteen thousand dollars". "Fourteen thousand dollars?," I said. A horrible feeling of terror swept over me. How could it possibly be $14,000? My worse fear was how I would explain it to my wife that I let them charge me $14,000 for a simple checkup of a car that was worth, at best, $4,000. I remember standing there stunned with a whole bunch of emotions running through me and then I woke up, badly shaken by the whole affair. I got up and went to the bath room and was turning it over in my mind. I was relieved that it was a only a dream but I was still pretty upset about it. There was a mixture of anger at the dealership for not calling me before doing the work and that helpless sensation anyone feels when you don't have control. The emotions I felt at the dealership in my dream stayed with me for a few more hours, wearing off gradually over the morning.

I wonder what Freud would say about this.

2007-11-26T22:12:00.000-05:00

Some Photos from Thanksgiving

This was the 15th Thanksgiving that we spent with family at the beach. We do the traditional turkey thing on Thanksgiving day and have a little cocktail party on Friday night where we steam a few oysters. We always take a couple of walks down to Bird Island and visit the Kindred Spirit mailbox. This is to get rid of the cobwebs in the brain from maybe a bit too much wine the night before and to take time out from constantly eating. As you can see from the pictures at the mailbox, it cooled off a lot from Thursday to Friday. A good time was had by all. Here are some pictures.

Thanksgiving 2007

2007-11-04T00:14:00.000-04:00

Video Test

OK, I haven't blogged in ages and it's time that I started back. There are a lot of reasons that I haven't blogged lately. The biggest ones are that I don't have time, I don't have much to say and I'm lazy. But, I've decided to get back on the circuit. I have an upcoming blog on the work my lovely wife has been doing out in front of the house. But not tonight. Tonight I am going to experiment with posting video. I have a nice little piece of video that I shot, oh, about 19 years ago. I've recently turned it digital and now I'm going to put it up on my blog. It's from the very early days of my son learning to talk. Here goes. (By the way, let's not mention this to him).

2007-08-08T22:07:00.000-04:00

Beach Photos, Summer of 2007

Hi guys. We go to Sunset Beach every summer during the week that crosses over from July into August. Sometimes I take pictures. Here's the ones I took this year. The link will take you to my public photos on Picassa.

Enjoy.

2007-07-21T21:05:00.000-04:00

Simpsonize Yourself

Could anything be cooler than this. There is a new web site that allows you to upload a picture of yourself and turn into a Simpson's character. I took that photo over on the side of my blog and used it to make a Simpson of myself. Here it is:

I could have messed around with it a bit more but this is OK for now. If you want to make one of your own go to the Simpsonize site and give it a go.

2007-07-16T22:12:00.000-04:00

In Fairness to Durham

In all fairness to the City of Durham, North Carolina, they finally finished the corner and a lot of other stuff. They even had a celebration. I didn't go but I did take a picture of the finished corner for you to see.

Enjoy!

2007-07-16T21:08:00.000-04:00

How to Prepare a Gourmet Meal

Recently, my wife went somewhere and I had to feed my daughter and myself. This was an excellent opportunity for me to prepare a real gourmet meal. It's not hard. You can do it, too. Here's what I did along with some instructions and illustrations.

First choose a gourmet meal. I chose Marie Callender's Chicken Pot Pie, a delectable mix of chicken, vegetables, crunchy crust and some weird creamy yellow goo to hold it all together.

The first thing you do is turn on the oven to 400 F. While the oven is heating up, open up the boxes and place the pot pies on a tray. Then you tear off little strips of tin foil and wrap them around the edges of the pot pies. This keeps the outer edge of the crust from drying out while you're trying to bring the bulk of the food from rock hard frozen up to steaming hot. When the oven hit's the desired temperature, in they go.

Now comes the hard part. Set the timer for 60 minutes and go work on the Sunday Cross Word puzzle. You're supposed to cook then for 65 minutes, but you'll need 5 minutes to fix a couple of glasses of milk.

OK, times up. Open up the oven and give them a look. They should have a nice golden color. They should look like this.

Now comes the really hard part, the Flip. The real test of the gourmet preparation of a pot pie is a successful Flip. Basically, you have a fragile crust holding a flowing magma of goo and your job is to flip the whole thing over onto the plate and keep it all intact. Of course, the successful Flip must include a good release of the pie from the container. Nothing is worse than a good Flip, followed by tearing away the pie bottom and releasing the pie's contents before its time. If you do it right, it looks like this.

Bon Appetite!

2007-05-26T21:28:00.000-04:00

Downtown Durham Update

Over a year ago I wrote a blog about the work going on in downtown Durham, NC. I specifically wrote about the absurd placement of a new fire hydrant in the middle of the street. Well now I can see, sort of, why it was put where it was. It looks like the curbing was going to be extended out further so that the place where the new hydrant was to be placed would be on the sidewalk. That's all well and good except that a year has passed and these photos show how the project is going.

I'm glad I don't pay taxes in Durham, though I suspect that there's a bit of Federal money going into this downtown revitalization project.

2007-05-16T21:42:00.000-04:00

Socks

The other day I was helping my wife do some laundry. Of course, in our house, anytime you do a load of laundry, you always find an old load left in the dryer that you have to deal with before you can get your load through the process. Well, in this case the load in the dryer was particularly interesting. It had a bunch of my kid's underwear and other such stuff. There were also a bunch of socks. Anytime you fold laundry with socks, you always have a single or two. Well in this load, there were 12 socks and only one pair in the bunch. Here's a picture.

Who knows where their partners are. Maybe they'll show up in the next load.

2007-05-15T21:09:00.000-04:00

New Computer

I recently got yet another computer. I didn't really need it but I didn't know it at the time. Tonights blog is about what I bought and why.

When I left Lilly a few years ago and started a new company, I needed a Windows computer because I was going to sell robotics which would require a Windows computer. I'm normally a Mac kind of guy, but for this application, well, I needed Windows. So I bought a Dell Inspiron 600m. Here's a picture of one:

Over the next year or so, the company didn't make enough money so I went back to work and left the company on a low hum. In the meantime, my lovely wife developed an affection for my Dell computer. She moved it downstairs to the living room and started playing online poker and sudoku and lots of other things while watching TV. She became very attached to it. I think I wrote about how I had to go buy another computer to use. That was the Mac mentioned in a previous blog. Of course, my daughter took over the Mac, but that's another story.

Anyhow, about a month ago, the Dell went on the blink. I came home from work and my wife told me the Dell wasn't working. So I went over and booted it up and it all worked fine. "See," I said, "I must have magic hands." About that time, just as I showed it to her, it locked up. I tried to reboot but it wouldn't happen. After a couple of hours, when it had cooled down, I tried again. It booted up fine, but after a few minutes, maybe when the fan kicked in, it locked up again. So it appeared that it would work just fine after it had cooled down, but when it warmed up, kapow!

It was this juncture that I did something stupid. We booted up and took off all the files that we needed. Then I started trying to figure out what was wrong. I decided to do some sort of disc scan to see if there were any errors. Well, a disk scan takes a long time and you can't get control of the computer back until it's done. It's not hard to figure that it could never get through the disc scan without locking up. It was during the many attempts to get through the disc scan that I was finally able to see for sure that the machine locked up just when the fan came on as I'd suspected. Hmmm! I think "So maybe if it stays cool, I can get through the disc scan." It was still sort of cool outside so I took the computer out and put it on the cold cement porch and let it sit there until it got plenty cold and booted up again. It ran a lot longer but not long enough to get through the disc scan until it locked up again.

I talked to the computer guy at work and he said that it might be a memory problem. So I came home and took out one of the memory chips. And, what do you know, it ran through the disc scan and seemed to be working OK. But with only one 256 MB, it ran really slow: 1/2 hr to boot, 15 minutes to launch the mail program, forever to surf the web. This is because, windows XP consumes all the ram and everything else has to get it's memory from disc swapping. So I got a new memory chip from work and put it in the computer and it booted up and ran fast again. Cool it's fixed. Then the fan came on and it locked up. Crap.

By this time my wife had gone into severe withdraw and showing signs of depression. So I figured it was time to replace the machine. I asked my wife if she would like a new computer for Mother's Day. She looked so happy, so I ordered one. I ordered a similar machine, though, because it's been three years since I got the last one, a similar cost a bit less. Also, I didn't buy Microsoft Office again. The bad news is that this one has the new Vista operating system. It sucks. Anyhow, here's a picture of the new machine.

In the meantime, I tried to figure out how to fix the old machine. I looked on the Dell web site and sent in a problem ticket. They said it was a bad mother board which they could fix for about twice what the computer was worth. So I got to thinking, maybe the only thing wrong with the mother board is that it can't read one of the ram slots and the electrical drain that accompanies the fan coming on exacerbates the problem and causes the lockup. This doesn't have to make sense. It only suggests a possible solution. Don't use the bad slot and jack up the memory in the good slot. It so happened that Staples had a 512 DDR notebook ram dohicky on sale for $40. So I bought one and slipped it in the good slot on the Dell and, viola, back to it's old self.

So now my wife is happy again and I got a new computer that I didn't really need but at least now I can blog at the same time my wife plays Nanosweeper and my daughter plays with her iTunes playlists.

OK, enough of this. So long for now.

2007-04-29T14:05:00.000-04:00

An Afternoon on Jordan Lake

So I haven't blogged for a while. And a I got a nasty comment from one of my two readers telling me that I need to start back and that I can't blame it on God. That's not exactly how he said it, but it's close. I haven't had so much to do that I haven't had time. It's more that I've always got a little something to do which I'm always putting off and so I can't blog when there's something else that needs to be done but can be put off a bit longer. I call it "procrastination as art."

I finally got most of those little somethings done and so now I can blog freely for a few days.

Today I'm going to talk about what we did yesterday. But it starts on Friday, or maybe sooner. I work for a small biotech company in Durham. Like most such organizations, we don't make any money. We do something much more interesting. We create value. Recently, we created some more value and so, to celebrate, each employee got a little gift. This past Friday afternoon, we had a small happy hour and everyone got the same gift, some flexible remuneration and a lovely group photo. They said that we shouldn't use it (the money) to pay bills but to do something nice for ourselves.

I came home and told my wife about it and, of course, she had an idea. "Why don't we go to Jordan Lake and rent a motor boat and ride around the lake?" She had already done her homework. There was this place, a marina, that rents motor boats and we could go tomorrow and it would be a lot of fun.

So I called the next morning and reserved a boat for us from 1:30 to 6:30 PM. We loaded up some drinks and snacks and took off for the lake. It was a beautiful day. It was in the mid to high 70's and there were a few fluffy white clouds in the sky. When we got there I went in and read all the rules. The rule book that you had to read had lots of pictures and at the bottom of each page it said "NO EXCEPTIONS!" "NO EXCUSES!" We paid up and off we went. Here's a picture of a boat like the one we rented.

Of course, I had to drive. We took off slowly but pretty soon we got the hang of it and sped up a bit. The first thing we did was head south under Highway 64 and started looking for something interesting to do. "Let's go up the Haw river." But instead of going up the Haw we took off a bit further to the east and went into a little nook as you can see on the map charting our progress.

There were a lot of tree stumps off to one side of the nook and so we went fairly gingerly and stayed in the middle away from the stumps. This path eventually stopped and obviously didn't lead where we had wanted to go. So we got out the big water-proof map that they give you so you don't lose their boat and realized that we went the wrong way. We turned around and took off to where we needed to go. My wife had a bit of trouble figuring out the map and kept looking for a bridge that we should go under to get to the river mouth. Eventually, we figured out that the road that she was looking for was now under water and it all made sense.

Given that I was driving most of the time, we didn't get a lot of pictures. Here's Whitney, sitting up front, enjoying the ride. She's always liked to ride in boats from the first time we put her on a boat at age 2.

And here's our intrepid river boat pilot manning the stern.

So we eventually figured out the map and went a few miles up the Haw river and then came back through the lake and up to the more northern parts where there a few more stumps and trees off to the sides. After about three hours of this, the clouds got a little thicker and it was actually cold when the sun went behind the clouds. So we headed back taking one more little side trip under a bridge before heading back to the marina. Before we left, we went back in to pay for the gas we used. I happened to look on a map on the wall and saw that our trip into the first nook was in a strictly forbidden zone,"NO EXCEPTIONS!" "NO EXCUSES!" Luckily, we didn't hit anything in there and damage the boat. That would have chewed up the rest of my little gift and a lot more.

So that's what we did yesterday. We ain't gonna do nothing much today.

Bye!

2007-02-05T21:59:00.000-05:00

Shopping at COSTCO

My wife likes to shop at Costco. Costco is one of those big membership warehouse stores, like Sam's, except that they have liberal policies like paying their employees well and giving them good benefits and they don't try to destroy the environment and other eco-friendly things. It's "Sam's for Liberals". They're from Oregon. Figures!

Anyhow, the problem with a place like this is that they sell things in really big quantities. "What a bargain!!", my wife says as she hauls in a 25 lb. bag of rice.

And so I get around to the subject of tonight's blog. This week, I finally emptied out the last of the 25 lb. bag of rice into the little rice jar that sits on the counter for regular use. All the rice is not yet gone, but I was able to throw away the bag and free up some room in the storage closet. I went back to see when I took the picture shown above which I took soon after the rice came home. I took the picture on February 1, 2006. So it takes this rice eating family a good year to do in 25 lbs. of rice. So if anyone ever asks you how much rice our family eats in a year, you'll know that it's probably less than 25 lbs. but not by much.

Well, that all for tonight.

Khudaa haafiz (good-bye in Urdu)

2007-01-26T23:07:00.000-05:00

Marginally Cleaned Up Desk

Since I recently wrote about my computer desk and the wiry mess below it, I thought it might be worth mentioning that I have done a little work to make it a little less of a mess. My wife gave me a new power strip for Christmas. It's one that has some space between the plugs and has the plugs aligned outward. This way all those little black power converter boxes can fit on it without covering up all the other plugs. So I replaced the old two power strips with one new one. I added two little micro-shelves that you can't see to on which to hang some of the wires. I another shelf below the server shelf so I could put in the VCR that feeds the TV box. I stacked the TV box on top of the computer using some little spacer feet. I added a shelf behind the monitor to hold the speakers (Oh, I think they're new also) and the wireless router so the desk is a bit less cluttered behind the monitor. I also added a little headphone-speaker switch (the little black box next to the computer) so that I can listen to the speakers and my daughter can listen to headphones without having to go behind the computer every time we switch computer users. The best thing is that one (usually my wife) can get to the little dust bunnies that used to grow under the wires with the vacuum.

OK, so it's a pretty pathetic life if this is all one can think of to talk about but I poured out my passion last night on the lottery.

Kíhtwám ka-wápamitináwáw   (goodbye to more than one in Cree)

2007-01-25T21:18:00.000-05:00

The North Carolina Lottery

About a year ago, North Carolina finally got a state lottery. This is supposedly for education. I hate state run lotteries. If there's something that will get me up on a soapbox fast, it's the lottery. The lottery is one of the lamest, unethical things a state can do. It's a tax on people who can't do math, people who ain't got nothing but dreams. Stupid People. It was always obvious to me and to any moron who manged to look, that a disproportionate amount of the lottery tickets were purchased by people who should have been spending the money on something else, like food and clothing for their children. So basically, the state sets up a mechanism to extract money from the very people that it will have to turn around and support in some other way based on their lower expendable income due to money spent on the stupid lottery. It's not only unethical, it's also inefficient. For all the money we get from them, we only get to keep about 30%. Half goes to the few people that win, and a bunch more goes to the corrupt organizations that run these lotteries. If we really want to screw these people, which is what we're doing, then why don't we just shoot them. It's only marginally less ethical and certainly more monetarily efficient.

For a long time, I was proud of being a North Carolinian. We didn't have no stinkin' lottery. We weren't mean and nasty like those arrogant jerks up North who like to look down on us. Lotteries are tacky and North Carolina was classy. OK, NC has it's problems, but in this instance, we were a model of class. Then all of a sudden all the stupid states in the south started feeling like they were missing out on something that all the other states were enjoying, "Screwing the Stupid People for Fun and Profit." About the only argument for a lottery in North Carolina that I can abide, is that now we get to screw over our own stupid people rather than let Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina do it for us.

The reason that I bring all this up is that the PowerBall lottery got up to $240 million and I got stupid and bought a lottery ticket. Here it is:

Last night they had a drawing and here are the numbers. Some stupid person in Missouri won.

I didn't match a single number. Now I really hate the damn lottery even more.

Görüsædæk (that's good-bye in Azerbaijani)

2007-01-20T22:07:00.000-05:00

DOG POO !

No matter how long you live or how well adjusted you are, you never get quite used to stepping in dog poo. It just takes the shine off your day.

Today I was walking around in the woods behind the house, looking at the dead trees aimed at the house. When I walked back to the house I noticed something on the side of my shoe. It had the consistency of muddy clay but unfortunately, it wasn't the right color and it had a subtle but pungent aroma. Damn! Dog Poo! I walked back out into the woods and found what was left of the offending excretion lying in the trail. I used a stick to slick it off to the side. Then I used many of the dead rotting stumps to scape the offending stuff off my shoes. I got most of it off but my wife suggested that I leave the soiled shoes outside.

Maybe I'll go walking in the mall tomorrow to loose up the remains and return my shoes to a state of OK.

May you always have clean shoes.

Good night.

2007-01-18T22:28:00.000-05:00

A Bit of Snow Today!

I got up this morning to go for my morning walk and, "Holy Cow!", there was snow on the ground and it was coming down like gangbusters. That was all the excuse I needed not to go for my walk.

Actually, there wasn't that much snow, only about an inch. But we haven't seen much snow around here since Global Warming really took off a few years ago. And it wasn't really coming down all that fast, but it was exciting just the same. It's been pretty warm around here lately and so the snow melted almost immediately on hitting the pavement. So I went to work as usual. School was canceled. There was a planned delayed opening and so I guess they decided to just "call it a day."

Anyhow, by about 8:30 AM the snow turned to sleet and then rain and by the afternoon, the snow was little more than a memory and we were left with only a cold rainy day. Yuk!

Well, enough for now.

Auf Wiedersehen!

2007-01-16T22:09:00.000-05:00

American Idol

I just finished watching this years first episode of American Idol. It was a two hour special. I really like the season's early shows the best. That's when they (Randy, Paula and Simon) go around to various cities in the US and audition some of the worse "talent" that one can imagine. Where do they find those people? Unfortunately, its the most untalented and pathetic people that make for the best entertainment.

This week they were in Minneapolis. There are a lot of people out there in the heartland that can sing good enough to get through a shower without breaking any glass. But not a lot better. They are often surrounded by people who can't sing at all and are completely tone deaf. So these shower singers get the feeling that maybe they can sing good enough to go in front of millions of people and sing. Unfortunately, the tone deaf people only encourage them if only to make them feel good and because they don't know any better. It's all done with the best of intentions and with the most disastrous of results. It's like some illiterate reading my blog and then convincing me that I can write. But I know better.

Anyhow, I enjoyed it. It's on again tomorrow night. They'll be in Seattle. But I won't be able to watch. I'll be at choir practice. Maybe I'll record it using my little device that I mentioned in my last blog.

Time for bed. Au Revoir.

2007-01-13T21:50:00.000-05:00

What's on TV?

Some time ago I bought this little box that shoots TV onto my computer screen. It's called TVMax and it looks a lot like my little computer. You can record TV shows and do all the little things that one does with a DVR like TIVO. It can do a lot of other things, too. Actually, I bought it so that I could turn all of our old VCR tapes into electronic versions so that those precious moments wouldn't be loss when the tapes go to crap and I can no longer find a VCR to play them on.

Anyhow, I was sitting down to play on the computer tonight and was watching the tube over in the corner and I discovered that there was nothing on. Oh there were lots of things but few were really worth watching. Here's a sampler:

There was a Tom Hanks movie on channel 6.

Channel 16 was trying to sell something:

There was a football game on Channel 13:

CNN on Channel 29 was all over those lost boys in Missouri:

And there was a commercial for cheese on HGTV, Channel 76:

I liked this one the best. The black and white cows look real nice against the green grass and blue sky.

So that's what I was doing on a Saturday night, although it was Monday night before I got around to finishing this post.

Adios, Amigos!!

2007-01-01T15:29:00.000-05:00

Christmas Letter

My wife recently wrote our Christmas letter. You know, that thing you insert into your Christmas card telling how much more exciting your life is than that of your friends. Well, I thought I'd post it, only it doesn't sound so exciting. I've decided that, as I get a little older, "exciting" ain't all it's cracked up to be. With minor edits to give anonymity to my family, here it is:

Greetings from North Carolina!

I've been procrastinating about writing this annual letter because we've had a very uneventful year - which is a blessing. This morning I asked Phil what were some of the big highlights of the year and the only thing he could come up with was: We got a new bird feeder!

Phil did change jobs this year from company A to company B (not much of a change, eh?). They are both small companies, but he's happier at his current place where his favorite former boss is now his boss again. He's still singing in the church choir and is about to start a term as elder.

I continue to volunteer at church and school. This year I kept my sewing machine humming making costumes for the school play (Hounds of Baskerville - I made a great Sherlock Holmes coat and hat!) and the youth choir musical (Seuessical - bird girls, fish, monkeys - you name it!) and am about to start all over again on the Wizard of Oz. I'm beginning to get bored and may have to find a new venture this year.

Son (or "alternative son" as he now calls himself) is now a happy sophomore at Earlham and pleasantly surprising his parents by doing better than they expected. He recently decided to do a double major - adding math to his economics degree. Unfortunately for us, that means he had to drop his plans to do a semester abroad in Vienna where we were already making plans to visit him. He sings in the Earlham chorale and has a steady girlfriend (from Seattle). He spent the entire Thanksgiving break in bed, and a week later ended up in the ER where he was diagnosed with mono. He managed to make it through exams and is now recovering at home (by sleeping days and staying up all night).

Daughter started high school this year and is loving it. She's in band (French horn) and especially likes her Japanese class. She continues to take tap dance, sing whenever she can, and always has a pencil in her hand for drawing. She cut off all her hair this year, so no more tangles!

We did not take any big trips this year. Daughter was sick most of spring break - our usual travel time, but we did manage to get in a short trip to the mountains. We had our annual July trip to the beach where we enjoyed the company of Phil's best friend from high school and his wife. We spent Thanksgiving at the beach for the 14th year in a row - always a great time for Scrabble, long walks and watching the dolphins play right off shore. We also had a beach weekend in October when we celebrated Uncle Frank's 80th birthday!

That's about all the news from our corner. We hope you and your family have a Christmas blessed with joy and peace.

And that's it.

Of course, I'll have to toss in a few pictures just to make it all worthwhile.

2006-12-23T22:37:00.000-05:00

Big Ass Bird!!

I was wandering around in the woods behind the house a few days ago when, all of a sudden, this very large creature rose from the ground. It was a big ass Owl. He landed on a branch and stared right at me. He looked pissed. So I ran into the house and got my trusty digital camera. I took 3 pictures of the sucker, but only one was unblurry enough to make out the owl. It's times like this when I think I need a camera with a good zoom lens, maybe one of those expensive SLR digitals. Anyhow, here he is.

It's hard to tell from the picture how big this guy is but I would estimate him to be about 14-18 inches tall, or maybe bigger, sitting up on that branch. Anyhow, I tried to get closer and he flew away.

I think he lives back in woods behind the house. Often, if I'm outside at night, I can hear a pretty loud hooting not far from the house, just into the woods. He's helping the cats rid the area of rodents. He's a good neighbor and I like him, even if he don't like me.

I'm gonna go look in Wikipedia and see if I can find out more about him.

Bye for now.

OK, I'm back. Wikipedia was not very helpful in figuring out what kind of owl it was so I went downstairs and got out our Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Birds. It's a Barred Owl. If you search Barred Owl in Wikipedia, you get better information. There's even an audio clip of the barred owl. However, the audio doesn't sound like the sound that I hear in the woods at night. Maybe it's something different, like Sasquatch, maybe.

OK, bye for good this time.

OK, I'm back again. The idea of having Sasquatch in the back yard got me a bit concerned so I did a bit more digging. I looked up "owl sounds" in Google and found, can you believe this, all the damn owl sounds you could ever imagine. There were 4 different ones for the Barred owl. The first two sounded like the one from Wikipedia, but the third, the "hoo-wah" sound, was like the sound I hear in the woods at night. So it is my friend, the barred owl and not sasquatch after all.

Now I can sleep soundly. Bye, and I'm serious this time.

2006-12-21T10:12:00.000-05:00

A Simple Test of Google's Picture Thing

I recently signed up for the Google Picassa picture thing that lets you put pictures on the web so that other people can see them. I'm sure Google is doing this so that they can plaster ads next to your pictures and rake in more revenue. I tend to like the stuff Google does because they tend to make it simple to use and they have the motto "Don't be evil". So I have, for better or worse, decided to trust them with a lot of stuff.

I'm now going to test the utility of their photo warehousing for putting things in a blog. I have a picture of some of my sand art. I'm no longer a sand castle builder, there are way too many people out there that do it better than me. I am now a sand artist. OK here goes...

Crap! It doesn't work. Now I'll have to post it the old-fashion way since you're all excited about seeing my sand art. OK here goes again...

Crap! It came in sideways. How did that happen? Let's try again. OK here goes again...

Crap! It came in sideways again. I won' bother to show it to you again. OK, one more try.

There, I finally got it right. It appears that if you rotate a photo and save it, what you really save is the photo in the original orientation and an instruction to rotate it. When you open it again, some document will read the instruction and some will ignore it. Apparently, all the programs I use read the instruction and Google Upload does not. So I had to actually display the picture with the correct orientation and do a screen capture to get what I wanted. I bet the image quality suffered but I'm not going to do anymore work here to find out.

So what started out as a simple blog to test something, turned into a lot more work. But, who cares? I'm on vacation. You got to see some really nice sand art and I killed an hour.

So that's it for today.

Merry Christmas.

2006-12-14T22:09:00.000-05:00

My Morning Walk

I haven't written in this old blog in a while so I figured it's about time to try again. Tonight I'm going to talk about my morning walks. I started a new job back in April at a little company in downtown Durham. Here's a picture of the building. This has nothing to do with my story of my walk but I like to post pictures.

Anyhow, when I started working there, it became obvious that this crowd was a bit more into physical activity than some groups I've been associated with. My boss runs marathons, one guy rides his bike to work on occasion. Lots of people run. So I decided that I needed to get some exercise. I hate to run. I never liked it even when I ran track in high school. But I like a good walk. But walking doesn't give you enough of a workout in a short enough time. So I figured maybe a good hill or two might do the trick. I've been doing this since sometime in June of this year.

So here's my morning routine. The damn alarm clock goes off at 6:15 AM. I still hate to get up in the morning but now I do it pretty quickly anyhow. There's nobody to talk to so it doesn't matter if I'm grumpy. I sit up and put on the underwear and socks lying on the floor from the night before. I stand up and put on some shorts or new exercise pants that my wife recently bought me, depending on the weather. Then I put on a t-shirt followed by a fleece shirt if it's cool. Finally, I put on some old tennis shoes and make my way down stairs. Oh yeah, somewhere in the first few minutes I manage to pee. Anyhow, once downstairs I usually feed the cats and, if it's cold, put on a jacket and cap and head out the door. This is usually around 6:22 AM.

Here's an aerial photo of my walk. My guess is that its about 1.4 miles long.

We live on a decent hill so I get to start out on a pretty steep downhill. That's good since I'm rarely awake enough to climb up a hill. I just stumble along for the first few hundred feet. This time of year the sun hasn't come up yet and it's still pretty dark. I like that except it can be a little scary at times. This morning as I was passing the woods on the way down the first hill, a loud snort followed by a lot of rustling in the woods startled me a bit. I quickly realized it was probably deer. The deer get up early. Yesterday, as I was leaving the house, five of the suckers were peacefully munching on the neighbor's shrubberies. I smiled, waved and went on my way. Anyhow, I venture down the hill till I get to North Lakeshore Drive and walk along it for a short piece and then head up the big hill. When I first started walking, this hill would have me seriously puffing by the time I got to the top. It's gotten a bit easier but I still warm up a bit going up the hill and still look longingly at the peak on the way up. Then it's a short downhill followed by long gentle incline and then another little drop and I'm about half-way through.

So now I hit the second heart-smart hill. It's not quite as long as the first but I know it's there. At the peak, I take a long slow downhill back down to the lake and a flat walk back to my street. My street is nice and steep so that gets my heart going once more before I get back to the house around 6:45 AM. In the meantime, the sun's come up and the coffee has brewed and I get to kick back with a poptart and some coffee and surf the net for the days news for a half hour before I'm off to the shower, shave and out the door to work.

I don't walk on weekends.

So that's it for now.

Sometime soon I plan to talk about razors. I recently got a promo razor in the mail that has 6 blades. That should be worth a story.

2006-10-08T13:33:00.000-04:00

Ultimatum Gone Awry!

I was looking through some of my old photos and saw this ad. I guess I thought it was funny enough to save. So I guess it's funny enough to share.

Hmmm! As I looked further down the list. I found another interesting advertisement related to cats. I think this is pretty cool, too.

So enough for today and enough on cats for a while.

2006-09-22T21:24:00.000-04:00

Cats Need Water Too

Where does your cat get water? Some cats have water bowls. Actually, a lot of cats have water bowls, but only a few drink out of them. Most cats drink out of the toilet or, when they are otuside, they drink from the bird bath. But my cat Lucy will only drink from the sink. If she's thirsty and she sees you loitering around the sink, she'll leap up on the table and then across to the counter and the walk up behind the sink. She's gotten too fat to leap directly from the foor to the counter. Then she just looks at you like you know exactly what she wants. Which, of course, you do. So you start a slow stream of water and she leans over lapping until she's had her fill. This is usually followed by a short period of cat sneezing. She then jumps down and is on her way.

2006-09-19T21:23:00.000-04:00

Office Guys

Good evening. I just wanted to update you all on where my friends, the office guys, have gone. They no longer stand on my macs at home but have moved to where office guys ought to be. They're at my office standing on my big IBM computer. Here's a picture.

Maybe I'll get a better, less washed out picture later. But for now...

2006-09-17T22:39:00.000-04:00

The Wonders of Wireless

I was looking under my computer the other day and noticed that, although it has 2 forms of wireless communication, it still has a boat load of wires. Here, look for yourself.

See, that's a lot of wires. So I decided to figure out what all those wires were doing, you know, sort of map it out. Oh, I knew what each wire was for when I added it to the heap, but after a while, it's gotten to be a bit of a mess. So I sat down on the old Mac (see previous post), launched a CAD program, drew out each wire. Here's my diagram. You can click on it to see a bigger version.

You'll notice from looking at the legend on the right, that not only are there a lot of wires, there are a lot of different things being carried on those wires, in lots of different ways and with different protocols.

First there's the power. The power is AC, 110V at 60 Hz coming out of the wall. From there, it goes to the surge protector into which lots of things are plugged, including a power strip. Most of the things that are plugged in are those nasty little transformer boxes that Martha Stewart was complaining about at the last SONY shareholders meeting. These convert the AC (alternating current) into DC (direct current) and drop the voltage down to about 12 V in the process. Everything, except the monitor, has a little box.

Next comes the USB 2.0 wires. USB 2.0 is a protocol for plugging things into your computer. It's a very common protocol and is used to connect the printer and the TV (yes, my computer has a TV) to the computer. A USB 2.0 line runs to the monitor which acts as a hub for even more USB things including the mouse and the camera and ipods when needed. When USB 2.0 came along, it replaced the much slower USB 1.0 and allowed USB to be used for many more things.

Next is the cable TV line. The cable presents all sorts of goodies over one line and the devices on the end suck out the part they need. We get TV, internet and phone over the cable in our house. Time-Warner gets a big check every month. So the cable comes into a splitter. One line goes to the TV tuner, which sucks out the TV signal. The other line goes to the cable modem which sucks out the internet and the phone and sends them separate ways. The internet protocol is called TCP/IP. Guess what IP stands for? The phone protocol is called VOIP or voice over IP, which, I think is a subset of TCP/IP. The TV signal is just a big nasty analog signal which the TV tuner splits out into the various channels.

OK, next in line is the FireWire cable that connects to an old 80G external hard drive. FireWire was introduced by Apple a number of years ago for fast data transfer. It made streaming of video straight from your didital camcorder to your computer possible. SONY uses it with its camcorders and calls it something else (iSight?). Nerds call it IEEE 1394. It almost made it big until USB 2.0, which is almost as fast, came along. It's slowly going away, but you have to admit, "FireWire" is a cool name.

Next in line is Ethernet. The cable modem takes the cable signal and sucks out the internet and sends it to the wireless router with an ethernet wire. The protocol is still TCP/IP. The router then sends the internet out over more ethernet wires to the old Mac, the new Mac, and the 40G Snap Server. The router also sends the internet out in other ways which I'll mention later. All the wires and wireless communication on this side of the cable modem is handled by the router and is called a LAN, or Local Area Network.

No modern electronic equipment would be complete without shipping around some sound and so there is an analog audio signal going to the headphones and one going from the old analog camcorder to the digitizing box which also happens to be the TV tuner mentioned earlier. I need to buy some better speakers for this setup. Of course that would mean more wires.

You have to get the lovely graphics out of the computer to the monitor and there is a cable to do that. I think it's called DVI or something. It has a complex looking plug with lots of thingys in it. It runs from the computer to the monitor and is, by far, the fattest wire of the bunch.

I mentioned earlier that we get our telephone out of the cable line. The cable modem converts the digital info from the cable into analog and sends it into a box connected to our old analog phone system. There's a little splitter box so that I can run a phone connection back to our printer, which also happens to be a FAX machine and therefore needs a phone line.

The reason that I started talking about all this is that I was stuck by the irony of having so many wires in the face of wireless technology. Well, this is the other thing that the router does. Using a protocol called 802.11g, it send out information embedding the TCP/IP protocol in radio waves. That way, my wife can sit downstairs and get to the internet (and play on-line poker) without having to run an ethernet cable down the stairs, through the kitchen and into the family room. My son can also connect when he comes home from college without wires. This 802.11g is better known as WiFi. It's the stuff you can also get at StarBucks. Ain't wireless great!!

USB 2.0 is a great way to do wires, but for some types of short range communication, there is another wireless protocol called BlueTooth. BlueTooth is actually the name of some sea god, but it's been stolen to describe this short range protocol used for peripherals. My keyboard communicates with the computer via BlueTooth. I also had a BlueTooth mouse but it weighed so much that I switched it out for a cheap lightweight multibuttoned USB mouse. Bluetooth is slowly taking over USB for some peripherals. You'll see phones advertised on TV as having BlueTooth that let you suck calendars and addresses and phone numbers and songs off your computer without having to find the right wire.

And last on my list is the analog video signal coming from the old camcorder to the digitizer in the TV box. This is so I can convert all my old camcorder movies to digital to save for posterity. When I get through digitizing the 8mm tapes, I'll move on to the even older VCR camcorder tapes.

So there you have it -- The wires in my life and why they are all important to me. Thanks for paying attention.

Finally, here's a dynamic picture of my wires so you can watch each one being added. I think you have to click on it to see it in action.

2006-09-16T21:09:00.000-04:00

Boring Life

I sometimes think that maybe I have a boring life. Just to drive the point home, I'm going to describe my Saturday morning. Of course, I'll throw in the usual historical perspective to set the mood.

It was pretty dry around here from July through August, so the grass in the yard pretty much quit growing and in many places, especially the shady spots, it just died and turned to dirt. At lease it looks like it turned to dirt, since there's no grass there. However, starting in September, with the arrival of the pretty wimpy hurricane, Ernesto, we've gotten a fair amount of rain. Maybe 6 or 7 inches already this month. Consequently, the grass that had barely survived sprung back into action. I mowed the front lawn last Saturday and it needed it pretty bad again this week. Here's what it looked like before I started:

That's a lot of grass for just one week. So I got out my trusty mower. This lawn mower is pretty amazing. When I needed a new lawn mower about 16 years ago, I looked in Consumer Reports and they rated a cheap no-frills Sears mower as a "Best Buy". I think it cost about $110 dollars. So I bought it. I was intent on taking care of my new mower so I looked in the manual to see how to do it right. They said you should drain the oil every winter and replace it in the spring when you start using it again. I did that for the first year. Since then it's gotten zero maintenance. I mean none, nadda, zip. Oh I would occasionally put some oil in it when it got low, but I haven't even done that for a couple of years. I'm scared to look at the oil level. I don't think it would be detectable. For the last few years, I think the only form of lubrication that it gets is the heavy parts of the gasoline that squeak past the piston rings. Given its age and the wear on the rings, that may be substantial. But it just keeps running. I pull it out of the garage, pump the gas thingy a few times, pull the cord a couple of times and off we go. I guess it's about 123 years old in mower years. Here she is:

It takes about 35 minutes to mow the entire lawn. I did the front first and then moved to the back. While I was working on the back, my lovely wife came out and started a job she's wanted to do for years, edging the sidewalk and driveway. That means cutting the grass cleanly away from the concrete with a little trench looking thing between the two. She saw how my sister had done it when we were at their house a few weeks ago. My sister's yard looks real nice. I think they work on it a lot. I mentioned that we would have a nice yard too but that our children take up so much of our time. My much ignored high school age daughter thought that was funny. My son, who is off at college, would have laughed too if he had been there. The thing is, yards are a competitive sport in North Raleigh and Cary. In Chapel Hill the tendency is more to let things "go natural." My wife would have none of such nonsense. Respectable people have little trenches between their grass and concrete and we are respectable people and so, for the next few hours, we were involved in putting little trenches between our grass and concrete. We eventually got the job done and although it looks a little ragged, I think it will heal with a bit of wind and rain and look real nice. Here's the finished product:

So job done, I went into the house, took an ibuprofen, and chilled with some ice water while surfing the web.

Till next time.

2006-08-27T22:46:00.000-04:00

Same as Usual

On the way home from picking up my daughter at the annual youth choir kickoff pizza party, I noticed an interesting sign posted by one of those mini-storage places in Carrboro. You know, those places where serial killers hide bodies.

Anyhow, it was getting dark but I stopped and got a snapshot. Good sense of humor for a somewhat dry business. I guess there's no reason to drop by again tommorrow after all,

2006-08-19T16:39:00.000-04:00

New Blogger

Today I just switched over to the new version of Google's blogging thingy. I'll do a few Blogs and let you know how it works. So far it looks about the same.

Bye!

2006-08-13T21:41:00.000-04:00

The Blue Chairs

A long time ago, maybe 14 years or so, my wife bought a couple of very Blue Plastic Beach Chairs. Every time we went to the beach, I packed up those lovely Blue Chairs. Here's a picture of my lovely wife sitting in one of the two Blue Beach Chairs. This was taken in the summer of 1994.

Anyhow, starting sometime in the nineties, we began staying in the same beach house each year. And each year I would pack up the Blue Chairs and take them to the beach. Problem was, my wife hated the Blue Beach Chairs. They were too low, they didn't have arms, they got hot out in the sun and they were a little heavy. They were made of a lot of very fine Blue Plastic. About eight years ago we decided to get rid of the Blue Chairs, so we just left them down at the beach house. For the next few years they were always there when we came back. Their devotion to us didn't endear them to my wife. She still hated them. About four years ago, when we returned again in the summer, the Blue Chairs were gone. For me, that vacation just wasn't the same. We didn't actually take them down to the beach with us, but knowing that they were there always provided a sense of continuity for me.

This year we went back to the beach again as usual. The pain of losing the Blue Chairs was ebbing but I still felt it some extent. One day, as we were sitting out on the beach, building sand castles, catching some rays and waves and downing some brewskies, my cousin shouted out, "It's the Blue Chairs". We all turned around and looked and, I'll be damned, there were the Blue Chairs out sitting under an umbrella, enjoying the sun, just like the good old days. Turns out they had only moved over one house. I spoke with the renters who had brought them down to the beach, explained my special attachment to the Blue Chairs and asked if I could take a picture. They clearly thought I was crazy but indulged me anyhow. And here they are, twelve years later. They're aging much better than any of us.

And that's the end of my story of the Blue Chairs.

Bye for now.

2006-08-12T13:40:00.000-04:00

NC Boys Choir's Chamber Choir Reunion

A few years ago, when my son was still in high school, we sang in the Chamber Choir associated with the NC Boys Choir. The Chamber Choir was composed of some high school kids who had sung in the main choir as kids, some dads, and a few friends who liked to sing. At our Christmas 2004 concert in Henderson NC, I was able to persuade the high school kids in the choir to pose while showing off one of the neat features of our new choir robes. I posted that picture on this blog some time ago.

Last night, thanks to organizing by Adrian Randall, the high school guys, most of whom are now in college, got together at BoJangles. I was invited along as the honorary "Old Man". We all ate a "Chicken Supreme Meal" which has 3 week's worth of the RDA for grease and calories and drank Sweet Tea which is 57.3% sugar.

Afterwards, I took a picture of the group.

Bye!

2006-08-06T22:01:00.001-04:00

Pictures from Sunset Beach

Hi Blog readers. Not much to say right now. We went to Sunset Beach last week and had a great time. For now I'll just post the pictures that I took. Sorry, but they're a little heavy on the sand castles and I didn't bother to rotate a couple of them.

Enjoy. See you later.

Pictures from the Beach 2006

2006-07-21T21:22:00.000-04:00

Fire Hydrant Update

On the way to work this morning I noticed that the fire hydrant has been removed. I wonder if city workers did this or maybe it's sitting in some Duke dormroom. The orange barrels are still there and the flange is still sticking up out of the asphalt.

Bye for now.

2006-07-16T17:10:00.000-04:00

A Misplaced Fire Hydrant

I recently took a new job in downtown Durham, NC. Durham, once the Bull City and now the City of Medicine, is one of those once important North Carolina cities that has fallen on hard times but is always on the verge of a comeback.

Recently, something minor happened that gave me some insight into the bureaucracy of the city of Durham and suggested that maybe that comeback might not be just around the corner.

On my way to work one morning, as I was turning onto Foster street, I was greeted by an absolutely absurd site. Someone, I guess a city employee or two, had installed a fire hydrant right in the middle of the street. Well, it wasn't in the middle of the street, but it was in the path that a car would take. It was about 3 feet away from the curb. It was sticking up out of the asphalt just waiting to get slammed by a car. The more bizarre thing is that there was already a perfectly fine fire hydrant up on the sidwalk where they belong. To someone's credit, there was a traffic barrel in front of the hydrant to sugggests that you might not want to run over it.

Well, it lasted about a week before someone actually did run over the thing. The hydrant is just lying there in the street, next to the exposed flange, it's twisted bolts glistening in the midday sun. I think of it as a monument to the incompetance of city hall.

You might think that such a scenario would be an embarrassment to some town officials and the whole mess would get cleaned up. Not in Downtown Durham. It's still just sitting there. Has been for about three weeks now.

Last Friday, a coworker and I walked down to inspect it during lunch and I took the opportunity to take a few photos which I am happy to share with you today. I hope you enjoy them. Please notice how nicely the awning, in the photograph above, matches the traffic cones. You might also notice a building with Oprah in the window. I'll save that for a later post (as soon as I figure out what that's all about).

Bye for now!

2006-07-08T13:40:00.000-04:00

Good afternoon Blogging fans, all two or three of you. This morning I did some weeding. Our house sits off of a little island (the concrete kind) along a dead end street. Heere's an arial view of the island:

Every once in a while the island starts to look a bit ragged so one of many neighbors will be moved to do something about it. This was my morning. The weather was a bit cooler and I felt like doing something mildly useful.

So I got out the wheel barrow and an assortment of tools and went down to the island to do a bit of weeding. It was about 10:00 AM. I had already had a few cups of coffee and had done the daily Jumble and crossword puzzle before I went out. I took a picture of the weeds before I got started. It was mostly some kind of grassy crap.

This turned out to be a bit of work. I couldn't just pull the crap out. I had to go into the ground with the dandelion tool and break off the roots about an inch below the surface. After about an hour, I took another picture.

Looks much better doesn't it? I worked for about one hour more, then I came in and ate lunch. I've done enough yard work for one day.

Bye!

2006-06-27T20:15:00.000-04:00

It's blogging time again. Tonight I'm going to talk about my new computer.

Recently, I needed to use a computer to get on the web and do something useful. Well, actually, it probably wasn't something useful that I needed to do. Maybe I just needed to surf the web to feel like I was connected to the world. They say it's like an addiction, where if you don't get on the internet at regular intervals, you go into withdraw and start twitching and feeling helpless and lost.

So I went upstairs to connect. My wife was working away on my Dell laptop on something important, maybe video poker or a Sudoku puzzle. My daughter was also doing something equally important on the old mac. She might even have been writing a paper for homework, otherwise, I'd have tossed her off. I was twitching pretty bad by this time. There was no way I was going to get on my son's computer. He was locked in a battle to the death with some pretty evil looking beasts in one of those online multiplayer games.

That's when I summoned up the courage and announced that I was getting a new computer so I could get on when I wanted to. And guess what? Much to my surprise, my accountant, I mean wife, said "Sure, what kind are you gonna get? A Mac or a PC?" What a silly question. Of course, I was getting a Mac. I've got one of those white Apple decals in my car window and I'm a major Apple stockholder. OK, I'm a minor stockholder. Anyhow, It's been 8 years since we got our last computer, which was our third Mac. I don't count the Dell since that was purchased by my business strictly for business purposes.

To make a long story less boring, I bought a Mac Mini, one of those new Duo Core, Intel Macs. I also bought a wirelss keyboard and a wireless mouse. Cool!! But I'm not crazy about the wireless mouse. It's heavier than a regular mouse and the response isn't as crisp. I also needed a monitor. I could have bought a nice Apple monitor. They look real good and go for something between 2 and 7 million dollars. I ended up buying a Dell monitor from Costco. It was rated high by Consumer Reports but not recommended because it listed for almost $400 when they tested it. I could get it from Dell for $309 but Costco had it for only $259. I went for it.

Of course, I have no software for my new computer besides all the stuff that comes with it (which, by the way is fairly substantial). But these days, who needs software? All you need is a browser and a Google account and you can still figure out how to waste endless hours on the computer and never spend any more money. Except, of course, for that monthly bill from Time-Warner for high speed internet access.

OK, time for some pictures. I'll get a little help from a couple of my business partners, who will stand next to each computer so you can judge the sizes better.

Here's the old Mac with the ViewSonic monitor perched on top.

And here's a close up so you can see my business partners better.

And here's the new computer. Notice that there ain't no wires connecting the computer to the keyboard or the mouse. That gives you the freedon to have incredibly poor posture as you surf the web.

And of course, a close up with my business partners standing on top of the computer. As you can see, it's much smaller but it's much more powerful.

OK, that's all for now. I'd write more and put in some more pictures but it takes so long to upload the pictures. You have to watch this silly spinning forever.

Goodnight.

2006-06-11T22:19:00.000-04:00

Boiled Peanuts

Recently, my wife moved the portable computer down to the living room so she could play poker on line while she watched TV. She would generally play two tables at once and surf the TV channels. Talk about the need for mental stimulation. Recently, she's been slacking off the 'puter a bit so, since the computer is sitting in the living room already, I can blog while I'm vegging on the TV.

Today I want to talk about boiled peanuts, or more specifically, how to use science to cook them. If you look in a thousand books and on the internet, you can get lots of history and a bunch of recipes. After perusing them for a bit, I discovered the secret. A lot of recipes tell you to boil them for a couple of hours in salt water and serve. Well, I can tell you that don't work. The peanuts aren't even close to being done. The secret is to get the juice into the nut so that they taste right. "Right" being salty and juicy.

OK, here's the science. It's mostly physics or maybe chemistry if you believe that the behavior of liquids and gasses is the domain of chemistry rather than physics. But because there is little or no bond breaking, I, being an organic chemist, tend to think of this as physics. So, the problem is to get the juice into the peanut.

You start out with a peanut that is filled with air inside sitting in a pot that has water outside the peanut. As you heat the liquid, the air (gas) inside the peanut expands and builds up pressure which does a great job of keeping any water out. As you boil away, some of the gas escapes through the shell into the water, but for the most part, a positive pressure remains inside keeping the water out. This is not what you want.

So what you do is heat the peanuts in water for a while, say about an hour. During this time, some gas escapes from the inside of the peanut. Then you let the peanuts cool. Because much of the gas escaped through the shell, when the peanuts cool back down, the gas contracts to occupy less space than originally needed. When this happens, an actual vacuum is created inside the peanut which sucks in that succulent salt water infused with all the flavoring of the peanut shells. Then you heat the suckers back up again and this time the peanuts inside the shell are bathed in a salty solution. As they heat up, they cook inside the little pressure cooker of the shell. Of course, the shells are somewhat permeable so the peanuts leak out a bit of the air and juice to avoid exploding.

So here's my recipe.

Get a bunch of fresh peanuts and wash off any dirt that's on them. A quick rinse will do. Don't get anal about this step.

Get a big pot and pour in a bunch of water and a bunch of salt and a dash or two of winegar. Then toss in the goobers and heat for 1 and 1/2 hours. Turn off the heat and remove from the burner and let the brew cool off for one hour. Then return to the burner and boil for another 1.5 hours.

You can eat the peanuts now.

Peanuts are best eaten with your hands. Squeeze the shell and the secret opening reveals itself. Pry the shell apart with your fingers and place the peanuts up next to your lips. With a loud slurping sound and a great sucking motion, the peanuts will fly out of their shell into your mouth. Munch them down quickly so that you can get another one up next to your lips before the flavor fades. You should repeat the process as fast as you can till you reach a state of life altering euphoria. If you're fast, you'll also eat more than the other fool slurping away across the table.

Hope this helps. I know it still takes 4 hours, but if you leave out the cool down step, the peanuts will still be hard as a rock after 4 hours and you will be abondoning science when you need it most.

So till next time.

2006-06-07T21:57:00.000-04:00

It's been a while since I've posted so I thought I'd give it a go. I'm sitting here watching the Canes (short for Hurricanes) play the Oilers for the Stanley Cup. Normally I don't give a flying phooey about ice hockey, but every once in a couple of years a local team makes it to the latter stages of the play-offs and all of a sudden the whole Triangle is into hockey like a bunch of canucks.

It's just before the start of the third period of the second game. The Canes are up 3-0. They won the first game 5-4. Both of these games have been in the RBC center over in Raleigh. I'm a bit curious about this 3 period thing that they have in hockey. All the other sports seem to go in halves or quarters, there's a definitive half-time so you can sell some kick-ass advertising time. But not hockey. I guess I forgot about baseball. It's got nine innings. That's pretty odd too, I guess.

Well the third third has started and I have to go back to watching. Hockey is a low scoring game so you have to watch it intently to have any chance of seeing something happen in real time. Most of the time you just watch a lot of guys do a whole lot of random stuff. I think there are some rules but there doesn't seem to be any good reason have any. You can't watch and see any rules having any effect.

Crap. I missed it. The Canes just scored again. Oh no! They disallowed it. The guy kicked it in. Oh yes! They just allowed it again. You can't kick the puck into the goal but you can use your foot to deflect the puck into the goal. The consensus was that it was a deflection and the goal counts.

The Oilers are pissed and beginning to act nasty. Being down 4-0, they don't have much of a chance of pulling this out. So all they can get out of here with is a bit of flesh. One of the Oilers whacked a Cane up side the head and got put in the penalty box so the Canes get to play with an extra player for a couple of minutes. It's called a power play. Whoops! Carolina just scored again on the power play.

5-0

Back to full strength. Looking bad for the Oilers. I'm gonna quit writing and go back to watching. Oops. Those nasty oilers just whacked another Cane with a stick. On the replay it didn't look intentional. Back to another power play.

Gotta run. Go Canes.