A New Friend

The only thing I can say is that if I die, I hope my wife grieves a little longer before replacing me.

Anyhow, the good news is that I replaced my old friend with a close copy.  In the last blog I lamented the death of an old friend, my Model 400 Advent radio.  I still haven't performed a full autopsy on the old boy but the silence in the garage was too much for me to wait.  So I did some research again.  I typed "best radio" into Google and the Tivoli Model Two showed up.  It was more than I wanted to spend so I went hunting and found the Tivoli Model One for $149.  And guess what?  It was designed by the same Henry Kloss that designed my old Advent Model 400.  So I ordered one from Crutchfield and when it came in, I put it in the garage.  It sounds great.  You might notice that it looks similar to the other radio.  It has that same 5:1 analog Vernier dial for the tuner.  And, of course it has only one speaker.  It's got a real wood cabinet too.  Kinda Retro, don't you think?

Here's another shot of it in the garage and a picture of Henry. He died about 10 years ago.  Do a Google Image search of "Henry Kloss" to see a lot of his inventions.

And finally, here's close-up of that Tiki god that watches over all the going-ons in the garage.

Death of an Old Friend

Yesterday, I lost an old friend. I had known him for almost 34 years. He had served me faithfully for all those years. And just like that, he was gone. He was fine in the morning, delivering Car Talk with his old familiar clarity. But when I returned in the afternoon, there was only silence. There was nothing I could do to revive him. I guess after 34 years it was time to let go. What am I talking about? Why, my old Advent Model 400 FM radio.


First a little history. Back in 1978, I was just starting graduate school in chemistry at Cornell and in need of a radio for my lab space. I had acquired something of a poor man's golden ear by that time and so I was looking for good sound for not a lot of money. So, being in graduate school, I did some research. The Advent Model 400 was a mono, not stereo, FM radio that consisted of a little receiver unit and a separate speaker. It was somewhat reminiscent of the KLH Model 20 stereo, probably because it was designed by Henry Kloss, the stereo pioneer who had gone on to start Advent and introduced the famous Advent Loudspeaker. Anyhow, all the reviews said that it was probably better, in the price range, to have one good speaker than two crappy ones and almost all agreed that Kloss had designed the perfect radio, with no more and no less than was absolutely necessary.

At that time, I had worked for a couple of years as a chemist and so I had saved a little money before going back to school. Early in the fall of 1978, I still had some of the money left, having not yet blown it all on beer. So I sprang the $139 for the Advent Model 400. Back then it was still a good deal of money for a radio, especially one with only one speaker. Remember, we were just getting over the quadraphonic binge of a few years earlier. However, everyone who heard it agreed that it sounded better than their crappy stereos with 2 speakers. I've kept it for all these years and it has served me well. It has spent the last 21 years on the shelf in the garage, blasting out NPR on Saturdays as I puttered around the garage or as I grilled hamburgers for supper.


I haven't figured out what I'll do with it yet. Maybe I'll take it apart and see if I can figure out what's wrong with it. Is it the speaker or the tuner/amp that died? I can get the electronic schematics on line along with some other info. Maybe I'll get out the volt meter and do a little diagnostic work. Maybe a simple repair with the soldering iron will bring it back. Or maybe I'll just say a little prayer for a dearly departed, faithful old friend and bury it in the back yard.

Another New Lawnmower

About two and a half years ago, I put up a blog post about buying a new lawnmower. I had the old one for over eighteen years and did essentially no maintenance and yet, it continued to run until it didn't. So I bought a new mower. If you look back at the old post, you'll see a picture of the old mower next to my new one.



Well, the new mower didn't last nearly so long as the last one. On Monday, while mowing the lawn, I hit a low lying tree stump and completely stopped the mower. Hmmm? So I started it back up and it was making a rubbing sound like the blade was hitting the deck. If I held it just right the sound went away and if I held it just wrong, it made a lot of scraping noise. So I finished the front yard with the occasional odd noise and started on the back. As I went across the back yard, the mower hit a root hard enough to stop again. Hmmm? That shouldn't have happened. So I started again and then I hit a root that was lower than the grass and this time I bent the crap out of the blade. As I dragged the lawn mower toward the garage, the blade was digging into the dirt. On close inspection, it appears that the first collision with the stump had actually warped the deck or tore the engine loose from the deck and the blade was actually at a rather bad tilt. I surveyed the damage and saw that the motor was no longer firmly attached to the deck. It was ruined. Maybe the motor is still good, but the lawnmower as a unit is toast.

What to do? Get it fixed or buy a new one. I decided to buy a new one just like the old one. So I looked on the Sears web site and found that same old mower for $159.98. Unfortunately, they didn't have one in stock at the Southpoint Mall Sears but they did have two in stock at Northgate Mall. Since Northgate mall is a bit further away, my wife suggested that I pick one up on the way home from work.

The next day I checked on the web to see if they were still in stock at Northgate and the web site said no. But they said that you should check the store just in case they were wrong. So I called and after the usual horror of phoning a company and going through their series of robots, I got a human who obviously looked up my question on Sear's web site, just like I did. I asked him if that was what he did and he said yes so he transferred me to the Sears store itself where I got an answering machine. The heck with that.

So I just left work and decided to go to the store and see for myself. When I got there, they told me that the model I was looking for was discontinued and the price was a closeout price and they wouldn't get anymore in. It's odd that on the exact day that I want to buy a mower, the previous day they sold the last mower of a line they've been selling for more than 20 years.

So I asked about the next model up at $179.99. There were a couple of guys waiting that also wanted that model. The sales guy said they only had one in stock, but would get a new shipment tomorrow. I said I couldn't come the next day, but maybe later in the week. The other guys said they would drop by tomorrow and get one. I thanked them. So the sales guy goes into the back and comes out and said that, no, he was wrong and they don't have anymore of that model either. OK, so what about the next model up at $199.99? Yes, they seem to have that one. And unlike the bland grey and black mowers of the past, this one is fire engine red.

When I said salesman earlier, I actually meant three salesmen. There were about 4 or 5 customers with questions about lawnmowers and three different salesmen were dealing with all of us simultaneously. There was one who seemed to be the most knowledgeable, one who kinda knew what was going on and one who might have been a trainee. So the middle guy goes back into the back and checks and, yes, they do have that one in stock. So I go through the check out process and he sends me around to the back to pick it up. I scan the receipt and after a while a guy comes out with the lawn mower in a beat up box. There is another guy waiting for a pickup and the guy with my lawnmower tells him that, as it turns out, the item he just purchased is not in stock after all. So he needs to go back to the sales guy and cancel the purchase.

Sears was bought a few years ago by some super rich business guy who also owns K-mart and is slowly destroying the company by starving it for cash. I think he's taking all the money home for himself. It's kind of sad to watch. I'm not sure how this works, but I suspect these types of financial shenanigans are a part of the problem rather than a part of the solution.

Anyhow, I took the mower home and followed the 5-step instructions (raise handle, tighten a couple of bolts, add oil, add gas) to get it ready. I drug out the old mower for a picture and then cranked the new mower. It quickly roared to life. It seemed a lot quieter and smoother than the last mower and didn't shake as much. Right now I'm thinking that maybe the extra $40 was worth it. My wife, who thought maybe Sears had bait and switched me up a couple of models, did like the red color. I finished off the yard.

So there. Hopefully I won't have to write about mowers for another 18 years.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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:

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!!!

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

Pictures from Thanksgiving

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

Thanksgiving 2010

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.