Wake of the Plague

My reading list has expanded quite a bit in the last few weeks, with a couple of very interesting books. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Einstein by Walter Isaacson, In the Wake of the Plague by Norman Cantor, most of the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher.

The last is sci-fi fluff, but I've been entirely drawn in by the book about the Black Death, In the Wake of the Plague. It's fascinating. It was recommended to me by a fellow air traveler as an interesting book on medieval life, more than a history book. It covers the basics of the bubonic plague outbreak in the 14th century (1347-1350 or so) and weaves it in with fascinating details about the way people lived and how the plague changed society.

Fir example, he whole "not bathing" thing was a result of churchmen deciding that bathing would "open the pores" to the miasma and make you susceptible to plague (it was thought that "bad air" was the cause of contagion). The tapestry industry in Bruge wa sa direct result of the idea that closing off the windows (again, to keep out "bad air") was necessary.

We rely on the descriptions of contemporary records to identify the "Black Death", and the common belief is that it was bubonic plague -- vivid descriptions of black welts and buboes (hence, bubonic plague) on the victims, who died a particularly gruesome death in a matter of a week or so left us with the clear idea that the pestilence that wiped out 20 million people in Europe in the 14th century was, indeed, a form of bubonic plague. But writers also described people who died without these symptoms, often within a few days.

Bubonic plague is spread by fleas, carried by specific species of rats. (For a really detailed description of how it affects the flea, check out Wikipedia. Ugh). But the plague spread too quicky, and in odd patterns, to be entirely dependent on this infested-rat idea. There are a few people who have hypothesized that the "plague" was not plague at all, but a form of anthrax spread by contact with (or ingestion of) diseased cattle -- a topic which also had much contemporary documentation.

In 1984, Graham Twigg argued that the climate made it nearly impossible for rats and fleas to have transmitted bubonic plague. His suggested alternative was anthrax. In 2001, scientists in Liverpool posited that the Black Death was more likely an ebola-like virus, since the human-to-human transmission rate was unsupportable in the fleas-on-the-rate model. Both of these alternative explainations are detailed at Wikipedia: Black Death.

One of the most interesting theories, however, relates to a genetic mutation and seeming immunity to HIV/AIDS in modern times. This got a half-page treatment in Cantor's book, but I happened upon a Science Channel show discussing this mutation -- CCR5 -- and how they had traced it back to people who had contracted the plague and survived. It is related in some way to people who have survived plague and possibly smallpox, and is a promising avenue of research into AIDS drugs or vaccines. Apparently about 15% of caucasians have this mutation, which showed up only a few hundred years ago.

Of course, it's all theory, and there are just as many scientists with alternate hypotheses. But it's fascinating reading, nonetheless. Considering that we we haven't wiped out bubonic and pneumonic plague (although we can treat them now), and the real risk of biological warfare, knowing about how earlier mass deaths occured is pretty critical. I strongly recommend the book -- not necessary for it's scientific accuracy, but for its interesting and engaging coverage of the period.

More info:
Black Death in Western Europe
Shifting Definitions of Plague
Encyclopedia of Death and Dying
About.com

FISA Redux

Congress has proposed an amendment to the current FISA rules to prohibit illegal wiretapping.

The American Civil Liberties Union today cheered an amendment to the House Intelligence Reauthorization Bill that would prevent illegal domestic wiretapping by the government.

The amendment, by Representatives Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ), will reaffirm the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) as the only legal means of collecting electronic intelligence surveillance. The amendment was passed late last night by a vote of 245-178.

If this wasn't so serious, it would be laughable. They're going to pass a bill to prohibit illegal wiretapping. So now, illegal wiretapping will be...you guessed it, illegal!

So the administration, which has engaged in some seriously questionable wiretapping in the War on Terra while it was simply "illegal", will now have to stop because illegal wiretapping is double-plus-really-really illegal.

Basically, they are reaffirming that the original wording of FISA must be adhered to, and efforts by the administration to "modernize" the law by clearing out legal oversights, will not be accepted or tolerated.

I find it interesting that congress is implicitly stating that they believe (know?) that the NSA has performed illegal wiretaps or is illegally monitoring communications they should not be listening in on...and yet all they can manage is to propose legislation to reinforce that it is already illegal. I suppose that every other effort to prevent it has failed, but this just seemed a little bit too 1984 to me. Ooh! Double-plusGood!

Town Fair

A few years after we moved into Erie, the Chamber of Commerce sponsored a "Town Fair" -- those first few years, it was a sad affair with a few local businesses ponying up a little tent and a few brochures to hand out, and the one local restaurant doing a barbecue. The main street in town was blocked off and everyone wandered around for a couple of hours in the scorching heat.

Since then, it's become quite the soiree. Local hospitals and other businesses set up big tents and have raffles, local craftspeople sell their stuff, live music and fireworks -- and a couple thousand people.

It's still scorching hot, of course, but it's definitely worth a stroll through main street to see everyone. This year, they had two days of balloon launches and after-dark concerts.

I don't usually go, to be honest. Even though the fair in the last few years was a far cry from the sad collection of tents that first year, it's not really that fascinating to me. The Adorable husband loves to go and see everyone, and watch the fire department dismantle a car and demonstrate rescues. Eat a little barbecue, watch the kids get pony rides, that sort of thing. So, I did go this year. We parked near our old house (which used to be a prime location for the fair -- we could easily walk to the festivities)...which left me feeling terribly depressed and sad about the whole day.

I had a really hard time selling our old house. I loved it -- and even realizing that we had no need to have a second house, no urge to be landlords, didn't make it any easier to sell. The buyer immediately started renting it out and it's been occupied for the last three years or do. I get really sad driving by and was just devastated when we parked on the corner and realized that the yard is COMPLETELY overgrown -- three and four foot weeds have taken over the entire yard, the hundred or so rosebushes that we had so carefuly planted and cared for and weeded every year were completely buried by the weeds, which in some cases were taller than the fence. No "regular" grass anywhere anymore...just crabgrass and weeds.

Outside the fence, they at least mowed down the weeds, but there isn't a spec of grass anywhere around the elm trees we planted. The flower beds are gone, even the mighty peony that impinged the door every year is buried under the flourishing weeds.

Sigh. I know it's not mine anymore. But if they can't be bothered to do the basics -- like MOW -- how can I assume that they are taking care of the inside of the house? Or doing the basic maintenance that is required to keep a 120 year old house standing year after year?

TASLFWP

That would be "tiny-assed sorry little first world problem", btw.

That is, the woe and horror that currently making my perfectly comfortable and happy life annoying and difficult....which is so unbelievably trivial that it's embarassing to complain about. It's not like I don't have clean water, or food, or shelter, or the basic protection of human rights. No, my particular little first-world problem is exceedingly banal.

Not that that would stop me, of course. Sometimes we just need to whine and complain about the trivialities.

I can't find my favorite pens.

Seriously, they are impossible to find and it seems as if they are being phased out and replaced by roller-ball pens or gel-ink pens. I hate all of these. I spend so much time typing, that my handwriting has become crabbed and tiny and nearly impossible to read if I'm not very careful, and these new-fangled roller-balls and gel-ink pens are simply too smooth. (And, oh, isn't that a reason for woe and horror?). I end up writing in an illegible scrawl. I need a pen that has some resistance to it, more scratchy, heavier ink. Something.

So I have been using Pilot RazorPoint porous point pens (they are like regular felt-tip pens, but have a hard nib made of plastic, so they are fine-lined or extra-fine-lined). We stopped at every office supply place we could find. We finally found a box of 12 black pens and a packet of colored (oy! Pink! and Aqua!) pens but nothing else. Online, I could find them sold by-the-pen, with a whopping eight bucks for shipping, but that's about it.

I am quite unhappy. I bought all the boxes I could find on the assumption that they are going to disappear entirely quite soon and I'll be left with sparkly gel-pens in Fun! Colors! and super-needle-point rollerball pens that render my writing into chicken-scratches.

Woe is me. Oh, woe.

More Youtube fun

I know, I know, everyone searches youtube on their own, but sometimes I just have to pass on some of the funnier ones.

Hallelujah Nuns. Enjoy.

Technology Explained

Have you ever wondered how the cursor actually moves around your computer screen? It's really quite simple.

Super-magnified view of your cursor!

[Make sure to stop periodically, to see what happens.]

School days

I spend quite a lot of time in online forums (Salon's Tabletalk is a favorite) and after talking extensively about school and school projects, realized that if someone referred to going to school "at the U" -- they invariably meant the University of Minnesota. No one could think of another university that was referred to as "the U"...just the UofM.

Which only served to remind me that I don't sound Minnesotan anymore, unless I'm actually saying 'Minna-soh-t'n'. Sigh. I've always believed that we in the midwest have a pretty flat, almost non-existant 'accent' (which is wishful thinking, we all have accents), but I've apparently started sounding more 'western' than 'midwestern'.

I may have to adopt a Fargo accent just to reconnect with my roots! Ya, sure, you betcha!

Falwell

Dr. Jerry Falwell died yesterday. I'd like to be a better person and feel badly about this (and indeed, I feel great sympahty for his family and for their loss) -- but I found him to be a hateful, narrow-minded, bigoted, and hypocritical man. Most certainly, he was not representative of good Christian people that I know. He had a huge impact on evangelical christianity in the United States, there is no doubt of that, but you'd have to do a lot of explaining to make it a positive one, in my eyes.

And so I hope that the afterlife that he believed in is exactly what it should be for a false and arrogant prophet.

21 "Not everyone who says to me, "Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, "Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?' 23 Then I will declare to them, "I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.' (Matthew 7:21-23)

Doh! Moment

My sister called this morning, just checking in and had to admit to her moment of complete and utter stupidity....have you ever had one of those moment where you say something, and just as it passes your lips, you realise it might just be the dumbest thing you've ever said? Or that anyone has every said? And you can't just sort of rewind and make it disappear?

So, she went out to breakfast on Saturday and when she got back, the power was out at her house. It was out for everyone on her side of the street, but the other side apparently worked fine. Work on the lines, or something, and the power company said the power would be back on by 2 or 2:30. Sure! No problem. They went out to see a movie and go grocery shopping and when they got back....still no power.

As it started getting dark, she looked over at the houses across the street, and said to all and sundry, "Well! They have power over there, maybe I should go and borrow a lamp."

It took a full ten seconds before she actually processed that this was a boneheaded sentence, while everyone in the room stared at her with gape-mouthed horror. Doh!

Dog Logic

If you've ever had a dog, you have defintely had a day like this one.

"I Had a Sweet Potato"

If Looks Could Kill

The Queen is visiting, as she has done about once a decade for the past fifty years. As would be expected for visiting royalty, she has been feted and treated like...well, royalty.

But the gaffes are flying thick. Not only did Bush give a starkly political speech at a social gathering, he apparently winked at the Queen. This is apparently Not. Done. (Although to be honest, I have no idea what possible offense this could be!)

What made me laugh about the whole thing was The Look that she shot him. That LOOK should have drilled him dead on the spot. Had the poor Shrub been British, he probably would have just exploded in a puff of smoke. You could hear the 'We are not AMUSED' behind that look, and it had me giggling madly.

Project Woes

Let me say first that I love my current project -- it's interesting, challenging, and just stressful enough to be motivating.

That was yesterday.

Today, the other developer on the project announced that she's taking a leave of absence for the summer and will be leaving in two weeks. This, of course, after my company pulled her "temporarily" off the proejct to deal with fires at another client. By now, she should have been on my project for almost two months. In reality, by the time she leaves, she'll have worked on our project for less than three weeks.

I can't blame her -- I took a sabatical last year and it was the best thing I've done for my professional life in years. She's frustrating with previous and ongoing projects, and realized that she just wanted some time off. Good for her! Bad for us, of course, but we'll manage.

Sigh. So, it's just back to ME, alone, on the project doing the front-end development. The PM for the project is going to pitch in, and it might end up that she and I do this ourselves. Given the past history with the project, the person we get to "fill in" may be a) temporary or b) a novice and on this project that's going to be bad.

We'll just have to adjust the timeframe and deliverable dates. At least I don't have to be the one telling that to the client! I just have to put my head down and churn out a whole lot of code in the next few weeks! Wish me luck!

And they Napped

Have you ever had one of those weekends where you have a huge list of things to do, tons of errands to run, and somehow you end up doing absolutely nothing on the list? That was our weekend. Dragged ourselves out of bed late on Saturday, in time to run one small errand and meander about the house and nap most of the afternoon, and repeated the exercise on Sunday, except we managed to eat lunch before collapsing in drowsy heaps by 3pm.

So we napped all weekend. I think the Adorable Husband managed to mow the grass late tonight, but that's about it.

I can't tell if it's stress, if we're still depressed and just ignoring it, or what. But I'm awfully glad that we don't have kids around who need to be fed and monitored, and that no one is counting on us to do anything that requires more than the basics of effort!

Ullaq's doing much better -- although she definitely has attached herself to the Husband and is pretty much ignoring me. I can't tell if it's just because I'm home all day and she's bored with me, or what. He takes her for long walks (which might be a bit too long, considering that she's getting old and sleeps for HOURS after he brings her back inside) but otherwise we're both around. Maybe she's picked up on the fact that for a few days after we lost Rukh, I was irrationally angry at her -- that she wasn't the one who was sick, that she was still around. I'm not anymore, of course, but I'm still being snubbed.

Bombs away!

Hate pesky squirrels in your birdfeeder or terrorizing your cats? Well, someone took matters into their own hands.

Ok, this video should not be viewed by anyone who loves small furry creatures. I'm pretty sure the squirrel comes out ok.

Pretty sure.

Incomprehensible

I was listening to NPR this week, regarding the House passing a bill extending the definition of hate crimes to include attacks based on gender and sexual orientation.

Apparently this is something that many people object to -- the religious televangelists and neo-conservative groups are trying to paint this as a religious freedom issue. There was a representative from Georgia (I think) who was objecting strenuously to the bill. He claimed that this would somehow stifle freedom of religion. He was going on and on about how passing this bill on national prayer day was in and of itself hateful against Christians.

The primary people against the bill? Mostly religious groups, the "social conservatives",

who say the bill threatens the right to express moral opposition to homosexuality and singles out groups of citizens for special protection.

Umm. ooookay. Apparently these people don't quite get the concept of "hate crime".

According to the Traditional Values Coalition (TVC), Congressional Democrats rammed through the hate crimes bill defeating all 25 Republican amendments, which [included those that] ...ensured Christians would not be prosecuted for expressing religious convictions opposed to homosexuality.

I really need someone to explain this to me. Classing attacks on homosexuals, and hate-speech aimed at gays and lesbians is somehow stifling religious speech? Are the fringe religious groups actually arguing that it is their right to bash gays because they have somehow twisted their scriptures to tell them to? This is somehow a christian behavior?

Maybe I'm missing the point.

Anybody Home?

Helloooo? Helllooo-oooo?

I know it's been about two weeks since I posted at all -- just haven't had the oomph to think about writing anything. I took a couple of days off, and I've travelled a bit for work. Nothing too fun. I didn't realize that I had completely ignored the blog until my sister called to see if we were all right, since nothing new had showed up for weeks.

The house is pretty quiet with just one beastie, and Uulaq is pretty damn depressed. She just mopes around the house, running to a window when someone drives by, and then just laying down when she realizes it isn't Rukh. I think she realizes that he's not coming back, but even so, we (the humans in the household) are not satisfactory replacements. She doesn't even want to play with the neighbor's dog, Maggie.

But, we're doing pretty well and life is slowly falling back into place. I'm still working from home, and loving my project (even spending a few days in Baltimore). Busy, and just stressed enough for it to be motivational, and not freaky.

Thanks to everyone who sent a nice card or note. We really appreciate your kind thoughts and wishes.

Goodbye

We euthanized Rukh tonight. It was time.

He was a great dog.

#^#@^&^

Well, we got the xray results for Rukh yesterday -- much worse than we expected. We stopped all the meds earlier this week, because they were just making him nauseous, and we weren't too hopeful that they had been doing any good.

Not really. His xrays look awful. What was a dozen small spots and a few dime-to-nickel sized spots only a month ago is now dozens of tumors, some a few inches across. If the chemo did anything to slow it down, it wasn't much. It's just too aggressive.

He still seems to feel ok, but he's not getting up to eat and drink unless we prompt him, and even then he's having a hard time getting up on his own. I think he's just getting weaker, since he's not getting enough oxygen. That, and laying about all day just makes him stiff. But he still wags his tail, and still wants to go outside, although he's sleeping most of the time and even a short walk taxes him too much. He's working pretty hard to breathe, even just going out into the back yard.

He really deosn't have a whole lot of time left. The Adorable Husband thinks a week, maybe two, before he's having a hard eough time breathing that we aren't going continue. It's scary not to be able to catch your breath, and I won't do that to him.

Damn. Just...damn.

Snow Update

Remember the three-minute scrolling warning that we were going to have a Blizzard! Oh, no!

Not.

One.

Flake.

Killer Chickens

Using some very interesting new technology, scientists have been able to analyze the protein codes in the fossilized bones of a 68 million year old T-rex. DNA evaluation is usually impossible because the fossilization process simply doesn't preserve it well.

So, relationships between bones is usually done by other types of analysis -- shape, size, age, etc. Rather subjective, and very dependent on the amount of remains there are. Given that fossilization is (despite the popular belief from Jurrasic Park) a rare process. Most animals die and their bones rot and disappear. But this new technology can find molecular-level similarities in bones that clearly show how bones are related to one another.

There's a lot of detailed molecular biology involved in how they figured this out, but:

The first results, described in today's issue of the journal Science, show that the collagen protein in T. rex bone is extraordinarily similar to that of the modern chicken, confirming current thinking that dinosaurs' nearest cousins are birds.

I don't know what else they tested against, but as they continue to use this particular method of comparison, I'm sure the data store will expand and they'll have more and more samples to compare against. It's a neat start. I'll be curious to see how all this data pans out. The article here details how they are trying to use this new technology, adn how it's being tested.

Or course, I have to admit that getting some level of confirmation of the theory that dinosaurs are the ancient ancestors of modern chickens actually makes me rethink just how scary a T-rex was -- and, having seen chickens in action, it actually ratcheted it up a notch. Chickens are not docile, friendly creatures, not at all! Imagine a huge T-rex with the personality of a chicken and dagger-sized teeth. Scares me.

Warning Overkill

So, spring snow storm. No biggie. Except that this notice takes about three minutes to scroll over the top of the television screen for "the National Weather Service has issued a Winter Storm Warning for....

LARIMER COUNTY BELOW 6000 FEET/NORTHWEST WELD COUNTY- OULDER AND JEFFERSON COUNTIES BELOW 6000 FEET/WEST BROOMFIELD COUNTY- NORTH DOUGLAS COUNTY BELOW 6000 FEET/DENVER/WEST ADAMS AND ARAPAHOE COUNTIES/EAST BROOMFIELD COUNTY- ELBERT/CENTRAL AND EAST DOUGLAS COUNTIES ABOVE 6000 FEET- NORTHEAST WELD COUNTY-CENTRAL AND SOUTH WELD COUNTY-MORGAN COUNTY- CENTRAL AND EAST ADAMS AND ARAPAHOE COUNTIES- NORTH AND NORTHEAST ELBERT COUNTY BELOW 6000 FEET/NORTH LINCOLN COUNTY- SOUTHEAST ELBERT COUNTY BELOW 6000 FEET/SOUTH LINCOLN COUNTY- LOGAN COUNTY- WASHINGTON COUNTY-SEDGWICK COUNTY- PHILLIPS COUNTY- INCLUDING...FORT COLLINS...HEREFORD...LOVELAND...NUNN... ARVADA...
BOULDER...GOLDEN... LAKEWOOD...LONGMONT...AURORA... BRIGHTON... CITY OF DENVER...DENVER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT...HIGHLANDS RANCH... LITTLETON...PARKER...CASTLE ROCK...ELBERT...FONDIS...KIOWA...
LARKSPUR...BRIGGSDALE...GROVER... PAWNEE BUTTES...RAYMER... STONEHAM... EATON...FORT LUPTON...GREELEY... ROGGEN...BRUSH... FORT MORGAN... GOODRICH...WIGGINS...BENNETT...BYERS... DEER TRAIL... LEADER...AGATE...HUGO... LIMON...MATHESON...FORDER...KARVAL... KUTCH...PUNKIN CENTER...CROOK... MERINO...STERLING...PEETZ... AKRON... COPE...LAST CHANCE...OTIS... JULESBURG...OVID...SEDGWICK... AMHERST...HAXTUN...HOLYOKE 430 PM MDT THU APR 12 2007

The scroll one of the channels was even longer.

Faster! Faster!

Remember sitting down to a game of Monopoly with your family? Or Parcheesi? Or an hours-long game of Risk? Apparently we were a slower, better-focused group of people then.

Parents are lobbying game manufacturers to "shorten games" because, they claim, they take too long to play and kids aren't having fun.

Michelle Hastings admits she's sometimes cheated to get through a game of Candy
Land with her 5-year-old daughter, Campbell. The board game can take just too long, she said. Disney Monopoly is another big offender.

"A game like that, it could literally take you days," said Hastings, of Holliston, Mass. "A lot of times, you don't play games because they take so long." Board game makers are heeding pleas of parents like Hastings and introducing games tailored to busy lives and shorter attention spans that take only about 20 minutes to play

So the game-makers are releasing "express" versions of the games. Some have nifty electronics to speed things up, others are just simplified to make the game move faster and be easier to play. There have always been "fast" games (Uno, Go Fish, Crazy 8s), but not everything has to be at light-speed!

Best of all for busy parents and kids, the games are brief and they're packaged differently so they can be taken along in the car."It's analogous to a kid picking up his Game Boy for 10 minutes," said Chris Byrne, an independent toy consultant based in New York. "Yet it involves the whole family."

Easier. Faster. Is this really a good thing? C'mon -- not everything in life is instantaneous and not everything should be "easy". This trend actually kind if disturbs me. Everyone has made up rules to a common game to get it over quickly if you really don't have time; but to demand games that are shorter because they take longer than 10 minutes to play? Seriously, do parents really want to teach their kids that a) everything can be done quckly and if it's not fast then it's not valuable and b) they should always be able to "win"? This is where I put on my child-free hat and criticize parenting: kids really do need to learn that they don't always win, that some things do need work and practice and attention to do properly. It's not enough to try. You have to succeed. The world really doesn't give a damn about your fragile self-esteem. [turn off harpy-mode]

Methinks that the demand for faster games has absolutely nothing to do with the kids' attention spans and abilty to play. It's the parents who think things take too long. (As evidenced by the opening paragraph of the article.) Kids can sit and do the most inane things for hours on end, they are perfectly capable of playing a game lasting an hour. Or at least, I certainly remember doing so. I remember playing cards with my dad for a couple hours (he taught me cribbage -- great for math!) and spending the afternoons playing Monopoly or Life with my friends. Scrabble should not be a 10 minute game. Well, maybe it can be, but that's an entirely different mode of leisure, in my book.

And books! If everyone is used to 10-15 minute bursts of entertainment, how on earth are we going to teach them to appreciate books? It takes most people a few days to finish a long novel...if their entire childhood is spend on fast-forward, will kids every learn to enjoy that?

I'm one of the highest-input-requiring people that I know -- I have to have something to read while sitting the carwash or waiting in line to get the mail. I read while I watch television (how's that for a bizarre twist?). I have a ton of hobbies that are tedious and time-consuming in a way that only a zen master can appreciate (a 24x36" cross stich piece on 36ct linen, anyone?). I multitask by default. I feel let down when movies are only an hour and a half long. I really don't get the weird "must be connected must be amused must be entertained" vibe that I get from alot of people. I really have a hard time being passively entertained. Sit in front of the tv and just watch? Not likely.

Apparently, I'm weird.

Catching up

Apparently, it's been a busy week. Or I've simply been too depressed to post. Either way, I haven't had much to say lately. For those who pop in to see what's going on at Chez Phouka, sorry about that.

So what's up? The wine cellar is in and trimmed up, and I've been feverishly entering all the wine into the Wine Curator software that I bought. Very nice. And then printing out labels to hang on all the bottle tags so we can identify things. Yes, appealing to my weird, OCD-organizational habits. I even found little images of grapes, red and white, to put on the labels.

We talked today about Rukh, and decided that we really don't want to keep him on the metronomic chemo that he's on. The combination of chemo, anti-inflammatory, and antiobotic seems to really make him feel crappy, and frankly, I'm not willing to make him feel crappy anymore. I'd rather have four weeks of happy-dog than six of not-so-happy. We're going in for x-rays on Saturday to see where things are, but we've stopped everything except the thyroid meds -- and even after only a day he actually seems perkier and his face looks better. Yeah, you, might think it's hard to discern much of an expression on a fuzzy face, but anyone who's met the beastie would notice a difference. I feel much more calm about the whole thing now. Now we just make him comfortable and spoil him rotten and wait. That's ok.

I expect that his xrays show rather aggressive growth of the tumors in his lungs -- I will be surprised if things haven't progressed much. Although even if they haven't, and things appear to have stalled, we're still going to stop treatment for the cancer itself (chemo, etc). It will give us an idea of how long we really have, though, and that's important.

Seeing in the Dark

As anyone in the technology industries know, the cock-eyed change to Daylight Savings Time early this year caused all sorts of computer distress: patch releases for Windows that boogered up other applications, database issues with timestamps, etc. All in the name of "saving energy".

I've always been skeptical that this has any effect on energy consumption. So what if using lights later in the evening...we're just using them earlier in the mornign to make up for it. We no longer have the luxury of changing our schedules to match the sunrise-sunset, we still have to get up in the morning for work at 6:00 am, for example, and if it's dark outside, we're turning on the lights and turning up the heat.

But other than forcing millions of drowsy American workers and school children into the dark, wintry weather three weeks early, the move appears to have had little impact on power usage.

"We haven't seen any measurable impact," said Jason Cuevas, spokesman for Southern Co., one of the nation's largest power companies, echoing comments from several large utilities.

It's nice to have more hours in the evening that are light, and leave work in the daylight, but the whole "energy savings" things is a bust -- an opinion that most energy companies expressed last year when this whole thing was suggested.

I feel quite vindicated.

Internet Gateway

I have to admit that I get very annoyed at poor spelling and grammar on the 'net. Not that I am immune to typos or dangling participles, but the number of people who can't figure out the difference between your and you're and don't understandthat there, they're and their are different words. Or too and to. Its and it's. And the bizarre evolution of txtspk in IM and text messages has me confused.

I can't tell you how many emails I receive that have 'I really like you're website'. Or the misplaced apostrophes that show up all over in ads and webpages. We should have some sort of standard!

So, Defective Yeti blog has set up an Internet Gateway for users, testing just these things. Refresh the page a few times -- there are a number of different tests!

Wine Cellar

The Adorable Husband spent yesterday putting together the 19 boxes of wine racks that arrived last week. They come as an enormous jigsaw puzzle of side pieces and cross bars and molding and all that -- something the Adorable Husband loves to do.

He didn't have to buy new tools, but he did have to special order really long screws to secure things to the wall. We ended up adding another 2 1/2" of insulation to the outer concrete wall because we were actually having problems keeping the cellar WARM enough. It seems to be stabilizing now. At any rate, in order to secure the racks to the walls, he had to find 5" screws to get through the wallboard, insulation, and the bracing for the racks. And, since the Adorable Husband is a Handy-Fix-It-Scandinavian, they are solid. We could climb them. There is no way these things are moving.

It took him the better part of two days to get things together and attached and laid out properly but it looks so cool! I'll take some pictures and post them when he gets all the molding up. Soon, I promise!

More info on Dog Food

Ok, I'm not defending Menu Foods, I think their response to this tragedy is shameful. They are making decisions based on the bottom line, and trying desperately to cover their collective asses about this whole thing because it wil cost money to fix it.

However, even human food producers don't test every product they use. They don't test each load of ingredients, regardless of where they come from. THey might test samples now and then, but each new shipment is not checked before dumping the bag into the hopper of the machine. That doesn't happen. While I feel Menu Foods needs to step up and take responsbility for their actions, the tainted wheat was not something that would have normally been tested for, even if it was used in your wheaties.

Even if they did test, what do they test for? It doesn't seem reasonable to expect testing for "everything" -- our food producers rely on existing laws and regulations to ensure that the food they receive is "good". By choosing to import food from an unregulated country, Menu Foods made a huge mistake; but we import billions of dollars of foodstuffs from countries that do not follow our FDA rules. And even if they did follow those rules, only about 1.3% of the food imported into the US is ever inspected or tested at all. 1.3%. Scares the hell out of me, I tell you. Less than five percent of US beef is inspected. We risk eating contaminated food every time we eat something we didn't grow ourselves. And even then.

What I can't figure out is why Menu Foods and the related companies didn't approach this like the Tylenol case -- "Holy Crap! THis is awful! Something happened and we're going to get to the bottom of it. We were following the laws about food safety and apparently that wasn't enough. Here's what we're going to do...."

Instead, we get protestations that they don't really see a clear correlation, that it's someone else's fault, that they aren't liable because it was tainted when they bought it, etc. Shameful. I'm waiting for one of hte high-end dog foods (SD, Euk, etc) to start advertising that they are making food NOT at Menu Foods, even if they have to open their own plants to do so.

By the way, the shipper of the tainted wheat gluten is ChemNutra, sourcing from Xuzhour Anying. ChemNutra’s shipments commenced November 9, 2006 and ended March 8, 2007. [snip] ChemNutra shipped to supplies wheat gluten only to pet food manufacturers.

The total quantity of Xuzhou Anying wheat gluten shipped was 792 metric tons.

Wikipedia is keeping up with the story -- perhaps not as fast a breaking news, but they seem to be well fact-checked.

Slower than Molasses in January

I never thought about the old saw, "Slower than Molasses in January", but I never would have thought it derived from an actual event.

In 1919, a huge molasses tank in Boston, owned by US Industrial Alcohol, exploded and flooded the town with a sixteen-foot-tall wall of molasses that killed 21 people, injured over a hundred, and took out several buildings. Two and a half million gallons of molasses (about 14,000 tons) leveled several city blocks. The molasses was for distillation purposes (for industrial alcohol and rum)-- and the accident precedes the start of Prohibition by one day.

More here, and a writeup on the accident here.

As I read through some of the articles, I discovered that this is not the only Molasses Flood. This happened in 1911 in New Orleans, as well.

And how fast is molasses in January? Well, estimates say that the molasses ran through the streets and through buildings at about 35 miles per hour.

Snow!

Woke up this morning to about six inches of SNOW.

Last weekend it was near 80 degrees. Yesterday was in the 70s and sunny and beautiful. Last night at 1am (when I finally staggered up to bed) it was clear as a bell.

This morning? SNOW. Lots of it.

Good news for us, since we've got family coming in today who want to go skiing over the weekend. Yeah!

Another Decider

Hypocrisy, thy name is Dobson.

James Dobson, from Focus on the Family, has self-righteously decided that HE is the arbiter of who is christian and who is not. According to Dobson, Fred Thompson (a former TN senator who may throw his hat in the ring for the 2008 election) is not a Christian. Dobson weighed in (apparently with the self-described role of judge) on the presidential hopefuls for 2008. Apparently, most of them aren't really Christian...at least according to the definition that Dobson made up.

Focus on the Family spokesman Gary Schneeberger stood by Dobson's claim. He said that, while Dobson didn't believe Thompson to be a member of a non-Christian faith, Dobson nevertheless "has never known Thompson to be a committed Christian—someone who talks openly about his faith."

"We use that word—Christian—to refer to people who are evangelical Christians," Schneeberger added. "Dr. Dobson wasn't expressing a personal opinion about his eaction to a Thompson candidacy; he was trying to 'read the tea leaves' about such a
possibility."

So according to Dobson, to be a Christian you must “talk openly about your faith”. Non-evangelicals aren't Christian? Oh, really? Pulled that out of your ass, did you? Does it matter that you're directly contradicted by your own religious foundation?

Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven. (Matthew 6:1)

When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. (Matthew 6:5)

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think it’s up to somebody who consistently acts in opposition to the teachings of the Christ to decide who’s a Christian and who isn’t. I know a lot of good people who are christians, in act and deed every single day. They don't go around proclaiming how righteous they are, how much better they are -- they just do it. Every day. Dobson talks the talk but he certainly doesn't walk the walk.

Of course, the fabulous construct that he used: I don't know he's X because I've never seen him do Y, has no basis in logic, no basis in fact, and I think we should use the same idea to characterize everyone else, too. I don't know that Dobson isn't a child molester, because I've never seen him throw up when someone mentions it. I don't know that Newt Gingrich isn't addicted to crack because I haven't seen him refuse to buy some.

Hey, this is FUN! I can make up some cockamany definition of something and then hold everyone up to it, or accuse them of being horrible people. Don't eat popcorn? You're obviously a terrorist. Watch Friends on TV? You're definitely stealing from your employer. Drive a pickup truck? You're a shoplifter. See how easy this is?

Well, if you don't mind being a hypocrite.

Wichita

So far, the one and only travel requirement for my current client has been one day travelling to Wichita for a face-to-face meeting. Well, it ends up taking two days, since you can't get a direct flight except in the evening, but that's it. One day.

So I flew out with the project manager on Monday night and returned Tuesday night. It was a fun trip, to be honest. They took us out (all of the project team -- some 12 people) to a veeeeerrry nice steak dinner when we arrived, and then we spent a day in a meeting.

Sometimes those can be horrible -- people aren't prepared, the people in the room can't make decisions, all the worst behavior you find in business settings. We may have been bemoaning the fact that the client doesn't seem to have done large projects before, and that they don't quite understand the importance of the requirements and design phase of things....but they were absolutely on the ball for this meeting and it was tremendously productive. Wow.

Of course, my travel karma reared its ugly head, and our flight out was delayed 2 hours and the flight back by nearly an hour. Pretty tame, compared to my usual travel chaos.

I am SO looking forward to starting the development on the project!

Manual vs Automatic

Both the Adorable Husband and I drive manual transmission cars -- we both prefer them, and have driven sticks since we started buying our own cars. But they're getting harder to find, as most new cars are build with advanced automatic transmissions (Triptronic, etc) and only a few car options on the very cheap end and the very expensive sports car range continue to offer manuals.

Not so in Europe, of course, were most cars are still manuals. But in the US, only 17% of the cars on the road are stick shifts. This came up recently because we're just starting to look for options for a next car for the Adorable Husband (in two years or so) and his current favorite -- the Passat -- is moving away from offering a manual transmission and opting for their Triptronic automatic in all their cars. You can apparently still order a manual, but it's now more expensive than the automatics. Instead of the surcharge for an automatic, which was the norm for many years, it's now a premium to have a stick.

What surprised me more was the percentage of people who are driving sticks and looking for cars with manual transmissions. From Product Design and Development,

...consider the findings of Art Spinella, president of CNW Marketing Research, which conducts extensive surveys at the retail end of the automotive business. He says that for the past three years, women, not men, have driven the manual transmission market.

In last year’s survey, 14.3 percent of women versus just 8.5 percent of men were shopping for a stick shift. In 1985, the numbers were dramatically reversed: 4.4 percent of women versus 52.8 percent of men.

I wonder what has prompted the change? Control? Manuals used to be cheaper? Flexbility? One of the suggestions about why over 80% of cars on the road are automatics is that people are doing so much more intheir cars -- cell phones, Starbucks coffee, etc. They don't have a hand free any longer to shift. Sounds reasonable to me.

Although I'm still looking for manuals when I buy my next car.

Beastie Update

Just an update on Rukh. He's doing pretty well, although we can tell that he's not feeling terrific. We're not sure if it's because of the new drugs he's on, or just feeling crappy in general. He's on a major antibiotic daily, Piroxicam (like Rimdayl) as an anti-inflammatory, and Cytoxin every other day as a low-dose chemo drug.

It's supposed to slow things down a bit, but we're not sure that it's worth it if the combination makes him queasy and unhappy. If he's only got a few weeks or months left, I'd rather they all be as happy as possible, you know? So, we're giving it a week and we'll see if he perks up or not.

We're also looking at putting him on thyroid meds to see if that also makes him feel a bit better. HE's always been on the low end of normal, which is low for an Akita. He wasn't symptomatic before, but with everything else that's going on, he seems to be now -- losing his fur, feeling lethargic, etc. It's hard to decide what to do; with so many drugs in his system, and so much happening in the last few weeks we can't tell what's causing the problems, so it's just shooting in the dark.

But, he's still happy to go for a short walk, get's excited about biscuits, and seems to be feeling ok, if not good at this point. He gets tired really quickly, and sleeps a lot, but that's to be expected. At the moment, he's racked out inthe living room, after having had pizza for lunch.

Dog Food Recall

By now, everyone knows about the Menu Foods pet food recall -- apparently the new info is that hte culprit is a chemical used as rat poison that contaminated the wheat-gluten that the company imports from China. The chemical is not illegal in China.

If you feed either canned food or those little foil packets of food from any of fifty three name brands, definitely check the list of recalled foods here.

Makes me wonder if it's worth paying a premium for Eukanuba when the same plant produces wall-mart brand goods, too. So far, this does not extend to dried kibble, but I have to wonder.

Buttons

I heard a perfectly common-sense theory on why women's clothing buttons "backwards" -- ie, left-handed with buttons on the right, and men's clothing buttons right-handed, with the buttons on the left. I never really thought about it, except to laugh a bit when one of my coats is "backwards" for me or I wear on of the Adorable Husband's shirts.

The explanation? Buttons showed up on women's clothing in the mid-19th century, when the whole concept of "idle rich" was a real biggie. Women's buttons were backwards because the had to be right-handed for the maid. Men usually dressed themselves (although not always, I guess), and so they needed to have the buttons properly placed for a right-handed person to dress themself, while women had assistance and thus the buttons were placed for a right-handed person to dress someone else.

Kind of elegantly simple, don't you think?

There are, of course, many other theories (including some cockamamie idea that it forces women to use their inferior hand to remind them that they are inferior to men).

Someone else has spent a LOT of time thinking about the buttons quandary, and has written up a neat article on it.

Brilliant

Archaeologists have argued and puzzled about how the enormous stones of Stonehenge were moved and set upright, how the many-ton blocks of the pyramids were moved, how people without benefit of pulleys and complex machinery could move these enormous weights.

Well, the elegant and amazingly simple solution of a retired Flint, MI carpenter may be just the ticket. Wally Wallington has figured out how to move enormous stones by himself, how to tilt up the standing stones, he even moved his son-in-law's barn 300 feet by himself. He has a website explaining how he figures all of this out. Brilliant. You can watch the entire proces here.

Absolutely brilliant. A wooden crossbar, a few stones and one human. He raised, moved, and set a 10-ton stone by himself with tools available to neolithic builders. Wow.

Carpet Woes

Once again, I am VERY thankful that I bought a SpotBot -- the little carpet cleaning thing from Bissel that you set on the spot, push a button, and voila! clean carpet.

We came home to a really stupendous spray of dog barf in my office. From experience, we know that these sorts of spots (mostly bile, I think) stain the carpet yellow. Seriously, after all the chemo and the rest of it, we're going to have to recarpet the house. But then again, what's a little urp and pee between friends, eh?

Anyway, this thing (the Spotbot) is amazing. Fill it with pet stain remover and some sort of Oxy-clean stuff and it pulls out even the worst stains with no effort at all. One of the best hundred bucks I've ever spent. I never anticipated using it this much, but I'm really glad that I bought it! No muss, no fuss, and it works like a charm. I don't often really recommend household appliances, but we've used this little carpet cleaner thingy more than anythign else in the house, including the vacuum.

No Pizza Delivery

How on earth do they get up here?

Yes, it's a real house -- of many on the page of Weird Houses. I just thought it was rather fun. I like the Trout house, too.

Pretty amazing view, though, he?

Crime in Erie

This was the FIRST item in the Police Blotter of our local newspaper. Obviously crime is a serious issue in our little town:

A man called Erie POlicy at about 8:30p.m., Wednesday, March 7, to report a suspicious peanut in his back yard.

The man told police he just wanted to document the incident at his home in the [local development].

No further information was available.

A suspicious peanut? I mean, can you imagine the poor officer having to respond to that without laughing hysterically? What could possibly be suspicious about a peanut? "Well, officer, it seemed to be....lurking."

Further rant

I'm bit better this morning, and Rukh seems to be perky as ever. Well, it's gray and rainy outside, so he's lumping around and snoring blissfully, but you get the idea!

The vet says that this isn't going to be painful, he'll just get sicker and sicker and eventually will have a hard time getting a deep breath. DH and I are on the same page about "quality of life", so hopefully the beastie will do his part and let us know when he really feels like crap.

On the no-hair front, the vet also thinks that it might be thyroid related -- that all the chemo and stuff set his hormones out of whack and he's hypothyroid, so the hair isn't growing back/thinning. He's pretty pink all over now, because much of his undercoat is thinned. So we're going to see if the blood test confirms that and get him on synthroid to see if we can make him feel better, even if only for a few weeks. Low thyroid might explain the blahs, too, so hopefuly that will help.

All I could think yesterday was "why can't we be the people who love pugs and yorkies, they live about twenty years!"

And I hope this doesn't sound really, really cold-hearted, but we had a talk last night about searching for a new puppy. We can't replace Rukh, we woudln't try, but we know from experience taht we cannot be a one-dog household. Uulaq is going to be a neurotic mess when he goes.We will be, too. It takes a long time to search for a good breeder and find a puppy, etc. We had figured to wait until fall before talking to people, but our schedule got a lot shorter.

Probably the first time in my life that a puppy for my birthday isn't a good thing. I don't want a new puppy. I want to keep the OLD one around longer! Nine years is not enough. Damn.

Today has been a truly shitty day.

No more chemo, I suppose that's good, but it's because the bone cancer has already metastazied into Rukh's lungs -- eight weeks ago, his chest xrays were clear. Today they show dime-size (+)tumors.

He'd been doing so well, too; he still seems to feel ok and has romped around the yard with Uulaq. Our vet said 2-4 months, tops. Maybe less. The fact that things grew so quickly doesn't bode well for more than a few months.

We expected this, of course -- but we thought we'd have a year or so.

Baad commercials

Working from home for me = having Discover Channel on all day. It's background noise, and I find that I'm actually more productive. Yeah, weird, I know, but it does seem to keep me focused.

(Unlike the Adorable Husband, who can't remember how to speak when the television is on)

But it does mean that I end up seeing a boatload of commercials during the day. When did advertising agencies adopt the theory that we're stupid and don't notice how awful the ads are? They're embarassing, or gross. I leap for the mute button when some of these show up.

There is currently an ad for colon cancer screening that actually involves a man making a colon-shaped gulley in a mound of mashed potatoes and dropping in a pea, all the while talkiing about polyps and how they can be removed...and then he eats the pea. Eeu.

A Healthy Choise talks about "adding flavor to taste" in the new ads for their food. What in the hell does that mean? Flavor to taste? Huh?

Dominos Pizza has the freaky facial-cgi guys.

Even Target has fallen into the trap. Their new "less" campaign has skinny models frolicking about while words emerge on the screen: fearLESS, endLESS, etc...and then marveLESS and fabuLESS. Huh? Marveless? Fabuless? Can they not spell? I wonder how many people noticed that one.

And those are ads for well-known, large corporations. The cheapo ads for fat-reduction pills, esurance, and Head-On are even worse.

Maps of Conquest

Someone spent a lot of time getting this right, and it's really cool -- a history of conquest in the middle east from 3000 BCE to today, as a 90-second flash movie. Egyptians, Macedonians, Mongols, British, and all the empires in between. Definitely worth a minute and a half of your time!

The Website, Maps of War, is an interesting browse. Cool!

Mistaken Identity

My dear friend Mark is buying a house. After years of renting, he found a really neat development and he closes on the new house next week. During the design phase of the housebuilding, he asked me to come along to the sessions to help him pick tile and carpet and flooring and all that "decorative" stuff. So I trundled along to the Design Center and helped him pick tile for the bathroom and laundry, countertops, bathroom fixtures, all that stuff.

It was kind of fun. We started referring to me as the "rental wife", since he doesn't have a woman in his life to give him a hand with all that.

Today was his final walkthrough prior to closing -- you know the drill, looking for things that need to be fixed, making sure tha l lthe doors and cabinets open and close, all the faucets work, that sort of thing. He asked me to come through and look for stuff.

So I arrive a bit early at the house, where the two representatives of the building company are waiting and introduce myself as the 'surrogate, rental wife'. They chuckled a bit, but Mark arrived shortly afterwards and Mark made the comment that I'd been really helpful, and that my husband was glad I wasn't doing it for our house.

"So, you're not married?" Chirpy walk-through woman says in surprise.

"Nope."

The look on her face was priceless. For just a second, before I could say that I was just giving Mark a hand with the aesthetics, you could tell that she was thinking...huh? What sort of weird sex triangle have I stumbled into? There's a husband somewhere?

We laughed like hyenas, which I imagine didn't help.

Data Mining is Dangerous

Had a DUI? A misdemeanor charge from back in college? Don't plan on going to Canada any time soon. At least don't expect smooth sailing.

Because of a demand by the US Dept of Homeland Security to have criminal background infomration from Canadians, there is a new program in place to share data between the US system and the Canadian system. Pretty much anything in your criminal record -- from speeding tickets to possession of marijuana back in 1960 -- that can be seen by a state sheriff is now available to the border guards in Canada.

Travellers are being turned back at the border for transgressions that are thirty years old.

...ask the well-to-do East Bay couple who flew to British Columbia this month for an eight-day ski vacation at the famed Whistler Chateau, where rooms run to $500 a night. They'd made the trip many times, but were surprised at the border to be told that the husband would have to report to "secondary'' immigration.

There, in a room he estimates was filled with 60 other concerned travelers, he was told he was "a person who was inadmissible to Canada.'' The problem? A conviction for marijuana possession.

In 1975.

The rules haven't changed, of course; Canada has always had laws controlling immigration and entry to the country. But now Canada has records, shared real-time (apparently) from the US, that make the job a bit easier. Canada has always turned away those have criminal records -- crossing the border is entering another country, even though we have taken for granted that things go pretty smoothly between the US and Canada. But this new data mining is overkill.

I imagine this is the result of the us demanding all this information and Canada (quite rightly) demanded reciprocity. I, for one, am a bit annoyed that the DHS both demanded this info of other countries and has made our crinimal databases available. I know that the intent is to find and refuse entry to actual criminals, but a misdemeanor charge from 1975? This is relevant how?

And this is only the beginning. Canada is only the first country with which we are sharing data. I'm sure others will demand the same access. Eventually, the criminal records of every US citizen will be collated and shared, probably with other countries, as they also request the data in return for their own records.

Does Canada have this right? Of course they do, just as the US has a right to screen those it lets through our borders. I'm not arguing that at all. Foreign nations have every right to make their own laws and enforce them. We don't get special treatment, and while it's going to be problematic for some travellers, Canada hasn't done anything wrong here.

That's not what makes me twitch about this -- what makes me all freaked about this is the beaurocrats and politicians suddenly thinking they know about databases, data mining, and the sharing of information. Records from the municipal, state, and federal leveel are being gathered into a single database and made available. It contains everything, even minor infractions, and are being opened up to beaurocrats all over the world.

This is what I do for a living, and believe me, I have ZERO trust that a slew of cooperating government agencies understands the ramifications of making this data essentially public. It's only a matter of time before something that shouldn't be public, that shouldn't be shared, makes it into that matrix.

Meeting Groupthink

I knew it! Putting a half-dozen people together in a conference room is actually detrimental to finding a solution. Meetings -- supposedly to share information, "think outside the box", come up with innovations -- simply don't work.

People have a harder time coming up with options when in a group than when alone. It apparently has something to do with repetition. Meetings do foster discussion of issues, but the more than a particular solution is said out loud, the harder it is to think of other ideas.

The researchers speculate that when a group of people receives information, the inclination is to discuss it. The more times one option is said aloud, the harder it is for individuals to recall other options, explained Krishnan, associate professor of marketing at Indiana University.

I've seen this happen in meetings -- one idea is discussed endlessly, and when the group finally gets around to talking about other options, people are fixated on the first idea that was talked about.

Heck, I've used this to my advantage in meetings where I want the group to do things my way. Persuasively present the preferred solution...and then ask for other ideas. People gravitate back to the same solution, as if it gets stuck and is somehow validated, because they simply can't think of other options when they are saturated with discussion about the first solution. People fall into "groupthink" because it is self-supporting: get approval and positive reinforcement for reiterating the ideas of other, and eventually they seem like the right choice.

Interesting that someone has proved that it is a consistent effect, though.

Squicky Ad

There is an ad out for Dominos Garlic Bread pizza that absolutely squicks me out -- gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies.

Guy opens box: his nose covers half his face. "Smell the garlic!" Across the table is a guy with a weirded-out enormous CGI mouth, "Taste!" and then pan to a guy with huge eyes stretched to fill his whole face.

It's all CGI, of course, but for some reason seeing the faces all mooshed around that like really makes me queasy. Yuck. This is supposed to be appetizing?

Factoid!

Weird things I learned today: You can tune just about any modern instrument against the dial tone on a regular phone.

At least in the US. The dial tone is a "buzz" between an F (350 Hz) and an A (440 Hz). Most instruments tune to an A, so you can just pick up the phone and go.

Melancholy? Really?

According to the people who populate the discussion forum I frequent, I should be sad, disappointed, melancholy, regretful (add your favorite adjective here) that my menstrual cycle has finally decided to jump into the random, disjointed pattern that signals menopause.

Probably not imminent, but at least it heralds the light at the end of the tunnel. I mean, really. I've never wanted kids, never intended to use any of the female plumbing, yet I've had thirty years of monthly annoyance. I've had a few hot-flashes (wow!), and some of the other symptoms of peri-menopause, and honestly, I've been waiting for things to stop. My family has a history of early menopause, and I can only hope.

When I expressed pleasure that my cycle (which has been clock-work consistent down to the hour for thirty years) had started to succumb to chaos theory (five weeks, four week, six weeks, three. Lasting ten days, five days, two days, four), no less than five people expressed sympathy at my "end of fecundity". I should be saddened and less, apparently, that I have finally started to cross the threshold of barrenness and somehow my "womanliness" is diminished by the fact that I will soon no longer be able to bear children.

I have to admit surprise at this attitude. It's been a long time since people have equated a woman's worth with her ability to produce children. That women are defined by motherhood. I had hoped that the idea that you can't posisbly be a "complete woman" if you don't have children, and that being fertile was somehow a status determinator was long past. Bearing and raising children can be the most important thing a woman can do (and the raising of children shouold be on the list of the the most imporant thing a man can do, but that part seems to be a bit more flexible), but it's not the ONLY thing she can do. It seems archaic and patronizing to assume that women will be lessened by their inability to have children, as if their sole purpose is to do so.

More women are choosing to be childfree now than ever before, and those women who do have children are having fewer (at least in the US). Is this a bad thing? I don't know. So many women in the past had children because "it's what you do -- you get married, you have kids". My own mother did. Perhaps if the social pressure to follow the "norm" and start having kids as soon as you married had been less, she might have done differnet things with her life. I don't think she regrets having kids, but there didnt' seem to be any other choice for her.

For me, the decision (if I every actually had a decision) was very easy -- no kids. I like kids well enough, but I have simply never had any urge to have my own kids. I'll borrow everyone else's and be a cool auntie, but having my own never really crossed my mind as a possibility. I can facetiously say that it's because my Mom did daycare at home for years and I had a very realistic view of life with a toddler, but it's more than that. Most girls show some interest in babies and having children and I never did. My mom thinks I need therapy, that i's unnatural to not want children, and I see her attitude in the response of my "invisible friends" online.

Can't have kids? How sad. Don't want kids? You're wierd or unnatural or disturbed and -- and here's the REALLY annoying part -- you don't know what you want.

I can't tell you how many people have told me, "oh, you'll change your mind" or "it's different when they're yours" or "you can't possible mean that" when I told them I didn't want kids. When I married the Adorable Husband, we discussed this very seriously -- and I still heard that it would be unfair to him to not have kids; or, at some level, that he thought I might change my mind, too. He never really wanted kids except as an abstract, but social pressure (and family pressure) is intense.

Do I regret not having kids? Nope. I've had opportunities that my childed friends don't have, and I have wonderful nieces and a sweet nephew. Like I said, my mother thinks I'm disturbed and need therapy to discover my natural role as a mother, but my life certainly isn't lacking anything. Many people have suggested that I've "missed" something by not having kids. I can't decide if that's because they are so happy being parents, or if they envy me for not having the constraints on my life they do. There is sometimes a desperation in the criticism of the "childree life" that smacks of jealousy. I get an undercurrent of that from some people, "oh, you can do that because you don't have kids.", "I wish I could go to Ireland for a month!" In some way, that's true. We travel for weeks at a time, and I took a quarter off last year -- something that would be much harder if we had a traditional family. Difference choices -- and the Adorable Husband and I made the choice not to have kids, it's been a different path. Better? That's a judgement I can't make.

Dear Abby (or Ann Landers, I can never remember) once asked if parents would "do it again" and a suprising number admitted that they wouldn't have kids, or would have delayed having children, if they had the change to go back in time. I'm not surprised -- having kids is at once the most rewarding and most frustrating things people can do, I think.

Well. Here's hoping that the two-days-every-three -weeks is the new schedule and that this doesn't drag on for years. Although I have determined that rushing out to the store for an emegency stash of tampons does indeed effectively stop your period. Heh.

Mathematics Fails

We bought a really cool double-bookshelf curio sort of thing last weekend, and the furniture company tried to deliver it today. I say tried, because they were unable to maneuver the enormous thing down the stairs and into our "library".

I'm disappointed, because we measured the thing (and did it twice) and really thought that they'd be able to inch it down the stairs and through the door. Mathematically, it should have fit! With perhaps a quarter-inch to spare. I'll admit, but it should have made it down the staircase and (more importantly) through the door at the bottom). The delivery guys balked. They did try, I have to give them credit, but they got it halfway down the basement stairs and decided that they coudln't do it without gouging something.

Ok, I decided. It can go upstairs (can you tell I really love this piece?). They tried, and despite the fact that I coudl see at least 2" of freespace around them, declared that they couldn't get it UP the stairs either. Without the limitation of a doorway, I figured they could boost itup over the railing. Apparently, they shoudl have sent BIGGER guys. Luckily, the Adorable Husband was home (delivering foam insulation for the wine cellar with the rental truck from Lowe's) or the little guy on the bottom of the stairs would have been squished. But the delivery guyswere insistent -- it an't gonna go.

They could, the lead guy announced, get it upstairs if we didn't have the bookshelves in the landing (if you haven't seen the house, we have a wall-full of 6"-deep shelves in the landing for paperbacks). Ooookay. They wouldn't wait while I cleared out the books and removed hte shelves. They insisted that I reschedule. So, they reloaded the thing on the truck and drove away. I'm not sure if I should be pissed they did that, or grateful that they tried so hard. I opted for grateful, and tipped them 20 bucks for the other stuff they delievered, and the attempts to get this huge beast down and then up the stairs.

Feh. The Adorable Husband and I are in negotiations as to whether we can put this in the sitting area upstairs, or whether we return it and get something else for downstairs. I bet you can guess which side of the that argument I'm on....

Legal Reform?

If this doesn't convince you that we need some sort of legal reform, I give up. I can't imagine that a) any attorney took this case and b) it might actually make it to court. It should be dropped and this guy should be fined to within an inch of his life for proposing such absolutely ridiculous arguments

A man is arguing that being fired for spending time (apparenlty a lot of it) on internet chat sites describing explciit sex acts is discriminatory -- PTSD from Vietnam made him an Internet Sex addict and he shoudl be recognized as having a disability. So firing him is discriminating aginst a disabled person and should be protected under the ADA. He was warned about his behavior, and continued. WTF? Surfing porn on the web might be "protected"?

Hey, I can think of a whole host of things that I could possibly claim as disabilities, so I don't have to take responsbility for my actions and can get the world to revolve around me. What's the attorney's name again?

Protecting what?

Attorney General Launches Initiative to Protect Religious Freedom:The First Freedom Project

"Preserving religious liberty requires an ongoing commitment to protecting this most basic freedom for people of all faiths." --Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales

Call me a cynic, but this has nothing to do with protecting religious freedom, of course. It's all about imposing a specific religious belief on those of us that don't want religion imposed on public life. Its going to allow the favored group -- evangelical religious-right christians, who have dominated political life recently -- to demand all kinds of concessions from employers, teachers, zoning boards etc. This is all about special rights for a religion (and, in the history of this country, a specific religious belief), not about religious freedom.

I don't get it. Who is being prevented from exercising their religious beliefs? Who is being forced to deny their religion? Whose rights have been abridged by any law or behavior of the government?

Apparently the people who think that their religion requires that they force it on others. When they are prevented from making other people follow their specific beliefs, they believe they are being "prevented" from observing it. Sorry. That doesn't match reality.

I understand that I'm generalizing the opinion and actions of a small fringe group. But I can't help feeling that those people claiming that they are being persecuted, that Christianity is somehow threatened by the views of other, aren't living the same world that I am. Do good, and I will fully support you, whether I agree with your beliefs or not. Act like a club-carrying thug and I will try to make sure you're disarmed.

Much of the complaints that I see are because other religions are now getting the same sort of concessions and recognition that have historically been given to the Christian faith in America. Whether you ascribe to the mistaken belief that we are "a Christian nation" by design or not, Christianity has been a cornerstone belief of the US. For the most part, this has been a positive influence. However, we no longer can claim that Christianity has primacy -- the world is a small place nowadays, and people who believe in many other definitions of God abound. If you believe they are all mistaken, that's well and good. They think the same of you, as have most of the people who populated the earth since we climbed down out of the trees. But accepting that the differing beliefs of others should have the same cultural and social treatment is quite a stretch for some people, and is quite threatening to them.

One of my friends tried to explain to me once why 'tolerance' of other religions was dangerous and disengenuous, and I have to admit that I never quite got the argument. Tolerance somehow validates alternate beliefs and weakens the faith of those who go along with it? From my perspective, it's a non-issue. A person of any faith criticizing someone of another faith for having the "wrong beliefs" is quite astounding to me.

I've been reading 'Misquoting Jesus' in the last week or so -- and despite the title, the book is actually not a condemnation of any religous belief or the bible itself, it's a rather long-winded explanation of textual criticism and an explaination of the process of copying and deriving versions of the New Testament and how we know what the "original" looked like, even though we have never seen it. More like "how do we know what we know?" Very interesting. What we believe is so firmly entrenched in what we have been given as resource material, it was interesting to trace how we can trace how that source material has changed from early versions to newer ones and map the general beliefs of any age of Christianity to the influence of the written word. I strongly recommend it.

Woah. That digressed. Sorry!

Radio Ad Missing the Point

Not only is my email filled with offers for things to enlarge anatomical parts I don't have and offers for drugs to keep said anatomy ready-and-waiting for action...now the radio is starting with adds for Viagra and Cialis that are sounding quite a lot like my spam.

On the way to lunch today, I heard an add for Viagra "soft tabs" from some online pharmacy that promises you results in 15 minutes from a reformulated Viagra tab that "dissolves under your tongue."

"Did you know," the ad intones seriously, "that Viagra can take SIXTY to NINETY MINUTES to work?"

All I could think of was that this ad was obviously aimed at men. Me? Well, I think all those Viagra-hungry men should spend that 60-90 minutes doing something useful.

Like foreplay.

An hour and a half before you have an erection? Piffle. Be creative.

Beer Guzzlers

I love The Week magazine. Interesting summary of the week in the world.

This week -- a startling tidbit that 10% of beer drinkers drinkg 43% of the beer consumed. That's a little over a gallon a day.

I have no idea if that's worldwide, just in the US, just in the UK, or what. But stil....Boggle.

Wine tasting fun!

Apparently when I finally get immersed in a project, I forget to update anything! As you can tell, I've been sucked into a new project that involves a complete re-engineering of a 15-year-old application with no documentation, no requirements, and a short timeline.

Actually, I love it. I'm really excited to start the rewrite. Of course, I'm in the process of creating use-cases, process flows, context diagrams, and (hopefully soon) detail design docs). Lots of visio diagrams. I'm having a blast, even if I'm starting to dream about "process enhancements". Ugh.

So, what's been going on?

We went to a really fun, kind of impromptu German wine tasting at a friend's house this weekend. The invitation said" bring a german wine to taste, and german food". Well, the wine was easy -- head to the Boulder Wine Merchant and ask for "something different from Germany", but the german food was a bit of a problem. We all brought lots of sausage. We found German cheese and Bockwurst. Another person brought beer-cheese fondue, and smoked sausage and sauerkraut. I'd forgotten I really like sauerkraut. My mom used to make polska keilbasa and sauerkraut, but I'd forgotten that it was so good.

We all decided that German red wine is...well, disappointing covers it. We brought a Pinot Noir (Spatburgunder) and someone else found a red table wine. We all hated both of them. We also found a "champagne" from Germany -- a sparkling reisling that was the hit of the evening. Everything else was variations of sweet-to-dry Riesling. Good, but definitley not my cup of tea. It was an absolute blast, though. Next month, we're all trying Irish food and beer, in honor of St. Paddy's Day. Our dear friends the LInnemeyers, have been doing this for awhile and invited us!

It's a fun idea -- invite people to bring a wine to taste, bring a dish to share, and enjoy an evening of good food and wine and conviviality. I'm thinking we need to do this a few times a month!

Introducing the Book

If you have ever answered the phone or emails for a helpdesk, you know that some of the problems can be trivial and mind-bendingly weird. And you know how hard it is to be calm, helpful, solicitous, and nice when faced with a user who Just. Doesn't. Get. It.

Ever wonder what it was like before technology? Check out the Norwegian Old Helpdesk.

It's in Norwegian, but don't worry -- you'll get it.

Especially if you've ever had to make a call just like this poor helpdesk technician.

[I found a version with english subtitles, if you'd rather know exactly what they say. We had more fun imagining our own dialog, but....]

Blogging the Bible

Most people haven't really read the whole Bible -- all the books, chapters, and verses. Most people know the big stories -- the flood, the ten commandments, the sacrifice of Isaac, the story of Joseph, etc. But few of them have read the text themselves.

They have read bits and pieces, or have had bits and pieces "explained" to them by clergy or one of the hundreds of 'how to read the bible' guides. They have things packaged and carefully filtered to teach a specific lesson, or they work through passages with someone else's interpretation to guide them. If you accept things without question, it's much easier, and not many people are interested in digging any deeper. This is a culturally iconic text, and for many centuries, detailed analysis was frowned upon.

So what happens when someone starts at the beginning and reads the whole thing, word by word, without bringing in those preconcieved ideas? Well, David Plotz, and author at Slate magazine, decided to do just that -- and carry everyone along with the process by blogging each book and chapter and his feelings.

It's not a slam on the bible, it doesn't appear to have any hidden agenda at all -- just the reactions of someone who has been a practicing religious person their whole life, but who hadn't ever tried to read the bible on their own. He compares what he reads to the lessons of his childhood and the misconceptions he had about things (for example, that the mark of Cain is actually a mark of favor, not of condemnation), and how some stories are very different than he was taught. It's been interesting to see his experience.

You can read the whole series (still in progress, I think) at Slate Magazine. The set of entries is called Blogging the Bible.

Momentary Brilliance

So, I get this call on Friday morning, my boss asking if I can use OWB (Oracle Warehouse Builder). Well, yeah. I did a huge project using an earlier version of the tool, I could probably figure out the newer one without too much problem. I figured he was looking for some project proposal analysis, or something.

Nope. A new client called with a Serious Production Issue -- they had lost connectivity and were absolutely frantic that htey couldn't do their data loads from ther old system into their data warehouse. Could I come out for a few hours and fix it?

Gaah! I hate that kind of gig. You have to come in, get up to speed, and be a gold-plated expert in two hours or less. There are technologies that I'm perfectly happy to do this for, but Warehouse Builder is not one of them. Not any more. I haven't touched it for a year. The salesperson on the gig had told them that we could send someone "today", but I really wanted a bit of time to refresh myself on the tool.

So I blithely told the client on the phone that I had client responsbilities for the rest of the afternoon and I'd be there first thing Monday morning, without waiting for the sales person to get a word in edgewise. WHile it was a production environment, there was ONE user and she was out. Ha!

In the end, I was there for less than two hours and things were back up and running, and the person I was helping was actually pleased that I'd not come on Friday. If it had been fixed on Friday afternoon, she would have had to work all weekend. I told her this was part of the well-rounded services that TUSC provides.

I got to feel momentarily brilliant, but then I had to go back home and feel inadequate and dense while trying to decipher the code in the application I'm supposed to re-engineer. Sigh.

Color Photos, 1911

Someone posted a link to photos of turn-of-the-century Russia, and at first I thought they were colorized versions of orignal black and white photos. Not so -- the photographer, Prokudin-Gorskii, had figured out how to make colored images from mutiple black and white glass-plate images. He took three distinct photos -- with green, blue, and red filters. He never printed photos in color, of course, but he mimicked the output by projecting the three images onto a screen simultaneously during his lectures.

This photo (from the Empire that was Russia website) is NOT a modern photo. It was taken in 1911. The photo is of the newly ascended Emir of Bukhara and was not "colorized" by modern methods. The website explains how they reproduced the color photos from the glass-plate images, but what I was struck by was the modernity of the images. They look as if they were taken last week, with modern equipment.

They're easier to relate to than black-and-white images, for some reason. There is a liveliness there that you don't usually see in old photograps. I wonder if that's just because we are so programmed to see things in color, and black-and-white photos (especially old photos) are seen as 'unreal'.

You can see the rest of the photos on the website -- the architecture photos are particularly striking, as if the explanation of how they do it.

$4300 a square foot

And we complain about real estate prices? Ouch. Apparently, the Chelsea area in London is one of the most expensive places to own property on earth. The average asking price for a house is 1.1 million pounds (about 2.2 million) in this ritzy area. That's appalling enough, until you realize the sorts of places that are for sale in Chelsea.

A janitor's storeroom in an existing housing block was just listed for 170,000 pounds ($331,000). It is 7 x 11 feet -- about the size of a closet. It has a cupboard for a shower, and a tiny kitchenette -- or it will, after the new owners shell out another $50K to add electricity and proper plumbing and clear out the rubble that fills the tiny room.

Even the estate agent selling the property admitted the flat was "incredibly depressing".

"We have to go in with a torch because the lights do not work and it is full of rubble," Jason North, associate director at Lane Fox.

Nevertheless, the flat is expected to attract buyers due to its close proximity to the fashionable bars, shops and leisure facilities of Kensington and Chelsea.

The article goes on to note that it might be one of the few affordable places in the area, if you don't mind living in a windowless room that's actually a bit smaller than a maximum security cell in prison.

Vista Gotchas

I've been running the beta for Windows Vista as a dual-boot on my work machine -- it's a lovely operating system, seems to have been pretty stable, and adds in a lot of functionality. Like other recent versions, though, it tends to "dumb down" some of the security and network stuff. For the most part, this is good, I guess; but annoying the user to manage security because Windows has such a horrible history of dealing with it is perhaps not the best solution. I don't want it making decisions -- MS has proven in the past that it can't make good ones.

I will probably move to Vista permanently on my work machine, but only after the first service patch is released (I really don't want to be one of the first adopters on this one). But I read something recently hat made me rethink my possible change to my home machine and laptop:

From the BBC -- the fine print in the new version of Windows grants Microsoft the right to delete whatever it wants to from your computer, and there's nothing you can do about it:

Vista's legal fine print includes extensive provisions granting Microsoft the right to regularly check the legitimacy of the software and holds the prospect of deleting certain programs without the user's knowledge...Vista also incorporates Windows Defender, a security program that actively scans computers for "spyware, adware, and other potentially unwanted software". The agreement does not define any of these terms, leaving it to Microsoft to determine what constitutes unwanted software... even though that may result in other software ceasing to work or mistakenly result in the removal of software that is not unwanted...

For those users frustrated by the software's limitations, Microsoft cautions that "you may not work around any technical limitations in the software"...

Well, yes, Microsoft, I can work around the technical limitation and monumental invasion of privacy that your license suggests: I can not upgrade, or I can swap out to another operating system, such as Linux or move to a Mac. Perhaps Microsoft might want to think about that before deciding to "manage" my computer for me.

Subway Model

I ran across this while surfing aimlessly -- the US Interstate system as a subway-type model. Interesting.
You can see a much larger version here.

Kiss of Death

There's a running joke in the more leftist forums I hang out in (although, how can I call it a joke when it has such far-reaching and disappointing results) that if Bush starts touting some program or congratulating some group, in a few days, he'll cut funding for it.

More disturbing to me -- and part and parcel of politics in general -- is the adminstration's knack for getting a ton of positive attention and credit for talking about making the right choices and funding/unfunding the right things, but when it comes to enacting the change, they quietly and without any fanfare, don't do it. But everyone remembers that they talked about doing it, so everyone also remembers that it somehow happened, even if it didn't. If you don't pay attention to page 42 of the paper below the fold, you never know that the much lauded plan to do X was cut. A prime example of standing ovations and applause for education:

“Bush’s proposal to increase the maximum Pell Grant for lower-income undergraduate students was greeted with fanfare when it was announced last week.
But his FY08 budget released Monday contains no new money to pay for it,” CongressDaily reports. [ThinkProgress]

Or this, which got a ton of attention in Bush's new push for a healthy populace:

To fight childhood obesity, Mr. Bush asks Congress to set aside $17 million for a new program to promote ‘healthy behavior’ among adolescents. But at the same time, he asks Congress to eliminate the preventive health services block grant, which provides $99 million a year to help states prevent obesity and other chronic conditions. [NY Times]

It happens all the time (and to be fair, Bush isn't the only one who has a history of this) but it's damn frustrating and hard to keep track of. I'm still searching for a website that lists all these popular programs and statements about them -- adn the real, concrete actions that were taken, good or bad. I haven't found it yet.

Truer Words Never Written

I saw a tagline/signature line that made me laugh out loud:

I am fairly sure that if they took porn off the internet, there would only be
one website left, and it would be called "Bring Back the Porn."

Football Alternative

I can't say I'm a football fan, and even though I like the commercials during the superbowl, they're usually not enough to get me to sit and watch four or five hours of football.

Instead, might I recommend The Puppy Bowl, on Animal Planet. Four hours of cute puppies playing. That's it. Just puppies. For four hours! I spent most of my afternoon working with the Puppy Bowl on tv. I'm a complete sucker for cute puppies.

Of course, I need a Samoyed puppy. Now. Maybe three.

Ouch.

Bush has been touting his "surge" option, and reiterating his commitment to his currentplan in Iraq and, apparently, his inability to recognize that things need to change. He tends to be relatively tone-deaf, and repeated the same arguments when speaking to the house Democrats during their annual retreat. But...

Later, in a question-and-answer session that was closed to the public, Democrats questioned Bush about the war. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters afterward, "The president really stood his ground on Iraq" during the session.

Asked if she was disappointed by his stance, she replied, "Disappointment is attached to expectation. . . . I knew what to expect." TimeRichmond

Ouch.

Winter Social Life

When it gets cold, and dark at 4pm, everyone out here in Sunny Colorado starts to hibernate. It happens in all cold states during winter -- we don't leave the house, we stop talking to people, we basically hide out until spring.

Not entirely, but everyone who has snow knows the drill. I can't wait for the warm spring nights so we can hang out on our porch, have a glass of wine, and enjoy the company of our lovely neighbors as they wander by. Neary every night in summer, someone on the culdesac is hanging out on their front porch and we all end up there.

Our neighbors invited us to dinner at a new Italian place in Niwot -- Treppeda's --great place, and we broke ouf of the mold this weekend, and actually socialized! Whoohoo! Since we still have two feet of snow in our front yard, and at least 6" of ice on the roads in our part of the neighborhood, we're feeling very adventurous!

Having good neighbors is such a huge blessing. We've lucked out entirely -- our culdesac turns out in force to snowblow and clear the driveways, we hang out on summer weekends, and in general we have a great bunch of people. I've never understood people who don't know their neighbors, or prefer to have a six-foot privacy fence between them and anyone who might possibly see them in their backyard. I like knowing that I can borrow a cup of sugar from any of my neighbors, and that they feel comfortable asking to borrow any of the Adorable Husband's vast collection of tools. It makes me feel part of a community, not just like I happen to own a house somewhere.

Harry Potter VII

So, have you pre-ordered yet? Amazon sent out emails this morning to order the last Harry Potter book (released in July) -- and it's already the #1 book on Amazon. Actually, it's number 1 and number 2 -- the deluxe edition comes in a close second.

There were roughtly 1.5 million pre-orders at Amazon of the Half-Blood Prince, the previous book, and Amazon fully expects that the last book will outstrip even that. Half-Blood Prince was also notable for selling 6.9 million copies the first day it was released (worldwide) and having the largest initial printing of any book. It looks like the last book will do even better.

Amazon.com today announced that in just the first seven hours of pre-order availability for "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" the online retailer has sold over 200 percent more books than it did the entire first day of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" the sixth book in the series. In fact, sales on Amazon.com in the first seven hours today have eclipsed total sales for the entire first two days of the sixth book. [dmn newswire]

That means three million or more pre-orders. Just at Amazon.