For friday cat blogging I have stories.

Fierce Cat has a new trick. She has figured out that we won’t let her bring live mice in the house. So she hides them. In her mouth. She tucks them up somewhere and then stands by the door like she wants to be let in. Then once she gets in she gives them to George. I think she thinks George needs to be taught how to hunt, or maybe he’s not being fed well enough or something. George is insanely grateful (he agrees with the not being fed well enough assessment) and incredibly disappointed when we retrieve the mouse from the corner and scold the heck out of Fierce Cat.

But we’ve begun to get smart about Fierce Cat’s ploy because she can’t hide the whole mouse in her mouth. If you’re paying attention you can usually spot tiny mousie feet or a tail sticking out the sides. And the innocent look gives it away every time.

In the meantime we have discovered that George is actually a dog. He fetches. Repeatedly, and eagerly, and will not stop. He has one particular toy, a bunch of green feathers bound together at the end, that he particularly likes to fetch. The feather toy must be put in a secure location at the end of the day or he will demand it be thrown for fetching at 3AM. Note: closed drawers are not a secure location.

If we are both in the room he will kindly alternate bringing the toy to Eric and to me. And if you don’t feel like playing fetch he will repeatedly tuck it behind you on the couch and then pull it out again to get your attention. Meanwhile, Fierce Cat looks on disgustedly and thinks “Have some dignity, you tool.”

Perhaps she is feeding him mice to try to explain to him his rightful position as Cat.

I was in South Park on monday (the neighborhood in SF, not the cartoon), on my way to my hairdresser’s. And a nice young well dressed couple were walking along the sidewalk toward me. Her: pale, blonde, impeccably dressed, really nice shoes. Him: black, stunningly handsome. Young urban lawyers or marketing or bizdev, moving up in the world. As they passed, I overheard her state emphatically:

“No, no, its not true, I get laid there all the time.”

Did I turn around and follow them to find out what that conversation was all about? No I did not. Its been bugging me ever since. All the time? *all* the time? Where is this? What’s not true? Arrrgghhh!

Dammit, it really is true that marketing is just one big drunken sex party and only the beautiful people are invited, isn’t it.

OK, just one more post today. (I’m down to only one page of backlogged draft blog posts! woohoo!)

By now y’all have seen the footage of the JetBlue airplane that landed without incident in LAX a few days ago with the crooked landing gear. (or at least heard about it). In an online discussion about that landing elsewhere an acquaintance passed on Wade Nelson’s gripping, edge-of-the-seat account of the Gimli Glider, an Air Canada Boeing 767 in 1983 that ran out of fuel in mid-flight and had to glide all the way into a landing. How could they possibly have run out of fuel? The fuel gauge in the then-new 767 wasn’t working, so they refueled the plane using a more traditional, basic method — measuring the amount of fuel you have with a dipstick and determining how much you need based on mileage and weight. Except that the fuel weight is measured in kilograms. They did the conversion in pounds. They ended up with half as much fuel in the plane as they thought they had.
Math is hard. This page from the American Chemical Society explains the problem of fuel density in better detail.

Basically, everything totally went wrong on this flight that could possibly have gone wrong, and yet it still has a happy ending. Good read.

(click through to Bug Bash for the big comic)

I love this particular comic more than I probably should.

A long time ago I used to work for a large unix workstation manufacturer I like to affectionately call Stupid Company. Then because I was a moron I just recently went back to work for them again for a couple of years. (learning from one’s mistakes: something higher-order mammals are supposedly good at. ook.)

Like many large companies, Stupid Company has a corporate campus of many buildings arranged around a central courtyard. The courtyard is actually quite lovely; grass, benches, lots of places to hang out and not work.

Also just like every corporate campus everywhere, each of the buildings has electronic doors, so in order to get into the buildings you need your badge. However, the buildings are also locked from the courtyard side, so you need to badge in there, too. There is no way into the courtyard except through a building, so in order to get to the courtyard in the first place you would have had to badge in earlier. But no. Badge badge badge. You also have to badge into the cafeteria and the gym, also on the inside of the courtyard. Stupid Company is very secure. (well, except for the wireless network, which is accessible from the far end of the parking lot. Don’t ask me why I know this.) Oh, I should also mention: no connections between the buildings. To get from building to building you go into the courtyard and into the next building, badging in at each step. Also a whole lot of Stupid Company employees took the “no tailgating” rule seriously — they wouldn’t let you follow them into the cafeteria unless you showed your badge! No bad chinese food for you today!

When I was at Stupid Company I worked in a building that, because of layoffs, did not have its own receptionist. So if you forgot your badge you would have to go to the receptionist next door and beg for a temporary badge (see cartoon above). The receptionist would let you into that building. Then you would go out into the courtyard…and get trapped.

I forgot my badge a few times while I was there, and it’s particularly humiliating to have to
stand by the courtyard door in the rain hoping someone will come by and let you into your own building, waving your temporary badge at them through the glass to prove that you’re not some high tech courtyard vagrant (“will code for food”). I’m pretty sure they did it to make sure you were so frightened of forgetting your badge you simply never, ever took took it off. Just embed the damn smart card in my butt! I don’t care! Don’t make me stand in the rain any more!

Please note that I resisted the temptation to use the really obvious “no stinkin badges” title to this post, as appropriate as it would have been. You may congratulate me below.

A bunch of months ago we got wireless broadband Internet, and all was right with the world. Except there seems to be a rule in our world that once something goes right in our tech configuration, something must also then go horribly wrong. So after changing ISPs, getting a new mini-firewall, renumbering our entire internal network, moving our DNS offsite, reprogramming our entire spam management system, and finally getting everything working perfectly, the very next day the power supply in our main server blew up (“what do you mean it won’t turn on?” “you heard me, it won’t turn on and it smells bad.”)

While the easy solution would have been to just go find a power supply, we considered all options. Usually the death of a box is what forces us to upgrade; this box was purchased when our last server blew up a few years ago (hard drive Grind of Death). It was a decent box for its time but nothing top of the line, and it was showing its age. I began shopping for a new computer. Something in the $500 Dell range, I figured.

It was then that Fry’s began to advertise the Dirt Cheap Computer. Fry’s, as anyone from the area knows, is the local evil computer superstore. You can get anything — *anything* computer or technology related at Fry’s, and at really incredible prices. You just have to completely humiliate yourself to do it. No sales people at Fry’s know anything about the technology they sell, but they harrass you madly for the comission; they browbeat you to sell you things you don’t need; they line you up like cattle to pay for stuff and shout at you (“Line 14! Line 14!”) and then they search you at the door on your way out. And that’s just to buy things. Just try to return something (shudder). Fry’s is really evil, everyone hates them, but yet its hard not to keep going back. If you really need a null modem cable at 10PM on a sunday, they will have it. Its right next to the porn and the diet coke.

The Dirt Cheap Computer (DCC) is actually technically called the Great Quality computer. You may snicker derisively; we did. It is not Great Quality. It has off-brand parts in a no-name case. It runs linux (linspire, actually). And it costs $180. No rebate interpretive dance needed; that is the price. (you can get a slightly higher quality version, with Windows, for $250).

At the time we found out about the dirt cheap computer, it was on sale. For $150. We figured: if it blows up in a year we will just buy another one. $150. Its practically free. Yeehaw.

The DCC, it turns out, is terrific. Fedora Core installs on it with zero issues. It comes with a minimal 128M of memory (thus the price) which was fine for basic routing and web and shell access and mail until we installed SpamAssassin and then it swapped itself into a puddle. Another 512M made it much happier. Its just a server machine, but now it gronks away happily in the corner with nary a peep.

Waiter Rant: The God Who Drowns

Since God doesn’t come down in a blizzard of special effects to bail us out – we have to help each other. We recognize the suffering of others and are moved to relieve it. We can’t coop ourselves up in our apartments, churches, and mosques wishing all the bad things will go away. There’s no room for childish magical thinking. We have to act. The rescuers of 9/11 and the Gulf Coast understood this without all the fancy theological reflection. Bonhoeffer would say when we help each other that is God helping us. The human heart is moved by weakness not by strength. It is our brokenness, not power, that binds us together. Perhaps our weakness will be our salvation. Maybe that is how God “can be with us and help us.” Who knows? I’m only a waiter.

No, no, Mr Waiter. You are one fucking great writer.

Over at the Seattle aquarium, employees had to move their two giant pacific octopus into a big holding tank with some sharks for a while. They figured the octopus would be safe from the sharks because there were plenty of places to hide and they could turn color to blend in with their surroundings.

They were wrong. But not about the safety of the octopus from the sharks.

Over the next week there was mayhem in the tank: the sharks started turning up dead and mutilated at the bottom of the tank. Four over the course of a week. They couldn’t figure out what was going on. So one of the aquarium employees stayed late with a video camera.

This intense footage of the octopus stalking and attacking a shark was shown on PBS’ Nature. No one had any idea whatsoever that pacific octopus were this mean. Warning: requires the hated Real player. (its worth it)

(I got it from Collision Detection.)

Last week I finished up Yet Another Tech Writing Contract, which once again went into overtime as it ended and hence prevented me from posting anything here about comic books or squid. This is my usual post-quiet warning: prepare yourself for a barrage of saved-up postings.

This week I have been cleaning my office. One would think that office-cleaning would not take three days, but my office was way way out of control. See, over the last bunch of years I have been successfully getting rid of the crap in the rest of the house. The rest of the house is pretty much clean and straight and there’s not a lot of clutter lying about. The problem is that I did it by putting all the crap into my office.

When I started on monday my office was pretty much full of crap with small narrow paths leading to my desk, to the router/mailserver, and to the printer. There were enormous stacks of paper and books on nearly every surface. Magazines. Old computer equipment. More books. Tangled ropes of cobwebs and dust hung from the ceiling and obscured the windows. Many more books. It was like some dark monster lair. A very sad nerdy monster, who likes to read. I hated working in this office, and something had to be done.

Many boxes, a trip to the computer recycling center, a full trashbin, another trip to goodwill, untold bouts of sneezing and a good vacuuming later, and I can see the floor. There’s still a lot of crap in here. I really don’t know what to do with all the books, at least a third of which appear to have been written by me. I’m going to need more boxes. But at least now there’s a great deal less dust, you can get to the printer without hurting yourself, and sunlight can penetrate into the room.

So now I am in out of work slacker downtime once again. I have only a few small goals for my unemployment this time around:

• Learn Python
• Learn PHP
• Learn Ruby
• Learn docbook
• Lose six pounds gained on last contract (too many good lunches out; not enough bicycling)
• Do a complete website overhaul
• Start publishing empire

Eh, shouldn’t take long.

Went in for my once-in-a-zillion-years eye exam this morning. Something had to be done; I was having trouble seeing the TiVo.

My eye doctor has a new cool machine. You press your eye up against a giant lens, there’s a big flash of green light, and then your retina shows up in bright reds and greens and yellows on a computer screen. It looks kind of like some kind of giant veiny blob from outer space. It looks like it should be breathing. My retinas are just fine, although I have a freckle on the right side. They took the picture a number of times to make sure it wasn’t just a shadow or dust on the lens or a cancerous tumor. Nope. Its a freckle. Freaky.

They tell me they’re going to email my retinas to me. I will be sure and put them on flickr when I get them because, you know, next to cat pictures there’s nothing cooler than veiny pictures of the inside of one’s body.

The other thing I discovered was that my right eye isn’t lined up. They had a test where you hold up a card with a hole in it at arms length and line up the hole with a dot on the wall. Then you close one eye at a time. The hole should still line up with the dot. It did with my left eye but my right eye shifted the hole way over to the right. I don’t know what that means, exactly. I suspect it means I won’t be an astronaut any time soon.

I didn’t get dilated this time around, which is good because I hate it, and I got a spiffy new pair of glasses ordered. Soon I will be able to read the television again and my life will be complete.

Speaking of totally not knowing what things mean, here are the mystery numbers that tell you everything you need to know about my terrible vision. Or it could be the combination to the safe. I don’t know, really.

R -1.75 -1.50 3
L -0.75 -0.75 162

The tree people are here. They come with big cars and fear and poor load securing skills. Every year we hope for early winter storms to keep them from coming or to drive them away. Every year the weather is nice and they come up from the flatlands in droves. We stay at home and we seethe. Or we get stuck behind them and we seethe. It is a month-long seethe. We are the seethers.

In New England they call them “tree peepers,” the tourists who flock up to the country to see the leaves turning colors in the fall. They come out from the cities and they drive badly on the country highways. They stop randomly in the middle of the road to admire the views (“look! trees!”) and are generally a nuisance to the people who actually live there and have places to be.

We don’t have tree peepers; our trees are California trees and the colors are kind of boring (yellow, brown). What we do have in abundance is choose-and-cut-your-own Christmas tree farms. It is a similar phenomenon.

The mountains are kind of known for Christmas tree farms, and our road, being the first exit out of town, is tree farm central. It seems that anyone who ever grew up in the valley within driving distance of my road has harvested a tree here. I have been in the eastern sierra, in Arizona, and in New Hampshire, and I have met people who know the Christmas tree farms on my road. It is kind of like living in Disneyland.

Starting the day after Thanksgiving and sometimes even before then the people from the Valley get into big cars or trucks and drive up the hill to our road. But these are flatlanders who are used to 6-lane freeways and big wide straight suburban streets. They don’t see a lot of narrow twisty roads with a sheer dropoff on one side. It scares them. So they drive in the middle of the road, at about 10 miles per hour. Woe betide you if you are used to driving the road and you get stuck behind a convoy of white-knuckled minivans. You’ll be there all day. And on the way back down again: tree people do not understand that you should not lean on your brakes for the better part of three miles down the hill. Christmas in the mountains smells a lot like a brake pad crying out in pain.

Then there’s the indecision. Admittedly, there are a lot of tree farms on the road, and its hard to get an idea of what a good farm is from one small sign on a gate by the road. But a lot of tree people will drive up the main road, stop in front of a farm, and then have a family discussion whether or not to go into that farm. This can take the better part of two or three minutes. If you are behind the discussion, you might as well put it in park and have a sandwich. But I also suggest leaving a fair amount of room between you and any vehicle that comes to a sudden stop in the middle of the road, because there is about a 50/50 chance that the driver will decide, no, let’s go to that farm we just passed, and abruptly put the car into reverse and back up into you. Yes, this has happened. Yes, more than once.

Once the tree people have actually found a farm and found a tree there is the securing the tree to the car problem. The tree farms charge $30-$40 for a tree regardless of size, which is a great deal if you’re looking for a Rockefeller Center-style tree to put in your three-story foyer, but they charge extra for something to actually tie it to your car. You can tell that a lot of people get really stingy on this. I usually see one of a number of tree securing methods:

• The Gravity Method: You have purchased a tree that is bigger than your car. In fact you no longer actually own a car; you are now driving a 4WD douglas fir. That tree will probably permanently remain on top of your car, because it took a team of ten to put it there. Good luck getting into the car. Note that the gravity method usually only works while driving down the hill; once you reach the bottom of the hill and merge onto the freeway the increased speed and wind pressure usually sucks the tree right off the roof. There’s no team of ten to help you reload your firmobile down there.
• The Thousand Hands Method: If you roll down all the windows and you and all your children reach out of the car and just HOLD ON REAL TIGHT, then the tree will remain on top of the car. If you are really fortunate when you reach the bottom of the road and merge onto the freeway and the tree gets sucked off the roof and into the fast lane, it will not suck your children out of the windows with it. Buckle up.
• The Hope For the Best Method: The tree farm only charges $1 for a little bit of twine. How secure is a tree going to be attached to the top of the roof if its tied with a little bit a twine? Not very. But maybe if we hope for the best it’ll be OK. Until you get to the bottom of the road and merge onto the freeway and then the twine will probably snap immediately when the tree gets sucked off the roof.
• The Its a Truck Method: Its a truck! Just put the tree into the bed! This is what pickups are for! No need to invest in anything to tie down the tree! This method works spectacularly until your reach the bottom of the road and merge onto the freeway, at which point the wind pressure sucks the tree right up out of the bed and flings it into oncoming traffic.
• The Enormous Pupae Method: Some sensible people believe that something horrible is going to happen to their chosen tree on the way home, and so they invest in the complete tree securage package. The tree is wrapped completely in some sort of white plastic netting from head to foot so that not even a single needle will escape the trip, and then the bundle is tied tightly to the roof of the vehicle. The car is no longer merely transporting a christmas tree back home, but now looks more as if a giant insect were gestating on top of it. This tree is going nowhere. Not even in the merge onto the freeway, as trees are getting sucked off cars all around. This is absolutely a reliable tree securage method, it just looks really funny and is thus still worthy of mock.

So from this description you may be thinking that the onramp to the freeway at the bottom of my road is just littered with devehicled christmas trees. I perhaps exaggerate a tad. But it is definitely not unusual to listen to the traffic report around this time of year and hear that “there is a backup on Highway 17 because of a christmas tree in the road.”

The best part of christmas tree season, however, is that it ends. After Christmas the roads return to quiet and the flatlanders remain on the flats. At least until wine tasting and wedding season starts. Then we get the drunk flatlanders, but that is another essay for another time.

I don’t know a darn thing about VoodooPad (although looking at its features, its sounds kind of neat.) But its developer, Gus Mueller, has written a long postmortem post on his blog about developing the 2.0 version: lessons he learned, stuff he threw out while developing it, good and bad choices he made along the way.

I really enjoy reading this sort of stuff. I’m no kind of advanced developer (well, not much of a developer at all, actually), but I always learn interesting things from these kind of software programmer journals. I love them.

(I got it from Brent Simmons. Brent is the developer of NetNewsWire and MarsEdit and writes a lot of these sort of developer introspection posts himself. Also: NetNewsWire and MarsEdit rock.)

Yahoo! News – IBM Puts PC Unit Up for Sale – NY Times

I bought an IBM Thinkpad laptop almost ten years ago after a really great conversation with an IBM sales rep at comdex, and I’ve owned three more since then. I bought a a refurbished X31 with a full IBM warranty just recently as my main Windows machine, replacing both an older X20 Eric stole from me and an aging desktop. When I was having horrible trouble with my hands in 1999 and I could not type on any computer keyboard, ergonomic or not, for more than about half an hour a day, I discovered that I actually could type on a thinkpad keyboard. IBM hardware saved my career.

Eric inherited my old Thinkpad X20 because he discovered there was a thriving community of linux developers and support forums for the Thinkpad. Red Hat installed on it without problems. When the screen died a few months back he replaced it with a slightly larger model (a T40) because he found out that IBM itself was certifying and supporting linux on those models. No one else seems to have such large corporate support for linux (who would ever have guessed that IBM would be at the vanguard of free software development? It still boggles the mind).

I’m primarily a Mac user, but I do use Windows a lot for work. And the thinkpad hardware, while not as technolusty gorgeous as a powerbook or even, say, a Sony Vaio, is incredibly well-constructed. I’ve only ever had one problem with a thinkpad — my first one, a 770, blew up, literally, small puff of smoke, smell of ozone — and when I called them they had the entire thing fixed in two days, including shipping (I still don’t know how they did that). And for the record I have no difficulties with the nipple mouse and actually prefer it to a trackpad.

So although I understand IBM’s motivation — the PC business is obviously not a good business to be in unless you are Dell — I will mourn the thinkpads when they are gone.

It’s persimmon season. Yum.

They didn’t have persimmons back east where I grew up. Or if they had them, I never saw them. When I first moved out here I saw persimmons in the store, and people told me oh, persimmons are wonderful, you should try them. So I bought a persimmon at some exorbitant supermarket price, brought it home, sliced it into quarters, and put one in my mouth.

It was like eating a handful of bitter flourescent orange dirt. The persimmon immediately sucked all the moisture out of my mouth. I would have said “Bleah! argggh!!” if I had been able to talk, which I couldn’t, because my lips had sealed themselves shut and unfortunately the bite of persimmon was still inside. I staggered around the house waving my arms and knocking over furniture looking for something with which to pry open my jaws. I was eventually able to expel the persimmon and with enough water and time eventually I regained salivary equilibrium. The remainder of the persimmon went into the trash.

I confronted the person who had recommended persimmons to me at work the next day. She laughed at me. “They’re kind of astringent if they’re not ripe,” she explained.

Kind of astringent. Right.

Suffice it to say this experience did not make me want to try persimmons again, ever. It was only later I found out that there are two kinds of persimmons: Fuyu and Hachiya. Fuyus are round like an apple and yellowish-orange. You can eat them the day you take them home from the store, even if they’re still hard and not very ripe, although they’ll taste better if they’re just a little squishy. In either case fuyus are supposed to be crisp and slightly crunchy.

And then there is the hachiya. Hachiyas are acorn-shaped, with pointy ends, and a much brighter orange than fuyus, They are sold hard in the stores. And unless you actually want to have a horrible mouth-sucking experience like I did when I tried one, you cannot eat them when they are hard. With a hachiya persimmon, you have to leave it out on the counter to blet. That is actually the correct technical term: bletting, and its actually a decaying process. No, really. The hachiya doesn’t become riper, but it does soften up and the tannins that make it, well, astringent, go away as it blets. The softer the hachiya, the better it will taste. A hachiya persimmon is not really ready to eat until it has the consistency of a water balloon. You can also quick-blet a hachiya by freezing it and thawing it, but that only makes the persimmon edible without giving you much of the flavor.

And the flavor is everything. Ripe hachiyas have a rich, honey-like flavor. They are thick and sweet and sticky and kind of messy to eat, but they taste wonderful. Because of the mess a lot of people use hachiyas for cooking but I like to eat them with a spoon and my fingers and lick off the plate. Fuyus are good and enable instant persimmon gratification, but it is the hachiyas that I really like.

I used to resist buying persimmons even after I found out how to eat them because they were so expensive in stores. $1.49 each: no. And then I found I just wasn’t talking to the right people. Persimmon trees are fairly common around here; they are a fast-growing tree that doesn’t need a lot of water or a lot of care. After the leaves fall the fruit stays on the tree, like bright orange christmas ornaments. They’re pretty to look at. The problem is that they can grow to be very large trees, they bear really heavily, and once the fruit gets ripe you have to harvest it all because otherwise the water-balloon effect works against you and whatever happens to be standing underneath the tree. It can get kind of icky. Thus, if you own a persimmon tree generally you have way more persimmons than you know what to do with. Owning a persimmon tree is kind of like planting a lot of zucchini: you begin to look around for neighbors with unlocked doors.

So around this time of year I start mentioning in casual conversations that I like persimmons. I bring it up at the gym, at jobs where I’m working. I sigh dramatically and mention the high price of persimmons at the store. And invariably someone will perk up and say “You like persimmons? Thank god. I will bring you some.” And then the next say or so I have a giant grocery bag of persimmons. Or two or three. It never fails.

I usually eat all my persimmons out of hand but one of these days I will cook with them. Persimmon pie and persimmon pudding seem to be popular. Epicurious has a whole bunch of persimmon recipes, including persimmon salsa, persimmon feta and hazelnut salad, and persimmon cardamom sherbet. Yum.

Its enough to make one want to plant a tree.

The True Story of Audion

This article went around the blogs a few weeks ago, so I’m behind the curve here. Audion was a Mac MP3 player that was around for a long time and made a respectable living for its creators, the small software shop Panic. And then iTunes came out, iTunes was free, and its difficult to compete with that. Panic has retired and discontinued support for Audion and is now offering its final version for free while the developers go off to writing bigger and better things.

What this article is all about is how Audion got developed, and more interestingly, how Apple ended up buying their main competitor and turning it into iTunes. Its a really interesting look into how a small software company in the mac world works and also a glimpse into what happens when you try to compete with Steve Jobs (as in: don’t). The article is well-written, funny, with lots of little pop-up asides and links to other tangential information. Its a good read. Thanks to Panic for sharing this.

A cute Halloween short story spoofing Lovecraft from over on Strange Horizons: The Great Old Pumpkin, by John Aegard (yes, I’m late.)