The Former Goose YArd

Hello

2011-02-07T13:37:00.001-08:00

Can't cope with Facebook or Twitter any longer, going back to writing in this thing. See you soon.

Linux taking over "the desktop"

2011-01-15T19:52:00.000-08:00

In the past 10 years I must have seen a hundred articles titled along the lines of "Will/Has/Could/Can Linux take over the desktop?". This evening I saw another one somewhere, and it occurred to me what a weird question it is, because as far as I can tell, Linux had utterly demolished everything else in its segment at least 8 or 9 years ago.

There used to be these things called "Workstations" that cost a fucking fortune, were not advertised in any of the pop-computer magazines like Computer Shopper or PC World, and were used by everybody who was anybody in the computer business. PCs were toys; if you wanted to do any serious work your company shelled out serious coin to buy you a Sparc Station. Or perhaps you were a DEC shop, and your desk included a rip roaring DECstation running Ultrix. A really lucky bastard might have his own SGI Iris, while the poor sod at an IBM shop had to settle for an RS/6000.

The workstation business was gigantic, but you never saw ads for these things because nobody could possibly afford them; they were all sold at golf courses or in hotel rooms at trade shows. It was also an incredibly exotic business; comparison shopping amongst PC brands was like trying to decide between a toyota corolla and a honda accord. The workstations were as different from one another as a Porsche and a Ferrari. They chose you.

Anyhow here it is, 2011, and someone is still seriously writing a shitty blog post about whether Linux will some day conquer the desktop.

Are you high? Seriously, look up "Chapter 11" on wikipedia, without a doubt there'll be a link to a page with a list of the myriad manufacturers of Unix workstations circa 1990, all of whom are as dead as doornails. SGI, DEC, Sun, Apollo, NeXT, Cray, TMC, they are g-g-g-g-gooooone. buried. And these dudes did not switch to Windows NT. Well some of them maybe.

Back then, you spent huge sums of dollars for incredible hardware that you could run some shitty Unix on. Now, you spend virtually nothing for some generic POS intel motherboard that runs a really kickass Unix that works with everything.

And you're still lucky if the sound works and you can print.

2010-12-11T13:00:00.000-08:00

In the history of this publication there must have been, 100 stories about me being sick. Since I really began to neglect writing in it, I know there have been some doozies, see the entries in March 2008 for example. Now I'm sick with my second Sinus Infection this Fall, because one skull crushing Sinus Infection was not enough to convince me of the importance of boiling the plastic bottle from my sinus rinsing kit. Now the bottle is in the trash and I have 500 packets of salt that I can use in an emergency.

There are so many things I'd like to tell you about. In case an archeologist from Sagittarius stumbles across a copy of this web site in the year 3128, it is no coincidence that blog posts started to peter off around the same time. Some mongoloids invented Facebook and Twitter and two things happened:

1. People got addicted to cruising Facebook looking for pictures of people who got fat after high school, or where part of their tits are visible in some photos. When the run out of photos to look through they try to outwit each other pasting pithy two line messages.

2. People too cool for Facebook spent all their time aggrandizing their accomplishments/travel/eating, etc.

They are both positively awful. The level of narcissism on twitter makes Usenet look like Pre-Cana, so it is relatively easy to ignore. The opportunity to revise ones level of popularity amongst former High School classmates is too hard for anyone to pass up though, so it has obliterated webpages and blogs altogether, but man does it suck. If you wrote so much as a paragraph there people would blacklist you.

So that just about covers 2008-2011, the lost era. Posting this to Facebook would be like dirty whoring; I don't know if I can let the two mix. I'm sure I will.

Now I have a cramp from writing a whole page so I should probably go and ice my hands down and take an Aleve.

how to make a pizza

2010-03-27T10:54:00.000-07:00

I know I've written this down before, but I can't find it.

Get the biggest stone that will fit in your oven, and a wooden pizza peel. It is folly to use something other than wood for this purpose.

Turn on the oven as high as it will go. If its a gas oven, put the stone on the floor of the oven and take the bottom rack out. If its electric, put the bottom rack down as far as it will go and put the stone on that.

_do not_ make the pizza on the stone and then put the stone in the oven. The stone and the crust will fuse together and you'll need a jackhammer.

Make a batch of dough:
http://gooseyard.blogspot.com/2008/06/revised-pizza-dough-formula.html

I drop the whole big ball of dough into my can of flour and roll it around a little.

I usually cut the ball into quarters, then drop the small balls into the flour can.

I mash the ball down in the middle then flatten it out, then go around in a circle stretching the edges out. I also use a rolling pin, pizza snobs can blow me.

Once I have something pizza like in shape, I put it on the peel and stick it in the oven for 2 or 3 minutes. I don't bother with corn meal or flour. This bakes the bottom of the crust so that it wont stick to the peel while you're putting the stuff on top. When you start to see huge bubbles forming in the crust you can take it out.

Put all the stuff on it and bake it until the cheese starts to brown. I usually move mine up off the stone and up to the top oven rack once the cheese has melted. It browns faster that way and you can start the second pizza once the stone is freed up.

binutils 2.20.51.0.5 and kernel compilation on slackware64

2010-02-04T16:50:00.000-08:00

If you've googled for binutils 2.20.51.0.5 linux Slackware64, and you're getting a kernel panic the first time the kernel tries to load a module, its an ld bug. It doesn't appear to matter whether you're using the bfd linker or gold, they both gave me roughly the same results.

I've read some complaints about gold and kernel linking, it appears that it has worked at one point, but in H.J. Lu's current release, its busted. I haven't tried the straight gnu binutils 2.20 yet.

Wired 802.1x with Slackware

2010-01-27T05:31:00.000-08:00

The easiest and most reliable way I've found to use wired 802.1x with Slackware is to hook wpa_supplicant up to dhcpcd's "CARRIER" hook. I prefer wpa_supplicant to xsupplicant for wired 802.1x- I've had better luck with it, and the status of xsupplicant appears to be sketchy.

Drop a copy of this script into /etc/dhcpcd.enter-hook.

If you have already been using the dhcpcd.enter-hook file for other nefarious purposes, it should also be possible to save this script as /lib/dhcpcd/dhcpcd-hooks/10-8021x (be sure to set the executable bit), and dhcpcd should execute it along with any other dhcp init scripts.

WPACONF=/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
WPAWAIT=10

start_wpa_supplicant()
{
if [ -x /usr/sbin/wpa_supplicant ]; then
PID=`echo \`ps axww|grep wpa_supplicant |grep i${interface}\` |cut -f1 -d' '`
if [ ${PID} ]; then
echo "$0:  wpa_supplicant found running already"
else
/usr/sbin/wpa_supplicant -B -c$WPACONF -Dwired -i$interface
fi
wi=0
while [ $wi -lt $WPAWAIT ]; do
wi=$(($wi+1)); sleep 1
if (grep -q "^ctrl_interface=" ${WPACONF}); then
if (LC_ALL=C /usr/sbin/wpa_cli -i$interface status|grep -q "^wpa_state=COMPLETED"); then break; fi
fi
done
if [ $wi -eq $WPAWAIT ]; then
echo "802.1x authentication did not complete."
fi
echo "$0: wpa_supplicant: authentication complete"
sleep 3
fi
}

stop_wpa_supplicant()
{
if [ -x /usr/sbin/wpa_supplicant ]; then
PID=`echo \`ps axww|grep wpa_supplicant |grep i${interface}\` |cut -f1 -d' '`
if [ ${PID} ]; then
for cmd in logoff terminate; do
LC_ALL=C /usr/sbin/wpa_cli -i$interface $cmd
done           
else
echo "$0: no wpa_supplicant found for $interface "
fi
fi
}

case "$reason" in
CARRIER)                                                start_wpa_supplicant $interface;;
STOP)                                                   stop_wpa_supplicant $interface;;
esac

If you don't already have /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf, here's an example, using client certs:

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=0
fast_reauth=1
ap_scan=0

network={
key_mgmt=IEEE8021X
eap=TLS
client_cert="path/to/your/cert.crt"
private_key="path/to/your/cert.key"
ca_cert="path/to/your/ca.cert"
identity="username"
password="password"
eapol_flags=0
}

The state of the summer

2009-06-29T05:37:00.000-07:00

Over on Facebook I started changing my "interests" field as a joke to whatever random thing I was obsessed with for the week. Most recently it reads:

what is killing the black oak trees in my back yard, camassia

What killed the red oaks (they looked black cause they were dead as doornails) was a fungus called Hypoxlyon. This spring just before the leaves started to bud, I could look out back into the county park and pick out a straight line, going about 200 yards back into the woods, of standing dead red oaks, all with the same mottled silver fungus on the bark. Hopefully it doesn't make the leap to white oaks. A buddy of mine felled all the dead and dying ones for me, and I've been slowly building up a stack of firewood from it. It's almost dry enough to burn as it is.

Last year for fathers day, I rode my motorcycle down the Blue Ridge Parkway to Roanoke. One of the plants I saw along the road side caught my eye, they looked like some kind of Lily. Uncle Frank called them "Rock Lilies", and dug up a bunch of them for me at at his cabin near Lexington. If I'm reading the book right, they're called "Camassia". I planted them in the front bed, and they got really droopy and started to brown, so I cut them down to stumps. They sat that way for a month or two, and just started to shoot up. I'll take a photo when I get home.

Time for some new interests, I guess.

SATA PATA MATA

2009-03-26T06:47:00.000-07:00

Last night I added some memory to my PC, a generic, home-made thing with an Intel D865PERL motherboard and a Pentium IV. I can't be bothered to use grounding straps and that type of junk. I have never successfully messed up a computer with static electricity, while having succeeded at virtually every other feasible method.

I also had the machine torn open to swap out another SATA hard disk that was laying around, so that I could try the Windows 7 beta without ruining the old copy of XP that was on it. The machine only has two SATA power connectors, both of which are daisy chained on leads that also have the older type of 5/12v Molex drive connectors. One of those Molex connectors was in use by a CD drive, and the extension with the SATA cable wasn't long enough, so I unplugged it from the CD drive the night before.

The next day I dragged my chubby ass across the carpet to insert the new memory, and POW, a nice fat blast of static shot from my hand (with the memory in it) to the computer case. Big deal, I though. I restarted the computer and it was fine, now I've got 2GB of ram. I turned off the computer again to reconnect the second hard drive, and when I touched it, POW, another fat blast. I'm blowing stuff up left and right now.

I fire it up, I get the self check screen, and then nothing. No beeps, no messages, it just sits there. Poor old SATA drive, I think to myself. I disconnect the one that I'm sure I've exploded, and put the old one back on the primary channel. Same deal. Ugh, I thought, clearly, that big blast of static has travelled over the SATA cable and into the motherboard, destroying the SATA controller chip and with it, my motherboard.

Then I remembered- after years of troubleshooting computers, I still have that nerd tendency to dream up a complicated, fantasy explanation for a simple problem. Here I've just added new memory in the machine, and I'm imagining that a bolt of static electricity is the problem. A naive mistake, but a common one. I shut it off and removed the new memory.

Same problem. Maybe I nudged the old memory while installing the new stuff. Reseating memory is my go-to cure for almost every PC problem, and it works about 50% of the time. No dice. Maybe I nudged the CPU while I was putting in the memory. I take it out, check to see that the diaper rash cream I applied as thermal paste is still greasy, and its fine. Damn. Reseat the video card. Damn.

The worst part of this is that, now that I've blown up the motherboard, I'll want to return the memory I just bought, only I'll feel bad about returning it since I've probably just blown it up too, but I'll feel bad about buying a new motherboard if Ive got 50 bucks worth (yes I know) of DDR memory that won't work with a new computer.

Another thing is bothering me- I know that this computer has exhibited the same problem at least a couple of times in the past, but I can't remember what caused it. Maybe I never found out what caused it, I can't say. But I know I've seen it sitting on the BIOS screen like this, and at least once after 10 minutes or so, it booted right up as if nothing was wrong. What the hell?

After rebooting it 6 or 7 times, I managed to hit the SETUP key at just the right time to get the thing into CMOS setup, which was working just fine. I know now that my memory and my cpu are OK, but I think that I've probably blown up the SATA controller, which causes the machine to hang when it starts probing for hard drives. I've already tried booting it up with no hard drives, with the same results. It's not making sense.

I page through the CMOS SATA options and everything looks fine. I load the CMOS defaults, reboot, same thing. I get back into CMOS setup, but I'm stumped.

Just above the SATA drive options are the PATA options. Something doesn't look right here, I think. How is there a slave CD drive, but no master? Also, don't I have two CD drives in this machine?

Son of a bitch.

I look down at the computer, and see the back of the CD burner, with a big fat PATA cable marked "SLAVE" stuck in the back of it, but with the power connector empty, after I scavenged it to power the other hard drive.

At least a dozen times before, I've had a machine hang at the PATA probing during boot up when one of a handful of things is wrong. The master/slave jumpers are wrong on one device. Cable select is enabled but the cable is plugged in wrong. One of the drives is simply fucked up and wont work at all, etc. etc.

This is yet another reason why new things like SATA are such an improvement over old crap like PATA. Back in the old days, your goofy little IDE/Serial/Parallel/Kitchen Sink controller card had 900 jumpers on it and a leaflet written in cuneiform scratches, and every time you nudged or even looked at the card, the machine would stop booting until you had a seance, cleaned the contacts with alcohol, and scratched a bald spot on your head until you realized you were just mixing up J1 and J11 in your head and you had disabled the IDE controller and put COM2 on IRQ?.

It's the same thing with things like PATA, its a jive-ass, cheap-ass mess of enormous, unreliable ribbon cabling, making a rats nest of your computer and being a general pain in the ass for as long as you own it. When people were building computers with PATA controllers in them, nobody ever sat down and said "Oh, I'll be damned, we forgot to check what would happen if a drive was hooked up in cable select mode as a slave but somebody forgot to plug in the power connector!". Or they thought of it but just didn't give a hoot about it. Drives are supposed to be powered, you jackass.

PATA also lends itself to a lot of experimentation when things go wrong. There are so many options that often when you stumble across the right configuration, you aren't sure how you did it, or you don't even realize you changed something. So you don't walk away any wiser about how to fix the machine. SATA is much nicer because there's a little cable that goes from point A to point B, and it has a little lug that orients it to the connector, so you can't accidentally be stupid.

Some day I'll meat the SATA guys, and hug them.

Maps

2009-01-19T18:29:00.001-08:00

Several years ago, I began to spend a lot of time looking at maps. Before I moved to Boston in 99, I bought a copy of the Delorme gazetteer for West Virginia with topographic maps of the state.

Life in West Virginia, for a kid without maps, is magical. You might climb the mountain in your back yard, go down the other side, and find yourself on the side of the road someplace miles and miles from where you live. Even with a rudimentary knowledge of the roads of Boone County, it is still often impossible for people to believe that two places so far apart by car might be separated by a single ridge.

When my father explained to me that you could take a left off route 85 at Van, drive up through Twilight, and eventually come out on Route 3 not far from Whitesville, I thought he was pulling my leg. In my internal map of the world, those places were hours apart. The route through Twilight to Beckley is one you would take if you lived there, but not if you were from anywhere else.

It was even harder for me to believe, but the old man told it so solemnly that you knew he hadn’t believed it either, that you could turn off 85 up around Bob White, go over Cazey Mountain, and come out in Logan county. For a 10 year old kid from Boone County, the existence of such a route makes the science fiction interstellar wormhole seem like kid’s stuff.

I have still never travelled over Cazey Mountain. The closest I ever got was when my father took us all out in the big K-5 Blazer one weekend to see where a road went. Today this is called “Four-Wheeling”, but back then we had no name for it. We had no names for the roads either, or we might have heard several names for the same road. That one turned out to be Jack’s Branch and my sister and I at one point were crying and hugging because we didn’t expect to ever see home again.

When I got the Gazetteer, I spent hours looking at the plates for Boone, Raleigh, and Logan counties. You cannot hope to ever have a real understanding of the geography of southern West Virginia. I think the most you can hope for is to know where the ends and intersections of the various roads are. There is nothing flat, nothing straight, and nothing level. Euclid would have hated it.

Looking at those maps caused a change in me. I suspect that the same change must have occurred in my father, some time between the time he learned to drive and when we stopped taking our weekend roadfinding expeditions. I believe he was after deer, or Carl Caruthers or Eddie Richardson had the urge to wander and took him along to help unstick the truck. By the time I was old enough to go off hunting on my own, finding land that wasn’t posted was harder, or I just wasn’t as adventurous as the old man, but with those maps I could take the trip anyway. I had a hunger for those maps, it was like I could taste the earth in my mouth and it was the flavor I had been craving all my life.

When Google Maps came along, my case worsened. Now I could zoom in and out. My wife and I had been spending a lot of time around the Quabbin Reservoir in western Massachusetts, never with a map and always confused later when we tried to figure out where we had been, or how we could get to some prime looking fishing spot without a boat.

I came into some money around this time, and that taste of earth became too much to bear; I wanted to buy a piece of that land, but I had no idea what I’d do with it. I think the kind of craving that had me wouldn’t have been eased by ownership, anyway. Once you are standing in a spot, it becomes like any other spot. Having seen it, the only way to enjoy it is to move from it, and digest it slowly as you move to the next and then eventually home.

I zoomed and clicked anyway. I’d pick a point somewhere mysterious to me, usually something down along the Greenbrier River. I’d look at it up close and then back out. Holy shit, you could walk to Virginia from there, in some places. Sometimes there’s so much land and no towns. I wished I could zoom all the way down and look and the gravel on the side of the road. I wanted to see the Blackberries at Army Camp on New River.

Getting a motorcycle was like the valve on the water heater that goes off and floods your basement, rather than blowing up your house. Years up pent-up wanderlust flooded out, wrecking my home life, and continuing in an unabated torrent for about a year and half. If I had an hour to spare, I was off on the bike. If I didn’t, I was looking at a map, trying to figure out where I would go next. I could not let winter interfere with the serious business of scouting, so I bought an electrically heated getup, and rode around in January and February. Today I could barely be bothered to take the bike if I wasn’t feeling like zipping the liner into my jacket. It is amazing that my wife didn’t leave me simply for purchasing a motorcycle, much less for stranding her at home with a new baby while I was out finding all the roads in Massachusetts.

I am lucky to have a wife so understanding in these matters. I am luckier to have a wife whose primary objection to my motorcycling was simply that I alone was out seeing all the interesting country on a death machine that she would not throw a leg over for money. She would usually suggest that we retrace part of the route by car, so that she could see the landmarks I recounted.

I am permanently caught in some kind of gravity, the center of which is the bridge over New River at Prince, WV. Its pull was too strong; I could not stay in Massachusetts. In Virginia, I can orbit it like a comet that comes twice a year. Last year I made the trip by motorcycle, over the Appalachians the old way, through Grant and Pendleton and Pocahontas and Greenbrier. I had no route planned. I had not thought of whether I would use the bridge or cross the river someplace else, but I crossed it and upon crossing it I felt that I had crossed the center of something, a spot where a compass pointed nowhere, or a line where toilets fail to swirl.

At the bridge, movement became the device for reaching the point of stillness, rather than leaving it. The vehicle was a tool for finding the place I would stay, not a means of leaving the place I had been. I did not know it then, and it is only after time that I see that the change occurred there, and then. At the time I felt only that I had been overcome by something that I did not recognize.

Last week McCallister told me he was buying a house in Pocahontas, a good base for ski operations and a fine rental property for someone looking to do some fishing. The photo he sent me was a Google Maps link. Since they added some of the larger rural state highways, I’ve been spending many evenings trying to find the spots along roads that I remember from travels on the motorcycle. Finding them often causes me a shortness of breath that I guess to be awe. I zoomed out and as the names of places appeared my heart tightened. Cass and Green Bank were there- when you see those names together on the sign for the exit to US219 on Interstate 64, you would have no idea what they mean until you have been through them. Cherry Grove looks nice, but I’ve never been there, except for the pictures.

I now have a home that I love, and a family that I love in a way that makes houses and land seem laughable. I think now that, instead of starting at a center and working my way outward, I will spend the rest of my life in the infinite web of roads about the center, and to think about what I will put down as I get close. I don’t think you need to find it, to the inch, and put a stake in the ground there. You only need to be near enough to orbit, as time provides.

This weekend, I bought a maul and a hatchet. I took the little electric chainsaw my father gave me, and dragged a few black oak trunks that the county had felled after something got them and left them standing dead, too near houses. I never split wood as a kid, but I’d put the pieces on the block for the old man to do the swinging. I guess I’d learned it by watching, and now we have a stack of wood that’ll probably be dry enough around July, I’d wager. It’ll be wonderful for the fire next winter.

Technology I am excited about

2008-12-11T04:34:00.000-08:00

Google added Wikipedia Geotagged articles as points on interest on Google Maps. This will be the coolest thing ever on car trips, although I'd very much like it to work on a system with a static copy of Wikipedia, since most of the places I like to drive to are rural and I don't want to have some nutty wireless internet connection.

Google also added Street View data of some of the rural highways in West Virginia. Clicking down some of the roads I've travelled in Pocahontas and Greenbrier counties caused me to lose my breath a few times.

What I want next is geotag reminders. When I'm driving and I pass a Supermarket, I want the GPS to beep and remind me that I need to stop and get a dishwashing brush to clean out the coffee pot at work.

The End of Race as We Know It

2008-10-30T13:46:00.000-07:00

http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i07/07b01101.htm

Darfur: the dangers of celebrity imperialism

2008-10-27T07:30:00.000-07:00

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/5852

2008-10-07T15:47:00.001-07:00

Every day when my wife gets home, she runs down a checklists of questions that unanswered would result in the implosion of our home and the breakdown of western society. Any attempt to blow off these questions or provide stock answers is emphatically discouraged. This is all despite the fact that the daycare sends home a manifest of every poop or nosewiping that occurred through the 6 hours or so that the girls are there.

To streamline this handoff process, I have created a form of my own, with a variety of blanks, boxes, and multiple choice fields that I can use for briefing my wife each evening.

2008-09-27T20:02:00.001-07:00

this afternoon, Eleanor refused to pick up a bunch of cheerios she spilled in the living room floor. I gave her a couple of chances to comply, then things got ugly and I took her to room to reflect on her insolence.

unfortunately, I did not think to take away the black magic marker she was holding.

Later, I taught her how to paint with interior eggshell latex.

Biscuit Joinery

2008-09-26T16:12:00.001-07:00

A little while back I blew all my birthday loot on a biscuit jointer. there have been many times where I wished I'd had one, to keep stuff in place while I was gluing it. Now I see why people like these things so much. I used to wonder why, when there were so many other ways to joint two pieces of wood together, were these little footballs used so often. Why wouldn't you just screw stuff together? Or drill a hole and put in a dowel?

Here is a table I made for the shop, so that I would stop trying to build things on top of my table saw all the time. Its a new saw but the top has already got gouges in from screws coming out the backside of something into the table, and its covered with glue.

The legs are made out of 1/2" plywood that I have a huge stack of after tearing out some shelving in the room I use as a shop. The design I stole (from the new yankee worksop) called for 3/4 plywood, but I didn't want to spend any money building this thing. The legs, as you may be able to see, are like angle iron. Its just two lengths of plywood joined along one edge at 90 degrees. The plywood is not great, its full of voids and warped from years of sagging. If I tried to glue and screw the edges, the screws would blow out the cut edge of the plywood. If I glued and nailed it, it would be harder than hell to keep the pieces clamped together while shooting the nails. The biscuits are absolutely perfect. You clamp the piece down flat, cut the slots, then when you assemble it, all the warp disappears. You can clamp the bujesus out of it and nothing moves, and you don't need to screw it or nail it. Its a lot of slot cutting and glue smearing but its so easy its worth it.

The only fault I can point out is that the biscuit machine generates the most impressive stream of high speed wood chips of any machine I have owned, and no matter how I hold it, I wind up getting covered. I know I can hook it up to a dust machine, which I have avoided purchasing out of shame and guilt for having bought so many tools over the past few years, but the number of hours I spend sweeping probably makes it worthwhile.

Credit default swaps

2008-09-18T05:32:00.001-07:00

Found this very enlightening.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94686428

Why I can't vote for John McCain

2008-09-17T05:59:00.000-07:00

Years ago, what was perhaps my favorite technology company of all time, Digital Equipment Corp, was purchased by Compaq.

I never understood it. Digital's PC business was so-so, but they had killer server and storage hardware. I hated Compaq's servers, so I felt like the only hope was that Richie Lary would be made Chief Technical Bigshot and turn Compaq into a legitimate research company.

The Compaq debacle went on for a little while. As far as I could tell all Compaq ever did with DEC was to put new graphic art on all the packaging, and to make the new DEC branded product offerings boring.

Then came Carly Fiorina and HP. She drug HP kicking and screaming into a merger with Compaq. The talent fled. Fiorina sold off all the interesting parts of the company, ran the rest into the ground, and then got fired.

Therefore, I hold Carly Fiorina personally responsible for the demise of my favorite technology company and microprocessor architecture. Although it was doomed to fail eventually anyway, there were many fates for DEC more dignified than being butchered up by an overblown inkjet printer cartridge business, being run by some horse-faced donkey without a trace of respect for the community of engineers and programmers who had built a livelihood around DEC's technology. Fortunately, HP had the good sense to send Fiorina packing, which is great because I like their printers and I didn't want to have to boycott them forever (the only other company I have officially boycotted is U-Haul).

This morning on news radio I hear Fiorina referred to as "McCain's Economic Advisor". In all seriousness; in a time when our economy is struggling, where are work force is antsy, is this the kind of history you want to read about a candidates Economic Advisor? And she's claiming that McCain wouldn't do well as a CEO? This is not the kind of person I want offering economic advice to the President of the United States. First thing you know, she'll be offering to sell Alaska to the Russians.

Because I have officially boycotted Carly Fiorina and John McCain has evidentally slated her for some kind of position of national influence, I cannot possibly vote for John McCain. Until this morning, I was undecided, but it looks like I'll be voting democrat in 08.

The Many Weeds of Andy's Lawn

2008-09-08T04:38:00.000-07:00

I am confident that several of these identifications are incorrect. The sum total of my education in weed identification is about 4 hours spent clicking around on the VT weed identification guide. Plus I'm the guy who tried to explain to my father about the trees I was trying to identify as either Blackgum or Ash, until he pointed out that they were both covered with hickory nuts.

Words fail me in attempting to express the feeling of triumph I enjoyed after at least 1000 clicks when I finally discovered the name and species of Euphorbia maculata, which would take over my goddamn yard in about a month if I didn't crawl around pulling it up. It gets the last laugh anyway because it has some sticky resin that turns your fingers black after you pull up enough of it.

Anyway here they are, in roughly descending order of aggravation. I know that pin oak is not a weed, but the seedlings are a nuisance on account of the fucking squirrels who have buried at least a dozen acorns per square foot of my yard. Yesterday I startled one, red-handed (or brown , as it were), and we had a stare down. I bet he doesn't know about my slingshot.

Spotted Spurge: Euphorbia maculata
Carpetweed: Mollugo verticillata
Hairy Bittercress: Cardamine hirsuta
Creeping Woodsorrel: Oxalis corniculata
Willow (Pin) Oak: Fagaceae Quercus phellos L.
Dandelion: Taraxacum officinale
Smooth Crabgrass: Digitaria ischaemum
Large Crabgrass: Digitaria sanguinalis
Broadleaf Signalgrass: Brachiaria platyphylla
Indian Mock-Strawberry: Duchesnea indica
Prickly Lettuce: Lactuca serriola
Spiny Sowthistle: Sonchus asper
Mayapple or Mandrake: Podophyllum peltatum
White Clover: Trifolium repens
Common Purslane: Portulaca oleracea (by the mailbox)
Wild Grapes: Vitis spp.

A Truman for our times

2008-08-14T16:53:00.000-07:00

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10309

experimental al pastor recipe

2008-08-14T13:57:00.001-07:00

dont try this, i just need to write it down

1 onion

6 anchos

2 anaheims

1 1/2 tbsp chili powder

5 cloves garlic

1/4 c cilantro

1/2q pineapple juice

1 lime

1.5c white vinegar

1/2 stout beer

1 1/2 lb pork

chop it all up, cook the marinade for about 45 minutes, cool it then marinade the pork overnight.

it smells like heaven but I dont know what its going to taste like yet

Edwards

2008-08-09T08:21:00.001-07:00

Man, what has a guy got to do these days to get a break when he fools around on his ailing wife, fathering bastard children and sneaking off for rendezvous? If being a tireless soldier for the poor doesn't earn a guy this kind of pass, what in the world possibly could? Shouldn't there be some break for these guys who care so much, when they need to shit on their own families?

Feeling good about yourself.

2008-08-09T07:04:00.000-07:00

A good reason to be skeptical of somebody's causes is when they try to motivate you with guilt. When someone starts laying a line on you about thinking about the plight of the workers, or the poor, or the environment, or the puppies, or whatever guilt-inducing cause they're on about today, its only ever for one of two reasons: these people are looking to feel better about themselves, or they're looking to profit from it.

No good deed ever need be done out of guilt. I suppose there are some people in the world who've done a lot of bad things and they feel guilty about it, but most people who'd be reading this and feel guilty about the way they live are misguided and probably are guilty only of wasting too much time on the internet.

Many years ago, PBS ran a special on recycling. It was a good one because it didn't have a narrator with the grave tone, with a bunch of shots of seagulls tangled up in pantyhose, or deformed turtles. They were simply pointing out that it is generally more efficient to collect raw materials as quickly as possible after their use, or to avoid using them altogether.

Programs like these had a couple of effects. Guilt-prone do-gooders had something new to feel bad about, and to make other people feel bad about. The other effect was that clever people in industry started thinking about how they could increase their profits by either reducing waste, and people in the garbage business started thinking about new profits in the collection of specific types of waste.

The really amazing part of this is how the do-gooders played right into the hands of those evil, money grubbing and polluting corporations.

Sorting garbage is a complicated job. You need a huge machine that can differentiate plastic from paper. It has to be done cheaply, since the value of each piece of the crap you're looking for is very low.

It turned out that the cheapest way to achieve the required sorting was to take advantage of do-gooders, by making them feel good about themselves for doing the job for free. Millions of Americans dutifully separated plastic from paper, then actually payed to have a waste company haul it off, so they could sell it at a profit. Amazing, and it only works if individuals or town governments are overcome by guilt and try to save the Earth.

The non-guilty are a harder nut to crack, when it comes to their garbage. Since its impossible to compel them with shame, and nearly impossible to compel them with law, you need something else. It's definitely worth doing, because there are far more non-guilt households, meaning the potential volume of garbage, and thus profit, is also higher.

The first cut at monetizing the garbage of the non-do-gooders was to mix a little rudimentary technology with low-paid labor. You simply hire a team of people with gloves and masks to pick stuff off a conveyor belt and sort it into bins. This is how most of the single-bin recycling programs work, its not too hard to find people who are willing to spot milk jugs all day.

Manual labor seems to work well enough, but what would really spell profit would be a much higher volume process in which the whole stream of garbage, not just what winds up in the blue bins, could be sorted efficiently. 30 years of profits from guilt-based recycling programs added up, and now towns everywhere are moving to single stream systems. It was all built on the backs of the do-gooders.

I expect that do-gooders, when confronted about this, will probably say that they don't mind, that it was worth it to foot the bill as long as it kept the trash out of landfills. The problem is that now that we have a machine for sorting single stream refuse, landfills become the modern equivalent of a gold mine. The next 20 or 30 years will see a rush of trash prospecting, with portable single stream sorters hauled to sealed up landfills built with public funds. We'll continue to pay higher prices for goods packaged in cheaper packaging, and the do-gooders will continue to pay for the privilege of feeling better about themselves.

Julia

2008-07-09T16:20:00.000-07:00

http://picasaweb.google.com/GooseYArd/WelcomeJulia/

7lb 7oz (funny how everybody asks that, like we had caught a fish or something)

She's a beauty.

revised pizza dough formula

2008-06-24T16:58:00.000-07:00

I have revised my pizza dough formula since I got a little postage scale. It is much easier to make with a scale than getting a bunch of spoons and measuring cups dirty. I have had this written down on an index card for a while and it occurred to me today that if I lost it, I would be frustrated. So here it is for posterity.

365g warm water.

15g salt

10g sugar

12g olive oil

45g whole wheat flour

550g bread flour (make damn sure it says "bread" or "better for bread")

1 Teaspoon of active dry yeast if you are going to let it rise in the refrigerator, 2 if you want to eat it now.

I used to use our bowl mixer but its a pain in the ass and doesn't work as well as a bread machine with a dough cycle. the bread machine keeps everything warm, waits between mixes, and produces a much smoother dough than the mixer. on a kitchenaid mixer the dough sticks to the hook and is utterly useless for making pizza dough.

the bread machine cycle runs about 55 minutes, it kneads for maybe 10 minutes, then raises a half hour, then kneads a minute, then raises another 15 or 20 minutes. As long as you let it raise a half hour or so its fine. It tastes better if you let it get nasty in the refrigerator for 3 or 4 days but its fine to eat it right away.

this makes enough for two one-man pizzas and we save the other half for later, or make rolls out of it. They taste just like Bertucci's rolls, if you've had them.

as for sauce, I don't have any advice. we just put canned crushed tomatoes on ours, you don't have to cook them up or anything. I've tried all the brands, I like Hunts best, they're more acidic I think, but they cost about twice what everything else runs so use whatever you find. I will tell you that there is nothing special about the exotic looking italian canned tomatoes, even the ones in the imported food isle. food snobs will be disappointed by this information, but I have made probably 200 pizzas in the last 5 years and have used every kind of canned tomato I can find, and they all taste pretty much the same. I get whats on sale at Costco.

also some of the canned tomatoes are watery and if you make your dough more sticky than mine, the water will run all over the place and make the dough sticky, and you'll have an incident.

also we are experimenting in the cheese department. Angelico Pizzeria in Fairfax County has, hands down, the best tasting pizza cheese that I have ever eaten, and I mean to tell you I have eaten some frickin pizza during my life. We can't figure out what kind of cheese this is but its got more than Mozzarella in it. It doesn't really taste like provolone, but when we started adding provolone to ours, we instantly liked the cheese a lot more. I don't want something so complicated that its a pain in the ass to make but it definitely tastes better with some other stuff. Fontina is also really good for pizza, I think that's what Gino's in West Virginia uses.

2008-06-17T03:59:00.000-07:00

Saturday I rode down to Roanoke. I didn't really want to take Skyline Drive down, since it was a weekend and I had a late start.

Between Warrenton and Sperryville, it started to rain. Rain when its in the 90s is an irritation because its too hot to ride with your rain suit on (or zipped-in, in the case of my summer pants), so I hold out until the last second. Fortunately on that day, riding down 211, the temperature dropped about 20 degrees in 30 seconds, as if the cold front had been standing there like a brick wall. It felt nice but I knew I was in for it. I got off and worked on some zippers.

In Sperryville there's a big curve with a little restaurant and dairy bar on the left. Rounding the curve, the wind moved me about a foot sideways at just about the same time I saw that another gentleman had parked his Volusia and taken refuge under a folding picnic umbrella. By the time I got my blinker on, he had already started scooting over to make a space.

We holed up there for a half hour, having a hard time hearing each other on account of the rain and thunder, but too anxious to get back on the road to go inside the restaurant. My colleague, who had been on the parkway and had to hustle down off the mountain warned me that Skyline would be lousy riding; they've torn up the asphalt and theres three inches of gravel for miles.

When it let up, the road had been repaved with green leaves. My visor was wet on the inside, and nothing dries on its own in such humidity, so it was hard to see. I got over the mountain on 211, and hooked up with 340 in Waynesboro. I figured I'd take it to route 11 and then all the way to Lexington and through Natural Bridge. Somehow in the rain I wound up on a little side road, that got narrower and narrower. The water was getting deeper and it rained harder. I didn't want to turn around. After about 10 miles, a little wooden sign said "Blue Ridge Parkway", and I figured, I guess I was meant to take the parkway today.

I think that was one of the best mistakes I've made. There wasn't a soul on the parkway. I didn't see another human being for the first 50 miles, and speed limit outside the national park is 45 rather than 35, which is about as fast as I care to go on that road anyway, at least with it raining so.

There's no sense in trying to describe the Blue Ridge Parkway. It's beautiful enough, but having grown up in WV and VA, you can get numb to that. I think what is amazing about the parkway is that you are only ever a few miles away from I81 in distance but in time it feels like 200 years.

It was a good trip down. I forgot to zip one of the pockets of my rain jacket, so my belly got a little wet. I also forgot to fasten the cuff of my rain liner when I snapped it into my pants, so one boot got some water inside. I think I prefer this system of having a goretex rainsuit on over my riding jacket and pants. With a liner, your riding suit gets soaked on the outside, so you still have to dry it, even if you stay dry, yourself. It's also a lot easier to take off a rainsuit than it is to deal with the liners, and jackets and pants with very good waterproofing are a lot more expensive than buying a decent jacket but a very good set of goretex. Plus you can use the goretex for all kinds of purposes, not just riding.

In Roanoke we celebrated father's day and my 33rd birthday at Uncle Frank and Aunt Wilda's. We had a good time just sitting around talking about who would replace Tim Russert, and Uncle Frank told me a lot of stories about the old days working on jets at the airport. Sunday we drove up to the big Roanoke star, and the view from there made me anxious to get back on the parkway.

Coming home the weather cooperated, but I was in more of a hurry than I liked since I needed to get into DC by 1 to get the girls. Even leaving at 5AM it was tight. The clock on the bike is wrong and I never rememeber to fix it, so I was constantly having to estimate the time, and I wasted a lot of it on breaks to let my aching shoulders recover. I am going to have to try a set of bar risers for the bike, as the pain my shoulders is unbearable at times.

Around the route 43 exit off the parkway, in a steep uphill right hander, I had already gotten into a lean when I noticed a big black bear looking at me from the left shoulder. I had plenty of space and I knew he saw me, so it wasn't a close call. What they say about bears being fast is definitely true because as I got abreast of him, he made a break up the hill, still in the left lane. He was keeping up with me going maybe 20mph, until I saw I was definitely going to clear him and opened it up. Later I was trying to decide what would have been the best sight picture to get through the windscreen if I had needed to torpedo him, to be sure he wouldn't maul me if we wound up both floundering in the middle of the parkway.

I took the stretch through the National Park on the way back- I guess that's technically "Skyline Drive" and the rest is the Blueridge Parkway. It's a beautiful stretch. The 35mph limit seems like paralysis compared to 45 on the other section. My bike is not as enjoyable at that speed. In retrospect I wish I had just gotten off at Wayneboro again and burned it up 81. As it was, I got home at 12:45, got off the bike and into the car, and headed into DC.

340 and 211 are nice motorcycling roads. Alone they wouldn't be a lot of fun to ride, its mostly straight road, but it feels like paradise after riding the parkway for a long time. It's a good contrast.

The Dumbest Story of All Time, or: Traffic Court in 57 Steps

2008-06-02T04:11:00.000-07:00

Short synopsis of my trip to Fauquier County Traffic Court last week.

Looking shaggy, decide to get pre-trial haircut, leave sick wife at home, take bike.
Return from haircut, park bike in driveway.
Check on wife, rush out of house with critical court papers.
See that bike headlights are on. Fetch jumper cables.
Think to self "rushing away from house on motorcycle with questionable battery for court appearance in 1hr" among dumbest ideas of life.
Bitterness over 25$ worth of gas required to take truck to Warrenton prevails. Tear off on bike.
Hit I66W, begin wondering if critical court papers truly in tail-case.
Begin wondering if pulled over to check for critical court papers, good chance will forget to drop kickstand in neutral, kill motor on roadside miles from home. Arrest Warrant. Decide not to stop.
Begin wondering, if pulled over to check for critical court papers, if bike keys removed to open tail-case, will bike start again. Arrest Warrant. Decide not to stop.
Picture self committing ritual seppuku before judge after arriving at court with no critical papers.
Aha. Will use house keys to open tail case, leave bike running.
Pat down pockets for housekeys while riding.
No house keys.
Arrest Warrant.
Remember where house keys are.
In truck.
In driveway, still running.
Did I even close the hood?
Pull over, leave bike running, try to remove tail-case key from ring with bike still running.
Visualize key bouncing out of hand onto I66W, being ground into powder by manure truck.
Open tailcase, papers of course there.
Phone wife. Why bother? No answer.
Begin to put tailcase key in pocket. Visualize trying to find crowbar 5m before court in Warrenton to pry open tailcase after key falls out of pocket.
Put key back on keyring, with bike still running.
Papers safe and sound, decide to press on.
Make it to court with 15m to spare, happen to be standing next to door that court clerk opens, first in line into court.
Happen to sit on end of court room where County Lawyer lines up the offendors, am first in line for that too.
Total court appearance time, approx 3m.
Good ole red bike starts right up. Triumph! (well, Suzuki, but you get the point)

2008-05-26T10:59:00.000-07:00

Excellent article on using gcc with shared libs

2008-05-25T08:54:00.001-07:00

By the way, my old friend Tyler sent me an email a couple of weeks ago after he found this blog, and I replied, but I worry it might have gotten spam filtered, so email me again if you didn't get it and let me know, and I'll send it again.

2008-05-25T08:11:00.000-07:00

the back yard of the new house is nice. There's a row of azaleas about 30 feet long, a pair of white dogwoods, a pair of enormous burning bush, and a young japanese maple. These all sit in a bed of mulch.

The seller had complained about the shade in the yard, and it was obvious when ferns and Mayapple started budding up around the deck, even when it was sunny and bright every day in the yard, I figured that when the trees leafed up it must get pretty shady. Sure enough, now its May, and the yard is like a swamp in a couple of spots. The Azaleas bloomed beautifully, and earlier than I expected, just beating the shade.

Once those blooms started falling, the mulch bed was a mess of petals, and instead of admiring the yard I started noticing that some parts looked a mess. As much time as I've spent in my life cutting brush and mowing, I never payed much attention to what anything looked like. I notice when someones garden looks nice, and when one looks bad, but I don't think that I could articulate what makes one or the other. As such, I'm nervous whenever I start working on the garden, because despite knowing enough about the tools to do what I'm told, I don't know what steps to take.

I usually start with books, but its interesting that although there are thousands of books about every species of plant, I have not found very many that offer subjective advice about how you should try to make things look. Most of them cover the when, and the how, but the what and why is entirely up to you.

Having a long term home has eased my worries about getting started on outdoor work. The reason is that there's very little that need stop you from just trying whatever you think might be right. If you do too little, you can do a little more next year until you get it right. If you do too much and kill a plant or a tree, you'll learn your lesson. It was your plant anyway.

My new philosophy is that I am going to do whatever I want, with the goal of having a conventionally attractive garden. Because I don't know a lot of plants, and because I have a huge variety of native plants growing already, I'm going to do what I can to make those look as nice as possible, and worry about introducing new things later, when I have more of an opinion about what looks nice.

With this in mind, it was obvious that the first job after mulching was to prune. The Azaleas were tilted at about a 30 degree angle, with the back row growing 6 or 8 feet long over the backs of the front rows to get some sun. The whole patch looked pretty wild and uneven, so I went in with a pair of cutters.

While pruning the Azaleas, I noticed how some of the wildest looking pieces are usually part of a desperate plant way in the back that has grown underneath the front row. This happens on our hollies as well- a branch on the back of the plant will vine all the way around to the front of the holly, and practically strangle out the other half of the tree. It's as though each branch is a plant of its own.

Once I noticed that pattern, I started seeing it everywhere. Young Beech trees have popped up everywhere back in the woods behind the azaleas, and they've sent out branches into the spots between the tops of our ornamental trees and the older white and black oaks. That causes the ornamentals to lean out over the yard. They look strained and uneven.

Now I understand what pruning is about. Everybody wants to get ahead, and you've got to go in and make cuts so that everybody does what they do best. In several cases this meant cutting down entire Beech trees, but there's no way around it. For the Beeches this yard must be just about perfect, and although they're beautiful trees, I prefer variety. So I've picked out the nicest ones and they can stay.

As I spent more time among the trees pruning, I was excited to find what I thought was a huge Pawpaw, but oddly enough Virginia has one other tree with a leaf almost identical to a Pawpaw, this one called Blackgum. I didn't realize it until I got a look at the base of the supposed Pawpaw and it had bark more like an Ash, and the Virginia Tech tree id website confirmed it. That's a new tree for me and I'm curious to watch it through the year.

I bought a cheap pole saw to do my pruning with. I don't regret getting the manual saw because I've been so sedentary for so long that it's a pleasure to wear myself out doing yardwork. The floppy pole and blade make the job harder than it needs to be though, so I think next year I might get a better one, or an electric. Some of what I'd like to prune next year is very high, maybe 20 or 30 feet, so I'm not sure what I'll do about that.

The other problem is the mound of brush I've accumulated in all this pruning. I could leave it where it is, but one of the first things I notice when I see a yard that looks bad is brush. It's easy not to see it when you don't want to but it sticks out to me. It might be easier to rent a chipper this fall than to haul it off.

Evidentally with the new baby's arrival only a month or so away, my nesting genes are firing. We're repaining the living room today, and I spent last week down in the shop making a step stool for Eleanor, who considers handwashing to be among life's greatest pleasures. I tore out a bunch of utility shelves that were built into the shop space, and I had enough 1/2" plywood to build the stool and probably 15 more of them. A toybox is next in the queue.

Here's how it turned out:

Because I want to try my hand at some cabinetry to make a few builtins, I ordered a larger table saw. The old Ryobi is a fine machine and has served me well, but to cut big panels on it I'd have to build extension tables, which means cutting big panels. Instead I ordered the new Jet JPS-10.
I'll probably pass along the Roybi to a friend with less space. It still seems like an extravagance but its so obvious after working in the new huge shop how much enjoyable it is to do woodwork when you have enough space and when your tools are sized for the pieces you are working on.

Anyhow back to the painting. It's nice to be busy, for a change.

What has been shaking, of late

2008-05-21T17:37:00.001-07:00

Last week, I was making pizzas. A while back I got a little postage scale for the kitchen, so I changed my dough recipe over from cups into grams. You don't have to pay nearly as much attention when you are measuring things out, and you can always weigh the whole batch before you put the water in to make sure you didn't screw up and leave something out.

Anyway, I have been making it kind of sticky lately, because it comes out thinner and crisper that way. The drawback is that the shit sticks to everything, your hands, the counter, and most disastrous, the wooden peel. Sometimes some tomato juice will leak through a little hole in the dough and get the bottom of the pizza sticky, then when you go to slide it off into the oven, all your toppings slide right off and you have a pizza shaped fire smoldering on the floor of the oven.

Few things cause worse fits of rage in Andy Bailey than a kitchen mishap. I cry over spilled milk. No, I don't cry, I throw shit and swear and stamp around and get completely bent out of shape, particularly when its something that has happened before, and worst of all when something I spent a long time working on gets ruined. A pizza accident is probably the pinnacle of all kitchen disasters because the oven is at the hottest possible temperature and cheese smoke is like what you get when you burn tires, only worse. I think tires are secretly made out of bad cheese.

Anyway last week it happened again. I was starving, it was late, and all my shit slid off onto the shiny clean interior of the oven in the new house. My rage was apoplectic, apocalyptic. Ralphy's dad would have required therapy, had he been there for it. I threw things, I swore. Then I tried in vain to rescue a big slice of mozarella and it came up with charcoal from the last accident melted onto the bottom. I invoked demons, I cast a pox upon the manufacturers of watery canned tomatoes, upon pizza in general, hell upon electricity and wood. The lights flickered. The baby watched me from the table with a grin and squished her Play-Do.

I don't have any memory of a few minutes there, but I remember leaning over the kitchen island clutching a pair of giant barbecue tongs caked with smoking dough and pieces of green olive, little streams of drool hanging from the corner of my mouth and twitching faintly. Tricia was in the corner clutching her pearls. We looked at each other, like a cornered deer might look at a rabid badger. She was afraid.

About that time, the blue can of Play-Do went flying off the kitchen table, and Eleanor, one hand cupped for a well placed slapshot and the other raised triumphantly in a fist above her head shouted "AWWWW SHIT!!!"

POWER

2008-05-05T04:21:00.000-07:00

Lately it pleases me a lot to stay busy on the weekend, instead of sleeping until 10 and reading the Intarweb all day. Not being lazy is the only cure I know for feeling bad about being lazy.

Uncle C. came over Saturday and we put a subpanel in my shop. The first time I used a saw last week, the fluorescent lights flickered out, which is not cool when theres a ten inch blade going 4500 RPMS next to your head. I came up with a wild plan to put 60 amp 220 service in, until I witnessed the price of a roll of 125' #8 wire, which is close to 300 bucks. Unc had a piece of #10 BX exactly the right length, so I've got 30 amps instead, which should be plenty for me anyway.

Fish-taping wire is, I think, the worst possible job on earth. It's bad enough with skinny computer cable, but 60 feet of steel jacketed 1/2" cable is an all day job. I think that's what separates electricians from amateurs. The Unc is a pro and knows all the tricks of the black art.

6 or 8 hours later we had a little GE 125A box mounted, and now I have 4 new circuits with 4 outlets a piece, 16 shiny new overhead outlets, and my shop lights are on the old dedicated switched circuit from before.

Sunday morning I got up early and went to work on an overly healthy beech tree in the backyard that was shading out one of our ornamental maples. I have to do these things early to avoid having to discuss it with my wife, who does not believe I can safely operate a chainsaw.

Tree branches are like roadsigns, in that they look about 10x larger when they're laying on the ground in front of you. I must have spent about an hour hacking and dragging, and now instead of having a giant stray limb as an eyesore, I've got an enormous mound of beech foliage in the woods behind my trees.

Due to my short attention span, it is often difficult to tell from minute to minute which project I am actually working on. When Tricia and Eleanor came out to see what I was doing, Eleanor made me nervous by standing at the top of the long flight of steps that leads down from the high end of our deck. Before I even got the chainsaw put away I was off to Lowes to fetch some lumber for a gate. By the end of the day I'll have three different job's worth of tools in different spots around the house, so cleanup becomes a chore of its own. Some day, I will learn.

The gate came out nicely. My wife also poo pooed this job. I am not a master craftsman but I hold my own despite Tricias lingering doubts on account of one living room renovation that dragged on a few weeks longer than it should. Shocking one's wife with construction projects is, I think, one of the sublime joys of being a man.

My mom is staying with us this week. Her flight was supposed to arrive at 3:30, but because the airlines have given up even trying, I finally loaded her and her luggage into the truck last night at about 10:00. I boycotted airplanes for pleasure travel after the valentines day 07 Jet Blue debacle, and I am not flying anymore until some substantial changes are made.

When air travel was only in reach of the privileged, the airlines had an incentive to try hard to impress their passengers. Now the old guard of airlines are being replaced with "TED" and JetBlue and all the other Greyhounds-of-the-sky. In fact its unfair to Greyhound to mention them in the same sentence as our nation's airlines, because despite their low speeds you're much more likely to get where you're going on a bus. It's a pity that our train service was neglected for so long, and so many routes were pulled up and paved over. Id rather spend 12 hours moving on a train than 10 waiting in an airport and 2 in the air.

2008-05-01T13:46:00.000-07:00

I don't even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.

-- Umberto Eco

That's precisely how I feel about Twitter. Because I am not as old as Umberto Eco, I still want for people to send me messages. However, I have become old enough that my main purpose is to have people not know where I am, where I am planning to go, or what I am doing.

Items of note

2008-04-24T17:42:00.000-07:00

1. Returned one leased Toyota and came home with another one, a minivan this time. Compared to the Matrix, this thing feels like riding on a cloud, and we can carry grownups with us now, in addition to carseats.

2. Drove the cloudmobile to Connecticut for my nephews christening. On the way home, Eleanor started howling "BUUUUUUUUUUGS!!!! BUUGGGGGGGGGGGGSSS!!!!!!! AAAAAH". It turns out Nona used chocolate sprinkles on some of the cookies she sent us home with.

3. I bought a few bags of mulch to cover the front flower beds. 75 bags and a wheelbarrow later, I finished the whole house. Next year I'm going to hire a mulch professional.

4. Eleanor took a leak in her mini-potty. She will only cooperate though if you allow her to take out the little plastic bowl insert. "HAT!!" she smiles, puts it on her head, and leaves it there while she's on the pot.

5. T is on the cusp of being enormously pregnant.

6. I bought a lawnmower, a self propelled Toro Recycler. I can't believe I ever thought self-propelled walk-behind lawnmowers were a gimmick.

T thinks it sad that we can only come up with about 6 items of note. She says we're boring. I've been thinking about being boring, and have concluded that I like it. In my life, I never dreamed that I would be excited about mowing grass. How many times did I wish for a grass pox to fall upon South Madison, WV. If I had been smarter, I would have seeded the old mans yard with mutant crabgrass that would turn brown and fall over dead about the second week of June. I am sure that I considered sabotaging the lawnmower, except that the old man bought a Gravely Tractor, and they are indestructible.

I love the family life. I love coming home and working my ass off in the yard and then coming inside and helping with dinner and then cleaning all the mess up. I love changing diapers and getting woken up in the middle of the night by a crying baby. Occasionally its awful but then you find yourself late at night in the rocking chair with your beautiful little baby daughters head asleep on your shoulder.

information addict

2008-04-18T05:25:00.000-07:00

something screwy has been going on lately.

I sit down at the computer, open up a few websites. after four or five, I go back to the first one again. ten minutes, and still nothing new.

when I started at Marshall, I had a shell account on a VMS box to read my mail. right after the login banner, VMS would beep the terminal and give you a "13 new mail messages". I used to get a tingling sensation in my fingers during that window of maybe 500 milliseconds between hitting enter after my password and when the new email count would appear. Most times, it didn't. That was back in the days before spam came along, so if you had an email, it was really meant for you and didn't involve wristwatches or penises.

I might log in 25 times a day, longing for that beep that meant somebody wanted to talk to me. This was also in the days before the web browser (at least, before I could run one) so if you wanted new information, you had to wait for somebody to send it to you, or to read it on Usenet, which was what I'd do immediately after reading my mail, if I had any.

I can remember feeling kind of sick sometimes when no emails came. Not because I wanted the email that badly, but because I wished I didn't crave it so much. Many times I wanted to throw the computer out the window because I hated the craving to sit down at it and have my brain run in circles over the same few screens for hours. Games were an occasional distraction but I was a junky for information.

In the next ten years a lot of things happened. The web came along and that was fascinating, although it was pretty easy to run out of webpages for a while. Then the search engine came along, providing several years of information binging. Next came the forums where people talked about products around the clock and everybody was an expert. Then the social networking stuff started, and you could spend a couple of years gathering information about people- looking up the ones you used to know and finding out what they were doing.

I think back to holiday vacations while I was in college. I'd bring my computer home from school to tinker on it, only we were hundreds of miles from the school dialup pool, so I was isolated from the internet. The computer seemed like a meaningless empty box.

That's the way I feel now when I sit at the PC, even though I've got an internet connection in my home that is hundreds of times faster than I could have imagined in 1993. The entire world runs into my house over fiber.

Now that everyone is on the internet, the information doesn't seem so good anymore. Wikipedia is fascinating, and the search engines and maps have really replaced all prior methods of looking stuff up, but as a tool for the information junky, the computer is not really interesting anymore. It's just a faster way of getting the same press releases.

Whats more, I don't want to be an information junky anymore. I used to want to know the instant things happened. Now, the presentation seems to matter more than the expediency. For example, I would rather wait weeks for next months issue of Cycle World to arrive, so I can savor it while on the crapper, than to blink at a grainy jpeg on some internet forum. I'm not going to be buying one, anyway.

A few times I've thought I should quit the internet, cold turkey. That's a dumb idea. Boycotting something because you can't discipline yourself means the thing is either so bad you shouldn't be doing it at all, or it means there's something about yourself that needs changing. In this case, the computer is not the problem anymore than a phonebook or a TV guide is. I had to figure out what the craving was about.

I wish I knew. All I can tell you is that the closer I get to having a typical family life of my own, the less I want to hear. I've had 20 years of people trying to outdo me with purchases or to "raise my awareness" about something that makes them feel guilty.

There's a reason my house used to be so dirty, yet my parents house was not.

gripping, titillating excitement

2008-04-09T05:23:00.000-07:00

that is how I would characterize the week that I have spent replacing all the lightbulbs in the new house with the compact flourescent variety. there are a number of reasons why this is a dumb idea, but being dumb was never a reason for me to give up an idea.

foremost, I have now spent in the neighborhood of 75 dollars on lightbulbs. About 10$ of that was squandered on a package of Costcos "75 watt DAYLIGHT" model. These bulbs seem less light daylight and more as if your bathroom was being lit by a bolt of lightning. After taking a shower and brushing your teeth and then walking out into the bedroom (where the right bulbs were installed), your retinas will be so bleached that everything appears to have been turned brown. Also while the daylight bulbs promise "truer color", that is not what you want when you are naked, you want the false ones. If I learned anything, it is not to go naked outdoors in daylight.

The other reason the CFL is dumb is that in order for the 78% savings in electricity to be significant enough to care, you would have to be burning every goddamn light in the house, around the clock. Since my parents invested about 18 years of shouting about turning off the lights, the best I'm ever going to do with these bulbs on a daily basis is to go from about 20 minutes of 440 watts to 20 minutes of 104 watts. I have not calculated the real savings but my guess is that the CFL bulbs will probably pay for themselves about the time my mortgage is finished, provided I don't accidentally buy anymore DAYLIGHT bulbs.

I'm sure before that day comes I'll have invested in three more waves of goofy lightning technology. I've already started hunting LED candelabra bulbs for our outside porch lights that are on an overnight timer. I'm sure that around 2038 I'll have probably repainted the walls with nanotechnology LED paint that lights the whole place on milliwatts and costs 1000$ per can.

In other scintillating news, the new garbage company dropped off a can for us. It's the kind that has fixtures molded into the body so that the garbage truck can swing out a robot arm and pick up the can. I've always wanted one of these fancy cans, and delightfully I did not have to go buy it myself. Sure I get reamed quarterly, but the can was free!

There is a detail about these fancy cans that I was unaware of. If you've ever been close to a roadsign that you've driven by dozens of times- that's the same kind of mystery and awe I experienced when I wheeled this colossal garbage can into the garage and realized that we weren't going to be able to park a car in there anymore. I have used many showers smaller than this can. I have travelled great distances on vehicles that would fit inside this can. It is a big ass can.

Here is a picture of Eleanor eating a banana. She was extremely happy about this particular banana, for reasons that are not clear.

Mostly I have been working around the house. Hanging things up, taking things downstairs. I put down about a quarter ton of mulch but I've only a third of the job done. Getting rid of the moving boxes took a while, the bags of packing paper took even longer. Fortunately there are people online who want these things, so if you're patient you can get somebody to haul it away for you.

I installed a cat door at Tricias request so the poor hairy beast can go down to the basement to use his box. Cutting a hole in a masonite door is a sure way to get pissed off at tools. Also the screws that came with the door were just long enough to get about one turn of thread hooking the inner and outer plates of the cat door together. A couple of days ago there was a huge calamity from the hallway, and a moment later the cat, lying on his side but running with the throttles wide open came tearing around the corner with an entire cat door assembly around his cat-midriff like a life preserver. Somehow the two became separated and I didn't see the cat for a while.

The new neighborhood is great. People are always coming over to say hello, and there's a roving band of kids between 8 and 13 on wheeled contraptions who come over to ask how we're doing. There's a good sized creek in the woods out back, and Eleanor spends hours throwing rocks into it and then demanding that I wipe her hands off once they're muddy. I can't figure out if she's a tomboy or not.

Anyway that's my story for this week. talk atya later.

Ribbons

2008-04-04T05:33:00.001-07:00

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/4919/

Notable events of the past two weeks

2008-03-17T05:17:00.000-07:00

1. Contracted death-flu from wife (Tue.)

2. Replaced failing cell phone with new-old-stock phone bought from friend.

3. Discovered replacement cell phone floating in clothes washing machine (wife)

4. Hid in basement with high fever while packing crew was upstairs boxing and taping my thermometer and medications.

5. Hid upstairs while packing crew worked in basement packing up all my shoes, remote controls, and laptop charger.

6. Negotiated with nurse to avoid being put on an IV in the clinic (Fri)

7. Laid in pile, on carpet, under moving blanket in corner of empty room in new house wearing jacket and shoes while moving crew arranged boxes around me and kept asking my wife if I had died (Fri)

8. Bought replacement cell phone.

9. Discovered extra cell phone that wife thought she had lost months before in city park under couch (Thur)

10. Wife bought me a copy of Kevin Camerons new book "Top Dead Center", forgave her about phone.

Apologies

2008-03-10T19:37:00.000-07:00

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/02/05/55-apologies/

By the way, who invented this new-style apology where you call a press conference and apologize to your family in front of a bunch of reporters, only you don't actually mention what the bad thing you did was? The first time I saw this was when Yankee Meathead Jason Giambi pulled the same stunt. Then Douche the Bountyhunter went on TV and cried for Larry King.

Where I come from, that would be called "being a pussy". Man up, for christ's sake.

If these douchebags are so uncomfortable with the idea of a legitimate apology, they ought to stop fucking around doing the kinds of things that warrant apologizing like, say, breaking the law or fucking over other people. Then if you still can't get it right, at least have the guts to look the person you hurt in the eye and apologize, instead of dragging them onto the stage or into the limelight in an effort to preserve your shitty career. Honestly.

raise awareness!

2008-03-09T09:09:00.000-07:00

I know this is old but its so good I have to link it too.

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/

High Anxiety

2008-03-03T16:59:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, I bought a house and was a disaster. The house was fine; I was the disaster.

I was mainly worried about the money. How was I expected to come up with that much money every month? Then I learned about "assessments" and things got worse. Acts of god littered my dreams.

During that era of house-flipping, nobody hip was buying houses to live in them. Instead, you'd buy some dump at a great discount, put down some Pergo, and reap a quarter million dollar reward. You did that about 3 times and then bought a palace somewhere.

My house, on the other hand, was almost perfect inside. Unfortunately, every seedy house down the street looked like a likely hideout for the Irish mob. The safest lot on the street was occupied by a giant humming electrical substation. At least the liquor store was in walking distance, and the cemetery across the street was quiet. Talk about resale value! We closed on the place and moved right in.

I could not sleep for weeks.

Nothing in the place seemed as nice as I remembered before the purchase. Our nest egg was gone, squandered on a down payment on this big beige albatross. Then there was a hubbub with the lender about flood insurance. I knew the end was near.

Where does this anxiety come from? I was making my payment every month with money to spare, and not even dreaming of selling the place, but I was coming undone with fear and doubt. The Irish mob was even leaving me alone.

I don't mind pressure but I'm lousy with stress. Stress seems to show up where pressure is, like Fred Phelps and television camera crews. Pressure is not the cause of stress, they just happen together when stress finds an opportunity.

I could say that I don't know how I managed to get through that period of stress, but that would imply that I triumphed. I did not come out on top in that battle of wills. My will was broken. Frankly I think that stress got bored of me and left. I just happened to be living at the end of it, and my wife was still around.

I didn't have a lot going for me at the time. I was a college dropout with no hobbies other than the computer and a hot and cold relationship with the electric bass, and it was cold spell for the bass. What money I had amassed had all been swallowed in a gulp by the bank. My company's stock was in the toilet, and I had a credit card that carried about three-quarters of a bachelor's degree tuition festering into an impressive little consumer debt. In retrospect I was probably better positioned as a tenant than an owner.

To make matters worse, I was living a million miles from home in the most liberal population east of Berkeley, so all my guns were tucked away someplace in west virginia, and I had not been hunting since I moved north. My band had ejected me on account of my wanting to go home and sleep immediately after gigs. Come to think of it I was probably also a better candidate for engagement than for marriage. I was perfect in one way, as a victim of stress.

The next few years in that house things slowly began to go my way. There were hard times for sure, but I finished my degree, paid off all my debt, bought a canoe, and started taking bass lessons at Berklee. I started to relax a little. I bought a few tools, set up a little shop in the basement. Then my wife flunked a pregnancy test, and everything changed again.

The chief advantage, to tightly wound people, of having children is the dramatic reduction in ones idle time. To the high strung, idleness begets boredom, which begets introspection, which begets self loathing and insecurity. There is no more certain cure for boredom than the steady stream of excrement that issues forth from your child. You are instantly so busy that you simply haven't got any time to worry. You can concentrate on enjoying the baby and fishing poop out of the bathtub.

A couple of months ago, with the end of our lease here in Virginia approaching, we put an offer on our first real house, and it was a doozy. We reasoned that I would likely not survive more than one more house purchase, so we had best buy one that would last us 30 years, which meant spending about twice what the last one cost. This was around the time I found out about Prilosec.

As the closing date approached, all the old feelings came back. There's no Irish mob in Chantilly, and our money situation is much improved. I had no excuse to come apart this time, but come end of February I was going to bed with an anvil in my belly. Tricia had noticed, and wasn't pleased.

The morning of March 1st, the anvil and I got out of bed, went down to the kitchen and then stepped out onto the sunny deck. It must have been 60 out, nice. To hell with you, I told the anvil, I hope you've got a helmet that fits.

We rode all over Fairfax county, nothing scenic, but I checked out the new paths I'd soon be taking. We rode past the new house twice and the anvil giggled.

That night, the anvil had to suffer through a couple of hours practicing the bass, which I hadn't even had out of the case more than a couple of times in the last 9 months.

That monday I wasn't going to go shoot since my nerves were a wreck, until Tricia told me to have a nice time shooting and motioned me at the door. Since I had nothing to lose, I shot a 189 and a 190, the best targets I've shot all season.

The rest of the week I rode the bike to work, on long windy routes, and became obsessed with the new online Dopewars game on facebook. I played a lot of Freecell, too.

By the time the big walkthrough and closing came around, I had almost forgotten about that house.

The anvil didn't even leave a note.

2008-02-21T16:33:00.000-08:00

I can't believe I'm going to do this. When I read blogs about software, for the most part I want to stab out my eyes and set the monitor on fire. however I like to write in this stupid thing and I havent been able to think of any other subjects that I'd care to spend the time on. so I'll do this one.

I started using microsoft software back around the time of ms-dos 2.0 or 3.0. technically I guess I had been using their basic interpreter on the Tandy, which was something of an operating system in itself if you'll grant it. I had OS/9 but I didn't really understand the concept, mostly because I usually dedicated one floppy to a program, and never ran more than one program at a time.

I started using Linux when the kernel version was 0.9.5, it was some version of SLS linux that I had put onto floppies. At the time, you didn't use Linux because you were anti-microsoft. rather it was because you were using some other unix (in my case it was Ultrix) on hardware that was so preposterously expensive that you could never hope to own it yourself. a shitty decstation 5000 would set you back a cool five grand, and it wasn't that great a machine anyway. I had a 486sx25 at the time and the decstation wasnt as fast as the 66Mhz dx2.

The idea of loathing windows hadn't even been invented yet, because at the time windows wasn't in consideration as an alternative for unix. I hadn't heard of trumpet winsock yet, and although KA9Q was around, you couldn't do anything really useful in dos like running ircii.

So I got really interested in Linux and that was how I learned most of my Unix, although I had to translate the skill onto a lot of other variants, mostly OSF/1, NeXTStep and a little bit of Solaris. There are hardly any others I haven't tried but I always liked intel hardware and linux the best.

Around 1994 I paid cash money for a copy of Windows NT 3.1. I got the student discount, so I think it was about a hundred bucks. I used it for a week or so and then put some version of Linux back on the computer. The problem I had at the time was memory- NT was kind of a hog compared to Linux running without X, so I settled for Alt-Fn console switching in linux. Mosaic hadn't come out yet so I wasn't browsing the web and there wasn't much need for a GUI.

There's no need to bore you with more chronology. The point is that I have been alternating between a Microsoft OS and an open source OS for about as long as you've been able to do tcp/ip on a PC. (Without a network, PC's are only useful for business, or for playing games, so Windows is the only choice).

After all this time, I still like them both a lot. I managed to establish a career for myself working with both of them. Now in 2008, I found myself replacing my Ubuntu development machine with a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate (a gratuity from MS for participating in the Vista Beta) for no particular reason other than I had been getting kind of bored of using KDE.

When the Anti-Microsoft movement came along, I felt kind of embarassed for the people who went from being recreational mousers to software activists. I think the reason that most of them felt like they'd been victims of a Microsoft monopoly was because they were too obtuse to have known about the enormous variety of computing hardware and software that had been available all this time, or they'd simply not been able to get themselves in a position to take advantage of it. (Surely not everybody could afford to buy an SGI, for example). But because all this stuff had been essentially free to me for the paltry cost of in-state tuition, I never felt like Microsoft had tried to give me any kind of a fucking at all. Windows up until 95 was essentially free if you had a box of floppies, and NT hadn't set me back much at all.

So anyway I didn't buy the zealotry then and I think it's even more stupid now. I enjoy using a Windows computer as much as I enjoy using a Debian computer. At home I use an XP computer because I have an outrageous scanner/printer, but I don't feel like I'm being conspired against because I had about 15 gigantic Linux computers at my disposal 24/7 if I feel like I need to commune with freedom. A patent I received with another inventor at my job was for a system for managing huge deployments of Windows NT computers. The nifty part was that half the system used Unix.

Now that I've spent many years working on software development projects, I am less interested in the specific, existing technologies that people employ in projects, and much more interested in the strategies that they take on to allow them develop working software systems in time. Sometimes people develop very sparse, efficient systems in rapid time. Other times people build huge, complex systems in larger time periods. To some extent the larger systems fall out of teams where developers are retained for longer periods of time, which is the way a lot of the big components of Microsoft OS's seem to be developed.

A contemporary example of this is support for Wired 802.1x in the network stacks for Unix and NT. The Microsoft model is a zero-configuration system that involves features included in XP Service Pack 3 or Vista's network stack, configured via the group policy system and a server component that handles the authentication. The client software is hooked into the domain logon stuff in NT, and you can enable 802.1x for thousands of users without any intervention on their part.

On Linux, you've got a single piece of client software, xsupplicant, that has a .conf file, and is packaged by Redhat and Debian. The configuration is much less slick than the NT system, but its very flexible and you need very little expertise if you've got the manpage handy.

They're both great systems. They were designed with different goals in mind and that accounts for the enormous difference in the architecture between the two. Neither of them are going to be perfect for everybody, and because there are only two its likely a lot of people are going to find either one of them alienating, in terms of their needs.

The Microsoft system is not as customizable as the free software on account of not having the source, but on the other hand, having the source does not guarantee that somebody who needs special behavior out of the system is going to be able to accomplish it. Very few open source zealots that I've run into would be capable of customizing or extending a piece of software like Xsupplicant on their own. In a lot of cases they'll wind up hiring a third party to do the feature they need, which is something you can do for Microsoft systems as well. Either way there's going to be a cost involved for the work.

What it all boils down to is this- can the people you are going to deal with deliver the software? Whether you're going to buy a license from somebody for a packaged system, or whether you're going to sign a contract with somebody that they'll craft a custom system for you is a lot less important than whether they can get you the product on time and within budget. The livelihood of the people who will be using and caring for the system depdends on that. It is easy as an armchair computer enthusiast to adopt some philosophy about computer software if your ass is never actually going to be on the line to deliver a big software system.

My recommendation is to try to keep your passions in check until you've walked a mile in the shoes of someone who's actually had to deliver software in a situation that really matters.

i am purchasing a house

2008-01-28T18:18:00.000-08:00

I, meaning my wife and I, have agreed to purchase a very nice house in the area.

In some ways the decision was spur-of-the-moment. After negotiating with each other for months and a great deal of consternation on my part, I agreed to join my wife and a realtor on a tour of area properties. one in particular caught our eye; my wife liked the spacious and plentiful bedrooms, while I nearly had a stroke when I discovered the 20 x 20 wood shop in the basement. it had, frankly, everything we could have hoped for in a house. spacious, relatively modern, in impeccable condition, and affordable. we made an offer a few hours later.

we won't have to buy any other houses after this one. I am not going to change jobs unless my company were to close up shop in northern virginia, which seems unlikely. I am positively uninterested in moving anyplace else, certainly not back to the northeast and there are no cities south of here that I would live in.

after years of temporary living, committing to a permanent location is exciting and relieving. it is still a pain in the ass to get to our parents' homes but it is not torturous like it was living in Boston.

living with some kind of serious compromise like your location or a lack of space is in my opinion tied for first place with having a miserable job in the list of of the top ten things that will ruin your enjoyment of life. stupid shit like having to move one car in order to get the other one out of the garage, or not having space to cut up a sheet of plywood, or living some place where you have to spend an hour or more getting to work. In west virginia I had to cope with everything I was interested in seeing being 8 hours away. in boston everything I wanted to do was either illegal or 15 hours away. nova is very good and I'm not leaving. I think Eleanor can be a very happy kid growing up here.

i would post some pictures of the house but since I don't actually own it yet, that would be inappropriate. also because I cannot seem to shake the last bits of superstition I'm cursed with, it would probably be considered a jinx, so I wouldn't post them for that reason also. once those obstacles are surmounted, I will regale you with photographs of the house that somebody else made nice, and you can look forward to many unnecessarily long articles about tile or lightswitches or whatever I come up with. I will not disappoint.

I think there's actually a chance I may be able to set up an indoor shooting range in the basement, which I am positively certain will run me afoul of the homeowners association and my wife, so it's important you tell neither of them about my scheme.

Bullseye School

2008-01-06T17:11:00.001-08:00

I just got back from a two day class on Bullseye put on by the Virginia Pistol League down in Richmond. It was held at the Richmond Police Training Center, which has the nicest indoor 25 yard range I've ever shot. The instructors were Brian Zins (the Michael Jordan of Bullseye), his USMC instructor Andy Moody, and former Marine shooter/instructor Larry Quandhal, now with NRA. It is awesome to get involved in a sport where the masters are available to developing participants.

One of the things that makes me uncomfortable about shooting as a discipline is how much different it is than studying on an instrument, at least in terms of where and how you learn. In any activity you can strike out on your own and do things your own way, but if you want to enjoy the company of other people when you do that thing you usually have to do some formal study.

On the bass its pretty straightforward; find a teacher, learn the blues in all keys and learn a bunch of standards. What technique you need will come together while the teacher is watching you perform the tunes you are learning. The performance of the tune is the thing you use to evaluate everything you are doing. The teacher notes the problems and you adjust.

With shooting its even easier to measure your performance. Instead of playing a tune with a group you go shoot a match and then look at the target to see how you did. The problem is that if you aren't an expert you won't be able to identify what you are doing wrong if the target does not look good. You need a teacher for that.

Finding a good teacher is always hard unless you are in the right place. Even then you have to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. On an instrument there are always a bunch of hacks who want to be teachers but don't really know anything about teaching. If you're in a city like Boston you can actually march over to Berklee and hunt down one of the top guys. You'll pay for the privilege but 5 lessons with a master is worth more than 1000 lessons with a hack.

With shooting, it seems like most of the the oustanding bullseye coaches are military, so it is probably a little more tricky to get hooked up with them for private lessons than it would be with an academic.

Workshops like the one this weekend are probably my best bet. Even though its only a couple days with instructors, the contacts you make at such a class are probably your best bet to track down somebody who can work with you in the future.

In the class we mostly focused on the shot process. The Marines have one process and they use that process for every shot in every event in the match. The process includes every detail of what you do from the time you step to the line to the end of the string. The goal is to have your concentration focused only during the time where it is necessary, and they achieve that focus simply by having you executing your plan rather than thinking about the situation.

The other part of the system is detecting any deviation from the standard process. If you come down on the target and you notice your point of aim is off, you abort and repeat the process. If the process is not detailed enough that it causes the point of aim to be correct every time, the process is modified. Theres no rocket science here at all, its just accepting that stance and grip control everything, and thinking systematically about accomplishing the correct ones.

I needed this lesson a lot. I have good attention to detail but when that attention is unguided I notice new things every time and react differently every time.

Two other problems I have are that during timed and rapid fire, I pay attention to the sound of other shots. My anxiety about the frequency of those shots causes me to accept an incorrect sight picture and fire. I think that the shot plan will eliminate the anxiety because I will know that if I follow the plan I will never have a problem firing after the buzzer.

The other problem is that I am zeroing my pistol incorrectly and not adjusting the zero between 25 and 50 yards. I have a chronic left pull that I can see clearly after zeroing on sandbags. I'm not sure yet whether people have a natural zero of their own, or rather I should make myself adjust to the zero I get shooting from a rest. This is the kind of thing I need a teacher for, so I'm hoping I can get set up with one soon.

great article from the newstatesman

2008-01-04T09:05:00.000-08:00

http://www.newstatesman.com/200801030023

2008-01-02T05:44:00.000-08:00

http://www.frankfuredi.com/index.php/site/article/160/

Bad Words

2008-01-02T05:32:00.001-08:00

Someone taught my daughter the word "shit".

2007-12-31T15:34:00.000-08:00

Let's face it. Everybody writes these things for attention. A blog is just the nerds way of trying to get laid, or gloating about getting laid. The less nerdy make obscene blinking Myspace pages and limit the "blog" entries there to approximately one sentence. They are also sure to post lots of pictures of themselves drinking alcohol, to establish an atmosphere of hair-trigger sexuality. The more nerdy flock to the upscale social networking sites where they can enumerate their credentials and make lists of their accomplishments and maybe show a little cleavage.

After you get married and spawn, the urge to draw attention to yourself doesn't go away all at once. You'll notice the phenomenon of the blogging parent. The mellow kind will post funny pictures and witticisms about childrearing. The obnoxious ones become parenting enthusiasts and post a lot of supposedly sage stories that demonstrate what hip parents they are. All I can figure is that this is natures way of hedging a little bit- you get the word out that you're as hip as a parent as you were single in case your mate splits and you need a new one.

In line with what I've described, within a couple of years this post-parent blogging stuff seems to wither to a trickle and then stop altogether, leaving the temple to oneself abandoned like a half-scale internet Parthenon.

I believe that I am entering this phase now because even though I am occasionally moved by the urge to engage in self-promotion, when it gets right down to it and I sit at the keyboard, I can't get started because I don't give much of a shit about whether anybody is impressed by it or not. This is not the youthful, rebellious manner of non-shit-giving. It's a new and improved grown up version of shitlessness that is the root of all types of parent-induced embarrassment inflicted upon you as a child. You've reached the point where not only have you realized you aren't going to be famous, the very idea of becoming famous is so nauseatingly horrible that being too hip is kind of worrisome.

I go back and forth on whether the blog is purely self indulgent or not. Look at Facebook.com, for example. I had to delete my Myspace.com account on account of the pornographic ads, trojans, and the tendency to become sucked into an endless chain of profile hopping, interspersed with plugin-induced browser crashage every 8 to 10 clicks.

Facebook, on the other hand, seemed grown up and legitimate. There's much less blinking and music and far more people that I was actually happy to see and catch up with.

It wasn't long until you see that Facebook is essentially a system for strutting. People use the little "... is doing blah blah" feature the way Myspace users use the photo posting feature to demonstrate their beer bonging skills.

"George is on his way to Switzerland to pick up his international literary prize".

"Samantha regrets that she won't be able to attend Sergey Brin's wedding because she has to defend two different dissertations that day". etc.

It is horrible and I become annoyed, either because these people are annoying or because being a clown is the only means of recourse when one is without ambition, I am forced to make corny jokes and to generally misuse this powerful feature. I feel like I've used the word "feature" about 25 times in this post.

Anyway lots of things have happened lately but I haven't written about it mostly because there's nothing in it for anybody. The only possible justification that a person could make for this blogging stuff (the personal kind, I mean, not the journalistic type stuff) is if you intended to keep doing it for a long time so you'd have a record like a regular journal that you'd be able to look at with your kids years later and laugh about. I guess by that reasoning that I really ought to record these dumb mundane details after all.

Eleanor has been a riot lately, and has learned lots of new words and, somewhat shockingly, a variety of dances. We are at a loss to explain the dancing; it must be something from daycare. I hope she sticks with it, it is a pain in the ass to grow up as a non-dancing stick in the mud, and dancers clearly have more fun and are I believe better people for it.

We found what I think is the best used bookstore I have ever been to in my life out in Manassas of all places. I think it is called McKays but I'm too lazy to look it up. While I was wheeling Eleanor around in the stroller, she urgently leaned out and grabbed a copy of Stephen J. Gould's Dinosaur in a Haystack, and spent the rest of her visit to the store thumbing forward then backwards through the entire book. I have not read a Stephen J. Gould book before but it sounded like something I might like so I figured she could keep it and if she got it sticky I'd buy it. She never even drooled on it, but I had to buy it anyway because she wouldn't hand it over at the end, and it was 5 bucks anyway (which is about 75% of why I like McKays so much).

We traveled to West Virginia for Christmas and had a great time. I shot at least a dozen boxes of shotgun shells at the semi-traditional pigeon shoot out at Daddypop's farm. When we ran out of pigeons early we spent the rest of the afternoon sniping pieces of them in the field with the various other pistols and rifles that were around.

Eleanor got a truckload of loot. She was so excited by her little green Kawasaki pusharound four-wheeler that she kept trying to throw a leg over it before I could the twisty ties detached from the cardboard. She repeated the same with stretchy-legs Elmo and there was a conflagration. When we got home there was a spectacular Kitchen set waiting for her, and now there are tiny bottles of olive oil and canned green giant products littered on all three levels of this townhouse.

My father got my mother some outrageous jewelry; they were equally delighted.

I got my father a tiny remote control helicopter and we crashed it all over the yard.

Tricia and I bought each other a nice couch for the basement but it won't arrive for a while yet.

I got mostly 22 shells for the shiny new S&W Model 41 that I bought for myself. I put a pair of Herrett Nationals grips and an Ultradot four on it, and have spent most of my spare time over at the NRA range trying to figure out how to get it to feed reliably. I have a bag full of hoity-toity 22 ammo that I'm going to run a little accuracy test with when I get a chance.

Christmas post I never posted

2007-12-27T05:46:00.000-08:00

Eleanor enjoyed her second Christmas this week. She isn't old enough yet to understand the opening of presents, but she is aware enough to grab whatever thing you're trying to free from a blister-pack once you've got it out of the wrapping paper. There was pandemonium while I tried to get Elmo unbound from his cardboard backing, and again when she tried to mount her rollaround Quad-Racer before I could get it loose from the cardboard package.

There was plenty of other good loot, too. T and I bought her a little Kitchen, and she spent most of yesterday evening opening and closing her cabinets, piling her food on the floor and then putting it away again. I am not sure how to interpret this behavior; although I certainly demonstrated the skill of emptying cabinets onto the floor at a young age, neither of us would ever have put things away. It must be a recessive gene.

She also got a ball-popper, a sit-n-spin, and a toy cell phone, and she wouldn't go to bed last night.

Smith 41 post I never posted

2007-12-20T05:54:00.000-08:00

In other news, I shot a 544 last week, my new high score. I'd like to shoot a 550 this year but I read an article that discouraged the making of number goals in shooting. It would be a better goal to make my Expert classification this year. I think I might be able to make Expert scores but I'm not sure if the scores I've already shot will rule it out. I need to do the math.

I bought a new pistol. It's the first time I ever bought a gun online, and I was very pleased at how it reduces the complication of buying the gun you want. I knew I wanted a Smith 41, but I only found a couple even at the gigantic Dulles gun show a few weeks ago. They both had the 7" bbl and were expensive. If I bought one from a shop around here, they'd have to order it and I'd pay out the nose.

I tried out Gunsamerica.net, found exactly what I wanted for about 200$ less than I could order it around here. Several of the guys in our league are FFL's, so I made a couple of phone calls to get the paperwork going, placed my bid, and a few days later I had a brand new 5" Bbl Smith 41 in my hands. No haggling with a shop.

Things I am Doing

2007-12-20T04:33:00.000-08:00

Often my wife will ask me a question such as "Are you looking forward to ", or "are you excited about ". Usually, my answer is no. Years ago should would ask me this a few days before we went to someones wedding. I am not excited by weddings, but it would be untrue to say that I do not "look forward" to them. Like Nostradamus I could call up a crystal clear vision of me, in a car, in traffic someplace on I84, wearing ill-fitting suit trousers that I have not put on since the last wedding, sweaty and miserable and looking forward to chicken dinner with a table full of people I don't know and will never see again, being accosted by my wife because I won't dance and not dancing because I can't get hammered on account of the driving.

These questions of hers became a touchy subject. She deemed me a curmudgeon, as "no fun". I think it was unfair, because she'd never ask me a question like "are you looking forward to the UPS man delivering your new saw?". Fuck yeah! Get a table of strangers together and some booze and we'll talk about some frickn saws until midnight!

"Are you looking forward to Christmas?"

There's another hot one. I'm no scrooge, no humbug. I like Christmas, but there's no arguing that it's not a pain in the ass. The guilt-buying, the impossible air travel. For almost 10 years I've lived about 15 hours from home. For a few years I liked the nomadic holiday wandering. It's the closest thing a modern man with a day job can get to satisfying his wanderlust, packing up an automobile at 5AM on a weekday morning and hitting the salty highway, 7 dollars in your pocket and a hankerin for some Arby's. Then we got a baby and it was fun one more time and that was the end of that.

I caught a lot of shit from my wife on account of answering no to all those questions. Are you looking forward vacation? Is there an airport in my future? Then no, fuck no, I'm not excited about it. The last trip I looked forward to, the one where I was supposed to spend 5 days in a hot tub, I wound up sick in bed for four of the five days and then spending two extra ones stuck in the West Palm Beach airport while Jet Blue came undone. This is vacation?

As of 2007 I had two weddings remaining. One of them is finished and turned out to be fine. I was able to get my pants buttoned and I was seated with the right blend of cynics and noncynics and the traffic was alright. The next and last one will be staffed with a bunch of raving alcoholics and I think it'll be alright.

Now its Christmas and I have to do something about that, only this year instead of driving 15 hours and then dreading driving another 15 the whole time I'm home, I've got about a 5 hour high speed run. Half of that is on Interstate 64, which is like driving through outer Mongolia and you're lucky to see another car.

I haven't seen my cousin Art in almost two years and I've not met his little girl at all, and they'll be home. I managed to buy some Christmas gifts for a change. Our daughter is old enough to have some fun and she likes toys now, and they'll be plenty.

I am looking forward to Christmas.

Recent Scientifick Experiments

2007-12-01T03:47:00.000-08:00

It can't be that scientific, I reckon, if I have to begin by saying "around a year ago", because I can't remember precisely when it was that I started my experiment.

I am very impatient and impulsive and in most caes I would have reported the results of my experiment after like, say, 2 weeks. Then if the results had changed I would have been embarrassed and would have to redact my results and then explain about having been wrong to everybody who I told in my excitement.

This experiment was inspired by a fit of boredom, in which I started reading Wikipedia. It is likely that I started out reading an article about military ordnance, then got off onto chemicals or contagious diseases. I think at some point I was reading about "Trench Foot", which always makes me think of "Trench Mouth", which immediately makes me think of "Canker Sore", which has always sounded nasty and fascinating at once.

While reading the Canker Sore article I found a name I hadn't heard previously, Aphthous Ulcer.
The instant I opened the page I knew I'd struck gold. There in the photo you see some poor bastard pulling his lip down to reveal that little crater of agony that goes by more names than Satan. You can just feel it burning as the air hits it, and imagine the way it ruins your day as you try to eat a big floppy slice of pizza.

The first reason for my excitement is that this new name represented an altogether different diagnosis than the one I'd been consigned to for years, which was that I and millions of other poor bastards were infected with some mutant non-genital form of Herpes. It's bad enough imagining some tiny virus hanging around in your spinal column and coming out occasionally to fuck up your mouth and make it hard to drink orange juice. It is even worse thinking that you are infected your family with the thing every time you give them a kiss.

The second and more significant reason I was excited is that the article contained one little nugget of information, amongst all the quackery in the "Causes" section, that really stood out.

Anybody who gets these mouth sores knows a couple of things. First is that if you bite your lip or cheek, or gouge the inside of your mouth while chewing something, you're in for it.

The second thing is that no combination of poking, squeezing, toothbrushing, or disinfecting will do a damn thing about it. In fact over the past few years as these sores began to frustrate me more, I'd waged a campaign of aggressive attack with Listerine. Hell not even viruses can live in that stuff. After reading a can of Lysol I had some even more diabolical plans in mind, but luckily I found the article first.

If you trust the Aphthous Ulcer article, the bulk of these sores are not viral in nature, they're an autoimmune response. Suddenly the biting part made sense. It still didn't make sense that you'd get these things out of the blue, until I read this:

The large majority of toothpastes sold in the U.S. contain Sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS), which is known to cause aphthous ulcers in certain individuals. Using a toothpaste without SLS will reduce the frequency of aphthous ulcers in persons who experience aphthous ulcers caused by SLS.

Now, Sodium Lauryl Sulfate is not some dangerous chemical, don't get all green. It's a surfactant; a foaming agent. It makes stuff bubbly. They put it into toothpaste because nobody would use toothpaste if it didn't foam up and appear to be doing something, like shampoo. Surfactants make this magic happen by changing the surface tension of liquids, which makes them free to pull away from whatever they're stuck to and bubble up.

That's fine for wet hair, but the inside of your mouth is covered with a film of mucus. When the mucus is removed by say, biting your lip, the immune response kicks in and you are rewarded with a painful sore. Now imagine you fill your mouth with a surfactant like SLS. Your mouth feels squeaky clean because most of the lining is gone.

Now imagine instead of toothpaste you gargle for 30 seconds with Listerine. I always used to wonder what the funny little stringy bits were when I spit the mouthwash out into the sink.

After I read this article, I stopped using regular toothpaste and switched to plain baking soda in powdered form (Arm & Hammer Baking Soda Toothpaste contains SLS). Also I stopped using Listerine completely, even though I liked using it.

In the 15 months or so since I started the experiment, I have had one aphthous ulcer. In any year prior, I would have had at least 8 to 10. The one sore that I did get was after I nicked my lip, and this sore stayed small, disappeared in around 3 days instead of a week like usual, and the glands under my jawbone never swelled up.

I'd call it a miracle except that it makes me mad how frickin stupid I'd been all this time. I'd get a sore and brush my teeth and gargle like crazy, and the sore would get worse and worse.

I don't know what the consequences are of using baking soda instead of toothpaste. There is one variety of toothpaste I know of that doesnt have SLS but it costs a lot and they don't keep it in stock at my supermarket. The next experiment is to see if my teeth fall out from using baking soda for two years. I'll let you know how it goes.

2007-11-24T13:25:00.000-08:00

To all those people who laughed at me when I explained my plan to get to Long Island by leaving at 5AM on Thanksgiving Day, I offer this for your pipe smokage: a flat 5:15 door to door Fairfax to Massapequar (sic) NY, including one extended stop to try and mop up about a quart of baby vomit that looked remarkably like cottage cheese. A record breaking run for the Baileys, for sure. People all over the island were commenting on how astonishingly light the traffic was. I have no idea what happened, but it was unprecedented in Long Island history. I scarcely saw a brake light from the Verrazano bridge til I hit Merrick Road.

A while back I started reading a couple of motorcycle message boards, but had to give it up for the same reason you have to give up anything on the internet that involves reading things written by the public, specifically that the public consists primarily of cretins. The most popular act of cretinism on motorcycle message boards is to make up names for the riders of various brands of motorcycles and then to disparage those who ride any brand other than the one you do.

Actually its more than brand, it's whichever "lifestyle" the cretin identifies with
, and there are several. There are the sportbikers, the biker bikers, and the adventure bikers. My bike falls into the last category, although I am not really very interested in adventure. Most of the adventure bikers are pot-bellied middle-aged post-crisis guys who dress up in motocross garb and photograph each other riding through mud-puddles on the weekend. They also obsess about death and abrasion and like to spend thousands of dollars on lemon yellow crash suits.

Their favorite hobby, which seems to exceed their love of riding, is disparaging the riders of Harley Davidson motorcycles. They criticize these blatant lifestyle-enthusiasts in between posts like "what should I keep in my tank bag" and "adventure at Podunk State Park". The Adventurists don't care for the Bikers riding skills, their clothing, or their vehicles. They're all accountants and dentists pretending to be badasses, which is almost as absurd as a computer programmer pretending to be a trans-global explorer. You can see why I can't read these things.

Anyway I had never ridden a Harley Davidson motorcycle, but after reading an encyclopedia's worth of consternation about the inferior design and quality of these bikes, I began to wonder if maybe it was true and Harleys were crap.

Of course, it's not. I see why people love these bikes, although it took me a few minutes. My father-in-law's Deuce had a low front tire, which he sent me out to inflate. I thought the steering seemed dangerously slow until I added twenty-one pounds of air. It is hard to make a good judgement of a motorcycle that you are unable to steer, so I can't say anything objective about my trip to the gas station.

I tore out of the station, intent upon seizing the opportunity to finally be the asshole with loud pipes tearing out of a gas station, and it was great. I had my dad's deathtrap half helmet and a pair of Cobra pipes and a 96 inch motor and it was the second most fantastic racket I have ever made, surpassed only by the time I got my old F-body Mustang sideways pulling out of Bill's Used Cars in Madison WV for a test drive.

I am not an authority on motorcycles so I won't give you a review, but the Deuce is a wonderful bike and anybody who truly loves motorcycles would love this one. Which leads me to believe that any so called motorcycle lover who doesn't love Harleys is simply in love with some alternative motorcycle lifestyle. Those things are great, and it reminded me why I love bikes so much and want 50 of em.

2007-11-20T05:40:00.000-08:00

Last night I shot a five-twenty-something, which was below my average and wrecked my handicap score. I was shooting my uncle's pistol, a Smith 41 with the 7 inch barrel. Where my 22/45's trigger is kind of an abrupt break, the one on the Smith has a buttery smooth release. I think I could shoot it a lot better than my 22/45 but I kept jerking the trigger. When the targets came back you'd see the last 10 or 12 shots closing in on the X after I got it together, it really makes you wish you could throw the first five away and shoot another string.

I was shooting the 41 because it's one of a handful of pistols I am thinking about purchasing. I think the Rugers are excellent- you are certainly not at a disadvantage shooting a Mark II. My only complaint about the 22/45 is that I can't change the grip. I've considered getting a regular Mark II and putting nicer grips on it, but it was frustrating having to get the trigger done, and if you put a lot of money into a Ruger, it doesn't seem likely that you would recoup much of it if you decided to get rid of it. On the other hand you would have a good shooter without laying out a huge amount of money.

One problem I had with the 41 was the weight. I was getting shaky toward the fourth string on every target. I don't think it'd be a problem once I got used to it, but it did make me stop and think about what I actually ought to be looking for in a pistol. Some of the pistols I've looked at use specialized scope bases that weigh 5 or 6 ounces. If a person wasn't careful he could build up a gun that weighed a lot more than he expected, and it'd take a while to get comfortable with it. So I made up a spreadsheet of parts and weights and got out my little postal scale to see how much the 22/45 weighed. It's a lightweight at around 1kg with an empty magazine. The Smith and a Benelli MP are closer to 1400g, which is a pretty big difference.

On the other hand, I noticed I hunted a lot less with the Smith than my pistol, so once I got accustomed to the weight, it might be advantageous.

While I was looking up the weight specs for the Ultradot sight I use, I began to wonder about what made people choose one of Ultradot's other models, like the 4 Dot or the Match. The weights about the same, the big difference is that unlike the plain Ultradot, the fancier models offer larger dot sizes. When I bought mine I assumed that the smaller dots were better, since they allowed you a finer point of aim. After some reading, I began to worry a little.

When I shoot the 50 yard slow fire target with an 8 inch bullseye, I have a chronic problem of shooting high left. Although I certainly have trigger problems to deal with, the high left doesn't seem to be a trigger problem because it does go away when I change the zero. It seems to be a sight-picture problem, and I think its because I am trying to feel where the X is (even though I can't see it very well at 50y) and put that 4 MOA dot on top of it. It is hard to form a sight picture with a little dot in the center of a big dot.

The incentive to use the big dot seems to be that if your dot size roughly matches the size of the bullseye, then you simply hold the dot so that you can't see any black (or you see an even ring of black), and then fire. On a B-6 Target at 50 yards, a 16MOA dot would cover the bullseye. So I think the Ultradot 4 is what I want.

Specialties

2007-11-18T08:17:00.000-08:00

Women claim that men always ruin special moments, but it's the other way around. Special things only happen once in a great while, and the proper method of observing them is with solemnity; silence and maybe a hug if this situation calls for it.

My wife is poised for the special occasion, as if one were about to occur every 60 to 90 seconds. She prefers a gaudy display of oohing and ahhing and "isn't that SPECIAL"-ing, which she has learned from her even more notorious mother. It is virtually impossible for a stoic fellow to exhibit any emotion in the presence of this tag-team. Say a tear were to roll from your eye at some memorable and touching performance- one of these two emoti-hens would lean over and "whisper":

Tricia: "oh my god! is that a tear! oh my god, mom, mom, look Andy has a tear, this is so special!"

Mom: "Tricia look at that! He has a tear, oh Tricia Tricia where is my camera, oh this is so speeeeecial!"

Dennis: "Peg, uh, uh, what is it, whats going on?"

Mom: "Dennis write this down in the calendar so we can talk about it next year at dinner"

And so on. This is a completely fictional script, mind you, and I have not cried publically about anything lately and you can see why I'm not likely to.

Anyway this morning at about five, the baby woke up crying. My wife has had some success with a strategy of fetching the baby and plopping her into the bed with us if its after 5 or 6 and we'd normally be up anyway. The baby seems to go in for the group laziness and sometimes we manage to squeeze out another hour of sleep that way.

This morning it was not happening however, and the baby mewled and wiggled. She'd sit up, then lie down. When she got tired of that she vomited a milky stream all over me, moments after Tricia had left the room to get her some milk. Finally, the baby seemed happy. I am convinced that happiness is like energy. There is a certain amount of it in the universe and for every soul who smiles, some other poor bastard gets vomited on by a baby.

Here we are, then, until moments ago rapt in beautiful slumber. Now we are stripping the sheets off the bed, then I get into the shower so I can wash off the stream of barf off my nether-regions, which were tragically exposed through the escape hatch in the front of my boxers which was evidentally agape at the precise moment that Eleanor ralphed. It's nice that I can laugh about it, now.

Tricia says to me "Can you believe we're thinking about having another?", and she means it, and it makes me angry because I hate that kind of second guessing, and it makes me think about the kind of people who resent their children for interfering with their own comfort. That's a kind of poison I can do without, and I snap at her, and hurt her feelings. We're both tired after a late night, and we know it, so we stop.

After the mess is taken care of, Tricia takes the baby to the guestroom, where she always seems to sleep better, and I slump into our bed. I blink my eyes and the clock switches from 6:00 to 8:30. I'm supposed to be out of the house by now. T is not next to me, and doesn't answer when I call. I peer down the hall and the baby's door is open but the light is off. I have to piss like mad, and while I am doing it my paranoid imagination fires- they are both downstairs overcome by carbon monoxide. They've both been kidnapped by a phony Jehova's Witness. They've gotten in the car and left me because I'm so grumpy.

Now I'm worried and I go downstairs, but its peaceful and the lights are on. I go to the basement, slowly down the stairs after they don't answer (and its the only place they could be). I check the coatrack but the baby's hat and new tiny ski-coat are both there so they can't be outside. Now I'm really worried.

I race back upstairs to put on pants, and I notice that the guest room door is closed. I peek through the crack and there asleep are my two girls.

They are sound asleep, together, and they are the most beautiful sight. The most.

I watched them for a moment, and closed the door. Yes I can believe we're thinking about having another. You bet your life I can .

Then I had to laugh because I thought, imagine if Tricia and her mother were standing behind me, watching me watching through a crack in the door. They probably wouldn't notice that I was having the most special occasion in some time, and it seemed almost unfair to keep it from them.

I better go write this down.

2007-10-29T19:19:00.000-07:00

last week I shot a 514, and on account of my horrific performance two weeks ago, i got a very high handicap score.

this week i managed to improve again, to 537. I think the reason my score is increasing is that I am eliminating the most obvious mistakes. If I had kept about 6 or 8 shots in the black I think I could get around 550.

some targets I shoot, I feel like I am gripping the gun perfectly and breaking the trigger really cleanly, and I've shot a couple of really good ones that way. it feels like theres a lot of slop in my hand with this pistol. I'd like to have a second match gun anyway, so I'm looking around for something I can change the grips on. I'm going to go take a look at a Smith 41 (which I have shot and really liked a lot) this weekend. I dont think I'd have to do much to it.

in rainbows

2007-10-19T05:53:00.000-07:00

colin greenwood's bass playing on the new radiohead album is superb. that is all.

There's always more than one way to screw up

2007-10-15T18:40:00.001-07:00

tonight's bullseye pistol match was the first to be scored officially. I have practiced a great deal lately, working on each shooting style individually in hour sessions. I've improved my stance, my grip, trigger control, breathing, everything. Practice scores are up considerably from where I started.

Despite these efforts, my slow fire (50 yard) target returned tonight without a single hole in it. Even more remarkable (I suspect that remarks will be made regarding this phenomenon for some time to come) the target in lane next to me had double the normal number of holes in it.

2007-10-05T18:52:00.000-07:00

im giddy.

went to shoot again tonight, everything was coming together. i only had about 10 shots outside the black all night, out of 150 or so, practicing 25 yard timed fire.
I've been shooting 30 rounds per target, since I havent got any repair dots, and I've been trying to use all six of the magazines I've got for the 22/45.

I only changed one thing tonight from a couple of nights ago, and that was to switch from using my fingertip to my first knuckle for the trigger. That has always felt better to me, but somewhere I got the false impression that it was a bad habit. Now I can really feel the trigger and its a great feeling.

I decided to shoot one last string, about 20 after 9. I shot it and knew I pulled a couple of shots, but it seemed alright, nothing spectacular. When it was over I had a 295/10x. That score is as good as anything I saw anyone shoot at this weeks match.
My other targets were not far off, so I know it wasn't just a lucky break, the practicing has been worth it.

I have no delusions about whether I'll repeat that score in a match. The matches are not at all like practice, with a raft of challenges beyond just shooting. Besides imagine what guys who can shoot a score like that in a match can score in their own practices. I am a long way from good.

A good score like that makes me happy, though, because I know I don't want for anything. My little pistol could certainly do it again, and with enough practice and coaching I might be able to score like that on a regular basis. The ammunition I'm using is working well, I didn't have a single problem all night. I think its just a matter of keeping up the late night trips and making sure that I remember everythign I've learned every time I pull the trigger.

2007-10-04T04:44:00.000-07:00

the last entry wasn't finished but when something has been a "draft" for that long I'm not going to finish it anyway.

I shot a better match Monday of this week, my highest score so far. I was in a lane between two exceptional shooters. It feels good to know that you can shoot alongside someone who could easily get a perfect score, without making an ass of yourself. It is not good to look at their targets when they return though, it makes you nervous and if you're thinking about what anybody else is doing you'll mess up a lot more.

On the other hand I guess thinking about those targets through the rest of the week is what makes a fellow want to go and practice, and so I've found myself over at the range late at night more often. It's a good time to shoot, after 8:30. There are more open lanes and its not so loud.

I bought a fancy aluminum pistol box from champs choice and it arrived yesterday. Its the biggest size they had, since they didn't have the smaller one in stock and I am impatient. It's huge but I'll have a hard time running out of space. It works out well because I didn't have a cabinet or a safe at home to keep my pistols in. Going to the range can be frustrating because I pick up a lot of extra crap I don't need on my way out of the house, and when I arrive I discover I forgot the one or two things I actually needed, like the trigger wrench. Now everything stays in the big box and I just pick it up and leave.

On Monday the guy to my left kept shooting ahead of the starting buzzer in the rapid fire. It was pissing off the guy to my right. Unfortunately I believe he thought it was me, which is comic because I haven't got any idea when the buzzer is coming, and when somebody shoots before it I don't hear the buzzer and I stand there waiting for 5 seconds for it to go off. Maybe the early shooter is counting down and shoots exactly at the buzzer to annoy the other guy. Next week I'll stand someplace else.

I have been keeping notes about practice, they are too boring to print. I made up a sheet to record misfeeds when my pistol was giving me trouble. Of course they immediately stopped after I spent an hour making the sheet in Excel. I'll take it if it means no misfires though. I think I have gotten my stance together, last night I was steady enough that I could start concentrating on where I wanted to aim in the black, instead of just keeping it in the black, period. I hate practicing without a teacher though. If I've learned anything, its that you can practice by yourself but you can't train yourself, and the more time you spend trying to develop yourself in a bubble, the harder it is to undo your mistakes. So I got to get some instruction soon.

2007-09-25T18:48:00.000-07:00

I shot my second bullseye pistol match last night. I shot a horrible match and got a lousy score.

I gained 6 points over last week in the slow fire. The score was encouraging. Last week I was short of 22/45 magazines, so I borrowed a tricked out Marvel and shot decently with it. I put a Volquartsen kit and an Ultradot on the 22/45, shot a couple of practice rounds with it, and wound up with a slightly higher score than I got on the Marvel.

Things went to hell in timed fire. Three of four mags gave me feed problems, and I wound up dropping four or five shots. I couldn't remember to leave the jam and call for an alibi. I wound up scoring about 70 points below where I was last week. I let myself get agitated and shot poorly on the rapid fire targets as well.

I had no feed problems when I practiced during the week, although I did have two brand new magazines

On the Road Again

2007-09-09T16:43:00.000-07:00

Saturday afternoon I walked out of a Wendy's restaurant in White Sulpher Springs, WV. My big ugly-ass Suzuki DL650 was on its sidestand in a parking space by the door, where I could keep an eye on it. I hadn't thought much about where I was until I was out on the sidewalk where I could hear the traffic on I-64, headed north to Lewisburg.

Lewisburg, Rupert, Rainelle. When I was a boy we'd visit my Granny in Rupert, and go to see Pap at the nursing home in Rainelle. Later just before he died we'd see him at the hospital in Fairlea, where my grandmother Cohenour also passed away. The state fair is still in Fairlea and it was the most fantastic thing I can remember from my childhood. there's a photo of my sister and I in taupe clothing riding a carousel with motorcycles in place of horses. Mine has a brown metal flake paint job.

The bike I am riding now is bright red. It's an ugly bike with a bulbous half fairing that hides a 6 gallon gas tank. It has a weird 20 inch front wheel, the whole package gives you the impression of something like a wasp or a mud dauber. It is the finest machine I have ever owned.

The bike and I have been winding down route 92 from someplace way up in pocahontas county. I hit the 2/5's tank mark and then rode another 60 or 70 miles before I started to worry about the absence of gas stations. I have learned that in the east there is probably no stretch of road between gas stations than the v-strom cannot travel on a quarter tank, so I don't worry much.

I left home this morning at about 7 and I hadn't made up my mind whether I would ride all the way to Beckley or not. I don't like to plan trips on the bike. I prefer to not even have a destination in mind at all, although I usually have some route numbers in my head for roads that go through places I am curious about. For this trip its 41, 21, US 219, 28. I hadn't planned to take WV 92 but now that I did I'm glad.

The ugly bike and I have come about 300 miles, and as the door to the restaurant hisses closed behind me and I see it in the parking space a big smile hits me- the kind that makes tears just begin to bulge at the corner of your eyes when something makes you very happy. All the dreaming I did as a boy, riding my bicycle or the dirt bike down some road and imagining what would happen if I just kept going, that ugly red bike is the embodiment of it. Only this one can really do it- this one can hang with any traffic, it can climb any grade. It can carry enough of my junk to see me through a weekend, and it can take me there and back again without a hiccup.

It's a little 650 when everybody is riding 1000s. It's never been to slow, and it's never been too fast. This is one of the good ones.

...

I'm back home now. Dad and I fished at Hinton Saturday morning, we caught a slew. Dad had to swap me his wading shoes for the sneakers I was trying to wade in; I will own a pair of them shortly. Dad talked me out of riding back on route 20. It looked good on the map but I think he had enough close calls as a young man on that road that he didn't like the thought of me tearing down it on a motorcycle. They had me take US 219 instead. I hadn't been over Droop Mountain in years. I could not believe what I had forgotten.

on the road

2007-09-04T05:45:00.000-07:00

sunday was the cohenour family reunion in Smoot WV. I hadn't been to one in a long time, and it was the baby's first. family reunions are the one event I can think of where people are universally pleased when you bring your children, and there were no exceptions this year.

in the old days, to get to smoot from beckley, you'd have taken one of several long and winding routes through fayette county to Rainelle, and then down US 60 through Rupert or over Little Sewell Mountain to Sam Black Church or Meadow Bluff. Most of my trips down 41 through the gorge included nausea, particularly on the way home from my grandmothers house. She saved the Minipages for me and I'd try to read them on the way home. Reading in the car is a recipe for vomit for me anyway, much less doing it on Loops Road. The name says it.

About the time I started high school, Interstate 64, with its 7 mile long 7% grade down Sandstone Mountain, opened up. We had been driving by the stubs where the road would end in Sam Black and Beckley for 13 years, a pair of four lane roads to nowhere, about 50 yards long a piece. As a little fellow I couldn't believe those two things would ever lead to each other. More unbelievable yet would've been the idea that once I64 opened, I'd never make the trip through the gorge again. Well not for almost 20 years anyway.

When we left the reunion I mentioned to Dad that I had been thinking about the old road. He hadn't taken it in a long time either so we all agreed to make the trip. The baby was sleeping besides and the long way meant a longer nap. We took the road over Little Sewell where my father taught my mother how to drive a car while they were going to Greenbrier West High. It was longer than either of them remembered but we chalked it up my old man having slowed down some since the 70s. Nobody got car sick either so I think we isolated the cause of that.

Rainelle was full of motorcycles, Goldwings and BMWs. It pleases me to see people from the outside world roving around my home. I've never been able to explain to people how much different West Virginia is from anything around it, but it wasn't until people started craving the long way that there was any real reason to visit a place like Rainelle. For a while it looked like I64 was going to wipe everything off the map, but now US 60 has put it back on again.

We went through Danese, Layland, past the old mines down Layland Mountain. I couldn't remember much of it until we started into the gorge. That was always my favorite part and it used to seem like a long way between Quinimont and Badoff Mountain, but it sure isn't.

That's about as close as I'm ever going to get to time travel, I reckon. Low speed time travel, where you wait 20 years for the future to show up and then go out and look around to see what changed. I'm only just getting started looking around.

2007-08-31T16:07:00.000-07:00

i finally shot at the NRA range around the corner last night. its a pretty fancy range, you've got to take a short test and get a card
to use the range. very much a no bullshit kind of place. there were maybe three range masters there with sidearms, but when you've got 15 lanes all full of people you never met before, I don't know if I'd want to shoot there if somebody wasn't paying close attention.

the unusual thing about this range is that they allow rifles up to a certain caliber. I had never shot at an indoor range with rifles, and I have mixed feelings about it. It's great to have a place to zero a rifle, but its only a fifty yard range so the rifles there were people plinking on AR's, I can't believe how many people are shooting them now. We were doing Bullseye type shooting and there were 223s going off on either side of me. It was frustrating occasionally but its also a good way to practice chilling out and shooting and not being a puss about concentration.

I hadn't been to a range since I moved to Massachusetts. I know I've shot pistols between then and now but not much. It's not the kind of thing you forget how to do though, and I had forgotten how much satisfaction I used to get out of range trips. Even more this way because my honorary uncle Jack had me shooting one hand stance, something new for me. The range is fairly dark inside so the family I was shooting with all use UltraDot sights. I tried Jacks S&W 41 with an ultradot and loved it.

Now I can't stop thinking about fiddling with my 22 pistol, a Mark II 22/45. I've already worked out a deal with my dad to swap him his Mark II Target, which I can change the grips on. The 22/45 grip is supposed to be a clone of a 1911. It's fine but the small grip makes one-hand harder, at least compared to the M41. Dad's already got a dot on that one as well.

I don't know a lot about how the matches work, but I know theres a handicap system. I still don't play golf but one of the things I admire about it is the way the handicap system encourages people to work on their game. If you strip away the bullshit around golf it's really a lot of men and women who'd like to be just a little bit better, and that keeps them going out weekend after weekend. Tricia's father is one of the most thoughtful men I've met about this kind of thing, a couple of times we've sat outside and talked and he's told me a lot of what he knows about learning the game. Something about shooting appeals to me more though, but I hope I can take my matches as seriously as he takes his, because it gives you some kind of center of things when you dont know what the hell else you should be doing with your time.

anyway now ive got a bunch of frivolous purchases to make from volquartsen, dads not going to recognize his pistol when he gets it back :)

The Peace Racket

2007-08-28T08:28:00.000-07:00

http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_peace_racket.html

2007-08-28T05:19:00.000-07:00

went to see Monte Montgomery at the State Theatre in Falls Church. That's a good place to see a show, and I am very happy to have been introduced to it. I haven't been to see any music since I moved.

M.M. is unique- his facility on acoustic guitar is incredible, but like all my other favorite musicians I think he would rather hear compliments on his writing, and the guy writes good songs.

It is invigorating to hear a lot of unusual harmony outside of music where you expect to hear it, especially in the context of a song that could easily get radio play. Janek Gwizdala does a podcast on bass playing and this week he was talking about melody in improvisation. There are a slew of impressive improvising bassists but not a lot of them make the connection between popular music and improvised music, and melody is undoubtedly the bridge that connects them. The timing of that podcast and seeing M.M. play was uncanny, because Monte Montgomery is exactly that kind of player. Several times I caught myself thinking "what is that he is playing?", which is a pointless question because the phrases are something that exist in that moment, and it is important only to remember them. Understanding is something that may or may not happen later, and it has no bearing on the experience.

People like Gwizdala have really started to strike me lately. I bought John Ellis's album "By a Thread" a couple of weeks ago, and I had an odd feeling of being really proud of my generation when I was listening to it. I sometimes regret that because of the choices I've made in life I haven't been able to develop my abilities to the level of the players I admire, but it is impossible to feel real regret when you're listening to a piece of music like any of the compositions on Ellis' album. Fuck that, man! I got down to the basement and started studying Reuben Rogers bass lines. His playing is outstanding throughout, every performance on the album is worth studying, in fact. Aaron Goldberg, Mike Moreno (who is becoming a big favorite), and Terreon Gully. These guys have arrived, and they're us.

Developing your gifts can be a struggle, I think because people long to have a kind of perfect, unified identity where you have a talent and it grows unbounded, and it is both what you are and what you do. It's no coincidence that the language for such people is "star". They act as guides yet we feel we can never reach them. All too often people stop the journey and spend their time thinking about where they would rather be, which leads to misery. If you replace that kind of thinking with simple repetetive tasks, you stay so busy that you stop caring about where you are. Just like taking a long trip in a car, you don't spend much time thinking about regret for where you are, because the car is moving and you're experiencing something.

I am fortunate to have met Jim Stinnett when I did because every time I start to feel that regret about where I am, I can see his big grin and the puzzled expression he gives you when you act like you've run out of things to learn. Anytime you feel that way its because you're too dumb to recognize how much you don't know, or too arrogant to admit it. So rather than feeling sorry for yourself, you've just got to tackle the thing thats in your way.

If it's a song, you transcribe it. Miles Davis tune "Four" has always been frustrating to me because people play it so fast and its easy to make it a lot harder than it needs to be on the bass. I remember one time years ago in a lesson with Lucas Pickford, I asked him how he learned to play walking bass and he held up one of Aebersold's books of the transcriptions of Ron Carters lines from the tapes, and just kind of shook his head. I never quite understood what he meant until later when Stinnett said the same thing in a different way. People my age seem to want to take everything apart and then build something totally new with theories and principles. We seem to have a big problem copying people, but we need to get over it, because life it too short to try to reinvent everything from scratch.

2007-08-08T18:38:00.000-07:00

I have a harder time starting on entries in this journal than I did a year ago.

I haven't got anything to bitch about, for starters, and somewhere during the past six months or so I seem to have lost the penchant for bitching. I think that may be a side effect of having a private commute- I experience the public very little since moving to Virginia, except in those places I go by my own will- to restaurants and such.

I suspect that if I commuted into DC by car I'd be a homicidal maniac. I have this thought every morning when I get a brief glance at Highway 66 over the side of the Waples Mill Road bridge that crosses it between Fairfax and Oakton. Every day its a logjam at 6:30. I'd feel smug but I remind myself that feeling smug is for assholes. Its an aching rage those people endure and they'd happily tear out and eat a smug heart. I don't blame them, I've been stuck in that shit before. I chose my way out of it and I'll never feel smug because fate would feed my smug ass a nice fat deer around the corner just past the bridge where Oakton Road runs in.

A year ago I thought I'd be more annoyed about the Enthusiast-Parent movement than I have been. Occasionally my wife has bothered me with insecurity about the attachment parentists or whatever other crackpot fad she has stumbled across on the internet. From the gnashing about parenting that she would IM me all day, I assumed that at some point things would turn sour and be bad and I'd find unpleasantness in fatherhood. In the end the only unpleasantness I can recall is the worry my wife was plagued by on account of reading too many websites about how to parent, written by people who had only very recent experience at it.

It's the same trend you see everywhere- young, dumb people in love with something new and positive that they are experts start writing how-to guides, not as filled with error as borne by it, by the pathological need to teach that which we have just learned.

What I experienced instead during this year was joy that needn't be described. Parenthood in my mind is like the high tech manufacturing process on TV, where a grain of sand falls into the recipe, and the finished product splits along the line where the defect laid. If there is any selfishness left in your heart by the time your children arrive it will foul the product of your efforts, if not the child than the relationship that bore it.

I am no expert but I can see enough of how this stuff works to know that selfishness is the impurity that poisons families. It's the same selfishness that makes proselytizers crave the internet, they lust after the idea of seeing their words repeated. Here I go bitching. That was the only bad part.

And maybe having to visit the emergency room once. That was also bad.

The good part is how you can lead a life that is simultaneously mundane and profoundly gratifying. All the ritual I crave is here, the alarm clock and the coffee pot and a trip to the office. Yet there is far less of the boredom and the paralyzing self-scrutinization of the old days. At 3 O clock I leave the office and I don't have any qualms about it because theres somebody who needs me right about that time.

I am not obsessed about what's going on because I know if it's that important it'll find me. On the other hand, all the things I love, I still have. In caring for a child you understand more clearly the similar responsibility you have always had to care for yourself. It is still distinctly yours and I have had much less difficulty acknowledging it. I'm not bathing myself in luxury I just make sure theres a steady supply of books arriving at the house, because I am too goddamn old to be getting bored and turning all depressive as a result.

Sometimes I get awoken at night and its alarming and unsettling. Fortunately it doesnt happen very often, owing to my wife's convictions about babies and sleep. being completely ignorant of the subject mysef, I thought these values she had were bogus. fortunately women seem to be built to have opinions about child related crap. sometimes it means being hassled by some old broad at the supermarket about how I've got the baby in the cart, but significantly it means that the baby sleeps in a sane way and place and everybody gets to keep their shit together as a result. I am glad that I avoided having any opinions about it because I'd have just have gotten in the natural way of things, and it wouldnt have made any difference anyway.

i still have no opinions, only experience.

Myron Magnet

2007-08-07T06:20:00.000-07:00

http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_black_america.html

2007-08-04T19:19:00.000-07:00

Here I sit, alone on a Saturday night with no beer. No matter what she says, my wife polished it all off before leaving on a trip and stranding me here with a sleeping baby.

From Eleanor's Thi...

Here she is, helping me out today. "Hold this while daddy cranks it, honey". You can see there she has my parts guy waiting on her cell phone.

The throttle adjustment on this bike- well if you actually want to be able to see the cable while you are adjusting it -is under the airbox. The airbox, which is tethered to the brains of the bike by at least a dozen sensor wires and vacuum hoses, is underneath the gas tank. The gas tank in turn is wrapped up in the fairing, which consists of about 87 separate pieces of plastic. Thankfully it isn't like the door panels in cars, where once disassembled, go back together crooked and fall off when you slam the door.

I shouldn't complain, this type of mess on cars has gotten so insane that normal people cannot possibly have enough time and patience for it to be worth doing work yourself, like trying to change out a water pump. Anything more advanced than a brake job requires separating the entire body and chassis and probably removing the heads. At least on the bike, work can be done at home.

Many of the hoses are in impossible positions, or at least they are easy to get off but impossible to put back on. I have a set of ridiculous looking pliers, needle nose things stretched out to bizzarre lengths and twisted. They look like those fish that live at the bottom of thirty thousand foot ocean trenches; like something Dr. Seuss would keep in his toolbox. They are weird but indispensable; you can thread them into tiny remote spaces where no hand can go, to slip on a hose or turn a tiny screw.

What a man really needs is a set of tentacles, tipped with some manner of barb or flagella that could operate a hose clamp in tight quarters. Eleanor isn't advanced enough yet to take instruction, which is regrettable because I needed those tiny roly-poly arms about three times today. I had to fall back to the weird pliers.

The purpose of dismantling the bike was that the abrupt throttle opening has returned. All the internet sages claim that its the throttle cable, so I wanted to have a look at the throttle bodies. There was several mm of slack in both cables, and I got all of it out that I could take without opening the throttle when the bars turn. Since the papoose was with me I couldn't take a test spin, but based on the play in the cable (probably 4mm) I think this may do it. My previous adjustment helped for a few weeks but the trouble returned.

The Dumbest Idea in History

2007-07-21T17:31:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, mankind devised a pocket sized radio transmitter that could be attached to a keychain, for the purpose of remotely toggling the power locks on an automobile. It was a fine invention. Someone at GM thought to wire the receiver up to the horn, to provide reassuring feedback that your vehicle is locked, in the form of a quick chirp.

At around the same time, some dumb bastard, or more likely a team of dumb bastards, made what I believe to be one of the greatest mistakes in the history of invention; an idiotic "feature" that has led to more misery and aggravation than any feature ever added to any product.

It's a little red button that says "PANIC". Really it should say "EMBARASSMENT" or "SHAME" because. Maybe PANIC is right, but its not a button that allows one to indicate one's own state of panic, but rather a trigger to set it off.

Because nobody carries a single key, and virtually everybody carries their keys in their pockets, the idea that a little rubber button that could cause the fucking horn to blare until the battery runs dry is preposterous. Further, nobody, NOBODY, is going to give a rats ass about a beeping car horn in the distance. You could be getting beaten to death by a team of drunken santa clauses in a parking garage, and next door the guy who hears your car alarm going off would be thinking about how much he'd like to kick the shit out of you for failing to police your car alarm. Jackass.

Thats not unlike the sentiment I've felt several times as I lie in bed listening to some jackass's car alarm going off just outside the building. Eventually I'd decide to go outside and figure out who's car it was, for future vandalism purposes. Only when I got downstairs, the floor in the kitchen was shaking every time the alarm horn blasted, so that I realized it was my own goddamn truck that had been honking in the garage for a half hour, because the MORON button had gotten pushed as I dropped my keys on the nighstand.

I decided to solve this problem once and for all by simply cutting the button out of my key fob. I did just that; now theres a great hole where the red FOOL button used to be. I was so smart. Only now while the keys are jingling in your pocket, the tip of another key on the ring goes into the hole, scrapes the copper fingers where the button used to be, and sets the fucking alarm off. What's more, pocket lint seems to be conductive and there are times where the alarm goes off and im there jamming my pocketknife into the fob to stop it, and it start back up again.

Yesterday I was in the garage and it started again. hONK HONK HONK. A vein popped out on my forehead and I reached for a nearby ball peen hammer, intent to finish the fob. At the last moment I realized that I had better turn off the alarm before I destroy the transmitter. I did, but then it came right back on again. Something, I realized, was afoot. Finally I got it to stay off. I took it inside, found where the trace to the JACKASS button was printed on the tiny circuit board, and I drilled a quarter inch hole right through it. Never again, you rat bastard.

A few minutes later while showing my handiwork to my wife, she says "oh that? the baby was chewing on my keys and I heard the alarm go off, so I turned it off for you!"

I'm going out to look for a fuse.

How The News Works

2007-07-19T05:17:00.000-07:00

http://www.salon.com/comics/tomo/2007/07/16/tomo/index.html

Cheney vs Pelosi

2007-07-11T20:07:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SA4fwBFoKg

What I Did During My Summer Vacation

2007-07-09T06:40:00.000-07:00

Late last night, a question occurred to me:

"What would George Washington think of my playing the new Zelda game?"

You see, my wife went a bit crazy and bought me a Nintendo Wii for my 32nd birthday. They are scarce and although I was delighted to receive one I was terrified about what she might have paid for it. I have given strict orders that she not reveal the exact figure, since I am already having a lot of heartburn lately.

"How is George Washington involved?", I can hear you ask. The answer is simple, although you know I will make it a long one. The founding father has been on my mind as a result of a family outing to the estate of the man himself, at Mount Vernon, which is separated from our home Fairfax by only a pleasant drive down the George Washington parkway. This detail and and my recent fixation on the man's history, combined with my wife's pathological need to be "out of the house", propelled us there.

There were annoyances. The baby vomited spontaneously and stank up the car. It is peculiar how vomiting makes one feel like a new person, since everybody in the vicinity feels worse. The other annoyance is that despite the guides at the plantation often repeating the point that GW rose at five each morning to go about his business, the park itself doesn't open until 8, by which time it is already sweltering and busloads of dreadful middle school students are converging upon the place. Finally someone set the food court kitchen on fire leading to an evacuation, but it was as were leaving anyhow was it was a memorable touch.

The place was nice. My favorite detail was the paneling installed throughout the first floor of the mansion. The frames looked like butternut or a very light mahogany, while the panels were what looked like highly figured crotch mahogany, except that they were too light, unless they had not been stained the red you'd expect. I asked a melodramatic tour guide about it and he just said "Oh, pine". I was puzzled because he seemed to know everything else about the place, but I couldn't figure out where you could find pine boards with crotch grain that weren't a solid knot. Last night after we were home I visited the Mount Vernon website, which has a virtual tour that solved the mystery. Washington had pine boards used for his panelling, stained a light mahogany. The panels themselves had a mahogany crotch grain painted on by hand, since that wood was in high fashion but outrageously expensive. Now that's my kind of guy.

2007-07-07T05:46:00.001-07:00

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3568/

Why Linux Advocates are Fools

2007-07-06T06:39:00.000-07:00

this morning I found yet another article on the web about linux advocacy.

a while back I read an article somewhere that said you should never trust anybody who uses the phrase "ordinary people" as a means of distinguishing them from us. In computerese the phrase is "the common user", and wannabe computer people use it to distinguish the ignorant savages from us, the knowledgeable elite.

to linux zealots, the common user is the modern day noble savage. these idealists, fresh out of high school or college, make it their goal to save the common user from whatever constitutes the dark threat of the day. Comically, the big villain is still Microsoft, after all these years. It's hard to imagine in a world where Malaria and hunger are still not under control that a bunch of pubscent Don Quixotes can make it their mission in life to protect affluent first world computer users from the dangers of proprietary software and Bill Gates. Imagine if that energy could be harnessed for something useful.

Anyway the most amusing aspect of this absurd situation is that most of these vocal "advocates" of open source software wouldn't know what to do with a line of source code. They'll acknowledge that the noble savages won't actually make use of the source code either, but that by having the source available, their benevolent technological superiors will be able to create for them a world of ease and openness unrivaled by anything the commercial world could produce. It's a pretty picture, but sadly most of the advocates are simply not equipped intellectually to be able to make some kind of contribution to the effort. Spend some time reading through bug reports on the Canonical tracker thing and you realize that these fanboys have a couple of things in common; they are all absolutely convinced that open source software is going to save the world, and secondly that virtually none of them have got the foggiest fucking clue how computer programs are structured or how they work. The ones who do have generally little to no experience at releasing or maintaining software. What you wind up with is a tiny minority of skilled enthusiast programmers who are just out to have a good time and are too busy programming to engage in high-minded rhetoric about freedom.

in my opinion the movement to replace commercial desktop software with something like linux has been largely disgraceful. the majority of features offered by the software are bad ripoffs of Apple or Microsoft products. They are largely unpolished, poorly tested, and scantily documented. Frequently they are hard to get installed or configured. I have confidence in my opinion here because I have been using these pieces of software since they were introduced, and I still do, so I'm keenly aware of their shortcomings and I'm not willing to overlook them on account of the nobility of the open source movement. Crap is crap, and if you look through freshmeat.net 99% of what you see is crap, written by kids and used by nobody.

Where Linux is absolutely brilliant on the other hand is in the hands of skilled software developers. almost any tool you can imagine needing is there for you. I have quality compilers, quality relational database management software, and a reliable platform on which to run them. KDE is nicely done but the thing you should be thinking about when you see it is not "look at that desktop" but rather imagine that the environment in which it was developed was made possible by GNU and free software.

Open source software is like a big public gymnasium in which the minds of software developers can exercise their abilities and become better at what they do. At some juncture they may go on to solve problems for "the common user", perhaps even using open source software to do it, but that is not really the value. The value is that all of us who dedicate ourselves to writing software are not limited by our access to tools. Benefits to the public at large are a second, not first, order result of the availability of source code for software, and its foolish to mistake who really benefits from the availability of the code.

The people who really benefit from Linux don't need to be proselytized to about the advantages of open source software because they already understand them. They don't need advocacy rants on the internet because programmers are like moths- they find the bright spots in the environment and they're already there. A lot of datacenters aren't running Linux machines because savvy fanboy IT guys converted their boxes over to Linux. They're running Linux boxes because skilled programmers realized they could simplify how they deliver product by engineering to a common operating system for which there is a good depth of understanding in the community of its users.

So the next time you hear yourself blathering to "the common user" about your noble principles about software, ask yourself: "do I know what the fuck I am talking about?". My guess is probably no. If you really want to be useful to the community that you imagine yourself a part of, develop yourself. The noble savages take care of themselves.

2007-07-04T15:31:00.000-07:00

One time years ago I decided to go to the Patriots super bowl championship parade downtown in Boston, even though it was about 1 degree outside, because I couldn't resist the allure of something that might happen only once in my lifetime. little did I know it would be horrifying being swept along in a human wave (particularly when I couldn't feel my feet), and that the Pats would keep winning the superbowl and everybody would forget about the parade.

This morning there was something way bigger than a superbowl parade in the DC metro. A Wednesday morning without bumper to bumper traffic on I66 has got to be way more unusual than the rarest eclipse. I had to get a piece of it.

I took the bike. I missed the George Washington Parkway (I think) and wound up in DC. Even at 6:30 the cops were out with barricades, so I had to putter around downtown trying to make my way back over the Potomac. I can remember a time in my life where I would have been terrified to be lost downtown in a major city, not to mention on a two-wheeled contraption. I credit Boston with having jaded me with respect traffic to the extent that I could not possibly be shocked or shaken by being lost anywhere in the United States. I can imagine getting shaken up in Bolivia maybe but not here. I just rode around the letter-named streets for a while checking shit out while I looked for I66 signs.

I got on the GWP finally but there was no East/West option on the ramp I took. Maybe I missed something obvious, but I rode up to Mclean before I could get turned around. It looks pretty hoity toity along the river. That's cool.

Lately I've been devoting my free time to filling in the holes in my understanding of things, in no particular order. It all started when I rode through a place called Oak Hill out in Faquier County on route 55. There was one of those black on white historical marker signs and I slowed down a little to read it. It was the home of John Marshall, the famous supreme court justice who happens to be the namesake of my alma mater. I realized I knew practically nothing about the guy so when I got home I took a series of wild tangents and wound up spending most of the evening reading Marshalls multi-volume biography of George Washington, which let to a series of Amazon Marketplace purchases of used books. Now months later Ive worked through stacks of books on the founding fathers. You could spend a year studying Dumas Malone's volumes on Thomas Jefferson alone. The dangerous combination of Wikipedia and Amazon means you can follow practically any historical tangent you like for about 5 bucks.

The nice part of studying history as an adult is that something like riding past John Marshall's plantation will give you chill bumps if you've read a few hundred pages about the guy. Mt. Vernon has been high on my list of places to go since I worked through Washington's biographies ( I like "An Indispensable Man", by the way) and it's only maybe 30 minutes from Fairfax (home of GMU, I get chills riding by there too). That's what had me on the GWP, even though I wound up just speeding by Mt. Vernon when I got there, since I'm not crazy about stopping for tourist shit. Once I went to Ernest Hemingways home in Key West and I could just hear him snorting and swearing about a bunch of donkey shit disciples roving through his house wearing bad shirts and snapping photos. He'd have shot these people.

You can't go to these places and know about these people and not start making connections. Was I more of a Washington or a Jefferson or a Hamilton? Also it's funny to see the political stuff that post adolescent neophytes get all riled up about has been happening in the US for 225 years. Reading about the Greeks and Romans you get the sense its been going on forever, but those connections are more abstract and harder to feel sure about.

It's amusing to think about what the men of that era sacrificed for their political goals, when today amateur politicos don't go much farther than making a couple of donations (by credit card, online) and maybe writing some angry blog posts about George Bush. What a bunch of pussies.

Anyway the GWP is a pretty road, although somewhat boring by motorcycle since its four lanes until it hooks up with 235. Also it doesn't have any particular historic significance I'm aware of other than passing through Mt Vernon and Washington's grist mill and distillery (which has a housing development next door, which pleased me because I'm sure it annoys purists, which is ironic when you consider what "development" means in this context). I think I'll go back in the fall when the crowds are gone, so I can get chills wandering through the house GW built.

Article of the Year

2007-06-14T19:59:00.000-07:00

here you have it:

http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/The_American_Lefts_Silly_Victim_Complex.html

Carvin BR615 Review, Installment 2

2007-06-14T06:04:00.001-07:00

I've been able to play the new amp the past few evenings and I have some more observations about it.

A lot of times when you play a 5 or 6 string bass through an amplifier, the E A D and G strings sound normal, but the B string sounds weird. Bass players will often remark about whether a speaker can "handle" a low B string, as if the amp is perhaps incapable of producing those frequencies. In my experience its the other way around, typical bass amps handle it too well and the B string sounds very boomy. I think this is usually the result of having the cabinet tuned to resonate somewhere just below 40Hz, to boost the bass output some.

I don't think that sounds bad, but it can be surprising, particularly if you are playing a ballad and go down for that low D. Your volume seems to whoosh out of control. I have played through some amps in fact where I avoided the B string because it sounded like a different instrument when you played on that string. The first gig I ever played on a 5 string around 1992 or so was memorable, I had been playing in a pit orchestra for several weeks and the whole ensemble would turn around to look at me whenever I played a note on the B string. Didn't sound wrong, just kind of shocking. Kind of like those crabs that have a normal claw on one side, and a giant garbage-truck sized thing on the other.

Fifteen years later I'm sitting in my basement trying out the new amplifier, and I'm conditioned to the B string boom, and when the BR615 doesn't produce it, something seems wrong. With this combo you actually hear what the B string sounds like. It's actually kind of disappointing at first- the right hook becomes a jab like all the other strings. I'm used to playing low D's softly but you don't have to do it with this amp; the notes on the B string are the same volume as all the rest. The nice thing is that when you're playing tunes in F or Bb in 5th position, it sounds way more consistent, you arent sacrificing anything by playing there instead of first position.

I assume that since everybody has a 5 string these days, Carvin is tuning the cabinets below B so that there's no weird variation in volume. Come to think of it I'm not even sure the box is ported, I'll have to look tonight.

I still haven't found anymore information about what kind of IC amps Carvin is using in this head, although I've been asking around. I'm hoping someone there notices my posts and gives me the skinny.

Anyhow so far so good.

Suzuki DL650 Jerky Throttle Blippy

2007-06-07T18:30:00.000-07:00

sorry about the title, I just wanted this to show up in the search engines :)

there are only two things that really irritate me about the suzuki dl650. First is the way the P (Park) position on the ignition switch is placed a hairs breadth to the left of the LOCK position. About once a month when I leave work the fucking battery is bone dry. The only way to prevent it is to go around back of the bike and bend over and see if the taillight is going. There's no easy way to fix it, either, other than installing some LED taillights. I think I might.

The other thing is the way the bike surges when you just crack open the throttle. The situation is like this, you're going into a slow curve, maybe theres a traffic light at the end of it. You gear down and let the motor brake the bike a little. When the revs match the speed, you crack the throttle open just enough to keep the engine braking you further, but as you crack it, the bike coughs and jerks forward. It is a massive pain in the ass. The only way around it is to go heavy on the throttle when you shift, or to slip the clutch a little as you open the throttle.

A while back I synced the throttles thinking that had to be it. It did seem maybe a little better, but then as time went on it was obviously not the solution. Last night I did the throttle position sensor, but it was fine. I was sure that was it, but it wasn't.

I needed to change the oil and while it was draining I decided to adjust the chain slack, thinking the slack might be behind the surge. One thing led to another and I also wound up taking off the throttle cable boots and taking up some of the slack in the throttle and return cables. I followed the manual exactly, but its hard because there is play in the grip throttle even if you tighten the throttle cable up like a banjo string. So I did it by feel and just got rid of the obvious cable play and then cinched up the return cable until it was just tight.

I took it out again this morning, and I thought I was going to cry. No more jerking and surging when the throttle opens. Unfortunately I can't say for sure whether it was the chain or the throttle, but I suspect the throttle because the chain had accumulated some slack over the past couple thousand miles, but the blippy throttle problem has been the same since I got it, and I never bothered to check the cables. dumbass.

It's a big difference, especially when you're threading through a parking lot and the bike keeps bucking and you look like an asshole.

Carvin BR615 Review, Installment 1

2007-06-05T10:05:00.000-07:00

I don't get new bass stuff that often, and it's such a thrill for a guitar nerd to get new stuff that I figured I'd do a cheeseball review of the amp I ordered this afternoon.

I've been playing bass for about twenty years and have played gigs for the past 15. I've had a lot of different amplifiers, combos, heads and cabinets, etc. Most recently I used a rack mounted amp and preamp with a pair of speaker cabinets. The past few years I've played a mix of rehearsals and gigs. Often rehearsals are in a rental practice room with some amp, or a gig where either the venue or another band brought the backline. That's a great situation.

There are two other common situations. The first is a rehearsal at a fairly small space, like somebody's basement. Often people have some bass amp, but it turns out to not be great, and you wish you had brought your own small one. So its a good idea to have some kind of combo amp about 100-200 watts.

The other situation is the gig at a venue without much in the way of a PA. It seems like a rule of nature that if the gig is in a huge room, the PA will be bad, and as a bonus, it will be harder than hell to get in and out of the building. I played one memorable gig last year at a college where some insolent work-study student lectured the band on feedback and forgot to order wedges for the stage. The room was like a hangar and you had to go up about three flights of stairs and then a quarter mile down the sidewalk, which was under construction. I got a parking ticket while I dragged all my junk inside. And it was raining.

Looking back at all these gigs, I can draw some conclusions. The most obvious one is that you can't really get away with owning a single amplifier. There are going to be some situations where you just need something way bigger or way smaller, but in my experience the large stuff tends to be at gigs where I am traveling and renting, or where the backline is provided. Almost every time that I've brought my own amplification, I could get away with a 400 watt amplifier and one or two cabinets with 12's, but dragging all that stuff into a venue while you're double parked outside is such a frustrating experience that a few times I've wished I could just go home. Maybe I'm lazy but being a pack mule sucks a lot of the pleasure out of playing gigs.

For a while I've been checking out high powered combo amps. I think the first I tried was probably an SWR Redhead, which seemed like an awesome package, but I was never nuts about the volume and definitely not the price. SWR had a few others; the sound of the Silverado was fantastic to my ear but the thing cost more than my amp and cabinets combined. Some other amps I've liked a lot are the Fender Bassman 200s that are in all the practice rooms at Berklee. I've A/B that amp with the Fender Pro 400 and realized that I don't like 2x10 amps. The Bassman 200, on the other hand--what a sound, but the power concerned me.

The last few years have yielded a bunch of new high-power combos: the Aguilar 112 thing, EA, Markbass, etc. The problem with most of these amps, in my opinion, is that they cost too damn much. I'm not spending a thousand bucks for a 500 watt head.

The alternative is to get something like a Peavey TNT 150, but there are few feelings worse than knowing you've got your amp cranked all the way and the band is complaining about the lack of volume.

Recently I began preparing to move from Boston to Northern Virginia. After my last gig in Boston, I put my amp and cabinets up for sale. Once they were gone, I was ampless for the first time in 20 years.

I spent the last 6 months or so shopping around for a high-powered combo amp. I had a number of candidates:

Roland D-Bass 115 or 210
Markbass CMD 151
Aguilar SC112 combo
Ampegs new BA300 and BA600 combos
Line 6 Lowdown 300
Various other new stuff, Trace Elliott, SWR,
Carvin BRX212 or BR6xx
GK Neo112/700 or 212/1001
Mesa Walkabout Scout

I know people will say that I should try out tiny heads like a Walter Woods, or Acoustic Image, or the Markbass Littlemark thing. I thought about the latter pretty seriously, but I would like to wait a few more years before I invest in any head with IC amps like the Tripath stuff or having switching power supplies. Also the cost is pretty steep on those.

I played as much of this stuff as I could. Frankly the sound doesn't matter that much to me. As long as the amp doesn't sound weird when I plug into it, and turning the knobs does what I expect, it's fine. Ampeg seemed to have me with the BA600 but as usual, it's now months after the announcement at NAMM and there is still no availability. The GK Neo amps seemed pretty cool, but pricey.

Carvin discontinued the BRX212 and BRX112 at about the time I began to consider them. It may be that they simply weren't selling well but I was loath to consider a product destined for the scrapheap.

This afternoon I finally gave up and just ordered a damn amp. After reading good reviews of the Carvin head, I opted for their BR615 combo for $549. Carvin is killing the competition on price-- this amp was half the price of many of the others I looked at. I wasn't able to trial the amp, but since there weren't really any standouts in the group I tried, I wasn't expecting to make a decision based on sound. I'm already accustomed to playing through strange amps--an amp has to try hard to suck enough to make me complain.

Here are my concerns, prior to receiving this thing:

The efficiency of the speaker is lower than my old Aguilar 112s by 3dB. Even with similar power to my old amp this thing may not have enough ass.

If it breaks I'll have to ship it back to Carvin.

The topology of this amp is not clear to me. Based on the photo of the internals in Bass Player, I think this amp may be using one of the new IC amps, although it definitely has a conventional power supply with a gigantic toroidal transformer. The power supply is my main concern, so I think I might be comfortable enough with an amp that is expensive to get repaired (because of the shipping) if it doesn't have any exotic components. It's also USA-made, which improves my confidence somewhat, although some of the USA boutique stuff seems to suffer more than the Chinese-made, run-of-the-mill amps.

1:17PM 6/5/2007

Anyway, I've just ordered this thing. I used the online web ordering, it was simple enough and I got an email confirmation with a minute or so of ordering. The shipping was about 50 bucks but I didn't have to pay a sales tax. I feel less dirty after using Carvin's site than I do when perusing Musicians Friend. Those little mind control messages at the bottom of the screen make me nauseous: "Buy it today, the tone will make you forget all about your poor credit rating!"

I'll update this post as the order continues.

3:57PM 6/5/2007

Got another email and my order status changed from "NEW" to "RECEIVED."

10:00PM 6/5/2007

Got another email, "SHIPPED", tracking number included. They ship quick, that's nice.

12:10PM 6/11/2007
UPS just dropped the box off. I popped it open to make sure nothing was busted. Looks nice.

It is pretty easy to order stuff from Carvin.

5:37PM 6/11/2007
I've been able to play the amp for about an hour now.

My initial impressions are that it is a very loud amp for its size. With the EQ tweaked a little bit and the active switch turned on, I cannot turn it up past 1 without rattling the walls of our basement a little too much. I've run it up to like 5 and it's outrageous. I don't think volume is going to be a problem.

It is a much nicer looking design in person than in the catalog. In the catalog photos it's kind of a dull looking thing, so I was surprised when I took it out of the box. I wondered why Carvin left the corner protectors off, and now I know. Usually the plastic ones split or the metal ones get caved in and look worse than having the plywood dented some. They use a thinner plywood; I can't tell from the carpet whether it's 3/8 or 1/2", but it makes the amp look trim and sharp. I like the blue LEDs and the gray face without any superfluous crap written on it. It's always annoying to have some marketing BS silk-screened on the front panel of the amp--usually they're advertising GENUINE FAKE TUBE SOUND or something. All the materials look good and are in proportion to the size of the amp. The knobs are not guitar-sized knobs wedged onto a 2U high panel; they're smaller and dark chrome so as not to be garish. The Carvin logo itself is scaled down to the proper size. I like the mini toggles instead of those horrible spring-loaded plastic push buttons. Carvin has evidently hired a designer to do some aesthetic tweaking of their products, and the results are good. A lot of the stuff you encounter on a sales floor has had garishness added to attract buyers; this thing looks kind of serious by comparison.

There is a ding in the plywood along the top lip of the speaker cabinet, matching up with a divot in the shipping box. It's not enough to bother me, although if you're picky about that kind of stuff, the shipping packing is not great; there weren't any Styrofoam blocks around the amp.

I don't really know how to talk about the knobs on the amp; most of them are pretty obvious. I am suspicious of any knob on a bass amp that was not on the front of a Fender Bassman, and if the purpose or function of a knob cannot be summed up in less than about four words, then I usually wish it could be drilled out of the amp, never to be seen again. The Carvin amps I have seen in catalogs in the past seemed to have the kitchen sink of knobs while just staying out of absurdity, but it appears that they've gone more in the direction of practical with this head.

Where you would expect to find the "GAIN" knob there is one marked "DRIVE," and it seems to function like you would expect a gain to function, except that it has a smaller effect on the overall output of the amp. They also claim that when it's all the way up there's a little bit of overdrive. It's subtle, but you do hear a little bit of fuzziness without ever getting into distortion. Actually pretty nice; with both my basses I like it all the way up.

It doesn't make sense for me to talk about all of the knobs on this thing. For starters it would be tedious since you can just look at a picture and figure out what most of them are going to do. Bass and Treble controls are what you'd expect and seem to be in good places. There are three parametric mid controls. That's cool although sometimes I wonder how much value there is in having 6 knobs' worth of mid adjustment unless you are playing the same instrument all the time. I considered screwing around with the mids on my bass with a finicky midrange-y pickup and no EQ, but then I considered having to possibly undo it all when I plug my other bass with a regular P/J setup. It wouldn't make much sense to have it defeatable either. I don't usually switch basses on a gig so it's probably a moot point.

There's a one-knob compressor. These things are great. I was introduced to the idea on a Fishman preamp box, and the idea is to reduce complexity by just making a compressor where the threshold rate and release are linked by some ratio to the position of one knob. It's not a precision instrument but it is fantastic when the sound is getting kind of flabby and you want a touch of compression. I haven't really played with this yet so I don't know how it compares to my Fishman.

There's a graphical EQ, although I'm not sure why. It's defeatable, which is nice because I never seem to use them when they're on an amp. There's already 5 different bands of EQ. I guess maybe if you would rather leave those flat and twiddle the sliders.

The sound seems fine. No weirdness. It seems that no modern review of a bass amplifier is complete without someone saying either that the tweeter "is harsh" or that it "is not harsh." I have never encountered a tweeter in a bass cabinet that did not sound dreadful if it was wide open, but I've played through many amps with a single 15 and I felt like I was suffering from high frequency hearing loss after a while because there was nothing above maybe 8 or 10kHz coming out of it. So you add tweeter like you add salt. This one seems fine.

Next thing I had to do was take it apart. The head is hung by 4 screws that go through the top of the amp. The chassis is one piece of formed sheet metal. I can't tell the gauge by sight although someone looking at these photos probably can. All the controls are on a daughter card, and there's another similar card with the output jacks and switches for the effects loop.

Right away one thing is certain, which is that this is not a conventional transistor amplifier. For a long time I have been bitching about the exorbitant prices the "boutique" amplifier builders have been charging for designs that are based around the new breed of ultra low cost discrete power amplifier ICs. There's nothing like reducing your design, materials, and manufacture cost enormously and then passing the savings on to yourself instead of the customer. Burns my ass up. While the price of consumer electronics is plummeting thanks to Tripath and Texas Instruments, the cost of a lightweight chip-based bass amp is through the roof.

Anyway the interesting module inside the amp is marked "POWER MODULE, PATENT PENDING." When you're looking at it from the top, the thick part with the sticker affixed is a heat sink about 2" thick with a fan on top that is screwed through to outside of the case. Peering underneath the edge of the heat sink I can see what looks like two gangs of three chips soldered to a board. I can't tell much more than that without removing the heat sink and I'm sure Carvin would ban be from customer service for life if I posted photos of me tearing the amp apart to that extent.

You can tell a little that there's some digital magic going on in there when you juuust barely open the master volume, you can hear a tiny bit of stepping in the volume level as on any digital receiver. It isn't notchy enough to be a nuisance, it's plenty smooth, but the amp is so loud even near 0 that I was delicately twiddling the knob and noticed that.

Anyway I wished they had mentioned this technology in the catalog because I would have run out and bought one right away if they said "super light high tech 600 watt amp head for 500 bucks,"as I recently pledged to whoever would build the first one.

There's not much else to write at this point. The real value of this amp won't be known until I get some rehearsals and gigs on it and see if the smoke gets out of it when it starts taking a flogging. I'll update this entry as I get to screw around with the thing a little more.

2007-06-04T07:01:00.001-07:00

When my grandparents were born, there weren't many cameras around. The only photos I have seen of my grandmother as a baby were my haggard looking great grandparents standing at the edge of a cornfield with some babies littered around them, the smallest one in my great grandmothers arms.

When my parents were born, they snapped a few more photos, and a few during school, so I've been able to see what my father looked like in the elementary grades. I think my grandparents must have lamented how few photographs of their parents existed, so they seemed to make a point of taking more as the 60s ended. There are photos of proms and dances, a few weddings and whatnot.

When we were born, cameras were dirt cheap and there are hundreds of photographs, of everything. Candid shots of me sitting in a pot of mashed potatoes, for example. They were more random than formal.

When my family looks at photographs together, the same thing always happens. My parents point out photos of people that my generation wouldn't recognize, long since dead. They are grainy and mysterious to me. Then we come to photos of my parents generation, and everyone (particularly the girls) laugh like hyenas at the hairstyles and clothing. Some of the clothes are positively absurd. The earth was apparently struck by a tiny black hole around 1968 that resulted in temporary damage to the dignity of human beings in North America. Later it knocked down a bunch of trees in Siberia, I hear.

The second order result of this period is that people in my generation do not look at photographs in the same way my parents generation did. My parents were happy to bring home a photo from the prom that reminded them of where they had been and what they had done. My own generation projects the future implications of each photograph and anticipate our own children laughing at us. It is a powerful dissuasive force.

The baby was christened this weekend, and now I've seen the photographs. There is a guy in them who looks sort of like me, only heavier and with an oddly large head, overly shiny cheeks and an enormously dopey smile. It is hard to tell the era of the photographs because everyone in them seems to be careful to wear clothes and hairstyles that are chronologically ambiguous. It is easy to point out the exceptions, even though the photos were only taken this weekend. Already we can see which things will be dated and which things will not. We have inadvertently learned the golden rules of design by faded drugstore prints.

My children will have some new kind of relationship with these photographs. For one thing they won't be on paper. I wonder if they'll be around at all since the life span of the rotten PC most of them live on is far shorter than the paper version. My mothers home burned when she was a child, destroying all her photographs. Now all it takes is some crappy Taiwanese hard drive failure to wipe out the historical record.

What will she see when she looks at the photos? We're a generation ahead of our parents in the technology, too. No more faded red prints or scotch tape damage. These are big ole multi megapixel marvels. You can zoom in on the salsa spot on my tie, if you like. The file even has the date; there's no need to look on the back. We've also sanitized them for embarrassment. There are no avacado appliances, no polyester slacks. My eyeglasses could have been my fathers or his fathers.

Maybe they'll laugh at how many photos we took. "Jesus dad, 14 photos of my foot, thats great". I am already embarrassed by the endless stream of closeup artsy photos of flowers, for example, that so many of my contemporaries seem to snap and then gaze at, longingly. Pretty twee.

Somehow, they're going to one-up us. It's going to be cliche to have a story about dad losing the family photos when he installed Windows 2012, or its not going to be enough megapixels, or our kids are going to be mutants with infrared vision and it'll be painful for them to look at our dreadful RGB photos. I don't know what it will be but it will happen. The meaning of life seems to be personal development aimed at sparing the susbequent generation from the embarassment of having been borne of the previous one. Only we never know what it is until its over.

2007-05-19T14:48:00.000-07:00

Last week there was a hubbub in the office. Reportedly one of the fellows had discovered a cat under the hood of his car. I imagined the grisly scene - twenty yards of entrails twisted about the fanshaft and bits of gib, barely identifiable as feline save for the odd claw, slowly baking onto the engine block in a horror show that would last for weeks. A horrible fate, to be sure, and even worse for the poor cat. Some of the guys headed down to check it out.

A little while later they returned in much lighter a mood than I would have reckoned. It seems not only had the cat not been processed, he had not even been maimed. This cat had, in fact, taken a ride on the front axle of a fellow's truck from Great Falls to Reston, if not farther. And it was a kitten and not a cat.

The office was abuzz. Quarters were secured for the palm-sized beast. The better part of the staff dropped what they were doing and began to speculate in earnest as to the sex of the animal, one concludes in order to get around to the more significant matter of naming and subsequently becoming attached to it. Five ounces (my weight estimate) of dynamite could not have shaken our office as profoundly as the undercarriage-borne arrival of a tiny cat.

I know how cats work. The bear tiny, hairy offspring with a squeaky cry. The spawn are genetically engineered by thousands of years of evolution to appeal to humans in a way that our own offspring are barely able to achieve. Their ploys for our affection are many and varied; they are nature's unequaled con-men. Which is why I ignored this one completely, having been duped myself on at least a half dozen occasions throughout my life, succumbing to years of torment in the form of crying, ass-dragging over the carpet, and piles of shit or vomit on or near my precious possessions, including my bed.

Reston being nearer civilization than my former home, some suggestions as to what to do with the larval cat were advanced by former military men. "Put him in the freezer until we figure something out," one fellow suggested, and I laughed because the idea of cats suffering is usually amusing to me. The office animal crowd was not amused.

I sat there trying to accomplish some acts of technical genius while the staff attended to the cat, but to no avail, as I was curious about an animal that could hitch a ride on a Universal Joint and then charm an office full of overachieving salespeople. How had he done it?

Talk turned serious after it became obvious that the office was falling apart in the presence of the cat. He could crawl right out of his paper-box cube and rove around distracting people with his meowing. Furthermore, it seemed likely he would take a shit on the office rug, and this being a satellite office none of us are really sure how (or if) the place gets cleaned. Headquarters would likely smite someone on the staff if feces was reported on the carpet. Efforts to have the cat adopted began.

Everyone involved in the rescue wanted to take the animal home, but this being a more middle-aged group than my former Cambridge colleagues, practical matters (i.e. spouses) precluded adoption. I myself had recently taken a sworn oath that no new animal would ever inhabit any home of mine unless it shared about half my genes - this after Trouble, one of our two cats, was eaten (we speculate) by a team of foxes operating in the neighborhood. Impossible.

Within 15 minutes the cat had been named Mini-Mike for the main instigator of the rescue, and an ad had been posted to Craigslist. Amazingly the ad had been answered and the cat's future in the home of some Cup-O'-Soup sippin' cat maniac in the District seemed assured. I was bothered. For a beast of such obvious merit to succumb to the likes of a cat lover seemed unfit, unconscionable. Hanging around some dreadful condo, listening to NPR left on all day to keep him company, choking down upscale cat food. This is a cat that rides in chassis, not some tea-drinking milquetoast.

"I'll take him," I announced. And that was that. I called my wife and told her to expect a second for dinner at the cat tray.

Then it occurred to me that the kitten and I would have to share my motorcycle home. I have transported cats in many ways that would be shocking to people who worship cats. In particular I recalled an episode where I needed to move a former pet about 2 miles to a new apartment and I had neither a DOT-approved cat transporting device nor the money or will to purchase one. I put the cat in my toolbox, and through a violation of physics that I have yet to understand, the cat escaped the toolbox at a traffic light in front of the Super America on 16th Street in Huntington and attached himself to my clutch pedal as I was attempting to stop the car. There were two Huntington Police cruisers stopped chatting while I tried to stall the car with the handbrake, all the while being mauled about the legs by the cat.

I ruled out the tail case of the motorcycle, fearing the worst.

I checked, and the kitten fit comfortably in the pocket of my cycle jacket, but the prospect of having the cat escape the pocket, particularly into the interior of the jacket, seemed to hold risk even with a minimum of imagination applied to the problem.

Fortunately, I had the backpack that my dear sister had given me as a gift. It's roomy inside and has good straps that keep it from flying off while you're riding. I've ridden with it all over the place with good results. I put the cat in it to see what would happen, and he seemed to prefer being inside the bag to being outside the bag. So before anyone could ask any questions about the wisdom of carrying a cat on your back in a motorcycle (I knew it would work, and that's all I ever need), I took off for home.

Here's Axel after we got home. I put some salami in there for him, since the other cat's food is large and it would be a lot like you or I trying to eat a softball, only harder. He liked the salami and thanked me by not taking a shit in my backpack.

Anyhow, Tricia loves Axel. She's been having a rough time of it with work and all, and it has lightened the mood around the house dramatically. Also, Sabrina, the other cat, apparently in the depths of depression since Trouble disappeared (even though he didn't do much other than assail her at random, as far as I could see), seems to be improving despite the new guy being quarantined (more namby-pamby new age pet BS, in my opinion) for a while. I suspect she plans to abuse him in retribution, but we'll see.

2007-05-17T05:41:00.000-07:00

last summer I took the Motorcycle Safety Foundation's beginner course from a place called Training Wheels of New England. It's a good deal, you get to tear around a parking lot for several hours on somebody else's motorcycle under the watchful eye of serious, impressive riders.

...

My two favorite machines are the airplane and the motorcycle. For many years I planned to get my pilots license. I studied books and magazines constantly. After all this time reading, I still don't know how to fly a plane, but I think I could lie to you about it convincingly.

Light airplanes and motorcycles have a few things in common, the primary thing being that their operation consists mainly of risk avoidance. The control inputs are so slight as to be secondary to simple awareness.

The cultures on the other hand could not be more different. They are so different that I, the wannabe pilot, am often embarrassed of motorcycles and motorcycling. If you pick up a copy of Flying magazine, almost all the columns have to do with training and risk avoidance. The training is very methodical and procedural. A pilot, even when flying VFR for pleasure, is flying maneuvers and not just out roaring around having a thrill. He requests permission to take off and land, and manages his speed as is appropriate for the maneuver being flown. Altitude is carefully monitored and controlled. People are watching. The aircraft is inspected regularly.
There is a fundamental emphasis on safety, but not in an absurd way.

Motorcyclists on the other hand seem to run the extremes. On one end are guys on high speed bikes tearing around in t-shirts and flipflops. These guys actually crave risk. In an age where we can't play with lawn darts or take an aspirin to school, there is something to be said for taking on risk and not giving a shit about it. It can be liberating. We're all going to die eventually and it is important to understand that living in fear is no kind of living. On the other hand, there is a profound joy in standing up and realizing you're alive after a scrape. I think that the memories of one good trip without a helmet is probably enough to get you through many years of head encasement.

At the other extreme are the self-righteous safety gestapo who could repel bullets with their multi-thousand dollar synthetic fabrics, myriad horns, and headlight modulators. They would likely buy a helmet with a strobe light on top if they could find one. These are people who take gleeful pleasure in criticizing the safety principles of anybody who is less uptight than they are. On the other hand, they seem to suffer little from the machismo that might keep a guy out a good training class, they buy sensible machines, and my guess is they crash at a rate probably 1/20th that of the people they disparage.

My approach to safety on the motorcycle is copied from the approach to safety in an airplane: equip reasonably, but strive for excellence of skill rather than excellence of impact resistance. In other words, practice your maneuvers rather than building your up with equipment to withstand a crash. All the kevlar in the world won't save me if I fall off the bike and get run over by a bus.

The MSF course consists of a lot of drills, flown in a parking lot. I did horribly at most of them. You cannot take your time in this class. Like 6th grade gym, everybody is watching you, especially when you're making an ass of yourself. When some guy dumped the clutch, panicked, and opened the throttle into a full bore 250cc wheelie, nobody missed it and it was the first thing you thought of when you looked at him later.

You don't pass the class by being good with machines. You have to listen to the things your instructor tells you and do them, even if you are afraid to do them. Many times people will go to a master to learn a thing, but then they'll continue to do their thing rather than doing what the instructor says. It's understandable to be afraid of something but its a complete mystery to me that people can be in these situations and lack the self awareness to recognize that they are hearing something and simply not responding to it.

To pass the class you absolutely have to trust one of the things the instructors tells you, which is that you must what your brain tells you about the thing on the ground just ahead of you that needs your urgent attention. Instead you look where you want to go. You also have to keep the throttle going even though you want to slow down, because it is better to go slightly faster than you want and run out of some line than to fall over.

I cynically thought, toward the beginning of the class, that these low speed cone weaving things were mostly a hedge against liability. Rather than allow people to exceed 20mph where they might actually learn something, the insurance company mandated they keep the speeds low by having you weave around in unrealistically small spaces on tiny toy motorcycles. Embarrassing really.

There may be an element of truth in that, but it doesn't matter. To me the little Nighthawk 250s seemed like Piper Cubs, and to airplane people a Piper Cub isn't an embarrassment at all. It's a rare thrill, something special to fly and experience. You can do anything in a Cub, including some things you couldn't do in a sexier airplane, like put tundra tires on it and land it on a sandbar in a river. The fundamental skills seem to me to be the same in a Cub as in a larger airplane, and I've never heard a single pilot disparage the cub on the basis of it's size or capabilities.

The Nighthawk 250, on the other hand, is marginalized in the commercial motorcycle culture. My guess is that the reason for this is that its a big event when somebody certifies a new aircraft, so every model with staying power becomes almost sacred to pilots. New motorcycles , however, appear on a schedule similar to that of athletic sneakers. As such they are adopted and disposed as fashion items. This accounts for all the embarrassing animosity between camps of various brand owners in the motorcycle community. It makes about as much sense as disparaging the color of a guys shirt. Hopefully the fad will tail off in a few years and the motorcycling community can mature like the airplane community.

After taking the class and riding for several hundred miles I was relieved to find that my shortcomings in the cone weave and figure-eights seemed to have a minimal impact on my ability to ride around for pleasure. I didn't fall over at intersections and I had been driving and riding long enough that I knew not to do anything stupid in traffic. What the hell had all those cones been for?

As hundreds turned into thousands, particularly when I began to commute to work on the bike, I'd notice things that annoyed me about my riding. I'd get to end of some great ride and make the sharp left onto my uncle's street, all wobbly and stupid. You can chalk it up to being tired from a long ride at first, but after you make a lousy turn at the same intersection a few times you realize its something you need to improve. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to think back to the cones and figure out that bad sharp turns and lousy cone weaving are probably connected somehow.

Everybody I've talked to who took the MSF course has said the same thing- that they mean to go back and practice some of that stuff, that they know they should be better at it. MSF runs a second course for people who've finished or don't need the first one, and I suspect its that nagging doubt about the cones that brings them back.

My old bass teacher Jim did something, when I first began to study with him, that frustrated me . Later it proved to be the most important thing that anybody ever taught me on the instrument. In fact its probably one of the most important things I ever learned period.

He made me play the blues on my bass. I'd played bass for 20 years, I knew how to play the blues. In fact the blues was kind of boring to me by the time Jim got around to teaching it to me, but he'd do it anyway. In my picture of the music world the blues was over in the corner someplace being stagnant and old and boring, and I sometimes thought he was trying to waste my time or just being a classicist about it. It was impossible for me to practice because it seemed so simple that I couldn't even think of a way to challenge myself playing it. He let me go this way for a couple of weeks before he started to reveal his plan.

The first thing I remember him asking me was to play the top two notes of the chord in the blues, he'd handle the bass note himself. I couldn't do it, not even barely. You can bullshit with your mouth but not with your hands. Not only could I not play the chords, I couldn't name them. I couldn't spell them, I could barely even spell the scales. This simple thing, the blues, I had been faking it the whole time. I did not know what the fundamentals were.

That's where we always, always get ourselves into trouble with learning. The fundamentals of things are never, ever obvious. They are never appealing or sexy, and people seem determined to invent bullshit fundamentals for any field of study that are wrong and simply won't ever get you anywhere. Some people know the fundamentals but talk about too much other crap and cloud up the issue. Some other people don't know exercises that focus purely on the fundamentals, or they don't know how to recognize the signs that somebody else doesn't know the fundamentals. The best teacher is never the guy who is fastest or most incredible, its the guy who knows the fundamentals and knows how to teach them.

Weaving through plastic cones on a motorcycle at 5 or 10 mph is about as pure a distillation of the fundamentals of riding a motorcycle as has ever been devised by man. It's all there and if you can't do it you are willfully ignoring the fundamentals of riding.

Pardon the mess

2007-05-12T08:55:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to restoring all the old posts, trying to filter out some of the crap in the process.

I noticed that a lot of the posts are just URLs. Most of them still work, which is cool, but I don't think it makes any sense to have a bunch of random URLs littered through stuff you've written. Theyre more like a bibliography for your diary. I think I'm going to stuff them into a google notebook and link them all. some of its funny stuff.

A few weeks ago I posted a URL for Bjørn Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist. The title of the book had intrigued me for quite a while, I heard of it at least a year or two ago and had put it on my to-read list.

This book is, without question, the most significant piece of reading I have ever encountered. Many books are important to me, but none more than this one. When I'm President I'm issuing an executive order that Al Gore write a 10 page book report (due in two weeks) on Lomborg's book.

The Skeptical Environmentalist is a book to keep on hand when you have grown tired of suffering through the same tedious wailing that you heard from your earnest yet tragically underinformed do-gooder college friends. It is comical that people in my generation are quick to send Mom over to snopes.com when she mentioned Nieman Marcus cookies, but they will bob their heads repeating absurd environmental fallacies at one another, quaking in shame and guilt at the progress mankind has made, all the while forgetting about the human suffering for lack of a cup of water or a bag of rice elsewhere in the world. The only shame you will feel after reading this book is at your own foolishness.

My Kid is Cuter Than Your Kid #3

2007-05-11T06:41:00.000-07:00

23 Things a Man Should Own

2007-05-11T05:17:00.000-07:00

Manly virtue does not include the ownership of Italian loafers, high powered automobiles, long range rifles, or bottles of premium scotch. These objects are all basically useless; an obsession with procuring such goods is not unlike adorning oneself with perfumes and cosmetics.

Having reached an age of self sufficiency and happiness, I've identified a list of things that all men should own in order to carry out their manly duties. Life is not impossible without these things, but it is more difficult than it needs to be. While it is also true that too much time wasted on the researching and buying of things is wasteful and foolish, there is a certain baseline of goods that every man should own.

The goal here is not to amass the largest collection of exotic brands, or to play oneupmanship in expanding the list. Resist the temptation to overly research these purchases. You are not going to be performing surgery or adjusting nuclear warheads with these tools. They are to sit on a shelf in your basement until they are called for. Many of them you will use but twice or thrice in a lifetime. The purpose of the list is simply to have the basic things a man needs not to collapse into a blubbering pile the first time something simple needs taking care of.

Many things can be procured as needed. For example, I'd rather go to the supermarket and get a new tube of superglue when its called for than to keep it around so it can harden into a diamond in my junk drawer. I have never been stranded for want of superglue, but for everything else on this list I can guaran-damn-tee you a need in your lifetime.

Without further ado, 23 Things a Man Should Own

A 12 Volt Battery Charger

A pocket knife, kept about person at all times other than air travel

A toolbox with the following items:
1. curved-claw hammer
2. enormously long-handled flathead screwdriver. doubles as pry bar
3. stubby and longhandled philips screwdrivers
4. assortment of itty bitty precision screwdrivers
5. studfinder
6. at least three pairs of Channel-Lock pliers
7. 8" crescent wrench
8. 3/8" drive metric and sae socket wrench set
9. 1/4" drive metric and sae socket wrench set
10. utility knife
11. razor blades
12. one of those cheesy ratcheting screwdrivers with the whitmans sampler box-o-bits
13. at least three tape measures
14. some black electrical tape
15. flexible tape like duct.
16. teflon tape
An electric drill, or one with a battery. preferably both.
Small air compressor, preferably with a tank.
Cheap multimeter and one of the new little non-contact voltage detectors
Jumper cables, one set per vehicle
A snow shovel and something to bust ice with
Bag of salt
Bubble level
Bouple packages of wooden shims
Plastic funnel
Screw retriever, the kid with a magnet or little claws on the end.
Shop vac of any size
Meat thermometer, preferably the kind with the wire probe
Church key
Some source of spark or flame
At least two ratcheting straps.
Proper tire pressure gauge with a hose and a dial
10,000lb nylon tow strap, kept in vehicle
50 foot extension cord
Water hose
Box of latex or nitrile surgical gloves, from Harbor Freight.

The Horror

2007-05-03T18:42:00.000-07:00

http://www.hi5.com/friend/video/displayViewVideo.do?videoId=1986514&ownerId=40377086&smid=20070423_4002_sStiQSL2uoUr1nN7ML3r515934101

My Kid is Cuter Than Your Kid #2

2007-05-03T13:25:00.000-07:00

This will only be funny to you if you live in Boston

2007-05-03T05:02:00.001-07:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/03/AR2007050300406.html?nav=rss_metro

2007-04-27T16:11:00.000-07:00

My wife comes down the stairs. "You have to see this," she says.

A swollen diaper is balanced on her outstretched hand, folded closed on top like a delicate pastry dish with diabolical filling.

She comes at me with it, and I hurl myself backward in the computer chair, upsetting and nearly spilling my glass of cheap wine.

"For Christ's sake woman, no!". She has it aimed at my nose.

"You have to see this!" she says again. I shield myself with my arm. This is something I can't parse. I am the sole instigator of scatological humor in this house. There is no jovial farting in the Bailey home; no lighthearted rumination about feces has ever occurred here. It has to be a tapeworm.

She starts to open it and I'm still too horrified by the prospects to form an coherent argument against it.

In the middle of a pile of runny poo sits one of the buttons off the shirt T was wearing yesterday.

I will write more on the subject when I regain my composure. Have a pleasant Friday evening.

2007-04-23T15:56:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been reading a lot of books about the state of things. Politics, the environment, culture.

One of the peculiar things I've noticed about people is that the ones willing to talk to you about a thing are often more likely to feel like things are bad. Squeaky wheels, I guess.

When I was a kid, it was sin and hell from one side and drugs and pollution from television. Oh and forest fires. There was also a lot of worry about accidentally eating poisonous chemicals (remember Mr. Yuk?). I forget the order that some of these things occurred in; forgive me.

Nuclear war was a particularly scary one, and there was that made for television movie that my mom wouldn't let me watch. Then came kidnapping, and overnight nobody was worried about nuclear war anymore. Everything was about sketchy black vans. Somewhere in there we got razorblades in the candy.

Just Say No went on forever.

What I am saying is that practically since my birth the culture has been obsessed with whatever is wrong. As I get older it cracks me up to hear people bashing fundamentalist christians and then ranting about global warming with the same zeal. It's funny that they can't recognize patterns. Bjorn Lomborg calls it "The Litany" in his book that I've been reading. It cracks me up every time I think about it. The old christian fanatics vs. the new tree hugging Al Gore fanatics. All a bunch of goofy assholes.

It is kind of amazing to me how little insight people seem to be able to get going, at how little intellectual equity they seem to accumulate after 20 or 30 years of living. Then I realize that most people probably do get it, they just don't say anything about it because they've gotten tired of arguing about jesus or bombs or ozone or whatever the hell it is that the feebleminded paranoids have chosen to get upset about today. While theyre all upset about the creator or the destructor or the government or the planet, the rest of us are busy trying to make dinner or to get the toilets to stop leaking.

Of course in the process of thinking about those things you have recognize your own pattern of getting irritated about things you can't change. I have to remind myself it's not a problem. Getting irritated occasionally is the price one pays for awareness.

Exceptional Reading

2007-04-22T16:52:00.000-07:00

http://www.amazon.com/Skeptical-Environmentalist-Measuring-State-World/dp/0521010683/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-3640628-1091248?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177285950&sr=8-1

Internet Forums explained

2007-04-22T16:49:00.001-07:00

Borrowed from another forum..

How many motorcyclists does it take to change a light bulb?

1 to change the light bulb and to post that the light bulb has been changed

14 to share similar experiences of changing light bulbs and how the light bulb could have been changed differently

7 to caution about the dangers of changing light bulbs

6 to argue over whether it's "lightbulb" or "light bulb" ...

another 6 to condemn those 6 as stupid

2 industry professionals to inform the group that the proper term is "lamp"

15 know-it-alls who claim they were in the industry, and that "light bulb" is perfectly correct

19 to post that this forum is not about light bulbs and to please take this discussion to a light bulb forum

11 to defend the posting to this forum saying that we all use light bulbs and therefore the posts are relevant to this forum

36 to debate which method of changing light bulbs is superior, where to buy the best light bulbs, what brand of light bulbs work best for this technique and what brands are faulty

5 People to post pics of their own light bulbs

15 People to post "I can't see S$%^!" and their own light bulbs

7 to post URL's where one can see examples of different light bulbs

4 to post that the URL's were posted incorrectly and then post the corrected URL's

13 to link all posts to date, quote them in their entirety including all headers and signatures, and add "Me too"

5 to post to the group that they will no longer post because they cannot handle the light bulb controversy

4 to say "didn't we go through this already a short time ago?"

13 to say "do a search on light bulbs before posting questions about light bulbs"

1 to bring politics into the discussion by adding that George W. isn't the brightest bulb.

4 more to get into personal attacks over their political views.

1 moderator to lock the light bulb thread.

1 forum lurker to respond to the original post 6 months from now and start it all over again.

2007-04-21T16:38:00.000-07:00

I left home at around 7:30 this morning and rode up to Harpers Ferry and back.

Occasionally on a motorcycle you get behind someone slow, and you spend time thinking about just how incredibly fast these machines are, and how you could execute a dangerous pass almost any time you wanted. Then you think about your family and your future, and why you're out riding anyway and hurry seems so frivolous. You gear down, the high revs feel fast, and its fine.

Right off MD 464 I got passed by a truck hauling rotten garbage. It was 55f going on 70 and theis stinkmobile was ripe, the air was like a putrid pudding that stuck to your eyes. As he cut in front of me, I saw the first "left lane ends" sign. We started up the first steep on US 340 and I thought to myself- this moment is why they put such huge motors into motorcycles.

I opened it up and I watched that needle blowing up to 9 and then 10, and I felt that tank against my belly and was filled with joy and love for this machine, a twist of the wrist and a little flick of the ass and he was a blurry little stink in my replacement right rearview mirror (not heavy like the original it replaced, so it shakes a little).

We, the bike and I, crossed the WV border together for the first time a few miles later I had goosebumps down my back to my toes.

How important this is. How important it all is.

Exceptional Reading

2007-04-20T05:43:00.000-07:00

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691090165/ref=wl_it_dp/104-1285896-9127909?ie=UTF8&coliid=I2LI2KZ98LFJJU&colid=2Q547QMJP9JK3

The End of Radio

2007-04-12T16:10:00.000-07:00

Radio is now over, at least the terrestrial kind. Don Imus wasn't just the last good thing on Radio, he had always been the best thing on radio. I know that people who love Stern and O&A feel the same way, and that's cool. I think we all understand each other.

In a way, it's good that Imus is off the terrestrial air. Since satellite radio came along, it's been unbearable switching back to the terrestrial stuff and having to sit through the endless idiocy of commercials. On WTKK, and any talk radio station for that matter, the commercial programming is the worst kind of garbage; dating services, male pattern baldness cures, real estate seminars. This is the "public" airwaves?

What happened isn't surprising at all. Imus has been blowing hot air into this balloon for years, and it was bound to burst. Proctor and Gamble was the first name I heard to pull out, not that his Greening the Cleaning products represented some kind of serious threat to P&Gs hegemony, but he went on about it at such length that countless P&G executives must have developed a taste for his blood. He mocked the nitwits at MSNBC so relentlessly that it's difficult to believe he was ever on the air there. But again, it was hard to reconcile the disaster that was MSNBC with Imus' exceptional program.

The worst part about the firing is that anybody listening to radio is going to have to endure days of fat slobs like Al Roker gobbling with glee about how big advertising is the powerful new ally in the war against racism. Soon they won't have a pot to piss in, because there's now essentially no reason to listen to terrestrial radio at all. The Al Rokers and Oprah Winfreys of the world are so obsessed not with ending "racism" but with simply trying to get the power to force someone like Don Imus to kiss their asses.

The good news is, they're one step closer to achieving that goal. The bad news is that we're also one step closer to public airwaves that are wholly dedicated to the shilling of bullshit products and services.

Can't wait for Imus on XM. Check ya later, I gotta go order some Imus Ranch Coffee.

White Guilt

2007-04-10T18:07:00.000-07:00

Casto referred me to the embarrassing article in the Washington Post about having a famous violinist busking in the metro only to go practically unnoticed. It's embarrassing because it shows how white guilt and a fundamental ignorance of music can drive a man to make an ass of himself in a newspaper.

To begin with, no amount of equivocation, quoting old boring philosophers, or anything else can make an asshole look like anything but an asshole, and this guy is an asshole. You don't have to look any further than the title to understand that this is an article about elitists celebrating their superiority over the philistines. Context, whatever.

The author doesn't even understand classical music- he had to get somebody else to help him understand what he was hearing. But on account of that, he knows its good stuff!

Only a victim of white guilt feels like he has to stop and throw a buck in the case in the subway or he's slighting the arts. I can tell you this because I have actually made a living playing music before and I have walked by plenty of buskers before without giving them a dime. I don't particularly enjoy listening to music played on a train platform in the early morning in a big echoing brick cave. Why would I encourage an artist to do this?

You have to understand that art is never an object. Art is a relationship, in the case of music the relationship is a conversation. Naive people think that if you take a piece of "great" music and put it on in front of a group of random people, they should be moved, as if it would just be that simple.

This notion is the epitome of fat, white, and stupid. It's the simplistic understanding of music that you have when you have't ever played for an audience. You'd judge whether they're moved by watching for them to make some gesture indicating that they're moved. In my experience the most demonstrative people are also the most annoying and I can tell you there've been plenty of times when I saw cretins responding favorably to a piece of music, and the performers (myself included) wished that they weren't enjoying it so much. Maybe even that they'd leave.

I have seen guys take solos that would peel the paint of walls, and there was simply nothing anybody could say, so they just didn't say anything and that was fine. If you don't play music, you have no idea what "yeah, man" really means, and you would be better off not writing articles about what makes people enjoy music.

I use the term "conversation" to mean that stuff is flowing in two directions. I give you a little of what you want, and you give me a little of what I want. A good example of this is dance music, where the audience responds to what I play, and I change what I play to suit how the audience is reacting. The currency at work here is not dollar bills or applause, and a skillful artist will listen to his audience and change what he's doing, instead of playing on like some hopeless robot. A performer must be versatile.

The other thing about the relationship is that it unfolds slowly. It takes a man like Joshua Bell a lifetime to achieve the proficiency required to play the pieces they mentioned in the article. I don't know the pieces but I know the process. Frankly, I find most of that music boring, primarily because it originated in the Victorian ethos of virtue and excellence and its frilly and overdone like their architecture and literature and al those other things that bore me.

Anyway it takes a lifetime to understand and appreciate the music Joshua Bell plays. You can't stand there and drop your jaw and swoon and use words like "amazing" and "gorgeous" over and over and expect anybody who actually knows what the fuck they're doing to be impressed. Gene Weingarten was looking for that kind of reaction, not the development of any kind of real relationship between the audience and the performer. He created an experiment that was designed to fail to highlight what he feels is a lack of taste and sophistication in the commuting proletariat, nothing else.

So if you don't give me a dollar, you don't like my playing? Fuck you, I'm not playing for your dollar. I'd rather have one guy walk by and nod at me than have a bunch of phony jive-ass elitists humbly drop a dollar in the case, making sure to establish eye contact so I would be sure to understand the depth of his appreciation. Did this guy at the Post even read what he wrote about Joshua Bell's fees for a performance? And he's complaining that the guy can't make a hundred bucks at the train station? And while we're at it, who the fuck is buying the Post every morning?

If you want these commuters to have a relationship with this music, try getting his agent to repeat this stunt every day for a few weeks, instead of one performance. If it really mattered so much, that's what you do. But the author surely isn't going to do that, and Bell's agent is sure as hell not going to do it either. Is there still a travesty here?

And another thing. My guess is that if I took you out to watch, lets say Chris Potter, you wouldn't have any idea what the fuck was going on. First, you probably never heard of him, and it's quite likely that you wouldn't really like the music. You might ask me a question about a tune that sounds familiar, and I'd say "oh yeah that's a Radiohead tune, Morning Bell".

It might bother you that he was taking such liberties with a tune you know, or you might find the solos repetetive and boring. However, I wouldn't think you were a philistine, and I certainly wouldn't write an article about you.

The reason is that I, we, understand that complex music, whether you are playing it or listening to it, is something that you take on slowly. It starts with a familiar tune- often people get into Jazz listening to Dave Brubeck play Gershwin standards. Miles Davis played Disney Tunes and people loved it. Time passes and you find you enjoy hearing that same tune intepreted differently, then you hear Coltranes playing on a Love Supreme and it takes you a long time to hear it and get the taste of it in your mouth.

If I put on an Eric Dolphy record in the Metro station I wouldn't expect people to walk by and ignore it- they'd probably try to break the fucking record player. That doesn't make them philistines about music anymore than a baby who cries when you feed him a hot pepper is a philistine about food. So surely you can't expect a lot of people who obviously do not get a steady diet of classical music to even parse the sophisticated shit that Joshua Bell was playing, any more than I would expect you to pick out the little lick from the nursery rhyme that the horn player just dropped in the middle of his solo. If you can't relate to music, you can't have a relationship with it. And without the relationship, I may as well not even be playing.

People don't get into Jazz in the hopes that every random joe will appreciate what geniuses they are. We get into it because we like it. We play music because of our relationship with other players, and to a lesser extent, the audience. I can tell you that no serious musician bases his value as an artist on what the audience thinks. Most people with brains understand this and they therefore understand that they dont have to trip over themselves with gratitude because you deemed it worthy to show up and expose them to some culture at the train station.

So anyway, do musicians a favor and don't use music as a tool to make any stupid points like this. Music is best used for positive messages, and this article is, at best, just ambiguous. And for god's sake, if you're going to pay to hear somebody's music, do it in the right place and do it for the guy who is playing music that moves you so much that you don't even have to think about it.

How It's Going

2007-04-06T18:01:00.000-07:00

"But when we ride very fast motorcycles, we ride with immaculate sanity." -- Hunter S. Thompson, Song of the Sausage Creature

It's great down here. Hell, I even like Boston again now that I don't live there. I was bouncing down the street from the Kendall Marriott to my office a couple of weeks ago and everybody was smiling. I think someone may have whistled. No satisfaction can match that of having a 200 yard commute if you work in Cambridge, MA.

Since I got down here I've been riding my bike to work. I wasn't anxious to do it at first, although idea of getting to your job on a vehicle that you'd probably be out riding if you played hooky was appealing.

I've read about people around Seattle who paddle kayaks to work, which seems cool. A bicycle doesn't seem to fit into the category however, unless you live somewhere like Reston where there are special roads for you and you don't transform into an activist after a couple of weeks of getting almost killed two times a day. Also I'm a little fat and I sweat a lot, so I couldn't do it. I'm also lazy, so I won't. There's a guy who flies a Cessna 152 to his job in, I believe, Maryland, and I bet after I write this someone will send me a story about a guy out west who comes in on a horse. I don't blame him.

I can go three weeks on a tank of gas, which usually runs me about 12 bucks. Paid parking must be considered vulgar in Fairfax County, as it appears to have been banned. I don't have a finance payment, and the maintenance is negligible. Insurance is about 1/3 of what I payed in Massachusetts, that was actually a much higher payment than my fuel down here.

Commuting by motorcycle is not without complication, however, and has revealed some kind of low grade retardation that I wasn't aware I suffered from. Put on your overpants. Remember you forgot your socks upstairs. Go get socks. Put on overpants again. Put on boots. Go out on stoop to see how cold it is. Dig through closet for fleece. Remember fleece in bike tailcase. Go outside in socks and overpants to get fleece. Tailcase key on ring in jacket pocket, still in closet. Go back inside, get key, put on boots, get fleece, go back outside. Notice thermos in tailcase, remember forgot to make coffee. Take whole fucking tailcase inside. Put on fleece, put on jacket. Velcro everything. Look at thermos and suddenly need to take piss bad. Take piss, think of coffee. Finish piss, go make coffee. See clock. Feel angry. Go to put thermos in tailcase, now have lost keys. Swear, search.

Honest to god, I should probably leave the fucking helmet on even when I am off the bike. Some variation of this bullshit happens every morning. It can't be avoided. I can put everything out the night before but it won't matter because I'll manage to misplace something, or the temperature will change dramatically and wreck the whole plan. Yesterday morning I stood triumphant at 20 after 6 AM in the driveway, record time, gloves cinched and ready to throw a leg over the saddle when I realized my fucking helmet was in the foyer closet and 12 layers of velcro were undone to retrieve the keys I'd need to go back in for it.

The weather is a complication because you need some layers in the morning and you need a place to haul them back home in the evening, so you've got to have some luggage. You might need two sets of gloves. I could suck it up and not be a pussy and grit my teeth and be cold in the morning but I'm all grown up with my own money and by god if I want to be toasty in the morning I'll be goddamn toasty. I therefore own an electrified vest, one of the great technological accomplishments of our time.

There are also getups easier to put on and take off than the jacket and pants I have. I have been avoiding the purchase of one of those expensive Aerostich suits for numerous reasons. First is I'm loathe to join a cult. Second is because everything in the catalog is overpriced. Finally, because any civilian adult in a jumpsuit for any purpose other than hazardous waste removal should probably have DOUCHEBAG stenciled across the back of it. Mention any of these things to fanatics of the suit and they will begin to gobble like turkeys about how fashion is irrelevant when you are sliding down the highway on your ass, about American labor and/or the repair and return policy. I know, I know. I'm going to order one shortly, relax.

I suspect it'll take a long time to arrive, and will ride up in the crotch and chafe my bag, like virtually every other one-piece thing I've ever owned. However, after doing this commute for a couple of months I would eagerly volunteer as a douchebag with a chafed sack if it meant I could avoid having to do my idiot routine every morning. Probably I won't even have to deal with the sack thing anyway, since they'll do alterations for you to make it fit just right. I heard what you just chuckled to yourself about me being a douchebag from the time i put on my birthday suit, so you can eat me.

Anyway it's good practice for living, this motorcycle commuting. It's a lot more like real life than taking a car to work.

For starters, you definitely have to get your shit together when it comes to placing your things in a place where you can find them later. It's one thing to be a disorganized slob at home. It's a different matter when you're roaring down the highway, vinyl dry bag trailing behind you like a kite on an ancient bungee cord, your other set of keys dangling out of the tailcase lock, and you don't notice any of it because you are freezing your ass off, busy trying to reach the zipper on the back of your jacket that will close the gaping hole you opening yesterday evening to cool off. Things are falling out of the pockets you forgot to close and will be run a fine powder that you don't recognize as you pass it on the way home this evening

I am getting better. I am, in fact, using a coat closet without being asked by my wife. There is an element of bliss here.

It is also excellent practice at paying attention to matters beyond your person, much more so than driving your car to work. Before I start the next paragraph I want you to know that I have not fallen victim to the short time motorcyclist's disease of going around shooting my mouth off about women in SUVs or calling everybody cagers. I have so many different lifestyles going that I find it impossible to devote myself enough to one to become an elitist about anything. I still drive a car and when I do it I notice that I suffer from all the same shortcomings that other people in cars do.

Cars are comfortable. You have all your stuff in there, your radio and your coffee. Some people even have appliances and furniture in there. It's like sitting cozy in the living room. Until somebody comes careening out of the kitchen driving the refrigerator straight into the couch and knocking you across the room into the closet where you forgot your helmet.

The car is not the problem, nor are the people who drive them, or their size or any of that shit. It's the comfort. We weren't designed to be comfortable and cognizant simultaneously. It doesn't happen in nature. Close your eyes, lay back, relax for a moment and see if you're in the floor or someplace worse when you open them. It really doesn't happen, at least not on weeknights. There have been times when I looked out the windshield at the road and although I could remember what I had been thinking of for the past two minutes or so, I couldn't recall any driving whatsoever. That's a horrifying realization the first time you have it, and just as horrifying after the 50th, because you never really seem to get over it.

The bike is totally different. Almost everybody has preconceived notions, especially people who want one. Women you know have been speaking in hushed tones for as long as you remember about how you can be killed just standing too close to a motorcycle. That you will be killed is a distinct possibility, being simply crippled is guaranteed within the first 500 miles of operation. Even among people who actually know what they are saying, its no joke. Go you YouTube and search, and that's just what's on camera. Everybody guarantees you that you're crazy.If you have any kind of brain in your head whatsoever (that I can tell this applies to about 20% of motorcyclists) you will fear for your life from the day it occurs to you to buy a cycle.

It is not the kind of thinking that one typically does while driving an automobile, because there is an immediacy about the need for thinking on a bike that makes it very difficult to do anything else. Get distracted at a stoplight in a car and the worst that usually happens is somebody behind you blows their horn. Get distracted at the same spot on the bike and you are likely to be horizontal cause you put your foot down into a little pile of sand and the foot kept going.

So before I ever even threw a leg over this thing, my mental model of motorcycling was like the Yin Yang: An image of glorious freedom and discovery, balanced by an identically profound specter of serious bodily damage. I was afraid to ride the bike home from the dealership, it was so bad. It was days before I'd go out of the driveway, and weeks before I'd stray more than a few miles from home. Someone on the internet told me that the best way to think on a bike was to imagine that, like a video game, every other moving thing on the screen exists to put an end to you. On the other hand, you're supposed to be enjoying yourself, not simply trying to survive.

There's no reason you can't do both, though. If you are doing it right, on a bike you will notice more beautiful scenery around you for the same reason that you notice a lot of other things you never saw from the car, either. Like every variety of sign indicating an intersection. The T sign, the "Watch for turning vehicles" sign. Other things too- the arrow sign becomes a much bigger deal. The little chevron arrow signs, those are a really big deal. Then there'll be things that are now doubly interesting, like running deer.

I say it's like practicing for real life because so many of the dumb things that people do seem to derive from just how goddamn easy everything is. When I go to the DMV and I get annoyed because the signs are lousy, it's because I was expecting the people there to make things easy for me when I should have been expecting them to be hard. Riding the bike, you have to expect a car to turn out of every driveway. You expect oncoming traffic to turn left in front of you. You are usually disappointed but when you are not, instead of experiencing the profound unhappiness of t-boning another driver, you chuckle to yourself at having been right at slowing down for no reason the last 50 times.

It is an infectious strain of sanity that breeds in every manner of your thinking. You think of it when you watch your children rolling around on the floor near large objects, or when you take a knife from the kitchen drawer. I already knew it well when hunting with a rifle or wading in swift water, but speed makes the reality of risk on a motorcycle even keener than that stuff. Pretty soon you are turning down the radio in the car and asking your wife to be quiet so you can burn around an on ramp and merge with traffic.

And forget drinking and driving, a couple of beers and I'd never even be able to get all my shit put on right, much less go out and cause an accident. Anyway, its a huge improvement over riding on the train for two hours a day, although now I'm not able to read nearly as much as before. I'll be careful but stupid, I guess.

2007-03-22T19:17:00.000-07:00

Fuck you, MBTA, you crooked shiftless bastards. Suck on this.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/22/AR2007032201168.html?nav=rss_metro

p.s. Im driving to work now, I take needlessly long routes and i leave my truck idling in the parking lot all day.

p.p.s free parking, fuckers

2007-02-24T10:59:00.001-08:00

http://topquark.roadkill.com/~bailey9/Eleanor%20Month%20Seven/

Here we Are

2007-02-07T05:50:00.000-08:00

My observations about living in Fairfax, VA so far.

The traffic on I-66 ( I havent seen the beltway yet) looks about like I-93 in the morning, bad. However, the secondary roads are broad and pretty fast when the rush is not on. I've been taking VA 608 and 602 from Fairfax to Reston and hauling ass. It takes about 15 minutes to go 10 miles. I tried it again leaving at 5:20 instead of 3:30 or 4:00, and it took 35-40 minutes and was not enjoyable. Most of the hang ups are at the traffic lights, which are very long. The wider intersections seem to discourage Red Light abuse that is chronic around Boston even though theres way more incentive to squeak through a light since theyre so long.

The chief complaint I heard from Boston people about this area of Virginia is that it is all strip malls and housing developments. I have been leery of these developments myself, figuring that they were infested with pod people who would lay a lot of rules on me. So far though I am pleasantly surprised. Despite the fact that the developments in my area are meticulously maintained, the management companies seem to be laid back, and our neighbors are about the same age, very friendly, and busy.

The strip mall situation is kind of interesting, as it seems like most of these places are now on their second generation of inhabitants, and they are kind of fascinating like the ones where Tricia lives on long island. The one around the corner from us is all restaurants, an Afghan Kabob joint, Pho, Thai, Sushi, Chinese, and a couple of specialty stores that I can't remember.

In the newer areas of Fairfax the trend seems to be building places that remind you of downtown from 25 or 30 years ago, but with wider streets, and the parking situated off the streets, such that the avenues are more for foot traffic. One such place around the corner from our house has a "Rio Grande Cafe", which is pretty good, a Ruths Chris steakhouse, and a bunch of other big restaurants I haven't heard of. Also one of those Luxury movie theatres, which I hear is free of indigent talking children. This could be good.

The old section of Fairfax is near our house, and its kind of funny to pass Guitar Center and then around the corner its 300 year old stuff and gas lights. You can't see it from the highway but its interesting down there. I bought a pizza from Joe's.

For a long time I've heard people talk about new urbanism and that stuff. It seemed like a load of crap to me, a type of vengeful living where your goal is to lord over your philistine friends how thoughtful an inhabitant you are.