Dizzy day

Apparently smacking my head against the pavement real hard is not a good thing.  Since my accident in August, I’ve had problems with balance.  Not usually walls-swimming-around dizzyness, but just being off-balance.  Walking down the hall and feeling like I’m heading toward the wall.  Holding onto the railing on stairs.  Turning around in the kitchen and falling flat on my face.

Today I went in for a long series of tests of my inner-ear function.  It was a strange experience…
=-

Continued...

Posted by George on 01/19/05 at 08:21 PM
Personal • Link

Giving congress the proper motivation

On Tuesday this week, US Senator Dick Durbin visited Bloomington and met with The Pantagraph newspaper editorial board.  AFter talking about many issues including social security, he came up with a stunningly simple suggestion for simplifying the tax code:  make members of Congress fill out their own tax forms.

It seems Durbin’s bookkeeper died, so the Senator decided, “What the heck: I’m a senator and an attorney.  How hard can it be?”  Heh.

The Pantagraph thought Durbin’s suggestion was made tongue-in-cheek, but I would like to see it really happen.  Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Luckily, I have a good accountant, whose services I cherish.  There’s no way in hell I could make sense of those tax forms by myself.  (As a bonus, he’s a Libertarian - just the perfect political persuasion for a tax accountant!)

Posted by George on 01/17/05 at 12:50 PM
Issues • News • (3) Comments • Link

A not-so-liberal reason for universal health care

I’m not a very consistent liberal.  Despite voting for both Clinton and Kerry, and opposing the war in Iraq, I disappoint my friends by shopping at Wal-Mart and opposing gun control.  (There are lots of other examples but I don’t want to get off-track here.)  Universal health care is one of those issues - I’m for it, but not for the usual reason.  Leaving aside the curious notion of a “right” to health care, I prefer a greedy, capitalistic “what’s in it for me” approach.  We’re spending more on health care than anyone else and getting less for it.  In short, we’re being ripped off.

Go read this entry at Stupid Evil Bastard: “The problem of 45 million uninsured Americans hits home.  Hard.  It seems that one of Les’ cousins died young because of pneumonia - because she didn’t have health insurance.  She thought she had the flu and couldn’t justify the expense of a doctor visit ...
=-

Continued...

Posted by George on 01/16/05 at 03:23 PM
Issues • News • (6) Comments • Link

Flow dynamics

I drink hot water, which means I often turn the faucet on to get hot while I get a glass out of the cabinet.  This time there was an empty root beer bottle in the sink, right under the aerator.

Normally the water would just burble over the edges and down the sides of the bottle.  But when I turned back to the sink, glass in hand, I found the water shooting up in a neat jet above the bottle.  There was hardly any water at all running down the side of the bottle - just a drop or two.

My guess is that the bottle was empty when I turned the water on, so the down-moving column of water punched through the rising water inside the bottle, creating a turbulent reigion at the bottom concentrating into a sleeve of upward-moving water around the down-moving.  I surmise that the aeration somehow kept the two streams from interfering with each other.

If anyone can think of a way to do something useful with this phenomenon (like mixing chemicals in an industrial process,) it’s all yours.  Go get rich!  (click on the “Read more” link to see the close-up picture)

Continued...

Posted by George on 01/16/05 at 11:32 AM
Geeky • observations • (2) Comments • Link

Trying to fly before I can walk

This is one of the dangers of blogging, I suppose: blog envy.  MrsDOF sends out an email newsletter to about 50 people and there are mounting requests for her to get a blog of her own. 

I ‘spoze I could just send her to Blogger but I just escaped from there myself and now face importing 250+ entries one at a time into my Expression Engine blog.  Not a fate I’d wish on the Mrs, let alone the interminable anguish of posting on Blogger and waiting for several minutes only to receive an error message - sorry!  Try again later!

So while I am wobbling along on training wheels under Expression Engine, I’m trying to set up a blog for MrsDOF to call her own.  So far I’ve got it to produce a - blank page - when you type in “mrsdof.com” - hey, if you don’t count all the words and pictures and stuff, it’s practically finished!  Stay tuned.

Update, 20 January ‘05: Looks like I’d made an error on pointing the domain.  It boils down to my misunderstanding of how EE works.  Now that that’s cleared up (at least on that little point) the domain does resolve to mrsDOF’s home page so I can begin making the blog work and look pretty.

I’ll write later about the whole folder/path/domain-pointing thing in EE.  It usually works this way - concept first, then procedure. 

Posted by George on 01/15/05 at 06:56 PM
Geeky • Blogging • (4) Comments • Link

Huygens runs longer than expected

While NASA (under happily soon-to-be-gone Sean O’Keefe) can’t seem to lift a shuttle to fix the super-useful Hubble space telescope, the European Space Agency has lifted the horizons of human imagination.  Their Huygens space probe outlasted its design expectations to send back dozens of pictures and other data from Saturn’s mysterious moon, Titan.

When the batteries finally went dead (long after they were expected to,) Huygens was resting on the surface sending back pictures, mass-spectometry data, and even sounds.  We may get to hear thunder on another world.

There were so many hazards, so many ways it could have failed to work.  One system - a data channel - did fail but it was backed up by redundant systems.  We’ve seen unprocessed pictures of what looks like a hydrocarbon seashore, rocks on the surface, ice - material for insight into another realm.

Everything about this mission is mind-blowing: the planning, the design, how it was built, the distance it had to travel, the time it had to survive the cold of space, the pressures and heat of entry into Titan’s atmosphere, the pictures themselves, and the thought of an example of Earth’s finest craftsmanship sitting on the shore of an alien sea. 

In the weeks following the tsunami we’ve seen human generosity and compassion, and now the boundless desire to learn about things unimagined in all the generations of our ancestors. 

See also: The Scotsman, UTI, and Wired.

Posted by George on 01/14/05 at 08:57 PM
News • (1) Comments • Link

Disorderly conduct (also known as innovation)

It’s hard to imagine the typical city planner or architect anticipating this:

The rather dull scene in this picture is a parking lot with a building and a fenced-in power substation.  Behind your view is a large dormitory.  On the other side of those obstacles is an apartment building, a Baskin Robbins, a McDonald’s and a popular coffee shop.  So a lot of people have to get past the building and the power station.

In the colored section of the photo there’s a large shipping container - the kind you see on trains or ships.  And between the shipping container and the chain-link fence is a 22-inch space unevenly bisected lengthwise by a curb.  You wouldn’t think many people would walk the forty-foot length of such an odd space…
=-

Continued...

Posted by George on 01/13/05 at 07:32 PM
Design • (6) Comments • Link

Splash

Yesterday the outside was a foggy 55of., but the temperature is beginning a slide (according to the weatherman) to well below freezing.  Of course the atmosphere could not hold all that water as the temperature fell - some of it had to end up in my basement.

I enjoy getting up in the morning, answering email, reading blogs with a cup of tea… all very relaxing.  Much more fun, for example, than putting boxes up off the floor, sopping up water with oversize beach towells, and setting up fans to dry the remainder. 

All-told it probably only amounted to a couple gallons, but 2 gallons of water can cover a huge area on a flat floor.  As someone once said, garbage is matter out of place.

Posted by George on 01/13/05 at 07:16 AM
Personal • (0) Comments • Link

Tsunami from space

Watching videos of the tsunami (usually taken by people who are running for their lives) it’s hard to grasp how deep the destruction went.  The coastline was changed so profoundly it’s obvious at a glance… from space.  Just click on the picture to go to Nature Online’s collection of satellite pictures.

In 1968 my dad took me to Charles City, Iowa to see the tornado devastation.  I remember thinking how much it looked like bombed villages in Vietnam.  Now the imagination conjures up thousands of Charles Cities…

Also check out this essay, What’s really important on UTI.  I hadn’t thought of this:

Deep under the now scenic, placid blue seas of southeast Asia, a geological horror is forming of gargantuan proportions. One which will leave its novel signature for eons in the rocky column. A new layer of strata has been laid down, but this deposit is uniquely macabre. It’s a hominid bone-bed. Mixed in with the newly forming sandstones, limestones, shales, and chalk, are the remains of a civilization. Homes, trees, crops, cars, factories…

Posted by George on 01/11/05 at 05:52 AM
News • (0) Comments • Link

So explain this species to me again?

One of my favorite online comics is Joy Of Tech, which is apparently written by, and for geeks.  Usually they’re just plain silly but this one is quite meaningful.  Two aliens are orbiting the Earth and one says:

“So explain this species to me again?” and the other answers;

“They spend most of their time fighting and creating disasters, yet when there’s a natural disaster, they help each other.”

The caption is: “So are we half-evolved or half-extinct?”

Make that “visible natural disasters.”  The tsunami is rated something like number 7 among natural disasters, but if you figure the body-count from preventable diseases like AIDS and Malaria, the big wave is a piker.

The tsunami has the marketing advantage of being visibly no one’s fault.  This is as “act of god” as it gets, folks.  So we can all gather ‘round and check our charitable giving on the international scoreboard.

As for the body count of our various wars?  Well, we’re too patriotic to question that.

Something else to ponder: I saw a Newsweek headline at the store, “After the Flood.”  It sounded biblical, and set me to thinking.  The Noah’s ark flood story has too many holes in it to stay afloat, but obviously the collective human memory does reflect one or more catastrophic floods.  People like to farm on fertile, flat land, which is usually a flood plain.  Add tsunamis and you get legend-generating events. Hmm…

Posted by George on 01/10/05 at 07:38 PM
Geeky • (0) Comments • Link

Rescued wireless card


A couple days ago we had an ice storm.  Everything got covered with a lovely jacket of ice, much to my delight because ice is pretty.  But there is a downside.

On the morning of the ice storm I slipped on the back steps and fell right on my ass.  It was more undignified than anything else and the worst part was MrsDOF had just warned me about the steps, oh, a minute before.  I picked myself up, dusted off, and went to work.

But my Lynksys/Cisco dual-band Wireless network card (shown here inserted in my rough-around-the-edges laptop) did not go to work with me.  It flew from my shoulder bag, landing next to the back steps where it acquired a thick coating of ice.  For three days I had no occasion to use it so I didn’t know it was missing.

Then today the ice began to melt and I found my card lying in a pool of ice water with water from the roof dripping right on it.  Darn!, I said, or words to that effect, and scooped up the card.  I sucked water out of it through the PCMCIA connection holes, dried it off with a towel, and warmed up the oven to about 110o F.  I turned off the oven, placed the card on the rack, and waited 4 hours.

It works fine.  Whew!

Posted by George on 01/09/05 at 07:44 PM
Geeky • hardware • (1) Comments • Link

Going insane with a simple domain transfer

Some years ago, I registered a domain for a family member and set up a small website on it.  Unfortunately (this being about 1997) the only domain registrar I knew about - maybe the only one available at the time - was NetworkSolutions, also known as Verisign.  The process was a hassle and it was expensive, but I got it done. 

Over the years I’ve hosted her site on a few different hosts but it’s always been registered on NetworkSolutions.  As I registered other domains (I have 19 now) I became aware that there are much better registrars out there.  GoDaddy, for example - their website is clear and easy to use, their FAQ files actually contain information that works, and in a pinch I can call them and talk to a real human.  They act like they really want your business.

It’s hard to imagine a worse registrar than NetworkSolutions.  Their website is loaded with circular logic like “Welcome to form A.  To do what you want to do, go to form B.”  So you go to form B and it says “Go to form A.”  Their database is a mess, it’s almost impossible to update, and just when you think it can’t get any worse, you try to get help from them…
=-

Continued...

Posted by George on 01/08/05 at 09:06 PM
Geeky • (3) Comments • Link

Most ironic newspaper article pairing of the day

One of my favorite newspaper-reading games is finding funny headlines, like “Nuns jailed in drug conspiracy,” or “High schoolers may be required to volunteer.”  (My kitchen is festooned with headlines like that, cut out of the paper and taped up on cabinet doors.)

Another is looking for ironically-paired articles or pictures.  The rules are simple: they have to be on the same page or on facing pages, and be somewhat ludicrous when considered together.  Here are two that appeared on page A8 of the 06 January, ‘05 Bloomington Pantagraph...
=-

Continued...

Posted by George on 01/06/05 at 09:48 PM
News • (0) Comments • Link

What the heck is a “Captcha?”

“Comment Spam” is when some lowlife uses the comment feature of some Decrepit Old fool’s Weblog to post their web-links about debt consolidation, online gambling, generic viagra, and so forth.  mad  I just cleaned out several comment spams that hit this morning.  This caused me to enable “captcha” security…
=-

Continued...

Posted by George on 01/06/05 at 07:03 AM
Geeky • Blogging • (3) Comments • Link

Just two naked men and a model

Despite all the jokes, men’s locker-room talk seldom travels along unsavory lines.  Usually it’s weather, sports, cars, work, and food.  This was the case the other day when I wound up talking about network technology with someone at the gym.  We were in the locker room, he getting ready for the shower as I was drying off.  As with most conversations, I’m not really sure how we got onto this subject:

“Bluetooth, wi-fi, wi-max, they’re all incompatible,” he opined.  “Someday one of them will win and it will just be the standard everywhere and everything will work together.”

I replied, “Actually the different standards you’re referring to all exist because…”
=-

Continued...

Posted by George on 01/05/05 at 08:36 PM
Geeky • (0) Comments • Link
Page 117 of 122 pages « First  <  115 116 117 118 119 >  Last »