Adventures in Engineering

It can be scary

2012-02-09T07:10:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, as I was driving into work, I had just passed an interchange where one heavily-traveled road joined the four-lane highway I was on. I usually pull to the left to let drivers from the other road merge into traffic on the larger road because traffic can be pretty heavy on both roads. Lots of people from the smaller road seem to forget that they are supposed to merge - but that's a story (and rant) for another day!

This day, drivers from the other road settled into positions ahead of me and behind me and it was a relatively easy day for me. Until I noticed that the driver behind me was pretty close. Uncomfortably close. So close that I could see that they weren't on their cell phone (what a surprise) and they were looking straight ahead. So, there didn't seem to be a distraction causing them to ignore the space between us. I assumed they were getting ready to pass me and were just waiting for other people in the left lane to pass first. But when I looked in my mirror, I saw no one in the left lane. My bumper hugging friend could pass at any time.

I was on time for getting to work so I was not speeding but thought that maybe I could help out by slowing down a bit. The car behind me didn't get closer (which would have really alarmed me) so I knew they were at least paying some attention to the situation. So, I slowed down some more. Still nothing. As I stole glances in the rear view mirror, it looked like the driver wasn't looking around (as you would expect if they were looking to pass) - just staring straight ahead. I began to be distracted by this situation and just wanted them to pass me so I could get back to paying attention to other things. I slowed down some more. We were now going 50 miles per hour in a 55 miles per hour speed zone. No change. Slowed down to 45. No change. 40 - no change. Finally, when we got down to about 35 miles per hour, the driver turned to look around and then passed me. Not fast or cutting it close like you might expect from someone who was upset with my going so slowly. Just a normal pass.

Maybe they were used to really heavy traffic where you don't have the luxury of having a three second buffer between you and the car in front of you. Maybe they were listening to something really interesting on the radio and were not paying attention. Maybe they had a hands-free cell phone and were engaged in a really interesting conversation. Maybe they were just sleepy and driving on autopilot. No matter what it was, they were not paying attention and it scares me (I wrote about this before). As I sped back up to my regular speed, I was glad to have that behind me. But when would the next one come up?

The appearance of being healthy

2012-01-27T19:40:00.001-05:00

People have written about these things before but I couldn't resist. And no one really thinks ramen noodles are health food. But when the cover of the box looks like the picture at the right, you can imagine yourself getting ready to eat a healthy soup with a large portion of vegetables. That is, until you open the package.

I know a lot of people who use ramen noodles that just throw out the flavor packet because it has so much sodium in it. My stupid joke is that while everyone else in the lunch room is wondering if they are getting enough sodium in their diet, I'm sure I am when I eat these noodles.

Well, there is no flavor packet to throw out when you get this particular version of ramen. It comes mixed in - with all the vegetables. So, how many vegetables do you get? See the second picture on the left. Yes there are about seven pieces of corn, three or four peas and about eight slivers of carrot. Not exactly vegetable soup. But it is tasty. And my wife alsways gives me something to mix in. Today it was some ham. It is amazing how much better that makes it taste. And it's filling. So, while I wouldn't eat this too often, it's fine for a quick lunch when there isn't time to prepare something more elaborate.

Also, there are some interesting things you can do with the blocks of ramen noodles. Someone at work told me about breaking a raw egg over the noodle block along with a slice of cheeze and maybe a pice of ham, sausage or Spam. It tastes pretty close to an Egg McMuffin but a lot cheaper. And, as before, I don't recommend a daily habit of this but once in a while, it's not bad.

Going to non-existent meetings

2012-01-25T17:05:00.000-05:00

I'm getting behind in my posts again and part of the reason is that things are so hectic at work. I been under pressure for a few months. We were working on two different versions of our software product at the same time. The first of those was released just before Christmas and the the other was just released last week. Now, we're pushing on to make a new product that has a very aggressive schedule but I'm also in tech support again this week (see my Customers: who needs 'em? post for more about that). It's not that I write these posts during work hours but that I'm so exhausted by the pace at work, that when there is some free time to write in this blog, I'm too tired to do it.

One indication of the problem is that today I went to a meeting that I wasn't scheduled for! I looked at my email and saw a meeting agenda, noticed that it was a few minutes after the hour and rushed off to the meeting the agenda was for. I got to the room and saw only a few of the people I was expecting to see. They all looked at me with smiles on their faces. It was then that I realized that I wasn't supposed to be in this meeting. It happened to be using the same room as my meeting would use - later. I think it's time for a little break. I know my family would like that. But I can't take any time off until this new product is released late in March. Can I hold on till then? Stay tuned.

First snow of the season

2012-01-22T07:27:00.000-05:00

We had previously gotten a dusting of snow and ice a couple of days ago but this is our first real snow of the winter. You can see my usual picture to the right. It doesn't look as impressive because I took this the day after the snow after we'd cleared the car and packed down a lot of the snow in a snowball fight and in making a snowman. The local TV station says we got at least seven inches but I think we got more than that. The TV station reports that a town a few miles away got almost ten inches so I think it depends on who measures it. But if that's what they say on TV, it must be true!

Our snowman looked a lot better yesterday when we made it. A photographer from our local paper even stopped to take pictures of the kids putting the finishing touches on it. This morning, you can see it must have been a rough night. The snowman looks like it is leaning into a strong wind but it's just leaning - no wind.

We cleared the dirveway once when we thought the snow was ending but then the forecast changed and we got more snow. It snowed until dark so we will have to clear it today when there is time. I'm glad we can just walk to church this morning.

First base syndrome

2012-01-18T21:07:00.001-05:00

We've all seen it, especially in youth baseball games or pick-up softball games - the person playing first base gets set to catch a throw from another fielder for a put-out of the batter running toward first. The first baseman puts one foot on the bag and prepares to catch the ball. But, due to the skills of the players in the game, the throw is wide of first base. The first baseman has been told that they need to keep that foot on first base or the out won't count. They stretch as far as they can and still maintain contact with first base but the ball is just too far away. Their foot is on the base but the ball falls far away from any of the fielders and the runner not only reaches first base safely but can then run on to second base base because everyone is scrambling to get the ball (another syndrome that we might talk about some time). I call this "First Base Syndrome". The player has gotten their priorities wrong. Yes, it is very important to keep your foot on first base if you are catching the ball but the higher priority is to not let the ball get by. If you can catch the ball and keep your foot on the base, that's great but don't let the ball get by or you've got two problems. The runner is safe and the runner (and other runners) are going to advance.

I think we all do this from time to time. We are working on two projects at work but we work on a less critical project first because, perhaps, we aren't as sure about how to do the more critical project. Or our child comes to us with a question while we're watching our favorite TV show. We tell the child to wait while we listen to a show that seems so important at the time. We are faced with a problem we know the answer to but we say we'll pray about it because we don't want to face it just then. Prayer is almost always the right thing to do but we shouldn't get our priorities wrong. Sometimes we just need to do what we know needs to be done. We need to take our foot off the base and make sure we've got the ball first.

I'm not saying this to be preachy. I've written this to remind myself. There are important things and then there are more important things. Lord, I pray you will help me to keep it straight!

Worries from both sides

2012-01-17T09:16:00.002-05:00

I heard an interesting story on the radio this morning about protests in Italy about how monetary policy trying to make the world one, big market and removing the national identity of the nation. They don't want the big international banks coming in telling the country what to do.

It seems that both sides of the political spectrum worry about these things. The right worries about world Communism and Socialism taking away their individuality and the left worries about big banks doing the same thing. We do need to keep our eyes on small groups getting too much power.

My thoughts on walking

2012-01-09T17:10:00.000-05:00

Evan and Charlie walking - a long time ago

As I was walking today, I had a few thoughts about walking for enjoyment or exercise. Most of my thoughts are about making sure you continue to walk and staying motivated to walk. I guess most of these thoughts could be summarized in the statement, "Walk every day."

1) Get out even if it is only for a few minutes
I find this to be the most important of these thoughts. Even if I am dead tired or sick or it's raining or snowing or too hot or too cold, I get immense satisfaction even if I only walk for five minutes. But usually, once I get out, I'll continue the walk for the full time. Another reason for getting out even for only a few minutes is that any exercise is better than no exercise. Also, once you've skipped a walk, it is much easier to skip the next walk, too.

2) It's better to walk on uneven paths and up and down hills
I haven't done a study on this and I'm not aware if anyone else has, either. I just find it to be true in my own experience. On my first walk of the day, about one mile with my dog, Charlie, we are walking on the sidewalk and the ground is flat. On my second walk of the day, at lunch time in the woods behind our office, I'm walking on an uneven dirt path that goes up and down some small hills. At least they are considered hills here on Cape Cod. Depending on the direction, that walk is about a mile and half long. I find that I get more benefit from the walk in the woods. I'm constantly needing to balance myself and exerting more on uphill sections. Maybe it's because it is longer. Maybe it's because I'm not stopping as Charlie checks out smelly points of interest. I just find that my back hurts more at night if I've missed my lunch walks as opposed to when I miss my morning walks.

3) It's better to walk on a schedule
Here we're back to a version of my "Walk every day" thought. When you walk on a schedule, you can set aside time for the walk. You are not interrupting something to go for the walk. Also, other people expect you to be going for the walk and don't expect you to do something else.When you walk on a schedule, you can set up a reminder for yourself in case you forget. If you're low tech, you can set up an alarm clock to go off at your walk time. If you're higher tech, you can set up a more elaborate reminder (something that allows for different times on different days). In my case, I don't need the reminder. My schedule is: first thing in the morning (after getting a pot of tea ready, feeding the pets, cleaning out the cat boxes and checking the news on TV for a few minutes) and at lunch time on work days (after eating lunch). So, maybe I should amend this to, "It's better to walk on a natural schedule." That way, you don't need to be reminded.

4) It's better to walk with a dog (or another person, but a dog is better)
Let's start with why you should share your walk. It's another motivator to keep you going. If you don't go for the walk, you have to explain yourself to the other walker. Sometimes, it's not easy to find that other person before the walk starts and you know they will show up for the walk and wonder what happened to you. And this is the reason it's better if your walking companion is a dog - a dog will accept no excuses! Charlie has gotten me out for a walk in the worst conditions simply because he won't take no for an answer. He just expects to go every day at the same time (whether it's New Year's Day morning and you stayed up till midnight or not). Yes, this is yet another variation on "Walk every day" - if you're keeping track.

5) It's a good idea to take a cell phone with you
This is both for safety and for helpfulness. I'm fortunate that I've never gotten into a problem where I've needed to call for help but if you did twist your ankle, you'd need to call someone to come and get you. But the reason I always bring a cell phone with me is because of the time Charlie and I found a stray dog on our walk. I found his name and a phone number on his collar (but no address) but since I didn't have a phone, I walked all over the place looking for someone out in their yard looking for him. I had taken my belt off to use as a leash and, fortunately, he and Charlie got along well. We walked all over the place but I didn't see his owners out anywhere. We were saved from needing to bring him all the way home with us by some neighbors being outside and lending me their cell phone. The owner was not far away (but not on our usual route) and we met him half way. I've never needed the phone since but it's ready.

6) Take a small notebook and something to write with
I find I get some really good ideas while I'm out for my walks. But I also find that these ideas are fleeting. I get so many thoughts and see so many things that the ideas can fly away as fast as they alight. It's great to be able to pull a small notebook and pencil out and jot down the ideas before I forget them. If you're not as forgetful as me, you can probably skip this one.

7) Keep track of how long you walk
There are a couple of reasons for this but I think the most important one is that it keeps you honest. If you find that your walk over the same distance is taking longer and longer, you need to remind yourself to keep up the pace. If you're not walking for exercise, you can ignore this one, too, but another reason for keeping track of the time is to let your own competitive nature spur you into improving yourself by walking the same distance faster or by walking a further distance in the same time.

8) Take a camera with you
For two reasons: One reason is similar to the reason for taking a notebook with you. You never know what wonderfully interesting things you'll see and may never see again. I've gotten pictures of a box turtle, squirrels, chipmunks, people dressed in medieval gear (sorry, that picture isn't on my blog), birds, people on dirt bikes (again, that picture is not on this blog), Presidential helicopters (actually, I missed that one) and the results of fires in the woods and tree munchers. In every case, they weren't there the next time I walked. That leads to the second reason I take my camera and it's another variation of the "Walk every day" theme. I have convinced myself that if I don't walk that day, I'm going to miss a great picture. It's gotten me off my lazy rear-end a number of times that I wouldn't have done otherwise.

9) Walking a shorter distance more times is better than walking one longer distance - and then canceling
This is similar to my first thought. If you walk only once a day, say for two and a half miles, and miss it, then you've not walked at all. But if you walk twice a day with one walk of one mile and the other of one and a half miles and you miss one walk, you'll walk at least one mile and maybe one and a half miles (assuming you didn't miss both walks). There is a limit to this but you might extend this to taking five walks of a half mile each time. Each walk doesn't take as much time and it may be easier to motivate yourself to just get out and walk. But I would worry that it is then too easy to say to yourself, "Well, if I don't walk this time, there are four or three others that I can walk." This is a bad precedent. You get too used to skipping walks this way. I think two (or maybe three) walks is ideal.

But that is just for me. As with all of these thoughts, they work well for me and maybe not for anyone else. As with the first thought, just get out and start walking. It is good for you and may lead to some wonderful discoveries. You can come up with your own motivators as you go along. Another idea is to start a blog so you can write down what you find on your walks. If you don't walk, you'll have less to write about!

Eighteen years

2012-01-08T14:29:00.000-05:00

It was eighteen years ago today that Cindy and I were married. I was in love with her that day but I didn't realize how much more in love with her I would be in eighteen years. It just goes to show you that even if you think you can't love someone more than you do now, love can grow. For as great as everything seemed that day, it is amazing how it has gotten even better through the years.

I remember being nervous when our minister was giving his message during the ceremony and he said, "I don't believe in marriages that are 50-50." He was pretty conservative and I was sure he was going to talk about men's roles versus women's roles and that some people at the ceremony were going to be offended by what came next. But I was delighted when he continued, "Those kinds of marriages have more trouble than marriages where both partners give 100%." How true that is. Of course, no one can give 100% all the time (in spite of what the TV commercials would have you believe) but I think he meant you have to do your best all the time. You should give your all to your spouse and the marriage. When you have children, it does sometimes feel like your giving more than 100% but all you have to do is sit back (for a minute) and see how much more your spouse is doing.

Cindy, I love you more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.

Rudolph is #1

2012-01-07T09:03:00.001-05:00

I'm in the habit of checking the This Day in History site (beware, a movie will play when you first start it, but you can pause it or click on any story other than the Lead Story to stop it). Today, I was surprised to find that on this day in 1947, the song Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer hit #1 on the popular music charts. Wouldn't you think that it would have been before Christmas or at least during the week between Christmas and New Year's Day? As with many things, though, I was wrong. You can find the story here. It's a nice story with a sort-of happy ending.

I've always enjoyed the TV special about Rudolph, too. I'm talking about the one done in stop motion animation that has its Internet Movie Database listing here. As you'll see if you read about the original story on This Day in History, the fellow who wrote the music for Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Johnny Marks, also wrote the music for the other songs in the TV movie like A Holly Jolly Christmas.

Would the song ever make it to #1 now if it had just been written? I doubt it. I think the only reason we hear it now is out of nostalgia. For one thing, singing cowboys don't usually get to the top of the popular music charts. They usually only show up on the country charts. Getting to hear this song every year around Christmas is a reminder to not forget some of the old things. If we forget them, we may never see their like again. The only reason we get to hear Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or get to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas around Christmas now is that they were made at the only time they could have been made. If they wouldn't have been made then, I doubt they would have ever been made.

Cloning the nose

2012-01-04T21:39:00.000-05:00

Woody and Diane telling how they'll do it

I'm off to a slow start writing blog posts in the new year. I've had a few ideas but it's been so busy after my time off for Christmas that I haven't had time to think through my ideas and get them into good enough shape to publish them. It reminds me how far I have to go in improving my writing.It's one thing to come up with ideas but putting them down on paper (or typing them into a computer) is another story.

Well, this post was inspired by a post on one of my favorite blogs, Just Thinking... by Earl Pomerantz. In his post Sitcom Slang, he mentions that there can be short phrases that describe certain situations so that you don't have to spell out the entire story. He says he came up with a few of those himself and that reminded me of the time I did the same thing.

I really enjoyed Woody Allen's movie Sleeper. Woody plays a man who is awakened from cryogenic sleep far into our future where he finds a totalitarian state rules the world. He ends up in a ridiculous situation where he and Diane Keeton are mistaken for surgeons who have been given the task of reforming the assassinated leader of the state from the only thing that survived the assassination - the leader's nose. They are supposed to clone the nose and make an exact copy of the dead leader. So, to stall for time, Woody and Diane give a talk, with a lot of hand waving and jargon filled talk, about how they plan to clone the nose. The picture here is from that scene. They have no idea what they are doing and the task before them is well beyond their (and probably anybody's) ability.

It reminded me of some meetings I had been to or talks I had seen where the presenters had no idea about what they were talking about. They had no idea what they were getting into and probably had no idea how to do what they were talking about. So, whenever I go to a meeting like that, I tell others that the presenters were "Cloning the Nose". Now I don't have to describe the entire meeting. Just that short phrase lets others know everything they need to know about what went on there. With all the time we save, maybe we can really accomplish something.

My little bit

2011-12-31T19:52:00.000-05:00

Charlie telling me it's time for his walk

Every morning, I walk our dog, Charlie, about a mile. I've invited other members of the family to join us but it is almost always just Charlie and I. We walk about 100 yards down the busy, noisy road by our house and brave the fast traffic to cross over to a nice, quiet side street. We do most of our walk there. It's a tree-lined street with nice wide sidewalks. I'm one of the few people who walk this street that cleans up after his dog. Besides it being the law, I consider it the proper thing to do - especially on this quiet refuge of a street. I also pick up some of the trash we see as we walk along (if it will fit in the plastic bag I've brought along). I pick up bottles and cans and discarded cigarette packs as Charlie points them out to me. Someone throws wine bottles a couple of times a week. There are also leftover McDonald's, Burger King and Dunkin' Donuts packaging. Someone left the insides of a tape measure laying on the walk and we've seen a lot of those tiny liquor bottles the airlines sell (one of the local food stores sells them, too). I pick up whatever fits in the plastic bag and that isn't too hard to pick up with the scoop I use to clean up after Charlie.

As happens every year, the leaves and pine needles fell along this street this fall, too. Woods line a long section of the street and the leaves cover a good portion of the sidewalk. So, another thing I do is to push the leaves and pine needles off the sidewalk and back into the woods. I can't uncover the entire sidewalk during one walk, though. I'd have to stop for too long and Charlie won't have that. I just kick a little debris whenever Charlie stops for a sniff or other activity. And I'm getting pretty good at kicking a little bit as we walk along. I know I'm not doing much each day as we walk but since Charlie is insistent that I walk him every day, I get to do my little bit every day. Rain or shine. With no snow on the ground this year, we've had a longer time to work on the leaf cover and the sidewalk is almost entirely leaf and pine needle free.

As this year draws to a close and I think about my place in the world, I feel like this is a metaphor for my life. I'm not one of those people who can organize a great movement to change the world. I'm not one of those tireless people who help others everyday and can balance their private lives well enough to do a full time job and still find time to work toward a larger goal. I'm just someone who is tired all the time. I'm disorganized and I can't see solutions right away like other people. I'm not really smart and can't finish one project and dive into the next one right away. I just plug away at my projects at work. I'm thorough and responsible but I never seem to get too far ahead. I don't have great projects lined up for my children and my wife always needs to keep after me to get projects done around the house. I finally put some shelves up this week-end that have been in the works for months.

But I'll just keep kicking small piles of leaves back into the woods every day. Maybe I'll have an impact some day. Not right away but some day. Have a Happy New Year. May the Lord bless you and your family and friends this coming year.

[Update - I didn't mean to imply that I push the leaves off the sidewalk all along the mile my dog and I walk. Also, only about a section about 200 yards long has enough trees to make enough leaves to cover the sidewalk so that's the section I work on. And we walk a half mile out and then turn around and walk back the same way. So, I get two chances to push back the leaves each time.]

A Christmas gift

2011-12-28T11:32:00.000-05:00

An Arduino Uno board

I will try to have a few posts about some of the gifts I received for Christmas but I want to start out with a gift I recommend to anyone with an interest in making electronics do things. This is opposed to writing programs for a computer that just displays things on a screen or the Internet (not that there is anything wrong with that). I'm talking about being able to write programs for a system that gets information from the outside world through sensors (like reading temperature, humidity, pressure or light) or making things move (with motors) or turning on switches.

I got an Arduino kit. The Arduino is a small, inexpensive computer board (costs about $30 - pictured here) with an extensive community where you can share ideas about hooking up various sensors, transducers and actuators and controlling them with small programs stored on the Arduino. The software for controlling the board is free and runs on any Windows, Macintosh or Linux computer. The schematics for the boards and the firmware (the instructions for running the board itself) are free and open source, too. You could build your own boards if you wanted but it's much easier, quicker and less expensive to get a ready-made board.

I got the Inventor's Kit from Sparkfun Electronics which includes an Arduino board, a small solderless breadboard (for building your own circuits) and a number of sensors (temperature and light), motors (a DC motor and a servo motor) and other interface components (switches, buttons and potentiometers). There are also a number of components to allow for hooking those devices up to the Arduino's inputs and outputs. It comes with book detailing fourteen experiments to familiarize yourself with the Arduino and the various components. You might ask, "Why would someone who has a degree n Electronics Engineering need or want to get a beginners kit like this?"

For one thing, it's been a long time since I've really done any electronic work. I've mostly been doing Software Engineering for the past 15 years or so. So, I'm out of practice. Another reason for doing this is that I wanted parts that would work with these boards. Not all motors or sensors can work with the voltages and currents available with all boards. This kit is "guaranteed" so to speak. I don't have to worry about looking for and buying the right components right away. I can just start trying things. And now that I've got a nice oscilloscope (see my post, Birthday gifts - part 1), I can see what's going on electrically with the board and the surrounding parts. I'm finally building up a lice little lab. It only took me 60 years to do it. You are never too old to get started on something new.

We enjoyed "The Adventures of Tintin" ...

2011-12-24T21:00:00.000-05:00

...in 2D. It wasn't easy to do. The studio really wants people to watch it in 3D and only offered one showing in 2D. But while we've enjoyed a number of movies in 3D (Avatar and Puss in Boots to name two), we've seen others (and paid extra) for some movies that had no reason to be in 3D. So, while many reviews of The Adventures of Tintin said the 3D was done well, we find ourselves 3D-sceptical.

So, we went to the one showing expecting it to be packed but my son Evan and I were the only ones in the theater (my wife and daughter showed no interest in coming with us). It was amazing. We could talk to each other during the show and not disturb anyone. Of course, we're hypocrites because we were pleased than no one was there making noise and talking during the movie. I suppose it's OK to be hypocrites when it is out of our control. What were we supposed to do? Go out and recuit people to come in and watch the movie with us?

Well, in a way, I'm doing that here. We both thoroughly enjoyed this movie! It had mystery, action, terrific characters, wonderful music, humor and an intricate plot. The animation was superb. I often forgot that we were watching an animated feature. The detail is amazing and I can't help but feel that it wouldn't have been as clear in 3D looking through those glasses. One of the hallmarks of a good movie, in my mind at least, is how much you think about it and talk about it after you've seen it. Well, we discussed it the whole way home. And I'm still thinking about it.

I was not familiar with the Tintin series of comic books by Belgian Georges Remi. This series has been going since 1929 so it has a long history and people who are familiar with it may have different opinions from us. But film critic Roger Ebert was familiar with the original books and he wrote a glowing review that can be found here. So, I think the only reason you shouldn't go to see this movie is if you don't like action, good animation or a terrific story. Also, if adventure and humor mixed together don't appeal to you, you shouldn't go to see this movie, either. But everyone else should see this movie - now that we've been to the theater alone.

It's winter?

2011-12-22T17:35:00.000-05:00

Today is the first day of winter this year. The temperature started out in the upper 30's (Fahrenheit) and ended up in the mid 50's! It was so nice, I rode my scooter to work. My scooter rides have dropped off in December but I've been riding it to work an average of two or three days a week since Thanksgiving. The reasons for not using it, though, have mostly been the rain and not the cold. Other folks who ride their motorcycles to work have been riding in, too. One guy tells me the cold isn't what stops him in winter. He's learned to dress warmly and he stops when he sees salt on the roads that can get on his bike and ruin it.

I'm taking time off from work until January so it will really be a stretch to say I'll be riding my scooter to work then. But with this crazy weather, you never know. My scooter is always ready to go. But I may need to move it into my mother-in-law's garage if we get a string of really cold weather. I don't want to ruin it just for the fun of riding as often as possible. And I certainly don't what to have an accident due to surprise icy roads or ruin its frame with salt.

I posted this with the date of December 22 because that is when it happened and that is when I started writing it. I actually uploaded this to Blogger on Christmas Day.

Christmas lights

2011-12-21T21:49:00.001-05:00

We went to two places to see displays of Christmas lights this week. One was in our own town green where a Christmas display is set up every year. I'm proud of our town for including a Nativity Scene. Unfortunately, my picture of that didn't turn out very well. But here are some pictures of other scenes from our town's display. The first shows Santa and his sleigh being pulled by the eight original reindeer but led by Rudolph. Sorry, Rudy. I cut most of your head out of the picture but your nose still shows a bit.

The next two pictures show our children looking into smaller displays. Evan is looking at Santa making his list and checking it twice. We couldn't see either of our kids' names on the lists there so those must be the naughty lists. To see the details, you might want to click on the picture to see it larger.

The next picture, on the right, shows Emma looking at a little workshop display. The toys are helping to make other toys. That's good engineering practice - make one item (the bear in this case) that helps you make the next item (the truck) more easily. Who knew Santa had his workshop organized on sound engineering principles?

The next day, we traveled about 60 miles to Attleboro, MA to the LaSalette Shrine where there is a Christmas Festival of Lights. There are over 300,00 lights with many other displays to enjoy. We started by going to a concert by the resident singer-composer and LaSalette missionary Father Pat who has two concerts a day five days a week. I don't know how he does it. His songs always feature the real story of Christmas. There are also displays of nativity scenes from around the world, and one huge Nativity Scene shown here on the left.

The last picture, on the right, is my poor attempt at taking a picture of a portion of the outdoor lights around a pond. The weather was cold and the pond was frozen but the ice was flat and clear and you can see the lights reflecting off it. We were fortunate to be there on a night when it wasn't crowded. Other years, we've been packed in with huge crowds and it's hard to move. This year was a joy. We had a small meal in the cafeteria and Cindy had some hot chocolate. I always come home happy after visiting the LaSalette Christmas display. If you get a chance, I urge you to go.

Two government rulings I agree with - Part 2

2011-12-18T20:40:00.000-05:00

Which drivers are not paying attention?

As I mentioned in my last post, Two government rulings I agree with, like most people, I'm not always happy with what our government does (or doesn't do). But sometimes, they do the right thing. As it happens, recently, two things happened that I'm happy with. The first was the Federal Communications Commission ruling that commercials must have the same average volume as the program they are running with. The so-called CALM act (Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation) won't go into effect until December of 2012 but you have to start somewhere. It will be a relief to not have to turn the volume up and down as much next year.

As I wrote up that last post, it seemed to go on too long (and some of you would say that all of my posts go on too long) so I left the second ruling for another post. Well, the wait if over. The next "ruling" that I agree with comes from the National Transportation Safety Board. It's not really a ruling because it does not have the power of law like the FCC ruling. But I believe the NTSB recommendation is more important. Here is a link to the press release introducing the NTSB recommendation that all use of portable electronic devices while driving be banned - except in emergencies. And here is a story about the recommendation from National Public Radio. I think there is going to need to be some clarification because I'm not sure they mean to ban all use of portable electronic devices - what about radios and music players? What about video players that cannot be seen by the driver? Maybe those aren't considered "portable" because they are part of the car. But so are some phones. There are phones that work through the car's audio system and are hand's-free. So, a lot of that needs to be hashed out.

But I would be happy to see all use of cell phones be banned. I know this is a very controversial recommendation. People say it can never be enforced and others say people will just not give up using their cell phones in the car as they drive. But my feeling is that it is just too dangerous to use a phone (or especially text which means you are using your hands while driving). Almost all of the people I see on the road who are casing other people to swerve around them are using their cell phones. Often, they don't even realize they've caused a problem because they are so distracted.The longer it is allowed, the more people will resist restrictions because they will feel it is normal behavior. It was also accepted that people could drink and drive, too. Where would be be if there hadn't been so much work at reducing drunk driving?

Here is a link to a report about a study done in California about how cell phone use and texting are causing more problems with driving than they have in the past. And here is another link reporting that auto insurance providers agree with the government's action. A little more moderate approach is suggested by the Governors Highway Safety Association. Perhaps if there is too much opposition to an outright ban, some of the suggestions from the GHSA could be implemented to at least begin reducing the amount of distracted driving going on. Something has to be done, though. Texting and cell phone use is not decreasing.

The picture here comes from this page.

Two government rulings I agree with

2011-12-15T17:26:00.000-05:00

Capitol Building - image from Wikipedia

I know it is not popular to like things that the Federal Government does. I can see why that is. No one likes to be told what to do and nobody likes paying money for things they don't think they need. The problem is that this is a large and diverse country with a lot of people. If we aren't organized, some other country with good organization is going to start taking our business or, worse, taking our property or, even worse, taking our land. Being organized and making sure things get done takes time and money. It takes people and sometimes those people have to tell other people what to do. That's the way government works.

So, even though I don't like being told what to do and I don't like paying for things I don't think I need, I do see a place for our various levels of government. I get very angry at our town and state governments just as I often get mad at the Federal Government. The difference between me and a certain overweight, hard-of-hearing radio host is that I see good things in government, too.

Two of those things I like are represented by two recent rulings by two independent government agencies. They are considered independent because they are not directly under an Executive Branch department. For instance the US Geological Survey is part of the Interior Department and the Secretary of the Interior is in the President's Cabinet and it is not an independent agency. The National Transportation Bureau used to be part of the Department of Transportation but it is now independent. The Federal Communications Commission has always been independent of the Executive Branch. This independence lets them make tough decisions with less political pressure than if they were directly under a president's cabinet.

OK. Enough about the structure of government and on to the two decisions I liked. The first happened on December 13, 2011 (this year) when the Federal Communication Commission ruled that starting on December 13 of next year, 2012, commercials must have the same average volume as the program they are interrupting. It drives me up the wall when you're watching a show and the commercial comes on and blasts you with loud music or has someone shouting at you. Now, if we can just hold out for a year, that will be behind us. Sure, some smart commercial makers will figure out how to get the average volume to be low while still blasting us for part of the commercial. But now that this has been labeled as a bad practice, it will be harder for them to get away with it. It is called the CALM act (Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation - where do they get these stupid names?) and here is some information about it at the FCC site. Here is a link about how the CALM act will be enforced.

Now, if we can just get the FCC to make a ruling about channels that show little, moving images while we're watching the shows! I'm referring to those stupid little inserts that take up a part of the screen with some of the characters from the next show that will be aired who are dancing and jiggling around to get our attention to announce that they are coming on next and in the process they distract us from what we're trying to watch. Please FCC - get rid of those things.

Well, this is turning out to be longer than I thought so I'm splitting this up into two blog posts. The second will concern a recommendation from the National Transportation Safety Commission. I hope to post it soon. By the way, the picture of the Capitol Building here is from Wikipedia at this location. It has a much higher resolution image.

Mistakes and experience

2011-12-12T21:00:00.000-05:00

Here is a funny quote that I enjoy repeating:

Good decisions come from experience but experience comes from bad decisions.

Most places don't attribute this to anyone but some places claim that Mark Twain said it. It's funny and it seems true but I don't really believe it. It makes us feel better about making mistakes and it is good to turn bad decisions into something positive - a learning experience. But there are a lot of bad decisions that don't lead to something positive. Take my last post - A chilling story. The bad decisions the pilots made may have led to experience for other pilots but not for themselves. And it took a near miracle, the finding of the flight recorders, to turn it into a learning experience.

I think another goal of this quote is to get us to try things. You can sit around and worry about something and never come to a decision and that's a bad thing. But I don't want to believe that the only way to gain experience is from making mistakes. I think that's one of the great advantages we have as human beings - we have the chance to learn from other people's bad decisions. That brings to mind another funny quote:

Just remember that it's possible that your whole reason for existing could be to serve as a bad example.

That's pretty pessimistic, too. I don't think anyone has that as their sole reason to exist. Everyone has a chance to do good and everyone can be redeemed and can be forgiven:

This is good and pleases God our Savior, who wants everyone to be saved and to understand the truth. 1 Timothy 2:3-4 New Living Translation

Yes, God would like all of us to be saved but that probably will not happen. We've been given free will and everyone does not have to accept the free gift of forgiveness. But remember, especally at this time of the year, that the gift is offered. We just have to accept it!

[Update - Boy did I mess up that second quote! I made it sound like everyone exists to be a bad example! Pretty stupid. Although, at one time or another, I guess we all do serve as bad examples.]

A chilling story

2011-12-09T17:15:00.000-05:00

Stall diagram from FAA manual

About two and a half years ago, a loaded Air France passenger jet plunged into the Atlantic Ocean. It had been through a very turbulent storm at night but other airliners had gone through (or around) the same storm with no problem. What had happened? The airplane had an advanced method of automatically sending information about its situation and its controls back to a receiving station in France so even though they couldn't find the data recorders on the plane itself, the company had some ideas about what went wrong.

But in April this year, amazingly, the flight data recorders and the voice recorder were found and recovered. And they still worked! That enabled a piecing together of what caused the crash. An article in Popular Mechanics magazine titled What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 by Jeff Wise is a well written summary of what has been found from the recovered recorders. It mixes excerpts from the voice recordings of the pilots with facts from the data recorders to tell what it was like in the cockpit of the doomed jet. The writer is not only a pilot but has also written books on human reactions to fear. Reading the story is like reading an adventure novel but it's scarier because it really happened. The only complaint I have with the article is that there should be an illustration showing how stall works in airplanes and how the plane could have its nose up and yet be losing altitude. I've included the image here to help with that a bit. Imagine that the plane is no longer moving forward fast enough to produce lift at its wings. In a stall, it is falling down while pointing up - almost like a leaf falling from a tree.

Learning about the human reactions and why they may have made them was enlightening. The author gives some possible explanations why the least experienced pilot made the mistakes he did and why all the pilots may have acted so illogically. But, as an engineer, I found that the human interactions with the plan's controls were just as interesting. The pilots made many mistakes but they were made worse by the design of the airplane's control system.

From my perspective, the design of the Airbus 330 is flawed. The plane is controlled through a pair of sticks at each pilot's seat (pilot and copilot). They don't use the familiar yoke or wheel and they are not physically tied together. So, one person can be doing one thing with the controls and the other can be doing something else without realizing what is going on. And even more perplexing, the Airbus averages the values if the two controls are different! This isn't a political process where compromise is important - it is a precise technical activity.

I don't bring this to your attention to scare you or to keep you from flying on commercial airlines. It is still safer to fly in an airplane than to travel in just about any other way. But it scares me a bit that technology can be so advanced and still allow things like this to happen. As I said in my post This day in engineering history, it is important that we learn from mistakes like this. And we all need to learn how to act in an emergency without panicking. It could save your life.

Picture from Federal Aviation Administration publication Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge - Chapter 4

Decorating for Christmas

2011-12-03T20:31:00.001-05:00

My wife, Cindy, gets so excited about Christmas. We begin decorating our house for Christmas right after Thanksgiving. We have an artificial tree that we've used for over seventeen years. We can leave it up as long as we like. We haven't been putting up lights outside since we moved to this house five years ago but this year, we have a few lights out on the porch. Those are the showiest of our decorations. But some of my favorites are the small, unassuming things we place around the house. The first picture on the right is a modern, simple manger scene that we place in the window.

The next picture shows a choir. Presumably, they are singing Christmas carols. I'm not sure that's true but who's to say they are not? This collection started when I was the choir director at our old church. The choir bought me the director figure one year. I even have a hat like that but I never wore it while conducting. Cindy liked that figure and bought singer figures over the years. I enjoyed being the choir director but I don't think my musical selections were very popular. I tended to like classical music or more modern pieces with complex harmonies. I liked the idea of our singing Christian music that forced us to work and stretch our abilities. The minister and many of the younger, active members of the congregation wanted more contemporary music with unison singing and less part singing. So, I stepped down after about six or seven years and just sang in the choir under the direction of others. Now, there is no choir at that church which is one of the reasons we left. I'm not involved in the music at our new church. They have very talented musicians and I don't know where I'd fit in. Also, it's nice to be able to sit back and worship and enjoy the service without being responsible for anything.

The last picture shows my favorite piece. It is Santa kneeling at the manger and worshiping the baby Jesus. Jesus is the reason for the season, after all. I wrote about The True Meaning of Christmas about three years ago so I won't write about that here. I'm not one of those who get angry about the commercialization of Christmas and rail against those who buy presents and decorate and have parties. I'm just against doing all that and forgetting about why celebrate Christmas. We need to first, bow down at the feet of Jesus and thank God for sending him. We need to help our fellow humans who need our help and then we can go and celebrate any way we want. Of course, no one is going to worry about getting my approval.

The open parking space

2011-12-02T12:56:00.000-05:00

This image is from Wikimedia Commons

Now that we're in the Christmas shopping season, I thought another story from my old college friend, Jim, would be appropriate. He was coming out of the mall with his arms full of packages and was heading back to his car to leave. As he walked, a car slowed down and motioned to him indicating he would like to take the space Jim would be opening. Jim nodded and walked on. The car followed him with the driver assuredly smiling broadly. He had just made a smart move. "All the other folks driving around blindly looking for spaces should be so smart," he probably thought.

As Jim walked, though, he became less sure of just where he had parked his car. It wasn't a parking garage like the episode in Seinfeld but it was a huge, single-level parking lot (larger than the one in the generic picture here) and he was now sure that he was heading in the wrong direction. How does he tell the driver behind him what's going on? He can't really, without going over to talk with him. So, he keeps walking with the driver following with the driver's smile fading rapidly. Finally, after a few changes of direction and waiting for the driver to catch up, he found his car and blocked the way for the driver to claim the spot so no one else would grab it first.

When he told me this story, we laughed and thought of how a TV situation comedy might expand it. We imagined that another car would see the first car following Jim and assume they knew where parking spaces might be so they would follow the first car. Then another car, seeing the first two obviously heading to an open space, would join in the line. Maybe they could grab the space before the other two pulled in! Then, in our imagined TV show, we'd pull the camera back and show a long line of cars following Jim around the parking lot as he searched for his car - knowing that only one space was going to be opening up.

Picture from Wikimedia Commons

Checking your speed

2011-11-30T20:00:00.000-05:00

The weather has been so nice and the temperature so warm, that I'm still riding my scooter to work when it doesn't rain. The other day, as I rounded a corner, I noticed that one of those portable, automated radar speed indicators (like the one pictured at the right) was just ahead. It flashed my speed but I was caught off guard and I didn't check the speed on my speedometer in time. I was past the trailer before I could check it again.

I have wondered how accurate the speedometer on my scooter is. If we are threatened with being pulled over for going too fast, you'd think we'd be able to check the speedometer in an easier manner than looking for these radar indicators or finding marked sections of highway that let you check them. I've found that most of those marked highways are in areas of heavy traffic and it's almost impossible to keep a steady speed so you can time it correctly. Someone is always forcing me to change lanes or slow down. It just doesn't seem right.

I thought I'd be ready for it the next day so I could really check my speedometer correctly. As I got to the place where the radar trailer had been, I checked my speed and then looked up to see what the display showed. But it wasn't there. The trailer had been moved or just taken away. About mile later, though, I saw the trailer up ahead. Just as I was getting close, a car pulled out in front of me and I had to slow way down. As I passed the speed indicator, it didn't register anything. I was going less than the speed limit so I figured maybe they only flash a speed if you're going faster than the speed limit.

So, today, I saw the speed indicator in the same place it had been the day before. This time I was ready and raised my speed just above the speed limit and, sure enough, it flashed a speed very close to what my speedometer read. So, I finally knew that my speedometer could be trusted. And it only took me three tries.

Consistency

2011-11-28T12:57:00.000-05:00


A Sigma 7 system

Here's a short, funny (or maybe just mildly amusing) story I remember from our introductory programming course in college. Yes, back in 1970, most of us didn't learn to program a computer until we got to college. And then, it was on a large computer that everyone had to share. No one had a personal computer at that time and there were not even minicomputers in any of the departments. Our school, Bucknell University, was more advanced than most, though. There were computer terminals all around the campus for us to use to interact with the main computer, a Scientific Data Systems Sigma 7. SDS was later bought by Xerox.

We first learned programming using BASIC and once we got to needing to write larger programs, we switched to FORTRAN. That was FORTRAN IV. I remember one of my big hurdles to learning FORTRAN was that you didn't need a line number for every line like you did for BASIC.

Anyway, our teacher was writing down three qualities of a good subroutine. I'll list them similarly to how he listed them. The explanations are my ideas from what I know now (this all happened 41 years ago - I'm lucky to remember that he made three points!). Back then, he just wrote three words and then explained in the lecture what he meant.

1) A subroutine should be reusable. The idea was to not have to rewrite code and a subroutine allowed you to use one piece of code over and over. While it might help to organize your code to write a subroutine for a piece of code that was only used once, you generally didn't want to do that.

2) A subroutine should do only one thing and do it well. This meant it should be simple to understand and simple to test. This allowed you to use it with confidence in other places.

C) A subroutine should be consistent. For instance, you shouldn't have a bunch of subroutines that take their arguments in degrees (for angles, not temperature) and then have one subroutine that takes its arguments in radians.

A few people noticed the problem and then, in a matter of seconds, everyone was enjoying the joke. Everyone but the professor! He didn't see the problem until one of the students pointed out the in-consistency of his list. But once he saw it, he, too, enjoyed the extra joke that the error would come on the Consistent item.

By the way, the picture here is from the CR4 Blog entry "On This Day" in engineering history for October 29, 1969. It talks about what many consider the first message sent between computers on the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency network (ARPANET) - the precurosr to the Internet. The message was between a SDS Sigma 7 and a SDS 940.

Tiptoeing dog

2011-11-25T07:35:00.000-05:00


Charlie NOT tiptoeing

Our dog, Charlie, has taught himself to tiptoe. Since it's a holiday today (our company gives us the day after Thanksgiving off) and my wife and daughter are out shopping and my son is not yet awake, the house if very quiet. I'm working on my computer (out of site of the dog bed) and Charlie is supposed to be on his bed - waiting for me to take him for a walk. But the left-overs from yesterday's wonderful meal are beckoning and the cat food dish is full and calling to him.

Charlie knows it is wrong to eat food that is not in his own dish so if he wants to get at the other treats, he needs to do it without me finding out about it. So, he tiptoes. His version of tiptoeing is to move very slowly and put his paws down as gently as he can. But his toenails give him away. If the house wasn't so quiet, I might have missed it but I heard the ticking of his nails and caught him in the act.

Only a hound dog can give you the look he gave me (similar to this picture I took a while ago ). He didn't scramble back to his bed (although he sometimes does that when I catch him off his bed). He just looked up at me mournfully. If he hadn't already had his breakfast and a treat, I would be tempted to give him something to eat. But both he and I know that he just wants more to eat. Yes, dogs are a lot like humans. Good and bad.

Driving isn't hard enough?

2011-11-23T13:17:00.001-05:00

My title is a little misleading. If there had been more room, I'd have said, "As if driving before the Thanksgiving holiday isn't hard enough..."

I saw a report about a tanker leaking a tar-like material over a forty mile stretch of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. This report at National Public Radio has a bit of video with it. There is a another angle to the story in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette where people are blaming the turnpike authorities for not closing down the highway. Finally, here's another version from television station WPXI in Pittsburgh that has some pictures of the mess.

People were not aware of what was going on until their cars started handling badly. Then they noticed that other people were pulled off on the side of the road. What a mess. From the pictures, I don't know how no one was seriously hurt. It looks like one of those things that happens suddenly and it certainly wasn't something that you would have experience driving in. You'd never know how to handle the situation before it happened.

I often wonder about this. You try to be careful and figure everything out and practice and learn and study and prepare yourself for the troubles you'll face in life. And then somebody pours tar on the road in front of you.

The joke that couldn't miss

2011-11-19T20:21:00.000-05:00

Once again, I'm writing a story that I was reminded about when I went to visit some old college friends last month. That visit is mentioned in my post Too much to write.

My best friend Nick was in ROTC in college. He heard a joke there that he thought was great and told everyone. Here it is.

A really tough lieutenant was in charge of his platoon and had them all assembled. Word came to him that the mother of one of his men, Private Smith, had just died. Instead of dismissing the men and telling Private Smith of the tragedy in private, he announced, "Private Smith, front and center." Private Smith stepped forward and the lieutenant announced, "Private Smith, your mother has died." Knowing his lieutenant didn't like his men showing emotion, Private Smith simply answered, "Yes sir!" The men were then dismissed. The captain saw this and talked with the lieutenant. "Don't you think that was a little harsh, lieutenant? I would like you to show a little more tact in situations like this in the future." "Yes sir," answered the lieutenant.

It so happened that a few days later, word came that Private Jones' mother had died. Remembering what his captain had told him, the lieutenant assembled his men and said, "All you men with mothers take one step forward." As the men complied, the lieutenant said, "Not so fast, Private Jones!"

Nick told this joke every chance he got. I thought it was funny but I didn't think mentioning death in a joke was a good idea. Weeks later Nick and his girlfriend (and future wife) Andrea went to see a performance in the campus coffee house. As they told the story, during a break in the acts, to take up some time as the next group set up, the master of ceremonies asked if anyone wanted to come up and tell a story, sing a short song or tell a joke. Nick raised his hand and Andrea knew right away what he was going to do. She tried to dissuade him but he jumped right up and told the joke. She said he was so excited about the joke that he had a hard time containing himself. As he finished the joke, "Not so fast, Private Jones!", she said no one laughed. There was dead silence. It was agonizing for his friends to think about but it was a good lesson, too. That's why people can earn a living telling jokes. If it was easy, everyone would do it.

Why didn't I post this earlier?

2011-11-18T15:12:00.000-05:00

It's always bothered my that the National League has one more team than the American League. It's also bothered my that the National League Central Division has six teams while the American League Western Division only has four teams. I know there has been talk about realigning the leagues but the arguments against it were always that this would lead to an uneven number of teams so there would always be one team in each league that couldn't play on a given day. Also, there is the inertia of the owners and fans not wanting to change things.

There have been articles written for years about moving the Milwaukee Brewers back to the American League (they started in that league), just swapping the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Kansas City Royals (but what would that solve?), moving the Florida Marlins to the American League (so they could have a rivalry with the Tampa Bay Rays) and moving the Houston Astros to the American League (where they could have a rivalry with the Texas Rangers). Actually, I hadn't heard about the Astros move - it was something I thought about myself. As a matter of fact, I've had a draft of an article sitting in my Drafts folder for quite a while but never finished it. My answer to the problem of uneven numbers of teams in each league is easily handled by those two extra teams playing each other. The extra teams in each league would rotate. Baseball has had interleague play for years now so the "extra" teams would fit in with that nicely.

Well, now, the word is that the Houston Astros are going to be moving to the American League and into the same division as the Texas Rangers. That would mean that all six divisions of Major League Baseball would have five teams. Just as I thought they should! Why oh why didn't I finish my post and publish it even just a few days ago? I could have been famous! People from all around the country would have pointed to me and said, "See, this guy had the idea before anyone!" But I blew it. Once again, I've missed my chance at fame and fortune.

Thank goodness.

[Update - I looked back in my records and found that I first started working on a post about moving the Astros to the American League in May of this year! I can't believe I waited so long.]

Surprise visitors

2011-11-15T20:25:00.001-05:00

Here is yet another story I was reminded of when I went to visit my old college friends last month as mentioned in my post Too much to write. This story is a another one about one of my best friends, Jim. I told a story about him before in two parts, Unintentional practical joke - part 1 and Unintentional practical joke - part 2, because the story happened in two parts - separated by about a year. This story happened in two parts, too, but it wasn't nearly as intricate and didn't happen over the course of a year. So, I'll just tell this one in one post.

My friend Jim was very busy and a little absent minded. He would sometimes lose his phone bill and his phone would be shut off. This didn't happen often but it happened two times that I remember. As I mentioned in the previous story about him, we were living near each other for about three years after graduating. He lived in a high rise apartment in Washington DC and I lived in a suburban apartment in Northern Virginia. As luck would have it, our good friends Nick and Andrea stopped in to see us. This was very unusual because Andrea was still finishing up her last year of college and Nick was serving in the Army in Germany. But Nick was home on leave so they decided to surprise us. Well, they were able to call me and we decided to surprise Jim in Washington. We couldn't call him ahead so we just showed up at his apartment building. There was always someone at the front desk and they sometimes wouldn't let you just go up to see someone. They liked to announce you or let you call before going up. We decided to not let Jim know that both Nick and Andrea were there. So, I called him (apparently the phones worked as an intercom even if he hadn't paid his phone bill) and told him that Andrea had made a surprise visit and we'd like to come up. He was a little upset because his room was a mess and if we'd wait a little while, he'd clean up a bit. We gave him time and then went up. Andrea and I made sure he was in another room and brought in Nick and hid him under the messy covers of the bed. When Jim went to straighten them up, Nick jumped out at him and we all had a good laugh at Jim's surprised look. I remember us having a great time that week-end. Then they had to leave and we went back to our regular schedule.

Weeks later, Jim told me a funny story that was funnier because of our surprise visit. He said he was sleeping soundly when he got a call from the front desk in the middle of the night. The desk clerk said that there were visitors on their way up to his room. If we hadn't done the same thing to him weeks before, he would have thought nothing of it and assumed it was just a mistake. But because we'd surprised him once, he figured we were doing it again but at a worse time. So, he rushed around the apartment getting it straightened up. He cleaned what he could and made himself as presentable as he could so early in the morning. He was surprised it took so long for the visitors to arrive but was grateful for the time. He finally decided he'd done enough and sat down to wait. And wait. And wait. After a while, he knew something was wrong. When he called down to the desk to see what was going on, they knew nothing about it. Either they'd changed shifts or had called the wrong room and didn't want to admit it or - it had all been a dream. But if it was a dream, he must have dreamt the phone call and then woke up. But he said it seemed so real, he didn't think it was a dream. It was just one of those mysteries in life. But he'd never forget the foolish feeling he had of being all dressed and ready in the wee hours of the morning. He went to bed early that night.

Secret experiment

2011-11-10T12:13:00.000-05:00

This is another story I was reminded of when I traveled to see some old college friends last month. That trip was mentioned in my post Too much to write. In my group of close friends, we all, at one time or another, took a class in psychology. But Andrea took more than most of us because she was majoring in animal behavior - a mixture of psychology and biology. So, she was given many projects where she needed volunteers for experiments. She usually asked her boyfriend Nick, one of my best friends and her future husband, to help but sometimes she needed more than one person or Nick was busy doing something else. So, this time, I was the subject.

She told me that she would be asking me to make up sentences given a verb as a starting point and using a subjective pronouns like "I', "we", "he", "she" etc. which I could choose. She didn't tell me the purpose of the experiment because that would have biased the outcome. She started by giving me a verb and I made up a simple sentence. Next verb - another sentence. As I spoke my sentences, I noticed that she would seem to approve of some of them with, "Good," or "Yes.". It seemed like she found some of my sentences interesting so, I started to make up more elaborate sentences.

Sometimes, when I thought I'd made up a really good sentence, she would say, "Good," but other times, she'd say nothing in response to what I thought was one of my better offerings. Or I'd even get a, "Hmm," as if I'd made a mistake. I was getting desperate and was almost reciting small short stories with a single sentence. I was determined to find out what subjects she was approving of. Was it when I talked about personal things or should I make sentences about world affairs? Maybe she'd respond better if I threw in a little romance. But that didn't seem to elicit as much response as when my sentences were about food - but then a sentence about dessert got a, "Hmm." Then I thought she responded better to sentences about sports. No, I think she likes funny sentences better.

Well, I was so wrapped up in my search for approval of my "story telling" that I was surprised when Andrea announced that the experiment was over. Once we finished, we were able to talk about the purpose of what we'd just done. It turns out, she was seeing if she could affect my choice of subjective pronoun and specifically the gender I chose - "him" or "her". So, when I started the sentence with "I", "we", or "you", she wouldn't say anything. If I used "she", Andrea would give some sign of approval. If I used "he", then some form of disapproval was used. Sentence structure, depth of the story or subject had nothing to do with it. She said that she didn't seem to be able to correlate any of my pronoun choices with her influence. But I said, "You certainly did influence me. Just not in the way you intended."

This happens so often in our lives. We don't want to overtly influence people but we try to do it in a "nice" way by implying things. But usually, in my experience, the person we're trying to influence gets the wrong idea. It's better to just come out with it.

This day in engineering history

2011-11-07T17:04:00.000-05:00

Today is the anniversary of the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State in 1940. It's a sad day, of course, because it commemorates a failure. Fortunately, no was was hurt but it was still a waste of both money and time. And it could have ended terribly. I won't go over the whole story. It's documented many places as well in this Wikipedia article. But the importance of remembering failures is to learn from them. It doesn't help anyone to just say, "It was their fault." The failure of this bridge led to changes in the way bridges are designed and made everyone a bit safer.

This is one of those things that is true for engineering and true for our life in general. While it is important to get to the bottom of a problem, it doesn't help to just punish the people responsible. You need their cooperation in getting to the bottom of the problem. You need them to be open about the problems they faced and why they made certain decisions. I'm not saying you don't punish people who willfully disregard good design practices. But when someone is trying to do something no one else has done before, you must take into consideration that they had no path to follow for part of their project. Simply looking for scapegoats and making a big show of punishing them doesn't prevent future problems. It might cause people to be less willing to try things that are absolutely assured of success but it doesn't help us progress.

This is one of the nice things I like about the company I work for. When problems arise, everyone works together to solve the problem and learn why it failed and how to keep it from happening in the future. Sometimes, people are punished or fired when their methods were way outside normal engineering practices or they were intentionally deceptive in their methods. But nothing slows down innovation that making a big show of punishing people who were just trying to do something new.

Here's an interesting website. Learning from Failure, if you'd like to learn more about this.

Sunrise...Sunset

2011-11-06T21:37:00.000-05:00

Well, we've moved the clocks again. Where sunset was around 5:30 PM yesterday, tonight it was at 4:30 PM. The people who make up these rules (and change them) are not morning people. Well, yes, switching back to Standard Time in the fall is a good thing for morning people. But the whole concept of Daylight Saving Time does nothing for morning people. It was nice to see the Sun at 6:23 AM this morning instead of 7:22 AM as it was the day before. But that's just because we put it back where it should have been.

We didn't save any daylight during the summer and we didn't save any energy by changing the rules in 2007 (Congress passed the law in 2005 but didn't enact it until 2007). All switching our clocks twice a year does is disrupt our lives. I've heard people claim that the idea of Daylight Saving Time was to help the farmers but I don't believe that. The animals don't respond to our changing our clocks. My dog got me up at 4:30 AM this morning needing to go out and wanting to eat. Do you think the cows all shifted their schedules this morning when the farmers in Vermont wanted to sleep an hour later?

As a side note - isn't it funny that 500 years after Copernicus first proposed the idea that it was the Earth that orbited the Sun instead of the other way around, we still refer to our first view of the Sun in the morning as Sun Rise and our last view of the Sun in the evening as Sun Set? Even scientific journals and papers use these terms. If you need a good Sunrise and Sunset calculator, you might try the Time and Date site or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration site.

What we did for Halloween

2011-11-01T20:30:00.000-04:00

This year, instead of going to the houses in our area and the kids asking for treats, we participated in our church's Trunk or Treat event. These are found many places and done in different ways but at our church, families sign up to decorate their cars' trunk (or pick-up truck or van) to a theme and offer candy to passers-by. The vehicles are all parked in the parking lot so this is a safer way for the children to trick-or-treat and it lets families in our neighborhood get to visit our church in a less "threatening" atmosphere. In our case, we all dressed up as Nintendo game characters and decorated our car to the theme of Luigi's Mansion.

Luigi's Mansion is a game for the Nintendo gaming console that my son has enjoyed. In it, Luigi's brother Mario has been abducted and turned into a picture (?!?) by the king of the ghosts. Luigi must find clues and track down his brother while fighting off ghosts and other bad things as he finds his way through the mansion. It's an adventure type game and really makes you think. In the picture here, you can see Evan dressed as Luigi (notice he has a vacuum cleaner - that was used in the game to capture ghosts) and Emma is dressed as Toad - a toadstool from the Mushroom Kingdom who helps Luigi. My wife is dressed as Princess Peach, also of the Mushroom Kingdom. I was dressed as Luigi's brother Mario but I was taking the picture. In the second picture, on the left, you'll see a young fellow who also dressed as Mario. We had a good laugh over that and he was a good sport about it.

It was a great time for all of us and over one thousand people visited our Trunk or Treat that night.There was free popcorn, hot chocolate (it was pretty cool that evening) and other free food. There were other activities for the kids, too, like dancing games and inflatable bouncies. The fire department was there to display one of their new fire trucks for getting into wooded areas that aren't normally accessible to fire fighting equipment. The next picture, on the right with the Statue of Liberty, was another of the more than 25 decorated trunks there. You can see that people really got into it!

The last picture shows our scariest visitors. I remember looking up from something I was doing and seeing those two faces staring at me. I took a step back before I remembered what we were doing and laughed at my own surprise. Many Christians don't like Halloween because lately, it has been co-opted by people who consider themselves witches and pagans. But they forget that this holiday, while similar to celebrations of pagan people, gets its name from the All Hallows Evening prelude to All Hallows (or All Saints) Day on November 1. There are no pagan celebrations for the Saints. I have always looked at our celebration of Halloween as showing our lack of fear of the dark powers of the Earth. We look to Christ for our power and nothing can harm us if we put our trust in Jesus. Even these scary folks!

I'm marking this as being posted on November 1, when I started this post, even though I finally posted it on Sunday,

Cat story

2011-10-31T12:43:00.000-04:00

I was reminded of this story when I got together with my old college friends a few weeks ago as mentioned in my post titled Too much to write. I was spending part of the summer on campus because I'd gotten a chance to do some extra-credit biomedical research. Since that was the field I wanted to go into when I graduated, it seemed like a good idea. By good fortune, my two best friends were also going to be on campus, too. One of my friend's girlfriend (who he would later marry and who would organize our get together in Too much to write) would stop by to visit during the summer, too. She was working at a resort in the Pocono Mountains not too far away. During one of those trips, she brought along a little kitten she had adopted. I was never crazy about cats but I liked all living things and could tolerate cats as long as they didn't bother me.

Well, she had a problem. She couldn't keep the cat in the dormitory on the resort and my other friends were going to be going home for a while before classes started for the next semester. So, since I was going to be staying on campus until everyone came back for the fall, she asked if I could keep the cat for the few weeks left on summer. "Taking care of cats is very simple, " she said. "Just put out some food and water and have a litter box in another part of the room and he'll be happy. And if he turns out to not like being inside all the time, you can just leave him outside and put food and water out for him. Cats are very smart and he will come back to the food and water and you can bring him in when you want and leave him out when you want." She finished with, "You won't have any trouble."

You probably know where this is going but I'll fill in some details. He was a very nice cat but he was a little too affectionate. He was busy all night and wanted to play. No matter how many times I put him on the floor, he jumped back on the bed. So, then I decided to move to the upper bunk of the bunk beds in the room. He still managed to jump up and get on the upper bunk - of course making a lot more noise as he "rope climbed" up the blanket and grabbing onto me as he finished his epic climb. So, then I locked him in the closet but he cried and cried until I let him out. So, the next day, as much as I was afraid to, I put him outside the dorm with some food and water. I stayed there with him for a while and played with him to familiarize him with the area. He cried a little as I walked into the dorm and closed the door behind me but I couldn't help it. I had things to do.

When I got back, I went to see if he was there but he was gone. I filled the food and water dishes and went on my way. I checked back the next morning and he still wasn't there. I don't remember, after all these years, whether the food and water were being used. I just remember the panic I felt. I'd lost my friend's cat! I walked all over looking for him. I had a lot of things to do but I couldn't think about anything besides finding the cat. I asked all around and walked and walked. There wasn't much time until classes started and I was sure the cat was either dead or had been adopted by someone else.

Finally, the day before my friends were to get back to campus, I heard a cry. It was my friend's cat! He was on the other side of the building but at least he'd found the right building. I ran around to get him and took him to my room. That night, I didn't have a problem with him wanting to play. He was exhausted and slept all night. He was hungry and thirsty too. He'd had quite an adventure. The next day, I took him and all his stuff down to where my friend's girlfriend would have her room. She wasn't there but my friend, her boyfriend, was there setting things up for her. I gladly handed him the cat and his stuff and told him the story. As I helped him get the room ready, we turned our backs and the cat jumped out the window! We were on the second floor and he jumped into a bush. We ran down to look for him but he was gone. We never saw that cat again. But I'd done my duty and had passed him off to my my friend. As bad as I felt, I'd done my duty.

It would take sixteen years for me to learn to love cats. I got a cat of my own at that time and she changed me forever. But until that time, I swore I'd never have anything to do with cats again.

It happens every fall

2011-10-27T12:47:00.000-04:00

My title is a bit of a play on the movie titled It Happens Every Spring which was one of my favorite baseball movies when I was growing up along with Angels in the Outfield, the 1951 version, because it was about the Pittsburgh Pirates. An interesting side note is that Paul Douglas is in both movies. He plays a catcher and friend of the lead character in It Happens Every Spring but he plays the manager and a lead character in Angels in the Outfield. But this post has nothing to do with baseball. It has to do with our gas fireplace. Boy, talk about getting off topic.

We have a wonderful gas fireplace. This thing is so good you could almost heat the entire house with it. And there is no smoke, no wood to split and did I mention no smoke? We don't have to worry about a chimney fire and don't have to get the chimney cleaned. We don't have a flue to worry about and no air leaks during the winter. Too good to be true? Almost. Its one problem is that every fall (see how the title works?), we have to light the pilot light and I can never remember how to do it. It's just too long between lightings for me to remember this. If it was once a month, I'd probably be OK. But doing something once a year gives me too much chance to forget how to do it. And this morning, I once again showed how well I can forget things.

The first problem is getting the glass cover off. I tried sliding it up and lifting it out like I thought I remembered doing last year but it didn't budge. Then I remembered it had something to do with getting into the lower metal grate and releasing it. How to get the metal grate open? That turned out to be the easiest job - it just tilts out. I did that after yanking and pushing and sliding the grate to no avail. Then, with the bottom grate opened and no apparent screws holding the glass cover I realized that there were two latches that held the bottom and flipped those which released the bottom of the glass cover. With the glass cover just hanging there, wonder of wonders, the glass did slide up and lift out as I remembered doing last year. My confidence took a big boost. I was going to do it. But then I couldn't remember why I needed to get the glass cover off in the first place. All the controls were in the bottom part covered by the metal grate - which was open already!

So now I had to figure out how to light the pilot. Well, actually, I first had to figure out how to get the gas flowing so I could light the pilot. And this, I'm ashamed to say, was where I finally got stuck. There were three or four knobs and switches down there and I had no idea which order to do them in. There was a knob that had three positions - "off", "pilot" and "on". I moved it to "pilot" and heard nothing. I was afraid to leave it like that because maybe the gas was flowing slowly. I finally had to ask, "Where is the manual?" I know my wife had the manual last year but she wasn't sure she remembered where she'd put it. Then she had a great idea. "Let's look it up on the Internet." We knew it was a Vermont Castings fireplace so I went to their site but they seem to make a million different gas fireplaces and none looked like ours. So now, to look up the particular manual for our fireplace, we had to find the paper manual to know which one to look for.

Finally, after I'd tried a few more configurations of knobs and switches, my wonderful wife found the manual. Then it was simple. You not only turn the knob to "pilot" but you push the knob in which starts the gas flow. Then you light the pilot either with a match (that's the only reason to remove the glass cover) or with the handy igniter switch in the lower panel. You continue to hold the knob in with the flame burning for a minute until the safety allows the flame to burn on its own. The safety causes the gas flow to stop if the pilot light goes out because it's no longer producing heat. Holding the knob in overrides the safety until there is enough heat to keep it on. After you release the knob, you turn it to the "on" position and you're done.

So that's it for this year. After getting everything back together, the very next thing I did was look for the electronic manual for our fireplace since we now had the model number from the paper manual. The electronic manual is now safely saved on my computer and ready for next fall when this will all repeat. But next year, I'll bring up my handy electronic manual and review it before attempting this again. If I can remember where I stored the manual a year from now.

Harvest time again

2011-10-26T12:57:00.000-04:00

Just like it happened about this time last year, see Cranberries, I saw a cranberry harvest as I was returning from work. I was heading home to a nice meal and the welcome of my family and these poor folks were rushing to finish before dark. I stopped to snap a few pictures and saw more activity this year. Last year, I only saw the machines that shake the cranberry plants that allow the berries to rise to the surface. This year I also got to see corralling of the floating berries into a section of the pond where they would then be pumped into trucks to be hauled to storage or processing buildings. The first picture is a good overview of everything. Click on the pictures to see larger versions. To the right of center in the picture, you can see the harvesting machines getting the berries to separate from the plants and rise to the top. To the left of center, you can see the guys in waders corralling the berries and dragging them to shore.

In the foreground, you see the berries that have been brought close to shore for pick up. In the picture on the left, you can see a closer picture of the berries themselves. They don't look so appetizing floating in the not-very-clear water with all the other material floating around them. These guys don't worry about that. That's for the processors to worry about. The water is actually very clear. It has just freshly flooded the bog.

The next two pictures show closer views of the workers. The guys corralling the berries look like they are having fun but it is really hard work. If they mess up and let berries escape their nets, they have to go to a lot of work to get them back. The berries are a lot heavier than you'd think because there are so many of them.

The picture on the left is a closer view of the harvesting machines. I used to think the harvesting machines were boats but now I see that they are not. They have wheels and ride on the cranberry beds. That's another reason the bogs are only flooded with 6 - 8 inches of water. I couldn't stay to watch them finish and it's a good thing I didn't try. I saw them at the same bog finishing up their work. There are no lights on the bogs so I know they didn't work through the night. They just got up much earlier than I do and got to work much earlier than I do. I'm glad I have the job I do!

The last picture shows a non-human cranberry harvester. It was moving very fast and I wasn't able to get a good picture but I was lucky to get a picture at all because it swam under water for long periods and I was only able to follow it by walking very fast and following the trail of bubbles. I'm guessing it is a muskrat but I'm not sure. It was too small for a beaver and not as long as an otter. I'll probably never be sure. Click on the picture to see if you can figure out what it is.

The boys went to see "Real Steel"

2011-10-24T12:32:00.000-04:00

I've always been fascinated by robots and it seems like my son is taking after me. My wife and daughter weren't interested in the least. So, we had a boys day at the movies.

Most of the time, robots are misrepresented in movies and books and are used as artificial (ha ha) villains. They always have to be menacing and they don't follow orders and attack the people or they do follow orders from evil people and hurt the good people (whoever they are). But in the movie Real Steel, although the robots are menacing, they always follow orders if they can. The story is set in a near future when boxing with human participants has been outlawed and boxing matches now consist of two robots bashing each other until time runs out or one is knocked down for a count of 10. The concept is a little like Robot Wars with much more sophisticated robots. The story, though, is more like Rocky.

I liked the movie for a number of reasons. First of all, the robots were terrific. I don't know if real robots could take the punishment these do but it sure looks convincing. Another reason I liked the movie was that in one scene, when a creditor finds the hero and beats him up (with some thugs to help), the fighting robot owned by the hero does not start on its own to defend the hero. That would have been ridiculous (even if it would have been satisfying to see the bad guy get beat up). Another good scene from the movie was when the underdog robot (owned by the hero) is able to stay in the fight with a much more advanced robot because the advanced robot was losing power. Being bigger with more advanced capabilities would use up a robot's stored power more quickly. And, if the robot was as good as the story implies and its previous matches didn't last long, this wouldn't have shown up before. One last thing I really liked about this story was that the hero was an ex-boxer. His son discovers that their robot has a mode where it can match the movements of a human and this allows the robot, with less sophisticated equipment, to beat more advanced opponents being operated by people who weren't boxers themselves. I liked the fact that just knowing how to operate the robots was not enough. It took skill and knowledge to do it right. I find this to be true in real world engineering, too. Just knowing the equations and how something works isn't enough. You have to understand what you're trying to do. You can just plead ignorance and barge ahead with a plan. You've got to know what you're doing and what the customer wants.

Too much to write

2011-10-18T12:58:00.000-04:00

My title tells two tales. It explains why I hadn't written to my friends in so long and it explains my dilemma in writing this post. This post is one of of few posts that I'll write about visiting my best friends from college who I hadn't talked with in over five years.

They are my best friends - aside from my wife who is my very best friend. I think college friends become such good friends because you meet them under circumstances when you're on your own for the first time and you come to depend on them as you learn your way around in this strange, complex, adult world. I especially depended on my new college friends because I'd led a sheltered life in a small town. I was an only child with just a few close friends. No one in my family (including grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins) had ever been to college. Even though it scared me to death, I felt the need to strike out and face the challenge of being away from my parents. Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA was a four hour drive away from the 400 or so people in Finleyville, PA. My friends and I helped each other along. We were all in the biology program but two of us combined that with electrical engineering. As we each got married later, we were all in each others' weddings. As the years went on, we didn't keep in contact as much as we'd have liked. So, when one friend's wife called recently, it was a pleasant surprise. He was turning 60, as I'd done earlier in the year, and she wanted to have a surprise for him. I missed the call and couldn't call back because it might ruin the surprise if my friend answered. So, I would send an email. Then I realized the problem - the same problem that had kept me from writing or calling for the previous five years and the problem I have now with this post. There was just too much to say. How could I organize it all? Each time I went to write a line, three more stories flooded into my mind. I couldn't stay organized long enough to get a coherent message written.

But then, like facing a new project at work where I didn't know quite where to begin and didn't even know what I didn't know, I had to ask myself, "What is it your are trying to do?" My goal was to answer the simple question, "Could I get to their house for the week-end?" In this case, the question may have been simple but the answer wasn't. Cindy was still going through day-long tests in Boston, I was trying to find time to visit my mother who I hadn't been able to see for over a year and my mother-in-law had collapsed and been to the hospital and was still resting at home. While I'd love to go see my friends, I wasn't sure I could commit to going. Even if I could go, I wasn't sure if my family could go with me. And, in the end, that is what I said. I just answered the question, "Did I want to go?" with a resounding Yes. But the answer to, "Could I go?" had to be left open. All I could do was to go down the list of high priority things that needed to be handled first and then say, "I'll be there if I can."

In the end, I got to see my friends but I had to go alone. It was a terrific week-end but I missed my family. While I was having a wonderful time catching up on my friends' lives, I was anxious to get home to my wife and kids (and yes, even the cats and my dog). I'll tell a few stories from my trip. There is too much to write but I've got a start. Even if I can't write it all written down, whatever I do will be better than nothing. Or putting it off again!

Riding the 'T'

2011-10-12T20:28:00.001-04:00

In Boston, when you refer to the 'T', you're talking about the transit system but especially, the subway system. I've loved streetcars and trolleys since I was a child. Then my parents took me to New York City and I fell in love with the subway. When I moved to New England and made trips to Boston, I was pleased to find that Boston has both trolleys and subways. It's an old system, the Boston subway was the first subway in North America, but that just adds to its charm. It's not as efficient as newer systems but it sure is fun to ride and explore.

So, when my wife needed to go to Boston for two days of tests, we took the kids. Rather than drive around, we took the 'T' and my children enjoyed it. We rode on four of the five color-coded sections of the system. But just for fun, without needing to go there, we decided to ride to the end of the Blue Line. I'd always wanted to do that. On the map in the picture, that's the end on the upper right of the Blue Line. We got out and walked around. There used to be an amusement park there called Wonderland. Then it closed and a dog racing track, by the same name, was opened there. Then dog racing was banned from Massachusetts but the station kept the name. That's not the first time the thing that gave a station its name has gone away. There used to be a department store called Lechmere at the end of the Green Line. Even after that chain of stores closed, though, the station kept the name.

Maybe, one of these days, we'll go to the end of each of the lines on the Boston subway system. That would be fun. I don't know why it's so much fun but it is.

---

Well, I've finally published all the posts I mentioned in Another long time between blog posts but... last month. It took longer than I thought it would but at least I finished. I've updated that post with links from each of the 10 posts I said I'd publish to their eventual location. It's always nice to do something you planned to do. If I can do that more often, I'll be a happy guy.

New England Aquarium - part 2

2011-10-10T12:24:00.000-04:00

In my previous New England Aquarium post, I mentioned that I had more pictures from our visit there that I was going to post this time. After a long week-end of driving (more about that some other time), I'm finally going to show them.

The first picture is in a new part of the aquarium that is quite exciting. If there aren't a million people at the aquarium (like there were by the time we got to the tank) and if they aren't a bunch of children who never learned to take turns (as there were when we got to the tank), you can actually step up to the edge of this tank and touch the rays and sharks (!) as they swim by. In the Shark and Ray Touch Tank this day, the sharks were few and far between and when they came by, I was usually being pushed out of the way by kids and their parents who also didn't know about taking turns. But the rays were much more numerous and I was able to sneak up close enough for a photo this one time. This is such a beautiful scene to me. Just as the penguins seemed to be flying in the water, these rays seem to fly rather than swim.The contrast of the sandy bottom in the foreground and the light blue further back makes it seem like they are leaving the sea and flying into the air.

The last picture I want to show you is of the Sea Anemone tank. The colors are amazing and I wish I had better skills at photography to get them into my pictures. If I'd had a tripod, I could have set the camera for a long exposure to get more light. But I didn't have my tripod so I just have to be satisfied with what I was able to do. The fact that the picture is taken through the glass of the tank doesn't help, either. I wonder if a polarizing filter would help there? I'm going to look into techniques for taking pictures through glass.

Isn't it funny how so many things in the sea are named after something on the land? Sea Anemones are named after the Anemone flower. We have Sea Cucumbers, Sea Lions, Sea Horses, Sea Urchins, Sea Weed and even Sea Monkeys. Then there is the Star Fish with its doubly removed name. It's not a fish and it only looks like a caricature of a star but that's what we call it. With the vast expanse of the sea and the myriad creatures in it, you'd think we could be a little more creative in our naming.

Here is the ocean, vast and wide,
teeming with life of every kind,
both large and small.

See the ships sailing along,
and Leviathan,
which you made to play in the sea.

Psalm 104:25-26 New Living Translation

New England Aquarium

2011-10-07T12:58:00.000-04:00

Click to see the diver on the right

While my wife was going through two days of tests in Boston at the Boston Medical Center, I took my children to the New England Aquarium. I had been there about 20 years ago and was looking forward to seeing it again. My kids had never been there. We got there early before the crowds filled the building. It probably got so crowded because the weather was so bad that day.

From the aquarium website

The biggest feature of the aquarium is its huge, saltwater tank. Hundreds of different kinds of fish and turtles swim around in what looks like a coral reef. In the first picture at the top, my son joked that we came to an aquarium to see people. Yes, it takes a lot of people to maintain the environment and to feed the animals. The small picture to the left gives you a better idea of the scale of the tank. It holds 200,000 gallons of salt water and is 40 feet high and 23 feet wide.

Another popular feature is the penguin display. They are quite active (and noisy at times) and everyone seemed to spend the most time watching them. And yes, another human in the picture. It's amazing how many people it takes to maintain the aquarium. I don't remember seeing this many people at the zoo. Someone has to clean up the mess the penguins leave behind on the rocks and the penguins are too busy to do it themselves.

They don't just stand around. The penguins love to swim. The next picture, on the left, shows the penguins swimming around the huge pool provided for them. It circles the large salt water tank shown above. It was hard to tell when one penguin started and stopped but they seemed to like swimming for long periods. They are fast and graceful and seem to be flying underwater and, being birds, maybe that's why it looks that way.

Well, I'm running out of space and time so I'll leave the last two pictures for the next post. I've got a picture of some rays swimming in another large pool in the aquarium and I'll finally show you some invertebrates - sea anemones.

Be careful, you're being watched

2011-10-06T12:23:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned in previous posts, Cindy has been going to Boston for various tests. As mentioned in "Under the Sea", for one set of tests, we went for two days and the weather was terrible. But on the next trip, the weather was wonderful. Cindy and I happened to make that one-day trip without the kids so we just strolled around the Public Garden. We watched the ducks and the people but weren't aware that we were being watched, too. The picture at the right shows Cindy relaxing a bit before she needed to go to the next appointment. Do you notice who is watching her? You never know who is behind you.

As you can see in the next picture, the squirrels were keeping their eyes on us (just click on the picture to expand it so you can see the squirrels more clearly). We don't know if they just found her interesting or if she looked like she might give them some food. Maybe they thought we were hanging around in their territory a little too long and were giving us the, "OK, move along. We saw these acorns first," look. I guess we'll never know. It shows you that when you're in the big city, watch your back!

"Under the Sea"

2011-10-04T17:10:00.000-04:00

Well, I didn't get all my draft posts published in September as I had hoped in Another long time between blog posts but... but I'm still pretty pleased with myself. Even after not posting anything for 17 days, I still managed to publish 11 posts for the month. That's about what I've been averaging over the last few years. I also learned the lesson that I'm not a good enough writer to post every day. I think I'll stick to posting every 2 to 3 days and even putting up with gaps of up to 17 days.

When my wife needed to go to Boston for two days of tests (see Amyloidosis), we wanted to bring the kids along so they would know what was going on. But the children and I were not able to go into the various testing and consulting rooms so we decided to explore Boston. Since the remains of Tropical Storm Lee were bringing days of rain to the area, we weren't going to be doing much outside. So, I took the kids to the New England Aquarium. One of the things we did there was to go to the Simons IMAX Theater associated with the aquarium. We saw a wonderful movie titled Under the Sea.

We've seen some really good 3D movies. At least Evan and I saw a really good 3D movie, Avatar, not to be confused with Avatar: the Last Airbender which we also saw and enjoyed. We've also seen some really horrible 3D movies. But this one ranks up there with the great 3D movies. You really feel like the schools of fish and colonies of coral are right there in front of you. At some points, you feel like you need to get your arms out in front of you to push the kelp away so you can see the wonders ahead. The camera work is amazing. When you consider how difficult the environment is for taking these pictures, you just have to shake your head and wonder at how they pulled this off. You know the equipment must be large and imposing yet the animals don't seem to notice. Of course you know they did and it is the skill and patience of the filmmakers that makes this work. It is so clear. I have trouble getting scenes in focus with my auto-focus camera. How do you do it hundreds of feet below the ocean surface with hundreds of subjects to focus on? So you not only marvel at the beautiful images but, if you're like me, you marvel at the technical aspects of this movie, too.

I took a class in marine biology in college but all we ever saw were animals that we were able to dredge up on a short visit to the Duke Marine Lab in North Carolina and the organisms in the small aquarium in our lab and pictures in books. This movie should be a requirement for anyone thinking of studying the oceans. It makes you understand how something as vast and diverse as the ocean can also be so fragile and in need of our stewardship. To see a more extensive website devoted to this movie, see this page at the IMAX website.

Two more things before I finish. One pleasant surprise was the narrator. Jim Carrey does a really good job. When I first saw his name on the opening credits, I worried that we were in for a bunch of goofy voices and silly jokes but Mr. Carrey just spoke clearly and eloquently. He seemed as amazed as we were at what we were seeing. But one other thing that I wish would have been different was the 3D glasses. For a normal 3D movie, these glasses would be fine but for an IMAX movie, I found myself wishing they were bigger. Yes, you could move your head to look at different part of the huge screen but I find one of the nice things about IMAX movies is that your peripheral vision kicks in and makes you feel like the movie is all around you. With the normal 3D glasses, I just felt like the movie was in front of me. But it was still a fantastic experience and I highly recommend it.

The unwritten laws of engineering

2011-09-29T22:06:00.002-04:00

I learned a lot of things in engineering school. I learned the basics of electricity and electronics. I learned circuit theory, communications theory and digital electronics. But when I got my first job, I found there were a lot of things I didn't learn in college. I bumped into this series of three articles in Mechanical Engineering Magazine Online that covers a lot of what I and many other engineers didn't learn in college. Here are links to the three articles.

Part 1:

a) In relation to the work

b) In relation to your supervisor

c) Regarding relations with colleagues and outsiders.

This section covers what you need to know when you're first starting out. Remember that no job is too small. You need to demonstrate that you can be trusted with small projects before you are given more advanced projects where more is on the line. Enthusiasm for the job counts. One of the big things in this section that I still have trouble with is speaking up and promoting my ideas. It's never too late to learn things. This section also covers the importance of dealing with other people. The good and the bad. It's important to cultivate the habit of working with other people. You need to solicit their ideas, too.

Part 2:

a) Individual behavior and technique

b) Managing design and development projects

c) On organizational structures

d) What all managers owe their employees.

The second section carries on from the first. It's important to learn not to try to do it all yourself. This part is for when you are further along in your career. Presumably at this point, you've settled into the com[any structure and made a niche for yourself. This section also discusses the importance of learning to make concise decisions and wading through all the details of a problem and boiling it down to its essentials. At this point, you will be starting to run a project and this section discusses the way to do that. Finally, this section covers the situation when you take the supervising of other people. You have to treat people right to get them to contribute to a team.

Part 3:

a) Laws of character and responsibility

b) Regarding behavior in the workplace

c) Regarding career and personal development

This last section is really for anyone. It's not just about engineering or even working in a company. It's just plain, good advice for anyone. It ends with a section on developing a career and looking toward your future. It's not that you're going to immediately be looking for a better opportunity as soon as your start working at a job. It's more that you need to keep in mind that everything you do at your job will reflect on you if you do want to (or need to) look for another job. Don't forget that it's important to keep learning. School never ends!

What is especially interesting to me about this series of articles is that they were first published in 1944. These "laws" are just as relevant today as they were then. Some things just never go out of style.

A historic collapse

2011-09-28T23:59:00.000-04:00

In the evening of August 31, the Red Sox had the best record in the American League. That evening, they had a one and a half game lead of the Yankees for first place in their division. As they went to bed that night, they had a nine game lead over the third-place Tampa Bay Rays. Everything seemed rosy as they fell asleep that night. The Red Sox were beating the Yankees most of the time and everything seemed to be going well. At the beginning of the season, they had been picked, by some, to get to the World Series.

Then, September happened.

They started the month by losing to the Yankees. Players got hurt. Pitchers had trouble pitching for more than a few innings. They dropped out of first place. While they had a relatively easy schedule in the month, they didn't win a single series against any team that month. The Red Sox only won seven games the entire month.

On the final day of the season, they had given up their nine game lead for the wild card position in the play-offs and were tied with the Tampa Bay Rays for that last spot in the play-offs. All they had to do was beat the team in last place in their division while the Rays lost to the first place team in the division. The Red Sox were ahead in their game and the Rays were losing 7 - 0 in their game. It looked like the Red Sox were going to limp into the play-offs.

But they didn't. The Red Sox gave up their lead in the ninth inning and the Rays stormed back to win their game in the 12th inning. And that was it. History was made and we'll be telling our grandchildren about it. The Red Sox are back to the way they were in the 20th Century. And we saw it.

While I finished writing this and actually posted this in September 29, I'm labeling this post with the date September 28 when the collapse completed.

Forgivness and Trust

2011-09-27T21:17:00.000-04:00

This post has been a long time coming. I first wanted to write about this after a sermon in our church on November 14, 2010. Yes, last year. Then, in another sermon on August 7, 2011, a different sermon touched on a similar theme. So, I thought it was about time that I wrote about this. The surprising thing to me is that I had never thought about this before but my son says he knew this already. The Child is father of the Man.

One of the basic teachings of Christianity is that we should forgive others as we have been forgiven by God.

Since God chose you to be the holy people he loves, you must clothe yourselves with tenderhearted mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Make allowance for each other’s faults, and forgive anyone who offends you. Remember, the Lord forgave you, so you must forgive others. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds us all together in perfect harmony. Colossians 3:12-14 New Living Translation

But I always found this hard to do. How could I forgive people over and over and allow them to do bad things to me again? This is what I needed to learn more about and these two sermons helped me a great deal. There is a difference between forgiving someone and trusting them. Forgiveness is a gift but trust is earned. We are to forgive even if it isn't earned. Again, this is just what God has done for us. But we don't necessarily need to trust the people we forgive - until they earn our trust. When we forgive people, we are giving up on hatred and retaliation. But it doesn't mean we allow them to take advantage of us. We are allowed to not trust them until they prove themselves.

But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming to watch him baptize, he denounced them. “You brood of snakes!” he exclaimed. “Who warned you to flee God’s coming wrath? Prove by the way you live that you have repented of your sins and turned to God. Don’t just say to each other, ‘We’re safe, for we are descendants of Abraham.’ That means nothing, for I tell you, God can create children of Abraham from these very stones. Matthew 3:7-9 New Living Translation

This made it so much easier for me to forgive. When I realized I didn't necessarily have to trust that person in order to forgive them, it allowed me the freedom to forgive. Not that forgiving is always easy but this definitely makes it easier. If you'd like to see these two sermons for yourself, look at People and Trust and People We Don't Like. I think our minister will explain it better than I can.

We interupt this blog...

2011-09-26T12:58:00.000-04:00

Lately, I've been catching up on a number posts I had started but not finished (see Another long time between blog posts... ). But yesterday, when I was going to write about some sermons from our church, we ended up driving my mother-in-law to Connecticut at the last minute to see her sister who is in bad shape. The sisters needed to visit and my wife wanted to see some of her cousins that she hasn't seen for a while. The bad news was that both of our children had colds and we couldn't take them in to see their great aunt because she is so weak. Also, due to the length of the trip, we thought it was better if I drove. So, we decided that the three kids (the two younger ones and me) would go to the nearby Connecticut Trolley Museum while Cindy and her mother visited their relatives.

I have loved trolleys and street cars since I was a kid growing up near Pittsburgh where trolleys were always a large part of the mass transit system. I'd do anything for the chance to ride the trolley. So, I think I was looking forward to this trip more than anyone. The top picture is the view out the cab of the trolley we took a ride on at the museum. It is a 1912 St. Louis Car Co. open-air unit from Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. We had a nice long ride but it was awfully slow. This is partly due to the condition of the tracks and the age and condition of the trolley. All the work is done by volunteers and there just isn't enough time and manpower to fix everything the way they would like. The picture on the left shows my son Evan next to this trolley. When we got to the end of the line, we got a short talk on the history of the local electric railway and the car we were on. Then, since there was no loop, they flipped the seats so we could be facing forward on the way back.

Just to show how much work they have to do to get the cars in shape for riding, the bottom picture shows my daughter Emma in one of the cars they are still working on. There were other trolleys in a lot worse shape and I wish I'd have gotten pictures of them. It is amazing to think of a bunch of volunteers giving up their time to recondition these machines that are in such terrible shape. When I saw the ones waiting for work, it sent shivers down my spine. One of my worst nightmares about work is to be put on a project where I have no idea where to begin. My heart goes out to the dedicated volunteers who can look beyond the problems and get started working on such a difficult problem.

Misunderstood lyrics

2011-09-24T18:07:00.000-04:00

When we got our dog, Charlie, about twelve years ago, our son Evan was three years old. Charlie is half Basset Hound and half Black Labrador Retriever. Evan loved Charlie (and still does) and spent a lot of time playing with him and talking with him. He also liked singing to him and thought he knew the words to the song Hound Dog written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller (and most famously performed by Elvis Presley) but he wasn't quite right:

He's the bottom of a hound dog
Cryin' all the time
He's the bottom of a hound dog
Cryin' all the time
He doesn't eat rabbits
He doesn't eat pie and
He can't know what to do
Hey

With the Hey being performed at maximum volume and enthusiasm. He didn't have a second verse. This was just repeated over and over. And over!

Thinking about this reminded me of the website Am I Right and especially the section of the site devoted to misheard lyrics. It is a lot of fun to read what some people thought the lyrics were to famous songs. Some songs, due to the strange accents of the singers or sound effects of the tracks, are especially prone to people mishearing the lyrics. For years I thought that one section of the theme song for The Flintstones TV show was,

Let's ride, with the family down the street
Through the, courtesy of friends this week

thinking they were referring to the sponsors of the program when in reality the line is,

Let's ride, with the family down the street
Through the, courtesy of Fred's two feet

meaning that the family car was moved by Fred's two feet pushing it. There is also a section of the Am I Right website for parodies of songs. That's another type of fun and it makes me think of my wife's parody of the song Feelings when she sings it to our cats and changes it to Felines.

5,000 miles

2011-09-23T13:12:00.002-04:00

Earlier this month, my scooter turned over 5,000 miles (I'm up to about 5,200 miles now). It's ironic that I write about this today because due to some expected rain, this is the first time in months that I haven't ridden my scooter to work. It's been a good summer for riding. It hasn't been too hot and when we've gotten rain, it hasn't been raining in the morning or evening when I'm on the road.

I always feel better when I take the scooter to work. I think the fresh air and needing to stay alert helps get my body and mind running. When I take the car in, I'm in that closed shell and don't have to think as much. The two good things about driving the car, though, are being able to listen to the radio and not getting stuck behind school buses because I can take a limited access road with the car that I can't on the scooter. It's all back roads when I ride my scooter.

This year, the school bus schedule was modified slightly and one bus actually starts closer to my house on one road and then makes the same turn I do onto another road where it stays for a long time. My only option, after a few miles of no passing zone, is to pull off onto a parallel road which adds some distance to the trip. This bus seems to have a new driver this year, too. Last year, the bus driver would pull the bus off to the side of the road after a while (always at the same place) to let the line of cars (and scooters) behind him get around. Not this year. But I find if I leave the house about five minutes earlier than usual, I can usually get to the critical intersection ahead of this bus. But getting that extra five minutes isn't easy. Something always seems to come up at the last minute.

A few weeks ago I happened to be reading the owner's manual for my scooter and found that I'd been checking the oil level incorrectly. Since the oil check stick is so short, it needs to be screwed into the pipe that connects to the oil reservoir. I just assumed that you'd screw the stick into the holder to get the oil level but I was wrong. When I checked the oil correctly, by removing the stick, wiping it off and just seating into the top of the pipe, I found that the oil level was low. Very low. I bought the right oil and went to pour it in only to find that it wasn't easy to get the oil into the pipe without spilling it. I tried a bunch of things and couldn't seem to get much oil in without spilling about twice as much on the ground. I finally got enough in to feel comfortable about starting up the engine. Sure enough, when I got out on the road, I'd used my five minutes up and found myself behind the school bus. Like I said, getting that extra five minutes isn't as easy as it sounds.

Plantar Fasciitis

2011-09-22T12:36:00.000-04:00

When you wake up in the morning, does one or both of your feet feel stiff but, if you walk on a bit, it will feel better? If you sit for a long time, does the same thing happen? When you are laying down, does your foot tend to rest with your toes pointing down? Well, you might want to check with your doctor to see if you have Plantar Fasciitis.

Those were my symptoms and I kept thinking it was just stiffness from either walking too far, working too hard or not doing either of those enough (maybe my foot was stiff because it didn't get used enough). It got worse and worse until I could hardly put pressure on my foot at all. Then it got to the point where walking around for a bit wouldn't stretch it out and relieve the pain. I was in constant pain. I finally went to see my doctor on May 26.


Arch supports

Actually, I saw the nurse practitioner and she knew right away what the problem was. Plantar Fasciitis is an inflammation of the thick connective tissue that connects the heel to the toes. It doesn't just go away but you usually don't need surgery or medication (other than mild pain relievers like aspirin or ibuprofen). The nurse suggested stretching by holding a towel around the toes and pulling it toward you. But her number one recommendation was to get arch supports for my shoes. And she said that it wasn't necessary to get expensive ones. The ones they sell in running shoe stores are good enough. As you can see from the image to the left, they didn't need to be high.


Boot to keep foot from flexing

Another thing that helped me was a type of boot (picture to the right) that is worn at night and keeps the foot from flexing with the toes down. The boot keeps the fascia stretched by keeping the foot flat at night. I got the boot from a friend at work who had had the same problem. As a matter of fact, an amazing number of people I know had this problem at one time or other. One guy let it go so long that he was walking on crutches before he finally gave in and went to his doctor.

As best I can remember, I first noticed this starting in April this year and it finally felt like it was better at the beginning of this month. From what I read, that is pretty typical. They say it can take up to 2 years! I'm glad mine didn't last that long. Of all the things I did to help, it was the arch supports that did the most to help. [Update, September 24 - I added the pictures of the arch supports and the boot]

Be careful out there

2011-09-20T17:00:00.000-04:00

One day, as I was using Google to look up stuff, I noticed that sometimes when I clicked on one of the search results I was taken to a strange looking site that acted as if it had search results of its own about the subject I'd just searched for. Except, the results it had were either bogus (leading to another search site), poor (nothing to do with the subject) or to sites I knew I didn't want to visit. The more I searched, the more often I got to one of a number of false search sites.

I decided to see if this was a common problem and typed "google search redirect" in Google and came up with a lot of entries about a virus with those characteristics. Of course, I couldn't go to any of the sites the results pointed to because I'd end up at one of the false search sites. So, I decided to switch to Bing for my searching. That worked once. Then I started to get the bad searches there, too. Next I tried using a different browser (I normally use Firefox) but that didn't help, either. I was getting desperate and went to my wife's computer to see if something was wrong with searches on the Internet in general. Everything worked on her computer so I finally realized that I'd gotten a virus on my computer. I disconnected from our home network in case it could spread that way.

Using the links I found on Cindy's computer, I researched what might be wrong with my computer. What I found was scary. Many links referred to a rootkit virus that acted like what I was seeing. But nothing I tried from those links seemed to work. I even found two highly regarded anti-virus companies that offered free programs to fix this problem but neither of those found the specific rootkit that the sites mentioned.

This went of for over a week and things were getting worse. Pop-up dialogs were randomly appearing on my screen (even when I wasn't running my Web browser) and it was taking a long time to shut down and start up my computer. Some of my programs were not running and others were acting strangely. As I tried each method to defeat this virus, I found that it would work for a few minutes and then the old behavior would return. It was not only frustrating, it added more time to the job of trying to fix the problem - I couldn't just try each method, I had to try using a few searches before I could say that the problem hadn't been fixed after all.

One of the things I first tried to fix the problem was to use Windows System Restore. This allows you to restore the system files on your computer to their state at an earlier time. But when I tried that, it failed to run correctly. Just getting my computer back to running condition after that failure took a few days. So, as I got more desperate, I realized I might have to start from scratch and reformat my entire hard disk and reload the operating system. Before I did that, though, I needed to make copies of all my personal files including pictures from my camera, files I needed for work, information I'd saved about our network set-up and a list of the programs I'd installed on my computer since I bought it. That took another day and filled up two DVDs. Finally, I felt I was ready to start the process of wiping my computer clean.

On my Dell computer, there is a separate section of the disk that is protected and allows you to restore the computer to the way it was when you first bought it. I started the program and it complained that I needed to start this process from power-up. I followed those directions and was about to hit the "OK" button to start the process when I had one more thought - what if I had tried to use Windows System Restore from a state that was too close to the start of the problem? Maybe the virus had corrupted the Restore Point I had tried to use. Maybe I just had to use an older Restore Point. I stopped the wiping procedure and tried, in desperation, using a Restore Point from a month before I started noticing the problems. The first good news was that the System Restore worked! Where my earlier attempt had locked up and wouldn't even finish its own process, this one at least finished and said it was successful. Was I just being teased by this insidious problem? I tried a few searches and clicked on the resulting links. They took me where they said they would! It seemed like the problem was fixed.

I couldn't relax for days after this. Every time I'd search for something, I'd expect to be sent to one of the bogus search sites. But after two or three days of no problems, I assumed I was going to be OK. Now, I'm very careful about what I click on in the search results. I believe my problem was brought on by searching for information about a television show I liked and one of the links pointing to a site about one of the actors on that show. But I'm not sure. It could have been any of the hundreds of searches I do every day. I just don't click on links without thinking about them anymore.

I know you're saying that I probably didn't have an anti-virus program running on my computer but that is incorrect. I have a very good anti-virus program running and I never turn it off. It runs with maximum protection settings. The customer support people at the anti-virus company attempted to help me get rid of this virus but none of their suggestions worked, either. Although my repeated scans of my computer showed a number of problems, removing those problems didn't fix my big problem. Only the System Restore solved the problem. And I'll never look at a search result the same.

Amyloidosis

2011-09-19T21:18:00.002-04:00

As I mentioned last year, Cindy and her mother (my wonderful mother-in-law) were diagnosed and treated for breast cancer. They've both done well and have not needed further treatment since it ended late last year.

But because of her brush with cancer, the doctor's were especially careful when they found a growth in her nasal cavity and decided to remove it and look closely at what they found. When the lab work on what was removed came back, even the surgeon had never heard of the results - Amyloidosis. It's a relatively rare disease where certain proteins take on a distorted, insoluble form are deposited in the organs and fatty tissues where they do nothing and can prevent the ordinary functioning of the organs. It can be very serious if the Amyloids are deposited in major organs. There is information available from the Mayo Clinic and from the Amyloidosis Foundation.

Cindy was referred to a special Amyloid clinic at the Boston Medical Center and had to undergo two days of testing. Because she was afraid she'd miss the kids too much and because they kids would miss her too much for those two days, we decided to go up as a family and stay in Boston one night to make it easier on Cindy. After all the testing, it looked like the news was mostly good - the Amyloid deposits seem to be limited to her nasal cavity are are relatively harmless. But in all the testing, two unusual nodules were found - one on her Thyroid and another in a lung. So, we had to go back again today for further tests and another CAT scan. We'll find out more about this but, once again, the doctors, nurses and other medical workers were fantastic. They are very organized and really work well together as a team. There doesn't seem to be any conflict between the various departments. They all work to complement each other. As we await the test results, it really helps to have confidence in the medical team.

Another long time between blog posts but...

2011-09-18T13:02:00.000-04:00

It's been 17 days since my last blog post. This is due, in part, to more illness. Both to my wife and to my computer! I'll be writing much more about both of those subjects plus a lot more. I have a number of posts in draft right now and hope to finish them up soon. Just as a sampling:

1) My wife Cindy has been diagnosed with one of the forms of Amyloidosis. We spent two days in Boston as she underwent tests. Most of the news was good. Some wasn't so good and we're headed back to Boston tomorrow (Monday, September 19) for another day of tests. [Update - see Amyloidosis]

2) My computer got some sort of virus that caused clicking on any results from a search engine search to redirect me to a bogus web site acting as if it was a search engine, too. Yes, I had full anti-virus protection enabled and updated on my computer and it wasn't picked up there. I went through an epic struggle to get rid of the problem but in the end something very simple and basic fixed it. [Update - see Be careful out there]

3) I myself have been plagued with a problem called Plantar Fasciitis and after about five months, I can finally say I think it is behind me. I'll tell you what I've found out about it and what helped me. [Update - see Plantar Fasciitis]

4) My scooter has turned over 5,000 miles and I found out I wasn't checking its oil level correctly. I've been running it for some time with a low oil level. [Update - see 5,000 miles]

5) I was reminded of a time when my son was about 3 years old and we'd had our mixed Basset Hound and Black Lab dog for a short time, he heard the song Hound Dog but mixed up the lyrics. His version is funny enough but I'm going to tell you about an entire website dedicated to misheard lyrics. [Update - see Misunderstood lyrics]

6) We've had some great sermons at our church over the years. I'm going to write about a couple and point you to videos that you can watch. Happily, our church has decided to find a permanent home for the sermon videos. [Update - see Forgiveness and Trust]

7) I ran across a series of articles in a mechanical engineering magazine about the unwritten laws of engineering. They were written in 1944 and still make sense - even if you're an engineer in another discipline or even if you're not an engineer at all. [Update - see The unwritten laws of engineering]

8) While my wife was undergoing two days of tests in Boston, I took the kids to an amazing 3-D movie in an IMAX theater that I want to tell you about. [Update - see "Under the Sea"]

9) Also while we were in Boston (and Cindy was getting poked and prodded), I took the kids to the New England Aquarium and I want to tell you about that, too. [Update - see New England Aquarium and New England Aquarium - part 2]

10) One other thing the kids and I did in Boston was to ride the 'T' a lot. If you don't know what that is, you'll find out. You'll also find out how I fulfilled something I'd always wanted to do. [Update - see Riding the 'T']

That's it for now. I hope to get these posts ready and published before the end of this month. I know I once said in Promises and Monkey Wrenches that I would never say ahead what I was going to be writing about in the future. I am going to trust that this will be more an encouragement to me to finish the posts than a hindrance that ties my hands. We'll see.

What are the numbers for?

2011-09-01T12:15:00.002-04:00

I happened to see a headline in the sports news about Texas A&M University moving its football program from one conference to another. Normally, I'm not a football fan but something intrigued me about this story. Why would a team make this move? Also, I had spent a lot of time on a research vessel run by the Texas A&M Marine Sciences department and the crew on the boat were BIG football fans and talked about the Aggies' football team all the time.

The news story was that Texas A&M was going to be leaving the Big 12 football conference. But when I went to look up that conference, it turned out that they only have 10 teams - and it's soon to be 9. What's going on here? Then, while in the list of conferences, I happened to see that the Big Ten conference (they use the number spelled out) has 12 teams. This is crazy. I know there have been arguments in the past that the football programs have gotten far away from insisting that the football players be students in good standing but this mixing up numbers is really going too far.

But it's not just mathematics that is suffering. Geography has taken a hit, too. There is a conference called the Pacific 12. At least they do have 12 teams. But 4 of them are in states that aren't on the Pacific Ocean. Colorado? Utah? Not even close! Only 8 of them are in states that border the coast.

When will we return to the days of student-athletes? When will these university-sanctioned organizations set a good example for these athletes?

Is louder safer?

2011-08-31T12:25:00.000-04:00

On my way home last night, I needed to stop to get some gas for my scooter. I only had $3 on me but that was enough to get the tank about 3/4 full. Another fellow was there with his Honda motorcycle and we got to talking. He was very enthusiastic about having bought his used bike cheap. It needed a lot of work but he had fixed it up and it looked great. One of the things he liked so much about his motorcycle was that the motor ran smoothly and quietly.

It got me thinking about noisy motorcycles. Our town has always had a touchy relationship with noisy motorcycles. The businesses in our town depend a lot on vacationers and a lot of those come here on motorcycles. People on vacation seem to think they can do things that they wouldn't do in their regular life and a lot of the motorcycles go roaring along the roads here. That's led to a lot of complaints about the noise and some noise-limiting laws were passed (or maybe the town is just talking about passing some laws - I'm not sure). But many motorcyclists claim that they purposely make their bikes noisy so car and truck drivers will notice them. So, the arguments go back and forth. Can the town ban something that is a safety issue?

So, as I was pulling out of the gas station last night I wondered - Has a study ever been done comparing the number of traffic accidents for people with quieter motorcycles with the number of traffic accidents for people with noisier motor cycles? I'm going to look into this (since my Honda motor scooter is very quiet) and if I find anything, I'll write about it. In the meantime, I agree with the Honda motorcycle guy. I like having a quiet ride. For one thing, I don't like bothering other people. And another reason is that I don't want to lose my hearing any time soon by riding something that makes a lot of noise. But the biggest reason, to me, is that having a quieter ride lets me hear other cars approaching and lets me hear horns, sirens and people yelling at me better.

When I started to ride my scooter, I was already used to riding my bicycle a lot and needing to stay aware of what cars, trucks and even pedestrians were doing so I could stay out of their way. On a bicycle, you've got to learn to look ahead for trouble and stay away from it. People in big cars can just blast through assuming other people will get out of their way. And, if you're in a big car, even if you get in an accident, you'll be safe. People on bicycles, motorcycles and scooters can't make that assumption. Safety for these smaller vehicles is more in the rider's ability to see trouble coming and stay away from it. And that means seeing and hearing where trouble may be coming from. To me, quieter is safer.

Goodnight, Irene

2011-08-29T17:15:00.008-04:00

[This post was scheduled to be published on August 29 but something went wrong at Blogger. So, I'm republishing it with the date of Aug 29]

Cumulative Wind History - Hurricane Irene - www.nhc.noaa.gov

So, Hurricane Irene is gone and we were very fortunate. I am sorry for the people of North Carolina, New Jersey, New York and Vermont who seem to have been hit the hardest by this storm. Our worst problem was that we lost power for about six hours. It gave us time to talk and play some old board games we hadn't played in a while.

The title of this post is a reference to the folk song, Goodnight Irene. The chorus goes

Irene good night Irene good night
Good night Irene Good night Irene
I'll see you in my dreams

From what I can find, it was written and performed by Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter around 1908 but he probably got some of the lyrics, or at least the idea, from older folk songs. It was most famously performed and recorded by The Weavers. They would end their show with the song. It's a sad song with some hard-to-take lyrics but it ends with

Quit your rambling quit your gambling
Stop staying out late at night
Stay home with your wife and family
And stay by the fireside of right

That's good advice and being without power during a hurricane helps reinforce that. Nothing is cozier and better for the family than gathering around a flashlight or candle and playing a game together.

Saturday morning surprise

2011-08-27T12:50:00.002-04:00

So, it's Saturday morning and I'm trying to find something on television that isn't about the approaching Hurricane Irene (which is still over 500 miles away - it's just hitting the coast of North Carolina for goodness sake). I happen to find a movie in progress called Zero Hour! and as I watch it, it starts to look familiar. The more I watch it, the more sure I am that I've seen it before. I even start to anticipate what the characters are going to say before they actually deliver the lines. It's really creepy.

The synopsis of the story is that a long distance passenger airplane flight is struck by an outbreak of food poisoning. Both the pilot and co-pilot get sick along with many of the passengers. One of the passengers flew fighter planes during World War II (this film is from 1957 so he wasn't too old) but has no experience with large commercial planes. They get in radio contact with an airport control tower and an experienced pilot is brought in to talk the "pilot" down. It turns out they know each other from the war and don't like each other. Also, the "pilot" is on the flight with his wife who is wanting to end the relationship.

OK. Does this sound familiar to you, too? If you haven't guessed yet, here are a couple more clues. Here are quotes from Zero Hour! and I think you'll guess which movie I saw that made me think I'd seen Zero Hour! before. The first quote is from the doctor on board the plane, Dr. Baird, who diagnoses the illness of the crew as food poisoning and tells a stewardess their situation.

Our survival hinges on one thing - finding someone who not only can fly this plane, but didn't have fish for dinner.

Fish was the source of the food poisoning. The second clue is a conversation between the pilot and a small boy who was brought up to see the cockpit.

Capt. Bill Wilson, Pilot: Come on, move up here, you can see better. [takes out a toy DC-4]

Capt. Bill Wilson, Pilot: Joey, here's something we give our special visitors. Would you like to have it?

Joey: Thank you! Thanks a lot!

Capt. Bill Wilson, Pilot: You ever been in a cockpit before?

Joey: No, sir! I've never been up in a plane before!

Now, you have to know that the movie that sounds suspiciously like the movie I saw is Airplane! and yes, it has an exclamation point in it's title, too. The producers of Airplane! actually bought the rights to Zero Hour! to produce a remake of that film but they made a parody instead. That's why they were able to use so much of the story and dialog and so many of the same characters. So, it's not an amazing coincidence that these two movies are so similar. Seeing the original movie makes me appreciate Airplane! even more (even though it has always been one of my favorite comedies). It is interesting how the exact quote from a drama can become hilarious when used in a slightly different situation. Here is a seven-minute clip showing the similarities.

Another funny aspect to this is that the screenwriter for Zero Hour! was Arthur Hailey - the writer of the novel Airport and the screenplay for the movie of the novel. He was a pilot in World War II (in Britain's Royal Air Force) and prefaced writing the screenplay of Zero Hour! by writing a teleplay with a similar story, Flight Into Danger, for Canadian TV in 1956. And one more funny aspect to all this is that the star in the 1956 TV movie was James Doohan who also played Chief Engineer Scott on the original Star Trek series. There, Scotty was famous to shouting that there wasn't enough time to do what he needed to do.

If I push these impulse engines too hard in the condition they're in they'll blow apart!

That is from The Doomsday Machine episode of Star Trek. I can just imagine his lines in Flight Into Danger. I'll have to see if we can see that one, too.

Good news from science

2011-08-22T12:50:00.003-04:00

I like reading articles from a variety of sources. But I've often thought that if you really want to feel hopeful about things, there are two good sources of reading. The first is the Bible which gives us the wonderful news that we are forgiven. No matter how badly we've messed up in life, we can be saved by grace. The other source of hopeful news is reading about advances in science. Yes, often science and the Bible seem to work against each other but that doesn't have to be the case. They are two completely different things. Science is the study of how the Universe works. The Bible explains that the Universe is God's creation and how he created us to be his companions in his universe.

OK, back to the good news from science. I enjoy reading the news at ScienceDaily. Each day you find that we are making progress in discovering how the Earth is made. Each day progress is made in making new materials. Each day we learn how different types of animals and plants live and grow. Every day new proofs are made in mathematics enabling us to use computers more efficiently or to find information where we didn't know it existed. It's amazing how many new things are being learned every day.

Today we learn that medical researchers at Northwestern University in Chicago have found the underlying cause of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's Disease). I lost a cousin to ALS a few years ago. It is a terrible disease that has eluded treatment for a long time. But now, the researchers at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern have found that all forms of ALS have a common cause. You can read the article for more information but to put it simply, ALS occurs when nerve cells fail to recycle waste proteins correctly. The no-longer-useful proteins build up and the nerve cells become damaged. This discovery leads to the possibility of discovering a treatment. And, in other good news, this may also lead to discovering how Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease can be treated because they may have the same mechanism for damaging nerve cells.

As I said, this is wonderful, hopeful news. And, as someone once put it, the answer was always there. We just needed to find it. It takes time and money to find these things and if we were less obsessed with having the softest toilet paper or buying tobacco products or getting a new car every few years, we'd have more money to spend on important research.

I'm adding ScienceDaily to my list of links on the right side of this blog.

Changes in Motorcycle Row

2011-08-20T16:52:00.002-04:00

Our office has a designated area to park motorcycles and scooters. It's not marked - it's just an understanding between the company and motorcycle owners. There are about six people who own motorcycles in our office but only three or four ever ride them in on the same day. The Harley in the right of the top picture is gone now. It was traded in for the bright red Harley on the left in the bottom picture. I told the owner that he was just jealous of my nice red scooter and tried to match it with his new bike. He just laughed.

Once in a while, people who drive cars will park in this area. As I said, the space isn't marked so it's not surprising. Maybe car owners like this space because it's close to the building. There are places to park that are even closer to the building but in this area, there are no lines to park between and I think some folks like the luxury of allowing more space between their car and the one next to them. The marked spaces are pretty tightly packed. One day when cars filled the area for motorcycles, I parked my scooter in one of the marked spaces. Someone remarked about how I was taking up a whole space so I won't do that again. Why does there always need to be a problem?

Why am I like this?

2011-08-18T12:18:00.012-04:00

As I was walking through one of the laboratories in our office and headed for the door, I noticed that one of the guys who works in the lab was walking toward the same door with his hands full. I was part of the way out the door but I saw him out of the corner of my eye and was able to turn around and hold the door for him. He thanked me and commented on what good peripheral vision I had. That made me think about the term, "seeing something out of the corner of your eye," and mentioned to him that a friend of mine had come up with a saying, when he overheard something quiet that he might have missed under different conditions, that he, "heard that out of the corner of my ear." The lab guy laughed and said that was a good saying and we parted ways.

The problem is that I was the one who came up with the "corner of my ear" saying. Why did I say someone else had come up with it? Was I just being modest? Or was I afraid he wouldn't like it? By denying I'd come up with it, if he said, "That's a stupid thing to say," I wouldn't feel so bad. After all, a "friend" came up with the saying. No, I don't think it is either of those things. I just have a hard time taking credit for clever things I do. I guess it is a form of modesty or humility. I was always taught not to be boastful. Doing something to make yourself stand out was frowned upon in the schools I went to up through high school. I don't think it was school policy as much as it was the policy of the people I hung out with. We all tried to not draw attention to ourselves. We took a lot of effort to try to blend in. Not that it worked very well.

Anyway, here I am at 60 years old and I'm still afraid to take credit for good things that I do but I must be getting a little better. I'm writing about it here for all the world to see. All 5 of you!

Spaghetti story

2011-08-16T17:31:00.005-04:00

When I was in college, I would sometimes take special classes during times when the school was officially shut down. Being officially shut down just meant that they could charge you again for staying in your dorm room and could charge for using the cafeteria because your meal plan was no longer in effect. Since I needed to live somewhere and housing was in short supply, I'd pay for the dorm room but I'd try to eat cheaply by cooking for myself or sharing the cooking with others. Since I was a novice cook, I was delighted during one of these extra classes that my best friend, Nick, and his girl friend, Andrea, (they married after graduating) offered to share cooking with me. What this meant was that Andrea would be teaching me to cook.

One of the easy things I learned to cook was spaghetti. We just used bottled sauce so all I had to worry about was dumping the spaghetti into a pot of water, adding a bit of salt and heating the pot to boiling. Then, of course, I had to keep my eye on the pot and test the noodles once in a while to see if they were done. When they weren't too hard or too soft, I drained the spaghetti in a colander until it was dry enough. We heated the sauce separately in another pot and poured it on the spaghetti once it was on the plates. Easy as pie. My friends were very nice to me and made a big fuss over the results making me feel like a great chef. But as you can see from my description, I did nothing fancy. But it made me feel good and helped me get the confidence to move on to more ambitious meals - like pancakes!

Well, during one of these times, we were all going to see Nick's parents. We were going for a couple of days and they would be feeding us. During one of the evening meals, my Andrea was telling Nick's mother about how we'd been sharing the cooking at school. Nick's mother chuckled, "So, that probably means you've been doing all the cooking, right Andrea?" "No," she said, "The boys do quite a bit of the cooking." "As a matter of fact," she said, "Jim (that's me) is quite a cook. You should taste his spaghetti. He does such a great job!" As I blushed, I realized she was just being nice. She went on a little longer making it sound like I made the best spaghetti in the world. Nick's mother's tone changed a little, though. While she said, "Oh, isn't that good," she didn't sound like her usual jovial self.

As you've probably guessed, when the time came to eat and we asked what we were having, Nick's mom said, "We're having spaghetti. I hope it's up to Jim's standards." I felt so bad and I could see Andrea squirming. How could she make Nick's mother feel comfortable while not going back on her praise for me? I could see she didn't want to make me feel bad. So, she made some comments about how she was sure it would be a fine meal etc. When we did sit down to dinner, though, it was obvious there was no comparison in the two spaghetti "masters" cooking. Nick's mother was a terrific cook and the sauce was her own recipe. It was delicious and my my spaghetti was only a small step above canned spaghetti in comparison.

I learned a great cooking lesson that night, too. Even an easy-to-make dish can be made to taste wonderful. I also learned a lesson about praise. Don't take it too much to heart. Sometimes someone is just trying to make you feel good.

Here's why it's been so long since my last post

2011-08-14T18:11:00.002-04:00

Charlie bed bound

I can't believe it's been so long since I last posted to my blog. A number of things have kept me from getting to it but the biggest reason was that our dog, Charlie, was really sick. Or at least he acted very sick. Just so you don't worry through this post, he is better now. The pictures here are older pictures but they illustrate the point. The top picture shows him on his bed where he stayed for about three days - not wanting to move. The bottom picture showed him after we'd taken him to the vet and he'd taken his medicine (good boy, Charlie!).

Feisty Charlie barking at me to go for a walk

I won't go into what started Charlie's problems (you might be eating you dinner while reading this) but the scary part was that after a few days, he started limping around with his tail between his legs. He would just lie on his bed whimpering and not wanting to get up or do anything. When he was able to lay down and sleep, his breathing was heavy. The only good news was that his nose stayed wet (is that really an indication of a dog's health?) and he never lost his appetite

The vet wasn't sure what was wrong but since Charlie has arthritis, he thought that perhaps he hadn't been absorbing the Chondroitin and Glucosamine from his "old dog" dog food which generally helps his joints stay limber. Here's a link discussing the effectiveness of these additives - for humans. I've seen its good results in Charlie and I'm convinced it is good for dogs. So, besides pills for the original problem (which we won't discuss here), the vet gave Charlie some Chondroitin and Glucosamine supplements to jump-start their re-absorption. The vet also had us put him on a bland diet and took some blood to check if anything else was wrong.

After a couple of days, Charlie was obviously on the mend. The blood work came back telling of no other problems so we're greatly relieved that the old dog is going to be fine. He is anxious to go on his walks again and is peppy and happy, too. Our pets look to us for help and when we don't know what is wrong, it is frustrating. Once again, the veterinarian has earned my respect. I think human doctors should have to do a few rotations in vet school to learn how you treat a patient who can't tell you what is wrong and who has a great capacity to suppress pain.

The return of the flying crayfish

2011-08-07T18:00:00.001-04:00

Back in 2008, I saw a strange, flying object. I wrote about it in a post titled What is that thing? I had to do a lot of searching to find out what it was. I thought it was a hummingbird at first. But its abdomen and tail looked like a crayfish! It couldn't be a moth or butterfly could it? The wings moved so fast and butterflies and moths always seemed to flap slowly and move in a jerky, haphazard path. This thing could hover like a hummingbird or a dragonfly.

I finally found out that it was a Hummingbird Clearwing Moth. I put a couple of links to sites about these fascinating insects and I won't repeat them here. But here is another page that goes directly to information about the Hummingbird Clearwing. I hardly saw any of these moths over the next two summers, though. I was afraid that 2008 was just an anomaly and that they were going to remain a rare find on my walks.

Well, they're back! I see scores of them every time I go for a walk at lunch this year. They don't stay long at any one flower making them difficult to photograph. In fact, if there weren't so many of them, I probably wouldn't have any pictures to show. But since they are so plentiful, I manage to luck into a picture now and then. I'm showing my best pictures taken over the last week or so. I hope you enjoy them.

Better yet, I hope you get to see them in the wild. They really like the thistles in our area but I've seen them near a variety of flowers. So, if you think you see a hummingbird in an open field or if you think you see a crayfish hovering at a flower, take a second look. It may be a Hummingbird Clearwing Moth.

As always, just click on the pictures to see a larger version. And also, as always, you're welcome to use any of my pictures as you see fit. I don't copyright them.

Gene patents

2011-08-02T12:07:00.001-04:00

I saw an article in New Scientist today that stated that a patent on the gene making people more susceptible to breast cancer has been reinstated. Apparently, you can patent genes and the company (Myriad Genetics, Inc, press release here) that discovered the gene sequence making people more susceptible to breast cancer had tried to patent it before but it had been declared invalid because you can't patent something that occurs in nature because they are not inventions. But because the patent doesn't include parts of the gene sequence that aren't actually used by the gene, they don't occur in nature. They only occur in the human body. There are large sections of our DNA that actually are not used - or at least scientists don't know what they are used for. How about if I try to patent Mount Washington but I don't include the parts where you can't walk? Does that count?

Well, I don't agree that genes should be patentable. Whether the company doesn't include non-working parts of the gene or not, they should not be able to patent a part of the human body that they had no part in designing or making. Just because the company went to a lot of time and expense discovering the gene sequence, it doesn't follow that they should get exclusive use of that information. I figure there is one quick way to take care of this. Anyone who is diagnosed with breast cancer from now on should sue the company. If they want to "own" that gene, let them take responsibility for it.

Emma's birthday

2011-07-28T17:00:00.028-04:00

Although I'm entering this on July 29, I'm labeling it as July 28 because that is when Emma celebrated her 9th birthday and when this picture of her cake was taken.

As usual, we all wonder how the time has flown since we adopted Emma. As she has matured, from a little girl who loved pink to a young lady who adores light blue, she never ceases to amaze me. She does jigsaw puzzles as quickly as I can lay the pieces out. We try to help her with them but she is so fast, and just sees where the pieces go, that she is often taking the piece from our hands that she handed us five seconds ago because, in that time, she's found where it goes. She loves learning new things and likes to figure out how things work. She loves to read and she loves to do crafts. She started a blog, Crafts Made By Me, that she updated for quite a while but now finds she doesn't have enough time to write in it. I hope we can change that in the future but I don't want to take time away from the other things she loves to do.

As you can see in the picture, there are more than 9 regular candles on the cake (the purple ones). She figured that as long as the Number 9 candle was there, she could put as many candles as she wanted on the cake. She did enjoy blowing them out after all. For a little bit more about how we got Emma, you can go to this post.

A detour for our national budget

2011-07-27T12:25:00.007-04:00

Our country is facing a number of big problems but the most urgent one concerns the limit on how much the federal government can borrow to pay its bills. It seems like the people in charge of handling these things are not doing a very good job of solving this problem. It's two problems, really. The immediate problem is the limit on borrowing (which we will reach in about a week on August 2) and the other problem is the growing national debt that is triggering the problem with the debt limit. If we weren't needing to borrow so much money to cover expenses, we wouldn't need to worry about the debt limit.

What is making this problem even worse is that it is not just the Republicans and the Democrats who are having trouble agreeing on what to do. A sizable number of Tea Party members of the Republican party are even disagreeing with members of their own party about what to do about these problem. The Republicans have said they will not work on increasing the debt limit unless a budget can be worked out where large spending cuts are made and taxes are not raised. The Democrats have said the budget must include tax increases (or at least, the removal of tax decreases that were put into place years ago) as well as budget cuts. It seems to make sense that people would want to tie action on the debt limit to fixing the budget problems because, if they don't, we will just need to borrow more money and raise the debt limit again later. But these huge budget deficits have been going on (with a small break in the late 1990's) since Ronald Reagan was president in the 80's. Why the urgency now? Why flirt with economic chaos by allowing us to reach the debt limit just to force a deal on the budget? The Republicans answer that it is because the budget deficit is growing much faster now since Barack Obama has increased spending so much to stimulate our economy to get out of the recession that started four years ago. They blame this stimulus for the huge problems we face with the national debt.

Well, while that seems to make sense, it is wrong. Here is a link to a story in The Washington Post about what has really caused the deficit (and the accumulated deficit or The National Debt) we face. It is NOT caused by the stimulus and it is NOT simply a result of recent spending although those things have contributed to it. To be fair, both sides are partly to blame for this misunderstanding. The Republicans are wrong in claiming that they have the right to demand severe budget cuts because it is the President's spending that is causing the problem. But the Democrats and President Obama are also at fault for not getting the facts out for everyone to see. They were also wrong to go along with extending tax breaks enacted in the early 2000's that have made the deficit balloon. Again, if the Democrats had gotten the word out for the need to reestablish taxes on the wealthiest Americans, we wouldn't be in as bad shape as we are in.

For another interesting article about how both sides are failing in the debate about how to handle the debt problem, see this GlobalPost article, The Negotiator: Solving the US debt problem.

Patty Pan Squash

2011-07-24T11:58:00.001-04:00

We thought we were getting Zucchini when we bought our squash plants. But once they started to grow and came out looking like the ones in the top picture, we were confused. What in the world was growing in our garden? They are flat (only a couple of inches high and 4 - 6 inches across) and have scalloped edges. Some are dark green and others have mixed green and yellow coloring. Were they alien pods waiting for us to fall asleep before assuming our identities?

I entered the description in Google and found out that we were growing Patty Pan Squash in our garden. It's a type of Summer Squash. My wife, Cindy, cooked some and it is delicious! I had never heard of (or seen) this type of squash before but I'll be keeping my eye out for it in the future.

Speaking of our garden, it is going crazy. Instead of squash plants, we seem to have squash trees. And the tomatoes are growing better than I've ever seen - in our garden at least. We should have quite the harvest as the summer goes on. And Evan's beans keep producing and Emma's eggplant is starting to get near harvesting size. Yes, we're going to enjoy eating this summer.

More funny graffiti

2011-07-22T17:16:00.005-04:00

Well, it's Friday and I'm about to go home for the day but there is time for one, short post.

For some reason, I recently remembered something that happened to me when I was about 12 or 13 years old. We had gone out to one of my parents' favorite restaurants. It was sort of fancy and normally, in such a nice place, you wouldn't see graffiti on the walls of the restroom. But apparently this line, written above the men's stand-up urinal, was considered high class enough for the restaurant. Or maybe it had been written just before I got there and before one of the employees got to it.

"The future of the world in in your hands"

I thought I was such a man of the world when I got the joke. I'd known about this stuff since my father had "the talk" with me but it wasn't something we talked about in the open. It was more like something my friends and I whispered about in gym or at the roller skating rink. I so enjoyed the joke that I repeated it, in a very low voice of course, when I got back to my parents. I'll never forget the look on my mother's face. It was a lot like the face she made the first time I swore in front of them when I came home from college one year. I think she knew that I knew about such things but she wasn't sure just how much I knew about such things. It just added to her worries about me. But my father had a good laugh. He knew what I knew. At least he was pretty sure.

Our Mr. Bean

2011-07-20T12:13:00.000-04:00

This is a picture of my son, Evan, holding just a few of the green beans from our garden. Every year, when my wife buys the plants she wants in the garden, she lets the kids pick one of their own. I previously wrote about the time Evan picked a peanut plant. This year, Evan picked green beans and Emma picked eggplant. There is a way to go on the eggplant but Evan's green beans are ready. He's only holding a few them in this picture but there are many more than that. We already have enough for a few meals and the plant is still going strong. Maybe we'll get more than one plant next year.

I have another picture of him where you can see the beans better but I wanted to use this wider shot because it also shows the birthday cards from Evan's recent birthday. I didn't include a picture of him in that post. In case you don't know, the large picture on the wall is a view of our house in the snow (from New Year's Eve 2008). The title of this post is a play on the British comic Rowan Atkinson's character Mr. Bean. Those shows are a big favorite in our house and Evan does a great imitation of Mr. Bean - especially when he is talking to his stuffed companion, "Look, Teddy!"

Well, this post has been all over the place. I need to focus a bit better on my next one.

Where's the dragonfly?

2011-07-18T12:54:00.001-04:00

Boy, it's fun to go for my lunch walks with my camera again! As I mentioned before, I let the lens go without cleaning it for too long and my pictures were coming out either washed out or cloudy. Why do I let things like this go? If I could answer that, I'd be a millionaire and my wife, my kids and my mother wouldn't be so frustrated. But I've been like this my whole life. If I could put something off for a later time, I would put something off for a later time. At least in my personal life. I'm pretty good at work. I keep up with work and even get a little ahead sometimes.

Anyway, back to my pictures. Here are two pictures from today's walk. The top one is a picture of a dragonfly where I snapped the photo quickly from pretty far away because I wasn't sure how long my subject would stay around (I just missed a picture of another dragonfly because it wouldn't sit still for more than a few seconds at a time). Can you find it in the picture? I guess it's not too hard but it does blend into the wood debris pretty well.

The bottom picture is one I was able to take my time to focus and frame correctly. It still blends into the background pretty well but it's more obvious here. This dragonfly eventually moved after a few minutes but by then I had to move on myself. Happy hunting you voracious predator. I like dragonflies for a number of reasons but the number one reason? They eat mosquitoes! I hope there will be a few less mosquitoes for my walk tomorrow.

An amazing athlete

2011-07-15T12:49:00.005-04:00

Josh Hamilton - from his Wikipedia article

There are many talented athletes in the world and there are many athletes who are also role models. But what do you call an athlete who has made big mistakes but has turned their life around? You don't want to call them a role model because you'd hate to see a young person make the same mistakes they made. But you have to admire them for making the change that was needed. So, I'd like to mention Josh Hamilton.

He is a baseball player for the Texas Rangers. He won the American League's Most Valuable Player award last year. He was injured earlier this year but is making a big comeback during the mid-season now. But that is not the big change I am talking about.

Mr. Hamilton was a promising young ball player when he was drafted by the Tampa Bay Rays (then called the Devil Rays) but got messed up with alcohol and drugs and almost lost his chance at playing in the big leagues. He hit bottom but turned it all around with the help of his faith in Jesus and the help of people around him. I had not noticed him before but last year, he was featured during a series in our church about the I Am Second movement. Their website says, "I am Second is a movement meant to inspire people of all kinds to live for God and for others." Part of that is a series of short videos featuring people from all backgrounds explaining their faith in God and how they've come to realize that they need to be in second place - behind God.

Go to the list of films here. Some of the people are famous and many are not. But they all have one thing in common.They are second. You can find Josh Hamilton's profile here. To watch the video featuring him, look for the button labeled "Watch the Film". I hope you will find it inspiring, too.

Now my pictures look better

2011-07-11T12:35:00.002-04:00

After cleaning the lens on my camera, as I mentioned in my post The great lens cleaning, it's a pleasure to take pictures again. On my walk at lunch today, I saw this colorful orange mushroom (upper right picture) and this perfect little pink flower (lower left picture). It is nice to not have to retouch the pictures before posting them. I did crop them but I didn't have to change the brightness, contrast or the colors in any way.

Unfortunately, the mushroom looks like an ashtray with the stick laying on it like that. If I'd have noticed that before I'd taken the pictures, I'd have removed it. Another interesting note is that I didn't see the small white markings on the flower petals until I off-loaded the picture to my computer and looked at them full sized. Anyway, it's nice to be taking good (not great) pictures again.

My son's birthday

2011-07-08T21:38:00.040-04:00

I'm actually entering this post on July 11 but I'm writing about three days ago so I'm labeling this as July 8 because that is my son's birthday. To be more specific, I've set the time to 9:38 PM - when he was actually born.

As usual, I can't believe another year has passed and I especially can't believe Evan is 15 years old! To bring out the well worn cliche, "...it seems like yesterday that he was born." My poor wife had to go through 32 hours of labor (is that right, Sweetheart?) before the doctors and nurses finally let her stop pushing and have a Cesarean Section to deliver our boy. I can't remember if I've mentioned this before but my first act as Evan's father, as I held him for the first time, was to apologize to him for all the mistakes I was going to make in bringing him up. And, it turns out, I underestimated the number of things I would get wrong. He is a bright, attentive, curious and handsome young man and I haven't done all I should to help him reach his potential. But I will keep trying to improve. I will try to remember to encourage him instead of criticizing him for slight problems. I will try to expose him to the wonders of this world more often. And I will try to help him develop his relationship with Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. And I'm going to continue to try to beat him in games. But the number of things I can win is getting smaller every day.

Happy birthday, Evan.

The great lens cleaning

2011-07-06T12:20:00.006-04:00

Before cleaning my camera's lens

As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, I've been letting the lens of my camera go without cleaning it. I noticed that many of my pictures were washed out and didn't have the contrast they used to have. The problem was that I'd heard too many horror stories about people trying to clean their camera lens and ending up scratching it. So, I've been looking for lens cleaning kits that were good but affordable. I've gone around and around with various suggestions from many sources but I could never come to a conclusion. I heard about kits with special brushes and air blowers. I heard about things called a Lens Pen that uses a special dry compound to clean the lens. Then, over the Fourth of July week-end, we were in a real camera store. Not the camera department of Walmart or Best Buy - a real camera store.

After cleaning my camera's lens

I asked what they recommended for cleaning camera lenses and they said they were out of kits just then but told me what was in it. It was a microfiber cloth with lens cleaning solution. I mentioned that I already had those things for my glasses and they said, "Well, whatever is good for your glasses will work for a camera lens. Just be careful and don't spray the cleaning solution on the lens. It could splash onto parts of the camera that it could react with. Just wet the cloth and use that to wipe the lens and then dry it with the other, non-moistened end of the cloth."

So, that's what I did. The two pictures here show the improvement. This type of scene caused the most problems. The light sky seemed to diffuse through the entire picture and wash it out. As you can see in the bottom, "After", picture, it's much better now. I look forward to taking more pictures and posting them here - without needing to run them through a photo editing program!

This points out what is nice about having real stores in town instead of buying everything off the Internet or having only mega stores that carry everything but are experts in nothing. I was able to ask questions of people who were professional photographers themselves. They took pride in their craft and were happy to share their knowledge with a novice. They had cameras there that we could try out and they would teach us how to use them correctly. When the time comes for our next purchase, we'll be going there.

A mushroom scene

2011-07-05T12:28:00.007-04:00

This is a picture I took on my lunch walk last Wednesday (June 29). It's a photo of three mushrooms emerging from the ground and pushing up through the debris left from when the tree muncher cleared out a fire break in the forest behind our office. It's surprising how strong the soft little mushrooms are when they are seeking the open air.

As I've mentioned before, I like mushrooms. Besides the taste of edible ones, I like the look of them, too. Their shape and colors are appealing. But I also like the "setting" of these three. This almost looks like an abstract Christmas Manger Scene to me. The pushed up wood chips seem to make a shelter for the three huddling mushrooms. I've uploaded the full picture which you can expand if you click on the picture. Unfortunately, I had to retouch this photo. I had to play around with the contrast and brightness in a photo editor to bring out the subtle colors. I haven't cleaned the lens of my camera for too long and all the pictures I've taken recently seem washed out. But that's been corrected and I'll be adding a new post about that soon.

4,000 miles

2011-07-02T09:07:00.002-04:00

I passed 4,000 miles on my scooter on the way home from work yesterday. Here's the odometer and you can see I had my helmet on in the reflection and yes, I was pulled over by the side of the road! Don't be fooled by the speedometer going up to 70 miles per hour. My scooter can only go about 50 mph and it doesn't like running that fast for long. I only have to do it for the final 200 yards of my ride into work when I have to ride on a four-lane highway to get to the entrance to our office.

So, 4000 miles! I could have traveled the entire length of US Route 6 and been on my way back. The reason I mention Route 6 is because it starts on Cape Cod and runs all the way to California. Before 1964, it was a transcontinental route and ran all the way to the Pacific Ocean ending in Long Beach, CA. But then California renumbered its roads and US Route 6 was changed to end in Bishop, CA. It doesn't have the fame of US Route 66 - no songs, few mentions in books - certainly not the famous mention as "The Mother Road" in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath that US Route 66 got.

I know people are probably tired of my mentions of mileposts (so to speak) about my scooter. But then, not many people read this blog so I only have to please myself and a few others. But I will say this - I'll be marking when I pass 5,000 miles and then I'll hold off until I get to 10,000. How's that for optimism?

I've thought about what it would be like to travel the whole Route 6 on my scooter but even averaging 40 mph for the whole length, it would take me over 160 hours (20 days traveling 8 hours a day) to make the round trip. I don't think that's going to happen.

Drivers in the rain

2011-06-30T12:50:00.000-04:00

Another note about our vacation. We drove home in the rain and my wife and I were amazed at how many drivers didn't turn their lights on when the visibility was so bad. Not that you couldn't see without your lights on. The problem was that it was harder to see the cars without their lights on. I wish I had a picture to show. I thought about grabbing a picture of cars in the rain from the Internet but it wouldn't mean anything. Besides, all the pictures I could find showed all the cars with their headlights on.

I don't know if the light-less drivers were just lazy or were responding to some misguided idea of saving energy - "turn the lights off when they are not needed." Well, the lights were needed! Surely they saw how hard it was to see cars with no lights because they were in the situation themselves. It seems that the worst drivers were the ones without their lights on, too. Isn't that always the way? It's the double whammy of the bad drivers speeding and getting to you faster than they should and being without their lights making it harder to see them coming. It almost doubles the chance of an accident.

I think a lot of people drive with the idea that everyone else will look out for them. This is similar to the people who talk on their cell phones while driving (don't get me started!). It's all just another case of not really caring about other people. One way of loving your neighbor is helping them when they've gotten in trouble (as in the original story of the Good Samaritan) but another way of loving your neighbor is to help them keep out of trouble in the first place. Surely it's better to not have an accident than to have to stop and help after an accident. At least, that's the way I see it.

Back from our vacation

2011-06-28T12:08:00.000-04:00

We were at Santa's Village from June 21 through June 23. We were going to stay one more day but it started to rain the afternoon of the 23rd and it looked like it was going to continue into the next day. So, we left after lunch on Thursday, June 23. We thought we'd get home about 6 PM but we didn't count on getting stuck in an 11 mile traffic jam going through Boston. We spent about an hour getting through the city and got home around 7 PM. At least it was still light and the rain had let up as we got home. No matter where I've been, it is always good to get home. And there is nothing like sleeping in your own bed.

We enjoy going to Santa's Village at this time of the year because it's not crowded. In many ways, it seems like they opened the park just for us. Because there are so few customers and we go multiple days, the ride operators and the people who run the concessions got to know us. It's such a friendly place. But the thing I like the most is how relaxed it is. No one is rushing to get in front of you and everyone (customers included) is helpful and pleasant. It's good to be home but it's also nice to have a relaxing place to go when we're not home.

Taking a closer look at a picture

2011-06-23T07:00:00.005-04:00

The picture to the right is a photo from about seven years ago when our son Evan was seven years old and our daughter Emma was only one. There is no record of how old my wife Cindy was at this time! I've looked at this picture scores of times but there is something about it I didn't notice until a few days ago.

We'd only had our daughter about a year when this picture was taken. She took a longer time than normal to learn to crawl and walk because the girls in the orphanage didn't get much chance to exercise and were often bundled up in clothing to keep them warm which made it difficult for them to move. So, we had to work with her a lot to get her muscles in tone so she could get around on her own. She was nine months old when we first got her and when she first started to sit up, we always had to prop pillows around her or she wouldn't fall over.

In this picture, we'd gone to the beach to feed the birds. Besides being fun and getting us all out in the fresh air, it was a good reason for Emma to get some more exercise to help with her walking. Cindy was trying to reach some of the birds that didn't seem to be getting anything and she was putting some extra effort to throw the food farther leading to her acrobatic position. And after all these years, I noticed Emma's position in the picture. It's a mirror image of my wife's position within the limits of what Emma was capable at that time. My wife worked with Emma so much and Emma was so used to following my wife's movements that even when we didn't notice, Emma tried to emulate her movements. The poor little thing was doing her best to do what her mommy did. Or is she trying to perform some Tai Chi? Click on the picture and you'll see a larger version so you can see Emma's position more clearly

It's so easy to take pictures with digital cameras that we take hundreds of pictures just because there is no cost for film and it's easy to store them. But it's not easy to go through all your pictures to truly appreciate what you've got. I hope this will be a lesson to me to spend a little more time looking at the content of the pictures I've taken.

A year with my scooter

2011-06-21T07:00:00.020-04:00

It's been a year since I made my first post about my motor scooter. I've ridden about 3,800 miles on it in that time and I have to say that it's been one of the best things I've ever bought. It's cheaper to own and operate than a car and it doesn't take up room in our driveway. It fits nicely in our shed. But I won't be riding it much this week because we're on vacation. There are still some things you need a car (or a van) for!

Saving money using the scooter is great, of course, but another aspect to it is the fun I have riding it to and from work. I ride it around town doing small chores, too. It's nice to think I don't have to waste a gallon of gas every time I run to the store to pick up one small item. I actually look forward to running to the post office or the hardware store for little things, now. I hope to be getting helmets for the rest of my family so that, maybe, one of them can come with me on these little jaunts.

I look forward to many more years of using my scooter. It's been very reliable and easy to maintain so far. Of course, now that the warranty period is over, I may find that things will start to go wrong. I'll be sure to write about them (and their solutions) as I run into them. But, for now, everything is great.

A good Father's Day

2011-06-20T10:51:00.001-04:00

I had a very good Father's Day yesterday. And it was more like Father's Weekend because we went out to dinner, at our favorite restaurant The Olive Garden, on Saturday. Their prices have certainly gone up over the years but there is so much food that we end up getting two meals out of a visit.

On Sunday, I got cards, some nice short-sleeved shirts, wool socks (for my walks in the woods when my feet may get wet), a chocolate cake and a special Gumby t-shirt. We love Gumby and have a huge DVD collection of the early shows. We haven't watched them for a while and getting the Gumby shirt was a good excuse to watch some of them again.

The weather was beautiful all week-end so we were finally able to get our garden ready and plant our vegetables. We'll never be mistaken for farmers but it is a lot of fun to watch the plants grow. And nothing tastes as good as vegetables you raise yourself and eat fresh.

I'm the most fortunate man in the world. I had to wait until I was 42 to get married and until I was 44 to be a dad but it was worth the wait. I've got two wonderful children who are willing to overlook my faults and a terrific wife who makes it easy for me to be a dad.

Our company is 30 years old today

2011-06-17T14:42:00.000-04:00

Today, our company celebrated its 30th anniversary with a nice, catered buffet, a few words from our two founders (they were married when they formed the company) and a few more words from the current company president. Both of our founders are retired from the company now (one still lives locally and the other one is living in Hawaii and had to join us via a video hook-up) and we rarely get to see them anymore. When the company first started it was just a husband and wife business. He designed and built the electronics and she answered the phones, did the books and dealt with all the government (local, state and federal) involved with running a company. They eventually hired someone to build the circuit boards who could do a better job of it and could build them faster. They worked in the barn behind their house and only needed a small portion of it for their "offices". The rest was for storage and where they kept their chickens.

Another of the jobs of our founder was to call up magazines and try to write reviews and informational articles about their products. He wanted to make the company sound like it was well established and capable of making a good, well-designed products. But he told us the story that one day, when he was on the phone, the chickens started to act up and got excited about something and were making a lot of noise. So, he kept trying to talk as much as he could so the editor on the other end of the phone wouldn't hear all the clucking and noise. He must have sounded rude not letting the editor say much. But it worked, they were able to get nice write-ups in the magazines about their products.

I didn't join until 1988 when the company had about ten people working for it. The chickens were gone when I started and the barn had been cleaned up (a little bit). Now we're a company of over 130 people and we're in our third building having outgrown the first two. I still learn something new every day.

Magic windshield wipers

2011-06-15T12:33:00.004-04:00

At one time, I had a car (a 1976 Mercury Capri II, the picture is from Wikipedia, mine was white) that not only had regular windshield wipers and intermittent wipers but also had a switch on the floor that you could push that would cause the wipers to make one pass over the windshield. I didn't think too much about it after a while. I just used it for those times when the regular wipers and intermittent wipers were just too fast for a light mist or rain that started and stopped often. I hate the sound wipers make when they rub over a not-quite-wet-enough windshield. This way I could keep my hands on the wheel (especially in the tricky conditions of a wet road) and wipe when I needed to improve the view.

One day I was giving a friend a ride and it was one of those days when the rain came in fits and starts. I was absent-mindedly hitting the wiper switch on the floor when I needed it. After a while, my friend said, "That's amazing. I've never seen a wiper that could do that." He thought something was sensing the degree of wetness of the windshield and triggering a pass of the wipers. Or maybe he thought something could sense that you couldn't see clearly through the windshield. Well, yes. That something was me.

I guess I could have played a joke on him and acted as if it was all automatic. But I couldn't make fun of him that way. I told him the truth that I was doing it. I'm just not a very fun person.

I was reminded of this story from a short post on Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing blog - Sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. They had more fun with their situation.

Funny graffiti

2011-06-14T12:36:00.001-04:00

Here is a bit of graffiti I saw once

The meek shall inherit the earth - if that's OK with the rest of you.

This is a reference to Jesus' Sermon on the Mount from Matthew 5-7. Specifically, it is from Matthew 5:5 and is part of The Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12) - the first part of the Sermon on the Mount.

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
Matthew 5:5, King James Version

There is also a version of this teaching in Psalms 37:11

But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.
Psalms 37:11, King James Version

Many a sermon has been preached on this subject. Not the graffiti with its, "if that's OK with the rest of you," part. The Bible verse. I won't try to add any new insights there. But one thing that I will mention is our society's mixed signals on being meek. Everyone else wants you to be meek so they can get what they want from you. But when it comes to being meek themselves, you won't find many takers. It's all fine and good if everyone is meek but once one person isn't, the feeling is that they will take advantage of everyone else. So, one after another, people slip out of ranks of the meek and join in the "get it while you can" club. In the graffiti, it shows up as the meek needing to ask permission to get their inheritance.

What brought this all up? Someone talking about their manager pressing them to finish a task that is complicated and not easily pushed through. It seems that being meek is not one of the job requirements for a manager. Part of being a manager seems to be not listening to excuses. So, it seems that part of being meek is accepting that your chances for advancement are limited. Being meek means being satisfied with doing the best you can in the position you have. I'm fine with that - as long as it's not shoved down my throat. I may write my own graffiti

The meek shall inherit the earth so be nice to us today.

National Geographic - Photo of the Day

2011-06-12T06:00:00.004-04:00

I've added another link on the right side of my blog. This link, temporarily at the top of the list, points to the National Geographic website Photo of the Day page. The picture at the right, a very reduced version of the Photo of the Day for June 11, 2011,
was taken by Jonathan Manshack during autumn in Hameln, Germany. If you follow the link, there is an option to download a 1600 x 1200 pixel image for use as wallpaper on your computer. You can do that for any of the Photo of the Day selections.

The National Geographic magazine has been famous for over a century for its beautiful photography but there is much more to it. The society funds research and exploration. Their maps are beautiful art in themselves and very informative. And they've changed with the times. They have a television channel and their website is well thought out, responsive and beautiful.

As my colleague who told me about the Photo of the Day site says, "Beware of the Previous link on the page. You can spend a long time clicking it as each picture draws you in." You won't be disappointed.

For those who diet

2011-06-10T17:30:00.007-04:00

Well, I've been doing my stint in the technical support group this week (as mentioned in my Customers: who needs 'em? post in February) and it makes it hard to find time at lunch to write new blog posts. - or even at night as I put in extra time to try to keep up with my regular projects in addition to the time I've spent helping out with the technical support group.

So, just to get something out, I present this wonderful idea for those of us who enjoy eating but need to watch how much we eat. I'm thinking of producing an infomercial and begin selling the amazing No Weight Gain Spoon. I'll sell millions and can quit my job and never need to work in customer technical support again!

As you can see from the picture, you'll never have to worry about gaining weight again. You can eat as much as you like and still stay within your dietary guidelines. And, if you act now, we'll send you two of these revolutionary spoons so you can share one with your spouse (not that they need to diet). And, as a special bonus if you call within the next 30 minutes, we'll throw in (for just the cost of shipping and handling) our new, amazing Slow Down, You Move Too Fast Boots. With these lead-soled boots on, you may want to get to the refrigerator but it will take you so long and you'll be so tired by the time you get there, you won't have the strength to eat. The pounds will just melt away! Act now before we're sold out!

Inspiration from the Bible

2011-06-07T17:20:00.003-04:00

Of course we can get inspiration from the Bible but I'm not talking about spiritual inspiration here. I'm talking about creative inspiration.

I started by seeing an article on a blog by a programmer I greatly admire, Larry O'Brien. He is much more than just a programmer. In addition to his programming abilities, he is an editor, a writer and has also run his own company. His short article, Bible-Study S/W Is…uh…Inspirational, led me to the full article at O'Reilly Media titled What ebook designers can learn from Bible-reading software. By the way, you MASH fans will get a kick out of the name of the blog at O'Reilly Media, Inc. - it's called O'Reilly Radar.

But it didn't end there. The O'Reilly article is just a republished version of the original article from the A New Kind of Book site titled Better eBook Ideas from…the Good Book. Finally, the end of the road. Now I could read it and enjoy it. It's a good lesson in how to be creative even though you are using material that your readers may already be familiar with. I love it when you find someone who doesn't have to have the latest material to make something new. Of course, the people making eBooks based on the Bible are using new techniques and a lot of creativity to help their readers learn more about the Bible and to help in the study of this amazing collection of books.

It's also a lesson in not stopping at the first link you find. Each of the sites added information to the original article but it always pays to find the original article. You don't know what the later authors may have changed or missed in the original. In this case, they didn't miss anything and just added new insight. But you never know. Keep digging and get to the truth. Just like when you're reading the Bible itself!

Just a silly Friday post

2011-06-03T12:10:00.004-04:00

It occurred to me today that no one really knows where the expression "OK" comes from. Oh, there are plenty of ideas about where it comes from but I don't like any of the explanations. And anyway, I've figured it out. But first a little background.

The character "K" is used a lot in computing and it stands for Kilo but it doesn't mean exactly the same thing as it does in the metric system. There, it is supposed to be used in lower case form, "k", and means 1,000. In computing, it is almost always written in upper case as "K" and means 1,024 because computer arithmetic is done in binary and 1,024 is 2 raised to the 10th power. So, if you wanted to tell someone how much memory a certain piece of computer code took up, you might say, "This function only takes up 2K," and that would mean that the function is relatively small and only uses up 2,048 bytes of memory.

So, imagine that you're trying to tell someone that everything is alright and there is nothing to worry about. Well, the more memory you might have, the more things you would have to worry about, right? So, if you had NO worries, then you would have NO memory to worry about and that would be zero bytes or 0K. Now I can see where people who don't know much about computers would get confused and think that zero is an upper case letter 'O' but they'd be wrong wouldn't they? But since there are a lot more people around that don't know much about computers, using the upper case 'O' won out and that's how we write it today. And, of course, you hear stories about how the expression "OK" was used a long time ago. Well, a long time ago, they didn't have computers and, you've probably guessed this, they didn't have any computer memory either - they had "0K" and everything was "OK".

Anyway, that's where "OK" comes from - you have no worries, you have no memory to think about, everything is "0K". Yeah, that's got to be right.

Another Martha's Vineyard story

2011-05-31T17:27:00.009-04:00

In my previous post, Martha's Vineyard story, I talked about a camping trip I took with a friend to the island of Martha's Vineyard where we took a bike trip that ended up lasting into the night and we had no lights to get back to our campsite. This post is about what happened at our campsite a night later.

After having wonderful weather for the few days we were on Martha's Vineyard, we were going to get some rain one evening. We knew it was coming and it wasn't going to be a big storm so we were prepared for it. If it's a light rain, I actually enjoy camping out in the rain - as long as the tent doesn't leak and it doesn't last all day. So, when it started raining that evening, I was ready to sleep well. The sound of the drops on the water-proof fly over the tent relaxed me and helped me to go to sleep quickly. Normally, I sleep very soundly and it takes a lot to wake me. But during the night, I felt something moving and it did wake me up. At first I thought it was my friend moving around. Maybe he was looking for something in the tent or maybe he needed to get out of the tent for some reason. So, I let it go and fell back to sleep. Later, I was awakened again when I felt something moving against my sleeping bag at the end where my feet were (near the door). This time, it really woke me because it obviously wasn't my friend. It was something with four little legs. The rain was still falling and the clouds made the night even darker. I could see nothing and was imagining everything from what I could feel. Whatever it was, it moved in quick little motions. I imagined a rat getting into our tent or maybe a squirrel or a chipmunk. While I'd prefer one of the latter two, a rabid chipmunk was not high on my list of desired tent-mates.

I was afraid to move because I didn't want to startle the intruder. I'd seen enough movies about cowboys finding a snake in their sleeping bag to know that you don't move and startle the varmint. So I waited. It wandered around but never left my feet for long. It walked around them and over them. Once it seemed to settle down on them for quite a while. I was going nuts. How could I let this - whatever - sniff around me as it decided what to do with me? I started to inch my hand out of my sleeping bag to get my glasses and/or a flashlight. But I'd zipped up too tight and couldn't do it without unzipping by bag. I pulled it down one tooth at a time. Finally I was able to slip my hand out but as I felt around for my glasses or the flashlight, I knocked something over and the intruder flinched. Then it started to slowly walk up toward my face - on top of me! I didn't have long to think, I had to prepare for when it got up to my chest. I didn't want to thrash around to get the light and incite it to move faster so I waited. I knew where it was and set my hands where I thought it was going.

It was up to my knees. Then it was up to my waist. When it got to my stomach, I let loose a yell, shot out my hands and threw it against the door of the tent. Then I sat up yelling to my friend to watch out, "There's a rat in the tent." I grabbed for the flashlight. I shown it around looking for the beast and my friend yelled, "You big baby, it's just a kitten!" just as my light caught its frightened face looking up at me. "How did it get in here?" I yelled. My friend said he heard it pawing at the door when it was raining and he felt sorry for it and let it in. He didn't want to wake me up and assumed the kitten would just fall asleep and not bother us. He hadn't counted on my usual moving of my feet and legs while I sleep. I must have disturbed it and started it on its midnight prowling.

I can't remember if I was mean and made him put it out or if I relented and left it stay in until the morning. I hate to admit it but I think I made him put it out. That was a long time ago before I became a cat lover. I'd act differently now. I'd still be afraid and make a fuss but, if it turned out to be a cat, I'd let it stay in the tent. At least until the rain stopped.

Martha's Vineyard story

2011-05-30T17:05:00.000-04:00

Here's a story from 1977 when I was living in Northern Virginia. It happened that one of my two best friends was living and working in Washington D.C. and we often got together to do things. One summer, we decided to make a trip to Martha's Vineyard for a short camping trip. While we drove my car there (and took it to the island on the ferry), we wanted to bike around the island. So, we got to the campsite (somewhere near the red circle labeled '1' on the map to the right), set up our tent and set out for one of the lighthouses taking the State Road (and its south branch named S Rd on the map). Gay Head Lighthouse - located, of course, at Gay Head - on the south-western tip of the island and named for the brightly colored clay cliffs there) was about 15 - 20 miles from our campsite. It's circled in red and labeled '2' on the map. It didn't take long to get there and we spent a long time investigating the lighthouse and then climbing down the cliffs to the beach. It was beautiful and we spent more time there than we had planned. It was getting late so we looked for a shorter way back. I had a pretty large scale map that seemed to show a shorter way along the western side of the island. But when we got to where we assumed a bridge would be across a small harbor (the red circle labeled '3' on the map), there was no way to get across. After searching for a way across, we finally decided we'd have to go back the way we came (all the way back to the red circle labeled '2' because we didn't trust the map anymore). We had to backtrack about 2 - 3 miles and by the time we got back to the lighthouse, it was dusk. We'd have to move fast but we missed a few turns on the way back and, with about 10 miles to go, it was completely dark. We didn't have lights on our bicycles and didn't even have flashlights with us. So, we carefully rode along the light-less road going off onto the shoulder more times than we could count. The worst part, though, was when a car would come down the road. The headlights were so bright to our dilated eyes that they would blind us and we had no idea where the car was coming from and where the edge of the road was. We came close to being hit a number of times with people yelling and honking at us making us even more nervous. We ended up only making about 5 miles per hour because we walked as much as we rode and that part of the trip took us about 2 hours. It seemed longer than that. We were completely exhausted when we finally got back to our campsite and had to rest for a long time before driving off for a much anticipated meal at a nice restaurant. I've never gone on a bike ride without some sort of light since.

The joy of solving even a small problem

2011-05-27T12:34:00.002-04:00

Just to contradict myself:

A few days ago, in my blog entry, The joy of solving a problem, I said:

Every day I solve one or more problems and it's nice to be able to do that but when you're faced with a potentially catastrophic problem, there is a special joy in diagnosing the problem and fixing it.

Well, maybe the "special joy" is due to the relief of the catastrophe not coming about. But I fixed another thing over the week-end and I'm still elated about it. The door knobs on both our front and back doors were acting up. Like the picture shown here, they have a button you push in to lock the door. To unlock it from the inside, you're supposed to just turn the knob slightly and the button pops out and the door is unlocked - unless it's like our doors. Both of the doors have been getting harder and harder to unlock to the point that I was afraid someone was going to break one trying to get it to unlock.

So, among my many projects for the week-end, I resolved to get to the bottom of the problem. Getting the knob apart was not hard but when I looked at the mechanism, I was a little surprised. It looked a lot more complicated than I'd expected. I'd hoped to see something obvious but I didn't. Finally, in desperation, I tried putting a little oil on the moving parts. After oiling the wrong parts a few times, I found the right place. Both doors now unlock easily (from the inside only!) and I couldn't be happier.

So now I've got a new saying to go along with the one about fixing a potentially catastrophic problem: There is a continuing joy that comes from fixing something that you use many times every day. Even small things make a big difference when they are used a lot.

The Wandering Balloon on its last "legs"

2011-05-21T10:09:00.001-04:00

As I mentioned in the post The Wandering Balloon, some balloons I bought for my family for Valentine's Day are still inflated but the one I dubbed The Wandering Balloon is not doing so well. It's still wandering about the house but it's not moving as much or as fast as it once did. The picture here shows it limping along in our living room. It's really kind of silly but I feel sorry for it! We've come to look on it almost as a pet. Should we "put it down" or let it continue as it is? Is there a balloon doctor we should think of taking it to? Whay am I spending time think about this?

Well, it has involved itself in our lives. We will be talking about something and out of the corner of our eye, we'll see the wanderer move into the room. In some ways, it has an easier time now that it's dragging along the floor because it no longer needs to dip down below the top of the door to move from room to room. I don't think we'll be seeing it upstairs anymore unless someone helps it. That reminds us of our helping our old cat Rosie (a post about her on my wife's blog) onto the couch when she isn't feeling up to it. Speaking of the cats, they liked tracking it around the house when it was more active. They liked batting at the string but now that it's moving so slowly, they've lost interest in ti. If only I could get it out of mind.

The joy of solving a problem

2011-05-20T17:28:00.000-04:00

I often wonder what level of technical understanding the people who read this blog have. But then I think, "What does it matter?" No matter how technically inclined you are, there is always something you don't know about. I can take that even farther - in software engineering alone there a hundreds of things I know nothing about! If someone found out that I'm a software engineer and launched into a description of their latest web application that uses technology ABC to act as the front end for database XYZ, they'd probably lose me in a matter of minutes. So, I'll try to treat this as if you don't know much about the technology behind my story. But in the end, my problem is really not much different than the problems any of us has had to solve at one time or another.

One of my responsibilities is to oversee the building of our software product so that all the changes everyone in our group has made on the project each day get incorporated into a new version that can be installed the following day. We do this every day and it's called the Daily Build. What I REALLY do is set up commands to a computer program that actually does the work. That program is called Hudson. You can set it up to, for instance, build the project and make an installer for it every day at 4 AM (so the installer is ready for us in the morning). But setting up Hudson can be a big job and when things change, as with any computer program, you have to make sure everything is configured correctly or the Daily Build isn't ready for testing in the morning. One of the things that has to be set up is to have a Java development kit installed on the computer where Hudson runs. Java is a programming language and to write programs for it, you need other programs that take your program (written in text) and turn it into instructions the computer can understand. This set of programs is the Java development kit and this changes from time to time as bugs are fixed and improvements are made. Since we had just released a version of our product and were getting ready to start work on the next version, it seemed like a good time to update the Java development kit on the Hudson computer. This is normally an easy process but on the Windows operating system, telling Hudson where the new, updated version is located is a little more involved. I did that and ran some tests that showed that it was working and went home for the day.

The next morning, I checked my office mail from home to see if any surprises were waiting for me when I would get to work later and I saw a message that the Daily Build had failed. The Hudson program sends this with a list of errors whenever the Daily Build is not able to complete. The error list looked strange and I thought it might just be a simple matter of a power failure at the office and , since it looked like the power was fine now, I just restarted the build (doing that from home is a story for another day but suffice it to say that I can do pretty much anything from home that I can do in the office but a little more slowly and a little less efficiently). That second build didn't work either. So, I sent a note to everyone in the group that I'd tackle this problem first thing when I got in.

When I got to work and looked at the situation, I saw more problems. The tests that I'd run the night before no longer worked. As I tried a few minor changes to the Hudson configuration, more and different errors showed up. Then, even stranger things were happening as time went on - without my even doing anything! I began to think that the disk drive on the computer was going bad. If that wasn't the problem, it looked like the Java development kit update had not installed correctly. But why would it work at first and then fail overnight? The best thing I did to solve the problem was to not panic. When I tried to update the Java development kit again and it failed (in a different way), I was able to look at the clues and figure out that I needed to completely remove the Java software for the computer and start from scratch. I did that. Then, after many hours, I was getting different errors in the Daily Build - but these made much more sense. Now, I was able to fix each problem as it appeared and finally, after about five hours of work, I was able to declare it fixed and to produce a good Daily Build.

Boy did that feel good! Every day I solve one or more problems and it's nice to be able to do that but when you're faced with a potentially catastrophic problem, there is a special joy in diagnosing the problem and fixing it. I thought back to my earlier post Cheering for Sports Teams where I thought about not getting involved with professional sports teams that often disappoint you and that I should just follow teams that never lose (like the Harlem Globetrotters). But then you miss the special joy when those teams that have disappointed you in the past come through and do great things. Just as I could shy away from taking responsibility for things that need to be done every day with precision and timeliness, it's so sweet when you're able to do that under tough conditions. Those are the high points of an engineering profession and they're not as fulfilling without the hard problems.

A paucity of blog posts

2011-05-18T16:47:00.030-04:00

How's that for a word I never thought I'd use? Paucity - The presence of something only in small or insufficient quantities or amounts.

My posts have really fallen off recently. It's partly because I finally got out to do some yard work that has needed to be done and I also took the time to clear out and dig up our garden plot to get ready to plant new vegetables for this year's garden. But the biggest reason I didn't post anything from May 12 - 15 was that my wife had to go to the hospital for surgery on Thursday, May 12. I was kept pretty busy those days doing things she normally does plus doing things I normally do.

Of course, the day of her hospital stay was all taken up with being in the hospital. My wonderful mother-in-law watched the kids that day so I could take Cindy to the hospital and stay there while she was there and then bring her home afterwards. We ended up spending almost eight hours there due to them taking her into surgery late and then our needing to stay in the recovery area a long time because she felt so sick whenever she would get up to leave. But we are thankful for the wonderful hospital we have right in our town. It is well run and well staffed. They doctors, nurses and other staff are courteous and helpful.

When I first started this blog, I was paranoid about mentioning anything about who I was, where I lived and anything about my family. I always made sure to not show the faces of my wife and children. As the years have passed, I've lost some of that paranoia. I've even put links to the two churches we've attended in our town. So, I shouldn't worry about giving our local hospital some much deserved credit. Our wonderful Falmouth Hospital was recently honored as one of the top 100 most improved hospitals in the country and a few years ago was recognized by Consumers Digest as being one of 50 exceptional hospitals in the country. That's pretty nice for a place that is only a 10 minute drive from our house.

Cheering for sports teams

2011-05-11T14:47:00.009-04:00

Note - I posted this on May 11 and I saw it on my blog. Then, something happened at Blogger and this post was removed and placed in the Drafts list. Also, the picture I posted was removed. My guess is that posts made during a certain time period were lost and all that remains are earlier drafts of those posts. I'm re-posting this now and have re-loaded the picture. Here's my post - it may be updated later:

It's fun to cheer for a sports team. I've always liked baseball and rooted for the Pittsburgh Pirates because I grew up near that city. Now I live in New England and I root for the Red Sox (although I still keep my eye on the Pirates). I cheered for my high school team in all sports, of course, and when I went to college, I cheered for all of the teams there, too. I even tried out for the track team but never made it into competition.

But cheering for professional teams has always fascinated me. The only reason most us root for a team is because it's in a city near us or in a city where we used to live. I lived for a few years in Northern Virginia where everyone is a rabid Redskins fan. Locals would get quite mad at me if I didn't watch their games and cheer them on. I guess I would have if I'd lived there longer. I just was never crazy about football. I can't warm up to the New England Patriots either.

Not matter who you root for, though, there are going to be good times and bad times. Right now, the Red Sox are having a tough season and the Celtics basketball team is facing elimination for the playoffs. It can be trying to have your feelings jerked around by circumstances you have no control over. Maybe it's time to start rooting for a team that never loses or disappoints. Maybe it's time I dropped all these other teams and adopt the Harlem Globetrotters as my team. They rarely lose (and those few times are just a mistake). There is no championship to lose. They always seem so happy. Everyone enjoys their games - except for the Washington Generals! They always lose to the 'Trotters. Yeah, that's the way to go. Root, root, root for the Harlem Globetrotters and never be disappointed again.

Then I think back to 1960 when the Pirates beat the heavily favored Yankees in the World Series. Then the 1971 and 1979 Series where the Pirates came from two games down to win the championship. And then, of course, there was the 2004 World Series when the Red Sox won for the first time in 86 years. And even better, the American League Championship Series where they came back from being down three games to none to win four straight games from the Yankees. It doesn't get any better than that.

So, I guess I'll stay with cheering for my usual professional teams. The Red Sox will turn it around and the Celtics will pull off a miracle and win their series to move on. The lows are bad but the highs are so much sweeter.

[Update - Well, the Celtics didn't turn it around and are out of the playoffs. And the Red Sox continue to struggle. But that's just going to make the wins later that much better. I know the Red Sox can finally reach .500 - by the end of the season]

The Wandering Balloon

2011-05-08T16:29:00.000-04:00

The youth group at our church was selling heart-shaped balloons for Valentine's Day. They are trying to make money for summer camp. So, I bought one for each member of my family. I've bought the balloons before but they never lasted this long. Usually, they would have deflated by the middle of March. This year, three of the four are still floating. My daughter played with hers so much that it lost its helium a few weeks after she got it. The ones I got for my wife, son and mother-in-law are still floating. But now, the one I got for my wife is starting to act strangely - it can't seem to stay in one place.

It's the Wandering Balloon and it's become the source of a lot of fun for us. You never know where it's going to show up next. I guess it's because it's starting to deflate and doesn't push up again st the ceiling as strongly as it once did. So now, any small air current will carry it around the house. The top picture shows it in my daughter's room (you can tell from the pink wall). But, since she had already "used up" her own balloon, Emma thought it wasn't fair that the balloon was in her room so she brought it downstairs and tied it to the hand rail of the stairs as you can see in the second picture.

But apparently she didn't tie it very well because, as you can see in the third picture, the Wandering Balloon worked its way back up the stairs later that day. At least, we think it was because she didn't tie the string correctly. Could it have untied itself? That could never happen, could it? And how do we explain the balloon moving into and out of rooms that have doors? How did the balloon drop down to fit through the door and then rise again once it got into the room?

This morning, I found the balloon in the living room (in the last picture). Once again, it dropped low enough to fit through a door. Did it just stay low this time or is it just bending down to look out the window? I'll be watching the door of our bedroom tonight. If I see a shape moving in close to the top of the door, I'll know it's just the Wandering Balloon checking to see if we're sleeping OK. Or could it have a more sinister purpose? If this blog doesn't get updated in the next few days, you'll know.

Another scary headline

2011-05-06T12:16:00.003-04:00

As with the headline that I wrote about last year, the headline in the picture to the right caught my attention. On my iGoogle page, I have four or five headlines from various sources and today's headline from New Scientist sounded too much like all the automobile and other types of recalls we've been seeing in the news recently. But how can you recall an infant? Do you take them back to the pediatrician who delivered them to get that birthmark removed or treat that weepy eye? Have they found a new childhood vaccine and they want to bring in all the kids who haven't yet had the shot to inoculate them?

Well, of course, it was just me misunderstanding something again. When I clicked on the little "plus" icon to open the headline up for the next level of explanation, it makes more sense.

Babies absorb information like a sponge. So why do we struggle to recall our first few years?

So it's about why we don't recall our early experiences. It is an interesting question and I'd like to read more about it sometime. But at least I can let my heart settle down a bit and worry about other things. I should have known they weren't talking about what I thought at first. There was no list of model years that normally accompanies a manufacturer's recall. What was I thinking?

The last Easter Egg

2011-05-05T06:20:00.005-04:00

We always have an Easter Egg hunt for our children. We're always careful to have the same number of eggs for each of them (with each of our children looking for eggs of a certain color). But this year, Evan found one less egg than his sister Emma. We looked and looked but assumed the wind had blown it away, our dog had grabbed it or I had just miscounted (I'm the Easter Bunny).

I felt very bad and every time I've gone out in our yard since then, I've looked around for the missing egg. Our dog Charlie had helped me place the eggs and he helped me look for the missing one, too. And we still couldn't find it!

Finally, yesterday, after having his dinner and needing to walk it off (so to speak), Charlie convinced me to take him out for a snoop around the yard. While Charlie didn't find the egg (he spends the whole time with his nose to the ground), he led me to the tree where I'd put the egg - and forgotten about it.

I couldn't wait to get into the house to tell Evan and the rest of the family. As you can see in the top picture, it's a wonder that we missed the egg for so long. And as you can see in the second picture, while Evan is 14 years old, he still enjoys hunting for Easter Eggs. Especially when they've been hiding for so long.

Quite a few days of news

2011-05-03T12:43:00.004-04:00

Except for one of these items, none of these will be a surprise to anyone reading this blog. But I just wanted to list these things since this blog also acts as my diary. So, now I can be reminded of what has happened in the last four days.

There was a Royal Wedding on Friday, April 29. It was the wedding of Prince William (oldest son of Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana) and a "commoner" named Kate Middleton. I tried to ignore it but it was all over the news. Also, my wife and daughter were very interested in it and I enjoyed watching part of it with them. Their favorite part? Seeing the horses pulling the carriage after the ceremony was complete!

Also on April 29, we released a new version of our software product. Part of the reason I wasn't able to watch much of The Wedding with my wife and daughter was that a bug was found at the last minute and I was trying to fix it at home and check it into our code library so we could do one more build before making the master disk for the product. I got it done but my supervisor was nervous about changing anything just a few hours before release. So, there is a known bug (not a big one, no data would be lost) as it goes out the door. It will be fixed in the next version. It's just something my co-workers can hold over my head if I get too cocky at work.

The Vatican beatified Pope John Paul II on Sunday, May 1 in Rome. This is the next step on the way to making him a Saint (with a capital 'S'). We Baptists feel that anyone who is a Christian is a saint (note the lower case 's') but the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church have decided to have a higher echelon of people who are, so to speak, Heroes of the Faith. In one way, I think this is a good idea. It's good to have people to look up to and these people have done amazing things (classified as miracles). I just don't agree that we need them as our intercessors to God. Jesus is the only intercessor we need.

Osama bin Laden was brought to justice late Sunday night, May 1 (or early Monday morning, May 2 in Pakistan where it happened). Notice my euphemism. In reality, he was assassinated. Couriers that were known to work for him were tracked for months and and, when they finally revealed the place he was hiding, it was watched for more months. Then a team of Navy SEALs was sent in and he was killed. [Updated- I originally said that bin Laden resisted and also that he used one of his wives to shield himself. I don't know if either of those is true so I removed them.]

You'll notice, by the way, that I'm no longer using links to The New York Times. That's because they have begun to charge for access to their content. While I greatly respect The Times and I think they have the best news website, I don't want to have links that will only work if you pay for them. That's too bad but I understand their reasons. Here is a link to that information.

Happy birthday to the universe

2011-04-27T17:10:00.000-04:00

Today is the day German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler calculated as being the day the universe was created - in 4977 BC! I would love to know how he came up with that number. Did he actually do the calculations based on the laws of planetary motion that he developed or was it from a reading of the Bible and figuring the the first day of creation mentioned in Genesis was also the creation of the universe? I hope to do more reading about this.

Johannes Kepler was an amazing scientist. He wrote the first published defense of Nicolaus Copernicus theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun. He was an assistant to famed astronomer Tycho Brahe and he corresponded with Galileo Galilei about the telescope - even making improvements to the design of the telescope. Kepler's work inspired Isaac Newton in his gravitational theories, too.

Modern scientists may laugh at Kepler's date saying that it is nearly 13.7 billion years off. Do any of the people who come up with that larger number have the courage to set a specific year, month and day for the Big Bang? Another thing that has always bothered me is that cosmologists and astronomers talk about how we are looking back in time when we look at distant objects in the universe. They say we are all speeding away from each other and, since the speed of light is a constant, when we look at a star that is a million light years away (in distance), we are seeing that star as it was a million years ago. From what I understand of the Big Bang Theory, stars started forming about 100 million years after the Big Bang itself. That's a very short time compared with the age of the universe. Did we "out-run" the light of those early stars as we rushed away from them? Or did time itself not really kick in until a certain point in the expansion? Is it possible that what seems like 13.7 billion years is not really that long because the "clock" wasn't running all that time?

I've not studied this stuff and people who are smarter than me have come up with these theories. It sure makes me curious and I'd like to read more about it. Some day, as I find out more about these things, I'd like to write more about them. Till then, let's sing Happy Birthday to the universe, have some cake and play a game of pin the tail on the comet.

3,000 miles

2011-04-25T12:55:00.002-04:00

The odometer on my scooter turned over 3,000 miles this morning on my way into work. If I'd have used our van for those miles, it would have probably used approximately 176 gallons of gasoline. At the current price of around $3.80, that's $668.80 in gas alone to travel those 3,000 miles. On the other hand, my scooter has only needed 35 gallons. That's only $133.00 to travel those 3,000 miles - a savings of $555.80. And that's just for the gasoline. It takes a lot more to keep a car running than just the gasoline. For instance, we had two repairs done on our van just a few months ago that totaled almost $2000. No repair on my scooter would ever cost that much - or I'd just buy a new scooter. It only cost $2,500 brand new last year.

The gas price I used, $3.80, is actually lower than we have to pay in our area. But the gas prices happen to be really high right now and continue to go up. So, of course, these numbers are all estimates. I'm not sure if the price of gasoline will stay this high but it's never going to go down too low. The world is increasing its use of gasoline and other petroleum products faster than we are discovering and exploiting new sources. But every time I see a report on the news about how high the price of gasoline has risen to, I smile a little thinking about my scooter.

[Update - April 26. In case you want to check my math: I know you could figure this out but to make things easier, I'll tell you that our van (a 2005 Chrysler Town and Country) averages 17 miles per gallon. For my scooter, the average is 85 miles per gallon.]