Father-in-law Knows Best?

So, they found the guy who flew out of the country and back in all while carrying a particularly drug-resistant strain of TB. Actually, if I read the story right, he flew out and snuck back in by way of Canada, figuring (rightly) that in our current state of Holy Crap Mode vis a vis airline passengers, he would not manage to get on a plane with his passport tagging him as a potential biohazard. Lucky for him, Homeland Security can't be in Holy Crap Mode in all places at all times. Since so far, no terrorists have mounted a successful attack by automobile from Canada, there is still a way to sneak a virulent pathogen into the country.

In all fairness, the TB patient said he didn't know he had the extra-dangerous variety of TB until he was already in Greece for his wedding. He thought he only had the normal tuberculosis. When he was told otherwise, he thought he would die without treatment back in the U.S. The obvious course of action when one thinks one has an infectious disease that will require some of the better health care available on the planet is to seal oneself into the cabin of an aircraft and share your recycled exhalations with a couple hundred people for hours on end.

Anyway, it didn't take long for someone to figure out who TB Guy was once a few details were made public in the effort to find people he might have breathed on. Turns out that this man is pretty near the top of the list of People Who Really Ought To Have Known Better. He's a personal injury lawyer. But wait. It gets better. Remember how I said he was in Greece for his wedding? Turns out, he was marrying the daughter of a CDC microbiologist who specializes in TB (who, unlike this guy, know how to keep their drug-resistant TB under wraps). I'm guessing that is going to be a bit of an awkward visit with the in-laws once he gets out of quarantine.

'Splain this...

A while back, our old 23-inch CRT television set spontaneously decided to remove red from the spectrum. Since there is a reason TV in shades of green never took off, and I like to take things apart to see how they work, I dissected the TV, leaving me with a plastic case and a TV picture tube with a few random TV guts attached. The latter item is somewhat tricky to dispose of, since it contains non-trivial amounts of lead and is under a vacuum that tends to make it go BOOM when the glass breaks. I left the tube in the utility room and conveniently forgot to call the trash company for several months about getting rid of it.

Well, tonight, I finally got around to calling them to see what sort of precautions I might need to take to dispose of it. Turns out, they can't dispose of a CRT tube alone, and couldn't find anywhere on the hazardous materials dropoff calendar that would fit that particular item. However, they can dispose of CRT television sets. So--and I asked specifically to clarify this--if I leave the dangerous part out at the curb, they can't do anything about it, but if I put the dangerous part back into the inert case, they will be happy to take it.

Stuck in my Craw

If the US Postal Service wants to increase revenue, or at least remain a relevant service for items other than applications for pre-approved credit cards that no sane bank would actually issue to me, they may want to consider the merits of not making the new postal rates completely incomprehensible.

The old rates were easy: 39 cents for the first ounce, and slap on a 24 cent stamp for each additional ounce up to 16 ounces, and if you can stick a full pound of paper into an envelope, more power to you. I spent half an hour this morning trying to figure out the new rates for multi-ounce #10 business sized envelopes. Near as I can figure, it is 41 cents for the first ounce, 17 additional cents for the second, third, and third-and-a-half ounces, then after 3.5 ounces, one must switch to the "retail flat" table, that starts at 80 cents for the first ounce and 17 cents for each additional, so that a 3 ounce letter is $1.14, four ounces is $1.31. I'm still not entirely clear on how much a 3.75 ounce package costs.

If the post office spent as much time sorting the actual mail as they do sorting out rate regulations, I might not get my neighbor's Visa bill every other month.

Life Imitates Warner Brothers Cartoon

In spite of it being released on DVD at least three times, Warner Brothers' 1950 classic cartoon "8-Ball Bunny" is not available on YouTube for me to link to, but you know the plot. Bugs finds a penguin far outside normal penguin range, and hilarity ensues when Bugs tries to return the penguin to his native Antarctica. Well, once again, the penguins have managed to re-enact their mid-century celluloid antics, albeit without the Humphrey Bogart impressions. A Magellanic penguin strayed 3,000 miles off course and ended up in Peru.

Thanks to SuperDad for the link.

Pass The Stuffing

We spent Mother's Day at Emp. Peng.'s grandmother's house, which backs up to an area home to several wild turkeys. One particularly handsome tom took exception to the "other" turkey that apparently lives in the front bumper of our rental car. The above is a photograph of him beaking the crap out of a rented Pontiac. We did not get a photo of me spit-buffing beak marks out of the paint, shortly after I threatened him with a pot of boiling water and some bread crumbs. Lucky for me, the folks at Alamo return counter at Logan were backed up and didn't notice a bit of turkey damage. I have posted the picture so you all won't think I've been getting a little too far into the Wild Turkey.

3.1415927

I'm trying my hand at homemade pecan pie. I really hope it comes out of the oven looking better than it went in, because it went in filled with what looked like nuts floating in beige phlegm.

Still a Few Bugs in the System

The concept is sheer automotive anti-theft genius. A car senses that someone is trying to steal it and automatically initiates an error message that triggers a lockdown sequence to immobilize itself. Deep in the bowels of the car's onboard computer, where the would-be auto thieves can't see, it takes its own fuel pump offline, mimicking engine failure that would make it an unattractive target for the thieves who would be more interested in moving the car than diagnosing the mechanical problem. Basically, the car sees that it is under attack and plays possum until the bad guys lose interest. Very sci-fi.

Emp. Peng.'s Volvo apparently has had this feature since 2001. We learned this week that, however cool the idea is on paper, there are still a few bugs in the system as it exists in today's reality. Principally, a 2001 Volvo, while an advanced piece of engineering, is not quite smart enough to tell the difference between thugs attempting to commit grand theft auto and Volvo-certified technicians attempting to replace part of the throttle. Humans, on the other hand, are generally smart enough to know whether they are felons or Volvo technicians (not that the two are necessarily mutually exclusive), but in our case, the humans failed to compensate for the weakness in the mechanical system by clearing out the onboard computer's memory when they finished replacing said throttle part.

Unbeknown to anyone, the shop sent me home Wednesday with a car that thought it was being carjacked, and the error message triggered the next time Emp. Peng. tried to start it, Friday morning. Now we know what the Blue Screen of Death looks like on a computer system that does not have a display; it is the Blue Volvo of Immobility. Unfortunately, in addition to not having a monitor to turn all blue, the car also lacks a user-operable Control-Alt-Delete.

About that last one...

Rosa Brooks of the LA Times says most of what I meant in that last post, and says it better than I did. She also says it a little more tactfully that Christopher Hitchens. Thanks to ME for the link, even if it came to him secondhand.

Glad to see someone has said it

Christopher Hitchens has the cajones to say what should have become patently obvious by now: we are not one. We are not united in grief. Bad things can happen in the world without affecting us personally.

What, for instance, is this dismal rush to lower the national colors all the damned time? At times of real crisis and genuine emergency, such as the assault on our society that was mounted almost six years ago, some emotion could be pardoned. But even then, the signs of sickliness and foolishness were incipient.... If we did this every time, the flag would spend its entire time drooping.

He goes on to point out a quandary now faced by, of all people, the Russian trade mission, which lowered its flag after the Virginia Tech incident, only to have former Russian President Boris Yeltsin die in the middle of their solidarity. Oops. Bad timing on Yeltsin's part, dying within a week of a random violent act.

When my grandfather died, I noted here that it seemed obscene that the world kept on going, but that is one of the great lessons of grief: life has to go on in spite of any personal pain. Nothing teaches you that you are not the center of the universe quite like having everything go on like nothing is wrong while you are devastated. Our increasingly constant orgy of grief, moving from one tragedy to another, commemorating anniversaries and locations until time and space is one giant, constant memorial, robs people of this important demonstration of their place in the cosmos, while cheapening the grief we are supposed to be sharing.

Astronomers may have found E.T.'s home world

From what astronomers can tell, 581 c is a nice little planet, probably around half again as big around as Earth, a bit more gravity, temperatures amenable to liquid water and in fact not so different from the midwest (between freezing and 104 Fahrenheit). The orbital period is 13 days, so you get birthday cake every two weeks. Most important, it is there. For the first time, we found a planet outside our own solar system that fits our assumptions of what conditions are amenable to producing and supporting life.

581 c is the first extrasolar planet humans have found that falls into the range of being "hospitable to life"--a category which also contains Mars, so don't pack the space bikini yet. It is around Gliese 581, a dim star 20.5 light years away, in the constellation Libra. At Warp 1, that gives you a couple of decades to get into swimsuit shape, not counting the time it takes to develop warp drive.

As with so many scientific discoveries that sneak up on us, the first potentially habitable planet was not where we were looking for it. Gliese 581 is smaller, dimmer and cooler than the sun, and while plenty of extrasolar planets have been found around stars like Gliese 581--including one the size of Neptune around Gliese 581--planet hunters looking for earthlike planets tended to concentrate their efforts around stars like our sun. In the project that discovered 581 c, about 90% of the telescope time went to sun-like stars. The new planet was found in the other 10%. Makes me wonder what else we have been missing because we assume it can't be there.

From the Rookery

For the two years we have lived here at the Rookery, the North 40, which is in fact the south quarter acre, has been an ugly weed farm that I imagine to have been the bane of the neighborhood, or at least of the neighbor whose swimming pool looks out over the area. The former owners used the spot as a scrapyard and left the area crossed with ruts that I learned (the hard, but thanks to the extended warranty not expensive way) can eat a riding mower. Since I couldn't mow it and some idiot around here puts thistle seed out to feed the starlings and barn swallows that nest in my barn rafters, the weeds took over. For starters, the thistles topped six feet tall. For starters.

No more. The landscapers came out and brush hogged the area, kindly shaving off some of the taller bumps in the process, so I just have to fill in a few lower areas. Amazing how much bigger the property looks when you can get to all of it. Now that the area is clear, I wonder how we went two years essentially wasting more land than most city-dwelling homeowners have to call their own.

Spring has sprung, the grass is green...

...and when the grass is green, there is only so long one can put off mowing it. But that's just fine, because I got that chore done yesterday, and today was sunny, warm and so gorgeous I had an uncontrollable urge to skip through the mall parking lot on our way to pick up some Mother's Day cards.

Today was one of those days that was not going to get ruined by anything. I got to geek out on some sci-fi over my morning cup of coffee. There is something invigorating about dissecting why the toasters on Battlestar Galactica rebelled against their human creators yet accept second-class status under their human-form cylon counterparts (and if you understood any of that sentence, you know what I mean about it being invigorating). After that, I got to bury my bare toes in fresh-mowed grass, found some new blackberry shoots coming up, and finally got a bloom on a purple crocus. Good things came in the mail, some good news by phone, and it was just an all around fantastic day.

Sales Help

As you may or may not have heard, a whole mess of CompUSA stores are closing, necessitating a massive clearance sale effort. We happened to be near one of the soon-to-be-closed stores today and stopped in to see what had not been picked over yet. As we expected, the good stuff was gone--probably snapped up on the first day by people flipping the merchandise on eBay.

When a store has the staple yankers and the timecard holders for sale, the 17 PA announcements of "Everything is on sale. We're clearing the store out to the walls" are pretty much superfluous. When there are price tags on the fixtures, for the fixtures, we get the message. We spent about an hour picking through what was left, which was not that much. After listening to a couple dozen reminders that the company was "Clearing the store to the walls," we finally saw something we wanted: a HD TiVo with DirecTV. We looked for a sales clerk--harder than you might think, since folks who are on the verge of unemployment are not overly eager to serve you--only to find out that it was not for sale.

Everything was for sale. Except the TiVo.

They were selling the shelves. Not the Tivo. Selling the discolored little plastic tags that hold the prices to the shelves. Not the TiVo. With a high enough credit limit, we probably could have bought a couple of the employees. Bit not the TiVo.

For Irony, Press or Say "One"

Since about five minutes after the advent of the automated phone menu, I have hypothesized that none of the button-mashing these systems put you through has any effect on how your call is routed. The sole purpose of the options menus, I figured, is to keep you occupied so you don't realize how long you've really been in the queue, waiting for The Next Available Representative, who then asks you all the same questions the automated system just asked. It has come to the point that, when I am in a hurry (and who isn't in a hurry to get out of the purgatory of "press 5 for..."?), I'll hit whichever option seems likely to shut the automated system up fastest, since these folks have gotten wise to the trick of bypassing the systems entirely by pressing various combinations of 0 and #.

Shows what I know. I had to call the postal service today, since for what seems like the hundredth time since we moved in, we got our neighbor's credit card bill but not mail that we were expecting, and I've grown weary of waiting 3 weeks for time sensitive mail. The postal service, probably wisely, does not seem keen on giving out the phone numbers to the individual post offices, where my complaint might be most effectively routed, so I was stuck with 1-800-ASK-USPS, which connects to that most vile of automated phone systems, the voice prompt. You know, the ones that make you speak and confirm all of your choices, thus keeping you in the system twice as long as the dialpad menus. These voice recognition systems don't seem to understand, "Get me a human, you automatic piece of crap!" as a valid request. After a couple of runarounds with the USPS menus to find out that none of the options seemed to get me anywhere near a human representative, I started randomly choosing options. Wouldn't you know it, I resort to this in the one automated system on the planet that seems to actually record and display the information you give it. When I finally got routed through to some unsuspecting CSR, she started right in with, "I understand you are calling about a redelivery?" I had just enough presence of mind not to say, "Oh, is that what I chose?" and instead pulled something out of my hindquarters about how "redelivery" seemed to be the closest option to "My mail carrier seems to be delivering my time-sensitive mail to Neptune."

At Least The Yard Looks Better

I hurt. It might have been the two wheelbarrow loads of fist-sized stones I took from behind the barn to the flower bed at the bottom of the driveway (about 500 feet one way, mercifully downhill), or it could have been the 22 wheelbarrow loads of mulch I loaded, moved and spread around the barn and the house. I think it is safe to say that the one load of leftover sod bits is not the problem. Whatever the cause, I am sore.

One of the 22 loads of mulch went to the newly transplanted azalea. I don't know what someone was thinking when they planted it, but "shade loving" does not mean "plant on the north face of a retaining wall, behind a hedge, under a tree." There's shade, and then there is never seeing daylight.

Did I mention I hurt?

Someone Was Not Thinking

Emp. Peng. qualified for the sales convention in Clearwater, Florida, and we just got the activity agenda for the weekend. The activity coordinator obviously does not know anyone prone to motion sickness. On Saturday, we have our choice of going to Busch Gardens or going deep-sea fishing. Either way, I'm pretty much guaranteed to barf; it's just a matter of whether I want to barf into the Gulf of Mexico over the rail of something that looks like the S.S. Minnow, or barf into a trash can next to the Budweiser Clydesdales. I'm leaning toward the Clydesdales.

Putting the "service" back in "customer service"

I have found an island of reprieve in this era of manufacturers who live by the phrase, "No user serviceable parts inside," and back it up with torx screws just to make sure we won't try to fix something when it breaks. This island is the Genie Company, who unfortunately only seem to manufacture garage door openers, giving me scant opportunity to support them by buying many things from them.

Two days ago, my garage door opener crapped out, and after an unsuccessful attempt at removing the outer casing with a pair of needlenose pliers, I called Genie's customer service line to find out what sort of implement they might recommend for the task. The very helpful lady on the other end apologized for not being able to tell me exactly what size nut driver I needed to procure, and proceeded to explain that, once I got the outer casing off, there would be three more identical fasteners that remove the gear box, and if I looked in there, odds were I would find a gear that had cracked. She explained that it was about a $5 part, and even gave me contact information for a local purveyor of the necessary part, adding that, if for some reason they did not have it, I could order the part directly from Genie.

This in itself would have been above and beyond what I have come to expect from customer service, but she went through all that after I told her not to bother looking in the customer database, as I had never purchased anything from them; the garage door opener came with the house. It's one thing for a company to do that for a customer, and quite another to do it for someone who just sort of fell into possessing one of their products.

In The Mailbag

My SASE came back from Analog today, containing the following note, along with a copy of the submission guidelines:

Thank you for giving us the opportunity of looking at this manuscript, but I have found it not quite suitable to our present needs.

I rather like your style of writing and suggest that you try us again.

Sincerely, Stanley Schmidt

To some, this may seem like bad news, but I have graduated to getting rejected on a full sheet of 8.5x11 paper, signed personally by the same person I addressed the original submission to, not one of his assistant editors, and containing sentiment that might possibly be construed as "you don't totally suck as a writer." The only way I could be happier about this is if I could progress to someone actually buying the thing.

Not Fried

I passed the Smoke Test. It has been three hours since I installed the last of six replacement electrical outlets, and nothing has caught fire yet. I am also not electrocuted. More importantly, I have electricity in my office again, two days after we first noticed that none of the outlets worked.

Replacing the outlets marks my first foray into the wide world of home wiring. Until now, all the home repairs I have had to do involved the plumbing. An argument could be made that the house's record is still intact, since the circuit that went kerblooey, prompting me to replace the receptacles on it, includes the socket that the water softener is plugged into.

A phone consultation with PengDad, who has some experience with home repairs, convinced me that the most likely causes of my problem were all things I could handle myself, even though until recently my toolbox was a corrugated cardboard box. I decided to skip the first solution and went straight for replacing the outlets. There were a couple around the house that were broken and needed replaced (none, of course, in that room), and if I was going to have to do two, what's the difference doing six? Two hours, for those keeping track.

As it turns out, no matter how justifiable replacing the outlets was, that was probably not the cause of the problem. Seems the GFCI outlet behind the utility room sink--and, critically, at the head of the circuit that powers my office outlets--had tripped. Nothing like spending an afternoon fixing a problem that could have been solved by pushing one button.

Note to PengDad: the sockets ended up being 33 cents apiece, after I convinced the sales clerk that there was absolutely no way that a box of 10 outlets cost $17. Perhaps, sometime, you can explain to me why the outlets cost 33 cents and the cover plates cost 48 cents apiece.

Penguin Image of the Day

Just thought I would share my new desktop background