Some more links and a bit of opinion now. Watch out!
Some business-ey things. Is your organization designed for humans? can spur off an interesting thought experiment about how businesses should be structured. The traditional model chooses people and puts them in slots. Person A designs the widget, person B makes the widget, person C markets the widget, and person D sells the widget. I think that companies where all people from A to D can interact and share duties — Person A and B can talk to person C about how to market, and person D can relay customer information and suggestions back to persons A and B. Companies where people are too siloed have problems — designers design products and never really find out about how their customers really use their products, or what problems they have. There are a bunch of companies I’m familiar with that are blurring the lines between divisions, and letting engineers and designers *gasp* talk to customers. I think this is a good thing. (Link via Kottke.org)
Five questions every mentor must ask. I think it applies (as the author states) equally well to anyone (especially internal folks!) who are looking at a business or a process within an organization, as well. At the very least it gives you a framework to start from when trying to “think outside the box”. (Egh. I need to work on my synonyms.) Via the New Shelton Wet/Dry.
This is something I’ve run into in the past. How does a technical person effectively convey to HR or a recruiter what they’re looking for when relying on them to screen resumes? Not sure if this comic will help.
In an interesting experiment, a UCLA psychologist showed that talking about bad feelings helps lessen their impact. So talking to one’s priest, therapist, psychologist, even your S.O. really does help one cope with overwhelming emotion. Possibly found via The New Shelton Wet/Dry.
And last, to make myself happy, I’ve been listening to The Birdsong Radio web site at work. Lovely recordings of just birds singing their tiny hearts out.
Okay, time for more post. Here’s part II of how to soundproof a wall.
By this point, I’ve already sealed the gaps in the other side of the wall with goop, and padded up the boxes and other protrusions. The blue-jeans cotton insulation has gone in, and it’s onto finishing the mass-loaded vinyl.
Once you’ve got the first course up, you’ve got to put up the second course above it. This is harder than it looks, since it weighs about one pound per square foot, comes in four-foot wide rolls, and you have to hold it up eight feet off the ground. I suggest you get help from your resident fourteen-year-old.
You want to make sure it covers everything and is continuous, since it acts like a barrier to block the higher frequency sound as well as medium frequency. When it comes to openings like doorways, though, you can either have it stop or wrap around the wood. You’re making the wall assembly heavier (more massive) and less able to vibrate and transmit sound, so any bit should help.
This weekend, it was hot. Unhappily hot. We pretty much spent it lazing around in air conditioning or well-cooled spaces. Not a lot got done, but that’s OK.
start traffic graphing some of our fibre channel switches
and a few other things too.
Going to try more of blogging the inane stuff as well as the meaty stuff. It should at least get me into the posting habit, even if it’s not all substantive.
…to the first post. In the grand tradition, I’ve not done a good job at all of keeping my new year’s resolutions; though I’ve done OK at the whole not obsessing or getting cranky thing. Everything else, well, at some point soon I’ll make progress, really. I promise.
A couple of notes and bitchings. First, I can’t get enough of QI — the Quite Interesting quiz show out of the BBC. Basically, it’s sort of like Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me from NPR if you take out the news and the callers and just let the guests banter about whatever topic is put before them. Curse the person who thought of region coding DVDs; we’ve been importing the discs from Amazon UK – Quite Interesting: The A series and Quite Interesting: The B series — and have been having great fun enjoying Stephen Fry, Alan Davies, and the rest pass BS and generally make up interesting facts about whatever they like. It’s sort of like Balderdash with comedians and intelligent people.
Second, I’d like to take this opportunity to decry the ineptitude of either certain flash programmers or of the flash plugin itself. Granted I’m writing this on an older system, but lately it seems everyone and their subsidiary needs to write a fancy new video player or fun animated flash ad; every one of these increases the page load time for web pages I surf, frustrating the heck out of my attention-span-challenged self as I sit there waiting for a page to finish so that I can start oh, say, scrolling down to read it. The worst are the web sites that write their own video player and don’t test it on anything but the fastest modern systems; YouTube’s viewer is just fine, thank you, while sites like Gizmodo and UCB Comedy feel the need to write a bloated pig of a player that can at best perform 1 frame every three seconds on my poor overworked system. The first rule of web design is that thy page should not take more than 5 seconds to load. (I realize this site is also an offender, but I’m working on optimizing it and keeping it as fast as I can with the old server it lives on.)
[update: as I just found out, apparently clearing out the cache of flash movie stored data at Adobe's flash player privacy manager (it's a special page that pops up the control panel for the flash player) with 'Delete all' makes the flash player pop up much speedier. However, it still doesn't fix inefficient flash media players.]
Beyond that, I’ve discovered the magic of lemon butter and how they can make cooked greens like chard and the like taste yummy; I’ve been practicing the horrendous-for-you but oh-so-good recipe for Ruth’s Chris restaurant sweet potato casserole, and the first couple of tries have gone OK. (I can’t afford to go eat there, but I don’t mind so much if I can recreate their best dish at home.)
More to come soon, I hope. We’ll see if I can’t catch up to that third New Year’s resolution.
Let me back up. Four years ago, due to a poorly-constructed addition (before we moved into the place), our roof leaked; catastrophically so. It took us a bit to figure out what was happening, since the leak took place inside a wall. But by the time we did, the dreaded mold had set in.
This actually happened shortly after we started remodeling a different room, and discovered that asbestos had been used in the glue for the linoleum flooring, and in the acoustic popcorn from hell coating the ceilings. So we had already started talking to a company, Alliance Environmental, that specialized in asbestos (and now mold) remediation.
I tried fixing the leak myself, but that didn’t work; shortly after Alliance came in to pull out the asbestos and damaged drywall and remove the mold from the framing, the roof leaked again, so I put them on hold while we had the roof fixed.
We had the roof redone, completely, where they found more water damage. So that was taken care of. We worked on the initial bedroom, putting insulation (when the house was built, insulation wasn’t important!) in the walls, putting up new, non-paper-faced drywall, new windows, bookshelves, and floor tile due to not being able to seal the concrete floor and too much moisture coming up from the concrete slab.
Fast forward a couple of years, and we’re finally ready to finish the job started a few years ago. We just had Alliance back out to take care of the popcorn ceiling in the kitchen, where they also finished the final bit of mold cleanup, from the last of the leaks we knew about.
The guys who pulled out the damaged drywall and cleaned up were absolutely stellar; it took them about a day and a half to do (most of that was setting up the environmental containment stuff — I’ll post pictures soon, but our house looks kind of like what they set up in E.T. when the government moved in), and they finished yesterday. Now, an inspector from the company, as well as a tester from an independent lab have to come out to verify that all the asbestos and mold are gone from the air in the contained area. If that’s the case, they can take down the plastic and we can get at our kitchen again (today breakfast was root beer and pop tarts, yum), and start doing the actual fixes.
The other projects that are coming together with this are:
putting the stereo equipment in a built-in closet in the family room
retexturing the kitchen walls and ceiling with something not-sprayed-on, and fixing all of my unhappy drywall repairs after ripping out the old, too-big-for-the-kitchen island cabinets
insulating more outside walls where drywall’s been removed
and putting soundproofing (or rather, sound-reducing) items between the bedroom we’ve finished, the bedroom we’re remodeling, and the family room.
Since we’re actually doing work instead of just talking about it, I’ll try and post more about what’s actually going on. So there should (should }:> ) be more posts for a little bit.
…in Home Depot or otherwise, is not to be used for:
* items like wire that have been cut to a custom length and labeled by an employee
* items like bolts that do not have barcodes
* items that do have barcodes but are too light to trigger the bagging scale to register that a new item was placed upon them
* giant items like ten foot pieces of conduit that do not in any way, shape or form fit on the bagging scale
These things I learned while noting that the one human-powered checkout line was miles long, whereas there was nobody at the self-checkout lane this weekend at Home Depot. It ended up taking twice as long as the human-powered checkout, since the person supervising had to take half my items over to the central station and scan them manually. (It didn’t help that they went through three people during this time and the last one had to verify that all the items in the bag were on the receipt at the end.)
So I do see, now, why a lot of people consider the self-checkout line to be more of a pain than it’s worth. From now on, I’ll (try) to use it only for middle-weight, medium-sized boxy items that fit on the bagging scale and have a real barcode. Sigh.
The other day, our dogs decided to play “How much is inside?” with our Love Sac post-beanbag thing that had become their bed.
It’s quite the game with the dogs to rip their toys apart; unfortunately, when they run out of toys, they move on to bigger and better things. They do seem quite pleased with themselves when they manage to rip something apart; our tripod (the brown one) takes particular relish in pulling all the stuffing out of a stuffed toy she’s tired of licking to death, and she and the puppy (the black one) enjoy a good game of tug of war with anything that has seams that will tear.
In any case, THAT MUCH is inside a Love Sac, and there’s still plenty of foam left inside for cushioning the dogs. (The seams, unfortunately, were quite ripped; not being any good at sewing things back together, we ended up tossing the lot, and now they have $20 (but just as comfy, it seems) fleece stuffed pet beds from Costco.
So I’m not exactly sure what triggered it, but Cricket Moods (that plugin that shows the lovely mood icons at the top of each post) pooped out and no pages could be viewed.
On the plus side, that also means no comment spam for however long this was going on.
Not much to report; plodding along like usual. Got mailman working on a new system, had to upgrade kernels on some boxes at work due to some process suddenly triggering a kernel bug, and not really too much else exciting. Trying to clear out the weeds from the yard so we can start putting in sprinkler piping and planter boxes, finally.
Also my new favorite youtube videos: the “Look Around You” series. A marvelous send-up of mid-70s “educational” films in a straight-laced, Python-esque sort of way.
Thursday some co-workers found a baby crow at the park near the office. The poor thing couldn’t stand up; it had apparently tried to leave the nest too early.
We didn’t want to leave it on the ground; the area is too well-kept to leave any good hiding places, and while the mother was apparently there (she screamed at us every time we got near the baby), there were enough night animals that the baby would be a quick meal for someone. The nest was way too high in the tree for anyone to be able to put the baby back in. So we tried to figure out how to put a makeshift nest in the tree where we could reach, but out of reach of any predators. We tried putting a cardboard tray in the tree with zip ties; that worked well enough, but the baby backed out of that too and fell to the ground again.
A couple of co-workers were concerned about catching West Nile Virus from the bird; but everything we’ve read says that crows can just be carriers or infected by it — the virus requires a mosquito to actually spread. So that wasn’t an issue. Still, we kept him relatively isolated and washed our hands and clothes after handling him, just in case.
So we ended up taking him home for a night; we washed him off (there was some poop stuck to him where he’d scrabbled about in the box), and gave him some water (he was just at the point where he should be figuring out drinking; we had to point his beak at the water, but once it dipped in he got the idea and started trying to scoop water in his beak and drink it.)
He was reasonably awake and alert through all this; he didn’t make a sound unless there were other crows also making noise; even then it was a quiet cheeping. He kept his legs extended anytime he wasn’t on something; his feet could grip around fingers, but he wasn’t able to stand on his legs, or fold them underneath him comfortably on his own. We were able to slowly fold the legs underneath him, but he kept wanting to extend them — either under him or to his side.
We took a picture:
We also tried to feed him a bit; we’ve fed baby parrots before, but not crows. Some sites recommended mixing up some dog food and water along with something grainy or mealy like cornmeal. We’d actually mixed in peanut butter with baby bird food for the fat and protein content; so we crushed up some dry dog food, mixed in a small bit of peanut butter and some warm water until it was a wet slurry. We tried giving the bird some with an espresso spoon, then letting him drink it like the water, but he wasn’t really all over it. The stuff didn’t smell quite as bad as dry dog food does to me, but I wouldn’t have wanted to eat it, either.
During cleanup we decided to try and sex him; for the most part, you can usually determine the sex of a bird by the width of the two points of the pelvic bones just under their tail. You’ll be able to feel the bones as two nubbins; if they’re really close together, it’s probably a male; if they’re far apart, it’s probably a female (‘egg laying bones’). It’s not 100% reliable, but it’s worked well enough.
Turns out baby Squibbs (my SO named him) is a she. We made up a box for her, so she could sleep. And she did:
We put the box into a room where the dogs couldn’t get, and let her sleep through the night. The next morning, we tried another feeding, but she was more interested in just having water than the food mixture. We took the bird to Project Wildlife, a local organization that rescues and rehabilitates injured wildlife.
We were a bit apprehensive as to whether or not this would be a place that is a bit free with the euthanasia (a few years ago, San Diego’s Animal Control department was run by a person for whom euthanasia appeared to be the first and only option; fortunately she was ousted after an expose by the local paper). As it turns out, that appears not to be the case — the Project Wildlife office had lots and lots of cages, and from what we could see, there were lots of recovering birds, baby and otherwise. It was actually quite heartening to see. They even have a question and answer on their FAQ — “I found a hawk that was hit by a car, should I just let “nature take its course”?”. Their answer is absolutely not — that if you can get the bird to Project Wildlife it can be rehabilitated and rejoin the wild.
The person at Project Wildlife said that there might be something developmentally wrong with the crow; she said that at this size it should be able to stand and vocalize well. The bird did seem fine, other than being unable to stand. It still had lots of baby fuzz (not the real, interlocking feathers) covering its head and body, so with any luck she just decided to leave the nest early.
Here’s hoping baby Squibbs recovers and is rehabilitated well enough to rejoin the wild. I think Project Wildlife can do so. We enjoyed taking care of her for a night; I have to admit I had a couple of fantasies about a shoulder-perched crow making foreboding noises at opportune times, but gothic fantasy rarely matches reality. A bit sad to see her go, but she’s definitely in good hands now.
(the blue and brown lines are in the attic; the green, red, and purple lines are more realistic) I’ve been more or less wanting to build things, improve things, etc.
Last weekend, I weeded a corner of the lawn; we’ve been talking about putting in container gardens in the front yard, with pea gravel all around them so that we could grow what we wanted (veggies!) and not have to worry about maintaining a lawn or dealing with a dirt patch.
Of course, me being me, I want to put sprinklers in the ground first. So I’ve got to dig trenches for the irrigation pipes. But of course, it being TOO HOT lately, I haven’t done any of this. There’s a half-dug trench from when I freaked out about a leak a couple of months ago, but that’s about it.
Then, of course, I’ve found a project in the “Family Handyman” project annual that seems like fun. It shows how to use a small pond liner (small as in 2-3 feet in diameter), a small pond pump, a few ceramic dishes, hardware cloth and rocks to make a decent looking fountain. (Normally I’m more of a “Fine Homebuilding” person, but this issue looked interesting enough to pick up.) So now I need to think about how best to get electrical out there as well.
I can’t let a small project be simple, you see — it has to be elaborate, complicated, and fun. Whatever the project ends up being, I’ll post something about it.
So I think I’m a news junkie. I have a regular repertoire of web sites that I check every morning and night for news and information; some are on the linkroll at right. I try to suck up every story and read the more interesting ones. Not sure if I like staying informed, or what.
I actually think it may have started during an earthquake in the mid-90s; it happened at some ungodly hour in the morning (why do the bigger ones always seem to happen at, say, 4AM, and not 2PM?). Earthquakes freaked me out for a while growing up; I was within about 20 miles of the epicenter of the 1989 Loma Prieta (6.9Richter) quake when it happened, and that shook me up a bit. This one, though, was only a 5.0 or so. But I got up and couldn’t sleep, so I started listening to the radio. This was back when certain AM stations would spend an hour after a quake taking listener calls after a bigger one from people who’d say if they felt it or not.
The next night, it became more of a habit, and for a while I started listening to news radio at night. Then it turned into News TV (I used to be a great fan of World News Now, the slightly kooky 2AM-4AM newscast on ABC). I finally grew out of that in college as I realized I actually needed sleep to function. But off and on with the advent of easy web access, I’ve been sort of a web site news junkie.
Anyway, in order to fizzle out this whole story — being a news junkie, I’m also an avid fan of Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, the kooky NPR news quiz show. I listen every week when I can. We even went to a live show when they were touring. So every now and then, I’ll come across a story that I just *know* is going to be on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.
I came across such a story today.
And don’t remember where I found it or what it was about.
So, to make up for this letdown, please watch this crazy, super-must-be-drug-induced ad for coffee:
So for the first time in my life, I got Harris Poll’ed. They asked the standard political stuff — who’s doing a good job, who I might vote for in the 2008 presidential race, then moved on to find out how I felt about the oil and natural gas industry.
If I were to analyze it, it seemed decent enough, except there were some statements that I was asked if I agree or disagree with — something about the statistics of ethanol-burning cars on the road — where I would have liked to check the numbers. But there was no “I don’t know” option, so I just went with it.
It was interesting, at least. Not to say that my life is so unexciting that being called by a pollster is the zenith of my weekend; several other general entertainment things happened that I had fun with. But at least it’s unique.
Plus, for all the times I’ve said “that poll must be bogus, those respondents don’t know what they’re talking about” — I can now proudly count myself among those who don’t know what they’re talking about.
This person who doesn’t know what he’s talking about is also avoiding studying for his japanese final. Just to get that out there. Admitting it is the first step, you know.
One of the last links for the day from The Consumerist (a fun read if you revel in good & bad tales of companies and customer service) was a YouTube video of Mr. Rogers saving CPB/PBS.
I grew up watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, so I’m not sure if it’s because of that, but every time I see video of Mr. Rogers either doing his show or otherwise (in the above clip, or on an episode of This American Life, I have to marvel. If any other person spoke with slow, deliberate tones of Mr. Rogers, I’d assume they were patronizing me. But with Mr. Rogers, you just get this feeling of caring, that he’s just a genuinely nice guy. I’ve seen comments comparing him to Gandhi, and that sounds about right.
I dunno, it’s hard to explain. Reading some of the “for parents” stuff on the Mr. Rogers web site, it looks like his philosophy was a simple, treat everyone (including kids) with respect; everyone deserves to be listened to and dealt with as a human being.
I do wish there were more Mr. Rogers’, and fewer O’Reillys and Hannitys and DeLays. The world might be a nicer place.
Not much for today. Got up at 5, went to work, had meetings most of the day, came home, made grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner, went to Japanese class where I did OK but not that great, and watched the last half of the season finale of Boston Legal (Denny Crane!).
I processed all the pix for the PS2 rackmount how-to; I’ll post that tomorrow at some point. I hope.
So I do a dutiful job of my Japanese homework, in both Romaji and Hiragana (granted the day before it’s due, but hey, I’m busy). Despite doing a final vacuum before the SO’s mom arrives tomorrow, walking the dogs to pick up the small one from practice, having dinner, and bathing one of the dogs (the amount of brown water that went down the drain was very impressive).
After I finish homework, I note that the still slightly damp dog is still shedding, even though I bathed her. So, in a flash of brilliance, I decide to use the air filter we have in the living room as a shed collection device.
It works decently well; a bit escapes in the updraft of the exhaust, but standing the dog in front of the filter and rubbing her vigorously does seem to do a good job of trapping the bulk of her hair detritus. Of course she’s not exactly thrilled about the idea; attention is good, but this big humming machine sounds a little too much like the vacuum cleaner for her comfort. (This is the dog whose favorite outdoor pasttime is chasing the hose when I’m watering the few plants we have, and trying to bite the stream of water. The fiftieth or sixtieth time you’d think she’d figure out you can’t bite it.)
I tried to do the same with the other dog, but she was having even less of the air filter than the first dog. A bit of her fuzz did get sucked into the air filter, but not nearly as much as the just-bathed dog.
Anyway, the original reason for me posting is because Mr. Destructoid himself commented on one of my E3 posts! I think it’s because WordPress pingbacks each URL that gets mentioned in a post.
Not that it really means anything; it gives me a teensy tiny bit of fame and ego boost and not much else. But still, it’s fun to be noticed. Plus I get a w00t point. I’m not really sure what that means. But I have one!
Anyway; I have to make katakana flashcards for the next 10, set up another E3 pix post, then get up at 4:45 AM tomorrow. Yuck, but such is life.
I have a last round of E3 pix to put up, but first — it’s My First Food Porn!
I got the idea from this article at SlashFood for a mother’s day breakfast in bed blueberry yogurt brulee. I had gotten a culinary torch several months back and hadn’t even filled it yet; I never really got up the energy to make the custard and such for a true creme brulee.
Since today was shopping day, and my SO doesn’t really like brulees, I decided to get the items for it and make it myself. With frozen berries instead of fresh (we did just buy a new fridge).
The recipe didn’t turn out quite as expected (see Out of House and Home in a bit for details), but I got to use the torch for the first time, and it was a decent dessert.
We also cleaned up the house in prep for my SO’s mom visiting. The backyard is decent and somewhat useable again (our dogs like digging, and the dirt gets EVERYWHERE); and my SO did an impeccable job in the kitchen and bathroom; I vacuumed everywhere and tried to get things as tidy as possible. Not perfect, but better.
Now, I have to get going on my Japanese homework…in a bit.
Ungabunga. I like that word. I think I learned it from the Flintstones.
Today I went to work, watched the Sony E3 press conference event via Gamespot (in which there was a person who spoke Japanese through a translator, and I understood most of what he said without needing the translator! yay!), came home, drove around running errands, purchased birthday things for my S.O. with help from her offspring, and came home to do Japanese homework. Oh the excitement, I can barely contain myself.
Tomorrow I go to work, watch the Microsoft and Nintendo E3 press conference events, drive around running more errands, go to Japanese class, and come home.
I will leave you with a picture of the dragon skull we just re-hung (after needing to take it down to allow the new & old refrigerators to pass by). It sits on a wall against a lovely background of picture frame and asbestos popcorn ceiling treatment, wearing festive christmas bells on its horns. You know, for festive purposes.
A few months ago, I cleaned out our front hall closet. It had collected some picnic supplies, outdoor chairs and mats, as well as cleaning supplies, and some coats that hadn’t been worn in years.
Since the floor of the closet had a sort of half mishmash of cement with old adhesive on it and some really ugly vinyl tiles, and since I had some leftover sample bamboo flooring planks from iFloor, I decided it would be a good idea to cut enough bamboo to fit and make a nice, clean looking floor for the closet.
To make a long story short, the bamboo part works fine, until I get to the point where I nail in the baseboard above the flooring. The nail in a particular corner seems to not want to go in; so I try a bit harder, and finally it goes in.
About 3 seconds after this happens (the “oh shit” moment), I realize that the natural gas fired water heater is on the other side of this wall, and that the nail just about vertically aligns with the natural gas line feeding the water heater. So I quickly run around to the other side, and while I don’t hear any hissing, I do smell gas. Only a tiny bit, mind you, but a bit of gas nevertheless. Enough to make me worry, at least.
So we have a dog that we watch for a few hours at a time every now and then when its (out of town) owner visits and has to go take care of an errand locally. This dog happens to not have learned its doggy manners very well; he wants to play very much, but however he asks for it, he ends up annoying the heck out of every dog we’ve ever tried to introduce him to. No idea why; the dog doesn’t seem malicious, just incapable of saying the right thing.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, we were watching this dog in the front yard. We had him on a 10 foot leash thing attached to the front porch; our dogs were just inside the screen door watching his every move and occasionally barking and whining. (Which is also usual but strange — whenever they meet they can’t stand this dog, but they always want to get to where he is and see him.)
Rushed & 
Workingputs up an explanation of old and new terms found in various parlance. Via I don’t remember where.
Accomplished & 
Hopeful
Contemplative & 
and 
Mellow & 
Scared & 
Relieved