The Blog of Harald

Going back over the front page of the blog:

* My back was better enough that I could function by the weekend, thankfully. It was still bugging me at curling two weeks later, but now I seem to be completely back to normal. (Yes, I know what you’re all thinking: “As normal as Harald ever gets…”).

* I’ve emptied the eavestroughs and other clutter from the roof. I think a pile of sticks was trapping water, allowing it to seep up under the shingles and then down. The flashing is all intact, so I can’t see any other way for it to get in. Tonight’s the first big rain since then, so we’ll see what happens.

* The wasps are well and truly gone. We still need to dig the nest out of the house, to prevent carpet beetles…

* Every day I hate driving in this city a little bit more.

* G, C, and I are now all addicted to Maple Story. I have a reasonably capable level 17 bowman and an optimized level 21 mage (I found a guide online :). Sadly, it’s a “grind” game; lots of monotonous killing of monsters to level up, and a few quests that mainly involve killing lots of monsters and picking up the stuff they drop.

That’s it for now…

via “Tanya”:http://andpuff.livejournal.com/103815.html. Out of the 50, I’ve read 22, loved 10, hated 2, and never put down any of the ones I started. Not too bad, but could be better, considering my SF&F shelves have over 1000 books. (I’m amused by the set of (mainly older) SF that I’ve read but Tanya hasn’t…)

The Meme:

This is a list of the 50 most significant science fiction/fantasy novels, 1953-2002, according to the Science Fiction Book Club.

Bold the ones you’ve read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put an asterisk beside the ones you loved.

-*The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien*-
*The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov*
*Dune, Frank Herbert*
*Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein*
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
*Neuromancer, William Gibson*
*Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke* *
*Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick*
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
*Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury*
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
-*The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov*-
Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
*Cities in Flight, James Blish* *
*The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett* *
Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
*Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey* *
*Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card* *
The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
*The Forever War, Joe Haldeman* *
*Gateway, Frederik Pohl* *
*Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling*
*The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams* *
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Little, Big, John Crowley
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
On the Beach, Nevil Shute
*Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke*
*Ringworld, Larry Niven*
Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
*Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson* *
*Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner* *
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
*Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein*
Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
Timescape, Gregory Benford
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

We’re sleeping in our own bed tonight! The last couple of days only one or two wasps have made it into our bedroom and they’ve all died in front of the windows, so it’s probably safe…

Perhaps foolishly, I just geotagged all “my Flickr photos”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/chkoch/

I saw these beer bottles in the LCBO today. The people on the bottles are candidates in the upcoming election for Mayor of Toronto.

I was amused…

(Update: the blonde on the left won. The politician, not the beer :-)

I arrived home this evening to find my dining room dripping (it’s been raining fairly heavily all day).

bq. You are at wits’ end. Passages lead off in all directions.

I woke up Sunday morning from evil dreams involving buzzing creatures to find a dozen wasps in our bedroom! Fortunately they were all clustered in the windows at the opposite end of the room; they’re attracted to the sunlight. It turns out that there’s a nest under the floor in our bedroom. The wasps found a home there because the second floor sticks out about 3-feet farther than the first floor, and the overhang is just covered in aluminum, with lots of nice cracks for wasps to crawl through.

We’ve been plagued with the damned things for years. They keep building nests in different parts of the front porch, in places that I can’t easily get to with commercially available tools :). This is the first time they’ve made it into the house, though. Wasps will chew through wood to find nest space (and to build their nests), and with the cold weather outside, they were attracted by the warmth and the light that filters down through the furnace vents from the bedroom.

Since Michaéla is allergic to the beasties, I called a professional (“Bees & Pest Removal”:http://www.yellowpages.ca/business/0%2C1/2720719.html). They came around noon (on Sunday!). We actually had two nests; one “yellowjacket”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowjacket and one “umbrella wasp”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polistes. He blasted both nests with finely powdered “pyrethrin”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrethrin. The powder form easily fills the cavities in the walls and floor, coating the various surfaces (unlike the commercial foams and sprays). The wasps walk through it, tracking it into the nest, killing the whole crowd (up to 10,000 of the critters!) in 24 hours.

It seems to have worked; there’s no more activity outside the house. However, every morning since we’ve gone upstairs to find one or two new wasps that have managed to avoid death. We’re sleeping downstairs for the time being, because the bedroom smells nasty with all of the pesticides floating around, and neither of us wants to be accidentally stung. Monday morning there was a huge wasp (probably a male) on the wall in the bathroom, because the light had been left on overnight; when I turned off the light he eventually moved to the window. Since then I’ve seen either huge wasps or immature workers.

I want my bedroom back… sleeping on the futon is not helping the back injury from last week.

Yes, it’s true, I threw out my back washing my hands.

On Monday morning I woke up with a bit of a twinge in my lower back, right over my left pelvic bone. A day in the car driving from Ottawa to Toronto didn’t help, but I was feeling a bit better on Tuesday, so I went into the office to deal with about a half a million burning fires.

I went to the bathroom. Our sinks are a little low (wheelchair access), so I bent forward to wash my hands. Big mistake; my whole lower left back went into spasm. I made it back to my desk, but after that I could not stand up for love nor money. Pain-killers and rest didn’t help; I was trapped in my chair, unable to get to the elevators, never mind to my car.

My darling wife came to rescue me (two coworkers wheeled me to the curb in my chair, then took my chair back to my desk; quite a sight for the rest of the HP employees, I’m sure!). She helped me hobble into my doctor’s office (after convincing the receptionist to give me an appointment that day instead of the following Monday!). I could walk, barely, if she supported me and I walked stooped over like an old man.

The doctor did a bunch of tests for pinched nerves, then wrote me a scrip for Naproxen and Tylenol 3, and sent me home. I spent all day Wednesday flaked out, but on Thursday I made it up to the shower and to dinner with the family, and today I was fairly mobile, even managed to pick up the kids from school.

It still hurts to move the wrong way, and I can’t put my own socks on :-). Still, that was my week. (How was yours?)

G: “Uh-oh… one of us is going to die!”

C: “Who’s wearing a red shirt?”

Rands In Repose: Trickle Theory

bq. My advice is: START.
“But Rands… I’ve got three hundred tests to run and one day to…”
Stop. Go run one test. Now.
“Wait, wait, wait. Rands. Listen. They need this spec tomorrow @ 9am….”
Shush. Quiet. Go write. Just a paragraph. Now.
Welcome to Trickle Theory.

I first encountered this in the context of ripping CDs. A friend had a huge CD collection that he wanted as MP3s. He’d take 6-7 discs to work every day and rip them on his laptop while working on his desktop. The whole process took three months, but it got done, a Trickle at a time.

I’m currently working through creating a patch description in our patch tracking database. There are over a 100 defects, and each one takes about 5 minutes to process through the system. So I do 5 or 10 a day. As of today, I have 20 left.

Go read up on Trickle Theory. It works.

I’m addicted to “Flickr Interesting Photos”:http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ .

Mick’s addicted to YouTube.

G’s addicted to Maple Story.

C can’t get close enough to a computer to have a ‘net addiction. She is, however, addicted to Debbie Travis…

Bandwidth use in this house in increasing…

I was walking down the street the other day, and wished I had my camera.

A stereotypical “tough guy” was walking towards me. Shades, black t-shirt, camo shorts, overshirt, and baseball cap (worn backwards). Typical “tough guy” stride and stance.

He was carrying a Hello Kitty gift bag, complete with pink tissue paper and ribbons…

Last night on the way home from the in-laws, in the rain, I only had three people try to remove the front corners of my car by diving in front of me. As usual, there was lots of space _behind_ the car.

Since I was driving the other car, it’s not my car that has the “Kick Me!” sign. It’s me.

My car has a “Kick Me!” sign on the back; I’m convinced of this. Or maybe it has glasses with tape across the bridge…

My _fourth_ interaction with an idiot driver who insisted that he go in front of me, despite the vast, prarie-like expanse of empty road behind my car, almost ended in an accident.

Picture me following close behind the Jeep Cherokee in front of me. In fact, I’m technically tailgating, since there is less than a car-length between him and me. Picture at least 150′ of empty lane behind me. Picture the guy who, completing a right turn beside my car, first accelerates, and then starts “aggressively drifting” across the lines into my lane (without signalling, of course).

I honked at him, to remind him that there was actually a _car_ already occupying the space he was trying to claim. Apparently he is deaf as well as blind, because he proceeded to try to _force_ his way into the gap that was too small for his car!! Fortunately the lane to _my_ left was empty.. several more horn blasts were required before he gave up.

At which point he accellerated again and jumped in front of the Jeep.

TheStar.com – Cape Breton joins space race

They’re building a private launch facility in Cape Breton, launches planned by 2009 or 2010.

I wonder if they need any network security people? :-)

globeandmail.com – The $2-million comma

bq. This agreement shall be effective from the date it is made and shall continue in force for a period of five (5) years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five (5) year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.

From a contract between Rogers Communications Inc. and Aliant Inc. for the placement of cable lines in Eastern Canada. Aliant cancelled the initial 5 year term in 2005 after only 3 years. The cancellation will force Rogers to pay an extra $2.13 million to use utility poles. The placement of the second comma in the sentence above permitted the contract’s cancellation, to the surprise of Rogers.

(via the “Quotation of the Day”:http://ca.geocities.com/quotationoftheday/index.html mailing list)

I love thunderstorms…

| Date & Hour | Conditions | Temp (°C) | Humidity (%) | Dew Point (°C) | Wind (km/h) | Pressure (kPa) | Vis (km) | Humidex |
| 2 Aug 2006 22:00 EDT | Thunderstorm with Rain | 22 | 90 | 20 | W 30 gust 55 | 100.8 | 24 | 30 |
| 2 Aug 2006 21:00 EDT | Cloudy | 30 | 71 | 24 | WSW 30 gust 39 | 100.6 | 24 | 41 |

In case anyone is wondering, my brain has left for vacation in Greenland, or Iceland, or somewhere else not-as-damned-hot-as-Toronto.

It turns out that we didn’t _quite_ set a temperature record yesterday; we missed by 1/10th of a degree. But as they’ve been commenting on the news, we may have set a new record for the highest low temperature; on Monday night the temperature dropped to 27°C at about midnight and then stayed there until morning, never dropping further. Last night we had the same thing; the low temperature was 27°C, but again it stayed that temperature most of the night.

It was ~30°C in the house. We all slept (fitfully) in the basement last night.

I’ll be one of the many happy people when the cold front comes through tonight/tomorrow (update: now? the temperature just dropped 4°C between 3PM and 4PM…).

I was asked for my title links plugin (See “wordpress filter”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2006/06/10/wordpress-filter/), so here it is:

“title-links-1.0.zip”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/title-links-1-0.zip

Updated with a brute-force fix for a conflict with the “pretty quotes” functionality in Textile:

“title-links-1.1.zip”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/title-links-1-1.zip

This plugin will create links between WordPress posts whenever the title of the target post appears in the text of another.

You can specify alternate link keywords for a post by creating a Custom Field named ‘link_names’, containing a set of alternate phrases surrounded by square brackets. e.g. if the ‘link_names’ field for the post titled “Lady Danielle de Barbarac” contains

[Lady Danielle] [Danielle]

Than any occurence of the either phrase in another wordpress post will create a link to the Lady Danielle article.

You can see this plugin in action on “The Queen’s Guard”:http://www.the-gang.ca/roleplay/queensguard/ and “Five Rivers”:http://www.the-gang.ca/roleplay/fiverivers/ game log sites.

“Reid”:http://rae.tnir.org/ bugged me about documenting the tools I use for photo processing and publishing:

“Irfanview”:http://www.irfanview.com/ Thumbnails – autorotate. Irfanview is a very good image viewer for Windows. I’ve always used the lossless jpeg rotator in the package. Recent versions have been shipping with Irfanview Thumbnails, which lets me do bulk autorate of my photos, based on the EXIF orientation flag which is set by an orientation sensor in both of our cameras.

“Picasa”:http://picasa.google.com/ – photo management. I discovered Picasa when Google first bought it; I love both the photo browsing interface and the builtin “simple” photo editing tools, which do a surprisingly good job of basic edits (light balance, crops, etc.). One thing I like is that Picasa always keeps your original photo; any edits can be undone, even months later.

“Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/chkoch/, “Gallery”:http://gallery.menalto.com/, “Picasa Web”:http://picasaweb.google.com/harald.koch, Rogers Photos – publishing. I use each for different things. Flickr has the advantage of social networking; my friends see my pictures because they have friended me. Gallery runs on my server, and I use it for blog images (including for the “rpg blogs”:http://www.cfrq.net/~rolemaster/). Picasa Web is new from Picasa/Google; not sure if I like it yet, but it does make publishing from Picasa trivial. And Rogers Photos I use because of the “unlimited” storage for bulk pictures, like those from kite flying events.

“Unison”:http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ – sync/backup to the main fileserver. Unison is a bidirectional file synchronization program, like rsync but it moves files in both directions, resolving conflicts appropriately. I use it so that the photo collection can be stored and edited on all four computers around here, without (too many) conflicts.

“Nero”:http://www.nero.com/ – backup to CD / DVD. Mentioned for completeness, and because the Roxio package that comes with the Compaq’s -sucks- doesn’t work for me (Nero came with both of my DVD writers).

“Ubuntu Dapper”:http://www.ubuntu.com/ – fileserver. Also mentioned for completeness :-). The fileserver currently has 200Gb of disk, but it’s filling up again; I have a pair of 320GB drives on order, with plans to RAID-1 them together.

HP PhotoSmart 7960 – printing :-). I love this printer, even though it’s not available anymore (the new Vivera-based HP PhotoSmart printers like the 8250 are even better, from what I’ve seen). The output quality is awesome. I also have an HP LaserJet 1020 for day-to-day printing; saves wear-and-tear (and ink!).