The Blog of Harald

from WWdN: In Exile: Seriously. What would Jesus do?

bq. if I were a Christian, I would be profoundly upset that this huge organization, with such a loud voice at the table and such a significant presence in public life, is declaring that stopping gay marriage and telling women whether or not they can make a deeply personal decision are more important issues — and more specifically more important Christian issues — than helping the people among us who have the least and need the most

We all eventually noticed that the bar / look-out at the front of the “ms Zuiderdam”:http://www.hollandamerica.com/cruiseships/Zuiderdam, called “The Crow’s Nest”:http://www.hollandamerica.com/signatureofexcellence/crowsnestlounge.do, could also be referred to as “Ten Forward”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Forward …

Geeks. Who’s idea was that?

It really sucks to come home from a Caribbean vacation to find that the house is 16.5°C instead of a slightly more balmy 20. Seems I mis-set the thermostat slightly, although I’m sure I checked it twice before we left…

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

I was talking on Thursday night about how the Internet is enabling “The Long Tail”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail. Disintermediation is allowing small, specialized producers to deal directly with their far-flung customers.

Today I tripped over a perfect example: Mr. McGroovy’s sells “box rivets”. These are small plastic fasteners designed to hold cardboard together in building projects. You know, fire trucks, castles, submarines, etc. for kids to play in :-).

Now this is a specialty market! But his website doesn’t just have the product; he has free plans, and details on how to easily get large cardboard boxes (and how to load them into your car!). Very well done, and an excellent example.

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…

EO Newsroom: New Images – United States Population Density

This image also has Canadian population density information on it. It’s a very cool looking visualization; check it out.

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.

I saw them, I had to share. With everyone! Mu ha ha!

“Irregular Webcomic 1356”:http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1356.html

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…

“UNIX – The Hole Hawg”:http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html – I’ve been a UNIX person since I started university, what, 22 years ago now?

“I’m tired of September 11th”:http://www.easterwood.org/hmmn/?p=88 – me too.

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…