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Daynotes
Journal
Week of 25 October 2010
Latest
Update: Sunday, 31 October 2010 15:33 -0400 |
09:14
-
Late start this morning. Barbara had some transmission work done on her
SUV and it wasn't quite right. Malcolm had an 8:00 a.m. vet
appointment. So I drove Malcolm out to Clemmons while Barbara drove
over to the transmission place, where I picked her up after dropping
Malcolm off. This afternoon, assuming her vehicle is ready, she'll pick
up Malcolm in Clemmons and then come pick me up to go get her SUV back.
The
election approaches, and like all voters I'm faced with an even worse
choice than usual. On the one hand, I'm certainly not going to vote for
any Democrats, who are determined to destroy what shreds remain of our
republic. That leaves the Libertarians, who have no chance of being
elected, or the Republicans, who oppose nearly everything I stand for.
If I vote Tea Party, at least I'm voting in favor of smaller
government, but the flip side of that is that most Tea Party candidates
are religious nutter know-nothings who'd love to destroy science and
see the US become a Christian theocracy. I suppose I'll vote
Libertarian, which at least has the advantage of being a principled
choice.
07:55
-
With all the to-do over National Liberal Radio firing Juan Williams for
making comments that were not Politically Correct, I have to ask the
bigger question. Why PBS continue to receive public funding? The
original rationale for PBS made some sense. Back then, we had three
commercial over-the-air broadcast networks, which then, as now, ran
mostly garbage. PBS was intended to provide programming that would
never have made it on the air in those days when airtime was a scarce
commodity. And it did a generally fine job, running fine-arts programs,
Masterpiece Theatre, Mystery!, many great science shows, and so on.
But
airtime is no longer a scarce commodity, and hasn't been for decades.
We now have cable network channels devoted to cooking, fishing, golf,
and other specialized interests. There's simply no need for PBS any
more, and certainly no reason why taxpayers should be funding it. If
PBS disappeared today, we'd have no shortage of the types of programs
it runs. In fact, we'd probably have more of them. HBO might pick up
Masterpiece Theatre and Showtime might fund an ongoing series of new
Nova episodes. No doubt we'd soon have one or several new cable network
channels running high-brow programming. There's simply no need for PBS,
and no justification for continuing to spend taxpayer money to support
it.
Wednesday, 27 October 2010
07:58
-
It had been a bit dry around here until recently. Not anymore. We had
about half an inch (12.5 mm) of rain in the gauge Monday morning and
another three-quarters of an inch yesterday morning. Last night, we had
heavy thunderstorms, with another four inches of rain in the gauge this
morning. More is expected today and tonight. Added to the rain we had
earlier this month, that should put us at about twice normal rainfall
for the month.
I'm working on the group of lab sessions on
chemical kinetics. In the book, I used Alka-Seltzer tablets for a
couple of the kinetics experiments. I was going to include Alka-Seltzer
tablets in the kit, or a generic version of them, until I found out the
price of two-packs. Even buying in bulk, including enough of those
tablets to do the experiments just once would cost $3 or so, which is
non-trivial. So I wondered if anyone sold simple sodium bicarbonate
tablets in bulk. Sure enough, I was able to find them, at about $14
plus shipping for a bottle of 1,000. That makes the cost per tablet
about two cents, which is a lot more reasonable. Even with packaging
costs, I can include a good supply of them at a cost of maybe $1 or so.
11:44
-
I've spent the morning creating and issuing purchase orders for the
remaining small items I need for the kits. Actually, although I still
had to create actual purchase orders for record-keeping purposes, I
placed all of these orders on-line with a credit card, because it's not
worth the time to set up accounts with the companies in question. I was
ordering stuff like a roll of 500 ORM-D shipping labels and a roll of
bubble wrap, two bottles of 1,000 sodium bicarbonate tablets, three
dozen purple Sharpie markers, three dozen 9V batteries, three dozen
Mead composition books, and so on.
I ordered the composition books from Costco.com
for $1.26 each, shipping included, because that was easier and cheaper
(in terms of my time) that trying to deal with a wholesaler. I was
surprised at checkout to see that Costco had added $3.52 in sales tax.
Oh, well. I have a tax-exempt resale number, but again it's not worth
the hassle necessary to save $3.52. So the state of North Carolina ends
up getting $3.52 in sales tax revenue that it's technically not
entitled to.
I'm actually proud of myself for staying organized.
My personality is about as far as you can get from that of a typical
accountant. My natural inclination is just to order everything I need
with as little effort as possible and let the bean counters worry later
about keeping everything straight. The problem is, I'm now the bean
counter, as just one of my many hats*. I've set
up purchase order management and receiving spreadsheets, and am
keeping track of everything. The extra time necessary is annoying, but
I keep telling myself that it's not excessive. Once I'm up and rolling,
it'll take no more time to order a hundred dozen batteries than it took
me this morning to order three dozen. Less, in fact, because I can
merely edit the first PO to update quantities, issue a new PO number,
and send it off.
I've also set up the basics for a
cost-accounting system, although it'll be crude. A proper
cost-accounting system would give me actual costs down to the fraction
of a cent. I'm using a broader-brush approach. Although shipping costs
can be a significant percentage of the total item cost, if I issue a
purchase order with numerous line items, I'm not going to attempt to
break out per-unit shipping costs. For example, one of my orders
included 40 of one item (it comes in packs of 10) that costs $0.83 per
unit. There were a whole lot of other line items on that order, and
shipping costs for the entire order were about 10% of the order total.
Rather than try to allocate that shipping by individual item, taking
into account things like actual item weight and number ordered, I'll
just increase my nominal cost for quantity one of that item by 10% from
$0.83 to $0.913. Of course, if I turn around and order 1,000 of those
items, my actual delivered cost may be a bit more or a bit less than
$913, but it'll be close enough not to matter.
I got my MBA 25
years ago, and I did wonder if it'd turn out that I'd forgotten
everything I learned. Fortunately, I think I remember most of the
essential stuff. I've probably forgotten most of what I knew about
marketing, but none of that ever made sense anyway.
* I recall the story of Braxton Bragg. From the Wikipedia article:
Bragg
had a reputation for being a strict disciplinarian and one who adhered
to regulations literally. There is a famous, perhaps apocryphal, story
about him as a company commander at a frontier post where he also
served as quartermaster. He submitted a requisition for supplies for
his company, then as quartermaster declined to fill it. As company
commander, he resubmitted the requisition, giving additional reasons
for his requirements, but as the quartermaster he denied the request
again. Realizing that he was at a personal impasse, he referred the
matter to the post commandant, who exclaimed, "My God, Mr. Bragg, you
have quarreled with every officer in the army, and now you are
quarreling with yourself!"
Thursday, 28 October 2010
09:17
- Barbara is off to the beach with her parents for the next few days. As usual, it'll be wild women and parties while she's gone.
What Happened When I Yelled Back at the "Christians" Calling My Wife a Murderer
His
wife was carrying a fetus that was doomed to be stillborn. They visited
an abortion clinic. It was the worst day of their young lives. As if
that wasn't bad enough, these Christian nutters were protesting
abortion outside the clinic and accused his wife of murdering their
baby.
The only thing I take issue with is the quotes around
"Christians". I don't doubt that these women were committed Christians.
Their actions were fully consistent with their deranged beliefs, which
are certainly among those espoused by many mainstream Christian
churches. The implication of the quotes is that these two women were
not behaving as "Christians", when in fact that is exactly what they
were doing.
As far as I'm
concerned, these two women are no different from the Westboro Baptist
Church scum. I think he showed
immense restraint merely to accost them verbally. I'll defend their First Amendment right to free
speech, but I certainly wouldn't shed any tears if someone harmed them.
10:26
-
Barbara called yesterday afternoon to say that she, her parents, and
her aunt had arrived safely at the beach house. Her sister and her
sister's husband are arriving today. Malcolm and I are on our own. No
parties yet, mainly because of the complete absence of wild women.
With
Halloween rapidly approaching, the local news has dusted off and re-run
the stories they run every year about safety. I always wondered about
the supposed dangers of Halloween. It'd take a very special kind of
evil/insane person to randomly poison small children, and I've always
found it hard to believe that even one such person exists or ever has
existed.
Still, every year the hospitals set up to X-ray sacks
of candy, searching for razor blades or needles, which they never find.
A week or two ago, I happened across a blog entry from a woman who's
written a book deploring our fanatic fixation on child safety. She
claims, and I have no reason to doubt her, that there has never been a
confirmed incident of Halloween candy being poisoned or otherwise
tampered with. Well, there was one exception: a father who slipped
poison candy to his own children, and was subsequently convicted and
executed.
Work on the microchemistry kits continues.
Greg
Lincoln sent this warning about Firesheep to Pournelle's back-channel
mailing list this morning, and it's worth repeating here.
From: Greg Lincoln To: Chaos Manor AdvisorsDate: Fri Oct 29 09:58:20 2010 Re: Firesheep I suspect many of you have already heard of this, but just in case you haven't:http://codebutler.com/firesheepEven though most sites will redirect you to HTTPS when you send your username/password across the wire, they revert to HTTP immediately afterward, which means the cookie they use to associate you with a session is sent in the clear. This firefox extension makes it trivial for a user on the same hotspot to steal your session. It is literally a double click operation.There are four options to combat this that I know of.1. Don't use public wifi, or any services like twitter, facebook, etc while on public wifi. Verify any service you use is SSL.2. Use a firefox addon like SSLEverywhere. This isn't perfect, as it only works with the sites it supports.3. Use a VPN. There are premium VPN services available, as well as some free options.4. Use a socks proxy with SSH.
Saturday, 30 October 2010
07:57
-
The results from Malcolm's urine culture finally came back from the lab
yesterday. He had a resistant E. coli infection, which our vet, Sue
Stephens, was treating with Zeniquin, a veterinary-only antibiotic.
We'd given Malcolm the last of it on Wednesday evening. I was getting a
bit concerned about a gap, so I called the vet Thursday. They had
preliminary results, but the receptionist said that Sue had told her to
tell me not to worry about a gap in treatment. Zeniquin apparently has
a long biological half-time.
So, Sue called yesterday about
13:00 to say that the Zeniquin had cleared up the infection, but she
wanted to continue it for another week, just to make sure. It doesn't
pay to mess around with resistant E. coli infections. So I headed out
to Clemmons to pick up another week's supply of Zeniquin, along with
some tramadol and phenylpropanolamine. The former is for pain. Sue says
Malcolm has lost muscle mass in his hind quarters and she thinks he may
be in chronic pain. Tramadol is a safe non-NSAID pain reliever, so
we'll start him on that and continue it routinely.
The
non-NSAID part is important, because Malcolm liver enzymes are
elevated, so aspirin or other NSAIDs are not a good idea. We'll take
Malcolm back to the vet in three or four weeks to have another urine
culture done, as well as another ultrasound. The last ultrasound was
only of his bladder area. This time, she'll look at his bladder, liver,
pancreas, and other nearby organs. It's possible the ultrasound will
show something about the liver. If not, we're not going to go any
further with it. Sue says a needle biopsy would be useless, and Barbara
doesn't want to put Malcolm through surgery for a full liver biopsy.
The
good news is that he's acting like a perfectly healthy 11-year-old dog.
He has his aches and pains, but he's the same as he ever was mentally.
I remember James Herriott commenting in one of his books that he always
figured that if he couldn't catch his patient there probably wasn't
anything too serious wrong with it. Malcolm is his usual energetic,
enthusiastic self, so unless the ultrasound shows something
diagnostically useful we'll just take things as they come.
12:17
- Barbara is due back from the beach tomorrow. Malcolm and I are already preparing to do our happy dance.
I
have to get things straightened up before Barbara arrives home. UPS
showed up Friday with deliveries of several orders of stuff for the
microchemistry kits. When he left, our foyer was stacked full of boxes.
Among them was one the size of a dorm refrigerator that weighed next to
nothing. I couldn't imagine what it was until I remembered that I'd
ordered a 175-foot (53 meter) roll of bubble wrap from U-LINE. I guess
bubble wrap doesn't weigh much, even in bulk. Duh.
I
crossed my fingers and upgraded Barbara's office desktop system to
Ubuntu 10.10. The upgrade went flawlessly. The Extreme System from the
new edition of Building the Perfect PC
is still sitting on the floor of my office. I haven't had time to
migrate all the stuff on my current office Core2 Quad desktop over to
the new system, so for now I'm still using the system I've been using
for a couple of years. It was truly an extreme system when I built it.
Even now, that old system is nearly half as fast as the new extreme
system, which is to say maybe three times faster than a typical
new midrange desktop system.
In fact, that old system is
much faster than any of the new systems we built for the book, other
than the Extreme System. When I have a spare hour or two, I plan to
recycle that motherboard and processor with new memory, a new case and
power supply, and new drives, and turn it into Barbara's new office
desktop system. Despite its age, it'll be roughly four times faster
than her old office desktop system, which is itself no slouch.
15:33
-
Barbara called early this afternoon to say she was watching me.
Somehow, she knew that I'd upgraded her system. She even knew details
like version number. It's uncanny.
We'll see if she's really
watching me. After we hung up, I went out and spent a couple hours
blowing leaves in the front yard. Well, I partly blew them and partly
raked them. There was a bit of a breeze blowing from exactly the wrong
direction, and my lung power isn't what it used to be.
There
wasn't much green visible under the fallen leaves, and I didn't want
Barbara to have to deal with that after just returning from her
vacation. Ordinarily, Barbara does all the yard work, mainly because
she likes doing it, but these days also because she's afraid if I
engage in any strenuous outdoor activity she'll be widowed. I keep
telling her that I have the body of a teenager. A
sedentary, out-of-shape, very elderly teenager, but a teenager
nonetheless.
I guess I should make some effort to get back in shape. I'm off to do a push-up. Maybe a sit-up as well.
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by
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