I’m a very fortunate guy.
Not only did I receive some clever and thoughtful gifts, but, most importantly, we got to spend time together as family. We ate well, laughed loudly, and heard good stories of hope and adventure.
Making Baby Jesus cry – 2013
And the winner for the earliest last-chance Christmas deal is …
Dept. of Non-obviousness: Drupal configuration message
You might not think that this stream of messages would be caused by character encoding:
I was editing a configuration file and switched to UTF-8 because I needed to add a few unusual characters to a web page. When I did so, the stream of errors appeared. It took a long time of searching before I discovered. this discussion page where ANSI vs. UTF-8 was mentioned.
It’s not a universal law, but experience shows that the bigger the gusher of error messages, the cause is usually quite small and and the least obvious.
If you get there last, leave a message
There’s a scene in Three Little Pigskins where Moe and Larry are arranging to meet at a predetermined location:
Moe: If you get there first, put a chalk mark.
Larry: Okay. What if you get there first?
Moe: Then I’ll rub it out.1
Anyway, The Reg reports that scientists have done this, only better, sending a message from one photon to another that that was already deceased.
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| Measuring P1 destroys it; even so, it gets its state from P4 Image: Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 210403 (2013) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.210403 |
1The Marx Brothers may have done this first, but I can’t locate the scene.
On Google maps and education
At lunch today, I talked with a former professor about some of the issues that he sees with his students. This, by the way, is at Amherst. The students who get in there did so because they knew how to present themselves to their high school teachers and admissions boards. They knew how to win.
Many student wrote papers that were focused on a narrow topic, crisply-defined, but with little connection to other ideas or domains. These students did well well because they showed a clear answer to a specific, albeit esoteric, question. Their research skills were limited to delivering a precise answer with no ragged edges.
If you ask Google Maps (or any GPS system) for turn-by-turn directions, you get good results. Using those directions will get you where you intend to go, but with a curious side effect. You are delivered as in a tunnel, without context.
Time was, we studied maps and knew not only the path, but also the frame of reference. Recently, I had to travel to a part of a nearby town that was unfamiliar to me. The person I was visiting said that his street is right near the so-and-so school. I used Google Navigation. It made no mention of the school as a prominent reference point. Instead, it said, “in 600 feet, turn left.” I got where I was going, but Google told me nothing of the fact that this family lived near a school.
It turned out that living near a school was very relevant to this person and his wife because his kids could walk to school. Google told me what was true, but not what was meaningful.
How to lose a sale and win a customer
While cutting firewood this weekend, the chain slipped off the bar on my chainsaw. In the process of re-
tightening the chain, a small clip and, I later learned, a bearing fell out of the sprocket assembly and into the underbrush. I took it as an omen to stop work for the day. I put the chainsaw into the back of my car.
I went back to Holden the next day to tend to a few other errands and brought the chainsaw to the repair place near our house, Parker Power Equipment. They have worked on other saws before as well as our lawn mower and snowblower.
The young man behind the desk looked at the saw and said that they don’t always have the right Stihl parts in stock, that I might do better to go a Stihl dealer such as the one in Worcester. I had errands in Worcester, so I went to the dealer. They had the parts and installed them at the counter.
Both places did well, but Parker did better. They said that losing this sale was better for me, the customer. They were right. My chainsaw could have been with them for several days while they tried to get the right parts for this simple repair. They earned my loyalty as a customer.
Plans for the weekend? The weather says, “Ha!”
What’s been weirdest among the many weird aspects of this weekend’s weather has been nearly two days of precipitation with a strong northwest wind.
In typical patterns, systems move up the east coast, dragging a cold front behind them. The cold front shifts the wind to the northwest and brings in colder and drier air. In this case, the wind started to shift on Friday. The rain continued, hard, through Friday and Saturday. Lighter on Saturday night, we saw or thought we saw some snow mixed in.
Three months earlier, we would have called the a three-day Nor’easter.It’s not uncommon for winter storms to strengthen as they get into the Gulf of Maine. Bombing out, they call it. The weather charts don’t show that this happened, only that the systems moved slowly.
There are breaks in the clouds now. There are whitecaps on the lake.
The fireplace, even if we had good, dry wood, doesn’t put out enough heat to fight against the wind and cold. The porch of the camp has single-pane windows with broad exposure to the northwest wind coming across the lake. When I was a kid, we had a pocket door and a pocket window on the wall that separated the porch from the main room. My father removed those during a renovation in the 70s. We could have used them this weekend.
We’re burning wood that’s long past its prime, stuff that was cut five or more years ago. My plan had been to cut and split the fallen hemlock that’s in the front yard. There was still plenty of good meat on much of the tree. Split, it’ll be good for both the fireplace and sauna. It was too cold and rainy on yesterday and on Friday, though, for me to spend very long outdoors.
The rain will stop. The winds will calm and shift again. By the end of the coming week, it’ll be 90.
When cool is too cool
As states, cities, and towns replaced their traffic signals with energy-efficient LED lights, they discovered an underappreciated feature of the old systems : the heat melted snow and ice.
You can read more in my blog post on All LED lighting: Of Light, Snow & Ice
Happy 15th Birthday, Tess
Our party was a day after her birthday, but the joy was undiluted.
With Lynn, Krista, Cassie, Joe, and Lily.
Reading by Kindle light
For the second time this week, we lost power. It was earlier in the evening this time, about 5:30. We listened for our neighbor’s generator. Sure enough, the low hum was rolling across the cove.
Ours is such an exciting life. Friday evenings are anchored by several PBS shows (Newshour, Beat the Press, This Old House) plus a couple of items on DVR. As a half hour became an hour, we set ourselves up for a different time.
We heard the sounds of the Northern toads in the swamp, a long, low call offered to potential mates. We had a round of checkers. Sandra won two of three. We had our supper on the deck by the sauna and lingered until the black flies and early mosquitoes drove us away.
The dark filled the house and eventually the outdoors. We could see our neighbor’s flag, waving in an easterly breeze. The hour became two. We read for a while, Sandra on her iPad, me on the Kindle. At nine, we went to bed.
I’m usually awake a couple of times during the night, for an hour or two each time. I woke at midnight, read for a while, went back to sleep, and got up again shortly before three.
National Grid, our electric company, has a website that let’s you check on the status of outages in an area. Cell phone coverage at the camp is faint, barely 1 bar.
(National Grid uses Amazon Web Services, AWS, to handle its outage map.)
Sitting by the window and with the phone high, I waited and eventually collected enough bits from the sky to get to the website and learn about the state of things.
As I was reviewing the information, the WiFi signal icon came on. Odd. I looked at the floor and noticed that the lights on one of the power strips was on. The power was restored an hour earlier than estimated.
Dunno what happened. My guess is that a transformer blew out, affecting a small part of a small town. I stayed up for a while longer, drifting off at first light.