Musing, Muttering, Meandering Through Life

For months I’ve had a nagging suspicion and you’ve probably noticed it too: we’re in the midst of a bacon and pumpkin epidemic. It’s not hard to miss given bacon’s dalliances in bacon infused vodka, candied bacon ice cream, and the true heart stopper — chicken fried bacon. Pumpkin is no homebody either; out there galavanting around in pumpkin chocolate chip muffins, pumpkin ravioli, and pumpkin jelly rolls. I’m all for culinary experimentation, but this is a plague of mutated foods that threatens us all.

Look back to the somewhat provocative Reese’s marketing campaign of the 1970s and 1980s where we learned that some things, like chocolate and peanut butter, do belong together. This campaign helped bring about a new world order where people were free to co-mingle ingredients in an understanding environment. Nowhere in the campaign did they suggest there was a license for wholesale promiscuity between all editable items.

I LUV bacon and adore pumpkin; but seriously, some things are not meant to be joined. I’m not trying to discourage experimentation and creativity as I want new culinary delights just like the next guy. Experiment if you dare, but post warnings when it goes wrong, don’t propagate the misfortune by turning it into a recipe and publishing it world-wide. That recipe might appear in some demented marketing company’s campaign: “AS SEEN ON THE INTERNET, foods to torture your tastebuds and upset your stomach”. It’s just not right.

Interventions are a common method of helping people confront their problem. Earlier this week CBS’s “How I Met Your Mother” had an episode in which the group staged interventions at the drop of a hat. While they almost needed an intervention for interventions, I’m a little disappointed that they didn’t recognize the need for a bacon and pumpkin intervention. Consult the table of Google search results or hop on over to twitter search and you’ll be amazed at how often these items appear. We’re clearly out of control. While I was typing the last 2 sentences, the bacon OR pumpkin search had 6 updates.

Did you noticed that there were 247,000 results for recipes that combine bacon and pumpkin; it’s just not holy. Every year I look forward to Fall and the return of the venerable pumpkin pie. Be creative if you must, alter the spice proportions, change sweeteners, or adjust the flakiness of the crust, but don’t follow Joe and codify desecration of a sacred food. Imagine my horror when I discovered this abomination, “Joe’s Incredible Bacon Pumpkin Pie”. This could be the tip of the iceberg, what’s next; bacon soda?

Don’t just sit there when it’s clear we have a problem. Call your friends. Alert the neighbors. Then let’s gather at Joe’s for the first of many interventions.

One of the things I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten older is that I try and convert as many things to habits as possible so that I’m not continuously making small decisions. Conventions help make habits efficient. For example, in our house, coffee cups are stored upside down in the cupboard. Habits are also suppose to make pre-caffeine rituals safer, because, let’s face it, anything pre-caffeine for most of us is just outright dangerous.

We don’t brew pots of coffee in our house because Laura and I are the only coffee drinkers and we prefer slightly different coffee. For years now, we’ve used the Flavia beverage system which produces reasonable coffee by the cup. The designers of this system must have had to use their own product in a pre-caffeinated state because it does have a nifty feature, the overflow reservoir.

Good product design helps minimize the damage when habit and convention fail.

Making coffee in the morning is a habit with several simple steps:

1. Open door of Flavia to inform it to heat the water.
2. Select your coffee-pack from the carousel. My favorite, Intense Dark Roast.
3. Insert coffee-pack into machine, close door.
4. Select mug, invert, and place on brewing platform under dispenser.
5. Push brew button
6. Wait 15 seconds or so
7. Open door, remove used coffee-pack, and dispose in trash
8. Close door, take coffee in cup somewhere safe to drink

Product Safety Note: Performing any task without caffeine is not recommended.

Imagine you have house guests sleeping on the couch and you don’t want to wake them up by turning on the lights. Also consider that you might have ruined your night vision by checking email, twitter, or some other service before remembering coffee. Let’s see how this goes.

• Step 1, check
• Step 2, wait, can’t see, ah, use blue LEDs on top of coffee maker to read labels, check
• Step 3, check, easily done by touch
• Step 4, check, coffee cups are right above coffee maker, easily done by touch, with some help from blue LEDs
• Step 5, check, button is illuminated, and we know it’s location by heart
• Step 6, check, we know noise machine makes when coffee has finished brewing, it’s Pavlovian
• Step 7, check, easily performed by touch
• Step 8, check, WAIT, WTH, sound of coffee splashing on floor, instigate corrective action ASAP

So, at this point, I … oops, YOU, go into damage recovery mode grab paper towels and start cleaning up the floor and the counter, by touch of course. Your brain registers that you spilled coffee, but there is not enough to account for all of the liquid that’s suppose to be in the cup. Slowing down, you reach over to the coffee cup, and, by touch, conclude that you put the cup on the beverage platform upside down. Convention and habit FAIL. That’s also when you remember that there is a small reservoir on the beverage platform and thank the designers.

New habit, when making coffee in the dark, check cup orientation, by touch before Step 5.

I was minding my own business this morning, when I get the call. Using my normal trick, a very quiet, sharp ‘hello’ to detect predictive dialers from numbers I don’t recognize, I was expecting the normal lightning fast sales pitch. Instead …

REP: Good morning sir, is this Don Thorp?

ME: Yes. How may I help you. (Sometimes I do try to be polite)

REP: This is Charter Communications and we think we may have misconfigured your cable service. Please tune to channel 50 and let me know if you have clear reception.

Thinking to myself, “ok ‘maybe’ they’re being proactive”, I hunt for the remote (I’m in my office, if you could see my office, you would understand this is not undertaken lightly) and tune to channel 50.

ME: It’s static.

REP: Good, that tells me that you have our limited basic service. I can upgrade you today to our expanded basic cable for only $15.00 a month. Would …

ME: Ma’am, I don’t …

REP: You would get The Discover Channel, …

ME: Ma’am, I have DirectTV for that, I only want …

REP: Sir… (stopped listening)

ME: Have a nice day ma’am, thank you (click)

I have to hand it to them. By pretending that they’ve messed up my service, she was able to get me involved in the sales process. Sleezy, but effective in getting my attention.

Just a quick note to let you know that parts of the site will be missing, mostly pictures, as I upgrade to the latest WordPress. I seem to have gotten everything updated except for Gallery. I’ve always had a love hate relationship with it and I think the hate side has won. I’m going to be galleries up to smugmug, and probably putting post graphics locally. This is going to be a little painful, mostly for me.

Pardon the dust.

Every once in a while, you have one of “those days”. April 10, 2008 was one of those days.

The day started around 3:40am when a wall of wind and water hit the house. Tornados are not uncommon so I do feel an obligation to check for them which weather like this happens. Confident that we weren’t about to land in the Oz, I crawled back in bed to enjoy the storm. I really do like sleeping when it’s raining.

Five minutes later, I’m awakened by the crickets of the computer age, the UPS on battery. Some demented person must have wasted a good part of their life to come up with that sound. Although, it’s not quite as bad as the chirp from a smoke alarm with a dying battery. After 15 minutes with no power, I crawl out of bed and successfully shut everything down. Afraid I might oversleep, I grab my mobile, set the alarm, and crawl back into bed.

Of course, I can’t fall back asleep. After locating a flashlight I spent 10 minutes locating the number for TXU’s power outage hotline. Keying it in my phone informs me that the number had been previously saved. I put it there to save myself some time after the last power outage. I call the hotline and report it, the automated attendant happily informs me that they have no idea when the power will be restored. I flop back in bed.

The mobile alarm functions as expected and I wake to the silence of the power impaired. At least there was hot water in the tank so we were able to clean up a bit. I had to figure out how to shave with limited lighting. I would say it was like camping, but honestly, who shaves on a camping trip. I would have blown it off, but I had to interview someone at the office today. On the positive side, the blood loss was kept to a minimum. Oh, and checking with TXU, still no word on when the power would be restored.

You would think that would be enough for today, but no. I forgot to mention that Alex and I were headed to American University tonight. Given that we live in the Dallas area, American Airlines is the easiest carrier to use for most flights. Guess who "forgot" to inspect their planes. Checking the website all morning the flight showed as on time. I went to lunch thinking we’re still going, come back and right before I race home, find out it’s been canceled.

To see if I can salvage the trip, I immediately try to get an agent. After sitting on hold for 15 minutes or so I actually get a live person, who then takes 20 minutes to tell me that there are not flights. I ask her to please schedule us for the same trip next week. Of course she says, let me put you on hold, where I sit for 15 minutes and then get disconnected. In the middle of this Alex gets to the house where he discovers that the garage door won’t open and he doesn’t have his house key. So I call American back, on my mobile this time and start driving home.

After 25 minutes I get another agent who is able to successfully reschedule us for the next week in only 20 minutes, with out loosing me when she had to put me on hold. A few minutes later I reach the house and let Alex in and then start trying to deal with the hotel and cars. Let me just say, dealing with the Expedia rep was fast, efficient, and painless. Oh, yes the power was on, It only took them 12 hours.

Relieved, I decided to check Facebook only to discover that a good friend was having a crisis, she couldn’t decide what color to paint her toenails. Thinking I could help I suggested maroon and white, apparently OU’s colors are crimson and cream, I had to apologize profusely, and now I know there is a difference. Oh and she chose cotton candy to celebrate Spring.

Finally, I didn’t forget to wish my mother a Happy Birthday. Given the rest of the day, I consider that a minor miracle.

I’ve always wondered why ActiveX controls continue to be written. There are cases where you need access to the local machine to provide a useful service, but most things don’t, at least not outside of a sandbox. There will always be security flaws in every type of software, but ActiveX controls seem to be the easiest target for the dark side. Most of my friends and I stopped using Internet Explorer years ago except for a few sites that either require IE (e.g. Outlook Web Mail) or other poorly written sites that won’t even display data unless you’re using IE.

Browsing through my email today I ran across an article on eWeek, ActiveX Under Seige: Facebook, MySpace Image Uploaders Vulnerable that once again highlights the problem. Here is a small excerpt:

“In tandem with the public release of this information, remote code-execution exploits targeting the Aurigma, Facebook, and Yahoo! issues were released. Each issue allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code in the context of the application using the ActiveX control (typically Internet Explorer),” Kamerling said.

In the absence of patches, Symantec recommends that IE users take “extreme caution” when browsing the Web and ensure that the browser is configured with the highest security settings.

The US-CERT goes a step further, recommending that IE users completely disable ActiveX scripting in the browser.

The article also points you to a helpful guide from US-CERT on Securing Your Web Browser.

A new website has been set up to promote a "
Consumer Technology Bill of Rights
". Take a moment to read through their material and join in the fight to preserve
your ability to use content you purchase or obtain legally.

It has been a long time since I’ve been able to post anything. It is amazing
where your time goes once summer gets here. Over the weekend I spent WAY to
much time helping fix my youngest brother’s computer. Not only did I have
to reinstall Win98 on it, the motherboard’s keyboard port freaked out
requiring me to replace the motherboard. As
with most hardware based problems, this one ended up costing me 8+ hours on
Saturday.

Agenda VR3

Ever since becoming addicted to using my Palm III, I’ve developed a stronger
interest in new handheld computing devices. I was an early
adopter of the Franklin eBookMan (I’m still waiting for the MS Reader
software if anyone from Franklin is listening) and still use it for
reading. It appears that one of the Linux contenders
Agenda is finally
getting a product out the door. A great review
The Agenda VR3: Real Linux in a PDA,
written by Chris Halsall, is available on the Linux Devcenter of the
O’Reilly Network. Not having played with one yet, this device sounds like it
might have longterm viability if the software quality can approach that of
the Palm platform.

Python

I’ve been slowly adding to my Python skills everytime I get the need to
write a new script. It is still slow going, but I do feel like I’m getting
better. As with most languages, the difficulty is in learning the libraries
not the language. While putting a script together I ran across a great
tool provided by ActiveState,
“
The Python Cookbook“. I was able to quickly find a couple of helpful routines
to accelerate writing the script. It also looks like a place to pick up
hints on using classes and cross-platform Python.

What a weekend. Besides soccer and all of that stuff, the biggest project was Alex’s
"Creativity Project". We spent a good part of the weekend building a
lighthouse night light, but it turned out well. Of course it’s due tomorrow, but there
are just a few minor touches that we’ve been adding. I help with soldering and
cutting of some of the materials, but he did most of it himself. I’ve got some
digital photos, but the quality is really bad. I may post them later.