|
|
 |
March 30, 2000
News
Information about Ty Davison straight from the horse's mouth.
News Archives
Years worth of mind-numbing details, ponderings, and events.
News Links
External URLs that have cropped up in the course of the News history.
March 30, 2000
I drove up to spend the day in Portland hanging with Garr and optimizing his G4/450. We did lunch at the Kennedy School, and held our usual political and social discussions. Garr and I tend to come at issues from opposing philosophical perspectives. Interestingly, the result is that we agree on a lot of things, but we agree for wildly different reasons.Then, of course, there are those issues which we just disagree completely. I've found this to be of enormous benefit personally, since it forces me to more clearly articulate the reasoning behind my opinions and to not dismiss alernative viewpoints out of hand.
I'm lucky to have such a friend.
March 29, 2000
Congrats to Dave on his birthday of a couple of days ago and to Erin on her birthday today.I took Erin out to dinner at a local pub (her choice), and we ate, sat, and talked for a long while. Don't get as many chances for that during the school year—at least this school year with all its new challenges—as we do during the summer. Now, with less than 12 weeks to go in the semester, we're having to plot our France trip with a little more specificity, and we're hoping to purchase tickets in the next three weeks. Exactly travel plans remain somewhat undecided, but I hope to see most of the major French World War I and World War II battlefields.
Speaking of wars, the carpenter ants are losing theirs. Ever since we pulled up the railroad ties by the southwest corner of the house and doused the wood stairs in the back yard with ant killer, the number of ants in the house was decreased dramatically. I'm hopeful that we can eradicate the little buggers entirely, but we'll probably have to pull out and replace all the wooden stairs and garden/flower boxes around the house to do so. That's going to take awhile.
I'm happy to report that my design, web hosting, and computer consulting concern, SiteRev.com, continues to grow. Knowing that the France trip has been in the cards for the summer, I've restrained my marketing quite a bit, since there's no point in adding a bunch of clients when servicing existing clients from a continent away will already be a challenge.
To that end, my company will be buying a PowerBook G3/400 (aka Pismo) in the next three weeks. It'll be custom configured with 128 MB RAM and a 12 GB hard drive, but other than that, it's the stock model. According to the benchmarks I've seen, it should blow Zeke here right out of the water in terms of speed, but crucial element is really portability. Theoretically, I can continue to service clients from anywhere in the world with a PowerBook and an Internet connection. That theory will be put to the test this summer in France.
March 28, 2000
I judged a couple of Lincoln-Douglas debate rounds over at Sprague today at the request of Matt and Ginger, both debate coaches who had speech kids involved in the District tournament. I was a little uncertain at first since I'm more comfortable making speeches than judging them, but ultimately I was persuaded.The first round featured an affirmative who clearly hadn't read through her case sufficiently and who was given to rambling answers as her mouth went off and her mind followed several paces behind. The negative had no such problems, but his complete failure to address the contentions raised in the first affirmative made me want to start hoisting bottles of Jack Daniels. You've got seven minutes. How hard is it to find the time to attack three contentions? In the end, I decided that his case offered sufficient clash, but I was peeved at having to vote for a clearly superior debater who had virtually ignored his opponent's case.
The second round featured two relatively poised speakers and was rather enjoyable to judge. The overall result wasn't that close due to a brutal cross examination by the affirmative which left the negative arguing about how a government killing four million people was no big deal. It was all downhill for the negative after that. My only regret is that I wonder if my ballot was overly harsh on the negative; I'm not certain that my criticism was constructive enough. Hopefully, the debater won't take my comments badly—I don't give scathing reviews no matter how awful a person's performance is—but I almost feel like I should have done a better job in communicating the positives of the negative's performance, no matter in how short supply they were.
March 27, 2000
With my dad ferrying me about the town, I managed to find a replacement for the downstairs bath fan at Keith Brown Building Materials, Inc. Their on-staff electrician, Rick, used the casing I had and just swapped the burned out motor with one from a bath fan kit. Total cost was $36, and the newer fan is quieter, too.After that I did a Red Cross blood donation at a local church. Turnout was poor which is bad, but it also let me rocket through the process in record time. I was done in 45 minutes, and it could have been 35 if I hadn't hung out in the canteen and chowed on cookies and drunk Hawaiian Punch.
It'd been several days since Erin went to Urgent Care for treatment on her burned fingers, but with little improvement and continuing pain, we thought it best to take Erin into the Emergency Room last night to have another doctor examine her fingers. No infection, so that's good. Said the pain should subside in another 3-4 days. She got a prescription for Tylenol 3 with Codeine and a couple sample pills of Vicodin. Can't teach classes while hopped up on either of those, though.
Dennis wrote up and emailed me a really great primer on buying a bikes—yet another item I'd like to purchase in the next 12 months. He noted the advantages of recumbent bikes, with particular emphasis on comfort and back support. It'll be something to think about when I start actively shopping.
March 26, 2000
The Matrix scores four Oscars: film editing, sound, sound-effects editing and visual effects. Somewhere George Lucas is stewing.March 25, 2000
I did a little more work on the retaining wall at the southwest corner of the house, and while I was busy at work Bret showed up followed by Dave a short time later. My cup runneth over! Needless to say, I didn't get the retaining wall finished.March 24, 2000
Another day of house cleaning. Three women from Pac Cat (Pacific Catastrophe) spent six hours going over everything yesterday. Pac Cat sent out five workers today and they did another five hours cleaning the living room, dining room and kitchen. This house, frankly, has never been cleaner.We expect Pac Cat to send out painters, but it's likely to be a couple of weeks. Now that the weather has cleared, they're busy tackling all the outside painting that was deferred over the winter.
We met with Garr and Terri this evening for dinner at Mallard's Landing, an around the block restaurant with lame carpeting, a one-man MIDI-band, and a pretty good menu. My six-cheese ravioli was great, anyway. The cheesecake dessert was yummy too. But what really made the evening, of course, was seeing Garr and Terri and catching up.
March 23, 2000
Bernard and Liz left for California today having completed or helped us complete so many different around the house projects that I can't believe it's only been four days. That list includes: cleaning the gutters; installing leaf guards in all the gutters; running a cable from the TV antenna on the roof into the living so that we now get ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, etc. very clearly; making my office curtains close completely so that outside light doesn't reflect off the monitors and so that peering eyes from the park don't catch glimpses of lots of neat electronics; removing the termite- and carpenter ant-infested railroad ties that formed a retaining wall at the southwest corner of the house; building a stone retaining wall its place; clearing all down spouts; digging a trench, laying out plastic tubing from a down spout to a drain field and covering everything back up; making a slip cover for the orange leather chair in our living room (the improvement is dramatic!); patching a hole in the garage wall; changing out the 2 prong electrical receptacles in my office with 3 prong receptacles (no more funky adapters!); attaching a sweep to the garage door so that it now closes to the ground (previously the garage door's "closed" position was several inches off the ground); checking out the attic and placing wire mesh into an attic vent hole to prevent a bird from nesting (as he has been for the last month or so) above our bedroom at night; weeding the garden; applying moss killer to the grass and raking out the dead stuff; removing the metal tubing and accumulated debris from the "well" in our front yard; putting up curtain rods and curtains at front and back doors; installing an electrical box in the eaves of our front porch for easily done Christmas lights; tying up (and hacking back a bit) the wisteria bush along our front walkway; vacuuming and cleaning every room in the house; adjusting the dryer's idler, thus returning the machine to service; fixing the downstairs bathroom sink faucet; and cleaning the shower head to allow better water flow. I'm sure I'm forgetting some things, but even so, you've gotta admit that's quite a list. Many thanks to Bernard and Liz for helping us improve our home!House cleaners are here today trying to rid us of the "burnt house" smell that permeates the upstairs living room and dining room areas from yesterday's fire. Painting will start late today or tomorrow, and an electrician is due out here Friday, I think it is. It's cost us the $250 insurance deductible, but I dare say this may turn out to be quite a home improvement bargain. (Not that I recommend setting your house on fire to take advantage of the great deal.)
March 22, 2000
There are a variety of really lousy ways to wake up, but tops on my list is to the sound of a smoke alarm. Yet that's what we did this morning at 5 AM. And is there anything quite so as exciting as seeing your house on fire? I don't think so either. I had just run out of the bedroom (without checking to feel if the door was hot—error #1 ) with Erin right behind me only to see the living room thermostat spewing a flame a good three feet high. I rushed to the fire extinguisher, but Erin judged that curtains would be sufficient to smother the flames and batted things out just before I could pull the pin and shoot the foam.Thermostats are electrical devices, though, so smothering was probably not the best solution (error #2). Worse, I'm sorry to say that Erin made the adrenaline-induced decision to try to turn off the thermostat which moments before had been so hot as to be glowing. The result of this error #3 was second degree burns on her index finger and thumb. She yelled over to me to shut off the power at the breaker box, which I did. By this time Erin's parents had come upstairs and we conducted a quick search of the premises to ensure that the threat was eliminated. It was.
USAA's insurance people had everything rolling by early morning and all the claims issues had been taken care of by late afternoon. We've got painters, cleaners, electricians, etc. headed our way in the next couple of days, and though it will cost us a $250 deductible, thank God for homeowners insurance.
The baffling question of the day ("how did this happen?") was answered by the guy USAA sent out to conduct a damage assessment: Apparently it's not uncommon for metal thermostats to short out and burn up. This was news to me and everyone in my immediate family, but according to Erin the inspector guy was like "Yep, see it all the time." It goes without saying that the other three metal thermostats in this house will be removed as soon as possible.
In this type of situation a circuit breaker should have prevented our near catastrophe, "should" being the operative word. Our Zinsco-manufactered electrical box is known for "product defects" and I'm willing to lay money that this was one of them. How much money am I willing to put down on this? Oh, how about the $900 it takes to get a new electrical box? My general feeling can be summed up by the phrase "take this Zinsco crap and remove it from my life forever."
There's always some weird ponderings that go on after moments like these, as people attempt to make sense of what they've experienced. For Erin and me, that started our assessment of the mistakes we made in the emergency (hopefully we'll do better next time—though obviously we hope there is no next time). Then we turned to our good fortune at actually being home at the time. If we'd been away, we'd be the proud owners of a 1953-built pile of ashes. It wasn't much of a jump to thank God for smoke alarms, because if it hadn't gone off, we'd have been in serious trouble.
It was a little later in the day, when I thought of God and fate and circumstance and luck, that I realized that the previous owners of the house, had they still lived here, might have had an experience much different than ours. When we moved in, they had disconnected the smoke alarm because too often it would beep when they cooked dinner.
March 21, 2000
Taking an evening break from all manner of around the house fix-its, we headed up to see Erin's relatives and drop by for a brief visit with Grandma Norma. A quick Portland trip, but a great one!March 19, 2000
Bernard and Liz are up for a visit, and they've wasted no time in helping us fix up our humble abode. After a quick tour of the house, Bernard fixed the dryer in nothing flat. It wasn't the belt as most people I'd spoken with expected, but the idler, which is a piece designed to hold tension on the belt. Quick little jiggle of that, and Bernard had the dryer back in top form.Today, Liz and Erin reworked the curtains in my office to more effectively block the outside light and, just as importantly, the peering eyes from the park. No need to advertise that we've got electronics in here. Liz is also busy re-covering a chair in our living room.
Bernard and I meanwhile, cleared the front garage gutter of leaves and installed leaf guards. Afterward, we ran TV cable from the antenna on the roof into the living room. The TV reception improvement is dramatic. ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS are quite sharp. UPN, WB and FOX are very good though to a lesser degree. WB, in fact, actually has worse reception than using the rabbit ears, so we may end up switching over to those if I tape Buffy for Erin.
We've got more projects on the horizon, but I'm thrilled with what we've already accomplished.
March 17, 2000
It took three weeks of trying and a revision of the software, but Dave and I finally succeeded last night in holding an Internet-based telephone call. Using the latest beta of American Online's Instant Messenger, some headphones, and an Apple PlainTalk microphone, we were able to speak back and forth to each other without much problem. Good-bye, long distance phone calls.Assuming that bandwidth on the Internet keeps pace, I expect that some day most phone calls might be routed this way. With the recent failure of Iridium, the Motorola-backed company whose worldwide satellite-based cell phone system is going down in flames (literally), I think it would be premature to say that current cell phone technology is definitively the wave of the future. There may yet be a place for an Internet based cell phone solution, since the Internet reaches everywhere. Just a thought.
This evening Dennis, Dave, and I happened to be online simultaneously and managed to get in a game of WarCraft II. There was no real winner, since the game stretched on and on and we decided to bag it around 11:30 PM. I will say I liked my chances, though!
I've finished editing together a QuickTime movie of the last QuakeWorld LAN Party we held. Dave let us borrow his video camera, Erin taped 22 minutes worth of footage on the day of the event, and then we dumped selected bits of video onto my hard drive (taking a considerable amount of space). Using Adobe Premiere, I edited together a more-or-less chronological movie, and then appended an intro and a credit roll which I produced in Adobe LiveMotion (a neat program which Adobe is currently offering for download as a free beta). The resulting movie will be given away to party participants (assuming they're interested) the next time they bring their computers over. Done for fun, but very useful practice in learning Adobe Premiere and Adobe LiveMotion.
Mom dropped by some more genealogy materials today, including a letter from Asa Lee Davison, my great grandfather. Even more interestingly, he wrote the letter in 1863 in the midst of the Civil War while serving as a Private in the 77th Illinois Infantry. I have a notation from his son that says Asa Lee did the writing for General Sherman—a distant cousin of mine—as the Union army marched from Atlanta to the sea. This account remains unverified for now, but like many family stories, it'd be nice to think it was true.
March 14, 2000
It's not often that something in the newspaper—especially the Statesman Journal—stops me cold, but this was just so strange. The accompanying photo hooked me first. Here's the caption: "Convinced killer Mitchell Rupe smiles to his mother, Anna Rupe, after a jury decided to sentence him to life in prison Friday in Olympia, Washington." This, as opposed to the death penalty, so the killer's 82-year-old mom is smiling right back. She called it "the best day of my life" when the jury deadlocked 11 in favor of the death penalty, 1 against, thus sparing her son's life.I can't think of anything worse to be happy about. I mean, just how rotten has your life gotten when you and your mom are cheering your life imprisonment? Even more perversely, this is the third time Rupe has beaten the death penalty. In one of his previous cases, his death penalty conviction was partially overturned when he successfully argued that, at 400 pounds, he was too fat to hang because he would be decapitated. (Law makers then changed state execution methods to lethal injection.)
Over the course of his three trials, 35 jurors have voted for the death penalty for Rupe, who admitted killing two bank tellers with a .357 at point blank range, while one juror voted for life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. That juror, serving on this latest trial, held out through five days of deliberations, probably enduring a great deal of pressure to vote to put to death an admittedly vile man. I would have been in the same situation.
In the end, the vote may have been irrelevant. Rupe has Hepatitis C and is down to about 10 percent liver function. He's probably not long for this world anyway, but as I've frequently said, the death penalty isn't about the murderer, it's about us.
March 13, 2000
Nothing like being awakened by a telemarketing call. Don't know what it is, but AT&T has been bombarding us the last few weeks. This morning's call was blatantly illegal, too, since they refused pointblank to identify it as a sales call. (Under Oregon's 1989 state law, they have 30 seconds to do so.) I asked to speak to a supervisor, so they hung up on me. As you might imagine, I'm less than impressed with AT&T right now.I talked with the State Attorney General's office a few minutes after the call, and I was told the best solution was to get on the AG's "do not call" (aka black dot) list for $6.50 a year ($3 a year thereafter). It's then illegal for a telemarketer to call whether they say it's a sales call or not. I'm having the appropriate forms sent to me, though I confess that I think that such a system should be free. This is a perfect example of why a US Constitutional Amendment establishing a person's right to privacy would be a really great thing.
Later in the morning, Mom came by and we went over Adobe Photoshop, scanner basics, and genealogy.
March 12, 2000
Given the utter chaos of my sleep schedule the last few weeks, this morning's 8 AM start to the 5k Shamrock Shuffle with Dennis, Joe, and Carol was not the easiest thing in the world to get up for. The race itself was fine (though running up Broadway was a little challenging), but doing everything on only three hours sleep was dreadfully hard.Afterward, Dennis and I had a chance to chat about gardening, Magic: The Gathering, card collecting, video games, and other topics. His new apartment is cool, too. Many thanks to him for the gardening book he gave me. As I told him at the time, my knowledge on the subject is sure to increase dramatically since I know nothing.
Later in the day, Dennis, Dave, and I happened to meet online and managed to get in a little bit of QuakeWorld. Tough to play well when you're exhausted, no question.
March 11, 2000
Got together with Dennis, Joe, Carol, Matt and Ginger to celebrate Ginger's birthday at an excellent potluck style get-together at Matt and Ginger's place. Fascinating conversation and great food, as always. Played a fun, rather socialist party game which required everyone to match as many answers with other players as possible on a given subject area. Bruce called from back east, so everyone got to chat with him as we passed around the cordless phone. We also had the chance to hear firsthand about Joe and Carol's recent engagement and their nuptial plans. (Congratulations to the happy couple!) I'm thinking Ginger needs to start celebrating her birthday more often.March 10, 2000
Our WarCraft II online tournament with Joe, Dennis, Dave, Matt and myself went fairly well, though we were plagued by some technical glitches and unusual snafus. First, Dave's work schedule got changed on him, so he wasn't able to join us until later. Second, Dennis' Internet service provider had their router go out (what timing) so he was delayed as well. Third, Joe had to reboot his PowerBook and rebuild the desktop file before StuffIt would work for him and allow him to open the custom PUD files for the game. ("Why?" you ask. Because he's had his PowerBook running continuously for three months without shutting down. Try to get that kind of performance on a PC running Windows 95/98!) Finally, I suffered a painful system lockup at the end of the final game as Matt and I duked it out for world supremacy. I liked my chances in the end game, but I suppose Matt probably liked his too.So I'd rate it a mixed bag on the whole. The game play itself was a lot of fun, but it's a total drag to sit out after you've been beaten at WarCraft II—especially since a game can continue for another hour or more. So this might not be the ideal online event. I'll be interested to hear what Joe, Dennis, Dave, and Matt think.
If decide to go again, I figure if nothing else we've definitely got to get all the WarCraft II client versions upgraded from 1.2 to the current 1.5 so we can avoid system freezes and game lag (which we saw a fair amount of toward the end).
March 9, 2000
Tonight's indoor game was a good reminder of why I really can't play Men's Division III for very long—my mental health suffers immeasurably. The team I'm on has lost several quality players to injury or illness, and I'm sorry to say that the replacements aren't even close to up to the challenge. I try to remind myself that I'm only playing in this league in an effort to get into shape (as a supplement to the treadmill). I don't know if I'll play next session, though. Some of our play is so bad as to be torturous.It looks like my long stated prediction of a Gore v. Bush presidential election race is coming to fruition. What does it mean when the party establishment (in the old days we called them "bosses") picks the nominee and thwarts a reasonably democratic say of the party rank and file?
It means we get guys like Al Gore, who's Clintonesque fundraising behavior in 1996 still hasn't been adequately explained. ("No controlling legal authority"? Give me a break.)
It means we get guys like George W. Bush, who might have the intellectual heft to rule Texas, but trust me when I say that a person can do that even if he's a few cans short of a six-pack.
It means that the real reformers, in this case Bill Bradley and John McCain, will be on the sidelines even though less than half the total number of delegates needed for the nomination have been allocated.
It means yet another opportunity for the Reform Party, but at this juncture it looks like their nominee will be Patrick Buchanan. Pat's a pretty witty guy, but that's fairly low on the list when it comes to presidential qualifications.
So will it be far left, far right, or far far right this November? The political disenfranchisement of America continues.
March 8, 2000
Dave made the trip up to Salem today so we could mess around with various Mac-related items. We ended up testing a couple of new QuakeWorld maps, installing his ixMicro video card, and capturing a bunch of video from the last QW LAN Party. I'll probably make a little 2-3 minute Quicktime movie out of the footage just for fun. We were going to head off to the Corvallis Macintosh Users Group meeting, but decided to bag that so we'd have more time to mess with the computers here.March 6, 2000
Staring as we are at Super Tuesday, the last wheezing breath of the McCain candidacy, I thought I'd offer some additional (and probably much unwanted) political observations. To wit:
- McCain's decision to attack the Christian Right was a huge mistake. With it, he effectively destroyed his "I'm not just another politician" shtick, and although he was losing the Religious Right voters by about 4 to 1 at the time, after his speech he might as well have been Judas. This was a strategic blunder of large proportions, though less than it would've been if he'd actually had a prayer of winning the nomination.
- McCain should sweep the liberal northeast and may win New York, but the latest polling has him losing badly in Ohio and in winner-take-all California. With Florida and Texas on the horizon, it doesn't matter anyway.
- Bradley's objections to Gore's character, while valid, don't translate well into Democratic votes. Democrats might have a quibble or two with Clinton's morals, but they've loved his policies, and with this economy you can't attack character (even if you're right) and expect to win the Democratic nomination. I'm not sure that any Democrat could have beaten Clinton's hand-picked successor, Gore, in the primaries. Look for Bradley to drop out by the end of this week at the latest.
- The question of the fall campaign will be whether Gore's character issues matter to the independent moderate voter in the middle. It's a nonvoting issue for the Democrats, while the Republicans go apoplectic over it. So the middle voters decide the race in this respect. McCain's campaign would seem to indicate that those middle moderates will make character an issue, but whether a lesser light like Bush can run that same standard up the flagpole and have people salute remains to be seen.
- The biggest issue with the next presidential election is NOT the presidency itself. It's control of the Supreme Court. Will the far right of Scalia, Renquist, and Thomas be joined by additional conservative justices? Or will the rash of 5-4 decisions begin to tip toward the more liberal end of the bench? The next president may have the opportunity to nominate several justices, and regardless of how self-congratulatory Americans might get about their version of democracy, the truth is that if you can get just five people to agree here, it's the law of the land.
Turning from politics, I did some major genealogy work over the weekend and now have some additional notes posted to the web site. It was amazing to me how much information is now available online—I found Illinois land purchase records for my great-great-grandfather, for example. I've also connected with several distant cousins, and I'm in the process of solving some interesting genealogical puzzles (like whatever happened to my great-grandfather's first wife).
In that genealogical spirit, let me implore everyone to fill out the Census 2000 materials when they start showing up next week. Your descendants will thank you!
March 4, 2000
Our friend Jennie came up from the Bay Area to visit us, see our place, and hang out. We walked around the neighborhood, drove around downtown, went out for Chinese, had an ice cream sundae, and watched an Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. That's a lot of living in a less than a day. And I didn't even mention the MP3 computer audio fun or the long talks. With luck, we'll see Jennie again before too long. We certainly appreciate her making the trip up!Our other, much less welcome visitors, the carpenter ants, seem to have suffered something of a setback in their quest for household domination, perhaps owing to the ant killer I sprayed around the outside perimeter of the house. Twice. It could also be the boric acid solution really does work for them (not just the sugar ants) and now they're feeling the effects. Or maybe the Raid was a little more permanent a solution than I thought.
Nonetheless, tomorrow I'm shooting some boric acid powder into the wall cavity they call home which should provide a nice "hi, how do you do?" for them and theirs. I'm all broken up inside.
March 3, 2000
Erin and I watched The Theory of Flight, a quirky Kenneth Branaugh & Helana Bonham Carter flick about ALS (Lou Gerhig's Disease). Strange but well acted. Not terrific screenwriting, but the direction was very good, and there's some nice filmmaking here. I'm giving it a thumbs-up.I'm also giving a thumbs-up to Primary Colors, a picture starring John Travolta and Emma Thompson and more or less about the '92 Clinton primary campaign. Travolta has a weird accent—sort of a New Yorker doing a Southerner—but he's really captured Clinton quite well. This is a rather long film, but even at the end I was hoping that it would continue. Very entertaining, very engrossing. (This assumes one is at least passingly interested in politics.) Recommended.
March 2, 2000
Team played about as lousy as we could, resulting in our first indoor soccer loss of the season. There were several easily observable reasons, but heck this Mens' Division III, so it's probably not worth getting in a twist over to begin with. I got to run around and kick a ball. How bad can it be?The carpenter ants, beaten back temporarily by a dusting of Raid, have begun popping up again, much to our annoyance. I sprayed the perimeter of the house yesterday and plan to do so again tomorrow. This yet another quick-fix until we can get out to grab the necessary poisons to do the job right. What fun.
Of course it's even more fun if you price local area exterminators like I did yesterday. Best case scenario is at least $250—those offering a more thorough guarantee are significantly higher. So I think we're inclined to try it ourselves first.
Though, does it seem to anyone else like the first step in becoming a "do-it-yourselfer" should probably not involve the handling of toxins? Nonetheless....
