Clay Bird's Journal

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Snowpocalypse 2010: Exodus
After being snowed in for 2 1/2 days, the county salt truck/plow made it to our neighborhood and onto my street. This is one of those HUGE dump truck & snow plow combo units, and it clearly was just topped off with a full load of salt - maximum weight should mean maximum traction. I've been watching this from my bedroom window, and it's like a comedy routine, in slow motion.

The salt truck was working well, until it got stuck in a large snow drift, right next to my driveway. I didn't realize that this had happened until a rescue truck and shovel crew showed up to tow the salt truck out of the drift. The shovel crew cleared the snow away from all the salt truck tires, and the rescue truck went to tow it out... only to find its own wheels all spinning.

The shovel crew went over to push the rescue truck out of its stuckedness, which eventually worked. then the rescue truck started using its plow to do a bit more clearing - while the salt truck was still stuck in the drift.

Not too long after that, a backhoe showed up and eventually succeeded in dragging the salt truck out of its issues. The backhoe is now continuing with the now clearing process, and even its mammoth wheels and treads are spinning quite a bit whenever it's trying to push enough snow.

I presume that when this is all done, the salt truck will come back and lay down some treatment on the blacktop... which might even be there on Tuesday/Wednesday when we get dumped on again.

Pix are living in Snowpocalypse-2010!

Edit: Damned salt truck never returned to salt. Lots of digging later, the cars are free, but it's a sheet of ice, it's as much skidding as driving out there.

Things That Are Doing It
Things That Are Doing It

Technically, none of these photos are NSFW - but you'll likely have to wash your mind out with soap all the same.

Enjoy!

Winter Wonderland, part whatever...
After the two car-ish lumps in front of my house, there's nothing but knee-deep tracks through the snow made by the folks determined to walk their dogs. The plow hasn't made it any closer to my house than the nearest street that has traffic lights, leaving my entire neighborhood snowbound.

Looks, in this case, like I won't be able to go to anyone else's place for the superbowl. Ah, well... there are people I was looking forward to seeing.

Hope everyone is doing well!

Two observations, neither of which really matter.
I learned this past weekend that small people - under the age of 3 - will, at times, leave cryons as droppings to mark their territory, inadvertently. Beagles appear to find crayons to be delicious, and emit what Nan lovingly refers to as "technicolor puppy poo" as a result. I believe this is a sure example of the food chain, and can probably be worked into The Circle Of Life.

***

In other news, I believe there is a ring of hell reserved for people who design cell phones, and cell phone chargers, so that one can not plug in a cell phone with a low battery and charge it up *while* continuing to talk. There's a LOT of energy available in a wall socket, it won't overload anything to provide the extra few milliwatts to both charge and talk at once. Bastards.

Edit: It's not MY phone that has this problem, it was the friend's that I was talking to.

In anticipation of Valentine's Day...
Is it silly of me to both be an apparently incurable romantic, and at the same time be rather cynical regarding Valentine's Day (probably the largest of the several-times-a-year holiday i think of as "Hallmark Day")?

Yay for good family events!
I just got back from a weekend in Florida, where I attended the wedding of my little cousin. Yay! I have an awesome new cousin-in-law. This is one of the great ways for a family to grow.

The wedding ceremony was performed on the Indiana Jones Altar of Doom. (Pics to come later). The altar area was at the front of a courtyard decorated with Mayan, Christian, Celtic, generic Pagan, and I think one or two other religious symbologies. (Sorry, couldn't help myself. If you're not a Boondock Saints fan, ignore that, and just pretend I said "symbolisms" instead.) From even a few paces away the altar area looked like a simple black-and-white checkerboard pattern. Close enough, and you could see that the black spaces were in fact holes, opening up down to the water below. One false step, and you go splash!

We then decided that in order to escape safely without the big boulder rolling down from somewhere, each member had to be removed, and instantly replaced with a bag of sand that weighed the same as them. But since the officiating Rabbi's talk included a tale about "The importance of salt", we decided that they had to be bags of salt, instead.

I know. you had to be there. All the same, I wanted to share.

Signal Boost

Current Mood: peaceful

On linguistic interpretation...
What, to you, is the difference between badgering people and hounding them?

Calling LJ Braintrust: Online library software?
I have, in the past, used a piece of software called Delicious Library to catalog all my books and music. It lets you scan in the barcodes via a webcam, or type in their ISDNs, and it then retrieves all available data from Amazon.com or something like that - author, title, cover art, publication/LOC info, and more. It works, however, only on the Mac OSX.

I've got a friend who wants to get ahold of a similar piece of software, but doesn't have a Mac. Is there one like that that any of you know of for the PC? I also know that i've heard of similar stuff that keeps its database online... do you know of one such with a barcode scanning option, or anything like that?

Hoping you can help...

the ups and downs

Staying up a little too late past my bedtime: Check.

Staying up too late because an old friend and teacher was reading me the riot act, reminding me that just because I'm happily working does NOT mean I shouldn't also be studying to upgrade my certification: Check.

Hitting the snooze button when the alarm goes off earlier than I wan, as a result of the first two: Check.

...realizing, as I slowly drift awake, that what I hit was my customary "off" button, and not the snooze button: Chec--SHIT!!!

Morning rush whilst avoiding coffee: Check.

**grumbles**

Two PSAs
PSA the First: Coke addiction: Costco has REAL Coca-Cola, with 100% cane sugar, imported from Mexico. No high-fructose corn syrup. And it comes in 12-oz glass bottles, which is in itself both a rarity and an artistic delight. It comes in flats of 20, for about $18.50, which is a bit more than you'd pay for cans, but if you care what your soda tastes like, then you may find this worthwhile.

PSA the Second: Porn warning: A friend-of-a-friend is about to go to federal prison for ~5 years because porn was found on his computer when he crossed an international border. He had been in the other country for a while working, so had more cash than the below-the-radar limit, so they searched *everything*. Most of his porn was ok, a few images were determined (after months of scrutiny) to have under-age women in them. Moral of the story: be aware of what can happen to you if you aren't careful about what you carry with you, especially stuff you don't think about all the time. "Getting off and having fun" isn't a crime, but "Transporting under-age pornography across international borders" sure is.

Tech question - Xbox 360, Rock Band 2
Ok. Got some new toys, and I need a little help.

I got a used (but in good working order) Xbox 360, including, among other games, Rock Band 2. Came with the mic, wireless drums, wireless guitar. The drums connect just fine, but the guitar won't turn on for more than a second or two if it turns on at all.

Everything I have read talks about problems getting the xbox and the guitar to sync, when they keep on searching for each other and can't connect. That is not the problem that I'm having... this guitar will simply not turn on most of the time, and when it does turn on it usually doesn't stay on long enough to make it through the sync process before it shuts down again. If it stays on long enough for it to connect to the xbox and get assigned the next available controller number, it works just fine as a controller - for the 1-3 seconds that it stays on. Then, poof! It's off again.

Batteries, right? Nope. Tried that. Swapped out the batteries in the guitar with the ones in the drum. In both cases, the drum set worked perfectly fine with the batteries, but in neither case would the guitar yield any better results. Even tried newer batteries in the guitar - new ones that don't expire for 12 years, instead of the ones that don't expire for 8 years - and still, no luck.

So. It's not a syncing problem, and it doesn't appear to be a battery problem. the guy i got the stuff from said he never had this problem unless it was batteries running down - which, again, this isn't. So.

Does anyone have any other ideas?

OwMyEye
You know that the eyes' drainage ducts empty into the nasal cavity somewhere or other, and that's all well and good. It means that when you cry, you have to blow your nose, because liquid runs down from your eyes and then you have to deal with it elsewhere.

The odd counterpoint to this is when you've got something - oh, say, a standard-issue CPAP machine - blowing high-pressure air into your nose and mouth. And where's the best place for it to leak out? A short passage between your nasal cavity and - you guessed it - your eyes!

Last night I blew my nose really well just before donning the face squid of breathy anti-doom, and had the most disturbing sensation of my left eyelids slowly filling up with air. I opened my eyes and heard/felt a little "pop!" come from there. And this happened over and over. Eventually I stopped reverse-blinking, and it settled down to a slow leak. Eventually I fell asleep. But let me tell you, air burbling up through the drainage duct in the *wrong* direction is a veeery weird feeling.

Holiday Open House
Kleber House in Columbia is open to all for the holidays. This is for anyone who doesn't have an Xmas event to be at - or has one, and would rather be elsewhere. Food is abundant, come help me eat it!

Current Music: Christmas At Ground Zero - Weird Al

Happy Transistor Day!
Dec. 23, 1947: The Transistor is first demonstrated!

And 62 years later, we've got some pretty snazzy stuff to show for it.

Scientists. We may be geeks, but we make some kick-ass toys.

HDTV questions - well, just one question.
I have a question about HDTV/16:9 TVs, and playing letterbox format old-style/4:3 DVDs on them.

On a 4:3 TV, there were full-screen movies (they had the ends of the picture chopped off due to the ratio difference between a movie screen and a TV screen), and there were letter-box wide-screen movies that put a black bar at the top and bottom, so as to retain the original aspect ratio and not lose any part of the picture.

Now, there are 16:9 TVs that *are* the right ratio. And I haven't yet seen one that deals with the old letterbox DVDs right.

One standard option is to stretch the 4:3 image, whatever it contains, to fit the wide screen. This distorts everything, meaning that if the image on an old tv were a circle, it would show up on a wide TV as an oval, wider than tall. I find this very odd to look at.

I have also seen some 16:9 TVs that will add vertical black bars on either side of the wide screen, so that it is only displaying a 4:3 area. So this leaves (new) big black bars on the sides, and then (the on-the-DVD) smaller black bars on the top and bottom of what's left. What's left, frustratingly, is an image that is indeed in 16:9 format, but because of all the black bars around it, it takes up less than half the screen.

A 16:9 image on a 4:3 screen takes up 56% of the space, the rest is taken up by the horizontal black bars. A 4:3 image on a 16:9 screen takes up 75% of the space, the rest is taken up by the vertical black bars. So put an undistorted 4:3 image on a 16:9 TV and it's 75% of the screen, but if that 4:3 image is letterboxed, using 56% of what's left, the result is that only 42% of the 16:9 screen is used for the 16:9 image it's displaying. The rest is black bars.

Are there TVs that have, as one of their multitude of image ratio settings, the ability to take the letterboxed image from a 4:3 DVD and pump it up so it takes up the full screen, at the right ratio, without the black bars? Are there DVD players that can do this, feeding the TV an image that it will display the way I want?

I have heard smatterings, but nothing in-depth, about anamorphic, progressive, and natural DVD players. I expect that all of these are much newer concepts than my DVD player is aware of. Most internet forums that I look at, though, simply explain why the black bars are needed to preserve the aspect ratio, which is not the answer I'm looking for.

Baking Bread in the Sink
Since several of you were curious about what happened...

I have one of those automatic bread making machines... I pour in the ingredients, push the button, and 4 hours later I have a fresh loaf of bread. This is excellent, fun, smells good, tastes great, etc. I hadn't used the machine in a long time, broke it out of the cupboard this past weekend. And on the second loaf of bread, while i was down in the basement, I heard a HUGE crash. I went upstairs, and the bread machine, while vigorously kneading the dough, had walked itself right off the edge of the counter, pulling its plug out of the wall and doing minor topical damage to itself upon landing.

The simplest conclusion was that the safest way to prevent this from happening again was to put the bread machine in the sink, and then it wouldn't be able to try to jump for it again. It worked beautifully!

Sorry to disappoint those of you that were imagining me using my sink as a fire pit, the sink was just to keep the bread machine from attempting suicide a second time.

And another first...
Today, for the first time, I baked bread in my sink. There was no other way to do it safely.

Climbing, how I love thee!
Had a good time climbing today :-)

Got new climbing shoes - biiig holes worn in the old ones, and it was certainly time to get new ones. My feet stuck to the wall a lot better with the new shoes than with the old dead ones.

The futility of good advice
At work, I'm tasked with helping engineers communicate and plan properly before they start building their crap, so that all the different teams manage to build crap that will work together. Today, a 2-hour meeting culminated in confirming that this one biiig project has had NONE of the proper direction, planning, communication, coordination, or any of those other things that make these things work right.

As a result, I get to go to my boss and tell her that, just as we feared, the project's management is doing everything wrong. The probability that she will be able to get them to quit screwing around and do it right, however, is really small. These folks don't like to take the time to plan, they would prefer not to waste time on that, and just wante to start doing, so they can get to the results!

Seriously, folks. If you're going to ask a team of engineers to analyze your problems and tell you how to fix them, you might at least consider the merits of the solutions they provide before you decide you're happiest with the same old way of doing things that got you into this trouble in the first place.

Reminds me of the economics and law enforcement studies I've heard about, where university and think tank groups are commissioned to come up with solutions to topics like prostitution and certain flavors of drug use - and their solutions are always ignored. *sigh* Ah well...