Highway 94 Closure in Jamul

Update II:

From 10 News, a much more detailed report of this incident:

A Jamul man was behind bars Tuesday for allegedly firing a pistol toward a transient camp out of drunken anger over its presence in his neighborhood, a sheriff's official reported.

Scott Andrew Amerman, 39, surrendered peacefully to deputies outside his trailer-park home at State Route 94 and Proctor Valley Road about an hour after Monday's non-injury shooting, Sgt. Manuel Diaz said.

A resident of the shantytown near Amerman's trailer made an emergency call shortly before 5:30 p.m. to report seeing a man in the area with a pistol in his hand, Diaz said.

While the witness was talking to deputies, four shots rang out from the direction of the mobile-home park, according to the sergeant.

Sheriff's personnel surrounded the complex and closed down a stretch of SR-94 while trying to locate the gunman.

About an hour later, Amerman walked to the entrance of the park and surrendered. A search of his trailer turned up two handguns and two pellet guns, Diaz said.A man who had been with Amerman at the time of the shooting said the suspect was "very intoxicated" and upset about "the local transient camp problem," according to Diaz.

"The trailer park and transient camp were checked for victims, with negative results," the sergeant said.

Amerman was booked on suspicion of discharging a firearm in a grossly negligent manner.

The decision this country has made to make some immigration illegal, but then not enforce those laws, has numerous consequences. What Amerman allegedly did isn't something I would defend – but I will point out that such incidents are inevitable in the context of the immigration laws, policies, and pressures facing this nation.

From a moral perspective, making some immigration illegal but then not enforcing the law is the only wrong choice – it would be far more moral to either have those laws and enforce them, or to make all immigration legal. Readers of this blog know that I favor the latter, with certain conditions about immigrants assimilating into American culture.

Update:

The San Diego Union Tribune is carrying this brief story:

EAST COUNTY: State Route 94 was closed in Jamul for nearly an hour yesterday until sheriff's deputies arrested a man suspected of firing a gun near a transient camp.

A witness reported seeing a man with a handgun near the camp near Route 94 and Lyons Valley Road about 5:30 p.m., sheriff's officials said.

Deputies were talking to the witness when they heard three to four gunshots from a mobile home park, sheriff's Sgt. Manuel Diaz said. Deputies surrounded the park, and a sheriff's helicopter crew flew overhead warning residents to stay indoors.

The man came out of his mobile home about 7 p.m. and surrendered after a friend first came out and told deputies that the 39-year-old man had not fired at anyone. The friend said the shots were fired in frustration over the transient camp near his home.

Diaz said the man was jailed on suspicion of illegal discharge of a firearm.

Original Post:

This morning's news brings this story (from NBC San Diego):

Highway 94 was shut down in Jamul for less than an hour Monday night as the San Diego County Sheriff's Department investigated reports of a suspicious person with a gun.

The incident began at 6:20 p.m. Monday evening. The California Highway Patrol closed the 94 between between Lyons Valley and Jefferson roads at the request of the sheriff's department.

The CHP said there were some motorists in the area who were told to remain in their cars until the area was secured. The road was reopened around 7:10 p.m.

Sheriff's deputies told NBC 7/39 a middle-aged man, described as being distraught, was walking around the vicinity of a mobile home park with a gun. He was taken into custody, officials said.

The investigation is ongoing.

I did not see this myself, and I don't know anything beyond this news report. The image above is satellite imagery of the area in question – click for a larger view. I've marked the closed section of road in orange, and also circled the trailer park mentioned in the news report. If you know more about this incident and its resolution, please leave a comment…

Six Years...

Bumped for September 11...

This coming Tuesday is September 11, 2007 – the sixth anniversary of the awful day when 2,996 Americans died during the despicable terrorist attacks by Bin Laden's al Qaida organization. In those six years the Bush administration has prosecuted the global war on terror, targeting not only al Qaida, but also other terrorist organizations and those countries that support or harbor them. There are many legitimate criticisms that can be raised about exactly how that war has been prosecuted. But despite those criticisms it is nevertheless still true that America has not suffered another such attack in all those six years – an accomplishment that Bush's opponents and detractors are eager to belittle, but which I am most grateful and thankful for.

There are also some disappointments, including the mainly symbolic and emotional disappointment that we have not yet managed to capture (or better yet, to kill) Osama Bin Laden himself. We have bled his organization until it is a mere shadow of its former self, but we not yet wiped out the root of that evil. Pragmatically I think this matters little – but it certainly would feel good to know that evil bastard was dead. Preferably painfully dead.

In any case, the anniversary of such an important event is a good excuse to pause, remember, and ponder. In that spirit, I offer you two links. First, a tribute page for Nicolas P. Rossomando – a brave member of the New York Fire Department who lost his life on 9/11 while rescuing innocents from the carnage at the World Trade Center. Second is a collection of photos from around the world, taken in the days immediately following 9/11, when for a brief time it seemed that the entire world shared the pain, grief, and anger of America. Note that there are multiple slides (pages) of these photos; use the links near the top of each page to navigate between them.

Second Course

Two of my friends have already commented (snidely, of course) on my previous post. They seem to think that I live-blogged my dinner, but such was not the case. The second course came along a couple of hours after the first course, after the scallops had settled a bit…

My beautiful bride outdid herself for the second course, creating another simple, perfectly finished seafood dish: pan-fried salmon with a sauce of fresh lemon juice and zest, fresh dill, garlic and butter, served over bow-tie pasta with pesto, fresh-grated Parmesan, and pine nuts.

I ate until I was near bursting. And because of that, the dessert course shall be postponed until another evening. Now I must go drink a large glass of a fine Cabernet…

Ahhhh… Now if I could only convince the wench that every day was my birthday!

Birthday: First Course...

Today is my birthday, and this year I'm as old as some of the dirt in my yard. Since 9/11, I can't help but associate my birthday with that awful day – today I celebrate getting older; tomorrow I remember and honor the ghosts of 9/11.

But today my lovely bride is doing her best to help me celebrate. We just finished the first course of what will be a long, drawn-out celebratory meal. For this course, she cooked one of my favorite foods – sea scallops – and they were simply spectacular. Note the past tense: those scallops are now happily lodged in my stomach.

She fixed them in a very simple manner, but oh, my they were delicious. She first fixed a light sauce with a touch of garlic, fresh tarragon, lemon zest, and salted butter. She drizzled this over the scallops and then broiled them for just a few minutes. The tops were lightly browned, and they were absolutely perfectly done (and that's quite tricky with scallops, as I know from many times that I've overcooked them). Yum!

I can hardly wait for the second course…

This Week's Puzzler

This week we delve a little into the history of technology – relatively recent history, which I am ancient enough to have personally participated in!

The ubiquitous personal computer is based on a “microcomputer chip” such as an Intel Pentium. Microcomputers first appeared in the 1970s, initially as the brains behind primitive four-function electronic calculators. Several companies produced early microcomputers powerful enough to be considered a general purpose computer, but arguably the first such microcomputer was the Intel 8008 – a primitive and slow little computer that was nevertheless quite a revolutionary device.

Unlike most earlier digital computer technology, the 8008 was cheap enough to be accessible to the hobbyist community, and a tiny little company produced an 8008 kit within weeks of the chip's initial release. This kit created quite a stir in the hobbyist community, and hundreds of nutcases like myself bought one. The kit was really just a bag of parts and a schematic – to assemble the kit required mainly wire-wrapping, a bit of soldering, and the ability to provide an adequate power supply.

I had my kit assembled and running in two days, and I was thrilled – I actually personally owned a computer! At the time, I was a DS (computer repair technician) in the U.S. Navy, and the computers I worked with there were the size of a large refrigerator – and yet not as powerful as the little 8008 that I kept in a cardboard box. I'm sad to say that I've long since lost that assembled kit. Advances in technology were fast even then, and it was only a year or two until that kit was obsoleted by a succession of more advanced microcomputer systems, based on chips like the 8080, Z80, 6800, and 6502.

What was the name of that wire-wrap 8008 kit? Display your geekiosity, and vote your answer at right...

Flying Pigs at NASA!

This has turned out to be quite a week of flying pigs! NASA/GISS has released the source code for their global temperature data aggregation – something that many climatologists and many anthropogenic global warming skeptics have been demanding for years. Jim Hansen, the GISS chief scientist (don't even think about getting between him and a liberal reporter), noted the release in a particularly grumpy ungracious email – he really does act more like royalty than he does a scientist…

I found two good posts about this release: one on Climate Skeptic (a new blog dedicated to anthropogenic global warming skepticism, written by the same guy who writes CoyoteBlog), and one on Steve McIntyre's excellent Climate Audit site. Steve is the ‘amateur’ climatologist who's been asking tough questions for the past couple of years – and getting mostly incoherent anger from the likes of Jim Hansen as a result. To me, Steve is the epitome of a professional scientist. Jim (how dare you question me!) Hansen, on the other hand, dishonors his profession on a regular basis by displaying exactly those attitudes and behaviors that are supposed to be avoided by scientists: opacity (e.g., the secret data “adjustment” methodologies), intolerance of debate, and a reliance on faith instead of reproducible experiments and verifiable facts.

The just-released data and programs are available at this link on NASA's site. I took a quick look through them; nothing exhaustive. It's a mish-mash of Python, Fortran, C, and shell scripts; from this software engineer's perspective it looks like something cobbled together by a convention of drunken chimps. My starting assumption, were I to review this in detail, would be that it is badly broken. The challenge would be to prove that assumption wrong, and my guess is that it would be a daunting challenge. I'll let someone else tackle that one!

Time Synchronization...

Geek Post Alert!

If you are not a geek interested in synchronizing the clock on a Linux or Windows host, then you should avert your eyes from this post, as it may cause damage to your brain.

If you've ever implemented NTP peering (the NTP daemon, in other words) on a Linux system, then you know it's quite easy to keep the Linux host's very accurately synchronized to atomic clocks. Really the only challenge is to locate some good NTP servers – and now a project has come along to solve that problem by creating known good NTP server pools. The member NTP servers in these pools are continuously checked, so you've got much better assurance that you're synchronizing to good NTP servesr than was previously possible. See the NTP Pool project's home page for more details, and this Wikipedia article for some background.

Using the NTP pool is almost ludicrously simple. In your ntp.conf file, today you might have several entries like this: “server a.b.c.d” (with real IP addresses, of course). To use the pool, you simply replace those entries with “server 0.pool.ntp.org”, “server 1.pool.ntp.org”, etc. That's all there is to it – after restarting your ntp daemon, you're using the NTP pool!

While reading through the information on the NTP Pool's home page, I came across something else that looks very useful: a full-on port of the ntp daemon to Windows (where it becomes a Windows service). So I tried it, starting from the port's download page. At this point I've only tried it on two Windows hosts (both running Windows XP Pro), so I certainly can't claim to have exhaustively tested it. But…unlike an earlier port I tried, this one worked first time after a flawless installation with a very professional looking installer. Better yet, an accompanying utility gives you a nice GUI-based monitoring tool. And even better, the whole thing is open source and free! Beats the heck out of the standard (but perverted) Windows Time Service…

Flying Pigs Alert!

Every Brit I've ever met has defended his country's strict gun controls. The British press seems to reflect this attitude perfectly, with a determined defense of the British policies and self-righteous condemnation of the American “Wild West” and its allegedly out-of-control gun culture.

So when I read the headline of a column this morning in the London Times, by Richard Munday, I was quite surprised – and even more surprising was the contents. The column is headlined Wouldn't you feel safer with a gun?, and it starts like this:

Despite the recent spate of shootings on our streets, we pride ourselves on our strict gun laws. Every time an American gunman goes on a killing spree, we shake our heads in righteous disbelief at our poor benighted colonial cousins. Why is it, even after the Virginia Tech massacre, that Americans still resist calls for more gun controls?

The short answer is that “gun controls” do not work: they are indeed generally perverse in their effects.

I fear that this heresy puts Mr. Munday's British citizenship in danger of revocation. By Monday morning, it's likely he'll be seeking asylum at the U.S. Embassy in London.

But it gets even better:

Virginia Tech reinforced the lesson that gun controls are obeyed only by the law-abiding. New York has “banned” pistols since 1911, and its fellow murder capitals, Washington DC and Chicago, have similar bans. One can draw a map of the US, showing the inverse relationship of the strictness of its gun laws, and levels of violence: all the way down to Vermont, with no gun laws at all, and the lowest level of armed violence (one thirteenth that of Britain).

Here's a liberal commentator, in a liberal newspaper, in a liberal country, citing the uncomfortable facts that liberals around the world struggle mightily to suppress and deny. What the heck is going on here? I have no doubt now that pigs are flying between the skyscrapers in London!

Here's the column's conclusion:

As late as 1951, self-defence was the justification of three quarters of all applications for pistol licences. And in the years 1946-51 armed robbery, the most significant measure of gun crime, ran at less than two dozen incidents a year in London; today, in our disarmed society, we suffer as many every week.

Gun controls disarm only the law-abiding, and leave predators with a freer hand. Nearly two and a half million people now fall victim to crimes of violence in Britain every year, more than four every minute: crimes that may devastate lives. It is perhaps a privilege of those who have never had to confront violence to disparage the power to resist.

Mr. Munday asks, “Wouldn't you feel safer with a gun?”

Well, Mr. Munday, speaking as a gun owner in the American Wild West, I can tell you this: even though I live in an area with statistically and historically very low rates of crime, my wife and I do indeed feel much safer with a gun. Several guns, actually. We own three firearms: a seven-shot Smith & Wesson revolver, a six-shot Beretta semiautomatic shotgun (a so-called “riot gun”), and a 22 gauge Remington rifle (a “varmint gun”). The guns are all legally purchased and licensed. Both my wife and I have attended formal training and have practiced on the range; the varmint rifle gets regular use on our property (mostly against ground squirrels and gophers).

The police emergency response time to the area where we live is around 30 to 60 minutes – not because the police are incompetent, but because we live quite far from any police station. If some bad guy showed up on our doorstep, dialing 911 and waiting for the police to show up is a recipe for becoming a victim. Our guns are much more likely to succeed in defending us, either as a shock-and-awe deterrent (that shotgun would punch some impressive holes in a vehicle!) or in violent self-defense.

Does that make us feel safer? Of course it does. As it should anyone whose brain hasn't been muddled with liberal claptrap…

Petzalooza!

It's time for you to meet some of our furry companions... First up: Halala Pala, whom we think is at least part Maine Coon cat:

Then there's Miki, the wonder-puppy (who's 18 months old now!):

And how about these two best pals? That's Maka Lea on the left, and Boots on the right:

Here's Kama, who just a year ago was a feral cat who wouldn't come anywhere near us. We trapped him and then very patiently acclimated him to human presence. He's now a mostly-integrated part of our household, with only the occasional regression to his aggressive wild cat persona:

Last but not least: Lea (our oldest field spaniel) and Maka Lea share a food bowl in the morning. The bowl is filled with dog food, which most of the cats disdain – but Maka Lea for some reason seems to enjoy having a piece or two for breakfast. Lea shares her food without any protest, something that neither Mo'i nor Miki would ever even consider.

Good Democrats

One of my faithful readers (Simi L.) sent this piece along. I'm really not sure whether to laugh or cry…

22 Ways to be a good Democrat:

1. You have to be against capital punishment, but support abortion on demand.
   
   
2. You have to believe that businesses create oppression and governments create prosperity.
   
   
3. You have to believe that guns in the hands of law-abiding Americans are more of a threat than U.S. nuclear weapons technology in the hands of Chinese and North Korean communists.
   
   
4. You have to believe that there was no art before Federal funding. Ed. And that the “art” purchased with Federal funding actually IS art!
   
   
5. You have to believe that global temperatures are less affected by cyclical documented changes in the earth's climate and more affected by soccer moms driving SUV's.
   
   
6. You have to believe that gender roles are artificial but being homosexual is natural.
   
   
7. You have to believe that the AIDS virus is spread by a lack of federal funding.
   
   
8. You have to believe that the same teacher who can't teach 4th-graders how to read is somehow qualified to teach those same kids about sex.
   
   
9. You have to believe that hunters don't care about nature, but loony activists who have never been outside of San Francisco do.
   
   
10. You have to believe that self-esteem is more important than actually doing something to earn it.
    
    
11. You have to believe that Mel Gibson spent $25 million of his own money to make The Passion of the Christ for financial gain only.
    
    
12. You have to believe the NRA is bad because it supports certain parts of the Constitution, while the ACLU is good because it supports certain parts of the Constitution.
    
    
13. You have to believe that taxes are too low, but ATM fees are too high.
    
    
14. You have to believe that Margaret Sanger and Gloria Steinem are more important to American history than Thomas Jefferson, Gen. Robert E. Lee, Thomas Edison and A.G. Bell.
    
    
15. You have to believe that standardized tests are racist, but racial quotas and set-asides are not.
    
    
16. You have to believe that Hillary Clinton is normal and is a very nice person.
    
    
17. You have to believe that the only reason socialism hasn't worked anywhere it's been tried is because the right people haven't been in charge.
    
    
18. You have to believe conservatives telling the truth belong in jail, but a liar and a sex offender belonged in the White House.
    
    
19. You have to believe that homosexual parades displaying drag queens, transvestites, and bestiality should be constitutionally protected, and manger scenes at Christmas should be illegal.
    
    
20. You have to believe that illegal Democratic Party funding by the Chinese Government is somehow in the best interest of the United States.
    
    
21. You have to believe that it's okay to give Federal workers the day off on Christmas Day, but it's not okay to say “Merry Christmas.”
    
    
22. Last but not least: You have to believe that this message is a part of a vast, right wing conspiracy.

Laughing is much better for me, though…

Unequal Tomatoes...

All tomatoes are not created equal.

Out here in California, the tomatoes we can buy in our stores and vegetable stands – even those very expensive tomatoes marked “Vine Ripened!” – have the flavor and texture of a piece of slightly moistened polystyrene foam. We use them on our sandwiches and in our guacamole mostly to honor and help remember the good tomatoes we've had in the past.

This morning I had a tomato experience of the delightful variety: a perfectly ripe New Jersey tomato, at room temperature, sliced in a sandwich. The bread was toasted Dudley's potato bread (quite possibly the best commercial bread on the planet), with mayonnaise and a little fresh tarragon. Heaven. Sheer heaven.

And I have three more of these perfect crimson orbs, sitting on my kitchen table. Tomato sirens, torturing me with their voluptuous beauty and promises of exotic pleasures. The four temptresses are a gift from my parents, in celebration of my birthday and advanced age.

New Jersey tomatoes are the only reason I can think of why America shouldn't give that pathetic excuse for a state to the first taker. It would make a terrific “New World” colony for any number of countries – Libya, North Korea, Iran, or France, for example. Just imagine what lessons those countries could learn from New Jersey's financial black holes, ecological disasters, political corruption, and civil incompetence! So long as I could still visit my parents (who would most likely still choose to live in a French New Jersey), I'd be happy to let another country have whatever they could find in New Jersey.

Except New Jersey tomatoes. I want to keep those tomatoes American!

Dog Found!

Update and bump:

I received this email note from the fellow who found the dog:

HI TOM. THANKS FOR YOUR EFFORTS. I POSTED SIGNS AND HAD TWO RESPONSES, BUT THE DOG WASN'T THE ONE. ANYWAY THE DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY, AFTER THE DOG ATE IT VANISHED AGAIN. I BELIEVE IT IS OUT LOOKING FOR ITS OWNER ITSELF. NICE OLD DOG, BUT OBVIOUSLY SAD AND NOT INTERESTED IN HANGING AROUND. IT WAS NOT THE FIRST ONE THAT TURNED UP HERE. I THINK THE BARK IT OUT THAT WE FEED GOOD. ANYWAY, SO FAR WE HAVE RETURNED 6 OR MORE DOGS TO THEIR OWNERS WITH A WORD OF ADVICE. "IF YOU WANT THE DOG TAKE CARE OF IT, ITS PART OF YOUR FAMILY NOW"

Yes, indeed, folks – our four-footed friends are very dependent on us despite their wild ancestors. My wife and I are saddened all too often by the loss of a neighbor's dog or cat to a genuinely wild predator, or a car. We are very careful with our own “family” of three dogs and eight cats – the dogs are outdoors in our fenced yard only when supervised, and our cats are either strictly indoors or are outside in a cattery that is predator-proof. We're especially careful when there are thunderstorms, as one of our dogs (Lea) is terrified by the sound and completely loses her mind. If we let her out in the yard when there was thunder, it's easy to imagine her running away in sheer terror, with no idea where she was going and paying no heed to cars, bobcats, rattlesnakes, or mountain lions along the way…

Original post:

I received this email concerning a dog found near the Lyons Valley Trading Post:

FOUND LARGE, OLDER BROWN RETRIEVER. SCARED OF LIGHTNING. LYONS CREEK ROAD, NEXT TO TRADING POST. 468-3853. POSTED SIGNS. THANKS.

I'm trying to find out more, but that's all I know at the moment.

If that dog is anything at all like Lea (our female field spaniel who is terrified of lightning), then it sure will be glad to see its owners again...

Lost Dog

Just received this as a comment:

Lost Yellow Lab, Friendly 11 year old missing since Sunday morning if found please contact the number on her tags OR call 916-7521 OR 994-1609

Ahhh....

Last night, for the first time in nearly a week, we opened our windows to the lovely, cool, crisp air of an evening in the desert. Along with the cool air came the perfume and sounds of the chaparral.

We've been having a bit of a heat wave the past week, with temperatures reaching 110F (43C) – though thankfully that extreme was very brief! We had several hours on several afternoons of temperatures over 100F (38C), with very low humidity – but still, all we could do was hide in the house with the air conditioner. But the worst were the hot nights – two nights with the temperature running almost 85F (30C) all night long – so we kept the air conditioner running all night long.

Until last night. The heat wave broke very abruptly around 3pm yesterday afternoon, and last night was very pleasantly cool. As I write this, it is almost 9 am and it is still very pleasant outside.

Ahhhhh…

Rain!

Rain. Yesterday afternoon, it rained. A glorious, if brief, downpour dropped 0.16" (about 4mm) of water on our parched patch of desert. Oh, it was wonderful! Big, fat raindrops splatting all around us. The ground actually got wet. The dust sloughed off the chaparral's leaves. The air filled with the delicious aroma of wet earth. The temperature dropped by 10 or 15 degrees (F) in just a few minutes. A rainbow crossed Lawson Valley. And the fuel moisture shot up to over 20% – so, if only for a few days, our fire danger is greatly reduced.

There's a 20% chance of rain each day and night through Monday. We're hoping for more!

Fortress Update

Well, my highly unreliable contractor (Ruben Ponce) has done it again.

Earlier this week, through my own personal inspection and the help of a very experienced friend (Dick F.), I determined that the work done on the form and reinforcing steel for the roof was unacceptable. There were many problems. My contractor came out to my site, reviewed the list of discrepancies with me, and agreed to fix them – before the inspection scheduled for Wednesday.

Naturally, he never showed up on Monday afternoon, Tuesday, or Wednesday. But he did call me on Thursday morning to tell me that he had rescheduled the inspection for that same day (which was yesterday), and he was convinced that the work would pass inspection without any additional changes. He then said he'd still make the changes I'd requested, but I suspect that once the inspection was passed, he'd put all his efforts into convincing me to pour the roof as is.

Well, the inspector showed up yesterday, as scheduled. He did not approve the job. He found six specific discrepancies (five of which corresponded to one of the eight that I found, and one of which was a new one) that will have to be fixed before he will approve it. He also made quite a few additional criticisms of the job; things he said he'd still approve anyway, as they didn't violate any building code or regulation – but things that he would never allow on any job he was in charge of.

Sigh. So now I know that my own intuitions, and the judgment of my experienced friend, were closer to the mark than my contractor. And I still haven't been able to get my contractor out here.

Rope.
Tree.
Contractor.
Some assembly required…

If Your Wallet is Stolen…

One of my loyal readers (Chrys) passes along this email she received. I can't personally vouch for the contents (other than the phone numbers given, which do check out), but it all seems quite sensible to me:

A corporate attorney sent the following out to the employees in his company.

1. The next time you order checks have only your initials (instead of first name) and last name put on them. If someone takes your checkbook, they will not know if you sign your checks with just your initials or your first name, but your bank will know how you sign your checks.

2. Do not sign the back of your credit cards. Instead, put "PHOTO ID REQUIRED."

3. When you are writing checks to pay on your credit card accounts, DO NOT put the complete account number on the "For" line. Instead, just put the last four numbers. The credit card company knows the rest of the number, and anyone who might be handling your check as it passes through all the check-processing channels will not have access to it.

4. Put your work phone # on your checks instead of your home phone.
If you have a PO Box, use that instead of your home address. If you do not have a PO Box, use your work address. Never have your SS# printed on your checks, (DUH!). You can add it if it is necessary. However, if you have it printed, anyone can get it.

5. Place the contents of your wallet on a photocopy machine. Do both sides of each license, credit card, etc. You will know what you had in your wallet and all of the account numbers and phone numbers to call and cancel. Keep the photocopy in a safe place. Also carry a photocopy of your passport when traveling either here or abroad. We have all heard horror stories about fraud that is committed on us in stealing a name, address, Social Security number, credit cards.

6. When you check out of a hotel that uses cards for keys (and they all seem to do that now), do not turn the "keys" in. Take them with you and destroy them. Those little cards have on them all of the information you gave the hotel, including address and credit card numbers and expiration dates. Someone with a card reader, or employee of the hotel, can access all that information with no problem whatsoever.

Unfortunately, as an attorney, I have first hand knowledge because my wallet was stolen last month. Within a week, the thieves ordered an expensive monthly cell phone package, applied for a VISA credit card, ha d a credit line approved to buy a Gateway computer and received a PIN number from DMV to change my driving record information online.

Here is some critical information to limit the damage in case this happens to you or someone you know :

1. We have been told we should cancel our credit cards immediately. The key is having the toll free numbers and your card numbers handy so you know whom to call. Keep those where you can find them.

2. File a police report immediately in the jurisdiction where your credit cards, etc., were stolen. This proves to credit providers you were diligent, and this is a first step toward an investigation (if there ever is one). However, here is what is perhaps most important of all (I never even thought to do this.)

3. Call the three national credit reporting organizations
immediately to place a fraud alert on your name and Social Security number. I had never heard of doing that until advised by a bank that called to tell me an application for credit was made over the Internet in my name. The alert means any company that checks your credit knows your information was stolen, and they have to contact you by phone to authorize new credit. By the time I was advised to do this, almost two weeks after the theft, all the damage had been done. There are records of all the credit checks initiated by the thieves' purchases, none of which I knew about before placing the alert. Since then, no additional damage has been done, and the thieves threw my wallet away this weekend (someone turned it in). It seems to have stopped them dead in their tracks.

Now, here are the numbers you always need to contact about your wallet and contents being stolen:

1. Equifax: 1-800-525-6285
2. Experian (formerly TRW): 1-888-397-3742
3. TransUnion: 1-800-680-7289
4. Social Security Administration (fraud line): 1-800-269-0271

Vote for Hillary!

From Simi L., our morning political humor:

One day, the seven dwarfs left to go work in the mine. Snow White stayed home to prepare lunch. When she arrived at the mine with the lunch, she saw that there had been a terrible cave in. Tearfully, and fearing the worst, Snow White began calling out, hoping against hope that some of the dwarves had survived. "Hello, hello," she called. "Can anyone hear me? Hello!" For quite a while, there was no answer. Losing hope, Snow White called again, "Hello. Is anyone down there?"

Just as she was about to give up all hope, there came a faint voice from deep in the mine. The voice said, "Vote for Hillary. Vote for Hillary."

Snow White, somewhat relieved screamed out, "Oh, thank God. Dopey is still alive."

The 2008 Presidential elections are absolutely rife with opportunities for humor. Perhaps this will help offset the generally pathetic field of candidates…

The Rock

My mom sent me an email full of photos of a rock in Iowa, covered with patriotic art. The email had this message:

I'm told that there is a huge rock near a gravel pit on Hwy.25 in rural Iowa. For generations, kids have painted slogans, names, and obscenities on this rock, changing its character many times.. A few months back, the rock received its latest paint job, and since then it has been left completely undisturbed. It's quite an impressive sight. Be sure to scroll down and check out the multiple photos (all angles) of the rock. I thought the flag was draped over the rock, but it's not. It's actually painted on the rock too.

Of course with emails like this, you always have to wonder if it's for real. So I went to Snopes, and they have certified it as a true story – and, as is their wont, they've collected a lot more information about it:

We can't recall an occasion since the brief lifetime of the infamous Malibu Canyon "Pink Lady" nearly four decades ago that a painted rock drew as much attention as the one pictured nearby.

The object captured in the images displayed above is a 12-foot-high, 56-ton rock which stands alongside Highway 25 in Iowa, about a mile south of the town of Greenfield exit from Interstate 80. For years it featured nothing but graffiti scrawled upon its face by a host of itinerant youngsters — until 1999, when a young man who had grown up in Greenfield was inspired by the film Saving Private Ryan to make better use of the natural canvas.

Ray "Bubba" Sorensen II, now a Des Moines resident who works as an ad/web designer, was a 19-year-old Iowa State University student who had seen the Greenfield rock many times before when, around Memorial Day in 1999, he decided to begin what has become an ongoing artistic tribute to America's veterans:

It was right around Memorial Day, and I was driving by that rock and wondered what it would be like if I actually took the time to go out there and paint it. And so I painted it with the flag-raising at Iwo Jima. I got such a huge response that I kept painting it. I've been painting it for the last five years with tributes to veterans on Memorial Day.

Each year around Memorial Day, Ray uses white paint to cover over his previous year's work, then spends one to three weeks creating new scenes on his blank canvas. The photographs shown above capture the 2003-04 version of the famous Iowa rock, which featured scenes depicting Washington's crossing of the Delaware, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and America's response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, interspersed with quotes from presidents Thomas Jefferson, John F. Kennedy, and George W. Bush, all capped by renderings of draped American and POW/MIA flags.

Only once in the six years he has been painting the rock has his work been defaced, Ray told an American Forces Press Service reporter: his 60th anniversary tribute to veterans of the Pearl Harbor attack painted in 2001 was vandalized a few weeks after it was completed, but the perpetrator "got a punch in the face from a Vietnam War veteran for his trouble," and his work has remained undisturbed ever since.

It turns out that Bubba – who is now a web site designer – has a nice web site of his own, showing off the paintings on the rock for each of the past eight years. Check it out!

Lyons Peak Cameras

I've mentioned in past posts that Lyons Peak (just east of the town of Jamul) has four web cameras on it. These cameras update every two minutes, and they look to the four compass cardinal points (north, east, south, and west).

While these cameras are very useful exactly as they were, I thought of some ways to make them better still. So I built a web page (link is at right as well) to implement these features: overlays pointing out prominent local features, automatic sizing of the image to your screen's size, and automatic refreshing on an interval that you can select. Enjoy!

Fortress Update

The news this morning is not so good. Together with a friend (Dick F.) who is very experienced in concrete construction, I went over the roof form and rebar very carefully, “pre-inspecting” it myself. We found eight problems, some of which are likely to cause a problem with the inspection. The rest might pass inspection, but they are problems for me – for example, the slope of the roof is lower than the plan, which will likely cause pooling.

So this morning I have a meeting with my contractor, whom I hope will be able to address my list of complaints. We'll see…

Update: met with my contractor, and I have secured his agreement to fix every item on my list. Now if he'll just do the uncharacteristic thing, and actually follow through with his promise…

Update II and bump: Well, my contractor is behaving exactly as usual – incommunicado for most of yesterday and today, promises to show up here to do the work before the inspection (which was rescheduled for tomorrow morning (Thursday), and … nothing. Nada. Zip. No contractor. No masons. No phone calls. No returned phone calls.

Sigh.

Meanwhile, Paul J. had me in stitches with this email:

Sounds like an opportunity...

You contract David directly, Dick F. oversees for one of those packs of beer that you hate, but America being America you have to consider the insurance......... . Ah- sue Contractor's insurance for the cost :-)

Better still, pay David in education credits for his kids and get a tax break? Get a TV channel to sponsor the Fortress as a reality show.......

This is getting silly, need to turn in now.

It will work out, even if you have to ask the blog readers to turn up en-masse and fix it up for the price of a BBQ. You can profile the volunteers based on their answers to your science-related weekly quizzes.

How about it, dear readers? Are you up for a BBQ?

Ponder These...

…and simultaneously ponder the future of mankind.

This Week's Puzzler

Update and bump:

Simon M. writes with a question about exactly what “thread count” actually means. There are two ways one could interpret that phrase: that in one square inch there are 200 threads (counting the threads going in both directions, so 100 in each direction), or that there are 200 threads per inch going one way (so 400 going both ways). I'm not sure what the correct use of that terminology is, but … for the purposes of my puzzler, I mean the second definition (200 going each way in a square inch, for 400 threads all together).

Original post:

Suppose you have a bed sheet that is exactly 6 feet wide and 8 feet long, with 200 thread count. If all the threads that comprise the sheet were laid end-to-end, how long would the resulting thread be (in miles)?

Cast your vote at right…

Last Week's Puzzler

To be fair, there is some legitimate debate about which tyrant was the worst of the lot. Specifically, there are some reputable historians who believe Josef Stalin was the worst of the lot, and others who believe (mainly on the basis of recently revealed evidence) that Mao Tse Tung was the one. On the basis of what I have personally read, I'd say the preponderance of the evidence would give Mao the nod.

George W. Bush (I knew someone would vote for him!) doesn't even place in the top 100 on this scale.

I expected many more people to vote for Adolf Hitler, based on his notoriety – my readers are apparently better informed than most Americans…

Fortress Update

Ready for the final inspection! The inspector is scheduled to visit on Monday morning, and with any luck at all, we'll pass the inspection and pour concrete on Monday. Woo hoo!

The photo at right was the last one I took today, after spending most of the day working with the crew. I accidentally caught a piece of wood in mid-air – someone below launched the wood up just as I snapped this. What I was really trying to capture was the two “mats” of rebar up on the roof. There's an amazing amount of structural steel up there, waiting to be covered in concrete.

Today, for some reason I never did figure out, David decided to bring most of his family along: his wife, his daughter Alicia, and three of his five boys: David Jr., Eduardo, and Alfredo. Except for Alicia, all of them worked at least part of the day, even if it was just being a gopher. They all work together very well, with the kind of teasing and ribbing you'd expect from a team very comfortable working with each other. Everybody was always willing and ready to pitch in, and everybody seems to know how to do a great many things…

Yesterday they finished putting the extra shoring on the interior part of the form. It looks very sturdy now!

A neighbor and friend, Dick F. (who has lots of concrete experience) came over to show David and the rest of the crew a better way to lift the two rebar mats up to the correct height above the bottom of the form. There was a little friction at first – I think David was probably a little put out by the idea of someone telling him what to do – but he seemed to realize quickly that he might be able to learn something useful from Dick. In the end, they supported the rebar in exactly the way Dick recommended, and it looks very good to me. There's one small area where I think the top mat is a little too close to the bottom mat, but that's easily fixed if the inspector believes its a problem.

The rest of these photos show scenes from yesterday's and today's work.

Fortress Update

This is almost getting to be routine – one day after another of great progress!

As of this morning, we are getting dangerously close to being ready for the final concrete pour. The forms are completely finished (although they're going to do some extra bracing on the interior section this morning), the bottom web of rebar is complete, and the top web of rebar is well underway. We need a few more pieces of rebar, and my contractor is supposed to bring them this morning before 11 am. Of course, he's been saying he'd bring them every single day this week, sometimes promising them on multiple occasions in a single day – but they haven't shown up yet.

In an earlier fortress update, I promised I'd share my load calculations. The interior portion of the forms (the only worrisome part) has to hold up a chunk of concrete that is 16' by 16' by 11.25" (average). This works out to 39,120 pounds – 20 tons. A total of 45 4x4s will be holding that weight up, evenly distributed between them. The loading on each 4x4 is therefore 869 lbs, and that is well within their strength limits – depending on the variety and quality of the wood, a 4x4 should be able to easily handle 4 to 10 times that loading. So no worries on that score…

It's been interesting to watch how David approaches the construction of the rebar. Basically he's building the two webs directly on top of the form, and will worry about securing them at the proper level as the very last step. By doing this, he makes it much easier to put the bars into place and secure them with twisted wire – he's free to walk all over them without having to worry about falling through. He's described how the two webs will be lifted into the proper position – that process sounds quite interesting, and I'm looking forward to seeing it happen – hopefully, later today!

If that so-and-so contractor of mine actually makes it here with the rebar…

Change for a Penny...

From Jackie B.:

These are actual quotes taken from Federal Government employee performance evaluations. Sadly, probably 98% of them are still in their jobs:

1. "Since my last report, this employee has reached rock bottom and has started to dig."
   
   
2. "I would not allow this employee to breed."
   
   
3. "This employee is really not so much of a 'has-been', but more of a definite 'won't be.'"
   
   
4. "Works well when under constant supervision and cornered like a rat in a trap."
   
   
5. "When he opens his mouth, it seems that it is only to change feet."
   
   
6. "This young lady had delusions of adequacy."
   
   
7. "He sets low personal standards and the consistently fails to achieve them."
   
   
8. "This employee is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot."
   
   
9. "This employee should go far, and the sooner he starts the better."
   
   
10. "Got a full six pack, but lacks the plastic thingy to hold it all together."
    
    
11. "A gross ignoramus. 144 times worse than an ordinary ignoramus."
    
    
12. "He doesn't have ulcers, but he's a distributor."
    
    
13. "I would like to go hunting with him sometime."
    
    
14. "He's been working with glue too much."
    
    
15. "He would argue with a signpost."
    
    
16. "He brings a lot of joy whenever he leaves the room."
    
    
17. "When his IQ reaches 50, he should sell."
    
    
18. "If you see two people talking and one looks bored, he's the other one."
    
    
19. "A photographic memory but with the lens cover glued on."
    
    
20. "A prime candidate for natural de-selection."
    
    
21. "Donated his brain to science before he was done using it."
    
    
22. "Gates are down, the lights are flashing, but the train isn’t coming."
    
    
23. "He's got two brain cells, one is lost and the other is out looking for it."
    
    
24. "If he were any more stupid, he'd have to be watered twice a week."
    
    
25. "If you give him a penny for his thoughts, you'd get change."
    
    
26. "If you stand close enough to him, you can hear the ocean."
    
    
27. "It's hard to believe he beat out 1,000,000 other sperm."
    
    
28. "One neuron short of a synapse."
    
    
29. "Some drink from the fountain of knowledge; he only gargled."
    
    
30. "Takes him two hours to watch '60 Minutes.'"
    
    
31. "The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.

What's your favorite? Let us know in the comments. I had a hard time choosing just one, but I think my favorite is #12…

Misty Morning...

We took our usual walk “up the hill” this morning, but the view was anything but ordinary. It was crisp – cool and humid – as the sun peeked over our local mountains, and the fresh sun lit up a layer of low clouds below us. The photos here were all taken looking roughly north, toward Cajon Mountain, Viejas Mountain, and Cuyamaca Mountain. The layer of fog visible is mainly in Lawson Valley (where we live), in its reaches that are lower in altitude than our home.

Below are three more views from our walk. The left-hand photo is a panorama stitched together from three separate photos; it really needs to be enlarged (click on it) to appreciate it.