“My passion was my weak spot.”

“My passion was my weak spot.”  That's the title of this interesting piece by Jacques Mattheij.  There's much in here that I agree with, and that I might offer as advice to an aspiring technologist myself.  There's one part, though, that I strongly disagree with.  That's Jacques' advice to never work for free in return for the promise of a future (paying) job.

My reason for disagreeing is quite straightforward: agreeing to work for free in exchange for future paid work was the key to my entrance into the technology workforce.  Back in the early '80s, on the tail end of a couple of less-than-successful businesses, I needed a job.  I very badly wanted to work with microprocessors (whether that meant hardware or software I didn't much care).  I knew that I could do the work, as I had been doing it for six or seven years at that point – as a hobby, as a consultant (where credentials matter less), and in my own businesses.

The biggest challenge for me at that time was that I completely lacked the credentials to be employed as an engineer.  I had no college degree.  There was no open source movement back then, and no Internet, so there was no obvious way to use the peer recognition I had to help get a job.  For instance, most potential employers had never heard of Gary Kildall or MP/M, and the code with my name on it was proprietary.

I needed a way to prove myself to a potential employer.  I decided to offer my free services to such a company (Xscribe) for a limited time, with the understanding that after 90 days they'd either boot me out or hire me.  I also made it clear that I'd be looking elsewhere while I worked there for free.  I figured that if they weren't convinced of my skills after 90 days, they never would be.  As things turned out, they made me a (great!) offer less than a month after I started.  I never had trouble getting a job after that, as I then possessed a credential of sorts: a referenceable, verifiable track record.

So I'll disagree with Jacques on that point: sometimes working for free is a good idea...

My, what interesting rocks...

My, what interesting rocks ... Curiosity is looking at now.  On Mars!  What do you suppose those tiny little pits are?  And are my eyes correctly telling me that every one of those pits has a tiny little pebble in it?

More rain and snow for Paradise...

More rain and snow for Paradise...  That's what's in our forecast for tonight through Wednesday.  It's hard to believe at the moment, as we have wall-to-wall blue sky and there's no snow on the ground.  Our soil is saturated, though – mud season is in full swing here.  You can easily tell that by the grit on our kitchen floor – the inevitable result of letting dogs with hairy feet (field spaniels) go outside :)

We're planning to make a few modifications to our house this year.  Those include a “mud room” outside the current front door, and a rear patio that opens onto the enclosed yard our dogs normally play in.  We're planning a dog washing station on that patio: a place with a hose and a sprayer, where we can easily wash the dirt and mud off their feet in mud season.  The gluey substance known as “Paradise mud” is almost impossible to remove without the assistance of high-pressure water.  The dogs won't appreciate this, but we will!

Will English “destroy” all other languages?

Will English “destroy” all other languages?  The trend is certainly in that direction, and there is much hand-wringing and anguish in certain parts of academia (and other places, too). The language generally employed to describe this phenomenon is that other languages are being driven to extinction by the spread of English, and that predisposes people to think it's bad.  “Extinction” is bad, isn't it?  Always?

I'm not so sure, whether we're discussing critters, plants, or languages.  I'd have no problem with the extinction of mosquitoes (and my wife would be ecstatic!).  Similarly, if burdock were to disappear forever, I'd shed no tears.  Should I be anxious about the impending extinction of Naukan Yupik?

I'm not ready to out-and-out endorse the notion of making English the universal language of mankind.  I'm well aware that as a native English speaker, such an outcome would be oh-so-convenient for me.  As a veteran world traveler, though, I'm also very well aware of just how much friction the absence of a universal language for mankind introduces into any interaction between people who don't share a common language.  From locating a bathroom to ordering a meal to conducting some business, everything is harder if you and the person you're dealing with don't speak the same language.  Fluently.  Easily.  Natively.

I should note that I have a family reason for opposing the obliteration of non-English languages.  My sister has a business that's predicated on the idea of teaching English to people for whom it would be a second language.  The universal adoption of English would obliterate her business.  I've not talked with her about this, but somehow I doubt she'd be in favor of this outcome :)

I haven't made up my mind about this.  It's certainly true that language differences are an important part of the cultural differences that add a lot of interest to our world.  There are tradeoffs.  Most people talking about this topic tend toward overblown rhetoric mourning the disappearance of languages.  But is the disappearance of language X intrinsically “tragic”?  That's where I depart from the conventional line of thought, because I don't think so.  I'd like to hear what the adoption of English means for the welfare of the people in the affected population.  For example, if a young woman growing up in (say) eastern Siberia spoke English (natively) instead of the traditional local language spoken by 200 people – how much easier will it be for her to become a doctor?  A welder?  A programmer?  I know the answer – it will be enormously easier, for the simple reason that she can read and understand the texts that are widely available, not to mention what's on the Internet.  That's the tradeoff I'm interested in exploring: if the price of losing a language forever is X, what's the benefit?  And is it worth it?  I'd like to see a more sober weighing of the costs and benefits.  I'm no expert in this area, but in terms of what's visible to me, the benefits of a universal language outweigh the costs, and not by a small margin.

What do you think?

Oh, it's so nice...

Oh, it's so nice ... to be able to get back to our routine of walking every day.  We just got back from our third walk of the season, Debbie and I, and the two younger mutts.  The photo at right is a 225° panorama from the highest altitude point we reached.  That road is actually straight – the distortion from the panorama process really makes that hard to see!  It was beautiful walking conditions, though we saw little other than a few voles the dogs spotted.  No matter; it felt great to get out.  Debbie is getting better on every walk.  Today was her first walk without her walking sticks, and she did fine.  We did about 1.8 miles today, with a little more elevation change (about 450' each way) than usual.

We're leaving soon to go join my brother Scott for a Sunday “lupper” at Angie's.  Today is chicken soup day, so we'll be having that for sure.  I'm feeling like some fish and chips, unless their special is mighty appealing...

If you don't already have ad blockers on your web browsers...

If you don't already have ad blockers on your web browsers ... here's a great discussion of why you should...

A project finished...

A project finished...  Well, one phase of it, anyway.  Way back in December, just before I drove back to Virginia to move my brother Scott out here, I was working on an electronic clock kit.  I'd actually finished the assembly of it, but I still had a bug of some sort.

Well, this afternoon I spread the kit, its manual, my 'scope, multimeter, and soldering iron out on the kitchen table and went to work.  An hour later, I had it all working, after fixing two more issues.  First issue was a broken circuit board trace (for a total of three in the kit).  The second (and last!) issue was all my own fault: a cold solder joint.  But now it's all running!

Next step on this project: a nice wooden case of some kind.  I'll have to ponder exactly what I want that to look like...

Fire in Paradise!

Fire in Paradise!  But it's fire we actually wanted :)  This year the Hyrum Irrigation Canal folks are sending two separate cleanup crews down the length of the canal.  The first crew started today; they're burning weeds and roses along the sides of the canal.  They're also burning some ancient brush piles that were left by canal cleanup crews in prior years.  The second crew will be along in a couple weeks; they'll be clearing brush and downed trees that are in the canal.  We have a little over a quarter mile of that canal that runs through the eastern edge of our property.  We did a lot of cleanup ourselves last year, plus had a horde of local Mormons come by on a service project that got even more.  Between the canal company's work and what we plan to do ourselves this year, we should have a much better-looking property!

The crew today used a large propane torch powered from a 250 propane tank trailer they hauled behind a pickup.  Here's what it looked like while they were working:

Quote of the day...

Quote of the day...  Scott Adams.  Watch the video; the quote will make more sense then.

“Reason will never be a satisfying explanation of what you see.”

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  We took a ride out past Hardware Ranch toward Ant Flats yesterday afternoon.  It was a good wildlife viewing trip – we saw an American Dipper, several Belted Kingfishers, a beautiful view of a Bald Eagle (sitting on a fence post in full sunshine!), lots of mule deer and elk, a Northern Harrier, and a mostly white undersides hawk that was probably a Ferruginous Hawk (at right) but could possibly have been a leucistic Redtail Hawk.

This morning, using Sibley's guide, we tentatively identified three swans we saw on a previous trip as juvenile (first year) Tundra Swans.  We're just barely within their normal winter range, and the pond is exactly the sort of place they visit when migrating.

The photos here are not mine, but I hope to have some bird photos of my own here soon.  I've ordered a telescope that can mount my iPhone 6 to.  I've seen some photos taken through it with an iPhone, and they're quite good...

An insider's view...

An insider's view ... of why the U.N. is failing.  His description does absolutely nothing to my conviction that the only “right” thing to do with the U.N. is to dismantle it...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  We had another spectacular dinner at the Red Iguana in Salt Lake City yesterday.  We also had the pleasure of introducing my brother Scott to its delights.  Much food was eaten with gusto, and a good time was had by all.  Debbie and I had a special of which the main part was marinated skirt steak; quite possibly the best I've ever had.  Especially notable: the meat was nice and rare, just like we prefer it, without our even asking.  Scott had a special that involved shrimp swimming in a red sauce of some kind.  He also had the mole sampler as an appetizer (all to himself!).  I tried the Maria's soup (a standard part of their menu) and it was delicious – I shall have it again!  We all had desserts, too: flan for Scott and I, arroz con leche for Debbie.  There wasn't a bit left of any of the meal when we got done.  No white boxes for our poor neglected mutts :)

We sat next to a couple who was visiting from Las Vegas.  We overheard them raving to the waitress about what an unexpected pleasure their meal was – better than anything they could get in Las Vegas.  We concur, but we'll note that in our own experience, that's not a particularly high bar :)

This oughtta do it...

This oughtta do it ... if you want to be even more pissed off at Hillary! than you already are...

Get more people to take buses...

Get more people to take buses ... by making them more dangerous.  I love this kind of thinking :)

Drones...

Drones ... can be art, too...  Via my brother Scott...

I love it when...

I love it when ... I check the market and find a graph like this!

Strange mail of the day...

Strange mail of the day...  This is something we just received via the U.S. Post Office.  It's most definitely not something we solicited.  There's no indication on it (at least, none that I can find) of who sent it.  There's nothing scary about the advice on it; it's basic “get ready for disaster” sort of things, except that they left out arming yourself (something that is usually part of the “prepper” dogma).  I'm left uncertain about the motives of the sender.

All that was surprising enough.  What I find even more surprising is that I can't find this text online!  It's not often I do a Google search and get zero results!

Anybody recognize this (click to embiggen), and can tell me who sent it and why?

Where to eat lunch in Logan...

Where to eat lunch in Logan...  This is another in a series of posts for the good folks who will be attending the Field Spaniel Society of America Nationals being held at the fairgrounds in Logan in May.

If you've been following this series, then you already know about the map we've made that shows all the places we've been talking about.  You might also notice that today's list of lunch places only has one new place on it – we've already talked a bit about all the rest!

Logan's Heroes is the place we haven't mentioned before.  It's a local institution, one of those places every local knows, and it's an easy walk from the fairgrounds.  At lunch time the small dining area is generally packed with locals – farmers, tradesmen, college students, and people who work nearby.  The menu isn't all that large, but we've yet to try a sandwich that wasn't great.  The bread is fresh and good, and the owner and his helpers are experts at making great sandwiches.  They're happy to accommodate any special things you want (or don't want!).  If you're allergic to waiting, it's better to go outside of the lunch rush – and even then you might want to do takeout, as there aren't many tables there.  The owner is a funny and interesting fellow, an Iranian immigrant who came here for college and stayed.  He has an amazing talent that we envy: he remembers people and their stories, even if it's been many months since he last saw you – greets you by name and picks up the conversation you were having last week or last year!

Angie's has an extensive traditional lunch menu, with all sorts of sandwiches, burgers, salads, and some fare like fried chicken and fish 'n chips.  Lots of locals go there for lunch, some (literally!) every day.  Nothing fancy, no high prices, but it's all good, solid food, and the people are friendly as can be.

Jack's Wood Fired Oven has great lunch specials, small pizzas with a bowl of soup.  Both of them can't be beat anywhere in the area.  Great desserts, too.  If you'd like a classy lunch that's a little different, Jack's is a great choice.

Herm's Inn is a little further afield, but if you're looking for a hearty sandwich or burger lunch, it's hard to beat.  You'll want to be really hungry before going there, though :)

Cafe Sabor has decent American-style Mexican food, with lots of choices for lunch.  It's within easy walking distance of the fairgrounds, too.  And yes, they have margaritas – though we're not sure it's a good idea to be drinking them at lunchtime if you have to show in the afternoon :)

Elements is the most upscale of the lunch eateries we're listing here, and it's in walking range of the fairgrounds for the swift of foot.  They've got all sorts of yummy lunch fare, some of it alcoholic.  They're a little pricier than the rest of the eateries here, so if you're watching your pennies you might want to look elsewhere.

The Crepery is within walking range of the fairgrounds, and has all sorts of interesting crepes for lunch.  It's often crowded during lunch hour, as it's a favorite haunt of local workers and college students. 


And last, but certainly not least, is the Crumb Brothers cafe.  It's just a short walk from the fairgrounds, and has lots and lots of delicious pastries, breads, sandwiches, coffee (including espresso) and tea.  This is the place to go for a delicious light lunch in a cafe atmosphere!

Ant Flats Road is open!

Ant Flats Road is open!  Yesterday afternoon we made our first drive on the road to Ant Flats, which starts at the end of the road to Hardware Ranch.  This (very nice) dirt road was a haunt of ours last summer and fall, because of all the wildlife we routinely saw there.  The road is closed to cars all winter (it becomes a groomed snowmobile road), but reopened yesterday – and we were one of the first to drive it.

We had the road to ourselves for about 90 minutes, and we saw a lot of wildlife.  The standout was several large groups of deer, numbering well over 100 in total (we really didn't even try to count them, there were so many).  We saw one large group of elk, about a half mile south of Hardware Ranch.  Best of all: we saw one bald eagle feeding on a ridge top, and a pair of bald eagles wheeling overhead.

The water in the stream (the headwaters for Blacksmith Fork) were fairly high, because of the runoff and melt.  The Wasatch Mountain drainages are running well in general; the water forecasts for spring are all looking very good.  We were at Porcupine Reservoir twice in the past 10 days, and it had risen at least 6 feet between our two visits.  I don't think we're going to have water challenges this year...

Lanna needs a home...

Lanna needs a home...  This under-two-year old female Black Lab needs a home.  She's at the Cache Humane Society shelter, in the kennel we sponsor there.  Do you know anyone who needs a lovable addition to their home?

Science vs. everything else...

Science vs. everything else...  Via my pistol-packing, medical team entertaining mama:

Puppy update...

Puppy update...  One of the puppies (the wheezing boy) died less than a day after he was born.  The other eight (five girls, three boys) are all thriving, and the mom is doing great.  The photo at right is from last night.

I'm going to have to teach our breeder the proper way to hold her iPhone when she takes photos :)

Yes, they're all brown (“liver” is the official term).  Some of them have white spots on their chests, like our Miki.

We still don't know whether we're getting one or two puppies from this litter.  That depends on how many other people are interested...

It looks like...

It looks like ... it's going to be The Donald vs. The Hillary.  Oh, joy.

It's still possible that we could have a contested Republican convention, and the Republican-powers-that-be will pull Jeb out of whatever hole he fell into, or draft Ryan or Romney, or nominate Bozo the Clown.  I don't think that's very likely, though.  On the conservative (well, non-progressive, sort of, anyway) side it looks most likely that The Donald will be our choice.  Pardon me while I go vomit.  I wish there was a way to invest in European comedians, though...

It's also possible that The Hillary will be indicted or even charged in the email scandal.  I've no idea what would happen after that, though I suppose that depends largely on exactly when that happened.  If it happened before the Democratic convention, they could cobble up some sort of procedure to get another nominee – in that case, it seems most likely it would be Bernie.  If she was indicted sometime closer to the election, I'm not sure what the Democrats could do.  Can they change their nominee after selecting one at their convention?  I don't know what the rules are there.  And I wouldn't put it past her to just keep right on running, unless they actually hauled her away.  In any case, I think the most likely outcome here is that she is not indicted or charged, and she will be the Democratic nominee.

If it's The Donald vs. The Hillary, I won't be voting.  No way either one of them is getting my vote...

Paradise phone mystery...

Paradise phone mystery...  For the past two days we've been inundated with marketing phone calls.  We don't answer them; our Sentry 2 blocks them for us after a single ring.  I Google the numbers to see who it is calling us, and they've ranged from healthcare insurance marketers (including one particular company that's called us 12 times already!) to political pollsters to home appliance warranty scams.  Generally we've been getting just a few calls a week, but suddenly we're getting dozens each day.  Very annoying, even with the call blocking capability.

I'd love to know why we're suddenly being targeted by so many companies.  My suspicion is that some company has decided to sell our contact information to a popular marketing list...

No giraffes were injured in this production...

No giraffes were injured in this production...  Because it's an animation, silly!  I published a clip from this last year, but now the whole thing is on line.  You'll definitely want to full-screen this one.

Computer animation is getting to the point where it's actually challenging to detect that it's not real...

Out here in Paradise...

Out here in Paradise ... I have little doubt that nearly everyone would behave just as this homeless veteran does.  I wouldn't be nearly as confident just 12 miles away in Logan, and in San Diego I'd be must as dumbfounded as the creators of this video were...

With any luck at all...

With any luck at all ... you should now see a little “Amazon” link at right, toward the top.  If it's there, you can use it to shop on Amazon.  Anything you buy while you're there will send me a small referral payment – but won't cost you a penny more.  I'd sure appreciate your using that link to do your Amazon shopping – it will help me pay for the bandwidth used when you're reading my blog...

Update: reader Richard Clark noted that ad blockers were (potentially) blocking the logo I'd put up earlier (thanks, Richard!).  I've changed it now to a different technique that I hope avoids that issue...

The puppies are born!

The puppies are born!  The mom (Sissy) had nine puppies, starting yesterday midday and ending early this morning.  Mom's doing fine, and eight of the nine are in good shape; the last is wheezing a bit (still has fluid in the lungs).  Five girls, four boys.  One of these puppies will be ours, and possibly two (because this was an unexpectedly large litter, and we don't want our breeder to end up with a puppy that has no home).

Good doggie!

Good doggie!

What's the right thing to do...

What's the right thing to do ... with primitive indigenous cultures?  We've all heard the stories about the “Stone Age” people still living in places like South America or New Guinea.  Conventional wisdom is that we should carefully isolate such populations, and “allow” them to live as they always have.

This has always bothered me.  This policy, beloved by progressives everywhere, effectively condemns those populations to lives filled with pain and death that our medical prowess has long since banished.  If they break a leg, they may be crippled for life as we refuse to intervene.  The children of these cultures are deprived of an education that we consider to be the birthright of our children.  I could go on and on in this vein.  Why do we think this is the right thing to do?  I've never understood that.  How can “preserving” a culture be more important than welcoming these peoples to the advantages of modern civilization?  It seems cruel and horribly patronizing to me.

Rarely do I see anyone else making those points.  I spotted one such case this morning...

On the Martian plateau...

On the Martian plateau ... is Curiosity.  What a view!

Weather radar picture...

Weather radar picture...  We're right where the precipitation turns from rain to snow...

Soup good. Soup my friend...

Soup good.  Soup my friend...  Debbie made a really nice soup for supper yesterday, accompanied by some dinner rolls made from frozen dough.  The soup was outstanding: a cheesy broth, laden with mushrooms, sausage, and veggies.  The rolls were good – not the best we've ever had, but perfectly decent dinner rolls...

Dang it!

Dang it!  More snow in Paradise (the photo is out our back window just now).  The temperature outside is 35°F; it just might stick for a while...

Happy pi day!

Happy pi day!  More about it here, and the first 100 digits in base 2, in case you didn't know them:

11.00100 10000 11111 10110 10101 00010 00100 00101 10100 01100 00100 01101 00110 00100 11000 11001 10001 01000 10111 00000

Another typically interesting post...

Another typically interesting post ... by Eric S. Raymond, this one on the link between autism and genius.  In it he makes an observation that immediately resonated with me: that high achievement (actually, “genius-level capabilities” is how he puts it) are enabled or promoted by not caring about social conventions (or, as he puts it much more colorfully, “not giving a shit about monkey social rituals”).  His thesis is that autistic people get this for free – it comes with the territory – and other high achievers have to learn how to do it.  The (unstated by him) corollary is that social convention is an enormous impediment to achievement.

Fascinating observation, and it rings very true to me...

The Mediterranean Sea was created...

The current Mediterranean Sea was created ... about five million years ago, when the Atlantic Ocean breached the natural dam at what is today the Straight of Gibraltar.  I'd read in the past that it took several centuries to fill up the Mediterranean Sea to match the Atlantic Ocean's level.  Now there's a new report that says it was filled in as little as a few months, and at most two years.  To do that, water flowed at rates of up to 300 km/hr (190 mph) through a 200 km (125 mile) long channel.  That would have been a spectacular sight!

Prime surprise...

Prime surprise...  I ran across this interesting article about a surprising property of sequential prime numbers.  But even more interesting to me is this piece in the article, which seems obviously wrong to me:

If Alice tosses a coin until she sees a head followed by a tail, and Bob tosses a coin until he sees two heads in a row, then on average, Alice will require four tosses while Bob will require six tosses (try this at home!), even though head-tail and head-head have an equal chance of appearing after two coin tosses.

Have any of my readers ever heard of this?  Search as I might, I've found no reference to anything suggesting unequal probability of head-tail versus head-head.  At the moment I'm assuming that the article's author just misunderstood something she heard...

This guy keeps surprising me...

This guy keeps surprising me...  John Oliver with an outstanding (and still very funny) piece on the Apple encryption debate...

Rain in Paradise!

Rain in Paradise!  It's pouring as I write this, and the weather radar shows lots more headed our way.  The forecast has significant precipitation between last night and this coming Thursday, alternating between snow and rain.  All of this is with temperatures above freezing, so presumably the “snow” will be more like slush, melting shortly after hitting the ground.

We drove up to Porcupine Reservoir yesterday morning.  It's just a few miles from our home, and is the source for our irrigation water.  It's filling up nicely, up several feet over the past couple of days.  This rain will aid in that, reassuring all the local farmers.  It will also ensure a very green spring for us – and hopefully a bumper crop of wildflowers in the mountains...

Nodules on Mars...

Nodules on Mars...  Curiosity is investigating...

Three thoughts...

Three thoughts...  Not in any particular order:

1. I wish we had more reporters like Megyn Kelly.  If we did, I might even watch television news on occasion.  
2. The response to this incident by both the Trump campaign and his lapdog media Breitbart is disgusting.  This isn't the first time we've seen this sort of thing in the U.S., but it's scary every time we do.  
3. Andrew Breitbart must be rolling in his grave at the actions of organization now using his name.

I hear knocking.  What could it be?  Why, it's the doom, at the front door...

A note on doing taxes...

A note on doing taxes...  One of the less delightful parts of doing taxes for me has been, in years past, having to find all the #&*^@$%#! receipts (especially for charitable contributions and tax payments).  That's because all I'd have would be a shoe-box full of slips of paper, in totally unorganized form.  What a pain!

This year it was a breeze – because all I had to do was to type a few key words into DevonThink (the software that organizes the scans I now make of all my receipts) and in well under a second it found each and every receipt I was looking for.  It's almost unbelievable how big a difference it is for me between now and then, and at negligible cost in terms of my effort.  It's way easier than a manual filing system, which takes considerable effort throughout the year.  This is more like a shoe-box with a magical “find it!” capability.

I can't believe I didn't do this five years ago, when it first started to look practicable.  Dang it!

Bumper snicker of the day...

Bumper snicker of the day...  Via my lovely bride:

Want more evidence...

Want more evidence ... that our government is completely out of control?  I'm not sure why anyone would need that at this point, but just in case: the FDA is cracking down on using manure on farms.  Yes, really.

Several historians have suggested that human societies really need to be tossed out periodically, and rebuilt from the ground up.  Sometimes I'm not sure that's actually enough, and that maybe my dad had the right idea: use a few nukes to glass things over, then wait a few million years for the soil to reform.  Maybe the radiation will induce a few beneficial mutations, too...

Jaguar in action...

Jaguar in action... 

What he said!

What he said!  This guy says, eloquently, what I've been feeling about modern art for many years now...

Paradise tutoring...

Paradise tutoring...  Well, I'm down to two kids (from three): Sarah had to drop out because she's already got too heavy a load.  Her mom listed all that she's got, and I have to agree – that slip of a girl has way too much on her plate.  So now I've got Nicholas (11 years old, 4th grade, budding robotics engineer) and Abby (around 13 years old, I think in 7th grade, budding scientist). 

Both of them did fairly well on their homework.  The concept of tens-complement arithmetic had escaped them, and decimal-to-binary conversions as well, so we worked on them for a while.  Then I gave them a concentrated hour on twos-complement arithmetic and the basic binary operators (inversion, addition, AND, OR, and XOR).  Their homework has some hard problems on it; it will be interesting to see how they do :)

Each time Abby got the idea about how something worked, you could see her light right up – she gets joy from understanding.  That's why I called her a budding scientist :)

I sent them home with a printout of a very simple HTML page (source code) that will serve as our first playground for messing about with code.  I'm going to start them with JavaScript, with Chrome's developer tools (which are excellent!) as their IDE...

Paradise kids...

Paradise kids ... are refusing to admit that winter is over.  They want to sled!  These are my neighbor's kids plus a couple they're babysitting.  The building in the background is our shed.  The “mountains” (their term:) that they're sledding on are made from the dirt we dug out of the field to make the shed's foundation.

The kids played on the “mountains” for about four hours.  One of the little blonde girls came over to the house later, and her face was ... not clean.  I'd have given a lot to see her mom's face when she went home :)

Captain Kangaroo, of course!

Captain Kangaroo, of course!  Via my pistol-packing, lobster-eating mama...

A wife's love...

A wife's love...  Via my brother Scott.

A very old man lay dying in his bed. In death's doorway, he suddenly smelled the aroma of his favorite chocolate chip cookie wafting up the stairs. He gathered his remaining strength and lifted himself from the bed. Leaning against the wall, he slowly made his way out of the bedroom, and with even greater effort forced himself down the stairs, gripping the railing with both hands.

With labored breath, he leaned against the door frame, gazing into the kitchen. Were it not for death's agony, he would have thought himself already in heaven.

There, spread out on newspapers on the kitchen table were literally hundreds of his favorite chocolate chip cookies.

Was it heaven? Or was it one final act of heroic love from his devoted wife, seeing to it that he left this world a happy man?

Mustering one great final effort, he threw himself toward the table. The aged and withered hand, shaking, made its way to a cookie at the edge of the table, when he was suddenly smacked with a spatula by his wife. "Stay out of those," she said. "They're for the funeral."

It's all too easy for me to imagine that happening here, in my house :)

Way back in the '60s...

Way back in the '60s ... when I was just starting my electronics career, I built a theremin using vacuum tubes.  I didn't design it myself; just built it from a schematic I found somewhere.  It worked fine, but sounded so awful to me that I disassembled it and used the parts for something else. 

Never did it occur to me that one could make a theremin with a dead badger.  Not once.  But it did occur to this fellow.  That should worry us, I think...

Andrew Klavan...

Andrew Klavan: I'm angry, so I'm voting for Donald Trump!  Is this really why Trump has so much support?  Angry low-information, low-cogitation voters?  That's it?

I don't know whether I hope that's true or false...

Mercury (the planet) is really weird...

Mercury (the planet) is really weird...  The trove of data collected by the MESSENGER robotic explorer didn't help make it less so, either.

Spam of the day...

Spam of the day...  Every few weeks I go through my spam folder, just to make sure that no important email got accidentally misclassified as junk.  GMail's filters are remarkably good; it's rare for me to find a false positive like that.

Sometimes the subject lines of the spam are enough to entice me to open it, just to see what it said.  Here's one I opened today.  I'm still laughing as I copy this over.  The number of people who are tricked by this sort of thing has to be vanishingly small – but when the cost of sending email is (literally) zero, that doesn't matter...

Subject: 2016 Compensation Payment

UNITED NATIONS OFFICE OF INTERNATIONAL OVERSIGHT SERVICES
Internal Audit, Monitoring, Consulting and Investigations Division

From: Mrs. Carman Lapointe

Good day to you, my name is Mrs. Carman Lapointe Young the United Nations Under-Secretary I was sent to Nigeria last week by the United Nation and is to officially informed you that your name is among the scam victims that will be compensated this 2016 with the total sum of $5.5Million approved by United Nations and other stake holders and this is the reason why the united nation sent me to Nigeria to make sure people like you receive there fund from here in Nigeria without any hitch, and I have a mandate with UN stake holders who approved your fund to make sure you receive your approve compensation fund before I go back to NEW YORK to summit my report, and I am contacting you now because your fund is ready for you to make the claim

Note the United Nation have ordered the appointed paying bank to program your fund in form of ATM Card and they have successfully program and activate your ATM Card so as am talking to you now your ATM Card is ready for use, Again I want you to know that you are only require to come down here in Nigeria to sign and pick up your Card without paying any cent but if you cant come down here in Nigeria to sign and pick up your ATM Card then you will have to pay Delivery fee of $250 and bank will hand over your Card to DHL and they will deliver it to your address within 48hours so I want you to tell me if you want to come down here to pick up your Card or you prefer to send the $250 so that DHL will deliver your Card to your address?

Note for easy communication contact me via this email (mrs.young112@gmail.com) or phone +234-7061268585, Thanks for your understanding, I wait to hear from you soon as you receive this email from me

Mrs. Carman Lapointe
United Nations Under-Secretary
General for Internal Oversight

I just love the part where “if you cant come down here in Nigeria” then for a mere $250 DHL will deliver your ATM card (loaded with $5.5 million!) right to your home address.  What a deal!

Oh my gosh...

Oh my gosh...  If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know that almost two years ago we ordered a Tesla Model X (their 4WD SUV).  The photo at right is what ours should look like.  We did so knowing that the delivery date was uncertain, so I'm not finding any fault with Tesla on this score.  For all that time, until early this afternoon, we had absolutely no clue when our Model X might actually be delivered.  All we had to go on were (a) our order number, which is in the 12 thousands, and (b) the news reports that told us when the first ones rolled off and what the production rate was. 

That changed today.  We got an email from Tesla that gave us a delivery time of “mid 2016” – still not very precise.  But that's the most we've ever had :)  There's also a little line that says if we'd care to change the interior configuration to include an extra row of seats, then we could get it as early as April or May.  Well, the configuration we chose already has too many seats for us, so we certainly didn't want to add even more.  Of course we chose the configuration that would be made dead last :)  So we're stuck with “mid 2016”.  But hey ... that's only a few months away.  The probability that I'll live long enough to actually see and drive our Model X is increasing.  Yay!

Paradise, on foot again...

Paradise, on foot again...  It's March 11th – my brother Mark's birthday, and the first day we were able to go for a nice walk this spring.  Debbie and I, together with two very excited dogs (Miki and Race) walked for two miles along dirt roads near our house.  This is a real first for Debbie: first time she's walked this far in well over a year, because of the knee injuries she's suffered.  She had no problems at all on this walk – hooray!  We did the two miles (which includes about 400' of elevation change each way) in roughly 75 minutes.  That's about 20 minutes more than the typical walk I did alone last year along the same path, and about 30 minutes more than our record (set when we were actually trying to go fast, instead of our normal leisurely gawking pace).  It's still wintry here, as you can see from my photos below, but it was oh-so-nice to be outside again.  The temperature was around 60°F, about as nice as one could possibly ask for.  The two lower photos are panoramas, each covering about 200°..

Curiosity is looking at nodules on Mars...

Curiosity is looking at nodules on Mars...  Here are a couple of photos, one of the area, one of a nodule...

A solar eclipse...

A solar eclipse ... as seen from space.  This photo (via APOD, of course) was taken by a high-orbit satellite (Deep Space Climate Observatory).  The dark spot in the upper left of the Earth's surface is the fuzzy shadow of the moon.  In the center of that shadow, people were experiencing a total eclipse of the sun.  In the fuzzy edges, a partial eclipse.  Click on the thumbnail to embiggen.

Home defense...

Home defense...  Via my pistol-packing, lobster-eating mama...

A liberal acquaintance in California asked me what I thought he might need in order to defend his home and family from home invasion, and the like.

I suggested a 9mm, a couple of clips, and a box of shells.

A few days later he sent me this picture and asked me how to make it all work. He voted for Obama … twice.

Yeah.  I know.

A history of English...

A history of English ... in just five words.  Interesting piece.  Here's a sample, with one of the five words:

“Tea”

Tea was first imported into Britain early in the 17th century, becoming very popular by the 1650s; London diarist Samuel Pepys recorded drinking his first cup in 1660.

By the 18th century it had become a symbol of fashionable society and a staple of the coffee house culture; Dr. Johnson was a self-confessed “hardened and shameless tea-drinker.”

The word “tea” derives from the Mandarin Chinese word chá, via the Min dialect form te. The Mandarin word is also the origin of the informal char, as in a nice cup of char. A love of tea is so ingrained in British life that the phrase “cup of tea” has come to stand for anything viewed positively. We express dislike by saying: “it’s not my cup of tea,” we comfort the bereaved with “tea and sympathy,” and gloss over any social faux pas with the phrase “more tea, vicar?”

The human stupidity demonstration known as Daylight Saving Time is coming this weekend...

The human stupidity demonstration known as Daylight Saving Time is coming this weekend...  So I thought it would be a good time to show this video again.  Buried in there is a map of the world showing all the time zones with different rules – something I've talked about before as being an amazingly complex mess.  The map in the video is already out of date :)

Seen on Facebook...

Seen on Facebook...  Via my lovely bride.  I found it for sale here (on a site I know nothing about).  This could be a big seller around here!

Dell, crapware, and Windows 10...

Dell, crapware, and Windows 10...  My friend and neighbor Tim D. recently bought a new computer.  He chose an inexpensive Dell model sold through Walmart.  Shortly after he bought it, he called me for some help: his new computer was vastly slower than the one it replaced, and he basically had no idea how to do anything.

So I ran over to his house, delighted to be able to do something to help repay him for the weeks of assistance he gave me in the past couple of years.  I had no idea what to expect.

First thing I saw was that the Windows 10 screen was like some alien thing had taken over his computer.  I haven't used Windows for nearly 10 years now, but I expected to see at least something recognizable.  There really wasn't much!  Everything seemed to have new icons, new names, and new places on the screen.  Those bits and pieces of Windows lore that I could dredge up were largely useless.  If it's that alien for someone like me, who has lived and breathed computers for almost 50 years – imagine what it's like for a non-techie who has no understanding of the technology and uses computers only casually!  Poor Tim was completely and totally lost – and I wasn't much help until I did some online reading to figure out a few basic things.

Then there was the crapware.  If you're not familiar with the term, here's the Wikipedia article.  This stuff isn't on every new computer (it's not on Macs at all, for example), but it's on nearly every low-cost Windows machine.  Dell has a reputation for being amongst the worst crapware offenders, and after seeing Tim's computer I can understand how they got this reputation.

Some of the crapware is “opt-in”, meaning that you have to install it before it does anything.  Most of it, though, was pre-installed – very, very annoying.  Worst of all was a malignant piece of crapware called NowUSeeIt Player: it was not only pre-installed, but it came with no uninstall program.  I call it “malignant” because it was putting up dozens of pop-over ads per hour.  Most of these were for bogus “security programs” that had scary-sounding (and looking) screens that tried hard to look like a Windows error screen.  They tried to scare the viewer into calling (with their credit card ready!) a company that really was just a front, would do nothing to help your computer, but would take some money out of your credit card account.  Probably they'd steal your credit card number, too!

Altogether, over the course of about four visits with Tim, I probably spent 5 or 6 hours cleaning his crapware-infested brand new computer.  A non-technical person would have been there much longer, and might not have succeeded at all.  That's just awful on Dell's part (it was their choice to earn a few bucks per machine by installing this horrible stuff).  I'm sure they don't care, but ... though I've often recommended Dell to people in the past (and bought quite a few of them myself), I will no longer do so.  In fact, I will actively recommend against Dell until I can satisfy myself that they've dispensed with the crapware.

I did have one piece of this experience that made me chuckle.  I found a guide on the Internet somewhere that described how one could get rid of NowUSeeIt Player even though it had no uninstaller.  Mainly it involved deleting registry keys (The “registry” is a uniquely Microsoft invention that is mostly horrible).  I had no idea how to do that on Windows 10, but I imagined it was some new tool, with a new name, that worked completely differently than the old tool.  That led to the chuckle.  There's no new tool.  You just use RegEdit, the same tool one used on the earliest versions of Windows.  So far as I could tell, there was nothing new or improved about this notoriously awful tool.  Using RegEdit is roughly akin to being force to hammer in a nail by using your pen knife, with the blade as the handle.  Tim and I tediously deleted the 100 or so registry keys that the NowUSeeIt Player installs, and afterwards his computer was (a) blessedly free of those incredibly annoying pop-over ads, and (b) at least three times faster than it had been.

Dell, you should be ashamed of yourselves.  You owe your customers a heartfelt apology, at the very least.  You really should find a way to compensate them for the tortures you've visited upon them, too.  Along with their geekly friends who have gotten them free of your crapware!

Taxes...

Taxes...  Man, I hate this time of year, when I have to sit down and spend hours torturing myself as I calculate how much money I have to give our government – which it will promptly spend mostly in ways that I find abhorrent.  Not fun.  Since I retired a few years ago, this tax computation has gotten worse – the tax consequences of living off your investments are way more complicated than living from a paycheck that's had taxes withheld.

Last year was the worst of all for us, as the 2014 tax year was complicated by our moving from one state (California) to another (Utah), owning two homes most of the year, major investments changes, etc.  This year was considerably simpler, and the tax software I use (TurboTax) surprised me by making something else much simpler: for the first time it automatically imported all the tax data about my stock trades from my broker.  Even the basis (price I paid) was correctly imported.  This saved a lot of manual lookup and typing.  Bottom line: I did our tax return in just a few hours this year, instead of the several days I was anticipating.  That, at least, is a positive thing.

But I still have to let them steal my money and waste it on something stupid (or worse), and that really grates on me.  Argh!

More memory memories...

More memory memories...  This article discusses several old computer memory technologies.  Most of these are things that I actually worked with back in the '70s when I was in the U.S. Navy: magnetic drums, Williams tubes, mercury acoustic delay lines, and magnetic core memories.  I also worked with a couple others not mentioned here: electrostatic dots and steel wire acoustic delay lines (photo at right, not mine).

I feel old today :)

PEX rules!

PEX rules!  What is PEX, you ask?  It's a (relatively) new technology for plumbing, one that's now nearly the universal way plumbers use when plumbing a house.  Wikipedia has a good article about it.  The photo at right (not mine) shows a typical PEX connector (the brass fitting), PEX tubing (the semi-transparent tubing), cinch clamp (the silver strap around the tubing near the brass fitting), and the crimp cinch tool (the big tool working on the clamp). 

I was at my brother's cabin yesterday, installing a new pressure tank for his water system.  The old water tank was a teensy 2 gallon job that was mounted right on the wall, directly threaded into some copper pipe.  The one I installed was a 20 gallon, floor-standing tank.  We had to run about 6 feet of pipe between the old tank's mount and the new tank.  If I had run copper pipe, I'd have had to cut four pieces of pipe to precisely the right length, plus three 90° elbows and two solder-to-threaded adapters for the ends.  I'd have needed a box full of tools, probably five or six hours, and an enlarged cussing vocabulary to cover all the mistakes I made.  Plus it would most likely have leaked the first three times I tried it.

What a difference with PEX!  Because it's quite flexible, I only needed two fittings: adapters to threaded pipe at each end.  I only needed one piece of pipe, and no elbows.  Cutting the pipe was as easy as using a pair of scissors – the cutting tool slices right though the pipe like scissors on paper.  I'd never used PEX before, so I wasn't sure how hard it would be to use the crimp cinch clamp tool.  Turns out it's about as challenging as a pair of pliers.  You just put the tool onto the clamp and squeeze – you're done!  Then when I turned everything back on, it didn't leak a drop.  Total time was about 30 minutes, and most of that was just me being careful with techniques that were new to me.

Count me as a new PEX advocate.  I'm actually thinking about re-plumbing the mechanical room of our house.  The current setup is an incrementally-installed copper pipe mess.  I sometimes have to study the pipes for fifteen minutes just to figure out which of the maze of valves I need to turn on or off.  With PEX I could easily make a manifold-based system with individual valves for every water destination...

Same thing for Trump, or Sanders...

Same thing for Trump, or Sanders ... and about 90% of our Senators and Representatives.  They aren't the problem – it's the low-information, low-cogitation voters who vote for them that are the problem.  I periodically suffer from an attack of the dooms precisely because I don't see any viable path to fixing that problem.  Via my pistol-packing mama, who isn't voting for Hillary...

Curiosity...

Curiosity ... is into some new and exciting things as it climbs Mt. Sharp on Mars!  These are from today's dump of raw images, and there aren't any notes on them yet.  The first one, to my amateur rockhound's eye, fairly screams “water!”  Those whitish deposits look like minerals that crystallized after having been dissolved in water; we see things like that on Earth all over the place.  The second photo appears to be taken looking across the slope that Curiosity is climbing – it looks fairly steep, though I'm not sure the camera was level when it was taken.  It also looks quite hazy, presumably from dust and not water vapor...

Morning chuckle...

Morning chuckle...  Via my lovely bride, who found this in some dark corner of Facebook (which really is just a giant bucket of dark corners)...

Update: Debbie tells me it was The Federalist Papers web site where she found that, not Facebook.  But Facebook is still just a giant bucket of dark corners...

Chladni patterns...

Chladni patterns...  This video is a great introduction to the magic of Chladni plates and the patterns one can make on them. 

I first ran into these back in the '80s, when I was doing some consulting work for a company that was using microphones listening to rotating machinery to monitor for impending failures.  The most success they had was with ball bearings, where some (relatively) simple fast Fourier transforms could be used successfully.  Even the slow computers of the day could do this math in near real time.  The company wanted to do some more sophisticated things (which is where the Chladni patterns came in) that involved math that they just couldn't make fast enough. 

They hired me to optimize those calculations by using assembly language and every hacky trick I could come up with.  They needed to speed up their calculations by a factor of about 1,200, but the best I could do was about 200 – still six times too slow.  I could only get that large speedup because the program they started with was written by scientists who basically had no idea how computers worked :)  They chose a terrible language (FORTRAN) for such a project, then compounded the error by writing terrible code.  It was great fun for me, because they were completely blown away by (a) how fast my code was, and (b) how small my code was – the assembly-language program I wrote was half the lines of their (horrible) FORTRAN code.  Also fun: they paid me on time, with a check that cleared...

Norman doors...

Norman doors...  The video at right, despite coming from Vox, is an excellent introduction to human-centered design (no technical content at all).  The “Norman” is Don Norman, whose work inspired a lot of how we experience computers today.  Note carefully, please, that I am not saying that his ideas have been well-executed :)   Obviously, in many cases, they have not (I'm looking at you, Microsoft!).  But much of what's good about the user interfaces on modern computers can be traced back to his work.

I attended a lecture of his back in the '90s, when his work was just becoming well-known amongst software engineers.  Then, later, I went to a short course he ran (which the company I worked for then helped sponsor), and had a delightful dinner with him.  He went through everything on the table and analyzed how well (or not) it was designed, from a human perspective.  It was so much fun!  But also one hell of a learning experience.

He looked much younger then :)

There is one thing that I think is a bit misleading in this short video, to wit: the video makes it sound obvious and easy to get the design right.  At least with computer user interfaces, that is the exact opposite of the truth.  Why?  Because discoverability and feedback are highly variable from person-to-person.  Someone like me who has been using computers for almost 50 years might find a subtle change in color to be useful and appropriate feedback.  Similarly, I might find a right-click menu to be an obviously discoverable element.  Another person, however, might need a giant purple blinking square, with 50 watt audio accompaniment, before they'd ever notice the feedback.  And that same person might never think of trying a right click – you might as well have buried that feature in a 10 ton block of concrete, as they will never find it.  User interface designers constantly face this challenge: the interfaces they design must be usable by novices, but still useful to experts.  Sometimes a single design can do this well, but that's relatively rare.  More often, the job is either done poorly, or sometimes the only answer is to have multiple designs – one for the noobs, another for the dweebs...

Coloring books and Trump...

Coloring books and Trump...  Rob Long, writing on Ricochet, makes an excellent point...

Paradise ice...

Paradise ice...  Our trees are covered with sparkly ice this morning, as is our driveway.  The sun is shining brightly, though, so we're expecting this all to melt fairly quickly.  Meanwhile, here's a few photos for your enjoyment (click to embiggen, as always)...

Pharmaceutical development...

Pharmaceutical development ... is a very complicated thing.  Several things are simultaneously true, making it almost impossible for ordinary consumers to figure out what's going on:

• Some drugs cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, but benefit relatively few people.  The money for development costs comes from investors in pharmaceutical companies.  The only way those companies can recoup their costs and hope to realize a profit is by charging extremely high prices for those drugs.
• Some drugs cost much less to develop, but the pharmaceutical companies charge high prices for them because they have a monopoly (usually the monopoly derives from them having a patent).  That looks like gouging to most people, and sometimes it is – but sometimes those profits are helping subsidize the development of less profitable drugs.
• Government bureaucracies, most notoriously the U.S. FDA, dramatically drive up the cost of developing drugs by requiring the pharmaceutical companies to perform long, expensive tests of their prospective drugs for both efficacy and safety.  Without special (and difficult to get) exemption, the drug companies cannot supply those drugs even to terminal patients in the U.S. before those tests are complete.  Other countries have far less stringent drug approval processes, and it's common for new drugs to be available in Asia and Europe for years before they're available in the U.S.  It's not as clear as you might think that foreign consumers have more risk because of the less stringent procedures there.  It is very clear that new drugs that actually work are saving lives outside the U.S. before they can do so inside the U.S.  
• One country in particular – India – has the technology to produce the most advanced drugs, but has a much stricter requirement for drugs to qualify for patent.  Since most drugs are minor modifications of existing compounds (which don't qualify for patent protection in India), it's perfectly legal under Indian law for their pharmaceutical companies to produce them there – and of course, they are.  This provides a means for people outside India to get access to drugs that would otherwise be too expensive for them.  That sounds great – until you realize that that also means that the pharmaceutical companies who developed those drugs, at great cost, are not going to recoup their expenses, much less make a profit.  The Indian companies, by and large, are not innovating – they're copying.  Somebody has to pay for the innovation, or said innovation ain't gonna happen.  If the Indian gambit significantly suppresses the revenue for such drugs, it's easy to predict that the pharmaceutical companies will stop developing them.

There are some obvious avenues that could be taken to help with this problem. 

One favored by progressives is to fund drug research with public dollars.  This, despite the fact that private pharmaceutical companies in search of profit out-perform every government institution that's ever tried their hand at drug development.  The CDC, in the U.S., is a great example.  While they've had a few successes over the years, the payback per dollar spent is trivial by comparison with what the pharmaceutical companies have done.  In my own opinion, this course is a recipe for failure.

Another approach favored by some in every part of the political sphere is to (drastically) reduce the bureaucracy and regulation around drug approval in the U.S.  Many schemes have been floated to do this.  The naysayers (and there are many) have one easy line to attack them all: some variant of “These reformers want to kill your kids!”  So far that line has stopped every attempt to reform the FDA's drug approval process.

Progressives have recently floated another proposal: to allow drugs to be imported into the U.S. much more freely (this is highly regulated today).  This would, in particular, allow the Indian generics to be imported.  This would rather dramatically change the financial equation for pharmaceutical companies with respect to financing drug development.  Only those drugs that were clearly novel under Indian patent law would then be attractive for financing.  Depending on who you want to believe, that's between 1% and 4% of all drugs currently being developed.  That's something to think about very hard before implementation.  One thing that scares me about that one: the immediate political consequences of such a program would all be positive.  All of a sudden, a broad range of drugs would be drastically cheaper.  The impact of shutting down the drug development pipeline might not be felt for 10 or even 20 years, so long is the development cycle.  That sort of decision, to a politician, is unfortunately a no-brainer: they're going to go for the short term benefit.

I certainly have no easy answers for this one.  It's an amazingly complicated problem that most people don't even think about.  A lot of people – especially younger folks – seem to think that drug development should be a government function, and the profit motive should be eliminated.  That notion scares me more than anything else, because all my own experience tells me that drug innovation would practically halt at that point.  Government bureaucracies are motivated almost entirely by factors that don't affect their success on their mission – the U.S. Post Office being the canonical example.  Private companies pursuing a profit, on the other hand, are motivated almost entirely by success in their mission.  I'll take the latter every time...

This morning I did something I should have done a long time ago...

This morning I did something I should have done a long time ago ...  I closed my LinkedIn account.  Everybody I care about knows how to contact me already, and I have no interest in (a) LinkedIn's unceasing efforts to trick me into giving them money, contact information, or my phone number, and (b) the mechanical queries from almost unbelievable numbers of recruiters who completely ignore my status of RETIRED. 

So it's gone.  Back in the day I put quite a bit of effort into boosting my profile on LinkedIn, and I don't believe that effort ever paid any dividends at all.  The one and only value I can think of that LinkedIn actually delivered for me was that it let customers and prospects find me, back when I had a job where that mattered.

The world could use a good, transparent equivalent of LinkedIn.  One that wasn't annoying and grasping.  How that pays off I have no idea, but my intuition says there must be a way.  That's an opportunity for some entrepreneur who recognizes the incredible suckiness of LinkedIn today...

Snow in Paradise...

Snow in Paradise...  Our forecast for yesterday called for a half inch or so of rain.  Instead we got rain for a while, turning into slush, and finally into sloppy wet snow – about 2 inches of it.  Dang it!  We're hoping for a fast melt with the warmer temperatures forecast for the next five days.  But ... after that, the forecast has about an inch of rain followed by up to six inches of snow, over a four day period.  Double dang it!  We're ready for spring :)