The trailer goes to work...

The trailer goes to work...  I actually used it a bit yesterday, to pick up trash.  But this morning I used the trailer for its intended purpose, for the first time: hauling brush.  Prior to building this, I had two inferior choices.  I could use the small commercial trailer I have for the ATV (holds 1/3 cubic yard, and nothing over 30" long), or I could use the forklift on my tractor (great for big branches, but worthless for the smaller stuff that is the vast majority of the waste I produce when pruning).  Over the past couple of days I pruned three trees and two shrubs, making four good-sized piles of brush scattered around the yard.  With the trailer I was able to compress them all down into a single load, and take them to my brush pile without leaving a trail of trash behind me.

Success!

One of the trees (a red-leafed plum) and the two shrubs (unidentified, but I think they may be Syringa) were originally grafts – one plant was used for the root-stock, and the other for the more decorative above-ground plant.  All three of these have sprouted prodigiously from the root-stock, sending nearly vertical branches heading for the sunlight.  On the plum some of them had reached 8' in length.  On all three plants, when they were in leaf I couldn't see the trunk and didn't realize that I had sprouting root-stock.  Right now, with no snow and the leaves just starting to bud out, I could easily see what was going on.  It took quite a bit of pruning to get them all.  Between the three plants, I'd guess there were close to 100 of these branches, from 1/4" or so to an inch in diameter.  About half of them were too big to cut with the short-handled loppers I have (at right), so I had to saw all of them.  The plants sure look a lot better now!  The plum had been struggling, so I'm hoping that the roots will be devoted to nourishing the desired top-stock now, and it will get healthier...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Debbie and I drove up to Hardware Ranch (and on toward Ant Flats) last night, late enough so that the sun had just set when we got back.  For much of our trip, the sun was at a low angle, just over the Wasatch Mountains to our west.  This made for some interesting lighting.  We also took my spotting scope, and I tried for some wildlife photos.  Given that I was hand-holding the camera (as they don't make a holder for the iPhone 6S+ that I have), I'm pleasantly surprised by the results.  The photo at right was taken looking down toward the residences and barn at Hardware Ranch, from a corner of the “back” way up to the visitor's center.  We don't know what those trees are with the yellow branches, but we've been watching them get more and more yellow as spring approaches.

We spotted this raptor sitting on the ground about 150' from Ant Flats Road, sitting in grass nearly as tall as it was.  After looking at it for a bit in the binoculars, I set up my spotting scope to get a photo.  Naturally, that caused the bird to fly away – to about twice as far from me :)  The photos would have been much better if the little so-and-so had stayed put!  After considering its perch-on-the-ground behavior and its appearance, we're pretty sure this is a juvenile Northern Harrier.

At the 5M cabin (by a set of gorgeous waterfalls), Debbie spotted this pair of Sandhill Cranes; female on the left, male on the right.  She spotted them first as we were driving behind a little knoll that obscured them, and when we popped out from behind the knoll it took her several minutes to find them again.  I thought she had imagined them :)  These two were brightly backlit by the sun at a low angle (see their shadows), which is a difficult photographic setup, as my spotting scope was looking nearly into the sun.  I'm really surprised how well this shot turned out.

After we turned around and headed home, we spotted a large herd (around 50 animals) of elk on a hillside about a mile west of us.  At that point we were in the shade of the mountains alongside us, but the elk were around 600 or 700 feet higher than us, and brightly lit by the setting sun.  It was a pretty scene even by eyeball, and even better in the binoculars or spotting scope.

What a great drive that was!

Lingual papilla in Paradise...

Lingual papilla in Paradise...  I could hardly get the preceding post typed in, as I was salivating over the delightful scents wafting up from our kitchen.  Debbie is there, in the final stages of making a pasta dish.  It has bacon, asparagus, mushrooms, peas, cheese and lemon – and all those perfumes are hitting me on an empty belly.  Hence the stimulation of my lingual papilla, aka “taste buds”.

At this moment I live only for Debbie's call out that our lupper is ready!

Paradise goose...

Paradise goose...  Yes, again :)  This time I managed to get a few photos in full sunlight.  I sure hope I can get the goslings when the time comes!

Paradise trailers...

Paradise trailers...  The last bits of painting were done yesterday morning (black on the metal parts).  This morning I assembled the sides onto the trailer for its debut piece of work: cleaning up the trash alongside the highway.  I took the photo at right just before I headed out to the highway to pick up the debris my fellow humans decided to toss out their window as they drove by.  I'm not too happy with them at the moment, as my back hurts from bending over about 10,000 times to pick up their crap.  I cleaned up about a quarter mile of one side of the road, along our property and my neighbor Tim's.   All together I picked up about half a cubic yard of beer cans and bottles, fast food wrappings, and a little bit of just about anything else you can think of.  That included a baby bottle, an empty box of condoms, a quarter of a front bumper, a CFL light bulb, and a bottle of Oxycontin with several pills remaining.

In the photo you can see a tractor with a fertilizer spreader running in our field.  That's Scott N., the fellow who leases our south field, putting down phosphate fertilizer on the alfalfa he planted last year.  He rents that (quite nice) fertilizer spreader for $30 from IFA, the same place where he buys the fertilizer.  I had no idea that such implements could be rented at all, much less at that kind of a reasonable price.  I'm gonna have to check into that!

My little trailer caused a little stir this morning :)  First, our friend Michelle H. pronounced it “too cute!”  Then, after I took it out to pick up trash, my neighbor across the highway (Gary S.) drove over in his ATV to take a look.  He wanted to know what the orange blight was :)  Then I had two people driving by stop to ask where I'd bought it.  They were disappointed to hear that I'd built it, as they wanted to go get one for their ATV!

I'm very happy with how this project turned out, even though it was far more work than I'd imagined it would be – especially the painting...

Paradise goose...

Paradise goose...  She's turned around to face our house directly this morning, and she was eyeballing me carefully the whole time I was taking these photos.  I set up my spotting scope outside (so no windows) about 155' from the base of the tree she's in, and got some better photos:

The mama goose is (according to what I've read) always the one sitting on the eggs.  The papa spends a lot of time in the general area, guarding the nest.  I am carefully keeping away from that area, so as not to stress them, so I don't know what his behavior is if there's a perceived threat of some kind.

Yesterday I twice saw the mama leave (presumably to feed) and return to the nest.  Her approach and landing have to be seen to be believed – somehow she manages to steer those giant wings of hers in between all the branches and end up perched on the edge of the nest.  It looks impossible to a bystander, but she does it without apparent effort.  Her mate flies with her, right up to the nest, but at the last second veers off to the side.

You can see in these photos how carefully the mama is watching me.  If looks could kill, Debbie would be making cremation arrangements right now...

Canadian goose nesting...

Canadian goose nesting ... in a tree!  This goose appears to be sitting on eggs in a nest about 40' high in a (I think) box elder tree.  The tree is on my neighbor's property, about 50' north of our property's edge.  We think the nest (which has been there at least two years) was an old hawk's nest. 

I took that photo through my telescope, at 45 power, from 175' away through a window.  I'm going to try for a better one when I get full sunlight, hopefully tomorrow.

Canadian geese normally nest on the ground, but when we searched for information about Canadian geese nesting in a tree, we found plenty of other examples – so this isn't quite as weird as we thought it was :)

Debbie's first question: how are the goslings going to get down to the ground from up there?  My guess: they get pitched out like wood ducks do with their babies, and they bounce when they hit the ground.  I hope we manage to catch that event!

How do cats land on their feet?

How do cats land on their feet?  Interesting slo-mo footage here...

The latest Blue Origin flight...

The latest Blue Origin flight...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Just finished putting the last coat of orange paint on the sides for my trailer.  The experience of painting this trailer has convinced me that I need to get a paint sprayer :)  While I was putting the next-to-last coat on (yesterday) I remembered that I have to do some black painting, of bare metal parts.  These are the latches that hold the top corners between sides together, plus the exposed bolts on the pockets mounted on the bottom.  I will do this last bit of painting (or possibly just the first coat, if it turns out to need two) this afternoon.  By Monday afternoon, or possibly Tuesday morning, I should be ready to actually use this trailer!

Yesterday afternoon Debbie and I ventured down to Maddox Ranch House for our “lupper”.  We both had fried chicken for our entree.  I thought it was the best I've had up here, but Debbie likes the fried chicken at Angie's better.  They both are very good to be sure.  I had soup (a cheesy broccoli and carrot cream soup) and Debbie had a salad (with homemade raspberry vinaigrette dressing); both were outstanding.  There were of course all the usual things about the meal to be fond of: the bread, the drinks, the excellent service.  But then there was dessert: fresh strawberry pie for me, raspberry cream pie for Debbie.  That strawberry pie was strawberry heaven on earth: perfectly ripe berries, a sauce that had just the right sweetness, and fresh (real!) unsweetened whipped cream.  I didn't taste Debbie's raspberry pie, but judging from the noises she made while eating it, it must have been pretty spectacularly good.

While we were enjoying the meal, I saw one particular waitress walk by our table a dozen or so times.  She was perhaps 35 years old, and not a beauty by conventional standards – but she had a wonderfully sunny and cheerful face as she greeted all the diners and coworkers she passed.  Her smile was infectious; it cheered me up every time I caught her (which was often!).  On our way out of the restaurant, she happened to be walking toward me, so I stopped and told her how much her beautiful smile had cheered me – and I got my own 10 kilowatt smile in response.  That was fun :)

Paper tape...

Paper tape...  This article brought back all sorts of memories for me.  Several of the earliest computers I built (back in the mid- to late-'70s) used paper tape as their only non-volatile memory.  I started with a baudot teletypewriter (a Teletype Model 28 ASR) jointly purchased with a friend that we named “Ralph”.  When I got tired of waiting several hours for a long tape to load, I built an optical tape reader that could read a couple hundred characters per second – a huge advance.  My little hobby area had a large number of paper tape rolls, each containing the object code of a program or the text source code.

Hobby computing was just a bit different back in those days!  Not better, just different.  In some ways it was more exciting, because all of us participating in the hobby had the sense that we were oddballs on the fringe of something growing.  We really had no sense at all for how big and important these little computers would become – we were just having fun pushing the envelope of what was possible...

Local online paper...

Local online paper ... pranks the community for April Fool's.  The idea of a “Gentleman’s Club” (a common euphemism for stripper bar) in Cache County is pretty much unimaginable – unless it were the kind of gentleman's club they reported!

My favorite April Fool's day hoax...

My favorite April Fool's day hoax ... perpetrated by the BBC:

What have we all been missing?

What have we all been missing?  Paragraph in a fascinating article:

In a 2011 study, 18 healthy volunteers were given four doses of psilocybin. The vast majority of participants reported prolonged positive changes in attitude and mood, feelings that lasted for at least 14 months. In follow-up research, scientists determined that many of the volunteers from both studies had undergone a change in personality, something that is supposed to remain relatively fixed after 30. Participants had become more open-minded, tolerant and interested in fantasy and imagination.

If you've been living under a rock for the past 50 or 60 years, psilocybin is the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”. 

It's encouraging (to me, anyway) to see a piece like this in the mainstream press, instead of in Rolling Stone.

I know a few people who admit to having used either psilocybin or LSD, and I've read about others (including Steve Jobs, famously).  None of these people have any observable negative effects.  Some of them are standout creative people, especially the engineers I've known.  Something I found interesting, though it may simply be coincidence: they were all particularly pleasant people to associate with.  It's experiences like this, rather than any personal experience with illegal drugs, that make me highly skeptical of the frightening stories that the government and other authority figures tell us.  My own observations negatively correlate with these stories...

Keep 'em out with a wall!

Keep 'em out with a wall!  Well, that didn't work so well, did it?

This is actually an interesting demonstration of what happens when you have a contest between a government project and a capitalist profit motive.  The latter's gonna win every time!

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  This morning I got a topcoat onto one side of the trailer sides.  That took two hours altogether!  If I keep this up, I might actually finish those sides one of these days :)

While waiting for that coat to dry, I came back inside and started working on the accumulated bills and receipts.  After a couple hours of that, I could stand no more, and decided to take a break.

So I finished putting my new spotting scope (a Swarovski ATX95) together, and took it outside to see how well it worked (or didn't).  The first poking around by eyeball got me pretty excited – the field of view feels wide and flat, and is crystal-clear from edge to edge.  At the lowest power (30x) I couldn't detect any aberration at all.  At the highest power (70x) I could see a bit of radial brightness variation, but no color aberrations.  The tripod is smooth and easy to use, and I really like the fact that the zoom and focus are on adjacent rings, right near the tripod mount where they jiggle the scope less.  Very nice all around.

Then I tried putting the camera on.  All I did was slip on a disk with a hole in it (supplied by the scope's maker).  This adapter is intended to be coupled with a holder for a mobile phone, but there are no holders available for the iPhone 6S+ that I have, so instead I simply held the iPhone in place.  The three photos below are my first three attempts through the scope.  The first two are at 30x, the last a repeat of the second, but at 70x:

For that first photo I was 22 feet from the feeder. For the last two, I was 160' from the base of the tree.  I think I'm gonna like this thing :)  Now I just need a bird to stand still long enough for me to get a photo of it!

Word of the day...

Word of the day...  Via my brother Scott:

deja poo: a political term describing the feeling that you've heard that shit before.

Ha!

Comet 67P...

Comet 67P...  Via the Rosetta robotic explorer, of course...

Extraordinary portraits...

Extraordinary portraits...  Photographs of homeless people...

Paradise postcards...

Paradise postcards...  I looked out our office window a minute ago, and said to Debbie: “We live in a postcard!”  Why?  Because I was looking at the isolated peaks to our north, snow-covered, and lit up by the rising sun while we were still in twilight.  It's the sort of scene you'd find on a postcard, and we get to see it every day...

Yesterday morning we were worried about Mo'i (our oldest field spaniel).  After weeks of him obviously feeling better, and urinating much less, he was once again getting lethargic and urinating at a rate you wouldn't believe unless you actually witnessed it.  The weeks of feeling better were while we had him on Clavamox (an antibiotic often prescribed for urinary tract infections in dogs).  He had finished a three week course of it about 10 days ago – but here he was, looking like the UTI had recurred.

So we called our (wonderful!) vet's office and told them the situation.  They asked us to bring a urine sample in.  A few minutes later, I was outside trying to hold a small bottle in the right place under Mo'i – and he was looking at me with such a questioning look on his face.  Why are you doing this?  You never did this before!  Let me pee in peace!

Even though I only caught maybe 10% of the urine in the bottle (and 20% on my hands), I managed to get more than enough for their testing.  We ran it up to the vet's office and then went into town to do a few errands.  On the way home we called them to see if they had any news – and learned that our vet had (personally) run the urine sample up to the veterinary school at USU for some special testing.  In the afternoon she called us with the results: Mo'i's urine is highly alkaline (unusual), has lots of uric acid crystals (bad), and he had a UTI again (which is what we suspected).  Poor old man!  The vet prescribed one more round of Clavamox, but asked permission to culture the infection in Mo'i's urine, to find out if we had some bacteria there that Clavamox wasn't knocking completely out.  That may result in us switching to another antibiotic, but we won't know for up to a week.  She also prescribed some special food (low in urea, a precursor chemical to those uric acid crystals) and passed along a recommendation from the folks at USU to add methionine to his food (this helps reduce the alkalinity of his urine).  We had to go to a health food store to get that; it's not something a vet or pharmacy normally carries.

Just a few hours after giving Mo'i his first dose of Clavamox, he was feeling noticeably better.  That's such a fast response that I thought I must be imagining it – and then I saw him run to his food bowl.  Mo'i hasn't actually flat-out run in years.  Then he was jumping around with food anticipation just like the two youngsters.  Finally, last night he produced only a tiny fraction of the urine he had just the day before (we judge this by the diaper weight in the morning).  That's an amazingly fast reaction to an antibiotic!  He may end up being on antibiotics for the rest of his life.

Yesterday afternoon we went on a drive up Hardware Ranch and toward Ant Flats.  We saw all sorts of wildlife: bald eagles, ferruginous hawks, northern harriers, belted kingfishers, Sandhill cranes, American dippers, bazillions of deer and elk, and more.  We took a slightly different route than usual (going up the “back way” to the Hardware Ranch visitor's center) and were able to drive up to within about 200' of a herd of 50 or so elk with a bunch of deer mixed in.  That herd had a magnificent bull elk, who stood on the hill just above us and stared us down.  Beautiful!

Seen on the Internet...

Seen on the Internet...  I'm not the only one thinking this!

Paradise water...

Paradise water...  The Paradise irrigation water company had their annual shareholder's meeting, which I attended along with a motley collection of geezers and their wives, and a couple of token youngsters (aka people under 50).  Unlike the predictably contentious meeting last year, when a water shortage loomed, this years meeting was very cheerful.  Porcupine Reservoir is almost certain to fill to the brim this year, barring a giant meteorite strike or catastrophic eruption at Yellowstone.  That means that all the farmers are sure to get their full allotment of irrigation water, and that of course means contented farmers.

So we zoomed through all the formalities of reading and accepting last year's minutes, a status report, and opening the floor for questions.  There was much good humor, even though there were no free donuts this time.  Even the election of three new Board members was done to general good cheer and no contention, with just one candidate for each of the three districts.  By the time we got around to the last one, we were all tired of the process and we just re-elected the existing Board member by acclamation – didn't even bother with the nomination :)

The most interesting bit to me was the review of the financial statement.  The small scale of this water company amazes me.  Their total expenses for the year (which includes assessments for their share of the Porcupine Reservoir itself and the High Line water delivery canal) are well under $100,000 – and they've got over 6 months of expenses in the bank.  Things like the accountant's fee ($400) are significant enough, proportionally, to be on their own line on the annual P&L. Such a tiny little enterprise ... and yet there are hundreds of people whose livelihoods are utterly dependent on it.  Of course the biggest reason why it's so inexpensive to run this little water company is that it's not a government enterprise – it's basically a formalized cooperative, a non-profit mutual benefit society.  As such it has huge incentives for reducing costs, and every shareholder is cognizant of that. 

One can only imagine what would happen if the government were to take over.  Here in Utah, my guess would be a trebling of expenses.  In California, it would easily be much more than that.  They spent $3.5 million building a bridge over a creek on a two lane road – some California bureaucrat would look at this water company as an opportunity to build an empire, and soon we'd have office buildings, platoons of administrators, unions everywhere, etc., etc.  My guess would be something like 100x the current expenses of Paradise Irrigation.

I love living here!

Devil-spawn in Paradise...

Devil-spawn in Paradise...  After having a nice cup of tea late this morning, I took my cup down to the kitchen sink and washed it out with hot water.  Well, I tried to – but there was no hot water!  After asking Debbie if she'd noticed the hot water wasn't working (no, she hadn't), I headed down to the basement to see what disaster had befallen our hot water heater.  At this point it's the only thing left in our “mechanical room” that hasn't been replaced, so my assumption was it had died.

On my way down the stairs, Debbie hollered down to ask if perchance the water was running in the cattery sink.  Why, yes it was.  It then turned out that Konani (our newest addition) had previously been suspected of turning on the faucets so he could play in the water.  Apparently he turned on the hot water this time – and drained the entire tank of hot water!

I thought of a way to kitten-proof the faucets, by strapping a bungee cord around the handles (first photo below).  I pulled out our container of bungees and went to work.  Meanwhile, Devil-spawn (aka Konani, second photo below) decided to spill the bungees onto the floor, and as fast as he could distribute them to the far corners of his universe.  This caused me to remember all sorts of words and terms that I have exercised only infrequently since leaving the U.S. Navy, lo these many moons ago.  I spent 10 seconds kitten-proofing the faucet, and 10 minutes gathering bungees, some of which were in the next zip code.  The whole time I was doing this, Devil-spawn was riding on my slipper, chewing and clawing as fast as he could.  I think he was trying to fell me.  My words, which would have scorched any mortal being, had no discernible effect on him.

Oh, and the hot water heater works just fine.

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  We woke up to a couple more inches of snow this morning.  In the photos below, note particularly the size of the pile of snow that fell off the barn's roof (the pile off the house is even bigger!):

I took those just before I went into the barn to start painting the trailer sides.  Here's what it looked like before and after I got the first coat of primer on:

That's 90 minutes worth of painting there, because I used a brush.  It's going to take a total of 6 steps to paint these, because I have to paint each side with one coat of primer and two top coats.  It works best, I've learned, if I flip the pieces in between each coat – but that means I have to wait longer between coats, so that the coat I just did is hard enough to stand up to resting on the rails.  I'm going to try priming the second side later this afternoon; we'll see if that was a bright move a bit later :)

The latest North Korean propaganda film...

The latest North Korean propaganda film...  The North Korean regime regularly releases this sort of thing.  It's hard for me to believe that these films actually generate any positive effect for the regime.  On the other hand, they keep making them ... so maybe they do.  In any case, I think it's useful for outsiders to view these once in a while, to get an understanding for just how loony that regime is.  It's amazing, and appalling, that a regime like this still exists on the planet.  The demise of the Soviet Union didn't end it all..

It's still snowing in Paradise...

It's still snowing in Paradise ... and it gives every indication of doing so all night and all day tomorrow.  We've got about eight inches on the ground right now, wet, gloppy, heavy stuff.  The temperature is well above freezing, so the snow is half-melted before it even hits the ground.  I'm guessing it's all gone by the end of the day on Thursday...

Heard on NPR this morning...

Heard on NPR this morning...  I got in my truck this morning to drive home from Home Depot.  When I flipped on the radio, there was a program in progress.  Starting with the first bits I heard, this dialog between an NPR on-the-street reporter (NPR) and a young woman (YW) he approached cold (transcript is from memory, but if it's not perfect it's very close):

NPR: I'm here to see what people on the street think of Bernie Sanders.
YW: Ok.
NPR: What do you think is the first, most important issue that Bernie should tackle?
YW: Auto-correct.  He should fix auto-correct on smart phones.
NPR: (giggling) Yeah, I'd like that fixed, too.  But seriously, what would you want Bernie to do?
YW: I was serious.  I can't think of anything more important than that!
NPR: (still giggling) Well, what about, say, terrorism?
YW: (peeved) What, don't you think terrorists have problems with auto-correct?
NPR: (speechless for a moment, then walking away) I'm so ashamed right now.

The. Doom. Approaches.

Bad news in Paradise...

Bad news in Paradise...  Our vet phoned this evening to tell us the lab results on the tissue she removed from Koa last Thursday: they got a definitive diagnosis -- it's an osteosarcoma.  That's an aggressive bone cancer, malignant and usually metastatic.  When it's not in a limb or digit (as with Koa), there is no treatment with even a reasonable chance at a good outcome.  This is a fairly rare cancer in cats, rare enough that our vet has never seen it before.  She's going to do some research on it, but ... we're not expecting good news.  It seems likely we'll be doing palliative care for him, treating his pain and any secondary issues as long as we can.  We'll buy him what time we can, but we won't let him suffer.

He's actually looking pretty good at the moment, better than he has for a few weeks now.  We've isolated hom, and he's getting lots of attention, a heated bed, and all the kitty junk food he wants...

Progress in Paradise...

Progress in Paradise...  That may not look like all that much at right, but it represents a whole bunch of progress.  As I write this, I'm pretty much wiped out, physically, from the effort it took to get to this point today :)

The first task came before I mounted the wooden platform (the orange thing) onto the steel frame (the part with the wheels).  I'd already assembled and aligned the frame, but I never had aired up the tires or greased all the (numerous) points that need it.  There are 8 zerc fittings plus a couple dozen exposed metal points where good old-fashioned grease was needed.

I figured I'd do the easy part first: the zerc fittings.  Little did I know how much work that was going to be!  I used up all my grease (about a half tube) on the first zerc fitting.  I have a pneumatic grease gun, so that took about 15 seconds.  Off to Tractor Supply I went to pick up a couple tubes of grease.  When I got there, I found them on sale for half price, so I bought eight of them.  Good thing I did – I went through four entire tubes before I filled those fittings.  There must be huge grease reservoirs inside the wheels.  That's a good thing, I guess, but I was sure surprised!

Then came the time to mount the wooden platform onto the frame.  That platform weighs around 160 lbs., more than I can maneuver by myself.  It started out up on sawhorses, as you've seen on previous posts.  I roped it to my hoist and lifted it up, then positioned the frame under it and lowered it back down.  The job of getting it exactly in the right place while lowering it the last little bit was made especially challenging by the fact that the control for the hoist was 15 feet over my head, in the loft.  I ran up and down the stairs about 20 times before I finally had the thing in position, about 1/2" above the mounting holes.  Then all I had to do was lift the frame slightly and slip the bolts into place.  That sounds easy when I write it like that, but it was actually quite a challenge: heavy parts that needed to be held to within 1/16" or so of the right place while inserting the bolt with my “free” hand.  That part would have been a lot easier with a couple of helpers :)

But I got it done.  Yay!

The cart rolls around very nicely.  All the sides are built (I forgot to take photos of that event), and tomorrow they're going up on sawhorses to be painted.  Then I'm done!

“I hate to say something that ugly...”

“I hate to say something that ugly...”  Listen.

Things you don't expect to hear...

Things you don't expect to hear...  I listen to NPR sometimes to get a better understanding of progressive views, so you don't have to.  On the way back from an errand this morning (picking up grease from Tractor Supply!), I heard an NPR reporter named Alina Selyukh giving a report about the Apple/FBI brouhaha over the terrorist's phone that the FBI wants to unlock.

So what's unexpected about that?  Here's what: her report was cogent, accurate, and very much on point.  One example of the unexpected excellence: she spent a bit of time discussing some of the speculation on the nature of the outside (i.e., non-Apple) help that the FBI is getting to unlock that phone.  She listed several methods, some of which required physical access to the particular phone (hardware-based methods) and some of which did not (exploits of software vulnerabilities).  Alina then talked about how the methods requiring physical access really don't impact our personal security (for our own iPhones) nearly as much as the software vulnerabilities do.  That's a distinction that's obvious to a technologist, but not to many people, and Alina did a great job navigating that with easy to understand language.  Her whole discussion, in fact, was completely jargon-free.

Kudos, Alina!  That was a very nice job.  And you've just enticed me to follow you on Twitter – and I have to tell you that's the very first time I've even been tempted to follow someone on NPR.

Paradise pictures...

Paradise pictures...  This is what it looks like right now.  Left-to-right: looking out our back door, out our front door, and the pile of snow on the front porch (which I'm about to go shovel).  Sheesh...

Wait, what!?!

Wait, what!?!  Reading this article made me feel ... old.

I've worked with (young) people who didn't believe me (until I showed them via Google) when I told them that computer screens used to work by shooting electrons through a vacuum to strike phosphorescent material that glowed.  These were cathode-ray tubes (CRTs), familiar to anyone over about 30 years old – but literally museum pieces today.  Those CRTs seemed magical to us in the '70s, when they started to replace teletypes as the human interface to computers.  At first CRTs were only monochrome (e.g., black & white), then in the '80s full color CRTs started to become common.

Those CRTs were far from perfect.  The displays were a little fuzzy, the devices were large, heavy, and power-hungry, and the fidelity near the edges was notably worse than in the center.  Still, they let us put text and pictures on a screen, and they were way better than those damned teletypes.

Then the flat liquid crystal displays came along in the '90s.  They got better and cheaper very quickly, and in the blink of an eye they totally replaced CRTs.  They're smaller, lighter, sip electricity, and (best of all) their fidelity is darned near perfect.  The fuzziness is gone ... text is crisp and clear from edge-to-edge.  Lines are straight.  The screen is flat, not curved.  They are so much better than CRTs that nobody cried when CRTs went the way of the dodo.

And then ... these nuts go to a whole bunch of trouble to make a video game played on a modern flat screen look like the very imperfect CRTs.  Because nostalgia, or something less charitable.

And here I am remembering how magical it seemed the first time I saw a teletype printing computer output.

I feel old.

Mind, blown!

Mind, blown!  This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time.  As Will Smith says: I gotta get me one of these!  The magnetic viewing film is available today from Amazon (at that link) and it's quite inexpensive; I just ordered myself a piece.  The latch magnets are on backorder at the moment, but I placed my order.

The engineer in me wants to know how they print these things.  From the speed and the fact that they're doing it on rare earth magnets, I'm thinking that they somehow reorient the fields inside an existing conventional magnet.  The vague descriptions on the Correlated Magnetics site seem to support that notion.  But I have no clue how they can do that on the scale they're working with...

Three, going on four...

Three, going on four...  Inches of snow on the ground right now, in Paradise.  And it's still snowing.  Really!

The weather forecast calls for a high of 45°F today, and rain through this evening.  You'd think that would take care of most of this white stuff, but it's not quite so easy.  The snow has been sliding off the roof of our house all night, and now we've got piles all around the house about 18" high.  That will take another week or so to go away, especially on the north side of the house.

Sheesh.

This man is ready for spring!

Quote of the day...

Quote of the day...  This time, from P. J. O'Rourke:

One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.

“Individual responsibility.”  Sounds almost anachronistic, doesn't it?

Tom's corollary: “I hate it when I’m an idiot!” 

Curiosity is looking at...

Curiosity is looking at ... some weird and wonderful eroded rocks, on Mars...

Morning smile...

Morning smile...  From The Onion, this lead:

ITHACA, NY—In an ambitious attempt to revive a population long considered to be on the brink of extinction, scientists announced Friday they have slowly begun to reintroduce normal, well-adjusted human beings back into society.
According to officials at Cornell University, where for the past 18 years conservation researchers have operated an enclosed sanctuary for humans who are levelheaded and make it a habit to think before they speak, the endangered group is being cautiously reintegrated into select locations nationwide in hopes that they can reestablish permanent communities and one day thrive again.

Read the whole thing!

I expect this attempt to fail :)

California leads the way...

California leads the way ... to lower employment and more automation.  They've struck a deal to raise the minimum wage to $15/hr statewide.  I'm expecting the other usual suspects (Blue America: Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Washington, Oregon, etc.) to follow suit soon.  That's great news for states like Utah whose minimum wage is the same as the federal rate (currently $7.25/hr) – kids who want a job but whose skills aren't worth $15 an hour will move from states like California to states like Utah.  In other words, motivated workers will vote with their feet.  Blue America will lose those good workers and employers will cut jobs or replace unskilled workers with automation – something we're already seeing in those cities that have raised the minimum wage to $15/hr.

I am so glad to be living in fly-over country!

Paradise Ponders...

Paradise Ponders...  I had an extra-long session with the kids I'm tutoring yesterday morning.  One of them (Abby) is really digging into programming, mostly because with just a few examples the key ideas are starting to make sense to her.  She came back over for a second session instead of going to the local Easter egg hunt with the rest of her family.  I gave them a homework problem of a simple bubble-sort (of an array of integers), and she wanted to see what it would take to modify it to work with strings (an array of names).  I showed her how to use the Chrome developer tools and I swear I could see that cartoon light bulb going off in her head.  We spent about an hour going over a number of questions she asked, including one on sort performance that got us into an overview of Big O notation and what that means for performance characterization.  She's picking this stuff up way faster than I did.  Debbie was in the kitchen watching us work, and she tells me that Abby looked very excited as we worked.  It's fun for me when the kids actually want to learn; so very different than my volunteering experience years ago in the Chula Vista “magnet” high school, where not a single student was interested in anything at all about the class...

The rest of my day yesterday somehow got consumed by some shopping and other running around.  I didn't do a darned thing on the trailer – and I thought I would finish the construction yesterday!  The weather turned out to be very nice – blue sky, sunshine, and mild temperatures.  That is, until Debbie and I decided to take a drive out to Porcupine Reservoir.  There we ran into snow flurries – while still under that nice blue sky and in sunshine!  The nearest clouds large enough to produce that snow were miles away, so what must have happened is that winds were blowing that snow a long way from the source cloud.  It was weird!

We chose Porcupine Reservoir because we hoped there would be fewer weekend visitors there, and that worked out just fine.  On the other hand, there wasn't very much wildlife to see.  The most interesting thing we (Debbie, actually) spotted was a group of four Sandhill Cranes foraging in a field about a quarter mile off the road.  We had a great view of those strange birds.  We also got to see some baby goats and lambs in a couple of farmyards.  There were a few deer, too, but that was it for wildlife.  The reservoir itself was looking very spring-like: all the ice is gone, and the level is up to within about 15' of the top.  I don't think we're going to have any water issues this year!  I walked across the entire earthen dam and took the photos below on that walk:

Both were taken near the south end of the dam, the first looking west across the drainage and the second looking east across the reservoir. It's a pretty spot...

My friend and neighbor Tim D. has been gone for a few days to the Green River area for some springtime sightseeing with his family.  He enlisted us to give his dogs (Lexy and Marley) a little attention during the day (in the mornings and evenings his granddaughter Randi was there to take care of them).  This is nothing but fun for us: those are two delightful and cute little dogs, and after being penned up for 4 or 5 hours they are very happy to see us!  They had a grand time playing with each other.  The photo at right was from one of those visits.  Tim and family are back now, so we no longer get to indulge in this dog-sitting :)

Trailers in Paradise, and ancient cats...

Trailers in Paradise, and ancient cats...  Well, I made some more progress today, though not as much as I'd like to have.  I've got one of the long sides assembled.  Each of those 18 joints (between 2x4 and 1x6) has a bolt through it, and was glued.  Partway through I realized I hadn't purchased enough 1x6s for the slat.  Dang!  Another trip to Lowe's or Home Depot...

Our oldest cat is a fellow we call Koa.  We're not sure exactly how hold he is, but it's somewhere around 16 or 17.  We noticed a hard lump on his right hip a few weeks ago, and we've been visiting the vet with him to try and figure out what the heck it was.  Yesterday on one of those followup visits, she (Dr. Russell) advised us that it was getting larger, faster, and had started to invade some bone in his pelvis.  That didn't sound good, and the behavior was tumor-like, though she saw no other indications of cancer.  She advised surgery to remove it.

So today we took him up there to get that surgery.  He came through it just fine, and he's home now trying to recovery his dignity (and get some sleep).  The bad news is that the mass she removed was like nothing she's ever seen before – it looks like neither a typical infection nor a tumor.  We always get the weird things, it seems.  So she's going to simultaneously send samples off for biopsy (mainly to see if its a tumor), and culture it (just in case it's an infection of some weird kind).  We're putting the poor lad on Clavamox (antibiotic) preemptively, just in case it turns out to be an infection.  Early next week we should have a bit more information, and can make a decision about what to do.  We hope...

Shrimp in Paradise...

Shrimp in Paradise...  Last night Debbie made a new dish for us: shrimp in a tomatoey sauce with stewed tomatoes, with garlic, bell peppers, and mushrooms sauteed in butter, Italian seasonings, over spaghetti noodles.  Delicious!  Somehow we both managed to eat these gigantic servings, much to the disappointment of the dogs...

Progress in Paradise...

Progress in Paradise...  I got a few good hours in my shop this morning, and got enough done that I'm enjoying a sense of satisfaction about it.  First thing I did was to install the handle and wheels on my welder.  I'd bought the “portability” kit a while back, but then stupidly never actually put it together.  That's done (at right) and it does indeed make the welder portable.  Well, more portable than it was :)

The rest of the photos show various steps and progress with my fabrication of the stakes.  There are 18 stakes, each of them 2'6" long.  These were cut out of 8' 2x4s, and then one end of each had to be sawn down to match the pocket size.  That involved sawing about 1/4" from the bottom 5" of each of the narrow sides of each stake, and about 1/8" from the wide side.  In the first photo below, you can see just how thin a slice that made on the wide side!  I did this with my band saw, which made short work of something that would have been quite tedious without it.  Then I drilled three carefully placed holes in each of the stakes (for 54 holes in all); these are where the bolts that hold the slats on will go.  I finished all of that fabrication today – so now I have all 18 stakes sitting nicely in their steel pockets, and holes in the right place for each one.  Tomorrow I'll start putting on the slats!

“I hate you both!”

“I hate you both!”  You'll see why...

An even better way to stop robocalls?

An even better way to stop robocalls?  I've written here several times about our Sentry 2, the best call blocking device I'd ever tried.  A few weeks ago I read about an alternative to having your own call blocking device: a free service called Nomorobo.  We've been using it now for three weeks, and I have only positive things to report:

• It really is completely free.  They never even asked for a credit card.
• It's a blacklist-based system - it looks up the number calling you, and if it's in their (apparently huge) database, it gets blocked.  If the caller is not on the blacklist (and presumably your friends, family, and local people are not), they get through without any trouble.
• You don't have to do anything to maintain it.  With the Sentry 2, I spent some time every week adding numbers to block and numbers to allow.  With Nomorobo, I do nothing.  I like nothing :)

Here's what it's like to use the service.  Whenever someone calls you (including any robocalls), your phone rings as usual.  If it's a robocall, the phone rings just once: after that, Nomorobo blocks it and you're done.  If the phone rings more than once, it's a real call.  That's it.  That's the complete operating instructions.

We've had just one robocall slip through since starting our use of Nomorobo. That was a political call for Bernie Sanders (boy did they pick the wrong household for that!).  Our neighbors reported getting dozens of robocalls in the days leading up to our primaries this Tuesday.  Nomorobo blocked all but one of them.

At the same time, now we have zero problems with people getting through that we want to get through.  The Sentry 2 greets callers it doesn't know with a deliberately intimidating message, so if a store calls us and we don't have their number programmed in, they get that message.  Now they just hear the phone ring, as though we had no call blocking at all.

Summary: winner!

Can you...

Can you ... read this without feeling the doom?  What's going to happen when these precious little snowflakes meet the real world?

A doctoral candidate...

A doctoral candidate ... says she understands why women are less attracted to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) than men.  Her doctoral thesis is all about this phenomenon.  Here's an example section:

At first, the course purpose statement presents a view of knowledge as constructed by suggesting that there is a possibility that different conclusions can be drawn from the evidence by the choice to use “a” instead of “the” conclusion. However, the second sentence indicates that the techniques to analyze the evidence, once learned, are to be used instead of applied.  This indicates that the knowledge of the tools, as well as the tools themselves, are facts, and students will learn how to use the tools to find correct answers instead of becoming independent constructors of knowledge. This represents a conflict between active learning techniques and a view of knowledge as a static concept. While there is a recognition that students learn better through active learning techniques, the knowledge being learned is still viewed as factual and unchanging, further reinforcing the masculine nature of STEM education.

So, according to her, saying:

The answer to two plus two is four.

Is masculine, wrong-headed, and off-putting to women.  Instead we should say:

An answer to two plus two is four.

Because that's so much more sensitive, the answer might change over time, and it would make STEM more approachable for women.

There's much more babble of just this sort if you read the entire paper (it's not long, nor is it technical).

Somebody take this planet, please!