An old mortgage... I found this on eBay a few weeks ago, and picked it up for a few bucks. What caught my eye was the name “Dilatush” in it. I scanned the “cover” at right just to give a flavor for the thing. The entire mortgage is on two sheets of legal sized paper, typed on both sides. The buyer and debtor is Edward Dilatush, the older brother of my grandfather (father's side) Earle Dilatush. That makes him my great-uncle, I think. In 1934, he bought 5 acres of farm land for $1,000, put down $200 and took out a mortgage for the $800 remaining at 6% APR. He paid it all off in two years and two months.
My favorite part of this mortgage is the legal description of the property. I've transcribed the beginning of it below:
All that certain farm and premises, situate lying and being in the township of West Windsor, in the County of Mercer and the State of New Jersey, consisting of one tract of land, bounded and described as follows, to wit: Beginning at a stone standing in the middle of the public road leading from Edinburgh to Trenton and running down the same North seventy seven and three quarters degrees East, twenty two chains and seven links to another stone in the middle of said road thence by land of Theodore Tindall and John Applegate South six degrees East, twenty one chains and forty three links to a stone thence still by the said Applegate South twelve and a half degrees West,...
All those references to old-fashioned surveying, in a document less than 100 years old! Chains and links refer to a now-obsolete method surveyors used to measure distances. I can't imagine New Jersey still relies on stones in the middle of the street, but “monuments” demarcating surveying “sections” are still the norm, at least in the western U.S. Often these are concrete blocks, deeply sunk, with a round brass medallion sunk into the top. We have one of these on our property in Utah. The angles specified in quarters of a degree (1/1440th of a complete circle) are reflective of the limitations in precision of the surveyor's equipment of the day. More accurate equipment was available, but was so very expensive that it wasn't used for ordinary surveying.
I know this property, something I didn't expect when I picked up the mortgage. It was fairly close to the farm I grew up on, along what is today called Edinburg Road. I believe it was either on or close to the property that the present-day Mercer County Technical Schools are on. When I was a child, Edward's home was on it. I don't actually remember Edward – perhaps he had already died by then – but I do remember his wife and two of their daughters. I have a memory of being at their house with those daughters, playing with their kids, and especially enjoying their backyard pond (literally – this was dug out of the dirt). This would have been sometime around 1956 or 1957. I don't remember any of my siblings there, and a little oddly I remember my dad picking me up in our family's old '48 Dodge. Normally my mom would have been doing that.
Paradise ponders, chaos edition... Man, what a day! Four workers from Leading Edge (the company we use for our heating and air conditioning, and a few other things) showed up to start work on an accumulated list of projects here. First up was replacing our old water heater. It was on its last legs, and the capacity was less than we needed. It's been yanked, and in doing so they discovered the thing was nearly half full of sediment. Sheesh! Now we have a pair of brand new 50 gallon water heaters, plumbed in parallel. That gives us 100 gallons of nice hot water anytime we want it.
The workers also started on correcting a problem the home's previous owner created: not enough air returns to the furnace. This was causing us all sorts of problems. Basically the size of our furnace dictates that there be at least five returns in the house (returns are the grilles that return cold air to the furnace to be reheated; they're generally located near the floor). Our house only had two, and even those were undersized. Why did we only have two? Turns out the previous owner decided to cover up four returns! Argh! Today the workers installed two new returns; tomorrow they're going to install a third and enlarge the two existing ones. They're also going to install a large surface area filter on the furnace to reduce the resistance to air motion in the system. We're hoping that finally ends our series of heating problems.
After they've finished with the furnace, they're going to plumb our diesel and gasoline tanks to the “filling station” we started last year. We've talked with our mason, and he's started the project of putting rock on that. With any luck at all, in a couple of months we'll have our own little filling station here.
Meanwhile, the sprinkler workers were back at it today. They're still making trenches for the 6" water line and risers they're moving out of our back yard. Once that's done, it's grade correction, then sprinkler installation, followed by sod installation. They're going to be here a while.
Both of these groups of workers needed quite a bit of input from me today. I was constantly being pulled in one direction or another by these guys. All necessary stuff – I'm not complaining – but not at all conducive to getting anything done on my list of things to do!
But wait, there's more!
Debbie (who's doing fantastically well) really wanted some chicken noodle soup. To satisfy her requirements for a low sodium diet, that means we have to make it – and right at the moment, we means me! :) So I ran to the grocery store this morning, then came home and cleaned and chopped celery, onions, carrots, and roast chicken; sauteed the veggies, spiced up some unsalted chicken broth, dumped in the veggies and chicken, tossed in some fresh fettuccine to make some homemade chicken noodle soup. It tasted good to me, and got Debbie's enthusiastic approval. Meanwhile, the water in the house is turned off completely (because they were installing the water heaters), so I couldn't clean anything in the kitchen – not even my hands. I used paper towels and Pine-Sol to wash up with. :) Later in the day, when the water was restored, I managed to clean up the disaster area formerly knows as our kitchen.
But wait, there's still more!
Partway through my chicken soup preparations, I saw Miki (our oldest dog) vomiting. That made it three days in a row that he'd done so. Time to be worried. Debbie made a vet appointment, and right after I finished making the soup I headed to the vet with poor little Miki. We were worried about bloat, something that had happened to Mo'i (another of our field spaniels) nearly ten years ago. The vet quickly eliminated both bloat and a different kind of blockage. Good. But he suspects pancreatitis. He took blood and urine for testing, and we'll know for sure by Friday if that's what it is. The vet thinks it's equally likely that this is just some temporary GI disturbance, and will go away all on its own in a few days. If it is pancreatitis, then Miki will be going on a special low-fat diet for a while, and getting regular doses of anti-nausea and metronidazole (an antibiotic used to treat stomach infections, amongst other things). Other than the vomiting he seems to be just fine, except that he's gained almost ten pounds over the past year (from 41 to 50). There may be a diet in his future. :)
Paradise ponders, wifely hardware removal, impossible niceness, the return of the Internet, and great big smiles edition... Today Debbie had a planned surgery to remove the hardware that was inserted last year to hold her knee together while it healed. The surgery was a relatively minor one; she spent less than 45 minutes in the operating room. It's hard to imagine how it could possibly have gone any better. The surgeon reported zero complications, he saw that her bones were healing very nicely, and he found exactly what he suspected has been causing Debbie's pain when she exercises: two “protuberances” poking into a tendon, one from the hardware and one from a bony growth. He pulled all the hardware out, filled in some of the screw holes (the ones near her tibia plateau), and filed off the bony growth. She's now all nice and smooth under that troublesome tendon. She's also lighter by the amount of the hardware removed (the photo at left) – more than I was expecting! That fancy plate is quite heavy all by itself. The photo at right is a not-too-wonderful duplicate of the X-rays her surgeon took during the surgery. The upper right one shows the injector he used to squirt cement into the screw holes.
For this surgery we were at Cache Valley Hospital instead of the Intermountain Regional Hospital we usually go to. This was at the surgeon's request; he prefers their operating facilities. We've been there just once before, for an emergency room visit shortly after we moved here. We were impressed by the ER staff at the time, but the insurance we got for the following year didn't have Cache Valley hospital as part of their network, so we didn't go there. Our insurance this year includes both hospitals, so we accepted the surgeon's preference.
If you've been reading this blog for a while, you likely remember how impressed we were with the staff at Intermountain Regional Hospital. Like most other people here, they were friendly and warm – and competent. Well, Cache Valley Hospital, I have to say, managed to top even them. There are so many little ways they made this visit easier; I could be here listing them for hours. I'll just mention two that jumped out at me. In the outpatient surgery intake room, the patient's chair was an overstuffed recliner – extremely comfortable, and very comforting for Debbie. In both the intake area and in the recovery area, there are people whose entire job consists of running around to all the patients there to make sure they're ok. Drinks, snacks, blankets, pain meds, a cheerful conversation – whatever is needed to make the patients less anxious and more comfortable, that person was right there every 60 seconds or so to make sure it happened. This is so incredibly different than our experiences in San Diego that I am having trouble finding the words to describe them. Our entire experience there today was a series of pleasant surprises. Have you ever had a hospital experience like that? I certainly hadn't!
There's one other thing about the hospital that I can't fail to mention. When we scheduled the surgery last week, most of the collection of information was handled over the phone (very convenient, that was!). Shortly after we finished with that, I got a call from someone in accounting in the hospital. They'd noted that the entire cost of this surgery would be less (much less, actually) than our insurance deductible – so the entire cost would be out-of-pocket for us. The hospital made us an offer: if we'd prepay the cost at their fixed rate, they'd give us a 10% discount on their cash rate (lower than the rate they bill insurance companies). Now I'm sure that makes good business sense for them, as they'd get their money right away and without risk. But obviously, since we have the money available, it makes good sense for us, too. I happily took that offer – but I'm delighted that the offer was voluntarily extended. Someone's on the ball there, identifying a nice win/win for both the hospital and its customers.
On the way home from the hospital today, I asked Debbie if she'd like to pick up something to eat. She asked for soup (today is beef soup day!) from Los Primos. We stopped there and Debbie waited in the car while I ran in to pick up that soup. I placed my takeout order with a young man who's served us several times before. He asked why weren't eating in the restaurant, so I told him about Debbie's surgery. That brought a young woman (who has also served us many times) over to join the conversation. When I got to the part about Debbie requesting the soup, there were two of the biggest, brightest smiles I've ever seen – and I swear the room got considerably brighter. The two of them scurried off to the kitchen to make sure I left with the best selection of beef and vegetables in the soup. So sweet!
Yesterday our Comcast technician (a fellow named Tony) came out to our house, exactly as promised (even well within the window they'd said). Tony was bright, well-equipped with test gear, and had his brain fully engaged during his entire time here. He actually listened to what I had to tell him, and upon hearing the symptoms agreed that this couldn't be a cable modem problem. He didn't waste any time getting to a short list of three likely sources of the problem: a bad cable distribution amplifier, a bad connector in the interior wiring, or a bad underground service cable. That list is in his order of likelihood. We tested the amp first, and it was fine (and we had a great signal there, so that also eliminated the third possibility). We located the cable leading from the amp to the office where we have the modem located, and a nifty little tester he had quickly told us there was an intermittent problem in that cable. It turned out to be the connector behind the wall plate in Debbie's office. In five minutes Tony had that replaced. Then he noted that it was a crappy connector (I'm sure installed by our house's previous owner), so he checked all the other connectors in that cable. Two of them were similar crappy connectors, so he replaced them too. Then we logged into my cable modem and checked signal levels: rock solid, and 6db stronger than I'd ever seen. So we did a speed test, and it was about 50% higher for download and 100% higher for upload (compared with previous tests I'd done). The visit was at no cost to me. I can't think of any way Tony could have done a better job. If Comcast manages to keep this up (and assuming the same sort of thing is happening everywhere), they just might manage to turn around their worst-company-in-the-universe reputation!
Paradise ponders, leaping Sandhill cranes, snowy machines, and acrylic finish edition... Yesterday afternoon was beautiful: patchy clouds, lots of blue sky and sunshine, and most of the previous night's snow had melted. We went for a drive out to Hardware Ranch, hoping to spot some wildlife. We did see about 4.3 bazillion deer, but also the Sandhill crane pair I took a video of at right. Be sure to make it full screen so you can see the cranes. The clicking sound you hear is my car's four-way flashers going – we stopped right in the middle of the road to watch this. These cranes are migratory, and they've just arrived here for the summer over the past couple of weeks. A great many more stopped here for a break in their migration, then continued north. We'll see the reverse of this next fall. These two were performing a dance of sorts, very much different than their normal quite sedate behavior as they're feeding. I was uncertain that was a mating dance when I first saw it, but some reading I did today confirmed it.
We had problems all day yesterday with our cable provider (which is actually just Internet connection for us). It was up and down 35 times according to the logs my server keeps. That's by far the worst experience we've had yet. I called Comcast (our ISP), who is notorious for their bad customer service. My experience was ... not bad, actually. I got through their automated system and to an actual technician in under a minute. The technician actually listened to what I described of the symptoms, tried only sensible things (instead of the rote power cycle, reboot the router, etc.), and quickly arrived at the same conclusion that I did: because the problem is isolated to us, there must be a connectivity problem between the junction where our line branches off, and our house. That's Comcast's responsibility, so they need to get a technician out here to check it out. That technician is scheduled for today at 2 pm – less than 24 hours after I called. Either I got really lucky, or Comcast is actually working on their “worst company in the world” image...
Naturally, this morning our Internet is working perfectly. :)
That's our sprinkler contractor's trenching machine at right, in a shot taken yesterday morning. The snow has all melted now, but the yard is very wet and muddy. I suspect he won't be able to actually do any work until Tuesday or Wednesday. Dang it!
Yesterday, as planned, I finished putting the fourth coat of acrylic (water-based polyurethane) on the stairs I'm building for our sun room. This morning that last coat was nice and dry, so I flipped the stairs over and put the first coat of acrylic on the bottom. The more I use this modern finish, the more impressed I am with it. It goes on easily with a brush, and the self-leveling is so good that I'm not sure I could tell brushed from sprayed. There's little odor, and even that is not foul at all. It dries quite quickly, so much so that you have to work fairly fast so you don't ruffle some partly-dried surface. You only have to wait two hours (though I waited three just to be sure) between coats; it's dry enough at that point to sand. Cleanup is ridiculously easy: warm water to rinse out the bulk of the paint from the brush, a little soap and warm water to get the rest, and in the end the brush is just like new. Pretty close to ideal!
Paradise ponders, cold snowy morning and polyurethane edition... Well, dang it! We got freezing rain and snow last night, with our low temperature around 29°F. Our backyard scene at right I took this morning (check the EXIF data if you don't believe me!). The dogs are loving the snow, but all our trees with their tender new leaves and buds may not. Our apple and pear trees may have lost their flower buds, which were just starting to swell. The temperature was right at the borderline for damage.
I just got done putting the first coat of polyurethane on the sun room stairs I'm building. I'm going to put four coats on the top, sanding between them. It takes three hours to dry thoroughly, so it will take me all day today to get the top done. Then tomorrow I'll flip it and do the bottom – probably just three coats on the visible sections and two on the hidden. That means most of tomorrow will be needed, too – and then Tuesday I'll install them...
A real-life variable-length encoding challenge... I've been poking around the idea of building a “money” class for Java. This would be based on a purpose-made decimal floating point class, with better performance than BigDecimal and with features aimed at use in monetary calculations. That decimal floating point class will need a way to encode the decimal exponent of the number held.
There are several interesting questions when it comes to the necessary range of that exponent. For US dollars, a range of 10^-5 (thousandths of cents) to 10^14 (hundreds of trillions of dollars) would seem to be sufficient for just about any financial purpose. That might not be true for other currencies, though the range of 20 orders of magnitude is probably pretty close to the mark in any currency. For the rest of this discussion, I'll assume 20 orders of magnitude is what we need.
How should we encode that exponent? All the existing floating point representations I'm aware of do that with a biased binary number. For this case, they'd use a 5 bit number (the smallest number of bits that can hold 20 states) with a bias of 5 (meaning that you subtract 5 from the binary number to get the actual exponent). So, for example, the exponent 3 would be represented by the binary number 01000 (or 8 decimal), as 8 - 5 = 3. This scheme is very simple, allows asymmetry between the positive and negative ranges, and uses a fixed-length encoding. If there is a requirement for fixed-length encoding, I don't know any way to beat this method. But ... those 5 bits could hold 32 states, and we only need 20. We could expand the range possible to store (that's the usual solution), but for the case we're interested in those extra states would be wasted. What we'd really like would be a way to use less bits – and if two things are true, that's entirely possible.
First, it must be allowable (and useful!) to use a variable-length encoding. I the case I'm working, that is allowable, and it's also very useful (in particular, when storing large lists of numbers, like a bookkeeping journal). Second, the distribution of the numbers to be encoded must be uneven in a reasonably predictable way. Intuitively it seems clear that monetary amounts in a typical bookkeeping system are distributed unevenly. It's less clear how predictable that distribution is, but again, intuitively, it seems like at least the shape of the distribution curve should be similar for any size organization.
I happen to have a sample bookkeeping journal leftover from a past work engagement: real data, with about 40,000 numeric entries. With just a little work, I came up with the exponent distribution at right (click to embiggen). Three quarters of all the entries are either in the tens of dollars or hundreds of dollars range! The frequencies fall off very quickly above and below those two exponents. That's pretty darned uneven, which means we most definitely have an opportunity for a variable-length encoding.
Those frequencies are expressed in a normalized manner, so they all sum to 1. That means we can use a simple formula to calculate the average encoding length for any encoding we want to test.
The first one I tried has two lengths selected by the leading bit. The exponent would be encoded as either 0xx (for exponents 0..3) or 1xxxx (for exponents -5..-1 and 4..14). The average bit length for this encoding on the data I have would be 0.975 * 3 + 0.025 * 5 = 3.05. That's a pretty good payoff for such an encoding! Note that in no case does the length exceed 5 bits, which is what we'd have with fixed-length encoding. Also note that the first form has 4 states and the second 16 states, for a total of 20 states – exactly what we need. There are no “wasted” states.
The second one I tried has two lengths, with a second (longer) encoding selected by an escape code. The short code would be just two bits long, with 0..2 representing exponents 0..2, and 3 being the escape indicating a second 5 bit code following (so a total of 7 bits). This second code would represent exponents -10..-1 and 3..24 – a range considerably larger than what we actually need. The average bit length for this encoding on the data I have would be 0.915 * 2 + 0.085 * 7 = 2.425. That's less than half the fixed-length encoding of 5 bits. However, this encoding has a longer maximum length (7 bits vs. 5 bits) and a bunch of “wasted” states.
I haven't yet decided what encoding I'll actually use, though I'm pretty sure I'll be using some variable-length scheme. Also, stealing an idea from Gustafson, I'm going to make the parameters (including length and encoding details) configurable, so no matter what I supply as default the end user can still configure his way out of any bind I create. I would like the defaults to be well-chosen, though. There are several things I need to investigate a bit more, especially (a) the differences between different currencies, and (b) the differences between kinds of financial applications and the size of the organization using them. All I really have to go on there is my intuition, derived from several decades of experience. I'd rather have hard data. :) Don't know where I'm going to find that, though!
Paradise ponders, slippery mud, wet wood, and sushi edition... I was able to spend most of day yesterday (and some this morning, too!) working on my stairs project. In the first photo below, you see the results of the first round of sanding off the black (using 100 grit and the orbital sander). The large landing has one round of sanding done (second photo is a closeup), while the smaller step is unsanded. Quite a difference! I ended up doing two rounds at 100 grit and a final round at 220 grit, and in the end I was pretty happy with how it looked. The black color stayed in the dents as I'd originally intended, but it also was infused in some other areas in a way that resembles how wood weathers. All good! Then I started applying stain: two coats yesterday, another this morning. The result (still wet) is in the third photo. I think I'm going to stop at three, as it looks pretty good. The stain has the side-effect of making the blackened areas a bit indistinct, again more like wood actually weathers. Once these stairs are in the sun room, the little bit of red still visible will gradually fade, and the white parts will yellow slightly – both of these effects will, I think, improve the appearance. So far I've only stained the top; later today I'll flip it over and start the process on the bottom. By tomorrow I believe I'll be applying the matte polyurethane...
We went out for our lunch yesterday to a local favorite: Black Pearl. I had sushi (my seafood nanudo roll at right); Debbie had their house pad thai. Both were excellent! We were both stuffed by the time we rolled out of there, and Debbie had some leftovers, too. Not me. :) On the way there we had an odd thing happen with the Model X. From appearances, the GPS stopped reporting the car's position to the navigation system. The car's symbol was stuck in one place on the map. Nothing I did made any difference at all. After we ate and started home, the position was still stuck – but only for a couple of blocks. Then it suddenly started working again, and has been since then. I've no idea what might have caused that. The Tesla forums have a couple of mentions of the same problem, with the exact same outcome, so I'm not too worried about it.
Last night and early this morning we got slammed with a big rainstorm. The snapshot at right shows the total storm accumulation; we got just over a half inch. That wouldn't be so bad except that our soils were already super-saturated with water – so nearly all the water from this storm is either sitting on the surface or turning the first inch or so of soil into a slurry. Some areas to our west and southwest got over 2" in this storm. These are areas that are normally very dry, so this will likely cause a burst of plant growth – and wildflowers! We have another storm approaching, too – starting around noon today we're expecting rain for 12 hours or so, with another half inch or a bit more in precipitation. All this water is going to make our sprinkler project quite a bit harder. I suspect Mark T. will be waiting a few days for things to dry out at least a little. After today we've got 10 days with little chance of rain in the forecast, with highs in the upper 50s or low 60s, light winds, and lots of sun. A few days of that and we'll dry out a bit, I hope! The farmers around here who didn't plant this week are going to have to wait another week or so before their tractors can make it through the fields...
Apple dribbles out some hope... I've held off buying any Apple desktop product for over four years now. Two separate problems have stopped me. The first was that the new Mac Pro (sometimes called the “trash can”), while interesting from an engineering perspective, was so constrained on upgrades that I couldn't imagine shelling out the bucks for it. The second was that the iMacs, while very cool products, had limited memory and storage options, just not enough horsepower for me to be happy with them as my development desktop. So I've been stumbling along on my nearly five-year-old Macbook Pro, which even as I write is busy overheating (as I can tell by its fan sounding like a Pratt & Whitney turbojet) in its stand.
In the past month or so I've been pondering a radical switch for me: moving my desktop to Linux, on a conventional PC. In that hardware world, getting something with specs I'd be happy with is almost trivial these days. Furthermore, the price would be substantially less than any Mac would be. I'd even gotten to the point of starting to check out specific hardware configurations, and pondering just which distro of Linux I'd move to. I've gotten very used to my Mac tools, though, so this move was not one I was really looking forward to.
Then a couple of days ago Apple did something really surprising for them: they held a meeting with the press and talked about their future plans for “Pro level” Mac products. I can't recall any similar forward-looking announcement by Apple – they must be really feeling the heat from disappointed “Pro” users, of which I am one. And what they announced is exactly what I've been waiting for, on both fronts: a modular (upgradable) Mac Pro, and a “Pro” version of the iMac.
So I guess my poor little Macbook Pro will be overheating for a while longer. I sure hope that fan holds up!
Paradise ponders, boring meeting, giant valve, and blackened wood edition... Last night was the annual shareholders' meeting of the Paradise Irrigation company. I've attended the past two meetings, both of them interesting mainly because there were some controversial issues to deal with. Last night's meeting was about as routine and boring as such a meeting can be, mainly because (a) Porcupine Reservoir, the source of our irrigation water, is already overflowing with much more water to come when the snow melts, and (b) the finances of the company were in far better shape than they were last year. Our Board members were all re-elected by acclamation, so even the voting was boring. The meeting was over in about 30 minutes.
On Wednesday evening I applied the first coat of the finish on the stairs. It did not go as expected, nor as my one past experience went. This coat is a dark grey that I intended to have lodge in all the dents to highlight them. I expected to be able to just wipe it off the flat surfaces, like the similar product I've used in the past. From the first moment I wiped it onto the wood it was obvious that this product was more like a stain, soaking into the flat surfaces. Once I'd made the first wipe, though, I was committed – whatever I did needed to be done over the entire surface. So I wiped it on everywhere, with the result you see at right. Yikes! When I was done, I figured out what happened. Being the dummy that I am, I assumed this product was similar to the one I'd used in the past, and I didn't read the instructions. Had I done so, I'd have noticed that you're supposed to apply this product only after you've sealed the wood. In other words, this stuff was supposed to go on as a second coat, not the first coat. Dang it! I'm going to have a lot of sanding to do to get rid of this, as black stairs are the last thing we want. Hopefully the dark color will remain in the dents after I sand it, so the end result may be just fine anyway – just a lot more work than I'd expected!
Mark T. and Dave were here all day yesterday. One of the things they did was to start the installation of a gigantic gate valve. In the first photo below you can see how they cut a hole in the existing 6" water pipe. Note that the irrigation system is empty all winter, and won't be pressurized for several weeks yet. That's why they can work on it now without causing geysers. :) In the second photo you see the valve body (the red part) before they installed it. The last photo shows Mark in the process of installing it, and there you can get a good idea of the scale of this beast. They're all done with the installation except for the step of torquing down the bolts on the various pieces (about 40 bolts in all). The bolts and nuts on the valve required a 1 1/8" socket (huge!) and will be torqued to 50 ft/lbs. Mark's bringing the required tools today, and then our shiny, new, gigantic valve will be complete. They'll be filling in the hole, and installing a vertical pipe that will let us use a “key” to turn the valve on and off. This will make the valve nearly invisible, especially since the vertical pipe's upper end will be hidden by our willow tree's trunk. This will give us the ability to shut off the water supply to just Tim and myself, so that when we (inevitably) break a riser or dig through a pipe, we can shut off just us and not our neighbors.
Paradise ponders, playful puppies, gray foxes, and holey yards edition... Yesterday afternoon I took little Cabo for a mile-and-a-half walk, mostly with the aim of doing some leash training. She did very well, actually – being alone (specifically, without her brother Mako along to make trouble) she was fully engaged in what we were doing and learned her leash-limits quickly. She was also smelling absolutely everything in sight, especially any little piles of dried grass that might hide a vole within them. She flushed several of them, but her snapping jaws missed by fractions of an inch each time. She certainly tried hard, though!
The highlight of the walk happened on the way back. I was looking at the road ahead, Cabo just ahead and to my right. Suddenly she went completely berserk, bouncing off the end of the leash, barking like crazy. When I looked where she was looking, I saw a beautiful gray fox about 50' away, loping quickly away from us while staring back at the fearsome Cabo. Nice!
Our back yard now has about ten holes in it, dug by Mark T. and his sidekick Dave. They're locating all the relevant pipes and fittings, and they've now dug out a place to put a 6" gate valve in. This valve will very conveniently control the flow to our sprinkler system along with Tim's irrigation system (a mix of hand-line and underground sprinklers). Both Tim and I will appreciate that. But in the meanwhile, our back yard is a glorious mess – it looks like a WWI battlefield with trenches and places where artillery shells exploded!
Paradise ponders: monetary disappointment, another hole-digger and glue on the stairs edition... The fellow at right (Dave) is standing in a hole that he dug in our back yard this morning. Dave works for Mark T., the contractor who's working on getting sprinklers installed into my yard. His day job is professor of political science at Utah State University, but when he's not teaching he's working for Mark doing much less frustrating work. :) He waxes poetic about the joys of digging holes, which instantly reminded me of my dad (as it would anyone who knew him) – for my dad's “hobby” (as we liked to tease him) was digging holes. As with Dave, the bigger the better.
Dave made an unexpected discovery upon digging this hole. What he expected to find was an elbow on a 6" diameter irrigation water line. The plan was to cut the line here, tap into the source side for the water for our new sprinkler system, and use the other side as a tunnel underneath our driveway (for a 4" pipe for the new sprinklers, plus a bunch of control wires). But he didn't find that elbow. Instead, he found a 3" diameter pipe for the source of the irrigation water, connecting into a 6" pipe that runs a quarter mile south of there. With some more work, we figured out that whoever installed this system connected from one 6" main through a 50' long piece of 3" pipe into the second 6" diameter main. That's like having an interstate highway with a few miles of one-lane country road in the middle of it! None of us can imagine any good reason for doing this. I shouldn't be surprised any longer at the crazy things the previous owner did, but this one probably is the new one for top billing...
This morning I rinsed the sodium hydroxide and hydrogen peroxide residue from the wood I bleached yesterday. That took a lot of elbow grease, but the result was worth it. That bleach really works well! Then early this afternoon I enlisted our friend Michelle H. to help me glue up the ribs and the landing board. The photo at right shows that assembly in clamps. When I made that landing, I glued it up with a (very) slight bow in it, so that the center was slightly higher than the ends. That allowed me to use the simple clamping arrangement you see here, with the blocks in the middle pressed down by a pair of clamps on a board. The result is a nice flat surface as the clamp presses the landing board down onto the flat surface of the ribs. I've had better results with a center clamp like this than with either a perfectly flat board or a bowed board the other way – I'm pretty sure that's because of the single clamp in the center, as you see here.
A couple of months ago, I posted about a book I'd read about: The End of Error, by John Gustafson. I've finished it now, and I have to say I'm a bit disappointed. My biggest hope is that he'd devised a good way to implement floating point arithmetic such that it could (practically) be used to represent money. I judge that he failed to reach that lofty goal. He did, however, have a few ideas that I really like. One of them is the notion of using a bit to specify whether the floating point number is exact or an approximation. That's a valuable piece of information when you're dealing with money. Unfortunately, he specifies the approximations as truncations of the actual value – whereas for money you would want the rounded approximation. Another very interesting idea is the notion of allowing encodings where the precision is specified as part of each number. That would allow much more compact encodings on average in most applications, assuming you don't actually need a fixed length. Those are a couple of great ideas that could be incorporated in a pragmatic money representation. Yet another idea is to associate a context with computation and encodings of numbers in a particular usage – particularly powerful for allowing variable precision for different needs.
The next version of Java is likely to have a better money representation, but what I've read suggests that it will simply be an amalgamation of BigDecimal and Currency. These are existing classes with much less than ideal characteristics for a general-purpose representation of monetary values. It amazes me that after over 20 years of use in business applications, Java still does not have support for a pragmatic representation of money...
A favorite branch... This is from Botany Photo of the Day, by Daniel Mosquin. Beautiful, it is. You can sign up for this free email here, where you can also read more about this Magnolia sargentiana...
Paradise ponders, despondent border collie edition... It's a beautiful morning here in Paradise: scattered clouds in a blue, blue sky, snow-capped mountains all lit up around us, long shadows on the greening valley floor. It's the kind of a morning that makes us say that we live in a postcard. For my younger readers, here's what a postcard is. The photo at right is someone else's photo from an actual postcard of Cache Valley (where we live).
This morning I fed our four dogs, as always. From their behavior you'd think we starved them for weeks in between feedings. :) I feed them in a particular order: Cabo, Mako, Miki, Race, as once they've learned the order they all behave better. If I feed them in random order, they'll all squabble for the right to be first. Because poor well-behaved Race is at the end of the line, he gets to watch me feed three other dogs before it's finally his turn. At that point he's always a drooling bucket of despondency. Even worse, from his perspective, is that I always make him sit and stay while I put the food bowl down (to protect my hands from accidental injury when he attacks the bowl). He can't eat until I release him from the stay. The first photo below is what he looks like every morning after I put the food bowl down while he's still in a stay. He's totally focused on my lips, waiting for the word “okay” to come out. He's also drooling about 4 gallons/minute. The second photo I took approximately 3 picoseconds after uttering that “okay”. About a third of the food is already in his stomach. :)
Paradise ponders, spring walk, oxide, and oven edition... I took Race and Miki (right) for our usual non-winter two mile walk this morning, first time since last fall. The road was still a bit muddy, but it was walkable nonetheless. The fields are just starting to green up, but those fields that are going to be replanted have already been plowed and harrowed by the busy farmers. Right now the fields are so muddy that a tractor would sink right in, I think. :) But the next few days are supposed to be fair weather, and they'll probably get dry enough for the farmers to plant – and I suspect they'll do exactly that. This coming Saturday we're due for another big rainstorm, just the right thing for a freshly planted field...
This morning I set up sawhorses and drop cloth, and got all my hazardous substance gear (face shield, rubber gloves, etc.). Then I got to work on something new to me: bleaching the redwood stairs. I was a bit hesitant to even try this stuff, as the chemicals involved are nasty: concentrated hydrogen peroxide and sodium hydroxide. The first photo below shows the surface of the big landing after the bleach had been on for about 10 hours. It will remain there until tomorrow morning, when I'll rinse it off (which will get rid of the splotches visible in that photo) and let it air dry. At that point it will be ready for final sanding, gluing, and then finishing. Progress! The second photo shows both bleached areas and unbleached areas (I didn't bother bleaching areas that would be invisible in glue joints). The color difference is pretty dramatic, no? That stuff actually works! It wasn't very hard to apply, either: just a 3" synthetic brush to slop it on with. The chemicals have the viscosity of water, so brushing it in was a cinch.
A technician showed up today to fix our oven. This made his third visit for the purpose, and the second part being replaced. The new part (a control board) made no difference at all, unfortunately. The poor guy has spent 10 hours or so at our house at this point, futilely working on this damned oven. His company is taking a bath on this job, as they charge a fixed price for their labor. Today we pulled the plug on the effort (our decision, after four months with a non-functional oven). We're going to trash this oven and get a new one. One that, as Debbie says, actually works. What a concept! Almost certainly it will be a Bosch oven, as we have several of their appliances at this point and we absolutely love them...
A great day for a bonfire... It was cloudy and drizzly, exactly as forecast. From a safety perspective, that's perfect weather for a big bonfire – no matter what happens, I wouldn't set the valley on fire. :) I started the fire with a bit of packing material and a bag full of shredded documents (those burn hot!), and within 60 seconds of striking my first match I had a roaring fire going (first photo), despite the steady drizzle. I worked steadily at this for about 3 hours, dumping 18 large forkfuls of brush on the fire. Each one of those was over a cubic yard, compacted – I'd guess around 25 or 30 cubic yards of compressed brush in all. The tractor did all the heavy lifting while at the same time keeping me at a comfortable distance from the fire. That was one hot fire – so hot that I could see raindrops flashing into steam before they even hit the bonfire. When it rained heavily (which it did only briefly), that steam made a sort of dome around the fire. As I write this the fire is down to the last embers. I've spread it out over 100 square feet or so to cool. Done!
Paradise ponders, all banged up and blackberries edition... The area where I live is a big berry growing area, and the biggest of the berry farms is a mile from our house. When they're in season it would be hard to beat our local berries. But they're certainly not in season right now, so when I read this Neoneocon post about wonderful fresh blackberries at (of all places!) Walmart, I knew I'd have to try them.
She was talking about blackberries by Driscoll's, a company that grows blackberries in Mexico and is working hard to improve them. More on their genetic work here. And if you, like me, had no idea what a °Bx is, here's an explanation (it's sugar content, basically).
So yesterday we were in our local Walmart, and Debbie thought to check the produce counter. The Driscoll's berries were there! I bought two pints. This morning I poured about a half pint into my morning muesli. Heaven, I tell you. Heaven. Heaven is Rosehill's decadent Creamline milk on Bob's Red Mill muesli with Driscoll's blackberries generously mixed in. That's it, exactly!
For the past year, our two crate-trained puppies (Cabo and Mako) have been getting old, mangled towels as their bedding material. We started out with an actual dog bed for them, but they shredded them within seconds. So old dead towels has been their fate. Yesterday we decided to try them with beds again, so we hied ourselves to Walmart and bought a couple of inexpensive, washable stuffed beds for them. Last night was the first experiment. Two things happened, both of them good. First thing: the beds survived unscathed. Second thing: the puppies did not wake us at two or three AM, as has been their wont. Instead, we slept in until almost eight AM. If you know us, then you know that's like normal people sleeping in until two PM or so. :) That was the most restful night's sleep I've had in quite a few months, and no drugs or alcohol was involved. Could be a coincidence ... but it could be those beds. Oh, how I hope it's the beds!
I worked on the sun room stairs most of yesterday. The first part of the day was sanding: 60, 80, and 100 grit on the belt sander, then 220 grit on the random orbital sander. By the time I was done with that, you could have used the surface of those stairs as a mirror. Then, per my lovely bride's instructions, I purposefully ruined it. :) What she really wanted for those stairs was reclaimed wood, but obtaining pieces of a suitable species of reclaimed wood in the desired dimensions would have been both challenging and outrageously expensive. So I'm “manufacturing” some simulated reclaimed wood through a process of prolonged beatings and some creative finishing. Yesterday was the beatings part.
In the first photo below you can see most of my basic tools: a fairly random collection of clean hardware, and a polyurethane-and-lead-shot dead blow hammer. The dead blow hammer is much easier to control than an ordinary hammer, and the relatively soft head splatters the hardware much less. I also used one other tool, not pictured: a small (5 ounce) ball peen hammer, to make some dents.
I got into a very mechanical, repetitive mode while doing this: hammering with my right hand while randomly moving the hardware about with my left. Every 60 seconds or so I stopped and collected splattered hardware off the floor, which also gave my right arm a bit of a break. Altogether I spent about three hours hammering away, and in the last photo you can see a closeup of the results. It's enough to make a grown woodworker cry, with that beautiful hunk of redwood wrecked...
The next step is bleaching, with a two-part bleach system of sodium hydroxide and hydrogen peroxide. That work needs to be done outdoors, and today (with gloomy skies rain in our forecast) is not the day for that. So today I will be burning the giant pile of brush I collected last year. I got my burn permit (online here, instantly delivered, and free – so different than California!) and I'm all ready to go...
Paradise ponders, special request gluey liverwurst edition... Because one of you just had to ask, here's the redwood sanding dust and glue filler material I've been using. The first photo shows a nifty blue silicone glue dish I picked up a few weeks ago, with a pile of redwood “flour” and a blob of Titebond III glue. The second photo shows the stuff after mixing with a putty knife. It's got roughly the color and texture of liverwurst, though it smells much better. :) I mix it fairly thick so that I can press it into cracks with the putty knife, then scrape it level with the same knife.
Once you mix it up you've got about 10 minutes of working time. Cleanup is crazy easy: just scrape the excess you can easily extract into a trash can, then wash it up under warm water. It could hardly be any easier than that! Once it hardens for 24 hours, the stuff is easy to sand and paint. One lesson I've learned: you'll want to press it into the cracks as hard as you possibly can with the putty knife, so that the paste infiltrates the rough sides of the crack. Adherence is much better that way...
Paradise ponders, mud, muesli, and Musk edition... I saw the results of a snap poll taken last night, asking 120 random adult Americans what the significance of that day's launch of a Falcon 9 was. Only 43 of them knew what a Falcon 9 was – and of them, only 17 knew that yesterday was the first attempted reuse of a rocket booster capable of putting a payload in orbit. It was also the first attempt to re-land such a booster. Both attempts were successful, something I suspect is likely to figure as an inflection point in mankind's exploration of space. The 13 minute video at right is the first edited highlight reel; I'm sure more complete and produced videos will be forthcoming if you're interested.
The story of SpaceX (the company that made the Falcon 9) is a powerful argument for the primacy of capitalism as the engine behind the advancement of mankind. Their goal from founding was to lower the cost of exploiting space (whether for manned or unmanned missions) by creating relatively simple reusable rockets. Prior to SpaceX, all rockets were thrown away after a single use – and each of those rockets cost many millions of dollars. The floor of the Atlantic Ocean east of Cape Canaveral is littered with the wreckage of thousands of such used-once rockets. Our government space agency (NASA) insisted for decades that the notion of a reusable rocket was impossible on the face of it. Later they changed their tune a bit, and said it might be possible but the development cost would be prohibitive. Now NASA is a big customer of SpaceX, who did what NASA said was impossible – and did it with a tiny fraction of NASA's budget for a single year. If they had any honor, NASA would close their ludicrously expensive development facilities and turn over their development to SpaceX and its competitors. I won't hold my breath on that one.
Anyway, a tip of the hat to the entire SpaceX team this morning for a job spectacularly well done. The founder and CEO of SpaceX is Elon Musk, who is also the founder of PayPal, Solar City and Tesla Motors, as well as the originator of the Hyperloop idea and most recently the launch of Neuralink. If you were looking for support for the Great Man theory of history, his story would be a pretty good place to start. :)
A couple of weeks ago I went to our optometrist for an eye exam, mainly because my glasses weren't doing the job any more – especially close up. My prescription had changed significantly, as I've previously posted about. Last week I received my new glasses and wore them for a week. They were significantly better for close up work, so much so that I could wear and forget them for all my woodworking, computer work, and reading at distances greater than a foot or so. There was, however, one small problem: my distance vision was compromised during the daytime – and at night was downright horrible. So back to the optometrist I went, and without any hesitation he re-examined me, decided I needed to change my distance prescription slightly, and ordered new lenses for me. All this was at no cost to me. My new glasses should be here on Monday or Tuesday next week.
Yesterday Mark T. and his helper Dave went to work on the trench for the new line of risers we're putting outside our back yard fence. About an hour after they started (and made great progress!), the sky opened up and the rain commenced. Within a half hour, the nice firm soil they'd been working with turned into something closer to peanut butter – and the surface an oily semi-liquid form of mud. They parked the trencher and left; there really wasn't any other choice. Now things will have to dry out for a day or two before they can go back to work. Of course, we have more rain in the forecast for today and Sunday, so the drying out may take a bit longer!
Last week I came across something I'd actually completely given up on ever finding in the U.S.: quality muesli that wasn't sweetened (or at least, wasn't very sweet). I've been eating hot cereals from Bob's Red Mill ever since I moved up here. Last week, looking over the display of their cereals, I spotted this muesli – and saw that the ingredients contained no added sugar or corn syrup. The only sweeteners were dates and raisins. If you're of fan of traditional muesli (which you can easily find in Europe), you're gonna love this stuff. Highly recommended!
I finished all the milling to be done on the stairs yesterday. The first two photos show the jig and results of milling the end of the big landing (this will be the side facing our bedroom door). The second two show the jig and results of milling a groove in the ribs to hold the cross-member that will prevent them from wobbling. These were the last bits of milling on the entire project; now all I have left is sanding, beating (to simulate use), bleaching, and finishing. :)
This afternoon we'll be heading to Los Primos for a special treat. Our waitress on Tuesday told us that they'll be making Salvadoran stuffed peppers as a special today. Recipes we found online convinced us that these were certain to be a delicious feast – so off we'll go! Hopefully we'll be bringing our friend Michelle H. too...
Stairs, continued... Just finished milling out the four grooves on the underside of the two steps that will accommodate the ribs. It all came out very nicely! It's kind of amazing what you can do with a router and a couple of straight edges...
Then I did a trial fit of the steps onto the ribs; first time I've done that. I had to sand about 1/64" off of one of the ribs for it to fit into the groove, but once I did that: voila! That's a good approximation of what the stairs will look like once installed. There's a cross-member going between the two ribs, and it will be (barely) visible. The finish will, of course, dramatically change the appearance. But so far as the shape of the stairs goes, this is a very good approximation...
Stairs ... a little machining... So this evening I jigged up a router template (first photo) to cut one of the grooves in the bottom of the stairs, just the big landing step for now. Both steps are in the pipe clamps. The other clamps are holding the jig in place, and the bags of lead shot are ensuring that the jig lies down flat on the step. In the second photo you can see the result after I ran the router through the template (but before I cleaned up). It took three passes to cut a half inch deep groove, 1.5" wide. I cut the groove a tad longer than it actually needs to be, so that the rib will fit in nicely without worrying about the radius of the router bit. After I cleaned out the groove with compressed air, I did a test fit of the rib – perfect fit!
Let the trenching begin! I've been trying for two years now to get sprinklers installed in our yard. I could write several thousand words just describing all the various things that have gone wrong on the three separate attempts I've made. But today is a red-letter day on this project, because today the first trenching on the project occurred.
If I were to stop right there, you'd think that great things were likely happening. But about 30 seconds after I snapped the last photo below, an alarm started sounding on the skid-steer – the engine coolant was approaching a critical high temperature. Oh, noz! A little quick detective work on Mark T.'s part showed that there was a coolant leak, and that the coolant level was low. Mark tells me that today's work is the first time any of this gear has been used since last fall, and he's had coolant leaks develop over the winter before. So now he's off to get some more coolant, and to gather his tools to find and fix the leak. Sigh.
Ignoring that little problem, though, his trenching machine is a pretty cool little gadget. It's powered hydraulically, through the enormous hydraulic pump on the skid-steer: 24 GPM vs. the 5.5 GPM on my tractor, despite the nearly identical horsepower rating of the machines. The teeth on the trencher drag soil to the surface, where an auger scoots it out of the way to the left of the driver. It makes a very neat trench about 6" wide, and it does so quite quickly compared with a backhoe. On the other hand, it can only do skinny little trenches – if you need one any wider than 6", you're out of luck...
Paradise ponders, Medicare edition... So yesterday Debbie and I visited Sam Winward, our health insurance agent. He's been very helpful to us the past couple of years, helping us navigate the (many) challenges of Obamacare insurance for older individuals. Yesterday was the day we'd set aside for him to educate us about Medicare. I turn 65 this year, so it's time for me to join that system. Sam told me last year that I was really going to like switching to Medicare, so I wasn't too worried about what I'd learn today.
Though there are a mind-boggling number of options available (unlike with Obamacare!), it didn't take long for us to home in on a low-deductible Part F plan. While this was the most expensive option available, the price is so low (roughly $400/month for me, $265 of which is the baseline Medicare premium) compared with our current plan, and the benefits so much better, that it was basically a complete no-brainer. When I say the benefits were so much better, I mean: nationwide network of providers, no deductible, no co-pays, large drug formulary, no caps on hospitalization or physical therapy, and so on.
How is this even possible at such a low cost? Well, fundamentally it's because of two things:
The baseline Medicare premium is heavily subsidized by the Medicare taxes we all pay on wages. For me, that's a little over a quarter million dollars over my working life. That's far more than would be required to subsidize my health insurance, so as an above-average wage earner my taxes subsidizing a lot of other people's insurance as well.
The Part F supplemental is mainly insuring against the risk of exceeding the baseline Medicare's caps (especially for hospitalization). That part of it resembles an old-fashioned major medical policy – the kind of policy I really wish we could have now instead of this #%^(&$# Obamacare policy we have.
Anyway, obviously Sam was right. The health insurance situation under Medicare is way better than as an ancient Obamacare individual who isn't broke...
Right after that meeting, we went to Los Primos for what is becoming our Tuesday afternoon ritual: a meal of their outstanding beef and vegetable soup. After we'd seated ourselves, the waitress we see most often (but who wasn't serving us yesterday) came over to say hello. We ended up having a nice discussion about, of all things, stuffed peppers. It turns out that stuffed peppers are something of a Salvadoran specialty, and they're making them on Friday. If they're anything like these, they look great!
2.7 Billion views... This says something about today's world, but I have no idea what! This is the most-viewed video on YouTube. Here's a list of the top 500 videos, ranked by number of views. Nearly all are music videos by performers I've never even heard of, much less listened to...
Our man-killing window holes are now covered... And very nice-looking they are! These are the two covers that we traveled to Kalispell, Montana to pick up. My brother Scott helped me install them today. Both of them fit perfectly – another outstanding piece of work from the wonderful folks at Lazy K Wrought Iron!
I don't think I'll go out of my way to try this particular delicacy... Even though it's seafood, which I love. Because it's fermented for six freakin' months, and I don't have to try that to know that I don't love it.
This stuff is from Sweden, it's called surströmming, and here's more than you ever wanted to know about it. Watching the video is enough to convince me that Sweden should be quarantined from the rest of humanity, permanently. First Volvos, then Abba, now surströmming? That's three strikes, and they should be out!
Paradise ponders, burgers and Foyle's edition... We had kind of a lazy day yesterday. I finished some chores in the house, built the second rib for the stairs, and then came inside for our afternoon meal: burgers. That is, I had a burger (at right). That's 3/4 pound of Macey's 85/15 burger (all that fat makes it delicious!), on a Macey's Asiago-and-onion roll, with avocado, ketchup, and sweet pickle relish. Yum! Debbie made her share of the ground beef into an enormous taco salad, low in sodium but apparently very tasty, as she ate the entire (gigantic!) thing.
After that meal we were so full that any resembling ambition flew off to an obscure country in southwest Asia. So we crawled upstairs (slowly and carefully), and watched the last three Foyle's War episodes in a binge. That's five hours of television, something I haven't done for decades. The very last episode is a real shocker, ending with (literally) a big bang. We're kind of sorry to be done with it. But no matter, at our age we'll probably forget all about it within a few weeks, and can start it over as though it were brand new to us. :)
Today's big project for me is to help my brother Scott with his taxes. I finished mine last week, except for the filing. Doing my taxes never fails to put me in a bad mood, but the trip to Montana immediately following really helped pick me up. In the future, I'm going to have to plan something nice for the few days immediately following tax prep. It will help tamp down the anger I can't help feeling as I watch my hard-earned dollars being stolen by the government so they can waste it on something I don't believe in.
Before my brother gets here, I'm working on the stairs project. I did an hour or so of sanding before I came up to write this post, and I'll probably go do some more in a little while. Sanding is amazingly relaxing, and it's very good arm exercise. :)
