Meteor...from the ISS...

Via Paul H., an astronaut on board the ISS captured this image of a Perseid meteor.

Warning: ASI Hastings...

In years past, we have done business with ASI Hastings on several occasions – the installation of our heater and air conditioner, and two major repairs.  We were pleased with that work, with the people they sent out here, and with the price.  Pleased enough that I recommended them to my readers, friends, and neighbors.

Today we had them out to repair our air conditioner, and it will most likely be the last time we ever call ASI Hastings again.

My wife called them this morning and asked for them to repair our air conditioner, which had just completely failed.  There are two major issues I have with what they did.

First, the prices for the repair items are just insanely high – hundreds of dollars for a contactor (relay) and startup capacitor.

Second, they sold my wife something we didn't ask for at all – an air cleaner to take dust and odors out of the air.  We asked for a repair, not some things we neither needed nor wanted.

I'm done with them.  Anybody got a good recommendation for a local (to Jamul, preferably) air conditioning repair firm?

Post Office Nears Collapse...

The Post Office's horrific “business” problems have actually made it to the news recently, so I thought it would be a good time to post this excellent primer on the Post Office's travails.  It's longish, but well worth reading if you'd like to understand this institution's problems – and why crazy people like me have long advocated ceasing all subsidies to the Post Office, and eliminating all special privileges of the Post Office.

As the article makes clear, the subsidies are not all direct and their removal will be politically challenging to accomplish.  Even more politically challenging: the huge union membership of the Post Office's work force.  The privileges granted to the Post Office are unknown to most people. The most important of these is that the Post Office currently enjoys an absolute monopoly on carrying first class mail, and on the right to deliver mail to a mailbox.  These privileges exist only to prevent carriers like Federal Express and UPS from competing with the Post Office.

It's time for this beast to die...

JavaScript Prototypes...

Yehuda Katz is on a roll, with a nice post about JavaScript prototypes...

VJ Day in Hawaii...

Hard Core Geek: Forth in Your Browser...

It was only a matter of time...

A Story to Make Liberals Squirm...

...and me smile, of course.  Here's a fellow who's figured out how to make money on the backs of the poor while making their lives better at the same time.  Everybody wins, as opposed to charitable doles, where everybody loses...

Starry, Starry Night...

And moonlit, too.  I was out walking the dogs at about 3:15 this morning.  The moon was high in the southern sky, full and bright.  It washed out most of the stars in the sky (especially near the moon), but in the northeast I could see almost all of Orion, rising from behind Gaskill Peak.

The dogs, of course, didn't care about all this beauty in the sky.  The three brown dogs were (as usual) doing the important work of smelling every possible scent deposited during the night.  Race, the border collie, had himself a stick.  He went through an endless cycle of dropping the stick, backing up and watching it intently for as along as he could stand it (maybe 10 seconds), then pouncing on the stick and victoriously dancing around with it.

The stick made an interesting sound when it struck the pavement – something close to the metallic ringing of a bell, but a muted and distinctly wooden.  It's not the mushy, soft sound one usually hears when a stick drops, though.  Once, years ago, struck by this sound, I did a bit of investigation.  I discovered that hardwood is more likely to make this curious sound than a softer wood.  Also, it turns out that the drier the wood is, the clearer this almost-ringing is.  So when I picked up Race's stick this morning, I wasn't surprised to discover that it was a piece of manzanita wood (very hard wood indeed) and very light (meaning it's very dry)...

Rick Perry Ad...

I don't really know much about Rick Perry, and I'm certainly not ready to sign on as a Perry supporter.  I've read a few things about him that bother me, but I haven't verified them yet.

Here's his first ad.  If this was the only thing I had heard about him, I'd be hollering my throat raw, jumping up and down with delight:



But it's not the only thing I've heard about him, so for the moment I'm just observing with interest...

JavaScript Function Invocation...

A nice article by Yehuda Katz on a subject many JavaScript programmers don't really understand...

Public Data Visualizer...

Here's a fascinating tool from Google that lets you visualize quite a few different sets of publicly-available data.  At right is a snapshot of fertility rates for some countries I picked, along with the world as a whole.  Note how the world's fertility rate is falling inexorably toward the “replacement rate” of 2.1 (the point at which the population stops growing).

When you click onto the tool, click on the box that says “Fertility Rate” to change what data set you're looking at.  Pick the countries you'd like to see on the check-box list at the left...

Art of Assembly Language - Online...

Here...

Open Office and Your Brain...

When I work at my company's offices, I work in an “open office” environment.  This is an area (a room with just three sides) about 30' by 15', with nine people working in it on tables.  Each of us has a fairly small area, perhaps 30" wide by 24" deep.  It works well for some things, especially when multiple people are collaborating on the same thing.  I find it nearly impossible to concentrate on programming while there, however – there are innumerable interruptions and distractions that keep me from the kind of deep, sustained focus in which I am most productive. 

Here's someone else with similar observations.

I observe, though, that some people seem to be almost immune to problems I encounter.  This immunity is definitely more prevalent amongst younger people.  I don't know whether it's actually age-related, cultural, or training.  My cure is to work from home as much as possible – there I actually stand a chance of sustained focus for hours at a stretch.  I balance this with days at the office, where I can be available to teach and help others (and I can get help from others).  If the balance was to be determined purely by my own personal productivity, I'd probably work from home 80% to 90% of the time.  But that is not the case; some of the value I supply to my employer depends on my being available for other people, and it's a challenge to figure out where the right balance is when including that factor...

Opportunity on Spirit Point...

The plucky little Martian explorer Opportunity has arrived at Spirit Point, named after it's sibling spacecraft now presumed dead on the other side of Mars.  Spirit Point overlooks Endeavour Crater, where Opportunity will likely be working for years.

If you've forgotten all about Spirit and Opportunity, here's a reminder: they landed on Mars in 2003, and were designed to be operational for just 3 months.  Spirit lasted 7 years (it died last fall) and Opportunity is still going strong 8 years later.  Much of the credit for this unexpected longevity is due to the design team, but some of it is just plain luck: it turns out that the dust devils that frequently whisk across the Martian surface keep the explorers' solar panels relatively free of dust.  Prior to the actual mission, engineers were expecting the red Martian dust to slowly accumulate on the solar panels.  This would slowly reduce their power output until finally the explorers would run out of juice.  The entire team was surprised – very pleasantly! – that the unpredictable dust devils have been coming along frequently enough to blow the panels clean well before the explorers ran out of juice...

The Debt Pool...

Another of the entries in the Powerline blog contest:

Bobcat Babies!

Don and Jan Maxted (I think from Deerhorn Valley, in rural Jamul) have a bobcat family living near them.  Don got this beautiful photo.

We've missed our bobcats, whose local population was decimated when the 2007 fires killed many of them and their prey.  I sure hope this is an omen of their return!  We sure have plenty of varmints out here for them to eat...

More Obscure Linux Commands...

Several of these look interesting, but especially mytop...

Jamul Casino Update...

The latest Lakes Entertainment report is out, and it's more of the same sad story.  They're slowly writing off their investment as time goes by with no progress.

Hooray for no progress!

Is Obama Smart?

Bret Stephens has a piece in today's WSJ titled Is Obama Smart?  Here's his conclusion:

Then there's his habit of never trimming his sails, much less tacking to the prevailing wind. When Bill Clinton got hammered on health care, he reverted to centrist course and passed welfare reform. When it looked like the Iraq war was going to be lost, George Bush fired Don Rumsfeld and ordered the surge.

Mr. Obama, by contrast, appears to consider himself immune from error. Perhaps this explains why he has now doubled down on Heckuva Job Geithner. It also explains his insulting and politically inept habit of suggesting—whether the issue is health care, or Arab-Israeli peace, or change we can believe in at some point in God's good time—that the fault always lies in the failure of his audiences to listen attentively. It doesn't. In politics, a failure of communication is always the fault of the communicator.

Much of the media has spent the past decade obsessing about the malapropisms of George W. Bush, the ignorance of Sarah Palin, and perhaps soon the stupidity of Rick Perry. Nothing is so typical of middling minds than to harp on the intellectual deficiencies of the slightly less smart and considerably more successful.

But it takes actual smarts to understand that glibness and self-belief are not sufficient proof of genuine intelligence. Stupid is as stupid does, said the great philosopher Forrest Gump. The presidency of Barack Obama is a case study in stupid does.

This is very reminiscent of the whole Jimmy Carter experience. The “elites” at the time raved about him as the smartest president ever – the same unlikely label many have been putting on the office's current occupant...

Congresscritters...

From my cousin Mike D.:

Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz is 72 years old. Today, if Dorothy were to encounter men with:

   no brains,
   no hearts,
   and no courage...

she wouldn't be in Oz - she'd be in Congress.

Zing!