Snakes in Paradise...

Snakes in Paradise...  There's one poisonous snake here, a particularly docile and low-toxicity rattlesnake called the Great Basin Rattlesnake.  We haven't seen any of these yet, but we're not worried about them as they're amongst the least aggressive and lowest venom toxicity of all rattlesnakes – pretty much the opposite of what we were dealing with in Jamul, California.  However, I have see four snakes here – all different, all small (about pencil diameter and 10" to 12" long).  I haven't identified any of them, though one of them I'm pretty sure was a garter snake.  One of these was on the shore of Porcupine Reservoir; the others in our yard, spotted while I was mowing.  It's interesting that all last year, even with all the outdoors work I did, I never saw a snake.  Now in the first few days outside this spring, I've already seen four.

Polygamy...

Polygamy ... a kind of “polyamory”.  When I was a kid, lo these many decades ago, such things were to be found only in breathless tabloid articles and dry histories.  Once in a while you might see a reference to contemporaneous polyamory in exotic foreign lands.  Never would you run into it as a possibility in mainstream American society.

Things change.  Faster than I'd ever have thought.  What's the next frontier in permissiveness after polyamory?  I'm guessing it will be the mainstreaming of bestiality, but I stand ready to be surprised...

Way back in about 1995...

Way back in about 1995 ... I worked for a company called Stac Electronics.  My boss tasked me with designing an ecommerce-capable web infrastructure – a fairly advanced notion for the day.  This was primarily an education problem for me, as when I started I knew almost nothing about the subject.  One of the requirements my boss gave me was for redundant ISP connections, and I figured out pretty quickly that one could only do this, practically speaking, by connecting fairly close to the “backbone” and running a routing protocol called BGP.  When I dug into BGP, I quickly ran into lots of discussions about security problems with BGP.

Twenty years later, nothing has changed.

The inertia of the Internet is truly astounding...

Meh...

Meh...  I used to care.  Now I barely notice...

Progress in Paradise...

Progress in Paradise...  You may recall the Mormon horde that swept through our property two weeks ago, making massive brush piles from cleaned-up deadwood and brush, and ripping out almost a half mile of five-strand barbed wire fence.  In the interim Debbie and I cleaned up and burned all the smaller brush, but a good-sized stack of larger wood remained.  In between rainstorms last week, I sawed up about half of these logs.  This morning, I sawed up the rest of them.  The result is roughly a half cord of 18" logs.  Some of these need splitting, but otherwise it's all good firewood.

About three-quarters of the logs were black willow.  That wood burns hot and clean, but it's relatively soft.  The rest is box elder (a kind of maple), and that wood is hard – so hard that cutting it up made the chainsaw blade smokin' hot, and required quite a bit of physical effort to get the blade to “bite” into the wood.  There was one particular box elder log, about 20' long, that looks like it has been drying out for many years.  I'm going to save the pieces of that one for turning on my lathe.

Now I'm back in the house, recovering from the (substantial) physical exertion of all that sawing.  Plus, it's actually warm outside (about 80°), and that added to the physical impact.  I'm about to help my recovery along by eating some beef stew that my lovely bride just finished cooking.  As soon as she gets the gravy made, it's time to eat!  After I recover from eating that meal, we'll go load up all that wood in my pickup, and then stack it in the shed.  That's the last step to finishing up the work done two weeks ago by the Mormon horde...

Update (4:30 pm)...  All the wood has been moved and stacked.   It turned out to be more like 2/3 of a cord.  With that plus the additional half cord or so that my neighbor is giving me, I should be nice and toasty in my office all winter!

The beef stew was delicious, by the way.  You should have been here!  There are some leftovers, but they'll be gone long before any of you can get here :)

After all the hard work today, we decided that we felt like ice cream floats.  We just got back from a jaunt to Ridley's, where we got some Americana sodas and some Tillamook ice cream.  They're in the deep freeze now, and in an hour or so we're gonna have us a good old fashioned ice cream float!

Update (6:30 pm)...  Those ice cream floats (I had vanilla bean ice cream in black cherry soda) were every bit as good as we were hoping.  Yum!  Now for a walkie with  the doggies, and we're off to bed.  I suspect I'll sleep well tonight...

Robins in Paradise...

Robins in Paradise...  While we were sipping our tea and coffee on our balcony this morning, we noticed a pair of robins were frequently flying into a mostly-dead tree in our front yard.  This tree is on our project list to be replaced, but we won't be doing that for a while – there's a busy robin's nest there!  The photo at left below shows the nest, which is just over 6 feet off the ground.  That photo includes nearly the entire still-living tree.  The right photo shows the four chicks in the nest...

Paradisical Perambulations...

Paradisical Perambulations...  Debbie and I and the three dogs took a most pleasant walk up the road to our east this morning.  The day could hardly have been nicer: blue sky with a few puffy clouds, 68°, 30% humidity, and a light breeze from the south.  Lush green fields and pastures completely surrounded us.  The dogs bounded through an alfalfa field that's nearly ready to cut.  A few photos and a bounding video:

If Bernie Sanders didn't actually exist...

If Bernie Sanders didn't actually exist ... then right-wing comedians would have to invent him.  But ... he does exist!

An interesting failure...

An interesting failure...  Are we alone in the universe?

Progress in Paradise...

Progress in Paradise...  Yesterday was the first day that the lawn was dry enough to even think about mowing – and the grass was nearly 6" high on average.  The rains over the past 10 days really pushed the growth.  So I mowed the whole yard, which worked better than I was expecting – the mower never sank into the soil, and the blades never clogged up with wet grass (though I did eject a few truly magnificent grass blobs!).

After I finished mowing, we headed up to WalMart to buy fertilizer.  My brother Scott (aka Mr. Green Thumb) recommended Ironite, but the price of that (for our 3 acres of lawn) stopped me.  We went for this stuff instead, for a small fraction of the cost.  Strictly by the numbers, it should be good stuff, with nitrogen, potassium, and iron.  We'll see.  I spread 300 pounds of it yesterday afternoon in less than an hour, thanks to the tow-behind-the-mower fertilizer spreader I bought last year.  That thing works great!

While I was doing all that, Debbie went to work getting our balcony ready for use this season.  You can see the result in the photo at right, which I took just a few minutes ago (just after sunrise this morning).  The view is to the southwest, over the Little Bear River's bottom and into the Wellsville Mountains.  The little red cafe table you can just barely see comes with a couple of matching chairs, and there are four pots with roses and some other flowers.  This is a very pleasant spot to sit and enjoy our morning caffeinated beverage, or a glass of wine in the evening.  This morning we were visited by a hummingbird checking out the roses – and that immediately prompted us to order some hooks to hang hummingbird feeders off the balcony rail.  If we're lucky, we'll attract some orioles too.  We've seen a pair of Bullock's orioles along the irrigation canal on the south side of our property.  If we keep food out, maybe we'll attract some more, like we did in Jamul!

Dog lovers...

Dog lovers ... prepare to bawl your eyes out.  Poh the dog's great adventure...

Firewalls are dead?

Firewalls are dead?  That's just one consequence of the changes that are sweeping the tech world.  If you're interested in enterprise IT security, the presentation at right is quite interesting.

I'd say that firewalls have been relatively ineffective for quite a few years now.  Keeping a single firewall patched and configured correctly is a big job all by itself, perhaps impossibly so.  Keeping all the firewalls a typical enterprise has patched and configured correctly is harder by a couple orders of magnitude.  Add to that the fact that by their very nature, the protections of firewalls lag behind the threats in the real world.  Firewalls are never up to date, even if you have the latest patches and configurations applied.  Making the publicly-exposed apps secure is the first and most obvious step; making all apps secure is the holy grail.

In my last job before retiring, I worked with over a hundred large enterprise customers.  There was a wide range on competence in their approaches to security, but by far the most popular approach was something like “buy all the right stuff, know all the right buzzwords, but actually know very little”.  There were a few enterprises I worked with that actually had very competent, right-on-top-of-things security teams who took their work very seriously – but these were notable exceptions.  There were many occasions when I was allowed physical access to “secure” facilities with no proof whatsoever of who I was (not even an ID check!), and many is the time I was allowed to plug my laptop right into their network.  On a few memorable occasions I was given access credentials (including administrative access) to the company's critical systems.  One time I called into a customer – a household name that anyone would recognize – I had never personally met, and at the end of the phone call I had VPN access and their Windows Domain Administrator credentials.  Crazy!

But my favorite unsecurity experience involves a government organization (of course!).  I won't name the city involved, but it was a large western U.S. city with a recently centralized IT department.  The IT facilities were scattered around the city, in a couple dozen places; these were the formerly standalone facilities for each of the city departments.  I arrived in town to help them deploy a test version of our product, and that required setting up a server in each of these facilities.  The IT manager handed me a key ring with labeled keys for each facility, a spreadsheet with credentials for each server (they had about 200), gave me a map of the facilities locations, and told me to go for it.  I was never asked for any identification, never asked to maintain confidentiality, and nobody even asked me for the keys and spreadsheet back!

I was frequently amused by IT organization's focus on things like firewalls.  Most of them had far worse security problems than out-of-date firewalls, and the problems didn't appear to be on anyone's schedule to be fixed...

Porcupine Reservoir is full!

Porcupine Reservoir is full!  We took a drive up there (map at right) this afternoon (photos below) and were delighted to see that the dam is spilling over – the reservoir is full to the brim.

This is most excellent news for all of us in the southern Cache Valley who depend on Porcupine Reservoir for our summer irrigation water.  Just a month ago everyone here was worried about a water shortage – now we're actually a little bit ahead of the water curve.  Most years the draw from the reservoir would already have started.  Not this year!  We're sopping wet at the moment.  The storm total ended up being 3.7 inches just north of Paradise, and it will have been something similar over the entire southern Cache Valley.

This is such a pretty drive for us, south from our home through the beautiful farms and towns of Paradise and Avon, then up the canyon to the reservoir.  There isn't any stretch of that drive that isn't pleasing to the eye.  This time of year, the fields are full of babies: colts, calves, kids, lambs, and more.  The trees and waterways are full of chicks and fledglings.  The fields are lush shades of green, as are the hills all the way up to the mountain peaks.  Lots of plants are still in bloom, though that's winding down.  The smells of farms and forest fill our nostrils on the whole trip, and the sounds of farm animals, birds, insects, and frogs are with us all the way.  As I write this the sun is setting, and around our house we hear dozens of birds complaining about the night time that is about to start.

We feel lucky as hell to live here...

The new peace...

The new peace...  An excellent short documentary on the astonishing reduction in war-related deaths since WWII.  There were no surprises in here for me, but I'll bet that for most people born after about 1980 it's chock full of 'em...

Medical instruments of a century ago...

Medical instruments of a century ago...  I don't generally suffer from the “good old days syndrome” – and things like these are amongst the reasons why.  Not to mention the fact that I would never have reached my age (62) a hundred years ago, because back then they had no idea how to treat my pernicious anemia.  I would have died from it a couple of decades earlier...

Powerless in Paradise...

Powerless in Paradise...  We were without power for several hours yesterday.  The outage was caused by someone hitting a power pole just north of our place, snapping it off at the base.  The pickup that hit the pole ended up in the irrigation canal alongside the highway, with its nose aimed right at our neighbor's (Tim and Jeannie D.) house!  When I walked over to see if I could help, the police on scene told me everybody was ok; no serious injuries.  Both Tim and Jeannie were away at the time of the accident, so I called Tim to let him know what happened – and he told me someone else had hit that same pole just a few years ago!  The thing must have a target on it :)

We need a generator.  We've lost count, but this is either the fifth or sixth power outage we've had this year...

Best dog story evah?

Best dog story evah?  My pistol-packing mama thinks it just might be:

A guy is driving around the back woods of Montana and he sees a sign in front of a broken down shanty-style house: 'Talking Dog For Sale'.  He rings the bell and the owner appears and tells him the dog is in the backyard.

The guy goes into the backyard and sees a nice looking Labrador retriever sitting there.

'You talk?' he asks.

'Yep,' the Lab replies.

After the guy recovers from the shock of hearing a dog talk, he says 'So, what's your story?'

The Lab looks up and says, 'Well, I discovered that I could talk when I was pretty young. I wanted to help the government, so... I told the CIA.

In no time at all they had me jetting from country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders, because no one figured a dog would be eavesdropping.'

'I was one of their most valuable spies for eight years running...but the jetting around really tired me out, and I knew I wasn't getting any
younger so I decided to settle down. I signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security, wandering near suspicious characters and listening in.  I uncovered some incredible dealings and was awarded a batch of medals.'

'I got married, had a mess of puppies, and now I'm just retired.'

The guy is amazed. He goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog.

'Ten dollars,' the guy says.

'Ten dollars? This dog is amazing! Why on earth are you selling him so
cheap?'

'Because he's a Bullshitter. He's never been out of the yard'

Curiosity finds layers on Mars...

Curiosity finds layers on Mars...  Tiny, thin layers.  I'm no geologist, but to me this says WATER.  All the ways I know that such layers can form involve water with minerals in solution, either invading a crack, or evaporating from a flat surface.  This image was taken with the MAHLI camera, so it is highly magnified.  It was processed with focus-merge, so there is an unusually deep field of focus.  (Many) more here...

“...because our feeble American brains cannot fully comprehend the awesomeness of organized labor.”

“...because our feeble American brains cannot fully comprehend the awesomeness of organized labor.”  Snatched from an excellent post by Frank Soto on Ricochet...

Two ways to see this...

Two ways to see this...  Watch the video at right, then read this.

Most software engineers viewing this will have the same reaction I did: some variant of “Holy crap!” Why?  Because that robot is doing something that is incredibly challenging to program, especially in real time.  Almost every element of that robot, from sensors to actuators, poses a very difficult programming challenge.  That challenge is even harder if the solution you're seeking is a general one (i.e., let this robot run anywhere and jump over obstacles) as the MIT program is, and not a specific one (i.e., jump over this set of specific obstacles). 

Most other people will look at this and say something like “Well, this is cool and all, but what else can it do?  Just run?”

And in a very roundabout way, that's why I'm not too worried about artificial intelligence powered robots taking over the world anytime soon :)  It's just too damned hard for conventional computers and conventional programming methods, no spectacular breakthroughs are around the corner (at least, none that I know of), and consumer expectations are light-years ahead of the reality.  I suspect that the spawn of Roomba is what we can reasonably expect for quite a long time...