Evening walkies in Paradise...

Evening walkies in Paradise...  The sun is low, the temperature balmy, there's a slight breeze, the dogs are lazy, and we just slowly walked through the fields of alfalfa and drank in the views...

Shaper in Paradise...

Shaper in Paradise...  My shaper is the last big piece of woodworking equipment that I'm planning to buy, at least until I learn what else I need (a standalone sander of some type is a distinct possibility).  I received the shaper last week, but other project have kept me from finishing the assembly of it until today.

The photos below give you an idea what it's like to unpack and assemble a piece of equipment like this.  The first photo shows what it looked like when I took the top of the crate off: a nicely milled cast iron surface, covered with a thick layer of grease.  The second photo shows it with the crate completely removed.  All the parts that had to be assembled (dozens of them) were packed inside the green cabinet, as you can glimpse in the third photo.  The fourth photo shows all those parts after I extracted them.  The fifth and sixth photos show a couple of stages during the assembly process, which is nearly all on the top of the machine.

The last two photos should have a title: “Really, Grizzly?”  The next-to-last photo shows the angle meter (for the tilting spindle).  Looks great.  Except – in the last photo, you see the handle for raising and lowering the spindle installed.  It completely covers the angle meter.  Really, Grizzly?  That's the best you can do? Fortunately, I suppose, I don't expect to be changing the spindle angle all that frequently.  But ... when I do, I'll be partially disassembling my shaper just so I can read the angle!  Jeez.  I certainly expected better for a machine in this price range. 

Aside from that one awesomely stupid design element (really, Grizzly?), I like what I see here.  The cast iron table is heavy and very nicely made, the sliding part slide true and smoothly, the tilting spindle works great, and everything on the machine looks like it was built to withstand a nuclear assault.  I haven't wired it up yet, so I haven't been able to actually run some wood through it. 

While I've got the shaper itself completely assembled, I haven't yet assembled the rolling base I bought for it.  That's a project for another day, along with wiring it up and lighting it off...

Really, Grizzly?  Really?

Storm in Paradise...

Storm in Paradise...  Yesterday afternoon we had a brief visit from the storm king.  It brought very little rain (just 0.04"), but lots and lots of drama – mainly in the form of gusty wind and dark, evil-looking clouds.  It was all over in less than an hour...

Progress in Paradise...

Progress in Paradise...  Yesterday I went to Seeholzer Vision in Logan and had my eyeballs examined.  I'd been there once before, last year, to get a pair of glasses repaired.  This time I needed an exam, plus I needed new glasses to replace the ones I melted last week while tending the bonfire.

Dr. Seeholzer is a second-generation optometrist – his dad started the practice over 60 years ago.  I thoroughly enjoyed the visit, which isn't at all what I expected!  Dr. Seeholzer (who asked to be called “Jeff”) is an affable fellow, happy to answer my questions in any amount of detail I wanted.  His exam was thorough, as was his review of my optometric history (which, unfortunately, he thought was interesting :).

I'm starting to think that appointments being honored on time is some kind of cultural norm here, just as in California it seem to be the norm for all appointment times to be basically ignored.  My appointment yesterday was for 9:15 am, and I was ushered into the exam room (and the exam was started) at 9:13.  Amazing!

This morning I hooked up my sprayer to the ATV, and sprayed ... just about every conceivable place on our property.  I used 67% 2,4-D at 2.5 ounces per gallon (a 25% increase from last time), and sprayed our entire lawn, the field borders, the area between the irrigation canal and the highway, the non-lawn areas around our outbuildings, the dirt piles leftover from the shed construction, and a bunch of weed “hot spots” scattered all over the place.  I'd made two batches of spray, 40 gallons each, and all the spraying on our place used 72 gallons.  The extra 8 gallons I sprayed on our neighbor's property (after getting permission, of course!), so they got a free second dosage on part of their yard.  I ran out about a third of the way through their lawn :)

Debbie's been making great progress on recovering from her fall in March.  Today she's feeling good enough to start cleaning up the agility court area of the shed, to get it ready for installing foam.  She's been going on about half our walkies, too.  It's great to see her getting better!

Mo'i in the moonlight, in Paradise...

Mo'i in the moonlight, in Paradise...  Our ancient and venerable field spaniel (Mo'i) just keeps getting better.  Beyond the Miracle of the Unnecessary Diapers, he's now getting physically stronger.  There are increasingly frequent moments when he seems downright playful and frisky.  Where he used to bark piteously at 2 or 3 am to be taken out for a walk (and to pee prodigiously), he now only occasionally barks to be let out before we wake up on our own.

That's what happened this morning.  I awoke around 4 am, then read email and news for an hour or so before actually getting up.  I took a leisurely shower, then wandered out to the kitchen to greet Mo'i.  He was up, wagging his tail, and eager to get outside.  We walked out into a wonderfully cool, still morning, brightly lit by the full moon that was about to set over the mountains to our west.  He strained at the leash to go off and investigate all the things he could smell, and I could not.  I smelled just four things: pines, spruce, roses, and the complex aroma of the irrigation canal.  Mo'i ignored all those things and chased invisible trails of mice, muskrats, neighborhood cats, and who knows what else.  He's reveling in the lush green grass of our lawn, something he rarely saw in Jamul.  He was obviously having a good dogly time, tail wagging like mad.  A couple of times, walking alongside me, he reached up and nibbled my fingers – something he did as a puppy when he was happy.  The fact that he survived his cancer to make it up here, and can enjoy it, is a source of great satisfaction to Debbie and I...

I don't know why...

I don't know why ... anyone is surprised by this.  It seems obvious on the face of it that the world would think of Obama's America as weak, and getting weaker...

TSA fails again...

TSA fails again...  Several readers flagged this one for me.  Larry E. also sent along a personal experience:

I went through screening one day and forgot some change in my pocket. I went through the body scanner and realized it, so I reached in my pocket to get it to show the screener but it was still in my fist as his device showed it, but he basically just wanded me over the pocket my change had been in and sent me on my way. I never had the chance to show him that I had it in my hand now and he didn't ask nor did he find it. Can you imagine is someone had even simple sleight-of-hand skills?

I've had some personal experiences of my own over the years, mainly involving my pocket knife.  I have a lifetime habit of carrying a small folding pocket knife with me at all times, and many is the time that I've forgotten to remove it (post-9/11) before flying.  Only once was that pocket knife detected by airport security – and that was in London, getting ready to come back to the U.S.  They confiscated it and mailed it to me (I paid the postage).  I never counted the number of flights inside the U.S. where I took the knife through security, but it has to be in the range of four or five dozen times.

Most of the news stories about the current brouhaha don't mention it, but TSA (and its predecessors) have been failing these spot checks for years.  In fact, they've never passed one!  As Bruce Schneier likes to say, the TSA is all about security theater.  It doesn't actually provide security, just the minimum necessary appearance (for sheeple pacification and political purposes) of it.

The continually failed security spot checks reminds me of a similar experience I had in the U.S. Navy.  Hopefully they've gotten better by now, though I wouldn't bet any money on it.  I served on a nuclear-powered ship that carried nuclear weapons, and it was a ship that could serve as “flag”, meaning that it could carry an admiral and his retinue – and had extensive secure communications facilities. 

To give just one example of the security test we routinely failed (routinely as in every single time): one of the testing agents was always able to get into the radio room, right up to the teletypes and printers that were handling all the “secure” communications.  The radio room could only be entered through a door that had a push-button combination lock (similar to the one at right), and the combination was frequently changed.  How did the agent get in?  It was trivially easy, as the combination was always taped to the door or frame somewhere easily visible.  WTF?  Why would they do that?  Because the several dozen or so people who were cleared to enter the radio room (including yours truly) couldn't be relied on to memorize the new combinations.  Plus distributing the new combination was an interesting challenge in itself.  So someone always taped the combination up.  I had access to the radio room for about three years (while I had responsibility for maintaining a computer involved in secure satellite communications), actually entered it hundreds of times, and I never once memorized the combination.

Why did nobody ever tell us?

Why did nobody ever tell us?  This morning Debbie and I changed our bedclothes.  Part of this effort included inserting a comforter into a duvet, something we've done about 10,000 times over the past 30+ years.  While trying to find a corner in the duvet, I noticed a pair of cloth ribbons, about 8" long, sewn into the inside of the corner. 

What could that be?  A tie?  To tie the corner of the comforter in place?  Working on that theory, I checked inside of all four corners, and sure enough: there are ribbons in all of them.  Who knew?

So then Debbie and I decided to try tying the corner of the comforter with the ties.  We weren't quite sure how we were going to do that, but it sounded like it would make the clumsy process of inserting the comforter a bit easier.  So we got the comforter in place, and then I went to tie the first corner – and discovered that the comforter had a handy loop right where we'd need it to make the tie work.  In a jiffy we had the comforter tied into the right place, inside the duvet, and in fact that was much easier than the corner-holding and shaking we've been doing all these years.

Duvets come with insider corner ties?  Comforters come with matching tie loops?  We checked our other comforters and duvets.  Yup.  Ties and loops in all of them.

How the hell could we have been doing this for over three decades without once even suspecting that those ties and loops existed?  And why are we completely surrounded by cruel people who never told us?

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...