Dinner in Paradise...

Dinner in Paradise...  Last night we had dinner at a restaurant in Logan that we've never tried: Le Nonne (which, apparently, is Italian for “The Grandmothers”).  Summary version: we're kicking ourselves for not having tried this before!

Our appetizer (left) was fresh ahi, raw, with asparagus and Parmesan cheese.  It was outstanding.  With it was a round of fresh Italian bread with a pesto topping, also outstanding (and refilled immediately when we finished the first two rounds).  My entree (middle) was thinly sliced pork “medallions” in a white wine reduction sauce – amongst the top five pork dishes I've ever had.  Debbie's entree (right) was fettuccine with a creamy, cheesy sauce, hunks of roasted garlic, and a pile of delicious mushrooms.  Her entree was suffused with an intense mushroom flavor, and my mouth is watering right now just remembering the couple of forkfuls I sampled.  Wonderful stuff, it was!  We ordered creme brulee for dessert, and I'm sad to say that it was our only disappointment.  It's not that it was bad – it wasn't – it just wasn't nearly as superlative as the rest of our meal had been.  It doesn't have either the egginess or the creaminess of a truly outstanding creme brulee.

The meal was a bit pricey, at least by Logan standards – we paid almost $90 including tip for the two of us.  That's over double the tab at any other place we frequent, and because of that we won't be coming here often.  But we will be back again, for sure!

When we got home we fed the dogs, and that reminded me to talk about the new food bowls we got for Race and Miki.  The two of them, but most especially Race, have a habit of gulping their food down just as fast as they can shovel it into their maws.  Race can do this so quickly that his throat gets clogged up, and he ends up spitting up a cup or so of food, then re-eating it – not the most pleasant thing to watch (or hear).  I stumbled across these food bowls on Amazon, designed to stop exactly that sort of gulping behavior.  The design looked plausible, and clever, so I bought two of them.

They work remarkably well!  Both Race and Miki now take longer to get their food in them than good old Slow Mo'i, who eats at the pace of a snail with arthritis.  No more gulping.  No more food spewing all over the place.  No more spitting up.  Recommended for anyone with gulping dog syndrome!

Theoretical limit exceeded?

Theoretical limit exceeded?  Well, it was only theoretical, right?

Weird happenings on Saturn...

Weird happenings on Saturn...  The rings tell the story...

The U.S. is still bombing...

The U.S. is still bombing ... the places where “We’ve ended two wars.”   Glenn Greenwald, not exactly a conservative demagogue, takes Obama to the woodshed...

The “Wil can fly!” site...

The “Wil can fly!” site ... has launched, and the calendars are for sale now.  Alan just announced that the final proof has been approved and the print run authorized.  We're looking forward to seeing our calendar soon!

Classic bug reports...

Classic bug reports...  I had some geekly fun with this site.  One gem:

R. Clint Whaley 2007-03-09 20:22:32 UTC

I'd like to welcome the newest members of the bug 323 community, where all x87 floating point errors in gcc come to die! All floating point errors that use the x87 are welcome, despite the fact that many of them are easily fixable, and many are not! We're all one happy family, making the egregious mistake of wanting accuracy out of the most accurate general purpose FPU on the market!

Cheers,
Clint

Much more like that through the site I linked to!

Sorting colors...

Sorting colors ... is much more difficult than you might imagine!  Years ago I worked on a compression scheme for a remote control product that was specific to color displays.  My objective was to use 8 bit palette to represent a screen snapshot when the screen was using 24 bit color.  This is very similar to the color sorting problem: I needed to identify 256 colors that were as close as possible to all the colors used on the 24 bit screen.  Knowing how “close” two colors were to each other was the key.  As the linked article details, this isn't the simple numeric problem you might imagine – how we perceive colors is quite different than how we represent colors in standard numeric encoding schemes (RGB, HSL, CMYK, etc.)...

Eston Kohver is back home in Tallinn...

Eston Kohver is back home in Tallinn...  He was freed in a prisoner exchange strongly reminiscent of the Cold War spy swaps.  Kohver was captured by the Russians just over a year ago...

Peeple...

Peeple ... a new web application launching in November, will let anyone “rate” anyone else, and view the ratings of anyone on the site.  This is much like Yelp lets you rate restaurants and other local businesses, and review those ratings.

I've often wondered why nobody had done this before.  It seems like such an obvious opportunity.  There's an obvious variant as well: rating employees of a particular company, where the reviewers are identified as either customers or other employees.

It's obvious that this will be abused by angry people, or those with a grudge.  You see this sort of thing on Yelp all the time, and even on product ratings at Amazon.  Nevertheless, the ratings still provide good information – and usually the abusers can be easily identified, often simply by the tone of the review.  Some sites with ratings allow the ratings to be reviewed, and this is a great way to help filter out the abusers.

I think there's great promise in something like Peeple. 

As a businessman, I'd have loved a way for my customers to give me anonymous feedback about my customer-facing employees.  The kind of blunt, honest feedback you see in product reviews is almost impossible to obtain about employees today.  I'd also have liked to know what employees thought about their managers.

As a consumer, I'd like to be able to give feedback about great (or not so great) experiences I've had with particular people at the places I do business with.

Where things really start to get interesting, though, is on the strictly personal level.  Imagine, for instance, all your neighbors being rated – and them rating you.  Will this lead to better behavior?  Will it lead to “wars”?  Will it reduce or increase conflict between people?

I'm inclined to think that more information is better in nearly all circumstances, Anthony Weiner and the Clintons (and their ilk) excepted.  Some people will never care how they're perceived by others, and Peeple won't change that.  Most people do care, though ... and Peeple's public shaming and recognition mechanism might just make a positive difference...

Tired puppy in Paradise...

Tired puppy in Paradise...  Not the dogs – me!  I've finished planting all those trees, but now I've got some seriously tired arms :)  I did most of the really hard work in the cool morning hours, which helped – but I've been going at it hard since 7:30 this morning, with just a couple of breaks.  I'm not used to doing this much hard work with my upper body, and I'm really feeling it.

On the other hand: trees!  Bushes!  We now have a small grove of five 15' to 20' tall paper birches (3" trunks), three well-positioned weeping willows, 10' high and the same across, and a rough group of six purple lilac.  The lilacs are small – 2 gallon pots, 30" tall plants, but they look very vigorous and healthy, and root-bound in the pots.  Two of the willows are on either side of our driveway as you pull in off the highway; once they have a few years of growth they'll make a fine entrance.  The third is in a gap in the row of trees alongside the irrigation canal, where a black willow was felled by lightning some years ago.  All three willows are within 10' of the irrigation canal (which is unlined; water seeps through its sides), so they should be very happy about the water situation.

In a related development, I asked the folks at Zollinger's for a reference to a quality sprinkler installer, and they came through.  I contacted that fellow today, and he'll be out here next week to scope out the job.  I'm thinking of a three-phased approach: one for all our lawn and landscaped area south of our driveway, two for the shed, and three for the lawn and landscaping around our house, once we've finished our planned construction and have it landscaped.  I currently irrigate with a combination of 3" diameter aluminum “hand line” and hoses with sprinklers.  I'm looking ahead a bit, to the day when that is an intimidating amount of work because of my age.  I'm probably good for another 5 to 10 years, but I want to get that taken care of before I can't do it any more :)

The Tesla Model X...

The Tesla Model X ... looks pretty awesome!

Given a choice of laughing or crying...

Given a choice of laughing or crying ...  I'll laugh, then cry.  My mom sends along this additional piece of Putin v. Obama fun:

Laugh of the day...

Laugh of the day...  Via reader Simi L...

Negotiating with Obama...

Negotiating with Obama...  I've seen this before, but I don't think I've posted it.  Via my Macified, pistol-packing, big Scrabble word making mama:

Negotiating with Obama is like playing chess with a pigeon. The pigeon knocks over all the pieces, shits on the board and then struts around like it won the game.

--Vladimir Putin

Now Snopes tells me that Putin didn't actually say this, and the pigeon chess meme has been floating around for at least 10 years.  But no matter – it's completely plausible that Putin would say this.  Fake, but real!

The Arctic Ocean is warming!

The Arctic Ocean is warming!  My brother Scott emailed me this:

The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulate, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone.

Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the Gulf Stream still very warm.

Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.

Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelt which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable.

Then his email casually mentions that this is a report published in the Washington Post, on November 2, 1922!

A quick look on Snopes (where would we all be without that wonderful site?!) told me it was real – but also that the story isn't quite as simple as it sounds.  No matter, it's still a fun story and a good example of the fallibility of prognostication...

Migratory birds...

Migratory birds...  I just found this great resource for when to expect migratory birds in any particular area. 

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  I spent most of the day yesterday planting trees.  The crew from Zollinger's showed up right on time, at 9 am, in a big truck with an even bigger trailer – and 39 trees and shrubs for us.  They have a nifty little rubber-tracked forklift that makes moving even the larger trees really easy.  In under an hour, they had placed the eight large trees (weeping willows and paper birches) in their holes (which I'd already dug) and unloaded the potted plants (lilacs and sumac).  Then they gave me a gallon of their famous cider (delicious!), picked up a check, and took off.

Now it was my turn.  I needed to position the trees, fill in the holes, clean up the grass (where it had dirt piled on it), and water the trees.  I couldn't finish it all yesterday; it was too much work for my poor old body to do.  I did get all the tree roots covered, and three of the trees are completely finished.  That leaves me with five to do today, but three of those are not on the grass, so there's no cleanup (which is actually the hardest part of the entire job!).  I'll finish off the big trees today, and hopefully get the lilacs in as well.  They're in little two-gallon pots, so they're a piece of cake to plant.

Yesterday while I was working out in the yard, I saw a few interesting things (photos below).

The flowers were pretty splashes of colors in the fall.  The yellow flower was about the size of a quarter; the violet/blue ones about the size of a match head.  The fellow in the middle is a rattlesnake – first one we've seen on our property.  But it was a teensy little rattlesnake, only about 9 or 10 inches long and very zippy.  After I chased it all over the yard, it got tired and stopped – and then very vigorously tried to attack my boot :)  Debbie was all for me killing it (worried about our dogs), but I know from my reading and from talking with our vet that rattlesnake bites on dogs are very rare for dogs in the valley – and not particularly threatening, as the rattlesnakes here are less venomous than the ones we had down in California.

Finally, I'll leave you with this.  The photo at right I took last night as we were leaving our dinner at Jack's pizza (wonderful as always).  The display in that window clearly says “LEER”, and to the right of that is the word “READ” written sideways.  You can see that LEER has a sort of Mexican motif to it.  What's up with that?  Well, it turns out that “leer” is Spanish for “read”.  It doesn't mean what my dirty old man's mind thought it meant.  And here I thought I was going to be surprised by an unexpected aspect of Mormon culture!

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  A few photos from our walk yesterday morning, with a beautiful giant full moon:

Somehow the moon doesn't look as large in those photos as it did in real life :)  I sure wish they could fit a nice zoom lens into the iPhone.  Most of the time the wide angle lens is exactly what you want, but I'd have liked about a 150mm for those first two shots...

This morning I went out to the shed to fire up the tractor.  I'm getting ready for the delivery of some trees, and the backhoe is my tool of choice for moving dirt.  As I approached the shed, I noticed this great big spider hanging on the side.  I've never seen a spider that looked like this (click the photos below to embiggen them).  Anybody have a clue what it is?

Update: I think I found it, by searching for similar images on Google Images.  I think it's Araneus gemma, aka the cat-faced spider.

The tree guys just called, and they're on the way. I'm expecting to be quite tired by tonight :)

Meanwhile, back at comet 67P...

Meanwhile, back at comet 67P ... Rosetta's research continues.  Here's a photo from August showing some of the evidence for a recent conclusion: that the two-lobed “rubber ducky” shape of 67P is due to an ancient low-speed collision of two comets with roughly spherical shapes...

Sure looks like water was involved, doesn't it?

Sure looks like water was involved, doesn't it?  Curiosity, the Mars rover, is looking at those rocks at right.  Meanwhile, as I'm sure you've heard, NASA announced confirmation of present-day flows of liquid water on Mars.  This is a necessary prerequisite for life-as-we-know it.  There are organisms on Earth that most likely could live on Mars, in or near those water flows...