Russian book jackets...

Russian book jackets ... from the 1930s.  For those of you with an imperfect grasp on 20th history, that's in the early years of the Soviet Union.  That's an example at right; many more here...

Obamacare explained...

Obamacare explained ... in just four sentences!  Via my lovely bride:

1. In order to insure the uninsured, we first have to uninsure the insured.
2. Next, we require the newly uninsured to be reinsured.
3. To reinsure the newly uninsured, they are required to pay extra charges to be reinsured.
4. The extra charges are required so that the original insured, who became uninsured, and then became reinsured, can pay enough extra so that the original uninsured can be insured, so it will be ‘free-of-charge’ to them.

It sounds funny, until you study it carefully – and realize that every word is true!

Quote of the day...

Quote of the day...  By Senator Ted Cruz, via my lovely bride:

If Americans really wanted Obamacare ... you wouldn't need a law to make them buy it.

Well put.

Ok, this is really weird...

Ok, this is really weird...  I don't even know what to call it!  Via my pistol-packing mama, which will surprise exactly nobody who knows her...

Saturn in all its glory...

Saturn in all its glory ... as seen on March 7, 2015 in infrared light from the robot explorer Cassini.  Magnificent!  Full resolution version here...

Sunset in Paradise...

Sunset in Paradise...  That's what it looked like last night from our front yard, just after the sun dropped below the Wellsville Mountains:

Paradise ponders....

Paradise ponders...  Took a drive up to Hardware Ranch this afternoon, hoping to repeat the bazillion deer spotting we did on Sunday.  On the way up we saw one deer.  One.  We also saw a bald eagle, on the wing high above us.  We watched the penned elk for a while; had the place nearly to ourselves. Then on the way home we saw a couple deer, followed quickly by a bull moose (sans antlers, since they'd been shed) looking a bit lost and possibly exhausted.  After that Debbie started spotting deer about every 22 inches.  We must have seen 50.  As best we can figure, those deer all have their alarm clocks set for 3:30 in the afternoon!

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  We had a long and interesting day today.  It started bright and early at the physical therapy clinic, where Debbie got a real workout for the first time since her recent surgery.  She did great!  Then we drove to Wellsville to meet up with my brother Scott, and we all drove down to Ogden together.  The transit through Sardine Canyon to Brigham City was particularly beautiful, with the snowy mountains and frosty trees.  In Ogden we dropped Debbie off at her hairdresser's, and Scott and I continued down to the south side of Salt Lake City.  There we raided Trader Joe's for a very odd assortment of food and treats (Scott eats some mighty weird stuff!), followed by a quick pillaging of one of the big State liquor stores - our beer and wine stocks needed replenishing.  Then it was back to Ogden to pick up Debbie (with her nicely refurbished hair), and back toward home.

We made a slight detour in Brigham City, though - a turn toward Perry for a meal at Maddox.  Scott had never been, and if you're going to live in Cache Valley, then you have to know Maddox.  He's now been introduced by means of a New York strip steak advertised as 16 ounces, but actually more like 20.  Delicious, of course (it's Maddox!).

Then we really did head home.  That wasn't quite so pleasant.  Miki had chewed and clawed his way out of his soft (cloth) crate, and was loose in the house.  The crate was destroyed.  Then our poor old dog Mo'i had pooped and peed all over our kitchen.  So our welcome home was a big cleanup job :(

Still, it was worth it.  We had a decadent meal, good company, and now we're all stocked up with a variety of goodies.  And tomorrow's another day in Paradise!

A class act...

A class act...  Via my pistol-packing mama...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  I dumped a few photos out of my phone.

The first one is Jahar, in his customary position tucked up against Debbie.  Whenever she's in the bedroom, you'll find him attached to her somehow (the exact position varies, but not the proximity).

The second one is Marley, Tim D.'s new dog.  He's two years old and is a bundle of energy – basically the complete opposite of Louie, Tim's dog that was killed a couple weeks ago.

The last photo is from last night, of the snow-covered Wasatch Mountains as seen from near our home, just before sunset.  The shadows of the Wellsville Mountains (behind me as I snapped that) have nearly crept to their peaks.

We took a drive yesterday afternoon, up toward Hardware Ranch.  We really hadn't expected to see any wildlife, but we saw something like 50 deer in about 10 groups.  We also saw a bald eagle sitting on a power pole right near the road, looking really pissed off.  I don't think he likes winter :)

Thank you, mystery person!

Thank you, mystery person!  On Friday morning, Fedex delivered a small box to us.  On the outside, it was marked “Collin Street Bakery”, in Corsicana, Texas.  Neither Debbie nor I had any idea what that bakery was, but hey – from a bakery it can't be too bad, can it?

So we opened the box, and discovered that it contained a fruitcake, in a traditional round tin.   We hadn't ordered it, so whoever did must be someone who knows me fairly well – well enough to know that I am one of 5 living humans who admit to liking fruit cake (well, good fruit cake, anyway).  Debbie is not one of the other 4 – she can't stand 'em.  Also, whoever it is knows our new address.  But there was no card with the cake, and no letter, so we have no idea who sent it!

Then we tried the fruit cake.

That's the best damned fruit cake I've ever had.  I've had some good ones in the past, but none even came close to this one.  When Debbie heard my exclamations of delight, she decided to try it, too – and now the cake is disappearing twice as fast as it was.  If a fruit cake is good enough to get Debbie to eat it, you know it's good!

So thank you, oh mysterious giver of fruit cake.  We don't know who you were, but thank you!

Geek: working around a Java bug...

Geek: working around a Java bug...  On Friday I ran smack into a weird bug in a most unexpected place, while doing something seemingly very straightforward.  I was creating a socket factory for SSL connections to a web site, using Jetty (which relies on standard Java library classes).  To do this, the socket factory needs to know about your certificates.  These are usually kept in a keystore file, which is what I am doing.  The standard API has you pass in the path to the keystore file, along with the password for it.  When I passed in the path, I got an exception (below with the first few lines of the stack trace):

Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: default directory must be absolute
   at sun.nio.fs.UnixFileSystem.(UnixFileSystem.java:54)
   at sun.nio.fs.LinuxFileSystem.(LinuxFileSystem.java:39)
   at sun.nio.fs.LinuxFileSystemProvider.newFileSystem(LinuxFileSystemProvider.java:43)
   at sun.nio.fs.LinuxFileSystemProvider.newFileSystem(LinuxFileSystemProvider.java:36)
   at sun.nio.fs.UnixFileSystemProvider.(UnixFileSystemProvider.java:55)

The default directory path was absolute, so this error made no sense.  Eventually I tracked down the source of the issue: a known Java bug (JDK-7181721)!  That's something one doesn't run into every day – virtually 100% of the time, the bug is either in your own code, or someone else's code that you're relying on – not the code that's actually part of Java.  This is so unusual that I was suspicious I was wrong at first.  So I came up with a workaround that avoided this code, and sure enough that fixed it.

The workaround?  It turns out that the socket factory as a completely separate way to get the certificates.  You can create a Keystore object (in memory) and load it yourself, then pass that in.  I did that this morning, and bye-bye problem.

I'd be quite happy to not run into another one of these!  On the other hand, finding and fixing such a bizzaro problem is kind of satisfying...

A slight change of plans...

A slight change of plans...  This past August we'd booked a trip to Hawai'i, to leave on January 13th, which would have been our first visit there in about five years.  With Debbie's surgery just a few days ago, and some recovery time needed, she's decided that she'd rather make that trip later, after she's more fully recovered.  So the trip has been canceled (boo hoo!), and we'll re-book it sometime later.

Happier news: Debbie's recovery is going rather spectacularly well!  Yesterday she spent most of the day on her own two feet, without crutches, cane, or any other kind of assist.  She reports that the pain that stopped her recovery progress over the past few months is gone – a pretty good indication that the meniscus tear has truly been the source of her issues.  Now she's got a different sort of pain, the soreness you'd expect after surgery.  It's already down to the point where she's not taking any pain medication except prior to physical therapy visits, and even then it's just ibuprofen.  She hasn't touched the opioids for days now.  Yay!

There's a new dog in town!

There's a new dog in town!  Not ours, but our neighbor Tim D.  Cute little bugger, isn't he?  For some reason they named the poor guy “Marley”.

We also heard from Sheila Miller, the breeder who has been the source of all our field spaniels over the years.  She's got a female who was just bred, and one of the puppies from her litter, if everything works out, has our name on it.  Sometime in March or April, there may be some yipping and squeaking in Paradise...

A geeky rescue...

A geeky rescue...  My friend and neighbor Tim D. had something of a computer emergency earlier this week.  His ancient Dell refused to boot, and made funny noises.  I checked it out for him, but it was deader than the proverbial door nail.  Not a hint of video, no audio, and no disk noises.  All I could really detect was the symptoms of a power supply in agony, which could be either the power supply itself, or something else drawing way too much power.  Tim didn't want to invest a lot of time or effort in it, so decided to upgrade to a new Dell: smaller, quieter, faster, and half the price.

Here's the rub, though: he had years of photos and documents on that old Dell that he really didn't want to lose.  He never backed up locally, of course.  He did have some kind of cloud backup running - but he had no idea what his account name or password might be.  Oh, my.

So today I went over to help him with his new machine.  First thing I noticed: the thing was larded up with an unconscionable amount of crapware, some of which was really obnoxious with the scary, misleading pop up screens full of doom-laden technobabble.  Sheesh.  I got rid of most of that, but at least one thing is still installed, forcing all of his web searches to go to Yahoo.  Shame, Dell.  I will never buy one of your machines again, nor will I recommend them.  Just awful.

Next I tried to figure out whether his Internet connection was up to snuff.  He's paying for a 105/50 connection, but his cable modem had a blinking orange light - likely some sort of problem.  Comcast told him to ignore the light.  I ran a speed test, and he's only getting a 13/12 connection - horrible, and not even close to what he's paying for.  He and I are declaring war on Comcast Commies!

Then I tried to figure out a way to log into his backup service.  Finally I got the account password reset, logged into his backup service - and discovered that he'd never actually backed up anything at all!  That meant that all his photos and documents existed in only one place: his old computer's hard disk.  Which, of course, might not be in working order.  Yikes!

So I removed his old hard disk, took it back to our house, and rifled through my boxes of junk to look for a magic widget I bought a couple of years ago.  This thing turns any SATA or IDE disk into a USB disk.  If Tim were really, really lucky, that would mean that I could mount that old disk on my Mac as an external drive, and recover his files.

Well, Tim must be doing something right, because that old disk spun right up.  Further, my Mac already had a read-only NTFS file system driver installed - so I could read it with no fuss at all.  A few minutes of work with the Finder and I had all his files on a thumb drive.  A half hour or so later, they were on his new computer.  Yay!

Now I've got him running on BackBlaze, my favorite cloud backup ... and I've recorded his credentials so he doesn't get in trouble like this again!  He'll have to find some new way to live dangerously :)

Quote of the day...

Quote of the day...  This time it's from the U.S. government, in a document just released called Scientific Report of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.  On the off chance that you're not familiar with this committee, they're the ones who issue the federal government's official dietary guidelines – the ones quoted so often in the press, and likely, by your doctor.

For decades these guidelines have contained strict limitations on the consumption of cholesterol.  Generations of Americans have been told that the science was settled: they should stop eating those nasty egg yolks.  So you might be surprised to see this in the latest (2015) guidelines:

Previously, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommended that cholesterol intake be limited to no more than 300 mg/day. The 2015 DGAC will not bring forward this recommendation because available evidence shows no appreciable relationship between consumption of dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol, consistent with the conclusions of the AHA/ACC report. Cholesterol is not a nutrient of concern for overconsumption.

Translated, this says: our previous guidelines were bullshit.  Eat all the cholesterol you want, as the cholesterol you eat doesn't affect the cholesterol in your blood – we're not aware of any potential for eating too much.  So go right ahead and eat those egg yolks – jumbo, if you'd like.

Sheesh.

Flying colors!

Flying colors!  That's how Debbie's first physical therapy went.  Her tiny wounds are nearly healed already, no infection, and the swelling is almost completely gone.  Best of all: full range of motion with very little pain.  Yay!

Excellent speech..

Excellent speech ... by Brigadier General Michael Kurilla.   Via Michael Yon, much more here...

Another Dilbert strip...

Another Dilbert strip ... that resonates oh-so-strongly with my corporate experience:

One incident in particular comes right to mind, in which my then-CEO, a nice fellow named John T., sent me off to make a budget spreadsheet for the engineering department.  He particularly wanted it to show the effects of a planned layoff.  When I brought the spreadsheet down, he said (these are his exact words):

“Fix that so that the total savings is $1.4 million.”

My calculations had showed a roughly $600 thousand savings.  Further discussion revealed that he really, truly didn't care whether the spreadsheet represented reality at all.  All he cared about was the bottom line.  So I just changed (as he stood there) the total savings cell from a formula to a fixed value of $1.4 million.  He said:

“Great!  But add just a little bit so it doesn’t look like we just made it up.”

At that point I reverted the spreadsheet to the way I had built it, emailed it to him, and told him I didn't want to know what he did with it...

Debbie update...

Debbie update...  All is well!  She's progressing nicely, getting around on crutches, and already able to put considerable weight on her surgery knee.  Her bandage comes off this afternoon, and tomorrow morning we've got the first physical therapy session scheduled...