Out of the Frying Pan

Various things

• It's, er, piling on to mention this, but as much as Jay Cutler dissed the Bronco defense last year (he and everyone else), he has to be missing the Denver offensive line. Last year: one sack per 56 attempts; this year, one per 16 attempts (according to the Bear site last week. After today's "performance", the number is surely worse). Ouch.
• Some seriously foul soup was made in the kitchen today and I doubt that use of the passive will do much to conceal the perpetrator's identity. Let's leave it that the search continues for a good corn chowder recipe. The Mimi's wannabe recipes on the Web are wanting. Seriously.
• For the over-25 set, only, We Don't Need No (Formal) Education: Social Media and the Edupunk Initiative. See what you think.

Usually homemade soup works for dinner and supper. Thank you, Good Times, for rescuing supper.

Little notes

• The Programming Language with the Happiest Users, except for the commenters, of course. Someone who knows just enough Perl to have created a lot of chaos in her world of years past and enough C++ to have really caused some problems -- well, that person is not going to comment.
• BlockChalk API - yet another way for me to introduce a little more havoc to my disordered world. HT O'Reilly Radar on both these items
• You want to be a dinosaur? Keep using tables strikes at the heart of my wondering whether to spend time re-developing literally hundreds of Web pages or to press ahead with new content development.
• And on a perhaps not unrelated note, Dumb Little Man has a nifty article on The Art of Changing Easily & Gracefully. It's a pretty good crash course in overcoming inertia.
• Finally, I vote with the folks who thought it was a, ahem, Richard move, but it's still pretty funny: a customer billed a sandwich shop for time wasted... and the sandwich shop paid up. Don't try this at home, kids.

Divers

That's such a great word. It was one of my heartbeat words, which is to say that it is a word I probably heard from the time my heart began to beat:

God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past...

Today's divers have rather less dignity than these words that begin the 107 word sentence that starts off the New Testament book of Hebrews.

First, a bumper-snicker sighted up in Fort Collins: Artificial intelligence is nothing compared to natural stupidity.

The peace agreement with my knees stipulates installation of an ADA commode. It's to be the fetchingly named UltraMax®, manufactured by Toto. My knees have an obnoxious sense of humor, but they do not have their own Internet connection, so I can speak freely of them here.

Leo Babauta has posted a beta version of his new book, Focus. He's using a wiki model, which means people are free to edit and even, one supposes, actually write.

Evernote, a means of information capture, looks interesting. One wonders about the privacy issues.

Finally, here's a blog entry on the difference between high and low income earners. Ultimately, the entry addresses in a fashion differences in opportunity, but it also tries to look at things that might be in a person's control. Interesting, even though I don't think I agree that these days a $100K salary is "high income".

Various things

• DC and I have made huge strides in digging out and reconfiguring my office. Pretty grand, isn't it?

• The HVAC company I was so pleased with last December turns out to have left the air filter leaning up against the furnace, instead of installing it. That means the furnace ran half a year without an air filter.

Yes, it would be possible to extract something from the HVAC company owner, especially because it was his tech here last week working on the A/C. But I told the owner about it, only because that's the major kind of mistake by an employee that, as a small business owner, I'd want to know about, myself. The damage will be rectified, anyway, by installation of a much more efficient furnace -- but this company will not, I think, handle the install.

• My tour through the Dalgliesh series by P.D. James is coming to an end. This is such a regrettable circumstance that my reading of the second to last book dawdles and pokes reluctantly along. One book every three years is her habit; The Private Patient was published in late 2008 and has a worrying valedictory note. Her date of birth is 3 August 1920, so you do the math. In all my tours of detective fiction, hers are the stories and hers is the writing most delectable to my catholic palate. God save the Queen and P.D. James.

• Do you know Aldo Leopold? You might find him interesting: more about him anon.

...and more bits

• Speed Test, whose results I referred to yesterday, is a free test of the download and upload speeds of your connection. If you're paying a premium for a fast connection, you might be interested in comparing your results to your ISP's average and to the average of what's going on in your area. It works world-wide.
• Fabulous Front Range Window Washer: Greg Bales, owner of Personal Touch Window Cleaning. His experience, orientation to detail, and professionalism give him a guaranteed return engagement here every year.
• My "new" office is coming along splendidly. Photos to follow.
• New leg elevator (seriously! that's what it's called) arrives today to augment the faithful services of Ol' Blue.

Quoi de neuf

The thrill of looking around town for cabinet hardware wears off quickly; even McGuckin's doesn't carry much of a selection these days. A couple of online sources I like: Hardware Hut, the online shop for a brick and mortar hardware store in Spokane, and -- with even more selection -- myknobs.com: over 300,000 items, they say.

The windows are open during these days of moderate temperatures, and the birdsong has been astonishing. The British Library has a great introduction to birdsong and the ornithology lab at Cornell has a jaw-dropping number of audio and video recordings.

A sense of place is one of the things I most enjoy in mysteries. Lately I've been reading P.D. James' Adam Dalgliesh series and recent festivities gave me time to wolf down Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti stories. What especially delighted me about the Leon series was each book's tight focus on an aspect of Venetian life: the floods, opera, housing, Murano glass making, pollution, and much more. OK, so those don't sound like subjects that will interest you. But they will, oh, they will.

It turns out to be possible to clean an acrylic tub: Soft Scrub, followed by scrubbing with Mr Clean pads. It works.

But there's plenty that doesn't work on glass shower enclosures. Trust me on this one. Vinegar works.

Refurbished Hunter fans turn out to be a really bad idea. If you're going to end up with (cha-ching!) Casablanca, anyway, it might as well be the first time the electrician calls.

More on the topic of what doesn't work: on cheap non-wireless phones, you'll probably need a coupler to swap out the too short cords for longer ones. At right, sadly, is my own picture.

More sundry

There's no news about New York yet, but Whispers has a credible report of what happened when Madame Speaker went to Rome. Why did she bother going? She's not going to change his mind about anything, and...

True confessions: the economic snooze is getting to me a little. Gretchen Rubin's "Happiness Emergency" tips has a couple of ideas I like: Rid yourself of a nagging task and Perform an action that reflects your values. Obvious advice, but bears repeating.

Gretchen has a one minute rule: never postpone any task that can be completed in less than one minute. I have about 49 one minute tasks right now, so it isn't entirely practical, but in concept it closely resembles the Getting Things Done "two minute rule", which adds up to about 167 little jobs for me. 167 x two minutes ÷ 60 = almost six hours in the two minute penalty box or, depending on how you look at it, "only" six hours. I guess.

But here's an irony likely to bring a smirk or snort to happiness skeptics. Gretchen's Happiness Project seems remarkably similar in its conclusions to Russ Harris' Happiness Trap. Or head on over to the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies and check out its efforts to "Advanc[e] the scientific study of behavior and its humane applications to the solution of practical problems". Choose yer poison. Or not. (Actually, these two links are probably worth the price of admission to today's blog entry.)

Odd bits, non-cheery edition

Borders bankruptcy? GM has the headlines today, but last month's story about Borders is interesting, too. HT Bob Sutton

Facebook is doing a little bit of damage control. Does it, or does it not, claim to own your content forever? Even if the new TOS are merely "overly formal", today I removed all photos except for my profile (vanity! vanity!). But the founder assures everyone that "In reality, we wouldn't share your information in a way you wouldn't want." Good. I'll try to make sure that they don't.

Social engineering drives right through the "feel good" of social networking of sites like Facebook. But probably it wouldn't feel good to get hooked by one of the 9 Dirty Tricks: Social Engineers' Favorite Pick-Up Lines. Oh, the humanity!

How long? Want to know how long it will take your 401K or IRA to recover from its recent illness? I'm not sure whether I'm happy to have found a recovery calculator: peak value, current value, annual contributions - bring your own crying towel.

Finally, a study about body language says, in a variation of an uplifting maxim wrongly attributed to Lincoln, Most people are about as nice as they make up their minds that they have to be.

Various things

In this time zone, one word comes up pretty consistently about yesterday's game: officiating.

Most of the words are being saved for the Hall of Fame selectors who, in their collective wisdom, denied first ballot entry to Shannon Sharpe. One of the 104.3FM guys speculated that its less Bias of the East than a generational bias, something that will cure itself by attrition. Eventually. For now, a selector for one of the eastern time zone teams hasn't covered that team in thirty years.

lynda.com is a godsend. Although the time and effort CANNOT be justified by anything I'm working on right now and I don't have access to a 3D printer, besides. lynda.com's training on Maya is a siren song. And this year Desktop Factory expects to roll out a printer that is almost reasonably priced. (I'm shouting at myself with the caps, not you!)

The news for the Front Range could be worse on the U.S. Drought Monitor, but it's never a good thing when your neighborhood has picked up a little color on their map. The animated maps are kind of cool.

When Is Good: nifty way for a bunch of people to figure out when they can get together. Useful.

Various things

The angel brings some tidings of joy. At 12F, the snow has stopped for now, but we hope the grey sky will repent of its recent stinginess.

Last night I tried Mark Bittman's suggestion of adding olive oil to the pizza dough and didn't care much for the results. It made the dough softer and, as you can see, the crust browned less well; I think that was attributable to the olive oil. (That's a cool link, btw.)

At the not so recent recommendation of Melissa, the blogger of A Contemplative Joy, I picked up Kathleen Norris' book, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life. I'm fussy about not writing in books, so I ended up filling many Moleskine-pages with notes. And it amused me greatly that just as I was "under some conviction" (as was put in the tradition in which I was reared) as I made my way through the book, Melissa wrote a shiningly anti-acediacal entry.

The homily complemented the bracing cold of our early morning sojourn to Mass. Fr Andreas latched onto a phrase used recently by Judge Robert Bork, "happy go lucky nihilism", which Bork tied to consumerism. Something to think about on the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul. right: icon of Saint Paul by Theophanes the Cretan, c. 1546; at Stavronikita Monastery, Mount Athos

Having been reared in the Conservative Baptist denomination (I wouldn't bother with the "What Does Conservative Mean" link on that page; it isn't a good summary of the denomination's distinctives), there are still large chunks of the Pauline epistles in my aging memory. Philippians 4 has great meaning to me; I Corinthians 15 (v. 51-58) is not only the basis for the text of one of my favorite portions of the Messiah, it has the comforting words read at the gravesite of each of the people dearest to me who have died. So on this great feast, these and other great portions of the epistles come to mind.

And while we're at it, here's an old column by George Weigel, Heretical Hymns. It's a number of places on the Web, but the comments are especially funny here.

Finally, my beloved and not so much (working there in a little Pauline style, except for that last bit): Small Talk with a Web Designer. That's pretty much how it goes.

Sundry

At home on the Front Range of northern Colorado, winter is a long way from having its back broken. Our coldest, snowiest days lie ahead -- we hope, because we certainly need more moisture than the parsimonious skies have been flicking in the general direction of this high desert. But at least things are looking brighter; the photo above was snapped on the west side of town at 5 PM, straight up.

When even I know that the Broncos have a major defense problem, it's almost as bad as if one of the players had gone on the radio and announced that the defense "feel like we're second class citizens." Hmmm...

There have been several stories of carbon monoxide poisoning in Colorado this winter. This seeped into my addled brain to the extent that in the dead of night, it made sense to me that I was worrying about our gas fireplace after it had been serviced, not before. I had a vague recollection that Adam the Wonder Electrician replaced our old, battery burning smoke detectors (burning batteries is what smoke detectors do when they are dying) with a hybrid, but I didn't feel sure that such had yet been invented. So off I tromped to a couple of Longmont mercantiles in search something to ease my mind. Well, everyone in Longmont is spooked. The detector I could find was, you guessed it, a hybrid that has to be hard-wired, just like the ten or so Adam hardwired throughout this place. Some enterprising Nebraskan could make a bundle by hauling cheap monitors over here and setting up a kiosk on Main Street.

Evidence suggestive, though not definitive, of the existence of a God who wants us to be happy: artichoke hearts and pink grapefruit.

Last weekend

This entry and others were moved.

Happy holidays... or not

The Telegraph runs a weekly feature in which people -- well, rather famous people -- tell about beautiful vacations and vacations that went horribly. Take a look at it for the good humor and, of course, for the cautionary notes.

Tagging images with keywords in iPhoto is a wonderful way to feel productive without actually having to do anything.

Bits

Dover Bargain Bin is up; Briggs Carpet Cleaning in Longmont did a fabulous job this morning; the knitting blog  purlyvictorious had an amazing entry this week about "one place where I always feel at home, never leave empty handed, and know I am loved." I don't think you know where she went with that.

Weekend detritus

Billy Joel's "For the Longest Time" is a great love song. I think we are seldom as successful as we think at keeping from people our true opinions of them. Humility (BTW that's a great post) might be the most under-rated virtue. It's embarrassing to admit, but I have Cat Stevens' Morning Has Broken on my Shuffle and am always happy when the little piano run comes around.

Sundrys

Verizon coverage, both Internet wireless and cell phone, isn't very good in New Orleans.

I keep finding myself by myself on Friday night in great American cities. I feel like a girl who didn't get asked to the prom (yes, I know how that feels). And, because no one wants to spend part of a Friday night with me,  it makes me think that I'm not very nice or clever. The former I knew; the latter I try not to know.

It's a mistake to travel without a hub. Two USB ports are so not enough

Meg Wolitzer's novel, The Position, is a good description of the failures of my generation as parents. I'm not saying that we failed entirely, but -- well, read the book if you want to understand what I mean.

Perhaps the occasion of photos below, from a tour today of the Ninth Ward,  accounts in part for this rather gloomy entry.

USW

obligation
wikipedia
wikimedia
bbc
mlb
botw
youtube flickr
maps
botw
Charles of Mount Argus
Saint Mungo

Back real soon

Blair, I have the tag. Thanks! I'm having fun thinking it over. Melissa, Mark, I'll be back to bother you on your blogs RSN :) Pretty, isn't it? It's early morning looking east along State Hwy 66.

Various

It's awfully good but making pesto at 9:30 at night was not the brightest idea in my personal culinary constellation. What would smell yummy at 6:30 is kind of too much a few hours on. This was a day when something needed to give. Ends up that it was a car battery. The piper has been known to exact a higher price. More than a year on, this situation turns out to be more complicated than one hoped. It would mean a great deal to me if you were to keep her in your thoughts in the coming weeks and beyond.

Portland public art

It's a blog. On an unrelated topic, my boss and I have regular skirmishes about what it means to be East Coast (arrogant) and Western (good). Today he suddenly asked, "What about Californians?" Easy. Those are just Easterners who like to sleep in. On another unrelated topic, office bingo! And something useful that you probably already know about, a site that collects current discount codes for e-tail sites.