Jim’s Random Notes

The latest projection of hurricane Ike’s path puts a tropical storm right over our house sometime early Sunday morning.  Of course, that’s just a projection based on current conditions and input from a half dozen climate models.  The storm could still move considerably north or south of its projected track.

I typically rely on the National Hurricane Center for information about hurricanes and tropical storms, and the Navy/NRL Tropical Cyclone Page for satellite pictures.  I recently learned about this Tropical Cyclones page, which has a whole bunch of graphs and images from many different places.  Not only does it have the graphs, it also has links to the pages the graphs came from.  I didn’t realize there were so many different hurricane tracking sites out there.

I especially liked this image, which shows Ike’s historical track and its projected path.  I’ve cropped it to show my area.  Click on it to get the full-sized image.

A tropical storm here shouldn’t be too big a deal.  Although Ike is expected to be a major hurricane when it makes landfall, we’re about 200 miles inland.  The storm will lose a lot of its intensity in the 24 hours between when it hits the coast and when we begin to enjoy it.  I expect some high winds, but not enough to do major damage.  And we certainly could use some rain.  I suspect, though, that we’ll get too much too soon and there will be some flash flooding.

I wouldn’t want to be in the grocery store between Thursday and Sunday.  People around here tend to panic when they see a storm coming, even though it’s highly unlikely that we’ll lose power or suffer other storm related inconvenience.  You do not want to be the only thing between the last case of bottled water and a woman who has visions of hurricane Katrina in her mind.  I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more injuries resulting from the pre-storm supermarket rush than from the storm itself.

All told, it should be an interesting weekend.

I hear a lot of people say that they want to change their lives: lose weight, make more money, learn something new, take up a new hobby, accomplish some physical challenge, etc. Sadly, most of those people then go on to say that they wish they could do that, but they can’t. And most of the time the reason they can’t ends up being a variation on one of these two:

1. I don’t have enough time.
2. I’ll be too old before I complete it.

Excuse me, but both of those reasons are bullshit. The second one, especially. How old will you be if you don’t complete it? You can sit there and wish all you like, and complain about how you’re not getting any younger and the world is passing you by, or you can decide that you want to do something. Either way, time will pass. But after five or twenty years, the person who actually tries will have something to show for it. The person who spent that time complaining about how it’s too hard or will take too long will have nothing but bitterness.

As for the “I don’t have enough time” complaint: that’s crap, too. You might not have enough time to dedicate your life to a new pursuit, but you most definitely have time to improve your life. All it takes is an hour a day, and most people spend way more than an hour every day watching TV, surfing the Web, or doing other things that are neither relaxing nor productive.

Let me give an example. I’ve mentioned a time or two that I used to run marathons when I was younger. I since stopped running and took up bicycling, but lately I’ve wanted to get back into running. So I set myself a goal of running a 10K race (6.2 miles). I can’t run 6 miles today. I’m hard pressed to run even one mile without stopping. But I can run a bit, walk some, run a bit more, and so on for an hour every day. I don’t know yet how long it’ll take me to build up to 6 miles, but every day I go out I find that I can run a little bit further. And in a few months I’ll be up to 6 miles.

Another example is education. A lot of people think they need school in order to get educated. It’s true that if you want a degree or a certification, you need to attend formal classes. But if you just want to learn about a particular topic, you have all the educational resources you need on the Web, in your public library, bookstores, and Amazon.com. All you need to do is start reading. Try reading on your topic for an hour a day.

Want to learn the piano? Spend an hour a day practicing. Build strength? Get some weights and a beginner’s book and spend an hour a day lifting. Learn to write better? Practice writing an hour every day. Pretty much whatever you want to do, you can get a very good start on it by allocating one hour per day, and I don’t know anybody who doesn’t have at least an hour per day to spend on self improvement.

Try it. Rather than complaining about how something is too hard or will take too long, sit down and plan how you can accomplish that thing you’ve always dreamed about. Spend an hour per day working toward your goal. You’ll be surprised at how much progress you make in just a few weeks. The longer you work at it, the more you’ll learn and the better you’ll become, and the more you’ll want to continue. All you have to lose is time, and the rewards are potentially limitless.

Some friends gave us a refrigerator about 10 years ago when they were moving to a new house.  It really wasn’t much of a refrigerator, even back then, but it fit nicely in the laundry room.  We used it mostly for beer and sodas, and the top freezer helped with the overflow from the main fridge in the kitchen.

A few weeks ago it started getting very noisy and then Debra noticed that the freezer wasn’t keeping things frozen.  It got to making more noise and the louder it got the warmer it got until it wasn’t keeping my sodas very cool, either.  Debra emptied it and I started looking for a way to get rid of the thing.

My first thought was to recycle the thing.  The Williamson County recycling facility takes appliances, but refrigerators and other appliances that contain or contained freon must be accompanied by a certificate showing that the freon has been recovered.  So I’d have to take the thing to a shop, pay somebody to recover the freon, and then haul it to the recycling center.

I was about to break down and pay to have the thing hauled off when somebody suggested that I post it on craigslist.  That worked great.  Sunday afternoon I posted a note in the Free Stuff section, describing the refrigerator’s condition and offering it free to the first person who came to haul it off.  I got a call within an hour, and 30 minutes after that the refrigerator was gone.  Works for me.

I’m sold.  Next time I need to get rid of something, I’ll know to try craigslist first thing.

• Tom’s Hardware is running a review of solid state drives that compares the latest generation of SSDs against current mechanical drive technology.  It’s little surprise that SSDs are in general faster than hard drives.  What I found surprising is that some SSDs actually require more power than hard drives.  Not the newer crop, though.  Even the least efficient SSD has better performance-per-watt numbers than the most efficient hard drive.  And the OCZ SATA II is very impressive.
• Solid state drives are still very expensive, though.  The 64 gigabyte OCZ SATA II will cost you about $17 per gigabyte.  That’s the high end.  Typical SSD prices are in the $10 per gigabyte range.  That’s a whole lot more than you’ll pay for a mechanical hard drive.  You can pick up a 320 Gb notebook drive for $110–less than 30 cents per gigabyte.  It’s nice to know that SSD is coming along, but it’ll be a year or two before I can justify replacing my notebook’s hard drive.
• If you’re interested in using Windows Server 2008 as a workstation operating system, you should visit win2008workstation.com.  But be careful.  The site has a lot of good information, but there’s a large hacker/cracker component that sees nothing wrong with sharing component files.  I wouldn’t trust downloading anything pointed to by forum posts.
• If you’re in the market for a “dual core” laptop, be careful.  Intel made a “Core Duo” line of processors which is in effect two Pentium M processors on one die.  These are 32-bit processors.  You probably want a machine that has a “Core 2 Duo” processor–a 64-bit part.  I can’t see any reason why a typical user would want to buy a machine with a 32-bit processor.
• Also on the subject of laptop computers, don’t assume that you’re getting the best price by buying on eBay.  I compared prices for Dell laptops on eBay and at Dell Outlet.  The outlet prices compare quite favorably with eBay, the only drawback being that you’ll have to pay sales tax if you buy from Dell.  Still, I found plenty of eBay sales where the buyer paid more than what he would have paid at the outlet–including tax.  Do your research.

A few notes after a day of knocking things off the “to do” list.

• I’ve used QUIKRETE before, but never for setting a post. Just pour the dry concrete mix into the hole (after placing the post), and add one gallon of water for every 50 lbs of mix. The stuff sets in about 45 minutes, and you can apply stress to the post after only four hours. No mixing required. Ain’t technology wonderful?
• Seeing as how I had only one hole to dig, I did it the old-fashioned way: with a post hole digger and a Texas toothpick. Note to self: wear gloves next time.
• From the hammer’s point of view, a thumb looks just like a fence staple.
• It’s always a good idea to remove the old part and take it to the auto parts store when you go shopping for its replacement. It’ll save you from having to make another trip when you realize that the part you got isn’t the part you need.
• I shouldn’t have to remove a dozen screws with three different tools in order to replace a relay.
• A PVC union is an ingenious device. But remember to put thread compound on the threads of the device itself, in addition to the threads of the two pipes you’re attaching it to.

A few years back, Debra and I started adding large mulch areas around the trees in the yard. This was an effort to make things look a little better, as well as to reduce lawn maintenance. More mulch means less grass to mow. And mulch around the trees means that I don’t have to run the weed eater to knock down the grass that normally would grow around the trunks. The problem is that weeds and grass grow in the mulch, and if you don’t keep up with pulling them and adding a new layer of mulch every year or two, the grass will take over again.

Another option is to plant a good thick ground cover that will prevent grass and weeds from growing. One of the best such plants for this area is asian jasmine. Getting it established might be a challenge, but once established it’s very drought tolerant and requires little maintenance. Just trim it with the weed eater, or run the mower over it on the highest setting once or twice a year. The only thing that concerns me is the stated requirement of “moist, well-drained, well-prepared soil” for establishment. Such soil is in short supply in our yard.

As far as I’m concerned, the perfect ground cover would be grass that never grows higher than an inch or two. Why can’t some of these genetic engineering whizzes get to work on such a thing? Forget Frankenfoods. I imagine just about any homeowner would kill for a lush green lawn that he never had to mow.

It’s property appraisal time again. We got our Notice of Appraised Value in the mail last month, and were shocked to learn that our property value increased by 16% last year. That’s on top of the 33% increase from the year before. At least, that’s what the local appraisal district would have you believe. Last year I missed the deadline for filing a protest. You can bet I won’t be missing this year’s.

I called a Realtor friend of mine to get comparable sales information, and then compared that with the proposed appraisal. The difference is quite remarkable. If I’m extremely generous, I can make the house’s market value almost equal to last year’s appraised value. When you take into account the comparable sales and subtract the cost of the many repairs we need to make, the house’s market value is about 1/3 less than the proposed appraisal.

One of the tools I tried to use for research is Zillow. This is a pretty cool mashup that shows satellite pictures with property lines and home prices, along with pertinent information about the houses. Zillow also gives a “Zestimate” of home values. I’m sure there’s some complicated formula for these estimates, but at least in my area I noticed that the estimates are much closer to the tax appraisals than to the sales of comparable homes.

In my experience, tax appraisals are trailing indicators: they continue to rise after home prices have leveled off following a boom, and they continue to fall (although not quite as much as they rise) after falling home prices have leveled off. The result is that sources like Zillow and others end up over- or under-reporting on market swings. For my area, Zillow is reporting values that are quite a bit higher than are justified by actual sales, indicating to me that it relies too heavily on tax appraisals.

As far as I’m concerned–especially in today’s market–the value Zillow reports is the “if everything goes exactly right and you find the perfect buyer” price. It’s a useful tool for comparison, but even then I’d look on it with a large dose of skepticism. As far as absolute values are concerned, though, Zillow’s numbers bear little resemblance to reality.

From Jeff Duntemann comes a link to an article on the Fermi Paradox, which puts forth the idea that it may be a good thing that we’ve been unable to find proof of extraterrestrial life.

Put simply, Fermi’s Paradox is a simple question: If there is other life in the universe, where is everybody? Given the age of the universe and the large number of stars, doesn’t it stand to reason that life should be common? And yet we have no direct evidence that life exists other than on our Earth. Why is that?

Since we have but one very small sample (the small part of this one solar system that we’ve studied) of evidence, we’re left with logical arguments and pseudo-scientific silliness like the Drake equation to explain why we’ve not made contact with other civilizations.

Yes, I realize that some people put a lot of faith in the Drake equation. But there’s no there there. It consists of seven variables whose values are incalculable. We have absolutely no idea what reasonable values are for any of them. The Drake equation is nothing but a formalized way to make wild guesses.

The logical arguments against extraterrestrial life go something like this: “If we’re not unique, then in a galaxy of 100 billion stars, many of which are older than our sun, you would expect that if even a tiny percentage of the planets developed a space-faring race, they would have spread throughout the galaxy.” The implication seems to be that if extraterrestrial life were possible, then it’s highly unlikely that we would have developed because the planet would have been colonized by somebody else.

Nick Bostrom, author of the article linked above, lays that out very nicely and concludes that there must be some Great Filter (a natural or societal calamity) that prevents development of civilizations that are capable of interstellar travel. His hope is that the Great Filter is something that happens early in the development of life or civilizations–something that would have happened to us eons ago–because to think otherwise would mean that the human race is doomed.

It’s interesting reading and one can hardly fault his logic, but it’s all just so much mental masturbation–exactly like the Drake equation. We simply don’t have enough evidence to say one way or the other. Lack of proof is not proof of lack. Drawing conclusions based on scant physical evidence and wild-assed guesses is mysticism, not science.

When I went the self-employment route three years ago, Debra took on the job of finding us some private health insurance. We finally settled on a plan that costs us about $300 per month and has a pretty high annual deductible–over $5,000. We also opened a health savings account so that our medical bills are paid with pre-tax dollars. At the time, $300 per month was about double what I’d been paying for much more comprehensive coverage (dental, eye care, short-term disability, prescription drugs, and $20 co-pays) through my employer. And that large deductible was something of a concern. Health care is expensive, right?

I had some tests done early last year. My doctor had quite a job convincing me that they were necessary, considering how much they cost. One test in particular was quoted at $4,000, and I cringed at how much that would deplete our health savings. But I really did need it, so I went ahead and scheduled the appointment.

The way our insurance works, we have the doctor or lab bill the insurance for any work, and the insurance company takes care of figuring out whether we’ve met the deductible. If we haven’t, the insurance company refuses the charge and sends it back to the doctor or lab, who in turn bills us. Since the test was done early in the year, I knew that I’d have to pay the entire amount because we hadn’t met our deductible.

Imagine my surprise when I got a bill for about $1,400, rather than the $4,000 that was quoted. How is that possible? I eventually discovered that there are two prices for health care: the retail price and the insurance negotiated price. Since I knew that I would be paying for the test myself (at least up to my deductible), I asked how much it cost and was quoted the full retail price. But I ended up paying the price that my insurance company had negotiated. The difference ended up to be about eight months’ worth of premiums. Not a bad deal.

Something similar happened recently. I had my annual physical a couple of weeks ago, and when it was done I was presented with a bill for $500. Since I have a high deductible, the doctor asked that I pay half up front and they would bill me for whatever the insurance company didn’t cover. We heard back from the insurance company the other day. Their negotiated rate for the physical is something under $100. So the doctor ends up owing me money.

If it sounds confusing to you, join the club. I’m pretty surprised that the insurance company can get a $4,000 test for $1,400, take 80 or 90 percent off the cost of a physical. It makes me wonder what the real cost of health coverage is. If you assume that care providers won’t negotiate rates that prevent them from making a profit, then it’s hard to understand why they’d set their retail rates so much higher. Although to tell the truth I can’t imagine how the doctor can make a profit when he spends an hour talking with and examining me and only gets $50 for his trouble.

In any case, you might want to reconsider if you’ve decided that you can’t afford health insurance. It’s quite possible that by purchasing even a very modest plan (and there are plans for quite a bit less than the $300/month that Debra and I have), you’ll end up making back the cost of the premiums by paying the reduced rates that your insurance company negotiates with providers.

I get a moderate amount of comment spam here on the blog. Fortunately, WordPress lets me moderate comments before they’re posted, and it’s pretty easy to separate the signal from the noise. Most of the comment spam is pointers to pharmacy web sites or links to porn sites. Some, though, are really random. Like the one I got today: “Sorry, but what is kimerikas? Jane.” That was the entire comment. Always willing to learn something new, I searched Google for “kimerikas,” and got about 900 hits. I didn’t look at all of the hits, but the few pages I did look at all contained identical comments. If anybody knows what kimerikas is, please let me know.

Another comment spam I got recently was for a piece of software that will post trackbacks to multiple blogs. Yes, you got that right: spam offering a spam generator.

It continues to amaze me that spam in all forms is still prevalent. Is there any research to indicate that spam is profitable? I’m sure it’s profitable for the big outfits that send spam on behalf of other people (i.e. they get paid to flood my email with trash), but do the people who pay these outfits actually see a return on their spam investments? With most major mail servers’ frontline filters throwing out the vast majority of spam, and the few stragglers being easy to identify and delete manually, how can anybody make money trying to advertise this way?

The lamp that sits behind my desk and that provides the majority of the illumination when I’m working here started blinking infrequently the other night. At first I thought it was the normal power fluctuations we get here from time to time, but then I began hearing what sounded like something shorting out. I reached to turn off the lamp, and the steel base was very hot to the touch. Obviously, I unplugged the lamp.

I tore into it this evening, figuring it was just a fried switch. The switch is fried, no doubt, but I also found this:

The black wire in this connector comes from the AC power source. The red wire goes to the switch.

When I disassembled the lamp, the top of this connector was touching the metal base. At first I thought that over time a piece of metal inside the connector had rubbed a hole in the clear plastic insulation and came into contact with the lamp base, causing a short. But when I cut off the burned part, there was no metal sticking out. I can only conclude that the switch shorted out and the resulting heat traveled down the 4″ red wire to this connector, melting the insulation and allowing current to arc between the base and these two wires.

Looking more closely at the switch, I see molded into the back the words, INCANDESCENT ONLY, but I don’t see anything that gives a current rating. The fixture in question is a halogen torchiere floor lamp with a 300W bulb. These lamps are said by some to be a fire hazard, although those that I have meet the safety guidelines published by the CPSC.

I can’t say for certain that this switch is original equipment, as I obtained the lamp from a former employer when our office was closed. As far as I can recall, nobody there ever replaced the switch (it would have been out of character), and I certainly hadn’t taken the thing apart before.

I have two other lamps of this type. One of them had a bad switch when I got it, and the other has been working in my living room for at least 10 years. You can bet I’ll be looking into that switch soon, though.

Is it common for the switches in these things to burn out? [Note added later: It's a three-position switch with off, low, and high settings. I almost always used the 'low' setting.]

I noticed this sign as I was walking by Wendy’s yesterday at lunch, so I went in to have a look. They told me that the fish only works the breakfast shift. I’ll have to stop by some morning, ’cause I just gotta see this.

I got a rude surprise on my way home from work last night when somebody decided to make a U-turn across my lane. I made a valiant attempt to avoid a collision, but I wasn’t completely successful. I did manage to minimize the impact, though. The left side of my truck collided with the right side of a Toyota Sequoia SUV.

As you can see, the major impact was on the left front fender. It ripped off my mirror, leaving a big black streak on the window. The bed side is also dented in a few places, especially behind the rear wheel (hard to see in this picture). Something also bent my ham radio antenna. Perhaps the other truck’s mirror. I don’t think I decelerated fast enough for the antenna to have bent on its own.

Neither I nor the driver of the other vehicle (its only occupant) was injured. We got lucky and drove away (after exchanging information, of course) fully intact, with just a bit of bent sheet metal to show for it. I’m now in the process of determining how much it will cost to fix the truck, and hoping that the insurance company doesn’t decide to write it off as a “total loss.” We’ll see how that works out.

I’m fine. No injuries. Not even the soreness I expected as a result of the unexpected impact.

One thing: anti-lock brakes are a Godsend. When I saw that truck coming across my lane, I applied the brakes as hard as I could. The ABS did what it was supposed to do: prevented me from going into a skid. As a result, I was able to maneuver the truck and prevent what could have been a very nasty crash. As annoying as the ABS can be from time to time, I don’t think I’ll buy another vehicle without it.

Lots going on here. I know I’ve been mostly absent from blogging for the last year. I’m trying to get back into it, and part of that is going back to update the status of previous entries.

• Back in August I posted about installing a pfSense firewall. Whereas the firewall I installed worked, it had some problems. We finally found that the load we were putting on the firewall was too much for the computer we were using. We replaced that old machine with a system that has a Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.4 GHz, and four gigabytes of RAM. We haven’t had any problems with it since. pfSense could handle the data transfer throughput at 30 megabits, but couldn’t handle us making hundreds of connections per second.
• Reader Roy Harvey responded to my post about the SQL Server transaction log filling up, and gave me some very good advice on how to prevent that from happening. In short: put the transaction log on a separate drive, give it and the database file a fixed size and turn off auto growth, and perform regular backups of the database and the transaction log. I definitely need to get a good book about SQL Server. Any suggestions?
• My Weird Computer Problem looks like a faulty motherboard. After checking BIOS settings and verifying jumpers on the board, I ran some stress tests with 1, 2, 3, and 4 instances of a highly compute-bound task. The program runs at full speed when there are two instances. Half speed at four. Since I know the processor is good, that pretty much leaves just the motherboard. New one is on the way.
• I got a couple of confusing “trackbacks” on my note about High School Math. The links are to sites that just post small excerpts of others’ blog entries. There doesn’t appear to be any original content on either of the sites, and there’s no “about” page or anything. The confusing part is that there aren’t any ads on the pages, either. I’ve received links from similar sites that are nothing but click magnets: people posting somewhat topical content on pages that have an over abundance of Google ads. It looks like a variation on the automated zombie attractor.

My long-term work project involves reading music and video files to extract what is called “metadata”–text information that is embedded in the file. A .MP3 music file, for example, often has a lot of information in it: the song title, artist’s name, publisher, musician credits, and even lyrics. One of the metadata tagging standards includes a field for “genre”, which can take one of 126 different values:

Looking at the list, I got to wondering what some of that music is. And I also got to wondering if people really know enough to classify their music correctly. For example, please give me a brief explanation of the differences between Classic Rock, Rock, Alternative Rock, Instrumental Rock, Southern Rock, Rock & Roll, Hard Rock, Folk-Rock, Gothic Rock, Progressive Rock, Psychedelic Rock, Symphonic Rock, Slow Rock, and Punk Rock. Why is “Acid” not “Acid Rock?” What’s the difference between Gothic and Gothic Rock?

And then there’s Industrial, Techno, Euro-Techno, and Techno-Industrial. The mind fairly boggles. Is Psychadelic (hey, they misspelled it, not me!) somehow different than Psychedelic Rock? And what, pray tell, is Trailer? I picture Billy Joe Bob sitting outside his trailer in a grungy t-shirt, holding a can of Keystone Light. What kind of music is he listening to?

Jungle? Is Jungle different than Tribal? I guess Trance is what hypnotists use? That’s somehow different, I suppose, than Meditative, which apparently people use to put themselves into a trance?

How many people can accurately differentiate between Disco, Soul, Funk, Pop/Funk, and Rhythmic Soul? And what the heck is a Power Ballad? Is that somebody serenading his electric generator?

I especially like #39: Noise. We could probably halve the genre list by reclassifying things like Disco, Death Metal, Gothic, Bebob, Avantgarde, … oh, forget it. Just make everything “Noise” and be done with it. No matter what kind of music you have, somebody is going to call it noise.

Interesting that there’s no “Baroque” classification. Is that because nobody listens to Baroquen records?

I doubt that even music publishers can agree on what “genre” many types of music fit into. And some music fits into many of these categories. A song could be Rap and Top 40, for example. It’s pretty obvious that this list of genres was intended for people to use in their own music collections, the idea being that the person would know what he means when he calls something “Lo-Fi” (whatever the hell that is). But when these private collections start escaping onto the Internet where the whole world can see them, confusion ensues.

Excuse me now while I go Rave to a Fusion of Booty Bass and Porn Groove.

A few items that have been gathering dust here while I bang away on the crawler.

• Ever wonder what you could do with a terabyte of really fast storage? Check out the Tera-RamSan. I hope you have a big budget, though. The unit is undoubtedly expensive, and it requires 2,500 watts. That’s some heater!
• Speaking of faster mass storage, several manufacturers (Samsung and SanDisk, among others) have announced or demonstrated flash replacements for laptop hard drives. These aren’t new, but soon we’ll be seeing 160 GB and possibly larger drives. They’re not exactly cheap, either, but the idea of a solid state “disk drive” for my laptop is very attractive.
• Not as much call for this sort of thing as there used to be, but sometimes there’s no substitute for a good bit twiddling hack. Thanks to David Stafford for the link.
• Got a crazy idea? Google has $12 billion dollars and an acquisitions chief who’s looking for “ideas that are ‘really crazy.’”
• If you’re looking for WordPress blog templates, check out the Theme viewer. You can search for themes based on a wide variety of criteria, and see them on a sample blog before downloading and installing. As you might expect, some work better than others. I really like this current theme (Tiga), because it includes an HTML interface for changing colors, column widths, field heights, fonts, etc. It’s very nicely done.