Tom Gryn's musings

July 4th trip to Gatlinburg TN, garden update, etc.

2009-07-13T01:34:46Z

* Uploaded 11 photos from our trip to Gatlinburg TN, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and Cumberland Gap National Park over July 4th weekend to my flickr account. Also included are three pics of our garden, one with annotations.

* Gatlinburg was OK. We took the tram up to Ober Gatlinsburg. The trip up was fun, but the place itself was a tourist trap writ large - lots of shops selling crap-crap-crap and kitchy amusement-park rides you'd find at any state fair. We visited our main objective, Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies. That was OK, but not of the caliber of Monterey or Scripps. The highlight was a slow-moving path through a shark tunnel, I've uploaded the best movie I took of that here on YouTube.

We went over the mountains through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and stopped at Harrah's Cherokees. We did some mild gambling there and ate at their buffet. It was OK, but quite smoky. Definitely didn't compare to a Vegas strip casino or Mohegan Sun/Foxwoods in New England. At Cumberland Gap National Park, we drove to the Pinnacle over some very twisty hairpin curves, but the view from the top was well worth it.

Other notes:
* Avis rentals have XM radio, and it was a big hit. We were able to listen to the Dodgers and Phillies games while we were driving, and they have all-80s and all-70s stations as well. We also found it amusing to be able to hear the real-time traffic for LA/Vegas/Philly while we were driving around.
* I finished staining our back fence before our trip. A big job, finally finished.
* I called in a pothole at the end of our cul-de-sac that was partially filled by the time I got home, and fully repaired by the next day. Very impressed with our county road crews; such a response would have taken at least a couple weeks out in L.A., assuming it was responded to at all.

Geopolitics

2009-07-06T20:59:31Z

Interesting & insightful discussion between Robert Kaplan and Michael Totten over at MJT's blog. RTWT.

Mad Social Scientist

2009-07-06T17:20:18Z

Have to say, one of my favorite characters in Foglio's Girl Genius is becoming the Mad Social Scientist, here and in the most recent strip here.

Gardening update

2009-06-25T12:48:07Z

* Picked two zucchini yesterday while I was checking the garden. One was huge - they really do sneak up in size under the foliage.
* We have cucumbers, a few small tomatoes, and a green pepper growing on the plants, plus lots of zucchini. Most of that won't be ready for at least another week or so, but at least the garden is producing. We have one small strawberry plant with a few small fruits on them, as well.
* I did have to transplant the tomato plant that has the fruit on it already - it was just too close to the zucchini plants to get much sun. It has been wilted for the past few days, but was looking more normal this morning when I was doing watering.
* My parents and brother visited this weekend, and Mom put in a lot of flowers and other plants in our front garden, including some lilis (?) which were originally from my Grandmom's house down the Shore, and another hydrangea.

Skiing in August, Iran, Star Trek memorabilia

2009-06-25T01:42:50Z

* Have always enjoyed the dichotomy of how winter in the Southern hemisphere is in August. Ski resorts in the Chilean Andes are opening this week. This one has a webcam and snow report. Here's a resort in Australia with a webcam and daily video report; here's other AU ski resorts. Bringing you the snow to your computer, in summer.

* Good analysis of the current situation in Iran.

* This seller on ebay is selling items from Joan Winston's estate. Worth checking out if you're a collector of ST items, there'll probably be some obscure items offered. I have a bid in on Foglio's "Capture Coloring Book", but considering the last one on ebay went for around $200, I probably have little shot at it.

The downside to Twitter as a primary news source

2009-06-20T17:42:53Z

Andrew Sullivan's coverage of the Iranian protests has been heavily reliant on Twitter and other IM sources. That's good in terms of bipassing the censorship which the mullahs have put on the Web and blogs, but there is a downside: there's little to no editing or quality control, so a lot of "rumors" become "fact" without vetting as to their actual merit. I am reminded of this post that Den Beste made at the start of the Iraq war on the 'fog of war' phenomena which so often shrouds events as they're reported in real-time. Also, the research on 'eyewitness' accounts generally shows that even they are filtered through the viewer's own perceptions of what they are expecting to see.

So things like the police using electric batons, using acid in their water cannons, the police and basjibeing supplemented with Hezbollah/Arabs, etc? Its wise to be skeptical of the more out-there claims, even if the person Twittering them does believe them to be true.

Do budget deficits matter?

2009-06-15T15:07:58Z

Megan McArdle over at atlantic.com has a good writeup on whether budget deficits matter or not, and how each political side uses them for their own goals (which usually flip around depending on whether the party in question is in power or not). RTWT.

Gardening/weekend update

2009-06-15T13:17:30Z

* Did another session staining the fence, its getting there. Couple more weekends of work and it should be done.
* Found two HUGE zucchini on the plants Sunday, bringing the total for the season so far to four. As I said on Facebook, perhaps I've taken the recession gardening thing too far and created a monster by planting multiple z. plants?
* The cucumbers and tomatoes are showing blossoms as well, a good sign. The comfrey plant is huge again, and the flowers on it are attracting bees into the garden.
* Replaced the top of the birdbath last weekend, but not sure the birds have figured out that its there yet. Then again we're not in a drought, so they probably have other options right now.
* Trimmed the hedges by the kitchen window, also chopped down the weed trees that had grown by the screened-in patio. Definitely leaves in a lot more light, and there's actually planting space along that raised bed for a change.
* After living here for almost 2 years, I finally (I think) figured out what variety the apple trees in the backyard are - they're Mutsu (Crispin), a kind of Japanese apple variant. It fits the Japanese theme of the whole garden, which is understandable since the previous resident was from Japan, and she probably liked having trees and plants around to make it feel a little more like home.
* Unfortunately, a lot of the apples have started dropping off the tree and are littering the lawn under both trees, so I've had to sweep them up. This is not a particularly good sign, as the apples if they are Mutsu aren't supposed to ripen until early autumn, but I recall this happening in '07 when we moved into the house, so its probably par for the course.
* We went to see Up on Saturday. It was fun and quality, as we've come to expect from Pixar, but I also agree with some reviewers that its a fairly dark and adult film to take young kids too - more like Miyazaki's work than Saturday Morning cartoons.

Iranian elections: this makes sense

2009-06-14T03:35:11Z

Here's a possibility: the results are a coup attempt by the Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran) and basij to force the election to Ahmandinejad. Given the autonomous nature of the Guards outside the regular military, its possible the IRGC decided it was too important not to intervene with or without Khamenei's blessing.

That's actually a very scary proposition, as the IRGC are among the most hardline in the Iranian political spectrum, and them running the country without checks would go a long way towards destabilizing the region quickly. Quds Force is a section of the IRGC, for example. The Guards and basij also wouldn't have a problem with killing a lot of Iranians to stem unrest.

Terry Pratchett on Science Fiction Conventions and Fanfiction - BBC celebrity interview

2009-06-13T01:51:35Z

Full interview: 1, 2, and 3

Hmmm...

2009-06-10T15:29:16Z

Found this passage while reading his biography, but it struck as being a decent description of me, as well (although I may be giving myself too much credit, of course), or at least qualities I aspire to:

(He) was not a man of great original thought nor an intellect, but never tried to conceal this. On the other hand, he had much commonsense, an ability to see both sides of an argument, and was possessed with clarity of thought, especially when it came to reducing a problem to its fundamental essentials quickly. He also had, at least until his later years, a capacity for hard work.

First crop of the year

2009-06-10T02:21:31Z

Yesterday, after raking the small apples which had fallen from the apple trees, I went over to see how the vegatible garden was going. Just for the heck of it, not expecting anything so soon, I looked around the zucchini plants, and lo and behold, a full-grown zucchini was ready for harvesting.

I suspect we'll end up with far more zucchini than we can use if its already producing, but I wanted to see if all the hype about the plants producing powers holds true for us. Looking forward to tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers in the weeks and months ahead.

Reading old drives

2009-06-08T14:41:51Z

I bought my first laptop, a Austin Vista notebook, sometime shortly after I started at Ohio State (~1997). I found it off of a refurbished computer auction site, and I remember being quite thrilled at the prospect of having my own computer and not having to walk in to campus every time I wanted to check my email (considering this was Ohio, some of those walks were unpleasant in snow, rain, and cold). I think I had it for about 3 years or so; it would be hopelessly outdated by today's standards, and had a bad problem with overheating, but it served me well for what it was.

Anyway, eventually the inevitable happened and it broke; as I recall, one day the screen shorted out. However, I still retained the hard drive with the data - email, photos, etc. - in the hope that someday I'd be able to retrieve it. Well, time passed, and eventually external hard drives became available, so I tried putting that HD in the one I have. Physically the connections all fit, but WinXP wouldn't read the drive. The drive, as it happens, was so old that XP read it as not having had partitions assigned to it - basically, it couldn't read the way Win95 had formatted the drive. And there the issue rested for another few years.

A couple of weeks back, I had the idea of putting the drive in my old laptop - it is an ancient Dell Win98 machine, I think it may even have been the one I bought after the Austin Vista. So I took out the hard drive in the Dell, put the Austin Vista into the drive carriage, and tried to put it into the computer again. The AV drive is a tiny bit bigger than the Dell one, so I had to push it in to get it inside, but finally it fit inside without the case breaking. And, amazingly, it booted up!

Have I mentioned how much XP is an improvement over Win95? Just browsing around on the drive to see what was on it was a reminder of how far we've come. The Dell has one major drawback: no USB drive ports. And Win95 doesn't recognize wireless cards. What to do?

In order to get the files off the drive to burn a backup CD, I eventually had to set up a direct cable connection using a null modem cable that I'd had an an artifact from a failed experiment using PC Relocator many years ago. I connected it to my wife's PC, which runs WinXP and has a parallel printer port (my current laptop is so advanced, they didn't bother to put a parallel port on it, figuring that technology was outdated). For anyone trying this, this link and this link were helpful. The setup didn't work until I reversed the usual setup so that the Win95 computer was identified as the guest and the XP computer as the host, even though the files were going Win95->XP, but it seemed to work. The connection was finicky, and I had to keep refreshing it after transferring a number of files, but eventually I managed to get the files I needed off the drive and onto the XP PC, and from there I burned the files onto a CD.

Reviving old drives and old data can be tricky, especially across platforms and operating systems, but this worked for me.

Genocide: its a laughfest!

2009-06-05T13:50:37Z

If this is supposed to be ironic and humorous, I have to wonder how long we've got until we start seeing 9-11 Cola. "Smash a couple of bottles together, like airliners hitting a skyscraper!" "When you're done, tip 'em over like a couple of towers!" "Drip it into your glass, like jumpers!" (the last with special Collectors Edition logo of little shapes falling out of the Twin Towers)

It'll be grand. After all, there's nothing we can't laugh at, right?

The circle comes full around...

2009-06-04T15:36:30Z

"Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall." - Proverbs 16:18

40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation by James Carville (2009)

Painting the Map Red: The Fight to Create a Permanent Republican Majority by Hugh Hewitt (2004)

Misc. doings

2009-06-03T20:51:01Z

* Uploaded 3 photos from our trip to Chincoteague two weekends ago to my flickr account.
* Cleaned out the gutters on the house over the weekend. I noted during a thunderstorm on Friday that one gutter had water pouring over its side, and when I reached in and pulled a bunch of leaves from its opening there was a tremendous WHOOOSH and a flood of water came out the other end for a good 2-3 minutes. That probably means it had been completely clogged for a while, and the water had been sitting in there for some time. Not good to have that weight there, and probably more than a few mosquitoes were coming from that, too. Problem solved.
* Did more fence staining on Saturday, fence is a little over half done.
* Garden is coming along. We took receipt of a small Meyers' lemon tree that I potted, with the intention of keeping it inside over winters. We'll see how it does. The zucchini is already sprouting flowers, and it'll be an interesting race to see whether the tomatoes or zucchini wins out in the raised beds.
* The black-eyed Susans that I planted last year in the front came up again this year, we should be getting flowers on them in another week or so.
* We stopped at Wegmans in northern Virginia on Sunday - its easily the best supermarket chain in the DC area. We always seem to find interesting items there, like this time we discovered they make pretzel rolls - think a regular roll, but made of pretzel bread. Yum! We bought a dozen. They also have a good selection of ethnic foods, though I passed on getting babka this time. Donna did make a delicious French toast on Sunday out of challah bread and fresh strawberries.

Dream

2009-06-03T18:05:35Z

I had a dream last night that I was in a large flea-market type place. Indoors, I found this restaurant that was run by a Chinese family, and the theme was Christmas dinner, year-round. There were long tables, filled with senior citizens (they knew where the good, cheap food deals were), and a sign said dinner was only $2. There was a huge hearth with a large blazing fireplace, and lots of Christmas lights and decoration. I thought it to be exceedingly neat and was happy to have run across it, but I had to leave before doing more than a quick look around, since I was already late for meeting up with my folks outside. I wondered if I'd ever see the place again.

Air France disaster

2009-06-03T01:43:24Z

Good meteorological analysis of the Air France 447 disaster

Memorial Day II

2009-05-25T11:03:53Z

A contrarian/iconoclastic look at Memorial Day and thanking veterans

Memorial Day

2009-05-25T02:44:11Z

(At the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery in Nettuno, Italy) on Memorial Day 1945, just three weeks after the end of the war in Europe, a stock, square-jawed figure would climb the bunting-draped speaker's platform and survey the dignitaries seated before him on folding chairs. Then Gen. Lucian Truscott, who had returned to Italy from France a few months earlier to succeed Clark as the 5th Army commander, turned his back on the living and instead faced the dead. "It was," wrote eyewitness Bill Mauldin, "the most moving gesture I ever saw." In his carbolic voice, Truscott spoke to...the thousands who lay beneath the ranks of Latin crosses and stars of David. As Mauldin later recalled:

He apologized to the dead men for their presence here. He said everybody tells leaders it is not their fault that men get killed in war, but that every leader knows in his own heart this is not altogether true. He said he hoped anybody here [deceased veterans] through any mistake of his would forgive him, but he realized that was asking a hell of a lot under the circumstances. Truscott did say he would not speak about the glorious dead because he didn't see much glory in getting killed in your late teens or early twenties. He promised that if in the future he ran into anybody, especially old men, who thought death in battle was glorious, he would straighten them out. He said he thought that was the least he could do.

(from The Day of Battle, by Rick Atkinson)

Birdies all gone

2009-05-20T17:08:05Z

The baby birds in the robin's nest outside our bedroom window started cheeping a lot on Monday. Yesterday when I was out watering the garden, I looked in and saw the nest was empty. Looked around a bit, found a tiny corpse of a dead bird but it had obviously been there a while - probably the runt of the three eggs, as there were two fledglings with almost full feathers there over the weekend. No sign of a struggle, the nest is in good condition still. Donna's likely right, they probably all just flew away. Well, its a better ending than the dove's nest met last year.

And the mosquitoes were seriously biting yesterday, after noticing none over the weekend. Glad I put the mosquito dunks in our rain barrels over the weekend, thought I was being premature on that. Guess not, and I'll have to start spraying myself now before I go out to do watering. Oh, well. Happens every year.

Commercials from far-away places!

2009-05-19T17:11:21Z

Tom enjoys the bonuses of the MLB baseball package on DirecTV: local commercials! Jack in the Box commercials from SoCal, and Canadian commercials from the Blue Jays broadcast, where all the websites end in .ca rather than .com.

So, why won't the FCC let viewers purchase and watch local channel feeds from other cities? I can even see what's being shown on these "distant network" local channels on our online channel lineup, for goodness sake, just can't view them. Heck, I'll pay extra for the LA channels!

Weekend, gardening, etc.

2009-05-18T13:04:09Z

- uploaded 4 photos to my Flickr account, two from Donna's birthday on Tuesday.
- We took Donna's Jetta into the mechanic's on Friday, as the check engine light came on AGAIN. This time, the mechanic said it was a "stuck thermometer", so we had to spend to get that fixed. Sigh.
- Had to rush into work on Friday to complete some deadlines I thought had been done. Not great,
threw off the whole day.
- We went to a BBQ place down in La Plata on Friday evening that had gotten big-time good reviews. Meh, food didn't compare to Lefty's, which is almost in walking distance of our house. Interestingly, the BBQ place had three Los Angeles Times newspaper racks (empty, of course) - not something you'd expect to find in southern Maryland.
- Stopped by a nursery on Friday, got a bunch of different vegitable plants - tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers. Planted a bunch of them on Saturday, just in time for the rain on Sunday. I still have some left over, which I may plant in the raised bed by the kitchen and we'll see how they do.
- The apple tree by the kitchen, and the sapling next to it that I planted last month, both have the cedar-rust infection that was a scourge last year, so I'll have to spray them for it over Memorial Day. Fortunately both the mature apple trees have a lot of small fruit on them, so we may actually get something off them this year.
- Went to see "Star Trek" Saturday morning, then ate lunch at Lone Star Steakhouse. Ate breakfast at Mimi's Cafe on Sunday after church.

Star Trek movie - brief review, mostly quibbles

2009-05-16T20:40:36Z

Donna and I saw it today. Fun movie, definitely has the JJ Abrams feel to it.

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* Overall, a fun movie, and my thoughts below are basically quibbles, rather than well-THAT-ruined-the-movie-for-me! things.

* I've liked if the writers had actually made a major trajectory break from canon Trek at some point and stuck to it. The destruction of Vulcan is one try, but it served more as a plot point than anything changing the basic characters in a meaningful way. An example of what I'm talking about: maybe have the movie close with us seeing a bearded Spock, obviously unhinged by the destruction of Vulcan and the loss of his mother, which sets us up to wonder whether the next movie is a venture into the Mirror, Mirror universe, rather than just having everything reset itself to standard TrekTOS-canon at the end.

* As the movie got near the end part, I have a nagging feeling they didn't think through all the repercussions of having Nimoy-Spock walking around in the United Federation of Planets (UFP), talking to current-time-Spock, etc. He's able to quote Scotty's advanced transporter formula from memory, what else can he contribute? He's already messed up the timeline with his presence, not like that was going to be OK after Vulcan was destroyed anyway. Sending him off to lead a Vulcan colony seems like a terrible waste of resources.

* Interesting twist with the Spock-Uhura romance, but like a lot of things in the film, not really explored at all.

* I always enjoy seeing Nimoy act, but I thought too much of his role here was just to act as a mouthpiece to say a bunch of standard Trek phrases, rather than being an actual character. OK, yes, it was a cameo, so maybe that was asking too much, but still...

* Why does a Romulan mining ship most closely resemble a B5 Shadow vessel? Also, the Narada is extremely well-armed for a "mining vessel." Its also way larger than one would expect, but I'm willing to accept that its something like the Nostromo and it contains not just drilling facilities, but also a full refinery and other processing plants.

* So, basically, you're asking me to believe that the Romulans in the Narada stuck around the same area of space for 25 years, waiting for Nimoy-Spock to show up out of the time rift, and that the Federation couldn't find them? Or worse, the UFP never bothered to send out ships to look for it, despite the destruction of the USS Kelvin and the fleet of shuttles that returned to tell the tale? (though Kirk's comment to Pike about "we never did find them" suggests that isn't the case). This makes sense if the Narada has a cloaking device, which the UFP's technology at the time (154 years earlier) wouldn't have been able to penetrate, but why would a mining vessel have one?

* Where'd the Romulans get the supplies to stick around for a quarter-century? Even with a small crew, the food and water have to come from somewhere, as well as needing a way to fix systems that break down over time. Nero implies they haven't had contact with the Romulans in current time, and I'm pretty sure after losing the Kelvin the UFP would have at least set up listening posts in the region to make sure the Narada isn't able to do exactly what they later do - slip into UFP space to attack - even if they aren't able to find the ship itself...which would make foraging without being detected difficult, to say the least.

Accomplished today

2009-05-09T03:30:46Z

* Took Donna's VW Jetta to the shop - the check engine light had been on for months, and at the last oil change the mechanic recommended the rear tires get replaced. The bill came in a little over $700 to get two tires put on the front, the two tires there rotated to the back, the ignition coil replaced (again! We'd had the same problem in 2006 when we bought the car) and the temperature sensor replaced - the latter two problems were what was causing the check engine light to go off. German engineering - great when it works, but also not exactly sturdy, either.
* Got a haircut. I needed it!
* Mowed the front and back lawns. They needed it!
* During mowing, saw that the robin's eggs in the nest outside our bedroom window had hatched, and there's baby birds there now. Their eyes haven't opened yet, and I finished quickly so I wouldn't freak out the mama bird any more than necessary. I'm not going to get too excited about baby birds yet, though - last year we had baby doves, and one day something came in and destroyed the nest and killed the babies, which was extremely unpleasant to find. So, we'll see how this goes.
* Did some minor fixes to our side fence. The one side has a section that's close to buckling, so I put a support in to take some of the weight off the main post. That's only a temporary solution, but its better than nothing. Also nailed back in a couple of boards that had come loose.
* Stopped by the library, returned books and picked up five books that I had on reserve. Picked up a prescription at CVS.
* Bought some more OJ and California oranges at the store while I was out, as Donna is sick.
* Did two loads of laundry, one load of dishes. OK, technically the machines did most of the work, but someone has to push the "on" button...
* Finished one level of Starcraft. Getting to the end of the Protoss levels!
* Wrote a scathing (for me) reply on this guy's blog who was criticizing African-American clergy for opposing gay marriage. Basic summary: hey, its not like there's been hardly any outreach to the AA clergy, who were at the head of the '60s civil rights movement. If you treat them like enemies, they'll act like enemies.

I'm hoping to get some more staining on our back fence done tomorrow, as well as planting some more vegetable seeds. We were hoping to get to the EU Open House at the DC embassies this weekend, but it doesn't look like we'll make it, sadly. Hopefully next year.

Have I mentioned that I hate tent caterpillars?