Today went to the beach instead of the hills. The Badham tide pools, just north
of the El Moro / Crystal Cove beach zone. We found some caves, with zillion
dollar views, and I reflected on the origins of tafoni. Got some shells and stuff.
Hung out in the caverous shade. This near Arch Rock. Look it up; see also
the california coastal website

http://www.californiacoastline.org/cgi-bin/image.cgi?image=200603089&mode=big&lastmode=sequential&flags=0&year=2006

I read this from Bruce http://www.schneier.com/:

Ridiculous "age verification" for online movie trailers: "It seems like 'We want to protect children' really means, We want to give the appearance that we've made an effort to protect children. If they really wanted to protect children, they wouldn't use the honor system as the sole safeguard standing between previews filled with sex and violence and Internet-savvy kids who can, in a matter of seconds, beat the impotent little system."

If we really cared about the "children", we'd ban Catholics

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed Saturday to a $660-million settlement with 508 people who have accused priests of sexual abuse, by far the biggest payout in the child molestation scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic Church nationwide.


http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-priests15jul15,0,7511378.story?coll=la-home-center

The Great Park's balloon opened yesterday, actually for local Elites, Friday. This AM the kid & I tried to find it. We eventually did, but had to pull some sneakiness to visit. And visit we did. I got pictures (submitted to http://news.ocregister.com/?page=0&qs=xdefault) and some video, posted to http://youtube.com/results?search_query=revtkatt

If you had N USB-webcams attached, and started them at random times,
would you often get a high-speed camera sampled at a conventional rate?
Eg, two cameras 10 uSec apart, sampling every 33,000 usec. I will have to
do some back of the envelope modelling, ie, math. Later I'll figure out the keywords to search for, this being the 21st century and all.

You could easily have a digital camera record stop-frame animation.
All you'd have to do would be:

1. set it in that mode
2. capture a frame 1 sec *after* motion stops
3. wait until there's motion, then go to step 2
4. have a way to exit the mode, and probably trim the last frame(s) which would be due to the user moving the camera to change the mode

I once wrote a program to do this, it worked. This was back when you needed a $500 video acquisition card to capture video.

Symbiosis

Some cultures need cows and their cows could not survive without their
shepharding. Same with sheep. Speaking of which, Amerikans too.

Cats needs people to live to e.g., the 17 years that my domestic shorthair has lived. People need cats if people are to accumulate wealth in the form of grains (before they get industrial tech). That is in fact how folks got friendly with cats: the grain guards got friendly, and gave the Prez. some nice friendly specimens.

Who didn't poop or pee on their Pharoah's clothes, unlike mine.

Symbiosis: lichen: algae (primitive plant) + fungi (plant or animal that's lost its ability to eat by itself). They could colonize Mars.

Humans are also symbiotic with gut bacteria (Est. coli), skin flora & fauna, and their various domesticated animals, cats dogs sheep pigs cows llamas etc. Read
Guns Germs and Steel, and then read Collapse or any of Chalmers Johnsons' books on the specific collapse of US civ.

Hi, I've accepted a position with a small engineeringfirm in Costa Mesa that does medical devices, etc. They have 6 EEs andI'm the second CS; clearly they are unbalanced. Anyway,if this doesn't work out look me up, if y'all get fundingbefore I get attached.(I hope you don't because then I'll have to make a hardpersonal decision ---but I hope you do because I likedworking there and y'all.)
Just after telling another headhunter to desist, one from the same agency calls with a slew of jobsrelating to DAS etc. I tell her that if Z crashesI'll forward the ref (or if y'all ask me preemptively :-) but won'tcannibalize for her. Other than this indirect ref as a favorto y'all.
Have you ever fed goldfish in a pond? Hungry goldfish?Or sharks? Tossed scraps to seagulls?
I hope its fun at the new place, I was told when interviewing about beingSW lead on an electric knife, but I heard from the headhuntertheir 'urgent fire' is some 'board bringup' which doesn't excite me.Although its for airplane-seatback entertainment computers; if I add a backdoor I'llbe sure to tell you :-)
This new place is very unslick, very crowded, like my garage, but its not the acresof undecorated cubes at Panasonic or Masimo and I like smaller groups and less paperweight-inertia. (Although I've raved to interviewers about how Tom & Mike were the Saviors. Process Uber Alles)
One of the guys who interviewed me at Panasonic recognized my name when he saw I was from UCI. Turned out I taught an assembly language class he took.
That's the second person I taught that I've met in OC. Hilarious.
The month of unanticipated vacation :-) has been used productively, I'veincreased my knowledge of Home Maintainence, debug, and repair considerably.Learned how to use Java Audio to build a sound toy for Isaac (available onrequest --its bad netiquette to forward (executable) JARs without prior notice),wrote a Heartbeat (high availability monitoring) Class after spending a lot of time thinking about medical sensor nets over commercial WiFi.. and an 8.5 hour interview.. and not getting it because I wasn't "systems" enough.. burnt the rest of the tree I chainsawed to pieces because it fell in a spring Santa Ana windstorem..
(re coding) gotta stay in shape.. I wonder how lawyers stay in shape "between projects", do they come up with random lawsuits? [Sometimes, yes, I think is the answer]
I got to use the phrase "a pig with lipstick is still a pig" in an interview, which I heard went very well (albeit its moot now). Some of you will know what lipstickedpig I am talking about. Isaac et al. will wonder what this has to do with Software Engineering which he knows I am. My SW Eng friends will know exactly what pig I am talking about.
The electric knife will be interesting ---in a way more irreversible than a defib,but there may be no monitoring of the physio signals required. If the analogs doit right, the critical path ---surgeon finger to 'blade' latency--- won't evenbe in software. That would make it much easier than the defib project, which was about as complex as it could be --multiple computers, hard real time constraints based on physio (ECG) signals, logging, printing, wow. Just to save a life two (actually three) different computers have to talk to each other. A electrosurgery knife is just a fancy high power CB radio.
Lap surgery may make it more interesting. I can speculate until I start work, I suppose. Also I probably have hit only 20% of the interesting/scary paths.

Fixed the dishwasher myself! I found
http://hometips.com/cs-protected/guides/dishwafix.html
and disassembled the float. That didn't help. Then I realized
that in addition to a hardwired pipe --which may be natural
gas-- going in, there is also a hose with a valve. I turned it on,
and now the dishwasher works --it uses clean water. Kinda
gross thinking about when the water was shut off. That
must have been when I fixed the food disposer.

Have to fix a flap valve in a toilet and replace a safe outlet which doesn't stay on.

So it looks like I will get the turkey knife job, and it will be under 20 mi
away. This is about $4 each way in gas. I'd say it should be illegal to drive more than that, but they're taxed in gastax & car part & labor tax. Many folks
drive 2 hours each way. Via high gas prices --and no government intervention-- this will restructure residences & business. Of course, the government will
intervene. Perhaps that will be stimulus for intervening in govt behavior... but
one suspects not, until the Collapse.

Surfing Moore's law & lap surgery as the new frontier..

I'm pissed off. My GE Potscrubber dishwasher, now 9 years old,
no longer seems to clean. A reverse engineering / disassembly
and dye injection indicates its not pumping new water in. It seems
that its suposed to recirculate during part of its cycle, but it never flushes
with new water.

This will be a few hundred bucks, no doubt.

The Students for Sensible Drug Policy said it was sad that the court thought there should be a drug exception to the First Amendment.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/S/SCOTUS_BONG_HITS?SITE=CAANR&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2007-06-25-19-34-52

Yep. The supremes should know this --now they are saying that categories
of thought (or ambiguous nonsense) can be limited by the State. Think about where that could go.

In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens said the ruling "does serious violence to the First Amendment."

Good Justice, bong hits for JP Stevens.

"The message on Frederick's banner is cryptic," Chief Justice John
Roberts said. But the school principal who suspended him "thought the banner would be interpreted by those viewing it as promoting illegal drug use, and that interpretation is plainly a reasonable one," Roberts said in the majority opinion.

Bad Justice, no donut for you, Roberts. Perhaps it is reasonable interpretation, lets say the banner said "illegal drug consumption is fun". What gives the State the right to censor that expression? Or suppose the phrase was "school is dumb". Is that permitted? Please re-read the Bill of Rights.
You see, the State has no right ever to censor; and we the people have the right to any expression we want. Actually, Justice, you should turn in your robes.

Google, Inc, is in a better position to be what the NSA is chartered
to be. Therefore we can assume that Google is an effector of the NSA; Sergei
needs that green card, baby. (Perhaps not, but you get the idea) Sure, put
your social network, passport-quality-photo on line, and let us all store and index
it for free.

No problem.

Rubes.

So, they seem to like me at the place I last interviewed, which is good
as I'm losing interest in the process and they seem to have an interesting
project to enter from "the ground up".

A friend at my last job advised me to be part of core team, to avoid job fluctuation. He's a young male bachelor who pulls 16 hour shifts often.

Also the new place is entirely engineers, admittedly at a fairly shabby location, but
still under 20 mi away, and probably lots of cool lunch opportunities ---on the way back
from the interview I stopped and got a jap bento, and an extra broiled squid, and an extra sake bottle too. Also lots of dried seaweed paper, the kind you roll sushi in, its a great source of vitamins and very tasty too.

One of the s/w engineers I talked to reminded me of my brother, had he gone into a respectable job instead of finance, complete with hair.

If they appreciate my humor we'll do great.

Actually I had to unscrew the rotary part of my dishwasher in order to clean it. There was gunk blocking the flow of the jets. Anyway, that's how you do it, you can unscrew that part.

Another thing you need to know is that the little mysterious plug on the sink is how the dishwashing-water gets down the drain. It can get plugged. Twist off the chrome cap then unscrew the plastic.

A needlenose pliers and kabab skewer (or similar long pointy object) are the tools you need.

Stuff done to maintain the house, now about 10 years old.

• Unplugged the water ports on the rotating dishwasher part (today)
• Unplugged the food disposer, requiring some nasty fishing under the sink
• Replaced toilet valve assembly
• Replaced toilet handle
• Replaced toilet seat
• Replaced external AC unit blower motor
• Ugly fix for upstairs shower splash damage
• Ugly fix for peeling kitchen linoleum
• Painted inside of gate

Pending

• Kitchen sink
• Linoleum replacement

Paid for repairs

• Garage door repair
• Downstairs shower faucet
• A/C

Once I called out a telco guy, because I could debug no further, and it was their fault (so I didn't pay for it).

We have never called an insect exterminator. Though for some visitors, e.g., sleeping (sick) raccoon, possum who set up home in the garage, sick crow, we have called animal control. Once they started giving me a nature lecture on how "they're endigenous", which was stupid, because you don't call the police for nature lessons, and anyway, normal endigenous animals don't sleep in the open in daylight, nor am I as an Irvine homeowner & taxpayer about to extricate a possum if I can get help.

We have, of course, had ants, but you can outwit them, if you try. Also there are poisons.. which I am very careful and frugal with.

Fortunately (and this is how antibiotics, etc work) ant metabolism or nervous system chemistry differs enough from mammals'.

Home Networking

RF:

• A cheap cordless phone
• x10 camera
• microwave oven
• keyfobs
• garage door opener
• pager
• cellphones
• FSMR walkie-talkies (ie leash for kid when camping)
• (No GPS yet. No toll-road transceiver, no contactless pay dongles. Don't use WiFi b/g/n/a. No bluetooth devices. Luddite? Cheap? Old-school?)

Wired:

• Cox digital phones
• Cox analog cable TV
• Cox Docsis2 internet
• 10 Mbps Cat-5 custom cabling (using built in would be nicer looking but harder to install & maintain) including a hub at the end of a hallway acting as a repeater to a PC downstairs
• 12V doorbell

"I cannot open the attachments you sent me. Can you resend it in word."



From a technical head hunter. Nice.



I sent it in RTF format, dude. You can't handle that? Should you even be daring to bother me?

You will die. Likely from plumbing, ie, your heart or the tubes to your brain will give out. You might have an import organ, eg, liver or kidney or lung, crap out.
You have a third of a chance of getting offed by your own cells' desire to replicate regardless of the effect on the host, ie, you, organism, ie cancer.

And if you outlive stroke, and heart attack, and cancer, your brain will sink into dementia, which is much harder on those around you than you realize. I think euthanisia sessions for folks in that spiral is moral, noble, something we can all be proud of. Some will oppose it, but they are medieval.

We do as much, or more, for our suffering companion animals. Should we not do the same for our peers?

Dedicated to Hunter S Thompson, Dr. David Earl Patton, Dr Jack Kevorkian, MD, Saint.

At least those who had terminal diseases could take out a few tax collectors on the way out. See Assasination Politics or just good ole fashioned home justice.

I curse those who oppose dignified dying, with long, excrutiating, embaressing pain. I bless those who help others, within the "law" or not.

Yeah, I take this "life" thing kinda seriously.

Obviously, I'm pro-abortion. Its your life. If you don't want one, don't have one. Leave the rest alone.

What a concept: leave others alone. Protect you only when others bother you and you solicit help. What will all the vice cops do?

Someone was recently discussing terraforming Mars. Lets assume that we've learned all we can from a sterile Mars. (Yes, a hefty supposition!)

I suggest lichens. They should be included in the first "Johnny Appleseed" terraform satellite dispersal package.

Also, obviously, Yellowstone extromophiles and Arctic and Chilean desert stuff.

Manifest destiny be screwed, its just a cool project.

Tornadoes today in western canada. WTF?
A hundred homes toasted in Tahoe. Already (3rd week of June).

Dry weather on top of dry climate can lead to large excusions.

Can't do much about the weather, eh?

A single volcano could reset things. Or perhaps, likely, Gaia will implement a little feedback in the carbon cycle.

WTF? I am aware now of at least 3 "in flight entertainment systems" positions
in the county. Wow.

One of the positions mentioned that hollywood is concerned about folks stealing movies from airplanes, because the planes have the latest spew.