handslive

Looking at a recent post on this site from

buhrger , I was reminded of something that came up in an online course I'm taking about Google's Cloud Platform (basically, their service that competes with AWS). In a video about reliability and service level objectives, the lecturer makes the point that 100% availability is impossible. He does this by saying, "Because we live in a quantum mechanical world..." The implication is that the world is a place where random events happen so you can't control for all modes of failure. I groaned and rolled my eyes and was grateful this wasn't an in-person course because I'd have had to speak up, I think. It would be more accurate and more germaine to point out that we live in an entropic universe where states of order will fall into disorder over time.

I need to think about this opening. The use of 'association' is bugging me, but I'm trying to connect the two sections together differently. Felt like the best I could do at the time. I like moving "eventually memory" up into the second last line. Maybe less emphasis, or at least different emphasis.

A broom and boxes of 60-penny galvanized nails

His house tidy, vacant and waiting
We swept out my father's garage
On a warm autumn day with all the doors open
Wearing masks against the dried mud and road grime
The slightly oily lint and bench litter
The mouse droppings and insecticide
Dead magpie and somnolent black flies
Rust, old bolts, washers, nuts and nails
So many nails
Working nearly clockwise around the floor
Workbench to shelves to cupboards to corners
Sweeping out dirt and past association
Barn to fields to hay shed to road
Back up the lane to the garage
Now neater anyway, recycling and trash sorted
Ready for the new owners to park their truck
Fill surfaces and drawers and spaces
With parts and needful pieces
The house with chairs and beds and cutlery
The stalls and pens and eventually memory
With living

It's been long enough now since I wrote that last entry that I have thoughts about it.

The first two lines feel clunky together. I was avoiding the obvious grammatical structure, but maybe it needs to be there for flow?
The reference to widdershins is actually a lie. The order I present is the order I went in, but that order is also clockwise. I felt like I wanted to imply a sensation of turning both ways, but the more I look at it, the more it bothers me. It might be sufficient to just...gyre.
The reference to the house, and especially its pre-occupied state comes from out of nowhere, which feels like sandbagging the reader with a detail I know and they don't. The earlier reference to the barn sets up the later reference to stalls and pens, so something similar is needed for balance.
- Arguably, a line breaking up the first two with a reference to the house would solve two problems.

I signed up for Master Class this spring in order to get my mother-in-law a gift of membership for her birthday (buy one, get one free). Recently, I've been taking Reading and Writing Poetry with Billy Collins. I haven't read any of his material previously, as far as I know. The most recent video had a bit about keeping a notebook where first drafts, notes, and just basic scribbling can happen. I did this all the time in junior high and high school, but it was a clipboard with a cover that held a pack of paper, the kind with the glue strip across the top and the cardboard backing. But it also became a folder of other bits of scrap paper and notes, marginalia on other printed things, even bits of music notepaper. I stopped packing it around in university. It was practically in tatters by then, the blue plastic covering tearing away to expose the heavy cardboard underneath, and bag space for class notes and materials was at a premium.

Those notes above would have been probably a few quick lines in a different ink (like actual boxes or brackets drawn around the words, possibly an arrow from "house" to the top two lines) and maybe two actual words: clunky (maybe spelled klunky) and No! This is a lot more elaborate because it lacks topological context. And, in some sense, I feel like I have to describe it for whoever might be unlucky enough to read about it.

I've had other notebooks I carried around since, but I keep thinking of them as journals, which has made it hard, mentally, for me to write in them. The thing about scrap paper is that it's transitory, recycled or reused. It's obviously not the finished thing; it's only not trash by virtue of being kept. A weird bit of ordering in my world I hadn't pulled up into the light before.

since I posted, much less since I wrote anything new. (Edited: small word change to avoid a needless repetition.)

A broom and boxes of 60-penny galvanized nails

We swept out my father's garage
A warm autumn day with all the doors open
Wearing masks against the dried mud and road grime
The slightly oily lint and bench litter
The mouse droppings and insecticide
Dead magpie and somnolent black flies
Rust, old bolts, washers, nuts and nails
So many nails
Working nearly clockwise around the floor
Workbench to shelves to cupboards to corners
And widdershins the farm after
Barn to fields to hay shed to road
Up the lane to the garage
Now neater anyway, recycling and trash sorted
Ready for the new owners to park their truck
Fill surfaces and drawers and spaces
With parts and needful pieces
The house with chairs and beds and cutlery
The stalls and pens
And eventually memory
With living

Current Mood: something

A long time ago (well, years anyway), M asked me about the possibility of setting up a 5 year diary. These are kind of a common concept in weather journals and gardening. Each page of the journal is for a specific calendar day and month, but you can put in different entries for each year. This is useful for recurring activities like gardening because you can see how the weather has been at different times of the year across multiple years or what you planted on the May long weekend each year.

The first example web application I found didn't work for me (for a bunch of reasons -- mostly that the code hadn't been touched in several years and the newer versions of the various coding frameworks used weren't backward compatible). However, a year ago or so I found another example with a much smaller and simpler code base. I've been tweaking and rewriting it now and then and have finally reached the point where I felt I could let M start playing around with it.

Along the way, I've been keeping notes of different kinds on the various bits used to build the site, what objectives I have, and what things I've done so far. There's still a sizable to-do list, including to rewrite this from scratch now that I have a clearer idea what it should do and how. For now, it supports multiple users, so M and I can use it at the same time and have our own entries. It also supports backdating entries and longer text entry than the original version. No formatting of content (yet) and no search function. Also, I'd like some additional security controls on the diary content at rest, like some kind of encryption at rest -- although how search would work with that is a question.

You may have heard about the recent breach at Air Canada. Because Air Canada recently purchased Aeroplan, it turns out that I have credentials stored in their service. I don't use the app, so I'm not even likely to be part of the subset of users affected. And that's not why I'm posting anything here. Instead, it was a tweet from Ann Cavoukian stating that the breach wouldn't have happened if Air Canada had encrypted all of their customer's data at rest. And maybe I should tweet something about it? But my response is not a short aphorism.

Encryption of data in a case like this is about instituting an additional measure of access control, supplemental to existing controls. But applications are built of components that are in a sense layered (at least conceptually) on top of each other. So where we provide encryption affects what access is protected and how the system overall is affected. This is meant to be a quick tour, so I`m going to make broad, sweeping generalizations. This is based heavily on my own experience.

( Application anatomy 101... )( Encrypt the file system... )
( Encrypt the database... )
( Encrypt individual data elements... )

( Attacking the application... )

( Working with your hands tied... )

I do think that some of the content stored by Air Canada could definitely have been encrypted and protected to a level similar to credit card numbers. Passport numbers and Nexus card numbers, for example. But to encrypt everything? That runs the risk of seriously hampering things. My main point is that encryption isn't magical security dust that protects against everything.

Current Mood: geeky

Like many others on the shreds of my friends list (it's been dwindling steadily for some time), I will be moving to Dreamwidth. Same handle, same basic lack of activity. But I'll be over there.

Today's work related reading and assessment included starting some compare and contrast review of NIST's Guidelines for Media Sanitization and the Canadian Communication Security Establishment's document on Clearing and Declassifying Electronic Storage Devices. I've only just got started on this, but one key point seems to be that NIST is satisfied with a single overwrite with any value (0s, 1s, random patterns, whatever) and CSE wants an overwrite with some value (e.g., 0), an overwrite with its inverse (e.g., 1), and then an overwrite with a preset value (e.g. 0xDEAD 0xBEEF) for verification purposes. A three pass overwrite more or less conforms to most guidance you'll find online although they don't usually do exactly what CSE is asking for there. Recovering anything from a drive that's had a full overwrite of all writeable sectors usually requires special equipment (from specialized software and hardware all the way up to electron microscopes in a lab). NIST feels you should just plan on destroying the drive if electron microscopes are something that'll be used against you. So does CSE, but they think you should do a 3 pass overwrite first before shoving the drive into an industrial shredder (which, btw, needs to break the drive down into parts no bigger than 10mm² if it's had top secret data on it at some point -- a bit more than half the size of a dime) and then mix the pieces with pieces of drives that weren't as sensitive. No question, this is your super villian scenario right here, except the US and the UK are potential super villians.

Current Mood: paranoid
Current Location: my desk
Current Music: background hum of my brain

Anyone who knows me may not be surprised to hear that I wear my heart on my sleeve.

While

purplejavatroll has been working some extra time, I've been spending far too much time watching silly auditions on YouTube. I think The Voice, * Has Talent, X Factor or whatever is actually lowering my IQ. But I do like listening to people sing, so I guess.

Current Mood: sappy
Current Location: my desk
Current Music: Everybody's Free

From Storm by Michael Longley. I googled until I found a line I liked.

I spent a fair bit of my morning looking at a threat-risk assessment one my co-workers wrote using a new template one of our new team members is developing. Or, really, I read through it quickly and then critiqued the template. I reached out to the guy working on the template and we had a really good conversation. I got a compliment on the feedback I provided, but it's entirely possible that I'm the first person to provide focused, technical feedback on the structure and purpose of the document. We've had so many new people added to the team recently, I'm feeling a bit lost sometimes.

And I learned today that our brand new director (in the job less than a year) is leaving the company before the end of the month. That makes three directors we've lost in less than a year. It's an unsettled time. I'll have worked for this director for nearly a year with no feedback on my performance. Well, until I get his written remarks as part of my formal evaluation after he's gone.

They've decided to stop searching for a replacement manager for my area. We're going to be merged with another group (under the same area) and one of those folks will be made manager officially. Not sure how he'll do as manager. I've dealt with him as a peer, but not as my superior. I think I pay a little too much attention to that, but why change now?

This current wind may blow for another 2 months at least, and I wonder what things will be like then.

Current Mood: Nicely
Current Location: my desk
Current Music: X-Files mood music

Someone thanked me today for giving him a forum where "I can just bitch. I feel so much better. I know you probably feel like shit, but I feel better. So, thank you." I think his tongue was firmly in his cheek. He knew I didn't feel like shit, for example. This was somewhat later in a meeting where I'd felt obliged to remind someone that I was not acting manager of the team.

And I'm not. I'm a single point of contact from the director maybe, but I'm not "managing". Very fiddly point, really. You might say I'm pseudovising.

And that kinda feels like my day. I swear I did other work. But mostly pseudovising and a little tiny bit of fixing a mistake I made 2 years ago that has only just come to light. (It's about firewall rules, but I don't think I should get into that.)

Tonight's activities: whisky tasting

Current Mood: thirsty
Current Location: my desk
Current Music: bzzzz...click click.....bzzzzt...bzzz

I keep meaning to write something and post it. Well, here I am with about 20 minutes before I leave to go to aikido, hurrying to just post something. Anything.

I'm failing to understand processes at work, lately. Today, I had someone cold call me because she saw my name in a RACI matrix related to a new project. On that basis, she believed I knew about the project, but it turns out I only knew who had put my name there, not about the project. It was a good match for my skills and interests at work, so fair enough. Normally, someone asks me before assigning me something. This is the second time, though.

In December, I was told I was preparing a "security framework" (no, I don't know what they meant by that exactly either, but I'm better prepared to guess than you are) for a project here before the end of January. I met with several panicked groups of people who all claimed to be waiting for this framework, all of whom had different notions about what such a divine scripture could deliver to them. Well, one of those groups has come forward now to let me know they've changed their minds. They have an as-is process for onboarding new staff to their application and, while they can see a need for the framework down the road, they don't need it for some time. The other groups are not forthcoming about their scope for this "framework", but I'm hopeful that their dates aren't as agressive.

I think the most interesting thing about that was the number of people I encountered who believed I was already working on a document for them, even though we'd never spoken to each other before. Expressing abject ignorance during the round table introductions at a meeting is not conducive to real discussion, I've discovered.

I was told last year that there was a critical requirement for us to update the standards and guidelines my department publishes. I agreed and produced a proposed approach with short, medium, and long term objectives, which I shared with my manager around April or May, I think. That manager left during a re-org and I sent the exact same proposal to the chair of a task force looking into process improvements. He left to a different part of the company and I sent it to one of the managers under my director, who was expressing interest in the status of the task force's work. I don't know what she did with it, but with 3 weeks to go in December she started issuing demands that the whole catalogue of material be reviewed and updated before the 31st, which was flat out impossible (and I was taking the last 2 weeks off). Also, not on my list of short, medium, or long term objectives. I made small changes to a handful of things. Apparently, so did some others since she happily reported last week that over 80% of the material had been updated. I suppose that felt like success, in some measure.

The new year feels like an open space or maybe a blank sheet of paper. Possibility, challenge, and some disappointment that this is all I brought with me from last year. (It isn't all I brought with me, but the disappointment is there just the same.)

Current Mood: hurried
Current Location: my desk

I have been watching season 3 of Hannibal on Netflix. I have to say I love the writing, the acting, and the cinematography, which has been simply stunning for what's really just TV. But I've developed a weird theory while watching this.

What would happen if you set out to produce a TV series that attempted to follow set canon for the story of Hannibal Lecter (up to a point) for the express purpose of making the ending of Thomas Harris' book Hannibal understandable? What would that story look like?

I've gone and read the Wikipedia page on the TV show. I follow the other two pieces of logic pretty well: "What would David Lynch do?" and "the love story of Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter". But that other idea is compelling to me just now. I'm 13 episodes in.

I told

buhrger that I needed a reason to post to help break the inertia, and it's taken me a week to even start drafting a response. So, that's working.

<memetext>If you comment "Meme Me" and weren't the person who memed me, I will pick six of your userpics that you can then write about, thus maintaining meme balance in the LJ-verse. Feel free to propagate or not, ask people to ask you for six userpics, as you like.</memetext>

All userpics are pictures of my "own" hands. I use "own" because one of my userpics is actually a picture of a game avatar's hands, but since that wasn't one of the six asked for, we won't talk about it. :-)

[aikido] This pic is carefully cropped from a picture taken during an aikido-l seminar. That mailing list is stale if not actually defunct now. I usually use it for anything martial arts related, especially aikido.

[writing] This pic is me typing (randomly). I usually use this for topics where I'm either engaged in "blogging" rather than "journaling" or where I'm talking about writing, usually fiction or poetry or some other dull topic or (particularly egregious) posting samples of said materials. Not doing nearly enough of this outside of work these days and I don't like to talk about what I'm writing at work. Sorry.

[coding] This pic is also me typing, but in front of an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and a Unix terminal window. I used to use this for posting about writing code, application development thoughts, and occasionally work items that touched on this area. I haven't done any real code development in about 10 years, so this userpic is very stale now.

[hiking] This pic is me reaching for my backpack (while wearing bicycling gloves). I do still go hiking (not as regularly, but still), so it may not be as out of date as [coding]. :-)

[playing2] This pic is me playing the piano. I usually use this one for any music related posting, especially as it relates to performance. I haven't posted much lately, much less much about playing, but this could conceivably be used sooner than [writing] would be. So much for creative outlets.

[rash] I think this pic was used specifically for the magnificently dramatic fall off of my bike in 2007 where I actually knocked myself out for a second and had a mild concussion. In practice, I'd use this one for any injury (especially foolish injury) related posting. Might mean I should have posted things that would use it, but haven't.

Could there be more pictures of my hands doing things than this? Maybe a smartphone hand or a driving hand or bicycling hand? Yeah, maybe. Something to think about anyway.

Obtained from Mr. Ellis who pointed to this page. I have no idea on what basis the average is six, so I`d ignore that were I you. Possibly that would only be a sign that a person was not yet 30 or something. And, hmm, I guess ignore some of the repitition (Chronicles of Narnia contains The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe). I suppose one could also imagine that the blank line in the middle is significant in some way...

Three books on this list are not crossed out because I started but did not finish them: The Bible, A Tale of Two Cities, and Ulysses.

Cross out what you’ve already read. Six is the average.

~~Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen~~
~~Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien~~
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
~~Harry Potter series - JK Rowling~~
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Bible - Council of Nicea
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
~~Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell~~
~~His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman~~
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
~~Catch 22 - Joseph Heller~~
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
~~The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien~~
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
~~Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger~~
~~The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger~~
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
~~The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald~~
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
~~The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams~~
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
~~Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll~~
~~The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame~~
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
~~Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis~~
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
~~The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis~~
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
~~Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne~~
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
~~One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez~~
A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
~~Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery~~
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
~~Lord of the Flies - William Golding~~
Atonement - Ian McEwan
~~Life of Pi - Yann Martel~~
~~Dune - Frank Herbert~~
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
~~The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon~~
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
~~Brave New World - Aldous Huxley~~
~~The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon~~
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
~~Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding~~
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
~~Dracula - Bram Stoker~~
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
~~Possession - AS Byatt~~
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
~~Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell~~
~~The Color Purple - Alice Walker~~
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
~~Charlotte’s Web - EB White~~
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
~~Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle~~
The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
~~The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery~~
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
~~Watership Down - Richard Adams~~
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
~~The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas~~
~~Hamlet - William Shakespeare~~
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
~~Frankenstein - Mary Shelley~~
The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
Paradise Lost - John Milton
~~The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain~~
White Fang - Jack London
The Portrait of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
~~Queen of the Damned - Anne Rice~~
~~Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson~~
The Call of the Wild - Jack London
~~The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde~~

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz — L. Frank Baum
Don Quixote — Miguel De Cervantes
~~Where the Wild Things Are — Maurice Sendak~~
~~The Cat in the Hat — Dr Seuss~~
The Giver — Lois Lowry
~~Inkheart — Cornelia Funke~~
~~Divine Comedy — Dante Alighieri~~
~~Macbeth — William Shakespeare~~
~~Romeo and Juliet — William Shakespeare~~
The Child Called ‘It’ — Dave Pelzer
The Hunger Games — Suzanne Collins
The Diary of a Young Girl — Anne Frank
Night — Elie Wiesel
Les Misérables — Victor Hugo
The Odyssey — Homer
The Scarlet Letter — Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Brothers Karamasov — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Eragon — Christopher Paolini

From London, we went to Bath and stayed there in a lovely B&B. Reasonable walking distance from downtown Bath, lovely rooms, nice people running it.

purplejavatroll and I wandered around a bit our first night there. We came to Bath on our first trip to the UK, I think, so it'd been quite a while. We spent more time in Bath on this trip, too. I took probably 45 photos, and the 10 I've put in the set are all that are worth keeping. Bath served as our base of operations for visiting various places around the Cotswolds.

I was impressed with the Roman Baths museum. When we went the first time, several sections that are now open were mostly still being dug up and researched. They had some walkways setup for the tourists to keep us away from the actual work. Now, it's amazing inside and there was a lot of really great info.

Also, the water in the Roman Baths? I've had worse pump water in rural Alberta, but it was still pretty horrid stuff.

( The Cotswolds... )

I got back from vacation almost two weeks ago, and here I am only now getting around to posting photos and writing something up. In my defense, I got back and we had an aikido seminar the next weekend. And I've also got around 2,000 pictures to go through (I'm about half way, I think -- there's a lot of junk).

The World Con was fun. I still feel like an outsider, but then, it was only my second one. I'm a panel junkie, but I bet part of that is coming to each panel ready to discuss or hear discussion. They're new to me, not a continuation from somewhere else, so it doesn't feel like a repitition.

purplecthulhu and

purpletigron introduced

purplejavatroll and I around some places. I certainly never lacked for people to talk to or things to do. The two panels I sat on were enjoyable, so that was an interesting new experience, too. Not too different from work, except with an audience actually.

purplejavatroll's mom stayed in London during the con, too, but spent her time going on tours, nearly getting lost, and I think generally enjoying herself.

I've got some photos up on Flickr from in and around Bath, but I'll post something about that when I've got more material from the places went to see posted.

One of my co-workers mentioned Blurb when I was talking to him about how many pictures I took. I've made a photo book there using photos from our Berg Lake trip last year. If it looks ok, I think I'll do something similar with some of these vacation shots and print copies for a few family members.

I posted in January of last year after an almost 2 year hiatus of not really posting anything at all. I sort of thought I'd have things to say or try to say things whether I had them or not. That didn't work out. In fact, I posted a grand total of 3 times. In my head, I've worked on two or three posts I might put up in the new year and, even as I type this, I don't know which one you'll get here. Maybe all of them. Well, let's suppose I gave you teasers and gave myself a chance to see what I might do.

Post number one was going to be a self-indulgent narrative of what I was doing for 2 years (or 3 years, or actually potentially 4 years) that meant I wasn't posting anything here other than the occasional house post while we were building. I'm worried about the self-indulgent part of it. In my head it consistently comes out more cynical and just generally down about work than I think is really the case. And it would be about work.

Post number two was going to be about a short fanfic bit I've been working on for longer than I care to think about in the Shadow Unit universe. It might even include excerpts. I have possibly around half or two-thirds of it drafted. It's at a point where some technical specifics for the next portion need to be researched, and I need to redraft some internal narration to crank the level of disturbed up. Or it might be about music. Yeah, that makes sense, right? Well, truthfully, this was going to be a "creative" post to help me focus on actually finishing something, anything really. I might tear apart an old piece of poetry, too, and highlight all the places I don't really like but have previously been too lazy to do anything about.

Post number three was going to be about a story idea I had over the weekend. Whenever I flip on the tv, now that I have cable again, if there's a show that involves federal agencies like the FBI or CIA or DHS, then everyone's very serious and, if you take out the plot elements, there's a lot of dystopian action involving government agents violating laws, privacy, and procedure without any consequences. All very serious shows, with some waffling about whether these are good things or bad things, but almost never any consequences for the technical steps that advance the action. This clearly calls for a British or Russian style comedy about a group of co-workers at NSA who bumble through bureaucratic crises while dealing with clueless officials (of varying stripes of good and bad and paranoid), inter-departmental, knife-edged politics, and absurdity.

"We can all plague and punish one another. Teaze him -- laugh at him." -- Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

Happy new year.

Berg Lake Trail 2013, a set on Flickr.

I'm late posting this here, given that I posted it to FB shortly after I got the pictures up.

It's been about 7 years since we did any backpacking. That's about the time I fell off my bike on the way to work and messed up my shoulder for a while. And life in general interfered with getting back out on the trail.

I'm pretty pleased that, although we took it easier (2 days to get into Berg instead of trying to do it in 1), we were still able to get out there. Of the three times we've gone into Snowbird Pass now, this was easily the best I've felt coming back from that hike. Hurrah for reasonable fitness and better boots.

I took about 430 pictures all told, which is a real testament to cheap storage. This photo set is 160 of what I felt were probably the best of those. Enjoy!

Yeah, like I ever post here, or, in fact, anywhere. Hi.

I joked to my former boss today that sometime last year the top of my head came off and now the weather gets in. In response, I suppose I should say, to a question of how I was doing. I worked for him for a few years, and was walking around looking a tad poleaxed today, so there was no point lying about it. He was also mostly responsible for laying down a half-day meeting in the middle my week with three days notice making me quadruple booked in at least one spot and prompting cries of "where are you?!" in my IM window a couple of times. I had spent my morning shovelling coal like mad to make my day productive and was staring down the prospect of missing lunch. I mean, oh sure, the meeting invite had said lunch would be provided, but since he'd gone downstairs to buy a sandwich and the woman joining us was eating a salad of her own devising, I couldn't help feeling left out. (Yes, I went downstairs and bought lunch. I'm not a complete idiot. My status bar only reads 90% or something.)

Today prompted me to thinking that meeting invites at work have inertia, which you can calculate by assigning a mass to the participants. Higher mass based on status or number of participants means the meeting will be harder to move. It's not a perfect metaphor, but it was working for me since one of the "where are you?!" folks seemed to think I should move things to accommodate him. Not a VP? Aw, too bad. Your meeting has 8 participants? Gee, mine has 19. There are additional factors in play, but I don't know how to solve for them. Like that one guy with almost no open spots or availability. He's not a VP and he's only one of the 19, but this 30 minute slot is the only opening he has for the next 6 weeks and goddamn but you will not succeed if he doesn't make that 30 minute slot. He now has an equivalent mass to a CEO. Or someone with a C in their title anyway.

So, yeah. Hi.

Do you know, I sometimes forget a little that I'm left handed? I'm not as left handed as my sisters, which is to say they're left handed like many of you are right handed. If I handed you a tool and told you to use it in your left hand, you'd be basically brainlocked and ready to give up. Don't lie. I've seen you. I'm not that left handed. I do a lot of things right handed because a lot of things are setup in this world to be done right handed. Because you just don't think about it, do you? Why would you? But every now and then. There are small screws inside my computer case that I am basically incapable of removing or putting back in with my right hand. I'll drop them, cross thread them, ricochet them around the enclosed space. No issue if I'm using my left hand, though. I bumped into another example on the weekend. I was cutting up pills for my cat (she can't hold her metaclopramide or her cyproheptadine, so I have to cut them up into quarters -- what, she's like 5 pounds). I have a little pill cutter and it's great for cutting things in half. Cutting a 5mg dose into 4 is trickier. Or maybe it's just my OCD insisting that I get them roughly even in size. Anyway, this is a teethgrindingly awful task if I'm placing the half pills in the cutter with my right hand. It's only frustrating if I'm doing it with my left. I've probably cut 100+ pills into quarters and I only realized I was using the wrong hand on the most recent bottle of 20. I blame scissors. And a fair number of building doors. And hockey sticks. And baseball bats. And my desk in school. Er, hmm.

Well. What was that, then.

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