Yesterday was a beautiful Spring day, so nice I sat outside in the yard and watched the stars come out while sipping a homebrew beer (excellent batch, by the way.) Here’s what it looks like from my office window at the moment:

When this storm is done, I likely will need a shovel to clear all this Global Warming from the driveway.

New York City, currently wearing the face of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has a lawsuit against handguns. It suffered a setback yesterday when the Second Circuit Court of Appeals tossed it out. Says Mayor Mike:

“I am disappointed in the court’s decision. Regardless of this ruling, we will continue our fight against illegal guns full bore — in the courtrooms, on the streets and in the Congress.” [Emphesis added]

Interesting choice of words there. My understanding of “full bore” is that it is a reference to bringing out the big guns, but I’m not a gunsmith. Let’s see what Mayor Mike’s own New York Times has to say about “full bore“:

Some lexicographers think the bore first measured an engine cylinder (and have a 1927 citation), while others think that the origin is from the measurement of the inside of the barrel of a gun. ”A .45-caliber gun can take a .44-caliber load,” John Snyder of the gun lobby tells me, ‘’so full bore would be the maximum-size load. In another sense, it means ‘maximum capable powder load.’ ”

Well, there’s certainly a gun angle. Regardless it’s a reference to maximum, unrestrained power. As a bonus, Mayor Mike is going to fight this out “on the streets.” Some how, I don’t think that means he’ll be asking the police to increases the number of hugs they give New York citizens.

I’ve written about Amanda Marcotte before. Well, sheeeeeee’s baaaaaaaack. There has been plenty written regarding her latest - and quite successful, I would add - effort to open a shoe store in her mouth. Not much to add there. But I did catch this from her apology:

“I didn’t pick the offensive imagery in my book, but I should have caught it sooner than now. I didn’t and there’s no excuse. It was my first book, I was excited and happy, but I needed to have a more critical eye.”

What author doesn’t go over every speck of ink on their first book with a critical eye? Does she not care? Is she so trusting of those towing the party line that she can be so easily duped? Was the book ghost written?

I call “bunk” and say she knew full well what she was doing, just as she did with the blunders at the Edwards blog. What she didn’t do was anticipate the reaction, as before, to her venom. She seems to think that everyone is as narrowly focused and myopic as she.

And then there’s this from Ms. Marcotte’s publisher, Seal Press:

“As an organization, we need to look seriously at the effects of white privilege. We will be looking for anti-racist trainings offered here in the Bay Area.”

Sensitivity trainings must be the equivalent to Catholic confession, or penitence of the self-flagellation variety, for followers of The Church of the Politically Correct.

I have to say, though, there’s a bit of Schadenfreude when multicultural, hyper diversity types get bit by their own pets.

Turns out, FedEx has both “tracking numbers” and “tour numbers.” Tracking numbers are those which show you where your package is as it moves from Point A to Point B, where presumably you are at Point B. For example, a recent purchase of mine was shipped from the vendor in two separate packages. Using the FedEx “tracking number”, we see the trace of Package One’s journey from Point A (the vendor) to Point B (me):

Nicely done, FedEx. “Tour numbers,” however, show your package’s progress from Point A to all points in between Point A and you. Using the FedEx “tour number” shows a different trace for Package Two:

Package Two went from Columbia, MO, through Denver (I missed the opportunity to wave as it went by), on to Salt Lake City and then back to Denver. What fun! Problem is, there’s no way to know what kind of number you have. Not so nicely done, FedEx.

Well, I hope Package Two enjoyed it’s visit to Salt Lake City.

Would you send a mattress to someone via the U. S. Postal Service? Doubtful. Mostly because it’s just too darn inconvenient, on the front end, to stuff it into an envelop and attach all that postage. So, nobody does this. And think of the effect on the back end with the recipient? Their mailbox would effectively be locked. No place to put any of the other mail the postal carrier may need to deliver for you.

Yet, people send mattress via email all the time. This is so because the front end effort is negligible, but the back end effect could be just as unpleasant as attempting to wrestle a mattress out of your snail mailbox.

I had a problem brewing with my mail server for the past six weeks. It went unnoticed until the server started sending notices the vendor’s bandwidth limits were close to being exceeded. Since early March and up until April 23rd, there had been a message with an attachments exceeding 10 Mb sitting in my primary mail server’s queue. Fetchmail attempted, every 5 minutes, to retrieve the message to a secondary mail server running postfix. Fetchmail would pull the 10+ Mb message down to the secondary mail server and pass it on to postfix at which point postfix would reject the message because it’s 10 Mb attachment per message limit had been reached. And on this went every 5 minutes. The kicker came on April 23rd when an email newsletter I had, until now, subscribed to sent a 30 Mb video as an attachment!

Now things were getting ugly. For a brief period, the primary mail server was down (This was the first sign I had there was trouble.)

The total monthly traffic for this server normally runs about 200 Mb, far below the allotted 75 Gb set by the vendor. With these two stuck emails, the total bandwidth consumed by April 24th had reach 65 Gb. All this due to fetchmail retrieving these two messages with a combined size of 40 Mb every 5 minutes. After FTP’ing these messages off the mail server, the storm abated.

And sanity returned to email land.

Two lessons here.

Lesson one was for me. The two mail servers have been reconfigured to handle this situation more gracefully as this is likely to happen again. Why? Because lesson two isn’t likely to catch on: If you have a funny/interesting/whatever video for your friends to see, consider sending an email with a link to the file and not the file as an attachment. Unless you know the recipient has an email server that works like this:

Otherwise, nobody likes pulling a mattress out of their mailbox.

Less than 10 days ago, it was a crisp Spring morning with snow on the ground and glazed on the trees…

…while the robins waited for the ground to clear.

Next day, it was sunny and warm and Mother Nature was back to showing her Spring colors…

And then there is today. It’s bright, sunny and snowing…

This won’t last and doubtful there will be any need to pull out the Global Warming shovel.

If you ever want to know what happens to a ball like this…

…after a puppy who could barely hold this ball in her mouth when she was two months old…

…grows up and finds that long lost ball under the couch, the answer is this:

Except the pieces will be scattered hither and yon.

Time to present another Mixed Metaphor Award. This go around the award goes to Barack Obama staffer Mika Brzezinski:

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Well, but you can’t argue that the Clinton campaign didn’t do some serious damage in light of the Wright stuff and the bitter comments–

SCARBOROUGH: That wasn’t the Clinton campaign.

BRZEZINSKI: They pounced on it like lemmings.

SCARBOROUGH: That wasn’t the Clinton campaign–

BRZEZINSKI: Oh, please.

SCARBOROUGH: And I don’t know if lemmings actually pounce. I think lemmings go over cliffs.

(H/T Eric Scheie)

Spry chickadees chirp.
Morning frost and crisp Spring air.
A new day begins.

I had excellent chemistry teachers and professors in high school and college. They were tough and thorough. What I learned there paved the way toward being a successful computer programmer. Writing software is easy. Writing successfully software is a challenge. Successful software is resilient, durable and stable. To get there, a developer has to be exceptionally adept at debugging. Finding a bug often comes down to recognizing what isn’t happening.

This is probably true for any complex field. Tracing network hardware issues can depend on noticing where date is isn’t being routed, fine tuning a medical diagnosis may depend on noticing which symptoms aren’t present. I find it can also be true of people’s beliefs. The things they don’t say often reveal how thoughts are being process inside their head.

An example of how this “insight by absence” idea is reflected in people came by way of one of my friends who remarked that another friend had noted “all those right wing nuts” in my blog roll.

Busted.

They’re there all right.

Hmmmmm. But what about these?

• Advice Goddess
• Ann Althouse
• Daily KOS
• Democratic Underground
• Eric Umansky
• Huffington Post
• Lawrence Lessig
• Liberal Oasis
• TalkLeft
• Truthout

Interesting filter in play. The sites bulleted above are also in my blog roll and are anything BUT right wing. So presumably, they are not “nuts.” But by including the “right wing nuts” I’ve revealed myself as a “right wing nut?” I’ve just learned a great deal about this particular person - how they perceive the world, where they draw lines, how they discriminate, what bothers them.

Well, my friend, you are not alone in such criticism. I’ve also been dinged for “polluting” my blog roll with “left wing nuts.” Forming such at-a-glance beliefs is dependent upon not actually reading this blog. Doing so would reveal I throw stones at both sides of the aisle. I’ve stated more than once on these pages I’m a registered Independent, preferring to listen to both sides, dive deeper to find the source facts (or lack of them) to my own satisfaction and form my own opinions. That may sound like work, but it’s much easier than towing any party’s line.

Alas, you can neither teach nor expect people to step back for the bigger picture.

The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. - Daniel J. Boorstin

[Edit History]

2008.04.12

Oooops. Took “Protein Wisdom” off the bullet list. Didn’t intend for that one to be there.

Blogging has been exceptionally light the past month or more because Emmi and I were planning, and then enjoying, a vacation to several Hawaiian Islands: Moloka’i and Kaua’i.

First week was spent camping on Moloka’i, a relatively undeveloped Island by any standards. Positively primitive by Oahu/Maui/Kaua’i standards. There isn’t a single traffic light on the island and with a total population of around 8,000, it’s easy to find places away from people - especially tourists. The ratio of locals to haoles is much higher and I found the locals on Moloka’i to be more friendly than on the other Hawaiian Islands I’ve visited (all of them except Lana’i.) I suspect this was due in part because we were keeping a low impact profile by camping and weren’t there to spec out a 15,000 square foot monster house.

While the lack of traffic lights was refreshing, there is a challenging dearth of street signs on Moloka’i as well. We arrived late at night on a Sunday, picked up the rental car just minutes before the place closed and set out to find our first campsite on an Island neither of us had visited before and which clearly rolls up it’s sidewalks and streets by about 5:00 PM on a Sunday. It took a bit of creative orienteering using headlamps and three maps (each of which differed from each other and none of which was entirely accurate) before we found Papohaku Beach. Our first look at Moloka’i didn’t come until the following morning…

In a word: Beautiful! In another word: Windy! The first day was spent in Kaunakakai finding supplies you can’t travel with (like camp stove fuel) and kicking back to catch our breath. Moloka’i is renowned for it’s sunsets, and I have to say I’d agree…

Day two was for a little more exploring. We headed East. Along the way, the “Rainbow Garden” maintained by the “Peace Crusaders of America Inc” was an interesting, if accidental, find by Emmi.

It’s the place to go on Moloka’i if you want to find out where you aren’t (click image for larger picture):

The end of the road East revealed some of the most stunning views…

On the way back, we got to be part of a genuine cattle drive. OK, so we were caught behind a cattle drive. All right, all right, already. We waited while the local “ranch” moved a few cows down the street. Still, that’s an authentic Hawaiian paniolo!

We shared the campsite on Papohaku with a small group/family of locals who appeared to be living there. Camping permits allow for three consecutive days at any one site. In talking with a man whom appeared to be the leader of the clan - if I recall, his name was Reggie - I learned they had been there over two months. He generously explained to me how to beat the permit system. At $3/night, it’s hardly worth my effort. But for these folks, who appeared to live off what they could catch and sell from fishing, I could see where it would make a difference. Besides, Reggie also explained to me the economics in play on the Island. Big resort money has squeezed the locals to the point they can’t afford to live in much of the housing available on the Island. Reggie was not the last local on this trip to describe this situation. Here is the view from our tent across the campsite to where Reggie’s group was staying…

After three nights at Papohaku Beach, it was time to pull up stakes and move to One Ali’i Beach. Much more open, completely vacant and very windy…

But what a view! Here’s looking across the water to Lana’i…

And here’s our humble tent. Did I mention the campsite was vacant?

Staged here, we pressed North to the Kalaupapa lookout and a view of the Makanalua Peninsula and Kalaupapa settlement, site of the infamous leper colony. To the far right of the Peninsula is a volcanic crater with a lake in the center that goes down 800 feet.

We then drove back up around to Papohaku Beach and ended up at Kapukahehu Beach…

The surf here, as at every exposed beach, was very rough. Around the edges, the beach was rather rough as well…

The morning of our departure from Moloka’i to Kaua’i, the sea was unbelievably calm. I had only seen it calmer than this once before, after a stay in a cottage along Anini Beach on Kaua’i.

On the way, we stopped for lunch and I spied, on the restaurant billboard, a display of support from someone who is a fan of both peace and Mercedes Benz.

We purposefully stayed off the grid while camping on Moloka’i. While definitely worth it and necessary, it had it’s drawbacks. After jumping back on the grid for our journey to Kaua’i, we discovered the airline we had booked flights with, Aloha Airlines, had gone out of business after 61 years in the skies. So there was a bit of a scramble to find passage from Moloka’i to Kaua’i. But find it we did, and arrived safely at the cottage in which I had stayed before.

The plants around the place had grown more in two years than stuff grows in ten years back in Colorado. The following day, it was off to Hanakapiai Falls for my traditional solo trek. I was on the Kalalau Trail just before sunrise and could tell I was first on the trail, given the number of spider webs I was walking through that had been cast across the path over night. As usual, the Na Pali coast is exceptionally beautiful, no matter what the weather.

Upon arriving Hanakapiai Beach, I was once again greeted by a magnificent, solitary `Auku`u. All is well in the world…

The surf at Hanakapiai Beach was gloriously loud and rough. A hiker can usually feel Hanakapiai Beach before they actually hear or see the surf, but that was especially true this morning. Great, grand thunderous booms as the waves landed on the beach and rocks.

I was happy to discover the trail up to the falls had been cleared somewhat and better marked. Even better, I hadn’t seen any trash alone the way. When last up this way close to two years ago, I ended up packing out a pretty good amount of other people’s trash.

On the way back, I also stopped at the Heiau where Janet and I were married. The previous trail, which clipped some private property, had been blocked off, so I had to search a bit to find the trail up to the Heiau. With the trail not as easy or obvious, there are fewer casual visitors so I had the place to myself for the better part of an hour before I headed back down to Ke’e Beach to meet Emmi.

The next day was a visit to Waimea Canyon. I hadn’t been up here for close to 15 years and it was more magnificent than I remembered.

From the end of the road, just past Kokee State Park, we hiked a couple of miles of the Pihea Trail. It rained just about the entire hike, but it gave the trail a very Jurassic Park kind of feel.

The trail follows a ridge line which serves as a break to the clouds coming up from the Na Pali coast, hence the constant rain. This picture gives a good view of the ridge break. Looking over the edge, the drop was a good 25 meters down before disappearing into the mist, so I’m sure it was a good deal farther.

Some more shots of Waimea Canyon on the way down. It was late in the day and the sunlight was doing some interesting things with the canyon walls…

The Friday before our return, I took Emmi up to Hanakapiai Falls. For your viewing pleasure, once again, the Na Pali coast…

That evening, we tried to catch a sunset from Anini Beach, but alas, it was a bit cloudy. This is as good as it got, but impressive nonetheless…

One regret from this trip…I wasn’t able to snag a piece of that excellent Hanalei pizza. They didn’t open until an hour after we had to live leave ([Edit History - 2008.04.24] Gad! What a typo! I really, really, REALLY wanted a piece of that pizza.)

Ah, well. A good reason by itself to come back. I substituded with a couple of excellent chocolate brownies from the bakery across the way. Yum.

A hui ho…

First of the season. Ahhhhh. Spring.

Holy reeling stunning revolations, Batman (H/T LGF):

“Former ‘Nightline’ reporter Dave Marash has quit Al-Jazeera English, saying Thursday his exit was due in part to an anti-American bias at a network that is little seen in this country.”

And this is interesting:

“Marash said he felt that attitude more from British administrators than Arabs at the Qatar-based network.”

I guess there are a few Brits who just can’t get over the whole 1776 thing. Or perhaps it’s that their own country is sunk so deep in the multicultural tar pit it’s beyond their ability to muster any hope, so they might as well shift their anti-sentiments to a country that at least has some hope for survival in the 21st century. There once was a time when the sun never set on the British Empire. Looks to be a day on the horizon when the sun may never rise on the British Empire.

In other news:

Job Opening: Al Jazeera seeks self-loathing, English speaking (American citizen preferred) TV personality. Actual personality not required. Prior experience as anti-American tool and Useful Idiot preferred.

This could just as well come from the Get-Out-And-Push Department: Satellite misfire to hurt HDTV expansion.

“Reports indicated that a rocket carrying the AMC-14 satellite did not reach high enough orbit.”

Apparently, the problem has been traced back to the early moments of the launch…

Tragically, rocket scientists designed the satellite assuming metric child dimensions whereas launch control assumed English child dimensions. The stomping power of a 24 year old male was needed rather than that of an 8 year old male.