Rants and Revelations

I went kayaking for the first time in 3 weeks today. The weather wasn’t looking great, but I figured it had been too long. I was right about the weather - it started raining when I was about 2/3rds of the way to the weir, but it wasn’t a cold rain so I kept going. I was alone, so I was paddling as fast as I could. Probably too fast. Mostly I wanted to see how far I could go without pausing, and then after I had to pause, how few pauses I could take and still keep up a decent pace. That’s sort of how I built up my fitness when I first started cross country skiing and again when I started mountain biking - go fast, and work on increasing the range, instead of doing the more conventional starting with long slow distance and building up the speed, which is how I started running.
Continue reading ‘Wet one’ »

Update: 3 hours later, it’s working again. No thanks to AT&T.

I have a Palm Treo. I’ve had it for over 2 years, and all during that time I’ve had the same cell phone plan, one which includes “unlimited internet”. And all during that time, I’ve used it at least daily to check my email - and since my employer cut off my access to my home computer, I’ve used it even more like several times an hour while I’m at work I also use it to check weather, check Google maps, and other things that require an internet connection. This morning, I’ve been unable to get to the internet.

So I called “The New AT&T”. And once again, their “trouble shooting” involved me taking out the battery and sim, trying and failing to read the tiny little 20 digit number on the SIM card, reading the IMEI number from the back of the phone, and then putting it all together and getting exactly the same results as before. The “helpful” AT&T tech said that one reason for my problems might be that my data plan is incompatible with the Treo, and I needed to switch to a PDA data plan. Except that she couldn’t make changes to the plan unless I could remember my wife’s social security number. I tried to explain that there is nothing wrong with the data plan as I’d been using it on a daily basis for more than 2 years, but she insisted that she couldn’t do any more trouble shooting unless i gave her my wife’s social security number so she could switch my data plan. I shudder to think how much more a “PDA data plan” is going to cost.

So the question in my mind is: is this a temporary outage on their network that the tech wouldn’t admit, a problem with my phone, or did they just notice that I’ve had the wrong data plan after 2 years and suddenly cut me off? And how does this affect the probability of me buying a iPhone when the 3G ones come out?

I had a phone call from a very nice person at PygmyBoats. She was calling me because I’d ordered the wrong size spray skirt for the kayak kit I’d ordered, and she wanted to know if I was ordering them for the kit, or for another boat. It turns out that the Arctic Tern 14 is a “medium” size boat, but the Arctic Tern Hi Volume is a “large” size boat. Also, when I saw the “1 hand toggle” on the order form, I’d actually ordered 1 pair. Oh, and I got the UPS tracking number - they said that I should get it Friday or Monday. I’m hoping it’s Friday for obvious reasons.

Has anybody managed to do the pre-order thing for their up-coming album? Pre-sales were supposed to start yesterday, but when I tried it just now, I got a notice saying that the album was out of stock, and therefore my cart was empty. Well, of course it’s out of stock - it’s a pre-order, after all. But I’ve had other problems using non-IE browsers on their site before. If you’ve managed to pre-order using Firefox or Safari on Mac, please let me know.

I’m reading the latest Analog (or at least the one on top of my to-be-read pile, which grows faster than I can read it down, but which usually acts as a stack rather than a queue), and came across a story “Sand and Iron” by Michael Flynn. I noticed the name “Slugger O’Toole”, and immediately started thinking of the song “The Irish Rover”. And as I read further, I realized that all of the names in the story seemed to correspond to names in the song. Here is the mapping, in roughly the order they appear in the story:

As you can see, I can’t figure out “Amos January”, and the only unused name in the song is “Malone”. And the Maggie B to Barnie McGee mapping isn’t exactly a slam dunk either. But everything else works so well, to the point where Mgurk hides from work as well.

Come to the table, for all is ready.

Today was a short day, but an expensive one. It started with a trip to Home Depot to pick up some strapping to make cross braces. Somehow I ended up buying a DeWalt 12V cordless drill. Then I came home and installed the cross braces, and put the tops on the tables, and plus I ordered the kit. Here are today’s interesting (to me) discoveries:

• Walking through the tool corral in Home Depot is scary - tools keep leaping towards your shopping cart, and you have to keep fending them off or you’re going to end up spending thousands of dollars. There was a particularly aggressive mitre saw that kept stalking us.
• Forget quick release drill chucks - the real secret to productivity is to have two drills, one with the drill bit and one with the screw driver bit. After the DeWalt cordless drill had charged for a little while (half an hour or so), I was able to do it that way.
• You ever noticed when two contractors are talking about things with dimensions, they’ll often pull out a tape measure and look at that dimension to help visualize it? Well, it turns out there is a reason for that. I made a mental calculation, and thought I could hack 1 foot off the width of my table tops, based on the fact that it was 4×8 and my cross pieces were 3 feet. I forgot that I’d put the other pieces outside the cross pieces, so the under-structure is actually 3 feet 4 or so. Which I discovered when I was cutting the particle board and I thought “hmm, why did the saw just get slow and then speed up again”. I cut 3 or 4 feet into the board before I realized the mistake, so I went back and cut only 8 inches off, and put screws on both sides of the partial saw cut.
• There is no room to walk around one end of my table. I hope that doesn’t cause any problems.

Anyway, more about the kit I ordered. After exchanging a few emails with somebody at Pygmy Boats, I ordered the Arctic Tern Hi Volume. I don’t really need a high volume boat because I’m not carrying overnight gear, but the deck is an inch higher and I figured it would help get my size 11+ feet in. The boat is pretty similar to my existing Skerry RMX in size, and it has a hard chine. I’ve already started experimenting with leaned turns, so I’m looking forward to doing that with a hard chine boat. I did not opt for the Silver Tip epoxy, because I am not clear that the hundred dollars extra would really be worth it. I also didn’t opt for overnight shipping, since it would add another $300 to the cost. I did buy the optional bulkhead and hatch kit - I had considered skipping those and just buying some inflatable floatation bags for the bow and stern, again because I don’t use it for overnight travel, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to have them. I also went for the foot brace studs that you cement to the inside, instead of the standard ones that you drill through the sides. And considering how I like the built in thigh braces on my Skerry, I also ordered the “key hole” braces for this one. For some strange reason, I only ordered one hand toggle. I’ll have to email them to see if they’ll throw in a second one.

I can’t wait for the kit to arrive!

Another day of interesting discoveries:

• Our drill SUCKs. It’s a not incredibly old Skil 4.1 Amp corded drill, and it doesn’t have enough power consistently to drill 3 inches into the end of a 2×4. It also has a standard old chuck instead of one of those new quick ones - I must have spend 80% of my time switching between drill bit and nut driver bit.
• In spite of having a degree in structural engineering, I forgot that a parallelepiped with non-rigid joints needs cross bracing or it will collapse. I guess I’ll go get some strapping or something tomorrow.
• This is probably going to end up being a fair weather project. After finishing the two parallelepiped, I put the particle board sheet on one (and attempted to put on the second one, but that one collapsed), and there is almost no room to move around the garage. I might rip a foot off the edge of the sheets to give me some room.

Anyway, the work surface is nearly done, and I can probably safely go ahead and order the kit.

In spite of the existence of my cedar strip canoe, which still looks pretty good 25 years after I built it, I’m not good with my hands. But for some reason, I got it into my head that I really want to build a Pygmy Boats kayak kit.
Continue reading ‘Construction project, Day 1’ »

The Democratic Party has had a rarity, two highly qualified and good candidates this time, and consequently it’s taking a bit of time to decide which of them should be our candidate. People have invested time and money and their personal feelings on one or the other of the two candidates. But if you get peeved that your candidate didn’t win and sit out the election in protest, vote for a third party candidate, or even worse, vote for McCain, you’re condemning the country to at least 4 more years of the same rampant incompetence, cronyism, pandering to the crazy Christian Right, preemptive wars against the wrong enemies, and hatred of anybody different from them as we had under Bush. Only as well as all that, McCain has a violent temper and is borderline senile. And don’t forget, some of the remaining left-leaning Supreme Court judges are getting up there in years. How safe do you think our civil liberties would be if we had another Rhenquist or Alito on the bench?

The media has decided that McCain is a tough maverick and a renegade. But the truth is, he is a Bush neocon through and through, and toes the party line. Take
The Bush-McCain Challenge and see.

I’ve seen dozens if not hundreds of articles stating the completely obvious: If you make people change their passwords every 90 days, put in place complexity rules and checks to stop them reusing passwords, and make them change the password on 4 different systems, the end result will be that people will need to write down their passwords somewhere near their computer. So why hasn’t the company I work at gotten that message yet?

It’s bad enough that I have to use the password recovery feature on 2 of those systems because it’s evidently not the one I wrote down, but the wonderful little system I use for generating passwords I can remember doesn’t work if I have to keep changing it.

I went out to the dealer today to put a deposit on a Prius. Since nobody is negotiating prices, I figured there was no reason not to just go to the closest dealership.
Continue reading ‘Taking the Prius plunge’ »

I let both my instrument currency and my club annual ride expire in the last little while, so I had to do that. I contacted my favourite CFI, Jim Hood, and he agreed that we could get both requirements satisfied with one IPC.
Continue reading ‘Current and legal again’ »

Blogging Against Disablism Day 2008

Frankly, I don’t even know if I count as “disabled”. Certainly, the people who see me walking around in public don’t see me as disabled. They probably see me as fat and lazy, because I seek out a chair and sit down as soon as I can, or take the elevator even for just one floor, or even sometimes ask for one of the wheel chairs they keep locked up near the customer service desk. You see, what I have isn’t totally disabling, only inconveniencing.

I have knee pain. The pain is constant, but it increases when I do things (sitting with my knees bent under my chair is the worst, standing is the second worst, walking actually isn’t as bad as standing, although walking slower than my natural pace is pretty bad). I’ve had it for 2/3rds of my life now, and it gets worse with every passing year. It used to just be a dull ache, with very rare intense stabbing pains. The first time I got the stabbing pain I cried out and had to sit down for several minutes while I tried to figure out how I was going to get to my car, and at first I probably only got it about once a year or so. Recently the frequency of the stabbing pains has increased to about once a week. Every year I think “I can take this, but if it gets any worse I won’t be able to stand it”, and every year it gets worse, and I somehow manage to stand it. There are times when I think “I hope I die young, because after 30 years of ever increasing pain I’m not sure I can stand another 30 years of this.” It already nearly killed me once, because with the constant background of pain I mistook a burst appendix for trapped gas - by the time I bothered to see a doctor, I had gangrene in a couple of feet of intestine.

It constrains my life, and in some ways it defines it. Over the years, I’ve given up cross country skiing, orienteering, backpacking, canoe tripping, mountain biking, and probably other things I’ve forgotten, all because of the pain. I’ve lately taken up kayaking to try to recover some of that feeling of freedom, but I’ve discovered that my elbow joints are just as much traitors to me as my knees - the pain in them is increasing gradually and I wonder how many years I’m going to get out of them before I have to give up that as well.

The thing about pain is that you can make a conscious choice to accept it if there is something you absolutely must do, or even if there is something that you want to do so much that the resulting escalation of pain is worth it. That’s why I don’t consider myself disabled, but merely inconvenienced. Pain is like a bank account - I can choose to “spend” it, or I can try to conserve it. That’s why you’ll see me walking around Oshkosh, or why I was able to rough-house and play with my kids when they were younger. I “spent” that pain, and while I’m still making the payments now, it was worth it. But that’s why I’ll grab a wheel chair or find a bench to sit on at the mall - if I don’t spend it now, I’ll have that much more to spend on something worthwhile.

Sometimes I take a cane when I go places. It doesn’t help a lot, but it does seem to change people’s attitudes when I’m seeking out some place to sit down. Like I said, I need to keep my knees straight when I’m sitting. If I don’t have my cane, people trip over my legs and glare at me for daring to intrude on their space, but if they trip over my cane, they apologize.

My experiences in the wheel chair have been enlightening. I’ve had store clerks talking to my wife as if I were unable to make my own decisions, or ignore me and serve customers who were standing behind me. But the difference between me and someone who is truly disabled is that if I choose to, I can stand up and end the discrimination. I never forget the people who can’t.