Fishing For Fords

Today was supposed to be a fairly normal day. Go shovel out the church, plow the Neighbors pond before lunch, eat lunch, and spend the rest of the afternoon working on odds and ends of this and that and organization, maybe help Dad work on the Buick. Unfortunately, I didn't get past the 'plowing the Neighbors pond' part.

The fun part: I get to drive a 1950-something Ford 9N. (Update: it's actually late '30s.) The more-fun part: it's got a 6-volt electrical system and took me 45 minutes to get it started. The slightly-odd-but-still-fun part: it's got a landscaping plow on the three point hitch, so we plow in reverse. The make-my-day-fun-part: The ice on one side wasn't as thick as we thought, so we get an afternoon course in Tractor Fishing 101.

After a bit of a 'kersploosh' and a startled reflexiv motion that kept the driver dry, the tractor settled (still running) with it's rear axle in four feet of water about six feet from shore, front end still on the ice and pointing towards the middle of the pond. Since it was so close to the bank, the original idea was to loop a rope around the blade and haul the tractor out with the Suburban. Of course, that'll dunk the (so far) dry engine and electrical system in. Hmm. Go home for lunch, Mrs. Neighbor has to take kids to Ballet. Dad wants to hear the whole story and immediately starts figuring. We'll see what we can dig up for useful stuff over at Mr. Skip's shop - the Buick is there anyway, waiting for work. Collect some useful planks, chains, etc. Mr. Skip shows up and we, not being fools, inquire of advice. "Let's go take a look."

If there's anyone to have around when you're lifting, towing, hauling, or otherwise moving anything big, it's Mr. Skip. Grow up on Farm equipment (they guy was backing haywagons at seven - you try that) and spend a few years in the house-moving business, and you have what you call expertise. We end up with a trailer load of planks, cables, chains, miscellaneous ice cutting tools, and the big Hough Payloader. All for the sake of Ford 9N. It got her out, though, and six hours later she sits in the barn with a shiney coat of greasy ice and pond weed and a fully drained engine and rear end, awaiting the kind services of somebody. We didn't manage to manage to get her out without dunking her nose, unfortunately. (To quote the neighbor, who saw her when she was nought but a steering wheel and the top two inches of hood, 'That doesn't quite look like where she's supposed to be.')

A short word to the wise: Don't sink tractors in ponds. It's a pain.

The Joys of Technology

I'm working on creating the most complicated desktop computer setup possible. Start with four computers. Add a KVM to switch so I only need one keyboard, monitor, and mouse. Now add a second head to the main desktop, so I have a 15" monitor connected through the KVM and a 19" that isn't. Got that all right?

But what if I'm using my Windows box on the KVM head and want to access something on the main Linux desktop's big monitor? I have tried, quite a number of times (unsucessfully), to move the mouse off the KVM screen over to other monitor like I can on the dual head rig. And then when I switch to it I can't see what's on the Windows machine. Conundrum.

Enter Synergy, which acts like a sort of network based KVM. One computer is the server, it has the keyboard and mouse, and you can move to any of the client's monitors. (So it's really only a KM switch.) Ah Hah! If we set up the Windows box as the server and the Linux desktop as a client, presto! We can then access both the Windows and Linux machines at the same time, but fortunately only when the KVM is pointing to the Windows box. Just think how confusing it would be to acess the screen of a computer you can't see...

Reading In The New Year

So what else is New Year's good for? Reading, of course! What better way to spend the hours waiting for the ball to drop (in a completely literal sense, devoid of metaphore) than with some whimsical creation of Roald Dahl? Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator happened to be the cause of my antisocial descent. Having finally read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (due to the great wisdom of library-going siblings) I figured I could do no wrong to continue in the trend. I am now trying to figure out how my childhood could possibly have been complete without Our Hero, Charlie Bucket. Next up, James and the Giant Peach.

Also on the docket for Holiday Break:

The Design of Everyday Things (Donald Norman)

Almost done, actually. Get a good book for your Birthday, and BOOM! The nasty little School monster steals away all your precious reading time. Very interesting, if slow reading at times. It feels like he's defining and solidifing things I think I should have known but hadn't the time to think through properly yet. It makes sense. And, as a geeky type, I find myself on both sides of the page at times; alternately wondering how someone could possibly fail to understand the operation of something as simple as that and what sort of bonehead thinks up an interface I have to spend days figuring out how to use. (Sorry, concrete examples escape me at the moment.)

The Princess Bride (William Goldman)

Yes, I've seen the movie, and yes, it was good. I have, however, too much experience with book/movie relationships and seek the whole of the story, for better or for worse.

1001 Dumbest Things Ever Said (Edited, etc. by Steven Price)

I haven't read it all yet (having just aquired it for Christmas) so the Jury is still officially out, but this would be my nomination for the Misstitled Book Of The Year Award. While a lot of the quotes really are dumb, many are just malapropisms, slips of the toungue, or the curiously quaint interpretations of knowledge characteristic of those under seven years of age. Sure, they may be flat out wrong, but that doesn't make them dumb. Or, for example, the much quoted assertions of the late Yogi Berra. I don't have a clue what he was thinking when he uttered some of his most memorable sentiments, but I find them quite amusing. He seemed to have a knack for stating grains of truth with such logical impossibility that, while the thought is true, the statement obviously isn't.

For example - "A nickel isn't worth a dime today." Factually speaking, a nickel has never been worth the same as a dime and never will be. The thought, however - that a nickel isn't worth as much as it used to be - is still there. There's nothing to feed the mind like warping an old cliche into a new context. It's clever phrasing, intentional or not, and actuall quite logical construction considering the cliche aspect. Some people call them idiots; songwriters make their living off things like "It's like deja vu all over again." Illustrating the concept (deja vu) you are utilizing to make your point with your sentence structure does not really strike me as the hobby of dimwits. It's recursive nature does put a slight warp on the cranial process, but it gets the point across. It's the sort of thing I would say on purpose. But then, maybe I'm a dumb critic.

It's A Super-Duper New Year

So far, anyhow, but that's always the way it goes. Yes sirree, it's a New Year, folks! And you know what that means.........A neeeeeeeeew You! All it takes is a few little resolutions, kids, and you could have a better life! Call today to recieve your free informational packet!

Ok, maybe that's a little...commercially pessimistic. But while I don't see much depth in the whole new beginnings thing that often fizzles this time of year, it is a good time to recoup between semesters, get reaquainted with family you've mostly just seen in passing since the semester started, do some things you didn't have time to this semester, and, uh, relax.

It's not that I dislike new beginnings and bettering yourself for fun and profit. Personally, however, I find it works better to do that sort of thing the whole year instead of chucking a nicely worded dart at the Corkboard Of Despond once a year. Not that I would know (I don't play darts), but to be good at darts I think it takes practise. And when you have finished mulling over that profound wisdom, you may move on to greater things.

Merry Christmas!

Why I'm up at this hour working on reinstalling and restoring 1.9 gig of files to a friends laptop I'm not really sure. Particularly since I have to be up tomorrow for usual Christmas morning and church, too. It's the spirit of Christmas, I guess.

And last night, of course, I was up till 3:00 (am) getting schroeder fully upgraded. He's been needing a good apt-get dist-upgrade for a while, not having had the chance since early May. But, of course, I had to pick a slow day for RoadRunner(tm) and had to do other stuff all afternoon, so the morning was spent watching him download (1.5 gig of packages to DL - at 30-80kB/s) and the late evening and wee hours babysitting the rest of the process. Fun fun fun.

Aside from that, however, this week has been remarkably relaxing and productive. Cleaned out my pack and filed (most of) my junk from this semester, hacked up an A/V connector and tested my $15 Nintendo 64 (it works! Goodwill rocks), got my Flickr thing going, spent a bunch of time getting acquainted with LibraryThing, fixed the powersupply for my Boss multieffects pedal (broken wire), reassembled a friend's Digitech RP-2000 and fixed the powersupply for that (two broken wires), whacked together a dual head linux config for my cousin, updated schroeder, completely dissasembled the old iMac (dead analog board, but PS & mobo still fine - build a linux firewall/router box, I think), slept in a lot, and did a whole lot of research on website pre-processing tools. I think I'm going with tt2site for now, I just have to figure it all out and migrate NateNet over. More fun for the Holidays. No school until January 17th, though, so plenty of time to work on Things In General(tm), read and see if I can help Dad get more of the basement organized. I need more boxes to put stuff in...

After the Holidays. I've got a solid week of goofing off to do with family, the other stuff can wait until post-New Years.

Killing Father Time

I'm learning (or at least realizing) just how time-driven our society/my life is, and I hate it.

In the three weeks I spent at Tauernhof's Upward Bound program this past summer, we weren't allowed watches while we were out on tour. It was awesome. Our leaders took care of waking us up and keeping us on schedule. We got up when someone yelled "Rise and shine! Brekky in half an hour!", we didn't know how many hours of sleep we got and didn't worry about it. Minutes were no longer important. Everything was somewhat flexible.

Now in contrast, these last two weeks of school would be fairly normal except that my church's annual Dessert Theatre production is next week - so, added on to the normal routine, I have to finish the lighting before this weekend and we have four performances next week. The last two weeks of school. Since my school schedule is pretty much a fourty-hour week, I usually do a bunch of homework on weekends. Now I have setup, dress rehearsals, and performances on weekends, on top of the usual midweek activites that take up a couple evenings.

I recalled this summer last week while putting together a robot during Lab - I happen to enjoy working on stuff like that and suddenly realized that I had been happily working on Olaf for an hour and a half (say that five times fast), oblivious to the rest of the world. That's when I realized I don't like time. Those three weeks with I spent mostly time independent and it was the proverbial breath of fresh air. (And I'm sure being in the Austrian Alps didn't have anything at all to do with it. ;) Regardless of where I am, I don't want to have to care so much about scheduling and time management and making sure I have enough time to do all my homework for PreCal. (And that's the kicker - I'm slightly behind and it's not because I don't understand the math. It just takes so much time to crank through all the problems.)

This is why I hate time: it waits for no-one, we can't kill it, all we can do is waste it (to borrow the cliches). But at the same time if we try to pack as much as possible into our minutes, we end up wasting ourselves instead. Which is really better?

Going for the Polls

We return for a special broadcast on the weirdness of CNN. On the front page today is a poll with the blaring healine: Most doubt Bush has plan for Iraq victory.

Initial reaction: then what in tarnation is this?

After reading the actual poll article, we find some interesting things.

(CNN) -- As President Bush launched a new effort Wednesday to gain public support for the Iraq war, a new poll found most Americans do not believe he has a plan that will achieve victory.

But the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Wednesday night also found nearly six in 10 Americans said U.S. troops should not be withdrawn from Iraq until certain goals are achieved.

Just 35 percent wanted to set a specific timetable for their exit, as some critics of the war have suggested.

White House officials unveiled a 35-page plan Wednesday to achieve success in Iraq, and Bush used a speech at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, to tout what he said was progress in getting Iraqi security forces in place to protect their own country. (Full story link)

The poll conducted Wednesday does not directly reflect how Americans are reacting to Bush's speech, because only 10 percent of the 606 adult Americans polled had seen it live and two-thirds had not even heard or read news coverage about it.

(...)

Among poll respondents, 55 percent said they did not believe Bush has a plan that will achieve victory for the United States in Iraq; 41 percent thought he did.

Bold text mine. Now, we would like to point out that the percentage of people polled who think that Bush has a plan for vicory (41%) is higher than the percentage (33%, derived from the 2/3rds figure above) who have heard coverage of President Bush's speech Wednesday.

How can this be? Assuming that those who have not heard any news coverage (66%, the 2/3rds figure above) also have not heard of of the plan (released Wednesday), I personally would count those poll numbers to be out of date.