"I'll take pot pouri for $100."
01:18 Thursday, 31 July 2014
Words: 1168
So this is going to be one of those miscellaneous, uncategorized posts that is more the result of a vague wish to just write something than any compelling urge to voice my opinion. Maybe there’ll be a nucleus of a later post here and there, we’ll see.
Anyway, July is drawing to a close. Not a bad month, just kind of sad because of Dad’s passing. I miss him.
Had a great weekend, last weekend. Went to St. Petersburg Florida with my girlfriend. (I’m 57, you’d think we’d have a better term for these informal relationships by now. "Girlfriend" is at least more concise than "this woman I’m dating.") She was competing in a the Top Gun sprint triathlon at Fort De Soto park on Saturday. I was transportation, logistics, photographer and cheering section.
We stayed at a small resort called Pasa Tiempo. It’s very nice and relatively reasonable. I’d stay there again without a second thought. Very quiet, on the water. Kind of out of the way, not exactly in the ritziest part of town, but very comfortable.
I drove, so I got the chance to use my roof rack, and bike mount. Before I retired, I made sure to buy the cross-bars for my car, and a bike carrier. My initial thought was I’d take a bike down to Key West sometime. Well, that hasn’t happened yet. But this seemed like a good opportunity to put that investment to use. I bought the bars on E-bay. They’re Mitsubishi bars OEM’ed by Thule. They were supposed to come with locks, but the box was in some disrepair when it arrived and the finger-pointing between the vendor and Thule sort of precluded a remedy. My guess is the vendor broke the locks out separately and sold them. Might explain why the bars were less than half the retail price. But, they worked, so I’m not too unhappy.
The bike mount is a Yakima Raptor. I’d put the bars on the car before and later removed them, so I knew how that worked. I’d never used the bike mount before. It was the typical type of chaos one experiences assembling bikes or large toys on Christmas Eve. Poor instructions, a missing part, with the addition of performing the work in the near-sauna conditions of a July morning in Florida. I had to order special rack mounts because my cross bars are larger than the mounts included in the kit. They come two to a package, and fortunately I only needed three because they omitted a key part for one of the mounts. Should have done this when I received it a year ago, I know.
Anyway, everything eventually went together and I got the bike secured to the roof and off we went right on schedule.
It was about a four and a half hour drive to St. Pete from Ponte Vedra, and we stopped for lunch, so we were on 75 in Tampa just before rush hour (luckily). We headed straight to the packet pick-up location, which was a very large, very interesting sporting goods store in Pinellas Park, Bill Jackson Shop for Adventure. I browsed the store while Mitzi checked in and bought some gear at the expo. It’s a pretty remarkable store with a lot of inventory in just about anything you can think of outdoors. I picked up a package of four Thule locks for the roof rack for $60.00, because we were going to lock Mitzi’s bike to the roof rack overnight. Had I not noticed that they were available there, I’d have just hoped that potential bike thieves didn’t know you can just pull the cross bar ends out and uncrank them to remove them from the rails. But I slept better for that $60.00.
Made it to Pasa Tiempo shortly before five when the office closes. Got the tour and a glass of champagne (er, sparkling wine), some ice for the race, recommendations for dinner and we were all set.
Mitzi wanted to be at the race site by 5:30 a.m. so she could get her bike set up and scout out the location, so it was an early turn-in after some great grouper at Dockside Dave’s.
Up at 4:30, on the road at 5:00. Easy to find, just follow all the cars with bikes on them! Got a great parking spot and everything was going gangbusters until I climbed up to get the bike down. The Raptor uses a clamp that holds the bike vertically in place, and there are two straps that go through the wheels. I went to remove the straps first, because once the clamp is released, the bike is coming down whether you’re ready or not. The straps are secured in a ratchet-and-pawl affair, and I pressed the big red tab that’s supposed to release the pawl and… nothing.
Naturally.
Press again. Nothing. Hmm…. I brought the instructions with me, so I pull those out of the back of the car to see if I was missing something, and I notice in big bold letters the warning: DO NOT OVER TIGHTEN STRAPS!
Uh-oh.
Mitzi’s unimpressed. Says she’s going to go find a bathroom.
I climb back up and I’m examining this thing by the light of my iPhone flash. I’ve got my Swiss Army knife out, trying to see if I can trip this pawl with the screwdriver blade. It’s not working.
Out of frustration, I grab the locking mechanism to try and wiggle it to see if I can get any slack at all and * POP! * the pawl releases and the the strap slips out as easy as you please.
Oh.
You have to press the tab HARD!
The other strap was a piece of cake.
Clamp comes down, I successfully climb down from the cat litter box I brought as a stool with the bike in hand and nothing damaged. Go me!
Mitzi shows up and says, "I knew you’d get it down." Yeah. Sure she did.
The race went well, apart from Mitzi’s bike-run transition. She hadn’t identified where to leave her bike on that part of the race because it was different from where she placed it at the beginning. It probably cost her more than two minutes. The morning was fairly cloudy, which was a blessing as the sun was very intense when it came out toward the latter part of the race during the run.
All-in-all, it was a very well organized affair. Wasn’t as much fun post-race, as they were required to break everything down and clear the parking lot for regular visitors. We didn’t stay long. On our way out, we stopped at Fort De Soto. More like a revetment than what I would call a "fort." Apparently we were worried about an attack on Tampa Bay from Spain at the turn of the last century. Kind of interesting, but not terribly.
Bitter Taste
17:14 Monday, 31 July 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 73.58°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 93% Wind: 1.99mph
Words: 198
I'm not of fan of Cory Doctorow's work. I've never met the guy, maybe he's a warm and wonderful human being. But whenever I've actually made an effort to read his work, as I did today, he comes off as deliberately, proudly and oh-so-self-satisfiedly abrasive. It's like someone deliberately put sand in what might otherwise be a nice sandwich they made for you. It's not just that he's angry, I can read angry writing and relate to it. It's the posing, that accompanies it. It's exhausting.
Some people seem to enjoy that sort of thing. I suppose my "I'm too old" post is abrasive, but I'd like to believe it's not my default setting. And I'm too old to put up with that schtick.
Whatever. I don't like Cory Doctorow's writing. I don't read Cory Doctorow's writing. Everybody's happy.
Anyway, with all that by way of preamble and warning, I did read this post, painful and unenjoyable though it was; and I think it's worth pointing to because it captures something important, albeit wrapped in that patented Doctorow contempt that saturates the whole damn thing.
It came to my attention by way of Ian Betteridge.
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17:35 Monday, 31 July 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 73.54°F Pressure: 1010hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 1.99mph
Words: 646
This post is prompted by something Jack Baty posted, and so is kind of directed toward him, but is more about blogging in general. In his post, Jack mentions that his posts are more widely and automatically distributed by way of RSS and his micro.blog account. And his post suggests that this wider dissemination has made him somewhat self-conscious about his writing. His reaction is to default to not "syndicating" his content via RSS ("really simple syndication").
The marmot is similarly re-distributed by way of micro.blog, to my Mastodon account.
I'm ambivalent about Mastodon, but I'm willing to participate, largely as a guest of the kind and generous Rob Fahrni, who runs a small instance at curmudgeon.cafe.
I've been blogging a long time. I'm pretty sure Jack's been blogging nearly as long. Maybe longer? Writing online is a public act. I am self-conscious as I do it, and from time to time it can be uncomfortable. Writing in an offline tool like Tinderbox makes "publishing" a more deliberate process. (Offline in the sense that my posts aren't as "live" as they might be if I were writing in the browser. Tinderbox can be as connected to the web as you want it to be. See here.)
In my now former blog, Groundhog Day, which still exists as a large Tinderbox document here in marmot central, I had a container called "The cooler." I'd start writing an angry post and think twice about it and park it in the cooler to think about it before I posted it. There's a lot of stuff in "the cooler," much of it unfinished. I'm inclined to believe it's no great loss to the world that it never felt the delicate touch of Google's robot crawlers.
In the marmot, one of the Displayed Attributes ("Properties," Obsidian, take note.) in each post is a boolean checkmark HTMLDontExport. After writing a post, I can preview how it will appear online. Reading it in Preview helps in editing. Spelling errors or awkward construction that were missed in the main editing view become more apparent. If I'm confident I'm not going to utterly embarrass myself, I then (un)-tick the HTMLDontPublish check box and export the marmot. Only thing left to do at that point is sync the folder to the server, which I haven't automated yet.
So posting is a fairly deliberate act, with a fair amount of "friction" that allows me to kind of check my inclination to be glib or snarky. It sometimes doesn't work, but trust me, you don't see the worst of my online self. That guy was mostly on Facebook and Twitter, and I didn't care for him much either.
But the point of having a blog is to share those thoughts, not hide them. And publicly sharing thoughts and ideas can be a fraught thing. Ego is involved, vulnerability, our old friends Dunning and Krueger, the chance to be publicly foolish or wrong. I mean, if you're not a little self-conscious, you're probably doing it wrong.
So having gone to the trouble of buying a domain name, paying for hosting, writing a post and publishing it, yeah, put it out there!
RSS is a superpower. Back in the early days, blogrolls were kind of two things. One was to show who you read and thought was worth sharing. The other was a convenient list of bookmarks you could visit, even if you were away from your own browser, to see if they'd posted anything new. With RSS, that "discovery" portion is centralized and simplified for you.
But RSS is also an enabling technology, a glue-layer or wedge that other services, like micro.blog and Mastodon can leverage, so why not take advantage of it?
And besides, nobody cares about your blog.
Embrace the RSS. Cast your posts to the wind!
✍️ Reply by email!Worth a read
19:37 Monday, 31 July 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 73.85°F Pressure: 1011hPa Humidity: 93% Wind: 1.01mph
Words: 18
Maybe it's just because I'm getting old, but I find John P. Weiss is always worth a read.
✍️ Reply by email!Easier Programming
19:46 Monday, 31 July 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 73.85°F Pressure: 1011hPa Humidity: 93% Wind: 1.01mph
Words: 98
This is an untitled post. It does have a title in Tinderbox, but it includes an exclamation point, which tells the export template not to include the title in both the web page export and the rss feed export. The result is that it looks like an ordinary "toot" to Mastodon. For images, it includes the photo. If I title the post, it looks like a blog post and doesn't include any images. All of which is just some meta-discussion as I link to this piece on "easier programming," which I found interesting.
Because it mentions BASIC.
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Current Wx: Temp: 74.16°F Pressure: 1011hPa Humidity: 93% Wind: 4.41mphWords: 9
Solid overcast this morning. No birds. Here's yesterday's paper.
✍️ Reply by emailStickless
06:50 Wednesday, 31 July 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 76.37°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 90% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 140
"Is this true?"
"Yes, your honor. This man has no sticks."
This morning's obscure cultural reference paraphrase is sponsored by laziness and indolence, attorneys at law.
Alarm went off at 0500, but I didn't feel like getting up. Finally rolled out a little before 0530. Realized I'd be encountering people (the horror), decided to skip the sticks. I even considered taking the morning off, but managed to convince myself to do something.
Anyway, confirmation that the sticks are useful and effective for better pace and more caloric expenditure and cardiovascular benefit. I wasn't exactly strolling, but 17'57" pace, a minute slower than with the sticks. Average heart rate of 113 bpm, vs 135 bmp with the sticks. 402 calories expended, vs 493 calories expended poling.
Lesson here is to just get out of bed when the alarm goes off.
✍️ Reply by emailLast Night's Sky 7-30-25
Current Wx: Temp: 60.37°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 5.35mphWords: 1000
Started a post yesterday called, "I'm getting too old for this..." But I didn't get around to finishing it.
After Tuesday's post, we went down to the storage unit and got started moving stuff from the pod. Mitzi had to take the RAV4 in for its state inspection, so I finished it. I was done by noon, but I wasn't being especially thoughtful about where I was putting things.
When we first got to the pod, the first things we took out were going into the truck. My recliner and a piece of furniture I can't describe. It's some kind of cabinet, maybe, a nice Ethan Allen piece with no doors, two shelves, a drawer and a wood-like formica top. I'd been using it in my office and planned to give it away, but Mitzi thought we could use it in New York. We also loaded two nightstands into the RAV4. We had planned to sell the entire bedroom set in Florida, but I thought we could use the drawers in the nightstands for storage space. We had been using two glass-topped tables.
So we met up back home and unloaded everything from the RAV4 and the truck and got it set up in the house. By 1400, I was done. And by "done," I mean, I couldn't do anymore. My back was jacked up, kind of spasming and aching. So I took a shower and tested the recliner. Test sat, but that was still about it for the day.
Yesterday we got our new refrigerator. Mitzi offered the old one to the guy we bought the house from, and he said he'd take it because he's building a house for a woman who needed one, and is up against a bad break. She drilled one well for $10K and came up dry. So now she's got to drill another well, and hope she gets water this time. Apparently that's a thing in that particular region near the lake, and also something she was at least aware might be a possibility. So a free refrigerator is probably welcome, albeit one that is about 13 years old.
After he got the old fridge out, the delivery company showed up with the new one. We didn't look too carefully at the box after they took it off the truck, or we'd have noticed the hole in it. We also didn't notice the dent in the right door. It had been covered by some paper taped to the fridge.
It wouldn't have mattered anyway, since the old fridge was gone and we needed a fridge. But we got it from Costco and they're going to exchange it for us. It's a side-by-side LG, nothing super fancy, though it does have wifi and an ice maker. I need to run a water line from the sink to the fridge now, but it's not urgent until we get the new one.
The new fridge is awesome in that it's virtually silent compared to the old one. And I won't bump my head after reaching down to the back of the bottom shelf for whatever we need that's inevitably hidden back there.
After all that excitement, Mitzi went to Ithaca to run some errands. She stopped by the storage unit to collect some things and mentioned to me that the two glass tables which had formerly been nightstands were blocked in by boxes (Anticipating bringing the nightstands up, we took the glass tables down and put them into storage on Monday before the pod was delivered.) She'd also mentioned that we needed to re-arrange the garage, because she felt like there were too many things near the back wall when she parked the RAV.
So I went out into the garage and grabbed a few things that could go into storage, and rearranged it so the back wall is clear. Then it was back to the storage unit, but I brought along a Makita battery-powered fan. It was early enough in the day that the sun wasn't shining into the unit yet, but it was still warm and I was going to be lifting some heavy boxes.
Spent a little more than an hour trying to arrange things into some kind of orderly configuration. I consolidated a few boxes so we were able to get rid of those. When I was done, the glass tables were accessible for photos and sale. I wasn't as wiped out as I'd been the day before, but it still felt like a significant effort.
Whenever we get the new house built, we'll probably hire a couple of guys and a truck to empty the storage unit and bring it all up to the new house. I'll probably be 70 by then, and while I hope to be in somewhat better shape then than I am now, it's not the kind of effort I want to make.
But the little house is coming along. Mitzi stopped by Home Goods and bought some decorative boxes to put her stationery items and other things into to put on the shelves in the Ethan Allen piece. She's happy with the nightstands, the new fridge and that Ethan Allen thing. The new fridge is wider than the old one, so we've lost a convenient place for the wastebasket we'd been using to store recyclables until we took them to the garage. That's a challenge that remains to be solved.
She's got most of her "good" pots and pans, and is excited by that. We could use some more cabinet space, but this is a useful exercise in trying to reduce the amount of "stuff" we keep around, which may help us save some money on the new house by observing similar constraints. I have a feeling we're not going to be able to afford everything we'd want to have, so we're going to figure out what we must have.
Well, that's enough about all that.
The beat goes on.
✍️ Reply by emailAfter the Rain
Current Wx: Temp: 69.64°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 80% Wind: 2.93mphWords: 197
We've been stymied by wet weather through most of the week. We'd hoped to pour the slab on Thursday, but the rain pushed it to today. The weather today is beautiful.
We got the radiant floor tubing installed this morning. The whole Parallels, Windows 11, LoopCAD exercise was a waste of money. I ended up doing kind of a SWAG on the layout. The great room in the basement has the densest tube placement because it will have the highest heat loss through the French doors and the window. The studio/guest room on the other side has the second-highest density because it's smaller and we've decided to put a small fan coil unit in there for cooling. Any guests should be able to dial-in their comfort pretty closely.
We got three runs into the basement bathroom, which should keep that floor fairly comfortable. The rest of the basement has very low heat loss so spacing is wider. We used three 300-foot rolls of PEX tubing.
Rebar has to go down and we should begin pouring a couple of hours from now.
(Update: No rebar. Mix has fiber in it.)
The beat goes on...
✍️ Reply by emailRent to Own
10:36 Friday, 31 July 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 74.66°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 73% Wind: 4.41mph
Words: 318
I'm going to offer an opinion about something that I probably don't really care about, Apple's new "Apple Upgrade" program.
Riccardo Mori has an opinion, one that I'm inclined to agree with on an emotional level. I've even complained about not "owning" things very recently, especially "intellectual property" products.. We "license" them, and those licenses are apparently revocable on a whim.
But I also believe "ownership" is an illusion. At best, it is an abstraction, an artifact of our economic system, and an unexamined belief in our culture.
I'm beginning to believe that "ownership" should attach to the producer, and that they should retain responsibility for the product throughout its lifetime, including its disposal.
I'm not sure how that would work for property like houses. Perhaps those should be "real" property, with title and responsibility. But consumer goods, like the electronic crap we buy to entertain ourselves, should remain the responsibility of the manufacturer. When you "buy" it, perhaps it should have a term, a defined period of sole possession and use, after which you return it to the manufacturer who is responsible for its ultimate disposition.
This would be horrible for the "retro" community, or perhaps a whole new business model for manufacturers. Sit on a returned product for 20 years, and then offer another term to oldsters pining to relive the days of their youth.
But this open-cycle of manufacture, use and unregulated disposal as "trash" is unsustainable.
I think we need to regulate industry to close the loop on consumer goods, and make every transaction something like this.
Apple's "rent-to-own" program isn't that, but it begins to shape the market.
I'm not confident we have the political will and legislative integrity to enact a genuinely effective system. But the current system is staggering toward collapse because it's unsustainable and to a large degree responsible for many of the challenges we face today.
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