damn cool libraries

Places I wish I could teleport to just to see them. (the cost of the plane tickets is too much, just for the scenery)

[not] supporting the habit

You might recall that I have a problem with TV. Something I saw recently explains some of the more subconscious aspects of it, which make quite a bit of sense about how TV attracts ones attention.

I'm not going to go and dump the TV, since I don't think that's a solution, for a couple of reasons:
- It's more likely to just replace one habit with an other. The actual behavior is somewhat independent of the object. It's more of a tendency to overindulge than the indulgence itself.
- And I think that it is important to be aware of popular culture (i.e. what's on TV). I don't endorse, or agree with, or engage in, lots of aspects of pop culture, but being aware of it is important to being informed citizens. I don't watch American Idol, but I know what it is. I don't care for baseball, but it'd be better to avoid downtown Detroit traffic when the Tigers were playing World Series games instead of blundering into a traffic jam and wondering "hmm, I wonder what's going on downtown?"

reading the fine print

How often do you read the fine print on something you sign? Always, sometimes, never? Well, ever since the first time I rented a car, I've had this thing about fine print. When there's a lot of it, there's all the more reason to read it and understand my liability, not just give in to the clerk behind the counter who is impatient to get back to the episode of Maury they were watching.

A couple months ago when I was at the oral surgeon (just a consult for a dental cyst, but thank you for being concerned), one of the stack of forms I filled out included a privacy statement. And normally, you'd think that it's something that protects the patient, right? One of the statements in it was worded "... with certain exceptions, the patient's complete medical records will be made available to the patient upon request." Hunh? Why on earth wouldn't I be able to see my own medical records?

You'd be surprised at the insult and indignity it caused among the office staff when I asked about it:
me - "Hi, I was reading this form, and it has this statement in it, and I was wondering what those exceptions would be".
clerk - "Well, I'm not a lawyer." [sneering]
me - "Yeah, but you handed me the form. Do you know what the form is, or what it's for?"
clerk - "Of course I know what it's for it says right at the top"
me - "Yes, I saw that. I'm asking about this part right here."
clerk - "look, everyone just signs that, and it's required before we provide any medical care, so why don't you just sign it."
me - [I wasn't initially angry about this, but by this point, I was pretty pissed off] "I don't really care what other people do or don't sign. I'd want to known what kind of exception would make my own medical records unavailable to me. If you don't know, find someone in this office who does." (important note: this is a large multi-surgeon office, with at least 5 nurses behind the counter, and 15 people in the waiting room. Not a mom-and-pop shop. At least someone that works there should know what's on the form.)

So after a while, the office manager and I go in to a room to chat about the privacy agreement. Though my curiosity was only barely sated concerning the medical record exception, what was more interesting was that she told me that, in the 6 years she had been there, this was only the second time anyone had asked about that or anything else on that form. Everyone else just signs it.

That's my own story of the month in the real world, but next time you install software on your computer, try actually reading the EULA. See if clicking the "I Agree" button means that you allow Microsoft to audit the contents of your computer, looking for things they don't think you should have. Looking for entertaining/scary examples of other EULAs? Try here and here.

It was all going so well... until it went bad.

This evening, I really and truly screwed the pooch on my latest little project. Pissed about it, yes I am. Only at myself, but combination raging/angry and sullen/depressed, all at the same time.

I picked up a decent road bike frame (in my size) a while back for super-cheap ($50, I think). An old Trek 620, no fork, a chain-suck gouge in the drive side chain stay, but otherwise sound. Couldn't really decide for the longest time what to do with it. It had "rideable art project" written all over it, but I didn't have much for inspiration. Maybe I could make gargoyles or figurines and braze them to the frame? Some sort of other metal embellishment? Well, after stripping the old boring grey metallic paint off it,

months of it sitting around waiting for me to be inspired, I finally decided to get off my ass. Decided it would become a touring/commuting (maybe cyclocross?) cantilever-braked road bike, with various handlebar options in the future. I got out the torch, filled in the gouge with silver solder, bought some cantilever studs, made a jig and torched them on. Added some seat-stay embellishment too, and primed it.

Since my new favorite color is orange, the overall theme became orange with details in black...


Black lugs, black Surly Cross-Check fork. I'll rebuild my old road wheels at some point and ultimately they'll be black-spoked too. Chris King headset in orange (ok, "mango"), black stem, orange bar tape, black Paul Motolite brakes with orange-red Kool-Stops, the whole deal.

I had primed and base-coated the orange, spent hours masking off the lugs and details, painted them black, and was ready to take it out to the LBS to have the head tube faced and reamed and headset pressed. The last thing to do before that? Clearcoat. This is where it all went wrong. Little did I know that the clear coat would swell and bubble the base coat, leaving it crackled and raised. Shitfuck.

Maybe the auto plant paint experience should have taught me that you lay down the base, let the solvents flash off, then the clear right after. Maybe letting the base dry overnight was a mistake. Maybe I just picked two different paints that weren't compatible. Either way, I fucked myself.

From having finished and rideable project tomorrow, I'm back to step 2, and multiple days away from it being rideable. Sure, the metalwork is done, but the paint needs to start all over. I'm torn between doing it myself again, spending money on spray gear, or dropping the $180+ for the "professional" paint from Assenmachers, or going half-way and finding a local auto body shop to do a single color for around $100.

Ain't shit happening tonight now. I'm pissed at myself about the whole fucking thing. It's time to drown my sorrows in some beers and more beers.

Fear of walking (no, white lady, I am not going to steal your purse)

A long time ago in a little town in central Illinois, one of my roommates went off to a summer internship. His girlfriend Beth, needing a place to stay during the summer, moved into his room for the summer and became a substitute roomie for a couple months. Now Beth and I had always been friends, but we hadn't had a lot of deep conversations - so it came as a surprise one evening as we're talking and something she said stuck out at me "... and so I had to leave the library to get home because the sun was setting, and ..." It turns out that Beth (and apparently other young women on campus as well) wouldn't walk anywhere on campus alone after dark.

This really surprised me. Being from Chicagoland and used to Big Cities, I'm well and truly accustomed to walking wherever and whenever, and never really paying attention to whether it was day or night, swank neighborhood or sketchy neighborhood. I realized in that conversation that one difference might be that I'm male, 6 ft tall and not exactly a "target of opportunity" for a would-be mugger, and that might be most of the difference... but honestly - Champaign-Urbana isn't exactly Cabrini Green. (for that matter, Cabrini-Green isn't Cabrini-Green any more) But that was the first time I realized that friends and neighbors might not feel as safe and secure in life as I do. Ok, it was eye-opening 13 years ago to a college-age youngester.

But of late, I've noticed even more fear, and if you'll permit me a cycling segue: Riding along Fuller/Gallup Park path, one would assume that standard Rules of the Road should apply - walk/jog/ride on the right, pass on the left. But over and over again, there are these people, iPods firmly emplanted, blithely walking/jogging/riding slow on the left hand side of the path, ignorant of everyone around them and thinking that they are the only ones on the path. It's fairly unavoidable that I'm going to blast past them, but they can't hear me give them the "passing on your left" shout because of their iPods, and it's dodgy to blast by on the right (they might get freaked out, confused, jump the wrong way... and then we're a-crashin'). It was after a few times that I realized that this happens mostly in certain spots where there's vegetation on the right side of the trail, and I got to thinking "is this some sort of 'avoid the mugger who might jump out of the bushes' kind of thing?" Since all these walking-in-the-passing-lane people were women by themselves, that's the best explanation I can come up with. (either that or they're ignorant of their surroundings and selfish about sharing the road) And the thing that's remarkable about that is that it's Ann Arbor... in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. Sure, we have crime here, but it's not like it's Detroit or D.C. crime rates.

More about just walking: when I'm walking by myself, what do I have to do to to put other people at ease?

All I'm doing is walking. I'm not going to murder anyone. I'm a clean-shaven, clean-clothed, suburban cracker going for a walk, relaxed and non-twitchy. When I make eye-contact with fellow pedestrians, they get skittish. When I don't make eye-contact, they swing wide on the sidewalk as if I'm about to draw a six-shooter on them. And forget about smiling or saying hello to people in passing - that only gets the "ugh, that's creepy... what kind of sick weirdo is this guy that he doesn't have a cell phone jammed into his ear whenever he's walking down the street?" look in return. I'd like to think that maybe it's just my social skills that are the problem, but what I'm really worried about is: maybe people constantly fear the world that they live in. That would be a pretty shitty life, for sure.

if only there was something...

I'm camped out in the library figuring out the hoosies and the what-sits of the photo gallery application on the web space that I'm playing with, and it's getting on in the evening. Not late, but getting to the dinner hour. So I'm thinking... "hmm, Jerusalem Gardens is always a tasty meal, and less than a block away". I do the mental pre-standing-up-from-the-chair inventory of whether I have everything I want to take with me... and realize "damn, I didn't bring my book to read while waiting for food, I guess I'll just entertain myself otherwise".

It only took about 3 seconds for it to dawn on me that I was sitting in a frickin' library. Surrounded by books. What a moron.

Fear. (prologue)

Something that's been on my mind for some time... Fear. Not my fear of the unknown, or anxiety at high altitude... societal fear.

How people don't seem to make eye contact with each other as they walk down the street. How they don't even walk down the street any more. How a bloke going for a walk in park gets dirty looks from parents who have seen too many episodes of "FOX News at Eleven: To Catch A Predator". How there are all these ridiculous "gated" communities to give a perceived sense of security, when there is no exceptional need for security ("This is reflected in an increasing fear of crime that is unrelated to actual crime trends or locations") and, most amusingly, when they don't even have functional gates (photo coming soon...)

How everyone seems to be afraid of their neighbors and whether they are ex-cons or not. How there's a registry for this and a registry for that. How all of this only serves to isolate one from another in little huts at night while being captive to American Idol and 24-hour re-runs of Law and Order.

And it's not just how we isolate ourselves from each other but every other way we live in the world. How we drive around in metal boxes with the windows up tight and the air conditioning on with our mocha-chinos in one hand, raging at the injustices on talk radio as we road-rage our way back and forth between the office and the subdivision. How we're somehow able to give up on personal freedoms in exchange for a color-coded Threat Level. How we play both roles - as Predator and as Prey, aggressor and victim... depending on the mood of the mob at the moment. Afraid that gas prices will go up. Afraid that the interest rate on the home equity loan will go up. Afraid that Johnny will fall off his skateboard. Afraid that Suzy will get picked last for the cheerleading team. Afraid that the appraised value of the house will fall.

It seems that so much of what we do is controlled by fear. Trying to keep away the things we have been taught to fear instead of drawing near the things we cherish. 150 Suggestions for Giving a Shit About Your Neighborhood ... #54, #61, #85 and #118 seem like pretty easy ways to start.

Mead, I tell you, mead

At the local upscale liquor/deli/lotto, I stumbled on some mead from Redstone Meadery. Never having had it, I thought I'd give it a try. Very, very tasty and drinkable. I'm kind of feeling like a viking right now and wish I had a horn to drink it out of. Go and try some sometime soon... of course, assuming you don't hate honey (who hates honey?).

other people's good stuff...

Nifty art by Thomas Keeley.

the pink collar

My neighbor appears to have moved out, so there's people rustling around there, sounds like they're painting... which gets me to thinking again about the notion of Pink Collar jobs (mentioned briefly in this previous post). What are the odds that the painter is a woman? Painting isn't a job that requires testicles or any other male anatomy... right? Then why aren't there more female house painters? Is it because of oppression in industry? The painting industry? I thought the interior painting service industry was dominated by the labor of students and part-timers... surely there's no institutionalized sexism there, right? So I'm wondering - why aren't there more women with jobs as painters? My only workable theory is that of self-selection and de facto gender segregation - the same concept that results in the categorization of pink collar jobs.

I got in trouble recently at Book Club when the topic came up. It's hard to say something meaningful in 30 seconds about gender equality in mixed company when it's part of pre-discussion chit-chat. Especially when one can be perceived as a chauvinist pig for not automatically echoing PC dogma. How can we have real and meaningful conversations about equality of the genders (or sexes, whichever you prefer - looking for a definition I can I can finally agree with? Try here) when we're limited by a Least Offensive Vocabulary? Me, I say fuck it. Say what you mean and mean what you say, and let's get on with it.

sucks to be...

... any lettuce or spinach farmer/processor/packager living in any state OTHER than California. They must just be hating the Californians who let the E. Coli get into the spinach.

... hating them so much that the bags of leafy greens I saw in the grocery department had to have stickers hastily put on them "grown in Colorado" just so that they would sell.

Feelin' a little Retro...

I don't recall from where I heard of it, but there's an open source (and free) application out there called Audacity which is a really, really handy utility for audio track manipulation. Sure, there's GarageBand for Mac, but what is there for Windows without having to steal software or pay money? Audacity is the way to go.

And who would really care about crap like this? Well, for sad schmucks like me who have been taking a stroll down Memory Lane via their cassette or LP collections, how else do you get them onto your MP3 player and take them with you in the car or wherever? Take that stereo output, plug it into the Line In jack on the computer, adjust levels, start recording, and then hit Play. Sure... you have to chop them up later and convert them to MP3 using either Audacity and the LameLib MP3 encoder or iTunes (or whatever), but still... how else could I listen to those old tapes of Minor Threat, The Smiths, The Replacements, and my new/old/new again fav-o-rite home-town heroes: Naked Raygun. (which, as I check out the link... appears they're going to be in Chicago Nov 5th for a reunion tour! How cool is that! ...just gotta get me some tickets now.)

Just like smells trigger specific memory, music I haven't heard in a while reminds me of everything that happened the year that I first heard it. So lately I've been walkin' my way through high school and college, one cassette at a time. Welcome back... to 1991.

what happened to Bird Flu?

I was tidying up at home and came across a free bi-monthly rag that I picked up in Moab. The general topic for that issue is the looming fact that this nation's population will reach 300 Million this month. That's a lot of people, especially when you consider than the last 100M were added in the past 35 years. The organization formerly known as Zero Population Growth is now known as "Population Connection" and has some interesting/surprising facts here. True, the USA doesn't have as high a population growth as developing nations, and some western european nations actually have negative growth. But the situation... well, it ain't good, folks. Developing nations, some of them gripped by famine, civil war, insufficient infrastructure and lack of clean water, are just churning out children like crazy.

Some would say that this might all be because we haven't had any population-adjusting catastrophes (i.e. Mathusian Catastrophe) which otherwise would act normally on the population. So was bird flu the potential bubonic plague of the 21st Century? And what the hell happened to the Grand Pandemic? Could it be that some other Fear Politicking took the stage? Yeah, I guess so.

Examples of population excess closer to home: (ok, it's just animals, but anyway) transmission of bovine TB to wild deer, and how diseased Michigan's deer population is. Did you know? The population of does is more or less ballooning, for two reasons: 1) Many hunters want trophy racks (does ain't got antlers, don't ya know) and so few hunters even go after does, and 2) Suburban sprawl produces an excessive amount of "edge habitat" which is where deer live, and where residents like to bait deer to attract them to their backyard. That bait brings deer closer to each other than they normally are in the wild, increasing disease transmission. My suggestion to you? Either go out and get a doe permit and control the herd, or STOP BAITING DEER, you fucking morons [sheesh].

Michigan is a cold, cold place.

Yes, I know. Master Of The Obvious, that's me. But I was so not ready for it to be cold. Got back from Utah, well... about two weeks ago. From beautiful red sandstone against achingly blue skies



and stunning views,



to gridlock and billboard-mania, just in time for the weather to start sucking. Depressing grey days.

Shitfuck.

back to UT

... been off the grid for a while, literally. Backpacking in SW Utah, where just finding water is something to spend time thinking about, and cell phone coverage and internet access are nowhere close. That, and I've been using cash, so if the FBI was looking for me, they probably would've had a harder time than usual. Not that I'm hiding from anything. In a Freudian sense we probably all are, but let's not go there quite yet.

Anyway, I've found plenty of reasons to delay and delay my return, hang around in Utah (who'd've thunk it?) for a while longer. Damn but if it ain't pretty out here.

argh.

I was so in the groove, and now I'm not. Traveling along, making my way to pick up fellow backpacker Richard in Denver on Friday morning, then overnight at somewhere with fascinating and/or stunning terrain/views, to arrive in Escalante with plenty of time to spare. But stupid-assed me totally forgot the text message exchange where he's not coming in until Saturday morning. So I was camping in the Denver area at Golden Gate Canyon State Park (their website doesn't do it justice - camped overnight at 9000 ft, had to drive up 19% grade roads to get there, etc. etc.) and got up at 6:30 am to be in Denver for the 7:30 am train arrival. Running late, I called Richard at 8:30 - left a message, and when he called me back, reminded me that we changed the pickup to Saturday. Shitfuck.

So now I have a day to waste in Denver. It's hazy and dreary (associated with smoke from wildfires in Montana, I hear), I'm tired because I didn't sleep well (stupid herd of Elk started bugling at 3am), not showered, and generally without purpose or plan for the day. I feel like a homeless person, not trying to attract attention and hoping I don't smell too badly as I sit in a Panera hogging the free wireless.

Fuck it. I'm going to go see a movie, then I'll find a new campsite this afternoon. Drove all the way to Denver to see a movie - go figure.
----------
And in the intervening 30+ minutes, struck up a conversation with a fellow Panera customer who was just fun to talk to - though the various topics included: overinflated real estate prices in Boulder/Ann Arbor, the Cold War, Israel/Palestine, etc.

A little animated conversation did me right to snap me out of the "it's a depressing grey day" funk. I'm still going to see The Illusionist though.

dude... I am, like... SO high right now

I'm sitting in my hotel room in Boulder (Colorado) with a stupid-assed grin on my face. Just got into town, it was getting late, so the first thing I do is find a bike shop to ask where to go riding. The guy draws me a little map, and on the way to the start point, I find a hotel, drop my shit, put the bike together, and off I go. It's about 7:00pm, so I'm hurrying to beat the sunset. Turns out it gets cold in the mountains, but it was a short ride.

I'm so enthralled with my little GPS thingy that I immediately got back, plugged it in, and here's the track...


Let's not focus on the fact that on the climb there are spots where I was sucking wind at 5 mph, and two clip-out-and-stop-for-a-second-before-my-heart-pops-out-of-my-chest spots. Let's focus on the ass-puckering 47mph downhill. We ain't got none o' dat in Michigan.

I kid you not, the thought "OhHolyShitDidILockDownMyStemAndSkewersTightEnough" went through my head more than once. And brother, I am not ashamed to say that I was on the brakes more than my manly ego would like me to admit to. I had no idea where this road went or if it suddenly became potholed, oh yeah, and I have approximately ZERO descending skills. So yeah, it took a while to un-pucker from those spots.

So yeah, I'm riding high on some endorphins right now, for sure.

And get this - on the hairy-assed descent back to the hotel, this motorist in a burgundy Ford Expedition passes me really closely right before a tight turn (yes, I was out in the middle of the lane, but I'm sure I was going at or above the speed limit). So I'm thinking "what an asshole" and then I see him stopped 300 feet ahead, blocking the lane. Asshole, right? Turns out there were 3 deer crossing the road. Around a couple more hairy curves and he's stopped again - but he's even with (splitting the group) of three more - the two on the left shoulder and one on the right. And as I come up on him, it seems like he was totally stopped and started going when I caught up. He could have driven on, but it seemed like he waited for me to make sure that I saw the deer.

How cool is that? I felt like he was escorting me a little bit. It might have just been coincidence that he was trying to not hit the deer, but the optimist in me would like to think it's people looking out for other people. Thanks, Mr./Mrs. Burgundy Expedition Driver.

So yeah, am I going riding tomorrow morning? You bet your ass. And am I coming back here after the Utah backpacking? Looking that way - I just might make a side trip out to here on the way home.

On the road again...

I just can't help but chuckle - the rest stops in Iowa have free WiFi internet access. I don't have any particularly pressing e-business to take care of, but I just gotta try it out. Seems to work, but why at a rest stop? To entertain the kids in the car? An oppurtunity for advertising? Or is it just the modern-day equivalent of having a pay phone?

In other news - I'm stoked about the fact that there's a Strategic Air Command Museum in Omaha, and I'm about to be there in a few hours. Gonna go see me some missiles, fer shure.

does it seem like a strange pairing of requirements?

I started browsing some pages of Department of Energy technology transfer, and somehow as I was browsing randomly, I ended up flipping through the job postings at National Securities Technology, LLC. (a.k.a. Bechtel Nevada).

Explain to me how is it that they list as job qualifications for one position:
- "Professional experience in event investigation highly desireable..." (where "event" refers to one involving radiation exposure)
- "working knowledge of ... 10CFR835" (which is Code of Federal Regulations, Article 10, Part 835) ...
- "Computer Skills with software applications such as MS Office"

Which of these seems like you shouldn't have to list it? If you are in the government business of dealing with radioactive substances (whether it be medical sources, energy creating, or weaponry making), I would think that you are savvy enough person that MS Office doesn't pose much of a challenge.

Or should I be worried? Are there people out there in the Department of Energy, or contractors, or on site at production/processing facilities who investigate "events", but who... have difficulty with MS Office? That would be a little bit scary.