RedBox Down!

On the suggestion of my sister, and because I could get a free rental, I gave RedBox a try yesterday. The website is not bad, there is a box close by that I would pass regularly, so worth a try for at least the free shot. Got the movie, watched the movie, and today was going to return the movie while out and about.

Alas, the poor RedBox had fallen on hard times since I had been by yesterday. Seems someone had taken offense to something it had done and smashed its screen. Perhaps it did not have the movie they wanted. Or maybe they couldn't quite get the 'barcode must be to the rear' trick just right (given that they were of the type to smash a big red machine, you know). Anyway, I could not return the movie. The merchant at that location knew of the demise of the box, but was having nothing to do with the returns himself other than point out where he thought the next closest RedBox might be. No blame there, that's just the way the RedBox deal works even if it is a nuisance to me. My worst case is I am out a couple of dollars while I wait for them to replace the box at this location. The best case, as today, is that I drop off the disk at a different box along the way to doing other things. I went off to do other things and the return at the other location went smoothly.

The email notice that I had returned the disk beat me home, which I find very cool in a geeky sort of way: every RedBox is on the internet. Which also means that there should be someway for RedBox Central to KNOW that my local RedBox had suffered a vicious attack, or any other kind of system failure, and know it before a customer told the local merchant. Which might well be the case, I don't know. Certainly if I had built a system that was networked to do inventory and billing, I would also use its alerts for faults, failures, and security breaches. I will be checking on this box to see how long it takes them to replace or repair it.

Given the number of the RedBoxes in my area, the online inventory and reservation system, the not-too-bad rental and return process, and the one-buck-a-day rate, I can easily see RedBox being on the list of movie rental services we use in the future.

Let's Try Again?

Success

I guess the girl scouts have to go back and find the right spot.

According to readings by the National Geodetic Survey, the Four Corners marker showing the intersection of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah is about 2.5 miles west of where it should be.

Update: Well, maybe not. Reading a bit deeper, it turns out both the original surveyors, the states, and congress knew the location was not exactly right and agreed on it because it was an easier spot to reach than the actual location. Deal signed by all makes it done. No need to to relocate, rebuild, or revisit.

Pork - The Good Kind

The weekend before last Nelson and I ate at Pappy Red's, a truly wonderful barbeque joint in town. At some point the talk to turned to us trying our hand at cooking some meat. Ribs. Pulled Pork. Maybe a whole pig just like we'd seen on the Anthony Bourdain show. Mmmmm. Well....maybe.

Anyway, this weekend we took a shot a pulled pork. We tried two methods of cooking Boston Butts to see which was better, whether we could even tell the difference, and whether the difference was worth the bother.

The short form was a recipe from Food magazine. A very simple and tasty recipe cooked in a Dutch oven in the stove. We used our cast iron pot. It took a total of 5 hours prep, cooking, and pulling (shredding) time. The long form was an Alton Brown recipe (our current cooking crush). This used a 10-hour brine followed by a 10-hour slow cook in a smoker.

We planned on having pulled pork Saturday and Sunday as sort of a taste testing weekend. We invited Vicki and William along for the ride with no complaints heard.

I dragged Nelson out of bed Saturday morning to help with the shopping and off we went. We stopped by Publics to get most of the stuff and check out the meat. The plan was to see what pork they had and compare it to Ferguson's Meat Market. We ended up with a 4-pound butt from Public's and 18-pounds of Butt from Ferguson's. By far, the better deal was at the Meat Market, but the little 4-pound butt we snagged from Publics was on sale for just ten cents a pound more while a dollar a pound less than the others. Makes you wonder why it was on sale, but we cooked it that day so it wasn't going to matter much. Ferguson's is pretty amazing. In the 14 years we have lived in Cumming, knowing it was there, and with Mary shopping there sometimes, I have never been inside. I have a feeling I will be there often now.

We got the rub on the small butt with its cider-based baste and put it in the oven. While that cooked, we put the two big butts in a molasses flavored brine to soak for 10 hours. I made some sauce (Emeril) and put it in the fridge to mellow. The little pig came out of the oven and was shredded.

Then we did other stuff. Nothing to do with the kitchen and nothing went as planned so I am not going to talk about it other than to say we did not spend money, which is good for now.

Vicki, William, and the boys came over for dinner. It was good.

The big pigs came out of the brine about 9:00pm. The Alton Brown cummin-based rub went on thick and they went onto the grill about 10:00pm. We had to use the grill as our smoker because our smoker had not seen any use in a couple of years and was DOA when we tried to turn it on.

The grill worked fine after some fine tuning. It held the temperature at just a bit above 200 degrees all night long except for one exciting spell around 1:00 am when some of the drippings caught fire and spread flames over the big pig. That called for some adjustments in the grill. The foil covering the burners was replaced with some heavier and wider pans to keep the fat out of the flames.

Nelson and I set into a schedule with him checking the temp and flamage at the bottom of the hour and me checking at the top of the hour. I kept that up until about 5:00 and the decided that the meat would be good enough or someone would let me know that the porch was afire because I was sleeping for a few hours. Nelson kept checking every hour. At 9:00 I took the smaller of the butts off the grill to rest. The bigger needed a couple more hours. Nelson slept until about 11:00 because he was done, too.

Mary and the kids went to the movies in the afternoon. It snowed. I pulled the pork, and made some cornbread. Vicki, William, and the boys came over for the second round. Everyone ate. It was good.

The consensus was that they were both pretty good. The long form was the winner in taste, but no one would turn down the short form. The short form was the big winner in the taste per effort ratio, although the long form wouldn't be so bad if we planned it so we were not cooking overnight.

Now I have pork sandwiches for lunch for the whole week and I am not complaining one tiny bit.

Read This John Scalzi Book

Just finished reading this from John Scalzi. It is basically a best-of from the past ten years of his online writings. You could go to his web site and read all ten years worth (I think it is all still there), but this is probably easier to get caught up and get a sense of what he is about. Plus it throws money at him so maybe he will write some more science fiction for us.

What He Said

Ed Felton:

This story might help to illustrate why experienced engineers assume that any large software program will contain errors, and why they distrust anyone who claims otherwise. Getting a big program to run at all is an impressive feat of engineering. Making it error-free is too much to hope for. For the foreseeable future, software errors will be a fact of life.

Spook Country

William Gibson tells a good tale.

I Killed Ficlets

A couple of years ago John Scalzi announced the launch of Ficlets (which I am not linking to for reasons to be clear by the end of this paragraph). I toyed with the idea of writing some things there, but always chickened out. On 1Dec I finally posted one. On 2Dec, the Ficlets admin announced the site would be closing 15Jan2009.

Sorry, I really did not mean to bring down the site. This is the Ficlet that did it.

---

"It's wearing the brown coat. Standing next to the fountain."

"Right then," with as much Brit twang as I could put on it to try break the tension.

He cut his eyes back, but did not turn his head my way.

"You stay here with the tag." A tube that looks and works like an Epi-Pen nestled in my jacket pocket. "I'll circle around with the others. When I leave it will know you are here. It will sense you. Knows your brain implants. Plus yours are mostly down. We will cover the other routes out. When it gets close enough, tag it. Should choose escape over reprisal. Probably. Tag will lock it down. Maybe"

"Okay."

"Without the tag it could take another month to find it. More bodies. One shot. Don't miss"

"Right."

Unspoken: Screw this up and it's back to the white coats poking around in my skull to see the effects of being occupied by a rogue AI.

Lyle walked way. I took the tagger from my pocket. If he was wrong about the AI choosing escape, I might die. If I missed the tag, I was about to lose my mind again.

Long Drive Home

After an hour and half of driving 25mph on 4-lane wide interstate between Macon and Atlanta we decided that we had to change the route. We got off, took a potty break, got some food and gave the GPS to Nelson. He tapped on it until the routing did not use any interstate highway. It took a few tries, but eventually the GPS-lady got the idea that we really and truly wanted to get away from those roads. Then we drove for two more hours, but at the speed limit, in the dark on curvy roads in the rain listening to CD of the teen vampire romance novel until we finally got home three hours later than planned. The usual five hour trip had turned into eight.

Then Mary got dressed and left for work.

PSA From the Cook

If the the propane powered grill on your back deck has trouble starting when using the built-in automatic starter, be sure to SHUT OFF all of the burners and WAIT a few minutes before trying to light them with a lighter. If you light them right away the resulting fireball will engulf your head and burn off most of your eyebrows. You will be lucky to be able to get away without your entire head being aflame or your clothes catching fire.

VStrom Commute

I rode the bike to work most of the days through the summer. The general rule was (and still is) that I ride the bike unless there is some reason not to ride the bike. Reasons not to ride are that I have to carry more than one passenger, the weather forbids, or I have cargo that will not fit into my bag. The weather has been the main reason in the past week or two. Mary insists that I will have to man-up unless there is ice on the ground between now and January when we get to the true local winter.

It's been mostly good so far. Certainly have used less fuel than the Jeep. 45 mpg is better than 15 mpg. 70 miles per hour feels faster than when riding fully enclosed. Crazies are still crazy, but they stand out even more when you are more exposed. Timing the commute to miss the 10mph traffic on GA400 is even more important now. I have missed out on a bunch of Talk Radio, but have not decided whether that is a positive or negative point (definite negative is missing the heads up on the traffic reports). Remembering that the gap in the trees at exit 14 acts like a funnel for the wind is important or I end up moved suddenly to the next lane over.

I traded the backpack I used to carry my load of stuff around for a Nelson-Rigg bag. It rides behind the Dan Vesel backrest on an tail rack extension from Dan (scroll to the bottom of that page). Dan made a larger model for me to handle the size bag I use to keep it off the turn signals. The main compartment of the bag has enough room for the second helmet which is handy. It is big enough and secure enough on the rack to carry my laptop when I have to bring that home for work. I use it mostly to carry a lunch and a book to read when I break for the day. I has plentiful little pockets to handle the small junk I carry around. So yes, it is a mostly great big purse that I strap to the back of my bike.

If the weather keeps to North Georgia norms, I should be able to ride at least a couple of sunny days a week in December now that I have the pants with the quilted liner. January and the first part of February will probably be the skip months. I will not try to ride on ice and have no plans to get wet in the cold weather.

Now I just need to the Jeep to last for a couple of years without major problems.

Reading This Week

I am reading Justine Larbalestier's Magic novels. They are Young Adult fantasy (magic and all) so out of the usual hard science fiction group that I usually go for. But they are good stories well told and have been fun reads.



The Science Fiction Book Club has the trilogy combined in a hardcover edition. This is where I snagged my copy during one of the many sales events.

Scalzi Books

Thanks to a heads up from his blog, I learned that John Scalzi's Agent to the Stars has been released in trade paperback edition. I am generally not big on collecting things, but I have found myself filling a shelf with the Scalzi works including a few signed editions (far out of my behavioral norm). So far, all of his writings have fit my criteria of A Good Story Well Told. I am glad to have them and recommend them to you.

I almost bought Agent from McMillan, but then checked at Amazon and saw that I could get it and Zoe's Tale for only $5 difference once the free shipping kicked in. That was more than I could resist.

So, Mary will scold me for buying more books while Mr. Scalzi is thanking me. And I have more on my stack to read.

4000 Miles and New Pants

We took the motorcycle in for it 4K check up this weekend. While we where in the shop Mary bought me a new pair of pants. The weather has started to turn a little cool and the bike has been parked in the garage for eight out of the past ten days. I think she was worried that I was starting to cave on the deal we made when she let me get the bike. The deal was that getting the bike meant riding the bike. I have to average riding it at least half the days of the year to justify having it and not replacing the aging Jeep now instead of letting it limp along until it dies.

So now I have these nifty black pants with a removable quilted liner, a removable rain liner, removable outer covers that expose mesh panels for hot weather.

And no excuses not to ride until the weather turns really cold.

Sweet.

Ike in Bridge City

This gallery has a pictures of what Ike did this past weekend to the town where I graduated from high school. Image 33 shows the main street, Texas Avenue. (I would drop in an image, but that site doesn't seem to want to share them that way and I don't fell like pushing the issue.) The first 75 or so pictures in the gallery are in Bridge City and the rest are in Orange, the next town over.

There are a few people who live there that I am concerned for. Aunt Bert lives somewhat south of that road that is a river toward the lake and has likely lost her house, but I am pretty sure she got out of town early. The other aunts and cousins live a bit farther inland by distances varying from just barely enough to well out of the way. My wife's parents (who did not leave their home) and one sister (who did the smart thing) live in the just barely enough range of about 30 miles north of these pictures and were spared much damage though they saw plenty of high winds and rain. They are all still without electricity today (Monday) except for my aunt who lives in Dallas (300 miles to the safe side) and Mary's sister who lives in Corpus, and who is only safe by luck of the spin because Ike slipped north instead of south.

What a mess. Be safe.

Update from my Aunt Sybil:

Bridge City has been 90% destroyed. I went with Roberta Thurs to check on their trailer. As we drove down the streets, every house has a pile of wet, sodden “stuff” piled in the front yard. Everything was ruined. On the news last night they said that out of 3500 homes in Bridge City, 14 were habitable. Roberta’s trailer not only is fine, but she had electricity and water. We don’t understand it. The house on both sides of her and across the street were flooded. The yards are covered in black slimy mud from the marsh and Sabine lake. There were no fatalities as far as we know.

And some photos of the aftermath. Number 15 in this series is the Bridge City main street after the water receded.

Vacations

The girls went to Vegas and the boys stayed home.

Caitlin left last week for a few days in California with half the gang before meeting up with Mary and the other half this week. None of the girls is a gambler, and are underage anyway except for Mary and Leah, they just are using Sin City as the the center of tourist adventures because its the only place you can fly into near the Grand Canyon, Four Corners, and the Big Dam. Plus it has it own set of non-gambling somewhat reasonably priced entertainment suitable for 16 to 18 year-old young women. The older girls (Mary and Leah) will have their hands full trying to herd the cats (tame cats though they might be).

Nelson and I counted the vacation as starting on Saturday, but there were some chores that had to be done before the fun could start. After excavating his room out and knocking down the jungle that is the back yard, we were ready to get our week off under way.

Nelson and I planned to stay close to home fishing and riding the motorcycle around. Our week almost got canceled before it started when the old fart of the pair missed a step and nearly broke his ankle. Luckily it just knocked a bunch of profanity out of me, gave me a headache, and left the ankle swollen for a couple of days without seeming to be broken or too badly sprained. That happened on Saturday before Mary left on Monday.

Sunday was spent sleeping late, drugging and icing the ankle, helping Mary pack, getting rid of three beds that we did not need to folks most glad to have them (one we found in the excavation of Nelson's room, one from Caitlin's room a year ago, and one from Nelson's room in the old house six years ago -- we are pack rats), and finishing the yard work that did not get finished Saturday.

Monday was spent getting Mary out the door to the airport and then some prep for the rest of the week. It was another late start to the day, because we are a lazy bunch on vacation. After seeing Mary off, we went shopping. We bought some fishing gear, some odds and ends for the motorcycle rides, and some groceries. Nelson got a new Oscar for his fish tank. Nelson has cheer practice on Monday so not much else was in plans. By the time we got all the stuff back to the house and got something to eat it was time to get him to the gym.

The plan for Tuesday was a ride motorcycle through the swervy roads of North Georgia. We got mostly packed Monday night then settled in to watch the movie Stardust. We stayed up a bit too late watching it though. It turned out to be better than we were expecting. Funny ghosts, Robert De Niro had an especially nice part, and Claire Danes, but it kept us up later than we planned.

So we went to sleep looking forward to a two day motorcycle trip to start on Tuesday.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

Another Joss Whedon hit.

Water Ice On Mars

While packing up from a sort of late work day and talking to my mother on the phone, I read a tweet from from MarsPhoenix reporting that Water Ice had just been found on the surface of Mars. So I passed the news right on to Mama as, "Hey, they just found water ice on Mars. I just got a text message from the robot they sent up there." And I give the quick run down of the lander and how I come to get a text message from it.

"Just imagine how far we've gone. In 1900, your Pappa wasn't even alive, there weren't many cars, and no airplanes. And now we've sent robots to Mars that are making ice water and sending you messages about it."

Yeah, kinda cool.

New Office

We have outgrown our office and are moving to a new building. My team got a tour yesterday of the very nice new space. The conference rooms are all named after games. We are very pleased to confirm that the 'Wii Room' does actually have a Wii system and is meant for use as a stress relief room. We were greatly disappointed that the much larger, sound proofed, curved-walled, black-painted, very cool looking 'Halo Room' had nothing to do with playing the game. Instead it is some kind of wacky high tech conference room. Something about saving travel expenses to Europe or something.

Now we need to convince the naming committee that names like 'Candy Land' and a couple of others just do not work for a tech company.

Who'd Thunk It?

Ummm...Smith, Hayek, Friedman, ... but not Waters,

Falling Demand

``Refiners are managing the crude supply they have on hand because they are worried about weak product demand,'' said Tim Evans, an energy analyst for Citi Futures Perspective in New York. ``Both gasoline and distillate demand over the last four weeks are down from a year ago.''

Fuel consumption averaged 20.4 million barrels a day in the four weeks ended June 6, down 1.3 percent from a year earlier, the department said.

U.S. gasoline demand increases during the summer, when Americans take to the highways for vacations. The peak- consumption period lasts from the Memorial Day weekend in late May to Labor Day in early September.

I think I remember those curves from econ 101. Let me see...supply went down and price went up. Price went up past a point and now demand is going down. Yup.

Hat Tip: Knowledge Problem

Heavy Ink

I read a few comics, but not many. I get them by subscription from Heavy Ink. Another case where shopping online costs less and keeps me from having to talk to people.

This online, subscription-based, get your cool reading material business could get me in deep. Mary has too keep the reins tight or I could be trouble.

Heavy Ink has also started to stock Manga. I will probably start saving a ton of cash on the stuff because the kiddies read racks of it. It generally costs about two bucks a pop less than at the Fry's or B&N (the closest things around that have decent shelves of Manga).

If you read the colored pages with words scattered about on them, you owe it to your budget to give Heavy Ink try.

Now How Does That Story Go?

About the Self Assembling Robot that Takes over the World?

What happens when they find my nuclear reactor?

Hat Tip: Noodle Food

The Answers

The answers I wish I had thought of:

Q:
Wow. Homeschooling. I could never do it with my kids.

A:
I know. God, I couldn’t homeschool your kids either.

Hat Tip One Sixteenth

Cheer Boosters

The Booster Club for Nelson's cheer team is going to be pretty aggressive in fund raising this year. As one more avenue for revenue for Nelson's part, I have set up an online store front (which I will use for other purposes as well) where Nelson will be offering as many of the Booster Club goods as possible each month. If you see something that strikes your fancy at a price you like, please throw some cash at the cheer leaders.

My motive, of course, is that the more money I can get my invisible internet friends to throw at the cheer leaders the less that has to come out of my pocket. It might be bad marketing to come right out and admit that, but it's the truth. The Booster Club is going to try to have decent quality items in the monthly rounds of fund raising. Not every month will be selling a product and not every month has been mapped out yet. The general plan is to run enough fund raisers, varied enough, and over enough time that most of the kids on the team have a chance to raise enough money to cover their uniform costs, competition fees, and travel expenses.

Anyway, the store is open, it's rough, but will get prettier over time. So go, spend, spend, spend. The cookies are tasty.

Thanks In Advance.

John Prine

Otis reminded me of John Prine.

Doorknob Installations

Why is a door knob designed such that if the deadbolt is retracted when you try to install it the mechanism binds but installed with the deadbolt extended it work smoothly? And why do the instructions not make this more clear? Just saying. Because it could have been thirty minutes instead of two hours had the doc been just a bit clearer on that point.

Not to mention that Nelson and I would not have to suffer the rest of the weekend of Mary letting us know just how much we need her as a supervisor since it was her idea to try it with the bolt out instead of in.

Then she fixed Nelson and me some lunch and we celebrated having new front door hardware and not having our keys getting stuck in the lock every other day. All in all worth the two hours and the lousy instructions in the end.

Riff on This

quote from a quote from a quote

You can eliminate a lot of conflict in your life by realizing that there are basically two categories of people you’ll run into - those who get paid to make decisions, and those who get punished for making decisions…

Which role am I in?
At what times do I switch roles?
Which role do I put my children in?

Can I improve their lives by guiding them into roles where they get 'paid' to make decisions (clearly better than getting punished)? Can I do that now within the home life as well as later when they move on in their personal and professional lives?

Early Spring Atlanta

Today was a lovely sunny 60 degree Spring day. Tomorrow will be a lovely sunny 60 degree Spring day.

Tonight we have freeze warnings.

Wacky, wacky weather.

Kirk Mellish says La Nina is the most likely cause:

Our latest taste of winter was first mentioned in my blog March 26th with changes made on the 2nd and April 8th. Reluctant springs are a comon feature of La Nina. After the cold snap a 10-15 day warm spell will ensue. Last year The Masters had record cold on the final day. We know what kind of Summer followed. This year the cold wave is just a few days later. Record lows are occuring in April in Georgia the last 30 years about 3 times the normal pace of the last 125 years. Average would be one record low every 4 years. So in the last 3 decades that would mean about 8 records, instead Augusta has seen 20 record lows in April. There is a consensus that the current La Nina, though weakening, will last the Summer and maybe even into next winter.

Lake Lanier

The water level in Lake Lanier, the main reservoir for metro Atlanta, has risen six feet since January of this year. The lake is still 10 feet lower than this time last year. Frequent rains this year have helped the lake rise steadily, which is a good thing.

The same rains promise to make it difficult for me keep the grass cut in the jungle that has become my back yard. I am not really complaining...much.

Job Markets

What next year could look like:

Nokia is hiring now.

Lovenox

We finally get to the Lovenox shots in the belly story. I did remarkably well with it given my history. The other stories are much more dramatic, but this one has me giving myself injections in the skin on my stomach. I get a bit dizzy just typing that sentence.

Mary gave me a couple of shots, but I was laying in bed for those so no drama at all. For all of the others I did it myself because the time for the shots fell when she was at work or was sleeping off a night of caring for someones twins.

I would go into the bathroom so I would not disturb Mary and because there is plenty of bright light. I have a problem with small details close up and these needles are very small. I figured it was better that I could see what I was doing than just stabbing blindly in the general area around my belly button. These are subcutaneous shots so just under the skin, not deep in the muscle. I did really will with all except two of the shots. On those two I got the angle of the needle wrong somehow and ended up too shallow. Instead of just a slightly stingy shot, I got a large knot of fluid close to the surface much like a really huge bee sting. I fuzzed out both times and was glad I was already on the floor.