11 December 2010 00:26
for whatever reason i found this to be an absolutely fascinating article about counterfeit goods in the modern market. i'd been trying to determine if a copy of msoffice i bought off ebay was a legit one when a forum commenter made an offhand comment to "third shift". in trying to find the definition of the phrase in this context i wound up at this article:Fortune Magazine: Not Exactly Counterfeit
(backup copy)
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19 April 2010 20:38
Info on our time in New Orleans can be had at ibbekah.blogspot.com20:38 email me permalink / commentary (0)
13 September 2009 15:10
Vaccinating coyotes and raccoons for rabies ranks pretty high up on my list of the things I enjoy about my job. USDA Wildlife Services oversees (and usually orchestrates) the aerial rabies control programs, and they're a good group of people to work with. As the projects require a fair amount of manpower they pull in their field guys to sit in the back and run the machine...these are good old boys who spend a chunk of the year trapping beaver, coons, and coyotes; weeks on end beating around remote areas with ATV's; and a lot of time down at the local joint drinking beer and swapping stories in the evenings. Flying along first thing in the morning the intercom will be quiet for a while then I'll hear, "Joe! Look at that pond down there, boy I bet that's some good duck huntin' right thar!". Ask them any question about raccoons or the local area and they can give you the ten minute answer no problem. It's a lot of fun and extremely educational.The vaccination program is rather straight forward. Take an oral rabies vaccine (a red jelly-like substance) and seal it in what looks for all the world like a ketchup packet. This packet can then be either dipped in oil and fish meal crumbs (called coated sachets) or tucked inside a dog treat and sealed there with wax (called "blocks"). The animals are attracted to the vaccination 'bait' by the smell and in the process of eating or gnawing the bait rupture the packet and (ideally) get the oral vaccine to contact their tonsils. Results have varied animal to animal and by dose, but for all practical purposes the vaccination is good for a year, often longer.
In the months following the bait application, the same field workers I flew with will be out trapping to determine the effectiveness of the vaccination program in order to make improvements the following season. The blocks have a marker in them that stains the teeth of the animal that eats it, but they haven't found a way to do that with the coated sachets yet; they instead have rely on the level of some chemical in the bloodstream. Both UV light and heat are hard on the vaccine (a live rabies virus, albeit weak), for this reason we drop baits in the local fall. This allows for the baits to maintain their effectiveness for as long as possible (up to three months in cooler temps) as well as providing a tempting food source. During the summer when other sources of food are plentiful, animals may be inclined to leave the baits alone. We bait New England in mid to late August, WV on down into GA in late September early October, and then Texas in January. The official target animal is typically raccoons in the East and coyotes/foxes in Texas, but the USDA is happy for any mammal (humans excepted) to partake of the opportunity.
Baiting is a daytime fair-weather only operation, first shift takes off a few minutes before sunrise in order to be onsite and baiting at sunrise. All the Texas locations are in the southwest 'desert' regions, highs in the 70's weren't uncommon this January, but lows were typically in the 20's. (Preflighting an airplane in the dark at 25 degrees isn't the part I like about this job). In New England this August/September we've had lows in the 50's and highs in the 70's. We have an onsite command trailer (the "Taj Mahal") which houses five or six computers, two printers, a crew area, lounge, base radio, and a satellite internet connection. There's a fair amount of data crunching that goes on, along with real time aircraft tracking for support and search & rescue (not needed so far). This year we're using five airplanes, so the five pilots would meet up with Andy (our project manager) and we'd head out to the airport together around 0630. Close behind us are the mechanics, in this case one for each airplane. They oversee all the ground ops: marshalling, fueling, loading, and of course any maintenance that comes up.
Preflighting takes about ten minutes, leaving me ten or fifteen to hang out in the command trailer where it's warm. Somewhere in the trailer (it's a fifth-wheel RV that's probably 40 or 45 feet long, it’s not uncommon to have 15 people in it on a cold morning) is my crew. I track them down (a navigator and a bowl operator) and we crawl in the plane around fifteen minutes to sunrise. One of our ground guys gives me the go ahead and I start engines. It can be a very busy ramp as over a dozen people are running around three airplanes (six propellers), with all three of them starting within two or three minutes of each other. We typically operate out of small un-controlled fields; so it's a simple matter of first come, first serve when deciding which of us gets to take off first. Everybody taxies to the runway in use and goes through the list of checks and runups for the first flight of the day. Subsequent flights follow an abbreviated list, the first one will take upwards of ten minutes to make sure everything is hunky-dory after sitting cold all night.
All of our airplanes have two communication radios, so one of them is always set to what we call "company frequency", it's like having everybody on the same CB channel. This allows us to make position reports, call in with problems to the maintenance crew, shoot the bull, and get updated instructions from the customer. Mostly it gets used to announce our position since we're flying in areas not controlled by any FAA facility. We use the second radio to talk to other traffic near the airport, or talk to ATC if we happen to pass a busier airport.
It's usually a five to ten minute flight from the airport to the 'block' as we call the area we will be baiting. This time is used to set up the flight guidance system as well as get the baiting machine up and running. The bowl operator is in charge of keeping the system running smoothly, making sure supply to the conveyor belt doesn't get interrupted by a jam or other problem. The navigator sits up front next to me and does the paperwork, making sure that we are applying at the proper rate (so many baits per linear mile). He also has a switch to interrupt the machine if we fly over a house or heavily traveled road, people don't like getting hit with the baits for some reason. 'Navigator' is a misnomer, I'm actually the one doing the navigating, but I let them think what they want.
Our flight guidance system lets me fly a back and forth series of swaths pre-programmed by the IT guys in the command trailer. Using the assignment sheet they hand out I punch in the numbers and the system gives me guidance to fly in a straight line from one point to another, and then come back exactly parallel to that line a half mile over. Lines vary in length depending on geography; sometimes we fly outbound for 200 miles, turn around and fly 200 miles back home. Other times we fly out 50, back and forth six more times at 50 miles a piece, then 50 miles back home. It's a little odd feeling—to hop in an airplane, fly 450 or 500 miles, burn 200 gallons of jet fuel, spend three hours aloft, and wind up in the exact same place I left—but I do that sort of thing all the time in this business.
Once we get on the line with the machine running smoothly and the cabin heater finally warmed up it's time to relax. I scoot my seat back a couple notches, ease my seatbelt, stretch, dig out my mp3 player and get it piped into my headset, finish off what paperwork I can, and prepare to enjoy the flight. We typically fly at 500 feet above the ground so that the navigator can have a good view of when to interrupt the machine when flying over houses etc. Sometimes if it gets too turbulent to fly low we climb higher in search of smoother air, but since I prefer to fly as low as possible that's usually where I'm found. If it's time to eat my mid-morning snack and nothing interesting is coming up I'll climb up to seven or eight hundred feet and engage the autopilot while enjoying a sandwich (this project I enjoyed two slices of bread sandwiching a healthy layer of Nutella most mornings). The autopilot works okay in smooth air but since it's not hooked into the guidance system we use for this particular project it actually usually requires more work than it's worth to fly the line.
It's fun to fly by hand anyway when you're down that low. Back in January the areas south of Pecos contained over 5000 feet of elevation gain, sometimes five hundred feet over what was immediately below you meant a mountain peak looming off the wing. Other times provided fun challenges like trying to pick the proper power setting ten miles before reaching a ridge so I would crest it five hundred feet above it without having to touch the levers (usually I would have to make adjustments in the last mile or so to make my target). I got to see vast acreages of western Texas that few people outside of aviation get to see. The number of no trespassing signs I saw while driving around on the ground was astounding, Texans in that area at least are not fond of interlopers. There were pockets in the mountains of evergreens and pasture, ravines and canyons in the flat, wind chargers on plateaus, game ranches covering tens of thousands of acres, little towns in the middle of nowhere, and windmills everywhere. Oh yes, and I may have seen a sage bush or two [3].
In New England we fly along the Canadian border in NY, VT, and NH; this includes some beautiful scenery in the Adirondack and Green Mountain ranges. Miles and miles of forested mountains dotted in the valleys with rivers and small towns. In the last week we've been baiting in WV along the western edge of the Allegheny Mountains, where there are fewer individual mountains but thousands of knobs packed together. We've also baited along the New River Gorge.
Some of the bait crews like to talk, others do their work in absolute silence. I had one guy in January who brought his laptop along and watched movies while we flew. This morning I had one of each, the first two guys talked non-stop, the second two spoke a grand total of 200 words on a two hour trip. The neat thing about flying with USDA personnel is that they usually enjoy the opportunity to see this territory from the air. Often they're quite familiar with the region from spending years trapping the rivers and streams, and they're excited to see it all from up above. I've flown with government supplied personnel before that had zero interest in what is for me the second highest joy of flying...looking at the ground from the air.
I don't mind when the crew isn't comprised of talkers, I turn my mp3 player up and zone out as I watch the ground zoom by. Two or three hours of flight time goes by quickly that way. Returning to the base airport is the busiest time of the flight as I close out the guidance system and prep the plane for landing. If it's my last flight of the day I'm also cleaning up the cockpit for the next pilot. The turnaround time between flights is usually less than 15 minutes. I shutdown, get my stuff together and get out, the next pilot gets his stuff in place, the fuelers top off the wings, the USDA swaps crews and loads more bait, and the next pilot is spooling engines within fifteen minutes. Typically each plane will fly three or four times a day depending on the amount of available daylight.
Just think, I could be working the airlines or flying cargo at night. Or I could be touring the rural countryside at 500 feet. I like this job.
USDA WS National Rabies Management Program
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07 September 2009 10:06
consider two brothers, farmers both. they get along well enough, but there's some fundamental difference in how they practice farming. perhaps the one focuses on what the market did last year and plans accordingly while the other focuses more on what he thinks he'll need to store up. perhaps the one prefers to patch up and use old and smaller equipment while the other goes into debt to buy new, larger, and more efficient equipment. exactly what matters not, but let it stand that they have a difference.a number of situations are possible. if the brothers still lived with their father, they would farm according to how their father directed. they might chafe, and relations might worsen if the differences were strong enough; but the authority clearly lies with the father. or perhaps they live on the same farm, owned by one of the brothers. again the authority would lie clearly with the brother who owned. he may be open to trying his brother's ideas, but the owner clearly has the final say. but let's say that the brothers each own their own farms, one next to the other. there's nothing to say that these two brothers—amiable, caring for each other, yet with fundamental differences in practices—that these two brothers can't get along. not only do they get along peaceably, but they help each other out.
what's the purpose of a farm? one simplified answer: to provide sustenance for the owner's family/community. it doesn't matter whether the method is different between the two brothers...they're both striving to provide sustenance. they could argue for hours on end on methodology, but when it's time to get the hay in before it rains or to raise a new barn...there's no point in arguing when there's work to be done.
this is my analogy for churches (all members of the same body of Christ) working together. our goal should be the same, regardless of method: save the lost, care for the saved*. vitriolic arguments over matters of dress, involvement in government, or the color of the carpet in the sanctuary can wait until everybody (and i mean everybody, all 6.8 billion of us) has heard the good news, been fed, clothed, and has a roof over their heads. yes, some of those matters are important...but when rain threatens you make hay instead of arguing whether to make round bales or square bales. better yet you start on opposite sides of the field with both balers.
i'm not in favor of complete abandonment of theological discussion. if you make round bales but have no equipment to load or haul them, then those bales are going to rot uselessly in the field. but on general principal it's better to work at saving souls than to devote too much energy on deciding how to save souls. no matter how we perfect and tune our approach, people are saved not by us—but by God through us. it's not our responsibility to get it perfect, it's our responsibility to do our best.
originally one of my example differences between the two brothers was "perhaps the one felt any given field should lie fallow one year in seven, while the other thought that was a waste in resources". i didn't leave it in because i didn't want to muddy the waters by mixing a religious example into a secular analogy. but what does happen if the rain is threatening and the hay's not in but it's sunday? one brother works on sunday, the other doesn't. the one brother helped out on saturday, now it's sunday and time for the favor to be returned...
i like some other aspects of this analogy, here's a random three:
– even if the two brothers don't spend much time helping each other farm, they should spend time in fellowship. after all, they're brothers and they live right next to each other.
– what happens if run-off from one farm damages crops on the other farm (eg, if one church's legalistic practices create a negative impression on the secular community towards all churches)?
– what about good farming practices? sowing the same crop over and over, year after year in the same field with no regard to soil nutrition or changing climate or market conditions would be poor farming. just as paul studied the athenians before preaching to them so each church should know the community it is trying to reach and adapt accordingly.
ah, and where is it the one brother's place to discipline the other? working/not working on sunday, both sides can understand the other's argument even if they disagree on which to choose. going into debt to buy equipment can make sense to one and utterly perplex the other. but sowing salt in a field, or indiscriminant use of illegal pesticides that wind up in the local water supply...these are clearly wrong. they clearly violate good farming practices. wearing a covering, or worshiping on saturday instead of sunday—understandable, they're within reason. condoning abortion, ordaining homosexuals—clearly wrong, clearly in violation of God's will. (no matter how much you argue that the EPA's wrong in declaring pesticide X illegal...it's still illegal, if you disagree take it up with the EPA**). how will the one brother relate to the other? i don't know the answer, but i do know that above all things it will involve love. it will also involve telling the propper authorities (God) about it.
no matter how much i might wish the christian life were black and white, i expect to be finding grey areas until i die. so i'm thankful for all Jesus' examples, "the kingdom of heaven is like...". and thankful for the random analogies he pops into my head when thinking about God's great big often grumpy family.
*my personal paraphrase of the great commission, which we could probably argue about for hours on end
**uh, and i by no means equate the EPA with God, that's just how the analogy worked out when talking off the top of my head. but yeah, good luck getting God to change his mind on homosexuality.
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17 August 2009 06:22
last night i did something i’ve never done before. under my free spirited gf’s indirect yet unmistakable influence i went out into the back yard and slept under the stars. just took a sleeping bag, waltzed out into the wilderness that is my back yard, plopped down, zipped up as far as i could go...and waited for the skeeters to find me.i made a number of observations:
1) it’s hard to stargaze if you’re too tired to keep your eyes open
2) a winter rated sleeping bag is not ideal for a warm summer night if trying to keep mosquitoes out.
3) i was amused to note that i was more concerned about ground based wildlife finding me than mosquitoes. might have something to do with my close proximity to the woodpile which i know for a fact contains some of the uglier specimens that God saw fit to call good.
i lasted about 5mins before unzipping the bag a good ways, and wound up doing more doing a good bit more stargazing than i expected after the initial two mins of heavy-liddedness. seems the “ooh this is nice” factor wore off on the sleeping bag’s plushness.
to camp verb the process by which a perfectly flat piece of ground loses its flatness over the course of a night’s occupancy, where rocks and twigs (formerly in a submerged state) make their way to the surface and protrude sharply.i spent a good deal more time contemplating the vastness and majesty of God’s universe than I’d planned, which yielded some good prayer time but failed to yield any rest time. at some point after midnight i relocated to another portion of the lawn...while the grass wasn’t any greener in the new location (we need rain) it was certainly less populated with protrusions. next time* i’ll make sure to pick my sleeping location in the daylight beforehand.
*we’ll see about a “next time”. i need to let time erase some of the memories of waking up repeatedly to random dogs, other people’s air conditioner units, trains, and a continuous string of crickets.
as the night wore on only a grim determination to spend a “night sleeping under the stars” kept me from crawling into my bed (a mere 50’ away). the romance of sleeping without a roof took a hit, the hours i spent reading westerns never failed to glorify sleeping with a saddle for a pillow and a horse grazing nearby—makes me wonder how many of those western authors actually slept outside.
but the vast bowl of stars...the cool breeze (once i unzipped the bag)...the dew...the quiet peace...there are good reasons to forsake a comfortable mattress and air conditioning.
it was a terrible night as far as sleep accumulation went, but all the same (from my current vantage point) t’was worth it. it really was a crying shame that i made it this far in life without doing it before. next time i think i’ll cheat and take an extra blanket for padding though, after all the cowboys always had a bedroll...
(ps, the first mosquito showed in 2 minutes. but for the most part i was left well enough alone, dry weather has its advantages.)
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20 April 2009 20:56
i guess six people asking me in five days what i do at work during the off season should be a hint to describe it better. but i'm afraid it's just not as enthralling as spraying with night-vision goggles or buzzing tree tops in minnesota. i created this pretty picture of my cumulative flight hours to demonstrate just how quiet things are in the winter/spring months. i went to panama for nov/dec and texas for most of january, so i've done a lot more flying this winter than i did last year. still, i wouldn't be surprised if it's another three weeks before i fly again. meanwhile, there's usually something to be done.
i used to wonder how office jobs worked. with a technical job such as mine, it's usually fairly obvious what my role is and what my task(s) should be. i pondered office floors with acres of cubicles and wonder just what was it that everybody did, and how did they know to do it? and how do you start something like that...starting a business you don't say, "hmm, i'm going to need 15 employees to process the whatchamacallits." ..do you?
now it's become a bit clearer to me, and as best i can figure it one simply does things that need doing. now that i know what everybody else's general assignments are, i can hand things off to them it's more "their job" than mine...but the lines are still fuzzy.
20 April 2009, a Monday
Arriving at my desk at 0740 I was hanging up my coat when I noticed that the calendar was still on March. I changed it to April.
After checking email, weather, and the latest breaking news of a hostage situation in Jamaica I finally got around to clocking in at 0810, just as a coworker arrived. That resulted in two of us being here, on a full day we have seven. As he had just returned Friday from two months on project in the Philippines I spent the next 40 minutes bringing him up to speed on the status of operations here at home base which is when our manager showed up. The catching up continued and morphed into a planning discussion regarding the upcoming mosquito season until 1030 when another coworker arrived.
This one (my former manager from Jamaica) had wanted me to check into photoshopping some pictures for the company newsletter—he's writing an article about the base we just closed there. Then he and my current manager got into a 20 minute discussion on crew duty times that I participated in. I also passed on some info I'd gotten from phone call to Jacksonville Center last Friday clearing up some questions we'd had about altitude assignments on our last trip up from the island two weeks ago.
Last week I'd worked with the Louisiana Department of Ag & Forestry to get an electronic copy of a couple lists they snail-mailed us (One was the addresses of 15 or so Certified Organic Growers in the state of Louisiana, the other was addresses of 75+ members from the Louisiana Registry of Pesticide Hypersensitive Individuals). Today I finally got the electronic copies and ran them through a website to create a kml of the address lists so that I could overlay them on a map. This provides something useful (a visual representation), whereas a list of 75 street addresses had little value. Now when we spray in LA we can drop this overlay on top of our project to see who we need to call.
Around 1115 I started working on a list of pesticide license categories by state to be entered into a Crew Management database that one of our IT guys is building. Each individual state has its own requirements when it comes to pesticide applicator licenses, and given that we have contingency contracts in over 20 states its a genuine mess to keep track of. The database should help that, the IT guy gave a presentation on Wednesday that covered the basics for the various segment managers. I sat in on the meeting and stayed after to discuss how we're going to structure the pesticide license portion...coming up with this list and the requirements/specifications for each category is the next step.
Scattered throughout the morning were all the minute interruptions that add up nicely; the plant manager came through looking for the flightops manager, our systems installer wandered through looking for the flightops manager, I helped a coworker troubleshoot an Excel formula error, I responded to two or three short emails, deleted four announcements, and dug through my photo archives for pictures of a project installation last July for another coworker.
Lunch found me mostly writing this, although I spent five minutes in my manager's office (next cube over) explaining where I'd gotten the start dates for a bid proposal we did in mid-March.
After lunch I fielded a call from our special projects manager in the hangar wondering if I knew were our secondary containment packs were, I handed that off to my manager and went for a tour of the hangar. I do that once or twice a week to keep track of what's going on over there, it helps to catch installation errors early or just find out what's going on with the airplanes. Communication can be rather poor between flightops and maintenance, so often its up to the pilot (me) to find out what maintenance has been performed. I stopped and chatted with one of our electronics guys, he's prepping control panels and motor control boards for a project we have coming up in June. Next I ran into the systems installer who'd been over earlier, I listened to him for close to ten minutes as he blew off some steam about management's handling of the June project. I'm usually quite happy to let him vent, we have a good working relationship in the field and whatever keeps him happy is worth it because he's a good guy to have on your side on project.
Ten minutes of griping later I arrived back at my desk and was intercepted by my manager. We headed over to one of the warehouses to look at a compressor wash system that I brought back from Jamaica the other week, to see whether it was worth fixing up to send to one of our bases in Mississippi. It wasn't, so after another ten minutes shooting the bull with the warehouse manager we came back. He had gotten some more info on the status of a couple of our planes which he passed onto me, then we called a vendor in Canada.
This vendor provides most of our guidance systems for spraying, it's essentially a souped up GPS unit that costs a souped up price. I was at a conference in January with the flightops manager and we sat down at this vendor's booth to try out the latest products. Mostly good stuff, but we've been trying to push some tweaks through in their software for the last couple months. We sent them a laundry list three weeks back but haven't gotten around to having an actual conference call yet with their chief software engineer, today didn't work either so we set it up for 10 tomorrow morning. After the call we reviewed the notes some more since it's been three weeks since we last thought about it.
One of our sales guys dropped by shortly after three to catch up. He just got back from a trip to Louisiana to attend the annual Mosquito Control Association meeting. The topic soon turned (again) to the project in mid-June as he had some further information about the specs the USDA gave us earlier. I started wrapping things up and clocked out shortly after four. Seven and a half hours on the clock and another Monday gone. Time to go home.
There you have it, a fairly standard day in the office. As we get closer to June I'll be involved in test flights and will probably wind up helping to install the systems over in the hangar, but by the time the actual project shows up I will be more than ready to go and get out of the office for a while.
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10 March 2009 10:54
life in a small town hasn't treated me too badly to date. it wasn't my first choice, but given the price of land in our fair valley and my budget, buying in a small town was a clear choice over something like harrisonburg or staunton. and as small towns go it's pretty nice. we've got a grocery store, a couple gas stations, and a library...i don't need much more than that. to boot, my house is on a dead end street, so there's 'relatively' little traffic. i remain astonished though, at the amount of traffic the half-dozen houses past us generate—it's absolutely phenomenal. i'm going to poke around online and see how much it'd cost to get one of those counters they string across the street to satisfy my curiosity.regardless, being cozied into a quarter acre hasn't bothered me unduly. our most grievous complaint was having to go inside to use the restroom, for us boys growing up on over an acre with no close neighbors the only rule on taking a leak outside was "don't let Mom catch you". we've restrained ourselves from playing baseball to the salvation of the neighbors' windows, have only lost one frisbee to an enemy canine, and haven't had any complaints about our music. true, we can't really play it as loud as we like all the time, but with fifty feet separating us from the next house it's several orders of magnitude better than living in an apartment complex. neighbor kids play hide and seek in our trees, last fall they made forts in our front yard leaf pile, and highschoolers like to hang out under the streetlight talking until midnight; none of this has bothered me.
then yesterday afternoon kyle and i cut down a tree in the backyard. this wouldn't have bothered me so much if i'd thought ahead about it, but it caught me a bit by surprise. not the tree, that was a long time coming, but the fact that i was going to have an audience doing it. when i become king, i'm going to add "and each man shall have the right to cut down his own tree on his own property in peace" to the bill of rights. not that anybody actually said anything to me, 'outgoing' doesn't fit anywhere in our neighborhood description...but they were all watching.
the tree long ago developed a proprietary lean towards my neighbor's chain-link fence. this would not have been a problem had not some sort of rot, disease, or general dehabilitation set up house in the first few feet of the trunk. i tried to convince me insurance agent that they would save money by preemptively paying for the tree to be cut down rather than waiting for me to turn in a claim involving the neighbor's fence as well, but he failed to be reasonable. not only was the fence in danger, but i'd planted some cedars under it as well and wanted the tree down in a controlled manner before it decided to take out my cedars.
we'd already gotten a rope around the trunk about twenty feet up and were taking up slack with kyle's pickup when i noticed that one neighbor's curtains were open. i can't recall ever seeing those curtains open in the year and a half I've lived there. then some kids just "happened" to walk by. curiosity killed the cat, but it works for kids too as they sauntered along the drainage ditch between aforementioned chain-link fence and aforementioned leaning tree—this now being the same tree that had a rope tied to a pickup and a wedge cut out of the base. in my planning to drop the tree it never dawned on me that I'd have middleschoolers running around trying to watch. i don't recall ever being stupid enough to hang out under a tree that Dad was felling when i was that age but i can assure you i wouldn't have done it twice. i don't know why they left, or if they were genuinely just passing through, but when they did i found myself fighting an urge to rush things in order to get it down before anybody else came along.
before i started cutting i established my goals. or in this case goal: don't hit the neighbor's fence. sure, i'd be happier if it didn't hit any of my trees either, but i wasn't going to be too picky. it wound up in the ditch, somewhat ahead of schedule and mostly unexpectedly, but it didn't damage the fence so i was pleased. but now instead of a tree lying at rest in my yard, i had a tree lying at rest across the ditch (town property) and against the fence (neighbor's property). pessimistically expecting aforementioned neighbor to come bawl me out about endangering his property, i set to removing the incriminating evidence posthaste. and of course using a chainsaw to do so can hardly be described as stealthy. at some point the neighbor's 8yo son wandered out and began shouting general questions at us about why we cut it down and where we going to cut any more—all over the noise of the saw. i'm pretty sure he's the first person to ever initiate a conversation with me in that neighborhood, but i judged the timing poor.
in the end all was well (with the exception of one of my cedars which suffered somewhat). and in all honesty i don't know how much any one neighbor watched us, nor do i begrudge them their entertainment (were they cutting down a tree i'd probably go so far as setting up a lawn chair on the porch). i wouldn't have minded the concept of being watched nearly so much if the tree had landed in my yard where it was supposed to through the application of skill and proper planning; rather than in the ditch more as a result of providential benevolence than anything else.
all the same, i'd rather cut down a tree on 25 acres than .25...
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21 January 2009 22:48
Do the Dew: Studying the Effects of Legal Drug Use on Productivity.it dawned on me this morning—far too early this morning—that there are some interesting and rather stark contrasts between two adverstising slogans we've heard on television and radio. on the one hand we have mtn dew, a legal drug that is essentially a non-drowsy anti-fatigue medicine with strong side effects including the ability to sooth coughs and ease headaches. on the other hand we have speed, a non-legal drug that is essentially a non-drowsy anti-fatigue medicine (with some strong side effects of its own). even with these similarities they have diametrically opposed advertising slogans.
Mtn Dew: "Do the Dew!"
Speed: "just say no!"
...dedicated to Jenn, whose peer pressure to "just do it" went so far as to actually buy me mtn dew kept me up late enough last night to think this stuff up.
in her defense, she did say to use "only in case of extreme need."
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17 January 2009 23:55
This overlays the USA on top of Europe. Fascinating how small it makes places like the UK seem...let's see, it takes three days to drive across the States, how long will it take to drive across England? Same thing with Israel.Having struck down some personal misconceptions there I continued on to Japan, where I would never in my life have imagined could look like this. My mental stereotype ran more along these lines.
Strange Maps has some very interesting posts. example 1 / example 2.
Here are some aerial pictures of the area I've been flying over in the last couple days...beautiful in its own way but I'm very glad I don't live anywhere near. Info and random facts about Valentine, TX.
I was always curious how much it cost to get one's business advertised on those blue signs along interstate...in VA it looks like $800 to $1000 per annum. Numerous states have privatized the operation care of Interstate Logos LLC (a Lamar subsidiary), Arizona's logos are taken care of by the creatively named Arizona Logo Sign Group, which posts the criteria for being allowed to purchase advertising space on the interstate signs (easy to read and surprisingly educational). This answered a question I have long had, that is, why the {creative adjective} wasn't walmart on them? ...it's because it doesn't fit any of the categories (although a walmart with corresponding gas station might be arguable). I think they need a new category: Gas, Food, Lodging, Camping, Attraction, & Walmart. Also check out these specs. I tried to find specifications for the interstate system itself, but couldn't find anything free (this is $20 but would probably be an interesting read). wikipedia came through with an abreviated version.
The black hole that is wikipedia led me to this overview of the "Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways", which then led to the pages for the individual routes (I-70 for example). Fascinating trivia, but even more fascinating (the "I can't believe I'm wasting my time like this but it's so interesting" sort of fascinating) is this website detailing the interstate system with a phenomenal number of pictures (I-70 again). Kyle and I were mucking about the west tunnel entrance below Rockfish Gap over the New Year's break and fell to wondering when construction on I-64 was completed. It took a while, but I finally found the answer at vahighways.com. From 340 up to the Gap opened in '72, and down the east side to Crozet opened in '73...much later than I'd assumed.
Going back to Lamar, I'd always wondered too what it cost to advertise on a billboard. Here is a table of rates for VA, I felt significant need for a legend or at least an acronym glossary, but none was to be found. Best I can decipher, it'll cost you >$500/mo. to have one billboard in a rural area. Or you can put an ad up on thirteen 14' x 48' billboards in Richmond for a mere $62,000 per month if you like.
I have now managed to cull the number of tabs I have open in firefox down to 5. I can't remember the last time I had it down this low, probably back in December. I feel like an internet pack rat.
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