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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
dglenn's LiveJournal:
| Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 | |
| 1:13 pm | And the other symptom of my being tired is ... Doing a little better today, but still feel like I'm moving at one-quarter speed, on account of not having been able to stay asleep long enough at a time, last night. Still have way too much to do and fearing too little time to do it in, but this morning I finally knocked off one item I'd been stressing about ... The automatic QotD-posting script[0] was a little fragile, in that if any one site it was trying to crosspost to was down or really glitchy, the script would get stuck trying and retrying to post to that site and not get to any of the ones later on its list. When this means I have to go thump it by hand when I wake up and the QotD is merely a few hours late some places, that's just a small annoyance. But I didn't want to leave it vulnerable to that problem while I run off to Pennsic, as I won't be logging in all that often and the state of the queue could get rather messed up if the problem were to occur and persist for a few days. So when I woke up this morning after my two hour sleep (*grrr* It wasn't even two solid hours, as odd dreams and odd pains took turns interrupting) and I didn't really feel like I could move much with the way my arms and shoulders hurt, I figured it was time to start banging out code. The new version is probably more complicated than it should be -- I'm considering it the first draft of the new approach, and if I wind up throwing it away and starting over sometime in August, no biggie -- but in my tests so far it does seem to be working. It fires up several background processes, and each of those does the "try to post, retry if Clive (the client I hacked) returns an error code" loop on its own at the same time as each other; I also made the timeout incremental (well, geometric actually) because my old wait-two-minutes thing was kinda stupid. (I'd coded the two-minute timeout when most of the errors I saw were brief connectivity glitches and cosmic-ray errors, and a few quick retries usually sufficed, but every so often a site goes offline -- or is still present but broken -- for a few hours or a couple of days, which means that I get a womdigious email message from the cron daemon, full of "failed, trying again" messages, when the problem finally gets fixed or I kill the process by hand, and I'm tying up more resources on the machine where it runs than really do any good (probably not enough for the admins to get annoyed, but it still feels wrong. So now it starts at two minutes and the delay is multiplied by the square root of two each time it fails, so one-time glitches and fairly brief site outages will still result in a successful retry after a very short time, and when a site does down for eighteen to fifty hours, my program will back off to a more reasonable interval instead of banging on the door constantly screaming, "Let me in!" But I should probably put a cap on the delay, and I do need to go fix a bug (or just a missing feature, depending on how you look at it) in Clive, where if the next day's quote does get posted during the previous day's wait-to-retry delay, the one that got delayed won't get posted at all[1]. But even if I don't fix that before I leave for Pennsic, it'll only affect one site at a time, rather than screwing up all of the copies of my journal.) Anywho, the reason I'm bothering to tell all y'all this[2] is that despite the tests I've just finished running, there's always the chance that I've overlooked some condition that will bite me come 5:25 tomorrow morning. So if tomorrow's QotD doesn't show up on time, or the same quote shows up two days in a row, it's probably because I need to polish the new autoposter. I've had a bunch of really cool ideas for it in my head for a while, but most of them will have to wait. This change is less nifty, but was something I really wanted to have in place before Pennsic. [0] Uh, I'm pretty sure most of you have either already heard me talk about this or figured it seemed obvious from the usually-consistent posting times, but every so often I'm reminded that it's not something non-geeks automatically think of as a candidate for automation. Anyhow, sometimes I have two or three days worth of quotes already lined up in the queue, and other times I have two or three months worth set up and ready to go. And the cron daemon is my friend. Someday in the (very distant, I hope) future, this may wind up being a little creepy and upsetting for the rest of you, but until then it's a signficiant convenience. [1] The problem is that LJ et.al. don't appear to let you just post a backdated entry if a later entry already exists, unless you set a "yes I really mean to do this" bit someplace (the "date out of order" flag), and (as of the version I've got which I think is current) Clive doesn't appear to have any way of setting that bit. So I need to go read up on the LJ API, to learn how it's supposed to be done, and then find the right spot (in a different section of the code than I've been tinkering with so far) to hack Clive to do the right thing. Either that, or give up on trying to backdate delayed posts -- which would mean that different mirrors of my journal would have entries in different orders. [2] OMG, I must be even more tired than I realized,
if I'm thinking in a dialect which uses a singular
"y'all" (thus requiring "all y'all" as the plural) -- Sheepie
has pointed out (and I think
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| 5:36 am | QotD "Apart from the Kingdom of the Lord there is not on this earth any nation that is superior to any other. Should it happen that a strong Government finds it may with impunity destroy a weak people, then the hour strikes for that weak people to appeal to the League of Nations to give its judgment in all freedom. God and history will remember your judgment." -- Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia (b. 1892-07-23, d. 1975-08-27), 1936 |
| Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 | |
| 5:02 pm | The Culprit So there was my rude awakening this morning too soon after I'd fallen asleep and with too much "eww" in it. And spending pretty much all day at the doctor waiting my turn (got seen at quarter to 14, left there at 14:30 -- and so much for my to-do list for today). And the promise -- or threat -- of photos. ( photos, high magnification, thingie with more than four legs )I don't think I'm going to bother trying to track down what species it is using pictures. There are so many of that class to sift through. Doc says I'm fine (I just have to wait for the itching to stop). I am so very, very, very tired right now. And I'm no closer to being packed for Pennsic, nor have I replaced that tire. Bleah. (Next question: can I afford the tire and groceries for Pennsic?) Anyhow, there are the photos. Click or not, according to how much they're likely to make you twitch. In better news, I have my tramadol again, so maybe I can pack for War without being in as much pain as I've been in for most of the last few months. (When it gets to the point where standing up means the weight of my arms hurts my shoulders ... that gets a bit difficult to cope with.) |
| 11:01 am | This Is SO Not My Week So, after going to rehearsal last night despite feeling week and achy, having a flat tire en route, having the fast-food burrito I grabbed afterward fall apart while I was eating it and spill goop on my skirt, running into a series of delays in a supermarket checkout line, driving home ever so slowly because of the toy ('donut') spare tire, getting stuck at at a railroad crossing, and feeling ever so much more wretched by the time I got home than when I'd left ... ... I got Very Little Sleep this morning because about an hour and a half after I finally fell asleep, I was woken by ( ewww ewww ewww yuck )I'll post the photos later today (my computer is being too slow and I need to get out the door and go see the doctor). They will be cut-tagged as well, yes. In other news, they're resurfacing a street three blocks south of here, the wind is currently switching back and forth between coming from the northwest and the southwest, and most of what I can smell right now is the sulferous, dieselly scent of hot asphalt. |
| 5:32 am | QotD Regarding the US Department of Health and Human Services
proposal that would redefine contraception as abortion (by
changing the definition of 'pregnant' -- and thus prohibit federal
grant recipients from requiring employees to provide contraception
or advice regarding it),
Elsewhere, XNeeOhCon apparently saw a similar progression, writng on 2008-07-15: I have the solution to this problem. We encourage them to continue this line of logic until they define abstinance as the ultimate birth control which is therefore the ultimate abortion. Then, after their heads explode, we come back in, clean up, and change the laws back to a reasonable level. |
| 2:53 am | *pout*  A stranger (with a much bigger x-shaped lug wrench than mine, fortunately) stopped to help me replace the dead tire with the %#@^ing toy spare (I understand the reasons for those but I still dislike them). I got to rehearsal very late. On the way home I faced a series of much smaller mishaps, but each was extra annoying because its annoy-ness built upon my accumulated annoyance so far; the last was, a mere mile from home after a drive that took a little less than twice as long as usual because of having to slow down on the toy spare, I arrived at the railroad crossing at the same time as a freight train did. (Okay, most-of-a-minute before the train, but the gates were down and the red lights flashing and a handful of other cars were stopped ahead of me.) The train was moving at a speed of approximately (I counted syllables, having forgotten that my phone has a stopwatch function) six boxcar-lengths per minute. I did eventually get home. And an already too-full week now has yet another to-do item in it. I also got a little good news today (or at least the long-awaited cessation of an ongoing bad-news-ness), but this is a whining entry so that'll wait. :-þ |
| Monday, July 21st, 2008 | |
| 8:45 pm | SMS Post [Posted from my cell phone via SMS] CRAP! Flat tire on I-95! |
| 7:19 pm | In The Air Earlier today I saw the slowest-flying dragonfly I've ever seen here in Baltimore, moseying across Pulaski about two storeys up (come to think of it, I've seen slower-moving dragonflies at Pennsic), ... right up until a swift overtook it from behind and swooped in to snatch it up. At that point the dragonfly started moving at a speed more like what I associate with dragonflies, zipped eight inches down and to the right, and the swift swept by. Then the dragonfly resumed its lazy meander. I'd wondered about the dragonfly (at least I think it's the same one) that I see crossing Lombard in the mornings and returning in the evenings -- I thought it odd that it had a set route right through an area so heavily populated by birds that hunt on the wing. I guess dragonflies are just really, really good at dodge-bird? I giggle a little each time I see a swift tip over and dive in a way that looks like a cartoon fighter aircraft being shot down. I don't know how often they catch what they're diving for, but the effort entertains me. OTOH, if I'm watching through a long lens instead of bare-eyed, those sudden direction changes are what make swifts so bloody difficult to photograph. *Poof!* Right out of the frame so quickly that I'm not even sure which direction they went. Oddly, just after I saw the slow-moving dragonfly, I noticed two helicopters hovering over south Baltimore, a few blocks apart. (They must have been television choppers, 'cause I almost never see a police bird hover. But they were too far away to see the paint jobs or logos, and I didn't have a long enough lens with me to make up for the distance.) |
| 12:29 pm | <brody>Gonna need a bigger hard disk</brody>  The last few thunderstorms had a) brushed past just far enough south to avoid showing lightning north of Lombard St., b) only had clout-to-cloud lightning, c) passed too quickly for more than one or two flashes, or d) gone by while I was asleep or in the wrong part of the house. But last night, I got my chance to use the downtown skyline in a lightning photo. I attached the camera to a cymbal stand and stuck the boom out the window, and had it click off frames as quickly as it could store them (which isn't really very fast for exposures longer than about half a second -- it has to think a lot longer after the shutter closes than it does after exposures of more ordinary length). Sunrise the day before brought a very pink sky containing clouds of varying degrees of saturation, all red or pink. 
In the heat we've been having lately, during much of the day my view of downtown is distorted by heat shimmer and/or haze (and yesterday afternoon I saw an advertising banner in the sky but found it difficuly to spot the aeroplane that was towing it -- the plane, when I finally found it, was painted a colour in between that of the clouds and the cast of the haze). For the most part, the hot-air ripples just make what I'm trying to photograph even more blurry than the borrowed department-store telescope and doubler ("Barlow lens") already make it (in effect, it's a 1400mm, f/22 lens with very little chromatic or spherical correction; multiple blurrinesses built in even before adding vibration, and I'm having plenty of trouble controlling vibration as well, but it's still fun) ... but a week ago I managed to catch the effect in a more contained way, in the hot exhaust of a Maryland State Police helicopter coming in for a landing at UMMC.  |
| 5:32 am | QotD "The secret to a happy life is never pass up the opportunity to eat, sleep, or gather possible blackmail material." -- Sam Starfall, in "Freefall" by Mark Stanley, 2008-06-18 |
| Sunday, July 20th, 2008 | |
| 5:32 am | QotD "A man writes to throw off the poison he has accumulated because
of his false way of life. He is trying to re-capture his innocence,
yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world
with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on
paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in." --
Henry Miller, Sexus [found via
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| Saturday, July 19th, 2008 | |
| 5:32 am | QotD "The longer I live the more I realize the internet is like a 32
Flavors, only it isn't ice cream they sell, it's crazy and the customers
are sugar-hyped two years old who get it everywhere." --
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| Friday, July 18th, 2008 | |
| 5:39 pm | Cat Pillow Whoops -- forgot this one was already up and ready to go (and I'm not sure where to insert it into my previous entry):  I've caught Perrine sleeping in this spot, using the dumbbell as a pillow, several times now (she wakes up while I'm trying to get into position for a photo). So I'm starting to think of dumbbells as 'cat pillows'. |
| 4:46 pm | Fairies and Birds and a Whirlybird I'm trying to make progress on a handful of different projects at once despite the rough time my body has been giving me, and really hoping to get then sorted out before Pennsic -- especially the 'get ready for Pennsic' project. So communication from me for the next week will be kinda scattershot and 'clumpy'. While I'm on hold on the phone, I'll polish off this entry that I started to write days ago ... and try to remember where I stashed other half-written ones. 
It seems that every time I look out my window, I see fairies floating over Lombard Street. So either there's a huge dandelion infestation somewhere upwind (west) of here, or some local species of tree produces tiny, tufted seeds that I'm mistaking for dandelion fairies. Inside my house, I frequently see strands or tuft's of Perrine's fur floatingby, blown about by electric fans and the occasional fragment of a breeze that deigns to come in through my windows. I wonder -- if I knot a little loose fur into a shape like this, would that constitute a feline fairy? And if we stretch the relationships between different sorts of
felines (I've been having my mind wander over words a lot lately -- not long ago I spent a while musing about the distinction between 'purplish' and 'purple-y', and more recently I couldn't decide whether an adjective meaning "reminiscent of, or tasting faintly of jalapeño" should be pronounced "ha-la-pee-nish" or "ha-la-peh-nyish". (The jalapeñish pickles that inspired that train of thought are quite tasty.) And on my way home last night I started wondering whether expressions containing the word 'druthers' had spread to dialects that pronounce "I'd rather" with an a-sound instead of a schwa. (A helpful poster on a.u.e pointed out that 'druthers' has had about a hundred and forty years to spread to other dialiects...)) 
In the meantime, I've been continuing to shoot birds for practice, though I'm still having trouble with the swifts (the birds most likely to be any help in learning to shoot bats). I've noticed that birds are much more active some days than other days, and the swifts in particular spend most of their time at different altitudes on different days. The first few days of this week, they were about three times higher up (except when on their way to nesting sites) than yesterday or any time in the previous two weeks. An obvious guess would be that they're going where the insects are, but that just raises another question ... Larger birds, such as the one shown here, are easier, but even they are difficult to keep in the viewfinder when they fly close enough to see a lot of detail. (I'm mostly using 400/5.6 and 100-300/4 lenses.) I don't think I'll be bat-ready by Pennsic. But I'll certainly try for a bat photo there regardless, as usual. Anyhow, as a result of paying more attention to them lately, I've been noticing that birds make me smile. I've also been noticing birds using ground effect -- sparrows using it to slip down the sidewalk a quarter to half a block well under a wing-length off the ground without beating at all, and other birds using it to 'skip' off my 2nd-storey roof. I'd never paid enough attention to catch that before. I don't remember seeing the parakeets I grew up with doing it, but I can't tell you whether that's because I didn't know to look for it, or because parakeets don't do it, or merely that there wasn't enough room in the house for them to make use of it. Some other recent uploads: 
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| 12:36 pm | LJ Stuff The good news: LJ is planning to bring back something called 'Basic' accounts. The bad news: they're not the same as what we're used to calling 'basic accounts'; they'll have at least some advertising on them. (So they're really just bringing back the name, 'basic'.) The somewhat encouraging detail: they're asking for feedback on four different proposals for how to incorporate the advertising. The terribly discouraging detail: the change will affect existing basic accounts, not just ones created under the new setup. So those of us who thought existing basic accounts were being grandfathered in when they took away the ability to create new basic accounts ... will (according to the current plan) wind up with ad-supported accounts eventually regardless. Several folks have suggested using a name other than 'basic' for this new account type, such as 'Plus Lite'. Some of the proposals for how to add ads are much, much worse than others. But which is worst and which is least objectionable will depend on how you prioritise different aspects of using a blogging site like this. For the folks reading this somewhere other than LiveJournal, yeah, I'm still using LJ (... so far). Because that's where most of the conversation on my entries takes place so far. This entry won't be especially interesting to the folks who've already left LJ entirely or never signed up there to begin with, but I'm mirroring it like I do all my recent entries -- it's less headache than keeping track of having posted different things to different sites. And for the folks who are reading this on LiveJournal, a few just-in-case links: BL, CL, SC, JF, GJ, DJ, CJ, IJ. Watching to see how this plays out. Hoping for something better than what looks likely. |
| 5:32 am | QotD "Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading
experience and not their political programs, there would be much less
grief on earth. I believe ... that for someone who has read a lot of
Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for
someone who has read no Dickens." -- Joseph Brodsky
(thanks to
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| Thursday, July 17th, 2008 | |
| 7:51 pm | Hyperacusis and Helicopters I've been interested in photographing helicopters lately. Partly because helicopters are just kinda nifty, and partly because there are a bunch of 'em that frequently fly nearby. So I've been keeping an ear toward hearing them approach so I can go grab a long lens and lean out the window. When I'm experiencing fibromyalgia-related hyperacusis (auditory hyperacuity), I can hear them from too far away to be useful. Worse, I keep hearing sounds that resemble those made by helicopters, but aren't. I think that's from a certain pattern of truck traffic on I95. (Some nearer street vehicles also mimic helicopter sounds, but I can distinguish them more quickly because the direction the sound comes from changes in the wrong way. The sound that I think is coming from I95 has enough reflections -- the effect that makes 'ghosts' in analog television -- that it's hard to hear an exact direction in it. Reflections are a challenge regardless, but this seems to have extra bounces.) I'm still trying to learn to distinguish street-legal motorcycles, scooters, and illegal dirt bikes by sound at a distance. The scooters and the dirt bikes sound awfully similar. |
| 2:40 pm | Huh. Well that's a new one... An ambulance (the ... fifth? sixth? since I woke up) just wailed up Lombard St., and this time the cars in front of it, instead of ducking out of the way into the mostly empty parking lane -- as I would have done -- or driving normally as though they didn't realize what sirens and flashing lights mean -- as I've witnessed far too often here in B'more -- a row of four cars just came to a stop in the middle of the block in the traffic lane, forcing the ambulance to cross the double yellow line to get around them. |
| 5:32 am | QotD According to IMDB, it's been forty years ...
... since Yellow Submarine premiered. |
| Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 | |
| 5:32 am | QotD "It is better to solve the right problem the wrong way than the wrong problem the right way." -- Doug McIlroy [from wikipedia: "Dr. McIlroy is best known for having originally developed the Unix pipeline implementation, software componentry and several Unix tools, such as spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, and tr."] [And happy birthday to
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