Criminal Mastermind Captured

The Washington Post reports on the capture of "Magnum," a 110-pound black Labrador retriever with case of lawn-ornament kleptomania. The perp was identified after police publicized a surveillance video of the dog making off with a ceramic squirrel, chipmunk, and fox.

Guess that whole homeland security thing is paying off...

Dangling my feet

As any regular reader of this blog knows, I've been "passively" job hunting for years. This basically means that I keep my eyes open for interesting job opportunities, but don't really actively network or anything. The end result has been several applications and one job interview, but nothing really serious.

At the moment I'm in no huge rush to get out of my current job, although I'm still interested in what else is out there.

So when I was contacted by a headhunter trying to fill a job in Knoxville the other day, I didn't immediately tell him to take a hike. But I also didn't get all lovey dovey with him.

Basically, the job sounds like it would have pluses and minuses. With the biggest minus being that it's in Knoxville. I've always told myself that if I left my current job it would be to move back to the Northeast. So I'm not especially interested in this.

On the other hand, everyone has a price. <rationalization>And Knoxville is closer to the northeast by about three hours... :-) </rationalization> So I sent him a note back essentially saying that I might be interested if they were paying about 25%-35% more than I'm making now, but it would still depend a lot on the particular company (which he's being cagey about.) I'm not expecting anything to come out of this, but it makes life interesting to have it floating around out there.

Back in the land of air conditioning and electric lights...

The power came back on. Thus concludes this episode of "Frontier House Nashville."

Blacked Out

Owing to recent large thunderstorms, I am sitting at home in the dark. Lucky for you, I figured out how to blog from my cell phone.

Modern Marvels: Contextual Advertising

I am continually amused by the contextual advertising chosen by the cutting edge technology over at Google. For example, there has been a lot of discussion about the reunion on our class message board. Google has provided helpful advertising to go along with this: three of the ads are for reunion planning services. One (in German) is for a travel agency that books reunion trips. The reunion theme continues with the final ad: "Ready for BOTOX® Cosmetic?" it inquires. "Order Your Welcome Kit today."

Creepy popunder ads

It has been brought to our attention here at Kumquat headquarters that some of you may be experiencing unpleasant popunder ads when browsing this site. Personally, our Google toolbar was doing a good job at shielding us, so we hadn't noticed. But we aim to please, and wouldn't want the 15 people who visit this site every day to take their procrastination business elsewhere. So we have decided to christen a blue-ribbon investigative panel. Here is their preliminary report:

Whatever is causing the pop-unders, it appears to be hidden in script being pulled from another server, since viewing source does not reveal the offending code. There is no smoking gun, but this guy has a theory that Bravenet has begun serving popunder ads with its "free" counters at random intervals.

To test this theory, we're going to expunge any bravenet-related code from our templates. Please let us know if you continue to see popunders when you visit.

I thought things were going to calm down...

... after the reunion, but it turns out things have been crazier than ever. Lately, every time I ponder a blog entry I think about how much catching up I have to do, and then I go watch The Simpsons instead. So below is my attempt to catch up in one fell swoop, hopefully facilitating a return to the normal level of inane drivel in this space.

Let me back up and start at the beginning:

• The Reunion -- The reunion was a blast. And I'm not just saying that because I helped plan it. As previously mentioned, we had money left over, and started out by giving everyone $10 and a free drink ticket. That probably helped. But the really fun thing was just seeing all these people again. In my role as de facto class webmaster, I have a vague idea of what a lot of people are up to. But in terms of really keeping in touch, there are only a few folks that I actually communicate with regularly. So it was a pretty cool thing to see all these people in the same place having a great time. Everyone seems to be doing well -- and it's amazing how many different paths people have taken. A lot of people still live in Maryland, but there are also outposts in Seattle, Florida, St. Louis, NYC, and just about every other corner of the country. There are doctors, lawyers, actors, computer programmers, marine biologists, aircraft carrier drivers, and (yikes!) parents of four children.

  The evening was, if anything, too short (the hotel cut off our electricity to get rid of us!) and ended with an increasingly drunken party at a local dive bar on Route 1.

  I documented the thing pretty thoroughly over here. And, no, I'm not really sure what was going on right here. We'd had a few drinks, ok?

• The Tradeshow -- Entirely by accident, the reunion coincided with a major trade show in Washington, so I the company actually paid my way to DC! Once the reunion was over, I spent a few days hiking around a massive exhibit floor in DC's brand new convention center. I also managed to schedule a visit to another division of our company on Wednesday to look at a system we're considering buying.

  On Thursday I was supposed to join my Mom to go down to my grandfather's farm and see my grandmother in the nursing home. However, my mom was planning this little excursion, and I was shanghaied and forced to fix computers at her office. So we were off to a late start to begin with. This was followed by the two hour drive to the farm, a hurried lunch at the Stanardsville Dairy Queen, and quick visits to the farm and the nursing home.

  My mom was supposed to be back for a 7:00 meeting, and I had a 9:00 flight, so we burned rubber up Route 29, only to hit massive traffic jams as we approached the city. (You would think heading into DC in rush hour would be easy, but not so much.) In an attempt to avoid the beltway traffic jam, we tried staying on I-66 toward downtown. When that didn't work, we got off, and partly due to garbled directions phoned in by my dad, ended up winding across half of northern Virginia before finally cutting through downtown and back up into Maryland. My mom was late for her meeting, and meanwhile my dad was throwing all my remaining belongings into my suitcase and rushing to meet us so that I could get to the airport on time. Needless to say this wasn't really the most relaxing day.

• Back in Nashville, I figured everything would calm down for a while, and got ready to enjoy a complete weekend with no plans. Which worked well, until Sunday morning, when one of our key servers had a heart attack on the table during scheduled maintenance and refused to wake up. So I was called in to work and spent most of the next three days there. We finally got things back to normal at 5:00 AM on Tuesday.

• Independence Day -- Once the crisis was resolved, I made a split-second decision to fly back up to DC for the 4th of July weekend. My yougest brother was home from the summer camp where he's currently employed, so I got to see him for the first time since last winter. I was pondering the idea of trying to go downtown for the big national parade, but am glad I didn't since it was called off early due to a deluge of biblical proportions. Instead we had a quick family cookout in between rainstorms, and then I went to a party at a friend's apartment in the city. Last year they had a good view of the fireworks through their window, but this year the smoke was blowing towards us and we mostly saw clounds. Still, it was fun. As I drove back up Georgia Avenue toward home, the city streets were sputtered and popped as the locals experimented with their own (illegal) fireworks. It was fun driving through it all.
  Click for more photos

  Takoma Park had been the subject of good-natured ribbing for delaying its festivities until Monday, but the city had the last laugh when the day dawned sunny and dry. Unfortunately my brother left that morning to meet a new group of campers. But my parents and I did our annual march over to old-town for the festivities. As always, the parade was a hoot, with various organizations and neighborhood associations turning out. As the Post pointed out,

  Grant Avenue offered up a giant gray-and-yellow cardboard Humvee that was propelled Fred Flintstone-style by nearly a dozen hot and sweaty denizens of that street. Labeled "Weapon of Mass Consumption" for its figuratively unquenchable thirst for fuel, it careened wildly right and left along the route with Dan Robinson as driver.

  "Every five seconds, we run out of gas," he explained with a grin.

  The presidential campaign was never far removed, with marchers in the Sherman Avenue "Bush Country" entry chanting, tongue firmly in cheek, "Don't think -- vote Bush" as they passed by. "Billionaires for Bush" appeared a few minutes later, in tuxedos and evening gowns.

  We spent part of the afternoon planning my parents' trip to Italy this fall, and then grilled again for dinner. After dinner my dad and I trekked over to Takoma Middle School for the local fireworks. And thus ended by Independece Day extravaganza -- the next morning I was back at work and trying to catch up. So this is only the second time I've spent a full day at home since the middle of June. Whew.

So that's basically where things are now. I'm off again to California for my cousin's wedding in a couple of weeks, and am planning to spend a week or so exploring out that way. (I actually don't have a return flight right now, so maybe I'll just decide to stay...)

Whew...

What I'm up to

In reunion planning hell until tonight. Yesterday's errands included going to the bank to pick up $1000 in $10 bills, buying nametags and certificate blanks, and trying to teach a kinkos guy how to use a computer. Plus dealing with a major server failure back in Nashville last night.

More of the same today. Reunion is tonight, and then off to the convention for tomorrow through Tuesday. After that, maybe a trip to the farm, and/or visiting another division of the company to see a new system in action. Back to Nashville next Friday. Whee.

A manager's lament

Editor's note: What follows is a bitter rant that I will no doubt regret in the morning.

I feel like all of my interactions with senior management go something like this:

Me: Here's what I need to do what you're asking.
Them: No, what we need is the absolute bare bones estimate. No frills.
Me: That's what this is.
Them: So you're saying that this is the absolute minimum your department can get by on.
Me: Yes.
Them: Ok, here's half of that. And from now on can you also have your staff wash the windows and empty the trash?

I am really freakin' tired of this. I work for a Fortune 200 company that pays regular dividends to its shareholders, yet to hear folks around here talk you'd think we're subsisting on government cheese. I mean, we ration Post-It! notes, for crying out loud. And our mileage is reimbursed at a whopping $0.24 (bumped up from $0.22 due to the gas price increases.)

At the moment I'm supposed to feel grateful because this year they only cut my laptop budget by 50%, instead of last year's 100%. Even if the budget were fully funded, we would still have 6+ year old machines in our fleet.

And I also found out today that some of my staff had simply been ignoring a public-facing voice mail box for the last three months. I can't blame them, because I've been pressuring them to do other things, and they simply don't have enough time. But I'm utterly frustrated that the company doesn't provide us with sufficient human and financial resources to do what is expected.

At some level, I know things could be worse. I mean, there are companies in our industry that are laying people off. But at the same time, I can't help wondering if things could also be better.

Supreme court considers making history; instead goes for pizza

After agreeing to hear a controversial case on the constitutionality of the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, the Supreme Court yesterday decided to weasel out of the debate by finding that the guy in question didn't have standing to sue. This leaves unresolved the core issue of how one reconciles the 1950s-era congressional insertion of "under God" with the the constitutional admonition that "congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."

"Passionate & Opinionated" vs. "Fair & Balanced"

I thought this was pretty interesting. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Oppenheimer points out that the most interesting and challenging teachers tend to be those with strong, passionate points of view that are expressed in the classroom:

Disagreement is a prime engine for advancing human knowledge -- and besides, hearing boldly stated opinions is tremendous fun. For smart students to feel challenged, and for dull students to lose their cobwebs, they need to learn that academic subjects are both a matter of grave moral concern and a source of exhilaration, worth becoming overheated about. They learn this not by being invited to care, but by watching professors who manifestly do care. For the college professor, the proper pedagogic role is not as facilitator, coaxing children into thinking, but as role model, showing young men and women what a thinking mind looks like.

My suggestion that professors are too mild, not sufficiently opinionated, may at first sound ludicrous. It is well known that professors take their fields too seriously. They are too inclined to think that second-century Roman coinage is a matter of ultimate concern, too willing to end friendships over what Willa Cather's lesbianism might mean for her depictions of wheat fields. But while professors may get contrary at conferences and in journal articles, those same professors are often profoundly milquetoast in their classrooms, so eager to get in opposing points of view and to assure students that no opinion could be wholly wrong that they forget to have opinions themselves.

Yes, some professors are known for "advancing an agenda," which is thought to be a bad thing. But for the most part, they hold to the well-meaning liberal dogma that students ought to figure things out for themselves. That leads to the kind of teaching that all of us dread and yet engage in: "Very good. I see where you're coming from. Now, does anyone have another point of view?"

I wonder if the same calculus applies to attempts by the news media to be "fair and balanced" (in the real sense, not the Fox sense). By trying to present every point of view equally, are journalists creating gutless prose that fails to inspire meaningful intellectual debate?

Justification for travel?

Phileas Fogg had won his wager, and had made his journey around the world in eighty days. To do this he had employed every means of conveyance--steamers, railways, carriages, yachts, trading-vessels, sledges, elephants. The eccentric gentleman had throughout displayed all his marvellous qualities of coolness and exactitude. But what then? What had he really gained by all this trouble? What had he brought back from this long and weary journey?

Nothing, say you? Perhaps so; nothing but a charming woman, who, strange as it may appear, made him the happiest of men!

Truly, would you not for less than that make the tour around the world?

-- The conclusion of
Around the World in
Eighty Days, by Jules
Verne, which I just
finished re-reading.

What I've been up to

Sorry for the blogging dry spell... Here's what I've been up to for the last week or two:

I spent most of the week doing various things related to a conference being held here in Nashville. One of the departments I supervise at work was on tour on Saturday, so we spent a lot of time frantically straghtening things up and getting ready. I think it ended up going pretty well.

Sunday I spent part of the day preparing a Powerpoint for my own presentation on Tuesday. In the evening I made an abortive attempt to meet up with someone who was supposed to give me a ticket to one of the conference events. I spent an hour wandering around Opryland, but never found him. So instead I went home, grabbed my new camera, and went down to the riverfront where a carnival was set up. (Might post a few of the pictures when I have a chance to upload them.) I ran into a couple of other amateur photographers doing the same thing.

After that I spent a fun week out at Opryland doing various conference-related things. The conference was great -- I learned a lot, and met some pretty fascinating people. (Oh, and never let it be said that librarians don't know how to throw a party.)

Since that's over, I'm trying to dig out at work, and have also moved on to the next planning crisis: the 10-year-reunion that I'm co-chairing next weekend. While I'm in D.C. for that, I'm also going to stop in at another conference for work.

Today was the first day that I've really been able to totally goof off in a few weeks, and I took advantage -- sleeping in, watching some TV, talking to one of my Boston friends, and reading. Tomorrow I guess I should try to accomplish something a little more productive.

New camera

Last week I finally broke down and bought the new camera I've been pondering for quite a while. I don't think the DSLR is going to replace my point-and-shoot entirely -- it's a lot clunkier to carry around, for one thing. But it should give me more flexibility in terms of lenses, time-exposures, etc.

Monday evening I went walking in Shelby Bottoms for about two hours, and brought the camera along to play with. I'm still learning how to use it, and I don't think anything I took is really that great. But it was fun to experiment. I've already decided that I need to get a longer lens than the 18-55mm it came with. (Actually more like a 28-90mm lens due to the smaller digital image sensor.)

The only problem with buying lenses is that the good ones are really expensive. Like more than the camera. I think I'm probably going to let my checkbook cool down for a bit before I send more money over to B&H.

Personal Enrichment

Our company has an Internet station set up in the cafeteria, mainly so that employees without computers can access the intranet, benefits website, etc. I was at work late, and went down to get a Diet Coke. There was a guy sitting at the machine surfing, while his friend microwaved a bag of popcorn. "Check this out," he says to his friend. "Decapitations by helicopter." I glanced over his shoulder. Sure enough, there were pictures.

Daily Yearly Bread

Continuing this weekend's theme of "all kitchen, all the time," I will now tell you about the loaf of bread. Not just any loaf of bread. The loaf of of Harris-Teeter brand "Premier Selection 9-Grain Enriched Bread" that I purchased last September or October and then accidentally left in a cabinet until now.

I'm sure you're expecting a scary-sounding description of mold and decay. But the actual result of this little inadvertent science experiment was even scarier. The bread looks and feels just like it did the day it left the supermarket. No mold. No staleness. Just plain old spongy American-style mass-produced bread.

Apparently they pump this stuff so full of preservatives now that it can basically stand decades in storage with little loss of its basic bread nature. Let's contrast this to bread from the local bakery, which tastes great, but basically starts going bad after a day or two.

So obviously store-bought bread has some powerful chemical juju going on. For all we know, Harris-Teeter just made one giant batch of super-durable bread made in 1987, and they've been selling it ever since. Kind of scary, if you ask me.

Truck Balls

I'm thinking about building a new Linux box to use as a media center/development server/web server/file server/etc. Ideally I'd like to get one that can just fit under my desk rather than taking up a whole shelf in my storage room. So I did a google search for "small form factor." It came back with helpful links to a variety of small PC vendors. But one of the adword results did't quite seem to fit:

I ask you, my friends, is this a great country or what?

My kingdom for some soap

Speaking of better living through chemistry, what I wouldn't give right now for some Boraxo. This morning I went to painting project sponsored by Hands on Nashville, and managed to cover my hands with latex paint. Boraxo is the only thing I know that gets this stuff off without a fight. Maybe I'll go on a soap expedition in a few minutes.

Kitchen declared federal disaster area

In addition to the Grape-Nuts fiasco (see below), I am also dealing with a massive ant infestation in my kitchen. When they first showed up, they just went after some hard candy that had been sitting in a mason jar on my windowsill for a few months. I got rid of that temptation, but new they were interested, and immediately commissioned ant-explorers to forage in new areas. Like the cabinets, the toaster, the sink, and just about everywhere else.

So yesterday morning I made an emergency trip to Cumberland Hardware. If you're imagining Home Depot, think again. This is the sort of old-school hardware shop that has been exterminated by the big boxes in most places. The moment you walk into the tiny shop, one of the proprietors quizzes you about what you're looking for. They then instantly locate it from amidst the floor-to-ceiling clutter. Once I asked for a lightbulb that they didn't have, but helpfully they sent me to another shop two doors down. I'd give you a web address, but they apparently don't have one. Which figures -- their main concession to modern technology is a cash register powered by a metal crank on its side!

Anyway, they sold me this stuff called Terro. It's a little bottle filled with clear goop that looks sort of like sugar syrup. And from what I understand, that's basically what it is, albeit with a dollop or two of boric acid thrown in for good measure. The idea is that you leave this stuff laying around, the ants go into a feeding frenzy on it, take a bunch of it home to the missus, and the die a horrible death. So far they're definitely snarfing it down as fast as I can ladle it out, but I haven't noticed a marked decrease in the number of ants marching in.

Too bad there aren't more of these guys around here.