Rick Keir

Happy Bata, Birthday!

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:39:31 GMT

uh, that's Happy Birthday, juliebata!

Briefs (of the non-boxer-or-brief sort)

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:15:55 GMT

Two good books this week. The first is The Billionaire's Vinegar, about the 20 year history of the Thomas Jefferson bottle of wine which sold at auction for over $150,000, and the lawsuits and fraud charges that followed. Sound a bit rarefied to be entertaining? Consider taht Will Smith is part of the consortium that bought the movie rights to the book (HBO bought the movie rights for the New Yorker article I link to, above).

The second is Defining the Wind, which feels like a long, friendly New Yorker article about science. It wanders through the history of the Beaufort Scale, who Beaufort was, the era of science and exploration he was a part of, and a lot of other topics presented in a way that reminds me of a really good lecture by a well-rounded, senior professor. I'd read it before, but came across it at the library and grabbed it on a whim.

an observation: it's two shirt season

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:45:52 GMT

Once again, we've hit summer, and I have two shirts hanging behind my office door. One is the one I wore in this morning, which was a bit sweaty by the time I arrived, and which I'll put back on when I leave. One is the one I carried in, which is hanging there for when I arrive tomorrow. There's also an empty hanger, where the shirt I'm actually wearing was hanging when I arrived and changed into it.

This is preferable to the season we just left, which was "two pairs of socks and shoes season".

If I have any more fun I'll be dead

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 04:38:58 GMT

I'm spending a long weekend down at Mom's, as my sister and her family are in town from California. I drove down on Thursday night.

They came over from their hotel late in the morning on Friday, and I played with my younger niece (7) and nephew (3) all day. I'd bought them bubble wands, and my nephew took his (a sort of foot long test tube full of soap, with a long skinny bubble wand that screws into the top) and promptly proclaimed it "my sword", and began hacking the air with it. Quickly, though, he decided it was a baseball bat, and wanted to play baseball with his father. (His sister knew how to properly use a bubble wand, and I got some cute pictures of her wide eyed at the big bubbles she was blowing). A half hour or so of baseball eventually sheared off the wand part, so I tootled over to the local shopping center and quickly picked up some Wiffle balls, a couple of foam padded bats, and a Nerf baseball.

Then my niece & nephew ran me ragged for the rest of the day. When they left, it was about 8:45, and I told my mom I'd load the dishwasher in a bit. I read about 2 pages of my book and fell asleep on the couch, rising at 11;15 when Mom went to bed. I crashed myself, and we didn't clean up till the morning.

Today I paced myself a bit better, giving the boy some Matchbox cars, a paint brush and a bucket of water (he painted roads for the cars), while his sister got sidewalk chalk to draw with and a jump rope. I told my sister that kid's toys should be rated by the degree of exertion they were likely to extract from an adult! Then my brother arrived, along with my older niece Maggie (who just finished her freshman year of college) and nephew Robert, who's just finishing high school. I turned the kids loose on them and poor Maggie was suckered into many a lethal game of catch, which mostly seemed to involve her standing against a wall while the kids threw balls at her, varied with games that involved both of them climbing on her and grabbing her. Occasionally I came over and picked up one by the feet while Maggie grabbed their arms, and we'd swing the kid back and forth. My niece always demanded "Do it again! Go SUPER high!", but we told her we were too old to swing her super high (besides understanding that her mother probably would not approve).

Later on, my Aunt and cousin dropped by, and eventually Lucy made it down from Madison about the time my brother and family left, so Lucy got the final shift of kid minding duty. She took the kids out hunting fossils among the rocks under the evergreens in front of Mom's condo, and they were taken by her genuine enthusiasm for what were (to my eye) a bunch of ordinary looking rocks. After they left, Lucy and I watched a "Jeeves and Wooster" with Mom, while doing laundry and dishes.

For Sunday, I have two sets of plastic kids golf clubs (an excellent investment in kind minding at a mere $5 apiece, including three balls: I am looking forward to watching a lot of golfing), and I have some hopes of making it to the end of the day. I won't have Lucy around to help, as she has to be back in Madison tomorrow afternoon.

In other news, I've been re-reading a bunch of P. G. Wodehouse, and am once again amazed at his sheer skill. Most writers don't have more than one or two volumes in print at a time even while they live, and usually go out of print completely shortly after they die. He started writing before World War I, was still writing when I was in high school. It's been over 30 years since he died, and my local Borders has 8 of his books available in hardback editions. I know people who think he just wrote goofy comedies, but seriously: you don't achieve his level of success for as long a run as he's had without some awesome talent. (Which is not to say that he's to everyone's taste, but to write him off as just silly the way I've seen some people do is a fairly uninformed view.)

Beware a man in a room

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 22:22:47 GMT

Just got done working with my colleague Peter on a plan for some IT security brown bag talks. I was reminded, once again, of why it's often better to work in at least a pair. In our talk, we came up with outline for an entire talk we could add to the series, just while wrestling with an announcement email, plus an idea for how to reach a whole segment of campus based on personal contacts that exist within our group. A book on managing programmers once offered the maxim "Beware a man in a room", and it's good advice for many reasons. A lot of us in IT are natural introverts, and we stay in our offices working by ourselves all too often. The eyes of others find your mistakes, and the ideas of others spur our own creativity. I feel exhilarated by the time, even if "two hours of working on a brown bag program" sounds like a deadly dull meeting.

On an unrelated note, I'm listening to Coverville's Gender Bending Covers episode. Mark Weigle's "867-5309/Jimmy" is amazing. Changing "Jenny" to "Jimmy" flips the song from a vaguely creepy stalker song with a pop beat, to a very poignant coming out of the closet song.

Jimmy Jimmy, you're the boy for me.
You don't know me, but you make me so happy.
I tried to call you before but I lost my nerve...
I tried my imagination but I was disturbed.

overheard - movie panel

Mon, 26 May 2008 06:53:16 GMT

the midnight movie panel:

"Then all the soldiers start to get killed off one by one, while the women start to lose their clothes...."

"Spoiler alert!"

overheard

Sat, 24 May 2008 01:46:16 GMT

In the hallway: "Torchwood slash fiction? But that would have to be hetero-normative!"

overheard

Fri, 23 May 2008 22:31:28 GMT

At breakfast: "I'm going to go check my email, but all I'm gonna have is spam, because everyone I know is here."

At the Gathering: "Don't inhale the balloons."

what happens when you hurry

Thu, 22 May 2008 20:33:15 GMT

I just closed a document and said "no" to "Save Changes".

It wasn't the window I thought it was.

Next year, I take off TWO days before Wiscon, in hopes of getting there ontime and unfrazzled.

Wiscon - see you there - someday

Thu, 22 May 2008 18:46:41 GMT

currently I'm still trying to dig out from work stuff. Our yearly cycle seems to dump a lot of things into this week! I'll be down there late today and looking for my LJ friends who have already arrived.

One medical note: if I seem to be ignoring you in the hallway, be aware that my eyesight has gotten really poor due to cataracts, especially in low light conditions, and I often don't recognize faces at a distance anymore. It's not you, it's my eyesight!

This is not a long term thing, as my eye doctor has told me that long before they start affecting my ability to do things like drive, he's going to want to remove them because they're interfering with his ability to monitor my glaucoma. Tentatively, I expect to get this fixed sometime next winter.

Back to prepping for my 2pm conference call.

"look on my works, and despair"

Thu, 15 May 2008 21:13:56 GMT

From a technical list I'm on:
[product name] was not stable, but is better now as it was sold off to a company that pretty much stopped development , which did make it more stable.

Victory in California

Thu, 15 May 2008 18:37:48 GMT

Tears of joy as same-sex marriage advocates get the word

My first thoughts were an old Violet Blue column from the SF Chronicle:

Pundits and politicians want to scare people with San Francisco values because they don't fundamentally believe sex is healthy. They're the dinosaurs, and we're the meteor.

"I thought this day would never come..."

Fri, 09 May 2008 15:53:45 GMT

the other night, my mother said "Oh, I have a question about how the TiVo works."

I was starting to think that she would never actually use it, but now that baseball season is here, and the writer's strike is over, she's gotten more interested in being able to control the TV than this winter, when she was watching whatever rerun happened to be on when she decided to take a break and watch some TV.

Brieflings - some unrelated notes

Tue, 06 May 2008 23:10:08 GMT

Thing that made me happy: Apple has a nationwide tour running this Spring, with professional photographers demoing Aperture. UW Madison had Steve Simon, a photojournalist, for our speaker. At the start, he was talking about how important it was to a journalist to always be ready for something to happen. "In fact, this is so important that I have a prize for the first shutter I hear..." Click, as my Nikon went off. "I think that's the fastest that's happened so far." Because I've known for a long time that you should always have your camera with you and ready. (Okay, I don't always have one that ready, but I do try to carry something with me everywhere, and to have it as ready to go as it allows.

The "prize" was just getting a free copy of Aperture right then, instead of having to wait till the end of the talk, but that was okay. The fun part was his comment.

I stumbled across Business Time by Flight of the Conchords, and I've had the song in my head this week. If you don't know this song, picture one of those old deep voiced Barry White songs, as written by Smoove B. Move from The Onion. There's several versions of it up on Youtube - look for "Conchords" and "Business Time".

Oh yeah, that’s right baby
Girl, tonight we're gonna make love
You know how I know?
Because it's Wednesday...and Wednesday night is the night that we usually make love.

Monday night is my night to cook,
Tuesday night is the night that we go to your mother's, but
Wednesday night is the night that we make love.

and
You say something like "Is that it?"
I know what you're trying to say,
you're trying to say "Oh yeah, that's it!"

Disturbing headline in the student paper: Faculty to Look At Snow Issues If you've ever worked at a University, you know how hard it is to get researchers to pay attention to any problems outside their own area, so it's disturbing (but not surprising) that snow this year has been bad enough to get their attention.

overheard

Fri, 02 May 2008 18:56:37 GMT

Six year old and his parent, while I was having coffee yesterday:

"I didn't DO it! And if I did, I FORGOT!"

an unexpected pleasure

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 21:57:26 GMT

Some of my ideas of friendship are those of the Tang and Sung dynasty Chinese scholar class: an ideal friendship is one where you can be separated for years and then pick up exactly where you left off, as though the other person had just stepped outside for a moment, instead of having been gone for a decade. This was a necessary concept in China because, to minimize corruption, the government moved you to a new district every few years, and never let you serve in your home district, so separation from your friends was the rule.

tandw posted a birthday greeting to a friend today, and I found that another friend from many years ago, naughtyaelf, was now on LiveJournal. It's been a decade since we moved in the same circles, but she responded at once and it felt like no time had passed. I am so happy, and so blessed.

The Way That Can Be PowerPointed Is Not The True Way

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:13:55 GMT

Spent the morning at the annual half day Academic Staff Leadership Institute, a training event for us academic staff.

Good idea: The first presenter was using PowerPoint, and had a neat idea. Instead of leaving his title slide up before the presentation, he was running a slideshow of Martin Luther King quotes which were related to his presentation, but were not part of the presentation itself.

Not so good idea: every five minutes, Windows Update popped up a dialog box telling him to reboot his computer. Problems like this are why I maintain a separate account on my llaptop that is used only for making presentations. The desktop is a solid, dark color. There are no applications that load at startup, so there are fewer opportunities to be bugged about updating a program. There is no screensaver that comes on.

Great idea: The next presenter had a better idea. He had this device called an "Overhead Projector", which does not need a network connection, can read material produced on any operating system, and uses a format called a "transparency" for storage of presentations. As a bonus, the presentation can be revised on the fly using a handheld pointing device called a "marker pen". I think we should buy one of those things: this is a technology that is going to be very big.

sometimes, life hands you your straight line

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:28:11 GMT

Got to this morning's meeting a few minutes early. My friend Steve was passing out his "Identity Management Principles" handout and remarked that "I put this on the agenda but I don't think this will be controversial, it's mostly Mom and Apple Pie."

I opened my briefcase, pulled out my copy of the draft he'd circulated, and pointed to my scribbled note "M & A.P."

that about sums it up

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:53:11 GMT

Co-worker: They have enough money to get off the ground, but not enough money to fly.

He was describing the plight of many departments, where there's enough money to get an IT project started, like building a web application, but not enough money to pay for ongoing maintenance. I still hear from departmental IT staff who say that Windows 95 is still necessary to support their department, because they have no money to get away from old DOS-based applications that don't run on anything after that.

If you're going to run out of money, it's a bad idea to be in the air when you do so.

overheard

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 19:40:30 GMT

Vendor, explaining how they came to add a scripting interface to their product:

Then we were trying to sell this to the military, and they asked us if we could openize the product.

overheard

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 19:13:14 GMT

Overheard, at an actually very well done product demo:

Q: Is that freeware?

A: No, that's big bucks ware.

an odd dream

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:35:53 GMT

Sunday morning, I was dreaming that I was in the house I grew up in, but with mostly the neighbors from the street I live on now. We were all outside because the old Donohue house was being moved by blimp to a new location, while the family followed behind in some sorrt of biplane. I got some great photos of the house sailing through the sky, with the happy family doing circles around it and underneath and above it.

It was a bummer to wake up and realize that these were not, in fact, real photos :)

where are the ice trucks of bygone years?

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:08:12 GMT

My mom turned 90 yesterday.

I'm reading Fred Saberhagen's time travel story A Century of Progress, with its memories of Chicago in the 1930s, when he was growing up there. There's a detail about the sign with numbered corners ("25", "50", "75", etc.) that you put up in your window, the appropriate corner facing up so that the iceman would know how many pounds to drop off.

I mentioned this to mom, and she remembered how the ice would be loaded in the truck, scored in 25 pound blocks, and how the iceman would have to take his pick and hack at the score lines till the block came free. There would always be chips of ice scattered on the truck floor, and in the summer she and the other kids would chase after the truck, and the iceman would give them all chips of ice to suck on.

We also talked about glove and hat shopping, but I have to get to a meeting now.

resurfacing...ping!...ping!

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:49:11 GMT

Because all my local friends are doin' it: complaints about the weather.

I got stuck in Illinois last weekend, after "Rain followed by freezing followed by snow on top of the newly formed ice, party on, dudes, because then the temperature is gonna drop below zero." We can't even hope for an early thaw, because there's so much snow piled up that everyone's basements will flood.

It was 15 degrees below zero this morning. Fahrenheit. Bored now.

fish and guests, after 3 days

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 07:47:42 GMT

we went to Point Reyes for 3 nights and 4 days, of which I will write sometime (probably on the plane back home). Yesterday was largely taken up by getting Sean ready for his time down in southern California on his refresher course, printing maps of wireless access, getting paperwork finished, packing, and so on. I spent a lot of time trying to make an old Windows 98 laptop usable for him (Microsoft doesn't even support 98 anymore, and even getting it up to where MS stopped issuing patches for security holes is a pain).

Sean left today, and Mary and I spent time working on our own projects. She had a late afternoon appt in San Francisco so we rode the BART in. I walked around taking pictures in the rain and we met at Union Square for the ride home.

Tonight, at dinner, she counted out how long I have left, and then said "That's it. You can't leave. You have to stay at least another month." I am lucky to have this place, where I am family and not a guest.

Sean comes back Saturday in time for dinner, then does the same thing the next few weeks, and then lives down there more or less continuously for the four week clinical practice part of the course.