Category Archives: GeekWorld

GeekWorld, Our Land and Home, Weather +Climate

Kohler Generators

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32  bar steep rise 30.22 4mph dewpoint 24 Spring

               Waning Crescent Moon of Winds 

“I simply cannot think that human beings will be able to discard their desire and need for something that is sublime, something that transports them, takes them out of time, takes them out of the banality of the everyday world . . . to make something is tremendously powerful in and of itself.” -Sean Scully

“Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long they live, although it is in the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man’s power to live long.” – Seneca

One last snowblowing adventure.  The snow has already melted off the driveway and the sidewalk.  It will remain longer on the yard and in the woods, but the days of the snowcover are near an end.  Even so, it was nice to get out one more time and see the arc of white curving up then fall toward the earth.  Good to be outside. (We’ll set aside being there with a two-cycle engine.)

Roger came out today from Allied Generators.  When we went through a spate of disaster planning last fall, we realized our home would not fare well in a power outage.  Why?  No water since we get our pump from a well.  That’s the big one.  We could be here with all the water we needed 180 feet below us and no way to get it to the surface.  Dumb.  Then, of course, there’s powering up the cell phones and the computers for necessary communication.  If Kate is to survive in a reasonably mellow state, we need the air con to work, too.  All of our appliances have electric starter switches.  And so on.  

The result of this got me to looking at generators.  Consumer reports pointed out an obvious problem with gasoline powered generators.  If there’s a problem with the electricity, filling station pumps don’t work.  So, how do you supply the generator?  Gas gets old, too, so storing much at home is problematic.  Anyhow, the Kohler line of generators run on natural gas which solves that problem.  They also supply enough power to manage the whole house.  Roger will send us an estimate this afternoon.  It might be a sledge hammer to take care of a mosquito sized problem, but we’ll see.

Piece of trivia:  Kohler got into the generator business in 1918 so customers could use their flush toilets and their bathtubs.  What da ya know?

I got on a tear this last week or so, completing several major tasks in a short period of time.  It reminded me of the way I used to work, juggling many complicated tasks over long periods of time.  Back then I was productive, really productive.  The old work method felt good to slip into for a while.  Don’t know that I’d want to sustain it anymore.

GeekWorld, Travel

I Feel Like a Vampire

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Mid afternoon and I feel like a vampire, driven inside by the sun. 

As you might have noticed, the second post I lost the server coughed up not once but twice.  Unfortunately, it really really likes it and won’t let me retire one copy.  So it will remain until I return home to a more stable cyber environment.

Today has been slow.  Real slow.  I took a nap, read.  Got up, had a snack, read.  Then Kate came back from broiling in the sun and we talked. Now she’s taking a nap.

The indolent side of vacation has always driven me up a wall. I like to be out exploring, experiencing, discovering.  So, just to be contrary I’m trying to see what others see in this complete snuggle offered by a huge resort complex.

Here the main entrance has an expansive view of the Pacific and comfy chairs near the large gate like structure that opens the hotel up to the outside.  I sat in one of those and read for awhile, then wandered over to Kate beside the pool, then up to the room where I’ve been since. 

GeekWorld, Memories, Travel

Bloggin with Palm Trees

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18  89%  28%  0mph NNE  bar 30.12 steady windchill17  Imbolc

              Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

Opened up my e-mail program today and had 29 messages.  A big morning for me is 5 or 6.  What the hell? 

Another lesson in the cyber world.  There are bots that crawl the web seeking out certain words or phrases, then link their source to another web page.  In some instances that’s google and can help others find your website if the title words you use resonate.  In most instances and certainly the most annoying instances the links go back to such intriguing locations as Addiction Levitra, Texas Facts Auto Insurance, Mexico Amoxil and HCL Dosing Tramadol.  Each one linked by some $%#@! algorithim to the words I had inadvertently used as the title for a post:  damn it!   A month or so ago I had a post that had the words body and flesh in it.  This was about the earth and her products.  You can imagine the links I got then.  Cyber world folks call these ping backs. 

I have had three ping backs out of hundreds that I kept, that is didn’t delete as spam.  One came in from a website for the Teaching Company from whom I buy the occasional lecture course, another from the NFL website and a recent one from Paul Douglas, the WCCO weather guy and his Climate Change website.  It’s a good thing wordpress has a straightforward, if not quick, way of eliminating ping backs.

In case you missed it–like you live in Singapore or Bangkok for instance–today is Super Bowl Sunday.  I tried to find out much beer we consume on Super Bowl Sunday but according to the Beer Institute (I know, but there really is one.) it’s not possible to track single day consumption.  A spokesman did say, “the Super Bowl is a good event in the ‘off season’ (cold months) to drive volume”

Each year I wonder why I watch football, yet, somehow, I’ve developed an interest and now have enough years watching to have a sense of historical perspective.  That makes it, for me, much more interesting. So, yes, I’ll be there in my seat, though sans beer, sans snacks and sans favorite, though I lean toward the Giants just because they’re the underdogs.

 Allison wondered if I plan to blog while in Hawai’i.  Yep.  Like football I’ve developed an interest in blogging, though this interest predates my football jones by quite a few years.  I have three bookshelves of journals of various types and sizes.  I imagine this habit came with mother’s milk, or should I say father’s ink and lead.  Dad wrote a weekly column for the Alexandria Times-Tribune, Smalltown USA, for many, many years. 

There is something about being able to read the breadcrumbs of your life, sprinkled out at various ages and stages.  In some instances it’s revelatory, in others it’s “Oh, my god.  What was I thinking?”  I suppose its a similar feeling artists get from paintings and sketches made over many years.  Or photo albums and all those home movies.

Family, GeekWorld

The Mobius Strip of Consciousness

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-10  48%  18%  2mph WWS bar30.16 rises windchill-12  Winter

             Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

Ordered a teaching company course on the brain.  I hope this will jump start a dive into the small library of neuroscience books I’ve purchase over the last few years.  The whole brain/mind debate fascinates me, as did the physiology of the brain, that is, just what is in the brain and what function does it have?  Another question of deep interest to me is the gathering and processing of sensory data.  How does it happen?  What does it mean for our connection to the apparent world beyond our senses?  (a philosophical question)

The most important question is that of the mind.  Is it a function of the brain only?  Or, does the mind arise as a thing sui generis?  A small group of thinkers on this problem call themselves the Mysterians.  They believe the problem can never be solved.  Since the brain/mind question involves a human organ and the defining human quality investigating themselves, it may be an endless loop, a mobius strip of a problem with no clear beginning and no clear end.

Kate has long ago burnt out on the corporate medical context in which she practices.  It’s attention to insurance codes and revenue capture.  It’s attention to happy talk and consumer satisfaction.  It’s routinization and cook-booking of medical practice.  The speed-ups which demand 5-6 patients an hour with no distinction for the levels of complexity.  The random and chaotic applications of accounting esoterics to physician compensation and benefits.  And on and on. 

She wants to retire.  I look forward to her retirement, too.

GeekWorld, Memories, Our Land and Home, Travel

The Scent of Spring

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2  56%  22%  6mph W bar 29.54  steep rise windchill-5

                Last Quarter of the Winter Moon

Kate brought me a spray of yellow tulips two days ago.  They have opened now and have the scent of spring.

We’re seeking another dog, looking at Irish Wolfhound and  Scottish Deerhound rescues on the internet.  We won’t do anything until we get back from Hawai’i, but both of us have a sense of incompleteness in our family without a big dog.  I would like a mix with a breed a bit more long lived, since we still grieve the loss of each one of our eight Wolfhounds.  Grief underlines the bond developed with these dogs and, in a paradox, draws us back towards them in direct proportion to our sorrow. 

Getting ready.  I have the portable DVD player, which I’ve never used, plugged in and charging the battery.  I do have a fix it role, but it entails electronics, not internal combustion engines.  Those I manage through repair services, but often the electronic stuff I can fix myself.  Go figure.  A partial credential for Geekworld.

Sat down the other day and read a Taoism lesson.  As I read, I realized a strange feeling had crept over me.  It was contentment.  In fact, I feel it now.  I had, for many years, a knot, a frissón of unease lodged in the lower left of my gut.  Even when I felt otherwise comfortable, a gut check would reveal a free floating angst speaking to me, soma telling psyche all is not yet right.  Right now, it’s gone.

GeekWorld, World History

Crossed Speaker Wires

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26  80%  21%  0mph SSE  bar29.64  steep fall  Windchill26  Winter

          Waning Gibbous Winter Moon

Performed the test of the sound system today with the microphone that listens to output from the speakers and adjusts them according to prestablished program.  It sounds out whistles, clicks, rolling thunder, static and a loud rush of static.  Then it tells you if things are optimal.  First problem:  I’d crossed one set of speaker wires, the smooth to the positive instead of the ridged.  Checked all twenty connections, on speakers and on the receiver, found one set wrong and fixed it.  Second problem:  difference in volume excessive.  No idea what that meant, but one of the solutions was to move speakers around.  I did that and the next time through, pass number 3, No Errors.  This ends the first phase of the new video and sound system.  All of it is in place.  All of it works as intended.  

Next phase will be optimization of various aspects of the receiver, the DVD player and the TV.  This will take place over time and really never ends.  Fun.  A hobby in itself.

Watched an interesting Discovery channel program tonight on the Great Wall.  It presented the Great Wall as largely a product of one general in the early Ming Dynasty.  While the existing wall traces much of its current form to that era, wall building as a defensive strategy began much earlier, in the Spring and Autumn Period of the Eastern Chou dynasty.   Various pieces of walls got built at many stages in Chinese history.  The reason the Ming Dynasty effort was so vast lies in their resting power away from the Yuan Dynasty.  During the Yuan Dynasty China became a part of the Mongol Empire, ruled by Kublai Khan first.

GeekWorld, Travel, Woolly Mammoths

A Retreat, Then An Advance

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19  82%  21%  omph ENE bar29.90  windchill19  Winter

             Waning Gibbous Winter Moon

A DVR.  Hadn’t planned on getting one, but the hdmi connection with the TV demanded it over the HD converter box alone.  Surprise.  I like it.  Already I’ve taped two movies, Cronicas and Killer of Sheep.  When I’m watching a movie, I prefer to start at the beginning and the start times of movies often don’t conform to my schedule.  In the past I would check the replay schedules and try to find a time that worked or I’d skip it.  Now I can press the record button and the DVR records the movie and I can replay when I wish.  Kate’s also used it to tape a TPT series, Jewish Americans.  Guess you never know.

No more tours until March.  I have ten days before I go to Dwelling in the Woods, days I’ll use to finish the garden planning, edit my sermon for Groveland and produce a 1-page Transcendentalism for Brights, work on my new novel and a short story.  Also, I’ll do the various pre-trip preparations like stopping the newspaper, the mail, reserving a ride on the Airport Shuttle, packing. 

Also have to plan a one-hour presentation to the brothers, something I want to share with them, a passion or a part of my life right now.  Could be anything.  We switched to this format last year and we liked it.  The way we’d done it before involved a focus on a theme and a common thread in what we presented:  Fathers, Mothers, Death, Myth.  Last year we had a theme, Darkness, but the suggestion was to present the theme in a creative manner.  I chose a ritual of darkness which involved reading poetry excerpts (Dover Beach, The Night by Rilke, Stopping by the Woods on A Snowy Evening that sort) and, in a room lit only with candles, extinguishing a candle with each reading.   This year, don’t know yet.

Cinema and Television, GeekWorld

Yearning for a Time Already Lost

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1 71%  17%  0mph SW bar30.36  falls  windchill1  Winter

            Full Winter Moon

Bill Schmidt commented on the last post, asking how I interpret the data in the box.

My reading of this data is that enactment of stimulus packages can be taken as somewhat reliable indicators that a recession is over, not starting.  I say somewhat because, though I see no data here that contradicts that statement, attaching cause and effect stretches the data.  Even so, it seems to me that history teaches us that recessions strike before any can diagnose them (see my late post on January 17th) and that this data suggests that by the time national concern, especially at the legislative and executive levels of government, reaches an ignition point for action that the recession is either behind us or on its last legs.  That said, everything I can see for 2008 suggests a rocky road, but that is not inconsistent with a recession troughing and beginning to ease into a recovery.  As Captain Piccard used to say, Let it be so.

Watched Rambo II tonight.  Yes, it’s my shadow side, or the side of me that doesn’t get enough real life action, whatever, but I did get a wonderful metaphor from it near the end.  Rambo, of course, gets routinely shafted by the gubberment and this movie is no exception.  Before he leaves on his mission, he’s shown the very latest in technology that exists just to back him up.  At the end, after defeating everybody (Russians, Viet Cong, American Bureaucrats), he goes into the room with a 50 caliber machine gun on one arm, a magazine of shells draped over his other and blasts all the technology.  We could call it rage against the machine or, the man of action versus the man at the computer console, a not unfamiliar theme in today’s movies.  I read it as a contemporary John Henry fable, much the same as Gary Kasparov against Big Blue.  The common thread in all three is that they yearn for a time when particular human skills had not been mechanized or programmed.  The most important point of all three is that they yearn for a time already acknowledged as lost.

Also, Rambo says, I don’t know whether it’s original though I doubt it, “To win at war you must become war.”  Or, was that the Italian Stallion?

Cinema and Television, GeekWorld, Politics

OMG! Bush Lied!

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-1  72%  18% 0mph W bar30.10  steady windchill-1  winter

                       Full Winter Moon

I now have sound going from the DVR/Cable box to the receiver and the 5 speakers.  I also have sound going from the new Blu-Ray DVD player to the 5 speakers.  This is close to total success, but I still have two hurdles remaining.  I have not been able to get any radio signals yet, in spite of connecting the antennas and I have not run the test microphone which will balance the speakers.  Still, I feel largely done with this project.

In order to get Blu-Ray quality movies you have to get Blu-Ray discs.  Not cheap.  I watched one this evening, Beowulf and Grendel.  This movie takes a spare approach to the story and gives a backstory for Grendel.  It is gorgeous, shot in Iceland by an Icelandic director.  I liked it a good deal, though I’d not heard of it.

The big screen, HD TV setup came from my love for movies.  This is a stunning way to watch movies at home and, with the surround sound, surprisingly close to the cinema experience.  Movies are as important to me as literature, music and the fine arts.  I’m glad to have this way to view them.

Now:  It can finally be said.

“WASHINGTON (AP) – A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks. The study concluded that the statements “were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”

The study was posted Tuesday on the Web site of the Center for Public Integrity, which worked with the Fund for Independence in Journalism.”

The life and times of celebrities must be difficult.  Heath Ledger’s death today, whether suicide or accident (and I would wonder if accident isn’t suicide by another name), puts another name in the column of this felled by fame.  To those in the limelight all the time there must be a moment when you either choose life or choose self-destruction, a decision many of us face only obliquely, perhaps at the dinner table.

Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld

BMI 25.1, Blood Sugar 98. Yes!

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22  82%  28%  2mph NNW bar30.06  wincdhill21  Winter

            Waxing Crescent of the Winter Moon

These next three weeks are, on average, the coldest weeks of the year.  I’m glad to see them come.  I love the snug as a bug in a rug feeling of very cold days, work I love and a home place to do it.

Weighed in this morning.  My BMI is now 25.1 and my blood sugar is 98.  I’ll continue on with the nutrisystem at least for the rest of this month, then I’ll have to have a good maintenance plan in place because I will head off for the Dwelling in the Woods, then 3 weeks in Hawai’i.  Hawai’i should be ok because the fish, fruit and vegetable type menu is common there.  It would not be the same if we were headed to, say, England or Austria.  I feel good about this effort so far.  The challenge now will be a healthy long term eating plan, one I strayed from too far for too long.

Still no joy on the sound system.  I had the DVD player sending signals through the five speaker set up, so I know I have them connected and working.  When I exchanged the Toshiba HD DVD player for a Panasonic Blu-Ray player, however, I eliminated the sound success I had made.  Since I won’t get the Blu-Ray until next week, I don’t know yet whether I can convince it to communicate with the speakers.  I know, right now, that the coaxial cable I got to connect the DVR/HD box to the receiver did not produce instant results.  Sigh.  I may have to talk with the folks at Ultimate when I go in to pick up the Blu-Ray.  This is part of the learning curve, less steep now than when I opened the first box, but steep enough to block my vision so far.

Today is more work on the Faery Tale and garden planning.  This is the work I love.t