Lamb Shanks Continued

Lamb Shanks

Here is tonights dinner... phase 1!

Distribution

It has occurred to me that there are about two people besides myself who ever look at this page. Far from disappointing, it is rather chummy, and I don't much mind. However, there seem to be a lot of folks who could be looking and aren't aware of the location. I am very disinclined to mass email alerts about the existence of this page, and probably would forget after two or three trips to the page anyway...
My friend Kevin was trying to tell me about the reasons people return to webpages. First, they have to expect to find fresh content. Second, if it can be interactive, that's better. Third, if it allows them to short circuit the mess everywhere else (like an aggregator) then that makes it useful. The only other reason people go anywhere on the internet is the quest to relieve ennui, or the never ending search for photos of naked women. I can't offer much to make your lives less tiresome, and won't be posting nudy pics here...
In short, thanks to my few readers, and a long apology for lack of anything to say.

I went to mass this morning. The recessional was a sort of jazzy hymn, sounded a lot like take 5 on the first few bars of drum and bass, then got fast lyrics riding over the top of it...

Also, I recently reimplemented my wireless network. Since the phone line is run to the garage, and does not work in the house, the router for my dsl lives in the garage. From my office, which is on the south side of the house (nearest the garage) I get a tolerable signal. But from the living room ten feet further (and one wall) the signal is transient, at best. A few weeks ago I tried to install a dlink range extender, but found out that it only works with Dlink routers... it saw the router in the garage fine, but for whatever reason (I think it was more marketing than engineering) it refused to communicate with mine. I returned it and added a second wireless router. It stayed in the garage for a few weeks, and left a marginally better footprint. After a long tiresome struggle to get it pleasant, and after riding on a neighbors unsecured connection for a week or two (I think that's a federal crime?) I moved it into the house, and tied a ethernet wireless client to it, setting it up in the office. Now I get an uninterrupted high quality connection... I'm sure there is an increase in latency since it leaves the living room, hits the office router, goes out on its external interface, moves to the pocket router in client mode, hits the router in the garage and becomes a dsl signal... I find it's not bad once the DNS lookups are out of the way. Big delay getting to the garage. I sometimes miss wires.

1  192.168.2.1  2.909 ms   0.636 ms   0.699 ms
2  * * *
3  tukw-dsl-gw13-205.tukw.qwest.net (63.231.10.205)  45.926 ms   43.922 ms   43.668 ms
4  tukw-agw1.inet.qwest.net (63.231.10.93)  45.473 ms   44.504 ms   43.873 ms
5  tuk-core-01.inet.qwest.net (205.171.11.97)  44.928 ms   47.444 ms   57.397 ms
6  svl-core-01.inet.qwest.net (67.14.12.6)  62.616 ms   61.623 ms   62.095 ms
7  pax-brdr-02.inet.qwest.net (205.171.214.38)  62.857 ms   62.005 ms   64.222 ms
8  205.171.4.170  64.071 ms *   63.748 ms
9  * * *
10  66.249.94.10  65.579 ms   63.101 ms   77.231 ms

Wine

Beth called and said she was going to pick up some wine on her way home!
She even talked to me as she selected the different value price selections off the shelves...
I am fairly excited.

Also, Elena sent me a mexican voodoo doll... I think I will let Beth use it as a pin cushion, and pray no little girl is getting stomache pains on account of my carelessness...

Yesterday I heard geese as they flew nearby... is it springtime?

Remade

Portland Roadtrip

It was chilly this morning, but it cleared and warmed throughout the day. I sufferred the usual wait trying to get over the bridge into Portland. Portland is a city of rivers and bridges, and getting from east to west, or from Washington to Oregon, is a matter of waiting for the hundreds of other people in front of you to realize that there is only one way through. I am constantly amazed at the traffic pileups these bottlenecks cause.
Yesterday, I drove to Vancouver, BC, and waited to get through the massey tunnel on Hwy 99, always a jam, since the east-west road hooks into 99 just before the tunnel. They even close the oncoming traffic to one lane to steal a lane from the southbound folks, but it is a mess, and then everyone makes it into the tunnel, and zips along at 80km/h like nothing had ever happened.
Well, here is my file photo of Portland. Enjoy.
Really big news, the siding is complete on my house. Before/After to follow.

Snow?

I saw a snowshower in Seattle today. It was a bizarre experience, the snow started almost immediately after I crossed the ship canal, and there was some slush on the lanes in Everett. Vancouver was clear and crisp, with no sign of our southerly troubles.
It got up to 45, par for the course, and the nasty folks at the weather service are foretelling some cold snap to drift down from the Yukon... could be the first cold weather I had to deal with since I moved out here. It was a little boring driving seven hours today, how many folks go from full to empty on their daily commutes?

Hmm, yes. Happy Valentines day. Please don't send me any happy hearty emails.

Dan

Happy Birthday

---

Beth and I went to my grandmother's 70th last night, we had a fine seafood dinner at Anthony's in Gig Harbor. The service was a little inconsistent, but polite, and the food was good. We were there over three hours.
We had made agreements to go to Aaron's Birthday last weekend, and lots of folks had made plans, and then a large storm hit, and three of four folks lost power. Lots of nice ice cream spoilt, it was a terrible shame.
Overall, it was a good time for all in attendance.

Lying and Honesty

Where is the moral imperative to honesty? I understand that when we don't expect people to be honest, we don't tend to deal with them. Much of this is presently handled by the law, and stands beyond morality. Laws keep men good regardless of the wrong ideas they may have, and irrespective of their bad upbringings.

But for the unenforceable lie, there seems to be a second set of rules. Isn't it sometimes a question of the consequences, as appraised by each individual prior to his telling either the truth or a lie? Should you decide about the potential harm versus the potential good, and make a decision? Should you try to avoid positions where the truth becomes harmful?

It seems that many times we are told the truth would cause great distress, and upset 'good' people who don't need or deserve the stress involved in its discovery. Isn't this merely indicative that we have been acting wrongly, holding false belief, causing real harm with ignorance. Isn't the trauma of the truth in many cases the sting of guilt on our minds? Especially in the case where one lies to himself.

Does the desire to be truthful, or the belief that it is better, cause more distress to the man who lies than the absence of such feelings? I think it does. Some men would prefer to be truthful in the face of rather serious consequences, and for a variety of reasons. Some feel that to lie would perpetuate a bad name not only on them, but on their children and relations. Indeed, to some extent this principle is still in effect in our modern society. Some believe the conciousness of sin would bear down on them, and perhaps they can relieve that through confession. Deep inside, the only way to rid themselves of this feeling is to confess to the victim. Some may understand this and fear that a 'victim' of the lie may die in ignorance, and take the sin to the grave, irredeemable.

Some people may find it easiest to be truthful, accept the consequences of whatever they do, and strive to be better. Some may simply not want the complications of remembering various versions of reality dependent on the lies they've told.
Most of our decisions seem not to be simply moral but a decision between morality and the benefits we can reap, monetary and social, from following a less strict plan for our lives. Many of us don't want to be thrown into the ring with lions to prove our worth. Martyrdom is for those who cannot get anything better than sainthood.

• Always tell the truth. That way, you don't have to remember what you said.
  --Mark Twain
  


• Be good and you will be lonesome.
  --Mark Twain


• A truth that's told with bad intent
  Beats all the lies you can invent
  --William Blake

Complete

Reassembly complete, tiger installation complete, only 4 extra screws left on the table, and no important damage... I forgot to reconnect the built-in speakers, but that is acceptable. And an irrecoverable hard drive failure... oh, well. Hoorah!

Good and Bad

I just got brand new windows from Sears. I am pretty excited about that. But on the other side, the hard drive in Beth's iBook (which had for a few years been my iBook) failed violently today. I had just thought about backing it up this weekend... irony is difficult to appreciate. Also, I am very disturbed at how well apple seals the iBook up! There is a reason the tech book looks like a car parts book. Well, I managed to pry it apart 'gently' and set the harddrive in an Ibm, and attempted to get a disk image from dd. The other computer showed the same indications (loud clicking noise from the hard disk when spinning.) No recognition of /dev/hda... bad juju.

Step two is to place a new disk in the old iBook, and cross my fingers... and format.
But the windows look great!

Also, I received a phone call from a friend of mine who was waiting for a man to pick her up at a bus station. She met him on the internet, he offered to pick her up and take her to his place...

I hope everything works out okay, for us all.

Dai Sho

A long day, a short day. I struggled to make it in and out of Long Beach on time, plenty of small issues, and no easy or clear answer.
Gilroy, however, I was on my way before anything opened up, and caught an earlier flight out of San Jose to get me home hours earlier. My 5PM flight was moved to 1240, which gives me a lot more time... I wish I had followed I Know Something's advice and looked around, but I would much rather go home than go sightseeing for a few hours.
I tried to sit down at the Expedia.com bar, but the bartender must have gone for a smoke, since no one noticed me, I left after a few minutes, got a burrito (San Jose has never given me a good tasting burrito yet.) and sat to read the paper.

Gilroy is beautiful. The hills are such a bright green, and the trees are a contrasting dark green spread sporadically along the sides. I don't know that I have ever gone that way when the sun shone. I can understand why someone would like to live there. They are building it almost all at once. The guys I worked with today finished a Johnny Carino's last year, a Famous Dave's this week, and are going to Arby's next month. The mall is sprouting up at the highway intersection. Target, the sign of status! I often joked about how a town in Montana becomes a city when it gets a dairy queen. Mostly, this impression was aroused during long greyhound bus trips during the UPS strike in '97. The Dairy queen was the post office, the western union, and the bus stop all in one. That's one step short of a wall mart.


I took Highway 101 last night from the San Francisco Airport to San Jose. I know better than to do that (the proper thing to do is take 380 to 280 to San Jose, and if you are going farther, catch 101 south there.) But I figured it was 10PM on a weekday, how bad could it be? It's four lanes on either side, and there cannot be that many people on the road. I wasn't counting on every trooper on the peninsula being out there at the 101-92 interchange picking up body parts. They had three officers in bright yellow pants crossing through the two lanes they hadn't cordoned off with flares to pick up evidence from the left shoulder. I spent the first hour of my trip in the 10 miles south of SFO. I was in pretty good humour through it all, but I had to wonder how powerless a mapquester must be to find an alternate route on his 1" square area map on his turn by turn sheet. There was an article in the AA magazine about how maps were antiquated and on the way to obsolescence. His general point was that no one would buy a highway map when they could always get accurate directions. His concern was that it took the fun out of a road trip, why bother going at all if you can't hand this enormous road map that is guaranteed to be the wrong detail for the destination you are approaching to your passenger, and then harrass him if he can't give you a definitive answer on the route. That was the fun, wasn't it.
My concern is that without accurate area maps, we all get stuck on Hwy 101 waiting for CHP to finish picking up the pieces. Never again. I'll take El Camino Real before I follow 101 again.