Spider wisdom

Spiders and me are not exactly the most compatible creatures on the planet. The little SOBs seem to think it’s great fun to run a guy line across a walkway, about the same distance from the ground as my nose. For my part, if I’m wearing shoes and I see one near the ground, it’s stompin’ time.

So one night a while back, the night I finished bottling my beer in fact, I had cleaned up the equipment, loaded it up in its box, and carried it to the outbuilding where I keep it in between batches. I had some extra bottles, so I had to make several trips. Coming out onto the small stoop, I saw one of the biggest spiders ever, off to the left, hanging on a guy wire. He saw me too, and immediately started (wisely) putting some distance between us. It was dark, and I didn’t have a stick, so I glared at him (which made him back off even farther). He had a huge web between the uprights of the stoop and a tree, that much I could see in the dark.

Next morning, I armed myself for battle and marched over to... nothing. The spider had taken down the entire web, except for a single guy wire, and left for parts unknown! Smart little barstid — which is probably how he lived to get that big.

Some thoughts on the “debit cards”

Among the government and private assistance (finally) being offered to victims of Hurricane Katrina is a $2000 debit card being offered to various households. Experience with The Boy's girlfriend¹ suggests that $2000 is, at best, barely adequate to establish a single person who has nothing. I seriously doubt it would be enough to get a family of even three set up, even with all the other help they might be getting.

The girlfriend, I figure, might be able to get established in her own place with $2000. She would need: deposit on an apartment plus a month's rent, a car (no public transport out here!), insurance & fuel for the car, deposits and payments for turning on lights, gas, and phone, maybe some furniture (like, you know, a bed & a dining room table for starters) if the apartment doesn't have any, and enough food to tide her over to her next paycheck. Oh, and there's cigarettes, but don't get me started on that. Evacuees need all that to get back on their feet, plus a job or two (the girlfriend has a job at least). It might take $2000 or more just to live on until they find work.

It's difficult to be independent when you're starting — or starting over — from scratch. Some will go back to rebuild their city... and I wonder if some of the refuseniks stayed because they hoped to be first in line getting cleanup and repair work. Others will be glad to relocate, especially with people wanting to help them get started. For all the noise we make about New Orleans “charm” and so forth, living poor would certainly obscure the charm. I suppose it would be like that for me if I moved to the beach: it's a nice place to visit, but if I lived there I'd have to fight traffic every morning, and I'm not used to living cheek-by-jowl with hundreds of people; beach communities don't seem to have a problem cramming a thousand people into the same amount of land as FAR Manor's acreage, where it's just the six of us (including Lobster and girlfriend).

Maybe that's why hurricanes do so much damage these days.

---

¹I really need to come up with a nickname for her....

Energy gloom

I saw several stations on the way home with bagged-up pumps yesterday. The BP near the office, that had been out for two days, finally got a shipment in though. Around home, the gas stations have nothing but regular, and now at least some of them put a 20 gallon limit on purchases (“during this temporary energy crisis” says the sign). I'm getting the impression that supplies are really tight at the moment, and it wouldn't take much to create out-and-out shortages.

As if gas(oline) was our only problem. Natural gas production got hosed up big-time by Katrina too. Economist/blogger Jerome a Paris wrote, “Now that [natural] gas costs 3-4 times more, power prices are set to increase by 50-100%.”

Got wood?

Morning runaround

The lawn mower is finally fixed. No sooner had I put the blade on, Daughter Dearest mowed out back until the replacement bolt I put on the handle came off & got lost. I went by the lawn mower place (among other things) and the guy let me take a couple of the bolts with big plastic wingnuts (lets you fold up the handle for transportation or storage). Other things we did on the trip this morning:

• ate at Waffle House


• got groceries (I put some ice in a cooler, which helped keep the milk & ice cream cold coming back)


• complained to the cellphone peeps about my phone's camera being out of focus (they gave me a number for a warranty exchange, yay)


• swung by the library to pick up a loaner (Haiku: This Other World by Richard Wright)


• gassed up the minivan — more on that in another post

Now that's how you combine your trips!

Here they come

I'd forgotten that schools have a pretty good rumor mill. The kids are telling us that a largeish church is taking in either 100 or 150 families, just that one church. They've heard that something like 700 kids will be signing up for school soon. Seeing as the system currently has about 2000 kids, that's going to be a pretty big influx. I presume the actual number will be somewhat less, but if they can do it without problems, bring 'em on.

Now we're hearing the death tool in New Orleans may not be as horrendous as we thought. Good, let's clear out some space and make room for them, then.

Funeral for a friend

It’s been said that nothing travels faster than bad news, but the cosmic rule that makes me the last to know something takes precedence even over the speed of bad news. Wife called me this afternoon: a kid that used to go to our church got himself killed in a car wreck a couple of nights ago. Not even a year older than The Boy, and *poof* he's gone. Ran wide in a curb and hit another car, according to the papers.

I told The Boy that this was exactly the reason we worry about him. He laughed.

The stuff I have to document...

One of the products I write about at work has a command-line interface (CLI) used for debugging and troubleshooting. Customers got wind of it, requested documentation, and that’s usually where I get involved.

One particular (or should I say peculiar) troubleshooting command is “ti_ts” — which starts a troubleshooting routine on some TI chips in the box. I tried to get them to change the name, to no avail. So on this development cycle, they added a “codesperms” command (which translates to “active codes per minislot’). I have a pretty good idea what the next oddly-named command will be, but don’t want to give them ideas just in case one of them stumbles across this blog....

Brevity

This is what happens when you try to be a little too concise with your writing:



On the other hand, the shoe fits....

Sign of the Times

“No Fuel”


I noticed the place where I usually get gas had run dry overnight, while I was on the way in this morning. I gassed up last night there, and they only had regular, so it wasn't a complete surprise. But I saw several stations with bags on their pump handles on the way home this evening.

Given the situation along the coast, gas being hard to find is nothing to complain about. Just sayin’.

More FrameMaker 7.2 Leakage

A post on the FrameUsers mailing list (thanks Thomas!) suggests doing a Google search on “FrameMaker new multiple undo” and then reading the cached page from Adobe UK (the first link when I tried it). Doing this turns up some more new features:

• multiple undo (one of those long-standing malfeatures I griped about yesterday)


• some support for XML Schema (probably conversion to EDD)


• support for native Photoshop (PSD) files

A sidebar had links for Solaris and Microsoft updates, suggesting that MacOS users are still left out. Figures.

The Boy: Good News, Bad News

The Boy grabbed Stephen King's Dreamcatcher from the school library last week. He's been at it pretty heavily, taking it to work with him and reading it on breaks & waiting for me to pick him up. It's good to see him that interested in reading; it has to lead to improving his spelling skills.

That was the good news. The bad news I expected: he's once again gotten difficult to get up for school.

Homebrew, glorious homebrew

I opened the first bottle of Proud Mary — a stout with some fresh rosemary boiled in. I've achieved a personal best with this one; there's no edge to it. Just smooth, dark beer.

My only beef: it could use a little more carbonation, in contrast to the last batch that had a bit too much. The difference may have been the first fermentation — last batch went for a week; I left Proud Mary going for two. Next batch, I'll try 10 days and see what happens.

Adobe Leaks FrameMaker 7.2 Info

In which I take a break from chronicling my personal life and talk about work stuff.

Over the Labor Day weekend, various pages on Adobe’s website mentioned the unreleased version 7.2 of FrameMaker, the preferred tool of the trade for most technical writers (who often affectionately call it “Frame”). Adobe (usually one to hold its cards close to the vest) has since revised the pages, although the old ones lived another day in Google’s caches before those too were updated.

But haste often leads to things getting skipped over, and that was the case with a migration guide white paper on Adobe Germany’s site. I grabbed an unrevised copy of the PDF Tuesday afternoon; the good people at Adobe.de have certainly gone home for the day but I expect the white paper to be sanitized first thing tomorrow morning (by about 2 a.m. EDT).

If you download too late, here’s what searching the PDF for “7.2” turned up in the way of new features:

• XSL processing at XML import and export (alongside existing read/write rules) — this is a feature I’ve wished for, but (see below) probably won’t get.


• Conversion tables, which add structure to unstructured files, can create a “first draft” EDD (a combination of DTD and style sheet).


• Conversion tables also support a “root element” to be applied to the converted document.

All this is structure-related, which doesn’t do you much good if you aren’t interested in moving to structured Frame. I’m sure that there will be the usual bug replacements (i.e. removing some known bugs and introducing new bugs) as well.

A group of vendors and trainers have been constantly flogging their “FrameMaker Chautauqua” conference on various mailing lists where FrameMaker is either the main or a common topic. The conference includes presentations by Adobe and will be held in early November, so I expect that Adobe will officially announce version 7.2 either at the conference or shortly before. If I’m right, it’s safe to assume that 7.2 is in beta testing right now.

FrameMaker has languished in a near-limbo pretty much since Adobe bought up Frame Technologies some years back. Frame has benefitted from minor updates from time to time, but long-standing bugs and malfeatures have persisted. That, and an abortive foray into porting the Unix version to Linux, have lead many to believe that Adobe is less than enthusiastic about supporting the program. The final straw for some of us was in January 2004, when Adobe dropped support for MacOS citing lack of sales (largely brought on by Adobe’s reluctance to modernize the MacOS version to run natively on MacOS X, leaving FrameMaker one of the last reasons to ever use the “Classic” environment).

Pretty much all summer, the “Chautauqua” people have been hyping Adobe’s presence at their upcoming conference, promising Frame users that they won’t be disappointed by what Adobe has to say about Frame’s life expectancy. Unfortunately, there’s no word on re-introducing MacOS support, preferably for MacOS X. That’s a show-stopper for me and many others: if the rest of the tool chain works well, why change the underlying platform if one tool is no longer supported?

Personally, even if Adobe repents of Windows-centricity, I’m not convinced that page-oriented WYSIWYG tools like Frame are the way forward for technical writing — in a world where our final output is more likely to be PDF and HTML than paper, it doesn’t make much sense to work on the electronic equivalent of a printed page. It makes more sense nowadays to work with markup, either directly (ooo, icky tags, say my less-technical brethren and sistren) or indirectly through an interface that provides formatting hints but no fixed margins or other page-centric details. LyX is a good example of the latter kind of program.

In the end, I expect little or no surprises come November. I’m certainly not going to ask my boss for $695 + hotel to attend a conference for a tool I’m currently planning to abandon, even if the conference is close enough to drive to.

Slow progress

Current music: di.fm EuroDance
I haven't addressed the pile of logs that need splitting in some time now. I started whacking at them a little bit today, but decided instead to pick up some sticks in the back; it's about at the point now where I can start weed-whacking without getting the string tangled in a fallen branch. I also need to address the front of the place, on the other side of the driveway, where we had the timber people clear the pines. Picking up the sticks, tilling or plowing the ground to smooth it out, and planting grass seed are things that remain to be done; later this month is the best time to do it.

We got a new lawn mower blade today and I put it on. The boys are now out of excuses to mow the lawn. (I'm sure they'll find some new ones though.)

I helped Lobster change the oil in his truck today... meaning I did most of the work while he watched. Rangers mount the oil filter vertically, leaving very little room for a strap wrench (I told Lobster to get a cap wrench next time he went to the parts place). That sucker was tight. But eventually we succeeded, just in time to get him off to KFC. Then I put my Civic up on ramps and changed the oil in it too. But I'm kind of surprised that Lobster's dad never showed him what to do — he works for one of the pipeline companies (yeah, one that got clobbered by Katrina) and has weird hours, so maybe that's the reason. Or maybe he makes enough $$$ that he just has it done.

Chicken house duty for a couple of hours today as well. Hope everyone else's Labor Day weekend is work-free and fun....

What do you want out of life?

Perhaps the best way to get what you want from life is to know what you want from life in the first place. As I cruise toward what I hope is the mid-point of my life, I think I know what I want of life and (being a guy) it's a fairly short & simple list:

• A place to stay


• A few toys


• “Whoopie” a couple of times a week


• Weekends mostly available for rest and/or recreation

Beyond that, a quiet, modest life with a quiet, modest retirement would pretty much wrap it up.

I'm halfway there: I have a place to stay (FAR Manor) and lots of toys. The rest is a faraway dream. I haven't had nearly enough to drink to willingly expand much beyond that. I'm interested in hearing what other people want though, and how far along they are to getting it.

We're on our own... aren't we?

Given the lackadaisical initial response to the New Orleans flooding, one has to wonder what would happen if we had a nationwide disaster, like the Spanish Flu pandemic, that affected more than a “mere” million people in a few hundred square miles of coastal territory. Given the reports we've seen this week, we can pretty much assume we'll be on our own. “Our” government has dumped too many resources on, and given too much attention to, a war we didn't have to fight to worry about details like saving lives at home. You know it's serious when reporters tee off on a Senator, telling her he saw rats eating a corpse on TV.

In the middle of all this, Daughter Dearest asked me if we could get a picture of the night sky. I cranked the aperature wide open, put the shutter on its max of 15 seconds, and took a few shots. She was able to use iPhoto's one-click Enhance to get something worth keeping:



(The thumbnail doesn't do it justice, click it to get the full-size picture.)

Looking up at all those stars, some of which we know have planets, you can't help but think that there's someone out there, someone who maybe has figured 'most everything out. Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe, because the alternative is almost too terrible to give much thought: that we're alone in the universe, stuck on a planet run by the worst of us.

The mayor of New Orleans is right: God is watching. He knows why it took so long to get aid rolling in. I cannot curse, I cannot condemn, for that is not my place. Perhaps feeling empty like I do is better in that respect.

70s flashback

45 cents my foot... more like 55 cents. My cellphone camera is somewhat not so very good at distance shots; that's $3.12 for regular on the sign. People are lining up to buy it, too: the Shell station across the highway had $3.49 up. The BP stations were $2.79 everywhere on my run home — I don't know how they're doing it. But a 70 cent/gallon spread isn't tenable; things will level out.

The long lines and frayed nerves remind me of the 70s shortages, not long before I was old enough to drive. There's already rumors of shortages, gas stations closing down. It will be a good two weeks, minimum, before the refineries and pipelines get sorted out. If stations are closing now, we're in trouble. Thank God I can work at home.

Yeesh

Current music: Kate Ryan - Scream for More (Club Dub)
We all gathered 'round and ate supper last night, everyone but Lobster — something that doesn't happen much what with various people working and so forth. The Boy's girlfriend is still with us; we're trying to find her a place to stay and coming up short (but we'll get there!!!). We were talking, and the girlfriend was saying something, and it struck me: this could actually be my future daughter-in-law. The Boy is telling me they want to get married after he graduates from school “this year” (I don't think the graduation part will happen, but that's my pessimistic side).

Quite frankly, I'm not ready to have those kind of thoughts yet, but I probably don't have a lot of choice in the matter. Fatherhood itself was something thrust on me before I felt ready, the gift of a birth control failure. It's not the girl* herself; I doubt I would feel much different if she was a genius, or rich (she's very very much neither). I'm just not ready to process this kind of input. I'm also not ready to be thinking about grandchildren... sure, I'll be 50 in a few years, maybe I can think about it then.

---

*She's 20, but the important part (mental) is closer to 16. So I use the term “girl” here in its strict sense, to indicate an immature female human.

When drains rebel

The perfect storm: plenty of rain, running the dishwasher & clothes washer, and a toilet with a stuck-open flapper. The bathroom with the stuck toilet started taking on water last night after my last post; fortunately, there were plenty of dirty clothes and used towels (and an area rug) to soak up most of it before I realized what was happening. Walking in the bathroom & getting my feet wet was how I figured it out.

A night of rest and not so much rain seems to have settled things down for now. But I guess we need to check the drain field and maybe pump the septic tank.

Rain coming down, gas going up

FAR Manor is far enough from Katrina that we're only getting a little taste of it. Having had to drive home through nearly blinding rain this evening, without wind to complicate matters further, I don't envy anyone closer in. I drove through a tornado warning area, and I saw everything but rotation at one point. The intersection where I usually get off the four-lane was getting lots of lightning down the way, so I went up and around.

During a lull in the action, I poured the water out of the bottom of my potted basil and dragged all the herbs in pots (and flowers in hanging baskets) into the garage. I think one of the sage plants (in the ground) is soggy toast, looking at it, but maybe it'll perk up. I think we already got the two inches of rain predicted for the area, and we have another day to go. Yuck! Then we went into town and filled gas tanks and containers... one of the attendants told the wife that they're going to jump the price from $2.63 to $3.08 tonight! Katrina has hosed up a bunch of production down along the Gulf, so we may actually see some genuine shortages before too long. I took The Barge today and gassed it up where it was $2.47, and we got a 10 cent discount, which made a pretty big difference compared to around here (especially tomorrow). Turns out The Barge gets close to 25mpg with fresh oil and careful highway driving, maybe even a little better than the minivan (big shock). But I tell ya, Dominic Tocci nails it.

Plan B is in action. I'm working at home tomorrow, maybe Wednesday if things don't go haywire, and I have the motorcycle if I need to go anywhere. Maybe things will recover before we have to buy much gas again. (Yeah right.)