I am applying for a job at a local community college as a teacher of GIS. I have the qualifications, and its only part time. It might turn out to be good, or might be a disaster. I really don't know.
Since it's teaching, I've been pondering what sort of things I'd be lecturing to students about. According to their department, its about training people for jobs in GIS software and using GPS and other remote sensing devices to work. A fine idea, but the obvious thing that comes to mind for me, having actually DONE THAT for a living is GIS is divided into formal accuracy and coding (data mining and applications). These are the extremes which pay.
Everything in the middle is a muddle of "good enough", most of which is freeware and online apps that normal people use to find something and print or download a map to get there. Nothing more complicated than that, really. Google Maps and Google Earth are a great easy example of this. You don't have to pay a fortune or track down obscure data and convert it to work on your application. You get Google Earth and you do a quick Earth Gallery layer search. View the chosen data and there you are. Easy.
So this leaves me wondering what-all I can teach students who probably already have Google Earth GIS experience before taking the course. I'm not an App coder. I don't enjoy that. I am not qualified to teach or certify Surveyors, and that job ad isn't asking for it anyway.
What I CAN teach is how to help students of GIS use their GPS devices more effectively, free data, free online resources for mapping and historical documentation (WikiMapia), how to work with volunteers and NPOs to solve problems. Why do I focus on those? Because GIGO. In the real world, free data is often best because it is updated the most frequently. Paying for data means you're usually getting the old stuff someone insists is worth money, and hasn't accepted reality. Google Earth killed ESRI's plans of consumer GIS. ESRI is one of the giants of the industry, before Google decided to just give this stuff away and update the data constantly. I used to use ArcInfo and ArcView, the primary ESRI products which costs thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars to setup and run. And the big lesson? GIGO. Garbage In, Garbage Out. The cost of primary data is exponentially expensive based on its scale. Large scale is massively inaccurate, and ESRI will display that data closer than its accuracy justifies, since its vector based data, which is a line in space. Its not necessarily accurate, however. This is REALLY important if say, you use that data to build a house thinking you missed the mining tunnel but really should have paid for the surveyor team and your house literally fell in. This is something that actually happened. There was a lawsuit and a settlement and disclaimers on my maps because of this. It was before my time in GIS, but only barely. These days error in GIS make people take the wrong turn going somewhere, and those funny stories everybody has are actually a royal b17ch to correct the code for. A job I don't want. And eventually someone will cleverly figure it out, so don't bother thinking fixing those is a career.
I imagine I can help people decide if they want their GIS to be hobbyist level or for a living. Help them to decide between Surveying GPS and coding GIS applications. Neither of which can I do, personally. Hobbyists can use an instrument like the one I've got to map a trail, accurately enough, to add it to a popular trail map layer for Google Earth, which in theory would allow that free uploaded trail to be downloaded to someone else's GPS so a hiker can find it if they get lost along the way. Or maybe snowshoe it in the wintertime. Hey, people do that here. It's the Sierras. A skilled hobbyist with a GPS could leverage that into retail sales, a blog, a book, a series of videos, some kind of thing like that. Expertise is valuable sometimes.
I don't know that a job application will turn into an interview or a job. School starts in about two weeks. I can't see going from nothing to teaching a class at start of semester. It's unreasonable. So I keep applying at local jobs. Something will turn into work.
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Horses
Years ago, my wife and I wanted to learn how to ride a horse. So she tracked down a place that was cheap, about an hour away up in Gridley. Gridley is this tiny town in the Sacramento Valley, north of the Buttes, which time forgot. Its laid out in a grid of streets, with the railroad going through the middle of town and the remains of a covered station at some park and converted warehouses. It's agricultural country, mostly fruit trees and a nearby cannery. This is where Jam comes from. I would totally live there if I spoke Spanish and had a business doing mail order. Cheap real estate, and UPS goes everywhere.
Outside the town a couple miles was this orchard and horse ranch, with watered pasture from the irrigation ditch filled every few days from Lake Oroville. All the farmers there wait for that release and open their ditches to it, fill them, close them again when they peak. They use gasoline powered water pumps to pump into their orchards and fields, as needed. You can hear them running at night. It's low tech, but it works very well. They do make sure the water isn't too cold. Turns out that the lake is deep enough that the Thermolito Forebay, called that because its big and spread out to let the water warm up from JUST above freezing, for a couple days before letting that hit the roots of the trees. Really cold water on the roots will kill a fruit tree. It was something I'd never learned about in college. A farmer told me that. I was surprised.
If you keep horses on a dry pasture you need about one acre per horse. If you irrigate that pasture so it keeps growing grass? You can keep five times as many horses. Ergo, irrigation, if you can get the water, is key. Buying pasture at California land prices can be expensive. Pasture with water rights? Even more so. I think we paid around $80 for the weekly 2 hour lessons in riding. I'm sure that both exercised the horses the lady was paid to care for, and gave her a little money to cover costs and repairs. Farms are ALWAYS in need of repairs. You never have enough money to maintain them. Just enough to keep it working a little bit longer.
This ranch had several horses, mostly draft horses but also some smaller and more agile runners. As the big ones tend to be more docile, you learn on a draft horse. When you start horse back riding, you first make friends with the horse. You take it out of the pen, put a harness on it gently, adjust to fit, and lead it to a fence. Then you spray it with water, brush it out, then with fly spray to keep the biting flies off. This is important because a biting fly can make the horse kick or lunge. You don't want that when you're a passenger. You put a blanket, without burrs in it, on its back and swing up a saddle. Adjust the stirrups and the belt as tight as you can manage. If it gets loose you're coming off. I find making eye contact with the horse helps. Let it know you're in charge. Think it real loud. Horses read body language in humans. They're herd animals and they've been raised around us all their lives. They understand.
I once described horses as big dogs. I've been told that's wrong by sheep herders in New Zealand, but if you think of a horse as a big dog, you're close enough. They're tippy so you can manhandle them around if you put your shoulders into it. When you clean their hooves, a lazy horse will try and put its weight on you, which could kill you if they fall on you. Instead, keep your knees bent and if they try, drop a couple inches. They don't want to fall so they'll balance again. You can clean the hooves. When approaching a horse, be sure to come around where they can see you, front or sides. If you surprise one from the rear it will slowly kick at you. If that hits, broken ribs or death. Its almost lazy how slow that kick is. But its got about 8 feet of reach. Make noise as you approach, like you would towards a dog, Pat or stroke its neck and head, scratch behind its ears. Like big dogs.
If you opt to feed a horse an apple or carrot, remember they can't tell the difference between those and your fingers, so be agile about getting your digits out of the way of their teeth. They won't mean to, they're just big and clumsy. My ex got a bad bite from feeding a horse and wan't agile enough. Its one of the dangers of being a Veterinary professional. I was studying Welding at the time, you get insanely agile doing that, especially "welders touch", something only welders have and is a very definitive motion that identifies them. The tattooed woman I used to work with sometimes had it. She knew MIG welding, barely, but had the touch at least.
Once the horse is saddled and ready for you, you walk it to a riding area and climb up. Test the stirrups. If they're the wrong length, get down and adjust them again. Try once more. Your knees should be bent enough to allow you to lift from the saddle. Now you're onto the hard part. And its difficult enough that getting a trainer is a good idea. Learning the right way to move in the saddle is hard, and you use a lot of back and abdominal muscles to tense and relax at just the right times. It is not easy. If you do it right, the horse will notice and allow you to go faster. Horses move differently, and bounce differently based on their speed. Some are very smooth, but its hard to change directions. Some are bouncy but agile, able to change a lot of directions without trouble, a wider stance really.
When you get good at it, horseback riding is a lot like being on a mountain bike with both a full suspension and someone else driving so you can look around as you go. That's very nice aspect of it. However, to get that you need to pay for a horse, barn, boarding, pasture, water, feed, veterinarian visits, access a breeder, keep multiple horses because they're herd animals and will go crazy alone, farrier, saddles, bridles, horse dentist, hay, hay storage, employees to care for them, and housing and health insurance for those employees.
Or you could get a scooter. And leave a space in the garage to park it. Horses are amazing, but they aren't cheap.
Outside the town a couple miles was this orchard and horse ranch, with watered pasture from the irrigation ditch filled every few days from Lake Oroville. All the farmers there wait for that release and open their ditches to it, fill them, close them again when they peak. They use gasoline powered water pumps to pump into their orchards and fields, as needed. You can hear them running at night. It's low tech, but it works very well. They do make sure the water isn't too cold. Turns out that the lake is deep enough that the Thermolito Forebay, called that because its big and spread out to let the water warm up from JUST above freezing, for a couple days before letting that hit the roots of the trees. Really cold water on the roots will kill a fruit tree. It was something I'd never learned about in college. A farmer told me that. I was surprised.
If you keep horses on a dry pasture you need about one acre per horse. If you irrigate that pasture so it keeps growing grass? You can keep five times as many horses. Ergo, irrigation, if you can get the water, is key. Buying pasture at California land prices can be expensive. Pasture with water rights? Even more so. I think we paid around $80 for the weekly 2 hour lessons in riding. I'm sure that both exercised the horses the lady was paid to care for, and gave her a little money to cover costs and repairs. Farms are ALWAYS in need of repairs. You never have enough money to maintain them. Just enough to keep it working a little bit longer.
This ranch had several horses, mostly draft horses but also some smaller and more agile runners. As the big ones tend to be more docile, you learn on a draft horse. When you start horse back riding, you first make friends with the horse. You take it out of the pen, put a harness on it gently, adjust to fit, and lead it to a fence. Then you spray it with water, brush it out, then with fly spray to keep the biting flies off. This is important because a biting fly can make the horse kick or lunge. You don't want that when you're a passenger. You put a blanket, without burrs in it, on its back and swing up a saddle. Adjust the stirrups and the belt as tight as you can manage. If it gets loose you're coming off. I find making eye contact with the horse helps. Let it know you're in charge. Think it real loud. Horses read body language in humans. They're herd animals and they've been raised around us all their lives. They understand.
I once described horses as big dogs. I've been told that's wrong by sheep herders in New Zealand, but if you think of a horse as a big dog, you're close enough. They're tippy so you can manhandle them around if you put your shoulders into it. When you clean their hooves, a lazy horse will try and put its weight on you, which could kill you if they fall on you. Instead, keep your knees bent and if they try, drop a couple inches. They don't want to fall so they'll balance again. You can clean the hooves. When approaching a horse, be sure to come around where they can see you, front or sides. If you surprise one from the rear it will slowly kick at you. If that hits, broken ribs or death. Its almost lazy how slow that kick is. But its got about 8 feet of reach. Make noise as you approach, like you would towards a dog, Pat or stroke its neck and head, scratch behind its ears. Like big dogs.
If you opt to feed a horse an apple or carrot, remember they can't tell the difference between those and your fingers, so be agile about getting your digits out of the way of their teeth. They won't mean to, they're just big and clumsy. My ex got a bad bite from feeding a horse and wan't agile enough. Its one of the dangers of being a Veterinary professional. I was studying Welding at the time, you get insanely agile doing that, especially "welders touch", something only welders have and is a very definitive motion that identifies them. The tattooed woman I used to work with sometimes had it. She knew MIG welding, barely, but had the touch at least.
Once the horse is saddled and ready for you, you walk it to a riding area and climb up. Test the stirrups. If they're the wrong length, get down and adjust them again. Try once more. Your knees should be bent enough to allow you to lift from the saddle. Now you're onto the hard part. And its difficult enough that getting a trainer is a good idea. Learning the right way to move in the saddle is hard, and you use a lot of back and abdominal muscles to tense and relax at just the right times. It is not easy. If you do it right, the horse will notice and allow you to go faster. Horses move differently, and bounce differently based on their speed. Some are very smooth, but its hard to change directions. Some are bouncy but agile, able to change a lot of directions without trouble, a wider stance really.
When you get good at it, horseback riding is a lot like being on a mountain bike with both a full suspension and someone else driving so you can look around as you go. That's very nice aspect of it. However, to get that you need to pay for a horse, barn, boarding, pasture, water, feed, veterinarian visits, access a breeder, keep multiple horses because they're herd animals and will go crazy alone, farrier, saddles, bridles, horse dentist, hay, hay storage, employees to care for them, and housing and health insurance for those employees.
Or you could get a scooter. And leave a space in the garage to park it. Horses are amazing, but they aren't cheap.
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Anime, Boarding Houses, and Our Future
I am an Anime fan. I like them because Anime use different conventions, different cliches, and aren't shy about discussing certain topics that are considered much too controversial in America. Like teenagers living apart from their disruptive cheating angry divorcing parents. That's controversial. Like kids having sufficient ambition to go to a school specializing in that in High School rather than waiting years more for college. Like teenagers getting jobs because they can see their education is a waste, that school is just a breeding ground for single mothers, shame, and bullying. That's controversial.
Japan is very interesting in a Meta level because that culture has already gone where we are heading, so in a manner of speaking, looking at them is a lot like looking at the future. America's real estate crash in 2007, combined with Peak Oil price spike of oil to $147/bbl got the ball rolling on our own collapse, as money shifted from construction jobs and economic growth to permanent economic shrinkage, to reduced hours, to unaffordable health care and declining living standards. Japan started on that path in 1989 with their own real estate crash, and 24 years later still hasn't recovered.
For most of us, being poor is the future. We will be living on very little money, forced working hours under 30 per week thanks to the loophole for employers in the Obamacareprogram scandal. I'm not sure how you plan to live on 25% less money, but it looks like we'll have the Dream of the 90's. Working part time, couch surfing, and painting birds on random objects and calling it Art. Ahem.
Couch surfing is not nice, from what I'm told. You use up your friendships. I'd rather have friends and live within my means. It is a shame that Defunding Obamacare is just a fantasy. The amount they want to defund is less than 1% of the total cost. The rest is already set to Bankrupt America. Both from the top and the bottom. In light of far less money to live on once it goes into effect (after the Election), we should be thinking about only have half as much money to live on. Half. Maybe less. Think about what that means. Its going to force young healthy people to pay for health insurance out of pocket, by law, a plan which will statistically drop premium costs... except that it won't. What it will actually do is make young people really angry and ask themselves why they voted for whom they did.
Whatever living space you've got now, you can either get a roommate to pay for half the rent, since you'll only have half the income in 2014, or move somewhere that costs half as much which means small or a bad neighborhood or both. If you're a miserable cuss, have sketchy friends, or are really loud in bed (snoring or sex), that may be best. Many people are NOT suited to living with others. Often, the right answer to roommates is not owning stuff worth stealing, having a completely different work schedule from your roommate so you aren't home at the same time, and having a good lock on your bedroom door. That's barely enough to not kill each other. If you have a family? Well... you're screwed. Should have voted for that other guy.
Living in a tinier apartment as cheap as you can get means a boarding house, or a studio apartment. Japan has many anime which take place in boarding houses and apartments. Hidamari Sketch is for high school students attending the art high school across the street. Pet Girl of Sakura-sou is also an art high school boarding house. So is Mahoraba, though only some of the residents are attending the local school. Anime classic Love Hina has a large boarding house with half a dozen residents and a central shared kitchen and laundry. Honey And Clover has several boarding houses near the art university they all attend. Places so tiny and poor you have to go down the street to take a bath. No really.
We have those art and technical schools in America, but most of them are ripoffs, designed to get you to accept debt to pay the high tuition, then leave you stranded after graduating with no job prospects and insufficient knowledge about business to start your own. In the real world, small business with few employees are the right answer to the modern jobs situation. Due to the costs of Obamacare, cutting employees workweeks to under 30 hours means employers don't have to pay for it. That's a 25% cut in your income if you didn't realize. And then being forced, by law, to pay for health insurance means you're out that money too. What I'm hearing is $1200 each, every month, for health insurance. Spending that much, you'd better go see the doctor, several times a month, to get your money's worth, which will massively drive up costs, thus raising premiums even more the following year. This is inflation. Mandated inflation. At some point, the system breaks. This is not a good thing.
What's left goes to food, car insurance, gasoline to get to work, and housing. Rent is often the most expensive part. America had boarding houses during the Great Depression, but I suspect we learned we didn't care for them much so don't have them anymore. The big downside to tiny row house apartments is you either pay too much for a condo and can't make improvements and are stuck with ever-rising rates for the upkeep of the grounds, or you get some roach infested ruin owned by a Slum Lord like you find in Oakland, a big part of why Oaklanders are so angry all the time.
Around here, there are granny units, often on propane which is $270/month including delivery charges, bad enough that many people get wood stoves to cut heating costs. Those SOUND great but laying a fire when you're freezing cold in the morning and need to go to work? And you can't leave the fire burning in the stove while you're gone because it might burn down the house. Not fun. Really not fun. Fire at night, propane in the morning might work, but its expensive when you use it, and the delivery charge is not small. If your road isn't paved, it costs more. I totally expect people to put in Pellet Stoves running on marine deep cycle batteries charged up by solar for those times when the power goes out. With the ever expanding poverty of the current Regime, outages are the inevitable consequence of too much poverty. What a shame.
The upside of living in a boarding house is that's a job for a PT maintenance man, living on the site, and a cook and laundress, for a nominal fee. It lets you live cheap, reusing one of those silly mansions on a postage stamp lot, so long as people are reasonable about the cars, with cuts in rent if they bike or scooter or public transit instead. I imagine a room in a McMansion including board (food and laundry) would be around $350/mo. and still make the owners money. Not great money, but enough to pay the mortgage if its a typical 5 Bedroom house like McMansions often are. If the cook and maintenance are a couple, that's one room instead of two and better wages for them as well. There's 3 car garage spaces there. What if you kept one of those, and put a workshop with a store front in the big one, building out onto the driveway about 10 feet. That would give you around 25 by 19 feet of shop space. Fixing something or selling something. Maybe a small restaurant/cafe. Maybe a fruit stand. Or selling hooch. Its the future. Hooch is fuel, after all.
I wonder if couples will form to run a boarding house together? If they'll dream of someday running a B&B with fancy meals and high dollar tourists. If they'll have side businesses to raise the capital, such as a food delivery service and small engine repair shop out of the garage. It would make sense. Its simple enough. You don't need an expensive adult-babysitting education in the arts or sciences to do that. Just access to YouTube and Wikipedia and RecipeSource to figure it out. Go from nothing to a future, even if its a modest one. Maybe this is the best ANYONE can hope for?
Japan is very interesting in a Meta level because that culture has already gone where we are heading, so in a manner of speaking, looking at them is a lot like looking at the future. America's real estate crash in 2007, combined with Peak Oil price spike of oil to $147/bbl got the ball rolling on our own collapse, as money shifted from construction jobs and economic growth to permanent economic shrinkage, to reduced hours, to unaffordable health care and declining living standards. Japan started on that path in 1989 with their own real estate crash, and 24 years later still hasn't recovered.
For most of us, being poor is the future. We will be living on very little money, forced working hours under 30 per week thanks to the loophole for employers in the Obamacare
Whatever living space you've got now, you can either get a roommate to pay for half the rent, since you'll only have half the income in 2014, or move somewhere that costs half as much which means small or a bad neighborhood or both. If you're a miserable cuss, have sketchy friends, or are really loud in bed (snoring or sex), that may be best. Many people are NOT suited to living with others. Often, the right answer to roommates is not owning stuff worth stealing, having a completely different work schedule from your roommate so you aren't home at the same time, and having a good lock on your bedroom door. That's barely enough to not kill each other. If you have a family? Well... you're screwed. Should have voted for that other guy.
Living in a tinier apartment as cheap as you can get means a boarding house, or a studio apartment. Japan has many anime which take place in boarding houses and apartments. Hidamari Sketch is for high school students attending the art high school across the street. Pet Girl of Sakura-sou is also an art high school boarding house. So is Mahoraba, though only some of the residents are attending the local school. Anime classic Love Hina has a large boarding house with half a dozen residents and a central shared kitchen and laundry. Honey And Clover has several boarding houses near the art university they all attend. Places so tiny and poor you have to go down the street to take a bath. No really.
We have those art and technical schools in America, but most of them are ripoffs, designed to get you to accept debt to pay the high tuition, then leave you stranded after graduating with no job prospects and insufficient knowledge about business to start your own. In the real world, small business with few employees are the right answer to the modern jobs situation. Due to the costs of Obamacare, cutting employees workweeks to under 30 hours means employers don't have to pay for it. That's a 25% cut in your income if you didn't realize. And then being forced, by law, to pay for health insurance means you're out that money too. What I'm hearing is $1200 each, every month, for health insurance. Spending that much, you'd better go see the doctor, several times a month, to get your money's worth, which will massively drive up costs, thus raising premiums even more the following year. This is inflation. Mandated inflation. At some point, the system breaks. This is not a good thing.
What's left goes to food, car insurance, gasoline to get to work, and housing. Rent is often the most expensive part. America had boarding houses during the Great Depression, but I suspect we learned we didn't care for them much so don't have them anymore. The big downside to tiny row house apartments is you either pay too much for a condo and can't make improvements and are stuck with ever-rising rates for the upkeep of the grounds, or you get some roach infested ruin owned by a Slum Lord like you find in Oakland, a big part of why Oaklanders are so angry all the time.
Around here, there are granny units, often on propane which is $270/month including delivery charges, bad enough that many people get wood stoves to cut heating costs. Those SOUND great but laying a fire when you're freezing cold in the morning and need to go to work? And you can't leave the fire burning in the stove while you're gone because it might burn down the house. Not fun. Really not fun. Fire at night, propane in the morning might work, but its expensive when you use it, and the delivery charge is not small. If your road isn't paved, it costs more. I totally expect people to put in Pellet Stoves running on marine deep cycle batteries charged up by solar for those times when the power goes out. With the ever expanding poverty of the current Regime, outages are the inevitable consequence of too much poverty. What a shame.
The upside of living in a boarding house is that's a job for a PT maintenance man, living on the site, and a cook and laundress, for a nominal fee. It lets you live cheap, reusing one of those silly mansions on a postage stamp lot, so long as people are reasonable about the cars, with cuts in rent if they bike or scooter or public transit instead. I imagine a room in a McMansion including board (food and laundry) would be around $350/mo. and still make the owners money. Not great money, but enough to pay the mortgage if its a typical 5 Bedroom house like McMansions often are. If the cook and maintenance are a couple, that's one room instead of two and better wages for them as well. There's 3 car garage spaces there. What if you kept one of those, and put a workshop with a store front in the big one, building out onto the driveway about 10 feet. That would give you around 25 by 19 feet of shop space. Fixing something or selling something. Maybe a small restaurant/cafe. Maybe a fruit stand. Or selling hooch. Its the future. Hooch is fuel, after all.
I wonder if couples will form to run a boarding house together? If they'll dream of someday running a B&B with fancy meals and high dollar tourists. If they'll have side businesses to raise the capital, such as a food delivery service and small engine repair shop out of the garage. It would make sense. Its simple enough. You don't need an expensive adult-babysitting education in the arts or sciences to do that. Just access to YouTube and Wikipedia and RecipeSource to figure it out. Go from nothing to a future, even if its a modest one. Maybe this is the best ANYONE can hope for?
Monday, July 29, 2013
Good Day For A Geocaching Hike
I live in a town with a lot of outdoors stuff going on. We're JUST below the snow line, in a place that still had a gold mine in operation until 1934. Its since completely flooded, 2 miles deep. 11,000 something feet deep with contaminated mine water. And there's about $6 billion in gold down there at today's prices. Someday they'll pump that out and mine it more. The gold is just too valuable not to. I went for a hike for my first Geocache hunt yesterday. I found this:
Which turned out to have this underneath it. The round thing is a GPS signal bounce. It beeps on a GPS.
Because there are so many outdoors people here, there's 440+ geocaches within about 10 miles of where I live. This was the strong argument to actually pursue the interest. Its EASY to do, lots of people participate in it, its good for kids, and an excuse to hike. So I found myself facing a utility shutoff for neighborhood maintenance today and said: "screw it, I'll go find some of these caches." So I took my GPS with coordinates uploaded and went for a walk. Really nice day. Temps dropped to 61'F overnight, thanks to Delta Breeze ALL the way from the SF Bay, which is 140 miles SW of here. There IS some smoke from a wildfire somewhere. The air is thick with it. Well, not thick. I've seen smoke blue enough that it was visible across the street, and this wasn't that. Its coloring the air, however, and its visible like LA smog. Still, hiking was easy enough and it was just under 80'F at 11:30 this morning so I marched up the hill in search of the nearest cache. I found where it should have been, but it wasn't there. Sad panda.
The next one was about a block away so I marched on, in my Tevas, along the parking lot, and into the next one because: feet go anywhere. This one was ALSO missing, though it was fun narrowing it down. No carrot. Sad panda.
I marched on to the next closest and found a lovely hiking trail worth visiting again, running beside the Nevada Irrigation Distrist (NID) Ditch, which supplies agricultural and drinking water to this part of the county.
I drink that water, after treatment. It was originally brought down the mountain through reservoirs and ditches running on the sides of hills for mining purposes, both hydraulic mining and hard rock for mechanical power generation. The Pelton Wheel was a big thing here.
The Manzanita Grove cache was also missing. I was noticing a pattern at this point. I marched on. Towards Br'er Rabbit's Cache. I looked and looked in the briar patch. I stood over the spot. The exact spot. Nothing. A woman hiking with her 6 yo son asked me what I was doing, so I explained Geocaching. They wished me luck and went on with their walk.
I hiked on down the trail, then realized I was missing the building I needed to reach so found a deer trail and climbed up the hill, in my Tevas. I found a fire road past a grove of wild apple trees, and circumnavigated a fence. I finally hiked up to a weird building I'd been wondering about for years and walked through an unlocked gate to find the OFFICE which houses the geocache behind a door locked with a button to annoy the office lady having lunch. I opted to leave her alone and called that one found. Even though I never actually SAW it.
Hiking back I marched along a dry section of NID Ditch, found some guy talking to a girl with an eyepatch in the woods. They said "hi", I said "hi", very non-threatening but almost certainly homeless. Strangely enough, people don't bother me. Maybe the fanny pack just says "gun" to them. I think I just exude a look of someone going somewhere else and not worth the trouble to mug, or maybe people are mostly nice and mugging is pretty rare up here anyway. The hike back found some trails down and my blood sugar was reasonably low by the time I returned home at 1:30. A seriously long hike. And a really nice day to do it.
In other news I applied for 3 jobs earlier, before the hike. With any luck there will be interviews and I can work again.
Which turned out to have this underneath it. The round thing is a GPS signal bounce. It beeps on a GPS.
Because there are so many outdoors people here, there's 440+ geocaches within about 10 miles of where I live. This was the strong argument to actually pursue the interest. Its EASY to do, lots of people participate in it, its good for kids, and an excuse to hike. So I found myself facing a utility shutoff for neighborhood maintenance today and said: "screw it, I'll go find some of these caches." So I took my GPS with coordinates uploaded and went for a walk. Really nice day. Temps dropped to 61'F overnight, thanks to Delta Breeze ALL the way from the SF Bay, which is 140 miles SW of here. There IS some smoke from a wildfire somewhere. The air is thick with it. Well, not thick. I've seen smoke blue enough that it was visible across the street, and this wasn't that. Its coloring the air, however, and its visible like LA smog. Still, hiking was easy enough and it was just under 80'F at 11:30 this morning so I marched up the hill in search of the nearest cache. I found where it should have been, but it wasn't there. Sad panda.
The next one was about a block away so I marched on, in my Tevas, along the parking lot, and into the next one because: feet go anywhere. This one was ALSO missing, though it was fun narrowing it down. No carrot. Sad panda.
I marched on to the next closest and found a lovely hiking trail worth visiting again, running beside the Nevada Irrigation Distrist (NID) Ditch, which supplies agricultural and drinking water to this part of the county.
I drink that water, after treatment. It was originally brought down the mountain through reservoirs and ditches running on the sides of hills for mining purposes, both hydraulic mining and hard rock for mechanical power generation. The Pelton Wheel was a big thing here.
The Manzanita Grove cache was also missing. I was noticing a pattern at this point. I marched on. Towards Br'er Rabbit's Cache. I looked and looked in the briar patch. I stood over the spot. The exact spot. Nothing. A woman hiking with her 6 yo son asked me what I was doing, so I explained Geocaching. They wished me luck and went on with their walk.
Hiking back I marched along a dry section of NID Ditch, found some guy talking to a girl with an eyepatch in the woods. They said "hi", I said "hi", very non-threatening but almost certainly homeless. Strangely enough, people don't bother me. Maybe the fanny pack just says "gun" to them. I think I just exude a look of someone going somewhere else and not worth the trouble to mug, or maybe people are mostly nice and mugging is pretty rare up here anyway. The hike back found some trails down and my blood sugar was reasonably low by the time I returned home at 1:30. A seriously long hike. And a really nice day to do it.
In other news I applied for 3 jobs earlier, before the hike. With any luck there will be interviews and I can work again.
Killing The Dinos
If you enjoy the broad sweeping claims of geologist at Berkeley, which turned him into a Rock Star, the dinosaurs were all killed off by a six mile wide asteroid impacting in Mexico 65 million years ago. Its a popular idea. Everybody knows about it. The author leveraged that into getting laid, good dinner parties, the best booze, book deals, and the talk show circuit. The problem with his hypothesis is it probably isn't right. An asteroid (or comet) did hit at Chicxulub Mexico, near the north side of the Yucatan Penninsula, around 65 million years ago. That's fact and not disputed. There's a fantastic oil reservoir, shocked quartz from the impact, all the usual impact evidence and a way to date it.
The problem with the impact hypothesis is the impact didn't kill a number of fragile species still around today, stuff we know is fragile because lots of things kill them. Things like sea turtles, crocodiles, birds, freshwater and ocean fish, the trees and plants. If the impact had happened as claimed, at the height of dinosaur superiority, there would be entire fields of dead dinosaurs covered in inches of iridium rich ash and clay from the impact. There isn't. Not even one dinosaur fossil covered in that ash. The odds really favor it if they were going strong and died all together.
Of course, if something else killed them first, like say some old variant of bird flu spread when North and South America joined together, something not carried by pteranodons but eventually mutates and kills them too, that could have killed off all the dinos 2500 years before the asteroid (or comet) hit. That's the closest we've come dating a dino to the impact, to the clay layer. 2500 years. That's all of human civilization with Democracy, if you start with the Athenians. The asteroid, according to the evidence, hit a planet where the dinos were already dead, and wasn't bad enough to kill off the birds and fish etc. Even with a 6 mile wide rock, and the nuclear winter, the birds survived, as did the sea turtles who are on the verge of extinction today we consider so cute with their babies hatching and trying to reach the sea down in the Caribbean or Africa or Indonesia. We still have freshwater and ocean fish. So the big rock killing them all? Its obviously wrong.
Another hypothesis suggests the Deccan Traps in India. They are major volcanic eruptions that went on through 10K years. They could have killed them off, but that also leaves the turtles, crocs and fish and birds alone without explanation.
I still favor the disease option. They're different enough animals it might not have hit them. I don't understand how it killed the Cretaceous nautiloids, called Ammonites, as they're sea creatures that should have been insulated from all this, but they died with the dinos for some reason, along with the swimming dinos but not the reefs. And not the crocodiles. Not the fish. Not the birds. But killed the provably warm blooded dinos in Alaska, which was turned 90 degrees but still up there and still in darkness several months a year, with snow. They had to be warm blooded or they'd be unable to move and die out. So why would they die from an Impact Winter? They wouldn't. It had to be something else.
A few paleontologists point this out, because paleontologists study ancient animals rather than more general rocks and environments. They don't get as much airplay with the media because big decisive science sells newspapers and advertising. It doesn't have to be right. If its wrong, its even better because then its a scandal and that sells even more. This is a great reason to dislike the media, btw. Truth is the furthest thing from profit. Paleontologists don't get much traction outside of real science on this issue because there are too many idiots deciding whom to fund, who to make documentaries about, and the guy with the asteroid killing the dinosaurs?
That dovetails nicely with judeo-xtian-muslim apocalypse religion and that's easy to sell to funding agencies. We need more religions that sell the idea of continuation rather than annihilation. Probably won't be as popular, since localized apocalyptic events (earthquake, fire, hurricane, tornado) happen often enough, but that could be worked in, pointing out that life goes on. Not for those who died in the event, but for everybody else there's cleanup and rebuilding. The Dinosaurs did die out, but I think it happened before the rock hit Mexico. All the evidence supports that. What exactly killed them isn't known.
It would be cool to find out the exact virus that did it. Find one in a fossil and code it up to study it. And before you worry... we are descended from the animals immune to it, as are all the other animals. It's harmless to us. It's probably loose, possibly already known to science, and still floating around out there in Brazil and the Congo, with no symptoms. There are diseases like that. If a dinosaur were recoded and brought to life? It would probably die shortly after birth from this just being breathed on by someone who owns a pet bird and is an asymptomatic carrier of the disease. That actually happens with bird owners, btw. Rather anticlimactic turn for a Jurassic Park attempt.
The problem with the impact hypothesis is the impact didn't kill a number of fragile species still around today, stuff we know is fragile because lots of things kill them. Things like sea turtles, crocodiles, birds, freshwater and ocean fish, the trees and plants. If the impact had happened as claimed, at the height of dinosaur superiority, there would be entire fields of dead dinosaurs covered in inches of iridium rich ash and clay from the impact. There isn't. Not even one dinosaur fossil covered in that ash. The odds really favor it if they were going strong and died all together.
Of course, if something else killed them first, like say some old variant of bird flu spread when North and South America joined together, something not carried by pteranodons but eventually mutates and kills them too, that could have killed off all the dinos 2500 years before the asteroid (or comet) hit. That's the closest we've come dating a dino to the impact, to the clay layer. 2500 years. That's all of human civilization with Democracy, if you start with the Athenians. The asteroid, according to the evidence, hit a planet where the dinos were already dead, and wasn't bad enough to kill off the birds and fish etc. Even with a 6 mile wide rock, and the nuclear winter, the birds survived, as did the sea turtles who are on the verge of extinction today we consider so cute with their babies hatching and trying to reach the sea down in the Caribbean or Africa or Indonesia. We still have freshwater and ocean fish. So the big rock killing them all? Its obviously wrong.
Another hypothesis suggests the Deccan Traps in India. They are major volcanic eruptions that went on through 10K years. They could have killed them off, but that also leaves the turtles, crocs and fish and birds alone without explanation.
I still favor the disease option. They're different enough animals it might not have hit them. I don't understand how it killed the Cretaceous nautiloids, called Ammonites, as they're sea creatures that should have been insulated from all this, but they died with the dinos for some reason, along with the swimming dinos but not the reefs. And not the crocodiles. Not the fish. Not the birds. But killed the provably warm blooded dinos in Alaska, which was turned 90 degrees but still up there and still in darkness several months a year, with snow. They had to be warm blooded or they'd be unable to move and die out. So why would they die from an Impact Winter? They wouldn't. It had to be something else.
A few paleontologists point this out, because paleontologists study ancient animals rather than more general rocks and environments. They don't get as much airplay with the media because big decisive science sells newspapers and advertising. It doesn't have to be right. If its wrong, its even better because then its a scandal and that sells even more. This is a great reason to dislike the media, btw. Truth is the furthest thing from profit. Paleontologists don't get much traction outside of real science on this issue because there are too many idiots deciding whom to fund, who to make documentaries about, and the guy with the asteroid killing the dinosaurs?
That dovetails nicely with judeo-xtian-muslim apocalypse religion and that's easy to sell to funding agencies. We need more religions that sell the idea of continuation rather than annihilation. Probably won't be as popular, since localized apocalyptic events (earthquake, fire, hurricane, tornado) happen often enough, but that could be worked in, pointing out that life goes on. Not for those who died in the event, but for everybody else there's cleanup and rebuilding. The Dinosaurs did die out, but I think it happened before the rock hit Mexico. All the evidence supports that. What exactly killed them isn't known.
It would be cool to find out the exact virus that did it. Find one in a fossil and code it up to study it. And before you worry... we are descended from the animals immune to it, as are all the other animals. It's harmless to us. It's probably loose, possibly already known to science, and still floating around out there in Brazil and the Congo, with no symptoms. There are diseases like that. If a dinosaur were recoded and brought to life? It would probably die shortly after birth from this just being breathed on by someone who owns a pet bird and is an asymptomatic carrier of the disease. That actually happens with bird owners, btw. Rather anticlimactic turn for a Jurassic Park attempt.
Saturday, July 27, 2013
GPS: So Fricken Cool
Okay, now I'm impressed.
First terms: GPS is a receiver which calculates your location on the surface of the Earth. It does not talk to the satellite. I receives data from multiple satellites, like a radio, and calculates your location. To work properly, it needs a 1 inch or bigger physical dish antenna inside or connected to it. The bigger the antenna, the better the position calculation, the faster it works. Most GPS units come with a tiny GIS program to display this position against map data layers. Google Earth is a GIS program. So is every mapping program you've used to find the local Pizza Hut or WalMart. GIS and GPS go together but they are not the same, in a similar way that Gasoline and Cars go together but are not the same.
I used to work in the GIS industry and my GPS map data is current used, including the roads and hand wrapped street labels. Those were painful but necessary so they label at multiple scales of map. Cartography is not just about accurate data, but presentation for the viewer. If the labels are too small for a room level presentation read from 30+ feet away, you want bigger labels on the main roads and a big U R Here arrow pointing to the spot your speaker is discussing. I used to make those for many purposes. Even the Jehovah's Witnesses used to use my services, so they could label the "please don't bother me" folks. If you ask nicely, and firmly, they will put you on that and never trouble you again. It pays to be polite, folks. It pays dividends.
If you recall, a few weeks ago I bought a GPS so I could both do geocaching and hiking. I spent about a month agonizing about what unit is right for me, and even considered a smartphone like the Nexus 4, which MAY work on my network but I wasn't about to spend money to try and find out. I also considered a tablet or laptop, good for map size and data updates, but I eventually decided on the Garmin eTrex 20, as it is moderately priced and has good features. It also is a one time fee, not a monthly subscription to data services and iffy connectivity any most of the locations I'd want to use it. The Garmin has a 2 GB memory and expandability for data (takes up to 32 GB microSD) if I want later, yet doesn't have things I don't need like a cheap camera and an altimeter. I don't need those features. I have a camera that takes good photos, voice notes, video, and I typically carry on hikes. The Garmin doesn't have a touch screen either, instead a tiny little joy stick nub. This works surprisingly well. It's very waterproof and very small, 5 oz + batteries, if slightly thick, but its really ideal size for hiking. Maybe small for putting on the handlebars of a bicycle, but if I somehow got lost, I could take it out a pocket and see where I was.
I did NOT opt to pay Garmin for their 1 : 24,000 quad map topographic data. Turns out I didn't need to either. There's tons of free data out there, with better contours, trails, etc and more free software to convert it. And the device has Gigs of storage space so even big files have plenty of room. I will eventually find aerial photos and get those in there too, which this gizmo supports. I already have water, full streets, 40 foot topos, all free. I am considering getting vegetation and possibly geology, as those suit me. I am still trying to track down high resolution trails so the next time I'm hiking I can actually see where they are rather than using my eyes to spot the blazes and footprints and disturbed brush. I'm very good at that, btw. Not just trained but experienced.
If I get this working well enough, I may loan it to my Dad so he doesn't suffer a senior moment while hiking solo and get into trouble. At his age, that is possible. Playing Sudoku will help him, but he's forgotten entire movies we watched together less than a year ago. That's... a bad sign. It's a warning. I am encouraged how he can do the math of Sudoku and his heart it good from all the exercise, almost daily at the gym. Then again, my aunt doesn't exercise at all and remains reasonably healthy if slightly confused about technology. MOST of my relatives are Luddites. Not all. I have a cousin who is a programmer, another in investment, a couple more in real estate, and one in music. These are technical jobs and require critical thinking and hard work.
Its good to get the water features in there. I will eventually get around to buying a carrying a serious portable water filter, one that can be washed and maintained, so when I'm hiking I'm not the verge of death when my water runs out. Carrying emergency food and my diabetes test kit are already standard. In the real world of hiking, you need enough water. That's your limiting factor in most cases. Its often the heaviest thing you've got, and something you can't skimp on without serious risk. Dehydration at high altitude and can get you into danger just as fast as a sudden snow storm. I take the weather seriously, I take my water and food needs seriously, and having this map gizmo is a big help.
I love that it runs on AA batteries. 18 hours of run time. That's astonishing. My old Trimble with its 7 inch antenna needed 2 or 3 camcorder batteries to work, and we carried spares. It weighed about 10 pounds, lasted about 4 hours, and we had to mount the magnetized antenna on the roof of the SUV we were using that day. It's all so much simpler now. The technology and computing power is more efficient, faster, and in GPS, its all about the FLOPS. Floating Point Calculations per Second. The better the calculation speed, the more you can make, the higher the accuracy and speed of the GPS. Multiple channels also means error checking and higher statistical accuracy. When I read complaints from Geocachers who can't find a spot and blame their GPS, I never hear them checking the satellite coverage and seeing they only have 4 in the sky overhead at the time, or asking if the soil is red and those cedar trees overhead just MIGHT have iron in them and thus make an effective radio barrier. Because that would be logical, and there's a LOT of dumb in the world.
So turns out you can get the critical software (Basecamp and MapSource) from Garmin for free, then download more software free (cGPS Mapper and MapSetToolKit) to convert public map data to work on the Garmin software and then swap back and forth into the GPS unit. So I was totally right to just buy this thing outright and not worry about the map layer data. That saved me about $200 off total cost of ownership. That's three days pay at my last job.
~~~~~~~~
Also, and this is a food thing, I found that Kraft has REAL mayo with olive oil and its cheap. Real mayo tastes better than the kind made with soybean or rapeseed (aka Canola) oil. 30 years ago, Canola oil spoiled so fast it was considered "unfit for human consumption" and then marketing made it the latest thing to avoid heart disease. Olive oil is better and keeps longer without going rancid. Coconut oil is better for frying than anything but Soybean oil and is as healthy as Olive oil. Good mayo tastes so delicious. And you can modify it with a dab of Grey Poupon Dijon mustard into one of many good sauces for sandwiches or salad dressings or fried eggs. That sauce on an egg cooked 4 minutes on low heat with a table spoon of water, then served on a toasted English muffin with a slice of cheese, ham, or both? Excellent, and very healthy. A good balance that sticks to your ribs and gives you enough energy for the day's labors. I like that.
First terms: GPS is a receiver which calculates your location on the surface of the Earth. It does not talk to the satellite. I receives data from multiple satellites, like a radio, and calculates your location. To work properly, it needs a 1 inch or bigger physical dish antenna inside or connected to it. The bigger the antenna, the better the position calculation, the faster it works. Most GPS units come with a tiny GIS program to display this position against map data layers. Google Earth is a GIS program. So is every mapping program you've used to find the local Pizza Hut or WalMart. GIS and GPS go together but they are not the same, in a similar way that Gasoline and Cars go together but are not the same.
I used to work in the GIS industry and my GPS map data is current used, including the roads and hand wrapped street labels. Those were painful but necessary so they label at multiple scales of map. Cartography is not just about accurate data, but presentation for the viewer. If the labels are too small for a room level presentation read from 30+ feet away, you want bigger labels on the main roads and a big U R Here arrow pointing to the spot your speaker is discussing. I used to make those for many purposes. Even the Jehovah's Witnesses used to use my services, so they could label the "please don't bother me" folks. If you ask nicely, and firmly, they will put you on that and never trouble you again. It pays to be polite, folks. It pays dividends.
 |
| I now have something like this in the palm of my hand |
I did NOT opt to pay Garmin for their 1 : 24,000 quad map topographic data. Turns out I didn't need to either. There's tons of free data out there, with better contours, trails, etc and more free software to convert it. And the device has Gigs of storage space so even big files have plenty of room. I will eventually find aerial photos and get those in there too, which this gizmo supports. I already have water, full streets, 40 foot topos, all free. I am considering getting vegetation and possibly geology, as those suit me. I am still trying to track down high resolution trails so the next time I'm hiking I can actually see where they are rather than using my eyes to spot the blazes and footprints and disturbed brush. I'm very good at that, btw. Not just trained but experienced.
If I get this working well enough, I may loan it to my Dad so he doesn't suffer a senior moment while hiking solo and get into trouble. At his age, that is possible. Playing Sudoku will help him, but he's forgotten entire movies we watched together less than a year ago. That's... a bad sign. It's a warning. I am encouraged how he can do the math of Sudoku and his heart it good from all the exercise, almost daily at the gym. Then again, my aunt doesn't exercise at all and remains reasonably healthy if slightly confused about technology. MOST of my relatives are Luddites. Not all. I have a cousin who is a programmer, another in investment, a couple more in real estate, and one in music. These are technical jobs and require critical thinking and hard work.
Its good to get the water features in there. I will eventually get around to buying a carrying a serious portable water filter, one that can be washed and maintained, so when I'm hiking I'm not the verge of death when my water runs out. Carrying emergency food and my diabetes test kit are already standard. In the real world of hiking, you need enough water. That's your limiting factor in most cases. Its often the heaviest thing you've got, and something you can't skimp on without serious risk. Dehydration at high altitude and can get you into danger just as fast as a sudden snow storm. I take the weather seriously, I take my water and food needs seriously, and having this map gizmo is a big help.
I love that it runs on AA batteries. 18 hours of run time. That's astonishing. My old Trimble with its 7 inch antenna needed 2 or 3 camcorder batteries to work, and we carried spares. It weighed about 10 pounds, lasted about 4 hours, and we had to mount the magnetized antenna on the roof of the SUV we were using that day. It's all so much simpler now. The technology and computing power is more efficient, faster, and in GPS, its all about the FLOPS. Floating Point Calculations per Second. The better the calculation speed, the more you can make, the higher the accuracy and speed of the GPS. Multiple channels also means error checking and higher statistical accuracy. When I read complaints from Geocachers who can't find a spot and blame their GPS, I never hear them checking the satellite coverage and seeing they only have 4 in the sky overhead at the time, or asking if the soil is red and those cedar trees overhead just MIGHT have iron in them and thus make an effective radio barrier. Because that would be logical, and there's a LOT of dumb in the world.
So turns out you can get the critical software (Basecamp and MapSource) from Garmin for free, then download more software free (cGPS Mapper and MapSetToolKit) to convert public map data to work on the Garmin software and then swap back and forth into the GPS unit. So I was totally right to just buy this thing outright and not worry about the map layer data. That saved me about $200 off total cost of ownership. That's three days pay at my last job.
~~~~~~~~
Also, and this is a food thing, I found that Kraft has REAL mayo with olive oil and its cheap. Real mayo tastes better than the kind made with soybean or rapeseed (aka Canola) oil. 30 years ago, Canola oil spoiled so fast it was considered "unfit for human consumption" and then marketing made it the latest thing to avoid heart disease. Olive oil is better and keeps longer without going rancid. Coconut oil is better for frying than anything but Soybean oil and is as healthy as Olive oil. Good mayo tastes so delicious. And you can modify it with a dab of Grey Poupon Dijon mustard into one of many good sauces for sandwiches or salad dressings or fried eggs. That sauce on an egg cooked 4 minutes on low heat with a table spoon of water, then served on a toasted English muffin with a slice of cheese, ham, or both? Excellent, and very healthy. A good balance that sticks to your ribs and gives you enough energy for the day's labors. I like that.
Friday, July 26, 2013
Groceries
Went to see my Aunt today. She's doing okay, if somewhat warm. Like me, she uses a fan to keep cool and stays hydrated. We fixed her A/C and showed her how to turn it on. She took a hard spill, at 83 years old, on the sidewalk and was left there by her indifferent neighbors. We've been trying to get her to move up here into a managed home where a spill won't be leaving her alone. So far, no dice.
After the visit, we went to WinCo Foods, an employee owned warehouse grocery store out of Salem Oregon which has them all over the place, including here in California. I was able to get more Silver Spur coffee, this time for $11 for 2 pounds which is still only $5.50/lb for best quality coffee I can drink without cream or sugar (best quality means BEST), just black. They also have my favorite wines for a good price. Being unemployed, I only bought one bottle of Barefoot Cellars Impressions Red (blend) wine. I can enjoy that later. It was $5/btl instead of the usual $7 at the local cheap grocery store. While its a bit of a hassle going to WinCo, since its a drive down to Roseville of nearly a hour, if you're near one, may as well go because it saves a LOT of money on pretty much everything and they have good produce and name brands, in small enough quantities I don't worry about it spoiling. When I lived in Rocklin with my ex-wife, we often shopped there together. Saved a lot of money, let us eat properly. I've become a better cook since then.
We also went to Costco, but everybody on the West Coast knows about them. Good place for meat and better wines and some electronics. Dependable quality, because their return policy makes that certain, but pointless if you live alone. Just a couple blocks from Winco, so we dealt with the hassles and the always-distracted customers, going one way, looking another. In the store, in the parking lots. It's weird as hell. A strong argument for Zombies Are Here, if anything. I really don't know why that is. Its really odd. Same problem at all their locations I've ever visited.
After the visit, we went to WinCo Foods, an employee owned warehouse grocery store out of Salem Oregon which has them all over the place, including here in California. I was able to get more Silver Spur coffee, this time for $11 for 2 pounds which is still only $5.50/lb for best quality coffee I can drink without cream or sugar (best quality means BEST), just black. They also have my favorite wines for a good price. Being unemployed, I only bought one bottle of Barefoot Cellars Impressions Red (blend) wine. I can enjoy that later. It was $5/btl instead of the usual $7 at the local cheap grocery store. While its a bit of a hassle going to WinCo, since its a drive down to Roseville of nearly a hour, if you're near one, may as well go because it saves a LOT of money on pretty much everything and they have good produce and name brands, in small enough quantities I don't worry about it spoiling. When I lived in Rocklin with my ex-wife, we often shopped there together. Saved a lot of money, let us eat properly. I've become a better cook since then.
We also went to Costco, but everybody on the West Coast knows about them. Good place for meat and better wines and some electronics. Dependable quality, because their return policy makes that certain, but pointless if you live alone. Just a couple blocks from Winco, so we dealt with the hassles and the always-distracted customers, going one way, looking another. In the store, in the parking lots. It's weird as hell. A strong argument for Zombies Are Here, if anything. I really don't know why that is. Its really odd. Same problem at all their locations I've ever visited.
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Good News
My divorce is final today. I got the call from my lawyer's office. I am no longer married. Legally, I cannot remarry for 6 months from today. I am not in a hurry. I am told by others that good women exist.
I found a site with GIS data, free, that I could select and their server compiled the layer. It takes them about 10 hours to run the data, then they email you to download it. Copy it into the Garmin folder, and it becomes an available map layer. I now have accurate street maps for where I live without paying $129.99 for software. I might find some DEM (shaded relief) layers to add, purely for looks. Since I bought a decent storage space GPS, I didn't even need a card to make it work. Just plugged in the USB and hey presto! I'm pretty stoked, because free is synonymous with really cheap. I used to WORK, and GET PAID to make stuff like this, the map layers I mean. So its nice to see its still easy for me despite that being over 10 years ago.
We had pork ribs tonight. 1 hour in a covered dish at 350F in the oven. I made oven baked fries too, salads, and sweet corn. Dad was happy, so was I. Very tender and delicious meat. I pity vegetarians. They are missing out on so much flavor, and easy protein too.
I found a site with GIS data, free, that I could select and their server compiled the layer. It takes them about 10 hours to run the data, then they email you to download it. Copy it into the Garmin folder, and it becomes an available map layer. I now have accurate street maps for where I live without paying $129.99 for software. I might find some DEM (shaded relief) layers to add, purely for looks. Since I bought a decent storage space GPS, I didn't even need a card to make it work. Just plugged in the USB and hey presto! I'm pretty stoked, because free is synonymous with really cheap. I used to WORK, and GET PAID to make stuff like this, the map layers I mean. So its nice to see its still easy for me despite that being over 10 years ago.
We had pork ribs tonight. 1 hour in a covered dish at 350F in the oven. I made oven baked fries too, salads, and sweet corn. Dad was happy, so was I. Very tender and delicious meat. I pity vegetarians. They are missing out on so much flavor, and easy protein too.
Four Wheels
The main reason people use scooters in Europe is because the roads are mostly good, taxes and insurance on drivers are high, spaces available to park sometimes cost money, and the people riding them are mostly young, male, and poor. They ARE great fun, and probably a major influence on the future, especially in urban areas when the cost per person of keeping roads smooth is lower than out in the boondocks where that simply won't happen, roads will get big holes, turn to gravel, and be abandoned until they vanish in washouts, bushes, downed trees, and stream beds. Not joking. It has already happened in Japan in areas where the weather is too much and the taxes too low to pay for repairs. Nature takes over roads in around 3 years. And by take over, see the video I linked to over in Google+. I do suggest muting the sound unless you're a fan of A Certain Scientific Railgun. On those roads 2 wheels, big ones with good brakes and sufficient torque, is the right answer. You can't get through that in 4 wheels without stopping every couple dozen meters and cutting out more brush, clearing trees etc. If you live there, maybe that's the right answer. If you're just passing through? Nope.
In the real world, my experiments with scooters, bicycles, and motorcycles are part of my long term mobility preparation. Rather than "guns", I'm looking at ways to stay employed, frugally, and let others turn to violence and get shot if that's their choice. And it often is, or so they say. I still contend that the cost of a firearm and proper training today is often more than simply moving somewhere with less violence. Usually. If you're tied to multiple jobs and the evil is everywhere you have visited, you may not be able to move far enough to escape it. Cities are full of muggers and rapists and politicians. The countryside is full of pot farmers with guns and methed up burglars. The suburbs are full of drug addicts, anger, and potential killings sprees. I heard a murder a mere night before I moved out of Unpleasanton, about 125 meters away from where I was sleeping. Slow, methodical, gunshots. And that was in the Garden Spot of the Bay Area. Everywhere else is worse.
Up here in the Sierras there are backyard pot gardens, methed up Middle Schoolers (really, not joking at all!), trophy wives trying to con their husbands into murdering them in crimes of passion via deliberate infidelity just to feel love one last time, and endemic unemployment. This is the real world. There are rough roads, big potholes, line springs, tar snakes, and driveway gravel on every road. If you ride two wheels, you must be cautious. If you aren't, you're going to die. As I'm interested in transportation, not suicide, I'm a very cautious rider. Except going down Hughes road on my bicycle. Give me that small moment. My brakes work fine.
In the real world, we drive cars. Some obsess over safety and insist on bigger heavier vehicles that suck so much gasoline they bankrupt over the cost of their commute, necessarily long because a big heavy vehicle needs higher wages to pay for it, and you don't much get those here. A big heavy vehicle with a long commute is a clear case of Bad Choices, and someone to be avoided because one bad choice likely has many friends and this person is a disaster zone, desperate, and desperate people do desperate things.
The smarter people I see around here are driving older Subarus. They are practical and can be maintained and offer whole minutes more traction in very light snow than a front wheel drive with similar tires. Minutes. It's hilarious too, once the snow starts coming down. If you put them in studded snow tires then that's something different. A Subaru with proper snow tires? Those work well in the black ice, if driven very carefully. Folks around here have the original steel wheels mounted with studded snow tires for snow and alloys with all-season rain tires for the rest of the year and they switch back and forth as needed. It really only takes about half an hour to swap wheels if you have a floor jack and stands. I've done it.
Most people who aren't in Subarus or pickup trucks or SUVs (retired mostly), are driving Hondas like mine. Front wheel drive is better than rear in light snow, and while that means there will be days you can't get to work, its only days, not weeks unless you live above the snow line. And if you have a job? Don't live there, stupid. Be more responsible with your choices. Air conditioning in summer is cheaper than wrecking your car every winter.
People who don't own pickup trucks do not despair. Gardening trailers and a hitch will fit your Subaru or Honda and I see people hauling plants and building supplies often enough. It's very practical and some fold up for convenient parking upright in the garage. I think that's Awesome. Learning to drive a trailer is mostly about awareness that something is behind you and you can't really back up. Use your mirrors. It's a proper skill every man should know today, like plowing a field in the old days. I don't have a hitch, but I have access to an SUV with one so that's covered.
Back when I first became aware of Peak Oil, in that first big run-up in price from $15/bbl to $147/bbl, I thought the answer to the problem was buying a car with max MPG/$$ value, which was NOT the Prius, but a Honda Civic. If I'd known about the Geo Metro, would have gotten that instead. They were cheap, gutless, but reliable. Nowadays most bubble cars get that MPG and are much more comfortable and powerful. They just cost a lot. Its hard to justify the expense when you aren't sure they'll matter after another unexpected and unpredictable oil crisis happens. And I mean that non-ironically. I kept expecting fuel rationing, but it didn't happen. Not yet. Instead we get demand destruction by both price and bad economy reducing people's dependence on fuel by unemploying so many of them that they simply can't justify buying it or using it much of the time, if they don't have a job to pay for it. Pleasure driving? That's for Top Gear on TV. Most of the fans will never own a supercar, even a beater. The most POWER a normal person can have will be a Rice Rocket, probably used, needing the cowling replaced after it was wrecked on a bad corner and its prior owner killed.
People who can restrain their joy to just apexing corners at low speed and seeing the sights? Well, jeeps and Miatas and a Honda with the sunroof open and the windows down? That's nice enough. Clean the glass properly and you'll see more of the world. Good tires and tire pressure, it corners better. Knowing the road well means you can drive it a little faster, feel more Gee's safely, and still have fun, as a driver. Take as much weight out of the car as you dare, remove all rattling objects and trash, make it spotless by detailing it in small parts at a time and eventually you'll feel better about your car and yourself. And that's so important. Most of the misery in the world is self inflicted. And most of that is by women fouling their living space, then getting angry and fouling it even more. I used to live with that. I've worked in places like that. Clean environments really are happier. If you walk into a cluttered workplace? Be prepared to deal with misery.
I find paper towels and Windex on the insides of my car's windows really helps a lot with visibility. Most upholstery out-gasses stuff that sticks to the glass, and you need to clean that off every month to see properly. Don't believe me? Wipe your finger on your side window and look at it. There's a clean spot now. You'll have to clean it all. You often have to hit it twice, because once with ammonia just smears it a lot. The second time gets most of the rest. Use a handvac to get up the stuff once you take out the floor mats and shake or vaccuum them off. Those little parking lot pebbles and bits of leaves and endless long hairs from your wife. They go everywhere. Wipe the tiny dust and skin flakes off the consoles and such. It will look so much cleaner. Toss old napkins, organize or dispose of papers, ask yourself if that CD case really needs to be there and check if the flashlight battery still works. Check your tire pressure every Sunday, just to make sure. I find removing trash, rattling stuff, cleaning the rugs and under the seats, the car feels new.
With good visibility its like it drives better because you can see the road properly, in all lighting conditions. Clean off the headlights too, btw, and Rainex them. If they are pitted? Fine car polish will make them smooth again. Works great, and a lot cheaper than other options. Glass Wax (rainex) fills in the pits and improves brightness. New headlamps are cheap, compared to a new car.
These little things, and a little effort, may reduce your need to buy a new car, increase your debt burden, and financial stress in such uncertain times. Be the smart person, be frugal, and put in the maintenance. Maybe some of what hurts you will end.
In the real world, my experiments with scooters, bicycles, and motorcycles are part of my long term mobility preparation. Rather than "guns", I'm looking at ways to stay employed, frugally, and let others turn to violence and get shot if that's their choice. And it often is, or so they say. I still contend that the cost of a firearm and proper training today is often more than simply moving somewhere with less violence. Usually. If you're tied to multiple jobs and the evil is everywhere you have visited, you may not be able to move far enough to escape it. Cities are full of muggers and rapists and politicians. The countryside is full of pot farmers with guns and methed up burglars. The suburbs are full of drug addicts, anger, and potential killings sprees. I heard a murder a mere night before I moved out of Unpleasanton, about 125 meters away from where I was sleeping. Slow, methodical, gunshots. And that was in the Garden Spot of the Bay Area. Everywhere else is worse.
Up here in the Sierras there are backyard pot gardens, methed up Middle Schoolers (really, not joking at all!), trophy wives trying to con their husbands into murdering them in crimes of passion via deliberate infidelity just to feel love one last time, and endemic unemployment. This is the real world. There are rough roads, big potholes, line springs, tar snakes, and driveway gravel on every road. If you ride two wheels, you must be cautious. If you aren't, you're going to die. As I'm interested in transportation, not suicide, I'm a very cautious rider. Except going down Hughes road on my bicycle. Give me that small moment. My brakes work fine.
In the real world, we drive cars. Some obsess over safety and insist on bigger heavier vehicles that suck so much gasoline they bankrupt over the cost of their commute, necessarily long because a big heavy vehicle needs higher wages to pay for it, and you don't much get those here. A big heavy vehicle with a long commute is a clear case of Bad Choices, and someone to be avoided because one bad choice likely has many friends and this person is a disaster zone, desperate, and desperate people do desperate things.
The smarter people I see around here are driving older Subarus. They are practical and can be maintained and offer whole minutes more traction in very light snow than a front wheel drive with similar tires. Minutes. It's hilarious too, once the snow starts coming down. If you put them in studded snow tires then that's something different. A Subaru with proper snow tires? Those work well in the black ice, if driven very carefully. Folks around here have the original steel wheels mounted with studded snow tires for snow and alloys with all-season rain tires for the rest of the year and they switch back and forth as needed. It really only takes about half an hour to swap wheels if you have a floor jack and stands. I've done it.
Most people who aren't in Subarus or pickup trucks or SUVs (retired mostly), are driving Hondas like mine. Front wheel drive is better than rear in light snow, and while that means there will be days you can't get to work, its only days, not weeks unless you live above the snow line. And if you have a job? Don't live there, stupid. Be more responsible with your choices. Air conditioning in summer is cheaper than wrecking your car every winter.
People who don't own pickup trucks do not despair. Gardening trailers and a hitch will fit your Subaru or Honda and I see people hauling plants and building supplies often enough. It's very practical and some fold up for convenient parking upright in the garage. I think that's Awesome. Learning to drive a trailer is mostly about awareness that something is behind you and you can't really back up. Use your mirrors. It's a proper skill every man should know today, like plowing a field in the old days. I don't have a hitch, but I have access to an SUV with one so that's covered.
Back when I first became aware of Peak Oil, in that first big run-up in price from $15/bbl to $147/bbl, I thought the answer to the problem was buying a car with max MPG/$$ value, which was NOT the Prius, but a Honda Civic. If I'd known about the Geo Metro, would have gotten that instead. They were cheap, gutless, but reliable. Nowadays most bubble cars get that MPG and are much more comfortable and powerful. They just cost a lot. Its hard to justify the expense when you aren't sure they'll matter after another unexpected and unpredictable oil crisis happens. And I mean that non-ironically. I kept expecting fuel rationing, but it didn't happen. Not yet. Instead we get demand destruction by both price and bad economy reducing people's dependence on fuel by unemploying so many of them that they simply can't justify buying it or using it much of the time, if they don't have a job to pay for it. Pleasure driving? That's for Top Gear on TV. Most of the fans will never own a supercar, even a beater. The most POWER a normal person can have will be a Rice Rocket, probably used, needing the cowling replaced after it was wrecked on a bad corner and its prior owner killed.
People who can restrain their joy to just apexing corners at low speed and seeing the sights? Well, jeeps and Miatas and a Honda with the sunroof open and the windows down? That's nice enough. Clean the glass properly and you'll see more of the world. Good tires and tire pressure, it corners better. Knowing the road well means you can drive it a little faster, feel more Gee's safely, and still have fun, as a driver. Take as much weight out of the car as you dare, remove all rattling objects and trash, make it spotless by detailing it in small parts at a time and eventually you'll feel better about your car and yourself. And that's so important. Most of the misery in the world is self inflicted. And most of that is by women fouling their living space, then getting angry and fouling it even more. I used to live with that. I've worked in places like that. Clean environments really are happier. If you walk into a cluttered workplace? Be prepared to deal with misery.
I find paper towels and Windex on the insides of my car's windows really helps a lot with visibility. Most upholstery out-gasses stuff that sticks to the glass, and you need to clean that off every month to see properly. Don't believe me? Wipe your finger on your side window and look at it. There's a clean spot now. You'll have to clean it all. You often have to hit it twice, because once with ammonia just smears it a lot. The second time gets most of the rest. Use a handvac to get up the stuff once you take out the floor mats and shake or vaccuum them off. Those little parking lot pebbles and bits of leaves and endless long hairs from your wife. They go everywhere. Wipe the tiny dust and skin flakes off the consoles and such. It will look so much cleaner. Toss old napkins, organize or dispose of papers, ask yourself if that CD case really needs to be there and check if the flashlight battery still works. Check your tire pressure every Sunday, just to make sure. I find removing trash, rattling stuff, cleaning the rugs and under the seats, the car feels new.
With good visibility its like it drives better because you can see the road properly, in all lighting conditions. Clean off the headlights too, btw, and Rainex them. If they are pitted? Fine car polish will make them smooth again. Works great, and a lot cheaper than other options. Glass Wax (rainex) fills in the pits and improves brightness. New headlamps are cheap, compared to a new car.
These little things, and a little effort, may reduce your need to buy a new car, increase your debt burden, and financial stress in such uncertain times. Be the smart person, be frugal, and put in the maintenance. Maybe some of what hurts you will end.
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Repurposing
I am currently following the Common Motor Collective out of Houston, a group dedicated to restoring to running operation old Honda CB350s.
They're slightly maligned by serious bikers because they're economy engines, rather slow, and better ones exist now. The thing is, in the post oil world, economy and slow are just fine, and you can fix them endlessly. They're also in the sweet spot for power to weight ratio running regular gas at standard 10:1 compression and still give you 30 HP, which is enough to reach freeway speed, climb a hill properly without holding up traffic, and be a true vehicle. They also have the advantage of being before plastic so they are vintage naked, last forever machines. Provided you do your part. I would very much like one for myself, once I get a license, and I would wear the appropriate gear to reflect its conservative pedigree. These are NOT rice rockets, or cruisers. The CB350 is a Universal Japanese Motorcycle, at least before the I-4's changed the game.
It's a very basic bike. Two cylinders, 4 stroke so its quiet and reliable, can be fitted with disc brakes on the front pretty easily, according to CMC. So I wonder? What can you do to give it better reliability? More power, better balanced cams and new valve springs etc. There must be some things to make it run a little better, without breaking the bank, and without ruining the look.
Probably need just the right springs on the rear suspension, and perhaps a preload twister in case you get a passenger riding pillion. I actually really like the banana seat. You can shift your body back and stretch your legs a little. Or at least it looks like that would be true. Provided the padding is firm enough on the seat so it is comfy. Still, its a no-nonsense machine and I respect that. Maybe this was originally meant as a toy motorcycle for recreation, or maybe it was meant as a commuter vehicle in crowded Japan which somehow ended up getting sold here too. The engines got put into various models. Used, fixed, tuned up, turned into Cafe Racers, wrecked, found, rebuilt, endlessly. Some farmers would buy them, leave them against the barn under a tarp, sell them for a few hundred to a scavenger who runs carb cleaner through it, replaced the upholstery on the seat and sells it to a Hipster in the Mission District in San Francisco. I like that these just don't stay dead. Repurposing old stuff so it keeps working? That's how the Cubans survived Castro. We can do that too.
They're slightly maligned by serious bikers because they're economy engines, rather slow, and better ones exist now. The thing is, in the post oil world, economy and slow are just fine, and you can fix them endlessly. They're also in the sweet spot for power to weight ratio running regular gas at standard 10:1 compression and still give you 30 HP, which is enough to reach freeway speed, climb a hill properly without holding up traffic, and be a true vehicle. They also have the advantage of being before plastic so they are vintage naked, last forever machines. Provided you do your part. I would very much like one for myself, once I get a license, and I would wear the appropriate gear to reflect its conservative pedigree. These are NOT rice rockets, or cruisers. The CB350 is a Universal Japanese Motorcycle, at least before the I-4's changed the game.
Art Is The Validity of Definition
The trick to art is you must be soul-deep convinced in the validity of definition.
Definition, the act of defining something as one way, not another. You have to believe that definition exists, that whatever you are defining IS what you say. Art is creating something to prove that, to show you Get It. I think the fact I am an Artist, inherited from my Grandmother the flapper, means I just can't get along with people with no definitions. Its popular to pretend at un-bias, to build a life around floating relativism. The little blonde in the center of the above picture is the most gifted of artists in an anime called Honey and Clover. Its not happy, but there is a scene at a zoo where she stares at giraffes and can not longer hold back her creativity, a field of unopened boxes. She has time to open just one of them, and express that box. That is what being an artist is like. Joy, at that expression, loss at everything you can't express because there isn't time. And every discovery leads to a new field of boxes, the prior field lost, probably forever. That is the great burden of being an actual artist. Knowing this loss.
An artist needs to be fully expressive of emotions. While not everyone can express emotions, most people try anyway. We have many means, too. I like that the Greeks believed in the Muses, one for each art or craft, the whispering source of inspiration. I think it interesting that the Gaels believed crafts came from the Leanan Sidhe, a high ranking member of the Winter Court of the Fae, a sort of anthropomorphic personification of dark impulses, creativity, winter madness so appropriate to a people still dealing with glaciers and really bad soil thanks to the cold.
Art has a long history. Cave paintings from 40 thousand years ago exist in the Sahara, and in 15,000 years ago in Southern France, much older in Southern Africa, and Australia. There are cave paintings in China too. We are a species capable of definition, in symbolic logic which helps us simplify and comprehend our world, and how we fit into it. Self awareness rises from this characteristic of our species. Those people who SAY they reject symbolic logic are just liars running from a past they would rather forget, and decisions they've made that did not turn out as well as they hoped.
As a species, every memory is actually symbolic logic, metaphors with facts tacked on, stored long term as protein strands, like hair, inside our brains. This is why it takes so long to remember something. Unwrapping the strands takes actual time which is why remembering something takes time. Those strands associate with the standard metaphors we define our world with, things we've learned through experience. Some metaphors are deeper than others, but that's how long term memory works. This was a recent discovery, if I recall correctly, from 2007, some article. There's a lot of important biochemistry required to make it all work properly, but explains a great deal why damage can prevent it all working right, yet some bits will come through. The very biochemistry of memory means we are ALL LUMPERS. We can't be anything else. Symbolic memory is lumping.
Splitters are obsessives who follow a logical path and sometimes this yields science and discovery. Acts of art are splitting, defining something very specific for the artist to their complete satisfaction. An artist won't stop until they are satisfied. People who are able to be easily satisfied generally do not perform great works of art. Skill makes up some of that difference, but effort is usually proportional to satisfaction. The more effort you put into the creation, the more satisfying the result is, usually. This is why I respect craftsmen. I look at the effort they define their world with, welding tubes into a motorcycle frame, fitting a faucet to work flawlessly for decades, building a stone wall. All these things show our pride, our place in the universe. It's so crucial to recognize. There are so many forms of art and expression and denying this act of definition is one of those warning signs I pay attention to. It's a big part of the reason I became a Libertarian, to be able to see the art around me more clearly. Create something. Validate your life.
Definition, the act of defining something as one way, not another. You have to believe that definition exists, that whatever you are defining IS what you say. Art is creating something to prove that, to show you Get It. I think the fact I am an Artist, inherited from my Grandmother the flapper, means I just can't get along with people with no definitions. Its popular to pretend at un-bias, to build a life around floating relativism. The little blonde in the center of the above picture is the most gifted of artists in an anime called Honey and Clover. Its not happy, but there is a scene at a zoo where she stares at giraffes and can not longer hold back her creativity, a field of unopened boxes. She has time to open just one of them, and express that box. That is what being an artist is like. Joy, at that expression, loss at everything you can't express because there isn't time. And every discovery leads to a new field of boxes, the prior field lost, probably forever. That is the great burden of being an actual artist. Knowing this loss.
An artist needs to be fully expressive of emotions. While not everyone can express emotions, most people try anyway. We have many means, too. I like that the Greeks believed in the Muses, one for each art or craft, the whispering source of inspiration. I think it interesting that the Gaels believed crafts came from the Leanan Sidhe, a high ranking member of the Winter Court of the Fae, a sort of anthropomorphic personification of dark impulses, creativity, winter madness so appropriate to a people still dealing with glaciers and really bad soil thanks to the cold.
Art has a long history. Cave paintings from 40 thousand years ago exist in the Sahara, and in 15,000 years ago in Southern France, much older in Southern Africa, and Australia. There are cave paintings in China too. We are a species capable of definition, in symbolic logic which helps us simplify and comprehend our world, and how we fit into it. Self awareness rises from this characteristic of our species. Those people who SAY they reject symbolic logic are just liars running from a past they would rather forget, and decisions they've made that did not turn out as well as they hoped.
As a species, every memory is actually symbolic logic, metaphors with facts tacked on, stored long term as protein strands, like hair, inside our brains. This is why it takes so long to remember something. Unwrapping the strands takes actual time which is why remembering something takes time. Those strands associate with the standard metaphors we define our world with, things we've learned through experience. Some metaphors are deeper than others, but that's how long term memory works. This was a recent discovery, if I recall correctly, from 2007, some article. There's a lot of important biochemistry required to make it all work properly, but explains a great deal why damage can prevent it all working right, yet some bits will come through. The very biochemistry of memory means we are ALL LUMPERS. We can't be anything else. Symbolic memory is lumping.
Splitters are obsessives who follow a logical path and sometimes this yields science and discovery. Acts of art are splitting, defining something very specific for the artist to their complete satisfaction. An artist won't stop until they are satisfied. People who are able to be easily satisfied generally do not perform great works of art. Skill makes up some of that difference, but effort is usually proportional to satisfaction. The more effort you put into the creation, the more satisfying the result is, usually. This is why I respect craftsmen. I look at the effort they define their world with, welding tubes into a motorcycle frame, fitting a faucet to work flawlessly for decades, building a stone wall. All these things show our pride, our place in the universe. It's so crucial to recognize. There are so many forms of art and expression and denying this act of definition is one of those warning signs I pay attention to. It's a big part of the reason I became a Libertarian, to be able to see the art around me more clearly. Create something. Validate your life.
Tuesday, July 23, 2013
Weather Shift
Its been hot, but it got cloudy and turned the sky a sort of orange shade all day yesterday, thick enough to make the shadows vanish. The wind came up and got stronger over night. Its dawn now, cool breezes gust this way and that, rustling the trees, there are clouds, and the there's potential for thunderstorms and rain today. Maybe. More likely, we'll just have the higher humidity, more clouds passing by, the usual thunderheads building higher up over Donner Pass and Reno, and then nothing local. Still, its nice to wake up to air like this. I'm very fond of it. Air that shifts direction every few moments is my favorite. Its not boring. I like walking in this weather, and bicycling too, though walking is best because you can just stop and feel the air shifts stirring the hairs on your arms, head, and legs.
I watched a show from Japan with That Guy(tm) about a student teacher who tried to force her ideals on students, to be the best they could be. And the show went on to say how the students didn't want to be the best, because it wasn't want they wanted, and how they rejected her and her enthusiasm, pushed her away for being really annoying, and how that rejection broke her heart and made her susceptible to despair. I wonder if I've been doing that. It is certainly possible.
I merely ask, why tell me your problems if you don't want a solution? I have the wrong gender for pure sympathy. Looking betrayed because there really is a way to end the problem you're facing is really the wrong response. Perhaps I respond this way because the essence of Libertarianism is "respect people's choices, even the ones that kill them". Most people who make bad choices want OTHERS to pay for them, and they keep making those choices till it DOES kill them. Possibly while killing the people who cared about them too. Libertarians segregate ourselves from paying for others decisions. We just watch them die, nod our heads, and go about our business when it's over. It's a sort of Schaedenfraude without being quite so vocal about it. We know that we can't and shouldn't save everybody, because saving them rejects their choices, their right to choose, and we're all dying in the end anyway. There's a degree of Greek valor in Libertarianism, in believing that we should make our lives and deaths count for something in the eyes of the gods, watching us from Mount Olympus. They're as good as any. And better than some Middle Eastern hack famous for promoting human slavery, genocide, and three thousand year old blood feuds. Read the book of Daniel sometime. Libertarianism is all about respecting human lives and human deaths, respecting rights properly, even the right to be wrong till it kills you. The big upside to that is big acts of mass stupidity that kill lots of people, like sitting under an oncoming hurricane or erupting volcano? We kind of cheer their ends. I'm a fan of Darwinism, after all. Stupid is as stupid does. I went to school for years to get proper respect for natural disasters, and to do the necessary preparations to avoid the worst of it, and know my risks. I have little respect for ignorant people, but being ignorant is a choice and if ignorance kills someone, well... okay.
Beth Gibbons when she was young is actually a very plain woman. I guess the hard decade of the 90's gave her those sharp edges, the sultry smirk, and grounded her firmly in the misery of real life so she could properly sing about it in Portishead. The above video is not some charming piece about fatherhood. Its about domestic violence. It was Massive Attack's breakout hit in the 80's, the one that made them famous and paid for Mezzanine.
I was a listener of Live 105 in San Francisco when they first formed from the split with KMEL, across the hall and managed by the same company. They were different formats. KMEL was rap and hip hop for black people in Oakland and Hayward. KITS (Live 105) was New Wave and later Alternative for the white kids and asians in the rest of the Bay Area. Massive Attack was one of those semi-crossover bands which could play on either, depending on song. Tricky got lots of airplay on KMEL. Beth Gibbons on KITS. When she formed Portishead after Massive Attack drifted apart, she focused on Jazz style lyrics, downtempo, and gave us that blue album in 1993. We had Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins and Red Hot Chili Peppers on one hand, Portishead on the other. Depending on which mountain I was driving behind determined if I could hear Live 105 or not. I was glad when CDs got cheaper, and CD players that didn't skip got into cars so I could listen to good music while I drove around the County. I enjoyed exploring the roads, seeing the views that tourists come for, meandering through country lanes past vineyards and over hills and along dry creeks which would briefly carry huge floods of water when the rains surged. Home was beautiful, just a really bad place to be if you had to work for a living. Or maybe the people there made it bad. Many were not very nice.
I don't regret my limiting interactions with other people after high school. That was a good call. Knowing what I know now, hell is other people. Still sadly true. As positive as I am towards motorcycles and scooters here? I wouldn't down there. The roads are too bumpy, and I've seen way too many deaths, most of them on modified cafe racers. Even with four wheel all independent suspension, the roads are bumpy enough you can feel the wheels lose contact around corners, and minding your speed into corners takes all your concentration. Its a literal life and death event, driving there. Lowering speed limits just increased the traffic, not reduced the death rate.
This breeze is making me nostalgic. It was like this there fairly often, especially in the Fall. I loved the frost covered mornings, the banks of fog. The temporary heat of the day. The smell of fermenting grapes and the blankness of CO2 gushing out of wide open winery doors every October. I miss the sharp smell of wood smoke, and the hiss of grills sizzling, the smell of baking bread after the first rains start the yellow grasses rotting. I wonder if the people who live there see it as anything but a mere nuisance? Somehow, I doubt they really get it. My Dad thinks I should look for a job back there, move back to Santa Rosa. Be able to enjoy the place again. He might be right. At least I'd have my preferred weather, and the twisting murderous roads.
Yes, I'd run into people I knew, not all of them people I liked or wanted to see again. Not all of them were decent human beings. Many were pure monsters. But we were imprisoned in High School together, and high school is mandatory, involuntary, and you can't quit till you graduate or flunk out. That hurts people. And we were all wounded when we escaped with our diplomas. The years following, college and then trying to find a career, it was HARD, learning just how vicious people are. All that desperation, all those shortcuts and suicides and people doing the wrong thing for a tiny tiny advantage short term. But I see that everywhere now, not just in my home.
I thought having more balanced politics would improve things, create more jobs, but it wasn't true, certainly not 15 years ago when I moved up here. Having resources creates more jobs. Having reason to employ people creates more jobs. Having easy transportation creates jobs. And automation destroys them, the jobs and the people. The end of mass production for the weapons and aerospace industry is why Oakland collapsed in the 1980's. We blame THEM for the collapse of their community, but that's really unfair under the circumstances.
It's ironic that the internet has done a great job of unemploying all the people who did rote jobs, who did customer service and sales. Price shopping is the touch of a button now, and there's no need to be an expert on a gizmo to talk about it when the customer will just read about it on Amazon or Costco or Best Buy and it gets mail order shipped to them in a few days, easy as can be. All those businesses based on direct personal connections to walk in customers? Mostly gone. You talk more with your checkout clerk at the supermarket than you do with the machine selling you your home theater so you don't have to go to the movies and get sticky feet and smell the masses of humanity, listen to their crunching smacking mouths as they eat. Maybe people like that, but I don't care. We're a failing civilization.
I have said it before: the future of America is agriculture and tourism. And their support activities. The Present is medical care for the dying Baby Boomers and their favorite retirement luxuries while they still have the money to pay for them. But those are jobs in a shrinking market because The Money Always Runs Out. Once the Boomers are dead, the number of medical jobs will decline as the population drops, and pay will decline as the Boomers get poorer paying for end of life services. Don't count on an inheritance. When they're gone, everything changes. It's mostly a matter of how much they guilt the rest of us into paying for their end, and how much that destroys the remainder of our future. In the Big Picture, I must simply wait for their end. Eventually their greedy and bad living will end their stranglehold on political power, and new generations can step up and do something progressive and useful. Start fixing things instead of stealing all the money, all the time.
If ultra-capacitor batteries (think a battery and capacitor combined for benefits of both) ever get scaled up and implemented, I can easily see a future where PG&E (electric utility) will offer gas-station type plugs via automated coin-op to quick-charge your electric car or motorcycle or van or truck outside a transformer station, and that gas stations will have big transformers out back to do this too. Have your choice of fuel type, pay, fill/charge, complete and go. If we're lucky.
I still see a strong chance we'll have a "bump" that changes us, a period of a few weeks where the oil supply stops, prices panic, hoarding grabs it all from the stations and nobody is moving. So our economy just STOPS till we fix the fuel crisis, by admitting we are too dependent on transportation. I suspect we'll just be too surprised it actually stopped to do much more than stare. Rioting is too much like work, and Americans don't have a strong work ethic anymore. It's not like people would bicycle to the site of a riot. And they can't drive, otherwise there's no reason to riot. If they can't stagger out drunk and angry and break something before they get tired, it just doesn't happen. This is a very good reason to live away from angry minorities, and why White Flight is still going on. Distance is excellent defense.
I need more knowledge of electrical assemblies. There are interesting jobs using them. It would benefit me to know the terms, the devices and what they do, so I can work with them. To be able to use a volt meter, and know the right way to solder things. And test components prior to using them in an assembly. There are too many cool things one can do with electronics. Stuff people eventually pay for. I should learn it just to install solar panels, at the very least, and setup a backup battery system for my refrigerator, if the power gets twitchy. Losing a whole fridge worth of food in a power blackout is often several hundred bucks today. We used to have a big deep freezer in our garage. A garage that passed 125'F in the summertime. Trying to maintain a deep freeze with that ambient temperature? It kills a compressor, then it stops being frozen. Imagine being on vacation during that, and coming home to a biohazard of rotted food.
Enology also interests me, and viticulture, using IT to run sensors in a field, wirelessly, to control watering of the grape vines to perfection. It would be a fun job, I suspect. Managing chemistry of fermentation would also be interesting. I wonder if there's some intro level books? I'm not excited about going back to college for a degree in a field that's mostly just USING the knowledge, not paying more just because you have a piece of paper.
Meh. I have chores to do while the temperature is still nice enough to be pleasant. Have a good morning.
I watched a show from Japan with That Guy(tm) about a student teacher who tried to force her ideals on students, to be the best they could be. And the show went on to say how the students didn't want to be the best, because it wasn't want they wanted, and how they rejected her and her enthusiasm, pushed her away for being really annoying, and how that rejection broke her heart and made her susceptible to despair. I wonder if I've been doing that. It is certainly possible.
I merely ask, why tell me your problems if you don't want a solution? I have the wrong gender for pure sympathy. Looking betrayed because there really is a way to end the problem you're facing is really the wrong response. Perhaps I respond this way because the essence of Libertarianism is "respect people's choices, even the ones that kill them". Most people who make bad choices want OTHERS to pay for them, and they keep making those choices till it DOES kill them. Possibly while killing the people who cared about them too. Libertarians segregate ourselves from paying for others decisions. We just watch them die, nod our heads, and go about our business when it's over. It's a sort of Schaedenfraude without being quite so vocal about it. We know that we can't and shouldn't save everybody, because saving them rejects their choices, their right to choose, and we're all dying in the end anyway. There's a degree of Greek valor in Libertarianism, in believing that we should make our lives and deaths count for something in the eyes of the gods, watching us from Mount Olympus. They're as good as any. And better than some Middle Eastern hack famous for promoting human slavery, genocide, and three thousand year old blood feuds. Read the book of Daniel sometime. Libertarianism is all about respecting human lives and human deaths, respecting rights properly, even the right to be wrong till it kills you. The big upside to that is big acts of mass stupidity that kill lots of people, like sitting under an oncoming hurricane or erupting volcano? We kind of cheer their ends. I'm a fan of Darwinism, after all. Stupid is as stupid does. I went to school for years to get proper respect for natural disasters, and to do the necessary preparations to avoid the worst of it, and know my risks. I have little respect for ignorant people, but being ignorant is a choice and if ignorance kills someone, well... okay.
I don't regret my limiting interactions with other people after high school. That was a good call. Knowing what I know now, hell is other people. Still sadly true. As positive as I am towards motorcycles and scooters here? I wouldn't down there. The roads are too bumpy, and I've seen way too many deaths, most of them on modified cafe racers. Even with four wheel all independent suspension, the roads are bumpy enough you can feel the wheels lose contact around corners, and minding your speed into corners takes all your concentration. Its a literal life and death event, driving there. Lowering speed limits just increased the traffic, not reduced the death rate.
This breeze is making me nostalgic. It was like this there fairly often, especially in the Fall. I loved the frost covered mornings, the banks of fog. The temporary heat of the day. The smell of fermenting grapes and the blankness of CO2 gushing out of wide open winery doors every October. I miss the sharp smell of wood smoke, and the hiss of grills sizzling, the smell of baking bread after the first rains start the yellow grasses rotting. I wonder if the people who live there see it as anything but a mere nuisance? Somehow, I doubt they really get it. My Dad thinks I should look for a job back there, move back to Santa Rosa. Be able to enjoy the place again. He might be right. At least I'd have my preferred weather, and the twisting murderous roads.
Yes, I'd run into people I knew, not all of them people I liked or wanted to see again. Not all of them were decent human beings. Many were pure monsters. But we were imprisoned in High School together, and high school is mandatory, involuntary, and you can't quit till you graduate or flunk out. That hurts people. And we were all wounded when we escaped with our diplomas. The years following, college and then trying to find a career, it was HARD, learning just how vicious people are. All that desperation, all those shortcuts and suicides and people doing the wrong thing for a tiny tiny advantage short term. But I see that everywhere now, not just in my home.
I thought having more balanced politics would improve things, create more jobs, but it wasn't true, certainly not 15 years ago when I moved up here. Having resources creates more jobs. Having reason to employ people creates more jobs. Having easy transportation creates jobs. And automation destroys them, the jobs and the people. The end of mass production for the weapons and aerospace industry is why Oakland collapsed in the 1980's. We blame THEM for the collapse of their community, but that's really unfair under the circumstances.
It's ironic that the internet has done a great job of unemploying all the people who did rote jobs, who did customer service and sales. Price shopping is the touch of a button now, and there's no need to be an expert on a gizmo to talk about it when the customer will just read about it on Amazon or Costco or Best Buy and it gets mail order shipped to them in a few days, easy as can be. All those businesses based on direct personal connections to walk in customers? Mostly gone. You talk more with your checkout clerk at the supermarket than you do with the machine selling you your home theater so you don't have to go to the movies and get sticky feet and smell the masses of humanity, listen to their crunching smacking mouths as they eat. Maybe people like that, but I don't care. We're a failing civilization.
I have said it before: the future of America is agriculture and tourism. And their support activities. The Present is medical care for the dying Baby Boomers and their favorite retirement luxuries while they still have the money to pay for them. But those are jobs in a shrinking market because The Money Always Runs Out. Once the Boomers are dead, the number of medical jobs will decline as the population drops, and pay will decline as the Boomers get poorer paying for end of life services. Don't count on an inheritance. When they're gone, everything changes. It's mostly a matter of how much they guilt the rest of us into paying for their end, and how much that destroys the remainder of our future. In the Big Picture, I must simply wait for their end. Eventually their greedy and bad living will end their stranglehold on political power, and new generations can step up and do something progressive and useful. Start fixing things instead of stealing all the money, all the time.
If ultra-capacitor batteries (think a battery and capacitor combined for benefits of both) ever get scaled up and implemented, I can easily see a future where PG&E (electric utility) will offer gas-station type plugs via automated coin-op to quick-charge your electric car or motorcycle or van or truck outside a transformer station, and that gas stations will have big transformers out back to do this too. Have your choice of fuel type, pay, fill/charge, complete and go. If we're lucky.
I still see a strong chance we'll have a "bump" that changes us, a period of a few weeks where the oil supply stops, prices panic, hoarding grabs it all from the stations and nobody is moving. So our economy just STOPS till we fix the fuel crisis, by admitting we are too dependent on transportation. I suspect we'll just be too surprised it actually stopped to do much more than stare. Rioting is too much like work, and Americans don't have a strong work ethic anymore. It's not like people would bicycle to the site of a riot. And they can't drive, otherwise there's no reason to riot. If they can't stagger out drunk and angry and break something before they get tired, it just doesn't happen. This is a very good reason to live away from angry minorities, and why White Flight is still going on. Distance is excellent defense.
I need more knowledge of electrical assemblies. There are interesting jobs using them. It would benefit me to know the terms, the devices and what they do, so I can work with them. To be able to use a volt meter, and know the right way to solder things. And test components prior to using them in an assembly. There are too many cool things one can do with electronics. Stuff people eventually pay for. I should learn it just to install solar panels, at the very least, and setup a backup battery system for my refrigerator, if the power gets twitchy. Losing a whole fridge worth of food in a power blackout is often several hundred bucks today. We used to have a big deep freezer in our garage. A garage that passed 125'F in the summertime. Trying to maintain a deep freeze with that ambient temperature? It kills a compressor, then it stops being frozen. Imagine being on vacation during that, and coming home to a biohazard of rotted food.
Enology also interests me, and viticulture, using IT to run sensors in a field, wirelessly, to control watering of the grape vines to perfection. It would be a fun job, I suspect. Managing chemistry of fermentation would also be interesting. I wonder if there's some intro level books? I'm not excited about going back to college for a degree in a field that's mostly just USING the knowledge, not paying more just because you have a piece of paper.
Meh. I have chores to do while the temperature is still nice enough to be pleasant. Have a good morning.
Monday, July 22, 2013
Iced Coffee, Burgers, Meatloaf
Time for some food articles. As I am temporarily without employment, I am cooking more between resume updating and job applications. There are some good ones, too. I'm so glad this happened now, instead of in the Fall when a bounced paycheck would hurt a lot more.
Iced Coffee
At a coffee shop, this is about $3, and made from the leftover coffee from that morning instead of being poured out. Its pure profit. To make this, being summer, the right way is have the following tools: French press, good ground coffee extra strong, caramel sauce, whipping cream. Fill a glass or cup halfway with strong coffee, cold. Add a tablespoon of cream and a tablespoon of caramel. Stir. Add ice cubes. Drink.
You just saved $3. See how frugal you are?
Ground Beef for Burgers or Meatloaf
Ground beef is often not that good quality. You can pay more for lean beef, but leaner beef burns and you really WANT that fat available to help it both cook and provide a medium for the oil-based spices to season the meat. I developed this method because a couple jobs ago, I was suddenly missing income from my absentee spouse and needed to stretch my pennies until my savings recovered. This happens in the real world. Being able to cook saves the average American a couple hundred dollars a month, and generally solves problems with mood swings and obesity caused by restaurant foods and raw food bacteria famous for food poisoning that Yuppies buy and "heat" or not in the case of "salads" or sandwiches.
Hamburger is not the cheapest meat out there, but it is one of the more versatile. I learned early on that the best way to enjoy hamburger is to put stuff into it, not just to bulk it out, but to retain more of the flavor during and after cooking. This means spices and binders are necessary.
With simple hamburger for the grill or pan, I add chopped onion, the smaller the slices the better. I use yellow onions because that's what we grow here, not white onions which are more Eastern. Yellow onions keep longer, too, probably due to more sulfur content which kills mold and bacteria. Use a VERY sharp knife and work slowly. This pays off later. Half an onion, finely chopped, per pound. I will note that the right way to cut an onion is very specific, and requires lots of practice. If you do it right, there's no stink. The better you do this, the less smell, saving that for the food. An onion has layers and grain. Use that to your advantage. Pro chefs do.
I keep panko (Japanese) breadcrumbs for a basic expander and binder and coating for some kinds of meats, like chicken or pork chops. A fresh egg. Fresh ground black pepper because not-fresh goes bitter and doesn't work as well. Own a pepper mill and pepper corns. It is worth it. Add a few tablespoons of hickory smoke BBQ sauce to the meat. Doing it this way actually cooks the flavor in, rather than merely topping it, and the spices kill bacteria as well as tenderize the meat. Mix all well with a big wooden tined fork. This or your fingers. Wash thoroughly before and after, because the egg and meat might have salmonella or e.coli, which do cook out but spread to surfaces easily. Be sure to wash all tools with detergent afterwards.
Form meat into patties on a wax paper covered cookie sheet if not eating burgers immediately, and freeze overnight. Place frozen patties into a freezer bag, date and labeled, for later consumption.
Meat Loaf
The above hamburger recipe can be modified with grated carrot, and thin cut celery and tomato paste for meatloaf, adding a second pound of beef or possibly ground pork, and the remaining half of the onion. After forming the loaf in a bread pan I recommend baking it immediately because frozen meatloaf does not defrost well in an oven and tends to be raw in the middle, causing food poisoning. Don't let that happen to you. You can tell it is done because the juices are boiling around the sides and the meat has visibly shrunk away from the edges of the pan.
Serve meatloaf with either boiled and mashed potatoes or baked potatoes with sour cream, the proper Hampshire variety (old style, no additives), or plain Greek style yoghurt, which is high protein but not distracting in flavor. Cut green beans are also traditional. Most people serve Meatloaf with ketchup (or catsup for Easterners), and sometimes top the meatloaf with stewed tomatoes or grated potatoes or hashbrowns. I prefer BBQ sauce because it does good things to the meat and makes it more appetizing.
Please note that all the fat in these dishes will take 12 hours to digest so feel free to fast through breakfast the next day. You probably won't need any more calories.
Iced Coffee
At a coffee shop, this is about $3, and made from the leftover coffee from that morning instead of being poured out. Its pure profit. To make this, being summer, the right way is have the following tools: French press, good ground coffee extra strong, caramel sauce, whipping cream. Fill a glass or cup halfway with strong coffee, cold. Add a tablespoon of cream and a tablespoon of caramel. Stir. Add ice cubes. Drink.
You just saved $3. See how frugal you are?
Ground Beef for Burgers or Meatloaf
Ground beef is often not that good quality. You can pay more for lean beef, but leaner beef burns and you really WANT that fat available to help it both cook and provide a medium for the oil-based spices to season the meat. I developed this method because a couple jobs ago, I was suddenly missing income from my absentee spouse and needed to stretch my pennies until my savings recovered. This happens in the real world. Being able to cook saves the average American a couple hundred dollars a month, and generally solves problems with mood swings and obesity caused by restaurant foods and raw food bacteria famous for food poisoning that Yuppies buy and "heat" or not in the case of "salads" or sandwiches.
Hamburger is not the cheapest meat out there, but it is one of the more versatile. I learned early on that the best way to enjoy hamburger is to put stuff into it, not just to bulk it out, but to retain more of the flavor during and after cooking. This means spices and binders are necessary.
With simple hamburger for the grill or pan, I add chopped onion, the smaller the slices the better. I use yellow onions because that's what we grow here, not white onions which are more Eastern. Yellow onions keep longer, too, probably due to more sulfur content which kills mold and bacteria. Use a VERY sharp knife and work slowly. This pays off later. Half an onion, finely chopped, per pound. I will note that the right way to cut an onion is very specific, and requires lots of practice. If you do it right, there's no stink. The better you do this, the less smell, saving that for the food. An onion has layers and grain. Use that to your advantage. Pro chefs do.
I keep panko (Japanese) breadcrumbs for a basic expander and binder and coating for some kinds of meats, like chicken or pork chops. A fresh egg. Fresh ground black pepper because not-fresh goes bitter and doesn't work as well. Own a pepper mill and pepper corns. It is worth it. Add a few tablespoons of hickory smoke BBQ sauce to the meat. Doing it this way actually cooks the flavor in, rather than merely topping it, and the spices kill bacteria as well as tenderize the meat. Mix all well with a big wooden tined fork. This or your fingers. Wash thoroughly before and after, because the egg and meat might have salmonella or e.coli, which do cook out but spread to surfaces easily. Be sure to wash all tools with detergent afterwards.
Form meat into patties on a wax paper covered cookie sheet if not eating burgers immediately, and freeze overnight. Place frozen patties into a freezer bag, date and labeled, for later consumption.
Meat Loaf
The above hamburger recipe can be modified with grated carrot, and thin cut celery and tomato paste for meatloaf, adding a second pound of beef or possibly ground pork, and the remaining half of the onion. After forming the loaf in a bread pan I recommend baking it immediately because frozen meatloaf does not defrost well in an oven and tends to be raw in the middle, causing food poisoning. Don't let that happen to you. You can tell it is done because the juices are boiling around the sides and the meat has visibly shrunk away from the edges of the pan.
Serve meatloaf with either boiled and mashed potatoes or baked potatoes with sour cream, the proper Hampshire variety (old style, no additives), or plain Greek style yoghurt, which is high protein but not distracting in flavor. Cut green beans are also traditional. Most people serve Meatloaf with ketchup (or catsup for Easterners), and sometimes top the meatloaf with stewed tomatoes or grated potatoes or hashbrowns. I prefer BBQ sauce because it does good things to the meat and makes it more appetizing.
Please note that all the fat in these dishes will take 12 hours to digest so feel free to fast through breakfast the next day. You probably won't need any more calories.
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Stability, Stone, and Spanish Tile Roofs
One of the things I'm interested in is architecture, and how it is repurposed from its original design to adapt to current needs. This is important because I'm Californian from birth, what we locally call Native Californian but does NOT mean Native American or Indian. In California there are so many immigrants from other states, states which DELIGHT in insulting California because they have tornadoes, hurricanes, ice storms, blizzards, lightning but California has Earthquakes so therefore is just crazy to live there. Yep. Earthquakes.
California does have earthquakes, yet there are centuries old buildings made of adobe and stone with big timbers to hold up a roof of Spanish tile. A building style wholly appropriate for long durable housing which lasts decades or centuries between renovations. A style which is also rare because in California, most of the state is built fast, cheap, and light, little better than tents of steel, glass, thin wood, and it all burns very nicely in our frequent wild fires. Work is being done to limit those, but it is slow going.
Some music for the article, Spanish chill out.
When I look at pictures of Spain and the South of France, I see places where the presence of Earthquakes is considered less important that the labor savings of building a house to LAST. The sense of age and permanence from all those heavy stone walls feet thick, the silent Spanish tile roofs, the cast and wrought iron railings all over the place, being stripped and repainted every few years to keep the rust down. These are people who are opposite trailer trash, opposite me perhaps.
I run from bad laws, but what if the laws weren't bad, if staying in a place actually meant that you weren't trapped by racists and lawyers chiseling your wealth away to enrich their petty evil? If California had a stable govt, and stable educated voters who didn't throw money at problems, it would be worth it to build for the long haul, to build in stone and tile, with walls rather than wire fences, and gates meant to hold off mobs and a roof that can be pounded by golf ball hail and not notice. A California built to last. That would be amazing. That would change everything. It would change how its citizens think of themselves and others, not as a quick con and a getaway (as most new arrivals treat my state and part of the reason we have such a bad reputation), but as a settled and governable place.
California must build and repair sustainable infrastructure, and move people out of unsustainable places, like the technically below-sea-level "islands" in the San Joaquin Delta. It really should start a silt removal program from the big reservoirs to stop them turning into meadows, and haul that silt and stone down to these islands, scraping their topsoil aside to cover it later, and fill them in, bringing them up above the river level so a levee is no longer needed. That's a LOT of work, and energy and human labor, and a century project so won't happen soon. What is more likely is to declare those islands disaster areas and refuse to back any insurance company that covers them. With no insurance, those places are merely risks not worth taking. Bad for the people who live there, but stupid is as stupid does. When the levees inevitably fail, their homes are going to get destroyed in the flooding anyway. Shouldn't have built there.
I would like for my state, with its very nice weather and very infrequent earthquakes to build for the long haul so the people who live here know it has moved on past the Boomtown mentality and start thinking long term instead of Exploit and Run like its been since the Gold Rush. California is a bit too forgiving of that. And because we're kind, the foreigners keep doing it, over and over again. That has to stop. Start putting them in jail, start being unforgiving of the con men, and hunt them down? More than the half the people moving here won't risk it. The few that do will either be on the up and up or get caught and jailed.
If we do what I suggest, and build for the long haul, build for a Thousand Years instead of decades, and start living with that in mind, we'll have to think really hard about our needs. About Transportation and how important it might be. I think trains are the easiest answer, electric ones, since the power can come from wherever. I also believe in larger wheel scooters and motorcycles, assuming that roads will end up covered in stone and stones shift and get slippery in the rain. And weeds grow and that road can vanish quickly. Nature is very aggressive here.
California is like Spain and Southern France and Portugal, only mostly empty. There are hillsides the size and shape of Monaco, yet hold only a barn and a simple farmhouse and grazing dairy cattle. This is huge potential for real estate. Most of the state itself is largely empty, a fact that foreigners, non-native California visitors, don't realize until they leave a city behind and get into the countryside, maybe on the way to some natural wonder like Yosemite or Lake Tahoe. Even with the San Andreas and other faults very close by, we could still build there. And if a quake knocks them down and kills a bunch of people? Well, so what? Life is temporary. Rebuilding with the fallen stone is just more work, and the next big quake could be decades or centuries off. At least the stone won't burn. If we start getting hurricanes and longer summer heat, then these are the houses to have anyway.
I've lived through several of those Atmospheric Rivers, those Pineapple Express events. It rains and rains, day and night, for weeks. Its like living in Portland in the Springtime, only the raindrops are bigger so an umbrella works. They're neat, assuming people don't freak just because their neighborhood drain is plugged. You drive around the pools, wait for the maintenance crew to clean the leaves out of the drain, for the creek to fall, and its fine. Younger people here don't remember those, and older people don't necessarily remember much at all that wasn't in the 1950's or 60's. The weeks of endless rain makes the ground saturate and causes some slumps and landslides, but it also makes the redwood trees green, the Spanish moss on the oak trees turns light green and the whole world drips endlessly. Its good for the plants, good for the groundwater. We could do with more of those events. I would be fine with that. You can engineer drainage to deal with that. Another bit of infrastructure to account for. Lots of earth-moving equipment required.
I don't know if a properly built Spanish tile roof is perfectly happy with that kind of rain but it should be fine. Its not like its snowing, just rain. There are plenty of homes with those roofs where I grew up, in buildings either very old or by the Old Money, who knew to mimic the old buildings because they're still around. I keep running into folk who ignore obvious things. Like they only make decisions when they're either high or angry or just massively stupid. And they spend the rest of their lives paying for that. Sometimes those decisions are to buy the cheap house which won't survive a good gale force storm with a really good view of the Pacific through the big picture window. The window that breaks when the wind blows hard. Which it does often. The stingy man pays the most. Sigh.
It's really weird living in this transitional period, post Oil plenty fading into a scarcity economy filled with short term viciousness and long term mistrust and retaliation. Even with the potential oil wealth in the Monterey Shale south of me in the San Joaquin desert (1-3 inches of annual rain is desert, folks), we still can't expect the price to fall. Its going to take 1 million gallons of water per well to frack that shale, and there will need to be around a million wells to get it all. Water we won't have for agriculture or LA's lawns. This oil, once out, is going to ship to the rest of the world, China especially. Having oil is usually the doom of a place that has it. California has weathered this storm before, and hopefully will gain some profits from it. Maybe keep our roads paved a little longer than other states. Maybe build those electric railroads. Fix the levees a little longer.
Cost of living in California will go up, even with oil money. People, families, which want to survive this difficult period must be exceptionally cautious of damaging their reputations. If you do that, people will remember a very long time, and in this clan environment, the acts of one member of a family reflect on the whole family and how ALL will be treated. So mind your manners of yourself and your family, folks. It is no small thing to be turned away in your time of need because one of you was mean to the wrong person at the wrong time. As I'm aware of this, I already live this creed. That's why my work quality is consistently high, why I don't forgive bastards who do me a bad turn, and why I have a long memory for slights. You must, or those people and their kin will hurt you again. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice? Shame on me. Develop the skill if you don't have it already. Its VERY important in the future.
California does have earthquakes, yet there are centuries old buildings made of adobe and stone with big timbers to hold up a roof of Spanish tile. A building style wholly appropriate for long durable housing which lasts decades or centuries between renovations. A style which is also rare because in California, most of the state is built fast, cheap, and light, little better than tents of steel, glass, thin wood, and it all burns very nicely in our frequent wild fires. Work is being done to limit those, but it is slow going.
Some music for the article, Spanish chill out.
When I look at pictures of Spain and the South of France, I see places where the presence of Earthquakes is considered less important that the labor savings of building a house to LAST. The sense of age and permanence from all those heavy stone walls feet thick, the silent Spanish tile roofs, the cast and wrought iron railings all over the place, being stripped and repainted every few years to keep the rust down. These are people who are opposite trailer trash, opposite me perhaps.
I run from bad laws, but what if the laws weren't bad, if staying in a place actually meant that you weren't trapped by racists and lawyers chiseling your wealth away to enrich their petty evil? If California had a stable govt, and stable educated voters who didn't throw money at problems, it would be worth it to build for the long haul, to build in stone and tile, with walls rather than wire fences, and gates meant to hold off mobs and a roof that can be pounded by golf ball hail and not notice. A California built to last. That would be amazing. That would change everything. It would change how its citizens think of themselves and others, not as a quick con and a getaway (as most new arrivals treat my state and part of the reason we have such a bad reputation), but as a settled and governable place.
California must build and repair sustainable infrastructure, and move people out of unsustainable places, like the technically below-sea-level "islands" in the San Joaquin Delta. It really should start a silt removal program from the big reservoirs to stop them turning into meadows, and haul that silt and stone down to these islands, scraping their topsoil aside to cover it later, and fill them in, bringing them up above the river level so a levee is no longer needed. That's a LOT of work, and energy and human labor, and a century project so won't happen soon. What is more likely is to declare those islands disaster areas and refuse to back any insurance company that covers them. With no insurance, those places are merely risks not worth taking. Bad for the people who live there, but stupid is as stupid does. When the levees inevitably fail, their homes are going to get destroyed in the flooding anyway. Shouldn't have built there.
I would like for my state, with its very nice weather and very infrequent earthquakes to build for the long haul so the people who live here know it has moved on past the Boomtown mentality and start thinking long term instead of Exploit and Run like its been since the Gold Rush. California is a bit too forgiving of that. And because we're kind, the foreigners keep doing it, over and over again. That has to stop. Start putting them in jail, start being unforgiving of the con men, and hunt them down? More than the half the people moving here won't risk it. The few that do will either be on the up and up or get caught and jailed.
If we do what I suggest, and build for the long haul, build for a Thousand Years instead of decades, and start living with that in mind, we'll have to think really hard about our needs. About Transportation and how important it might be. I think trains are the easiest answer, electric ones, since the power can come from wherever. I also believe in larger wheel scooters and motorcycles, assuming that roads will end up covered in stone and stones shift and get slippery in the rain. And weeds grow and that road can vanish quickly. Nature is very aggressive here.
California is like Spain and Southern France and Portugal, only mostly empty. There are hillsides the size and shape of Monaco, yet hold only a barn and a simple farmhouse and grazing dairy cattle. This is huge potential for real estate. Most of the state itself is largely empty, a fact that foreigners, non-native California visitors, don't realize until they leave a city behind and get into the countryside, maybe on the way to some natural wonder like Yosemite or Lake Tahoe. Even with the San Andreas and other faults very close by, we could still build there. And if a quake knocks them down and kills a bunch of people? Well, so what? Life is temporary. Rebuilding with the fallen stone is just more work, and the next big quake could be decades or centuries off. At least the stone won't burn. If we start getting hurricanes and longer summer heat, then these are the houses to have anyway.
I've lived through several of those Atmospheric Rivers, those Pineapple Express events. It rains and rains, day and night, for weeks. Its like living in Portland in the Springtime, only the raindrops are bigger so an umbrella works. They're neat, assuming people don't freak just because their neighborhood drain is plugged. You drive around the pools, wait for the maintenance crew to clean the leaves out of the drain, for the creek to fall, and its fine. Younger people here don't remember those, and older people don't necessarily remember much at all that wasn't in the 1950's or 60's. The weeks of endless rain makes the ground saturate and causes some slumps and landslides, but it also makes the redwood trees green, the Spanish moss on the oak trees turns light green and the whole world drips endlessly. Its good for the plants, good for the groundwater. We could do with more of those events. I would be fine with that. You can engineer drainage to deal with that. Another bit of infrastructure to account for. Lots of earth-moving equipment required.
I don't know if a properly built Spanish tile roof is perfectly happy with that kind of rain but it should be fine. Its not like its snowing, just rain. There are plenty of homes with those roofs where I grew up, in buildings either very old or by the Old Money, who knew to mimic the old buildings because they're still around. I keep running into folk who ignore obvious things. Like they only make decisions when they're either high or angry or just massively stupid. And they spend the rest of their lives paying for that. Sometimes those decisions are to buy the cheap house which won't survive a good gale force storm with a really good view of the Pacific through the big picture window. The window that breaks when the wind blows hard. Which it does often. The stingy man pays the most. Sigh.
It's really weird living in this transitional period, post Oil plenty fading into a scarcity economy filled with short term viciousness and long term mistrust and retaliation. Even with the potential oil wealth in the Monterey Shale south of me in the San Joaquin desert (1-3 inches of annual rain is desert, folks), we still can't expect the price to fall. Its going to take 1 million gallons of water per well to frack that shale, and there will need to be around a million wells to get it all. Water we won't have for agriculture or LA's lawns. This oil, once out, is going to ship to the rest of the world, China especially. Having oil is usually the doom of a place that has it. California has weathered this storm before, and hopefully will gain some profits from it. Maybe keep our roads paved a little longer than other states. Maybe build those electric railroads. Fix the levees a little longer.
Cost of living in California will go up, even with oil money. People, families, which want to survive this difficult period must be exceptionally cautious of damaging their reputations. If you do that, people will remember a very long time, and in this clan environment, the acts of one member of a family reflect on the whole family and how ALL will be treated. So mind your manners of yourself and your family, folks. It is no small thing to be turned away in your time of need because one of you was mean to the wrong person at the wrong time. As I'm aware of this, I already live this creed. That's why my work quality is consistently high, why I don't forgive bastards who do me a bad turn, and why I have a long memory for slights. You must, or those people and their kin will hurt you again. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice? Shame on me. Develop the skill if you don't have it already. Its VERY important in the future.
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