maunderings of a meandering mind

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maunderings of a meandering mind

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	2012.05.04 20.51 accidental pulled pork It's been kind of a lousy week* since my last post, but it's just ended very tastily, and I'm hoping for a lovely weekend. I'm feeling a little financially constrained, on account of the ongoing job hunt, and I've been mostly eating my own cooking for better than a year now. It's been a few weeks since I found a good bargain on beef of chicken, and I've pretty well depleted my supply of previously bought-and-frozen bargains. So when I found no good sales on either this week, I decided to try the $3/lb pork roast. I'm not quite sure how it is that i have almost no experience cooking fresh pork. I've cooked and eaten my fair share of bacon, ham, and sausages over the years, but until today I had only ever cooked fresh pork in the form of the occasional pan-fried pork chop, and that probably less than a half-dozen times in my life. I suppose it may have something to do with the fact that one of the first polysyllabic words I remember learning was trichinosis --- I was maybe three or four, and my mom was telling someone the "Mommy, is that a people down there?" story** --- which she never told without a discursion on the dangers of trichinosis. Add to that the fact that we never kept pigs, and I don't recall my mom ever cooking fresh pork. So I've just never really gotten acquainted with it as a cook. So it gets to be about 5:00 this afternoon, and the only thawed meat in the house is this pork roast, which I haven't given any thought at all about preparing. And my knee is sore enough that every trip up or down the stairs is a chore, so I really don't want to go grocery shopping. And, of course, since I don't have any experience with pork, I'm sort of vaguely worrying about trichinosis. So I decide fine - post-roast in the pressure-cooker, and I'll overcook it just to be sure. So I go into the pantry tinking "What do you flavor pork with?" Damned if I know, and all the computers are back up stairs, so I'm not going to google it. So I look around for inspiration. I drain a can of pineapple chunks into the pressure-cooker, putting most of the pineapple itself into the fridge --- where I spot a mostly-empty bottle of barbecue sauce, which I rinse out into the mix. I look around some more and notice an apple in the fruit bowl that's maybe not crisp anymore. "Well, applesauce is good with pork-chops, right?" Peel it, grate it, add it to the mix. Grind in some pepper; maybe half a teaspoon of salt; light the burner under it. Brown the pork in the George Foreman Grill. Turn off the heat under the now simmering pressure cooker, add the meat, put on the lid, bring it up to pressure, and leave it there for 40 minutes. The result: Really quite yummy pork that is literally falling apart. I'm definitely going to be doing this again. * The week: Last Friday I got a cast on my sprained wrist. (I had the option of a brace or a cast, and went with the cast, on the theory of avoiding the temptation to take the brace off --- which I'd already been doing for two weeks by then.) Friday afternoon, I tripped going down the stairs outside W20. I was going down diagonally (beside what I guess is now MITFCU), so I was able to catch myself on a step two or three higher than the one I'd tripped on by sticking out my left arm, taking the impact on the palm of my cast and regaining my footing without actually falling down the stairs, but adding a twisted ankle and re-injuring the knee I'd landed on in my original fall. Friday night I started getting paresthesia in that thumb, and when that was still going on that afternoon, I went to the Mt. Auburn walk-in. Which sent me to the ER (eye-roll) to have the cast what they call "bivalved" --- basically cut in half-end-to-end and wrapped with an ace bandage, so the patient can adjust the pressure. That seemed to make it better at first, but by the next day I couldn't feel my thumb again, so I just finished taking the cast off and went back to the brace. And finally, yesterday morning, I tripped on the foot of the stairs at home; managed to protect the wrist this time but re-injured the knee again. ** One day when my sisters were little (so around ten years before I was born), my dad killed a bear. The farmhouse was built diagonally into a slope, and at the downhill corner we had a ground-level door into the basement. So after my dad skinned and dressed the deer, he hung it from the rafters in the basement until he could get it to the butcher. The next morning, my sister Johanna, knowing nothing of all this, went down to the basement for some reason --- and came back white as a sheet and wide-eyed, saying "Mommy, is that a people down there?"



	2012.04.27 17.42 The kindness of strangers I took a rather stupid fall a couple weeks ago --- stepping off a curb I failed to notice & coming down hard on the heel of my L hand and knee. I decided after some debate not to go to the ER, but did go to the walk-in the next day to confirm nothing was broken. Two weeks later, my knee's more-or-less back to normal, but my wrist twinges like hell pretty much every time I do anything with it. So today it was off to the wrist specialist --- to learn that a severe-enough sprain requires as much immobilization as a fracture (sometimes even more). So right this moment I'm learning to type in a cast. (Casting type? Cast-typing? ....) It's definitely slow --- OTOH, I'm more productive than I have been the past couple weeks, when I had to take a break after maybe 5 min of typing because it would set my wrist off. By contrast, the cast is annoying but painless. So, the subject: I decided a while ago that I want to spend more time around SIPB: I've always found it a good environment for learning, and I'd like to get to know the current students. So after I left the hospital, I came to campus. I picked up lunch at Goosebeary's and as I was walking between the Med Center and Ames, noticed my shoe was coming untied. So I stopped at the bottom of the stairs next to the Media Lab, put my lunch down, turned around, put my foot up on a step, and bent over to tie my shoe. Now, my left hand has not been an entirely reliable contributor in its role in tying my shoes since my stroke. But it turns out that the additional constraint of the cast seems to be too much for it. So a few minutes later, there I am, bent over my shoe, with one shoelace in each hand, staring at them and wondering where the hell I go from here. Just then, a woman walks up the stairs past me, and turns as she reaches the top, and says "Are you alright?" "I just got this cast. And I seem to be in the process of discovering that I can't tie my shoes in it." She starts back down the stairs and before I can say anything, has knelt down and started tying my shoe. "You're too kind." I'm no good at ethnicities --- I suspect because it just doesn't seem that important to me* --- but I want to mention that this woman was brown of skin, dressed solidly middle-class, somewhere between 30 and 60. I want to mention that because, during the six months or so I was using a cane, I noticed that every single time someone offered me their seat on the T, it was a dark-skinned woman of indeterminate age and crisply middle-class dress. * A fact i should probably have cottoned on to when I was 17, and my dad referred to my friend Leslie "that little Jewess." At the time, I was too busy being shocked for it to occur to me that my cluelessness might say something good about me. And then, once Leslie and I had had the "Is your family Jewish?" "What, is this a trick question?" conversation, wondering how he could tell. It was only a dozen years later, when what in retrospect I now know was my third Ashkenazi girlfriend explained that word to me, that it made any sense.



	2012.03.30 17.36 Judging people by assonances Years ago, when I was first in Boston, I knew a Black girl who also happened to be British. I used to get a certain wry pleasure out of watching people's faces when they first heard her speak. We're tribal animals, of course, and all of us make unconscious assumptions about others, even after the briefest glance. And a British accent will usually elevate an American's estimation of someone a notch. In Sarah's case, opening her mouth instantly moved her up at least two notches. Today I glanced up to see an Asian woman walking toward me on the sidewalk who would not have looked out of place among my social peers. Then, as she walked past, she spoke to her friend. In a Revere accent. I did much the same double-take Sarah used to cause --- but with the polarity reversed. And noticed thereby things I might never have noticed had she spoken with the Educated-American accent--- things I don't think I'd have noticed in that case even if we'd had an actual interaction (say, one of us asking the other for directions). Her hair had a slightly lacquered look; her jacket was fake leather---and a bit run-down at that. No two ways about it: that's prejudice, and I should feel worse about it than I do. Especially after I spent my first year at my old job disrespecting the woman in Accounting who turned out to be one of my best & smartest colleagues there because of her Revere accent. Posted via LiveJournal.app.



	2012.03.30 17.36 Judging people by assonances Years ago, when I was first in Boston, I knew a Black girl who also happened to be British. I used to get a certain wry pleasure out of watching people's faces when they first heard her speak. We're tribal animals, of course, and all of us make unconscious assumptions about others, even after the briefest glance. And a British accent will usually elevate an American's estimation of someone a notch. In Sarah's case, opening her mouth instantly moved her up at least two notches. Today I glanced up to see an Asian woman walking toward me on the sidewalk who would not have looked out of place among my social peers. Then, as she walked past, she spoke to her friend. In a Revere accent. I did much the same double-take Sarah used to cause --- but with the polarity reversed. And noticed thereby things I might never have noticed had she spoken with the Educated-American accent--- things I don't think I'd have noticed in that case even if we'd had an actual interaction (say, one of us asking the other for directions). Her hair had a slightly lacquered look; her jacket was fake leather---and a bit run-down at that. No two ways about it: that's prejudice, and I should feel worse about it than I do. Especially after I spent my first year at my old job disrespecting the woman in Accounting who turned out to be one of my best & smartest colleagues there because of her Revere accent. Posted via LiveJournal.app.



	2012.03.22 20.30 hacking Sitting here, doing five other things, but watching with half an eye as tcpdump tells me the newly-installed DHCP server on my Ubuntu box is getting requests from my MBP, but not replying. And I suddenly remember one of the very first seriously hackish things I did: installing a Sun3 motherboard in a 4/260 chassis (along with the 4-260's own half-dozen or so VME boards), so as to turn the Sun3 into an X-terminal, giving us a second head on the 4/260. Hardly bleeding-edge computer recycling even in 1995 (though, remarkably, Google finds a 2008 discussion of the same hack). The DHCP packets appear on my terminal window, one of almost a dozen I have open, sprawling over the remarkably cheap four-and-a-half megapixels of display in front of me, so rapidly I'm only really sure it's changed by comparing the timestamp to my menubar clock. Yet it is somehow fundamentally the same thing as the BOOTP messages scrolling by at stately pace on the Sun3's CRT all those years ago. Exactly the same thing. And at the same time, entirely different.



	2012.02.29 21.46 Sixteen Years Today marks the 4^th anniversary of my quitting smoking for the last of many times. I mostly hate the damned things now, and I favor every flavor of prohibiting smoking in places non-smokers breathe. Yet still sometimes, when I catch a whiff of smoke, I find the sentence forming in my brain — Could you spare one of those? There is no better emblem of the failure of our political system than the fact that this highly addictive, frequently fatal, and always health-damaging drug is not only legal, but government subsidized, while our prisons are overflowing with people whose "crime" involved a vastly more innocuous substance.



	2012.02.03 18.13 Prof Winston's "How to Speak" I can now attest from first-hand experience that Prof. Winston's "How to Speak" lecture entirely deserves its reputation. I even sent him a fan letter. Something I last did almost 20 years ago, and have done fewer than five times in my entire life.



	2012.02.01 10.27 A yak not shaved I've been taking Philip Greenspun's Three-day database class this week,where they have everyone install virtualbox and download a VM preloaded with the tools we're using. Which is a fine idea, but I've found it annoying as all hell in a handful of ways, all of which basically come down to familiar things not working in quite the way I expect. (The integration with MacOS is poor: virtual box steals apple-tab and the claimed clipboard integration doesn't work. And X11 copy-paste doesn't work in the VM's desktop.) All of which would be easily worked around if I could ssh into the VM from the Mac. Talking to one of the class TAs (confirmed by a little Googling) tells me that adding a "Host Only" network interface (or changing the existing one to that type) should make that possible. But when I try, Virtualbox's GUI gives me a not-useful error message and leaves the "OK" button greyed out. So I got out my Yak razor and created a fresh VM. And got the same behaviour when I it up with a host-only interface. At which point I considered looking for the I'm-sure-it's-here-somewhere command-line interface, which would presumably give me a better error message. And then I dropped my razor and backed away from the Yak, leaving behind the tiniest of bald patches.



	2012.01.21 00.23 Liberal Identity Quiz It's been ages since I toot an online quiz and posted my results: My Liberal Identity You are a Reality-Based Intellectualist, also known as the liberal elite. You are a proud member of what’s known as the reality-based community, where science, reason, and non-Jesus-based thought reign supreme. Take the quiz at About.com Political Humor



	2012.01.13 01.21 Nerdy day - IAP Python One thing I've been doing this week (and forgetting to talk about here) is going to some SIPB IAP classes. Which I do pretty much every year, partly because I like to see how the current crop are doing at my old job, and partly because I don't really program enough that a good introductory class won't teach me something useful. Tonight's revelation was enumerators in Python. I bet I can find a couple hundred variants of `for k in range(len(l)):` just grepping through my personal CVS repository — any of which I still use, I can now re-write more cleanly! I generally resist the temptation to talk about my assessments of SIPB IAP instructors (and especially the temptation to pass them on to the current IAP suckers: I feel like it would cross the line between being helpful kruft and being a prick). But I have no hesitation in saying that I think the kid who's teaching the Python class is doing a fine job. I can highly recommend the remaining two sessions (next week) to anyone who has the very basics of Python (or a sound grounding in any language) and wants to learn more.



	2012.01.11 17.13 Borrow a hub? Does anyone have a hub I could borrow? (I'm thinking my DHCP troubleshooting might be helped by being able to watch the failure alongside a simultaneous success --- like we used to do routinely when Ethernet was CDMA.) Posted via LiveJournal.app.



	2012.01.11 00.20 RCN Clue? In 4+ years with RCN for Internet, I have generally been able to avoid contacting their tech support. But the couple of times I have, they've been as clueless as I expected. And now I have a problem that I know damned well front-line support will waste a massive amount of my time with if I let them. So before I call: has anyone discovered the trick of getting quickly passed on to someone with a clue at RCN? (The situation is this: I pay for a second dynamic IP address. Until a few weeks ago, I was using one on a NAT box and another on a Mac Mini. I took the Mini down in preparation for repurposing a different machine. Today, finally, everything was in place to bring that machine up. And it couldn't get an IP address from RCN. It's not a cable problem: With all the same cabling, but my own DHCP server in place of the cable modem, it gets an address just fine. The NAT box is still getting its address just fine. I haven't yet run tcpdump — I do that infrequently enough anymore that I'll have to RTFM first, and I didn't have time today. But I will of course do so before I call RCN. I'm reminded of the bad old days, when you had to phone your ISP with the new MAC address to change machines. Seems unlikely — but depending on what tcpdump shows, it may be my best working theory.) At any rate, if I do end up having to call them, I'd really appreciate being able to route directly to someone with a clue. Anyone have a secret formula?



	2012.01.09 22.05 Brava! It's standing room only on the number 1 bus. A woman gets on near Symphony Hall. She finds a place at the front, next to the only flat surface, a fender. I go back to my book. I glance up as we cross the Pike. The woman has opened a score, laid it flat before her. She conducs an orchestra only she can hear. Despite the driver's best efforts, she keeps her balance, and the score stays put. What's more, she incorporates the driver's random jerking of the wheel — his binary application of brake and gas — Into her rhythm. Making silent music amid the noise. Mood: good



	2012.01.05 23.27 todo 2012-01-06 Murphy was out in full force on sysadmin project today. So far the results are Old Somerville wiring flakieness: 3 Powerline Ethernet: 1 (And that one was a gimme: I deliberately ran my first test within a room — but only later realized I'd accidentally connected both units to extension cords on the same outlet.) I have another approach to troubleshooting it to try tomorrow, but I expect I'm going to end up running about 100 feet of ethernet cable. (I've been trying to avoid that, because the labor involved in doing it right in this house would be immense, and I really didn't want to do a half-assed job. But at this point I just a working wired connection betwen upstairs and downstairs, and it doesn't need to be pretty: It just needs to work. Tomorrow: find & apply for at least one job ≥ 1 hr focused reading check on printer progress make network happen between floors at home Don't try to make it pretty. Just make it work. Go to Waltham storage? ≥ 1 hr getting to know my new calculator



	2012.01.03 16.50 Bureaucracy never changes Standing in line with a carbonless form to register at BHCC. The web app won't let me register because I'm not matriculated. (Not that it gives any such human-comprehensible error message: I only found that out by trying to register in the advising office --- which turns out to use the same web app, but with an advisor looking over the student's shoulder.) So, modern tech having fallen flat, I've been standing now for a half hour in a line and with a form that are both redolent of 1984. Posted via LiveJournal.app.



	2012.01.03 12.46 Printer Repair? My printer (Xerox Phaser 6120) has stopped booting in a way that seems odd to me but that I suspect would look ordinary to someone who worked with them a lot: When I power cycle it, it seems to go through its normal boot routine - but never gets to the step of printing its configuration page. Instead, it goes into power save mode, and is not visible to my Mac either via ethernet or via usb. I can wake it with the front panel controls - but can't seem to get it to actually do anything with them. So I'm looking for a printer repair company, and wondering if anyone here knows of a good one. There used to be quite a few, several of them decent: last time I looked into this, close to ten years ago, I was putting a printer support contract out to bid for a company with about 20 printers, and IIRC had no trouble getting three good bids. But the company that won the contract appears to no longer exist, and I don't remember the names of any of the other bidders — and none of the top ten Google hits on Boston printer repair rings a bell. (Of those ten Google hits, the most promising looks to be `terminal.com` in Brookline. That link is an HP-specific page, but the company appears to have been around a while (domain registered in 1995), which has some appeal. Still, that's not much to go on, so if anyone knows anything about them in particular, I'd appreciate hearing from you.)



	2011.12.17 14.26 Extraordinary sights in my livingroom My housemate (a distinguished scientist who holds a PhD from MIT) staring into space, holding his iPad in one hand — and, with great concentration, slowly counting on the fingers of the other hand.



	2011.12.12 17.48 Blarg Prof told me & the other student who missed a test because of illness to meet him in the classroom an hour before class to take our make-ups. To be followed by taking the final with everyone else at 6:30. The other student and I are here. No sign of the prof. 5:45 as I write this. I woke up at 4:30 this morning & couldn't get back to sleep. So I've been tooling all day. Really just want to take the damned tests now! Posted via LiveJournal.app.



	2011.11.28 14.36 Python workshop for women, Dec. 16-17 I've heard great things about this workshop, and (as those of you who've worked for me know) I've always been supportive of women in technology, so I wanted to amp the signal: A project-driven introduction to Python for women and their friends Learn and practice Python basics with this project-driven workshop! Audience: Women and their friends who have no or limited programming experience. This event is welcoming and respectful of trans women. Men are welcome as guests of women who are attending.



	2011.11.19 09.45 News from the future 1 October 2043 After fifty years, the September that never ended has ended. Everyone alive today has grown up with the Internet; the resultant in a dearth of newbs has been driving unemployed spammers into the streets. Police throughout the world are reporting a huge upsurge in mugging and pick-pocketing....



	2011.10.28 16.10 Ick! People who get on a public conveyance reeking of cigarette smoke should be fined for air-pollution Posted via LiveJournal.app.



	2011.10.26 12.44 electronics diagnostics/repair help? I have a firewire RAID array that my Macs have stopped seeing. The RAID is fine, according to the front panel, and the Macs' consoles show nothing when I connect the cable. (Yes, I've tried multiple cables, and yes, I've confirmed that the cables work with other devices.) The array's firewire connectors have always felt a bit insecure to me, and what I suspect has happened is that signal is not getting from the RAID's motherboard to the connectors. I do not have the tools to test this, nor am I sure what I would do if I did have the tools, aside from look at stuff under a magnifying glass to figure out where I think there's supposed to be a connection, and test with a continuity tester. Do I know anyone with the tools, the knowledge, and interest to help me diagnose (and preferably repair) this?



	2011.10.21 00.00 East is East, and West is West, and the wront one I have chose I just saw in the Somerville Police LJ "Man stabbed in East Somerville alleyway ... on Broadway near Glen Street" and my immediate thought was East end of Broadway? That's got to be close." So I pulled it up on google maps. I live, as most of you know, near the west end of Broadway. I've had this problem since, quite literally, my first hour in Massachusetts, twenty years ago: my mental orientation in the world is deeply rooted in the idea that the ocean is west. That's an instinct that always worked well for me — until I moved to the East coast. I first arrived in Mass on I-84, driving north toward I-90. I'd driven straight through from Ann Arbor, taking I-80 across Pennsylvania to avoid the tolls on the New York Thruway, so I'd already driven something like 750 miles when I crossed out of Connecticut. I saw the signs ahead, and without really parsing them, took the westbound ramp. To this day, when I'm tired, I'll see an east or west reference, orient myself (or rather, think I've oriented myself) — and draw the 180° wrong conclusion. I guess it's nice to know my mental foibles are reliable. :)



	2011.10.20 18.07 Cunning Linguist Signal-boosting Cunning Linguist, short fiction by aldersprig responding to the prompt, "The Ghost of the English Language has its revenge on all the l33t sP34kNG TXT ABusrs." (Hat-tip tp dcltdw, who got it from kelkyag.)



	2011.10.10 12.10 This Week's New Yorker For those of you who don't subscribe to the New Yorker, this week's cover features Steve Jobs meeting St. Peter. ( Image behind the cut. ) It is, I think, a fitting homage.

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