interwebbage du jour

I'm working valiantly to reduce the RSS backlog I accumlated due to being out of interweb range for several days. Here's some of the more interesting stuff I've come across since yesterday's link dump:

• OMG ROBOT PONY!!!
  
• OMG BEER CANNON!!!
  
• Today's weird Japanese video
  
• The age of glossy OPML startups is upon us.
  
• From /. : The Poincare Conjecture saga takes another ugly turn.
  
• Talk radio wingnut declares war on lesbofascism. So guys, the line to audition to play Marshal Petain forms on the left. And no cuts. Thx. Mgmt.
  
• In fact, the jihad is already starting. See? SEE???
  
• In retrospect, it was inevitable: A New Zealand horror movie about carnivorous sheep.
  
• Rest in peace, Crimson Executioner.
  
• The latest research on wine chemistry. The article mentions that it may eventually be possible to create synthetic wine that's never been near a grape, much less a rustic Tuscan village. Take that, yuppie twits! I should note that the equivalent happened in the beer world years ago. We call it "Coors Lite", when we have to.
  
• SCO's anti-Linux jihad takes yet another turn for the worse. Jeez, how many turns for the worse is it going to take, already?
  
• Today's dinky Linux gizmo. Awwwwww.....
  
• The Guardian scratches its head about LA for the umpteenth time. Personally, I'm rooting for the pink crown rot virus.
  
• From Treehugger, another fun thing to do with old shipping containers. Plus yet another piece about green roofs. Oh, and bicycles.
  
• The experts seem to think they've discovered a slab full of Olmec poetry. Totally unreadable, of course, since we don't actually know the Olmec language. But hey, if it's really poetry that's probably a good thing.
  
• Seems that the poor US education system has certain advantages after all. Really I ought to be ranting about petty bureaucrats and the abuse of power, but it's just sort of funny. What I really want to know is: Did the customs guy himself know the right answer?
  
• Yet another reason not to eat sea turtles. It's actually altruism on their part: They're absorbing the heavy metals to help protect their silly two-legged landbound friends. I'm sure that's what's going on.
  
• Once again, lurid fiction becomes medical reality.
  
• HumuKonTiki proposes a vast labyrinth of underground tunnels to connect all the world's home tiki bars. May I suggest... a swoopy 50's mole machine, perhaps?
  
• Got beer? Got a helicopter? Brilliant!
  
• It's official: Thailand is weird.
  
• Today's cute echidna.
  
• The Guardian bravely attempts to include differential equations in a business article, and almost succeeds. Don't hold your breath waiting for USA Today to follow suit.
  
• George Allen rides again. As usual, Jon Swift has all the gory details. It all makes sense now. Thank you, Jon!
  
• Jared Leto is teh sux0r. Whoever he is.
  
• The Portland Streetcar is coming to Lake Oswego. It'll be the funnest, most awesome six hour commute you've ever had.
  

Olympics

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As promised, here are a few vacation photos from around Lake Quinault, up on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, mostly near the historic Lake Quinault Lodge.



The frog might be a Northern Red-Legged Frog. It leaped across the trail right in front of me, which was a little surprising, hence the shaky photo. Still, it's an awfully cute frog.

Alone at Tanner Springs

The park was empty, on this grim, rainy afternoon. The lone marigold in the pond was the only clue anyone had been there all day.



I was last there one month ago, almost to the day. Today there was far less water in the pond, and both the algae and goldfish have vanished. I gather the city pays close attention whenever I complain. Ok, the lilypads and spiderwebs were gone as well. So they might've overreacted somewhat. But then, I'm notoriously hard to please, and at least they're trying.



The bottom photo is a detail of the fence along the park's east edge, made of rusty rails from back when the area was a working railyard, with some bits of art glass inserted here-n-there. Through the fence you can barely see a tiny bit of the Lexis condo building. Aside from contending for the most godawful stupid name in the entire Pearl District, it's also a mildly unusual structure: While most Pearl towers are fake stucco and/or brick over concrete, the Lexis has a sleek metal (titanium?) skin over... plywood. Yes. It was originally built as an apartment building, and I distinctly recall seeing a local authority on the real estate scene say it couldn't be converted into condos because it wasn't built to the usual condo standards. Ahh, but recall that there's one born every minute, and so the place was converted almost as quickly as it was built. I wouldn't live there, not even if there was a smoke detector every six inches. But that's just me, with my weird priorities. Sure, it may be an overpriced deathtrap, but it's a super-desirable overpriced deathtrap in an excellent location. Condos here are guaranteed to keep appreciating at 20+% per year from now until Doomsday, or until someone smokes in bed (which is essentially the same thing.) Who could ask for anything more?

[keepalive]

Ok, I'm back from the wilderness now. It's a miracle of modern technology when you can blog from a boat on a remote lake in the back of beyond. But when you can't blog from a boat in the middle of nowhere, it's much, much better. It's good to take a vacation every so often, just to get a little perspective back.

This isn't my "What I did on vacation" post yet, since at the moment I'm simultaneously tired from the trip, and busy catching up with work. This post's called "keepalive" because I sometimes humor myself thinking that some sort of unspecified, unspeakable catastrophe will happen to me, or to this blog, or to my multitudes of Gentle Reader(s), if I fail to post on a regular basis. It makes life more interesting, and it's always nice to feel one's services are required, after all, even when it isn't "true", strictly speaking. I had a cat once who would occasionally decide the linoleum floor in the kitchen was hot lava, and he'd cross the room by leaping from one area rug to another. This post is sort of like that: We'll probably all avoid the hot lava regardless, but why chance it?

While I was away, this humble blog registered visitor #5000, according to the nice folks at Sitemeter. Turns out visitor 5000 showed up here via Technorati, arriving at my recent post marking visitor #4000, specifically the part about recent arrivals from Technorati. And the great wheel of creation turns again, with these recent Technorati arrivals, plus other Technorati and non-Technorati stuff to pad the list up to a respectable length, including a couple of weird search engine hits I got recently.

• Angry and Sloppy
  
• Bizhack
  
• Portland Food & Drink
  
• Pseudobot CO149
  
• City of Roses
  
• Water Studies Photoblog, found via GeoURL.
  
• 1221 SW 4th, Bojack's occasional satire on City Hall blogs.
  
• Hit: program asdf (Which sent people to my recent Registry post, just because I chose to use "asdf" instead of "foo" for once. Wow.)
  
• Hit: chemtrails zum oktoberfest 2006
  
• An article at Reliable Plant magazine, titled Germs, grime, bacteria, and picking our noses at work. Now there's a catchy title for you.
  
• a bunch of conspiracy links, found via that weird "chemtrail" hit. Because if you're going to believe in conspiracy theories, you may as well believe in all of them. You know, just in case.
  

Most of the search hits lately have been for the classics: Windows Registry coding tips, mock chow mein, ortolans, the South Waterfront district, Hercules vs. Hydra, silky anteaters, Kelly Butte, sidewalk ponies, Merche Romero, Saturn 3, and the upcoming UFO apocalypse. The hits just keep on coming. I've been doing this for maybe 9 months or so now, and I still can't get a handle on why some posts really pull in the page views, while others (some of which I really slaved away over a hot keyboard working on) never get a single search hit. Obviously it has to be related to how highly Google ranks the page vs. other pages on the same topic, but how that happens is a real mystery, and Google ain't sayin'. Well, whatever.

So anyway, I'm back, and I'll probably post some photos when I have time this evening or something.

---

Some "found on the interwebs" stuff to pass along, since I may as well run with the whole unstructured pseudorandomness thing today:

• Nirvana's Nevermind is 15 years old this month, and I don't feel so young myself anymore. The baby on the cover is old enough to have a long juvenile record by now.
  
• Also from the Mercury, a cat that looks like Orson Welles.
  
• A Shakespearean Insult Generator. Bathe thyself, thou gorbellied, motley-minded moldwarp!
  
• David Brin waxes nostalgic about the joys of line-oriented programming languages, by which he means the classic BASIC language so many of us learned back in the old-sk00l 8-bit days of yore:
  

  
  10 PRINT "HELLO"
  20 GOTO 10
  

  
  
  I have to disagree here. Sure, there ought to be languages easy and accessible enough that kids can learn them, but BASIC is bad for you. It teaches all sorts of bad habits, and it sure doesn't prepare kids for the modern, real world. Just about anything would be better, except maybe Perl, or Intercal. Even back in the day, LOGO was a good alternative to BASIC, and it's a real programming language, a cousin of LISP with some syntactic sugar. Or if we restrict ourselves to languages there's any chance of getting paid to code in, Java is much easier to learn than you might think.
  
• I recently found a copy of Jerry Pournelle's 1984 book The User's Guide to Small Computers, a 1984 collection of some of his classic Byte columns. He discusses the era's programming language options, and as the book goes on you can watch him moving further and further away from line-oriented BASIC as his language of choice, as everyone who uses it will eventually do if other choices are available.
  
• In October, First Thursday will feature hordes of rampaging zombies -- and not of the gazillion-dollar-condo-buying variety, for once. Grarrgh! Brains!
  
• AltPortland has a new section on our fair city's handful of BBQ options.
  
• Seems that the far reaches of industrial NW Portland are soon to be graced with the area's very first vegan pirate bar. Seriously. Their (heavily-flash-laden) website is here. Dialup users may experience a prolonged calming, Zenlike state while the site loads, and loads, and loads.
  
• Seems there'll be a write-in candidate facing Leslie Roberts for that prized judgeship this fall. I don't know enough about the guy to make a decision at this point, but right now I'm leaning towards anyone-but-Leslie-Roberts.
  
• The Portland Public Art blog has a recent post about Columbia River Crystal, which I posted about here. Check out all the security cameras. I guess I'm not the only person who thought that was peculiar. I didn't take any photos of the cameras myself because a.) I hadn't really figured out the photoblogging thing just yet, and b.) if you photograph security cameras, you probably stand a good chance of being labelled an "evildoer" and shipped off to Gitmo or a CIA black site behind the former Iron Curtain.
  

---

More:

• Issues of an early-80's journal devoted to the Motorola 68000 of fond memory yet green.
  
• Yet another cute echidna. Awwwwwww....
  
• And a much more technical piece that touches on the genetic makeup of monotremes. Seems they have multiple X (and sometimes Y) chromosomes. But at least they don't have Z and W chromosomes like birds do. That's just all messed up.
  
• Landshark!
  
• Over in the SCO universe, the Canopy Group has gotten a new lease on life with the dubious help of our friends at Solera.
  
• In related news, SCO hit a new 52-week low while I was gone. $2.05. I can hardly wait for the $1 barrier to fall.
  
• Also while I was away, a new ring of Saturn was discovered.
  
• According to El Reg, the next generation of GPU chips may conquer the universe. Hmm. I'm firmly in the "Let's wait and see" camp, especially since right now you need to learn entirely new languages in order to code for these beasties. This sure does look purty, though.
  
• New discovery: a baby Australopithecus afarensis.
  
• And at Cute Overload, a cute lil' snuggle-bat.
  

...wherein I conquer the moon...

It's true. I've conquered the moon. This photo should be all the proof you need.

I'll be off surveying my newly acquired realm for a couple of days, so don't be surprised if there aren't any new posts here until next week some time. I mean, I technically could, probably, but I expect my time will be consumed by assorted toadies and flunkies and grand viziers and other minions, along with the rest of the moon's vast population, all turning out to welcome their new Colossal Yellow Overlord. (If they know what's good for them, I mean.)

Incidentally, the crater I'm sitting on is either Thornton or Pythagoras. It's hard to tell which, because I'm sitting on it, and I can't see the label from here. (Ok, so the first one is only sort-of named "Thornton", technically speaking.) Here's a recent photo of Pythagoras by the dearly departed SMART-1 probe. As you can see, it's not really the most comfortable thing to sit on, but hey, it's the moon, it's not like there's a wide variety of seating options. You don't even get a good choice of colors, unless you're a big fan of grey. Well, whatever. I conquered it fair and square, and it's mine now, warts and all.

Jewett Park excursion

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Here are a few photos of Portland's tiny Jewett Park, a pint-sized triangle of land at the intersection of Vista & Spring St., across the street from Ainsworth School, up in the West Hills. Here's a Google Map of the area, but you really can't see much from above. The photos above show essentially the entire park, and as you can see the place is basically 100% stairs.

A 1998 Sunset Magazine piece titled "Step up to Portland" talks about the still-elusive Little Red Book of Stairs, and relays this tidbit:

A set of stairs in Portland Heights is actually a park in and of itself. The 18 steps leading from a corner of S.W. Spring Street up to Vista are known officially as Jewett Park, named in 1974 after their creator, Bill Jewett. A bronze plaque next to the steps bears this inscription: "There is nothing like sitting on steps in the sun when one has the unparalleled pleasure of doing just nothing at all."

The full text of the plaque, for dialup users who'd rather not download the larger & more legible version of photo #2 (I've added punctuation as needed, rather than mess around with HTML center tags and whatnot.)

This little park is given to the City of Portland for the enjoyment of the children of this neighborhood in memory of my parents and brother: Stanley Guion Jewett, Leslie Weidler Jewett, and Peter Jewett, who lived next door for many years.

William Weidler Jewett
"There is nothing like sitting on steps in the sun when one has the unparalleled pleasure of doing just nothing at all."
1974

That's the only mention I've been able to find about the place anywhere on the net. The city doesn't mention it anywhere, which is a real shame. Its creation was obviously a labor of love, and it's a cozy, tranquil little spot, even with the traffic on Vista. It would be a nice place to sit and read a good book, if the sun was out. All in all, it's a very civilized little urban amenity. Poetic, even. And (so far as I know) it's unique to our fair city, but without the forced-smile quirkiness and cloying twee-ness of certain better-known "uniquely Portland" things (*cough* sidewalk ponies *cough*)

Incidentally, I'm guessing that the Stanley Guion Jewett mentioned above might be Stanley G. Jewett, a wildlife biologist who cowrote several landmark books about the birds of the Northwest. But I could be wrong.

If you're more into extreme action sports, this may not be the place for you, although it might be fun to jump down the stairs on a skateboard, maybe. Technically you're probably not supposed to do that here, so you didn't hear it from me.

It's funny how something created as recently as 1974 seems like a relic of a bygone era. Today's overprotective parents would never let their kids anywhere near these stairs, at least without swaddling them in protective gear. As if kids had any free time to do "just nothing at all" anymore, which they don't. And then there's legal liability issues to worry about, and ADA compliance, and making it "elder-friendly", and there's the vociferous design-junkie community to pacify (and naturally they'll be demanding a kid-hostile "Tanner Springs II", with whirling razor blades this time if possible.), plus the bike fascist community to mollify, and on and on and on. Which is a shame, since these stairs are an interesting use for a weird sloping little parcel of land.

Diagonally across Vista from the park is what's reputed to be one of the city's best pizza restaurants, cleverly hidden high in the West Hills. I haven't been there, but it seems to come highly recommended. And where there's pizza there's usually beer. If you decide to walk, or bike, or unicycle, or otherwise get here under your own power, braving the narrow little streets and giant SUVs and steep hills, you couldn't ask for a more civilized amenity than that.

Alternately, TriMet Bus 51 runs right by the park on its way up to Council Crest, and there's a stop right at Vista & Spring St. If you're a tourist, or you have company in town and you're playing tour guide, you'll probably end up at Council Crest sooner or later anyway. Jewett Park is right on the way there, if you aren't in a hurry and it seems like your cup of tea. I realize it may or may not be. Suffice it to say that I can't think of anything snarky and negative to say about the place, which is quite unusual for me. You can take that as a recommendation, if you like, or as a sign that I've lost touch with my inner edginess, or that someone's bribing me, or blackmailing me, or impersonating me, or whatever.

---

Updated 7/7/08: I recently realized I only had two photos of the park in this post, and they really weren't that great, so I thought I'd go take another batch and update this post accordingly. The full set's on Flickr here. The park itself hasn't changed a bit, not that I expected it would.

...wherein I notice the seasons changing...

Dammit, it's autumn. It's official now, so far as I'm concerned. The top photo shows a wave of dark non-summery clouds sweeping into downtown today, right around sunset. Soon it'll begin raining in earnest. No more of this overnight drizzle nonsense; it'll be coming down in buckets, for days, no, for weeks at a time, and I'll have to keep explaining that, yes, that really is a color photo, it's just that everything here is grey. What, grey isn't your favorite color? Is that what you're trying to tell me?



At least we get a bit of fall foliage first (photo #2), although it's nothing like what you'd see in New England or upstate New York. Somehow we make do.

I realize I've been wringing my hands about the seasons a lot lately, as if there was anything I could do about it, I mean, other than buying a monstrous CO2-belching SUV. And with all this blabbering on about foliage and the seasons, I sound like I'm 70 years old, which I'm not. That, or I'm acting like I've never seen any of this before. Somehow having a digital camera and a blog makes you notice the little things more than you otherwise would. I categorically reject any suggestion that I've taken an interest now because I'm not a spring chicken anymore, or that I just don't have anything better to do. And shame on you for even thinking that. Bad! Naughty!

Creatures with a bit more sense than us (oh, and wings) will be migrating soon. And on a not-entirely-unrelated note, it turns out that our fair city is the "Retail" Birthplace of U-Haul. Who knew? There's a historical marker and everything, although you have to trek out to 88th & Foster to find it. (Or so we're told, anyway. I just found this on the net, and that's all I know about it.)

On a more unrelated note, I've finally figured out something that's been puzzling me for months now. At several spots along the streetcar line, and at other locations in the Pearl, there are these motion-sensored spotlights with solar panels attached, aimed at the sidewalk. Sometimes they trigger and click on when you walk by, which can be a little surprising. There's one on SW 10th around Stark or Alder or Washington that clicks on and illuminates a manhole cover in the sidewalk. The first time I saw this it startled me. I thought it must be some sort of inexplicable homeland security measure or utility maintenance aid or something. Turns out the spotlights are part of an art installation titled More Everyday Sunshine, by Harrell Fletcher. It all makes sense now. I had a feeling it might be art, but it isn't labelled anywhere, and the equipment for each light is quite utilitarian, so it was hard to be sure.

Via RSS - 9/13/06

I'd originally planned to take a vacation from blogging this week, since I had a self-imposed RL work deadline to worry about. But it just sort of hasn't happened. I have been slacking in my RSS-reading duties, and I've been trying to catch up, really really really, when I'm not grinding out Java. Right now I should probably be writing some unit tests, but that can wait for a few minutes.

Without further ado, here's today's edition of "stuff found on the interwebs".

• The latest cool Hubble photo: A photo of the planet Uranus with its moon Ariel, with the moon casting a shadow on the planet. This from beeeelions of miles away. Wow. Admit it, that rocks.
  
• If you haven't seen it yet, here's Keith Olbermann's 9/11 piece. If you're a Dubya groupie (and you haven't already fled this blog in horror), you probably don't want to visit this link. At least if you want to keep on being a Dubya groupie.
  
• A new Hobbit movie? Can it be? I eagerly, eagerly await big-budget Smaug goodness.
  
• New info on how blogspam happens. Cheap Third World labor will be the death of us all, I tell you.
  
• I've also fallen behind in my usual practice of linking to cephalopod items on Pharyngula. So here are the latest four items. All hail the Old Ones!
  
• The latest research into the biology of B-Movie Monsters.
  
• The Belmont Station blog has a video of people diving into a gigantic pile of hops. It's like porno for beer geeks.
  
• And for Mac geeks, here's how to set up your own custom kernel panic screen. Not that I've ever actually seen a kernel panic with OSX. Sometimes I almost miss the days of "Sorry, a system error occurred. ID = -17". But the feeling passes quickly.
  
• The latest physics crankery: The upcoming Large Hadron Collider could kill us all!!! Run for the hills!!!!
  
• The Champagne of Blogs has a piece about homebrewing in the great outdoors, with tons of photos. Apparently the Metolius River makes an excellent wort chiller.
  
• Four photos of echidnas.
  
• The only known naughty limerick involving echidnas. They do have remarkable tongues, you know.
  
• A post at Humu Kon Tiki explaining in great detail how to build a Tiki Bar. So now you have no excuse not to.
  
• Baby skunks. Awwwwwww....
  
• If you had a thing for Harmony from Buffy & Angel, November is your lucky month.
  
• Slashdot helpfully points us at what was once The Ultimate Blog Post. That was until this post came along.
  
• Also from Slashdot: Ding, dong, IRIX is dead. That's one less Unix to worry about porting to. Yay!
  
• More cat-related items at Cute Overload & Pharyngula.
  

More:

• Sometimes even giant natural gas tankers need to dress up and feel pretty.
  
• A slideshow at KGW showing our shiny new OHSU tram cabins. The first photo is the only good one, and the others just show heavily-wrapped cabins (or something) being loaded onto a cargo ship.
  
• For future reference: When you're trying to subdue an escaped alligator, it helps to have a roll of duct tape handy.
  
• A couple of Blogspot referrer pages from when I hit "Publish" the first time: The Armchair Nomad and 12 Degrees of Freedom.
  
• The cephalopod items at Pharyngula are coming fast & furious these days. Here's the latest.
  
• Cleaned-up, "digitally remastered" photos of the surface of Venus, courtesy the Soviet-era Venera 13 and 14. The Venera 13 image is especially interesting, with barren, misty hills in the distance.
  
• Also, MRO is finally done aerobraking. The Bad Astronomer geeks out over the occasion. And rightly so.
  

Obligatory & Reluctant 9/11 post

I'm not exactly anxious to write about 9/11, but trying to ignore the date doesn't seem right either. Over the last five years the day's mutated into a sort of creepy fundamentalist martyrdom festival and Republican campaign rally. Each year we're asked again to collectively wallow in wounded national pride and endless self-pity and ugly xenophobia. I certainly don't think the day's main event ought be yet another divisive partisan speech by GWB, the guy who took this national tragedy, misused it for his own ends (i.e. Iraq), and then botched the resulting stupid, needless war. If I was mayor of New York, Bush would be politely and quietly disinvited to the day's events. No need to make a scene; it's just better if he's not in town to steal the limelight from the real heroes and victims of that day.

What I remember about five years ago:

September 10th

On this, the vilified day of the "September 10th mindset", Portland's new MAX line to the airport opened to the public. This still strikes me a truly weird historical coincidence. I took a lazy summer's day break from work and rode the train out to the end of the line and back, and thought how much easier air travel was going to be in the future.

September 11th

I didn't really know anything was wrong until part of the way through my commute into downtown Portland from the westside. At the underground Zoo station, a National Guard soldier was standing on the platform, automatic rifle at the ready. At that point it just seemed kind of odd. It didn't seem like something they'd do if there was just a criminal on the loose. So I already knew something unusual was going on.

When I got off the train at Pioneer Courthouse Square, there were a few people standing around looking bewildered, or I seem to remember it that way in hindsight. The newspapers on the stands at that point didn't have anything unusual to say, so I figured I'd find out when I got to the office. A few blocks from the office, a car drove by with the news on, blaring. I couldn't hear what was going on, but the voice sounded agitated, and people usually don't drive around with the news turned up to 11. Something strange was definitely happening. So I walked the rest of the way to the office very quickly. I got to my desk, pulled up CNN, and saw everything. It took a long while to sink in. The unthinkable had happened.

September 12th

Some things can't wait, even when terrorists attack. It was the day after, and I had a birthday present to buy. The salesclerk said she thought it was a life-affirming act, and five years on that's still the best description I can think of. The people in DC who insist 9/11 changed everything are wimps. They wet their pants every time someone in a turban says "boo", and try to pass it off like it's the macho way to be. It's not. You grit your teeth, you pick up the usual quart of milk at the grocery store, you celebrate birthdays, you go on with life even when it seems the world's wheels are flying off, and you don't demand a medal for it. And you mourn the tragedy, for real, without ulterior motives. You don't wring your hands with glee over the partisan advantage you've just gained, and the wars you can start now, and the laws you can ignore. That would be unthinkable for any normal person. Clearly we are not ruled by normal people.

On the train home, several people were openly sobbing. I almost joined in, but saved it for later. Teardrops would've been bad for the giftwrap.

The Sky

I don't remember a lot about the next few days, except that the weather was warm and beautiful and impossible to enjoy. I'll never forget the sky, pure and blue and absolutely empty. Empty, and silent. The jets were gone, the small planes were gone, it seemed even the birds were gone, somehow. On the day they lifted the flight ban, a light propeller plane flew over the house just before dawn, startling me awake. There were still a few hours before the ban expired, but there it was. I've never heard a single thing about that plane, but I know what I heard. Doubtless it's all classified, and I'll never know anything more about it. I wonder what it was like, being in that plane?

That day I stood and watched jets in the sky. Contrails really are remarkable things, and after a few days' absence, nothing could be more beautiful.

The NYSE

Or, my not-very-narrow near-brush with post-9/11 heroism. My company at the time had a small supporting role in getting the New York Stock Exchange back up and running again after the attacks. A couple of people were on call in case there were problems, but I wasn't one of them, and there weren't any problems. Once or twice I imagined being strapped into a C-130, crossing the otherwise empty skies, laptop at the ready, the free world's economy hanging in the balance. That was never a serious possibility, but I still thought about it. And I admit that, on some level, I kind of hoped I'd be needed in some capacity. (Although that would have meant that the software I'd worked on was being problematic at a critical time, and I certainly didn't want that either.) After 3+ years of war in Iraq, I feel like a chump for ever daydreaming like that.

The Afghan War

I was glued to the TV. I was glued to the net. Even now I'd probably do very well in a trivia contest if the category was "recent military hardware". We'd just come off the Kosovo war (remember it?) in 1999, where I'd come to terms with not being a pacifist, so I never had qualms about Afghanistan. I still don't, really, although I think Bush & Co. have botched the postwar period, if you can really call it postwar. Then Iraq happened, and I remembered why I was so skeptical about war in the first place.

Updated 9/11/2011: I changed my mind about Afghanistan a few years ago. It began to seem like a pointless exercise even before Bin Laden was offed. That occasion would have been the ideal time to declare victory and come home. But the powers that be are quite adamant that we have -- at minimum -- three more years of war to look forward to. I can't imagine what's driving that, other than a particularly fatal form of bureaucratic inertia.

Self-Pity

My company's HR director(!) forwarded a chain email to the whole company. You've probably seen it, or one like it, one of those things that goes on about how we saved the world from the Nazis and Commies and Redcoats and Grenadians, etc., and we've done so much for everyone, and the entire world hates us for it, wahhh. This was a just couple of days after the attack, and bore no resemblance whatsoever to how the world was reacting.

I was furious. I put together a long email with links to all sorts of news stories, with people all over the world condemning the attacks and expressing support for us, including such seemingly unlikely places as Iran and Cuba. I assembled everything, and replied to all. Soon my inbox was full with private thank-you emails, including one from the CEO himself.

I felt vindicated at the time. But in the end, the laugh was on me. Over the last few years, the self-pity folks have remade the world into the place they always imagined it to be. And what a terrible place it is.

Ashes

I keep thinking it was the same day, but it may not have been, that a religious group laid siege to my MAX stop heading hope. They all had ashes daubed on their foreheads, and were going around silently handing out leaflets. The leaflets were crudely drawn, with a plane hitting a building, a couple bible verses from one of the Old Testament's endless lamentations over Israel and Judea, plus a bonus exhortation that the end was near and it's time to repent, and God had allowed the evildoers to attack us because of our sinful ways. I kept one for a while, as a souvenir of a deeply strange time. Some months later, I dug it out and looked at it, and immediately ran it through the shredder.

Looking back, the whole episode was creepy as hell. So why is it, again, that these crazies get to own our entire Middle East policy, and nobody else can get a word in edgewise?

Blood Drive

Like many people, I felt a need to do something about 9/11. Remember the huge, almost spontaneous blood drive right after the attacks? It wasn't a logical or a rational response, but it was necessary somehow, even if the Red Cross ended up quietly discarding most of the blood. I hesitated at first; I'd never done it before, because needles scare the hell out of me. Then I decided I needed to do it, precisely because needles scare the hell out of me, and this was no time for giving in to petty squeamishness. So I started looking around town for Red Cross vans and found one after a couple days. The nurse told me they were ok for blood for the time being, or something to that effect, and gave me a sign-up sheet so they could call me if they ever needed me. To this day, I haven't heard a word from them. If they called me today, I really don't know what I'd say.

Day of Prayer

There was a weekday shortly after the attacks, when the nation was encouraged to attend the church of their choice, for special memorial services and so forth. In hindsight it looks like an early example of the creepy Republican melding of war and religion, but we hadn't all cottoned on to them back then. This was in the middle of the day, and the office was encouraged to go. The usual HR rules were bent, as several people (including a few managers) sent out mails saying they were going to such-and-such church and they had room if anyone needed a ride. I thought about it for a few minutes. I am a confirmed nonbeliever, and have been since I was very young, although I was baptized Episcopalian back when I was too small to have a voice in the matter. And it's one of the few churches I still see as Mostly Harmless, so I did briefly consider going, but then I thought, no, as comforting as it might be, I'd still be pretending. I don't believe, and I don't want to believe, and just as it was no time to be afraid of needles, it was no time to be a hypocrite about core beliefs.

Perhaps you've noticed I was trying extraordinarily hard to be all square-jawed and principled and more than a little self-righteous. I'm not bragging, nor am I apologizing, I'm just recording what I remember. And I remember thinking that was what the times called for. At least I didn't rush out and join the Army right after 9/11. I'm not criticizing people who chose to do that, but I know I'd be feeling extremely betrayed by a certain Commander in Chief, if I was in their boots. I'd feel I hadn't joined up to dodge IEDs in Fallujah just to boost Halliburton's bottom line. That would seem very, very wrong to me.

In any case, I mention this particular incident because it was one of the first moments post-9/11 where the "unity" everyone reminisces about had broken down, and I couldn't participate in the big event without being a hypocrite.

Flags Everywhere

I also didn't join the rush to stick flags and patriotic slogans on every available surface. The flags were not an especially vivid memory for me right after the attacks; what I remember are the huge gas-guzzling SUVs with tattered, faded flags in their windows as the tanks rolled into Iraq.

I'd like to give a good, principled reason why I didn't join the flag-n-banner brigade. I'd like to say something about scorning purely symbolic acts when real acton is required, something like that, but it wouldn't be true. The best I've got is that it just didn't seem like an authentic expression of how I felt, but I can't really explain why in any great detail.

Instead, I found a beautiful, atmospheric photo of the WTC and made it my desktop background at the office, so that it was always right there. It stayed there until the Iraq war started.

OMG Broken Pony!!! LOL!!!

If you live in Portland, and you've heard of the horse project, and you've ever wondered if it'll still be around in a few years, here's your answer. And that answer would be "no". Installing cute 'lil toy horses on our fair city's old horse-n-buggy rings is Art with a capital A. Going around replacing the broken ones every so often is Work. With a capital W. It's as exciting as mowing your lawn, and almost as creative. Someday the tedium will just be too much to bear, and the little ponies will go the way of the Church of Elvis.

There's more about the sidewalk ponies here, and another photo (not by me) here, and another (also not by me) here. Oh, and more photos here, especially this one. (D'oh!) And just so we're all clear on this, despite my earlier mildly disparaging comments, I'm not actually in favor of people going around breaking anyone's art. While I can understand how all this aren't-we-special smugness could generate a backlash in short order, I'm absolutely not going to participate. Whether you agree with the artistic goals or not, vandalism just isn't very nice, I guess is what I'm trying to say here. Schadenfreude, on the other hand, is great fun, especially when the target's worked so hard to earn it. Quirkiness is fine. Deliberate, calculated quirkiness is kind of annoying. Add "cutesy" to the mix, and it's lethally aggravating. You could argue that I'm just being snarky and disagreeable about the ponies, which is probably true. Sadly, it is my way.

[If you're curious about the title of this post, it's a reference to an earlier post of mine, which in turn plays off of Slashdot's big April Fool gag for the year. It's not a very good title, is it?]

In any case, it's possible that the vandalism might, just might be an artistic act in itself. If artists never rebelled against other artists, we'd still be stuck with stupid bozotic allegorical paintings of Biblical scenes and Roman myths and fauns and cherubim and crap. So please, rebel, if you must. Just remember that if the public (i.e. myself, and anyone else who hasn't gone to grad school) supports you, or understands you, even, you aren't really rebelling, now are you? Let me appeal to our fair city's permanent inferiority complex: In a real city (i.e. Paris, Berlin, NYC, etc.), this would have still happened, but it would've happened for a reason. I mean, a reason other than "Whoa. Dude, let's break that."

(I should note that I have a sad history of misidentifying quite ordinary objects and actions as conceptual art. So perhaps I'm not a reliable authority on the subject. Still, you have to admit the world would be far more interesting if I was right more often.)

Some people (and I'm not one of them) might think this picture is Art as well. See, this horse is/was across the street from the mmm-tasty Pearl Bakery, in the heart of the artsy-pretencey Pearl District. I was walking by and decided to take a picture, because, well, the horse was broken and I thought it was funny. While I was doing so, a dumpy middle-aged couple wandered past, watching me closely. The way they were gawking, they must've been from the burbs, or from out of town, or they were rich Californians who'd just bought a gazillion-dollar condo in the Pearl. Apparently they thought they were observing an artiste in his natural habitat, like they were visiting the zoo, or witnessing the creation of the universe:

Woman: Huh. Wow. I wonder what he's thinking about...?
Man: Hoof... broken....

And after that, an extended, slackjawed gape. Evidently, not only did they mistake me for an artist (the idiots), they also thought I was deaf. And blind. Which would be a real feat for a photographer, if I was one, which I'm not. I'm curious how they came to believe all that, but no matter. They continued watching me as they walked by, craning their necks to make sure they saw the crucial moment where I actually took this astonishing photo. And maybe they got their wish. I don't know; I wasn't paying attention at that point. Freakin' parasites. I mean, from the dialogue I heard it sounded like they'd possibly gotten the gist, or an inkling of the gist, of why I was taking the picture. But still. If you really want to know, be a civilized person and ask me directly, and I'll (pretend to) be happy to (attempt to) talk to you about it (maybe). Either do that, or shut the fuck up.

---

Updated: It turns out that the Pearl Bakery location is a serious hot spot for plastic pony vandalism. Which sounds just absolutely dreadful, at least if you ignore the fact that three or four blocks directly east of here it's wall-to-wall hookers and crack dealers and drive-by shootings. Perspective can be a real bitch sometimes.

Updated 9/1/10: Linkage + a photo credit from a blog called "The Sky Pukes Rainbow". Ok, cool, that seems to fit somehow.

I'm not sure if the sidewalk ponies are still around these days as I haven't been looking lately and don't get over to the Pearl as often as I once did. The Church of Elvis, however, has returned. I didn't really expect to ever see that when I wrote this post.

Friday beery mobloggitude

Ok, so I had to get out of the office, due to the sunshine and whatnot. And it turns out that the downtown Stumptown has Rodenbach on tap right now. I'd never had it before, but now I can see why it's so revered. Not universally revered; some small-minded folks will never accept tart, reddish beer that's aged in giant wood barrels. 0h, well. More for me, that way.

The closest comparison I can come up with is Duchesse de Bourgogne, although if you haven't heard of Rodenbach you probably have little or no experience of DdB either. Rodenbach is actually less tart, and also drier (less sweet) than Duchesse, so it seems more refreshing. I would happily drink one after working out. I'd put it right up there with Bavarian hefeweizens on that account.
It seems more complex, too, and I can't put my finger on what those extra notes are. I'm generally not so good at associating a word with a smell or a taste, so this isn't surprising. I would be hopeless trying to write about wine. And hence, I almost never make the attempt.

It's also not too high ABV, at least by Belgian standards, so I might get some intelligible UML churned out today.

Yes, I'm on the clock right now, sort of, and I'm eagerly awaiting visions of sugar plums, er, class diagrams, dancing in my head. Any minute now, I'm sure.

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

Friday Shards

You're reading my 300th post here, counting a few draft posts I may or may not ever get around to publishing. Today also marks visitor #4500, more or less, for whatever that's worth.

It's also a Friday post, and my Friday posts tend to be jumbles of assorted links and misc. items. Today is no exception.

First, about the photo. It's just some broken glass I saw on the sidewalk this morning on my way to work, but I thought it might make a decent picture. So there you have it.

Some recent search engine hits:

• "What to do with ground meat?" Oddly, I am the only link for this phrase on the entire internet. It's a heavy burden to bear, truly it is. So here's my ground-meat-related advice: Make burgers. Add cheese, bacon, and/or guacamole as needed. Serve with fries or tater tots, and plenty of cold beer. Devour. Smile.
• sca way to tie hair male. Honestly, I don't know what to make of this one.
• corvallis oregon downtown statue phallic. I haven't been to Corvallis in years, and I don't recall anything about a phallic statue. I could've missed it, though; anything that's longer than it is wide is bound to look phallic to someone, I guess.
• "Pork Chop on a Stick" recipe. If you're interested, you really want to visit Porky's Delight, the company that created this dish. You also might enjoy Bacon Unwrapped, a blog all about bacon. Mmmm.... bacon....
• @executivegreetingcards.com CEO. A bit of background here: ExecutiveGreetingCards.com was the source of repeated holiday-card-related blogspam I was getting here, back when I'd inadvertently turned off captchas. The search originated from an outsourcing firm in Bangalore, perhaps looking for the CEO to drum up business. Which makes sense, really; why pay a US citizen to spam blogs and infuriate people when you can have someone in India do it for a few cents an hour?
• "Jesus fish" August 29 Oregonian. This confused me until I saw a brief item in this week's Willamette Week:
  

  
  There's no real clever way to put this, but here goes: Why is there a tiny "Jesus fish" in the bottom right-hand corner of some copies of the Aug. 29 Oregonian Metro section ? The well-known Christian emblem appears in ghostly gray at the edge of a story headlined "Clark County affidavit describes suspect truck." As they say, the Lord works in mysterious ways.
  

  
  So it's still mysterious, but now I know what the mystery is, at least.

Now, a variety of other links I've accumulated lately:

• Lately I've been grumbling about fall and leaves turning and so forth. So it's nice to be reminded that it's almost spring in Australia
• I can't mention Australia without a few cute wildlife links. An interesting biology-geekish post about monotremes -- mostly platypuses, though, and not so much about echidnas, which is unfortunate. There is a small photo, though, so that's something.
• Link #2, a visit to the Melbourne Zoo, with photos of non-Aussie beasties.
• And link #3, some koalas at Cute Overload. Awwwwww....
• Also at Cute Overload, yet another video of cute kittens. This stuff just never gets old.
• As much as I like animals, I'm still a happy, unapologetic carnivore. Which is why I'm opposed to the "Horse Slaughter Prevention Act" now working its way through Congress. Apparently the R's want to prove they can play "jackbooted food cop" too. So I may have to have one of Carafe's horse burgers while I still can, before the government drives the practice underground.
• Even multibillion-dollar robots the size of school buses need a breather now and then. Cassini took a break from its usual rings-of-Saturn daily grind to take a nice photo of the Pleiades.
• And a great piece by the principal investigator for the New Horizons mission, explaining why they're still going to refer to Pluto as the ninth planet
• A post at Beervana points out a classic Hamms commercial on YouTube. Now, Hamms is one of the worst beers on the planet; it's what you buy if you can't afford Budweiser. But they do have that catchy jingle. If I had any musical talent whatsoever, I'd be happy to write a song for the nice folks at Tugboat, but sadly, I am not merely unmusical, I am antimusical. Guitar strings break at a mere glance from me, and my mere presence depresses the natural musical ability of those around me. I can't explain it.
• A piece about Seattle trying to be greener. As one commenter notes, what downtown Seattle really needs is more greenspace. I like the place, but it's a bit too much of a concrete jungle. You sort of forget how lucky we are in Portland sometimes. I usually balk at the whole Portland smugness thing, so when I say we're lucky, it means more.
• I was poking around in MSDN, and it turns out there's a whole new API just for handling Terminal Services stuff. I hope I never need to learn or use this.
• Lately I've taken an interest in the obscure flights of public stairs the city maintains around town. I'm not alone: Here are some photos and more photos. Enjoy. Or roll your eyes at me and call me a geek. I don't care.

The latest pile of accumulated Blogspot referrer pages, from people Blogspot sends my way, usually after I post something here. I haven't been very diligent about capturing all of these, so I've missed a number of them lately. FWIW.

• My Paintings [ericksen-art]
• love [140blogs.com]
• !!!Fest:ON!!!
• Vistas de Metro e Meio
• one day it'll all make sense
• O meu mundo
• Little Tiny Hangers
• P & B's 3 days in Hong Kong
• Solomiranda

Programmers' Candy

Happiness is sitting in a room full of suits and Java guys and trying to explain all the different flavors of IPC you can do on Windows. You're trying to convince them to just go with sockets, because it'll have to work on Unix too in the next go-round, but the other stuff sounds so shiny and foreign and exotic to them, and they really want to have a go at it, moth-to-flame style. Or more to the point, they want you to have a go at it. Somewhere they've picked up the notion it'll be "faster" to go with something else, and not just because it'll have to be done in JNI. That may actually be true, so long as we don't mean "faster" in terms of development time. They also don't have any metrics or estimates on how fast is going to be "fast enough" for their needs. It's all just hunches and irresistable shiny objects right now So you're in a room with these guys, trying to explain the differences between a.) memory-mapped files, b.) shared data segments (blech!), and c.) opening another process and writing into its address space (yikes!). Plus a few other things you tossed in for the sake of absolute completeness, so they can't come back and demand why you didn't tell them about, say, doing it with custom window messages or NetDDE or something equally nutty. And at the end of it, you get blank looks and somebody asks you "Can't you just make an API?" Well, if you mean "Can't you hide the gory details from us with a clean, abstract interface?", sure, of course I can do that. But if you really don't want to know, why do you keep asking me?

Happiness is also explaining, for the umpteenth time, how to use the basic Windows Registry functions properly without screwing up, for really basic no-brainer stuff like listing the keys or values under a given reg key, or getting or setting a given value. It's not hard. If you don't know how, you go read MSDN and do what it says to do. Write a little test program, see if it works how you expect. If it doesn't, go back to MSDN, or just experiment a little until you figure it out. More than likely, you just didn't realize that the name buffer size is an in/out param in RegEnumKeyEx or RegEnumValue, and you have to reset it to the right value after each iteration. When someone says their registry code isn't working, that's pretty much the first thing I look for.

There are a few really obscure hangups and gotchas involving the registry, but you probably won't encounter them unless you deliberately go looking for trouble. (I'm coming at this strictly from a programming perspective, and I'm ignoring larger issues like the lack of meaningful structure, and the whole single-point-of-failure thing, just for example.)

• Key names can contain embedded null characters. The internal Native API calls use Pascal-style UNICODE_STRING structs to represent key names, rather than the null-terminated strings you see in Win32 land. So you can have two names "Foo", length 3 wchars, and "Foo\0", length 4 chars, and Windows will happily consider them different names. They look identical in Regedit. If you have both, selecting either will open the one with the 3-character name. If you just have the 4-character form, you'll just get an error. Since the Win32 functions expect a null-terminated string, and don't expect the null as part of the name, a name with an embedded null is literally unspeakable with the usual functions. You need to use NtOpenKey instead, but first you need to know you need to use NtOpenKey. There's very little documentation about this stuff out there. MS originally used this trick to protect some of the SAM keys under HKLM\Security\Policy\Secrets, and now it's become popular among spyware authors too. Someone at MS gets points for cleverness, but I still think this is a deeply silly and weird "feature".
  
• Registry symlinks are a big botch. I have no problem with the basic idea of symlinks in the registry. Having a CurrentVersion link that points at the current version of something is fine. The problem is that there's no easy way to tell 100% for certain if a given key is a symlink or not. There's a procedure by which you can open a key as a symlink. When you do that, the link data itself lives in a value under the key called SymbolicLinkValue. But just looking for values by that name isn't good enough, because you can just as easily create a value named that under a normal key. And opening a normal key as a symlink just opens the key normally instead, rather than erroring out. There's no property you can query that tells you whether a key is a symlink or not. Which is weird, since the information has to live in the registry somewhere, internally. It just isn't exposed properly to the outside world. Bastards.
  
• There also isn't any good way to know whether a given key is "volatile" (i.e. not backed by on-disk hive data) or not. There really ought to be some way of knowing whether the data you just stuck under key X will still be there afer the next reboot.
  
• Another Native API quirk: In the kernel namespace, the entire registry has a single root, so that HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Asdf is really \Registry\MACHINE\Software\Asdf, for example. \Registry has two subkeys, MACHINE for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, and USERS for HKEY_USERS. (If you have auditing turned on for any registry keys, accesses will be reported under these kernel-style names.) One fun detail is that the root key itself is not visible with the Win32 functions. I haven't tried this, but it's conceivable that you could mount a registry hive directly under \Registry and it'd be basically invisible.
  
• HKEY_PERFORMANCE_DATA works in a totally different way than everything else in the registry. Walking through its contents causes various performance counter DLLs to be loaded and executed, which a.) can take a while, and b.) may raise security concerns.
  
• 64-bit Windows introduces a brand new layer of complexity, with separate 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the "same" key, and a goofy redirection layer that tries to give you the right one. If you're a 32-bit app on 64-bit Windows, and you want to see the 64-bit portion of the registry, you need to specify the KEY_WOW64_64KEY flag when opening keys. The 32-bit version of a key is stored in a subkey named Wow6432Node, under the 64-bit version of the key. So when a 32-bit app opens HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software, by default it's actually looking at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node, unless the special flag is provided.
  
  So far, so good. But it turns out that you also need to *NOT* specify this flag if your 32-bit app wants to look at the 32-bit key, using the "real" reg path. If you pass the KEY_WOW64_64KEY flag in this case, instead of HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node, you get the real, 64-bit HKLM\Software. Which has a subkey named Wow6432Node. And if you open that subkey, again using the flag, you get HKLM\Software again, and so on, ad infinitum. Which is bad.
  
  The only solution I know of so far is to look for "Wow6432Node" in the key name, and take that as a sign to not use the 64-bit flag. At this point I don't know if keys named "Wow6432Node" are automatically 'magic' or not. If not, even looking at the key name won't be foolproof.
  
• Did I mention there's such a thing as remote registry access? And the 32-vs-64 bit thing can crop up there, too? So you have to either know or figure out what sort of CPU the other box is running, just so you can be sure you're talking to the registry correctly. That's just not very nice at all.
  
• If you need to change or validate settings for all (or arbitrary) users on a given box, you may need to manually mount their user hive under HKEY_USERS, and then manually save the hive when you're done, since HKEY_CURRENT_USER is always you, whoever you happen to be, and not the other user account. Apps really ought to have global settings under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or something, but often they don't. Windows isn't in the business of enforcing stuff like this.
  
• Windows isn't even in the business of enforcing a limited set of data type in registry values (the stuff you you see in the Type column in Regedit, such as REG_SZ, REG_BINARY, etc.) When you set a value, you can set it to any old 32-bit value you like. So if you have, say, a switch statement based on the type of a registry value, handling all the types listed in MSDN is not enough. You need a default case that at minimum doesn't lead to your app exploding. This is the voice of experience speaking here.
  
• Similarly, Windows doesn't even enforce the types it does know about (although Regedit tries). Just because something says it's a REG_DWORD, it ain't necessarily so, and you still have to check whether it's actually 4 bytes or not. It could be zero bytes, or 5, or 4095, or whatever.
  
• When you create a key, you can optionally specify a "classname", a string of arbitrary length that serves no known purpose and isn't exposed by the standard registry tools. If you're worried about people hiding stuff in your registry, or you want to hide stuff of your own in the registry (your own, not somebody else's, please), this is a good hiding place. It's only visible with RegEnumKeyEx, and then only if someone has the presence of mind to provide a classname buffer. Once the classname is set, the only way to change it is to delete the whole key and re-create it with the new classname.
  
• If you're backing up a section of the registry, or you just need to be sure you can read all of it, you can open it with REG_OPTION_BACKUP_RESTORE, which ignores all those pesky file permissions and so forth. The problem is that you can't use this flag with RegOpenKeyEx, but only with RegCreateKeyEx, with the unhappy side effect that if the key doesn't already exist, Windows helpfully creates it for you, and you may have to look at the "lpdwDisposition" outparam and figure out whether you just created the key or not, and act accordingly.
  

Stumped

Until quite recently, this was just another tree. A tree that happened to grow in precisely the wrong location. I think. It's hard to tell exactly what's going on here.

If I remember how the color coding scheme works, the blue spraypaint indicates a water main, orange is phone (or cable TV), and yellow indicates a pipe with something hazardous in it, probably natural gas in this case. White is for "other", generally for marks that don't refer to a buried pipe or wire. I'm going from memory here, and I could be wrong.

Today's South Waterfront update

I thought I'd mosey down to South Waterfront and have a fresh look around, since I hadn't been down that way for a while. The place is surprisingly hard to get to, and it's not really on the way to anywhere else, and there's not much to do once you're there, so it's pretty rare for me wander down that way. But as I'll explain in a minute, yesterday I saw something on the net that piqued my curiosity.

Photo #1 is our world-famous tram tower, now with "saddles" (the curvy bits on top), and a variety of wires attached. To get a sense of the scale of the thing, there's a tiny blob on top of the tower that's actually a construction worker sitting down and welding something. Or possibly mooning the camera. It's difficult to say.

Because the tram's my friend on MySpace and all, I'd like to make it crystal clear this is merely an expression of friendly, public-spirited, neighborly concern. I realize I'm not an expert on building trams, and looks can be deceiving, but I haven't seen much construction progress lately, and I'm starting to worry. I could have sworn the city said the tram wires would be up in August, and it isn't August anymore, and while it's true there are a few guys at work here and there, I don't see the flurry of activity I would've expected. I'd be trying to get as much work done as possible while the weather's still cooperating, if I was running the show.

But then, maybe I could be running the show, if I actually wanted the job in real life. Yesterday, the city put up a job posting for an Aerial Tramway Construction Project Manager. My job, if I chose to accept it, would involve duties such as "oversees and coordinates the Aerial Tramway construction project by insuring construction schedules are met". Actually that's the very first thing they mention. In fact, they harp on it a few more times, with the phrases "responsibility for insuring scheduled completion", "ensures project is completed as planned and on-time", "coordinates work of major contractors to avoid errors or delays", and "works with engineers, architects and construction contractors regarding normal and unusual project problems and phases".

I'd also be responsible for "cost containment, project performance and results", which shouldn't be too hard if everything's going as great as they keep saying. But there's always a catch: "Prepares and makes presentations before citizen groups, funding partners, and the City Council; responds to requests for press information." Ouch. I hate public speaking. I sure do hope it wouldn't involve going back to "funding partners" (listed as OHSU, PDC & TriMet elsewhere in the posting) and asking them for more money. I sure would hate to have to do that. And I can only imagine what the city council would say. I bet they'd accuse me of blackmailing them with a half-built tram, because politicians tend to say mean stuff like that. I tend to get red-faced and stammer a lot in situations like that, even when what I'm saying is the 100% absolute truth -- which I'm certain I'd be doing 100% of the time in this job, because it's a solemn public trust, and a high-profile one, and I have my principles. So anyway I think I may not be cut out for this line of work after all, strictly because of the public speaking thing. Sigh. It sounded so perfect until I got to that part.



So back to the photos. Photo #2 is of our fair city's shiny new South Waterfront Neighborhood Park, two full city blocks of nothing but beautiful green grass. Well, really this is just a placeholder for right now, not the finished park. For now, all they did was grade it, do the usual toxic waste mitigation (which I'm sure is nothing to worry about) and plant all that beautiful green grass. But eventually the city's going to give the place the old Tanner Springs treatment, to ensure the place holds no attraction for outsiders (i.e. kids). So walk your dogs here while you can, or play frisbee golf or have a picnic or whatever, because the design junkies have designs on the place, and after that you will not be welcome here. That'll be a while off in the future, though, since right now the city's got no cash to spare. (*cough* aerial tram *cough*)

If my camera hadn't run out of juice at that point, I'd have taken a photo of the new path along the river. It's really not much to look at yet, though. Like the new park, right now it's the minimum functional implementation: An asphalt path with a few Home Depot-style benches, running for just the few blocks next to where the condo towers are going up right now. So you can't actually hop on the path and walk down to the Old Spaghetti Factory (still the only restaurant in the area) for the time being. Oh, well. At least there's a coffee shop here now. Well, in a manner of speaking. There's a coffee cart, catering mostly to construction workers. From the very small sample I encountered, the iced quad espresso is the #1 choice in the building trades.

Oh, and one more thing. On the walk down to the South Waterfront area, I passed through an area I wrote about back in June, which I referred to as slightly off the beaten path. The reader was supposed to infer the place was much more than slightly off the beaten path. But oh, how wrong I was. The post's second photo shows an overgrown lot next to the gravel road the city calls SW Baker St. Today I was walking along Water Avenue (the paved street down the hill) and noticed the big signs for TheNextGreatPlace.com, the website for the coming-soon Water Avenue Lofts, described as "36 First Class Condominiums from the mid-$200s to $800,000+", with 14 already reserved. Jeepers! There were a few people standing on the sidewalk, looking at the as-yet-vacant lot, and one had a roll of blueprints under his arm. A worrisome thought crossed my mind: What if local developers read this blog, and they're relying on me to seek out weird, out-of-the-way (read "undervalued") corners of town, and then they swoop down and plant condos in my wake. That would not be a happy thought, and I refuse to give it any credence. But still, sometimes I have to wonder, just a little bit.

3 views of Lovejoy Fountain

Yet more photos of Lovejoy Fountain, in downtown Portland. The rest of this post has nothing to do with the fountain, so if you came here for that reason there's no real point to reading the rest of this post. I mean, unless you want to, it's not like I'm trying to discourage you or anything, I'm just trying to be fair and help you out if you're short on time. So anyway, I hope you like the photos. In the interest of full disclosure, the first came out really dark and I had to sic the GIMP on it a little, so the resulting colors are more "poetic" than "accurate". So if you ever visit the fountain at midnight and it doesn't look exactly as pictured, don't come complaining to me about it. That's all I'm saying.

You might have noticed a trend in my recent posts here. Call it light-n-fluffy if you like, or obsessively geeky, or simply irrelevant, or whatever you prefer. I feel like I really ought to be touching on the issues of the day, but really, what's there to say when the president and his minions start invoking Godwin's Law? The "Munich" boogeyman rides again, just in time for the elections in November. What a coincidence! You can tear your hair out, or you can laugh yourself silly over the whole thing, but responding seriously to that kind of talk is, well, it's a waste of time, and effort, and brainpower, and electricity if it's going on the net, or trees if it's going to the local paper. And consider the inevitable increase in the overall entropy of the universe. It just isn't worth it. Just roll your eyes and be sure to vote against the bastards in November, every last one of them. Every. Last. One.

I probably ought to say something about the Steve Irwin thing while I'm at it. I was never a fan, and I didn't care for his style. He built a career out of tempting fate, and people tuned in to watch for the same reason they watch NASCAR, i.e. just in case a terrible accident happened. And now it has, a weird, freakish accident, Dale Earnhart style. On the other hand, it looks like his zoo in Australia lets you pet an echidna. As longtime Gentle Reader(s) know, that counts for a lot with me. Ok, "pet" may not be the right word when you're talking about a spiny creature with sharp claws, but you can touch it, anyway, whatever you want to call it.

I also ought to say a few words about Pluto getting demoted. I thought it was a stupid idea. I'd have set the bar at the size of Pluto, at least for the time being, and said anything that big or bigger in orbit around the sun is a planet. So we'd have 10 now instead of 8. Ten is a reasonable number. If it looked like we were approaching 15-20 planets, then it would be worthwhile to set up a "dwarf planet" category and start demoting the runts of the litter. Although really (as I've argued elsewhere) there are exactly 4 major objects in the solar system, which make up the vast majority of its mass. The Earth is much bigger than Pluto or Ceres, to be sure, but it has much more in common with both than it does with Jupiter. If we lived on Jupiter, I expect that we wouldn't consider the Earth a planet, but merely the largest known asteroid, and the largest in the class of "terrestrial asteroids". From a non-anthropocentric standpoint, the right answer is 4 planets, not 8 or 12. That's my answer and I'm stickin' to it.

As some news stories have noted, there's a precedent for demoting planets. Ceres was considered a planet for a while, even after the first few other asteroids were discovered. There's a great article from the US Naval Observatory titled "When Did the Asteroids become Minor Planets", which discusses how the demotion occurred. It took a while, in part, because people had to wrap their minds around the notion of things orbiting the sun that weren't planets. It wasn't just a semantic debate like today; a whole new mental category of object had to be invented.

Of course, these days nobody imagines that every little rock in orbit around the sun is a planet on par with Saturn. That would be silly. As a result of the demotion, astronomers are free to give the little rocks all sorts of whimsical names. Here's a recent selection, with asteroids being named in honor of:

• J.K. Rowling
  
• The town of Charleville, Queensland
  
• Tony Hoffman, editor at PC Magazine.
  
• Arnie & Nancy Rosner, pioneers in remotely operated telescopes for the masses.
  
• Mark Thiemens, a science dean at UC San Diego.
  
• Paul Kurtz & CSICOP
  

Stairs & Ruins

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No, I'm not wafting around Tuscany, at least not today. These photos are of what was once the gatehouse for an old 19th century reservoir near SW 10th & Clifton, in downtown Portland just south of I-405. Seems the reservoir wasn't big enough and ran dry in the summer, so it was eventually replaced by the much-beloved reservoirs in Washington Park and on Mt. Tabor. I really can't tell where the reservoir itself is supposed to have been. But everyone says there used to be a large body of water around here somewhere, and I don't know why someone would lie about a piece of trivia like that, so I imagine it had to have been around here somewhere.



If you look in through the "window", you can see someone's been sleeping inside there quite recently. I would too, if I was homeless. Not "swanky" exactly, but it has a roof, and it's built better than most new houses these days.

Just to the left of the view in the top photo, 10th ends in a short public stairway up to Cardinell Drive. I was down at the Central Library the other day and looked over their reference copy of the ever-elusive Portland's Little Red Book of Stairs, and plotted this walk out from it, more or less, sort of.

One thing you don't see on the [map] is that there's a path between Cardinell Drive and Hoffman Avenue, right at the hairpin turn where Hoffman turns into Sheffield. The signs indicate it's private property open to public use, "at your own risk". It's a nice, wide, flat path, so I think the "risk" bit is just lawyer-speak, unless you suddenly get the notion to hurl yourself down the hill or whatever.

Going between the aforementioned stairs and the path is kind of interesting, because it turns out there's a gate on this part of Cardinell, to keep out the greasy hordes of the lumpenproletariat. At least the ones who arrive in cars, anyway. There's no gate on the sidewalk part, so you can walk through the area, you just can't drive through. I was actually coming the other direction, from the Hoffman side, so I didn't realize there was a gate until I was already on the snooty side of the gate. Weirdness.

(I'm doing this in backwards order because I liked those gatehouse pics the best and wanted to put them at the top. Plus it seems kind of artsy and pretentious this way, which seems appropriate considering we're in the West Hills here.)

Which brings me to how I got to the Hoffman Avenue end of the path. As you might suspect, it involves stairs. Lots and lots and lots of stairs. The Little Red Book dubs them the Elevator Stairs, and after climing them I tend to agree. Since we're going in reverse order, the first photo is from the top of the stairs, looking out at Mt. Tabor:



The last couple of photos are from about 1/3 of the way up. One photo looks up the stairs, and the other down:

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This is what happens when animated billboards malfunction, at least when there's a Windows box behind the scenes. Niiiiice. In fairness, it looks like a third-party app has gone south here, not Windows itself, and I suppose this could happen on a Linux box just as easily -- although I've never actually seen that in real life.

To the naked eye, the billboard was just a solid pink-white color, not the odd pixelated pattern you see here. You can't see the Windows menus very well, but I kind of like it this way. It's weird, and funky.

Once I saw a Westside MAX ticket vending system on the blink, which revealed that the systems are coded in VB and run on Windows 3.1. Blech!

But the best example I ever saw was on a local cable access channel years ago. Seems their community bulletin board thingy ran on an Amiga, and I know this because the box had crashed, and the channel displayed the flashing red "Guru Meditation" screen for a couple of days before someone got around to fixing it. That must've really confused the heck out of all the non-geeks out there.

Eek!

They say there's nothing scarier than a clown after midnight. I submit to you that a dimly-lit shop window mannequin after midnight is at least a close second.

It's always the cheerful ones you need to worry about.