Turkey Smoking

In our continuing efforts to engage in culinary experimentation and grill during the winter, we are trying to smoke a turkey today. Here's how it looked when we got started at 9:45am:

Smoking packet of hickory and apple chips on the left (yet to really start smoking) and the bird over a drip pan on the right. Only the burners on the left are lit so the heat will be entirely indirect. We're expecting it to take 8 hrs or so; stayed tuned for updated throughout the day.

UPDATE: Its 6:45pm (so much for updates throughout the day) and we've finished our smoked turkey dinner. Due to a later than expected start and emptying one of my propane tanks part-way through, we decided to finish the bird in the oven. It cooked there another 45 minutes; we were pretty close to being done on the grill. Outcome: the meat is drier but more flavorful. We're thinking next time only smoking for part of the day and finishing in the oven, hoping to preserve more of the moisture. I for one really enjoyed the smoked dark drumstick meat.

Alternative Christmas Story

Katie: Do you remember from the Christmas story we read who Jesus' mother was?

2-year old Avery: Mary!

Katie: Very good! And who was Jesus' daddy? [Setting aside important theological distinctions.]

Avery: Joseph!

Katie: That's right! And where were Mary and Joseph going when Mary was pregnant with Jesus?

Avery: RED ROBIN!

If you're going to run for office....

... and you want people to take you seriously, I recommend that you get a dedicated email address instead of using the one that implies you don't plan to show up to your new job because you're too busy golfing.

Canonical OK Go Videos

You know OK Go; they're the band that does the creative and adventurous music videos. I've linked to their videos in the past and I will do so again but this time in a much more rigorous manner. Which is to say I intend to provide a chronological and canonical list of their videos. Note that this list will not include all of the music videos attributed to them, just the real ones, if you know what I mean.

A Million Ways

Here it Goes Again

This Too Shall Pass (Marching Band)

This Too Shall Pass (Rube Goldberg)

End Love

White Knuckles

Last Leaf

All is Not Lost

Needing/Getting

The Writing's on the Wall

I Won't Let You Down

Upside Down & Inside Out

Fixing the Vacuum Cleaner

Our vacuum cleaner stopped running for more than a second or two at a time so I tried fixing it.



After all of this work, I determined the motor was overheating for unknown reasons, even when no external load was being applied. Verdict: dead vacuum cleaner.

And I don't even get any spare parts out of this mess, just a pile of plastic to put in the trash.

Rental Beast

I had a business trip last week to Seattle and due to my route cutting through the mountains in winter, I asked for an all-wheel drive rental car.  What I got was a beast.



Aside from needing to get over the mountains, this was exactly the wrong car to drive in a dense urban area, park in a garage with narrow spots, and try to make get back home through rush hour traffic.

But this is not a story about the mismatch between large vehicles and Seattle. This is a story about buttons.





I have never been a car with so many buttons. Quick, think of a feature a "fancy" car might have.

I'm not talking about things like powered seats, sunroof, and Sirrus/XM radio. Or even things like heated leather seats, built in GPS, back-up camera, push-button start or triple-zone climate control.

I'm talking about dynamic cylinder shut-down to increase fuel economy (we got over 19 MPG on the highway), cooled leather seats, and automatic windshield wipers that figured out how often they needed to swipe on their own.

And a vault hide your phone and connect to the media system while your in the store? It had that too.

Voicemail

Our phone system at work is set up to send us a text transcription of each voicemail we receive, called a "Voice Mail Preview". I guess they don't want to claim it is actually a transcription because of situations like this:

Hi it's your wife they bury in asleep please call back thank you bye.

Maybe somebody came to our house and buried my wife alive while she was taking a nap and she's kindly asking me to call her back.

Or maybe its something else.

Either way, I should probably give her a call and see what's going on.

One Year Anniversary

A year ago today I was hit by a car while riding into school on my motorcycle.  Today, I can walk and though there is pain in every step, most days it is not much more than what you might experience with a sprained ankle or pulled muscle: annoying but not debilitating.

Thankfully most of what I do is with my mind and and not my body because if the former was the case, things would not be so cheerful. As I have been fixing up our new house, I have found that the flurry of home improvement on Saturday has consequences on Sunday.  I take an ibuprofen and do as Christians have done for centuries; I rest.

I am fragile.  I have always heard those older than me talk about youth and their invincibility.  It wasn't true; how could they say that? It is true. This injury has prematurely aged me and made it clear that this is not simply a statement of the carelessness of youth but more specifically, the lack of necessary care, the lack of premeditation in every step, jump, sprint and turn.  When I approach a large step I become an old man, carefully easing my way down the twelve, fourteen, twenty inches. I remember when I would have eagerly jumped off and landed in a sprint. Now this step is a reverse Himalaya for me, the seasoned mountain climber.  I have history and knowledge that I can conquer this but not without effort and the outcome is uncertain.  There will be pain. I will persist.

I am not young, closer to forty than thirty. About a decade ago I injured my back and over the many months of treatment I was able to more-or-less recover to my pre-injury state.  The physical therapist told me that though I was asymptomatic, I would only stay that way through regular exercise.  The injury would never heal and the pain of my nerve impingement was only millimeters away.  I was young and I generally ignored her.  I have had several minor "re-injuries" since then and still don't do the exercises as often as I should.  My muscles get soft and fail to keep my back in line; I hurt.

Life changes quickly.  I was putting up a picture of Katie and I and it was clear to see they were taken when we were younger, several years ago.  It doesn't seem that like we should look so different.  How long ago did we get married?

This has been a full year for us.  The injury lead to three months of bedrest and three months of physical therapy destroying any plans I had of graduating in May. By mid-June I had a job offer and the process of relocating our lives has filled so many of the days since then. I managed to complete my degree somewhere in there.  It feels like every day from that first phone interview was full with the seeds and fruition of this move; the days feel like weeks. My mind tells me it has been a year since we left Wichita for good.

A legal settlement between all the relevant parties was reached shortly before we left and I do intend to finish my "series" on insurance and what I've learned of the legal system through this incident.  The money was helpful in buying this house but I would trade it back for the ability to run and hike without care again. The only basketball I can play on the huge concrete pad in our backyard is free throw practice.

I write all of this to affirm the platitude: life goes fast and we are not promised tomorrow.  There are many, many who have more than my share of difficulty and trouble through no fault of their own. What I write is not statement of pain and pity but one of grief for the ways things were and never will be again. In the same we that funerals remind us of our mortality and motivate us to consider our life choices, let this short eulogy of my days of youth push all of us to make the most of every day in which we wake up. It is a gift.

Let me end with this. These are words commonly attributed to the Biblical King Solomon of Israel, a man whose life was extravagant, impressive, and devastating enough for our modern media tastes, a man who knew the pleasure and pain of this world so well:

"You who are young, be happy while you are young, and let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth. Follow the ways of your heart and whatever your eyes see, but know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment."

Amen. May it be so.

Household Detritus

When the mover's had completed their job, our house was virtually empty with only the items we ourselves were taking in our car remaining.  By that Friday afternoon when we were leaving town, the house was virtually bare: the only things we knowingly left behind were paint for the rooms and exterior and the extra tile we had used in the kitchen and bathroom.  And a few air fresheners.

The house we have purchased and have been moving into these past few days was not so thoroughly expunged.  Here are just a few of the abandoned items of which we have recently gained custody.

Anti-stress medication for a cat.

Art used to decorate one of the bathrooms.

Fish candle decorating the same bathroom.

Mystery key.

Very large first-aid kit.

Art decorating the kitchen.

Tiny wrench.

Dog-bone keychain.

There's more, such as the drawer littered with cough drops, the 90's vintage radio and cd player in the garage, and a half-bottle of rubbing alcohol. Most of this will go away but if the fish watercolor is not a print, I think I'm going to fight for it. I don't know where I would put it.

Life Change

Today I successfully defended my PhD dissertation defense.  Except for some administrative paperwork, I have matriculated here at Wichita State University.

Today is also the day my wife gave notice at work.

Both of these events have been driven by the fact that a few weeks ago, I accepted a full-time position at Pacific Northwest National Lab in Richland, Washington.  The work I expect to do there is very similar to what I've been doing at Wichita State: research on the power grid.  Beyond that it is hard to say what my daily work will look like.

Landing the job at PNNL has been a series of divine interventions.  My relationship with the lab began during a class I took several years ago in which I ended up using a simulator they had been developing.  I emailed a number of times seeking help on using the software and ended up arranging a face-to-face with the developers during a conference we both attended that summer.  When I began looking for a job late this last spring, I emailed the developers and they pointed me towards a position that would be opening soon.  I applied, did a phone interview, and in just a few weeks, was flying up for an on-site interview.  Less than two weeks after that, I was told I had the job.

Life since then has been very full.  With a full-time position secured, I was highly motivated to finish up my dissertation.  My wife and I began scheduling all the various tasks and trips that needed to be taken before my start date in late August: moving company survey, house repairs before putting our house on the market, a house-hunting trip in Washington, camping trips with both sides of the family, moving company packing all our goods.... Some of these have taken place already, some haven't and the logistics never seem to end.

But there's been enough break in the action for me to write these few paragraphs. I'm incredibly grateful and thankful for the job and am glad that I'll be able to put my degree to use. My wife is thankful to be done working at her current company and looking forward to a new, job-free life.  We're both looking forward to the change in climate and the proximity to much more interesting geography.

In those regards, the change is good. Even without all the stress of the move, though, leaving is hard.  We have good friends and a strong community here.  Neither of us are extroverts and making new friends will be difficult for us.  There's a new town to get used to, a new way of life to establish, a new home to settle into. The accumulation of these challenges is not trivial and can be overwhelming to contemplate. So we don't.  By the grace of God, we've made it this far and I expect He'll carry us through the remaining difficulties. Its clear something is going on and we'll just have to wait to find out how it all plays out.

Ain't No Amazon

We've needed to replace our stall shower door handle since we bought this house.  It has been broken and corroded; barely functional and not pretty. Katie found a replacement at HomeDepot.com and to get free shipping we ordered a few other items were planning on picking up from one of there brick and mortar locations.  The order was placed with an expected delivery date on the upcoming Friday.  Not Amazon Prime but plenty fast enough.

The first sign of trouble came when I noticed the credit card transactions related to this purchase: five charges, one for each item.

When a package showed up Thursday I was impressed.  That is until I lifted it off the porch and realized that it did not contain my order, at least not all of it.  Inside that toaster-oven-sized box was one of the five items I had ordered: five fuses.  These fuses could have been sent in a padded envelope but they were instead bubble wrapped to fill the much-too-large box and shipped out to me.

Friday three boxes arrived and today, Monday, the final box showed up.  Five items, five boxes, five shipping charges that I didn't have to pay.  There is no way they made money on this transaction unless they have incredibly favorable shipping arrangements. My guess is that until they get their logistics more stream-lined, they are going to be losing money for quite a while with their online transactions.

Leather Seat Repair

We recently acquired a very used car that had leather seats.  All of the leather was in very good condition except the driver's seat; worn and with a large tear on the side:

The price for a full repair (including two other panels that were well worn) was $300.  Given the age of the car, we didn't think it was worth spending that kind of money on a cosmetic repair. Our primary interest was in containing the damage, not so much making the seat look new.  We talked over several bad ideas (duct tape, glue, switching driver and passenger seats) before we came up a repair idea that would look OK and keep the tear in check.

We decided to buy a piece of leather of the appropriate color (eBay), cut it to fill in the area behind the tear, and glue the tear down onto the backing piece. So that's what we did.

The trimming and fitting of the leather took longer than I expected and the numerous leather flaps from the compound tear did not want to lay neatly down.  We got it more or less in place and then used paint tape (low adhesion) to apply a small amount of pressure while the glue dried.

Twenty-four hours later, we pulled the tape off and got a good look.

Far from perfect but more or less what we were looking for.  The flap on the far upper right didn't get glued very well so I'm redoing it but everything else seems to be working fine.  We'll see how the special leather flue holds up; I already know from a test on a swatch of the backing leather that it is very flexible when cured. We'll probably need to re-glue it and we may eventually decide to have the panels professionally replaced.  For now, we're calling it "good".

Dropbox Arbitration

Dropbox just recently updated their terms of service and one significant change is the inclusion of an arbitration clause.  Arbitration clauses are used by many companies to avoid the hassle and complexity of resolving disputes through the legal system.  Instead, the two parties use a neutral third party (the arbitrator) and agree to abide by what he/she decides.

General speaking, arbitration clauses are not good for consumers.  The arbitrators are almost always chosen by the corporations and most of the "rulings" are in favor of the corporations.  If the arbitrator doesn't decide in your favor, you are without recourse.

Besides, don't we already have neutral third parties to settle our disputes?  I think they're called "judges" and the entire civil legal system is designed to handle such cases.  It can be expensive and time consuming and the issue of "how much justice you can afford" is real but in the very least it is unbiased and therefore more likely to be fair.

It may seem silly but the ability to sue someone is an important legal right.  Civil courts are an expression of democracy, where social status or power are diminished and two parties are put on equal footing before a judge to resolve a dispute.  Even a system like ours which appears at times to have serious flaws is better than the alternative: one where justice is truly up for sale and might equals right.

Dropbox has made this easy for us.  If you don't want to go to arbitration to settle a dispute with them, you can opt out of this arbitration clause.  You don't have to stop using the service and find an alternative.  Just opt out.  By doing so, you give yourself the option of settling any dispute you may have with them in front of a judge not some arbitrator.

Take it from me, a guy who was hit by a car, is glad he doesn't have to sue as a part of the settlement process, but is glad that the option exists.

Light Renovation

Over the past few days I've been adding lights to some much needed locations.

Under the kitchen cabinets...

... at my nerd desk...

... and in our storage closet

Preparation for the Storm

The never-wrong weather-man says we're looking at many inches of snow starting in the early hours of Tuesday morning.  Rather than keep the SUV we're borrowing out in the driveway (making clearing the driveway very difficult and effectively trapping the vehicle in), I undertook the herculean task of cleaning up the "shop" half of the garage while my wife was making lunch.  With effort, our two-car garage now holds two cars.  Thankfully one of them is no an SUV.

Breaking Madden: The Machine is Bleeding To Death

Through customizing the two teams in the video game Madden 25, an adventurous soul sought to create the most lopsided football game in history.  For example:

Letting the computer control the underpowered team resulted in some rather inexplicable behavior.  When you play this far outside the lines of normal, its hard to predict how the AI will respond to such overwhelming circumstances.

As my wife can attest, I've not laughed this hard in quite a while.

Seriously, read the whole thing.

Data Security

I just got The Email from Target.

Sorry.  The Bad Guys got your name, phone number, email, and mailing address from us.  We know you hardly ever shop here and only ordered that one thing from us online years ago but, hey, we hold onto all that data. We have and now they have it.  You might want to sign up for this credit-reporting service because who know what's going to happen now.

I'm signing up and Target is footing the bill which is the responsible thing for them to do at this point. I hope its not too late as the theft of the data was weeks ago.

We all shop online because of the convenience but convenience has a cost and when it comes to computers, that cost is often in terms of security of data.  Many website that allow/force you to have an account will keep you logged into the site as a convenience to you.  Whenever you go to the site, you enter it already logged in; no password typing.  Of course, that means anybody using your computer will also enter the site logged in as you.  Spouses, kids, person who broke-in and stole your computer, whoever.

And if that site is a retailer, many go the extra mile and will automatically or upon your non-refusal (that is, by default) store your shipping information for you to make checkout easier.  Some will even offer to store your payment information to provide a one-click shopping experience.

Over the course of the past few years, Intuit, the makers of TurboTax has been offering an online version of said software.  Rather than buy a disc and install TurboTax on your computer, you go to their website and do your taxes there.  Being online, they are able to suck in a bunch of data from other online sources and save you some time from manually entering in the data yourself.  To use the software on your computer can, depending on the version you use, cost you more than the online version.

There are a broad range of attitudes and perspectives when it comes to data security.  We each have to decide what level of inconvenience we are willing to bear for a desired level of peace of mind.  But without any experience involving identity theft, it is easy to overvalue the convenience and underplay the risk.  Due to my recent experience of being hit by a car, I imagine it feels similar how I thought about insurance.  It wasn't until I was dependent on the other party's insurance and saw the actual price of emergency medical care did I realize how important insurance was. The financial side of that collision would have played out very differently if the details of our coverage had been slightly different.

I don't know what changes I am going to make in light of this personal data theft.  The data that was stolen from Target is probably enough to do some damage but pales in comparison to what a theft of my tax data would provide access to.  For the foreseeable future, I'm using TurboTax on my computer and not the online version.  With one big exception, I don't have any online retailers store my payment information and I choose to actively log in and out of accounts when I visit various sites and retailers.  The exception is Amazon.  I'm going to have to think long and hard about the convenience/security trade-off there.

I've thought about using my Mac's whole-drive encryption for my home computer.  Any computer made today has enough horsepower to run this service with virtually no loss in performance.  That would provide another layer of protection in case my computer was stolen. I'm going to have to do some more reading on it before I make a final decision.

Even though it is highly related, I don't even want to talk about passwords; that's a whole separate topic.  I'll briefly say I use the Mac's Keychain (and I've mostly been able to get my wife to do the same) and I think everybody else should too.  I've considered going one step further and using a more full-fledged password manager so that all of my passwords are a mess of un-memorizable characters but I'm not sure how that would play out in my life.  I routinely work on two computers and a mobile device and am not sure I how much of a hassle it would be.

See, convenience versus security.  Even nerds have to make choices.

Proof Checking at Fedex Office

As part of keeping my Dominion box organized, I print off dividers that a wonderful soul has freely published onto cardstock via FedEx Office nee Kinkos.  The divider's I hadn't printed were for the latest release (Guilds) and so while having other fun Christmas-y stuff printed, I had these done as well.
The results are shown below.

Compare the above to the original file shown below:

Two problems here:

1. Clearly the file didn't print properly.  Where the name of the card should be in the title banner a black box exists.  No PDF viewer, including the online proofer provided by FedEx office shows this black box so I don't know how it ended up getting printed but it did.
2. Here is the full text of the pink note attached to the printed document.
   
   "PRODUCTION REVIEW SAMPLE
   Dear customer,
   I have compared the proof (if applicable), originals and the job ticket, and determined that it meets the FedEx Office standards of quality.
   All subsequent copies were produced to match this sample.
   We appreciate your business and look forward to meeting your needs in the future.
   (Team Member Signature)"
   
   Knowing that sometimes things get messed up, FedEx Office has a system in place where each print job is examined to ensure that it is getting printed properly and has an employee sign this verification. As the note clearly states, this includes comparing the printed product to the original. I know from trouble-shooting the problem with them after the fact that no digital representation of this file showed the problem, only the printed version.  They had a clear definition of the final product to use in comparing to the printer output and yet kind of blew it.

In my mind, the second problem is bigger than the first. 

Bad PDF Rendering?

The general publication of the professional society I belong to, IEEE, is their Spectrum magazine.  To make my life easier and less paper-oriented I've elected to receive the publication as a PDF which I often read on my iPad.  In the November issue I noticed an odd typesetting error.  The letters in the body of the text closest to the gray text box seemed to have something wrong. I have so little experience with preparing print-ready publications that I'm not going to speculate as to the cause of this problem.

Mutant Paperclip

Paper clips have been commandeered for a long time to be misshapen and turned into semi-sharp, pointy, pokey tools.  One of the most common uses in the world of personal computers is to reach a recessed reset button, one that the designers wants to ensure could ever to be pressed by accident.  Back when I was in middle school, our first computer came with the instructions to use such a paperclip to get to a manual eject button inside the disk drive. It was a bit scary that the official trouble-shooting procedure involved poking around in the computer innards but that was the way things were done.

Or "are done" I should say.  The receiver for my wireless mouse broke and the manufacturer sent me out a replacement.  The instructions for pairing the receiver to my mouse involved this recessed-button poking but rather than asking me to use one of my own paperclips, they send me one in the receiver package, pre-bent.

(The manufacturer is Evoluent, by the way and I'm using their Vertical Mouse 4 to help reduce strain on my wrist.  The product is great and their technical support was top notch.  I called phone support, a real person answered, and once my problem was described, he knew what needed to happen and sent me out a replacement receiver.  The only downside: I have to drum up a Windows computer to run the mouse-receiver pairing software.)