A Terrible Two-Edged Sword

Would you be in favor of giving a loaded shotgun to a toddler? Certainly he could figure out how to pull the trigger. Just as certainly, he would have no understanding of the consequences. This post begins a series (I hope) that deals with the danger of handing internet access to people who do not understand the consequences of going on-line.

Once upon a time there were people who exchanged information over the back fence. They spoke face-to-face. If one of them made an utterance, and the other repeated it to a third party, the original utterer could claim plausible deniability in that the repeater could have made some change to the information in the transfer. In any event, the passage of the information, in either its true form or as mutated, was slow. Nevertheless, the saying, "The cat is out of the bag," reflected the fact that once someone said something, it could never be rescinded. At least the cat had to jump from person to person in small leaps.

The telephone made a huge impact on information transmission. Not too many people remember the party line. In the United States, it gradually faded away during my teen years, but most modern teenagers would be horrified to learn that, in those days, anything you told your friend over the telephone could possibly be heard by the neighbor listening in. Teens back then were a bit more circumspect in what they said on the phone, because Dad and Mom just might be informed by Nosy Neighbor. Private lines, and laws governing wiretapping and recording, gave people a sense of privacy.

In the analog age, that sense of privacy had some basis, since the ability to store information was physically limited. You could write stuff on paper, you could record it on tape, but you still had to have a large library to store it in and a means of cataloguing it to make it of any use.

Times have changed. We live in a digital age. Terabyte sized storage is cheap and common; even larger media is available and larger yet is being designed. I have referred in a previous post to the fact that every email that I have ever sent (and I was on-line via Delphi and the FreeNets over 20 years ago, when most people had no idea what I was talking about when I said "email") is stored on a server somewhere. The internet has become an accepted facet of modern life, but familiarity, while not necessarily breeding contempt, does tend to breed carelessness.

When you log into an email system, or go online with a web browser, the mechanics of the system are hidden from the user. The internet began as a means of sharing UNIX files over closed server systems. Today, the systems are open ("world wide web") and cosmetically enhanced ("user-friendly graphic interface", "web browser") but the underlying mechanism is unchanged except for the size of the data "words" (ah, for the days when we hackers dreamed of being able to expand from 8-bit to 16-bit "words"; the 64-bit "word" is here and we await machines that will handle the 128-bit word!!). And, as noted above, the storage is no longer in the realm of Kilobytes, Megabytes, or Gigabytes, but Terabytes, and Google is said to be handling over 20 Petabytes (10 to the 15th) of data per day. It is all being stored, and Google has plans for its future use. Exabyte and Yottabyte (10 to the 18th and 10 to the 24th) will become as common in the not-too-distant future as GB. Unfortunately, the people logging into their internet accounts are as clueless as people unknowingly using a party line.

Do you use a cell phone? The message packets are digital, they pass through servers (although not necessarily on the internet, per se), and any intelligence agency that can access the carrier's records can obtain a complete copy of your conversation.

Do you use instant messaging? Or texting? Or internet phone service? All of those are transmitted across the internet in file packets, bounced from node to node and from server to server, and stored in memory somewhere. If a cell phone conversation passes through one of those nodes, it also goes out of the sole control of the carrier.

Do you use an analog land-line to call someone who uses a cell phone or internet phone service? Did you know that your conversation has also been recorded and saved? Do you know which servers it passed through? Did it get bounced through India, China, South Africa, or Europe, on the way from Akron to Cleveland? Did you even know that such a thing was possible? Are you in the same kind of situation as the toddler with the loaded shotgun?

So, now, what did you talk about in your last phone conversation? What did you send in your last email? What did you post on your blog? What did you upload to Facebook? Did you really intend for the whole wide world to be able to see that? Would you have discussed your very private life details over a party line with a dozen other neighbors able to listen in?

Lord willing, I intend to expand on this in future posts. I have had some previous problems with identity theft, I have had a very recent refusal by a bank holding company to buy!!! stock on-line because they had me confused with someone else via public records (in that case the State BMV!!), and I have some serious concerns about the privacy of data submitted to large information companies by people who obviously do not understand how that data will be used in the future.

If you think I am paranoid -- wait until I get done with YOU.

Grannie -- More Herstory

Sunday night we had supper with Grannie Annie. The talk over desert was interesting. In her stories of her childhood, she has often mentioned that while her father was off in the wilds of Northern Alberta, trying to homestead, her mother rented half of their house to a Jewish family. It seems that no one else in town would take them in, and when the house was sold to raise the money to immigrate to Canada, the renters were distressed because they felt they had nowhere else to go.

The sequel came out Sunday night. Grannie spent several weeks this past year visiting her sisters; she and Aunt Sue had a number of slumber parties. (The idea of two 80+ year old "girls" having a slumber party somehow amuses me!). Like all girls at slumber parties, they talked the night away. Aunt Sue related a story that took place decades ago, when she and Uncle John went together on a trip to Israel.

As they waited for their bus one day, they decided to browse in a nearby shop. They conversed in Slovak, and the shopkeeper stopped them and asked where they were from. They told her they were from Canada, and continued to look around and chat. The shopkeeper asked again, where they were from before they were from Canada, and they told her that they were from Glozan, in Yugoslavia.

The shopkeeper knew two men who had also come to Israel from Glozan. Aunt Sue knew of only one Jewish family from that town, and told the story of how her mother had rented to the Berger family.

The shopkeeper became very excited at that. It seems that when the War started, the oldest son took his youngest brother and fled to Israel. The rest of the family stayed behind, and was murdered by the Nazis. The two Berger brothers lived in the town that Uncle John and Aunt Sue were passing through.

They did not stay to meet the men; their bus arrived and they had a schedule to keep. Still, another part of the story has appeared. In some ways, it is a family link to Israel.

Grandpa, What Did You Do In The Revolution?

I'm just now getting around to this. Old age makes me slow? Or am I just too busy with busy work?

Tuesday I spent the day -- 5:30 AM to 8:30 PM -- at Precinct 4-B in Barberton. I was one of the (R) precinct judges, and my specific job, as assigned after I arrived, was poll judge. I recorded the ballot stub numbers as the voters were given their ballots.

In all, our group functioned quite well. The lady who was presiding judge seemed to be a bit unhappy with me at times, probably because when people came to the table and had a question, they tended to ask me instead of her. She may have taken that as a slight due to her gender, I don't know. She was a bit testy at times, especially when I asked for clarification of some of the procedures that were followed.

ID was generally supplied very willingly by the voters. We did have some moments of uncertainty, though. Active duty military IDs were supposed to be accepted, even though they do not contain the bearer's address. Otherwise, government issued IDs needed to have both the bearer's name and home address. We ended up accepting some VA ID cards, which also lack the address, in lieu of a driver's license, as a substitute for an active duty military ID. I questioned this, because I thought the instructions from the Ohio Secretary of State were quite clear that any other form of government ID than a military ID must also have the current home address. The presiding judge felt that a VA ID was the same as a military ID.

Roughly 4% of the ballots cast in our precinct were provisional : they were a result of the voter not having acceptable ID. In such cases the voter has 10 days to contact the Board of Elections and provide the proper ID. If he doesn't do that, his vote is not counted. Our precinct had, I believe, a higher percentage of provisional ballots than the adjacent precinct table (6-C). To some extent I attribute that to the fact that as the presiding judge called out the voter's name, I would respond with reading the address from the poll book. Quite a few of the voters would quickly say something like, "I moved since the last election." At that point, the ID check would tighten.

Any voter who had moved out of the precinct but still insisted on voting a provisional ballot had to be informed that the Board would not count a provisional ballot cast in the wrong precinct. We had voters who had moved out of the county trying to vote in Barberton 4-B because they said they had not registered in their new home precinct. They were informed that they could vote provisionally, but that their ballot would not be counted when the Board found out they had voted in the wrong place. Some wanted to know what difference it made, since they only wanted to vote for President. They had to be told that each precinct had different issues on the ballot; the ballots were specific for the precinct (and, in fact, there are some precincts that have different ballots depending on what the street address is!).

The ballot scanners did not jam (even though the AutoMark machine did have a paper jamb while our only disabled voter to use it was part-way through his first ballot page). We ended up with a different number of ballots in our scanner ballot can because we know of at least two voters who ran ballots from 6-C through the scanner for 4-B. The scanner is supposed to be programmed to reject ballots from the wrong precinct. That feature appears to have not been working that day. In fact, the scanner is supposed to reject a ballot unless the ballot stubs have been removed (would you want somebody to have a record of how you voted?). We had an odd number of ballots, which was a puzzle until I found a set (pages 1 and 2, clinging tightly together) that had gone through the scanner with the stubs still attached. Seems that another feature of the scanner also failed to work.

There were 951 voters registered in 4-B. 71 of them had been sent absentee ballots (which they may or may not have returned to the Board). We had 413 voters, counting the 18 provisional ballots cast. Bottom line : fewer than half the registered voters in Barberton 4-B actually voted.

I was very happy to head for home afterward.

Barry the Pigherd

I suppose that title is both shocking and irritating to some people. That was my intent. Yesterday's election was supposed to have ushered in an era of change. I doubt very much whether the change will be anything that will better the nation in any significant way.

Campaign promises are slanted toward self-interest. While the Obama campaign attacked the "selfishness" of those who did not want to pay more taxes, it played to the selfishness of those who deem it just to plunder and pillage anyone who has more than the average share of goodies. It will be interesting indeed to see how much satisfaction will be obtained by those who expect bigger handouts from the Federal pigtrough.

Welfare recipients (including all those who look forward to refunds of taxes they did not pay) aside, players such as the National Association of Homebuilders and the National Association of Realtors, both of which have substantial influence due to the amount of lobby money they can throw at Washington, are looking for a housing bail-out. They will probably get it. It matters not that the current economic crisis is founded in an oversupply of housing. Economics is a subject that no politician wants to master, because it does not supply soothing answers to thorny questions.

Housing has always been a part of American manufacturing. When offshore production of most other goods became more cost effective due to the levying of production taxes on American products, the percentage of manufacturing made up by housing increased because it is not practical to build houses overseas and ship them here. (The transportation problem is really the only thing that stands in the way of outsourcing housing to China. Once some enterprising American figures out how to build a Star Trek type matter transporter, and some Democrat President allows the advanced technology to be sold to the Chinese, you can kiss the US housing industry good-bye, too. Buy a house on-line, have it delivered to your lot, anywhere in the world. Think what that technology would do to pizza delivery. "No cold pizzas; we deliver fresh to your dining room table.")

It was a standing (and union-irritating) joke that anyone who could buy a hammer could be a carpenter. Out of work? Start your own construction business. Farm shut down for the winter? Get a construction job until spring. America built more houses than it had households, and the greedy foreign bankers loaned money at teaser rates with adjustable terms, fully expecting that they would recoup their initial low interest when the rates reset.

The foreign bankers gambled and lost. Congress and the Federal Reserve sold the American people into slavery to bail the foreign bankers out. It was not a problem of New Math. It was a problem of No Math. I doubt that many of the culpable ones ever sat down to figure out how 100,000,000 taxpayers would pay for a $700,000,000,000 bailout. (I once had an argument with a Jr. High math teacher who insisted that a zero was a nothing. Makes me wonder if he was a Congressional math tutor.) Now the Home Builders are asking for a $268,000,000,000 bailout, plus interest rate subsidies (paid by who?), to the tune of another $143,000,000,000. I am betting that they will get what they ask for. Here is a hot investment tip -- buy Milton Bradley money, because it will soon be worth more than Federal Reserve notes.

So here is the joke. To solve the economic crisis, we should build more houses.

Barry will only be able to blame GW Bush for a limited time. Then he will have to produce results. He will find that it is easier to promise change based on fairy tales, than to actually make coaches from pumpkins or waken sleeping princesses by kissing them (Bill found that out, too, but the people of Serbia stood for the tab). Reality is much harder to deal with. When piggies start to squeal over their disappointment, the ruckus can drive a pigherd to desperate measures. One solution is to chase the piggies from the trough and make bacon. Ask yourself, "What Would Obama Do?" Piggies of America, you have been warned.

Quick Clip

This is just a catch-up filler, for those who are blog junkies.

We had our first snow on Thursday, October 30th. It stuck a little, but there was no accumulation. Mike called from the road and said the snow was about 2 inches deep from Richfield and north into the snow belt. Of course, upstate NY had to get about a foot of fluffy to plow that day.

The deck rail is coming slowly. One 6 foot section is complete. There are still five post sleeves on back order from Carter Lumber. The rail color is "White Sand", and it is a sort of "dirty" white that doesn't quite match the white of the trim on the house. Mutterings have been heard about the possibility of painting it to match. I want none of that.

Moved the gas line from its original position (sticking out of the face of the deck fascia) to a new spot on the rail post of the lower deck. I had just enough scrap 1/2" gas pipe to do the job, and only had to buy a pair of close nipples for the project. Mike and I had determined earlier that the pipe threader would allow production of nipples down to about 6 inches, but I figured out a way to get that down to about 4 inches. Also figured out an alternative to a pipe vise, requiring a stand that would hold the pipe threader in a vertical position.

The MAD is going to need far more traps to do the job properly. I suggested that perhaps school projects could be encouraged where students would build the traps in shop class or as science projects. Registered at freepatentsonline.com and downloaded the files for the CDC Light Trap and the CDC Gravid Trap. Since the gummint was assigned the patents, I assume that all we have to do is put some working drawings together and see if we can get volunteers to build them.

Registered with the unemployment people. Found out that they cannot yet make a determination of my eligibility for benefits since my previous employer has only reported my employment through the end of June.

Sent out another resume this morning.

Met the parents of Dennis Datich at Family Night at church last night (see January 25th post). Found out that Dennis died two years ago. I'm starting to understand what old geezers feel when all their contemporaries have become extinct. Can you imagine being the last living dinosaur?

Tomorrow is V-Day. I will be a precinct judge at Barberton 4-B. 5:30 AM until 7 PM. Long day tomorrow, methinks.

Ready to set up a joint account on ComputerShare (can't change the individual account to joint), one at Dominion, and one at Mellon Bank for direct stock purchases. The mutual fund business may be an easy way to go -- let somebody else handle the management and charge you for it -- but direct control of what is purchased and held has some appeal. Too many mutual funds were heavily invested in financial stocks. I should have known better than to leave stuff exposed that way.

Se ya narrow.

Well, Well.

Time to catch up on some of our adventures. The beginning of September I started working on building the front porch. The permit was pulled, the holes were dug, the footers for the posts poured, and then on September 16 the pump stopped working.

Matt and I tried pulling the old pump. It wouldn't budge. Turning the power off and on assured us the motor was still working -- or at least trying to work (we could feel the pipe torque) -- but no water would come up. 105 feet down, it seemed to be stuck, maybe in mud, but we couldn't tell.

I remembered the last time we pulled it, just before Mike and Suzi got married. The location under the front stoop made it very difficult to work on, and we knew that the old casing was rusty and would cause us some problems. A 4 inch pump slides into a 4 inch steel casing nicely when the casing is new, but when it is rusty, there is a lot of friction. We thought it over, and decided it was time to drill a new well.

Old well under the stoop.

Old pump after Frontz pulled it.

No water for over a week. We hauled water in 5 gallon containers from Jesse's house and from Grannie's house. It was like not having a working water heater, but worse.

On September 23rd the crew from Frontz Drilling showed up. In order to get the rig in, we had had to cut down the maple tree by the drive, grind the stump down below grade, and remove the low fence along the drive with the electric outlets and the post light.

I came home for lunch at noon, and they were already down over 65 feet. When I came home at 5 PM, they were wrapping up their operation : the hole was 135 feet deep, cased in 120 feet of 5 inch PVC.







The next day the pump crew came in and installed the pump, set it up with the 86 gallon pressure tank, and chlorinated the system.



I was up at 5 AM, purging the system, and when I could no longer smell chlorine, I turned on the water heater. A half hour later, I enjoyed a hot shower before going to work. The Health Department took the water sample on the 30th, and on the 3rd we were told that everything was OK. I opened the valves for the softener. Frontz had tested the water for hardness; the new well was not as hard as the old one.

Hardness	5 gpg
Iron	o.4 ppm
pH	7.1
Manganese	0 ppm
Hydrogen Sulfide	0.2 ppm
Total Dissolved Solids	790 ppm

While they had noted a trace of hydrogen sulfide, there does not seem to be any noticeable iron or sulfur in the water. Thank God for that; clear, pure water at 12 gallons per minute for a half hour with no draw-down.

A Week Has Passed

So, for the curious, I suppose I ought to recap the events of the past several months. My employment has been a concern for quite a while (ever since Charter One was sold to RBS and REAS was spun off to NASCO and they closed the operation in March 2005). We survived (barely) under self-employment, but I was constantly sending out resumes and applying for openings that showed up.

On April 16 I received a call from a temp agency in California asking if I was interested in a Review Appraiser position in Akron -- the recruiter had spotted my resume on the internet. On April 17 I started my first 8-5 job in over three years. I would be working for the temp agency for the first 13 weeks, and then, if I had performed satisfactorily, would be offered a permanent position.

It turned out that the company I would work for was planning to expand its valuation services, but at the moment had a need for a certified appraiser to do quality control reviews on Broker Price Opinions (BPOs). Basically, the job was making sure all the blanks were properly filled in. The Appraisal Standards Board FAQ #198 ("I am an appraiser and my practice includes requests to comment on a wide range of valuation work performed by others. Sometimes this work is presented as an appraisal report, appraisal consulting report, consulting report, market data summary, and even as a broker’s price opinion. When does STANDARD 3 apply?") states that,

"Assignments related to consulting reports, market data summaries, and broker’s price opinions are not appraisal reviews. Even when the work under examination is performed by an appraiser, evaluating these types of work is not part of an appraisal review.

However, even if the service is not an appraisal review, the portions of USPAP that apply generally to appraisal practice, (i.e., DEFINITIONS, PREAMBLE, the Conduct, Management, and Confidentiality sections of the ETHICS RULE, the COMPETENCY RULE and the JURISDICTIONAL EXCEPTION RULE) would apply."

Standard 3 would not be applicable. I was comfortable with that.

Several weeks into the job, I was notified that plans were afoot to expand the responsibilities of the BPO auditors (we used that term so as to avoid misconceptions about the scope of our work) to "reconcile" BPOs and appraisals. The software that the company was using provided an on-line form which was filled out by the real estate agent doing the BPO. Once the form had been audited to make sure all the necessary information was there, and the specific client guidelines for the report had been followed, the software turned it into a PDF format report which was sent to the client. The report was not signed; a space at the bottom stated "Signature on File".

At that point there were two other appraisers doing the same thing I was doing. We discussed the implications and I studied the Standards. My conclusion was that, using the current software, it was not possible for licensed appraisers to legally and ethically do the "reconciliations". To do so would move the work into the category of an appraisal review.

Again from FAQ #198, "The answer to this question lies in the definition of an 'appraisal review:'

the act or process of developing and communicating an opinion about the quality of another appraiser’s work that was performed as part of an appraisal, appraisal review, or appraisal consulting assignment.

For this question, the key features of an appraisal review are:

• the work under review was performed by an appraiser, and
• the work under review was performed as part of an appraisal, appraisal review, or appraisal consulting assignment.

If a service satisfies the definition of appraisal review, STANDARD 3 applies. Assignments involving commenting on the quality of appraisal reports and appraisal consulting reports are appraisal reviews.

Standard 3 of USPAP sets out the conditions governing an appraisal review and its reporting. At minimum, to meet the Standard, the scope of the review would be determined by the client and the reviewer, but would have to be stated in the report. The signature of the reviewer would have to be under his/her exclusive control. The appraiser would have to maintain (for at least 5 years) the workfile containing true copies (meaning copies of the reports as received from and submitted to the client) of both the work under review and the review itself. Finally, the signed certification as required by Standard 3-2 would have to be attached as an integral part of the report.

I discussed these concerns with my supervisors and also with one of the vice presidents of the company. I would have no objection to doing the "reconciliations" if the software could be altered to allow conformance with Standard 3, and, I put forward suggestions as to how that could be done (it would be a very simple process of adding addendum pages to the PDF formatted reports). I was told that there were no plans to alter the software.

In mid-July, at the 13 week point, I had a performance review. At that time I was informed that because of my concerns over the "reconciliation" process, I was not going to be hired as permanent staff. I was, however, retained as a BPO auditor.

The amount of work fluctuated over the summer; in September, a new client came on board and by this time our department had 6 licensed appraisers and 1 real estate agent reviewing the BPOs. For two weeks in mid-September, we all worked overtime. Then the work slowed. People were asked to volunteer to go home during the day because there wasn't enough work. The week ending 9-27 I was able to put in 33.75 hours, the week ending 10-4, 23.25 hours, and my last week, 31.75 hours.

On Friday, 10-10, I was asked to go home at 3 PM since there wasn't enough work to go around. My team leader signed my time sheet, and checked the box that said my assignment would continue the next week. About 7 PM I got a phone call from the temp agency in California, informing me that my supervisor had called and said that I was being let go because "the numbers were not high enough". I have checked the local job postings all week; it appears that no effort has been made to recruit someone to replace me.

So... the LORD gives, and the LORD takes away. Blessed be the Name of the LORD. Its time to start a new adventure.

Time Machine Has Been Recharged

Where have I been? Busy. As of tonight, I will not be quite so busy. I got a phone call saying my 8-5 job was over. Officially, it was because of numbers -- production not high enough. Unofficially, ...

Well, I have some things to finish up around here. Maybe do more high-power blogging. We'll see.

Wow.

I was early a supporter of Alan Keyes. It was that support that likely cost me any kind of endorsement from the Summit County Republican Party in my 2000 campaign for Congress; I told the committee I favored Keyes over Bush.

Keyes' loss to Barrack Obama in the 2004 Senate race in Illinois appeared to me to have been the result of a half-hearted race; in retrospect, he probably was also a victim of Party shortsightedness. It was that opinion -- a perceived lack of stamina on his part -- that made me favor Huckabee in the place of Keyes.

Nevertheless, there is no other candidate out there at this time who has been as principled and morally consistent as Alan Keyes. With that in mind, I recommend the following :

2-party system: No choice but evil

It is a lengthy read. Too bad for America : he is right.

What would America do if a viable write-in candidate appeared in the next 30 days, in time to be certified for the ballot in a significant number of states? Could grassroots America launch a second American Revolution in 30 days? Could we draft Ken Blackwell? Or, could Blackwell be persuaded to be a running mate for Keyes?

Hmm...???

In Hot Water Again...

The part for the water heater arrived after I got home from work. From what we were told, DHL couldn't find our house. I was up in the garden when I saw the yellow and red truck drive away. The driver left the box out front -- didn't knock, didn't make any effort to let us know the part had arrived.

I assembled the unit (had to reuse the orifice from the old one; it was the only part they didn't replace), installed it, and turned the heater back on. Hot water. We take it for granted. It is a true mark of an advanced society.

I think I'll go take a hot shower.

The Cold Water Kid

Today is day ten with no hot water. The 4th of Julius I took a cold shower, but that is not recommended using water coming from 120 feet down in the ground. Contrary to fiction, there is not enough friction to warm it as it travels through the pipes. My frozen fannie disputes the notion of geothermal heating.

The infamous Whirlpool gas-fired water heater with its cheap stamped steel burner quit functioning on the 3rd. The gas bill for June was higher than normal (well, we did have a June that was colder than normal, Mr. Gore, but that is beside the point). There is no rust on the unit. Jesse's analysis is that the stress of heating and cooling produced metal fatigue in the stamping, and the spreader that was supposed to direct the flame upward broke loose and directed the flame in directions it was not meant to go. This probably kept the heater going long after it was supposed to shut off, and, I suspect, destroyed the thermocouple, since the igniter works and the pilot ignites but will not stay lit.











The heater was Matt's present to us just before Jim & Maria arrived from Loosie-anner in November 2006. As can be seen from the label, it has a 6 year parts warranty. So Matt called the 1-877 number the night of the 3rd and was told a replacement would arrive here in about 5 business days. He is not happy that we are still heating water on the stove to take our baths.

Coming a week after Mike had to replace the drive coupler on his Whirlpool washer -- the same part we replaced on ours about a year ago -- it just does not look good for the Whirlpool brand name around here.

I'm Cheap II

Way back on March 28th I let slip a little blurb about Tyvek sleeves for credit cards. Gather 'round kiddies, and Grandpa Jim will lead you in crafts class. Since this is an outgrowth of Cheapology, we will start with the scrounge movement. Ever get a nice envelope (from some company trying to sell you something) that has a sort of "woven" feel to it? That was probably Tyvek. Here is an example:



We cut a strip out of it just about the width of the card



(HA! and you thought I was going to post something with credit card numbers? HA! Its my genuine Old Geezer Membership Card!) and long enough to wrap around generously.


Then we fold a flap up at the bottom



and around back we mark it



for cutting.



Then we fold it backwards and mark the glue limit line, which we will stay back from about 1/16" so as not to glue the sleeve to the card...



We apply rubber cement to the outside of the short flap and the inside of the long flap, and when it has dried we set the card on the Tyvek and fold the short flap up



and the long flap down



and rub hard to seal the two glued pieces together.



The sleeve is just a bit longer than the card (by design, friend, by design)



and we trim to fit, cutting convexly so as to provide a grip wherewith to draw the card forth.



We have now protected our card from the nameless dangers that lurk in a wallet stowed perilously close to the human rear. There is also a utilitarian benefit. Protected by the Tyvek, the magnetic strip will not be damaged, and anything printed on, like photos or bar codes, will be safe from scuffing.



Cheap, huh?

The Illegal One Has an Idea

The system is down here at work, so I'm grabbing a quick opportunity to post.

What if gummint workers were required to pay into Social Security. "Whazzat?", you say. Yep. Congresscritters and all other forms of gummint life pay into separate gummint pension plans. What if they had to live like the peasants, and pay into Social Security? Maybe Social Security would be more viable? Maybe the Congresscritters would be more serious about how they treat it?

It IS a tax, you know -- FICA. Why should gummint people be exempt from a tax?

Of course, I'm not running for Congress, and even if I got there, there would be nothing I could do about the situation except make speeches for C-SPAN.

Happy Bees Are Here Again...

Had to go visit the livestock and see how they were doing. Earlier, the air in front of the super was thick with arriving and departing flights. These gals have super air traffic control.


Here we see them on the runway and parked in the hanger for the evening. Just a little traffic left. Some of the girls go out for an evening adventure, but they are back before dark.

I think they have accepted their new home. When I opened the top to check on the feeder, only a couple flew up. The rest were busy doing bee things.


Well fed bees are happy bees, I guess. Notice the level of the syrup. It was full to the top yesterday evening. You have to wonder how many thousands of miles a little feeder adds to their lifespans. Looks like one jar a week will likely keep them flush. Silly autofocus couldn't make up its mind what was important.

Settin' Back An' Bein' Cool

It looks as though the swarm has accepted their new home. I went in this evening, (smoking, of course) and they hardly flew up. I added a deep super, with only two frames along each of the sides and the center clear, set a a pair of 3/8" high blocks crossway on the top bars of the super below, and put in a feeder jar with 50-50 sugar syrup. That should make them happier. Then I removed the entry reducer and added a ventilated top cover.

Now to let my female slaves go to work!!

Hived a Swarm

Young Matt comes home a little after 11PM and says the neighbor told him earlier in the day that a swarm of bees was hanging in a bush at the back of their lot. We go out and look -- certainment, bees. Beautiful bees. Tight cluster, but big. Only 3 feet off the ground. I staple a super onto a bottom board, insert a reducer, and off we go. Matt stands back about 20 feet and plays the light on the swarm. I hold up the super, letting the bottom of the swarm touch the top bars of the frames, and give the branch a yank.

Bulls-eye! Almost the whole swarm drops on top of the bars, and after a moment or two, starts to disappear between the frames. Queenie must have headed for the innards. I scoop up a few of the fallen bees, brush most of the ones on the lip of the super onto the bars, and pop on a top cover. My gauntlet blocks the reducer entry. I start carrying it to its spot. Bees are heavier than you think.

Then it starts to happen. I feel movement inside my jeans. Soon there is a burning sensation. Then another. Then another. Smart aleck Matt. Tells me I should have tied off my cuffs.

I set the super down, and head for the house. Matt is trailing behind with the light. He should not have walked past the super. He gets to the bottom of the hill and complains bees are all over him. Not many, really, maybe 2 dozen. I understand, though. It can feel like a lot more. I tell him to turn off the light and stand still, then get a rag and go to him and start brushing them off. Soon he is clean. Me, not so easy.

So, we killed a few, we lost a few, but I figure between 40,000 - 50,000 went into their new home. I had some drawn comb in the super; maybe they will stay. I hope so. Just be careful where you walk in our yard for the next few days. Those ladies were not happy.

Michelle will be coming home from work in a short while. I hope things are calmed down on the deck by then. I'm going to sleep. Its after midnight and I have to be on the road to Columbus at 5:45.

WhatIfI?

So yesterday I slipped the clutch on my mind and let it free-wheel, and with Demogogic Party politics in the news, I began to fantasize. What if someone were to illegally run for Congress? Well, why not. They could be an Official Illegal Congressman. To get there would require violating election law and getting elected anyway.

The political parties have a lock on the US electoral system, except at the grassroots level. If a person wants to run for President, and is not the annointed cherub of his party, he is out of luck. You just ain't gonna make it as a write-in. It takes money, and money has to be accounted for to the Elections Police. Same thing for the office of Senator or Congressor. (I just made that one up, but you have to admit, it makes sense in a gender-neutral world, and follows general grammatical structure.) Now that Obama has finished (or nearly so) his jihad against Hilary and is ready to take the battle to Gentleman Johnny, it may not be politic to mention McCain-Feingold, but that law and other FEC regulations make a home-brewed, roll-your-own candidacy very difficult.

Nevertheless, I Have A Dream. A real nightstallion. So this guy runs for Congress in the 13th Ohio District as a write-in. In order for the votes to count (if he actually got any) he would have to file as a write-in candidate with the Boards of Elections in Summit, Medina, and Lorain Counties. That must be done by September 3 of this year. What if, until that time, he were not officially running for anything? What if an Internet campaign were waged, with no political committee -- just a bunch of wild mushrooms posting "Vote for The Illegal One" posts everywhere? Sig files that said, "Vote for The Illegal One". Handmade posters tacked up all over the district, unorganized (heh, heh) and officially unrecognized, saying "Vote for The Illegal One". "I'm The Illegal One, and I didn't approve of this message, but I'm not going to stop anyone from saying what they think".

Yes, I know the name of The Illegal One would have to be inserted in that space to be effective, but what if, come election day 2008, The Illegal One took the seat as a write-in candidate? Would that not tie some shorts and panties in knots in Washington?

And what could be done about a person who said repeatedly, "If you elect me to Congress, this is what I will not do", if he were not an official candidate until September 3? Could he be arrested or fined for campaigning illegally, if he were not officially a candidate? And what if he did not have any election expenses (think grassroots, unorganized, etc.) to report? Could he be jailed for violating campaign finance reform laws due to the fact that he did not have any campaign finances?

I generally eat oatmeal in the morning. Just think what the nightstallions would be like if I had oatmeal nightcaps.

And no, I have never smoked marijuana, even if I was exposed to marijuana smoke from students in the restroom next to my classroom. (And you wondered where some of your teachers got those silly grins -- it was an occupational hazard.)

Now here's a thought. Maybe its the apples. Do nightstallions like apples?

Oh, and before I'm done, a plug. Visit NorthernLightsWool.com sometime. But not too soon, because we haven't put a page there yet.

crack...crack-crack...

The group of three was about 1-1/2" low and 1-1/2" to the right at 20 yards. It was the first time I had pulled that trigger in over 35 years. The pull was a bit heavier and the muzzle blast was louder than I remembered, but the feel was really nice. My Nylon 66 was functional again.

I had given it to my brother the year after I married. And I had missed it many times in the intervening years. It had been substituted for by a CIL single-shot (that put many a spruce grouse in the pot in Beauval, and turned many a gopher into hawk-food in Nisku) that I left with Nathan when we returned to the US in 1986. But it had never been forgotten.

It was my first gun. I had never had a BB gun of my own. I was 17; the year was 1965, and I had discovered that if you could get a postal mail order check, you could send away for stuff in catalogues. The year before I had almost bought a nice little Cooey -- almost identical to the CIL I bought years later in Meadow Lake -- while shopping in Amherstburg, but Cousin Jerry warned me that I would not get it across the border.

The Nylon 66 was offered for $49.95 in the J. C. Penney catalog. I had seen the ads in Outdoor Life and Field & Stream; the pictures of the piles of over 100,000 wooden blocks that had been thrown into the air and hit without a miss or misfire were impressive. They also offered a Nylon 76 (lever-action) for ten dollars more, but I had my heart set on the Nylon 66. For an additional $4.99, Penney's threw in a 4 X 20 Tasco scope. I sent away for the package.

Granny (she wasn't called that in those days, kiddies) was not thrilled. I came home from school one day and she announced that the mailman had brought a package. (The US Post Office was once a full-service organization, delivering guns, baby chickens, and bees, but that was in the days when the US was a free country.)

I was thrilled. I took the Nylon 66 to show Andy Wineberg, we made sure it was properly sighted in, and the rifle became my constant companion on my hikes. I carried it openly, down the road, over the fields, through the woods -- everywhere. Don't try that today, kiddies, because some Nervous Nellie will call the police, you will be arrested for inciting panic, and you may join the list of domestic terrorists. Remember, this was all in the days when the US was still a free country.

The Nylon 66 had an incredible rate of fire. The 14 shot magazine could be emptied in 3-4 seconds (depending on how fast your finger was) and I was once accused of having a machine gun. There was some question (a very pertinent question) with regard to the virtue of throwing that much lead downrange so quickly, since it is almost impossible to keep a semi-auto on target in rapid fire; the twitch of the finger always throws the piece to the side a bit. We did it a couple of times just for the thrill of it, but for the most part, in practice, the rifle functioned as an auto-loading single shot. In fact, the only way to achieve semi-auto functioning was to use .22 LR cartridges (some people looked down on the 66, because there were other .22 semi-autos that would function with Longs or Shorts). I typically loaded with Longs and used the gun as a single-shot. LRs were reserved for groundhogs, and the rest of the time we were generally just plinking.

When John moved to California, he was cleaning out his barn, and the Nylon 66 was in the junk pile. When I asked him about it, he said it was broken, and that if I wanted it back, I could have it. When I got it home, Jesse and I tore it down, and, sure enough, the firing pin had been snapped.

I was going to machine a new firing pin, but doing so without a Federal Firearms License is a felony, so I ordered one instead. It came last week. The firing pin of the Nylon 66 is a flat steel stamping that slides in a groove in the bolt. It is restrained by a small crosspin through a slot. The pin had been broken at the slot. There is no side pressure on the pin, and riding in the bolt as it does, there is little reason for the pin to break. Further examination showed that attempts (unsuccessful ones, thankfully) had been made to alter the rifle to fully automatic status; there were machining marks and broken plastic on the trigger itself. This may explain the harder than normal initial trigger pull now, and I will probably be ordering a new trigger for it, and a new safety. (When we were cleaning it, we tore it all the way down, and the safety had been bent. It is functional, but has stress cracks.)

Thursday night, Jesse and I completely stripped the rifle and gave it what appeared to be its first thorough cleaning since it left my hands. We scraped and polished and oiled. Everything. I also discovered the firing pin retractor spring was missing, an apparent casualty of the amateur gunsmith; I will be ordering a replacement when I order a new trigger and safety lever.

We put it back together, and the action worked smoothly. A time-tested design, the Nylon 66 has been out of production since 1989 (although a Brazilian edition, that did not use the DuPont Zytel stock material, continued to be made and was sold in the US for a while). Jesse has a Remington 552 Viper, which briefly replaced the Nylon 66 and has a very similar bolt and hammer design, but the 66 is a classic. I'm happy as a clam in a mudhole that mine is now functional again.

Climate According to NOAA

I'm glad Big Al invented the internet. That makes it easy to find interesting facts. Maybe Al sometimes wishes that the internet would go away. NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) keeps track of the country's weather. Guess what? The facts are being stubborn; they have sort of slid in to the Global Warming Denier Camp.

Lessee, now -- some graphs of temperature trends in the US of A since 1998 (that was a good year for Al, since he was still almost the President of the United States, just a heartbeat behind Slick Willie) can be found on the NOAA website. Lessee what they show...genuine stolen government images of mean temperatures for every month, every quarter, and annually, since 1998.

JanuaryFebruaryMarchAprilMayJuneJuly
August
SeptemberOctober
November
December
WinterSpring
Summer
Fall
Annually


Anybody want to buy some carbon credits? Snake oil, anyone?

I wonder what the next ten years will look like, as we run through Sunspot Cycle 24? (If it ever gets up and gets going!!)

Makes Sense to Me (Oh Yeah)

So Junior says to me that there is a networkable HP Color Laser printer for sale at Sam's for $198 and it comes with cartridges and will print 2000 pages which is cheaper than ink for his inkjet and I go check it out and for sure he is right but the little details are the most interesting because replacement toner cartridges in black yellow cyan and magenta cost just a hair under $300 so using a little math and some common sense you would buy the printer for $200 bucks and print the 2000 pages then save $100 by throwing the old printer away and buying a new one instead of buying refills and all I have to say is I want a chance to check out the USB/ethernet interface on the printer since there is a possibility I could patch it into my Laserjet 2100M and make it run faster and oh yeah I would want the 16 meg sims out of it as well just for curiositys sake and Im glad you enjoyed this information because look at all the punctuation I saved by not using it those keys on my keyboard might last longer now

My Kind of News

Coffee Keeps Fossils Sane

Soon we will hear from Michelle, who will have invented an IV drip for just this kind of medication. We will also soon see the government require that Starbucks clerks have pharmacy degrees, and people with unlicensed coffee-makers will be jailed for having drug paraphernalia. This is part of the pan to require prescriptions for grocery shoppers; it is somewhere in the fine print of the National Health Care Plan. I think...

Oh. It's April 3rd. Sorry.

It Is No Secret...

Some people think the internet is a safe place to hang out. They forget that way back when, in the early days of the telephone, people had party lines. If somebody received a call, there was a good chance that one or more of the neighbors that shared the line would be listening in. You simply did not share the intimate details of your life over the phone.

Private lines, and privacy laws, sort of changed that. People, especially in the US of A, grew accustomed to the idea that without a court order, people other could not listen in to your phone conversation.

What people do not realize about the internet is that it is not a private place. There is a good chance that every email you have ever sent is in storage on somebody's hard drive, somewhere. Not too long ago, I retrieved a long lost blurb that I sent out when my email address was still a freenet address. Internet packets bounce from node to node, server to server, until they are delivered. At each node, there is the possibility that the mail can be read. Even encrypted mail can be read with the right cracker working on it.

There are also web crawlers -- spyware programs -- that live on the net, picking up and tracking down keywords which are then sold to advertisers who can target people that mention items in email or in blogs.

Yesterday I posted about my buying "new rechargeable batteries for the camera". My blog also references, occasionally, real estate topics. This morning my spamblocker at Earthlink caught this one :

• SpamSummarySuspectMessage


• Date="03/29/2008"


• Sender="Robert Gibbs" "rgarrison@intouchhometours.com"


• Subject="Things to consider when buying a new camera for Real Estate photos"


• UID="1jFC3F6qs3Nl34e1"

Of course, the sender name is bogus. If you do a whois :

Whois has started ...


"Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net for detailed information.

No match for "RGARRISON@INTOUCHHOMETOURS.COM".

Last update of whois database: Sat, 29 Mar 2008 15:13:38 UTC"

and a traceroute gives :

"Traceroute has started ...

traceroute: Warning: rgarrison@intouchhometours.com has multiple addresses; using 209.86.66.90 traceroute to rgarrison@intouchhometours.com (209.86.66.90), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets

1 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) 2.046 ms 0.484 ms 0.478 ms
2 * * *
3 * * *
4 * * *
5 * * *
6 * * *
7 * * *
8 * * *
9 * * *
10 * * *
11 * * *
12 * * *
13 * * *
14 * * *
15 * * *
16 * * *"
(I stopped at this point; it made no sense to keep hunting.)

It isn't really just a coincidence. I have had people from half-way around the world post comments about something that I have written. The web crawlers parsed my post, fed it into the syndicated feeds, and, behold -- someone I never met, or possibly never intended to have read my stuff, gets a copy and responds.

When people post family pictures on the internet, they are posting for the whole world to see. When they talk about family secrets, those items are then public information. If you want to tell someone something, and don't want anyone else listening in on the world wide party line, write them a letter and hand deliver it. Once they have read it, burn it and grind up the ashes. And do it where the EPA can't see you.

BTW -- I intend to turn on as many electrical devices as I can today. In your face, Earth worshippers!!

I'm Cheap

I was at Wal-Mart this morning to pick up some potting soil and oil for the ZX2 and took a look around the electronics section because I decided at the itch of a nose to buy new rechargeable batteries for the camera. Whilst there, I looked at CD labeling stuff, and also disk envelopes. I have cases for the critters, but I want to save those for stuff that really needs to be archived on a shelf, where the disks might be used from time to time. Other archive material only needs a sleeve, since it will get stuck on a shelf and forgotten unless something drastic occurs, like a need to format a drive.

It was almost $5 for a pack of 100 sleeves. I sez to myself, wait a minute, Horace, you also need to make some new Tyvek sleeves for your credit cards. Why not buy some rubber cement for $1.97 and kill two turkeys with one golf ball?

Ha! and you though I was sane?

So anyway, I designed a disk sleeve (copied the measurements from one that had an iBook install disk) and printed it out.


Then I cut it out, folded the flaps, and applied the rubber cement.


If you apply the rubber cement to both surfaces and let it dry before you press it together, it makes a permanent bond. You can rub off any excess afterwards.


And, to save you some work, you can get the .pdf pattern from:

Disk Envelope Template

and print it out. Might have to set your margins to zero, but I didn't.

I may be cheap, but I like to delude myself with thoughts of generosity!

OHIO is NOT Macintosh friendly!!

Ever since the Democrats took control of the State of Ohio after the 2006 elections, strange things began to happen on official websites. Macintosh computers using the Safari browser could no longer access government documents. I first noticed this at the Department of Commerce website last year, when I had to switch to the PC and IE 6 to get my licensing information. Then, this year, while trying to access the tax forms, I got this:

Pretty cute, isn't it? Most of the text is missing. There is no way you can fill out that form. Even opening it in Acrobat 7.0.5, which they say is required, does not allow you fill out the form on-line, since the only way it will properly open is if you download the .pdf. Then, if you fill it out, you cannot file it on-line.

If the government said that you could only drive on the highway if you used a Ford product, people would scream that their rights were being violated. This is the same kind of thing -- government saying, "Use this commercial product or else."

At first I was going to say something about Bill Gates having bought all the Ohio Democrat politicians. Then I went to Apple's website and found that other people were having the same problems, some of them on Federal websites. It turns out that Apple adheres strictly to the published web standards for browsers. Microsoft does not (that was always a problem, because years ago, way back when IE first came out, MS tried to knock Netscape out of the market by deliberately breaking the rules). The Open Source people who are responsible for Firefox simply make sure that if a site breaks the rules, the browser can use the corrupt site anyway. Apple tends to stick as closely as possible to the standards since opening any little loopholes can let nasty unwanted intruders in; Safari has fewer viruses than Firefox which has fewer viruses than IE. Apple says it is not a conspiracy; it is simply laziness on the part of website developers who learned to code with IE and never bothered to think that standards mattered.

So I think it will be a real hoot in another year or so when all of a sudden, these IE-specific websites will no longer work. Yep, you heard that correctly. It seems that Billy Gates himself has made the pronouncement that the next upgrade of IE will stick strictly to the published web standards. There will be some howls of outrage when all those non-standard websites will have to be rewritten, but the power of the marketplace, with the growing number of people switching to Safari and Firefox, is forcing MS to change the way they do business. And, as has been the MS custom, if you don't like it, they will throw you under the train. And charge you for it in the bargain.

Whew!! At Last!!

Now to finish the handrails...