furiousBlog

leaving early today

nospam@example.com (ben) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:45:12 -0400

Every so often I get in a particular mood:

July 30, 2009

[REDACTED], [REDACTED], The Distinguished Gentlemen of the [REDACTED] Mailing List
US Naval Research Laboratory
4555 Overlook Ave., SW
Washington, DC 20375

To whom it may concern:

I'm planning to leave around 3 today.

I guess that is all.

It just seemed like I needed to write some more since I
included a salutation in the email. Maybe I should take it
out and then remove all of this extraneous text. Or maybe I
should go all the way to the other extreme and include
addresses & dates for a true formal letter like I learned in
high school business class.

It's been a long time since I've done a true formal letter
format, so I guess I'll go that way. I should probably
update the conversational, string-of-thought style of the
text as well. I guess I won't go that far, though. Take
that, high school!

Well, I guess I'll go ahead and update the salutation. It
used to say 'Hello All.' On a side note, does anyone else
loathe putting punctuation marks inside of quotes? I really
think that "'Hello All'." would look much better. Stupid
english! Also, please note that I have left the requisite
four lines after my 'Complimentary Close'. See? Doesn't that
look better? On another side note, I didn't know what to
call the 'Complimentary Close', so I did some Googling and
found a page on formal business letter formats.

Sincerely,

Benjamin N Rasmussen
Linux Admin of No Note
US Naval Research Laboratory
4555 Overlook Ave., SW
Washington, DC 20375

Also, you can't tell here on the blog, but there were appropriate margins in the email.

Project: halving the deck

nospam@example.com (ben) — Sat, 09 May 2009 01:37:49 -0400

Fact: We have a deck. Opinion: It's a good deck.

Fact: We have a back yard. Opinion: It's not so good.

Opinions, presented as facts in a pro/con list:

Con: The deck is too big.
Con: We don't use most of the deck.
Pro: The deck railing blocks our view of our not so good back yard. (this one actually is a fact)
Con: The deck railing blocks our view of our myriad bird feeders. (this one, too)
Con: The deck feels like it is blocking us off from our backyard.

Computer generated result: reduce size of deck by 50% and remove back railing. This will make the deck flow into the back yard. This will make the back yard more inviting to humans. This will provide enough wood to build another, free-standing, non-close-in-ing deck just over there.This will provide plenty of room for sitting on deck and watching squirrels eat bird food. It will also continue to provide a location for the grill. It will also more or less approximate heaven on earth.

Factual Photos:

The deck from that one corner. Frame to hold upside-down tomatoes is lying in the foreground.

On the deck looking 'over there'

Unknown to the computer, we have already begun demolition of the deck. Since this picture was taken, it has rained almost continually, so no further work has been completed. Fact: the thing under the pretty blue tarp is my brother-in-law's massive roto-tiller.

Mysterious

nospam@example.com (ben) — Thu, 07 May 2009 13:38:03 -0400

Mysterious, originally uploaded by photophilde.

I used to do an occasional blog series about photo-blogs that I liked. That, as with most of my actual blogging, died a quick, yet painful death. When I started getting into flickr, I thought that I'd continue the same idea, but featuring flickr users. That didn't happen either.

Maybe this post will be the beginning of a long-running, oft-updated series of blog posts. Maybe...but I wouldn't hold your breath.

Anyway, I saw the above photo today and thought I'd share it with you. He's got some other great macro stuff in his 'plants & things' set, so definitely click through and check it out.

No Holds Barred Pinewood Derby Car

nospam@example.com (ben) — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:40:09 -0400

I recently took part in a 'No Holds Barred Pinewood Derby' at my church. I had elaborate plans for a car that would use some sort of spring-loaded arm to knock the other car off of the track, but in the end I went with a simpler design. Actually, I forgot when it was going to be and rushed to just get something done. Luckily, almost everyone else was in the same boat.

As you can see, my car is the block of wood from the kit with a brick gorilla-glued to the top. I named it 'fast,' but also toyed with the idea of 'heavy' or 'rough.'

Side view showing off the fancy design work.

You know it's fast because the eye is watering.

I was doing pretty well, but then I decided to lubricate the wheels with a little oil that someone had brought. Some of it seeped onto the nails/axles which caused them to slip under the weight of the brick. By the end of each run, the wheels looked like this:

The wheels are supposed to be vertical...

I ran it one more time after the derby was over and one of the wheels came completely out causing a pretty horrific (for a pinewood derby) crash.

In the end, I was beat by the car with the monkey wrench duct-taped to the top and the car with the wind-up accelerator. I did win the following prestigious award, however:

I blew out the competition in this category.

Toadtopia: toad houses at the furiousCompound

nospam@example.com (ben) — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 08:24:20 -0400

So, I may have recently taken complete leave of my senses. I've posted here on the blog and over on Twitter/Facebook (my tweets are also my FB statuses) about several tree-hugging hippie projects that I have undertaken or intend to undertake, including a rain-water capturing system, a gray water reclamation project and turning my backyard hill into a meadow. The meadow is actually in progress--I've planted wildflowers and clover on the hill, but, annoyingly, nothing is growing so far. The clover apparently needs an inoculent that provides bacteria that it needs to grow or something. I read some reports online where people just threw the clover seed down and the clover did great. I'm going to get some inoculent and some more seed and give it another shot.

Anyway, the project that may signal the parting of me and my senses is my toad house project. Toads provide many benefits to the area they live in. Ok, they provide one main benefit, but it's a good one: they eat bugs. One toad can eat 100 mosquitoes a night and thousands of slugs and other harmful (and I assume, some non-harmful) bugs a year. Obviously, my main motivation is the mosquitoes.

It is very easy to attract toads to your yard. Mainly, they just need a nice cool place to call home and some water.

There are a ton of places online that will sell nice toad houses that look nice and are appropriate for placing amongst your flowers or other places where they'll be seen. My toad houses were going to be out of view under my deck, so they didn't need to be particularly fetching. I have a lot of spare bricks that used to be a border at the front of our house. So, I decided to use those to form several toad houses. Basically all I did was lay two bricks parallel to each other about 2 1/2 inches apart and then more bricks across the gap as a roof. Then, to make it extra homey, I piled dirt over the whole thing.

I made two toad compounds (Toadtopia East and Toadtopia West) on opposite sides of the deck. Each compound has three homes and a water fixture. For Toadtopia West, the water fixture is an old cake pan with some rocks in it. Toadtopia East's fixture is a little bigger. It's a garbage can lid, also with some rocks in it. Both the garbage lid and the cake pan are dug into the ground.

Now, I just needed to sit back and wait for the toads. Waiting sounded terrible, so I imported some toads from the pond at my sister's house. Don't worry, they're only a few minutes away and have the same kind of toads that live near me. We went over there yesterday and my niece Jennifer had caught ten toads for me. They were in a big metal wash basin and it was absolutely X-rated. There were four couples locked in what appeared to be a love-death-grip. They had produced (and were continuing to produce) a ton of toad eggs.

By the time the toad houses were ready, most of the couples had separated. I took a few of the toads one-by-one and put them near the entrances to Toadtopia West. Two of them claimed houses almost immediately while one hopped up on top. I put another one near there, but I didn't see if it went in the third house or just hopped away.

The second picture above shows the whole of Toadtopia West, including the cake pan pond. The third house opens to the right making it hard to see.

By this point, there were two couple still attached. So, I took the other two singles and placed them near Toadtopia East. They both claimed houses right away. Since the couples were in water, I decided to put them in the trash can lid pond with the water and eggs from the wash basin. They both sat there for a minute or two and then climbed out. One couple hopped away under the deck (well the bottom one hopped, the top one just hung on), but I grabbed the other couple and put them right at the entrance to the last house. They eventually climbed in and turned to look out (the third image below is toad-pornographic and may not be safe for work).

Elise and my Inauguration Day adventure -- part 2

nospam@example.com (ben) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 13:57:22 -0500

At the end of part 1, Elise and I had made it into the silver section and were working our way up to get as close as we could. If you look at the map of the ticketed areas you can see that Third Street bisects the silver section. There was a fence on Third Street with only two openings to allow people to move up closer to the Capitol building's reflecting pool. They were doing the same thing that Metro had been doing: stopping everyone until the previous group had filtered into the crowd on the other side. Again, I have to wonder why a bottleneck on the west side of Third Street is better than a bottleneck on the east side. Luckily, it was only about a 10 or 15 minute wait to get across.

Once across, we started making our way to the reflecting pool. Our goal for the day was to be right up against the pool so that Elise would have an unobstructed view without me having to put her up on my shoulders. About 50 feet from the reflecting pool, there was two lines of plastic fencing. The section immediately in front of the pool was apparently reserved for handicapped people. The problem was that there was huge area cordoned off, but only about 20 people in wheelchairs. It was way too tempting for the huge crowd behind the fences.

About 5 minutes after we got too the first fence, someone a few feet from us knocked a section down and, very much like a broken dam, those of use close to the break flowed through to the next fence. Some people we had flowed in front of weren't very happy and their vocal displeasure caught the attention of a police officer who basically said "What do you want me to do?" So, they asked if they could move up, too. He shrugged and walked off. That was the end of the first fence. Within a minute or so, it came down along its entire length and the crowd was up to the second fence.

We were talking with a few people about how the second fence wasn't going to survive either. Everyone agreed that by 11, we'd be at the reflecting pool. This was around 9:30 or so. The fence was just plastic fencing zip-tied to posts. I demonstrated that a swift kick was all that was required to break the zip-tie. It didn't take until 11; about 10 minutes later the second fence was down and the crowd had advanced to the reflecting pool.

Elise and I tried to move towards the center, but only made it a little ways, so we ended up at the edge of the reflecting pool, but a little to the right. That put some trees right in our line-of-sight, but we could sort-of see the podium and could easily see the two jumbo-trons on either side of the Capitol.

We hung out there for a good while. A crowd of silver ticket holders made a break down the right side of the reflecting pool, towards the blue ticket area, but the cops were on the ball and shut that down quick. Most of them just stayed on the right side of the pool for the rest of the day.

At this point, we mainly just waited and chatted with the people around us. We met people from New Orleans, South Chicago, and a mom & daughter (if I remember correctly) from Alaska. Yesterday, I was reading this blog entry. The picture in that blog entry shows the exact spot where we were standing and the daughter of the Alaska mom/daughter duo we talked with. I helped he lady at the front with the poofy white hat with directions to the Inaugural Store and Ben's Chili Bowl. I think she was a Chicago-ite. For a little bit of foreshadowing, the police taped section near the trees across the reflecting pool will come into our story shortly.

As we were standing there, we saw a pretty steady stream of people moving down the left side of the reflecting pool. A police officer said he thought they were the purple ticket holders who had been held up for so long. They weren't; a lot of the purple ticket holders never actually made it to the inauguration due to some technical problems, I think.

We watched this stream of people and the girl from New Orleans said she and her aunt were going to go try to get closer. They were going to wave if they made it. I watched through the binoculars for 10 minutes or so, but never saw them wave. But, as I watched, it sure looked like people were just walking up from behind the relfecting pool, so Elise and I, after a few minutes of indecision because we didn't want to end up with a worse view than we had already, decided to go for it. We told the people we were with that we would wave our red blanket on the other side of the pool if we made it.

It turns out that the cops on the left side were not quite so on-the-ball as the cops on the right. They had basically just given up on keeping the silver people out, so a steady stream continued in, filling up what I assume was the purple ticket section as well as the monument on the opposite side of the pool. People had climbed up on all of the shorter statues that were part of the monument.

When we got over there, we walked towards that section near the trees I referenced before, waving our blanket when were lined up with our previous location. When we left our spots at the back of the pool it wasn't taped off yet, but it was when we made it across. So, we started walking to the front of the monument and saw a mostly empty spot on the other side of the bushes you can see at the top left of that photo. So, we cut through the bushes and came up to a fence on the sidewalk of First Street keeping us in the grass. There was a guy about 5 feet to our left and a cop about 5 feet further to his left. As soon as we got there, the guy hopped over the fence with no reaction from the cop to his left or the several cops in the street. So, I grabbed Elise and put her on the other side, handed her our stuff and hopped the fence myself.

So, this is how we came to our final location on the west side of First Street, far beyond our goal or even our assigned section. We had a perfect line-of-sight to the podium. The picture to the right shows our view. Click on it to see it larger on flickr. With our binoculars we could see peoples' faces. It was a great spot--way better than we could've hoped for.

At this point, it was about 11:15 and they had already announced Congress and the Supreme Court's entrances. It was still a little while until Obama's entrance and we spent the time munching some of our food and talking the family from Vermont next to us. While waiting, a guy in the grass behind us started climbing a tree and was promptly removed by the police. They checked his ticket, which was silver and I assume they just sent him back to the silver section. But, maybe he's at Guantanamo.

When they announced Obama's entrance, the place went crazy. A couple million people in one place all cheering at once sure can kick up a noise. I'm a little tingly now remembering the excitement of that moment. The only thing louder and more exciting was the moment after he took the oath.

I only have a couple things to say about the Inauguration itself, except that I was a little embarrassed by the booing. There was a good amount of booing for any republican, but it was really loud for Bush. I mean, I disagree with almost everything he did and feel he was a terrible president, but what good does booing him and his family do? It was just tacky. Everyone I've spoken to who watched it on TV said that they didn't hear the booing and when I watched it on CSPAN later, you could tell that they had turned off the audience mics when he came out, so you could only hear the crowd near the podium who were much more polite.

On a more positive note, I thought Obama's speech was excellent and got a little misty at this part, as this is a belief near and dear to my heart (heck, I'm getting a little misty just reading it again):

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. [...] Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.
[...]
Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

After the speech, Elise and I started making our way home. We assumed it would be even harder to get home since everyone would be leaving at the same time instead of over a period of hours like in the morning. It was crazy in the streets on the way back to the metro station, but once there we only stood in line for 20 minutes or so before our turn to walk down the escalators. We caught the second yellow line train and were back in Springfield by 3 and back home by 3:45.

All-in-all, it was a great day. Elise and I had a great time and were able to have a great daddy-daughter adventure together. We're very lucky to have been able to go and witness this historic event.

Here are few more pictures of us & the capitol we took:

We saw this one as we were leaving. Quite a few people apparently decided getting on top of the porto-potties would give them a better view:

Elise and my Inauguration Day adventure -- part 1

nospam@example.com (ben) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 10:28:11 -0500

Note: I was going to just post one big entry, but I timed out of my blog software and lost a chunk that I had written. So, I'm just posting what I didn't lost as part one. Part two should be later today. --ben

On Monday, January 19th, we lucked into a pair of inauguration tickets. Elise was a contestant in an annual Martin Luther King day oratorical contest. She had won at the school level, but didn't win at the regional level. On MLK day, there was a HUGE ceremony where she represented her school and we got to hear the six finalists (3 middle schoolers & 3 from high school) give their speeches. A the ceremony, they recognized a few local dignitaries including our recently-elected congressman, Gerry Connelly, who got up and spoke for a few minutes. When he was done, he walked over to the president of the event, chatted for a moment, and then came back to the microphone. He said "There are 30 contestants in this contest, so I am giving 30 tickets to tomorrow's inauguration." Of course, the place went wild, but I was wondering if he meant 30 pairs of tickets. One ticket wouldn't do Elise much good, as we wouldn't send our 11-year-old up to DC alone, of course. When she got the ticket at the end of the ceremony, it was indeed a single ticket for a single person. So, it was a nice gesture, but not too useful.

After the ceremony, we took Elise to a celebratory lunch at Chili's. She wanted to go to Olive Garden, because they have chocolate mints, but we convinced her that the food at Chili's was better, so she agreed to go there. While sitting at the table, Elise says "look, there's the guy!" We turned and lo and behold, there was Gerry Connelly leaving Chili's. So, I jump up and run outside after him. I explained to him that Elise was a contestant at the oratorical contest, that she was so grateful for the ticket and would love to go but couldn't without a parent and asked him if he had any more tickets. He said he may have one more in the car. We walked over to his car and he gave me his last ticket.

We obviously couldn't believe it. I mean, there were no tickets to be had, so it was completely lucky that we even got one, but then to run in to him at Chili's and get another?!?! It was crazy. We were pretty giddy all through lunch. After lunch, we headed home and started planning for the next day.

On Tuesday, we were up by 4 a.m. and out the door by 4:30. Just past Newington, we hit traffic that was backing up for the Springfield Metro station. It turns out that we should've skipped the Springfield station and driven up to the Van Dorn station, which was almost empty. I assumed that all of Metro would be crazy, so we stuck it out at Springfield. We ended up parking at Springfield mall and walking about a mile to the metro; even walking a mile, we still beat the people we were driving next to by 20 or 30 minutes. We were hoping to be on the train by 5, but it was 6:30 before we took our seats in the bizarely empty last car (the middle cars were packed, but no one walked to the back except us & one other lady). We switched from the blue line to the yellow line at the National Airport stop and took the yellow in to L'enfant Plaza where we got off.

L'enfant metro was insane. They were regulating the flow of people leaving the station, stopping them at the gates to let the previous group get up the escalators. I'm not sure why a bottleneck at the gates was better than a bottleneck at the escalators, though. Here are a couple photos I found on flickr showing the L'enfant madness: Photo 1, Photo 2, Photo 3. Photo 3 shows the exit we used and you can see that people are stopped at the gates. This was the worst part of the day for us. It took an hour of being squished to get out of the station.

Here's a pdf showing the various ticketed sections:doc-2009-map.pdf I'll refer to this going forward.

Once outside, though, everything pretty smoothly. We walked in the general direction of the gate for silver ticket holders which was on 3rd and Independence, right next to the Native Americans Museum. As we got to the Air and Space Museum we were pointed at the line for silver ticket holders which stretched back several more blocks. It moved quickly, though and by 9 or so, we got to and through the security checkpoint. We started making our way forward to get as close as possible.

Obama Memorabilia

nospam@example.com (ben) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 09:05:31 -0500

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you've already seen these. I'm really just posting because I feel bad for neglecting furiousBlog and this is a quick & easy post.

I found these two fantastic pieces of Obama memorabilia in rapid succession today.

First up, the Obama Paper Plate:

Yours for only $10 (plus $2 shipping & handling) at ObamaPaperPlate.com!

Next up, the Obama Bar:

The Audacity of Soap! Genius. Available from MyObamaBar.com.

Some Random Family Videos

nospam@example.com (ben) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 10:51:20 -0500

For my birthday this year, Cyndi gave me a Flip Video Camera. It's a little larger than the size of a cell phone, a couple gigs of internal storage (an hour's worth), and a flip-out usb connector so you can plug it straight into a computer. It's brain-dead simple to use. Its simplicity & small size make it ideal for actually using, as opposed to a 'real', more expensive camera that would have a good chance of sitting on the shelf most of the time.

I've had it since July, but only got around to doing anything with the videos the other day. I setup a YouTube account and uploaded a bunch of vids there. The vids are mainly just family stuff around the house, and feature a lot of the kids (both in front and behind the camera--be prepared for some motion sicknes when they're running the camera). They also feature a fair amount of me being impatient with the kids.

Annoyingly, someone had already taken the username furiousben, so on YouTube, I'm just furiousblog. You can see all the vids or subscribe via RSS on my channel:

furiousblog's youtube channel

Here are a couple of the vids:

Kids at Washington Monument:

Lori, After Crying

The last Obama rally before the election was held in Manassas, which is just about 20 minutes from our house. We went with the two older kids and my Dad:

The kids jumping in one of the five or six piles of leaves we raked on Tuesday:

Pumpkins & Netflix

nospam@example.com (ben) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 08:16:18 -0500

Most of you have probably already seen these since Cyndi posted them up on Facebook, but I figured I'd post here, too. Here are the two pumpkins I carved for Halloween:

I didn't cut all the way through, scraping out the design instead. They took forever, but I was pretty pleased with the results. I started with McCain, because I knew there would be a learning curve . I thought McCain was a little too dark, so I removed the skin from the shadowy part. It didn't actually lighten him up at all, and just made him look messed up in the light:

On a different note, I checked my Netflix suggestions today and had this:

My guess is that 'A Walk to Beautiful' is a eco-documentary about a historical bio pic that finds comedy in the mundane.

Ignore the exit polls

nospam@example.com (ben) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:45:21 -0500

The excellent poll analysis site FiveThirtyEight gives 10 reasons to ignore the exit polls tonight.

Ten Reasons Why You Should Ignore Exit Polls

These include the fact that exit polls have a larger margin of error than regular polls, they tend to overstate the Democrats' share of the vote, and they miss early and late voters. But my favorite reason is #10:

10. You'll know the actual results soon enough anyway. Have patience, my friends, and consider yourselves lucky: in France, it is illegal to conduct a poll of any kind within 48 hours of the election. But exit polls are really more trouble than they're worth, at least as a predictive tool. An independent panel created by CNN in the wake of the Florida disaster in 2000 recommended that the network completely ignore exit polls when calling particular states. I suggest that you do the same.

Presidential Pumpkins

nospam@example.com (ben) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 11:10:16 -0400

I love carving pumpkins. In the past, I've used templates that I found online to create Edward Scissorhands, aliens, etc. This year, I'm definitely going weirder:

President-o-lanterns

I'm thinking one pumpkin for each party, featuring both Pres. & VP candidates.

Die, lawn, die! Oh, wait. You're already dead.

nospam@example.com (ben) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:32:00 -0400

Over the past several months, I've become somewhat of a treehugging hippie (I know some of you think I already was, but I've taken it to a new level). I've started composting in massive quantities and started gardening. I also have a lot of plans for rain barrels, a gray water reclamation system and a homemade solar hot water heater amongst other things.

One of the things that I've been giving a lot of thought to is my lawn. Lawns are a pain in the butt to maintain, require unholy amounts of water, collectively generate more pollution from fertilizer runoff than farms and are completely unnatural.

For a month or two now, I've had a tab open in Firefox to this great article in the New Yorker:

Turf Wars

It talks about how we ended up with the absurd and unsustainable idea that everyone needed to have a patch of land covered with the exact same type of grass. It also discusses what we had before and a lot of the problems with lawns. I highly recommend reading it.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my lawn. I have a hill in my back yard that I planted grass on to keep it from eroding, but now it's mostly dead. For the bigger part of it, which is a little ways off from the house, I'm going to plant a 'meadow mix' of seed that will grow a mix of wildflowers and other plants. This will control the erosion, but will also require less water and maintenance, and will look good.

I've got big plans for the other half of the back yard, too, but they're a lot more involved and so will take a lot more time and effort (and money...) to pull off.

It's the front yard that's the real problem. Currently, it's just grass with some mulched areas next to the house. I've basically decided that I won't water the lawn, so it's not very nice right now. I'm not sure what I'm going to do there, but whatever it is, it will involve the elimination of most of the grass and replacing it with some sort of drought-tolerant, low-maintenance landscaping.

Olympic Crash

nospam@example.com (ben) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:27:18 -0400

This is amusing:

Full article:
CTRL+ALT+DEL: software malfunction at the opening ceremony (via Slashdot)

The first line of the article is priceless:

Turns out that Bill Gates was not the only famous Microsoft identity to be spotted at the Olympic opening ceremony.

Too fat to die?

nospam@example.com (ben) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 08:50:40 -0400

I've been reading a lot about the death penalty recently. I came across this (morbidly) humorous little article:

Ohio: Too Fat for the Death Penalty?

A death row inmate scheduled for execution says he is too fat to be put to death, arguing that executioners would have trouble finding his veins and that his weight could diminish the effectiveness of one of the lethal injection drugs. Lawyers for the inmate, Richard Wade Cooey II, claim in a federal lawsuit that Mr. Cooey, who weighs 267 pounds, had poor veins when he faced execution five years ago and that the problem has been worsened by weight gain. The lawsuit, filed Friday in federal court, also says that prison officials have had difficulty drawing blood from Mr. Cooey for medical procedures. Mr. Cooey, 41, was sentenced to die for raping and killing two young women in 1986. His execution is scheduled for Oct. 14.

If this works, expect to see the death row currency switch from smokes to sloppy joes.