Make Something Up

A week ago I visited a friend and snapped this picture. (I tried to get a couple pictures of her chickens, but they weren’t suffering me to get close enough for the camera I had on hand.) The blossom itself was a very vibrant purple, nearly magenta color. Unfortunately, that seems to be about the most difficult color for a digital camera to register properly; as a result the original photograph is almost painful to look at.

Originally published at Safety Fork. You can comment here or there.

Lately my brain seems to be putting thoughts to the tune of hymns, at least where the first line is similar enough to be fungible. Two examples (the tunes will be obvious):

1. A few weeks ago I drove a couple hundred miles to visit my brother where he is a church youth director. Having seen the church’s recent addition of a ground-level fellowship hall, I wondered to what use was the old basement put. Hence:

   The church basement foundation is made of cement blocks
   Its footings rest upon deep, immovable bedrocks
   Without, the fertile topsoil by gentle rains renewed
   Within, the parishioners partake of potluck food

2. And tonight, after having dinner with friends in downtown Minneapolis, I enjoyed driving home into the sunset and twilight (one of my favorite times to drive):

   You were there when I learned the gears to shift
   You were there when I learned the clutch to lift
   Oh, sometimes it caused the car to sputter, shudder, and stall
   You were there when I learned the gears to shift

Originally published at Safety Fork. You can comment here or there.

I took advantage of two sunny days in after a week of unseasonably chill and snowy weather to engage in a little automotive therapy. The Miata I bought last September has been in the garage since November. I had been holding out for a warm day, but with three more days of snow in the forecast, I wasn’t sure when would be my next good—or even mediocre—opportunity.

Aside, I am annoyed by the malfunction of people who leave public facilities in worse condition for their use. For the second time inside a month I have used the air hose at the local gas station I frequent (they are one of the few local places that have diesel for my New Beetle). A lot of stations these days seem to have weak, ill-maintained, coin-operated compressors, but this one has a real, shop-pressure hose, gratis. Nevertheless, previous customers have left the hose a tangled mess every time I have needed to use it. Surely a minute of time is not too much to ask in return for a useful service provided as a courtesy.

Driving the Miata—’though still in need of a name—was as fun as I recalled through the mental fog of a cold Winter. Now I just need either a 50F day or an extra measure of thermal fortitude so I can put the top down.

Originally published at Safety Fork. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at Safety Fork. You can comment here or there.

I have spent most of the day scanning old photographs for Kansas Lake Lutheran Church, who are closing this year. Among them were pastors going back to 1871, including the Rev. P.J. Eckman, circa 1900, who looks awesome:

And now I’m thinking that if I am survived a century or more by a photograph, I want it to be one where I, too look like I might crush you with rhetoric.

Originally published at Safety Fork. You can comment here or there.

My New Beetle is named Rudolf, in honor of his inventor. A few people have been surprised because they conclude therefore that I think of my car as male. I do not; cars are genderless.

Cars have no need for gender; they are asexual parasites of the human social organism. Like a virus, cars trick their hosts not only into making copies, but also into mutating the basic form for greater strength, speed, and desirability within the host. Thus, cars ensure that they will be individually long-enduring, wide-spread, and numerous.

Originally published at Safety Fork. You can comment here or there.

In the past, driving a new car has been a fun occasion. A new car responds differently to the accelerator, the brake. It has different gearing, different steering. Its mechanical sounds are new. But over time, I become accustomed to all of the nuances and cease to notice them.

Regularly driving two cars seems to negate that effect. I think it is a matter of contrast. The differences are enough that after driving a Miata for a few days, going back to my Beetle feels like getting a new car. I can’t just rely on motor memory to operate the car for me; I have to be conscious of the controls and what I want the car to do, and that makes driving—which I usually enjoy anyway—more fun.

I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about owning more than one car, but I think it’ll work out just fine.

Originally published at Safety Fork. You can comment here or there.

For the last two months, I’ve been walking to work three or four days a week. Every such day, four or five drivers make right turns in front of me, without stopping, not only after their signals are red, but also after my walk signal is lit.

I’m particularly incensed by such behavior because the signals in Eden Prairie are noticeably hostile to pedestrians. Of the six streets I cross in a typical day, one has a broken button (and so never changes its pedestrian signal), three always make me wait until the beginning of the next cycle (I’m made to wait even if I’m so tardy as to press the button while the cross-street light is yellow), and two will signal for walking only if the parallel street will have a green signal for at least another thirty seconds—about three times longer than it takes me to cross.

So I’d appreciate it if drivers would have the courtesy to yield. I’m considering two remedies (for my irritation, at least):

1. Note the license plates of all the offensive drivers, and list them on the internet. No utility, really, other than catharsis.
2. Carry one of those really annoying air horns.

Originally published at Safety Fork. You can comment here or there.

It’s after ten o’clock at night and I still hear a continuous hum of traffic and machinery from my open window. It’s not yet even air-conditioner season. I miss silence.

Changing a light bulb should not make one’s fingertips sore.

Changing a light bulb should not take two hours.

One of my car’s low-beam headlights failed last Thursday while I was on vacation. We were still in Tennessee at the time, and since we were only going to be driving during the day—and since I didn’t know how to change the bulb—I decided to let it be until I got home. The other low-beam lamp failed Saturday night at seven, just as I was nearing home, just as night was falling.

I had fun telling people at Easter that I had to be home before dark.

After work this afternoon I bought a pair of new bulbs. The passenger side took about fifteen minutes to change, and that long only because I had to figure out how it’s done.

To change a headlight on a New Beetle, one must:

1. Open the hood,
2. On the appropriate side of the engine compartment, locate the small plastic locking lever on the headlight assembly, free its catch and lift it upward,
3. Wiggle and slide the headlight assembly out the front of the fender,
4. Release two catches to remove the back cover of the assembly,
5. Unplug a wire from the back of the old bulb,
6. Release a clip that holds the bulb in place,
7. Slide the old bulb out, and
8. Reverse the process to install the new lamp.

On the driver’s side, the process is complicated because the lever is mostly hidden behind part of the battery cover which, although I lack documentation to back up this assertion, apparently cannot be removed without taking out the battery itself. Making matters worse, the lever on the driver’s side of my car was sticky and after an hour of trying to get it to re-lock, I had to walk to Home Depot down the street and buy silicone lubricant spray to loosen the mechanism.

I’m not convinced the lubricant helped, but after another hour of trying different ways to get more leverage from my thumbs, I got it back in place. I pity the fool who will have to change that lamp next time—especially since he will almost certainly be me.

This parody from Rifftrax cracks me up. I think it is, sad as it may seem, the most practical campaign promise I’ve ever heard.

I’ve started reading McCullough’s biography of John Adams. Many things seem applicable to more than one George.

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

—John Adams, 1772

I saw Juno with a few friends tonight; I liked it. After we had left the theater, it was pointed out that every character spoke a witty line at some point. I hadn’t noticed. I replied that those of us who appreciate good wit secretly believe that everyone is witty. Or at least, that’s true of me.

From Ars Technica:

Balancing national security with the public’s fundamental right to know what the government is doing in its name is a difficult challenge, but no challenge should necessitate abdication of essential checks and balances.

Ryan Paul (the author of the article) is wrong. Balancing national security with the public’s right to know what the government is doing is easy. There is no legitimate business of the republic that cannot be conducted in full view of the public. For example, if the FBI needs to use quiet, possibly questionable methods so as not to spook a suspect before he can be arrested, fine. But once he’s arrested, all the methods and all the reasons for their use must be published. It’s the only way we can ensure that positions of personal power are also positions of personal responsibility. If actions made in the people’s name can be kept secret at will, then “national security” is just a clever euphemism for job security.

I took my brother out for breakfast this morning. The parking lot is shaded, so when we got back to my car, we had to wait for the insides of the windows to defrost. After a few minutes, I wished aloud that the window would finish defrosting at eye level.

John replied, “You need to not be so high.”

I eat lunch at work each day, and sometimes that lunch includes french fries. I like to eat my french fries with ketchup. Normally, I get my ketchup from a pump dispenser. Sometimes, however, the pump dispenser is empty—or worse, the ketchup it dispenses is runny. (At first I thought they were watering the ketchup when they ran low, but then I found out the dispenser takes sealed bags of ketchup. Why is there such a quality variation between one sealed bag of ketchup and the next, presumably from the same supplier?) When one of these conditions is true, I grab a handful of ketchup packets instead.

I need a handful of ketchup packets to substitute for two or three pumps from the dispenser because the packets are so small. Obviously someone at Heinz, having decided that customers wanted a less-messy way to grab a handful of ketchup, had to decide at what volume to quantize it. But why is an individual ketchup so small? Ketchup is not so expensive that I (or anyone else of whom I can think) shepherd it by the milliliter. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever asked for or been given quantized ketchup by any measurement more precise than the aforementioned handful. I certainly have never eaten a meal for which I wanted more than zero ketchup, but fewer than three.

So is there a market I’m missing for small amounts of ketchup? A ketchup underground? I’m baffled because increasing the size of one packet by even fifty percent would reduce the number of packets by a third, which would lower packaging overhead for producers (but not the price; I’m paying for the ketchup, not the little plastic envelopes), and be less annoying for me since I’d be able to spend less time opening my food and more time enjoying it.

I mailed a package today. It was fun; I should mail things more often.

Their smallest box, eight inches on a side, was about twice as tall as I needed, so I took out the tiny knife I keep on my keychain, hacked the box in half, and taped it back together. I’ve done this a couple of times before, but I still get a nagging feeling that I’m about to be told off by the staff for chopping up the merchandise before I’ve paid for it. If I just gave up and walked, they’d be five or six dollars short—they can hardly expect someone else to buy half a cardboard box and a partly-used roll of tape.

But the guy at the counter complimented my ingenuity, once he figured out why I was trying to pay for a box he didn’t recognize as something they sell, and he gave me a break: since I was sending priority mail, I could apparently have used their tape for free.

Originally published at Safety Fork. You can comment here or there.

Minneapolis Institute of Arts I’d traveled about a whole block of my drive home tonight when I pulled over to take this picture. This is the kind of shot I never got in college, when I hardly ever carried my camera because I couldn’t have afforded a replacement if I’d broken it—faulty logic.

Originally published at Safety Fork. You can comment here or there.

I started playing Bioshock yesterday. The computer I keep mostly for games meets only the minimum requirements. There aren’t half as many new games I want to play as there were six years ago, so upgrading isn’t as much a value proposition as it used to be for me.

I was surprised to find a prominent (above the title) “Only on XBox 360 and Windows” logo on the game box. I sympathize with the decision to limit the target platform—it’s strongly favored by the technical and economic realities of commercial software—but I don’t understand bragging about it. We’ve made the same decision where I work, and while I believe it’s a sound business decision, it’s certainly not a feature. In fact, every time I make an engineering decision that will force users of the software I write to fulfill a precondition, I feel vaguely embarrassed.

I hope they’re getting kickbacks or something from Microsoft for badging their packaging, because it’s otherwise a waste of ink. Even the least intelligent, most impulsive consumer I can imagine isn’t going to change his mind and buy a game because he finds out it won’t run on a computer he doesn’t own.