July.01.2008

Yikes .... my journal website (here) is one year old this month .... who'da thunk it would last this long (what with my short attention span and all).

The New & Improved Scaler.tcl Program

am finally translating my Scaler program from VB6 to Tcl .... far from completed but it runs and the first feature is that it measures point locations (mouse click points) on an image, based on 2 user-input calibration points (shown in red .... hard to see here ) and arbitrary mouse click points (green .... also hard to see here)..... very useful for some technical applications.

next feature will be to write the data array to a file and then allow measuring and displaying distances on the image.

uh oh ..... someone in Texas is missing a tooth!
.... and it looks like Superman flew in to visit her !!

For the data junkies out there..... notice that increasing "mileage" from 10MPG to 20MPG greatly reduces actual gas consumption. But increasing "mileage" from 40MPG to 50MPG is only a slight reduction is actual gas consumption.

Above 35MPG, the only real way to reduce gas consumption is to drive less or car pool .... the numbers don't lie ! ! .

and further.....

the technology required to take the internal combustion piston engine from 10MPG to 20MPG is relatively simple. it is a harder technology leap to take the same concept engine from 20MPG to 30MPG, and it gets harder and harder each 10MPG, because the basic physical design of the engine (and therefore the basic physics) remains largely unchanged.... so tweaking out more MPG (for the same HP output) gets harder and harder.

add to that the fact (noted above) that a 10MPG improvement means less and less in terms of % fuel savings, and it's obvious that improving piston engine gas mileage beyond 35MPG is probably the least payback / highest cost action to take to reduce total gasoline consumption.

of course, we always have the option to put smaller engines in cars .... an 80HP VW beetle with 1950's technology got 35MPG and cruised at 70 MPH all day ..... but we love acceleration so we must have horsepower ..... it is not our "need for top speed" that is consuming gas in today's cars ... it's our desire that they accelerate quickly.

>-------<

you know, as the mailman said to me this week (he was explaining about hydrogen fuel cells for cars) ....

"You could figure it out, couldn't you ? ... you used to be an engineer."

..... i used to be an engineer..... i used to be an engineer....

D. Leo, P.E. (Retired)

>-------<

And.... our oil company said today the "lock-in" rate for heating oil this year is $4.65 / gallon. That should bump our 2008-2009 winter heating bill to about $3500 (paid in advance, thank you).

July.03.2008

mike gave me a good idea .... to study up on the ASL english alphabet ....

>-------<

hmmm .... my tikmark/awk page got 60 hits last month and the average time on site was 5:31... that's good.... tikmark/awk was the original reason i started a website !!

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness..... That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, ..... That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government......

To quote Milton (or maybe it was someone else) ..... "what a falling off there was." .... Look at our country today in the light of this incredible, inspired declaration of freedom, human values, compassion and independence.... God help We, the People .... our government today abuses its powers yet keeps the mass of us just complacent enough, and so splintered into special interest groups, so as not to unite and fire the sad lot of them.

When someone is impatient and says, "I haven't got all day," I always wonder, How can that be? How can you not have all day? [George Carlin]

>-------<

>-------<

a good story from somewhere ....

One evening an old man told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, `My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.`

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: `Which wolf wins?`

The old man replied ..... `The one you feed.`

from the New Yorker ....

July.07.2008

it's our 18th anniversary today.

i drove deb to work, tried to fix their printer (nope), and replaced some of the ceiling lights in the store.

her biopsy got scheduled for next monday.

i had signed up for dinner tonight with deb's parents at Peppercorn's in Worcester, but (tell me if you heard this more than say 100 times before) this morning, K called and decided (!) she and R and the girls wanted to come along and celebrate, in fact she also invited her folks since their anniversary is next week, and also she didn't like Peppercorn's so she made reservations at some other place for all of us .... and.... would that be okay with everyone.... ?

it was okay with everyone but me .....so.....

WTF .... this isn't my life anyway.

but then .... hey ! ! ..... i felt photographic, suddenly anti-social and extremely kayakish, and so i threw it on the car and paddled around Paradise Pond for a few hours, drank beer and took one good picture (i also took 10 horrible movie clips).... then ran the best image through the GIMP for some.... uh.... effetti artistici...

tonight's a million miles away.

went to pick up D at work .... UPS delivered a new HP laserjet to them (their printer had died the day before) and she asked me to install the printer on their cash-register-transaction computer.

30 minutes later, the printer was still not installed, but the computer was now cycling thru reboots that never completed (MSwinXP)and one reboot showed the blue screen of death with a horrid message regarding a faulty disk.

the help desk was some lady in ohio who didn't help.... turned out that the new printer was a coincidence / upgrade (not a replacement for the broken one) and the company was going to send someone to install it, but they didn't tell anyone and the employees thought it was a replacement that they had to install themselves since no messages came with it.

we left for dinner..... food was excellent, but as usual we sat at a long table so i heard absolutely nothing for 2 hours except what D leaned over and repeated to me.

R paid for the whole thing, so that improved my outlook about the evening.

July.08.2008

it's hot as texas out there today, and humid.

mowed the lawn early, shipped D off to work, then puttered with a program mike wanted that would measure his hiking distances off a map, so i modified the Scaler program to do that.... he is debugging it as the first user.

July.09.2008

Sharon asked if we could rescue 2 fish (6" , 5 years old) and i said yes and here they are, and the 4 new little fish i bought yesterday haven't been seen since !!

(click image for the movie)

.....and, furthermore....

For no good reason, I was thinking about Osama Bin Laden, and how he provoked the US into tearing itself apart, with a single attack-and-withdraw manuever (9.11.2001). He now resides in Pakistan (our good buddies over there "live and let live"), plotting his next attack (he quietly planned the WTC attack for 10 years).

On the other hand, our government has not sat still.... true to its history, it perceived that anything less than a violent response would show weakness, so the President let Bin Laden sit tight in Pakistan while he (Bush) duped us into attacking Iraq as an easy target, to show us that he grew up to be a real kick-ass cowboy.

Bushes perception of the world can't be argued with, simply because it is so out of reality that (as they say in science) "this is so out of whack, it's not even wrong".

Bush's world is win-loose, black-white, left-right, conservative-liberal, republican-democrat, weak-strong .... there are only 2 dimensions (2D) to it. And, as we know well in science, trying to solve a complex set of equations using only two dimensions is an impossible waste of time and effort. Nonetheless, people like Bush see the world, not as a complex set of issues, but as a simple 2D win-loose system. And as such, their actions can only be one of 2 dimensions, and of course cannot really be a solution to anything within a complex, global system of nations.

Getting back to Bin Laden.... it certainly looks like he knew what our reaction would be, and what he should do himself, after attacking the WTC. He would simply lie low for another 10 years, and the US government would wreak havoc upon the world and it's own stupid people by attacking something violently, failing, and blaming everyone but itself.

Bin Laden is like a boxer who throws a left jab and then watches the other guy punch himself to death in confusion and stupidity.

Nice job, folks ..... remember how the Ramseys were treated ??
the real killer is still out there somewhere.

BOULDER, Colo. (Reuters) - New DNA tests have definitively cleared the parents of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey of her unsolved murder almost 12 years ago, prosecutors said on Wednesday.

In a statement seeking to silence suspicions surrounding relatives of the slain 6-year-old, prosecutors said new testing techniques on male DNA found on JonBenet's clothes did not match any family members.

"This new scientific evidence convinces us that it is appropriate ... to state that we do not consider your immediate family, including you, your wife Patsy, and your son Burke, to be under any suspicion in the commission of this crime," Boulder County District Attorney Mary Lacy said in a letter to JonBenet's father, John Ramsey.

July.10.1984

From the news, my comments in green....

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008, passed by Congress on Wednesday [July.09.2008] and signed by President Bush today, not only legalizes the secret warrantless surveillance program the president [illegally] approved in late 2001, it gives the government new spying powers, including the power to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans' international communications [your web browsing, e-mail and internet messages!].

The new law permits the government to conduct intrusive surveillance without ever telling a court who it intends to spy on, what phone lines and email addresses it intends to monitor, where its surveillance targets are located, why it's conducting the surveillance or whether it suspects any party to the communication of wrongdoing.

[When I was a kid, we thought George Orwell's book 1984 was a ridiculous fantasy about the future of America, with Big Brother watching your every activity ..... and yet, the pathetic, God-awful truth is that most Americans today have no idea what this means to them..... we are such a sorry lot of fools.]

[McCain abstained from voting (coward .... I was not going to vote for him anyway) and Obama voted for this amendment (coward.... I will not vote for him in November).]

[Osama Bin Laden laughed his lungs out in the American Sheraton hotel he's staying at in Pakistan, as we Americans sacrifice the US Constitution hoping to prevent his next attack.
As I said before, Bin Laden threw us a jab and is now watching as we punch ourselves to death in Iraq and at home.]

AND.... my first movie for UTOOB....

(if it doesn't show up after 30 seconds.... right mouse click and run it in your movie player...)

I don't get it ....
...waiting in the rain to buy a telephone ....?

We know there are people lined up all over the world for the iPhone 3G -- so if you're among the intrepid souls out there waiting to get yours, send in your photos (and stories) for our international launch lineblog. Just hit us up at iphone@engadget.com.

10:32AM ET: Indeed, depending on what employee you talk to, in-store activation via iTunes is either "slow" or "down" -- but either way, they're handing you the phone unactivated, which needs to be completed by connecting to iTunes from the comfort of your home. Beware: if you're upgrading, your old SIM will be immediately bricked, so you'll be phoneless until you complete the activation!

10:21AM ET: We're hearing that Apple's activation servers are having intermittent problems, with lines coming to halt at both Apple and AT&T stores, and that some carrier stores worldwide are sending people home because they can't activate phones. Stranger still, some people are being told that they can "activate at home using iTunes." We're getting more info as fast as we can, we'll let you know.

9:42AM CT: Things are wild in Chicago as well -- at least 500 strong at the Apple flagship on Michigan Avenue, 100 at the AT&T flagship on State, and at least 200 at the AT&T store on Chicago. Austin and Andy here started waiting at 3PM yesterday, through some major rain -- that's nerd dedication.

Calcifications are tiny flecks of calcium - like grains of salt - in the soft tissue of the breast that can sometimes indicate the presence of an early breast cancer. Calcifications usually can't be felt, but they appear on a mammogram. Depending on how they're clustered and their shape, size, and number, your doctor may want to do further tests. Big calcifications - "macrocalcifications" - are usually not associated with cancer. Groups of small calcifications huddled together, called "clusters of microcalcifications," are associated with extra breast cell activity. Most of the time this is non-cancerous extra cell growth, but sometimes clusters of microcalcifications can occur in areas of early cancer.

July.17.2008 update

Deb's fine ... got the call today.

July.15.2008

From the Christian Science Monitor...

Expectations that the current US economic downturn will be shallow are diminishing.

A severe recession in the United States still isn't the mainstream forecast, but economists say it's a real possibility, especially as problems at American banks deepen amid a continuing shakeout of the housing crisis.

What makes forecasts challenging these days is that the economy's problems involve the linkage of many moving parts. Crucially, a healthy banking system is vital to the economy, and now an economic slowdown and a plunge in bank stocks have raised the prospect of more bank failures and the need for federal intervention.

The rising uncertainty and risk were visible Tuesday, from auto manufacturing to the value of the dollar. General Motors canceled dividends for shareholders, something it hasn't done since 1922. The dollar fell to a new low against the euro. Stocks fell worldwide.

Most electricity in the USA is generated by coal, natural gas and nuclear .... not fuel oil.... that's good I guess.

"BallPark Grillmaster Franks are robust, flavorful hot dogs that are big enough to handle whatever toppings you put on 'em. They come in 4 great varieties specially formulated to conquer your hunger."

They provide VitaminC and iron. Eating only 16 hot dogs a day, you will get 100% of your daily iron requirement. And as a bonus you will also get 704% of all the saturated fats you need, 496% of your sodium needs. But best of all, of the 4000 calories (!) you would have eaten, 3040 of those will be saturated fat calories.

.... I only have 15 hot dogs to finish by midnight.

July.16.2008

If I were the devil (um, Devil), and I wished to do evil on Earth, and to possess human souls, I'd create religions that worship God. Much evil this would do, and would confound God's great inventions of humans and souls.

These religions (the Devil ponders) would divide people with fear, hate and intolerance, and thus make chaos in God's world. Their scriptures would be cryptic and have origins lost in antiquity and be open to much interpretation; but it would be clear in all scriptures that "non-believers" are god-damnable and worthy of much hate and violence.

I, the Devil, am thinking that, in the long course of Earth's history, this hatred of other religions and their people, ironically, would be rooted in the peoples' love of their (various) gods (humans having lost sight of the real God somewhere along the way). Sort of rubbing salt in God's wounds from all of this.

Yes, the work of the Devil on Earth is best hidden behind a name for God. Pick a name .... any name.... God, Jehovah, Allah...whatever.

As the Devil, pondering my options of evil, I would imagine that a bonus of these religions is that people could hate and kill (or have their armies to do so) and not hold themselves personally responsible .... it's their religious duty ! .... God demands it!.... or so they could tell themselves.

Yes, I think, as the Devil, I would create religions in God's name.

July.18.2008

made a neat little widget to push-start my famous Tcl scripts

after that i wandered around cyberspace to mentally calibrate the quality of my journal pages (here) to what else is posted out there .... the first page that i stumbled into, this person showed images of 15 different ways to tie your sneakers.

the way i tie mine is not shown there.... so.... there are at least 16 ways to tie your sneakers.

and, since today is the first anniversary of my journal pages here, i decided to post a self-portrait, straining trying to look as handsome as i can.

Got Wood?

$460 will buy you either 100 gallons of home heating oil or 2 cords of seasoned (looks like one year to me) wood... in this case, i opted for the wood.
later this week we will also pre-pay $3500 for next winter's oil .... up from $1800 last year..... that's a chunk of money there.

I am paying $4.60/gal next winter for home heating oil. according to the DOF spreadsheet, i could pay as much as $612/cord for firewood and break even.
i don't think this accounts for fireplace efficiency, but it is still dramatic that wood burning is now better than oil heat.
pellet burning (see Mike) is even better ..... if you look at the other data in the spreadsheet (which is hidden in the original as downloaded), burning pellets is nearly twice as efficient as burning wood!

New Panasonic LX3

• zooms to 24mm / f2.0 (my dream lens !)
• hot shoe!
• lens attachment ring for filters
• $500

In full battle dress... with options

Lorem Ipsum

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum."

And that's all I'm saying about it.

..... well, not quite all I'm saying ....

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged.

but... is it really random? ....

Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..", comes from a line in section 1.10.32.

We hit 1197Kwhr / month, which is equivalent to leaving a 1666Watt device running 24 hours / day all the time....

the numbers are... 1197 kWh = $189.95
OR...
$ / month = watts * 24 * 30 * .159 / 1000

example: our living rrom TV draws 3.6 Amps, that's 3.6 * 120V = 432 Watts.
leave it on 8 hours / day and thats....
$(TV power) = 432 * 8 * 30 *.159 / 1000 = $16.49 / month

the bedroom TV uses only 2.4A = 288Watts. that's on probably 12 hours /day which coincidentally comes to about the same cost.....
$(TV power) = 288 * 12 * 30 *.159 / 1000 = $16.49 / month

a desktop computer uses up 175watts (typical) and my 19" LCD monitor is rated at 42W (full brightness).... that gets me to 217Watts = $24.84 if i leave it on all the time.

and Deb's computer also .... even if they only pull 150W each ( not including the monitors) each that's 300 * 24 * 30 * .159 / 1000 = $34.34 / month !!

that really suprises me .... definitely am going to shutdown when not in use from now on.

July.25.2008

(note the wrong date on my notes... today's the 25th)

... and, furthermore....

As the world (well, at least me + 3 people) well knows, I believe that the US Constitution is inspired of God and has a deep compassion and passion for human well-being. But it occured to me today that it (It) was written by people who were running our government at the time.

Think about that.

The people running the USA wrote the US Constitution.

What Happened ? Look at the sad lot that's in Washington today and ask yourself .... if given blank sheets of paper, could (would) this pathetic lot of fools write the US Constitution ?

We, the People deserve all the doom that befalls us ... we elected bad people to lead us, we don't care enough to run them the hell out of office, and we will be stupid enough to elect another sad lot .... we are doomed and we deserve it ... the revolution is too long overdo.... it's too late to revolt.... we are simply, like stupid cattle, doomed and that's all there is to say.

GrandMa Leo's Meatballs

back in.... ummm... 1953 - 54 the best food on Earth was Grandma Leo's meatballs and Grandma Fazio's riceballs.

i am still pondering how to make riceballs... the concept is easy, but (as we say in engineering) there's death in the details.

but i am making progress on meatballs (as cooked by Dad's mom and eaten by me on Sunday mornings before they ever made it into the sauce pot).

Captain's Log / Supplemental: i just tasted my meatballs and they utterly suck .... Grandma Leo's reputation remains unchallenged.

OS's on ROM Chips

ASUS is coming out with a linux "netbook" that turns on instantly.... no wait whatsoever to start the operating system, it's on right now. As mike pointed out, we should have been thinking this way 30 years ago, and i wondered why we didn't, but i figured out why we didn't, and then i figured out how we can.

today's computers "boot" the OS into RAM ("memory") one step at a time when the computer is turned on .... this takes lots of time and it's getting longer as OS's are getting larger (another topic). ASUS is going to simply burn (i think that's the term) linux permanently onto a chip that is on instantly when the ON button is pushed. this is called a ROM chip and it's cheap and simple to make, and is the basis for all "hardwired" devices like pocket games, cell phones, microwave ovens, gizmos.

historically we did not do this for a simple reason .... once the OS is permanently burned onto the chip, you can't change it ! ... you can't install new enhancements, new subroutine libraries, new service packs, new security fixes. the computing universe does not want to be locked in like this, so we booted the OS into RAM (read-write, eraseable, random access memory) at every startup.

well, hell, 90% of all we do is web surf and send e-mail, says ASUS, and who needs an evolving, dynamic OS to do that ? AND .... in the future, if you want the hot new OS, buy it on a chip and swap chips (slip it in the side like an SD card). for these personal "netbooks" that's just PERFECT, i want one now.

Actual watt-meter readings

This is stuff I tend to leave on all the time, and shouldn't...

July.29.2008

# Electric Heat vs Oil Heat (Updated Calc) #

• Current electric cost = .159 $ / kW-hr
• Current oil cost = $4.65 / gal
• Oil generates 115,000 BTU / gal ( net, including .83 efficiency factor)
• House requires 25,000 BTU / hr in winter
• Conversion factor: [BTU / hr] / 3412 = kW

Cost of Oil: 25000. * 4.65 / (115000.) = $1.01/ hr

Cost of Electric Heat: [25000. / 3412.] * .159 = $1.16 / hr

Is that coffee ready yet ?

Q: what's wrong with this picture ?

A: The LCD screen is blank when there should be a picture showing.

Q: Now what?

A: Wait for Leica to reply.

On the Phone with Mike

postscript: my mom would drive me crazy with conversations much like this one.... she knew how to fix all the woes that fell upon me.... she would drive me crazy .... now it's my turn to drive my kids crazy..... i love it !

July.31.2008

trying hard to stay away from the news sites ... all i get is wound up and revolutionary... gotta dial it back a bit.

yesterday i helped john do some volunteer gardening up at the nursing home ... maybe 3 hours work.... would have taken me 2 days but john is a groundskeeper and zips through gardening like no-one else i know. he has a machete (sp?) for splitting plants and jees does he split them and slices the roots and they're in the ground *now*.... while i am pondering which saw to use to cut that tree root that's in my way..... but we did okay.

today i raked and tidy'd the front yard, pulled many weeds out of the hosta patch and layered on preen weed killer and 10-10-10 fertilizer and peat moss on top.

am very upset and stupid feeling about the leica ... it was always a dream to own a leica and i bought it when the cash was flowing in wildly, but now that it's not working in retrospect it was a childish, indulgent purchase.... still waiting for leica service response.

Water on Mars.... from NASA website today

TUCSON, Ariz. -- Laboratory tests aboard NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander's robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies vapors produced by the heating of samples.

"We have water," said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. "We've seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted."

The Names of 4000 Dead US Soldiers