Safety Fork, the

Two things happened today that give me a pleased/saddened duality of feeling that reminded me of Determan & Surdo in this picture:

I’m saddened because when I went out to my car at 7:24 A.M. I found, instead of the usual dew, a respectable coat of frost on the windshield of my car. I’ve felt the cool breezes and seen the changing foliage, but naturally-occuring frozen water is a more depressing sign of encroaching winter.

Almost two weeks ago, I bought The Blues Brothers. Including tonight, I’ve watched it pretty much every other day. The best word I can think of to describe it is wholesome. Somehow this musical with car chases exudes optimism that I can’t resist. I sit here watching it, smiling. It makes me happy.

Someone asked in the OSX Development community on LiveJournal about how to replicate the sort of translucent bezel window used by the volume/brightness adjustments. After a little bit of thought, I was intrigued enough to try to replicate it on my own:

It turns out not to be difficult at all. There’s a lot to be said about programming for a graphics environment that wasn’t originally designed for the computers of the ’80s. I was going to write up something of a tutorial, but I’ve fallen into my usual pattern: now that I’ve solved the interesting bits, I’m not much motivated to do anything else. So if you want to see how it’s done, I’ve posted my XCode project. If you’re familiar with Cocoa, it should be pretty obvious what’s going on. Feel free to base your own code on it; I only ask that you send me a copy of your software if you use it verbatim in a commercial product.

After I got back from the Renaissance Festival, I took a short nap, realized I had nothing around I wanted for dinner, and ordered a pizza. While I waited—about an hour; it was a busy night at Papa John’s, I guess—I started to feel genuinely sick.

It seemed odd that I would feel sick. I mean, the Renaissance Festival certainly wasn’t any more physically strenuous—probably less—for me than working at the State Fair earlier this month. Why should I feel worse? I thought about my symptoms (headache, short temper with inanimate objects, dizziness, queasy stomach) and asked myself, Self, what have you eaten today?

Oh, about seven cheese curds and a pickle.

Really, I had a good time looking around at capes and excellent top hats (from the purchase of both of which my sense of fiscal responsibility saved me), trying mead, and watching my friends fencing. But somehow, maybe confused by the anachronism, I was failed by my usually impeccable sense of lunch.

Note to self: in future, remember to eat.

I had long wondered what—if the solution for re-entry was to remove them—was the purpose of the now-famous space shuttle gap fillers. Now I know.

Charles H. Campbell, brother of an MTS employee and a NASA subsystem engineer working on orbiter entry heating, gave a lunch talk at work today. It was technically interesting—mostly he talked about the procedures they have for solving engineering problems, since they often only have hours to make a judgement between when a question arises and when a decision on whether the orbiter can land is needed.

It was also personally interesting. It was obvious that he was personally pained by the destruction of Columbia. I didn’t get too upset when it happened—I am certain that astronauts knowingly take certain risks—but I sympathized with him because the failure was of something to which he was personally attached, even though he was certainly not individually responsible.

The gap-fillers’ actual purpose is to protect the tiles at launch-time, when there are all kinds of vibrations and sonic events (his description) that put up to 15 G of vibration back and forth on the tiles. The gap fillers keep the tiles from chattering against each other and chipping, which it turns out doesn’t happen and so is not terribly important at re-entry.

This is probably the smartest bit of computer security thinking I’ve read. In a nutshell, it proposes that instead of trying to monitor for events that are known to be bad, one specifically ignore things that are known to be harmless. It doesn’t guarantee that one will never be bothered by something uninteresting, but it does ensure that nothing that is interesting will be thrown away.

For some reason, I like dams. I think they appeal to my modernist tendencies.

On my way home from Labor Day festivities in Wisconsin, I stopped at dusk to take a picture of Mississippi Lock and Dam No. 5:

I was at the Minnesota State Fair yesterday. For the third year in a row, I volunteered to help run MTS’s booth in the Wonders of Technology exhibit hall. This year we brought out our tabletop earthquake simulator and enticed children of all ages to try to build towers of K’nex to withstand recorded earthquakes. Of course, since they have to take the building apart anyway, those structures that survive are subjected to the demonic “sine wave mode,” which can destroy practically anything. If plate tectonics ever figures out trig functions, we will all die.

I was going to take some pictures of the fair—I wanted to seek out and photograph everything being offered on a stick—but about the time I finished my shift at the booth, the rain began. My camera stayed in its bag, because it does not get wet. On the other hand, the rain was gentle in the early afternoon, so I enjoyed strolling down the avenues of the fair while all of the other fairgoers crowded under awnings as though they might melt (the people rather than the awnings, of course; I’m sure that the average fairgoer has the sense to stay away from melting awnings, even in the rain).

When my grandfather moved out of his house (years ago; I was in high school at the time), his children and grandchildren inherited most of the things he didn’t have space for in his apartment. I didn’t take much—I didn’t want much—as my memories tend to be of events and activities rather than things.

Somehow, I did get the one really good memento I wanted: an old Snoopy music box. It’s obviously old; it’s made of metal. I’m told it was one of my dad’s toys. The edges are worn and the crank squesks. Poor Snoopy doesn’t even have ears anymore, but he still pops up when it plays.

I take it down off the shelf from time to time to give it a turn. It’s a lot of memories, mostly of my grandparents basement. It’s the “No Peace” painted on the wall, it’s the telegraph-insulator plant hangars, it’s playing with the plastic bowling set. It’s drawing a ten-foot-long picture of hospitals, houses, cars, and churches with my cousin…and my brother adding in the attack helicopter. It’s Lincoln Logs and Bridge-It and baking sugar cookies and playing croquet in the back yard. And every time I play it I smile.

I wanted to be sorry for the people of New Orleans. I mean, they’re not the morons in Florida who build a new house in the same spot every three years and complain because no private company will give them hurricane insurance. I don’t remember the last time the city was in the news for anything worse than Mardi Gras rowdiness.

But the breaking news story on the BBC website when I opened it this morning was that rescue helicopters are grounded because people were shooting at them. With guns. I dug deeper and the news coming out of that area is all about looting and violence. Then I remembered that I knew beforehand—from my geography 101 class—that New Orleans is below sea level. The professor did his usual doom, doom, doom act—”It’s going to happen, we just don’t know when.” And if I, who live in Minnesota, am taught that in an introductory geography class, surely the people actually living there were aware of this small detail. When you choose to ignore the risk—and then behave like a bunch of hooligans—I’m afraid you’ll have to forgive the veneer of my compassion for being thin.

The second question that struck me was, where is the National Guard? I usually hear about how they’re all over this sort of situation, helping move people and supplies, keeping the peace. I can’t imagine that any state would refuse to send their Guard units to help. Except, I recall now, we sent them away. Yes, we sent our national guard to another country. So that they are not here, in our nation, when we have an emergency. Which, it seems to me, is the purpose of having a National Guard in the first place. We are all very stupid, and I am angry at us.

Yes, I am being unfair. People who are quietly suffering without making trouble aren’t making the news, so I just don’t have anything to say about them.