Mike Kullen weblog

Eclipsing is not what I do best.

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 21:21:53 -0800

[IMAGE]I wasn't sure whether to go with the Matt O'Donnell reference or the Bonnie Tyler reference. I guess history will decide whether I made the right choice.

In any case, I've determined that I haven't yet figured out how to work all the manual controls on this camera in order to get a decent moon photo.

Tonight we had a total lunar eclipse, with the moon fully in Earth's shadow from about 5:45pm to a little after 7pm EST. From about 7:00 to about 8:00, as the sunlight was beginning to spread across the moon again, I was standing in a field under a sky of thin, fast-moving clouds, trying to snap a photo any time a gap would appear in the clouds.

This camera (Olympus C-770) is mostly a point-and-shoot, but it has 10x zoom, a decent built-in lens, and a bunch of optional manual controls (manual focus, aperture, shutter speed). I had the camera on a tripod on a park bench, and I tried to do all the manual settings that I've been reading about, but I still feel like the white light was coming out way too bright, so even on my best shot it's impossible to make out any detail other than a giant ball of light.

My ideal would be something more like this one on Wikipedia (also taken tonight), with visible dark & light areas on the surface of the moon. Perhaps that's a bit ambitious for not having an SLR camera with a fancy lens, but I'll keep trying. There's another lunar eclipse coming in August, so I have 5 months to practice on regular full moons and get my technique down. We'll see how that goes.

Trying Atom

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 13:55:07 -0800

[IMAGE]A couple of years ago I hastily threw together an RSS feed for this web site, but I kept the format very sparse so that I wouldn't run into errors (no links, no text formatting tags). I'm now in the process of updating this from loosely-defined RSS standards to the more precise Atom standard.

My old RSS feed was at http://www.salubrio.com/mike/index-rss-full.xml. My current test of the new Atom feed is at http://www.salubrio.com/mike/index-rss-full4.xml. Once I settle all the formatting issues, I'll probably move over to another new filename to reflect that it's more Atom than RSS.

But for the moment, I'd just like to ask any of the people using RSS readers (Google Reader, Bloglines, Thunderbird, etc.) to let me know if the new test file works in the reader. Does it?

Just another morning with Matt O'Donnell

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 17:28:18 -0800

[IMAGE]On the local morning news here, Matt O'Donnell is one of the anchors. His sense of humor seems to have been honed at a fraternity or an all-boys high school, always full of snarky comments and especially innuendo for the blonde traffic/weather lady, Karen Rogers. His comments are easily the most compelling reason to watch the show, always walking that line between merely inappropriate and downright obscene. It's delightful to watch.

Sometimes it's just silly stuff like this, after a report on 6-foot-tall longstem roses at Valentine's day (paraphrased from memory):

"Bet you'd like one of those roses. / 6 feet? That would eclipse me. / Eclipsing is what I do best."

My favorite so far was earlier this week (unfortunately I didn't catch it on video), when one of the transitions back from commercial showed kids building a snowman on a slushy, muddy snow day. Matt's female co-anchor Tamala Edwards (who plays straight-man to Matt's clowning) made some throwaway comment about "That's got to be the dirtiest snowman I've ever seen." Unable to resist an easy target like that, Matt had to raise the ante: "But if it were a dirty, *naughty* snowman, Karen would be all over that, right, Karen?"

If anything ever happens to Matt, I have a feeling Karen's husband would be a prime suspect.

But anyway, today we had not one but *two* examples - the first one was facilitated by a teaser for a later story about pole dancing (almost too easy), but then the later one was completely out of the blue. And Karen seemed to play along with both, in that awkward way that makes it even worse.

Priceless.

Here's the video.

(Random aside: like my previous citation of bizarre segues on the local ABC news, this one also featured footage of an abused dog - perhaps that's an omen, my signal to fire up the Tivo?)

Nerds!

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 12:11:44 -0800

[IMAGE]Last night Kathy & I went to see "Nerds://A Musical Software Satire" at the Philadelphia Theatre Company. It was awesome. We haven't laughed that hard since "Little Miss Sunshine".

It's only playing at this theater until next weekend (Feb 25), and the decent seats are not cheap, but even so, we're considering going back to see it again.

Part of the humor is a wealth of nerdy references - various computer things plus Star Wars, Star Trek, and other cultural icons - but even outside of that it's just hilarious, very energetic, and very well performed.

I don't want to spoil too much of the plot, but I do need to mention that there's a lightsaber battle onstage involving Bill Gates. If that statement alone elicits a positive reaction from you, then you'll like this show. If not, you're really missing out.

I should also mention that Kathy (who got these tickets for me as a surprise) also went the extra mile & booked us for a night when they had a "talk-back" session with the cast after the show. The actors all seem really great, and in particular Jim Poulos (playing Bill Gates) just seems like the nicest guy you'd ever meet. As we were leaving after the talk, other actors disappeared back to backstage, while Jim came out and continued chatting with audience members. When we got outside, we saw him waving down a taxi for an older woman from the audience who was having trouble getting around on the ice & snow on a cold night. Helluva guy.

If you go, you would do well to get seats downstairs, not in the balcony. We've sat in the balcony there before, and discovered that it can be a problem if your legs are more than 8 inches long. Besides, you want to be close enough to smell exactly what Steve Jobs is smoking in his scene with Woz. :)

It's called the worst news-teaser segue in recent memory.

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 12:47:50 -0800

[IMAGE]Last night Kathy happened to turn on the TV right when ABC was doing a teaser for the upcoming news broadcast. It's a 10-second segment, and I would assume they tape these things at least a few minutes in advance, and yet this apparently got through:

"I'm Rob Jennings. Coming up tonight on Action News, new developments in the Anna Nicole paternity fight, it's called the worst case of animal abuse in recent memory."

Judging by the images on screen, it would appear that these were intended to be two separate stories, but I didn't watch the newscast, so I can't say that with absolute certainty.

I'm guessing that the teleprompter left out something important in the middle, such as "[Pause. Change gears. Perhaps insert a conjunction.]"

Slice like a hammer

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 08:08:38 -0800

[IMAGE]Everything I need to know about surreal musical collisions I learned from mall food-court background music.

Last night I was at the mall, sitting by the Sbarro's, when something caught my attention in the midst of the bland jazzy ballad that was playing.

No, I must have imagined it. Sometimes one's brain can subconsciously attach patterns & meaning to something just to try to recognize it, but... Wait, there it is again.

I needed a witness. So I called Pax.

"Quick musical question for you. To the best of your knowledge, did Tony Bennett ever do a cover of the Soundgarden song 'Black Hole Sun'?"

In my experience, those words had never been strung together in the same sentence before. But if this song was really out there, then perhaps that was my fault.

As it turns out, it wasn't Tony B, but Paul Anka. It's from his album "Rock Swings", full of similarly incongruous big-band covers of modern songs. And since we live in the age of iTunes, 5 minutes after learning that, I own a copy of it.

In looking up some details about Paul Anka on Wikipedia, I happened upon a link to "The Guys Get Shirts", a surreptitiously recorded, profanity-laced tirade that Anka once leveled at his musicians after a show. It's full of great lines like "When I move, I slice like a [bleep]in' hammer." Very funny stuff.

But even beyond all that, I think my favorite part was when I started listening to the album and heard track 1, the Bon Jovi song "It's My Life". Now, with all the Bon Jovi songs out there, why not go for an earlier, more iconic one like "Livin' On A Prayer" or "You Give Love A Bad Name"? Then he got to this couplet from the original Bon Jovi lyrics:

"My heart is like an open highway / Like Frankie said, I did it my way"

Except the Paul Anka version changed that second line slightly: "Frank said, he did it my way".

The main difference is just a pronoun, and it seems pretty subtle, but it's hugely important when you realize that Frank Sinatra's signature song, "My Way", was actually written by Paul Anka. Thus, "Frank said, he [Frank] did it my [Paul's] way."

He really does slice like a hammer. Or hit like a knife. Or whatever.

Books! Bookcases!

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 17:03:48 -0800

[IMAGE]It was a long time coming. After 4 months in our new house, Kathy & I finally have books on bookcases. And there was much rejoicing.

The plan from the beginning (last fall) was to set up our 3 big bookcases on the sun porch at the front entrance of the house. Two problems: (1) the floor in that room is noticeably slanted; and (2) three of the four walls in that room had non-functional baseboard heating units, long since disconnected from the radiator system, taking up space along the wall (and providing shelter to unknown numbers of spiders). So, all we had to do was remove the baseboard heaters and level the floor, and then we could put up the bookcases.

Oh yeah, and also figure out how to attach something to a brick wall, so that the bookcase against that wall wouldn't topple over. So I guess that's 3 problems.

Bringing that plan to fruition (removing the baseboard heaters, cleaning & repainting the exposed wall paneling, caulking the gaps, installing baseboard molding, leveling the bookcases, and attaching various fixtures on wood & brick walls) took about 4 months. Most of the visible progress happened in the past 2 weeks, but the mental preparation was an important part of the process too.

Equally important was calling my sister about a dozen times, because she has more experience in these kinds of remodeling & demolition tasks.

But now we have the bookcases up, and the whole process is documented in pictures here.

Piqued

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 12:49:47 -0800

The other day, I got an email message from someone who uses Yahoo Mail. Messages sent from Yahoo always have a little footer advertising something about their services, usually in about 15-20 words. Just 15-20 words, carefully chosen by marketing people and probably reviewed by dozens of employees before going into production, so you'd think it would be easy to spell those words correctly.

The footer this time:

"Don't get soaked. Take a quick peak at the forecast with the Yahoo! Search weather shortcut."

I had a boss a while back who consistently wrote "take a peak" where he meant "peek" (or, more rarely, "peak one's curiosity"* instead of "pique"), and it always bothered me. But he couldn't afford a full-time copy editor. The folks at Yahoo have no excuse.

(*) At least the example of "peak one's curiosity" could be construed to convey the same meaning, if you take the alternate transitive verb meaning "to cause to come to a peak, point, or maximum". The "take a peak" expression is still just plain wrong, unless you actually mean that someone should steal the summit from something. And even then you'd say "from" instead of "at".

Holy responsiveness, Batman.

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 10:43:48 -0800

[IMAGE]At about 9:00am yesterday I broke a tiny piece of my Dell laptop. I knocked off the tiny plastic pin that tells the computer when the lid is closed, so that it will shut off the backlight for the screen.

I contacted Dell tech support using the online chat.

I found a web site that linked to a Dell support page, which pointed me to the Service Manual explaining how to remove that plastic panel.

The tech support guy told me he would go ahead and sent out the replacement part (that whole plastic strip with the switch buttons attached). No charge.

The package from Dell arrived this morning. From my support chat yesterday morning, they sent out the part from Houston, TX, yesterday afternoon, and it arrived here in Philly at 9:00 this morning.

Dayum.

It's now installed and working fine. Less than 24 hours in a broken state (which wasn't *tragically* broken anyway), and no cost to me.

That's some good support.

Wonder how good it will be in another couple of weeks, after I pass the 1-year warranty period... :)

New year

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 10:21:22 -0800

Yikes. Almost 3 months since that last post. Here's the quick version of what's been going on the last few months:

* August-September: We bought the house, which has been great.

* October-November: We had our niece & nephew staying with us for a while. Lots of fun, but very exhausting, and we postponed a lot of the unpacking and setup tasks at the house.

* December: As usual, mostly one big stampede from Thanksgiving (in California) to Christmas (in Florida). In the midst of all that, most of my time at work was consumed by multiple levels of SOX audits - questionnaires, audit meetings, system changes, all TOP PRIORITY, and all in service of making my reporting system *less* streamlined... oh, what fun.

* January: Starting to emerge from boxes in our house, while also gearing up for Rick & Vicki's wedding next week.

Then comes the serious unpacking. And posting many more of my photos on Flickr. And maybe a month or more of not flying anywhere. And time for our Philadelphia Renaissance, aided by our new neighbor the Railbus. All good stuff.

Someone in the club tonight has stolen my ideas.

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 11:38:25 -0700

[IMAGE]We saw this car on the highway yesterday with a scrolling LED text bar built into the license-plate frame. Apparently it's this "License Plate Flash Frame", with programmable messages for the person behind you. This one was advertising to get recruits for the PA Air National Guard, which operates at the nearby base in Willow Grove.

I guess I missed my chance to wow the world with the communication system I was talking about back in 2003 and 2004.

Science wants my* bugs

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 11:00:04 -0700

[IMAGE]Not the cave crickets from my previous post. This time it's Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs, which recently invaded our soon-to-be-former apartment. We regularly have 1 or 2 of these showing up (crawling in through a window screen that's not properly sealed), but they seem to arrive in droves around this time each year, just as the weather is beginning to get cooler. Apparently they seek out a warm place to hide out for the winter, and they give a scent signal that others follow to come to the same place. So when you have one, you'll often have many more a short time later.

Anyway, yesterday we had a full-on invasion. Kathy was working from home, and she managed to catch about 25-30 of them by the time I got home, and then I caught another 10 or so. As with the cave-cricket thing, we have a whole technique for this (originally developed for a wasp in the house, so we wouldn't have to smash it or set it loose):

1. Trap the bug in a small glass.
2. Where one would normally slide a card under the glass, we use a CD in a paper sleeve - it keeps a rigid flat shape better than cardboard.
3. Put the glass & CD in the freezer.
4. When the bug is frozen dead, dump it into a holding tank with previous catches (another glass or a tupperware container).

Normally, step 5 is to dump them in the toilet, or outside, or something like that.

But this time, Kathy was curious just what the heck was up with these crazy bugs, because we hadn't heard of other people getting infestations like this. It turns out this is a relatively new invasive species, which came over from eastern Asia less than 10 years ago, and started spreading through eastern Pennsylvania in the past few years. Biologists at Cornell and Rutgers are studying the spread of these bugs (which are a major pest for fruit & vegetable farms), and even asking for samples.

Last night I emailed the Cornell guy, Rick Hoebeke, about our catch, including individual and group photos. He wrote back that he wants them:

-------------------
Thanks for your message regarding the sighting of the Brown Marmorated Stink Bug in your home. Can you do me a big favor? Can you send a bunch of these specimens (dead in among crumpled tissues in a crush-proof box) to me for an ongoing molecular study of this invasive stink bug? We need specimens from around the NE for extracting DNA (best when bugs have been recently killed by freezing). Please also include your full address and date of collection! They can be sent to my business address under my signature (see below). Please send by First Class or FedEx.

I thank you in advance for this courtesy.

E. R. Hoebeke
-------------------

We'll be mailing those out tomorrow. My only regret is that I have but 35-40 bugs to give for my country.

* All instances of the singular possessive adjective shall be assumed to include the plural, and vice versa.

Shop Vac 1, cave crickets 0

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 16:41:31 -0700

[IMAGE]If you've never encountered a cave cricket (a.k.a. "camel cricket"), you might not know how to react when you first see one up close. You'd probably be a bit grossed out. The big ones have peanut-sized (or even cashew-sized) bodies, with lanky legs more than 2 inches long.

But if you see one in the garage of a house that you're about to buy, and then notice there's a cluster of 50-100 of them the day *after* you buy the house, and see them hopping haphazardly off the floor, walls, and ceiling (they especially like the ceiling), your required reaction is pretty obvious - What the ___ are these things, and how do I get rid of them?

Then you'd look them up on Wikipedia and find a few more references via Google, and you'd mostly learn that they love damp, dark places (e.g., our garage), and that the most effective natural predator is the equally unpleasant-looking house centipede.

If you're into poisons, you could try spraying insecticides, but a few sources say that common pesticides are only *partly* effective on these guys. If, like me, you're *not* into poisons, you'd probably be reluctant to spray stuff on the ceiling, where (A) pesticide would waft through some cracks & crevices to the main house upstairs, and (B) the poison will drip back down onto you whenever there's some condensation on the ceiling.

So how to get rid of the creepy-crawly menace? Enter the Shop Vac, my new best friend.

Vacuuming bugs is a time-honored practice, but what do you do once you've caught them in the vacuum? If they're still alive, you don't want to handle them, and if they're dead, their guts might gum up the works of the vacuum. That's where the "wet" part of "wet/dry vac" comes in handy.

1. Set up the shop vac in "wet" mode (i.e., no paper filter inside).
2. Fill the vac bucket part-way (I did about 4 inches deep) with water.
3. Put a long extension and a pointy tip on the end of the vac hose.
4. Vacuum every living (or dead) creepy-crawly thing you see.
5. Just to be sure, vacuum up some water after the bugs to make sure they've all been doused (have this pool of water ready beforehand).
6. Turn off the vacuum, open it, and dump the contents outside.
7. Rinse the vac innards with a hose as necessary.

Naturally, you should only vacuum up things that are safe to dump outside (e.g., bugs & spider webs, but not household trash, construction debris, etc). If all goes according to plan, everything you vacuumed should now be dead (either from the impact or from drowning), so you shouldn't have to worry about angry bugs taking their vengenance on you. If you're worried anyway, you can dump the contents farther from the house to prevent recidivism, but I really doubt there will be any - mine were all thoroughly dead.

I did this on Saturday, and then another round on Sunday to pick up some stragglers who hid out during the Saturday attack. I think there are still some few survivors, but compared to the infestation we had before, it's a tremendous improvement. Almost ready to let the other bug move in...

House

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 11:19:06 -0700

[IMAGE]I feel like I've been way behind on blogging, so here's the main news: Kathy & I bought a house. We had our closing in late August, and we're officially moving in next week - there was a lot to do in between.

The house is just in the next town over from our apartment, so we're still in the same area.

I'll probably be writing a lot more about the whole process, but I just wanted to get the basic facts out first.

Needs more cowbell, but otherwise cool

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 16:52:34 -0700

[IMAGE]What could be cooler than a rock band with three cellos? How about a rock band with three cellos and a song named "Trogdor"?

Meet Break of Reality.

Oh, and speaking of Trogdor, his nemesis Kerik was in the news this week too: "Kerik now a criminal" and "NY jail ditches former top cop Kerik's name".

Rhymes with "driven"

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 15:25:23 -0700

[IMAGE]I don't know quite how or when the controversy first arose, but a couple of friends & I have long been uncertain about the correct pronunciation of Jeremy Piven's last name. We knew him mostly as the sidekick in a bunch of John Cusack movies, and somehow we had only ever seen his name in print, but hadn't heard it pronounced authoritatively. The two candidates were:

1) "PIE-vin" - long "i", follows the general pattern of long vowel sound before consonant-"e"

2) "PIV-in" - short "i", rhymes with "driven", which shares the same combination of letters

Either one seemed reasonable & logical, but for whatever reason, I found myself favoring (and defending) option #1.

Well, last night Jeremy was on The Tonight Show, and they pretty well laid the issue to rest. The announcer, host Jay Leno, and Jeremy himself all said his name quite clearly as "PIV-in" (option #2). And I managed to capture it all on Tivo.

But don't take my word for it. Here's the video.

Killing a good thing?

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 11:54:06 -0700

Is it just my imagination, or did Dell just take the best laptop I've ever seen (Inspiron 700m/710m) off the market? I don't see it on their product list anymore, and it looks like they might be replacing it with the heavier, fatter, more expensive XPS M1210... :(

Florida wildlife photos

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 11:18:02 -0700

[IMAGE]A couple of weeks ago, Kathy & I took a weekend trip to visit her parents in Florida. As usual, I came back with a whole bunch of pictures, but no people in any of them. :)

Got some good pictures of some creepy-crawlies around the outside of the house - mostly a couple of lizards and some spiders. The pictures are now posted on Flickr.

A small public service

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 16:48:58 -0700

This is not a spoiler or anything, but...

If you're going to see X-Men 3 in the theater (as many of you apparently have done), please make sure you stay through the end of the closing credits. There's a bit at the end that you'll want to see.

When we went to a matinee show last Saturday (opening weekend), our group of 5 were the only people left at the end of the credits. All those poor people will now have to go pay for the movie again, or make a very convincing argument to the theater manager, just to get back in and see those extra 30 seconds.

Here's my movie review, in 10 words or less: It's a good popcorn movie. Get the big tub.

Now I'm waiting for the DVD release, and hoping it has an alternate version that digitally removes Halle Berry from all of her scenes. She's just too annoying.

How to know when you've been friends for too long

Wed, 17 May 2006 21:06:43 -0700

You & your friend went to high school together. You currently work together. You worked together at your previous company too.

You have an extensive music collection stored on your laptop hard drive. This morning your friend asks you if you have a particular David Bowie song. You say "I think so...", but then check and find that you don't have it. Hmm, you really thought you should have that one. You're determined to correct that omission.

Your company policy frowns upon doing personal downloads (especially stuff like MP3 music) on the company network. But that's OK; you have an idea.

At lunchtime, you go off on your own to pick up something at Baja Fresh, but first drive over to Panera Bread. But you don't actually go in to Panera Bread. You park outside & switch on your laptop, which has built-in wireless networking. You connect to Itunes via Panera's free WiFi network, and you buy that David Bowie song. Then you shut down the laptop, and drive over to pick up lunch & bring it back to the office.

As you eat your lunch, you burn that Itunes track to a CD-RW disc, so that you can then convert it to an MP3 file (using a rewriteable disc to avoid waste, because it's just a stepping-stone in the process).

You walk over to your friend's desk with the David Bowie MP3 file on a portable jumpdrive. You hand it to him. You say "Here's something you were looking for. You'll know which one when you see it."

He says, "Hold on, I'll copy it onto my laptop in a minute. I'm busy burning a CD right now."

"OK, but you can take a quick copy of this in the meantime. It's the David Bowie song."

"Really? Where'd you find it?"

"I parked outside Panera & downloaded it from Itunes."

"What time?"

"About 12:30. Why?"

"I was there about 12:45. That's what I'm burning on the CD right now, so that I can..."

You're scary.