Bleeding Buggery Bastard

Rotted hardwood sill
Now walls must fall in the search
For carpenter ants.

The True Cost of Acquisition

I used to be a database administrator, and a fairly good one if I do say so myself¹.

For years I did the job the hard way, then a short foray into the heady bleeding edge of the dawning client-server world in a small but growing company in Greenbelt Maryland (which is in Washington DC in the same way as Kingston upon Thames is in London) introduced me to a product called ERWin Desktop Edition². It was a wonderful little tool that allowed me to array a database design as a diagram, and as I was doing it the software was sorting out the foreign keys ³ and letting me concentrate on the design itself.

It was an amazing piece of kit. I could (if I wanted) bind the various data fields in my database to Visual Basic controls so designers would be locked into my vision of how to manipulate the fields and not get creative, as they are wont to do. It came in two flavours: Visual Basic and PowerBuilder, the two most widely-used developer languages for the newly-emerging GUI-centric business world of Windows 95 and Windows NT⁴. Both flavours were made by Logicworks and I praised their product loud and widely because it was An Goode Thinge.

And it was cheap to own at $250.

It couldn't last of course. Computer Associates bought the company out and first order of business was to pull the Desktop Edition version of the software off the shelves leaving only the much higher cost Enterprise Edition. In time they reissued the product with many new features, but they never relaunched the Desktop Edition, and the entry price was around $4000 for the versions they did sell.

I recently had cause to need the product (my copy of the Desktop Edition will not run on Windows 7, sadly, coming as it does from the Windows 95 era) so I went to CA's website to scope out the latest situation vis-a-vis ERWin. There was a free Community Edition! Kudos to CA! I downloaded it and it was useful though it never delivered what it said it could on the box when it came to translating the designs into an actual database - the real point of such software is database administration on a day to day basis, not just the initial design, and to do that the tool needs to actually build the databases and read the design back. It was, however, only licensed for three months after which I would need to download it all over again.

And so it came to pass.

As I was looking at the site I noticed that there was a "Developer Edition" available. Now that sounded promising! I was a developer, sort of. Surely it would be a reasonably priced product - not $250 but perhaps not more than $450 and that might be thinkable.

Four thousand, seven hundred and some piffling number tens in small change. So, we must assume some pretty affluent developers associate in the Computer Associates, er, association. I find it difficult to see how a burgeoning market in pirated software isn't simply falling apart with these bargain basement prices making cracking the software not worth the effort.

And he best part is that experience shows that in about five years the software won't work with the operating system or the database software any more, which is where I came in.

1. And I do↑
2. It came in a variety of larger scale editions too↑
3. Which in this case are what the "links" between tables consist of which are the nuts and bolts of any database based on tables and a big part of the reason for going to the trouble of making a database in the first place↑
4. I'll not get involved in the continuing argument as to whether anyone should have gotten involved with these languages in the first place, the fact was they allowed rapid development of good-looking apps and in the hands of those who knew what they were doing both VB and PB were awesome↑

Anatomy of an Uckfup

Tax return deadline day dawned to the happy sound of my phone melting itself reporting a slew of incoming texts.

My boss has an important personal axe a-grinding, one that will mean a week of meetings, and he made it clear that I was to be at all of them and on time at all costs. Naturally he began by scheduling all these meetings far too early for me to get there, the realities of the Bloody Long Island Rail Road not being an area with which he has troubled his steel-trap mind (despite repeated explanations), and just as naturally I negotiated for a return to planet Earth, time-wise.

So, having made of myself a high-profile target when it came to prompt arrival at today's meeting, and having actually filed my taxes before today's deadline so as to clear the day of distractions, it was obvious what these text messages would be: the Bloody Long Island Rail Road crowing that service was badly disrupted on my line¹ and it wasn't their fault².

I greeted the day with some appropriate low-wattage Words of Power and leapt from my bed.

A sad mistake.

For the previous Wednesday evening I had injured my back quite severely by foolishly bending over the sink to expel the rinse water from my mouth after some ill-starred dental hygiene. I dunno what is wrong, and neither does Doc Rubberglove's partner³. I'm okay(ish) lying down, and I'm okay(ish) standing up, but the transition between the two states has broken glass in our house as I explain to the neighbours that my spine is doing unto me stuff that there are laws against even if you do pay for it and sign Mistress Alexa's release forms.

So once again the neighbours were woken by my manly falsetto shrieks, entreaties to anyone near to render aid and/or a merciful death etc. I imagine it was very inspiring if you didn't happen to possess the back in question.

Eventually I was up, showered, dressed (won't make that "save time by dressing in the car" mistake again) and on the road heading for Babylon, since the gist of the one hundred and twenty three messages I had received in the preceding half hour was "no trains at all on the Ronkonkoma branch line". Imagine my joy and that of my fellow Wyandanch-to-Babylon Grand Prix racers to be dueling for possession of the road with that most insidious of commute-ruiners, that most intolerable menace to the peace of mind of drivers anywhere, that cow-pat in the field of urban transit infrastructure: school busses.

Talk about lollygaggers. Every two seconds on went the red flashing lights and out pops the "STOP" sign that by state law has both directions of frothing, delay-maddened drivers screaming, biting the steering wheel and other stuff too horrible to mention, as dawdling kids got on the bus, sometimes got off again and therefore having to be forcibly enbussed, not to mention the impromptu parent-driver conferences, all the while the sure knowledge passing through everyone's mind that the three parking spaces at Babylon station not allocated to permit-only parking were singing their sluttish siren song to all passers-by.

Eventually the pack roared under the railway bridge in a crescendo of screaming internal combustive oomph, sped through the chicane between the pub and the florist and began The Hunt ForThe Last Parking Space.

It was long-gone.

And so began the ever-widening hunt for somewhere, anywhere, to dump the fabulous Steviemobile so I could try and arrive at work this side of September.

The problem, which may not be apparent to non-commuters, is that at Babylon the car parks are scattered around in a maze of small roads, packed in amongst residential housing. There are signs on many of them that explain that the reason this particular car-park has room in it is that each space belongs to someone who pays for a numbered permit, someone who it just so happens doesn't actually need their space right now, but they might so you can't have it and if you try you're car will be towed. The signs in question are small, often only readable after one has already begun entering the car park.

I drove in increasing spirals, occasionally encountering pedestrians who decided to liven up the process by walking into a crosswalk just as I was about to cross it, and then dawdling, pausing to admire the scenery and so forth. One guy decided he didn't like the way I had brought my vehicle to a stop and paused mid-crossing to explain the ascendancy order of traffic to me. Ha! When he caught sight of my livid visage through the windshield he almost fell over in his haste to finish crossing.

I eventually found a space in a small car park about half a mile away from the station which allowed non-permit-holding scum to park in certain spots provided they paid in a machine like the one I had so enjoyed using only last week. Not only that, I was in good time for a train to Jamaica with a connection to Atlantic Terminal. All was going to be well, it seemed.

Or not.

A sudden second sense warned me that the crowd of people milling about, shaking their fists and acting in a very disgruntled manner was a sign of possible further trouble, and it proved to be the case. None of the pay-for-parking machines was functional.

A "security guard" was paroling and we eventually managed to get him to stop and radio through the situation, after he had warned everyone several times of the $75 dollar fine for non-payment. It took forever to get this paragon of public service to understand that it wasn't that we were refusing to pay for parking, but that the car park authority was refusing to allow us to do so.

More people showed up and were warned about fines for non-payment. The mood was getting seriously ugly before a team of technicians arrived to fix the machines. I have rarely seen someone so intent on starting an unnecessary riot than the old guy in that securitymobile.

The technicians got to work, and one loud would-be parker told a gang of about half a dozen to "just go" and he would sort out the parking fees once the machines were fixed. Then the techs decided the machines would not get fixed in a timely manner and began taking parking space numbers on a pad, explaining that fines for these spaces would be waived⁴

As I write I have made my usual 9:08 am connection, so I can hope the commute horseshirt is over for the nonce.

Although there is still the subway portion to be experienced.

1. Which is becoming a twice-weekly affair for some reason which in any other enterprise would demand a draconian program of firings, demotions and reprimands to fumigate from the schedule↑
2. If it is their fault, you hear nothing other than the standard "The Train due to arrive at ridiculously-long-list-of-stations-with-now-pointless-times is being delayed"↑
3. The Doc himself was AWOL on Thursday when I begged for an appointment with someone who could command a pharmacist to sell me prescription pain killers by the handful↑
4. I fully expect to discover tonight that these men had no authority to do that and I have therefore paid $75 for parking↑

Wash Day at Chateau Stevie

People of unspecified gender who seek to do laundry¹!

Do you find yourselves trying, but failing, to achieve that blue-whiteness so prized by "Tide" spokespersons? Perhaps you yearn to sport a delightful 60s-era tie-dye wardrobe, yet own ordinary boring clothes?

Simply add one (1) disposable fountain pen (blue) to the wash and Hey Presto! Instant new wardrobe!

I was wondering where it had got to.

1. Histrionic slogan writing was so much easier in the days when you could still say "Housewives!"↑

Another Day in the Life Pathetic

The day started so well

I got up early so I could get one of the two straight-through, no-change-at-Jamaica-not-the-good-one trains that run from Wyandanch to Atlantic Terminal, the Jewel in the Crown of Brooklyn. Arriving in good time to find the car park really quite empty I realized that Good Friday had fallen on the start of Passover so my train would also be mostly empty! Yazoo!

Once on the platform I was, of course, introduced to the real reason for the lack of commuters: once again the trains had been "delayed due to a police action west of Wyandanch". Again I had to listen to the idiot in some booth announce the times that the "delayed" train would be arriving in stations over 25 miles and at least 30 minutes away on a line that would offer these poor devils quite a few alternative trains, assuming they were dimwitted enough to be standing on those platforms at this hour waiting for that train, a circumstance so unlikely as to be functionally impossible. One again the LIRR failed singularly to explain what the real issue was.

But after twenty minutes of "train delay due to police activity" messages and one presumably inadvertent mention of an unauthorized person on the tracks, I could guess.

Five minutes or so after that my guess was proved right - someone had been hit by a train and naturally the train service was now suspended indefinitely while the poor buggers in the squad cars tried to find the parts.

See, a human being is, for the purposes of collisions with fast-moving trains, rather like a kitchen bin liner half full of tomatoes and topped off with water, then sealed. On contact with the train hydrostatic forces tear apart the body and the various bits you learned about in school get thrown all over the scenery. Personally, I think that if the LIRR allowed people to see the results of this they'd find themselves less popular as a venue for drunks or suicides. Morons can't be stopped but you just know that bursting open has to hurt a lot.

My angst at this point may not be clear to the reader, so I will state up front that I do not hold the LIRR to blame for the loss of service due to idiots on the track. I hold them to blame for knowing about the situation and not telling me in a timely manner so I can make other commuting plans, like getting across the island to Babylon rail station before all the parking spaces, in short supply but long demand even on a good day, are taken. These fbleepwits knew they would be cancelling the service so why not just bloody well say so and do us all a favor?

So I set off with everyone else in convoy to Babylon to see if I could somehow park my car and arrive at work this side of Monday (it was already clear I would not be early, now the challenge was to see if I could avoid being very late). Luckily I had the good fortune to get stuck behind a car transporting two 8x4 sheets of plywood on the roof (and therefore doing 28 mph the entire way) which was also behind an Optimum Cable TV truck driven by someone paid by the hour and deciding to make the most of it. But I did get a space, one of three left in the car park.

Paying for the space was more problematical.

I a moment of brilliance I had departed work with two dollars to my name, which I had spent on coffee in Wyandanch station under the illusion I would soon be sipping it as the miles sped by. The car park has numbered spaces that you pay for at a machine to which, presumably, the traffic cop in charge has some sort of wireless connection. One simply pays and departs on one's journey.

First stop was at the Bank of America ATM, where I got two rather moth-eaten $20 bills and was charged $2 for the privilege. Bank of America, you may remember, were one of those organizations that demonstrated they had no idea how to run a bank about two years ago. Not satisfied with billions of tax dollars, some of which were from what I laughingly refer to as my pay packet, they have the nerve to assess a two buck service charge for an automatic transaction that actually saves them money.

It occurs to me that one of the terms of the "Bailouts for Bonuses" deal so skillfully negotiated by the Powers That Be might usefully have been that having funded them out of penury we would not be charged these fees for, say, ever. I digress.

So, I now had my money, albeit in rather unusable for for the purposes at hand, buying ten hours of parking at a quarter an hour. Fortunately the LIRR provides a change machine, one proudly labelled with a sign saying that it now can recognize a bill in any of four different orientations. I inserted one of my twenties.

The machine spat it back out as unrecognized.

Sighing and mentally consigning the person who suggested the sign to one of the less amusing circles of hell I reoriented the bill and tried again. And then once again, which proved to be the charm. I looked down at the small cup into which the coins would be delivered and thought "I suppose it will do five dollars worth and give me the rest in bills. I hope it doesn't give me any of those dollar coins though."

I was worrying needlessly. I looked on in horror as twenty dollars worth of quarters, a total of eighty coins in all, were vomited out of the machine and onto the floor with great mechanical tintinabulation along with a chorus of class three Words of Power from yours truly. Not only was my commute effectively fbleeped up to the nth degree, it would from now on be conducted with pockets more suited to deep sea diving than attempting to walk to the train. The LIRR, a stickler for deatil in these matters, had enhanced the affair by having one escalator out of action, which by lucky chance happened to be the one ascending to the Westbound platforms.

I arrived at the top of the stairs wheezing, blood pouring from my nose and ears, coins dribbling from my pockets¹, begging passers-by for the mercy of a bullet in the head. Sadly, since all my fellow commuters were those who had been caught in some variation of the same fiasco my pleas fell on deaf ears. "You know you dropped some quarters on the stairs, right?" said one, kindly, as I clutched the side of the stairwell, lungs roaring as my chest sucked in volumes of life-giving air.

Of course, the New York train had just left and the next one would not do so for 20 minutes or so.

During the trip it transpired that everyone capable of leaving their house had simultaneously decided to take a day in New York, and so in no time at all the local train² was jamed full of people with very young children. Those little darlings. They can make any journey seem 15 times longer than it really is, but in reality I think the LIRR was doing fine in that department without help.

By the time we finally rolled into Jamaica we had missed all the connections to Atlantic Terminal and the next train would arrive two minutes before I would be officially late for work. If the bloody LIRR had simply announced the problem at Wyandanch when they first knew about it, I would have been able to shave at least 20 minutes off my commute and would have arrived within my core time and that's why I'm livid with rage. There is no problem bad enough that the LIRR's mediation of the problem can't make it worse, often infinitely worse³.

And I just heard that Mrs Stevie's mom has collapsed with a suspected stroke, so it seems life is not done being a total jerkface quite yet.

1. Which gave me the appearance of having some sort of symmetrically disfiguring growths on my thighs↑
2. Which stopped at about three hundred stations and therefore averaged about 3.8 miles per hour for the journey↑
3. And for those who don't belive in infinity, I say ride the LIRR for a season and talk to me then↑

Incoming Clue Missile!

Today I was privileged to hear a young woman declare loudly to a friend that she couldn't sleep on trains.

This announcement was delivered somewhere west of Jamaica (not the good one) after an unbroken stream of loud conversation begun twenty minutes earlier before we set off from Brooklyn.

It was followed by a continuous stream of loud sonic infotransfer until she and her friend disembarked in Farmingdale, one stop before Wyandanch (Pearl of the East).

I should like to offer the opinion that the first step to sleeping on a train is probably to stop bloody talking for a few seconds.

I Have A Target (dot com) Painted On Me

I bought some parts for a model helicopter just after Christmas.

Mrs Stevie had bought one of those tiny electric helicopters for me as a present, but she got bait-and-switched with a cheap knock-off that would not fly at all and was, as a result, very sad.

So I pulled it apart and replaced the works with some from a more reliable brand and she was thrilled that the little thing flew. Almost as thrilled as me, but I digress.

Since that purchase, I have been plagued in my web-browsing by peripheral ads featuring helicopters to the point I'm sick to the back bleeding teeth with sub-miniature rotary wing aircraft of any sort. Well done that vendor for "enabling" the "web community" to "enhance" my web "experience". Left alone I would have probably graduated to larger, more expensive models over time, as I got caught up in the fad. Spurred by my enhanced web experience I shall probably never buy another electric helicopter as long as I live since I now associate them with boring, uninspiring repetition.

However, it has given me an idea.

I plan on purchasing a number of items of feminine undergarmenture. No, I haven't decided to explore my feminine side¹. Within hours my web-browsing experience will be enhanced by a variety of scantily clad models oozing from the sides and top of my browser in a desperate bid to enhance me into another buying spree.

If I'm going to be targeted, I'm damn-well going to be targeted by something worth looking at.

1. at least, not when there are witnesses around - that sort of thing should be done in private with only a webcam for company↑

Google Knows Where I Live

So, apparently Google has been collecting data on me since nitrogen formed in the atmosphere and plans to use it to properly tailor my web experience.

I'm not sanguine about this for two reasons:

a) I have been refusing Google Chrome since the nagware for it debuted and they haven't yet figured out that my tailored web experience is a Chrome-free one

2) Job one upon loading Google's splash page is to turn off the ridiculously nasty one-character-at-a-time attempt to jump the gun and pre-guess what I'm trying to search for while shielding my eyes from the psychedelic cascade of gibberish happening on my computer screen. If Google were the data interpretation geniuses they believe themselves to be they would have figured out long ago that this is not so much "enhancing" my web experience as "annoying the living piss out of me" and they would have stopped delivering the search page with the settings set to "stupid".

þ) Amazon's attempts to enhance my purchasing experience by tailoring it according to what they know about me is laughably off-the-mark, leading me to believe that the clever young things in charge of the web are still under the daft impression that data is information. Accordingly, I have been widening my browsing habits in order to add as much entropy to the process as I can.

Each evening I spread my search terms to land me on monster trucks, clerical garb, pony play accessories, roller derby games in Brooklyn, flower arranging supplies, hammers, male enhancement supplements, Google (for a dash of recursion), egg and spoon racing, cross dresser footwear retailers, plywood, solar power, global warming denial sites, extruded aluminum wholesalers, air bottle recharging specialists, telescope and binocular suppliers and erotic piercing forums. It's exhausting. I imagine the Google database on me must resemble this picture.

Sadly this has backfired somewhat in that when I'm signed on I can only search sites in Bellarus dedicated to nun-heavy industrial dungeon pron.

Or that is what I'm telling Mrs Stevie.

Science You Can Do At Home!

I discovered a new effect this Christmas I am calling the Stevie-Electric Effect.

In order to repeat the experiment in your home, you will need to buy these delicious chocs and eat them. No science can be done until all the chocs are consumed, and the Stevie-Electric Effect has not yet been demonstrated effectively using cheaper packages of said chocs, nor with inferior choccy comestibles so don't waste your time and funding on economy lash-ups.

Carefully remove the now-empty inner tray from the plastic box, along with the stiff glossy paper insert that lies under it. You may notice the paper sticks to the tray with a noticeable static charge.

Rub the tray against the paper using a flat hand to support the paper and gripping the tray in the middle with pinched fingers. You will notice a slight build up of static.

Now prepare yourself for the experience of the mighty Stevie-Electric Effect, which I already called bagsies and dibs on so don't try re-labeling it in the way scientists so often do to steal other people's hard work and insight.

Aligning the paper and tray so there is no overlap, gently move the tray back and forth by no more than a half inch. You should notice a rapid build-up of a ferocious static charge, far in excess of any that can be obtained by rubbing the tray on the paper over a wider path. Eventually the tray will stick so firmly to the paper that sliding the tray will become very difficult.

You have now demonstrated the Stevie-Electric Effect and should be in awe of my science powers and like that.

Harpy No Yeast!

I'm posing thistle missile bite means of my newt Kindle Fight.

A newt ear in blotting is at hound, moored sightly by the automobile spooling collection I hive nit fatigued how to tan often.

Expectorate mope of thus sight of thing as Tim goes on; one mist move whist the tomes, I almost sat.

As I Walked Out This Winter's Day

The Christmas Tree Guy
Is gone leaving just the smell
Of pine on the air

New Look

Gah!

Last week I was at a loose end, got curious, clicked something I shouldn't have and trashed my bailing-wire and chewing gum blog markup template, replacing it with a new one supplied by Blogger that has drag'n'drop gadgets, some of which actually work.

Shame I never got round to saving the original template.

I think I've gotten most of the value-added styles back in place, or rather, I've improvised several workarounds that sort of do the same thing the old styles did.

Anyway.

The new look: good or bad? Please let me know.

The Horrible Nastiness of Unpleasantness (aka Life)

So, since I last posted life has been crashing over me like cool, wild, blue surf contaminated with sharp scrap metal, nuclear reactor linings and toxic waste.

The LIRR has periodically broken down, never so spectacularly as the evening of hell when a signal outage on the lightning-prone Babylon branch was converted into a system-wide debacle by "a techie who pushed the wrong button", but once so badly I was obliged to take a train so late that I was greeted by my boss with an unironic "Good Afternoon".

Truly these people deserve some sort of Award for Dedication to Lack of Service. I'm not blaming the crews. They generally at least are in it with the rest of us and strongly motivated to Get Things Moving. I blame the middle- and upper-management who it seems cannot find their collective backsides with both hands and a map. Disasters happen, but why do the same disasters continue to cripple the service year after year?

I finally screwed up the courage to visit the skin doctor, who hacked off some of that newly mutinying organ and sent it off for tests. Specifically a skin tag that was growing under my left eye and entering my field of vision¹ and a wart on my thumb that reacted to my attempts to freeze it off cryogenically by regrowing, and the attempt at excision by the application of corrosive chemicals by springing a number of freely bleeding wounds which got infected.

There was nerve tissue in there too, as I found when I attempted a home surgery with a razor blade and a small rubber ball, which I bit in half but managed not to swallow as I hopped screaming around the bathroom/operating theater, crashing into things and begging for death's sweet embrace. One in the win column there. And the nerves turned out to be the type that don't become numb when the skin is frozen with the old cryogenic kit as a second impromptu surgery attempt proved.

Doc Hacksaw grabbed my head and, knocking my glasses to the floor with a skillful sweep of his scalpel hand whipped off the offending growth, missing the eyeball by several thicknesses of the blade. I had to admire his technique, especially when he managed to switch out the knife for a small electric branding iron and rammed it into the wound he had inflicted, all without receiving any wounds of his own from my frantically clawing hands and thrashing legs (though I did manage to bite his nurse as she applied the dressing, which mollified me a little).

Deciding that the wart called for Heroic Measures, Doc Hacksaw first anethetized me with a hypo fitted with a blunt needle, stabbing me in many places, some of them close to the area he planned to work on. I cooperated by showing him some of my very best Words of Power and attempting to grasp him by the windpipe. Then, brandishing his scalpel, so sharp the edge gave off blue radiation as it snipped the very photons of light in half when it moved, utilizing what I call a "Jack the Ripper" grip, he began to stab and slash with gusto. Naturally this produced a very deep wound in my thumb, which bled freely.

"Nurse!" screamed the crazed dermatoligist. "The cauterizer! No, the big one!"

I encouraged his efforts with manly falsetto screams as oily red steam rose from my (formerly) good hand and the delicious smell of burning meat filled the room. Then he gave me some cream to put on it and it was all over.

The Stevieling managed to infest her computer with Chechnyasoft and was plagued with pop-ups telling her she needed to buy her anti-virus software. This helpful message highlighted the fact that the still-under-subscription McAffee software she has was turned off, again.

This makes twice in about 8 months.

I was livid, so much so that Mrs Stevie told me to stop shouting at the Stevieling but became less involved when I explained that:
      a) even an administrator has to manually escalate their permissions in order to make registry changes (which had clearly happened here) so she had quite obviously clicked "yes" on a window without reading the message in the box
     2) The last time this had happened I had taken a day off work and it still hadn't been enough time to get the machine working again
     þ) I could take no time off this week and therefore the computer repairs would take time needed to put up the decorative Arch O' Festivity and get the Pre-Lit Yule Bush down from its perch in the garage² and
     ♥) That although the Stevieling had sworn to me that she was scanning her computer for infections when I asked each week, I could find no logs to prove it, and the only log I could find was he one from the scan I ran right after I fixed the damned machine eight months before.

It was five nights of pure hell getting the basted thing free of the grip of former soviet cyberthuggery. I thought I could do it in two, but the infection poved immune to the two day fix (either that or that wretched kid re-infected the machine within minutes).

So, life as usual, really.

1. I don't have enough to spare these days to allow it to be blocked by stupid growths↑
2. That more than anything served to get Mrs Stevie in the proper frame of mind re: needlessly virused computers↑

More Incompetence and Annoyance

Even though it was election day today, and many government offices were closed, we had a mail delivery.

I was impressed until I looked at the mail.

Most was for the house ten digits higher than Chateau Stevie. Some was for a house ten digits higher than that. Not a single piece was for us.

My guess is that Mr Singh got all our mail.

Pool Annoyance Rant

All the air pillows I so laboriously cleaned and inflated developed leaks and sank, so I had to buy another and deploy it on Sunday.

The hurricane had also peeled back the cover and dumped leaves in the water I so laboriously cleaned four weeks ago. I did my best to rectify this state of affairs but was so demoralized by this foul turn of events it was a sloppy job at best. There's four hours of my life I won't get back.

While lifting the pool cover, it became apparent that it was dotted with numerous holes which will let filthy rainwater in anyway. This also explains why the water level was very low - when I siphoned off the water on the pool cover I also siphoned off half the water in the pool through the holes in the cover.

So that's all right then.

Another Day, Another Annoyance

I find I have time on my hands to post to The Occasional Stevie, a now-rare occurrence up there with lottery wins, because once again I find myself sitting on a premium-priced peak period LIRR train, waiting for an off-peak train to clear the chicane caused by a rail failure.

I stand corrected: Two trains.

It's not the failures that I mind, though they seem to be occurring more and more frequently of late, it's the witless way these disruptive events are dealt with by the clueless wuckfits who are "in charge" of the bloody Long Island Rail Road. Holding priority traffic for low-priority traffic is mindless.

Yes, I know they have to get the trains back up the other end of the line somehow, but these could be deadheaded back in the relatively slow period from 10 am onward. I am sick to the back teeth of sitting in an expensively-priced peak train waiting because some dimwit dispatcher doesn't have a clue how to run a railway network.

As I just said to the conductor - this bunch couldn't get me drunk in a bewery.

More Expensive, Time-Wasting Idiocy

I arrived home tonight to find I had been served.

I read the summons with mounting rage. Name or defendant (identified by idiot lawyer as me): Wrong. Address: Spelled wrong. The complaint claims I have not acted to compensate someone I've never heard of who was injured some time ago in a vehicle I don't own that was part of a business I have never been involved with in a place I've never been to as far as I know.

Mrs Stevie, who is part of the well oiled machine that is the New York Legal System (and that is the only explanation I can come up with as to why someone would get so many of the details of a summons wrong) said I should calm down and she would deal with it in the morning.

So I'll let her tell the idiot, lazy lawyer he isn't worth whatever the plaintiff is paying him.

Careers I Would Have Liked To Try

Apache Dancer.

Flinging some slim French bird around the place, having her clutch me tightly and get paid for it? C'est une consummation devoutment etre wished.

Sadly, a love of Mars bars™ and food in general, a genetic predisposition toward bisinistrate-rhythmoperambulation and a complete inability to gain even rudimentary fluency in French doomed me to the path more traveled than that one.

Plus: I cannot smoulder convincingly¹.

Merde!

1. Unless we count the experiments detailed here↑

Internet Rant

Those who know me know I have some issues with the current festering pile of leperous vileness infesting the World Wide Web.

Chief among these is anything that slows down the delivery of the webpage I'm wanting to look at, and it goes infinity times more for anything that is simply going to be a signpost to where I really want to be.

I sometimes (rarely) use my laptop to connect to the web while on the train, where my Wi-Fi service is spotty at best and passing between different access points as I ride. It is therefore paramount that pages load quickly, especially if they are just being loaded to grab the next waypoint on my (usually unwanted) voyage of discovery.

It should therefore come as no surprise that today I am enraged that I sat waiting for a bleeping secondary site to answer the bleeping phone in order that Google could start showing me the link for the site I actually wanted to see (one of the ad-service sites) and then the bleeping site I wanted wouldn't load because it was waiting for Google analytics to answer the bleeping phone. Naturally, by the time I had the site I wanted up and began the process of untangling the resource I needed to see from the visual chaos that passes for design, the Wi-Fi connection had been lost.

I see many angry young things arguing that as soon as more memory becomes available for a PC, Microsoft fills it with cruft. I see just about no-one complaining of the incomprehensible dash to fill bleeding-edge bandwidth with digital vomit, forcing those of us who bought our machines before last Tuesday to endure design assumptions at the web-server end that are not true at the client end. Amazon is a case in point. Get a slow connection and you might as well not bother to load their site as it wallows, trying to pre-load rollovers and banners and Azathoth-knows what else, none of which is central to the business of locating the new Larry Niven novel and buying it.

For years I had to explain to people that the rest of the world was not built around free local telephone service and that V90 dial-up was not a world standard. My father once had to face paying a three hour long-distance telephone charge in order to download an update. Does anyone here begin to see another reason other than stupidity for not applying the latest patches to Windows? I never saw a business so intent of marginalizing its consumer base.

And don't get me started on the Javascript stupidity, in which the quest for shiny website bling has opened up everyone to insidious hijacks that have one's credit card in Chechnya faster than one can say "point, click and ship".

Gah!

Hurricanes: Ban Them Now!

Well, that was fun. Oh wait, no it wasn't.

Regular reader¹ will probably be aware that Hurricane Irene blew into Long Island a couple of weeks ago. Given the fact that it was actually dying down to category 1 by the time it made landfall, I expected it would be no real inconvenience, and thus rested my head in confidence on Saturday night.

At about 2:30 am the next morning the power went out on the side street that runs along one edge of our property because a small branch snapped off the dead tree the guy across the road is cultivating and fell on the cooper-clad thread of cotton that the Long Island Power Authority deems suitable for urban power distribution and strings for miles on rotten poles inadequately bedded in the sand that serves for soil hereabouts. The irony here is that the main road that runs along the front of the property, and which is referenced in our address, suffered no such interruption of power.

"Irony?" I here you sneer, digging out your Alanis Morrisette collection. "How is that irony?"

It is irony because after a warping power pole had tugged the cleat anchoring our power lines to the house off the wall twice in six months we insisted the IQ brigade at LIPA "do something to permanently address the problem" and they switched out power line to the side street's transformer².

And so, as the hurricane swept over Long Island in the early morning, we awoke to no power and a flood in the basement.

Mrs Stevie got busy with towels and something called a "sham-wow", soaking up the water and transferring it to buckets which were dumped into the septic system so it could seep back into the waterlogged ground and thence back into the basement in a few hours. I declined to join in since I knew the power would be back on in a few hours. After all, not even LIPA could be caught so badly out of crease as to not have contingency plans well in hand.

It was pointed out to me that stuff was getting ruined by the water, but I replied that all my stuff had been systematically ruined in previous floods so there was nothing I cared about, and all their stuff had been put up on shelves after the last time surely? This was greeted with harsh words but I remained resolute in my refusal to join the basement bailing fun.

In order to assuage Mrs Stevie's deteriorating temper I offered to drive them out for breakfast at a diner. The wind was howling and rain was falling, but it had stopped falling crosswise which I took to be a good sign, so we ignored the witless idiots on the radio saying "stay home", mostly because when we were home we had no electricity for the radio and so couldn't heed their advice until we had ignored it and fired up the Steviemobile, and drove to a nearby diner.

On the way I began to get intimations that the situation might be a tad worse than I had apprehended. Bits of tree were scattered everywhere. That much I did expect. What I had not expected to see was trees ripped out of the ground by their roots and dropped wherever gravity and the prevailing wind felt was appropriate. One fallen tree had a root system that was over ten feet across. The owner probably wished that it had gone down a bit further than it did. It looked like what happens when a very young child is let loose on a scale model railway. There were trees down everywhere. Trees big enough to block whole streets, and over a quarter of the town was blacked out.

The diner was in good repair and had power (and had a backup generator, I was informed) and staff, who all looked like they would rather be at home bailing out their own basements³. That diner was to do record business that day and most of the following week. As it was, we had breakfast with coffee (my main reason for suggesting the trip), and we left to see if Mrs Stevie's parents were okay.

They were in darkness, but un-flooded, so I drove the famikly home and returned with one of our Coleman electric lanterns after replacing the batteries so they would at least have enough light to get about the place.

I took Monday off and, after taking a box of coffee to the in-laws⁴ the Stevieling and I went out for a drive out east along the Long Island Expressway. She drove because she needs the practice, it was time she had freeway experience and this day at this time traffic would be very light. I just sat biting my arm and screaming when it was appropriate, while offering advice such as "You're drifting to the right, honey. You're drifting into the shoulder sweetheart! Daughter! You're about to drive into a stream of traffic on your right! TURN THE STEERING WHEEL TO THE LEFT AT ONCE! ARGHARGHLEFT!" and "You see those red lights on the car up ahead? Those mean the driver in front of you is braking. So slow down a little. Slow down! SLOW! STOP THIS VEHICLE IMMEDIATELY! ARGHARGHSTOPTHECAR!"

As we negotiated roads blocked by police insisting we turn right when we wanted to turn left (because all the traffic lights were out) we could see miles of power lines lying on the ground because the poles had fallen over. I started to get a very bad feeling about the whole reliance on LIPA to get the job done quickly theory and decided to formulate a new philosophy straightway - one involving Long Island being in the electrical dark ages for the foreseeable future - while keeping up a brave face and a positive attitude in front of the women of La Famile Stevie.

Mrs Stevie had scored some dry ice to keep the fridge cold which turned out to be the last dry ice in New York, and it worked quite well, but we had no electricity so we had no stove to cook with. The fact that I get home around the time it is starting to get dark was also getting old. I was reduced to walking around with one of those strap-to-your-head LED lamps so I could see anything. It worked well, but it was so damned depressing to only be able to see things right in front of me and only see those in shades of actinic blue-white. On Tuesday the performance of the Long Island Rail Road was the icing on the cake and I came home only to leave again in the ostensibly hopeless search for a generator.

As it happened my first stop was Home Despot where it transpired they had just taken delivery of a load of generators. By the time I found where they were there were only two left, and one of those was gone by the time I had finished checking the price one of those was gone. I grabbed the last one and called Mrs Stevie to bring her wagon to collect me as it was far too big to fit in my car. Then it was a simple matter of paying for it, spending twenty minutes sobbing, clawing at my face, tearing my clothes, pouring dirt on my head and yelling "Why me?" and then it was back home for several hours of generator assembly by flashlight.

Once it was bolted together it was a sort of wheelbarrow affair, a wheeled frame containing the engine/alternator, fuel tank and breaker panel with electric sockets with two folding handles so I could move it with only moderate back strain. I filled the sump with oil and put some gas in the tank, then read the starting instructions and my heart fell. The instructions said to choke the engine then pull the starter cord until the engine compression came up, then to heave on the cord to start it. My chainsaw has the same start sequence and it is no picnic getting that bastard to fire up. I was quite despondent when I contemplated the size of the generator's engine, but it actually fired while I was doing the pull-to-prime thing - the easiest pull-start I've ever personally experienced.

It was also the loudest motorized thing I've ever started with the possible exception of Troll⁵. Standing next to it, the sound of Mrs Stevie's voice was totally drowned out unless she shrieked at such volumes her nose bled. Unlooked-for bonus there. The noise was magnified by the narrowness of the area between the fence that separates us from Crazy Joe and our kitchen, and the dimensions of the enclosure meant that Mr Singh, the neighbor we are on good terms with, was getting the full benefit of the sound. I shut it down and moved it behind the swimming pool, figuring the body of water would act to muffle the sound. It did, a bit, but it still sounded like a Mr Softee van was serving delicious cone-mounted treats in our garden. Oh well.

The generator has five power taps: one 240 volt, 25 amp supply and four 120 volt, 20 amp supplies, and will supply five and a half kilowatts, but it was getting late so I decided that only emergency power would be plumbed this night. This equated to the fridge and a light. Fridge compressors suck an awful lot of power, but I happened to know ours is under 20 amps at peak (when it starts) so it was just a matter of avoiding voltage drop by using a short enough extension cord, something I didn't have in the thickness of wire required for the current draw, so I used the cord I power the swimming pool pump with, which is as thick as my little finger and weighs a ton. This and another, regular outdoor extension cord were thrown through the open kitchen window and plugged into the fridge and a lamp and all was happiness in the home. I, however, went out to buy gasoline, which because I had only a small can involved two round trips to the gas station to fill the tank.

Now I have a five gallon can somewhere in the garage, but it had been silted over with crap the women put in there then moved about to find other stuff they put in there and now, with no lights, I wasn’t ever going to find it. Mrs Stevie said she’d pick one up while she was out, but wouldn’t ya know it, there were none to be had fer luvner money so she bought a Kerosene can instead. A kerosene can is exactly the same as a gas can, and a day later that same can was available as a gas can, but a kerosene can is blue and it is illegal to fill a can that is not metal or plastic and colored red at a public gas station in New York. I explained this quandary to Mrs Stevie but she announced that she didn’t care because it was my job to fill the thing each morning. It would be my problem. A frank exchange of views was held in which I lost badly, but which fortunately the neighbors were not party to on account of the racket from the generator.

And so to bed.

The next day Mrs Stevie and I had a spirited disagreement on whether we should run the generator all day while we were at work. I felt we shouldn't, mostly because of the cost (24 hours running would be around $70-80) but also because my feeling was that the thing wasn't intended for such a heavy duty cycle (the box had a list of envisioned uses and some had "standby" featured prominently in the wording and specific instructions on how to shut the thing down including a five-minute, no-load running period so that the alternator could cool down before the engine - and the cooling fan - stopped). Not only that, but there were strongly worded contra-indications on the subject of the thing failing under load and my experience has been that tools with moving parts must be watched like a hawk because those parts have a tendency to stop moving in dangerously creative and expensive ways as soon as you take your eyes off 'em. Mrs Stevie felt that if the generator was not running flat out the fridge would slag down in a pool of water and rotting food within minutes.

The discussion ranged over a number of subjects, most of them to my detriment, and then we had another frank exchange of views and I gassed up the generator and left for work, its ear-splitting "blat" announcing to one and all that our (empty) house had power not of LIPA's doing.

As my home-bound train approached Wyandanch (Perl of the East) I got a call from Mrs Stevie to inform me she and The Stevieling were going out. She later claimed that she added the fact that since the generator was still running she wasn't going to do as we had agreed at breakfast and put more gasoline in it, but if she did she said it to empty air and static. Needless to say when I got home the damned thing was silent.

Silent and red hot.

It had clearly shut down while the fridge motor was running and was now in a state engineers call "heat soak" which is a fancy way of saying that the heat built-up in the engine and alternator casing was not blown away by the fan and so was hanging around while the formerly moving parts added more and more heat to the business. The generator was actually getting hotter as it sat there doing zero.

I waited a bit, refueled it and attempted to start it, but it refused to countenance the idea. My guess now is that some sensor had shut off the electrics.

By the time Mrs Stevie got back I had hurt my shoulder trying to get the bastard to turn over so I gave her the benefit of my feelings on the matter of owning a $750 paperweight, my opinion of the headache and nausea I had suffered all day as a result of being splashed by gasoline first thing in the morning, and the exact depth of my despair at the thought of yet another night by flashlight, and then I departed in the Steviemobile for an hour's drive to cool off and revel in the air conditioning, the wide field of illumination of the headlamps on the blacktop and the soft, powerful purr of the engine as we ate up the miles going nowhere useful. I returned home to find Mrs Stevie attempting to start the machine so I went to bed.

Early the next morning I managed to get it started again and put my foot down. I explained that the fridge was capable of sustaining its temperature if it wasn't opened for the eight hours we wouldn't be there if we froze cool packs overnight and moved them into the fridge when we left for work, and that if anyone wanted TV, Internet and a washing machine this side of Christmas they had better get in line with my "only when we're in" plan for running the generator because I was absolutely not doing any more improvised electrical work in the dark by the light of an LED flashlight. Mrs Stevie argued until I mentioned the sheer cost of electrifying an empty house, and she finally agreed⁶.

That night I ran more extension cords and by 10 pm we had all the aforementioned facilities up and glowing while the neighbors gnashed heir teeth in the dark or listened to their own generators. By Wednesday most of that side street were running similar lash-ups.

One funny incident occurred just as I was leaving. I saw Mrs Crazy Joe come out and glare at the fence between us, from where the sound of our generator was making itself known to the area. This was rich. On Monday they had deployed a generator of their own and placed it about five feet from my house. Payback is a birchbark canoe as the Algonquin Wise-men say.

Of course this running of extension cords necessitated the purchase of a new, thick and hence trés expensiv one because of the previously raised concern about voltage drop over the length of the cord, since the washing machine is another amp-hog. By now I was becoming inured to the hand-over-fist costs of the blackout and so the customers of Home Despot were treated only to quiet sobbing and some pounding of my head against the robot-checkout machine as it printed my receipt.

And so we had light, TV, Internet, cold soda and clean underwear despite the Long Island Power Authority. Huzzah!

On Friday night, around 7:30 pm, I arrived home to find Mrs Stevie feeding coffee and donuts to some LIPA guys who had arrived in theater thirty minutes before and were not feeling the love on account of a crowd of onlookers whose attitude could best be described as "disgruntled" that was letting the workforce know how much they valued the chance to live for a week as their original colonist ancestors had. Galvanized by sugary foods and delicious beverages they had the power back on in a trice and gradually the neighborhood fell silent as, house by house, the generators began to shut down.

Ours was last.

1. TOS Circulation now in double digits if you count me and in binary↑
2. We had naively expected them to simply allow another foot of cable from the looped reserve at the pole, but they were feeling mischievous and decided to reward our temerity by making our back garden resemble one from Queens by gittishly draping sixty feet of power line over it↑
3. I recently got into a discussion with some non-Americans over tipping, in which some of the tightest people I've ever communed with decried the process and claimed to "not understand how to do it". Tipping 101: If the person serving you braved a hurricane so that they could have the single pleasure of serving you eggs and coffee, they bloody well deserve a tip, and a big one, and a verbal thank-you for doing so with a smile↑
4. Yes, a box. Google "Box Of Joe"↑
5. The Snowblower of Supreme Spiffiness↑
6. There’s some Scots blood in her from her mother’s side of the family that I can sometimes appeal to↑

The Great Quake Of '11

And right after I posted that the building started bouncing like unto a boat on a choppy sea.

Our emergency director (yes, we have someone who directs such things) came on the PA to say he thought it might have been an earthquake and that we should stay inside because there was no danger but if we went outside we shouldn't congregate near the buildings because stuff might fall off them onto us.

I am not making that up. We were safe in the buildings - that might at any point disintegrate and fall onto the revelers outside.

I logged onto Google to see how long it would take to get something to show - about three minutes. The main event was in Virginia about nineteen minutes before. Odd, I always thought shock waves would be faster than that. Nineteen minutes from Virginia to here? That's one laggardly aftershock, but typical of the "just so good and no further" thinking that permeates everything these days. Bah, etc.

I signed onto the USGS website and they asked me to report my observations, so I did. They explained that the observations they were looking for were those about the Earthquake, not on the deplorable slipping standards and lack of backbone in today's youth, so I gave them a gripping tale of one Englishman's struggle to find sanity and relevance as his world bounced up and down around him, a metaphor for the current state of the world made manifest as unthinkable disaster was upon him. The poignancy of his wind-up robot toppling helplessly into the chasm formed between the Ultrasparc Workstation and a pile of unread manuals was of particular note, throwing the whole insane business into harsh relief and causing him to cry out against the forces of nature assembled against his very life in a World Gone Mad.

It took forever for the site to finish uploading my report because the servers were swamped by panicked idiots writing "What I Saw In the Quake" minutiae.

But now I join the ranks of frontline journalists, those who brave the vicissitudes of nature to get the story out to the public safe in their homes. I too, have stood on the abyss as disaster not of man's making loomed large.

You heard it here first.