And The Sinues have Clogged

I'd not gone more than three days feeling healthy before I work this morning with awful sinus pressure.  Ugh.  If I still have energy later I'll try to make a real blog post.

The Cold is Gone!

I am finally feeling healthy again!  The cold seemed to linger on for a week after I felt almost-better, a miserable week of tiredness and random periods of runny nose.  Starting Tuesday I finally started feeling fully better, so I hope to actually have a real post Soon.  Maybe tomorrow.  I hope whatever readers I may have are having a healthier new year than I.

Under the Weather

I'm too under the weather to write up a decent review of anything, or write anything creative.  Hope the new year is treating others better.

Brrrrrr!

It is too darn cold!  I'll probably have a book review tomorrow, either of Pam Uphoff's Shadow Zone or the eARC of David Drake's Though Hell Should Bar the Way, both of which were quite good.  But for now, I'm going to hop into bed and kiss this day good bye.

Happy New Year!

2018 is here.  Happy New Year, everyone!  I hope the holidays have treated everybody well.  I had a great Christmastime with family.

Not So Much Blogging, Afterall

Sigh.  There hasn't been much blogging here the past few weeks, unfortunately.  There's just too much I'm trying to get done before Christmas, for both Day Job and Real Life.  Too much distraction.  I'm coming home simultaneously too keyed up and too drained.  Maybe after the holidays. 

Speaking of which, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Do You See the Light?

Over at According To Hoyt the other day, a commenter linked to a NASA composite image of the Western Hemisphere at night.

Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using Suomi NPP VIIRS data from Miguel Román, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

I find it interesting how distinct and obvious some of the metropolitan areas are. The Salt Lake City and Denver-Colorado Springs areas are little vertical splashes of light among a sea of dark, while Saint Louis and Kansas City stand out as larger bright spots among a bunch of smaller bright spots. Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth are large splotches. The Northeast Corridor cities, on the other hand, kind of run together - but the near-straight horizontal splash that is Long Island makes it possible to pick NYC out of the mess. 

Map above blown up with captions added by me

You can also see how quickly the light falls off as you get a bit west of about 96 degrees west.  Between about 96 and 103 degrees west (it varies a bit), the population density drops off.  With the decline in population density comes a similar decline in density of the road network and the lights.  This is where the land transitions from the wetter, more fertile lands that support many types of crops, to the drier lands more suitable for ranching and grains.  This is the area once known generations earlier as the Great American Desert, though it is not really.

And I think that's all I shall touch on tonight.  Good night, world!

Blogging to Resume

It's been a few days since I last blogged.  Day Job became a bit hectic, thanks to a major performance problem that cropped up with an instance of one of the commercial software products.  After nearly two weeks of time-consuming and fruitless investigation, involving people all over the world, the problem disappeared as suddenly as it appeared.  The server and network admins performed monthly maintenance in the data center, and all of the sudden the problem went away.  The root cause is still not understood, but nobody is hounding me to get the problem resolved.

So expect blogging to resume tomorrow.  I have a few books I can review, and maybe I can wrap things up on that Shapes series I mentioned a few weeks ago, now that the nightmare at Day Job isn't send me home late, frustrated, and drained each evening.

Puzzled

I have something of a puzzle at Day Job, one that is drawing far too much of my time and brainpower.  A closed-source web application we use suddenly began performing about fifty times slower than normal, under practically no load (i.e. one user).  We've already tested network latency and bandwidth, and the responsiveness of the underlying database.  Everything appears fine.  Every other instance of the web application, running on other servers, works fine.  There were supposedly no OS updates pushed to the server.  But now that commercial web application is performing fifty times slower.  The home-grown web applications hosted on the same server are performing normally.  And neither our data center team nor the vendor have a clue.  Alas, I'm expected to solve, or coordinate the solution of, this problem.  Yay.  Go, me!  So rather than a longer blog post, I shall merely wish everybody well and get to bed so I can face the world bright eyed and bushy tailed in morning, and resume tackling the problem.  Goodnight and best wishes, world!

Bizarre Dreams

Last night I went to bed early, and made no blog post.  Instead, I had bizarre dreams. 

I was living in house, but it wasn't quite like any house or apartment I'd ever lived in.  It had five bedrooms and three baths, one bedroom and bath being in the basement.  A cousin and his wife came to visit.  So did an internet acquaintance.  The cousin and wife were just staying the night, en-route elsewhere, but the internet acquaintance was supposed to travel with me to somewhere else.  But in the morning I forgot she was there, and drove a few hundred miles until I remembered she was supposed to be in the car, and when I stopped I found her denouncing me as a fool on her blog. 

When I drove back home, it was empty again, but then my mother (who in real life lives 750 miles away) showed up to castigate me.  I then drove off with my mom to meet my dad and an aunt and uncle on the approach to a bridge over a wide river in a vaguely St. Louis-ish environment. The bridge approach had been closed to traffic so people could sit around in lawn chairs and listen to a baseball game on the radio. 

We were having a great time up until a tug pulling a long train of barges down the river at highway speeds (how?!?) hit one of the bridge supports, and the approach collapsed, falling into the river.  We had to swim to shore.  Then I drove everybody, soaking, back to my house to get cleaned up.

No rhyme or reason, really.  And stranger than fiction or fact.

Ouch!

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I was working on my ancient Airstream, which involved a lot of crouching and kneeling.  I'm fine while seated or walking.  The transition between seated and standing, though, is currently a bit painful - I probably look like an eighty year old at the moment.  Oh, well, should be better in a few days.  As it is, I'm about to go out in the reamining hour of light and try to make more progress.

Airstream Progress Report

As I've posted about before, I've been (very) slowly restoring an "ancient" Airstream travel trailer that was in fairly desperate condition.  The major aspect that's underway now is replacing the old, rotted floor, after which progress should be much more rapid.  As it is, I'm not at my best when crouching and kneeling, which doesn't help any.

The last of the old floor left the trailer months ago, but revealed that some of the aluminum floor joists had corroded in places.  I fabricated reinforcements back in late summer, half of which I installed before summer's end.  Then my mother's birthday, various yard work, stuff with Day Job, the Thanksgiving holiday, weather, etc. intervened. 

Finally, this week, the weather was cooperative.  Today, I riveted the rest of the reinforcing pieces to the original joists.  Tomorrow's forecast is promising, so I'll likely crawl under the trailer, put a few more rivets in from below, and install patches over the worst of the corrosion in the aluminum belly skin.

Progress.  It is nice to be making progress once more.  I'll try to remember to take some pictures to share.

Book Review: A Call to Vengeance

The eARC for A Call to Vengeance by David Weber, Timothy Zahn, and Thomas Pope was released within the past few days by Baen Books.  After getting some work for Day Job out of the way, I purchased and read it.  It is the third book in the Manticore Ascendant series, set in the same universe as Weber's Honor Harrington stories.  However, it is set several hundred years before Honor's time, before the discovery of the Manticore Wormhole Junction and the growth of Manticoran naval power. 

This book picks up mere weeks after the end of the events of the previous one.  The young Star Kingdom of Manticore and its navy are recovering from the aftermath of the unprovoked attack by hostile warships whose origin and motivates are a mystery to Manticore.  Of course, Manticore can't just be left in peace to recover. . .

As in the previous two books in the Manticore Ascendant series, the main character in A Call to Vengeance is Travis Uriah Long.  This book, though, spreads the points-of-view a bit more widely than the previous volumes.  The earlier books focused mostly on Travis, with a bit from the view of the antagonists, and only brief segments from the view of others.  In this book, Long's colleague (and potential love interest) Lisa Donelly also gets a good portion of the book, as do some members of the Winton dynasty that rules the Star Kingdom of Manticore.  Various movers and shakers of interest also get some scenes.

These different perspectives and scenes form what seem to be two nearly-distinct plot lines.  One features Travis Long, Lisa Donnelly, and their colleagues in the Manticoran navy and intelligence agencies trying to track down who attacked Manticore and why.  The other deals with the small Winton family and (primarily domestic) Manticoran politics.  The two different plot lines overlap only lightly.  Thus it feels to me slightly disjointed.

However, I also thought both plots are well executed.  The quality of the prose itself was fine, nothing that I took note of but also nothing that got in the way or proved distracting.  Even though this was an eARC (electronic Advanced Reader Copy), there were few spelling, grammar, or continuity errors to distract. 

Overall, I really enjoyed this book.  I hope there are more to follow, because there were too many threads left somewhat hanging at the end.  I should note that it doesn't seem to me a good candidate for a stand-alone novel.  In my opinion, you should probably check out the two prior books in the series, A Call to Duty and A Call to Arms, for the added background before tackling A Call to Vengeance.  I definitely recommend reading this book. 

Quiet Today

I've been rather quiet today, tied up with Day Job.  But tomorrow is Friday.  Hopefully that will give me a chance to come up with something.  Until then, good night.

Digging Into the Past

The other day, I was trying to look up some information about an interurban trolley company in northwestern New Jersey.  As is often the case, the internet was of only a little use in this regards.  Popular interurbans, the well-known lines situated in metropolitan areas and were lucky enough to last past World War II, usually have a little bit about them online.  This was not one of those.

Online, I found one brief thread on a discussion forum, and a paragraph in an online preview of a recent print book about Phillipsburg, NJ.   Offline, I found a single paragraph in The Electric Interurban Railways in America by Hilton & Due.  A few sentences are interspersed into Morris County Traction Company by Lowenthal and Greenberg, which also contained a map of unstated origin that covered the line's actual and project map (though not in detail).  That exhausted the regular web searches and my printed secondary sources.

From all that I really gathered only a few facts.  The line lasted a little over a quarter century.  It operated between Phillipsburg, NJ on the west and Port Murray, NJ on the east.  Most of the route followed the Morris Canal.  The owners hoped to extend eastward to Netcong, NJ, to connect with the Morris County Traction Company, which never managed to build its extension to Netcong.  They hoped to expand west to Easton, PA by crossing the Delaware River, but contentious relations with the company operating streetcar service there and in Phillipsburg prevented it.  Ultimately, that company bought the interurban out.  The company changed names a few times along the way.

I'm leaving out a few dates and proper names, but those are the bare facts a couple hours of research gave me - roughly the same information I started with from Hilton & Due, except for the marginally-useful map and the fact that the line followed the canal.

Sigh.

Next up, reading what primary sources are available from hundreds of miles away: decades of railway journals scanned by Google and made available online.  Not so easily searchable as a simple web search, though, for a variety of reasons (poor OCR quality being one of them).  When I have a chance, I'll see if I can ferret out anything more.

Anyhow, after Sarah Hoyt's recent "Facts are Facts" post, I thought I'd mention my own attempt to dig up some facts from the not-so-distant past.  It hasn't been going so great.

Canvas Test

This post is a test to see if I can use the HTML5 Canvas and JavaScript within a Blogger post.
If you see a circle below, it worked. :)




It worked for me, in preview. I used some very simple examples from the w3schools.com HTML5 Canvas page. I'm going to have to consider doing the Shapes series I was working on as HTML5 Canvas + JavaScript rather than the C# I was originally working on, so people can play with it interactively.

Link: Genetics and Extinction

Author and scientist Cedar Sanderson has an interesting blog post today about genetic paucity and extinction.  I found it quite fascinating, and worth a look.

Terminal Moraines

This is just a brief musing on the impact of glaciers on terrain.  I won't go getting into the science of it too much, but glaciers can create or alter terrain features in interesting ways - in addition to being terrain features in their own right.  One of the features they leave behind after they retreat are terminal moraines.

Moraines are masses of rock that the glaciers convey to their edge.  The rocks vary in size, all the way down to the size of gravel and sand, and they accumulate.  When the glaciers retreat, the accumulation that is left behind forms a hill or ridge.

On an otherwise relatively flat landscape, such a hill or ridge could stand out.  It need not be uniform, especially after erosion may have redistributed it.  So you can get irregular or lumpy ridges.  Or a collection of hills.  Or, if moraine was left in what is now a lake or sea, islands.  Many of the islands in Long Island Sound are the remnants of the terminal moraines from the last glacial maximum.  Some are not though, the Thimble Islands for example being the remnants of rocky hills that were partially ground away by glaciers.

Voting Can Make a Difference

I was talking with some of my family over the holiday, and they mentioned the recent elections in their town.  The councilman for their district won by one vote.  If my relatives had not gone to the polls, the councilman would have lost. 

Sometimes it seems like who we vote for doesn't matter - the politicians get in anyway.  But even when there aren't good candidates, when the choices are unpalatable, there are often reasons to pick one candidate over the other, if only to keep the worst candidate out of office. 

Sometimes one candidate may have such overwhelming support a few people not showing up to the polls one way or the other.  If enough people do that, though, it can start to make a difference.  And sometimes that one vote, or two, or three, is enough to make the difference.

Bad Football, Good Holiday

The Thanksgiving holiday was a wonderful time spent with family and family friends.  Food and fun were in abundance.  A good, new hike was found.  New foods were tried.  And football. 

Bad football.  I watched the Giants-Redskins game on TV Thursday evening.  It was a pitiful display by the Giants, but at least it was only on TV.  We could just shut the TV down, and wander off to our beds.

I watched Michigan State-Rutgers game in person.  Traffic enroute was tolerable.  The weather was perfect.  I got a nice intercampus walk from where I parked to the stadium.  I saw some family friends I hadn't seen in ages at the tailgate.  And that was all the positive that can be said.  Rutgers looked even more pitiful than the Giants had two nights before.  The stadium suffered a water pressure and was redirecting people to the portable toilets outside.   

At least Ohio State beat Michigan, so random residents of the state of Michigan will not be making as many derisive remarks.  Not that I went to The Ohio State University (note the definite article), nor am even a fan of Ohio State.  But I do live in the Buckeye State, which seems to be a sufficient condition for obnoxious Michiganders to start talking trash in years Michigan won.  Why?  Maybe it dates back to the "war" for the Toledo Strip, maybe it is more recent.  Anyway, another year I don't have to deal with it.

And now I'm home, and shall resume normal blogging again in the morning.  While resuming ignoring football as much as possible.  Not that I don't enjoy watching the occasional game, but its more fun watching with friends and family - and none of my family are local and none of my friends are football fans.  Without that extra bit to it, I might as well read a book or take a walk.  Thus ends the ranting and raving.  Have a great morning, everybody!