Category Archives: Home Life

Stuff going on in my personal life.

‘Universes’ Isn’t a Word

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I don’t know.  I like watching The Universe series on The History Channel (once I get past the stupid graphics and the talking-down-to they give us) but this guy, a frequent contributor to The Universe, seems a little too full of himself for someone who apparently doesn’t understand the words he’s using.

Just as there are many solar systems in our galaxy, and many other galaxies in the universe, there may be, we find, other somethings (he uses “soap bubbles”) in the universe.  “Universe” has it right there in the word– Uni.  There can be only one.  What all it may include is a subject for further study and discovery, but there is only one.  Please.

Maybe this bugs me more than it should, but I don’t think so.  When it comes to cross-culture or cross-generational communication it is critically important.  Simple things like the meaning of “the People” and of “…shall not be infringed” have been under assault for example.  If we’re not constantly on our guard we lose our history.  When we lose our history we lose our culture and our freedom.

For the Sesame Street audience, “soap bubble” works OK, but surely there’s a better choice.  I’ll take it over “multiple universes” any day though, as the latter is a direct contradiction of terms, hanging right out there in your face.

Encarta offers this definition of the universe; “the totality of all matter and energy that exists in the vastness of space, whether known to human beings or not.”  Well there you have it, see?  You might want to alert the theoretical physicists and the astronomers you know.  That last clause is even better than I’d hoped.  I’d figured on something more like “everything that exists everywhere, period. No, really– everything. Seriously. Dude” but that definition has a bit of a problem built into it.  Ten points if you can describe it.

Cajun intelligence

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Via email from my sister-in-law (the one who isn’t a democrat):

Subject: Direct Quote from “Larry, the Cable Guy”

“Even after the Super Bowl victory of the New Orleans Saints, I have noticed a large number of people, implying with bad jokes, that Cajuns aren’t smart. I would like to state for the record that I disagree with that assessment. Anybody who would build a city 5 feet below sea level in a hurricane zone and fill it with Democrats who can’t swim is a damn genius”.

You should not depend on comedians for accuracy. They sometimes stretch or gloss over the the truth a little to make things funnier. In this case Larry, the Cable Guy is wrong. My sister-in-law should know better than to send me something like this. I’ve been to New Orleans and she knew this.

The elevation of New Orleans is not a constant -5’. It varies depending on the location from -6.5’ to +20’ relative to sea level.

The price of sex

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I found this rather interesting:

“The price of sex is about how much one party has to do in order to entice the other into being sexual,” said Kathleen Vohs, of the University of Minnesota, who has authored several papers on “sexual economics.” “It might mean buying her a drink or an engagement ring. These behaviors vary in how costly they are to the man, and that is how we quantify the price of sex.”

By boiling dating down to an economic model, researchers have found that men are literally getting lots of bang for their buck. Women, meanwhile, are getting very little tat for their . . . well, you get the idea.

Sex is so cheap that researchers found a full 30% of young men’s sexual relationships involve no romance at all — no wooing, dating, goofy text messaging. Nothing. Just sex.

…

“Every sex act is part of a ‘pricing’ of sex for subsequent relationships,” Regnerus said. “If sex has been very easy to get for a particular young man for many years and over the course of multiple relationships, what would eventually prompt him to pay a lot for it in the future — that is, committing to marry?”

Did you answer, “Love”? You’re adorable.

With reliable birth control, lower social sigma, and less economic dependency the cost of sex to women has lowered and they are able to lower their “price”. The Internet makes “shopping” for availability, “quality” and “price” much easier for males. Hence the competition among “sellers” has increased and the price has dropped. There are some women that are even competing over sexual access to men. In essence some women are “paying” some men instead of the reverse.

One would then think that the price for two wives or at least a wife and a girlfriend should now be low enough that I might be able to afford it. But the last time I checked with Barb she assured me that was not the case. It is kind of hard to understand her when she is growling like that but I think she said she would have to sell all my organs to pay off the debt incurred.

Style Thwarting Function

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It used to be that your car’s horn control was a 360 degree, or near 360 degree chrome-plated metal ring.  It didn’t take much time or effort to find it when you needed it.  My Ford pickup has two horn buttons– tiny rectangular surfaces in the wheel spokes that are stylistically flush-mounted, much like the controls on an iPod.  Just as the iPod looks cool but can’t be very well controlled by touch due to the carefully flush-mounted buttons, so too the horn buttons for my pickup are designed as if to challenge the driver’s muscle memory and pin-point precision in a desperate situation.

Driving home in the dark last night I noticed a car in front of me swerve into the on-coming lane.  “Idiot” I thought, “probably texting or something…WHOA!”  After driving this pickup for many years, I am now able to stab the horn button in about a tenth of a second.  I am proud of that fact.  It has taken all those years practicing with the same rig to learn to do it.  Of course I wore out one engine at around a quarter million miles, and am well into wearing out the second.  I figure that by the time most people learn to find the horn button in the dark in a panic, they’ve already trashed the vehicle and are on to the next one, having then to start all over with the process of learning to find the horn button in the dark in a panic.

There was a deer, hell bent on crossing the highway ten feet in front of me while I was doing 60 MPH.  Stupid animals.  I’ve found that the white-tailed deer responds very well to short horn blasts, at around 3 to 4 per second.  It mimics the universal alarm sound in the animal world.  A full sized pickup whooshing along at 60 MPH doesn’t give them pause, but that horn will send them into hysterics and they’ll stop whatever they’re doing.  You should have seen the look on that deer’s face.  It looked as though it had been lassoed and yanked backwards, eyeballs bugging out, which is much preferable to having it crawl through my radiator and into the front of my engine at 60 MPH.  Sometimes if the car in front of you swerves, there is a good reason.

My next thought was to look in the rear view mirror.  No traffic.  If I’d hit the deer, at least I could have had time to heave it into the pickup bed without encountering any traffic in my lane.  If you’re going to have your radiator destroyed, at least there could be some compensation in your freezer the following week.  And yes; I can drive without a radiator (or a water pump, or an accessory belt).  Can’t you?  You go until the engine temp red-lines, then you stop and wait for it to cool down.  Restart, repeat as necessary.  I’ve had to do that on two or three occasions, for different reasons.  Drag racers don’t have trivialities like a cooling system and they do just fine.

But enough with the flush-mounted controls, OK?  Engineers; can we agree it’s a dumb idea?

Quote of the day—Kelsey Leal

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I come from a family of liberals. We believe that people that don’t work should live better lives than those that do.

Kelsey Leal
October 3, 2011
[Kelsey is my soon to be daughter-in-law.

This was in response to me giving her a bit of a hard time about not even recognizing the name of the Cato Institute. When I explained it was a Libertarian think tank part of her response was the quote above. It achieve the desired results. I was speechless.

She says she was joking—mostly.—Joe]

Pack a sidearm

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Via email from Jonathan H.

One of my Idaho Outfitter friends hunted a group of out-of-state elk archery hunters from the Great Lakes region  last week and they called in a pack of 17 wolves by cow calling. None of the hunters had a sidearm or wolf tag and it was a very traumatic experience as the wolves surrounded the hunters!   All hunters went home early very disturbed claiming these wolves are very different from the Great Lakes wolves as they claimed these Idaho wolves actually “Hunt” you and were not afraid!

Note she is wearing gloves!  We saw almost no gloves 2 years ago!

Archers please pack a sidearm where legal!

—–

This wolf came running toward Rene last night to attack her. She had to drop her bow & pull her pistol.  She shot it in the head about 10 feet from her.  She had to shoot it a couple more times to actually kill it.  CRAZY!  This – not even a week after Shane’s dogs were killed by wolves.

WolfTakenByArcherWithPistol

It’s not just archers that should carry a sidearm. Wife Barbara saw one while taking pictures near the Selway river last year.

Time for Change in which You Can Believe

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…and better grammar.  I can say that I’m college educated, but barely.  I can however recognize that words mean things.  I’ve learned orders of magnitude more about language and writing from reading things outside of academe than inside, yet I can’t claim to be literate in the way that a person considered literate in 1900 would be literate.

The use of the double “is” has become a disease, and has infected all parts of society.  I wonder if the CDC has been looking into it, but then I realize that their job is to get money.  The double “is” has become so common that it now has its own contraction among the smart people– “The thing is’s…that…the sky is blue.”  That’s three applications of “is” when one would have done better, yet we have people with advanced degrees, those with careers in journalism, and holders of public office saying crap like that.  I wonder when journalists and commentators will start typing “is’s”.  I suppose it’ll be a while before Bill Gates puts “is’s” into the word processor spelling dictionaries, and I figure most journalists haven’t figured out how to put it in themselves, so we may overcome this virus without “is’s” becoming “proper English”.  It could just as well be, “The thing is; the sky is blue” but even that is silly.  How about, “The sky is blue”?  It takes less energy, it actually means something, it requires thinking for a millisecond or two before you speak, and I won’t walk away thinking you beneath my 1.5 years of trade school.

Still I see horrible misuse of the language.  We can stop, right here and now, using the term “liberal” to describe an ideology that isn’t.  Really.  It isn’t difficult.  Other people may misuse and torture the language, but you aren’t held to their standards.  I’m a liberal.  I can say it and mean it without permission from those incapable of telling the truth.  Referring to a statist/socialist as “liberal” is to embrace a lie.  We can stop that right now.  These things matter.  You’ll find yourself thinking more clearly, with only a few little adjustments like that.  It is a Change in which You Can Believe.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going home, hopeful that I might have gay intercourse over the dinner table with my family.  I might pick up some faggots along the way though.  See?  Things that were written not long ago (as recent as my grandparents’ time) have had their meanings corroded.  Our Constitution is one of them.

Odd stuff

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I was going through my projects folder on my computer and saw a number of projects I didn’t recognize.  Looking at the code they were clearly my coding and comment style but I still didn’t remember many of them. Most were junk projects that appeared to be something that solved, or would have solved had they been finished, some simple problem.

There were projects like “NetConnect” which apparently was intended to pop up a dialog box of the machines visible on the network and handle assigning a drive letter to their public shares. Another project was “Wait” which wouldn’t compile because the requested version of Windows was so old. “SurveyProcess” appears to be for processing the Boomershoot participant survey results from 2006.

But the oddest project I found was “UniDecrypt”. I appears to be something to test the feasibility of a “universal decryption algorithm”. It is junk code. Something very “quick and dirty” that I apparently started working on at about midnight in late November of 2006. The time stamps of the various files continue through a little after 8:00 AM and then the last timestamp being about 1:30 AM the following day. This project probably was something that woke me up in the middle of the night and I couldn’t go back to sleep after thinking about it. That happens every once in a while. I once woke up in the wee hours of the morning and had to go find my “Modern Physics” text book (is it still considered “Modern Physics” if I took the class in 1976?) to look up why it was I had not thought up a way to travel faster than light.

Yeah, my brain is a little warped at times.

Woolrich Elite Series supports Project Valour-IT

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One of the sponsors of the Gun Blogger Rendezvous was Woolrich. They are a long time clothing manufacturer that has recognized concealed carry clothing as a worthy marketing niche. They donated a “Elite for a Year” package to the Gun Blogger Rendezvous prize table. Ry won the raffle for that prize but you don’t have to be left out. I received an email announcing:

Woolrich Elite Series wants to give readers of Rendezvous bloggers a chance to help out Soldiers’ Angels – Project VALOUR-IT.

Through a partnership with one of their dealers, Woolrich Elite has created a private shopping page where fans can purchase the latest Woolrich Elite Series gear. Woolrich Elite will then donate 2% of the total sales back to Project VALOUR-IT!

“From the beginning, Woolrich has supported American servicemen and women. We’re proud to support the outstanding work of Soldiers’ Angels and their Project VALOUR-IT,” said Jerry Rinder, Woolrich Elite Series vice president.

Visit http://tacticalgear.com/woolrich-elite-clothing to see the complete selection of Woolrich Elite Series products and make your purchases to help Soldiers’ Angels.

My birthday is coming up. I wear 34×34 pants and large shirts. You can have gifts drop shipped to my address here.

Living With Sclerosis

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In this case, the sclerosis of the USPS.  My wife thought I’d taken care of it, and I thought she’d taken care of it, so neither of us took care of it and our P.O. box rental lapsed.  “No problem” says the postmaster to my son on Friday, “you can still renew it on-line by the end of day Saturday.”

After much searching I find the PO boxes link in that grey fine print at the bottom of the page.  Then I have to create an account.  Funny – I’ve never run into this hurdle before, “profanity in the password. please choose another password”.  I always figured no one would ever see your password, so why the hissy fit?

After much fussing around, I finally get to enter my particulars.  “Street Address”  That’s an easy one.  It’s been the same for decades.  As far as I know it’s been the same since the house was built, more than 100 years ago.  “Invalid Address.  Please select from the the alternatives below.”  There were none, so I click through and this time it accepts it.  Next is “Post Office Box Number”.  So I enter that along with my zop code.  That box number with that zip code has only existed since that post office was built, sometime in the mid 20th century, so I can understand how they might not have gotten it entered into their database yet.  So it comes up “invalid Post office box”.  I quit.  I did get a nice e-mail notice this morning though, thanking me for setting up an account.  It listed four or five things that were really super great about having an account with them, one of which was “manage or renew a post office box”.  Super.

So I went in to the post office this morning, saying I’d tried the on-line thing and failed, explaining in detail.  “Oh, No!” the flabby man behind the counter says, “you should have entered your PO box number, not your street address…”
“It asked for the street” and I spell it out for him “Ess Tee Awr Eee Eee Tee, Street Address.” He ignores that. “So what can I do”  Now this is the Monday after the Saturday that was our last day to renew.
“I have to change the lock, and you’ll have to pay the fee. How many of the new keys do you want?”
“I’d rather keep the same keys if it’s all the same to you. Charge me the fee and you can avoid the absurdity of changing the lock” Well that put him all in a pother.
“I’ll have to fool the computer….” and he pittered and pattered around the office for a bit, printed something off, cussed, threw it away, printed something off again, I wrote the check, thanked him, and was on my way.

All I could think of after that ordeal was the old saying among business owners everywhere; “If they ran a business like that, they’d be bankrupt.”  Oh wait.

It also reminds me of Douglas Adams’ Vogons, or of Ayn Rand’s description of the Soviet Union as a “morbid absurdity”.

Agreement with Dr. Joe’s Cure for Everything

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Barb received an email the other day from our friend Michelle. She has started a blog, Sex, Lies, and Sensibility. Her first post essentially says, “Dr. Joe is correct.”

Off work for weeks

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Yesterday Barb visited the doctor for a follow up after breaking her ankle/leg last week. They found a tibia fracture as well as the known fibula fracture and the damaged ligaments. She is not supposed to put weight on her leg for another six weeks and it may be 12 weeks before she can walk normally again. Being a physical therapist this means she will be off work for many weeks. Physical therapists do not have desk jobs.

It’s a good thing that she has something like 300 hours of sick leave available as well as disability insurance.

One might think of this as a paid vacation but vacations for her usually involve lots of travel, restaurants, and walking. In this case she can’t do much but hang around the Clock Tower and wait for me to come home. She is mostly stuck eating my cooking too. I’ll bet work never looked so good to her before.

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It must be a conspiracy

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I don’t know who said it first but the phrase “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action” appears to be very popular. I’m sure that test provides accurate results in the vast majority of circumstances. But consider the following.

On our fifth year wedding anniversary we were broke. We had just barely qualified for the loan on our first home with both Barb and I working. We didn’t tell them that in three months Barb would quit her job to go enter physical therapy school. After two plus years (including her non paid “affiliations” with various medical facilities) of Barb being in school we didn’t have any money plus she was busy finishing things up. We didn’t have the time or the money to do anything special for that anniversary.

On our ten year anniversary daughter Kim was just one month old and we thought we could take her to a movie with us. She should sleep in the dark, right? Wrong. We didn’t get to see more than 30 minutes of it before Kim made it very clear that she needed our attention and the movie did not.

On our fifteenth anniversary Symantec had just purchased Zortech (who I worked for). They had a big meeting in their Boston office that everyone had to attend. Barb celebrated with her mom and the kids at Pizza Hut in Sandpoint Idaho. I “celebrated” with Symantec who told us how badly we were going to get screwed over (the person who received several million dollars in the purchase didn’t see what the problem was, those of us who had no job and found out they weren’t going to honor our contracts were rather pissed).

On our twenty anniversary we had a nice vacation planned in California and along the Oregon coast with Barb’s sister Susan. On our actually anniversary day we were supposed to leave the kids with Susan and Bob while we went off by ourselves for the evening. On the way from Idaho to California the van broke down in a little town in Oregon. We had to leave it there and we continued on with a rental that was too small for our family of five plus all the luggage for two weeks. On the actual day of our anniversary as we were traveling up the coast of Oregon, I drove a total of twelve hours to take the rental car back and return with our repaired van. Barb spent the day with five kids and sister Susan at a motel. I got back to the motel late at night and very tired.

On our twenty fifth anniversary I was unemployed during the dot com bust of 2001. At that time, we were taking turns choosing and making all the arrangements for our anniversary. With money tight we couldn’t go someplace far away and exotic like Bob and Sue who went to Hawaii or Barb’s brother Dow and his wife Katie who went to Ireland for their anniversary. I found a motel near Lake Coeur d’Alene which was about a 90-minute drive from our home in Moscow Idaho. It wasn’t the same name, but it was in about the right spot for the same place we had spent our honeymoon. They had recently remodeled, and their rooms had different themes. I chose the “Hawaiian Room”. It turned out it was the same motel. Our room had plastic vines, “jungle” wallpaper, funny carpet, and a hot tub decorated to look sort of like a pool in the middle of a jungle. Barb still laughs about that room.

On our thirtieth anniversary we went to Missouri. Barb mostly did genealogy stuff. We celebrated five days early with Dave and his family with a crab dinner and fireworks. The day of our anniversary I was traveling back to the Seattle area to go to work the next day while Barb stayed in Moscow to work. Actually, that was a pretty fair outcome. Perhaps we had broken the pattern!

Our thirty fifth anniversary was today. We planned to go to Mount. St. Helens for the day, spend the night in a nice motel and do lots of hiking. Yesterday morning as Barb was walking to the bus stop with me, she stepped on a rock, twisted her ankle we both heard a loud, “Pop”. She limped back to the Clock Tower by herself as I went on to work. Today instead of going hiking we spent it in Emergency Room at the hospital she worked at 20+ years ago. She has a small fracture of her fibula:

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IMG_6322FractureShownWebIMG_6350

According to the rule it must be enemy action or a conspiracy of some sort. Barb says she is afraid of what might happen on our fortieth. I asked if that meant she wanted a divorce.

Casting for New TV Show about Disaster Survival

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I can sort of figure out why this email was sent to me. But I’m not the person they are looking for:

Hello,

I’m currently casting for a pilot television show about preppers/survivalists. I think you may be a great resource for finding well prepared people, who would be open to appearing on camera. I’m wondering if you would be willing to post this info on your blog or website, or just pass this info along to anyone you think would be interested.

The gist:
It’s a 30 minute show, and we will feature two stories. We are mostly interested in seeing what the person has prepared or prepped, and right now we’re specifically looking for someone with a stocked bunker or extensive prep. The idea is to meet the person and see what they’ve prepared, then bring in a survivalist expert to evaluate how long you could actually live for if a catastrophe were to happen.

The purpose of the show is not to exploit beliefs, we actually want to cast people who the viewers will be able to relate to. We also want to feature someone who has prepped extensively, either in the home, or in a bunker. We really want something visually stunning.

This has been extremely hard to cast because of the secretive nature of the people who are preparing–which is completely understandable. I am contacting you because I think it’s important to get the word out about survivalists/preppers–that they aren’t all crazy people, that most of them are smart, well-informed people who we could take a lesson from. And I am hoping you will be able to pass this info along if you know someone who may be interested in participating.

We can provide full anonymity, and compensation is $1000 for the person who is chosen.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thank you for your time!

Michelle Reindal | producer | screaming flea productions |  mreindal AT sfpseattle.com

It’s not that I can’t keep the crazy away long enough or that I couldn’t pass for smart and or well-informed if I really wanted to. It’s that I finished my prep when I left the farm 35 years ago and then I moved out of my bunker and took up residence in the Clock Tower just last month.

Too bad

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Information Week says Windows Phone is likely headed for extinction:

Microsoft’s share of the smartphone market is plummeting at an alarming rate–so much so that the company’s last ditch effort to make an impact in mobility, Windows Phone 7, may be irrelevant by the time it manages to ship the much-anticipated Mango update and realize its partnership with Nokia later this year.

…

Mango’s debut should also coincide with the arrival of the first Nokia phones running Windows Phone 7, though Microsoft has yet to provide precise arrival dates for Mango or Nokia phones. Under a partnership announced last year, the Finnish phone maker is transitioning its entire smartphone line to Microsoft’s mobile OS.

Whether Windows Phone 7 is a legitimate player in the market by the time that happens remains to be seen. The current numbers suggest otherwise.

I was very proud of both my contribution and of the final product. I can’t speak for the iPhone but I have played with the Android enough to be convinced the Windows Phone has a better user interface. Barb has always said she didn’t want a fancy phone. She just wanted something really simple. I knew she wasn’t going to be very pleased when I got her one for Christmas. I was pretty sure she would eventually be happy with it but I had to get her something else to go with it or else I would be in trouble so I got her a Jeep. Now she loves the phone and she came up to speed on it really fast.

I now sometimes get a dozen or more text messages a day from her. With her previous phones the kids and I could sometimes get her to read text messages but sending them was exceedingly rare and usually accompanied with a bad mood. Now she even Tweets from her Windows Phone 7.

As I was leaving Microsoft in the middle of May I had some people inside and outside of Windows Phone who were in much better “positions to know” than I was tell me, “You are doing the right thing.” A lot of this was based upon the market acceptance of Windows Phone 7 as well as the crappy manager I had.

Microsoft might still pull it out but there are a lot of outside influences that Microsoft just doesn’t have that much control over like the number of external developers who support Windows Phone. And the carriers who might wonder why they are putting effort into supporting a smart phone with such a small percentage of the market.

It’s too bad. I think it’s a great phone and I’m look forward to the Mango update.

Monster Hunter books

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I have finished Monster Hunter International and Monster Hunter Vendetta. I now have Monster Hunter Alpha on my Zune ready for my Monday morning commute. I’m really looking forward to it.

Son James thought there was a bit too much gun porn in MHI but since a lot of it was about STI handguns and Saiga shotguns (which I have) I found it well within tolerable limits.

Dolly Sewell (“War Horse”)

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While visiting with my parents yesterday my dad told a story. I had heard it many times while growing up but had forgotten about it until he told it again. There were some additional details I noticed this time which I hadn’t put in proper perspective before.

The story, from about 75 years ago is about two students in Dad’s class at the Teakean grade school. It happened about 1936 when Dad was in the 6th or 7th grade. I decided to post it here so it would have a better chance of being remembered and some other people might appreciate it.

There were only about 10 kids in all eight grades so there was no hiding in the crowd or any hope of not being identified if you pulled off a prank in public.

A girl in the grade ahead of Dad was named Dolly Sewell. At age 13 or 14 she had hit her growth spurt and was taller than any kid in the entire school. She could also run far faster than anyone else. In any foot races she out distanced by a large margin the next fastest runner. Another student was Leon Coe. He was a little bit of troublemaker and, as boys of that age are prone to, liked to tease the girls. Because of Dolly’s height and running abilities Leon started calling Dolly “War Horse”. This was not a reflection on her general appearances as she was really a very nice-looking girl. But Leon should have thought things through a little better before he decided to push things a little too far with someone he knew was his physical superior.

One day at recess Dolly and some of the other girls were playing jump rope. I was just an old length of rope they found. Nothing special but it worked. Leon started daring Dad and some of the other boys to grab the rope and take it away from the girls. No one would take him up on his dare and finally he said, “If none of you guys are brave enough, I’ll show you how it’s done.” He then ran over, grabbed the rope and took off back to his buddies who were watching. Dolly took off after him and he tossed the rope on top of the roof as he went by. There was a ladder leaning up against the building and Dolly used the ladder to recover the rope.

As Dolly came down off the ladder, she spotted Leon and Dad told Leon that he better get out of there. Leon took off running as fast as he could and Dolly, rope in hand, took off after him. Even though they were not supposed to leave the property of the school Leon took off through the gate. Dolly followed him and easily caught up. She didn’t try to knock him down but instead trotted along behind and used the rope as bull whip and repeatedly smacked him on the rear side as Leon tried in vain to escape. They were just disappearing over the top of the second hill when the bell ran and the rest of the kids went back to class.

A few minutes later Dolly came back and sat down in her seat looking cool, calm, and collected. Leon came back several minutes after Dolly all sweaty, very bedraggled, and presumably wiser.

Dad saw Dolly a few years ago at the Old Timers Picnic at the Teakean Grange Hall. She had apparently done quite well. She and her husband lived someplace in California and had flown their own airplane up from California to attend the picnic. Dad asked what sort of business they were in and got a somewhat minimalist response of “the hamburger business”.

Dolly died last year and is buried near her parents in the Teakean cemetery.

What I hadn’t noticed before was that Dolly’s last name was Sewell. Barbara and I had a classmate when we went to High School in Orofino by the name of Nancy Sewell. Nancy’s parents were very good friends with Barb’s parents so when I got home I asked Barbara what Nancy’s father name was. It was Jim. So I then called up Dad and asked him what the names of Dolly’s brothers were. Dad said her siblings were named and were born in this approximate order: Ida, Lora (both missionaries) , Wally, Dolly, Elmer (who later drove the truck which pulled my Great Uncle Walt’s mobile home from Lewiston where he bought it to the farm where he lived for several years), Walter, and Johnny (who was a car salesman in Orofino for several years). Her parents were Charlie and Alice Sewell. They only lived there for a couple years but had a home on the east side of Meridian Road just north of the turn in for the shooting line at Boomershoot.

They may not be related at all but at best it appears that the father of our classmate Nancy was a cousin of Sewell family Dad knew. If someone stumbles across this and knows the answer I would appreciate hearing about it.

Steve Lacy is dead

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Via Peter N. Biddle I discovered a former co-worker of mine, Steve Lacy, was killed in a car accident on Sunday:

A volatile mix of speed, alcohol and road rage claimed the life of an innocent victim Sunday who happened to be driving in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Washington State Patrol says the incident began at about 2 p.m. when a man driving a black Hyundai SUV was involved in a road rage incident on Interstate 405.

Witnesses told troopers the Hyundai driver began following a driver who he believed had cut him off as he headed south down the freeway.

As the Hyundai driver took the Northeast 85th Street off-ramp, he was speeding and lost control, flying across the eastbound lanes of Northeast 85th into the westbound traffic.

At that point, the Hyundai slammed into a gray BMW that was heading west on 85th Street and had not been involved in the earlier road rage incident.

The impact killed the driver of the BMW. He was identified as Steve Lacey, a software engineer at Google and father of two young children.

I have driven on both that freeway and that street countless time. I’ve even walked up and down that street more times than I can count. Sometimes there just isn’t anything you can do about it when death comes calling.

It was this Steve that I blogged about a few years ago.

Steve came to the U.S. from the U.K. when Microsoft purchased the company he worked for. This company had a 3-D graphics rendering package. Steve wrote a lot of the code that is now known as Direct-X 3D. Every time you play a video game on a Windows machine that does 3-D rendering you are executing code that Steve wrote. The world is a poorer place now not only because of the contributions he would have continued to make but because he was also a really nice guy.

Long day, sort of

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Barb and I got up at about 2:30 AM this morning. Daughter Xenia and her husband needed a ride to the airport.

We helped them get through the check in line and started through TSA and then left. We were sad because daughter Xenia is now living over 2000 miles away. It’s the furthest any of our kids have moved away from home. We then came back to my bunker and went back to sleep.

We ended up spending the entire day in bed watching videos (“Night and Day” followed by 12 episodes of “In Plain Sight”). We only got up for bathroom breaks and to get a little bit of food.

It probably wasn’t the best treatment for mild depression. Exercise probably would have been better but it’s what we felt like doing.

Quote of the day—Giovanni Bisignani

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Today’s checkpoint was designed four decades ago to stop hijackers carrying metal weapons. We need a process that responds to today’s threat. It must amalgamate intelligence based on passenger information and new technology. That means moving from a system that looks for bad objects, to one that can find bad people.

Giovanni Bisignani
June 15, 2011
The future of airport security?
[Today daughter Xenia and her army husband went through TSA on their way to Alaska. One of his checked “bags” (a large plastic “tote”) had the locks broken so TSA could search the contents. He was also singled out for special attention. He opted for the “feel me up” search rather than the “naked body scan”.

The U.S. government trusts him to fight terrorists in the sandbox using some very expensive equipment and with the lives of the men under him and around him but they have to feel him up before he can fly on a commercial flight with his wife and her cat?

I think I know where to find the “bad people”.—Joe]