David Ernst chats with the World

Wednesday, 2007-08-08

On work and heat

Filed under: journalism — David @ 5:59 pm

Outdoor on the left, Indoor on the right I don’t have air conditioning. I’m not a big fan of AC, and it’s expensive and uses a great deal of energy. But it does get hot in the summers here in Indiana. For years I’ve done just fine with the heat, but I always knew I was cheating a bit because my workplaces were all air conditioned, so during the worst heat of the day I was in cool comfort.

Well, now that I work at home, that equation changes. I’ve been musing all summer about how I would deal with the bad heat if/when it comes. Up until this week, nothing was a big deal. I never felt challenged. Simple use of window fans kept things quite comfortable, especially for the casual attire that is appropriate in no workplace other than the home workplace.

But, I knew it would get more difficult, and this week is presenting the first challenge. So far, so good. I got a lot of work done today without feeling very uncomfortable at any point. But I’m using just about every trick I can think of:

I have a couple of indoor/outdoor thermometers, and although their accuracy is questionable I still base my approach on the simple question: is it warmer inside or outside?
At night when it’s cooler outside, I run my exhaust fan with doors configured so that only my main living area gets the benefit.
Once it gets warmer outside in the morning, I close all the windows and doors. I keep fans running inside for the evaporative effect, but no fresh air until evening.

So, no magic there, not even anything very clever. And the result? Well it’s been relatively consistent that I can be ten degrees (F) cooler inside at the hottest point of the day outside (see thermometer above). What’s funny after that is that the temperature starts dropping outside, but inside continues to warm up (it’s still warmer outside, right?). So, the worst part of the day is actually the very early evening.

Perhaps more impressive than the 10 degree difference is the range… outside temperature range today was over 20 degrees (25 degrees by my thermometers), but my inside range was under ten degrees. So, the house definitely has a moderating effect. It’d be nicer if I succeeded at getting the overnight low inside. I’ll keep trying.

The last little behavior modification is taking showers late in the day… Nothing like a cold shower to help one feel cooler. And then, there’s the return of the “swimming pool”, which is what my friend Ann called her invention of leaving cold water in a bathtub for when she was ready to relax and cool off.

So, that’s it, I’m feeling good about it. Of course, my ace in the hole is that if it ever gets too much, I’ll just take my laptop to some air conditioned Wifi hot spot and work there. I figure there should be fewer than 10 Bad Heat Days(TM) per year. I’d say three so far. Stay tuned!

Comments (7)

Saturday, 2007-07-07

Joining In on the Kinship Conversation

Filed under: philosophizing — David @ 1:53 pm

On nerdmeyr.com, K wrote a very personal piece about her attitudes on marriage. This inspired a wave of comments on the blog, and a wave of thoughts in my own head. Like mph, I decided that it wouldn’t be right to fill so much space (disk space?) on their blog with all I wanted to say, so here it goes.

(more…)

Comments (7)

Friday, 2007-07-06

Amazon’s suggestor evangelizes?

Filed under: journalism — David @ 9:01 am

In my email this morning, from Amazon.com:

As someone who has purchased “The Road Less Traveled” or other books on religion and spirituality from Amazon.com, you might be interested to know about these new inspirational books…

Woah! I haven’t purchased “The Road Less Traveled”. I didn’t even know it was about religion at all. I have purchased several books about atheism and religion from the point of view of atheists. So apparently that put me in a category to receive notices about religious books. So I received this list of suggestions, which all sound pretty Protestant at first blush:

Faith and Inspiration
Transformation Journal
Writing Tides: Finding Grace and Growth Through Writing
Vessel of Peace: A Guide for Pilgrims of the Spirit
Film & Religion: An Introduction
A Doubter’s Guide to Heaven: Walking a Path from Doubt to Trust
The Eight Blessings: Rediscovering the Beatitudes
Strong Was Her Faith: Women of the New Testament
Soul Tending
Soul Shakers: Inspiring Stories from a Presidential Speechwriter

Of course I don’t really think that Amazon’s computers are trying to convert me, but the thought has to enter your mind when you order books about atheism and are told “you might also be interested in A Doubter’s Guide to Heaven: Walking a Path from Doubt to Trust“. Presumably people who ordered the Qurâ€™Än were put into the same “interested in books about religion” category, I could imagine some of them might be much more offended than I am (I mostly think it’s funny). If I were Amazon, I’d be a bit more careful about this.

Comments (3)

Sunday, 2007-07-01

The Vacation Post

Filed under: photo tours, what I did today — David @ 10:30 pm

Well Hi! How are you? Great, glad to hear it! Me?? Oh, great great! Yeah, vacation was great, thanks for asking!

Those of you who also read Priscilla’s Blog have already seen the link to all of our pictures. We edited out about half of them, but there are still over 300. But, we’ve got them neatly arranged by place we were at, at there’s thumbnails and everything, so you can actually scoot through them pretty quickly if you, like me, have limited patience for looking at huge collections of photos.

Or you can just get the highlights here! First, that map there shows basically where we went. We flew into Denver, so if you want to follow along on the map (just click it if you want to) start on that side. You can zoom in and see the path with enough detail that you can use your inate-to-humans “snap to road” ability and pretty much know exactly where we went. Or, like I say, you can just look at the whole thing, it gives a pretty darn good overview, just not as cool (read: geeky). (Thanks once again to the amazing Gmaps Pedometer for making such things possible). I’m not going to type a play-by-play of everything we did. But here’s a text overview, with quick reviews and links to photos:

Rocky Mountain National Park: We were more impressed than I expected us to be. If you go there, I highly recommend the Mill’s Lake Trail.
Snowy Range Road: We had a nice campground and a nice scenic drive, neither of which were in our original plans.
Grand Teton National Park: Amazing mountains, although not a lot of great trails or other things to do.
Yellowstone: Big and famous, but unlike anything else on Earth
Arches: From the mountains to the desert, and uncommonly beautiful desert at that
Canyonlands: It seems like it’s gotta be as big as the Grand Canyon. Probably not, but awe-inspiring and beautiful.
Manti-La Sal National Forest: Amazing campground on a mountain with amazing views of Canyonlands that sadly didn’t photograph very well.
Bryce: I can’t think of anything as closely linked to my sense of visual beauty as this park
Zion: Another home of yet another kind of rock formation. Also home to two unique hikes: Angel’s Landing and The Narrows.

In addition to all of those links to photos, I’ve also got just a couple of google map projections of GPS recordings of trails that we walked. My favorite is definitely this one of the Fiery Furnace in Arches. The rangers warned us that the GPS wouldn’t work in there, which was largely true… but apparently it got enough glimpses of GPS satellites to give a sense of where we went, although I bet a lot of these data points are pretty inaccurate. Still, despite its lack of precision, I love that aerial view of the furnace. And of course, you can zoom in and out and see the whole park from above, if you like.

I also have projections like this one of the Flattop Mountain Trail and the Mills Lake Trail (both in Rocky Mountain National Park) if you (like me) can’t get enough of this GPS/aerial photo stuff. (Thanks once again to GPS Visualizer for making this kind of thing so incredibly easy and so deeply satisfying). (Ok, and yes, thanks also to Google Maps. But unlike the other two things, everybody knows about Google…) Anyway, as I hope is evident, we saw some amazing natural wonders, and we also had a great time. If all of this isn’t enough detail for you, I’m sure you’ll have no trouble convincing either of us to talk and talk and talk about it, so don’t hesitate to ask — at least, not for OUR sake. :)

Comments (3)

Wednesday, 2007-05-30

Retiring an email address

Filed under: Uncategorized — David @ 7:55 am

As I prepare to leave on vacation tomorrow (more on that soon) I realize that over 90% of the spam I get in my inbox comes from my old HoosierNet email address, which is still forwarding to my new email account. In an effort to have fewer than 10,000 emails in my inbox (not an exaggeration) when I return, I’m retiring that old address. I suspect that I’ll wish I’d done it sooner.

If you want my new email address, please submit a comment to this post. I’ll reply to you, and then you’ll have it. Thanks!

Comments (8)

Sunday, 2007-05-13

Have water filters gone the way of printers?

Filed under: what I did today, journalism — David @ 2:15 pm

Pri and I are getting ready for our vacation (very exciting). Yesterday we went to Campmor.com to do see if there was any camping equipment we should get before we go. There was. But one thing I thought of was a new filter for my water filtration system. (The language is confusing… both the high-tech piece of paper and the thing you insert it into are commonly called “filter”. I’ll call the paper “the filter” and the rest of it “the system”.)

Well, from everything I can tell, they no longer manufacture filters that go into my system. Rendering it essentially useless. This is distressing, since I guess I’ll now just throw away this perfectly functional product. At first, though, I thought that it was also unfortunate that I’d need to buy a new system, rather than just the inexpensive filters.

Well, apparently they also no longer make inexpensive filters. Looking at water filters and systems at REI and at Campmor it seems that the systems now cost only slightly more than their filters. For instance, I ended up ordering the Katadyn Hiker for $50. It’s filter is apparently good for about 200 gallons. If I’m worried that that won’t be enough, I can buy a replacement “cartridge” for it for about $40.

It seems, then, that the same thing has happened to these backwoods products as what happened to InkJet printers: the price of the systems has come down, with the manufacturers hoping to make their money on selling the filters. My joke about printers is: “Don’t think of it as buying a printer, think of it as buying an inkjet cartidge subscription”. For me, in the case of the filters, I can’t imagine paying $40 for the filter when I could pay $50 for a whole new unit. But, whatever the case, it seems lame to me. Maybe I don’t understand the economics of it… it’s perfectly possible that the 0.2 micron filters are more expensive to manufacture than the totally macro plastic casing pumps. So, maybe it makes sense. But, I’m more inclined to go with the other idea. If so, they might be pushing it too far. My brand loyalty is not going to be very strong if I can switch to another system for only $10 more than staying with the one I’m buying.

Would love to hear more about this if anyone out there knows anything…

Comments (5)

Friday, 2007-05-11

technical difficulty…

Filed under: metablog — David @ 7:35 pm

When my folks visited a few weeks ago, my mom said that she hadn’t seen Episode Three of the Car: The Mini-Series. I was surprised, she’s usually one of my most loyal readers (Hi, mom!). But, just a timing thing, I figured.

Last night the same episode came up in a conversation with Priscilla, and she said she hadn’t seen it. We were both surprised, I think she was a bit embarrassed.

But today, she told me that she went specifically looking for it, and didn’t see it. This was really weird for me because it was right on my screen when I looked at my own blog. I was terribly confused, wondering if it was some Internet Explorer thing, but I didn’t see how that could be.

Well, no, it’s a WordPress thing. I had “Saved” but not “Published” the post, which is obviously my fault. But WordPress has the questionable feature of showing that post on my computer as if it were published! So… Ugh. Now a month old, the conclusion to the story is down below. Sorry for the technical difficulty, and thanks, Pri, for unearthing the problem!

Comments (3)

Tuesday, 2007-05-08

An uninspiring voting day

Filed under: Uncategorized — David @ 10:57 pm

Well, it was about 5pm, I was wrapping up work for the day, and the 5pm local news on the radio said “it’s been a slow day at the polls”. Polls?!? It’s voting day? Yup, primary day in Indiana, in my area, the only races are for city government. “OH, but the polls are open until 6pm! I can still make it!” So, off I went.

Wow, this was a new low, I’d say. No worry about a last minute rush, I was the only one there. And this wasn’t that upsetting to me once I saw that the ballot for the Democratic primary in my district had 0 (zero) contested races on it. I gather that some other districts had contested races but… yeah, nothing. The only decision to be made was whether or not to vote for the person who was going to win no matter what.

The most interesting thing about the day, actually, was that we’ve switched voting machines. Still with the same company, but much to my surprise, we’ve moved AWAY from paper-trail voting! It used to be that when we pressed the final button you could hear the printer printing the actual paper recountable ballot. This was on a nice, easy to use, electronic voting machine. Why did we change? I don’t like it.

Whatever the case, I’m still glad I voted. I’m pretty sure I haven’t missed an opportunity to vote since I became eligible. I certainly haven’t missed an opportunity to vote since I was registered to vote here in Bloomington. So, I’m glad I didn’t break the streak. Although, if I had to miss one, this would have been a good one to miss. yawn

Comments (5)

Monday, 2007-04-30

Supreme Court deals a blow to dumb patents

Filed under: journalism — David @ 8:48 pm

In another obvious example of people stealing ideas from my blog, the US Supreme Court today released a decision which says, in short, “a lot of patents these days are STUPID“. I heard it on NPR’s headlines at 6pm ET, but nothing more about it all evening (including on Marketplace, which I am taking as a signal that the opinion must have been released late in the day). Hopefully it’ll get more coverage tomorrow. Many of the articles I found about it were pretty lame, but I liked this one at Forbes and this one at the LA Times. I even indulged and went to the actual Court opinion which was actually pretty readable and contained a remarkable amount of information about the history of gas pedals.

Yes, gas pedals. The basic issue here was a gas pedal that can be positioned to suit the driver’s preference. But that’s not the patent. The pedal does not pull a cable that opens the throttle mechanically, but rather an electonic signal was sent to open the throttle. But that’s not the patent either. The patent concerned the placement of the sensor. Specifically, moving it from the footpad (as was already presented in a 1995 patent) to the arm of the pedal. One is tempted to think that I must just be misunderstanding, because surely a patent would not be issued for moving a sensor from one part of the pedal arm to another. But, this comment from Justice Stephen Breyer in November (during the arguments of the case) really makes me think I’ve got it correct:

Is the Teleflex invention like moving a garage door sensor from the lower hinge to an upper hinge?

Well, the court voted unanimously that this patent should be considered invalid. In fact, they ruled that the entire basis by which it was awarded was flawed. The opinion part of The Opinion begins as follows: “We begin by rejecting the rigid approach of the Court of Appeals.” The Court ruled that a test known as the “TSM test” was incorrectly being used as the One True Test of an invention’s obviousness. The Court’s ruling today saying that while the TSM test can be helpful, “[h]elpful insights […] need not become rigid and mandatory formulas.” The opinion is being read, then, as to call into question any patent that was awarded on a similar application of this test. The NPR snippet I heard claimed that the number of affected patents would be in the hundreds of thousands. I jumped up and down with glee when I heard that.

A few more choice quotes from the Opinion:

The question is not whether the combination was obvious to the patentee but whether the combination was obvious to a person with ordinary skill in the art. … [F]amiliar items may have obvious uses beyond their primary purposes, and in many cases a person of ordinary skill will be able to fit the teachings of multiple patents together like pieces of a puzzle. … A person of ordinary skill is also a person of ordinary creativity, not an automaton.

And finally, this summary

[T]he results of ordinary innovation are not the subject of exclusive rights under the patent laws. Were it otherwise patents might stifle, rather than promote, the progress of useful arts.

After that statement, The Opinion goes on to cite the exact same section of the US constitution that I cited in my last post on this blog! Those damn pirates on the Supreme Court have plagerized my intellectual property!!

Ok, to close more seriously: a saw a woman today wearing a T-shirt that said something like “The first thing we’d do is kill all of the lawyers.” Lawyers get blamed for much. Rich capitalists get blamed for much too. It’s obviously not the case that all lawyers and all rich people are pure good, and I’m not going to claim anything like that. But I think lawyers and rich people get blamed for lots of things that are really the problems of our laws. If we have laws that allow governmentally enforced monopolies to be granted for matters as simple as where on a pedal arm a sensor is placed, then the capitalists are going to try to get the monopolies and the lawyers are going to try to keep them safe. Now, other lawyers working for other capitalists will sometimes challenge those monopolies, and I’m thrilled with today’s news about such a case. But I can’t blame the lawyers or the capitalists for the fight. They are just doing what is natural in the face of bad intellectual property law. If the government didn’t issue these stupid patents in the first place, the capitalists and their lawyers wouldn’t look so stupid trying to uphold them. But of course, it’s much more fun to blame lawyers and rich people for our problems than to talk about copyright and patent law. Whatever the case, hopefully today’s ruling will knock some sense into the United States Patent and Trademark Office, or at least bolster the courage of private parties to refuse to pay royalties to holders of dumb patents.

Comments (4)

Wednesday, 2007-04-11

Tax Shelter Patents?!?

Filed under: journalism — David @ 6:44 pm

We all have our issues that we care about, I suppose. But I don’t know why more people aren’t up in arms with me about the United States’ ludicrous intellectual property laws. Well, Marketplace tonight slapped this thorn in my side with this story about patents that have been awarded for innovative ways to save on taxes. People who study the tax laws carefully enough to find loopholes to help their clients to pay less into the Federal Government’s coffers are then protected by that same Government by anyone who wants to do the same thing without paying the first person to do it. Or, the first person to successfully register a patent claim on it. Disgusting.

The Federal Government’s claim to legitimacy in protecting intellectual property is rooted in this clause from Article 1, section 8 of the constitution: “The Congress shall have power … [t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” I’d be willing to bet that throughout the history of our nation, no one has ever referred to tax experts as “authors” or “inventors” in natural conversation. More importantly, deciphering tax law is neither science nor useful art. I could go on and on. It’s just bad.

Really, I’m pretty much opposed to all business process patents. And all software patents. I’m skeptical of traditional patents for inventions of hardware, but they sure don’t offend me the same way. This is bad. There’s apparently some legislative effort to stop issuing such patents. I realize it may not be a matter of life and death for anyone, but when many people are offended by the mere fact of someone being rich, I think more attention is due to ways in which people get rich, especially when they rely on help from governments and curtail the freedom of others.

ugh

Comments (1)

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