David Ernst Chats with the World

I always feel bad complaining about feeling busy when much of what’s making me busy is fun. So, I won’t complain, but I have been busy for the past month and a half or more. From doing a lot of coordination of the Sugar Hill contradance weekend to attending two separate weddings on the west coast, every weekend seems to have something scheduled. And every busy weekend means time that I can’t keep up with my normal personal chores. And every day off work seems to result in a clump of emails demanding attention. Next thing you know, I’m feeling scattered, even though there’s plenty of rest and relaxation going on in my life.

Saturday I spent hours taming my inbox. As I discussed last November, I like to have 38 or fewer emails in my inbox at any given moment (because I can fit 37 on one screen), especially at the end of a work day. I marveled then at what an impact the out of control inbox seems to have on my psyche, and the marveling continues. And, when I feel scattered, I never feel like I have time to write to my blog.

This got me thinking: I could develop a Scattered-David index… something like the Index of Leading Economic Indicators, that takes things like how many emails are in my inbox, how long its been since I wrote to my blog, maybe somehow it could track my purchases of plane tickets…. anyway, take raw data like that and compute some “Scattered-David index” that would give friends and family some sense of what’s going on with me when I’m feeling to scattered to post to the blog or what have you. The essential thing would be that it’d have to work without me doing ANYTHING, so I’d have to write a program to see how many messages were in my inbox and stuff, and have these programs run automatically every day or whatever. Once I had the number I could do things like show graphs and stuff.

Fun to think about. If I felt like I had more time to play with things like that, I’d probably give it a try. But, hey, I have to get a lot of work done this week before leaving next weekend for Boston for yet another wedding. I’m hoping things will be pretty calm between my return from that and Thanksgiving. Maybe I’ll even renew my efforts to blog more often. But meanwhile, at least my responsibilities are mostly fun and rewarding!

Well, it took a couple of weeks of waiting, but this morning the people are here to remove this tree. My parents discovered that it was dead when they were here at the beginning of August. When the guy came to give an estimate, he immediately identified the type of tree, said that it was a native tree and as such “volunteered” itself quite simply. But he said that this species also lived for a while and then died. So, there ya go. It’s all part of life…

They’ve got a very impressive wood chipper. Remarkable to see the tree disappear almost as soon as it hits the ground.

WFIU Produces a somewhat silly radio short called A Moment of Science. Silly though it may be, they’ve had quite a few shows that gave me a valuable bit of scientific knowledge. And a couple of times they’ve offered expert concurrence with theories that I’ve developed on my own. Last year they confirmed that fruit flies don’t really like fruit. And now, about walking…

For several years, I’ve asked people to “rank the following in order of comfort: standing still, walking, sitting”. You might take a moment and come up with your own answer if I haven’t already asked you…. Well, the striking result is: I can’t remember a single person who didn’t rank walking as more comfortable than standing still. I started asking the question because I realized that this was the case for me. Nearly everyone seems to agree, when they stop to think about it.

A Moment of Science says that this is because it lets points on your feet “take turns” bearing the pressure of your weight, (each resting when it’s not its turn) and because it circulates blood in your feet better.

So, now if anyone ever tells me they think standing still is more comfortable for them, I can tell them that they are wrong! :)

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!

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…)

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 Qur’ān 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.

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. :)

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!

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…

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!