Dan Rasmussen's personal blog

Today I awoke hours before I expected I would. Lying in bed, I thought over the possible reasons for it. Did I have to urinate that badly? Was yesterday's dinner of coffee and donut not sitting well? Was the hunger (which I definitely felt, even at that early hour) sufficient to shorten my slumber? Or perhaps God was calling me to go streaking. He works in mysterious ways, I hear.

As I lay in bed, not yet feeling the necessity to get out of it, I thought of science fiction scenarios I've read where people unexpectedly come out of hibernation. In my experience, they usually don't end well.

I started writing this a week ago, so if it feels stale, that is why. My next thought delivery will be fresh from the oven of my mind, or your money back.

I have been floating on air lately. Portland is a great place to be at the moment. The weather here is beautiful. The perfect temperature during the day, and just a little cooler at night. In Iowa I felt like a freak who had nothing in common with anybody. Portland is populous and liberal enough that I've made some friends based on shared interests. Not that I don't still feel like a freak sometimes.

I set a new personal record on Thursday. I covered about 34 miles (54 kilometers) on foot. You, the person reading my blog, are very nearly the first to learn of this. I went to a well-attended party on Friday and somehow managed to tell nobody. I was pleased by my ability to conceal this colossal human ambulatory distance coverage, tempted as I was to weave the detail into the conversation somehow. What would it have brought? How would I explain it? My internal PR team hadn't yet had time to spin it.

That team's been spinning for two days now, and found it necessary to create a new verb. The verb is "leg," and it means to cover a distance by foot. My jaunt wasn't a walk, though I did some walking. It wasn't a run, either, though I ran - for nearly half the distance! It also wasn't a limp, though I did a fair amount of limping.

I limped for nearly 10 miles, I figure. The second my halfway point came into view, everything hurt at once. Ridiculous! All in my head. It had to be. My feet were one of the things that hurt. My mini-backpack had been rubbing on my back for a number of miles already, I'm not including that. And there was one other thing, which I've already forgotten. "They" -- "science people" in this case -- say the brain quickly sheds the memory of physical pain. I can back that up.

One of my tactics for staying happy is to have low expectations for everything. On this particular day I forgot about that tactic. Maybe the burrito (lunch #1), or the arepa (lunch #2) elevated my happiness to the point where I no longer felt the need to employ stupid tactics. Anyways, I expected my halfway point to have running water and a bathroom, and it had neither.

Before leaving civilization, I'd chugged a disgusting amount of water, drinking until I felt sick. I then filled my water sack - maybe 3/4 a liter. I also brought a large bag containing peanuts, raisins, and strawberry-vanilla flavored granola. Shortly before the halfway point, I exhausted my water supply. I was beginning to tire of my snack mix as well, and was nearly half a marathon removed from the possibility of eating real food. I am getting bored of describing this, so I'll add a few details and call it good.
1) Those last 10 miles were very dark. I had no flashlight.
2) I'd disregarded the old Boy Scout rule of telling somebody where I'd be going, and when I'd be back. I didn't know the answer to either of those questions before I left home. And who would care?
3) The backpack left a rash, reminiscent me of that joke where your kidney count decreases.
4) Giant blisters, and toenails bloody from being jammed into the end of my shoe, are the only long-term effects of this run. There was very little stiffness or pain the next day.

Met some nice people at a birthday party. Got on with one couple in particular quite well. I made some jokes requiring a bit of background knowledge, and they were not only laughed at, but built upon. Sometimes one meets people whose conversational interests are on the same frequency. This amplifies the laughter and makes the silence awkward-er.

Lately I've enjoyed hanging out with "tech people" less and less. I keep going to gatherings of computer people, and leaving disappointed. People who describe themselves as "geeks" think they're smarter than everybody else. They like talking about gadgets. "It's so fast! It can (something they could easily do themselves if they had social skills, and weren't disinclined to leave their home or office)." Apple this, iPad that. Mostly they're unhealthy from a bad diet and lack of physical activity, have poor social skills, and think they'll make up for it by creating websites non-stop, or get rich through working for some startup. I would feel like a jerk pointing out that their startup will probably fail, and if it doesn't, that somebody else will be reaping most of the benefits, and that either way, they'll have created nothing of lasting value. If they like commuting and being stuck in a stupid office all day, who am I to stop them? Meanwhile, if you want me, I will be in the park.

The other week I went to a free workshop about "travel hacking." Hacking is a word that geeks combine with any other word to make it sound like what they're doing isn't lame. Some other ones are "hardware hacking," "body hacking," and "life hacking." I missed the first 20 minutes of the presentation, but presume they were spent discussing the same topic as the part I did see. That topic was airline loyalty cards. I recently watched the movie Up In The Air, and replaying some of its scenes in my mind made the situation initially tolerable, but it quickly got old, and nothing else was discussed. The thought of this whole crowd spending hours reading legalese on awful airline websites thinking they're "gaming the system" was merely depressing. This guy's whole speech, when you boil it down, amounts to him making the argument for coupon clipping. I don't mean to belittle coupon clippers per se, but question whether combing through fine print to save money is a good use of time. The presenter mentioned a man whose goal is to visit every country on earth. Why is that a goal people consider praiseworthy? Why not visit the native land (not necessarily a country) of every major world language? Why not visit every type of geographical region - desert, tundra, volcano, salt marsh, etc? A country is just a boundary within which people pay taxes to a specific regional body. This regional body often has a military, a flag, a sports team, airports, and something to stamp on your passport. This ambitious globe trotter is just another stamp collector, one whose actions create an extremely large carbon footprint. Maybe in our bleak climate change dystopia, his descendants will have the fortune to burn that expensive stamp collection for warmth.

Here's something not everybody seems to realize or appreciate: Twitter, and identi.ca (another "microblog" service, less commercialized, and free software) have 140 character limits. The 140 character barrier is well-known, even among people who don't tweet. Occasionally, as a tweeter might want to say something you believe ought to be re-tweeted. But: retweeting lengthens your original message! So if you want your WHOLE message to be retweeted, it has to be less than 140 characters. You have to do some math.
140 - (5+ # of letters in user name). So for me, that'd be 140 - 13 (from "RT @dhrasmus ")

Getting close to the limit? If you're sharing a link, time to learn about link shorteners. But if your whole tweet is only, a link, how about sharing the title? You can be even more useful by adding words such as "video" if it's a video, or "comic" is a comic. People who click unlabeled links come to immediately regret their choice 70% of the time, versus labeled links, in which only 40% of links are regretted. I made this statistic up, but please, be kind to people using mobile devices or slow computers. If you're sharing a link, give the reader some idea what it is.

This knowledge will bring you that much closer to the fame you deserve. Good luck!

People frequently ask what I'm up to. I'm often at a loss of words to explain. Sometimes this is because I can't remember. Other times I might engage in a bit of self-censoring (offline filter bubbles?) because I don't feel like explaining myself, or I'm pretty sure the person asking isn't interested. At a funeral a couple years ago, a distant relative asked "what I do." Upon finding out that I "wasn't working," she swiftly terminated our conversation.

I've seen this issue from the other side. This last Sunday, I spent part of the day in a park with a duo I'd just met. The woman was pleasant to talk with. The fellow, unfortunately, was a dud. I made several attempts to find out what he does with his time, what he's interested in or cares about, etc. All I managed to get out of him was that he used to do database work - a morsel that I didn't find at all interesting.

So instead of answering frankly when people inquire as to my personal goings-on, I've crafted a blog post. Here's what I did a few days ago.

I woke up around eight or so, sans alarm clock. I wake up when the cloud-filtered light streaming through the window tells me it's time. I don't have a "sleep schedule." There's a two-hour window within which I usually fall asleep, and I get out of bed seven or eight hours later.

On this particular day I had something to do. To help me get there on time, I went to a coffee shop I don't like. Given any coffee shop, I can find numerous things I don't like about it. This one has bad coffee, and is too loud. The proprietors clearly understand volume levels as a competition, and are not about to let their music lose out to human conversation. It was hard to tell where the human voices were coming from. Scanning the room, almost every table seemed to be harboring by a lone occupant staring into a screen of some sort, wires dangling from their ears. Given this environment, it was easy not to linger. I forced down my coffee — how is it possible to screw up French press coffee is beyond me -- and took off.

I've been in Portland long enough now that I can decently estimate how long it'll take to walk somewhere. My route was going to clock in around 90 minutes, and I wouldn't have to run. I had some podcasts to keep me company. After ambulating a while, it started to rain. Not a Midwest-style thunderstorm, just a steady drizzle. I was already in a good mood, and the weather only heightened my spirits. A few weeks ago I stopped carrying my umbrella, so I made a game of walking under tree cover. Northeast Portland, which I was walking through, is blessed with abundant impressive old trees. I enjoyed the fullness of color that comes when the sun is tucked behind a cloud.

At some point I became unsure of my location and made use of a skill few people apparently possess: finding the right person to ask for directions. In any given place, only a third of the people know their way around well enough to offer help. Typically, they know how they drove in, and how they'll drive out. Or here in Portland, they'll rattle off bus numbers! You won't catch me folding and unfolding a tattered map, nor looking to the internet for assistance. The woman standing outside the house with no apparent sense of purpose was all the help I needed.

I made it to North Portland with time to spare. Before long, I was standing on the roof of a multi-story building. I've been spending time with a non-profit group that wants to blanket the city with wireless internet coverage. I was on the roof not just for the fabulous view — though that would have been reason enough — but because a group member who knows what he's doing was there to check an antenna. I was there for the ride, and happily, I learned a few things.

It's probably not necessary to go into great detail about my lunch, but I can say I've been fully satisfied with all of the many food carts I've stopped at, and this large box of Thai-inspired food was no exception. It started raining again, harder this time. What to do? As it happens, I knew of a nearby coffee shop to wait it out. This one has great coffee, good music, and the New York Times. This was a Tuesday, the day the Science Times comes out. Possibly the best day to read the Times.

Whenever I read the Science Times, without fail, there is at least one story that fits into a certain category. I'll call this category: "Underestimation of Non-Humans." Now that I've told you, you will also notice. The story might be about a type of bird or fish, that flies or swims much further than previously thought. Or some animal has been observed engaging in a type of activity that has always been considered a human-only enterprise. Who are all these experts? Why do they not learn? I believe that other members of the animal kingdom have vastly more intelligence and abilities than we give them credit for. Every now and then one of them makes a show of something new, just to remind humans we're not so special. We carry on as usual and somehow never learn the lesson.

It stopped raining just before the cafe kicked everybody out. I wandered around the neighborhood until I found an agreeable place to hang out. A man who lived nearby was nervous about my proximity to his dwelling, and came out to talk. I was initially nervous. He talked at me for quite a while about an unpleasant experience our criminal justice system. Told me about why he started doing drugs, and how serving in the Korean War had affected him. Not for the better. Talked about how the government and legal system were just there to protect people who have money. He was clearly very angry about a lot, and it was refreshing to hear it. I think he's directed a much of it at the right people as well, if ineffectively. I'm surprised never come across people my own age talking like that. I suppose everybody is too well entertained.

On the way back home I stopped at another food cart. Mexican this time. A delicious taco and a tamale. I walked past a beautiful garden with a sign on the fence noting that it had once been a parking lot. Next door was a pleasant looking cafe. Many Portland venues that look like coffee shops also serve beer, and this was another one. I added this place to my mental spreadsheet of places to check out.

Certain parts of town typically feature a number of people sitting or standing on sidewalks or street corners not really doing anything. One such person commented to me how shocked he was that a guy riding past on an electric wheelchair had made it to such-and-such a place. I admitted I had no idea how far that was, and this man warned me not knowing my way around this area could lead to me getting robbed. In fact, said this man (for whom locomotion was clearly a challenge), he might do it himself!

I still had a ways to go. I walked along one of Portland's arterial streets, passing two Ethiopian restaurants (I've since eaten at both). I also saw something in a store window I was very surprised to see: a line of unicycles. I had my eyes on the wheel with the three foot diameter. 10pm, and the place was open. "Would you like to give it a try?" Riding a unicycle, I've been told, is a lot like riding a bicycle: one you learn, you never forget. It's been a good five or six years since the last time I'd ridden. I was able to ride it okay. Mounting the unicycle was a different matter, and came with a certain amount of embarrassment and pain. Was it worth it, just to ride up and down the block? Yes, yes it was.

This was just one day, and not necessarily a typical one. But anyways, hopefully that answers all your questions!

GPredict is a program that shows a map of the world and plots out where the International Space Station is. It also uses lots of terms I'm unfamiliar with. "TLE" was plastered everywhere. It's apparently "Target Location Error," the distance between the expected and actual location of an object.

I did not find this on GPredict's website, or even on the GPredict wiki: "This is the Gpredict wiki. We are not yet using it actively, but feel free to add content. If you want to talk first come to the mailing list."

Maybe more people would use the program if they could figure out how to use it. But until then, catch-22!

I spent too much time reading Wikipedia today. Here's a nice phrase I learned.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9

Hopefully it's clear which text here is mine and which is from the articles? Let me know if it's not.

Euphemisms!
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Category:Euphemisms
I quite like "Gone for a Burton" (a WWII phrase meaning "to die," also "gone missing" or "disappeared" Burton is/was a beer) and "Fuddle duddle" (look it up).
"Verschärfte Vernehmung" gets redirected to the English page for "Enhanced interrogation techniques," which I find odd.

It's important to listen to people who don't express themselves very well, but preferable to know how to do it right yourself. A "that doesn't sound right" alarm going off in my head lead to this website, containing the delightful phrase "BTQ Abuse."
What is "Begging the Question?", http://begthequestion.info/

Lifetimes of cryptographic hash functions, http://valerieaurora.org/hash.html
The chart at the bottom is great!

New York Times:
When Fashion Meets Fishing, the Feathers Fly
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/29/sports/when-fashion-meets-fishing-the-feathers-fly.html
“For someone to use them as a fashion statement is just sacrilegious,” said Bob Brown, 65, a fly fisherman who lives in an recreational vehicle parked in Kennebunk, Me. He said he had been tying flies for 50 years and this is the first time he had ever heard of a feather shortage.

On the Art of Puttering, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/25/opinion/25sat4.html
Short op ed. My favorite part:
As Robert Benchley once noted, “anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”

Utopia on the Hudson
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: “A father, maybe 60 years old, came up to me and said, ‘You know, I have a gay son, and I never really accepted him and I shouldn’t have needed you to tell me that it was O.K. to accept my own boy. But I did.’ ”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/29/opinion/29dowd.html

Extra Vitamins? A Great Idea, Except in Denmark
“It’s quite well documented that most vitamins are toxic, depending on the amount taken in”
“You won’t see a lack of vitamins in the Danes, and the opinion of researchers is that they do not need further fortification”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/17/world/europe/17copenhagen.html

Meatless Mondays Catch On, Even With Carnivores, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/17/us/17meatless.html

New York Public Library Buys Timothy Leary’s Papers
“I solved the secret of the universe last night, but this morning I forgot what it was.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/books/new-york-public-library-buys-timothy-learys-papers.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

Backward at the F.B.I., https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/opinion/19sun1.html
"Under the new rules, agents will be allowed to search databases without making a record about it. Once an assessment has started, agents will be permitted to conduct lie detector tests and search people’s trash as part of evaluating a potential informant. No factual basis for suspecting them of wrongdoing will be necessary."

about to head over to freegeek.org for another volunteer shift. coffeeing up in the neighborhood. beautiful weather in portland, almost a shame to spend any of it indoors.

watched the movie "psycho" last night, a film i had never seen in its entirety. the soundtrack was brilliant. it could have made "toy story" horrifying. the theater a few blocks from where i'm staying shows classic films, one every week i think.

on leaving the theater, i walked past a pair of young women. the only part of their conversation i overheard was "the thing about apple is, i know they make a superior product." yawn.

read an article about identity theft in "the oregonian." they talked to some bank, which recommended checking your account online "a few times per week." does anybody do that? seems a little extreme. online banking is a pain. why are bank accounts not available as an rss/atom feed? that'd make it way easier to stay on top of things. "date, time, amount spent/deposited, balance, available balance." it could be a huge, complex, unguessable URL with no personally identifying information attached to it, and that URL could change every so often, just in case "hackers" (i'll use the common industry term for them) manage to guess it.

i read a lot of articles from the new york times. at the bottom of each article, you almost invariably read that the article's author has written a book about the subject they're opining on. i think, great, another person who's written a book. the colbert report, daily show never have guests who aren't promoting an upcoming movie or newly released book. could they if they wanted to? do none of these celebrity writers/actors/directors have enough money or time to discuss things that aren't in their financial interest? if somebody wanted to come on the show who wasn't selling something, would they be allowed?

I just did some maintenance and hopefully this blog is functional again. Yes?

A couple weeks ago, I finished reading the book Bright-Sided, by Barbara Ehrenreich. She's the author of Nickled and Dimed, which I read several years ago. I enjoyed Bright-Sided quite a bit. Now that I'm about to bring it back to the library, here's a choice passage from it.

Why resent the swelling overclass -- the CEOs earning an average of $11 million a year, the owners of islands and yachts--when you are aiming to join their ranks? In reality, Americans are less likely to move upward from their class of origin than are Germans, Canadians, Finns, French people, Swedes, Norwegians, or Danes. But the myth, fortified with bracing doses of positive thinking, persists.As two researchers at the Brookings Institution observed, a little wryly, in 2006: "[The] strong belief in opportunity and upward mobility is the explanation that is often given for Americans' high tolerance for inequality. The majority of Americans surveyed believe that they will be above mean income in the future (even though that is a mathematical impossibility)."

Ehrenreich packs a lot of information in this one book without it ever getting tiresome. I would recommend reading it if you can find the time.
Publisher's link: http://us.macmillan.com/brightsided

Seymour Hersh, referred to below as S.H.
Sun Room, Iowa State University. 2010-03-09.

I did my best to take notes and present them here in a way that is accurate (or at least non-misrepresenting) and makes sense. - Dan Rasmussen.

S.H. talks for a while. A few minutes into it, somebody realizes microphone is turned off. S.H. urges audience to speak up if they can't hear!

You can't do anything w/out anonymous sources, but that can lead to sleazy, too.

Bush & Cheney really took constitution apart. Worse than you think! Guantanamo better than it was. Lots of abuse - there's still torture, rendition, no due process. (Something about flimsy evidence - ?)

Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) still have secret prisons. Obama has shut down some "black prisons" but we've still got them.

McCrystal is an apparatchik. Killing civilians.
Military = "Praetorian guys" (? - military kids, die at age 21, 22). Nothing good will come of our handling of the Taliban. Pashtum Expert dismissed from meeting with top brass (a couple levels away from Obama. Maybe this was during Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld days, not sure - Dan) for speaking his mind. Not 30,000 more troops going in - more like 38,000 (military always gets more than it publicly asks for). 100k soldiers, ~60k contractors will be needed. Problem: lots of ambushes!

(Somewhere, maybe not here chronologically, S.H. holds up Washington Post, which has printed 3 full pages of US military war dead's faces, every one they can find, everybody who's died from September 2009 - March 2010.)

Military is paying $400/gallon for gasoline due to transportation costs, bribes to pass certain areas, everything else. All war cost estimates mean *nothing*.

There's still enormous military intelligence, but the good guys aren't speaking up. They don't want to pass up on promotions, or be hounded by FOX News.

We're wasting $billions in aid to corrupt Pakistan. (Aside: "Mr Zadari (sp) is known as 'Mr. 10%' ").

Khalid Sheik Muhammad - waterboarded, etc.

USA not used to concept that terrorism is really a part of society: Spain and Basque, England and IRA, Germany and Baader-Meinhof, Italy and Red Brigade.

We've got lots of assassins in military. Bush smirked said of 3,000 people we captured, they'll never see the light of day again. Speculation (?): meant murder, not imprisonment.

(Something about Israelis demonstrated against their government/military when it committed a massacre). (Something about how he wouldn't go further into a topic, "I'm not into S&M").

Iran: goings-on there won't make sense. Green Movement not going anywhere. (Hersh references the Wood Allen movie "Bananas"!!! "Cheney and the robot factory"). Iran's having trouble enriching uranium, despite what we read in the paper. (Something about a bunch of natural uranium near Danville, VA, and how if we don't just leave it in the ground, it'll contaminate everything.)

Obama started out great but maybe raised our expectations too high (~"Oops!"). Everywhere but USA (Europe, Asia, Middle East), the presses are disgusted by the "Iraq Election," not at all excited/optimistic like the US press.

"I'm being Merry Sunshine here."
Pakistan's worried about our entanglement w/ India. Russians gave up on mountain area between Pakistan and Afghanistan. They wrote about this, but nobody in the USA seems to be interested. Their experience: 250,000 troops is not enough!

My Lai story, Vietnam. Background: S.H. born 1937 in Chicago. WWI was as foreign to him as Vietnam is to young people today. Viet Cong was against US, not necessarily pro-Communist, as we portrayed them, but they probably were (Dan: if only to have allies?). McNamara, like others in government, mostly a bunch of psychotic liars. In draft time S.H. would be giving this talk in a basketball stadium. Draft dodgers (something about 100k - 100k draft dodgers, maybe?).

S.H. worked with McCarthy. Phrase, "change color of corpses." Started using more minorities in military. My Lai: 90 people originally, 20% dead. Areas full of mines. S.H. explains, soldiers fight for their buddies, not for their country. The soldiers want payback. After a night of drinking & smoking, they execute 555 people (that's the # of bodies they found, anyhow) - old men, women, children. Atrocities committed by rural white kids. Not by blacks, Mexicans, etc, who shot high, not wanting to completely disobey and be shot themselves. Gruesome story about baby shot in the head. Mine blows off a guy's leg. S.H. tracks him down. His mother says, "I gave them a good boy, and they sent me back a murderer." (Talks about his some more).

S.H. disclaimer: ~"I'm just one person talking, may not be right about anything. I make no claim."

Q&A session starts.

Iraq: Billions of dollars disappeared (unaccounted for). That's what happens in war. Shipments of weapons sold to other parties, etc. Iraq "gonna be a bloodbath no matter what. I'm for getting out." US media portrays Mullah Omar as Hitler. Opinion of Europe, Asia, Middle East: talk to the guy!

Atomic bombs: Al-Qaeda: wouldn't know what to do if they had an atomic bomb. Eat it! Pakistan wouldn't use atomic weapons on USA - they'd use it on India.

Obama: smart, good. Smartest we've had in a while (digs at Bush, says something nice about Clinton.) Obama knew intricacies of health bill!

Mumbai assassinations: "Look, there's no system that can't be beat."

Still don't know everything about 9/11 terrorists! (Makes inaudible joke about the TSA.)

Writing for New Yorker, articles are run past three editors! One of them is a grammarian, another, a sibilant checker (ensures that no sounds are too frequent!)

Rumsfeld had the power to do anything to anybody.

People do bad things in war.

Test post with gnome-blog.

The danrasmussen.org blog is now alive. This post is proof.

After researching all of the options (it took ages) I settled upon Serendipity as the blog engine. It appears fairly secure, and it has a great plugin system, and plugins are written with Smarty, which is on my list of things to learn. I'm happy enough with this theme, but might make my own, and I'll likely add some plugins at some point. Anyhow, the basics are here. It's exciting to finally have it going.

It's early January. I've spent the last couple weeks pigging out on all sorts of Christmas cookies and chocolates. I've baked a few nice batches of muffins, read the book Homo Faber in English, read some other various things, and have been watching a bunch of videos on the Netflix internet box. I've seen a good deal of Little Britain and 30 Rock. Both are hilarious.

The family has been playing lots of games. Strategy games: Settlers of Cattan, Carcassonne, and card games: Killer Bunnies, and 500. Andrew and I have been playing quite a lot of GridWars - the video game that makes geometry fun! Ok, not exactly. Lots of pretty colors and lights though. Not many games get the adrenaline going and are also not bloody. Andrew has the blood covered, thanks to Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the game I bought new and barely played - turns out I'm more a fan of the classic, Wolfenstein 3D.

It's time to have lunch and play with dogs. The end. As they say in broadcast, stay tuned.