Blackcap Blog

Published at 22:47 on 30 October 2012

It’s going to be weeks before the subway fully reopens again. Weeks. If not months.

This was obvious the moment I heard about the flooding being worse than expected, and the media and the authorities are now starting to drop hints about it.

The biggest problem is the electrical and electronic components of the signal and control system. Salt water is absolutely the worst thing to expose such equipment to. Anything that’s been flooded by salt water will either have to be removed from service, washed several times with distilled water, baked for at least half a day in a drying oven, allowed to cool, and be thoroughly tested before reinstallation; or it will have to be discarded and replaced with new equipment.

Anything less will sacrifice reliability, and doing so is absolutely unacceptable on a passenger railroad. You don’t want malfunctioning signal and control equipment to send two trains in opposite directions on the same track, giving both a full-speed-ahead signal.

The reconditioning option will take much time and labor, and the replacement option will be (a) very costly, and (b) in the near term, impossible, because such equipment is fairly specialized and there’s not enough currently on hand to replace everything.

So the MTA is doubtless going to decide to give up on some lines of the subway system for the time being. Once you get away from lower Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, there wasn’t much flooding. That means the unflooded parts of the lines being sacrificed can be salvaged for spare parts to restore service on the priority lines. Then, in the coming weeks and months, the damaged equipment can be either reconditioned or replaced and used to put the sacrificed lines back in service.

The problem is, there really is no substitute for the subway in Manhattan. It’s so densely developed that the only practical way to deliver the number of commuters who are employed there is an extensive rail system which is completely separate from the surface streets.

Sure, they will try to make do as much as possible with buses, probably bringing in rented ones from other cities and banning or severely restricting the use of private vehicles in Manhattan, so as to make room for the expanded bus service. But that will only go so far.

To some degree, it’s a moot issue anyhow, since the subway tunnels and building sub-basements are interconnected, meaning that there’s a huge chunk of office buildings which are now unfit for occupancy until the HVAC and mechanical systems in their flooded basements and sub-basements are reconditioned or replaced.

It is, in other words, a real mess. More later, including something about the relationship between Sandy and human-caused global warming.

Published at 21:11 on 6 September 2012

I came closer than I like to think to missing it, but I managed to catch Kumare on the last night it showed in Seattle tonight.

It’s a documentary about what is essentially a case study on the human will to believe. The producer decided to exploit the advantages of his ethnic heritage and pass himself off as a guru from India. He basically concocted a spiritual belief system of his own (complete with plenty of new agey woo), and had no trouble attracting a small group of followers. (Which could have probably been a large group had he been so motivated to acquire one.) Eventually, he let them know the truth, after hinting at it in his teachings all along.

It’s an interesting study that raises a number of questions, not the least of which is his assertion that gurus are not needed. That’s an assertion that I am very fond of myself, but I have to admit that the movie can be taken as proving the opposite in some sense. Most of those who followed him really did seem to benefit from it, and it’s an open question whether they could have so benefited on their own.

Of course, we’re dealing with a self-fulfilling prophecy here. If you firmly and sincerely believe that gurus are necessary, and that you need one, then that belief in and of itself will get in the way of your being able to improve your life without finding and following one.

Published at 20:05 on 2 July 2012

Apple recently discontinued its old Mobile Me service and replaced it with iCloud. If, like me, you’re not using OSX Lion, there’s no seamless way to change your Mail settings so that they will work on iCloud, even if you did go to the iCloud web page and say you wanted to keep reading mail from an older Mac system.

I did not find the Apple help page to be very helpful in this regard, so for the record, here’s the procedure I figured out to get Apple Mail working with iCloud:

1. Do not delete your old account! It is not necessary.
2. Under the “Mail” menu item, select “Preferences…”
3. Select the “Accounts” tab, then select your Mobile Me account.
4. In the “Description” field, edit the description so that the host name after the @ reads: imap.mail.me.com .
5. In the “Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP) selection tool, select “Edit SMTP Server List…”. Set the SMTP server for your old Mobile Me account to smtp.mail.me.com . Ensure the “Use default ports (25, 465, 587)” radio button is checked. Also ensure the checkbox next to “Use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)” is checked.
6. Click “OK” to save your changes and return to the accounts settings.
7. Click on “Advanced”.
8. Ensure the “Use SSL” checkbox is checked.
9. Close the preferences window. Be sure to save your changes when asked.

Published at 22:49 on 30 June 2012

The President of Paraguay was recently impeached, not because he broke any laws or anything, but for so-called “poor performance of his duties”. In this case, that means firing two officials (the chief of the national police and the minister of the interior) in the wake of violence involving the national police. To make matters stranger, the votes in congress were both wildly in favor of the impeachment, meaning that they were backed both by the impeached president’s own party and the opposition.

I’ll confess to not knowing much about the Paraguayan constitution, but if Paraguay is like most countries, both sacked officials supposedly serve under the president and at the president’s approval. That’s probably why a number of neighboring leaders aren’t taking too kindly to the antics. This includes President Piñera of Chile, who is from a right-wing political party, so this can’t be accurately portrayed as simply a case of leftist leaders trying to shield one of their own from being held accountable for malfeasance (of which there really doesn’t seem to be any).

More details here and here.

Published at 15:56 on 17 June 2012

It’s sort of unusual for something like this to make it into the mainstream media, but sometimes unusual things happen. How much more attention is given to violence in the privileged areas of the city is something that’s recently struck me as well.

Published at 18:54 on 12 June 2012

No, I’m not going to rehash why I’ve chosen to leave Portland and not return; I’ve done that enough already, and most of the reasons for doing so are personal and thus not necessarily applicable to most others.

And no, I’m not going to try and talk anyone out of it. Portland is indeed by many measures a great place to live.

What I am going to do is warn anyone against moving there without a job in the hopes of finding one once there. Unless you have a lot of money squirreled away, and are prepared to weather a significant period (read: a year or more) of unemployment, don’t do this!

Portland has the most depressed economy of any major West Coast city. Expecting a job — any job, but especially a good job — to materialize just because The Great You just moved there is the epitome of self-centered magical thinking. I’m still subscribed to a Portland-area mailing list, and I’ve lost count of how many “Help! I moved here and a job did not materialize for me!” type messages I have seen.

To reiterate: it is not easy to find work in Portland. Even for what are entry-level service positions in most other major metro areas, in Portland employers will expect experience, often significant experience. If you don’t have that, they will throw your résumé out and move on. And odds are they will find someone with the desired experience.

Also, don’t assume because that because you do meet the minimum requirements for a job, even a menial one, you can easily score one. You might end up competing with (and losing to) other applicants who well exceed those requirements.

I am not being negative here; I am merely being realistic. There are many great things about Portland, but the local economy is definitely not one of them. It stinks.

If you’re itching to try living in Portland, find the job first, then move. Or be successfully self-employed. Or save up a lot of money and gird yourself. Or fly out and couch-surf with friends and be prepared to fly back if you don’t find anything.

Just don’t pull up stakes and expect something to materialize because you need it. Or I will just say I told you so.

Published at 14:19 on 21 March 2012

Nearly a year after I began it in earnest, my search for employment in the Seattle area is finally over. It is a position that reinforces my desire to leave Portland: salary and benefits are significantly better than any Portland job I have ever had, and management appears to be significantly more competent than at any Portland workplace I’ve been at as well.

For openers, they’ve already asked me not only what hardware I prefer for my workstation (and totally understood my preference for a Macintosh, because it is shared by many developers there), they also asked me what model of keyboard I preferred.

Plus, of course, there will be no elephant in the living room (grass pollen allergy hell) in Seattle. Sure, there’s still a grass pollen season here, and it’s certainly no fun. But Seattle’s pollen levels are much lower and do not turn me into a boy in the bubble who dashes from one air-conditioned space to another like happens in Portland.

Published at 18:31 on 17 March 2012

Today was the day of M. Dennis “Marvelous” Moore’s memorial service. Marvelous Marvin was little-known but influential figure in the struggle for LGBT rights in the State of Oregon. His satirical arguments published in the Oregon Voter’s Pamphlet are far better known than the man behind the pen of those same writings.

He passed away last week after a prolonged struggle with a rare genetic illness, and I was privileged to be one of the last people to visit him before he passed.

Published at 23:16 on 23 October 2011

Here. Hopefully the upcoming new antenna will fix some of the interference issues; then again, it is nothing short of remarkable that I can hear signals at all in an urban location.

Published at 11:34 on 13 October 2011

The warning message at the bottom of this page has got to be one of the stupidest things I have read on the web in a very long time.

Really, now: it’s on a publicly-accessible web server. One that hasn’t even bothered to use robots.txt to exclude itself from search engines (I found it via a Google search, while looking for information on shortwave frequencies).

If the Ninth Signal Command is putting sensitive information on that server, they are seriously derelict in their duty to protect such information against unauthorized access. I wasn’t even trying to find sensitive military information. If I could find some without even trying (in the comfort of my own home!), then what about all the spies in the world, who are continually trying to find it, because it’s their job to do that?

If they’re not putting sensitive information there, then why put that warning on their pages?