Blackcap Blog

Published at 09:23 on 18 February 2014

Yes, even stupider than the famously stupid “open floor plan” that means you have insufficient wall space for bookcases and artwork and get to live in your kitchen. Dirty dishes and cooking smells: the perfect living room accents. Not!

Try the two-bedroom house with each bedroom being a master suite. Let’s make it impossible for either me or my prospective roommate to host a visitor on the living room couch without compelling said visitor to trudge through someone’s private bedroom in order to take a shower. Let’s pump up the cost per square foot (and compel we waste heated square feet) by adding a third bathroom (to a two-bedroom house!) for guests to use. And since it’s only a half-bath, overnight guests still have to trudge through a private bedroom once per day.

Why is it that virtually no innovations in domestic architecture later than about 1940 seem to have any merits whatsoever? About the only two exceptions I can think of are better insulation and hookups for clothes dryers. If you’re in a hot climate (I’m not), air conditioning can be added, making it a list of three.

Aside from that, seemingly every other new idea has been a variation on the theme of stupid: removing trim (goodbye picture rails, hello drilling holes in your walls and searching for studs), wall-to-wall carpeting (a floor treatment that’s impossible to keep clean, the perfect innovation for people who like to live with lots of dirt), dishwashers (let’s take up cabinet space for a device which only gets your dishes clean if you spend 95% of the effort of just washing them yourself on pre-rinsing them), soffits (let’s deliberately reduce the amount of storage in your kitchen, so that we can then compel you to devote more square feet to it than you really need), formica counters (why use tile when you can use something easily scorched and burnt instead), sinks that are no longer recessed in the countertop (that stray water belongs dripping down your cabinet faces and onto the floor, not back in the sink), the list goes on and on and on.

Published at 19:14 on 11 February 2014

Actually, it was back to normal by yesterday afternoon. A day of temperatures in the forties and mild sea breezes made quick work of almost all the snow.

The suddenness with how these winter arctic cold waves could both begin and end was one of the things that surprised me when I first moved to this region. It’s like a switch is being thrown, engaging and disengaging Cold Mode surprisingly fast. Before I moved to this region, I visited once a few days after an episode of cold and snow, expecting to find lingering piles everywhere. Instead, there was almost no snow to be seen; I had to search to find the rapidly-melting remains of what had been significant piles of shoveled snow only a few days before.

At this stage, it’s something I expect, and when it happens it’s a sign that all is still right and as it should be, and that this winter wasn’t a disappointing repeat of last winter, snow-wise.

Published at 08:04 on 2 February 2014

There is a football game this afternoon. Living in the Seattle area, it is hard not to be aware of it. And because this region does not have a history of winning sports teams, that makes for a very big deal for those who follow such things.

Myself, I’ve never gotten it. My earliest memories about football were probably around age five or so, observing my father sitting utterly transfixed and engrossed by a flickering screen displaying images of men in uniforms arranging themselves in formations and charging back and forth across a rectangular field. It was a mystery to me how such a thing could prove interesting or entertaining. It still is.

So if the weather is good, I plan to take advantage of how I live on an island that still has its wild spaces by going on a walk in one of them. If it’s the expected raw, cold rain transitioning to a wet snow as an arctic front comes in, I’ll spend the day making copper jewelry.

I will either hear the celebrating or the silence and know the outcome, but it won’t seriously affect me either way. Sorry, sports fans. Just the way it is.

Published at 08:49 on 15 January 2014

About thirteen months ago, an acquaintance of mine was nearly aghast when I spoke of my desire to move out of Seattle. Despite my mentioning how urban things matter less than nature things to me, and how Seattle is not the best of matches for me as urban attributes go, he kept bringing up the advantages of living near the center of all the action, as he saw it.

A few months later I find out that Mr. City Life has a second home in the country that he visits regularly. At my current salary, I suppose I could afford such a thing, but I don’t want the hassle of managing two homes nor to become addicted to a higher salary. So given that I am to have a single home, I’d prefer it not to be in the big city, if I can find a way to make such a home work for me (and I have).

Last month, he starts posting from the Portland radical faerie e-mail list, as if he now lives there. Turns out he does. So not only was he of mixed feelings about the city versus the country, he wasn’t really all that attached to Seattle, either. Interesting.

Yet another reason why it’s always a bad idea to do something just because of what you think someone else might think or say: that other person may be putting on a false front, too.

Published at 09:07 on 10 January 2014

Apropos this, I disagree with the answer in the headline. Science may be harder than other subjects but I also found it much more interesting than other subjects. It was always my favorite subject in school. Difficulty is not an obstacle if a subject is interesting.

Yet, I almost dropped out from a scientific major in college. The issue wasn’t the work, it was that the work was mostly ritualized bullshit that had very little to do with actual learning. And most of the professors obviously cared more about their research than their teaching.

On the latter point: why shouldn’t they? Excelling as a teacher seldom gets one the recognition and rewards that excelling as a researcher does. Any professor who prioritizes teaching over research has chosen to buck the system and sacrifice formal career rewards for the intrinsic reward of doing well at a job s/he enjoys and values. The latter is admirable, but it’s not the way to get a set of professors who typically value teaching as the number one priority.

So, there I was, struggling with lots of BS homework that was getting in the way of side projects I was doing on my own that were leading to real learning. Mathematics and physics were particular problems, since I comprehend both in different ways than most. The lectures, books, and assignments were mostly mystifying and comprehension could only come as the result of extensive pondering and research on my own.

There were two straws that almost broke the camel’s back. The first was when honor students would come to me, the student who was struggling to keep a B- grade point average, asking for help with key concepts they were incapable of grasping. The second was my difficulty of of getting courses taught by my favorite mathematics professor (one of a select few who did not mainly mystify and confuse me), who also had a reputation of being one of the hardest professors in the department. In response to students avoiding the hard professors, that department had a policy of not publishing who was going to be teaching various courses, which frustrated my desire to get courses taught by that professor. It became clear to me that formalized education was a mostly corrupt institution with little overall net value.

I persevered, but got out as soon as I could with a B.S. degree and refused to consider going further. If I’m to be assigned lots of busy-work that gets in the way of my self-directed learning and exploration, I figured I might as well get that busy work in the form of a job where someone else pays me to do it, as opposed to at a university where I am paying for the same nuisance.

Published at 19:19 on 12 December 2013

It is time again for the yearly ritual of copying my contacts from this year’s Slingshot Organizer to the next. It’s something of a chore, but it also forces me once per year to do the necessary task of purging old and obsolete information. Moreover, I keep all the old Organizers and use them as a sort of back-up device to the current one I am using.

Yes, I’m old fashioned. I’ve rehashed this several times before and won’t bother doing so again. Suffice to say I’ve considered a smart phone and concluded it just doesn’t suit me as well as more traditional technologies.

Published at 14:59 on 11 October 2013

So, there’s this new option available where I work called a “Health Savings Account”. The one offered by my employer is actually a very generous plan. And it sucks less abjectly than the ironically named “flexible” accounts, which you have to use within a calendar year or lose, forever.

But, there’s still a whopper of a catch. In this case, it’s called “You must save your receipts. Every last one. For seven long years.”

Good heavens, I can’t even keep one week’s worth of notes on a project straight. I could not fathom what would be required to care for hundreds or thousands of slips of paper for seven long years.

And note that these aren’t pieces of letter-sized paper one gets delivered by mail; they are randomly-sized small slips that get handed to you at the pharmacy or the clinic, ones that you must not, ever, leave in your pockets when doing the laundry. You must not let one fall out of your wallet unnoticed, ever. You must not forget and leave one on the sales counter. You must not toss one in a sidewalk waste-basket by mistake. You must not leave it in the bag then toss the bag in the recycle bin. Ever. Or woe unto you if you are audited.

Obviously, there’s people in the world who are intrinsically organized. My parents, for one. When they work on a big project, every item on the desk is at a neat 90-degree angle with respect to the other items and in order, always. It’s just the way they’re wired.

It’s also just not the way I am wired. Even if I make conscious effort to organize my things during a project, within a minute or two after said effort is ended, a significant degree of chaos and disorder will have emerged. It doesn’t bug me; in fact, I never even try to achieve strict desktop order anymore. It’s just not the way I work.

Sure, there needs to be greater cost control in the medical establishment, but I’d much rather get it like, say, the Canadians do, by having a Medicare card that I can just use, with other people (you know, the intrinsically organized types) being paid to professionally do all the receipt-tallying minutia that I am personally so ill-suited to do.

And I don’t think I am the only one. Really, now, saving every last medical receipt? For seven years? This is someone’s idea of “reform?” Seriously?

Published at 19:30 on 7 October 2013

Oh, sure, you can spends hundreds (or even more!) on a literally gold-plated Montblanc or Waterman. That’s no secret. But I’m not into status symbols, and I’m simply too thrifty to consider blowing that kind of money on a mere pen.

The pleasant surprise is that they still make reasonably-priced ones intended to be used for routine writing instead of as snob-appeal devices.

Years ago, I bought an inexpensive Sheaffer cartridge pen in college. I had always been intrigued by the bits of older writing I had run across; the letters weren’t pressed into the paper as with a ballpoint pen. The imperfections were different, too. Ballpoint writing is marred by tiny little semicircular skip marks where the pen fails to deliver ink. The old fountain pen writing had its imperfections in the form of ink density that varied gradually instead of abruptly (darker at the end of each stroke where the ink had pooled more). It looked more appealing to me.

I soon discovered that the fountain pen tended to tire me much less, because I didn’t have to press it into the page to write. It became a favorite of mine, despite it having a tendency to come uncapped in my pack and sometimes make inky messes.

After college, I lost it, and because I was no longer a student who spent many hours per week writing, didn’t miss it. Until fairly recently, that is, whenever I would happen across some sample of my writing from my college days.

I was in the neighborhood for a dentist’s appointment, so on a whim I decided to check to see if the University Book Store (which has one of the best school and office supplies departments in Seattle) would have any such thing as an inexpensive fountain pen.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that while Sheaffer is basically defunct, in Europe many countries require students to learn how to write with a fountain pen as part of the public school curriculum, and as a result there’s still very much a market for inexpensive fountain pens in Europe. So I came home with a shockingly lime green and modern-looking Pelikan Pelikano.

Best of all, despite its modest price, it’s made in Germany and exhibits the typical German quality control; it writes much better than I remember that old cheap Sheaffer ever writing.

Published at 18:41 on 22 September 2013

It happened again last week. One of my co-workers — this time, one of the smartest people in the company, in fact, though most everyone where I work is above average in intelligence — was in the basement garage retrieving his bicycle at the same time I was retrieving mine.

He started walking with it in the direction of the elevator. To which I remarked:

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Oh, you have a door opener? I don’t.”

“Yes, I do, but that’s irrelevant. You can get out without one. There’s a button.”

“Really?”

It was one of the first things I checked on my first day riding a bike to work, because: a) I had no garage door opener at the time, b) it’s easier to exit from the garage door, and c) I was at least 99% certain there was some way to exit without an opener. The latter point was because of two reasons a) fire codes typically mandate that all doors be usable as exits, and b) the building management’s own self-interest is to allow drivers whose door openers fail after hours (batteries do die, after all) a way to get out that does not require them to go to the expense of dispatching someone to free the entrapped vehicle.

And sure enough, there it was: a standard, commercial-grade up/stop/down garage door control. A quick push on the “up” button, the door opened, and I was on my way significantly faster than if I had taken my bike up to the first floor on the elevator. I thought little further about the matter.

What floors me is that people who are smart enough to get advanced degrees (far more advanced than mine, and probably with a far better GPA than I managed as well) never even seem to go down that same train of thought. It’s not as if it’s a very complex or difficult one; it’s all pretty basic facts and logic.

It’s related, I think, to how badly I cope with advanced capitalist society’s demand that one hyperspecialize in one small area such as writing computer software. It’s one reason most of my spare-time pursuits are decidedly non-software; I crave the variety. I start going nuts if I have to do almost the same thing all the time.

It’s one reason my career path has generally been so rocky: simply because it’s a career path, and any such path falls afoul of my need for variety.

So maybe it’s not a surprise that someone who’s done better than I in the career world (and the academic world, for that matter, which also demands hyperspecialization) wouldn’t realize he could almost certainly use the garage door to exit. It’s something he can easily ignore as off-subject.

I wouldn’t trade the way I am, however. It’s probably the biggest reason why I’m an anarchist: because I have, over my life, felt compelled to dive into various diverse areas of knowledge. I know enough about enough things that standard propaganda tends to not work that well on me: I can come up with counterexamples and see the logical fallacies hiding beneath the rhetoric.

Published at 20:17 on 10 September 2013

I’m definitely quite sore from it all, made worse by my not breaking out the arnica oil until today. Still well worth it.

The year of my previous visit was probably 1996. I had my Dad’s old Minolta X700 with me then. It broke within a year of my getting it, and I replaced it with another of the same model which proceeded to get stolen in short order. I used either the old one or its replacement to photograph Comet Hale-Bopp, which peaked in 1997. That makes 1996 the most likely year of my other trip there.

I managed to locate a print of the photo of my standing atop the summit spire and added it to the gallery. There is unfortunately no date stamp on the print, so the year 1996 remains an educated guess.