Blackcap Blog

Published at 13:11 on 17 July 2015

The refrigerator I ordered finally arrived yesterday. Noise-wise, it sounds a lot like an old, manual-defrost refrigerator, with an added amount of fa noise underneath. So it’s still noisier than an old-fashioned refrigerator. But by modern, frost-free standards (the only models available these days), it’s not bad. It’s quieter than what it replaced.

I’m sure a Liebherr would have been quieter. But those: a) tend to be taller than standard US models, meaning I’d have to remove a cabinet, and b) in this country, at least, are only available in stainless steel. The latter is one of the stupider recent design fads; it shows fingerprints like crazy, plus it isn’t magnetic, so say goodbye to sticking reminders on the door with a magnet. Add to that a price over five times higher than what I paid, and it’s no sale.

The delivery experience left much to be desired.

1. I never got the promised confirmation call the morning of the delivery.
2. I requested it be delivered yesterday morning. When Sears contacted me with a delivery window on Wednesday, it was 11:15 to 13:15. Hello? Not only does that intrude upon afternoon hours, but the majority of the interval does.
3. Then they don’t show up during that interval at all. Not only don’t they show up, they don’t even bother calling me with a warning about the delay. It’s left up to me to call Sears, sit on hold for about five minutes, and then get an update.
4. When they show up, they push the both the old and new refrigerator across the floor, not doing anything to protect the floors. (The installers of my range were careful to use Teflon appliance slides to protect my floor.) Thankfully only few minor scratches result.
5. They use one of my dish towels as a door stop, without so much as asking me.
6. They did not fully remove all the packing material from the inside of the refrigerator.

I have two more aging major appliances to replace within the next year or so (the washer and dryer). My experience with Sears has probably just convinced me it’s worth paying a premium to order those from my local mom and pop appliance dealer.

Published at 09:58 on 15 July 2015

Highway 20 is officially the northernmost road through Washington State, much like the Crowsnest Highway is the southernmost one through British Columbia. Both roads are very scenic as they engage in feats of engineering to circumvent obstacles which otherwise could be circumvented by crossing the 49th parallel.

But I digress. Highway 20 is officially the northernmost road through Washington state. While studying my map of the Okanogan National Forest, I discover another road even further north going from the hamlet of Loomis to Winthrop. It involves a long gravel segment, and there are two Forest Service campgrounds along it, which is convenient, since if I’d take that road I’d probably be going by at about the time when I’d want to stop for the night. One of those campgrounds is listed as having an elevation of 6800 feet, which is the highest campground I’ve ever run across in Washington. This pretty much decides that I’m going to take that road.

It’s signed as Toats Coulee Road and breaks off from the road to Palmer Lake just north of Loomis. I pass several fire camps before I make the turn. Oddly, there’s no column of smoke visible anywhere on the horizon.

The road starts as your typical primary paved county road: narrower than your typical state highway, with tighter curves, but still a pretty good road. Soon it loses lane striping. It starts climbing. After I pass the site of an old power plant and cross a cattle guard, the quality of the maintenance decreases and the number of potholes increases. Pretty soon it’s obvious that it’s been some time since the road has seen any sort of maintenance at all. Huge potholes crater it. In a few sections, the pavement has crumbled entirely and it’s now a gravel road. Since these have been recently graded, they offer a superior ride to the pothole-cratered paved sections.

I see a pickup truck with the name of a fire agency on it parked at a scenic viewpoint. I stop to take a few pictures myself then query the occupant about the fire. It apparently was burning pretty vigorously up to a few days ago, but recent rains have really put the damper on it, hence the lack of a smoke column.

The road continues to get worse. Weeds and shrubbery encroach on it from the sides. Aside from the one parked truck, I haven’t seen any other vehicles on it. The empty nature of the road plus its decripitude gives an eerie, post-apocalyptic feeling to my drive. Deer cross the road in front of me multiple times.

After miles of dodging potholes, a welcome sight: the end of the badly-maintained pavement. What appears to be the “main” road continues ahead as a recently graded two-lane gravel road, but my map clearly indicates it dead ends after a half dozen more miles. The road I want is the one-lane gravel one branching off to the left.

It’s very lightly traveled. Grass grows in the middle of it. Yet the worn ruts are grass-free, and my sources indicated that the road is indeed open all the way through to Winthrop. It enters a burned area and for mile after mile it goes from one ridge to another, switchbacking its way up and down the ridges when it crosses valleys. It’s mostly in pretty good shape but the odd eroded spot is hard to see in advance, which keeps me from going faster than about 20 mph. I eventually do meet a vehicle coming in the other direction. We’re both startled to see someone else on the road. The other driver confirms that he started from the other end, and is floored when I say where I have come from on it. Apparently he didn’t have a map and is just following the road to see where it goes.

It’s about 5:00 in the evening when I finally come to the campground. It’s small (only six sites) and completely empty. I snag the best site (the only one with fully intact trees around it; the others all have varying degrees of fire damage).

I discover that the water jug in the back of my truck, despite being secured, has tipped over. Worse, despite there being a plug in the air hole, the pressure difference between 900 feet elevation (at Tonasket, where I verified it was securely plugged) and 6800 feet (where I was then) had caused pressure to build up to the point where the stopper had popped out of the hole. So not only was I virtually out of water, there was a mess in the back of the truck.

Thankfully, the ribbed design of the truck bed plus drain holes intended to let rain out had minimized the impact of the mishap. The campground’s name is Tifffany Spring, which was a big hint at a solution to the water shortage, and indeed the namesake spring was easy to locate. It had but a small pool, largely obscured by a lush growth of sedges, but with clear cold water which was deep enough to fill containers with. Between spring water for cooking and washing with and the remaining water in my jug for drinking as-is, I was set for an overnight stay.

It was a treat to have the luxury of car camping with sheets and blankets off the ground in a location so remote and high-up that one would normally have to backpack there and sleep on the ground in a small tent with a thin pad on irregular surface.

Published at 09:48 on 15 July 2015

The day warmed up rapidly as I worked my way north from Wenatchee on US 97. By the time I was in Tonasket the temperature was between 95 and 100 (a bank thermometer said 112, but no way was that correct). A black cloud loomed over the highlands to the east, my destination for the day.

As I drove up into the highlands, I noticed winds, evidently downdrafts from the thunderstorm ahead, were blowing. I opened my window and it was about 70 degrees outside, a good 25 degrees cooler than it was just minutes ago. No more need for the air conditioner.

Soon the road became damp, then outright wet as I chased the rain retreating southwards (I only ever experienced light showers on this drive). More and more runoff was evident; the storm I had just missed was a real gully-washer. The temperature fell into the sixties.

Ground fog loomed ahead. I knew what that probably meant: hail on the ground, creating a temperature inversion close to the surface. Indeed, my hypothesis was soon verified. The temperature was now in the fifties and I had my headlights on as I crept through the fog in a white landscape. In July, in eastern Washington, at 2:30 in the afternoon.

The campground that was my destination for the day was in the heart of the hail zone. It was about three inches deep when I got there, and didn’t completely melt until the next day.

Published at 07:57 on 15 July 2015

I mean, even the IMF (hardly a radical-left source) is saying the austerity the Greek ruling party is pushing for is too much and Greece needs more debt relief. So much for the “radical left” Syriza party.

I guess there’s another lession about Establishment politics corrupting everything it touches here. Even “anti-Establishment” parties really can’t be trusted to accomplish much if the ever get power. The seats corrupt whomever happens to sit in them.

Published at 05:48 on 10 July 2015

Because the austerity is continuing, odds are the depression there will continue, and so will a lack of ability of Greece to repay. Though the beginning of the process of writing off those bad loans is encouraging, the can has merely been kicked a few more years down the road.

And I’m outta here to for a few days to do botanical surveys in the Okanogan Highlands. It’s a part of the state I haven’t seen in about twenty years.

Published at 16:22 on 8 July 2015

For my paid work, I maintain a program which runs for a long time (essentially, indefinitely) making millions of socket calls per day and doing extensive amounts of text parsing (it’s a web crawler).

What impresses me is how often problems in my code are not really problems in my code: they’re problems in some library that my code calls. One time it was even a problem in the system libraries; socket I/O would work fine for a day or two, then some time from two days to a week in, socket calls would simply and mysteriously hang. Another repeated source of headaches was the LXML library, which tended to cause me all sorts of issues with memory leaks and indefinite looping and recursion.

This is in the open source (Linux) world, so it underscores a general lack of thorough testing. I consider it unacceptable that a program which makes about 2 million socket calls per day will fail due to a library bug after about 10 million calls on average. One should be able to make an indefinite amount of system calls (absent system quotas and limits, of course).

But apparently I’m somewhat unusual in having high standards like that. LXML has a (totally undeserved, in my opinion) reputation for robustness, and that faulty system library made it into a major CentOS release.

Or maybe I’m being unreasonable in expecting that a program which runs for an hour without running into issues should run for a day, a week, or a month without being cut down by memory leaks in the code it calls. (I assume it was a slow memory or other resource leak in the socket call case; it presents itself as a classic symptom of such.)

Published at 09:27 on 2 July 2015

Some basic points:

1. Yes, there was irresponsible borrowing and spending on the part of past Greek governments, which ran up a huge deficit which caused the current crisis.
2. It takes two to tango: Irresponsible borrowing is not possible without irresponsible lending. Part of the responsibility of lending money is doing the due diligence necessary to minimize the chance of lending it to a party who won’t be able to pay it back.
3. Greeks has suffered greatly for their past government’s role in creating the current crisis. There’s an actual depression going on there. The unemployment rate is 25%, and public sector services like health care are collapsing.
4. The capitalist class is suffering very little for their role in creating the current crisis.
5. If the Euro didn’t exist, currency devaluation would have stopped this crisis from getting to the current point. There still would have been unpleasant repercussions from the significant devaluation of the drachma, but they would have been less severe and more equitably shared between the Greeks and the banks.
6. Therefore the existence the Eurozone is responsible for turning a merely unpleasant crisis into a severe one.
7. If Greece stays in the Eurozone, there will be further unpleasant consequences. Austerity and the associated austerity-created depression will continue.
8. If Greece exits the Eurozone it will also cause further unpleasant consequences. Greeks will lose a big chunk of their wealth as Euro assets get converted into devalued drachma ones. But, the devalued drachma will make Greek exports and vacations cheap for foreigners, which will stimulate the Greek economy and end the depression. The humiliating status quo of having Greece’s domestic policy dictated from abroad by the “troika” will end.

Therefore it’s best for Greece to exit the Eurozone. Ditto for Spain, for basically the same reasons.

The Eurozone was a mistake. It created a tightly unified currency without a tightly unified governance structure, which spanned a region with significant cultural and economic differences. Such a thing was pretty much fated to collapse. Let it shrink to the point where it only contains the most affluent and developed European countries. Or let it gradually disappear entirely; the choice is up to the Europeans.

As difficult as the process is, it’s better to let it begin now than to dig the hole deeper and make the inevitable more difficult in the future.

Published at 10:39 on 1 July 2015

So, the one that came with the home I bought is starting to make strange noises in the present heat wave. It’s obviously on its last legs.

It was made in 1993. I did some quick research and it’s easy to find utilities that are offering low-income households to replace for free perfectly good refrigerators made before the year 1999. They’re that inefficient compared to current models. So it’s obviously not worth throwing money at trying to repair the refrigerator I have.

At this point, I start researching efficiency. A super-efficient refrigerator used to mean buying a SunFrost of a VestFrost. But efficiency of the normal big US brands in the USA has increased so much in recent years that you basically gain nothing (except a far lighter wallet) from purchasing a specialty, energy-efficient brand these days.

If you get an EnergyStar model, particularly a smaller, no-frills fridge without energy-wasting features like a built-in icemaker or an in-door ice/water dispenser, you’ll do as well as one of the specialty brands. Plus you’ll have one with standard US dimensions that fits in your existing kitchen without having to remove overhead cabinets (refrigerators built for the European market tend to be taller). So that’s what I did.

The rub is that smaller, no-frills fridges are not carried in stock these days. Everyone wants big and feature-laden. Not me. Not only do those features cost money and waste energy, they also reduce reliability; they are just something more to break. (That’s particularly the case for automatic ice makers.)

When one gets to reviews from Consumer Reports, it’s basically the same story. The smallest model (other than super-tiny dorm-sized fridges) they reviewed was 18 cubic feet. The largest size I am willing to consider is about 15 cubic feet.

So I’ve been compelled to order one sight unseen, despite my worries about noise. The model I chose only had one review I could find complaining about noise, and the noise was caused by for a factory defect and went away when the unit was repaired under warranty. By contrast, several reviews mentioned quietness. Plus, it’s a Frigidaire, and Frigidaire is owned by Electrolux, a Swedish corporation, these days. European brands tend to be better on noise than US ones.

So I’m cautiously optimistic about the noise aspect. We shall see.

Published at 18:58 on 28 June 2015

So, I ordered my replacement KVM switch from Amazon well over a week ago. Being a cheapskate, I opted for the free shipping. Which, of course, was the slowest shipping option.

It ended up being as slow as possible. The surprise was how it ended up being so slow: the item didn’t even ship until Friday, and Amazon then paid extra for a Sunday delivery so that the arrival date could be honored. Seriously, now: WTF? Why not ship it using the slowest, cheapest possible service the day they get the order?

Since it shipped from one of their Seattle-area warehouses, that would mean I got it about as soon as if I had paid extra for expedited shipping. But so what? The worst-case arrival date is just that: a worst case. There’s nothing wrong with making a package come sooner than that, particularly if it costs Amazon less money in the first place.

Then a thought occurred to me: What they did is botch a process (shipping a package) until it became a crisis and then spent extra money on heroic measures to deal with the crisis. That’s exactly how Amazon handles managing their technical staff. Instead of having procedures guaranteed to ensure routine, smooth operation, they pay people extra (Amazon has a reputation for having generous salaries) to work long hours in endless crisis mode (something else Amazon has a reputation for).

So, while consistent, both their shipping and their employee management practices still mystify me.

I can’t find the old post at the moment, but I’m pretty sure I’ve blogged about this (mis)management style before. Since then, I’ve come up with the term “techno-sadism” to label it by. It’s as if management believes that productivity is managed by making people work as hard as possible, which is done by ensuring that teams are in perpetual crisis mode.

How absurd it is becomes clear when you think of the manufacturing sector. How many manufacturers consider it a good thing to have routine operation of the assembly line to be disrupted regularly, to the point that heroic amounts of overtime and speed-ups are needed to compensate for the disruptions?

Published at 15:40 on 24 June 2015

I see Cliff Mass is now backpedaling from his earlier pooh-poohing about the abnormal warmth and low snow levels ever since last autumn implying ominous things about the coming fire season.

It’s just as well. His earlier dismissal was based on the assumption that fires would only really be a problem east of the Cascades. That’s indeed normally the case, but this is far from a normal year, and there have sometimes been truly epic forest fires on the west side.

And the first one of the season is already under way, in June, far earlier than such things normally prove an issue.