Blackcap Blog

Published at 18:47 on 17 August 2015

I am once again typing into my computer from my home office.

Saturday evening, my that room basically got shut down in preparation for painting. It was a task I expected to finish Sunday, but which stretched into most of Monday.

The issue: Edging, edging, edging, and more edging. The room has four windows and a closet in addition to an entry door. There’s so little unbroken expanse of wall, in fact, that it wasn’t worth my time to dirty a 9″ roller to paint it; the time saved over just using the 4″ roller on the one side with significant expanse of wall wouldn’t have paid back the extra time spent cleaning the 9″ roller.

The second time ’round took two hours less than the first, so at least I do seem to be learning how to paint faster. I also plan on painting my bedroom this summer. Although larger, I expect that to go quicker than this room; it has only one window, and the 9″ roller will let me really speed through the extra expanse of wall.

Published at 20:49 on 14 August 2015

It’s been a hot and very dry summer. It’s been very unsettling how dry and dusty the woods have been. Sword ferns and salmonberry bushes are withering and dying. I have never seen that happen before in the quarter-century I have lived in the Pacific Northwest.

At 3:00 AM this morning I was awoken by a thunderstorm. It passed, then another one woke me. And another, and another. By daybreak, four thunderstorms had passed. This is an approximate count, because I eventually incorporated the thunder into my dreams, dreaming of a day on the island with multiple thunderstorms. And in my half-awake state, it was hard to distinguish dreams from reality.

Alas, the rainfall from those four storms didn’t amount to much: only .10 inches.

Shortly after noon, Thunderstorm No. 5 announced its presence in the distance with low rumbles. The rumbles grew louder and the sky darker. Checking the NWS radar showed a large blob of echoes slowly (very slowly) working its way in my direction. Would it make it here, or would it fizzle first?

I was not to be disappointed. It took tantalizingly long, but the rain progressed from just lightly spitting to light rain to moderate to heavy at times. The thunder and lightning kept up for over two hours straight, and then the rain lasted for at least three more hours, gradually diminishing as the storm shifted direction, gradually weakened and moved its way west.

Final total for the day: 1.30 inches. The woods are fresh and moist again. All in all, one of the most satisfying rain storms I can remember.

It’s not enough to end the drought, but it did cut the summer dry spell in half, which I believe will really ease the impact on the struggling vegetation.

Published at 09:11 on 13 August 2015

Arresting one of your own because he wants to volunteer to fight against terrorism? Mainstream news article here, anarchist news article here.

To make matters even worse, he could potentially face life in prison.

Published at 09:18 on 5 August 2015

Just had a phone screen with a Seattle employer that lasted all but a minute or so.

Reason was the second question asked, which had nothing to do with technical competence. It had to do with a (very conservative, East Coast-ish dress code), which is something of a surprise to run into on the West Coast.

And no, I am not interested in such things. First, I find such garb physically uncomfortable. If I’m distracted by (lack of) physical comfort, my concentration and thus my job are negatively affected. Why would I want to limit myself like that?

Second, such apparel is expensive. Expensive to purchase, and expensive to maintain (dry cleaning doesn’t come cheap). So such a requirement basically amounts to an additional tax on my salary.

It’s not just me, either. I don’t abide by many stereotypes of software geeks but the above sentiments would probably be echoed exactly by the vast majority of software professionals.

Which brings up a third, yet more insidious reason to avoid the place. There’s basically two kinds of people that such dress codes screen for:

1. People who enjoy dressing up like that.
2. People who put up with dressing like that because it means getting a job of a sort they otherwise couldn’t.

Those in category one are basically harmless. So Joe or Jane Programmer enjoys dressing up in business suits? So what? If it makes them happy and they do their job better as a result, fine. Dress codes are something of a plus for this crowd as it lets them work on the West Coast, enjoy dressing up, and yet avoid this problem.

Those in category two are the problem. They’re at the place with the dress code because a huge chunk of everybody else in the programming field is not, thus removing more technically-competent competition from the picture.

Prevailing attitudes amongst software geeks mean this crowd probably ends up being in the majority. That my interviewer ended up asking this question very early in the process indicates it’s a show-stopper for many candidates, which validates my suspicion.

Why would I want to limit myself by working with subpar talent?

Published at 22:00 on 4 August 2015

List a job that I would otherwise want, but make the only way to apply for it be to fill out a web form that demands you supply an expected salary range.

It’s almost as bad as demanding you furnish your salary history. Particularly if, like the two jobs I just ran into this for, it’s either a public-sector job or one at a nonprofit. The former typically have more generous benefits packages and less generous salaries. The latter typically have less generous salaries. In neither case is simply plugging in a market-rate number (of which I have a fair idea) appropriate.

In this case, the nonprofit’s mission is such that I’d be willing to take less money in return for my work being particularly socially valuable. But, I have no idea what their budget is. So my choice is to either sell myself short by putting in a low number that they will take advantage of, or to sell myself short by putting in something higher that will scare them off from interviewing me, even though if the job is appealing I’d be willing to bend on that figure. There’s no way to specify that latter fact, either, of course. A number and just a number must be entered.

A similar conundrum exists for the public-sector job. The easiest solution is for me to just pass on both and move on to someone who doesn’t use such sleazy tactics. Which is probably just what I will do.

Published at 21:04 on 1 August 2015

The best thing that happened on the Deer Park camping trip was the new experience of being on a mountaintop as the sun set.

I’ve been on mountaintops many times, but always as the part of day hikes that involved the goal of getting back to the trail head before nightfall. This time, the summit was only 1.2 miles from where I was camped, most of the route back was on a road, I had a light and spare batteries with me, and the moon was nearly full.

So it was easily possible to stay until the sun had completely set, which is exactly what I did, watching the colors change on the mountain slopes, the fingers of darkness creep up the walls of the valleys, and the sky turn colors in the west.

It was a new and magical experience, and the light from the moon meant I didn’t even need to use my light on the way back to camp.

Published at 10:36 on 31 July 2015

Finally went camping at Deer Park after wanting to for over 20 years. Granted, many of those years I wasn’t much into camping in general and just kept procrastinating on it, by choice. And for a good chunk of the other ones, I was in either California or Oregon.

But for the past few years, I have been in this area, but I just haven’t had the time. There’s no reservations for the Deer Park campground, which means that a quick weekend getaway is impossible: if you attempt one, you’ll find that every spot is already occupied for the weekend by people who took a day or two off to get there early and secure their spot.

So it was a natural idea of someplace to go now that recent circumstances mean I might as well make my getaways on weekdays, when it’s less crowded.

It’s a beautiful spot, and I plan on returning, but it’s not quite as idyllic as I imagined, because even on random weeknights the campground completely fills up, so you don’t get the privacy you would at some spot with lighter use.

Published at 07:41 on 27 July 2015

That much seems sure.

Yes, that’s what the experts said last year, too. But not really: If you dug into the details, last summer there were signs of a possible El Niño, but many of them were muted and wavered. It was a “this is probably going to happen but we’re not completely sure” type event.

This year, the signals are strong, and are consistently getting stronger over time. That means something is almost certainly up. The question this year is not whether the coming winter will be an El Niño winter, but what sort of El Niño winter it will be.

Many in journalism are playing up the angle on how strong the signs are. The rub is that super-strong El Niño events are super-rare. The 1998 event was the strongest in history. So the chance of the coming winter being as strong or stronger, while it exists and is actually plausible given the evidence, is still a pretty remote chance.

Odds simply don’t favor it; they favor something weaker. So far, the signals have been growing and growing over recent months. But there’s nothing to say they won’t stop growing, and start wavering. Mind you, everything will still be squarely in El Niño territory if that happens, just not a super-strong event. More of a garden-variety one.

What’s up for us in the Pacific Northwest? If you go here, you’ll see that the overall correlations are not as profound here as there are in California. Temperatures have very little signal, and precipitation seems to end up slightly drier. If (and note the if) it’s a super-strong event, as it may turn out to be, then temperatures end up distinctly warmer than normal and it ends up slightly wetter than normal.

That’s bad news for snowpack in our mountains, particularly after last winter being so terrible. But odds are it will be less terrible than last winter, which was so bad that even most El Niño winters had far better snowpack.

What’s interesting (in the overall situation) is the temperature disconnect between coastal and inland areas of the Northwest. (Inland areas end up distinctly warmer, but there’s little or no overall temperature signal on the coast.)

That’s explainable by there being far fewer arctic air outbreaks in El Niño winters. (In fact, the warmer winters in the while US from the Midwest east are.) It’s rare for such outbreaks to make it past the Cascades, so the loss of one such event (if an arctic front makes it across the mountains, it’s rare for it to happen more than once in a given winter) doesn’t affect temperatures here on the west side much. By contrast, arctic outbreaks are a typical winter feature east of the Cascades, and in particular east of the Rockies, so the loss of a good fraction of those would be expected to have a major effect.

Published at 15:12 on 26 July 2015

Did a little ritual today: went through all my clothing and rooted out all the swag with my old employer’s name or logo on it (they were fond of issuing such things, particularly T-shirts). I made two exceptions: one older T-shirt, issued back in the era when the company was true to its stated values and a great place to be working for (and which had a retro 1980ish design I always really liked), and the hoodie that I was issued when I was first hired.

Goodwill Industries lets you assign your own value on their receipts. I chose $1/shirt, because they usually sell for at least that much in thrift stores.

Published at 18:53 on 25 July 2015

The code I was working on has its tricky aspects. Moreover, my departure has made an already short-staffed team even worse so. That means its maintenance will probably at least partially end up in the hands of those who consume its data.

Those are the same people who tended to have a lack of respect for me, so it’s reasonable to expect my (incomplete; I was asked to leave before I had finished comprehensively updating it) documentation and cautions will be ignored. And one of the modifications that software needs should prove very tricky (I know, I tried to make it).

So I expect things to blow up messily in the next month or two, as fools rush in where angels fear to tread. At that point, I might get called for a consulting gig, who knows. And who knows if I’ll accept it; that depends on many factors. The last time that happened, many years ago, when they first asked I simply needed a break from the place, and by the time they asked a second time I was working at another job and simply didn’t have the time.