A week ago, Cassey said she thought there was a cat in our attic.
I said "no way, it's just a cat on the roof".
I clearly wasn't keeping in mind the second law of marriage, which is, "the wife is always right". Sure enough, it wasn't long before I got a call from my wife while I was at work. Something in the attic had meowed at her and scampered away when she opened the hatch to peek in.
I'd never been in my attic before. I had many ponderings on the subject. I was certain the insulation was awful, and I was curious as to the state of the wiring and plumbing.
We have two attic hatches, one in the addition at the back and one in the original portion of the house, which is in the front. (Cassey's experience occurred in the addition.) I began my investigation last night by opening up the hatches and shining the flashlight around to see if I could get the attention of the cat (if it was still around). Nothing seemed to happen, so I followed this up by walking around the house looking for likely holes. However, all the vents were in good condition (and rather small for a cat), and nothing else seemed unusual.
After making these initial investigations, the real work began this morning. I rigged up something to allow me to climb up to the attic access hatches, and began in the front, as this was the easiest to get into. I discovered that the front did not provide access to the back and the insulation looked like lumpy gray foam. I expect it is ancient fiberglass. It doesn't seem to have been sprayed down. I didn't spend much time since the lack of connection to the back meant the problem I was investigating had nothing to do with the front attic.
The hatch in the back was harder to get into since it was smaller and located in a relatively open space. The tight access made me more nervous, so I decided to put a lamp up in the attic to provide a little more light. I also took a flashlight. (Cassey later sent up gloves and a camera to document my adventures.)
The first thing I noticed was that birds had evidently been there. There were droppings and feathers concentrated in a few different places. The second thing I noticed was that the insulation was awful... except for one spot where fiberglass insulation sheet had been piled up together. In fact, two packages were still largely intact.
It looked like someone went up there intending to put down some insulation, but never got around to really doing the job.
I'm gonna have to fix this situation. (Probably in the fall.)
The main portion of the attic did not evince any way for a cat or bird to enter. However, behind the pile of insulation was an offshoot which led out to the original roof. So, after shoving some fiberglass aside, I worked my way back to the eaves of the original house. Where I found some light streaming in from under the eaves of the original roof, where it connected with the new roof.
The lighting issues aren't apparent in the photo, but you can see how there could be a gap hiding under the eaves there.
I was able to find the hole from the outside of the house as well once I knew where to look.
I'm not sure how best to patch up this hole, but I expect I'll find some solution during the week.
My favorite part is that I have reason to hope to significantly improve the comfort level in this house before next winter.
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03/02: The Nature of Wiki's
This piece is being written at the instigation of a few co-workers.
What Is a Wiki
A wiki is a kind of content management system for a website. As such it is a system which is designed to manage web pages (often referred to as articles).
A wiki generally allows some (often all) users to edit the content of pages in their browser real-time. User discussions are also typically facilitated for the purpose of enabling collaboration. (Not simply to allow them to express opinions passively.) As such, a wiki is a collaborative endeavor which is designed to leverage the experience of individuals who do not manage the wiki. (Sometimes management tasks can even be delegated to interested parties.) This is the primary and definitive feature of a wiki.
A wiki is typically organized with a predominantly flat structure. Though, a superficial substructure can form based on the way pages relate to one another. This organization means that related pages will be interconnected and the substructure is very often organic. It also means that you don't typically have to go find the page about "termites", because there's probably only one place for it to be.
A wiki facilitates interlinking of content pages. For intra-wiki linking, you typically don't have to remember much more than the name of the page to connect to it.
The Strengths of a Wiki
Since wiki's allow real-time in-browser page editing by a variety of users, content can evolve rapidly. Small articles can be created when little is known because there's no expectation that you have to "finish it now", or even that you have to finish it yourself.
Due to all the topically relevant interlinking, wiki's typically rank well with Google.
The flat structure is particularly handy when the pages to be managed can be named in fairly obvious ways, the content is topical in nature, and the domains of interest don't intersect too much. That is, wiki's are great for managing reference material.
Some Examples of Good Wiki Themes
An encyclopedia. (See: Wikipedia) Often these are themed or fan based.Personal genealogy. (See: Cox Genealogy)
A dictionary. (See: Wiktionary)
Software Documentation (FAQ's, tips, supplimental documentation, signatures, constraints See: Wiki:NucleusCMS)
Some Examples that Don't Work
A meeting minutes repository. Since information in minutes is typically not topical in nature. Interlinking becomes extremely non-intuitive if even practical at all (if even desirable). Page naming is probably best accomplished with a date and meeting title, which generally tells you little about the page's contents. All organizing and sorting must be done manually. In comparison, a simple file system's tree structure will usually automatically sort files chronologically, especially if named chronologically. A file system also provides the freedom to use whatever editor or file format one chooses, which is almost always easier than writing wiki markup. The one advantage a wiki might provide is the easy inclusion of auxiliary materials. A simple file system might even be easier for that purpose. Since minutes are typically not expected to be improved upon and revised, and since this is typically not desirable, minutes storage takes no advantage of the Wiki's primary and definitive feature.
A lessons learned repository. Lessons learned documentation suffers from almost exactly the same pitfalls. In short, a wiki is ill-advised for the storage of largely stand-alone and static documents. These may be included as source media, but they do not make good primary content for a wiki. A wiki would merely add a lot of overhead to the management of such a repository while providing hardly any benefit at all.
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06/12: A productive weekend
I woke up early and found that my blog had a significant amount of spam from some guy in Pakistan. I already have a decent amount of spam protection for my blog, but this guy was still getting through. I figure this guy was sitting down and actually manually posting the spam. Anyhow, the actual comment never had a link, but his user website was always the same shady business website. Blocking his IP wasn't stopping him. (He's probably using dynamic IP.) Anyhow, it was obvious to me that what I needed to do was block the website he was trying to promote, and after looking around and finding no plugin for that, I wrote one. It's not ready for public consumption yet, but I'm excited to be able to block special website promotions.
After that I went to Lowe's to pick up some supplies, weeded the garden, broke up some cement, and chopped some fire wood.
After lunch, I sprayed for weeds in the front yard and replaced an outdoor outlet I had installed incorrectly. (It needed to be GFCI, and it wasn't firmly attached.) The outlet was fixed in preparation for putting up Christmas lights. We made some further preparations, but determined we didn't have the lights we needed, so I'll finish that up next week.
I finished up the day by working on The Glyph Project. I worked on transliteration and translation, then performed my weekly word import.
Ephraim and Jasher enjoyed playing outside and got themselves about as dirty as they could manage without water to help.
Cassey reports that Ephraim will create pretend words in the tub. He'll jumble the foam letters together and ask Cassey what the word is.
I can't say that his reading has progressed much lately, but things seem to keep getting in the way of his lessons.
Cassey hates to watch Jasher while I quiz Ephraim, and Ephraim has lately expressed a preference to have Cassey work with him, so we've started this last week to give that a try. Ephraim has also started making up songs out of random things that he hears. It's terribly cute.
It's nice to have a moment to sit down and write. Such moments have become more and more scarce for various reasons. I've picked up a traditional paper journal to write in, as blogging has become less feasible. I use the journal for planning, some note making, and goal setting as well, so it's fulfilling a few different purposes. Still, I have some hope to be able to get more work done on my own personal computer. (I don't see that changing real soon though.)
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06/11: Some tidbits
I've been quite pleased with Maine's passing of Question 1, rejecting same-sex marriage. It passed by a slightly better margin than our (California's) Proposition 8, even though the its proponents were out-funded by quite a large margin.
My programming has focused on The Glyph Project. I've been creating a tool to generate word pages to import into the wiki. I think I got it to a point last night where the pages that are generated are about what I want. I just need to break up the import files into manageable chunks of 100 pages or fewer to import. Once that is done, there will be lots of work to do to organize the words better than could be done automatically, extending MediaWiki to handle some of my unique needs, and adding words from other sources. Of course, I also want to automatically generate glyph pages as well. I think that job will be a little easier though.
Hopefully the reference material will be useful from the get-go. I definitely need something more than the short dictionary at the back of my textbook.
Jasher's talking is getting a little variety. Ephraim pulled out a Risk computer game recently and wanted to watch me play. After a battle, the winning team cheers, and Jasher would cheer along with them. (Yeah!!) It was the cutest thing.
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I think it's important that we all realize how dishonest people are being about the full scope of the real agenda of those who are now pushing same sex marriage.
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06/10: Baby Tales
Ephraim, meanwhile, has made some great progress with his letters. In my last comprehensive quiz, he was able to correctly identify 24 out of 26 capital letters as well as identify the letter's sound. And the outstanders? Those would be Q and Y. (He identified Q correctly, but he couldn't identify the sound.) Having been out of town last, Ephraim really hasn't been getting the regular attention he deserves. Now he has a sore throat and a cough, and since his lessons also involve copious amounts of chocolate, I'm giving him a bit of a rest.
While Ephraim's letter identification seems to have improved despite my being out of town; I presume my Mom worked with him (Thanks Mom!); even with that improvement, however, he seems to have lost ground on his reading, though he can still recognize his current favorite word, "up". "At" was one he could usually get, and he was able to get it the last time I worked with him, but it was clearly more difficult, and required more repeated sounding out than usual. There were a few other two-letter words that he used to be able to get by himself, but he couldn't get any of them on Saturday. (He was tired, though. I have to note that he also did poorly on letters on Saturday, but came around for the comprehensive letter quiz later with the above noted stellar performance anyhow.) It will be time to start on lower-case letters in earnest soon.
Ephraim is sick and Cassey is sick. Jasher seems to be getting off easy. (He got a mild fever a couple of days ago, but that was it.) I feel a tickle in my throat, but I'm nursing it and it seems to not be making any progress.
Jasher never fails to be adorable, even when he's formulating evil plans.
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I've written a lot on the subject of same-sex marriage in the past, but here is my current Argument Analysis series:
- Prop 8 (2008) Argument Analysis: Homosexuality Is Immoral
- Prop 8 (2008) Argument Analysis: Religious Rights Will Be Infringed
- Prop 8 (2008) Argument Analysis: Same-Sex Marriage in Schools
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28/08: Sick Day
Despite being sick, I was able to knock out a few important chores I've had to do.
My big goal for today was to deal with my overfilled webmail. I only had 10MB of space allocated to my email account, and to deal with the issue, I'd decided to install my own webmail application on my website instead of using the one provided by my hosting provider. Unfortunately, things didn't go so well, and the application was having trouble trying to connect to the servers. While looking into the issue, I discovered that my hosting provider had increased the space available to me for email from the old 20 MB to 1GB. All I had to do was increase the allocation to my specific email addresses. So, now I have 100MB allocated to my primary email address, and my problem is solved.
After conquering my email issue, I attacked The Shtick Image Editor. I've made a lot of changes since my last release, but it has been almost 3 years since I've made what I have available to the public. Having recently gotten the splash screen updated with the new version number, and having, just this week, updated the license, I was ready to release. So, today I released what I had. The website needed a little fixing up as well, but now everything is running smoothly and The Shtick Image Editor 1.2rc1.
Apart from this, I also finally got around to depositing some checks of small value, and managed to get around to blogging for CastilloPortraits.com.
Cassey made some great pancakes, and sloppy joes.
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22/08: A Jumble
The first major problem was a flea infestation. The source of the problem was the front bathroom, where hoards of fleas were getting trapped in the tub and living short hungry lives. They didn't all get trapped in the tub, however, and we were suffering for it. On the upside, we got pretty good at flea catching. So, we sprayed and we vacuumed and we sprayed some more. I'm now happy to report that I haven't seen a single flea since Sunday, though, we're still playing it cautious, and I haven't really been in the front bathroom much either. (Last time I went in, there were very few live fleas.) My bites have been healing nicely.
The drivers for the flea infestation seem to be two-fold. First, we had a possum living under the bathroom (and perhaps dying there). Second, humidity has been up. Apparently fleas need a minimum humidity level of 70% to really do well. (Below 50% and they're in real trouble.) I now understand why we never had flea problems in the desert.
The possums were hanging around because Sassy's food was available. Sassy, however, has not been seen in weeks, so we have stopped making the food available, and I haven't seen a possum in about a week.
Another busy point is my front yard. I've been diligently watering it and spraying herbicide on anything green that appears. It seemed a pretty endless effort until about today. It has been a few days since I last sprayed, and normally, I would expect to see the yard speckled green, but instead greenery has remained all but undetectable. I'll spray down what I can find tomorrow, but I'm really pleased at the progress.
Our garden has seen better days. A few days ago I noticed a couple of mounds in the garden area. I suspected gopher at first, but upon closer inspection, the ant activity, placement, and shape of the mounds led me to conclude that ants were responsible, which didn't really worry me that much. Nevertheless, the plants were looking a little wilty. "Probably just getting near the end of life", I thought.
On Wednesday, we had a neighbor in the ward over for dinner. Upon seeing the mounds his first thought too was gophers. I explained my ant theory, but he said that ants didn't make mounds like that. I replied that they surely did, but since my experience was only with ants in other areas, and since the plants were looking like the weren't getting enough nutrition, I began to believe I had a gopher.
The next day, I disconnected my hose from the drip system and set the little drip timer to "On" so that I could flush out the gopher... but nothing happened.
That's when I made an important discovery. Someone had turned off the water. We figure it was probably Ephraim, but who really knows. The main thing was... we now knew what was wrong with our plants.
So, do we have a gopher, or is it ants? I still don't know. I haven't seen any mounds suddenly appear indicating a gopher. I haven't seen any stalks chewed through.
I've been having regular lessons with Ephraim lately. I decided that to make any progress on reading, he needed to get his vowel sounds down better, and now he seems to know those for the most part. He also seems to know the difference between a letter and a word rather solidly, so that when I ask him what the word is and point to the letters, he sounds them all out rather than just picking one. Still, it's pretty slow going.
A couple of good sites I stumbled upon:
Linguistic Puzzles - Challenging and fun puzzles for the linguistically inclined.
OK... the other article is now demanding registration, which is pretty lame. (The paper was originally written in 2006... did my stumbling it have that great an effect on its popularity?) It's a scientific paper which describes a kind of pseudo-faster-than-light effect in certain materials. It was highly sensationalized in the science news pieces I read, but when it comes down to it, it seems the pulse is simply being deformed. The author himself clarifies that no information travels faster than light, and having read the paper, I agree, but still people seem to be making a big deal about it. (Actually, I have my doubts that any light is actually traveling faster than light. I think there are some obvious questions they not only failed to address, but failed to ask in the conclusion, where one typically speculates on interesting follow-up research.) Nevertheless, I mention it because it's interesting to me. I saw some very similar deformations in my simulations of similar gaussian pulses traveling in the heliosheath and it gives me pause. (We were attempting to replicate unexpected observations by Voyager 1. I don't really think our results were very interesting for that purpose.)
Anyhow, that's a jumbled summary.
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01/08: A Great Week of Ephraim
Cassey has been taking him swimming a lot at the home of his Great Aunt Carol. On Monday, he wouldn't even get n the pool, but by the end of the day he was splashing around with gusto. Water wings were obtained for him during the week, and by the end of the week he was jumping into the pool by himself (meaning, I was only hanging around just in case) and swimming (with water wings) to the other side. He still needs to learn to keep his mouth shut in water, but otherwise, he's doing great.
Having installed Daggerfalllast week for Cassey's gaming history edification, Ephraim soon learned how to walk around and open doors, which marks the beginning of his serious use of the arrow keys. (Which I'd previously failed at teaching him.)
This week, I showed Ephraim a game at his grandparents' house which he really liked (Kgoldrunner), which he refers to as "Stairs" (though, there aren't any... just ladders). "Stairs" uses the mouse, which is a bit odd for a side-view type of game. Anyhow, he asked me for "Stairs" again today, and I told him that we didn't have it here, but I offered to bring up another game for him, and I pulled up "The Ephraim Game". The Ephraim Game is a game that I started making for him many months ago, hoping to teach him to use the arrow keys, and to stay interested in letters. For those who have seen my homemade game engine at work, they will know what the UI kind of looks like. For those who haven't, you can check it out the first ever game created with it at my wedding website. (It currently seems to be acting a little odd in FireFox.)
Anyhow; Ephraim has demanded a few upgrades. I'll probably post the game he is playing once I've addressed his initial concerns.
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