Blitzed by @FeedBlitz

Some of you may have seen a scary message when you clicked on a link to my blog post this morning. The service that handles distribution of my blog, FeedBlitz, had a bit of a meltdown this morning. They've explained the error in an email and on their blog. In part,

This morning, shortly before 8am US Eastern, one of our databases became overloaded and, to use a technical term, crapped out.
Our monitoring apps told us of the situation, we quickly jumped on the apparent problem, and we thought we were done … but there was more to the issue than at first appeared.
One of our downstream web servers that handled tracking became horribly overloaded as a consequence of its being unable to reach that specific database. That in turn caused a failsafe in FeedBlitz to kick in, which had the nasty and unintended consequence of putting up a scary malware message.

There was no risk to your computer or with anything on www.roasterboy.com. I'm sorry for this false alarm. FeedBlitz responded quickly and correctly, getting the servers back online and communicating pretty well.

Twitter / RoasterBoy: It appears that @feedblitz ... via kwout

They did continue their regular Twitter posts, which did not relate to the crisis at hand and, for while, leading to the impression that it was business as usual. 

BoA getting it wrong in Holden

So, the Bank of America in Holden recently repainted the entrance to its parking lot. In the process, it got the arrows wrong in all the ways possible.

In this view, we're facing Main Street.

1. Left turns form Main Street into the BoA parking lot are prohibited. Nevertheless, there's an arrow on the parking lot showing how to make that left turn.
2. Coming out of the parking lot, only right turns are allowed. Therefore, there's an arrow for a left turn.
3. Both of those arrows are on the wrong side of the island. 

21st Century media via 19th Century communications technology

While my mother-in-law was in hospice care, we watched closely for signs of pain. If we saw grimaces or if she cried out, the nurses could give her more morphine.
Sometimes, though, the prescribed amounts weren't doing the job. The hospice team would quickly confer, in person or by phone, and recommend an increase in the regular and/or PRN dose and/or frequency. The nurse would then send the recommendation by to the doctor who, in turn, would send the prescription by fax to the pharmacy.
If the fax machine is out of paper or otherwise not working properly, the request or orders can be delayed. An hour's delay for a normal prescription is no big deal. An hour's delay for a terminal patient who is in pain is, well, do you want that for your mother?
The first patent for the process that would become a fax machine was issued in 1843. Based on those ideas, a commercial fax line connected Paris and Lyon in 1865.

The Pantelegraph in 1865, by Giovanni Caselli

The Pony Express had come and gone.We were still a couple of decades away from the telephone.
Physicist Michio Kaku observes that paperwork is, to descendants of hunters and gatherers, proof of the kill. Our caveman selves, instantiated as CYA bureaucrats in insurance companies and government offices, demand hard copy to prove that we've done something useful.

The Hawthorne Effect is alive and well

Research shows that LED lighting generally improves working conditions in the office and on the shop floor. Control over the lighting, however, matters most.
Read the rest on my blog post at All LED Lighting, LED Lighting in the Workplace: Hard to Measure

Starbuck's Wi-Fi vs. Verizon 4G

Speed Test with Verizon 4G at 1 West Boylston St., Worcester

Speed Test at Starbuck's at 1 West Boylston St., Worcester with one other user in the shop

Advertisers have a new way to get into your head.

It's been a long day. You're tired. You muscle your way onto the train and get a window seat so that you look out the window and start the process of not thinking. You rest your tired head against the window, hoping that the rhythmic rumble will shake out the weariness.
Advertising shows up inside your head.
Watch the video and then make plans for an aisle seat.

via Boing Boing

More on language, good times, and wishing the best for others

When you have a good time at a gathering of family and/or friends, it's not unusual to say, "I hope that you had as good as time as I did."
Courtesy suggests that we wish for better things for others than we do for ourselves. Saying "I hope that you had a better time than I did," however, doesn't have quite the effect that we're after.

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One of an occasional series.
A bunch of years ago, I worked for a software company. It was hard work for long hours. At one point, senior management made the pronouncement that the development team needed to focus more on a particular aspect of the product. The QA manager and I agreed that we'd be Focused More-ons.

Putting things in more or less order

A good vacation doesn't fit in a box, tied up with ribbon, that you can open years from now to say, "Yes, that's what it was."
A good vacation has time enough to look over the handiwork of spiders who've woven their webs in the overnight and now those webs glisten in the morning dew.

A good vacation has unplanned visits, particularly with young ones who bring their own views of us and what's important.

A good vacation marks transitions, from young to not-young, from before-adventure to after-adventure.

A good vacation lets us learn about the big world in our small corner.

Fisher Museum - Harvard Forest

A good vacation lets you sleep as much as you need to, work until it's time to swim, swim until your toes are pruney, air-dry on the bench until the mosquitoes have had their fill, and talk for a long time because there's always this one more thing to say.
A good vacation spills out of the box, onto the floor, and leaves tracks all around your house and yard and life.
It was a good vacation.

Doc rejoins Celtics, sort of

With Rondo on his way to Dallas, Pierce and KG heading to Brooklyn, and Doc moving west, Celtics fans may despair that the once-great team is being shattered.
Rest assured. We've been to this movie before.
In 1978, the original Celtics franchise was sent to Buffalo in a baffling deal that brought the then-Braves to Boston. (There was as baseball team called the Boston Braves that played at what is now Nickerson Field at BU. That franchise is now in Atlanta.) Included in that shuffle was one talented and troubled player, Marvin Barnes, whose story is featured in the "What the Hell Happened To" blog.
That same year, GM Red Auerbach had brilliantly drafted Larry Bird as a junior, even though Bird would return to Indiana for his senior year. The great teams of the 1980s had their basis in the train wreck that was the Celtics ownership of the 70s.
Astute readers will note that current GM Danny Ainge was a good basketball and baseball player and a pretty good basketball executive. Red Auerbach, however, Ainge ain't.
Meanwhile, the Buffalo team moved to California, first to San Diego and then Los Angeles. So Doc River is now coach of what had been the Celtics.

Ikea numbers

• The probability of placing an upside-down board in an Ikea project: 1.
• The probability of two or more people, each assembling the same Ikea piece of furniture, making the same mistake: 1.
• The step you will have to redo: 3.
• The number of times that one's grandfather, a cabinet maker, rolls in his grave: ∞.
• The number of better ways to spend a \vacation day with your wife: 0.

Mr. Hakkarainen goes to Helsinki

In Massachusetts, we've just completed a special election, characterized by tepid candidates and low voter turnout. Politics used to be something special around here, but we've become as dull as Wonder Bread.
Meanwhile, across the pond and to the north, Tuevo Hakkarainen has released a karaoke recording that will be featured at the Gold Cucumber competition in October. (You have to slog through a few translation services to figure out what's going on. Even then, if the resulting phrases are Gold Cucumber, karaoke, and evil foreboding name, you know that you're onto something.
In the case that you have doubts, here's the man himself, singing at an outdoor festival.

And if that wasn't enough, Hakkarainen missed the opening session of Parliament because of gastroenteritis. News reports referred to him as " the Lost Teuvo Hakkarainen."

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This post is one of a series about Teuvo Hakkarainen, the True Finns Party MP from Viitasaari. For the record, my grandfather was born in Viitasaari.

Comcast uses Catch-22 as a system design manual

While reviewing my credit card bill, I noticed that the bill for our Comcast service at the camp was higher than expected. I went to the Comcast website, logged in to my account, and clicked the b to see the details on the bill. I learned that I needed a PIN to access the bill.

For security reasons, Voice management and billing information on your account will be limited until you enter the Security PIN we sent to your home address or email. Enter your Security PIN now, or have it re-sent to you.

Fine. I clicked the link to have it sent to my email. Quick as you please, I was brought to a page where I learned that the PIN will be sent to our camp address in five business days.
Less fine. We don't receive mail at the camp address.
I looked around around to find another way to find out my PIN. I found none. I initiated a chat session with customer support. After I provided my account info and exchanged niceties, we went to the matter of the PIN.
I learned the following from a nice customer service representative.

• Even though the message says that they can send the PIN to my email address, they can't.
• They can only send the PIN in two ways: by USPS to our camp address, where we don't receive mail or to our Comcast phone number as a voice message. We don't have a phone to plug into the phone jack on the router to access the voice service that we didn't order.
• They can't send a text message with the PIN to my cell phone, which the phone number by which the CSR located the account.
• When I said that I would have to buy a phone to be able to access my Comcast voice mail, she said that wasn't necessary, that I could borrow a working phone from a neighbor.
  The CSR was very sad for me (her words) when I told her that I don't have a neighbor from whom I can borrow a phone. 
• I would have to go to the Comcast office 20 miles away to get real help.

When I got to the Comcast office 20 miles away, the nice customer service rep looked up my account information (based on my cellphone number) and then told me that the system could only send my PIN to the service address (the camp), not to the billing address. I quietly tapped my forehead against the glass that separates customers from service reps. She resolved to fix the problem. Twenty minutes later, she was able get the PIN sent to my home address ("in six to eight business days").

That was two weeks ago.
Update:
In the process of testing the links for this blog post, I clicked the Send me a PIN links. I just received the following email:

I logged in, entered the PIN, and can now view my bill. Thank you, Comcast, I think.

Father's Day 2013

I'm a very fortunate guy.

Not only did I  receive some clever and thoughtful gifts, but, most importantly, we got to spend time together as family. We ate well, laughed loudly, and heard good stories of hope and adventure.

Making Baby Jesus cry - 2013

And the winner for the earliest last-chance Christmas deal is ...

Dept. of Non-obviousness: Drupal configuration message

You might not think that this stream of messages would be caused by character encoding:

I was editing a configuration file and switched to UTF-8 because I needed to add a few unusual characters to a web page. When I did so, the stream of errors appeared. It took a long time of searching before I discovered. this discussion page where ANSI vs. UTF-8 was mentioned.
It's not a universal law, but experience shows that the bigger the gusher of error messages, the cause is usually quite small and and the least obvious.

If you get there last, leave a message

There's a scene in Three Little Pigskins where Moe and Larry are arranging to meet at a predetermined location:
Moe: If you get there first, put a chalk mark.
Larry: Okay. What if you get there first?
Moe: Then I’ll rub it out.¹
Anyway, The Reg reports that scientists have done this, only better, sending a message from one photon to another that that was already deceased.

Measuring P1 destroys it; even so, it gets its state from P4
Image: Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 210403 (2013)
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.210403

¹The Marx Brothers may have done this first, but I can't locate the scene.

On Google maps and education

At lunch today, I talked with a former professor about some of the issues that he sees with his students. This, by the way, is at Amherst. The students who get in there did so because they knew how to present themselves to their high school teachers and admissions boards. They knew how to win.
Many student wrote papers that were focused on a narrow topic, crisply-defined, but with little connection to other ideas or domains. These students did well well because they showed a clear answer to a specific, albeit esoteric, question. Their research skills were limited to delivering a precise answer with no ragged edges.
If you ask Google Maps (or any GPS system) for turn-by-turn directions, you get good results. Using those directions will get you where you intend to go, but with a curious side effect. You are delivered as in a tunnel, without context.

Time was, we studied maps and knew not only the path, but also the frame of reference. Recently, I had to travel to a part of a nearby town that was unfamiliar to me. The person I was visiting said that his street is right near the so-and-so school. I used Google Navigation. It made no mention of the school as a prominent reference point. Instead, it said, "in 600 feet,  turn left." I got where I was going, but Google told me nothing of the fact that this family lived near a school.
It turned out that living near a school was very relevant to this person and his wife because his kids could walk to school. Google told me what was true, but not what was meaningful.

How to lose a sale and win a customer

While cutting firewood this weekend, the chain slipped off the bar on my chainsaw. In the process of re-

tightening the chain, a small clip and, I later learned, a bearing fell out of the sprocket assembly and into the underbrush. I took it as an omen to stop work for the day. I put the chainsaw into the back of my car.
I went back to Holden the next day to tend to a few other errands and brought the chainsaw to the repair place near our house, Parker Power Equipment. They have worked on other saws before as well as our lawn mower and snowblower.
The young man behind the desk looked at the saw and said that they don't always have the right Stihl parts in stock, that I might do better to go a Stihl dealer such as the one in Worcester. I had errands in Worcester, so I went to the dealer. They had the parts and installed them at the counter.
Both places did well, but Parker did better. They said that losing this sale was better for me, the customer. They were right. My chainsaw could have been with them for several days while they tried to get the right parts for this simple repair. They earned my loyalty as a customer.

Plans for the weekend? The weather says, "Ha!"

What's been weirdest among the many weird aspects of this weekend's weather has been nearly two days of precipitation with a strong northwest wind.
In typical patterns, systems move up the east coast, dragging a cold front behind them. The cold front shifts the wind to the northwest and brings in colder and drier air. In this case, the wind started to shift on Friday. The rain continued, hard, through Friday and Saturday. Lighter on Saturday night, we saw or thought we saw some snow mixed in.
Three months earlier, we would have called the a three-day Nor'easter.It's not uncommon for winter storms to strengthen as they get into the Gulf of Maine. Bombing out, they call it. The weather charts don't show that this happened, only that the systems moved slowly.
There are breaks in the clouds now. There are whitecaps on the lake.
The fireplace, even if we had good, dry wood, doesn't put out enough heat to fight against the wind and cold. The porch of the camp has single-pane windows with broad exposure to the northwest wind coming across the lake. When I was a kid, we had a pocket door and a pocket window on the wall that separated the porch from the main room. My father removed those during a renovation in the 70s. We could have used them this weekend.
We're burning wood that's long past its prime, stuff that was cut five or more years ago. My plan had been to cut and split the fallen hemlock that's in the front yard. There was still plenty of good meat on much of the tree. Split, it'll be good for both the fireplace and sauna. It was too cold and rainy on yesterday and on Friday, though, for me to spend very long outdoors.
The rain will stop. The winds will calm and shift again. By the end of the coming week, it'll be 90.

When cool is too cool

As states, cities, and towns replaced their traffic signals with energy-efficient LED lights, they discovered an underappreciated feature of the old systems : the heat melted snow and ice.
You can read more in my blog post on All LED lighting: Of Light, Snow & Ice