Toby's Log page 107

My beard and my hair change

in

I’ve done something I once vowed never to do: I shaved my beard. I had intended to keep my beard uncut for life. This was made all the easier by the fact that it never grew particularly long. I wanted to have the softness of a never cut beard and the low maintenance. My mustache has shown that the sometimes disputed notion about shaving making hair grow faster and thicker is true, at least for me, especially the faster part. I don’t want to need to shave my beard as well all the time.

But all of this has seemed to matter less and less along with so many other things as I age. It’s harder to care. I’ve been told by some, especially my roommate Dwight, that my unkempt appearance might contribute to my loneliness. Though I’ve been more kempt in the past with similar results, I feel the simple but always present change may help to bring about change elsewhere in my life.

I’ve also cut my hair (slightly) for the first time in years. Several years ago I gave myself a mohawk (a faux-hawk really). After that, I’ve let it grow out long. I never was able to have long hair as a child, and I wanted to try it out. I’ve liked it to some extent. I sometimes feel it looks fairly good that way, though other times I feel it looks too unkempt and poofy. It perhaps illustrates visually to some extent my internal state. Without it I am somewhat visually bland.

Of course, it can be a pain as well. It always gets stuck in things, such as my car window upon closing or between my back and my seat back. In the wind it never ceases to get in my eyes. And in spite of the lack of cutting as well as my infrequent combings, it requires more maintenance.

Anyway, I cut a few inches off to make it a little less unkempt looking and less likely to get caught in things. I did the ponytail cut, where I put my hair in a ponytail and then cut the end off. It has created a somewhat inverted curve shape, with the outsides longer than the middle. I’m not sure If I’ll try to straighten this or not: It works well for the ponytail, which is pretty much the only way I wear it.

Shyness & Love

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I’ve found somewhat of a renewed hope in my life, at a time when things were seeming especially dismal. By chance, while looking through books at the library after a class, I found a book that seems to, in its opening, describe my most pressing affliction to a T. The book, titled Shyness & Love, describes a group of males who go through their lives strongly desiring emotional and sexual contact but unable to attain even a small bit of it due to an oppressively powerful shyness. Not only do these males fail to garner the spouse and kids so commonly considered a wonderful part of life, but their lack of social skills affects them negatively in the workplace and in their entire life in general. Happiness seems unattainable to them, and by the time they reach middle age, they’ve lost virtually all hope and have become very pessimistic and angry in general.

This dismal road seems to be the one I walk down at the moment. I don’t like the prospects. This book gives me hope that I might be able to escape. That my most dire problem has both been studied and has possibly a sizable population (the author estimates a little over 1% of Usonians) sharing in it gives me promise and makes me feel so much less alone. I intend to read as much of it as I can in the next few weeks, even as my schoolwork has been taking a large portion of my time.

Unfortunately, descriptors of love shyness on wikipedia suggest that I show many more differences from the affliction than the intro of the book suggested. Unlike the men in the book, I didn’t have abusive parents, though perhaps emotionally distant, and I like Rock and Roll music. In addition, reviews on amazon suggest that the book has its problems, including some lack of credibility and, fairly importantly, a general lack of real, usable solutions. The book is out of print, and the author and others have not seemed to have expanded upon the concept since the book was written in 1987.

None-the-less, I hope the reading will help me understand myself and my problem better, making me better equipped to handle the problem. I feel more confident that useful information and help might be out there somewhere. I will make in effort to use my brain to escape my trouble, to get past the pain and anxiety provided by social situations so that I might enter into the world in which everyone else lives, finally. Happiness may be achievable.

hosts file to access local servers

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Ever since I had to change to a Speedstream router instead of my old 2wire (constant and still somewhat present connectivity difficulties), I had been unable to login in to my WordPress install locally. This was because the Speedstream redirected traffic calling the external URL or IP from inside to itself rather than forwarding the request to the server, and because WordPress requires a single fixed URL reference in its database that it automatically redirects to.

I worked hard trying to get the router itself to not do this, but instead the problem was fixable on my computer itself: the hosts file, as I found on this post. You simply edit the hosts file:
$ sudo vi /etc/hosts
and then place an entry like “accessURL externalURL” for another machine, ie:
tobysServer.local cosmicosmo.ath.cx
or modify a localhost line for a local machine (haven’t tried this yet):
127.0.0.1 localhost
becomes:
127.0.0.1 localhost cosmicosmo.ath.cx
Or possibly you could just do as for another machine and access by the LAN address rather than localhost (haven’t tried this either, just speculation).

This was very quick and easy to do and works like a charm. I haven’t seen what happens if my WAN network access goes down with this method: I imagine it would cause problems accessing any part of the site.

One problem I’ve already found with WordPress and this method is that many links don’t work because they contain the full URL. Examples include the Preview button and the all post links. You must copy the link and past it, replacing the hostname bit. But all the admin links work, at least the ones I’ve tried. Tag autocompletion doesn’t seem to be working either, but I’m not sure if that is a browser compatibility problem with this new 2.7 version or a plugin (simple tags) conflict.

Education done like work flex-time

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*** reasons
scheduling classs around work, home, and other parts of life can be very difficult
especially when a rigid schedule week after week is required and
required classes frequently have few available scheduling options
long, fixed terms mean students must plan in advance and be scheduled for months

*** possible implementation characteristics
* semesters
no more fixed semesters or similar fixed periods
students attend lectures, office hours, etc. whenever they want
each lecture, etc is offered at one of many pre-scheduled times
students can pick and choose which time they want to go
times and frequency chosen based on previous demand
student must attend a certain set of lectures, plus perhaps some from an optional collection
can take as long as they want to complete a course
take tests/evaluations/projects when they feel they are ready
tests given in a testing center where they can be taken any time
monitored, students from many classes take tests at once
much harder than current tests to give flexibility in determining competency
getting 50% of the questions right probably good target normal grade
one on one type evaluations scheduled with prof for most convenient time
at least as important as tests
profs spend time with student determining their capabilities
projects are like homework, but larger and with a more defined purpose
projects last a certain duration, must be finished by a due date
some longer and bigger, some short and small
groups projects will require students signing up, running once a quota is reached
competencies rather than grades
not fixed
students can keep going until they achieve desired/required level of competency
profs decide competency based on tests, projects, evaluations, time spent with in class and office-hours
many profs involved, whole department perhaps
no homework per se normally
in class, supervised work only most of the time
perhaps some courses will have some continuity between some lectures with coursework given between
required to be taken in a certain order
should be rare
projects will be the majority of work done outside of class
Office-hours/tutoring
Some students obtain and undertand information in certain classes very easily while other students need a lot of help.
Part of profs time will be spent in an office hours / tutoring like teaching methodology where students are encouraged to seek assistance from the profs
in a larger capacity setting than an office.
An entire class should be able to show up and be handled in this setting.
Possible student activities would be private study with occasional questions to prof or longer discussions with prof about certain points.

Presidential Advertising and Funding

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The advertisements on the TV and radio and the costs associated are crazy and huge, and one item that helps prevent smaller parties from entering the political game. The money for these adverts coming primarily from donations, these donations sources have become a large point of contention.

I suggest that we eliminate all advertising by campaigners in these traditional advertising mediums. All other forums of communications that are currently used would then be expanded in power. Speeches and appearances, campaigners, candidate websites, and the debates should all be given more power.

The debates in particular need to be improved to allow more even representation of competing candidates and their ideas. Each candidate should be timed during the debate for how much they’ve said. This includes words spoken during or interrupting others’ speech. At the end, during their final statements, the other candidates should be given the time to even out their total speaking time. And the presidential debates should always include at least one third party candidate, the most popular probably. This will bring in an additional voice to attempt to break up the polarization in the discussion between only two voices.

Both the costs of campaigning and the needs to receive all that money through donations must be reduced significantly. All that money could potentially be used for better purposes.

Other mediums should be better at providing information than the more stagnant campaign adverts on TV and radio.

my first sailing race

in

I went on my first sailing race today. It was with Jim, two of his friends, Paul, and his friend Jen. I had met Jim and his two friends on the 4th of July while I was up there for a family gathering and fireworks. Jim owns a boat down towards the end of the dock and races every Wednesday. Paul has raced with him numerous times now and even joined him on a multi-day cruise out to the islands.

I was worried that we’d be late, but arrived well before Jim’s two friends. We were in fact heading to the race without them, when we saw them walking down the dock. We turned around and went up to an empty dock to pick them up, then headed out late for the race.

The winds near the start of the race were very low and we were moving quite slowly while also drifting to the side quite a bit. Though we didn’t look that far behind the other boats and even came pretty close to some, we didn’t cross the start line till 22 minutes after the start of the race. We continued moving very slowly for quite some time, and eventually found ourselves way behind.

I really had little idea of what was going on. I kinda figured out by observation. There was a motorboat at the starting point. We had to go on one side of a marker near the start, then head to a marker which we couldn’t see but had the lat long coordinates of. The GPS guided us there. We had to go around the marker on one side, then head back in to port around one side of the break wall and finish by passing a buoy.

Though close to some boats near the beginning, a few tacks put us well behind. Boats started heading back towards us, downwind, some with spinnakers, well before we were near the turnaround marker. We got pretty close to a couple of those boats as we passed and were unsure whether we’d have to turn. I’m amazed how close those boats can get and how easily they maneuver to avoid each other.

We started on the low side to force some heel to speed us up, but the winds eventually picked up and we were able to go much faster and heel a good bit with us on the high side. Still, the other boats were quite far away when we finally made it around the marker. It was getting dark quick. The last other boat rounded the break wall while we were still quite a ways away. We called in by radio, but the motor boat had gone in, told us just to call in our time when we finally passed the finish line.

The whole time I did very little to help. I sat more toward the front, as there was little room in the back. When tacking and jibing, I mostly just slid underneath the boom and later the jib, letting others do the work. I was unsure of how to help, but hopefully my observations of how things are done will help in the future.

It was quite dark well before we passed the finish line. We decided to forego the call in. We were at least 40 minutes after everybody else, probably a good bit more.

We enjoyed some appetizers in the marina restaurant afterward.

Another mouse

in

There was another mouse in my house, removed yesterday.

Over the summer I had occasionally heard some mouse-like noises, especially more recently. But I didn’t see any signs, such as mouse poop and chewed up food. On Monday I saw very sure signs, starting with the same scurrying past my bedroom door tiny brown furry thing that had alerted me to the presence of a mouse in the past. I didn’t want to alert Dwight, as I wasn’t sure how he’d take it or what he’d want to do about it. But as I was trying to sleep that night, the mouse kept chewing on something. I couldn’t sleep, so I repeatedly went into the kitchen searching for him. I pulled off some wall/cupboard material in my search. He finally stopped chewing after awhile, at least long enough for me to fall asleep, but I did set up one of my live traps from before.

He wasn’t there in the morning when I awoke. There were no signs of him. When I came home from work though, i heard a scratching/gnawing similar to the sound from the previous night. He was not chewing on my house though, but on the trap. I had him captured. When Dwight came home I showed him. He was not especially, though slightly, scared of the dirty little thing.

I drove him to the park. I tried to take some photos with my new macro lens, but was unable to get anything good. He disappeared quickly.

Internship

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It looks like I’ve got an internship for the eBusiness Managment program I’ve recently begun at Tri-C. It will be involving web development, which was my primary interest in going to Tri-C. RPM International is the company, a multi-national conglomerate mainly focused on coatings and sealants, including Rustoleum. The main company sort of owns many smaller companies, and it has web people to build web sites for these smaller companies. The company also does a lot of charity work, including helping non-profit group make web sites. I will be learning while helping RPM’s web people.

The company uses some Visual Basic and ASP stuff along with Microsoft’s SQL Server, so I will be learning those. I’ve never used them before, coming from a PHP MySQL background. But the concepts are all the same, and the syntax and what not involved will be very good to learn. I will also learn much more complex and sophisticated things than I’ve been able to do thus far. It’s been slow going learning on my own.

This will be my second actual job ever. I’m going to continue at the Winking Lizard for a while, but reduce my hours. The internship is 3 days a week, and I’ll probably end up with that at the Lizard as well. It will be six days with no chance of overtime, but I’m fine with that given the circumstances. Once school starts, I’ll probably leave the Lizard completely so I can focus fully on the eBusiness program. It’ll be nice to finally be free of that place. It’s been rough going there every day for so long.

wonderwash

in

I recently purchased a clothes washing “machine” for my home. It is the Wonderwash, a hand powered small washing machine. I was a little leery of the product, as it didn’t seem to have much more to it than would a plastic bucket with tight lid. However, it’s very small and costs only $50, and is supposed to use less water and much less energy than a conventional washer, so I sprung for it.

It is indeed similar to a bucket. It does come with a stand and crank, which seem to make it take up more room than a 5 gallon pickle bucket would while having a bit less capacity. But the cranking is fairly easy. I could simply roll a pickle bucket, but I’m not sure if that’d be as effective as rotating it on the other axis, with the sudden thwumping fall from one side to the other. The lid is screwed down, which is supposed to pressurize the contents (it definitely does). The pressure is supposed to do much of the cleaning, pushing the water and detergent through the clothing. This is the area I’m most worried about the pickle buckets capability. I will have to try the pickle bucket though to see how the results compare. It would be much cheaper, easier to obtain, more versatile, and smaller. The only other thing I’d be missing would be the spigot on the bottom of the wonderwash, which is nice save for the leaking it sometimes does.

So anyway, the Wonderwash thus far has done fairly well at cleaning my clothes, even in the two minute wash cycle recommended. Crank for two minutes. Drain and fill with rinse water. The rinsing takes 30 seconds, but I usually do two rinses. The whole process is fairly fast, most of the time going to filling and draining. Compared to hand washing, it seems to get the clothes somewhat cleaner, though probably not as well as normal washers. It is of course much easier, with no hands in the water, and is much faster. The rinse is also much easier and faster and seems to get better results with less water (the wash also uses less water than what I was using).

The biggest problem right now is with drying. I can easily handle hang drying from a regular washer, as the clothes are spun in them. There is no spinning in this or any ability to squeeze out the water as a group. This problem was the same as with hand washing, and is one reason I rarely did it. Since this is so much easier than hand washing, I’m more liable to do it. But I have almost no space for drip drying. Those clothes can really hold a lot of water. I can spend quite a bit of time squeezing them by hand and they still drip. I think the presses would probably be too bulky and take too much time. I’m considering a spinner. The wonderwash people also make two electric spin dryers. Uses energy, but it’d be fast and take me nearly to the dry point. I considered getting a commercial salad spinner instead, but they cost as much as the electric ones and would be more bulky and not get the clothes as dry. So I may just order an electric spinner soon.

Unfortunately, the spinner hurts the size advantages of the whole operation. I now need the washer, the spinner, and still need some hang drying space and apparatus. Luckily, the energy needs and water usage should be much lower. I’m hoping that once I get everything set up and get a good system going, the time required will not be much more than with the regular machines, especially since I have to drive to my parents to use them.

Second motorbike ride

in

Thursday, I went over cousin Paul’s house, as I had a day off. The intention was to go sailing if the weather was nice, or perhaps go motorcycling if it was too bad for sailing, but not awful, or we’d find something else otherwise. Though there was a 30% chance of rain, the sky was sunny and the forecast looked good, even for sailing. So Paul suggested we ride the motorcycles down to the dock so we could get both desired activities in.

I was quite leary, as I had only been on one rather short ride thus far, with no traffic, a few weeks before. It seemed dangerous going the 20 mile journey to the dock, especially with the probability that, after sailing, I’d have to ride home in the dark. Now that I’ve got my temps, it isn’t illegal to ride, but I’m not supposed to ride in the dark. But he convinced me I’d be fine, so I went.

I’m surprised he didn’t want to turn around and take a car in the initial bit of the ride. I stalled clutching from a stop several times early on. I moved slowly for sure. I was revving the engine very high at times, and something started smoking from the engine (he said probably just oil). When I had to ask how to change out of first gear, I thought for sure he’d see I wasn’t ready for such a trip. But he simply reminded me one down, two up, and we continued on.

I had trouble with the speed, and many car drivers were undoubtedly angry being stuck behind me. I was also slow at starting, stalling out plenty of times. I was slow at stopping, as I hadn’t really made much use of the brakes before, using mostly engine braking, and made sure to keep a wide distance open ahead of me.

I made it there and back again in one piece, no real problems. The ride was definitely a learning experience and I became much more comfortable with controlling the bike and using its various controls while paying attention to the road ahead.

Selected notes:

  • Braking: I hadn’t used the rear brakes at all, nor the front very much, before this ride. I did not feel comfortable using the brakes and wasn’t sure how quickly I could stop. I used a lot of engine braking, especially early in the ride. I kept my fingers on the brake lever most of the time, but this caused hand fatigue. I eventually left them off unless I felt I might need to stop soon, but my fear made this still be a lot of the time. After trying the rear brake in a safe place, I started using them more. I found them to be quite powerful, yet they didn’t try to lock on me at all. I am much more comfortable with them now. I’ll have to do some practice quick stops to be fully comfortable.
  • Turn signals: Paul told me early on to not worry about the signals; he’d be signaling anyway, and I was having trouble paying attention to the little slider while also coming to a stop. I didn’t use them at all for a while, but eventually became comfortable with them, especially after I stopped leaving my hand on the clutch lever the whole time. I started using them for every turn, and eventually was able to turn them off soon after the turn as well.
  • Speed: Had lots of trouble with this. It took me a while to get up to 40 mph. Around 40, the wind seemed fairly strong, and worried me. I did go up to 50 some, but not much more, and not that often. The speed limit was 50 or higher in some parts, making this tough for me, especially since cars always want to go faster than the limit by 5 to 10 mph. It seemed they had it so much easier, with their large steel enclosures. My legs felt very bare when going above 40 with just khaki pants on. I can easily see why riding pants’d be nice. The helmet and jacket and gloves I was borrowing from Paul felt quite safe though. Once I got used to braking and shifting, the higher speeds seemed less scary.
  • Shifting: I had lots of trouble starting from a stop early on. Getting the throttle to the right position while releasing the clutch was tough for me. I’d often give it too much or too little power, leading to a jerk forward or stall. I had to go through this somewhat when learning stickshift car, and the change in controls seemed to negate most of my skill from that. Shifting up to second and beyond was no problem. Shifting down was somewhat though. Once I got used to using the brakes, I often’d just hold the clutch in and kick down through the gears while braking only with the brakes. I was worried I’d have to start going at some point from something other than a dead stop and kick into the wrong gear, but I never had a problem with this, helped by the extremely high rpm range of motorcycles. Being used to shifting on my car, I didn’t go nearly as high in RPM as I should’ve. I cruised at around 7k and shifted around 10k, though the redline was way up somewhere above 14k.
  • Throttle: The hand throttle is tough to get used to. The throttle and the brake being on one hand was a little difficult to control at first, and was also fatiguing of that hand. Just holding the throttle to the same position constantly was tiring, and I’d often let go to adjust my hand, leading to a quick slowdown via engine braking followed by a sudden jerk forward again. I’m becoming more comfortable with this, but it’s still fatiguing.
  • Helmet: Paul’s helmet is quite difficult for me to get on. I have to take my hair down and then push hard to get it on, while holding the straps so they don’t slide up in with my head. I feel somewhat separate from the outside world with this thing on (moreso than usual): my vision is limited, I can’t hear much, I feel like I’m in an orb. While riding, the vision problem was a definite problem. I lost most of my peripheral vision. Turning my head as far as was comfortable gave me no vision of the vehicles behind me, and probably not enough to even see the blind spot normally hidden from the mirrors. Hopefully a better fitting helmet will have better vision as well. I also had problems with a fogging up visor. At one stoplight, it really fogged up, and I was worried it’d stay that way. I could hardly see. Luckily, when we started going, the air moving through cleared it up. I only came back a little bit occasionally while riding. I ride with the visor up for a little while. I felt much more a part of the world and could easily hear what was going on, especially what Paul was doing. I could also see somewhat clearer. For the most part little flew in at my eyes, but I did get a little bit of dirt.
  • Mirrors: I adjust the mirrors when I first got on to what I thought would be good. I was way wrong, and really had to tilt my head and move my shoulders to see behind me. It was quite impossible for me to adjust them while riding (couldn’t remove the right hand at all and had trouble using the left) so they stayed that way for quite some time. At a stop light, I adjusted them, but they got even worse, and I couldn’t see a thing behind me at all, couldn’t even turn and look because of the helmet. At another light, I finally got them to decent positioning. I still found I had to move my shoulder to see directly behind though.