Imablog Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.

Stuck in airline hell

So this was my day yesterday after the AAPM Summer School ended.

13:45: Arrived @ airport. Self check-in didn't work. Need to stand in long line.
14:10: Stuck in check-in line from hell. Only 2 ticket counter people. Good rant material for Blog. Waiting 40 min for ticket clerk to help one person.
14:35: Hour later. Finally checked in. Off to gate.
14:52: Flight to Charlotte delayed 1 hr due to weather. Will miss connecting flight to Charleston. Need to find out details on next flight.
15:12: Waiting in another line to see about getting rebooked.
15:26: Flight to Charlotte now scheduled to arrive @ 7PM in Charlotte .
15:42: Charlotte flight scheduled to leave @ 17:30. Later 19:55 flight to Charleston should be doable.
15:52: Should have taken my keyboard out of my bag before checking it.
16:02: Found one of those PalmOne airport stores.
16:19: Found book called How To Be A Canadian. Had to buy it.
17:36: On the plane at last!
19:03: Landed in Charlotte.
19:14: Flight to Charleston delayed too. Argh. C Concourse very moldy smelling. Keep getting busy signals trying to call Y.
20:09: On the plane at last.
20:15: Eek. Lots of babies on this flight. Hope they're all sleepy. With my luck today, they're all awake, cranky and screaming.
20:36: Still on the plane. Still on the ground.
20:40: Still on the plane. In the air now.
21:22: Finished the book. Mildly amusing and easy read.
21:35: Landed in Charleston.
22:30: Just when I thought I was home free. No luggage. Crap.
23:00: Arrive at home finally.

It was supposed to have been a flight that left Pittsburgh at 4PM and got me back to Charleston at 7. That flight out to Pittsburgh was probably a sign of what I could have expected on the way back home.

Suggestion to airlines

Anyone who's been to an airport recently will notice that the major airlines have installed those self check-in terminals. The idea is that you swipe your credit card so they know who you are and it spits out your boarding pass. Sometimes it doesn't work, so you have to enter another piece of information, like your ticket number. Sometimes that still doesn't work so you enter some other piece of information like the flight number. And if that doesn't uniquely identify you to the system, you're stuck standing in line waiting for a ticket agent to issue you a boarding pass.

So, airlines, if you're going to do this, you need to make sure it's much more robust and that it works for everyone. There's not much point in implementing the check-in terminals if it's going to result in long lines of hundreds of people who end up having to see the one or two ticket agents you only have on duty because you've reduced staffing (because the check-in terminals are supposed to be "more efficient").

Whoa, hey, where'd that come from?!

Ok, so while I was blissfully out of touch last week apparently tropical storm (now hurricane) Alex popped up right off the coast of South Carolina. No doubt the cause of my flight delays on Sunday. Fortunately it had minimal impact on South Carolina aside from making it a good weekend for surfers off Folly Beach and not much significant impact for the affected bits of North Carolina.

Next!

Oh, another one!

Gee, I wasn't expecting that next one to come quite so soon, but there it is, Tropical Depression 2 forming in the mid-Atlantic. According to the NHC's first discussion,

THE DEPRESSION IS MOVING WESTWARD OR 280 DEGREES AT 18 KNOTS...
STEERED BY THE WINDS SOUTH OF THE SUBTROPICAL RIDGE. HOWEVER...
LARGE SCALE MODELS FORECAST A LARGE TROUGH OVER THE EASTERN COAST
OF THE UNITED STATES. THIS TROUGH WILL ERODE THE SUBTROPICAL RIDGE
FORCING THE CYCLONE TO TURN MORE TO NORTHWEST AND NORTH DURING THE
LAST PORTION OF THE FORECAST.

Oh sweet, NHC does RSS feeds now!

Where the heck did all this crap come from?

Ok, busy trying to get the place packed up so I can move it all to the new apartment on the other side of the building. Not worrying about getting everything boxed up because I'm only going to have to take it out of them after moving it practically next door. Still, I've got about 15 or 20 boxes cluttering up the living room and that's only the bookshelves!

Most of the stuff will come off the shelves, closets or cabinets and go right back into them in the new place. The wife wants to box every single item up, but I'm resisiting. Besides, she's going to be too busy studying to help much anyway.

Yes, we have entirely too much Stuff. Some of it we need to keep, some of it I'm sure we can get rid of and never miss it. The problem is deciding what's what. Inevitably I'll pick up something that should go into the crap pile, have a look and then it ends up in the keep pile.

Reminds me of a kid's book I used to read. Something about a little boy who is supposed to clean up his room, so he gets two boxes, labels one KEEP and the other THROW AWAY. Things get put into the KEEP box, other Things get put into the THROW AWAY box. Then he starts going through the Things in the THROW AWAY box and decides it should really be in the KEEP box (because you never really know when a thingamabob or a doodad will come in handy). And then eventually everything ends up in the KEEP box. What I liked most about the book was the processes the boy went through to decide whether or not to keep the Thing.

Great book. I wish I could remember what it was called.

Help find gravity waves!

There's another interesting new distributed computing project on the horizon coming soon. Like SETI@Home or Distributed.net, Einstein@Home is a project aiming to recruit masses of personal computers to process data from the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observator) project. The purpose of LIGO is to look for gravitational waves by measuring teeny tiny changes in the length of the two arms of the observatory that might be caused by gravitational waves.

From the Einstein@Home homepage:

Einstein@Home is a project developed to search data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) for signals coming from rapidly rotating neutron stars, known as pulsars. Scientists believe that some pulsars may not be perfectly spherical, and if so, they should emit characteristic gravitational waves, which LIGO will begin to detect in coming months.

Bruce Allen of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's (UWM) LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) group is leading the development of the Einstein@Home project.

Einstein@Home is one, small part of the LIGO scientific program. It is being set up as a distributed computing project, which means that it relies on computer time donated by private computer users like you to search for pulsars.

The project is scheduled to start sometime in 2005 as one of the events for the World Year of Physics 2005, so sign up now to get the word when it starts!

Found at UIUC's Physics Blog.

More time wasters

Some more time wasters for your internet pleasure

Yeti Sports - with 4 more Yeti/penguin games!
Prank calls using the soundboards at ebaumsworld.

Moving day!

Today the moving process starts. Won't be moving as much stuff as I had planned since the carpet is supposed to be getting replaced first thing tomorrow morning. But I figure I should be able to get kitchen/bathroom/closet type stuff moved over reasonably easily.

This is going to be interesting because the movers are also supposed to be coming in first thing tomorrow morning. By the time I found out about the carpet, the moving company had closed for the day so I had to settle for leaving a message seeing if the moving could be rescheduled for the afternoon. Hopefully I'll hear back from them tomorrow morning, but with my luck there will be no rescheduling until Monday which will be too late. Well, maybe the carpet guy can be worked around.

Let the unpacking begin!

Ok, after a bit of a scheduling snafu with carpet installation, we finally moved into the new apartment on Sunday. Movers came by Sunday morning and carted everything over. As one of the movers put it, we scored high for being well organized, but lost them all because of all the boxes of books.

The kitchen is largely unpacked, most of the books are shelved again. Just need to finish unpacking dishes, clothes and do masses of laundry. Also need to do some grocery shopping. Our fridge is complete bare except for an unusually high number of condiments. You'd think all we ate were hamburgers and hot dogs with all the bottles of ketchup, mustard and relish we have.

It's nice having the extra space. We turned the second bedroom into an office, which gets all the bookshelves and the computer out of the living room. Makes it look much less cluttered. On the downside, there is a heck of a lot of carpet that needs to be vacuumed.

Geek toys

Oh, I like this. Still planning on getting the binary clock from ThinkGeek one of these days, but a binary watch would be even geekier. I want one...

Found via peetm.

It's a double whammy!

And then there were two. There is Bonnie, which I don't expect to have much impact here except for making it a rainy end of the week. The 11 AM 10-Aug-04 NHC discussion says

A SECOND AND STRONGER SHORTWAVE TROUGH IS FORECAST TO MOVE INTO THE
WESTERN AND CENTRAL GULF OF MEXICO. THE INCREASING SOUTHWESTERLY
FLOW AHEAD OF THAT TROUGH SHOULD ACT TO ACCELERATE BONNIE TO THE
NORTHEAST WITH LANDFALL OCCURRING IN THE FLORIDA PANHANDLE IN 48-60
HOURS. THE OFFICIAL FORECAST TRACK IS JUST AN EXTENSION OF THE
PREVIOUS TRACK THROUGH 36 HOURS...AND THEN FASTER AND TO THE RIGHT
AFTER THAT. A 96-HOUR POSITION WAS ADDED FOR CONTINUITY SINCE THE
BONNIE CIRCULATION MAY BECOME A SIGNIFICANT EXTRATROPICAL LOW CLOSE
TO THE U.S. EAST COAST AFTER 72 HOURS.

And then there's Charley (I keep wanting to say Clyde). This might end up being a double whammy for those eastern Gulf coast states, particularly Florida.

Definitely time to make sure the hurricane kit is up-to-date.

Nature's laying the smackdown on us

Ok, it's not a really big smackdown. At least not yet. I hope it isn't anyway. Maybe a slap upside the head or a smack on the wrist.

Just in case we'd gotten complacent over the past few years, Bonnie and Charley are our little reminder that yes, this is hurricane season, and just because it's been quiet the past few years doesn't mean it'll stay that way.

The current track for Bonnie has it going through the western part of SC and will probably bring heavy rain and winds. Charley on the other hand will come much closer to Charleston, and I think we'll be in for a rainy and windy weekend.

Adventures in Java

Teaching files. Residents want teaching files. Faculty want teaching files. Problem is it's hard to find any really good cheap/free teaching file software out there.

From the RSNA there's the MIRC project, which I know virtually nothing about, but which one of the residents wants to set up and run.

MIRC wants Tomcat and the Java SDK. Not the runtime, but the SDK.

According to the project website,

The MIRC project develops tools to enable the medical imaging community to share images and information for education, research and clinical practice--within an institution and via the Internet. MIRC provides a common index that can be searched using medically relevant criteria. MIRC also offers an authoring tool that makes it easy to create radiology teaching files and other electronic documents in flexible formats with a common underlying structure.

Should be an interesting project.

We are very messy people

Well, this is interesting.

THE MASSIVE NORTHEAST BLACKOUT of a year ago not only shut off electricity for 50 million people in the US and Canada, but also shut off the pollution coming from fossil-fired turbogenerators in the Ohio Valley. In effect, the power outage was an inadvertent experiment for gauging atmospheric repose with the grid gone for the better part of the day. And the results were impressive. On 15 August 2003, only 24 hours after the blackout, air was cleaner by this amount: SO2 was down 90%, O3 down 50%, and light-scattering particles down 70% over "normal" conditions in the same area. The haze reductions were made by University of Maryland scientists scooping air samples with a light aircraft. The observed pollutant reductions exceeded expectations, causing the authors to suggest that the spectacular overnight improvements in air quality "may result from underestimation of emission from power plants, inaccurate representation of power plant effluent in emission models or unaccounted-for atomospheric chemical reactions." (Marufu et al., Geophysical Research Letters, vol 31, L13106, 2004.)

Perhaps it will start people thinking a little more about what gets spewed out of industrial and power generating plants. One can only hope.

From Physics News Update 696

And waiting on deck...

Number 4 you're up to bat! Fresh from the NHC is news about Tropical Depression 4 getting warmed up in the eastern Atlantic.

AT 11 AM AST...1500Z...THE CENTER OF TROPICAL DEPRESSION FOUR WAS LOCATED NEAR LATITUDE 12.2 NORTH...LONGITUDE 22.7 WEST OR ABOUT 275 MILES... 445 KM...SOUTH-SOUTHEAST OF THE CAPE VERDE ISLANDS. THE DEPRESSION IS MOVING TOWARD THE WEST NEAR 14 MPH...22 KM/HR... AND THIS GENERAL MOTION IS EXPECTED TO CONTINUE FOR THE NEXT 24 HOURS MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS ARE NEAR 35 MPH... 55 KM/HR...WITH HIGHER GUSTS. SOME STRENGTHENING IS FORECAST DURING THE NEXT 24 HOURS... AND THE DEPRESSION COULD BECOME A TROPICAL STORM LATER TODAY OR TONIGHT.

This one will definitely require some watching for those on the East coast.

Adventures in Java Part 2

Ok, probably sheer coincidence, but with my luck probably not. After installing the Java SDK (1.4.2_05), Mozilla and Firefox broke. All I did was install the Java SDK RPM, copy the JRE plugin to my Mozilla/Firefox plugin directory and restart Firefox. Starting up Firefox, all I get is

INTERNAL ERROR on Browser End: No manager for initializing factory? System error?:: Success

If I try to run firefox-bin directly, it complains about not being able to find and open libmozjs.so, even though it's right there in the firefox directory!!!

Gaahhhh, stupid computers. Stupid user.

Update: Ok, so I remove Java, Mozilla works again but Firefox is still broken. Install Java again, Mozilla breaks. Remove Java, Mozilla works. Hmmm. Either I have a problem with my Fedora installation, Mozilla/Java is broken or I'm just dumb.

Update 9SEP04: Somebody who found this entry via Google emailed me to see if I had found a solution to the problem. I don't know if I had, but a few days after writing this entry I installed a new Firefox nightly build and everything has been working fine since then. Currently using the 08SEP nightly build of Firefox and haven't had any Java related problems so far. Haven't gotten around to checking out Mozilla yet though.

Hey, one at a tme, no need to rush

TD4 has started warming up and we now have TD5 gearing up in the same area that sprouted Charley. If this keeps up I'll need to develop chameleon eyes to keep track of all this activity.

Sometime tomorrow morning Charley will be brushing uncomfortably close to Charleston on it's way to another landfall in the Georgetown area. Hopefully there is no additional strengthening when it's over the Atlantic after it leaves Florida

Wave at the storm as it passes

Charley is passing by just off the coast as I write this. Last report had it about 50 miles or so just southeast of Charleston. It's been pretty windy and rainy for the past few hours, but that's about it. Heavy rain bands that passed by us a little while ago are hitting the Mt. Pleasant area and areas further north. I expect the worst of the rain will be over fairly soon, and the wind will die down in the next hour or two.

Then it will be time to keep an eye on TD5. NHC has it turning into a tropical storm later on this weekend, perhaps by tomorrow, in which case we'll have Tropical Storm Earl to keep tabs on.

In the meantime, TD 4 has turned into Tropical Storm Danielle overnight. Looks like Danielle will probably stay out in the Atlantic and not affect any land though.

I have a new vice

and it is called Cold Stone Creamery. One just opened up on King St and their offerings are sooo good.

They offer ice cream in three sizes, Like It, Love It, and Gotta Have It. The Love It size is the one I usually go for, and is almost more ice cream then I can eat at one sitting.

But the place is very cool (literally). You tell them what you want (or come up with your own ice cream/topping combination), they throw some huge scoops of ice cream on to this ice cold marble slab and mix everything together in front of you. You can get it in a regular styrofoam bowl, or one lined with a waffle cone. Then the trick becomes eating it before it turns into a liquidy mess and drips all over your fingers and pants. Or else wait until it becomes a liquidy mess. I suppose it's up to you how you want to eat it.

A midweek vacation

A view of the ocean from the Holiday Inn on Folly Beach.

Tuesday a collective sigh of relief was heard all over campus as the first year med students finished their final exam for the summer Gross Anatomy class. The next sound heard was the screeching of tires as they all took off for the beach.

Tuesday night one of my wife's friends was flying in from Albany, so we picked him up and headed off to spend a couple of nights at Folly Beach. Wednesday was spent doing nothing but loafing around on the beach, soaking up the sun and warmth, and playing in the water. It was an exhausting day. Oh the life. I could definitely get used to it.

Then today for her, it was off to the mall to shop. Sadly for me, it was off to work.

Then tomorrow we've got more friends and family coming in for the White Coat Ceremony, where MD wannabes get inducted into their class.

I think I need a vacation.

Wonder if she said yes

An interesting way to propose.

.

Spotted on Folly Beach in front of the hotel this morning.

They're gone at last!

It seems every time we have my wife's family over, it's like having a tornado blow through the apartment. Her parents come, her brother brings his small village over, they stay for a day or two, run us all over the place and then vanish, leaving a trail of destruction. Her brother's mother-in-law does the dishes for us though, which is nice.

Proud parents posing with the future physician after yesterday's White Coat Ceremony.

How Canadian are you?

Take the test and see how Canadian you are.

I scored 92, which makes me a

Member of Parliament Congratulations! You scored 92! You may very well be one of the Founder's of Confederation. You're proud of the True North Strong and Free, you can drink beer with the best of 'em! You follow hockey like a religion and may actually have your name etched on Lord Stanley's grail. You can tell the difference between a moose and a caribou at 100 metres and if we looked we'd probably find a maple leaf tattooed somewhere on your body.

The questions are pretty easy. If you really are Canadian, you ought to be pretty embarassed if you score less than 90.

Bring it on, spamboy

So for the past few days, I've been pestered by some annoying spammer who appears to be going through each of my posts and leaving spam comments. Nothing heavy yet, only about 7 or 8 a day. Thanks to MT3's comment moderation, nobody has to sully their eyeballs with the spam because all I do is just go into the database and dump the comments.

There's a pre-release of MT Blacklist for MT3 which I've been thinking about installing. I just haven't found time to get to it yet.

In the meantime, I'll just do the comment filtering manually.

The White Screen of Oblivion

With Windows, you have the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). On the Tungsten T3 (and probably other Palm models), you get what I call the White Screen of Oblivion. I've also seen it called just the White Screen of Death. That's when while you're doing something with your Palm OS PDA, and all of a sudden everything on the screen slowly fades away to a bright white. It invariably ends up with a hard reset of your PDA, although a lucky few survive with a warm reset.

Happened to me this morning when I inadvertently opened a 6 MB DOC file with DocsToGo. Meant to open another one, but my tap went awry. In the middle of opening, everything faded away to a blank white screen. Hitting the reset button brought me to the screen calibration dialog, meaning my T3 had just hard reset itself. My first non self-induced hard reset. And today of all days is when I leave my cradle at home. Just as well I suppose, since home is where my most recent sync is. Good thing I sync regularly and often. I suppose one of these days I ought to get an SD card and BackupBuddy or something.

Here comes Number 4!

Frances became hurricane #4 earlier today. This one will need some watching over the next few days to see where it decides to go.

Pop! Pop Pop Pop!

They're popping like mushrooms after a heavy rain! Big Hurricane Frances still in the mid Atlantic, and now there is Tropical Storm Gaston that popped up off the coast. Fortunately Gaston looks like it won't bring much more than a lot of rain as it wanders over top of us.

Bye bye Gaston, Hello Frances

We weathered Gaston pretty well. The wind got pretty howly and saw some branches fall from the trees outside one of our windows. Lots of water and blown down foliage on the roads yesterday and flooding in all the usual places. We ended up losing power twice yesterday, but not for very long.

Frances is making me a little nervous. It's a big one and should be a Cat 4 storm by the time it reaches striking distance of the east coast.

I have GMail!

Thanks to my friend Tom, I now have a GMail account. I don't get much mail there yet, mostly because at the moment Tom's the only one who knows the email address.

The interface to GMail is pretty simple and uncluttered. Haven't spent a lot of time getting down to learning more of the details. For categorizing mail, you use labels instead of shuffling them around to different folders. I think I'll like this because mail can have multiple labels. Stars let you flag mail for whatever purpose you want. And probably best of all, mail gets threaded, making it easier to keep track of things.

I've received all of 5 emails at my GMail account, and already I have 6 invites to dispose of. Oh, who to send them to...

Preparing for Frances

• Back up the computer
• Collect all the things to take with us
• Secure the apartment
• Top up the hurricane kit
• Gas up the car
• Get some cash
• Find a place to evacuate to

Where we evacuate to will depend largely on where Frances decides to go. During Hurricane Floyd back in 1999, we took off to Atlanta (had to go there anyway). The wife says we should go there again this time. But if Frances goes inland and turns to follow the coast, then Atlanta might not be such a good choice.

I'm not liking the way this storm is turning. No sir, not liking it much at all. A lot can change in 5 days though. Either way I think we're going to be in for a wet Labour day weekend.

From the 11 AM 31-Aug-04 NHC discussion:

THE HURRICANE WILL BE MOVING BETWEEN THE WEST AND WEST-NORTHWEST STEERED BY A STRONG SUBTROPICAL RIGDE. THEREAFTER...THE INTENSITY OF THE RIDGE VARIES WITH THE DIFFERENT MODELS. CONSEQUENTLY...SOME MODELS BRING THE HURRICANE FARTHER WEST OR CLOSER TO THE U.S. COAST THAN OTHERS. OVERALL...THE TREND OF THE MODELS SINCE YESTERDAY IS TO TURN THE CYCLONE TO THE NORTHWEST EARLIER AND NONE OF THE RELIABLE GLOBAL MODELS EXCEPT THE ECMWF BRING THE HURRICANE TO EXTREME SOUTH FLORIDA OR THE KEYS. THE MOST SIGNIFICANT CHANGE TO THE RIGHT IS PRODUCED BY THE GFS WHICH BARELY BRINGS THE HURRICANE NEAR THE NORTHEAST FLORIDA COAST. HOWEVER...IT IS NORMAL FOR MODELS TO VARY FROM RUN TO RUN AND I WOULD RATHER WAIT FOR ANOTHER MODEL CYCLE TO ADJUST THE FORECAST MORE THE RIGHT...IF NECESSARY

MT 3.1 is here!

Oooh, MT 3.1 is released! Fantastic, now I can go upgrade my 3.1 beta and upgrade my main installation. I'm really liking the dynamic publishing, which should really ease MT's weblog storage requirements.

The plunge into MT 3.1

Ok, since I'm trapped here at work while the wife is staying late to study Biochem, I thought I'd use the time to plunge into the MT 3.1 upgrade.

Upgrade process went pretty smoothly. Copied the files from the MT 3.1 upgrade package into my MT directory, ran mt-check.cgi to make sure everything was still ok, then ran mt-upgrade31.cgi. It did the DB schema upgrade and create a couple of new templates used for the dynamic publishing.

Next step was to enable the dynamic archives. Followed the steps in Movable Type 3.1 Guide, which are pretty straight forward. The only change I made was to put the stuff for the .htaccess file into my webserver httpd.conf file instead. Then did a rebuild. Since there are no archives to rebuild anymore, the rebuild process is so much faster now.

And then I ran into my first problem. I use Paginate for my category and date based archives. The Paginate tags don't seem to get parsed when those archive files are accessed though. But, from the MT 3.1 guide, this is to be expected

Please note that at this time, only the standard Movable Type tags are supported with the dynamic rendering option. Existing plugins are not compatible with this new feature, since they are written in Perl and not PHP. If you are seeing errors due to using plugin tags, you will either need to remove the tag(s) or change that template to render statically.

Then I noticed my second problem: no side bar in the individual entry archives. The side bar gets brought in with a PHP include(). A view source showed everything there, but the PHP include() doesn't seem to get parsed by the dynamic templating. Very odd. A post by Phil Ringnalda on the MT 3.1 beta blog indicated it should work. So in an act of desperation, I changed my PHP tags from <?PHP to <?php and surprise! In came the side bar! But inexplicably, this didn't work for another entry that I have PHP embedded into. Perhaps there was something else that I did that fixed the first problem.

So I'm still having problems with PHP embedded in entries. But so far aside from that small issue MT 3.1 looks pretty good. Still need to play with it a little more though.