Category Archives: Lite

Out of Place

Posted on by
Reply

So when I walked into the local asian food market I definitely felt a sense of being a stranger in a strange land. I was clearly the tallest person in the market, as I walked around I realized that I couldn’t recognize a single thing on any of the packages. I was after ramen noodles and I didn’t think they would be too hard to find. After 15 minutes of wandering around the store I eventually did discover where the noodles were. What I found in the market that surprised me was that everything came in very strange sizes, initially it was all 11.3 ounces, so I originally thought that the issue was that they came in different metric values that made sense. After looking at the products I discovered that the metric values weren’t correct either, they were just very strange.

What added to my awkward feelings were that the market pleasantly requested that customers only purchase in cash. I did not have a problem with this, however I had to visit the bank first to get out $20, then make my purchase, then return to the bank and deposit cash. It wasn’t unpleasant as the bank was just around the corner from the market however it was a little funny.

As I drove off I realized that I could have just gone to Meijers markets instead and got what I was after all along. Now I don’t have any problem with patronizing the asian market however it would’ve been more convenient to visit Meijers and I could’ve saved the run around back and forth to the bank.

The next time I need a very special ingredient, of course I will go to the Asian food market for this purchase. For regular stuff I’ll just go to Meijers.

Special Note: This blog entry was 99% dictated using Apple’s newest OSX, Mountain Lion. I think it did a pretty good job. The only thing it didn’t get was special terms like “Meijers”.

Off To The Races

Posted on by
Reply

Today we went back to exploring graveyards in the local area. We stopped as Weedsport Rural Cemetery with an educated guess that we’d discover some family there. My mother informed me that I should be able to find my great grandfather Charles Race there as well as my great great grandfather, Fernando Race there as well. After some wandering around we spotted the first grave. It held Fernando, Josephine, and Helen. Helen was only five years old when she died and so she was buried next to her parents. I never knew any of these people, but seeing that they buried their lost little girl right next to them started to color in the vagueness. I imagine Fernando and Josephine to be salt-to-the-earth people with huge hearts and kind dispositions. They had MANY children and when they lost one too early, they made sure she would always be with them, even in the hereafter. I had to pause and take it all in. Helen was born in 1907 and died five years later in 1912. As I paid my respects to my long dead super-great grandparents I started to look around their headstones. I immediately ran across Clinton C. Race. Clinton served in the Navy during the Korean conflict and his headstone (rightly so) proudly had his military plaque on the obverse side of his headstone marker. On his headstone he made reference to a lost brother, Leroy. Leroy was 1 month old when he died. Looking at the records of the family, Chester Race had twin boys, Charles and Leroy. Leroy didn’t survive. Chester went on to have many more children including Clinton. The kicker was, I didn’t know any of this and worse, I couldn’t prove any of it. The only real thing I had to go on was that I had a gaggle of Races all buried together, like arm-spans together. Clinton was feet from Fernando, and there was another grave for Mark Race right next to Clinton.

So I had Clinton and Mark and no way to link them, nor any way to link them to Fernando. I know that Fernando is related to me, and I suspected that Mark was Clinton’s son, but linking Clinton to anyone else? Nope. Fernando had a lot of kids, but never a Clinton. So I did some research. Ancestry.com wasn’t very useful as Clinton didn’t apparently show up on many public records, like censuses or anything like that. For hours Clinton was a lost lamb. I knew in my heart that Clinton was related to me, why would anyone with the same surname elect to be buried next to another person with the same surname? To punish future lookey-loos like me? Nah! It was a mystery. That’s a central carrot to this genealogical obsession. You know you’ve got kin but you can’t connect them up, until…

Thanks to the Fulton Historical Society, they placed a newspaper scan article on the Internet from 1964 which was an obit for Chester Race. Chester was the missing key. Fernando was Chester’s father, and brother to Charles – my maternal grandfathers father. So I was related to Chester. In Ancestry.com all I knew of Chester was that he had one girl child and that was it. Turns out I was wrong. Chester had Clinton as well! And Chester had his own Charles and with him came Leroy. That halcyon moment was so sweet and reverberated for hours. I linked Clinton Race with Chester, with Fernando, and with Charles and then Allen, to my mother and then to me. The cousin relationship is thick, but it exists! Right after that the rest of it fell into place. Clinton had two boys, Mark and Timothy. Mark was buried right next to his father. The obvious next step was to look at Mark. He was alive up until 2010, he died in an accident. Mark had two children, Rebecca and Brian.

Hungry for more discovery I started to concentrate on Mark, Timothy, Brian, and Rebecca. I know that Rebecca moved to Florida and maybe got married, so we hope a happily ever after for her, and Brian (thanks to the apple-not-falling-far-from-the-tree when it comes to looks) has some fame with him. Brian Race works for Sea Shepherd. It was a weird feeling, looking at a picture of a man who is definitely related to me, doing work I find incredibly impressive and courageous. Now, how related is he? Not really at all. We really share Fernando and that’s many generations and cousin-bridges. Is there any point to knowing about Brian Race? Probably not. But in the same way that I can claim some ancestral link to A.G. Spalding (of the baseball-and-catchers-mitts Spalding company) I can also claim a connection to Solomon Spalding, which if you are a Mormon should be a name you recognize and hiss at, like throwing holy water on a vampire. If you don’t get it, do a Google search for Solomon Spalding and Joseph Smith. It’ll be a good read, I promise. So, back to the Races – Fernando, Chester, Clinton, Mark, and then Brian. Five generations of people that connect to me.

Mark’s children, as well as Timothy (if he still draws breath) and any of the other Races, if you somehow happen to read this blog post and I am right (or even if I’m not!) about Clinton, I encourage you with all my heart to please make contact with us. I would really love to share our family tree with you and maybe help you get to know your greats and get to know them and appreciate their lives through the scraggly bits and pieces that we have collected. I don’t want to personally interfere with anyones lives, so I am going to put this message in a bottle and hurl it into the great abyss. Leave a comment or write me an email at bluedepth(at)gmail(dot)com. I’m all over, Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress. If not, no biggie.

International Day of Lying

Posted on by
Reply

People need lies. Lies are good.

At least when it comes to your online identity. I’ve been reading a few things here and there with people who are quite upset that Mark Zuckerberg is seeking ways to dodge his fair share of paying taxes and these people are very upset that Facebook is making money off their personal details – their lost privacy.

So how does one regain lost privacy? Simple, lie. Lie right through your teeth. Make lying an art form. Create a fantasy life out of pure whole cloth and make it as bombastic and marvelous as you have creative chops to make it!

In fact I think everyone should do this. Right now. We need a international day of lying. Everyone needs to log in to Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter and go to town. Change the years, fiddle with the places, come up with schools you didn’t attend and live in cities you have no idea about beyond their brief entries in Wikipedia. Make it all random, make it monumental, but above all else, make it a lie. A big beautiful fantastic fabrication!

To that end, I’m going to edit my Facebook to this end. It’s going to feel good. Oh so good. Why don’t you join me? Nothing says pleasure more than wrestling power away from those that do not respect you, like Facebook. And Google. And Twitter. And well, anywhere else really.

Monetize that bullshit. I DARE you!

Lepers of East Main

Posted on by
Reply

Kalamazoo has a section of road that I absolutely detest. The road in question is at the foot of Eastwood Hill. It’s East Main Street as it drops with an almost twenty percent grade downhill. The reason why I hate this section of road so much is because just to the left, as you are going downhill, there is always (or at least it seems so) a cop waiting in the unused parking lot just in front of the DQ on the corner of East Main and East Michigan. What makes this road so awful and uniquely suited to attract cops? The entire downward slope is set at 25 miles per hour and the cops are very fond of detecting oncoming cars with radar and pulling them over if they were in excess of this limit.

For those that are wondering, yes, I did get caught going 35 down the hill. It’s an evil hill because to go down it at 25 you have to chew up your brakes the whole way down. This got me to thinking about alternatives to this route, heading downhill. I started to explore the local roads and discovered that if I select Humphrey Road instead of East Main to make my way downtown I have three choices to make from that point and they all have minimums of 40, except for one which doesn’t matter. If I turn on Bixby then I’m guaranteed a red-light-signal which may or may not give me clearance to make an easy left onto Gull Road and head downtown. If I don’t do that, I can run to the end of Humphrey and brave a left onto Gull from that position further along, it’s more dangerous because there is no controls on the flow of traffic on Gull Road from there. Another path I’ve found is to turn right and head into the residential areas. If I turn right on Charlotte, then I can turn left on Bridge Street and that has just one dangerous intersection. The safest path is Bixby with the light, the quickest is actually a split between the end of Humphrey and Bridge Street.

Throughout all of this it bears noticing that I never once suggest following East Main downtown. It’s just not worth the trouble. The worn out brakes, the aggressive cops and their speed traps, or the stop light that always seems to catch me at the most time-consuming parts of it’s cycle. As I traverse these roads every morning I get to thinking just how much that particular section of East Main is kind of a taboo section of road now. Nobody should use it, it should be a one-way heading away from downtown. That would eliminate the brake wear and make it that much harder for cops to set up their damned speed traps. It’s much easier to have to scale a hill starting out slow, noticing the cop, and progressing slow with an assiduous use of the accelerator pedal instead having to endure watching dollars peel off your brakes as you use them up to slow yourself down.

If anyone else who reads this blog likes this intersection, all you have to do is get caught once in the speed trap and you’ll change your tune. If the city turned the entire affair into a one-way, that also would solve the issue. One can hope.

Brown Chicken, Brown Cow

Posted on by
Reply

It eventually had to happen. I read this little nugget in a spam email that was delivered to my inbox just now:

Excuse me ,
I have a question- have you seen this picture of yours in attachment?? Three facebook friends sent it to me today… why did you put it online? wouldn’t it harm your job? what if parents see it? you must be way cooler than I thought about you man :))))

The attachment is IMG9821.zip. Come on. A zip file? Seriously?

Just a note to everyone who might come across this blog post. When you get files in your email that you aren’t expecting, don’t willy-nilly go clicking on them. Even if you have a Mac you could be duped into running a Trojan Horse, which would be very bad. This is likely a Windows virus trying to spread via social manipulation.

Anyhow, if there are compromising photos of you on the net, own them. Be proud of them. There is very little you can do to combat something like that so you might as well make the best of the situation.

Brown Chicken, Brown Cow. 🙂

Making Sandwiches

Posted on by
Reply

I was raised with an appreciation for the simplest sandwich possible. The venerable Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich. It’s something that my father makes, some would say it’s the only thing he knows how to make, beyond fudge, and it’s something that I’ve just refined.

The refinement I’ve made adapts something my father does but always seemed unusual to me. He adds butter to the sandwich and as far as I can remember, he butters the side of the bread that eventually carries the peanut butter component. I’ve noticed for a long time that when I make a PB&J that the side of the sandwich that carries the jelly (or in my preference jam or preserves) always ends up being slightly soggy because the bread sucks up the water from the jelly/jam/preserves and carries that mush through, so you’ve got a dry slice and a damp slice. This makes for an okay PB&J, but it can be better. I’ve adapted my fathers use of butter to act as a water barrier on the jelly/jam/preserve side of the sandwich. By spreading a thin layer of butter on that side, you create a waterproof block against that slice of bread. After the butter, then the jelly/jam/preserves go on and you join the sandwich together. It can stay that way for a while, or at least until lunchtime and the bread isn’t damp or soggy. Plus the butter adds a little extra something to the sandwich that I like.

So if you are also fond of PB&J’s then I suggest you explore adding a little butter to the side where you spread your jelly/jam/preserves. You’ll be glad for a equally dry bread-edged sandwich.

Blogging on iPad with Byword and Bluetooth Keyboard

Posted on by
1

Thanks to how silly my workplace is when it comes to access to the Internet I now have to use multiple devices to access many of the services that I previously used to run on my work machine. They have instituted a 100 connection throttle on all inbound and outbound TCP/IP connections. This explains a LOT about why I’ve been having such problems accessing the network.

Of course I won’t change my habits, I’ll just shift some of what I do onto other devices. In this case, pressing my iPhone and iPad into service. They’ll be responsible for the more social apps like Google Plus, Twitter, and such.

One thing that intrigued me was trying out Byword for the iPad using a Bluetooth Keyboard. How is blogging on my iPad different than blogging on my iMac? Byword makes this almost a seamless move. I type and the text appears on my iPad, since there are no network issues for my iPad there really shouldn’t be any lag, beach balls of death, or anything else getting in my way when it comes to blogging. The bluetooth keyboard means I can kick back and relax, put the keyboard anywhere I like and the iPad will still hear it and respond well. I don’t expect there to be any issues with WordPress. The app may be a little crunky around the edges but I can post by email just as well as open the app and copy the text into that. Sometimes I think that the post-by-email feature is more compelling for me than the application is.

At least with a bluetooth keyboard at home and at work I won’t have to lug one back and forth when I go back and forth from home to work during the day. I will however take my bluetooth keyboard with me on my upcoming work trip and see how well I can use it to do office-type things with just my iPad.

My trusty 1st Generation iPad, which by the way, still works great, has great resolution and fits me perfectly. Apple, you missed out on planned obsolescence when it came to this device!

Time to post this sucker…

It's silly, and you should stop doing it.

Posted on by
Reply

Email confidentiality footers annoy me. I see them frequently on many emails that I get and I think of them as meaningless text that really should be ignored. That an email is somehow a private exchange of information is laughable. Email is sent in plaintext using an open protocol and on the wire it’s all unencrypted.

What really brings this to the forefront is when I see these meaningless bits of mental flotsam and jetsam clogging up my email box because someone set a vacation autoresponse and their membership on a email list is causing them to constantly reply with a “I’ll be out from…” email with this stupid block of text at the bottom asserting that the email is the property of blah blah blah.

Writing email has the same security protections as writing a postcard and tying it to a bird and letting it fly off. Your assertion that your communications are somehow proprietary or classified is utterly hilarious.

If people really wanted to make this not so utterly irrelevant, they should use public-key encryption or at least something like ROT–13 encryption so that the text isn’t readily apparent and takes some work to decode. Sending plaintext with this silly block at the bottom just musses up the display and doesn’t mean anything to anybody. So stop it.

The Passenger

Posted on by
Reply

Amongst all the Christian saints that exist there really is only one that I really can identify with and believe in. That would be Saint Francis. I love the image of him in statuary, a monk in a garden with songbirds perched on his shoulders eating seeds out of his hands. There is something really quite gentle and special about someone of such faith being so kind as to attract and befriend animals. I’ve often said that how animals behave towards a person is one of the clearest indicators of what that person truly is. I think animals can sense the inherent goodness or lack thereof in human beings on some level that we are no longer a party to. If a dog avoids a person, perhaps there is a reason why, that sort of thing.

So, the saints are supposed to inspire the faithful to follow in their footsteps. I may not be a Christian, but I can appreciate the faith without getting hoovered into all it’s dogmatic thinking. Specifically speaking, this morning after I drove to work and parked my car in the parking lot in front of my building I looked at my rear-view mirror on the drivers side and noticed that I had a very tiny, very dangerous passenger who followed me to work, riding on my car. It was the business end of a yellowjacket. Apparently sometime during the night he struggled up to my side mirror and was trying to climb behind the mirror to get away from the chill in the air this morning as we had a light frost. I sat there for a minute or two and looked and he was not moving. So after I turned the car off I opened the door gently and closed it and blew a little stream of warm air at him to see if I could rouse him. He was alive. Very sluggish, but alive. He continued his trek to climb behind the mirror assembly and once he was there and safe I sat there talking to him. “I spared your life, so, when we meet again you won’t chase me and sting me, okay?” and I’d like to think that we’ve got a deal. Obviously bugs don’t speak english and you can’t make a deal like that with them, but a part of me did think that if there was some regard from nature that perhaps one good act, not stuffing a credit card into the slot to crush the bug but instead allowing him to seek refuge in my side mirror assembly might just be enough to earn me a “Get out of a yellowjacket sting” card from mother nature itself.

It’s a deal that I’ve made with all the creatures that surround me. If you are outside I will not kill you, but if you enter my home and you are either hazardous or frightful then your life is forfeit. This is specifically for the spiders that invade every spring and hide in the drains of the sink in my basement. They aren’t really hazardous to me, but to Scott they are little crawling chunks of pure nightmare and so, they die. The only thing I offer is that death is swift and complete, that there is a minimum of suffering. It may not be exactly Franciscan but it certainly beats dealing with a frightened partner gripping his chest trying to catch his breath.

I can only hope that the daily temperature rises enough, and the sun comes out. Once the sun hits the side of my car and that housing to the side mirror assembly, it should warm up in there quite quickly, as my car is a dark blue color and is apt to absorb heat than reflect it away. Perhaps when I get back out after quitting time I’ll check to see if my little yellowjacket friend got warm enough to fly away or if I have a lethal little buddy for the summer. I know that one yellowjacket is not lethal, in and of himself, but I have never been stung by any stinging insect so I always reserve a little latitude for them as I do not know for certain how my body will react to the toxins in their stings. It could just be an irritation or it could be anaphylactic shock. It’s really a toss of the dice and if you can avoid pissing off a stinging insect it’s in your best interest. Every time I see one I develop an intense case of the willies. I think it’s an instinctual response to avoiding the risk of a sting. Nothing makes me more keen to flee than the willies.