Any deeper and you’d have to put your boots on.
Column linked to from Drudge on the failure of Lehman Bros.:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?MLC=/money/city_news&xml=/money/2008/09/16/ccjeff116.xml
I’ve been reading Alan Greenspan’s memoir, so the phrase “creative destruction” has been on my mind a lot lately. I highly recommend it:
so if you have error catching code that logs the error and redirects the user to an error page, guess what happens if you screw up the URL to the error page?
Clever, eh?
OK, no one reads my blog, but I heard a story many years ago and I can’t find it anywhere (I googled as well as I know how). I’m hoping someone else might have heard it, and know where it came from. It went something like this:
There was a rabbi and he always looked terrified when he began to pray. Someone asked him why and he explained thusly; “When I pray I begin with the words ‘Lord, have mercy’, and I am terrified what may happen between the moment that I invoke the Lord’s name, and the moment I ask for mercy”.
From a column by Peggy Noonan:
“Religious conservatives know something’s wrong with us, that man’s a mess. They are not left dazed by the latest applications of this fact. “This just in—there’s a lot of sinning going on out there” is not a headline they’d understand to be news.”
Link to full column: http://online.wsj.com/article/declarations.html
Upon showing up at a WYC meeting wearing a nice shirt, I was accused of being gainfully employed:
“Matt, you’re dressed like you’re gainfully employed!” —Brandon Whitehead
[Standing in an alley, my buddy starts making a weird sound while smoking a cigarette]
Me: Dude, what is that? Did your cigarette go out?
Buddy: Uhh…it’s not a cigarette.
Me: Ohhh…is that why we’re standing in this back alley?
Buddy: Yeah…I, uh, thought you figured that out.
Me: I’m a little slow…
So, yes, I am a little slow. I also have a poor sense of smell…
So I’ve been trying to figure out how I went from 400 psi to zero so quickly. Did I not check my pressure frequently enough? Was the gauge inaccurate?
Well, I figured it out. I have a gauge that measures pressure in bar, with tape on the face indicating PSI:
Notice the 500 psi mark (leftmost on the tape), which should be about
34 bar, actually lines up with about 12 bar, which is about 175 psi….
The rest of the marks are pretty accurate, but they aren’t the ones that really matter…zero is still zero no matter what units you’re using.
So, I screwed up the scale when I put the tape on there (been using this gauge for about 25 dives). In retrospect this wasn’t the best idea. I should have either gotten a PSI gauge or adjusted to reading the bar scale. I’m planning on buying a PSI gauge ASAP.
I went crabbing today. My buddy (Adrian) and I both got our limit. This particular day started out fraught with errors:
So, we *finally* get out to the dive site after a long surface swim. Adrian and I just barely got our crab limit before having to head back to the surface. We ascended to 15 feet and waited there for 3 minutes for our safety stop (helps off-gas any nitrogen—probably not necessary for a short 40 foot dive, but can’t hurt). I thought I had about 400 psi left when we started going up (plenty for breathing 3 minutes at 15 feet). During our stop Adrian showed me his computer, which indicated his air time as “0″. I didn’t know this, but his computer apparently calculate a 750 psi reserve automatically. So I’m keeping an eye on Adrian since I think he’s pretty close to running out of air.
After we completed our safety stop I gave Adrian the signal to go up, and he signaled OK. I give a few kicks up and…”hmm, that breath felt kind of funny, in fact, I don’t think I got a full lungful out of that one…oh !@#$. I’m out of air.” So I start swimming for the surface (15 feet, no problem). My regulator managed to find another half breath for me or so, and I stopped for a second to look down at Adrian, wondering what he was doing down there, and if he was OK. I finally decided “screw him, I need to breathe” so I swam the rest of the way to the surface.
Since I was out of air, I needed to orally inflate my BCD (surface flotation). This normally wouldn’t be much of a chore but my legs were cramping from the long surface swim and chasing crabs down (they’re fast). So I was briefly kicking my head above the water, taking a breath, inflating my BCD as I sank back (resting my legs), and repeating this process until I had enough air in my BCD to float. Hurray! Disaster averted. But I was a little nervous there for a minute. The legs cramping up and having trouble staying afloat was alarming.
While this wasn’t an emergency along the lines of “I almost died”, it could very easily have gone the other way (sinking/drowning diver or lung expansion injury). This event would have been less of an emergency if my legs hadn’t been cramping up, but then that’s always what gets people killed–multiple things going wrong (the so-called “error chain”).
So, in the grand tradition of, “coulda, woulda, shoulda”, I’m outlining things I could have done different, should have done different, and will try to remember to do different in the future.
What I did wrong:
Other choices I could have made:
things to do next time:
All in all, I am thankful that, as I am so fond of saying, “God looks out for stupid people”.
Well now that it’s almost the weekend again, I have a report on my incredibly productive previous weekend.
Saturday:
I was supposed to go to a fish ID class at the Seattle Aquarium. I decided to take the bus—after standing at the bus stop for 20 minutes I realized that the bus wasn’t on the route that day thanks to the University District Street Fair. Every now and then I need to take the bus to remind myself why I never take the bus.
After missing the bus I decided I’d rather not drive downtown, fight parking, and still be late. So, I decided I would run. After getting back from a short run in Ravenna Park I decided that if I was going to have to take a shower anyway, I might as well get some more dirty work done. So I mowed the lawn, weeded the flowerbed, raked some leaves, and edged the lawn along the sidewalk.
After this I decided to go to Home Depot and pick up some stuff I needed—Saturday was scheduled to replace the neck seal on Adrian’s drysuit so I needed some router accessories.
Back from Home Depot and armed with a new router bit (router bits are expensive, I found out), I went to the Waterfront Activities Center and built a circle cutting jig for the router there, and used it to make two neck seal installation rings from a sheet of lexan (lexan is like plexiglas, but stronger).
My primary mission for the day accomplished, Adrian and I sailed the SX-18 in some pretty decent wind. It was a wild ride. No capsizes, but definitely some hull-flying moments to strike the fear of God into us.
Of course, after all this I was hungry, so I went home and made french dip sandwiches (I did not make the dip from a packet, either—onions, garlic, beef broth, oregano, and pepper make a better dip).
After I ate Matt called me and wanted some help working on his boat. I believe his exact words were “I need you to come bang on the starter with a hammer while I turn the key”. Well he didn’t have a hammer, he had a large crescent wrench, and banging on it didn’t really work (at first, anyway), but we did finally get the starter working, and the engine almost started.
After giving up on the boat Matt and I went to Adrian’s apartment and replaced the neck seal on his drysuit.
All in a days’ work…
Although I should note that this is by far the most productive day I have had in *years*.
Sunday:
I was supposed to meet Matt around 11:00, but he didn’t show so I sailed a Hobie Bravo around Union Bay for a little bit. Matt finally showed up and we spent some time screwing around the carburetor on his engine. We did some checks on the ignition system, too, since I thought the spark looked a little weak.
Around 1 or 2 in the afternoon we decided we were hungry so we ordered take-out pizza from Papa John’s. Papa John’s is by my house, and I needed to stop by there anyway to pick up a floor jack and other tools to install a trailer hitch on Adrian’s car. There’s a nice little tree covered area parallel to the north docks at the WAC, and we parked our three cars there (Mine, Matt’s, and Adrian’s) and stood around eating pizza and just generally enjoying the beautiful day.
It turns out that getting some of the bolts installed for a trailer hitch is a real pain. After half an hour of fighting with the bolts, we finally got them in. It turns out a piece of string can sometimes be more effective than telescoping magnetic retrieval tool. Who knew? 
However, Adrian’s car had recently been rear-ended, which pushed the bolts into positions they weren’t supposed to be in. After a little bit of fooling around we came to the conclusion that we weren’t going to get it on until the collision damage had been repaired.
So, failure on that project, but at least the most troublesome bolts are in position, and that’s the hardest part.
Around 4 the batteries for Matt’s boat were charged, so we went back to that project. After a fair amount of fooling around (turns out there was an ignition problem, and we’d mostly been going after fuel), we finally got it to run for about 15 minutes (this thing had been sitting for 6 months). Once the engine had warmed up we tried adjusting the idle speed and ended up stopping the engine. We couldn’t get it to start after that, and there was oil coming out of the ignition coil, so I’m guessing we cooked it.
That’s it for the weekend. If only all my days were that productive…
(8:09:00 PM) matt@mattjm.com/Home: I HATE EVERYTHING
(8:09:23 PM) Heather Fuller: nownow. there are plenty of things you like. but i realize you are not to be reasoned with at the moment.
Yesterday I received a letter from the Social Security Administration about my estimated benefits that I will receive when or retire or if I become disabled. As an intelligent and thinking person, I of course know that I’ll see few benefits, if any. However, for those that didn’t already know, they spell it out in the fine print:
“Your estimated benefits are based on current law. Congress has made changes to the law in the past and can do so at any time. the law governing benefits may change because, by 2041, the payroll taxes collected will be enough to pay only about 75 percent of scheduled benefits.”
Translation: “nanner, nanner, we’ve got your money and can do whatever we want with it.”
This is a compelling argument for private accounts. For all the arguments *against* private accounts, they are all favorable compared to the current situation, in which you give your money to a “broker” (the US government in this case) who can change the contract terms anytime he wants (without your consent), and is not even obligated to return your money (or what’s left of it) when he’s finished with it. I believe I just paraphrased an argument I read in a column by Thomas Sowell some years ago.
And when I say “private accounts” I don’t necessarily mean an IRA or a truly private account. I’m perfectly happy to continue to have payroll taxes go into a government controlled account, as long as the contract terms are static (it is, after all, my money) and I *know* what I’ll receive when I retire. I do think folks should have some aspect of control over their accounts, whether it be full control (any combination of stocks or bonds you want) or a range of funds they can choose from to assume more or less risk in their portfolio.
I’m always good for one of these:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/02/guns_save_lives.html
Well in the last 48 hours I’ve managed to go from 40 feet beneath the water (scuba diving) to 3000 feet above it (in a glider).
Flying sort of freaks me out. I’m generally pretty unflappable, but one of the few things that can cause me significant anxiety (and sometimes outright panic, more on that later), it’s flying.
Anyway, a friend of mine flies gliders and took me up twice today. I found two little handholds on the console in front of me that I could hold onto for dear life (not unlike the “Jesus Bar” on the passenger side of Volkswagen Bugs). I got to fly a tiny little bit. On the second flight my friend did a little bit of “maneuvering”, one of which involved putting us in near zero-g for a moment. I thought I was going to die. I mean, I don’t usually panic, but I was pretty well paralyzed for a moment.
Anyway, it was a new experience. I don’t think I’d ever flown before except in commercial airlines.
I bought a drysuit earlier this week, and went diving with it today. These pics are from suiting up for the drysuit orientation Matt gave me. Diving a drysuit takes a little bit of extra training, mostly in what to do if you start getting air in your feet (because you can end up rocketing to the surface if you don’t take of that problem real quick). I have to say it was slightly amusing popping out of the water fins first looking like the Michelin man.
Wish I read more columns like this:
http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20080209/ASPENWEEKLY06/198091324/-1/DAILYCOMMENT
I don’t agree with every single thing in there, but I do especially like this part:
The Angry White Man owns firearms, and he’s willing to pick up a gun to defend his home and his country. He is willing to lay down his life to defend the freedom and safety of others, and the thought of killing someone who needs killing really doesn’t bother him.
There seems to be a correlation between cleaning my oven and the smoke alarm not going off when I cook.
I don’t really have an excuse, since I have a self-cleaning oven, but it really didn’t seem like it was that dirty in there.
Finally upgraded Wordpress…your XML-RPC exploits shall now fall on deaf bits.
I was going to write some witty political commentary now, but if I have to try, it’s not going to be any good…maybe something will come to me later.
