Altivo

Gary's planning on going to the Maritime Folk Festival tomorrow, unless the weather turns sour overnight. If he does that, I'm on farm duty all day. Workable as long as I can keep the head cold under control. So far I've only had sniffles and sneezes if I keep taking medication.

Looks like Libya's people have had enough and are willing to risk all to take control of their country back from the robber baron who has been running the place for decades. Even Ronald Reagan wasn't able to push Qaddafi out of power, but I don't see how he can hold on much longer in the face of today's events. When the word gets out, I suspect we'll see more revolutionary attempts in other military dictatorships.

Getting the users out of the library at closing time proved difficult tonight. We were more than 15 minutes late in actually setting the alarms and leaving. When we finally turned the lights off, another guy suddenly came wandering out of the dark. Neither of us had any idea where he had been hiding, and we both made rounds to check beforehand.

Gary called AT&T to make changes to our phone service, trying to lower the outrageous monthly bill. They accepted all his changes, and then tried to sell him a bunch of other stuff we don't need. Finally the sales rep tried to convince him to sign up for ADSL broadband. He had to tell her that we'd love to get ADSL, but AT&T doesn't offer it in our area. She was sure they did. He had to make her check on it, and of course, they don't and have no plans to do so. After all, they're the phone company. Why can't they just charge us for something they don't plan to deliver?

Could we please have some warmer temperatures? I'm not even asking for sunlight, mind, just not having to shiver would be nice.

Dog class was tonight, after being cancelled last week due to bad weather. Red is doing quite well at his basics. They introduced figure eights tonight (easy) and the boardwalk (harder.) He had some difficulty with walking the plank, which is only about ten inches wide. His normal stride has a wider wheelbase than that. By the third time, though, he almost made it through without stepping off the edge. The board is only two inches above the floor, so there is little risk of injury, though some smaller dogs seemed terrified by it.

Interesting note for those who continue to insist that "the founding fathers never would have approved of socialized medicine or forcing citizens to buy health insurance." A law passed by Congress and signed by John Adams in 1798 did just that for sailors employed by private ship owners. Details are here. Since John Adams was one of those founding fathers, and many more of them were in fact members of Congress at the time, I'd agree that this particular argument against health care reform is as bogus as, well, a three dollar bill.

The first seven holiday seasons that I worked for the city, they gave everyone a turkey at Christmas. OK, that's a pretty cheap Christmas bonus at roughly $10 apiece, but it's something.

The eighth year, they gave us nothing. Unless you count a cheap Christmas card signed by the mayor (an old style smarmy politico type.)

The ninth year? An invitation to a city Christmas Party. For which we are expected to pay $20 per person and drive up into Wisconsin. It's even a "cash bar." No, thanks, Harvard. You can keep your turkeys AND your parties. I'm sure that the police and fire departments, who account for most of your payroll and whom you've been shorting on raises for a while now will be just delighted to pay for their own second rate Christmas dinner too.

This weekend might be less hectic than the last one. Though the gallery show gets taken down tomorrow afternoon and I have to help with that. Gary goes into Chicago on Sunday for the Dark Morris (Pratchett anyone?) so I'll be animal care that day for sure.

Yesterday I saw juncos at the library. I expect to see them here at the house as soon as I'm home in the daytime when they might be visible. Called a "snowbird" by some, the junco is a traditional sign that winter is upon us. When the snow melts away in the spring they disappear back up into Canada. There are two color phases, the "Oregon junco" and the "slate backed junco" both of which are now considered a single species. We get both the brownish Oregon colored ones and the slate gray ones here. Collectively they are known as "dark eyed juncos."

Special pointless announcement: We have already voted. You idiot phonedrones can quit calling our number now, because it's too late. You could save yourselves a lot of time by paying attention to "do not call" anyway. Yeah, I know you made yourselves exempt from it, but that's irrelevant. When political campaigners call my phone to try to waste my time convincing me to support their air-headed candidate, all it does is convince me NOT to support their air-headed candidate. Get it? DO NOT CALL means just what it says. I do not welcome ANY calls that aren't from friends, or relatives, or about personal business. We took advantage of Illinois' new early voting provisions, and went over to Marengo yesterday afternoon to vote. We were the only ones there other than the two election judges, though someone left as we went in, and someone came in as we left. Much less hectic than actually voting on election day, let me tell you.

Still absorbing factoids about Richard the Lionhearted and his family, and thinking of obnoxious jokes to make of it all. I hope I can keep the funny happening fast enough for this thing.

I think I've got a mild RSS irritation in my right wrist from using a mouse too much, so I'm going to try to stay away from the computer more this weekend. Shouldn't be too hard.

But it won't blow us to Oz. More likely we'll end up in Toronto or something. NOAA is predicting the second worst cyclonic storm here in the upper midwest since their records began. The depth of the low pressure zone at the middle of the thing was exceeded only by the Ohio blizzard of January, 1978. I remember that one, because it buried Chicago in snow too, and I was living near the lakefront at that time so lake effect multiplied the load. The intensity of the storm is expected to exceed that of the Great Blizzard (1913, also called the White Hurricane) as well as the strength of the storm that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior in 1975. We shall see.

It won't be snow if it hits, just lots of wind with rain squalls or thunderstorms. The duration will be like a hurricane, 36 to 48 hours. Wind gusts to 55 or 60 mph are possible, they say, with continuous background gale force winds. We get storms like that most fall seasons, where the wind roars for 24 hours or so. Power outages are typically the worst damage. So we ran around this evening just before sunset to lock down anything likely to blow away. Gary put cinder blocks on the roof of the duck house, as that has sometimes blown off in the past. We chained the barn doors shut, put extra tarps over the firewood supply, and checked our emergency generator to make sure it starts and runs. The storm is supposed to get here between midnight and dawn.

Of course, when you feel confident that you are prepared, the whole thing is likely to turn into a false alarm, isn't it? The domestic animals seem unbothered about it all, but I could swear that the squirrels and birds are acting apprehensive.

Since we don't watch (don't even receive any more) television here, we are missing the worst of the election campaign garbage. I still laughed to hear on the radio this morning that someone on the Democratic side called the Republican candidate for governor a "racist homophobe," because as far as I can tell, he certainly is that. Of course, the Democratic candidate is just a moron who accidentally fell into the office when they arrested his crooked predecessor and took him away. I'll definitely be voting for the Green Party candidate this time. Neither of the two big party guys deserve my vote.

And that's the news from the predicted storm path...

It takes 30 minutes or so for NOAA to post the results of the latest polar orbital observation of auroral activity. In that time, the value may rise or drop by as much as two activity points. And a half hour ago they posted a value of 9. Somewhere between 9 and 10 is when aurora activity usually becomes visible at my location.

It was pretty cloudy at sunset but the forecast calls for "mostly clear" tonight. So do I walk out to the pasture, braving the mosquitoes, to see if I can spot the aurora? I dunno. I'm sorta waiting for them to post another reading to see if it is holding steady or moving up or down.

In any case, for those of you in North America and at latitudes above 40N or so, there's a good chance of visible aurora around your local midnight time, plus or minus an hour or so. If you've never seen it, I assure you it's well worth seeing.

Those of you who reside above 50N and see it more often are allowed to yawn, but I'll still point out that although I've seen hundreds of gorgeous sunrises and sunsets in my life, I still don't miss an opportunity to see another. Aurora is much rarer. I've seen it perhaps a handful of times in my life, and I don't want to miss an opportunity.

In other news, a federal court judge who was appointed by Ronald Reagan (and we know Reagan didn't favor liberals) ruled today that California's Prop 8 is unconstitutional. Apparently though, he stayed his own judgement from being carried out pending the inevitable appeal. Thus he has fixed nothing, but affirmed my belief that even a so-called "conservative" can't easily argue a way around this. Either the Constitution affirms equal treatment for everyone, or it does not.

Some voices on the extreme right are already mustering to repeal the 14th amendment. I can't believe the selfish gall of such people, I really can't.

Also, the great "I'm in favor of change" Obama has reaffirmed, though a spokesperson, the statement that he opposes gay marriage but favors civil unions. What? Here's a supposed black man saying he supports "separate but equal" treatment. I swear, we have no history at all in this country. Anything earlier than living memory didn't ever happen.

I think I've reached the limit of what I can derive of PI using my homegrown algorithm and the microprocessors I have handy. Except I've already said that what, three times at least? Today I coaxed up to the twelfth decimal place out of the Alpha DS10 I keep at work. Then I came home and ran the same code on the Alpha PWS 433au I have here. Took a while for it to run but it got the same results. To get there, I had to integrate the function in 10¹⁰ segments. Yes, ten billion. While I haven't run out of numeric precision in the variable space, the tiny errors in binary floating point representation are starting to add up to such a significant degree that I doubt I could get another decimal place using this method. To see what I mean, use a spreadsheet or BASIC or whatever to keep adding 1.0 to an accumulating total. Be sure the result is displayed with as many digits to the right of the decimal as you can get. As you keep adding, sooner or later you'll see a "1" creep into the rightmost digit. Then it becomes a "2" and a "3" and keeps growing and soon the "1" has shifted one column to the left while the rightmost keeps growing. This happens even though you are adding only 1.0 each time. It's a result of the way decimal values are represented in the computer's internal numeric language.

Thus we disprove something Heinlein had one of his characters say in Glory Road: "Democracy is doomed to failure. No matter how many zeroes you add up, it still comes to zero." As of the latest news I can get, it looks as if UK voters have disproved that claim by giving a significant number of seats to a third party for the first time in decades. I approve. Both the UK and the US need an electoral reform to get rid of the "winner takes all" election mechanism that almost insures that there will be only two parties and therefore only two diametrically opposed views in government.

So I say, "Well done!" to voters in the UK, who gathered enough courage to break the deadlock and force their politicians to compromise and cooperate in order to form a government. This is the way it really should be, in my opinion, rather than what we have in the US, where one party is the "winner" and gets to stomp all over the "losers" for the next four years. I hope you get the changes and reforms that you really want, instead of the empty nothingness that we got here by voting for a change advocate who belonged to one of the two main parties. Nothing is changing for us.

Makes it feel like Wednesday already. This morning before dawn the moon shone into my window through the trees and it was like a painted picture in a children's book maybe. Slate blue sky and big yellow moon setting behind the winter branches, it was almost surreal in the sharp edges and simple forms of the image.

One of the monthly details of my work is maintaining the "new books" selection. As new titles are added to the collection, we mark them with blue stickers on the spine that just say "New" and put them on a special group of shelves near the entrance so library users can browse the latest additions. The blue label reminds everyone to return these books to the special display after they are checked out. Of course, at some point, they have to move into the regular collection. The blue label is peeled off, the location in the computerized catalog changed appropriately, and the book is shifted to the normal place for its subject matter. This happened rather haphazardly until I took over the process.

Now I generate a report from the catalog itself each month, listing the titles that have been on the "new books" shelf for six months or more, so I can pull those books and switch them over to the regular stacks. If a book on the list is checked out, I place a hold request for it so that it will be given to me when it is returned and I can process it then. This works more reliably, provided I remember to run the report at the first of the month. Sometimes things are busy and I let it slip. For a while last spring I was getting behind and the lists of books to pull got longer and longer. Our circulation manager even asked me when I was going to get around to it because the shelves were overflowing. Fortunately I was able to catch up.

Today's list seemed excessively short. Just two pages, in fact. Last month's list was similar. Then it dawned on me that we began to feel the budget pinch of the economic slowdown just about six to eight months ago. Fewer titles have been purchased, in part because the state has been very tardy in paying us our legislated percentage from state revenue. The check for 2008/09 didn't arrive until well after the end of the fiscal year. The number of new books purchased has been accordingly smaller. Because we have a private non-profit trust fund based on the original legacy of the founder, it has been somewhat easier for us than for the libraries in neighboring communities, though. We have had no staffing or hours reductions, for instance, and have continued to offer our regular education and entertainment programs. Other communities have not fared as well.

Another sign of the tight economy seems to be a boom in interlibrary loan requests. We are lending more books to other libraries, perhaps twice as many per month as we were before the meltdown. We are also borrowing more, as people come to us requesting books that they probably would have just purchased for themselves two years ago. In spite of the claims that the economy has "turned the corner" I don't see much evidence of it yet. The newspapers are still full of foreclosure notices, there are virtually no help wanted ads in those papers or anywhere else, and we continue to see large numbers of people in the library asking for help with resume writing, faxing applications, and using the internet to hunt for and apply for work. Ironically, I also note that bank executives have once again reaped massive (I'd call them obscene) financial bonuses for their work in clear-cutting the economy and sucking all the loose money into their own privileged pockets. And, in spite of all of that, people in this area continue to resist any shakeup in the familiar status quo of politics. Any suggestion that a reform is in order produces shrieks of "socialism, socialism" and in a frightening number of cases, mutterings about armed resistance. I'm not inclined to optimism about the intelligence or survivability of human society right now.

The very same users who come into the library to read a newspaper because they don't want to spend the money for it themselves, who use our internet connections and books that were purchased with community funding are "utterly opposed" to socialism. Yet what is a public library other than a socialist institution? Pooled resources are used to build and maintain a common facility for the benefit and use of everyone in the community. Don't try to point that out to them, though, unless you want a huge display of histrionics to ensue.

Wednesday will kill me yet. It's just tooooooo long.

One reason that I am NOT applying for my boss's job now that it's posted. She's responsible for personnel and scheduling, which means she gets to fill in when people are sick or otherwise absent and there's no one else to do it. I was never any good at late hours, even when I was 20 years old. I'm even less tolerant now. If there were a reference desk shift that started at 7 am, I'd be fine with that, but of course there isn't. (In fact, I used to get the 8 am slots at the college. No one else wanted them, and as far as I was concerned, there was no problem with the time and it was less busy as well.)

I see I may have to freeze the discussion on yesterday's entry (at least, over on LJ) because it's getting a bit too flame-ish and hostile. For the record, in my opinion all American corporations are equally bad about these things, so singling out Google or WalMart misses the point. They are all greedy, irresponsible, evasive, dishonest, and have absolutely no regard for either their customers or their employees. It's so bad that there's little point in nit-picking among them. Those that do well on one occasion do equally poorly on another. It is utterly impossible to live in the US without feeding these monsters in some way. You can't avoid it.

So I was surprised that Google claims to have second thoughts about aiding and abetting the Chinese government. Unless of course, the claim is really based on profits. If they aren't making enough money, or the expected level of money, of course they are going to pull out of China. And of course they will try to put a good face on it by spinning the truth and making it look as if the move was triggered by Chinese human rights violations. But they knew the Chinese have no respect for individual rights even before they moved into the Chinese market place and demonstrated their own lack of respect for individual freedoms by agreeing to the demand for censorship. Like the morally and mentally bankrupt political parties, Google has already demonstrated its lack of trustworthiness. Could they be censoring the results they deliver in the US as well? Yes. While I don't think they censor in the same way they do in China, what they really do here is sell the top slots on popular search terms to the highest bidder. I feel quite confident of that.

Not the best. Some sort of power failure in Rockford took down the internet connections at most of the consortium's member libraries. We were one of three exceptions because we are far enough east that our T1 line goes through a different POP. Not that it made much difference, since with the main site offline, we had no catalog, no technical services, and no library user validation. The rest of our internet access remained intact and normal. This was not cleared up by 5 pm, which was the original estimate, and in fact seems not to be cleared up even now, at 9:30 pm. I hope they get it going before tomorrow morning.

Columbus Day is a holiday in name only for us. Worse, the schools were closed, so we were flooded early with noisy, boisterous kids.

However, it's a real holiday in Canada, and I wish all my Canadian friends a happy holiday and hope you are enjoying it rather than just putting up with family or in-laws because it's expected of you. ;p

I see that Governator Schwarzenegger of California today signed two bills that will surely make him very unpopular with the right wing in his state. One of them declares official state recognition of "Harvey Milk Day," something he has rejected in the past on the grounds that Milk was only a locally respected person. I guess he has changed his mind now.

The second is far more significant. It requires California to recognize same sex marriages that are solemnized in other states where such contracts are valid (such as Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, and I think Vermont.) Some people predicted that this would happen based on the poor wording of Proposition 8 as passed last year, and now it has arrived, and a full year before another election in which the right can try to override or repeal it. I predict a lot of histrionics over this one.