Markian M. Gooley

Ubuntu, Karmic Koala flavor

2009-11-15T14:53:01Z

I upgraded. It seems to have gone well. I agree with adw3345: "It's brown." Default color for a lot of things (bar indicating active window, selected text, and on and on): various shades of brown. They could take up the UPS slogan as their own, though they'd probably just get sued.

tympanoplasty aftermath

2009-11-14T15:52:59Z

I went to the surgeon for a post-op checkup yesterday. Out with the last of the packing (something had felt odd in there, and I should have guessed it was packing). Everything seems to be okay, and I see her again in another few weeks; I don't think she'll have had her baby by then. I stopped at my usual pharmacy afterwards for another $100 bottle of antibiotic ear drops, about the sixth I've bought since May.

I'm still stagnating. The foot ulcer that started out as a giant blister on my left heel has shrunken remarkably, but seems to be getting no smaller, holding at about a centimeter by a bit under two, and my podiatrist isn't brimming with great ideas on how to get the healing to complete. Perhaps I need to keep it entirely off the bed when I'm sleeping, but I haven't figured out a way to do that and still get a full night of rest.

tympanoplasty fun

2009-11-11T19:29:51Z

Always ask, and always expect the very worst.

Okay, maybe those aren't good rules in general. Somehow I'd gotten the idea that I could have my right eardrum patched with a bit of scalp fascia under a local anesthetic, via the ear canal. Ha, ha, bloody ha.

First blow: $1800 facility fee, partly because of the general anesthesia, not covered by insurance. I should have asked: maybe cash in advance would have procured a discount. Second blow: learning that for certain I'd be put under... leading to the third blow, the knowledge that I'd have to cancel going to the Scrabble tournament in Ft. Lauderdale the next day.

Anyway, the beautiful and charming woman who did the operation seems to have practically severed my right pinna from my head rather than going through the ear canal. It still aches around the stitches, and it's been six days. The inner ear aches. The ear canal aches and leaks bloody serum. The anesthesiologist put in my post-operative packet (of instructions and such) a form letter (augmented with extensive notes in excellent draftsman-like printing) explaining the astoundingly sore throat (worse than after my tonsil and adenoid extraction in boyhood, worse in intensity for a bit than the worst strep throat I can recall) that still lingers: attempts at conventional intubation failed, and eventually he used some fiber-optic gadget to guide the tube, once various parts of my throat had been reduced apparently to hamburger. I had a look at it. Then the cat threw up on it. Thank you, Rhondda.

The operation started around ten in the morning. I was awake before three in the afternoon. By bedtime I was still vomiting up everything I ingested, pretty much, though I woke at three in the morning without a trace of nausea. I'd e-mailed the tournament director in the evening to cancel, certain that I wouldn't be able to go to the tournament; I left the house at seven for a junk-food breakfast at the nearest remaining Hardee's (in Waldo: most Hardee's franchises in the area shut down in a bunch about seven years ago) and then some grocery shopping that should perhaps have included more canned soup. I could easily have driven to Fort Lauderdale and played in the tournament... it's just like the Orlando tournament I missed for my appendectomy a few years back, something I would have had no trouble with. Tournament entry fee gone, $70 of non-refundable shatnered room gone.

If the tympanoplasty is completely successful it won't matter much to my hearing, which was barely damaged by the ruptured eardrum. If I'd known this would be such a hassle, I wouldn't have had it done. Sometimes my luck just doesn't hold. Then again, by all rights I should be dead from diabetes or one of my car crashes by now.

If I weren't a diabetic (and hence a pincushion), and if I hadn't started a collection of surgical scars, would I have the very least interest in getting a tattoo? I doubt it. I wrote a somewhat lame ballade about that, in the old talk.bizarre days on Usenet...

home again

2009-11-02T01:05:06Z

When I get back to Orlando or Tampa or Jacksonville airport before 9 or so, it's usually best to just drive home. I didn't. I'd shatnered a $30 (plus $12 in taxes and fees) hotel room near the airport parking I'd used (a lot run by and next to the airport Marriott), and I went there. It wasn't that easy to find despite being fairly close, and it was well away from anywhere I could have dinner. Result: landed around 7:30, got back from dinner after 9. I could have driven home. I found it hard to concentrate on Monday Night Football or on online chat over the hotel WiFi. Went to bed relatively early, got up, showered, ate hotel breakfast-buffet food (sausage and sausage gravy, scrambled eggs and sausage gravy), got on one tollway and then another, stopped for groceries in Ocala and mail held at the post office in Hawthorne, went home to attentive cat with an empty food bowl and a litter box in need of changing.

Podiatrist had a look at the gradually-improving foot ulcer, surgeon took me through details of the tympanoplasty (repair of perforated right eardrum) scheduled for this coming Thursday, dentist had a look at my teeth and clucked over my general condition after hygenist cleaned them). Rinsed off the rocks I'd put in the acid bath: a few came out very well.

The day after the operation I'm supposed to drive to Ft. Lauderdale to play more Scrabble. Maybe I'll cancel. I don't want to play more Scrabble anyway. I wish I hadn't signed up.

back in the YYC Food Court

2009-10-26T11:19:32Z

Ir's just before 5 AM as I start this. Siri has a busy day today so rather than getting him to drive us to the airport (6 AM flight to Toronto, 7:10 to DFW) the two of us still staying with him sent for a cab... to pick us up at 4 AM. I got woken at 2:45 because the other guy had set his alarm wrong... sigh. He insisted on paying my half of the cab fare, and I didn't refuse that.

Three tournaments for the price of... well, three: 8-game event on Wednesday, another on Thursday, and then 21 games Friday-Sunday. I did well in the first, finishing 6-2 in the top division for 4th place and CDN$40, and also getting $10 for high word not involving a "bingo" (playing all the letters on the rack). The second... 4-4, I think (I've thrown out the paper evidence), $15 for tying for high loss and getting high non-bingo word again (ZINGY, 76 points) -- both in the same game. The main event... after 5-3 on the first day, I won a single game on the second and finished 9-12. Ny miserable 1291 rating shot to 1390 after the Wednesday event, and is now an okay 1340, still well down from 1452 earlier in the year.

I talked religion with a few people, ate three free meals, provided one, made a snowball, found a brand of dried squid snack at the Chinese grocery with only one gram of sugar per ounce instead of the usual 12 grams. I made it to church on Sunday evening and sang loudly and got approached by a hopeful choir director, which happens sometimes.

Long layover at DFW is on the schedule. They have wired connections but not perhaps free WiFi, and I didn't bring a CAT5 cable. Supposed to be in Orlando shortly after 7 PM. Maybe I'll stay the night. I haven't been getting enough sleep.

never shatner air travel

2009-10-21T05:45:05Z

Not if you're I. Well, none of you are. Maybe you can get away with it.

I saved only about $50 on airfare to Calgary, and I got here around 9:30 PM local time. Problem: there is no public transit to and from the Calgary airport. I'm staying with the astoundingly generous director of the Calgary Scrabble Club and the tournaments, Siri Tillekeratne, and cab fare to his place is $50 or so... someone else is arriving from Toronto at 1 AM, and a club member has volunteered to pick him up...

I need to wait here until after 1 AM. Okay, maybe I should have just blown the dough on a cab. I am pretty sure I will not get a wink of sleep tonight. Anyway, I asked for it, I guess. It's a long haul out to the airport from town, and having someone make two separate trips each for one person would be ridiculous. Last year I was Siri's only guest. This year his house will be crammed, and it's not a big house. My late arrival will probably wake someone no matter how careful I am.

My return flight leaves before 8 AM Monday... Siri himself will probably have to drive me there... early. Bless the man.

Every time I shatner a flight on priceline.com they choose lousy times. It's just not worth it. If I were saving vast sums it might be, but I don't, and this time my cheeseparing ways will inconvenience me and other people a fair bit. I think it's only the third time, but that's three times too many and two more than should have been necessary for me to know better.

Free WiFi. Empty food court upstairs in the Calgary terminal. To use the WiFi, one has to log in... a Facebook account is one of the ways to do that. It's the only use I've had for Facebook in months. The food court is one of the few places one can sit down... there's a Tim Hortons open at least, but I'm not hungry, and I seem to have found the only electric outlet near a seat in the food court, or anywhere else in the public areas of this terminal.

A timer in a popup window says I have under 49 minutes of my two hours of free WiFi remaining. When that runs out I will skulk around and seek out the guy giving me a ride... it'll be one of the best Scrabble players in the world, whichever of the two likely volunteers shows up. Currently I must be ranked about 1000th in North America...

I should probably give up Scrabble

2009-10-19T00:59:48Z

I drove down to Pinellas Park (a bit past Tampa and across an arm of Tampa Bay) on Saturday and played in a 6-game Scrabble tournament.

Seven people showed up. By 150 points I had the highest ranking. I ended up playing five games (first round I didn't play because of the uneven number of players). A slam dunk to win, right? Wrong. It was a metaphor for my life: the three weakest players trounced me, then I won one game, then I won a rematch with the weakest player. I rarely had good tiles, and I made several foolish blunders. I submit that only I can fail so utterly -- in this particular way.

My rating is now under 1300 again. I left the venue, a former schoolhouse now with a stage and a couple thousand square feet of meeting area, called The Auditorium (it's supposed to have a theater organ in it, but I didn't see any evidence of that apart from a plaque with names of theater organ enthusiasts on it), around 4:30, and turned on the radio for the Florida homecoming game against Arkansas. Florida was trailing 7-0 at that point, and I thought, "Florida will emulate my miserable performance and lose." Before I was home again, Florida had won, barely, 23-20.

On Tuesday I go to Calgary for their 37 games worth of tournaments. I expect to crash and burn. I arrive at ten in the evening, will probably get a place to sleep by two in the morning... it's going to suck. Mama told me not to go, or would have, had I told her earlier. I'll probably be incommunicado while I'm in Canada: no WiFi for the netbook where I'm staying, I suspect. In fiction, something magical and wonderful would perhaps happen to me on the trip. In real life, I'll settle for coming home again safe and sound, to an intact doublewide and a live cat.

Parade of Homes: should I bother?

2009-10-10T16:43:45Z

I thought that it was just last weekend. It's also this weekend. .

Yes, the Builders Association of North Central Florida (their website) runs it as a two-weekend event. (I keep wanting to add an apostrophe to that name.) It's not too late for me to go and make fun of their work. I don't actually have to go, because the booklet with pictures and floor plans is available on their web site and can be viewed on line or downloaded as a PDF.

The houses include a lot of my pet peeves, judging from what's in that booklet. They're not all bad, mind you. Some of the cheaper ones are rectangular. Some have relatively simple roofs, though almost every roof is needlessly complex and needlessly steep. Not all of the multi-story houses have rooms built into the attic. Some houses have a short axis parallel to the street, which would allow for proper orientation to the sun on certain lots -- although they tend to mar this with big front windows.

Cathedral ceilings seem more usual than not on the single-story houses. I don't care whether they're popular: they're a pain to insulate well, they demand scissor trusses or other dubious measures, and they remind me of the moldering doublewide I'm sitting in right now: the ceiling of each half slopes towards the center of the whole shebang, providing a little more storage space and in my mind not a hint of luxury or romance.

Might as well get moving, take a shower, perhaps go. I should go to Confession anyway, and that means driving into Gainesville this afternoon, though a lot of the houses are on the far west side of town and not all that near St. Patrick's. It's unseasonably hot, as it's been for over a week around here.

mysterious looming things in Tampa Bay -- explained

2009-10-09T19:02:08Z

In between losing (mostly) at the one-day Scrabble tournament last Saturday, I went out and had a look at Tampa Bay: the venue was an upmarket high-rise assisted-living place (old folks' home for ambulatory and still somewhat spry and monied) on the west shore of the Bay, a few blocks north of Ballast Point. The views were pleasant... but in the haze loomed two rather tall, blocky things like big greenish hills. I asked some of the locals about them. Nobody knew what they were.

They're a couple of islands, shown on Google Maps but not named. They're called 2D and 3D, they're artificial, and they're piles of material dredged up from the Bay, chiefly from creating and maintaining the deep channels required by large ships: the Bay is too shallow. There are (or were) plans to make them even taller, particularly if the channels are widened rather than merely kept to a given width and depth. The Port Authority owns them, they're off limits to the public, and dredged material is not dumped on them during the nesting seasons of various birds -- not any more.

I suppose there might be some really nice agatized coral embedded in 2D and 3D, but surely that's covered with lots of sand and silt. One can argue that the islands, already tall and likely to get taller, mar the view, but they're just big green things, giant artificial hills rising out of the Bay. Florida hasn't much in the way of hills, anyway.

belated rockhounding report

2009-10-08T19:41:37Z

For the record, here's what I suggest if you're collecting agatized coral and such on the shore of Honeymoon Island and the causeway going to it.

Low tide helps. I arrived not that long after high tide and left two hours before low tide. Time your visit for low tide. The rocks that spend most of their time submerged will sometimes have a sort of green hirsute look from some sort of algae: I took along some wire brushes but ended up not using them, largely because I didn't stay for low tide.

When you're taking the causeway to Honeymoon Island, you can stop and look on the beach west of the drawbridge, on the south side (the left, when you're heading out towards the island). The pieces here are small, generally well under fist size. Some of them look like fragments of the big, hollow agatized-coral geodes once found in the Ballast Point area of Tampa (whether they were dredged up and dumped there, or naturally there, I don't know). (An on-line search will turn up plenty of pictures of fine specimens of the kind now hard to find in the Bay area.) Generally we're talking about dark material contrasting with off-white, and sometimes small patches of the former embedded in the latter. Much of it's like what I describe later on, only smaller.

You're really better off going onto the island proper. Drive past the high-rise condos to the park gate. It's $4 if you're the only person in the car, more if you're not. Take the main road and don't turn off it but go to the loop at its end and head back the other way (the whole main road is largely a one-way loop). When you're heading back, the Gulf side of the island will be on your right. Look for the northernmost beach structure, the first one on the right. It's red-roofed, the center section capped with a little low pyramid, and I gather it holds the bathrooms (I didn't go in.) The section of shoreline with the rocks dumped from past dredging is on either side -- and partly under -- this building. If you're facing it from the parking lot side, a short stretch of the rocky shore will be to your right (north and west) and a somewhat longer stretch to your left (south and east). It's a mess of rocks, mostly about fist-sized but many larger, sinking into the near-white sand you'll see elsewhere on the shore. This stretch isn't a nice, evenly sandy beach, and not all of the rocks are smooth: you'll probably want shoes.

You'll find some dark rocks, or more usually near-white rocks with dark areas. Some will be football-sized, most smaller. The dark stuff is a sort of translucent chalcedony, usually with not too much pattern to it. Sometimes you'll find little crannies in it -- vugs -- lined with drusy (small, glittery crystals). Some vugs will have a few thin bands of contrasting colors around them: agate, I suppose, at least after a manner of speaking. You might find prints of fossils on the surface of the dark stuff. It's common for a rock to look like limestone, obviously fossiliferous or not so obviously, except that parts of it, sometimes as if at random, have been dissolved away and replaced with silica. Some of the agate/chalcedony/silica may be botryoidal masses ("the mineral has a globular external form resembling a bunch of grapes"), but I didn't find anything like that.

You may also find what looks almost like coral, only it's clearly a fossil and part or all of the body of the rock has had its lime replaced with silica. I found several pale-colored pieces, one about half the volume of a football.

Because I arrived only a little after high tide, and left two hours before low tide, I missed looking at a lot of the potential material. I brought a 2-pound hammer, but something with more of a point might have been better such as the sort of pick-mattock I've used in the past, but I don't think I'm strong enough to swing it now. One might be able to break off the non-silica bits of a rock from the silica ones with such things, but as a past visitor has noted in a report available on line, the silica stuff is dense and compact and doesn't break that easily. I didn't bring a shovel or spade; a crowbar might have been useful, and I made do with a Jack Nicklaus 3-iron bought for $3 at a thrift shop not far from the causeway. It served adequately as crowbar and more often cane.

If you're in good shape, with good eyesight, and work around low tide with a few tools, you might with a little luck might find some worthwhile material. The dark silica, by whatever name, could be excellent material for knapping into stone tools, and perhaps might even be cut and polished into attractive if unremarkable cabochons. With difficulty it might be bashed into pieces suitable for a rock tumbler -- but, again, little of what I found had much of a pattern. There may be some actual geodes or really striking pieces of agatized coral there, but I expect that most of the best material has already been taken, or slumped from the shoreline back into the Gulf: it's probably all dredged and dumped, not natural to the island. Most of what I took home would be unremarkable anywhere but in a rockhound hell like Florida, as at least one earlier visitor says: in Wyoming or Montana, I'd have left it behind.

It seems that Rock and Gem magazine had an article on Honeymoon Island agatized coral a little under two years ago, but I can't find a copy.

At least I had some exercise before the Scrabble tournament the next day.

to Tampa for Scrabble, with rockhounding perhaps

2009-10-01T23:01:50Z

There's a one-day Scrabble tournament at an assisted-living old-folks place in Tampa on Saturday. 24 people maximum, probably because it's in some small community gathering-place and I think there'll be about sixteen there. I think I can get in another one-day if I like before going to Calgary towards the end of October, and possibly bump up my rating -- or lower it further. It's seven games starting at ten, no lunch break, which suits me fine. I plan to drive home afterwards so that I'll be home on Sunday.

It's near Bayonet Point, a location famous for agatized coral, but whether because it occurs there naturally or was dumped from dredging operations I'm not sure. Tampa Bay and such have been dredged for a good while. Pickings at the shoreline park there are said to be slim.

(I'm missing the Parade of Homes thing in Gainesville this weekend. Oh, what fodder for derision is passing me by. Well, maybe it continues through Sunday...)

I shatnered a nominally $28 room -- $10 more for taxes -- for the night before the tournament, and I plan to drive a bit further tomorrow and go to another place known for agatized coral, Honeymoon Island. Probably most or all of that was dumped there by dredgers as well. I'm not too sanguine. With my dodgy diabetic feet I can't go into the surf too much, and even at low tide (late afternoon tomorrow) some of the stones may be covered with assorted organic stuff living or dead. Maybe I'll bring some scrub brushes and a little rock hammer. The island, formerly Hog Island and for a while home to a group of palm-thatched honeymoon huts built in 1939 or so, is now a state park, but collection of dead shells, and I presume fossilized corals, is allowed. Last I heard, anyway.

Florida is a poor hunting ground for rockhounds, and I'm still in poor shape to be doing it. I got adw3345 to take me to several sites in Connecticut the day after Thanksgiving a few years ago: there were some snow flurries but it wasn't all that cold: we got some ugly dodecahedral garnets at one and I bashed the rock a bit for a micromount or two at another -- probably I've lost the results by now. Ah, friendship...

silly Gigantor idea

2009-09-30T16:54:58Z

There's some talk about Gigantor because a life-sized statue is in the works in Kobe, if not already done. A friend pointed me to an article about that, and I noticed that the original Japanese name of the robot is Tetsujin 28-go, which apparently means Iron Man #28.

Then I remembered that a Japanese cast-iron teapot is a tetsubin. Tetsu meaning iron, I suppose.

Okay, maybe they don't sound all that much the same in Japanese. Maybe they do. But... please, please let someone in Japan have done a parody about a giant teapot. Robotic teapot, even. They've had decades.

comment I posted on amazon.com

2009-09-25T21:24:57Z

I really shouldn't write these things. Oh, well.

"I recall that when the OED [Oxford English Dictionary] first came out on CD-ROM, I contacted someone at OUP [Oxford University Press] via a friend we had in common, suggesting that they drop the price to something reasonable so that they could scoop up the vast market of word enthusiasts. The reply basically amounted to saying that I was an ignorant nobody and should go scratch myself. If the OED were not the best thing out there, and people who love words were not rather phlegmatic, the attitude of the OUP towards lovers of words would have resulted in the entire staff of the Press being lynched years ago. Deservedly. Sheesh, it took them this long to accommodate users of the Mac, they will probably never bother with users of Linux, the user interface is primitive rubbish, and if they really removed some features in this version they're complete knaves. Don't get me started on the $300/year individual subscription for the on-line OED: shouldn't they at least hand out a free disc of this version with, say, a two-year subscription? Complete wankers. Oh, and there's been nary a decent "Oxford Book of.." book published in twenty years. And I hope their dogs die."

Ahem.

hymn tune geekery and guesswork

2009-09-23T02:51:04Z

There's a lovely hymn tune based on an anthem by the Welsh organist and composer Thomas John Williams, known as Ebenezer or Ton-y-Botel. The latter name means "tune in a bottle" or such, and the story is that Williams found the tune written as a message in a bottle -- though that's considered unlikely.

My guess: the tune has a series of rising triplets. Think of a bottle being washed up on a beach. Every triplet represents a wave pushing the bottle up. The other notes represent it rolling back, sometimes checked by the sand or by a smaller wave. You could do an animation of it, with the bottle rolling up from the sea and back towards it in time with the music.

Or maybe I'm full of crap on this. You can find a video on YouTube of someone playing the tune, or seek out a MIDI on line: see what you think.

not quite a rant on domestic architecture

2009-09-21T21:07:23Z

I went to an open house on Sunday, the real-estate variety. Nowadays I often eat lunch after Mass on Sunday with someone from church, and he's planning to buy or build a house, and that provided an excuse to see a house built near here in 2006 without my feeling that I was completely dissembling: I still hope to build my own house on this land.

$230,000 seems a bit much for it, even though it's sort of on a private lake (the lots across the street have the shore as one side) and it's far enough from US 301 (four-lane divided highway at that point) to be quiet yet not far enough to be inconvenient, on a slightly meandering well-paved road. It's a bit under 2100 square feet, concrete-block with stucco covering -- that earns a bit of a premium here these days, being termite-proof and nominally hurricane-proof -- and has the somewhat steep roof (hip roof over main house, smaller hip roof over garage wing, maybe 8 in 12) that means at least one big room with a cathedral ceiling.

The house faces west when the layout suggests it should face south, with the garage taking up much of the southern exposure and keeping some light out. No doubt some streams in through the west windows (front of master bedroom, front windows of big room with cathedral ceiling) late most afternoons, although there are enough trees to mitigate that), and the east (master bath, other bedrooms, French door to the little deck in the back) in the mornings. The lot is big enough that they could have rotated the house to face south, but... why, that would be antisocial! Mirror-flipping the house and facing the long axis south, with the garage fending off much of the afternoon sun would have been wise, but... the front door... not facing the street? That windowless garage turning a cold shoulder to the street? Unthinkable, and probably against the Homeowners' Association rules; yep, a private lake generally means that in some ways you might as well be living in a condominium.

The stucco looks to have been painted. I didn't inspect it closely. One does not paint stucco, in theory, because repairing it would require the paint to be stripped first. (Maybe it was pigmented stucco. I hope so.) The two joined-together hip roofs have fully vented soffits and at least the big one a vent for nearly the whole length of its ridge, which is good.

Inside: big living/dining/family room with that cathedral ceiling. (I vaguely recall that they are bad feng shui.) This means scissor trusses, and difficulty with the insulation. Pergo-style laminate floors in a wooden plank pattern with streaky dark bits meant to represent heartwood or perhaps spalting. Damn it, if I have to have laminate flooring, I want it to look like tulipwood (cream with pink stripes), or some decorative stone like lapis lazuli or malachite: the hell with half-hearted fakery. The A/C outlets are near the peak, which is right.

The wall separating the end of the house with the two kid bedrooms (one used as one, and including a copy of The Phantom Tollbooth, hooray, the other as a weight room) has about an eight-foot section of brick with a mostly-glass door in it. The cathedral ceiling ends here, but oddly: just beyond the door the eight-foot ceilings start, so the big room has a snippet of horizontal surface about eight and a half feet off the floor, and only a few feet from the sloping ceiling. It's ugly and useless and silly.

I really can't poke good fun at the place. It's okay, it seems built well enough if a bit overpriced. There are two nice motorcycles in the garage, and some funky trusses that allow using the space over the garage ceiling as a really lousy storage area accessible through a pull-down hatch. It's rather dispiriting that what strikes me as not much of a house is so very expensive: it doesn't bode well for the house I hope to build.

I may have to rewrite this. I might just delete it later.

how to shatner a cheap room or rental car on priceline

2009-09-17T19:18:06Z

Personal coinage: to shatner. This means to get a hotel room, rental car, or air ticket via priceline.com. You bid money on something guaranteed to be roughly what you want, pay when the bid is accepted -- no refunds-- and only then get to see where you'll stay, what you'll drive, or when the flights will be on whatever airline.

Shatnering usually works for me. I can't recommend it for airfares: I'm never pleased with the flights they give me. For rental cars it can be a money-saver (not always), and for hotel rooms it's always gotten me in a comfortable room, though sometimes in very odd hotels in odd neighborhoods. So far. It certainly adds a touch of adventure to travel.

I've never had success getting cheap rooms in a top-notch hotel in the center of a major city, not that I've tried very hard or very often. It may be possible to use these techniques for that. I don't know. They work for me, for the sort of rooms (and cars) I usually get -- cheap ones.

Start early. A first try six months in advance is okay, but don't offer too much early on. It helps to know what else will be going on near where you want to stay. If no major events will be nearby (for certain values of "major" and "nearby"), it may pay to wait. A month or less before your trip, the hotels may be more desperate to fill rooms than they were earlier... or else, they may not. I cannot be positive which.

Use a travel search site -- priceline.com itself is adequate, though hotels.com, orbitz.com, sidestep.com, or any of a host of other sites are good for a second opinion -- to find typical prices where you want to go when you want to go. Get a feel for how much a room costs in whatever parts of town you'd be willing to stay.

When you click on the "Name your own price" link, you'll probably get a map showing the area of interest. It'll have shaded blobs on it indicating various zones you can choose. If you're trying for a cheap room and will have a car, your own or a rental, you can be less choosy if you don't mind risking a long drive. Keep aware of the scale of the map: is the extreme edge of that blob actually further than you'd like to be from your goal? (In my case, usually the venue of a particular Scrabble tournament.) Anyway, pick one or more blobs.

You'll also be asked to choose the minimum level of hotel quality you'll accept. This gets tricky. In my experience, even a one-star offered on priceline.com generally meets certain standards. I've never had one that wasn't adequately clean and quiet, with functional if sometimes rather worn furnishings. Also, a lot of Extended Stay America rooms, which include a kitchenette (sometimes a big convenience and money saver) but have only one double bed, rather spartan furnishings, limited maid service, and $5/stay flat rate WiFi, are considered one-star. Sometimes a bid on a one-star room gets you a two to three-star: it's not usual, but it's not rare.

If you're trying for a cheap room, it can't hurt to include up-market areas: you'll sometimes get an adequate cheap but nicely remodeled hotel across the street from the beach, or a great room in an expensive hotel being renovated (some smell of paint or new carpet, some noise if you'll be there during working hours). If you're hoping for a luxury hotel on the cheap, choose the zones that have the sort of luxury hotels you want, and choose the level you want -- but I have had poor luck with that.

The bid? Well, err on the low side. If it's ridiculously low, by their standards, you'll get a warning. You can try anyway at that price, but in my experience you'll rarely succeed. Don't increase your bid too much. Generally, 50% to 60% of the price you've seen on various travel sites is a good starting point. It depends. I rarely start below $30 for a one-star room anywhere except in a few places such as the Atlanta suburbs. I do adjust my bids high enough to shut off the warning messages, usually, and in some places that means going well over $30 even for a one-star. (I have not tried shatnering a room in California or Massachusetts or the more expensive parts of New York, mind you: a sane minimum bid there may be way higher.)

Before you submit your bid for real, you'll get an overview of taxes and fees: the cost per night will be rather more than your bid. You may want to adjust your bid downwards. Much of the tax is what you'd pay for any room in that location, but it's still annoying. I'm not sure how much of it goes to Priceline: I suspect that it's a flat fee of $5 or perhaps more. You'll need to give them credit card information, because if they accept your bid they'll charge your card at once. Yes, that sucks. You might as well get an account with them, especially if you trust them with a copy of your credit card information (I do, and so far I've had no problems, but I wouldn't blame anyone who didn't.)

Click on the bid tab, and wait. If your bid is accepted, you will feel a mixture of emotions. Disappointment will likely be one of them: the room isn't as close as you'd have liked, the hotel not quite as nice. If you've chosen the star-level and the location well enough, or Dame Fortune has, you might actually feel contentment or even happiness.

If your bid isn't accepted, you may get a suggestion to bid slightly higher, with no other changes to your bid. If it's only slightly more, you might as well. If it's a lot more... well, I've usually been disappointed with the result. More likely, you'll be asked to change your bid, but not just raise it but change other things: star level you'll accept, acceptable areas, dates of stay. Usually the only thing you should change is the price (and not by much) and the areas you'll accept -- but be sure you're really willing to go the extra distance. If not, give up for now. You'll have to wait 24 hours to repeat the process.

As I said, I haven't really tried for luxury hotels. There may be some bargains there. In most cities in the Southeast or Southwest of the United States, a bid of $30 a night for a one-star motel will get you a good room, usually in an Extended Stay America motel with a kitchenette. In the Atlanta suburbs you can go as low as $26 and often get a free upgrade to a two-star hotel. Florida varies: in the summer, rooms can be quite cheap, but in south Florida (Ft. Lauderdale) in winter, a bid of $40 for areas well inland may not work. The Northeast and the Midwest tend to be a few dollars more expensive: you may have to start at $35 rather than around $30. A room in Knoxville last year that in most places would have been $30/night was $38 -- go figure.

So what have I gotten by shatnering rooms? Some adventure. I stayed in one of the first Hyatt Places for $30/night because it was in the middle of being converted from an Amerisuites. It was fine apart from a rather intense smell of fresh carpeting, and had the first LCD TV I'd seen in a hotel room. (Too bad I had to leave too early for a flight out of MCO to enjoy the rather lavish nominally-free breakfast they offered.) A hotel run by an old golf resort in the west of Fort Lauderdale was being renovated and shatnering landed me a room there: I gulped a bit when I read reviews on line: complaints about dirt, shabbiness, smells. I found that the lobby had been tidied already, my room renovated and kept clean, the staff brought up to good standards. The only drawback: three different high school proms in their ballrooms that weekend, and once I had trouble finding parking. Shatnering an Albuquerque hotel near the airport put me in an Extended Stay America two blocks from the Scrabble tournament's usual venue -- three times in three years -- and city bus made car rental unnecessary, though I did rent a car last time, because the nearest grocery store was a two-mile walk and I wanted to see more of the area than the walk to church and the ride to and from the airport.

I shatnered a room sort of near the Albany airport for one of the Albany New Year's Scrabble tournaments -- a good drive from the venue. The motel had been renovated a lot of times. My first room had a defective heater but I got a different one promptly. The wifi was unreliable in my end of the place and I had to go to the lobby to use it, but the place was otherwise just fine and quite cheap -- except that the walls were covered in lumps. The concrete walls of the corridors and the outside walls of the rooms had lumps cast into them, roughly from fist size to football size. Perhaps this was intended to make the walls appear to be of large round cobbles, but instead it just radiated Flintstones kitsch. Hooray for shatnering!

Then again, specifying an outlying "blob" for a room near Disney World put me at the extreme edge of that blob, in a motel over ten miles of heavy US 192 traffic away, and at a higher price than the ones that many independent motels I drove past had posted on their signs. In certain markets, you're probably better off driving in and booking a motel right on the spot.

Rental cars: certain airports have more expensive rentals than others, and not always for obvious reasons. (Some airports also slap a large fee, not part of the official rental price, onto rentals to pay for their new Car Rental Pantheons -- off-site temples to all the car rental companies. PHX has one, BWI another, and there are probably a lot more. Last I was in Phoenix, it was $10/day extra on cars from the Pantheon -- very impressive place, with some escalators dropping two or three floors in one run to link rental counters and garages.) To shatner a rental car, check the going per-day rate, then add taxes and fees. Try a bid of about half the basic per-day, up it slightly if you get a warning that the price is ridiculously low, and then have a look at your total. It should still be pretty low, when compared with the full standard price. If it's too close, you're probably better off just going to car-rental company sites and looking for special offers. If it's 75% or less of the usual total fees-and-all rate, bid. Remember that if you win, your credit card will be charged at once, and the charge isn't refundable. Car-rental companies let you reserve a car at a given rate and don't charge your card until you show up for the car, another reason not to shatner a car if the savings is small.

At many airports (I generally rent cars at airports), that bid of half the usual daily rate will likely get you your rental -- though with the fees, your savings will be considerably less. At others, forget it. Dayton (DAY) is one airport where I've never gotten a deal with Priceline. ABQ, PHX, ROC, CVG, DFW, DTW, and XNA rentals via Priceline have all been reasonable -- but things change. Special events drive up the cost of cars -- or not, if demand is lower than expected. Consider booking a car with a rental company, then trying to shatner one in the last few days before your trip: you can always cancel the original reservation.

are all injection pens this lame?

2009-09-13T14:17:38Z

I'm out of Symlin in the 5 ml vials. I suspect that it comes in 5 ml vials because the cost of a 10 ml vial would be jaw-dropping rather than merely high. My dose is now 0.1 cc of the stuff at the concentration in a vial. Fifty doses in a vial, or on my current two-meals-a-day regimen, 25 days -- less when I have three meals.

My doctor gave me a sample injection pen containing, I think, about half a vial's worth of Symlin. The maximum setting on the pen is for 60 mcg, my current dose and probably what I'll be on for the near future at least. I just used the pen for the first time. It sucks.

Here's how to use a Symlin pen. (I suspect that insulin pens are not much different, but I have never used one). 1. Remove the cap from the pen, revealing a rubbery top like that of an insulin vial. 2. Remove the paper tab from a new insulin-pen "needle" (more like a double-ended needle in a sort of "needle assembly"). 3. Put the needle and its holder/cap up to the pen and screw it in, making the pen end of the needle penetrate the rubbery top of the pen and securing it to the pen. 4. Remove the cap from the needle. Don't discard it. 5. Remove the inner cap from the needle proper. Discard that. 6. Check whether the pen is set to the right dose. If not, rotate a band of the pen's casing to set it to the right dose. 7. Pull back the plunger. Make sure it's pulled back all the way: check the markings. 8. Now stick the needle into your soft underbelly. 9. Push in the plunger and hold it down, and keep the pen with the needle stuck in your skin, for at least ten seconds. 10. Withdraw the pen from your skin. 11. Replace the cap over the needle, if you haven't lost it by now. 12. Unscrew, remove, and discard the needle. 13. Replace the cap on the pen.

(Oh, and every time you get a new pen, or every time you drop a pen, you have to prime it to make sure that you get your full dose and don't inject air. This wastes the drug, too.)

Here's how to use Symlin from a vial with an ordinary insulin syringe. 1. Open up an alcohol swab. 2. Wipe the top of the vial. 3. Remove the needle cap from an insulin syringe. 4. Remove the plunger cap, if there is one. 5. Pull the plunger back on the syringe so that it takes in air equal to the volume of dose. 6. Insert needle into vial. 7. Inject air into vial. 8. Withdraw dose of Symlin. 9. Pull syringe out of vial. 10. Wipe skin with alcohol swab (not strictly necessary, and note that we didn't do that with the pen: add more steps to that if you want to do it). 11. Needle into belly. 12. Push down plunger to inject dose. (If picky, pull back plunger to be sure that you're not in a vein, but with a 1/4" needle you probably aren't anyway.) 13. Withdraw needle from your skin promptly 14. Replace cap over needle and discard syringe.

About the same number of steps, but, again, with the pen we didn't prep the skin with an alcohol swab. William S. Burroughs never did as a heroin addict, and reported that he never had an infected injection site, so maybe it's really optional. Note also that it takes time and care to screw in and unscrew the needle, and that to ensure the entire dose gets into you, having a clumsy, poorly-designed fat "pen" stuck in you for at least ten seconds. I submit that the steps using syringe and vial are easter and faster in general.

Also, I've been doing the vial and syringe shtick for decades. It's almost automatic. Maybe using a pen will be similarly automatic after a while, but I can't see a single advantage to it. The needles are 18 cents apiece and the syringes are 13. The pen is bigger than all but the biggest indelible markers, looks dorky, and does not fit in the (also very dorky) insulated insulin cases I already own. I bet that Symlin in a pen costs more, too. The pen is one of the least ergonomic things I've had to use in months. They've been around for at least ten years if not twenty! Maybe someone's gotten them right by now, but this model genuinely sucks.

The Symlin company was considering eliminating the vials and selling the drug only in pens. They seem to have relented. I hope so.

Rants on domestic architecture, #4

2009-09-09T03:27:10Z

I went to Georgia to play Scrabble, but I also looked at houses. Mostly I looked in a small area to the east of Georgia 400 (look it up on Wiki, if you care) between exits 7 and 9. I'd say that most of the houses and blocks of townhouse condominiums (that's what they looked like to me) there are well under twenty years old, in twisty little housing developments along old roads. It's all upper-middle-class to modestly upper-class. I don't know how much of what I saw was more the fashion of its day rather than anything peculiar to that area.

The needlessly-steep roof is usual. 7 in 12 is common, 12 in 12 not rare. This means dormers, both shed dormers and conventional ones with a single gable perpendicular to the main gable of the roof. There's a twist, though. Many dormers look to be only four or five feet wide, and often those come in pairs separated by at most twice their width. A large fraction of the houses and townhouses have those pairs: they really caught on. Some of the townhouses alternate between gable dormers on one unit and shed dormers on the next, a pair of skinny ones each time, which breaks the monotony but looks silly. Oh, and commercial buildings nearby have the same steep roofs and the same pairs of narrow dormers as well.

Have you no poetry in your soul? Aren't those steep roofs charming? Aren't those pairs of dormers cute? Don't you think that those cozy little rooms with the low, angled ceilings and the narrow windows set in narrow dormers are just adorable?

Poetry? Architectural doggerel.

The artist in his garret in Paris, the student in her converted-attic room in the big old Victorian house near campus... ah, romance. Also discomfort. Avoiding the discomfort while getting the romance means spending more money. Some of the discomfort is unavoidable, yet someone is paying premium prices for it.

Those steep roofs look like the ones on old buildings. Maybe to the deracinated Alpharettan whose soul is soothed by the Gothic looks of at least part of the nearby St. Brigid's (see previous post), a roof 7 in 12 or steeper means home, stability, some bygone architectural Arcadia. Tom Wolfe, in From Bauhaus to Our House, wrote about the love of modern architects for the flat roof, and of claims by architectural critics and theorists that peaked roofs represent a bourgeois desire to ape the crowns of royalty -- and not a desire for roofs that didn't leak, in the days before cheap asphalt products (a by-product of the petroleum industry) and other modern roofing materials. The near-flat roof is usual for grocery stores, big-box stores, Wal-Marts, and warehouses as well as usual with International Style architecture, and I understand the desire to rebel against it, crowns be damned.

Let's build the structure of a one-gable roof. That's two roof planes, and in a crude model of a house, both of them could be represented by a sheet of paper (creased down the middle, the crease as the ridge and the two halves of the sheet as the roof planes). Let's hold it up atop the walls of the house with a series of triangles of 2-by lumber, two inches (really 1.5) wide by some greater depth and up to 16 feet long. A ceiling joist forms the bottom of each triangle. Two rafters complete the triangle; probably they are sloped at 7 in 12 to 12 in 12 these days, but they don't need to be so steep. We put one of these every 16 inches or 2 feet on-center (measuring from the center of one joist or rafter to the center of the next), add some verticals at the ends of the gables, create roof planes by nailing planks or sheet goods across the outsides of the rafters, similarly close off the gable ends, and create the ceiling of the room underneath by securing drywall across the bottoms of the ceiling joists.

Ignoring details like overhang, soffits, and so on, we have an uninhabitable triangular prism. We can put insulation in the bottom (and add suitable vents) and never use it for anything. Or instead we can make the ceiling joists strong enough to serve as floor joists, secure a proper floor over those, and have a habitable attic. Sort of. Most of the ceiling is too low for comfort, and it'll be hot in summer and cold in winter.

Dormers give us more headroom, but they make the structure much more complicated. (If they are shed dormers, then we've just admitted that the roof is too damn' steep and we should have just added a full story to the house if we needed more living space, rather than trying to squeeze space out of the attic.) We need to insulate the dormers' walls and the dormers' own little mini-attics under their little gables or shed roofs -- and the attic proper. We can fit fiberglass batts between the rafters -- probably they will stay in place -- and if the rafters are deep enough this may be adequate insulation. Foam, or mixtures of cellulose fluff and glue, could also be applied between rafters, probably only by professionals, and in a pinch we can add an inch or two of rigid foam sheeting atop the roof deck or under the drywall of that sloped ceiling.

Rafters and floor joists require fairly big pieces of wood. These are getting rarer and more expensive. Floor trusses or I-joists (verticals of oriented strand-board [OSB] with flanges of wood) can replace solid joists; I'm not so sure about rafters. If we don't want to live in the attic, we can use roof trusses instead. They're made of small bits of tree, they're assembled in local factories from wood and steel trucked in, they're surprisingly strong, and they're cheap and easy to put up.

Of course, a joist and two rafters form one big triangle, and that means a space in which people can move about. A truss is made of smaller bits of wood connected by steel plates to form a set of triangles. You can't use an "attic" formed by ordinary trusses for much of anything: it can be hard enough crawling through those triangular gaps in the trusses just to direct the hose when you're blowing in some insulation. You can't really dignify the space defined by a set of roof trusses with the name "attic": it's not a proper room.

Let's see. We can have a needlessly-steep and complex roof that is expensive to build and cover with roofing, and relatively difficult and expensive to insulate. This yields a charming look inside and out, and quaint, romantic rooms with darling sloping ceilings that are mostly too low, providing ample opportunity for bumping one's head and pretending that one is an artist starving in a garret in Paris, or still a cute young college student in the attic rooms of a Victorian house near campus. (Or maybe the kids will feel more like storybook characters if the attic rooms are their bedrooms. One could take that too far and put them in cupboards under the stairs.) We can use expensive and relatively big pieces of wood, and pay highly-skilled carpenters to cut them and nail them together into a complicated framework. Or we can be sensible.

Why not just add another real floor rather than try to live in what should be the attic? A steep roof adds some height and grandeur to a house, but so would a complete top floor that isn't basically a converted attic -- converted on the drawing board, before it's even constructed. Dormers break up that great expanse of roof, but it shouldn't be there in the first place. Heck, add a little tower that contains a third or even a fourth floor if that's allowed by the Powers That Be: the money you save with a simpler 3/12 or 4/12 roof will pay for it, and more. Why not? Is it because a 3/12 roof looks cheap, like part of a budget ranch house, and a 12/12 with dormers looks as expensive as it is, and shows that you can afford to waste money that way? Or is it merely fashion and conventional thinking? I don't know. Conventionality sells, and maybe an up-market house is expected to look a certain way, even if that makes it cost yet more, wastes material and effort, and adds nothing to its habitability.

Finally, if we must have the steep roofs and the dormers, what's the point of putting two narrow dormers a few feet apart? The walls of each will have to be framed and insulated. For about as much work and only slightly more material, we can have one wide dormer replacing the two little ones and the gap between them, and we get more headroom in that habitable attic. Heck, save on roofing and framing and make it a shed dormer: idiotic as the shed dormer is, one good-sized shed dormer makes more sense than two narrow ones.

It's not as cute, of course.

to Georgia and back; ecclesiastical and domestic architecture

2009-09-09T00:04:24Z

Kudzu. Lots of kudzu. I saw kudzu on and off on the drive north, but around Alpharetta, near where they held the Scrabble tournament, it was ubiquitous. Big-leaved vines smothering hillsides -- it was planted to prevent erosion -- and trees and anything in its way. I saw no signs of attempts at control, but rank new growth could have covered those up.

Someday, people will be able to drive on I-75 between the southern border of Georgia and Atlanta and not encounter any road construction. I never have. I hit three traffic jams on the freeways during the whole trip, none lasting very long.

I left Georgia 400 at Roswell to get to the hotel, and hit Labor Day traffic at last -- still not that bad. Suite-ish room at the far end of the third floor, sitting-room area partly partitioned from bedroom, desk, small TV, microwave oven, mini-fridge. Shopping at Trader Joe's -- there are none in Florida -- and dinner in the room. I had some breakfast food at fast-food places this trip (avoid the bacon breakfast wrap at Burger King), but otherwise didn't eat out despite all-you-can-eat sushi at a Thai and sushi place nearby: the suppressed appetite and near-nausea from the Symlin don't go well with being a trencherman.

(The hotel room had a clean carpet. It didn't have piles of clutter everywhere. When the time came -- Monday morning -- to leave for home, I almost didn't want to go.)

Forty people at the tournament. I was seeded sixth of eight in Division 2, what with my depressed rating after Dayton, and I didn't really rise above that, finishing 10-10 before 12:30 Monday and the drive home. I'm doing something wrong. My strategy must be fundamentally flawed. Many people improve by learning to mimic the style of Scrabble-playing software, and sadly that seems to be the best way. Unlike chess or Go, Scrabble can be played better by a computer than by any human player, and using software that runs fairly quickly on a 100 MHz Pentium -- and given the full lexicon of permitted words.

I didn't see all that much of Roswell or Alpharetta. Mostly I stuck to a few main roads south of the tournament venue and east of Georgia 400. It's mostly middle- to upper-middle-class, and most of the houses and buildings look no more than twenty years old. At the lunch break on Saturday I drove to St. Brigid's, the church where I went to Mass on Sunday, and both days I had a look at the local architecture.

St. Brigid's is a modern, red-brick, Southern incarnation of the sort of the older Catholic churches I saw as a boy in Illinois: their website. They broke ground for it in 2001 after a few years of Mass celebrated in a house on the site, so it's new. The sanctuary is described as Gothic Revival -- which it more or less is, like the churches I grew up with -- but there are no internal columns, no soaring heights inside; it sits atop a huge walk-out basement built against a hillside, and the concrete staircases to the front doors take you up a full story (of course, there are also ground-floor entrances and an elevator). Sanctuary proper is cruciform, but with those angled-towards-altar pews in the arms, and a floor raked slightly downwards -- you can just tell -- towards the altar. The stained glass windows are fairly large, but mostly little rectangles of plain glass, with pictures and decorations of the usual painted stained glass a foot or two across looking rather lost -- but the old-style windows that were mostly patterns are probably just too expensive nowadays. The tabernacle is at back center of the altar -- good idea -- and although they have a Jesus On A Swing crucifix hanging above the altar, it's a rather good one. Big staircases go to a roomy choir loft. The ceiling isn't the usual cathedral ceiling of my boyhood Gothic churches, but relatively low and nearly flat, with plenty of air conditioning vents. The church holds about 1200, and the walk-out basement includes the parish hall.

There's a sort of simplified rose window over the altar, and two smaller windows a little lower and to either side. The one on the right depicts a young man in a slightly antique coat and tie, holding a sheaf of papers -- and to one side of him... I couldn't make out what. The Blessed Sacrament, I think. Who's the man? someone dear to the people who'd paid for the window? That'd be very old-school indeed. (I've toyed with the idea it might be a young John Henry Newman, but I don't think so: the papers could represent his writings, but there's not enough of a likeness, and he's not in clerical garb. The man depicted looks more like a lawyer.)

I saw plenty of needlessly steep roofs and strange dormers, and I think I'll isolate my thoughts on that in another Rant on domestic architecture.

Uneventful drive back. I stopped for groceries in Gainesville and was home by dark.

off to Georgia for more Scrabble

2009-09-04T02:26:35Z

In years past I would have gone to Portland, Oregon for the Labor Day tournament there. Instead I'm driving to the Atlanta suburbs. There's a new 20-game tournament in Alpharetta, organized by the dad of a rising young player who I think is in his early teens. I did my usual shtick and got a cheap room on priceline.com ($32/night with all charges, 5 miles from tournament. Unlike some parts of Georgia, there's actually a Catholic church quite near the venue with an early-enough Mass on Sunday. Loads of restaurants and a Trader Joe's nearby -- and I'm on Symlin and will probably verge on nausea half the time.

There are also winding suburban streets in the area in Alpharetta and Roswell (not the space-aliens Roswell -- this is Georgia). Mind you, the main roads, named largely for bridges, look on the maps as if they actually might date from quite a while ago. The clumps of twisty little streets with lots of dead ends are surely newer, and may hold some architectural monstrosities to set off a rant or two. I think that it was in Roswell or thereabouts that, on the way to Florida when I moved down from Montana, I got lost in a dead end with a big U-Haul truck towing my old Suburban, about 52 feet of vehicle all in all, and damaged some unfortunate lady's mailbox when I finally managed to turn the whole ensemble around and head back to the freeway.

Looks as if I'm going to the Calgary Scrabble tournament after all due to an impulse buy of cut-rate and not-refundable airfare on priceline.com. The departure and arrival times are not good: I should never use them for air travel. I didn't save enough to make up for the inconvenience. Either I will have to spend a ton on cab fare or some poor generous sods in Calgary will have to go out of their ways. Foolish of me.

Rants on domestic architecture, #3

2009-09-01T23:39:14Z

In temperate climates, a house really should be rectangular, and its long axis should run east-west.

Maybe I'm too much of a stickler for this, but it makes sense. Value for money means efficient use of materials, and a sphere encloses as much space as possible with a given surface area -- but spheres have their own problems. They're hard to make. People generally want and need a level floor beneath their feet, and material to separate ground from floor also tends to be cheaper per unit area than other material separating the outside of a house from the inside. A dome seems a reasonable compromise: the circular footprint encloses as much area as possible for a given amount of wall. Indeed, in certain cultures in certain climates, dome-shaped houses -- generally rather small -- are usual.

In a temperate climate, using pieces of dead tree as structure for much of a house, people generally go rectilinear. An igloo might as well be round: corners are inefficient use of material and cause cold spots, and trying to catch a bit of extra Arctic sun is futile. A stone hut can be round, and some are: barring a carefully-constructed stone dome, the roof will probably be conical because it's the obvious thing to do given that the roof is held up with lengths of wood. Similarly a tepee combining an efficient circle with the inefficiencies of using thin poles to support combination walls and roof -- in exchange for convenience and portability. I just don't see an efficient, easy way to use wood to support a roof for a round building much bigger than a small hut, especially without modern roofing materials. Also, a round building of much size tends to be dark inside.

The square is the best rectilinear approximation of the circle, but if you're trying to let light into a building and you're well north or south of the Equator, you're better off with a rectangle. In the Northern Hemisphere, you get reliable sun -- from varying angles -- through the south windows for most of the day, and reliable daylight but little direct sunlight through the north windows (reverse that for the Southern Hemisphere). In the winter, the sun is low in the sky and sunlight streams in, warming the house; in the summer, a bit of roof overhang lets in plenty of indirect light but blocks direct sun.

It's harder to control how much light comes in through east and west windows, so it's probably best not to have a lot of either. With a somewhat skinny rectangle, they're superfluous. We don't want too thin a rectangle -- too much surface area, too hard to keep warm or cool, too expensive to build -- and so we have to strike a balance between the ideal of the circular footprint and the daylight and winter warmth let in by a narrower and rectilinear shape.

We're stuck with a rectangle. We can choose a different shape, but generally we're wasting materials and money if we do. (Again, this is a temperate climate: in, say, a Mediterranean climate, the square house, often with an interior courtyard, has some advantages.) We should orient it with the long axis running east-west.

Suppose that you want to build a house. You go to a magazine rack in a local bookstore or building center and get a copy of a book or magazine full of house plans -- it will probably have the words "home" and "plans" in the title. Look at the designs.

Most of them have a more or less rectangular floor plan. (A lot of the designers can't or won't keep it to a simple rectangle -- too plain!) Almost invariably, the long axis of the main rectangle, or of a rectangle containing the footprint of the house, will run parallel to the street, judging by the location of the front door. Most of the windows will face the street. The roof ridges and the overhangs mostly run parallel to the street as well, though not necessarily: on many designs, about half run parallel and half perpendicular, with no consistency. Some plans seem designed simply to make the roof as complex and expensive as possible without being ridiculous.

These houses, in short, are generally designed for the lots on the north side of an east-west street. Not always: sometimes, no matter what way a wall faces, about the same fraction of it is window; the house isn't designed to be oriented in a particular direction. The long axis is parallel to the street, though. It almost has to be, because...

Suppose you choose a plan and want to buy a city lot to build your house on. Usually it's a rectangle. Usually the long axis runs parallel to the street. It doesn't matter whether the street runs north-south or east-west or at some odd angle: almost always it will be broader than it is deep.

The long axis of your house, like the long axis of your lot, will run parallel to the street. Period. The front of your house will be in a wall parallel to the long axis, and face the street. Period. If you've chosen the right lot and the right design, the long axis will run east-west, there will be few east or west windows and many north or south windows, and the roofs will have the right overhangs to shade the south windows in summer yet let warming sunlight into the house in winter.

If you haven't made the right choices -- and too often you're not even given the chance, because you may have to buy whatever has already been built and is for sale in a given area at a given time on a given budget -- you're doomed to be uncomfortable and waste money. Had the house been oriented or designed properly, the afternoon sun wouldn't make the kids' bedrooms hot every summer evening even with heavy shades drawn over the west windows from noon until sunset, but it does -- as it did for me and my sister in the houses where I grew up. (The west windows, especially in the first house because they were on the second floor, were great for watching Illinois thunderstorms, at least, and once we got good central air conditioning the heat wasn't that bad.) Only three small south windows, none with an overhang? Tough luck.

From just before my birth in 1961, to 1971, my family lived in a house facing west on a two-block street running north-south. In 1971 we moved a block away to a bigger house facing west on a parallel two-block street, and my parents still live in it. Both houses were designed mostly to face south. Both had a living room and two of the bedrooms facing full west and chronically too warm in summer and too cold in winter despite good central heating and air conditioning.

I can't even accuse the city planners, the developers, and the architects of most of the houses in that area of malice or incompetence. All these decades, past and to come, of discomfort and wasted money are due entirely to conventional thinking, and perhaps of a fear of having to explain unconventionality to the public.

West Main and West Macon Streets run roughly east-west. It was obvious that new areas of housing should be mostly on perpendicular north-south streets running between them. It was also obvious that a city lot should be wider than it is deep. Obviously a rectangular house would have its long axis running north-south, and obviously most of the windows in a house are in its long walls.

Obviously nobody cared that this is wrong -- or maybe not. Maybe they just didn't want to have to explain why they refused to do things the obvious way, and so they did them the obvious way.

I've driven through some new developments down here in the northern part of the Florida peninsula. They're mostly empty lots: ambitious plans during the housing boom couldn't be followed through. I will say that the streets -- and the long axes of most of the lots -- do tend to run east to west. Maybe it's chance. Maybe someone finally gives a damn.

Rants on domestic architecture, #2 (concluded, I hope)

2009-08-31T19:57:25Z

I've been reading and looking. I even drove a little out of my way, on the way back from an already ill-advised trip to Jacksonville (get off the freeways, and the traffic jams can be astounding), to see houses in a development created by a builder that touts its "brick homes" on billboards.

On reflection, I can see why people put facing brick even on frame houses here. It still makes me uncomfortable, but I understand why they do it.

$75 a square foot is fairly cheap these days for a house in this area. New houses probably cost more. Covering the outside walls with brick facing doesn't add all that much to the cost per square foot, and it has some advantages.

You won't have to paint it. You probably won't have to repoint the mortar because freezes are short and mild here. It won't rot, it isn't damaged by sun, it isn't easily blown away by hurricanes or penetrated by most wind-driven debris. It won't catch fire in a wildfire, it soaks up some low-pitched noises, and it even provides some thermal mass, though entirely on the wrong side of the insulation. If it's installed properly -- and that's a good word, because it's mere siding -- it won't trap moisture against the actual plywood-and-stud wall and make it rot. You can even put an inch or two of foam insulation board over the plywood and under the bricks for added insulation.

The house will probably have higher resale value than with any conventional siding, and will probably be easier to pretty up for resale. (I'm not sure what a modern pressure washer can do to brick facing in the wrong hands, mind you: nothing is idiot-proof.) It will look sturdier than it is, at least to people who don't know better. It will arguably be prettier than many a similar house covered merely with siding.

I'm still not sold on brick, but maybe I should just let myself be shouted down.

People waste vast amounts of fuel shipping things thousands of miles that should have stayed nearer home. People use western red-cedar (a giant arborvitae, actually) here, despite its huge knots and possibly carcinogenic sawdust, shipped from the Pacific Northwest or British Columbia: the local bald-cypress is, I think, wholly superior whether one wants rustic paneling or merely a naturally rot-resistant wood. (My little parish church has a combination nave and sanctuary with walls and ceiling entirely lined with western red-cedar: so much for local materials. The whole building is sheathed in facing brick, apart of course from the gable ends, as is the new addition just being completed. They managed to match the old brick perfectly: isn't it wonderful?) Why should I care about the cost, in fuel or money, of shipping brick?

Modern brick kilns are probably about as efficient as kilns can get, anyway. Why begrudge the fuel?

Mortar based on Portland cement is too hard for most brick, but nobody uses anything else nowadays. Given the mild climate here and the relative hardness of modern bricks, maybe that doesn't matter. It takes a lot of fuel to make cement, but it doesn't take all that much cement to face a house with brick. The concrete foundation and floor slab (often one unit, part of the same pour) usual here take far more, so what's a little extra?

Before I started this rant I thought that anyone using brick nowadays as anything but a refractory must be a fool or a knave. Now I'm not sure. I do think that if people are covering houses with pieces of decorative and arguably protective ceramic they should have more choices and hence more fun, yet anything more than common brick is usually breathtakingly expensive.

I can imagine myself sheathing a house with shiny blue-glazed bricks, but the cost would bankrupt a tycoon. I confess to still, even today, envying the owners of some fine old houses where I was born and raised (Decatur, Illinois), the ones with the shiny green or red ceramic tile roofs dating perhaps from the Twenties. Covering walls as well as roofs with such ceramic delights would be ostentatious and all too expensive, but I'd love to do it.

If you're going to be grossly wasteful of fuel, you should at least get fun out of it.

Rants on domestic architecture, #2 (beginning)

2009-08-20T03:01:48Z

I don't like bricks.

Building a house largely out of earth is not necessarily a bad idea. In fact, for some years I've been interested in what the Germans call Leichtlehmbau, loosely translatable as light-earth or light-clay construction. Mix clay and water to make a slip, chop straw into manageable lengths and thoroughly coat it with the slip, press the result into movable wooden forms to make a length of wall, adding a foot or so of height at a time. It helps to have wooden posts and other structure to hold up the roof, but the house is mostly clay and straw, earth and a by-product of growing grain. Or one can mix clay-rich earth with straw to make cob. That's usually shaped into "loaves" that are fitted together to form a wall.

Light-earth and cob work well even in wet warm-temperate climates. The straw holds the materials together, and the clay usually keeps the straw from rotting. With some sort of finish plaster and perhaps whitewash, a stone foundation, and wide roof eaves, both have lasted for centuries in Britain. In ancient Sumeria and Egpyt, most buildings were of mud bricks -- I suspect that they were choosy about their mud -- made with straw, and Exodus recounts the plight of the Israelites in Egypt who had to keep producing the same number of bricks even when they had to scrounge the straw for themselves.

Even today, mud-and-straw brick is cheap and adequate in dry climates for poor or thrifty people with a lot of friends and relatives to help them make and stack it. If the right soils are nearby, one can omit the straw. I've given up on my own light-clay house here because there's no straw (it has to be trucked long distances for the horse farms south of here), I'm not sure about using shredded wood as a substitute, and I can't beg for or pay enough people for me to get one built in a reasonable amount of time: machines to produce and handle clay-coated straw or wood chips are in their infancy. Again, I like earthen materials, but the kind of brick usual today has few virtues. (Offhand I can't think of any, but maybe some will spring to my mind as I write.)

Wikipedia again: apparently the fired brick was invented in India about five thousand years ago. The ancient Romans used them, especially the military. In the Middle Ages, they became popular in both Europe and China, but until transportation became cheap, bricks were fired near the clay pits, and used only a few miles away. Depending on whom you believe, English brick makers either shipped vast amounts of brick on the cheap as ballast for sailing ships, that brick becoming a usual building material near American ports, or they didn't. There was certainly locally-made brick in New England, it was cheaper all but local stone, and easier to use. Brick was popular stuff.

It's hard to make a practical tall building, as opposed to a monument, from structural masonry. The strength of any masonry is compressive, and I've heard of old multi-story warehouses in places like East Lynn, Massachusetts with basement and ground-floor walls well over six feet thick: brick is much weaker than most types of rock. Iron, steel, or steel-reinforced concrete frames are more practical for even a modest skyscraper: Swiss and British engineers figured out in the Fifties how to build fairly tall buildings with thin masonry walls, but apparently it's not as easy or economical.

Habits die hard. The habit of using masonry in a skyscraper... well, on my second-ever trip to New York City, I went to the top of the Empire State Building. (The Twin Towers were gone by then.) A succession of elevators took me to the top and another succession back down, and for the trip back, a guide ushered me and a dozen others down a few flights of stairs to avoid a wait for an elevator. I got a good look at the stairwell over ninety floors up. It was thick with paint, perhaps dozens of coats from over the decades, but despite that the infill material was easy to recognize: brick. From ground level to a thousand feet and more in the air, hundreds of bricklayers had labored to line the stairwells by filling the spaces between the steel and concrete framework of the building with heavy structural dead weight, one brick at a time.

What about bricks for houses? Houses that look as if they're made of brick do get built these days, but almost always they're conventional wooden platform-framed or concrete-block houses in brick-house drag: one thickness of facing brick tied to the real wall. The bricks don't help hold up the structure; in fact, the wooden or concrete-block wall helps hold them up.

I went to Millikin University in my home town as an undergraduate. It's a red brick campus. Maybe the oldest buildings use brick structurally, but on the newer ones it's purely decorative. Graduate school at University of Illinois, mostly in Urbana: red brick again, with some wonderful exceptions like Altgeld Hall, and I'd guess that almost all of the brick is purely decorative. University of Florida, near where I now live: mostly red brick, including many buildings I've seen under construction -- but nowadays, there aren't that many bricklayers. Maybe some of the detail work actually requires individual bricks to be laid one by one, but those are exceptional. Steel and concrete panels are fitted with bricks and mortar in a factory in Jacksonville, then trucked in and mounted on the buildings as needed.

As more than decoration, bricks are moribund. They deserve to be. Firing the clay into brick and transporting the finished bricks takes a lot of fuel, and then more fuel for the cement (usual nowadays) or quicklime (probably better for most kinds of brick but rare now) to make mortar. Then one needs a skilled craftsman to lay even the sort of facing-brick wall usual today, and an increasingly rare craftsman who can build a proper structural brick wall. Such a wall is at least as thick as a length of a brick, and although it has thermal mass, radiating or storing heat and reducing the swings of temperature inside the building compared with the outside, it's a poor insulator. Want insulation? Add it on the inside of the wall. Also want attractive interior brick? Build a double wall with insulation in the cavity between the outside wall and the inside wall, and fill it with insulation.

After all this, you have a wall with only compressive strength. Those old warehouses with the six-foot-thick walls at the base are easy to tear down. Get a heavy chain. put it through one basement window, bring it out through the next, and attach the ends to a bulldozer. Then drive the bulldozer away. The entire wall between the two windows will collapse. Repeat until razed.

I'll finish this later.

annoying joke

2009-08-19T14:40:50Z

I'd like to see a rib joint by the seaside called Intercostals on the Intracoastal.

more Symlin fun

2009-08-17T17:30:36Z

Recently I ratcheted up the dose to 0.06 mg (0.1 ml of standard 0.6 mg/ml) -- that's the same volume as 10 units of standard 100 units/ml insulin, and I use an insulin syringe -- after about two weeks back on Symlin, as suggested. My stomach hasn't gotten too much queasier: many days I have no nausea at all, others only a brief spell or two, but most waking hours I seem on the verge of it.

Mostly it's been a disincentive to snack. Sometimes food seems to settle my stomach, though. Ginger has been touted for women with nausea from pregnancy, and it does increase gastric motility (Symlin decreases it). I've been preparing and eating a lot of kung pao chicken since learning that it's the dish meant by the once-common mistranslation "The temple explodes the chicken cube," and it includes ginger, hot peppers, and Sichuan-pepper. Presumably it stimulates my innards and prevents nausea, but I tend to eat too much: it's a bit of work, so I make a full recipe each time, using nearly a pound of chicken thigh meat. It's chicken, garlic, ginger, scallions, and peanuts, with soy sauce and cooking wine and vinegar: I use a little peanuts-only peanut butter to thicken the sauce I add at the end, rather than cornstarch, and a little sucralose solution (generic Splenda, no dextrose or maltodextrin added, sold on line) to sweeten it. Probably I should eat half at one meal and reheat the rest for another: plenty, though I eat it without rice.

(The increased large-intestine motility from those ingredients has its own drawbacks.)

Another problem: after waking a few times in the early morning in a cold sweat soaking the bedclothes, from low blood sugar, I tend to have a bedtime snack, as I needed to as a child with my one-shot-a-day insulin regimen, if my blood sugar is even somewhat low. If it's too big, I get high fasting blood sugar, requiring more insulin (or more usually the fast-acting analog Humalog) before breakfast... but if I take too much and the Symlin brings on pre-prandial almost-nausea, I don't want to eat, and face a blood sugar crash that I'll have to stop with glucose. It's all a bit tricky at this point, a balancing act I am slowly getting the hang up.

When I don't overreact to blood sugar crashes or eat too much to prevent them, the new regimen keeps after-meal blood sugar low, usually peaking under 150: rare for me before the Symlin. Last I checked, I'd also lost weight, about five pounds, but I'm not sure that that's a trend: I eat less food because I'm almost nauseated much of the time, but I also feel less like exercising, or even moving around, and if little food ends up as sugar in my urine, more is available to keep me fat. Blood sugar always at or near levels normal for humans is surely good for me, but I just want to sit around and do nothing -- all too easy for me. Those workouts at the little gym five miles away are getting less frequent, too.

"Scorn pain: either it will go away, or you will," said Seneca. I need to scorn this borderline nausea. Maybe I'll get used to my stomach working this way. For now, I can get away with idling, but I really should try to get things done.