ROAD: Arcata

Arcata has got to be the crunchiest town anywhere, except for maybe the Haight-Ashbury, S.F., which is of course hippie ground zero. At 16,000 people including the homeless population and those who just want to look homeless, Arcata is the most distilled expression of northern coastal California. All of the main sub-sub-cultures of hippiedom are represented -- Apollonian intellectual in Victorian garret, funky dreadlocked neo-hippie and the closely related dreadlocked homeless person, to name a few. There is one palm tree in town, maybe the most northern one in California, so that is an indication that if you are homeless, this may be a good place for you.

I don't grudge them a moment of it, it's just funny to view California after living a very straight life in quasi-Calvinist northern Europe for so many years and then being exposed to Oregon's more misty, subdued charm. Add to that the awareness that for the most part Arcata is what a lot of places would term culturally irrelevant -- there is plenty of art and beauty but it lives only for the present like a third-world village.

In keeping with the hippie theme park, just about every store sign is hand-lettered, there is a total absence of chains, except for the motels clustered by the interstate exit, which were booked for a bellydancing festival. You walk into the local supermarket and the people who pass you look perfectly normal except probably they perceived the walk from one aisle to the next as taking about 15 minutes rather than 15 seconds and rather than you hearing "Should we get some baking soda" or something, you hear, and I quote, "Oh my god, which waay? (I am so baked.)"

Occasionally you see serious people around town -- a slightly frazzled woman with eyeglasses studying for her GMAT in a cafe at 8am on a Sunday. Or you see an earnest looking bookish professor, who doesn't look like the Donald Sutherland Animal House model, walking around town. And you wonder what quirk of fate or skeleton in the closet led him to end up tenured at Humboldt State, which as far as I know is pretty much wrote the book on basket weaving as a major. Though I think it does have a good environmental sciences programme.

The odd thing is, I have not smelled pot smoke, but unless it is some local species of plant that also smells of pine and citrus (and it could well be - I hadn't heard of myrtlewood until three days ago), major quantities of something are being cultivated in some of the Victorians.

ROAD: Brookings...

...is still in Oregon but is on the Gold Coast, which is geographically already in California, with the cliffs and steep offshore rocks one associates with the Golden State.

We camped in a state park just outside the city limits of this not very touristy but naturally very scenic port town. We had the "secret campsite", on a gravel cul-de-sac off the main loops which actually has a view of the Pacific. (Most state park campgrounds seem to be parked back as if to keep tents out of sight of passing ships...)

Yesterday was all about dunes. North America's most extensive dunal system, though there are higher individual ones, I believe, on the Great Lakes. But sixty miles ago the coast did a fault-block thing and went airborne.

As said, Brookings could be Ukiah, it is rednecky, old fashioned, unless I missed the turnoff for the old town when I ran to town last night to get the lay of the land. There are espresso shacks/huts, which is a very NW thing (I have not been to California in 4 years) but no Internet cafe. I am working in a old-man donut shop across the street from a motel's high-speed internet.

Besides dunes, everything has been myrtlewood, myrtlewood, a tree that only grows on about a 150 mile stretch of Pacific coast. Neither burl nor hair or redwoods -- yet. Oregon's we-fly-alone philosophy meant most of them were logged a long time ago.

Today...Redwoods National Park, and maybe a stop in Arcata.

HOME: East by south

Tomorrow we say goodbye to the city of roses and hit the road -- at first a week of short segments of driving through southern Oregon and California. TTT plans to meet her academic advisor in Fresno on the 3rd. We then visit a friend of hers in Pasadena on the 5th, I pop in on friend Josh in LA. Then back to Virginia, where we may visit some regular readers of this blog. It could be you. Keep your light on. We get around.

Anyway, cleaning up and consolidating tonight. I added sorbate and sulfite and racked (siphoned) the plum wine into 2 liter soda bottles -- very drinkable, actually. Yesterday I also made a pot of Portuguese fisherman's stew, a thick tomato based cod and salmon dish my mom makes. I added the works -- mussels, since they were on sale, linguica sausage, chick peas. With a bunch of colds in the house, it was quite the thing. I didn't offer the wine but the soup seemed popular with everyone but the kids. But, and I am not exaggerating much here, they eat only sugary cereal, milk, and waffles with artificial maple syrup. Which is a shame, because Kairi is a great cook, and my limited repertoire is rock solid too.

I have left and entered Portland too many times this summer on I-5 and I-205. Although I tend to criticize life on this side of the Coumbia River, in Washington state, it also feels like home, and we will miss our surrogate family here.

More thoughts as the trip unfolds.

Automotive notes: The trusty Subaru is nearing 120,000 miles. For what it's worth, that number was always been the benchmark quoted to me, i.e. An American car is built for 80,000 mi before it needs major work, Japanese cars are built for 120,000 miles. I had a Toyota once with 190,000 miles on it, but the only thing original on that one was the chassis. Hopefully the legacy of gentle driving on this Legacy is enough to allow it to get through another 4,000 miles, though I am prepared for anything. The German Ford back home has seemingly imploded just by not being driven for a few weeks, then being driven by friends and family -- we have sunk $300 into it these two months to fix various problems sight unseen.

Meanwhile, today in Belmont, I thought I would get the fuel filter on the Subaru replaced, just to get maximum gas mileage and show the car that I care. There is a Jiffy Lube where I had had an oil change and where the staff seemed professionaland efficient. Not today. A lengthy wait in a cramped lounge with bad coffee ensued, during which there was an incident -- the not so on-the-ball staff broke the fuel filter mounts on a car a woman also about to hit the road for a long trip had brought in for routine part replacements. One of my personal paranoias -- not specifically this but scenarios where doofus forgets to replace the oil plug and my engine fuses. Fuel filter and broken was all the words I needed to hear. As I quickly departed, they were on the phone with the dealership asking what part they needed to order.

POLITICS: Fundraising in the suburbs

So Bob Gates from down the street wants another $600 of my money for the war against the Iraqees. On one hand, I'm tickled pink -- it's not like I've signed over a blank check to the military -- this civilian guy actually comes round every now and then asking. Like this morning. At first I thought it was the day manager from Safeway who had become quite down at heel. Bob didn't look so good. There he stood on the stoop smoothing his shirt and brushing off some dead leaves from his silver hair. For some reason this struck me as charming in the manner of Wolfowitz. I felt my heart melt slightly. He said I had already preapproved $500 of it and this request was only for $120. I got out my books and checked. His tab was at $1500. Actually, not a lot of money for three and a half years, so you had to figure this was coming. I have Bob sort of budgeted as an inevitable suburban expense, much like school fundraiser items from a catalog. But when you get to thinking about it, at least you get tacky items when you support the schoolkids. With Bob, it's always Freedom this and freedom that -- he never wants to talk about himself or his past -- but you get the feeling the money is going down a black hole instead of to the Hottentot government.. Mrs. Reardon who lives kitty corner to us says Mr. Gates has disreputable associations and ithe money doesn't even get to where it's supposed to go. I don't believe it. Well, the long and short of it is that I gave him the old B of the D, as we say. "All right Bob," I says pleasantly enough, drawing myself up from my writing desk and handing him the check. "I hope we'll see some democracy pretty soon. Tell those Hottentots to shape up."

Best of both worlds

Back in the workadaddy world, I can't avoid yet another computer blog post.

But it's a happy epilogue to my search for a new laptop and it's brief -- only a thousand words long, one pic's worth:


Blue screen of life

I don't know if it is visible, but yes, my Mac is running Windows. Rely on Windows for the dependable computing, it says, and I agree. I am used to XP and like it. It makes my job easier. Giving Windows a small locked room somewhere within the magnificent Mac architecture -- even better.

About the only minus about the white Macbook 2.16 GHz, which I bought yesterday, is that you have to decide what to put in that small room (called a partition) and what to leave out.

The Macbook runs Windows blazingly fast, just as fast as any PC. Probably better. I don't really see any arguments why not to buy a Mac at this point. Though, on balance, there are a few limitations -- it should be possible to open the screen further than 135 degrees, since it is glossy and glare can be an issue. And well, the glossy screen as such...why? People seem to like them, but I see no advantages and a couple possible disadvantages. Also, it was not possible to use the Mac to watch an .avi movie file right out of the box, there was a hunt for drivers and codecs. Avi and DivX are so widespread that Quicktime which comes installed should be able to handle it as is.



As is obvious, Morgan's more of a oldschool boy, he's not yet too interested. As long the Mac doesn't compete for attention from Mom. But during special time today we stopped into the Apple Store in Pioneer Place and checked out some interactive Dr. Seuss.

By providing a free wireless mouse, Apple has found a nice way around the problem of having a small kid actually handle your laptop computer.

And the built in webcam demonstrated:



(((((****))))))

South Sister

Teardrop Lake -- Oregon's highest lake, at least in years where it thaws out -- viewed from the summit of South Sister, 5 pm, September 18. Taken with a cheap Coolpix, this is a splendid shot in the sense that the crater area is actually quite a gentle slope and the slushy body of water is only 200 ft down or so. The hike up the mountain is murderous, however. Because of the moderate elevation of "only" 10,400 ft, I had ideas of climbing the mountain as a very long day trip from Portland -- forget about it.



The other two Sisters, technical climbs, viewed from the same vantage point (not from an aircraft, I swear). I wasn't really up for the traverse, though those blue lakes in the potholes look inviting.



Camp, between Lewis and Clark glaciers at about 9,000 ft. The forecast was for the days of backlogged clouds to the west to finally break on through and bring snow to elevations above 6,000 ft, but it never materialized. Inversion kept temperatures at no less than 28 F. In the morning the air reversed and there was a stiff breeze and clouds "falling down" from the summit. So -- no Mt. Adams like weirdness, just a typical night on the mountain.

**

The overnighter allowed me to see a little more of Central Oregon and Bend, the fastest growing part of the state and probably the whole US. It's now pushing 80,000 souls while 10 or 20 years ago there was very little here. It's like a Colorado front range town. There is the same infinity of brush and buttes to the east, while the mountains rise abruptly to the west. It's at 3,500 ft. and has similar weather to Colorado. A lot of clouds right now, but I'm confident it's not going to rain much or at most maybe there will be some dry flakes of snow. The architecture of this well-heeled boomtown is also Intermountain West, with lots of low-slung, smart-looking new buildings with little idea of a city centre. So is the atmosphere and politics. It's young and outdoorsy with the typical acupunturists and spas and natural food stores and many ski and mountain shops in tasteful malls and "restored" riverside annexes, but it's not as crunchy as Boulder or as left-leaning and frayed as Portland. I'm roughing it -- strict diet of work, hike, and camp food -- so no breweries or restaurants for me. But I reckon there are some fine entries.

Bend: a smallish eastern Pacific city not afraid of jarring visual juxtapositions.

Fun with Windows

In the great central existential problem of our time -- Mac or PC -- I had been on the fence. I have an order in for a ThinkPad due to be shipped on the 21st, but it probably won't go through because it is on an Estonian credit card, I'm waiting for the axe to fall. The challenge of finding another non-Vista PC kind of compensates for the price tag and elitist aspects of Apple.

Then, fate knocked. Getting out of the car yesterday in an insanely small parking space in downtown Portland, I bumped my laptop backpack against the door.

As I mentioned in a past entry, there is a lot of fuzzy logic built into my elderly laptop. It has suffered many spills and drops and at times it has seemed self-healing. Certainly software has an effect on the hardware (and I'm not just talking about heavy number crunching stressing the fan) -- and vice versa. It's like the old jokes about the computer virus that, I don't know, damages the screen or something.

This latest bump was the last straw. It did something very subtle to the insides of the laptop which prevented Windows XP Home from loading. My configuration is heavily laden with drivers and takes some juice to get going, and at exactly the point where the elderly machine's hot AMD processor cranks up to a higher level, it hung and died.

The same thing happened every time, and eventually I kind of got it -- it wasn't coming back.

I ran through the things that had worked during a similar incident during the trip out West when it had gotten too hot in the car. I tried it on battery power. I took out the battery and ran it on mains. Finally, I turned the laptop upside down like a tent. That worked -- almost. It crashed about 20 seconds later into the process.

All was not lost. There was Safe Mode, which in my experience has never failed to work. Everytime I have had an spyware infection, Safe Mode has come to the rescue.

Sure enough, Safe Mode loaded without a hitch. I was in business.

I could have easily worked in Safe Mode, then transferred my files to a memory stick and sent them from my wife's computer. I could have even listened to music while working in Safe Mode.

But this wasn't enough for me. I had to meddle and fix the problem.

I reached into my backpack pocket and withdrew a CD I had been carrying around all summer. The XP recovery disk.

It comes with a utility called recovery console, which to me looked like a combination of DOS and an early debugger. So I skipped it. Luckily there is also an automatic Repair function. I pressed it and let the computer go to work.

Apparently what Repair does is this: not a whole lot of anything. But it was comforting for about 5 minutes. I rebooted to let Setup finish -- and Windows hung up at the same point. Since I was still officially in Setup, I was now locked out of Safe Mode as well. Now I no longer had a computer.

It had come to it -- a reinstall of Windows XP. I had heard bad things about this, usually from the same hapless folks who experience blue screens of death and the like -- an eight or nine hour process. So I nearly cackled when I saw the estimated time displayed on the screen -- 40 minutes. Piece of cake.

And it was. For the elderly laptop, it was like a new lease on life. In less than 30 seconds the desktop was up. All of my documents were safe in the separate old folder.

The bad news was that the screen had a resolution from about 1995, and apparently I had lost hardware in the process. There was no WLAN card, nor any sign of it. Nor -- boy, this was getting good -- was the manufacturer name printed anywhere, and none of the drivers provided for my model on the Fujitsu website were the right ones. The soundcard was there, but the driver was gone. Oddly enough, there was no Standby or Hibernate function anymore.

Gradually it dawned on me that there was another CD besides the Recovery one I had jealously guarded all this time, and that CD was in storage in Estonia. It contained all of the video drivers, antivirus software that the Fujitsu needed, that kept it from being just a entry-level consumer laptop from ten years ago...

I'm no quantum mechanic, but...

... I'm going to talk about it, anyway.

I’ve been writing on weird abstract themes, with references to God and spacetime, but here is a scary real topic… Quantum computers are closer than previously thought. This is not one of those problems like Y2K (remember that one?) that can be remedied by getting together a bunch of Eastern Europeans to go back and fix some COBOL code.

Computers double in power every two years, it's well known. Moore’s Law. For most of us, the forthcoming 64-bit processors will enable much more the memory and power we will ever need. (I might even be able to do this blog and my day job on a 486 running Windows 95. I probably should have bought a $400 Compaq as my next notebook and put $900 in Morgan’s college fund.) But governments and large corporations need more -- in the public interest, of course, to make sure that no one, like terrorists, ever keeps secrets from them by encryption, for example.

So groups of scientists are working in secret locations to see if they can do something they probably, in a perfect world, shouldn’t do, a) just to see if it can be done, and b) to do it before anyone else does. (Somewhere, someone is also trying to create antimatter – probably not a real bright idea, either.)

Once the subatomic barrier is crossed, some say, any code can be broken. For a while, there will be a kind of arms race, where encrypters devise stronger and stronger keys to keep up, but ultimately the code-breakers will prevail -- processor speed will still be increasing exponentially. Game, set and match. Goodbye internet banking, and good bye privacy. Because the quantum computing, if it really works, is essentially infinite-core computing. (You think your Core 2 Duo or quad-core is impressive? Well, imagine a subatomic world with infinite processors working in parallel dimensions.)

For a long time, I thought that subatomic physics was a crock, a pointless exercise -- like trying to zoom in on a single grey pixel on a black and white screen. It's kind of pointless -- you know the pixel is grey and you can't really go any further. If you did zoom in, the screen would show you either a) a pointillist pattern of black and white dots or b) dots flickering at a high speed between black and white. Basically, the color of any one given dot would be semi-arbitrary, as long as, if you zoom out, all the colours mix together to grey. (Oops, I have just quoted pop star Dave Matthews again in this blog. Kind of makes sense, though, his late dad worked on closely related stuff.)

But now a lot of people are betting the ranch on the idea that something very practical and powerful could come out of these flickering semi-arbitrary probability 'waves'. That they could actually store infinite data in them, somehow.

The good news is that it could all be a hoax.

**

But what is also scary about quantum computers is that, even if it were a hoax or wishful thinking, describing this flickering web with numbers and formulas is so over the head of most people. Hard to really prove it or disprove it. You also have to be exceptionally mathematically literate and apparently be able to visualize complex (imaginary) numbers on a 3-D graph.

No problem, you say? Well, I tried reading the Wikpedia article, and didn’t even understand it at all. If there were only one point of reference to latch on to, but there wasn’t. Kept on hyperlinking around in circles. Nowhere does t say what a quantum computer physically looks like. Even though some are allegedly already in the prototype phase.

As I said, I would love to dismiss it as a crock. But then again, I don’t have a perfect understanding of most electronics or classical microprocessors, either, so that is no reason to think that quantum computing won’t work. Unfortunately.

**

Some of the basics are old hat.

So there’s Moore’s Law, which holds that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years along with processor speed. Well, scales are getting so microscopic that very soon they will cross over into the subatomic. From that point on, funny things start happening in our usually reliable predictable physical world. It’s like this -- an atom can be used as a bit for computing, and it can be either a 1 or 0 -- but what about one tiny given part of an atom? There is no definite answer. It could be either a 1 or a 0.

The supposed power of quantum computers is staked on the idea that in fact the subatom could be both a 1 and a 0 at the same time. Or -- and here the weirdness begins -- that the subatomic particle hasn't in effect decided whether it is a 1 or 0 until someone peeks at it. That’s a famous thought experiment, BTW, known as Schroediger’s cat. (The question involves whether a cat in a box is alive or dead. Physicists are creepy, no?)

But I smell a rat here (so should the cat, if it is alive). It would seem that any sort of peeking would interfere. It’s not like we can cheat the system. As soon as we peek, we decide. So it can’t really be simultaneously a 1 or a 0.

Bottom line: How on earth could you devise a working, coherent computer, considering everything smaller than a certain point is a flickering wave of probabilities?

**

Some people are completely trashing the idea. (Interestingly, that blog in the link has the same style as mine - strange.) Theyre saying quantum computers are an elaborate hoax. Essentially a lot of liquid nitrogen (for special effect fog) and a couple white coats sitting in a box, like a pathetic Wizard of Oz. I guess such a notion does have its appeal to conspiracy theorists. Banks have a lot to lose, and could conceivably be brought to their knees by a consortium of nuclear labs who say that the banks have a limited lease on life.

I guess time will tell whether people like Louis Savain are flat-earthers or are doing a valuable service in calling a bluff.

Quo Madis?

Barring an accident involving the MAX light rail here in Portland,* I will turn 34 in two days. It has been a good year. I didnt forsake wordly possessions or become a holy mendicant. I spoke to some fishermen a couple weeks ago but they did not leave their nets and traditional fishing platforms on the Columbia River or follow me. The fishing was that good, or maybe they were there in the first place because their ancestors listened real good to the famous demonstration about what the mouth of a fish contains.

Though I am being facetious here in affecting a Christ complex (really), sometimes I do think about where I am going and why I am here (in Oregon, and not slouching or backpacking to Jerusalem). In Estonia and Europe at least, 33 is a significant age and people up the ante by referring to it as the juudijuubel (Jewish jubilee) and asking you, more or less, what have you done, so you kind of get to thinking and taking stock. WHID? Not enough, certainly.

Not all that many people want to be mortal or at least obscure. I dont know how it is in older folks, but there is still a little conceit lurking in some people up to their early thirties that they may buck the trend and not be 'subject to death', as actuaries say.

There was a time in my life when, if you asked me, Quo vadis, Kristopher Madis, my response might have answered to the description of some sage or wanderer, perhaps like a guy in the wilderness keeping himself as a pure vessel for the spirit, ready to pass it on at the right time. Having a family was not something I expected to do until much later in life, if at all.

Another time I would have answered with the sly words of Jerry Garcia -- When I was just a little young boy, Pappa said son you'll never get far/I'll tell you the reason if you want to know, because child of mine, there really isn't very far to go. It's a wheel, see. A circular path.

I am not religious, and certainly received very little religious exposure growing up. But eventually the powerful cultural memes made their way to me and shaped my understanding.

One image that made a deep impression on me was the Kazantzakis last temptation as depicted by Martin Scorsese -- Jesus dying fantasy of living in a hut with a wife and child, overlaid with the understanding that playing house like that was a horribly wrong abdication of his role. Could the same apply to anyone? Could it really be worth it just to continue the cycle of birth and rebirth and reinvent the wheel instead of having the courage to step out into space, as it were, and do something totally different?

My biggest difficulty with religion was and is seeing the middle road, and so it is with life in general. It seems that either you go all-out and witness 24/7, seeming very weird by conventional standards (the perfect example in Estonia is Ilmar Kesa, who carried a cross on the trams and buses of Tallinn for years: people who do that and are not mentally ill have all but disappeared in the US ). The other choice to my mind is that you just live a normal conformist, but then you don't talk about religion either.

Whatever.

Aside from the joys of parenthood, I have to say that reaching 34 -- without finding myself on a high windy hill pecked by crows, surrounded by the cold eyes of thousands of people -- is a blessing, and that is how I will take it. (Though the plan is to climb South Sister on Tuesday the 18th, which is a mountain.)

In some ways 34 is the final end of the conceits of childhood. The road is chosen. From here on, if I forsake possessions or make any abrupt shift, it will be called something else: mid life crisis. Though true aging is still a year or couple away, the final accceptance has been given of the fact that I am just a mortal.

Slowly the giving back will have to start. Maybe by actions like paying myself more of a salary (and thus Estonian social tax) and not just living off dividends like a high roller. Maybe tithing 10% (a page from Christian doctrine, but one I always liked).

But this isn't New Year's, so no resolutions yet.


* There is a guy in a Nabokov short story who is convinced he will die at Jesus' age and is killed, by streetcar. Characters in Russian literature are always getting run over by trams -- Master and Margarita, etc.

Deus ex machina in Washingtonium

Everybody who blogs about the war against Iraq has been writing about Petraeus, the Roman general who has appeared in the nation's capital. A quirk of the space time continuum, no doubt, but a fortuitous one for Bush.

OK, OK. According to Wikipedia, Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. Army, is someone who has been in the Who's Who of the military for a long time, and it is only his last name that sounds Latinate, maybe only to my ears. But for the folks in Peoria (assuming there is no large military base in Peoria and that expression can still be used to mean ordinary small town Americans), Petraeus might as well have entered through a wormhole a few days ago.

I would date him circa the time of Diocletian, but that is a best-case scenario. Diocletian is a fellow Bush might want to aspire toward -- an autocratic ruler who staves off inevitable decline, then goes into peaceful retirement in Crawford.

Anyway, Petraeus. Late yestreen (Conticinium) I sat by lamplight reading some of this officer and gentleman's collected works -- the oral ones in any case.

Videlicet:

Two weeks ago, I provided recommendations for the way ahead in Iraq to the members of my chain of command and the Joints Chiefs of Staff. The essence of the approach recommended is captured and it's title: "Security While Transitioning: From leading, to partnering, to overwatch."

Here is more:

Some of this is a little bit distasteful. It is not easy sitting across the table, let's say, or drinking tea with someone whose tribal members may have shot at our forces or, in fact, drawn the blood -- killed our forces.

We learned a bit, in fact, about this from my former deputy commander, Lieutenant General Graham Lamb, former head of 22 SAS and the director of special forces in the United Kingdom. And he reminded us that you reconcile with your enemies, not with your friends. That's why it's called reconciliation.

Indeed. Nor is it easy to sit across a table from someone your own forces have drawn the blood of, though I am sure that point is implied. The mutual bloodletting has been confusing, especially in the heat of combat, when a lot of the time no one is sure who is drawing whose blood.

But Petraeus's optimism is justified. An instructive and little-known example from history: the Russians reconciled with the tribesmen in Afghanistan. It took a while - two steps back, one step forward - but finally the mujahedin said, over sweetened tea one day, OK, let bygones be bygones. Essentially.

Or maybe not. Actually, I totally made that up. But my point: you dont hear Pashtun fighters railing so much against the Soviets. Not right now.

And that is real progress, folks.

The same will happen in Iraq, through a different mechanism. The Sunnis and the Shias will meet and reconcile. And then they will call us into the room and thank us. For overwatching.

So keep the powder dry, don't get out the mufti yet, and prepare for transitioning from partnering to watchover. I'm "at-watching" my calendar right now: by Martius or Aprilis we should have some answers.

Of which Anno Domini I do not know.

I appreciated the reader comments to the last entry, Sept. 7, made before I tacked on...more long-winded writing.

Regarding cameos on this blog, I, too, enjoyed Christ commenting not so long ago. I value his perspective on things. As for other people not commenting, the reason is that some find it hard to do so for technical reasons or they do not want to set up a Blogger profile. So they pass on their comments to me in another form. And that is fine. Christ doesn't use Vista, for one thing, so fewer problems for him.

***

It’s been warm again here in Oregon. There have not been especially many hot days this summer but for some reason the tip of Mount Hood – like the top 3000 ft above the glacier -- appears to be completely bare of snow, as viewed from town. Is this normal? I don’t really want to know. There should be hundreds of feet of glacial ice, no? Anyway, the forecast in Oregon is for more dissonance, as my wife put it. That is, landscape looks like early fall, but it’s hot in the sun, and the wind is cold. But I was born around this time of year, and I am generally at peak energy in Sept and Oct, so I am not complaining about the nice weather.

Speaking of wind-- windy air and winding roads -- we drove into the Columbia Gorge Scenic Area yesterday after a quick stop at the last outpost of commerce, the outlet mall, to exchange some clothes. Took the Old Gorge Highway, the one with the 8-foot-wide lanes and, on Sundays, many antique cars. They seem to have a new waterfall each time, or maybe my memory is bad. I thought we would hit Multnomah (the 600-foot one with the crowds) first, but instead Latourell Falls hove into view after a few miles. A photogenic falls and a good mini-hike with the whole family.

TTT is dealing with nausea but the fresh air seemed to help yesterday. She is a little pregnant (6 weeks) and has decided to be "out” about it. Since the progesterone is flowing so freely and causing very real changes, we are treating this pregnancy as official, even though it is such an early tenuous stage. More power to her. As for my own mindset, I have to say I have not been thinking too deeply about it at this point but certainly I am monitoring myself all the time to be sure that I am not taking things for granted or acting too cavalier (during the first pregnancy on the other hand everything seemed important).

I have pointedly not been following the news, except that the weather reminds me faintly, ominously of 9/11. For some reason, I had a weird feeling that we would get an earthquake this summer or that Helens would eject some matter. We still might.

The whole political scene is a turnoff, since there is nothing intelligent or useful that can be said.

National discourse on Iraq has completely retreated into schizophrenia -- no doubt the one-third of schizophrenia cases that get worse. For example, here in Oregon, you have local Democrats coming out on the record saying it is an unmitigated disaster, with the intimation that it is a failed presidency. Then they add that we have to stick with the Surge and see how it plays out. Follow the logic and there is none.

In Congress, some new guy as emerged as the go-to individual. Apparently some Roman general -- Betraeus or some such name. No first name that I know of. I have to say, Bush has to be happy with this turn of events. It isn’t everyday that Maximus comes home from exile as a free man.

A US senator, Larry Craig, was caught playing footsie in an airport bathroom. A wholesome Midwestern airport bathroom. I have to say, I don’t believe it and suspect character assassination. I only care because I don’t see why other people care so much. First of all, does this sort of thing even prove that a person is gay? I’m sure that in his day, Dubya played all sorts of witty pranks on the guy in the next stall. Don’t know the circumstances, don’t want to know, but I can boil these phenomena down to a simple statement: Texas titty-twister does not equal a nipple caress. Perhaps Sen. Craig is a mans man and the cop is a prudish humourless sort.

Local news has been more interesting, with a successful rescue (imagine that- in Oregon) of a 76 year old woman from a ravine, where she had been lost for nearly 2 weeks.

***

On film. We saw Bourne Ultimatum and liked it. If only all movies could be this sure of themselves, economical. It is the Saving Private Ryan of the chase genre. The action scenes are wonderfully edited.

We rented Amargosa, a documentary about a NYC woman who moves to Death Valley Junction pop. 10 and starts a one-woman opera company. Beautiful photography and a balanced portrait.

Duds: Prairie Home Companion (bland, slight, and not in the good way of the radio show), Grizzly (moments, but I could not take the human subject of the documentary seriously, even before he gets predictably eaten by bears).

Self-criticism

A quote from this blog: Everyone had fun. But there is still somewhat of a cui bono aspect to the 2nd birthday, too, isn't there?"

A cui bono aspect, eh, Kris?

Whew. I must have been tired. Then again, I must have been tired on August 27, as the opening to that entry reads like bad Annie Dillard. Maybe I am really turning into a colossal bore. Too bad, now that Google is actually returning hits including this blog. People outside my small circle of frineds might actually read it! (The search engine presence was kind of cool, actually. I spent 15 minutes one day plugging unique combinations and seeing if my blog came up number one in the hits. I could never get my Estonian company website even recognized.)

Still, the policy for this blog is, if it plays, it stays. I'm not going to go back and edit past entries. The guiding principle: whatever was written was simply an artefact of the moment. Shit, now I'm starting to sound pretentious again. I know what -- next subject. Something political.

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Save the almonds

And my soapbox stand for today is on the topic of nuts.

The US Food and Drug Administration is a really interesting agency. Besides doing much that is laudable to protect public interests, it has odd blind spots (such as allowing the synthetic neurotoxin aspartame in diet foods). And every once in a while the FDA gets hotted up over a non-issue. Like raw almonds.

Under a plan, one of those executive agency level plans that the public doesn't really get to vote on, all almonds legal for sale in North America are to be pasteurized. This is not satire. If it sounds odd and difficult and expensive to enforce, that is because it is, and apparently the process involves heating almonds with the use of a nasty chemical. But the FDA is determined to achieve full compliance.

The FDA's reason was apparently two salmonella outbreaks in the last five years. Oddly these outbreaks did not get much coverage while scores of people were keeling over from eating spinach. But the FDA is out watching for us. Spinach remains legal for the time being, but almonds will be banned. You can always toast a raw almond, but you can't uncook a cooked almond. These almonds will not be viable.

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Sprouting things -- in order to release their Gaia-given energy -- is popular among health food people. I am definitely not on this bandwagon hook line and sinker. I'm largely an instinctovore who eats simple, fairly whole food that tastes good. (As a basic benchmark, a Twinkie does not for example taste good. If I ate them every day I might feel otherwise, which is the problem of many people problem in the case of too much salt and sugar.)

In 1999 and 2000 I worked in an office overlooking Charlottesville VA's downtown mall. My friend Tim, who is now a dietitian and whose home has at times in his life resembled the Kam Wah Chung museum we will visit in remote interior Oregon, always brought in various goodies. I'm not talking about baked goods, but things like cardamom pods or pickled astralagus. Someone was for ever steaming or juicing vegetables in the kitchen area. Sometimes it seemed like more of a smart shop or cafe than a digital editing business, like we were on a course not just to transcribe the complete works of Locke and Bentham but also be completely detoxified with superb deep-immune functioning by the end of the project.
Sprouted almonds were one of Tim's offerings. I remember the episode clearly because it is one of the few things that I have pretended to eat and surreptitiously spit out. Judging from the flavor, I could not believe they would not contain a fatal amount of cyanide; it was overpowering.

One of the deepest cultural prejudices we have is that cooked -- roasted, browned -- food tastes good. Raw and sprouted food is a more difficult sell. In the case of barley, I agree whole-heartedly. Sprout away. Malt the stuff. Mung beans are tasty sprouted. But most things, no. I am not a fan of sprouted almonds.

**

Almond pasteurization seems perfectly set up to be the stuff of jokes. You got as the main opponents of the plan a radical contingent that many mainstream people like to put down as hippies or worse. And after all, It got up to 108 in parts of California in August. (The person we are going to visit near Pasadena raises chickens, and most of them died in the heat wave). The almonds there are probably already naturally pasteurized right on the vine, or whatever they grow on, right? Ha-ha.

But unfortunately it is a part of a larger serious issue that ties in to many things: consumer choice and paternalist attitudes on the part of the government. Variety is not actually increasing. It is an illusion. The fact that our household can, and did recently, buy green tea wasabi peanuts and cashew trail crunch with raw cane juicefrom Costco is no indicator. Behind the esoteric ingredients there are still the same reliance on hydrolyzed protein/MSG and too much sugars as in other snack food. The wasabi has been overprocessed. Since food color has been added, who knows if it is really wasabi and not just Wasabi brand mustard or horseradish, custom-engineered for a national retailer.

We are really way backwards when it comes to nutrition in this country. Look at the Nutrition Facts label. With the exception of the de facto banning of trans fats, which was welcome and long overdue -- they had no place in food -- very litt has changed. We see things in terms of only a few individual parameters. Usually it doesn't matter. The four "elements" on the labels -- Iron, Vitamin C, Vitamin A, Calcium -- are not unimportant.

Most people get by on the Amercan diet. Most people aren't sensitive to pesticides and their immune systems attack and destroy the occasional cancerous mutations that are always popping up before they can spread. So organic doesn't have such a direct impact on health.

Sure, we have a weght problem as a country, but most of us have strong genes, and our metabolism only finally conks out for good from all the corn syrup in our late middle age, and at that point we keep afloat with a raft of pharmaceuticals. And they work. They don't really work, in the sense that they treat a complex problem complexly and get the body locked into a cycle of corrective feedback, as they should. But still, we Americans live close enough to the lifespan of people on islands like Crete, where most people still eat mostly real, living, unprocessed food that there is no sense of real urgency. Although our happiness index is far, far lower.

It is also easy and fun to deride nutritional research. You can't really fault people for doing so, because our media dumbs down the nuances of each story. Coffee appears to be bad for you one week then good for you again. Very few studies are expressly contradictory but it sure seems that way.

Actually, what no one has ever ever disproven is that a whole food diet is better for you than processed food. It is. Of course you have to know to avoid the leaf of the rhubarb plant and probably not everything that is raw is beneficial (potato). Making sure you fulfill the RDA of a few substances is all well and good. But if you want to be at your best -- productive, alert, healthy -- you eat high-octane, whole food.

But then you have retailers actually called Whole Foods making forays into all sorts of processed snack food and candy bars, and the distinction gets watered down.

There are tons of things in whole foods -- the uncapitalized kind -- that we are not even aware of, and certainly we are not aware of all of the interactions between them. We have a dim idea of things like lycopenes (especially in cooked tomatoes) and what they do. Enough to conquer them -- synthesize them, package them in a bottle and sell them at prices that are far under a single heirloom tomato. Other things like reversatrol in wine we are only now isolating, though our whole thinking is already aimed at marketing it as a possible "fountain of youth". The French wine industry may go under due to global warming but we will be left with one red herring clue to eternal life.

There is a whole biosphere of micronutrients out there that is like the rain forest in terms of diversity, and we are hacking it down. We are losing ancient cultures by the minute. Some are being rediscovered (grains like spelt and kamut) and touted. But it is trees for the forest. To use another figure of speech, for want of a nail (sterility and zero deaths from food poisoning) we lose the kingdom (such things as raw-milk and cave-aged cheeses). I don't intend to eat a lot of raw-milk cheese or feed it to the children of the neighbourhgood. But I want to make responsible choices and not have to smuggle unpasteurized milk from Pennsylvania, as people in the DC area have had to do for years. The choice should be there.

***

Compulsory almond sterilization is not the end of the world. You can kill salmonella in mayonnaise-bound eggs without hard-boiling them. The pasteurized almonds will probably not taste that different. For most people, the banning of raw almonds may be like reading about the extinction of an exotic species in some remote forest. But you should be concerned. It is a major salvo in the sterilization of our diet. It is typical in that it is an fairly unnecessary requirement that favours large producers over smaller ones. The truth is that no organically grown almond has been found to have salmonella. So often it is the major economy of scale producers that develop a fatal quallty control problem. At that point it is easy to find a scapegoat -- dirty organic farms that use manure instead of good clean chemicals of course! But whether you want to sprout them or not, almonds should be available in their elemental form to people who want to choose for themselves. Slap a disclaimer on the package if necessary.

Happy birthday, Morgan

He has been 1 forever. Much as it seems he was around 10 kg forever (he now weighs in at 12.3 kg), it seems he has been close to 2 years old for a very long time, maybe because he was already walking and talking slightly before his 1st birthday. But he finally reached the actual day. The first such milestone he will remember, possibly. And how's this for a present -- he is finally getting some more hair on his head. About time.

As far as the actual party was concerned, he had fun. The other kids had fun. But there is still somewhat of a cui bono aspect to the 2nd birthday, too, isn't there? In Estonia, the conventional wisdom is that the 1st birthday is for the parents, but It also still seems a bit silly to foist all the rituals like gift-opening on someone as young as 2. Though you have to start somewhere, I guess, and it all makes for cute, cute pics.

We made homemade pizza and bought desserts from a good bakery. I recommend this in hindsight to any parent. Instead of spending $$$ on bread and grease from Pizza Hut and dealing with heartburn all night, you do the easy part yourself for far less, and it is fairly easy for pizza -- two cast iron pans, an hour of prep, let the kids knead the dough, fairly easy cleanup -- and farm the hard part out to a patissier. The two (2) cakes, the Queen of Sheba Truffle (TTT's pick) and a Ghetto (gateau) Cake topped with blackberries, blueberries and grapes, Morgan's favourites -- had even us men in the household saying things like "heavenly". No lisping, though, thankfully.
Indeed the chocolate cake was more of an adult self-indulgence. As Riima, 4, announced: "smells so good, tastes so bad".

I was famous at Christmas for opening one gift a day, becoming engrossed in each one. Morgan has a similar attention span, but I wonder how this was even possible in my case. After all, adult egos require that the child be quickly shuttled on to the next gift, because everyone wants to see their particular gift opened. The giving is more important than the receiving. Kids will find something to do, but no adult can be left out. Morgan wanted to read Richard Scarry but it was the adults who exhorted, on, on, on to the next one. There are photos that must be taken, the child must smile. If the child wants to go to the kitchen to throw away the wrapping paper (like a very well raised child, I should add, with more self-congratulation in my voice) on this day even this is an unwelcome intrusion into the flow of the spectacle. :)

(To Jehovah's Witnesses: I understand you.)

His first birthday marked his first acquaintance with electronics. All of a sudden he was surrounded by winking blinking quacking gifts. It was a bit too much. This time around sparklers (my brilliant idea) made him freak out. Luckily he recovered quickly and true candles were lit. Then Sammy, 3, insisted on blowing them out and it was his turn to freak out when denied this privilege. Controlled chaos was the order of the day. Of every day.

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Both wines are now below 1.000 specific gravity and ready to be racked for the first time. They taste a little like dry prosecco and look like rosé, one around 9%, the other 12% alcohol. Too bad they are short-lived fruit wines (though one has enough added tannin that it could use some mellowing) or we could do a special bottling in honour of Morgan.

Wine update and laptop hunt

Wine update: Three days into the process I realize there is no way to be discreet about winemaking. It's lucky it is not illegal. We have achieved what is termed in the literature as a rollicking ferment. You could hear the bubbling from across the room. There is a faint odor of sulfide from the first, larger bucket. Rotten egg gas, a byproduct of fermentation. is the #1 problem of winemakers everywhere, but it is not necessarily serious in and of itself yet. I will check again today. The control batch, made with corn sugar, is a day younger and is simply wonderful. It is about 3-4% alcohol and already tastes delicious.

Computer issues: I will be buying a laptop here in the States. It has to be a 15.4" widescreen with excellent battery life. Those are pretty much opposites, of course. (Weight is not an issue. My current laptop weighs 9.5 pounds with the brick and I consider it light enough.)

And it should be under $2000. But really, under $1,500.

Naturally the MacBook Pro is on the shortlist. It is pricey but the OS is of course included, it being a Mac. And it would be virus-free, which may save time in the long run.

But I am leaning toward a ThinkPad T61 or maybe a Dell Vostro 1500. The ThinkPad is ahead because I need a solid, best in the biz keyboard that is good for three years of nonstop pounding. (The Mac is said to have some "flex" in it, whatever that is). The fact that the ThinkPad looks "boring" is actually a pro, not a con, for me. I could care less about what my computer looks like as long as it is a sturdy business class build. Something makes me think that Macintoshes are beautiful, odd, expensive toys for the status-conscious. There are some real issues with Macs that have never been resolved in my mind.

I am typing this on a G4 -- the computers here are all Macs -- but consider:

* The 1992 Powerbook (which originally retailed at $2000, my absolute maximum budget in 2007). This was my road computer for light word processing as late as 2002. Then it suffered a fall of 12 inches from my car while in its case and the screen shattered into tiny pieces. I do not care that this was a machine from 15 years ago. No $2000 piece of hardware designed for portable use should be that fragile. Have things improved?

Contrast that with my current notebook, a $2000 (as marketed in Estonia in 2005) Fujitsu Siemens Amilo, a hot and heavy but powerful 2004 notebook -- I have landed on it with my full weight in a bicycle wreck, it has been nicked and dented and thumped around, yet it still works well. The only problem is that dust clogs the fan and overheated CPU will cause it to shut down without warning, but regular vacuuming resolves this problem.

* Safari, Apple's browser, used to take 45 seconds to boot on this G4. Now it looks like this problem has been fixed. But I don't know why or how.

* On my Fujitsu, I have only lost maybe 8 hours of work in three years of heavy use, even with my bad habits -- such as not saving or backing up as I should. The AutoRecovery utility was up and running on Word when I installed it. Never had to do anything. I am happy with Windows XP. Even adware hasn't been that much of a problem -- maybe an additional five hours of fixing in three years. Nothing that Safe Mode or a System State Restore hasn't resolved. On the other hand, I have suffered just as many application crashes on various Macs, and always the data is gone for ever.

* My wife is unable to access the wireless Internet at Portland's Public Library with her Mac PowerBook 12". In a number of other locations, there have been problems with AirPort.

* I rely heavily on the Delete key and right mouse button. The Mac lacks them. Tapping twice on touch pads (the Macintosh's way around this) doesn't sound like a good substitute to me. I had a problem accidentally brushing the touchpad for the first few months using my current laptop.

* My translation interface is a Visual Basic script summoned within Word -- like a big macro. Would it definitely work on a Mac? It works without a hitch on XP, but it is a Polish written programme that is a reverse engineer of a much more expensive translation programme, Trados.