Category: Uncategorized

komo news | State To Buy 4 New Ferries:

The state Transportation Department is gearing up to replace five of its oldest ferries with four new ones that can carry twice as many passengers and five times as many cars.

The first new vessel – with a capacity for 320 cars and 1,200 passengers – could be ready for Puget Sound service as early as 2008. Plans are to start construction next year.

Note the difference in size between the ones being replaced — the smaller silhouette — and the current top of the line Jumbo Mark II.

This image shows the likely size of the replacement compared to the Jumbo Mark II.

[images courtesy of WA State DOT]

Comfort Stand – [Various Artists – People Doing Strange Things With Electricity Too]:

People Doing Strange Things With Electricity II and People Doing Strange Things With Electricity Too

Heard some of this on KUOW this week. Interestingly, all the pieces are freely available for download and are explicitly released under a Creative Commons share-alike/non-sommercial license.

for your saag paneer or other Indian dishes

Naan
2 cups unbleached white flour (replace with up to 2/3 cup of whole wheat if you like)
3/4 cup soured milk or yogurt
1 tsp yeast
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp water

If you’re not using yogurt, sour the milk with 1 tbsp vinegar or lemon juice. Let stand 5-10 minutes.
Add the flour and yeast to the bowl of your stand mixer.
Add the milk/yogurt.
Mix together with a hook, then add the salt when everything is moistened and mixed together. Add the water as needed.
Mix at medium speed until the dough is smooth and not too sticky. It should all pull away from the sides of the bowl and be kneaded together.
Lift it and put the dough in an oiled or buttered bowl, allowing room for it to double. Cover with plastic wrap.
Put it in the (cool) oven or in some place (a sunny windowsill) to rise.
In an hour or two it will have risen to double in size.
Preheat the oven to 450F.
Remove it from the bowl and put it on a floured countertop.
Divide the dough into 8 equal piece and roll them into balls.
Cover them with a dish towel for 10 minutes.
Roll each piece into an 8-10 inch circle, dust with flour and put aside: be careful not to stack them without flour, or they’ll stick.
When you have 4 rolled out, lay them on a baking sheet and put them in the over: set the timer for 5 minutes.
Roll the others out.
Check the first batch: if they have puffed up and are browning just slightly, they’re done.
Pull them out and put them on a rack to cool.
Put the others in to bake the same way.
To serve, cut them in half and put them in a basket or add to plates when serving. Some like to brush them with butter when they come out of the oven: personal preference.

FreeBSD Documentation – 6.12 Tuning Disks:
6.12.1.2 vfs.write_behind

The vfs.write_behind sysctl variable defaults to 1 (on). This tells the file system to issue media writes as full clusters are collected, which typically occurs when writing large sequential files. The idea is to avoid saturating the buffer cache with dirty buffers when it would not benefit I/O performance. However, this may stall processes and under certain circumstances you may wish to turn it off.

I have been seeing some weird performance issues: slowdowns and high loads with the busy processes in the “inode” run state, all of which are httpd processes (load of 18 on a single CPU machine and 4-5 process all splitting 100% of system time). From my reading of this, I guess there is some contention for disk writes (ie, logging). I toggled this sysctl off and hey, presto, loads dropped like a rock. A symptomatic fix, but it will do for now.

Well, we’re getting this one to replace our lost Coolpix 4300. I put a lost notice on craigslist today, but I’m not optimistic.

The 5400 has a lot going for it and it comes with a $200 rebate, making the net cost $300 — less than the 3400 was. I considered replacing the 4300 with some I found on eBay, but once the price of those got north of $200, it didn’t make sense. The difference in price is more than offset by the features on the 5400.

No idea if it will get here in time for Saturday: I still have an old school APS film camera so we’ll have some documentary evidence of the carnage.

Now playing:Cumberland Blues by Grateful Dead from the album “Europe ’72
”

This is a list of the most common keyboard shortcuts in Firefox, and the equivalents in Internet Explorer and Opera.

I installed the FlashBlock plugin and it seems to work as advertised. In the meantime, I had to look up some information on navigating with keyboard (Safari’s simple top and bottom of page commands get used a lot). So if you’re interested, here’s the table of shortcuts in the fine Mozilla family of products.

Maybe I’m Chinese too:

Strange things can happen to you while you blog. You might even change your mind.

Months ago I described my vegetarian desires that I had given up for love. Whenever Ted travelled, I would make meatless dishes and imagine what life could be like without butcher bills. I wasn’t that excited about my marriage compromise to be a carnivore and hoped somehow I could turn Ted onto tofu.

But now, as I’ve posted recent pieces describing carpaccio appetizer and Burger King vocabulary, I am becoming more comfortable with my carnivorous practices. I’ll even confess I have cravings. Hey, I eat meat! It’s the way we live. It fits our family.

Living without meat is more than just tofu (we rarely eat it and when we do it, it sure isn’t that wobbly white stuff you see in the dairy case).

We don’t eat meat for a variety of reasons, some related to health, some economic (not whether we can afford meat but if the planet can afford it), some ethical.

I grew up eating all kinds of animal parts, meats and organs, and while it may not have done me any harm, it’s a different world today. The way animals are raised (the fact that we pay other people to raise animals for slaughter, something we wouldn’t or couldn’t do ourselves) is part of it: the antibiotic feeds, the conditions of feedlots — veal pens, anyone? — are all things we don’t want to subsidize just to satisfy a craving.

Those issues touch on health and ethics concerns. The economics are another issue: what if 1.1 billion Chinese decided they needed a steak or burger everyday? What if 1 billion Indians gave up their traditional diets for our American — not Western: this is an American phenomenon, not European — diet? As it is in this country, much of the beef cattle are grazed on subsidized public lands with subsidized irrigation as well as fed subsidized corn and grains in the feedlots: the romance of “where the buffalo roam” is just that — a lot of idealized nonsense. So we — my household and others like us — are subsidizing the slaughterhouse industry, whether we like it or not. (This could be tied back to the old Red State/Blue State divide of late, where it was revealed that the rugged individualists of the Red States couldn’t live without the largesse contributed by the effete Blue States: I’m not going there, other than to point out the connection.)

I don’t want to moralize or lecture, especially another adult who is raising their own family in a conscious and thoughtful way, but to adopt a practice you don’t agree with out of love for another, even while that practice might be harming the ones you love and yourself, doesn’t make sense.

I have been invited to post over at Grab The Mic, and unlike Groucho, I’m happy to accept that invitation. I think I’ll try to keep my election and political rants over there: not that I won’t find something to grouse about . . . . .

I tried last year to grow roses from seed — for no compelling reason — but it didn’t go too well. When I saw the size of the rose hips from this summer’s heat, I decided I should try again. That hip is about an inch in diameter.

Roses don’t come true from seed: the ones you buy are all grafts or rooted from existing stock[1]. Apples are the same way: if you were to get an apple tree from the pips in that Red Delicious, it wouldn’t bear Red Delicious apples.

Continue reading “roses that you’ve never seen before”

some wags at Harvard’s primate center are having some fun with the president’s alleged similarity to our simian relations . . . a smaller version of this clip is given pride of place on their site’s main page.

[link]