News and Views

We are back from our Cruise (actually on Saturday). It was very nice; cool and rainy which is a relief after a summer in Tempe. We got a good view of a glacier and saw lots of “calves” falling off. Visited Juneau, Sitka and Ketchikan. We traveled on Holland America. I would rate their food and entertainment below both Carnival and Princess.

Gisele and her brothers and sister had a great time. It was the first time they have been together since their father’s funeral, so it was a more celebratory occasion this time.

Tomorrow we are going to Las Vegas for just one night, and will be bringing back with us Gisele’s brother Joseph and his wife Anita and son Tim. They are going to spend 3 days in Arizona before getting ready to return to Australia.

Gisele and I are off on a week-long Alaskan cruise. It’s really a family reunion for Gisele, as all of her surviving siblings and their spouses are coming along.

A grip helps out on a movie set. The Key Grip is the main guy who helps organize the other grips.

I mentioned about a year ago that my friend Benjamin won first prize in a Screenwriters contest in New York City.

I spent the day yesterday at a cemetery in Miami, Arizona, helping Benjamin film a short piece from his script. We were a crew of about 10, and I was the bottom gopher. I figure that should be about 4th grip. I sat around watching most of the day.

His main character is an old black man with Alzheimers. His actor is John Cochran who has played in movies beside Clint Eastwood, done lots of Theater, and taught acting at Yale and Stanford. It was amazing to watch him work. In one scene he falls down. I was crouched down below the camera’s view to help make sure he didn’t roll off the air mattress, and after he fell he started groaning. I said, “Are you all right John?”. The director called “Cut!”, and John looked at me and said “You never leave the scene until you hear ‘Cut!'”. I was chagrined. He had just been continuing the role.

The short is for entry in another major contest (he’s already a finalist), with a big enough payout to finance production of the whole movie.

And we just heard today that Benjamin won another category first place screenwriter’s award from the Woods Hole Film Festival.

With or without the prize money for the short, he hopes to begin filming the full-length movie this fall or winter.

The veterinarian said that Apollo can stop taking his Valley Fever medication!

He still tests slightly positive for the disease, but she said he had recovered so well that she wanted to try him off the drugs for 3 months, then test again.

Have you ever thought about the long instructions you get when you reach the voice mail for a mobile phone?

“The number you have dialed, 480 555-1234 is not available. You can leave a message after the tone. After leaving your message, you can hang up, or press pound for other options. To leave a numeric page, press 1. To leave a callback number, press 7.”

That’s actually a composite of the instructions from T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T.

Think about it: These days, who needs to be told that they can leave a message after the tone? Who needs to be told that they can hang up after leaving the message? They have my phone number on CallerID; why would I leave a callback number? Does anybody ever leave a numeric page on a cell phone?

On T-Mobile it’s 17 seconds from the start of the message to the beep. On Verizon it’s 18 seconds.

Why doesn’t the message simply say, “Please leave a message after the tone”?, short and clear. Or when I set up my own message, why is it still followed by the carrier’s message?

The answer is money. The longer they keep the line open, the more you have to pay. Cell phone executives have admitted that it’s all about revenue per customer, and that long voice mail instructions are part of that strategy.

David Pogue, technical blogger for the NY Times, has a column on this and other complaints about cell phones (Why do text messages cost 10 to 20 cents a minute to send, when they cost the phone company almost nothing? If part of the cost of the monthly bill is to subsidize your cheap phone, why doesn’t the bill decrease when your contract expires? )

Oh, by the way, each carrier has a key you can press that will immediately take you to the beep, but they don’t advertise them and they are different for each carrier. If you press one carriers key during another’s message, who knows what might happen. However, someone has discovered that if you press 1 * #, with a pause to listen for the tone between each keypress, you can safely bypass all carrier’s message:

Press 1. If it’s Sprint, it will work immediately.
If not, press *. If it’s Verizon you’ll get the beep.
If not, press # and that will take care of T-Mobile and Cingular.

AT&T is in there somewhere too.

Gisele and I are in Snowbird, Utah for 5 nights. Snowbird is a ski resort about an hour outside of Salt Lake City, at about 8500 feet. The weather is very nice, but a little warmer than I expected.

I came up to attend a Botany convention. My friend Les and I are giving a presentation on a program I am developing that can help convert old style plant specimens to a database.

It’s very beautiful up here.

Mozilla has come out with a new version of Firefox: Version 3.5.

There are several improvements in this version. I especially like two of them:

1) They finally seem to have memory management under control. Previous versions of Firefox would seem to slowly take up more and more memory, and never release it even when you closed tabs. This version seems to use much less, and you regain memory when you close a tab. It’s about time they fixed that!

2) Private Browsing. You can enter a “private browsing” mode, where nothing is kept on the computer to show where you went or what you did. Useful if you are using someone elses computer and want to do banking or private email, or just when it’s nobody’s dang business what web sites you were visiting.

The page rendering engine is supposed to be faster, but I can’t really tell a difference.

Anyway, I’ve been using it for about a week so far, and find it an improvement.

I run Linux on my Netbook, and find that it works perfectly well in that application. On my netbook I primarily need a web browser and email, along with the ability to view media and PDFs, and run Skype and ICQ. I don’t think there’s any reason to pay anything for Windows on a Netbook.

But I don’t run it on my main computer. My main complaint about Linux is the difficulty I find installing new programs. There are lots of free programs for Linux; almost anything you can do in Windows, there is a roughly equivalent program for Linux. But installing those programs is such a chore that I usually just don’t want to bother.

Linux enthusiasts are going to tell me it’s easy. If your particular brand of Linux supports RPM, just find an RPM packaged version of the program (if it exists), open a shell window and type,

rpm –ivh packagename

If you’re lucky, your version of Linux may even have a GUI-based RPM interface, but you still have to figure out how to use it.

Or, if it’s not RPM and you get it in a “tar”, just open a shell window and type:

tar –xvzf Apackage.tar.gz
cd Apackage
./configure
make
make install

Oh, yeah — before you start this you should log in as root, otherwise you will probably get errors about insufficient rights.

See this long page for more insight into the complications involved with installing programs on a Linux computer.

Compare this with Windows, where you simply double click the setup program’s icon and in a minuter or two it’s done. There’s rarely a question about which version of Windows the program is designed for, or if you have the proper installation package.

Why can’t Linux be this simple? I’m running old versions of Firefox and Thunderbird on my netbook, because I don’t want to jump through the necessary hoops to upgrade them.

Linux has come a long way, and in many ways is as good as or better than Windows. But for me this is a real show-stopper. Linux can’t be a mainstream OS until it is simple to install and upgrade programs.

Gisele left early this morning for her annual month in France. She is only taking 3 weeks of class this year, in the city of Tours. The other week will be spent traveling around the country.

Angela happens to be there at the same time, so Gisele will get to spend some time with her sister.

After 4 days of vacuuming up bees, I decided it was time to get serious.

I went to Lowe’s and bought a can of “Wasp and Hornet Spray”. They can’t advertise that it kills bees because they are protected, but they assured me it would work fine.

I found the most likely place for a hive — it’s a box-like extension to the wall where the dryer hose goes out. I drilled a 3/8″ hole through the drywall, stuck the spray nozzle in the hole, and sprayed for a few seconds. Then I quickly covered the hole with duct tape.

In a few seconds a gentle buzz turned into a loud hum that grew until it was a frightening roar. Thousands of bees must have been beating their wings, trying to find an enemy to attack. The vacuum cleaner was sucking at the outside entrance, and could barely keep up with the swarm as they flew outside. Many of them got past, and we could see them swarming around the porch light.

I sprayed poison into a few other nearby locations, and got more reactions in a couple of them. But it was clear that the first shot had been on target.

It took almost an hour before the roar died into a faint humming sound, and we went to bed.

This morning I sprayed a little more in, just testing if there were any live bees, but there was no reaction. So I cut a hole through the drywall into the box. Here’s what I saw through the hole:

I had reached in and broken a small piece of the honeycomb off before I took the picture, but most of it is intact here. The two bees on the comb are dead. Look carefully in the bottom and you can see lots more dead bees — about 2 inches thick. There were even a few larvae, though they’re hard to see in this picture.

Here’s what it looked like after I got it all out:

That’s a lot of comb to have been created in the few days they have been there, especially since I have been continually decimating their workers. I guess they had been as busy as bees.

And here’s a close-up:

There’s honey in that comb, but not a lot. I was sucking up most of the bees before they had a chance to get back in the hive, so they didn’t deliver much nectar. Even this wasn’t edible, because it was soaked with insecticide.

Finally, here’s a picture of the vacuum cleaner with dead bees.

The canister is 12 inches diameter, and the bees are 3 inches deep (with a little drywall dust on top of that where I cleaned up after cutting the hole). That’s about 340 cubic inches of bees. Assuming a 10 x 10 x 10 cube of 1000 bees is about 4 inches on a side, or 64 cubic inches, there must be around 1000*340/64 or over 5,000 bees. And that’s probably a low estimate.

Things are quiet in my house again. I feel a little bad about killing off so many bees, but I didn’t want to take any chances. The bee man who came on the previous call said that he doesn’t try to save the bees any more, so they would have died anyway. I guess the local beekeepers have plenty.