Category: Uncategorized

I can’t believe I lived my whole life so far without using tomatillos. Whenever I would see them in the market, they looked foreign to me. I had no idea how to use them, and wondered why anyone would want little green tomatoes covered with papery leaves. I never realized that they were the sole reason behind some of the sauces I loved, and that they are very easy to work with. Until today.
While shopping at the Mexican Price Chopper – the name we’ve given to a market a few miles away that has fresh tortillas, all kinds of chiles, nopales, masa, and all kinds of other things I like to cook with, I decided to pick up a few tomatillos. I only bought 8 of the little round sticky spheres. But with just a few minute in the oven and a blender they turn into a mouthwatering salsa that I will be making over and over again. When I think of all the years I cooked for people without them I feel such regret at not trying something unfamiliar much much sooner.

Eating light and drinking an espresso must be the key to good writing. I came home really tired from work, but when I went back after dinner I had the clearest writing session in weeks.
Today at lunch there was a goose on the patio outside the cafeteria at work with a little flock of 4 green goslings under her wing. The mother perked up her attention whenever anyone came near to the glass.
Web stat snippets: Two weeks ago my google gadget had 87 hits in one day. Today it had over 5000. Some guy who takes content from one of my pages and makes his own google gadget out of it is causing my site to get 100,000 hits/day from google servers.
My original homepage has a counter that stopped working at 87,000 hits last August because I upgraded my server, but didn’t recompile it, so it’s been broken like a lot of thigns on my site. It took 10 seconds to recompile and replace the old binary.
I learned enough css create a new decent looking homepage for myself and have decided to slowly start revamping my network of websites to be consisten and functional. I’m happy to finally understand the difference between html and layout – hopefully I can make use of it.

Today was a gorgeous day, one of only a few so far this spring. It’s time to start filling pots with plants, and doing projects around the yard. I’m still wrapped up in chapter writing, but I managed to take some time for other things.
For the first time this year, I spent money on gasoline for the Moto Guzzi. Two and 3/4 gallons for $8.53. I took a ride over to what’s left of the old Oak towers and took some pictures. The buildings have been reduced to a pile of rubble. The new structures are being advertised for Fall 2008, and look to be only 3 or 4 stories tall instead of the 10 or 15 stories of what was just knocked down.
I also spent $35 on a round cement ball for the fish pond. I had looked into building one myself, but coudln’t find information on water resistant or fish safe formulations of concrete used for making solid structures for water. I’ve read that some formulations can leach alkali or phosphate and change the water chemisty. I don’t like the ball just yet. It will make the pump difficult to access, and I worry that I used a clay pot to elevate it and I don’t know if clay gets soft over time in water. I hope the ball doesn’t leach anything into the water. The person at Van Liew’s guessed that it was fish safe. The fish have grown long beautiful flowing fins since they’ve been there.

I signed up for google analytics, just curious about what kind of information they collect. To track pages I had to insert some javasript calls back to google in the pages I want to track. The two pages I wanted to track are the most popular pages on the site. When I looked at the last time I had modified the pages I was surprised that I hadn’t touched them since 2001.
There’s a lot of pages on my site that haven’t been touched in years. I feel a small internal hesitation when I fire up emacs to change something that hasn’t been changed in several years. Kind of like when I used to buy records just because I felt like I should be able to say I have that record, instead of asking myself whether I really needed or wanted it.
Anyway, within 2 hours of enabling google-analytics I had the following picture of people accessing my site:

After years of neglect I’ve been mucking around in the guts of my website. I have a book chapter due, so of course any activity besides that needs immediate attention. There are some message boards I created in the late 90’s – when such things were rare and cool, that have been getting spammed by robots. One of them had accumulated 52 MB of text referencing viagra, drugs, and pornography in every way imaginable. The first 731 lines of text were conversation from 1998 about story writing, followed by 278,000 lines of SPAM. I decided to remove the spam and turn off the ability to add new posts, and found that I hadn’t modifed the code in nearly ten years! According to the logs, one of the message boards had received 1700 posts in 12 hours from 49 unique IP addresses.

This morning I left the house in my leather jacket. The sun was out. The air didn’t bite. I opened the garage and wheeled out the Moto Guzzi. It started right up. It was my first ride in 3 months. The bike felt great. But my ride lasted only 4 minutes because my commute to work is so short. I parked right near the entrance. I didn’t see any other bikes. I felt a small amount of joy that my motorcycle was the first to make an appearance this year. A little announcement to the others that it’s time to start riding again.

It took a while, but as the election draws near I’ve started to see more and more of the blue signs. A few days ago it seemed as if the red signs were outnumbering the blue signs with a ratio of 5 or 10 to 1 depending on which roads I travelled. Was the opposition really that overwhelming? Or are they simply better organized? Something I’ve noticed about the midwest is that a lot of people go to church. Since the Catholic church has some out against the amendment, I wonder if the signs were handed out at church. Perhpas the abundance of red signs is really just an indicator of church attendance.
With each passing day I see more and more blue signs popping up. My feelings of angst about anti-research attitudes in the midwest are letting up. I’m feeling hopeful.

Driving along some Kansas City neighborhood, a square little blue friend said hello to me from someone’s front yard, “Yes on 2”. A campaign sign in favor of stem cell research. In contrast to the “No on 2” signs I had been seeing, which were an alarming red color, the “Yes on 2” sign were a smart optimistic looking blue color. I was so glad to see the lone sentinel as I drove by. There is hope, now where do I get one of those signs?

As I was leaving work, I noticed there were people gathering
on the sidewalk out front. Some of them had candles. It must be a vigil or a protest of some kind!
The day before there had been a protest, but it was announced in advance, and it lasted only an hour. I missed it because I was in a meeting. The news didn’t really cover it. By the time K and I looked up from our laptops while watching the news, the report was over and we had to use TiVo to go back and see the 10 second blip.

I’ve been getting pretty comfortable living in the midwest. When visiting lecturers come to my office, some of whom are considering moving here from either coast, I have good things to say about living here. I know it’s more conservative than I like, but I’m usually not bothered by it as I can hold my own in conversation. I find that people aren’t used to being challenged on their ideas, and when I confront them with a well constructed argument, most of the conservative underpinnings dictating how things “should be” dissolve under the weight of open-minded rationality.
However, on my very short commute to work the other day, there was a house at the end of the block with a sign in the front yard reading, “No on 2.” The house is an older, well-used family house. Usually with lots of toys in the front yard. Sometimes the kids are out sitting on the steps watching the cars go by.
The “No on 2” signs have an ominous red color. I read it as I drove by and my heart sank. I almost did a double take. “That’s a conservative sign, declaring a stand against what I devote my life to”, or so I thought to myself. I live among people who are against stem cell research.
Over the next couple of days I began to see them everywhere. I might have expected to see them in other neighborhoods, but not in my own. Then again, I probably would have been surprised to see them anywhere. Just like when I used to see “Bush/Cheney” signs on motorcycle rides outside the bay area, but never in my own neighborhood. How could people simultaneously tell their kids to do good in school, but then put a sign in their yard favoring the inarticulate dumb guy over the too smart, too heady, well-spoken, experienced guy? I had heard that California was more conservative away from the cities, but I had to see it to believe it.
So here I am, living in a conservative part of the country, but in the neighborhood with the rainbow flags, thinking everything’s great, and I see houses all around me taking an active stand against research. It gave me the creeps. It reached inside my chest, and I felt a tinge uncomfortable. I actually toyed with the idea of packing up and moving. “Now that I know how you really feel, excuse me while I return to a more open-minded part of the country.”
I wondered if I should be a good citizen, walk down the block, and knock on the door of the red sign posters. “Hi. I’m a scientist, and I wonder if you could tell me why you favor throwing blastocysts straight into the garbage, rather than letting them donate a few of their stem cells to research that will benefit humanity?” But I felt afraid to approach the house. I don’t know exaclty what I feared, perhaps that people wouldn’t be able to tell me anything other than it’s just not right, and slam the door in my face.
What I didn’t see, were signs for the opposite viewpoint. I was sure that the majority of people were in favor of stem cell research. So where are all the signs for that?