bierfaristo blogs

I've started writing posts several times, but haven't found time to write more than the beginning of a paragraph. I'll try to actually get something out tonight.

We got off to a slow start with catching mongooses, but today we made a lot of progress. Buzz had always been enamored with laying out grids of traps, but the past few days have convinced him that using traplines along roads is a more efficient use of effort. We've caught a fair number of mongooses in the past couple of days. We've caught around 20 so far.

We're sampling in a few new areas. We're trapping near the refuge headquarters and also at the north end of the refuge, near a public swimming pool. I've been trying to take more time to just look around, now that we have the students to do the lion's share of the actual work.

Near the pool, there is a population of iguanas that go out into the lawn to eat grass and other greens. They are shy around people, but aren't afraid of cars, so we could get some good pictures of them from inside the car.

There is another guy here who studies bats. We took him out to see our mongoose operation and we're planning to go out with him "batting" sometime. Daniel already got to go with Jonathan and George (the bat-guy's son). They caught 20 or 30 Artibeous and the boys got to release them. Coincidentally, there was a bat low down on a tree near the cottages today that we all got to look at. For him to be hanging around in the day, suggests that he's not healthy. We tried to poke some mango into him and he seemed to be eating lustily. Hopefully, he'll pull through. They're cute little guys, with soft fur like a chinchilla.

This evening, we also visited the turtle researchers on the nesting beach. We went to a spot where a green turtle had recently done some excavating, but hadn't actually nested. We could see the tracks, though. It sounded like that was all we were going to get to see. I was sitting in the sand watching, when I saw a baby sea-turtle back up the beach. I ran for it, to make sure the pelicans and ghost crabs couldn't get it. It turned out to be a leatherback nest they had missed. We rescued all of the babies and then got to take them to the other side of the point and release them. It's wonderful to watch the little guys struggle into the waves and swim away. Mission accomplished.

The rain ended and today was another beautiful day in paradise.

Today we tried to lay out a grid of traps. Buzz had the goal of setting out a grid of 25 traps in a grid with 25 meters between each trap. In the scrub under the tropical sun it was incredibly brutal. After a couple of hours, I was exhausted and soaked with sweat. And our GPS was dead. Buzz and the students managed to set out 20 traps on the grid.

We had set traps the day before along the road. We checked the traps and found only a single mongoose. The mongoose was already tagged -- we had caught her first in 2007 and again in 2009. She was an old female with almost no teeth left. Somehow, even without teeth, she's managed to hang on. We wonder what they eat after their teeth give out.

In the evening, we had the chance to go out and see baby sea turtles again. Daniel had seen the before, but Charlie hadn't, so we took him out. Luckily, just as we arrived, two scientists arrived with a bunch of baby turtles, so we got to see hundreds of baby leatherbacks. We stayed for a half hour as they got started processing them, and then headed back. I was glad Charlie to to see them.

Originally, we were supposed to out with a guy to catch bats tomorrow, but it turns out that the owners of cottages are having a pig roast, so instead we're going to do that.

Traveling to St. Croix is really pretty easy: just two flights. You leave around breakfast time and arrive just after lunch time. I hate flying, but its about as painless as one can ask for.

We arrived this year under heavy overcast. There is a tropical storm somewhere to the north, which they tell has has brought a lot of rain over the past few days. The colors are all muted in the gray half-light and there's hardly any breeze.

The water is still nice, however. It's not as clear as usual. Reportedly it's a bit murky for snorkeling, but its still warm and salty -- that's good enough for me.

After cooling off in the ocean, we went to the Lost Dog for pizza. I posted the following haiku: La Perdita Hund'... ja la plej bona pico en la tuta mond' / The Lost Dog... absolutely the best pizza in the whole world.

I felt a bit bad about running out on the staff trying to sort out issues with the server migration. This evening, there was a note from Chris that they'd solved one of the key issues with mail. Now I don't feel so bad.

Now its after 9pm and I'm exhausted. It's been a brutal week. Time to get some sleep.

I spent an intense week, culminating last night, preparing for and then migrating the department services from an old server to a new one. It's a server we've had for about 10 years and it has everything running on it. I was primarily responsible for migrating the file and web services -- including a complex scientific web application. Last night, I was in the office until 3am trying to stitch things back together. Today, most things are sort of working, but many things aren't quite right. Still -- we did it and the world did not end. Now we can go forward and make things better.

Today, we went to see Jonathan Coulton perform with his new band. He played a mix of old and new songs. The Iron Horse was packed with his fans, who sang along with all the old favorites and listened raptly each time he performed something new. We always enjoy seeing him perform, although its quite different when he doesn't have Paul and Storm to warm up the audience. On stage, he affects having quite an edge, which works for him pretty well.

I had seen that John Hodgman was going to be there and when he saw that I was going to be there he mentioned via twitter (I guess that's called "tweeting it" to use the vernacular.) Within minutes, I had another half-dozen followers on twitter. I wonder how long before they discover that, instead of some interesting funny man, they're following some weirdo who writes Esperanto-language haiku.

Afterwards, I posted two comments, I said

limako was not just soft-rocked by @jonathancoulton & actually touched @hodgman with (his) hand / devas nun gardi la manon kontraŭ memorigaĵ-stelistoj

and

famulo staras inter la homar'... kvazaŭ mem homo / the celebrity stands among the people... as if one himself. #hajko #haiku #senrujo

It was nice to meet John Hodgman. I shook his hand and he spoke with me for a few moments. He was very genuine and thanked me effusively for the little translation I made for him several months ago. He invited me to speak with him further after the concert, but he was swarmed with people, so I just remembered myself to him in passing as I left, with his earnest thanks following me. I was pleased that Lucy got a copy of the book that had that bit for Richard for his birthday.

After we got back, we finished packing for St. Croix. Tomorrow we leave early for our next big adventure.

It's our last night in Champaign. Tomorrow, we're planning to stop at the Pine Hills Nature Preserve in Indiana, and then drive back to Massachusetts. We'll probably need to stop on the road someplace and will get home sometime on Friday.

We've had a great visit! We did a lot of fiction writing -- I wrote thousands of words. I finished one story -- at least a rough draft. It still needs a lot of work, but was satisfying to finally get it written. I have two other stories in progress. The three of us also wrote a draft of a collaborative story. We had a lot of fun.

It's all been over much too quickly, but I'm also looking forward to a quiet weekend at home before going back to work on Tuesday.

We arrived in Champaign as a heat wave swept in and gripped the city. We had planned to visit a water park for two days, but thunderstorms prevented us until Wednesday. In the morning, we worked in the library until the water park opened at 12:30. Around noon, some dark clouds swept in and we worried that we'd have to wait yet another day, but a quick check of the radar showed that they were just passing clouds, and we changed clothes, put on our swim suits, and headed for Centennial Park.

Daniel, as usual, was wearing his swim-trunks, black crocs, and an orange and silver swim shirt with his swim goggles around his neck. Philip was wearing a loose, light-blue mesh shirt over his swimsuit and had his fedora. Jackie wore a large straw hat. Lucy hadn't changed into swim wear, intending to find a quiet spot in the shade to read while we went swimming.

The Sholem Aquatic Center lies in the middle of a green park surrounded by subdivisions and adjacent to a middle school. We got the last parking place and walked along the black chain-link fence to the entrance in a low, cement building with a blue metal roof. As we approached, the woman in the ticket office slid open the window and took our money. A man sitting at the entrance marked the receipt with a blue highliter and let us pass. We walked through a dark hallway, past the changing rooms and other doors, emerging into the busy pool area with the bright sunlight reflecting off the cement deck.

The place was packed. People of all ages, sizes, shapes, and colors were running this way and that, splashing and playing and shouting. There were small children, young women wearing bikinis, skinny boys, parents, grand parents and everything else. Life guards, wearing red swimsuits, were positioned strategically around the pools and would occasionally whistle to redirect children not following the rules.

The aquatic center is divided into regions each with a catchy name: the Puddle is a small pool for toddlers, the Oasis is a large, irregularly-shaped pool with regions for all ages, and, at the other side of the center, are the Plunge, with water slides, and the Lazy River. We took Lucy to the Meadow, a grassy area near the pools, and found her a shady place to read, then slathered on a copious amounts of sun screen before setting out. Philip and Jackie headed directly to the Lazy River while Daniel and I went to the Oasis.

The Oasis has a shallow end, like a beach, with water lapping at the shore. Jets of water spray up in one area. Another place has a post with branches, like a tree, each with a bucket that periodically fills and dumps water. In another spot, a mushoom-shaped structure produces a circular sheet of water that children can duck under and splash in. Little children were running and splashing here with their parents

At the deeper end, older children would hang on the walls, climb out, and jump in, in a never ending cycle of laughter and splashing. Most of the people in the deep end were in small groups of two or three, sorted by gender. Young women, talking constantly, and young men swimming, yelling, jumping, and rough-housing. Floats sectioned off a few lanes where a handful of people, mostly grownups, were swimming laps. Daniel and I floated in the cool water for a while before going to join Phil and Jackie in the Lazy River.

The Lazy River is a water-filled channel 10 to 15 feet wide formed into a irregularly circular loop with underwater jets creating a current that carries swimmers, using inflatable rings, around and around. One of the water slides, an open slide, enters the Lazy River near the middle. Two entrances to the Lazy River open on either side of the Waterfalls -- a region where jets of water soak anyone floating through on their inflatable rings. Jackie particularly liked the waterfalls and would exit on one side and run back to the other to float through the waterfalls again and again like a little kid.

After an hour in the sun, I was ready to just sit in the shade. Little by little, everyone trickled back and joined Lucy in the Meadow, except for Daniel who is indefatiguable when it comes to aquatic sports. Finally, we dragged him out, dried him off, and headed for the car.

Daniel, Lucy and I have been enjoying our visit to Champaign. We've spent much of the days in the library using the private study rooms to write. I've started writing a new story and worked a bit on an older one. We haven't done as much Esperanto as we'd planned to, but Daniel has done the first few lessons at Lernu and Phil and I have worked on a translation.

Last night, we escaped the heat by going to a movie. We saw Toy Story 3 in 3D. It was fine, although the franchise seems a bit tired to me. It didn't really break any new ground.

This morning, we took a tree walk down a street with an interpretative booklet to identify all the trees. Some I knew, many I had once known, but had forgotten, and some were entirely new. On a hackberry, we found two cicadas emerging as adults. One was already mostly done and the other just emerging from its exoskeleton. We watched for half an hour while it drew itself out and unfurled its wings.

Later today, we plan to go to a water park (if the weather cooperates) and then we are scheduled to have dinner with Barbara. We're keeping busy while maintaining a relaxed pace.

It takes most of two days to drive between Western Mass and Champaign-Urbana. We generally just drive until we're ready to stop and then stop someplace at random for the night. This year, we were near Kent, Ohio and stopped at a Comfort Inn just off the expressway. During the night, I took a few minutes to read up on the Kent State shootings and, in the morning, we drove over to visit the memorial before setting off for the day.

It was a clear, summer morning with the sun just rising as we pulled into the parking lot by Prentice Hall at Kent State University. There are four small regions demarcated by short light posts that indicate where students were killed. Lucy was shocked to remember that so many had died. The spot where Jeffrey Miller was killed -- the student featured in the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo from the shootings -- was closet to the knoll in the background from where the troops had fired.

We were all very moved by the memorials and walked silently among them then up to a sign with information about the shootings and about the memorial. We walked up to the metal sculpture to see the bullet-hole. We didn't stay long -- maybe 20 minutes -- before getting back into the car and heading back to the highway.

Today, Lucy, Daniel, and I headed out to visit Philip in Champaign. We got a good early start and drove until early evening before finally stopping in Kent, Ohio. We made pretty good time, stopping just briefly for gas and quick rest stops. We stopped for a few minutes in Scranton for lunch at the Coney Island Texas Lunch. We fell in love with the place years ago and try to stop whenever we go through.

We're staying at the Comfort Inn in Kent and finding it very satisfactory. They have a nice pool/water park which Daniel liked a lot. They're also right next to a passable Mexican restaurant. I got one of their specialities: the Brimfield Special. It is an odd burrito with chicken and onions, smothered with a cheese sauce and garnished with shrimp. Weird, but really really good. It's not Enchiladas Jocoque, but still very tasty.

Exhausted now.

Lots of great stuff on the teh interwebs today. gripping story about human trafficking, you are not dead (by the guy who posted the human trafficking thing),a birthday surprise, an offensive translator, Hacking the Academy.

A faculty member recently proposed that University classrooms on campus would be "no wireless" by default. Sigh... I sent this reply:

This won't work (on technical grounds), but I would oppose it on
philosophical grounds as well.

From a technical standpoint, it's not feasible to exclude wireless
networking from classrooms. The base-stations that are providing 802.x
connectivity in classrooms are part of a network providing connectivity
generally in an area. Moreover, many devices students are using are
using 3G (cell phone) technology and are not part of the University's
infrastructure. The only way to stop them would be to either enclose
the classroom in a giant Faraday cage (impractical, unless you're the
NSA) or jam the signals (against Federal law).

I've heard the arguments before and I know how passionately people feel
about this issue. When the printing press was first created, I'm sure
that some faculty thought it was terrible that students could just buy a
book, rather than having to create their own hand-written copy from what
the professor read (that's the etymology of "lecture" after all). As
the printing press changed the nature of knowledge, I believe the
network is changing what it means to learn. Trying to shut it out of
the classroom is denying that reality.

Reading about recissions in the health-insurance industry, I was struck again by the clever ways that capitalism does things efficiently. Rather than checking to see if people are eligible for coverage (which might be expensive), instead insurance companies would sign people up and get them to start paying. As long as they didn't file any claims, they would keep taking their money. But, if the person got sick, only then would the company check to see if there were any way to weasel out of covering them. What a monstrous and inhuman way to treat people! The whole point of insurance is to know that you're covered in the event of a crisis. To have a whole industry devoted to pulling the rug out from under vulnerable people is a real travesty.

The semester reached a crescendo today. I spent yesterday and this morning helping my students (and another class of students) finish making posters, went to the founder's day celebration during a windstorm, and learned that a tree had blown over in our yard. It was a little stressful. After it was over, I came home and had a drink. Or maybe two.

Each semester is different. I always worry a bit about the final research project in class writing class because sometimes it works great and sometimes it doesn't. Even when it isn't great, I always think it's better than if we hadn't done it. Research is always like that: you don't know for sure what the answer is going to be. And if you knew what the answer was, you wouldn't be doing it, would you. This semester, I offered to open up the BCRC on the last Sunday afternoon before the research project was due, expecting most of the class to use the chance to get the project finished. Only one student showed up. Yesterday -- when on the day before the project I still hadn't seen a single poster -- I began to sweat a bit. But the students pulled it together. Before I left for lunch, all but one group had their poster printed.

I don't usually do anything for lunch, but today was "Founder's Day". The University put on a giant catered lunch to celebrate. When I left the building, I was surprised how windy it was -- I hadn't heard that in the forecast. The celebration was near the library, which (being 26 stories) does weird things with the wind on a regular day. Today, the winds buffeted me as I walked to the celebration, making me stumble it was so strong.

The plan had been to meet Alisa at 12:30 (when I thought the lines might have gone down some). Alisa was late (big surprise), but the line was extremely long -- almost a quarter mile. I waited in line and hadn't even made it to the front of the line when Alisa joined me 20 minutes later. Then Lucy called.

Lucy said, "I heard a funny noise and checked and found that a big part of a tree has blown down in the yard." I asked, "Did it hit the house." She said, "I don't know." I said, "Well, can you check?" After a few moments she said, "I don't think it has." I said, "Do you need us to come home and check?" But she seemed pretty sure things were OK.

After another 25 minutes, we had our food and were sitting in a giant tent which did a remarkable job of keeping out the wind. It was a great lunch!

After lunch, I went back to the office and we had our final class meeting and poster session. Al Richmond stopped by and I invited him to see the students posters too. It went fine!

Still, the stress of the afternoon rather played on me and, by the time I got home -- after I had checked on the status of the tree -- I was glad to fix myself a cocktail and watch the evening news.

There's more to do: we'll need to find a tree service to deal with the tree (and maybe deal proactively with some of the other trees in the yard). And I want to make some adjustments in how the research project go: we just haven't had enough time for it in recent semesters, so I guess I need to cut one of the other assignments to make more time. But there will be time another for those things in the days that follow. For the moment, I can take pleasure in my students' fine work and the tree that didn't hit the house.

Among my varied accomplishments, I can now add that I am an award-winning author of Esperanto-language haiku. And I get a pound of free Raos Coffee!

I have been writing a lot of haiku lately and posting them to my twitter feed -- partly for napowrimo and partly just because. Twitter is perfect for haiku: the shortness and the empherality of the medium. (Although I am informed that the Library of Congress is going to archive all twitter posts.)

In any event, I was primed when I saw that Raos was having a contest and I submitted two haiku:

vintra dimanĉo...
paruoj manĝas semojn
mi trinkas kafon

a wintry Sunday...
chickadees eat their birdseed
I drink my coffee

and

unua kafo
kaj varma kaj vapora...
atendas ĵurnal'

today's first coffee
hot with the steam still rising...
the newspaper waits

They haven't said which one they liked better. I had also written this haiku years ago, thinking about Raos:

homoj kaj birdoj...
la frumatena
babilad'...
ĉe la kafejo

people and songbirds...
early morning conversations
at the coffeeshop

Philip is just a little jealous. :-)

When I first arrived in the Biology Department, the webserver was mostly the province of geeks: they were the only ones who know anything about it -- or cared, really. We have consistently been ahead of the curve in terms of engaging faculty and staff in building and maintaining web services, but over the past two years we've turned a corner. The conventional wisdom has finally shifted and what used to be considered an addendum to the Department's public image, the website is now the pre-eminent way in which the Department presents itself to the world.

One effect has been that I'm much less comfortable hacking on the live site to make changes to drupal, update modules, etc. Several months ago, I sent an email to the technical staff saying that we needed to construct a system for staging so that we could update our multi-site drupal installation and do testing, without affecting the production site, and then switch when we were ready. Over the past two or three days, we finally made it happen.

I spent a good time of time looking to see if there was a common way everyone did this, but it seems like each sysadmin rolls their own, so that's what we did.

Conceptually, it's simple: we duplicated the webtree and called one "htdocs-yin" and the other "htdocs-yang". We similarly duplicated all of the drupal databases into yin/yang versions. The script looks to see which way htdocs is pointed (yin or yang) and replicates everything from one to the other -- this builds the development mirror -- and rewrites the drupal settings files to use the new copy of the database. The second script just switches which way the symlinks point.

With development space, I could finally update the department website: I updated drupal from 6.14 to 6.16, updated about 12 modules, installed a new module, and made some scary changes to some views that are prominent features of the site. Everything seemed OK, so we pulled the switch and we're now using the updated version of the site.

If there had been a serious problem after we switched, I could have just run the switch again and it would swap them back again. Next week, I can start working on doing some significant development for the department site and not have to worry that my changes will break the production site. A very satisfactory accomplishment.