Patrick’s Rants

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We’ve been camping a few times this summer. Three times at Blue Ridge Reservoir, and this past week at Beaver Creek Campground. It was rainy this past weekend, the forecast was for 60 – 80% chance of continuing rain and I was sure that we wouldn’t be heading anywhere to camp. But my wife decided she was going camping and there wasn’t anything that I could do about it, except go along. Rock Crossing is our favorite campground, but we’ve been there when it’s been raining. It’s miserable – or least I am.

The water was high and running quickly. Not so quickly that the kids couldn’t get in, swim, splash around and ride the float down the channel, but quickly enough to keep the bottom swirled up and the water a bit muddy in the widened space we were using. I fished all three days we were there with only a minor amount of luck. A nice sized catfish hooked on my line, but I was too far from my net to slip under it and as soon as I tried to lift it out of the water my 6lb or so line just snapped and the fish was gone. It was later, fishing just as the light was beginning to fade that I hooked into my only trout of the trip. I was casting my line across the creek nearly landing the bait no the shore and letting it float down the current when I noticed what looked like a little pop on the bobber. A couple more casts exactly the same and I hooked a 10 – 12″ rainbow trout. I was hoping to hook a catfish or two and switched to hotdogs on the bottom – and to my new catfish pole (replacing the pole lost at Lake Mary) and settled in to fish.

Around 9:30 or 10:00 my wife came down to the water to check on my luck. While we were chatting, I caught movement from the corner of my eye. A skunk. And then two and then five. What is it with night fishing and skunks? I decided to give up on the fishing, packed my stuff up and grabbed my trout. We went back to our camp site and I started to clean my fish. Apparently fish smells good to skunks because one walked up right behind me while I was cleaning the fish. I had to clean it quickly, slip it into a ziplock bag and drop it into the cooler. I put my fishing bait in the trunk of my car too so the skunks would leave.

For breakfast we had bacon, eggs, potatoes, and no my plate fresh trout cooked over the grill. Butter, salt, pepper and the last of the Corona limes squeezed over the top and sealed in foil. The trout was absolutely delicious. My wife asked for a small taste and then kept taking forks full from my plate. She agreed that I could bring home more trout to cook.

A few things to remember if you are going to Beaver Creek:

• it can get noisy during the day since it’s easy to get to, the PBR crowd just may show up
• do not keep trash at your campsite overnight, the skunks will visit – they even licked the greasy spot where our portable grill was sitting. We kept the grill in the back of our van
• No see ums are out morning and evening, put on bug spray before bed. Watch out for the ants too, they are everywhere
• The campground is small – 12 rentable spaces – and you are fairly close to your neighbors
• There is a charge for your second vehicle if you have one
• Firewood can be bought from the host or picked up in the forest
• The water is not deep enough for diving

All in all we had a great time even though it rained for days in Flagstaff (we only had a little bit of rain). The camp hosts were very friendly, chatting any time we ran into them.

I sent my brother a text message as I was leaving the boat dock at Lake Mary late last night. Technically it was first thing this morning. I had to tell him what just happened to me.

I had been looking forward to doing a little catfishing out by the boat ramp for a couple of days. I haven’t had any luck out at Lake Mary, but I keep trying; the very definition of insanity, I know. My brother calls the lake, “Lake Maybe”, when he’s being nice. A dirty whore of a lake that takes and takes and never gives anything back when he’s not. Many bobbers, weights, hooks and bait are gobbled up by the lake with little to no return of fish.

Last night I headed out with two poles and other gear to try to hook an elusive fish. I forgot my landing net (which I seem to do quite frequently) and I got out to the lake much later than I thought I would, around 9:00. I fished with anchovies and catfish bait for most of the night. The anchovies were stripped off the hook by those roaches of the water, crayfish. The catfish bait might have been as well.

I fished from shore because even though it was late there were still boats on the water and the dock was a bit busy. I was really hoping to have the boat dock to fish from, but the lake didn’t clear out until around 11:00pm. I moved over to the dock once everyone left the parking lot and continued my less than stellar fishing experience. About 12:30am, I pulled the remaining bait from one of my lines and thought just for the heck of it I’ll put on a lure and cast out a few times. I walked to the furthest end of the dock and cast and reeled in three times. I heard the bell attached to my other rod start to jingle and turned to grab the pole sitting about 20 feet away. I could make out the pole bobbing up and down in the dark. The fish hit the drag and it zzzzzzipped out. Six feet away from the pole it dropped off the pickle bucket that it was propped on and headed toward open water. I dropped down onto my knees to reach for it, but my hand only grabbed air. I missed the pole by two or three feet. Somewhere in the lake is a fish with a pole mounted over its fireplace.

I guess I will have to use some kind of light rope to secure my poles when I’m fishing this way. I guess we chalk that up to a life lesson.

I haven’t read Bob Cringely as much as I used to, but it’s nice to see that he somewhat agrees with me on social notworking He suggests downsizing your friends list and I can’t disagree with him. At least on here, there aren’t many commenters regardless of the number of readers so everything here is important. And everything on Bob’s blog is important to Bob and sometimes, such as here, important to our readers as well.

Let me repeat something that I have said before – all water is reclaimed water. All water is recycled. There is no more and no less of it. All the water on the earth is water that has always been here. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed; it’s a law of physics. Sure it can be combined with other chemicals and some reactions that make it something different – hydrocarbons for instance contain the basic molecules for water, burning oil based fuels will release some water vapor. Heck, breathing and plant respiration both release water vapor.

Native tribes, and some European transplants (yes, Caucasians, I’m looking at you) don’t want snow making at Arizona Snowbowl. They don’t want snow making because the “reclaimed” water “desecrates” the peaks. Give me a break. The First Amendment protects me from your wacky religious ideas as much as it makes an argument in your favor. Freedom of Religion canceled out by Freedom From Religion. Your religion cannot impinge on my freedoms just as mine cannot impinge on yours.

They don’t want it because there is “not enough research” into the effects of reclaimed water on the environment. Again, all water is reclaimed water. Reclaimed treated water is cleaner than incoming water in the water treatment plants. It is cleaner than water that you naturally find flowing down the streams. It is clean. Drop the bogus claims already. To use a phrase that has been floating around lately, your claims are vapid and hollow.

Bottom line, your side lost. You have lost at every step of the way. Howard Shanker has filed for an injunction in the related article,

“To win a temporary retraining order, Shanker must prove either that he is likely to win this case, or that irreversible changes (logging, for example) will result if construction proceeds before his case is heard.”

The recent 15,000 acre Shultz fire in Flagstaff shows what happens when the forest is allowed to become too thick, too dense. Fires that might have been small and burned naturally end up burning tens of thousands of acres due to injunctions against cleaning and clearing land. Don’t get me wrong, I like trees. I like my hair too, but I’m not about to never cut it because it would be “unnatural” to do so. Shanker and his clients have lost over and over again. It’s time to step aside, you have lost. You have nothing left to prove and you are using the legal process to vex and harass.

This morning the story of the California man whose Prius accelerated out of control has been on the major networks. I saw the story and wondered what the hell the guy’s problem was. I’m not saying the car didn’t do what he says it did, accelerate up to over 90 mph. He called 911 and a Highway Patrol officer was able to intervene, talk him through several steps and finally stop the car. Now, the CNN story says the emergency dispatcher tried to talk the man through possible solutions but doesn’t state what those steps might have been.
If you are driving a car that accelerates beyond your control (especially on more or less flat terrain, not going down hill like a bat out of hell) immediately put the transmission into neutral and apply the brakes. Once you get your car pulled over, shut off the engine. I can only wonder what the 911 dispatcher actually told the runaway James Sikes but it should have been, “put the transmission in neutral and pull the car over”. And that should have been it.

It all makes me wonder, “did you get that memo? I’ll make sure you get a copy of that memo”.

Qwest is going to lose my business due to a $1.00 convenience fee. I pay my bill online normally scheduled on the due date. I usually pay using a credit card that I rotate from time to time so that the card remains active – I have one that shows a credit “profile” that I can view if I use it once every 60 days. Since I don’t have a balance on it, that’s how I keep it active. This month they implemented a $1.00 convenience fee unless I sign up for auto pay. No way am I setting up auto pay. I don’t trust them not to screw it up. I don’t trust that something else might not happen to the account that will cause the price jump through the roof one month and I don’t trust myself to not get lazy and let an auto bill start a cascade of overdrafts and fees. It’s happened before. How about the guy with the million dollar water bill or the couple with their tens of thousands of dollars in roaming fees on their iPhones because the iPhone checks your email even when it’s turned off? Or how about the over $14,000 my ex-wife ran up in long distance in one month? Auto pay, no mufugging way. The payment is processed the same whether I schedule the bill or they do so why to they want to charge me to schedule it when I want? It doesn’t matter. I’m going to be costing them much more than $1.00 per month. I’m going to be paying the bill by check. They have to open it and process it – that is when I don’t use the walk in service and take up more than a dollar of their time or when I call customer service to complain regularly about the fee. Then I set up my account to paper bill.

But the $1.00 convenience fee is the final straw. I haven’t upgraded my personal internet speed since I went to DSL – I’m still surfing at 256k. Any upgrade offers Qwest has had include making a deal with the devil company itself, Microsoft. To get a discount from Qwest one must use MSN as the ISP. The only thing worse would be getting my internet service from Enron or Haliburton. I am not sending a dime more than absolutely necessary to Microsoft. $1.00 has broken my inertia. I talked to the cable company about internet and phone service. I’m going to save about $5.00 per month. And my internet speed will go up to 6mbs. That’s about 24 times the current speed with a $60 annual savings. Qwest, this is the last straw. And it only took $1.00.

It’s got to be national news. Rumors are flying about how much snow we are supposed to get this week. El Nino weather patterns are supposed to hit Northern Arizona like it’s 1967. Three storms are lined up to completely dump on us. Monday it’s anywhere from 5 to 16 depending upon elevation, Tuesday is supposed to add another 5 to 10 inches of snow. And following that is another “stronger” storm that there is no prediction for yet coming in Thursday night. It’s anyone’s guess at this point, but it’s entirely possible that this web site, hosted the way it is, might go dark for a few days. I’m hoping not. It’s also entirely possible that school will be canceled for all of next week. With my Sonata, I’m not gonna leave the apartment if that’s the case.

Oh, and nobody tell Rush, because for him this is proof that there is no such thing as global warming. I mean, look what finding out the Obamas were vacationing in Hawaii at the same time he was did to him.

Anyone who has any number of servers that they manage will eventually see failures. It’s just natural, hardware gets old and dies. Or you run completely over the hardware’s ability to keep up with demand.
Both of those things happened this year.

First – and I have to say this, forgive me – Windows Server 2003 has served me well. But the hardware just would not keep up with three to five users who kept three to five programs open each. This is a machine that has dual PIII 1ghz chips and a whopping 1.5gb ram. Three full time users on Windows 2003 Server, even I’m a little impressed. But it was straining under the heavy load. And the load was heavy.

My partner ordered the new Dell to replace the VisionMan gray box server that served us so well for these last several years. The server itself – hardware – is still up and strong. I have had to replace CPU fans on one of our machines, but that happens sometimes.

The migration from Windows 2003 Server (using Terminal Services for Windows based software access) to Windows Server 2008 64bit (also with Terminal Services) has been a little bumpy.¹ I nearly fell out of my chair when the current year tax software installed without any major hitches. Our Windows Server is now online – all major software has been migrated and the Windows 2003 server has been powered off awaiting the day it is wiped clean.

1. Mostly chronicled in Geek News and Stuff

I guess I’m not the only person who thinks that CEOs are overpaid and that compensation needs to be fixed. Will Ashworth writes Executive Bonuses Must Go over on Investopedia.com and his arguments are compelling. Pay CEOs a decent rate of pay, say $4 million/yr and let them buy shares of the company with their own damn money if they want stock.