Where Are My Teeth?

The canadian acting mafia

If, like us, you watch a bunch of middlng and bad scifi and the couple of good canadian dramas that make it over the border in this neck of the woods, you start recognizing a lot of the same actors, including a fewwho might actually be good. (For all I know even bad american shows pay a bunch more than the top canadian series, and it's for damn sure they don't require as much work.)

One day the disposable partner of a rogue vice cop, the next day the leader of primitive warriors on an episode of Andromeda that makes Star Trek's treatment of The Race Question look sophisticated. Or one day a top homicide detective, the next a good doctor or a bad cameraman on Stargate. (The transition from fearless vampire lover to leading parliamentarian takes a little longer, it seems.) Even the random read-from-the-computer people keep showing up again and again. (Of course, in a country that's mostly howling arctic wastes how many actors do you expect to see?)

There's one guy who's appeared as a villain on both Stargate and Andromeda, but I have yet to see him in anything echt canadian. I don't even know if I should look.

Not as bad as it might have been

"That's really weird!" was what my dentist kept saying as she drilled a couple of little keyways and slapped in another dollop of amalgam, wham! bam! no charge no novocaine. (And maybe I just hadn't noticed before, but the drill had a cool little LED spotlight just behind the tip -- seems like a good idea.)

Apparently the little plug of metal that popped out last week was just part of a much larger filling in that tooth. How it cracked off and became eligible for a flip of the floss is anybody's guess. One possibility is that the hole was so big (four batches of amalgam, I think she said) and took so long to pack that some of the amalgam simply didn't bond to the rest, like a concrete foundation poured in batches a couple of weeks apart.

And then off to the tire store, where they dithered some more with the leaky right rear tire, this time plaming it on a corroded rim. We'll see how it goes, I guess.

in which I declare defeat

I've been building an LCD picture frame with a tiny little linux motherboard and a notebook hard disk behind it, and I thought it would be really cool to have a wireless network connection so that I could dowload pictures to it remotely, upgrade the software without taking it off the wall, and generally have another computer in the house to play with.

So I went to the web site of the people who supposedly make drivers for wireless USB adaptors, and I followed different driver that was supposed to be compatible with my particular linux kernel. Uh-uh. I upgraded my kernel, then downgraded it. Nope. I downloaded the source code for the driver and compiled it from scratch (which also requires downloading and configuring the source code for the kernel. whee.). Nuh-uh. I downoaded a bunch of usb scanning tools so I could make sure the dongle was really there. It was, but no driver software was willing to claim responsibility for it. (May I say that each of these negative results required an hour or two of fiddling with scripts that were supposed to be somewhere but weren't, or if they were there produced microsoft-level uninformative error messages, plus powering down the machine and booting it back up every time something might have changed for the better?)

I'm sure that someone who has configured this stuff successfully could spend only a few hours to tell me what I'm doing wrong and how to fix it. But I'm just going to wait six months until the kernel people and the driver people have come to some kind of agreement and packaged the whole thing in one place for idiots like me who don't want to delve into the gory details.

So there.

More News from Planet George

The president's crack team of economic advisors is taking aim at the decline of the US manufacturing sector. Almost three million fewer people in the US have jobs making cars, clothing, integrated-circuit chips and other material objects than when Bush took office, and that's bad because those jobs tended to be relatively well-paying, with decent benefits and the kind of long-term prospects you could make a career out of. Jobs in the rapidly-growing service sector that have been available to ex-manufacturing types tend to be lower-paid, with lousy or no benefits.

So are the president's men going to revamp the economy and bring those better jobs back? Nu-uh. Instead, they're making an argument that some supposedly service-sector jobs are really manufacturing jobs in disguise. Filling a container with sugar, carbonated water, flavorings and colorings, they suggest, could be considered manufacturing whether it's done on the assembly line at a soft-drink bottling plant or at your local restaurant. Assembling a whopper hold the lettuce extra pickles, by these lights, is no less manufacturing than assembling an automatic transmission. Those folks who ask you, "paper or plastic" at the store aren't just baggers, they're manufacturing packaged groceries. And Steve down at Astor Place, he's manufacturing both piles of clipped hair and finely-coiffed heads.

If all of this nomenclature seems kinda pointless to you, you're probably right. The baggers and burger-flippers don't suddenly get health insurance and a big raise from $5-something an hour just because someone in Washington thinks they should be reclassified as manufacturing workers. They can still be canned on 10 minutes notice -- although with the way things seem to be going, maybe this is the kind of job careers will be made of for the next generation.

At the upper echelons of the service sector, of course, this renaming has been taken to heart for some time already. Anyone who's worked in publishing can tell you that writers, artists and photographers don't write, draw or take pictures, they produce content. And journalists, as Noam Chomsky and others will tell you, don't report the news, they manufacture public consent to policies already decided on. Oh, and those financial whiz kids at Enron, Arthur Andersen and Worldcom (may their corporate tatters rest in peace) weren't committing fraud, they were just manufacturing earnings statements.

It just keeps coming

Or going, as the case may be. The other night, scant hours after running into my dentist's receptionist at the grocery store, I was flossing that lower right molar where the new filling has an edge that slices right through the floss.

Or had, rather. "Not this time" I said to myself as I pulled upward. And I was right. Out popped the little slug of grey metal, leaving the floss perfectly intact. I left voicemail, got a call back the following morning that no one was in friday, and monday was booked solid, so 9AM (gasp!) tuesday will be the time to survey the damage. Meanwhile the hole I can feel with my tongue really doesn't seem that deep (which of course worries me in its own way...).

But I like chewing on things.

A replacement for Scott McClellan?

Soon-to-be-former University of Colorado football coach Gary Barnett two days ago:

"You know what guys do, they respect your ability. Katie was a girl, and not only was she a girl, she was terrible. She couldn't kick the ball through the uprights."

and yesterday:

"I sincerely regret that yesterday a portion of my remarks were either misinterpreted or aired out of context.
...
What I wanted to communicate was that regardless of Katie Hnida's abilities, I wanted Katie on our football team, I wanted to give her a chance to be a part of our program ."

I'm getting too old for this

What you're looking at, flanked by AA batteries for scale, is a USB-to-wireless local area network adaptor. I remember when electronic components used to have real heft to them, real metal in their coils or bodies, dangerous corners. This thing is about the size and weight of a pack of sugarless gum.

It only has to be that big because of the antenna; otherwise the whole thing could probably fit inside the plug. Yeesh.

The Mole In Winter

For at least a week now we'd been wondering what strange bird made those drunkard's-walk tracks around the feeder, and late this afternoon we found out.

Even as you hate the little lawn-destroying vermin with an incandescent ultraviolet passion you have to admire its pluck surviving the winter under the snow and coming out at even the first signs of growing daylight.

I couldn't tell whether the mole was picking up suet bits, thistle seed, or something else entirely in its peregrinations. It would pop out for a while, zigzag about mostly through its existing tracks, and then pop back in its hole.
Strange.

That was then, this is now

The picture in my mind's eye is probably wrong, but I think it was in my father's study in New Haven that I first learned about proxy statements. (A wall of bookshelves, the big desk I sit at now, more bookshelves, pictures, the closet with the file cabinet that held all the interesting old widgets, the big picture window overlooking the park) He explained to me the basic idea, that shoreholders got to vote but that it seldom made much of a difference because most of the stock was held by big institutions (banks, pension funds, mutual funds), and said that he almost always voted the way that management recommended, because they were better informed about the particulars of each proposal.

Nowadays I almost always vote against management recommendations. The board members have typically collected $50,000 and up for a few days' work, while overseeing decisions that range from more or less sensible to downright stupid and occasionally treasonous or fraudulent. And every time a shareholder suggests, say, forming a committee to look into allegations that supervisors in overseas factories make a habit of beating to death workers who get uppity, or letting shareholders vote on plans that give multimillion-dollar bonuses for dismembering the company, the opposing arguments are always the same. We don't need to do that. We already do that. We've looked into our current system of compensation and are satisfied that it meets or exceeds industry standards.

Of course it still doesn't make much of a difference; the big institutional investors still control most of the shares, and no one ever got sued for voting with management. But it gives me a brief glow that I've done a little bit of the right thing.

Where, Indeed

Part of one of them is probably making its way through my small intestine even now, thanks to some really crunchy overcooked pita bread I was using to dip pesto for lunch. Appointment at 330.

UPDATE "It's just a little flake of enamel that's chipped off. I'll see if I can polish it down so it doesn't cut your tongue."
...
"Ohhh. It's bigger than I thought." And that's where the fun began.

Things were a little hectic down at the dentist's office -- the computer messaging system was down (there's a computer by every exam chair and a few other places, but sadly no keyboard for patients) the dental supply guy was there to take orders, but the person who usually ordered stuff was out with the flu. So between ordering new rollers for the xray film processor (this set lasted seven years; the previous set -- which never left the chemical bath -- lasted three. I wonder what they're made out of; almost certainly not the composition that used to be standard for pritning presses) and discussing new wax-impression tricks for getting better-shaped crowns, and whether a lot of dentists' office were losing swathes of staff to the flu, I got a little keyway drilled into the big block of amalgam that had been exposed when the side of the tooth cracked off, and then the dentist slathered Miracle Mix into the gap, shaped it with a pick and a spatula, and presto! it was all done.

The stuff is hard as a rock, she says, and will last until that tooth -- which was a teardown anyway -- can be dynamited and rebuilt from scratch.

It doesn't add up

I was thinking about this the other day, until it made me nervous.

For most of the past century or so, historically low interest (and inflation) rates havehelped businesses and governments make long term investments. The Bell System paid in the neighborhood of 2% for the money it spent implement universal service; the feds spent maybe 3% on the funds to build the interstate highway system. That's about the interest rate you want when your investment is going to be paying off 20, 30 or 40 years down the line.

Now interest rates have been down around 2-3% for a couple years, but you don't see any big long-term investments in infrastructure, education, manufacturing plant and equipment, nada. (The biggest infrastructure investment of the past 10 years, hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber optic cable, is still going largely unused, and it was funded not with low-interest borrowing so much as fraudulently inflated stock.)

Of course the obvious reason not to make major investments is that you don't believe they will pay off. And that kinda says something about everyone's idea of what's going to happen in the coming 10 years. (Yes, I know about obsolescence, but a) there are some things that don't become obsolete quite so fast, and b) if something is going to become obsolete, better you should pay a tenth again the price in interest during its useful lifetime than half again or more...)

Gordon Moore and hard disks

Just now I got spam from MacMall offering, among other things, 160-gigabyte firewire drives for $179. (That's not the cheapest you can get them, but it's a nice convenient number.)

I bought my first 20-megabyte drive (for a Mac II) in 1988 for the exhorbitant sum of $605 (I was about to become unemployed, so why not splurge). In the ensuing 16 years, the price of disk storage has gone from roughly $30/megabyte to roughly $1/gigabyte. That's a factor of 30,000. If you allow for inflation, the amount of disk you can buy a retail for a dollar has pretty much doubled every year.

Remember that fable about the chessboard and the grains of rice? We're a quarter of the way there.

War Tourism

I came across this thoroughly surreal account of a visit to Iraq by actor Sean Penn. He really seems to have only a minimal understanding of what's going on around him, but the descriptive snippets are telling.

It reminds me of the impression I got after watching Platoon and reading Bill Mauldin's The Brass Ring that for individual soldiers war is like a really long camping trip where you can't go home and people keep trying to kill you.Of course the crucial thing for someone like Penn is that he can go home -- in fact, as with most of us, the very prospect of being in a situation he can't get out of is enough to send him back there.

In full voice

I am coming more and more to think that Thermos is the feline equivalent of Fran Drescher (or perhaps Lina Lamont), only prettier. He opens his mouth, and out comes a sqeak or a raucous *mrowr* or some other noise that just isn't the mellifluous cat we were used to. He does it to warn us away, but he also does it to say "Come rub my belly" or "Oh, hi, it's you" or "Wake up!" or "Just walking around, thought I had something to say" and it's all the same set of grating noises. I think voice lessons are really beyond what we could do for him.

He's trying to be a good cat, I think (or may we're just the only warm things left in the house) but he just doesn't measure up. Maybe we should get a kitten to do voice-overs for him.