Blog Archives 050914 to 050819

Old pointless chatter instead of new pointless chatter.

 

050914 Raleigh, NC, USA
Finally here. Tired. Very tired. Nice new apartment, good car to use. I have updated the Travel Details page with all the new current contact information. Bed now.

050914 Washington DC, USA
Ahrgh! My fourth trip through security when I have not left secured areas all day! As usual, US security pissed me off. I need that belt to keep my pants up, so the US insistence on wanding and patting down everyone even when they didn't set off the metal detector means that I have to let go of my pants and spread my arms wide while hoping they are fast enough that my pants will not fall around my ankles before they are done with the pat down. My freaking shoes are canvas and rubber, no metal, so surrendering them is pointless especially since rubber and plastic explosive look the same on the screen. Were these more invasive procedures actually more effective, I would have less reason to complain, but the truth is the procedures are simply more invasive. Stupid.

050914 Frankfurt, Germany
I'm now a little worried if I will be fed this flight; SAS was quite mercenary on the flight from København to Frankfurt; you didn't get so much as a cup of coffee unless you waved cash at the attendants. Almost American of them. Anyway, it was an interesting view coming in for a landing. Dense population centers separated by broad swaths of dense forest. I've been through security three times now and I have already been told I'll be doing it again when Doing customs in Washington DC. First Danish security, then German security, then US security before boarding the US-bound flight. That's three times of having to remove belt, shoes, and spare change. Three times of having to explain why I'm carrying two laptops, and three times of being pulled aside for bag searches because the tangle of power-cords, power supplies, external hard drives, USB keys, PDAs, cell phones, and other electronic devices in my backpack are confusing the X-ray people. Technology is great, but carrying a whole lot of it through security is not super-fun.

The plane I've boarded for the US is a massive B777. Take-off was impressive, with the plane hurtling faster and faster down a very long runway, straining to take to the air. We spent so long at high speed at ground level that I was becoming concerned about when the runway would end and the tree-line would start

050914 København, Danmark
I don't know if it is lingering effects of the cold, moving-induced stress-related, or a combination of both, but meals are not staying down that well. Anything more than a quarter or half of a sandwich is a guarantee of seeing the meal again. Bleah.

My air freight was 167 kg this time even though it was 98 kg coming over here. It is not that I bought much, but I was given a suitcase, more clothes, language books and a computer. Also, rather than haul more myself, I decided to air freight a significant portion (>38kg) of the things I had initially hand carried over here. Once I get to North Carolina, I'll be shipping at least 70 kg (i.e. 40% of all my remaining stuff) to my parents for storage. This includes the language texts I had kept with me out of optimism; the Italian, German, and Japanese stuff. Anything I don't have time for needs to go into storage or be given away. Hauling it around the globe is too big a pain in the rear.

050914 København, Danmark
I wrote a goodbye letter to the department in Denmark sent it about two weeks before I was due to leave Denmark, or about one week before I was due to leave the department (the last week in Denmark being spent at a Training Course away from the department). The letter was constructed out of both things I had looked up and phrases I had asked my Danish teacher about. On one hand, it was entirely my work, but on the other hand it used many elements that I had been gathering from my Danish lessons, including knowing what translates really poorly and what turns of phrase translate well. I then wrote it up and showed it to my Danish teacher, correcting the worst mistakes with his help. The fact that it had been corrected meant that it was far better than my honest skill level, so I left some of my mistakes in, in the version emailed to the department, so long as the mistakes did not too-badly compromise the ability to understand what I was trying to say. Still, even with errors left in, it was probably "too good" to honestly represent my skill level.

Anyway, here is the 100% corrected version, along with my literal line-by-line translation.

Hej alle,
Nå, om kun meget få uger skal jeg flyve til min næste opgave, i Franklinton.
Well, in only a few weeks I will fly to my next assignment, in Franklinton.
Jeg har været glad for den tid vi har arbejdet sammen.
I have enjoyed the time we have worked together.
Enhver har været venlig og jeg har fået en sød modtagelse.
Everyone has been very friendly and I have had a kind reception.
Særlig tak for den hjælp jeg fik da jeg skulle lære hvordan tingene er her i Bagsværd.
Particular thanks for the help I have received when I have learned how things (are) here in Bagsværd.
I har været tålmodige med mig selvom mit danske vokabular er meget lille og min danske udtale ikke er så godt.
You (all) have been patient with me even though my Danish vocabulary is very small and my Danish pronunciation is not so good.
(Dansk udtale er meget svær tror jeg, men, heldigvis for mig, er det at skrive og udtaler helt forskellige ting.)
(Danish pronunciation is very hard I think, but, fortunately for me, writing and pronouncing are completely different.)
Tak til jer alle fordi min tid i Danmark og på proteindesignafdelingen har været så hyggelig.
Thanks to you (all), my assignment in Denmark and in the Protein Design Department a very pleasant experience.
Hav det godt til vi ses igen.
Have good (luck) until we see each other again.
Kærlig hilsen,
Caring greetings,
Keith
P.S. Vær sød at bære over med stavefejl og grammatiske brølere.
P.S. Be kind over bearing with spelling mistakes and grammar errors.
Jeg har fået noget hjælp med den her email, men jeg er sikker på at der er en fejl eller to.
I have had some help with this here email, but I'm sure some writing is incorrect or strange.

050913 København, Danmark
My efforts to put down roots here have been a good decision; I feel at home here and it is nice to tell my Danish friends "I'll be back" instead of "Goodbye forever". I have had a lot of people go out of their way to tell me they have liked having me here. That makes it harder leaving, but things feel much less empty and rootless for me than if I had treated the six month posting as temporary. Living so many places is / will be hard, but it would be harder still if I didn't do my best to make each place "home", if only for six months. For now, I am looking forward to the next several moves and new places to live / see / visit / experience and I am looking forward to finally not moving anymore. That should not make sense (since the two seem to be in opposition), but that is how things are.

050912 København, Danmark
Let's kick things off with a little game I call bad news, good news. The bad news is that I'm still a bit sick. The good news is that I feel much better after a hot shower. The bad news is that is that I feel better because I'm no longer nauseous, having explosively vomited while attempting to shower. The good news is that if you are going to vomit a whole lot, doing so while in the shower anyway is a very clean way of getting the job done. Now, I think I'll switch over to talking about the "enjoyable" topic of packing. Bleah.

For most trips, I just throw in an assortment of clothes, a handful of toiletries, and then make sure I have at least one thing appropriate to weather changes and I'm done. When I was leaving California, it was awful, with the need to sell stuff, give stuff away, pack stuff for long-term storage, pack stuff for air freight, and pack stuff for my travel bag. Once the movers had taken most of my things away, it was just a matter of ensuring that there would not be a single scrap left in the apartment and I was done. Actually, I was done except for discovering a few piles of stuff I'd missed the first time, shipping that to my parents for storage, and then I was really done. I had hoped that packing would be easy from then on.

Well, it is definitely a whole lot easier, but packing is still dull and a little depressing. I have a whole lot less to deal with, but I'm still packing one box for long term storage (stuff I don't really need to be hauling around), several boxes for air freight (which I will not have access to for several weeks) and the bags to go with me (for the several weeks it will take for the air freight to arrive). It has been made slightly tricky due to the fact that I am in a furnished apartment and now I can not just pack everything, but instead I'm extricating my stuff from the stuff that goes with the apartment. I just know I'm going to end up leaving something that I did not spot when I was changing the apartment from really cluttered to moderately cluttered during the packing process. Eh, I'll just have to see how it goes. I think I'm going to be pretty expert at this before too much longer.

050911 København, Danmark
I'm still sick and I should be packing, but after having been watching about Katrina in the news for so long, I have to say something. As with any big bad event, there is going to be a lot of discussion in the aftermath about what went wrong. Some people will claim that any attempt to analyze the event and the response to the event is "finger-pointing" or "the blame game". They are attempting to block the sort of discussions that could allow us to learn from the event and be better prepared the next time. I believe that it is deeply unwise to chose willful blindness out of political expediency.

The organization which will be critiqued and examined most thoroughly is FEMA, since they have the primary responsibility for managing events like Katrina. So far, they have admitted to being surprised and overwhelmed. This is bad. The next step should not be lynching the directors, but rather determining why they were surprised and why they were overwhelmed.

Let's look at the "surprised" part first. An ambitious flood-control study proposed by the New Orleans district of the Army Corps of Engineers in 2001 remained just that for four years - a written proposal never put into action for lack of funding. Congress approved the study but did not allocate the funds for it. It was known that there was a major problem, a massive vulnerability, but they had no assessment of the best way to go about defending the population from the disaster. The popular press had even talked about the probability of a massive disaster.
Take a look at the October 2004 National Geographic article http://www3.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0410/feature5/ The Louisiana bayou, hardest working marsh in America, is in big trouble - with dire consequences for residents, the nearby city of New Orleans, and seafood lovers everywhere.
In late May 2005, the New Orleans district of the Army Corps of Engineers formally notified Washington that hurricane storm surges could knock out two of the big pumping stations that must operate night and day even under normal conditions to keep the city dry. Also, the Corps said, several levees had settled and would soon need to be raised. FEMA was not "surprised" by the disaster; they were surprised by all the particulars of the disaster; they were surprised in which specific levees and bridges failed and which specific pumping stations were inoperable. Without any careful assessment funded, they best they could do was go with a few guesses as to which levees looked weak or had settled. Mostly the "surprise" statement is used because they lacked the data needed to plan anything better than a really generic response. Without predictions of where would be flooded and where would be passable, precious time was lost while they attempted to understand the scope of the disaster after it had happened. Rescue operations could not start until they could do an assessment of how to get in and out. This was not unavoidable; this was a funding choice. More than that, this unwise funding choice is still being made, with bad consequences for the future: Bush's 2006 Budget slashes funding for the US Army Corps of Engineers, New Orleans Districts, by $71.2 million dollars and cancels a study to determine ways to protect the area from a Category 5 hurricane.

OK. So the "surprised" part turns out to be a penny-wise-pound-foolish funding choice and we now know that the federal government has decided (at least in the 2006 budget) to continue being surprised in the future. Let's look at the "overwhelmed" part of the equation.

The Bush administration has pushed for privatization of essential government services, including disaster management, and merged FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security where boring old natural disaster programs must compete for priority with the War On Terrorism. These changes have seen many of FEMA's most experienced personnel leave for work in other government agencies or private corporations. The result has been a smaller, less experienced, and more poorly funded FEMA. Again, this was by choice, not accident. However, it is also important to look at the scale of the disaster, in trying to understand why FEMA was overwhelmed.

To some degree, the damage was so massive because even those anti-flooding projects that had been approved were not funded sufficiently for completion. For example, the Lake Pontchartrain Project was a $750-million Corps operation for new levees and beefed-up pumping stations. But funding cuts reduced the scope of the project repeatedly and interfered with the time line of completion, resulting in the fact that many sections were incomplete when the hurricane hit. Projects like this are typically vulnerable to politics. While it is true that an ounce of protection is worth a pound of cure, it is not very politically flashy.

Beginning in 2001, the Bush administration has consistently cut federal disaster mitigation programs run by FEMA. Key federal disaster mitigation programs, developed over many years, have been slashed and tossed aside. FEMA's Project Impact, a model mitigation program created by the Clinton administration, was canceled outright. Let's just look at the cancellation of Project Impact for a moment. The Northridge earthquake, which hit the San Fernando Valley in California in 1994, was a spectacular disaster, with dramatic pictures of collapsed highways crushing hundreds of cars and a financial disaster as well as a human disaster. Capital losses were about $25 billion for this one event. Enter Project Impact. This project did many many things, but one of the things it did was preventative flood control and refitting older buildings and highway bridges to be earthquake resistant.
Check out this link to see a short list of other disasters project impact helped mitigate. http://www.colorado.edu/hazards/o/mayo01/mayo01a.htm#nisqually
In 2001 there was another massive quake in California, of a size and intensity similar to Northridge. Buildings and roads shook and rumbled. Thanks to the couple of million dollars that Project Impact had spent in the area, there was only very very minor loss of life and little damage. The next day, even as Project Impact was being lauded for having saved lives and billions of dollars, the Bush administration announced that they were "zeroing funding" i.e. canceling the very project that had just proven itself invaluable. When asked about the timing of the announcement, canceling a project that has just saved lives and money, the Bush administration spokesman had this to say: "The timing of the earthquake was unfortunate".

So, it looks like FEMA was "surprised" due to funding choices imposed by the federal government, like FEMA was overwhelmed because FEMA itself had been reduced by the federal government, and the scale of the disaster itself overwhelmed FEMA in part because the federal government had chosen not to fund the mitigation and prevention programs that could have reduced the size of the disaster. People are now calling for the head of FEMA to be fired. Perhaps people are right to ask for the firing of the head of the government group responsible for the Katrina-related missteps, but I'm not certain that person is just the head of FEMA. I think we need to look a lot higher up the chain of command to see the person who deserves firing.

050905 København, Danmark
A few days back, my bro' pointed something out in response to my quote from Janis Joplin (see blog 050815). He pointed out that her quote can easily be interpreted as saying that tomorrow isn't any different and the future is boring, just like today. He's right. The little bit I quoted does definitely have that negative connotation, but I was not bothering to transcribe 4 minutes worth of semi-inarticulate drugged-out hippy rambling, which is what it probably would have taken to give the line proper context.

Anyway, he pointed out a few memories that my mention of ELO triggered: we'd pretend we were playing that music on a little organ and we'd go ride bikes and pretend to drop dynamite behind us. Why were we dropping dynamite? Well, we were not really sure what was involved in being "all grown up" so we had come up with our own ideas. We were going to ride around on motorcycles and fight with a rival gang. We had it all worked out; one of us was going to have to drive the van, so we could sleep in the van when we were done with a day of riding motorcycles and throwing dynamite.

I have a pretty crappy memory. I'd forgotten about the plans to be in a motorcycle gang driving around and tossing dynamite, but I don't remember the little organ. Now, I don't know about the rest of you, but my past is a hazy thing that I don't have a very good grasp of. Until prompted by outside stimulus, my memories are mostly just hazy associations and a vague sense of feelings. Yeah, occasionally, I'm reminded of something and the entire day comes back crystal clear in all details, but that is not the typical situation. Kind of disturbing to realize how much of your own past is made up of things you think know rather than things you truly know.

050904 København, Danmark
Dang. I was not sure before, but now I am certain; I'm coming down with a nasty cold at the start of a conference week that has every day planned and scheduled from 8:30 AM until 9:00 PM. Ugh. At the Wild West event many people got pretty happy on the free beer and (although I didn't have that much) I was not always successful in keeping my beer in sight, so I don't know how many people drunk out of my glass. The random beer grabbing and putting down back where it came from was happening often enough that I learned the Danish for "Hey! That's my beer!" I'll bet that I got the cold. Damn. I was hoping this week would be relaxing, but this cold is going to make it kinda painful.

Today has been a bit of a bad-luck day. My rail pass expired last night and I thought it was due to expire after today. When I went to go help a coworker move out of her apartment, I was running just a little late and hopped the train for 3 blocks instead of walking for 3 blocks. They were checking passes, so I handed them mine and was quite surprised to be given a fine... A 500 DKK fine. That's about 90 US dollars. Turns out, the rail pass is for 30 days exactly, not one month, which is why the pass expired one day earlier than I expected this month. In the time it took for the guy to write me the ticket (no, the "I'm just a stupid tourist" line did not work), I ended up having to get off the train several stations late and walk 16 blocks 500 DKK poorer and badly delayed. Great. 5.75 months with no problems but just as I'm leaving I got nailed.

Oh, if you are trying to reach me at all this week, I'll be at Kollekolle conference center all week. They have ethernet and I should have email access, but the net is down right now. I'll be able to post this blog and check email and such whenever they get the network working again.

050902 København, Danmark
On my last day of work, Friday, the whole department went on an outing together as a team-building exercise. We went to the "Texas Ranch Wild West" center, wore cowboy hats, metal sheriff stars, and learned the finer points of saying "yeee hawww", tossing horseshoes, and lassoing milk jugs. There was also mechanical bull riding, (air)pistol shooting, bow and arrow shooting, and other such "western" events. Sitting in a bar that looked a lot like where Heather (a friend from Texas) held her wedding reception, watching elderly Danes square dance to Danish pop music from the early 1980s... It was a surreal last day.

Actually, I did not finish everything in time to go to the outing, so I still have to go back in to work on the 12th, after I get back from a conference at Kollekolle. Also, I should mention that Heather's husband Brian is neither Texan nor a cowboy; he is just very nice and very sweet on Heather, so he was pretty much OK with getting married just about anywhere, so long as the process involved Heather showing up and saying "I do" at the right time... He's more of a martinis at the club sort of guy, but for love he was willing to go someplace where he was not entirely sure they were joking when they mentioned that he would have to be branded with Heather's mark. Hm. I ought to ring 'em up some time and see how they are doing.

050828 København, Danmark
Damn. I had hoped that moving would get easier with time. I was wrong. It is still a pain in the ass to pack up all your random crud (even if you don't have that much) and emotionally wrenching besides. Looks like "The Expert Expatriate" (a book that was a gift from my sis) was correct: it predicted that it takes about six months to be fully invested in your new home and feel at home there. Sigh. I had just gotten a circle of friends outside of work and was finally turning the language corner with Danish finally sounding like words instead of incomprehensible yammering. Now I'm using my newfound Danish ability to say goodbye.

050827 København, Danmark
OK. I have now officially lost all rights to my Punk credentials. Sure, I'm too old, I hold a professional job, I have listened to unfashionable music before, and there are a number of other factors that have weakened my Punk credentials, but now I have crossed a line that can not be undone. Sigh. I like a Backstreet Boys song; Incomplete. Yeah, the song has bits that dip into the pop ballad pool of suck that is traditionally swum in by boy bands, Whitney Houston, Maria Cary and the like, but overall the song is pretty good. And holding that opinion means I have lost all right to claim to like Black Flag, Skinny Puppy, Sonic Youth, or any of the more recent punk bands. Damn.

050825 København, Danmark (night)
These last few days are going fast. Today, for an example - Morning, analyze primary project data and prepare to give a talk on Arsenic binding motifs. Give the talk. Make more moving arrangements, continue analyzing project data. Lunchtime meeting on the LEX project, followed by more data analysis. Write up analysis conclusions, re-examine the kinetics calculations on another project, email Davis with a database project proposal, make travel arrangements, go home, do final Danish homework assignments, translate part of a talk due at the end of this week. Stay up for a phone call with Franklinton, then go to bed and prepare to do it all over again.

050821 København, Danmark (night)
Er, of course I couldn't let the computer "win" so I messed with the codes some more and figured out what was going wrong and how to do what I wanted to do. Now I know I can do it and, in good conscience, can stop messing around with what is not broken. Hm. Now that I know how, what do you all think? Is this something I should bother doing or do you like the minimalist look I have now?

050821 København, Danmark
Sometimes you need the right place for the right activity. I am obedient to habit and I have difficulty settling down and writing in this journal if I am not outside, at a cafe. Hmm. I guess this is the first time I have mentioned that I actually write this stuff in a notebook. In the on-line blog, long rants and tirades are the result of sitting down and spewing at a keyboard. The introspective entries are always retyped entries from this notebook.

050820 København, Danmark (night)
I caught the toe of my right sneaker and tore a big hole in it, so I finally need to go shopping, at least for new sneakers. I hate going shopping. If you can go shopping with a friend, then it takes the edge off of the otherwise painful levels of boredom. Unfortunately, I have no friends in the same time-zone who are close enough friends to drag along on a stupid exercise like sneaker shopping. Unless you are spending huge amounts of time with the other person (like when dating), six months is not enough time to make close friends. The next few years are going to be rough.

050820 København, Danmark (morning)
OK. I must admit that I couldn't wait and I decided to play around with the code last night and this morning... It was a total mess. I'm talking about errors I couldn't even debug. Just copying and pasting the random quote javascript resulted in it breaking. The most simple position requests resulted in masses of text looped in one location rather than put in readable lines. And all these problems were when I was just trying to lay the groundwork before bothering to get fancy about things. Ugh. I'm hereby giving up until I actually do have time to mess with this.

On an entirely different note, it was recently pointed out to me that the World of Warcraft Collectible Card Game was being released soon. I gave one "collectible" game (Magic) a try a while back and I will never play another one. It was a good game, but the players (users) call it "cardboard crack" for a reason: the psychological territory those games mine is a combination of strategy and gambling addiction. The latter half of the equation is where they make all their money and why I find the Collectible Card Games (CCGs) objectionable.

050819 København, Danmark
If any of you are interested in the possibilities inherent in the total separation of content and design in the modern html / css separation, then you ought to take a look at http://www.csszengarden.com/. Specifically, compare the default design with ye olde design with a "modern" design.

I like the possibilities illustrated, but many of them were style over substance with too much empty space, poor organization, and the screen becoming a way-too-tall- scroll-forever tower. Still, some of the presentations showed good potential with solid organization and images which increased understanding by clearly indicating links and divisions. I fully believe that content is king, but I see no harm in properly marking up my html to allow CSS manipulation of far more individual elements than is possible in my current scheme. Once I have more time (when Danish classes are over and I have finished the move to Franklinton) I fully intend to play around with the possibilities of CSS and see how I can improve things or fancy things up a bit while retaining clarity.

Page Last Modified: 2006 04 21, 08:59:20

 

 

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