Engineering problem

Spent the morning this morning solving a minor problem in home engineering. The objective was to sink some drip irrigation tubing underground to water two clumps of pampas grass, a clump of red fountain grass, and to keep water dripping into our bird bath. Sounds easy — but here's the catch: the water fauce to which this all needed to be attached was on the other side of a solid concrete sidewalk. Somehow I needed to get some flexible 1/2" tubing run under that sidewalk!

The solution, as with virtually all home engineering projects, involved a trip to Home Depot. They get more of my paycheck than Arnold Schwarzenegger does, but somehow I'm less resentful of Home Depot's take. Oh, I guess it's because I get something tangible from Home Depot, and from the state I get...what? Anyway, I bought a length of 1/2" PVC pipe, a cap for that pipe, and the parts to allow the pipe to be attached to a garden hose. I drilled a few holes in the cap, attached it to a hose, turned on the faucet, and voila! A $5 drilling tool. Took me about 3 minutes to poke that thing all the way under the sidewalk.

Naively I thought that was just about the end of my job. All I'd have to do is push that tubing through the tunnel I'd just drilled, and I'd be in business. But would that tubing go through the tunnel? No way, Jose.

That's when the real battle commenced. It was over an hour before I finally had the tubing run through, and then only with the help of my wife. I won't bore you with all the failed attempts, but here's the one that worked: First, I attached a steel ballchain to a fiberglass "fish" and pushed that through the tunnel (the "fish" is designed for snaking cables through cielings and walls, but it worked great for this). The "fish" wouldn't make the turn at the opposite end of the hole, so I used a magnet on a string to fish up the steel ballchain from a foot or so below ground level. Then I tied a rope to the ball chain, and pulled the "fish", ballchain, and rope all the way through the tunnel. This gave me a rope all the way through the tunnel. Then I tied the end of the tubing to the rope, and pulled it back through the tunnel (I could pull it through, but not push it through — some kind of physics problem to solve someday). This is where my wife came in. You see, that *$*$@#) tubing didn't want to make the bend right at the end of the tunnel to come back above ground. So I got on the rope end and pulled like hell, and Debi got on the other end and wiggled the tubing around. Oh, and I also had water flowing through the tubing to help push debris out of the way. Well, with some heaving and a few oaths (from both of us), I finally got the tubing pulled through. Whew!

The rest of the project was just as straightforward as it sounds, and didn't take very long. Now I have three happy plants, a completely hidden system, and fresh water in the bird bath...

Broken tooth ponders

A couple weeks ago, while driving to work and chewing on a breakfast burrito, I felt something hard and odd-shaped moving around in my mouth. Strange feeling; I thought it was a piece of bone (which definitely didn't belong in my breakfast burrito!). So I spit it out, and by gosh it was about half of the top part of a molar. And sure enough, there was a vacant spot in my mouth, lower left hand side. Somehow, on something as soft as a breakfast burrito, I'd managed to break a tooth apart!

Fortunately for me, this was a pain-free broken tooth. Not like the fall-on-the-floor-writhing-and-screaming kind of broken tooth that I'd witnessed in others. So when I got to work, I called and made an appointment with my dentist, Dr. Tom Brassington ("Dr. B") of La Mesa, California.

This past Thursday, I went in to see him. He went to work on my mouth, full of good cheer and friendly conversation as always. I've known Dr. B for close to 30 years. We met in (I think) 1979, when I owned a business manufacturing business computers, Z-80 CP/M based machines with minimal software, but a nice oak or walnut cabinet (which we also made). Dr. B was one of the first customers we had, buying a computer for his business. I'm not entirely sure he knew what he was getting into, but he was positive he wanted one!

An hour or so later, I was on my way with a very numb face and tongue, and a brand-spanking-new temporary crown. I'll get the real thing in a few weeks, some kind of fancy porcelain-on-gold high-tech thingy.

But I couldn't help thinking about Dr. B some more. His work contrasts in many ways with mine. The most immediate difference, to me, is the simple fact that he's been doing basically the same work ever since I first knew him. I don't know how long he'd been a practicing dentist when I first met him, but I think it's safe to say he's been in practice at least 30 years. Compare that with my "career" — I haven't done the same thing for more than a few years at a stretch, ever. Then another difference: every single day, the work that Dr. B does helps people in a very direct and tangible way. My work (in software engineering, at the moment) can be positioned as helping people, in some kind of general, vague, and abstract fashion — but that help has nothing like the direct, personal nature of Dr. B's help. Then I had the chance on this visit to watch Dr. B handle a situation gone awry (of course this would happen to me!). Apparently my gum was bleeding and would not stop. In very rapid sequence, Dr. B did several things to attempt to staunch the flow. I'm not at all sure I can remember all of them, but there was an injection of some vasoconstricter (I know only because I asked him), some kind of electrical device (that was painful, even through the numbing), and some kind of ferrous chemical (that tasted extremely bad). Eventually the bleeding was stopped. What struck me, however, was the calm, competent, and practiced manner that Dr. B had throughout the whole affair. He was moving quickly, was obviously concerned, but knew exactly where everything was (and it was right at hand), knew what sequence to try them in, and just generally seemed to be in control. Some of this, I suspect, is because Dr. B really is a wonderful general practitioner dentist — and some, I suspect, is because he's been doing this for 30 years. I'm sure I'm not the first "bleeder" he's had to deal with. Contrast that with my work, where it's very common for me to run into something for the first time ever, and to bumble about trying to find the answer. Now it happens that I enjoy the troubleshooting and debugging; it's like solving a puzzle. And I do believe I have an above-average skill level in this area — but rarely do I ever have the opportunity to show the kind of all-encompassing competence that Dr. B does day in and day out.

I hope Dr. B finds his career as rewarding for him as it is for his patients...

Ali's back!

Ali at Free Iraqi hasn't posted for serveral weeks. I've been browsing to his blog every day in the hopes that he would return, but I was nearly ready to give up; truthfully, I was afraid something had happened to him. This morning, a fresh post appeared — whew! In it, Ali gives his thoughts on Operation Lightning. He begins:

Operation lightning seems to be going better than what I expected in terms of reducing violence in Baghdad. I think everyone who's following the news must've seen that the attacks in Baghdad these days are getting less than before, and here on the ground we can see the same thing. Not just terrorist attacks that has been reduced but even regular crimes, as it seems that part of the operation is focusing on capturing regular criminals who are in addition to their usual criminal activities do form, in my mind, the right hand for the Ba'athists.

It sounds like things are going reasonably well, from Ali's perspective, and I'm very glad to hear that. He goes on to tell the story of an Iraqi police raid right near his home (it went well), then concludes:

One of my greatest worries about operation lightning just as the whole war on terror is that it would give those in charge a more than needed and accepted power. In a place like Iraq where all our miseries came from unlimited power, that is certainly a huge concern. Still I know and feel that most Iraqis won't accept something like this to happen. It's not easy at all to explain where this feeling come from but it's there and I have full faith that most Iraqis will clench their teeth on every bit of freedom they gained through America's help and that we will and are ready to sacrifice to gain more; the type of freedom that even America cannot grant us.

Welcome back, Ali. I'm very glad you're safe. And it sounds like good news on Operation Lightning.

Read Ali's whole post, or I'll conjure up a plague of desert fleas to pester your dog and your sister.

APOD

APOD brings us...

No sudden, sharp boundary marks the passage of day into night in this gorgeous view of ocean and clouds over our fair planet Earth. Instead, the shadow line or terminator is diffuse and shows the gradual transition to darkness we experience as twilight. With the Sun illuminating the scene from the right, the cloud tops reflect gently reddened sunlight filtered through the dusty troposphere, the lowest layer of the planet's nurturing atmosphere. A clear high altitude layer, visible along the dayside's upper edge, scatters blue sunlight and fades into the blackness of space. This picture actually is a single digital photograph taken in June of 2001 from the International Space Station orbiting at an altitude of 211 nautical miles.

Click on the picture for a larger view. The expanded picture is gigantic (1499 x 1025), suitable for screen backgrounds or printing.

Koran reality

You'll recall the recent controversy over how our troops in Gitmo handle the Koran, with Newsweek fanning the flames and the MSM in general throwing fuel on the fire. I haven't posted on this previously because I really couldn't think of any way to respond with descending into anger and foul language directed at the media. Roger Kimball at the New Criterion took care of this for me; in a new column he nails it:

Should we laugh or cry at this exhibition of politically correct hyper-sensitivity? By all means, let us treat prisoners with the dignity and respect they lack in their own lives. Let us not besmirch or ridicule the Koran. But let us also preserve some rudimentary contact with reality. These people are terrorists and suspected terrorists. Many--probably most--of them have dedicated their lives to slaughtering innocent Westerners, inspired, note well, by the very document our soldiers are enjoined to handle as a “fragile piece of delicate art” (as distinct, one supposes from a “sturdy piece of delicate art”). Operating in the realm of fiction, Evelyn Waugh might have made an amusing episode out of this absurdity (talk about “Black Mischief”!) Perambulating in the precincts of real life, however, we should have the fortitude to acknowledge that the comedy has gone rancid. Those sections of the army’s “Detention Operations Group Standard Operating Procedures” that bear on the Koran should be respectfully excised, using only the right hand. They should then be carefully conveyed in a “clean, dry detainee towel” to the nearest outhouse and . . . flushed down the toilet.

That's his conclusion, but you won't want to miss the whole thing.

Quote for the day

A revolution is not a bed of roses ... a revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.

   Fidel Castro

Why our soldiers fight

Believe it or not, this quote comes from Scott Ott at Scrappleface! I'm not going to spoil the punch line; you'll just have to read the whole thing.

"Men volunteer to fight, bleed and die for the United States of America because she is the last, best hope for peace and freedom on earth," he said. "They consider the evidence that America has pushed back the veil of tyranny and saved countless millions of men, women and children from imprisonment, torture, starvation, humiliation and brutal death. And they act on that evidence, knowing that the blood of free men is always the price of freedom.

Amen, Scott.