Radioactive Non-Superheroes

Numerous comic book superheroes start their careers by being exposed to radiation or radioactive substances of some sort. In those (fictional) cases, the effects are sometimes bizarre (not to mention unsightly), but our erstwhile heroes always find a way to turn their new situations to some advantage.

It turns out that exposure to radioactive substances happens in our much more boring reality, too. Unfortunately, it never confers superpowers. If anything, it tends to produce occasions for great annoyance. This Reuters report describes the rising incidence of innocent civilians triggering radiation detectors at security checkpoints because of the presence of medical radioisotopes in their bodies. The article tells how six people triggered the radiation detectors at this past year's Christmas tree-lighting party at NYC's Rockefeller Center.

"All six had recently had medical treatments with radioisotopes in their bodies," Richard Falkenrath, the city's deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, told a Republican governors' meeting in Miami recently. "That happens all the time."

The article also tells of an even more humiliating incident:

In August, the British Medical Journal described the case of a very embarrassed 46-year-old Briton who set off the sensors at Orlando airport in Florida six weeks after having radioiodine treatment for a thyroid condition.

He was detained, strip-searched and sniffed by police dogs before eventually being released, the journal said in its "Lesson of the Week" section.

Something like this happened to a friend of mine a couple of years ago. Ermanno is an Italian-born naturalized citizen. At the time of this incident he was living in upstate New York, but working a lot in Ann Arbor. As a cost-saving measure, he actually drove back and forth between the two locations. He began having back problems, which became increasingly severe. One night they were so severe, he ended up in the ER at the University of Michigan Hospital. He had a whole battery of tests. They finally determined that his back pain was caused largely by the fact that he was sitting on his rather out-sized wallet for those ten-hour drives back and forth to New York.

The good news was that this diagnosis showed him how to eliminate his back pain immediately, namely, always take out his wallet before he went on long drives. The bad news occurred a day or so later, when he drove back to New York. He always took the most direct route, which went from Ann Arbor, to Detroit, through Canada, and back into New York at Niagra Falls. All went well until he tried to cross back into the States. To his mystified dismay, he triggered the radiation detector at the security checkpoint.

The border guards didn't put him through a strip-search, but they did turn his car inside out, searched his luggage, etc. It didn't look good: here he was, a foreign national, driving a rental car, triggering a radiation alarm as he crossed into U.S. territory. (Remember, this was only a year or two after 9/11.)

Finally, after questioning Ermanno about his recent activities, one of the more intelligent border people had the bright idea that the radioactivity might be due to one of medical procedures he had been through. They called UM Hospital's ER and found that, sure enough, one of the tests he had been through involved injecting a radioisotope. If had waited another day or so, the natural decay of the radioactive material would have reduced it to below detectable levels. But alas ...

The Reuters article speculates that it might be wise to start carrying a note from your doctor describing the reason you seem radioactive. This problem is probably just going to get worse, as detectors become more sensitive, and able to pick up radioisotope traces even weeks after their use. It isn't entirely far-fetched to worry that eventually we may all have to start carrying not only our identification papers at all times, but our medical records, too.

Thawed Out But Still Behind

Once you get behind, it certainly is hard to get caught up again. The power outage of two weeks ago took a big toll in almost every part of our life here, my writing included. As I described a few days later, we eventually got our power back and began to put everything back in place.

However, I was not really able to get back into my normal pace once power returned. I'm not complaining, though, since the reason was that I started a new part-time job, something that my family and I are very happy about.

I haven't worked since March 11, 2005 when I went on medical leave to deal with multiple myeloma. During the intervening months since then, my employer decided that they didn't need my position any more and terminated me in absentia. Their reasoning in that decision was quite faulty, in my opinion, but perhaps it's just as well. The company has continued to do poorly under that same management, and it doesn't look like it will survive long anyway.

Since I was terminated, I have been able to continue my family's healthcare coverage using a COBRA extension. This allowed us to get the same coverage by paying the insurance premiums ourselves. However, doing so is almost prohibitively expensive. Our coverage currently costs over $11oo/month. Worse, one can use a COBRA extension for only 18 months. One way or the other, I knew that I was working with a limited amount of time to find an alternate means to provide healthcare insurance.

My new employer made me a very generous offer that allows me to work at a reduced pace, yet maintain decent healthcare insurance. Moreover, the work itself will be quite interesting, and I should be able to make a useful contribution. Another bonus is that I'll be working with some old friends, whom I have collaborated with a number of times over the past 15 years or so.

I started this new position on January 22, 2007, and I have been quite busy ever since then. There has been the usual bit of administrivia, filling out a seemingly endless number of forms, all asking for slightly different variations of the same information. There has also been a fair amount of computer setup, trying to get my laptop properly configured to work both inside the corporate firewall, and through a VPN connection from home. And of course, I've been trying to learn more about the tasks at hand.

My first project involves my becoming very conversant with a scientific programming language called Interactive Data Language (IDL), which is a quasi-descendant of the venerable Fortran (a language I first used in 1968). My new employer has built up a large body of legacy IDL code that needs to be re-organized and cast into a more readily usable form. I've always said that I'm really a frustrated librarian, so I expect that I'll be able to do some good here.

I find blogging to be therapeutic, so I have really missed my regular writing times. I'll be trying to re-balance my schedule so that I can get back to those. I'm glad that I'm only working part-time. One of my frustrations these past few months is the realization at how much more 'inefficient' my life is now. Everything I do seems to take longer than it used to. Although I am in remission, I still have a large number of medically related tasks that take up significant parts of the day. Also, I need more sleep than I used to be able to get by with. Finally, I am just plain slower than I used to be. Every activity, from eating to walking down a hall, I now have to do at half the speed I used to be able to manage. On off days, I'm even slower than that. I guess I'm supposed to learn patience from this. So will everyone else, if they are waiting on me. My brain still seems to be working at close to normal speed most of the time, so I'm hoping that I can learn a style of working that makes better use of thinking and less of moving.

More On Thawing Out

I just read over yesterday's post about our various low-power and no-power woes of the past few days. I realized that I sounded pretty whiny, especially when I consider that there were some unfortunate folks who were completely without power from Monday through at least yesterday. I heard from several sources that there were still whole neighborhoods in the western part of Ann Arbor that had been without power since the ice storm. And it's been cold here, well below freezing for a great part of that time.

I should point out that all of these troubles just re-affirm my contention that wires and cables are nothing but trouble.

Thawing Out

I mentioned before that we had low voltage power in the house after an ice-laden tree branch hit the power line coming into the house, and pulled it partially away from the pole. The line itself was hanging low over the back yard, maybe 7 feet off the ground, much lower than it should. We had what looked like low voltage. Every time we turned on anything with a sizable current draw, the lights would brighten and/or dim. If this went on for more than a few seconds, then the UPS on our main server would start honking out its low-voltage warning.

I reported this on Monday morning to DTE, our local power company. And again Monday evening. And again Tuesday morning. And again Tuesday evening. (Are you seeing a pattern?) And several times on Wednesday. They were always "unable to give an estimate at this time". Eventually, though, I began hearing that someone would look at our power by 6pm Wednesday. No-one came. Later that evening when I called, I was surprised to hear the automated system tell me that my problem should now be resolved. I quickly got hold of a customer service representative and disabused them of that notion. They allegedly made sure that my problem report was indeed still open, and that someone would be out to check on Thursday.

I called multiple times on Thursday, finally getting the promise that someone would come out around 4pm. Sure enough, a DTE tech did show up about then. She poked around for about twenty minutes measuring things, and determined that the problem was an 'open neutral'. The wires bringing the two phases of current into the house were intact, but the main tension cable, which is also the neutral conductor, had snapped up near the pole. This was an unsafe situation, so she completely cut our power, and said that she would report this. Since we now had no power, she said that we would be moved higher in the priority queue for problem resolution. Right. It must have really sucked to be low priority.

I kept calling every few hours, as the house got colder. Thursday evening, Mary, Tim and I went out for pizza, and came back to a cold, dark house. We sat around reading by candlelight in the living room. Finally, around 9:30 or so, another DTE tech came. He had the bright idea (actually, it seemed like a pretty good idea) to see if he could get us hooked back up by using a good ground in place of the neutral connection. He tried valiantly to make our ground connection work, but alas it just wouldn't for some reason. (There were some strange things about the way our house ground was set up, but fixing those didn't fix the grounding problem.) So, he left around 10pm. We were still very dark, and getting colder.

Thursday morning brought no change except slowly dropping temperatures in the house. I kept calling DTE. Finally, around 12:30pm a team of three workers from some electrical contractor in Detroit showed up. (They were not DTE employees.) They restrung the cable, reconnected the neutral, and turned our power back on. It was a good thing, too. The temperature inside had gotten down to 41° before they got us turned on again.

Joy of joys, we had power. I went around turning on computers and network gear, while Mary got a load of laundry going and reset all the clocks. The house ever so slowly warmed up. Some. Well, only a little. After a while, Mary pointed out that the heating zone which covered the living room and dining room was not getting heat. Sigh. I called our regular HVAC repair place, and they sent out one of their guys. He found the problem (apparently a pocket of air had formed in the problematic zone of our hot water heating system during the long inactivity) and fixed it. He left around 5:30pm. Right now it's 6:39pm and the house is up to 51°.

I just took a break for dinner. Mary's sister Karen is here visiting for her birthday. Now I see that the temperature is about 60°, although it is colder than that in the bedrooms still. Here in my office I turned on both my laptop and the big noisy desktop machine to help warm up the place. (I also had some picture editing to do on the big machine, so that wasn't a big waste.)

After we got power back this afternoon, Mary told me "Little House On The Prairie isn't all it's cracked up to be." I'm glad she is seeing it that way now. I've always thought that. My idea of a recreational vehicle is the Starship Enterprise. That's 1701-D (the Next Generation ship), mind you, a real home away from home. Come to think of it, though, at least 10% of their episodes involve losing power. Never mind. I would like a Honda home power generator, though.

Low Power Blues

The nasty ice storm that trashed its way across the middle of the continent has made its way to Michigan. It left about a quarter of an inch of ice on all the tree branches. In particular, it weighed down the branches of a tall white pine tree in our back yard so much that all of them bent way down and some of them broke off. Unfortunately, the tree has grown into the path of the power line and two phone lines that come from the pole in the corner of the yard all the way to our house. So a lot of the bent and broken branches ended up on these lines.

Although none of the lines broke, it was obvious that something was wrong. My first clue was when I turned on the toaster oven in the kitchen early this morning, and all of the lights dimmed to half intensity. A few other experiments confirmed that we were facing a low-voltage situation. Mary and I went around turning off and disconnecting what we could. I powered down Tex, the new server that I'm setting up as our new cavnar.com host. I also turned off several other bits of always-on hardware. I left Tesla, our old server, up, since it provides some services to people besides me. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to draw very much power.

Our power supplier, DTE, is swamped with calls from all over the area. When I called the trouble reporting line this morning, I was informed by a cheerful automated voice that I had to wait approximately 167 minutes to talk to a customer representative. I went back down to the dark workshop in the basement where Tesla lives to see if I could eke out enough bandwidth to contact DTE's web-based trouble reporting. I was successful, I guess. The choices for the kind of problem I was experiencing seemed inadequate. The line wasn't down, so I had to settle for checking the box that indicated that our power was intermittent. I've gone back to the site a few times to look at our status, but their system is still unable "at this time" to give an estimate of when they can look at the problem.

I called the phone company, but they won't come out unless a phone line is actually down. I finally managed to call the tree trimming service that did a bunch of work for us about a year and half ago. One of their guys came out about an hour ago. He was able to get all the branches off the wires using just his long pruning pole. However, once all of the branches were out of the way, I was able to see the real problem: the power line, although not broken, has pulled partially away from the pole. I can't tell for sure, but I'm guessing we've lost one of the two incoming phases for our power. So, we're still stuck until DTE graces us with an on-site presence.

Mary and Tim seem to be taking this a lot more cheerfully than I am. Mary has always been much more prepared to go low-tech. (My old joke is that I don't really know how we got together in the first place, because she wants to live in the 19th century, and I'm still mad because it's not already the 24th.) Our son Tim, who spends a lot of time practicing on his electric and acoustic guitars, is off from school because of Martin Luther King Day. When I told him, he immediately replied "I guess this means it's an acoustic sort of day". He knows what to do and isn't whining about it (yet). But old geek that I am, I feel significantly disoriented. It took some soothing talk from my wife and a bit of creative re-prioritizing with her to find a way to use the day effectively without being online continuously. Even so, here I am, sitting in the dark, typing on an old keyboard by candle light (seriously!) just so I can get my blogging fix. In a way, it might have been easier (or at least simpler) if it had been a complete outage.

I hope it is warm, dry and well-powered where you are.

Weather Bonk

In one of my recent forays into somewhere or other, I ran across Weather Bonk, a very cool mashup of Google maps, regular weather forecasting, amateur weather stations, and webcams. You can enter a city name or a zip code, and then you'll get a page with a bunch of weather and geographically related information. The most interesting part is a Google map of the selected region, but showing temperatures from all of the amateur weather stations in that area. (These are private stations which publish their data to the U.S. Weather Service.) If you position your cursor over one of the temperatures, you get a semi-transparent box showing more detail about that station. Likewise, there may be little camera icons on the map. These represent webcams at those locations. If you position the cursor over those, it shows a small window containing the most recent image. Very cool.

Controlled Avalanches

I recently ran across this article in Yahoo News about the serious problems that Colorado has been having with avalanches crossing over highways. Several vehicles have even been knocked off the road and carried hundreds of feet. The article starts off with this attention-grabbing statement:

Crews fired artillery shells Sunday to safely trigger avalanches before they could pose a threat to traffic on a mountain highway...

I was struck (sorry, I just had to put it that way) with the cleverness and the directness of this approach. Although I had never heard of it, I figured this idea had been around for awhile. A Google search amply proved that, but I was floored by this claim that there are over 100K explosions per year just for triggering avalanches, in the Western U.S. alone.

Perhaps you half-remember, as I do, various action movies where the heroes or villains deliberately trigger an avalanche by making a loud sound, such as a gunshot. Apparently that is yet another myth, or at least an exaggeration. In almost every case, the avalanche is triggered by a direct force, such as the weight of a person or the concussion of an explosion. According to the page I mentioned above, the preferred triggering technique is for a skier to approach the area from above, light a dynamite stick with a two-minute fuse, heave it down onto the potential avalanche site, and then ski like crazy to get away. If it is too difficult to get to the area from above, the other approach is to fire at the area from a distance with heavy artillery, as was done in Colorado.

I still think it's pretty cheeky to refer to these as 'controlled avalanches', though. It makes it sound like an overly confident military policy of some sort.

Shilling For Google And Netflix

Over the holidays, I had a number of occasions to chat with family and friends. Toward the end of the break, I began to realize how often I ended up evangelizing for Google and Netflix. This was disturbing to recognize, because in the past I myself had often been critical of people who were overly laudatory about some company's products.

For example, back in the early 1990s, I worked for a large contract research house. One of my fellow employees, otherwise a fine individual, was a monomaniac about Lotus Notes. His basic view was that it was good for whatever problem you had, so he brought it up in every meeting he attended. This greatly irritated me, because (1) I thought the product was over-priced, (2) regardless of what my friend thought, Lotus Notes was not the magic bullet that would cure all our ills, and (3) I wanted to develop such systems myself, and there was no way I would be able to do that if the company spent a lot of money buying one. I needn't have worried. The product was too expensive, and I left the company anyway.

Then there are Microsoft zombies. These are people for whom the answer to any problem is a Microsoft product. There are not anywhere nearly as many nowadays as there were, say, ten to fifteen years ago. Back then Microsoft was the only acceptable desktop application vendor for a large corporation. A Microsoft zombie in a management position was every bit as repressive as any party official in a totalitarian state. Of course, the synergistic interplay of the Internet and open source software has taken a lot of the wind out of Microsoft's sails.

Like Microsoft in the 1980s and 1990s, other companies have had their own dittoheads. Both IBM and Oracle won my disdain early on because of this, although it seems they both have lost the adoring crowds that once followed them.

Since the late 1990s, I have mostly been plumping for open source stuff. There are lots of reasons for this, including lower costs, usually higher quality for the things I cared about, and more diversity. Nearly all of my geek friends felt the same way. There was something really gratifying about endorsing and using software that was free to download and install. I didn't mind at all telling people about it, and I argued with commercial software dittoheads on more than one occasion about why open source made sense for commercial companies.

Then Google came along. They are not an open source organization by any means, although they make heavy use of an open source infrastructure. Somehow Google managed to establish a pretty lofty reputation among geeks even though they were a commercial outfit. Part of this reputation came from their "Don't be evil" slogan. Probably an even bigger part was the fact that their most useful service, namely searching, was free. Google found a non-offensive way to present relevant ads along with search results, and users gladly accepted that as the cost of getting such a great service. For a good long while, about the only people critical of Google were competitors.

Google began branching out into other products, including the ones that I regularly use: Gmail, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Video, Google Reader, Google Chat, Blogger and Picasa. These are all 100% free, and they have changed the way I do things every day. It has gotten to the point that if Google rolls out a new product, I almost never bother to look at what competitors have to offer. Even worse, I evangelize for these products. I tell people what great things they are. I have become just like my Lotus-Notes-loving friend. I am a Google shill.

As if that weren't bad enough, I found myself doing the same thing for Netflix. In case you don't know about that (I was surprised that some of my non-geek friends had never heard of it), Netflix provides an extremely easy-to-use DVD rental-by-mail service. For a relatively small monthly fee, you can request DVDs online, and they are mailed to you as they become available (usually there is no waiting). You keep them as long as you want, but you can only have a certain number out at a time. When you are done with a DVD, you mail it back in, and then Netflix will send you the next one you requested. The best part of Netflix, in my view, is the incredible range and variety of material that they have available: old classics, whole TV series, rare and seldom seen masterpieces, etc. Searching and requesting are very easy.

So, here I am . The only thing that keeps me from being a true shill is that I don't get anything out of my evangelizing, at least not in a monetary sense. But then, neither did my Lotus-Notes-loving friend. The real question is whether this change is because I am growing morally weaker, or just mellower.