Retro Shaving

About 2 or 3 years ago I started using a shaving brush and mug full time and switched 'back' to the double edged shavers. The introduction of a 'four bladed' razor was probably the tipping point. I even bought a 'travel brush' and keep it packed in my travel kit.

At one point the Uptown Lund's sold shaving soap and double-edged blades but it's been a while since I've seen anything there or at any other store for that matter. There are several places on-line to by, the one I use is 'Amazing Shaving' .

I know that avoiding aerosols and the extra plastic in fancy blades is good for the environment and I like to think I save money - however, I'm not sure I'll recover the capital costs of the brush, mugs and razor. A good brush with badger bristles runs $30 to $40 dollars and a safety razor is similar. However, shaving soap is only $3.50 and a pack of 10 blades about 5 bucks.

I'm due to reorder soap and blades and will probably spend some extra on a true travel razor and collapsible cup. I've cut myself on the old razor I use (currently the head is wrapped in tinfoil) and I've got soap stored was once a plastic covered food container. So my current plan is to live an extra 10 years to recover these costs ;-).

First Bike Commute of the Season

Spring has been slow a'coming in Minnesota this year, but I finally biked to work today. (Last year it was a month earlier, but then I hardly biked again over the summer). I have been out on my bike a couple times this spring and last Sunday did an 11 mile trip so I figured might as well start biking to work.

The trip is a little over 9 miles and it took a little over an hour (a slight head wind). Today's weather is sunny with a high in the 60's; the rest of the week will be rainy and cold, although it may clear up by next Monday or Tuesday.

I was concerned that my usual route to downtown using the Cedar Lake trail would be blocked because of the new construction on the Twins Ball park. When I drove past, it looked like it was totally blocked: I figured I might have to go over to Hennepin Ave before the bike lanes started. However, when I got onto the Cedar Lake Trail, I saw a couple of bikers heading down it toward downtown so I followed. The trail keeps going and cicrumvents the construction and just exits a little further down the road then it used to. I circled up to 6th street and got on Hennepin pretty much my usual way.

For reference, I am creating a personal 'google' map outlining my route:
Google Map of Bob's Bike Commute
(Note that it may be a while before I complete the map, but I got a start on it today).

From Hennepin, I get on the path by the river and cross at the Stonearch Bridge. From the bridge, I usually take 2nd street to 11 Ave SE, but then saw that 2nd street was blocked around 8th Ave. Oh yeah, there is a collapsed bridge that wasn't there last year. So I went up to University Ave a few blocks early. I got up to 5th street and went through Dinkytown and found the next alteration to my route: the U's football stadium construction. There was a turn I missed, so I ended up on gravel, but did get to the bus transit way that connects the Mpls and St. Paul Campuses.

I took the transit way to Energy Park Drive and found no further surprises before getting to the office two miles or so down Energy Park. I'm a little stiff and sore but looking forward to the ride back.

Fashionable Prgramming Languages

Doctor Dobbs Journal's May issue has an article which is a 'conversation' with Paul Jensen, who is the managing director of TIOBE Software. The article (which is not on line yet, but will be in May), discusses the TIOBE Programming Community Index, which 'ranks' programming languages based on how often they are searched on line (see here for details). In the article, Paul states that only one new language has cracked the top 10 in the last five years: Python replaced COBOL. He also says that Perl has had it's day and that C & C++ are on the decline. He notes that a lot of new languages are arriving on the scene, mostly due to web programming. However, he sees Java and C# dominating over at least the next 5 years.

Of the 20 languages listed in the chart I have done at least some 'production' coding in the following: Java, C, C++, Perl, JavaScript and COBOL. (I've also know a bit of SQL, but this is mostly embedded in Java or C++). Since Java, C and C++ are ranked 1,2&5 - I think I'm probably in pretty good shape for the rest of my career (ending on or before Nov 14th, 2012).

I am most comfortable in Java, but have just started a longish project in C++. I took COBOL and FORTRAN when I as at the U in mid 1980's. FORTRAN is still used, but not much in business (mostly science applications). I did some work in a tool that had a BASIC like language, but never did much in BASIC itself. The first product that I worked on for our company to sell was written in COBOL so I became pretty fluent. In the early 90's we started migrating to C - I took a night class in C and learned a lot from a C Guru who worked with me for a couple of years. Java and C++ I picked up as needed. I spent a lot of off work hours learning Java, but now use most of that time for making music.

I'm guessing when I retire (I call it quitting the day-job), I'll focus on music but still need to do some sort of programming to keep that part of my brain 'happy'. I have no desire to change company's but it is good to see that my skill set is current just in case.

Walking in 40 degree weather

Last week as the daylight saving change was approaching, we had a couple days that went below zero (8 below on March 6th or some such). Setting the clocks forward seemed to kick in a March thaw and we've been enjoying highs in the 40s (one report said high of 50 today, at 12:35 it is 43). I've switched to one of my lightest spring/fall jackets and was out for the first time without being totally bundled up. (Once into the walk, I discovered I only had one glove... but didn't miss it). Perhaps because I couldn't get the ipod to work (I've just plugged it in and it says "please wait, very low battery), I was coming with a lot of Curmudgeon blog topics. Of course, since I wasn't actually blogging, what I'm putting down now may reflect some of these thoughts but may go in an entirely different direction.

In the news is the Eliot Spitzer scandal. Other than 'what was he thinking', I won't make any moral judgment only to say that I was amazed that he had spent over $80,000 for his 'escorts'. I immediately thought if I had that kind of money, I'd be getting a pre-war Martin guitar or two. (It's only a down payment for 1940 D-45 at Gruhn's for $165,000). However, it should cover a D-28 and you'd have plenty left over after buying the 1942 D-18 at Elderly's for 18,000 ).

Lynn has been in Claremont, CA (high today:73) seeing her mother. Lynn's mom is 91 and was in the hospital with pneumonia last week. She's recovering, but in the Pilgrim Place nursing home. From what Lynn is telling me she should be back in her assisted living place in a week or two.

Lynn's coming back Saturday, so I've been living solo (with Smudge our cat). I've been busy enough with work and the last two days we've had the new president from Boston as well as the major investor and the overall CEO (a Swede in charge of a Dutch company). The original founder and company parted ways a week or so ago ( a not uncommon story), so the new 'team' wanted to see their assets. I was glad to meet these guys and just hope they can keep the company going for a couple more years (I'm 65 in 2012 - worst case, I could get Cobra at age 63 1/2 to tied me over until I'm eligible for Medicare). I've managed to have Smudge indoors by the time I leave for the office, although with the warmer weather she leaps outside as soon as I get home. Been staying home most nights, but did get out to choir last night (and ate supper at Cuppa Java after a 45 minute post-work nap). Tonight will probably be spent at home, although Bill Cagley is hosting a roots showcase - we'll see how I feel once work is over.

I just became a Facebook Friend with Keith Ellison, our congressional rep : I'm also friends with Mpls Mayor R.T. Rybak and Al Franken. They all list their political views as 'Liberal', so maybe it is ceasing to be the 'L' word. They are strangely silent on 'religious views' - Politically I list 'Very Liberal' and Religious View is currently 'Old Time Musician grounded in Tradition' (I got that idea from Bruce Molsky who simply lists 'musician'). Of my friends, the best religious view is Jonathan Delehanty's "Cheap Whiskey' (he's another musician).

On Facebook and over 60

About a year ago, I got an invite from the person who books the Mpls Stonearch Festival to join Facebook (this was shortly after they opened it up to non college students). Lynn and I had been using Myspace as our band website for some time, but for facebook I joined as 'Bob Dixon'; so far I've tried most of the 'music' networking tools on Facebook, but none seem to be as effective for a local 'old-time' band as Myspace. I started to gain Facebook friends, once some of my younger relatives and younger friends from Danebook found out (to their surprise) I was on facebook. I have also become friends with Musicians and Politicians who aren't necessarily close personal friends. So far I have '36' friends in roughly the following groups (there are some overlaps - I have relatives and Danebod friends who are musicians, for example):

Relatives:
Nieces and Nephews; but not all of them (Lynn is threatening to join, so I'd be her friend).

Danebod Folk Camp Friends:
Mostly 20 somethings, but just became friends from someone closer to my age ( a forty something).

Musicians:
some through my original Stonearch connection, others are more 'national' and even international.

Random Friends:
People I know who have discovered me or vice versa.

Politions:
Al Franken and R.T Rybak (Mayor of Minneapolis) are on Facebook , so I figured why not?

Been doing some computer hacking

A couple weeks ago, I got a new laptop for work and I have spent time at work (and at home) getting it correctly configured. It came installed with Vista, but I like to do most development in Linux. So after spending a week getting a development environment installed on Vista (both Java and C++), I started the process of getting Fedora 8 installed. This involved shrinking a Volume on Vista which freed up about 40GB (out of 160GB). After downloading the ISO image for Fedora and having it burned to DVD, I installed it on the empty space to create a dual boot machine. There was an issue with the Grub loader, so Vista didn't boot. But working with Joe (from TIE), we played around and discovered that the Fedora install had the wrong drive partition as the Vista boot drive (hd2 was correct, not hd1).

Since I want access to both Vista and Linux at the same time, I knew that I need to install VMware. I was hoping to have a native boot to Fedora and run Vista inside a Virtual Machine; however, Fedora wasn't recognizing the wireless network at home and I had issues getting the 'dual' head monitor to work. So I downloaded an eval copy of VMWare workstation and am running Fedora as a virtual machine.

For development on Linux, we use an Oracle Database. Although I could connect with an Oracle Server at TIE, I wanted to create a local instance of Oracle on the laptop's Linux. I first attempted 'Oracle Express' - this appeared to install, but I couldn't get things to work. So I downloaded the 700MB tar file from the Oracle Technology Network and installed the 'Enterprise' edition. I have installed Oracle before, but it has been many years. This was not trivial, but I was able (eventually) able to solve all the issues. Here's a brief recap:

• The Oracle installer is a Java application in which Oracle supplies its own JRE (1.4). It initially failed from the get-go 'cause it couldn't find a shared library. Some initial searches said to install the x-11 'deprecated' libraries. This didn't work. Finally, I ran across some information about using 'YUM' to install the specific missing library. That worked.
• One the installer started, it complained because I was not running an officially supported version of Linux - again Googling provided the solution - in a 'text' file, replace "Fedora 8" with "Red Hat -4".
• Next up was another issue with the oracle provided JRE - this ended up involving a problem that JRE 1.4 has with 'modern' XWindows servers. The solution? run a 'sed' script to swap something in one of the JRE shared libraries. (This came up again later when I was trying to run some oracle tools).
• At this point, the installer actually came up. I installed it,but there were complaints. I reinstalled, but still had complaints (this was eventually traced to the same JRE shared library problem).
• The biggest issues with Oracle were getting the listener to work - there is still an issue when I am using it at home or off network.
  

I guess the interesting part of all this is that I really haven't done this kind of hacking for a long time. In the mid-nineties I started investigating Linux and Java and spent a lot of off-work hours 'hacking'. However, the last few years I have focused on music in my off hours. This past couple weeks I spent a few more hours at home 'hacking' - it was fun in its way, but a horrific time sink.

Politcal Animals (who are not us)

This article in the New York Times, describes the 'politics' of animals such as monkeys, elephants and whales based on fairly new observations in the wild. This kind of article reinforces the fact that humans are in the continuum of animal behavior and not some distinct branch. For modern humans, this quote says it all:

“The paradox of a highly social species like rhesus monkeys and humans is that our complex sociality is the reason for our success, but it’s also the source of our greatest troubles,” he said. “Throughout human history, you see that the worst problems for people almost always come from other people, and it’s the same for the monkeys. You can put them anywhere, but their main problem is always going to be other rhesus monkeys.”