I just spent a small
Fortune at the vet,
And all I got to bring home
Is this lousy cat.
Our cat Szürke’s packed cell volume (PCV) is up this morning. A ray of hope. Dare we hope? Or is it just that roller coaster thing again, and his PCV might come crashing down over the weekend, as it did before? If that happens, we’re really out of options.
My wife took the #7 bus yesterday on her way home from the Byward Market.
The bus had to take a detour, due to the ongoing construction on Rideau street.
Then it had to take a further detour, perhaps due to the construction, maybe some other reason (an accident?)
When I spoke to her, the bus was standing still on Chapel street, heading in the wrong direction.
Some 20 minutes later, when the bus was already on Laurier, I turned on continuous GPS tracking of her phone. Tracking information was collected roughly every minute.
All in all, it took her approximately 45 minutes to get home from the intersection of Chapel and Wilbrod streets.
According to Google Maps, the distance is 950 meters on foot, and it would have take 12 minutes to get home walking. Unfortunately, she had some heavy bags with her so walking was not really an option. Although, had she known what was about to happen, she could have gotten off the bus at Besserer and Chapel, only a 700 meter walk from home.
Construction season is so much fun.
Our second oldest cat, Szürke (his name means gray in Hungarian, as he is a gray tabby; but we often just call him Süsü, which means something like silly, because he’s a silly little lapcat), is gravely ill. (As is my bank account as a result of the veterinary expenses, but that is another story.)
Trouble is, we don’t know what’s wrong with him.
He has hyperthyroidism, that much we know; he has been getting medication for that for a couple of years already.
But most recently, he became severely anemic. The doctors at first suspected renal failure. But that does not seem to be the case. The problem is more acute, perhaps some gastrointestinal bleeding. Yet still, there is no obvious cause, hence no obvious treatment.
His red cell count keeps dropping. We visited him tonight in the veterinary hospital. We are prepared for the possibility that this was good-bye.
But we have not yet given up hope.
Here is a sight I have not seen since July 30:
Route results for 199.166.252.0/24 from Vienna, Austria
BGP routing table entry for 199.166.252.0/24
Paths: (4 available, best #1)
1239 577
AS-path translation: { AS1239 BELL-AS }
edge3.Frankfurt1 (metric 13114)
Origin IGP, metric 100000, localpref 86, valid, internal, best
Community: Europe Lclprf_86 Germany Level3_Peer Frankfurt
Originator: edge3.Frankfurt1
1239 577
AS-path translation: { AS1239 BELL-AS }
edge3.Frankfurt1 (metric 13114)
Origin IGP, metric 100000, localpref 86, valid, internal
Community: Europe Lclprf_86 Germany Level3_Peer Frankfurt
Originator: edge3.Frankfurt1
1239 577
AS-path translation: { AS1239 BELL-AS }
edge3.Frankfurt1 (metric 13114)
Origin IGP, metric 100000, localpref 86, valid, internal
Community: Europe Lclprf_86 Germany Level3_Peer Frankfurt
Originator: edge3.Frankfurt1
1239 577
AS-path translation: { AS1239 BELL-AS }
edge3.Frankfurt1 (metric 13114)
Origin IGP, metric 100000, localpref 86, valid, internal
Community: Europe Lclprf_86 Germany Level3_Peer Frankfurt
Originator: edge3.Frankfurt1
This is a valid routing table entry for my class C address space at a randomly picked backbone router somewhere on the Internet.
On July 30, Verizon Canada disconnected me. Or rather, they decommissioned the point-of-presence equipment that was utilized by my Internet connection, without moving all their customers first to another POP.
When Verizon proved unable to restore my connection after 10 (!) days, I canceled my contract with them. Meanwhile, my sites’ continuing existence on the Internet was maintained using a backup cable modem connection.
But, as of today, I once again have a functioning DSL connection, courtesy of Bell Canada. Better yet, they were actually able to set up everything properly, including my special request for routing for my portable class C address space. Needless to say, I am very pleased.
And their service costs a lot less than Verizon Canada’s.
Bittersweet, or solanum dulcamara, is a species of vine. According to my wife the gardener, it was a vine of this species that climbed up a light pole just outside our house a few years ago.
Bittersweet is actually considered an invasive weed in North America, and for a good reason. Just look at the picture below… the vines climbed all the way to the top, completely engulfing the concrete light pole.
We decided to call this thing Shrek. The name was inspired not so much by the animated character but by a New Zealand sheep named after it, which avoided being caught and shorn for six years.
Alas, our Shrek has also been caught and shorn. The City of Ottawa had enough of it (and with good reason, considering the damage it likely did to the concrete light pole, not to mention the increased surface area which may very well cause the light pole to topple in a windstorm.) A few weeks ago, a city crew appeared and cut Shrek at the roots. This is what Shrek looked like as a result last week:
Of course, we hope that Shrek will grow back eventually. That light pole just wouldn’t look the same without it.
Meanwhile, though, it’d be nice if the city opted to finish the job and remove the now dead remains of the plant from its light pole. Or maybe they hope that winter weather will do the trick?
We used to have a cat named Tarka. (It’s a Hungarian word for mottled, spotted, etc.) She showed up at our doorstep in 1999. Winter was just around the corner, the cat was obviously not doing well outside, and no-one was looking for her… so one day, we let her in.
Tarka was “not a very polite cat,” as a neighbor described her one day. Her characteristic sounds were hissing and howling, especially at other cats.
One such other cat was Bill, another stray that showed up in the neighborhood. Eventually, Bill was adopted by some people across the street, but in the winter of 1999/2000, Bill was still an outdoor cat who occasionally showed up on the small deck just outside our kitchen glass sliding door.
One morning, Tarka noticed Bill outside and she began howling. My video camera (yes, it was that long ago) was handy, so I started taping. The concert went on for several minutes until Bill got bored and left. But not before our other cat, Marzipan, showed up on the scene, no doubt wondering what this racket was all about.
Sadly, none of these cats are around anymore. The first one to leave us was Marzipan; ten months after this video was made, lymphoma killed him. Tarka stayed with us for another 11 years, until her ailing kidneys took her away. She mellowed as she aged, but she never really became what I would call a “polite” cat. And Bill spent 13 years with the family that adopted him before he, too, died earlier this year.
We have several other cats, who will hopefully stay with us for a long time. But I doubt we’ll ever have another cat as unique as Tarka was.
After spending a week in Hungary earlier this year, on my way back I stopped in London for three days. London is one of my favorite cities, and I haven’t spent any time there in years. My plan to enjoy myself was simple: get an Oyster card, take the Underground to random places, walk.
A few days before, still in Budapest, I badly twisted an ankle. Still, even this did not deter me, although it did slow me down; occasionally, I felt the need to sit down and rest my aching and swelling foot a little.
That’s precisely what happened one early evening in central London, where I found a tiny little park tucked in between two large office buildings near the Thames. Despite the fact that I was in the center of a world metropolis, it was eerily quiet in this spot, except for the loud singing of birds.
As soon as I sat down, I spotted a bunch of pigeons eating some crumbs from the pavement and occasionally fighting each other off. It was fascinating. My phone was with me, so I started capturing the scene on video.
Don’t expect anything spectacular. Just a bunch of pigeons living their lives in a big city. I don’t even like pigeons; many believe that they are flying rats, and I think they have a point. Still… these guys were funny. And the surrealist quiet of the spot I found right in the heart of a big city created an atmosphere that I will forever remember.
Two days ago, a woodpecker appeared on our linden tree. By the time I managed to grab my phone, it was gone.
Today, the bird reappeared and kindly stayed long enough for me to shoot a few minutes of video.
Nothing exciting here. Just a woodpecker doing what woodpeckers do, on a dead branch of our tree. I just found the bird fascinating, and I found it especially fascinating that a somewhat uncommon bird like this one would appear on a tree in a busy city.
Visitors to my blog or Web sites may have noticed that in the past week, my Web pages loaded more slowly than usual, and may even have been unavailable at times.
The reason: shortly before noon, July 30, I lost my primary Internet connection.
This connection was via a legacy DSL service (bridged DSL) to a company that used to be UUNet Canada, was purchased by MCI, and eventually, by Verizon, and now does business under the Verizon Canada name.
Yes, the same Verizon that is about to enter the Canadian wireless market, much to the concern of Canada’s “big three”, Bell, Rogers and Telus.
I noticed the service interruption essentially immediately, and reported it to Verizon. First, they suggested that it was a telco problem; indeed, Bell Canada even wanted to send out a technician, but fortunately, I was able to talk them out of this. (The DSL modem was connecting just fine.)
The service was not restored the next day, nor on August 1. But on August 1, I had a long discussion with a Verizon technician. The first thing I learned is that the technician resides in the Philippines. Back in the old days, when I had a technical issue with UUNet Canada, I usually ended up talking to an engineer in their Toronto network operations center, and my issue was resolved in minutes. Don’t get me wrong, the Philippines technician spoke accent-free English and had a basic level of understanding of the technology; but no real competence and, obviously, no decision-making authority.
What the technician did explain, however, is that Verizon made a colossal screw-up: they decommissioned some of their point-of-presence equipment here in Ottawa without first moving all customers who were still using said equipment. The technician told me that they were scrambling to find a solution, and I’ll be back up and running within a few days.
Well… that was August 1. A long weekend then came and went, but still, no Internet service. So on Tuesday, August 5, I called Verizon Canada. Their main 800 number was answered by a pleasant sounding young lady (an intern, I later learned) but on my first two calls, she managed to connect me to two different voice mailboxes, whereas on the third try, I got disconnected. On the fourth try, she made a real effort to reach someone within the company. She was ready to give up (providing me with an e-mail address instead) but when I told her that I’d rather wait on hold a little longer, she finally managed to get me connected to a senior manager.
This gentleman was friendly and competent enough, and certainly understood and appreciated the severity of my situation. I explained to him that I was already taking steps to switch to Bell Canada as my primary Internet provider. He promised to look into my situation and find a solution. He asked for a day. I asked him to call me this morning, because I wanted to make a decision today, one way or another.
He called indeed at the promised time, but all he could tell me was that he was still waiting for some technical folks to come out of a meeting. Okay, we agreed that he’d call again before 2 PM. He sent an e-mail at 2:09 PM, saying that it would take just a tad longer.
At 3:45 PM, I e-mailed and then called him. No answer. So a few minutes later, it was the end of the line for me: I called and e-mailed again, this time instructing Verizon to terminate my service. I then contacted Bell and asked them to initiate setting up my new account.
Now let’s be clear for a moment: I am not talking about some cheap $20/month wireless contract. I was paying★ a premium, to the tune of several hundred dollars, to Verizon for this service. And I’ve been their customer (with a a short interruption) since way back in 1994. If my experience is indicative of the kind of service Verizon provides, all I can say to people cheering the prospects of Verizon’s entry into the Canadian wireless market is to be careful what they wish for.
It will be a few days before my new service with Bell is up and running. I am sure there will be headaches, but I am hopeful that it won’t be too much of a hassle. Meanwhile, I am relying on a backup service that I set up two years ago with Rogers, when my Verizon service was down for a few days (that time, it was actually Bell’s fault, or so I was told.) This service is a little slower, but at least it works (for now).
★I said “I was paying a premium”, but in the last few months, I really wasn’t. Not my fault… I really tried giving them my money. Earlier this year, Verizon moved their Canadian business customers to their pre-existing Enterprise system that combines billing, online payments, service calls, etc. I dutifully set up my account as instructed and made many attempts to pay. The system accepted my credit card, informed me that my payment was processed, but charges never actually appeared on my credit card account. Last month, I contacted Verizon and after some lengthy phone calls with their billing department, also located in the Philippines, they finally told me that the problem has been found and fixed. Well… no charges appeared on my credit card account yet. Funny thing is, when I check with Verizon, my account there shows no arrears. What can I say? If they don’t want my money… I just hope that if they do come to their senses and collect the outstanding invoice amounts, they don’t actually try to charge me for the month of August… the service, after all, went away on July 30 and it was never restored.
I spent a part of yesterday afternoon speed-reading Konstantin Kakaes’s new e-book, The Pioneer Detectives. It’s a short book (still well worth the $2.99 Kindle price) but it reads very well and presents a fair picture of our efforts researching the origin of the anomalous acceleration of the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft.
Yes, I was one of those “detectives”. (In fact, I still consider myself one, as I don’t believe our job is quite done yet; we still owe the community a detailed account of our research and an update of our Pioneer Anomaly review before we can move on with a clean conscience.) So I have an insider’s view of this very intriguing story.
I had a chance to talk with Kakaes at length when he visited me here in Ottawa last year. Over the years, I learned to be apprehensive when talking to journalists; often, the words they put in your mouth bear little resemblance to what you actually said to them when interviewed. I was relieved that this was not the case now: at no time did I feel compelled to cringe while reading the book.
So I really enjoyed Kakaes’s telling of our story. Indeed, I think I learned a thing or two about presenting a complex subject to a non-specialist audience. Kakaes, an accomplished science journalist, manages to do so without dumbing it down with excessive oversimplifications.
One person whose views may not be as favorable is the original discoverer of the Pioneer anomaly, John Anderson. I am told that Anderson is not fond of our results. Kakaes believes that this is because Anderson is “blinded by his desire to believe in something new, in something unexplained. He wants so badly not to know.” Yes, scientists are people, too, and the prospect that a discovery you made, once thought profound, may just be an engineering fluke is not an easy one to swallow. Kakaes does what a responsible journalist must do: he tries to paint an objective picture, which sometimes includes unflattering bits. Yet I think that John Anderson has more scientific integrity than Kakaes gives him credit for.
And to be perfectly honest, I am also disappointed with our own results. When I first read about the Pioneer anomaly (as an outsider, long before my involvement) it seemed to fit perfectly into the big scheme: namely that perhaps the same physics that was responsible for significant deviations from Einstein’s and Newton’s predictions on cosmological and galactic scales might also be responsible for a small but measurable deviation here in the solar system. This was a fantastic prospect!
Sadly, it was not to be. What once seemed like a revolutionary, paradigm-shifting result has been reduced to a small footnote in the history of gravitational physics. Yet I think that our story is nonetheless intriguing. Kakaes seems to think so, too, judging by his book. A book that I am happy to recommend.
Today I realized that in the past month, my blog has once again become what blogs were meant to be originally: a write-only medium that nobody reads.
Well, almost. The few people who actually bother to look it up at spinor.info could still read it (and thank you for your interest!) The few people who follow my tweets may have seen my posts. People on Google+ may have seen them as well, but are there still people on Google+?
However, the WordPress plugin that I’ve been using for the last couple of years now to publish my posts automatically on my Facebook page has quit on me. And since I was not usually checking my own Facebook posts, I didn’t even notice that something was amiss, I merely assumed that my Facebook friends were really not that interested in what I had to say.
In reality, my posts never made it to Facebook. The culprit has been one of the stupid “migrations” of the Facebook API (Application Programming Interface), which I foolishly enabled, thus breaking the plugin.
Anyhow, thanks to a helpful hint by the plugin’s developer in a WordPress support forum, I was able to find the cause and fix the problem.
I have yet to figure out why people who develop software on which other people depend, most notably people who develop software libraries that are used by other people’s programs, are so keen on making changes that seemingly serve no useful purpose other than breaking said other people’s programs.
Grumble.
This beautiful cat belonged to my mother-in-law. I last saw him just a few short weeks ago, when I visited her in the city of Pécs, Hungary.
Sadly, my use of the past tense is justified, as Frici (which was his name) is no more. He passed away today, from what appeared to be a severe urinary tract issue, I was told. He was only about four years old. He was a stray that ended up with my mother-in-law after she lost her previous cat.
Yes, we know that it’s just a cat. Yes, we know that cats who spent some time on the street as strays like Frici are much more likely to acquire an infection, or just suffer the consequences of prolonged malnutrition or dehydration that would eventually shorten their lives. Still… Frici was much too young to pass away, and did not deserve to pass away in pain.
Life, I guess. Cherish every day of it, who knows how many are left.
This morning, my wife and I attended a very moving ceremony in the memory of my good friend, George Olah, who passed away earlier this year.
George’s daughters decided to dedicate a tree in a public park in Ottawa to their father. A little marble plaque at the foot of the tree bears George’s name, the dates of his birth and death, and the Hungarian word for cheers, “egészségedre”.
A violinist was also present. The sound of a solo violin during a cloudy, rainy day was especially poignant and it helped set a somber mood. At one point, when the violinist was asked to play one of George’s favorite tunes, I was able to capture a few seconds of it with my cell phone.
Yet we also had plenty of laughs. George, after all, was a very happy person and his stories were always delightful. My favorite moment: when one of George’s daughters told us that the city permit would even have allowed them to set up a trampoline, several of us exclaimed, “Why didn’t you?” That is because we all knew that George would have loved something so unconventional.
I noticed that the pictures on Google Street View for our neighborhood were updated recently. Much to my delight, I noticed that two cats from the neighborhood, cats that we have known for at least seven years, were photographed by Google’s cameras:
Yes, my wife and I are both fond of cats. Not just our own four cats but also cats from the neighborhood.
Today, the weirdest thing happened on my main desktop computer: the right-click menu of Windows Explorer, as well as the Windows desktop, disappeared. I was also unable to bring up the Properties dialog, even through the menu bar.
The worst part of it is, I could not figure out what happened. A reboot didn’t fix things, nor did an obvious Registry hack (making sure that HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\NoViewContextMenu is set to 0. For some reason, it was set to 1.) Eventually, I resorted to the big guns and used System Restore (thanks to the fact that I do backups daily, I had a restore point from 2AM this morning) to fix things. Still, it bugs me that something happened that I do not understand.
In comparison with another, mostly identical system, I noted that the other system had no subkeys under the Policies key whatsoever. So I wonder exactly when and how the Explorer and System subkeys were created on this workstation.
And while I was at it, I searched the Registry a little more and found another, possibly relevant entry: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\NoViewContextMenu. Once again, this Registry value is missing from the other machine, so I wonder how, why and when it was created on this workstation.
This is deeply disturbing. I don’t like mysteries, especially not on a machine that I use on a daily basis. Life is short and one does not need to resolve every mystery, but occasionally, such unexpected behavior can be a sign of a security issue.
There was another reason for me to stop by in London: the possibility of meeting some old high school friends, celebrating a shared milestone in our lives as we are all turning 50 this year.
The reunion was smaller than we hoped for, as in the end, only three of us were present. But the evening went well, good food, good beer, good company and all. One of my friends was, in fact, just recently in North Korea, and the stories he shared were absolutely fascinating.
When I decided to visit London, I secretly hoped that if I am lucky, I’d spot the TARDIS, Dr. Who’s infamous “bigger on the inside than on the outside” time machine.
Thanks to Richard Bartle, my quest was not in vain. The TARDIS, as it turns out, is sitting quietly just outside one of the exits of the Earl’s Court Underground station.
Except that… well, it’s not the real TARDIS. Instead, it’s just an ordinary blue police box, just like the one the TARDIS mimics, but unlike the TARDIS, this one is decidedly not bigger on the inside than on the outside. Still, it was fun to find.
With four cats in our house, it’s easy to guess that my wife and I are both animal lovers. To be sure, we are partial to felines, but we love most other animals (with obvious exceptions such as flies or mosquitoes) and we are especially troubled when we see animal suffering.
And animals suffer a lot. Especially in wars. Which is why I find the Animals in War Memorial especially poignant.
I happened upon this memorial when I made an unplanned detour on my way to Leicester Square, where I was to meet with Richard Bartle, who was kind enough to come to London to see me. We were supposed to meet under the Shakespeare statue at Leicester Square. When I arrived, there was no Shakespeare statue. Fortunately, I eventually realized that the cordoned off area in the center of the square does, in fact, hide the statue which is currently being renovated. Shortly thereafter, I spotted Richard.
I was silent in the past ten days because I was traveling. I spent six days in Hungary, and a few more in London, England.
I’d like to say that I had a blast of a time but that is not strictly true: I had a rather nasty bout with gastroenteritis that severely interfered with my plans concerning my time in Hungary. Indeed, let this serve as my apology to all those friends I did not have time to look up: the two days I reserved for this purpose, I ended up spending mostly in my hotel bathroom. Oh well.
At least the view I had from my hotel room was enjoyable. I don’t mind trainspotting, and I was on a high enough floor that the noise was negligible, even with the window open.
The view from my London hotel room was perhaps a little less exciting. But, at least it was also a quiet room. Or would have been, were it not for some noisy neighbors next door. (Yes, dear lady, the entire floor heard you when you were loudly banging on your friend’s door at 6 AM yelling, “are you awake?” We all were, by then.)
If only my room had been a tad bigger, with a mattress a tad less worn and a TV mount a tad less broken, I’d have been entirely satisfied. But beggars can’t be choosers, and when looking for reasonably priced accommodation near Paddington station in London, we are all beggars.
And the weather in London was absolutely spectacular. Blue skies and sunshine most of the time, not too warm, with a pleasant breeze.
Now I am safely back home, though still nursing my left foot; I almost twisted my ankle getting out of a car about a week ago in Budapest, and endless walks in London did not help either. Hopefully, I’ll stop limping in a day or two.
In all the excitement (okay, I wasn’t that excited. But, I was busy) I almost forgot to celebrate an anniversary: it was 40 years ago on April 5 that Pioneer 11 was launched at Cape Canaveral.
In a recent Letter to the Editor published in the newsletter of the American Physical Society, a correspondent suggested that Pioneer 11 may still reveal some anomalous behavior. I do not believe this to be the case. While it is true that our investigation of Pioneer 11 was not as thorough as our investigation of Pioneer 10 (due, in part, to the fact that we have less Doppler data from Pioneer 11) there are no statistically significant inconsistencies.
This Letter also reveals two misconceptions about the anomaly. One is that if the anomaly is Earth directed, which would presumably be inconsistent with a thermal cause. This is not so: quite the contrary, since the spin axis and the Earth direction mostly coincide, an Earth directed anomaly is exactly what one would expect to see in case of a thermal cause. Second, I don’t think it is even relevant to say that “a new physics cause may still be possible”. Of course new physics is always possible. But before one can speculate about new physics, “old physics” must be excluded, i.e., there must be an incontrovertible demonstration that conventional physics cannot account for the observed phenomena. This is not the case for the Pioneer anomaly: conventional physics comfortably accounts for the anomalous acceleration. Sure, there are small discrepancies that are within the margin of error, but you don’t fish for new physics within the margine of error. That’s not the way science is supposed to work.