DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Bim forwarded a great story about the legal battle stemming from the so-called Energy Crisis of 2000-2001: Small-time officials take lead in Enron fight (mirror)

Enron has been accused of manipulating or “gaming” the energy market, by withholding supply in order to increase demand and raise prices. The fallout was enormous: western states signed energy contracts providing ridiculously inflated prices; rolling blackouts killed power across California with little warning; Gray Davis was replaced as governor by an action-movie actor whose name escapes me.

Today’s story, in brief, is that a small utility company in Washington acquired and transcribed hundreds of hours of audio tape featuring Enron employees bragging about manipulating the market. It’s precisely the sort of evidence that Enron officials must have prayed would never come to light.

The transcriptions were explosive. Enron traders joked about lying in their negotiations with Snohomish and others. They joked about stealing money from “Grandma Millie” in California, and they joked that President Bush would not stop them by imposing price caps because of his close relationship with Enron chief executive Ken Lay.
”This is more than a smoking gun,” says Russ Campbell, another Nevada Power lawyer. “It’s an audiotape of the gun being fired, the bullet hitting the victim, and the murderer standing over the victim laughing.”

According to the Chronicle’s wine writer,

The tongue only has four taste zones — the tip is sensitive to sweetness, the back portion responds to bitterness, the forward edges detect saltiness and the back edges react to sourness.

And so bad science is propagated yet again. Here’s the truth about the taste map.

The article contains this related and interesting bit about the impact of the shape of a wineglass on the drinker’s perception of flavor and aroma:

At a tasting that Riedel conducted, he actually proved that the thick oakiness of a Chardonnay tasted leaner in a Montrachet glass and a Zinfandel lost much of its sweet cherried fruitiness in a goblet meant for Bordeaux.

I used to see those Riedel glasses at wineries all the time. I always wondered if they were for real, or just a marketing scam aimed at people with more money than sense. I guess it’s time to start buying Riedel stemware now.

The second day of my Jaguar upgrade attempt ended much as day one — with an inaccessible mirrored RAID volume.

The driver is supposed to time out when a mirror isn’t available, and mount the one available partition. The bug is that this “waiting” condition never times out.

At the request of the software vendor, I booted the system after disconnecting one of the two RAID drives. I hate to muck with disk drives… but this seemed to be the only solution. I’ll summarize an afternoon’s work and a dozen email exchanges with the vendor, and simply say that although I was at one point able to mount one of the mirrors and copy off all my data, I was never able to correct the core problem. Throw in the usual mix of inexplicable SCSI weirdness (“Erm, it’s run that way for 4 years; why won’t it boot?”) and you’ll have a decent picture of the process.

So the good news is that my system is fully functional — I’ve installed most of the apps I need, configured the UI to my personal taste, and begun the tedious process of becoming accustomed to a new email client.

Monday I’ll revisit the RAID issue. Wish me luck.

Pictured is about seven pounds of multigrain sourdough… a double batch, baked into two boules, a 10 oz. batard, and a 3.5 lb. monster sandwich loaf that nearly overflowed my pizza stone.

We served a pile of it for dinner. The rest is in the freezer.

I eat bread nearly every day. (I might have a problem.) I used to bake three days a week so I’d always have a fresh fix. Because most recipes turned out more bread than I could reasonably eat in two days, I gave away surplus loaves frequently.

Then I discovered that bread keeps well in the freezer. It changed my life. Now I bake only every few weeks, but in enormous quantities. Our freezer is full of the stuff.

The downside is that I’m a lot less generous with bread now. Years ago I was eager to give it away because otherwise it would go stale on my counter… now, though, I know I could eat every bite, given a few weeks’ time and a toaster and maybe a little dish of extra-virgin olive oil. So I rarely am willing to sacrifice a loaf to friends. I’m trying to compensate by being really generous with my time.

(That’s a joke.)

The time has finally come to upgrade this creaky MacOS 9.2.2 workstation to a modern, efficient, secure, feature-rich operating system: I’m switching to WinXP.

Heh. Pick up your jaw. I’m only kidding.

I am sorely past due for migrating to OS X (which I use and embrace on my laptop). Upgrade pain is acute in my case — I’m so thoroughly wedded to my particular collection of apps and utilities that any minor disruption could take weeks to overcome. And a few of the apps I rely on don’t exist for OS X, so I have to find uncomfortable replacements. Join me as I begin to bite this bullet, hopefully without blowing the back of my skull all over the wall.

1. Make backups: set up firewire drive, find Retrospect installer disk, find license key, install Retrospect, run backup, run backup again after reducing match criteria because archive was bigger than OS filesize limit (2gb), run four more backups with carefully-selected criteria to keep archive size down.
2. Update SCSI card firmware for OS X compatibility: decipher cryptic notes on vendor’s website, download latest utility, download latest firmware, act surprised when latest firmware package contains utility newer than “latest” utility downloaded separately, run utility to flash firmware, ignore configuration screen with about 75 incomprehensible parameter-tuning widgets in hopes that the defaults are OK.
3. Install new boot drive: find baggie of surplus machine screws that’s buried in the garage somewhere, remove drive sled from computer, mount new drive to sled, restore sled to computer, discover that the single remaining power cable won’t reach new drive. Pull on harness, cut cable tie, re-route many connectors, fiddle. Search in vain for 4'' extension cord that I know I have, somewhere. Re-route connectors again. Finally make everything fit. Close case.
4. Find Jaguar CDs, which haven’t been seen since last September: look at prominent place on shelf where other utility disks are kept, but find (for reasons I cannot explain) only the old Panther disks. Look in storage area under stairs where all remaining media is kept. Look in closet. Look through media box again. Search desk. Look through media box again. (Yes, I am a George Carlin comedy sketch.) Finally find Panther disks in box of ancient audio CDs moved from the living room because we never play them any more.
5. Install Panther: Format new disk with Disk Utility; see error message that system can’t boot from new drive and therefore OS can’t be installed, re-partition new drive, see error again, call Apple, explain problem, learn that OS X drive has to be “primary” ATA drive. Pull both drives from case, look up jumper configuration on vendor website, reset master/slave jumpers, reinstall drives, re-attach power cables. Re-run installer. Act nonchalant when it works. After all, why wouldn’t it work?

For most people, the above would describe an afternoon that, if not exactly pleasant, at least resulted in success. But I have complex needs, or at least a complex configuration, so I was only beginning.

My OS 9 system had three logical drives: an ATA boot drive, a SCSI RAID-1 (striped) drive for applications, a SCSI RAID-0 (mirrored) drive for data. I’d need to upgrade the RAID drivers for OS X. The process can’t be reversed.

The striped array came right up. The mirrored array — the one with five years’ worth of data — did not. Sigh.

I shot an email to the vendor. I know they work weekends because they’ve bailed me out once before, when a previous upgrade went awry.

And then I addressed the next critical phase of any OS X upgrade: setting up cute desktop icons.

BTW, OS X kicks ass. Don’t mistake my tale of woe for a general gripe about Apple or even about the third-party RAID software I’m using. I wish computers were easier to set up, but I recognize that I push mine harder than most people.