I asked a state game and fish dude about bears and beehives. Here's what he had to say:

It's my option that bears view hives as targets of opportunity. Simply put if they discover a hive in town they are already here looking around. The key is if they can access it and identify it as a food source. If not, it will not hold them in the area. If they do make access they will return until such time as the food is no longer available. The key is bear proofing your hives.

There are several bee keepers in town who could advise you. One of the best practices I've seen is a simple wrought Iron cage anchored in the ground (make sure it's strong enough for the bear to climb on and can't pull it up). This can be fairly light weight, provides easy access for the bees and the bear can't reach the hive.

So it looks like we're still go for bees, we just need to decide between an electric fence (cheap) and a wrought iron cage. Where could I even find a wrought iron cage?

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I went under the house again today, to spray the crud with some enzymes that are supposed to eat it up. The plumber, who only charged us $150 or so, left his tarp under the house, and didn't bother to uncover any of the sludge. When I pulled the tarp off I just about tossed my cookies several times. Then I got to spraying. The stuff Amy bought smelled pretty good to me, we'll see if it helps or not. The scent is wafting up into the living room right now (10pm), but it's bearable, mostly because I know now what's causing it, and I feel confident that eventually it will go away.

I guess technically what we have under there is a biofilm, an ancient ancestor. I seem to be biologically programmed to be revolted by my cousins down there, but I still couldn't help feeling a little sense of irony that I was down there doing everything I could to kill off the very thing that kicked off all life on Earth. Then I heaved again and resumed my killing spree with zeal.

After this, I played with Ginnie. She's been excited about LEGO bricks lately, she likes to play house with the little LEGO dudes. She got a girl in her LEGO advent calendar last week and boy howdy was that the best thing ever. She still likes to build things, though. I got her a LEGO Batman set for Christmas. She knows I got it for her, she was with me when we picked it out together. She knows it's under the tree all wrapped up, and that she can't open it until Christmas. Is this normal for a 3-year-old? It seems too patient to me, but hey, I'm not complaining.

I ordered Amy's christmas present. I wanted to get her a G1 phone, but our 2-year contract isn't up until May, and it costs twice as much if your contract hasn't ended yet. I have a little trouble swallowing the concept that our craptastic phones set T-Mobile back $180 per phone, but whatever; we signed the form so we'll stick it out.

When Ginnie went down for her nap, I went outside to help Amy clean the crud off my shoes and the electric drill I left under the house for a week. While I was out there, I decided to move the locust tree. I swear, it was like "If you give a mouse a cookie". Moving that tree took a lot of strength that I just don't have on account of my desk job not really beefing me up. But with the help of Amy and a saw, I got the thing out of the ground and into a new hole. I hope it lives. It's a really great place for a new tree, it's even close to our little moat (lots of water).

Once I had that moved, we put our Hawthorne tree where the locust tree was before. The Hawthorne should fare better, it's smaller and won't try to compete with the nearby oak and pine trees.

While I was outside, I mentioned to Amy a reminder I got from a co-worker: Los Alamos has bears. Bears like honey and bee larvae. This could be a problem for us. The solution appears to be installing an electric fence. But putting up an electric fence sounds pretty scary, and also costly. We're going to put out our feelers to find out who the local beekeeps are, and ask them how they deal with bears. The last thing I want to do is bait a bear into eating food from town: that's pretty much a death sentence for the bear. Not to mention killing our beehive.

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Elisabeth Pauline Pickett is my father's father's sister. My sister was named after her, and she named her daughter after her too. When I was 16 she took me to France and Switzerland and I wish I hadn't been such a snot, but then again I was 16 touring Europe with my 70-year-old great aunt, so I probably did pretty well. I remember, I was pretty nice until she wanted me to be in a photo, at which point I became dour. I think at the time I didn't want to spoil the shot by having people in it, or something. I was a fruitcake when I was 16.

She was one of 6 or so woman urologists in the world for a long time. She never married, spending her time and money touring the world with friends and relatives. She said she'd never been to Albania, but I think she'd been pretty much everywhere else in the world. Here's something her alumni association wrote up about her.

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Here's a little script I run out of cron every hour. This makes it so I can place scripts in ~/lib/cron/daily to run daily, or into the hourly directory for hourly... you get the idea. If you have this on a laptop, then it'll recognize that the daily script hasn't run in over a day, and run it right away, instead of waiting until midnight or whatever. It's like anacron in that respect.

I've tried to make this as portable as I could. It only needs Bourne shell, hostname, and find (and test and echo, but if you don't have those you're in trouble).

#! /bin/sh

basedir=$HOME/lib/cron
cd $HOME
hostname=$(hostname -s)

run_parts () {
    for fn in $(find $1 -type f ! -name .\* ! -name \*~ -perm +100); do
        $fn
    done
}

while read name interval; do
    if [ -d $basedir/$name ]; then
        if [ -n "$(find $basedir/$name -name .timestamp.$hostname -cmin -$interval)" ]; then
            continue
        fi
        echo > $basedir/$name/.timestamp.$hostname
        run_parts $basedir/$name
    fi
done <<EOF
hourly  60
daily   1440
weekly  10080
monthly 302400
yearly  3669120
EOF

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I've recently begun using a very dated Linux box as my primary machine at work. As a result, I've once again begun compiling software I use (like git, dwm, and dmenu). I used a Makefile that I've been using on fozzie (AKA woozle) for some time now, which automatically downloads the tarball, unpacks it, optionally applies patches, configures, builds, and installs the software.

The advantage to doing things this way is that it becomes much easier to upgrade. In a lot of cases all I have to do is change the version number and run make again. Other times I need to modify a patch file a little (there's a target for creating patch files based on changes I make in the source tree), but all the knowledge about how to configure the thing and install it is encapsulated in the Makefile.

Here's my Makefile for dmenu:

BASENAME = dmenu
VERSION = 3.9
URL = http://code.suckless.org/dl/tools/$(TARBALL)

include ../Makefile.common

build:
        cd $(DIR) && make
        touch $@

install:
        cd $(DIR) && make install
        touch $@

Pretty easy.

If you'd like a copy, head on over to the git project.

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What I'm really made of

For a while now we've had this funky smell in the house. It coincided with a mouse infestation, so at first we thought it was undiscovered mouse turds. We hunted with a passion, picking up each and every turd we came across, then bleaching it. Still the smell persisted. I figured it had to be coming from the crawlspace.

Our crawlspace has a forced-air heating unit right next to the entrance, and I have to crawl under a vent, through a bed of styrofoam insulation beads with about a foot of overhead clearance until I hit the asbestos-covered duct.

I went down there once and sure enough there were mouse turds all over the place. I cleaned them up, placed some traps, and left it alone for a few weeks. I didn't bother crawling under the duct, why would I? Obviously we had mice under there, and I didn't want to dork around a 2-foot crawlspace to confirm such an obvious diagnosis.

Today I decided I'd had enough, and went down there with a couple plastic baggies, latex gloves, and some bleach. I went the long way around so that I didn't have to crawl under the duct. This involved going through a crapload of cobwebs, over the line that brings the toilet to the sewer, and god knows what else. I found two crispy mice at the north and south ends of the house. By the time I'd circled around to the north end it was pretty soggy. I was getting pretty worried. When I crossed back over to the west side of the house, I found out what the smell was coming from.

Gray is wet. Green is sewage. Blue is a pool of water. The orange line is me at top speed.

That's right ladies and gentlemen, we had our own vermin resort under the kitchen. One of our 50-year-old metal pipes had corroded through and all our garbage disposal crap was dumping straight out into the crawlspace. I then did what any rational male would have done at this point: I crawled over it. I mean, it was either that or spend another 15 minutes retracing my steps, and clothes wash, right?

I got up and explained calmly to Amy how totally grossed out I was: "oh my god honey the house is going to collapse!" Well, it would collapse if we let this continue. And honestly, I wanted to express my dismay with as few vomit-inducing words as I could manage. Amy proceeded to flip the crap out, which made me feel a little better about my own mental state at the time. Ginnie wanted to see the dead mice.

After a few phone calls to the plumber and then Darrell (note to self: that was the wrong order of calls) we decided we might be able to fix this ourselves. We headed to Metzger's, the local hardware store, and picked up a "drill pump", and a tiny hacksaw for small spaces. I put my poopy clothes back on and went under again armed with an electric drill with uninsulated wires, two garden hoses, a hacksaw, a trowel, an empty yogurt container, and two flashlights.

I tried, I really did. But I'm just not tough enough for this job. Up against the shit chowder that had formed, I never really stood a chance.

Myriad insects enjoy a delicious leftovers-and-poisoned-mouse-turd stew. Click for maximum gross-out.

You really need to zoom in on the photo to get the full experience, with the corn and beans and oregano and mouse poop and worms and flies on the layer of snot-like something. Maybe it's soap. I'm going to pretend it's soap.

The smell and sound was what really did it. Every time I took a step it squished in just the right way to make me heave. I tried to inch closer to the pipe, and got close enough to whack it with my flashlight and verify that it is metal. I tried to pump out the little pool under the gigantic gaping hole in the pipe, and the $11 pump proved to be utterly overwhelmed my this slimy goo. It did nothing but stir up the chunks of food in the pool, which I must tell you was a lovely sight.

About the time that I splashed some black goo on my face, I decided that I went to college precisely so that I wouldn't have to deal with this kind of shit. Painting the house is cool, repairing the sink is no problem, I can install electrical stuff, rip out carpet, fix just about anything, but right then and there I decided to draw the line at replacing plumbing in a 2-foot dark crawlspace full of raw sewage.

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When I talked it over with the guy who we suspected to have the allergy, he was borderline excited about us having bees. He has a big herb garden and was pretty happy about the prospect of them pollenating it. Our 70-year-old neighbor thinks bees are okay too. That leaves the neighbors behind us who would probably never notice bees on account of the two-story playhouse they erected in the back yard (the bees would fly over it) and our mellow neighbor to the south.

Amy's going to place an order for bees today. We'll get a package of Italian bees shipped from Texas. We don't feel comfortable housing feral bees just yet. It would save us about $100, but we feel like we need to do everything we can to make sure the bees won't sting our neighbors. In reality even Africanized bees probably wouldn't go stinging our neighbors willy-nilly. And Africanized bees can't live at this altitude anyway, so feral bees would be more tame than that. Still, this way we have a receipt showing we got mild-mannered bees. But I feel like we're copping out.

We've also decided to go with a Kenyan top-bar hive. I'll probably build the one detailed on http://biobees.com/, since a lot of trial end error experience has gone into that design. I'll get some pallets from the local newspaper, which will be cheap, and re-use wood that as a bonus isn't chemically treated. I have to get the hive finished before April when our bees ship.

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As I've mentioned previously, we have a new MythTV box. This is a computer that feeds our television set, and is fed by our TV antenna. It looks sort of like one of those fancypants cable or satellite TV boxes that show you what's playing on TV, and lets you record shows so you can watch them later. What makes MythTV cool is that it's all free software. So, like, bugs get fixed. And you can do things like rip CDs and DVDs onto the hard drive, or listen to your MP3 collection or Internet radio stations, or schedule recordings with a web browser. And it all works with a remote control

We had to buy a new computer to do all this, since the old one couldn't keep up with HDTV. I got a nice motherboard from ASUS that didn't require me to add any expansion cards, and it included this apparently recent VT1708B sound chip.

This sound chip had a problem right away: playing DVDs creates this bizarre scratching/looping problem sound problem. What's weird is that it's just for the center channel (voices): the soundtrack keeps on playing smoothly. This problem also shows up with playing back music, but oddly not for watching TV. And to add another wrinkle, the ogle DVD player worked fine for sound.

I was knitting a hat for Ginnie when it hit me: ogle is probably using the obsolete OSS interface, and everything else is probably using ALSA. Sure enough, setting the sound device in MythTV to use OSS cleared the problem right up. Armed with the near-certain knowledge that it was a driver bug, I went searching on the web. Turns out that this is a problem that's been fixed relatively recently and just hasn't made it into the stock kernel for my distribution.

Here's where the old age and treachery comes in: I'm not going to do the right thing and build a custom kernel, or try to pull in development versions of things, because I found something that gives me the result I'm after. I can run it this way for years, I don't care. And every once in a while I'll probably remember that I'm using this outdated interface, and try the new one to see if it's working yet.

This is a pretty lame dig at the whippersnappers but I'll take what I can get.

Update Nov 24: it totally didn't work at all. And the fixes in the 1.0.17 release of the ALSA drivers don't fix it either. So much for me being clever.

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I've been riding the bus a lot this last year, and I've been thinking a lot about whether or not that's hypocritical, given my role as a cycling advocate.

On the one hand, I ought to be out riding my bike every day so I can be in tune with cyclists. I have two awesome bikes that I should be putting miles on instead of letting sit in the garage needing repairs (actually it's just the folder that needs fixing).

On the other hand, I never claimed to be anything other than a commuter and utility cyclist, and I'm also a big fan of public transit. Riding the bus I've made actual friends, something that never happened on the bike. It's gotten me walking more, which isn't a bad thing. And it's not like I take the bus every day, either.

Perhaps instead of positioning myself as a bicyclist, I should position our whole family as having only one car and not using it much. Bicycles are a big part of that equation, but so is the bus, and so is a good pair of shoes. I don't want to confine myself to a single way of getting there.

I'm not going to worry any more about riding the bus. I am going to worry more about getting enough exercise, though, and that might get me on my bike some more.

My fancy custom bike has over 3000 miles on it now. That works out to less than 50¢ per mile. At this point I feel comfortable saying that it was a good investment

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Tonight we get to move back downstairs. That means we'll be moving a bunch of furniture when I get home.

As I predicted, we are all pretty sick of living in such a cramped space. Last night I moved a sofa and TV stand out into the living room, just so we'd have some room to maneuver again. It made a big difference in how the whole house feels.

Ginnie's having a lot of fun playing gymnasium in the parts of the house that are deviod of furniture. She's running around kicking a ball around, which is a pretty fun game for Amy and me too.

While we were bunched up in half the house, the new TV computer arrived. I apparently neglected to order a power supply (boo hiss) so I had Paul pick one up for us in Albuquerque. It's a little bit on the loud side, but whatever, it works. Maybe for my birthday I'll buy a new quieter power supply, but probably by then I won't care any more.

The aerial antenna signal strength leaves something to be desired. The new tuner can't pull in any stations with the antenna the way it is. I suspect that it's because the wires are frayed where they meet the antenna, they go through one or two connector boxes, and the cable is about a hundred feet long. All those things add up to big signal attenuation.

I'm going to figure out how to properly wire up the antenna. Once I've got that, I'll try running a shorter length into the living room. If that doesn't fix it, I'll try moving the tuner closer to the antenna and running a long network cable from that. We have options. I'm not giving up yet.

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