Tim Peterson's Blog

In the absence of anything coherent to write, I shall draw on some random bits of journalings to compose this random post.

In September for Biodiversity and Society class we went to the RIT Bird Observatory to see some bird banding. They have three sets of mist nets to catch birds in, and then they bring them back, measure them, and band them. I took a few pictures. Afterwards I looked up their web site. They have some pictures of how to distinguish older and younger birds of different species. In one of them I noticed that the fingernail of the person holding the bird had a lot of parallel ridges, more (or more pronounced) than I have on my own. Immediately the word “striated” popped into my head. I couldn’t place the meaning, so I looked it up. It turns out that that’s exactly the word for that type of formation. Somehow I unconsciously knew the proper word without knowing I knew it!

October 4th was the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1 , so the Imaging Science department had a Sputnik party. Unfortunately, it was at 3, right in the middle of class, but we got done about ten after so I could go over there. I missed the majority of it, but I did catch some of Roger Easton talking about his personal memories of Vanguard , the US response to Sputnik. It seems his father , in addition to being the inventor of GPS , was directly involved in the Vanguard project. On December 6, 1957, they tried to launch the TV3 satellite into orbit. The first stage guidance system failed 2 seconds after liftoff, and it crashed to the ground and exploded . However, the satellite itself fell clear of the explosion and continued functioning, though too badly damaged to be reused. Roger said that the next morning he woke up and his dad said, “Go look in the kitchen.” There in a cardboard box was the TV3 satellite itself. It now resides in the Smithsonian.

I think I multitask too well. I drove from RIT to the library yesterday, and on the way back I decided to avoid some of the traffic on Jefferson by taking some residential roads leading from 15A to Hylan. Just as I turned in there, Bible Story by Scott Krippayne came on the radio, so I started singing along. Shortly thereafter I got engrossed in checking the map to make sure I knew where I was going. Several minutes later when I was back on bigger roads I put down the map and discovered that I was still singing. Apparently I was too busy driving and checking the map to pay any attention to what my mouth was doing, so it kept right on going since I knew the song so well. I’ve done that plenty of times before; I just noticed it rather vividly today. The trouble is, I don’t think that’s a good thing. I think I do that in church sometimes too; letting my mind wander while still singing along. If I’m not paying attention, is it still worship? I don’t want to sing for the wrong reason…

I see it’s been a long time since I last wrote anything here. I think I was waiting for an opportunity to write about Basileia (InterVarsity’s spring retreat) in May, and Justin and Melissa’s wedding in Canada in July, but I never got around to it. I did write this for the ToO thread , though:

The second of my two flights arrived at one of the gates for international arriving flights, which feeds right into the customs area. On the plane they had handed out cards to fill out your information and what items you were bringing into the country, which the people at the desks took and wrote on as they asked a few questions. Apparently the US doesn’t communicate too well with Canada. The guy said that they shouldn’t have even let me on the plane without my birth certificate, but I explained that I didn’t have it because I had to send it in with my passport application. They hadn’t seemed to have heard that under the new rules I only need the evidence of application to get back into the US (which I had).

The next stop was immigration, where the fun began. They check your ID and ask a bunch of questions to find out why you’re entering the country and how long you’re staying, in order to decide whether you’re actually allowed to be there. I gave them my flight plan, Melissa’s address (I didn’t have the phone number), and so on. Then she asked, “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?” I said no, and she turned to her computer to confirm it. After a minute she called her supervisor and talked to him for a few minutes out of earshot. Then she informed me that a Tim Peterson had on his record a robbery in Windsor, Ontario!

The birth date was the same, except that he was one year younger than me. Unfortunately, her computer didn’t give any physical details like hair color, eye color, etc., and it wouldn’t show a picture. (Apparently it should be able to, as her computer in the marine immigration office was able to do it.) She said she was pretty sure I was a different guy, but she had to check anyway. She got her supervisor again and had him go off to check my social security number. Unfortunately, he took approximately forever to do it. She sat around, I stood around, and we talked a little. Eventually another officer came by and started talking to her. They discussed various plans they had with co-workers, and we joked around and such for the next 15 minutes. I had mentioned earlier that Googling my name produced a number of different people with my name, and just for fun she did it herself. I’m apparently a lawyer, a poet, a singer, and a senator, among others. At some point I mentioned that I was actually the best man in the wedding, and that Melissa’s father was a pastor. They were even more guilt-ridden at that. “You better let me in!” I chided.

“So, what are you keeping this gentleman around for?” he had asked. She explained, of course, and eventually he went off to find the supervisor and see why it was taking so long. He eventually came back with the papers, and they sent me on my way. I picked up my suitcase, and exited the strategically-frosted glass doors to the public area. At this point, it had been at least an hour since the plane landed, and it was after 10. As I exited, I quickly spotted Melissa, who just as quickly spotted me. She, of course, asked what had taken so long. It had been so long that she eventually found someone official to ask about my whereabouts, not knowing if I was still in there or if I had perhaps not even gotten on the plane. The officer, presumably following protocol, made her describe me to him. (I had never met her before, so providing a description of me was slightly more difficult than ordinary.) “Um, dark curly hair, a little hair on his face… and he’s 6 foot 5.” “Oh, yeah, we’ve got him,” he immediately replied. “It’s an identity problem” is all they would tell her, though. (On my way out, he mentioned, “I talked to your… girlfriend? who’s waiting out there.” “I’m in her wedding,” I explained, “but I’m not… that.”)

My adventures as the “Border Bandit” (Melissa’s sister’s phrase) became the running joke of my stay there. My questionable past was brought up by everybody at various times, it seemed. Alas, “my reputation precedes me,” I once commented. Justin corrected me: “No, someone else’s reputation precedes you.”

That was an eventful start to my trip.

Maybe I’ll write more later; ask me if you want to hear about it.

If you’re not a Linux geek, feel free to ignore this post.

I started OpenOffice today, and soon found that it was pegging my CPU. This had happened a previous time I started it, but I just killed it and didn’t investigate. I needed to get my paper written this time, so I investigated. I attached to the offending thread with strace, and saw that it was in a busy loop of connecting to port 631 (ipp) on localhost, sending a request, and immediately failing on a Broken Pipe. A quick check of /etc/services revealed that this port belongs to the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP). I have no printing installed on my machine, so this seemed strange, along with the fact that this is only the second time I’ve seen this happen. I found the process listening on that port with “lsof -i :631”. It turned out to be rpc.mountd, which I then recalled was also showing activity at the same time. This didn’t make sense, as this process helps with NFS, not printing. I hypothesized that this was one of the RPC protocols that allocated a random port at startup, and it just happened to pick that one this time around. (I recently had to reboot my machine.) I thought auto port numbers started at 1024, though, so I wasn’t sure. Regardless, I caused it to reallocate its port by invoking “/etc/rc.d/rc.nfsd restart” (Slackware). Sure enough, it picked a different port this time, and OpenOffice now works fine.

This was a rather strange coincidental conflict between two disparate programs that just happened to have both undesirable and noticable consqeuences. I’d say it’s the fault of both programs: RPC services should pick unreserved ports above 1024 to avoid collisions, and OpenOffice shouldn’t be busy-looping on a network connection.

Friday was IV’s quarterly service night. There are usually 3-5 different service projects for people to choose from. Some people went to serve ice cream at a nursing home, others made phone calls for a youth center, and others went around to the apartments on campus to clean their bathrooms, which has become a tradition every quarter in the past few years. Finally, people could make PBJ sandwiches for Open Door Mission, and write cards for old people’s birthdays.

After people started dividing up into projects, Becca came up to me and asked if we could get TV in this auditorium. It seems that a good friend of Val’s was going to be on the Jeopardy College Championship that night, and she wanted to watch. So, I got the TV going through the projector. We watched Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! on the big screen between 7 and 8 while we made sandwiches and cards. I handled running the TV and muting the commercials, since this is exactly what I do at home when we watch Jeopardy!. I know how long each commercial break runs, so I can time it on my watch and not have to worry about keeping an eye on the screen to run back and unmute it. Everyone cheered for Anna, but she didn’t end up winning, despite being the only one to get Final Jeopardy right.

Some people made the sandwiches, some people put them in individual zip-loc bags, and others ran to the store at various times to get supplies as needed. I found my niche as the bag packer. I took all the bagged sandwiches and packed them into grocery bags, counting them as I went. We ended up with 192 sandwiches, plus or minus a few, in approximately 10 bags.

After their service projects, everyone went to a meeting room in the dorms to eat pizza and play games. In quarters past, we’ve had the worship team do some songs there, in which case I handled the sound system. This time they didn’t plan anything big, so I wasn’t occupied setting up th sound. However, during the sandwich making they did decide to do some songs anyway, for which we didn’t have the lyrics to display at such short notice. So, they emailed me the words and I dumped them into an OpenOffice document. I didn’t really want to take the time to actually make slides (though I did do this on the fly in a previous quarter). I simply turned the background black, made the text big, put OpenOffice into full-screen mode, and removed any latent toolbars, to give a similar effect to the usual PowerPoint slides. I then scrolled around with the cursor as they sang the songs. It worked well enough, though not as polished as I’d prefer.

Stephen (who usually runs the PowerPoint) mentioned to me about the RIT Spring Festival. Somehow, perhaps by being an isolated commuter student, I’ve never heard anything official about this, neither this year nor in years past. (Somebody needs to do a better job of promoting it.) All I knew is that carnival rides appear in D lot every year with no explanation. Apparently it’s happening all Friday and Saturday, with rides, inflatables, and concerts at various times. The rides are all free, and Stephen said that was where he was headed afterward.

One I finished helping clean up the room, I figured I’d head over there and see what it was all about. There were 5 rides, a climbing wall, food, and miscellaneous carnival games. I’d never been on any rides like this before, and I wasn’t really intending to do so. I ran into Stephen and Richard (brothers) waiting in line for one of the rides. I watched them ride, and then saw Anti-Dan, Sarah White, and another girl I didn’t recognize. They invited me to join them to fill up the 4-person car on the Tornado. I supposed I’d come with them. Richard and Stephen got on as well, despite the former saying he wasn’t feeling quite as well after the previous spinning ride he’d been on. This was mainly a constant rotation, so it didn’t bother me much. While we were waiting for the ride to start, Dan and the other girl started talking about someone whose identity I didn’t catch. Sarah explained that the “he” in this conversation was a 3-foot-tall skeleton. I then realized that this was in fact Allison, whom I had seen on Facebook with her skeleton, and had subsequently emailed about to Carolita, a fellow skeleton-lover.

After that, we wandered into the line for the Octopus. Rich didn’t want to go on any more spinning rides, and on a related note, someone had recently thrown up on this ride. Stephen and I got on together. It proved to be rather cramped for my extra-long legs. Dave Ortiz and Dan got in the next car, followed by Sarah and Allison. The latter pair, they later said, had exactly the opposite problem, being short and therefore having too much room to slide around. The random rotations of this ride started to get to me, unlike the previous one, but I found that it was better if I relaxed and didn’t push with my legs against the car. Rich didn’t come, for precisely this reason.

We subsequently wandered around for a few minutes, and ended up talking near the ferris wheel. Stephen started asking me if I wanted to go on it, and edging toward the very short line to get on. I consented. He said it was scary because it was the most rickety of the rides. His point was reinforced while we were waiting. I saw one attendant looking up into the structure, and another talking to him. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I soon made out what was going on. The second guy pointed to a spot on the ground next to the contraption and held up a large metal nut, an inch or more in size. They proceeded to look around and try to find where it had come from. This wasn’t particularly encouraging, especially when they seemed to decide not to put us on one particular seat. But we got on anyway. Dave and Sarah got on the next seat. As we went around, Steve and I talked randomly about, among other things, the structural stability of the contraption, as it seemed to sway laterally slightly whenever we stopped at a certain point. It was just about 1 am at the time, which is when everything was to be shut down for the night. We stopped, and people were let off seat by seat. We thought that it was slightly strange that Dave had gotten on just after us and then got off first, leaving us to be the last to get off, but this wasn’t a big concern. We rotated to the point where we were just above and out of sight of the loading area. We continued chatting. Stephen jokingly suggested, “Everything’s shutting down — what if they leave us up here?” “We could probably climb down…” In a few minutes, we came down and were unloaded. The attendant said, “Sorry about that, guys.” “So you were planning on leaving us up there!” replied Stephen. We returned to the others, where Richard informed us, “I had to tell them you were still up there!” We laughed in amazement. He recounted:

Richard: “You know there’s people still up there?”
Attendant: “No, not until tomorrow.”
Richard: “No, I mean they’re up there right now! ”

“They had just put a lock on it to keep it from moving,” he finished. We hadn’t noticed anything was wrong; we were just sitting there admiring the view and jabbering away, waiting for our turn to get off. I also informed the gang of what I had seen before we got on, with the mysterious missing part. Maybe this isn’t the best ride to go on after all…

I’m taking a class called “Fundamentals of Audio Engineering” this quarter with a guy named Rick Wyffels. He’s a nice guy, and really flexible when necessary. (He also makes interesting sound effects to demonstrate things, and gets off track to tell stories.) On Monday he gave back our second quiz. I got 9.75 out of 10, with half credit for one out of 20 questions. I couldn’t see what I did wrong with that question, so I talked to him afterward to find out. The question was about how balanced audio signals reduce noise using three wires. Apparently the problem stemmed from the fact that I know something more about electronics and how this actually works than he does. I wrote an answer that, to my mind, said the same thing as what the book said, just a little more specific about how it actually works. He didn’t quite agree, and said I should memorize the book’s definition for the midterm. He turned over the quiz to see my score, and said, “Ohhh, I see what you’re doing. You want a perfect score…” It’s not that I care that much about having a perfect score; anything above 90 is enough to assure an A. I just want the truth to be known. I still thought I was right, and he gave me the half-point back. Then when he went into his spreadsheet to update my score, he saw that I had also gotten a perfect score on the first quiz, and groaned, “Oh, boy…” He said he’d ask someone he knows to explain to him how the concept actually works.

Wednesday we had another quiz. I checked over it before handing it in to make sure I hadn’t said anything he could mark me off for. He accepted my quiz with what I can only (inaccurately) describe as a posture saying “what are you up to this time, you troublemaker?” and proceeded to flip through it, which he didn’t do with anyone else’s quiz. He was obviously checking it over to see if I had made any errors by which he could declare triumph. Above one question I had written a note of clarification: “One assumes we’re talking about compressors here, though it doesn’t say…” When he read this, he laughed out loud, and then announced this fact to the rest of the class (for those who hadn’t finished yet). “One every quarter…” he muttered, which I could hear from my place in the second row. When he was done looking through my quiz, apparently without finding any errors, he gave me a grin and a thumbs-up. “Gotta watch you every minute…”

It’s fun being smart.