Woodstove

This last summer we moved from the city into the country. We're no longer able to see and hear everything our neighbors are doing, which I consider a pretty major improvement.

One of the complications with our new situation is that we're now living in a bit of a snow-belt, and our poor house isn't really designed to handle that sort of weather. So one of our first orders of business was getting a reliable source of heat.

Just to give you an idea: it's October 1, and we've already had our first snowfall this year. It all melted within a few hours, but it was a liberal dusting of snow. The hilltops around us stayed snowy for a couple days. It's looking like a cold winter.

Being out in the middle of nowhere, a wood stove was definitely an option. And the more time we spent researching and mulling it over, the more we realized that was probably the right choice.

So we bought a wood stove:

We spent more time than I expected on finding the "right" stove, but it was installed surprisingly quickly once we made the choice. The stove is a Hearthstone Heritage TruHybrid.

I didn't like the look of the stove at first: I thought it looked like someone had glued stones to a squirrel to make a turtle. But I admit it's grown on me. It's built out of blocks of soapstone on a cast iron frame. So it's very heavy, and it takes a long time to warm up.

The "TruHybrid" system is actually a "catalytic combustor" system. There's a catalytic reactor in the "ceiling" of the stove that burns the smoke from the fire in order to make the fire hotter, reduce the smoke, reduce the emissions from the stove, and clean the burn. This isn't just injecting air into the top of the stove for a secondary burn – this stove does that as well – it's actually a tertiary burn.

I grew up with wood stoves. My chores included splitting wood, cutting kindling, and bringing armloads of split wood into the house to fill "the wood box." But the wood stoves of today aren't the glorified cast iron boxes of my youth: they're a great deal more complicated, and it took us a while to figure out how to use the new stove.

So here are some things I wish someone had told me about the Hearthstone Heritage IV before I got one:

1. The soapstone really works. It does. It is frequently warm to the touch ten or twelve hours after the fire has gone out. This stove is almost more a wood-powered radiator than a wood stove.
2. We have the optional blower installed on the stove. The blower is heat-activated, so it won't come on unless the stove is hot to the touch right near the blower. The blower will turn off when the stove cools down. The blower is a little loud, but we just turn it down during the day and turn it back up at night.
3. The Hearthstone manual isn't terribly helpful when it comes to troubleshooting. It might even make things worse. The manual gives dire warnings about "over-burning" the stove, and how it voids all your warranties if you burn it too hot. The problem is... the stove won't start unless it's hot. More on that later.
4. The glass door is a nice touch, but it smokes terribly when you open it: the side door isn't a gimmick, it's the only way to get the fire going without smoking out your house.
5. The glass door gets messy, but the recommended cleaning technique in the manual actually works: wet a cloth, dip it in the ashes in the stove, and it'll wipe the creosote right off the glass.
6. The stone on the stove takes forever to warm up. It can be cool to the touch while there's a blazing fire inside. This means the stove will smoke like a cold stove for a very long time. This is one smoky stove if you're not careful.

The biggest challenge with this stove is getting it lit. The stove is designed not to operate at low temperature, because they want it to run clean via the catalytic combustor; and the catalyst doesn't work unless it's hot. But because the stove is stone, and it takes so long to heat up, it's a real challenge to get the fire actually to light. As long as the stove is cold, it won't draw air, and your fire will die in billows of smoke.

The solution is to start with a much bigger fire than you think you need. You need to get a hot fire going as quickly as possible, so that the stove will stop smoking and draw in fresh air. Of course you're worried about shocking the stone and cracking it. And you're worried about over-burning your stove and voiding the warranties. But if you don't get the biggest fire you can in the stove as early as possible, it won't ever light – you'll end up with a smoking, cold stove.

So we use a lot of paper, and a lot of kindling. That gets a good blaze going very quickly. We're not even trying to light the wood at this point: we're trying to get the stove hot as quickly as possible. After it blazes up, we keep a door cracked open to get more air to the flames for at least twenty or thirty minutes. Once the stove warms enough to draw, we close the doors.

Now, it's taking almost an hour for the stove to warm to the point that the catalytic combustor can work. But once we get it to that point, we throw the lever and it really takes off. Now that we've figured out the key is a large blaze as soon as possible to get the stove actually to light, our next goal is to get the catalytic combustor working in less than 45 minutes. We'll see how that turns out.

I'm quite happy with this wood stove, but I honestly thought we'd gotten a lemon for several weeks. We just couldn't figure out how to get it to light cleanly. Now that we've cracked that nut, the stove is a dream.

September

Is dark and rainy on my trip into work. I love fall!

Things

I anthropomorphize things all the time. I like to think it makes them feel loved.

The times, they are a-changin'

Life has been somewhat tempestuous for the last six or seven weeks. The details are boring and unnecessary, but the upshot of it all is that I've been sort of cloistered away in a haze of uncommunicative business.

One interesting feature of the last six or seven weeks is that my [new] employer wants me to have a disclaimer on any blogs to make it clear that my opinions don't reflect theirs. Of course they don't! But it's a simple enough request, and not unreasonable. So I've added a disclaimer block to the bottom of the page.

In other news, I've been reading a lot recently. I finally read Emma. I've watched several movie adaptations and listened to it as an audiobook; but it's only been in the last month that I read it. It is a delightful book. I find I like about half of Jane Austen's books. Persuasion is on the short-list of my favorite novels, but I couldn't make it past the fourth page of Northanger Abbey. It was simply too annoying.

Now that I think about it, that's why I never read Hunger Games. It's not that I haven't tried to read it, it's just I hadn't made it to the third page when I realized I completely hated it. Which says something, because I hated Wuthering Heights too, but I actually finished it.

At any rate, what I love about Jane Austen is how she can make me love, hate, despise, pity, or admire a character with just a few bold strokes. She leaves me despising Sir Walter, while at the same time patiently tolerating Mr. Woodhouse. It's not that her stories are terribly interesting: it's the characters who live in them. To be blunt, Jane Austen writes some pretty boring stories about people I find very interesting.

Since my acknowledgement of reading Jane Austen likely will cost me any claims to being a Real Man, I might was well go the distance and say I've been reading Georgette Heyer again too. Like Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer wrote some really boring stories. In fact, I wouldn't even call her characters interesting, but they are so terribly witty. One doesn't read Georgette Heyer for the story, nor even for the characters. One reads Georgette Heyer for the dialogue.

Again?

A week ago I rode my bike to work for the first time this year. It hurt and embarrassed me, so I thought I'd try again today. I went out to get my bike, and the rear tire was completely flat. Not "lost a little pressure sitting in the garage" flat, but completely, totally flat.

So I get to apply yet another patch to my rear tire. Sometimes it seems like I've spent more money on tubes and patches than the bike actually cost.

This morning when I was walking from the bus stop to my office, a guy asked me if I could spare a couple bucks so he could go and buy a coffee and some food. "Nope, I can't," I replied, "but we can walk over there together and I'll buy you some coffee and something to eat."

He accepted my offer, so we started walking over there together. Along the way, he asked me a couple times if I could just give him $5. I told him I don't like to carry cash, but I'd buy him some coffee and food.

As we walked up the street, a car parked next to us. I think it was a guy going to work at a nearby construction site. My companion stopped.

"Are you coming?" I asked.

"Maybe this guy can give me some money," he replied.

"C'mon, I'll buy you some coffee," I urged. But he wasn't willing to come with me.

"All right, I'm going to work then," I said. And I turned and left.

I guess he wasn't hungry after all.

Enigma

Many years ago, I went to see Batman in the theatre. There's one scene where the Joker says, "This town needs an enema".

"Aha!" I thought, "that's how you pronounce 'enigma'."

Many years later I learned it's not.

Suddenly a lot of things started to make sense.

Poor Navigation

So I'm in Raleigh, NC this week. I head back to the Northwest tomorrow afternoon. Since I'm so close, I lined up lunch with a good friend in Charlotte. It was what they call a "wild hair": a two-to-three hour drive for lunch, but I figured it might be worth it.

I have a pretty sorry little rental car this week, so between my fear of it dying on the Interstate and a desire for a nicer drive, I decided to take 64 to Asheboro, then 49 to Charlotte:

View Larger Map

But I missed the turn from Hwy 1 to Hwy 64 in Apex. I have no idea how I missed it, but I did. I started getting nervous when I saw signs for Southern Pines, but still hadn't seen signs for Siler City.

Yep, I ended up in Moore County, "on the way" to Charlotte. I was south of Sanford.

I had to call both people I meant to meet and tell them. They both laughed, so there were no hard feelings. But I sure felt stupid.

Gah.

ðē; ðə

For the last year or so I've been observing a strange trend. It has to do with "the". When I was growing up, I learned to say "the" with two pronunciations. When the following noun begins with a consonant, it's pronounced with a short "e": ðə. But when the noun begins with a vowel, it's pronounced with a long "e": ðē.

But recently it seems like the second version (long "e", ðē) is dropping from usage. I hear people say things like "the island" with a short "e". "thuh island". "thuh oven". "thuh arch".

The whole world sounds like a bunch of mouth-breathing, illiterate louts.

But of course, since you can't really blend the "ə" ("uh") sound with a vowel, they insert a glottal stop between the words. That makes it sound a whole lot worse.


I mentioned this to Shan and Mum last time I was home. They both said "I KNOW!" and went on their own diatribes. Shan kept mentioning the glottal stop. I think she just likes to say "glottal stop".

Barbarians are at the gates, I'm telling you.

Sheople

So I'm test-driving Flock: a web browser for Mac that appears to be much more like a client than a browser. I'm in minute 8 right now, and am frankly impressed by what it offers.

The basic idea is, the browser keeps you logged into things like Blogger and Facebook; and offers browser-based tools to interact with them. So rather than posting this from the little editor window in Blogger, I'm using the "Blog Editor" in Flock.

So far, an interesting idea.


In more personal news, we're moving on buying a house. Inspection is today. That's a lot of why I've been out of the loop: the house search has consumed a great deal of time and energy over the last couple months.

I've been intentionally limiting my personal computer time, trying to spend more time reading, pedalling, and paddling. I've found my laptop can be the most vicious time sink.

I owe several people phone calls and email. I'm working on it...



Finally, today is our 14th wedding anniversary.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Plural?

I've long thought it was weird that in English (at least the mixture of Canadian and American dialects I speak) it's fairly common to pluralize the word "one." As in, "these ones are my favourite." Do other people do this? It just seems really odd, but I hear it at least daily.

And your point is...

Someone of whom I actually think very highly told me a couple weeks ago, "No one takes Objectivism seriously".

The full irony of that didn't hit me until last night.

Two Things

So I've been neglecting this blog recently: that's more laziness than anything else. But today I wanted to break the silence to mention two things.

First, there is an interesting editorial by Paul St. Pierre, "A voice from the grave's edge", apparently published in The Vancouver Sun. It's a most accurate and succinct write-up of the direction North American culture has taken in my lifetime. Whether one considers the changes in the USA since 9/11 or the Maoist speech controls in Canada, it's obvious to anyone who thinks that the world is changing, and not for the better. Ayn Rand seems less like a novelist and more like a prescient every day.

St. Pierre writes:

Our Canada is now very close to a condition in which everything that is not compulsory is forbidden. We have become prisoners of the state. Like modern jail prisoners, all our needs for balanced diet, climate-controlled shelter, approved and tested medication, mental health counselling, higher education, suitable entertainment, grief counselling and consensual safe sex are available free. The inmate lacks only freedom itself.

This one is well worth the read.

Second, I've been greatly enjoying West Coast beer, and really have to mention the seasonal offering from Alaskan Brewing Company. I discovered Alaskan's beers when I moved out here, and I've become a real fan. Alaskan Amber Ale is not the best beer I've ever had: but it's very, very good. And at around $1 per bottle at Costco (about the same on sale in Safeway or Fred Meyer), it's a real winner. Listen, I take beer seriously, and I've been drinking this stuff almost exclusively for the last month. Smithwick's and Guinness are better, but not much. This is really good stuff, and at a price point where I can't justify not buying it.

And this last summer, I enjoyed several bottles of the incredible Alaskan Summer Ale. It's nice to have a "summer ale" that's light in colour rather than taste.

But today I bought a 12-pack of Alaskan Winter Ale, and it's amazing. Check out the colour of this nectar:

From Alaskan Winter Ale

This is an insanely good beer. This is the sort of brew the ancient Teutons dreamed they'd drink in the halls of their pagan gods after dying in gloriously in battle. If you like beer and you have access to Alaskan ales, you need to get some of this.

Next to Sarah Palin, this is best thing to come out of Alaska.

Mt. Rainier

If you haven't spent time in this area, you might have trouble understanding the extent to which Mt. Rainier dominates the landscape. It doesn't dominate the view so much as it defines it. Ames took this picture a couple miles from the house:

From Mt. Rainier

You can see Rainier from almost anywhere here, except the house where we live: we have some tall trees right at the east end of our yard.

Rainier is about 30 or 50 miles from our house, so we decided to head on out and take a look. We didn't actually anticipate getting there, but we figured we'd head out to explore in that direction and take a look around.

There are some interesting things between us and Rainier: Alder Dam was impressive

From Mt. Rainier

We wound through several small towns and finally got to Mt. Rainier National Forest. A day pass is $15, a 12-month pass is $30. So we bought a year pass.


We never actually got to Rainier, which wasn't really a surprise. But we did manage to go for a walk in the foothills. The landscape definitely reminds me of home:

From Mt. Rainier

The "lonely road at the base of the hill" look sure takes me back to BC.

There are a lot of mushrooms on the west coast, and I ended up tagging some in photos:

From Mt. Rainier

From Mt. Rainier

It was terribly refreshing to walk in the cold damp air. That's a winter-on-the-Pacific-coast thing. We might not get a lot of snow, but the winter damp cuts like a knife. I've been out in the cold (I mean real cold, not just freezing temperatures), and it has its challenges; but there is a unique coldness to the damp air on the coast. To be sure I've never wintered in Cambridge Bay, but you get the point. Most places get dry in the winter: our winter humidity presents a unique cold.

From Mt. Rainier

Anyhow, we spent some time walking on a path that followed a creek up a foothill

From Mt. Rainier

From Mt. Rainier

The creekbed itself is bright orange, I assume that's clay washing down from deposits upstream, but I don't know for sure.

From Mt. Rainier

There were some really interesting branches along the path: trees apparently had some unique challenges in that forest:

From Mt. Rainier

From Mt. Rainier

From Mt. Rainier

We even found a hollow tree.

It wasn't an epic journey or anything, but it was certainly a nice way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

From Mt. Rainier

Home again, Home again, tiddle-lee-dee

"Well, I'm back" --Sam Gamgee

The trip to Charlotte was a success on any measurable level: we accomplished our goals, at least as well as can reasonably be expected.

I got to work with a new acquaintance who'd probably have been promoted to "friend" if I hadn't met him as I was leaving. He's a Solaris guru and a shell scripting genius, so I learned a lot. In return, I was able to share some Perl-fu. I was flattered when he told someone, "I thought I knew Perl until I worked with Ox."

But the high point was certainly seeing Ames and the kids again.

So I'm home, the new job starts Monday, and I'm very happy to be home.

Lambda is your friend

I've been doing this IT thing for a while now; and I'm about to make a major transition. January 2006 I transitioned from the master ninja Unix sysadmin to the newbie Java developer. It wasn't an easy transition, but I made it. I had a lot of help, mainly from the tech lead on our project, a great guy and excellent developer. But after two and a half years, I'm tired of the Java developer world. It's not so much that I find it hard (it's not), but it's just that it's not where my passion lies. I still have trouble articulating this idea, but I prefer Getting Stuff Done (TM). It's not that I don't respect Java developers (well, I don't respect a lot of them, but that's the nature of anything with huge market share), it's just not a field I find myself passionate about.

So I'm going to a new job soon, returning to the life of Getting Stuff Done (TM). I'm very excited about it.

I think the whole Getting Stuff Done (TM) approach is why I love Perl so much. I use Java at work: it's what I'm paid to do. But when I have a problem that needs to be solved on my own systems, I use Perl. I can solve the problem in Perl in the same time it takes me to write all the boilerplate code in Java.

It's not that Java's bad, it's just that Java isn't good at Getting Stuff Done (TM). I realized in the last 12 months that all Java projects eventually grow into large frameworks. The word "framework" describes Java like "regex" describes Perl or "list" describes Lisp or "pointer" describes C. Java is plagued by thousands of huge frameworks that get stacked on each other, each containing hundreds of classes or interfaces, none actually Getting Stuff Done (TM).

When I tell people I know Java, they want to know which frameworks I use: no one really programs Java, they program collections of frameworks. Our stack involves Hibernate and Spring, so potential employers get excited about that: I guess the Hibernate + Spring stack is a popular one.

Don't get me wrong: I've seen good Java code, and I've written both good and bad Java code; some of it even does the job fairly efficiently. But it's a language that lends itself to Yet Another Framework, rather than a language that lends itself to Getting Stuff Done (TM).

Perl lends itself to Getting Stuff Done (TM).

That's not to say Perl doesn't have its own problems. Much like the Java culture has evolved to produce zillions of frameworks, none of which actually form a complete application; Perl's culture has evolved to produce billions of lines of unreadable code that only the Perl parser has any hope of understanding. And as one friend pointed out: people write bad Perl because they can. So far, the Perl community has been more impressed by obfuscated code than appalled: so Perl newbies learn terrible habits that any other language's community would quickly humiliate them out of.

But Perl's no mean language: it's actually possible to write very elegant and efficient code in Perl; it's just not emphasized by the Perl community like it is in most other communities. Dominus' Higher-Order Perl is a great example of someone looking past "quick and dirty" to "incredible potential". I hope to see many more books like it.

But after writing a lot of code in projects from simple short scripts, to various Java applications, to C plugins, to fairly monstrous Perl and Python programs; I've settled on what I think is my favourite language: Scheme. I've been using Gambit for a while now, and I'm finding it's a very simple, clean, elegant language. But best of all, it's a great language for just getting out of your way and letting you get the job done.

To be sure, I've used a lot of the Gambit extensions, so I'm not at all programming in "pure Scheme"; but the extensions I've been using are also included in most of the Schemes I've seen out there, so I think my code is fairly portable, if not actually standards-compliant.

Gambit also supports hygienic (define-syntax) and non-hygienic (define-macro) macros. That's a huge deal.

But after mucking with Scheme for the past four or five weeks in my spare time; I'm finally seeing the truth in what a lot of old Lispers used to say: the simple syntax (or lack thereof) lets you see the code, not just the syntax. And it's amazing how easy it is to make things happen in Scheme, although it takes a very different mindset from standard Algol derivatives.

Funny thing is, I started trying to learn Lisp maybe five years ago now. But I kept seeing it in little pieces: seeing how cool any one feature is, but never able to combine them all into a working piece of usefulness. But like others have said, with some practice, it suddenly clicked, and I'm writing genuinely working code.

It's all very cool.

I still find Common Lisp a strange entity: it puts all the power in the known universe at your fingertips, but I find it hard to get things done in it. That seems weird when I'm extolling the virtues of Scheme (they are very close cousins, after all); but I still find solutions tend to flow from my fingers in Scheme. In CL I find myself thinking around problems too frequently.

Part of that is CL's insane number of options: accessing a file system in Common Lisp is not a simple task. And that complexity bleeds into my code too. Perhaps my problem is that the Scheme implementations I've tried are better implementations than the CL implementations I've worked with.

But I'm not trying to fan the flames of the infighting between Schemers and Lispers here: I'm just happy to have found a great language to work in.

Tripping Teresa Day

August 14 is an important day for us: it's my baby sister's birthday.

My baby sister is one of my favourite people, for all that I haven't seen her in a few years. In fact, I just recently saw my older sister for the first time in 7 years... there seems to be a pattern here.

Gwen's clever and witty: I try to keep up with her, but truth to tell, I can't. To misquote Blackadder, she's as witty as a very witty person who enjoys good wit.

We used to be good buddies at one point. Not that we're enemies now or anything, but the course of life tends to affect one's relationships just as it affects one's waistline. We're no longer found bombing around in my old VW Rabbit or a Cessna 152. We don't rise at 4:30 to go fishing in Dad's canoe like we used to.

But although I rarely see her in real life, I certainly hold her in the same affection as then. And I suspect a great deal more respect.

So many happy returns, Gwennie. I look forward to seeing you again in real life when the days get shorter.

Pics of the trip

I've been a little busy lately, and my blog has suffered. Not busy with anything that generates results, mind you; just busy with important stuff like having fun with friends and family.

We're still in BC, we'll be here another week or so before heading to our new home: Tacoma!

But since I've taken so many, I thought I'd share some pictures of our time in BC:

Touching base

Life has become somewhat full of not much. You know how it is: you spend all your time in frantic business and can't possibly account for it in accomplished tasks.

We upgraded our car stereo this weekend, which was considered a justifiable expense in the light of this summer's drive from North Carolina to Vancouver Island. Let me explain: we've developed a family tradition where we listen to audio books on long drives. We generally buy an audio book from audible.com for every major car trip. An audio book generally plays for 8 or 15 hours, and costs between $12 and $25. We load them all on the iPod and play them on our drives. Audio books keep everyone in the car quiet as they listen; and unlike the ubiquitous car DVD player, an audio book teaches the kids to listen. We've got a half-dozen or so Redwall books on the iPod, as well as one or two others. Our drives are characterized by listening to books or podcasts, rather than music.

We've been using one of those FM transmitters to pipe the iPod through the stereo, but after a couple years, I've become convinced those transmitters are a waste of money. For close to $100 I have to look for free channels every 30 minutes or so, I get to hear the iPod through radio interference, I can hear people's radar detectors, and I have to turn the stereo way up to hear it at all.

So after some research, we upgraded the whole stereo head unit to an Alpine stereo with native iPod input. It's nothing fancy, but we have an older Suburban---we're not trying to pimp our ride. But the improvement is worth every cent we spent. And half-way across North Dakota, we'll be thankful for it.


In other news, we've made some friends in our daughter's soccer team. We had dinner with a very nice family on Saturday, then cooked out at their house on Memorial Day. It's always a pleasure to meet another Christian family with small kids.


Finally, there are complete episodes of The Splendid Table available as podcasts from Apple's iTunes Music Store. How cool is that? It's a great program, but it comes on Saturday afternoons, right when I have better things to do than listen to the radio. Podcasts are the greatest thing since Batter Blaster.

Silver Screen

So I took the kids to Prince Caspian today on a whim. All in all a very good movie... unless you wanted to see the plot of C. S. Lewis' novel Prince Caspian in movie form. I mean, they didn't change the entire story: the characters generally have the same names, for example.

I was generally impressed with the movie adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which led me to actually see Prince Caspian in the theatre, rather than waiting for the DVD release. Even The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was not completely true to the novel, but it was as close as Disney can reasonably be expected to get, so I tolerated the minor plot deviations, and very much enjoyed the movie.

But Prince Caspian took so many liberties, it went beyond "liberty" into "anarchy". They inserted at least one major battle, gutted Trumpkin's role, didn't even name most of the major Narnian characters, ignored Dr. Cornelius' long relationship with Caspian (briefly alluded to it, but also indicated it was substantially different than in the novel), totally changed Aslan's return (neither Bacchus nor Gwendolyn are even mentioned), and developed an entirely weird romantic interest.

All was not lost: the movie is really very well made, and the story is not bad, just... er... novel. The actors were very good, the battle scenes epic, the score very good, and the filming well done. All in all, it was a good movie, and I shall certainly buy the DVD on release. I did enjoy it, if not so much as Spiderwick earlier this year. Of course, I haven't read Spiderwick, which could have a lot to do with that.