Author Archives: gmcdavid

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About gmcdavid

Retired IT professional with a wide range of interests. Married. Three sons, two with autistic-spectrum disorders and the third being transgender with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. From Chicago but now living in the Twin Cities metro, Minnesota. Episcopalian. Carleton College (BA 1972, physics) and Stanford University (MS 1974, Applied Physics; MS 1976 Statistics).

Politics in the background

I am waiting for mia_mcdavid. Her mother is watching political commentary on TV–just after the Republican debate. All I can think of are H.L. Mencken quotations:

  • A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
  • A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
  • In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

Mia’s Mother is here

Gen, mia_mcdavid‘s mother, arrived yesterday for a visit. She will be staying until next Saturday. This is good. I get along with her very well. last night she took us to a great dinner at a well known (to foodies) restaurant in St. Paul. A rare visit to the culinary stratosphere.

Gen is a political junkie, so we have had the Democratic presidential debate on for the last couple hours. Very low signal-to-noise ratio.

Difficult Sunday

Trouble at work all afternoon, and through dinner. I had to drive into downtown Minneapolis three times. Not fun. Very obscure issues with SQL Server connectivity. We seem to have ended up with something that works, but there are still some unexplained issues.

New Tool

After my computer class finished today I went to the local Woodcraft store, which is in the same part of the Metro. wolfsword was working there and was in at the time. I had a discount card, so I did something I have been wanting to do for a long time: I bought a Lie Nielsen block plane. Lie-Nielsen makes some of the best hand tools for woodworking available today. Perhaps some day I will be able to get one of their larger planes as well. Meanwhile, a good block plane is a very useful thing to have in a shop, and I expect this one will serve me well.

Class Crosstown

I spent the day at a SQL Server Class in Edina, on the other side of Minneapolis. The commute actually was not too bad. That area of the Metro is notorious for bad traffic, but coming from the Northeast I avoided the worst both morning and evening. The really bad traffic was all going the other direction. Still, it was a lot of driving. I would really hate to live in that area and need to drive through it routinely every day. There is something fundamentally wrong about how modern American urban areas are constructed, and at a deeper level, the decision processes by which we got there. We, or our children, are going to pay for it.

Memorial Day

I spent much of the morning working on colgaffneyis newsletter. The hard copy is printed and almost ready to mail. All I have to do tomorrow is buy stamps and mail it.

After finishing that I went by the graves of my grandparents. I took the wrong exit from the expressway and corrected myself, to my surprise, by reconstructing the directions from their old house, rather than from our home in Roseville. I cleared the grass and debris from the grave stones, and afterwards I drove by their house in NE Minneapolis, not far away. The house is being well kept up. Sometime in the past decades one of the owners repainted the trim brown. The contrast with the stucco looks good. Two houses on the block had For Sale signs. I hope that does not mean there is a problem with the neighborhood. Everything I could see looked OK.

I came home and had a sandwich for lunch. Then mia_mcdavid, our son James, and I went to see the latest Pirates of the Caribbean. I carefully avoided every temptation to make sense of the plot and just sat back to enjoy the action and the scenes. Of course, I noticed the gear and clothing ranged from c. 1600 (e.g. a helmet similar to the one I am wearing in this userpic) to the mid 1700’s (the infantry uniforms). Some of the wigs were typical of the latter period, but others were more suited to 1690. One of the firearms was quite similar to colgaffneyis grenade launcher (if you imagine it being upgraded to a flintlock) and there was a boarding axe quite similar to one I own. So it actually was rather amusing :-)>