Blog of Bermanism

Yahoo – James Doohan, the burly chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise in the original “Star Trek” TV series and movies who responded to the command “Beam me up, Scotty,” died Wednesday. He was 85.

Doohan died at 5:30 a.m. at his Redmond, Wash., home with his wife of 28 years, Wende, at his side, Los Angeles agent and longtime friend Steve Stevens said. The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer’s disease, he said.

I met James Doohan at a Star Trek convention in Denver in 1989, I had gone to the convention with my high school friend Jeff. The convention was the first, and last time that I would attend a “Starcon.” As an experience, the convention was, well, an experience. While I’ve always enjoyed Star Trek and I can be a little obsessive about watching it, the series and movies have always just been a form of entertainment for me. There were others at the convention that were like me, who simply admired the imaginative effort put forth to create the idealistic future that was portrayed by the Star Trek universe. But, there were others there who had literally made a lifestyle out of this television series. These people were fanatics, and they scared me a little. So, my friend Jeff and I heckled them and made wise-cracks about how weird they were and went to see the keynote speakers. This year, they included both James Doohan and DeForest Kelley (who played the role of Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy on the original series, he passed away in 1999). He gave a great talk about the vision of Gene Roddenberry and how the ideals of the Star Trek world would bring peace and enlightenment to our crazy world. He also said how that vision translated into how he lived his own life and that his family and friends have remained the most important thing to him. After that talk, I went up to the stage and shook his hand, and told him that his character originally inspired me to start tinkering with electronics and gadgets and led me to believe that I could fix anything, which is not remotely true, but I do believe that mostly.

Anyway, his manner was very kind and it was obvious that he was a happy and good person who fully enjoyed the life he was leading. It was also obvious that he enjoyed and appreciated his fans, even the fanatical ones. It is indeed a sad day that he has passed, but, as if in tribute to his long sci-fi career, his passing comes on the 36th anniversary of the first lunar landing. My best to James, may you boldly go to the next stage of existence, and my best to his family and those who knew him personally. His life enriched many of ours and we, as fans are grateful.

Today marks the one week anniversary of my turning in of the rough draft of my major paper (aka – The Ticket Outta Here). I gave it to my professor who quickly read it, said it needed fixing and that she’d get back to me at some undetermined time. So, while I’m patiently waiting for her to make corrections and offer feedback, I’ve started writing my next paper, which I’ll deem, The Pass. This paper is a technical paper that we plan on submitting to BMC Bioinformatics that outlines the database system that I wrote to store, process, and analyze our microarray data. This paper should flow pretty easily since I wrote the system from scratch, so I’m excited to be writing it. I’m hoping to finish it up this week, if possible. Then, I’d have The Ticket and The Pass finished (both of which will be entire chapters in my dissertation), and I can then schedule my defense date. I’m very ready to be done, so I’m excited about finishing up.

We head to Carmel, CA. next week for my cousin Devin’s wedding to her fiance Adam. We are very happy for Devin and Adam and we’re excited to see all of our family members. Weddings are great excuses for family reunions, and for a break from the daily grind. I’ve heard that the Carmel Valley is quite beautiful, so I’m ready to see what that is like. Rachel and I are staying at this bed and breakfast in downtown Carmel called The Crystal Terrace Inn. It should be really nice and it is right in the middle of downtown. More on the wedding next week.

In three weeks we are off again to the other side of the country, Worcester, MA. for the US Rowing Masters National Championships, which is on Lake Quinsigamond. This regatta represents the pinnacle of all of our training throughout the summer. We have some great boats going that have a real chance to medal on the national level. The regatta is a three day event, with races on Friday and Saturday. I’m in five races this time, including a 2x with Rachel. We’re practicing that boat tonight, so it should be fun.

That is all for now, just a quick update on things happening and things to come. All in all, things are very good right now.

Sometimes I hate email almost as much as I hate talking on the phone. I’ve been so crazy busy the last month or so, that I’ve started pretty much ignoring my email until later. Well, a lot of people are used to me responding to emails in some reasonable amount of time, so I’m starting to miss things and forget that I need to accomplish certain other things because I read my email one day, and then it is buried under 150 emails the next day and I never see it again. That is, until someone reminds me that I need to do something again, at which point, it promptly gets lost under another few hundred emails.

Well I say: STOP THE MADNESS!!!

I just cleared out the inbox in my main email account (I have four email accounts right now, as any self-respecting geek would). It took me three hours to go through, re-read all the subjects for all the emails I’ve received, and then to file away the ones that didn’t need my response. The last time I did this was on June 22. Since then, I had accumulated 800, count them, 800 emails!! That is just insane. For a while earlier this year, the bulk of my emails were automated messages that were coming from a conference server that I was running, but not this month. A lot of the emails were still things that I could largely ignore, but a large-scale delete was no longer feasible. Anyway, I got the list narrowed down to about 40 emails that I had completely forgotten about and needed to do something with. I decided that I just needed to answer all of them. That process took me two hours!

So, I suppose it is time to rethink my plan. I should probably reconfigure procmail to filter out all of the help requests coming in from my old admin job, since I really do not look at them any more. That would probably cut down on my emails a lot more. But, I should probably start spending time every day actually responding to, and then removing the unimportant emails from my inbox so that the ones that I need to do something with don’t get buried under all the rest. Overall, it would probably save a lot more time to do things this way. I realize that this is an idealist approach to the problem, and it is the one that makes the most logical sense, but it is likely that I won’t do this and that I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing all along. Oh well. It feels better to rant about it anyhow. It also feels good to only have 20 emails in my inbox right now, oops, I just got three more, 23. Ok, rant off.

So far, this blog entry officially served very little purpose. But, ultimately, I did have a point other than explaining to all you fine folk why I don’t email you back. I wanted to segway into the subject of spam. Not spam, spam!

Receiving spam makes me about as happy as having my hands run over by a steamroller being driven by George W. Bush, while getting crapped on by a flock of angry geese. Spam is so intrusive, unpleasant, unnecessary, and inappropriate, that it makes me just want to scream the words, “For the last time, I like my penis the way it is!!!” Spam should be illegal, as should telemarketing. Oh wait, spam is largely illegal, it is just that no one enforces the laws that are in place. Think about this. What if your kid starts getting emails about lonely housewives and how they will blow him on the first date? How is that any different than the kid being able to go to a hardcore, pound-me-in-the-ass website to see it all for himself? There is tough regulation about the ages of people allowed to look at porn online, but there is little to no regulation about the content of unsolicited emails that our children can receive. How is that at all right?

The current regulations state that unsolicited emails must bear subjects that pertain to the content of the message, that there must be a method to opt-out of receiving those emails ever again, that the content can’t be sexually explicit, that the email can’t be selling anything illegal, it can’t redirect the reader to a website that claims it is part of a legitimate online business, when in fact it is not, and the emails must include a valid reply-to address. What are the penalties for breaking these very explicit rules? A fine, and what are termed in the laws as, “civil sanctions.” The laws also established an anti-spam national registry, in which you could nationally opt-out of receiving any form of spam from anyone. I signed up on the three different lists that were established nationally, state-wide, and locally in Austin, and it had the effect of increasing the amount of spam that I receive. This kind of marketing can’t work, I just can’t imagine that anyone is dying to buy penis enlarging pills, or sleep with someone else’s wife who lives within five miles of you. This stuff is just asinine.

Luckily, I use a spam filter called SpamAssassin. This little open-source beauty takes care of 98% of the spam that I receive. Since spam filters have a tendency to accidentally filter important emails along with spam, I don’t delete the spam messages, I drop them into a different mail folder that I can check later for false-positives. You can add your own rules if you start to receive emails that the filters aren’t catching, and if you update the system periodically, the rules that are written into the program keep improving. But, spammers are smart people who are making a ton of money off of companies and people who utilize forced-advertising. Every time a successful spam filter is put in place, the spammers figure out a way to change their emails so that it will get past the filters. To date, the most efficient spam filter I’ve seen is the one that gmail uses. Google thinks so far out of the box on everything, that they seem to have created a legitimate filtering tool that really gets every spam that is sent to you. They should really make their filters available outside of the gmail system. Another strategy that has merit but needs work is something called greylisting. Basically, this method utilizes the way that most email servers are set up to get rid of most of the spam that you might receive. Greylisting causes the receiving server to defer the email, that is, to bounce it in a manner that will ask the sending server to resend it during its next queuing cycle. Most spam senders will not resend the email, therefore you will never see the email. Most normal servers will resend the email and when the same email is seen by the greylisting software, the email and sender is accepted and forwarded on to the user’s inbox. From that point on, emails from that sender will not be deferred, they will be immediately accepted (whitelisted). The only problem with this concept is that there is a large degree of variance in the settings of email servers and the interval within which to resend deferred emails. Some servers resend in five minutes, some resend in 48 hours, and some even take up to six days to resend. So, you can imagine that this system is fraught with problems in this regard since it could be up to six days before you actually receive the email that was intended for you. Greylisting is a good idea, but it requires system administrators everywhere to set their servers to a reasonable resend time for deferred emails.

POP based email programs such as Eudora and Outlook Express come with built in spam filters that officially suck. The one included with Eudora works about 70% of the time and has a false-positive rate of about 20%, which is really high and it means that you have to check your junk folder all the time for real emails. So, if you want good spam filtering, you have to use an external system or one that plugs into these programs.

So, I basically hate spam, I am starting to hate email in general, and I wish for world peace and a colony on Mars. But, until our nation isn’t run by its corporations and the government starts caring about something besides money, we will always have power hungry, money grubbing parasites forcing marketing of all sorts down our throats. Until then, all you can do is to make sure you don’t swallow.

Well, something wholly strange happened to us this morning during our practice on town lake. We began practice at 5:30am as usual. We had two boats out, an 8+ and a 2x (I was in the double with my friend Kris). Today’s workout was to row four 1000m sprints in a row. We started east of I-35 in front of Festival Beach this morning because we have a marked 1000m course over there, making it an ideal location for workouts of this type. It was a hard workout, but we were having a really good row and we were happy with it. After we had completed our third sprint, we headed back under I-35 for our final sprint so that we’d end up near our boat house at the end. Before beginning the last piece, we came to a stop on the west side of I-35 where we took an 8 minute break to let our heart rates recover. Two rowers in singles were rowing east-bound on the south side of the river when one of them shouted, “There’s a guy in the river!” We looked over where he was pointing and it looked like there was a log floating in the water. Our coach, George Jenkins, took his launch over to the site while we waited in suspense for confirmation of the body. George took a good look, picked up his bullhorn, and said casually, “Yup, that’s my first ever dead guy in town lake.” The body was floating near the south shore of the river about 100 feet west of I-35.

We then quietly rowed back to the docks where the coxswain for the other boat got out and called the police. Here is George’s account of the incident:

Everything was fine. I borrowed a cell phone from a lady on the path and called 911 — about a dozen cops showed up. They promptly wrapped caution tape around the boat ramp by the Holiday Day Inn. I have absolutely no idea why. After some standing around and a suggestion that we secure the body in caution tape (lots of caution tape-centric humor with these guys), three ambulances showed up. And finally, a fire department truck arrived with a zodiac in tow.

When I first saw this guy, I considered flipping him over to see if there was any chance he was still alive. I am glad I didn’t, because as the sun rose, it was obvious that he was really, really dead.

It turns out that he had jumped off the Congress Avenue Bridge on July 4, and the AFD/APD had been looking for him. Jumping off the Congress Avenue Bridge seems like something that any self respecting 18 year old would have a go at, given the proper double-dog dare, not a stage for a suicide. However, by all the by-stander accounts, this guy had jumped very near the shore, and was injured and then stuck in the shallow, muddy bottom of Town Lake.

Once they got the zodiac fired up, I left. My morbid curiosity quotient was more than satisfied without seeing or smelling this guy getting fished out of the water.

I have been coaching for about 18 years now and rowing in general for almost 25. Nine or ten of those years were in the Port of Los Angeles, where anything can happen. I have spent several summers coaching at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, where we were routinely notified about illegal aliens who had likely drowned while fleeing from the border patrol. From my launch, I have seen boat explosions, lost whales, tornadoes, and impromptu plane landings. However, this was my very first “floater.”

So, this was a weird occurance during our row this morning. Someone on the docks said that this was the 3rd body found in the last few years, and someone else said that rowers have found all of the bodies found on Town Lake to date. Wild stuff. Anyway, my condolences go out to the family of the dead guy (if he had any), and I hope that he’s found what he’s looking for. Hopefully, our next practice will be a little less eventful.

A few weeks ago, the Austin Rowing Club’s men’s and women’s competitive teams traveled to Dallas for the 2005 Bachman Lake Annual Sprint Trials (B.L.A.S.T.), which was hosted by the Dallas Rowing Club on Bachman Lake. This regatta was meant to be just a fun, friendly race, and that was exactly what it was. The cost was $25 for a full day of racing, as many races as you wanted to row. I ended up rowing seven of them! The course was a 1000m course extending from the west to the east end of the lake. They had six lanes, that were packed very tightly (the large boats had trouble not hitting the buoys). DRC was extremely gracious and we had a great time.

WARNING: The use of rowing terms/jargon is about to begin. For reference, see Introduction to rowing, or just try to follow along.

My day started off with the first heat in a 1x (single) race. The event was M N 1x (read men’s novice single). Technically, I’m still in my novice year since I’ve only started competing this last year. Since I was one of the more experienced rowers out there, I thought that I had a very good chance of winning. But, I was really nervous. I’m always nervous before a race, and then I settle down once I’m into it. The single is my worst boat by a lot, so I was putting all sorts of pressure on myself to do well. So, I paddled up the start, took my position at the steakboat platform (a person sits on these floating platforms and holds your boat so that everyone in the race is lined up perfectly evenly), and got ready for my start. My heart was totally pounding and I was really not looking forward to the next 4 minutes and 15 seconds. It is a long way in a single when you’re sprinting the whole time.

The official shouted, “Attention!”, “ROW!” And we were off. I had a pretty bad start and was last off the line out of the six people in my heat. That didn’t help my confidence much, but I pushed through it. I took up my stroke rating to about 34 strokes per minute (spm). That helped. I caught up to the guy closest to me in about 10 strokes. Pretty soon, I was hanging in at 3rd. The top three from this heat went to the finals, so I started really pushing it up. The problem was that as I pushed harder, my technique got worse which ultimately slowed me down a lot. When I hit the 250 meter mark, I gave it all I had. My legs were aching, my head was throbbing, the sun was burning on the back of my neck, sweat was dripping into my eyes, and I felt like my lungs were going to collapse, but I pushed harder anyway. Unfortunately, so did the two guys in front of me. I crossed the finish line third and immediately collapsed over my oars, trying desperately to catch my breath. Once I had recovered for a few minutes, I took a light paddle back to the docks, which were all the way down the course that I had just rowed, so it was a long way back. When I got off the water, I was a little confused as to how I came in third. I should have come in at least second. I put it out of my head and started preparing myself for the final, which was about an hour later. I spent the time trying to figure out the parts of my stroke that were slowing me down. One major part is that when I get excited and am trying to pull really hard, I put my oars way too far under water. The problem with that is that when you pull the oars out of the water when you’re getting ready for the next stroke, you have to yank them out, which effectively stops the boat. So, I thought I’d do what I could to fix that in the final. I’d redeem myself then.

Well, the final came around, and I was against two of my friends from my team, both really strong guys with less experience than me. I knew it was going to be a tough race, so I got myself prepared. We started, I had a really good start this time because I took my time with it and relaxed. I was rowing at about 32 spm up until the 250 meter mark, then I kicked it up to a 34. I was trying not to pull so hard this time so that my technique would clean up, but it wasn’t serving me well. My boat was not running between the strokes and I had secured a healthy 5th place. Then, at the 500 meter mark, a Southwest Airlines plane decided to take off, which blew some very refreshing jet exhaust into my face. That didn’t help anything, and amid my coughing I still wasn’t gaining any ground. I ended up in 5th place in that race, it was disappointing to say the least, since I should have won it with my level of experience. From that point, I decided that I wasn’t going to let the single be my nemesis anymore, I was going to conquer it and become a good singles rower. I’ve been working hard on that since then and have been steadily improving.

I rowed 5 additional races that day. We lost our 4x (quad) race, which was sad because it was potentially a really strong boat. But, things just weren’t gelling in the boat and we had no swing so the boat had no chance to run and be set up well. So far, a disappointing race. Then, I had the Men’s Open 4+ (four) race. We had a great team put together for this boat and everything that could go wrong did. We were late to the start, so I didn’t even have any time to tie into my shoes, so I rowed the whole race out of the stretchers (it is a good thing that Texas crew taught us how to do that). Also, our crew had never rowed that line up, we had a new coxswain, and all of us usually row starboard (in sweep style boats, you only have one oar and it is staggered with everyone else). Anyway, this race surprised us all. We had a crappy start and then we started to gain on people. We went from 5th to 2nd in that race and we were gaining on our other 4+ with all the really strong, big guys in it. They were scared by our final sprint because we really started to gain on them. It was a fun race and it redeemed my others for the day.

Next, we had the Mixed 4+ race, in which we had two men and two women in the boat. These boats are usually a lot of fun. We had a very strong lineup, so we were excited. Plus, my wife was coxing, so that was exciting too. We had another bad start, and we were having a lot of trouble getting our stroke together. Rachel was telling us that we were in 4th at the 500 meter mark, but Nathan looked around and saw that she was screwing with us and that we were last. So, at that point, we decided to row. In 500 meters we went from dead last to 2nd! It was really fun and made us realize that if we had done that the whole time, we would have won by a lot.

Finally, we had our mixed 8+ race. The Dallas Rowing club doesn’t own any eights because their lake is too small for them, so we brought two of them so that we could have some races in them. So, it was our 8+ vs. their 8+. This race was great. We put all the guys in the front of the boat and the women in the bow. We took off, had a great start and were ahead of the other boat the whole time. We were at least three boat lengths ahead of them when we got to the 750 meter mark, so we took the rating down and did a reverse sprint. It was fun because I think we even started going faster when we did that. Anyway, we won gold by a lot on that one, and it was really fun.

We had a great showing for the race, a lot of our crew came along, some of them for their first real regatta. I think everyone had a great time. Seven races was a little too much for me, but I had a great time and I was happy that I could do seven races and stay alive. I ended up with two silvers and a gold, Rachel ended up with five bronze and two silvers. Also, our team won the team trophy for the most medals won in the regatta. Paul, our president is holding it in the picture below.

Also, here is a great picture of the whole team (minus our coach because he left before we took the picture):

I love regattas. They test your skill and strength, your resolve, your heart, and they bring a team together in the spirit of competition. I came away from this regatta feeling very proud to be a part of our team, and proud of my effort and results. I also came away with a clear picture of what I need to improve on, and I have been working on that. Much thanks to the DRC for hosting a great race, thanks to Rachel’s parents for hosting all 30 of us in their house, thanks to George, our coach, for all the brilliant training, and thanks to the team for putting it all out there. Our next regatta is the Master’s National competition in Worcester, MA at the beginning of August. We’re looking forward to that for sure!