Necessary Roughness

HT: Slashdot

PatentlyO, a blog that discusses patent law, has an article about a Halliburton patent application that patents methods for someone to get a patent even though someone else did the research.

The purpose does seem funny, but I wonder if we have some people in our law department that remember the fiasco regarding foam fracturing.

Halliburton was the first in the oilfield services industry to offer foam fracturing service. Instead of fracturing with just liquid, we introduce either nitrogen or carbon dioxide gas to generate bubbles and reduce the amount of water used to flood the formation. Foam fracturing is particularly useful in water-sensitive and low pressure lithologies. Most foams I pumped in Duncan ran around 65-70% gas (v/v).

As I was told by my first boss, HAL has the patent to pump foam fluids with 42% or greater of nitrogen gas or carbon dioxide gas. Our competition figured out a way around our patent, by pumping foams with two gases, each less than 42%. Thus we couldn’t keep a total lock on the foam fracturing market.

Fortunately for us single foam technology is superior: there’s less equipment, less complexity in the foam design, and greater ability to design the foam for what it is supposed to do.

The NR commenter Starfox and I had a bit of a friendly debate over “gay marriage” over on his LiveJournal blog. Excuse the point about insurance costs: he gave me an argument, and I ran with that rabbit trail to its end. My main point in that argument is that marriage’s definition is outside government control.

Josh S quipped on the Boar’s Head Tavern: “Also, none of us social conservatives are any more or less against a woman giving herself to another woman in marriage than we are against circles having corners.”

If we want to talk about the state’s role in “marriage” as a legal corporation that allows resources to be pooled and people to visit one another in the hospital, then let’s call it that, a social partnership or corporation, but calling it “marriage” confuses the issue as to what marriage is.

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The last two weeks I stayed at the Comfort Inn in Indiana, PA. Between it and the Holiday Inn here, there doesn’t seem to be a satisfactory hotel for under $100/night.

The room size was pretty small, just large enough for a king-size bed and some walk around space. The bed was pretty firm, but the pillows were very weak and provided no support.

A round table in the corner provided the work space, and there was only one outlet available within reach of the table. The cell phone needed to be charged on the other side of the room. The remote control for the television kept flaking in and out. The TV had about 30 channels, including Food Network, SciFi, and BigTen Network.

The heater worked well, but the fan was noisy, forcing me to turn it off when I was on the phone or recording the podcast. Controls indicated that it was a fairly old unit.

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Copy:

A long time ago, on the shores of the Lake of the Ozarks near Osceola, MO, I was a camper and later a summer camp counselor. One of the things that was very cool, was the time between 9:45 and 10 at night. Between Call to Quarters and Taps, relaxing classical or patriotic music would play, setting the mood for a quiet night.

Martin Luther advises in his Small Catechism to say a prayer of thanksgiving, and then, “go to sleep promptly and cheerfully.” Personally I find that difficult to do, for a host of reasons.

The intent of this podcast is to play performances, some by me alone, some by good musicians of the Lutheran Church, and some by both.  Like the time before Taps, I promise not to run over 15 minutes. In future podcasts I hope not to talk so much, but some recordings come with great memories.

This evening’s performance is from July 1, 2007. Trinity Lutheran Church in Rock Springs, WY, was dedicating their new and beautiful sanctuary. Kantor Steven Hoffman was in charge of the music, and he was nice enough to let me record a duet with him. What you are about to hear are the first two verses of Hymn 656 out of The Lutheran Hymnal, “Behold a Host, Arrayed in White.” Enjoy.

That was fun to do.  I need to work the introduction a little more, and I need to record more performances. It definitely helps to read the script aloud beforehand.

This has probably taken place long enough ago that the guilty party will not see recriminations.

Image by Kansir via Flickr

The previous generation of HAL data collection hardware was an RS/6000 AIX-based system that was very network friendly. One could easily hook two data acquisition trucks together and broadcast the job for high-profile work. One truck could also easily tell the other truck what to do by logging into the other truck and issuing terminal commands.

One service supervisor was learning the software in an intensive, 3 day, 12 hour/day class. The class had four of these systems networked together. Since I had worked with Unix-like computers in college, he asked me for some cool things he could do to the other people learning the system.

Well, I said, you could telnet to the other machine and run commands. If you did that, then typed in a command like warn "Have a nice day!", you could pop up a red box on their screen wishing them a good day.

The next day, he came back.  “Dan, I did something.”

Uh oh.

“We were in the middle of a practice session, and everyone was recording data like they were on the job. It was a really long job, and I was bored, so I telnetted to a friend’s machine, like you said, and typed:”

shutdown -h now

Which performed an immediate shutdown of the poor guy’s machine. Fortunately after the initial shock they thought it was a fun prank. Of course, he promised never to do it again.