Author: cdwan

My house is less than a block from a junior high school. At this time of year, the athletic field is taken over by 12 to 14 year olds (and their parents) practicing football and cheerleading. Also, my street is jam packed with minivans and suburban assault vehicles. My own SAV can barely fit between them. Anyway, I hear the cheerleaders practicing as I sit at my desk. I can never quite make up the words, so I make them up. In my mind, the cheers go something like this:

Gooooooo US!
Beeeeaaaat YOU!
US not YOU!
US not YOU!
You’re not us!
We’re not you!
US US US!

Or perhaps:

Let’s go our team!
Kill those others!
Break them stomp them!
Then come kiss me!
Gooooooo kill!
Theeeeeen neck!
US US US!

I went to bring in the mail this morning, and there was a pair of moths on my screen door. Butt to butt. I can only assume that they were busily copulating. They didn’t seem at all disturbed by me opening the door, getting the mail, and closing the door again. Kids these days, I swear.

The heat has finally broken, at least for a few blissful days. The temperature has been in the mid 70s, and the cats are no longer looking at me with lethargic hopelessness. For that matter, I’m no longer laying on the floor in the air conditioned bedroom, waiting for November. Good all around.

Not much else to report. My usual rock-star existence seems to be taking a summer vacation. Maybe I should do the same.

We recently got netflix, and I’ve spent the last hour or so populating my queue with the 30 or so movies I’ve been meaning to watch for a while now.

If there are movies that an adult life can’t be complete without seeing, or even ones that are well worth an evening on the couch, send suggestions.

And no, simianpower, they don’t have “Ankle Biters” OR “Alien Arsenal”. AAAAA! I’m wrong! They DO have Ankle Biters! Netflix rules!

Okay, it was freakishly hot today. Far too hot for manual labor. So, of course, that was what we did. Started off with a nice round of mowing the lawn and then ripping rotten wood off the garage and nailing up non-rotten wood. Then up to Boston to help technolope and capital_l move from one apartment to another.

Naturally, we encountered the by-now-standard instance of the piece of furniture not fitting in the place. In this case, the piece of furniture was a barrister bookcase from Ethan Allan, and the place was this bitchy, bitchy staircase up to the top floor apartment. This is the price they’re paying for not living underneath kids. We applied all of our not inconsiderable mathematical skills to determine that the damn thing was simply not going to make it up the stairs. Just as we were about to give up, the landlady declared open season on the plaster in the staircase wall. When we were able to gouge an additional 1/2″ of clearance, things worked a little better. We also tore one of the sides clean off their fold out couch. Despite protestations that it was a really old couch, I feel bad about that. I mean, you tear someone’s sofa in half, that’s just not cool. I won’t deny though that it was sort of fun…in a sick, sofa-destroying way.

I have the impression that when capital_l sobers up from her slap-happy state of denial (probably after a good night’s sleep and some serious breakfast), she’s going to be fairly torqued about what happened to her furniture today. It was not a damage-free move.

Have I mentioned that these lovely people own ROCKS. Very stylish and decorative 117lb slabs of sandstone? Good Christ, you think someone is your friend, and then they’re all like “yeah, come help me move my stylish rocks!”

I think that I poured about 1.5 gallons of fluid (gatorade, flavored water, and finally tap water) through my body today. Wow. Betcha my pores are totally clear now. Evan, one of the other friends roped into this moving party was seen at one point to remove his shirt and wring it out, leaving a puddle on the ground. For my part, I took a blissful shower in an attempt to return my core temperature to normal, and then went to a fun little party on the Charles River. Then I drove home and watched the first disk of “Children of Dune,” the 2003 version.

All in all, a decent use of a day.

Wild, party time Friday night at my place. I got 5 6′ lengths of 1×6 pine, and 3 8′ lengths of 1×4. I then ripped the remaining pieces off the sofett on my garage (the corner edging where the roof meets the wall) and began to screw the new stuff into place. redmed had ripped most of it off, and I got the rest. Our garage is such a piece of crap. I put $40 of the lowest quality wood I could find on it, I’ll paint it tomorrow, and that’ll be fine.

At about 4:50 today, I learned that Apple has taken one of our wacky “blue sky” ideas that might be cool in the future, and plastered it all over the marketing campaign that launches on the 16th. Therefore, it has to be real on the 16th. Like TUESDAY. Fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuck. That can wait until Sunday. Tomorrow is booked.

I was just settling into a night of solo video games when my buddy called, asking if I wanted to come over and play video games. Woot.

Spent the last hour or so wrestling with Retrospect, which is my answer to the “I need to back up my laptop” question. It’s very easy to define an “internet backup” using this software, and to point it at an FTP server, like the one in my basement. Turns out it’s just a hair trickier to actually convince the backup to run. Had to twiddle settings on both the FTP server and in Retrospect. For the record, “pure-ftpd” is old and busted. “vsftpd” is the new hotness.

Prior to that, I took a run. When I left the house at 8am, it was pretty reasonable. When I returned at 9, it was totally not reasonable to be running. Made about six miles, but man. Heat and humidity are not so much fun.

Prior to that, dropped off redmed at the airport for her (gack) 6:45am flight. She’s going to British Columbia. I was worried about the drug cartels, but she assures me that’s a different part of Columbia. The Brits apparently keep everything nice and safe.

Yesterday evening, we had a schmancy dinner with her boss and an interview candidate to join her group. Didn’t get much of a read on the candidate, but the swordfish “au poivre” was awesome.

Tomorrow, I plan to try to nail up new fascia boards on the garage, then drive north to help technolope and capital_l move. There’s some sort of heat index warning for the day, so I’m rooting for thunderstorms. After that, it’s party time in Boston with the owner of BDC.

I just ate the second tomato of summer. It was perfect.

I made a veggie burger sandwich, with cheese, on pumpernickel, and I put the center slice of the tomato on the sandwich. The rest of the fruit was chunked up in bite size pieces, with a bit of salt and pepper. On the side, fresh pickles.

I love summer, so much.

Thanks to amnesiadust, I know that there’s a decent article in the current New Republic that proposes a “new”, New Deal. I like it a lot, because the authors first state their goals, and then propose a plan that seems to address those goals:

(1) The federal fiscal system should be moderately progressive. In other words, the net effect of all federal programs taken together should be to reduce somewhat the inequalities of income that are inherent in any market-based economy, but not in such a way that economic efficiency is compromised and growth lowered.

(4) The federal fiscal system should be based on the principle of intergenerational equity; that is to say, net lifetime taxes should take out of our children’s income roughly the same proportion as they take out of our income.

Their solution is (in short) to eliminate the income tax (corporate and personal), as well as FICA and social security. In their place, they propose a 33% federal sales tax. That works out, spending power wise, to a 25% income tax, which is less than I pay now.

I like it. Let’s do it. Where do I sign up?

This morning, I was dreaming when I woke up. I had been having trouble hearing, and so I dug around in my ears, and started pulling out snails. Live ones, with shells. They were just normal, like, 1 inch across garden snails. In my ears. Ick.

Worked today at MIT. I like MIT. Wrote (you guessed it) some code to BLAST a pile of sequences against another pile of sequences and spew the results into a database. In between coding, we drank coffee at the Stata center. Given that I need to go in again tomorrow, I think it’s time for sleeping.

Meanwhile, Jen had a day off of work in celebration of “Victory (over Japan) Day”. Rhode Island is the last state to have a full-on state holiday for VJ day. Anyway, she ripped the fascia boards off the garage and kicked the ass of several other household projects.

So apparently (and here, and here) Dick Cheney likes to go to those “hunting” facilities where they toss pheasants into the air for you, and he shot 70 of them in a single day. In 2003, the farm tossed 500 birds, of which his entourage killed 417.

Meanwhile, the death toll in Iraq is 1827, and 20-some thousand Iraqis.

This is not a good time to be reading Cormac MacCarthy books.