Author: cdwan

Went to Evil Pharma today. Spent the day integrating their custom software with my software and somebody elses software.

At the beginning of the day, the question was “can we make this work at all?” By the end of the day I had elicited solid snorts of respect from both the guy and his boss. The end of the day question was “well now that it works, and is faster than ever before, can we run all 5 million of our compounds through it? Answer: Sure, that’ll take about a day.

Yeah, 1.6 seconds per compound, on one CPU of one node of the cluster. What if we decided to use the other 112 nodes? Who knows! Woot! All I know is that I’m matching the prior best performance, and that was using a 30 CPU SGI machine.

Oh pure bliss. The first gazpacho of the year. Farmers market tomatoes and cukes. I roll on the floor in hedonistic bliss, and dip out another bowl.

redmed will be away this weekend. While the cat’s away, the mouse is going to get some work done.

I’m planning to brew a couple of batches of beer this weekend. Anyone within the sound of my voice is welcome to come over. Anyone who helps with the dishes is welcome to a significant portion of the batch. I plan to make Mountain Brew, plus a batch of “what I’ve got left over from other batches” brown ale.

Haven’t decided on Sat. vs. Sunday yet. Saturday night there’s a Waterfire, so I might go down to that in the evening.

Anyway, that thar’s the plan. Probably the only people in range right now are technolope and capital_l, and they’re probably pooped out on the whole “drive down to Providence and party all weekend” scene from this last weekend.

Sitting in StarbuXXX trying to eke another productive hour or two out of a pretty good day.

A woman walked up and asked me how I liked “that there Apple computer.” In a heartbeat, I was into a solid monolog of the virtues of Apple as compared with just about anything else. The elegant lines, the simple setup, the raving, near fanatical devotion of the Apple community…

I’ve become an Apple slut, spouting their party line. My God, my god…have I been looking in the wrong places for faith all this time? Is it really that simple?

Obey. All must obey. We are all unique. We are all special. And we all, every last one of us, thinks different.

Thus, my campaign for world emperor now has it’s party: “iParty”. Think different, y’all. Think different.

It’s raining a bit, just gently soaking the grass, the garden, the houses, and the cars. It smells pleasantly like rain, and the breezes have turned cool. It makes me think of a lot of memories, suppose it’s that scent-memory thing. They all come jumbled up together. Nothing clear, but afternoons camping, crouched under a tarp and watching the rain seem to predominate.

Somehow, rain has also quieted the neighborhood. The sounds of cars, kids, motorcycles, and hollering domestic abuse are muffled. Even the cats have decided that it’s a decent time for a nap.

It’s deeply calming, for whatever reason.

I’m still stuck on this demolition derby.

It was a strange and savage event. I found myself filled with the bloodlust of sheer competitive destruction. I would like to say that it overwhelmed me from the outside, but the reality is that my personality is apparently built on top of some sort of volcano of brutality that loves to watch cars burn.

There was no sex in this violence. It was pure. Even football has cheerleaders … even boxing has the bikini girls. This had nothing of the sort. There was violence, beer, and pizza.

My friends who entered the competition went back home and got into a roman candle fight at a range of about five feet. I’m sort of glad that I skipped it.

It’s been too long since I posted pictures. Here are a whole bunch of them.

Pics from the demolition derby are at the end. Also included are some shots of Detroit and the garden.

For the intrepid (it’s 10 Megs, and no whining to me if your computer can’t play it) here’s a Quicktime Movie of a piece of the demo.

Here are technolope‘s pictures of the same event. Clicky.

This morning was peaceful. Conversation over coffee with amnesiadust followed by a walk in the park. I should try this “hang out with friends” thing more often. What with having seen so many people lately, I’m having the strange feeling of being popular. Taking the advice of Garrison Keillor, I will wait. it will pass.

In totally unrelated news: Humans can serve as a selective force for Darwinian selection. First, duh. Second, thank God that couldn’t possibly ever apply to our selection of *each* *other*. No, no, we don’t evolve, just the rest of those critters.

The demolition derby exceeded all my expectations. I wasn’t really sure what expectations I had (Nascar idiots, mostly), but they were blown away by the sheer and wondrous reality of it all.

The event started with “spectator drags,” where ordinary people entered their “street legal” cars in pairwise races. One lap around a quarter mile track. These were the cars “that these crazy folks drive to work.” There were a few outrageous entries: A corvette, a volvo station wagon (with some kind of psycho turbo modifications, because it kept winning), a hatchback Corolla Civic with “for sale” on the back window, and (most amazingly) a brand new Chrysler 300 Series. The Corolla The Civic did really well, but eventually got stomped by the ‘vette. The 300 also did quite well before losing to a Thunderbird the Corolla Civic.

Then there were “enduro drags” in which cars which had been specially modified to take abuse raced each other. The first rounds were seven cars at a time. Then there were five car “reverse” rounds, in which the cars raced backwards. Then finally more heats until a winner was determined.

Then things got a little psycho. Up to this point, there had been some moderate damage to a couple of cars, and one or two solid crackups against a wall. Mostly, control had reigned.

The “Figure Eight” changed all that. The cars raced in a figure eight pattern (across a cross in the center of the track), hurtling headlong through the death zone in the center. What made it even better was that smoke and darkness were starting to occlude the view, and small ramps blocked cars from seeing what they were driving into. In short: Chaos. Mass hysteria. At least five cars were disabled (read as: unable to drive away) in each of three heats of the figure eight.

They took a little time for some fireworks before the main event – the demolition derby. “There can be only one.”

The derby was astonishing. About a hundred cars started off with noses to the wall. The announcer said things like “drivers, if it’s not running, you should be!” Then the cars all started slamming into each other and all hell broke loose. One of our buddies had his car flipped, climbed out, the forklift came over and righted the car, and he climbed back in and restarted the car. The announcers said “I guess if a rollover can’t stop him, then nothing can!”

At the end, technolope had some sort of experiential peak moment, gazing at the Max Max style litter of smoking, wrecked cars…as “God Bless America” creaked out of the crappy sound system, and thousands of Nascar Americans abandoned their trash and headed for home. It was, for me, a moment of pure and unashamed love for my country.

Pictures to be online in short order.

Installed a ceiling fan in the office / guest room today. We’ll have to see how it does with the whole “no air flow” situation in there. amnesiadust is staying there for the next couple of nights. We’ll have to wait eagerly for his reports.

Installing the ceiling fan involved some fairly high level (for me, at least) home hackery. See, in general if you want to install a ceiling fan, there’s an outlet box already attached to the house. You just screw the fan into that and go away happy. In this case, we had to (without going into too much detail) jigsaw a hole in the ceiling and affix a perpendicular support above the ceiling, and then attach an outlet box to that. Once all that was done, the fan went up easily enough. Oh yeah, ground? Bah. Ground is for the weak. We’ve got two wires. Labels on said wires? Nah. They’re cloth insulated. I love my house.

redmed has another take on it that involved more swearing. That’s true too.

Tomorrow, redmed, capital_l and technolope will all be going to a demolition derby. Five for five people in a group, all on LJ. That’s some sort of a record for me.

Oh yeah, and I met another five week old person today. She’s cute, but still floppy.

Justice O’Connor has resigned from the supreme court. This steps up the pace a bit, and probably hands Bush two opportunities to work his will on the judicial system. Hopefully, he’ll use this as an opportunity to act as “a uniter, not a divider,” but I doubt it. This one’s going to be ugly, folks. At least this happened after the Republicans in congress decided that they’re not just tools of the executive, but legislators in their own right.

I hope he nominates someone so foul and offensive that even his own party can’t stand them.

In other news, I’m having a lovely day working from home.