Author: cdwan

Feels like I haven’t posted anything in a while. No idea whether that’s true or not.

redmed is home safely from her international adventures. Today we’re supposed to take delivery of a futon, which will get its inaugural use this weekend when friends from Minnesota come to visit.

The weather is grey and nasty. Temperatures in the mid-forties, with spitting rain. For variety, there are torrential, cold, downpours mixed in every few hours. Good weather to curl up with a laptop.

We had a catastrophic beer failure at some point recently. I went in the basement and smelled stale beer. Traced it back to the beer-cache, where four bottles of the Double IPA had exploded. Fortunately, the cardboard cases I store them in absorbed most of the mess. No idea how long that’s been down there. Lesson learned: Store beer on the bottom shelf.

Somehow I’ve slipped back into the caffeine cycle. It’s not nearly so many cups per day as it was at the peak, but I find myself skittering around nervously if I don’t know where to get a cup of coffee. Ack. Thought I had rid myself of those chains. Humbug. Poo.

Gah. Years ago, my officemate and I sat and babbled about a pattern recognizer that would allow you to whistle a tune, and would provide the name of the song and the artist(s) who performed it. Of course this would only work if there was a really large database of music available online, and computing power was free. Well, it happened: here’s the slashdot story.

People who have been listening to me gripe for long enough know that I get really irate about coal. I think that one of the symptoms of our continuing slide into oblivion, as a species, is the fact that we’re going back to coal power. In my opinion, any power source that we have to dig out of the ground and burn, releasing toxic crap into the air in the process, is a bad idea. I still have a cough from the pollution in India, thank you. Given that we’re stuck with the whole “burn it and release poison” idea, I would like to burn “it” as slowly as possible and in as controlled a manner as possible. Thus, I favor nuclear power over coal. It takes a long time to “burn” a stick of uranium, and everybody knows that you have to be really careful with the resulting sludge. Nobody has ever (so far as I know) blasted the top off a mountain to get at uranium, nor have they dumped the used junk directly into a river, thinking that nobody was looking. The fact that there are new nifty-cool technologies for burning coal more efficiently do not impress me. The fact that it’s a “250 year supply of energy” does not impress me. You know what would impress me? An energy source which would be clearly sustainable out to the projected lifetime of our species. That would make me happy. Coal does not.

Anyway, point of story: I saw a commercial today advertising coal. It’s described here, here. The commercial itself is available here. The juxtaposition of sweaty, oiled up (kerosene?) hardbodies with freaking coal mining sort of upsets me.

A totally inappropriate, non work safe, and non recommended video is available here. It’s girls in bikinis demonstrating power tools. You have been warned.

From the same site, here’s a mangled version of Bush’s state of the union address.

On further reflection, that whole site is really funny.

I don’t know why everyone doesn’t put marshmallows in their coffee. I happened to try it out, and it’s at least as good as putting marshmallows in hot chocolate. Call Starbucks.

While we’re on the topic of Starbucks, I think that they should put a caramelized crust on top of their high end drinks. Sprinkle “Sugar in the Raw” on top of the foam, and then crisp it up with a kitchen torch. Another way to add $1 to the cost of a cup of coffee. There you go.

While we’re on the topic of putting flames near things that don’t necessarily need flames near them, how about a combination cell phone / kitchen torch? I want a small jet of flame from my cell phone, on command. Just please, nowhere near the volume button. I hit that one all the time while I’m talking.

It’s finally a quiet and relaxing day in the tiny province of “me”.

redmed is off in Denmark. Put her on the plane last night around 7:30pm, and then skipped over to capital_l and technolope‘s place for pizza and conversation. simianpower was there, wrapping up his Boston vacation. It’s nice to have friends within reasonable driving distance. I managed to borrow simianpower for a couple of nights (Thu and Fri), since we hadn’t seen each other in person in something like two years. It’s also nice to have “old” friends with some history to the friendship. We indulged in a bad movie night, including “Resident Evil, Apocalypse,” “Blade Trinity,” and “Ghost in the Shell 2.”

Saw “The Sith Kick Ass” (or whatever it’s called) yesterday. Nothing to report that doesn’t reiterate what everybody is already saying. It’s the best of the most recent three, it provides a satisfactory back-story for the rest of the series, and the heroic-mythic parts are damn cool. The acting is wretched, and it’s really not even sci-fi. Anakin plays “turning to the dark side” with the “I’m seriously constipated” vibe that seems to pass for acting in some circles, and Padme does well with being pregnant until she decides to start *running* around at term, with twins. I mean, hello? Had they ever even *seen* someone who’s at term with twins?

Spent a couple of hours in the yard this morning. Transplanted a hosta which was being overwhemed by day-lillies, mowed the lawn, and continued the futile game in which I regularly spend an hour tearing out unwanted crab-grass from my flower beds. The radishes are off edible size, the beets are starting to show signs of life, and the peas are climbing. The basil is a lost cause, and I’m off to buy non-craptastic plants after I post this entry.

Right. Off I go then.

The juxtaposition of a quiet laundry scene with random, thoughtless brutality fills me with giggly glee. click here to understand.

Sunday evening, I crashed at around 6pm. By my math, I had been awake (minus a couple o fitful naps in the air) for about 40 hours. It was very rapid. redmed and I were out shopping for a futon, and I was participating usefully. Then I sat down on a futon, and she was asking “are you okay? Do you want to go home?” I went face down until 3am (9am Frankfurt time).

Monday I spent puttering around the house. Got RI plates for the jeep, paid the bills, and put tomatoes and peppers in the garden.

Yesterday was Bio-IT World Expo in Boston. I gave my talk, and participated in a roundtable on grid computing. Since my opinion is that the word “grid” has been so devalued by hype and marketing that it no longer has any value. Not that the technology itself sucks, mind you, just that we need to scrap the term. Sort of like “best practices.” Nobody is ever going to say “no! I don’t use best practices!” Therefore, we can skip it entirely.

Pleasant dinner with technolope simianpower and capital_l. Got my TGI Friday’s standard of the Southwest burger, with a veggie patty substituted in. It doesn’t suck.

Back to Boston today, as I got suckered into sitting on another roundtable (Grids in Pharma, hype or reality?). I hope they want someone on the “hype” side, otherwise this could get ugly.

At some point, I wouldn’t mind doing a little bit of programming. Maybe next week.

CNN says that:

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states may not pass laws blocking outside wineries from shipping directly to customers.

This squares well with my reading of the constitution, and that whole “no interference with interstate trade” bit. This means that I will no longer have to impose on my friends in MI and CA to ship me my annual installments of my very favorite wines. Yay! No more shameful skirting of the law!

I’m safely home, and had a nice sleep. The end of the trip was uneventful. redmed picked me up at the airport. Unfortunately, I’m also wide awake at 3 in the morning. It’s 9am in Delhi. My body is convinced that we’re late to be somewhere. Ah well. This too will pass.

Pictures from the trip.

In other news, I am totally satisfied, for life, with this trip setting my speed record for getting my body shipped all the way around the world. I left my front door at 8am on Saturday the 7th. I returned to my front door at around 3pm on Sunday the 15th. That’s 8 days and 7 hours. Let it be known: I have no interest in bettering this record.

I wouldn’t mind going to space, which will probably involve technically beating this for time, but that’s a totally different goal.