Author: cdwan

Bob, angriest of flowers, has this to say about immigration. I feel likewise. Why can we not all just do the things that make sense? Why must we all be so uptight about stuff? I just want things to go smoothly, that’s all. I hate stress.

Congratulations to my friend Mark, who has successfully (assuming all goes well at the Nationals tomorrow) organized the first national high school a cappella competition, ever. Wish I could be at the show instead of fitfully sleeping in coach class over the Pacific.

Yesterday was cool. I did a technical assessment for a small liberal arts college that wants to build a rockin’ bioinformatics infrastructure and isn’t quite clear on what they need to buy or how to put it together. Talked to a bunch of faculty, IT staff, and administrators, and they were all so positive about the process. It was refreshing. Next I get to try to dream up some awesome facility and give them a plan for it. I love my job. The only thing that sucked was having to drive halfway up Maine to do it. four hours up, nine hours of interviews, four hours back, and that was my day.

Only my father can trump stories the way my dad can trump stories. I was sharing one of J’s stories that I thought was pretty brutal, and he responded: “Oh yeah, that’s just like the time I saw this guy who fell out of a tree, onto a chainsaw. That was bad.” My life will be going well if I never have to use the phrase “onto a chainsaw” to describe any part of it.

Departing for Asia tomorrow at 9:30am. Woot. Wish me luck. Back to my slides.

This comic pretty much hits on the head what I think about the “Christian” politicians and hucksters running our country today. To the quotes he cherry-picks, I would add my favorite: “Go in your closet and pray, for the lord who sees what is done in secret will reward you. Do not be like these hypocrites on the street corners. I tell you the truth, they have had their reward in full.”

The point is: The US constitution explicitly disavows a religious foundation and specifies that matters of religious belief are outside the domain of government. Jesus explicitly disavowed any interest in governments built by human beings, and specifically said that there is no conflict in serving both a nation (with taxes) and God (with your work and soul).

I have lots of stuff I would like to write, but work demands that I be brief. Things are going well, if a bit hectic. I leave for Asia on Saturday morning, and I’m back 8 days after that. Should be a fun, exhausting trip. Hopefully I can drum up tons of business, make friends, teach a couple of people “Clustering 101”, and see a tiny, tiny bit of three countries that I haven’t seen before (and one continent!!!. Don’t get to add those to my collection very often.)

Garden news: All my seedlings were severely rootbound because of the stupid “peat pellets” that I used to start them. These were little dehydrated pods which swelled up when placed in water. They came with a divot on top, into which the seed was placed. When the pod expanded, the seed was auto-planted. Turns out that my seedling roots were unable to pierce to peat / non-peat barrier, and were stunted by it. When I finally went to transplant my sickly, nearly bonsai tomatoes, I discovered the problem, and performed the full “rootbound” treatment, which involves gently knocking the dirt off the roots, and then spreading the roots loosely into new soil. I have about a 20% fatality rate so far, but the other plants are already growing much faster than they were before. Dammit.

Radishes, beets, peas, onions, and cilantro are up in in the garden. Peas are almost to the first rung on their terrace.

BFMs are in the ground, and the cat and squirrel count in the neighborhood is already decreasing. God, I love those things.

I’ve been dividing my time between writing presentation materials for asia and preparing Automator actions and Dashboard widgets to connect Apple’s new OS to my software. As my colleague put it “We haven’t had the time to develop the full blown implementation, spending our time delivering something flashy and disposable instead.”

Dear lazyweb:

What’s the best way to effect a transfer of domain ownership? Has anyone done this before? Sweet victory

Three works of art:

Cinematic art: Sin City

JWZ has amazing powers to reshape the world. Yahoo has already fixed the thing he bitched about.

Dude, Most awesome thread ever, courtesy of jwz. I truly admire how rapidly and cleanly he carves people into little bits. The meat of it:

hidden, for profanity

My hosts in India wrote to say:

Hi Chris, 

Do you like to change your flights to Sunday May 15 instead,. you will still
arrive back in US on SUnday.

Coz Rajiv has made a great suggestion to visit Taj on Saturday morning which
is 2.5Hrs drive from New Delhi.

LEt us know if you like to do a Apple Family tour after all hardwork in the
week :)

To which I say: “Hell yeah!” with a refrain of “my life ROCKS!”

Just called United, and re-confirmed one of my personal rules of travel which is to always, always, always deal with the international desk if it’s at all possible. The airline scale of competence and power to bend the rules goes from zero (the guy taking your luggage at the electronic check-in desk) to infinite power to bend the laws of space and time and reshape reality itself (the international help desk at their hub). I spoke to a nice lady who switched my tickets and gave me back the difference in fares ($2.35). It took three minutes on the phone.

So far, Tiger (OS X, 10.4) is a lot like Panther (OS X, 10.3). I succeeded in doing a clean install and carving out a little space for GenToo along the way. Strangely, Tiger appears to be *smaller* in terms of raw OS footprint than Panther. This probably has to do with ditching all the revision history and downloaded patches, but it’s amazing to me. Software *never* gets smaller.

I’m not totally enraptured with “Dashboard,” but maybe it’ll grow on me.

My laptop is a lot peppier since the install, but so many things changed that I’m hesitant to give the new OS any credit for that. Let’s give it a year and see if it’s still peppy.