Author: cdwan

Ah, a brisk and exhilarating morning sprint for the train. Now this is life. Not only do I have time before work to get a quick workout in, it’s almost mandatory!

Picked up hardware from various locations around Boston yesterday. Two G5 xservers, and four G4’s. Brought the G4’s back to BDC, and took the G5’s home with me to serve as a development environment. This is going to rock. The G4 servers are seriously old school. They appear to be from the very first hardware run of Xservers. I really want to get some linux variant running on the G5s.

On the way home from Boston, I stopped off at the Braintree “Rock Bottom Brewery,” since my friend Tim recently became a manager there, and I haven’t seen him in a while. He introduced me to the master brewer (Scott Bunell) and got me a tour and some samples of the reserve stock. Scott had recently completed a “bourbon aged scotch ale.” The idea is that you put the beer in a barrel which had been used for aging bourbon, and vary the pressure for about three months to force the beer in and out of the wood. That was some good stuff. A fine example of a style that I will never be able to make at home. Sure, I could fake it with oak chips or something, but why?

Spent the whole weekend in the garden. Bliss. The only sticky point was when a neighbor sneered out “raking on Easter?” Fortunately, I was in a really good mood and just called back “happy Easter to you too!” with a big smile. She didn’t seem to know what to do with that, and hurried her kids into the car.

I raked the whole lawn, then aerated it. Aerating is awesome, since you end up with little holes all over the yard. So gratifying. I got about halfway through slinging compost on the grass and then brushing it off the blades. That’s heavy work, and my back started to snivel, so I’m out for the day. I no longer have a sense of humor about the whole “my back hurts a little, but I’ll push on through” idea. It’s crap. As soon as I feel an injury coming on, I stop immediately. Otherwise I hurt for a week at least. Not 18 anymore, I suppose.

Also built my raised bed for my garden. It’s going to be larger than any previous garden, yet still small relative to my parent’s efforts. 8′ by 8′. I think that I’ll put stones in to walk on, leaving 4 (approximately) 3′ by 3′ quadrants. Organic Gardening this month had a whole section dedicated to “square foot gardening,” which sounds interesting, but a little chaotic to me. I’m sort of into my little rows of plants.

On Thursday, we had the chimney guys out to install a liner in the chimney which serves our oil burning furnace. I learned all sorts of things about chimneys.
Pictures

Anna Callahan put on a remarkable concert this evening. She did this move in one of her scat runs where she started off low in her alto range, and worked upwards, transitioning to a lip buzz in the middle (like playing the trumpet), and came out the top in a whistle register. It was very, very cool. It’s been a while since I heard good jazz. This band was great, and the venue was small and intimate. Someone described it as “like a comfortable living room.”

Anna and her sister both made an impressive show of remembering me from the years and years passed since we’ve been in the same state. I passed on greetings from _earthshine_, and Myfanwe inquired after ctmzeus. The only down side was that the place was an hour and twenty minutes away, and the show started at nine and ran past midnight. I’m beat. Goodnight.

Easter is cancelled: they found the body.

Name worship

Fact: “Koala bears may spontaneously combust when isolated from their group due to a build up of eucylyptus oil on the tops of their heads. They cannot reach this area to clean it and rely on other koalas to groom them, hence when isolated for a long time the oil builds up and in extreme heat can ignite and explode the koala. This has been blamed for many bush fires.”

I’m compulsively washing my head now, so that it doesn’t explode.

This is raw genius. The guy found a common thread in his unsolicited email, and followed it to its source.

The Solar death ray is my new project. “Do not build one of these!” says the author.

Avoid the crushing foot of death

I finally mustered the energy to respond to the moron who owns “dwan.net”:

My response

Despite the fact that it’s supposed to snow a foot tonight, I’m posting some happy springtime pictures.

2005 Spring

Anna Callahan is, like, one of my personal gods. I will be attending her CD release party.

Here

So, there’s a solid chance that I’m going to China and India pretty soon here. I find out tomorrow. If I do go, my schedule will look something like this:

May 9 : India – HPC/Bio Training
May 10: India- Customer Seminar and key customer meeting
May10: Night flight out from Delhi to Singapore, arrive Singapore 0715am on May 11
May 11: Afternoon : Singapore – IHPC ICCSA seminar
May 11: Night Flight out to China Beijing, arrive 0720am in May 12
May 12: Afternoon Customer meeting ( Prof Zhu) to do a planning session for customer Phase 2 100 cluster nodes plan.
May 13: China Beijing Training.

This, needless to say, is insanity.

Today was fun. Got to meet with capital_l and her boss. I don’t think there’s any opportunity for us to work together, but they did spend about 2.5 hours showing us some butt kicking software. Maybe in the future, maybe not, but it’s always fun to spend a couple of hours talking to someone who knows where their towel is, and J.Q. certainly does.

This new law that just got passed, about Terri Schiavo, is really pissing me off.

here’s why