Author: cdwan

A team of scientists discovered this Invisible galaxy. Note that they did not simply circle a random patch of sky where there is nothing to see, instead they circled a very carefully selected patch of sky where there is nothing to see.

Adamantine is a relatively new anti-viral agent which is based on nanoscale properties of “diamondoids”, which amount to diamond dust. Apparently the ideal particle to disrupt viral action is a carbon crystal with only 10 atoms in it. The flu-preventing drug is called “adamantium.”

Okay, I’m in full on disease mode. This sucks. I blame the flu. Jen and her flu shot have a much milder case of whatever the hell this thing is that’s taken over my body. I shan’t speak ill of her, since she’s been nothing but kind to me, but illness envies health. I hung out at about 102 degrees for most of the day, and then had the wicked cool “fever breaking” cold sweats. Thanks, but for such a minimal high, I’ll go ride a roller coaster or something. Now I’m down to 100 or so, and I keep muttering to myself that I’m on the road to recovery.

Helped Jeff and Sharon move today, which was made amusing by sniffling into a tissue every few minutes. Jeff went to high school with Jen, and they’ve remained in touch. He went to MIT, and is yet another example of the all too common phenomenon where, a few years after graduation, the MIT student realizes that he doesn’t really like his chosen field anymore. Jeff was an electrical engineer working at Lincoln Labs. Now he’s bought in to a martial arts school called Guard Up.

Okay, so simianpower has the disease, rev_e has the disease, my friend Sarah has her away message set to “Sick as a Dawg”, and there’s a raging discussion on my friends list about the merits of “Cold-Eeez”. Somehow, the bug has jumped the distance between all of us, and now my throat is hamburger. Gah.

Seems that last night was “nuclear rant” night.

• We had one potential customer tear us a new one because (so far as I can tell) he was expecting our product to solve different problems than it actually does. Oh well.
• One of the prominent people in cluster building for bioinformatics cut loose on a *big* mailing list with his review of a new O’Reilly book on cluster computing. Good thing I resigned myself to do a shot of tequila after every typo I found. It dulled the pain this book inflicted. Yikes.
• And Mainely A Cappella just unleashed a broadside against my friend Mark’s National Championship of High School A Cappella. Oopsie, it was really the not for profit Varsity Vocals who announced their International Championship of High School A Cappella. There’s a longstanding smokescreen of BS obscuring the fact that the Varsity Vocals is a marketing arm of Mainely A Cappella. They have the same staff, the same web server, and notes from VV come on MAC stationary. The only difference is that VV is tax exempt.

  You may have already heard of another high school a cappella tournament operating under a very similar name to the ICHSA. We want to emphasize that this other tournament is NOT a Varsity Vocals event. We feel that it is unfortunate that this company has chosen a name so similar to those that our company uses, and we regret hearing that so many of you have felt misled and confused by the similarity in names. Unfortunately, this other tournament has refused our requests that they change their name.

  While we do encourage your support of and involvement in any event that benefits your organization and the a cappella community, we hope you’ll choose the ICHSA and will continue to support Varsity Vocals. We pledge to continue bringing quality programs to you.

  Their contention seems to be that they hold exclusive rights to organize any a cappella competition, anywhere. Weird.

“Hey, what’s this ticket on Chris’s coffin?”

In which there is piteous whining.

1:47pm, and I’ve gotten to exactly ZERO of the things I put on my list this morning. Customers and partners keep touching things and breaking them, and somehow it’s my problem when they do so! Today started with such promise, but all I do is keep trying to put out fires.

And no, procrastination is not the problem for once…

My friend robotify pointed me to this: The Rachel Carson Trail Challenge. It’s a one day, 36 mile hike over “brutal” western PA terrain.

June 18. Who’s in?

One of the truly weird and powerful people in the world is now gone from it. By several reports he did the deed himself with a gunshot to the head. Somewhat appropriate, given that he had spent 67 years demonstrating that nothing *else* in the world could kill him.

When I was little, I burrowed my way into my parents collection of Doonesbury comics. My favorite character was Duke, loosely modeled off of Hunter T. I think that “Hells Angels” may have been the only book that my parents ever took out of my hands for a couple of years, saying that I was too young for it. He was wild and crazy and fearless and truly lived free.

I hope that someone will look after his peacocks, and that similarly free people keep pushing back the boundaries of what’s okay to think and to say.

This weekend has been fun.

We installed new shelves in a couple of closets to expand the amount of horizontal space available for storing junk. Even with the recent great purge, we still have enough junk that some of it is sitting around in piles on the floor. Far better for it to be sitting in piles in closets. Along the way I discovered that one of our closets is a topological anomaly. It’s square in ZERO of its three dimensions. I had to do truly horrible things with a saw to get the shelves to sit square.

Made a batch of “Double IPA” beer. This one had an interesting twist: The instructions said to make a “hop tea” in a smaller boiling vessel rather than boiling the hops in with the wort. Something to do with the high sugars and poor extraction of the bittering acids. In any event, it’s supposed to be a spectacularly hoppy, strong, flavorful beer. I look forward to it, in about a month.

This means that Dwan Brewing Co is operating at a new record capacity: We have 14 gallons in process, all at once! Purchased a couple more cases of 12oz bottles in preparation for bottling day, which is estimated to require 140 bottles. Wheeee!

In other news, my muscles have finally stopped hurting from my recent attempt (Thursday) to keep up with my Navy Seals workout tape. I need to either do that workout more regularly, or not at all.

Jen brought this home from her most recent trip. I have to admit that I’m intrigued by the fact that a casino would serve drinks in this. The straw, so I’m told, goes in the belly button.