Author: cdwan

Fat kitty.

I was listening to the radio, and heard an ad for heating oil based home heat systems. Among the many selling points that the chipper young thing they had reading their ad offered was the following: Heating oil produces more heat per gallon than any other home heating system. Given that the only competitors I’m aware of are an electrical current and a gas, yeah, I’d have to say that by the gallon…oil kicks ass. Even throwing coal and sunlight in there…yup…by the gallon, it’s hands down heating oil. Even if we include nuclear fuel rods…by the gallon, oil kicks ass.

Later on, she was heard to say that “only with heating oil do you get service from your friendly heating oil technician.” Really? Wow…and here I thought that my friendly heating oil tech *also* worked on gas systems.

Criminals.

In better news, I’ve got the first of two batches of beer in primary. Making a Barley Wine and the Imperial Stout. I broke down and ordered from Northern Brewer instead of continuing to flail for ingredients around here. Got the two kits above, plus a “Double IPA,” which is billed as a West Coast Pale Ale on huge, hop-infused steroids. Had a little boil over with the barley wine and lost some precious fermentable sugars. I compensated by only topping it up to 4 gallons. The original gravity was a whopping 1.08. I mean, my God, my God. What have I wrought?

Almost every morning, when I emerge from the bedroom, my smaller cat and I have a conversation. She meows at me, and I back at her. Sometimes it lasts until the tea is ready. During the entire thing, she looks very intently and earnestly up at me. She clearly has something to say. Sometimes, instead of speaking “cat,” I lapse into english. On those mornings we have great conversations. We talk about foreign policy, the ethics of artificial intelligence, the future of bioinformatic software, and other things.

It’s a lot like this

Our new co-lo facility rocks my world. Boston Data Centers is the bomb. It’s located in a massive warehouse, and they sell everything from web hosting, to space in racks (your machine might sit next to somebody else’s), to “cages” (what we’ve got) where you functionally rent a room for your computers to live in. Every rack comes with enough battery backup to get through the time it will take for them to start up the two huge diesel generators out back. They have amazing bandwidth, and they’re cool people besides. We’ve even made use of their offer to walk over and power cycle a machine as needed. Sweet! Somebody who has a 24/7 staff, who is willing to reboot my machine if I wedge it really badly!

Poured out five gallons of beer yesterday. The fermentation on the “gose” style salt beer had not been vigorous at all, despite my best efforts. When I tasted it prior to moving into secondary fermentation, it was just *bad*. Not bad in a way that might improve with age, chilling, and carbonation. Bad, like, “this tastes like salted crap” bad. Out with it.

Oh, and here’s some news: Apparently the city of East Providence has known about an E. Coli contamination in the city water supply for the past month, and felt no need to tell any of us. Criminals. Criminals all of them.

Now, back to writing documentation.

I just heard about an opportunity in MI for a high performance computing wizard. Parallel programming, shared memory tuning, cluster optimization and algorithm development. It’s for an on-site gig of indefinite duration in the Western suburbs of Detroit. I don’t know the industry the position would be supporting. If you, or someone you know, would like a job like that…contact me.

Going into town to visit our new co-location facility. They have unholy bandwidth. Like, 7MB/sec up and down. We can finally start up our data service! Yay!

Conferences in my future:

• LinuxWorld – Boston, next week
• BioMOBY – Vancouver, May 7-8
• ISMB – Detroit, August (I think)

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VALHALLA!!!!! I AM COMING!!!!!!!!

Excellent dinner meeting with two people from Apple this evening. They continue to impress me as a company that has managed to get large with only a minimal amount of “suck” added into the mix (at least the ones I deal with. I say nothing about the service or consumer electronics end of things). We had one of those broad ranging conversations which somehow managed to cover all the business points which needed to get covered, and yet never got too stultified or organized. I love working with bright people. Plus, the creme brulee was excellent.

Now off to crash out in preparation for an early day dealing with MPI-BLAST. Gah. Why must we add every version of BLAST ever created before we add the apps that bench scientists actually want? I know, it’s because the higher-ups know about BLAST…but I loath BLAST. I’m so sick of its idiosyncrasies and dumb-ass optimizations. “Why are we wasting all our time in the alignment phase?” “Because you’re BLASTing chromosomes against each other, and the alignment phase first reads both sequences into memory, again. Don’t be dumb! Chop up your chromosomes first, or use BLAT, or MuMMer, or something meant for the task!”

Sleep. Clearly needed.

Today is so stunningly beautiful out, I’m having a lot of trouble believing that it’s February. The snow is melting, if this keeps up, the trees and lawn are going to think that it’s spring and start sending out new shoots. The weather report claims that it’s only 50 degrees out, which is totally bogus. I’ve got all the windows open, and am airing the house while I can. I *really* want to go for a run later this afternoon.

But now, back to writing documentation.

I decided to hunt around for some good conspiracy theory web sites. These range from hysterical but possibly informative alternative news sources (What Really Happened, AlterNet) to the ravings of the mentally ill (Mind Control Fora). It’s sort of disturbing to me how many of these raving loonies are VERY DEVOUT CHRISTIANS and tell you so IN ALL CAPS throughout their writing. Yeesh. Jesus understood proper capitalization, people. In no particular order:

Pupp’s Theories

What Really Happened

Mind Control Forums

Star Gods

The Watcher Files

AlterNet

Anthony Sutton

Millegan Stews

Conspiracy Archive

Nexus Magazine

(1) The nice people at Home Depot will cut your roller blinds to custom lengths for you, using this truly amazing blind cutting machine.

(2) When you measure roller blinds, *always* measure the distance between the mount points, *not* the width of the blind itself. You want to end up with a roller the correct width. The cloth will, naturally, follow the roller in terms of being the correct width.

(3) You can exchange blinds that were cut to the wrong length, again with the nice people at Home Depot.

In other news, I finished my first bottle of Dave’s Insanity Sauce. To celebrate, I purchased another one. Dave’s is the slowest consumed product of which I I know. I love spicy food, and I (apparently) go through one bottle per decade, max.

Here’s what’s on my mind: When are the republicans going to get on with the agenda of hate and discrimination that got them elected? They mobilized their base with anti-gay fear mongering and that white supremacist code word “values.” I would have thought they’d follow through. Instead, they’re going after social security and high malpractice payouts. Even more weirdly, I’m sort of a fan of both initiatives.

I’m confused. I thought they were going to ban gay marriage, crush unions in favor of big business, and destroy the arctic wildlife preserve. That’s what I voted against, anyway. Damn flip floppers.

Black metal photos mocked here.

http://folk.uio.no/tsandvik/fun/learn_disco.mpg”>How to disco.

I actually like the goldfish racetrack

A Gallery of failed dotcoms.