Author: cdwan
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Planks in the platform
For my very own amusement, I’ve been trying to come up with some unambiguous statements of what policies I would enact, should my candidacy for whatever office come through. Here are four
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That ROCKED
From time to time, auto companies will host public relations events in which you get to drive their cars. Yesterday morning, I attended a drive party for Mercedes-Benz, and it rocked. They had a large “lifestyle tent,” which was basically souped up PR, with hand massage and muffins and stuff. Interestingly, the hand massage people were just random office temps hired out for the day. They had received no special training, but the pay was apparently okay. Guess we should keep that in mind when we pay a premium for salon and spa services…they’re just not that difficult.
The cool part was that they had professional drivers giving what we came to call the “rocket sled” experience with racing tuned versions of the cars in question. We rode the rocket sled twice, and I now understand that professional drivers really do have a totally different approach to driving. I’ve never ridden in any vehicle that was pushed like that. One driver was totally ice-man masterful: He took turns at approximately twice the speed I would have gone for, and never once lost traction on any wheel. The other was a total velocity junky. The course started off with a straightaway on which we got up to about 80 mph in 6 or 7 seconds. He fishtailed at the end to shed speed before whipping around a 270 degree turn in one smooth controlled slide.
The other bit was a course on which we got to drive the cars. That was fun, but I was too chicken to really push them. Also got to sit in a $100,000 car. Hardwood steering wheel and stick shift, hard-top convertible, crazy-wacky german engineering. They didn’t let us drive that one.
Here’s a set of recent Pictures.
In other news, here’s the crazy plan of the week: I’m going to try to qualify for the presidential physical fitness award as a 17 year old (they don’t have the requirements for a 28 year old…). Some parts will be cake, others will require some work. I’m confident I can get down to a six minute mile if I work at it. The “V sit and reach” of 7 inches (7 inches past the soles of your feet, with feet one foot apart and knees straight) will be tricky.
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Balls in the air…
Too many balls in the air, that is. Old juggling metaphor.
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Busted
I had fun for a while asking people who had read the Harry Potter books as what character they thought of themselves, and then as which character they thought their friends perceived them. I thought that I mapped pretty well with Snape. Snide, harsh, good at what he does, spends too much time in the systems room. Then I found the quiz below, which got the Myers Briggs personality index dead on (INTP) and called it as:
Harry Potter Personality Quiz by Pirate Monkeys Inc.Oh well.
In other news, it was the first major frisbee day today. Two guys from work & I wasted over an hour chucking the disc around. It was a good thing.
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Eeeeeevil
Careful, it’s a mind virus…
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Hoppity, hoppity…
Cracked the first of the “Tongue splitter” west coast style IPA this evening. God DAMN that’s some hoppy beer. Admittedly, I knew what I was getting into. Instead of the standard two hop additions (one for bittering, and one for the hop aroma) this beast included SIX, of which two were “dry hops.” That means they go directly into the fermenter once most of the fermentation has died down. Clarity is excellent, almost no haze at all. This is a surprise to me, given how much crap was floating around in the fermenter at bottling time. I guess my technique is improving or something. I’m really pleased that I can now make a perfectly drinkable beer that’s as good (and interesting) as a commercial microbrew.
Still waiting with no small amount of trepidation for the Imperial Bomber (an imperial stout) to age a bit more. The recipe recommends six months in the bottle. We’re about two months out from that. It seems that the higher alcohol brews (this one clocks in between 8 and 9 percent) really do need some serious time to settle out and lose that harsh edge that characterizes cheap, strong hooch.
Where the Tongue splitter is a limit case for hops, the imperial is a limit case on the “dark” malt flavors. 12lbs of dark malt extract (average batch contains around 6lbs). The malt provides sugars for fermentation (thus the high alcohol). It’s the one that blew the lid right off the fermenter.
In other news, other people’s code sucks. Spent most of the day chasing in a circle between CPAN, various open source repositories, and my very own pile of perl and C hacks to accomplish what, in hindsight, is a pretty simple task. All we want to do is align a pair of protein sequences for which we also have the genomic sequence. Then we want to generate a DNA alignment based on the protein alignment. With that in hand, we can calculate some interesting numbers. In order to do this right, you have to answer lots of piddling questions: Full length or partial alignments (full length), reciprocal best hits, a certain threshold, or hand curated (reciprocal best) and so on and so on. There is a bit of code in BioPerl which addresses this exact question, but it turns out to have comments like “this code is not guaranteed to produce correct answers!” in the docs. Gah!
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Easter
I celebrated Easter in my own special way this year, as often happens. I dug up my roses, functionally rescuing them from the grave and bringing them back to life. The short form is that roses don’t like cold. You have to cover them when it’s going to drop below freezing, and when the ground freezes solid, it’s usually bye-bye rose bushes. In many climates, you can get by by covering them in a heap of mulch, or even by employing “rose cones” which are a structured sort of perma-cover for the winter. Here in Minnesota, we bury our roses. With the roses underground, and also under a layer of mulch, they survive most winters okay. This is one source for this info, and This is another. Suffice it to say, I didn’t make this up.
Rose bushes are a high maintenance sort of plant, and they’re a commitment. They tend to be pricey, labor intensive, and highly rewarding (if they live). I didn’t expect to like keeping rose bushes, but I do. I also never expected to get married, but I did. I never in my life expected to live to thirty…and we’re well underway to that. Lots of weird stuff going around. I’ve also noticed that if you plant two or three bushes a year for a few years…pretty soon you’re one of those people with roses everywhere. I’ve grown attached to them.
It’s just downright strange and spooky to, in the fall when things are beginning to die, dig your roses a little rose grave and tilt them into it. It’s even stranger, yet deeply fulfilling to get them back out of the soil alive, as seems to have happened this year.
Huzzah for the return of life to the world. Huzzah for spring, and huzzah for the roses that arose, living, in their original form, from the grave.
On a totally unrelated topic, “Hellboy” is just a bad movie. I completely agree with one of my fellow patrons who remarked to his buddy as we were all trooping out of the theatre: “What was I THINKING?”
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Long bike ride
As a “welcome back” from my travels these past two weeks, I decided to take a 30 mile bike ride this morning. Naturally, it started snowing at about the 10 mile mark. No accumulation, but the emotional effect was quite palpable. Still, pressing on was good for the soul.
Now, on with the chores that so often define our day to day existence.
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Airport post, number two
San Jose International. There’s a bit of spirit here, but it’s still horribly soul draining. Expedia.com owns one of the terminal bars, and the other (my new favorite bar name) is called “Martini Monkey.” Why not tell it like it is, you know?
Otherwise, deep in thought. The opportunities to take long walks and be disconnected from electronic communication for hours at a time have been good for my soul.