Author: cdwan

Wow, do I ever love my wireless broadband card from Verizon. The other day, I hopped online to pull a needed piece of information during the 5 minutes of down time in the car wash. Mmmmmm, ubiquitous communication. Maybe I’ll start keeping my grocery shopping list in a wiki or something.

Today, however, I’m logging in from the Baltimore airport, enroute back to VA. It’ll be good to see my family again, and I anticipate a thoroughly emotionally exhausting week leading up to the memorial service on Friday. Has it really been a month already? How time flies.

Being home was good. Got some solid hangout time in with folks from the dojo … everyone is being incredibly supportive and sympathetic.

Work is heating up. New responsibilities, new opportunities, all of them just about as positive as they could be.

On Tuesday night I went to dinner with the local Masonic lodge. Yes, these are the grand-conspiracy-theory, illuminati-were-styled-off-them, Washington Masons.

my thoughts

I just achieved a new personal best for “sheer weight of a single piece of computing equipment manhandled into a car, by myself:” 220lb (108kg)

It was an IBM BladeCenter. Thanks for asking.

Off to dinner with the Masons tonight.

I wonder if I can borrow a Schnauzer from anyone …

There are only a few acts of such simple and direct hope and optimism as planting one’s garden. Today, despite the truly strange blizzard-let of snow, I started the seeds which require 6 to 8 weeks of indoor growth.

We’re going very simple this year:

* Early: Snow peas, radishes, and Swiss Chard. Hopefully some onions and kale will come back from last year.
* Mid: Herbs herbs herbs! Got a “planter pack” suitable for the 3′ container where my sequoia died last year.
* Late: Tomatoes (Better Boy), Hot peppers (mixed), and Cukes (Picklebush).
* Also: Flowers! Flowers! Flowers! I’m dedicating a major portion of the garden to a late-summer flower garden designed to *move* this house when we put it on the market.

Yeah, I’ve seen this movie before … the one where the protagonist gets his garden all planted and then has to move out of the house right at harvest time? Bah humbug. Humbug, I say.

I believe that I’ve mentioned the buddha of the splice, previously. This is the small statue in one of the flowerbeds, placed to indicate the location of the un-conduited cable that provides electricity to the garage.

redmed captured a penitent, on film:

Yes, we’ve already submitted it to cute overload.

I’m safely home in Providence for the week. Things are in good shape. Apparently the world, both local and global, can look after itself without my direct supervision for three weeks. This is a good thing to know.

Drama from my heating oil company

Today:

I continued creating a path through the woods out back of the house. I’ve set myself a difficulty modifier of “using only this axe, right here, as well as this rake, right here.” That’s making it a bit … tiring. A couple of large-ish trees had fallen right across the place where I wanted my path to go. Getting through the trees would be quick work with the chainsaw, but one cut takes about half an hour of sweaty, breathless, gasping hacking and chopping. For the larger ones, it takes two cuts to remove the section which I want moved.

After all the hacking and chopping, I sat in the hot tub, watching a blood moon rise, while fully eclipsed. That was pretty awesome.

Then, dinner, followed by The Departed. Heck of a movie.

Tomorrow: Home.

The CIA World Factbook page on Swaziland

Interesting tidbits:
* Slightly smaller than New Jersey
* Last absolute monarch in the world, gave up a little power in the 1990s
* Median age: 18.5
* Death rate: 29.74 deaths/1,000 population
* Infant Mortality: total: 71.85 deaths/1,000 live births
* Life expectancy at birth: 32.62 years
* HIV AIDS prevalence in the adult population: 38.8% (2003 est.)
* Airports: 18
* Airports with unpaved runways: 17

For the curious, Haitian life expectancy at birth is in the mid 50s, their HIV rate is around 5.6%, and they have 4 airports with paved runways.

Welcome to the future, which is already in progress.

Yesterday, while driving to “Short Pump” VA, I got a little lost. As soon as I realized that I was off the trail, I pulled to the side of the road, fired up my computer, and signed on with my wireless card. I hooked up to google maps, and got directions to the short pump mall from the intersection I was looking at. Turned out that I just had to turn left and drive 3 miles … but it’s good that I checked … I had been planning to turn right.

In two or three years, this capability will be on your phone, entirely voice recognition and GPS based.

Of course, if you’ve got a friend with a phone, sitting in front of a computer, this capability is *already* on your phone.