Author: cdwan

Strangely, I want to see a movie about people. “Venus,” specifically. I heard an interview with Peter O’Toole as I was driving home this evening, and I’m hooked. He sounds like such a wonderfully erudite actor. My favorite quote from the story (go ahead and click on the “Listen” link) is:

If someone asked me to sum up the picture, well, it’s about a dirty old man and a young slut of a woman.

The inflection that he puts on all those words, somehow makes me want to see it.

You could also go watch the preview for Premonition. That one looks pretty sweet, though watching the trailer probably has the same emotional impact as the whole movie. What a horrible idea! What a great possibility for drama!

Shamefully, I also kinda want to see the Silver Surfer movie. Should I see the first Fantastic Four movie first?

My story

Current statistics indicate that 95% of all the email that comes to my primary email address is thrown away before it hits my mailbox. Another 55% of the remaining is tagged by spamassassin as junk. Apple’s spam filter catches another bunch, and sorts it all into a junk folder. That junk folder is averaging 150 new messages a day. I skim it before deleting, but I’m soon going to stop even doing that and just outright delete anything that gets tagged as spam, sight unseen.

Therefore, if you write to me and I don’t respond … just write again. It’s highly likely that I’m throwing away some signal with the noise at this point.

Also, don’t try to use an attached FireWire disk as your primary shared data repository for a compute cluster. It doesn’t work.

* Understand sustainable public health and infrastructure building in developing nations (mostly Haiti). Meet Paul Farmer. Save some people from preventable death.

* Reconcile intellectual atheism with a moral mandate to do good in the world. Explain it in a compelling manner. Start a national movement which will make it possible for atheists to “come out” and run for public office.

* Run for public office. Win.

* Develop an ass-kicking piece of software for generalized scientific computing which sits squarely in the middle between “keep using Excel” and “learn a full-on programming language.” For bonus points, make it generalizable enough that jobs can easily be re-submitted to big supercomputers or “the cluster down the hall” as appropriate.

* Bulk up my arms. Become “jacked.” Build abdominal muscles which inspire awe and terror.

* Get a freakin’ iPhone. Oh my God, so very cool.

* Play music.

* Build a wind turbine to generate power for my house. Create a do-it-yourself kit. Sell the kits for both profit and to encourage people to make their own electricity.

* Read Roger Penrose’s “The Road to Reality”.

* Start a home business hosting websites. Find 1,000 customers. Use customers to replace salary. Quit job. Laugh maniacally.

* Remove 500 pounds of stuff from my basement. Throw it away, give it away, make it be gone.

* Nap more.

* Care.

I’m all buzzed over the new apple “iphone”. It looks revolutionary.

Real time feed from Job’s keynote

It’s an ipod, a phone, and a PDA. It has one button (“on”), and the rest of the interface is a “multi touch” screen. It connects via Wi-Fi to the internet, and it runs a real operating system (OS X) with itunes, calendar, etc.

Without going into too much detail about the very, very many ways in which this will be cool: I would like one, please.

One of my old a cappella groups from Michigan is having their 20 year reunion this year. With amazing thoughtfulness (for them) they decided to tell the alumni about it a couple of months in advance. Bravo! Wahoo!

However, they picked the very weekend on which I already have tickets to go see the Tallis Scholars, perhaps my very favorite singing group in the entire universe.

There’s really no contest here. While I would love to see old friends in dear Ann Arbor town … I doubt that very many of them will even show up.

Bee-hold: Bee Wars

I have vague sadness for the bees, but also sympathy for the humans. This *is* the toy on which kids play … you know. The bees have the whole world to choose from.

What a great weekend.

Sunday, capital_l and technolope came down for a long afternoon starting with brunch, and including flying machines, video games, and finally pizza and port. Good times all around.

Today, I’m getting myself in trouble. The theme might well be “drain the wound and let the healing begin.”

Obtained a second airport express and plugged the existing speakers in the living room into it. This means that I can play music from my laptop to any subset of (its own speakers, the living room, the kitchen). Rock. Go me.

Another bottle of the Ivory Tower “volunteered” by blowing its cork clear up to the ceiling. This very nearly scared the pants off of redmed. After calming everyone down (the cats were freaked out), I decided to open all the bottles, pull some CO2 out of solution to equalize the pressure, and re-cork them. So, that was fun. We’ll see if it holds.

Dinner tonight with work folks from the hospital. Warming up my polite conversation now.

Having people down tomorrow to break in the new crepe pan.

Finished both The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. I highly recommend each of them to any and all. They share a theme, that according unconditional respect to religious thought leads to disastrous social repercussions. Of the two, the Harris book is the place to start. It’s tiny and reads in less than a couple of hours. Dawkins is more thorough, on many of the same messages.