Author: cdwan

Yes, I was in the glee club. And the chess team, too.

Bulk update. Time marches on, and already the beginning of the week fades into the mist:

* Mother and sister came to town. We went to Block Island and rented mopeds to scoot around. It was awesome. After that, we went to the Pumpkin Spectacular. This morning there were waffles with cherry conserve, and a walk down to the bike path where we all watched a flock of cormorants fishing together.

* Last night after dinner, we tried the Carrot Wine (Fowl Hooch). It was *good*. Sweet and raisin flavored. I’m totally stunned that I made a dessert wine, triply so that I made it out of carrots.

* This afternoon, I dumped out the beer that tried to kill technolope and I, and kegged a batch of the cherry stout. We’ll see how this one goes. It’s “force carbonating” as we speak.

* Racked the two wines as well. The red has cleared considerably, and it’s at about the right level of dryness. The white is still a little too sweet, and is also still hazy with yeast. Neither is vile in any detectable way.

Mom and sister are in town. Went to the vegetarian restaurant this evening. Tomorrow, off to Block Island, and then to the Pumpkin Spectacular in the evening. If we’re feeling really adventurous, we might even crack a bottle of the carrot wine. Who knows?

Long week. That’s about all I have to say about that.

So, every Libyan schoolchild will have a laptop in pretty short order. I’ve babbled about the $100 laptop project before … and now it’s real. For further details, go check out John Negroponte’s talk at TED.

For its $250 million investment, Libya will receive 1.2 million computers, one server per school, a team of technical advisers to help set up the system, satellite internet service and other infrastructure.

The computers come with a wireless connection, a built-in video camera, an eight-hour battery and a hand crank for recharging batteries. They will initially be priced below $150, and the price is expected to decline when they are manufactured in large numbers.

I wonder, do we have any school districts in the US willing to spend $150 per student on a laptop? What about if we could buy all textbooks electronically, and distribute them on the laptops?

We’re about to get leapfrogged by Libya.

In other news, I’m in Boston every day this week, building an 80 node cluster. Fun, but a lot of commuting. In better, other news, my mother and sister are coming to town on Friday! Yay!

Many things happened this weekend:

Yesterday, I cooked down $20 worth of tomatoes into 5 quarts of spaghetti sauce and a gallon of tomato juice.

technolope and capital_l made the trek down from Boston, and we went to a pick-yer-own apple farm. While there, we reveled in the pumpkin field (so orange!), and picked about 20lbs of apples. Then, we drove down to near Newport to wander around in a corn maze. Good times all around.

We came back to the house, ravenously hungry, and cooked salmon (sea salt / garlic / rosemary / basil crust), and mac and cheese for dinner. After dinner, the four of us rendered the apples into applesauce. We’ve got 12 pints put up. We would have had an additional quart, but the jar’s bottom came off as we set it in the water to process. This left us with a somewhat unstable column of applesauce in the center of a pot of boiling water, sitting on broken glass. Not a great scene. We managed to rescue maybe half of that quart with a ladle and a pair of spoons.

Also took possession of a refrigerator. My friend Dan is tearing his kitchen apart, and brought it over. technolope and I wrestled it into the basement, in open defiance of basic principles of geometry.

As a reward, I poisoned him with my beer.

No wait, hear me out: I’ve got this batch of beer in the keg. I poured two glasses, we both took a hearty swig, and shortly thereafter we both felt distinctly unhappy in the guts. Nothing serious, but it was enough that neither of us took another sip for maybe half an hour. After that, I went out on a limb and asked if he was feeling the same gastrointestinal unease that I was. Since it was just the two of us, and had started immediately after the beer … I blame said beer. I’m looking for possible explanations here.

I am so not looking forward to driving to Woburn tomorrow.

The Harvard Bookstore Readers Series looks pretty incredible. Thanks to medyani for pointing it out to me. I think I’ll be going to Dawkin’s talk on the 19th. Unfortunately, Paul Farmer is already sold out.

In other news, I think that I’ll be making spaghetti sauce (for canning) today with the $20 basket of tomatoes I got at the farmers market this morning.

Tomorrow: Apple picking.

Fall is not all bad.

I just wasted a day, dithering around rather than making decisions.

I just watched Richard Dawkins’ TED talk. You should go watch it too.

Dawkins Quote

An article in the Rolling Stone asks about voting machines, and whether they can be systematically tampered with. Their conclusion is that if the machines are centrally administered by a private firm (as is the case in Georgia, Florida, and Ohio), and if standards for the machines are lax (apparently, nobody knows how to certify software for this sort of thing), then it’s certainly possible to rig an election.

I’ve been saying for a while now that if we see “Surprising Republican Gains!” in november, I will start to take the conspiracy theorists seriously. I think I’m going to get a head start on that. Given the perfectly legal, but ethically dubious, tactics that the parties will use to retain power (jerrymandering, with attack ads from “unaffiliated” PACs as a close second) I have no doubt that if it’s possible to cheat, someone will try. Political parties have no interest other than the maintenance of their own power, and they are just as fundamentally unethical as corporations. We must act to keep them in check, or they will do whatever they can to expand their power.

I also have no doubt that the Republicans will be much better at rigging votes than the Democrats.

Todd, of the Mighty Hammer Brewery, sends a horrifying update about a fire in a hops warehouse.

Fires have long been an expensive danger at hop warehouses, largely because of the potential for spontaneous combustion from heat buildup in bales of resin-loaded varieties.

The new album by Evanescence rocks. I don’t think it’s as brilliant as their last one, but it’s still damn good.