Author: cdwan

“Broken formation, razzle dazzle, don’t let them use their targeting computers, and for God’s sake stay out of Galactica’s firing solution!”

I think that I like having TV shows on the internet.

My day has been filled with some truly ugly people. Comically ugly. Imagine a caricature of a person who has been constantly scowling for the past 55 years. “Your face will freeze that way, oh my God it really did!” ugly.

Lots of ’em. I don’t know what’s going on.

Just got back from Jet Li’s new movie, “Fearless.” It’s excellent. Go see it immediately. If you haven’t seen “Protector,” you could even make a double feature of it.

On Friday night, we went to see Cirque du Soleil’s show, Corteo. As expected, it was some great spectacle. I’m glad that there’s still some honest circus work left out there.

Forklift Upgrade: An upgrade to a system in which the old version is picked up, with a forklift, and thrown in a dumpster. The new system is brought in, also by forklift, and set in its place.

I plan to do this today, in the small, with my work environment. “Trash bag cleanup” might be a better term. I’m sick of mess.

I have 16 gallons of fermentables going in the kitchen. Racked both the red and the white into carboys, and neither tastes “off” at all. They’re both still cloudy, a little sweet, and a bit yeasty. No interesting flavor characteristics yet. I’ll be letting the red go all the way to “bone dry.” The white, I plan to stop while it’s still got a bit of sugar in it … so I’ll be tasting that every couple of weeks. It’s interesting to me how slowly wine fermentation goes, relative to beer. Bubble, bubble.

It’s apple picking season, so I considered getting some cider to add to the mix. redmed made it clear that if all the carboys are full, it’s time to hold off on brewing for a little while. Oh well. Maybe applesauce instead.

By some miracle, I have no trips scheduled this week.

redmeds laptop gave us a scare yesterday, in which the disk was going wild, and the beast wouldn’t boot. Even “target mode” didn’t work. This morning I decided to try target mode again (in which the laptop is nothing more than a big firewire disk) and it went really slow for a while. After a couple of hours, I heard a loud yelp, went to check on it, and the disk was working again. I don’t trust it. Transferring the contents of her disk to my old 15″ powerbook, and then seeing if I can replace the hard disk on the 12″. Plus, kicking up the ‘ole backup schedule again.

Today’s weather: Rain, with Fall and Winter to come next. Joy.

simianpower, this one’s for you:

I’m safely home again, thanks for asking. On the plane, immediately upon receiving my glass of ice water, I poured its entire contents into my lap. Well, more onto my seat, to be soaked up my the seat of my pants … but some did wind up on the lap. The nice girl next to me offered me her napkin. That, plus my napkin, absorbed something like 2% of the spill. It was awesome.

I hit a new low in road-warrior land last night: When we got back to Providence (11pm), I sat on the floor by the baggage carousel, got online, and while we waited for our bags I set up the car and hotel for the trip leaving the next morning (6:45am).

This inspired a rough sketch of my top-N road-warrior moments. I’m not ready to share that sketch yet. It seemed cooler when I started the list than as I remembered that travel is fundamentally uncomfortable.

This evening, I’m in Rockville, MD. Customer seems happy. I’m going back for another day of work tomorrow, then flying home by way of Baltimore. On the way, I’ll hopefully have dinner with sacredangle and justkidding_nr.

My computer is almost out of battery, because my cats chewed through my laptop power cable during the 5 hours I was home last night. Sadly, punishing them now would only punish the cute behavior where they greet me at the door. Off to Comp-USA in the morning to spend $70 on a magic new Apple power adapter.

Okay, I got up at 5am, and I’m tired now.

I like this: Remind me. “How things work,” but with an electronic edge.

Posting from Ann Arbor, 12^th floor of the Campus Inn. redmed‘s prospective employer put us up here, at some obscene daily rate. So far I’ve identified a couple of value points (umbrellas in a little umbrella stand, dimmer switches on all the lights) which justify a little bit of expense … but not this much. I’m assuming that the remainder is intended to flatter us, or something.

the details

I picked up Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich for the trip to VA this week, and finished it off during the plane rides.

my thoughts