Author: cdwan

Arrived safely home at around 5 this afternoon. The drive back was totally uneventful, and slightly shorter than expected. The most exciting bit was right at the beginning, when I decided to grab coffee and a muffin down at the inner harbor before setting out. I left my car on a side street and went to drink my coffee. Had an uneventful conversation with a random dude who never got around to asking me for money, and then wandered back having totally forgotten where I left the vehicle. I was pretty worried for a couple of minutes … wandering around … looking for the car.

Got back and all is well. A few of the seedlings were casualties of dehydration … mostly cabbage and parsley. Thus does natural selection work. I planted more immediately. Two of the four rhubarb plants are up, I expect that the other two are simply dead. All the peppers have germinated (finally!) and I’ve got a wide assortment of radishes and lettuce coming online.

I’m at the Tremont Plaza in Baltimore. The rest of the consulting gig went well (though exhausting) and I wound up eating sushi and drinking my very favorite beer late into the evening. Today, I drove south, arriving in time for a crabcake lunch at the inner harbor. Albert is doing well, and showed me around all the recording studios at Peabody, including the most badass mixing console I have ever seen in my life. Turns out that the whole campus is densely wired, such that you can patch into any microphone feed from any of the recording rooms. They even set up a video feed to the various concert halls, with a preset zoom/point coordinate such that they can visually inspect the microphone attachments / patches by remote. Sw33t.

This evening, we went to the little Irish pub around the corner from the hotel, and the live music was none other than Shamus Kennedy, the same guitar player / singer I used to go watch in Old Town Alexandria a decade ago. His show is pretty much identical … still entertaining and a little bit steam-roller-ish.

Now, I believe I shall go fall asleep.

I want an Edrive. Lithium Ion upgrade for the Prius battery, plus a firmware modification to encourage the car to “go electric” more frequently. Pushes it up to 120MPG city driving. No that doesn’t include the metric tons of coal that will be burned by our 1920’s era electrical infrastructure to charge the batteries late at night … but that could conceivably be replaced with nuclear, wind, or whatever.

Stolen from cuteoverload:

I rebuilt PERL today. Yes, I had to rebuild and re-install everything on top of that. No, it wasn’t fun.

Thanks for listening.

Mopey, emo ranting. Move along.

New essay is up: Immigration Reform.

I owe two more this week, and then I’ll be back on track.

Staybridge Suites in Princeton is a nice place to stay. It’s in the price range of the cheaper hotels (Best Western, Holiday Inn Express), but it’s set up for longer term stays. I’ve got a little suite, with a bedroom separated from the main area, a kitchenette (fridge, stove, sink, dishwasher), and a sitting room. The cabinets are socked with plates and glasses and stuff. They serve breakfast (with a self-serve waffle maker!) and a “sundowner” dinner buffet, which are included. I’m connected through the complimentary high speed internet. They’ve even got a little DVD rental machine, where you put in money, swipe your room key, and get a DVD. I’m not totally sure what the downside is. Maybe that there’s no meat market hotel bar (“OMG, did you see Frank’s face when I said 3%? I mean, 3%! HA HA HA HA HA!”) , no restaurant, and it’s a block off the highway.

Pleasant dinner last night with the guy I’m working for down here. Turns out that one reason he hasn’t been responding to much email is that the other two “director” level people in bioinformatics have left their positions … leaving him with a lot of extra responsibilities. Plus, he’s been renting the house next door while rebuilding their own house. The new setup is sw33t. We sat around drinking wine, assembing Ikea furniture and talking about what we hope to get done this week. His kitchen is a model which one could do worse than to emulate.

The machine I’ll be working on today has 64 processors and a quarter terabyte of RAM. I am filled with geeky joy.

Lots of stories under the cut, for brevity