Author: cdwan

Had an awesome time in Ann Arbor this weekend. For one brief trio of days, I was popular. My phone rang off the hook, and it was always some new friend wanting to hang out, get coffee, hit a favorite restaurant or bar, show me their new child, or whatever.

details

You know those stupid “type the text in the box” things? here’s one with kittens?

I’ll be at Angelo’s tomorrow at 10am.

Be emotionally prepared to stand in line. That’s how it works there.

Looks like Flim Flam late breakfast at noon today (Saturday).

Additionally, I’ll most likely be at Angelo’s tomorrow morning, but I don’t know when.

New one, more autobiographical than most: A cappella sociology.

Damn. Still owe two more this week to be on schedule. How can it possibly be hard to grunt out one essay a week, for a year?

Flying to Ann Arbor today for my a cappella thingamabob. I carried almost no metal, and I wore tennis shoes. The footsie fetishists at security “suggested” that I remove said shoes. I said “do I have to?” They said “you’ll be subject to the special screening.” I said that was fine. It turns out that if you refuse to give them foot action in the line, hopping around for their amusement, then they have to kneel down and wipe your shoes with a little moist-nap / bomb detector. I much prefer the latter. From now on, it’s “refuse, resist” for me.

Don’t bow to authority.

Today: Concert.
Tomorrow: Breakfast / Lunch, someplace fun, with LJ people. Places I wouldn’t mind eating:
* Cafe Zola
* Angelos
* Good Time Charlies
* The Brown Jug
* Flam
* Other
Sunday: Visit the _earthshine_ fam, as well as non-LJ friends.

Ganked from jwz:

Inside the apartments, known as Reversible Destiny Lofts, the floor of the dining room slopes erratically, the one in the kitchen is sunken and the study features a concave floor. Electric switches are located in unexpected places so you have to feel around for the right one. A glass door to the veranda is so small you have to bend to crawl out. You constantly lose balance, gather yourself up, and occasionally trip and fall. There’s no closet space; residents will have to find a way to live there. “[The apartment] makes you alert and awakens instincts, so you’ll live better, longer and even forever,” says Arakawa. Completed last October, the apartments are selling for $763,000 each — about twice as much as a normal apartment in that neighborhood.

See? Being perpetually irritated will make you fucking immortal.

Beer mapping

Back into town this morning for more computer worship. Gonna install our first co-located server today. This is a good idea; We have machine room space. Some of our customers really don’t care where the physical machine is located, so long as they can get to it on the network. Therefore (for a fee), we take care of power, cooling, network, setup, and all that other jazz … and they just use the machine. We’ll see how it works out.

This evening, going to a “partner reception” with one of our corporate partners. It may be cool, but I suspect that I drew the short straw.

Last night was fun. redmed and I came over to technolope and capital_l‘s place to celebrate the fact that he has shipped off the final text of his Thesis. They cracked the schmancy champaign that they had been saving, lit a fire, and we laughed and laughed as we became funnier and funnier. Plans for world domination were advanced somewhat with the introduction of “homeheatpump.com”.

Yesterday at BioIT-World was also fun. I gave my talk, and got a new and interesting form of ego-feeding: When I reached the penultimate slide, which shows off some sw33t new technology we’ve developed, people in the audience took out cameras and took pictures of the screen. Not just that dorky guy in the front, either. Like, lots of cameras came out to record the moment. I thought that was pretty cool. Got several nice complements as well, including “yours is the last talk of the conference, and the first one that I’m glad I came to.” I guess she wasn’t a big fan of the rest of the show.

Holy hell, is it really Thursday already?

From jwz:

Tonight/tomorrow, the time will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. Which also happens to be 123 seconds after 1 AM. (You can all stop mailing me about this now.)

The artist’s statement on this weeks The Pain comic is pretty good. He’s talking about the end of the world, whether due to environmental collapse, peak oil, or plague. Naturally, there’s profanity and stuff. Consider yourselves warned.

A Google search of the term “peak oil” will instantly tell you far more than you ever wanted to know about this subject and immerse you in a subculture of somewhat tediously well-informed people who believe with alarming certainty and unanimity that modern society is going to go to all to hell in the near future. Suffice it to say that “peak oil” refers to that historical moment at which the depletion of the resource will exceed production, a point we may pass in the next few years, or may indeed already have passed. Exacerbating the crisis is the fact that the Indians and the Chinese have just learned that cars are fun to have. (The most readily comprehensible and alarming analogy I’ve read is that, in party terms, we have one six-pack, of which we’ve drunk four cans [!], a bunch of new people have just shown up with no beer, and it’s after two.) After this happens, energy prices will continue to rise and never come back down, massive shortages and crises will become common, and eventually the infrastructure of industrial civilization will collapse, after which we will descend into Mad Maxian squalor and savagery and terrible warlords such as Lord Humungus will assume control of what’s left of society.

However … not to worry, there’s plenty of oil, we’ll figure something out before it runs out, so just relax and take another half a Xanax and why not get myself a beer from the fridge. I would like to feel comforted by this advice but the fact that it is roughly identical to the official position of the Bush adminstration RE: oil and alternative energy sources (except for the Xanax and beer) disquiets me.