Blog

A productive day for me

in which I relate the rather bland, but calm and fun story of what I did this weekend

What I’m reading

The Atlantic
The Economist
Enigma: Alan Turning
Night Falls: Iraq in the shadow of America’s War

What I’m watching
Firefly
Galactica

What I’m listening to
Ani DiFranco
System of a Down
Black Eyed Peas
Lords of Acid
Nine Inch Nails

Bill Gate’s keynote from Supercomputing makes for interesting watching, if you’ve got an hour and a half to run it in background: Streaming download.

The first part, about graphical environments for web services workflows is something that I believe, and have been working on, as well.

The most interesting piece, to me, was the question at the end on energy utilization. The question was something like “the last generation has had effectively free energy. That won’t be the case in the future. How are we going to deal with that?” His answer was that energy won’t be the limiting factor … and he waved his hands at “fusion” and “science.”

Also, it’s finally public knowledge now that my company is working with Microsoft on the compute clustering / bioinformatics side of things. Apparently the booth they gave us at Supercomputing was sweet.

I think I found a teensy bug in Cox‘s internet status tool.

Select a region. Then click “display all current activities.” No matter which region you pick, you get a message indicating that “Some customers may be unable to log into Internet Tools at this time.”

Nice.

So I can either have a kernel that boots, OR have a keyboard that works, but not both.

–UPDATE–

Turns out that the x86 install image works fine. Of course, this is a 32 bit install image, so I’ll have to cross-compile fucking everything, reinstalling as I go … but hey … why else be a computer geek, right? Why the different drivers for USB between the images? How the hell should I know.

So filled with hate.

Get rich quick and all that.

A friend has a company. One of the partners in the company is selling all his stock. They’re looking for investors with at least $25K apiece to buy that stock. It’s a non-publically traded company (i.e: This is not a day trading or quick turnaround opportunity) which expects to be issuing sizable dividends to stockholders in late 2007. I like them, and I think it’s a good deal. However, I’m not in the market for stock investments right now. I’m in the market for improvements to my house, plus a shiny new Prius.

If you want to sink some money into a small company, let me know and I’ll pass on the contact info.

Timeline is now.

I read in this months Atlantic Monthly that the (former?) chess champion of the world, the man who played John Henry to the steam driller of Deep Blue in the modern man vs. machine that took place a few years back, I heard that Gary Kasparov has turned into a political agitator in Russia. He claims that he doesn’t want the presidency for himself … just that he wants to take power out of the hands of the elite few and return the country to a democracy which is responsive to the needs of the citizens.

Having read the article, I think that this is a man we can work with. I support his efforts. Plus, he knows firsthand what’s coming down the pipe in terms of machine intelligence.

perhaps, too much information