Chris Dwan

Blog

  • Lazy day

    Not much to report today. I’m totally procrastinating on writing more benchmark code because, well, I suck. Need to get these things done. The machine goes back on Friday.

    Went to the zoo today, in a futile effort to calm my favorite stressball. We hung out in front of the Snow Leopards for a while. They were active today with very recognizable cat-play going on. All the standard games of hide-and-pounce, stare-fixedly, and sit-high-up were in evidence.

    The concert last night was fun, if something of a bummer of a venue. It was at a Thai restaurant in Salem, which is just trying to establish itself as a place to come for music. As such, there were lots of people noisily eating dinner, and a few of us listening to the the music. Things cleared out substantially before the third set, and she was actually willing to play some of her own stuff. I can respect the urge to crank out covers as long as you’re competing with clanking crockery and loud patrons. There were around 8 of us left for the third set, which was wonderful. Even more impressive, as I was leaving, Anna came over, remembered my name, and thanked me for making such a long drive to see her. Hello? We (a) were at the same school at nearly the same time about a decade ago (b) chatted briefly during a set break <at a gig nearly a year ago. I should make such an effort to remember names and faces. I have trouble identifying myself in the mirror most mornings.

    I got totally lost trying to find Salem, by the way. For reference, it is just northwest of Boston. You take 107 there. If you find yourself on 1 going north out of Boston, you have made a wrong turn. Do not attempt to bushwack East to the coast, guess which of North or South leads to Salem, and then hack around. This does not work.

    One more thing: I found a truly evil little search engine at ljseek.com, which searches only livejournals. All of you who think you’re being clever and sneaky, you’re not.

  • Serenity quiz.

    Entertaining. I’m either a leader, or a psycho killer. Runner ups, psychotic or a fighter pilot. Wheeeee!

    You scored as Capt. Mal Reynolds. The Captain. You are the captain of the ship, so the crew are your responsibility. You just want to do the job, get paid and keep flying. Why is that always so hard?

    Capt. Mal Reynolds
    		100%

    The Operative
    		100%

    River Tam
    		75%

    Hoban 'Wash' Washburne
    		75%

    Kaylee (Kaywinnet Lee) Frye
    		75%

    Zoe Alleyne Washburne
    		63%

    Inara Serra
    		63%

    Jayne Cobb
    		56%

    Simon Tam
    		38%

    Shepherd Derrial Book
    		25%

    Which Serenity character are you?
    created with QuizFarm.com

  • Productive!

    Last night, went into Roslindale for sushi with friends. Sat up talking until 11, and then turned into pumpkins like the old people we are, and drove home. Thud. Asleep in moments.

    This morning, measured the bedroom as well as the space between the rafters in the dark and terrifying part of the attic (17′ by 14′, 15″ spaces). Purchased 6 rolls of R-25, 15″ wide pink insulation for a total of about 198 square feet. Hauled it upstairs, and rigged up a light by which to see, and a half sheet of sub-flooring on which to sit. It’s not so bad, once you get the proper infrastructure in place.

    The space is rectangular, with the roof too close to stand up. In one corner (occupying about 1/3 of the total space) is this hole. No rafters. At first it seemed to be filled with roofing trash. This is the part over our little hallway leading to the bedroom. Eventually, I realized that it was the old entryway to the house, a little roof-let over what had previously been a small back porch. I installed as much insulation as I could, prior to dealing with that.

    Yes. They built the addition around the old structure, and never bothered to remove the old porch roof. I love these people.

    I wound up totally destroying the roof-let with the Wonder Bar, a saw, and a fair amount of grunting and kicking. I left a bunch of the structural stuff in place in case it was somehow holding up the house or something. Then I stuffed insulation into the spaces around and between what was left. Insulation ain’t rocket science.

    Pictures are here

    After that I made a large batch of applesauce. 9 pints. Preliminary reports are that it’s pretty tasty.

    Meanwhile, there a study session for the OB-GYN board exam going on in my dining room. The other husbands and I during residency summarized the noises that come out of these sessions as “blah blah uterus, blah blah placenta.” That’s been triply true today. The most entertaining part was when they were reviewing genetic oddities leading to ambiguous gender. For them, it was very serious to distinguish between the various and very specific forms that this takes. To me, it started off vaguely amusing and descended to hilarious.

    I’m going to go, before I reveal too much.

  • Walken, 2008

    Behold your new leader.

  • Everybody else is doing it …

    If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don’t speak often, please post a comment with a memory of you and me. It can be anything you want–good or bad. When you’re finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or moritified) about what people remember about you.

  • Goddamn news media

    I start to see what the protesters and hippies are whining about with our news media. Let me repeat the important stories in the world, for those who don’t get out much:

    Paris is burning after 7 days of rioting.

    73,000 people are about to die of starvation in Packistan.

    THE CIA RAN SECRET PRISONS. What the hell are we? No seriously, who thought “hey, this’ll be okay!” The Red Cross and EU investigators want access.

  • Sparring

    Tonight was the first sparring night we’ve had at the gym in a while. My second time ever. Apparently, right before I joined the gym it had gotten pretty ugly in the sparring department, with emergency room level injuries every week. So my teacher called it off for a year or so. Now we’re getting back into it.

    (1) Teacher puts on this padded armor suit, and we get to hit him as hard as we want. Good times.
    (2) Sparred a 14 year old girl. Felt vaguely guilty, being both bigger and faster than her.
    (3) Sparred a 50 year old policeman. He’s solid, stay the hell out of the way of those hands and feet … but I could handle him if needed.
    (4) Sparred a 24 year old firefighter, third degree black belt, who drives in demolition derbies for fun (yes, technolope and capital_l, it was the guy who got back in the flipped car at the derby). Jesus Christ I’m gonna have bruises, and I could tell he was going easy on me.

    Overall, I live.

  • Energy conversions

    More tinkering with numbers.

    The DOE’s energy calculator is awesome.

    I’m very confused right now.

    1 kwh = 3412BTU
    1 gallon of heating oil is 139,000BTU

    Yearly kwh consumption: 1.291e3 * 3.412e3 = 4.4e6
    Yearly fuel consumption: 1.162e3 * 1.38000e5 = 1.6e8

    This isn’t all that surprising, since we use the oil to both heat the house and to heat our water. All the electric has to do is run the computers and the lights. Plus, there’s some inefficiency in the conversion of fuel oil to heat, otherwise known as “what’s hurtling out the chimney.” I’m willing to believe that keeping the house warm and the shower piping hot is two orders of magnitude more energy than keeping the lights on.

    But, if I wanted to buy the same amount of BTUs from the electric company, it would cost a lot more.

    1.6e8 BTU / 3.4e3 = 4.7e4
    4.7e4 * $1.2e-1 (cost per kwh) = $5.6e3

    So, assuming that all the inefficiencies are identical on my end, it would cost me around $5600 to get as many BTUs from electricity as I currently get for $1800 from fuel oil. Of couse, there’s tons of other stuff, like the fact that an electric heater would be more efficient (rather than running hot water around my basement in pipes, I could produce the heat exactly where I need it).

    Put that in your electric car and smoke it.

    I do love math.

  • Perl humor

    So, I’m hackin’ some PERL. As frequently happens, the fact that it’s PERL leads me down this crazy obscure path of references to arrays and arrays of references. I would up doing something the hardest and most bass-ackwards way possible:

    print ${@{split(/ /, $string)}}->[$i] . "\n";

    This produced an error message I’ve never seen before, but which made me giggle:

    Bizarre copy of ARRAY in leave at ./test line 5.

    The scary part of this is that they foresaw my hack, and coded a specific error message for it.

  • Energy

    I’m tinkering with data, now that I’ve got a full year of usage information on my house.

    * We burned 1162.3 gallons of heating oil last year ($1825)
    * We burned 1291.06 kwh of electricity last year. ($1291)
    * We used 5,100 gallons cubic feet of water last year. ($199)

    I also noticed that last year, fuel oil cost $1.40 per gallon. This year we locked in at $2.50 per gallon, and it’s already retailing at $2.62…so that may have been a good idea. Yes, this is the reason for the insulating frenzy.

    There seem to be a lot of pages with totally unsupported claims of “average” residential use. Anyone know a really good resource for specific, regional averages? I found This site, which is pretty awesome. It’s a government sponsored calculator that lets you plug and chug potential savings from various modifications to your house. It’s adjusted for zip code and everything.

    I found a water use page claiming that the average american uses about 60 gallons of water per day. Our usage appears to be 5100 * 7.4(gal/cf) / 360 days * 2 people = 52 gallons per day. Once you factor in the fact that we both travel a lot, I suspect that it all averages out.

    I’ve got a kill-a-watt on the way, primarily to measure power consumption of the machines I’m benchmarking at work, but I also plan to find out how much energy my appliances are burning.

    Edit: I just confirmed that my company’s computers burn more power in a year than my entire house.