| that storm we were talking about... |
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via. I like how you can see the cold front drawing moisture from the gulf like a spigot to make clouds. |
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| this is caveman talk, honey |
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"Without a belief that you will be rewarded or punished after the end of your life--what drives morality among your people? . . . I know that you're a good person. Where does that goodness come from?"
"I behave as I do because it is right for me to do so . . . by the standards of my people." "But where do those standards come from?" "From . . . from our conviction that there is no life after death! . . . A person's life is completely finished at death; there is no possibility of reconciling with them, or making amends after they are gone. . . . If I wrong someone . . . under your worldview I can console myself with the knowledge that, after they are dead, they can still be contacted; amends can be made. But in my worldview, once a person is gone . . . then you who did the wrong must live knowing that person's entire existence ended without you ever having made peace with him or her." --Neanderthal- and Cro-Magnon-descendent discussing the afterlife in Robert J. Sawyer's "Hominids". This passage is quoted in Gabriel McKee's "The Gospel According to Science Fiction", a survey of various SF books with religious implications my mom got me for Christmas |
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| is this real life? |
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--Making the rounds, the trip home from the dentist...MAN, why can't I find a dentist who uses that stuff rather than then jabbing my gums with novocaine? |
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| tom brady and the heartbreakers |
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Wow, that really stunk.
4th down, 13 yards to go, in long FG range... they decide to try for first down... what? WHAT? Seriously. You have a young kicker with a solid leg; give him a chance. Or punt. Going for just showed a disrespectful overconfidence that completely killed the game for the Patriots. What a disaster! Congratulations Giants, you did things no else did against the Patriots this year. Weird. I'm almost wondering if playing in what is otherwise the worst division in football is hurting the Patriots; they do have at least 6 winnable games every season. Science of the Moment We sometimes find when we get up in the morning, by a rise of an inch in the barometer, that nearly half a ton has been quietly piled upon us during the night, but we experience no inconvenience, rather a feeling of exhilaration and buoyancy, since it requires a little less exertion to move our bodies in the denser medium. --Wyville Thomson, quoted in the Bryson book. (Tomorrow will mark my last day of quoting from it, along with some commentary.) Video of the Moment --Bill the Splut posted some Raymond Scott stuff, but I gotta admit I enjoy the full-Orchestra version of "Powerhouse" more than Raymond Scott's smaller quintent. |
| last of the scheinfeldt brothers |
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So yesterday I attended the funeral of Joe Scheinfeldt, last of the Scheinfeldt brothers, 4 great and funny guys, including my grandfather Papa Sam.
Anecdotes about the brothers include them swimming across the Charles naked, clothes in a bundle above the water (they were all good swimmers... actually all of them except Papa Sam served in the navy for decades), getting dresse, then sneaking into a Sox game. The legend doesn't explain if the swimming helped them sneak in somehow, or if it was just for the hell of it. The graveside service was Navy, and included some moving touches, the flag-draped coffin, a rifle salute, taps, and the presentation of the flag to Joe's widow. Comment of the Moment "Good God. Wait until somebody leaves a Speak and Spell lying around. They'll probably send in a hostage team to negotiate with it." -- Crooks and Liars on the lite-brite bomb hoax, via Bill the Splut. |
| mind-controlled zombies |
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Thanks for all the feedback and support yesterday.
I've been thinking more about when in my life I lost this baseline optimism of "chances are things will work out alright." Googling my own site for a reference I realized I a long but fairly cohesive ramble about this last April, and much of what I would have said now I said then. Going solo as a consultant (but as a co-worker pointed out, I'm not totally alone; part of my hourly rate is access to my company as a resource through me) still makes me very edgey. It probably points to several character flaws in me: I'm very recognition/reward driven when you get right down to it, and petrified of being the guy "screwing things up". The unknowns, then, of consulting gigs, especially when I'm having to play catch up with some of the technologies, is nervewracking. And then there's those rings under my eyes...I've noticed that I seem more likely to have problems putting complex thoughts into speech lately, though I'm not sure if I'm just more aware of it now, or if it could be related to not getting enough sleep, or if it's, you know, rapidly degenerating mental facilities, probably from whatever carpet shampoo they use in my new office or something. But the sleep thing is a real possibility: my anxieties have produced some very elaborate...not quite nightmares, but strange, technology-themed haunting patterns. I realize that my subconscious brain has invented a whole new computer scripting language syntax, and so I get the fun of half of my half-awake brain fretting how it has to accept that it doesn't get what the other half is generating, because it's labeled the new stuff as the technology for work. And another time I think my brain mapped the layout of comforters on my bed into an intractable programming issue. It's that kind of stuff that makes me wonder if I should look for some kind of medication... I dislike the idea, and am nervous about addiction, but being somewhat sleepless over stuff like this can't be useful to me. Technology of the Moment Speaking of being alone, my company's development crew tend to use AOL Instant Messenger. The trouble is many companies we travel to block it on their network. So I have high hopes for meebo flying under the radar for some time -- it's a web-based UI to AIM, MSN, Gtalk/Jabber, and Yahoo. Being able to reach out to my co-workers back at the ranch is mightily reassuring, even though I don't want to be too dependent on it. Link of the Moment
Quote of the Moment "The real problem with having mind-controlled zombies as my servants is that it's tough to get up a really sincere-sounding round of cheers when I've come up with a plan I think is worth cheering." --Maximus, X-Factor |
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| atlas shrugged. and scratched himself |
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Question of the Moment So I had a thought yesterday...just what was Atlas standing on when he was holding up the world? Google to the answer! Maybe it's the classic on the back of a turtle...and it's turtles all the way down! But I didn't remember much about turtles in my hazy memories of greek mythology. According to Godchecker's Atlas entry, I guess he's atually holding up the heavens, which makes a little more sense given a geocentric world view...but it would be harder to make into a nifty statue, so the world it is. So the answer was a little prosaic, but at least I found Godchecker, a very readable if somewhat flippant reference on all sort s of deities. |
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february / is so very hard to spell / so be wary |
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Tools of the Moment Michal Kowalski has put some useful freeware programs on the web. Probably few of you will find his 6502 Macroassembler & Simulator as useful as I did (a way of practicing the math programing I had to get the Atari 2600 to do) but his Exif Image Viewer is a simple tool that can autorotate the JPEGs that my camera notated as being taken with camera held sideways. (Other software can do this of course, but my other options seemed to be either the bloatware that came with the camera, or a downloader that used to be free but now wanted $20-$30 for functionality that is now 75% included with Windows and 25% in Kowalski's program...) He also has a font viewer for Windows, and some other programs for BeOS and the Atari ST. Quote of the Moment "'Faith' in the language of heaven is 'Love' in the language of men." --Victor Hugo Link of the Moment Tips on searching with Google. Starts with the very basics but works it way up to some complex-ish strategies. Gamer Link of the Moment I continue to be a sucker for videogame "Top 10" lists and Top Ten Real-Time Strategy Games of All Time is no exception. I think I've only played Starcraft, but I find the genre (commanding large armies in real time) conceptually interesting, especially games that have you leading hoardes and hoardes of warriors. Misunderstood Joke of the Moment It's dawning on me that for years I got the "wrong" mental image from that old one liner "he's so fat, when he sits around the house, he sits around the house". I always pictured some enormously fat person, so enormous that they could sit over the house, engulfing it completely. (Yeah, what can I say, I had a graphic imagination.) Only now do I see that the joke probably means just around, only big enough to cover varying locations inside the house. |
| hopefully not quite the final frontier |
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Link of the Moment This 1980 look at the Space Shuttle points to it as an expensive and dangerous boondoggle. It's foresightful in some ways and shortsighted in others. 
If you haven't heard about it, there is some interesting work going on in the private sector on reusable space launch components...one of the coolest is the Roton Rotary Rocket, which actually has a helicopter like rotor at the top. It's an ingenous approach which helps the craft gain speed at liftoff while consuming much less fuel (and being more efficient has a nice virtuous circle effect: the less fuel you need for liftoff, the less fuel mass you have to carry. The less fuel mass you have to carry, the less fuel you need...) as well as helping to slow the craft as it re-enters the atmosphere.You know, for someone who was complaining about all the Shuttle coverage, I sure am talking about it an awful lot. Phrase of the Moment "Come, shall I stroke your 'whatever', darling? I am so randy..." "So am I, darling. Whatever your stroke, I shall come." --from that book of euphemisms...it's a palindrome sentence (you can read it backwards, word by word, and get the same result) that's been stuck in my head for a bit. At first it didn't seem that impressive, but now the form seems cooler than regular palindromes...this one depends on how "stroke" and "whatever" can be completely different grammatical types depending on the context. |
| the silence of the rams |
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Alright! My 14-point-underdog hometown team kicked some superbutt. GO PATS! It's
really cool; even as they were coming on to the field, the starters weren't
individually announced; it was just The Team. That's style. They dominated the first half, held a "line in the sand" against a powerful Rams offence that tied it up, and got a terrific final drive in to end with a winning field goal in the final 7 seconds. It was one of the best games ever to watch with some friends and chips and beer. And salty pork...mmmm. Actually, we set up two
TVs, one for some video gamin', the other for the game, but it was more football than otherwise.
(Incidentally, today's title shamelessly ripped off of Fox News.)
I like the "new" Pats logo, up there to the left, though I understand why some have called it the Flying Elvis. The classic logo below was a pretty mean lookin' fellah. 
Quote of the Moment "If I knew the meaning of life, would I be sitting in a cave in my underpants?" --Wise Old Man in Mountain Top Cave from a New Yorker cartoon. |
| keyboards |
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Keyboard Fun Just got one of those Microsoft split keyboards for home, like I have at work. Except all they have are the 'pro' model, with USB connectors, and a row of special shortcut buttons at the top. I'm not sure what I think of those. Except for volume +/-, they're pretty much all things I don't really need or have my fingers trained for already, in terms of using the existing keyboard shortcuts. (Of course, I used to think 'damn windows key. I can just use ctrl-escape!') Actually, it is kind of annoying how small the spacebar is becoming these days. That shortcut key on the right side for the context menu is well night useless, generally I have to click on the thing anyway.
Actually, I really wish I could have an ergonomic keyboard without the stupid numberpad. It's just a space hogging unused piece of electrocrap.
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It's also funny that they've started labeling common keyboard shortcuts, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-N, etc., with captions. It feels like I'm back on my Commodore 64 with all the graphical shortcuts. Even odder is that the symbol they decided to use for Ctrl, a circle with 3 lines cutting through it, looks a lot like the Netscape ship steering wheel as it appears on the taskbar.