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Saturday 16 November 2002

Saturday - keeping busy. I had the oil changed in the car, went and bought some film and a new battery for my Dad's AE1 camera, a cable release, and shopping for some other minor items. In the afternoon it was mowing the lawn, weed whacking here and there, and assembling and using a new edger. It's electric, but after a couple of passes the lawn is starting to look better. I need to finish edging further along the far portions of the lawn, and the backyard, but I feel better about the place already.

Then, over to my friends' for some algebra tutoring, and a very nice dinner of potato soup and biscuits. Just what the doctor ordered. It brings to mind younger days, when for dinner my mother would make dozens of biscuits, from scratch. We would them all, my brothers and I! And as I recall, my father would steal them off my plate , if I glanced away for a moment, all warm and nicely buttered.

I fear that faith in my fellow man took a blow there, from which it has never really recovered...

Friday 15 November 2002

F riday - working on the PVM still. Making progress. The debug facilities/messages are rather terrible, but the basics are starting to work for me.

A professor I know is also building a cluster, out of cutting edge 2.4 Ghz boxes, not yet delivered. When I saw that Intel had announced 3.0Ghz boxes yesterday I had to email him about it... A definition of cutting edge might be: obsolete tomorrow.

A Scientist Joke
Heisenberg is driving down the autobahn. A police officer pulls him over.
The officer says, "Excuse me, sir, do you know how fast you were going?"
Heisenberg says, "No, but I know where I am."

Ooops. I was supposed to drop a couple of things off on the way home - better go do that. And pick up some ant poison - they are back.

Thursday 14 November 2002

Thursday - therapy and then work. Work was OK, I'm making progress on the parallel processing stuff, slowly. Dinner was at a chinese buffet place - I've forgotten the name. My god-daughter and current beau were supposed to come up from Hollywood, but got stuck in traffic and didn't make it until afterwards. Too bad - it's all you can eat and she was looking a bit peaked to me.

While up at my Dad's I tried Mozilla . I wanted to like it, I was prepared to like it, but...it's not quite ready for prime time, still. It's too bad. Crashed a lot. Didn't have a spell checker for Composer. Just presented blank pages a lot. Perhaps it's a Win98 thing and it runs better under Linux? I dunno. Netscape 6.2 crashes in Composer occasionally, just enough to keep me on my toes. I forget, write a couple of paragraphs, and whammo, Dr. Watson comes to call. The demo pages are pretty cool, at the mozilla web site, by the way.

Wednesday 13 November 2002

Wednesday - working on PVM at work. Also had someone ask me for information on doing tether simulations. Looking at my notes, I see I last worked on it in about 1997. Time flies. As I recall, however, the simulation code crawled. My workstation is almost 10x as fast now. But they want to add stiffness to the tether model, which will slow it down.

Hmmm. PVM for tethers?

The Leonid meteor shower is next Tuesday. Here on the left coast there is a second maxima predicted for just after midnight. This is probably the last good Leonids shower for thirty years or more. Not sure if I'm going to repeat last years effort and cruise far out into the desert (not in my truck), but the Red Rock Park might be a good site. My father loaned me his film camera, and I need to stop by the local photography shop, Kings, and see about a new battery, and what sort of film I'd want for a long exposure.

I wanted to call and wish my niece a happy birthday, but she's not well today. Happy Birthday Little Girl, see you in a couple of weeks!

Tuesday 12 November 2002

Tuesday - therapy and work.

Monday 11 November 2002

Monday - clear and sunny. I took the opportunity to re-asphalt around the roof vent jacks, because of a minor leak. Also mowed the lawn and swept up some leaves - but I think that the leaves are about to turn in Martinez, so there will be a lot more!

The drive back to Lancaster was uneventful - the cruise control fixed itself, as it has before, and that helped. Through Livermore the traffic slowed to 5mph or so. The freeway necks down over about four or five miles to a mere four lanes in the easterly direction - from about seven or eight, and I think that is the cause of the slowdown. Once past that it was just the usual road conditions. Got in about 10:15 pm.

The cats were in good health. I'm told that they ate almost all the food in the first day, and then vomited all over the house. My cat sitter cleaned up some of it, but the cats cleaned up the rest. Yuck!

Sunday 10 November 2002 Sunday - A rather blustery day sometimes, with a light rain being blown sideways by the wind. San Francisco beat Kansas City, but just barely. I think the San Francisco coach Mariucci 'choked' for some reason, and made some strange calls. Ah well, it's just a game, used by the media to sell beer and automobiles...

We also watched a tv special done by National Geographic on the raising of the Civil War ironclad Monitor. It was rather disappointing actually. Far too "touchy-feely" and far too little real information. There is a script now, that 'specials' use, where they give a little bit of history, a little bit of the actual salvage operation, and a surfeit of information on the people working on the salvage operation. Maybe that's what people want, but this show left some unanswered questions. For example, the ships' hull was on top of the turret, because the ship turned over when it sank, but then later in the show the turret is suddenly magically clear of the wreck. Did they lift the deck off of the turret with the ships crane, did they cut it off with torches, use explosives, what? Not a hint.

Immediately following that show was another on the raising of the C.S.S. Hunley. It just starts with the salvage ship anchored over the wreck. Not a word on how or who discovered the wreck after a century. Hint: it wasn't the Navy or some university, it was Clive Cussler, and he writes about it in his book The Sea Hunters .

Links of the Month: September and October
George Orwell's book: 1984
Astronaut, Scott Horowitz
A-7 Corsair , aircraft
LSRA project (shuttle tire testing)
'My Big Fat Greek Wedding
Isaac Asimovs Foundation series
Donald Kingsbury's Psychohistorical Crisis
Steve's Digicams , good digital camera reviews site
Olympus D370 , oldie but goodie
Olympus C-3040 , 3 megapixels, whoohoo!
Canon Eos-1D , awesome
Vandenburg launch here , successful ABM launch vapor trail
Monk the TV detective
Barry Bonds the baseball player
San Francisco Giants the baseball team
Anaheim Angels. the baseball team
"The Grapes of Wrath Steinbecks book
Dragons vs. Guided Missle Cruisers
Comparative Anatomy of Skeletons'
GVIM the editor
Lancaster Performing Arts Center cool shows in Lancaster
The Pipes and Drums of the Royal Scots Guards loud but fun.

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: This is the wreckage of an old side-wheeler ferry in the Sacramento River near Martinez. It burned a few years back, and I'm afraid I don't have any other information on it.

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