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Travels and Images
WEEK 48 2004
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Saturday 27
November
2004
Saturday - in the daylight, and with a
light that actually worked, my father and I were able to get the pipes
back together, with only a small seep.
These often seal themselves, particularly with plastic pipes and their
ability to slightly deform, so we are going to let it go for now
instead of cranking on the
pipe wrench and possibly stripping threads. A complete dishwasher cycle
leaks
about a teaspoon of water.
This is all directly
above my office and computer workstation downstairs. Naturally.
Note: I forgot
something. Something mean. Something I shouldn't write about - but
will. My brother, younger and more dexterous, crawled under the sink
and disconnected the wreckage. It was all grotty with about twenty
years worth of slime and grease. Once he had gotten everything
disconnected he crawled back out, stood up, and turned on the water to wash
his hands. The water into the sink whose drain he had just removed...
Replacing a sink trap, $5.59 and tax.
Watching your brother do something like that...priceless.
My brother and the gang headed back south. The little girl cried at
having to leave Peg, my fathers dog...
It seems that my sister K is
writing five novels simultaneously. Five.
She says she got the idea from Isaac Asimov. Five. Well, I can console
myself that she doesn't have
a blog.
Yet.
I see that the author of a book I enjoyed and mentioned here: The
Psychology of Sailing, Michael Stadler, is the editor of another
book: The
Handbook of Implicit Learning. Apparently this is on the subject of
why some things are easy to
learn. We've all struggled to learn a foreign language, or algebra, or
something of the sort, and spent hours memorizing things. Yet some
things seem to stick easily, to burn themselves into our brains. I've
wondered about this myself from time to time, not being blessed with a
particularly good memory. At $150 I am unlikely to go buy it, but it
might be interesting to see if its available via interlibrary loan.
Friday 26 November
2004
Friday - staying at my
brothers house I've been working, coding, in the mornings before
heading over to my fathers. His cat finds a comfortable place nearby
and watches as I code, compile, and run little test cases.
The old laptop - a PIII-266 - runs very slowly, but in coding that
isn't as important as it might be. There is a lot to think about and
research as I painstakingly try to re-create some functionality that I
worked on almost ten years ago. A lot of people have touched the codes
and it's an odd feeling trying to recreate my own train of thought from
the pasts cannibalized remnants. I tend to use a lot of comments and
whitespace to aid in legibility - most of the other coders didn't.
In the evening I played cards with the kids. First we played UNO, where
I lucked out and won a couple
of hands. Then we played GIN, in which I lost consistently. I then tried to cover by claiming at the end of the
game that I thought we were still going
for fewest points still. The kids thought this a hilarious
gambit, but, alas, didn't
believe it for a moment.
There was a bit of a disaster in the evening. The pipe and trap in the
kitchen failed - essentially the rust holding it together finally gave
out. My brother and I made a couple of trips to the local hardware
store but weren't entirely successful in getting it all back together.
Still, we have to give
thanks that it didn't happen on Thanksgiving!
My other brother called from Arcata. It was, of course, raining there...
Thursday 25
November 2004
Thursday
-the guys at NASA have put together a mosaic of images
of Saturn's moon, Cassini. To me it looks a lot like the ice shelfs
of Antarctica, though it may be floes of wax, not ice, though IANAPS (
I Am Not A Planetary Scientist).
Wednesday
24 November 2004
Wednesday - staying at my brothers. I was
in his computer room, checking email when his cat decided to climb his
miniblinds. Heh. It was funny to watch, but disastrous for the blinds...
The gamma ray detector, SWIFT, was successfully launched.
Tuesday 23
November
2004
Tuesday - via The Speculist, from 12
November, a link to ideas for performing the famous double slit
experiment over large distances in space. This is neat. I once
considered doing something like this with the lunar retroreflectors on
the moon. I have lot of ideas, few ever put into practice.
Monday
22 November 2004
Monday - home again. Rain in the early
morning.
Sunday 21 November
2004
Sunday - In San Diego. A wild night,
as a storm blew in from somewhere with thunder and lightning in the
early morning. Later, traveling back to Lancaster there was quite a bit
of snow on the I-15 and SR-138. I understand that the freeway was
actually closed for several hours later in the evening.
