Saturday
- a busy day, as Saturday's and Sunday's have become.
I
needed to smog the Explorer, so first I had the oil changed. Then,
since the 'Young Marines' had a car wash next to the oil change place,
I had that done. Then drove over to the smog check. Whereupon I
discovered that it was the Probe that needed smogging. June, you know, same as the last 18 years. Arrgghhh. Fortunately I'd changed the oil and had a tune up about 800 miles ago in that
car, so I just brought it in and it passed. I haven't looked at the
numbers, but it passed. So then I went by and had the ;Young Marines;
wash it, then stopped by my cat sitter and paid her for her time, and
thanked her for taking the Explorer to the mechanic.
Then I went home, went online, registered and paid for the pleasure, turned on the Dodgers station - and passed out.
When
I awoke it was 5-ish. I was going to visit some friends and quickly
finished putting together a Ubuntu Hardy Heron system - after annoying
troubles with CD drives and the built in video on the old D815 mobo,
and collected up a bunch of books on PVM, MPI, and Cluster Computing in
general.
Went up the hill to Tehachapi, where the GPS did a
pretty good job of navigating, had dinner, talked computers and
clusters briefly, then headed home. In bed by midnight.
Friday
- not much to say. Another day of work done, and back to Lancaster. I'd
stay and work on the boat, but the key to it, and the dock, are in my
other car. Plus I should smog the Explorer, now that the O2 sensor has
been replaced.
I was talking to a good friend, with whom I used to work. She's been
offered a job doing computational aerodynamics on a high performance
Linux computing cluster, and called me about it. We talked a bit, and
will probably try to get together this weekend, family and friends
permitting. She's used UNIX before, specifically AIX on the RS/6000,
but is a bit hesitant about the Linux thing. I may just gen up a system
out of spare parts laying about the house, put Ubuntu Hardy Heron on
it, and let her get comfortable with it.
It's the return of Cat Blogging for Friday:
In the channel. There are a lot of birds and lizards present, and therefore a lot of cats.
Thursday 29 May 2008
Thursday
- another day. Beautiful, warm weather. And me wearing a long sleeved denim shirt. Oh well.
Sitting here I've just lost network connectivity to the wireless router
downstairs. There is some sort of conflict between the Verizon EVDO
card and the 802.111B/G network software I think. After it starts this
stuff I pretty much have to reboot the laptop to get back on with
either option. Annoying, but at least I expected it - I think there was
some talk about it on the EVDO forums somewhere.
Time for dinner, I'll shutdown and upload later :-)
Went over to a friends for a nice baked chicken, boiled apples, and
turnip dinner. It actually tasted great. I had seconds on the turnips.
Go figure.
Wednesday 28 May 2008
Wednesday
- each morning I am awakened by pigeons (doves?) sitting on the
telephone wires outside my bedroom. Here is a pic, but there are often
a lot more than pictured here:
Birds on a wire
Not a lot to say otherwise. Worked hard, had dinner, talked with a
friend and watched the end of 'Independence Day' on teevee. We agreed
that the President should have used more than one nuke on the alien
ship over Houston - more like ten nukes, and then kept them coming until the alien shield was penetrated or we ran out of nukes.
They didn't do that, but at least, later in the show, after the virus
disabled the shields, they should have had more nukes, ready to go,
ready to whack the shieldless ships. What are the odds that earth
pilots would always be able to get to the 'primary weapon' with
conventional warheads? Not good. Those are spaceships, after all. If
they just rose vertically to, say, 20 miles altitude they'd be
completely above any fighters flight ceiling. We, on the other hand,
would still be in range of their primary weapon. It would only take one remaining ship to ruin everybodys day!
Perhaps I overthink these things.
Tuesday 27_May 2008
Tuesday
- up at four a.m., and back to work in Ventura.
Jerry Pournelle also links to the Freeman Dyson's global warming book reviews, those that I'd mentioned on Sunday, and adds a few thoughts of his own.
I'm not sure that we couldn't build electrical grid interties from
one side of the world to the other, and from one hemisphere to another,
but it'd be a big big project.
Went out for lunch with my brother. We just didn't feeling like braving
the holiday traffic, so we didn't go down to San Diego. Too blustery to
do any hiking.
Not much else going on. Did some bills, laundry, cleaning. Policed the
carpet for cricket corpses. Napped some more. Moved all the inspection
gear out of the Explorer and into the Probe. A friend will take the
Explorer over to Scott, the Wizard of Newberry St., tomorrow.
Sunday_25_May 2008
Sunday
- well, the Phoenix Lander landed OK. Good for NASA and
everybody on the team!
Still tired, didn't do much. Watched some teevee, read the library book
checked out yesterday, went out for a beer in the evening with someone
from my old workplace. Does not sound like much has changed there.
Book #21 was
Crystal
Rain, by Tobias Bucknell. Eh. Jamaican science fiction? Maybe
it's a fad, 'culture' science fiction. Earlier this year it was
Australian oriented, in The
Outback Stars. But, to be honest, I was looking for some
straight ahead, mindless, escape reading, and that's what it was, so I shouldn't complain.
Freeman Dyson has written a review of some books on Global Warming, The Question of
Global Warming. He doesn't really come down on either side of
the argument, though I suspect he's a skeptic. But the review is highly
intelligent and well written.
My thoughts on the 'precautionary principle': An ounce of precaution prevents a pound of progress.
