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Sunday 21 July 2002

Sunday. I feel much better. Whatever was wrong seems to have...um...finished. I did some laundry, vacuumed, went and completed some shopping. It's hot though. Visited the Vietnam War Memorial , here in town as The Moving Wall.

My sister's new kitten, Roxy.

Monday 22 July 2002

Monday - work went well enough. We are about ready to start a long analysis and have been checking to see that we are working the right parameters. When a job takes days/weeks to run, you really want to get it right the first time! On that note I really need to get to work on PVM and stuff that can speed things up. Intel is also supposed to have a 3Ghz P4 chip out by the Christmas, almost double the speed of my current workstation.

I see Ridge/Bush have essentially proposed federal/military police forces. It's incredible, but there are actually people in Congress willing to go along with it. They are already getting around the century old Posse Comitatus Act by stationing federal troops at the border (unarmed - and what's the point to that?), but now they want even more power. Scary stuff.

There was an interesting KCET special last night on The Battle between the Hood and the Bismarck . It claims that the Hood's sinking was due to a well known deficiency in it's rearward armor, and that the Hood was in the process of making a turn to port to minimize the exposure of this area when the Bismarck's shell hit the powder magazine. This, it is suggested, sent a blast wave through the ship setting off the forward magazine as well - about two hundred tons of explosive altogether. The would explain the fact that the ship sank so quickly, and was found in three pieces, and that there were no survivors from the ships interior spaces.

Tuesday 23 July 2002

Tuesday - a long day. I tried to put in a few extra hours to make up for lost time the rest of the week. Not much to say, really.

A co-worker and I had an interesting problem where the sine of 0.0 degrees was coming up as zero, but the sine of 360.0 was coming up as around 0.5e-6! This is compiler/machine precision thing. We 'fixed' it by doing the calculation in double precision, and then assigning the double precision result to a single precision number, which resulted in a nice clean zero. Yes, we could have put in 'if' statements and such, but what about cosine and tangent functions, and other angles? We might end up with a page of checks...

Wednesday 24 July 2002

Wednesday - another long day. I need a vacation.

There was a chance of thunderstorms today, but we had none. Which reminds me of a joke:

One summer evening during a violent thunderstorm a mother was tucking her small boy into bed. She was about to turn off the light when he asked with a tremor in his voice, "Mommy, will you sleep with me tonight?" His mother smiled and gave him a reassuring hug. "I can't dear," she said. "I have to sleep in daddy's room." A long silence was broken at last by his little voice. "The big sissy."

Thursday 25 July 2002

Thursday. Busy. Dinner was at "Gino's". It was OK - I just had the spaghetti, and took most of it home as I wasn't particularly hungry. At one time the same family owned Gino's, Barrone's, and another restaurant whose name I can't recall. They eventually sold them all off. I prefer Barrone's because of the atmosphere - red and white checkered tablecloths, candle's stuck in wine bottles, waiters and waitresses in black and white. And the food might be a touch better.

My friend's house remodeling effort is showing fruit. The inspector has signed off on a lot of stuff, so the sheetrock and insulation is in, the walls textured and painted, the hardwood floors sanded, and the older concrete floors being refinished as we speak. It's going to be grand! She had the vision to see in a decrepit dump what no-one else could - it's a rare gift.

Friday 26 July 2002

Friday - another long day. Spent quite a bit of time on the phone with the health insurance people. I am really getting the short end of the stick, but it's partially my own fault that I didn't check and inquire about things enough. Just because your doctor is in-plan doesn't mean his therapy center is... Ouch.

Went to the "Fairy Tale Theater" at the local playhouse, to watch a friends daughter act. It was a lot of fun as the aspiring young actors worked their way through various fairy tales. It was the dress rehearsal so camera's were allowed. Tomorrow is the big day for them all! Then we had dinner and tried to watch a DVD. No luck there, the brand new DVD player wouldn't work. I seem to recall reading somewhere that certain brands of electronics have a 40% failure rate - in fact, a CD burner I bought only about two weeks ago has also failed. Both were off brands, and very inexpensive. Very cheap I should say, in the pejorative sense.

For those interested in naval history, here are a few pictures of the Bismarck/Hood fight. It's an interesting collection of stuff in general there. Lots of other ships.

Saturday 27 July 2002

Saturday - mowed the lawn, front and back. Mowed the neighbor's lawn as well - he's on vacation and I didn't want his house to look like a target. Changed the oil in the car, and got it washed. Took some stuff back to the library. Went to the movies, saw MIB II. It was OK - not as surprising and amusing as the first.

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: This is the Moving Wall, here in Lancaster. It's quite a sight to see the people come up to it, stare, reach out and touch it.

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