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Saturday 26 October 2002

Saturday - the flu. I was feeling poorly the last couple of days, but hoped it wouldn't be that... I don't seem to have the really severe form, just a bit feverish and tired. Maybe it'll be a 24 hour version :-)

Friday 25 October 2002

Friday - therapy, followed by a trip to the dentist, then work. Some days are like that.

It turns out that my coworker found a disk partitioning tool on the internet that was able to fix the 80Gb drive, and after that Win2k installed in a flash.

Working on some modal interpolation a coworker and I realized that we also needed to interpolate phase along with magnitude for some elaborate calculations we are doing. It's always something.

My brother called to invite me over for a sneak preview of the air show. The planes start arriving the day before, and the booths are being set up, and base personnel can walk around and view the stuff without the crowds. It's a nice perk, so we went and looked at the planes. These included the F-22 and the A-35, as well as NASA's B-52b, 008, and all sorts of warbirds and currently operational planes. I took a few photo's that I'll try to post some time.

Afterwards we went out for dinner at Vinces, then I went home and crashed.

Thursday 24 October 2002

Thursday - discovered that the limits for allocatable arrays using the AIX fortran compiler are much smaller than those on the Digital Visual Fortran. The standard specifies how to set up and use language features, but not the size limits of such. Oh well.
Dinner was at the Texas Cattle Company.

Wednesday 23 October 2002

Wednesday - most of the baseball people at the hand therapist are Angels fans. No surprise there I guess, this is southern California after all. The fans ferocity is remarkable - when I brought up my opinion of Bond's status some people just lost it. Explainable if team sports are in fact a displacement activity for war. The Giants won again tonight, so they'll be even more unhappy.

Q: How do you tell a folk banjo from a bluegrass banjo?
A: The folk guitar burns hotter, but the bluegrass banjo burns longer.

Working off site. I had planned to work on the restart option problem, but ended up trying to get a brand new 2.8GHz machine going. We worked all day on it, without luck. The 80GB disk partition table was messed up, and each time we rebooted it would give a different, erroneous, size. Once it told us that there were 456,789GB available of disk 0's 79,823GB. We tried Win2k, WinNT, WinMe, Linux, and Dos partition tools. No luck.

After work I went with some friends to see the Cirque de Eloise at the LPAC. Sort of a european acrobat/clowns/vaudeville thing. Very different, a lot of fun.

Tuesday 22 October 2002

Tuesday - wrestling the some CFD code problems. Restart was working, now it isn't. Is it a code problem or possibly a compiler version conflict? Hmmmm.

If you could record sound and video of every moment of your life, cheaply, easily, would you? Will personal memories go the way of the ability to memorize epics saga's, or do long division? Will privacy become 'virtual', the way it was in Japanese paper houses?

The Giants lost again. Bonds homered twice though. I think we are seeing something incredible going on there - someone who like Mays or Ruth stands head and shoulder above the crowd. It won't last, it can't, but we can enjoy seeing something extraordinary while it happens.

Monday 21 October 2002

Monday - back to work. Wrestling with various problems.

For some reason we were making jokes about banjo players in therapy. I started it I'm afraid. Gary, the boss there, plays banjo....

Q: What do you call a banjo player without a girlfriend?
A: Homeless.

Q: What do you do when a banjo player shows up on your doorstep?
A: Pay him for the pizza.

Q: What do you call someone who likes to hang around musicians?
A: A banjo player.

In Kingbury's book, there was a critical plot element, a persons 'familiar', a computer that has been with them since they were a child, that contains many of a persons memories and skills, and that can communicate directly with the brain via some sort of radio frequency effect. If people had those in Virginia now, they could replay the scenes around the sniper shootings, and identify the shooter. In fact, it needn't be even that elaborate: David Brin had in his novel Earth the concept of omnipresent video surveillance - when gigabytes and terabytes of storage are available, and digital cameras are as cheap as a disposable lighter, small as a pinhead, there will be a lot of footage available. I believe he had them built into sunglasses for example.You could call it the death of privacy or the transparent society - is that glass half empty or half full?

Maybe the trick to catching this shooter is to have all the cameras on the 7-11's and gas stations facing the street for a few days, rather than the customers. Of course, there'd be a rise in stop-n-robs and drive-offs ...

Sunday 20 October 2002 Sunday - a nice quiet day. Mostly a mix of football and baseball, with a little vacuuming and play watching thrown in for good measure.

Barry Bonds crushed the baseball in the World Series Game 2, even though the San Francisco Giants eventually lost to the Anaheim Angels. What a hitter! San Francisco's '49ers also lost, in overtime, to the New Orleans Saints, who are on a roll apparently.

In the mid afternoon I went out with some friends to see a production of "The Grapes of Wrath ". They had a family member in the cast, and it was an interesting production. It managed to squeeze a lot of the book in , and was a lot of fun to watch.

Cast of "The Grapes of Wrath " at LPAC

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: This is the afterglow from a minuteman missile launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base last week. It was an apparently successful ABM interceptor launch.

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