Brews you can use

After putting it off for way too long, I finally started biking to work last Tuesday. I’ve car commuted twice since then, to give my legs a break, but I think bike’s the definite preferred commute. The bike commute keeps me awake and my mind engaged, so I just feel more energetic and alert throughout the day. It’s a nice natural high, and I can feel the beginnings of an addiction — I’ve noticed myself getting uncharacteristically cranky when I’d rather be biking.

I still have a bit of learning to do until I really know how to ride a bike, though. I remember it being much simpler as a kid — “pedal this way really fast, if something gets in your way, turn “. Part of that could have been simpler equipment. My first bike was single-speed cruiser, and by the time I moved in to a ten-speed, I didn’t really see the need to shift.

The ride this time around is a decent used Raleigh mountain bike with nice fat (and heavy) tubes and more gears than I know what to do with — 24 nominally, including the way-too-useful-for-me “Granny gear”. I chose it because (a) I liked the sturdy feel of the cruiser I outgrew long, long ago, and (b) I’m nearly 300 pounds, so part of me thinks I would crush a nice sleek (and light) road bike. I could use the exercise, anyway.

No pictures yet, but think:

but only one of me, and not as well-dressed.

I still haven’t gotten the hang of pedaling smoothly, or found a good cadence. One experienced biker at work suggested 90 rpm as a good spinning speed, and I started trying to find that. 90rpm = 3 revs every 2 seconds, or 3 pushes of the pedal every 2 seconds…. Think 3 beats per measure. Accent the first beat, and you’ve got a nice brisk Walz. “Tales from the Vienna woods” would be a good target. Currently, I seem to be dialing in at more “Blue Danube” speed when I can actually maintain a cadence. The usual mode, though is more like “Hall of the Mountain King” followed by panting and coasting.

Well, at least it gets me there…

I was just getting the urge to blog about various trivialities today, and things got all weird. Everyone I know (out to two degrees, so far) is OK and accounted for, with a few close calls. So far, at least, it’s turning out to be not as bad as it could have been.

The kids were probably feeding on some of the anxiety, and acting unruly. We took a walk to calm down a bit. There were thunderstorms approaching, causing air traffic to be re-routed over our neighborhood. The news choppers were constantly commuting to and from the scene of the disaster. Quite eerie.

Grace almost gets what’s going on. She’s just learning to ride a bike, and seems to have integrated this into her fears from a close call on the bike…. While walking home, she told me she didn’t want to ride her bike across a bridge, because it would break it and it would collapse. I tried to reassure her that very smart people design bridges to stay up, and it works most of the time. That appears to have worked — she suggested going over a “bridge that they haven’t built yet and we haven’t been over before” tomorrow.

What would I do without kids? The absurdities I can come up with pale in comparison.

I work pretty close to the bridge. I’m debating swinging by the area to see it for myself. It still doesn’t seem real…

Well, laptop #3 has bitten the dust. It at least had an entertaining (and well-traveled) life, if a somewhat mundane end. I’d had this one since early 2005; it was a nice little find — 12″ screen, weighed less than 2 pounds. While it was still under warranty, I had to send it back to the manufacturer (in Taiwan) twice for screen replacements. On the second trip, the case was pretty nastily damaged, but still held together through several trips, being thrown to the floor by a toddler, and several adventures.

Until today. I opened the laptop and heard a sickening crack as one of the screen hinges didn’t move, and instead split the base of the screen about halfway across. Crap. Laptops aren’t exactly useful if you can’t open them…

I’d said several times that, after 6 years of running and tinkering with FreeBSD on whatever Intel laptop I could get cheap, that my next laptop will be a mac. Jess is doing some triumphal “he’s been assimilated” blogging at the moment. I’m still getting used to the new macbook

So far, so good. Here’s hoping <raises virtual drink> I can keep from destroying this one.

(And I’m not ruling out FreeBSD under parallels quite yet )

I took a look out the west window of our house this evening, and saw an uncommonly astronomical sight for a city where lights in the sky are usually taking off or landing. It was the crescent moon with Venus nearby. Beautiful. This iconic image which has inspired generations of painters and, later, photographers sucked me in for quite a while. It wasn’t quite “guy sees crescent moon and Venus, and converts to Islam” — I’m not a joiner — but the cosmos intruding so nicely on an otherwise normal day was almost a mystical experience.

Aside from the obvious religious significance, it reminded me of “the morning star is the evening star”, and many idle conversations in the philosophy of language with a philosophy major friend from college, and the many trivialities too trivial to be trivia I carry about in my head for some reason.

As an example, I was in Boise last week meeting with “the adversary” (the fellow who decided to outsource my favorite job; the trip was for me helping this thoroughly depressing process along…) and about three drinks in at the local distillery-pub (!), the conversation turned to food and drink. I got a surprised look when I described Everclear using the word “azeotrope” — it turns out he was a chemical engineering major, and never expected to hear that word post-college…

On a lark, I asked if anyone at the table was familiar with transfinite cardinals (or countable vs. uncountable inifinity), and struck out. The first question was “what’s the practical use?” Obviously from a non-math type. The closest that has to a practical use is understanding the premise of the novel White Light Frankly, I don’t even remember the full implications; I’ve forgotten more math than I thought I’d ever learn….

Bah, Point? See subject…

So, I work on a presentation off and on for a few weeks. It’s to a bunch of engineers I don’t know, trying to introduce them to e-mail concepts, internals, basically “how it works” stuff. Second nature to me. I’m a bad public speaker, so that’s a bad sign.

Worse, I’m phoning it in. Everyone listening (and the guy shuffling the slides ’cause I couldn’t get netmeeting to work in time…) is also on the phone. Only I’m off mute. No natural human interaction or feedback.

It’s supposed to be an introduction. I get into micromachine man mode, and blow through the material, in a 45-minute uninterrupted ramble.

But the worst came when I was talking about spam.

(NSFWWCFFW — [not safe for work web content filtering firewalls] stuff behind cut….)
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So, the wee little toy is working out wonderfully. I do all of my web surfing on it, and some typing too, occasionally. Xterm + dropbear ssh means I can do “real work”, a character at a time. I still reach for the laptop when I need a real keyboard, but the pocket size, day+ battery life, and absolute silence of the tablet mean I reach for it most of the time. It’s truly wireless.

Jess calls it my girlfriend.

I finally got around to installing gnugo and Cgoban on it yesterday, and now it’s getting much more use.

I’ve found the game of go fascinating since sometime in college. The rules and objectives of the basic game are simple, but these simple rules generate a wonderfully intricate game. Actual analysis of a full go game is intractable enough that even the best players rely on instinct and attitude for their decisions, and computer go programs have not advanced as far at professional play as their chess counterparts.

The go board is large enough to have multiple, mostly unrelated “battles” going on in different parts. Turns must be allocated to the different battles, and battles need to be prioritized so that you only burn turns on the ones that may come out in your favor. There’s always a conflict between spreading out to occupy more of the board or concentrating in one area to defend it more thoroughly. It’s a game of balance, where both players need to be spread very thin to have a chance of winning.

Sounds a bit … familiar. It’s wildly fun when it’s just stones on a board, though.

So, at a little before 10:00 this morning, I set about finishing up some documenting. Mind-numbing stuff overall, just recapitulating some of the 1.3.6.1.4.1.666.make.this.stop stuff I’ve been messing with off and on for a month… I needed something else to do, so I started up go on the toy, with no time limits. If I needed a break from documentation, I’d check the toy, ponder a bit, and make a move. The CPU on the Nokia 770 is no speed demon, so gnugo takes most of a minute, if not more, to make its next move. That was enough to keep me from getting distracted by the game. Perfect.

One of these days, I’ll need to play a human. I did a bit of that via NNGS (No Name Go Server) back in the day. That showed me how much of a novice I was (and probably still am). I actually got completely wiped off the board once or twice. At least when I’m pounded into the ground by a computer, I don’t get embarrassed; I think that’s what I get paid for, actually.

And now, a day bad enough to post about. There have been worse, mind you, but today was in a little basin of suckiness attraction where it’s bad enough to mention, but not bad enough to completely exhaust me and shut me up.

At work, I took refuge in writing documentation. ’nuff said.

After work, unruly kids. One spoiled by a day with Grandma, the other is two. A big, steaming, pile of two. Jess’s livejournal friends may hear more details, I’m shutting up now.

What finally worked was…

• 1 cube of sugar, soaked with Peychaud’s Bitters.
• Splash of water to dissolve.
• Tiny, tiny dash of Absinthe (Absente pastis)
• Twist of lemon.
• Two jiggers of rye whiskey

Dissolve sugar, bitters, water, whiskey in shaker glass, stirring well with ice. Coat the inside of the cocktail glass with Absinthe-ish stuff, and follow by rubbing it down with some lemon peel. Strain rest of stuff into glass.

It’s a classic New Orleans cocktail called the Sazerac, a modern variant of one of the oldest known cocktails. Enjoy a bit of history. Share it with the kids. Perfect for settling the nerves after (almost) defenestrating the wee ones.

I just got a new toy.

It’s a slightly-used Nokia 770 off of eBay; pretty cool so far, although the hunt-and-peck “virtual keyboard” is getting a bit old, aud I 7con t truined hl handwvitil eng’nl yxt, so this will be a short first post

Same code and same input, down to the bit, only works on one machine. Reliably fails on all others. Reliably works on the working one. Same OS and system libraries, also down to the last bit.

I have to conclude that God hates me. Only the sick bastard who designed the tapeworm would be capable of such a finely-tuned annoyance.

The problem is no longer merely taunting me, it’s violating causality. Wait, does that mean it is no longer of this universe, so I don’t need to worry about it?

So, I’ve been banging my head up against cantankerous computers far more often at work. It’s been refreshing. Computer problems are so much nicer than the political wrangling, because if a computer’s being uncooperative, you have the option of kicking it in the head. Better still, the technical snags often have solutions, even if only theoretical. I’ve long since given up on the feasibility of large organizations.

(Not that the technical stuff is pleasant in absolute terms; I just found myself thinking “of course 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.7 means ‘true or false’, I should have known that by now, makes perfect sense.” Stupid over-engineered protocols. And I once thought IMAP was bad…)

I roughly categorize the “engineers” at work by their output; some write code, others configs, there’s word and powerpoint (I lump those together, since they seem to come in pairs), and finally excel. I like to stay as close to the code/config boundary as possible, but have been on the word-ppt/excel boundary for many frustrating months.

Part of me enjoyed getting back to the technical problems enough to give me a bit of a scare. Once I latched on to a stubborn technical puzzle, I couldn’t let go. I was obsessed with getting it solved. It was personal; the problem wasn’t just “not being solved”, it was taunting me, and IT MUST PAY!

At about the time when the urge to put on warpaint and crawl into the #*!ng computer after the #!@*!ng insolent problem, I’d take a bathroom break, go get some water, and calm down a little bit.

The breaks didn’t cutting it for more than an hour or two, so to prevent any awkwardness or HR incidents, I started writing a powerpoint presentation. With an animated slide, natch. That did the trick. I feel much, much calmer now…