Personal

The past week has been a series of ups and downs, culminating in the saga for the last half of the week. My car. My Celica. The first new car I ever owned started making a noise on Wednesday. The noise was due to extremely low engine oil (hypothetical question - what’s the point of an oil pressure light if it doesn’t come on until after the car is making noise?). The good folks at Jiffy Lube wouldn’t actually work on the car, but were kind enough to fill up the oil and suggested that I take it to an automotive shop immediately. I called up Wasp Automotive and made an appointment for the next day. I had heard a lot of good things about Wasp and even had that confirmed after I made the appointment. ...

So, I’ve been in my apartment for an entire two weeks now. Sadly, it’s been a bit sparse. There’s a bedroom set, a recliner sitting in front of a television which is resting on my stereo. But fortunately, that should all start changing. Yesterday I placed a fairly large furniture order. For the first time in my life, I’m going to have new furniture! Not a hand me down, nothing 20 (30?) years old, but honest to god new furniture. ...

Last Friday, hsarik pointed out an interesting web site: Echo Nest. They provide a web service that allows you to analyze and remix music. The API also can provide information (meta-data) about music, artists, songs etc. and has Python bindings. If you’ve seen the “More Cowbell” website where you can upload an mp3 and have more cowbell (and more Christopher Walken) added to it, well that site uses Echo Nest and if you download the python bindings for their API, you can see the script that adds the sounds. Personally, I’m fond of “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da” with 80% cowbell and 20% Christopher Walken. ...

K’s out of town this week. IIRC, this is the first week since we’ve been married that she’s out of town and I’m still at the house. I figure that’s gotta give me a good sense of what I’m actually like without her, um, civilizing influences. Helpfully summarized in the table below: Behavior****ChangeTelevision watchingdecreasedComputer useincreasedWork while at homeincreasedBowling averagesway upMini-golf scoresway downAlcohol consumptionslightly increasedNews consumptiongreatly decreasedFood varietydecreasedFood qualityno changeFood healthinessno changeTime spent preparing food ...

42 ° and sunny, perfect for turning: 10273 into: 10270 into: 10276 and then: 10267

Okay, I wasn’t really dead, I had the flu, but I was wishing that I was dead for a while there. Five days is too long for a massive headache and very high fever. I’m finally recovering and doing some self-imposed quarantine after getting on Tamaflu Monday. Tuesday afternoon was somewhat interesting. My doctor’s office had given me a little trick - you can take full doses of acetaminophen and full doses of ibuprofen. They’ll both contribute to lowering fever and reducing pain, but their side effects are different and you don’t risk ulcers or your liver as if you had doubled up on one. ...

One of our dogs, Darwin, likes sleeping on the floor. He’ll occasionally sleep on the couch or on his dog bed, but then he gets too hot and moves to the floor. The other dog, Sierra (named after either the Sierra Nevada Mountains as beautifully described by John Muir or the brewery named after the same mountains, depending on whom you ask), doesn’t get so hot and prefers sleeping on pillows or couches… my spot in the bed if I’m not currently occupying it, etc. One of her sleeping spots is on an old pillow in the bedroom. But apparently, it’s not always that comfortable. When we went to bed last night, this was the scene that greeted us. ...

For a guy who uses computers as much as I do, you would think that I would have better machines at home. But really, no. Our last desktop was eight years old before we replaced it. My laptop was an old Thinkpad X31 - maybe six or seven years old. So, for a combination birthday/Christmas present, I got a new (sort of) laptop. I picked up a refurbished thinkpad X200s from the Lenovo outlet. So far it’s a nice machine: good processor, lots of high speed memory, and a big LED backlit screen. Lenovo sent me notice that they were shipping the laptop today and the next thing I knew, it arrived at the office. The advantages of working 5 miles from the outlet. The only problem is that they didn’t ship all of the parts. I’ve contacted them and they’ll send the dock/dvd. ...

With apologies to Terry Prachett, I feel like I being dragged (dragging myself?) into the Century of the Fruitbat. As I mentioned a long time ago, I don’t care for Facebook. I prefer my blog. That said, many of my friends and most of my family use Facebook. So I’m going to start a bit of an experiment. I’ve downloaded and installed the Wordbook plugin for my blog software (wordpress). Starting with this post, in theory anything that’s published on the blog gets cross-posted to fb. ...

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers; A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked; If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, Where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked? When I planted the garden, I put in a couple of banana pepper plants. I seem to recall that my thinking was along the lines of, “I’ve got a great idea, I’ll plant some banana peppers - I love ’em.” Great in abstract, but I don’t actually have any recipes that call for banana peppers. I only seem to eat them pickled. ...