As I mentioned a few weeks ago, a professor from my old department contacted me about some work. I went to the company, talked to them for a few hours and then later had lunch with the president of the company (whom I’ve known for a while). Last week we agreed that I would start as a part time consultant and see how it goes. Thursday and Friday we negotiated salary and tomorrow I’m heading over there. ...
Not a whole lot going on this weekend. A little shopping, a little work around the house, etc. Saturday, Bryn’s husband, Adam, came by and took a look at some trees that were worrying me. Having a master arborist tell you that, while they are dying, they won’t come down immediately was reassuring. I had this fear that they were going to come down any minute. We’ll probably still want to take them down this fall, but at least we get to pick the times 🙂 ...
After migrating two other sites off of my desktop, it was time to move the main site. I’ve now got fenris.org running on the LinkSky ISP. So far I’ve been very happy with them. I still need to turn on ssh access, but I am thrilled that they offer it. If anyone runs into any problems on fenris.org, please let me know.
etselec has her dreams to help her figure out what’s going on in her subconscious. I don’t dream. Okay, for all of you pedants, I do dream – I just never remember my dreams. Instead I have music. I find that almost any time I ear worm myself with a song that I haven’t heard recently, it’s my subconscious trying to tell me something. So what does it mean when you start thinking about a song where the protagonist is singing about her country turning into a war zone and being accidentally nuked by it’s ally, the U.S.? It probably means that I have reservations about forming a business relationship with a company that gets most a good chunk of its business from the DoD, DARPA and the Air Force. ...
I never planned to comment on the Duke Lacrosse rape case, but one observation keeps running through my head and it’s probably best to get it out. Back when I was in high school, I remember being told that, in a Shakespearean sense, tragedies were uplifting and comedies were depressing. That struck me as backwards for a while until I had watched/read more plays and understood that the tragedies, where the protagonist dies, often display the best elements of human character. There is nobility or love or honor in the characters as they face a universe that is, not hostile, but merely indifferent to the concerns of mankind. On the other hand, a comedy, where the main characters survive the play, often shows the pettiness of people: the bitterness, the backstabbing, the prejudice, the lying, etc. ...
I haven’t been so much with the blogging lately. For me, that is generally a sign that things are busy enough that I’m living life rather than blogging it [ed note: For all of you young readers, this is what is known as irony. When I have the most to say, I have the least time to say it in; conversely, when I write the most, I have the least to say]. ...
Okay, this is too cool. Icon has put together an audio clip of the old Sesame Street Martians listening/responding to the telephone. For the first time ever, I’ve actually put a ringtone on my phone instead of using the boring default! Thanks Icon!
Back when I was a postdoc, I was studying FFTs. Okay, actually, I’m not enough of a mathematician to study FFTs, I was studying the efficient implementation of FFTs on parallel computational clusters. One of the graduate students I was working with on the project penned the following: If there’s a working FFT That’s not in FORTRAN but in C Alas it twice as slow will go And that (as always) goes to show If speed is your greatest asset, Then what you C is what you get. -V.V. (Mony) Iyers ...
It was K’s birthday today and I decided to take the day off. In part, I needed to because I had to work on her present. It’s hard these days knowing what to get each other. I could have gotten her jewelry – again. Instead, I decided to clear out one of the beds that the previous owners had planted (fancy) grass in, and plant flowers instead. I’ve never been a big flower person, so most of the things I’ve planted have been fruit trees or vegetables or herbs (big basil fan!), but this was for her, so flowers it was. ...
Yep, it has been a few months since we’ve had major water issues, so we were due. We had water before dinner, but when I went to rinse the dishes, we had no water. It seemed like the pump wasn’t working. I checked the breaker box, the breaker was fine. I went under the house with a multimeter and found that the pump controller was working and was sending power to the pump. So either the power is not reaching the pump, e.g., a root grew through the power line; or more likely, the well pump itself died. ...