K thinks I’m a freak. In her defense, I’m not certain that she would have ordered a $70 keyboard, so she may be right. In my defense, I bought my first IBM-clone in 1990 and have kept the keyboard I chose since then. The company I bought it from, Formosa Computing (for those of you in NC, think Intrex), assembled parts and sold white-box computers. The keyboard that they originally gave me was awful. I didn’t like the mushy keys, so I went back, tried a dozen different keyboards and finally exchanged it for something with a bit more tactile response. With every new computer I bought, I used this keyboard. At one point, it had an AT to PS/2 to USB adapter in order to get it working. ...

As a member of the IEEE, I participate (loosely) in a a couple of societies: IEEE’s Computer Society and the Society on the Social Implications of Technology (SSIT). I was reading SSIT’s magazine this weekend and ran across an article on Amish technology (no jokes please). The article was particularly interesting to me because my grandmother’s mother was a Mennonite and her father was Amish. While reading the article, I ran into a sentence that caught my eye. The article noted that Issac Glick in Lancaster County Pennsylvania was the first Amish to use electricity in 1910. He hooked a generator up to an electric light. Shortly after that, all of the Amish communities banned the use of electricity except in certain controlled circumstances. What caught my eye was the name and the place. My great grandfather was named Glick – in fact, both my father and I have the “Glick nose (what can I say, it’s somewhat unique 🙂 ). ...

Working in IT, one of the things that is often on my mind is backing up my data. It’s often on my mind, but I seldom do anything about it. A few years ago, K and I bought an external USB drive to which we occasionally sync our desktop. That made me a bit more comfortable, we’re now covered if the drive crashes. Of course, I then started worrying about a fire in the house. Since my external drive is sitting on top of the computer itself, anything that destroys the one will likely destroy the other. ...

Okay, thanks to Jag, I’ve seen the coolest thing ever. The steampunk keyboard + monitor: Now all I need is a few dozen hours of free time to build my own.

I made a few things I’ve never made before for dinner last night, including lemon pizza and two kinds of ice cream. The lemon pizza recipe is from the Wednesday Chef and was mentioned by someone on an IRC channel (etselec? I can’t remember – sorry). K and I don’t eat salmon roe, so I substituted finely chopped capers. Overall, it was pretty good, but we didn’t slice the lemons thin enough and they over powered the pizza. If you’re going to do this, try to get the lemon slices down to about 1mm. ...

Sorry I’ve been absent for a bit. I got sick the Sunday before we left on vacation and didn’t even start feeling better until Thursday morning. The we headed out to Yellowstone for two weeks on Saturday. The vacation was great, although yesterday’s trip home was a nightmare. We got diverted from our connecting airport to Rochester, MN. That meant that we didn’t get to Minneapolis until an hour after our connection was supposed to leave. Fortunately, the connection itself had been diverted to Deluth, so we still beat it by an hour. We did make it home, but rather than the plane landing in NC at 10pm, it didn’t get in until 12:30am. We didn’t get home until after 2am. With getting the dogs from boarding and doing some shopping so that we would be able to eat, I haven’t had a chance to write up much about the vacation. ...

K and I are going through the preparations for our trip out to Yellowstone and I was looking into the photography setup. I headed over to B&H, found the circular polarizer for the lens of my new digital camera, then went over to the film section. For a number of reasons, I still think that landscape shots should be taken using slide film, preferably slow slide film, ideally Velvia 50. It does things with greens and browns that make my heart all fluttery (yes, I know this makes me a big photography nerd). But when I got to the slide film section, I couldn’t find Velvia 50. Velvia 100, yes, but no Velvia 50 – it has been discontinued. Now, Velvia 100 is a nice film, but it’s really just not the same as Velvia 50. For landscapes, it’s too fast – I would rather have the slower speed. After all, my digital can imitate 100 speed film, I want something slower. I bought the 100 speed anyway – I still think that slide film is better than digital for landscapes. ...

Technically, K and I are not vegetarians. We’re pesco-vegetarians: we’ll eat fish and I’ll eat shellfish (K just doesn’t like shellfish 🙂 ). We didn’t become pesco-vegetarians overnight. We started by getting rid of red meat, so no pork, beef, lamb, etc. More recently, we stopped making chicken at home (we seldom eat out) and then stopped eating it at all. One of the more challenging things about changing your diet is finding food that is interesting and still meets your dietary requirements. While we’ll try new recipes when we find them, we’ve also done a lot with substitutions. This has gotten a lot easier with all of the new meat substitutes that are out there, but even without them, there are still some things you can do. ...

We finished the protective boxes we are going to use for cage cameras. They are pretty basic with hinged tops (where the cameras are mounted) and plexiglass fronts to shoot through. We’ve mounted them in the cages and run the 300′ of wire back to the house. K will need to angle them so they point in the right direction, but other than that, we’re done! K also had someone call today who had a cat-mauled bunny. They’ve dropped it off and K has it set up in a cage upstairs with a heating pad. Assuming it makes it through the night, we’ll take it up to the clinic tomorrow for antibiotics, etc.

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. ...