- Got closer on the entropy problem. Also have much, much better autogenerated network diagrams. Still need to make a real intersection map. #
- Fuck entropy. I choose you, N-choose-2. #
- Come with us to where man has never been, but to where he will go as certain as the passage of time. Come with us to the moon. The rocket… #
- No more research until Saturday. Now on to packing and shipping, making presentation slides, flying, practicing. But first: some sleeping. #
- Instead of putting me on hold, Southwest's system asked for my phone number and called me back when it was my turn. I love Southwest. #
- The only key left on my keychain goes to my bike lock. #
- Bike is boxed. Hands blackened and bloodied as always. I hate packing it, and it hates being packed. We'll miss each other in transit. #
- Working on a presentation on an airplane. I feel so… professional. Or something. #
- Back at Chez Stempel in Lakewood. I like having parents I can borrow occasionally. #
- A liter of coffee on the desk at 10pm. It's going to be a long night. #
- naptime. #
- Fitter. Healthier. More Productive… #
- So much for trusting my bits to Google. Gmail down again. Will reconsider my whole hosting setup in January. #
- It's so early, and yet, so so late. #
- Are you ready to ruuuuuuummmmmble!?!?! #
- As expected, that went better than expected. (Expectation is the mother of disappointment, so I try to keep mine low.) #
- To my many half blind friends: how much should an eye exam and prescription cost if you pay cash? (glasses exam/Rx, no contacts). #
- Stayed at Julie's too late talking. Now have to sleep in Boulder. I don't have a problem with her couch. It's more like a relationship. #
- Back in Lakewood. Need to make up a writing schedule for myself, and re-assemble my bike! #
- Probably not the best idea to antagonize someone on my thesis committee over minutia, but actually it encourages me to do a good job. #
- Only obvious FedEx casualty is a smashed taillight. Thankfully whatever poked the big hole in the monitor box was harmless. #
- Apparently I needed to catch up on some sleeping last night… #
- Finding it very difficult to concentrate, and feeling angry about it. #
Monthly Archive for September, 2009
- Just FYI, the next person who congratulates me on having a PhD defense date runs the risk of being punched in the face. #
- Trying to feel good about making a bunch of progress on the stratigraphic sorting. #
- And then every so often I'm like, "Maybe I could enjoy a being Postdoc, given a sufficiently long vacation first." #
- Okay, enough of this nonsense. I'm going home. Right after I pilfer some toilet paper… #
- I'd much rather get a partnership out of my PhD, than a PhD out of my partnership. #
- I have a bunch of good day-old ciabatta bread in my office, if anybody wants some. #
- Mmmm, PB&J. Mike would be proud. (Or jealous…) #
- Sacrificing the ornamental plants in the courtyard to the Ice Queen Europa. #
- Pasadena Bicycle Master Plan Meeting 6:30-8:30pm, October 1st at 1020 N. Fair Oaks Ave. More details here: http://bit.ly/USQYY #
- The Wall Street Journal just contacted me about being interviewed for an article about dumpster diving. What should I do? #
- It's hard to believe that many of our grandparents (or even our parents!) remember a world before modern China existed: http://bit.ly/PvoB7 #
- There's no food in my office, so what are these ants looking for? #
- not sure what to think of being told I am too articulate and enlightened to be useful by a journalist from the WSJ. Compliment? Insult? #
- either rationality *or* intelligibility would be a big improvement in our landlady. We can't even tell what kind of crazy she's talking. #
- Trying to measure a reduction in entropy. As much as anything, I associate entropy with evil, and someday it will win, but not yet. #
If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading ‘Links for the week of September 17th, 2009′
Message from the City below, linkage courtesy of yours truly. Unfortunately I’ll be out of town, so hopefully others will be able to attend and take notes and post them on the web, as I have done here, and here, and here (okay, actually that third link goes to a rant…). I’m posting the info here because strangely, it does not seem to be posted anywhere on the City’s website. Funny that.
Ryan Snyder Associates, consultant, will provide a progress report on the development of the City’s new Bicycle Master Plan. An open forum will be held to gain public comment on the proposed improvements to the current bikeway system.
When:
Thursday, October 1, 2009 – 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
Where:
Jackie Robinson Center
1020 N. Fair Oaks Ave.
Pasadena, CA
Hosted by Department of Transportation and
the Bicycle Master Plan Advisory Committee
More Info:
Contact Rich Dilluvio at (626) 744-7254 or rdilluvio@cityofpasadena.net.
An updated plan will look at the full range of actions (PDF) Pasadena could take to improve conditions and encourage bicycle riding
- I guess waking up at 4am is closer to being on a "normal" schedule… #
- Mmm. French toast made with English muffins. Is that culturally insensitive, or does the maple syrup from Quebec make it okay? #
- getting occasional random ~10 second hangs in just about all apps under #snowleopard Annoying! #
- I find the fact that we still nominally celebrate Labor Day in this country somehow darkly comic, or ironic, or something. #
- Holland has about the same population and land area as LA+Ventura+San Diego+Orange County. If only we had their bikes and healthcare. #
- WTF? I'm at Caltech and I can't read old Icarus articles online. I hate the scientific publishing industry with an unhealthy passion. #
- Amazing how tiring getting up at 4am is… #
- The last day of a long weekend is apparently not the best time to get dumpster bread. Too much accumulated garbage obscuring the quarry. #
- Don't you think you're playing God? Oh, I'm not playing. -Craig Venter Synthetic Biology Masters Class w/ George Church http://bit.ly/Knh3T #
- I think I'm losing weight as my thesis gains it. That's probably not terribly healthy. #
- I hate getting gigantic e-mails that have been hopelessly garbled by an ancient version of some GUI e-mail client. #
- Reading a review of the work in my field, it sometimes feels unclear whether it's even worth the effort to tell them they're wrong. #
- It's 2:30am, does anybody know where my Michelle is? #
- Well I can only hope that the mystery sleepover isn't happening in a medical facility. #
- gall dernit, I still ain't registrated! #
- Well that was exhausting. Even if I hadn't been up since 2:30am. #
- Can't find a good full-screen slideshow for new @HubbleTelescope pix. They should set up a @flickr acct. or mediarss feed. #
- I'm on the verge of being genuinely creeped out by the preternatural relevance of the webcomics I follow. Telepathy will only make it worse #
- Ah, mobile phones and cars. Thankfully nobody was seriously injured, and I got to see an urban geyser. http://bit.ly/bu5Tk #
- I wonder if Apple lets artists pay to get played more frequently in the iTunes Genius mixes and playlists? #
- Back of the envelope: ~50 m^3 of water was wasted by that broken hydrant = ~8 lbs beef = 1 BBQ <= last night's dumpster diving haul. #
- Outlined data structures for geographic superposition networks, now on to pseudocode algorithm for DAG enforcement, & stratigraphic sorting. #
- Wikipedia has improved dramatically since I last worked on graph theory. #
- Seems absurd that it took all day to write 15 lines of code, but using osgeo and networkx I can now take a map and turn it into a graph. #
- It's a sad morning inbox that contains nothing but a bunch of notifications of backups, successfully completed. At least my data loves me. #
- Why on Earth do all of the geographic processing libraries act like the world is flat? I am so tired of hacking in Euclidean space! #
If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading ‘Links for the week of September 11th, 2009′
- Terrifying time lapse of Station Fire: http://vimeo.com/6341555 Mt. Wilson cam is all shadow, and flame: http://twitpic.com/fy9li #
- I suppose technically this is the land of milk and honey. And also beta-phenyl-isopropylamine. #
- The air outside is so bad it makes my eyes sting, and every street light has a bright yellow cone of haze beneath it. #
- People are asking the UK government to apologize for the persecution of Alan Turing which led to his suicide http://bit.ly/R0D81 #
- sleeping soon. #
- Went grocery shopping, and on the way home down San Pasqual, saw more bikes than cars, including one with a skirt guard! #
- Sign up to help do the first ever LA bicycle count, September 22nd and 23rd! http://bit.ly/20ao2R #
- How much of a paper you aren't first author on can go into your thesis? #
- Drinking two liters of tea seems so much less ridiculous than drinking half a gallon. #
- Cost (to me) of student healthcare at CU has doubled since I entered grad school from $500 to $1000 per semester. #
- Godspeed You Black Emperor goes great with forest fires. #
- If nothing else, it seems assured that the Apocalypse will be well documented. Yet another fire timelapse: http://www.vimeo.com/6356422 #
- My life always feels so boring an inhuman when I work like this. #
- Publishing a scientific technique & releasing a buggy closed implementation effectively prohibits anyone from improving on your work. Lame! #
- Only three weeks to my committee meeting?!? Feeling desperate. Also, I think I really need to brush my teeth. #
- Seems absurd that the overwhelming majority of our roads, buildings, and other urban infrastructure is used only half of the time, or less. #
- Pulled in and re-organized all my existing thesis content, except for the geological superposition networks stuff. 101 pages so far. #
- Annoyed that I can't go to Caltrans BAC mtg to evangelize http://bikewise.org b/c of my PhD committee mtg. Same day & time, different state. #
- AGU abstract functionally done. Going to reward myself by upgrading my OS. At least, I hope it ends up being a reward. #
- Installing a bunch of crap from source makes me feel kind of nostalgic. Nostalgic for what I'm not sure. Maybe for a time before computers. #
- python 2.6 + ipython + readline + snow leopard ==
# - nobody should die because they can't afford the longevity treatments, and nobody should go broke because they got old http://bit.ly/Up79x #
- Sometimes it's just best to lie to the computer outright. #
- It's amazing what a decent table of contents will do for the soul. #
- And that's all the phase there is to shift. #
- Are babies had or made? Do we give or lose our virginity? I vote for making and giving. #
- Being nocturnal feels like living in some kind of weird, silent, de-populated world. #
- It's phenomenal that our oldest genes are about as durable as the oldest whole rocks on Earth, but have passed through billions of bodies. #
- tonight, I will finish the introduction and background section. #
- I gave myself a haircut, making my beard by far the longest hair on my head. Now I look like some kind of villain from Imperial Russia. #
- Need spicy noodles, and a "nap". Got bogged down in crater counting and it's weaknesses in the outer solar system… #
- We can all vote tomorrow to suspend gravity, but we'll still be gravity's bitch. http://bit.ly/ZRY1s #
If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading ‘Links for the week of September 4th, 2009′
