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A Brisk 3 Below And it's snowing lightly. This has been the winter for snowing while the sun is shining. The yard is starting to look like last winter, too, where there was basically 1 to 3 feet of snow in the yard for about 3 months. My wonderful neighbor came out with the loader last night and cleared my driveway, so I should be able to get out of here today. I got out on Thursday after another neighbor came with the big tractor.I e-filed my taxes, so I'm expecting my refund very soon. Yeah, I know I'm letting the gov't make interest on my money for a year, but interest rates suck, and it's a good savings plan for me. I'm hopefully going to look at a car today. I've been trying to get out to see it for weeks, the weather has hindered me. It's a 2000 4-door 5-speed Civic DX, exactly what I've been looking for. 27,000 miles on it.
I'm reading Ender's Game, a scifi novel by O S Card. I'm really digging it. Like Oryx and Crake, it's about the unintended shitty consequences of human manipulation. This one has a bit of a Harry Potter smell, most scenes take place in a school for extraordinary children. So far, I give a thumbs up (I'm about 3/4 through it).
posted by cat mcconnell 9:04 AM
Thursday, January 29, 2004
Backup Schmackup Overheard on /.: Why take up all that space keeping your backups around? Just zip it all, put it in your Shared folder for Kazaa, and name it "olsentwinsnaked.jpg" or "parishilton_does_horse.mpg." Then delete.
posted by cat mcconnell 9:19 AM
A Salute to the Three-Finger Salute The coder guy (David Bradley) who invented the Ctrl-Alt-Del softboot sequence is retiring after 28 longass years with IBM. There is a hilarious bit of video shows Emperor Bill's unamused face as David explains, and I loosely quote, "I may have invented it, but Bill Gates made it famous."Ain't that the truth.
posted by cat mcconnell 9:06 AM
Monday, January 26, 2004
2 What can be said?
posted by cat mcconnell 5:52 PM
Sunday, January 25, 2004
10 below Though it's a relatively balmy 3 above right now, it got down to 10 below last night on my porch. Tonight the forecast calls for several inches of snow, followed by sleet or freezing rain with ice accumulation of up to 1/4 inch. I smell snow day! That's what I'm talkin bout.This morning I watched the last hour of the 25th anniversary episode of Sunday Morning on CBS. I think I've been watching that show for most of that time, it's still one of my favorites. And unlike most other network fare, you always know when it's going to be on cuz they can't rightly shift it to, say, Friday night or something.
posted by cat mcconnell 10:35 AM
Saturday, January 24, 2004
How Low Can You Go? At least 4 below zero, cuz that's how freakin cold it is on my porch right now. But thanks to my stellar pal Dan the Man, it is a cozy and warm 70 inside the wigwam with my new furnace. My stellar neighbor Dave plowed my driveway this morning. And my house is starting to smell like the yummy pepperoni rolls that I'm baking in the oven. All good on the eastern front.I'm especially enjoying it all after a week from hell at work. All kinds of fires to put out, and some are still smoldering. I'm hoping Liv will have a snowday on Monday, and that'll give me an excuse to stay home and procrastinate for another day. Yeah, that's the ticket.
Ziggy played guitar.
posted by cat mcconnell 9:36 PM
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
Every Tao and Zen I Hear a Good Joke The Zen monk says to the Taoist hotdog vendor "Make me one with everything." I got this great joke from Liv when she was madly into jokebooks and jokesites at around age 8. Actually her version was "what did the Dalai Lama say to the hotdog vendor?"Today I stumble across Part 2. Enjoy.
Vendor says "that'll be $2." Monk hands him a $5. "Where's my change?" "Change comes from within."
posted by cat mcconnell 11:30 AM
Monday, January 19, 2004
Thank You Martin Luther King, Jr. for all the great letters and speeches and thoughts you left about liberty and justice, they are still my best sources of inspiration on those important concepts. Thank you for contininuing to be a public leader even though your life was repeatedly threatened because of your activism. Thank you for not standing down until they shot you. Thank you for this snowy holiday from work. Thank you for intentionally going to jail to demonstrate how wrong the status quo was, and for not limiting your cause to race.You da man.
posted by cat mcconnell 9:12 AM
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
23 skidoo I'm working at home today, not feeling too bad but definitely at the beginning of some kind of virus I want to quarantine. My pal Ed is going to be on HGTV! He bought a hundred-yr-old schoolhouse and freakin lives in it. It's all kinds of cool. In the teeny tiny world in which we live, I actually heard about him and the school when he first bought it, years before I ever met him or knew where it was. It was incidental info that came my way via a guy I was having a torrid email romance with years ago. All these ones and zeroes keep recycling themselves, just connect the dots.Banished words list 2004 I love this thing, how come its existence has remained unknown to me all these years? This year's list includes bling-bling, LOL, smoking gun. I couldn't agree more. Last year we had black ice, branding, and "it's a good thing." Years previous have included such classics as no-brainer, edgy, 24/7, thinking outside the box, chad, my bad, outsourcing, done deal, and my personal favorite nuk-u-lar (if you can't pronounce nuclear, please don't pretend you can be leader of the so-called free freakin world, k?).
I'm outtie (a good one for next year's list?)
posted by cat mcconnell 10:16 AM
Sunday, January 11, 2004
An Interesting Solution Dig it, Magnatune is a record label of a different color. Cool taglines on their website include "Magnatunes, the open music label," "Internet music without the guilt," and "we are not evil." Their artists make albums available in their entirety as .mp3's, and you get to listen first to see if you like it. Then you can choose your price (between $5 and $18, $8 suggested), and 50% goes to the artist. You can also license tunes (for use in your video, movie, radio or TV ad, etc.) through the site at fixed rates, no negotiations, easy, breezy, cheezy. And the artists keep the rights to all their music. Sounds good to me. Literally. I'm grooving hard on Chris Juergensen, a jazz guitarist on the label.The downside: it's freakin .mp3, a (very) lossy codec. My Bose speakers turn their coney noses up at such a low-rent format. For that reason, I'm considering buying this album for about $6. I'd pay twice that for all the 1's and 0's I'd get on a CD. Yes, I know that even a CD is lossy, in the sense that it's basically a sample collection from a master that is almost always recorded at a higher bitrate. But .mp3 is not even close, people.
posted by cat mcconnell 11:14 AM
Double Digitry The temperature on my porch has soared up to 10. It has been 3 or less everytime I've checked in the past couple of days. I'm not here during the warmest part of the workday, so I'm sure it actually gotten higher than that, just not while I've actually been here to experience it. And the results of the beer test were mystifying. 5 bottles of beer (4 clear coronas and 1 brown Sam Adams) sat upon my porch. At 3 degrees, all beers stayed unfrozen. When the temp went up to 20, 2 Coronas and the Sam froze, and the Sam's lid unsealed leaving a little frozen beer foam around it. The temp dropped again to 0, and 2 more Coronas froze. Finally this morning, over a week after the beer test started, the last beer is frozen.Have you ever experienced the phenomenon of a can of beer sitting outside in subfreezing temps, but remaining liquid, until you bring it inside and open it, at which time the water in the beer freezes and you get a beer slushie? This little physics puzzle presented itself to me years ago, before Olivia's birth. And it was repeated several times, leaving me to wonder, why? How? Should we get those Slurpee paddles straws for these special occasions? My friend Greg, the physics nut (he read Einstein for fun) said it's about the principle of heat transfer. If I understood him correctly, it was precipitated by the significant difference in temps between outside where beer was stored (sometimes sub-zero), and inside where it was probably around 80 degrees (the poorly-insulated house I was in led me to keep burners and oven on when it was wicked cold). The cold beer, not frozen because the freezing point of alcohol is way lower than that of water, was made to rapidly warm up when brought into the tropical warmth of the kitchen. The alcohol warmed quicker than the water, separated itself from the water, and the water was then all alone to freeze until it could more slowly bring itself to the ambient temp.
Tesselate that.
posted by cat mcconnell 8:37 AM
Monday, January 05, 2004
Have I Told You Lately That I totally love Alias, the cool international spy show with the bodacious and yet ass-kicking West Virginian Jennifer Garner? No? Perhaps that's because it keeps getting pre-empted by freakin college football. No cheerleader could rival the great happy noise I'm making as the bloody bowl season finally grinds to a merciful end. Sheesh.I love Alias so much that it inspired me to get liv the coolest xmas gift. OK, Alias had nothing to do with it, but still. . .check out the 007 Stealth Camera. Yes, I actually bought this for my child, and it is actually exceptionally cool.
I got a great book on creating tesselations from my mom, and I'm exploring this kind of mathematical tiling art. I've been into it ever since I was a wee young'un, grooving on MC Escher and whatnot. Stay tuned for some cat tessellations here soon.
posted by cat mcconnell 7:11 PM