Walrus Notes

2004.02.06

Fri, 6 Feb 2004 14:07:23 UT

Thoughts

Worst-sounding coffee order overheard thus far: triple decaf grande soy mocha no-whip (yeah, it was at a Starbucks). I am not sure what this person really wanted. Chocolate tofu?

2004.01.29

Thu, 29 Jan 2004 19:10:35 UT

Activity

I cleaned out my home office Tuesday night but not by choice. That evening the water heater seemed to be making more noise than usual, and there was a trail of water going from it to the sump pump. The water kept pooling even after I wiped a spot dry, so I turned off the water supply to the heater, and the noise stopped. The water looked like it may be draining the other way into my office closet. When I went into my office, my feet became damp and the carpet was making squishy sounds. There was also water pooling around the three computers (fortuitously located on a 1" thick boards to provide ventilation room underneath). The next 30–45 minutes were a scramble to shutdown the computers and equipment and to remove the books (most of which were on the floor as I had donated the bookcases to school in August and not yet gotten around to installing new shelving). Given the recent heavy snowfall, it seemed possible that snow up against the house was melting and seeping through the wall, so I shoveled the snow away from the side of the house. Using a wet-vac, I removed several gallons of water from the carpet. The carpet did not seem to remoisten, so I placed a couple Vornados pointing toward the carpet to aid in evaporation. I went to sleep thinking the wall or foundation may need sealing.

The next morning I turned on the water to the water heater, and the noise returned. After a few minutes and upon looking more closely at the valve location, I realized it was not for the water heater but for an outside spigot on the other side of my office. When I checked the office, sure enough, a puddle had reappeared in the corner near the spigot. Another 1/3 of the wet-vac later and the office was re-drying.

So now I'm trying to find a plumber to investigate further, but my office is ready for installation of new shelving. The annoying bit is that the first time in about 3 or 4 years I remember to remove the hoses from the spigots, a pipe bursts.

2003.11.03

Mon, 3 Nov 2003 19:10:35 UT

Activity

I'm just now getting over pneumonia that lasted for a week and a half. Before the pneumonia it was just a fever with a slightly stuffy ear. That turned into a rampant cough which led to the three doctor and one hospital visits that resulted in the healthy me of today. Azithromycin, predisone, albuterol, and fluticasone propionate.

2003.04.06

Sun, 06 Apr 2003 18:10:35 UT

Rant

as someone with a spectating problem, i watch more than the average amount of sports—especially sports which comprise much of the olympic games. crew, cross-country skiing, badminton, curling, luge, team handball, i enjoy watching them all. all of the sports that is.

the problem is that i live in the usa, and networks don’t like to show most of these sports. instead they focus on basketball, hockey, gymnastics, and figure skating. basketball and hockey are okay, although they seem out of place in the olympics, and i enjoy their collegiate and professional versions more. as for gymnastics and figure skating, these aren't even sports.

now i realize that for some reason these two activities—gymnastics and figure skating—produce huge television ratings, but they are not sports. a sport is a athletic game with the winner determined by the clock or a score but which does not score based on artistic effort. figure skating and gymnastics definitely require athletic ability and substantial training but in the end they are the equivalents of beauty competitions and pet shows relying on a judge's idea of art. lest someone think this is a thinly veiled attack on women's sports, note that i also claim ski jumping, half-pipe snowboarding, skateboarding, freestyle skiing, and diving should not be classified as sports. they may be difficult to do and fun to watch, but they too are not sports.

i’m sure someone is about to complain ‘but many of your so-called sports routinely rely on judgements from referees, umpires, linesfolk, etc. what’s the difference between that and an artistic score?‘ the answer is that the scoring is not based solely upon the judgment. imagine a basketball game with a score of 83–82 where the team with fewer points won because they played a more artistic game. perhaps they passed the ball more, involved more players in the scoring, had fewer fouls, etc. does this seem like a silly way to determine the winner? indeed, but that's exactly what happens in snowboarding, do more technical tricks, but fail to get enough air (sorry, amplitude)? too bad, you may lose.

Activity

More gardening this weekend. Despite the rain, sleet, and snow of the past day-and-a-half, the gardens continue to green. I cleared the dead bits out of a couple more beds. The baptista, cosmo, and hosta remains are now laying on the side of the ravine, ready for further decomposing. The snow-drops are finishing up, but I saw a few crocus nearing bloom. The grape hyacinth and miniature tulip leaves are pushing up as well.

As for indoor gardening, I purchased the fourth orchid of the year. This one is from Tom Thompson Florist on Main Street. The woman was very helpful and provided me with 3 baggies of orchid food: blue, yellow, and green. I am going to leave the orchids alone for another week before feeding them. Two of the other orchids are sending offshoots of the main blooming stems. I am curious to find out whether the food will help them develop some new blooms.

2003.04.04

Sun, 06 Apr 2003 18:10:35 UT

Futzing

Added the standard set of insert-buzzword-here buttons set at the bottom. There is now a link to this hand-maintained RSS 2.0 feed.

I really need to acquire/write an xhtml-and-rss-from-same-source generator.

Activity

The weather forecasters were correct in predicting Wednesday would be the last warm day this week. I took advantage of the forecast and spent an hour or so removing dead foliage from the gardens. There are a lot of narcissus and iris shoots, but so far only the snow-drops and some small bell-shaped blue flower are in bloom.

2003.04.01

Tue, 01 Apr 2003 16:36:35 UT

Activity

I saw the Cuadros Pamplona Alta exhibit at the UM Hospital last Friday. This is a very moving depiction of life outside Lima, Peru. It is located at the south end of the first floor of the Taubmann Center.

Sometime after 6pm yesterday evening, a gnome appeared. He is standing on a table between the two adirondack chairs. I neither know whence he came nor where he is going. One odd thing is that he is wearing a green jacket instead of blue. His appearance freaked out the smaller dog. She jumped at the sight of him and frantically sniffed all around him. The other dog does not have as keen a sense of smell, so he paid little attention to the visitor.

2003.03.26

Wed, 26 Mar 2003 21:15:00 UT

Activity

Finished going through the Exponenents, Roots, and Triangles exercises with the math group. They're still having trouble accepting the sqrt(2) as just another number and not something to be solved. I'm hoping to help them understand it better next week by having them measure triangles and comparing the calculated hypotenuses (hypotenusae?) with the measured values.

The computer group started Monday. 4 students, one of whom was absent on Monday. Looks like we shall be using python as none of them have extensive programming experience. I walked through some simple control logic with them, and they appeared to understand the python statements without much explanation. I provided them with a simple program (one explicit function) to look at through the week and to try running (all of them have computers at home).

Words

I started reading Imagining Numbers (ISBN: 0374174695) after reading a review on slashdot. I haven't reached a part about imagining i, but my hope is that there will examples I can relay to the math group---if not about i itself, then perhaps irrational numbers in general. Futzing

I removed the style sheet information for this into a separate file. Using Dave Raggett's Adding a touch of style, I made some more style changes such as the section backgrounds and creating a footer division which allows me to remove the hr tag. There's very little HTML left in this document now, and for some reason I feel rather pleased.

2003.03.18

Wed, 26 Mar 2003 21:13:00 UT

Activity

Tomorrow's math group will focus on exponents, roots, and the Pythagorean formula. The exercise sheet is here.

2003.03.16

Sat, 15 Mar 2003 23:55:00 UT

Music

I flipped by VH1 just as the Police were being inducted. I sat through Roxanne hoping they would follow it with something interesting. Instead, there's a commercial and they start playing Every Breath You Take. That's when the television went off.

Futzing

I considered writing some code to manage both the html and the rss information. I figured since rss is xml that one of the first things I should do is validate the resulting rss file. It appears that there's no official schema/document type definition for rss 2.0. the mailing list archives would indicate that there's not going to be one either; there are arbitrary rss validators so that might be sufficient.

2003.03.15

Sat, 15 Mar 2003 23:58:00 UT

Music

Just purchased Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's Facing Future. It's a smashing good album and not just because of the superb Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World medley.

Words

Border's is having a buy-3-paperbacks-get-the-4th-free sale this weekend. This only feeds my book purchasing problem. As it turned out, I managed to buy my freedom with just two books (the latest Doonesbury and Fox Trot collections of all things). I considered getting a couple computer books (xml-rpc and python. Fortunately for me, however, I encountered my usual resistance to purchasing programming language/spec books: the belief that most of what I need to know is already documented on the net (or as part of the software itself). This is not always the case, and my book shelves testify to this. (La)TeX is a good counter-example.

2003.03.14

Fri, 14 Mar 2003 12:06:00 UT

Activities

Breakfasted with mdw. The other two regulars were unable to attend this week. If he had a link to it, I'd reference the announcement of his native perl/java AES string-to-key implementions.

After reading Wil Wheaton's "This title has no H3 tags!" entry, I replaced all header tags with spans and added divs for sectioning. There is very HTML markup left now. Seems it's time to start looking at automatically generating both this file and the rss file.

I see haenck has updated his moveable type-based site after several days of inactivity. The logging competition continues!.

2003.03.13

Thu, 13 Mar 2003 17:27:00 UT

Futzing

Last night I downloaded the latest versions of Camino and Safari. Options are nice. I still find Safari essentially unusable due to its (current) lack of tabs. Additionally, I didn't notice any difference in web page rendering times between in and Camino. The combination of Camino and NetNewsWire makes web reading much more efficient. Click on interesting links while going through subscriptions in NNW. When that's done, go through all of the tabs Camino opened in the background. I became too tired to do much more than boot Spring last night though.

Future Activity

I agreed to guide 2-3 5th/6th graders' programming work at school. Their current interest seems is java. It will be interesting to find out what they're doing with it. I'm getting the class schedule today to find out when our schedules match up.

2003.03.12

Thu, 13 Mar 2003 03:09:00 UT

Activity

I just purchased the happening bundle of Spring and NetNewsWire. I then decided to add a hand-edited RSS feed of these notes. It's time to add a link to one of the other contestants in the obscure web log post category, Perhaps leeph will provide me with the URL of the other contestant (or even join in the fun).

I've been doing yoga (daily when possible). Last night I did the fully-modified workout sufficiently easily that I'll try the 1/2-modified tomorrow. I really enjoy this DVD. It makes use of the DVD multiple-angle feature to provide 4 different workout levels: normal, 1/4-modified, 1/2-modified, and fully-modified. Since my hamstrings are rather inflexible, I've been using the fully-modified angle. GAIAM seems to be the Starbucks of yoga. The DVD I purchased a year or so ago is a Living Arts DVD but their web site now shows it as a GAIAM product. Other GAIAM products area Living Arts co-branded. I wonder when GAIAM purchased Living Arts. There is no mention of it in their press releases.