Category Archives: Other

Other

A blur of a day

I awoke once more at around 05:00, without an alarm, but was a bit slow to get moving. I felt heavy, like I wasn’t meant to be up. No matter, I caught up on my RSS feeds, did my morning pushups and crunches, and remembered that I have today off from running because it’s the weekend. In reality, I should have run anyway since I skipped a few days this week, but I just wasn’t feeling up to it.

I’ve been setting up and running simulations all day. This takes a bit of time, because I’m running the simulations remotely on our cluster. I have to log in, set up the simulation, submit it, wait for it to finish, zip up the data files (they’re quite big but compress very well), copy them over, load them, play the sequence in the data viewer, and then discover yet again that something’s not quite right with the timing. I’m trying to initiate a spiral wave, and I fear that perhaps the model I’m using is too small. My excitable gap is too narrow. The problem is, this mesh must be relatively fine. Therefore, if I make it larger, my required computational power will increase quite a bit, slowing me down further. I’ve got another try running right now, and I think I’m getting close to the right timing. I’ll check it in the morning and find out.

In the gaps of time between simulation stuff I’ve been playing some Prince of Persia / Sands of Time, reading blogs, pruning my RSS feed list, making some phone calls, eating breakfast, brunch, lunch (with a margarita!), and dinner. Oh yes, skipping exercise and eating more. This is doing me a world of good.

The blog associated with HubMed was full of Mac-friendly goodness today, including links to a bunch of free games for Mac OS X. Most of them are available under the GNU General Public License (a.k.a GPL, free as in speech) and are originally Linux games. One of my favorites, which I played on Linux first, is Frozen Bubble. I have problems copying it to my applications folder for some reason, and have to play it off of the disk image. I was also reminded by the presence of Goban on that list that I should try picking up Go again. But not tonight. Maybe I’ll order a Go book from Amazon once their gift certificiate payment scheme is back up and running. By the way, I hope none of you have sustained any injuries during the post-Thanksgiving commercial feeding frenzy…

I know by this time you must be dying to see the stats for the day. Agonize no longer:

Sleep Water Exercise Coffee Green Tea Alcohol
8 h 2.5 L 0 min 2 cup(s) 4 cup(s) 1 drink(s)

If I’m going to get eight hours of sleep again, I should get on with my pre-sleep reading, and then crash. Ta ta for now.

Revenge in Blood

I listen to a Chinese-language learning podcast, based at chinesepod.com, which has helped me keep my Chinese listening and speaking fresh, though it’s not helping my writing. I also subscribe to their blog, which contains both language and cultural news. There’s one quote from the latest story on corrupt government officials and their mistresses, and this quote about one of the mistresses really took me aback:

Li Yuchun exposed him after she learned he was laundering money. After she blew the whistle, she also was sent to jail this summer for five years for harboring a criminal, her brother — a sentence that drew public outcry over the risks of exposing corrupt government officials.

She was so enraged at her prosecution that in the courtroom, she bit her finger and with the blood scrawled on paper: “This is revenge,” her lawyer, Jin Xuekong, said.

“She has a very strong spirit,” he said.

The bolding is mine. Wow, I haven’t heard of anyone writing in their own blood in court before. That’s pretty intense.

Bratty Post (205m36cm10mm)

What? What is this? Something is missing. This blog is not Del.icio.us enough. Not delicious at all. We were making it more delicious, but then we decided not to. Oh, and we also lost something. We were going to give it to you, but then we forgot about it. No matter. Make this blog more super fab delicious. We can believe in you for 8 earth minutes, but after that, even Brock cannot wait.

Yes, I’m playing way too much Katamari Damacy. I love that game.

Today was good, and it was bad. I was once more lethargic, though this time it was largely due to having only six hours of sleep:

Sleep Water Exercise Coffee Green Tea Alcohol
6 h 1.2 L 0 min 2 cup(s) 3 cup(s) 1 drink(s)

Not drinking enough water was probably not good either. I may drink some more after this post. Water, that is. I wanted an after dinner drink, so I had some of vodka tonic. I’m going to read some Chronicles of Narnia and get some shut-eye.

What’s this? It’s short. This post is too short. I guess it will work. We would have made it much longer. I guess we’ll get a decent post out of this somehow.

Ramping back up

Being at home seems to sedate me. Not only do I not feel like doing work when I’m at my parents’ house, I don’t feel like doing much of anything else, either. I get way off schedule. I stay up too late and sleep in. And I was doing so well in St.Louis. Case in point? I prefer to go to bed at around 21:30. It’s now 23:41. I’m not tired. In my quest to begin drinking 4 cups of green tea per day, I neglected to consider that I should drink them in the morning, and not the afternoon / evening. Combine this with the fact that I haven’t been drinking much caffeine lately and… yeah. Not good.

Here’s a news item for you, courtesy of Slashdot. Evidence continues to mount that we are experiencing a bit of global warming, that nothing like this has occurred for thousands of years, during several cycles of the earth’s climate, and that the rise in greenhouse gasses and average temperatures almost exactly parallels the industrial revolution and the use of fossil fuels.

Hmm…

The greenhouse gas study is here, while the water level story is here. In science, when all of the evidence points to something, it’s generally considered to be the working theory. To say that this probably has nothing to do with human activity is like saying that because living things are complex someone had to design them — that is, it’s a cop-out that offers no counter-explanation, and no substantiated criticism.

In other news, here are the stats for today:

Sleep Water Exercise Coffee Green Tea Alcohol
8 h 2.4 L 18.88 min 1 cup(s) 4 cup(s) 0 drink(s)

There is some wine here, but it’s not open, and due to some sulfite allergies in the house, opening a bottle is akin to flooding the house with radon gas or something. I guess I’ll just have to have some next week when Amanda’s in town. I’m missing my drinks-with-dinner tradition. My exercise today was running. I felt too lethargic before running to air up the bike tires, get dressed in bike things, and go ride the bike. Also, I’m afraid of debris and crap on the roads, but they’re probably okay now. It’s been months.

I managed to squeeze out a little bit of work today, but it was not a top priority. Tomorrow, it should be. I have a lot to get done. Maybe I’ll shoot for four productive hours. I’m busy trying to induce a spiral wave in a sheet of tissue.

Old Katrina Helicopter Images

I just went back and checked the MSN Virtual Earth thing where I found images of my apartment and Amanda’s. The interface is so screwed up on Firefox for mac that I didn’t notice before, but I could have zoomed in. It’s probably better that I didn’t, given how depressed I would have been at the time had I seen mine.

My Place Amanda’s Place