I’m in something of a manic mode now that winter has fully departed. This weekend saw the embarkation on/completion of a few projects. I finished up all of the remaining niggling table-saw work required for my kitchen — the quarter round floor molding and the remaining decorative molding under the cabinets. Then I cleaned up my garage a bit; who knows, maybe in a month or two I’ll be able to get my car back in there. I also took the first steps in what I hope to be a less sucky landscape for my house: I mulched an area around my trees that tends to grow weeds like crazy, pulled up said weeds, removed a rotten and termite infested bench, and started a little indoor herb garden. I still had time to play a few rounds of The Ur-Quan Masters, until I remembered what an incredible time sink StarCon2 happened to be, at which point I resigned my post as intergalactic diplomat forever and went back to noodling on the guitar.
Open sores
Well, as of yesterday, after a long protracted review and release process, several lines of code by me have found their way into an operating system: Linux 2.6.16 includes my Rio Karma drivers. So you can go ahead and blame me if Linux sucks. Then I’ll blame Jeff Garzik in turn, just because.
Last weekend was nice. Angeline and I spent most of it shopping for her DC area apartment for her new job at NIH beginning this summer. If anyone knows of a cheap but nice apartment convenient to Bethesda, let’s hear it.
Note to job seekers: don’t put “career” or “job” in your resume. I keep getting keyword searches in my httpd logs for “objective education experience oracle unix -job -career.” I guess said headhunters won’t see this post, so let me take this opportunity to tell them that they are ugly and they smell. I also get lots of referrer spam from ballsacks.net. Just thought you should know.
Yellow for a day
I decided to put some new color on the walls of my breakfast area before my newly rescheduled party (March 4th, 8pm, be there) and so I hopped on down to Home Depot. Yellow was the decided color, because breakfasts are supposed to be sunny early morning affairs. I spent half an hour pouring over the little cards trying to pick out one that wouldn’t be too bright, too washed out, too dark, or ugly. A tough set of requirements when dealing with yellow. Anyway, picked up the best candidate and headed for home, and spent the day painting. End result: hideous. It looks like a dayglo schoolbus parked in the room. So I get to repaint it a new color. Awesome. I’ll update this with a picture later when I get rejoined with my mini-USB cable.
Those who didn’t quite get my Halloween costume may be pleased to know that the Venture Bros. are back on Adult Swim on the weekends. Set your TiVos. Next episode:
Careers in Science – The family travels to space to repair an orbiting space station.
Cartoon Network, Sat Feb 25, 2006, 11:00 PM (30 mins)
Update:
White stuff
In case you missed the thirty hours of news coverage, it snowed this weekend. My car is punk: it has a snohawk.
day verbed noun
Recent minutiae:
Saturday, saw vampires.
Sunday, visited National Building Museum. Didn’t pay $5 suggested donation. About as dry as sounds, though translucent and fiber optic concrete are interesting.
Tuesday, used no pronouns or articles.
Fete
By the way, readers of this who happen to know where I live, if you are wondering what to do next Saturday night, the 21st: party at my house! Though I may cancel the thing since there are a few conflicts and I’ve heard yesses from only a couple of people. Incriminating photos will be posted here.
Mishmash
While riding the Rosslyn escalator today, I wondered where it stood in the hierarchy of tall escalators. Wikipedia seems self-contradictory on this point, but I believe it is credible in proclaiming Wheaton the West’s largest. Go WMATA! Now if you can just extend the superior escalator tech to keeping them running.
I believe myself simpatico with everyone at hates-software. So allow me to air a gripe of my own: LaTeX, WTF? Why must you have no useful interaction mode that actually tells where the errors are? Why must I run you twice to fix up references, couldn’t you try rescanning yourself? Why must you, even in batchmode, tell me that you got wedged, and refuse to exit? Too bad you are still way better than Word.
Crankcase oil smell not doing it for you? Better go more manly…I think. Orange County Choppers, the tough guys known for the series American Chopper, now have their own line of cologne: Full Throttle. Hilarious.
Still here
Yeah, I got nothing.
++year;
Well I trust everyone had a good set of holidays. I worked through most of it, but I did take an extra day off to celebrate the birth of Santa Claus, that fickle diety who will destroy the universe if retailers end the year in the red. Once again we made it, barely.
Christmas dinner was gluttonous, featuring a 10 lb. turkey, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, baked macaroni & cheese, mashed potatoes (AB’s “mashers”), dinner rolls, a bottle of white wine and the piece de resistance, a Ghirardelli chocolate cheesecake, all homemade. Not a bad meal for the two of us.
No one came through on the NYE invite, TYVM. What do I pay you friends for? So I spent the 31st playing with my robot. Really: I bought myself one of those Roomba things that day. My house has never been cleaner.
So here’s hoping ’06 is a good one filled with joy, and that our robotic housekeepers postpone the revolution until next year.
Happy Christmas
