Winged Devils

OK, I know this may sound cruel, but such is the effect of sleep deprivation.

Spring can be pretty wonderful. It's pretty, what with all the flowers and trees. It's comfortable, temperature-wise, and this particular Spring has been exceptionally nice; meaning that we've actually had a Spring. Usually, Spring shows up for two weeks, and is then immediately replaced with the hot, humid, miserable Summer demon.

But I am susceptible to the dark side of Spring. The loud, obnoxious, irritating winged devils (most people know them as birds) wake up in unison at 5 AM. The girl contends that I have selective super hearing, so of course, I awaken right with them because apparently their concept of morning exercise is to open their tiny little beaks and scream at one another with all the force their little, black hearts can muster.

So if you happen upon me one bright, sunny, beautiful day, and you see massive black hole where my eyes should be, and I am not my congenial self, then go kill a bird. If you feel exceptionally ambitious, feel free to continue your reign of terror on the winged ones.

An Iota of Random

I am just about certain the world is going to stop rotating on it's axis, revolving around the Sun, and spin off into space in the very near future. Why am I so certain? The girl likes a car, and a good one at that. The new Subaru WRX, of all things. I hadn't seen the sedan model of the WRX until yesterday. The old model didn't do anything for me, but the new one is not bad. And she likes it, which, corresponding to me liking a car, happens once in a blue moon. And I like it, which is pretty much a major statistical anomaly, and may cause some strange event that could end creation in its entirety. Remember the Babel Fish? It's like that...

And then there's compilers. I dig 'em. But they're a pain in the keister, too. A book about ANTLR was just reviewed on Slashdot, and I'm curious. The reviewer goes on to say that the book talks about compilers in general, and so I'd like to see what best practices could allow me to avoid shooting myself in a foot again and damaging my remaining nine toes. I'm a fan of PLY just because I like Python (see half of the cartoons on XKCD for why). PLY takes Lex and Yacc, two of the more popular tools available for compiler-type people, and gives them the flexibility of Python. I'm pretty sure that, using these together, my computer might be able to figure out how to spout wings and fly all by itself in a line or two.

OK, off to vegitate...

Kiteyaking

So, we were kayaking today (the girl, Amanda, Ken, and I), and the wind was up quite a bit. I learned quickly that using a paddle as a sail doesn't work so well. Not that you don't get momentum, because you do, but because you have no torque to use to rotate. Don't get me wrong; if you don't mind ending up dashed on the rocks, then by all means, please do. However, in making this determination, we happened across a new term, and potentially a new pasttime; kiteyaking. Ken has a trick kite. We all have kayaks. It's worth a shot. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? :-)

The girl is putting up pictures.

A Touch of Random

So do you ever look into other cars on the road and wonder about the people in them? Do they ever look back? I like to when I'm the passenger in a car. Sometimes they look back. It creeps me out sometimes. I wonder where they're going and why they are at that particular place at that particular time. If this were XKCD, this post would be titled "My Hobby."

Stimulating the Economy, One Obsession at a Time

It's a shame. I'm sure I could stimulate the economy like a fiend if the government wanted to give me more than $600. I could burn through twice that easily. If I had my way, I'd immediately go out and put together a 64-bit machine (all priced out already) so that I could mess around with virtualization, Mac OS X, and Compiz Fusion, among other things.

In the middle of that, I'd take a break and go out to buy some ropes for an outdoor climbing setup. I'm just dying to spend time outside climbing on real rock.

On the way back from that, I'd go out and by one of the impending 3G iPhones. I really dislike AT&T, but then I really dislike all cell phone providers and phone developers, so it's just a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils, or rather the option that affords me the most fun. If I can't find a phone with a good battery life that I can sync with my Mac for an affordable, I might as well go all out and play with a new toy.

Oh, yeah, then I'd order a Mac Mini with a touch screen LCD and make a car PC, complete with GPS, radio, and an HSDPA data connection for completely mobility. :-) That'd get me Leopard, too, which would be very not bad.

Instead, I have to prevent myself from spending compulsively. I'll probably just choose one from my list when the check arrives. Maybe two, depending. It'll likely be the computer, since I just have so much trouble justifying giving AT&T any more money, and I dislike subscriptions pretty intensely. It pretty much seems these days like subscriptions entail ever-increasing costs and ever-decreasing customer care and service. Comcast blows. AT&T blows. Insurance is a pain in the ass, since you pay somebody to cover your ass and have to fight with them when something goes wrong.

Enough complaining. Time to return to the mold of being a good consumer.

Misadventures in Water-soaked Climbing Gear

Took to the great outdoors today to learn about setting up toprope systems.  For the sake of reference, here's the summary of what we learned.

• Bowline knot
• Single bowline
• Bowline on a bight, which can be used to make an extra safety knot
• BFK (Big Fat Knot), which is effectively just a figure 8 on a bight on a bight.  
• BFK placement 
• Carabiner placement:
•  Opposing gates
• Don't put them on a rock edge
  
• Anchoring
• Placing angles:  Less than 90 required.  Less than 45 ideal.
• Where to anchor:  to live trees, rocks with good features, etc.
• Tying two ropes together using a Flemish knot or a fisherman's knot

The big thing, though, is SREANE.  Solid (where to tie anchors), Redundant (at least 2 anchors, BFK, 2 biners), Equalized (so the force is minimized on each anchor piece), Angle (above), No Extension (if one piece of the system fails, then the other won't go very far).

OK, that was boring for the non-climbers.  It was probably boring for the climbers, too, but I'm excited and I needed to write it down somewhere.  Just after lunch, the skies opened up and poured down rain in bucky-wuckets.  That was fun, or at least as much fun as swimming along walking trails can be.  

The girl took pictures and started a picasa page, in case you'd like a brief look at the excitement.

Death by iPod

The girl would probably like to kill me. I have, as of late, taken on a metric @55load of projects. My latest... Frankenpod. A simple concept; to take multiple broken iPods and create some smaller number of working ones. However, when multiple is 2 and broken means neither one has a fully working harddrive, it makes life hard. It's taken me nearly 3 days of tinkering to determine which components are bad.

One of these days I'll put it down. I still hold out hope that the parts aren't really bad, though...

Python

This pretty much sums up my views on Python at the moment.

import happy