This Day In History: 05/20
Desparate Housewives: This darkly humorous show looks at the secretive lives of four women living in a cul-de-sac. Eva Longoria will play one of the women, an unhappily married former runway model. Said unhappiness drives her to become involved with their 16-year-old gardener.
This is the show that ABC is hoping will do better in the Alias timeslot next fall. Luckily they're not completely retarded, as Alias will return in January 2005 with twenty back-to-back new episodes.
Infertile couple tries a new approachFor this rainy Friday, here's a collection of news stories about stupid people recently in the news. Enjoy!
Who not to solicit for drugsRobot digger set to land Sunday at Martian pole
Like a miner prospecting for gold, NASA hopes its latest robot to Mars hits pay dirt when it lands Sunday near the red planet's north pole to conduct a 90-day digging mission. The three-legged Phoenix Mars lander . . . is zeroing in on the unexplored arctic region where a reservoir of ice is believed to lie beneath the Martian surface.
To be clear, the article is not saying Phoenix is a gold digger, but it's not messing around in a region where it won't find anything. This type of colourful simile is common in stories that NASA wants to excite the public mind.
Phoenix lacks the tools to detect signs of alien life -- either now or in the past.
When asked, project manager, Barry Goldstein, confided that a fully-functional flux capacitor (and the accompanying plutonium fuel) was too heavy and too expensive. He said the extra savings were spent making the robot look extra fly for the day it would touch the Martian sky. Good photography is the keystone to any popular space mission.
On Sunday, Phoenix will punch through the Martian atmosphere at more than 12,000 mph. Over the next seven minutes, it will use the atmosphere's friction and a parachute to slow to 5 mph. Seconds before touchdown, Phoenix will fire its thrusters for what scientists hope will be a soft landing. The last time NASA tried a soft landing on Mars, it ended in disaster.
NASA blamed previous crashes on an engineer who had trained extensively with the 1980s game "Lunar Lander", written in BASIC. Apparently an extra GOTO statement in the game's code made this engineer believe that it was safe to land at 456 miles per hour. Perhaps it is only fitting that the new robot is named after a mythological bird that ends its life in a fiery explosion.
The spacecraft's main tool is an 8-foot aluminum-and-titanium robotic arm capable of digging trenches 2 feet deep. Once ice is exposed -- believed to be anywhere from a few inches to a foot deep -- the lander will use a powered drill bit at the end of the arm to break it up.
When asked what would happen if there were no payload in the first 2 feet of ground, Mr. Goldstein exhaled deeply, scratched the back of his head and admitted, "We'll probably be shit out of luck." His rare candor is unsurprising, considering that the Phoenix robot does not come with wheels, and cannot reposition itself after the initial landing.
"It'll be a construction zone," said mission co-leader Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis. He predicts the ice will be "as hard as a sidewalk."
Because this is highly technical jargon, please refer to the following graph for a comparison of the hardness of Martian ice against various everyday objects.
The excavated soil and ice bits will then be brought aboard Phoenix's science lab. It will be baked in miniature ovens and the vapors analyzed for organic compounds.
A quick glance at eBay reveals that EZ Bake Ovens can be purchased for as little as $10 these days (less for the government-recalled model that partially amputates fingers), so at first, it's puzzling why the Phoenix robot costs so much money. NASA has spent $420 million on this mission, not including the $100 million wasted on a cancelled prototype from NASA's "faster, better, cheaper" era, when designers in the good life felt that the best things in life were free.
It is hoped that the "harder, better, stronger, faster" era will result in fewer crashes, even if the resulting robot costs enough to feed the obese of America for at least seven weeks. The price tag certainly isn't buying longetivity:
While scientists say there's a chance Phoenix could live a month or so beyond its 90-day mission to see late summer or fall, it won't survive as long as the rovers. That's because its solar panels won't produce enough power to keep it alive during the Martian winter.
Said [mission co-leader] Arvidson: "Its feet will be embedded with dry ice and the sun will be below the horizon."
Mr. Arvidson is currently engaged in a plagiarism lawsuit for his alleged theft of a Japanese Yakuza hitman's trademarked slogan.
As prices rise, crime tipsters work overtime
tagged as newsday, mock mock, favourites | permalink | 2 comments |
We arrived at the Back Creek Inn B&B around 10:30 on a stormy Sunday morning. The little detached building on the right was our private cottage. |
Evidently, sharing the road means running over pedestrians. |
Our cottage had a king-sized bed, gas fireplace, massaging tub, shower, fridge, and microwave. I had to bring my own woman though. |
From our screened porch, we could look out across the gardens to the Chesapeake Bay. There was a dock available, in case we wanted to arrive by boat. |
Pooping is FORBIDDEN. |
All of the fire hydrants in Solomons had wildlife painted on. In the event of a fire, your home could be saved by the maximum pressure ejected from this stork's butt. |
The pastor at this church was rather worried about his personal parking space. |
Soft serve with sprinkles only ran us $2 each! |
tagged as media, day-to-day | permalink | 2 comments |
There are no spoilers in these reviews.
JUnit Recipes: Practical Methods for Programmer Testing by J. B. Rainsberger:
The BURI is still out on the penchant for publishing companies to put unrelated animals and lithographs on the covers of their technical books, but I'm leaning towards the side of "utterly retarded design decision". Thankfully, I did not need any warrior skills to benefit from this book, which is a tip-oriented cookbook of common approaches and patterns for unit testing. It's not as cover-to-cover readable as, for example, a book in the Pragmatic Programmer series, but the information is concise and jokes are thankfully relegated to footnotes.
Final Grade: B-
The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary by Eric S. Raymond:
This tiny tome contains various essays on Open Source Software (which DDMSence is an example of), with musings on the psychology behind open source developers and several open-ended questions on the economic viability of open source. Some essays are more readable than others, but even the dry ones are interesting, as long as you are interested in the field.
Final Grade: B
A New Tide by Gomez:
I picked up this CD because I liked the song, and wanted to see what they'd done more recently. This CD is very mellow and easy to listen to, with a good mix of hooks and interesting combinations of instrumentation. Samples can be heard -- I really like the timbre of the vocalist on Track 2 and 6, but dislike the whiny Rufus-Wainwright-sounding guy on Track 1 and 5.
Final Grade: B+
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(599KB GIF)
The good stuff starts on Day Four.
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The first half of the weekend was quiet and nondescript. We sat on the back porch with a pinot grigot on Friday night, diligently waiting for the cicadas to arrive, but all we saw was a fearless skunk boldly rooting around in the backyard like a truffle pig.
On Saturday, I went to Costco for the essentials, such as five pounds of steak and a new badminton net (after nine years, the original net looks like public school gym equipment). I then worked on Bugler in the afternoon while Rebecca did female stuff like yoga and haircuts. We had a late dinner at Taste of Burma and then watched 30 Rock until we fell asleep.
Sunday afternoon was the huge NOVA graduation, for which we spent a half hour sitting on Braddock Road waiting to turn left into the Patriot Center with PTSD flashbacks to the Nissan Pavilion. We were also in front of an old white guy in an Audi who became cartoonishly upset when it took five cycles to get through an intersection and smashed down on his car horn when I refused to "block the box". I gave him a Miss America hand wave out the window, and his Vesuvian blood pressure probably formed several more arteries in his chest cavity by the time we had gone through.
There were roughly 1200 students graduating on Sunday, which is apparently the largest community college graduating class in the country. I think we cheated a little though, since they bind all of the neighbouring college campuses into a loosely allied cluster of feudal city states under the Northern Virginia banner. I had a $6 box of nachos and a $4 coke to go with my $0 seat close to the action, and listened as the two of the four chosen name-callers horribly mangled any names that weren't in English or Spanish.
Getting out of the Patriot Center was much easier than getting in, and we closed out the evening with an early diner dinner at Denny's around the corner in Fairfax.
How was your weekend?
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I've owned my car for two years now. Here's how my mileage has looked over the life of the car:
Here's the raw data, which can be paged and sorted as tabular data is wont to be.
Date | Gas (gal) | Cost ($/gal) | Total Miles (mi) | MPG |
---|---|---|---|---|
5/16/2012 | 16.9 | 3.87 | 419 | 24.5 |
6/7/2012 | 15.4 | 3.6 | 744 | 21.1 |
6/18/2012 | 16.6 | 3.54 | 1119 | 22.59 |
7/1/2012 | 13.2 | 3.47 | 1424 | 23.11 |
8/9/2012 | 16.7 | 3.7 | 1787 | 21.74 |
8/29/2012 | 17 | 3.77 | 2153 | 21.53 |
9/16/2012 | 11.2 | 3.85 | 2385 | 20.71 |
10/3/2012 | 13.8 | 3.85 | 2698 | 22.68 |
10/24/2012 | 16.6 | 3.8 | 3040 | 20.6 |
11/9/2012 | 12.4 | 3.51 | 3272 | 18.71 |
11/24/2012 | 14.5 | 3.43 | 3602 | 22.76 |
12/20/2012 | 16.3 | 3.29 | 3910 | 18.9 |
1/9/2013 | 16.8 | 3.46 | 4259 | 20.77 |
1/23/2013 | 9.9 | 3.49 | 4461 | 20.4 |
2/4/2013 | 14.2 | 3.56 | 4745 | 20 |
2/24/2013 | 14.1 | 3.86 | 5014 | 19.08 |
3/7/2013 | 5.8 | 3.87 | 5119 | 18.1 |
3/10/2013 | 8.3 | 3.59 | 5341 | 26.75 |
3/27/2013 | 15.6 | 3.79 | 5690 | 22.37 |
4/17/2013 | 15.6 | 3.6 | 6019 | 21.09 |
5/14/2013 | 16.6 | 3.7 | 6349 | 19.88 |
5/25/2013 | 12.6 | 3.4 | 6621 | 21.59 |
6/13/2013 | 15.8 | 3.68 | 6956 | 21.2 |
6/28/2013 | 13.4 | 3.71 | 7271 | 23.51 |
7/13/2013 | 12.6 | 3.71 | 7555 | 22.54 |
7/20/2013 | 10.8 | 3.77 | 7838 | 26.2 |
8/11/2013 | 12.4 | 3.77 | 8074 | 19.03 |
8/27/2013 | 16.6 | 3.55 | 8452 | 22.77 |
9/15/2013 | 14.7 | 3.47 | 8766 | 21.36 |
10/6/2013 | 12.4 | 3.6 | 9028 | 21.13 |
10/21/2013 | 15.3 | 3.37 | 9349 | 20.98 |
11/8/2013 | 11.9 | 3.35 | 9577 | 19.16 |
11/14/2013 | 7.1 | 3.18 | 9731 | 21.69 |
11/20/2013 | 13.3 | 3.29 | 10078 | 26.09 |
12/6/2013 | 14.2 | 3.39 | 10407 | 23.17 |
12/18/2013 | 12.2 | 3.37 | 10649 | 19.84 |
12/30/2013 | 11.6 | 3.44 | 10918 | 23.19 |
1/20/2014 | 12.7 | 3.44 | 11143 | 17.72 |
2/11/2014 | 14 | 3.36 | 11393 | 17.86 |
3/11/2014 | 13 | 3.46 | 11618 | 17.31 |
3/21/2014 | 11.3 | 3.6 | 11864 | 21.77 |
4/1/2014 | 7 | 3.64 | 11998 | 19.14 |
4/6/2014 | 14.2 | 3.31 | 12407 | 28.8 |
4/24/2014 | 15.7 | 3.7 | 12756 | 22.23 |
5/11/2014 | 16.2 | 3.72 | 13119 | 22.41 |
Lessons Learned:
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On Saturday, May 20, 2000, Paige was in town, visiting me at my parents' house in Alexandria. I had just finished the first week of my first internship at FGM, and on the Friday before, I picked her up at a random dead end in Leesburg (her car could not travel more than 10 miles without exploding, so her parents pushed her out of their moving car on their way to locales further north).
As a native of the DC area, I had already become jaded with the tourist grandeur of the area. So, the sightseeing agenda for this day consisted of easy-to-reach landmarks along the Blue Line which, even then, was the blue-haired stepchild of the Metro system. We hit Old Town Alexandria in the morning, where I showed off the million dollar boathouse funded by the Alexandria Crew Boosters and nestled in the armpit of eight blocks of ghettos, and followed it up with a trip past Arlington Cemetery (because no one actually gets off there).
In DC proper, we went to the Smithsonian for the only exhibit worth visiting: the Insect Zoo at the Natural History Museum (sponsored at the time by Orkin). We also went to an exhibit about pianos at the American History Museum, which probably would have been more exciting had it been about brass instruments. After a classy late lunch at the Food Court in Pentagon City, we returned home to watch Usual Suspects and eat cereal.
I also may have tried to get her to read Janny Wurts, but I think she hated it like everyone else who is not specifically me.
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Blizzard's latest game, Overwatch, has its global release on Monday night, May 23 on PC, PS4, and XBone. I normally don't jump on the hype bandwagon for new games (the last game I preordered may have been the highly disappointing Ultima IX in 1999), but the hundred hours I spent playing the beta has convinced me that this is going to be a huge hit. Besides the obvious care, charm, and polish baked into the package, the game features the same addictiveness and accessibility that made World of Warcraft intriguing to gamers who wouldn't normally be interested in the genre.
Overwatch aims to do the same for first-person team shooters, where you compete in teams of 6 to accomplish different objectives. While kills and reflexes are important, coordinated teamwork is a must, and there are roles that even people with the aiming skills of North Korea can perform to help their team succeed. The heroes fall into the traditional MMO categories (tanks, damage dealers, and healers) and all 21 are varied enough to lead to unexpectedly satisfying team compositions.
You might enjoy the animated shorts that Blizzard has released to develop the lore behind the game (although the story is more for flavor than an essential part of the game). Even if you're not a gamer, you'll appreciate their high quality production:
Matches take place on well-designed maps in scenic global locales and consist of three game modes: Defenders try to prevent Attackers from capturing a control zone, both teams try to claim the same control zone (King of the Hill), or Defenders try prevent Attackers from escorting a payload to a final destination. Some maps feature a mix of these objectives. Objectives take precedence over deathmatch kills, and it doesn't matter if you've killed 20 enemies if you end up losing control of a capture zone.
Besides running, jumping, and crouching in a 3D world, each hero has a very constrained skillset, generally consisting of a primary shooting ability, a secondary shooting mode, two support skills, and an "ultimate" ability that can only be used after you've charged it up over time (not unlike heroes in Warcraft 3). This makes it easier to try out and enjoy different heroes without having to master tons of key bindings. The tutorial hero, Soldier: 76, is the most traditional hero, and a good starting point if you ever played DOOM or Team Fortress as a wee youth with a 9600 baud modem.
The game comes with a basic tutorial and then drops you straight into the action. You can opt to play against the computer to get comfortable, but this gets boring pretty quickly. I was surprised by how much more interesting the game got simply by adding unpredictable real players to the mix. Games against real people are overwhelmingly chaotic when you first start -- you will die a million times and have no idea what all of the heroes are doing to you, but you'll enjoy every second of it. The art style, sound design, and animations all blend into a giant interactive Looney Tunes cartoon.
If you're interested in playing Overwatch, you should take a look at Overwatch: A Complete Beginner's Guide. Here are a few quick tips for your first games:
Next Tuesday in Part II, I'll give a brief overview of the 21 heroes and provide some suggestions on the easiest heroes to get started with!
tagged as games | permalink | 3 comments |
On Friday afternoon, we had the entire Ahlbin family over (Ben, Anna, Ella, Rosie, Kathryn, Isaac, Felicity, and now, Gideon) for a pizza lunch and toddler dance party. They can no longer fit into normal cars and now drive a vehicle that holds 11 and looks like a cross between a SWAT team truck and a hearse.
On Friday evening, we had a family dinner at The V and then started a new puzzle (canals in Amsterdam).
On Saturday, Rebecca had to work, so Maia and I went to a nearby playground in the near-90 degree weather. I tried to teach her to express her displeasure with climate change by saying, "Boy, it's hot!" but she could only say, "Oh boy! It's hot!" We're still working on it. In the evening, we had our first barbeque of the season, featuring old work friends, our neighbours across the street, and their dog. As you can see from the photo below, our grilling experience is much brighter now that the neighbour's long-dead trees have been chopped down. Looks like it's time for a screen porch!
On Sunday, Rebecca finally got a chance to transfer her life into my old Samsung S5 phone (after having lost her iPhone in the pool last week). In the evening, Maia cooled off by playing in buckets of water and we had a dinner of pork tenderloin, weird mushrooms from the farmer's market, and kale.
How was your weekend?
tagged as day-to-day | permalink | 1 comment |
This picture was taken two years ago today, on May 20, 2018.
The AT from Route 7 to Bear's Den is normally an easy, no-drama affair. We made the mistake of trying it after a solid week's worth of rain which raised humidity levels up to 120% and converted most of the trail into interminable mudslides. Hiking in damp shoes is my least favourite activity.
Maia was 10 months old and enjoyed her first trip in the kid backpack, as well as the view (and milk break) at the top.
tagged as memories | permalink | 2 comments |
There are no major spoilers in these reviews.
The Outlaws, Season One:
This was an unexpectedly pleasant ensemble comedy about a rag-tag group of petty criminals doing community service together, with great performances from Stephen Merchant and Christopher Walken. The characters are likeable and the plot never gets too menacing or overwhelming. Its only flaw is that many of the subplot threads are dropped without resolution by the end, in favor of wrapping up the "main" storyline, so a few characters seem to have sudden character changes to align them better with that plot. On Amazon Prime.
Final Grade: B+
Modern Family, Season Eleven:
This show should have ended years ago, but it was just pleasant enough to watch when nothing else was available. In the later seasons, we found ourselves tolerating most of the B stories until the characters we actually cared about were back onscreen. That said, this is a decent final season with a finale that's the right balance of funny and sentimental.
Final Grade: B-
404 by Barns Courtney:
A nice, if a little short, follow-up to Barns Courtney's great debut album, Attractions of Youth. 99 is a good, representative track.
Final Grade: B
Reacher, Season One:
The first episode of this mystery / thriller is captivating, with a ridiculous Marty Stu trope lead character and some interesting mystery elements. It starts better than it ends, though, as the plot progression is very by-the-numbers (coincidental deaths, key intelligence popping up at just the right time). By the end, I was mainly watching for the evolving bromance between the two lead guys, and didn't care as much about the plot resolution or ultraviolent action sequences.
Final Grade: B-
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New bathroom color.
Happy and full of popcorn shrimp after Ford's Fish Shack.
Walking in Claude Moore Park.
Amber, 19 years 7 months, just after a mandatory bath.
Maia goes to the American History Museum with the grandparents.
Maia tours the latest in playground technology in Alexandria.
Newest gift from the grandparents, a mixed sand + water table with a valuable theme.
tagged as day-to-day | permalink | 1 comment |
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