I got an email from Alexander Pope today.
Can you believe my disappointment when I opened the email to find only spam? I was really hoping that I’d have a chance for enlightenment first thing this morning from a man of the Age of Reason. Bummer.
Craig’s Birds has some pretty cool photos. I’m not a birder, though I have an ornithologist friend (Hi Susan, I owe you an email) who taught me the value of pishing in the woods. If you click on that link, by the way, be prepared to blink a few times in the presence of the face of, presumably, Ryan Zimmerling.
Other than that, this was just a small post to note that I missed not seeing cardinals this winter. They’re the state bird in Ohio so they’re everywhere (because they’re the state bird? or did the cardinals come first? who really knows).
Utah’s state bird is the seagull. I definitely see them all over the place. But we had seagulls in Ohio (at least near Lake Erie). Why can’t there be flashy fluffs of red flying around my backyard here? Boo. At least there are robins in the area.
On a very I’m-a-boring-grownup-now note, the daffodils started to bloom in our front yard yesterday. It was pretty cool to see a hint of yellow when I left for work and a lot more yellow when I came home.
Dammit! My left speaker just died. This is just under 24 hours after my iPod (30G I bought in August) froze up AGAIN. Only this time, I can’t rescue it right away because I don’t have a direct power source, only the USB cable to charge and sync it to my computer.
Why don’t I have a direct power source? My dad bought me an iPod dock in the shape of a yellow VW Bug for Christmas (from Sharper Image) and it stopped working a couple weeks ago.
Fuck you, technology. I’m up too early this morning to be dealing with you, anyway.
Yesterday it was 70 degrees and sunny here in Utah Valley. I walked barefoot on the grass in my yard, then I went for a walk on a Hobble Creek Canyon trail with my dad and his dog and it was simply gorgeous. Oh, mid-March weather, please say you’ll stay this way!
We kept the windows cracked last night to relish the fresh air… but it was definitely too-cold-to-get-up this morning. Yeah, so it dropped down to near freezing last night. This mountain-desert weather throws me sometimes, but I still prefer it to perma-cloudy Cincinnati, with its 45 degrees or 85 degrees with 95% humidity all the time. I do, however, miss the Cleveland snow belt weather, with the 1 to 2-foot dumps of lake-effect snow. Frosty!
It’s cool and sunny right now and quite humid today at 54%. Relatively speaking.
My friend hud_callahan is taking a math class this summer so that he can teach eighth grade math next year, and he keeps mentioning polynomials in his excitement. His latest blog entry reminded me that Ben likes to use this phrase when I correct his uncaring grammatical structures and/or pronunciation:
“You say tomato, I say fourth degree polynomials.”
The HD-DVD and Blu-Ray format war is on. I didn’t really care about it until we got a monster of tv with HD capabilities… and it still was a “maybe someday” luxury in the back of my mind at that point.
Then we got a three-month trial deal for HDTV. OMFG.
Granted, there are only a handful of channels that actually broadcast in HD, and Ben and I have never been huge watchers of the television. We go in spurts (like watching Heroes in drippingly detailed loveliness, and I’m just trying to not think about it until new episodes return on April 23). Last week we signed up for the free two-week trial of Blockbuster’s Total Access, their answer to Netflix. They offer some HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs in the plan.
What’s a geek to do? History is repeating itself and it’s VHS vs. Betamax. It’s the freakin’ Marvel Civil War, and I’m a freakin’ Switzerland who wants to be involved but finding little solace in neutrality. I want to involve myself, but I don’t want to choose a side that will end up losing. I remember going to the Perry Public Library around 1986 when they had a small movie selection with both VHS and Beta. My family had just purchased a VHS player and every time we went to the library, I pined for a Beta player so that we could borrow Mary Poppins. Don’t worry, I saw it eventually. But what a scarring memory, you know?
So I’m glad that capitalism is stepping in before this thing gets out of hand. HP and LG have both announced DVD players that will work with both formats. They’re still in production, though, and I’ll probably wait to purchase one until they come down in price and get some of the kinks worked out.
What have we learned from all of this? At least Sony didn’t start out this war with a name like Beta, which was clearly destined for second place. Maybe this time they’ll pull through.
I’d still prefer a Wii to a PS3, though. And I’d prefer not to wait any longer… but I am. Stupid non-discounted bundles with games I don’t really want that are making me wait until I can find one a la carte.
Happy Pi Day!
Today’s the perfect day to finally memorize Pi to at least 10 digits to honestly take that extra point on the geek test! Say it with me: 3.1415926535
It’s easy to remember the numbers. You should have learned at least up to 3.14159 in school. After that, it’s 265, which is similar to Indianapolis’ area code 765… and then 35, which is the minimum age for the President of the United States. Also possibly the minimum IQ, if you have enough of Daddy’s Texas oil money to buy your position.
Ahem. So make that goal for today! Learn Pi to 10 digits! You just don’t know how handy that knowledge is in real life.
Oh, and some pouty, horny guys apparently ignored the fact that today is a national math holiday and thought they would be clever by naming it Steak & BJ Day (NSFW, duh).
Okay, one last entry for this morning.
All geeks worth their NaCl know that Pi Day is celebrated on 3/14 every year. For some reason, it’s considered Breaking News on Lycos where, better yet, the title of the AP story even has a parenthetical “Get it?” to ensure the general population that they’re being let in on a cute joke for math geeks.
Durrrrrrr…..
Yet in the article, the date is explained with the afternote “Obviously.” The author, Erin McClam, clearly assumes (as she should) that her readers have passed at least one high school math class. Yahoo’s title for the same story is “Pi fans have their day” which I like much better. I found the Lycos article because I was looking for a news link with less ads than Yahoo annoyingly has on every page.
To first approximate Pi, Archimedes used the method of exhaustion. I sometimes exhaust myself when trying to understand the general public.
This one’s a winner because:
1) I haven’t seen it before.
2) It’s in Norwegian (don’t worry, it’s also subtitled in English and Danish).
3) The thematic content includes a book, a geek and an average user… all set in a dank medieval room!
I’ve had a bad cold the last few days, and it really sucks. I don’t normally get sick (or “fall ill” or seem “under the weather,” depending on your preferred phrase) so I don’t know if I’ve just been a baby or if virii can really make me feel like this particular strain of shit.
The natural choice for the title of this journal entry was “SIck as a Dog,” which just got me thinking about the etymology of the phrase. I did some light Internet research as usual, and in the process discovered that horses can’t puke. Ladies and Gentlenerds, THAT is how to become versed in useless trivia. Well, perhaps not useless if you are an equestrian aficionado or a veterinarian. I found a tolerable etymological answer on World Wide Words, where I’ve found some interesting tidbits before.
There’s also this kid-friendly explanation of the meaning from kidshealth.org: “If you’ve ever been very sick, you may have used this expression. Because dogs eat just about anything they find, they often get sick. So it’s fitting to describe someone who is not feeling well as being “sick as a dog.” Arf!”
That was a fun little piece of journalism. I think I’m going to end this blog with some onomatopoeia related to being sick. Barf!
