I can't get this stupid little song out of my head. How embarrassing.

This being a college campus, I'd sort of assume that basic math skills would be relatively prevalent.

I just bought a coffee and a sandwich at a local shop, and there was a sign on the cash register saying "NEED $1 SINGLES PLEASE!" My total was $6.26. I looked through my cash, and I had a couple of twenties and a few singles, so I gave the girl a twenty, two singles, and a penny.

She took it all very uncertainly, and looked at me like I'd done something wrong. I just looked back at her expectantly. "Did you mean to give me two dollar bills?" "Yes, the sign says you need singles, I'm trying to help you out."

"But this won't...." she started. I said "just enter that in the cash register and you'll see what I mean."

When she did, and the $15.75 change amount displayed, she looked at me like I was a miracle worker, or something.

*sigh*

After too many dry and tough ones, we finally hit on the right way to cook pork rib chops.

I was always a little leery of pan-cooking these things, since it's so hard to get thick meat to cook properly all the way through. But we found a promising recipe and it worked very, very well. It involved searing the chops for about three minutes on each side in a bit of olive oil, and adding about 3 tbs of butter and three smashed garlic cloves to the pan about half way through. The pan is then tilted and the butter and renderings ladled over the chops to baste them. For once, we let them rest properly afterwards, too, for almost ten minutes.

After pouring off most of the butter and renderings, we deglazed the pan with some red wine to make a bit of a sauce to put on top, and served them over sauteéd apples and radicchio.

The crust was lovely and they were at just about the right doneness. The apples added the right amount of brightness to an otherwise fairly heavily-flavored chop.

We'll definitely be doing that one again. The only real problem was the stove got grease-spattered pretty badly, which is never fun to clean up.

I'm not sure what was going on in downtown Champaign last night. I thought we might have lost the basketball game, which had people in bad moods, but we actually beat Wisconsin, so the mood should have been more upbeat.

sudbla and I were driving to meet a friend for dinner. In the busy downtown area, I made a right turn and had to immediately stop because there was someone in a crosswalk going across the street. I was nearly actually at a stop when he turned, pointed both arms at me, and yelled "STOP! JUST FUCKING STOP! I'M CROSSING THE STREET!"

I probably shouldn't have engaged him, but since I WAS stopped, I rolled down my window and said "Dude, I did stop. Just relax." His response was still going on and fading away behind us as I drove away. "FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU, YOU ASSHOLE! YOU'RE A FUCKING ASSHOLE!"

Slightly shaken by this, I made another right and parked, and we got out of the car and walked across the street to the restaurant. A car came up right behind us and there was a loud horn blast. Startled, both sudbla and I whirled around and raised our middle fingers at the inconsideration. Once again, we were met with the response from the angry driver of the car, a woman this time. "FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU!"

I always forget that what I'd like to do in situations like that is to stop and stand in front of the car, further delaying them, but that probably would be risky because someone in that kind of mood might actually dare to step on the gas and hit me.

It was just really disorienting, though. I've not seen that kind of blatantly angry behavior around here in a while; to have it happen twice in a matter of minutes... I hope it isn't just people on edge because of the economy or something. I was actually a little shell-shocked and when it came time to leave the restaurant I almost didn't want to walk back out into the street.

Five years ago, Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars. While they're getting pretty broken down and rickety, they're still functioning despite their expected lifetime of a few months. This is an amazing testament to these vehicles roaming around another planet and to the people here on earth controlling and maintaining them.

I watched a TV special on the rovers, and it ended with surprising poignancy. I thought it was very touching that these normally down-to-earth scientists and technicians were speaking about the rovers very personably, as if they were more like beloved pets. It made me a little emotional myself.

The show ended with this dialog:

Ashley Stroupe: These rovers are pretty old, now. They're getting kind of arthritic; they don't see so well any more because the cameras are getting more and more coated with dust so their vision's getting a little fuzzy.

Together, they've explored Mars in a way that no planet other than earth has ever been explored. And those who work with them have given up trying to predict when their mission will finally end.

Steve Squyres: They're gonna die when they die. You know, at this point, every day's a gift. We just push the vehicles as hard as we can, enjoy them while we've got them, and some day they're gonna die and I don't know when.

However this adventure ends, their legacy is assured. They've returned hundreds of thousands of images, enough data on martian water history to keep scientists busy for decades. And their most important work may be yet to come.

I used to have this naïve idea that at some point we'd be able to sit back and fold our arms and say "yeah, well we did it. We learned everything we can about Mars with these rovers." I don't think that's going to happen.

But then, there are scenarios in which the rover is still alive, but it can't do much useful science any more. And you'd like to think at that point, well, you turn it off. Well, you can't turn them off. They don't have an off switch. If you build a piece of hardware with an off switch you might accidentally hit that off switch when you don't mean to, and you don't want to do that. So we have no way to turn them off. There's not a command that we can send that says, okay, *click*, you're done.

And so, as long as the rovers are alive, they'll wake up every morning when the sun hits their solar panels. And they'll call home and await instructions, whether anyone is listening or not.

And long after their circuit boards have given out, they'll be sitting on the surface of a planet where little has changed for billions of years.

It's cold, it's dry, there's no vegetation, they're not going to rust or anything like that. You know, these things could be still sitting there with their aluminum surfaces still shiny a million years from now. They're going to last a long long time. Longer than most things that humans have ever built.

Despite my WM6 smartphone seeming less and less shiny since I got an iPod Touch and am using it for almost everything except actually making phone calls, I was poking around on the net for news about it last night, and was horrified to discover that there have been major software and feature upgrades available for over six months now.

I was pissed about this because "Windows Update" on the phone was returning nothing and Sprint's web site seems to have totally forgotten that this phone model exists. But going to the web site of the phones manufacturer, HTC, revealed a new firmward download. It took my ROM version from 2.09 to 3.56, and now I have EVDO rev A, plus GPS (I had no idea this phone even had GPS hardware; the previous software load didn't acknowledge it and the phone's hardware specs don't mention it). Windows Mobile 6.1 fixes a bunch of bugs, makes available a bunch of features I used to use third-party add-ons for, and generally runs faster and looks better. There's even a GPS navigation program that seems to work fairly well, although I haven't tried it out and about yet. And something called "Sprint TV" which downloads live video content over the air. Despite it mentioning things like the Discovery Channel, NBC, and CNN, this isn't nearly as useful as that since it's all just clips, really.

And to think I was missing this for all this time.

Does anyone know how to produce a local on-disk copy of a song that can be streamed, but not downloaded, from the Myspace music player? Besides some kind of external analog coupling, I mean.

It's almost New Years and I'm thinking about the two years I celebrated it at Toad in Cambridge where Guitarzan was playing. And I'd like to carry a couple of their songs around with me on my iPod.

I just got email from someone in a working group I'm on saying that the weekly conference call this Thursday is being canceled.

To me this is just cluttering my inbox.

Merry Christmas though!

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

I tried to learn a little Hawaiian while in Kauai. The most interesting thing I've discovered so far about the language is that nouns are the same in both singular and plural. Instead, there are different forms of articles that convey the quantity of the associated noun.

• Ke Honu - the sea turtle
• Nā Honu - the sea turtles
• Ke Pali - the cliff
• Nā Pali - the cliffs

Hence the Nā Pali coast, you see.

Giant "evil" hosting organization McColo was disconnected by both its network service providers yesterday. It's almost horrifying to imagine a hosting company that actively marketed itself as a safe haven for spammers, botnet command-and-control, malware distribution, and child pornography.

McColo used Hurricane Electric and Global Crossing as network providers, both of which responded to increasing pressure from the community and the press to act. Both did so on Tuesday, and this company is now off the net completely, at least for now.

The resulting impact on the amount of Internet-wide spam has been stunning. Some data shows that nearly HALF of ALL spam came from this company, either directly or as a result of command-and-control of botnets worldwide. The effect was obvious on our own spam control system, as demonstrated by these performance graphs.

We can certainly hope that this impact is at least semi-permanent, but this kind of illegal scam/spam/botnet stuff is just too lucrative for the people running them to just roll over and take this. But at least for now, it's fun to gloat over the demise of McColo.

There was a minor disaster in downtown Champaign Friday morning. An historic, 130-year-old building that was being renovated into lofts burned to the ground. Apparently it collapsed into the street just moments after the firefighters arrived, and then the massed pile of wood burned like a giant bonfire for an hour before they got it under control and extinguished.

Picture gallery here.

Flames roared a hundred feet into the air, the heat cracking windows in businesses nearby. Some ancillary fires got started from direct heat and hot embers, but apparently these all got extinguished before any kind of damage could be done.

The fire was immediately across the street from the building where our new home will be, so we are very concerned about this. The south side of the building has been mostly finished on the exterior, so the fire, just a few feet away, shattered glass and scorched and discolored brick. The whole area looks like it's been bombed out, and crews were still working this afternoon to clean up the street and sidewalk.

What this is going to do to any move-in dates, nevermind the integrity of the building, is really worrying us. Thankfully, none of the building HVAC is functioning yet, or at least is not running, so no smoke got sucked into the interior like several other apartment buildings and businesses downtown. And our apartment is quite a ways away from the fire, so whatever damage occurred should not have affected us. But they will probably have to stall construction to do inspections for fire and heat damage.

I hope this whole move isn't, like, jinxed, or something. Having to move and sell a house in the middle of a nationwide economic crisis is bad enough.

Michael Crichton died? I guess I missed that news among the din of the election results.

This makes me really sad. While his later stuff was kind of formulaic and crappy, much of his earlier medical fiction was quite relevant and gripping, including one of my very favorite cautionary tales of biology, The Andromeda Strain.

"Today, I was a candidate for the highest office in the country I love so much, and tonight, I remain her servant," McCain said.

That, I have to say, is pretty classy.

Tony Perkins, the president of the Christian right’s most powerful Beltway lobbying outfit, Family Research Council, echoed Colson’s language. “It’s more important than the presidential election,” Perkins said of Prop 8. "The nation cannot survive without the institution of marriage."

I can't even believe I'm reading this.

Since the early 90's I've had a 75-gallon freshwater aquarium. I've always really loved Black Ghost Knife fishes, since I find their movement really graceful and I'm fascinated by their weak electrical activity. Normally they don't get along so well together since they are aggressive feeders and fight, but the very smart pet store owner in town suggested that if I added a LOT of young ones to the tank at the same time, that they would school instead of fighting, and he turned out to be right about that.

So in addition to the first ghost knife that we got in about 1992 or so, we had seven more from about 1993-4. They all survived a move to the current house in 1995 and while I would lose one from time to time since then, they proved remarkably hardy and long-lived.

The last two died within hours of each other, while I am out of town all week no less. sudbla buried them both in the garden, which is a tradition I have for all dead fish so they can do one last good for me as fertilizer.

So now the big tank is empty, and I think I will drain it, clean it up, and sell it. I don't really want to move it to the new place. I have a smaller 25-gallon tank which I will move, though.

Normally the death of pets really upsets me, but these guys were SO OLD (the big one that just died was nearly 17 years old) that I really can't blame myself for it. They just died of old age. Also, unlike a mammilian pet, it's hard or impossible to get an emotional bond with a fish, and that too limits the sense of loss. The worst part will be the end of the nightly ritual of feeding them, which I've done countless thousands of times.

Rest in peace, guys. You were great pets for a HUGE chunk of my life.