Liebe und Frieda – love & peace. Christianity at its best.
Kathy and Michelle are in the kitchen making our easter feast. Barley and I are tired from the park. Its a beautiful day, and I feel very happy.
I’ve added pictures of Michelle and my trip to Manzanita, and from when Meghan & Troy visited. Feel free to check them out.
Tomorrow is the first day of the term. Should be busy.
Today my coworker and I installed the new Student Multimedia (formerly production) Lab computers at Rock Creek. I say computers because we forgot to bring the scanners, and the bail of cat-5 we brought for network cable turned out to be cat-3. Oh well. Guess we’ll be back tomorrow.
Rock Creek is a nice campus; very bucholic, nice and green. However, you have to drive on Hwy 26 to get there. Hwy 26 is an awful stretch of road with sprawl around it. I couldn’t work at RC because I’d have to drive on 26 each day, and with all the traffic, I’d go insane. Sprawl is bad. Tell your congress person.
I’m going to be tutoring tonight. I haven’t tutored on the side since middle/high school. I liked it then, and I’m probably better now. If you need tutoring, contact me :) I do Mac and PC.
Sorry for the downtime. We had very dear friends visiting, and I was considerate enough to turn off my computer so they could sleep peacefully. Thank goodness no one pays me to serve.
Michelle and I just spent a wonderful weekend in Manzanita, OR. The weather was perfect, and we had sun until Sunday as we were leaving. The cabins were amazing, and we were lucky enough to check in early because we found out they had forgot to mark us in the book, and were just about to give our cabin to someone else. They even gave us some truffles as a ‘we’re sorry’ gift.
Michelle is on break this week, but I’m busier than I’ve been for a while, and loving it. I’m installing new computers in the PCC libraries that have all the software any student could want. Its been a fun project, but I’ll be glad its over.
Yes, Today I was excited to finally upgrade to Windows 2000 Professional. It only took 6 months of crashing to get an upgrade. Hopefully now when I have more than 3 applications open and something happens (i.e. new mail) I won’t have to restart. Now I can print in the office across the hall instead of the printer in the back circ office. Simple pleasures are the best.
I need to look in to redirecting on this server because I’m getting lots of Nimda style requests for cmd.exe. Stupid IIS, Stupid Microsoft. These are just from people on my @home network, many of whom don’t know they have the virus. Hopefully they will be split up, and they will start making secure products. Hopefully they’ll collapse upon themselves and Apple will finally get recognition. Hopefully it will slow cookies and cream.
I’m going to Manzanita, OR with Michelle for the weekend. It should be nice, even with the rain. Enjoy your weekend.
I want to make an IBU calculator for predicting the bitterness (yes, bitterness is good) of my beers. There are plenty of quick tips in the brewing books out there, but I don’t want to have to open a book. And I want to learn to use php to do it.
I found this java applet that accomplishes the same thing. I could use it and give up this dream, but what fun would that be? We’ll see if I ever get around to it.
Word from Scott is that the wort has reached high krausen. Excellent.
Scott wants to help work on the Homebrew U site. I’ve moved it onto this server, so you can check it out if you want to. Now that its local, and I can do and say whatever I want, things will improve.
Scott and I also each brewed a batch of beer yesterday. He did an IPA, and I tried a Redhook clone recipe. I used Edinburgh yeast from White Labs to give it a full body. I’m quite excited because we’re going to take the two batches camping in April with our First Floor friends.
We made a wort chiller out of 20 feet of 3/8″ coppor tubing for about $18. It worked much better than we anticipated, and it shortened the wort cooling time down by about 90%. Some of the best $18 I’ve ever spent. You can buy one for $60 if you’d rather.
I just finished CAS 111 – Intro to Dreamweaver. I’ve used almost every other editor, but I can now say that I love Dreamweaver. Its smarter, cooler, and now that I’m used to it, sexier than any other editor.
My final project was to create a fully functioning site using all the skills I learned. I created the skeleton of a home brewing site because I have hopes that my friend Scott and I can beef it up, and even attract visitors.
It was really rewarding to actually take a class for something computer related becaue it made me slow down and look at all the features rather than quickly hunt and pick up bits as I needed them. Now all I need is the drive to rebuild this page. We’ll see..
My uncle passed away last week. I hardly knew him, except from stories my dad told me. I was upset by his death, but felt a sense of calm knowing that his life would be easier. I’m not saying he’s better off dead, but his life, and those around him were hurting. He’d given up a while ago, and had resolved himself to a life of solitairy confinement with the bottle.
When I heard of his death, I cried a little. I cried for my dad, for my grandparents, and for his wife and children. I’ll miss his voice, and I’ll miss that my father had a brother. But his death didn’t frighten me, or make me as sad as reading this.
Nuclear weapons are something that we should be ashamed of. Sure, adolecent boys often joke about nuclear this, nuclear that, but the fact that we have devloped something that can kill so many, so permenantly, and so impersonally makes me shudder. The fact that we are re-evaluation our use, or revving up our use of these weapons is what made me cry. It wouldn’t scare me as much knowing that it was truely Bush JR.’s idea, but it wasn’t. Knowing that his whole presidency is handled by much smarter, and much more ruthless people is what scares me. Knowing that people who did this want it because it will allow them to have their oil, or have their way much more quickly, and easily that before.
It scares me that in a year and a half, we could go from a president whose major shortcoming was his desire for sex (is that a shortcoming? or is the lack of self-control) to someone who could re-deploy nuclear weapons so quickly. People joke about how similar the canidates were in the last election, and they may be right. But people forget how different the people behind these canidates were, once you get beyond the canidate.
I just read a story about a firm who could test the detainees at Camp X-ray, and in Afganistan to see if the concentration of plutonium in their body was higher than the normal ambient plutonium level for humans for evidence that al-queda had access to nuclear fuel. The fact that there is a background level of plutonium in every human is scary. The reason we all have some plutonium in is the result of open-air nuclear tests earlier this century by the US Govt.
My point in all this is Nuclear Weapons are Bad. We’re already the most destructive culture in the world. We don’t need to re-involve nuclear weapons to prove it.
Peace.
Gavin Menzies will be presenting his evidence to the Royal Geographical Society (UK), where it will surely be met with skepticism. I think this sort of thing is great, and is what makes geography so much cooler than, say… Economics.
Check it out http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/primenews/story/0,1870,106236,00.html
Alan is taking shots at my site. I’d better spend some “inside” time this weekend so I don’t piss off the establishment.
The motivation for finally getting Greymatter running came from two fellow PCC employees with whom I had recently spoken to on the subject of web logs.
I think it was decided that there should be under-30 office, where all the hip employees would “work”. It would have a real internet startup feel, and “work” would always be fun. Alan took offense, being on in years, so the office would have to be under-36. We’d all have web logs that said very similar things, and we’d read each other’s logs and talk about how cool they were. I imagine it would quickly turn into gossip and slander. Blogging would soon become Blander. Maybe the under-36 office will have to wait.
Here are their blogs:
Alan: http://cordle.info (only .info user I know)
Moira: http://musings.considereddesign.com/current/ (If blogging has an establishment, she’d be blue chip)