Tonight's Big Bang Theory was not only one of the funniest episodes of a show that is consistently very funny, it contained the intersection of three of my favorite things:
Science Friday on National Public Radio;
Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica;
the word Exothermic.
Yes, in my life, it's the simple pleasures.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Sunday, November 22, 2009
It's No Goldwing
My new bike. I bought it a few weeks ago, just in time to put it into storage for the Winter. I plan on giving it a lot of use next season and a few seasons after that. Until then, I'm tripping over it in my garage.
No, it won't be replacing the Goldwing.
Somebody Had a Good Time Last Night
Up until the millisecond where it stopped being fun. I found this wreck as I was returning from the store this morning. It's on my street, about 2/10ths of a mile from my house. I don't recognize the car - it could be a neighbor's or carrying a neighbor. Both airbags deployed. They were moving pretty fast at the time of impact, especially since they were 50 feet from a T-intersection. They were headed for trouble one way or another.
I talked to the neighbor who belongs to the front yard where the car came to rest. She didn't hear anything last night. She could be a drunk for all I know, so let's assume there was some noise at the moment of impact and probably some ambulance and constabulary noises. Doesn't look like there would have been any tire screeching, though - no skid marks. I think the driver's window was down intentionally, as there is no broken glass.
That's a funny place to park a car.
The fact there is no water in this photograph is a testament to the strength of the fire hydrants in Minnetonka.
The passenger airbag broke the the windshield and knocked the rear-view mirror loose.
I talked to the neighbor who belongs to the front yard where the car came to rest. She didn't hear anything last night. She could be a drunk for all I know, so let's assume there was some noise at the moment of impact and probably some ambulance and constabulary noises. Doesn't look like there would have been any tire screeching, though - no skid marks. I think the driver's window was down intentionally, as there is no broken glass.
That's a funny place to park a car.
The fact there is no water in this photograph is a testament to the strength of the fire hydrants in Minnetonka.
The passenger airbag broke the the windshield and knocked the rear-view mirror loose.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
1000 and Still Dropping
My quest to listen to every song in my music collection is progressing nicely. Over the weekend the number remaining dropped below 1000. At the time I ran a new calculation to project when I'll hit zero and it came out as December 3, same as when I calculated on October 29. I must have picked up the pace the last couple of days as I'm down to 725 today and the new projection is December 1. Maybe with the holiday weekend in there, I might increase my burn rate even further and hit zero in late November.
Hey, it's my hobby. I don't care if I'm boring you.
The odds of who will play the last song have shifted since the last post. The artist with most songs remaining is...Kathy Mattea. Hey, where have I heard that name recently? Chicago, Debbie Gibson, Toto, the Eagles and Kylie Minogue are a little behind. Most of the remaining artists have only one or two songs left in the unplayed list.
I'm afraid “One (is the Loneliest Number)” by Three Dog Night has already played but it would be real cool if that had turned out to be the final song.
Hey, it's my hobby. I don't care if I'm boring you.
The odds of who will play the last song have shifted since the last post. The artist with most songs remaining is...Kathy Mattea. Hey, where have I heard that name recently? Chicago, Debbie Gibson, Toto, the Eagles and Kylie Minogue are a little behind. Most of the remaining artists have only one or two songs left in the unplayed list.
I'm afraid “One (is the Loneliest Number)” by Three Dog Night has already played but it would be real cool if that had turned out to be the final song.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Kathy Mattea
This is weird. I'm sitting here writing my movie blog and listening to music. "Summer of My Dreams" by Kathy Mattea comes on and I think, "I've got a date with her this weekend." I actually do. She's doing a concert with the Minnesota Orchestra on Saturday and playing a regular show on Sunday. I have tickets to both.
Then my phone beeps. It's a voice mail from Orchestra Hall saying that the KM shows are postponed due to illness. Postponed to next June. Wow. Shocking news.
Wait. I was listening to Kathy Mattea sing about Summer while I was daydreaming about her concerts and I get a message saying the concerts are postponed until Summer. My imagination is not so good that I could make this stuff up.
Then my phone beeps. It's a voice mail from Orchestra Hall saying that the KM shows are postponed due to illness. Postponed to next June. Wow. Shocking news.
Wait. I was listening to Kathy Mattea sing about Summer while I was daydreaming about her concerts and I get a message saying the concerts are postponed until Summer. My imagination is not so good that I could make this stuff up.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
2000 and Dropping Fast
No, I'm not talking about the NASDAQ index, but rather how many songs I have to listen to in order to have heard them all.
I built a new computer last Spring and loaded my digital music collection on it - you can read a few posts about it from the June 2009 archives. I use iTunes and an iPod to listen to the music. When I migrated to the new computer, I lost all history, so I'm taking the opportunity to listen to every song once before spooling up my usual low-effort playlist. That playlist plays songs randomly but excludes songs that haven't been played in the last four months.
I started on June 14. I don't know the exact count of songs at that time because I frequently add and delete, but today, excluding podcasts and comedy albums, I have 9875 song files. Every day when I go to work, I listen to the playlist - I named it “Breaking In” - that randomly selects songs and deletes them from the list after they've been played once. As of this morning, the count remaining was 1995.
It took me 138 days to get below 2000. At that rate of usage, it will take another 35 days to get down to zero. That's December 3. After that, I'll go back to my usual low-effort playlist. I may have to adjust it a little, because if I used it today, there would be a whopping 717 songs on it that were not played in the last four months.
What will be the last song to get its first play? Well, that's anyone's guess but I know (9875-1995=) 7880 songs that it won't be. It has the highest chance of being a song by Chicago. I have 37 Chicago songs remaining. Chicago+The Beatles+Toto equals a cool hundred, or slightly more than 5% of the 1995. Adding Debbie Gibson, Kathy Mattea, The Bangles, Bob Seger and The Eagles gives us another hundred. Those eight artists have a 10% probability of performing the final song but since it's random, it could be any of the 1995 left. I'll find out on or about December 3.
For the detail oriented, the shortest song in my collection is the closing theme to “WKRP in Cincinnati,” clocking in at 28 seconds. The longest file is “Glad” & “Freedom Rider” from a live album by Traffic, at 20:59. Traffic tends to jam on their live stuff and this file is two songs joined together that really couldn't be separated. The longest single song in the collection is “Alice's Restaurant” by Arlo Guthrie, clocking in at 18:09.
I haven't just been listening to the songs that have never been played. I occasionally listen to albums and sometimes by whim. The most listened to song since June 14 is “Save it for a Rainy Day” by Minneapolis' own Jayhawks, with a playcount of six. Three songs are tied at five. Two of those are due to a saxophone jag I went on last month. “How Bad Do You Want It?” by Don Henley and “Wooly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs both have great sax. Shannon Curfman's “I Don't Make Promises (I Can't Break)” rounds out the five-count tunes. I have 20 songs with a playcount of four.
I built a new computer last Spring and loaded my digital music collection on it - you can read a few posts about it from the June 2009 archives. I use iTunes and an iPod to listen to the music. When I migrated to the new computer, I lost all history, so I'm taking the opportunity to listen to every song once before spooling up my usual low-effort playlist. That playlist plays songs randomly but excludes songs that haven't been played in the last four months.
I started on June 14. I don't know the exact count of songs at that time because I frequently add and delete, but today, excluding podcasts and comedy albums, I have 9875 song files. Every day when I go to work, I listen to the playlist - I named it “Breaking In” - that randomly selects songs and deletes them from the list after they've been played once. As of this morning, the count remaining was 1995.
It took me 138 days to get below 2000. At that rate of usage, it will take another 35 days to get down to zero. That's December 3. After that, I'll go back to my usual low-effort playlist. I may have to adjust it a little, because if I used it today, there would be a whopping 717 songs on it that were not played in the last four months.
What will be the last song to get its first play? Well, that's anyone's guess but I know (9875-1995=) 7880 songs that it won't be. It has the highest chance of being a song by Chicago. I have 37 Chicago songs remaining. Chicago+The Beatles+Toto equals a cool hundred, or slightly more than 5% of the 1995. Adding Debbie Gibson, Kathy Mattea, The Bangles, Bob Seger and The Eagles gives us another hundred. Those eight artists have a 10% probability of performing the final song but since it's random, it could be any of the 1995 left. I'll find out on or about December 3.
For the detail oriented, the shortest song in my collection is the closing theme to “WKRP in Cincinnati,” clocking in at 28 seconds. The longest file is “Glad” & “Freedom Rider” from a live album by Traffic, at 20:59. Traffic tends to jam on their live stuff and this file is two songs joined together that really couldn't be separated. The longest single song in the collection is “Alice's Restaurant” by Arlo Guthrie, clocking in at 18:09.
I haven't just been listening to the songs that have never been played. I occasionally listen to albums and sometimes by whim. The most listened to song since June 14 is “Save it for a Rainy Day” by Minneapolis' own Jayhawks, with a playcount of six. Three songs are tied at five. Two of those are due to a saxophone jag I went on last month. “How Bad Do You Want It?” by Don Henley and “Wooly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs both have great sax. Shannon Curfman's “I Don't Make Promises (I Can't Break)” rounds out the five-count tunes. I have 20 songs with a playcount of four.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
A Race Against NaCl
I bought my 1995 S10 in January 1997, with 33,000 miles on it. It hit 150,000 this past summer. It was the nicest vehicle I had ever owned at the time so I began maintaining it with an eye towards getting 200,000 miles out of it.
Before I continue, let me throw a little geek at you. I keep a spreadsheet tracking gas usage, maintenance and the like. On one of the tabs is a grid of how many miles are on the odometer on the first of the month. From that, I do a calculation that projects how many miles I will drive in the next year based on miles driven in the past three years. It's just for fun, but can be quite illustrative.
When I bought the S10, I lived in Alpharetta, Georgia and worked about 25 miles away in Free Home (Next to Magnolia Interiors on Hwy 20. Hi Blake!). That 50 mile daily round trip gave me a 20,000 mile annual usage. I figured I'd hit 200k in 2005. That pace lasted only two years, as I moved back to Minnesota and, after bunking at my sister T's for half a year, I rented an apartment 0.6 miles from my employer. That lasted two years, when my employer moved their offices to a location 0.5 miles from my residence. I kept that apartment for another five years.
Having a negligible commute really cuts down on the miles so my floating annual average settled down to between 3500 and 4000. That pushes my current projected date to hit 200,000 to May 5, 2017, or as I keep track of time, Jackie Prescott's 44th birthday. Well, it will likely go past Jackie's 44th, as I have a round trip to Florida from 2007 pushing up the three-year average.
However.
Maintaining the engine, transmission, etc, is only going to get me so far. Although I have tried to keep the body clean for the most part, I have not rigorously washed it. And in Minnesota, they coat the roads with salt to melt ice to make it safer for us to drive. While I appreciate safe roads, the sodium and chloride molecules are very sociable and like to introduce oxygen molecules to the iron molecules in the steel of the body. In other words, rust.
My S10 has the cancer.
Rust is a fatal disease for a car. It is now a matter of time before the rust is so bad that the well-maintained mechanicals are irrelevant. May 5, 2017? The rust is so bad that Jackie Prescott may still be in her child-bearing years when the S10 is ruled inoperable. Take a look, below.
Oh, and it's been since September 1994 since I've seen Jackie but she was hot enough to remember. And given how I remember minutiae, it's easy to remember someone's birthday for no particular reason. If there was, for example, a major, festive North American holiday or something on May 5, I might use that to keep track of time instead, but alas, I cannot think of one.
Before I continue, let me throw a little geek at you. I keep a spreadsheet tracking gas usage, maintenance and the like. On one of the tabs is a grid of how many miles are on the odometer on the first of the month. From that, I do a calculation that projects how many miles I will drive in the next year based on miles driven in the past three years. It's just for fun, but can be quite illustrative.
When I bought the S10, I lived in Alpharetta, Georgia and worked about 25 miles away in Free Home (Next to Magnolia Interiors on Hwy 20. Hi Blake!). That 50 mile daily round trip gave me a 20,000 mile annual usage. I figured I'd hit 200k in 2005. That pace lasted only two years, as I moved back to Minnesota and, after bunking at my sister T's for half a year, I rented an apartment 0.6 miles from my employer. That lasted two years, when my employer moved their offices to a location 0.5 miles from my residence. I kept that apartment for another five years.
Having a negligible commute really cuts down on the miles so my floating annual average settled down to between 3500 and 4000. That pushes my current projected date to hit 200,000 to May 5, 2017, or as I keep track of time, Jackie Prescott's 44th birthday. Well, it will likely go past Jackie's 44th, as I have a round trip to Florida from 2007 pushing up the three-year average.
However.
Maintaining the engine, transmission, etc, is only going to get me so far. Although I have tried to keep the body clean for the most part, I have not rigorously washed it. And in Minnesota, they coat the roads with salt to melt ice to make it safer for us to drive. While I appreciate safe roads, the sodium and chloride molecules are very sociable and like to introduce oxygen molecules to the iron molecules in the steel of the body. In other words, rust.
My S10 has the cancer.
Rust is a fatal disease for a car. It is now a matter of time before the rust is so bad that the well-maintained mechanicals are irrelevant. May 5, 2017? The rust is so bad that Jackie Prescott may still be in her child-bearing years when the S10 is ruled inoperable. Take a look, below.
Oh, and it's been since September 1994 since I've seen Jackie but she was hot enough to remember. And given how I remember minutiae, it's easy to remember someone's birthday for no particular reason. If there was, for example, a major, festive North American holiday or something on May 5, I might use that to keep track of time instead, but alas, I cannot think of one.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Insulation Works
I have a very nice camera. I am a lousy photographer but I have a nice camera. Doesn't matter, since I didn't have it with me this morning. Could've used it. If I could have snapped a picture, I would just post it and save me from writing this. I'll try to keep it under 1000 words.
There was frost on the pumpkins this morning, as well as on roofs. I left for work this morning before the sun rose and before the air started warming up. The frost on the roof of my building seemed to be melting only due to the heat coming up from the living units below.
But not my unit. I had 13" of insulation added to my attic space last fall over the existing 6-8" that came with the place. I assume none of my neighbors have done likewise. While my roof had a thick layer of frost on it, except near the bathroom exhaust fan vent, my neighbors all had wet, drippy layers of dew. I assume that at some point in the night, we all started with identical layers of frost but theirs were melted by heat loss. My attic, adequately insulated, preserved the frost.
Since the insulation wasn't free, it's good to be able to see evidence that it is working. I'm saving money on heating and cooling, and presumably extending the life of my furnace and air conditioning.
But before I get all high and mighty, it's important to remember that all the insulation in the world isn't going to change the fact that I need to lose 50 lbs. It's good to have perspective even if you don't need to turn the furnace on.
There was frost on the pumpkins this morning, as well as on roofs. I left for work this morning before the sun rose and before the air started warming up. The frost on the roof of my building seemed to be melting only due to the heat coming up from the living units below.
But not my unit. I had 13" of insulation added to my attic space last fall over the existing 6-8" that came with the place. I assume none of my neighbors have done likewise. While my roof had a thick layer of frost on it, except near the bathroom exhaust fan vent, my neighbors all had wet, drippy layers of dew. I assume that at some point in the night, we all started with identical layers of frost but theirs were melted by heat loss. My attic, adequately insulated, preserved the frost.
Since the insulation wasn't free, it's good to be able to see evidence that it is working. I'm saving money on heating and cooling, and presumably extending the life of my furnace and air conditioning.
But before I get all high and mighty, it's important to remember that all the insulation in the world isn't going to change the fact that I need to lose 50 lbs. It's good to have perspective even if you don't need to turn the furnace on.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
An Apple a Day
It is apple season in Minnesota, so I decided to buy some this morning and made a trip to my local Rainbow Foods store. Here is what I found.
Macintosh from Michigan
Courtland, also from Michigan
Pink Lady from Washington
Honey Crisp from New York
Oddly, Honey Crisps are my favorite and were created at the University of Minnesota Arboretum but we have to import them from New York? That's just wrong.
Macintosh from Michigan
Courtland, also from Michigan
Pink Lady from Washington
Honey Crisp from New York
Oddly, Honey Crisps are my favorite and were created at the University of Minnesota Arboretum but we have to import them from New York? That's just wrong.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Painting, Again
For those of you that have visited me in the past six months, you're familiar with the 2'x2' patches of beige paint on the delightful lime sherbet-colored walls in my kitchen and powder room. This afternoon I took steps to turn the entire walls into the beige color. Yay me!
Step one was removing the trim. The upper trim on the kitchen wall broke as it came off, so replacing and upgrading is in store for that. Not a big deal. The baseboard trim gave me a little trouble but it's not fatal, either. When I redid the entry-way last Winter, I upgraded, so I have some pretty good lengths of spare trim which I can cannibalize.
The people that owned the house prior to me, in addition to having questionable taste in paint colors, had the original vinyl floor in the kitchen replaced with laminate at some point in their ownership and they didn't remove the baseboard trim. That means, in addition to a visible wall-to-floor joint, I had to wrestle with the small pieces of rim abutting the cupboard. The layout of the flooring and trim is not the way I would do it and I'm notorious for using shortcuts, so you know it's bad. It may accelerate my plans to put tile on the kitchen floor, or I could just get used to it. Even money on that bet.
There is a lot of surface prep to do before primer hits wall, so it will be next weekend at the earliest before I dig out the paint brushes. When this project is done, which I still hope will be in 2009, I will start the kitchen backsplash project. No guarantees though that the backsplash will be done, or even started, it 2009.
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