For the past month or so I’ve been reading three books concurrently. While we were in Germany we picked up a copy of Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth, an epic tale of building a cathedral in 12th century England. This has become the bathroom book, and we each read a few pages every visit.
My bedroom book, which gets read for a few minutes every evening before going to sleep has been Joseph Heywood’s The Berkut. I finished that story two nights ago, so last night I picked up Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien, to restart the Lord of The Rings again.
And during lunch I’ve been reading electronic books. Just before leaving for Europe I finished rereading Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, a wickedly good take on the Dracula story. Since returning I’ve completed John Katzenbach’s Hart’s War (far better than the movie), and I’ve started The Blue Nowhere, by Jeffery Deaver.
I’m enjoying each book, and I like having plenty to read. The only trouble is keeping straight what’s happened before when I sit down with a different book. Fortunately the story lines are all different enough to help keep them separated. There are very few Hobbits hacking in the blue nowhere, and very few hackers in 12th century England. I suppose there could be Hobbits in 12th century England, but so far that hasn’t been an issue.
A fascinating look at how the process of selection works behind the scenes to make predictive models work. The author uses Wikipedia, predictive markets, and Netflix’s recommendation system as examples of processes relying upon selection to work, producing results that are counter-intuitive.
He uses these examples as excellent analogies to evolution and makes the thesis that at least some of the resistance to the theory of evolution is a result of the hard to conceptualize process of selection.
Excellent.
Star Wars, er, Harry Potter.
This afternoon, after returning from a grocery shopping trip, we discovered that the power was out. A quick trip down the side walk confirmed that it wasn’t just us, the entire complex was in the dark. Knowing that others had likely already called, I wanted to call anyway, just so I would feel like I had done something about the situation.
Using the laptop and my wireless broadband card I was able to look up the number for Kansas City Power & Light. I called and entered our phone number only to have the automated system tell me that, “no account matched that phone number.” Then Sibylle reminded me that we don’t have KCP&L anymore, we have Weststar now.
She ran upstairs and got the last billing statement, which had the “report an outage” phone number listed. I called that number and entered our account number. The automated system told me that the outage had been recorded and that based on historical records, we could expect the power to be restored within 1 1/2 to 3 hours.
No sooner had I repeated this information to Sibylle than the lights came on again. The power of a phone call.
All week long, as we have waited for the delivery of our washing machine, Sibylle and I have kidded about sitting down in the basement watching it run. You know, a pair of lawn chairs, a lamp, maybe a drink with an umbrella. Entertainment. Color television.
The delivery has been made, and the first load is now being washed as this is being typed. I’m sitting in the basement, half watching the new color tele… er, washer do it’s thing.
Really.
Follow this link to see an image that will help you determine if you are right-brained or left-brained.
I am right-brained, according to this test. After concentrating at a point just below the image for a few seconds I was able to switch to the “left” side.
I have a love-hate relationship with Zone Alarm. Operating a Windows XP machine without virus and adware/spyware protection is foolhardy at best, so I appreciate having it on my laptop as a software barrier. However, it often times gets in the way of normal operations making wish I could operate safely without it.
Recently, upon waking the ThinkPad from sleep or hibernation, I was unable to access the Internet. Email, IM, and Web browsing all refused to work. Eventually I discovered that if I stopped Zone Alarm and restarted it my connectivity would be restored.
Searching the Zone Alarm forums I discovered I wasn’t the only person with this issue. The fix (I hope) is fairly easy: add the IP addresses for your DHCP and DNS. In my case the DHCP source is my LinkSys router, and the only DNS entry I have is the DSL modem upstream from the router. Here are the steps I followed, for future reference:
Open a command prompt and type ipconfig /all. In the output of this command will be the DHCP server address, and any DNS IP addresses. Copy these.
Open Zone Alarm’s control center and go to the Firewall page. Once there open the Zones tab. At the bottom of that page click on the Add button. In the dialog that appears add the one of the IP addresses you copied in step 1.
Repeat for all the IP addresses you copied in step 1.
Apply your changes and, hopefully, in the future Zone Alarm won’t interfere with your connectivity upon waking the machine.
Many things go into the concept of home. Some are tangible, others are not. Sibylle and I have started, slowly, to make a home, together. Tonight we added something tangible to the list of home in the form of a new front-loading clothes washer.
Her townhouse in Manhattan, and the apartment I had, that we shared here in Kansas City, both had washers and dryers that belonged to the structure, and when we moved to our new townhouse we left them behind. For the past month or so we’ve been doing laundry in the Laundromat, which isn’t bad, but it isn’t great either.
The only advantage the Laundromat has is that it realizes a form of parallel processing. You can wash all five loads at the same time. Dry them simultaneously too. At home multiple loads are serialized through the single thread of one washer and one dryer. And since the washer usually takes about twice as long to rid the clothes of water as it took the washer to add, the process is throttled to the speed of your dryer.
Our search for a dryer continues, but we are both very pleased to have a washer scheduled for delivery this Friday.
Sibylle and I had a quiet weekend. Saturday was spent doing very little; we slept in late and then took a nap in the afternoon. The most ambitious thing we accomplished all day was making dinner and sitting down to watch The Full Monty while we ate.
Sunday was also laid back, although we did venture out to run some errands and to try a new Mongolian BBQ restaurant - HuHot Mongolian Grill. We both enjoyed the fare, and the chance to eat out. We did some window shopping afterwards and eventually bought groceries for the week before coming home.
After the hectic weeks of moving this summer, and then our trip to Germany, it was very nice to have an unstructured, unplanned, no-expectations weekend to just be.
Most modern browsers offer an auto-complete feature for the address bar; start typing an address and the browser offers one or more addresses that start with the same character or characters to save you from typing the entire URI. Over time your favorite sites gravitate towards the top of this auto-complete list, resulting in the ability to type just a single letter, in some cases, to get to a site. Here, then, are the top 26 sites in my version of the Internet, as determined by their first letter.
A a.wholelottanothing.org/ B bits.blogs.nytimes.com/ C cnn.com/ D daringfireball.net/ E ericalucci.com/ F flickr.com/ G google.com/ H hivelogic.com/ I idlewords.com/ J jasonsantamaria.com/ K kottke.org/ L lifehacker.com/ M mail.google.com/ N news.bbc.co.uk/ O officesnapshots.com/ P padawan.info/ Q quirksmode.org/ R randsinrepose.com/ S shawnblanc.net/ T twitter.com/ U http://www.useit.com/ V veerle.duoh.com/ W woot.com/ X x180.net/ Y yahoo.com/ Z zanshin.net/