Martians Retreat, Earth Wins!

Since the temp had cooled off last night, I figured that I’d be pretty safe from the mosquitoes. So I took the telescope out to have a look at Mars. Well, the mosquitoes were still alive and well and now, more fed. But I did get a decent look at the red planet. The telescope magnified it just enough to be able to make out the white of the southern ice cap and the dark streaks of the Terra Meridiani and the area around the Hellas Basin. Not bad. I think I’ll try hooking up the camera sometime in the next few nights and see if I can get any sort of decent picture.

Also, spent the evening the night before last ripping, cutting, remixing, encoding, and burning the recording of the Cats show from the Ann Arbor Summer Festival. Surprisingly, the sound (which was taken directly from the mix board) came out pretty well. The best part is that we now have a decent recording of “Come Dance With Me”, one of the Mike Sasena originals which had never been preserved in any of our other recording sessions.

Curiouser and curiouser

I think I need to adopt a new philosophy when working on the house… I’ll only be surprised when I uncover things that were done right. Spent much of the day today under the house, clearing out boots, jars, cinderblock, rotten wood, in order to reroute the 240 volt line to the new location of the dryer. Finding out which fuse controlled the power to the outlet necessitated pulling every fuse in the box and then going around the house to figure out which outlets and lights were connected to which circuits. Then I got to drill holes. I figure it’s about time that make the dryer vent to the outside rather than into the back sunroom (which has become a haven for all kinds of molds, spores, and fungii). Also pulled some more siding and paneling down from the walls in the backroom, bringing me closer to putting up the new interior wall and making a separated laundry room.

Oh, and it appears that I have a gabled roof instead of a trussed roof. The upside of this is that when I redo the ceiling in the living room and kitchen, I may be able to turn the whole thing into a vaulted ceiling. The downside is… well.. who knows if the roof will be able to support the weight of the drywall hanging from it.

DNS training pays off

Whew. Got dreamstorm moved over to the new office and back online after being down since the GREAT POWER OUTAGE OF 2003 . It was a rough weekend for Emergency Services folks, but really, what’s a day and a half without power? No big deal. Now if it had been a couple weeks, things coulda gotten interesting.

So I had my first training session for the new job on tuesday, where my manager gave a class that was a basic review of DNS. Towards the end of the class, he was talking about other lesser-known DNS record types and mentioned the “SRV” record. This record type indicates the target machine and port number for a given service on a given domain. Traditionally, web browsers know to connect to port 80 on a server, ftp clients… port 21, etc, etc… unless the user specifically tells them to connect to a different port. Well, recently, Comcast and others have been hinting that they may start blocking specific ports in an effort to keep home-users from running their own web and other servers. One way to get around this is to tell everyone who may want to connect to your server to enter a different port number. Not so good if you can’t get the word out. Another way is to use a buddy’s server (on a less-restrictive network) to redirect all requests to the new port. Also, not a great way to go (since you need a well-connected buddy). But through the use of SRV records, web browsers (as one example) could automatically figure out which port to use. Neat, eh? Yeah, I think so too.

New job, new office, back to the beginning

I started the new position (still in ITCS at the ‘U’) on monday, moved into the office (an interior one, unfortunately), and got my first assignment… “Hello World” in C. For y’all not in the programming-know, that’s the first example program given in any text on any programming language. For me, it was the first BASIC program that I learned to run on the VIC-20:

Workout tune-out

I’ve noticed many times before that a strenuous workout or physical activity seems to give my mind a bit of extra juice. It’s a little confusing actually, beating up on the body should result in lower energy and weariness, but it seems to be the other way ’round. I worked myself especially hard today (first the gym, and then Aikido) but it seems to have yielded a couple of interesting thoughts.
The first came while I was sitting at Borders reading about neural nets, fuzzy logic, and other “AI” stuffs. Years ago, I remembered reading a suggestion in the book, “Holographic Universe” that said that our minds could be seen as a type of hologram. They distribute the information in a non-localized manner, data can be retrieved even if part of the medium is damaged, and they store a tremendous amout of information in a finite space. It makes for a good analogy, but it may also make for a good model. So I was thinking that in the case of a hologram, the way to get useful information out of the medium is to illuminate it with a source in a certain perspective. The combination of the source illumination and the stored patterns results in a coherent image. So it’s possible that the neurons in our brains are similar to the light-sensitive particles in the emulsion of the photographic film, and theoretically, we may one day be able to duplicate and investigate those structures bit-by-bit, but I’m not sure that this study will yield the much sought “secret of life” or rather “secret on consciousness”. The thing is, that pattern is just a bunch of noise until illuminated by a reference light. The degredation or loss of one or the other results in at least the loss of resolution and at most the total failure to produce an image. So maybe when the whole of the human brain gets mapped and the structures understood, we’ll discover that, as many already believe, the brain is merely the vessel.
By the way, thanks to Michelle who, many years ago during a discussion about souls and what the implications of the existence of a human soul meant for people with mental disabilities or disorders, said that maybe the diseases simply prevent the expression of the whole of the human soul, but doesn’t mean that the soul itself is damaged or incomplete. That thought has stayed with me every time I sit down and think about the nature of consciousness and mind and soul.

And that’s how they do it in The O.C.

Well, managed to make it back from CA in one piece. Though I’ve definitely decided that LA is NOT my place. Too crowded, hot, dirty, etc. I guess that makes me an East Coaster, assuming you have to be one or the other… actually, I’m pretty happy to just be a midwestern farmboy.
I met some folks at Siggraph who are producing jet-powered surfboards (Powerski), and ended up staying in San Antonio an extra day to take a demo ride and chat with the folks some more. To tell the truth, riding them is an absolute blast and I really expect that they will be incredibly popular. Which is why I was interested in selling them in Michigan. I looked and some numbers, did some thinking and decided that I could probably sell a few, but not enough to make a living on. But the bigger thing was the moral dilemma that I faced. The thing uses a newly developed two-cycle engine, designed to fit into the shell of the board, but like all two-cycle engines, it’s loud and dirty. As fun as they are, and taking into account the fact that I already own a waverunner and a gas-guzzling Wrangler, I just couldn’t ignore my heart telling me that selling these toys was not the right thing to do. I love having fun, and the exhiliration of flying through the air, over the road, or skimming across the water is incomparable to most anything else… but we $200 windsurfer.