Author: cosmo

08/12/2010

This evening we made our annual pilgrimage to Lakeside amusement park, a turn-of-the-century (that’s 1900, not 2000) place down in Denver that gives out free passes to kids who complete a summer reading program at the library. I don’t know if we’d ever pay to go there, but since it’s free we’ve made it an annual tradition for the past six or seven years.

All three kids brought friends, so we had a gaggle of half a dozen running around the place riding the roller coasters and the whirl-and-hurl sorts of rides. Whee! A good time for all, especially since the weather held and it ended up being a gorgeous night despite forecasts of thunderstorms.

On the way back home we pulled off I-25 somewhere between north Denver and Longmont, heading out east into farmland looking for a spot without a lot of city lights. We found an old gravel road, pulled over, and climbed out of the van to look at the night sky. Far enough from the city lights, we could see the Milky Way stretched across the sky in its dusty splendor.

After our eyes adjusted a bit for night vision, everyone was able to spot a few meteors here and there. It wasn’t prime time viewing for the Perseids yet, but the kids were thrilled to see a few shooting stars. Then we piled back into the van and headed home, tired after a long day.

Good times.

08/05/2010

I’m officially an internet celebrity. My friend Jeff posted an entry for me on Wikipedia under Shoeless Jeff:

Shoeless Jeff is a legend in his own mind, and a towering figure in Boulder Ultimate.

While other Ultimate players worry about which cleats to wear, how many pairs of socks to bring to a tournament, and the best way to deal with blisters, Jeff blithely ignores all that. While other players are ‘cleating up’, Jeff is curling his toes into the lush summer grass, and dreaming of patchoulli, hippie chicks, and jambands.

Despite these handicaps, Jeff somehow still manages to hold his own with some of the slowest, most egregious swill-throwers in the league, and hardly ever slips and busts his ass.

Rumor has it that as he gets older, he’s discovering the benefits of playing in shoes, leading one to wonder if the “shoelss Jeff” moniker will stick, or will he have to be called “Shoed Jeff”, “The Jeff previously known as Shoeless”, or just plain old “Old Fart”.

Due to Wikipedia’s moderation guidelines, I don’t know how long it’ll stay up before someone in charge yanks it, but for a brief moment I enjoyed my fame and had a good laugh.

08/04/2010

So a few months ago Bill Gates and Warren Buffett challenged the billionaires of the world to give away at least half of their wealth, with the intent of changing the world. One could argue that both of these men have already made a huge impact with their generous contributions to many causes, so it was really cool to see them call others to action.

They created the Giving Pledge list, which now includes about thirty people with over a billion dollars in net worth– all of whom have pledged to donate the majority of that money to worthy causes. (The causes are selected by the donors.) We’re talking about a serious amount of money here, all for good.

Without getting too political in a feel-good post here, I can’t help but wonder what other world-changing things could happen if, say, the United States government stopped spending billions of dollars every month in Afghanistan. They should take a hint from these generous people and consider how to make a difference that doesn’t involve bullets and smart bombs.

07/29/2010

Hoo boy, after playing ultimate today I climbed into my car and noticed the thermometer said it was 99 degrees out there. That’s a hot day to be running around. Laralee complains that I don’t sweat enough during our league games, but I’m sure she would’ve been satisfied today– I was drenched. Good game, though. I love summer.

07/27/2010

Intel just unveiled its 50Gbps fiber-optic network card. Now that’s fast. Even as gigabit wiring becomes mainstream, I think we lose sight of the fact that we’re pushing a billion on-off signals every second down a tiny copper wire that’s strung between walls. Now we’re looking at fifty times that.

Intel says they’re working on the next-generation terabit model. One trillion pulses of light every second? Heck, in a trillionth of a second a photon travels about one foot. That’s some pretty amazing speed. And in five years we’ll take it for granted.

07/25/2010

Laralee makes fun of me because I keep old t-shirts in the closet. I have piles upon piles of them, and sometimes digging through them is somewhat like an archaeologic expedition as I delve into the deeper layers.

Take, for example, this sweet shirt that I unearthed and wore today:

I’ve always called it my “Calvin shirt” because of the grinning Calvin character on the back (designed by my old friend Jason Peters). And notice the date. This bad boy is seventeen years old. And still wearable!

Now I’m thinking I should dredge up some other shirts dating back to my college days and start wearing them. After all, why buy new clothes when I have hundreds of perfectly good shirts in the closet?

07/22/2010

From a fascinating article on large numbers by Scott Aaronson:

One could define science as reason’s attempt to compensate for our inability to perceive big numbers. If we could run at 280,000,000 meters per second, there’d be no need for a special theory of relativity: it’d be obvious to everyone that the faster we go, the heavier and squatter we get, and the faster time elapses in the rest of the world. If we could live for 70,000,000 years, there’d be no theory of evolution:we could watch speciation and adaptation with our eyes, instead of painstakingly reconstructing events from fossils and DNA. If we could bake bread at 20,000,000 degrees Kelvin, nuclear fusion would be not the esoteric domain of physicists but ordinary household knowledge. But we can’t do any of these things, and so we have science, to deduce about the gargantuan what we, with our infinitesimal faculties, will never sense.

07/20/2010

For fun I’m reading the “barter” section of Craigslist, and found someone offering web programming skills in exchange for “something interesting”. What caught my eye was part of his list of qualifications:

I have expert level certification in HTML, XHTML, CSS 1,2 and 3, PHP, and MySQL.

Wow! Expert level certification! I’ve been doing web programming for over a decade now, and I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as certification in any of these technologies. If there is, someone’s running a sweet scam giving them out.

Hmm. Maybe that should be a side business… I could offer certifications in writing HTML code. Heck, when we interview candidates for positions at Zing we throw a couple of tricky questions at them– and those questions cover exactly what this guy’s “certification” does. I could just reuse my interview question sheet, charge a hundred bucks, and print out a nice PDF certificate suitable for framing. Sweet!