Author: cosmo

02/13/2009

As usual, I’m jamming to various tunes while I work. Roxette’s “The Look” just came on, and I’m reminded once again how these guys have lyrics which are apparently generated by a random dictionary computer program or something.

For example:

Fire in the ice,
naked to the T-bone
is a lover’s disguise.

Banging on the head drum,
shaking like a mad bull,
she’s got the look.

Swaying to the band,
moving like a hammer,
she’s a miracle man.

Loving is the ocean,
Kissing is the wet sand,
she’s got the look.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they’re Swedish and only learned a subset of English; I don’t know. The funny thing is all of their songs are like this. Still, they have a good beat and remind me of those heady days of yesteryear… circa 1990 or so.

02/05/2009

When it’s 11:00 at night and you’ve been working for 10+ hours, and all of a sudden there’s some kind of weird power spike that shuts off all electrical devices in the room (computer, monitors, network switch, printer, stereo), it’s probably a sign that you should stop working.

02/04/2009

Nine hundred billion dollars.

Last year we heard promises that the unimaginably large $750 billion federal bailout would kick our economy into shape and get credit flowing again and unlock the world’s markets. It hasn’t even been six months and now Congress is putting the “finishing touches” on another $900 billion. Will this one save the world?

I doubt it.

02/03/2009

Geek alert:

On Friday February 13 2009 at 04:31:30pm MST the Unix timestamp will be 1234567890.

That’s the number of seconds since the Unix epoch began (January 1 1970). I also used SSE (seconds since epoch) in all of my orbital analysis work back when I was a rocket scientist. Cool.

01/30/2009

I was working late the other night with a client who was doing a web site switchover, and managed to come up with a clever solution to his problem. He sent me an e-mail:

Nice one. Thanks Jeff.

I bet you know how to solve a Rubik’s cube too.

And of course I had to admit that yes, in fact I do know how to solve one. Then he threw down the gauntlet.

When I was a kid, I could get about 2/3 of the way through one of the algorithms, but then I would just get lost.  So when I stumbled on the cube on someone’s desk a few weeks back, my determination was reignited.  I’m no speed demon, but I’ve got the sequence down.  Takes me about 4 minutes right now.

Complete with photo!

So I dug around my closet a bit and unearthed the Cube that I had when I was a teenager (junior high, maybe?). I scrambled it a bit:

And then I went to work. It took a few practice runs to remember all of the moves, and then I had Laralee time me as I went for speed.

1:30. Oh yeah, the old man still has it.