Month: May 2009

Courtesy of Craig. Hilarious.

I’m doing some server administration and realized that one of the servers I manage has been running for quite a while…

Hmm, 1172 days is about three years and three months. That’s pretty impressive– humming along 24/7 and still handling requests without even breaking a sweat. Go Linux!

Today was our last science enrichment class. Our topic was “propulsion” and we talked about how rockets work. Our experiments were a lot of fun.

First, balloon races where we show how the air (the propellant) pushes the balloon:

Then we couldn’t resist blowing up a few bottles of Diet Coke by dropping Mentos into them:

And finally each of the kids got to launch an air rocket that uses pressurized air to shoot about fifty feet into the air:

We had a lot of fun teaching the kids and getting them excited about science. Maybe one of these second-graders will end up being a world-famous biologist or astrophysicist!

My latest desktop wallpaper: the Horsehead Nebula. It’s cool to program atop that.

Mmm… bonbons.

I’ve had a hankerin’ for some homemade bonbons for a while, but they’re really tedious to make (compared to, say, chocolate-chip cookies). The other day I was at the grocery store and decided to pick up some Rice Krispies and Skippy, and finally commit to make them. And today I did. Kyra was a big help, although to be honest I think her motivation was more about licking the chocolate-covered spoon than actually doing any work.

Regardless, now I’ve got a couple containers full of them, and can enjoy them with my popcorn tonight when Laralee and I watch our next episode of Heroes.

The library is having their annual book sale, which is a great opportunity to look through thousands of books– most in very good condition– and buy them really cheap. Hardcovers sell for two dollars, paperbacks for fifty cents. So Laralee and I headed over there at the start of the sale and spent a couple of hours wading through boxes and tables stacked high with books.

Of course you can get any John Grisham book you’d ever want, or Michael Crichton, or Robert Ludlum, even Danielle Steele. There always seem to be piles upon piles of those authors. But you can also get obscure stuff; I found a copy of Godel Escher Bach which I first read back in the late 80’s, and I figured what the heck. (I’m reading it now but it doesn’t seem as interesting as I remembered. Oh well.)

Anyway, our bookshelves continue to expand beyond capacity; we’ve got two-deep paperbacks and stacks of recently-purchased books (from the book fair or Amazon gift cards) just waiting to be read. I think we’re covered for a while.