Sometimes funny, sometimes thoughtful, always a good time
The other day Alex was playing on the trampoline and somehow (it’s still not clear to me how) he swung down below it and slammed his face into one of the metal supports. It blew a chunk off his front tooth.
So now I call him Chip, which he doesn’t think is nearly as funny as I do.
Laralee and I just finished watching the movie Rendition. If I had to use a single word to describe it, I would call it “powerful”. The message it conveys is delivered with the subtlety of a freight train, but that doesn’t make it any less thought-provoking. Highly recommended viewing.
From a funny online post about how ABC might have run the Lincoln-Douglas debates back in the day:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Excuse me, did an Elijah H. Johnson attend your church?
LINCOLN: When I was a boy in Illinois forty years ago, yes. I think he was a deacon.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Are you aware that he regularly called Kentucky “a land of swine and whores”?
LINCOLN: Sounds right — his ex-wife was from Kentucky.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Why did you remain in the church after hearing those statements?
LINCOLN: I was eight.
DOUGLAS: This is an important question George — it’s an issue that certainly will be raised in the fall.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you denounce him?
LINCOLN: I’d like to get back to the divided house if I may.
I’m wading through some PHP programming code written by another company, because I’m replacing it with my own (vastly superior) programming. Apparently they have some speling problems:
Maybe they’re big Lord of the Rings fans, and when they heard “column” they thought of Gollum, and ended up with “collum”…
New figures suggest that 92.3 percent of all e-mail sent globally during the first three months of 2008 was spam.
Spammers… we hatessss them, yesss!
Yesterday : 80 degrees and sunny.
Today : 30 degrees and snowing.
Is spring here? Or what?
“The reason lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place is that the same place isn’t there the second time.”
— Willie Tyler
The European Space Agency just released some graphics showing a fairly comprehensive display of the satellites and orbital debris surrounding Earth.
Of course it seems amazing that there’s so much junk flying around up there. But I’m not very surprised, because I did exactly this back in 1998 or so.
Those were my days at Raytheon Space Systems, where I wrote (amongst other things) software to do orbital analysis and 3D visualization of satellites. For fun, I decided to get the full catalog of satellites from all countries and drop their orbital information into the simulation. The result was a graphic almost identical to the ESA one shown here.
Strangely, I didn’t get the same press they’re getting now. I guess it’s because I was just a brilliant but somewhat quirky analyst working in the bowels of an aerospace giant instead of a multinational space agency. Go figure.
“May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”
— Dwight Eisenhower
Ahh, another productive meeting with a client. I was at IZZE’s headquarters talking with them about a deal with Amazon, and when I left they asked if I wanted to take any product home with me.
I love my clients.