Alkahest

er, sorry just a minor Red Dawn reference – it’s not my fault, I grew up in the 80s.
Now that I’ve got that out of my system, a note on a new toy.  As I mentioned before, I’m going to go (mostly) digital on my trip to Yellowstone.  I bought 8 GB of memory cards [...]

It felt like I was griping a lot about plumbing here, so I thought I would make it a new category and go back and classify old posts as “plumbing” if they were water related. So far, I’ve found 14 posts on plumbing problems – more than I’ve written about photography .  That’s depressing.

Back when I was a postdoc, I was studying FFTs. Okay, actually, I’m not enough of a mathematician to study FFTs, I was studying the efficient implementation of FFTs on parallel computational clusters. One of the graduate students I was working with on the project penned the following:
If there’s a working FFT
That’s not in [...]

It was K’s birthday today and I decided to take the day off.  In part, I needed to because I had to work on her present.  It’s hard these days knowing what to get each other.  I could have gotten her jewelry – again.  Instead, I decided to clear out one of the beds that [...]

Yep, it has been a few months since we’ve had major water issues, so we were due. We had water before dinner, but when I went to rinse the dishes, we had no water. It seemed like the pump wasn’t working. I checked the breaker box, the breaker was fine. I [...]

Created by “the Robot Economist,” and for hsarik, it’s Bob Ross and the Joy of Painting Missiles.  Click the picture for the full sized image with rotating scenery.

Finished up a lot of little things this weekend. Nothing too terribly exciting:

Planted some herbs and covered them with hardware cloth to keep the squirrels out. Basil (lots of basil), thyme and rosemary. I was looking for sage, but couldn’t find any.
Fixed the water softener – the backwash drain hose was so [...]

A few years ago, I participated in Group 1 of a new leadership program geared toward the IT profession. The program usually has four schools per group, each school sending a number of participants. The group meets four times over a six month period, each time at a different, participating school. Each [...]

Sometime in late September or early October of 2001, I received a call from an individual identifying himself as an agent of the FBI and asking for information about the owner of an email account from the place I worked.  He stated that he believed the account was relevant to a terrorist investigation. Of [...]