I’m going to be offline for the next week or so. The website will be up of course but I will be very very far away from any sort of computational device much more complicated then an MP3 player; a mostly busted one at that too.

I’m leaving in the morning to road trip with some of MTU’s finest to go ski and board out at Breckenridge and Arapahoe Basin in Colorado. The complete absence of snow this year should prove to make things more interesting since the first skiing I do will probably be near the top of a large mountain (never done mountain skiing either). We’re going to back a ridiculous number of people into a small ski-in ski-out condo on the hill for about a week. What will prove particularly interesting is living at about 10,000 feet. The more likely more expensive beer should be easily offset by the lack of oxygen in our brains making for a very pleasant and traditionally priced week.

In the mean time though, it is time for who-knows-how-manyth-annual Wold Class Track Meet on the Nintendo Power Pad over at Cory’s. Catch you on the flip side(s).

Back home in Minnesota again.

Sarah, Dan says hi.

In what is certainly a first, I took my bike to work on December 20th.  I was in my truck sitting in my driveway waiting for traffic to clear so I could skid out on to 41 when I realized how nice out it was.  So I tossed it in reverse,  parked, grabbed my bike and hit the road.  I can’t believe this weather though.  The high today in Houghton is supposed to be around 47 which just blows my mind.  Hell, we were even toying with the idea of going scuba diving this week!  Insane.  Sounds like most everyone is going to having a green Christmas.

Some things need some bass.

Skrape - Summer Song

Perfect example. In the lab this song nearly shakes the place apart despite being nice and mellow. On my laptop speakers / headphones I probably wouldn’t have given it a second chance. Luckily I was connected to the lab sub when I first heard it.

I had a dream about Saved By the Bell last night.  Weird.  Whoever is putting stuff in my coffee, keep doing it.  It is starting to work.

So far as Sunday’s go, I had a pretty long day today.  My thruster test on Friday didn’t go so hot so I was forced to do a total rebuild in order to continue forward.  The original plan called for that to happen on Saturday but I just wasn’t up to the task then so I put it off until today.  Typically, I can rebuild the thing  from scratch in 5-6 hours depending on how much stuff needs to be repaired.  Today’s took about 8 hours though since I had to replace a few integral parts as well as include some additional optical diagnostics.  Heh, optical diagnostics sounds clever but it is really just a 4 dollar mirror I bought so I can see down the barrel of the thruster without pointing it right a window.

The half marathon training has been going quite well.  I haven’t fallen apart or anything and I’ve seen a huge increase in my performance.  For instance, when I first started training, running a single mile was certainly possible but it was a chore.  Today I clicked off a pretty leisurely seven miles and contemplated going for ten but I had to get back to work.  I’m really satisfied with myself thus far though since I usually make all these grandiose plans and never really follow through.  Perhaps I have some discipline after all.  The real challenge is going to be sustaining the progress I’ve made over Christmas break; three weeks which usually entail tons of food, beer and lack of physical activity.  We’ll see this year.

I’m really disturbed by the latest volley of US military recruitment advertisements on TV.  The need for more people to enlist is a subject well beyond the scope of what I’m getting at here, so we’ll just whistle past the graveyard on that one.  Anyway, I was watching Family Guy this evening when the Air Force had a series of ads clearly directed at convincing people that the USAF is all about being able to fly jet fighters and well actually more about flying in general.  Some quick math though shows the validity of that argument: approximately 9000 commissioned airplanes with 352,000 enlisted translates to 39 people per plane.  Furthermore, I believe you have to be an officer to be a pilot which basically requires a college education begging one to ask the question: why are attempting to lure high school grads into the AF under the premise they could be pilots when that is pretty much impossible.  To toss in the irony card, one of the other big “selling points” is that they are supposed to be getting money for college, you know so may then they could be an officer.  Sorry if this seems incoherent – I’m installing Linux on my virtual machine in parallel with this not giving either the attention required but hopefully you get my point.

I played underwater hockey last night for the first time. In a nutshell, it was basically an hour of getting kicked in the face, clubbed with very hard plastic sticks, being raked against the bottom of the pool and of course constantly almost drowning. So in other words a lot of fun. I was amazed at the skills some of the people playing had. Apparently for them breathing air was optional which isn’t all that big of a shock since they basically swam like fish anyway. Probably the strangest thing though is when you pop up for air and just see bunch of splashing around on the surface yet no people. Sort of reminded me of when I used to spook the minnow tank at bait shop.

So what were you doing this evening? This is what I was up to (not even staged).

Click for actual screen resolution.