The second law of thermodynamics states that whenever you do something constructive, there is a less-organized waste product. This is mine.
00:14 UTC this morning (which for me was 5:14pm yesterday), marked the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska blast. Some friends and I mixed up white Russians, raised our glasses, and from the comfort of my living room, toasted the lack of any large explosions currently transpiring in our neighborhood.
I noticed the impending anniversary a few years ago and put "visit Tunguska site on 2008-06-30" on my list of travel ideas. I had only a vague idea of where it was. A few months ago I started to get serious about it and begun to research the event and the region's travel logistics. I even fixed the Wikipedia article, which was off by two weeks due to a calendar translation error.
The beauty of such a pilgrimage is that, as far as I know, the time and place are completely ordinary. There would be no parades, no parties, and no reason to believe anyone else would show up. The site would be the same the day before or after, and after 100 years, is probably indistinguishable from any other random patch of forest in central Siberia. But I liked the idea of flying to Irkutsk and finding slow passage 1000km north, meeting people along the way, and finally standing in a clearing early that morning (7:14am local time), watching nothing happen. If anyone else did turn up, we'd have shared something special, but in any case the journey would probably make a pretty good story.
I've had good and bad experiences traveling alone, and what it came down to this time was that I was kind of busy and didn't really feel like going. It's a little disappointing to miss a once in a lifetime chance to make a pilgrimage to the site of a large mysterious explosion on its 100th anniversary, but at the same time it seemed a little pointless and the reality of solo travel is often more laborious than entertaining. Ah, well. I'll be sure to cook up other excuses to travel, and will post stories and photos upon my return.
Since I wasn't in remote Siberia, I took some pictures at the two big shows at the circus center: Pratfalls and Rising Stars and the annual student showcase.
I'm moving this week, to a place about 155 meters around the corner. Ask me for my new address and coordinates if you're not a creepy stalker. Non-creepy stalkers are welcome (but good luck qualifying).
Strolling through the new place, a friend of mine found an old discarded note:
There's a feeling inside that I want you to know you are the one and I can't let you go.
* Just before that.
Apparently it's (nearly) a quote from Back Here, a song by by BBmak, who I'm not cool enough to have heard of. I've no idea what the footnote means, but most interesting is that above all that is an address in Yuma, Arizona. I guess I'll have to mail it there.
I just picked up my cell phone, opened it, and held it to my ear to listen for a dial tone. I haven't had a land line in years. Where was that reflex hiding all this time?
This year, paying taxes turned out to be a little more painful than usual. On my way home from the post office, I accidentally got off my bike before I came to a complete stop. I was going about 55kph. There I was, apparently not minding my own business as well as I should have been, when suddenly, in the middle of a major intersection, my bike and I went our separate ways. I suppose we must have been growing apart for some time and I simply hadn't noticed, just as I hadn't noticed any obstacles until the front wheel ran into what I can only assume must have been a tear in the fabric of space itself, or maybe that pothole I always forget about.
It all went pretty well, considering. I wore out the knees of my pants a bit faster than I'd planned and here and there I'm missing some skin I'd been taking for granted. Several bystanders got to watch me fly through the air then surf the asphalt on my wonderful biking gloves, whose virtues I can't praise loudly enough and without which I wouldn't be typing today.
When I finally ground to a halt, I got up, picked up my bike (which I was very pleased not to have gotten tangled up in), walked out of the street, and assured everyone I was fine and told them how happy I was to be wearing gloves, not realizing as I showed off my leather-clad hands that one of my arms was shouting "he's not fine, he just doesn't feel it yet". But escaping with just a few scrapes is pretty good, and it was nice that I was just a few blocks from home. I can't say that I recommend a biking accident, but if you do find yourself in one, I hope it goes as well as mine.
I'm sitting in a coffee shop, as I often do. Laptops to the left of me, laptops to the right. The guy on my left is swapping between some funky GIS application and real estate listings, and the guy on the right has his nose in a rather large amount of LISP code. I love this part of the world.
Blu-Ray beat HD-DVD, and the high-res DVD format was is over. I pity the fools who bought HD-DVD players, which are basically worthless now. They're like those people at the race track who find themselves holding a fist full of worthless paper at the end of the race. (At least, that's what they do in movies.)
Format wars are nothing new though. The battle over the color television protocol is an odd one. In 1950, the FCC ruled in favor of CBS' proposal (because their demo worked well), but in 1953 was forced to reverse its decision because RCA kicked their ass in the marketplace. RCA's proposal evolved into NTSC, and all 100 CBS-compatible color TVs were scrap.
The AC/DC war in the 1880s was even more colorful. AC power eventually triumphed, but DC had a large user base in New York City. Most buildings converted to AC or installed local transformers, but the local electric company (Con Edison) was still delivering DC power to a few customers until a few months ago.
I added a "dubious" tag to something on Wikipedia. It was fun and satisfying and I recommend it if you can find a sufficiently unlikely allegation. I'm awarding myself bonus geek points because the fact in question is whether the commonly accepted date of a particular event is correct in the Gregorian or Julian calendar. The page currently claims Julian, but my preliminary research suggests otherwise.
Be the first to guess the date I'm referring to and you'll win a prize. Be the first to authoritatively resolve the dispute and you'll win a much cooler prize.
About six months ago, I bought a new laptop. For $20 extra, it has 1GB of flash hiding inside somewhere, which I was hoping I might be able to access like an ordinary external storage device. I had a plan for it. I haven't gotten around to doing anything about that plan, so I thought maybe I'd at least write it down for posterity.
First, some background. Keeping a hard drive spinning takes a significant amount of power. (Especially significant when running off batteries.) Replacing the hard drive with solid state storage might be a great solution someday, but for now it's still too expensive. One common tradeoff is to spin the drive down when you're not using it and tweak your system to need it as little as possible. One such tweak is to increase the dirty buffer flush timeout so that when you try to write something to the drive, the system holds off a while so that if you decide to write more, it can do both at once and only spin the drive up for a single short burst. The drawback is that if your system crashes before it gets around to writing those changes to disk, they're gone forever. My approach to saving and backing up approaches clinical OCD levels, so I'm not a big fan of my machine not writing things to disk when I tell it to.
So here's my crazy, as yet unrealized plan for the flash storage: whenever my laptop switches to battery power, it mounts a fan-out filesystem on top such that every write goes to both the hard drive and to an otherwise empty filesystem on the flash, then increases its hard drive's dirty buffer flush timer to, say, 30 minutes, and sets the drive to spin down quickly. When it gets back to grid power, resets the timers to normal levels, flushes the buffers, unmounts the fan-out shim, and wipes the flash. This would let me keep the drive spun down unless I need to read something that wasn't already cached, but writes would go somewhere persistent and I wouldn't lose any data in a crash. Recovering the data might be as simple as copying the flash to the hard drive. There might be complications that make automated recovery difficult, but you'd at least have a copy.
One reason I haven't done this yet is that UnionFS doesn't support fan-out where writes go to each underlying copy, only where they go to a single one. There are other union-mount filesystems, and maybe one does what I want, but I haven't looked very hard.
Another option would be to keep a copy of the ext3 journal on the flash, but I know even less about how to set that up or how I'd use it for recovery.
A friend and I drove to Las Vegas for a few days. Both of us had seen it briefly in passing but hadn't really been there before. It's a freakish place. My overall impression was that someone had seen Disney World and said, "This is a fine idea, but the centralized command structure is un-American. Let's redo this with an open set of autonomous agents organized by a market economy. And not so much for the kids." I imagine that's what everyone thinks when they see Vegas for the first time.
We saw two Cirque shows: Zumanity and O. Zumanity sucked. It was supposed to be Cirque plus sensuality, but instead it was Cirque plus crass clowns and wasn't sensual or interesting. It had a few good acrobatic routines, but they couldn't salvage the show.
O, on the other hand, was phenomenal. Someone told me it doesn't live up to the hype, but if that's the case, the hype must be tremendous because I thought the show was excellent, and I'm pretty jaded. It was definitely a Cirque show, with all the over-the-top pomp that implies, but it had a unique stage and routines that took excellent advantage of it.
Blue Man Group was excellent. I saw it 15-20 years ago in NY and it was pretty much the same show, but it was great fun regardless. Creative routines, good physical comedy, and great music and visuals.
We caught a faux-Beatles show ("Fab Four"), which was ok. There's nothing wrong with live performance of music I enjoy, but under normal circumstances, I'd be disappointed to pay $50 for a merely adequate concert.
That was it for the organized entertainment. We rode the monorail a few times (for transit, not purely for entertainment), but mostly did a lot of walking up and down the strip and into many casinos. The Venetian wins our awards for best architecture and best pizza. (We had a tough time finding meals in between fast food and $50/plate fancy dinner, and the service was universally awful.) I'd sad to report that the MGM lions were not interested in my laser pointer.
I also rode the NASCAR Speed Ride at the Sahara, a super fast super short roller coaster. And by "rode", I mean "rode six times" (four during the day, then two later that night). The initial acceleration is the best part. On their web site, they list some specs: 0-45mph in 2 seconds, 70mph max speed, 3.5G acceleration, total ride time 45 seconds. There was no line except for the very front car (which was definitely the best), so it was easy just to go a bunch of times.
Even better than the roller coaster was the indoor sky diving. It wasn't really very much like skydiving, but it wasn't much like anything else either. You wear goggles, earplugs, a helmet, and the floppiest clown suit ever made, then you walk into a room whose floor is an open wire mesh trampoline above a jet engine. Flyers take turns soloing with one teacher/wrangler. My teacher, Mike Snyder, was awesome, so ask for him if you go. He gave me lots of technical instruction at exactly the level I wanted and more clearly than I expected, even when he was reduced to hand signals. One of these places opened up recently in Union City and I plan to check it out.
We also went to a gun range and fired a few clips with an AK-47 and an MP5, just for the novelty. As you might expect of a machine gun, it was all over pretty quickly, especially since the operation there (5km from the strip) was nicely optimized to maximize throughput of silly tourists like us.
One of the benefits of driving there, in addition to avoiding the Kafkaesque absurdity of modern air travel, is that we could see other things along the way. These included Hoover Dam, highway signs for Zzyzx, and the delightful tar pits of Los Angeles, all highly recommended.
I'm slowly editing and posting photos from two recent shows. Expect to see more dribble in over the next couple weeks if you subscribe to any of my photo feeds.
The first show is Habitat, by Sweet Can Productions. It's a fantastic professional show running through January 6th at Dance Mission Theater. If you're in San Francisco between now and then, you should go see it. I got to shoot this one during their dress rehearsal.
Next up was a one-night-only student showcase at the circus center: Ethereal Bodies and Crazy Clowns. Mostly ethereal bodies, judging from my pictures.
A few weeks ago, I was showing off some circus photos at a party and ended up getting involved in a photo shoot for hotchixdig.com, an environmental propaganda web site and pin-up calendar. They want to spread messages of conservation, and one way to draw people in is with photographs of scantily clad beautiful women, all of whom are shown in some sort of environmentally beneficial scenario. I hope the benefits produced by their activism offset the two gallons of gas I burned getting to and from the photo shoot, but in any case it was a good learning experience for me and obviously a lot of fun.
I spent Sunday playing hide and seek. I woke up at 4:30am, drove 120km down to Uvas Canyon County Park to look for a 15 year old boy who'd been missing since Saturday afternoon. Neighbors found him five minutes after we deployed.
Searches usually take all day (and are usually fruitless), but there we were, all dressed up with no one to look for. Going home to sleep was tempting, but three of us opted to help out with a K9 exercise we'd heard needed some extra bodies. Urban Search & Rescue dogs were being tested at the Structural Collapse Rescue Training Site in East Palo Alto. Our job was to hide quietly under several tons of simulated post-apocalyptic rubble for an hour while dogs tried to find us. I took lots of pictures when I wasn't hiding.
| tmp+14083@sethoscope.netFri Jul 18 01:54 GMT 2008 |