Life and Stuff

For once I was traveling on business – just me!  With no four-year-old to entertain, my first thought was to get my laptop ready so I could get some work done.  WAMP server?  Check.  SVN synced and databases replicated?  Check.  Battery?  Charged.  I was ready for 90 minutes of untethered productive time.  Unfortunately Virgin America ruined my best laid plans.

I’ve been doing it for more than 20 years now, playing a sport that few had heard of.  Even my parents hadn’t seen an ultimate game until they came to watch me at a tournament in the mid 90’s.  Beyond the underdog attitude and the slacker social culture that surrounds ultimate, there is a crucial piece that separates it from other sports: Spirit of the Game, also known has good ol’ fashioned fair play.

may-21

... And hopefully a similarly large number of days ahead.

On a related note, I decided to give Wolfram|Alpha a go at figuring out how many days since I was born.  So, I plugged in "may 21, 1969" to see what it would come up with.  Besides the "no known notable events" notice -- thanks, you're lifting my spirits -- it also told me my date of birth was both 39 years, 11 months and 31 days ago as well as 40 years ago.

Perhaps it's rounding off?  At least it got the number of days right.

The UW student newspaper, The Daily, posted an article today about an overdue library book.  Ralph Day Major checked out Antigone by Sophocles; it was due back to the Suzzallo Library on 5 March, 1909.  Overdue by exactly 100 years, it was returned to the library yesterday by Ralph's great-niece, Katie Dale.

The library waived the $18,000 late fee. 

OK, I realize it's a little late to be tossing out my predictions for the next year, but I don't think my 15-day peeking period is really going to give me any huge insights to what will happen during the next 350.  So, here are my predictions for 2009:

I stumbled across this Web page recently.  It's a collection of time-lapsed photos taken from a west-facing web-cam atop the Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysics building on UW campus.  The web-cam snaps a picture every ten seconds and the server stitches them together to make a movie -- the day in fast-forward.&nb

The sun is shining in Seattle, literally and figurtively as I go through the election results from last night.  I don't usually comment on politics on this site, but I can't really help it right now!

Let's tally the results:

"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room."

Dr. Strangelove

David Brooks writes his opinion column today from China where notes a distinct difference between Asian and Western views on the indiviual versus the collective.  But Mr. Brooks didn't need to go all the way to China to see that.  All he needed to do was spend some time with kids...  or engineers.