Oh, it was only one year ago that I rode public transportation to change into a tux in the church bathroom. And then of course change back in the bathroom of the hotel where the reception was held. I made fun of the D.J. wearing orange, and my street clothes included a red T-shirt. :) I missed the Total Eclipse of the Heart dance… Ah, memories.
My brother has a conditional job offer as a firefighter for Denison, TX.
And he’s getting married. Probably Nov, 16.
WOOT!
In an advertising stunt for a cartoon, a firm put up little light displays throughout Boston, New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Austin, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. It was basically a board with a bunch of LEDs in the shape of a cartoon character, powered by a few batteries. Here’s a picture of one. Here’s one up close, not illuminated. Here’s a video of some of the installation. You can see the scale. They’re Lite-Bright’s, basically.
A student who saw one of the devices in Boston said:
It’s so not threatening — it’s a Lite-Brite. I don’t understand how they could be terrified. I would if it was a bunch of circuits blinking, but it wasn’t.
A policeman in Portland said
At this point we wouldn’t even begin an investigation, because there’s no reason to believe a crime has occurred.
A police spokesman in Seattle said
We haven’t had any calls to 911 regarding this.
However, in New York, they shut down a bridge for a short period of time. Seems prudent enough. They didn’t know what it was. It was weird. They had to be safe.
And that’d be the end of the very boring story if not for Boston…. They shut down bridges; they shut down harbor traffic. They sent bomb squads all over the city, and brought traffic to a standstill. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars…. Even if you think that they responded appropriately, they did it much too late. The devices had been up for 3 weeks. If they really had been bombs…
But I doubt you think they responded appropriately. Overreacting at non-threats really does nothing for security. If you were a terrorist, and for your nefarious purposes needed a distraction, or wanted to shut down a city, now you know that you should go to Boston. If you can so easily manipulate them into wasting time and energy and frustrating traffic, hey, what else do you need?
What’s worse is that they have the chutzpah to charge the advertisers and ask that the TV company reimburse them for their unneeded bomb-chasing efforts. Why can’t I ever find someone to pay me for running around and chasing my own tail? Why do they get to do pointless, ineffective things and not have to pay for them? Fortunately it seems the Judge is sane, and the charges don’t apply (no criminal intent) so at least the advertisers won’t go to jail simply because the local Boston government is too proud to admit their (pretty egregious) mistake.
I ordered 3 shirts from Men’s Wearhouse online yesterday. Chose (free) ground shipping, estimated at 5-7 days.
They showed up today, even beating the charge…
So there I am at work at 3:30 p.m. I have a headache, and it’s loud, and there’s not a whole lot that I need to be there to do. I decide to leave a bit early.
I get all but 2 miles from home when my car dies. I’m told that when the water pump goes, it usually does so gradually. Mine had to be Shakespearean about it. Very dramatic. No one saw it coming. By the time I get pulled off into a parking lot and get the hood open, there is fluid all over the place. It looks like something green and watery had exploded under the hood.
I wisely decide that I can do nothing. Even if I walk to a gas station and replace the antifreeze the car won’t make it home. Such a catastrophic failure is not so easily alleviated.
I walk the rest of the way home, take some much needed Tylenol and await aid. My Dad soon comes to look at the car, and decides also that nothing can be done.
In the end, we get a strong chain, and drag the car back to its proper place. It’s out of commission for a few days at least.
Wednesday I’ll be heading out to SuperComputing ‘06 in Tampa.
Two very unsurprising things: coddling students to the point of not introducing new or challenging material because it’d make them feel bad doesn’t do them any favors and telling women that their underperformance is inescapable affects their performance.
(Latter link found via this blog.)
Two English men are on a train.
“What’s in that box up there?”
“It’s a MacGuffin.”
“What’s a MacGuffin?”
“It’s for catching lions in the Scottish highlands.”
“But there are no lions in the Scottish highlands!”
“Then it’s not a MacGuffin.”
So I encountered an interesting problem this week: too many ranks. Apparently Opterons can only handle 4 ranks of memory at 400MHz. We loaded a certain machine with 4 dual-rank DIMMs per CPU (=8 ranks/CPU) and it was woefully unstable. Opterons can handle 8 ranks if they run at 333MHz, so I downclocked the memory in the BIOS.
Just something to watch out for the next time you try to build a 1U with two dual-core Opteron 270s and 8 2GB DIMMs. :)
This machine pulls 2.9A under load!
I left early Wednesday morning. Before noon, Rob and I had made it back to his place. We went to Snakes on a Plane that afternoon. (It didn’t live up to our expectations!) Afterward we went to dinner with djao and his fiancée. djao took us to see the Fields Institute before heading back to Waterloo. We headed off to play pool and wait for “the gang” (B&E, Mike). When they showed up, Rob and I alternately played pool and conversed with the table…. EC teased that I’d have to entertain SG at the wedding. We all caught up a little. Before long though, they had to go. Rob and I moved on to another pool place before crashing.
On Thursday, I made it out to Mississauga for the tux fitting. Mike and I roamed Square One for a bit, talking, and of course acquiring ping pong balls for the Csima’s. We then had to try them out. :) I made my way back to Toronto that evening, and Rob and I met some of his friends for pool. They were lame….
On Friday, Rob and I went to the rehearsal. He then bailed while I went on to the rehearsal dinner and the after-dinner festivities (including ping pong!). SG and I kept losing at the ping pong. I didn’t make it back to Rob’s apartment until pretty late.
Saturday was the auspicious occasion. I took public transportation to the wedding, and changed into my tux in the bathroom. The wedding itself went pretty quickly as these things go. The highlights: Papa Csima almost tripped over the bridal gown on his way back to the pew, Rob had some trouble with the video camera, and the kiss looked a bit awkward. :) After the wedding proper, we moved on to a quite beautiful park for some more photographs.
After the photographs, we made our way to the reception. I rode in a very full car, but an amusing one. There was a whole discussion about which Disney character each of us was. Apparently I’m very much not Peter Pan (SG balked at the idea). By the time we arrived, pretty much everyone was already there. It was a nice crowd. MBD and Christina were there, as well as N&N.
The dining hall was set up with a dance floor in the middle, and the raised head table behind that. B&E named all the tables after mathematicians, and the head table was the Grothendieck table. There was all the usual: food, dancing, speeches. I spent quite a lot of time talking to SG. That was especially fun. (… and sad. Travel hundreds of miles, and see not only friends I desperately miss, but also meet other cool people I’ll never see again. :))
There were a lot of great moments. Bert’s parents were really getting down. And Papa Csima’s always fun. But the moment as far as I’m concerned happened when no one was watching. B&E were in the corner of the crowded dance floor during one of the slower dances. Elizabeth had her head on Bert’s shoulder, her eyes closed. Elizabeth was in her beautiful dress, and Bert in his tux. At the end of the song, Elizabeth said something to Bert and then they kissed. It wasn’t staged or awkward. She looked happy.
There’s a poem by Billy Collins. It goes something like:
The boy at the far end of the train car kept looking behind him as if he were afraid, or expecting someone, and then she appeared in the glass door of the forward car and he rose and opened the door to let her in and she entered the car carrying a large black case in the unmistakable shape of a cello. She looked like an angel with a high forehead and somber eyes and her hair was tied up behind her back with a black bow, and because of all that he seemed a little awkward in his happiness to see her, whereas she was simply there perfectly existing as a creature with a soft face who played the cello. And the reason I am writing this on the back of a manila envelope now that they have left the train together is to tell you that when she turned to lift the large, delicate cello onto the overhead rack, I saw him looking up at her and what she was doing the way eyes of saints are painted when they are looking up at God when he is doing something remarkable, something that identifies him as God.
(Forgive the arrangement. I’ve not seen it in print.) Don’t know why I thought of that. :) I think SG made me an idealist again, for a short time….
All in all, it was a fun wedding, and a fun trip. I arrived back late Sunday. It was weird. As soon as I landed, it felt like a long dream had ended. I was back to “real life.” I went to work Monday and hardly anything had changed in my absence. Just last week I was in Toronto, and now I’m back. It’s quite jarring.
This weekend I’ll be in Chicago. Prepare yourselves!