Planet RGSB

New versions of TREES and Ironclad are available from their usual place. Performance enhancements and bugfixes are the order of the day here. There's also been an incompatible change in how PRODUCE-DIGEST works in Ironclad, so you may want to check the documentation for that.

Update via Jean/Mom

The night of Wed. the 14th was spent at the Siler Bald Shelter. Scott had just finished his first 25+mi. day and as he arrived at the shelter he was greeted by three hikers who had a campfire going and invited him over for supper. They had prepared a huge amount of pasta with fresh vegetables (meals planned in advance by their wives for their week long hike). Let's hear it for the wives! These guys are what is known as "Trail Angels". :-) Two of the men were civil engineers from Georgia Tech, hiking with their uncle from NH. They had a lot to talk about over the campfire.

Thurs. the 15th he hiked about 18 mi. to the Wesser Bald shelter where he spent the night.

Fri. the 16th he is at the Nantahala Outdoor Center www.noc.com where he was able to resupply his food, shower, wash clothes, replace a leaky water bottle, eat supper and spend the night at the hostel. He had planned on whitewater rafting today but there was an irregular amount of water being discharged from the dam, so his rafting trip was canceled.

Tomorrow he will continue his trek and take about a day to get into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. He expects it to take 4-5 days to hike through the park.

Most thru hikers develop a trail name. So far Scott is going by "Smiley", which was his nickname back in Chicago.

I don't know how set up links, but found this site that has some good pictures of the type of shelters he is staying in.
http://www.maconcommunity.org/nhc/shelters.html

Some of the shelters have been very full, so he plans to keep his tent, but is considering sending his stove and some other items back to Rockport.

Sounds like he is having a good time!

Word is that the Bushmaster ACR won't see civilian sales until early next year.

That's too bad, but I guess I'll have to spend my money on a Garand instead.

Rose-Hulman’s Challenge X team took first place Thursday night (May 15) for Best Commercial in the Challenge X 2008 East Coast Showcase.

Melissa has recently gotten Gothic 3 (german rpg riddled with bugs) to work well enough to make it playable. She loves the game, but the community had to patch it in order to make it playable, so I'm certainly not...

I don't cook very many things you could call "casserole," but here's one:

Macaroni & cheese

Ingredients:

1 small onion or 1/2 large onion
2 T butter
2 stalks celery, sliced
2 cloves garlic or 1/2 tsp garlic powder
1 28-oz can stewed tomatoes
1 lb noodles of your choice
1/4 lb chopped ham, optional
12 oz velveeta or other fake cheese
1/2 c milk
4 oz or so shredded cheddar
dry bread crumbs
paprika
dried parsley

1. Chop the onion & celery. Sautee in butter until translucent. If using fresh garlic, add it near the end so you don't burn it. If using garlic powder, use it in step 5 instead.
2. Cook the noodles according to package directions. Drain.
3. Cube the fake cheese. Put the fake cheese and milk in a bowl; microwave for about 30-40 seconds at a time, stirring until melted and smooth.
4. Put the noodles in a 13 x 9 cake pan or other similarly-sized casserole dish. Add the sauteed vegetables, the canned tomatoes, the cheese sauce, and the ham (if using), and stir it all up.
5. Sprinkle with bread crumbs, garlic powder (if using), cheddar cheese, and a lot of paprika. Some black pepper never hurt, either.
6. Cook at around 375 until it's browning on top & warm throughout. 15-20 minutes is usually enough.

Want more casseroles? Check out Natural Mommy's recipe swap.

Person A: So, newegg is offering a 2 gig Creative Zen Stone Plus for $30.

Person B: Man, I paid $40 for 1 gig last year.

Person C: Me too.

Person D: Those prices are going down, but the price of milk is skyrocketing.

Person B: Sadly, Moore’s Law does not apply to cattle.

Shifty VU Demo from Garrett Mace on Vimeo.

Here's a demo of the new Shifty VU operating. This is no longer feeding Winamp Data into a Cubloc; the audio signal is rectified, filtered, and amplified with an RC decay, then oversampled with an AVR ATmega128 and displayed as a bar graph. Currently no fancy presets, just red and blue, but I have lots of ideas. Fading orange neon, peak detector, variable speed chasers, etc. Feel free to post your own ideas below!  Read more»

My right to stay on the path supersedes your right to walk next to each other. I will happily walk right into you, as one person today can attest.

(The one exception is for cases where someone is being aided in walking by others)

Via Mom/Jean
Tuesday May 13 Day 9

Scott called from Standing Indian shelter at about 6 pm. He  wanted to get some information about the Standing Indian campground and store 1.5 mi away, but unfortunately I was still at work and didn't have access to a computer. He is about 70 mi. into the hike. It has been a slower start than he had planned, but his blisters are healing and he will start doing some longer days soon. 

The weather has been good. The only bad storms have been at night and he was in a shelter or his tent both times. However, the forecast for the next couple of days is for rain. 

On Sunday May 11 (day 7) he called from Tray Mountain shelter. We didn't have a very good connection but it was great to hear from him on Mother's Day. He is meeting interesting people, and seen some of them a couple times as they take different days off the trail for rest and supplies.

He sounded verry happy, and satisfied with the hike so far.

Seriously, what the heck?

It's hardly news, I think, that the editorial line over at most of the Gawker Media sites tends to the stupid. I actually keep Gizmodo, Uncrate, and io9 in my RSS aggregator, and, leaving Uncrate aside as it seems to have no discernible editorial bias except for shinies, io9 is far dumber on a day-to-day basis than Giz. Which might actually be saying something, though I wonder if it's just the focus on pop-cultural trivia doing that.

In any case, accusing people of being homophobes because they aren't turning out in sufficiently large numbers for "Speed Racer" to please io9's editor strikes me as the height of both egoism and insulting-your-audience asininity.

FWIW, I haven't bothered because I have no particular interest in the property the film is based on, and I'm not in the mood to have my eyes and ears assaulted with a film that looks like a combination of F-Zero with an acid trip. And because it looks totally gay. And, by gay, I mean homosexual.

5 points to anyone who can give a reason to execute this command:

$ cd `pwd`

(there is at least one common situation for which I think this is the minimal solution)

Anyone have any desire to see Bill Maher at the Murat in Indy on August 16th?

All ShiftBrites have now been sold. I'm working with my suppliers to get a lot more manufactured, but leadtime will be 20 to 30 days. I underestimated how fast these would go, I had planned to start thinking about stock replenishment around the 15th of May at the earliest. Not bad for zero advertising, just people who were keeping an eye on the project and a recent mention on Hack A Day. I'm shipping out the last orders and will focus on getting more of these in stock ASAP. When I do receive additional stock, I should have my site and shipping arrangements all in place for international orders; apologies to those of you who contacted me regarding shipping to the UK, Europe, and Australia.

I signed up for Amazon Associates and Google AdSense accounts for my new recipe blog (nothing really there yet). Let me tell you, both experiences have been a joy.

I wasn't able to sign up for Google AdSense in Firefox. The long version: I went and filled in the registration forms, and then it asked me if I wanted to use my existing Google account to log in to AdSense as well. I selected "yes", entered my credentials, and hit the "Continue" button. After a bit, it sent me back to the registration form, with all of the fields blank. I was confused and thought that maybe I had accidentally hit the "Back" button instead, so I tried again. Same result. (Also, Roboform didn't like their fields for some reason, so I was doing this all manually, too.) Finally gave up and did it in IE, and of course it worked just fine, Roboform included. GG, Google.

Amazon Associates was much easier, and I didn't have to wait for approval to start using it. I played around with Product Links for my Resources page for a while. I sort of liked their Product Previews script, but I didn't want it to pop up for the text links, so I just disabled it in general. The Enhanced Display option (text and image, with an obvious "Buy from Amazon" button included) was a bit intrusive, so I decided to use image links for the books and then text link to DVDs and a few other things.

First thing I noticed was that the images for the image links were broken. After a bit of frustration, I noticed that the HTML they generated for it contained a relative URL for the image instead and figured it was a bug. Apparently you're not supposed to hotlink their images for this type of Product Link, but they're more than happy to serve the images for their Enhanced Product Links for you. I'm an idiot, because there was text on the Build Link page that notified me that I would have to upload the images somewhere else to use them and I completely missed it. I still don't understand why one type of image is okay to hotlink, but not the other. It's not just a size issue. Right now, I'm hotlinking, but I'll probably change that later today.

The second annoying bit was, of course, finding all of the products I wanted to link. The books were easy to find, since I had their ISBNs; even a search by title yielded results. I was also able to find Alton Brown's salt cellar on Amazon too. Finding DVDs for the TV shows I wanted to share proved to be much more difficult. The ATK Season DVDs were there, but only some had thumbnails, so I decided to go with text links there. The Good Eats DVDs were not all available, so eventually I gave in and just linked to AB's Food Network store. Guess I'm missing out on that. Sometimes it's so hard to find what you want on Amazon.

After the rough start at AFSP with the car trouble, I got off to a great hiking start that night.  Finished 5.8 miles that night after starting at 5:30pm. Tented that first night on a mountain top with a GREAT sunset and a wonderful sunrise. :-)  The next day I got the 3 miles to Springer, then did ~15 miles to Gooch Shelter.  I met some wonderful people there. I ended up hiking to the same place the next night as 2 of them, Dan and Allison.  Austin went ahead of us and did to Neels Gap while the three of us stopped at Woods Hole Shelter after about 12.5 miles.  Today I did the 3.5 miles into Neels Gap hostel where they have an outfitter, store, and hostel. So I'm stopping and letting my blisters heal a little bit and they will stretch my boots tomorrow morning. The blisters aren't all that painful, I'm just afraid of infection, so I'm taking the cautious approach.  And, as it turns out this might be the opportune time to heal the blisters because it's predicted for a really bad T Storm with hail this afternoon.  We'll see how that turns out...
And tonight, the hostel is supposed to take us to an all you an eat buffet. :-)

Overall, a great experience! Beautiful, just beautiful. The mountains seem so young and small here, you are always can see the mountains in both directions.  Gorgeous. :-)

I hadn't noticed this one until the Bureau of Public Debt sent a reminder email. They've reduced the limit on annual purchasing of savings bonds to $5,000 per person. It used to be $30,000. The last time the limit was $5,000 was in 1973.

I'm not even going to try to guess the real reason they did this. But what it means is that one of the best places to keep cash without losing purchasing power to inflation, the I Series bond, is not as useful as it was.

I like I Bonds. The rates are continually adjusted to keep ahead of inflation. Right now, they are at 4.84%. They are sold at face value, have a minimum ownership time of 1 year, and only a 3 month interest penalty if sold before 5 years. You can buy directly from the Treasury Direct website for free, so there are no account fees or transaction fees to reduce the return. The interest income is even exempt from State income taxes.

Of course, I'm being a bit silly, because I've never bought $5,000 worth of I Bonds in one year. But I had planned to use them as the major cash component of my portfolio. They'd certainly be doing better than the stock I bought last year.

So, some of the guys at improv were unaware that I have a blog. They were momentarily worried that I might be posting embarrasing things about them.

As if.

This blog exists so that I can blither about the latest stupid meme to completely hijack my frontal lobes. In this case, Caramell Dancen Be warned: they’ve set anime characters to do a stupid dance to fast paced swedish bubblegum pop.

I can’t get this crap out of my head.

Well, I finally finished setting up a web store to try selling some of the ShiftBrite modules I had manufactured. If these start to go fast, I'll put in a larger order. The product page is available here, and everything should work though it's my first attempt at "e-commerce" I believe is the fasionable term (maybe in 1998). Let me know if anything looks strange.

You know, I've been joking about putting signs for a Pat Paulsen/Alfred E. Newman campaign for ... at least four, possibly eight or more years now. Always too lazy to be bothered, but it looks a little more attractive every year.

Imagine my surprise to find that Mr. Paulsen is running, sort of.

It is with a heavy heart and an empty stomach that I announce that El Morocco in Indianapolis has closed.

Actually, it seems to have been gone for a while. I'm assuming it hasn't just moved, because there's no "we've moved to..." kinda sign in the window. I only went there a few times, but it was always fun and tasty. The owner was a character, as they say.

It is survived by many other inferior ethnic restaurants in the same strip mall just East of 86th and Ditch, and by several excellent restaurants just Northwest of the same intersection.

What an amazing week and weekend! This has been such a wonderful send-off, I couldn't have asked for better. :-)

A HUGE thanks to Amanda and Tony for letting me stay at your place and the conversations in-between moving out of my apartment and leaving the Chicago area! I really appreciated it.

The Indianapolis Half Marathon went fairly well all things considered. I set a new Personal Record for that distance at 1:58.52, or 9:05 pace. The best part of the race by far was the company before and after the actual race. And I would definitely do it again because of that company! Everybody that I hung out with and met was fantastic. Overall it was one of the most positive and life-affirming weekends I've had in a long time. And believe me, that's saying a lot. People's attitudes to life make SO much of a difference, and it was wonderful to see that in action. A very grateful thank you to everybody!

The race itself, was so-so. I really don't like the way that they do the start, because Everybody is seeded. So rather than just lining up at your pace like most major races, Everybody gets a seeded start corral. And because I didn't have an official race that I could use to seed myself, I was in corral Q of Z. Needless to say the entire race was zigging and zagging around people to pass them. And that took A LOT of energy. The other thing that was both positive and negative about the race is that you run around the Indy speedway near the middle of the race. Awesome that you get the opportunity, but hot and sunny with no shade, and the road is sloped sideways for a lot of it. So a mixed blessing. If I do it again I was told that my finish time would qualify me for corral E next year, where it would take only 2-3 minutes to cross the start line rather than Q where it took about 18 minutes.

On the way from Indy to home I stopped at Caleb's and we ate at his dinning hall and then caravanned from Evansville to my parents. Since we had me, my brother, my mom, and my dad all unloading the trailer it didn't take all that long. We got everything in storage and then laid down for naps. After nap-time my parents made very good pork chops on the grill and we had a feast. :-) The rest of the night was spent sorting hiking gear and maps and equipment and finalizing my packing for the trail. So now, All I need to do is throw my cell phone in, grab a couple of grocery items on the way out of town, and I'm set!

This is SO real to me now! Crazy crazy.

All right, my dad just got up and is downstairs eating, so it's time I joined him so we can take off soon.

Wish me luck!

If you haven't, you should. Sit all the way through the credits, though.

... That's really all I have to say on the subject.

John Derbyshire of National Review fame and some excellent mathematics histories (I guess that's what you'd call them) built a treehouse for his children, documenting the process in prose and photos. I always wanted a treehouse when I was little, but I never thought about how much work it'd be to actually put one together. Maybe if we plant a tree in our new house, my grandchildren can have a treehouse...

I am now the proud owner of a board game with a Class II laser warning. We can blame Karen, because she said that when I was first talking about PRISM (the DS game) she thought I was talking about Khet. She also mentioned that they were selling it at Gamer's Paradise in Woodfield Mall. The sales dude there introduced it as "laser chess" because of how the pieces can be moved. I'm terrible at chess, but I do have an affinity for bouncing light around with mirrors.

He also mentioned that one can purchase a pair of beam-splitting pieces as an expansion. Then, he started to explain what those would do. At that point, I did let him know I was an optical engineer. (Flashbacks to engagement-ring diamond shopping, I do already know what an index of refraction is...) He then said that there are rumors of a second level that can be added on. I assume it will really start looking like that funky chess from Star Trek.
But now that I think on it more, that could have safety issues because it brings the beam level closer to eye-level.

So, who's up for a game? With Blinky Lights AND Shiny Objects?

I built these today. Despite appearances, no welding was required. That's all 1/8 inch hardboard and 3/4 inch square hardwood molding, hot glued together. Then I sealed, painted flat black, applied iron-powder paint in various locations, then applied rust agent in multiple layers to get a nice effect. Then I pulled some parts off the TechShop Wall O' Junk and glued them on for extra zing. The tubes contain 10 ShiftBrite modules each, and will be used as left and right VU channels.

and such a large need for sleep... Not a great combination, but I'll try. :-)

I'm out of the apartment! It took much longer than I anticipated, and I had many more objects than I realized, but I'm out! When I get back from the trail I'm going to spend some serious time looking through my belongings and discarding some (read a lot) of them. I did a TON of that in the last year, but I'm nowhere near finished...

So yeah, I said goodbye to a lot of memories in leaving that apartment. Some good, some not so good, but I'm glad to be out.

I would write more about the amazing dinner last night at Ginza, the incredible experience of packing and moving, the HUGE lessons learned about addresses and how important they are, and so many other things, but right now all I want is sleep. So off to slumberland I go!

Wish me luck tomorrow in my drive out of Chicago and my second attempt at getting an Indiana Driver's License!

Later!

Spanish Rice and Vegetables (4 servings)

---

2c	water
1	packet Lipton Spanish rice
1/2c	peas
1/2c	corn
1/2c	spinach, chopped
1/2c	green pepper, diced
1 block	tofu
1 Tbs	salt

The Lipton packet can be substituted with ~3/4c white rice and ~1/4c vermicelli (or just a cup of rice). Plop rice in water, bring to boil, add everything else, cook covered for ~10m. Spice to taste (paprika is good).

275C per serving, 3g fat, 16g protein.

It's hard to beat the CZ-75 and its close relatives: they're relatively inexpensive, and get very good marks for accuracy and reliability. They get good marks on their long guns, too.

I'm pointing this out because Larry Correia's doing another group buy, this time with CZ. If the SIG group buy is any indication, you probably can't beat the prices with a stick.

Why has it been so difficult for me to learn to let go a little and have fun, or even to take control and make fun happen? It would seem that fun is what other people have while we are getting work done. I'm in the last year of my twenties, which is, I think it has been said, when we are supposed to be having all of the craziest fun of our lives. I started my twenties at Rose (party central, if you count Denny's runs at 2 am on Tuesdays). Then, when that was over, I got a real job, got married, and we bought a house in the suburbs. Work Work Work.

In an attempt to shove a decade worth of fun into the remaining two-in-the-tens-place time I have left, I have a proposal. Let's get together and do something fun! I'll still put in my hours at work, and I'll still get the laundry and the dishes done, eventually. But, I want to GET OUT. To DO MORE. But not BY MYSELF all the time!

Example 1: last Friday at lunch, a coworker mentioned she would be going to a party at a local nightclub. I indicated interest and she said I should go with her and her friends. So, I bought my ticket online, then went to the mall between work and home. (I had no appropriate shoes, or dress, or purse, or...) We got to the club (heat) at midnight and danced until they closed at 3 am. I have never done anything close to that before. Fun Fun Fun.

Example 2: Karen and I have season passes for Six Flags this year. Woo Hoo roller coasters!

Other ideas, please let me know if you are interested: cookouts, bowling, bicycling, camping, zoos, botanical gardens, concerts, fancy parties, dancing, road trips, canoe-ing, volunteering, 5k races, museums, photography trips, walks, shopping, Rocky Horror (I drove to Ft. Wayne to see my first "live" show, thanks to Carrie and Lucas), improv, downtown, pick-your-own, cooking club, karaoke, spa day, video games, picnics, hiking, scotch tasting, and just hanging out. Maybe even at Denny's at 2 am.

I just stumbled across a pretty neat thing you can do with a Reed-Solomon encoded bitstream. If the data you’re feeding into the RS system has sidebar information about erasures, and you can model the proportion of erasures to undetectible bad symbols (as a function of raw bit error rate), you can use the observed number of erasures in your input stream to reliably guess if the data in your input buffer is gibberish.*

It turns out that not running known gibberish through your ECC significantly drops your false positive rate.

Yeah, I’m building a packet protocol on top of a lower speed channel with a bit reliability of only 80% - 85%. The guys at the bar tell me that my beer-fueled rants on the topic are, “Impressive”.

*To illustrate: A RS(10,2) system can correctly decode if 8 > 2*errors + erasures. Let’s say that you know an erasure is twice as likely as an error if the Bit Error Rate is constant over your sample area. (not a bad assumption for small sample areas) Given 4 erasures, you can expect about 2 errors, and 8 > 2*2 + 4 won’t ever correct, and running RS will probably give you garbage.

Just got back from watching my 4th and 5th shows at the Indianapolis International Film Fest. Good stuff (for the most part). If I think of it I'll do quick reviews of all the movies I saw this weekend.

I went into the bar at the theater to get a beer before the first show this evening, and Dan Butler ("Bulldog" on Frasier) was there hanging out just chatting with the two or three other random patrons who were also there about the acting biz. Honestly, I only kinda recognized him, and wouldn't have been sure except that he stopped to explain that he was on Frasier to the people he was talking with. I hadn't seen either of the films he was in which were showing at the festival, plus I had to hurry to get to my movie so I didn't stick around, but he sounds like a nice guy.

Not impressed with my brush with fame? Hey, this is Indianapolis.

The WSJ says that the public's view of the Republican party is as negative as it has ever got. Granted, it's still a very, very long way to November, but I'm thinking McCain ekes out a victory in the White House, while the GOP suffers a net loss of seats in both houses of Congress. Probably the Democrats pick up more seats in 2010, given the ongoing economic mess which they are and will do nothing to alleviate.

In truth, I think this mostly illustrates that the Democrats do a much better job controlling their message than the GOP does. Whether that's because of the relatively Democratic bias in the mainstream media, or just a matter of group temperament, I'm not sure.

Link stolen from Adam C, posting in RedState's RedHot semi-blog-thing.

Now, there are some suspicions that the Democratic Party is headed on its way to a major crack-up sooner rather than later, and the current Presidential primary may be an indicator of just how it will go down. I don't think this is very likely, but, if it happens, it would produce a major realignment of the US. I'm thinking a large number, likely young voters and activist types, seem likely to jump ship from the Democratic party to a new Progressive party in that case. What that would mean in the long term, I'm not sure, but I think it would actually spell a net shift in the US electorate left-ward, because it would further marginalize conservatives in the Republican party: neither new party would have the electoral strength in Congress, and the GOP would probably absorb some cast-off moderate and conservative Democrats in the process.

Everybody in the family except myself seems to be somewhat sick lately, so I have been taking a chunk of time off each day this week to assist with care. Yesterday that involved playing Duplos with Becca while Tricia and Ally slept. We built a Duplo car that was roughly the size of a good-size U-Haul moving van...strapped onto the chassis of a Honda Civic. As part of its accoutrements, it featured a house in the back for one of the Duplo animals she owns (the lion, in this case).

Becca also decided that there needed to be a computer on the roof of the car. She sat down one of her little Duplo men in from of the computer, prompting the question from me, “What's the Duplo man doing, Becca?” Her response: “Oh, he's just writing...he's just writing GCC.” She is her father's daughter.

I need to be out of my apartment tomorrow during the day, so tonight is final packing!

Even though I had already moved so much stuff down, I'm amazed at how much I have in my apartment. I'm pretty much down to my bed, food, lamps, and stuff that I'm going to need during the next couple of days. But it will still be a long night of carrying and cleaning ahead of me. At this point it's just buckle down and keep making trips down and up!

Yesterday was crazy. A HUGE thanks to Amanda and Tony for helping me pack! I got probably 85% of my stuff down to the trailer last night with their incredible help. Unfortunately, we had to stop at 85% because of a faulty door to the trailer I rented. Apparently one of the springs in the closing mechanism broke and the wire got tangled in the wheels and tracks. As a result, the door wouldn't shut. After spending far to long trying to get the wire untangled, we called it a night, threw a tarp across the door, and backed it up against a fence.

This morning I was up bright and early and got to the U-Haul place about 20 minutes after they opened. There I pulled the trailer into their garage, unpacked it, switched trailers, and repacked it. All said it took less than an hour from when I left my apartment for U-Haul till trailers were switched and I was at work.

Right now, I'm at the point where I'll leave the apartment clean, but I'm not be overly concerned about it. So long as I'm packed and out of here tomorrow morning I'll be happy.

Well, time to get back to it!

Wish me luck, it will be a Long night!