My distraction of choice this morning is a comment thread about pie. Mmmmmm, pie. These are just some links that got passed around that I want to keep handy for my own reference...
Cherry Pie
Pies in tiny jars
Steak, Guinness, and Cheese Pie
Schadenfreude PieCurrent Mood:  hungry |
D and I had a great time in Stockholm last week. We saw tons of Cool Things, walked a lot, and generally enjoyed ourselves quite a lot. I've started working on picture sets on Flickr, although there's a lot still to upload, and they're largely focused on items in museums. That might be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your preferences.
Between a series of family obligations and another conference trip, it looks like my summer has suddenly gotten completely booked up. I really don't purposely try to over-schedule myself; I'm happier when I don't, but sometimes it just works out that way regardless. (I get tired just thinking about how much I used to pack in to my calendar... not sure how I survived it.)
What else is new? hmmm. Diverse fiber arts: I realized I had actually worked through better than half of the grand sewing project list I had made a few years ago, so I took an evening to plan out a lot of new projects, and assign fabric from the stash. (Like the yarn stash, the fabric stash is threatening to overflow its storage containers.) It's a dizzying array of ideas to work on (12th through 16th centuries inclusive? check. plus the 18th), and only adds on to all the stuff from the previous list that I hadn't gotten to yet. Knitting-wise, finished the baby jacket and am pleased to be back to working on socks, which I am enjoying much more. And if the parents-to-be don't get me info soon (like say, a due date, or a mailing address) I might just save it for someone else.
Video game land is the same old story - massive backlog. Finished Mass Effect (thumbs up), re-playing Persona 3 before I start Persona 4, FFTA2 has taken over the DS refuses to share time with the other games. FFXI - hit 30 on RDM, going back to level WHM and BLM to 20-ish so I'm covered for subjobs until 40. Actually, having a bit of fun with BLM at the moment. Zorch! LOL. Might unlock Ranger just because I can. I tend to have a strong reaction to how archery plays out in games, either very good or very bad, but I think I'll at least want to try it out at some point. Speaking of, it's time to leave for practice ^_^Current Mood:  cheerful |
Why is it that when I get inspiration for a project, it's always something batshit crazy abso-fucking-lutely insane?
So here's what my brain has come up with this morning: a feather shawl. Not real feathers, lace knitting in a feather pattern. But not an abstract, geometric, repeating feather pattern, a this-is-what-a-bird's-spread-wingspan-looks-like feather pattern. In a semi-solid black colorway with blue or purple undertones, and maybe in a silk thread for extra shininess.
Yeah. Crazy. Even if such a pattern existed, it'd be beyond my skill. The only piece of lace knitting I've ever started is languishing in it's project bag because I seldom have the concentration to work on it. And such a pattern does not, as far as I can tell, exist. Oh, sure, there are plenty of feather-theme shawls (you'll have to be a Ravelry member to see these links):
http://www.ravelry.com/projects/Yosemiteelp/peacock-shawl
http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/peacock-feathers-shawl
http://www.ravelry.com/projects/laytonius/gail-aka-nightsongs
http://www.ravelry.com/projects/SpinningJenny/irtfaa-faroese-lace-shawl
http://www.ravelry.com/projects/kydawson/pretty-as-a-peacock-shawl
http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/icarus-shawl
But again, they're all pretty abstract, unlike the thing dancing around in my head taunting me. So I'd have to design the pattern for it too. I, who have never knit anything without a detailed pattern and have never finished a piece of lace knitting, would have to design a complex, non-repetitive, representational lace shawl pattern that would probably be considered a masterwork among even serious lace knitters.
This is is making my brain hurt, and I still can't stop thinking about it. Well, I'd want the stitches oriented like this, and I could use that double decrease to make the spine of each feather pop a little and...Current Mood:  creative |
I find myself completely unable to face my code this morning (not feeling so great), so let's post to Livejournal instead! ^_^
Had a great time and Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival on Saturday. Missed most of the rain, thank goodness. I spent about $100 on the following: hand-painted sock yarn, more hand-painted sock yarn (socks that rock, woot!), semisolid wool-bamboo blend sport, hand-painted merino worsted, more sock yarn, and some buttons. All of which should keep me well supplied for projects for the foreseeable future. (Not that my stash wasn't already well-supplied for the foreseeable future, but well, how could I resist?)
The weather means that archery practice is almost certainly cancelled (again). D expects to be working very late pretty much every day this week, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do with myself. Probably some knitting and gaming. I've been spending a lot of time on Mass Effect; still really enjoying it. Alternatively, if I put my mind to it, I could probably hit 30 in FF by the end of the week. Plus there's literally a dozen other games I'm theoretically playing at the moment.
As for the code I'm avoiding, I'm in the middle of moving an algorithm from 4x vector single-precision floats to 8x vector 16-bit signed integers, which is a prelude to going to 16x 8-bit uchars. It'll be interesting trying to make sure that the round-off errors are actually bounded.
Morning Ritual Tea:
1 Tazo Organic Chai teabag
2 packs Splenda (substitute sugar or your preferred sweetener)
~2 tablespoons whole milk
The key is to have everything in the mug before you pour on very hot water. Delicious - kind of like a chai latte, but without being so sweet and creamy that it completely overpowers the taste of the tea.
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I have a bug, and it is maddening.
- only occurs with optimization on (-O2 and higher)
- does not raise any memory access or uninitialized value errors in valgrind
- in gdb, once optimization is on to replicate the bug, "p foo" gives "Variable "foo" is not available." - for nearly all of the relevant variables.
- adding printf's to manually check values prevents the bug from occurring
I have a hazy idea of what's going on - I've been able to narrow it down based on exactly which printf's prevent the bug, and I think I know where the 'wrong' values are coming from... I just can't figure out why I'm getting them instead of the ones I expect. It looks almost like a timing issue (i.e., reading before a previous write finishes), but fixing that would mean whittling the thing down to a documentable compiler bug, so I'm perversely hoping that there's something wrong with my code instead. Arghhh.Current Mood:  frustrated |
| » Cherry Blossom Time |
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Went down to DC for the cherry blossoms today. Abso-freaking-lutely gorgeous. Glad I had enough money on my farecard, though, because the Metro was a total zoo, particularly the ticketing machines.
Apr. 4th, 2009 @ 08:01 pm
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| » April Fools |
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I have a pretty low tolerance for the April Fools Internet News Story, but these geeky gamer ones hit just the right spot for me. YMMV.
Witchaloks Class Preview
City of Heroes: Golden Age
Here's hoping my visual migraine doesn't turn in to a full blown one.
Apr. 1st, 2009 @ 05:54 pm
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| » Is it Friday yet? |
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Athleta.com wins this year's swimsuit competition. The top I got isn't perfect, but it's good enough. These are very comfy.
Worked on proofs of the paper today. They've only screwed up a couple of things, so hopefully we'll only need to go through one more set of proofs.
My sister is going to be in town on Saturday. I believe the plan for the day involves looking at bridesmaids' dresses.
There was something else I wanted to mention, but it has completely escaped my mind...
Mar. 26th, 2009 @ 05:30 pm
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| » Friday food pr0n |
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Strawberry shortcake
Originally uploaded by Catrijn
Strawberry shortcake, from scratch.
NOM NOM NOM
Mar. 20th, 2009 @ 06:13 pm
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| » Turn down the rage-o-meter! |
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I guess I'm pretty cranky lately, 'cause there's a lot of crap that's ticking me off, and I feel a need to vent.
( Move along, nothing to see here. )
Mar. 18th, 2009 @ 10:11 am
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| » Time flies when you're having fun... |
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... and even when you're not.
So. My paper was accepted for publication over the weekend. This is fabulous, happy, wonderful, double-plus good news, worthy of celebrating (which I have, thankyouverymuch). It's my first first-author work since starting grad school, so it's a big deal. It is also Just In Time, since I have a committee meeting coming up in a few weeks, and having that pushed over into the Stuff I Actually Finished column will be very good.
All of this led me to clean up the archeological layers of my desk today, so that I can pull together my materials for a progress report and presentation. Now, when I say archeological layers, it's not actually hyperbole. Although in fact most of my desk surface is clear, there are a few discrete piles of papers, each of which may be a couple inches high. One of these was the printouts of papers I referenced (I've since converted to electronic management with Papers), but the larger was a record of drafts of the paper, neatly stacked in reverse chronological order. I find it much easier to write and edit with pen and paper, so these copies are spilling over with margin notes and red ink. What really struck me, though, was how deep the layers went. I'd somehow convinced myself that I'd only been working on this manuscript for a little over a year, but the system dates on a latex document don't lie (or something like that). The oldest one? March 6, 2007. No wonder I'm so sick of it.
Mar. 16th, 2009 @ 03:06 pm
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| » A very bad joke |
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Knock, knock!
Who's there?
You know.
You know who?
Yes! Avada Kedavra!
... it hurt so bad I had to share x_x
Mar. 10th, 2009 @ 01:33 pm
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| » I mourn for you, my lost electrons |
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Our internet connection at home has been incredibly unreliable of late. Well, I suppose technically, it has been "reliable" - reliably dropping connection and re-assigning IP every 15 minutes or so. This is guaranteed to drop you out of whatever online game you might be thinking of playing, likely to cause character death, and if you're lucky enough to be halfway done with an instanced mission, you can bet that the whole thing will be reset and you'll have to start over. With the knowledge that there's no way you can get it done before the next time you drop link, this is, shall we say, unmotivating.
So this, combined with a whimsically nostalgic mood, has lead me to browse my own files, rather than the internet, for evening entertainment. Saved IM conversations, photos, random things which made me laugh, inscrutable collections from the heady early days of P2P... it's an odd collection of memories connected to things I remember, and surprises at things that I don't. Having exhausted the main places I store these kinds of things, I went off looking for my e-mail archives... only to not find them.
Some of it is expected: webmail accounts that I've been locked out of, or on services that no longer exist - I knew that stuff was gone. Other absences are more surprising - like my PSU account, where I know I wasn't using server-side storage. I've got a stack of back-up discs where it theoretically could be, but I've checked the ones with plausible labels without success. The last computer that I know would have had those files is one I sent in for recycling last year. The last time I migrated computers, I might have looked through my mailbox and consciously decided I didn't need to keep any of it - short sighted, perhaps, but it sounds like something I would do. And so I'm pretty well convinced that it's irretrievably gone. There probably wasn't anything half as interesting as I'm thinking there might have been - more likely just reminders about meetings, stupid re-forwarded jokes, and piles of spam that never quite made it to the trash. All the same, it's kind of weird that I don't have a single e-mail from before mid-2003*, when I'd been on the internet since '96 at least.
I'm already way more careful about back-ups than I ever used to be - 2 firewire back-up drives, at separate locations (home and work), each with a partition for a complete HD copy (bootable, even) of each of my two computers. That should be enough to protect against hardware failure. But maybe I should be less aggressive about cleaning up my digital possessions, especially when they don't take up space, just electrons. Who knows what I'll want to reminisce about 5 or 10 years from now.
*This isn't technically true. I have one webmail account still active that dates from early 2002, however, it only has receipts from online shopping, so it's not very interesting.
Mar. 5th, 2009 @ 09:30 am
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| » Have you even listened to what I've been telling you? |
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Scene 1:
Me: I need to make an appointment to bring in my cat for some preventative medicine.
Vet's desk clerk: How about Thursday at 9?
Me: That's fine. She'll probably need to be sedated in order to have the work done.
Vet's desk clerk: Well, don't worry about that yet, we'll let the vet figure that out once you bring her in.
... 2 days pass ...
Vet: Well, I think I need to sedate her. Has she been fasted for 12+ hours?
Me: Umm, no. No one mentioned that.
Vet: Well, it doesn't really matter anyway, since I don't have any openings in my surgery schedule for today. Let's go see when we can reschedule you for.
Me: ...
Scene 2:
Me: I need to book a hotel room for this conference trip on these dates. It'll be high travel season there, so I'm concerned because rates are very high and about half the hotels already have no vacancies. It's a small meeting, so we're on our own for accommodations.
Corporate Travel Agent: OK, I can get you this, this, or this for this much respectively.
Me: Wow, that's better than anything I found, can you go ahead and book that?
... next day ...
CTA: Well, I'm finding a room for the first four days, but not the last three, so I'm contacting the hotel to see if they have a reserved block for the meeting.
Me: x_x
Feb. 19th, 2009 @ 12:48 pm
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| » Fall back, the outer defensive walls have been breached! |
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It was only a matter of time, really. We knew that sooner or later the economic storm around us would pierce the bubble that surrounds us. But I've never seen the boss so openly worried. And angry, about what this might forebode for the people whose projects are in danger.
I shouldn't complain. It's still far better than the 'real world', and even compared to the ordinary academic world. We're going from budgets of funny money, to budgets of real money, with actual limits. But the timing is bad. We unexpectedly inherited an expensive project this year, which was already pushing the budget under the old system. Under the new one, it may be untenable. The main person working on it has already been hit with a multi-year career setback thanks to the careless can't-be-bothered attitude of an ex-collaborator. Having to go on the job market now, with nothing to show from this position... And it's not a good sign when the director steps in to order a project halted, the experiments terminated. (The boss had given the same order already, and with additional circumstances it makes sense, but that sort of intervention is worrisome.)
I'm not at risk, I'm certain. Not yet. But the air of nervousness and anxiety that has descended on this place all of a sudden this week is pervasive. The extra stress is getting to me. And that standing offer to stay on in a temp position after graduation? Might not stand anymore. I think I need a drink x_x
Feb. 12th, 2009 @ 01:04 pm
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| » LOL |
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Not saying that this applies to my current life, it doesn't, but I found this strangely hilarious this morning.
Feb. 4th, 2009 @ 08:28 am
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| » the travails of publishing |
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Submitted the revised version of my paper today. The changes were quite minor; my boss thankfully did most of the writing for a diplomatically worded letter explaining why we thought the changes they suggested were irrelevant and we weren't going to do them. The editor at least sounded pretty positive on the paper, so hopefully it'll go straight in. I have absolutely nothing nice to say about the online submission system they're using, though.
I'm pretty stressed out now, though - 12 hour day today to get that all wrapped up. There's supposed to be ice tonight, so I figure I'll stay home tomorrow, and likely stay up late gaming tonight in order to cool off ^_^ Likely on tap: Guitar Hero 3, Portal, and/or Lego Indiana Jones once D gets done with his nightly Left 4 Dead session, and maybe some MMO time until then.
Jan. 27th, 2009 @ 08:28 pm
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| » Rhetorical question |
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We are currently getting a small, completely expected snowstorm. The office remains open, although schools are closed. So why would you wait until after 9AM, when the employees have (largely) arrived, to start clearing the building's driveway?
I mean, it's not like the public roads were cleared or salted either, but that's because this is Vahginyuh, and that means its The South, and it never snows in The South. Right?
Jan. 27th, 2009 @ 09:36 am
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| » RFID comes for thee! |
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So, today I got RFID-payment-enabled cards from my main credit card. This was totally unexpected, especially since we just got new cards about two months ago due to the expiration date coming up. Currently debating between buying an RFID-blocking wallet (the one through ThinkGeek actually looks decent), or shredding them and requesting non-chipped cards from the issuer. Hrmm.
Also this week:
- Had lunch with a Nobel laureate. Interesting to listen to a conversation with someone with encyclopedic knowledge of the last 50 years of your field.
- Been playing GH3 on 360 - the price drop at BestBuy on the Les Paul bundle was irresistable. Also Braid, and soon Portal.
- Also playing: WoW trial. Not sold on this, but it's not too bad. Except for the main chat channel, which is mind-bleedingly atrocious, at least on the new server we got shunted to by default.
- Work: 25% speed-up on my vector code. Still slower than the scalar version X_X Learning curve of DOOM.
Jan. 23rd, 2009 @ 05:08 pm
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