Archive for March, 2006

Silence of the power outage

It was a pretty rainy and stormy day here, but I’m not sure if it was the water or a lightning bolt that killed power in my neighborhood this afternoon. It was about 2:40 or so in the afternoon when power sputtered. Literally–it went down and came back up I think three times […]

Sneezing up a storm

Spring is definitely on its way, I’ve been sneezing uncontrolably today. There’s some kind of allergens in the air and the most likely culprit is pollen.
In a bit of good timing, I just got a little flyer from Target in the mail that included a coupon for Claritin. I will be taking advantage […]

Republicans already jostling for 2008

This is just unseemly I think–the Republican contenders are already jockeying for position in the 2008 presidential race. Come on, President Bush still has over two years to go on his second term. We haven’t even reached the mid-term elections for heaven’s sake.
Not that the Democrats are any better–the nattering nabobs are already […]

Liquid water on a moon of Saturn

Now this has got to be the big science story of the year, at least so far–they’ve found liquid water on a moon of Saturn. Can you imagine–where there’s water there’s life. At least that’s how it works here on Earth.
We have to send a probe down to the surface.

Hope I didn’t unleash some kind of contagion at work

So this past Friday I rolled into work early but a few hours later I went home because I was feeling sick. I’m hoping I didn’t inadvertantly start some kind of contagion–first Smorty got sick earlier this week and today Twinkie went home not feeling well.
Maybe I’m some kind of Typhoid Rex. Yuck.

Ambien causing sleep-driving

So I don’t generally have problems sleeping, if anything I probably sleep too much. But like everybody else I’ve been seeing a bunch of those ads for Ambien on TV the past few years. It’s an aid for those people who do have problems getting enough sleep. Apparently though one of the […]

US Open tennis tournament to use instant replay

The US Open this summer will become the first Grand Slam tennis tournament to use an instant-replay system to make disputed calls. It’s the Hawk-Eye system that they’ll be using, which has been around for a few years. Mostly it’s been television using it during their coverage but now the tournaments themselves will […]

My employer contributed into open source

We use a lot of open source where I work–Linux and Apache and MySQL to name the most prominent. So it’s cool to know that we’ve contributed a new project into the Apache incubator. A text-search system built on Lucene, called Solr.
Will be interesting to see if anybody out there finds it useful.

Trying to re-learn how to study

So I’m hoping to apply to U of L soon, to get an MS in Computer Science. Right now I’m taking a GRE prep course to get myself ready and it’s proving difficult to study. It’s been so long since I’ve been a student and I’m just finding it tough to get back […]

Got a free bag of apples at Wal-Mart today

I was at the Wal-Mart Supercenter today, buying some groceries for the week. When I was at the checkout line, something went wrong with the scale. No matter what he did, the check-out guy could not get it to register the weight for this little bag of apples I was buying. After […]