Rice Cooker
I want to buy a rice cooker, but I know nothing about them. Are they all made equal? Is there a best brand, a best model, handy features to look for? Tell me. Someone.
Curtis Jones
McKinley Training - Weeks 1, 2 of 26
A McKinley expedition wants six to nine months of training; having succeeded once, I am complacent enough to pick six. The gym got boring, so did hauling a heavy pack up the stairs, so I run them. The lack of inspiration is my job's fault: I love working from home.
Holy Crap
Training for McKinley with no mountains in NYC, so I've been running the stairs of my 35 story building. Then I read about the Empire State Building stair race: 1,576 steps, 86 floors, and the winner does it in about ten minutes. Holy crap. I've got a long ways to go.
Breakfast
I remembered to turn the stove off after making breakfast just now. Unlike yesterday. Today is a good day.
Proposition 8
A friend posted her thoughts on Prop 8 while trying not to offend anyone. An impossible goal, I suspect. I have no such goal, because this is my soapbox. Fourteen little words and so much debate, so let's get started, shall we?
Baseline the Project Plan
Everyone mocks engineers for technobabble, but the product guy's email asking us to "baseline the project plan and milestone dates" left me wondering: we need to WHAT? Now I know how the managers feel.
Just 25 More Weeks
I get an uncontrollable smile every time I think about flying back to Alaska. Just twenty-five more weeks. Sounds close, until I reframe it as nearly half a year, which actually makes me feel better since I still need the training time.
Follow-Up with the Fruit Company
A more technical interview with the fruit company: TCP versus UDP, congestion control, hash tables. The TCP questions were fortuitously timed, since my latest project has me implementing a TCP-like protocol over UDP. I even got to name-drop Karn's algorithm.
Lead by Example
On that famous "spread the wealth around" quote: I figure Obama should lead by example and give away all of his possessions to reduce himself to the lowest common denominator, whether he wins tomorrow or not. If he really believes it, the election shouldn't matter.
Cemeteries
My mind wandered during a sermon on the burial of Christ, and I started thinking about cemeteries. They just sit there forever, and the count of the buried never goes down. Eventually we'll run out of land, because the whole planet will be covered in graves.