Catching up

Let down a little on the blog writing the last few days. The other writing is also going slowly this week, feels like I have gotten barely anything done. Maybe the weekend will make up for it?

Random

Today's post is rather random. I've been paying attention to gas prices at various gas stations around town. The gas station I've always heard has the lowest prices (corner of Union + Lake) was not actually the cheapest, but it did beat the median sample by around 10 cents/gallon. The cheapest was about 20 cents/gallon cheaper than the median - just across from Borders on Lake. Most other gas stations in Pasadena were all at the same prices ~ 3.27$ per gallon, so that was easily the median sample. I just found it odd that there were two fairly extreme outliers.

Other cities had different prices, though not by much: Glendale was right around 3.27, but I did see one station there that was 10 cents cheaper.

Anyways... gas prices are odd, even on a local scale.

Photo Op

Here's some photos from yesterday. I got back from work and the sky was doing beautiful things and so I took the camera with when I went on errands.
The above shot was southwest, over Grant Park. Here's the south-eastern view:

The sky this way was gorgeous about 5 minutes before this picture. It's still neat here, but a lot of the orange color is gone.

After dark:
I must have moved the camera (was crossing the street), but I still think it looks very cool.
Final one:

I just like the way the building on the right looks like it's leaning over the road, and the streetlight masquerades as the moon. :)

Veronica Mars: Guest Post by L

Veronica Mars has become my favorite TV show. Fast-paced, clever dialogue, lots of twists, lots of guessing, and not creepy until the very last episode.

Part of me is dying to compare Veronica Mars (and do you know how hard it is to not spell it Weronika?) to Buffy. Yeah, sure, blonde girl with a single parent who used to be popular in high-school, but is now a pariah; we've seen that before. But the similarity's only skin-deep. Buffy went after evil from the outside, while Veronica is about handling the things our friends, family, and neighbors do when we aren't watching. Buffy is about fighting back against things that go bump in the night, and friendship, and sacrifice, and knowing when to rebel against authority. Veronica Mars is about secrets, and truth, and trust, and when all these things are good, and when they're dangerous. In addition, while Buffy's battle lines were drawn up around Kid/Adult, as well as Popular/Unpopular, Veronica's major battle line is Rich/Poor. Taking place in a "town with no middle class", class tensions underlie a lot of conflicts that, on the surface, appear unrelated to money.

And while Buffy was primarily about the kids -- you could be excused for thinking that, besides Buffy, no one had parents at all -- Veronica is about the whole family unit. The show could have been subtitled, "How Parents Screw Up Their Kids." The interactions between parents and kids are a major vehicle for making the characters multi-dimensional, as well as sympathetic. Several times, you meet unpleasant characters you'd love to hate -- then you meet their parents, and you just can't hate the kids as much. This is, again, tied up in class. I can't think of a poor kid who had truly bad parents, and I can't think of a rich kid whose parents didn't think of their child as an extension of themselves.

In Veronica Mars' world, everyone has secrets, everyone has flaws and everyone is capable of anything. Veronica states her philosophy as, "The people you love will let you down," and in a way, the show is an examination of the effects of that policy. And given that Veronica's boyfriend, friends, mother, police, and town have (repeatedly) let Veronica down, you can't really blame her for being defensive. Throughout the show, most times when she trusts someone (that is, when her reaction to negative evidence is "they're innocent" rather than "they're guilty"), she ends up being wrong. Unfortunately, her reaction to this -- assume guilt -- wreaks havoc on her relationships. Repeatedly accusing people of horrible actions based on unsupported hearsay is a great plan for heartache. And even when she operates on a "trust, but verify" basis, her friends are deeply hurt that she'd suspect them at all.

It is this theme of trust -- how much trust do people expect, and how much do they deserve -- that makes me like Veronica Mars so much; both the show and the character. It's a complicated subject; as a culture, we claim to value loyalty, but tend to define it as blind obedience, the loyalty of a dog. Supporting someone, "right or wrong", is seen as an admirable character trait, and not changing your mind, even in the face of superior evidence, is called conviction. Yet the fact remains that you may like your friends a lot, but you have no way to know that one of them isn't a murderer. How much evidence would it take for you to call the cops?

Thank you, Veronica Mars

So, I tend to pick up DVDs of TV shows that I've heard good things about, when I see them used at Interact (or sometimes new). This started with Firefly, and has continued with several more TV series.

Saturday night while L was feeling badly, I suggested that we pick up one of the shows that we'd not seen (but I'd picked up) and watch it. Veronica Mars was the choice (we also had Heros that neither of us had seen, but I've been meaning to watch it with Lem/M^2), and it was a good one.

I've heard that the first season is the best one, and while I have the feeling that I'll like the others, I can see why: every story is a mystery of some sort, and the entire season is tied together into a single mystery. Each show was excellent and there were a lot of really interesting plots, and as the season progressed there were more and more clues to the overall mystery. I didn't figure it out until the final episode, pretty much at the point where the reveal happened. Wow. Talk about cliffhangers, too. Though the mystery got wrapped up, there were several major plot points that didn't get resolved, which L and I think is horribly evil, and we will have to go find the next season now. :)

In any case, that's the word from here. Great series, L said it's her favorite TV show she's seen, and it's one that she would actually watch again. As for me, I have a hard time ranking things, but I thought it was excellent and would also watch it again. As for other stuff, L's still sick but out of the worst phase, she's probably going to take monday off work and should finish recovering by tuesday. I've got a lot of work still, but not too stressed about it. :)

Favorite character: Tough tough one to pick. Besides Veronica herself, I really like her father, Eli and Logan, and for those who haven't seen the series and start watching it, that may be a bit confusing.

Favorite episode: #10: An Echolls Family Christmas. The poker game whodunit sequence in this one was priceless. Runners-up: #11: Silence of the Lamb. What happens when you dig up dirt on parents? Do you like guitars?, and #22: Leave it to Beaver. Yeah. Well, it wraps up so much stuff in such a surprising way...

Favorite line: either "Who's your daddy?" from Keith Mars (said several times, there's one in particular that made it worth it), or "We used to be friends, long time ago" - Veronica Mars, from the beginning of episode 13. There's a bunch of other good ones, but those stand out. :)

Open thread (open thread)

This is the open thread about open threads. So, what books have yall read lately?

Most recently here, I read:
_Glasshouse_ by Charles Stross
_Karma Girl_ and _Hot Mama_ by Jennifer Estep
_Radio Freefall_ by Matthew Jarpe

All were excellent, and I may get around to reviewing them sometime. The first is sci-fi, about a history professor (sorta) who gets his memory erased and proceeds from there. The second and third are superhero books, set in Bigtime. The author (and I think the books) I found out about via Girls Read Comics, and they are superhero action / romance / psychology. The last was a book which I spotted that had an absolutely beautiful cover. I ended up reading a chapter in the bookstore and had to get it. It's sci-fi and follows a musician named Aqualung (I caught the reference immediately! Thanks dad!), a computer programmer (sorta) and a band as they battle the evils of politics, censorship and lots of other stuff! Really tough to explain that one in a single line, but it was a good book and had some interesting ideas about artificial intelligences, communications distances and heterogeneity of society.

Addendum: So, I said it was the open thread about open threads, but it ended up being an open thread about books! Feel free to hijack it to talk about other stuff, like what open threads you've read recently that you found interesting. :)

Long day

Friday has morphed into saturday, and it's about to be sunday soon too. L's sick (flu, started friday night) but seems to be recovering a little. Sorry for the quietness, just posting this plus an open thread for saturday, back to other posts later!

Weather Art Thou, Post?

Since I can't find the post I thought I posted yesterday, instead I am posting the post I thought I posted.

It's been raining here. No, really. Apparently it's rained in some parts of southern CA more than all of last year combined. (source). It's not going to do much to help the drought problems though. Pasadena sent out messages warning that ground water reserves were down 60%, etc, and I think the problem with all the rain showing up over a few days is that it's hard to absorb. Maybe it's a sign it'll rain a little more over the next few weeks? I just wish it wasn't so cold (55F). It looks like the rain's stopped for now, though there's a pretty large storm system up the coast a ways it doesn't appear to be heading this way.

Witty Comment

Just kidding! Instead, you get a zoomed in photo that I've already posted!

Maybe tomorrow there'll be a witty comment! Have I used too many !'s in this post? Maybe I've gone over quota! Oh no!

Extremely Dangerous

L, M^2 and I started a band. (In Rock Band. We're thinking of starting a band not in Rock Band too, but that's further out.) With the goal of only playing songs on expert difficulty. This was surprisingly easier to start out than I had expected. I was on drums, M^2 on guitar, L on vocals. We opened the night with "Say It Ain't So", and while I was expecting that to be our top scoring song, it only clocked in at #5 as the night went on.

Most fun to play: "Here It Goes Again" - OK Go. This one was a real blast! I actually got the drum beat and we were rocking it like mad.

Second most fun to play: "All The Small Things" - Blink 182. Crazy drumming but it felt so good! We followed this one up with "When You Were Young", one of our favorites, but it was also a real killer on the drums. I managed to die about 2/3 through, and after that couldn't get back into the beat. We finished the song with me having failed out, but the others held through.

Gaming the system: The setlist that lets you get a van has a mystery song. The first time we tried, it was Epic. Ouch. After the burn from that one, the next shot got "Go With The Flow", which some readers may recall I was horribly stuck on about a week ago, on hard. That went poorly as well. Third try we got the Ramones and finished it off. Whew. (Do I need to say which song by the Ramones? Didn't think so.)

You can tell it's been a good jam session when you have to get up to change your shirt halfway through. And then it's dripping again when you finish.

"You can tell it's been a good jam session when the guitarist can't find his shoes." - M^2

People Photos

Here's a few recent pictures of the people around here. Also, if you didn't see my (late) update for sunday, go scroll down some to see a bunch of rattie pictures. :)


L holding Lu Bu:
(Yep, that's a new computer in the background! That's not the only new thing, too. See if you can spot the others!)

Here's the basket of ratties:
I think only two or three are in the basket, but at one point I managed to get nearly all of them. However, it's really tough to actually get a picture of that when they're wiggling like crazy. Speaking of that, here's a picture of me holding the basket:
And there you have it, recent pictures!

Funny Ratties

Here's what happens when I try to take a picture of the ratties:

See? They love having their pictures taken so much that they just have to hop on my lap and try to help with it! This actually happens a whole lot, get too happy taking pictures and they run up and try to inspect the lens close up. Also, you may notice the rat-tail phenomenon in this picture: even your best pictures tend to end up with a random rat's tail in them. If you're trying to get a picture of just a single rat, it's usually just the tail that you got, so you know a good picture when you get something besides just that.

Here's what happens when you try to read a book in bed while the ratties are playing:

Actually, it's surprising they are so stationary in this picture. It's actually because they were each given a treat. It's amazing what that will do to a rat's mobility, they just stop and eat!

Speaking of mobility, here's Scotty, who loves to chew holes in towels. This time, he's discovered a possible issue with chewing a hole in the towel:

Uhoh! He got horribly stuck. I actually tried to help extricate him from it, but he wasn't very happy with me helping so I let him work out the problem. He eventually made it out, luckily:

Finally, there's a pose that the rats all use, but it's really tough to get a picture of. I finally got one tonight though, this only happens when they're resting, they just lie down and flatten out, it's terribly cute. Usually when you try to get a picture of it they perk up and come see what you were doing, but this time I happened to be right next to the camera and didn't alert Blue before taking the picture. I only got one try though, it's lucky it did turn out:

Saturday! (Open Thread)

Ok, so this post may be a bit late, but it's open thread time anyways! How did yall's weeks go? Doing anything really cool next week?

Stuck On...

(Don't Fear) The Reaper - Blue Oyster Cult
Foreplay/Long Time - Boston

Working on the second to last set on hard drums (Rock Band), and these two songs have me stuck. The first one is just fine, up until 90% through when everything goes crazy. I probably just need to practice it once or twice, as I have only tried it once and failed right there when everything went wacky (it was a nice beat, and then all of a sudden half the drum hits came between the beats they were on before). Foreplay/Long Time has an intro of DOOM. Oh my god. I think I can make it past there now, maybe, but not in the sense of actually playing it well, at all.

The good part is that this means I got past two of my previous stumbling blocks - Cherub Rock (Smashing Pumpkins) and Go With the Flow (Queens of the Stone Age). I can at least complete them now, if not play them well yet.

Addendum: yes, this does mean I'm close to announcing a time for trying the Endless setlist on hard. I figure once we have two people who can do every part on hard, we'll have the numbers to actually sit down for the whole 5 hour thing (or however long it ends up).

Spam

I got a good laugh - I'm up late working and checked my gmail folder. Hey, one spam message. Lottery thing. Ok, it's spam. Delete! Wait a sec... the normal spot for advertisements is...

Spam Vegetable Strudel - Bake 20 minutes or until golden, serve with soy sauce

Hey! Does it always do spam recipes for the spam page? :) Anyways, pretty funny. I actually get very little spam at the gmail address, mostly because I never give that one out much.

Bread: Entertainment Value High

The ratties got an afternoon snack today. I ended up with a single extra slice of bread after making sandwiches, and since it was the end of the loaf I figured the rats would probably enjoy it much more than I would. It turns out that I probably enjoyed it nearly as much!

The rats were all sleeping, it being around 2pm or so. I ripped up the bread into four pieces, all quite big, and then took a bit off one of those to offer to Barrick, who seemed the most awake. Then put the other pieces in the cage. Barrick immediately was interested and happily munched away. Scotty and Lu Bu woke up from where they were sleeping on the main level (inside the yellow thing (tm)) and grabbed large pieces. Blue emerged from the hideout on the top floor and took another one of the large pieces (a single one now remaining) and all of them scattered. Blue back up to the hideout, and the others to whatever corner they could find. Blue managed to alert Cao Cao to the presence of food, as Cao Cao was sleeping in the hideout, but after unsuccessfully trying to steal Blue's piece, he ended up going down and finding the largest slice of bread and taking that. No, I don't know why the others didn't take the largest piece. I guess they just were so happy to see it at all that they didn't care.

Anyways, this was all very interesting, but not especially entertaining until Scotty decided that instead of eating, it was time to stash his piece of bread. So he trundles down to the bottom of the cage and puts the piece of bread into the tissue box there. Looks around a few times, then goes back up to the main floor and... takes Lu Bu's bread! And he runs off down the ramp and stashes that in the box too. Naturally Lu Bu decides that he needs more bread, and starts trying to take Blue and Cao Cao's pieces but failing. Scotty comes back up the ramp and immediately manages a perfect steal on Cao Cao's piece! Back down the ramp he goes and stashes that into the box. Barrick has now finished his small piece and so he, Cao Cao and Lu Bu are running around frantically trying to find their missing bread! Blue has fortified the hideout and is generally sneaky so they don't notice he's still got a rather large piece. I was cheering for Scotty to steal the last piece as well, but he couldn't make it past Blue's defenses and instead the rest of the rat squad ransacked the tissue box and removed all the carefully stashed pieces of bread. Alas, a hiding place is never safe from hungry ratties!

Daisy Mint

L and I finally got to go to a new restaurant which opened this past year: Daisy Mint oriental cafe. It's very close, just half a block west of chester on colorado street. The inside was really cool, two walls had picture frames, some with pictures in them, some which were just really cool frames, and some with slight variants on just being the frame (such as being a plate that looked like a picture frame, or a frame with some bees on sticks so that it looked like they were sitting on the glass interior of the frame). There was an absolutely gorgeous table in the center of the dining room, which had a glass center piece, under which were antique sets of plates and silverware for display, sort of like a display case table.

The menu was extremely varied. Like, really crazy combinations of things, most of which looked really good. I ordered a thai fried rice with beef, a tom yum chicken soup, and L ordered a spicy spaghetti. There was also thai iced tea that was excellent, and the menu also had a wide variety of teas that I didn't try, but noticed that some people would come in and order just a tea and have that. So they must be pretty good, I'll have to try some later.

Let's start with the soup. It was a pretty large portion, and served really really hot. The menu said it was spicy, which I wasn't worried about, but should have been. Holy moly was it spicy. The culprit was a crushed thai pepper (looked like a jalapeno but smaller/condensed), and it was really spicy. However, that wasn't actually the strongest flavor, the broth itself was actually a tangy/sweet combination of lime, lemongrass, sugar and some type of thai ginger variant. Really really tasty, and L really liked it, which is unusual. If only it weren't so spicy! The mushrooms and chicken in the broth helped carry the broth's flavor well, and it was a good dish. But... spicy! My mouth still burns!

The thai fried rice was excellent, and not spicy. It had a distinct flavor which I couldn't place, sort of a light savory/starch flavor, and the rice used was very tasty. It was a very small grained white rice, that really reminded both of us of couscous but wasn't exactly that. A good dish, and very affordable - it was $6.50 and with the amount we were served, I could probably have eaten for two and a half meals on just that dish. It also really helped absorb the spiciness of the other two dishes, so it was a good thing we got it.

Lastly, the spicy spaghetti was a neat combination of italian style spaghetti - the noodles, tomatoes, basil, green and red peppers, with thai flavor: a really tasty spice that builds up. I ate a noodle and gave L a look, cause she was saying it was really spicy and I hadn't tasted any. A few seconds later I went "OH!", because it took a while for it to arrive. It was really tasty, and a completely different style of spicy than the soup had been. L had ordered it mild spicy rather than it's usual spiciness, and it was a good thing, because it was a bit too spicy for her, and about right for me, except the soup had already thrown my calibration out of whack. The waitress was really nice though, we reassured her that it was very good and it wasn't her fault we couldn't handle even the mildly spicy version. She brought us some soy milk to help, and it did. It actually was a really good complementary flavor too, so I'd recommend ordering some to go with that type of slow spice.

Overall: Very good dishes though I'd recommend being very careful with ordering the spicy ones, the prices were very good for the amount you got (A lot!), and the menu had lots of other things I'd like to go back to try.

<3 Ernie's

Monday is enchilada day. But I went pretty late, and they were out. So I ask for my usual tacos. And I get the word back that they have an enchilada left, if I want that with the tacos. Sure! Same price, I get back to lab and start lunch. I ended up with two tacos, two enchiladas, rice and beans. Yum.

Nifty

Here's a Terribly Neat Video of a scene created with only three people being on camera, but made to look like a huge number. Very neat stuff.

My brain hurts!

Statistics and fitting sometimes causes my brain to shut down. Today was mostly spent working, ending with the grand finale of trying to fit some data against my guess of a probability distribution. This took altogether too much braindead time, but luckily Mylanda came to the rescue and bounced ideas for me enough that something made it through!

So with that, my simulator is actually useful, I can generate rate constants from the simulation data and compare it to real data (and find out it's all completely wrong? I hope not, but haven't tried it yet.)

Haircut

L got a haircut today and it looks great. :) I was hoping to post a picture but haven't been able to convince her to let me take one. She also wore one of her new hats today, and it was cool as well.

And that's the big news from here! See you tomorrow! ;)

A thing to read

I was reading an open thread on Making Light and ran across a link to "Being Poor", a post by John Scalzi on his blog. I think I had read it back when it was originally posted, but it was just as powerful reading it again, along with the comment thread.

Evil Genius

There's not many people that can write a chaotic(-ish?) evil character who's believable. Far fewer are the people who can play one in a RPG with a mostly good party. Somehow, this comic has both the first one, and the feel that it's someone playing the character as well, as I can see exactly that situation happening and the punch line is a wonderful foil for the GM trying to split up the party.

Productive?

So Wednesday turned out a lot better. I actually woke up feeling energetic, which is VERY rare for me, it usually takes me about an hour or so before I feel awake. Lots of stuff done today, only a little of it was research, but the other stuff was productive, I think.

I tracked down the postman and asked about our missing packages. They definitely were deliver, so it appears someone has been stealing our books. Please warn me if you send a package here, they should be waiting to deliver on signature only now, but if I know it's coming I can make sure it arrives. I think I can get amazon to send another copy without too much hassle, but one of the other orders that's missing is a used book L wanted that's pretty tough to find.

I also ate today, which is good. Having trouble eating lately, mostly because I don't want to walk places to get food, but keep missing the on campus options. I actually had three meals (lunch, dinner, and second dinner!). I went by the health center to check on some random stuff, which turned out well too.

So, productive day, not necessarily in the ways I would wish, but I did have a few research insights before going to sleep, so it's a start. :)

Bleh!

Tuesday was a crappy day, not feeling well. On to Wednesday!

Oh Noes!

So L and I were rocking at Rock Band tonight, me playing drums on Hard and her on vocals (also Hard difficulty), when calamity struck! The drums stopped working! More specifically, the green pad stopped responding. Luckily the song we were playing didn't use it much, but I couldn't activate star power. Afterwards, it appeared to not be coming back at all, so I think the drum pad is officially dead. I hear that customer service is good about replacing them, so I'm going to call tomorrow, but until it's fixed I won't be able to practice drums! I was getting pretty good, was on the 3rd to last set on Hard, and I think I could get further pretty easy, just haven't had the time to actually play it. :)

Oh well, time to actually try the guitar solo career for Rock Band and learn some of the hard guitar solo sections. I'm pondering getting my Rock Band guitar replaced at the same time, it has some issues as well. We'll see when I call up customer service.

Book Review

I just read a very good book. It was about an old woman who dreamed she was a young woman, who wanted a pony.

[spoiler follows]
She did get the pony.
[/spoiler]

The book is called Cyteen, by C.J.Cherryh. I don't think I can accurately describe it, but here's my attempt: It's a story about genetics, psychology, immortality and family. It's also a murder mystery which doesn't get answered until the very end, and even then it's unclear whether it got answered. The setting is science fiction, and mainly around the planet Cyteen, the third large world settled by humanity. I should also note, the book is about 700 pages long, and while I can normally finish a 400 page book in a few hours, this one I ended up reading over three days, and much more time. L asked what it was that made it relatively slow to read, but I really don't know. I'm not very good at analyzing that sort of thing while reading, I just observed in between reading that it was taking a lot longer.

Oh, and the opening paragraph is true about this book. It's not the whole story, but it's the one where I was hopping up and down, excited when it looked like she might actually get the pony. :)

Determination

The rats went to the vet today. They were very naughty. They tried to escape being weighed, but were not successful, and so they are going to have to go on a diet, Lu Bu and Scotty being a bit overweight, and the rest being on the high end of normal.

But what I actually wanted to say about the visit to the vet was that I really admire our veterinarian. She was a little late after we got into the waiting room (her previous appointment went long), but apologized and went right about examining the whole crew of rats. Very positive and calm, even when Cao Cao and Blue were naughty during their examinations, and that was pretty impressive.

Board Games

So tonight we had another board games night. The rain made it tough for a lot of people to show up, but there still was a good showing - Lem, M^2, Mason, Matt, L and myself. We played a good bit of Rock Band (4 people playing expert! Scary!) until food arrived and then there was a game of Ticket To Ride, which is always fun.

The thing I'm pondering, and why I write this post, is that maybe I should start up a regular thing - maybe a first friday of the month board game night. Or some other day, but that's the idea. It'd be sorta cool to have a regular thing, and I know I let people know about this one pretty late or more might have been able to show up.

I also want to get some RPG's back off the ground and that also requires a regular type of timing. So if you would be interested in those (the previously planned Serenity game, as well as some of the ongoing campaigns, possibly other ideas I've had) please let me know along with which days of the week you'd be able to play, probably every other week or so. I've been playing a bit of Vampire on the computer, and I might be interested in running a game of that as well.

Weather

So, I'm told there's going to be a storm here in CA. I read a quick post on the CNN page about winter storms in the state, saw Sacramento and filed it away. Then while writing down a note, I saw that my weather widget was saying it would be raining today and for three more days. Then it came up again in conversation w/Mylanda later. So I looked, and apparently there are going to be a lot of storms (three different ones!) coming through and so it may be raining a lot. I should go get supplies to help survive the rains. Any suggestions?

I'm...

... up a bit late (though not unreasonably so) and working on my simulator. Today's task was changing over some of the classes to use double-precision numbers rather than integers. Integers worked fine for most of the basic cases due to the precision of the experimental data, but when dealing with changes in temperatures it turns out to be more useful to just store doubles. I haven't yet done a speed comparison for the two styles, but that's also on my list of things to do, as it may be advantageous to use the integer version whenever possible. Anyways... I'm a tad annoyed because I naturally just changed all the functions and had it crash horribly in a psychic way, so I went back and am doing the change over step by step and in each step it works fine. Sigh. I want to know what caused the psychic crash but I've not yet developed psychic powers to figure it out.

Peace

Happy New Year to all! My hope for this next year is that the world will be a more peaceful place, and that all in it will be less stressed. That's a tall order, of course, but it might happen.