Rise and shine campers! And don't forget your booties 'cause it's cold out there today.
Cold out there today!? It's cold out there every day. What do you think this is, Miami Beach?
Not hardly. But there's another reason why today is especially important.
Especially cold.
...especially cold. The question that's on everybody's lips...
Everybody's chapped lips...
...their chapped lips is, "Will Phil see his shadow?" That's right, woodchuck-chuckers, today is GROUNDHOG DAY!!!!
Those lines, written down from memory, are from my favorite movie Groundhog Day. I first saw it in my college film class, for which I wrote an essay on the existentialism of the movie. Sadly, that essay is lost to the ages, but I've made it a tradition to watch Groundhog Day every February 2, which it just so happens is Groundhog Day. I've also seen the movie dozens of other times on non-Groundhog Days. The last time I was able to watch the movie with another person is when I saw it 5 years ago with my friend Renee. My problem is that I know all of the lines in the movie, and I can't help saying them obnoxiously as the movie plays. Renee's little brother said I was a "pain", but she didn't yell at me. She even laughed when I did Ned Ryerson's first scene:
Ned: Phil? Phil Connors? Phil Connors, I thought that was you!
Phil: Hi, thanks for watching.
Ned: Hey now, don't you tell me you don't remember me 'cause I sure as heckfire remember you.
Phil: Not a chance.
Ned: Ned... Ryerson. "Needlenose Ned"? "Ned the Head"? C'mon, buddy. Case Western High. I did the whistling belly-button trick at the high school talent show? Bing. Ned Ryerson, got the shingles real bad senior year, almost didn't graduate? Bing, again. Ned Ryerson, I dated your sister Mary Pat a couple of times until you told me not to anymore? Well?
Phil: Ned Ryerson?
Ned: BING!
Phil: Bing.

Posted at 6:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

John, Sheila, and I made our second attempt to climb Mt. Sherman on Saturday. The weather was chilly as heck. A bank sign in the town at the bottom of the mountain said it was 10 degrees. But we were hoping that it would be calm, with no wind or storms or snowfall. We bundled up for the cold. I had my new winter coat that I got for Christmas, and I wore snowpants and snow gaiters to keep the snow from going into my boots and a balaclava, which is not a misspelling of baklava, to cover my ears and mouth, and lots of layers of sweatshirts and flannel shirts and pants and sweatpants. I was so warm that I was even sweating when we started out. And the thing is that I'd been sitting watching talks all day and swilling coffee and pastries all of the week before at the conference, so I was completely out of shape for mountain-climbing on Saturday. So I was all out of breath pretty soon after we got started and I was dying climbing the steepest parts. As we got higher, the winds started picking up. Once we got above 13000 feet, it started getting uncomfortably cold from the wind chill even with all of the gear we were wearing. And then when we were about to climb what looked like the last ridge, around 13500 feet, after which it was a walk up a gentle incline to the summit, the winds got wicked. A wind gust almost knocked down Sheila, but I caught her before she fell. And then a second wind gust came immediately afterwards and knocked me down. It also almost knocked John down, who was standing on a dangerous part of the trail right at the top of the ridge. So we decided after that happened that it was time to turn around. On the way down, we ran into one hiker whose friend reached the summit, and he said that the only way his friend could hang on against the wind was by anchoring himself to the ground with an ice axe and digging his feet into the ground with ice crampons. None of us had crampons, and only Sheila had an ice axe, so there's no way we could have made it to the summit. The wind was pretty bad for most of the way down, and it made things dangerously cold. Luckily, the only part of my body that was exposed was my nose, so I was pretty much protected. My nose did get a little frostbit right at the bottom, but it's fine. Anyway, after two unsuccessful tries to get up Sherman, and after Sheila and John ended up having to turn around on another of their hikes because of a wind storm, we've decided not to try to climb anymore 14ers this winter unless the temperature is 50+ degrees in Denver (at 5300 feet altitude) and there are no storms anywhere near the mountain. You can see alll of my pictures from the hike here.

Posted at 9:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well I'm back from San Jose (and, per my last post, 100% sober). I didn't end up visiting San Francisco. I didn't want to miss any important talks at the conference, since that's the reason that my way was paid to go out there. I do think that taking the train would have been a nice and easy way to go to San Francisco by avoiding the notorious California highways. If I ever go back to the conference, I might pay out of my own pocket to go out a day early and take the train up to San Francisco. Anyway, I didn't really have a good time at the conference. I always get excited when I go out to these conferences (I went to about 5 conferences when I was in grad school), but I somehow forget that going to a conference basically means sitting through 8 hours of PowerPoint presentations a day for 3 or 4 straight days. It can get mind-numbing very quickly. So, while it was nice to be in a new city and away from the cold for a few days, it was work all the same, so I'm a little bit glad for it to be over. The pictures at the top of the post show the San Jose Downtown Convention Center where the Photonics West Conference was held (top), a pretty little pedestrian promenade area near the Convention Center where I ate my lunch every day (middle), and a thermal image of myself from the San Jose Museum of Technological Innovation (bottom). San Jose is in the middle of Silicon Valley, so not only to they have lots of technological companies, like Adobe and, oh I can't remember, Intel, I think, and a lot of others, but they also have lots of technological-friendly things in their city like this museum and a similar children's museum and a wonderful light rail system that I used to get back and forth from the hotel to my conference, so that was nice, to be in a city that tries to showcase science and technology. Anyway, I might have more to say about the conference and some of the things I did, but I'm going to be going over to John's and Sheila's house pretty soon. I'm staying overnight and we're going to make a second try at climbing Mt. Sherman. The temperature has been in the high 40s and low 50s for the last two days in Colorado Springs, and John told me on the phone last night that the weather on Sherman was predicted to be nice this weekend. But I don't know, I just looked at the forecast, and it says that the high on Saturday will only be 18 degrees with a wind chill between -3 and -13 degrees, and that's at 11667 feet elevation, so you can subtract at least 10 degrees from each of those numbers for the conditions near the summit. That doesn't sound like nice weather to me. But hopefully if I bundle up enough the cold won't be a problem, and I have snowshoes now, so I won't have to post-hole for miles through deep snow like I did last time. So we'll see. If it gets too cold, I'll just turn around. I'm no hero; I'm happy to wait until summer to climb the darn thing.

Posted at 5:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I got out of Denver airport just fine. Well, it was snowing, but I just ignored it and got to the airport with hours to spare. Anyway, I registered for the conference today. But traveling absoloutely wipes me out, so I went back to my hotel instead of going to the afternoon session today. And instead of going back to my hotel, I went to an Irish Pub and watched the playoff games. But for lunch, I went to a faux 50s diner called Johnny Rocket and had a chicken club. And while I was there, I heard the "Sh-Boom" song. Whenever I used to go to North Carolina every year, my friend Kevin used to make fun of me because I had "Sh-Boom" on CD, and I would put it in his car's CD player whenever we went down to NC, and I would sing it and even do the jazz hands for the "Ya-da-da-da-da-da-da" part. Tbere was an Irish guy at the Irish pub (I know, huge surprise) who told me I could take the train up to San Francisco to visit, and ignore the roads and traffic, but I don't know. There are some talks I should go to tomorrow. I'll have to think about it. I'm a little bit drunk right now, so I'll set my alarm for 6 AM. so that I can take the light rail to the Convention Center and make it by 8 AM, but if I want to change my mind, I can get off at the "Train Depot" stop and go to San Fran instead. We'll see.

Posted at 9:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm going to be leaving tomorrow for the Photonics West Conference in San Jose, California. I'll be flying out of Denver International, so we'll see how that goes. I talked to a guy in my lab who flew out of Denver on Christmas Eve, the day after my miserable experience, and he said he got through baggage check and security in less than an hour, so I guess I just got really unlucky flying out of there on the day I did. Even though the Photonics West Conference officially starts on Saturday, the sessions I'm interested in don't start until Tuesday, so I have a couple days free to do what I want. I was told that I should take a drive down to San Francisco, but I'm not sure. I'm very navigationally-disabled, so driving any long distance on strange roads is usually bad news for me. There's a 16-mile hiking trail near the hotel where I'm staying, so I'll probably set aside an afternoon to check that out. But we'll see, I would like to go to San Francisco. I'll be staying in California until Thursday, so it'll be a nice long break from work. It's especially nice because I'm not giving a presentation at the conference, so I have no responsibilities there except to check out a few of the talks that are pertinent to my work. By the way, on a completely different subject, if there are any Veronica Mars fans who visit this site, besides me that is, there was a wonderful interview with the show's creator, (the other) Rob Thomas, posted at Television Without Pity. It's looking iffy about whether the show will get renewed next season, but it sounds like there are some very good episodes coming up in the second half of this season. New episodes start up again this Tuesday, so I'm going to have to figure out what time it comes on in California because I'm definitely not going to miss it. Oh, and since I won't have to go to any talks on Monday, I'll probably be able to watch the Sunday night silent movie feature again on the Turner Classic Movie channel. Unlike Metropolis, the movie this week is one I'm unfamiliar with. It's an early Rudolph Valentino feature called Moran of the Lady Letty. I don't know if I've seen any Valentino movies, so maybe this Sunday will be my first.

Posted at 9:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm reading the novels in the Dune series right now. The first novel, titled Dune, is considered one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time. Its author, Frank Herbert, wrote five sequels to Dune and then his son Brian wrote six prequels. So far I've read the first two books in the series and am in the middle of the third. The original Dune novel is set thousands of years in the future, when humans have colonized numerous planets around the universe. Each planet is ruled by a noble familiy, which are collectively referred to as the Great Houses. The novel begins as one of those families, the House Atreides, is being forced to moved from its home planet of Caladan to take over rulership of the desert planet Arrakis, commonly referred to as Dune. While Arrakis is in nearly every respect a desolate wasteland, it is the most valuable planet in the universe because it is the sole source of the addictive spice-drug melange, which can enhance the mental abilities of its users. Despite the value of the planet, the Atreides' forced move is not a gift. Rather, they are being set up by the Emperor Shaddam IV to be ambushed by the departing rulers of Arrakis, the Harkonnens. The novel follows the Atreides, consisting of Duke Leto Atreides, his concubine Jessica, who is a member of the secretive female sect known as the Bene Gesserit, and their son Paul, as they try to negotiate taking over the rulership of Dune while avoiding the impending ambush, which they have already anticipated. The universe of Dune is filled with politics and metaphysics. Advanced computers have been outlawed because of a long ago event known as the Butlerian Jihad. The function of computers is done by human beings known as Mentats, thinking machines who have trained their brains to mimic computers. The aforementioned mysterious female sect known as the Bene Gesserit is one of the most powerful political entities in the universe. They subtly manipulate the Great Houses while undertaking a massive breeding program with the ultimate goal of breeding a male Bene Gesserit, known as the Kwisatz Haderach, who will take over rulership of the universe. Females who have undergone Bene Gesserit training have numerous abilities. Among these are the ability to use their minds to control functions of their body, such as determining the sex of their children. They also can use their voice to exercise mind control over other people, and they have trained their observational and analytical abilities so that they can read people's thoughts and emotions through nearly imperceptible facial, body language, and vocal clues. At the time that the novel opens, Paul Atreides has received extensive Bene Gesserit training from his mother, and by novel's end he uses that training along with enhanced mental abilities brought out by the melange spice of Arrakis, namely prescience, to defeat the combined armies of the Harkonnens and the Emperor.

I'm somewhat surprised that Dune hasn't received more prominence in our post 9/11 society. The novel, written in 1965, takes much of its source material from Middle East societies. The natives of the planet Dune are a fierce nomadic people known as Fremen, who are part of the Zensunni religious sect, which is, as the name implies, a combination of Zen Buddhism and Sunni Islam. The Fremen are known as being ungovernable savages, constantly staging guerilla attacks on the Harkonnen army. Fremen religious mythology holds that a messiah known as the Lisan al-Gaib will come to free the Fremen from their imperial rulers. Also an interesting parallel with the modern Middle East is that Dune is a desolate and despised world except for its indispensible natural resource, the spice melange, which is easily seen as the equivalent of oil in the Middle East. When the Fremen join with Paul Atreides and gain their independence, they begin a universe-wide "jihad" (this is the word used in the books) which results in the death of billions of people.

I don't enjoy reading the Dune books, but they are intriguing, and they build such a rich universe (a thousand times richer than the Lord of the Rings universe in my opinion) that they are an interesting read even if they're not exactly enjoyable. One of my biggest problems with the books is that the characters are rather two-dimensional. Paul Atreides, who is the central character in the first two books, quickly moves from being a typical teenager at the beginning of the first book to being some moony unknowable demigod figure. And to the extent that his character comes out, it is in whining about the burden of having special powers and being a ruler and on and on. It's not unreasonable that someone in his situation would lament his troubles, but it's a tedious read. The morality of the book is also somewhat troublesome. Frank Herbert said that one of his intentions in writing Dune was to illustrate the problem with heroes. Even when they have good intentions, heroes inevitably create destruction with the power they are given. It's hard not to see Paul Atreides and the Fremen as sympathetic figures in the books, but at the same time these seemingly sympathetic characters kill and brutalize innocents to retain power while forming a grand religious cult to indoctrinate the Empire into viewing Paul as not just a leader, but a messiah. It's troublesome. Few of the things they do are commendable, but without Paul and his Fremen compatriots, it's difficult to find anybody in the novels to root for.

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I was off today for Martin Luther King Day, and that meant I got to stay up late last night. That was nice because every Sunday night the Turner Classic Movies channel shows a silent movie. The movie doesn't start until 10 PM, which is too late for me if I have to get up for work. But I got to watch last's night feature, Fritz Lang's Metropolis. I'd seen it several years before, but I was glad to see it again. People who have never seen pre-WWII films, particularly pre-WWII foreign films, would be surprised to see just how weird these movies can be. In the early days of film, filmmakers were very concerned with how and why film can be considered an art form, and they experimented with ways to distinguish film from photography, painting, or live theater. In Russia, filmmakers like Stanislavsky and Pudovkin developed a montage technique in which filmmakers juxtapose scenes and/or images to create a meaning or idea than is larger and more profound than that of the scenes and images by themselves. In Germany, the dominant film movement was Expressionism. Metropolis came along at the very end of the German Expressionist period. The movie is ostensibly a dystopian portrait of the world in the year 2026, although, as a work of science fiction, none other than H. G. Wells described it as "quite the silliest film." It mostly centers on grand themes like Communism vs. Capitalism, Machines vs. Humanity, and the debt each of us owes to our fellow human beings. The city of Metropolis is divided into two levels. Above-ground is the domain of the rich industrialists, below-ground is where the slave-workers who run the machines that power the city live. The slave-workers have fallen under the thrall of an enchanting priestess-firebrand named Maria, who tells them that they need to wait for a "Mediator" to relieve their plight by uniting the "head" (industrialists) with the "hand" (workers) through the heart. Meanwhile, Freder, son of the head industrialist, has ventured underground and, after attending one of Maria's rallies, falls in love with her. When they meet, she annoints Freder as the "Mediator". Above-ground, a scientist named Rotwang, who has an artificial hand just like Dr. Strangelove, has invented a Machine-Man robot. Joh Fredersen, the head industrialist, tells Rotwang to give the robot the appearance of Maria in order to spread disorder among the restless workers. And it is at this point where the movie becomes totally awesome. Machine-Maria, instead of going underground and preaching to the workers as the real Maria, instead becomes an exotic dancer in Yoshiwara, the red-light district of Metropolis. Her "performances" consist of herky-jerky dance moves and weird, prolonged eye-winks that are just the opposite of sexy. But the young rich men who come to her show fall under her spell, and there are multiple scenes of them leaning forward in unison, literally slack-jawed, on the verge of having their tongues loll out of their mouths like starving dogs. Eventually, Machine-Maria ventures down into the workers' area, while the real Maria is held hostage by Rotwang, and she incites a riot that gets out of control, threatening to destroy both the workers' city and above-ground Metropolis. Anyway, I won't tell you how it ends, but let me conclude by saying the Machine-Maria is by far one of the most whacked-out heaps of movie character greatness ever created. Interestingly, even though this film is pro-Communism, if it's anything, there is a famous work of film analysis, Stanley Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film which makes the argument that Expressionist films like Metropolis, M, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari both shaped and reflected the German mindset that led to the ascent of Adolph Hitler. Although this connection may be difficult to see in Expressionist films, the Romantic mindset of a proud and innocent German state corrupted by industrialists, bankers, and con men of all stripes can be seen. This mindset plays off another film genre that was popular in Germany at the time, the Mountain Film, which celebrates the triumph of man over nature and also celebrates an idealized German past. It is from this genre that Hitler's favorite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, emerged. But you don't need to know all of that to enjoy Metropolis and the other great films of that period.

Posted at 5:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Hello, my name is Fred, and I'm addicted to YouTube. My latest find is a picture slide show from the incredibly underrated movie Empire Records set to Coyote Shivers's song "Sugarhigh", which is on the movie soundtrack and is the song that closes out the movie. I also found, when searching for other videos of "Sugarhigh", a video from this geeky band called Cute Is What We Aim For. I don't mean any offense since I'm pretty geeky myself; I'm proud of it. And when I started watching the video, I thought, "Sheesh, what geeks." But then I kind of fell in love with the video, and now I keep on watching it just to get to the part where the lead singer does his little jukey sitting-down dance before the third verse. So enjoy. Oh, by the way, guess who is the woman singing background vocals on the Empire Records version of the song? Renée Zellweger! Honest, it totally is Renée Zellweger. And also by the way, be warned that the bottom video has some sexually suggestive language.

Posted at 9:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (0)

I was going to write a post tonight about the new book I'm reading, Frank Herbert's Dune, but I just found out while eating lunch and surfing the Internet that Tillie Olsen died. As an undergrad, I had to read Tillie Olsen's short story I Stand Here Ironing for my American Literature class. It was and still is one of the most wonderful, direct, and gut-wrenching stories I have ever read. Olsen was a published writer in the 1930s, but she had to quit writing to raise a family. She didn't write another published story until the 1950s and didn't finish her first book, the short story collection Tell Me a Riddle, until 1962, when she was 50 years old. Much of her work is, or at least seems to be, semi-autobiographical, expressing the torment of the choice she had to make between love and family and writing. On the first page of I Stand Here Ironing, in just a few sentences, you can see what made her writing so powerful:

I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron...(W)hen is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again. Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped.

Posted at 1:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I went over John's and Sheila's house this weekend to watch the NFL wildcard playoff games. Before the early game on Saturday, we snowshoe-hiked to a reservoir about 2 miles from their house. It was the first time I got to try out my new snowshoes, and the first time I'd hiked in the snow since our miserable attempt to climb Mt. Sherman. It turns out that the snowshoes help a ton when you're hiking across deep snow, which is what you would expect, but it's still nice to know. Anyway, the reservoir hike was much more pleasant than our Mt. Sherman trek; we got up to the reservoir and back with no major incidents. Sheila is crazy about doing every kind of physically strenuous outdoor activity that Colorado has to offer. She's been trying to get me to buy rock-climbing shoes so that we can take rock-climbing classes this summer, which I'm totally up for. She also is planning on running the Leadville 100 100-mile-long ultramarathon. Luckily, she doesn't want me to run that with her; if she did I would go all Michael Corleone on her and say, "I can give you an answer now if you like. My answer is this: Hell no." But I did tell her I would pace her in one of the 10-mile sections, which is no big deal because, as you might expect, the pace is very slow for an ultramarathon. But the thing I am worried about is that she wants to climb all 54 of Colorado's 14ers in the next year, and she wants to do about 15 of them this winter, and on a lot of them she wants to take non-standard routes that are supposed to be more scenic. She's hoping for me to join her and John when they go climbing, but geez louise, I enjoy climbing 14ers, but I don't know if I want to spend every weekend over the next year doing mountain-climbing. And climbing a 14er on a standard route is just about enough to do me in, so I really don't need to experience the challenge of non-standard routes. And trying to climb 14ers in winter is just so difficult and miserable that it kind of ruins the experience of the whole thing. On the weekend after we tried climbing Mt. Sherman, John and Sheila went out with another friend of theirs to try and climb a 13er, and the two of them, John and Sheila, had to turn around because there were 50-60 mph winds near the summit. John's ears were going numb even though he had on a tossle cap, and Sheila could barely stand up against the wind. So, I just don't know if I want to go through that. But I'll probably give it a try and see how it goes. They're not going to go out climbing until after the playoffs are over, so I have a few weeks to ponder it.

Posted at 7:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just the other day I was thinking, "Yeah, several feet of snow in the last two weeks is nice, but what would make things perfect is if we could have 8 more inches of snow right before the weekend." Lo and behold, my wish came true today. It's supposed to warm up by tomorrow, but the physics department gave us an early dismissal today, so I'm home right now. On my way to work this morning, I heard Harry Belafonte's calypso song "Jump in the Line". And even though you can't actually jump in the line or rock your body in time when you're driving a car, I was doing a little hand dance - "point-point-point" to the left then "point-point-point" to the right - when Harry was telling Senora to shake-shake-shake her body. This was all while I probably should have been paying attention to keeping my car from sliding off the snowy roads, but you can only do one thing at a time, and I had my priorities. Anyway, my car did not slide off the road then, and neither did it slide off the road when I was debating with myself whether "Jump in the Line" was the song they played in Beetlejuice or whether it was "Day-O". I knew that I either got it wrong all the time thinking it was "Day-O" when it was really "Jump in the Line", or it was the opposite way around. If you try searching for "Jump in the Line" on YouTube, what you get, surprisingly, is a bunch of anime videos. Anyway, I posted one of them at the bottom of this entry. Speaking of YouTube, I got an email yesterday from someone who was talking to someone else who was having trouble viewing my "plugins", which I think means the YouTube videos I post. It's like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, except with website incompatibility instead of movies. Anyway, if you are having trouble viewing the YouTube movies on my website, my first suggestion is that you go directly to the YouTube website, and see if you can watch any of those movies. If you can, then the problem is with my website, and, if that's the case, please contact me so I know about it and can fix it. One thing I am aware of is that if you leave my website open for a long time and then try to watch the videos I've posted, they don't work. I think it just drops the connection to YouTube after a while, and I don't know any way around that. If you can't watch movies on YouTube, you can visit YouTube's help page. The two most likely reasons for trouble seem to be not having the latest version of Macromedia Flash or not having a fast enough connection. If you're on dial-up, I wouldn't be surprised if the movies play very choppily or not at all. Also, if you're trying to watch from work, your workplace may block streaming media. I can't go to the YouTube website at all through the Academy's internet connection, and, while I can open up my website, the YouTube videos that I post won't load. It's just says "2 items missing" or "3 items missing", however many videos I have posted, and it keeps trying to load them, but you can wait all day and they'll never load.

Posted at 12:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (107) | TrackBacks (0)

So I sat down last night to do all of my website-revamping and CV-editing work, and guess what happened - Windows fatally crashed. Everytime I tried to boot up Windows, it would restart the computer before getting to the login screen. Luckily, XP has some pretty nifty recovery features, so I managed to rebuild Windows without losing any files as far as I can tell. At one point though, I got the Blue Screen of Death telling me that my system files were being dumped, which just about made me cry, since I had nothing backed up (I do now). But it came out OK in the end. While I was working on my computer last night, I was watching the Season 3 premiere of Beauty and the Geek, and one of the geeks gave an interview where he said, "The thing that annoys me about most women is that they don't know anything about Linux. They'll complain about how their computer always crashes, and I just want to scream at them, 'Don't you understand that Windows is an unstable operating environment!'" I couldn't help thinking that except for the fact that I'm not a woman, that geek had me pegged. Speaking of reality TV shows, I was randomly jumping around the internets a few days ago, and I ended up reading an old show recap on my favorite website Television Without Pity, and it contained this hilarous passage, which I have to share with you all:
We see a Wanda ("English Teacher") interview in which she explains that she has "written a bunch of songs for Survivor," and she wants it to be "one big party as long as it lasts." Does she sing at parties? I wonder if she's noticed herself not being invited anywhere more than once. Anyway, I sure hope she stays on the island for a long time, because whenever I come to the end of a season of any reality show, it's common for my one complaint to be, "Not enough original songs."

Posted at 12:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I usually try not to post to my diary from work, since I am being paid to work on laser stuff and not to update my online diary, but it looks like everybody in the lab has decided to make today a half-day. It turns out that yesterday was a holiday, in remembrance of Gerald Ford, for non-essential government employees, which I didn't know since I was going to take the day off anyway, so today is the first day back for everyone after Christmas/New Year's break, and nobody seems very enthusiastic. I myself am working on about the thousandth draft of a 10-page article that somehow has to be fit into 6 pages because of the requirements of the journal to which we are submitting it, and I'm feeling like right now I would rather chew glass or bang my head against my office whiteboard than look at that article for one more second. So, that's how come I'm posting here and not doing real work right now. Anyway, at the risk of leaving behind such exciting subjects as Snow Hiking!!! In Really Deep Snow!!! and Oh Let Me Count the Ways that Denver International Airport Sucks, I wanted to talk a little bit about web site maintenance and issues related to web site maintenance. Let me start out by saying that I'm going to very soon be looking for a part-time teaching job at a local college. As some of you know, I was hoping to get a teaching job at the Academy, but that is almost definitely not going to happen. So one of the people I work with in the lab suggested that I'd have better luck trying to catch on with one of the other local schools. He mentioned specifically that the University of Colorado system, which includes UC-Colorado Springs, is very cash-poor lately, so if I'm mainly interested in the experience and not picky about salary, which I am, on both counts, then I'd have a good chance getting a teaching job there. Regardless, I am planning on actively looking for a teaching job, probably for the summer semester, starting hopefully next month. Which means that I will need to update my CV. And since one of the skills I tout on my CV is my web programming experience, and I give the address of my web site on my CV, I'm probably going to try to do a sitewide update to include, for example, a general description of the research I'm doing at the Air Force Academy on my Professional page, and some of my pictures from my 14er hikes on the home page. And maybe I might replace the scowling, I-just-woke-up-why-is-there-a-camera-in-my-face picture on the About page. Maybe here is as good a place as any to mention that the purpose of this website has been from the beginning to show off my web programming skills for potential employers. So, if you've perused the slide shows on my home page and gotten the impression that I am touting myself and all of my wonderful achievements in an unseemly manner, that's because I am. Or if you've read my diary entries and wondered why I have lots of pictures of doggies and mountains, but not much red-meat rhetoric about lousy politicians and the stinking media, well that's because that's not what I'm trying to do here. But, as I mentioned not too long ago, I am trying to make this Diary section a little more blog-like, by enabling comments and trackbacks and permalinks to individual posts. And that's another thing I'm going to be working on in my sitewide update. What that's going to translate to for the next several weeks is continued sporadic posting. My general rule is that I strive to do a post at least every two days, and I try at all costs to avoid not posting for more than a week, so I'll try to stick to that. Certainly I will keep everyone up to date on any more snow hiking fiascos, and there's bound to be a few; I would guess at least one fiasco for each time I go out snow hiking. And since I'm going to be flying out of Denver for a conference at the end of this month, there will probably be at least a couple more posts about how DIA is the dominion of all that is evil. So, OK, time to get back to work. That glass isn't going to chew itself.

Posted at 12:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (492) | TrackBacks (0)

Happy New Year everybody! Well, let me talk a little more about my trip home for Christmas. This time, instead of describing the seventh circle of Hell that is Denver airport, I'll talk about all of the wonderful Christmas gifts I got. Joe and Leanne got an artist friend of theirs to make a picture for me. You can see it at the top of the post. I don't know much about art. Pretty much the only paintings I can recognize by sight is Mona Lisa and Van Gogh's Starry Night. But I think the picture I got is pretty cool, and everyone I've showed it to has really liked it. I got a winter coat from my sister, which will definitely come in handy, especially considering the weather we've been having in Colorado lately. Amazingly, I've been here for almost twelve months now, and the only coat I had before this Christmas was a thin corduroy jacket. It looks just like Sundance's jacket from the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, if that helps you form a mental picture. Anyway, despite my last experience of winter hiking, where my friends John and Sheila and me had to wade through waist-deep snow for miles and miles (and miles and miles), and I ended up with frozen pants and near-numb toes, I'm planning on doing some more winter hiking. I got snow shoes today and I'm going to get snow pants and gaiters later this week. And my new winter coat will definitely come in handy. From my mom, I got the boxed DVD set of the complete series of Six Feet Under. I've never had HBO, so I missed out on it. Now I can catch up. I think I'm going to do the same thing with The Wire, get the complete series on DVD when the show finishes up after next season. I also got Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day from Joe and Leanne. It's 1100 pages long, so maybe I might be done with it by next Christmas. Hee. I also got a Pitt sweatshirt from my dad, which is great because I have almost no Pitt stuff even though I went to school there for 4 years. So all in all it turned out to be a great Christmas for me.

Posted at 12:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (451) | TrackBacks (0)