Category: Uncategorized

Today is the annual diversity potluck. I made “cheese”cake and hummus. I bought marionberry syrup and pita to go with.

I worked out for the first time in chicago last night. It felt soooo goood. I’m still in pretty good shape, even if I have gained a couple of fat pounds (I’m sure the cheesecake and hummus will help with that). I’ve started back into the morning protein shake game. And I’ve been playing chicken with my sleep schedule. Asleep after midnight, awake before 6. Sometimes well after midnight, usually a few minutes before 6 (when my alarm goes off). Probably also related the air traffic which flies right overhead, before 6.

I can’t keep this up, I do not want to become a zombie.

Plans for the next seven days include: ffx at ‘s place this evening. A seminar on green roofs at green tech u tomorrow evening. Touring a downtown gym & getting free passes on friday. On tuesday, I’ll be heading out to libertyville for my first gaming session in 4 years with dungeon master extraordinaire, , who will be playing instead of dm’ing for once. =)

None of this seems designed to introduce me to fun, intelligent, single gay men. I would very much like a summer fling. Any suggestions on how to go about this are welcome. Work time.

USA today article found on .

Right, so, fuel cells, particularly hydrogen fuel cells are “pollution free” only if you think hydrogen comes from the hydrogen fairy. Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFCs) are a very different technology, massively (like two times) more efficient at producing electricity from hydrocarbons. And that still creates carbon dioxide. Just half as much per megawatt hour.

As for burning coal without producing CO2, whoever came up with that idea did very poorly in chemistry 101.

Nuclear waste still represents a huge disposal problem. As I understand it, not so much because enormous quantities of it are produced, but because it sticks around forever, leaks out of nearly any containment you put it in, and cannot be transported safely over long distances.

And carbon sequestration gets only 5% (or less) of the funding for such a hare-brained scheme.

Biomass, people. Biodiesel for your cars. The things needed to make it work are a cheap source of vegetable oil (see also research on high oil algaes) and work on the emissions from diesel engines. Not prevention of CO2, but catching the particulates which cause worse localized air conditions.

Biomass sucks the CO2 out of the air because it’s based on harvesting solar energy with plants.

Cheap, effective solar cells.

Energy conservation. And the best way to do that is to _raise energy prices_. Slap a giant tax on non-renewable energy. You want to stimulate innovation? You want to see change in this country? Make sure that it affects major corporate bottom lines, and watch them do a 180 on a dime.

So, work on that first. Then focus on the further-from-usability fusion. Because we’ll need it, too.

There are a few highlights I recall as a very young kid. Most of them are memories of being told about them, but I have a few actual memories of the time. We were bouncing around as my dad finished his medical degree, and mom finished her masters in social work. I was told a story about a friend of mine named Scotty, from when we lived in columbus. He was apparently my best friend. After we moved away, the feds caught up with Scotty’s dad, who had kidnapped him across state lines after having his custody removed in divorce proceedings. Scotty’s dad killed his son and then himself. Apparently, after we moved to perry county ohio, I asked mom when I’d get to see scotty again. This broke her heart. I recall none of it. Before that, while mom was finishing up her master’s degree in michigan, my best friend there ran over me with a bike (it was an accident, no serious damage was done). I remember that as a fact, but do not remember it as an event. In perry county, my best friend accused me of rape. That one I remember. Vividly. I remember it the way one remembers an old injury that hurts every time the weather changes. So much of that is indelibly engraved on my brain. It’s odd how I didn’t remember it for years. I think ‘denied’ would be more accurate than ‘didn’t remember’. Regardless, forgive me if I ever come across as a little cynical about the title of ‘best friend’.

Yeah, I was the nerdy kid in high school, and was even more ostracized in elementary school. elementary school

This is going well. My supervisor and I get along. I’ve done one of the parts that I was pretty nervous about, and received praise both from my mentor (ie “buddy”) and supervisor for it. It was a phone interview. I know that it’s kosher to discuss the questions that we’re working on, and that it’s not kosher to discuss intermediate results, or personal opinions or impressions of the work in any sort of a broadcast forum. I’m don’t think it’s cool to get in to much detail regarding methodology, or roadblocks here. So, it went well. And I’ll leave it at that. My excel spreadsheet work has been a breeze, though, given that I haven’t done much excel work before, I continuously found myself saying ‘Oh, if I did that, everything would have gone much more smoothly, and been easier to document’, so I have a patchwork of subtly different methodologies. I’ll clean that up on monday and turn it in.

And I like my job. It doesn’t have the burnout inducing anxiety and high that I got in my days of teaching. It’s way more social than I ever found my coding jobs to be. The pay’s pretty good too. My coworkers are very cool. For the most part, it’s a low-key, friendly group of genuine seeming people. I don’t know that I’ve ever had the “well, what if I were to stay with this job for the rest of my life?” thought that lasted into the second week of a job before.

It definitely has its boring and tedious bits (and I won’t even be doing the worst part, referencing, as an intern, though our little exercise in that didn’t seem as horrible as my coworkers made it out to be). This may very well be the first job I’ve put in truly full time hours for two weeks. Wacky. It’s sucking away my time. I’ve correspondingly reduced my default view and subscriptions here. It’d be nice if I had more of a life in chicago, but that’s a project I’ll be working on soon. Besides, I’m only here for another 2-3 months. A subject for another post, I suppose. =)

I’m not married to the job yet, but signs are promising.

made an intriguing post. And I want to get input from my subscribers and friends on this one: lesbian culture. What is it? Does it even exist? Why does the ‘l’ always come after the ‘g’ in glbt?

As I was boiling water for my pre-packaged couscous it occurred to me that another perspective on this could be that gay men are more herd animals than lesbians. That of course led to the question of why. The money thing does seem like a likely explanation. The idea of culture being defined by mass marketers is pretty sad, but may be more accurate than I like to think about.

I guess my point is to question the value of a unifying culture for homos. Alot of the same resources that define the common experiences of gay, american, men of at least the middle class are also available to lesbians. There is a lesbian floor on gay.com, is it much used? If not, is that actually a bad thing? There are lesbian bars, but I hear they are fewer, don’t get as much business, comparatively speaking, and are generally less successful than gay bars. That speaks to me of the supply of lesbian bars exceeding the demand. I guess I’m asking what it is about the gay cultures (for conveniences sake, we could talk about geek, bear, drug, gym bunny, bar, and drag subcultures) that is so great?

I have lesbian stereotypes, though I have no idea if they are valuable descriptive groupings, let alone if they cluster into communities: lipstick, earth mother, diesel dyke, punkette, angry activist. To me those all imply a way of being, but not a way of being together. Comparing that with my conceptions of the gay male communities formed out of the cultures I listed above, I have at least as much of an association of common activies, or communication techniques as I do for descriptive elements of the stereotypes in the gay male categories. Is this because I don’t know dick about lesbian culture (no pun intended) or is it that there are lotsa lesbians who identify with these categories, but don’t congregate, because they don’t feel the urge to congregate, or what?

I’ve finally caught up to lj from my weekend dc trip. I’ll have to do something to slim it down over the summer at a minimum. Spare time is not as plentiful as once it was.

So, it turns out I have music from 4 subscriptions who are also friends, or at least friendly acquaintances on my iPod: , , and . Anyone else who wishes to provide me with mp3’s of past work, I’d like to listen to it though perhaps no more than once 😉

Last night was my first time doing gymnastics in a little over a month. I got sweaty fast. My form blew, and I screwed up my front handsprings repeatedly. But, I had fun. I will be _very_ happy to go back to umn’s facilities in the fall. Their spring floor and tumble track had all the spring of a peat bog. It’s in a neighborhood where I don’t feel completely safe. It’s a little out of the way on public transportation. On the other hand, it’s a gymnastics facility. I’ll take what I can get. I really ought to check out whether uic has any open floor type thing going on.

And on wednesday, I came home. It was about 7.5 hours from hitting the hotel to reaching the airport. It was another 4.5 hours before we took off (lightning over O’Hare. I hate O’Hare). Then about 2 hours to home (including the cab ride home).

And it seems likely that I will be in dc again in another week or two. This time for something a little more substantive. Hopefully, we’ll get a place in dupont circle. Or at least somewhere on the red line. Work will be taking us out to rockville. It’s not going to be drug expiration dates, but rather, whether and why the rate of uberdrug creation has fallen off. Still much chatting with the fda. Should be interesting.

I now officially hate traveling for work. I hate hotels that provide wireless for an undisclosed fee (no thanks, think I’ll pass, assholes. If you’re going to rape us on the price, at least have the balls to tell us what it is before we check out.) Television is a nuisance, not a necessity. Internet access is a necessity, not a luxury, and one not covered by the agency shipping me.

I hate government agencies with assigned ‘buddies’, and one size ‘fits all’ (except me) planning processes. I hate it when “buddies will take you out to lunch” at places you don’t want to go, where you learn nothing new about the agency you’re working for, and you have to pay for the food you’re being “take[n] out” for (albeit, covered by a generous per diem). I hate flaky won’t-be sublessors who waste my and ‘s time.

I hate having to be the know-it-all loudmouth in order to move the training program along, because someone else’s mental processes are frozen, and I’m the only one with the balls to be a dick, and point out the obvious while the instructor is in a kinder, genter, smily automaton loop, asking the same question with minimal rephrasings.

I hate puritans legislating a friend’s job out of existence. I hate the defunding of transit.

Bleh!