Surreptitious Opinionation

Saturday afternoon I went to a grass roots training thing for the howard dean campaign. I found it incredibly useless. I stuck around mostly because I emphatically support the cause. See, loud and irrelevant interjections. See also no concrete suggestions for actions one can take (mostly it was “here’s the overall campaign strategy, some dynamics of primaries and political wrangling, and we’ll give you the details of what to do later”. I probably would have found the theory more interesting if they’d managed greater coherence and rapidity in their delivery). Saw (who came a few minutes late and left more than an hour before the windbags finished their noisemaking. I so think he had the right idea) , , and .

Went home afterwards, drove ‘s car over to the city (with simon) for dinner at Axum with Ro, Simon, Shannon and friends. Sadly I was the one in the outer 40. I sat next to Ro and Simon, with the other people on their other side. I like Ro and Simon, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t need to go the city to hang with them. And the spatial arrangement and ambient noise made it difficult for me to chat with anyone else. <sigh>

Afterwards, the party reassembled at a bar right next door. I walked to bart and went home. Then yesterday was a total clinic day. Emergency advisory meeting at 11 and medicing until 9 or so. No dinner afterwards. Bleh. I also only saw 4 clients (not counting giving results). A wart treatment and three routine screens.

Sidenote: It is both kinda flattering and rather embarrassing when clients get a boner during the exam. Especially since one of the clinic founders said he’s gets a similar reaction maybe once a year. Happens at least once most evenings for me. I say something to the effect of “that’s okay, it happens, don’t worry about it. If you’d like a chance to compose yourself, we can get back to this later.” They generally just want to go ahead, but calm down after that.

Overall a somewhat frustrating weekend, but the endorphins (and energy drain) from saturday morning seem to have served me in good stead for the rest of the weekend.

So, after repeatedly performing surgery on my laptop on saturday evening, I eventually taped a dime to the fold-over connection in an attempt to put pressure on the right part. It’s broken again this morning. I’m thinking of sticking a couple more pennies/dimes in there (on opposite sides) to get the right pressure effect. What these crackheads were thinking when they developed this wiring setup is completely beyond me.

Saturday morning I got up tres early and went for a bike ride. (Well, after I rode down to the hardware store to get rechargeable batteries for the camera so I could share the view with you all). There was alot of up, quite steep at the outset, but becoming more gradual for the rest of the trip. Also much wind. Hot, dry wind. My sweat stiffened my helmet straps as it dried into a salty white crust. Kinda cool, actually. Probably should have invited , but it wasn’t that long a ride. And it sorta grew as I was out there.

the route I took

so for a week and a day ending wednesday, we had Ro’s sister (Maria) and her husband (David) staying over at our place. Ro’s sister is cool, got us to interesting places in the area that I probably never would have noticed otherwise. Like the ecoshed, and some community garden places. The siblingness she shares with Ro is quite obvious. As are her uniquenesses. She got alot of plants, and gathered several seeds, which she boxed up and sent on the plane back to texas with them. David helped Ro with the setting up of the Linux stuff to get pacman running under x11 and pulling data off of the exercise bike. Sadly, I think little progress was made for the more sophisticated modifications he wanted to make.

It was cool having them, and I kinda miss them around the office. But at the same time, it is nice to be able to sack out on the floor without having to be disturbed by conversation.

Last tuesday’s class was interesting. Well, more to the point, the lecture went totally over my head. Then after break, we recovened and talked in a more accessible fashion. Fixed Rate v Variable Rate loans, the option to default or prepay the loan made for some very interesting analyses. Defaults are low penalty ways to break a lease if ones house becomes worth less than the amount remaining to be paid on the mortgage (hedging against massive property value loss). Given that variable rate mortgages are based on the rates at which the banks can borrow from the federal government, they remove all risk for banking corporations (and are designed to generally perform better over the long run than fixed rates). I’d go in to greater depth, but that would take time, and I have much catching up on lj to do. =)

‘s post reminded me. I miss snow.

Went to the gym for the first time in a long time yesterday. Upper body lifting. My shoulder is doing pretty well. Not at pre-accident levels, and I don’t know that I’m ever going to do dumbbell military presses again, but I may well start back up with barbells in a week or two.

Dash from there to Indian buffet lunch with Patrick the gymnast. (name space collisions, always with the name space collisions). Good food. The cute waiter that has been very, very friendly with me since I moved out here. Great conversation, good food. It’s strange to have someone kiss me who already has a bf, with whom he shares a ‘weekend boyfriend’ on a fairly major street.

Back to the office. Food coma. sacked out on the office floor for an hour or so til Ro got in. Work work work. Clear head by walk to park. Work work work. Lots of insanely complicated math. Just to do a least squares, three dimensional triangulation on a non-moving target (while moving linearly), should be easy right? Today will be day 3 that I’m trying to work on the computational geometry behind this. (though, in counterpoint to sounding like I’m actually productive, my freecell game has improved quite a bit).

Started biking home, realized that when I got home, odds were good that I would be the only one there. Went to gaming instead. Played a brief game of privateer. Won by being the last left standing (all players start out with three ships, everyone else lost all three, and I only had 2 left). Then convinced , his date, and a couple of other guys to play Puerto Rico. I think I came in second in a five player game (45, 42, 40, some other scores). I was the only one in the top 4 with no big buildings. I must have done something right 😉 Buying the wharf probably was not one of those things.

Discuss biking stuff with , we go back to my place, and chat with Simon, and Tom, when he got back, largely about geeky stuff that more than half went over my head. And end up staying up til 2am with this. So much for early gym today. =)

I had a very strange nightmarish dream involving bugs, all over the place, in my bed, in my bedroom, some centipedes (kinda like the alien brain implant from Taken) that rose up and dueled in a trash can. I’m pretty sure I woke up and made noise at some point (didn’t quite yell, but close). But I thought I had woken up at some point, when I saw the shadow of a rattler-sized centipede-esque thing crawling over my window. CrEePy.

I feel so like my mother who flipped out over the plane crashing ‘near’ pittsburgh on 9-11, but I read about this, and my immediate thought was “I hope Joel’s alright” followed by “he better have gotten that vaccine, especially since cheetah is so close to home for him” So, , consider yourself mothered 😉

lethal meningitis in chicago, vaccines anyone?

going in to work is not worth the commute today, because I fucked around at home too much this morning, and have class at 3. I’ll get reading in for class (as well as a fair amount of screwing around).

And as an example of my academic productivity gains: quiz time