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Flying home I pulled up some Colin Hay on the iPhone. What am I, an idiot? I was just asking for trouble. I stared at Kansas through weepy eyes; the upshot is that I ended up finding Lena’s song.

Good morning. First off, I would like to thank all of you who cared for Lena in these final weeks. Your service is the stuff of sainthood, and I thank you all: family, friends, social and hospice workers, nurses, all of you. Thank you. Second, I am honored, truly honored, to speak here about Lena. Thank you again.

I still seem to be unable to talk about this, so here’s the obituary, as I prepare to head back east.

Goodbye, Grandma. I love you.

I just finished reading Richard Dawkins’ latest gem, “The Greatest Show on Earth”. It’s a necessary book, as Dawkins himself points out, since something like 40% of Americans believe that the earth was created by a very productive entity in a week about 10,000 years ago. Today. They believe this, today.

Yeah, uh, Happy New Year. 2010 is already underway, as far as I am concerned, because the International Date Line rolled on through, hours ago. Here in Boulder, It’s less than an hour away until my Timex ticks over to 2010. I’m not doing a “year in review”-type post, but wanted to wish everyone (anyone) still reading this blog a happy new year. 2009 was a crazy year and very much a mixed bag. 2010 promises more of the same. I guess I’m getting old. The cynic in me grows ever stronger and is provided more ammunition every day; all the more reason to reflect on all the good that has happened to me and my friends this year, I suppose. I’ve lost touch with some, renewed friendships with others, changed jobs, and been impressed by some and absolutely disappointed by others. I guess that’s the way we all go around. In the tightest orbit of my atomic life, the house is filled with joy and wonder; the dog is wonderful, the cat is a challenge but is helping me realize that no cat will ever be Emma (and that that’s OK), and Brenda & I are bouncing down the road toward ten years of marriage and twenty years of companionship. And that, THAT, is fucking awesome.

Once again, I have had a humbling experience working with Radiance. Just when you think you know even a little bit about this program, you are told otherwise, simply by attempting to learn more about it.

I have had a chance to test out the new multiprocessing option (-n) for rtrace – introduced in the Radiance HEAD distribution on Dec 15, 2009 – and am not getting the results I anticipated. This page includes my assumptions and results (and questions!).

Today has not gone smoothly so far. Hooper woke us up at 5:15AM, whining. He’d had gas all night, so I took him out, just in case. He leads me around on a tour of the neighborhood as he strafes the area. We get back, I try for another hour of sleep but he keeps farting and belching (which smelled worse than the farts), then Ellie our cat pukes on the carpet, presumably because we weren’t paying attention to her. So I give up on sleep for the day and head downstairs to start working at 6AM, already deciding to work from home rather than repeat the two hour commute from my house to my house like happened last week when it snowed. Then Brenda takes Hoop out for a longer walk at his usual time, and comes back with no tags! He must have gotten the ring caught on a branch or something, and just unwound the ring and the tags all fell off. Brenda noticed once they got back that he had the ring (barely) hanging on his collar, but no tags. We go on a hunt in the snow, which in hindsight was utterly ridiculous, but Brenda thought she might have known a couple places where this might have happened. Hooper of course is thrilled, because he’s now on this third romp in the snow for the day and it’s not even 9AM yet. About halfway though the walk Hooper’s harness literally falls apart and slides off his body, too.

Today is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection”, and I for one am feeling a little celebratory. The importance of Darwin’s work cannot be understated. Last year, I took a couple of semesters worth of biology classes, and natural selection could be seen at work throughout those two very entertaining semesters, chapter after chapter, after chapter.

To merely call my old college buddy a photographer is to understate things a bit. Jeff Bosie, the aforementioned buddy, is a real photographic artist. I had just been bragging about Jeff’s ability to a co-worker just last week, and oddly enough yesterday Jeff sent out a mass email yesterday announcing some updates to his website. So I took the opportunity to click on over and check out the newest additions as well as some of my old faves – three of which are hanging on the walls of my home.

Maureen Dowd’s Op-ed piece in the Times yesterday was just great.

So, my last post was a little congratulatory quip to the New York Yankees, for winning their 27th World Series Championship. (Their 27th; I know, it’s a lot!) In the title of that post, I accidentally juxtaposed two characters in my haste to get the thing online, and I was quickly corrected by Yankee haters who likely enjoyed correcting me in the worldwide forum that is the Intertubes. Meow.

The title says it all. Congratulations to the New York Yankees!

We’ve been talking about doing this for months and months, and finally did it. We enrolled Hooper in a beginner’s dog agility class at the Boulder Humane Society, starting up in a couple weeks. Hoop spent half the morning running and jumping in the ballfield today, and we’ve long thought that Hooper would be a natural at agility trials. And even if he sucks at it, we figure he’ll have a good time trying to not suck at it. And so, on November 12th, Hooper will show up for class once again at the Boulder Humane Society and hopefully will ace his classes!

Wow, start actually blogging again, and you discover all these new things about your blogging software. WordPress, the software that has “powered” this blog for the last several years, is up to version 2.8.5 and a lot has changed for the better. Software updates are automated and work seamlessly, even for users running WP on other hosting sites (like me). Themes and plugins have similar auto install/update functionality.

(light transport simulation geekery alert)

I knew this would be a fun World Series, with two teams I like in there, and a good matchup to boot. With a large percentage of my Facebook friends hailing from the Philadelphia area, I detected a certain bias toward the Lesser League’s team in the growing wave of “go team!” status messages over the last few days, and that’s to be expected. After all, trash talking is how we as fans can participate in the game.

Thank you Chase, for making my blood boil with rage enough to finally achieve enough inertia to log in to my long lost blog and post some bile. I should also give a shout-out to the asshole driving the cab to my hotel last week in Boston because that idiot is to blame for starting this little mess in the first place.

A few years ago I wrote a little post on this here website about my idea for the Best Band Name Ever. Imagine my surprise when there was a comment on that post, this here mornin’: