Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

I'm a Fraud
January 06, 2007

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and I’ve not really given it a voice except to Berta and maybe a couple of others.

I’ve been writing code for a pretty long time. 25 years now, actually. Sure, a lot of that is not professionally, but I think it’s relevant in that programming has never been a tinkering kind of hobby with me. Programming is not something that I picked up like many people do a musical instrument in their childhood and then forget when they get older.

My Understanding of the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD Format War
January 05, 2007

There are only three truly significant differences between these formats in my mind.

First: Blu-ray holds more data than HD-DVD, although no Blu-ray disk manufacturer is producing the highest-capacity Blu-ray disks, and so all current commercial HD-DVD movies are higher capacity than Blu-ray. Not that you’ll care too much how big your disk is when the picure is comparable due to HD-DVD’s better compression algorithms.

Darn It
January 04, 2007

Berta got me a book for Christmas by Neil Gaiman called Fragile Things. Fragile Things is a collection of Gaiman’s (who at once I feel weird calling “Gaiman”, because of my familiarity with his writing, or “Neil”, because I only met the guy once at a book signing) short stories, in that strange genre that there isn’t a good name for but has been called “fantasy” by those who try.

This book made my Christmas list because of a section that I read in the book store. In it, there was a circus of sorts, complete with ringmaster. I don’t have the book in front of me, and I wasn’t expecting a quiz, but the story title was something like, “The unexpected disappearance of Mrs. Twitter.” I’ll regret trusting my poor memory later, but I thought it quite an unusual title for a story about a circus. I should have read more.

The New Notebook
January 03, 2007

In late November, seeing a need for portable computing capability, I placed an order for a new notebook.

Basically, work was ramping up. Working at home is great, but sometimes you’ve just got to get out of the house. If you put in enough hours working and then don’t go out in the evening, you can run a whole week without stepping foot out of the house. As a matter of fact, I haven’t put gas in my car in a month. (Although I will admit that we usually take Berta’s car out when we go out for family trips.)

21 minutes + 1
January 02, 2007

I think the threshhold of my bathroom is a mind-wiping device.

At 5:53am, I woke up unexpectedly. No alarm, although there was one additional child in the bed at the time, and they tend to kick. I mused at the idea of how he might be affected when the alarm went off in seven minutes, and concluded that he’d simply sleep through it, like any good 2-year-old. It then occurred to me that the alarm wouldn’t be going off in seven minutes, but in eight.