As you may have seen in the news, we had a bit of a rumble last night… a 5.6 magnitude earthquake. It was only a few miles from my house, so I really felt it. It was the strongest quake I have ever felt, and it lasted quite a while. I could hear the house flexing a bit during the main quake, and the chandelier was swinging madly afterwards. According to the news on the radio this morning, this was the strongest quake in the area since the Loma Prieta quake in 1989 that did so much damage up in San Francisco (before my time). That said, there was no damage that I could find to the house; and apart from a knocked-over web cam and some shifted papers at work, I saw no evidence anything had happened at all. Still, I take this as a warning I need to be a little more diligent about earthquake safety around the house… too many things can slide around the place for my comfort.
Archive for the 'General' Category
I just got back last night from a little trip back to Indiana to visit with the family. We didn’t really do anything terribly exciting, just visits with the family… although we did take a little hike in Spring Mill State Park in Mitchell. Spring Mill is a nice little park. There are a couple of caves you can visit as well as a virgin forest that was preserved back in the 1800s and is simply beautiful… especially since there are so few places now where you can see truly old tulip poplars, oaks, and beeches. Links to some photos are after the jump.
Just a quick note to let you know that I’m setting up a space over in Flickr for my photos. In future, I’ll be posting pictures there and not directly here (although I’ll be linking to them from here). Flickr is rather easier to work with than the Wordpress stuff I’ve tried for managing photos, plus it does tagging of photos and slideshows.
Just a quick post to let you all know I’m still alive. I went for a bike ride with a friend yesterday, and it was the first time I’ve been on my bike in months. We didn’t go all that far… just along the Los Gatos creek for a bit, and we took it easy. Still, I’m clearly out of shape and went too long without biking, because I am reminded of yesterday’s excursion every time I sit down. *wince*
Things have been a little hectic the past couple of weeks, so my apologies for the silent treatment. The main bit of news is from work: the project I’ve been on for the past two and a half years has finally released code to our production servers. Wooo-hooo! At the moment, we’re in our so-called stabilization phase where we’re letting the users bang on the application and shake out any of the last remaining bugs (our QA people were very good, so we have had a remarkably small number of bugs). I have to say, this particular project has been a very long haul for me (if this is any indication, my beard has started to turn gray and the hair on my head is noticeably thiner than it was when we started), so it is a big relief for me to finally see it finished. Partly to celebrate the release, and partly to start to prepare for the next phases, I am actually up in Oregon this week meeting with various parts of the team.
To try to have a little fun this week, I took a little extra vacation time over the weekend and went up to Seattle to visit with my friend, André (aka Ozymandias). We bummed around a rather chilly and damp town, strolled around the Fremont neighborhood during the tail-end of their Solstice festival (and got an eye-full of some unfortunate fashions… hint: kilts are in for the men folk, but total nudity will do in a pinch… or not).
On the way back down to Oregon for my meetings this week, I was going to swing by Mount Saint Helens (I have been coming to the area for years and have never made it there), but the weather was less than cooperative. Combine the lack of visibility with some camera problems (hint: if you have digital SLR, don’t try to clean the sensor yourself), and I’m afraid you’ll have to do without pictures of me trotting around the north-west. Sorry… maybe next time.
Oh, incidentally, I just discovered that my e-mail address here at tailrecursive was forwarding to the wrong mailbox… so if you sent me anything recently and I didn’t respond, that is probably why. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Ok. So, I haven’t posted in a long, long time. But I saw this message when I checked out the administrative interface on WordPress:
[Missing Picture]
Akismet, by the way, is the WordPress plug-in I use to catch and throw out the spam comments I get on this blog. That’s right, if I didn’t have Akismet, I would have had to delete more than 13,000 comments by hand. Yikes!
[Edit: Removed image link after I lost the image file on the site... oops!]
In California, it sometimes seems to be the case that Nature has a switch: flipped one way, it’s winter outside… cold, drizzly, dark; flipped the other way, it’s summer… warm, clear, and sunny. On Monday, Nature flipped the switch. As a result, I have the itch to be outside, and my wild lilac is blooming… making me and my bee-ish neighbors ecstatic.
Read the rest of this entry »
Attention Neil deGrasse Tyson and the rest of you anti-Plutonians, the New Mexico legislature is fixing to show you what’s what. You may have fancy degrees and all that, but the legislature has the power of the resolution.
Seriously, I’m starting to wonder if the main purpose of a state legislature is to look asinine. I think one of the problems here is that people seem to think that Pluto’s being reclassified somehow makes it a less interesting object… like this reclassification is somehow an insult to Pluto and Clyde Tombaugh. Really, it’s a very strange reaction to have; and it’s an even stranger thing to feel the need to legislate. Don’t these people have real problems to be dealing with?
Several of my friends are posting about books that they have read recently. I’ve decided to be a sheep and add a side-bar widget to my blog to show what I am currently reading. Unfortunately, that means changing my theme a little, but that’s ok. Expect the look to change a bit as I settle on something reasonable. Click on the book to find out what I think of it… assuming I post a "review."
It’s been a while since I posted anything, and this is largely due to the fact that I haven’t been doing anything of note lately. Work has been quite difficult for this past month or so, and I haven’t had a lot of energy for other things.
Still, I do have (for me) exciting news: Casa del PJ finally has a new roof! I have had serious problems with leaks over the guest bedroom pretty much ever since I moved in. It would leak, I’d call in a roofer, it would be fine for a season, and then it would leak again (always after the warranty period, of course). This time, I called in the big guns, and they replaced my old tar and gravel roof with a science-fictiony membrane that is guaranteed for life.
Basically, my roof (which is a flat roof [sort of] with a surrounding parapet) is covered by a single piece of something rubbery that is supposed to last the rest of my life. I think of it as a swimming pool with downspouts. Of course, now that I have a new roof, California is heading into what looks like a drought. So, I have no idea if this new roof will deliver the goods. We shall see. If nothing else, the white membrane will keep the house cooler in the summer; and it will be worlds easier to sweep off the detritus that collects up there every fall.
Stay tuned for my exciting homeowner updates!