Some friends came by school on the weekend, and just for kicks, one of them wrote “E = mc^3″ on the whiteboard. “Just to mess them up,” he joked. (He studied physics at Caltech.) He was sure that this would provoke some kind of response, too.
Well, he was right:
Last weekend I vanished for a few days. I just needed to get away from school and life for a bit, and have some time to rejuvenate. So, I went to see some good friends in the northwest, and just get away for a bit. It was a good trip.
Tonight some tuna showed up unexpectedly. My mom has a way of getting ideas that something or other would be cool to pick up at the store, and then it’s up to me to turn it into dinner. It’s our own home-version of Iron Chef, I guess. Today’s surprise ingredient was a package of three tuna steaks from Costco. ALLEZ CUISINE!
So, I marinated them in soy sauce, rice vinegar, ginger, garlic, sugar, and a little sesame oil. Then I seared them in a cast-iron grill pan. YUM. I took the marinade and reduced it on the stove to use as a sauce. (Added some more sugar to cut through the salt.) The flavor was great.
The best way to enjoy tuna steak is to cook it rare. Only problem is, this fish was packaged four days ago. Not so thrilling a thought now, huh? But what could I do? I made mine rare anyway. I mean, come on, it’s tuna.
So now I count down the two- to eight-hour incubation period for food-poisoning. We’ll see if I dodged a bullet or not…
What is up with Linux distros shipping with PHP5 as the default installation? It’s not completely compatible with PHP4, and it’s too new for applications to support it yet. So far I’ve come across two applications this week that say, “We don’t support PHP5 (yet).”
So, one of these days when I scrape together the guts to do this, I’m going to uninstall PHP5 and install PHP4 on my server. Hopefully it will be a quick and painless operation, but for some reason I’m a bit dubious…
I got back from my little trip today. It has been a bit of a marathon once I hit the road. The flight was uneventful, but it took nearly two hours to get back to work from the airport. And now I have to finish up the second-term grades, so it will be a bit of a late night…
I’ll write more about my trip later!
Man, I’d hate to be near this thing when it goes off. I freak out when I get zapped on a cold dry day.
The Z-Machine just has to be used in some movie. It would be such a shame not to. Too bad it’s a “highly tuned scientific instrument.” Blah blah blah.
Sometimes I wish I knew how to dance really well to hip-hop and techno, so that I could make fun of people playing their music too loud.
It would have come in really handy today at the gas station.
I just got business cards for my job at Caltech! Yay for me. I feel very professional now.
“No, really, I work at Caltech. See, here’s a business card.”
Of course, this is a bit of a bad omen, since at every other place I have worked, getting business cards was a sure sign that the job was just about over. I have tons of unused business cards at home, still in their boxes. I keep all the boxes stacked up in plain sight in my room, as a memorial. Or a warning, or something. Just seems like there’s some lesson there that I need to make sure I don’t forget. Like, start paying attention when they get you business cards.
The most classic business-card experience was at my most recent employer (which shall remain nameless). I got a box of 500 brand new business cards, and within a month they gave me an ultimatum to relocate or quit. Classic! All 500 cards are still sitting pristinely in their box. I got to use zero of them.
So, hopefully I will start a new trend, and keep my Caltech job for many years. Even though I just got new business cards…
I wish the waitresses at Coco’s wouldn’t keep refilling my coffee cup all the time. I mean, I know they think they’re doing me a favor, but what they don’t realize is that I just painstakingly achieved the perfect balance of coffee, cream, and sugar, and what I really want to do is to enjoy that perfection all the way to the bottom of the cup. Not get a surprise 1/3-cup warm-up, struggle vainly to regain what I was just enjoying, and then resignedly (and grouchily) drink what ends up being a pale shadow of the perfection I had just fifteen seconds before the coffee caravan steamrolled over my morning.
Yeah, so I get worked up about these kind of things. It wouldn’t be a problem if I always drank my coffee black, but I like to mix it up. Er, so to speak.
OK back to work.
Today I came across this very interesting article on the Sky and Telescope website:
It’s really quite an interesting thought, that scientists have developed a much more accurate model for the solar cycle! It is also personally interesting to me, because I happened to buy a solar telescope just a few years before the solar cycle hit its minimum level of activity. Which was quite a bummer for me, needless to say. All that money, and bupkis to look at! “Note to self: Before buying the next solar telescope, check the solar cycle…”
But now it looks like we are getting back to the up-swing in a couple years, so it will be good to hang onto my solar telescope and see all of the increasing activity through it. Maybe I will even get some good photos. I’ll have to go up to the mountains if I want to get any really good photos; there’s just too much atmosphere down here near sea-level.
It also got me to thinking that, just like telescope sales jumped right before the 2003 Mars opposition, maybe we’ll see a jump in the sales of solar telescopes over the next 3-5 years. I’m not exactly sure how I could take advantage of that, though…
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