Donnie’s Blog

For about the last month I have been really working hard to rearrange my working area at home, because it was just unusable before. I didn’t have enough room to do much of anything, and what little room I had was really unenjoyable to use.

So, I got a new desk - a really nice large desk with plenty of filing space, and I have been cleaning things up and throwing things out like crazy. But the last thing I needed was a storage cabinet, for all the odds and ends that couldn’t really go anywhere else. Blank media, blank paper, tools, planispheres, that kind of stuff. (Actually, I already have a good place for my planisphere…)

I finally found the storage cabinet I wanted on Office Depot’s website, so I ordered it earlier this week. I got an email confirmation with details on how to check my order status, so I went ahead and checked out the order page.

Lo and behold, the very first order status, before anything has actually happened, is called “Buyer’s Remorse.” What’s up with that??

(The only thing that made me feel any remorse was that the estimate said it was going to take a month to get my storage cabinet.)

I was browsing through MSNBC.com (the CNN.com clone) this morning, looking at some of the pictures of the Chinese Olympics facilities, and lo and behold, I came across this picture of the aquatics center:

• The National Aquatics Center

The pattern on the wall is called a Voronoi diagram, and is formed by taking a bunch of random points, and dividing the space into regions that are closest to a particular point. The boundaries are lines that are equidistant between two points.

The ceiling of the aquatics center uses the same technique:

• Interior of the National Aquatics Center

Who knew?!

Evidently there was a sizable earthquake today.

Unfortunately, I didn’t feel it since I was in the swimming pool when it happened.

So now I am trying to figure out if it is a massive nationwide conspiracy.

For some reason, the “Monty Hall problem” has been coming up pretty frequently lately. The basic idea is as follows:

You are on Let’s Make a Deal with Monty Hall. You have three doors to choose from. One of the doors has a NEW CAR behind it. The other two doors have goats.

1. You choose one of the three doors.
2. Then, Monty Hall opens another of the three doors, revealing… A GOAT!
3. Then you have the opportunity to either change your choice to the remaining closed door, or to stick with your original choice.

Is it in your best interest to stick with your original choice, or change your choice after finding out about the location of one of the goats?

Unless you are well-versed with basic probability theory, the correct answer is actually pretty counterintuitive. I won’t go into that; Wikipedia has a great article about it.

But I do have one complaint - who decided that you lose if you get a goat? I think it would be pretty awesome to have a pet goat. You could name him “Chewy” and keep him in the back yard. Now how could anybody call that “losing”?

I haven’t written anything since I got back from Australia, so I thought I had better put up at least a brief update. When I got back it was straight into the first term, and I am still settling into it.

I was able to get a telescope down to Australia and get some great pictures. However, astronomy photos always seem to require a lot of post-processing to bring out all the details, and I still have some work to do. But, here is one for you:

This is the Tarantula Nebula, also known as 30 Doradus and NGC2070. It is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy, which means it’s about 160,000 light years away. It’s pretty stinking bright.

So far the school year is promising to be a smooth one. There hasn’t been too large a glut of students in any classes so far, and TAs can always help with that!

You can definitely smell burning in the air, too. :-/

Everybody wants to be just a little cooler. Then the power goes out and nobody is cool. I find the irony delicious, for some reason.

I’m glad that I finally got a UPS on the computer at home; it survived this power outage without any problems, and now it’s turned off, waiting for the power to come back.

Of course, for the time being, none of this has affected me since I’m at work! It’s nice working in a lab full of computers - nice and cool.

In the catastrophe vein, there was a minor earthquake this morning at about 10:30am. Magnitude 4.7, it turns out. I guessed 4.2 when I felt it, so that’s not too bad.

Yay California. Last weekend the mountains catch fire close to home. This weekend the power goes out and there’s an earthquake.

I have got to get me a new state.

When I was out acquiring my Mac mini, I happened to be in the neighborhood of my old elementary and high school. And what do I see?

This is where the elementary school portion of my school was. Along the right side were the Kindergarten through 3rd Grade classrooms. The big tree was in the middle of the area where we would have recess.

I think the line of trees in the middle ground is where the parking lot was. Behind that was the high school complex.

This is where I worked during the last couple years of high school. There was an office equipment maintenance shop there, and I would do all kinds of work there, usually involving cables and tight dusty crawlspaces. Looking back, I can see why the guys had me do that stuff.

Anyway, I am so *sniff* heartbroken *sniff* to see my school razed to the ground.

Yeah, right.

I just wrote a post over at Infodder about journalist deaths around the world. I thought it was worth mentioning over here too, since it really is a reality that we don’t comprehend in this country.

It’s dangerous being a journalist. I had no idea.

A few weeks ago we finally decided to eliminate Charter Communications from our lives. We have had cable service from them for a long time (my mom says it’s probably been two decades), and more recently we were using their cable modem services. Over the years the prices have just gone up and up and up, until we were paying a pretty ridiculous monthly price for our services.

So, I priced out DirecTV and DSLExtreme, and discovered that we would save $40-50 every single month, for exactly the same services, just by switching over. Also, we finally got our first DVR as part of the DirecTV package, and now we can watch the shows we like whenever we want. It’s pretty awesome.

I just got everything switched over last week, so we are finally back to where we were before as far as television and Internet access. It’s always a hassle to go through something like that, but it’s infrequent. Saving a bunch of money every month doesn’t hurt, too.

So, I got my little convertible when I was a senior in college. I had just gotten my official offer letter from Microsoft, and I triumphantly took it to the dealership and demanded a car. That was back in June of 1998.

Today, in April of 2007, I just discovered that I could lock my trunk so that it can’t be opened using the lever inside the car. I accidentally turned the key the wrong way and discovered that the lock responded positively to this “abuse.” Curious, I tried the lever in the car, and lo and behold, the trunk stayed securely closed.

I don’t think that knowing this would have made my life any easier in the last 9 years. There were never any times where I thought to myself, “Boy, if only I could lock my trunk shut.” But I have to admit that it is a little embarrassing that I didn’t realize my car could do that until just now.

I just hope I’m not missing anything really cool that my car can do…