A Recreational Physicist

I haven’t been riding as much as I planned since I’ve been taking Kung Fu classes.  It’s been about a month now and I think it is going to stick.  It’s been such a workout 3 times a week.  I haven’t felt as worn out since I was swimming 2 miles 3 times a week.  Now that things have settled down with that, I’m going to be getting back on the bike more.

Short 30 minute ride around the hood.  12 mph 6 miles total.  Followed it up with Kung Fu streches and lots of kicks.  191.4 lbs.

I’ve been bitten by all eight of these at one time or the other.  The most stable release we ever did when I was working at Dell was just before Christmas and I reduced the average number of database lookups from 5 per page to one per 5 pages.  After that, the operations team began to get suprised when the application went down. 

Its unfortunate that so few developers understand the cost of hitting the network.  I don’t know how many I’ve dealt with that will go to elaborate levels to unroll loops, remove function calls, and avoid exceptions, but think nothing of doing many many database lookups per page.

It’s been a while since I’ve made a post.  I’ve been busy with work, they’ve been paying me to take Microsoft certification exams so a lot of my spare time has been spent studying.  The other sliver of my time has been taken up with reading The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose.  It’s a good book, which is perfect for someone with my background.  He goes into a lot of the mathematics required to understand modern physical theories.  I’ve found this to be eye opening and has really given me a lot to think about.  Both about the nature of reality and where to go with flightpath.  Tensor diagrams are really interesting for example.  I’ll have a few more posts about what I think about sections of the tome later on.

I’ve been wanting to do a custom skin for the blog since I set it up.  I finally got a title image and a layout I was happy with.  It’s amazing to me how much a little gradient makes a huge difference.  The other big change is the color scheme.  It’s dark.  I’d never been fond of sites with dark backgrounds, but tying into the image of the logistic bifurcation diagram really called for it.  I’ll see how I like it.  I’m sure I’ll be making little tweaks here and there, but overall it has a good feel.

I just had a frustrating experience with task manager under windows XP.  The tabs, status bar, menu and frame border disappeared.  I thought some spyware app or virus was attempting to hide its effects on my system, so I ran multiple scanners none of them found anything.  Safe mode, repaired windows nothing worked, I still had the same problem.

I finally searched the Microsoft kb which requires you to login now. :mad:

And I found it's a feature.  Just double click to the right of the tabs and everything is hidden except the current content window.  Double click on the border and it comes right back.  That's a $#!#*&^ brilliant feature.  I bet Microsoft tech support loves having to take that call, and Dell, and Hp, it would have driven me nuts when I was in tech support.

On the other hand, last night I saw the man with a screaming brain last night, had a book signed by Bruce Campbell and was there for the Q&A he had with the audience.  Bruce is really funny and is a great speaker, much better then his typical corny roles allow him to be.  The movie was shot in Bulgaria, and the stories about how everything is done there reminded me of the time I spent in the Dominican Republic.  The same trashed out roads, crazy driving, wild dogs, and construction standards.  The movie was better then I thought it was going to be, especially since it was made for the sci-fi channel.  Their adaptations are generally OK or better, but their original movies are way beyond awful.

Rode down Shoal Creek to Windsor, came back crossed Mopac and tried Balcones for a little bit.  I don’t think I’ll ride Balcones between 35th and Hancock again, the road is too narrow, hilly, bumpy, curvy and there is too much traffic.  I’m still going to take 35th over and climb up Mt. Bonnell like I used to at some point. 

Overall 19 miles, 1hr 40min, avg 12 mph.