“Get this, and get it straight: Crime is a sucker’s road and those who travel it wind up in the gutter, the prison, or the grave. There’s no other end… but they never learn.”
Maybe it's just me with my stochastic interest in history and our country's founding, but I found this article by Steven Hayward (Reagan's biographer) concerning Sarah Palin very interesting. What do we really think about "government of the people, by the people, for the people"?
Last episode, we left our heroes (my family) slumbering away their mediocre McDonalds in Louisville, KY. The next morning we raided the hotel's free breakfast cereal counter - a legendary delight the kids remembered from last road trip; three kinds of cereal! As much as we want!
Back into the van and away we went. 700 miles yesterday, and about 500 miles today. We should be at grandad's in the late afternoon. Maybe we can even go swimming when we get there. We grabbed a Starbuck's in downtown Louisville and we were on our way.
This leg didn't quite go as swimmingly. The six bladders-on-board were nowhere near as resilient or synchronized as the day before. So more stops. And this was the mountain leg of the driving, which always takes longer.
And we had another last-minute waypoint in the works. Helen was hoping to meet up with a friend who lives in North Carolina. A few emails and phone calls were exchanged as the morning went on on we had a plan. So we typed the new destination into the borrowed Garmin nüvi and it led us on our way. Though the distance was little different than just going straight to my dad's, it was slower going because of the smaller, winding roads and 30 mph zones as we moved through the small towns. But, man... it was lovely. We ended up going through a bit of Virginia, which I'd never seen before. Wow.
Well, we were making our way - slower than I wanted, but it was OK. But there was a flaw. I tend to be a bit of a ruthless packer: I don't want to haul extraneous things around. Well, I misunderstood something about the borrowed nüvi. I left the auto adapter at home because I already had a USB auto adapter. Mistake. While it can be charged via USB, it will not operate while plugged in to USB. So I had to charge it, then use it, the see "OK, I have 50 miles before the next turn" and charge it for a while. Monkey business. And part way through Virginia, it ran out of power. I'm in Virginia for the first time and the GPS that took me there is dead. Ken gets grumpy.
I had a paper map and finally figured out where we were. Helen called her friend and figured out where we should be going (enough time had passed that plans had to change). We finally made our way to wide, fast, and welcome I-77.
As a side note: I really like paper. I mean, I love my gadgets - computer, iPhone, GPS, etc. - but paper is so much nicer and more convenient and "information dense" than a screen. (For the geeks visiting, yes, that's a very Tufte-esque observation.) A paper map shows so much more in such a small space... layers and layers of information. I love paper maps.
Anyway, the evening approached and we accomplished our rendezvous with Helen's friend a bit north of Charlotte. They hugged and and spun (see photo on bottom) and gabbed, while I enjoyed the entertainment inside the Outback:
Friendly waiter, but not very satisfying food. I'm 0-2 on culinary satisfaction so far on this trip.
Back on our way. We approached Charlotte. On a number of levels, I always love seeing "Billy Graham Parkway" on a street sign. I know my way by heart from here, and we rolled in to grandad's place sometime around 9:30. Get the stuff in and the kids to bed. Day two done.
Driving totals:
Ken: 1,200 miles
Helen: 0 miles
...even though today was billed as possibly being the "End of the World".
The Large Hadron Collider is intended to collide a bunch of particles at about ~99.99997% of the speed of light, thus reproducing conditions quite close to the moment of the Big Bang. Some folks are concerned that doing so will unleash tiny black holes which will interact with Earth's gravity and grow in size until we are annihilated. Which would be a drag. More on that here.
I thought this was funny, though... one paper is cheering "Success!" because the machine got switched on and we're still here. But the experiment that could make the little black holes won't actually be run until October, and actually maybe not even for a year, as they slowly ramp up to full power.
Although the big switch-on took place today, the first high-energy collisions are not due until October 21.
This is nice, but not really "success" in the "see, we didn't destroy the world" sense.
I thought this was pretty good...
The CERN team insist the project is safe.
Well, if they insist it's safe, then they must be right, right? But aren't they running the experiment because there are things they don't know but want to? Ah, nevermind. Anyway, as long as it's all worth it...
They say it could even help to bring massive benefits, such as a cure for cancer and solutions to nuclear waste and global warming.
Haaa ha ha... doesn't that sound like a line from the Simpson's or something? The only things missing are world peace and ED.
They added that if it does actually turn out to destroy the Earth, they will issue a formal apology and form an inquiry to examine what went wrong.
OK, I made that up.
No, I'm not really worried. I'm just impressed by the vapidity of the 'pat-pat it's OK, dear... now run along' infomercial-style reporting. (Reminds me of Mark's writing in That Hideous Strength)
Thought for the day: This machine and its experiments are costing somewhere around eight billion dollars. Eight thousand stacks of one million dollars. I know "governments" funded this, but they get their money through taxing people and their companies. Best possible "public good"?
The last two weeks of August, we had a road trip. Our goal was to make it to South Carolina to visit my dad, and then down to Charleston for a couple of days. Two weeks... ahhhh... enough time to actually relax.
I've had all sorts of things I wanted to post, but wasn't sure how to organize it, so I'm just going to start and see what happens.
I got to leave work the Friday before with that great "the desk is truly cleared" feeling. We had a little too much to do over that weekend, but we got things together pretty well, and Monday morning before 6am we were on the road, and were well into Wisconsin before the sun was actually up. Great start.
I'd loaded up the iPhone with History of Christianity I from Reformed Theological Seminary on iTunes U - awesome stuff - and that kept me occupied while everyone snoozed away the morning.
Our goal was to get to Loiusville, KY where we'd find a room for the night. We were making great time, until...
Helen had a plan. And as the morning progressed and emails were exchanged, we found that we had a stop to make. Near Chicago.
Yes, Jellyfish Labs, where Phil Vischer (creator of Big Idea... think Veggie Tales) is building a wiggly Jellyfish army with which he'll rule the world. Actually, he's building Jellytelly.com, a Christian, internet-based media network for kids. Excellent stuff, well done, and with a little humor for the grown-ups thrown in. (See jellyfishland.com, too.)
We left saying "That was so GREAT!" about a million times, and then everyone fell asleep again. (Well, except for me. Mostly.) And we made our way to Loiusville. We got there a bit later then we expected and got a couple of rooms at the Fairfield Inn on the north bank of the river, where the nice desk clerk worked hard to get us a good rate. I ran over to McDonald's to get us some passable burgers and way too many fries (what was I thinking?) and off to bed. So ended day one.
Driving totals:
Ken: 700 miles
Helen: 0 miles
We went to the Star Wars exhibit at the Minnesota Science Museum a couple of weeks ago. Pretty cool stuff. They had some fun hands-on stuff; making maglev Lego cars and programming little robots.
My camera wasn't capable of catching it, but the detail in those models is really incredible. It was also fun to see goofy little things like the cockpit of the medium-sized (post-episode IV) Millennium Falcon model had a big bent green LED as one of the mechanical "details". Interestingly, Luke's lightsaber wasn't there. Here's a few pictures:
In the midst of bringing the first public revision of flyGarmin to a close at work, a friend emailed me and asked if I could whip up an "instant web site" as his new startup company was about to get national attention. I had a week.
So I worked a normal busy day every day that week, and every night I came home and worked on the new site, kept company by my bride and my new John Adams DVDs. It went like this:
It was quite a week, but we got a pretty nice site out of the deal. And the great part was that I was able to make it client-maintainable right from the beginning. Open source is the coolest. I know that folks who love Drupal really love it, and I can tell it's really powerful, but it just wasn't "jump-in" intuitive like Joomla.
Oh, the site... weathernation.net. :)
The EAA air show in Oshkosh in Wisconsin, that is. flyGarmin was going to be released to the public for the first time in conjunction with the beginning of the air show. Garmin had a Monday morning press conference announcing all sorts of stuff, and flyGarmin was on the list. I was pacing around the whole day like an expectant father. How's the site doing now? How's the site doing now? The image to the left is the display we had to show flyGarmin off to folks. I got to "work the booth" occassionally, and the feedback was fantastic. Folks would come up as though they were paid to be in an infomercial; "Tell me you've done something to make updating my databases easier" "Why yes we have!"
So I hung out in Oshkosh for a few days, gathering feedback, seeing the kinds of things people were showing off at the show.
On my last evening, I decided to run out and get a bite to eat for supper. I drove around downtown Oshkosh wondering what I should get, and then I saw this:
I was driving when I took that photo. Yes, it says zero MPH. And see how all of the P, R, N, D, 1, 2 lights are on? That's called "limp mode." It means the computer sees something wrong with your car, and the transmission has been essentially shut down. Yeah, hundreds of miles from home, the day before I'm finally heading back home, and the transmission had gone out.
And I really wanted to go home. I'd been away for days.
Well, I limped back to where I was staying. Emailed Helen... "pray please". I searched the internet looking for ideas. I found some transmission shops nearby, so I could get there first thing in the morning.
The next morning, I went out and tried the "turn the ignition on-and-off five times fast" to get the computer error codes. No luck. I tried the "hold down trip reset while turning on the ignition" to get the error codes. No luck.
Then my car just started working perfectly fine. The engine light was still on, but I took it for a one mile drive, and then a 20 mile drive... all seemed fine. I met my last commitment and headed home. The trip home went perfectly; I got 29 MPG.
And the car has been fine ever since. The engine light even went off before I could hook up my code reader to see what had been going on. I took this as a Nehemiah 9:21 thing. :)
I know that may not mean anything to you, but that's a big project I've been working on at work for the last many months. It's been a fun, complicated project focussed on making it a lot easier for pilots who use Garmin equipment to keep their equipment up to date.
I've got an awesome group of guys that I work with in Minnetonka, and literally dozens of people from all over the US have contributed. It's been a great project for a pilot wannabe like me. And there's still lots to do. :)
Life is settling down. A big web site release looms. Wordpress 2.6 is installed, with whatever shiny goodness that brings. And I can blog from my iPhone. And I have things I want to talk about. Stay tuned...