After this morning's workout (intervals – I hate intervals), the FBIL and I were sitting on his front porch, drinking water and shooting the breeze. We started talking camping.

There are two kinds of camping that I like, and they are almost polar opposites.

I love lightweight camping, either backpacking or touring bicycle or long-range canoeing or whatever. Carry everything with you, under your own power. Pare your needs to a minimum, cooking with a canteen cup and a spork. Bring two pairs of socks and alternate. It's a wonderful challenge, and it really gets you back to the more primitive state of nature. You can get so far away from civilization, it's unbelievable.

I love heavyweight camping. This is the kind of camping that requires you to park your car no more than 100 yards from where you'll be camping. If it's any further away from the parking lot, you need either a heavily-laden canoe or a pack mule. You've got an air mattress, a camp chair, and a screened pavilion in addition to your tent that's bigger than a medieval peasant's home. You've got an iron skillet, an iron dutch oven, and a coleman stove in case the weather gets unpleasant. You get the fun of being outside and seeing nature, while also brewing some perfectly good coffee every morning before cooking the bacon and eggs and buscuits after a night sleeping in such a way that you didn't get acquainted with the tree roots under the tent.

And for me, there's no fun in the middle ground. I either want to be comfortable, or I want to be so uncomfortable that the suffering is part of the experience.

As Hil is not an experienced camper, I think we'll be starting out with the comfy option for her. But that might not stop the FBIL and I from doing something more hard-core. We're competitive enough that we were talking about having a backpack weigh-off at the trailhead.

Posted by: Boviate at 11:15 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I have occasionally joked that as an uncle, it is my duty to get my nieces and nephew into trouble.

So a bit over a week ago, I met my Uncle Frank and Aunt Pat at a bicycle swap meet. My fiancée couldn't come, as she had a prior obligation. At the meet, I admired the bikes, but only bought a pair of winter gloves.

As we ate lunch together after the meet, my uncle convinced me to text my fiancée that I had bought three new bikes at a great price. She was not pleased to learn this.

I guess it just goes to show that an uncle's job never ends.

Posted by: Boviate at 03:45 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Things must be different now for the young kids playing soccer. When I was doing it in elementary school, I never saw the game at the professional or international level. Perhaps Wide World of Sports ran twenty minutes of highlights every fourth year for the World Cup, but that was it.

Now, of course, even basic cable's ESPN shows several MLS games per week during the season. NBC shows games over the air, if your local affiliate doesn't preempt them with infomercials. If you want to spend the money to go premium, there's an entire network dedicated to soccer alone.

Now get those kids off my lawn!

Posted by: Boviate at 09:57 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I've said it before– while I love cats, you have to realize that all cats are monsters. If you took a domesticated dog an enlarged to to be 150 pounds, you'd get something that was loving and great with kids. (And we have in fact done just this.) If you took a domesticated cat and enlarged it to be 150 pounds, it would probably eat your kids and kill you in your sleep.

Posted by: Boviate at 11:47 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Anyone that's been to the Corning Museum of Glass has seen a Prince Rupert's Drop, but this is a cool short video featuring high-speed cameras. The fracture front moves very very fast! And while my father would know more, their science explanation agrees with my memory of how they work.

Posted by: Boviate at 08:45 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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The future father-in-law treated the family to a comedy show last night, starring J. B. Smoove, whom everyone else has apparently seen as an actor on the TV series Curb Your Enthusiasm. I must confess to not being a fan of that show.

I haven't been to a comedy show in many years, but this one was pretty good. Although, I must confess I liked one of the warm-up comedians more, as my tastes run less to impersonations and sound effects, and more on observation and self-deprecation.

The club was downtown right near the city's major sports arena, and it took forever to find a place to park the car. It turns out that there was a professional lacrosse game going on. I had no idea that pro lacrosse was that popular. Unfortunately for us, the game ended just a few minutes before our show did, so we got stuck in the giant traffic jam leaving, too. I'm just kvetching now, really it was a fun evening.

Posted by: Boviate at 11:02 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Legos never cease to amaze me.

Posted by: Boviate at 01:11 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Hil is a big fan of Breaking Bad, a TV series about a high school chemistry teacher who turns his skills to evil. We don't get the cable channel that runs new episodes, but the episodes show up on NetFlix the next day. So I was instructed that by the time the new season starts up, there would be a way to watch NetFlix on the living room TV.

I love building computers, so I put together a HTPC ("Home Theater PC"). It cost about $300 in parts, all told. I tried to get Linux running on it, but there didn't seem to be good graphic drivers or sound drivers for the hardware. It took a good four hours to get the graphics to work at all, at the end of which I was too irritated to work out what wasn't working with the audio. I had a completely legal extra copy of Win7 hanging around, so I installed that without issue.

Anyway, as long as I had Win7 going, I used it's built-in profiling tools to benchmark the new system, then I compared the benchmarks to my current primary desktop system. I'm depressed now, because the $300 computer was better in every respect other than HD access time and 3D graphics performance, and it was a near thing in both those cases. That's even though my main computer has a discreet graphics card, while the HTPC uses a fancy new AMD chip with the graphic processor as a CPU co-processor.[1]

So now I'm having new-computer envy. But I shall hold on for a while yet, I think. I don't need a new PC, I just want a new PC.

[1]: I remember reading somewhere about a humorous proposed law of computer design, that there would always be alternating cycles of the following two steps: (a) This special purpose processing would be faster if we did it on a specialized secondary chip! (b) We've got too many secondary chips and the new CPUs are crazy fast, let's re-integrate all those special processes into the CPU! This has happened for audio, Ethernet, video, floating-point math, and other stuff too.

Posted by: Boviate at 05:34 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Today in Buffalo, we've had heavy snow, then light rain, then sunshine, then snow again. All between 9AM and noon.

I love springtime in Buffalo. It keeps us on our toes.

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Cornell has wished me luck in my academic endeavors, provided that I pursue said endeavors elsewhere. That's somewhat despiriting, as I had high hopes of attending the school build by telegraph wealth.

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