I got my first PhD program rejection today, from Georgetown. Which is unfortunate, because that's the school I most wanted to attend.

It's certainly not a good sign about my prospects with the other schools that have yet to send word.

Posted by: Boviate at 11:17 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 43 words, total size 1 kb.

I have inexplicably failed to mention that Hil and I got a new cat, almost a month ago! Where has the time gone?

Anyway, Aria is now about seven months old. She's black except for a few stray white hairs, some of them clumped together but not in sufficient numbers to form a white patch worthy of the name. When we got her, she'd been spayed only two days earlier and was still recovering from the surgery. Once her incision healed, she got a lot more active and started meowing and purring with great enthusiasm.

The first few days in her new home, she was shy and afraid of strangers. As she's settled in, she's become much more willing to socialize. Last night we had a party, and I expected her to spend it in the basement; instead she wandered around demanding that people amuse her with cat toys. The people generally did.

As I write this, she's sleeping on my lap, the first time she's done that. I'd tried putting her on my lap before, but she always immediately left, seeking a higher vantage point on whatever piece of furniture looked most interesting. I think I shall build her some climbing structure.

Posted by: Boviate at 06:45 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 205 words, total size 1 kb.

Just two doors down from Hil's house is the home of her distant cousins Al and Mary. I believe that they've been living in that house not just since before Hil was born, but before Hil's parents were born.

I only went over to visit with them a few times, because each visit took forever. They loved to chat about anything and everything, and share fresh cookies. There was a time we stopped by at the end of a bike ride, all covered with sweat, and stayed an hour.

Once, Hil woke from a nap to the noise of hammering on her front porch. Al had come over and was installing a set of wind-chimes that he had just made. I think he thought she was at work, and he thought it would be fun for her to come home to a set of surprise windchimes. It was quite windy last night, and those same chimes were sounding constantly.

As men so often do, I bonded with Al over our shared military service. He told me that the only time he'd been outside of this city was during World War Two. He was an Army artilleryman, crewing 75mm howitzers in Italy and Germany. He came home from the war, married Mary, bought a house, and they raised three children in that house.

Al died yesterday, of pneumonia. He was 89.

As dusky mountains please the eye
When twilight chases day;
As bugle-tones that, passing by,
In distance die away;

As leaving some grand waterfall,
We, lingering, list its roar–
So memory will hallow all
We've known, but know no more.
—A. Lincoln, "My Childhood Home I See Again." 1846.

Posted by: Boviate at 11:30 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 285 words, total size 2 kb.

I bought a laser printer four years ago, and it's served me well. Today I wanted to print something on it, but because I've moved it to a different location I had to re-configuring it to connect via WiFi rather than USB. While doing so, I realized I'd never checked if it had a firmware update available. Turns out it was using firmware version 24, and there was a version 68 on the manufacturer's website.

When I had it upgraded, it's built-in webserver configuration system now offered a "telnet" option. I've never telneted to a printer before! But Windows 7 Ultimate doesn't have a telnet terminal, so I quick downloaded PuTTY and connected. It offered a rather boring configuration menu. Which was cool, but, well, boring.

But looking at the configuration menu reminded me that it offered a "Raw TCP/IP" printing option. That, I suspected, means one could just connect a terminal (like PuTTY) to the port the printer is listening on, and send it raw PostScript and whatever other languages the printer understands. It's been shown that PostScript is Turing complete; while it was invented as a way of describing documents to be printed, it's really a fully-fledged computing language. So I sent off a "Hello World!" program to my printer, and I could hear it printing, but I apparently missed the command that would cause it to eject the newly-printed page. So, off to the language reference to check what the relevant keyword was, when I suddenly realized that I'd originally turned on the printer with the intention of printing a document, and here it was an hour later and I hadn't printed that document, because I was having so much fun playing with my printer.

This is the same mental quirk that caused me to start with reading an assigned book on pirates and end up with a MA project on whaling that includes side sections on intellectual property law in mid-ninteenth century America and the career of actress Clara Bow.

UPDATE: When I telneted into my printer, the welcome message included the following line:
System Up Time: 0000:00:00:00:19:11 (YYYY:MM:DD:hh:mm:ss)
Note the four digits for years of uptime. Really? Who honestly expects that a printer is going to have more than 999 years of uptime? I assume that the telnet server code was copy and pasted from elsewhere, but who assumes that a computer of any type is going to have more than 999 years of uptime?

Posted by: Boviate at 05:55 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 407 words, total size 3 kb.

Merry Christmas everyone! Yesterday Hil admitted that she had forgotten to get any stocking stuffers, so I stopped by a grocery store and bought a bunch of candy plus a few fruits to assuage my guilt at all the candy.

This morning, though, Hil baked up a fabulously complicated french toast and cheese confection, so we didn't even get to the stockings until early afternoon. That made me feel old.

We were going to do a Christmas dinner at Hil's parents' place, but there was a problem with the turkey, so we went to the casino's buffet instead. Hil's sister carpooled along with us. Getting to and from the buffet required passing through the gaming floor thrice. People under 18 are not allowed in those sections, so there are guards at every entrance. All three times, the guard nodded at me, then told the two ladies I was with to produce ID. That made me feel very old.

After our supper at the quite decent buffet, the family trouped back to Hil's house, where we did a mighty gift exchange, sipped tea, and ate homemade cookies and fudge.

Hil's parents left, but Hil's sister stayed for a few more hours. I tried to stay out of the way while the two of them caught up. While casually glancing in a mirror, I noticed my first gray hair. That made me feel really old.

Then, once everyone had finally left, I asked Hilary to marry me. She said "Yes."

Posted by: Boviate at 11:43 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
Post contains 255 words, total size 2 kb.

Driving home from a holiday party, I tuned the car radio to the local classical station. They were playing Benjamin Britten's A Ceremony of Carols, followed by Francis Poulenc's Gloria. I swear I am not exaggerating when I say that those two works were my two favorites out of the four Christmas concerts I did back in high school.

Ah, nostalgia.

Posted by: Boviate at 09:38 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 65 words, total size 1 kb.

When my siblings and I were young, a favorite game this time of year was "guess the present". I think we were inspired by my father doing it. Peeking inside the box or damaging the wrapping paper was strictly forbidden, but one could shake the gift, weigh it, determine its center of mass, etc, all in hopes of figuring out what was inside.

Today I got a package from Amazon with a wrapped gift inside. Curiously, the shipping package had a big ORM-D sticker on the outside. For those that have never worked in shipping, the ORM-D label means that the package contains a hazardous material that is exempt from most of the rules governing the carriage of hazmat, because it is packed for sale to an individual consumer. These are usually things like perfumes, cleaning chemicals, and lighters. Now I'm really curious as to what's in there.

UPDATE: It was a bottle of bicycle chain lube. Specifically, "dry" style, meaning it's a volatile oil with suspended waxes and some teflon bits for good measure.

Posted by: Boviate at 09:10 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 175 words, total size 1 kb.

Here's something interesting. All previous NASA radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) were based on plutonium cores and generated electricity by using thermocouples combined to form a thermoelectric generator. But NASA's got two problems with the current generation of RTGs: the Department of Energy is getting stingy about handing out plutonium; and thermocouples are only 5-10% efficient, making the units heavier than they'd like.

Enter the Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator. That prior Wikipedia link shows the ground-based prototype, while this news article has pretty pictures and video of the final design. It uses uranium, which is more easily available and also not as dangerous in case of a problem.[1] Intriguingly, it generates the electricity with Stirling engines, which are piston and cylinder technology invented in the early 1800s as an offshoot of steam engines. The great thing about the old RTGs was the total lack of moving parts, making them very durable; the new ASRG has a moving control rod in the center of the uranium, and the Stirling generators have pistons and flywheels and whatnot chugging back and forth, meaning lots of moving parts to get stuck or broken. I guess NASA is confident they will keep working as long as necessary.

Anyway, I just think the whole thing is very cool, and I wanted to let my nerd flag fly.

Video of the whole thing, copied from the news link above:



[1] Environmentalists have been complaining for years about the potential hazards of plutonium being released into the atmosphere by an old-style RTG if it exploded during launch. With uranium, there is already a huge quantity of it in the atmosphere, because uranium is found in trace quantities in coal and thus goes up the smokestack in every factory and power plant that burns coal. Note that I don't expect this to calm down certain environmental groups, specifically those that don't realize that a typical large coal plant releases more atmospheric radiation than did the Three Mile Island power plant during its accident.

Posted by: Boviate at 03:31 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 326 words, total size 2 kb.

Last weekend, I mowed Hil's lawn and declared that mowing season was over. The 10 gallon portable can was still half-full, so feeling virtuous, I poured the leftovers into Hil's car.

Then she reminded me buried in the depths of the garage is apparently a portable electric generator. Power does go out every so often in this part of the world, so it would be a good idea to have that thing ready to go. The house has forced air heat, so if need be I am confident I could use the generator to power the furnace to keep the place from freezing.

Which is to say, guess who gets to fill that stupid gas can up again? *sigh*

Posted by: Boviate at 02:59 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 120 words, total size 1 kb.

In this election, we've got an "Barack" versus a "Mitt". How long has it been since there was a presidential election where neither major candidate had a WASPy forename?

Perhaps 1964, with Lyndon vs. Barry. "Barry" is somewhat WASPy, though. 1952 and 1956 were Dwight vs. Adlai, again, "Dwight" seems like it wouldn't be noticeable at Eton. 1852 had a Franklin vs. Winfield, but "Franklin" is a very traditional English word, so I'm going to call it a WASP name. That also disqualifies 1936, Franklin vs. Alf, and 1940, Franklin vs. Wendell.

1872 was Horace vs. Ulysses, and 1868 was Horatio vs. Ulysses. So I'm going to declare those as being the only prior elections where neither major candidate has a WASP forename. Amusingly, neither Horace Greeley, Horatio Seymour, nor Ulysses Grant had any substantial Greek ancestry.

Posted by: Boviate at 12:11 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 141 words, total size 1 kb.