The Big Think

I’m sometimes ask people where they would go if they had a free ticket to anywhere in the world. Pick your destination and go, for a week, or a month, or a season. Where would it be? I get all kinds of answers- Europe, Russia, Hawaii. For me, the one place I would choose is Antarctica. Why? A couple reasons, really. It’s not on the way anywhere, so you’re never going to just stop off on a layover, there haven’t been that many people who have done it, but mainly because it’s just so different. Like a completely foreign planet. What must it feel like to be in a world that’s totally iced over year-round? Where a warm day is zero degrees? Where the windchill can get down to -100 fahrenheit? The alienness of that landscape fascinates me.

I picked up Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica at the library last week and just finished it tonight. Like his Mars trilogy, Robinson uses the dramatic backdrop to weave a very literate and moving story of technocratic utopianism. Along the way, he delves into the history and mythos of Antarctica as well as, through one of his characters, a very zen-like appreciation of the austere and sere landscape. One of his main character is a mountaineer guide and I was impressed with how accurate he got not only the technical details of guiding, but also the emotional aspects of taking people out into the wild. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and it made me want to go there even more.

The Little Dog Robot.

(and I think only two of my readers will get that title).

Crash test your car at Consumer Reports here.

3D faces from 2D pictures. Cool.

Google Moon offers “street level” views of the lunar landing sites. Cool!

I don’t know what I like more, their incredible materials science or their inscrutable television shows. Why not put them together?

The Uncanny Valley, that is.
Zeno, the Robot Boy.

We just got our annual letter from the insurance company in the mail. The old “we’re sorry, but due to the increasing cost of medical procedures…” letter that tells us we need to start checking the couch for loose change. The year the damage wasn’t that excessive… only seventeen percent more than last year.

I did some quick figuring. If rates continue to increase by the lowest percentage that they’ve gone up the past four years, and there is no indication that they won’t, in fifteen years our policy premium will cost over thirty-one thousand dollars per year.

For one person.

And it’s the very best price we can get. Highest deductible. One person (we’re with different companies).

Thirty one grand per year.

How is this not broken?

(file this under politics for obvious reasons)

Well, everybody’s got to have a hobby.

Ahh, the Quigmans.

Playing around with WordPress widgets that link to my Flickr account. You can see the random pics down there on the right. I don’t have many flickr pics yet, but I plan on getting a bunch onto there eventually.

How to learn another language.

What do firefighters do when there’s no fire? This.

Happy birthday to Patrick!

I’m all about learning new skills. Guide a raft, fly a plane, EMT, do the Mr. Spock eyebrow. If it’s unusual and slightly difficult I’m all over it. So last week I started learning a new pen spin. In college a bunch of us learned to do this the “thumb around“, and I’m so practiced at it that it’s second nature. I decided last week to learn the “finger pass“, where the pen rolls effortlessly (ha!) through your fingers and then back up to the starting position (see the video). What I realized is that the trick is much harder to get fluid than you’d think, and that I’m totally right-hand dominant. I can spin the pen through all of my fingers at a fairly respectable pace, but I’m nowhere near fluid yet. It’ll take another 10,000 times before I start to get really smooth. Wasted time, you say? Not really. It’s something that you can do when you’re sitting at the desk thinking about other things, or reading a book, or whatever. Good double use of your time.

I tried to spin with my left hand and was amazed at how uncoordinated I am over there. I couldn’t even get the pen to go through all of my fingers once without dropping it. It’d be interesting to see how the left/right side of my brian is different. Oddly, I’m about equal in dexterity between my hands while typing or playing the guitar, but I’ve always been left-hand limited on the piano.

Build a man a fire
and you warm him for the night.
Set a man on fire
and you warm him for the rest of his life.

Americas life expectancy increases to record high.

This is pretty much in keeping with what the actuarial escape velocity people claim will happen. They say that we’re on the beginning part of the bell curve and that they expect it to take off somewhere in the next 30 years or so (some say 10 years, some say as much as 50). At that point we’ll be improving life expectancy by more than 1 year per year, therefore our expected average max age will go up faster than the calendar years go by.

Critics say that this will never happen, but the Kurzweilian view is that it’s happening now, but we’re just on the gentle initial slope of the curve- hardly noticeable because the slope is so gentle. We won’t see disruptive changes until the last few years. The critics will be saying “sure, life expectancy has gone up, but it’s still only a few days per year increase”, then “sure, but it’s only a few weeks/year”, then suddenly it’s month/year and years/year and we’re over the hump.

I don’t believe that we’ll reach the holy grail of “infinite expected lifespan” in the next 100 years (too many unknowns to be realistic, I think), but I do think that it’s very possible, and even likely, that I’ll get my wish and get to see the year 2100.

Welcome!

Today I am 38

Today my blog is 4.

You’ll probably notice something different if you’ve been around here for any length of time. The place looks new. Actually, it is new. New carpet, new furniture (not much of that yet), and some spiffy new fixtures.

I applaud and thank my previous host for putting up with me these past few years, and while the price was right, there were some speed issues that made it necessary for me to make the jump. You’ll probably notice that the page loaded right up without a hitch. That’s because I’m now being hosted on some serious hardware. My good friend Sean has offered to hook me up with a great hosting service and I have gratefully accepted, so from now on you can expect some good response time.

You’ll also probably notice that this is the only post here. I have to get the old site archived and moved over to the new server. Until then it’ll be a bit bare around here but hopefully things we be back to normal in a week or so.

I wanted to make today the official rollover time for the new blog because it’s the fourth year of my writing here as well as my 38th birthday.

Yup, 38! Last year I talked about how weird it was to hit the “official” middle-age number of 37 (assuming a statistical 74). While I believe that the current generation can expect much more than that through medical breakthroughs, it’s still strange to reflect on how fast time is moving us all downriver.

This past year hasn’t seen many life-altering changes (for which I’m grateful), but I have got to experience some rather fun stuff. To wit:

Erin and I celebrated our 10th anniversary with a blowout trip to California (I’d link to the post here but it’s in limbo right now). We spent 11 days, splitting the time roughly equally between San Francisco, Sequoia National Park, and Napa/Sonoma wine country. Erin had never been to California and seen where I grew up so it was a fun experience for her. Like all of our vacations, when we got back she started planning on the return!

I also spent a back-breaking and totally exhausting three months completely remodeling my studio/office from a spare bedroom to a fully fleshed out recording space. To say that I’m giddy about it would be an understatement. Even three months later I still pause when I walk in here every morning and look around with pride and satisfaction. And I know how tardy I am with pictures. That was mainly because the old server was so slow. Now that I’m on a speedy site I’ll have the pictures up. In fact, I’ll make it my first priority.

I shaved my head. Yup, I went cueball. I had joked for a few years that I was going to finally shave the head and the beard but friends didn’t believe me. So on monday, February 26th I took a razor to it all. How long had I had the beard? Here’s some fun stats:

From and including: Friday, June 27, 1986
To and including: Monday, February 26, 2007

7550 days from the start date to the end date, end date included

Or 20 years, 8 months including the end date
Alternative time units
7550 days can be converted to one of these units:

* 652,320,000 seconds
* 10,872,000 minutes
* 181,200 hours
* 1078 weeks (rounded down)

Kinda fun to realize how long it had been. It was definitely a unique feeling to not have any facial or head hair. Made me look a bit thuggish as it was growing back in. Here’s me right after the deed was done.

And since you all know what I look like bald I guess I’ll never be able to shave it and hide from Johnny Law.

This year I also continued my audio career. I got to run the boom and do post for several really fun projects. It’s exhausting work but the crew is a hoot to work with and the director is top notch. I got hooked up with this gang a few years ago when I volunteered for Austin’s 48 hour film project. It was a propitious event that has had long lasting ramifications ever since. I’m very happy that it has led to work that is not only fulfilling professionally but also in line with my personal beliefs. I mean, sometimes you have to do the job just to get the paycheck, but when you’re able to make a living and do it working on projects that you believe in, why that’s just icing on the cake.

Got food poisoning. Ick. Either some bad pepperoni or something else gave me the worst case of food poisoning I can imagine. Well, I can imagine worse, but I wouldn’t wish that on an enemy. I could have done without that three days.

What else? Well, I put another year of Sing into the books. This one was, in my humble opinion, the very best show that I have seen in the past 17 years. I’ve always been really proud of all our work on the show, but this year things came together better than ever. I was really proud of all of the groups and thrilled with the outcome. If you’re in Waco the weekend of November 1st, come on down and see Pigskin Review (the best of Sing from last year). I think you’ll be entertained.

This year I also dipped my toe into Facebook after the site went public. It used to be restricted to college students but since it was opened up to the masses has become a great meeting place for everyone. I’ve gotten a ton of happy birthday messages from friends and clients.

Erin and I went to dinner with some friends last night and got to talking a little about work and life and I was reminded again of my good friend Barry. Barry and I have very similar job/life balances (he’s the other Sing arranger), and our conversations always seem to drift back to how blessed we are to be doing what we love. This past year has been more reinforcement for that and I’m grateful. No major illnesses (well except for that food poisoning bit), no unpleasant life surprises, and wonderful time spent with great people.

Today was a totally wasted day. I woke up this morning hoping to get a big jump on work after being gone all day yesterday on the Thanksgiving shoot.

Instead, I was greeted with timeout and error messages in my email client. AT&T has been bugging us recently to change over our email settings in order to coincide with theirs. I thought I had done that but called ATT to make sure. First mistake. The “tier one” people who populate the phone lines at ATT have two job requirements: do not to speak the English very well, and make sure you take long periods to read the ineffectual phone “help” script before you tell the customer something that will further mess up his system. After fargling my email client even farther I asked to be escalated to tier 2. When I got there I got the well known complaint:

I’m sorry, sir. I’m not trained on the Mac. Well are you trained on email, meathead? So I finally got to tier 2 MAC support. Now this dude, this Todd guy, really knew his stuff, and he spent the better part of an hour getting my settings back to normal and my system working again. It turns out it was the mac.com email servers that were down, but I had messed up the other server settings (AT AT&T’s insistence), and only by invoking the gods of email were we able to get things working again. In the course of all this, however, I had to give Todd my user name and password so he could check things on his end. Fairly standard procedure, I think, but I was still nervous about things as this information would let him get into my iTunes account and download stuff on my credit card, were he the nefarious type.

So once the email was all up and running again (and here I’m in hour FIVE of this fiasco), I did an even stupider thing: I changed my .mac password. Simple, right? Go online and type in the new password, right? That seemed to work, and I was able to access the .mac webmail just fine. But when I put the password into the Mac’s MAIL application and have it go out to find my email I get either a timeout or this:

So I am once again adrift, only this time the problem is with APPLE’s product, not AT&T. I’ve followed the letter of the law, made my changes according to their rules, and everything should be working, but no fuzzy dice, Batman. I can only hope that things start to work again of their own accord, because the alternative is either a lifetime of checking email with the web application, calling tech support for a $50 fix, or junking the whole thing and moving away.

Thirty years ago today the Voyager spacecraft started its infinite journey.