Areas of Unrest

QOTD: "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." - Aldous Huxley

Reading: Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years

Listening to: The Bobs, My I'm Large

Decluttering accomplishments: Finished the filing cabinet. Well, except for the top drawer but that is a multiyear task in and of itself.

6 February 2002 - There's Hills In Them Thar Hills

First, a few links for your amusement. At the risk of being trendy, I've created one of those How Well Do You Know Me? friend tests. I'm not sure how long people keep these things open, so you might as well do it sooner rather than later.

Secondly, in the interest of making sure other people share my addictions, I've become quite compulsive about doing the Daily Word Game Puzzle at the Merriam-Webster Site. They're really pretty harmless and they only take a minute or so each. The added bonus is that the "definition demolition" ones have some truly awful puns in them. (Yes, this is a good thing.)

Finally, my other current harmless brief internet addiction is to the USGS list of recent earthquakes in Southern California. This may have been the very first internet thing I persuaded my friends was interesting and useful, back when you had to ftp the list from the USGS site, before the web existed, when the giant redwoods were saplings and all. But I was reminded of it last week when we had a swarm of small quakes (about 3.5 or so) and I wanted to look up where they were. Those were in Ventura County but there had been an even smaller (1.7 ish) one that I figure was just inches from my apartment. Okay, it was nine miles down or so, but still.

As for what I've been doing, work is way too hectic. We're back in the annual replan process. If you keep people busy long enough replanning their work, you can effectively keep them from getting anything done. Writing lengthy answers to questions I can barely understand is simply tedious. And I suspect that it would not be appreciated if, say, in answer to a question on how we stress test software, I claimed that we write it to CD-ROMs and bend them back and forth a few hundred times. All of which I mention largely because it made my meetings in Azusa today and tomorrow a welcome respite. As an added benefit, the air quality was astonishingly good this morning. The San Gabriel mountains were spread before me in all their glory, prompting my remark that "there's hills in them thar hills."

In other news, I am glad that baseball contraction has been postponed a year. Which gives me an excuse for excursions to both Montreal and Minneapolis - the two cities that may not exist in another year. I realize that the presence of a major league baseball team is not normally viewed as an existence criterion for a city, but think about this. New York, which is the citiest of all American cities, has two baseball teams. Admittedly, one is really an embodiment of evil masquerading as a harmless sports franchise, but that may even further my point. While poor teamless Washington is more of a concept than a city.

That I can think this way may be proof that I have degenerated from having a sharp wit to having a brain that would best be utilized as a blunt object.