kadmium

One of the things I like about walking or riding my bike to work is that it makes my work day feel much shorter. When I drive to work, it takes me about ten minutes to get here, give or take a couple of minutes. Walking or riding, it takes me about 20 or 25 minutes. (I can make the ride in about 15 if I want to, but I have to ride on this really busy street. The 20 or 25 minute way takes me along the Coastal Trail that runs by the Knick Arm — much nicer.)

So how does that shorten my day? I recently noticed that when I drive, I’m already mentally at work about 5 minutes before I even leave the house, so that’s an extra 15 minutes (5 at home + 10 in the truck) on my work day. If I walk or ride, I’m not mentally at work until about 5 minutes after I get to the office, so that’s 25 to 30 minutes off my work day.

Okay, maybe it’s not quite that literal. I do have to leave the house earlier if I’m walking or riding, but even taking that into account, I don’t have that 15 minutes of home-and-truck-work-time. It’s worth it, even if it’s 1°F outside with a windchill of -10°F

The British Library has created an online presentation of two fifteenth century editions of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The books were printed by William Caxton, credited by the site as “the first English printer”.

In addition to high-quality scans of all pages from both editions, the site has transcripts of both books, biographical information about both Chaucer and Caxton, and background information on the time period and technology used to print the books.

I have a backlog of long entries in draft mode, but rather than finish up one of those, I’ll just post this picture and say that if I could travel through time, I’d only use it for eating. Well, and killing Hitler, but that goes without saying.

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Monday was a great day. It was sunny and warm (low 40s), I was productive at work, and our Girl Scout cookies arrived (mmm … Samoas … ). Then that f*cking little halfwit in the White House made it absolutely clear, so that there really could truly be absolutely no doubt whatsoever in any way even to the most starry-eyed optimist that he’s sending troops into Iraq on the flimsiest of pretenses. It’ll probably happen before the end of the week. I ate a half a box of Thin Mints just thinking about it. It doesn’t seem to have helped much.

When something big happens nowadays, there are so many people gathering information about it that surprising details rise to the surface that I probably wouldn’t have ever learned about.

When the WTC was destroyed, I learned that the engineers had planned for the contingency that an airplane might fly into it, but they only planned for a 727, I guess because it was the biggest commercial airliner flying when they were designing the building.

Today I learned just how fast shuttles are moving on re-entry. The actual number indicating their speed (Mach 18 or 12,500 mph) is not what surprised me. It was the combination of details that allowed me to visualize the approach.

The shuttle was over north-central Texas when it fell apart, headed for a landing in Florida. It was at 200,000 feet. The accident occurred just before 9:00 AM Eastern time. The landing was scheduled for 9:16 AM Eastern time.

So they were going to decelerate from 18 times the speed of sound, drop just under 38 miles in altitude, and cover roughly 1100 land miles in 16 minutes. That’s just amazing. I think the most amazing thing to me is that the space program runs so well that this doesn’t happen more often.

Yesterday was a big day for babies in our family. Amy and Brian welcomed Frances Ebeling McCreath and James Philip McCreath into the world in the evening, both over 5 pounds, happy, and healthy. Hopefully we’ll be able to get to Boston sometime soon to see them.

Brian said that the hospital has a system where they can post some pictures to a web page, so hopefully we can see the little stinkers pretty soon.

I talked to Brian and here’s the link:

Newton-Wellesley Hospital

Once you get there, click on “Visit a loved one’s welcomesite” and enter the following:

mother’s last name: McCreath
secret word: pickle

There is also a guestbook that you can sign. The link is at the top of the page with babie’s pictures .

Earlier in the morning, my cousin Rachel, her husband Bobby, and their daughter Asha, welcomed Neel into the world.

Hello, all you happy babies!

Dean Allen lives in France and has a Weimaraner named Oliver. Like many dogs, Oliver provides fodder for good stories.

I’m generally comfortable with the decisions that I’ve made throughout my life, and comfortable with the person that I am. There is one thing I wish I could do over, though. Dental hygiene.

I have a lot of cavities. A lot. Last month I had to go in for a cleaning, and the dentist said, “Ooo … we’re going to need to replace those before you leave the country.” He was referring to five (yes, 5) old amalgam fillings. I’ve known for a while that these would need to be replaced, but I wasn’t planning on doing it right now. Oh, and just to make things more fun one of the fillings was going to have to be replaced by a crown (my second this year).

The FDA has approved a new drug for building bone mass. This is some pretty exciting news, because although Katie’s had some improvement with the Fosomax, it hasn’t been as rapid or successful as we had hoped.

In case, like me, you frequently find yourself in front of a computer but with no ruler handy, here’s a page of printable paper rulers.

Yesterday I went to get passport photos made (have to go through Argentina to get to Antarctica) and when the pictures developed, they looked like mugshots. I took them home and showed them to Katie, laughing about it as I said, “Look at this! And I even made a concious effort to look pleasant!” (And I had. I’ve had a bad couple of weeks at work and I’m feeling pretty stressed out. When I went to get my first round of vaccinations for the trip, my blood pressure was just on the high end of normal. I’m usually smack-dab in the middle of normal. I just don’t have high blood pressure. So while I was driving to get the pictures taken, I practiced smiling and made mental notes to myself to look like I wasn’t going to slug the photographer.)

Katie said, “But that’s how you look a lot of the time.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. When we walk the dogs in the morning, about half the time you look really pissed off.” For the record, I’m usually not pissed off in the morning. By the time we’re walking the dogs, I usually am thinking about work, but I always thought that my thinking face was sort of neutral looking. Apparently not.

So the question is this:

When you picture me in your mind, what expression do I have on my face?

Be honest. I’m not fishing for compliments, and nothing is going to hurt my feelings. I really want to know. How do people perceive me and remember me?

(I had to submit my passport application this morning and didn’t have time to scan the picture, but I will when I get my passport.)

If I really need to get my head down and work, one of the best things I can do is turn on a never-ending stream of old school punk rock (late 70s–early 80s; up through the end of the first wave of US hardcore). I get happy and focussed and productive.

I guess it has to do with how important that music was to me when it was new. It made me happy. It was a huge part of who I was. I was in bands most of my late teens and early 20s, and if I wasn’t playing at a club, I was watching someone else.

I imagine other people experience this with other kinds of music, too, but I’ve never met anyone who uses old punk rock for concentration.

Oh, and for it to really work well, I have to be able to use speakers. Headphones just aren’t the same. Hm. Maybe it has to do with establishing control of my surroundings.

For those of you who are anxious to try new things like posting pictures or playing with HTML, I’ve set up a new site where I’ll be posting links and tutorials about web publishing in general and using Movable Type specifically. I’m not quite done with the templates, so they may be a little rough around the edges.

Today I put up two items related to photos and the web, one is a tutorial I wrote about including images in your posts with Movable Type and the other is a link to a tutorial about photos on the Web written by someone else. Please let me know if you have specific questions about anything.

Now, go learn!

A few months back, Katie proposed that we go without TV for a week. I said it sounded like an interesting idea, then chose not to discuss it further. I’m very habituated to TV. I watch a lot of TV. Too much, really, considering what I watch. I’ll watch reruns repeatedly. I could ponder on the deeper reasons why, but it ultimately comes down to wanting to be entertained without having to think. An entertainment IV, if you will. Not very satisfying and not very productive.

Katie, on the other hand is much more discriminating in her television watching, at least when I’m not at home. She rarely turns on the TV on her own. There are a few shows that get her attention, but only the first time they air. She doesn’t watch reruns.

So with the upcoming week of faux-patriotism and force-fed grief programming coming up, I told Katie that I’d be willing to try. I have to admit that the idea of a week without TV is troubling, even knowing that I would end up turning it off in disgust most evenings anyway. But this morning I sat down and skimmed through the upcoming week’s program schedule and after mentally blocking out all the September 11 memorializing, there really wasn’t much interesting on.

We’re also not subjecting ourselves to a complete media blackout. We still get the paper, we’ll still listen to Morning Edition as we get ready for our day, we might even rent some DVDs. But we won’t have the near-constant murmur of broadcast TV in the background. It’ll be different. And probably better. But I’m still going to miss my IV.

Two men (a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor and a pilot) are flying a single engine plane from South Africa to Alaska. This site is tracking their progress.

Well, here we are. This will be the permanent home for our site. Hope you enjoy it.

Here’s one more picture of the house: a blueprint of the first floor. ’Cuz I’m a geek and took the time to make one. The full-sized version is 800 × 484 pixels, but it’s only 13k, so it won’t take long to download, but you might have to scroll around to see all of it.

Here are some pictures of the new house. There are more on another roll of film around here somewhere, but heckifiknow where they are! Click on the picture to see a bigger version.