Here’s a painting that is supposed to make some sort of statement about science. I don’t know for sure what that statement is, though, and I’ve never seen a chem lab or a bio lab that looked anything like this. The anglerfish, at least, needs serious containment for the serious water pressure that it needs to survive, and it couldn’t really live in the same tank as the more ordinary-looking sharks above it. I guess this is just artistic license at work though.

The plan to go to the range yesterday fell through. Bleah. Juan had to work huge amounts of overtime on Saturday, so he couldn’t go out Sunday. Next Saturday, we hope.

I’ve been reading The Buddha from Brooklyn, about a woman from Brooklyn who was recognized as a tulku (reincarnated spiritual leader) by a rather conservative Tibetan Buddhist. She decided that the thing she should do was start a Buddhist center in Maryland, build a temple complex and a bunch of stupas, and attempt to spread Tibetan Buddhism through the USA.

The book is mostly written in an oh-gosh-wow style that I didn’t particularly like, but at least the author describes the bad things about the religious practices as well as the good things. A fair number of people went to the center for months or years, learned stuff, experienced inner peace and/or subtle enlightenment, and generally had a decent time. However, the participants were always encouraged to think of their leader as infallible, and to obey her orders without question. This is a tradition in Tibetan Buddhism (everyone always does what the lama says), but it has serious potential for abuse and very little oversight.

Also, rules that applied to the participants (no adultery, for those who had taken vows, no sex) were not applied to the leader. She married and divorced several men over several years, and there were multiple times when she slept with people she wasn’t married to. And of course, participants were encouraged/browbeaten/forced to contribute lots of money, labor, and time to the temple.

The goal of the center is to reduce and eventually eliminate the suffering of all sentient beings everywhere. Good goal. I don’t know if this particular center is accomplishing it in the best way, though. People who are in positions of power tend to do things which benefit them personally, and the concerns and problems of their subordinates often get stepped on. Some of the descriptions of the center made me think of “cliquish high school where most of the people are wearing saffron robes” instead of “a place where everyone’s trying to become enlightened”.

Actually, a lot of the negative things I noticed are probably endemic to humans and human organizations. Buddhists—even advanced, practicing, devoted Buddhists—don’t have a way to make people be awesome. Pity that they don’t.

After thinking about it for a while, I have come to the conclusion that what makes financial sense is to take work up on their offer of work-paid Cox net service, buy some hosting from the slicehost guys, and obtain a domain name. This site will change its name to crow202.org. That’s actually live right now and points here, but the blog entry will not change until a bit later on today, and so forth.

I still have to get my slice set up. It may take a day or so to do that. Then transfer everything that I want to have public from my home box to the slice, then make sure it all works right. Then, switch the DNS records. It should be cool, hope it all works. There will be another entry right before it all happens, and probably 15 minutes worth of downtime. And then, the site, my mail server, and all of my public stuff will be available via ssh or web from anywhere, and be living on a box in a rack somewhere instead of in my desktop box. Guess it had to happen sometime.

So yesterday evening we all got together for dinner and Bad Movie Night. Lasagna, garlic bread, Trevor’s special awesome punch, and so forth. The pre-dinner entertainment was Guitar Hero 80′s Edition, which I thought was OK but not insanely great. Maybe this is because I didn’t really get into music until I first heard “Nevermind” in 1991.

Then the Bad Movies were on the queue. First up was “Mansquito”, which was . . . actually much better than I was expecting. It was still a bad movie, but its script was not insanely terrible, the actors could almost act, and the special effects weren’t that cheesy. I’ve paid good money to see worse movies in theatres. (“Street Fighter” with Jean-Claude Van Damme and “Frequency” with Dennis Quaid are both worse than “Mansquito”.) It’s a solid if predictable B-movie, and had some unintentionally funny lines.

Dr. Dan had brought “Shark Attack 3: Megalodon” on DVD, and that was our second Bad Movie. It was quite a bit worse than “Mansquito”, and consisted of 20% stock footage of marine life, 60% badly dubbed softcore porn, and 20% extremely fake shark attacks. OK, it was either that or “Ankle Biters”, a film about midget vampires. I am not making this up. I can see that Dr. Dan is or should be my primary source for bad movies, since he had the worst ones available.

Here’s a gilded bronze statue of Venus from the Phoenix Art Museum. The picture really didn’t turn out that well, but the statue itself was pretty good.

At work yesterday, I changed a script, hoping to improve it. Right after that, I got a help desk ticket saying that something was screwed up. Of course, I thought it was something I did. After some more fiddling, we found it was something totally different; a job had gotten stuck elsewhere and that was causing the problems the user was reporting. The user was happy after we unstuck the job.

Also went out to lunch with the guys and the developer who left the position I’m currently in. That was fun.

The Plan(tm) for today is to get the laundry and grocery shopping and other shopping done, then go have a potluck dinner with Trevor and Zach and Kelli and all of the local people. “Mansquito” may be involved at some point, or possibly Killer Bunnies or Guitar Hero 2. I don’t know. It should be fun, though.

This piece of art looks vaguely like a thing Van Gogh might have done, though the artist was IIRC from Arizona.

I suppose I should fill in what happened at trivia on Tuesday. We won (yay!) thanks to knowing most of the questions. And there were a bunch of questions about the Olympics, which was good for us because Trevor knows a lot about Olympic events and the athletes who compete in them. And we may have something going on Saturday evening—a potluck dinner and the viewing of the awful B movie “Mansquito”.

Something stupid happened at work. For once, it wasn’t my fault. I figured out a somewhat hackish way to fix it, and it worked, and the person who noticed the error said, “Oh yeah! It looks great now.” Minor victories, sometimes that’s enough.

This painting depicted a bunch of people with houses on their heads. It’s not nearly as blurry as it looks here. Flash photography is not allowed in the art museum, and I didn’t have a tripod, so ordinary body movements blurred a few photos.

Late yesterday, as I was getting ready to head out to trivia, I got a phone call from Suzanne. I hadn’t heard from her in a long time, and it was great to hear all about what was going on in Michigan. I had not realized that I had missed her so much until I talked to her for half an hour. Ah well.

Went to Steve’s last night, talked about obscure technical details of Gentoo and the future of copyright infringement and Digital Restrictions Management. Unfortunately, we didn’t come to any really profound conclusions.

Not a lot else to report. I’m 0×20 (or 040 for the old-school types) now. Got a present in the mail yesterday (thanks, Mom!) which should make excellent reading on future bus rides to work. Oh yeah, apparently if you ride the bus 4 or more days per week, they won’t charge you for the parking garage pass, which is always nice.

This was an interesting piece of art. It was a bunch of charred remnants from a church that had burned down. The artist arranged the pieces of burned wood on wires, then strung the wires up in a rectangular array. In person, it looks like there’s some sort of pattern to the piece. There isn’t really any, but people’s minds are great at looking for patterns and finding them even when they don’t exist.

Took the bus again, it worked out well. I was able to do more reading this time. I think about half of the people on the bus were reading a book. I guess this means I’ll have to get more library books the next time I go there, so I won’t run out of books mid-week.

Speaking of books, The Impossible Bird is pretty good on the whole. Sci-fi has always asked questions like, “What would people do if limitations X, Y, and Z were removed?” and this book does exactly that. I don’t know whether most people would like the book as much as I did, though. Many of the topics the book addresses are things I’ve been thinking about for the last few years. Could you build heaven? What would a world without death be like? Who are you? What do you want? I don’t know why this book didn’t get more attention, but what the heck.

Work: I have to deal with an interestingly hard question soon. Do I let work pay for my Net access at home? The provider they’ve chosen is Cox, which doesn’t allow users to run their own mail, ssh, and web servers. I really need to have a general purpose box that I can get to from anywhere, and a reliable mail delivery mechanism, and a web server. I can do that with Deru, I can’t do that with Cox alone. I’d also have to do something like buy some hosting from the slicehost people, which is reasonably cheap, but I’d also need to register a domain name with somebody. Also, how heavily does work monitor/censor/control the service that they’re paying for? I spend time all over the Net, including parts that can’t be reached via port 80 and parts that may offend people.

Trivia: If you see this, it means I was too tired to update this page before sacking out.

I went and rode the bus yesterday. The bus schedule isn’t that great about telling you which bus stop the bus actually stops at, but at least it was very close on the times. I think I’m going to like riding the bus, even though this time, I was too busy looking out the window to get more than a few pages of my book read. And the ride back in the afternoon was bearable even though the driver apologized for the A/C only being at half strength. (It was 111 F yesterday at 5:00pm, for those of you who are not familiar with Phoenix/Tempe weather.)

The Impossible Bird is a lot like “The Matrix” crossed with “The Sixth Sense”, with the addition of aliens.  Despite that, the story hangs together and I can suspend disbelief.  So far.  I’m only a bit over halfway through the book, though, and the author could easily do a Neal Stephenson on the ending.

There is a rather annoying and stupid problem that’s been happening for the last few months at work. Sometimes, machines that are heavily loaded are assigned tons of work, while machines that are lightly loaded are assigned little work. This is exactly the opposite of what should be happening. A couple of us think we may have a way to fix it, which would be pretty cool. The approach should work in theory. (I want to live in Theory. Everything works in Theory.) There are some questions I don’t know the answers to, though. Guess it’s time to find out.

The first firearm I’ve ever owned, a Ruger 10/22 rifle, shown with a 25-round magazine, the regular 10-round magazine, and the all-important Fine Manual. It’s simple to operate, fun to use, and ammunition for it is cheap. I probably won’t actually be able to use it until Sunday, when a lot of us are going out to the range again, but no worries. I’ll have some time to get familiar with field-stripping and cleaning the thing.

That reminds me of something Juan was talking about on Saturday: He walked into a gun store and said, “Hi, I’m looking for a .22, bolt-action, youth model.” The clerk said, “We don’t have any! There aren’t any here! There’s no market for anything like that!” Juan replied, “I think I see one on the rack over there. Could I take a look?” “You’re wasting your time! We don’t have anything like that,” said the clerk. Some places just don’t understand customer service at all, I guess. Juan ended up buying a rifle that was what he wanted from a different store. Companies take note: If your salespeople are idiots, your smarter customers will buy things from other companies.

Fuzzball was a lot quieter yesterday since I was home all day catching up on stuff like laundry and cleaning. She’ll have a rude awakening tomorrow when I get up early to catch the bus in to work. I don’t know for sure how long it’ll take the bus to get there; they claim 15 minutes. The bus going back from Phoenix to Tempe takes much longer, over 30 minutes.

Been reading The Impossible Bird, a sci-fi novel about parallel universes, government conspiracies, and two protagonist brothers who have a seriously messed-up relationship. It’s not profound great literature, but so far it’s been interestingly weird. I hope that when all the actual motivations behind the shadowy conspiracies are revealed, they don’t turn out to be lame, stupid, or totally implausible.

In the last part of the “Iraq Barbecue” painting, we see the Pilsbury Doughboy holding Japan on a stick. I don’t know why he’s holding Japan. Every time I try to attach profound thoughts to this painting, they dissolve into silly meanders on a closer exam. Maybe that’s the real message behind the painting.

Went to Prescott yesterday with Juan and Luli and Zach. We all took one car, so we weren’t wasting a ton of gas money. Prescott is beautiful, but they were having a bluegrass festival yesterday.  That made it a bit difficult to get around town.  We stopped in a couple of stores and browsed around and ate lunch.

Not much else to report.

Another part of the “Do you like Iraq (Barbecue)” painting. From the left, you can see Italy, Spain, France, Scandinavia, and Great Britain on the first skewer, then Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia on the next skewer, then Argentina and Australia sitting on ice. You can see how this part relates to the previous part by looking at the relative positions of Betty Boop.

Apparently, Friday is the designated “Let’s go out to lunch” day at the new job. So most of us went to a coney island place a few blocks away and had tasty if fattening food. I didn’t know about the tradition, so I had brought my lunch, but what the heck. I can put the sandwiches in the fridge and eat them later.

I also got a company cellphone, a company RSA token for VPNning in to work, and a company bus pass. Next week, I’ll be taking the bus in to work every day, which should be interesting. I have an iPod, I’ll bring a paperback, I won’t be bored on the trip. I also have a definite report on 3 distinct software alternatives we can use for a project. #1 is fastest, but it may be unsupported in another year. #2 is slightly slower, but should be supported for a longer time frame. #3 is not ready for prime time. So we’re probably stuck with #1. Ah well.

Went to dinner with a number of friends yesterday, and had a large amount of good sushi. Heard a bunch of stuff about the old company and what’s going on there. Apparently, the former CEO of the company is now suing the company. It sounds like a mess, and the only people who will win anything in the end will probably be the lawyers, but it was interesting to hear. I also heard an all-too-familiar story of good technical people being hamstrung by spectacularly incompetent management.

The Plan(tm) for today is to get together with Juan and Zach and go up to Prescott. We’ll all be carpooling, so we’ll use less gas, and I’ve never been up there. There may have been a plan for Sunday too, but I don’t know if I can participate in that. I have to do laundry, go grocery shopping, and clean the condo at some point.