Well, maybe it doesn’t. But there really wasn’t anything going on on Saturday. Cleaning and laundry, and trying to organize some stuff.

Also read Flash Forward, by Robert J. Sawyer. This is a fairly standard sci-fi story which starts off with a physics experiment causing everyone on earth to have a 2-minute vision of whatever they would be doing 20 years from now. Sawyer then explores what this tiny slice of foresight does to society, science, and his main characters.

It’s reasonably well done. However, I don’t think all of it rang true. Two of the events in the book did seem totally plausible, though. First, when the experiment happened, for 2 minutes, everyone on earth was unconscious and unmoving. Tens of thousands of car accidents and 8 plane crashes happened during this time, and many people died. When the book’s protagonist says, “I think I know what caused the crisis. We should probably go public with the info,” his boss’s boss replies, “Are you NUTS? If we do that, we’re going to get sued!!!” Second, one of the minor characters is a writer. His vision of himself 20 years in the future shows him not as a nationally recognized author, but as a waiter in a tourist trap. This depresses him so much that he kills himself.

If saying, “You cannot have the dreams you want most.  NOT YOURS!” to a group of people and backing that up with force would drive people to suicide, then the suicide rates for any oppressed minority group anywhere would be much higher than statistics says they are.  And really, hundreds of millions of people worldwide live without any chance of achieving anything other than mediocrity.  So I think what the author intended for readers to think was, “This minor character is totally overreacting.”

For some reason, my virtual machine barfed last night, so this site was inaccessible for a while. I don’t know why it did this, but I’ve set up a cron job that’ll restart apache every 24 hours and, I hope, prevent that from happening again.

We all went out for lunch on Friday, as we usually do, which was a welcome break from the eat-at-your-desk routine. A lot of us have houses or condos, so we were a bit irritated when someone mentioned a rumor that people who bought houses in 2009 would receive a $15,000 tax credit. I approached buying my condo in an old-school way, though, getting 20% down, a fixed rate, and treating it as a place to live in for years rather than a disposable ATM.

Booked a hotel room for the Vegas trip later this month. It was a bit expensive, but what the heck. It’ll be worth it to see Brian and Karen again.

This is really silly, but it surprises me that a small batch of beer with this name hasn’t been produced. Samuel L. Jackson would probably be amused by that.

Work was a little more interesting today, partially because there were no meetings and I was able to get more done. After dealing with a set of annoying and fairly stupid security updates, I was able to fix a problem that someone else had caused with only 20 minutes of debugging and testing. There’s also a set of things that another project team wants, and my Reading The Fine Manual makes me think that doing some of those things should be no more than a few hours worth of work.

Almost done with Winning the Race.  A large part of John McWhorter’s book is devoted to “therapeutic alienation”, the phrase he’s coined to describe a general behavior pattern he’s spotted among blacks in the USA.  A crude paraphrase of McWhorter’s use of the term would be, “Racial discrimination is almost extinct in the USA.  However, a number of black people find great psychological validation in saying that it exists and is, if anything, worse than it was in 1950.  This may feel good in the short term, but it doesn’t help anyone out in the long term.”

I am not sure how well his discussion of this meme/trope/whatever describes reality.  Some would even say that my opinion on this topic is irrelevant, as I’m a relatively educated white guy.  Ah well.  I can’t say I agree with everything that McWhorter says, but the book was an interesting read.  See if your local public library has Winning the Race; it’s probably the most interesting and controversial nonfiction book that I’ve read in the last 6 months.

In other news, my “This Week in Science” weekly feed had an article that said, “Current physics models say that stars larger than 20 solar masses should not be able to form, because of radiation pressure.  However, stars larger than that definitely exist.  New work by teams of physicists shows how such stars can form.”  For some reason, I really dug that.

The really long meeting on Wednesday had almost nothing at all to do with anything that I was working on. Some of my co-workers’ stuff was discussed, but that was it. I felt a lot like this dog during the meeting. Also, over half my team was working from home on Wednesday, so our corner of the office was pretty empty.

So that left the usual Wednesday night trip to Steve’s. We had pasta, chicken, and Rock Band 2. I played the drums for an hour or so, which was a little frustrating as I’m still not very good at them. Adam was even worse than I was, though. He said, “I can’t play the drums because I’m extremely white,” which is true, but then again, I’m also extremely white. Nathan is also pretty white, but he can play almost all of the drum tracks on Expert and not fail. Practice has something to do with it—I would probably be much better on drums if I hadn’t spent most of my gaming time in the last month playing “Lego Star Wars II”.

Get your tires rotated, your oil changed, and your bunnies balanced. Makes the whole universe run more smoothly, it does.

Work was fairly boring (again) but that can be a good thing. Brian called while I was on the bus home, and said that he’s trying to get a good price on a hotel via a travel agent. I thought the Net had mostly rendered travel agents obsolete, but I guess not. He also told an amusing story involving a friend of his who had had way too much to drink, and then assaulted an ATM with a plastic Halloween decoration.

Trivia: When it started, only Nathan, John, and I were there. We discussed Zach’s saying, “If I get stupid rich, I’m going to buy everyone a .50 rifle,” and wondered whether that was feasible or even something people would want. Everyone else finally showed up, so we were able to hash out a partial plan for the “Billy Mays as gigolo” short film. John came up with a truly horrible pun/movie reference involving the ShamWow pitchman, which I hope will get used. We decided that our team name next week should be something like “We’re LeVar Burton’s mother@#$%ers!” for some reason. Trevor still needs to install that Firewire card so that he can download that “Piranhas” video that features hand puppets. We were in 3rd place when I left, no telling how it all shook out. Darn this “having to get up early” thing.

There’s really not a lot happening. Work was fairly boring, and I’m going to have about double the number of meetings this week as I usually have. No traveling excitement either.

Moira is so horribly oppressed. I’ve been reading Winning the Race by John McWhorter. His main thesis in the book is that many poor black people in cities are poor not because of racism or lack of jobs, but because of changes in welfare policy in the 1960s and changes in culture that occurred around the same time. Fascinating stuff, even though it’s probably ideologically suspect. I’ll read through the whole book and try to judge how it stands on its own before checking Google/Pickyweedia for what the rest of the world has to say about the guy and his work.

I wonder if I’ll be able to sort the legitimate criticisms of his research from the incoherent wharrgarbl by eyeball.  The trouble with far-reaching social science like what McWhorter’s trying to do is that it’s almost impossible to do repeatable experiments and tests with it.

Sunday, I took this revolver out to the range and fired it, using both .38 and .357 rounds. The trigger pull is pretty darn light when you pull the hammer back. It doesn’t really kick that much with .38. It feels like a good idea to use both hands when using .357, though. I also tried Zach’s target .22, which has a 12x scope on it—serious overkill for a .22, but what the heck. I didn’t try shooting at the metal plate at 300 yards, because I didn’t bring a whole lot of .357 with me. Next time. It was good to see that the revolver functioned as it should have, though.

Then we picked up some lunch, then went back to Zach’s house. We hung out with Zach’s wife and their dogs, ate, and talked about various things including stuff to do in Las Vegas that’s actually worth spending money on. Apparently it’s a good idea to get a day pass for the Deuce bus, which goes around a large part of the city, and there are some good restaurants downtown. The “Siren Show”, whatever that is, is also not worth the money. Zach and I played a new video game (N+) which has some interface/control problems, then an old-school video game (Streets of Rage II) which was similar to “Final Fight”.  Then noticed it was getting sort of late, so went home.

Gigantic spiders are rare in Phoenix. I’m really, really glad this is so, because they can scare the hell out of you, even if they’re harmless.

On Saturday, I went to get a new battery for my phone. The first store I checked had no batteries—apparently, batteries are only available at “corporate stores”. So I drove over to one of those, explained what was wrong, and they said, “Well, you could send the phone in for service, which will take forever, or you could pay us money for a phone upgrade and extend your contract for 2 years. . . .” “I’d just like a new battery, if you have one in stock.” They found one. I said, “Cool! How much do I owe you?” “Nothing.”

This seems really, really weird to me. Are the people who write Sprint/Nextel store policy smoking the really good drugs? I wanted a product, they had that product, they gave me that product, and they didn’t want any money for it. Maybe it’s because my phone is almost 5 years old. Oh well. At least my phone should be able to get more than 20 minutes of talk time now.

Did my federal taxes on Saturday too. I’ll be getting a refund that’s at least twice what I had expected. Mortgage interest deductions for the win, I guess. The 2009 tax year won’t be like that, though, mostly because I shouldn’t have 3 months of being unemployed.