emergent properties
Wow,
jfleck posted a really cool example of
emergent properties in his diary. Thanks! There's a lot
that can be done with that one, I'll have to bring it up
next time I'm sitting around BSing with friends.
rain
Heh, 0.06 inches, huh? We're supposed to get 0.5 inches
between yesterday and today. Not neat storms, but we do get
plenty of water. It's actually been raining since about 10
minutes into the Cat II race last night, not just drizzling.
Pretty fascinating. Oregon is the land that intermittent,
or "delay" if you prefer, wipers were made for. Low is too
fast, and off is too slow.
Hmm, I guess I lied to DV this morning, I can read the
French at the end of
mathieu's diary, more
or less (without the help of babelfish).
dyork mentioned something about an
"American aversion to all things metric". I don't believe
in such a thing. I'm an American, and I love metric. I can
convert most things between metric and English Standard in
my head in a trvial amount of time. Metric is incredibly
nice computationally.
I'm amazed that people can get by using vi, or even vim, for
SGML editing. I need to try out Dan's .vimrc, but I can't
imagine it being able to keep up with an editor that
actually reads, and presents options based upon reading, the
DTD. I've gotten some people to write me some "macros" for
things in emacs/psgml, like insert graphics, and other
complex markup. I should write up a -really- good .emacs
for use by the LDP, GNOME, and so on. Yeah, in my copious
spare time. :-)
computer hardware
<rant>
Dan York put something up a while ago about about somebody
trying to put the e-smith server on a notebook (or laptop if
you prefer). He said '...the system must be "PCI-based"...'
and '...I haven't really seen any laptops that supported PCI
cards!..." I'm looking at the website, and I see "PCI-based
Pentium machine" as the hardware architecture. Regardless
of which of those you choose, every x86 based laptop made
today meets those requirements. They're all PCI based. The
memory and the CPU exchange data through the "north bridge".
The "south bridge" controls the expansion capablities, such
as PCI, and ISA slots, and serial and parallel ports. Every
chipset on the market now supports PCI. All of the
notebooks that we've purchased within the past year no long
have a PCI-ISA bridge, meaning that -all- of their
peripherals communicate via the PCI bus. There's no reason
that I can find that it shouldn't run just as well on a
notebook as it does on a desktop system.</rant>
Sorry about that, I like to learn about computer hardware,
and it irks me when I see things that are "just plain
wrong".
Biking
I promised John that I'd write about my race last night
here, so I guess I'd better hop to it. So, on Tuesday
nights they have bike races out at PIR, Portland
International Raceway. It seems that it's a 2 mile track,
very flat, with curves that might be challenging at 150
miles an hour, but are pretty wimpy at 20. I'm not entirely
sure how the entire race went, because I was working too
hard to really think. We started off, and just glumped
together for a while, then strung out into single file.
Either the first or the second time we came through the
finish line (did I mention that it was 5 lap race?), the guy
behind me dove into a little sprint. Colin (a guy I know
from the velo) and I took off in chase, and kept up with
him. We got into a -fast- (for my tired legs, 25mph) pace
line, which I was able to stick on for a lap. As we came
onto the straight-away, after my pull, I didn't have the
strength to keep up with them, so I let them go, and pushed
on by myself. By the end of the race, I couldn't see either
the two guys ahead of me, nor the guy behind me. It's
pretty boring to just crank away for that long, but it's a
really good workout. So, I got third, out of a field of 4,
by a long margin both ways. Unfortunately, they didn't
publish the results on the website, nor did times get posted
on the emailed results. Drat.
Impressions? Well, the race was fun, because it was a
race... and boring, because the track is really boring.
Once I get faster, the other categories look a lot more fun
(40+ people, rather than 4). But I race at just over 20
miles an hour, and they were all doing better than 25, which
is just too fast for me to maintain. Those races will
definately be a good workout for me. Six or seven miles
from work to there, and then eight to twelve miles as a
race, then another bunch (dozen?) miles home. And of
course, Wednesday nights are out at the velodrome, when it's
not raining. I do like bike racing and riding...