Late last year, I finally started requesting inter-library book loans regularly. As I started reading more (because it was now simple and free), my list actually got longer, so I started writing it down. One unexpected advantage to this is that I can go back and look at the books I’ve enjoyed (or not) over the last year. I’m not an especially prolific reader, but I’ve surprised myself with the amount that I’ve actually had time to get through.

• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
  An epic fictional memoir that brings you through three generations of family conflict. Quite touching and surprisingly entertaining.

• The Golden Ratio by Mario Livio
  Phi is an interesting subject, but in the end the book was unfocused and a bit weak. I was hoping for something Simon Singh-esque.

• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (Borrowed from Rosi)
  Amazing. Somehow, Margaret Atwood explains absolutely nothing until the very end, and then you realize there wasn't really much to explain. Totally believable.

• Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 by John E. Ferling (17 Feb 2005 - 10 Apr 2005)
  I just couldn't get interested in this one. I had high hopes that it would be enlightening in the shadow of the 2000 and 2004 elections.

• Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams by M.J. Simpson (10 Apr 2005 - 3 May 2005)
  You appreciate the Hitchhiker's Guide books so much more when you learn how close they came to never really being written. A great biography of a hilarious, distractable author.

• Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design by Henry Petroski (5 May 2005 - 17 June 2005)
  I picked this up at the book store and was enthralled. But the chapters somehow were both repetitive and unconnected. I got bored about two-thirds of the way through.

• Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell (19 June 2005 - 23 June 2005)
  Short and sweet. A great summer read.

• Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (23 June 2005 - 30 June 2005)
  A classic that I somehow never got around to reading. Despite the fact that this is a massive novel, I finished it in a week. The jumping point of view was perfectly done, and the plan to settle Mars was very well planned.

• Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks (2 July 2005 - 24 July 2005)
  Dr. Sacks' book was one-half childhood memoir and one-half the history of chemistry. I don't know which was more interesting.

• The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (24 July 2005 - 28 July 2005)
  I can't say much more about this book. One of the best stories I've ever read.

• Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (30 July 2005 - 7 August 2005)
  Another good summer read. It's nice to see how much numbers and carefully designed studies can explain. I follow their blog, now, too.

• Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (8 Aug 2005 - 13 Aug 2005)
  Waiting for a book to get to my library, I decided to re-read this classic. (See Ender's Shadow, below)

• Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen Hawking (16 Aug 2005 - 5 Sep 2005)
  A great introduction to modern physics and astrophysics theory. In fact, it's written so well that I want to read more Hawking.

• Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card (9 Sep 2005 - 15 Sep 2005)
  Waiting for another book, I decided to re-read the parallel novel to Ender's Game (above). This time, I realized how much is left open at the end, and I was inspired to read the rest of the series (see below).

• The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy by William Strauss and Neil Howe (16 Sep 2005 - 10 Oct 2005)
  This book is wholly remarkable. It suggests (and strongly supports) a theory of cyclic American history, and warns of a coming period of "Crisis". But it is so dense with information and concepts that it reminded me too much of college. I'm glad I read what I did, though.

• Shadow of the Hegemon by Orson Scott Card (6 Oct 2005 - 10 Oct 2005)
  (See Shadow of the Giant, below)

• Awakenings by Oliver Sacks (11 Oct 2005 - 31 Oct 2005)
  Something made me lose interest by the end of this book: either Dr. Sacks' earlier writing is less engrossing, or the fact that every patient had fairly similar symptoms and reactions to L-DOPA. But he covers a startlingy insidious disease and its ambiguous "cure" in fantastic detail.

• Shadow Puppets by Orson Scott Card (24 Oct 2005 - 28 Oct 2005)
  (See Shadow of the Giant, below)

• Shadow of the Giant by Orson Scott Card (23 Nov 2005 - 27 Nov 2005)
  By the time I got to the fourth book in the Bean Series, I was worried. Each book had become a little less strong than the last, and although I was still interested in the story, I was worried it was going to end badly. I was wrong. The finale literally moved me to tears. It was absolutely amazing. Another thing: In the original Ender Series, Card has this habit of introducing a new planet based on a single country (the Portuguese Planet, and later the Chinese Planet). It seemed really silly at the time, but he explains it well here, and is able to show the same deep understanding of different societies in these books without it seeming quite as clumsy. Looking back, this was (by far) the better series.

Am I the only one who doesn’t like keyboard shortcuts on websites? I find it far easier to navigate on the web by, I don’t know, clicking on things, than by remembering that “Y” means to archive, and shift-A means to reply-to-all-in-new-window. One of the things that stood in the back of my mind as not-too-nice about Google Reader was the fact that it forced these keyboard shortcuts upon you. Gmail is at least nice enough to default to shortcuts off.

And now Bloglines, thinking it needs to actually start (gasp) improving, took a look at Google Reader to see what they needed to do. Obviously, there was only one thing there they could learn from. Keyboard shortcuts! Don’t hit shift-A in Bloglines or you’ll end up marking all of your news items read. The “read all” feature itself is so ridiculous that even before they started “innovating”, I had wished I could remove the link that did that. It’s obnoxious — I end up with a page that’s several megabytes long. It’s dangerous — the only way I can undo it is by clicking “Mark all new” on every single feed’s header. And it’s totally unnecessary.

The following is M’s current draft list for where she’s applying for residencies. In most cases, I don’t know the actual hospitals or programs, so this is just a list of the cities. Farmington, CT; New Haven, CT; Boston, MA; Providence, RI; Philadelphia, PA; Washington, DC; and Portland, OR. Possibly also on the list are San Francisco, CA and Rochester, NY.

Update: Oh yeah, I forgot Baltimore, MD.

Update, 9 Oct: We She applied today. Rochester, NY was on the final list, but not San Francisco or Baltimore.

My Uncle Steve will be racing his lawnmower at the Terryville County Fair north of Waterbury this Saturday at 6pm. Tickets to the fair are $7, and unfortunately no pets are allowed.

It’s kinda silly, but I’ll be there.

Yesterday, I passed my Red Hat Certified Engineer exam with flying colors. I’m willing to call it a legitimate certification. The entire test was hands-on troubleshooting (“Here’s a machine that won’t boot. Fix it”) and installation and configuration (“Here’s bare metal, and a four page description of how we want the machine setup. Go”). It’s very indicative of the kind of work I do on a daily basis, so it’s far more useful than a multiple-choice test would have been.

This morning, on the way to work, my car’s extended warranty expired. I’ve driven 72,000 miles since I bought it on 26 April 2003. In those 845 days, I’ve averaged 85.2 miles per day. Every time I calculated it, I got about 27 miles per gallon, which means I’ve used roughly 2,666 gallons of gasoline, or 3.1 gallons per day. I filled up my 20-gallon tank at least 133 times — although probably more like 150 times (once every 5.6 days) since I usually didn’t wait for it to empty completely. When I purchased my car, a full tank of gas would have cost me about $34 (roughly $1.70 per gallon in Waterbury). Now, that same tank costs me $52 ($2.60 per gallon). Based on my rough eyeballing, I’ve probably spent approximately $5,000 on gas since I purchased my car.

Update: Wow, my eyeballing was ridiculously accurate. Based on some real historical gas prices, I've spent $4954.02 on gas.

Recently I finished reading The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. I had been reluctant to pick it up. The cover and the summary on the back gave me this dizzy “romance novel” feeling, but my father-in-law recommended it. Finally, when I hit a thin area in my reading list (and M essentially forced me to read the first chapter), I decided to give it a chance. Five pages later, I was completely and irreversibly hooked. That statement is NOT an exaggeration.

The story starts quickly, and the first couple of chapters give you the goose-bumpy willies when some weird stuff happens. The characters are totally believable even if their situation is (literally) incredible. The book started off very engrossing, and as it got more serious and intense, I couldn’t stop reading. I averaged more than 100 pages a day for a week, the first time I’ve done that with a book in a long time.

Here’s my suggestion: go to the library or the book store. Read the first five pages. The book will either purchase itself, or you will put it back. Oh, and don’t do any research into movie deals until you’ve finished the book, or you’ll be sorry.

I reiterate my derisive laugh at LA traffic: ha-hah! It took me more than three hours to travel the 42 miles to work this morning, and for about twenty minutes of that, I was travelling at 70+ mph. My math tells me that that I was travelling an average of roughly 7 mph for the remaining time.

My wife just sent me an email with a file called "ANUS.doc" attached. It wasn't quite as hilarious as I was expecting:

The dentate line- location of anal crypts and draining of glands
Superiorly visceral afferents, therefore non-painful; columnar epithelium
Inferiorly somatic afferents, therefore painful; stratified squamous epithelium

Doctors have to talk about funny things like anal crypts and gland drainage, but they have to be all clinical about it. It's sort of a shame.

Today in 1495, the Friar John Cor made almost 1500 bottles of scotch whiskey from fourty-eight bushels of malt and thus distilled the first recorded batch. Happy birthday, my amber friend.

(Also, happy birthday to my father-in-law.)

This is my old 1990 Toyota Camry. I purchased it for (I think) $2700 in the summer of 2000. It was the first car that I ever purchased with my own money. My previous car, a white power-nothing Mazda 626, was given to me by my parents after I totalled my first car: a 1989 Toyota Camry that despite the similarities should not be confused with this one.

Read the rest of the story...

My parents put up a bunch of pictures of Brian’s new apartment. Granted, it’s bare-bones right now, and photos from next weekend will probably be more accurate, but you can tell from those pictures that it’s pretty big. Good party pad, from the looks.

M just looked over my shoulder at the list of blogs that I read, and said “Do you really read that much shit every morning? How do you ever get any work done?”

Congratulations to Brian for getting his first full-time job at TV Guide On Screen in Bedford, MA, outside of Boston!

Update: Also, he passed the test he needed for graduation! Hooray!

The conventional wisdom for when you’re pulled over by a traffic cop is to not admit anything. You’re always told to deny knowledge. “Sorry, officer, I don’t know how fast I was going.” I’ve never been able to do that convincingly, so I usually try to just be deferential and apologetic. It doesn’t really work, but it’s better than having the cop kick out my tail light and give me another citation.

This morning, I was pulled over on the I-8 on-ramp in Naugatuck. The officer asked me if I knew why I was stopped. I wasn’t sure, but I had a pretty good idea. “Because I didn’t fully stop at the stop sign?” “Yup.” I got a written warning, and he told me that it was because I owned up to what I had done. If I had argued (and I bet traffic cops see a lot of that) or said I didn’t know, he said he would have given me a ticket for violation of §14-301(c). (Well, he didn’t cite the penal code section, but it was implied.) I’m glad that my wuss-ness saved me a ticket.

Tada Lists were a blog-world meme a few weeks back, and I’ve finally come up with a good use for them: keeping track of my reading list.

I gave blood today. You should, too. Every two seconds, someone in the US needs blood, and artificial blood is still a ways off. It’s an easy way to lose a pound, plus you get free juice and cookies.

My dad has posted some pictures of their bedroom remodeling project. I haven’t been there in a few weeks, and he’s started doing work on the bathroom. In fact, it looks like he’s done a lot of work on it. This’ll give a nice progression for those of you who have only seen it once or twice since it started.

As a birthday gift, I was presented with this lovely message on my Freeipods.com account this morning:

5 of your referrals must sign up and complete one offer. Currently 5 of your friends have joined and successfully completed one offer.

Thanks to Brian, Chris, Manish, Nomad, and Mari for making this possible. Hopefully you guys aren’t suspicious-looking frauds, and they’ll approve my free iPod!

Update: They decided that Chris and Mari, who now live together, were the same "household", and thus cancelled their referrals. I felt really crappy about this yesterday afternoon, but then my parents gave me a 175G SATA drive, and I feel better now.

What’s the earliest news event that you can recall when it occurred? For me, it was the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle. In fact, I remember being afraid of pieces falling on me (even though I lived in Colorado at the time). The earliest political event I remember is the the fall of the Berlin Wall fifteen years ago today.

It’s official, I’m going to be working for Priceline.com’s UNIX group as the in-house Linux guru. Go, me.

I gave an interview today. It was a totally surreal experience. I think I was more nervous than he was.

How to do your laundry - An essay by Plutor

1. Put your dirty laundry in the washer, using your nifty Smart Card(TM) to pay for it. Be sure not to notice that you don't have enough money left to dry said laundry.
2. Wait 25 minutes.
3. Take your laundry out of the washing machine, put it into the dryer, then act surprised when you can't start it.
4. Assume you have no money. Do not, under any conditions, check your wallet.
5. Call your wife, because you don't want to go to the ATM, and she might have squirrelled some away in a shoebox. Women plan ahead like that.
6. If your wife tells you to use your precious change, say OKAY.
7. Go all the way to the other building to add the aforementioned change to the aforementioned Smart Card(TM).
8. Discover the Smart Card machine doesn't accept change.
9. Return, dejected, to your apartment.
10. At this point, it is safe to check your wallet. You will have a single dollar bill.
11. Go all the way back to the Smart Card machine.
12. Discover that the Smart Card machine doesn't accept bills smaller than $5. Why didn't you notice that the first time you were there, retard?
13. Return -- AGAIN -- to your apartment.
14. Get in the car, in your pajamas and sandals, go downtown to the ATM, get money, and return.
15. Try put the laundry in the dryer without killing or maiming yourself.

Date: Sat, 2 Nov 2002 21:06:32 -0500 (EST) From: “DomainMonger.Com” <service@domainmonger.com> To: <log@wsvw1u.com> Subject: Automated 30 day renewal reminder 2002-11-02

This message is to inform the owner of the below listed domain name(s) that it is time to renew your domain name(s). There is no disadvantage in renewing early as the renewal years are added to the current expiration date not the date you renew. So do not postpone your renewals.

Thank you. Domain Name, Expiry Date wsvw1u.com, 2002-12-02

There are very few places where the lack of something is a tourist attraction. Ground Zero and the Grand Canyon are the only two I can think of.