After a week of much needed R & R, it’s back to the grindstone tomorrow. We arrived home safely this afternoon to the delight(?) of our cats.
The trip was delightful. Fantastic food. Good friends. Reunions.
Tonight I am meeting up with some friends from high school whom I have not seen in over 15 years. Not a big beer drinker, a brew pub wouldn’t have been my first choice of locations. Be that as it may, we shall be meeting at Rock Bottom Brewery on Fountain Square in Cincinnati.
The little missus has chosen not to go to this gathering, instead opting for a quiet evening at the house eating pizza and watching movies with the dogs. That is, unless she dares venture across the street to the ‘rents place.
I am somewhat anxious; a more self-conscience anxiety than true nervousness. While I’m not particularly apprehensive about seeing old friends again, what they think when they see how much weight I’ve put on has been weighing on my mind (no pun intended). For the most part I suppose that is normal, but on the other hand I have been obsessing about my weight lately, so I’m certain I am blowing it way out of proportion.
In other news, we surprised the hell out of a long time friend and his wife. After a year without even talking, I simply came walking down the sidewalk towards him as he got home from softball practice last night. The look on his face was priceless. He did the classic double-take. Not being aware that we were in town, I’m sure seeing me at his house was quite a shock. We sat and chatted with him and his wife for about an hour, then let them get back to their evening routine.
The geek and wife have headed south for a much needed, long overdue stint of R & R. With a trunk full of wine and cheese, literally, we arrived safely in Cincinnati for a week of relaxation and two days of family insanity. If all goes as planned the family insanity will remain confined to those two days and we’ll be able to relax and enjoy ourselves the other seven days.
Today marks the 60th anniversary of the birth of the “modern computer.”
The room sized Small Scale Experimental Machine, or “Baby” as it was affectionately called, went online on June 21, 1948 at Manchester University, England. The significance of “Baby” was that it was the first computer that could be repurposed for performing different tasks without being physically rebuilt. It also had a whopping 128 bytes (1024 bits) of memory in which to store programs and the data for use by the programs. For comparison purposes, 1 GB of RAM, the amount available in most off the shelf consumer personal computers and laptops today, can store about 8 billion bits and that’s not including the 160+ GB hard drives most of today’s computers come with.
While other, somewhat better known computers, such as ENIAC and Colossus preceded “Baby,” they all had to be completely rebuilt to change the function they were performing, which often took weeks. This is why “Baby” is considered by most computer aficionados to be the first “modern computer.”
Click here to view the original 1948 news report of Baby
Are we going to have any trees left when the year is over?
Today’s round of storms took out the trees across the street from our house. We now have a clear view of the lake and western sky.
I had to be at work at 7:00am this morning. Waking up at 5:15am was brutal.
As if getting up that early wasn’t bad enough, I then spent the first three and a half hours of my work day on my knees on a concrete floor covered by what barely qualifies as carpet My knees are both bruised and rug burnt.
After eight hours of sucking face with and crushing the chest of Little Anne, followed by tying my desk partner’s extremities in various positions, I was released from the torture chamber and headed to my office to actually get some work done. Having scored 100% on all exams, however, I earned Red Cross certifications for CPR, AED, and first aid. I suppose the long day, sore knees, and aching muscles are all worth it if I’m ever in the position to use my new skills to save someone’s life. I’m going to have nightmares about that freaky CPR mannequin Little Anne, though, particularly pealing away of the latex face to reveal the alien like skull structure beneath.
As the sky darkens and thunder rumbles in the distance, we brace for another turbulent night. Belleville has been rocked by storms this weekend and we did not escape completely unharmed.
Powerful straight line winds blew out windows, downed power and telephone lines, tore siding off houses, and uprooted trees within a four block area around our house last night. An 18″ diameter tree by the rear corner of our garage was uprooted and is leaning precariously over our neighbor’s driveway, being held up by a combination of a tree it fell against and part of its root ball being under our garage slab. The telephone line between the pole and our house was knocked down by a branch and is lying across out back yard.
Thankfully, no one was injured and we should be able to get the tree out without significant damage to our garage. That is, unless the storms about to come through, with forecasted 70+ mph winds and hail, don’t take the tree down for us.
Our village square (two blocks from our house) is a disaster, with no trees escaping damage to some degree and several uprooted or snapped. One tree smashed the recently renovated gazebo/band stand in the village square. It’s a total loss. Another uprooted tree crushed a mail delivery truck at the post office across the street from the village square.
More pictures are available in the gallery at http://thegeeksite.com/gallery.
When I got home today our digital cable and Internet (also through the cable company) were out. I know they’re doing upgrades in the area, but I don’t know how that would’ve knocked us offline.
Customer Service is being less than useful with their script read, “power off your cable box,” “unplug the cable and plug it back in,” etc. troubleshooting steps. Dutifully, I am following them, but explain to me how powering off my cable box will fix my Internet connection. Or, for that matter, how anything to do with our cable box impacts anything to do with our Internet connection, other than they connect to the same main cable junction.
I’ll call back tomorrow when I can talk to someone who doesn’t just read a script. In the meantime, we have analog cable (so I can at least watch the Stanley Cup Finals) and I’ve found a spot in the corner of the dining room where I can get a stable, albeit sssllllooooooowww, connection to a neighbor’s unsecured wireless access point. They must have DSL or a satellite hookup.
This puts me in a moral dilemma. I know I am breaking the law by “stealing” my neighbor’s bandwidth, however, I need an Internet connection tonight to get work done. While I’m trying to get my work done as quickly as possible (he says as he updates his blog) so I can relinquish my leeched connection, I still feel somewhat guilty about the whole thing.
My guilt has little to nothing to do with breaking the law. Rather, it’s the knowledge that if my Internet connection was being slowed down by a neighbor leeching my bandwidth I would be upset. Then again, they would have to know a decent amount about WiFi hacking to get to my network and I would kick them off almost immediately. So maybe it’s my neighbor’s own fault for leaving the door open. Yeah, that’s it. It’s the neighbor’s fault I’m a thief.
What do you think? If a person literally broadcasts an open, unsecured Internet connection, is it wrong for other people to use that connection? Does it make a difference if the person “illegally” using the unsecured connection isn’t breaking any other laws, such as sharing copywritten material, viewing illegal pornography (whatever constitutes illegal in the area), opening the other person’s files, etc?
Looks like we’ll be heading down to Cincinnati for the week of July 4th. Although I already have plans for the weekends surrounding the fourth, I don’t have any plans June 30 - July 4. If anyone wants to get together for a cup of coffee, breakfast, lunch, dinner, to play Pictionary, karaoke, dancing, mud-wrestling, etc., or knows of any good gatherings on the 4th, let me know. It would be great to see some old friends again.
And so it begins.
I entered my company’s “Biggest Loser” contest today with the hopes that it will add yet another incentive for me to get some of this weight off, as if health, longevity, and simply being able to walk a block without my back hurting wasn’t enough incentive already.
I weighed in today at 318.4lbs. To put that in perspective, that’s about 140 pounds more than when I graduated high school.
Day 1:
June 2, 2008
318.4 lbs.
