Introduction

As I was about to leave for work last Wednesday I noticed that the front tire of my bike was flat. “No problem”, I thought, “just a quick fix.”

For all of you out there who are wondering where I will be from February 24, 2010 through February 26, 2010, I have your answer: I will be at the SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing (PP10). The conference is being held in Seattle, so really, I will be pretty much where I would have been anyway.

Now that I am getting more serious about using my bike, I am ready to begin exploring phase two: events. Although I lived in Iowa for 20+ years, I never had the desire to do RAGBRAI while I was there. I am now thinking that I would like to do it sometime (add it to the list of things I want to do eventually).

IRIOTI: I read it on the internet. (Therefore, it must be true.)

I clearly recall being told in elementary school that the skin colors of dinosaurs are unknown because the necessary parts do not survive the fossilization process. I think that bothered me at first. I got over it eventually and had no trouble accepting that dinosaurs probably were similar in color to some selection of extant reptiles. Still that’s not as nice as knowing for sure.

Here’s one of the articles I have in my backlog of items to share; it is from a while back.

I have already hinted that I read many articles that I feel are worth sharing, but never get around to writing anything about them. Explanations of this behavior include being busy, lazy, or not really having much to say, other than something is interesting. As described earlier, this leads to a build up in the various (lame) places that I store the links. To mitigate this, I have started using Twitter to make small posts about these interesting articles. That’s all fine and good, but that means my reader(s) has(ve) to check two places. I preferred the idea of having all of it in one place, hence the revamp of parts of the site. I am now using Lifestream to pull in my Twitter feed and displaying that in the new, right sidebar of the blog pages.

The Meadows Field Airport in Bakersfield, California was shutdown on Tuesday by bottles of honey. They did not know they were dealing with honey at the time. From “Bottled Honey Shuts Down California Airport” in VOANews:

I plan to add new memory to my desktop machine around the time I install Windows 7. A few months ago I checked the price on two more DIMMs of the same type that are already in the machine: $32 at the time. I should have bought then because they are now up to $50. Oh, well.

“Dream of solar sailing in space lives on in new project” discusses an announcement by The Planetary Society to build, launch, and test LightSail-1 — a small craft that will be propelled by solar sail. As explained in the article, previous attempts to launch solar sail craft failed.