Wednesday, March 23, 2011

A Clarification post.

The Girl mentioned in my blog post is *not* the same girl mentioned in posts say.. prior to last year.

They are in fact different in almost every respect.

This post was not published with the current girl standing over me with a cudgel...

:P

This space *not* Intentionally left blank.

It was my intention to write here more frequently, but I find myself more often then not staring at this white space waiting for inspiration.

It's not that my life is empty, there is a lot happening. I just wonder of how much of it worth putting down on paper.

For example, I still love my new job. But a lot of my day is spent digging into the innards of OpenPGP workings, user profile management, and redundant fallback procedures for fault tolerant servers. It hardly makes for heady reading.

He brandished the mighty scroll wheel, and rolled his cursor down to the next line. His breath caught. "Certificate services are denied in non-standard port settings! How can this be?" he cried in alarm.

*Ahem* I think we will spare you all that.

I suppose the one thing of note is I will be doing a sweep of the eastern 1/2 of the state next week with new equipment installs interspersed between 17.5 hours of driving in 4 days. Thoughts of this trip are mixture of excitement and dread. On the one hand, I will be seeing parts of Montana I have not visited and meeting new people, on the other hand... 17.5 hours of driving mixed with equipment installs.

If nothing goes wrong I will have ~ 2 hours to set up each site. Any longer and the time table goes out the window. Things always go wrong... so...

Weather has been... exciting, with 50 degree days followed by 6 inches of snow and 20 degree nights. I almost took my snow tires off for this trip. I'm glad I didn't. I may wait until July at this rate.

However, the early warmth has caused the Woolly Mamot.... err dog to start her shed a bit early. It's fair to say that there will be mountains of dog hair over the next few weeks. She is in otherwise good spirits, though the regular walks she goes on with the Girl have shown just how out of shape she is now that she doesn't have a 1 acre yard to cavort in every day.

I suppose the other thing of note is that I have officially hit the 1/2 point in 3rd Brown. I have learned 1/2 the techniques and 1 of the two kata. I suppose I should add a big "In theory" in the front of that. The first Kata (who's name I never remember) is at least as hard as the Green belt one (Chinese Hands) that kicked my butt.

Which reminds me... need to practice it more tonight... *sigh*

Thursday, March 3, 2011

7 things...

So I didn't have the honor of being nominated as being super-stylish but I did try and come up with 7 things that you might not know, be of interest and don;t violate some of the basic privacy rules I follow for posting on the interwebs.

So without further ado...

7. I read a lot and fast too. Depending on the day and the book I will read 100 pages an hour. Though really that is with a subject I am familiar with, has me engrossed and barring distractions. My daily rate is usually much less, but it is not uncommon for me to read a 300 page book in less then 24 hours of doing other stuff too.

6. I am supertaster. I wish that meant that I was better in some way. What it actually means is certain compounds and food taste awful to me. Notably cilantro tastes like soap. Though recent research shows that I may hate cilantro for a completely different reason as the alkaloid compounds supertasters taste aren't even in there.

5. In spite of being a renaissance man in many areas (painting, metal smithing, computers, martial arts) I am complete failure as a musician. Whether it is just a lack of willingness to practice an instrument or a fundamental lack of... something on my part who knows. In any case I really don't play any instrument with any level of competency. Although I can pick out ode to joy an almost any instrument after few minutes.

4. I prefer crisp Fall days and barely warm Spring rains over Winter or Summer. really... if we could do entirely without Summer...

3. There has never really been a dog less then ~50 lbs in my life, and usually they are much much bigger. Something about yap...err lap dog's voices just sets my teeth on edge. The smallest dog I would ever consider ever having is a Scottish terrier. After all they are really medium sized dogs with small dog legs. They are like the Dwarves of the dog world (as a friend once described them.) Give them and axer and horned helmet and they are good to go.

2. I love crepes. Sourdough crepes may in fact be my favorite food ever. I am going to have crepes for lunch at the newly opened French cafe down the road. Assuming my lunch date ever shows.

1. I was born in a southern State where tabbacco is picked, but grew up in the wild north. Since the name of the blog gives it away, I feel confident that you know it is Alaska. I have never been back to said birth state... and really don't feel any particular pull to do so.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011