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Monday, September 16, 2002 |
I am switching my blogging activity from radio Userland to Blogger. Previously, the Radio weblog was aggregated directly to my Blogger page, but starting now I will no longer be updating the Radio page. To view my weblog, go to:
http://bobme.blogspot.com/
10:14:43 PM 
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Friday, September 13, 2002 |
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Wednesday, September 11, 2002 |
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Tuesday, September 10, 2002 |
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Sunday, September 8, 2002 |
Art Buchwald. "You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it." [Quotes of the Day]
4:22:46 PM
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Wednesday, September 4, 2002 |
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Friday, August 30, 2002 |
Konrad Lorenz. "It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young." [Quotes of the Day]
9:33:02 AM
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Thursday, August 29, 2002 |
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Wednesday, August 28, 2002 |
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Monday, August 26, 2002 |
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Sunday, August 25, 2002 |
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Friday, August 23, 2002 |
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Wednesday, August 21, 2002 |
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Thursday, August 8, 2002 |
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Tuesday, August 6, 2002 |
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Saturday, August 3, 2002 |
E. B. White. "Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time." [Quotes of the Day]
9:35:45 AM
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Friday, August 2, 2002 |
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Wednesday, July 31, 2002 |
Check out the helpful Microsoft Word spell check suggestion
12:53:21 AM
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Tuesday, July 30, 2002 |
Just got a new toy -- a Concept 2 Indoor Rower. But it's not like the shiny new one you'll see on that link. It is actually a model B rower, about 10 years old, much more like the one on this link. It showed up tonight around five o'clock, and I immediately pressed it into action. Since I am just starting out, I started slowly. First I had to sort out the drag settings. There are two different sprocket positions, and there is a baffle box outboard of the flywheel/fan assembly. An interesting factoid is that rowing at 5000 feet creates much less air drag than at sea level. The readout device includes a double-secret key combo to pop up the drag display. I was not seeing numbers anywhere near what the manual says one should see with a brand new rower. After switching the sprocket and adjusting the baffle to wide open, I obtained a drag that was "within normal limits." I rowed three 10 minute sessions this evening, falling just shy of 2000 meters with each try. It was quite a pleasant 5k row for my first go. The newly downloaded electronic music in the background helped a lot.
1:11:29 AM
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Now this is fascinating. If you don't want to devote the time to reading the books (I don't), have a look at this review. Kind of make a little bit of sense about what's going on in Washington. --rgm
Fundamentally unsound. Left Behind, the bestselling series of paranoid, pro-Israel end-time thrillers, may sound kooky, but America's right-wing leaders really believe this stuff. [Salon.com]
12:35:33 AM
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Monday, July 29, 2002 |
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Sunday, July 28, 2002 |
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Saturday, July 27, 2002 |
The Matt Lauer haircut lives!
I just went out and got all my hair shaved off. It's part of my new weight loss regimen -- I'll bet I lost a good 5 pounds of hair ... or is that grams ... One or the other. This reminds me of a story. Back in (I think) 1984, I was working as a new start-up company called Spectra-Tech, Inc in Stamford, Connecticut (the F.U. state). I was working there because I had recently been fired from my job at Harrick Scientific Corp in Ossining New York. At Harrick I had met and become friends with Frank Wesley. Frank and I decided that we would fly to Germany and buy used BMWs and have them shipped back to the US. At the time, one could privately import a used German car and be exempted from the EPA emission requirements (one time only). I soon found a candy apple red BMW 3.0CS and bought it. Frank and I drove said car through Germany, through France, onto the ferry at Calais, and over to Dover. We then proceeded onto London where we were to stay at the home of Phil and Dianna Buckberry, friends from my Penn Biochemistry days. But all of this has nothing to do with haircuts you say? You are right. There are about ten stories here that I want to write about, but let me move on to the haircut story. Frank and I found ourselves the next day in Trafalgar Square and inexplicably, we both decided we needed haircuts. We spied a barbershop on the square and went inside to meet the world's oldest barber with the world's oldest clippers and straight razors. After the cut, the barber/salesman convinced us both to buy a bottle of his special pink hair tonic. Could this have been Pirelli's Miracle Elixir?
7:02:24 PM
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Thinking about tiny digital cameras lately. I don't tend to carry around my Canon D30 for snapshots, because it is just too big and conspicuous. Here is a review of a couple tiny cameras: Tiny digital cameras head to head. Japanese reviewer and friend of dpreview Yamada Kumio has today posted a head to head comparison between Casio's Exlim EX-S1 and Sony's DSC-U10. The comparison includes a quick side-by-side size and features... [Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)]
2:37:15 PM
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Test posting with blogscript. Gosh this is a really cool AppleScript for Mac OSX.
2:16:07 PM
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Test posting with blogapp
2:10:18 PM
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Sunday, June 23, 2002 |
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Friday, June 21, 2002 |
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Wednesday, June 19, 2002 |
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Tuesday, June 18, 2002 |
My new favorite store is Wild Oats. This is a small chain of "organic" grocery stores, which is based in Boulder, Colorado. I stopped by after work tonight to pick up some stuff to cook. I plan to make shabu-shabu for some guests Thursday night. Major observation: you can apparently make soy beans into every imaginable shape, texture, and flavor. Soy milk takes up two sections of the store (refrigerated and not). It greatly outpaces the space alloted for cow's milk. It is available in vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and "original" whatever that is. The space devoted to soy milk is dwarfed, however, by that reserved for tofu. Tofu comes in a numbing array of styles and flavors. It can masquerade as cheese or meat or even ice cream. Soy mayonnaise? You bet! The only kind of soy I could not find at Wild Oats was, believe it or not, regular old soy beans. Fortunately I have some of those in my freezer - edamame. Over to the deli, and guess what ... more tofu! Sometimes known as tempeh. Hidden in with sesame noodles. Flagrantly impersonating mozzerella. Stop the insanity! I wheeled my cart to the checkout, abundantly full of natural goodness. Eightly dollars worth in fact. But there were problems. The totally natural looking, patchouli-wearing, sandal-footed check out clerk did not know her veggies, a cardinal sin. She stared quizzically at a bag of tomatilla. She asked me what they were, but this was not enough. She needed to look up the register code, but first had to decide if they were fruits or vegetables. Now you must believe me that I did not want to prolong the agony, but I felt compelled to say that while they are technically fruits, she would probably find them filed in her book under vegetables, and she did. This prompted her to ask me how this issue is decided, and I gave her the whole seed-case explanation. At this point she had pretty much stopped ringing up my order and was thinking up objects on which to quiz me about fruit/vegetable classification. Tomatoes? Fruit. Eggplants? Yes those as well. Here she interjected that even though she was curious as to the fruit nature of eggplant, she actually hates the taste, which reminds her of Windex. hmm. She reached for another object. Oh dear. It's bok choy I told her, and she dutifully looked up the code. She told me that her maternal step mother (I think) is Japanese and that she used to carve cute little animal figures out of baby bok choy. Next item: again no clue. Leeks, I said. She had no humorous aphorism about leeks. I thought about making a pun, but thought better of it.
11:14:08 PM
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I enjoyed reading this article about Bush policy on bioethics: Playing God. Bush's bioethics czar Leon Kass wants to criminalize lifesaving medical research as violating the natural order of things. Would he have opposed wiping out smallpox? [Salon.com]
10:39:39 PM
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For my Canadian friends: P. J. O'Rourke. "Very little is known of the Canadian country since it is rarely visited by anyone but the Queen and illiterate sport fishermen." [Quotes of the Day]
1:05:41 AM
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Monday, June 17, 2002 |
I recently became interested in the topic of entangled photons, which through a borderline-divine process are being used in the laboratory to demonstrate teleportation. This article describes a new breakthrough where a data stream, encoded in photons, was teleported: Australian teleport breakthrough. A team of Australian scientists says it is able to teleport a laser
beam from one place to another almost instantaneously. [BBC News: sci/tech]
11:51:24 PM
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On Friday I closed on the sale of a house. Everybody gets a cut. Of course it's no less painful on the buyer's side. Have a look at this article:
Buy a House, Pay Lots of Fees. Expect to pay much more than the sale price when you buy a home. [The Motley Fool]
11:07:50 PM
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Hello world. It's Monday night and I have decided to start a weblog. Why? It just seems like the thing to do. Weblogs are cool. I can use it to keep track of important snippets of information. At the same time, I can publish some of those snippets for others to read. Isn't it a bit self-aggrandizing to think that others will want to read my blog? Probably. Is there something wrong with that? I don't think so :) Furthermore, I think it will be a cool way to share stuff with friends, especially when some of you start your own blogs. To be accurate, I have only one personal acquintance with her own weblog, and that is Stacey George. It is really her website that piqued my interest in blogs. It is a beautifully designed site, as you might expect from a skilled graphic artist. Here is the link (go here and then click on the blog button):
http://users.rcn.com/staceygeorge/portfolio/
In addition to occasional stories written by me, and links to friends' blogs, you will find here in the future links to interesting news stories and the like. Also, I plan to link in lots of photos. That's all for now. - Bob
10:40:27 PM
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© Copyright 2002 Bob Messerschmidt.
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