Dale Miller

I am reminded of one of the things I truly enjoyed about Friday — I was warm! I spend far too much of my life feeling cold. I was not pleased to show up at work this morning to find that the heat was off in the building. I’m going to be pretty much useless until that is fixed.

I really need to think before acting. I’m excited about getting a GPS receiver, as I’ve wanted to start doing geocaching. Since I had some free time this afternoon, I started looking for the nearest caches and benchmarks. I found one (EJ1877) which was only about two miles from my house (as the crow files). I thought to myself “Hmmm… It’s not raining right now, and there are a couple of hours of daylight left. I should go find it.” Of course, as soon as I left the house it started raining again. I headed down Tram road searching for the turn off to the north. I think I found it, but it’s blocked off. I walked a way up it but didn’t see the turnoff that was supposed to be there. Since the mileage listed is from the Thornburg end of the road, I had the bright idea that I would just drive to that end, turn around, and check the odometer carefully. A mile or two later I was worried that I would hit a spot muddy enough to cause me to slide off into a ditch. Another mile or so after that I was actually worried about getting stuck right in the middle of the road. Needless to say, once I reached asphalt again I decided that I would try this on a warm, dry day rather than a cold, wet one. I’m back home now, having thoroughly covered my car in mud and shaken it up more than I would normally do in several hundred miles of normal driving. I need to get a cheap 4-wheel-drive vehicle (if there is such a thing). I want to start finding some out-of-the-way places, and an Eclipse just isn’t the right vehicle for that. A motorcycle would be another option, but frankly I’m afraid of them.

I am glad today that I was active yesterday. The weather has gone from beautiful to stormy. It has rained much of the day, with thunder and lightning thrown in for spice. On top of that, I have a headache. The two may not be unrelated, since my sinuses sometimes have an adverse reaction to changing weather. Nevertheless, it means I haven’t been terribly useful today. I’m trying to decide whether I want to try to go anywhere tonight. I have to weigh the facts that I have little that I want to eat at home with the desire to not spend money. Gas prices have made me very conscious of the cost of driving into town to eat. I have to factor $5.00 in gas into whatever it would otherwise cost me for a round trip to Little Rock or Conway. That’s quite annoying.

I’m really glad I have a good UPS on the computer. My power has gone off (for a few seconds) at least five times this afternoon so far.

Oh, I received two wrong-number calls today. “What about it”, you may ask. It’s just highly unusual for me to have a wrong number at home, much less two in one day. You can tell I don’t have enough interesting in my life when something like that even registers on my brain.

As most everyone knows, Easter is coming up this weekend. On Thursday the question of how Easter is calculated came up. I knew the “official” formula was that it was the Sunday following the first full moon occurring on or after the Vernal Equinox. I also knew that it was based on a table rather than the observed Vernal Equinox and full moon. The question then arose — how close is the calculated full moon to the real one? Since the real full moon is today, I assumed it couldn’t be far off. I dug out an old FORTRAN program that I had lying around that calculated Easter, and modified it to also print the date of the full moon. Since I happened to have an ical file of moon phases lying around, I did a quick check and discovered that it’s really pretty close. Jay uncovered this article, which explains the calculations in great detail. While the moon phase calculation works well, the official calculation makes the assumption that the Vernal equinox is always March 21st even though worldwide from the years 2008 through 2103 it actually will occur no later than March 20th. The first time this would actually make a difference in the date of Easter is 2038 (March 28 vs April 25). Maybe I’ll remember to check and see which is actually observed that year. :)

One other interesting tidbit I found in the above article is that the sequence of Easter dates only repeats itself every 5,700,000 years in the Gregorian calendar.

Today was lovely. I took off work as my “spring break day”, since I’m going to end up working next Friday when I’m supposed to be off. I got up early, and started puttering around the house. The weather was just so grand that I had to go outside, and ended up digging out the chainsaw and lawnmower and cleaning up a bit more. A few more days like today and I’m going to have another huge brush pile to get rid of, but I have kerosene now, so I can manage that. I was apparently not the only one who thought the day was nice. The Air Force concurred. I saw several C-130s playing follow-the-leader at low altitude over the mountain. It’s still interesting to watch large, slow planes go by at only 1000 feet AGL or so. Today is Mark’s birthday, and I had been unable to figure out what to get him. Suddenly this morning it came to me. Of course, it won’t be delivered on his birthday, but he will soon be the proud owner of a handheld GPS receiver with a GMRS radio. Oh, and I bought myself one too. :)

I got out of the house this afternoon to run a few errands. I stopped into a fairly new shop on Rodney Parham called “Cupid’s Lingerie”. They had some nice things, but their prices were rather on the high side. I guess I’m spoiled by ordering things off the Internet. Most of their merchandise can be mail-ordered for roughly half that price. Being able to see things and try them on is good, but I don’t think it commands quite that much premium.

Choir practice last night was very good. There were moments when I realized we were actually making music, rather than just singing. I know it’s been a good night when I feel worn out afterwards, but energized at the same time.

I have been really negligent at reading LJ this week. I am going to catch up sometime this weekend, but not tonight.

this was in my mailbox this morning:

I was seduced by the siren song of elegant perl and stayed up past midnight writing code for idmgmt. I’ll be in a little late this morning.

-jbp

I, on the other hand, simply got up early to work on configuring OPENLDAP servers to properly replicate. They do now, by the way.

After a discussion at lunch yesterday with Jack and Jay, the answer is:

yes, it is possible to order custom-printed M&Ms.

Surreal spam of the day:

From: Henrietta Puarstr [paymentjac@asher.net]
To: Dale O. Miller
Subject: Feel yourself living in cloud – land! Present – day mode of losing flesh.

Our tabs is a headmost grease – binding addendum which shifts grease from the meal you have!
Our product aids you lose flesh using a totally another law than the vast majority of diet aids on the market.
It will not make you experience jittery, our pills does not hold any influences. Our tabs includes simply real components and is quite drug free.

When I woke up this morning, I decided that today would not be a repeat of yesterday. I proceeded to call in sick, take some medicine, and climb back in bed. I’m feeling somewhat better now, although not really back in top form. I always know that my body is having issues when I have strange dreams. The last two nights have certainly counted. I won’t even try to re-cap any of them (partly because they have faded considerably, and partly because they just made little sense even at the time). I should just decided that if I wake up from a really weird dream, it’s a good day to call in sick. :)

One fun thing happened — I awoke mid-morning to find all five cats sleeping on the bed with me. It’s common to have one, two, or three, but all of them is fairly rare. Of course I didn’t have my camera within reach, and when I got up they did as well.

Today is not starting out well. I had excellent intentions — I went to bed early last night so I could get a good night’s sleep and start the week out right. I had trouble getting to sleep, and then slept fitfully. I was also plagued by disturbing dreams. Not really nightmares, but just situations that were uncomfortable. Maybe I should treat things as “It has to get better from here”. :)