Last night I went to a lecture series hosted by the Janelia Farm Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The talk, on the evolution of human color vision, was terrific—and I was given the opportunity to take a tour of their lab facilities.
(Click the image above for a small gallery of additional pictures).
So I’m waiting for a package to be delivered via FedEx SmartPost. SmartPost is designed to reduce costs associated with the “last mile” of delivery. Stuff travels via FedEx to the local post office, then the U.S. Postal Service handles the actual delivery.
My experience with SmartPost service has been terrible, but this was bad even by dealing-with-the-post-office standards.
I’ve run this website since 1996. I haven’t updated it frequently, in part because it’s never been really easy to do so. A few minutes ago, I noticed that the last major update to the landing page was made in 2002, over a decade ago.
So I’m going to attempt to promote the tools I’d used for a few blog postings (the last of which was, embarrassingly, in 2008) to be the primary content management mechanism for the website. I’m hopeful this will be an easy process—because technology upgrades are never more complicated than expected, right?
I’ve had a couple of opportunities this week to reflect on the reliability of complex systems. None of these thoughts are especially profound, but they’re nonetheless interesting.
Earlier in the week, a line of powerful thunderstorms rolled through the DC area. At one point, over 25% of the region was without power. Most of the outages were brief, though there are a few places that are still awaiting power restoration two days later.
I recently acquired a copy of Yazsoft’s “Speed Download” product via the MacHeist bundle promotion. The software worked fine, but I recommend putting Yazsoft on your “to avoid” list nonetheless. Companies that abuse their customers don’t deserve to have customers in the future.
Perhaps by now you’ve heard of web logs, or “blogs,” in which one can tell the world about any foolish idea that happens to drift through one’s head. I’ve waited quite a while to get started, but I keep hearing rumblings that this “blogging” thing might really catch on one of these days. So I wanted to be ready.
In complete seriousness, this section of the site is designed to contain stuff that is too inconsequential to deserve an actual formal article, but that might nonetheless be of some interest to others.
So, enjoy. And keep your eye on this “blogging” thing. Someday, I predict that quite a few people will be doing this.
February 2014: Found these photos of the whiteboard in my office at Concept Five Technologies, taken in May 1999. There were quite a few projects going on at the same time!
Snow began here around 10pm on January 6; it ended about 10am on January 8. We got plenty of snow (in excess of two feet). These pictures were shot using an Apple QuickTake digital camera after I finished digging a trench down our driveway so that it might be possible to get the cars out.
