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We just returned from a long weekend in Wyoming. Tracie’s parents live in Ranchester, which is just slightly north of the middle of nowhere and about a six- or seven-hour drive from Boulder, depending on how much you press your luck while pressing the accelerator. We buzzed up and spent a leisurely few days taking in some of the local scenery and eating slightly too much. I put up a set of photos on my flickr site here.

Yes, we saw a moose. He was grazing not far from the road, up on one of the mountain passes near town. We also saw a number of deer, a few antelope (while en route), a beautiful sunset, and one owl. read more

Fatboy Slim may have overstated the situation. For instance, it’s hard to imagine either of my parents having much use for a TB-303 despite their above-average interest in music. I’m not even sure that I need one, having never used the real thing. However, shortly after finding out that a couple of new sources for x0xb0x kits I happened to listen to a few 303-heavy tracks by The Crystal Method and decided that I might as well grab a kit while they’re available. I mean, eventually the world is going to run out of those discontinued transistors, right? It seemed like a reasonable rationalization anyway. read more

Scenario: I have a local network which is part wired and part wireless. Depending on what’s going on, connected to this network are as many as eight desktop computers (six PCs, two Macs), four laptop computers (three PCs, one Mac), one iPad, one PDA, and/or two NAS devices. Usually it works. Lately I’ve been trying to figure out whether the wireless router is somewhat dodgy (because the laptops occasionally lose their connection and the iPad doesn’t make a connection about half the times I turn it on) and/or whether the new NAS is a POS, in short. Answering these questions partly involves figuring out how fast data is moving from one place to another. read more

It’s been a year since our cat Madeline had to have nasty lumps removed from her neck, as I described here and here. Maddy recovered from that unhappy incident and grew into a rather lovely cat. Here are a couple of photos of her in celebration of her ongoing good health:

Lately she’s taken an interest in origami, as you can see.

I just posted a few photos of flowers in our yard here on my Flickr site. There will be more in the not-too-distant future; the senior clematis, for instance, started blooming just yesterday and I have not yet photographed it.

One of the beautiful things about mathematical notation is that it can be used (and misused) to express complex concepts succinctly:

(Yeah, this is not new but I saw it for the first time today, taped to the cash register of the local electronics shop.)

…or are Mother’s Taffy sandwich cookies in their new Kellog’s incarnation different than they used to be, back before the unfortunate demise of their original maker? They smell a bit more like coconut than I remember, and it seems unfamiliar that the cookie isn’t a uniform color throughout. They’re still pretty good, though.

There’s an interesting article in The New York Times here about multitasking, online information consumption, and their effects on the brain. I don’t particularly have anything to say about it, other than to say that I found it interesting and think that it’s worth taking the time to read it if you spend any significant amount of time online. (I’ll let you be the judge of what constitutes “signficant”.)

Update: half an hour or so after posting the above paragraph I closed all of the windows on my second monitor. Now it’s just showing the desktop image, a photo of a sakura tree somewhere in Japan, courtesy of the “Japan” theme for Windows 7. Maybe I’ll get rid of it altogether. OTOH it is useful for work when I need to see both my source code and the resulting plug-in simultaneously. read more

Widget, my cat of 16 years, finally departed for that sunny windowsill in the sky this morning. She lived about six months longer than anyone expected. Late last October she was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease. A week or so later she took a sharp turn for the worse and we all (i.e. me, Tracie, and the vet) thought that she wouldn’t last through the weekend. She rebounded, much to everyone’s surprise, and was in reasonably good health for the next several months, all things considered. We really didn’t expect her to last until our trip to Japan in April, but she did. Hence she enjoyed a little vacation of her own, staying at the vet’s office, where she was waited upon by the techs and the vets. All of this was a prelude to the inevitable, of course. She slowed down over the last few weeks, declined sharply a couple of days ago, and now she is with us no more. read more