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I'm having one of those days where I just feel absolutely irritable and aggravated.  I have a stack of endless tasks to dig through, and the first thing I walk into the office everybody descend upon me like vultures onto dead meat, both in person as well as via IM.  "Can you help me with this?"  "This is not working, can you fix it?"  "What does this mean?"  "Guess what?  I broke that, help!"

Usually I just take it in stride, believing that the more I answer their question, the more they'll learn.  But sometimes it feels absolutely futile, like the knowledge is just not sinking into their heads.  Or they're not trying hard enough to tough it out before coming to me.  The worst is when people just interrupt me in the middle of writing some complicated algorithm just to tell me some marginally relevant stuff or to ask me a question whose answer can be easily found by the good ol' RTFM method (you can search for that acronym).  The least they can do is ask me, "Can I have a moment of your time?" instead of just firing off their questions/demands like I'm their personal concierge.

Awesome and terrifying at the same time...

BOOM!

It blew up good. The software release it is. Still fixing it at 1am. Got some duct tape...will fix more tomorrow...

Relatives showed up...at the wrong terminal...at the exact opposite side of the airport. Alex wanted to run a different direction, so my wife and I went in opposite directions. Fortunately SFO is actually a circle (hence the O), so everybody converged at the same point.

Good thing is that dinner was pretty good and Alex was nice enough to sit through all of it. It's good to finally have a decent Cantonese restaurant downtown. But why is it that other relatives invite themselves to dinner? The bill was $200. I paid. Nice.

One more thing from the concert on Saturday. Just before Dream Theater's encore, they played a fan video inspired from an unholy mix of Super Mario Brother's and Dream Theater's song "The Dark Eternal Night'.  Aptly it's called "The Dark Nintendo Night". It's absolutely hilarious.

So the weekend plan went without a hitch. We got to drop off Alex at the inlaws on Saturday just after noon. The plan is to stay at a hotel near the BART station in Pleasant Hill so we can take a train into scary Oakland.  The hotels was excellent, and we got a discreet, corner suite that we can use for any nefarious reasons ;)

We had a great dinner afterwards at a Cuban restaurant in downtown Walnut Creek.  They had a great halibut ceviche and tasty mojitos, but unfortunately something did a number on our stomachs. That delayed us hopping on BART to go to the concert, and as a result we missed the first band (called 3) on stage. Slight bummer, but no problem. The main attraction is yet to come. 


So overall we had a great time at the concert.  We got back to the hotels at midnight, and went to sleep by 1:30am. I was in bliss not having the baby boy stick his foot in my ribs or my head (or even worse places). We woke up at 10am and went to brunch in Walnut Creek at a place called the San Franciscan. The food was good (I had crab cakes Benedict), but then it was time to pick up Alex. So we showed up at my inlaw's house. Alex was pretty good with them, but he was ready to go home. So we got home and all was well. I made a teppanyaki dinner again because naiad8  wanted to go to Benihana earlier but the idiots wouldn't open for lunch until 1pm.

The weekend was great, but the week is going to be crazy.  It's already started crazy.  Alex woke up at 2am and didn't go back to sleep until 5am.  So I'm pretty tired this morning.  My company is having a software release today, but I'll miss that because I have to go pick up my relatives at the airport.  A cousin of mine is graduating from UW Pullman so her brother and mom came from Costa Rica, who will then go on the coast-to-coast tour of America with stops in San Francisco and New York.  The original plan was for my mom and I pick up at the airport, but a phone call last night drafted naiad8 and Alex in the second car because apparently my cousin at Pullman decided to send two suitcases worth of crap with her mother and brother back to Costa Rica.  So they'll have like 6 pieces of luggage and carry-on, and there's just no way it'd fit in any of our cars.  Don't you just love cheapskate relatives?  How hard is it to ship her crap to Costa Rica?  It's not like it's a real third-world country.  Jeez!

Anyway, back to work.  It's gonna be crazy.

Software release day is next Monday. Same day I got relatives flying in and I gotta pick them up in the afternoon. This means that the rest of the crew gets to do the upgrade without me. I think I need codeine to get sleep between now and Monday night.

Not that I've been sleeping much lately. I've been up until godless hours working on ten man-days worth of work that needs to be done in two days. Yeah, it's that good.

Stress, what's that?

At least this weekend Alex will be with the grandparents so we got to go to Prog Nation 2008 with Dream Theater and Opeth. Oh yeah! Plus we'll get a nice dinner by ourselves and a night w/o He-Who-Uses-His-Mom-As-Pillow-And-His-Dad-As-Foot-Rest.

And why am I using my Cylon icon? Because of this:

New Basic Element For Electronic Circuits: 'Memristor' Could Give Computers Memories That Don't Forget
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080501155234.htm

Current computer memory is either stored in magnetic wells on your hard drives (slow) or between capacitors as in main memory (volatile).  This new memristor is supposedly both fast and non-volatile.  And really small.  5 nanometers, about the size of a sugar molecule. 

While I do nominally hold an electrical engineering degree, I have to say that EE people needs to come up with better names.  "Memristor"?  Sounds like a bad marketing move from 1999 for some failed dotcom (like the ones I was in *hides in shame*).

OK, back to work.

The folks at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory take some pretty amazing pictures. The most recent one shows incandescent smoke plume at Kilauea's summit crater just before dawn. It looks really alien and spacey, with the stars in the background. It's a bit big so it's under a cut.



While talking about cool pictures, a picture of mine taken pretty close to my office got short-listed to be included in the California Guide of some website called Schmap. No clue what the heck they are, but I'm kind of flattered that somebody like that picture. I remember that I did try to make it quasi-artistic, or at least with good composition and balance. Whatever. Here it is.

Spring is upon us. It was 80° F and sunny in Mountain View, California, and allergens are freely roaming the air...*eyes water* *itches back* *sneezes*

Another sign of spring: A mommy duck and ten ducklings waddling down my street. We followed them until they safely got inside a RV lot. Alex must've really liked them because he kept saying "ducks come back!" The blue jays are also stealing the coconut husk fiber from our hanging plant baskets to line their nests. In general nature is gearing up for new life.

I even got some time to work on AncientScripts. I just added the Lycian page, and found some source material for Carian and Phrygian. Hopefully I'll be able to fully cover the whole of ancient Anatolia. 

And I just made a teppanyaki dinner better than any Benihana can ever make. Hah! Rocky Aoki, eat your heart out.

If there's one thing to tamper the good weekend is that I have to read 250 pages worth of my deposition transcript to make the court reporter got all the technical lingo correctly. If there is one thing more boring than getting questioned for 8 hours by a lawyer on technical details, it is having to read the transcription of those 8 hours. Blah...

My office went out to play laser tag today.  Apparently we finally got some entertainment budget.  Still waiting for that promised Wii...

Anyway, that was really cool.  It was the first time I've played.  I actually didn't do too badly.  At least I wasn't at the bottom :P  The only thing I didn't like was the size and layout of the place.  Everybody just ended up staking out a corner on the 2nd floor and sniping everybody else.  While that's how real-life combat works it's not as much fun as running around guns ablaze like Rambo.

And now they expect us to work after that.  Bah humbug!

Opeth has become one of my favorite bands. They have a new album coming in June, and they're coming to town for a concert with my other favorite band Dream Theater. I'm really excited about that. And today they released their brand new video for their first single, Porcelain Heart.

And the gist of the video? A castle. A threesome. Kissing Goth chicks. Murder. And four Swedish guys and an Uruguayan.

OK, it's actually less trashy than that.


Anyway, it's 1am. I just finished some work, and I need downtime. Especially after some previous uptime, so to speak. naiad8 knows what I mean.

Sorry...they're coming like flash floods today.

Terracotta army has egg on its face
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/04/21/2223137.htm?site=science&topic=ancient


Apparently getting that beautiful sheen on baked goods also helped Qinshi Huangti's terracota army keeps its paint for a few thousand years. And while we're on paint, there's this:

Synchrotron light unveils oil in ancient Buddhist paintings from Bamiyan
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-04/esrf-slu042108.php

The peregrine falcon eggs at San Jose City Hall hatched last night!  Right now on the webcam Clara (mommy) is busy feeding the chicks.  Less than a day old and already ravenous (bad pun).

http://www2.ucsc.edu/scpbrg/falconcameraSJ.htm (Quicktime)
http://www2.ucsc.edu/scpbrg/falconcameraSJ_ms.htm (Windows Video)

Birth of peregrine falcons makes an auspicious Earth day!  They were on the brink of extinction 30 years ago due to the extensive use of DDT as insecticide.  Unfortunately DDT also caused peregrine falcon egg shells to become thin and brittle, thus easily killing unhatched chicks.  Their recovery is a symbol of conservation and environmentalism.  Let's keep it up for the future!

ETA: Looks like Clara is done feeding and is now keeping the chicks warm while they take a nap.

A while ago I discovered a bunch of work-in-progress in AncientScripts land. Well, I've finished them up and uploaded some of them over the weekend and today. The new pages are Lydian and Meithei. I still have a bunch of "leftovers" that I need to turn into fully fleshed out pages, including Lycian, Kalmyk, Khipu, and Tangut.

Ahoy mateys!

All my coworkers deserted me today for lunch, so I went home to make myself egg and mushroom on potato cakes with a side of mesclun. Ahem...Sorry about that culinary tangent. Anyway, so naiad8  and I watched the series 3 finale of the latest Doctor Who which was been sitting on the DVR for a week or so. When I got back to work, I didn't feel like work, and so I bummed around Wikipedia reading about the minutiae of Dr Who until I found the mention of a special made for the Children in Need telly special. I promptly found it on YouTube, and it was just hilarious. A lot of self-referential jokes but what the hey. Anyway, I know there's a bunch of Dr Who fans on my flist, so if you haven't seen it, here it is. There's some spoiler for the end of series 3 though, although unless you've been living under a rock, you should already know about the itsy bitsy spoiler there.


And yes a little eye candy for you Torchwood (*ahem*John*ahem*Barrowman*) fans.

Niçoise salad's main component is not salt. Please refrain from using canned tuna fish that is already salted, because you'll be adding capers and olives, both of which are salty as well. And please add some acid, any kind of acid, to your dressing, because that would cut the salt somewhat. Plus salad dressing is supposed to contain acid, like lemon juice or vinegar, capisce? Cooking school 101. Here's Julia's recipe for reference. And please taste your freaking food when you're "conceptualizing", even if you're on pot or meth. You'd find out that the salt level will leave your customers with literally a bad taste in their mouth (not to mention chapped lips and achy throats).

Don't make me send Gordon Ramsay to bust your bollocks.

The underbelly of the historical/anthropological/archaeological world is an unhealthy illegal trade in cultural heritage and patrimony. The scope is vast, from the poor farmer who dug up an ancient pot to sell for bit of money to feed his family, to well-organized and armed outfits that provide beautiful and unique artifacts for collectors and even museums (*cough*Getty*cough*Met*cough*). Well, apparently the very stately and serene world of libraries and historical archives aren't immune to greed and X-ACTO knives.

To Catch a Thief
How a Civil War buff's chance discovery led to a sting, a raid and a victory against traffickers in stolen historical documents
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/to-catch-a-thief.html

I know it's important to grab the reader with some snazzy headline and gets readership up, especially in science where the news might actually be not as far reaching as, say, how Brittney Spears has embarrassed herself, but please don't have headlines that are misleading, partially truthful, or based on inconclusive facts.

For example, on LiveScience there's an article with the headline "Humans Might Sense Oxygen Through Skin" (link). However, if you read it, it turns out that oxygen sensors were discovered in mouse's skin. The only part where human comes in is the "Mice and frogs are quite distant relatives, separated by more than 350 million years of evolution, so the fact they have these molecules in common in their skin suggests these compounds might well be found in the skin of other mammals also, such as humans." Chances are, yes, we might be able to sense oxygen through the skin, but using that in the headline is immediately misleading. I was expecting that they've discovered oxygen sensors in humans or at least a higher primate.

Or this one: "Faith in Prayer Kills Children" (link). I'm not religious and certainly no fan of strange cults that prevent their children from going to the health services because supposedly prayer will heal them miraculously (soapbox: God has already sent you help...it's called doctors), which is what this opinion piece is really about, but the headline is misleading and worse, polemic. Faith and prayers don't kill children. Ignorance does. The last thing the scientific community needs to do is alienate potential readers with religious beliefs. Science and religion aren't exactly kissing and cuddling but I don't see how there can't be at least dialogue and respect for each other. 

Anyway, off my soapbox.  Now sushi for lunch.

It feels like Spring is teetering into Summer. It's a lovely 87° F (30° C) in Mountain View today (feels great with no humidity). It'd be much worse if we hadn't put in the insulation in the attic last year. The house was like an oven in years past.

I'm sitting in the backyard right now, watching the sun slowly set. The garden is an amazing kaleidoscope of colors. naiad8  should really be a dryad because of her handiwork coaxing the garden into bloom. The birds in the neighborhood love the backyard because of the fountain (a great bird bath) and all the basket lining material that they use to build their nests.

On a different note, April is Autism Awareness Month. As you know, Alex is autistic, but he's shown great progress in the past few months in his new school. The city of Mountain View funds the autism program, but as with all things government they're always short on money. So the school has set up a Cafe Press store to sell shirts, hats, and mugs. All proceeds from the store go toward supplementing the materials used in classes. Please consider buying something from the store to help support the program.

http://www.cafepress.com/slaterautism

And on the third tangent, I leave you with this video. It's a song (well, part of a 43-minute suite, really) from my favorite band Dream Theater called "Solitary Shell" about autism. Don't worry, it won't blow your ears off. Its decibel level is in the light rock level. 

Finally, new page on Mangyan, the only remaining indigenous script that has survived Spanish colonization of the Philipines, is uploaded to AncientScripts.

And it's 1am.  Gotta sleep...