If you don’t know mis_nomer, she’s the one who wants to drive a little Coke van (look in the header image).
Well, in Washington, DC, there’s a little McDonald’s van, and it gets to drive on the sidewalk.
edit: Sheesh. WordPress is so smart, it capitalizes names that have no capital letters in them. Sorry, m i s _ n o m e r.
Thirty minutes, just under three miles. But it’s the first time I’ve been out in a while, so I’m pretty happy with it. Oh, and no ITB problems, either, which is the bigger thing. That’s what stopped my running a long time ago.
Every time I’d try again, it would flare up within the first mile or two, so I’d stopped for quite a while.
Here’s hoping this is a sign of things to come. I feel so much better when I run.
Wow. Impressive (and beautiful) test of a methane-powered rocket by NASA.
Methane (CH4), the principal component of natural gas, is abundant in the outer solar system. It can be harvested from Mars, Titan, Jupiter, and many other planets and moons. With fuel waiting at the destination, a rocket leaving Earth wouldn’t have to carry so much propellant, reducing the cost of a mission.
Perhaps surprisingly, this flammable gas has never powered a spacecraft before. But now scientists and engineers at Marshall, the Glenn Research Center and the Johnson Space Center are developing LOX/methane engines as an option for the future.
When I was young, and my Dad bought us an Atart 2600, I played Asteriods and Adventure and Breakout until my firing thumb was sore. We called it “Atari Thumb.”
Years later, it became “Nintendo Thumb,” and was worse than Atari Thumb. See, the Atari joystick was operated with two hands, but only one of them pressed a button. The Nintendo controller had two firing buttons for your right thumb, and a four-direction pad for your left. Nintendo Thumb was an ambidextrous affair.
If you played too long, too soon, you’d actually get blisters. It was important to develop a callus.
Skip forward 18 years. My little brother has a Nintendo Wii, and I went to visit him this past weekend. The Wii (pronounced “Wee”) is different. Instead of a joystick with buttons, it has two wireless hand-held controllers with accelerometers and buttons. This is called the “wiimote.” And your character in the game (whose appearance you can spend far too much time tweaking) is called a “Mii.” You play the games by making real motions. To play tennis, you swing your arm as if the Wiimote were a racket.
To pitch a baseball, pretend you’re throwing a ball. There is a tether on the wiimote to save your TV if you forget you’re pretending.
There’s boxing, too. If you don’t normally box, let me warn you that it calls on muscles in the shoulders that don’t much contribute to typing.
So (I learned after the fact) you should warm up before you play Wii for too long.
Or else you will end up like me. Quite sore, and wondering if you’ve done any damage.
Atari Thumb affected one hand.
Nintendo Thumb affected both.
And this new one - what else can you call it but an injuWii - continues the spread.
Checking my visitor logs, I noticed a search for info on my friend Dave’s motorcycle accident, but I’m not sure who it is.
If it’s you, maybe you could leave a comment or send me an e-mail? I’m at beanquest at pobox.com.
If you don’t want to, that’s fine, too. I’m just curious who else is thinking about Dave today…
OK - things, I don’t think about. Maybe you’re more aware than I am.
Our water’s out. It was fine for tooth-brushing, but gone for drink-before-bed for the boys.
The power goes out now and then, but the water? I don’t think I’ve ever been without running water in my house.
How often to you use your fresh, clean running water without thinking about it?
Via Tim Blair, via Instapundit, I found this story of a woman overcome by an irrational fear while on the subway.
Her description of her feelings afterwards is curious:
Almost as soon as it has subsided, my fear seemed cartoonish and unreasonable. Generally, I prefer reason over impulse. Trembling like a devout Christian at the onset of a solar eclipse seems odd. I had joined the coalition of the nervous and I wasn’t at all certain why.
I admit I’m relatively new at trying to live a Christian life (so it’s entirely possible that I missed something) but I can’t figure out this thing about “a devout Christian should tremble at the onset of a solar eclipse.”
I am genuinely curious, here. I know some people like to get hung up on specific Bible verses — is this one of those? Or is she poking fun at something she just made up?
I prefer ‘geek’, but the recent arguments in favor of ‘nerd’ can be quite convincing.
Jim’s score is way too low. Gwynne’s seems about right, as near as I can tell. And Patti is someone I should be reading more often, it would seem.
Mine’s a little too high (but somehow, I feel it should be higher. I run Linux on my router! I use the CLI as much as the GUI! My favorite calculator is the long-discontinued HP-11C I got from my Dad. Wait a minute - I have a favorite calculator!)
Still, I am to “Apply for a professorship at MIT now!!!.”
(Punctuation is as provided on the evaluation. I’ll be sure to follow that example on my application.)
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