as the sunlight breaks the haze to touch your skin

The first step is admitting you have a problem: I am an Asimov junkie. I have always liked stuff like I, Robot and Foundation's Edge, but recently I realized I had never read his 'Empire' novels. So I went on eBay and got them for a ridiculously low price. That was a set of five books and I have read them all. But it doesn't even stop there. There are a couple of used bookstores downtown and they have old Asimov collections. I just bought one today, I have gotten at least two others that way, and I know I left at least one more sitting on the shelf in the store. It's true that the books tend to be kind of thin so I can burn through them pretty quickly, but the man was prolific. This sort of thing makes writing electronics lab reports very difficult to accomplish.

googled

Well I held out as long as I could, but Google finally refused to let me log in until I had migrated to something or other. I don't like messing with stuff that is working fine as it is.

cached

A pretty quiet weekend. Nothing got done on Friday of course, but yesterday I did 2/3 of my grading and I've finished the computational physics assignment that isn't due until Friday. I decided to take a short break and found another geocache, but I paid the price - I dropped my camera and now most of the buttons don't work, and the inside may smell of burnt plastic. Damn.

forget what they said in soho

It was nice out this weekend so today I tried some easy geocaching. Although it wasn't too cold outside it was still pretty muddy, and one of the geocaches was amidst blackberry bushes and some old barbed wire and I ended up having to pull some thorns out when I got home. On the plus side, this was really the first time I've experimented with the new GPS software's street navigation, and that worked out pretty well. It was much easier being given roads than having to suffice with an arrow and a distance.

i think about the implications

I love getting stuff in the mail. Today was one of those days. I got a bunch of stuff from eBay, several Asimov books I haven't read (and a third copy of I, Robot) and more red pens than I could possible have need for in my last term as a TA.

Today was also a partial snow day - classes before 11AM or after 5PM were canceled. Sadly I don't think that's likely to repeat tomorrow.

amazon.lame

I was going through old email and found that since 2003 I requested not once but several times for Amazon.com to notify me if and when "The Fountainhead" ever became available on DVD, and when it finally came out last November they never did. Way to drop the ball on that one, Amazon.com.

happy new yar

2006 was really just a year I needed to pass through to get from 2005 to 2007. This year should be big for me though.

post-season

Well, I made it through the Christmas season without hearing the damned hippopotamus song once. Christmas truly is the time of miracles. Visiting with extended family was nice except everyone wants to know what I'm going to be doing and I have no idea.

My big Christmas present was a GPS receiver, which is extremely cool and slightly devious. You see, if you just sit around being a bum all it will do is tell you where you are. However, if you get off your butt and leave the house it will tell you where you're going, track where you've been, and then there's the whole geocaching angle. Mine is even able to automatically generate routes on the fly and act like a satnav. Apparently some software will even let you look up ATMs, gas stations, hotels and restaurants.

They have quite a racket going with these GPS receivers though. The one I got isn't cheap, but you could easily spend twice as much for a unit with one or two more unnecessary bells and whistles. The preloaded maps only have main highways, so if you want to see every street you're going to have to drop $100 or so on software. If you want better reception from the satellites you can buy an external antenna. Then of course you're going to want a case to protect your investment.

The furthest I've been from the house since I got my GPS receiver is the mailbox, so I really haven't tested what it can do yet. I just figured out how to load geocache locations this afternoon (the receiver has a steep learning curve) but as soon as I did that it started getting dark out so I couldn't test it out. There is a geocache about a third of a mile from my house and I want to check it out.

primed, part II

In other news, I coded up an implementation of that Shanks factorization algorithm. So far it can do 19 digits, but I don't know how to get it to stop returning trivial solutions (e.g. factoring 51 as 1 * 51) so it only works most of the time. I was able to factor some phone numbers for people, so that was amusing. I tried to make a copy that used Java's arbitrary precision data types to work on RSA-100, but that wasn't going well. I'm also having problems with Java running out of memory.

beyond jet lag

It is just not my night to sleep. I've been trying to get over the jet lag from coming back to Michigan but tonight has been ridiculous. I went to bed around 11, got up again at 2, tried going back to bed at 3. Then I got fed up with my bed so I fixed it, and when I tried going back to sleep it was too stuffy in my room so I cracked the window open and now the fresh air is too invigorating to sleep. I can't win. So now I am writing some emails until I crash again.