Taniith’s Relto

On the Arduino forum, someone linked to this very interesting TED talk on the science of motivation. Its about 18 minutes long, but I think its well worth the watch.

I finally watched the finale to Quantum Leap today. They really did a nice job with it, I think; filling the bar with faces and names from the series, and the whole mystery of the bartender. Very cool. Very sad too. Sam’s decision to go back and tell Beth about Al was an interesting choice, especially considering that the producers originally intended that to be a season clifhanger and not a series finale. It was already established that the project would still happen without Al, but the show wouldn’t be the same. It would have been interesting to see how Al, and his relationship with Sam, would have changed after not losing Beth.

Oh well, I suppose that’s neither here nor there. Still, it was a great show, despite what come people seem to think, and I’m sad that its over. And not just because now I need to figure out something else to watch with breakfast.

I’m going to go play with Zbrush.

-K

I logged in to check my blog stats today, and found I had something like 83 in just a few hours! Thats more than I often get in a month or two! Some of you may remember this post. Now, I get several hits for that post each month, but usually not much. Today, all of those hits were for that post; it seems I was linked to by another angry post here (its in the comments), which has made the rounds in the past day or two.

Well, cool :D

-K

edit: Its up to about 300 hits at this point. Craziness!

So, I just got back from a fun afternoon at the MOS with Emily. It only took us half a year to manage to hang out. She apparently just broke up with her boyfriend this morning, so… um, yay distractions? Anyway, it was fun. Couldn’t figure out where to go for food afterward though. She wanted Finagle, which was closed, then she offered to drive me to Waban (where I parked for the T), and I suggested the Waban Deli… which was also closed. So we called it a day.

I also discovered today that the green line seems to take its cues from Amtrak. The first train (yes, first train) I boarded at Waban had its power turn on an off for about ten minutes, while stuck at the station. Eventually, the next train pulled in, and we were told they were taking ours out of service and to switch to the other one. So, no more seat for me till Fenway :(. Then, after I had to transfer at Government Station to get to the museum (which was equally annoying), that train had power issues twice; once in the station, and once while it was barreling down the track. Wonderful. Well, at least now I know that they are using 9600 baud for something in the train, because the startup routine declared it (along with the firmware version number, which was v7.0).

The museum has reorganized stuff, but its still mostly the same old crap. I did finally manage to see Dan’s installation thing. Um, yeah, thrilling. I mean, I bet its good for their research, but it wasn’t super compelling. Oh well.

Time to find food that my stomach want’s to agree with for dinner…

-K

I finally uploaded all of my photos from The Adventure. Behold

Also, the infamous Quab Wash Pitch

Someone just posted this link to an article about the acquisition of a company called Gamecock (lets not discuss the ridiculous name).They were one of the main employers of Cyan Test (Cyan’s offshoot, offering QA services as an added revenue stream), which I knew. Turns out that it wasn’t just the acquirers having some other testing services that they liked to use, but it was instead that the acquirers tried to get out of paying for things from before the acquisition, like Cyan. So it wasn’t just the loss of a customer, but the lack of being payed for services rendered that caused the whole layoffs thing.

Interested. Despicable, but interesting.

-K

Here’s the rough calculation of miles spent on the rails (give or take; no idea about the re-route through Wyoming, etc).

Boston to Chicago - 1017
Chicago to Salt Lake - 1608
Salt Lake to Sacramento - 745
Sacramento to Portland - 637
Portland to Spokane - 380
Spokane to Havre - 511
Havre to Chicago - 1366
Chicago to Boston - 1017

7281, or roughly 7,300 miles in all. Woot!

-K