Just finished David Owen’s dense-yet-inspiring biography of Xerography and its inventor, Chester Carlson, entitled Copies in Seconds

In his first few chapters, Owen tries to imbue his fascination for the ordinary (to those of Generation X and afterwards) office copier. Frankly, his treatment of the development of copying is boring. I don’t care about scribes, Gutenburg, or Ditto machines. He spends inordinate prose on the distinction between “copying” and “duplication”, and why the idea of ‘copying’ is so important.

On NASCAR

NASCAR’s brand of homogenized, low-tech racing is back for another season. Fields of 35-45 “athletes” will pilot tube-framed ‘Murican V-8s in 40 races from today through late November. Aside from a handful of visits to road-courses, all these races will be on ovals, ranging from the bullring half-mile of Bristol to the world’s fastest track, the 2.66 mile tri-oval at Talledega.

Nascar is at once Good-Ole-Boy, downhome charm and a corporate juggernaut that’s the secondmost lucrative sport behind football. Once confined to circuits in the Southeast, the series ranges from coast to cost, north to south. Whereas the man on the street 30 years ago might equate “car racing” with “Indy 500”, he now thinks “NASCAR”.

Went to the farm machinery show today with Dad and Ceeb.

I feel kinda crappy tonight. Headache and tingling on my face + sinuses.

Ugh…what a weird, up-and-down day. I’m currently on a very strong DOWN…

- Up at 7:00 when Dad calls. He re-confirms we’re going to the Farm Machinery show in Louisville tomorrow. Up
- I have to go to work today Down
- I take a vacation day. It’s nice outside, and I can go ring shopping and relax. Up
- I realize just how dirty my apartment is Down
- I clean it up and organize Up
- I head out to the ring shop that Scott suggested. Up
- While at the ring shop, Dave calls me and tells me they’re sending him to Luxemburg tomorrow and that they need me. Down
- The ring shop only sells loose stones, and then gets them set. Up
- They’re out of princess cut diamonds Down
- As I’m pulling into the parking lot, I get a call from my beloved, and she’s very happy Up
- She thinks I bought her two dozen roses. I hadn’t. Down
- I get the work done in about an hour, calling Whitney as I leave. Up
- She’s mad and disappointed I didn’t send her flowers. I’m disappointed that I didn’t send her flowers. I make an offhand remark. Hilarity ensues. Down…WAY down.

On order from Ken Towrey’s in Louisville, 4 Kumho V710 racing slicks:

ß

Ahh, the delicious irony: The guy who started the GTO thread on the Car Lounge is going to have to get rid of his GTO

Don’t know whether to label this tragedy or the successful pursuit of a Darwin Award.

on the left is a TUNGSTEN CARBIDE wedding band. On the Right is a titanium band that weighs nothing. Seriously, thing feels like you’re wearing a piece of plastic.

Check out the Valentine’s cake that Whitney made for me:

Just finished Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night.

The 217 page novel is about the world of an autistic English teenager named Christopher adept at math and intensely logical but unable to express emotion or understand humor. I found the tale riveting, and the last half of the book from its climax through the falling action of his journey to London to find his mother reinforces how scary modern life is.

Currently listening to a book on tape of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, encapsulator of Victorian England, its middle class, and the plight of young, bored women looking to get married.

Reading, or rather, listening to this book, I’m reminded why the Romantic Movement of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats was so big: It was vital and alive. The rest of England is dead. These women–LITERALLY!–have nothing to do but sit and plot their marriages. Their families are rich enough to spare them hard labor, so there they are, twittering about to no good use.

Just got through with Dashiell Hammett’s famous The Maltese Falcon, the prototypical and oft-imitated detective novel.

It’s a quick read, at only 217 pages, with good characters, some murders and a little mystery.

Overall, I didn’t like it…long way to go for an elliptical story and characters I didn’t care about.

Blog from within a useless Meeting:

We’re finding that one of our divisions is sort of eating the other one, just based upon merit and the overwhelming personality of its President. :-) I still wonder if I shouldn’t have taken a job over there, though I think they outsourced all their programmers years ago.

Couple of conclusions J. and I came to today after reading Joel Spolsky’s “Guide to Guerilla Interviewing”.

1. We’ve got way too many of the “Get things done”/“Not smart” people. These are folks who treat code like disposable parts, hacking around without thinking. “Anything to make it work” is the mantra for these people. Compentent programmers spend most of their time fixing the sublte (and not too sublte) errors that come from these people.

Giving you a snapshot of how overloaded a software engineer can become when he’s working for a hardware company:

My current projects/tasks/research items:

• On my current product:

  2. security:

     • Support for test tools for our next printer family that’s currently in test

     • New server function responsibilities

     • Updatest to a spec that’s 3 months out-of-date

     • Unit tests that I haven’t written

  3. bug Reports: 7 outstanding (probably will get more)

  4. Field issues: none (for now)

Preface: I’m not looking for baby names for any specific reason, but this is just COOL!

Ah, Google, king of this vast meritocracy called the Internet. Check out Google Maps everyone. I may never hit Mapquest again.

Alert Alert Alert!

If you’re using FireFox to browse the web, please do the following to prevent a ‘phishing’ vulnerability that could cause identity theft:

1. type about:config into the navigation bar (the same place you’d type a URL)

2. scroll down and find the key network.enableIDN

3. If it says ’true’, double click on that line and set it to ‘false’.

This tweak will protect you from getting redirected from a legitimate site to ones where your Identity could be stolen.

Pic of Wes during the race…pretty Porsche :D

Hats off to Wes Allen, of our local chapter of SCCA, competing today (and tomorrow!) in the grueling Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona. Wes is running in the GT class in a Porsche GT3. Here’s his team listing:

Number

Class

Team name

Drivers

car type

sponsors

43

GT

Orison-Planet Earth Motorsports

Wes Allen, Lexington, KY; Brad Blum, Winter Park, FL; Eric Lux, Buffalo, NY; Manuel Soltero, San Juan, PR; Ron Zitza, Maitland, FL