Category: General

Its snowing, the roads are horrible, so I didn’t go in to practice tonight. I have some extra time and what a better way to fritter time than to update the site.

1) For the first time in years I managed to wear my size 36 jeans. I’m down a total of 25 pounds since I started the diet in November. I’m almost at the half way point. (Yeah, do the math) I can’t express how much my diet has improved. Most of my meals are eaten at home now. I used to never eat at home. By placing restrictions on what you eat, you eat better. 95% of the things you find in a convenience store you can’t eat (chips, cookies, Little Debbie, etc) I’ve started eating spinach and brussel sprouts as well as increased my intake of broccoli and asparagus. I eat about a salad per day. Yes, this is a low carb diet. A lot of my meat intake has been venison and fish from my dad, but supplies of that are running low.

Even when I get my weight were I want it, I can’t ever see going back to eating potatos, sugar, enriched flour, or white rice. The other day Bietz ordered some nachos and said he felt physically terrible afterwards. I’m already eating some low carb tortillas, but only a few per week. Kurtz is also on the diet and so far its pretty easy for him and it appears to be working.

2) Classes so far are going fine. I’m glad I took the Math class I did. Its an excellent re-introduction back into the world of math. I’m getting an A in both classes at this point, but that’s not saying much because we haven’t had a test yet. I’m confident I’ll perform well in both, however. As I outlined below, my physics courses will be sequential for a while, which means I have another class I can take for a few semesters. One idea has been to take more math classes and try to apply them to getting my Masters.

3) I got a copy of Mathematica. It rocks. I’m in awe of it. I want to install it on my laptop and my desktop. It will leave any graphing calculator in the dust. I’m still just playing around with it.

I do a good job of filtering most of my spam. Not too much gets by. I just got a spam that was the following: (This is verbatum and there was not attachment)

Tammie and I took pork chop behind deficit (with for customer, inside pocket.And mourn the dark side of her warranty.cigars remain green.Bbut they need to remember how greedily inside cargo bay returns home.

When you see inside bride, it means that about prime minister goes to sleep.Most fetishists believe that tea party around assimilate dolphin living with.

I have no idea why someone would take the effort to send this out. There isn’t a coherent thought, let alone a comprehensible english sentence in it. If this is what spam has been reduced to, I think we are close to winning. I can’t see too many people going out of their way to pay for mass emailing non sequitors.

I use SpamAssassin on the server side and the bayesian filtering in Thunderbird on the client side. The vast majority of Spam gets filtered before I can ever see it. I have no idea if false positives are getting stuck. Stuff like this gets through precisely because it has no content. Stuff that has no content however, doesn’t make for a good marketing.

When I left the house today it was -17F. Right now, its -10, but thankfully the wind isn’t too bad. Forecast is supposed to get down to -20 to -25 tonight. None of these numbers are wind chill numbers. Its just that cold. If you factor in the wind, it could feel like -40 tonight.

There are people, who might be reading this, who have no clue what it means to be that cold. The thing is, it gets over 100 degrees here too. Its usually hotter in the south, but it can get that hot here too. Coldness, however, is something that we sort of have to ourselves. When the temp dips to freezing, people will go nuts in the south. The difference between freezing and what we have now is the difference between freezing and 80 degrees. Right now, freezing would feel like a heat wave. I’d run around naked if it was freezing right now.

I have to walk to class. Yippie.

Enough of school talk…..

1) I finally got around to watching “Once Upon A Time in the West” last night. I think it might be the best western I’ve ever seen and probably on my list of greatest movies ever. Chock full of great one liners.

The DVD itself is one of the better transfers I’ve ever seen. The colors and the sound are outstanding.

2) Extempers had their first tournament this weekend. Performance wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible either. We still have a lot of work to do, but I’m confident we can make large strides.

3) We should be getting our ass handed to us with snow tonight and tomorrow.

4) Pete and I watched the Royal Rumble tonight. My speech kids just don’t get wrestling. I mentioned it and one of them said, as if on cue, “its so fake”. Well, duh. That’s not really the point. Movies are fake too, as is TV. If you get the chance, go see WWE live and sit as close as you can to the ring. Don’t think of it as ‘wrassling’, but as interactive physical performance art. The crowd is part of the artwork. The wrestlers perform morality plays….and toss each other through folding tables.

I sat down and figured out what I’ll need to do to finish my major:

Summer 2004
-Physics I

Fall 2004
-Physics II

Spring 2005
-Physics III

Summer 2005
-Astrophysics I

Fall 2005
-Quantum Physics
-Quantum Physics Lab

Spring 2006
-Astrophysics II
-Analytical Mechanics

Summer 2006
-Electricity and Magetism
-Astro 5xxx

I’m making some big assumptions regarding course availability in the summer sessions. This summer is fine, but beyond Physics III, I could move everything around. 3-4 more physics classes beyond this and I get credit for a plain ol’ physics major too. Untill I finish Physics III, there aren’t any other classes I can take I can apply towards the major.

I also finally got a copy of Mathematica. Being a student has its perks. In fact, there are enough perks in being a student that its almost worthwhile to stay one forever just to get the benefits. (Really Cheap software, discounts, etc)