blogwaffe

Members:
blogwaffe
langabi
apparent horizons – NEW!

Status:
A fully armed and operational zulu word for general relativistic double entendre.

#1 Fan:
Marc Broussard

I gave a talk at group meeting yesterday, and it went reasonably well; I was able to answer not one but two Sergey questions, and Preskill seemed to think the question Andrew and I are asking is fairly interesting. It’s nothing monumental, but there may be a clever answer to it nonetheless.

In other news, it seems likely (it used to seem unlikely) that I’m being funded by IQI over the summer. Not a sure thing, though.

I’m trying to compile a time schedule for Ernie’s daily tour through campus.

9am – 10am: Lauritsen?
11:30am – 1pm: Facilities
1pm – 2pm: K Spalding
2pm – 2:30: Noyes

But I don’t know if this is right. Please add and correct.

I once made the boast (read “threat”) that I could eat twenty tacos from Del Taco in one sitting. I still think I could do it, but it’d take some prep work.

I just got polished off nine and am pretty full. But how could I possibly resist three tacos for ninety-nine cents (plus tax)? $3.22 for a veritable feast… of cheap tacos… and hot sauce. Well, maybe not a feast, then, but good nonetheless.

What is the marketing strategy behind such a promotion? I mean, this happens once a week, and it’s the only time I go to Del Taco. I suppose by making it an “event”, they get people thinking about it. And even at thirty-three cents a taco, they probably still manage to skim off a profit. Plus, people will probably buy drinks (with which restaurants fleece their customers) and other menu items.

Hm. Now that I think about it, it’s pretty clever. And of course, they got me talking about it.

Damn you, Del Taco, and your cheap tacos.

Holly got me to join bebo.com. It’s… not evil. I was really impressed. A nice change from Friendster, which is truly awful (slow, ugly, bloated beast that it is). It’s an interesting idea, but, man, Friendster did not pull it off well. orkut is pretty nice, but, sadly, I never really put any effort into it and then, one day, everyone seemed to be using Friendster (Oh, Sarah, why?).

But back to bebo. Both Friendster and orkut are about connections. Bebo is much simpler; it’s an address book first and foremost with a journal and a photo archive as secondary features. The idea is that you shouldn’t have to send out mass emails when you update your contact information (and shouldn’t have to deal with mass emails when someone else does). Everybody’s info is stored centrally and, as long as people keep their own information updated, is always up to date. It’s a nice idea, and it’s implemented really cleanly. Their privacy policy even seems pretty good.

Pretty slick. You should check it out.

After six months of residence, Greg, Paul.za and I are finally listed on the apartment directory. And we’ve got an official label on our post box. Guess that means they finally think our money’s good enough for them.

On the whole, the SLR’s been good to us, or at least to me. The obvious benefit our place offers is the space, but beyond that, we’ve never had any big problems with the management, the rest of the residents are all pretty nice, and the voting station is directly across the street.

Sure, real bike racks would be nice, and it’d be awesome if we could have one more garage clicker. I suppose, while I’m at it, I might as well mention how rockin’ it’d be if all the bathrooms had showers.

Now if Greg would only stop smelling my sheets all the time. Come on, dude. Creepy.

Everyone has no doubt heard of the Cassini Spacecraft launched in 1997 which last year began a series of flybys of Saturn’s moons. Well, on Christmas day, the Hyugens Probe was released from Cassini and began it’s mission: a closer inspection of the moon of Titan. While the Hyugens Mission is primarily an atmospheric one, it was designed to land on the surface (find it liquid or solid), and take some surface measurements and pictures.

January 14th, Hyugens descended into Titan’s atmosphere and it’s four hour data collection spree began. Four hours for two reasons: (1) the batteries wouldn’t last too much longer, and, more importantly (2) because Hyugens transmits to Cassini, not to Earth. And Cassini wasn’t stopping.

Well, as of 2am this morning, a lot of the data have been analyzed. Except for some awesome pictures, though, little has been released; wait until next week, say.

But, I can say that there is quite a high probability that there exitsts life on Titan.

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Greg says I should put a little shoutout to DrLP whenever sprachwaffe get’s updated. Come on, Greg, ever here of RSS?

But, really it’s not a bad idea. Who in their right mind would feed off of sprachwaffe. Except me, of course, but it’s for administrative purposes, I swear. And I think Paul.za does too. Him I have no excuse for.

But speaking of technological incompetence, what do you get when you cross William Gibson, Bruce Springsteen and a fifteen year old script kiddie? Some form of heinous, ill-formed, leeching invertebrate who is but one example of the hoarde of “beta users” WordPress has managed to accumulate.

The upcoming version of WordPress is in beta at the moment and is in need of testing. Since nothing here is terribly important (I think we can all admit that, right?), I decided to make blogwaffe a testbed for WordPress as of the now passed alpha phase of the development. WordPress is an extremely open community; I didn’t have to sign up for the privilege (if you want to consider it as such) of doing this, I just downloaded the software and had at it. And I’ve kept having at it all the way through alpha and into beta in the here and now.

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