Author: Simone

It’s not like a rollercoaster.

Just got back from Cloverfield at the Uptown. I’m almost not-queasy enough (an hour after the movie ended) to think about maybe being able to drink a glass of water.

While it’s true that I can ride rollercoasters all day and not feel sick, the experience was a bit more like trying to read in the car (as a passenger, I mean.) Only the car and everything around it is being blown up/shot at/consumed by an earthquake, and every once in a while you get a glimpse of a pretty cool monster.

I had my eyes closed for most of the movie, but weirdly don’t feel that I wasted my $10 on the ticket. The soundtrack gives good clues of when there’s monster action, and overall it was an entertaining experience. I just can’t truthfully say that I’ve seen it. I saw maybe twelve minutes of it. My neck kinda hurts now, from the tension.

Things I Discovered at Lunchtime

1. There’s a pizza-by-the-slice place at 17th and G (it’s called Ecco Cafe).
2. McReynold’s Liquor on G Street between 17th and 18th has a “10% off all single malts” sale every Thursday.
3. Brewood Engravers has moved to 17th and Pennsylvania. (They used to be at 17th & I, and I lamented their disappearance.)
4. The “nondescript government building name” Ehren was talking about earlier today is the Office of Thrift Supervision.

And I saw a woman riding a unicycle. (She wasn’t performing. She was going somewhere.)

Unlike the Immortal Sablefish?

“It is a slow-growing species, extremely vulnerable to mortality,” says Leonard.

*blink?*

As opposed to all those immortal fishes??

Sure, he’s saying that a species with lots of fast-growing, fast-to-reproduce individuals have less of a problem with mortality, as a species. That’s why no-one is complaining about the overfishing of krill. It just struck me as funny. What with pretty much every known species being vulnerable to mortality, as far as I know.

How this happened: I was in Whole Foods yesterday looking for halibut (because it’s high in magnesium and therefore good for my joints), but halibut’s apparently out of season, and I got suckered into buying some Chilean sea bass because it had a “sustainable fisheries” sticker on it and looked the most like halibut of anything there. Then I felt guilty because of the whole fishing thing in general and the Chilean sea bass thing in particular, so I looked it up and found the above quote which, perversely, made me feel better about the whole thing. I feel guilty about buying fish, generally. Except for the ultra-sustainable tilapia (which I think of as the bamboo of fish). But who wants to eat tilapia all the time? Bland. Not so much with the Omega-3s. A bit on the pointless side. May as well eat tofu. (In fact, I’d usually rather eat tofu than tilapia.)

Plus, today I discovered that despite halibut being at the very top of the “high in magnesium” foods list, there are no other fish on there at all. So the whole magnesium justification is out, and I should just eat spinach instead.

 

New Geek Badge

You know how I claim to not care about hardware?

We just figured out that because of some crazy specials that Dell is running, it’ll be cheaper for us to get new PowerEdge 2900 server than anything from the 1900 series. I’m reading technical specs, and I’m actually salivating.
“Salivates over Server Specs.” That’s a new badge.

Fogey File

Things that make me feel old:

(1) Area codes with a non-1-or-zero center digit. When I was growing up, all area codes had either a 1 or a 0 in the middle. I asked my dad about it once and he said it was a technical limitation of the telephone switching system from way back.

(2) After accidentally deleting the Busta Rhymes episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast from TiVo about three years ago, not realizing until yesterday that we could just look it up on YouTube.

(3) The thing I’m happiest about finding on YouTube so far is a 1914 recording of a song written in 1820 from a poem written by a guy who was born in 1774.

(4) Realizing (while doing a crossword puzzle) that I remember when “undo” was a fancy new computer function.

(5) Having a panic attack because I only have 3.8 GB of space left on the file server, and then realizing that probably sometime in my lifetime, 4 GB was more storage than there was on all the computers in the whole world. (Maybe. Have been unable to find a chronology to confirm.)

Addendum: I was talking to Colin about this the other day, and we figured this: Back in the day (the October 1970-type day, when I was born), a really whiz-bang corporate computer had maybe 1 kilobyte of storage. Yes, kiddies, that’s 1KB. Most of the data at that time was on tape or cards, so the computers themselves were not big on the byte capacity. For there to have been 3.8GB available on the planet, there would have had to be 38,000 1KB computers in 1970 (or, alternatively, 3,800 1MB computers), which we are pretty sure there were not. But if anyone can tell us otherwise, we’d be delighted to hear about it.

And P.S. I got my shiny new file server and now I have 418GB of available space, and I sleep much better, so ha!

Biggest acorns ever

The giant mutant acorns I saw are apparently from a bur (or burr) oak, Quercus macrocarpa. I’ll bring one to the office to show you. Web images are mostly lacking in scale—I had to look for about half an hour before finding the image that clinched the identification. I’ll check the leaves tomorrow too, if I can do so without incurring the wrath of the guards of the Bethesda Naval Hospital, where the tree is.