The final days of the month were marred by my succumbing to what I must believe was a genetically-engineered flu virus. It began last week when practically all of the team situated on the opposite side of the office went missing due to illness. A friend of mine on the team came back to work and discovered the huge bag of peanut M&Ms I had on my desk to encourage socialization with all of my fairer coworkers (indeed, it worked well for this… even better than my alien action figure!)
Being the glutunous, addictive bastard that he is, he was constantly at my desk, dipping his pale, clammy hand in my M&M’s, ensuring I would contract whatever virus was incubating in the detritus of partially-digested candy souring in his rotten gut. And I’m sure he scared away some of the fairer coworkers while he was at it.
Despite the unusual virility of this bug, I am happy to report that I think I have survived it. I think. I have to be cautious, as I thought I was over it Wednesday and it came back with a vengeance Thursday.
Some good did come out of my week of laying around on the futon, a fevered, writhing mass of tissue covered with sweat and cats: I discovered that the universally-panned “Speed Racer” (by the Wachowski brothers, of Matrix fame) is actually one of the best movies I’ve seen in a while.
I’ve also decided to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. My username is (creatively enough) clusterlizard if you wish to add me as a buddy (assuming you can get into the site which must be running on a dialup connection in some dork’s basement, splitting the limited bandwidth with his WoW sessions). I’ve really wanted to do something with the Blue Aliens and thought this might be a good way to actually get it done.
I was getting ready to leave work tonight, when I was visited by cute coworker #1 from a previous installment.
me: Cute coworker #1! What’s going on?
cc1: Oh, not much. I thought you might like some popcorn…
hands me a plastic cup filled with popcorn.
me: Hmmmm. Thanks!
cc1: They have a popcorn machine in tech-ops…
me: Oh yeah? It’s like that whole side of the building is a completely different world. I kinda think of it as the fields of Elysium as I sit here watching everything from my grey, dead cocoon of nihilism…
cc1: I don’t even know what that means. Do you like the topping? I made it myself.
me: Yeah. It’s like at the theater. I like the self-serve ones. I drown my popcorn in that shit. I’m all about excess.
cc1: Yeah, me too. Well, sorta. Sometimes. I guess.
me: You’d make a great politician.
cc1: babbling about the real point of her visit—which was to get me to manually insert some crap in the database…
My favorite movie about excess is Scarface. How can anyone not love that fucking movie? It’s almost a bottomless pit of choice quotes and scenes.
One of my favorites is a shot of Michelle Pfeiffer sitting in front of an expensive mirror in her lavish mansion. She looks like she just got out of the shower, with her damp hair combed back. She snorts some coke from a spoon, puts some on her tongue, takes a drink of some alcoholic beverage then, shaking, takes a drag off a cigarette.
Then, with her little finger in her mouth and still shaking, she stares off… from her grey, dead cocoon of nihilism.
Obama: Here’s my shitty plan to fuck things up even more than they already are…
McCain: Here’s Obama’s shitty plan to fuck things up even more than they already are… oh and did I mention I can reach across the aisle and help someone from the other party implement their shitty plan to fuck things up even more than they already are?
Most of the scientific computing challenges that the LHC experiments are facing will require access to huge amounts of storage, the LHC will produce 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data per year. These data requirements mean that most analysis programmes cannot be run on individual PCs. This is why CERN is leading the development of Grid computing, which aims to link hundreds of major computing centres around the world.
However, there are exceptions where volunteer computing makes sense for the LHC. In particular, volunteer computing is good for tasks which need a lot of computing power but relatively little data transfer. In 2004, CERN’s IT Department became interested in evaluating the sort of technology that is used by volunteer computing projects like SETI@home. LHC@home became the overall title for these efforts, and a program called SixTrack, which simulates particles traveling around the LHC to study the stability of their orbits, became the first application to be tested. It was chosen because it can fit on a single PC and requires relatively little input or output, but a lot of processing power.
Sixtrack began running as a volunteer computing project in 2004, and has been running for most of the time ever since. In addition, a new application called Garfield has been ported so it can run on the same BOINC platform as Sixtrack, and work is ongoing at CERN to see whether even more sophisticated physics software could be ported, especially using virtualization technologies.
Sarah Palin gets a solid 9. Dear God, she’s hot. Who was that annoying used car salesman who kept interrupting her? Every time I’d start to develop a hot fantasy, that greasy old guy would show up blubbering about… well, I don’t even remember.
The only mistake Gov. Palin made was her dress… it could have been much slinkier.
So, I was watching the news and stumbled across something interesting. This whole $700 billion dollar bailout thing has had a foul stench about it from the start. The Secretary of the Treasury, Henry M. Paulson, has asked Congress (well, you and me) for an insane amount of money and even more insane levels of independence in how he spends it.
Paulson used to head up Goldman Sachs, an investment banking and securities firm. And who showed up at a closed-door New York Federal Reserve meeting on September 15th as the only representative of a private corporation? Why, Lloyd C. Blankfein of Goldman Sachs!
A few days later, federal officials ended up bailing out A. I. G. for $85 billion-a move which they had refused to make prior to the New York Fed meeting… hmmm…
I wonder what would have happened if they had gone with their initial plan and let A. I. G. sink? Why… Goldman Sachs would have been out $20 billion dollars! My heart bleeds for them.
So, yeah, I don’t trust Paulson with our $700 billion dollars and the man should probably be fired immediately.
An excellent overview of the Federal Reserve, from my old college friend, Jake. Originally posted here. And I thought he was just playing video games all those times he skipped class…
I went to the elevator on my way to lunch, only to discover three very cute coworkers already waiting there…
clusterlizard: wow… my lucky day!
cute coworkers: giggle
clusterlizard: so where you all going for lunch?
cute coworker #1: we’re going downstairs to do yoga in the gym.
clusterlizard: we have a gym here?
cute coworker #1: yeah… it’s kind of dark and smells… like a gym.
clusterlizard: wow. I should go down there and lurch around in the shadows sometime.
cute coworker #1: do you want to come exercise with us?!
clusterlizard: hmmmm… there are a million ways I could play this… and I’m certain every one of them would get me fired… I don’t know… can I smoke there?
cute coworkers: giggle
cute coworker #1: smoking is bad for you!
clusterlizard: yeah, but it looks cool. What’s the point of being able to breathe if you look like a dork doing it?
From a protest of the $700 billion bailout on Wall Street. Hilarious.
Protest on Wall Street
Latest reports are that democrats are saying progress is being reached in hammering out a “relief plan”. I’m so glad this effort to bend the entire country over and assrape us all is a bi-partisan one! That $700 billion would buy an awful lot of lube.
