I’m sitting at the computer typing, when the dog bumps up against my legs. I look down, and she’s sniffing the floor around my feet intently.

“What are you doing down there?”

“I’m looking for steak!” she says, wagging her tail hopefully.

“I’m pretty certain that there’s no steak down there,” I say. “I’ve never eaten steak at the computer, and I’ve certainly never dropped any on the floor.”

“You did in some universe,” she says, still sniffing.

I sigh. “I’m going to move the quantum physics books to a higher shelf, so you can’t reach them.”

Myself, I’ve never had a physics course in my life. I do however have some interest in the various sciences and I have cracked open the occasional science textbook for classes I’ve never been in. Pretty much every time, it makes my brain leak out my ears and causes me to wonder why I bother. Then today while waiting for a rather incredibly slow server to finish running my SQL update, I hit up SEB out of boredom and found his link to the article on Uncertain Principles. The article both made sense and made me smile, which lines up nicely with my idea of good teaching. So thanks to Les for pointing out Mr. Orzel’s excellent article and double thanks to Mr. Orzel for writing it.

One Smart (sort-of) Doggie © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

For a long time I have resisted placing any form of advertising on this site. I just didn’t want to deal with the hassle of it and I wanted to keep CoffeeBear.net “pure”. However I realize now that is something of a very silly notion and decided to give Text Link Ads a chance to make this site pay for itself.

Does this mean I’ve sold out? Well I am trying to make a small amount of money from this site now; however CoffeeBear.net will not become some advert laden monstrosity with hundreds of annoying, flashing banners. Just two little links in the sidebar. So you’re free to think what you like, but I’m not thinking this counts as selling out.

¹ Readers of my RSS feed will also eventually be seeing some text link ads as well. How long it takes depends on how quickly Text Link Ads sells the advert slots.
² All links to Text Link Ads in this post are in fact affiliate links and if you use them to go to their site to sign up, then I am supposed to get 25 smackeroos. :)

Adverts by Text Link Ads © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

You see, one of my all-time favorite video games was the original Team Fortress mod for Half-Life. The class choices, mayhem and fun were an unbeatable combination¹. Then as other mods were developed further; Valve announced they were going to go all out on making TF2. This was 5 years ago and was the last we heard from Valve about it. At least the last we heard until this month when they released the official trailer for TF2. The new character models are wicked cool and oddly enough something about the trailer reminds me of No One Lives Forever (another great video game).

Just wow! I cannot think of any better description of how cool this trailer looks. Go on, hit the link and watch it yourself!

¹ At least I’ve always thought so, but others have preferred that POS called Counter-Strike.

Team Fortress 2! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

“Ultimately, negative perceptions of candidates could have participation implications by keeping more youth from the polls,” they wrote.

Maybe I’m just a bit cynical myself but I’d think there’s also the possibility these youth will start working the political scene to replace the loser candidates we have now with somebody who might actually represent their interests.

Jon Stewart, Cynical Youth and Voting © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Those crazy cats at EepyBird.com took 101 liters of Diet Coke & 523 Mentos and rather than throwing some sort of god-awful party with it; they came up with a much more original idea. With those humble ingredients, they recreated the famous Bellagio Fountains in Las Vegas, NV. Oh and as a quick warning to anybody tempted to drink the leftovers of such an experment; DON’T. From the reactions of the EepyBird guys, I’d say it makes motor oil taste good. :)

Wooosh! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

If so, you better have your towel with you today! As today, is Towel Day.

For those not familiar, Douglas Adams was one of the funniest writers of our time. He wrote a wonderful series of radio plays which were converted in a a series of books and a TV show and later into a really awful movie. This was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In this, Mr. Adams wrote:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical
value — you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you — daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

After Mr. Adams’s death some lunatics decided to create Towel Day as a tribute to his genius. I only heard about it this year (about a week ago to be more precise) and decided to join in on the fun. And the fact that I’m telecommuting to work today had absolutely nothing to do with that decision. *grin*

Are you a hoopy frood, like me? © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

• We survived the tornados and hail that hit our area a week ago. Our apartment and cars were not even get damaged by the storm. Below are a few links to some of the stores online about what happened.
  • Press-Citizen.com | Tornado Coverage
  • USATODAY.com — Iowa tornado damage tops $12 million
  • Radio Iowa: Emergency calls from Iowa City tornadoes released
  • CNN.com — Tornadoes rip through eastern Iowa, killing one — Apr 14, 2006
  • FOXNews.com — Funnel Clouds Reported in Iowa Tornado Threats — U.S. & World
• Last weekend, we replaced Ariesna’s car (1992 Ford Escort, aka Ghost) with a 2002 Volkswagen Golf (aka Grace, aka Gracie). The really odd part about getting the new car? Even though it’s a replacement for Ghost; Ariesna has been letting me drive it the most. Apparently, this is at least partly due to the amount door dings her old car suffered through in her office’s parking lot but it still seems strange to me. Then today, the dealership called me back asking me to come in and sign a new finance contract on the car. Why? Because they found me another offer which would drop the interest rate by 1.25 points! Now that’s what I call service. So a big thanks goes out to Carousel Motors for the excellent service.
• Last weekend, Ariesna and I looked at a house. But it was too expensive for the amount of work required to make it a home we’d want to live (namely a musty basement and some bad remodeling in the family room, dining room and kitchen). We showed up about 15 minutes early for the showing and the realtor showed up just short of 15 minutes late. He did eventually call to let us know he was running late… 5 minutes after he was supposed to be there. I was initially a bit underwhelmed by the guy. But when he finally got there and let us into the house; he let us do our own looking around without trying to pressure us and listened to the comments we had about the house to get a better idea of what we were interested in.

Real Life Recap © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Inquire Within © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

• Bento | Gmaps:Google Maps with English translations showing eating/dining options in Tokyo, Japan
• Motherload: A flash based game where you drive a mining pod on Mars digging for ore. Sounds silly but it’s strangely addictive; I clicked it intending to play for just a few minutes and ended up spending hours on it today. Then again, part of that could have been the cold medicine.
• MythBusters | Lost Experiments: The Discovery channel has put online short video segments from the MythBusters TV show where we get to see never before released footage. :D Very cool!

Sickday Links © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

I was up playing Wild Arms 3 till about 3 am as I just couldn’t sleep. Most likely due to an excessive amount of munching on holiday goodies while downing glass, after glass of soda¹. I found one monster to fight that took around an hour to defeat but it jumped my characters up 4–7 levels! *grin* Then when I eventually got to bed; I slept poorly. Our apartment is just too dry this time of year and our little humidifier stopped working. This causes me to keep waking up with sinus headaches and a terrible thrist. I got out of bed about 8:30 — 9 and went back to playing the video game a bit more. Shortly there after, Michelle got up and gave me my birthday present.

What’d she get me? A case of blue balls Bawls. Then after lazing around most of the day; we headed out to the local mall to meet some friends.

I’d foolishly asked a bunch of friends to join us in watching the Narina movie with a follow-up plan to eat dinner together. There was one point that I’d not factored in these plans. This year, my birthday fell on a Saturday. Just about the last Saturday before Christmas. Traffic was insane and people all around were grouchy, though we did run across some nice people that helped us get around the parking lot². We went over to the mall a little early and bought a new humidifer and then headed down to the theater. We got tickets, met up with our friends and went in to watch the The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

*whew* What a movie! While not perfect, it was probably as good as we could hope for from a Hollywood production.
High points:

• The actress playing Lucy was spot on. Most of the other actors cast in the movie were also quite good
• The backgrounds were gorgeous.
• The addition of the Nazi bombing run at the beginning of the movie really helped to give context to the time of the story.

Low points:

• The costuming on the witch. Her outfits were ugly and just didn’t work with the imagery I have in my head for the character. Though I do have to admit the black , soulless eyes did work for me.
• The witch was not nearly as afraid of Aslan as she should have been. In my memories of the book, the witch was terrified of Aslan but the movie seemed to put them on a more even footing.
• Maugrim’s voice. The actor doing the voice did a fine job, but being the only character without a british accent really stuck out and annoyed me.

Overall, I’d say it was worth seeing in the theater and it is something I’ll be adding to our DVD collection when it becomes available.

After the movie was over, we headed to the restaurant. Oh, I should mention we had called earlier in the day to try making reservations but were told they don’t do that for parties of less than 8. And that they would have plenty of room for the 6 of us. When we got there; we were told it would be a 2 hour wait. We decided to switch to the Oyama Sushi restaurant. They seated us within minutes of our arrival (even though they were already pretty packed). Then they plied us with drinks until our food was ready³. We had a jolly time chatting and drinking (non-alcholic, for the most part) but all good things do come to an end and eventually we all headed home. It was a very good day and while I ain’t dead yet; I am a bit tired so good night, sleep tight and don’t let the space bugs bite!

¹ a.k.a. pop to you heathens.
² A few people threw their cars into reverse to open up bigger areas for us to drive through and things of that nature.
³ It turns out this weekend contains not only my birthday and practically the last weekend before Christmas but it’s also graduation weekend for the University! No wonder everything was so packed today! This also explains why it took so long for our food to arrive.

Ain’t Dead Yet © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.