Yeah, Still Here

Sorry for the lack of updates.

It has been only slightly less busy than before, but the good news is that weekends are mine again. The bad news is that my mental stamina and energy level aren't what they ought to be, and I imagine the solution for this will eventually be a nice week's vacation somewhere away from all the folderol at the office.

This post has it all, by the way...

...Travel
This weekend will see me visiting Matt in Atlanta for a Memorial Day Party (honest, Megan, one of these days I'll call first so we can meet for lunch or something) and to get away from everything that has come to be normal in my life: the daily work grind, cleaning the house, feeding the dogs, listening to the multifarious hums and whirs that surround me in my house.

...Romance
The lady I mentioned in my previous post, whom I shall henceforth call L, is still untired of my company, so we're meeting frequently for dinners, conversing over e-mail and the like. In contrast to my treatment of former dating adventures, I shall keep my commentary here to a minimum, as she is quite desirous of privacy. So, sorry, no descriptions of hair, manner, height, eye color or other distinguishing features. Suffice to say she revs my engine, and evidently I do hers, despite a rather breathtaking chasm between us in political terms. 'S a start. :-D

...Philanthropy
There's been an illness in my family since I was posting anything close to frequently. I won't get into any real detail (privacy again, you know), but one of the upshots of the situation is that I have recently made all the computers, idle and otherwise, that I have sitting around my home into contributing machines to the Folding@Home distributed computing project.

A distributed computing initiative is what happens when someone has a problem or set of problems that require truly massive amounts of computing power, like cracking an encryption key, or parsing possible signals from the vast corpus of SETI data (SETI == Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) that has been collected by radio telescopes, or even modeling the complicated folding that protein molecules do as they assume their final forms. The person with the problem figures out a way to split it into manageable chunks, then he/she sends those chunks of problem to hundreds, or thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people who agree to run special "client" programs that will work on those chunks.

SETI@Home is definitely the most famous of the DC initiatives, but also (very arguably) the least immediately useful. Folding@Home is the group with whom I've chosen to throw in my hat (and an approximate six aggregate gigahertz of computing power that was otherwise sitting idle around my house). Understanding protein folding is one of the important frontiers which medicine faces today; specifically understanding why the folding process occasionally goes awry, which can lead to all sorts of diseases, among which are such lovelies as Alzheimer's, several cancers, "Mad Cow" and Parkinson's disease.

Folding@Home's Science page is better equipped to furnish the particulars, but modeling protein folding is an incredibly computationally intensive endeavor, which would tax a modern high-end supercomputer for years on end. But if you can split the problem up and let tens or hundreds of thousands of volunteers work on problems (and you manifestly can), then you can cut that modeling time from years to months or even days. In other words, you can begin to tackle problems that are completely untackleable through any other available method.

F@H has had its preliminary do-the-numbers-add-up results published in several scientific papers, and the huge distributed supercomputer that produced them (which is really what we volunteers are providing) is now being put to work on the nontrivial problems.

It's an exciting thing to be associated with, and it's certainly nice to know I can put my computer-building skills to a use that truly benefits mankind.

-Rich

Putting Life Back Together

Life, at long last, is good.

It's been a wild and wacky two weeks of rollout fun. Between panicky last-minute fixes, nursemaiding tricky network connections, chasing down truant data and otherwise birthing this project, I and the people for whom our team have developed this application are a few hours away from the successful conclusion of its major rollout.

I have officially lost 31 pounds since the 20th of January. Last night I mowed my lawn for the first time since the middle of April. Tonight I'm having dinner with a truly beautiful woman I met in the course of my adventures, and this weekend I plan to take radical steps along the lines of vacuuming the house, restocking it with various sundries, and taking out its trash.

Tae Kwon Do classes restart for me sometime early next week. It'll be nice to be physically tired for once. :-)

-Rich

Pounding Out the Code

Here at work on a Saturday, still working. Ah, the delivery of a product.

So sorry to have neglected Brain Squeezings these past few weeks. If it's any consolation, I'm ignoring everyone else too.

-Rich

Good Freakin' Grief

Boy, am I tired of putting in the time. I've been fighting the creeping crud all week, and mostly winning, but the Project is continuing to demand time, and will continue to do so over the weekend. I've had to nix Tae Kwon Do attendance for the week, too; I'm sure the school sees me as an absolute flake by now.

Anyway, enough griping. This, too, shall pass. I have sleep to get to, and the good news is that the money is still very nice. If the world keeps being good to me and I can keep costs down, I can be entirely out of non-mortgage debt by the fall.

Something to look forward to, anyway.

Snore...

-Rich

Crazy Week; Getting Some Exercise

Oy, only back for a week or two and I'm already going for days and days without posting. Ah well, remedying this tonight.

The week has been a full one, with multitudinous support calls to answer, development to do, bugs to stomp, and meetings to suffer. But one survives, of course. And this weekend I'll be flying to Philadelphia to visit the family over Easter. I'm mentally exhausted, but riding that fulfilled feeling that accompanies the knowledge that no one can in good conscience say I'm not doing my utmost. :-D

Mentally I've been tired, but physically I've been feeling the need to get the blood moving a little. My weight loss from maintaining a simple caloric deficit has slowed over the past weeks, and while it'd continue if I just kept up with the diet plan, feeling so much lighter on my feet has motivated me to undertake an exercise program.

Since I never seem to do anything without making a physical and/or spiritual production out of it, I shopped around a bit and have settled on and enrolled in a Tae Kwon Do class. As Tripp can attest, I dabbled a bit in Tae Kwon Do and Cuong Nhu back when we attended the University of Richmond together, but since then he's done lots more than I have (I never actually took a test; just learned a form or two and some fundamentals about strikes and maintaining my balance while doing absurd things like roundhouse kicks); he may even have attained some real belt levels along the way--care to fill in the gaps, Tripp?

But since I've been thriving on the structures I've imposed on myself over the past few months, I came to the conclusion (watching some martial arts film or documentary a few nights ago) that it was time to revisit the old discipline. The DoJang (dojo) I've joined is Karen Mitchell's American Taekwondo. The people are very friendly there, and Karen herself is a good, patient teacher, which will be a real help to me. There are lots of kids there, but a good number of teens, twentysomethings, and thirty- and fortysomethings too. Two husband-and-wife pairs that I know of, and several of the instructors have their children attending too. A very cool group.

I had my first class tonight; my knees are complete rubber from maintaining the different stances after several uninterrupted years of desk driving, and I may be in some pain tomorrow, but I have the weekend plus Monday to heal up. :-) I was pleased; the balance and some of the techniques came back quickly, to the point that Karen figured out that I'd had instruction before. I've still got the old flexibility, too: the wide, lean-down-to-your-leg stretches beforehand, and above-your-head kicks were no big deal, though my kick control leaves a lot to be desired. As I mentioned, though, maintaining stances, and indeed any sort of exotic weight shifting or holding was tricky. They finished the lesson with push-ups, crunches and leg-lifts too, which were excruciating to my out-of-shape muscles, but exactly the sort of exercise I want.

There was even a big good-natured production around my trying on the uniforms, because I'm taller and broader than their typical students, but in the end one was ordered, and I'll be properly attired in a few days or weeks.

It felt really good to start doing something. A new circle of potential friends, a good look at my svelter self in the DoJang's mirrors; I'm definitely feeling good tonight.

-Rich

A Recuperative Friday

Back in the office today, after a week full of teaching, handholding and question-answering. It's been a long while since I've presented anything to a group of people, and it was good to get back in the swing of it.

Every one of them has my work e-mail address, now, too. I expect my work Inbox to melt down at about 9:15 Monday morning, but in the meantime I will be enjoying my weekend. I'll only have to put in a few hours to get some last-minute cosmetic changes in; as a result I think I will relax by doing some mundane things like mowing the lawn and cleaning the house up a bit. There's a contingent that will be golfing tomorrow, but I won't be joining them; after all the face time I've had over the past few days I need a few days alone to stoke the fires again.

I'll be presenting this material another ten times the week of 4/19 through 4/23, so a recharge is pretty much mandatory.

Yeah. I definitely need to get away sometime May-ish. I'll have to see what sort of vacation time I have available this year.

-Rich

Rode Hard, Put Away Wet

Two days of class-teaching down, and I'm tired. It's been a satisfying pair of days, with feedback from the students almost one hundred percent positive. It's nice to receive a little appreciation for the fruits of one's good old-fashioned hard work.

There was even one sweet young thing in this afternoon's session who seemed quite taken with me. She lives in New York, if memory serves, so most likely nothing will come of it, but she has my e-mail address, so if she's inclined to whisper sweet nothings in my Inbox, she's got my coordinates. ;-)

It feels good to get in front of people and brag on my program. There's a portion of the lesson where I invite them to use it themselves, and that's easily the most powerful part. Then it moves from 'demo' to 'product' in their minds, and that's been fun to watch. People have been flying in from all over the country to see the app, so it's doubly good to know they're feeling as though their time and money have been well spent.

Well, I'm off to sleep the sleep of the just.

-Rich

PS. Stop over by Acidman's and wish him well. He sent beaucoup hits over here today, and looks as though he's done taking boots in the face from his ex-wife. This may mean a hiatus for him, so if you've got wellwishing to do, go do it.