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| Ephemerides |
Thursday, March 24, 2005
It's looking more dark and discolored. Although the darkness is partly because the porch was in shadow when I took the picture, while the background was sunny.
Also, Happy Birthday to my sister!
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Last weekend I was driving up my street, and 3 deer ran across the street in front of me. Which is kinda weird because the side of the street that they came from is just houses, and another big street behind those houses. So where were they coming from? Had they just finished their grocery shopping?
Learned something about gas pumps last weekend. When you buy mid-grade, apparently the pump mixes together the regular and premium gas... there isn't a dedicated underground tank for mid-grade. Which makes sense from the gas station's point of view. The way I figured this out is, I was pumping my premium gas and noticed there was a little odometer-type thing in the corner of the gas pump that was ticking up, evidently keeping track of total gallons ever pumped at this pump. Furthermore, I noticed there were actually two odometers, one which was 10 times higher than the other. This makes sense since regular gas is way more popular than premium. But I got to wondering why there wasn't a 3rd odometer for the mid-grade, so I stopped pumping premium and tried the mid-grade. Turns out both odometers ticked: the regular counter ticked twice for every time the premium counter ticked. This makes sense since here in Michigan, octane levels are 87, 89, and 93, so you need 2 parts regular for 1 part premium. Cool, eh?
Also, you learn something new about Unix every day. Have you ever
had the error message "device is busy" when you try to unmount
something, even though you are sure you've closed every window and
cd-ed out of that directory in every shell? Have you just wanted a
way to find out what the heck process is keeping that device busy?
Well, /usr/sbin/lsof (list open files) does it. (In my
case, turns out some daemon called gam_server that checks files for
modification was keeping the device busy.)
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Damn:
From here: "Gas prices are seen Tuesday, March 15, 2005, at a 76 gas station in Malibu, Calif. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)"
Sunday, March 13, 2005
I just went for a drive because I wasn't tired enough to go to sleep and I didn't feel like doing anything productive, and I haven't gone for a random drive in a while. Anyway, at one point a deer crossed the road right in front of me. (I wasn't close to hitting it or anything.) It was right by a "deer crossing" sign too... what a well-behaved deer! Heh.
**
Can't forget about the pumpkin:
This picture was taken a few days ago. As you can see, looking a bit flatter and a bit more wrinkly lately.
So for some reason I was looking around online to see what's new at UCLA, since that place is always under construction. (Actually the reason is I got a song stuck in my head, and when I looked around on my computer for that song I found this directory of songs from 1st year of undergrad which I never play anymore, and that reminded me of the dorm years, which made me wonder what was going on there nowadays.) Anyway it turns out they're building 3 more high rises on the residential hill, with a total capacity of about 2000 new beds. This surprised me somewhat because.. really, where on the hill do they have room for 3 more high rises? Plus they just built De Neve plaza. But anyway, apparently when all the new housing is done they will be able to house 3rd years.
By the way, dorm rates unsurprisingly have increased. I lived in a double suite with a Blue 14 meal plan, and today that would cost $11,404. Yikes. Apparently, a similar setup here at UMich costs $7030. That's like 60% of the cost... although, not terribly surprising I guess.
Sunday, March 6, 2005
I went snowboarding with Bill yesterday at Mt. Brighton, which is a ski area really close to here (about 30 minutes away). It actually used to be a landfill that they've since covered up and put lifts on. It's really small (both in terms of area and elevation). See those two bumps in the picture below? That's Mt. Brighton, and the term "Mount" is being used loosely.
Now, in case you are not aware, southeastern Michigan is basically completely flat land. So actually those bumps are the highest ground for quite a while, and you can see pretty far from the tops of them. Ski conditions were really nice because it snowed quite a bit last week, and yesterday the weather was beautiful, above freezing with not a cloud in the sky as you can see from the picture. Ideal snowboarding weather, really.
Anyway, it was a pretty relaxing day, since we were able to go on all the runs by lunchtime. So the rest of the afternoon just consisted of leisurely taking whatever runs we felt like. During that time I rode on a tow rope for the first time, and also landed my first jump.
One funny thing about this place is the runs are named for colors, and the colors do not match up with the green/blue/black colors used to indicate difficulty. So for example the blue run was a black diamond, and the black run was a blue. So yeah, there would be potential for confusion except that there was really very little difference in difficulty between the runs anyway.