This is exactly what I think cat’s personalities are like.

I really wish the person who makes this comic had a web site that I could link you to – it’s really a very funny daily comic.

So today I started what I hope will be a new routine for me: walking to work.

It’s about 2.5 miles one way from my front door to my office, and about 500 feet of elevation gain along the way.  I did it today in 35 minutes – not too shabby, if I do say so myself.  And it’s a beautiful walk to boot.  I’m hoping to use this routine as a sort of training for hiking longer trails in the future – I figure that walking 5 miles 6 days a week (Delilah and I take 5-mile walks more or less every Saturday) is decent starter training for walking 20 miles a day 7 days a week further down the line.

I finally got some time in this weekend to do some work on Feralor.  I haven’t had much time to work on it since late January, and it feels good to get back in to the code.  The first thing I did was I moved all the computation of the interactive map tiles to the client’s web browser, instead of processing that data on the server.  At the moment, this means blockier images (because JavaScript isn’t as fast a C or C++) but on the other hand, it requires no storage or computation on my server, which makes for an infinitely more scalable system (and keeps my hosting costs down).  I also changed around some of the UI stuff to be a bit more polished, and I made the avatar gallery more browsable (before, you had to know the name of a friend’s avatar to see it; now you can view a list of all the names that have been registered so far and click on the one you are interested in).  This will probably break down once more people start registering, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

I’m feeling pretty good about the project again, and I’m very motivated too.  I’m hoping to get some more work done on it in the weeks to come and maybe even have people start logging in and poking around soonish.

Mike Rowe, the guy behind Dirty Jobs, just testified before Congress about the total lack of skilled labor in this country:

A few months ago in Atlanta I ran into Tom Vilsack, our Secretary of Agriculture. Tom told me about a governor who was unable to move forward on the construction of a power plant. The reason was telling. It wasn’t a lack of funds. It wasn’t a lack of support. It was a lack of qualified welders.

In high schools, the vocational arts have all but vanished. We’ve elevated the importance of “higher education” to such a lofty perch that all other forms of knowledge are now labeled “alternative.” Millions of parents and kids see apprenticeships and on-the-job-training opportunities as “vocational consolation prizes,” best suited for those not cut out for a four-year degree. And still, we talk about millions of “shovel ready” jobs for a society that doesn’t encourage people to pick up a shovel.

In a hundred different ways, we have slowly marginalized an entire category of critical professions, reshaping our expectations of a “good job” into something that no longer looks like work. A few years from now, an hour with a good plumber — if you can find one — is going to cost more than an hour with a good psychiatrist. At which point we’ll all be in need of both.

I came here today because guys like my grandfather are no less important to civilized life than they were 50 years ago. Maybe they’re in short supply because we don’t acknowledge them they way we used to. We leave our check on the kitchen counter, and hope the work gets done. That needs to change.

I’ve been saying this for years.  This country is so hell-bent on getting everyone a 4-year degree, and nobody realizes that this country needs skilled labor (and unskilled labor, for that matter).  We need plumbers and construction workers and sanitary engineers just as much as doctors and lawyers, and perhaps even more so.

At some point, I lost a bunch of the original content on my web site.  Some of those things I really miss.  For example, I had a large number of pictures that my friend Dan and his friend Jake took on a cross-country trip during which they visited a whole bunch of national parks.  I also had a large collection of random crap that I thought was funny or pertinent at the time.  This web site has functioned as something of a public journal of what was going on at my life at any particular point in time.

Well, just for shits and grins, I visited the Internet archive today and to my immense satisfaction, I found that they have a fairly complete archive of a lot of the older content of my site, and so I started copying parts of it back into the live site again.  Hopefully I’ll be able to get it all, or at least the quotes and funny stuff that I used to have before (although it appears as though most of the picture attachments are not available), and perhaps even the journal content itself.

This is beautiful:

Tinkerer's Rules

I bought one and will be having it framed shortly, and then it will find its way to my office to be displayed for all to enjoy.

Killing Osama

My favorite user-contributed quote posted on BoingBoing:

Obama looks like he was just walking down the hall and decided to pop in the room that everyone’s hanging out in. He grabbed a chair and was like, “What’s everybody watch….oh.”