Kids gone missing over the weekend.

Monday 30 June 2008 at 3:40 pm The kids that went missing have been located. I don't have any more information than that, though their parents are probably having kittens right now...

Stand down.

Missing children from Alexandria, VA

Monday 30 June 2008 at 1:41 pm Lyssa's just informed me of a missing persons report that was posted to a mailing list in the DC metroplex: Two children (Michele Dalton, age 15, and Jessica Williams, age 17) were reported missing by their parents on 26 June 2008 from their homes in Arlington, Virginia. They've been sighted a number of times in the vicinity of Fort Belvoir, Virginia (off of exit 57-A on the Beltway) but havn't returned to their homes or been picked up by local police yet. Download the flyers from the report I linked to (in .pdf format) and take a look at them - if you've seen them, please call 911 (if you're in the area) or the Arlington County Police Department (703-558-2222), or you can call the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 1-800-843-5678 (1-800-THE-LOST). The notice also states that the flyers can be printed out and posted in the area, and that your local Kinko's/FedEx will often print them out for free if you ask them nicely.

Please, if you're in the area, keep an eye open for these kids, and help them get home safely. They might be runaways; they might be trying to hitchhike to the beach; they might be in serious trouble. There's no way of knowing what the deal is until they've been found, so please lend a hand if you can.

Restaurant review: Red, Hot, and Blue BBQ

Monday 30 June 2008 at 09:34 am Last Friday afternoon, the guys from work and I went for one of our infrequent lunch trips offsite because our PM is leaving for another project in a few weeks, and it's tradition to take the outgoing folks out for lunch sometime before their last day. After some discussion about who liked what, what was within comfortable driving distance, and what kind of transportation was available to us (thank you again to A-, whose minivan carried most of us at the same time). We eventually decided to go out for barbecue at Red, Hot, and Blue BBQ in Alexandria (6482 Landsdowne Centre; Alexandria, VA; 22315; phone 703-550-6465; fax 703-550-6463).

The lunchtime wait wasn't bad, at most ten wallclock minutes during peak dining times, which was most impressive given that there were ten of us with two takeout orders in the queue for the folks who couldn't join us. The restaurant has a serious thing for the blues, and it shows all over the walls: There were photographs of famous jazz and blues musicians on every vertical surface, vintage and antique concert posters dating all the way back to the 40's in frames, and even one of B.B. King's guitars (with autograph) held a place of honor by the front door, safely enclosed in a lexan shadowbox. After perusing the menu for a couple of minutes, I decided on one of the lunch specials, the grilled chicken salad with a cup of chili on the side, coffee, and water. A few of the others went for the fried catfish, hamburgers, pulled pork, and a few other things that I don't recall off the top of my head. Personally speaking, the meal I'd ordered was excellent, and I'd definitely go back to order it again. Talking with some of the guys after we left, there were no complaints and smiles all around. It's hard to make a bunch of techies happy at the same restaurant but Red, Hot, and Blue certainly accomplished the feat without breaking a sweat. The waitstaff was attentive, fast, and most of all pleasant, which I greatly appreciate.

All in all, I'd give the Red, Hot, and Blue Barbecue one flaregun out of four. If charred meat and sauce are your thing, you'll definitely want to check this place out because you'll enjoy what you get, and there's a fine selection of things to order. Hell, I'd go back, and you know how I am about barbecue.

Restaurant review: Burrito Brothers, Fairfax, VA

Thursday 26 June 2008 at 6:28 pm While out and about running errands last night, Lyssa and I found ourselves running dangerously low on blood sugar but trapped in a Whole Paycheque that just didn't have anything we particularly wanted for dinner in the form of takeout, which to date isn't anything that's happened within recent memory. After stowing our groceries in the trunk of the TARDIS we cast our eyes about the strip mall in search of a nearby restaurant for a quick dinner. The local Thai restaurant didn't particularly appeal, but then our eyes fell upon a hole in the wall tex-mex joint called Burrito Brothers (7505 Leesburg Pike; Suite E; Falls Church, VA 22043; phone 703-356-8226; fax 703-356-1235) on the other side of the parking lot.

"What the hell," we said. "This could be either really good, or hideously bad."

While it wasn't hideously bad, it was what Fuschia once termed "stunningly mediocre" in fare. We walked in and found ourselves inside what seemed to be a buffet restaurant converted into a sit-down; the buffet part was behind the counter and contained sundry components of their fare: shredded lettuce and spinach, different salsas, cooked and steamed rices and beans, what have you. By this point I was hungry enough to order just about anything on the menu so long as it would clear my head, so I ordered the chicken burrito. Lyssa ordered a papusa revuelta and what appeared to be the carne a la plancha (grilled steak with sides of refried beans, rice, and fresh salsa). My burrito wasn't all that bad, especially when I started trying samples from the bar of salsas on it, though my digestive system prepared to hoist a black flag and threatened to slit some throats if it didn't get its way shortly (it did). Lyssa says that she wasn't impressed at all by the carne a la plancha. Both of us agree that the papusa was definitely something to write home about... to tell our friends and loved ones not to order it.

If you do happen to go here, don't bother ordering the super platters because the burritos themselves are quite large, and would easily be enough for two strong-stomached individuals to share as a meal. It should also be noted that the usual extras taken for granted with tex-mex food (like guacamole and sour cream) must be purchased as extras if you've a mind to add them.

Overall, I give Burrito Brothers a rating of three and a quarter flare guns. The food was mediocre at best: not very tasty, filling because there was so much of it, and required a major trip to the bathroom about an hour after we got home. Also, I was desperate enough to need food of any kind so that I'd be able to drive home. If you're desperate or a high school student looking for someplace to get a cheap meal while you're out with your friends, and you happen to be in Fairfax, Virginia, then this is probably the place for you. If you're looking for decent fare, however, avoid this restaurant.

RIP - George Carlin

Monday 23 June 2008 at 09:39 am A moment of silence, please, for comedian, satirist, and renegade intellectual George Carlin, who died on Sunday afternoon at the age of 71 of heart failure. Carlin was one of the first hosts of Saturday Night Live and an outspoken voice against censorship, stemming from his famous "seven deadly words" skit, which culminated in an indecency trial that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Since then, he had been arrested a number of times for performing that particular set, but every time the charges were thrown out of court. Over the years, he released many stand-up comedy recordings, performed hundreds if not thousands of times on stage, and recorded almost a dozen stand-up shows for HBO. He was renowned for his scathingly funny monologues about the absurdity of modern life. Later this year, he was to be awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor by the John F. Kennedy Center.

Rather than eulogize him in a manner that would, if Carlin were still alive, cause him to verbally roast me like a medium-rare steak, the seven deadly words: Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits. Remember: language can give you power or take power from you. It can harm you if you let it, but it can also set you free if you claim your authority over it.

Walking the Thresholds: This one went to eleven.

Wednesday 18 June 2008 at 6:17 pm At more or less the last minute last week, I decided to attend Walking the Thresholds 0x0B at the Four Quarters Farm, just over the Pennsylvania border, in the lands I simultaneously love and fear because they're so far off the grid that you're fortunate to get three GPS satellites to lock on to. After co-ordinating with Hasufin, Mika, and Sarah for a bit it was decided that I'd head over to their place, leave the TARDIS behind to save on fuel costs, and ride up with them. Our colleague in arms and all things nerdcore Jason would be going on ahead due to his schedule, and we'd pitch camp together after arriving. Because I was traveling lightly for a camping trip, with only a trunkload of stuff, it really didn't take long to throw together three changes of clothes (you never know), some food, some equipment, and a few things to keep myself busy (because the Four Quarters Farm does not have a "no event horizons" rule due to its distance from civilization).

It took a few tries to get all of my gear loaded into Hasufin's car sufficiently so that Mika and I could crush ourselves into the empty space for the drive to Sarah's apartment, where we'd be splitting our personnel and equipment among the multiple cars and caravaning up to the campsite. In retrospect, I wish I'd taken the time to find my FRS radios so that we could keep in touch without having to rely on our cellular phones, but ultimately it didn't matter a great deal. Before actually heading out, Hasufin and I took off for the local Trader Joe's store to pick up a few last minute choice morsels of food (vis a vis, curried chicken, steak, and stuff for s'mores) and a bit of coffee to keep me going (because I was running on nearly 20 hours of uptime with practically no blood sugar), but returned in record time because he knows the back way into the shopping plaza, which is a much shorter trip during rush hour in northern Virginia. I'm also thankful that traffic on the Beltway thinned out sufficiently so that the drive to Sarah's (which is not too far short of Fort Meade and Baltimore) only took a little over an hour. Not bad for the DC metroplex, I think. However, this put our departure time closer to 1800 EST5EDT, which will become important later... during car-ride conversation on the way over, it was determined that we had yet more stops for supplies to make (most of them medical in nature), which took up yet more time. Backtracking to return to the Beltway took even more time... not that I'm complaining about how long the trip took, but a goodly amount of the night was spent in the car burning dead dinosaurs. If I didn't include these bits, my paragraphs would be a lot shorter, but now it's the four cups of coffee I had at breakfast talking.

Less caffeinated commentary after the cut.
More under the cut...

Going traveling for a while.

Friday 13 June 2008 at 4:03 pm Headed up to Pennsylvania to go camping. Back on Sunday.

Take care of yourselves, everyone.

Hot, humid, and bored.

Monday 09 June 2008 at 10:58 am One thing about writing posts with Google Docs: You can't divide posts into a header and the part-behind-the-cut with it. With the advent of June in the DC area comes summer, and temperatures that one would expect of the South: hot, sunny, too damned bright, and damned hot. If you factor in the high humidity which tends to come with summer, call it "hot enough to not want to get out of the shower, let alone leave the house" and you've got it right. Temperatures on Friday were around 100 degrees Fahrenheit if you factored in the humidity (the 'heat index' that they've started using in the weather forecasts in the past year or two). Saturday was also in the neighborhood of the low hundreds, Sunday a bit higher, and if the forecast was correct, today's supposed to feel like it's 110 degrees Fahrenheit if you're standing in the sun, a bit less if you're in the shade. It isn't the heat so much as it is the humidity. Handling high temperatures isn't a big deal for me (you're talking to someone who walked around wearing cordoroy and a fedora at DefCon a few years ago) but when you start putting moisture into the air, I've got a problem. I suspect that it has something to do with the humidity preventing the cooling mechanisms of my body from transferring heat efficiently by impeding the evaporation of sweat. In hindsight I probably should have gone swimming this weekend, but all I really wanted to do was lay around reading and move as little as possible. It should be noted that we've had the air conditioning turned all the way up since Friday, and it still makes you feel lethargic. Oh, and I also feel the need to grouse a bit about the cost of petrol in DC. The cheapest I've been able to find thus far has been $4us per gallon, with the highest being $4.29us per gallon (all prices for 87 octane, also known as "the cheap stuff"). Those of you who don't live in the United States are probably shrugging and grousing that you've been living with far higher prices than that per litre for gasoline for well over a decade now, and that I shouldn't be complaining. You're probably right, so I'll let the topic drop here.
More under the cut...

Walking the Thresholds 10 photographs.

Saturday 07 June 2008 at 9:25 pm Thanks to Jade in New York, I've got a few photographs from Walking the Thresholds 10 in Pennsylvania.

Storms ravage NOVA: power loss and major property damage

Thursday 05 June 2008 at 12:45 pm It's probably hit your local news by now, but I'll push on with this article, anyway. A series of violent thunderstorms ripped through northern Virginia yesterday afternoon and went on well into the night, wrseaking havoc as they went. Lyssa tells me that the power went out in our neighborhood around 1500 EST5EDT yesterday, around the time that she and Jason were on their way to the optomitrist's office to get her eyes checked. They tell me that it took them better than an hour to make a three hour drive from route 7 to our road. For my part, I was soaked to the skin within seconds of setting foot outside, and the wind was strong enough to force water beneath the doorseals of my car, so that the passenger cabin was only slightly less humid than outside (the windows were in fact up - that's why I ran outside to check). When I actually punched out to go home the rain had all but stopped (for a couple of hours), but the aftermath was plain to see: Trees were down all over the place, disrupting traffic (one resulted in an hour-long detour that gave me ample opportunity to sit back in the driver's seat and read a book) and knocking out power all over Fairfax county. Not a few stoplights were inoperative, and most of the highways were practically parking lots in places for no good reason (as is often the case around here, it was less "the stoplight's out - let's be careful" and more "We're all going to the same place, so why did we suddenly stop?"). I recall one woman walking along the side of the road and covering more distance in half an hour than I did in my car as I tried to get back to the main road. Between those things, pedestrians suddenly darting out from between parked SUVs, minor flooding blocking entire lanes, and police directing traffic, it took about two and a half hours to get back home. Kind of sad when you take into account the fact that it was only about fifteen miles.

Lyssa and I had decided to take Jason out for dinner because he'd taken her to the doctor's office yesterday afternoon, so after changing into dry clothes and swapping out my trainers for boots, we hit the road to try to find a restaurant that still had power. As it turned out, to reliably find open restaurants that didn't suck we had to go all the way to southwestern Fairfax County, which didn't weather the storms particularly well. All told, we counted four stands of trees that had either been struck by lightning or blown down in the wind, three of which had taken power lines with them as they came down. One of them was just a few blocks from the apartment complex: When the tree came down it pulled the power lines and utility pole with it, and then the whole mess came down on top of someone's house. We didn't get any photographs of it because I was more concerned with not being t-boned by idiots who decided that it was time to drive at seventy miles per hour through the aftermath than I was documenting the sight for posterity. Besides, with the power having been out for over four hours by this point, there was little point in doing so because most of the Network was offline anyway. Unfortunately, we haven't had a chance yet to pick up any blasted-off bits of the trees, and I doubt that there will be much left by the roadside by the time I leave today.

Interestingly, cellular communications were spotty during and after the storms. I was able to receive but not transmit text messages; same with telephone calls. I was able to receive calls successfully but my side of the conversation barely made it through (as Hasufin and I discovered after I got home). I suspect that this had to do with the disruptions to the power grid caused by downed power lines and probably a few lightning strikes here and there.

The three of us wound up going out for Thai food in a strip mall (the name of which always escapes me - it's the one in Fairfax County with the not-so-indie-anymore movie theatre, AC Moore, China Star, and hobby shop) because we know that it's good, and the entire complex still seemed to have power. Finding parking was a trick because everyone and their backup seemed to have the same idea as us, so we dropped Lyssa off to get a table while Jason and I hunted down a parking space. We got to the restaurant just in time: the clouds opened and the rain picked up again. Though the lighting was pretty, there wasn't much in the way of thunder, which made it difficult to estimate exactly how far away the core of the storm was. Lyssa went on ahead to DHS to look for a new pair of shoes for her sister's bridal shower next weekend while Jason and I stopped in the Hobby Store to see what they had (RPG books: not much; other things to use in projects - quite a bit, though I don't have time to work on much of anything right now) and then AC Moore (why didn't anyone tell me that they had complete resin casting kits there?! Lyssa and I went all the way out to Rockville looking for casting resin!!). Around 2100 EST5EDT we headed for home, just as the rain got worse. The power still wasn't back on when Jason left, and the rest of the night was spent by flashlight. As I recall, the power didn't come back on until 0100 this morning, when all of the lights and the air conditioning suddenly reactivated. I left the Network offline until just before we left for work this morning, not only to give the UPS a chance to recharge (note to self: get off my ass and set up APCUPSD to automatically power everything off when mains power fails) but just in case the power failed again, the Children wouldn't be caught out in the middle of resync'ing the drive arrays.

Microbot dance recital at Duke University.

Tuesday 03 June 2008 at 12:46 pm The field of nanotechnology just took a hop, a skip, and a jump past a xenon atom stick figure and mechanical gears microns in diameter. No, researchers at Duke University didn't take up country line dancing, they created microscopic robots microns in size and caused them to dance across a one square millimeter floor. The microbots are shaped more like spatulae with guide rods attached to them than people, but they capable of interacting with each other as well as shimmying across the miniscule dance surface, propelled by oscillations in an electrical field... which happened to have the same rhythm as one of Johann Strauss' waltzes. Not only were they not controlled by a tether of any kind, but they were acting independently of one another, and shuffled around at the rate of 20,000 steps per second. They also have the distinction of being the smallest microbots yet constructed in human history, as they are 100 times smaller than everything else that's worked so far. Researchers are now figuring out ways of building microbots that can connect with each other and act en masse.

If the projections in the article are correct, functional nanotechnology seems to be advancing in three year cycles right now. It took five years to figure out how to make a tetherless microbot, but only three years to make them steerable, and another three years to move more than one at a time. One has to wonder what will happen in the year 2011 in this field...