I'm back in Maryland on week two of (possibly two, possibly three) of my field assignment. I'm in another hotel in the same general vicinity as before and approaching dead tired after a long weekend of hot weather, running around, and pulling all nighters of one sort or another. I was running rather late today because I had a number of errands to run, which I took care of before starting the laundry, but now it's academic because it all worked out. Thankfully, the headache and aftermath of heatstroke last night went away while I slept, so I woke up …
Yesterday afternoon, downtown Washington, DC saw a number of brightly coloured rainbow kites of all shapes and sizes added to it sky for LGBT Kite Day 2007, the local LGBT community's way of tugging on the sleeve of the people in power to remind them that we're here, we pay our taxes, and we vote.
Because I just about pulled an all-nighter Friday night I wound up sleeping until 1100 EST5EDT on Saturday morning, so I didn't get the early start that I hoped to have. In fact, I left the apartment shortly after noon local time and hiked to …
During my tenure in Maryland while on assignment, I've been given the opportunity to try the cuisine of not a few restaurants in the general area (I don't have much of a choice, having neither microwave nor refrigerator in my hotel room), much to the chagrin of my wasteline. At any rate, some days my colleagues and I are in the mood for something near the top of the ladder in terms of quality, and sometimes we're after something more down-home and tasty... proximity to our hotels is also a nice thing.
On Tuesday evening we found ourselves at Bennigan's …
Dear jackasses drag racing on the highway a fraction of a block away from my hotel:
Please stop driving like you're trying out for NASCAR. Yes, you've probably sunk a couple of thousand dollars American into your cars. The rest of us don't care. You don't seem to understand that the purpose of a muffler on a vehicle's exhaust system is to quiet the noise that your vehicle's engine makes. Your cars don't sound more powerful, they sound like they need a trip to the garage because they're malfunctioning. If you continue weaving in and out of traffic like you're …
While in the field on assignment for work this week, I'm going to be stuck eating out a lot, so I may as well make the best of it, right?
Last night I went out to dinner with my cow-orkers and the other guys on my project team after the day's wrap-up meeting was over. We stopped back at our hotels to change and take showers after a long day of hiking around a huge business complex, wandering through server rooms the size of gymnasiums, and crawling around on …
In preparation for LGBT Kite-Flying Day 2007 the organizers have worked up a map to direct people to the correct location this weekend, the afternoon of 4 August 2007. Click on the thumbnail to view the full-sized image.
Last night Lyssa, Orthaevelve, and I decided to go out to dinner to celebrate things looking up at work these days after work. It was something of a snap decision, you see - I got a call from my boss while I was at the Metro station headed for home, and immediately told Lyssa as soon as she arrived. After going to the doctor's office so that she could get her weekly allergy inoculation, we called up Orthaevelve and asked about the wherabouts of any good Chinese restaurants in the area. Much to our surprise, there …
It seems that Google has changed its mind about one of their more famous open projects, namely, allowing web developers to use the SOAP protocol to pull data from their network. They've quietly killed the Search SOAP project and pulled the developers' kit from the website. Here's the thing: Google's SOAP API is used to teach developers how to integrate other sites' functionality into their own. You might say that it's the gold standard, about which many books have been written (well, all of them, actually). An open source project called EvilAPI has arisen to provide continued accessbut it's anyone's …
Here's something you don't see every day, but I sincerely hope will become common in the next couple of years: Books On Demand, both a principle and the name of a company (well, it's called On Demand Books, actually... I tried) that manufactures automatic printing press/bindaries. Their first model, called the Espresso Book Machine, costs $50kus, but can print, cut, trim, bind, and fit into a laminated cover two books simultaneously inside of seven wallclock minutes, or 15-20 library quality books per hour. There are two in public right now, one at the World …
