Old and busted: MS Excel

New Hotness: MATLAB scripts for parsing giant tab-delimited TXT files, grinding a few conversion factors, and plotting everything in pretty colors with an intelligent legend.

Next Week's Hotness: Perl batch scripts for executing the proprietary modeling-and-simulation code, immediately followed by running MATLAB functions ( Read more... )

...the lack of recent entries is because my new job rocks extra-awesome. I am busy for the entire workday. I am not surfing the intarweb for hours on end. I'm learning crazy stuff about orbital mechanics and range/payload curves, and all this science I don't understand -- it's just my job, five days a week. I'm a rocket man... yeah, a rocket

So about once a month I get together with some friends face-to-face, and we all settle in around the living room and do some old-school tabletop role-playing. We are not a party of paladins, and this is not D&D. We have been known to frame our enemies for murders that we committed. We are occasionally the Bad Guys. One of the NPCs is the nephew ( Read more... )

Just filled out my AF 214, Separation Worksheet. As of 1050 today, I'm on terminal leave, and as of the first minute of 1 April, I'm a civilian again. I'm selling back 40 days of leave (40 days base pay in my pocket!). Monday I start my new job, and get to go back to being a rocket scientist.

1. Dinner and a movie Friday night: V for Vendetta. See it! Don't go to DuClaw on St. Patrick's Day expecting anything like service -- even the most capable of wait staff are overwhelmed by the drunken mob.
   
2. Went to the Laurel racetrack. Bet $5 each on Celtic Innis to show and some other horse to win. Celtic Innis placed third - won me $15, so I ( Read more... )

In honor of Chuck Norris's birthday (which is tomorrow), I would like to counter several myths about this great man with some actually true and mostly verifiable Chuck Norris Facts:

• Chuck Norris owes his interest in the martial arts and law enforcement to his time in the US Air Force. He was stationed at Osan Air Base, South Korea, where he ( Read more... )

From an actual e-mail that our otherwise totally square helpdesk sent out today:

You may have noticed a change in the landscape of the 14th Floor Copy Room. Our steadfast and unfailing friend, the HP 8100 laser jet printer, has been stricken with the Paper Jam of Death (known in the IT world as Error Code 13) for the last time. On the behalf of ( Read more... )

So David Foster Wallace, author of infinite jest and probably several other good books, but infinite jest being the one of one-and-a-half of his books that I've read personally1, has published2 a collection of non-fiction called Consider the Lobster, which I am halfway into reading. I haven't yet gotten to the part where he asks me to consider the ( Read more... )

Columbus police destroyed the bicycle of an Ohio University student who had affixed a sticker to his bike which advertised a band called This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb. Bomb experts from Columbus hit the bike with a high-pressure spray of water, then pried it apart with a hydraulic device normally used to rescue accident victims trapped in cars, acting ( Read more... )

Yesterday the Senate voted to make several provisions of the USA PATRIOT act permanent. Ten senators voted against it. The "no" votes were Jim Jeffords (I-VT), Russ Feingold (D-WI), Robert Byrd (D-WV), Daniel Akaka (D-HI), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Tom Harkin (D-IA), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Carl Levin (D-MI), Patty Murray (D-WA) and Ron Wyden* (D-OR ( Read more... )