What is up with the google ads?  Paper plates, coffee beans and chicken caserole?  I suppose its because of all the food I’ve been listing throughout my older posts there.  Oh well.  Hopefully they will come to be more interesting in the future.

I really don’t have much to talk about at the moment.  Just thought I’d drop a note here to keep things moving along.  Been a busy weekend.  Trying to get alot of stuff done around the house and out in the yard.  Partied a little here Friday night.  Some friends, booze and pizza.  Did a lot of runnin’ around.  Looking forward to relaxin tonight.  Some more friends coming over to chill.  Maybe grill a little.  Shit…. I guess I do talk about food alot huh?

I have a handful of things worth mentioning today.  Unfortunatly, due to my tiredness and slight alcohol impairdness, I will not be deeply elaborating on them.  I’ll only mention them with hopes of getting back to them in some form of detail.

First, during preporation for a meeting today about the options for a project at work, I had calculated that a 20hp motor running full out 24 hours a day, 333 days a year, costs approximatly 9,000 dollars to run at our current price for a kwh.  Give or take the couple twenty dollars that my electric bill is every month, that 9,000 dollars to run that 20hp motor far exceeds my yearly electric bill.  Which makes me think, my total household amperage consumption must be far less than that of a 20hp motor.  And a 20hp motor does not seem like a very high power load to me.  Kind of makes me think that a windmill on the property might not be a bad idea.

I also attended a banquet dinner tonight.  At this dinner there was a keynote speaker that talked about her favorite philosopher and her key learnings from her art program and how they carry over to everyday life no matter what the situation, art related or not. The German philosopher, whose name escapes me at the moment, had a core philosophy that seemed to coincide with many beliefs I’ve had.  The main being that everything is contextual.  The meaning of everything is based in the context of which it is given.  This is something I’d like return to for further discussion.

And lastly, I read an article that used three distinct toilet designs to illustrate the founding philosophies around three distinct nations/societies.  I thought it was pretty amazing.  And hopefully, I’ll remember to come back to this one as well.  Cause it was extremely interesting, but, I’m far too tired to drone on about it at the moment.  So, goodnight and I’ll see you soon.  I hope.

Yep.  That was a long time spent on a bus.  I’m thinking it may be faster, more comfortable and cheaper to drive in closer to a city with a train running in and take a train in.  I didn’t really enjoy that bus ride at all.  Other than that though, it was an allright trip.  Didn’t really get to do too much other than bum around a few blocks and find places to eat.  We were up off of Lexington in like midtown maybe.  Lots of fancy stores to shop in.  But, its always cool to get to visit a big city like that.  Being from out in the sticks here, its neat to just hang out and do some people watching.

Well, I gotta get moving towards work.

Well, slipped already.  Been busy and distracted over the weekend here and I probably won’t get much of a chance tomorrow to keep up on my food log either.  Heading to NYC.  I do have a bit of a sinus headache now though.  Probably gonna pop a couple sudafed pe’s and head to bed.  Gotta get up around 4 to get ready and catch our bus.  I guess I will mention I had two whole sushi rolls today.  I forget all of what else though.  Just got back from seeing Silent Hill.  That was a pretty cool freaky ass movie.  Maybe I’ll talk more about that another time.  I’m headin to bed.

There is an amazing article on Popsci.com about what is being called an invention machine. John Koza has essentially mated the programming concepts of artificial inteligence and genetic programming, creating something that sounds like its straight out of The Matrix. You feed the program some basic properties of a device, give it what your desired results are to be, and it utilizes a process of natural selection to create a new and improved device. Read this quote for an example.

Lohn got his hands on the antenna specs for the Space Technology 5 mission. He plugged in an antenna’s basic requirements and let the software run. What he got, several hundred generations later, appeared to be a mistake. “It looked like a bent paper clip,� he remembers. Lohn had no background in antenna design, but that was beside the point. “There’s no chapter in the textbooks on crooked wire antennas,� he says. He had his bent paper clip prototyped and put it in a test chamber. Sure enough, it provided the tricky combination of wide bandwidth and wide beam that NASA required. Like the duck-billed platypus, it looked preposterous but proved perfectly suited to its niche.

Is this good? Bad? I’m not really certain yet. Towards the end, the article talks about how the machine, at least thus far, can’t create its own problems to solve. We, as humans, still need to tell it what we’re looking for. The invention machine merely crunches through the numbers in a new revolutionary way to get somewhere we would probably have gotten in time. It just gets there much faster. Being able to run through 1000’s of generations of code using a Darwin-esque process of natural selection. Getting rid of bits of code that don’t hold up to the ends and mating together the ones that do.

I’m attempting to learn myself about C# and the whole .NET developer network thing. I’ve decided to do this after searching and searching for an easy way to sync an address book between two different programs. Namely, palm desktop and thunderbird. My email addresses don’t do me a whole lot of good sitting in my palm desktop, and, I just wasn’t satisfied with the replacement conduit to sync directly with thunderbird. So, I’m going to try my hand at developing my own app to sync directly from palm desktop to thunderbird. If ya’ll know a little about C# or the intricacies of the palm desktop db or thunderbirds db and you’d like to help out with the project, give me a yell. Maybe this could turn into a sourceforge project for universal address book syncing.