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It's amazing the things you discover when packing. Today Brittan and Alora held an impromptu tea party after the discovery of a miniature tea set in their room...

1009 miles to John's Creek 1176 miles to Mt. Airy 1224 miles to Orange 1276 miles to Cambridge 1284 miles to Hilton Head 1432 miles to Incline Village 1564 miles to San Diego 1608 miles to Berkeley No one's more than a day's drive away!

Yesterday I flew to Chicago for lunch. Yeah I know - nuts! It's actually less time on planes than flying out to SF though. Anyway, on the plane I had time to finish an interesting book on the Mondavi family. Visiting the winery last year I wondered what all the hoopla was about, but ironically didn't get a chance to taste their wine, and thought I should probably learn more when Robert Mondavi's death last month brought about so many tributes. (Amir actually sent me an email from Kuwait to break the news to me.) All this thinking about wine lead me to write an article about good summer whites for TheWineRater.com, which I've been neglecting since it made the transition from possibly profitable venture to hobby. ...but back to Chicago. The lunch trip was an interview with Experian, which apparently went well because they want me to move to Lincoln and work for them. Finally, somewhere with snow!

Maxwell and Zara enjoyed running in the grass.

Amir is back in the states midway through a stint in Kuwait, so we headed down to Alpharetta this weekend to see him and Jaime. Mom and dad had everybody over for a cookout and we got crazy...

Today I had a nice lunch with a guy over in Oak Ridge who makes germanium (Ge) γ-ray detectors. Basically, the photons make it a little way into the Ge and the energy deposited is recorded as a voltage. By making a large wafer and pixelating it they can figure out the source location relative to the detector. The problem with Ge is that it has to be vacuum sealing and cooled to around the temperature of liquid nitrogen to work - but this bloke has designed a nice Stirling cycle engine to cool it. The upshot is a battery-powered nuclear device detector that is battlefield ready to pinpoint the location of a nearby weapon in 3 dimensional space. It's so sensitive that the just the concrete floor of their clean room gives a strong signal. You can imagine the army would love to have these sitting in the frontseats of their Humvees before their enemies in this asymmetric warfare get nukes from Iran or North Korea. Of course, one man's non-proliferation is another man's nuclear hegemony. That is the the paradox of Oak Ridge. The real question is if nuclear hegemony has any deterrent capacity against a death cult meme like the Wahabist brand of Islam. Some ideas kill people. That in itself is a scary idea. Everyday life is, of course, full of humor and this is no exception. We left his lab to head for the local Chinese buffet and as I climbed into his car there was an ever so faint ripping sound. A small rift had opened in the seat of my pants. An ordinary lunch place and this would not have been so bad - but we were going to a buffet! So all the while we're chit chatting and getting food I'm trying to strategically position myself to avoid embarrassment. Well, I made it through lunch (although a few hours later I would regret having eaten it) and we got back in the car. Despite my care in sitting, the small rift nearly quadrupled in size. When we got back to the lab and said goodbye I made sure to walk backwards toward my car. Sitting down there finally finished off the pants.

Okay, so how lame is it that Flickr limits people to 100 Mb per month? Yeah, so Kate & Howie convinced me to post a Flickr page of photos and such. There are just too many social networking tools around these days. Don't expect anything other than this website to live forever.

We love pie.

13 June 2008 The summer sunshine calls us all outdoors, while making it nearly impossible to see a laptop screen. This has lead me to do quite a bit of reading and gardening lately. Of course, there is some overlap as I've scowered the viticultural literature for answers to my vineyard's failings. Would that such pursuits provided renumeration.

The other day on the way to the zoo Zara made up a song about her favorite animal. I thought it needed a beat behind it though, so I added one and posted it on SoundClick so y'all can download the mp3. And as he passed into the 7th level of nerdom he wondered how many more until he would be required to save a princess...

Some people feel tied to dictionaries and proscribed grammars, militantly correcting anyone who dares venture into the vernacular. Frequent readers of this blog will know I am not among them, but attempt to coin my own words to communicate ideas in novel ways. With a majority of English-speakers today having been raised speaking another language it's not surprising that the language is expanding its vocabulary both in regional dialects and in the international world of computing to encompass new technology, like the crackberry my sister oft contacts me from. Now there is a site, Word Spy, entirely dedicated to lexpionage as they call it. (Okay so it's been around since 1996, but I'm usually a bit behind the times.)

Playing WiiFit one is reminded how much of life is about balance. I like to think of it in terms of a chemical solution: add too much of this and you become acidic, too much of that and you become basic. We seek to balance work and play, to raise our children balancing firmness with freedom, to balance creativity with usefulness, to balance spending with income, to balance our presence in the environment, etc. Only a small imbalance between food intake and calorie burning can lead to significant weight gain over a lifetime. So naturally once we achieve balance we try, in analogy with chemistry, to buffer it. (If you have a solution of table salt, NaCl, and you add Hydrochloric Acid, HCl, or Sodium Hydroxide, NaOH, to the pH won't change much - we say it's buffered.) Most of my buffering comes in the form of algorithms, like never grocery shopping on an empty stomach, journaling to provide myself with feedback, budgeting spending, thermodynamic parenting, etc. Nevertheless, life does get out of whack sometimes and often sets up oscillations about the equilibrium balance - assuming it is a local minimum, if the balance being aimed for is a local maximum then only constant work can keep you there. Perhaps my most frequent oscillation is between work and play, where I find myself working furiously for a few years and then indulging in intense recreation.

If you got married, wouldn't you want to tell people? Today is Cara's sister Colleen's birthday, and she called her earlier to wish her well. Apparently Colleen and Zach have been married since May 9th. Weird. Nevertheless, I'm excited to add Zach to the family - although he's known all of them, Cara included, for quite a bit longer than me.

Back from a trip to Alpharetta where we saw just about everybody, played at the pool and picked strawberries. The links are to some videos of the events.