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While I don't believe in the central theme of retirement, that you work until you have enough money and then play the rest of your life away, I do realize that diminished physical capacity will limit what I can undertake in my later years. Considering that my heart muscle is the one most likely to run into trouble, I concluded a number of years ago that allowing it semi-retirement will probably keep it ticking longer. And what better semi-retirement than a nearby gravity well only a sixth as strong as the one I currently inhabit? Far fecthed as a lunar retirement colony might seem today, one must remember that the oldest people on our planet tend also to be the wealthiest. With the unveiling of Virgin Galactic's new commercial spacecraft yesterday I think we can fairly say that the engine of capitalism is getting behind the project as well. Now I realize that a few minutes of space orbit is a long way from a lunar colony, but how many years seperate Otto's first internal combustion engine and Ford's model T?

I have discovered where all the blue hairs in Lincoln go before church on sunday: Panera! Silly me I thought it would be an uncrowded place to get some work done this morning since it usually seems to be a place occupied by teenagers and yuppies... ... although after church came in the parents with their teenagers. Clay-zee!

So when I got the job at Experian I only had one nice pair of pants (which I'd bought for the interview) that fit. Yes, my weight control has not been very good so far this summer. I knew trying to implement some changes before the beach trip was a recipe for failure, so I waited until I set out on the road for Lincoln. I packed the cooler with fruit, cokes, cheese slices and lunchmeat. Okay, so it's not over the board healthnut stuph but I've learned over the years that food is a very important part of my life, one from which I draw a great bit of pleasure. Which is easier to do while driving: opening a bag of Doritos or peeling an orange? The situations we allow ourselves to get in can greatly influence our choices. When I'm hungry I generally choose the path of least resistance, even though a nice fresh navel orange usually gives me about the same satisfaction level as the Doritos (if it was Tostitos and jalapeño dip though, the orange doesn't stand a chance). Sometimes I feel like my weight is in a karmic cycle of death and rebirth, and each time it gets reincarnated a little bigger! So I was sitting under a tree the other day and I realized the secret to breaking out of the cycle . . . just kidding. I'm not sure I can break out of the cycle unless I get and extremely labor intensive job or move to a third world country live in abject poverty. Both scenarios, I think, would entail giving up more quality and quantity of life than being obese causes me too. This winter I will also have the opportunity to shovel snow, which believe it our not I am looking forward too. I just love digging as anyone who's seen my gardening or beach engineering is no doubt aware, but I've never really had much of an opportunity with snow. Rambling back on topic I brought with me several pairs of pants (36s), which I figured a week or so of healthier snacking would let me fit into. Such small successes can be very heartening. Last night I also watched a very good lecture by a man who just died. He had just been given six months to live (he made it nine) and was talking about his life and the goals he achieved. He had a short list made as a child, but I have a rather extensive list I started when I was about sixteen - simple things like visit all 50 states, learn German, and invent photosynthetic skin. I later learned thermodynamic constraints precluded that last one from being a replacement for food and my current list is mostly dominated by books I'd like to read. Over the years I've stapled copies of my evolving list into my journals, but I thought I might provide a copy, sans books, here: Visit the following U.S. States: Alaska, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Vermont, Wisconsin – (the Wogsland Homestead) Visit the Following Canadian Provinces: British Columbia, Yukon, NW Terr., Nunavut, Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba, Newfoundland Visit the Following Countries: China, Japan, South Africa, Australia, India, Brazil, Cuba, Egypt, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland , Denmark, England, Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, Netherlands, Estonia, Latvia, Russia, Belorus, Ukraine, Poland, Deutschland, Austria, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Italy, Greece, France, Spain, Portugal, Chile, Argentina Learn the following languages: Arabic Chinese Gaelic Greek Norsk Prussian Sanskrit Urdu/Hindi Finish my Novel Climb Devil’s Tower WY Heavy Metal X-mas Album Write books on the following subjects: Genealogy History of Science Christianity Poetry World Government Human Variation American History East Germanic History Learn to Play Piano Earn a Ph.D. Obtain a professorship Earn an Erdös number <5 Actually that last one I may have achieved already, considering some of my more prominent co-authors at BaBar. Unlike Randy Pausch, I've got quite a bit left to do but I've always assumed I would succumb to some form of heart disease in my mid-60s.

It dawned on me today that I will be doing the exact same analysis at Experian I was doing at BaBar. There it was ntuples of data on 300 million events, here it's ntuples of data on 215 million individuals. There groups of ntuples variables were used to identify particles, here we use groups of nutple variables to indentify consumers as pacesetters, early adopters, etc. Some events and individuals are missing data, so we extrapolate to fill in the blanks. There we had ROOT, here we have SAS. Math is great; same problem, same solutions. Who'd have thunk marketing and experimental high energy physics had so much in common? Of course, as my physics friends will no doubt point out, I'm ignoring the vast differences in the theoretical underpinning of the two fields, but at a functional level it's hard to find too much that's different between the search for new particles and the search for new customers.

So how's the new job? Federal regulations prohibit me from discussing the nature of my employment. Just kidding. I don't really know yet. Today was merely a day of getting acquainted and most of the people charged with acquainting were out. Maybe tomorrow I'll get access to some data to mess with and then I'll have a better idea, but since our business is based on our huge dataset there are several levels of security which I have to get permissions for. It seems that the number of passwords I have to keep in my head for everyday use will probably double this week. C'est la vive. If the problem set is half as undefined as advertised, it should prove interesting for someone with an organizational penchant like myself.

Tomorrow is my first day at Experian and for the first time in probably a decade I bought some deodorant. I know, I'm a sellout. But I actually did have a deodorant stick before that which I used semi-annually as the occasion presented itself. Well I discovered this morning while preparing my supplies for tomorrow that it was, in fact, broken. I do enjoy buying random combinations of things at the grocery store though. Like deodorant and a 7 pound bag of ice. Would you like a bag for your ice? No thanx. Would you like a bag for your deodorant? No, no thanx.

Out here alone on the plains my thoughts turn to those early pioneers, men who would leave their families behind back east to come out and plant a homestead. Maybe he would bring a teenage son with him. He would build a dugout house with blocks of dirt to live in for a year, fence in the homestead and plant the first crop with only a horse or mule. The he would harvest and sell it to the man on the train who would send it back east where most of the population lived. Or maybe it would be used for cattle feed on the train, because in those days before refrigerated cars whole cows where sent back east to be slaughtered there. Then he would hunker down for the long winter, alone on the plains. If his venture had thus far been successful in the spring he would order a house to be brought in by the train. For in those days whole houses could be ordered as kits much as the pre-fab industry of today. After planting he would build his house from the ground up with hammer and nails in the hot summer sun and sudden thunder storms of the plains. If he was not so lucky or chose a poor homestead it might be several years before he enjoyed this level of success. When finished with his new house, the old dugout he had lived in would become a storage cellar. Then, and only then, would the man send for his wife and children. They would come on the train from the east where they had lived in an overcrowded city or perhaps worked someone else's land to the wide open plain where they now held title to 160 acres of farmland. I can imagine the man waiting at the train station; he probably got there early, maybe even he'd come into town a day or two ago. His family life for the past year or so had consisted only of letters, bits of paper with writing on them that required his mind to translate into voices as he read them again for the hundredth time. And here I am growing wistful and melancholy after four days apart with all of modern technology to remain connected and a mere eleven days still ahead of me. Perspective helps a little though.

Below is the most important picture of our new house in Lincoln, the swingset in our backyard. The biggest complaint in leaving Tennessee from the kids was that we had to leave our swingset behind. After much frustration I finally found the perfect little 4 bdrm house in a good part of town. Most of the rental market here in Lincoln is geared to college students because of UNL, whose UGA colors are going to be difficult getting used to. It's also near a nice park as well as being only a few blocks from the elementary school - so the kids will be able to say they walked uphill both ways in the snow to school when they get older.

How long is it good etiquette to stay in a place with wireless internet? This morning I sat so long in a coffee shop that the lady behind the counter asked me to come back and fix her printer (turns out it was merely jammed). Finding a house to rent here in Lincoln is pretty hit or miss - and mostly I've just missed. None of the major realty companies here manages rental properties, and the apartment complexes seem to all manage themselves. I've had the most success driving around looking for "For Rent" signs, but craigslist has also been useful. Driving around town I've seen some nice neighborhoods devoid of "For Rent" signs and bad neighborhoods where they line the street. I suppose home ownership does generally lead to better upkeep, but it makes my current attempt to find a nice place rather tough.

So here's some info from our HHI trip I couldn't post this past weekend: I read several books there, but the best by far was Ayaan Hirsi Ali's autobiography, Infidel. pics: Shutterfly (I lost my Yahoo! password and the dorkwads there won't let me reset it so I no longer have access to my Flickr account) vids: Glowsticks Galore | An Ocean of Peeeeeeee

Yesterday I ate breakfast in Hilton Head (where I forgot my computer cable - AHHHH!); tonight I'm sleeping in Lincoln.

9 July 2008 Down in Alpharetta last month we found some caterpillars chomping away at my mom's parsley. Naturally we captured them to raise in captivity as a science project for the kiddoes. Watch the video of them hatching from their pupae and drying their wings.

We slept in. We got a Happymeal. We went to the zoo. We played in the water. We opened presents. We hunted bees with our new vacuum bug catcher. We frosted cupcakes. We got sausage pizza for dinner. Now we're going to snuggle and watch a movie in bed. It's fun just being the four of us while the twins are in Alpharetta. Maybe we will watch Star Trek.

Walking the neighborhood here in Karns this morning, my thoughts dwelt on the concept of home. What is a home? I suppose home is a place you leave and then come back to. There's something of home in Alpharetta, Maryland and California. We also left Tennessee and came back to it - the same house even! Leaving again soon I wander when, if ever, I will be back this way. Perhaps I am in a minority pondering the collapse of our civilization, but with peak oil behind us now it seems as if life on Earth in the 21st century will be quite different than life in the 20th. I still believe east Tennessee is an ideal location for anyone's genes to weather a few centuries of societal quiescence. There's plenty of water, low population density, nearby mountains to hide in, lots of sunshine, mild winters, nearby resources like coal and dams for power generation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Even when the next ice age hits glaciers will not extend far into the Tennessee Valley. The complete collapse of western civilization would put on a small dent in survivability here. Lincoln, Nebraska will most likely be under a glacier during the next ice age. There is a low population density, plenty of water and natural riverine trade routes. Even in the this relatively warm period in history the winters there are quite cold though, and poor soil management of early settlers turned todays American breadbasket into the Dustbowl of the 1930s. Culturally it would seem from afar that eastern Nebraska enjoys some of the same advantages as East Tennessee - but that remains to be seen. It looks like another strong possibility to put down roots, but I have trepidations as we approach our ninth move. While Maxwell is excited and Zara is oblivious, the twins vehemently disapprove of transferring our family there. I despair of having inflicted upon them the same shifting childhood which so scarred me. What is a dad to do but best provide for his offspring?

We finally nicified the alcove.