The Same River.

If I was really down for tropical living, I would live in that area of the globe designated as the tropics. Just thought you’d be interested to know this in the event you were acting all hot and humid for my benefit.

Love,
Nick

When you close a lane of traffic for road repairs, you should probably conduct those repairs in a timely manner. The roadway is for traffic, not for construction equipment storage.

Love,
A Concerned Motorist

One of the things we tried a fair bit of while in Los Angeles was Yelp* when looking for places to go, eat, waste time, etc. I have to say it batted about .500 in terms of giving good advice. The closer in we were to the city itself, the better it seemed to do. Out in the Empire it was a bit more dicey.

Using Yelp in the Omaha metro area, however? Yelp == Yikes! I’ve never been more certain that I and my circle of compatriots are not similar to the vast majority of folks here. On the other hand, Applebee’s will be happy to know that they’re one of the metro area’s favorite restaurants. /eyeroll

More generally, we discovered a great many more things about the iPhone than we knew before we left. There have been tremendous strides made in localizing the web and I really can’t imagine traveling without one now. It is so much easier to plug in to a “foreign” environment and navigate as a native. All in all, very sweet. I just wish I could go more than 8 hours on a charge these days. Not really ready to upgrade, Mr. Jobs, but this lack of battery longevity and the inability to replace it myself (on the up and up) is really killing me.

Giving the WP3.0 install a whirl. Seems a bit spiffier.

The night sky in the nearby desert is truly remarkable. Have you looked at it lately? If not you definitely should.

Love,
Nick

I know how good a good Grand-Slam can be but I was curious to know whether you really need quite so many Denny’s restaurants. Can you elaborate on this for me?

Love,
Nick

I have been visiting your lovely city for a while now and I think you might have a small issue. I just wanted to bring to your attention the number of cars on your numerous roads. Perhaps you might consider some trains and the like.

Love,
Nick

I know you have rush hour traffic—all cities do. I wanted to know, however, why you insist on doing it on weekends too. Did you know other cities keep their rush hours on a Monday through Friday basis? Because, for the most part, they do.

Just letting you know.

Love,
Nick

Programming is kind of an objective thing. Code works or it doesn’t. This can haunt people who, to any extent, tie their sense of self worth to their current job performance. Starting some time Tuesday afternoon my personal stock plummeted as the IR Index climbed to five tickets, all of which I thought I’d solved already. Yet this afternoon I am happy happy happy. One issue was redundant code (I fixed one of two blocks of identical code) and the other was what we’ll charitably call “not my fault.” Now my ticket queue is on its way to zero.

And some people say programming is boring.

I woke up this morning from a dream where I was a consultant for company specializing in archaic measurements. We were contracting with various sports governing authorities to de-modernize various sports. The ‘why’ is unimportant–or at least never made itself known to me.

The work was kind of interesting. We were playing with ideas such as in North American style football the game would be played on a field of 20 rods. Teams would only get two downs and would have to move the ball 1 rod to reset the downs. Progress ground to a hault when a faction started advocating the 4 downs / 2 rods approach. This presented the opportunity for further factionalization apparently because there was suddenly another group who wanted to go with chains. The idea being to use a field of 5 chains and teams get 8 downs to move the ball 1 chain.

I asked to be moved to a new committee but baseball wasn’t much better. The disucssion was on how to measure the ball. One faction wanted to use barleycorns while another was interested in using nails. The barleycorn side thought that using fractions of a nail made little sense while the nail proponents felt that barleycorns were far too small to provide a meaningful number. They tabled the discussion and went on to how to measure the weight of the ball. This one was easy, apparently, and it was decided that baseballs would have to be between 30 and 31.5 zolotniks.

I woke up to the alarm which was putting out sound in the vicinity of several phons.

And, in a pre-emptive post-script…Yes, I know that inches/feet/yards/miles is just as silly and archaic. Also interesting, a megadeath is equivalent to an incident causing 1 million deaths.