Friday, May 22, 2009

How's That Function?

Morning weigh-in (Thursday): 173.5#, 6% BF (WTF?)
Morning weigh-in (Friday): 175.5#, 12% BF
 
Blog Watch: I truly love Doghouse Riley, but I think he's been working his way up to an aneurysm lately. Too many fools for someone who doesn't suffer them gladly... "Kumbaya" indeed, and I love that first comment!
 
Conjunction Junction: That little musical Wednesday night was pretty cute, even if it wasn't quite Broadway. I have a photo or two that I'll eventually post, but the basic setup was: about a half dozen kids did the acting (and sang and danced) onstage while a chorus, split into two groups, sang on either side. There was a framing device,  "new teacher working through her lesson plans and first-day jitters," but most of what went on was the song-and-dance. They did most of the songs I remember, and a few I'd forgotten. Cute, fun, and I thought Anne was going to die laughing when Deb and I started singing along. Donna did a good job with her kids.
 
To Understand Recursion, You Must First... That little MTO program I wrote was interesting in terms of real-world uses, yadda yadda, but my real reason to write it was because I wanted to play around with linked lists and recursive functions. Well, mission accomplished, I must say. Back in the day (before you could buy such things, like way back when I was in college) I wrote a bunch of math functions for heat transfer problems; some of them, like Bessel functions, were based on recursion, but I rewrote them to be iterative since they were sooooo slowwww -- it was an overhead thing, I was overloading the limited resources of my little Mac Plus. Funny how things come full circle after 20 years, but though I used a mishmash of iteration and recursion in this new thing, I think the recursion seemed to work much better than I remembered it.

Hey Nineteen:
I forget now if it was my BS (1988) or MS (1990), but my graduation for at least one of them was May 19th, which I have always heard sung to the tune  of "Hey Nineteen." Well here it is, either nineteen, or 21 years later -- someone who was born on my graduation is now officially old enough to drink.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Do The Hump

Morning weigh-in (Tuesday): 173.5#, 12.5% BF
Morning weigh-in (Wednesday): 174.5#, 6% BF
 
Damn you, stupid three-dollar taco night...
 
Beautiful ride last night: I went out via Market Street into Freemansburg, then out via Buttermilk Road and back on Wassergas, then crossed over the hill and came back to Freemansburg on Applebutter Road. I left around 6:30 and got back a little after 8:00, home just before dark.
 
Anne was at knitting while I rode, so we met at Brew Works after our respective things. It was a bit subdued at first, but Scott came in, then James, and things livened up; we got home around 11:30
 
 
Tonight we're going to see Donna's elementary students put on a musical, one based on Schoolhouse Rock.
 

Monday, May 18, 2009

Carpe Weekendum Procrastinatus

Morning weigh-in: 175#, 10.5% BF
 
A quick recap...
 
Friday night was awesome, and it all started with a singlespeed ride on the towpath: I left a little after 5:00, and maintained a 15 mph average (legs spinning like hamsters) to Easton where I hooked up with Larry and Kirk, and took a more leisurely return ride -- we still hammered, but also cruised for a bit and talked, made a few pit stops, and towards the end we ran into Joe G out with his wolf-dogs, which necessitated more stopping and schmoozing etc.
 
When I got home I pulled straight into the backyard, which is looking really good right now I might add, and knew Ben was home when I heard him and Anne talking on the porch -- cool! His other ride plans fell through I guess, and he came home a day early with his dad.
 
Anne was on her way to meet the Main Street Gang at Mama Nina's, and was actually leaving when I got there, but she stuck around while I hopped in the shower. We were up there in about 20 minutes, and our table was not yet ready so we waited outside on the street. Scott and Deb both live on Main Street, and we're only a few blocks away, and Donna's a regular part of the crowd, so it was like we were hanging out on the front porch or at a block party or something. Deb said she loves it there, but also said living on Main is like living in a fishbowl -- then she went and greeted Nina, all the wait staff, and half the clientele... we saw, and said hello to (and gossiped about) what seemed like hundreds of people during dinner. After that we went to the Steelgaarden; we sort of lost Scott, Donna and Deb in the crowd but met up with Doug and Lori. I have to say, that was probably my most pleasant "Bethlehem evening out" probably since the Funhouse days. Maybe it's just that summer is finally showing up, but it sure was nice.
 
Saturday started with an awesome yoga class in Easton, then Ben and I were put to work digging sod back home. This was the first step; Anne plans to replace much of her front lawn with terraced gardens. Hot, dirty work but we got a lot done before running off to Wired, to do nothing for the rest of the afternoon. We continued the nothing at Brew Works, but dinner was at home, followed by Pineapple Express. Yikes!
 
(By the way, I got the final part my little project to compile, but it was crashing out -- some tweaking over the weekend, and this rough first draft seems to work fine.)
 
Yesterday started with a short bike ride with Ben and Anne, over to Blue Sky for breakfast, which was followed by some backing and filling, chores, etc before we went down to see my folks. That was really nice: we hung out for a couple of hours, they grilled up a bunch of steaks, and my sister in law came over with my nephew towards the end of the day. Back home and tired, but I had the insight that allowed me to fix the program -- as soon as it was working, we sat down and watched Matrix Reloaded. I'm beginning to suspect that my original opinion was correct: the first Matrix would be the best. We shall see, we have the final movie waiting at home.