A weekend of quiet

Well, the weekend was, at best, routine. Didn't do much at all. We spent a good portion of Saturday doing little more than cleaning house, running errands, and trying to take care of the apple tree in the back yard. The apple tree bends toward the sunlight rather than heading up, and in Seattle that means bending to the southeast, mostly; to the southwest, pine trees block its light. Over the years, this means that the tree has developed a distinct tilt, which is made worse every other year when it bears fruit. This year was too much for it; the tree is now barely holding a 30° angle with respect to the ground. Mostly, taking care of it involves propping it up and picking the fruit to alleviate the weight burden.

We also ran around to buy new shoes for Omaha and Kouryou-chan. I need them too, but I couldn't find any that I liked. I'll try again later in the week.

Sunday, in the morning, we went up to where Yamaraashi-chan was getting onto the bus to head off to Camp Ten Trees. She looked healthy and happy to be going off. We ran into Shasta there as well, along with her son who was getting on the same bus.

After that, we took Kouryou-chan to a birthday party, and then Omaha and I, with a few hours to spare, rode all the way around Alki Point, a ride of about ten miles. At first, I was feeling a bit winded and Omaha wasn't feeling bad at all, but it just took me time to warm up. By the time we got to the far end, I was feeling just fine. We had ice cream at the point, then drove back ogling the pretty boys and girls as we went.

The evening was quiet. A weekend of nothin. Not too bad.

The consequence of science illiteracy

PZ Meyers recently posted an article entitled "We are so screwed," which showed that the United States came in second-to-last (only Turkey did worse) on the acceptance of biological evidence for evolution. Traditionally Christian countries like Greece, Romania, Ireland, Malta, etc showed a much more comprehensive acceptance for evolutionary biology than the U.S. The Discovery Institute crowed about how this showed the American's "independence of mind."

6_bleen_7 has posted a lovely response. Are you familiar with the Duggan family? They're a darling of the Christian Right: mom, dad, fifteen children with a sixteenth on the way. They're homeschooling their children, and they're teaching their children young earth creationism and are opposed to that evolutionary biology stuff.

Prof. Bleen's response, being a graphic depiction of what would happen if young earth creationism were the standard mode of thought throughout the land, is devastating:


Click the image for more detail.

Skipt Criddies

I have had a very stressful day. It started with waking up this morning with a splitting headache, a terrible backache, tired eyes and a generally poor disposition. This despite having gotten almost nine hours of sleep last night, although it broken repeatedly by Kouryou-chan climbing into bed. I almost never wake up feeling so bad; it had better not happen tomorrow. I am tired of coming home tired.

Perhaps, today, I had an excuse. I experienced five hours of meetings this day. An hour with documentation, an hour with the development staff regarding a new product, an hour with the staff just to discuss UI issues, an hour with a job candidate, and finally a one-on-one with the boss. I'm working on a new infrastructure for the UI, one in which I push the business logic down into its own layer, and one which enables Ajax components reliably on the client.

I took a look at the Pendorwright site this afternoon and discovered that in the course of the past week some skipt criddie had tried five thousand different common HTTP bugs looking for a hole into the system. Since I haven't deployed PHP or Rails (yet, mostly due to issues like this), he didn't get in, but man it was sobering to see that. That's on top of the thousands of brute-force attempts to break in through SSH. It's quite sobering to realize just how careful I have to be to keep the botfools out of my playpen.