To the Annapolismobile, Robin!

I’m heading north in the morning to the company’s home base in Annapolis. Gonna meet some customers, do some support, and wreak havoc with the status quo for a few days. Things start off with a bang with a lunchtime call at the infamous Rams Head Brewery. I’ll be returning there after work for some tasty pints of their IPAs.

Yeah, I could fly there but why spend four hours going car-airport-plane-airport-car-work when I can just go car-I85-I95-work? Air travel being what it is these days, I can get there in the same amount of time and keep my dignity. Easy call to make, yo.

Now What?

I feel like the dog that finally caught the car it was chasing: now what? I’ve got a tank full of 330 gallons of rainwater and nothing yet to do with it. Spent some time yesterday with Travis at Lowes, looking for some piping I could use to hook up a garden hose to the tank. Out of a long aisle there was exactly nothing I needed. Guess I’ll have to be more creative.
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Ingrid approaching?

On the heels of what was Tropical Storm (and briefly Hurricane) Humberto, Tropical Storm Ingrid is now churning towards North Carolina. My guess is that Ingrid will turn north before getting to us, but I Am Not A Meterologist (IANAM). I sure wouldn’t complain if Ingrid stopped by just long enough to dump a bunch more rain on us, though.

Buckets of rain!

After months of no significant rain we finally got a drenching today, and boy is it wonderful! By my estimate we’ve gotten at least 1.5 inches so far with more to come tonight.

Remember that big honking tank I purchased a few weeks ago? When I heard the rain was on the way, I slipped out to Lowes this morning and bought a flexible downspout pipe. I then spent 15 minutes attaching it to just one downspout, thinking I’d attach the other downspouts later.
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cat /dev/funkywhiteboys

This may be the funniest geek humor I’ve ever seen. I was building the OSX plugin for the XMMS audio player just now when I got this ‘error’:

checking pthread.h usability… yes

checking for GTK – version >= 1.2.0… yes
checking for xmms-config… /opt/local/bin/xmms-config
checking for gawk… (cached) awk
checking for XMMS – version >= 1.2.0… yes

checking for white_boys in -lFunkyMusic.so… no
Warning: You may not have enough white boys to play your funky music.
Please obtain additional funky white boys.

configure: creating ./config.status
config.status: creating Makefile

Kudos to Bob Dean! We’ll see if it will work in spite of these limited resources. 🙂

[Update]
Must not have enough funky white boys: the plugin segfaults. 🙁

Opposition mounts to Butner pathogen lab

Greg has alerted me to opposition forming against the BNAF, the Butner pathogen lab I wrote about earlier this summer. I can’t find any other links to the opposition, though. Bummer.

According to Greg’s post, the DHS will hold a public meeting at 7 PM on Tuesday, September 18th at South Granville High School. Wouldn’t it be great to see biohazard suits in the audience?

It all makes me wonder … is Ebola drought-resistant?

Removing old Drupal redirects today

I’m removing the old Drupal redirects today, the ones that make old, old, old links work. I’ve been using WordPress now for months so I figure its time.

If you don’t see new entries after September 17th, chances are you need to update your feed address. Get with the program, you lazy slugs!

[Update:] For the benefit of the extremely lazy, I’ll provide my new feed link here.