“Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine, a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.” – Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Andre Morellet.

I had to do some quick research on this quote since it is often misquoted as: “Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”  There appears, in my cursory search, no actual original reference document pointing to the more famous quote and that it is actually a bastardization of the original letter referring to rain and wine.  It is still a good quote regardless of who actually first said it.  I prefer the version without the word living.  The fact that there are two so common versions of the quote leads on to question its authenticity anyway.

The weather is awesome today.  Temperatures are not set to break seventy degrees all day.

Oreo and I got up a little before eight and went to the living room to work and to charge up energy laying in the sun (I will let you surmise which of us will be doing which.)  Because of continuing market volatility there is still very little to do at the office and today is promising to be a nice, slow day leading into my four day weekend.  This is, I believe, only the second four day break from the office that I have had since starting this position in March of 2006!  The other four day weekend was this past June in Walt Disney World.

During overnight trading in the foreign markets, the global economy seems to be recovering in a very serious way after a very rough week.

This morning I tested the new theory that yawns can be contagious between humans and dogs.  Oreo was sitting in the middle of the living room and I looked over at him and yawned right at him – fake yawn but decently convincing – and before I was done yawning he yawned as well!

Katie and I had lunch at Asian Fusion at 11 Stone Street in downtown Manhattan.  I had the pad thai.  It was okay, nothing special.  Overall the whole restaurant experience was not really worthy of lower Manhattan.  If this was a Thai restaurant in Warren, New Jersey I would not find a compelling reason to choose it over the competing Thai restaurants so it really does not cut it here in New York City.

The afternoon was pretty slow, as expected.  Today is the slowest Friday, actually, that I can remember so far this year.  It was great.  I was able to leave the office only a little after six – once I knew that there was not going to be any evening surprises.  Ronak and I were even able to step out to get some hot chocolate at Leonardis before the end of the day.  They have awesome hot chocolate on Hanover Square.

I took the train home and arrived in Newark around seven.  On my way home I noticed that 87 octane “unleaded” gas is just $3.29 per gallon in New Jersey!  That is pretty cheap after what it has been this past year.

I got to the apartment and found Dominica and Oreo asleep on the bed.  Dominica had packed up our “suitcase”, which is actually a duffle bag thing, and was exhausted and took a nap.  Oreo is always obliging when it comes to naps.

It took us until after eight thirty to get everything ready, the plants watered, the computers shut down, the windows closed and the car packed so that we could leave for our long weekend.  It is pretty rare that we leave Newark for four whole days.  It always makes us nervous in case we have forgotten something important.

The drive through Jersey had a surprising amount of traffic for how late it was on a Friday night.  We stopped at a McDonald’s along the route for some dinner.  We had been hoping to have been able to have stopped at a Panera Bread but we forgot to keep looking for one and bypassed the only corridor that has anything other than fast food and were stuck in our dinner choices.

Overall the trip was uneventful.  Dominica was pretty tired and slept for a good portion of the drive.  I was really exausted making it a pretty hard trip but I listened to quite a bit of IT Conversations podcasts that I had stored up on my iPod and when those ran out I listened to some of the “News from Lake Wobegon” podcast.

I also listened to a bit of the beginning of J. Maarten Troost’s “Getting Stoned with Savages” which helped to pass the time.  “Stoned” is the follow up to Troost’s really interesting book “The Sex Lives of Cannibals“.  In both books he and his girlfriend and then wife pack up and leave Washington, D.C. to live in the islands of the South Pacific (techicnally can an island along the equator be in the “south” Pacific – how Northern Hemisphere-centric is that?)

It was around two in the morning when we arrived at dad’s house in Peoria, New York.  Oreo was so stiff as he struggled to get out of the back seat of the BMW.  He slept soundly the entire drive.  My right foot, which has been having months of ongoing issues due to something rather like tendinitis, really hurt on this drive.  Normally driving does not seem to aggravate it but today it was really bad.  I was in some serious pain by the time that we got home.

Dad was up waiting for us.  We all sat up in the living room talking for what was probably close to an hour.  While we were awake I put an ice pack onto my right heel to see if that would help relieve some of the pain.  We have no idea if the issue is due to inflamation of some sort or not.

I prefer the term “permutation golf” as the real innovation is dad’s use of triple fairways from each “hole”.  His ten acre course, two and a half miles in “length”, is created using only six boulders and flags.  Each fairway begins at one of the boulders and ends at one of three possible ending boulders.  Through a series of permutations you end up criss-crossing the course several times as you work through the mesh of starting point / target boulder combinations.

At this point dad is working almost exclusively with open grass which is all “rough”.  The fairways themselves have not been made and he is not planning on working on that aspect of the course until next year after he is able to bring in a heavy-duty steam roller to smooth out the course.  One of the holes has a little bit of a green created so far.

We look forward to being able to play permutation golf when at dad’s house in the future.  If you play straight from hole to hole and do not hook or splice too badly, it requires approximately two and a half miles of walking to complete the course.  There are no sandtraps yet, though.

If everything goes according to plan, we close on or around October 15th.  Our lease in Newark ends on November 1.

We are very excited.

Vote for OrbTrak

Every vote helps.  We are counting on the SGL community to help pull him through.  Tell your friends.  Get people involved.  It only takes a second to vote.

Andy’s OrbTrak web application tracks the current location of four of the night’s most interesting artificial satellites as they orbit the earth.  A handy guide for finding them for yourself.

Andy’s last Dice Tech Challenge entry was SpyHop: The IHOP Finder.

Photos:

Flickr Photo Set for Disney 2005

Podcast:

SGL Podcast Episode 13: Show 1 in WDW Direct Link to MP3
SGL Podcast Episode 14: Show 2 in WDW Direct Link to MP3
SGL Podcast Episode 15: Show 3 in WDW Direct Link to MP3
SGL Podcast Episode 16: Show 4 in WDW Direct Link to MP3
SGL Podcast Episode 17: Show 5 in WDW Direct Link to MP3
SGL Podcast Episode 18: Show 6 in WDW Direct Link to MP3
SGL Podcast Episode 19: Show 7 in WDW Direct Link to MP3
SGL Podcast Episode 20: Show 8 in WDW Direct Link to MP3

Vlog:

SGL “We Are Going to Walt Disney World” Announcement in QuickTime
SGL in Disney World Day Four Part One in QuickTime
SGL in Disney World Day Four Part Two in QuickTime
SGL in Disney World Day Five in QuickTime
SGL in Disney World Day Six in QuickTime
SGL from Disney’s The Animal Kingdom in QuickTime
SGL on Safari in Disney’s Animal Kingdom in QuickTime
SGL Safari Thumbs Up in QuickTime
Meerkats in Disney’s Animal Kingdom in QuickTime
Meerkat Scout on Rock in Disney’s Animal Kingdom in QuickTime
SGL at the Winnie the Pooh Dance Party in QuickTime

Blog:

Day One at Walt Disney World
Day Two at Walt Disney World
Day Three at Walt Disney World
Day Four at Walt Disney World
Day Five at Walt Disney World
Day Six at Walt Disney World

Are you following the story of ex-NBA player Tim Hardaway’s public statement that he hates gay people? This is good news for gays. When Tim Hardaway decides to hate you, it’s time to celebrate. I want Tim Hardaway to hate me too. This post should help.Years ago, I used to watch Tim Hardaway play for my local team, the Golden State Warriors. He single-handedly ruined my love of basketball. As a point guard, he had two noteworthy skills:

1. A great crossover dribble
2. The ability to do something stupid in the last 10 seconds to lose almost every close game.

Tim never seemed to notice that when he took the last shot in a tight game, his team almost always lost. Now, just to be clear – there’s nothing wrong with being a poor clutch shooter, unless you also happen to be the starting point guard, and it never occurs to you that passing to another player might work.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that Hardaway ruined my love of basketball. That’s literally true. I didn’t mind rooting for a team with a bad record, but I couldn’t cheer for stupidity. I gave up on the Warriors and never regained my interest.So when Hardaway said on the radio that he hates gay people, I think he was surprised that it caused a problem. He’s not good at pattern recognition. I’ll bet he spent the first week of the shit storm just shaking his head and muttering, “I didn’t see THAT coming.”

And did I mention that Hardaway was scheduled to do some public appearances for the NBA during All-Star week in Las Vegas? Apparently it never occurred to him that announcing a deep hatred for a portion of your fan base and advertisers would be bad for business. More muttering, “I didn’t see THAT coming.”

But my favorite part of the story is that Hardaway apparently never noticed that he’s African-American. Or maybe he never realized that enthusiastically promoting bigotry isn’t a good idea if you’re a member of a persecuted minority. Either way, it’s not the sort of thing that gets you into Mensa.

The great irony of this story is that millions of people probably had the same first reaction to his announced hatred of gays: “He’s probably gay.” I doubt there’s any statistical validity to the notion that the biggest gay-haters in the world are closeted gays themselves. But lots of people believe it. So Tim Hardaway managed to insult gays while simultaneously planting the suggestion in millions of minds that he might be one.

Does he hate me yet? – Scott Adams of The Dilbert Blog

Cannibals have health concerns like anyone else and as such need to make careful dietary considerations. For reasons of convenience, let us group cannibal food into three general categories. These categories will be vegetarians, omnivores (people who eat vegetables and meat but not human meat) and other cannibals. Of these three, vegetarians should be a cannibals top choice, omnivores the second and other cannibals as a last resort.

Why would a discriminating cannibal want to each vegetarian meat before other types of meat? In reality, the arguments for eating vegetarians are fairly obvious. Just like free-range, corn-fed chickens are the most desired chicken meat for omnivores, vegetarians are naturally healthier, leaner and are less likely to carry life-threatening parasites and diseases that are transmitted through meat. Cannibals have to be extra cautious about this as their food source is 100% parasitically compatible with them – not a factor that normal omnivores have to worry about.

The last type of meat that a cannibal would want to consume is the meat from other cannibals. Cannibals are the most likely category of all meat sources to be carrying a wide array of human to human transmitted parasites and diseases. Many of these diseases are practically isolated to cannibals as they can only easily be transmitted via consumption making cannibal meat extremely dangerous – rather like eating steak tartar made from mad cows.

Probably the hardest thing about cannibals attempting to eat well is that healthy food is harder to catch. Vegetarians are by their very nature more likely to be health conscious and will be more likely to have a regular exercise regimen. These heart healthy, fit individuals will generally be able to outrun and outlast a chase from cannibals who have been eating fatty, disease ridden meat for any length of time. Cannibals will find the most available food source to be of the “couch potato” variety. Any extended “meat of potatoes” diet will surely lead to heart conditions.

In the end it is a struggle for any cannibal in today’s world to maintain a healthy diet. While food sources continue to become more widely available and even though vegetarianism is on the rise cannibals continue to face hostility, armed prey, disease and parasitic pests.