Arlen Ward dot com

I see that a book based on the Last Lecture of Randy Pausch was released a while ago.

While it something that I would not mind reading some day, I really only mention it so that I can link to the YouTube video of the lecture Pausch gave for the Last Lecture “Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”. Watch the whole thing, you will be a better person for it. The insights and clarity are not often available like this.

Over at the New York Times one of the illustrators, Christoph Niemann has put together a graphic chronicle of coffee. All put together as if on napkins.

Here’s his plot of coffee related bias with respect to time.

Christoph describes it here:

Here’s a chart that shows my coffee bias over the years.

For good measure I have added my bagel preferences over the same period. (1) Drip coffee, (2) Starbucks, (3) blueberry bagels, (4) sesame bagels, (5) poppy-seed bagels, (6) everything bagels

Please don’t hold my brief affair with blueberry bagels against me. I cured myself of this aberration.

I am sharing this will all of you because if I get stuck playing this too much, you should too.

Fantastic Contraption

Ah, the Dropkick Murphys. Good stuff.

I was out in Massachusetts again for a few days. Actually I was in Mansfield, for a two day meeting at our company headquarters. To get there I had to rent a car in Boston and drive about an hour or so. This was the first time I had to drive in the Boston area, and despite the city being originally plotted out prior to automobiles, I would say the Big Dig really made it a tolerable experience. I really only have one complaint.

Why don’t the interstate exit numbers match the mile markers? They do here in Colorado. They did when I lived in Wyoming. In fact, I think they have in every state I have ever lived in. I even drove the 20 minutes into Rhode Island to see if it was an east coast thing or a Massachusetts thing. Seems to be an east coast thing.

It drove me crazy the whole time I was there (all two and a half days).

I know, I know. Therapy is always an option.

Well, I’ve always said that I thought the Wind River Mountain Range in Wyoming is way more breathtaking than any of those we have here in Colorado, but I’m not sure I would have done this…

Wyoming Mountain depicted on Colorado Stamp

“Hey, can we borrow this? Nobody up here seems to be using it!”

I have to admit, today’s XKCD comic took me until the second “Boom De Yada” before I recognized it was a song…

click to embiggen

The Discovery Channel commercial that it was based on is pretty good too:

Just in case the last video restored your faith in humanity too much, I give you the other end of the spectrum.

…just ask yourself “Where the Hell is Matt?”

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

One of those off-shoots of that bill of rights we have is protests. People that feel strongly about a postion can help draw attention to thier cause with signs and marches.

These are examples of attention that I don’t think they intended.

Example One (or why you should proofread your sign before leaving home):

Example Two (or why knowlege of history is important if you are making references to it):

I have to interupt work on part 2 of “How to get that first job in Engineering” (which is actually getting long enough to be parts 2 and 3) and point out that today is Pi Day!

That’s right. March 14th is Pi Day. 3/14. Thje ratio of a circle’s diameter to its circumference. Maybe celebrating at 1:59 gets you a couple extra geek points.

In honor of Pi Day, I point you to a site that translates the digits of pi into sound. I hate to say music, because any mapping of 0-9 to notes that I use isn’t very harmonious.

Pi has now been calculated to more than 1.2411 trillion digits, without any signs of a pattern emerging.

And here is a link to the movie Pi, just becasue my wife hates it.

Anyway, Happy Pi Day!