Whoa, Buttercup Festival is updating again! I love Buttercup Festival!
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Monica and Sumana came to visit! In the same week! It was a very full week, but I am still very fortunate to have had both my pretend big sisters come see me. I got to meet a nontrivial fraction of the Geek Feminism crew and attend the Beard Team USA National Beard and Mustache Championships, of which, yes, pictures will forthcome. Now: to sleep until August.
I liked it this much despite the fact that it takes place in Kentucky
Recommended: Underground, by Jeff Parker and Steve Lieber. Those of us who are always demanding clever, tough ladies in lead roles will enjoy meeting cave geek Wesley Fischer, and those of you who want exciting comics without superheroes and lasersharking will be equally happy. (I could have stood a little more lasersharking, but my weaknesses are common knowledge.) There’s a hint of a sequel in the afterword, which is an idea I heartily endorse!
And boy are my wings tired
I did a hundred pushups! In a row! I had done lots more in a session, just not in a single set. Also some of those reps at the end would have been pretty hilariously sloppy to anyone watching. But it still counts!
I’ve been following this workout plan since, uh, the beginning of March. It’s a six-week plan, and you will note that it has taken me three months to complete! In retrospect, that progression gets a bit suspicious at the end; even on the best-case track, you’re supposed to go from around 60 to 100 in a single week. I had to repeat week six several times, and then repeat week six/day one for a couple more weeks, adding five to ten more reps each time.
I’ve talked before about my complete lack of upper-body strength and how ashamed of it I’ve always been. I know how to maintain cardiovascular shape and build leg muscle–go running–and I have done so, because running is the only exercise that doesn’t bore and frustrate me. It’s also got a pretty low barrier to entry, whereas I perceived upper-body workouts to be fraught with torn tendons and requiring of huge weight sets. And if I want to actually build muscle in any serious way I probably will have to get some kind of free weights someday. I should probably learn to do the Ab Ripper first.
But meanwhile I’m just going to keep doing a hundred pushups every night and see how far I can take it! I hear there’s this fancy kind you can do with one arm.
I realized later I should have made them say “BAD” and “ASSSSSS”
This is my current setup at work–since starting there last October, I’ve gradually advanced from working solely on my battered white Macbook to a laptop-and-monitor setup, then to a Mac Mini-and-monitor when my laptop got stolen, and now at last to the glorious panopticon you see above. I’m trying the portrait screen for my email client, SQL client, terminal and (mostly) IDE, and so far I really like it. I got the idea from some interview about a high-ranking Google engineer’s setup that I can’t be bothered to find now. Ben (the boss) said he thinks it originated with Flight Simulator junkies.
You can just barely see my tiny, mighty computer and a box of rejected business cards peeking out from under the right monitor stand; on the left are various plastic utensils, half a bag of snack chips, and a ceramic dish Kara gave me for reheating leftovers in the work microwave. The latter contains the Magical Neverending Napkin Supply. I never request or grab napkins from lunch places anymore, I just take whatever they throw in the carryout bag and put the unused ones in there. At this rate, I will never exhaust it.
The headphones are the stupidly expensive ones I bought from a DJ supply shop down the street, where the DJ supplier looked at me askance when I explained that I would be using them for web development. Like all headphones, they still annoy me with trapped ear-heat and weight, but they provide good isolation and I can stand them a lot longer than anything I’d tried before. I would have paid the whole price just to have the padded cups that go around (as opposed to pressing directly on) my ears.
Uh, what else can you see in there? Venerable iPod sitting on the Mini waiting to be plugged in, sexy aluminum keyboard that likes to shock me if I scuff my feet too much, expensive Logitech mouse with the click-and-lock free-scrolling mouse wheel that is fun but not actually that much of a productivity enhancer. Don’t tell Ben, he paid for that too. The little gray wrist cushion doubles as a stress ball / fidget toy. The books in the right corner are copies of the Ruby Cookbook and Mastering Regular Expressions, both of which I will go to great lengths to avoid cracking open. The shadow on the left is my hat.
Twitter is creepy
Yesterday I twittered a thing about the prostate cancer vaccine approval and this is what I got in my inbox the next morning.
WELL GOOD.
I have, as expected, read more Maureen McHugh–specifically Nekropolis. I liked it more than China Mountain Zhang, in that it had a much defter way of pulling my heart out and stomping on it. The problem with writers who deal in compassion is that they are mean.
McHugh has a prose style which I believe I am required to call “unadorned” and which I don’t typically go for–despite all my protestations about clarity and Strunk and White, I am easily seduced by linguistic fireworks (Douglas Adams, William Gibson, Margaret Atwood, Ellen Kushner, et al). She makes me understand why people get so lathered about Hemingway.
Not All Dreams Can Come True
From across the political spectrum (that is, from my liberal girlfriend and my conservative cousin) I have heard rumblings of disappointment about Obama’s supposed plan to end manned space exploration.
If you go read that article you’ll actually see that it’s not the case at all: they’re scrapping the rickety Space Shuttle program, which has been slated for retirement for years and basically only goes to the International Space Station, because they want to concentrate on the mission to build a Mars base–a mission proposed by Bush. Resupply missions to the ISS are being contracted out to an increasingly healthy private spaceflight industry (which development I’d think would please free marketeers). NASA’s budget is actually increasing by $2 billion next year.
But this also seems like a good time to re-link Leonard’s article from 2008 about the relative awesomeness of manned vs. unmanned space exploration. It did a lot to persuade me that, while manned spaceflight does a lot for a very small group–a few hundred people worldwide, all more genetically perfect than supermodels, mostly white, mostly male–unmanned exploration delivers a great deal more, dollar for dollar, for the rest of us.