Yuri Malenchenko got married!

Despite disapproval from the Russians, Yuri Malenchenko married Ekaterina Dmitriev while he was on ISS and she was in a meeting room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

Texas law allows one — or even both — of a couple to be absent from the ceremony as long as the proper affidavits are filed.

[…]

Malenchenko and Lu wore their standard fare blue-gray flight suits, augmented with bow ties and cumber bunds.

WISH 59: Games for Non-Gamers

WISH 59: Games for Non-Gamers asks the question:

Name three games you might use to get someone who has never roleplayed before into roleplaying.

My experience with dragging non players into games so far has been consistent. It doesn’t matter what game system you use; what matters is insulating the new player from all of the complicated stuff. We have always done this by having the GM manage all of the game mechanics for the new player, giving the person only a high-level description of the character. The player describes to the GM what they want to accomplish, and the GM handles the details of die rolls, spell casting, etc.

Giving Good Reports

Why do they keep yelling at me?

Silence is bad. Management cannot differentiate between someone who’s gone off the deep end and is over their head, someone who is malingering, someone who’s trying to solve an intractable problem, and someone who is making progress on a hard design issue.

Caffeine

Seen on the elevator today:

Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century.
— Greg Egan

How true…

The Oracle at Delphi revisited

Scientific American: Questioning the Delphic Oracle

Prior to 1900, the behaviour of the Oracle was attributed to a vapour that produced divine posession. In about 1900, an Englishman visited excavations at the site, found no chasm or gases, and published an article debunking the claim. In the late 1990s, a couple of geologists tripped over evidence of tectonic fault lines, and started a new investigation, determining that all of the original documented Oracular behaviour could be explained by gases released by tectonic movement. Fascinating!

Canal Days

As part of the Canal days celebration in Port Colbourne, the Niagara Windriders host a kite festival. This is our third year attending; we usually make a weekend of it, spending Saturday in Niagara Falls (or at the water park in Hamilton), and then spending the night in St. Catharines or Welland. The Colleges there rent out student residences cheap during the summer!

Anyway, I joined the Toronto Kite Fliers over 5 years ago, and this the first kiting event I’ve been to that has had to deal with rain; a pretty good track record!

A New Car!

Via a friend of Michelle’s, we found a cheap Daewoo Lanos.

Well, actually we found two; a 1999 SE with A/C, a slightly larger engine, mag wheels, etc.; and a 2000 entry-level model. I decided on the 2000; this is our second car, so A/C isn’t as much of an issue (we only really need it for about 3 weeks out of the year in this climate anyway). The A/C (and other stuff on the larger engine) will only lead to more maintenance issues (and higher bills!) down the road, and the smaller engine still has more than enough power for day-to-day use.

A Technology Jump

Things are jumping around here!

In the last couple of months, we have joined the 21st century and acquired:

• a DVD player (for the TV)
• a CD burner
• a DVD burner (with DVD-RAM support, to replace the dead DAT drive for backups)

This is quite a technology jump, considering that our newest desktop PC is a P200-MMX, is about 5 years old, and was acquired second-hand from Secure Computing’s office closing sale! We’ve got another one of those and a 486 (gasp!) for the kids to play on; a P-133 firewall/server, a Mac Quadra 840AV, and two aging laptops (a PIII-450 and a PII-650).

Ties Cause Blindness!

Take that, you dress code fanatics!

Wearing your tie too tight could put you at increased risk of blindness, say doctors.

The small study in New York measured the pressure of the fluid in the eyeball in a small group of men before and after they attached their tie.

They found a significant rise - and warn that long-term pressure rises have been linked to the condition glaucoma.

This Shouldn’t Be News…

Yahoo! News - Ice Cream ‘Isn’t Health Food’-Study

the staggering calorie and saturated fat content of most of the treats served up at chains like Baskin-Robbins, Ben and Jerry’s, Cold Stone Creamery, Friendly’s, Haagen-Dazs and TCBY is bound to surprise most consumers."

It shouldn’t be a surprise, especially with all of the health news floating around these days.

The CSPI said an empty Ben & Jerry’s chocolate-dipped waffle cone, designed to hold at least two scoops of ice cream, itself packs 320 calories and 10 grams or half a day’s worth of saturated fat.

Quotes from the Trip

Some notable quotes from the children.

In Pisa:

M: “It’s forty cents for the bathroom.”

H: “That’s cheap!”

G: “Well of course that’s cheap, it’s not like the bathroom is very exciting…”

In the park in S.Margherita:

C: “You know, mummy: hot countries and hot days are not for scraped knees; they are for ice cream!”

Coincidence?

So we’re in London, on the south side of Tower Bridge, looking at garbage art (as in art made from garbage, not art that is garbage), when on the sidewalk next to us appears Charlotte’s phys-ed teacher. It was our first full day in London and her last one.

It’s a small world…

Vacation without the bulge

My first post-vacation weigh-in was today. I managed to not gain weight while on vacation in England and Italy!

I ate like I was on vacation, which is to say a lot, when I felt like it. On the other hand, we walked everywhere, including up and down the hill from the convent to the seaside a couple of times per day. All that exercise burned off the extra calories, apparently!

The Car Died

I went to the movies with Sibylle yesterday afternoon. On the way home, I was trying to pass someone when the engine suddenly lost power; just for a second, but enough to make me nervous.

Less than a minute later (at the top of the big hill at Finch & Don Mills, fortunately :-) the engine stalled. I tried to start it; no crank, just a feeble click. Sibylle and I pushed the car off the road, and waited for Michaéla and CAA to come rescue us. I was hoping that I had just thrown a fan belt; this was when we discovered that the hood release is broken (the latch mechanism had rusted, and so the cable popped out under the extra strain :-). So Sibylle and Michaéla crawled around under the car trying to release the hood, while I made sure that they didn’t get run over by passing cars.

Speculating on the new commute

Our new office location is going to be 901 King Street West, at Strachan Avenue (just north of the Exhibition grounds). I’ve been spoiled by working within the downtown core for the last 8 years, so this is coming as a bit of a shock for me!

I live at Leslie and Sheppard. My current commute is about an hour, whether I take the GO train, the subway, or drive in with my wife. The GO train is the most pleasant; it is quieter, and doesn’t stop/start constantly like the subway does.

Firenze

We spent a week in Italy, staying in Santa Margherita, a small town south of Genoa (next to Portofino, if you know where that is).

This put us within striking distance of Firenze, only a 3-4 hour train ride away. We have a fridge magnet of David with various items of clothing, so we wanted to show the kids the real thing. Even better, the trip requires changing trains in Pisa; why not stop there on the way? I’ll admit that I was a little skeptical; dragging the kids on an eight hour train ride could have been a nightmare!