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Moving to Masala

Early Morning Masala

As Bryan is heading off to circle the globe in a few days I’ve had to find a new place to live.  His condo is worth more rented out in its entirety than as a combination of two rooms.  As luck would have it, there was a summer sublet (with the option to renew) open in the Masala Co-op, where I lived in the summer of 2004 (after serving on the board of the Boulder Housing Coalition, which owns the co-op houses in Boulder).

I decided to renovate my room, since I had the time, and no hard pressure to move.  I did some soundproofing between the room and the common areas, re-painted, and built myself a big sleeping loft.  Then I moved all my stuff across town by bike.

Here are some pictures of the new space, before, during and after the work.

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The U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse

BusinessWeek on the End of Mail.  Honestly, I can’t wait for the USPS to collapse.  It’s a garbage delivery service as far as I can tell, and it sounds like virtually all of their plans for pulling out of the dive are related to serving that industry better.  FedEx and UPS kill them on parcels, and real, personal mail is so rare these days I don’t think I’d even notice if it vanished.

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Escape to Elk Mountain

Dark Skies

Kurt and Kerry and I went on a week long bike tour from Boulder to Elk Mountain, Wyoming and back, with about half the miles on dirt roads.  It was 800 km in all, with sun and snow and mud, as well as a cracked rim, elk, moose, and antelope.  We took 4 epic days to get up there, and Kurt made it back in 2.  Kerry and I came back via North Park and Cameron Pass, skipping the last leg from Ft. Collins by taking the bus, and it still took 4 days.  Four nice, non-epic days.  This was not a gentle introduction to touring!  Thankfully Kerry still thought it was fun and wants to go again.

This post has nearly 100 photos in it, so it’ll take a minute to load.  Just go make a cup of tea or something.

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Scientific Process Rage

Scientific Process Rage.  Science doesn’t work like in the movies.  In reality, there’s a lot more cursing and crying.

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The PhD factory

Nature notes that the world is producing more PHDs than ever before.  And asks it time to stop?  Graduate education isn’t like a pyramid scheme, it is a pyramid scheme.  And like all such schemes, it will eventually end in ruin for most of the participants.  Something has to change.  Why not sooner, and pro-actively, rather than later and in shambles?

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Dirt Season at the Hawthorn Garden

[flickrset2post photoset_id=”72157626306601421″]

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Hike and Bike at Karl’s House

I tagged along with Kira to go visit Karl and his awesome house up Wagonwheel Gap Road off of Lee Hill. We went for a hike and cooked dinner together. It was pretty awesome. The Bike Culture meetup is there in June. Should be fun!

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The economy wants me to be evil or useless

I’ve been encouraged to apply for this job at UCAR in the research applications group.  It would involve managing real-time meteorological data for the FAA.  Ingest.  Re-organize.  Excrete.  Databases and GIS.  Systems integration.  Source control.  I’m probably qualified for it.  It would probably pay well.  It would be a ten minute bike ride from downtown, with good healthcare and retirement benefits.  Except.  But.  However.

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Tarsnap – Online backups for the paranoid

Tarsnap looks like a good offsite backup option, if you’re afraid of snoops and spooks and gagged subpoenas, but not of the Unix command line.  Spideroak looks like a more user friendly application with the same zero-knowledge ethic.

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Ecstasy does not wreck the mind

A Harvard Medical School study designed to address the shortcomings of earlier research was unable to detect any long term negative effects in MDMA users.  The main difference in the new study was that both the control and user populations were all-night ravers — some straightedge, and some not, and the ones using, using only MDMA.  The results suggest that previous studies were observing the negative effects of all-night dancing, dehydration and sleep deprivation… not MDMA!  Full article hidden behind a paywall… until PubMed gets it in 6 months.