3 p.m. Update

In the boredome, I went to amazon.com, and, as you may know, amazon.com gives "featured recommendations" based on your previous purchases and your wish lists and books you've viewed. Anyway, today's feature was a book entitled "Quaternions and Rotation Sequences." (Ever since the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton introduced quaternions in the nineteenth century--a feat he celebrated by carving the founding equations into a stone bridge--mathematicians and engineers have been fascinated by these mathematical objects). I am such a nerd. And even amazon.com knows I am a nerd.

And, on e-bay, I found the most random thing: Up for sale is some of GODS neatest WESTERN ART. You have read about them in the books of the WEST and seen them in the WESTERN MOVIES. Now you can own one or more of them. They tumbly, they roll, they can be all kinds of things. Buy three and stack them and have a WESTERN CHRISTMAS TREE. Stack them in the yard and have a WESTERN SNOWMAN, or just set them around the house and have that great WESTERN OUT DOOR LOOK. Organically grown in the OKLAHOMA BAD LANDS where the BUFFALO and the INDIANS ONCE roamed. This piece of GREAT WESTERN ART comes packed in a 16X16X16 box and deliverd to your door by UPS. Each of these WESTERN ART TUMBLE WEEDS have there own CHARACTERISTIC, and no two are alike. Yours will differ some from the one in the pitcure. My promise to each of you is IF THEY WON'T TUMBLE WE DON'T BUNDLE.

Woe is me

Woe is me. I am at work, while everyone else is on vacation. I imagine shortly Sarah will join me in this should-be-a-day-off kind of day. Its eerily quiet. I was also disappointed to read Karen's journal entry today. She didn't make a single comment on how she left her turkey unattended and nearly burnt down her friend's house in a grease fire. Gosh. That would've been funny. I know this because Karen called me. I miss talking with Karen. I need to call her more -- make this my Thanksgiving resolution. But I am so bad with calling people (at least since high school -- when back in the day, all I did, when I wasn't doing homework, at home was talk on the phone).

Gobble Gobble

So, what did I do yesterday? I missed the Cutri-party in Cleveland; the Dad&Waif-Child-Slut-party at Yardley; and the Slightly-More-Sane-Kohart gathering, wherever that might have been held.

In the morning I ran a 5K (The Uptown Turkey Trot). Yes, you heard me folks. 3.1 miles. Ok, I admit, I walked for about 3-4 minutes of the total race. But, still, I think that's pretty damned good! I'm not going to tell you the embarrassing time it took me to complete it. I kept running, though, even when people were walking faster than my pace. And the best part is, I could gorge the rest of the day without feeling guilty one bit.

Then I went over to Kennda's for Thanksgiving Brunch and drank mimosa's and ate smoked fish and chilled veggies and brie. Mmmmm. I rushed home to make the cherry pie. May I never ever ever ever attempt to make my own pie crust. After 3 attempts, I finally had the dough of the right consistancy and the right shape and size to put in the pie pan. Even then, when I put the second (top) crust on, it wasn't quite even. Part of the edge broke, letting filling poor out into the pan. But I baked it anyway. I didn't actually eat any of it at the party last night, but I warned them about the potential for the crust not to be very good, but I got compliments anyway -- of course, there's no way to know, especially when the cook complains, that they weren't trying to make me feel better. But it turned out ok. And I also have to say that my stuffing was smashingly good.

All I have to say is that you would think something with only THREE ingredients (which is all there is in pie crust) wouldn't be so complicated!

Today's boring work babble

I wonder if I will actually get anything accomplished today. Last week I modified this MATLAB script I had written a while back to extract some new data from a project I did a while back. But I was really sloppy and nested about 7 really long loops in it, one inside the other. In non-technobabble, it means that the code takes like a million years to run once (it didn't finish after 6 hours on Wednesday), and I need to run it about 7 times. So, the question is, do I leave this "brute force" approach, or start from the drawing board again today to actually attempt to write pretty-optimized code. I really wish I had taken some good "How To Code WELL" classes that would give me some better ideas of how to logically do things like this. I remember Irwin and George always laughing at my Matlab scripts. They should see my Fortran, its even scarier. But Fortran sucks. So I don't care how those scripts look. Well, maybe I'll try to make my code prettier (i.e. faster and more flexible) today. That would be progress. And there will be no distractions, I think.