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You know how it’s kind of uncomfortable to type with a watch on? Well it’s harder to type with a little dog on your wrist. I’m dogsitting today and the little one has to be on your lap because a) he’s needy b) he will be picked at by the larger one until a fight erupts otherwise and c) being on your lap antagonizes the other dog. And when he is on your lap, he has to rest his head on your arm unless he has your full attention. It’s almost adorable. Almost.

Also, the bigger dog is the way I envision children which is to say, if you are not actively paying attention it goes off and tries to eat something. Anything really. Leathery, bird pecked, dried out husk of tomato? Check. Strand of carpet that appears to be sticking up higher than the rest? Check. Other dog (having foolishly ventured off-lap)? Check.

The ice maker in the fridge is the devil come to take us all to hell. We’re all up in arms about it. We barked and ran around and now we’re fighting with each other stopping only to give the kitchen a good intimidating when the ice maker makes more noise. And now the timer on the microwave has beeped. Oh lord. It is truly the end times. Why has our mommy forsaken us?

Earlier today someone’s little darling boy pulled the fire alarm while I was having a nice cup of coffee after lunch so I basically didn’t get much done there. I had to install Windows 7 in Parallels on my work computer to get some database stuff done and Windows keeps updating itself and restarting. Which is fine, except for the part where I said do it later and then it decided now was later and killed my PL/SQL Dev. session. It looks like stuff was saved but seriously wtf?

The bigger dog is now running back and forth and in circles. I take this to be a good sign. Gonna be nice and tired tonight. The smaller dog is making sure that everything on the porch has been carefully smelled. Despite all the complaining it’s been a pretty relaxing day. Just bumming around the house, watching a little bit of internet starcraft video, watching the dogs and so on. If I can actually get a little work done tonight I think everything will be ok.

I also have a picture of the bigger dog trapped under the couch. I’ll see what I can do about internettting that.

I’m home. I found my keys which were hiding from me in my checked bag. I am really happy the launch went to plan and from all of the NASA updates and tweets it sounds like they’re getting done what they need to do up there.

Here’s a link to the launch video at NASA

Here’s a link to NASA’s HD video download page. For your HD viewing pleasure.

Scrubbed

Dan sent me some pictures of the food previously mentioned and Bill provided a link to his Flickr collection of his pictures.

Uh oh. Look what crawled out of the garage. I have been dreading working on the car for a while now. Last time I tried to start it I was defeated. Today I decided to spend a little money and a lot of time on it and see if it wouldn’t get going. I changed the oil and filter and installed a new positive battery clamp with a quick disconnect to replace the old, cracked one that was causing problems before. I also took off the air filters and housing, put damper oil in the carbs and fed it some starter fluid. No new air filters were to be had at the autozone but, oddly enough, Amazon has them so I think I’ll just order them from there. It finally started after a few tries and more starter fluid although it sounded bad a couple of times when cranking and was a little smokey when it first got going. I let it run for a while, pulled it into the driveway, let it run some more, pulled it back in and then shut it off. At this point it made a hissing noise and spit a little coolant out of the top of the radiator. So, I guess it probably needs a flush and some new fluid now. Joy. I cannot imagine that I will be up to that tomorrow but I suppose we’ll see. At least it runs now. It also needs the brakes bled because I let them go too far when last it was drivable and got air into the lines. I also noticed that I am missing a lug nut from front passenger side wheel. No telling where that went. Yay project car. If I can get the coolant and brakes done it’s probably ready for registration and inspection at which point I could drive it to somewhere more thorough work could be done on it.

I was too lazy to get up at 4:30 am to go see the meteors. Too bad for me. I was pointed to this excellent time lapse movie of them though so that’s a little consolation.

Joshua Tree Under the Milky Way from Henry Jun Wah Lee on Vimeo.

Came across this today.

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

While you can watch it here I suggest following the link, selecting HD and watching it full screen. For maximum astonishment, please keep in mind that the entire film is Computer Generated.

Everything’s coming up Milhouse. This was already a good week. The presentation went well at work and work became permanent. I’m still very excited about that. Before I started my contract in May I signed up to take the GRE. The idea is to go to grad school for materials science. UT has a really cool materials science institute that is multidisciplinary and has faculty from all over the university in it. They’ve done some awesome nanotech work and I’d like to learn more about that. Anyway, I digress. Step 1 in going back to school is to take the GRE which I did today. The GRE these days has a writing component, a multiple choice verbal component and a multiple choice quantitative component. Since they have human beings score the writing I won’t hear back on that for a couple of weeks but they give you the scores on the multiple choice bits after you’ve finished the test. The score range for each is 200 to 800. I got 730 verbal and 800 quantitative which is about as good as I think I can expect. I’m really happy about the 800 quant. Those scores are better than I did on the SAT back in the day. I don’t think I knocked the writing out of the park but I managed to avoid drooling on the keyboard so I’ve got that going for me.

Of course, if I actually get accepted to grad school then I will have a hard decision to make but it’s better to have the decision to make yourself than not. I think I owe myself something nice. I may go wander around the Crate and Barrel and look at all of the pretty furniture I don’t need and then go to the arts at the Blanton this evening. Tomorrow to celebrate the independence of my country from the rule of the hated English I will clean the kitchen and mow the lawn. If I’m feeling especially patriotic I may clean the bathroom too.

Huzzah!