Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Erich Schneider's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, October 14th, 2008
12:47 am	The dead rise! A few months ago when clynne was up north getting trained for her job, I picked up a copy of Last Night On Earth for her, since she loves zombie movies. Tonight we had ipsin and sarahliz over and played it two times. sarahliz and I played the four heroes in each game, with clynne and ipsin played the shambling undead. Both sides won once. The scenario we were playing was the basic one, where the heroes have to kill off a certain number of zombies before a time limit expires. Unfortunately a reasonable strategy for the zombies is to try and avoid contact with the heroes and run out the clock, but it's less fun for them if they do so. In the first game, where the heroes lost, we were still getting the hang of things and got two of our heroes killed, which is an instant loss for them. In the second game we were more effective, and the game came down to two dramatic fights in the High School (where the sherriff's neer-do-well son carved up a couple of zombies with a chainsaw) and the Gun Shop (where Nurse Becky grabbed a pump shotgun and gave three zombies the what-for).  I'm eager to try out some of the other scenarios, like the one where the heroes have to stop the zombies from taking over a manor house. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 13th, 2008
11:33 am	Notion So, if we're about to enter Great Depression II, could we get WPA II working on building us a space elevator? (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, October 12th, 2008
12:48 pm	Resumption I've restarted reading Greek literature in the original with Plutarch's Life of Alexander. (Comment on this)
Friday, October 10th, 2008
8:05 am	Closer... I repeated week 4 of the 100 pushups program. Today I managed 29-33-29-29-25, when the last was supposed to be 40+. So, I'm closer, but I'm going to repeat week 4 again. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
9:58 am	Stiff It's amazing how much flexibility I've lost in the few months since I stopped doing my daily yoga. I stopped a few weeks before Burning Man due to general tiredness in the morning and the effects of my minor bicycle accident. I've now recovered to the point where I can start up again, but just touching my toes has become challenging. I'm still on the 100 pushups plan, which means avoiding upper-body strength-type exercises on the days I'm not doing my pushups, so I've restarted doing a set of martial arts stretching exercises I used to do daily before I got into yoga. Hopefully this will get me back to the point where I can resume my yoga routine after I finish my pushup training. (Comment on this)
Monday, October 6th, 2008
9:20 pm	Weekend So, this past weekend. Saturday I spent most of the day in Lake Hughes for our friend Jetfuel's birthday (he's the guy that helped us out with our wind turbine). clynne had a function to attend in Long Beach that afternoon, so I caught a ride with tgoesh and melissa_shea, and clynne came up in the evening and I drove us both back home around midnight. Basically it was a whole day of hanging out at the little bar in Lake Hughes with a bunch of Gigsville people and others. I discovered the bar had a well-maintained Terminator 2 pinball machine in a side room; it is one of the few pinball games I am pretty good at, since the campus rec center had one when I was in grad school and I played it a lot. I think I got four free plays off one of my for-pay plays. On Sunday I entered a Race for the Galaxy tournament at Game Empire. I came in third out of 11 entrants, turning my $6 entry fee into $10 of store credit. The structure was such that the game with the top 4 players paired off the 1st and 2nd to determine the overall 1st and second, and the 3rd and 4th to determine an overall 3rd and 4th; I wound up being tied with another player for second, but the tie-resolution rule was not in my favor, so I wound up playing (and winning) against the fourth place finisher to get third place. I then went and did a lot of grocery shopping. (Comment on this)
Friday, October 3rd, 2008
10:33 am	Pushup setback Continuing in the Hundred Pushups program, I am in week 4 and have been having a tough time of it. Today I was supposed to do 29-33-29-29-40+ with two minute breaks in between. Instead I wound up doing 29-33-29-15 and being unable to continue. So, I'm going to repeat week 4 at the same difficulty level before moving on. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 2nd, 2008
2:08 pm	Why not * Grab the nearest book. * Open the book to page 56. * Find the fifth sentence. * Post the text of the next two to five sentences in your journal along with these instructions. * Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST. --------------------- "We have been very careful to define the time structure in this model. The exposures are known at time t, the beginning of the period. The asset returns, factor returns, and specific returns span the period from time t to time t + 1. In the rest of this chapter, we will suppress the explicit time variables." - "Structural Risk Models", from Chapter 3, "Risk", in Grinold and Kahn's Active Portfolio Management (2000), sitting next to me on my desk at work. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, September 28th, 2008
11:13 pm	Sculpture My parents attended the Society of Experimental Test Pilots' annual symposium in Anaheim this week. Since they had an extra night's stay at their hotel after the symposium ended, they came up to see us. We had brunch at Firefly in South Pasadena, where I had a really great dish of shrimp over grits. clynne had to work from 3-8 today, so she went back home while my parents and I headed off to the Getty. One of the special exhibits there was of portrait sculpture by Bernini. It was amazing to see up close. I was especially impressed by his skill in rendering cloth out of marble. The verisimilitude of the busts was such that it was one of those moments where I was really struck with the "reality" of people living in the past. It was also interesting from a historical perspective, seeing these lifesize renderings of various Popes, Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIV, etc. The period of roughly 1492-1648 is one of my favorites to study, and I was intrigued by the claim that the Baroque style in representational art was promoted by the Church as a means of furthering the Counter-Reformation. All in all it was a great day with them. And as a bonus, our house is much cleaner as a result of us preparing for them. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, September 26th, 2008
8:13 am	Distraction I will be glad when this election is over. Not because I'm tired of the process, but because I spend too much time reading news about it. I think today I will have to reinstate blocking of certain web sites when I am at work, so I don't sit around for hours popping between four or five of them waiting for something new to happen (in lieu of working). I have been like this at least since 1992, the first presidential election where I could vote; I remember spending way too much time reading newspapers and news magazines in the library and watching CNN Headline News and the NewsHour on PBS and what online news sources there were back in those days. And it's not like I didn't decide which side I'd vote for, oh, a little less than four years ago. I disagree with the current Republican party on so many social issues that I can't imagine voting for them. I guess I'm the political equivalent of a rabid sports fan, except I just consume the analysis instead of the events themselves. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, September 21st, 2008
11:38 am	Pushups The residual effects of my bike accident a while ago have made doing my usual yoga routine difficult, so I've been doing the Hundred Pushups Training Program instead. Back when everyone was all enthusiastic about it I took the test, and was able to do 20. I've now gotten through two weeks and took the test again today; I was able to do 30. So, actual progress, although getting from 30 to 100 in four weeks seems pretty ambitious. Interestingly, the guy who runs the site changed the workout plan within the last two weeks; the definition of the low/middle/high bands chagned and the number of pushups done on each day increased. (Comment on this)
Friday, September 19th, 2008
6:49 am	Together Ten years ago today, clynne and I had our first "date". (I use quotes because it wasn't mutually planned as such by us; she set a trap for me and I happily took the bait.) And here we are, still going strong, through many ups and downs. There is no one in the world I love more and whenever I think about it I realize how lucky I am to have this life with her. The plan is to go out to Parkway Grill in Pasadena tonight and then see Ghost Town. Hopefully clynne's dental appointment this morning will not throw a big wrench into the works. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
9:22 pm	Winner Today was the company's "Casino Luncheon" at the Pasadena Hilton. Everyone who attended got 1000 fake dollars in chips with which to play craps, roulette, and blackjack. At the end of the event we could convert every 100 fake dollars into a raffle ticket which could be allocated towards one of several prizes, which were all gift cards for various places. However, if you won a prize, all of your other tickets became void. I hit the blackjack tables and managed to win another 1300 fake bucks - 700 of which came from my lest bet where I doubled down a bet of 350 and won. Another player who had won a bunch gave me 100 for no reason at one point, and another co-worker who didn't play gave me 500 of his 1000 fakebux. So, I ended up with 2900 fake dollars, or 29 raffle tickets. I was considering putting them all into the bowl representing $50 iTunes cards, but I saw it had a lot more tickets in it than the one for $50 Barnes and Noble cards. I figured "well, I can get music from B&N too, if I want", so they all went into that bowl. And I won one! Good thing for me B&N gift cards were less desirable than those for Best Buy or Nordstrom's. (Just to give a sense of perspective, the big winner of the day had something like 150 tickets, and another co-worker got 96 off a single bet on 12 at the craps table - all of which he put into the "$100 JetBlue gift card" bowl and wound up not winning.) (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 11th, 2008
11:19 am	Today So, thinking about 9/11 got me to thinking about a series of TV ads I really liked, produced during the first year after the attacks by the Ad Council. A group of guys are talking in a diner. One of them starts complaining about the government and high taxes. The others try to shut him up and say "you know they can ruin your life if they hear you saying that, right?" A Catholic priest is finishing saying Mass. He then tells the congregation to "be careful out there". We see the worshippers exiting out of a trap door in someone's garden, looking around furtively as they leave. A guy is in a library. The librarian at the desk tells him that "that book is no longer in circulation". As he tries to leave, two men in suits come out of the stacks, grab his arm and lead him away. A man in his car has been pulled over by the police, and is being frisked as they search the car. Opening the trunk, they find what they are looking for: a cache of newspapers. They all ended with the line: "What if America wasn't America?" They didn't get a lot of airplay, but I saw them on line, and in a story on The Daily Show. I wish they had been seen more, as I thought they offered a great comeback to the then-growing "homeland security" hysteria in the country. I'd give you links to them, but there aren't any references to them on the Ad Council's web site, the videos were hosted on a streaming video server that no longer has them, and they aren't on YouTube. "Down the memory hole", as Winston Smith might say... anyway, you can find traces that they existed by searching for "Ad Council" and "Campaign for Freedom". (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008
9:52 pm	BM2008 post 2 Thoughts general and specific: ( Behind a cut for those who don't care to read about Burning Man ) (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 4th, 2008
9:04 pm	BM2008 post 1 How our various projects turned out: ( Behind a cut for those who don't care to read about Burning Man ) (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008
10:33 pm	home So, we're home, as of about 7pm tonight. Spending yesterday at the Atlantis was wonderful. It's so nice have some vacation time together that doesn't involve survival skills. More to say later, but I leave you with some pieces of documentary evidence. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008
1:37 pm	Alive and well We're alive and well and hanging out at the Atlantis hotel in Reno. We finally got all our stuff packed up and left Burning Man at about 6pm yesterday, breezed through the exit (there was no wait at all until a 5-minute one right at the end), and made it here shortly before 10. We're spending an extra day here courtesy of a "stay a day free" deal with the hotel, getting reacquainted with air conditioners, hot water showers, sleeping in, nice restaurants, and all the other great aspects of "radical division of labor". clynne's getting her nails done at 3:45, and in the interim we're going to go lounge by the pool. More about our trip when we get back to L.A... (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, August 22nd, 2008
1:35 pm	sql>commit; Well, we're about 4 hours behind schedule. On the other hand, my wife is a freakin' miracle worker. There is not a cubic inch free in that cargo van. I think she designs TARDISes in her spare time. Once we get all three cats in the house, we're heading out. No internet access for us until at least September 2, so have a good Labor Day, everyone! (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
7:51 pm	break The packing of the cargo van proceeds. It will be a tight fit but we should be able to get everything in. Hopefully we'll get everything in by midnight... (1 Comment |Comment on this)