Integrating the Derivative

New blog! February 20, 2009

Because I post so much material here </sarcasm>, I started a new blog over at Newaygopoli.  Newaygopoli will focus on the history of politics in Newaygo County.  I”m looking forward to staring at tiny print on the microfilm reader to bring you stories from the past!

My counties January 28, 2009

I found a neat website where you can track the counties you’ve travelled through.

hmm…I guess I’m a homebody. 

Counties I've travelled in

Ahhh…nature June 26, 2008

There’s nothing quite like opening the birdseed bag and finding hundreds of little beetles happily munching away on it turning it into crust.  Inside the house too.  No wonder I’ve seen so many of these things crawling around lately.  At least the cats had fun chasing them around!

Kari’s new pickup June 23, 2008

Kari bought a pickup today.  It’s a 2005 Dodge Dakota:

Hmm June 22, 2008

Been a while since I’ve really posted anything here.  Eh, maybe later! 

Any requests?

Did I really need more books?? June 7, 2008

Today I picked up a complete 1963 edition of the book series Harvard Classics, compiled by Charles Eliot, at a yard sale. It’s a collection of classic books on just about every topic imaginable. I paid $50 which, judging by the sole result on eBay of $200, was a bargain!

What I really want to point out though is this website by Christopher Beha. He read through the entire series over the course of a year, one volume a week, and wrote a short essay on each one. Quite a feat!

Random stuff June 4, 2008

Here’s a few things that I’ve been doing or thinking about over the past week or so:

• Last night I finally finished The World Treasury of Science Fiction by David Hartwell.  If you like reading old sci-fi from the 1940s to 1960s you might enjoy it.  Unfortunately I don’t.  I enjoyed the previous sci-fi anthology I read.  I suppose the older stuff just hasn’t aged well (to me anyways).
• A comment on my Jefferson Felton & Eliza A. ? genealogy post by Dennis helped me get back another generation on my family tree!  From the marriage record and the census I’ve learned that Eliza’s maiden name was Reynolds and that her parents are John J. and Mary Elizabeth Reynolds.  This is the only advance I’ve made in my family history in quite a while so I’m pretty excited.
• I’m glad that Obama finally clinched the nomination.  On to the General!  As for VP, I’m ambivalent about the so-called “Unity” ticket.  Partly because I think the “divided democrats” meme may be overrated and also because Clinton’s message of insider experience doesn’t seem to mesh well with Obama’s message of changing Washington.  Just how much is it about the message and not the ideas  anyways??  *sigh*  I suppose I don’t have any clear preference for VP at this point.
• Recently I’ve been toying around with the idea of creating a website on Newaygo County cemeteries.  There are already two sites I know of that have burial listings but they only use HTML.  I’d like to create a burial listing database using MySQL and PHP instead of just HTML.  The Fremont city clerk is supposed to contact me about getting updated records for Maple Grove Cemetery.
• To that end (and for another project I’ve been working on), I’ve been playing around with the WordPress software lately.  It’s not too difficult to work with as long as you know the basics of PHP, CSS and HTML.  Coming up with the design, unless you use a pre-made theme, is the hardest part (as usual).
• Kari and I did some more geocaching while we were at my grandparents for a birthday party.  We ran into some fellow geocachers on the last cache.  We almost walked into a swarm of bees on that one too!  Fortunately we noticed them before we got too close.  I’m still annoyed that someone stole my travel bug.  I’ve had two geocachers contact me asking for hints on a particularly difficult, but fun, multicache here in Fremont that Kari and I found several weeks ago.  Neither of them has posted a log  so I assume they haven’t found it yet.

That’s it for now!  Consider this an open thread.  Talk about whatever you want in the comments.

3,088 down, 11 to go May 23, 2008

Back in January I mentioned a distributed computing project called climateprediction.net that I was running. I predicted that the work unit, which is very large, would finish in May.

I was right! The latest image is on the left. As you can see, there are about 11 hours left. That should be finished today. I’m not sure if I’ll keep running it after today. I might switch over to another project. We’ll see!