Carmichael's Position

Racquetball

I'm fairly athletic...  well for a "Crap! I'm only 3 months away from 40" year old!  Now please don't confuse me with one of those runner perverts!  I cannot stand running for distance.  To me a long distance run is...well... a double!  Through high school I played the reflex sports!  Baseball (2nd base, 3rd base and catcher), I wrestled, well actually I counted a lot of ceiling tiles (weighing 89 pounds and wrestling in the 101 weight class will do that to you!), and I played tennis. 

Now, I play racquetball. 

I love the sport for the workout I get while forgetting that it is actually exercise and I am no longer 25!  I play it for all I am worth.  I play in the "A" leagues, and while I do not win them all, I do make them competitive.  I have a "Never Say Die" attitude on the court.  And many of my opponents will attest to the fact I refuse to call a hinder until I have made ALL efforts to get to the ball... yes even if you are between me and the ball!  I am respectful however, in that I know that my struck racquetball can approach supersonic (At least it sounds that way) and to be the surrogate front wall in such circumstances is not fun... but Damn you should see the welts that can leave!

I've played the sport for going on 24 years now, with a number of unintentional sabbaticals sprinkled in.  In the past year and a half, I have picked the sport up again in earnest in an effort to fight the impending floatation device that seems to be dead set on inflating around my mid-section, ruining my view of my size 12 Nikes!  So far it is paying off!  My size 34 Levi's are not tight!  And I can still wear belts with normal belt buckles, not those cowboy girdles!

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have caught one "Pain in the Ass" of a cold.  This bastard really wiped me out for the past two weeks.  Which has precluded me from exorcising my stress demons on the court.  I have been grumpy!  Well this past Friday, I stepped gum rubber laden foot once again on the wood floor, and played a respectable game against one of my usual opponents.  He won the majority of the 5 games, but not all.  And considering my endurance was somewhat wanting, I still felt better for the effort.

Then came today.  Because of my layoff I had some matches to make up in my league.  So I played 3 independent matches, 3 games each!  Wouldn't you just know it, I couldn't win any one of them in the first 2 games, nor would I give in, so all went the maximum 3 games.  And damn it I only won 1 out of the 3 matches!

But I did learn a really interesting fact relating to Newton's First Law (Inertia) during tonight's matches.  When in the final stages of fighting a cold, the snot stays with you till the end... well... almost!  Snot doesn't like sudden stops and rapid changes of directions!  I felt like a rodeo bull!  Fortunately none of my opponents suffered the "Rodeo Clown Rinse!"  But I did manage to make a lasso or two.... I Hate Colds!  Don't get this thing!  It takes all the fun out of racquetball and other activities!

Wanna feel like an idiot?

I like to think I'm pretty smart.  Now mind you I am surrounded at work by easily some of the best and the brightest (don't believe me?...  Just ask any one of them!) so sometimes it is easy to fall into the shadow of mediocrity.

But I hold my own on many fronts.

Not on this one though!  And I'm willing to put money that after taking a gander at this article, replete with quotes like...

Utilizing two coupled optical interferometers, nested within a third, Kwiat’s team succeeded in counterfactually searching a four-element database using Grover’s quantum search algorithm.

“By placing our photon in a quantum superposition of running and not running the search algorithm, we obtained information about the answer even when the photon did not run the search algorithm,” said graduate student Onur Hosten, lead author of the Nature paper. “We also showed theoretically how to obtain the answer without ever running the algorithm, by using a ‘chained Zeno’ effect.”

.... you, oh learned reader, would pale in comparison as well. 

Yeah I bet these guys are more fun than a "Barrel of Cercopithecidaes" at Happy Hour!

Whew!

Photo by L. Brian Stauffer

Another Milestone at NewsGator

I have been with NewsGator for going on 2 years now, and have had the pleasure of watching as we have grown, from me, Greg and Lane, working from Greg's house (sitting on the none-too-comfortable dining room chairs!) to our first official office space where we grew from small start-up to "growing-now-VC-funded-small-start-up" expanding from 4 employees to 12.  We then progressed to a "Rabbit Warren" of an office on the 9th floor of one of the older buildings in Downtown, complete with "Caution Asbestos Hazard" signs in the bathroom!  While there we grew from 12 to approximately 50 employees, outgrowing our space weekly it seemed.  We actually had a number of developers who's desks were in the hallways! (No Joke!)

Which brings me to today at Newsgator!  We've moved!  And the excitement here can barely be measured!  We have room to move around!  Hell you can actually get winded walking from one end of the floor to the other!  A number of folks here have commented that they can turn in their gym membership and start running laps around our parameter corridor!  (I bet 16 laps makes a mile).

But the really spectacular part of the new digs is the view that comes with now residing on the 25th floor!  Magnificent! 

One fun thing we have done is changed the naming conventions on our conference rooms.  Rather than the old "really creative" names we used like "Conference Room 1" and "Conference Room 2," we have acknowledged a few of our's love of Poker and Vegas and named our conference rooms after Vegas Casinos.  The Executive Conference room is of course Bellagio, we have a Venetian, and a Gold Dust.  But the piece de resistance is by far "The Stratosphere!"   An open area in the southwest corner, designed for collaboration and community (and the occasional company meeting).  It has, for 30 feet in either direction, an unobstructed floor to ceiling view of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, and the city of Denver Colorado.  It is breathtaking!  I cannot do the view justice, but here's a taste...

I have noticed a bit of gawking taking place today as we all acclimate ourselves to our new surroundings.  We all hope it will serve as inspiration to our creativity and willingness to excel to even greater heights.

Ground Based Spin Recovery!

Ran across this on a link dump site. (Fair warning, much of the stuff on this site is Not Safe for Work, and certainly not safe for church!)  But this particular video video link below is safe for both so feel comfortable clicking.

The website is from one of the Nordic countries so I really can't say what was said about this.  But when I watched it I thought, "Oof here goes one hell of a spin cycle!"

Watch and be amazed at the Situational Awareness presented here! http://media.kladblog.com/media/200602/uphill.wmv 

Been Sick!

Man am I ticked!  I just completed writing a post about all of the latest hubbub in the news lately, and absent mindedly clicked the back button in my browser's window while composing the post and lost all of my writing!  Hate when I do that!  It would be nice if Typepad could find a way to guard against losing all of my draft when I execute such a dumb-ass maneuver!  (Wow, I'm sounding dangerously close to a... well you know who you are... with a statement like that!  When I want a company to protect me from my own stupidity... Can anyone say "Caution contents in this coffee cup could be hot! Drink with extreme care!")

Anyway the gist of the post was clarifying to my readers why I had not been posting lately in spite of all the juicy political and media topics that have been laid before us.  I'll try to recreate my commentary on the topics of the week in the next day or so, but it is late and I am sick!  Which is why my posting has been a bit sparse.  I am usually a very resilient person who seldom gets sick, but wow, did I catch a doosy!  I have been wiped out for a week!  It started right after my business trip to Los Angeles last week.  Damn commercial airliners!  That does it, private jets for me from here on!

One thing I did want to share with you gentle readers is the view I had from my hotel in Los Angeles.  The sunrise on Wednesday morning was stunning!  Please enjoy. 

I Bet John McCain Won't be the Media Darling After this One!

Wow!  I'll bet our favorite RINO (Republican in Name Only), Senator John McCain, won't be the media darling after this one from McCain's own website...

Dear Senator Obama:

I would like to apologize to you for assuming that your private assurances to me regarding your desire to cooperate in our efforts to negotiate bipartisan lobbying reform legislation were sincere. When you approached me and insisted that despite your leadership’s preference to use the issue to gain a political advantage in the 2006 elections, you were personally committed to achieving a result that would reflect credit on the entire Senate and offer the country a better example of political leadership, I concluded your professed concern for the institution and the public interest was genuine and admirable. Thank you for disabusing me of such notions...

As I noted, I initially believed you shared that goal. But I understand how important the opportunity to lead your party’s effort to exploit this issue must seem to a freshman Senator, and I hold no hard feelings over your earlier disingenuousness. Again, I have been around long enough to appreciate that in politics the public interest isn’t always a priority for every one of us. Good luck to you, Senator.

Way to go John.  Pick on the Democrats' Favorite Son! 

Talk about ONIONS!

Where is the Media Outcry!

The public debate gets marginalized once again.  I hate! HATE! mind you... Racism in any form.  Whether it be in the overt form of hate speech of the KKK or of any other organization or subtle stereotypical remarks.  As we all should.

When public figures like Pat Robertson make categorically stupid remarks relating to a race, we as a democratic society need to know what was said so we can then determine the credibility of the speaker and in turn the organization he represents.  It is the responsibility of the media to expose these remarks.  And wow! They do just that!  They have a "Blood in the water" field day when any "Right-winged" moron opens his mouth and inserts his foot!  A few leap to mind!

• Pat Robertson
• Trent Lott
• James Dobson

Even when these folks are speaking at a private or semi-private event, the press takes glorious reverie in quoting, and maintaining the fervor over really dumb-ass statements made. 

Ok, great!  Have at them!  I'm not about to say that these figures should be immune from scrutiny.

BUT!  Let's share the wealth here a bit shall we?  I have given this a couple of days to see the light of the "Mainstream Media" but alas, my extremely low expectations of our "Free Press" were sadly... met.

From World Net Daily:

NAACP chairman compares GOP to Nazis
Bond delivers blistering partisan speech in North Carolina

Civil rights activist and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond delivered a blistering partisan speech at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina last night, equating the Republican Party with the Nazi Party and characterizing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell, as "tokens."

"The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side," he charged.

Calling President Bush a liar, Bond told the audience at the historically black institution that this White House's lies are more serious than the lies of his predecessor's because Clinton's lies didn't kill people. [more]

I was really hoping to see this exposed in a Mainstream outlet so I can validate the credibility of the report.  Without having been there personally, I have to trust the media to investigate the accusation and various claims made in some posts and arguably biased press sources.  But I have not.  I searched Google News and not one mainstream outlet is reporting this story!  If this were the head of an organization like the NRA or similar, banner headlines would have draped across the New York Times and Washington Post.  Not to mention made the lead story on CBS and CNN!

But no... I guess the third rail of the fourth estate is as charged as ever...

I did like this post's analysis however.