Courtesy of TV in Japan.

Well we ended up in 4th place... out of 4. The fifth team, the one we beat yesterday, evaporated and its remnants were absorbed into another ABQ team. We lost both our games today, though we played really well in the first half of the first game and were only down 7-8 at the half. From there we pretty much lost it, but it was still fun.

Today was the first day of Los Alamos' annual ultimate frisbee tournament, The Atomic Blast. [Almost] Every year we put on the tournament and somewhere between 4 and 10 additional teams drive in for two days of ultimate, camping, and grilling. And beer. Generally, most of the teams who come are sort of club-level teams that practice together and the quality of play is usually quite high. The exception is the Los Alamos team, which is comprised of the people who attend our twice-weekly pickup game after work. The level of play on the Los Alamos team tends to be so low that our best players defect to other teams in order to get a bit more competitive play in during the tournament, which only further degrades the quality of the Los Alamos offering.

This year our best player, Chris, was going to join the team from Lubbock, TX, which he usually does. However, there weren't enough people from Lubbock who could make it, so instead Chris and four very good Lubbock people played with Los Alamos and vastly improved the quality of play. As a result, we had a fighting chance for the first time in many years. (The last time we won a game at the Blast was, I think, in 1999 when we beat Lubbock, ironically, because they were at the time brand new and very bad. The next year they returned and handed us our asses.)

Despite our infusion of talent from Lubbock, our first game saw Santa Fe completely dismantle us for a final score of 13-2. I scored one of our points, which I was happy about, but on the whole we played abysmally. However, there was a noticeable improvement in our play during the game, and during the course of the following two games, which we lost 13-4 and 13-6. Our final game of the day, against a team from Albuquerque, we actually won! It was incredible. By the end of the day the team had figured out how to deal with zone defense and hard runners. A lot of the people on our team are new this year and had never seen tournament play, so there was a sharp learning curve, but by the end of the day they were getting the hang of it and it was great to watch this happen. So for the first time in probably 7 years, we were not the worst team at the tournament. :)

Anyway, four 90 minute games of ultimate later and a huge dinner at Gabriel's, I'm going to bed a couple hours early. Tomorrow we play the championship bracket. I don't anticipate we'll last past the first round, but the team morale is pretty high on account of our win.

Have I, all this time, been wearing my pants incorrectly or something?

Allow me to explain the need for this question. As I mentioned earlier, I recently purchased a new cell phone and it isn't the smallest phone ever; it's more like a small PDA. This causes some consternation amongst the membership of the Committee for the Organization of Mouser's Pockets, namely me. I don't want to scratch the screen on the phone, so I can't put it in the pocket with my keys, and it's too big to fit into a pocket along with a wallet. Putting the wallet and the keys in the same pocket is a pain because the one I want access to at any given time is always at the bottom. This has forced me to enter the realm of The Third Pocket, i.e. a rear pocket.

Now I'm well aware that guys have been carrying wallets in their back pockets for years and, indeed, for most men it seems to be the default location for a wallet. But for whatever reason, I've always carried my wallet in the front-left (keys and pen in the front-right). So I figured it wouldn't be a problem to just replace the wallet with the phone, and put the wallet in one of the rear pockets.

But when I sit down, there is no way for me to sit without sitting on top of my wallet, which is extremely uncomfortable. I can't imagine that all these guys who normally carry their wallet in their back pockets are just accepting this massive ergonomic affront and go about their business with a slight list to starboard, so there must be something about either my pants or my body that is causing the wallet-buttock alignment factor (WBAF) to be out of whack for me. So, I ask you... do I wear my pants wrong? Or do I wear the wrong pants? Or do I just have a funny-shaped ass?

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do if I also want to carry around my camera, which fits nicely in a pocket by itself but not with anything else... Clearly I need to stick to cargo pants with the thigh pockets; they work great.

Down with rear pockets!

The YMCA in Los Alamos was originally built with six courts to support raquetball, handball, and squash. There were originally three squash courts (the smaller "American style singles" variant that is reasonably unpopular in modern squash) and three larger courts appropriate for raquetball and four-wall handball.

Several years ago, one of the squash courts was euthanized to make room for the indoor climbing wall. Last year, a second squash court was converted into a "multi-purpose room" which basically meant they shoved about 15 exercise bikes in it, rendering it useless for squash. This left the squash players with a single court, which was problematic since there are probably more squash players in Los Alamos than raquetball and handball players combined.

The solution was to take up a collection, funded almost entirely by the squash players, to rennovate one of the three raquetball/handball courts into a sliding-wall convertible court which could be re-sized from its regular size down to a standard squash length (for singles games, though the court is 1' narrower than a standard singles squash court). For the last several months this rennovation has been taking place, temporarily leaving only a single squash court and two handball/raquetball courts available. As a result, there has been a serious traffic jam for prime court time.

The YMCA has a reservation system for courts, allowing us to call ahead and get a court assigned to us for our desired time. Like everyone else who isn't retired, we wanted to use the 17:30-18:30 block for our twice-weekly handball games. With just the two courts useable for handball, the competition between us and the raquetball players for court time was intense. It ended up that we were calling the YMCA the moment they started taking reservations for the day in question, which in this case was 9am the previous day.

Enter the convertible court, which is now being fought over by all three sports. It turns out that, in order to relieve phone conjestion at the YMCA front desk, the reservation start time for squash players was set to 8:30am. This wasn't a problem because they had their own courts. Now that we share a court... they haven't rectified the discrepancy between the times and, as a result of fierce competition for court times, the squash players always get the good court.

After a scheduling error on the Y's part had both our handball game and a raquetball game scheduled for the same court and time slot this evening, and the handball players lost in arbitration... we were left in a really frustrating position. Both standard raquetball/handball courts were filled with raquetball games, the convertible court was filled with a squash game, and the squash-only court was empty.

I asked the squash players if they would be willing to move back to the regular squash court so that the handball players could play but my request was summarily denied for two reasons. The first was that the old squash court was not regulation size and all of the good squash players in town had vowed never to use it again (nevermind that he also told me about the new court being too narrow). The second reason was that the squash players had ponied up all the cash for the convertible court rennovation and they thus deserved preferential access to it.

I'm thinking the moral of this story might be that squash players are pricks.

So the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, Ted Stevens, the republican from Alaska, made a total ass of himself in session the other day. The commerce committee is in charge of regulating the e-commerce, which means they have a tremendous amount of influence over what sorts of services are available on the internet. So it's a little disheartening to see the extent to which Stevens has no idea what he is talking about.

Jon Stewart helps explain the Stevens description of how the internet works.

Someone made a commemmorative music video.

I can just imagine the scenario; someone had to explain to him how latency on the net came about, and was forced to use... really simple metaphors. And Stevens took it to heart. And I'll bet the staffer responsible for this explaination is now taking heat for it.

Anyway, this is the sort of screw job that comes about when non-technical people are put in a position of making important technical decisions. Reminds me a bit of some of my work.

Left Nashville yesterday late morning and drove north towards Lexington. On the way, I realized I was passing within about 10 miles of Mammoth Cave National Park, which I had never been to, so of course I went and took a tour. It's the longest cave in the known universe at well over 300 miles of surveyed passage. But the tour I took only shows you about 1 mile. It's a water-flow cave and as such is less decorated than the caves in the Guads, and a 1 mile sampling doesn't really give you the sense of how huge the cave system is. It was sort of a let down, but I did get a cool early map poster.

Arrived at cousin Rebecca's place in Lexington without incident (other than the "holy krikey it's hot" incident). Met her new husband, Chad, who is an ultimate player and great to talk with. He gets the Mouser Stamp of Approval. As does Rebecca, but this was somewhat of a given as I already knew her.

I learned that a corn oyster is a bread product, a mater is a fruit, and that the proper pronunciation of Versailles is "ver-SAILS."

Now they're off to build a house for Habitat for Humanity and I'm off to find the top of Kentucky. Next stop: unknown. The stop after that: Charlotte.

As you can tell from the title of the conference, this is a real edge-of-the-seat experience. A lot of the presentation content is focused on policy and procedure, neither of which I find very interesting. People from my group (many of whom attend this conference) tend to cluster around the technical talks. Unfortunately, the talks are collected into sessions with vaguely similar talks and they often had multiple technical sessions going concurrently. So there was a lot of time spent wandering the exhibitor's hall during periods when there were no technical sessions in progress.

On the other hand, the quality of the technical talks was very good. I learned some interesting things. The N1 talks seemed to go over very well as a general rule. I was a bit nervous for my talk because they put me in the largest room and it wasn't as empty as I had anticipated. A lot of the N-1 heavy-hitters showed up, despite Shorty's talk going on concurrently (and the opportunity to see him in a silk shirt [no tie] and with his black jeans pulled over his combat boots rather than tucked into the top). I had my talk more or less memorized from the previous two evenings of practice, but I found myself slightly less comfortable than I am used to once I got up on the stage. But it wasn't a big deal; the talk proceeded without incident. The questions were not aggressive and were easy enough to answer. All of the hard copies of my paper that I had brought with me were gone by the end of the session, as were all of my business cards.

I had lab travel change my rental car agreement, so now I have to drive back to the airport today and turn in my Avis car and pick up a new National car, which will have unlimited milage. Sort of a pain... but the admins in my group office took care of the bulk of it; they're awesome. The only remaining issue is that the hotel only charged me the government rate ($139) for the first night of my stay, then jacked it up ot $179/night. I'll have to go down and have a chat with them.

Nashville, like much of the country, has been in the grip of a heat wave during my stay. The 1 block walk from my hotel to the convention center has been really uncomfortable, particularly with the formal attire yesterday. Yuck.

The fine folks at Reuter-Stokes (they make ³He tubes for neutron detection) took a bunch of the LANL guys out for dinner last night. I am now sick of barbeque. Someone ordered the humorously named "Mexican Spaghetti," which was clearly spaghetti with Cinncinnatti-style chili on top. It'll be nice to get out of downtown Nashville and start eating normal food again. Downtown caters to tourists and conference types, and there is an air of falseness to it (and far too many honky-tonks). Speaking of honky-tonk, the radio in my room woke me up on my first night here to a song called "Honky Tonk Badonka-donk" which I found.... very disturbing.

Anyway, today I'm driving up to Lexington, KY, to see my cousin Rebecca and her newly-acquired husband. The following day it's the Kentucky state highpoint and some random sight-seeing, then I drive down to Charlotte to see various aunts, uncles, possibly cousins, and grandmothers. I haven't seen any of these relatives since I was at my sister's wedding.

It's sort of like a little bastion of Texas. A Texas away from Texas, if you will. Or perhaps, Texas East.

Not much to tell yet; I sat in a plane for 3.5 hours in Atlanta today because the world's weakest rainstorm blew through for a period of approximately 10 minutes. But apparently Atlanta is a little jittery about weather and shut down the whole airport, including preventing the landing of the airplane that contained the pilots for my flight. So, for fuel reasons, they diverted to Knoxville. Once there, they had a mechanical issue. In the time I sat on that plane at the gate, I could have driven to Nashville (no exaggeration).

What's missing from this cockpit? Pilots.

I should mention, however, that my Uberstatus kicked in and they upgraded me to the front row of the plane for this leg, so I did spend my 3.5 hours in relative comfort and with a lot of free drinks. All I had was water and apple juice. The guy behind me went through about four Bailey's on the rocks before the kid next to him said, "If you have one more I'm telling Mom."

Anyway I didn't get in until much later than anticipated and it was already dark. So I really didn't see much of the city other than wandering around downtown to find a sushi place that was recommended by a friend. Yum.

So the conference hotel is the Marriott Renaissance, located in downtown Nashville. It was full when I registered, so they put me in the Marriott Courtyard Downtown, which is... one block away. The Marriott density here is disturbingly high, but the good news is I won't have to drive my car at all. And that's good because (for some reason) Lab Travel decided it would be funny to sign me up for a rental car that doesn't have unlimited mileage. I didn't know anyone still did this, but Avis wants $0.30/mile in addition to their rate. Great.

Watched "Everything is Illuminated" this evening. I loved Liev Schreiber as an actor, and now I love him as a director. Eugene Hutz's broken english is hilarious. "Many girls want to be carnal with me... perhaps because I'm such a premium dancer." If you get this on DVD, definitely watch the deleted scenes. They don't even seem to fit in the movie at all, but they are a h00t. What's with Elijah Wood and the 70's muscle car!? And the midget?

It has been brought to my attention that I haven't updated since returning from Belize. I've been frantically preparing for my presentation in Nashville next week. And when I'm not doing that, I've been slowly wading through all of the images (4.5GB worth) from Belize and working on the back end for my weather station. Neither of these two endeavors will be complete before I leave on Friday.

After Nashville I'm going to take a few days vacation and drive out to Charlotte to see some of my extended family. At the same time, Nina is going to be undergoing a great exodus from Connecticut—driving her car from Connecticut to New Mexico via Michigan, Indiana, Atlanta, New Orleans, possibly Canada, and possibly Charlotte. Her route is possibly more circuitious than my similar exodus in the spring of 2002.

Anyway, there's some possibility that we might see each other for a day while in the deep south and to make that work we'll definitely be needing our cell phones. Unfortunately, Nina's phone recently died. And we both hate Sprint, so the decision was made that she would switch providers to Verizon and get a new phone. Now my largely un-used cell phone is actually a rider on her plan, so when she cancelled her service, my phone ceased to work as well. This meant that I had to get a new phone as well.

Of course I took this opportunity to purchase the most ridiculous phone I could, the Treo 650 (which I have blathered on about before once or twice or thrice). In my defense, this is not the latest and greatest anymore and thus no longer costs an arm and a leg, though it is still not cheap. Hopefully all of the beyond-phone features will entice me to actually use it, unlike my previous phone which basically lived in my truck, turned off, all of the time.

So I have my phone activated and my INMM talk is almost complete so I'm ready to hit the road. I'll be in the Nashville area from July 15 to July 20 and the Charlotte area between July 22 and 25 if anyone wants to get together. I will have email access while in Nashville.

Just a quick note to let you know that I got home safely and am now going to bed. It's been a long two weeks and I have to work in the morning. Saw fireworks from the car on the drive home from Albuquerque.

Two days ago we found a 10m diameter hole in the ground out near El Progresso. The locals said they had never been down it because it was too deep. They had tried to knock a tree into the hole and use that as a ladder, but it fell out of sight. Then they lowered someone down on a 30' hemp rope but he said he couldn't see the bottom. We threw a rock and it took 3.5 seconds before the last sound occurred, however it clearly bounced off a couple of ledges on the way and may have rolled down a slope at the bottom. We rigged a 150' rope to a nearby tree and sent James over the edge to see how far down the hole really went. He radioed back that the rope went exactly to the top of a rubble pile at the floor of the cave, with 1 foot of rop laying on the floor.

The drop was measured as 38m (125') to the top of a 10m pile of detritus that had fallen in the cave over the years. Once James was down and clear, we followed him into the pit one by one. After about 30' down, the cave ballooned out to a 45m wide dome chamber with a ceiling almost 30m tall. It was nicely lit by the large entrance hole. The floor of the cave was soft clay and showed no footprints at all. We are very likely to have been the first people in this cave ever. It is possible that some Mayans got down here on a really strong vine ladder or something, but they left no sign. We found a couple pot sherds right under the entrance, but they were likely the result of a pot tossed from the surface.

Anyway, the cave was really nicely decorated and sported a large side chamber in addition to the huge entrance room. We did not survey the cave, but I would estimate the total survey length to be about 500m. This was my first significant virgin cave, and it was one hell of an entrance drop. Lots of pictures and a great video of rappelling the drop to follow.

This afternoon we're going to do one last cave and then make an attempt at drying off all our gear and clothes for tomorrow morning's flight out. It's more than likely that I'll end up throwing most of my stuff into the two drybags I brought and just deal with the funk when I get home. Yeuck.

I should be back in Los Alamos tomorrow evening, just in time to hide in a closet for the annual Great American Explode-a-thon. This has been a great trip, though I am absolutely covered in bites from various mosquitos, ticks, spiders, ants, and the odd walrus. And I'm out of hydrocortizone. The next week of posts will probably be related to Belize pictures and videos. Then I'm off to Nashville for a conference on July 15th.