Minesh, Laura, and I are planning to climb Rainier at the end of July. We had a preliminary meeting about it last night, wherein we developed a training plan that basically devoured every single weekend between now and then. Our training regimen features climbs of Santa Fe Baldy, Lake Peak, Caballo, Bierstadt, Evans, Quandary, Handies, Mount of the Holy Cross, Eolus, Windom, Sunlight, and Truchas.

Unfortunately, much like the two weeks I spent in Vienna just before mountaineering in Mexico this past winter, I will be attending a wedding in Seattle and a conference in Tucson just before we hit the slopes of Rainier, so I'm going to have an acclimatization challenge again.

Apparently I've sunk to a new low on account of my financial situation.

I was at Mike & Christina's place, and we were talking about "food challenges." First they bet me I couldn't eat three brats (w/ buns) in 90 seconds. I didn't take them up on it, though I did do a test-run of a single brat and it took me 35 seconds, so I wouldn't have made it anyway. I brought up the 5-saltines-in-a-minute challenge and Mike and Christina both said that would be trivial. So out came the saltines, and Mike fell as so many have in the face of a mouthfull of what amounts to glue. It was good for a laugh, anyway. Then Christina dared me to drink an entire jar of pickle juice. I told her no way, but then she offered me $20. And Mike said he'd match that.

So I drank about 12 fluid ounces of pickle-flavored vinegar with hot pepper oil in it (they were "hot and sweet" pickles). Much to my surprise, it didn't make me sick (yet?). My stomach hurt for about an hour, and then I felt OK. This brings back memories of highschool, when I used to do stupid crap like this at lunch for money and infamy. Obviously, I'm no more wise or mature than I was in 1992. But I've got $40, which is gas money for a couple weeks. Sweet.

One of the guys I play handball with died today. He was probably the best player in town and taught me a lot. I didn't really know him outside of the handball court, but I wish I had because he seemed like a really genuine person and I respect that. We'll miss you, Robert.

This obviously isn't my month. Truck broken into, oppressive mortgage, threatened lawsuit from my former landlord, the lab hasn't reimbursed me for my $800 INMM registration yet (which the credit card people are now on my ass about paying), and I still haven't been converted. I should set up a paypal donation link. Send food.

But maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel? My group leader writes today to say, "...your conversion package is in the director's office for signature. Word has it the next signing session will be Wednesday, 2 May."

Signing session?

The fact that signing forms is an activity that gets scheduled a week in advance is so amazingly... Brazil that I can't even laugh about it.

I received word today that my postdoc had been extended through April 30, 2008, meaning that I won't be in a world of hurt in 10 days, when my original appointment would have ended. In other news, my conversion package has moved beyond the Principal Associate Director level and now resides on the desk of the Deputy Lab Director. I didn't realize there was a level between the PADs and the lab director, but apparently the DLD has to sign off too. And after him, it's on the big enchilada himself. I've been told that the DLD and LD signatures are largely pro-forma, and should go through much quicker than the three weeks it took the PAD to sign off.

Also in work news, some good and bad: my paper on nuclear safeguards at BN-350 (Kazakhstan) was accepted to the ESARDA conference, and I'm on the agenda as a speaker on May 23—in Aix en Provence, France. Sweet. However, the funding for that project has been frozen temporarily, so there's some chance Washington won't clear financing for the trip. Ugh. We'll see...

The cave dig went well, though there was no amazing breakthrough. Plenty of less-than-amazing breakdown, of course...

This week has been the joint US/UK workshop on information barriers which I have been preparing for over the last year or so. I've been pretty busy.

Tonight was our banquet at a resturaunt in Espanola, during which some consummate wanker shattered a window in my truck. They clearly had a look around my truck; my shell handles had been rotated, etc. But nothing is missing as far as I can tell, despite a wealth of reasonably valuable things in plain sight. I dunno. There was shattered glass from my window all over everything, and I could see glass from a car next to mine in the parking lot as well.

I guess I get to spend some of tomorrow spinning up my insurance people. In the meantime, it's rather drafty driving around.

It has been too long since I went caving. I'm going to spend this weekend down near Carlsbad participating in a cave dig at Big Manhole Cave. A bit of background for people who haven't heard me tell this story a billion times:

Caves tend to keep the air inside at a reasonably constant temperature and pressure, so when the barometric pressure outside changes, they will "breath." Winds at cave entrances can be quite strong; creatively named Wind Cave, SD, has had measured airflow at the entrance reaching 100mph. The amount of airflow a cave experiences is a function of many things, but the big ones are the volume of the cave, the rate of change in barometric pressure, and the cross sectional area of the entrance passage. In general, the faster the wind blows in the entrance, the bigger the cave.

Sometimes a seemingly small cave will blow considerably more air than it should for its known size, suggesting that there is a lot of undiscovered passage in there somewhere. A famous example of this is Lechuguilla Cave in Carlsbad Caverns National Park, which was just a 90' pit of no interest, other than the extreme winds coming out of a rubble pile at the bottom. A project started to dig there and eventually broke through into what is probably the most spectacular cave in the United States. At last survey, there are over 120 miles of passage in Lechuguilla and lots of going leads.

Anyway, Big Manhole is another cave in the area (the entrance is less than a mile from Lechuguilla) and it blows pretty fiercely sometimes too. It's possible that it is another entrance to Lech, but it could be its own large system. Currently the cave is just a 60' tall dome room about 100' in diameter. They have been digging in this cave for the better part of 20 years and no breakthrough yet.

Electroresistivity studies of Big Manhole suggest that it has some very large voids near the known chamber and that the dig tunnel is heading straight towards them. Lately, the dig tunnel has been breaking through into some small voids (big enough for a person or so) with increasing frequency. At the end of the last dig, they broke through into what looked like a bigger chamber, but it was late on the last day of the dig and people were having to leave, so they didn't enlarge the hole enough to really tell what they had. It's probably just another small void, but it could be something important.

Anyway, I'm going down this weekend along with 21 other people and we're going to see what happens when hammerdrill meets calcite.

When I bought the Silverstone LC16M case for my home theater computer last year, I was excited about the built-in VFD and IR receiver, which was rumored to work with Linux. The iMon VFD/IR unit and remote control are manufactured by a company called Soundgraph and it turns out that they have no interest in helping out Linux users.

A guy called "Venky" has managed to cobble together some semi-functional drivers for the VFD/IR, but they fall short of actually being useful. The VFD control is the better of the two; Venky has written a driver for LCDProc that allows you to use the VFD in text mode only. This is OK, but you can't use it as an equalizer, which is one of the more interesting visual modes of the device (and works fine with the Soundgraph-supplied MCE-only drivers).

The more troublesome bit is the IR receiver and remote control. Instead of just digitizing the IR signal and passing it on, raw, to the operating system, the iMon unit decodes the signal and passes on the control codes to the OS. This means that it can only function with iMon remote controls. I've tried to get it to decode my TV remote, PS2 remote, and a handfull of "universal" remote controls that are lying around. I don't know what's different about the iMon transmission protocol that makes it unable to properly decode data from other remotes, because Soundgraph won't release the technical specs. There is exactly one remote control that works with the iMon other than the supplied remote: the Logitech Harmony 880/885, which retails for about $150. Geebus.

But wait... you can only get it to work with the iMon if you reprogram the VFD to accept slightly different timings. And you can only do that with the supplied drivers from Soundgraph, which only work on Windows. Great. So I'm stuck with their remote.

Now don't get me wrong, the iMon remote is actually one of the better remotes I've seen for a DVR, at least in terms of button layout and feature density. And it does work fine with the Linux driver for LIRC that Venky released. Unfortunately, the iMon's directional pad is actually set up to function as an analog stick rather than a digital direction pad, meaning that this portion doesn't work with LIRC. I've read some posts online that suggest that you can patch LIRC to get the direction pad to act as though it were digital, or to actually get the mouse functionality working—either of which would be fine with me—but neither patch seems to work with the current LIRC version.

So my HTPC has a remote with no direction buttons, which makes it awfully hard to navigate menus in MythTV. Furthermore, I can't use a universal remote with my home theater setup because nothing in existence will work with the HTPC and anything else. What a crock.

Of course, if Soundgraph would just release some technical specs for their hardware, people would have the utilities written in an instant to take care of all these problems. Soundgraph's hardware would suddenly become very attractive for the burgeoning Linux-based PVR market, they'd sell more product, and people who don't like the hideous limitations of MCE could make the machine they want to use rather than settling for something less.

People have made very well-written pleas to Soundgraph on the company forums, asking for an opportunity to provide free labor to them, write open-source Linux drivers for their hardware and allow the company to distribute the finished product on their website. They have gone unanswered by the forum admins in every case. I suspect that Soundgraph is actually in Microsoft's pocket, and MS sees Linux and MythTV as encroaching on its MCE profits. And if that's the case, it's really sad.

My parents have really been on my ass to post pictures of the new house, so I sat down today to upload some of the shots I took before I moved all my stuff in... only to find that I had clearly left the autofocus off on the lens when I took the pictures. They're pretty much all uselessly blurry. So I walked through the house this morning and took a video. Production value here is epsilon away from zero. Enjoy.

Today's mission was to equip my house with a doorbell that would play MP3 or WAV sound clips. Accomplished.

Right now I've got it set up to play a selection of stuff I found on dailywav.com, including old-school cylons, John Wayne, Colossus, and of course, "Open the pod bay doors please, HAL." Any suggestions for better material?

Saturday was the last day I was an occupant of my old apartment; I am back to being a one-dwelling guy. The living room/home theater is coming together well, all of the switches and outlets have been replaced, the painting is done aside from minor spot touchups here and there. The work progresses slowly, as there is a ton of it and I live alone. But I'm still enjoying it.

I now have 27 days left on my postdoc appointment and still have not been converted. As a result of the new hiring system here at the lab, my paperwork has to be signed by the lab director himself, and every manager between him and me, which (because I'm in the lowest-ranking non-student echelon of the lab) is a lot. Last week, my group leader told me that it was at the Principle Associate Director level, which is one step down from the big enchilada. I've been saying this for about 11 months, but... Any Day Now.

And here's some more content stolen from Penny Arcade: The trailer for 300, re-cut for 10 year old girls.