I think I have entered patent hell.

Any idea what the title of this post means? Apparently it describes what I've invented. Still confused? Perhaps this figure will provide some illumination:

Figure 4: OMGWTFBBQ!?

I swear I didn't remove any labels or anything from that flow chart; that's how it appears in the application. A patent application company is helping my collaborators and I to prepare our app. They took a signal flow diagram I had made which was basically self-explanatory and made the above megacluster.

This is my first foray into patent-land, and I must say that it is a dark and thoroughly disturbing place.

Since almost breaking my ankle in July, I haven't really been getting much exercise. I started playing handball again (with an ankle brace on) this past week, though my performance is significantly degraded. I've been missing mountain climbing this summer so Andy and I went out on an easy climb this weekend to test out my ankle's response to scree and what-not. We successfully reached the summit of Conejo Peak in the southern San Juan Mountains of Colorado. At 13,172', it's reasonably high, but we started at 11,600' and only hiked a total of 5.7 miles round trip... so it was a short trip. Ankle performed well and we got lucky with the weather.

Some pictures.

So my gallery has had captcha spam protection ever since I upgraded to v2.0, but the gallery existed for several years before this on a v1.x install and was swamped with spam comments. For some reason, there is no built-in mechanism for deleting comments en masse in gallery, short of just removing all comments (which I didn't want to do because there are actually some good ones). I wrote a script to just go in and delete comments that included substrings found on a blacklist of ten keywords or so.

I managed to blow away 372,389 offending comments in one fell swoop.

Apologies to anyone who's comments got caught in the crossfire. But enjoy the considerably less-polluted gallery.

Note that there are still some spam comments in there, but they are almost exclusively the random letters ones that can't be nuked using a blacklist technique. If you find comments that have keywords that I could use, post here and I'll do another run.

Made it back to Albuquerque last night, safe and sound. The southern tip of Greenland has some of the most striking geology I've ever seen. Chicago's customs system is exceptionally efficient. I'm sleepy. I'll be returning to my house tomorrow morning.

It appears that the airport folks at Almaty aren't as good as the internet provider folks. They failed to associate my (massive) frequent flier miles with my ticket, which explains the rotten seats I got for both of the long flights. Luckily, the first flight was half-empty and I was able to move to a window seat in an empty row, so that was fine. This next flight from Amsterdam to Chicago is full, and I hate a middle-middle non-exit, which is about as bad as it gets. Got the KLM ice queen to associate my frequent-flier number with my ticket, an instantly I got bumped to a window. Sadly, I couldn't make this happen until they started processing this flight and by that time it was too late to take advantage of the Crown Room. I have been on travel more or less continuously since I achieved gold status, so I still have a silver card. And silver gets you no Crown Love. And since my gold status didn't appear on my tickets like it should have, they wouldn't let me in. So this layover was less awesome than the last one.

In the end, I don't really care; I'm just excited to be coming home. Looking forward to this flight for another reason: i will be my first flight on a 747 Super Fatt. Sadly, not in the cool part at the front where you can see forwards out the windows...

The only remaining challenge will be to traverse O'Hare customs, re-check luggage, and come up with a boarding pass for (usually crap) American Airlines within the two hour layover I have there. And all of this will be done while running on what can only be described as a markedly lean mixture.

On my way in here, I had a dismal experience trying to get WiFi to work at the Almaty airport. Which is to say that it would give me a connection, but the latency appeared to be in excess of a minute and everything would timeout and fail horribly. This morning they appear to have fast service, free access, and there are at least 15 people in this lobby with unprotected windows networking shares. At least, that's what someone told me.

My three-hour layover here is magically melting away. :)

Next stop, Amsterdam.

At 11:55pm tonight, I will fly out of Aktau after a total of one month and five days. Due to some sort of cruel irony, Nina will be leaving for California just after I return. So I'll have a week to myself to eat nothing but breakfast burritos and watch tron over and over. Greetings, program.