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rain!

Saturday,  01/07/23  11:58 AM

Rain!  Yep, lot's of rain.  Lot's of storms.  Lot's of weather.  Yikes... Reading my flight of posts from years past, I guess yeah we do get winter in California and yeah it does often rain right after New Years'.  The pic at right is downtown LA, post storm.  Beautiful huh?  You often see those mountains and don't think of them, but you don't often see them covered with snow. I was supposed to go sailing tomorrow - first race of the season, the Hot Rum - but Santa Barbara harbor is silted closed and the yacht club itself is surrounded by water.  It sits on stilts on the beach, and has done so for a long time, so I think the building will be okay, but the parking lot, beach, boatyard, etc. will need some recovery time.  Wow.

 

Zwifting

Saturday,  01/07/23  12:03 PM

So it's crummy weather and being a candy-ass Californian (instead of a hardy Dutchman!) I have resorted to Zwifting instead of riding outside. The pic at left shows my setup; a Wahoo Kickr "smart trainer" that holds my bike, measures my power output, and simulates riding conditions like climbing hills and wind, a cadence sensor that goes in my sock, and a heart rate monitor.  I can use my Renovo road bike "as is" in this setup, easy in, easy out when I want to do a "real" ride outside. Zwift has a bunch of riding terrain on their made-up island of Watopia, but also recently have digitized some real places to ride like France, Italy, and Innsbruck, Austria.  The overall experience isn't exactly like riding outside, but it's not bad.  Especially when exactly like outside would mean riding in a storm.  And the best part about Zwift is there are other people - just like me - out there riding, and we're all together.  Kind of fun to pass people from all over the world (well, and also getting passed by them :) Zwift nerd note - if you look closely at this picture, you can see I'm wearing a KOM jersey.  Don't ask!

 

wet filter

Saturday,  01/07/23  12:15 PM

Making a filter pass on a rather soggy day ... we'll see how it goes. I recently discovered Dutch Bros coffee!  How did I not know about them?  SpaceX (and Elon Musk) celebrated their 61st launch of 2022, and their 61st successful one too.  Wow, just wow.  Remember when they were working on launch 1?  Putting in a marker here ... over time, SpaceX might well become one of the largest and most successful companies of all time. Not everyone is excited about space, Maciej writes why not Mars, in which he attempts to answer that question.  (via John Gruber)  And to be clear, his objection is to manned travel, which is admittedly not a bad point.  But if we abandon manned space travel, what's next for us?  (And how will I ever get to Titan?)  An interesting reminder: our first image of Mars was a paint-by-numbers pastel drawing.  My father worked at JPL at the time of Mariner 4, I remember it well!  I've been working on a cool project which involves using NVidia's CUDA library to accelerate processing by offloading parallel tasks to a GPU.  (More on this to come...)  GPUs are being used for this all over the place, especially in connection with AI tasks; computing a neural network is a perfect parallel operation.  (Essentially what are brains are doing all the time.)  But despite this, Slashdot reports desktop GPU sales hit 20-year low.  Related: Portland startup to mine artisanal bitcoin using only slide rules and graph paper.  Excellent!  It's the blue people!  Avatar: The Way of Water surpasses $1B mark globally.  Not surprising to me - it was a good movie.  And a good reason to go to a theater, with the spectacle and 3D and everything.  This is not a movie where you say "oh I'll wait for it to be on Netflix".  Speaking of Netflix, "Emily in Paris": why it's so hard to admit love for the show.  Salon's tagline: "at best is something of an embarrassment, at worst living embodiment of cultural imperialism."  Heh.  I'm not sure I love it, but I've liked it a lot.  It's entertaining, and that's all it has to be.

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