I know it’s been done before, but this is still mighty good: Space Ghost & friends in the “Whassup” commercial.

In one of those bizarre events that shows just how interconnected everything is, an entry in my referrer logs led me to an on-line textbook: A Radically Modern Approach to Introductory Physics. This book was written by a former professor of mine (and chair of the Physics department at the time) Dr. David Raymond. Dr. Raymond and I didn’t really get along all that well, and he is a very large part of the reason I didn’t continue on in graduate school (a decision I’m very happy I made), but I’m always interested when someone attempts to write a new introductory physics text. There have been very many attempts but very few successes, at least when looked at from a student’s point of view. One of my first confrontations with Dr. Raymond was when my friend Kevin Healy and I gave a talk in front of the entire department’s faculty and graduate students on suggested new approaches to teaching physics. I don’t remember why Kevin and I thought we had the authority to tell a group of world renowned physicists how to teach, but I know we gave a very reasonable talk full of reasonable suggestions. Generally, we both got a positive response, but Dr. Raymond (as department chair) took our criticisms personally, I think, and that began our rocky relationship and my decent from a bright young rising star in the department to just another student. I’m eager to see if any of our general ideas made it into the book. Oh – how’d I find this from my referrer logs? Someone was searching for kestrel, and his entry showed up two above mine because it’s being hosted on a computer named kestrel. Very tenuous threads that hold us all together, no?

It seems a shame to mow down all of the wildflowers in the yard. One of the nice things about a reel mower is rather than rushing through the job to escape the noise, I can hear the birds, play with the neighbor’s dog, and pay close attention to the life around me. Like the wonderful flower pictured here. It was only an inch and a half tall but still looked spectacular – deep blue bells against the greens of the grass and dandelions. I mowed around it.

On a whim, I woke up early and drove to a yard sale being held a few miles down the road from me. As I walked in the yard, the very first thing I saw was a new-looking reel mower, exactly the same model I wrote about the other day. Asking price? Twenty bucks. I grabbed it and a wheelbarrow and went on my way. I have this knack for having things work out well. My friends notice it more than I do and ask me (usually after yet another roll of triple sixes during a Risk game) how I have such good luck with everything. I’ve never had the answer before, but now that I have a car, I realize that I was given good luck in exchange for having every traffic light turn red right as I pull up. It annoys me at times, but I’ve come to terms with the trade and I think that I got the good side of the deal.

The Gouda wheel has been air-drying in my pantry for the last several days. It smells divine, though not like gouda yet. It’s like fresh sweet cream, like a slice of the finest plain cheesecake you can imagine. It’ll cure for about three weeks, then get dipped in wax for a two month ageing. The next step in my cheesemongering is to find a source for fresh milk. When I was small, we’d get glass gallon jars of fresh milk from local small farmers regularly. The cream would rise to the top and we’d make butter and other great things. Maybe I was just spoiled or lucky or both; I just can’t find anything like that where I live now. Even with about 25 herds of goats around me, goat milk’s being denied me as well. I’ve pulled up to complete strangers’ houses, asking to barter for or buy fresh milk. The folks tell me they just have them around to keep the pastures looking nice, for weed control. I guess the next thing to try is stopping at the local churches (of course, there’s about 50 within a few miles of my house) and leave my number on the message boards. With all of the small farms and all of the livestock near me, someone has to have fresh milk, right?

Those of you still in Austin after the technology conference and those of you there for the music festival that started it all, go see my office-mate Brad’s band, Deacon Brody, playing early this evening at one of the SXSW venues. They’re mighty good.

The World of Croquet is your stop for croquet on the web. Rules, organizations, equipment, and a photo gallery (with action shots!) can all be found here.

There has been some difficulties with my work email over the last two days. Most email in or out bounced around due to DNS lookup errors. If that happened to you, please resend – it all seems better now.

Back in January, I wrote of a movie filmed from a kestrel’s point of view called Kestrel’s Eye. It’s not been shown here in Athens, of course, but the publisher has it for sale on their website. Only $285… it looks like I’ll have to wait for the “priced-to-own” $19.95 realease a while longer.

A peek through my refferer logs found this interesting personal portal. One click opens several of Toby’s favorite sites each in its own window. I found it interesting because it mimics my own browsing style of having a handful of browser windows up at once and trickling through them while I’m at work. While waiting for data to extract, for example, I can quickly read a news story that caught my eye earlier in the day and then get right back to work. Quick burst of web browsing followed by a couple hours of slow digestion. The only trouble is when my laptop crashes (say, when I’m alpha-testing new code or, oh, using a Microsoft product), I lose all of my unread windows, and I rarely remember what I had waiting for me.