My work doesn't do direct deposit, so they have to send me my paychecks via FedEx Overnight. One downside of that is that FedEx guarantees that overnight shipments will be delivered by 10:30 am — usually it's more like 9 am. But I'm not usually awake by then, so the night before I was expecting a package, I'd have to carefully lay out a set of clothes on the floor so that when the doorbell woke me up the next morning, I could leap from my bed, throw on my clothes, and answer the door before the FedEx guy gave up and left.

One day, as I struggled to sign his pad through my bleary eyes, he mentioned that if I leave a signed note on the door, he can accept that as my signature and not have to wake me up all the time. I said awesome, and since then, every 2 weeks I leave the note on the door before I go to bed, and all is good.

I didn't want to waste new sheets of paper, of course, so I just wrote the notes on the back of scrap paper.

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I've been reading a lot about the Large Hadron Collider lately, since it's so close to finally being turned on after decades of planning and 13 years of construction. Some people worry that it will create a mini-black hole that will swallow the Earth, though there have been repeated, exhaustive studies performed to disprove those fears. Just like it was safe to push that mysterious crystal into the beam of the anti-matter spectrometer at Black Mesa.

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Last week I finally got around to ordering the first four of a set of seven books I'd long been interested in, written by a machinist and inventor named David J. Gingery. He published these books back in 1980, showing you how to build a complete metal-working shop entirely from scratch. He starts with a simple charcoal foundry, made for $25 using a 5-gallon pail, a vacuum cleaner, silica sand, and clay. He describes the usefulness of this simple foundry:

You can melt aluminum, pot metal, and even brass with a very simple home built furnace fueled with grocery store charcoal. In a very few minutes you can melt beer cans, your wife's pots and pans, the siding off your neighbor's house, the pistons out of your car, and anything else you can beg, borrow, or steal. It costs very little to build, and it works incredibly well.

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Last month I took the Motorcycle Safety Foundation's Basic RiderCourse. It's a two-day course aimed at teaching absolute beginners how to ride a motorcycle. It runs a Saturday and a Sunday, and you spend about 9 hours each day in a parking lot and in a classroom, learning not only how to stay upright on a bike but how to handle emergency situations — they teach you to swerve at 20 mph, how to perform a quick stop in a turn, etc. It went well, and while I certainly didn't take to motorcycling like Mozart to music, I did feel pretty comfortable and made good progress (unlike some of the other students, unfortunately). We were unlucky (or lucky?) enough to have our course take place on a weekend where the weather was rainy, so we got to perform some of our exercises (and, indeed, the test itself at the end of the second day) in the rain.

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I'm sitting at the airport waiting for my flight. There are about 15 free seats all around me, and yet the middle-aged man in shorts chose to sit in the seat right next to mine to eat his ice cream cone.

And he didn't even offer me any.

During the Cold War, the U.S Navy set up a system called SOSUS (the Sound Surveillance System). It's an array of underwater microphones positioned all around the world, which they used to track Soviet submarines by the sound of their engines. The microphones sit several hundred yards below the surface of the water, at a depth where sound waves become trapped in a layer of water known as the "deep sound channel." At this depth, a combination of temperature and pressure cause sound waves to keep traveling without being scattered by the ocean surface or seafloor. Nowadays, NOAA has expanded the concept, installing additional hydrophones in 1996, and using the array to record underwater sounds for scientific study in the fields of biology, seismology, etc.

Through the years, several unexplained and unidentified sounds have been recorded, some repeatedly. Today, I've been reading about them and listening to the sound clips provided by NOAA. It's kind of spooky.

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A few weeks ago Jenn sent me a video of a robot that a Danish guy named Frits had built out of paint mixing sticks and hot glue. He called it "Yellow Drum Machine", and it basically just drives around until it finds something interesting, and then it plays a drum beat on it, records the beat with a microphone, then plays that back on its giant smokestack-like speaker and taps out other beats along with it, or dances to the music. It was adorable, and I wanted one of my own. As I looked at the pictures more closely, I realized that I actually already had a lot of the motors and sensors that he used to build his, and so it was decided — I have to build one of my own.

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Over the past year or so I've noticed BinRock getting slower and slower. It got so bad that visitors' web browsers were timing out before BinRock got around to sending them the page they were waiting for. I don't get any notification when a visitor times out, but for the last few months, I've been getting 5-10 error messages a day from my own scripts that load BinRock pages for one reason or another, and I can extrapolate from that and guess that it's been quite a lot.

In Linux, there's a measure of how heavily the machine is loaded, aptly called the "load average." A value between 0.0 and 1.0 means that the machine is only partially being used, and it's spending part of its time idle. A value of 1.0 effectively means that there is something using the CPU at all times, but nothing is being made to wait. That's just about perfect — you're not wasting hardware sitting around doing nothing, but you're also not overloading it. Values above 1.0 mean that the machine is overloaded, and processes are having to sit around waiting for their turn to run. Generally, if you see it reach 2.0 or more, the machine will be running pretty slowly and it'll be really obvious to the users.

For years, BinRock's load average was down around 0.10 — it wasn't even breaking a sweat serving all the web sites, email accounts, etc that are hosted there. But for the last year, the load has started growing steadily, and during the last few months, I'd regularly see it get as high as an astounding 30.0. Hence all the timeouts.

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It's convenient how every year at midnight on March 14 I get a handy reminder of exactly which vBulletin-powered message boards I'm still registered in. It's a walk down memory lane, because many of them I haven't visited in months or years. It's touching that they haven't forgotten me despite my neglectful inattention.

I think SupraForums is really really glad it's my birthday.