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impromptu Oscars party
Sunday, February 22 2015
The weather was almost balmy today, at least in comparison to the way it's been for the last month and a half. Temperatures maxed out in the low 40s, and the sun even came out in the afternoon. The last time temperatures had been that high had been over a month ago on January 19th, and then only briefly. To get to truly warmer conditions, we have to look all the way back to the warm spell that ended on January 5th. Still, low-40s does not a thaw make. Perhaps the snow finally melted back enough to form a crust. Whenever that finally happens, the dogs will get a lot more exercise because they will have many more places to run. When I took them on their walk this morning, the weather was nice enough for me to do it in a sweater. But the snow was still so deep and fluffy that the only places to walk were the existing tramped-down paths on the Farm Road. I tried going off-road, following a snowshoe path left by our neighbor Tommy, but the snow was too deep even in that.
Highs above 36 in the past two months (or so) in Fahrenheit, according to wunderground.com:
42 on February 22nd
38 on February 12th
37 on January 30th
38 on January 25th
37 on January 23rd
37 on January 22nd
42 on January 19th
40 on January 16th
48 on January 5th
This morning, I received a series of panicked emails from the seed library guys down in Philadelphia. Evidently there was some sort of incompatibility between the USB-to-DVI adapter and the webcam they were using to capture still images for their animation demonstration. These are the sorts of things that can happen when equipment testing is incomplete. The only thing I could think to do was for them to buy a flatscreen with a VGA port, but in the end they routed around the problem by showing canned animations from a USB stick on the VGA-less TV while the animator worked on the other screen. If someone wanted to see what they were up to, they'd have to look through the kiosk window at the same screen the animator would be looking at.
It was a good thing that I'd finished a bunch of annoying web development work before Ray and Nancy arrived late this evening after a boozy dinner at New World Home Cooking. Because there would be no further work possible. They'd come to watch the Academy Awards with Gretchen, though Nancy (who is really into pop culture) was much more interested in them than Ray was. They wanted to see the pretty dresses, talk about who's had work done, and all of that. Ray, on the other hand, mostly just wanted to sit around drinking beer, and that was fine with me. With that in mind, he drove me down to the Stewarts in his newly-purchased 2005 Saab 9-2X (bought to replace the Jeep he'd totalled not more than 150 feet from our house). The 9-2X is a sporty little hatchback with all wheel drive, and it actually is mostly made with Subaru parts (the product of a corporate merger). Ray was drove it a bit like a badass, playing Smashing Pumpkins from its six-CD changer (the stereo unfortunately lacks an aux-in). At Stewart's, Ray got a six of Michelop Ultra for himself (supposedly that works best with his diabetes) and some Brew Free or Die IPA for me.
Ray and I spent most of our time in the laboratory, with me showing off some of my more interesting things: the boiler-sparker jacob's ladder, my second Hackintosh, a Raspberry Pi, and a two-servo pan/tilt mechanism driven by an Arduino. The only time I paid any attention to the Oscars out in the teevee room was during the performance of a couple songs. The first was when a very heavily-made-up Tegan & Sara performed their hopefully-sardonic song, "Everything is Awesome." The second was when Tim McGraw performed "I Won't Miss You," a song I'd just learned about at J&L's house the other day. "I Won't Miss You" was written for and performed by Glen Campbell as Alzheimer's Disease was robbing him of his faculties. As far as I know, it is the only song on the subject, and it's blunt and beautiful in the way that country music can occasionally be.
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