Tag Archives: Schrubbe

One Spare Lonesome Ticket

A week from today, I will be pulling in to the parking lot at Miller Park to commence with Opening Day festivities.  Would you care to join us?

Dave has one spare ticket, and it’s a nice one.  It’s in the “Field Infield Box” area:

  • Section 125
  • Row 23
  • Seat 13

It’s available for face value ($80).  Great opportunity to join us and have a nice view, if you’re still looking.  Shoot Dave an email if interested: schrubbe at gmail dot com.

Sorry, all – need to clarify on this: the ticket you would be purchasing is a single.  The four of us that are going together are in 2 pairs at the moment, and the extra is in a different part of the ballpark.  I apologize for any confusion.

Pause For a Breather

Been a lot happening in the last week-plus.

  • Michelle got a new job.  She’s going to be working here.
  • As a result, we are going to move.  To here.
  • Meanwhile, we had a whirlwind week of Brewers baseball on their last homestand.  We saw them do this, this, Dave went with me to this, and finally, a nice ending with this.
  • We looked at many apartments.  It was hard to keep them all straight, but I think we have a winner, unless someone steals it out from under us.

Also, it got cold.  I like moving in fall the best, I think.  How about you?

(Fast) Slow Week

Quite a bit of action on the work front this time of year, and not nearly as much at home.  I have been ruminating on a few topics I’m anxious to share with you soon, up to and including a return of the podcast for the 2009-10 season.

One thing I did at home this week was to install the DD-WRT firmware on my router.  It’s got a much more robust feature set than the stock firmware, and I haven’t dug into everything that it can do yet.  Best thing I’ve found so far, though: support for zoneedit.com.  To you, dear reader, that will mean less down time on those occasions when my IP changes and I’m not at home…

Other than that, take a look at the Milwaukee gallery for some shots I took at a baseball game with the Schrubbe boys a couple weeks ago.  We had really good seats!

Once Again, Without Emotion:

Contributing colleague David U. Schrubbe sends in a link today to a story posted by MSNBC about the work being done on “a package of software and hardware” (read: SkyNet) that will serve as an “ethical governor” for robotic war machines in the field.  The assumption here is that with adequate programming, we will be able to relinquish human control  and LET THE ROBOTS DECIDE FOR THEMSELVES WHOM TO KILL.  For once, I am NOT exaggerating on this point.

The arrogance is staggering, to assume that we will still ultimately be able to control machines to which we grant greater and greater autonomy and logic-processing.

Meanwhile, enjoy this musical interlude, certain to become the Robot Nation’s anthem:

Growth Will Be Exponential

Astute colleague David G. Schrubbe sent over a link about the first robot to make an autonomous scientific discovery.  A little blurb from the piece on labspaces.net:

Using artificial intelligence, Adam hypothesised that certain genes in baker’s yeast code for specific enzymes which catalyse biochemical reactions in yeast. The robot then devised experiments to test these predictions, ran the experiments using laboratory robotics, interpreted the results and repeated the cycle.

Just to reiterate, the robot did this WITHOUT HUMAN INTERVENTION.

Weathered the Weather

The weekend didn’t quite turn out as we planned, thanks in part to Saturday’s snow storm.  We made it to Sunburst on Friday evening (a day early, as it turned out), and had a good time skiing for a few hours.  It’s not a bad little hill they’ve got up there, although we could tell on Friday that most of the snow was man-made.  Jason Hill said that he had a successful evening of remembering HOW to ski, too, so the trip served its purpose.  Now if only we can get enough people together to go up to Rib Mountain next month…

Saturday morning, we were greeted by a blanket of fresh snow that we hadn’t quite been expecting; I read the forecast the night before, and didn’t quite realize that the storm would be lasting through most of the day.  Consequently, Michelle and I had to cancel our plans to head up to Oshkosh for Dave’s birthday celebration.  Fortunately, he is going to be in town on Tuesday (actual day of birth), and we’re planning to meet up with him and his brother for dinner.

Michelle was tentatively planning to go in to work to make up a few hours that she missed earlier in the week because of a class, and I met up with some friends for the Lakefront Brewery tour.  A handful of new pictures in the Milwaukee gallery are from that excursion.  Later that night, Michelle and I stayed in and got a nice specialty pizza from Pizza Shuttle.

On Sunday, I was at Pulaski High School for a few hours for College Goal Sunday.  The event was a success, but it wasn’t the best-organized thing I’ve ever participated in.  I ended up spending about three and a half hours of my day there, where I was only productive for about 90 minutes or so.  I guess that’s one of the things you put up with when the whole thing is done on a volunteer basis…

Had to do some laundry to get ready for the work week; right now, I’m thinking of getting to bed by 10 so I can be good and rested when the alarm goes off at 5:15.  These weekends sure cruise by in a hurry.

Fun With Sounds

I think it’s fair to say that Dave and I try to maintain a modicum of weirdness non-normalcy uniqueness in our lives.  We were talking a little this morning about how I’ve updated the ringer on my phone to a naval general alarm you might hear on a surface vessel, and he was planning to use the “Cliff Hangers” song from the Price Is Right on his.  Then Dave struck gold on the UTubes!