Ow, poor Ben

Seems that Ben fell down while jumping rope yesterday and took a divot out of his chin. Chris tells me that she doesn't see how it can't leave a scar, as it's chewed up pretty badly. She's making sure it doesn't get infected and all of that, and I'm sure he'll be fine.

Still, I feel bad for the guy. I know stuff like this is part of being a kid, but I don't like him being hurt.

I'm ok

Seriously. Several people have emailed me to make sure I'm fine after the last couple postings about being ill. So...I'm ok.

Sleepy, but not sick.

(Waiting for email expressing concern that I'm not getting enough sleep...)

Better, sort of

Well, I'm not violently ill like I was, but I'm certainly not completely better. There's this sick spot in my stomach that makes me hungry/not-hungry. Schroedinger's Appetite.

I was up too late last night.

I feel sick

I stayed home from work yesterday. I pretty much never do that, but when you're violently expelling fluids from your body, it's pretty much a given that you don't go to work.

At least I'm not doing that today, but I do still have a terrible headache. Not much fun. Also feeling rather weak. I thought about not coming in today, either, but here I am.

Can Aaron hear me?

That's right, I'm referring to the other Aaron Stanton, the more famous one.

I've gone and created a Facebook group for our namesakes. Let's see if he joins.

Love

I was just thinking about my kids, and how I look forward to seeing them fall in love, and then it hit me - my own father never got to see that. He left the country before I ever fell in love. I never got to talk to him about it.

It makes me sad.

Springtime

Spring is officially here, but the weather is fluctuating a lot. Warm one day, cold the next. We're supposed to get snow here soon. I want clear blue skies and no jacket. I want to eat lunch outside and watch pretty women walk by. I want fresh air.

Not much going on right now with me. Getting ready for Easter with the kids. I hope they like it. I don't care much for holidays any more, myself, but if it makes them happy, I'll go for it. I haven't thought about whether or not we'll do anything special. Maybe we'll go over to my mom's house.

Anyway, I'm a bit lonely. A girlfriend would be nice.

Ugh

Yes, I arrived in Indiana just fine. I've been busy getting an apartment, moving into it, taking care of my kids, figuring out my new job, and all the mundane crap associated with all of the above.

It's all extremely stressful.

Day 4

I am here right now.

So what happened to days 2 and 3? Well, day 2 should have ended with me in Evanston, WY. It turns out that Evanston is a crappy little town, very poorly laid out, impossible to even see the hotel signs until after you've passed the exit you'd have to take to easily get to them - at least, when you're coming from the west. I got there shortly before midnight, and the hotel manager wanted $100 for the room. I asked if there was a AAA discount, and he said that actually the AAA rate was *higher* than that. wtf? So I drove about 40 more miles to the east, pulled over at a rest stop, and slept with the engine running for warmth.

Wyoming, by the way, sucks. I would say that it's a total waste of space, except that it's a great example of space. Lots of it. Lots of useless space.

So day 3 I crossed it and about half of Nebraska. Also mostly space. Somebody really ought to consider colonizing those states and doing something with them. Anyway, at about 10 last night I decided I was tired enough to stop, and since there's nothing within a whole lot of miles of anything out there, I found another rest stop and, well, rested. From 10 til 2. Woke up, thought maybe I could drive some more, made it to the next rest stop about 37 miles down the road, and decided I was wrong. So I pulled over again and slept another 2.5 hours. 4:30 this morning I woke up and started driving.

And kept driving. For 18 hours I drove, stopping only to get gas, buy snacks, and use the bathroom. Oh, and to clean my frickin' windshield, because apparently even though I filled the wiper fluid, it has decided to not spray anything. Whether it's clogged, frozen, or just stupid I can't tell and don't really care.

So I've stopped in Danville, Illinois, less than 100 miles of Indianapolis, why? I mean, what's another 100 miles after the 1000 I drove today? Nothing! Except that the weather has turned to crap. I've finally hit active snowfall and icy roads. Icy as in I slid in a straight line right across 2 bridges. You know how signs say "Caution, bridges may be icy", or some such? Well, this is the first time in memory that has actually mattered. It seems that towing a trailer with a small car is a very tricky thing to control on ice. So, given those conditions, my fatigue, and the aforementioned lack of working wiper fluid (which makes driving in these conditions even more interesting, let me tell you), I decided that the better part of valor would be to stop in Danville, IL.

So here's the amusing part: The annoying hotel in Evanston was a Best Western. Why? Monday's Best Western was good. But that's not the amusing part. The amusing part is that here in Danville, a Triple A discount actually means you pay less for the room. Which is a big part of why I am not sleeping in my car tonight, and why I did Tuesday.

Day 1

I made it to here today.

I have a splitting headache, and will be taking a nice hot bath soon. Ahhhh...

Leaving soon

I plan on leaving Walla Walla in 9 days. I got a job in Indy that I am pretty excited about, and I finally get to be back with my kids.

I am really not looking forward to the move itself, though. I do not trust the weather here right now, and am going to have to leave the vast majority of my stuff here and come back for it later. I'll probably just load up my car and drive back.

I'm going to miss the people here.

Meh.

Kids

Yesterday Ben lost his first tooth, and, taking after his mom, he accidentally ate it. Seems it came out while he was enjoying a Rice Krispy Treat, and gulp, gone.

Sigh...one more milestone I've missed by being out here.

While visiting with the kids Zoe apparently decided she's afraid of spiders. Not that she actually is, mind you, she just decided she is. A conversation:

"A spider!"
"Did it bite you?"
"It bit my booty!"
"Is it gonna eat you?"
"Yeah."
"Is it gonna eat me?"
"Yeah."
"Is it gonna eat the world?"
"Yeah."
"Is it gonna eat the sun?"
"Yeah."
"Is it gonna eat space?"
"Yeah."
"Is it gonna eat itself?"
"Yeah."
"What's gonna be left?"
"Its booty."
(laugh) "And then is it gonna eat its booty?"
"Yeah."
"And then what's left?"
"Just biting."

That last response gave me pause. Ah...that's my girl.

Talking to Ben last night

Ben was asking about grandparents, great grandparents, great great grandparents, and so on. He asked about my grandparents, most of whom are still alive, and my great grandparents, none of whom are. Then 3 greats, 4, 5...so I had to cut him off and tell him that they're all gone. So he asked about my zero great grandparents, and I said that would be my grandparents. Then my negative one grandparents, so I said that would be my parents. And my negative 2? That would be me (and my sister). And my -3? That would be him and Zoe. And -4? That would be his kids. "But I don't *have* any children!" "Well, someday you might." And -5? His grand kids. -6? His great grandkids. -7? His great great grandkids, but around there I lost track, and just started laughing.

But then he tied it all back together. He realized all his great great grandparents are gone, and asked if he "will be died" when he has great great grandkids. Wow. How do you even respond to that? I said I don't know. I heard my ex in the background tell him he will live a long time, so I said that, too. "A hundred?" I don't know, Ben. I hope so.

Off by a day

I was wrong - Thursday marks a year.

Sigh.

Molecular Nanotechnology

I don't know where to start, so forgive me, but I am going to ramble.

MNT is going to happen. It's a matter of time. Not if, but when. For it to be successful and useful, there are going to have to be some very significant advances in several sorts of fields. Some of them are advancing by leaps and bounds already, but there is plenty of room to grow.

Chemistry. Synthetic chemistry cannot currently create the kinds of things needed to make MNT feasible. It may be that it will used to create the first gen of it and then bootstrap from there. Computational chemistry, the quantum side in particular, must also be advanced a great deal. Unless there have been major advancements over the last 8 years that I am unaware of, the level of precision in computing chemical structures is prohibitively computationally expensive - the magnitude of error tends to be on the order of the strength of a chemical bond, which while it is very close in absolute terms, it renders the computation almost useless.

Algorithms in math and computer science. Serious improvements in algorithms could greatly reduce the time required for predicting chemical structures. My own PhD work represented a good advancement in optimization of functions, but that does not decrease the time required to compute the energy of a single structure.

Parallel computation. The use of this is twofold. Parallel computers are really starting to take hold in mainstream systems, and properly using them would greatly enhance the speed of predicting structures. Later on down the road, fault tolerant systems will be needed to handle truly massive parallel architectures - imagine a personal computer with trillions of processors and you're starting to get the picture. Processors would be continuously added and removed from the system, error checking and redundancy would be needed, and so on.

Programming languages. Again, parallelization. There are advancements being made in this arena to handle multiple processors, but I have no idea if they handle dynamic addition and removal of cores, along with fault tolerance. Such a language must be easy to use or people will not be able to adequately deal with the scope of the problems to be dealt with.

Artificial intelligence. In particular, the ability to partition problems and solve subproblems. This goes back to parallelization and programming, among other things.

Encryption and security. The homegrown encryption routines used by corporations in their efforts to enforce DRM are woefully inadequate, and there must be active safety protocols in place from the very beginning. A small imbalance of power, a minor error, or a deliberate attack or sabotage could yield a catastrophe beyond anything seen before. Additionally, there must be a way to enforce end user rights as well, or people will be left with no ability to be self sufficient and/or choose to opt out of this system.

Database technology. I do not know the limitations of current database systems, but I suspect they will be far from adequate for the volume of data coming down the pipeline for projects involving MNT designs. Even breaking down systems into a fractal-like heirarchy, there are still vast numbers of atoms to be accounted for in even the simplest of MNT systems, along with the instruction set coded for the assembly of the system in question.

Intellectual property and economic theory. This ties into encryption and security. Energy, rare elements, structural designs, and items of sentimental value will be the only things of monetary value - in fact, one could argue that that's true today, as well. The most useful elements for MNT are typically going to be the ones most commonly found on the planet - carbon, silicon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen. Trace elements will be useful as limiting reagents. There will almost certainly be certain "open source" designs that will be carefully evaluated as safe for general use.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. All of these things have been thought of before by people involved in MNT, and are just what I can think of off the top of my head. Each and every one of these represents a potential business opportunity with profits to be made along every step of the way, not just after the fruition of MNT.

And I don't know where to start. I just know I am once again really starting to get the itch to walk down this path once more.

I think that in 2 days

I will have been divorced for a year.

I'm not too sure exactly how I feel about that.

Life

Posting for no real reason. Just thinking about how the last year and a half or so has gone. I'm still confused. I'm isolated from pretty much everyone I care about, and kinda numb about that. I'd like to be more motivated, enough so to get something done for a change...but that's how I've been most of my life, I guess.

Life

So it's about 2 AM here, and I'm tired. I have bought plane tickets to go back to Indy in about a week. I'll be working when I can there, spending time with my kids, and hanging out with friends and family. I haven't seen them in over a month, so it will be good. It's also good that August is a 3 check month. It makes it easier. It's not cheap to fly to Indy, less so on such short notice. With proper planning, I can get tickets about a month ahead of time for around $400.

I'm less enchanted with Rails lately. Looking into the guts of it, some things annoy me. The most obvious is not properly escaping table names. If I want to name a class "Line", ActiveRecord pukes out because it wants to find a table named "lines", which should be fine, except that the SQL generated doesn't escape the table name, which means it is garbage SQL. This is a simply retarded mistake to make. So, given that, what else is broken that I haven't noticed yet?

I still like comic books. The Dark Tower just ended, and it was good. There is a new Buffy series that picks up where the TV show left off, and it's already on issue 5, dammit. Maybe I'll try to dig up the back issues while I am in Indy, as the local place doesn't have them all in stock.

I need to start creating again.

Walla Walla

Things have changed.

June 21 I got into a truck and drove. For 5 days. I wound up in Walla Walla, WA, the location of my new employer. Lived in a hotel until I got an apartment on July 1.

Wow.

I know almost nobody here outside of work and a few people who works at shops near here, and really have only hung out with my boss socially. I need to find a D&D group here, or create one, especially since my D&D stuff was among the first stuff I unpacked, for some reason. I have several empty bookshelves in my apartment, and lots of stuff in storage.

It's a RoR job, which is cool. The people here are mostly green, but have some good talent. There's potential for some really cool stuff to happen here, so I am excited about that.

The downside is that I miss my kids. I talk to them every night at bedtime, but have not seen them since I left. I'm not financially in a situation yet to begin contemplating flying back to Indy, but I should be soon. We get paid biweekly, and the check I get on the 20th will mostly go to rent, but we get paid 3 times in August, so that's good.

So...that's life right now.

Paralyzed from the neck up

Everything inside the skull, that is.

I seem unable to think, or take action, or do much at all, lately.

I think maybe I'm broken.