St Michael, defend us in battle
Crisis Magazine has a great piece about St Michael and the ongoing spiritual warfare in the world.

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New PGP Key!
So apparently Evil32 happened. Approximately 24,000 PGP keys were generated that had collisions with the 32-bit short IDs of existing keys. Then someone decided to use those conflicting keys to generate revocation certificates and upload them to the keyservers. Joy.

Though my old keys still work, they were affected by this mass revocation of collsions. I have created a new key which can be found at http://skinnymf.com/~mforde/mforde.asc.

On a related note, if anyone is interested in Key Signing Party, shoot me an email. I haven't been to one of those since college.

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Time Travel?
A few months ago I happened to snap a photo of the DeLorean on Main Street in Boonton near the Darress Theatre. It's probably one of my favorite photographs of the car and certainly one of the best I've ever taken.
The theatre was built in 1919 and has remained largely unchanged since then. A lot of Boonton still has a very old "look and feel" to it, and this section of Main Street served as a perfect backdrop for the DeLorean.

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How to Drive a Classic Rolls-Royce, or a DeLorean, Any Time You Want
Bloomberg has posted an article entitled How to Drive a Classic Rolls-Royce, or a DeLorean, Any Time You Want. It's really quite simple, actually. You take your keys, go out the the garage, and you drive the DeLorean any time you want.

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This ends tonight...

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Sometimes...
Sometimes it's dificult to find a reason to continue.

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Ninth Runniversary
Yesterday was my ninth runniversary. Like my first day running, I ran on the treadmill while listening to Broken. Unlike the first time, I only listened to it once, and covered 4.48 miles during the duration of the EP, thanking God every step of the way.

I'm confident in knowing that the bone in my ankle has healed completely now; however, I'm still rebuilding the muscle in that ankle and the rest of that leg. There was significant atrophy during the early phases of recovery. Slowly as it may be, I am making progress, and I am thankful for that.

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A Weekend at the Races
Tomorrow is the Fifth Avenue Mile and Sunday is the Marathon Tune-Up. I'm looking forward to both. If all goes well, I should be done with tomorrow's race in under six minutes. Sunday's race I'm aiming for a time between 135 and 140 minutes. We'll see what happens...

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FreeBSD 7 SATA Weirdness
Over the weekend I installed the x86-64 build of FreeBSD 7 on my workstation, dib. I haven't had time yet to configure everything to my liking yet, but almost everything works.

The one really annoying issue centers around a SATA DVD burner. When this device is attached to the primary SATA controller (ICH7), the system refuses to boot from the hard drive. It reports that no system disk has been found. I've tried all of the SATA settings options in the BIOS and none work.

If I connect the SATA burner to the secondary Marvell "RAID" controller the system boots from the hard drive without issue. In Windows, this requires another driver (which for some reason installed a copy of apache along with it). Under FreeBSD 7; however, this second controller seems to be currently unsupported, leaving me with only the IDE burner available.

I may spend the $20 and get another IDE burner and just forget about the SATA issue, but I really would like to know what the problem is. If any one has any idea why the system would fail to boot from a SATA hard drive when a SATA optical drive is attached, please email me and give me some insight into this issue. Maybe the Unix category wasn't the best for this. I spent more time discussing the hardware/BIOS weirdness than the installation or configuration of FreeBSD7. In fact, FreeBSD 7 isn't a very good title for this either. I'm going to change that.

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Thoughts on National Computer Science Education Week
This week is apparently National Computer Science Education Week. Code.org is organizing the "hour of code" to promote teaching of Computer Science and Programming in schools. They're also organizing petitions to make CS courses count as credits in Mathematics or Science for High School graduation requirements.

In High School, my CS courses were by far my favorites, Programming in Pascal, AP Comp Sci in Pascal, Programming in C++, and AP Comp Sci in C++ ( the language for the exam switched my junior year). I learned a lot about structured code, elegant, efficient code. I learned enough about Data Structures and Algorithms that I didn't have to study for my college CS classes until Computational Structures (Discrete Math II with Scheme, essentially) in my third semester. I had an amazing Computer Science teacher who also taught me Calculus and the proper order of precedence in life: God, Family, Math. I wouldn't be where I am today without that educational opportunity I had in High School. I want others to have that opportunity too.

However, this is where I differ with the opinion of the Code.org folks. I do not believe that CS classes should count toward the Math or Science requirements. In this state, CS counts toward the "practical or performing art" requirements, I'm assuming under the "practical" label. I think this is a better place for it at the High School level.

Computer Science is not a hard Science. It's not Physics. It's not Biology. It's not Chemistry. There's a saying that if the subject has science in its name, it's not really a science. That is true with Computer Science. It's not studying the how and why of atoms, of molecules, of living systems, of anything really. It's not science.

Computer Science is really applied mathematics. I am very fortunate that the college program I went through was very strong in mathematics: Calc I and II, Linear (Matrix) Algebra, Discrete Math, Discrete Math II in the guise of Computational Structures, Probability and Statistics, Theory of Computation, Algorithmic Analysis... the list goes on. All of these mathematical foundations were then applied to a machine, to make the machine carry out a task in an efficient manner. It's those mathematical foundations that are the true core of Computer Science.

While mathematics is the core of Computer Science and Computer Science is essentially applied mathematics, I do not believe it should count toward the Math requirements. The CS classes would likely detract from other mathematics courses such as Geometry, Trigonometry, and Calculus. These courses are far too important to an education to be replaced by a Computer Science course. Many, maybe even most, High School Computer Science courses focus more on "programming" than the fundamental mathematical theories. They will pick the language du jour and teach you the syntax and semantics. They'll teach about basic data structures like arrays, and linked lists. The AP exam currently focuses not on implementing lists, trees, stacks, queues, and sorting and searching algorithms, but on arrays and lists using Java library calls. This is not math. This is learning Java syntax.

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Resetting Vim
On occasion while I'm coding, I'll mistype something and vim's code autoindenting will stop honoring my settings. Likely, I've done something stupid that has disabled or modifying the settings from the defaults I set in my .vimrc file.

If (when) this happens, Vim can be reset without exiting the procces by going into command mode and typing

:source $MYVIMRC

This reloads the settings of the .vimrc file without forcing you to restart the process, thus losing your place in your code.

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Coogan's 5K
Unofficially I just PR'd at 19:44.

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Prince
I'll never forget the day I started liking Prince's music. I was with my friend in his car headed somewhere. We were listening to K-Rock and they had a "listener playlist" where for about an hour, all the music had been selected by a listener and this listener was on the phone, talking with the DJ about his selections and introducing songs.

The guy announced that the next song was from Prince. The DJ questioned this selection and he said, "No, this dude can shred. Just listen."

And we laughed.

And we listened.

And Prince shredded.

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It's been a while...
It's been a while since I've had a substantial update here. I've been busy living life leaving little time to be writing about it; at least writing about it here.

Work has been quite busy for a while now. Lots of projects, lots of deadlines, lots of extra hours. But there hasn't been any "mandatory seven day work weeks" like I had at that one job, and there isn't that expectation of "you can work from home so you are always expected to be working" I had at the last job. Plus, the work is a lot more interesting than anything I've done in years.

Bernstein was right: money doesn't motivate me, interesting problems and the ability to tinker do.

Yesterday the DeLorean rolled over to 16,000 miles. That's still about 1,000 miles a year I'm putting on it. I'd like to keep the mileage low, but she's just so much fun to drive. I've been asked by people at work to bring Aisling next week for Bring Your Child to Work Day. Apparently a lot of my co-workers have told their kids about the car and they want to see it.

I ran my 29th half-marathon this past weekend. I'd like to get up to 32 this year. I'm also signed up for my 13th marathon this Autumn. I'm considering running number 14 a few weeks later.

In addition to all of that taking up my time, I've also been volunteering with the Youth Ministry at a church in my diocese. That's been quite an amazing adventure. It's had a profound impact on my life and has certainly helped at least a few teens. It's been an honor to do the Lord's work. Maybe someday I'll publish some of the talks I've given. The In His Image talk seems to have resonated with a lot of people, certainly more so than some of the other talks.

I guess that sums things up for now.

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"Each of us is willed. Each of us is loved. Each of us is necessary." - Pope Benedict XVI

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1260056285
Hibachi in Ballston. People in VA are still afraid of snow.

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