Ofey...

Did you know that Richard Feynman was an artist?  I don't mean his bongo drums – I mean drawing and painting.  Even though Feynman is one of my personal heroes, until this morning I had no idea he had this talent.

Unsurprisingly, nude women are frequent subjects – but also people that he knew (some of whom are famous themselves), and his relatives (especially his adopted daughter Michelle).  There's a collection of his art here; my favorite of the bunch is at right.

Ofey?  That's the pseudonym he signed his artwork with...

Weather Station Heart Transplant...

I'm in the midst of a makeover on our home's IT infrastructure.  Mainly this means removing things – parts of our infrastructure were over 10 years old, and technology has come a long way in that time.  I'm replacing 5 servers, a noisy Cisco 3550 switch, several routers, and some other gear with a single Mac Mini Server, a silent Cisco SG 300-20 switch, and a 3TB mirrored disk array.  Ah, quiet!  And small – this whole setup fits on a single 18" x 36" shelf, with plenty of room to spare.

One of those old servers I've replaced was a Windows 2003 server box – the last vestige of Windows to remain in our home.  It is now shut down, plug pulled out of the wall.  I could do this because WeatherHawk (the manufacturer of my weather station) now has an OS/X software package.  Yesterday I installed that package on our Mac Mini Server, and set it up to report weather as a personal weather station on Weather Underground (the link will be permanently at right).

This new software installed and configured painlessly.  While I can't really see how it's built, I can tell from some of the interactions that its communications protocol implementation is much better than that of the old Windows software I'm replacing.  Getting it connected to Weather Underground was totally painless.  There was a big surprise for me upon installing it, a very pleasant one: the software has the option of working with a MySQL database!  I already had MySQL installed on my server (for my own purposes), so all I had to do was create a database and login for the WeatherHawk software and voila!  I'm now collecting the weather data straight into SQL database – which means that reporting on the data is very straightforward.  Win!

The Mechanic and the Surgeon...

Ah, I need a good one like this, but for programmers...

A Honda mechanic was removing a cylinder head from the motor of a Honda when he spotted a well-known cardiologist in his shop. The cardiologist was there waiting for the service manager to come and take a look at his car when the mechanic shouted across the garage, "Hey Doc, want to take a look at this?”

The cardiologist, a bit surprised walked over to where the mechanic was working on a Honda. The mechanic straightened up, wiped his hands on a rag and asked, ”So Doc, look at this engine. I opened its heart, took the valves out, repaired or replaced anything damaged, and then put everything back in, and when I finished, it worked just like new. So how is it that I make $24,000 a year and you make $1.7M when you and I are doing basically the same work?

The cardiologist paused, leaned over, and then whispered to the mechanic ... “Try doing it with the engine running.”