Tuesday, December 02, 2003
how embarassing.
my niece comes into my brother's kitchen last week, wants to send pies to her cousin at saint john's college on march 14th. my triple-ms engineer brother, and me, the physics/math major and on/off grad student and software engineer, can't figure out why. his wife is laughing at us - that's pi-day. uh-oh, endangered geek credentials here. then my niece says they have to be square pies. again, we were like “why?”. as my niece patiently points out, everyone knows that “pie are squared”. except, apparently, for her red-faced dad and uncle.
our geek cards are revoked for the day. later we try and redeem ourselves by comparing exponents of pi and the natural logarithm in full public view. it doesn't work.
got gas ?
my heat was gone when i got back here yesterday - again. dang. this time the pilot wouldn't stay lit. and the last time i lit it, apparently there was some leak in the control valve assembly that caught fire and burned the valve and some nearby wires. total burned area was a few square inches. but i'm thinkin', damn, if that valve had gone, i would have had a raging supersized blow torch in the basement. wtf, who the hell makes gas valves out of flammable material anyway ? great way of making a small problem worse. so everything's shut down now, waiting for the gas man. again. at least they should hire a cute gas lady to send around. never heard of one of those. then i could get, uh, serviced ;-)
turns out that little space heater i bought a couple years back was a great investment. pop that into the "things that shouldn't be" barrel.
odd thought: i wonder if a hair dryer could be used as a space heater substitute ? aren't they basically the same things with different form factors ?