Now, the Mayan Calendar ends on December 12th, 2012, so if the end of a calendar is to be taken as an indication for this world’s demise, then MY calendar predicts the end of the world to be on December 31st, THIS year!
THAT will teach those people from WeCanKnow not to make up silly stuff!

So, anyway, I’m obviously not buying a 2011 calendars this year!

(Because they’ll be much cheaper in January 2011)

There’s one thing that really puzzles me, though:

The WeCanKnow people are obviously very devout Christians with a very literal view of the Bible. But despite their self confessed claim of a strictly  literal interpretation of the Bible, they take a quote from the Bible, and then say: “Err.. NAH, that’s not true”.
Granted, there are some passages in the Bible that are quite nebulous, pure gibberish, actually, so it’s to be expected that people disagree about their meaning.

The mentioned quote however, is not one of those; it’s one of the more straightforward, to-the-point, clear, unambiguous statements. In fact, the WeCanKnow people admit that all the different Christian factions that fight over differences in Biblical interpretations, agree on this one! It’s THAT clear: NOBODY knows when the Rapture will be. NOT EVEN JESUS!

Mark 12:32 (KJV) But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.

Then, given that one holds the Bible as the literal, infallible and inerrant word of an all-knowing and all-powerful Lord, how twisted a mind does one need, to then turn around, point at a VERY clear statement, and say: “Sorry, My Dear Omniscient Lord, but you’re wrong!”?

How can anyone say such a thing without myriads of very loud alarm bells going off and huge red flags being raised in the logic-and-reason department of his or her brain?

The mind boggles.

T-Shirts come in sizes like S (small), M (medium) and L (large).
These S, M and L sizes remind me of the clothing sizes we got to choose from in the military:
“too small”, “too big” and “WAY too big”.
It’s a known fact that the human species has grown taller over the past millennia, so I must assume that the S, M and L indications go WAY past in time.
Because these days there’s not a single Large person on this earth who would fit into an L sized T-shirt.
So, to allow for the ever growing height of the average human, they had to extend the size range: we now have: XL (Extra large), XXL, XXXL, etc.

I consider myself an average person in height and weight. I’m not tall, nor overly heavy.
My T-shirt size now is XL, and some of those are simply too small!
While it’s kinda silly that an average sized person like myself would need EXTRA EXTRA LARGE T-shirts, that, in itself, is not the problem. It’s just a name.
The REAL problem with T-shirt sizes is: they’re relative!
If you pick a Large T-shirt out of rack, then the L ONLY means that it’s (marginally) larger than an M, from the same brand, make, model and batch.
It does NOT mean that it is of similar size as a different L sized T-shirt.
I now use XL as a baseline size. But I have come across XL T-shirts that I couldn’t even get my head through, as well as ones that probably required me to have a camping permit.
Architecturally, a T-shirt is basically a two dimensional affair: length and width.
However SOME T-shirt makers seem to apply their sizes to only ONE of these dimensions: I have had XL T-shirts that could easily have fit people three times as ‘wide’ as me, yet it wouldn’t cover my belly button.
But I also have had XL T-shirts that were so tight I could barely breath, yet they reached till FAR over my knees.
Are there actually human beings involved in designing these things?
Then there is the type of fabric! While mine are ALL 100% cotton, not all 100% cotton appears to respond equally to washing.
I have had perfect shirts that, after their first laundry experience, would be something like an XXS if that size would exist.
Learning from experience you buy your next T-shirt slightly larger, but IT then emerges from the dryer big enough to cover the entire Statue of Liberty.

One step in the right direction would be to standardize these sizes for T-shirts:
S (M, L, XL, etc) simply means .. a T-shirt is THIS wide, THIS long, the sleeves are THIS wide, and THIS long. Period. Shouldn’t be too difficult: if they can do it for jeans, why not for T-shirts?
Call it a ‘Standard’ T-shirt.
Maybe I should do just that! Establish a set of fixed sizes, trademark them with the name ‘Standard T-shirt’, and sell the rights to use that indication, coupled to certification, to T-shirt makers.
I know ~I~ would only buy ‘Standard T-shirts’ from then on!

Our first day in the New Year was a quiet one. We didn’t go out, other than having our traditional New Year Polar Bear Club meeting (in the pool). For more details see Dawnell’s blog entry.

Other than that, I didn’t do much: played some stupid Facebook game (now that’s something I should have made a New Year’s resolution about!), worked a bit on my picture collection, ignored my other New Year’s resolutions (except for that math thing!) and ordered us a Blue-ray player with Netflix access capability and “Instant  Tray Opening” at Amazon I think I will replace our wireless LAN setup with a cat6 wired one, which involves getting up in the attic and making some tricky wall drops.

Yesterday my previous boss (CEO at HF Engineering) asked if I would come along on a trip to a photo store in Orlando (he’s a serious amateur photographer and considering making his hobby his profession). He and I both now do contract work for our previous customer. He told me he’s looking for some cheap office space. I told him that in principle I wouldn’t mind sharing an office space from where we could do our contract work. I like the idea, but it probably means I would have to concentrate on getting more contract work. Plus there is the cost factor. We’ll see.

After that Dawnell and I  visited ex-coworker and fellow Dutchie Tim de Waal and his lovely wife Toni and their 9 month old baby Nathan: see Dawnell’s blog entry. They live in a wonderful apartment with a great view over Melbourne’s marina with beautiful sunsets. Unfortunately we had to cut our visit short, as I wasn’t feeing quite well. We’ll do it again soon.

Went to bed early (with a math book!).

This morning my buddy Bob Cuyt called from Belgium (he and  his family just got back from his wife’s fatherland Slovenia) and we chatted for a while. He turned 55 yesterday and will become an opa for the third time. Time doesn’t slow down.

Daughter Laurilee and grandson Jackson are on their way up here. Better get dressed.

It’s a somber and cold winter day. 9 C! For Florida, that’s cold! Bitterly cold.

The picture above is my first “Picture of the Day” for 2010 .. Bonnie on her new sofa.

I fully intend to make this year a GREAT year, and I’m NOT going to let me distract from that resolution by the dark, grim, gloomy day it is today.
And on that same note: the cold drizzle is not going to keep me from my traditional "Polar Bear Club" swim either, even though the pool is a MESS right now (The potted conifer, that doubled as Christmas tree this year, just fell in it).

As for New Year’s resolutions: Yes, I made a few. One involves the garage, most others are simply "nonya".
Except maybe the one about my blog: When it comes to blogs (and real life conversations for that matter) I have always been of the opinion that if you don’t have anything to say, well, then don’t!
Until now, that is. At least for my blog.
I intend to start using it more as an actual log book, mostly for myself, just to have a record of my activities, no matter how boring they are.
So expect to find WAY more postings here than in previous years, but don’t expect them to be more than a simple status update for a boring Tuesday afternoon.

As for 2010 …

Work

I’m still unemployed, but have some interesting part-time contract work for, hopefully, another two months.
I will step up my efforts to find full time employment, but at the same time I will be looking for additional contract work.
I’m still trying to figure out what I would prefer: find an interesting full time job, or remain a contract worker, working from home, with the option to make it a business, and grow it into a company with partners and employees. With the economy coming out of a recession, this may be an excellent time to start a company and have it ride the waves up to prosperity.

Pleasure

We’ll be in Vegas for a few days in the 2nd half of January, where Dawnell will try to persuade some slot machines to cover the cost of the trip and where we also will meet some good friends of ours.
We had some plans to spend our vacation traveling the Californian West Coast (well.. duh! California doesn’t HAVE an East Coast), from San Diego to San Francisco.
Just the other day we started to kick around the idea to go to Germany, where Dawnell would love to see the world-famous Oberammergau Passion play, a 10-yearly event. A tradition that started in 1634! It may be followed by a side trip to “The Fatherland” and visit my army of sisters.
I’m sure more plans will be made, before we make our final decision.

Non-resolutions

Things that I’d like to accomplish but haven’t turned into resolutions to avoid disappointment and self-loathing on 12/31/2010:

• Start (seriously and frequently) practicing and studying the piano
• Start (seriously and frequently) practicing and studying the guitar
• Immerse myself in Linux driver and kernel development
• Start writing apps for Droid phones
• There’s that one subject in math, that I never mastered and would love to master: master it!
• Start reading Feynman’s 3 part “Lectures on Physics” (well ,‘starting’ I already did! Many times!)
• Do the various things around the house that need to be done
• Start writing that best-seller, and have it turn into a blockbuster movie.
• Take more pictures for the “Picture of the Day” club. It’s not called: “Picture of the Week” club!

Health

• Well, here I CAN reveal some – but not all – resolutions:
• go to a fitness club and start working out, even it it’s only once a week, or 10 minutes at a time.
• two words: medication: discipline.

And with that …

ON to the pool!

Amazing stuff!

A warning though: don’t go overboard with it.

You can die from it.

But not without work.

This morning I found THIS taped to the bedroom door:

(Click picture for larger version)

Ikanos is headed by CEO Michael Gulett.
Who once was the president and COO of Virata Corporation!

Sounds like he’s buying back his own stuff, from before his disastrous ‘merge’ with Globespan, the company that then went on to buy Intersil’s (also a previous employer of mine) Wireless Division (Harris’s spun-off semiconductor division), and then later ‘merged’ *cough* with Conexant.
So now Conexant is selling the stuff back to the ex-Virata president’s company! Ha!

Dang, there’s a lot of hot potato-ing going on in the semiconductor industry, these days (years!).

Consider a list of naturally occurring numbers. And by naturally occurring is meant numbers like for example stock prices, number of inhabitants of cities, your electricity bills of the past few years, prices on your Saturday grocery receipt, lengths of rivers, number of books in the bookcases of all your friends, you name it.

The question then is about how often a particular digit appears as the first digit of the numbers in such a list.

Let’s take for example the digit ‘1’. The question then becomes: how often (in %) will ‘1’ be the first digit of these numbers in a given list? Or to put the same question differently: How many numbers in that list (in % of the total number of numbers) start with a ‘1′?

Hint: keep in mind the first category this post is published in!

I moved this blog to a new domain at a new hosting company.

Especially for that one reader who uses RSS to receive notification of my bi-yearly post: the new home address of my blog is claessen.com/blog, the RSS feed for posts is at claessen.com/blog/?feed=rss2 and for comments at claessen.com/blog/?feed=comments-rss2.

I also changed the layout, using a theme that is freely available from my new hosting company www.040hosting.eu (I only customized the header picture, which shows part of our lanai)