I don't know if anyone in the room is a fan of Nine Inch Nails, but if you've got tickets, be prepared to clear a new date for the show. I know when I was traveling and working a lot, it tended to wipe me out pretty good so I guess I'm not to surprised that a couple dates might get rearranged. I would have liked an official statement on their web page rather than marking the Minneapolis date as "just added", but I'll help get the word out by printing the press release here:

Minneapolis, MN – (Friday, August 1)  JAM Productions have just announced that the Nine Inch Nails/Crystal Castles concert originally scheduled for Saturday, August 2 at Target Center has just been postponed due to illness.   The band is sincerely sorry for the last minute announcement, but after receiving doctor’s orders not to perform Trent Reznor has reluctantly agreed to the postponement.
 
The concert is being rescheduled for Tuesday, November 25, 2008 at Target Center.  All tickets purchased for the August 2 concert will be honored on the new date. For those unable to attend the rescheduled date of November 25, a refund will be available at original point of purchase.

Looks like some people's Thanksgiving week just got a little busier. Here's a map of all the US and Canadian tour dates.

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Everybody else seems to be jumping this meme, so I guess I will too. I suppose it will tell my stalker what to get me for my birthday.

The following is a list of books that came from the internet. I can't find a source. Supposedly, the average american has read 6 of them. Titles in bold are books I've read, underscored titles are books I've partially read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

This isn't really a good list, but it's not a bad list either. Note that both The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and Hamlet are listed as well as The Chronicles of Narnia and Prince Caspian. Many of these books can be found in High School Curricula or at least could be when I was in High School back in the rotary dial days.

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Turns out justice can be served by this administration on occasion.

Howe said she couldn't comment on the reasoning behind Pitt losing her $89,920 job, but said the information MnDOT sent "corroborated our investigation.''
- StarTribune

I'd still think you would want to check on reports that your job candidate was fired for failing to do her job and misappropriation of state funds before hiring her. But maybe that's just me.

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I know the current administration is bad about responding to crises, but they didn't have to show that their hiring was specifically tailored to create crisis response problems.

We know President Bush kept reading his picture book when the Trade Towers were hit. We know it took a week to get water to New Orleans. What will the TSA miss in the near future?

Pitt, 44, of Red Wing, was fired last November from her high-level job at MnDOT after she failed to return from an unauthorized, state-paid trip to Washington, D.C., during the I-35W bridge collapse crisis. The bridge collapsed Aug. 1 and Pitt didn't return to Minnesota until Aug. 11. Various state investigators later determined there was no work-related reason for her to be in Washington and that her trip there was unauthorized and at taxpayer expense.
-- StarTribune

 At least there's an investigation. That means someone thinks there's a problem.

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In the past couple of years, I've had the opportunity to observe several managers within a single organization of around 550 people. This is the first time I've worked in a situation with multiple managers whose behavior and success I could compare. I'd like to share what I've learned about management through that observation.

The most important component of any organization is communication. A good manager is an expert at communication. Larger organizations are more likely to  have problems with communication either within the ranks or between the ranks. There will be groups and managers that don't want to talk to each other and there will be management that doesn't want to communicate up or down the chain of command. A good manager will work to bridge those gaps by bringing in people from outside of their group and will ask questions within their chain of command to facilitate missing communication.

I used to have a saying when I made service calls for a living: "If I ask a yes/no question and the person I'm asking doesn't understand what I mean, their answer will be yes." I tried this out on many occasions by asking questions I knew I'd have to clarify later. Every time, the answer was "yes". A good manager can recognize this type of situation and make sure that the answer given by them or to them is an informed, correct answer.

A good manager delegates work that can be delegated and keeps track of what their employees are working on at any given time. Occasional group/team meetings to keep everyone up to date are good, and it never hurts to go for a short walk and talk to people and see what they're doing and how they feel.

When work that has been delegated is not completed satisfactorily, a good manager will take a step back from the situation and ask a few important questions. "Why didn't this work get done?", "Did I clearly state the requirements and, if not, was the work completed as I requested?", "What can be done to avoid this situation in the future?". If the requirements were complete and the work was not, a good manager will help understand where the shortcomings were.

I want to keep this a positive message of what a good manager does rather than what they don't do, but this one is important. A good manager refers to their employees as people, not resources. Resources are mined and drilled and pumped; people are nurtured, trained and worked. Even the best possible use of the term, "renewable resource", suggests that, once the resource in question has been burned out, you can wait a season and another one will grow back.

So, when hiring a manager, or when managing, keep these things in mind and you'll find that things go well for you and your organization.

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The world's first tidal-electric turbine has been connected to the Irish power grid. Powering 150 homes during the break-in period and 1500 once it's up to full capacity, this is a small step toward true renewable energy production. As an added bonus, the turbines rotate at 10-15 rpm so they're unlikely to cause "problems" with sea life.

The idea of a space elevator has fascinated scientists and the space-aware for many years, even though the possibility of a cable strong enough is incredibly unlikely. Turns out there's an annual space elevator conference and they have a blog so you can keep up on the progress.

I've always been annoyed at the artificial shutter sound made by my digital camera. The first thing I did with my new SLR when I took it out of the box was disable the focus beep. This article told me why those are there and why they can't be disabled in Japan.

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I started taking an art class this summer. It's Drawing 1101 at the University of Minnesota and it's a prerequisite for many art degrees. Since I've been thinking about getting a BFA in photography, I thought I should start somewhere, especially since most of the classes I took when I was in college were in engineering. I still have an interest in engineering, but I'm already a pretty good photograper, so that was the direction I decided to go.

I've learned a few things at this class that I didn't expect to. One is that I can actually draw. I knew I was okay at drafting and representing mechanical and angular shapes, but I didn't expect to discover that I could draw organic shapes as well. Faces are still tough though. The second thing that I learned came completely out of the blue, during an assignment on perspective. It turns out that many "photoshopped" composite photos don't have a consistent vanising point. One more thing to use for spotting the hacks.

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I was listening to someone talking about why mathematicians are so obsessed with pi the other day. They broke it down to what I thought was a fairly simple explanation. Pi is an infinitely complex, seemingly random, never-ending number, and it describes the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter. Since a circle is one of the simplest shapes and pi is one of the most complex numbers, they feel that the complexity of pi must contain the hidden secrets to the simplicity of the universe.

I say that the square root of two is getting a bum rap here. If you measure diagonally, point-to-point across a square, and divide that "diameter" by the length of one side of the square, you get the square root of two. This is an infinitely complex, seemingly random, never-ending number that describes one of the simplest shapes known, and I've never heard of someone calculating the sqare root of two to billions of decimal places.

Don't even get me started on e...

Update:  The square root of 2 was recently calculated to 1,000,082 digits. Still not billions, but quite impressive.

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I wouldn't feel like a geek if this didn't make me happy. The way that memory manufacturers have been able to make CF and SD cards have such high capacity is by stacking silicon layers on top of each other. The increase in thickness is minute, there's no increase in board real estate and every time you do it, you double capacity. The problem with moving this technology to other areas, like CPUs is heat. IBM has just solved that problem. IBM via Gizmodo.

Everybody knows that email is a huge time-sink in the workplace. It interrupts work and forces a response or a change of priority. In my experience, people walking into my office to ask a question can be just as bad because I have to respond now, rather than on my own time. The obvious corollary is that instant messaging would be worse than email, but not as bad as a personal visit. A recent study shows that may not be the case. - Science Daily via Lifehacker.

More and more this seems to be the case.

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So, I get extra cash each year to do something healtcare related. In the current case, it involves looking at information provided by my insurance company about prescription drugs that I'm taking.

Since I have alergies fexofenadine, an antihistamine, is one of my prescriptions. Here's an excerpt from the provided information on that medication:

What drug(s) may interact with fexofenadine?

• antacids
• erythromycin
• grapefruit, apple, or orange juice
• ketoconazole
• rifampin
• St. John's Wort

In addition, the following medicines can make you feel drowsy:

• alcohol
• barbiturate medicines for inducing sleep or treating seizures (convulsions)
• medicines for anxiety or sleeping problems, such as alprazolam, diazepam or temazepam
• medicines for hay fever and other allergies such as antihistamines
• medicines for mental depression (antidepressants)
• medicines for mental problems, anxieties and psychotic disturbances
• medicines for pain such as opiate analgesics (e.g. codeine)

 Now, I can understand barbituates making me drowsy, but I've never been prescribed this "alcolol" stuff...

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