i prefer pi

Some links:

• Too busy to handwrite letters this Christmas? Too lazy to even sign and address Christmas cards? Have the USPS do all of the hard work for you, so that you can spend as little time on your friends and family as possible.
• The greatest holiday special soundtrack that almost wasn’t.
• From Brian, “Thirteen Things That Do Not Make Sense“. They left off “girls”.
• “Ninety-eight percent of the nearly 3,000 US troop casualties are men. When men die so that other men can sit at home and blog, play video games, watch Sports Center, argue about N.T. Wright, and obsess over what “emerging” means, the least we can do is commit ourselves to their families and to surviving veterans.” From Iraq War Veterans Are The Church’s Responsibility Too
• Laura’s photos from the Seattle Half-Marathon that Jacob and I ran last Sunday.
• Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Captured Koala — Wikipedia defines reality?
• In case you needed some, here are Ten Reasons You Should Never Get a Job.

“Forty degrees and rainy” has never sounded so good.

To my surprise and great delight, it wasn’t cloudy when I got up this morning. It was still Twenty Degrees Fahrenheit (or “Really Flippin’ Cold”, if that’s your parlance), but that meant that there was an actual, visible sunrise, with actual, visible sunshine. The clouds above were peach and gold against a clear blue sky, and the frozen earth below gave back the same muted, snow-dappled hues.

It’s a clear day — rare enough for this time of the year — and the world has frozen solid and shut in upon itself. In short, it’s a perfect day to walk around and take photos of the snow-covered bulldozers, or the sunset over a snow-covered pier on Lake Washington, or the last leaves on the golden maple in the backyard. Campus is closed, and the DOT told me to stay home. Why am I at work?

I know that many of you are from much colder climes, but I’m just a poor Texas boy. It’s dark and cold — cold! — outside, and it ain’t gettin’ any warmer.

Dang, I suck at updating.

• I worked a lot the week before Thanksgiving, but it was all good because I was going on vacation.
• Laura and I went back to Dallas for the Thanksgiving week to relax and spend time with our families. It was a really great time. I’ll post some photos to Flickr tomorrow-ish.
• Just a little less than twenty-four hours ago, I completed the Seattle Half-Marathon. Unofficial chip time was 2:06:46. More on this later.
• It snowed (off-and-on) yesterday, and we had about an inch and a half of accumulation by the end of the day!

• Pinecone Caramel Macchiato
• Poinsettia Passion Iced Tea*
• Reindeer Musk Mocha

What else?

* I know, I know, Poinsettias aren’t really poisonous.

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Our long run this week was twelve miles, so on Saturday morning, Jacob and I dutifully got up and obeyed the schedule. I, who, four years ago, failed to complete a hundred yards at a full sprint, *ahem* did the dirty dozen (and a half mile beyond for cool-down). Just like last month, we ran along the Sammamish River Trail, and also like last month, it was the farthest I’d ever run. Unlike last month, however, I didn’t eat candy afterwards until I got sick. I went to the ProClub, showered, and then had a delightful spaghetti dinner with Laura at the food court at the mall. I’m such a romantic.

The race is in thirteen days!

It’s 5:20 my time and almost completely pitch black outside. This chart says that the sun set about half an hour ago, and it’s only the beginning of November. It looks like we’re set to lose about fifty more minutes off our morning and about twenty more minutes off our evening before the winter solstice.

On the bright side, it was a lovely sunny day with blue skies this morning and afternoon. Something was strange when I finally woke up this morning, and it took me a while to realize that it was the sunshine coming through my window. It’s been cloudy for a few weeks now, and even when it isn’t, the sun hasn’t even peeked over the horizon until after 7:00.

It’s not hard to understand why fully a quarter of our populace suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder.

A series of campaign materials for fictitious candidates.

My Christmas list:

• For Half Price Books (and every other used bookstore) to get a computerized inventory system
• For every bookstore to have a web interface so that I could check to see if they had a book in stock
• For a web service to aggregate all of these into site so that I could do a geographical search and discover which bookstores had my book
• For a web service that takes an Amazon.com wish list, compares it to the inventory of a given bookstore, and produces a shopping list

or, barring all of that:

• Instantaneous free shipping from Amazon.com