Today’s OoTS is a highly amusing variant of Abbott & Costello‘s Who’s on First routine.
Very funny stuff.
The 4-way stop conundrum
There are a couple of 4-way stops around work that I usually walk past once or twice a day. Over the years I’ve noticed a few things about drivers’ behaviour at these intersections, particularly older drivers. I think it must be one of those ‘southern politeness’ things.
Driver N pulls up to the intersection and stops, followed shortly after by drivers E, W and S. Now normally, whoever gets to the intersection first. That way people get to go through nice and orderly.
However, people in the south tend to be extraordinarily polite, especially older folks. So Driver N, trying to be polite waits for the other drivers to go. Drivers E, W and S sit there waiting for Driver N to go, since he was there first. Everybody waits, holding up traffic until someone decides to go. Naturally, everyone decides to go at the same time. So they advance into the intersection, but suddenly, seeing the others go too, they stop (don’t want to get into a fender bender after all). Then you get this Mexican stand-off type of situation going where everybody is waiting for the other person to go.
Finally someone reaches the end of their patience and zooms through the intersection and traffic begins flowing again, until the next person comes along wanting to be polite.
Paper writing time
It’s not often I get a chance to write a paper for submission to a journal or meeting. But when I do, I always seem to be torn between choosing to write it using plain old MS Word, or going with TeX/LaTeX. I’ve always liked look of TeX generated documents. Problem is I’ve learned enough TeX/LaTeX to be able to generate some simple equations, but still haven’t learned enough to make a full fledged document. A couple of TeX books sit on my shelf to help me learn more (one of them seems to be missing…), but it’s always a slow process, because some of the things I end up wanting to do always seem to be things that have a hard time finding solutions to.
And then it comes to crunch time, and usually I end up falling back to MS Word, because it’s quick and easy. Just doesn’t look quite as nice or sophisticated though.
This time, though, I’m determined to do it in TeX. I have a working TeX environment in the form of MikTeX and what appears to be a decent TeX editor in TeXnicCenter (used Emacs before).
Time to go get started…
Don’t let your guard down yet
With everybody dealing with the aftermath of Katrina and Rita still, and more finger pointing ever, NHC’s Tropical Weather Outlook says:
SHOWER ACTIVITY WITH THE TROPICAL WAVE ENTERING THE WESTERN CARIBBEAN SEA IS CURRENTLY LIMITED AND DISORGANIZED. HOWEVER… UPPER-LEVEL WINDS ARE EXPECTED TO GRADUALLY BECOME MORE CONDUCIVE FOR DEVELOPMENT… AND THIS SYSTEM COULD BECOME A TROPICAL DEPRESSION DURING THE NEXT DAY OR TWO.
Still two months left in the official season.
Getting ready for Christmas dinner
Now that we have a house, the wife decided that we would be doing Christmas dinner at our place this year. That means instead of us heading out of town, the horde will be descending on our little house.
This year, instead of the traditional roasted turkey, we decided to try cooking it on the grill. So to practice, I threw my first turkey on the grill yesterday. We stuck with Alton Brown‘s tried and true Good Eats Roast Turkey (from the Romancing the Bird episode. The bird was brined overnight and then a basic BBQ rub spread liberally over and under the skin. Placed a drip pan under the rack over the two middle burners and fired up the two outside burners. Made a little foil packet filled with mesquite wood chips and tossed it on the grill. Once everything got nice and hot, on went the turkey and some sweet potatoes. Roasted everything until the thermometer in the turkey read 165°F (I never roast anything without a thermometer anymore) and everything came out just about perfect. The only problem was an area on the back of the turkey that didn’t get cooked all the way. Must have been near a cool spot on the grill. Not a place where there’s much meat for eating anyway, and the rest of the bird turned out fine. It didn’t come out quite as smokey as I was hoping (a lot of the smoke escapes out of the grill), so I think next time I’ll try to fashion some kind of foil tent to put over the turkey and wood chip packet. Still, it was a mighty tasty bird.