Very Local News

• The other day's  blog entry about Russia was bad, and had legs to be much worse. It was one of those posts that you just have to know when to pull the plug. I'm not even going to get in to where I wanted to go with that post. Let's just insinuate it was dark and foreboding.
• Those little robots on Mars were designed to last ninety days. They have been going four years.
• McDonald's moved in within walking distance of work. They have wireless and a TV. A Boston Market used to be in the same spot  We had a discussion for fifteen minutes about profitability of McDonald's vs Boston Market today at teatime.
• After doing some tests, the old way of doing string compares took about 650 seconds. The new way, using regular expressions, took 5017 seconds which comes out to about an hour and twenty three minutes. This is the same logic with a different method of comparing. The CPU time is almost identical between the two methods. So, the difference is the re module in Python. The count of times the module was hit is 16,386,469. That is how many times the program attempted a compare of strings.
• There have been wrecks in the morning at or near Westheimer and Highway 6 the last three days running.
• Last night Nat made these Indian vegetarian dinners. They were tart and tasted great. There was some noodle meat (kind of chili-mac) on the side and I ate th left over chicken nuggets Elle didn't want. What a great meal.
• Someone in the elevator today after lunch blamed a bit of absentmindedness on the fact that it was after lunch. That doesn't fly at our company.