Good news on evolution

Apparently the voters of Dover, PA got fed up with their school board that is trying (the case is being fought in court and should be decided in January) to implement "Intelligent Design" in the biology curriculum. Eight of the school board members were voted out of office. Unfortunately, the ninth board member wasn't up for re-election. Maybe there are still some "intelligent" people in this country.

(Also see this article where the Vatican seems to be against "Intelligent Design.")

iPod Nano Dock

Apple was nice enough to include an adapter so that an iPod Nano fits in a standard iPod dock. That's fine and dandy, but I already own an iPod Mini dock where the adapter didn't fit. Not wanting to buy another dock, I did what any engineer with a Dremel would do; I modified the adapter so that it fit in my Mini dock. Thanks, Apple, I was looking for a reason to break out the Dremel!

Video Games

I must say that I enjoy playing video games on my PlayStation 2. I'm not very good, so I don't play all that often. I recently bought a few games off eBay. I also bought a steering wheel and Gran Turismo 4. However, I'm really bad at games and my driving consists of steering into walls most of the time. Since I wasn't very good at Gran Turismo, I saw that the wheel also worked with Burnout, so I played that and thought it was quite cool. Realizing that this was an ancient version, I bought Burnout Revenge. It turns out either that I'm OK at this game or they made it quite easy. In either case, I am having a great time playing it. My poor driving skills don't seem all that poor (however, I found that the Dual Shock controller works better than the steering wheel for control). My wife thinks I'm crazy as I've played for a few hours at a time for the last week. I'm about 30% complete and am making decent progress, all while having a pretty good time. It's amazing that this game has kept my attention for so long already; usually I play games for a few minutes and get bored. Kudos to the folks at Electronic Arts for producing this addictive game!

Cycling class

I've been going to a cycling class 2-3 days a week for about 2 years now, not to learn to cycle (obviously), but to stay in shape. Over that time, I've had a number of instructors at 2 different facilities ranging from the instructor that thought it was a Latino dance class (based on the music she was playing) to the instructors you can tell have done real cycle training. This morning I went to the gym, happy as a clam as I just fixed 2 serious code bugs, and see an instructor named Wendy teaching the class. She isn't the normal instructor and I've had her as a cycle instructor before. Actually, she is the reason I no longer goto Sunday classes; she took over the Sunday class from another instructor. I find that she is loud, annoying, and not very competent at teaching. The commands she yells out (you can hear her half way across the gym) are sometimes helpful, but sometimes plain stupid. She keeps saying "Gear up" and "Gear down". I think the reason this annoys me so much is that it is so inaccurate. The stationary bicycles are all based on resistance as they have a belt that goes around the wheel and pushing the lever "up" adds more resistance. I suspect she learned those words at a training class and keeps using them, but really doesn't have a clue that the bicycles don't have gears.

So, I stayed for about 30 minutes and walked out. I started getting a headache. I normally enjoy class as it gives me time to think and gives me a good workout.