Diana called this morning and warned me that traffic was really bad. I I flipped around local stations to look for news and traffic updates, and noticed something that I'd never really paid attention to before. Morning news, either locally or nationally, is sickeningly sweet and wholesome. Everything is health news, puppies that need to be rescued, Rod Luck frightening little children who are doing some fundraising, weathermen doing their wacky weatherman stuff. Such a contrast to evening news broadcasts. My guess is that people don't want to face bad news when they first wake up, but I wonder what kind of newcast Darwinism went on that resulted in morning news being so innocent.

Adam Carrolla has taken over for Howard Stern, and after some listening, he is officially added to my list of things that I could do without. "Now... here's the thing about the penis..."

I recently concluded my .NET Programming Challenge here at work. I had people write software that would solve a given Sudoku puzzle, and judged them on accuracy and speed. Including my own, there were five submissions. More than I expected, but not as many as I hoped for. It was great to see what people came up with. We have some smart people working here! I had 20 puzzles, and let the code chew on each one, timing how long each puzzle took to solve, and summing up those times to get a total score. Well, the resolution of the normal Windows timer comes down to about 16 milliseconds, and one guys solution registered as taking 0ms per iteration, and therefore the sum came to 0 as well! Pretty impressive. That prompted me to look up how to do high-precision timing, and I learned how to programatically access a timer that ticks about 2.7 billion times a second (on this machine). The timings I got went out to about 18 decimal places. Pretty damn cool. If you ever to time something really fast, I'm your guy.

That's about all my news for now. I officially submitted my request for sabbatical time off. June 26th to August 8th. This fits in pretty nicely with Diana's time off from school, giving her a week or two on either end. Plans are in the formulation phase, and currently include visiting Alicia in Sweden, hopefully visiting Mike in Germany, seeing my old Viennese stomping grounds, and a number of other possibilities. Exciting!