I can't think of a place to ask this question, so I'm asking it here. Does anyone have any idea what the thermal coefficient of expansion of granite (or whatever mineral makes up the majority of the earth's crust) might be? How much will the radius of the planet shift from a one degree increase in average surface temperature? What might be the consequences of that expansion?

Rules: Each person tagged blogs 7 random facts about themselves, as well as the rules of the game. You need to tag seven others and list their names on your blog. You have to leave those you plan on tagging a note in their comments so they know that they have been tagged and to read your blog.

Warning: These rules will be violated.

Random Fact #1) I believe any system that depends on infinite growth in a finite universe is ultimately doomed to failure. That includes both economic systems and "send this letter to seven friends" schemes.

Random Fact #2) God went away for me pretty much the same time as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Of course, most of the people who are likely to read this already knew that.

Random Fact #3) I have a tendency to stick to things I'm told I won't be able to do just to prove otherwise. Of course, after it's actually been accomplished, I don't care about it anymore.

Random Fact #4) I didn't get my wisdom teeth until I was 25. I only ever got two, but I still have both of them.

Random Fact #5) I am naturally posting this message from my Gentoo Linux installation. I also use it for playing World of Warcraft.

Random Fact #6) I want to be able to retire by age 30. Yes, I'm running a little behind.

Random Fact #7) I have a really hard time coming up with random unrelated facts. It's ever so much easier to deal with things when some kind of constraint is given.

Rule violation: I have no intention of "tagging" seven people on Live Journal. Everyone I know on Live Journal has already been hit by this virus anyway. :-)

Return from the holidays. I need some time to recover, obviously. Pretty much the first thing I did this morning was filter my spam, try to select it, select all my inbox, permanently delete all of it. If anyone sent anything this morning that I didn't respond to, I apologize.

I got an email the other day with a subject line "VIbAGRA" and I thought "That would make a good product name. I wonder if it's taken?"

So we're waiting at Pearson International for a plane home. A shrieking alarm starts going off. Nobody appears to be dealing with it. After a couple of minutes I talked to the flight attendants getting ready to start boarding our flight (still 20 - 30 minutes away). They are currently just making their announcements over the shriek. I ask one of them who is responsible for the alarm. While we are talking, two airport employees both drive up to where the alarm is going off, look at it, and drive on. Eventually one of the flight attendants comes to the conclusion that she could actually notify someone instead of just hoping someone will notice a light blinking in a central office somewhere. Finally someone with the appropriate authority and keys shows up. Final response time: seven to ten minutes. Net response: flick the switch that shuts off the alarm. Find out why it's going off? Why would I want to do that?

Airport security is marvellous.

... we're back. And I already have a report of problems at work. Sigh.

OK, breakfast, then the airport. I should see everyone Tuesday (we get in in the wee hours).

No kidding. We were in Leipzig Saturday night. They were running some kind of festival. The band was called "Night Fever". Complete with one singer/bass player dressed in gold lame with a "'fro" wig. The keyboard player wore a red satin-like outfit. They played a selection of music from the seventies and eighties, disco mostly. They were actually pretty funny. At one point the man with the 'fro asked for a drink and someone from the crowd offered him some of his beer. The singer accepted, took a drink, passed back the remainder and flashed the guy some nipple.

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Just a note for people who might care: 91 octane is the cheap crap in Germany. "Super" unleaded is 98.

OK, we've now been to the WWII "U-Boot" display. Most of what I got out of it is a 1940s vintage German sub has MUCH more room than a 1970s vintage Russian sub.

Incidentally, while in the vicinity we also went to a Viking museum. What I found out there is that people are willing to extrapolate an entire vessel from remarkably small parts of the original.

We're in Hamburg. All the plans that were made before we got here were for the morning after and involved driving from here to other sites. One of those sites is a WWII German U-Boat. It turns out that there is a Russian "U-Boat" (submarine everywhere else) which was stored right here in Hamburg. We went to take a look. canadian_worm isn't impressed because it's actually a 1970s vintage sub.

Just out of curiosity, I asked if the sub was actually floating or on some kind of pilings. The response:

"We have a 3 1/2 metre tide here. He has to be swimming. There are pylons on the port side so he won't swim away."

I need to look up the German words for "float", "drift" and "swim".

Hat einen rauchenden Abschnitt in einem Restaurant ist wie ein peeing Abschnitt in einem Schwimmbad.

Avoir une section fumant dans un restaurant est comme un fait pipi la section dans une piscine.

And the original:

Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like a peeing section in a swimming pool.

(Comment courtesy canadian_worm, translation courtesy of FreeTranslation.com)

I just realized that there were a number of things we did on the way to Wiesbaden I didn't post. The hotel has two computers for internet access, one of which was broken the other in pretty much constant use, otherwise no other free access. I was pretty sure there would be free wireless at LinuxTag (which there is), so I chose to wait to post. Then I forgot.

On the way to Wiesbaden we stopped at a town called Speyer. There is a very old cathedral there (the Speyer Dom). After a couple of false turns, we finally managed to park the car and walk to the building we could see with a tall spire. The exterior was almost completely covered in scaffolding. The signs said it was being cleaned (at least, I think that's what it said). The building itself was still open, though, so we went inside. We wandered around a bit looking at the stained glass windows, the high arches, the usual big churchy kind of stuff. We stopped to talk to the nice lady manning the information booth. That was interesting in itself, since she didn't actually speak any English. Through halting German and frequent consultation with the dictionary, we managed to find out that the church was in the middle of restoration and that it was built between 1896 and 1904. canadian_worm commented that he had thought it was supposed to be older than that by several hundred years. We assumed we had misread the tourist guide we had.

On the way out of the church, canadian_worm decided to check to see if they had stamps. It was during the discussion of what the correct word for stamp was (aided by the display for a commemorative stamp they had done for this church), we discovered that this was NOT the building we thought is was (the post office was on the way to the Speyer Dom). The lady in the information booth gave us directions to the other one (which is something like 500 years old). I'm sure she'll get a good laugh out of telling her family and friends about silly English speaking tourists. Oh, well, we get a story out of it, too. Fair trade.

OK, we're here. They have an open wireless link, from which I am posting this message. Nothing of interest to report.

canadian_worm may have more to say.

This will have to be brief. After cleaning out email, I have four minutes left on this connection.

First, obviously, we made it! Spent one night in Strassbourg. Went to CERN near Geneva. Eventually found our way to the hotel in a community just outside Geneva (in France by 300m). Took a roundabout trip to Lucerne, from which I am posting this message. More later.

(See canadian_worm).

Edit: This draft was originally saved Monday, but the time ran out on the internet connection just as I tried to post it. I guess I can continue here.

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I'll try to post updates a little more regularly from now on.

No, I haven't started playing. I'm pretty sure not all of you read The Inquirer, so I thought I would post this headline:

World of Warcraft has more citizens than Norway

I thought it was an amusing statistic.

One article I saw suggests that the amount of money Bush allocated to alternative energy for next year is equivalent to two days spending to support their action in Iraq. I wonder how much oil they could save by sending the troops home?