Two grid links

The New York Times has an article on the 200th anniversary of the Manhattan street grid. I hadn't realized, and probably should have, that hundreds of buildings north of Houston Street were either moved or torn down to fit the grid plan. (Greenwich Village was explicitly excluded from the grid, which is obvious on looking at a map or wandering around that part of town.

Less cheerful, the state of the Japanese electrical grid is bad, and unlikely to be fixed in time for summer. The main problem is loss of capacity; a smaller one is that Japan has two incompatible grids, one at 50 Hz and one at 60 Hz, dating back to decisions made in the 1890s. There's a lesson here about excess capacity, and how quickly it can become necessary, which I suspect nobody in North America is going to be allowed to act on. [via autopope]

Five things make a post

conuly stopped by my office this morning to pick up some books that cattitude and I no longer wanted. This after weeks of delay due to such exciting causes as her needing to pick up her nieces, me being out of the office, and missed phone calls. But the books are going to a good home, even an enthusiastic one.

It is now astronomical spring, ushered in by extremely mixed precipitation: mostly rain, but I saw snowflakes mixed in, and Conuly mentioned a hailstorm. This is entirely typical of New York in March. I am glad that I grabbed the chance to be outside Friday afternoon, when it was both warm and sunny.

I am thinking about doing a book post, not trying to cover everything I've read in the last $time_period, but mentioning a few things. I am also looking for recommendations of ebooks that I can get in ePub format for my iPod touch. I'm largely looking for information on what's being sold in suitable format (including pointers like "$publisher has an ebook catalog at $link"). I've already been wandering through Project Gutenberg and the Baen Free Library. I'm getting a lot of my paper books from the public library, but the limiting resource here isn't money for books, it's places to put bookshelves, and ebooks take up much less space.

The weekend's main achievement was doing our 2010 income taxes. The process was more straightforward than in the past few years; I'm not sure why, since we are using the same software and neither of us has changed jobs, but I'm not complaining.

I went to the gym after work today. A good workout, including more machines than usual: I decided I wanted to use the leg press machine, instead of the squat-with-ball I've mostly been doing, to get an idea of the current strength of my quads. Not bad in terms of how much I could press; I'll know in the morning if this was a mistake.
( numbers cut as usual )

(I had meant to do a combined journal and links entry, but hit "return" at the wrong time, and posted the links. So, separate entries.)