where in the world

It's been quite a bit slower around here after the chaos of driving and moving in last week. I tried to meet with the guy I'm going to TA for, but I couldn't find him. I waited around for like an hour but he was still MIA so I came back. I'll try again tomorrow. I told the phone company to hook me up, but that could take until Friday and I can't work on getting DSL until my phone works.

I checked out some more stores today too. There's a place called Winco that has bulk foods like Costco. In that plaza there was also a hobby store. It was cool, but definitely for serious modelers like my Uncle Mark. They had special brushes and clamps and everything. I think I'd like to do an Me-262, but I haven't done models in a long time so I would probably mess up whatever I tried to do.

Tomorrow I'm getting the seven extra boxes of stuff that wouldn't go in the car, so I'm looking forward to that. I was kind of holding off checking out the nearby scenic hill until I could get my camera's tripod, and there's a ton of other stuff I would like to have around.

I've been running Gran Turismo 4 in the background, but that's not the main way I've been killing time today. That award goes to Google Earth. It's like a combination of Terraserver, MapQuest and the Yellow Pages. Screwing around with it gives you a real good sense of geography. After I'd found my apartment, my home in Clarkston, UCSD, NHMFL, Disney World and Kennedy Space Center, I found a more difficult challenge: the real-world tracks from Gran Turismo 4. Some of them were fairly straightforward. Others I had to stumble across someone else's drawn-on Google Earth screenshot. I think the only track remaining is Circuit de la Sarthe, and that's because it's a temporary track composed of local French roads. By the way, don't miss the link in this post's title. I amuse me.

I've also been reading a book one of my friends sent me about the Golden Ratio. It's actually quite interesting, especially when they mention bizarre properties about the Golden Ratio or Fibonacci numbers that I had no idea about. I'm trying to find something I can send back to my friend, but I can't think of anything offhand. I'm sure I'll think of something.