merriment

Christmas today. Among other things I got the entire set of Northern Exposure, a TV show I've vaguely heard good things about but I've been oblivious of it until now. Checking that out should be neat, especially with normal TV running completely on empty now - no Heroes, no Top Gear, no QI, nothing. Tomorrow will be Lansing for Christmas with grandparents. I haven't been up there in a long time, and I've not really been out and about since I got back except for a pizza run.

With Christmas festivities almost over I can try and concentrate on making the most out of being in Michigan. Unfortunately I caught a minor cold en route, so I have been a little out of it since I got back.

where will you be when this is through

Much quieter today with no family xmas events. I even managed to divert the CTS for the purpose of going to Gregg's for lunch. I am trying to pull down the last Top Gear of the series but the time zone difference is not as favorable here. I dug around my local book collection and found Player Piano by Vonnegut, but it's not great. My family has finished wrapping presents but we still have to wait another stinking day until we can unwrap them.

I'm sad I'm going to be missing the Detroit auto show because they will have both a Corvette ZR1 and an R8 convertible. Audi might also bring a V10 R8 if they can figure out how to make one that doesn't burst into flames. My extended family is praising the virtues of upcoming 'clean diesels' but I still have my heart set on the last bastions of petrol, before the new MPG laws ruin anything interesting.

I am continuing to apply labels to the archives as I see fit. It's somewhat bizarre because for the most part I am going backwards, so a post about 'went to see the Hard Lessons' is followed by 'Hard Lessons in one week!'. A minor disclaimer is that I am also engaging in some limited revisionist history, mostly tweaking hindsightedly stupid lines and removing italics applied for similarity to Tycho's writing style.

I also ran this URL through a blog readability tester and I've apparently been upgraded from high school to genius, despite my continuing to rant about cars and technology as usual.

if all goes as planned

Travel day today. I expected things to be crazy getting to the airport but it was only usual work traffic. Southwest has changed their boarding system and I like it, although I would have gotten even better priority if the network at work had not been in the process of crashing when I was trying to check in. The first leg of my journey was from PDX to Kansas City. For some reason I picked a window seat that had no window, so I got to stare at the wall for three hours. I discovered Kansas City has an inane system where every five gates gets their own security zone, so I had to go back through security. They had some Jags littered about the place, I was hoping to see an XF but they were just XJs. The next flight was a hop to Chicago, which apparently was besieged by advisory-level fog but we got in and out with no issue. I didn't even get off the plane because it continued straight on to Detroit.

template

More screwing around, this time I upgraded the template that governs this site. I have no idea if that actually did anything.

Still working on the labelling. I have 344 posts to get through. I was also going for a couple more achievements in Orange Box.

Last.fm is gone now.

labels

I decided to break down and start filling in the labels section for all my posts. So far it seems the most applied tags are "gaming", "cars" and of course "rant". It's kind of an interesting undertaking because I have to go skim all my old posts, and this thing has been running for the entire duration of my Master's degree.

broken already

I've used last.fm for barely a day and it's already screwing up. It apparently doesn't understand the concept of soundtracks, so it says things like Solaris is a Latvian band. I also can't wait to see the charts when it learns I will pick a song and listen to it twenty times in a row while doing computer work.

(Update: I was listening to some Half-Life music and the Last.fm application told me that I was 'incorrect' in tagging it as Half-Life and I should 'do last.fm and myself a favor' and change the tag to whatever composer I've never heard of who wrote it. So I went on the wiki and told last.fm to bite me.)

I have a mere four days of work between now and Christmas break, but it's going to be hectic. The new networked manufacturing system is entering its validation phase which means I get to help test it on top of doing whatever it takes to make sure the line keeps running. I'm also apparently the only one who knows most of the new process to release material for shipment.

inspired and organic

I installed Last.fm. We'll see how long that lasts with everyone being able to see what weird music I listen to. Maybe someone will figure out where these titles come from.

and i need you to recover

My neighbors have started some kind of passive-aggressive battle amongst themselves over phone books. For some reason we get at least three different types of phone books and the last two put a big stack in the front lobby instead of distributing them properly. So someone left a note saying they shouldn't put garbage there, and then someone else wrote an annoyed note about how these are new phone books, and I haven't really been paying attention except when I got home from work today someone had left three phone books at my door, including the annoyed note. I don't know why these people think I am involved in their petty battle, as I don't care about them in general, but I might just throw all the phone books down the garbage chute if people can't resolve their phone book issues.

I finally finished Mass Effect after three weeks. All 1000 points. I think I'm taking a break from serious gaming now - although screwing around in TF2 is not out of the question.

I made some fudge for tomorrow's Christmas potluck lunch at work. Of course I couldn't do it without incident. Peanut butter fudge is the Alfa Romeo of food.

holiday season

Finally getting near the holidays. So far the only decorations I have is Christmas lights on the floor. It did actually snow yesterday - just barely, but still. I did find the two radio stations playing Christmas music, but shortly after I did one of them started playing Kenny G and the other went to a bunch of annoying ads so I had to turn it off.

it might change my memory

More new people at work. One started today who is in process/manufacturing and apparently he's into car stuff too, which I found out after lamenting that my Camaro will be difficult to get up and down the narrow back roads near Oswego Lake as it will be almost a foot wider than the Malibu.

MasterCard is running some contest where one prize is dual cars - one for you, one to give to someone else. The cool thing is it isn't prepicked, it's your choice, up to $70,000. That's an interesting problem. Obviously that isn't going to get you a Ferrari F430 or a DB9, at a price tag of around $170,000. The Camaro, besides not existing yet, is aiming more for the Mustang price range, so you wouldn't be taking full advantage of the win. What would be the best pick for 70 grand? Corvette?

I got Mass Effect this weekend. It's pretty cool. I haven't really played any RPGs other than Final Fantasy so it was interesting getting something different. Apparently it's the first part of a future trilogy - can you say timesink?

I had high hopes to get things in order today, and while I didn't get far for the most part I did mail my brother's birthday present. I also mailed back the mistaken Amazon.com package. It feels good to get that damned thing out of my life.

I finally got my webcomic shirt today some ten weeks after originally ordering it. They claimed they mailed it out over two weeks ago but it's clearly postmarked Wednesday. They just couldn't help being incompetent to the bitter end. And of course it's now too cold to show off my F15 shirt.

think of all the things we learned

Work is pushing hard to get this week's shipment out because of Thanksgiving, so they ran production all weekend. I wouldn't care except they wanted to have enough lead time for reworks so I had to come in on Saturday and Sunday for a few hours and process them. It wasn't a big deal but I am not exactly used to having to schedule around things on weekends.

When I wasn't at work this weekend I was trying out the last piece of Orange Box, Team Fortress 2. It was fun for a while but I think I've already hit the point where I've had enough.

I was almost set to go ahead and build a new computer but then it turns out Intel is launching a quad 45nm 2.5GHz processor in January, so I guess I'll put it off some more. That's unfortunate because my computer has really had about enough. I saw the new SimCity came out and even though it's probably been ruined I wanted to give it a shot, but my computer couldn't possibly handle it.

black and white picture of her on my wall

I have one achievement left in Beautiful Katamari (not counting the downloadable content that isn't available yet) which requires me to play 200 levels on normal. I've already cleared them all and gotten 100% collection so I didn't really have any reason to keep playing, but I started again anyway. I started playing the same level over and over and kept getting a little better each time, and as a result I also starting climbing the leaderboards. I finally got to 8th place out of about 3400. I'm pretty happy about cracking the top ten, even if it's just for one level.

I was hoping to get actual work done at work this week with my bosses out - hence no crazy meeting days - but for some reason a lot of component issues have been cropping up and as Component Quality Engineer I have to take part in them. The new manufacturing system is also taking up more time as it creeps closer to going live. So I've been quite busy just trying to hold down the status quo.

don't know where we're goin

Sunday night finds me trying to track down a flute concerto. I've had an mp3 for a while called Bach - Flute Concerto in G which I like quite a bit despite generally not taking to classical music. I've managed to further identify this track as the second movement of the work, but now I am trying to figure out who recorded this version because apparently just any version isn't good enough to make me happy. So now I am on Amazon.com hitting all the preview buttons and checking track lengths in hopes of finding the one I'm after. For example this French guy speeds it up to a point where the track is 7:09, when the one I like is 8:50. Someone else is 6:30.

Another interesting point is that it's not Bach Bach as I thought, but his son Bach.

And of course Amazon.com sees me doing these searches for more than thirty seconds so it fills everything on my front page with classical music items.

The upside of this quest is that it distracts me from the Top Gear torrent, which is on track to be done well before I intend to go to bed. This week's episode looks awesome.

My neighbors left more free stuff in the lobby this weekend, where I scored a USB floppy drive. Technology has reached a point where floppy disks are a novelty. Now that nobody has a disk drive I should start sending disks to people.

shallow water channel and tide

I called the university today to figure out why I haven't gotten my Master's diploma yet, and it turns out my advisor never submitted grades for the summer credits of my internship. He fixed that right away after I informed him, but that means I'm back to waiting.

Work has been pretty crazy lately, at least six meetings a day, so I can't get any actual work done anymore.

In other lame news the post office has apparently reneged on their agreement to deliver something I mailed, and my attempt to buy a t-shirt from a webcomic is caught in limbo with nobody on their end acknowledging my emails but happy to take my money.

a place no spaceships go

Ever have one of those days where you haven't thought about something for months and then it comes up several times independently in one day? I've had that feeling twice today - about space elevators and the tale of Prometheus. Very odd.

Incidentally I was also reading about Atlas, who was Prometheus' brother, and in fact it was not the Earth he was punished to hold up.

I beat Ace Combat 6 for the fourth time this morning (after getting it upon release on Wednesday) so I'm taking a break - hoping one of my friends will get a copy as well so I can try some of the online features. Instead of Xbox this evening I have been watching new episodes of QI on YouTube.

Lots of car stuff. First and foremost, I saw an Enzo on the road yesterday! That is by far the rarest car I've seen here, with only 400 made.

The Nissan GT-R has been making a lot of news lately. It was just officially shown off recently at the Tokyo auto show. It's already been to the Ring, where it posted a lap time of 7:38, which puts it above a Z06 or a 911 Turbo. The GT-R is apparently going to be the poster car for at least two new racing games, NFS ProStreet and Gran Turismo 5. The former I tried the demo for and found to be awful; the latter will be PS3 only.

GT5 is also going to have the Top Gear test track. That makes me almost want to buy it. Maybe with the current trends of PS3 price drops, the console will be $50 by the time the game comes out around Christmas next year.

Top Gear is back today after a week off so the BBC could televise snooker, and it looks to be an awesome episode. It isn't going to have one film that takes the whole episode like some of the latest shows have. Unfortunately the torrent is crawling so I won't be able to watch it until tomorrow.

50k

i can't feel you there

My iPod has been working OK for a while, but now it's started a new game - locking up when I try to sync it with iTunes. Fortunately I can use the power cable to keep it powered, but that means I can't load up the new Gobeski/Wallace Report podcast.

I've been spending some time cleaning up the kitchen. The plume of ash got tiny carbon flecks everywhere, so I now have to clean every surface. I did get the stove cleaned up nice, and now I'm enjoying some frozen pizza. I also bought a fire extinguisher to curtail future incidents.

I blew some money this weekend and some of it was on a Halo 3 wireless headset. Note this in no way implies my endorsement of the game. Another $20 got me a receiver for the computer, so I can now use Skype with it as well. Adam and I tried that for a little bit, and now that Skype usage is starting to proliferate amongst our circle of friends a multi-way podcast may appear in the future. We have to commission a technical feasibility study first though.

Sunday night again, so pulling down the next Top Gear. Someone posted a lower resolution one so I should be able to get that before it gets stupid late and let the full size one run overnight.

fire, brb (part II)

I figured out the mysterious source of the fire. It was a damned spatula. I had used it the previous day to scrape some peanut butter out of the jar and then tossed it in the sink. Then when I put the pot in the sink the next day to fill it with water, the peanut buttery spatula stuck on the bottom.

That would explain why the smoke smelled like nasty burnt plastic.

fire, brb

I accidentally started a fire today while trying to boil water. I still have no idea how it started. My initial theory was that a towel was caught under the pot I was heating, but whatever the hell I pried off the stove was more white and rubbery. So I don't know what the hell it was. The more pressing concern after getting the fire out was the fact that the entire apartment had filled with smoke. And yet didn't set off my smoke alarm, come to think of it. I should probably check up on that.

I opened up all the windows, got the fans going and drafted my ionizer to clear the air, and I went out. I didn't have anywhere to go, so I went to Fred Meyer, where they had copies of The Orange Box which I have been looking for but had not been able to find. So when I got back I cleaned up some of the mess and then played through Portal. It's an interesting game. I then started HL2: Episode 2, but I was too used to playing with the portal gun to deal with it.

TG1001

Decided to stay up. Totally worth it.

still chasing skies

Now that it's October, the rainy season is upon us here in Oregon, but I am looking forward to another new development - my master's diploma should be showing up soon. Technically I have been a Master for three months, but it's good to have the official proof. Just like how my business cards showed up, so I feel more of a proper engineer now.

Once more this is not a mere Sunday night, but a Sunday night with a new Top Gear torrent running. Series 10 just started up. From the previews it looks pretty good. I've had torrents running since 2 but none have finished yet. Now I have to gamble on whether it will finish at a reasonable hour or if I should just go to bed.

Last week, figuring I am not building a new PC in the near future, I picked up a used copy of Need for Speed: Most Wanted for the 360, and worked my way through that. I had played it before but didn't beat the last guy. Yesterday I picked up Need for Speed: Carbon, which is the sequel, and I finished it today. Obviously, the campaign is much shorter, and there are other ways you can tell the game was half-assed (in standard EA fashion), but the number one annoyance I have is that the version I got does not have the Camaro Concept, which I had been led to believe and was the only reason I got the game to begin with, and I need to hunt down another copy if I want it. The least they could do was at least offer it on Xbox Live as an extra download.

autumn tactics

It is definitely turning to fall here and it is messing with my head. I feel like I should be moving into a dorm or getting ready for band invitationals or buying textbooks or something, but I'm 24 now and that is all in the past now. It doesn't help that all the stores are now pounding the Halloween stuff so it almost feels like middle fall instead of the very beginning.

I made an attempt to do something productive weekend but it didn't get off the ground, as the standard time everything closes in Oregon is twenty minutes before I get there, so I spent most of the weekend enjoying my new HDTV setup. I managed to clean out the last two major achievements in my racing game on the 360, and I watched the Back to the Future trilogy on my new upconvert DVD player, which was awesome.

Unfortunately I have not as yet incorporated TV into my HDTV setup, so I won't be catching the new Heroes until I can pull it down from a torrent. I'm more excited about the new series of Top Gear in two weeks anyway.

However, amazing as the setup was this weekend I just figured out that the 360 needed to have settings changed so it could do 1080i, when apparently I had it set to 480p. So when I thought my racing game was too pixelated, all I had to do was crank up the settings on the Xbox. Oh well, at least it only took me a few days to realize that. The higher resolution settings only work as widescreen for some reason, but that just takes getting used to.

new toy

hd hell

I did decide to get a digital projector yesterday. I had to drive all the way through Portland at rush hour to the Best Buy at the stupid airport to get it. By swiping cables from most of my A/V setup I was able to get it running, but I did not have the proper cables to get HD.

Today I went to finish the fight. I managed to find most of the cables I needed, but even Radio Shack has no idea where to find the special adapter required to complete the HD circuit. So I have to resort to ordering it from the internet and wait for it to show up.

I also discovered that yesterday while swapping cables around I got the 360 to grind my Test Drive Unlimited game disc to the point of unplayability. Guess I'm going to need another one of those.

The one minor piece of good news was that the Ace Combat 6 looked pretty amazing even without HD.

days when i could live my life without you

Best Buy fails.

Yesterday I had scoped out a nice looking projector on Best Buy's website, but when I went to the store to maybe get it I found that Best Buy, supposed beacon of high tech toys, carries all of three projectors in their stores, none of which I had any interest in. I also tried Office Depot, but they appeared to be out and were selling it for $100 more anyway.

i would read that page every day for the next year

I brought in a picture of the stricken Malibu on the back of the tow truck, but everyone expected it to be wrecked or something. Even though it was just a bad battery I still wasn't going anywhere. Philistines.

Since I can't spend money on an iPod or a car, I might buy a digital projector. I did all of five minutes of research and found a good looking one. So tomorrow I may go get it and rack up a million Best Buy reward points and turn my wall into an 80" TV. May as well get an upconverting DVD player while I'm at it. That way when my Project Gemini DVDs show up I'll be ready to rock.

On an unrelated note, there is apparently a Project X at work. I had never heard it before and then heard it twice today. If they wanted to name it something generic and low key, they picked the wrong name. What is Project X?

swing and a miss

I ran across an Apple store in the mall that at least had new iPods out on display. I had been trying to find one and was all set to buy one now that I'd found it.

And then I tried one.

My biggest complaint is that the scroll wheel sucks. It's jerky and not very sensitive and I don't like how the center button is now an 'innie' and bottom line the wheel experience put me off on the whole thing. That was hardly the end of it though. The shape is less rounded than my 4G and I didn't like that. The new anodized aluminum fron panel was also somehow annoying to the touch. On the software side of things, the operating system is so busy making fancy flying graphics that there is a lag when you switch menus rapidly. I also discovered that if you are listening to a song while scrolling through cover art, the song gets drowned out in static. Apple has obviously spent so much time making this a fashion accessory that they forgot that first and foremost it's a damn music player.

I was immensely disappointed. Here I was, one of millions of iPod fans, and I ended up walking out of the Apple store in disgust and into a Best Buy (despite yesterday's bad experience) to check out the competition.

But frankly, there isn't much. It pretty much boiled down to Microsoft's brown brick, the Zune. I played with one for a minute and liked how widescreen videos play sideways, so you can actually see it, but I couldn't actually work out how to get back to the menu. There were seven buttons and none of them did anything remotely menu-ey. So the controls are unfathomable. And that is before the host of other issues such as the crippled WiFi. At the very least I'm going to wait for the next generation so Microsoft can fix what it knows it screwed up. The Zune is a first generation product so I will give them the benefit of the doubt while they hammer things out. In the meantime I am going to have to make do with my iffy battery, floor-dropper 4G iPod.

I also picked up a Consumer Reports new vehicle guide, although it doesn't have any info on the G8. I am kind of cooling on the G6 again. Unless I really like the new G8 I may be holding out for the long term, most likely for a Camaro. So long as the Malibu keeps running.

there's beauty in the breakdown

Today was an adventure day, as much as I didn't want it to be. The company picnic was today. I figured I would hit Best Buy quick to see if the new 5.75G iPods were in and then head straight over to the picnic for lunch.

However, when I came out of Best Buy the Malibu wouldn't start. At all. It was totally dead.

I walked to the nearby gas stations but they were useless, so I had to call a tow truck. It eventually showed up and the guy broke out a battery booster, and after two attempts we got the engine running. However, when he removed the booster the engine died again. Tow Truck Guy declared the alternator broken, so I had him load the Malibu up onto his truck in the middle of the parking lot, causing a bit of commotion.

Tow Truck Guy kindly hauls my sorry ass over to Sears (saw a Ferrari 360 on the way) and dumps me in their repair bay, effectively allowing me to jump the line. After I settle with Tow Truck Guy, Sears Guy runs some more thorough tests and said it was the battery that was bad after all.

I went to pass the time in the waiting room, where a very static-y TV was showing U-O whoop on U-M, a game I didn't think I was going to catch any of. I also read an interesting article in one of the magazines about the roots of GM racing. I had a bag of salty stuff from the vending machine, which combined with the emergency Mt. Dew I had in the car amounted to everything I'd eaten so far today.

At one point Sears Guy came back and said they'd discovered my serpentine belt was badly cracked. I told them the go ahead and fix it and then, since I'd never heard of the damn thing, checked to make sure it wasn't in the same category as headlight fluid. Turns out it does exist, so good catch, Sears Guy.

I wasn't the only one in automotive purgatory. Another guy kept wandering in and out. After he wandered back in I asked him "So what are you in for?" So I talked with him a little bit. Mostly about how we wanted U-M to lose. Same with some of the other Sears Guys who were checking the score. One of them was once a Buckeye, so we were united by our common enemy. I thought the score was 12-7, but when I went to squint at it it looked more like 39-7. At that point the TV says "If you're wondering what the numbers at the top of the screen are, they are 39 and 7." Uncanny.

Eventually the Malibu is repaired and I am freed from automotive purgatory. I pull out of the Sears center and punch in the coordinates for the picnic in my GPS. Of course, following GPS to an unknown location is a tricky thing and I am nearly T-boned en route, but I eventually show up to the park around 4:30. I wander around for a little bit before finding a guy I know from work, who says the picnic has been over for half an hour. He then gives me a short tour, pointing where the tables of ribs and the raffle prizes were, and then shows me where the food was, which is now reduced to trays of baked beans.

So I got hosed. And now I have to spend all Monday explaining why I skipped the picnic.

And no, the new iPods aren't in yet. Lame.

day of the $115

By coincidence I spent $115 today both at work and when I got off work. The work one was buying 600' of Teflon-insulated wire for the Mk. V circuit I've been building. Since I was the one ordering it I got to pick the colors, so I went with gray orange gray. (Bonus points for getting that reference.) For the Mk. IV circuit I got stuck with red and yellow, so it looks like a condiment bar.

When I got off work I went down to Best Buy and got a new car stereo. The old stereo may have been reparable, but I decided $115 installed is not a bad deal. Especially for a stereo that actually has a knob and a front auxiliary jack.

On an unrelated note, as I was coming back from Best Buy I saw an H2 on the road equipped with FLIR on a telescopic mast. I have no idea what that's about but it was kind of cool.

what

As not a hell of a lot is going on this evening, I googled myself, and I actually got a bit of a shock this time. Apparently I've been credited in a powerpoint presentation by a Polish materials engineer. This was in regards to my work on nanostructured copper in Tallahassee. I hardly broke new ground but I guess I do a good job explaining the fundamentals of things.

watching wind scalp the white off the waves

All of the clocks in my apartment are wrong. This is made more annoying by the fact that two of them are atomic and one is internet-updated. The atomic ones are wrong because they are actually just 'atomic' clocks, i.e. they get a radio signal from a real atomic clock. Which never gets picked up in my apartment. Meanwhile the clock in my computer's system tray is supposed to update itself by talking to NIST, but some firewall or other miscommunication issue means it never ever works. To add insult to injury, my car's clock runs fast. Also the CD player broke. I'm fairly certain St. Joseph wasn't even involved this time.

In other news the hard drive transplant has taken so far, and I have a red stapler.

Other news in brief: Apparently the G6 is getting a new variant next year but will be more about looks than getting more power. Bush is an idiot (OFN), this time for suggesting we shouldn't have left Vietnam. The new Katamari demo's framerate makes it feel like the game is being played on fast forward.

swiss time is running out

Best Buy had a ridiculous sale on some different Norton software so I picked it up. Unlike Norton 360, it's what I actually expected from the beginning. Unfortunately, not all of the stupid little 360 plugins got uninstalled. I could occupy myself chasing them all down, or finally getting around to the reformat Freeman so badly needs, but instead I have decided to get a new notebook hard drive with twice the storage space, which isn't even going to cost me $120 because I went to Newegg.

I have also been picking which parts I want in the new computer, and it's kind of amazing how useless Best Buy is in this endeavor. It's not just that their prices are way higher - they don't even have some of the upper tier tech I'm after. They didn't have the 160GB Western Digital notebook hard drive, for example. Fortunately Newegg is a good source and will even store the list of parts for later. So I can see all the parts come to about $1600. I'm going to wait a few paychecks. In the meantime I should be able to occupy myself with Freeman's HDD transplant.

but i was haunted by the idea that i remembered her wrong

I have been saving up a list of things to get on Amazon.com but when I tried to order them I failed miserably. I was going to get a bunch more Tribune daily crossword books but all the old ones I don't have are out of print, and somehow I don't fancy a used one. I was also going to break down and get the final part of the Hitchhiker's Guide radio plays after several years of wanting it, but it turns out it hasn't been released yet.

never trust robots

Norton 360 is really dumbed down. It won't tell me anything it's been doing. I have to go three or four screens deep just for it to tell me how many files it's been messing with.

Even more annoying is how it demands it be turned on 100%. I like having the firewall and antivirus but the stupid browser plugin crashes IE and all it does is detect phishing scams, which I can do myself because I'm not an idiot. Norton also demands Automatic Updates be turned on, but I prefer doing the updates manually.

if you're not a machine we're in business

I got fed up with Kaspersky and bought Norton 360. Unfortunately Norton has dumbed down their interface a lot since I last upgraded. At least I can find a screen that calls the firewall a firewall instead of 'Anti-Hacker'. The old stuff was better. I only stopped using the old Norton software because Symantec sabotaged it after they realized you could gimmick it to not require renewal for updates.

The most interesting part was installation. I decided to install Norton without first removing Kaspersky so I wouldn't go without a firewall, and also just to see if Norton and Kaspersky would pick a fight with each other. Norton mostly minded its own business, but Kaspersky decided Norton was a trojan.

The security swap has added to my computer's instability, however. Some Norton plugin now crashes IE every time I close it, producing no fewer than 21 popup dialogs about memory read errors. I am putting off a reformat until I build my new machine. That's going to require like $1600 in parts though.

Also among today's spoils are Lego gummis. I couldn't pass that up.

On another note I am annoyed at my cell phone's adaptive text prompts. It learns words if you type them in manually, but it apparently deletes them if they haven't been used in a while. This usually comes up in the context of swear words.

technology

I went to Fry's today to get 300. I also picked up a new fingerprint scanner since my old one broke. It seems to be cleverer than my old one, which is good since the old one was something like eight years old. I also got a wireless USB hub/print server for the hell of it since they had a good price.

it's the same old thing as yesterday

I recently reread Cryptonomicon so now I'm psyched about encryption again, and thinking about getting PGP for the new desktop PC I'm planning on building. Part of the reason I haven't actually commenced construction is that I'm not entirely sure what its function will be. I do want to be able to play more demanding games, but the majority of the games I play on the PC are older and don't require cutting-edge technology. I am also trying to find entirely new interesting uses that can be accomplished with newer technology.

In other news I spent most of the day figuring out how to build a high voltage test circuit. This will generate a few hundred watts of heat so I decided a case fan would help. While looking at case fans on newegg.com I found this amusing note in a review:

"The reviewer who is concerned about the .4 mm width difference really doesn't have much to worry about as .4 mm is about the width of 3 or 4 human hairs...about 0.015 inches. You should be able to deflect the back plane of your Sonata that much by giving it a dirty look. Then you'll be able to fit all those 88's in there."

Also, I went to Wikipedia at one point to look up resistor technologies, which eventually led me to reading about anamonics, combinations of anagrams and mneumonics that are frequently used in competitive Scrabble. Interesting trick.

this ain't a surfin movie

So I'm a Master now. I have been since Friday but I have been in a very low energy and reclusive mood for whatever reason until today. I would put some details of my defense up but the whole ordeal did not really seem that cathartic for some reason. I presented my work again, not the smoothest version but pretty well. The oral exam consisted entirely of project-related questions so all my work studying wave functions and Maxwell's equations was useless. I would have been better off studying barium titanate and the nature of the dielectric constant. But in any case I passed, with no dissenting votes. I spent the rest of Friday running around doing things like turning in keys and passing off paperwork. Fun. Thanks to everyone who showed their support in one way or another!

Saturday I did nothing. Today I printed off the hard copies of my report. I was under the impression I had to get them professionally bound but they just want Kinkos-level. So I went to Kinkos. They didn't do the world's greatest job of copying but I now have a trifecta of somewhat professional looking reports along with the original template from which they were wrought.

You might expect that now that I'm a Master and a full engineer I would go off and buy myself something to celebrate, like a new PC or car. Today I actually did buy something - a helicopter. A really little one about as long as my hand. Fry's had them for $25 and I couldn't resist. It really is a toy of a thing - it has some kind of styrofoam body, and it will only go forward if you turn right, not left. Even so, the thing is a marvel of miniature engineering. Somehow it works by infrared control, and the materials used are lightweight but certainly strong enough to protect it from all the knocks it's taken so far. It even has a working tail rotor and an interesting double main rotor for balance. The thing brings me some joy and keeping it in the air requires no small skill so it gets a lot of your attention when you fly it. The biggest downside is that I have to turn the fan off or else the helicopter will just blow away in the airflow, so the room gets hot while I'm flying. That's not a big price to pay though. I have a helicopter!

The PC and car are still in the brain crack phase.

Anyway, it is back to work tomorrow. It will be a little different now that I am not preparing defense material - I have to go back to doing real work. It's going to be a short week though, as on Thursday I am flying back to Michigan for ten days or so.

Also, I updated my video game reviews.

like car parts, bottles and cutlery

Well somehow it's now the week of my Master's defense. Time to step up my efforts. This involves finishing my paper and presentation, studying physics and generally making sure I'm in a condition to go through this on Friday.

ride the fire eagle danger day

Well it's July 7. I am now done with my internship and will be a real engineer on Monday. I'm not sure what my new duties are but next week is going to involve more training, assisting other people with real problems rather than studying one in isolation and preparing for my defense on the 13th.

Also, Pettit and Regina are getting married today. Congrats!

car talk part something

More car stuff. I tried looking around at what else is available. The outgoing Grand Prix actually sounded kind of tempting. It's been in production for a while so I'm sure they've gotten it to a point where they've got it all worked out. It has front wheel drive instead of rear, but that isn't critical. The real dealbreaker is the transmission - you can only get a four-speed automatic, it's not one of the lucky few that have GM's new six-speed auto. Same story with the Impala. I like the looks of the previous generation Impala but the new one doesn't impress me too much. I figured I would give it a look anyway and the stats looked pretty decent. It even comes with Active Fuel Management, but apparently that only makes a 5-7% difference in fuel economy.

So I am kind of back where I started. I am backing off from things like the Camaro and the G8. I really don't need that much power and the cars will be too big anyway, and I don't feel like waiting and waiting either. Especially since it's never a good thing to get the first run of something. I am starting to favor the G6 again. I went over to a Pontiac dealer and harassed them about it but I only drove the base model, whereas I'm all for speccing it up all the way (sans some of the body kit stuff, and I wonder if there's any way I can get it without XM.) I might go back to the dealer to really scope out a GTP model and run through the available options, but then they'd really be on my case and I'm still not set to buy anything just yet.

yippee-ki-yay

So I spent the 4th watching Live Free or Die Hard and Transformers back-to-back. Surprisingly I like the former better. It felt really epic while Transformers tried too hard to be silly, and any action scene with the robots was useless because everything was just a blur. I was kind of hoping for more of a car chase/duel between the Camaro and the Mustang as well. And I felt let down that the Camaro wasn't rebuilt as a 2009, it just went off and did that itself.

Anyway I actually have to go back to work today, which is harsh. Tomorrow is technically the end of my internship (although I am just going back to work on Monday as a full engineer) and I am defending a week from tomorrow. Which means I need to sit my ass down and study some physics for the very last time.

endgame

The endgame of my Master's degree started with a jolt yesterday. I signed on to be a full engineer at MSEI after my internship ends in two weeks, scheduled a date for my defense and told the Graduate School to get their stupid program of study audit going. Hard to believe it's been two years already.

a conundrum of h8

I haven't been paying much attention to the new Facebook apps stuff. I decided to check it out by seeing if I could get an aftermarket mod for the stuff Facebook doesn't cover - enemies and things you hate, rather than friends and favorites.

I did find an enemies list app, but paradoxically you have to be friends with your enemies in order for it to work, which kind of defeats the purpose. I may give PJ a hard time but he isn't my enemy, and I won't friend my actual enemies just for the privilege of calling them my enemies. The one person I can think of off the top of my head is a pretty lousy enemy anyway. I don't have a true arch-nemesis sort of thing going on. Mostly I find single-serving nemeses in traffic, morons that do 23 in a 30 zone and the like.

I also found some more generic hate lists. One allowed you to type in anything you were currently hating on. That would be good for say, the asshole in the Civic who refused to suck it up and merge behind me on a 2-to-1 onramp. On my birthday. Unfortunately that app still has some major bugs in it so you can't edit things correctly.

The other hate list app lets you list TV shows, music, movies and books you hate. I was having trouble thinking of things I actually hated - I don't like Seinfeld, but I wouldn't go so far as saying I hate it. I managed to come up with a couple items but after I did, I realized that posting them defeats the purpose. I just wish they would cease existing, they don't deserve being called to attention.

Thus, I have removed all of the apps.

memory loss

The RAM upgrade failed. I bought a gig and put it in (yes I did figure out how) but only got a blank screen. I exchanged the stick and got the same result so I just returned it. It was Kingston so it should have worked.

Also, the price was not right as I had previously concluded. It's $40 for a gig of current RAM - while what I have costs $75 at Fry's and $125 at Best Buy.

In other news I got an official offer from MSEI for work as a full engineer, for more than I was expecting. Woo!

looking forward into the old days

Freeman has been getting a little more sluggish ever since I installed Kaspersky. I'm thinking after two years of service it might be time for a RAM upgrade. The price seems to be right - $40 for a gig? Actually putting this into action is a different story. I opened up the little panels on the bottom and have no idea how one goes about swapping laptop RAM. The one stick I could see appears to be wedged into place, I have no idea how they got it in there in the first place, and apparently another stick lies even deeper within the electronic bowels and requires a large portion of the main case cover to be removed. I miss having a desktop sometimes.

what the hell is an aluminum falcon

Well, my test at work is finally back up and running, although it will be somewhat jury-rigged until next week.

I was recently worried that the Pontiac G8 was going to be too much larger than my Malibu, being slightly longer and five inches wider. Well apparently the Camaro Concept is ten inches wider than my car, with promises to not reduce the width on the production version by more than 0.5". Apparently it's been decided to make the next Camaro five inches wider than any previous version. Hmm.

get busy child

So I kicked ass in my presentation to the company's general manager/COO/my boss cubed. Apparently he was impressed I did my own cross-section work. He only had some valid concerns about the test setup, which I had not designed but which I am now in the process of overhauling now that the new equipment is in. This involves like four times as much soldering - I'd say I did 550 solders today, and I haven't even started the wiring - but should last forever instead of breaking down. I am hoping to get the test back online tomorrow. Apart from the experimental benefits my boss says the retrofit ought to get me even more points with the boss cubed.

more car talk

I found some more stuff on the Pontiac G8 and it seems less interesting now for some reason. I'm not sure if I want a car that big, I'm not sure if it will have enough legroom, it looks a lot like a BMW (even if it is supposed to emulate an M5), and I'd like to see what kind of effect Active Fuel Management has because the mileage on the Commodore looks pretty low. I won't really know how I feel until I get to try one though. I might go harass a Pontiac dealer on my birthday.

Also, I saw a DeLorean on Friday when I was driving home from work. That's a new one.

that frankly will not fly

I still can't take any data at work so I've been working on my final report. I would say I'm working on my thesis but apparently it isn't one, which annoys me, because I'm doing at least as much work and it doesn't feel like my major is taken seriously. At least that means I have a little more leeway in writing my paper - the thesis guidelines are pretty strict, down to stuff like "DOUBLE HARD RETURN HERE" and "DO NOT CAPITALIZE, BOLD OR ITALICIZE THESE." I am writing my paper as close to the thesis guidelines as possible but not stressing over stuff like that. Today I dedicated the entire workday to writing and I got quite a bit further, actually filling in most of the placeholders I'd put in earlier this week.

media stuff

Beautiful Katamari: 10/26/07
Ace Combat 6: 11/13/07

I have to say the Heroes finale was kind of a letdown. The last two episodes of the season just couldn't keep my full attention.

now all i hear is tearing of paper

Now that the futon situation is at least contained thanks to metal plates, my new domestic project is to spruce up my balcony. I didn't have a proper one in Corvallis so I'd like to make good use of this one now that the weather is getting nice. The biggest change I am trying to make is to use mosquito netting to screen it off (at least mostly) so I don't have to worry about bugs or leaves and seeds blowing in. This is actually a bigger challenge than it may sound. I have already been through two iterations and still have not found a suitable way to mount the nets. I was hoping to finish that tonight but I have to let my blokish ingenuity simmer on that one. Perhaps metal plates are involved.

computer h8, part II

I have too much Microsoft in my life right now. My computer is under control, and the Xbox 360 works pretty well by itself, but getting the two to talk together is a pain in the ass. The most annoying bit is that in order to stream music to the Xbox I have to use the Zune software. Even though I don't have one of the damned things. Unlike iTunes for the iPod, which actually works really well, the Zune software is the worst thing in the world. It takes forever to load, keeps trying to rescan the same folders over and over, doesn't organize things properly, and the stupid network sharing service takes up 40 megs of my precious RAM. God forbid if Vista got mixed up in this somehow.

As long as I'm hating on computer stuff, I'd also like to give a shout out to Creative, who can't make an Audigy 2 that won't make mysterious static drown everything out in San Andreas. At the moment my sound drivers have completely failed for no reason. I did see some heartening news recently, which said that sound cards are becoming endangered because it is now possible to do 7.1 Dolby surround sound without dedicated hardware. I was worried I would have to settle for another Creative product in my future supercomputer, but maybe I won't after all.

Since I got the 360 I'm not in as much of a hurry to build a new computer. I did see that Hitachi finally put a 1TB drive on the market, but apparently it's relatively loud and uses a fair amount of power. Which I suppose should be expected from the leading edge. Still, the only thing I've decided on for the new computer is the case, an Antec P180.

look to my left and you'll see where i tried

So I got an Xbox 360 a couple of weeks ago. I have to say that Dead Rising does a fantastic job of desensitizing you to zombies. I had to start playing the game slowly because it freaked me out and now I've beaten Overtime Mode and gotten Zombie Genocider. The only other decent 360 game I've played so far is Test Drive Unlimited. I got a bunch of demos off Xbox Live but none of them were very good. Guess I'm stuck until Ace Combat 6 and the new Katamari game come out.

computer h8

I had a bit of a scare today at work when I messed up my work computer. I had changed some network setting so when I tried to log in it couldn't talk to the company network and it wouldn't log me on. I was about to call in the IT guys when I figured out there was no password for admin on the local machine, so I was able to get in and fix the network without anyone knowing. The irony is that I messed up the computer while renaming it Ephialtes, which I had picked because I knew it would eventually betray me. So the machine and I have a mutual h8 now.

these missiles you bubble wrap

Well I just figured out why the font is always so freaking tiny when I post. Something to do with the stupid template. I don't really want to mess with it but I can try and correct for it from now on.

Tomorrow is Friday! I have a much greater appreciation for them now that I am working full time. I even get to wear jeans.

My boss gets back tomorrow, this will be the first time he's been around since I started working. I think I have gotten quite a bit accomplished, but I couldn't do the main task he set out for me because the manufacturers are being snooty.

I finally got access to test data yesterday, but it's in another building so I've been running back and forth to upload the latest copy to the network. This isn't going to work if it starts pouring so I wrote a batch file to automatically copy the file to the network every 15 minutes.

I also started writing up some of the basic framework for my final report. My thesis. It's kind of scary because this is part of the end. It's about time.

Unfortunately I have yet to see the best part of having a real job (or something like it), a decent paycheck. My first payday isn't until next week. After that I might head down to Fry's to spend a bit of it, but mostly I need to start saving back up again after the move, especially since the financial aid office at OSU is being bitchy about the last part of my student loan.

Car sighting of the day: Lotus Elise.

from where i sit none of it seems real

I remember when I was taking a computer science class that the teacher explained we use a decimal system of numbers because we have ten fingers, and that if we had eight fingers we'd probably use octal. But really, we don't count on our hands in decimal. We count in unary. You need ten fingers to count to ten. It would be a major improvement in finger-numeral efficiency even just to move up to binary. That way the maximum number you could count to on one hand would be 31, and for both hands it would be 1023, not 10. Just...be careful where you're pointing when you get to 4 or 128. It probably seems really strange at first but I bet it's like Top Gear steering, it becomes second nature because it's a better way to do things.

It has been a slow couple of days on the car-watching front. I did see the red NSX the other day, but since then I've been struggling even to tally a few Porsches, although I have been seeing enough Land Rovers that I'm wondering if I should tally those too.

but does that mean i have to walk on water

I have been meaning to update for a while, and have even gotten as far as logging in to this, but couldn't actually think of anything to post.

Today has been quite a car-spotting day. First I saw a BMW 830Ci on my way out to some stores. I didn't even know there was an 8-series. Then I saw a Corvette C6 Z06 coming out of Fred Meyer, and in the parking lot itself was an Aston Martin DB7 Vantage. I really need to start taking my camera everywhere I go.

Those cars were on top of the million 911s I see all the time. There are Porsches around here like there are Jettas around a college campus. In Corvallis I once decided to count how many Jettas I could see on the ten minute walk into campus, and the record was 13. I'm tempted to start doing the same thing with Porsches. I think I might start keeping a car-watching journal.

In other news, I finished one week of my internship. Only 12 to go. My regular boss is out for the first two weeks so nobody really knows what to do with me, but I have been making progress. They didn't really give me anything to do so I've been doing literature research and poking around the compnay intranet, generally getting up to speed on everything that is going on.

Also, I got a grill this week, so I've been trying to learn how to grill stuff properly.

everything looks perfect from far away

Well, that's it. I am in Lake Oswego and getting settled. My new apartment is pretty huge and is only a 10 minute non-highway drive from where I'll be doing my internship.

I got my DSL up and running yesterday after some confusion - Qwest actually turned my DSL on first thing in the morning, but botched the programming, so I thought they hadn't turned it on at all. After some slightly irate phone calls after 5 one guy was helpful enough to get the DSL people on the line and fix it.

I am still getting used to the area. If I didn't have my GPS I would probably die of starvation because I still don't know where most of the stores are. That thing has earned its keep several times over during the move. At least there are stores here.

electrical devices that transfer energy from one circuit to another by magnetic coupling

TRANSFORMERS.

Because the only thing cooler than a Veyron...

...is a Veyron with rocket launchers.

you've no idea what you're like

I was at the Pontiac website today and they had a feature on countering excuses to not get a convertible. Their defense basically boiled down to "man up." They didn't actually address the concerns I have actually heard about convertibles - they have no space and when you take the roof off of a car, you lose torsional stiffness unless you put huge steel beams in the sides that add weight and spoil the performance.

Whatever. I wasn't at the Pontiac website to look at convertibles. I was there for this, which is now my new car to dream about buying. It's the Grand Prix replacement, the G8. Top Gear had the Vauxhall VXR8 on display in a recent episode, and I remembered hearing rumors that Pontiac might import and rebadge its own version of the Australian car it's based on, and apparently it shall come to pass. The G8 GT is supposed to have 362 HP, and I'm guessing the GTP model would be around the Vauxhall's 420 HP (before the supercharger kit.)

For those of you playing along at home, the G8 is actually a step back from the brink of total irresponsibility. Once upon a time I wanted a Prius above all else. Then the new Civic got Car of the Year from Motor Trend, and I thought about the hybrid a little bit. But then it turns out the normal one is almost as eco-friendly and actually moves. Then once you think about the Civic, there's a thought about the Si model, the hot one. But once you get that far there start to be similar GM products, and the GM equivalent would roughly be a Cobalt SS. I respect the Cobalt, but I'm used to the Malibu which is the next step up. There is a Malibu SS, but it didn't really catch my fancy.

Around this time its cousin the Saturn Aura was coming out, and I actually test drove a base model, but a little while after this the Aura's UK origin, the Vauxhall Vectra, was on Top Gear, and the Vectra is far from JC's favorite car. So I started looking at other cars in this class. Fischer had been down in Corvallis around then, and his G6 didn't seem too bad. So since then I have been lusting after the G6, particularly the top-end GTP model because it's got some options you can't get in the other ones, and also a good sized V6 with a little more power than the Malibu's got. I also test drove a G6 and thought it was OK, although a bit tight for a big guy like me. This has pretty much where I've been for the past few months, until PJ got a real job, got internet again and implanted an evil idea in my head because it's been rattling around in his. It can almost be rationalized. And so I've gone from wanting a Prius to wanting a muscle car.

The G8 is therefore a slightly more rational choice. It's a sedan and not a coupe. Maybe it has better trunk space or something too. That's about all I can think of. Perhaps only 97% as irresponsible as the alternative. It would certainly be more interesting than a G6 though, especially with RWD and a V8 with a hundred and ten more horsepower, and possibly more on the way. That's quite a bit. It almost makes me stop and wonder how much is enough. 362 HP is probably twice as much as my Malibu, and that 420 HP in the Vauxhall is comparable to something like an Audi RS4 or a BMW M3. Power is good, but I don't want a car that is so twitchy if I barely touch the gas pedal it tears off at 100 MPH and torque steers into a tree. I think I would be plenty happy with having the GT instead of a GTP.

she said the satellite is coming

Today was the last day of classes for the term, so I don't have to take classes anymore. Ever. The prospective grads came through today but I only came onto campus late in the day for my one class. There was an informal poster session after that to show the prospectives what the other grads are working on. I didn't have to do anything because I don't do research. This was the first time I'd seen some of the older grads in a while and it was good interacting with them again. Them talking about their research emphasized how much more knowledge they've absorbed as fifth-years, but on the flip side I'm going to have a real paycheck in the near future. All I have to do now before moving is clear out the last of the assignments that have piled up and do finals, but tomorrow I am going out to the coast with the prospective grads and that will be a nice break.

moldy

I have been kicking ass and taking names in my computational physics class, so it's annoying when a project finally gets the best of me. It's mostly the prof's fault. Up until that assignment we had been doing Metropolis Monte Carlo stuff, and we had started with something simple and built on that over several weeks. Even in the end we were still only simulated a 2D square lattice with nearest neighbors only. Then the prof turns around and tells us we had one week to make a molecular dynamics program (which is completely different), with a 3D FCC lattice, and make measurements of temperature and pressure. I wasn't even able to work on it the over the weekend because I had to grade the stupid PH212 midterms. The prof eventually realized the folly of his ways and gave us an extra week, but that second week he was at APS so nobody could ask questions. In the end I probably got further than anyone else - I initialized positions and velocities properly, got the forces working, and even had energy conserved. But when I tried to measure the temperature I got something like 10^20, so I decided that was a good place to stop. My friend asked for and got another week's extension, but I have wasted enough time on that timesink. The rest of my schoolwork has been piling up.

you'll begin to wonder why you came

Big news. I had a second interview and got an internship, and they seem pretty insistant that I stay on afterward too. The company makes things like pacemakers and implantable defibrillators, and they are hiring me on as a component quality engineer. So at the end of the month I have to pack everything up, move up near Portland, and start my three month internship. It looks like I will end up doing my defense/oral exam sometime in mid-July, and then I'll have my Master's degree.

So in celebration of getting an internship, I bought a 19" LCD monitor. It looked normal in the store but once you put something like that on your desk, you realize it's big. I switched away from widescreen so I am enjoying having extra vertical room again.

scrubbed

Scrubs has jumped the shark. That may be obvious to you, or more likely you don't care, but it annoys me and when I get annoyed I rant. It was bad enough when they decided to make everyone have a baby at once. Then they start giving all the characters diseases - Turk having diabetes is OK, but now JD has something or other so he "passes out when he poos." Poop jokes - always a sign of high level writing. Last week they decided to run a clip show which was awful, as soon as I figured that out I deleted it. I even went to the site jumptheshark.com and Scrubs satisfies quite a few of their criteria. (Apparently there are such criteria, and people with nothing better to do than apply them.)

we've got a wave in the air

I had an interview for an internship/job last Friday and it went pretty well. The company called and wants me back for a second interview, so I have to drive most of the way to Portland again to talk to some other people.

So with the prospect of actually making some money around the corner, I have been daydreaming what I might do with some of it. I am thinking of building a serious new desktop PC, but I am not really in a rush, especially with a whole new batch of components about to come out (like 45 nm CPUs and 1TB hard drives). There also isn't a hell of a lot coming out to force on upgrade on my part. The only think I might actually pick up is a big LCD monitor, which I could use right now with my laptop and then I'd have one for when I eventually build a new machine. A really nice LCD monitor only costs as much now as the first 15" one I bought several years ago.

There's also the matter of next gen consoles. I still think the Xbox is for Halo-playing frat boys, so that is probably out. I gave the Wii a try but I did not like it, and Nintendo is a little childish for me. So that leaves the PS3. Its ungodly price tag is an issue, but one that can be remedied with an actual paycheck and enough time. A bigger problem for me is that no one has actually released anything decent for it yet. For example, the one game that the guys at Penny Arcade like (flOw) is just a next gen version of Snake. Which is stupid.

So what games might make me change my mind? Final Fantasy XIII might, if it looks better than XII. I've heard rumors of a new Ratchet & Clank game, but I am a little wary because the series is already getting a little tired. A new Mercenaries game is in the works, but that is a ways off, as is a new Gran Turismo. A new Kingdom Hearts would also be nice, but I think that's a long ways off, and I haven't heard of any plans to bring Ace Combat to the PS3. All of these games are expected in Q4 2007 at the earliest, so I certainly have plenty of time to think about it.

i'm gonna tell you that i'm innocent

Here is what I have left from my epic battle with a bag of Cheetos.

As you may have inferred, I have a working camera. I broke down and bought another one exactly like mine from Newegg. It was only $99 for an OEM one and I figure I could easily rack up that much having someone look at my broken one. While I was on Newegg I also got a 2GB memory card for my camera, so I can take an obscene number of pictures now.

Unfortunately I have just been working on computational physics all day so I didn't get to try out the camera much. It's been rainy out anyway.

in the name of science

Yesterday was the weekly TA meeting to go over the next week's physics lab. In this case it's the thermodynamics lab, and one of the main attractions is burning a Cheeto to calculate how much energy it contains. One of the other TAs is Ukrainian and so had no idea what a Cheeto was, so I offered to go get some out of a vending machine. I also wanted to burn one to show the others how much the things go up.

So I wandered over to the business building's vending machine. I opened my wallet to find that I had spent my last $1 bills earlier that day (on a used Asimov book), and all I had was a five. I tried giving it to the machine but it wouldn't take it.

This was annoying, but I had a cunning plan. Next to the snack machine was one of Pepsi's slick new vending machines, which does take fives. So I'll use my five to get a Mt. Dew, get change back, and use that to get Cheetos. I put my five in the Pepsi machine, punched Mt. Dew, and waited for the fountain of quarters to spit out.

It gave me three Sacagaweas and a Susan B. Anthony.

I was a little stunned that anything would dispense these useless forms of currency. I tried them on the snack machine anyway, but to no avail.

So now I needed to trade one of these coins in for something more useful. There was a girl working the tech support desk in the computer lab next door so I tried her first. "Excuse me," I said, "I'm trying to get some Cheetos for a physics experiment..." and went on to explain my plight. Unfortunately, when I'd finished, the girl said the smallest thing she had was a five, which would have simply put me back at square one.

I then crashed the study lounge, where I found a guy and a girl working on something together. The girl sounded French and had no idea what currency I was in possession of. The guy was amused though, and bought the Susan B. Anthony off of me.

Now armed with a $1 bill, I returned to ground zero of this farce, the snack machine. I put it in and punched in the code for Cheetos. You should see what's coming next.

The Cheetos got stuck and wouldn't come out.

I began to despair at the prospect of obtaining another $1 bill. I didn't want to go through that again if at all possible, so I rocked the machine a little. The Cheetos did not budge at first, but slowly started to lean more and more. Finally, they yielded to gravity and fell.

Triumphant, I returned to the physics lab and set fire to one of the damned things.

chair affair

My computer chair broke this morning. Oddly enough, the failure mode was not what I have been anticipating for months. I thought the whole seat would crack off at the base since it wobbles from side to side, but as I was getting out of it this morning one of the arms sheared off, compromising the structural integrity. Didn't see that one coming. That chair lasted 14 months, blowing away the previous record of 3.

I got a new chair already, which put me down $130. The new chair seems pretty nice, but as I was putting it together I could only wonder which piece would be the first to betray me. I've already found the microfiber fabric does a good job of building up static electricity.

as the sunlight breaks the haze to touch your skin

The first step is admitting you have a problem: I am an Asimov junkie. I have always liked stuff like I, Robot and Foundation's Edge, but recently I realized I had never read his 'Empire' novels. So I went on eBay and got them for a ridiculously low price. That was a set of five books and I have read them all. But it doesn't even stop there. There are a couple of used bookstores downtown and they have old Asimov collections. I just bought one today, I have gotten at least two others that way, and I know I left at least one more sitting on the shelf in the store. It's true that the books tend to be kind of thin so I can burn through them pretty quickly, but the man was prolific. This sort of thing makes writing electronics lab reports very difficult to accomplish.

googled

Well I held out as long as I could, but Google finally refused to let me log in until I had migrated to something or other. I don't like messing with stuff that is working fine as it is.

cached

A pretty quiet weekend. Nothing got done on Friday of course, but yesterday I did 2/3 of my grading and I've finished the computational physics assignment that isn't due until Friday. I decided to take a short break and found another geocache, but I paid the price - I dropped my camera and now most of the buttons don't work, and the inside may smell of burnt plastic. Damn.

forget what they said in soho

It was nice out this weekend so today I tried some easy geocaching. Although it wasn't too cold outside it was still pretty muddy, and one of the geocaches was amidst blackberry bushes and some old barbed wire and I ended up having to pull some thorns out when I got home. On the plus side, this was really the first time I've experimented with the new GPS software's street navigation, and that worked out pretty well. It was much easier being given roads than having to suffice with an arrow and a distance.

i think about the implications

I love getting stuff in the mail. Today was one of those days. I got a bunch of stuff from eBay, several Asimov books I haven't read (and a third copy of I, Robot) and more red pens than I could possible have need for in my last term as a TA.

Today was also a partial snow day - classes before 11AM or after 5PM were canceled. Sadly I don't think that's likely to repeat tomorrow.

amazon.lame

I was going through old email and found that since 2003 I requested not once but several times for Amazon.com to notify me if and when "The Fountainhead" ever became available on DVD, and when it finally came out last November they never did. Way to drop the ball on that one, Amazon.com.

happy new yar

2006 was really just a year I needed to pass through to get from 2005 to 2007. This year should be big for me though.