there's so many things that i cannot explain

On the advice of family members I've started reading "A Random Walk Down Wall Street." It is supposed to be a guide for investing, but so far it is mostly concerned with how people are stupid and irrational. Once I finish this book it might be interesting to go back to "Critical Mass" and go through what it says about patterns (or lack thereof) in the stock market.

Another week of work. But car control class on Saturday!

it was over before it started

Had another near miss on a Firebird - found an '87 Firebird Formula on CL that had the right color, wheels, transmission, engine...unfortunately when I called to see the car later that day it was in the process of being sold.

Finished rereading the Caves of Steel quartet - don't know what to read next. Maybe Catch-22 again.

I took the day off of work tomorrow, but I don't know what to do. At least I won't be at work.

drive until you lose the road

I signed up for an advanced driver's ed class at PIR. I was not able to swing it so I could take a day off and do that instead of work, but it should still be good. We'll see if they kick me out.

Since I finished that Brian Greene book I went back to my limited book collection and dug out an Asimov, one of my favorite authors.

LHC is finally being ramped to full power on Wednesday, although that is only for one beam - collisions won't take place for another two months, and then it will take six months just for them to figure out the first data. I have mixed feelings about HEP but I'm interested to see what they can find.

a fabrication of our own

I finished that awful book. The ending was even worse than the body of the book so I pretty much didn't read any of it. They end up failing in the end anyway, which wasn't a surprise because the characters pretty much failed their way through the entire book.

I am now indulging in another awful book, but one with some history - I bought a new copy of the Hardy Boys/Tom Swift crossover book, which when I was a kid I thought was the most awesome book ever.

I only have about 6 story missions left in GTA IV and an hour and a half of game time left to do them in. I have to say this achievement is extremely un-GTA because it emphasizes not screwing around.

but at that time i couldn't see it

My stupid cold dragged itself out much longer than I would have expected, and I'm still working on the last 1%, but I am much better now. Finally having a weekend where I could sleep in helped - unfortunately it is back to the grind tomorrow. San Diego in less than three weeks though, even if my overall plan is still half baked.

I picked up GTA IV and so pretty much dropped off the face of the earth for a few days. I have to focus on the storyline now because there is an achievement to beat the story missions in 30 hours, and I do not ever want to play this game all the way through again. It starts off really slow and never seems to open up the same way previous games did. I pretty much forced myself to keep going to open up new areas. The graphics make GTA IV look like it's been taken to a new level but in terms of actual gameplay it's actually been brought way back from where Vice City and San Andreas were - at least in the parts that mattered; we have traded car customization, side businesses and jetpacks for in-world internet spam.

I've not only been playing GTA IV - I also picked up Consider Phlebas, the first book in the 'Culture' sci-fi literary cycle. The setting for the book seems very interesting but the actual events of the book are petty, overdescribed or downright uncalled for. I am finding myself pretty much skimming the book for the parts where they talk about the setting as a whole. Unfortunately this book was described as the best in the series, so it may be downhill from here.

Not much of what I would consider interesting car news lately, although there was the story about the "Return to Vanishing Point" Challenger. The very first preproduction Challenger was rescued from the crusher, painted white and entered in a race under a Vanishing Point theme...unfortunately reality seems to have mirrored art too closely, as the Challenger met a tire wall during a time trial and seems to be out of action. At least for that particular race.

grown up in slow motion

I have been reading The Codebreakers, a huge tome on cryptology. I'm still in the old-timey stuff, although there are a couple ideas I haven't heard of before for the basic substitutions. I just got through the general solution to polyalphabetic ciphers, which was interesting.

Now that Gauss is up and running, I installed a couple games that Freeman really stuggled with and Gauss blows them away. That's what I was hoping for.

I've had the radar detector for over a month now. So far it has been totally useless. 99% of what I pick up has been grocery stores, and the two radar signs I've run across caught me off guard. If anything I have been driving more restrained because of the thing - I don't trust it and don't want to be caught off guard, whereas before I was blissfully unaware.

The weather here is back to cool and rainy - so much for the springtime euphoria.

so stuck inside

Work was more crazy today. They are getting ready to ship the first test batch of modules processed with the new computerized system, but several modules are locked up in my area of responsibility and I couldn't process them because the system is still broken, so not-my-bosses have been putting pressure on me to do whatever it takes to get the shipment ready.

My computer is finally holding up nicely so I worked out how to salvage data from my corrupted xD card. The pictures aren't great because the museum had terrible lighting but some of them came out pretty good, so I put them on facebook. Now I am going to go read The Selfish Gene in bed. At least I don't have to go to Canada at 4AM like PJ. Sucker.

more fun than watching static

With my luggage situation resolved and some other errands done I decided to tackle my computer issues. I managed to clear up the malware issue but adding that fight on top of previous Windows rot left my computer not entirely stable. I decided to go ahead with a reformat, but it ended up taking four before I got all my troubles resolved (mostly involving Outlook). On the plus side it seems XP service pack 2 is able to uncover the extra unpartitioned space on my new hard drive, so I was able to add another 21GB to my data drive. I was fortunate these reformats were on my terms so all my data has been backed up, although I don't want it sitting on the external drives for too long.

In order to stay sane during the long and drawn out reformats I have been powering through Northern Exposure, I got through two and a half DVDs this weekend. I also went to the bookstore and got The Selfish Gene, which I have never read because I don't know anything about biology.

On a note more in line with normal behavior, more spy photos of the Camaro turned up last week showing the interior which is apparently closer to the concept than I would have guessed, down the the gauges at the base of the center console. There was a note later that day on GM's blog that the Camaro prototypes will now be run without camouflage to test aerodynamics and cooling efficiency. My primary concern is still whether they've put in enough headroom for me.

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.

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.

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.

gone fission

So today I got to apply an important grad student skill - raiding free stuff. Some prof retired and left a bunch of old books for people to take. This was last week sometime, but apparently not many people have bothered because there's still piles of them. I went through them today and got a bunch of good stuff. I found an instructor's solutions manual for Marion/Thornton and Halliday/Resnick, but they are 2 and 3 editions out of date respectively. I just like acquiring what used to be contraband - they have the answers to every single problem in the texts.

There was a lot of miscellaneous stuff too, like microcomputer manuals from the late 70's and early 80's, and some books on the nuclear arms race. I took a couple books that opposed Reagan's SDI. I also took a book called "The Discovery of Nuclear Fission" which looks very interesting because it has excerpts from the original research papers. That book is from 1971 though, I think it underplays Lise Meitner's role. I'm still looking forward to reading it

In other news, my dumbass neighbor moved out yesterday, so I'm pleased with that. I also went in for jury duty orientation and got assigned to the circuit court's grand jury. I have to go in two days a week for eight weeks and here about all the horrible stuff going on in the county, but at least it's not hard and it fits in my schedule. I even get a little bit of cash out of it, though that probably won't show up until early November.

culture shock

Spring term has started and I've now had all my various new classes. Comps (quals) ran at the beginning of the week, and Vincent and I just sat on the sidelines and watched as all the other first-years joined in. Vincent and I don't have to take comps because we're PSM. It's just kind of odd because this term I finally start my major deviation from the normal course of physics.

I now have a proper MBA business class, which is composed of about half PSMs and half MBAs. It was kind of funny because there was definitely a bit of culture shock going on there. I thought it was going to be a lecture class, but it's another one of these case study classes which I'm not completely sold on. Still, we're finally getting some business training, which is a good thing.

I'm also in a scientific computing class as a prep for computational physics next year. The odd thing is that my department programs in Java. I don't know why. I don't know Java, but it's loosely related to C++ so I'm getting by pretty well so far. Vincent only knows Fortran so he's having a rougher time. I think I did work with some Java back in my SOAR days, but that wasn't writing code, just kicking it around until it compiled.

In my crash course on Java I'm finding out all these little idiosyncrasies Java has that make me shake my head. It is like C++, but 50 times as uppity. The structure is much more restrictive (like 4x won't be intepreted as 4 * x) and it seems like everything takes twice as many lines as C++ to express (like how declaring an array takes two lines of code instead of one). I tried formatting some numbers, and the process was to use a good sized command to format the number, but it got returned as a string, so it had to be parsed back into a number using another good sized command. It practically took up a full line just to say I wanted less decimal places. And there's some really weird stuff about how it handles objects.

I also discovered one of Java's dirty little secrets - it can't even add properly! For some reason Java can't express the number 0.1 properly. Java's proponents blame it on binary numbers, but C++ certainly didn't seem to have any problems. They claim it doesn't matter unless you're doing taxes or something, but any way you cut it I don't like it when I add 0.2 to 6.0 and get 6.199999999999 back. Not appreciated.

I'm not a big fan of Java.

As for my engineering bug, I made a major find at Borders last weekend. I found the other book by J. E. Gordon, who wrote the slightly eccentric but very interesting book on structures I like. This one (The New Science of Strong Materials, or Why You Don't Fall Through the Floor) is more about material science, but it's still good. I love the way this guy writes, these books are good reads.

510 nm

Being the only sober person on St. Patrick's Day, I have some time on my hands. I finally got around to typing up all my quotes from Dr. Stetz. It was no small feat. So go check out my updated quote board.

Today was pretty good with the exception of my being vaguely unsettled all day. It was the last day of classes for the term, so that was good, and spring break is finally just a week away. I still think it is stupidly late. That makes me a hair short of a third of the way through my Master's degree, and 40% done with my classes. So I'm making progress, slowly. But I am starting to wonder what I'll be like on the flip side and if that's really what I should be shooting for. Some in-flight corrections may be in order.

I am also suffering from the engineering bug because I've just been saturated with physics not-practical stuff all term. If I were still at MSU I could just run off and take another civil engineering class to satisfy my need for balance, but finding time for it here would be much more difficult.

Michigan State got beaten in the NCAA tourney in the first round, which is very sad. March Madness is gone already. Now all I can hope for is that Duke and UNC will get beaten. (UNC because they beat us last year and I had to deal with those bastards while working on the SOAR telescope at MSU.)

Tomorrow I should start writing my HEP doomsday term paper for ethics. My presentation earlier this week about my topic went well. So well that it's probably hyped up to a level I can't possibly meet. Ah well.

For some reason I am still not big on video games at the moment. I played a little R&C3 earlier but put it away after quickly tiring of it. I tried to find a new book to read (I tore through Catch-22), but I couldn't find anything in Borders worth getting. I've kind of overdosed on Top Gear at the moment because I've been compiling a personal cheat sheet for the good episodes. And I'm too exhausted today to bother going out. So I have been trying to find things to do today to unwind. Hence the Dr. Stetz quotes. He's a funny guy.

when i close my eyes i am at the center of the sun

Today was the last day of proper E&M lecture, which promptly meandered into the fields of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. I would have minded except that this particular excursion was a discussion about how lasers work, and it's a scientific fact that lasers are frickin' awesome. I'm a physics major. I know science. So we had a nice talk about population inversion and neon energy levels. And during all this laser talk I remembered that I have a Class 3A laser module sitting in a funky box that I haven't done anything with because both my soldering iron and DMM broke.

I am in a cantankerous mood because everybody else's spring breaks have come and gone and we're still slogging away here with another week to go. It doesn't help that I've been rereading Catch-22. Fortunately, most of my duties for the rest of the term are TA-related, which I enjoy. I only have one more big assignment to take on before finals, my research ethics term paper. I think I'm going to be the only person in the class that isn't taking one of the three suggested topics, even though the prof was hoping everybody would pick something different. Most research ethics stuff is boring, especially in physics, so I'm going to be talking about the possibility of destroying the world with particle accelerators. I haven't decided which side to take yet. I know the chance of catastrophe is incredibly remote, but I also can't resist slamming high energy physics.

perturbed

Two more weeks and I'll be home in MI for spring break. I have a couple big homeworks due Monday and an ethics term paper to write before then, but fortunately no real major projects are left. We changed gears in quantum and we're doing basic perturbation theory now as a prep for what we'll be doing all next term. It's more interesting that what we were doing before. We're apparently almost done with EM waves in E&M, which is odd because we have barely done anything with it. That whole class has been rather silly and pointless.

The prospective grad students finally came through and it was a little weird being in the opposite position of what I went through last year. I went to the dinner (free food) but not the Q&A session or the Newport trip.

I finished reading Fire in the Valley, an epic tome about the history of the personal computer. My favorite chapter was about the start of the PC vs. Mac rivalry, because I like to see Macs get an ass-kicking. Unfortunately, despite the book's size it doesn't seem epic enough. A lot of time was spent talking about the Altair and then the book covers less and less specifics as more and more happens. There was no real connection for me to what I already know about computers. Even at the end of the book it seems like a "computer" is still some sort of newfangled toy. The book is also out of date already - it ends in 1997 when Microsoft just got sued over IE, it didn't even get to Windows 98. The book is also kind of badly organized, with chapters broken into many sub-chapters consisting of only a few pages, even though they mostly talk about the same thing. I can't stand when authors do that.

One of the big things about the early days of computers was the whole magazine scene. A lot of computer stuff was just advertised in the back of the magazines, and the articles talked about exactly what hardware can do and how to program it. I would say that modern magazines are not like this at all, but I recently found an interesting magazine called Make that tells you how to make stuff like windpower towers and a pulsejet-in-a-jar, and there are ads for circuitboards and stuff. One of the neat little things in the magazine was a way to make origami envelopes, which is pretty cool.

I haven't been playing any games since I got fed up with Black & White 2 and uninstalled it, which is just as well because it's been busy recently. Some tempting release dates are coming up though - Kingdom Hearts II, Ace Combat Zero and the Half-Life 2 expansion should all come out later in the spring. It's about time some good games got released.

no war no wrapped in plastic

I stopped trying to make up titles to posts that actually make sense. Now I'm just pulling random lines from songs I'm listening to. It seemed like the hip thing to do. Or maybe I'm just lazy and like confusing people.

Idiot Neighbor Boy was at it earlier today with his incessant pounding bass, so I went over and yelled at him. This time I didn't ask him to turn it down, I ordered him. It's much quieter now. Hopefully it sticks in his damned head this time.

So far my schedule is not too hectic, but the labs I TA haven't started up yet. I was assigned to a section that conflicted with my schedule and it took me two days to get it sorted out. I have to move my office hours though, which means I'll probably get stuck with some awful time slot. I wish this crap had been taken care of ahead of time instead of waiting until classes have started.

My classes. Quantum and E&M are off and running again like we didn't have a break. They're both pounding away at Lagrangian stuff I should have learned somewhere but didn't. It doesn't seem too bad to pick up though. It always amazes me when several independent classes get hooked on the same topic at the same time. At least I only have to learn one thing instead of two.

My philosophy class looks kind of interesting, although I want to go back and read up on Objectivist moral theory. I believe most of it, but I can't debate because I never remember the specifics. Also, I don't really care what other people believe anyway so there's no point in debate. I also do that Roark thing where I don't pay attention to people in the street. I'm always worried philosophy classes will turn all socialist. They were already throwing the word 'selfish' around in the first class today. I'm not looking for trouble, but I won't go quietly.

PSM seminar is going to make a pain of itself to start with, but then the whole second half of the term is making web pages. Hell, I could sleep through that. Just knowing how to get into my OSU FTP is like a million bonus points.

Speaking of websites, I added a couple game reviews to my much neglected MSU site.

The Nice Device released a song that's going to be on their new album. I can't wait until I can get my hands on that. They apparently have the final mixes in hand. I'll probably have to go to a show to buy it though. I really liked them the first time I saw them, but the second show wasn't quite as good. Part of it was just the sound. "Girls and tuning don't mix." -- Alicia Gbur, retuning after a couple songs.

I saw the Miami Vice trailer online. I thought it looked pretty good, until I stripped out the Linkin Park song they used, the fact that I played Vice City and the Ferrari 360. Then it looked awful. I have never actually seen Miami Vice, so I have no idea what the show was supposed to be like. Remember, 'Miami' spelled backwards is ' I Maim'.

My wireless keyboard shipped and should be here Thursday. Should be cool.

I'm a good chunk of the way into my latest book, Germany's Last Mission To Japan: The Failed Voyage of U-234. It's an interesting piece of history, but sadly you might not realize that from the book. It is kind of tepid when talking directly about U-234, and it also has a tendency to go off and talk about the war as a whole and make some sweeping claims in passing when it should be talking about rogue Nazi submarines. The book's organization is a little odd too. My tome on cryptology that I am excited to read arrived yesterday from UPS with the rest of my stuff from home, so I might start chipping away at that after I finish the U-234 book.

i fail at sleeping

So it's like quarter to 4 AM and I'm still up. I had a plan to go to bed an hour earlier each night until I got rid of my jet lag, but it's not working. I keep getting distracted when I should go to bed. I've been reading a bunch of books lately like Slaughterhouse-Five, Flatland, Sphereland, lots of interesting stuff. Tonight I was watching a clip of Top Gear and got sucked in by one of the songs, so I hunted it down, found the entire album it came off of, and found some other albums while I was at it, and now it's 4 AM. Damn. The one song in particular I found is classical / electronica from a movie that is supposedly set in the 1800's or something, so it kind of has a steampunk edge to it as well which I like. I do have to say that Top Gear is a very good source of new music for me, my old sources have been dried up for a while and I was sad. Also, I found that a good way to find mp3's online is to do a Google search for "Index of /mp3", it pulls up a lot of random stuff.

I've also been playing Generals again. I beat all 36 missions from Generals and Zero Hour, which is intense when you do it all at once. I've gotten pretty good, even the really hard missions didn't go too badly. I still have every intention of playing FFVIII, except I don't have a memory card here and Final Fantasy with no mem card is asking for trouble.

Tomorrow I should work on finishing Christmas shopping. I have half of it done. Thursday night is the Hard Lessons / Nice Device concert, but I haven't gotten around to making those plans yet. But it's happening. Two weeks from today (technically) I go back to Oregon. Bleh.

There were a couple other things I wanted to note, but coherency is not my strong point at 4 AM.

Yeah, I think I should sleep now.

the seasoned traveller

Yeah, I'm home. Travelling home wasn't too bad, except I finished Snow Crash early in the long and boring flight from Phoenix to Detroit. I did figure out how to get wireless internet in the airports at Portland and Phoenix, and I found out I actually know my way around those airports from previous trips. My flight back in three weeks has a stop in Las Vegas, which I haven't been to yet.

So far haven't had much time to sit and relax since I've been home. I'm still adjusted to West Coast time, so I'm not getting enough sleep. Tomorrow is a family Christmas with my mom's side of the family. I am looking forward to seeing family again, though not the inevitable explanations of what the hell I've been up to in the past few months. I can't quite account for it all myself. Between sleep and being in shock from last term I'm kind of wandering around in a stupor, disconnected from reality. But hey, that's what break is for. Hopefully normal operations will resume next week.

Grad school is just a blur. Being at home is definitely better than being out there. I just want to get my damned degree and come back for good. I am still reading my radar book, and it is in the post-WWII part where basic research resumes and all these graduate students do spectacular things for their theses. Yeah, that's not me. Basically I have to survive the rest of this year, and then next year I start getting classes that actually relate to what I want to do, and then I'm off and running.

Went out shopping a bit today. I'm getting a new cell phone for Christmas because the one I have sucks, but it'll all be worked out so I'll have the same number and whatnot.

random notes

I had to go to Student Network Services today to work out some insurance stuff, because they threatened to put a hold on my account. While I was there I saw a magazine with BT on the cover, so I swiped it. I like BT. Apparently he has 8TB of data storage in his home studio. That's way more than even what I put in for that astro prof last year for all his astronomical (literally and figuratively) images. It is an issue of 'Keyboard' magazine, so they talked about all of his hardware and I have no idea what they are saying.

I did make-up labs today for people that didn't finish certain labs, so I had people working on several of eight different setups at once. Fortunately everything worked. One of my students left their calculator behind though, and the TA that came after me was an ass and wouldn't take responsibility for it in case the student came back, so I had to take it with me and email the student. I have to drop it off in the physics office tomorrow morning. It's a TI-89 Titanium, and I have no damn clue how it works. An 83 just isn't good enough for people anymore? For me, it's TI-30X Solar for life! My trusty physics sidearm.

This morning I found a link to massive (like 500GB) hard drives that were like giant Lego blocks. I was amused. I don't remember at all where I found that though. Jim and I think it would be even cooler if you had hundreds of little brick flash drives you could piece together to act like one big hard drive, and you could make Lego sculptures out of them.

I have also been cruising ytmnd.com, I am amused at its randomness. My favorites:

http://katametroiddamaci.ytmnd.com/
http://joneskatamari.ytmnd.com/

Man, now I want to play some KD/WLK. Which reminds me, Vincent still has my copy of KD...

I joined a forum for identifying songs from Top Gear episodes (they don't publish a playlist). It's an interesting source of new music, and trying to remember obscure songs I have heard before can be fun. iTunes is great for that kind of surfing through my entire music collection. When it's working. iTunes + iPod have been acting up a bit and it's been getting on my nerves.

I made some good headway on tomorrow's quantum HW, but I'm just going to finish it tomorrow morning. as usual. read some more of my new book and go to bed. I am reading The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought. It is worded a little fancifully, they use the word 'modern' pretty loosely, and has lots of those little historical details I don't particularly care about (like Voltaire's stock exchange transactions), but I think it still brings up some interesting points. The next chapter is Adam Smith so I am looking forward to that.