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.

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.

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.

if it can be lost then it can be won

I had a nice weekend. Mostly because I did no school work. I made peanut butter fudge, went to the department picnic, watched Where Eagles Dare, got on the roof of the physics building (pictures on Facebook), saw Cars, and did no studying for quantum mechanics. I'm flying back to Michigan in a week and I'm looking forward to that.

it's the last major festival dance-wise of 1999

Spaghettios have never tasted as good to me as they do now. I have been subsisting on token airplane foods all day. I think my proper lunchtime occured when I was in the air. I fully intended to get a good meal for lunch/dinner in Las Vegas, but their food court was closed! Then I was going to get a good meal in Portland waiting for the shuttle bus, but the plane out of Vegas was over an hour late, so I barely caught the shuttle. Which takes another two hours to get to Corvallis. So now I am eating whatever is left in my cupboards, which is all my canned foods.

I killed time on the planes today by rereading The Cardinal of the Kremlin. It's not Tom Clancy's finest, but it passed the time. Several parts of the book just seem like The Hunt for Red October Part II instead of a new book. I finished the book just as I got on the shuttle, but I had a loaded iPod in reserve.

I went to Fischer's New Year LAN earlier this week. It's been a while since I've been to one of those. I did good in fy_iceworld, my specialty, but not much of that was played. I did like the new mod SourceForts, but it isn't quite polished enough yet. We also played some of Fischer's "Red" mod, which I was awful at because I'd never played it before.

I've also been working my way through Need for Speed: Most Wanted. I have a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution, so I'm a happy guy. If I could get a Lamborghini Gallardo I would be set. Freeman doesn't run that game nearly as well as Jim's computer does, which is sad. However my biggest problem was Freeman's keyboard, which has been taking a beating from computer games. So I went out and bought a $10 USB keyboard, and it's definitely much better for gaming. I also have a new USB hub that is much better than the one I had before. I think a wireless keyboard would be even nicer, but I haven't seen any I like yet.

Anyway, travelling sucks, I'm back in Oregon, and I'm going to get some rest.

an evident lack of light tonight

Last week I had a craving for a Papiano's pizza, and found that it was closed. It turns out they might have just moved, or so Vincent says. I don't see anything wrong with their previous location, and I don't actually know where they new place is yet. It doesn't show up on the Papa John's locator. You don't do too much business if no one knows where you are.

It's finally the weekend. I am so wiped that I don't really have the energy to waste my Friday night gaming. Instead, I have been watching episodes of Top Gear, a car show on BBC. They are greatly amusing, have awesome cars, and their cinematography and music can be stunning. Watching those shows just make me want a Mitsubishi Lancer EVO more and more. I actually recognize a lot of the songs they use, which shows how well I've picked my electronica collection. The latest shows have been drawing a great deal from Hybrid's latest album, which I hadn't really delved into. I am now listening to "Blackout" on loop, though I did cut something like 70 seconds from that song. I hate it when it takes nearly a minute to get to the good part of the song, and it had a really annoying ending. I love Sound Forge - it's like audio Photoshop.

I have been getting some odd "delayed write" errors on my external hardrive. If it dies I am going to be very sad. My iPod also has been giving some minor but weird errors when synching.

I talked with my major professor today, and felt a little better about my program but not terribly much so. The things that have been causing gripes in the PSM program aren't under his control at all, so bitching about that doesn't do much good. There is supposed to be some kind of major PSM meeting on Tuesday anyway. I have the feeling that if I didn't have a designated goal for my program it would just kind of wander aimlessly. I am chucking classical mechanics and probably statmech so I can work in solid state and optics. I would also like to squeeze some EE in if I can. And I would love to take that cryptography class, if they would ever offer it...

So yeah, I am still geeked on solar power. I joined the American Solar Energy Society, to no noticeable effect except to my credit card bill. I am pretty skeptical about battery technology though. I can never keep the damned things charged, and they die over time, and I want something that will last forever. Just in case of the end of civilization as we know it or something. So I figure, how about a flywheel? It sounds pretty good for a system that isn't going anywhere, like powering houses. I guess I'm not the first person to think of this though.

I finished reading Body of Secrets. That last few chapters seemed more like a collection of trivia than a proper book, but it was a good read overall. Quite a long book. I don't know what I'm going to read next.

This weekend I have to prep my PSM seminar presentation and get ready for an EM exam I really need to pass. I have been doing ok, but I haven't really had my edge in classes so far. (Except for destroying the quantum exam I suppose. I'm an exam-taking machine.) And I don't know how to get my edge back.

I also need to get out and run errands tomorrow, so I don't think I'll be able to participate in tomorrow's revelry. Tomorrow is the Oregon-Oregon State game. I'm definitely going to sleep in all morning. I'm also getting sick of PB&J every day for lunch, so I'm going to have to figure something out at the grocery store.

back to school

I turned in my PHY 492 term paper on April 27th. That was the last thing I had to do to graduate MSU. Tomorrow is September 26th, and after five months off school is starting back up for me. My physics classes don't start until Wednesday, but I have to go in tomorrow morning to sign up for office hours and take a math diagnostic test. My business cohort meets tomorrow so I should meet the PSMs from the other tracks.

Fall 2005 schedule:
PH 651 - Quantum Mechanics
PH 631 - Electromagnetic Theory
PH 607 - TA Seminar
PH 507 - PSM Seminar
COMM 512 - Communication and the Practice of Science
PAC 113 - Badminton I

I am also going to be TAing three sections of calc-based physics lab. I am working for the department chair and a guy who used to teach high school physics that our department picked up, and the other TAs are grizzled veterans. I was lucky to snag this spot instead of getting non-calc physics lab like most of the rest of the new grads. I think I got picked because I have experience from MSU and I worked over the summer. It should be interesting.

It took seven attempts to make PB fudge for the department picnic. Even after seven tries it looked funny, but it tasted OK and it held together so I went with it. The picnic was alright, pretty informal and lots of food.

Last week was very long so I spent Friday night eating pizza and playing Final Fantasy VII, and Saturday I bought We Love Katamari and played that all day. Today I have been getting things in order - I cleaned up the mess in the kitchen left after the fudge disaster, did laundry, got groceries, and figured out where my books and other supplies are.

Edit: After looking over the list of covered topics, I believe I am going to completely bomb tomorrow's math diagnostic exam.

Edit 2: Math oddity I ran across while making sure my TI-83's batteries work: 10! = the number of seconds in a day * The Ultimate Answer.

miscalibrated

I am not in a good mood. Today I had to sit through 2 1/2 hours of TA training stuff with the crazy prof I can't stand. It wasn't a total loss though. During one of the touchy-feely group learning sessions I said "My name is Jon, and I drew a pirate." That's what they get for giving me markers.

When I got back to the apartment I became suspicious of my new cooking thermometer. I went out and bought a better one and was suspicious of this one too. Indeed it was off as I incinerated an experimental half-batch of peanut butter fudge, turning it into some sort of powder. So I have to figure out how to compensate for retarded equipment before I make fudge for the department picnic. Fortunately I have lots of supplies.

Yesterday was OK. The other grads seem alright. We have a lot of TA training stuff to do, it is kind of a pain. Happy birthday Erin.

o lancer evolutions, where art thou?

I went into town today to get a rice cooker because I suck at making rice. The Bed Bath & Beyond here is right next door to the Mitsubishi dealer, so I decided to stop there afterward and take some pics of the Lancer Evolutions. However, when I got to the store I couldn't believe my eyes. The entire Mitsubishi dealership had up and left. No cars. Nobody in the building. Nothing. I swear I saw them open as recently as Tuesday.

Fortunately the car watching was not a complete bust. Just down the street there was a used Honda dealer with an orange Acura NSX.

NSX 1
NSX 2
NSX 3
NSX 4

(My usual image uploading program is broken.)

I ended up going into Staples as well. They actually had a really good deal on bookshelves, so I got two. My apartment is no longer ghetto. Not like I was ever as bad as this guy...

I did not work on the RSA code today. I'm having some kind of problem compiling the library for the new data type I want to use, and I worked on it too much yesterday. Tonight I am going to grade the homework for my recitations, and maybe watch a movie. Tomorrow I think I am going back out to the coast.

Edit: Just finished grading the first of two homeworks. I laugh when I see someone trying to BS me, but then the fun fades when I have to figure out how much of their work is BS and what kind of comments to write. It's so much easier to grade the people that actually know what they're doing. 10/10 - next!

cooking with jon

i already knew there was a 6 AM, i didn't need proof

It's so early...I up this morning because my car is going in to the shop to get its A/C fixed. If I'm going to be up and about this early in the morning I'm at least going to get some french toast sticks from Burger King. I'm meeting my H.S. physics teacher for lunch too, so today is a busy day.