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.