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.