Maryland: atheists and agnostics need not apply.

Wondering around the Internet, I found this little jewel of historical relevance. It comes from the Maryland Declaration of Rights, part of the Constitution of Maryland. I can't find anything else in the Constitution of Maryland that overrides this.

Article 36. That as it is the duty of every man to worship God in such manner as he thinks most acceptable to Him, all persons are equally entitled to protection in their religious liberty; wherefore, no person ought by any law to be molested in his person or estate, on account of his religious persuasion, or profession, or for his religious practice, unless, under the color of religion, he shall disturb the good order, peace or safety of the State, or shall infringe the laws of morality, or injure others in their natural, civil or religious rights; nor ought any person to be compelled to frequent, or maintain, or contribute, unless on contract, to maintain, any place of worship, or any ministry; nor shall any person, otherwise competent, be deemed incompetent as a witness, or juror, on account of his religious belief; provided, he believes in the existence of God, and that under His dispensation such person will be held morally accountable for his acts, and be rewarded or punished therefor either in this world or in the world to come.

(emphasis added)

Looks like I'm getting out of jury duty if ever called.

Tattoo, Tae Kwon Do, iTunes...

The theme of this post is items whose first capital letter is "T".

I went to the Tattoo place just off campus with Jeremy to talk with a tattoo artist about what I wanted done. The guy said that he couldn't do it, and that anybody who said that they could was lying. There's too much detail, and skin can only hold so much detail over the years without the ink bleeding around a lot and making the tattoo look bad. So I'm going to go back to my solid black design idea, and try to render some high resolution images tonight so that I can go ahead and do this thing. I'll post pictures tomorrow if I come up with anything.

I went to Tae Kwon Do tonight and nobody was there. Tim wasn't coming because he had to take Chloe to the vet, and I'm betting that Kevin's working because he isn't here, and that's where he typically is when he's not here. I drive up, and the lights are off, so I come home and try to stretch. We've been given the challenge of being able to do splits by June. Right now I'm halfway there: my legs bend 90 degrees away from eachother (that's pi/2 for those of you who don't like angular systems based around a rough approximation to the number of days in a year.) 90 degrees in addition to what I can currently do, divided by 6 months (180 degrees around the sun) means that every day I have to progress half a degree. That seems doable.

I'm re-ripping all my music into iTunes so that I have fairly high quality copies of my music on my computer. I would really like to see ogg support in more mp3 players (both portable and software based.) I had an ogg plugin for quicktime (and therefore iTunes, which uses quicktime) but the new quicktime uses a different sound structure, and so the plugin broke. So now I have a ton of oggs that I can't listen to in my room, and tons of CDs that I need to rip. Right now I'm ripping the soundtrack to Star Wars: A New Hope, disk 2. I've got about 125 more CDs to go through. Then there the CDs at my parents house, and any CDs I can find downstairs. At least when I'm done I'll have a large collection of fairly diverse music: Latin, Metal, Ragtime, Techno, Pop, Classical, Rock, Classic Rock, Jazz, Grunge, Blues, Punk, R&B, New Age, Easy Listening (nothing really bad, only as bad as Elvis Costello, Burt Bacharach, and Tony Bennett) to name a few.

There's other stuff going on, too, but none of it starts with the letter "T" so this isn't the place to discuss it.

Tattoo

Here's a tattoo I'm considering getting on my right arm (deltoid.) I'm probably going Friday with my brother. What do you think?

I have got to start writing these things down

I had an idea like this a couple years ago. Zero-gravity football. Somebody has got to remember. Mine was somewhat more true to the "one-gravity" football currently played, and basically just involved having two identical fields facing eachother, like a floor and a ceiling, separated by 4 feet or so. Also, mine was designed for people traveling between planets, while this one seems to be designed for rich people with too much free time on their hands. Also, mine didn't get published.

linked list of color value matrices

Um, I should have put these up earlier, but then I didn't.

Pictures from Utah.

Machines that pump blood

I donated blood again, on Wednesday. While I was waiting to get screened a guy who works there approached me and asked if I could donate double red cells. The requirements are to be 150lb and some height I can't remember, but it's under the 6'2" which people tell me I am; I fit the requirements. I said I could, and we did the whole screening process. I had good iron levels and heart rate, but my blood pressure was a little higher than normal (120/80) but still relatively good. I sat down at this machine, got the needle put in, and it started taking my blood. About half a liter later it filtered my red blood cells from the plasma (which was bright yellow, a good thing I am told) and then the machine pushed saline solution back into my body, followed by the plasma. The saline is cold, and my plasma has cooled off considerably from being out of my body for so long, and all this cold liquid going into my bloodstream starts to make me cold. Then, it starts all over again, taking another half liter of blood. This time, after the saline went in, and the plasma got started, my vein clotted. This is bad, since the machine is still pushing fluid up the tube and into my arm. I start to get this large bump where the needle's going in, which I am told is the plasma collecting under my skin (what else could it be? the beginning of a new forearm?). It gets to be about 2 inches across and an inch or so high. It doesn't hurt, but it feels bad anyway; it felt like there was pressure under my skin (which there was) and I started wondering how much pressure my skin could contain before busting. The guy taking my blood turns off the pump, and the bump in my skin eventually fades away. This, however, means that I lose most of the plasma I would have gotten back. So I'm out a liters worth of red blood cells and about a half liter of plasma. They patch me up, give me donuts and drinks, and a t-shirt, and I go on my way, trying to figure out the easiest way to get warm without burning myself too badly.

Nine Inch Nails

On Wednesday I went down to DC with Tim to see the Nine Inch Nails concert. Just outside the venue we bumped into Laurel who was waiting for Kevin to show up, but they had seats and Tim and I were on the floor. We got in, and the opening band kindof sucked. They weren't horrible, but the vocals were annoying. Then, Queens of the Stone Age came out and did a good set. The crowd was still fairly calm at this point; mosh pit here or here, someone jumping up and down like an idiot over there, but nothing big. Then, Nine Inch Nails came on, and the crowd rushed towards the stage like iron filings towards some kind of huge music playing magnet. Than analogy sucked. NIN was great (btw, why isn't there a backwards N key? or is it upside down? I need to know these things.) My only complaints for their set is that they didn't play The Perfect Drug, and they didn't do an encore (ooh ooh, I know what song they could have played.) My complaints for the crowd I was surrounded by run more numerous than that. For starters, everybody was undulating forward and backward like a spring every 10 seconds or so. Since we were all packed up front, this meant that you ran the risk of falling over, which would be bad. My guess is that when everybody rushed to the stage the people in the front just bounced off, sparking the recoil, and that people near the back were resisting being pushed further back, causing the wave to propagate back and forth. I love fluid dynamics, which brings me to my next complaint: fluids. Some kind soul from further up decided that a cup containing some fluid (smelled like beer, had a lime, so I'm going to guess Corona) would do more good to the people further from the stage, so (s)he threw it, and it hit me and the girl who was standing next to me. Nice. Also, on the topic of fluids, there were some really sweaty guys who kept accidentally bumping into people (read, me and those around me,) then continuing to shove people around like some drunk frat-boy version of Chris Farley (RIP) and getting more sweatty. I'm not saying I expect the environment to be entirely sterrile, but if you're going to sweat like a pig, wear something that will soak it up, and try to avoid smearing your sweaty back against people who are only facing your way because you're standing between them and good music. Okay, rant's over, the concert was great.

Salt Lake City

We got to Salt Lake City Thursday evening and went out to dinner with our hosts: Will's friends from college, Suzanne and Anne, and Anne's friend from West Virginia, Zelly (I'm not sure how to spell her name.) Later we hit up an office supply store and I failed to find those massage chairs they sometimes sell and have out on display and you can sit on and get a free massage and it's really relaxing. But they didn't have one. They did have lots of electronics, though. We got back, hung out some, then went to bed.

Friday we went to the Tracy Aviary in SLC, where Suzanne works. It was raining, which sucked, but there were random large birds wondering about in the open, which was nice. We got lunch at a soup kitchen, and eventually made it to the grocery store to pick up food, and the movie rental place to pick up Shawn of the Dead. Anne and Zelly made brownies, but the came out soft (they seemed to think this was bad, but they were good soft.) We ordered Pizza and watched the movie, then went to bed again.

Saturday Anne, Zelly, Will and I drove out west to the Bonneville Salt Flats where they have all sorts of racing and what not. As the name would suggest, the salt flats are made of salt, and impressively flat. This time of year, however, they are covered in an inch or so of water. I took off my shoes and started wondering out. Here's the problem with this: the salt flats were covered with water, and water softens skin. The salt we were walking on, while being smooth enough to drive on, had some pretty large and sharp salt crystals that you would step on. Once your feet are torn raw by the surface, they're soaking in salt water, which isn't the most pleasant of feelings. Still, it was an amazing sight. Since the water was so shallow it was very still, and would reflect the sky and mountains in the distance, which made it feel like we were floating around in the sky. Very serene. We then wrecked the serenity by taking a car out on the flats. Since there's nothing for miles, you can speed up, slam on the brakes and skid, do donuts and various other slides, and not have to worry about hitting anything. You do need to worry about the salt, though. We got to land and all the salt water that had been kicked up by the wheels had dried, leaving a thin layer of salt covering the car. We took it to a car wash and all's well, other than the engine block, which is probably still coated in salt. Arter all that we headed breifly into Nevada to try to find a post card, but failed to. Part of that search brought us to a casino. Casinos are creepy. No natural sunlight so you never know what time it is, lots of neon lights to anger up the blood, so many people wasting their time on this planet putting metal disks into machines and pulling levers.

We got back to SLC and had dinner with some of Suzanne's coworkers, one of which was leaving and being the cause for this dinner get-together. We got home, I made sure all my stuff was ready to go, and we went to bed. Sunday morning Will drove me to the airport. While there, and bored, I picked up a couple books at the book store. One, which was being read by one of our hosts, and was suggested to me by Will, and sofar is quite the good book is A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers. It's kindof reminiscent of David Sedaris. Anyway, I eventually boarded the plane. I had a window seat this time, and whilst sitting a woman came up to me and asked if I would mind switching with her so that she could sit with whatever man I was sitting next to. She didn't ask it like that; I'm sure she knew him; maybe they were married. Anyway, I moved a couple rows ahead to her window seat. Eventually my neighboring seats were filled by a few girls visiting Maryland coming from California. After a week of hiking around and only using the biodegradable camp soap that doesn't clean that well I smelled like skunk. I'm not just saying that I smelled bad, which I did, but I smelled like a skunk, literally. It was bad, and I felt sorry for those girls. Eventually the plane landed and my parents picked me up. After a shower and dinner at their place I took my car back from Jeremy, dropped him off at school, and headed home.

Canyonland, Arches

We got to Canyonland on Wednesday and setup camp, then went for a hike. It's interesting to see the range of variation from park to park considering that they're all pretty close to each other. Canyonland looked more muddy, which is just to say that the rocks were more rounded with fewer sharp cracks. The hike took us past some interesting formations and once I get my shit together and get my film developed I will post pictures. Our campsite was near this huge rock wall, so that evening Will and I did some climbing around. Once it started to get dark I followed Will's lead and climbed back down to the campsite.

The next morning we got up, made breakfast, and headed out to Arches. Arches was the last national park we went to, and did a short day hike to Delicate Arch and had lunch, came back past some petroglyphs, then continued on back to SLC.

Bryce

When we got to Bryce, Monday, and got a campsite we went for a short walk along this ridge near the campsite. It was starting to get late and the orange from the sun helped make the canyons (which were mostly orange rock) really stand out. We made dinner over a fire and went to sleep. It got really cold that night. Tuesday we went on a fairly strenuous hike around the canyon. There were these things called "hoodoos" which are towers of rock remaining after eons of errosion. When we were hiking the trail started to look familiar to Will, (not to me, though) and it started to cloud up and drizzle. Getting stuck in the rain would have sucked. We turned around and quickly found the spot where we should have turned to go back to the entrance to the park, and got out of the canyon before the rain hit. The rain was kept mostly to the valley that the canyon opened up to so we just watched the storm clouds drift by and soak the nearby land. We went back to the campsite and rather than stay another night we decided to get going and drive to Canyonland. Every time I hear Canyonland I think Candyland, and start imagining a huge national park made out of rock candy.

The drive to Canyonland is a long one, and we stop along the way for food at a restaurant/inn called the Devils Backbone Inn or something like that. The food was great. Probably the best thing we'd eaten all week. After dinner, and more driving, we got out on the side of the highway, in the middle of nowhere, to see the stars. It gets real dark out there between the lack of major nearby cities, high altitude (less air to scatter light) and relatively dry air (less moisture to form clouds.) I can't remember the last time I saw the Milky Way, or that many stars in general. We finally make the last turn to get to the park and I notice that we have a quarter tank of gass and still a while to go. I mention this to Will but we decide that we should be fine, and that they probably have a gas station near the park. We get to the park, and not only are there no gas stations, there are no available campsites, and it's around midnight. Now I start to get nervous. Little gas, nowhere to sleep, our situation looks grim. We figure the best idea is to head to the nearest town and get gas and go to a motel for the night. I set cruise control to 55 to conserve gas and head out of the park. At this point we don't know how far we're going to have to drive, but it's at least 30 miles on less than an eigth of a tank of gas. As we're heading toward the highway, through open grazing land for cows, at 55 miles an hour, one appears just barely off the side of the road. When you can't see much in the dark, and all of a sudden an animal the size of a small car shows its head and looks at you, approaching at nearly a mile a minute, one can feel less than safe. We get to the highway and go toward the closest town, and on the way the "Low Fuel" message appears and we still don't have much of a clue how far we have to go. We roll into town and stop at the first gas station we see, and fuel up. The gas tank is a 12 gallon tank, and we put in around 12.06 gallons, which leads me to believe that we were moments from running out of gas in the middle of night, in the middle of Utah. We find a motel, each take a shower, and go to sleep. Wednesday morning we hit up a convenience store and head back to Canyonland.

Zion

After getting up in the morning on Sunday and making oatmeal on a fire we go for a drive. The plan was to go to a trail starting at The Grotto but we seem to be going in the wrong direction. The view from the drive is amazing, though. Zion is quite the change from the DC Metro area. We turn around and head to the visitor center and get on a shuttle that goes up the canyon to the starting point. We get on the trail and head up to Angels Landing, the place where the trail leads. The hike starts moderately, paved even. Then it starts to get a little steeper. Then steeper still. Then it turns into rock climbing, but they outfitted the trail with some chains to make the climb easier. Then we get to the top, and the view is well worth it. We're almost half a kilometer up at this point, and eat a lunch of crackers cheese and sausage, then head back down. We get back to the campsite and make dinner. Monday we go on a few smaller hikes: one to the Emerald Pools (we go to the upper one) and then to Weeping Rock. These are both fairly small hikes and when we get back we head out.

On the way to Bryce National Park we start looking for lunch. Apparently people in Utah don't eat lunch on Mondays. Every restaurant is closed. Unfortunately for us they are all connected to motels that are open, and have large signs saying so. What we see from the highway are two things: restaurant signs, and "open" signs. It's not until we get up to the door that we see the little "restaurant closed" sign. Boo. We eventually find a place just outside Bryce then head into the park.

Getting There

I've decided to do incremental posts on my trip to Utah, as to provide some logical breakup of the trip beyond simple paragraphs.

I got picked up by my mommy from school at around 2:00. I got my brother keys to my car so he could drive it last week (since he can park on campus using my permit, and I'm nice like that) then we headed up to BWI on 295. My flight was leaving at around 5:00pm so despite the stop-and-go traffic on 295, I got to the airport with plenty of time. I got my boarding pass, and waited to check my luggage (I had one of those e-tickets so I just went to a kiosk to get my pass, and the people working behind Delta's counter were calling peoples names to check their luggage.) There were tons of army people flying around to report for duty, and each of them had a half dozen or so large duffel bags, and they were all carrying firearms. This slowed things down some, but it was still a while before my flight was supposed to leave. While waiting there I misread a sign saying that lighters couldn't be put on checked luggage (it really said carry-on) and I remembered that the last time I flew they were letting people carry lighters onto planes. I took the lighters I was bringing out of my backpacking backpack and put them in my normal backpack, or rucksack if you would, and then checked my luggage. Then when I went through security their x-ray machine detected the lighters and they took them. I had a few nice zippos in there, too. Oh well.

I got on the plane and the guy I was sitting next to looked identical to Garrett, Aerials brother. I don't mean he looked similar. The resemblance was enough that despite the fact that he hadn't said anything to signal that he recognized me (we bump into each other every now and then and talk) I asked, just to be sure. His voice was about as far from Garrett's voice as it could get without him sounding like a kid, woman, or James Earl Jones. The flight was ho hum, they showed Batman Begins, which I had already seen, and I listened to some Elliot Smith and read. I got to Salt Lake City around 8pm local time and sat and waited until midnight when Will's plane landed. More reading and Elliot Smith (the only music I had on me.) We got the rental car, and headed to his friends' (Suzanne, Anne, and Zelly(sp?)) place where we rolled out our sleeping pads and went to sleep on the floor.

The next morning we got up, hit up a R.E.I. to pick up some stuff we needed like fuel for my backpacking stove, cooking utensils, etc., then went to the grocery store to get food. Then, we drove south along I15 towards Zion National Park. We got there before it got dark, and started to setup camp. The ground at the park was terribly hard, so the tent stakes weren't going in, and my tent isn't free standing: it needs to be staked down to stand up. We improvised and tied one end to the picnic table and the other end to a log we dragged over. We started cooking sausages, at first on the camp stove which didn't really work, and it started to rain, which made me worry about how the weather would be this trip, but it let up after a short while and then we just sat there by the fire, cooking polish sausages on sticks in the fire. It gets dark early in autumn, and so we went to bed around 8 or 9.

Back on the other side of the continent.

I'm back in Maryland. Utah was fun. When I have some energy I will post on my goings on, hopefully before my memory fails me and I have to start making up stories about seeing God in the woods. I brought some friends back to the woods, but they didn't see Him, so I sent one of my friends back and now I'm looking for a few wives.

extra hour in Utah

Daylight Savings Time ends next weekend, while I'm out in Utah. This means I'll have to set my clock three times over this next week or so. Once to adjust to Mountain Daylight Savings Time (- 2 hours), again to adjust to Mountain Standard Time (- 1 hour), then again for Eastern Standard Time (+ 2 hours).

Speaking of daylight savings time, terrorists are dumb...

In September 1999, the Palestinian West Bank was on daylight saving time while Israel had just switched back to standard time. West Bank Palestinians prepared time bombs and smuggled them to Arab Israelis, who misunderstood the time on the bombs. As the bombs were being planted, they exploded—one hour too early—killing three terrorists instead of two busloads of people, the intended victims. -(http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/k.html)

Everything balances out eventually

Last weekend sucked. This weekend was great.

Friday was sortof a downer. Nobody was here for a while, so I sat around and worked on little projects here and there, but I couldn't help myself from being bored. Even if I don't see anybody, knowing someone else is home makes me feel less shiftless. Example: Kevin's in the basement studying yet I feel like things are normal; he could have snuck out the back door and headed toward Tokyo and I wouldn't know; I'd still feel normal.

Saturday morning I got up and started packing my back packing back pack. Ha. I guess if I unpacked it, then started packing it again, I could say that I was packing my back packing back pack back up. I'll stop here. The plan was to go camping in Frederick last night, but I'll get to that in due time. I rounded up Kevin and Tim, then Jeremy, then we waited at the old house with Karen for Nina to be ready, and the six of us headed to the Maryland Renaissance Festival. Renfest was fun. Nina used to live with some people working in the wax hand place, and Colin teaches juggling. We met up with Colin during his lunch break, and drank some and watched some belly dancers. Did I menrion there was mead, which is honey beer. I knocked a few back. Later when Karen and Nina and Tim were getting Food I laid down on the mulch, figuring it was a good idea, and some guy dressed up as a wwwyzzerdd walked towards me with a staff with a large ball at the end. He pointed the ball end at me and told me to touch his ball. I obliged, then his friend (standing by my head) asked me if I liked beer. I was drinking mead at the time but said yes, and he motioned with his cup like he was going to pour some over my mouth. I opened my mouth, and got 90% of the beer he poured. The rest of the beer spilled on my shirt, but hey, free beer! Later, I scaled the climbing wall drunk, but I scaled it quickly, which I think is a feat. Tim couldn't make it up, which puzzled me not quite as much as it amused me.

Eventually we get out of there and head back to College Park to drop off Jeremy and let Kevin get his car to go pick up Laurel. Tim and I pick up some needed stuff for the camping trip, then start heading toward Frederick. Kevin and Laurel are ahead of us at this point, so we tell them to find a campground. Tim and I pick up food and beer and get a call saying that all the parks are full. So we start heading back toward College Park when Tim spots another sign for another campground. We get lost in the woods, then find a map in a parking lot and figure out where we should be. Kevin and Laurel catch up with us at this point. We make it to the front gate and I find a sign (hidden in a mailbox of all places) saying that the campground is full. We figure 'screw it' and head back to the campground in Greenbelt. We get there around 11:30 and try to stay up, but it's late and we're tired and intoxicated, and only stay up for a few hours. I got up first in the morning and roused the rest, built a fire, and after breakfast we left.

Getting back to the house, Tim and I decide to go for a bike ride, so we head down 198 toward this park/army training center/hunting grounds. We bike around there for about 10 miles worth and head back, totaling 19 miles in all. On the way back I decide to try this BBQ place down the street, and the food isn't half bad. We got back, I cleaned up, picked up Jeremy, and head to our parents.

After dinner and West Wing Jeremy starts going through his camping stuff in the basement and starts picking out stuff for me to take to Utah. I need to figure out what kind of camping/hiking we'll be doing, and how long we'll be out there. (Will, do you have any idea?) My parents also picked up a couple journals for me to take to Utah: one lined and one unlined. I'll try to keep track of my goings on in Utah so I can post something interesting in a couple weeks. Until then you'll have to put up with this mindless drivel.

What a weekend

Man am I glad that it's Monday. This weekend was all sorts of ugly. For starters, there was a party at our place on Friday. Mostly people I didn't know, mostly friends of Parkers sister. Mostly people I'm not too interested in seeing again. There was a problem with people busting into Kevins room, and him kicking them out, and now it's snowballing into some sort of ideological battle between them what live here. It seems people aren't trying to resolve this, and it could end badly. Tim and I are trying to mediate this, but I'm not sure there's much we can do.

Saturday night Tim and Parker had their engagement party, which was nice. Afterward I went to Cicis and then saw Serenity, with Ben, Anna, Kevin, Laurel, Kyle, and Will. I wasn't as impressed with the movie as I was with the TV series, but it wasn't bad. Some of us met up with Kat and tried to go to a bar in Silver Spring, but they were closed, so we came back to our house, but it was late, and most of us were tired, so yeah. Sleep.

Sunday I studied some for a test, then went home to celebrate Jeremy's birthday with the family. We went out to dinner, and then I took him back to his dorm. I came home again and the whole housemate issue came up again, followed by another argument, followed by someone packing up and leaving.

Today I had a test in my syntax class, which I'm pretty sure I aced, and now I'm going to go see Weezer and the Foo Fighters in concert with Will. Today feels like a weekend.

Gathering of sorts

There will be a gathering of people at our house in Laurel on Friday the 7th. You should be one of those people. Show up around, let's say, 9:00 pm. Or earlier if you're one of those people who doesn't stay up late, or later if you have to, or some third thing, probably involving complex numbers.

The Promised Land

Well I've booked my flights and I'm going to Utah. The plan is for Will and me to bum around the state for a little over a week --- the 21st to the 30th --- in October. I've never been to Utah before, or anywhere in the southwest for that matter (I don't consider the west coast to be the southwest, but it's a contested issue.) Since we're spending at least some of the time in SLC I'm half tempted to get my "Heroin Bob" mohawk going again, but I won't.

As a unrelated side note, one of my many bosses said the other day during a meeting that the progress seen so far on a project indicated either that the engineers out at JPL were half-assing it (not his phrasing) or that I was incompetent. He then said that he didn't think it was the later. I'll take that as a compliment, even if it's in a roundabout kind of way.

odds, ends, this dream I had

In no particular order, here are a bunch of words:

Today I went down to DC with Tim and Leonard to observe/participate in the anti-war protests. Tims blog sums up my feelings on going down, so rather than mimic his post (which would be in my style, I guess) I will just say that while I have ideological reasons not to go down, it still beats sitting around the house and doing laundry, which were my other plans for the day. After coming back a few of us got dinner in Baltimore. Uneventful but filling.

I signed up at a Tae Kwon Do place down the street. I've been to two classes so far and have only discovered that I am horribly inflexible. It's fun when I'm not trying to do any high kick, when I am it's painful and pathetic. Watch out. Soon my horrible cognitive coordination will be coupled with horrible punch and kick coordination. I will be an unstoppable force.

Gooooooooooooooooogle is coming to campus on October 5th and I plan on going there and seeing if I have a ice cubes chance in hell of ever working with them. I figure my 6 years of work experience, BS in CS, and linguistic coursework will put me at a slight advantage against the teeming masses of CS majors. It would probably entail moving to NYC, which wouldn't be so bad considering that I have always sortof wanted to live in a city, but I would miss being close to my friends and family.

I finally got my act together and installed FC4 on my PC. When we moved to Laurel I couldn't get my computer to boot without getting a "kernel panic" and never bothered reinstalling Linux. Well I did it, and now all I need is a switch and some network cable and I will have it online, which means I will finally get access to the 60 some gigs of music on there, compared to the 20 gigs I have on my iBook. I've made do without the rest of my music, but I would really like it now.

I had an interesting dream the other night. I would like to explain it in detail but it's too nonlinear in my memory and countergeometric in spatial reasoning to do that. I will have to settle with a vague and sporadic description. It started with me, after having died, drifting down into a room. This I guess is the afterlife (phew, I would have hated simply ceasing to exist.) The room was setup like a classroom or library or cafeteria or computer lab. It's hard to describe. As I was approaching the floor I noticed that some of the people in the room (the room was peopled, by the way) were old teachers of mine. One was a generic elementary school teacher that doesn't correlate with anybody in particular, who said "you were the stupid one." implying that my achievements in her class weren't impressive. I remember that I was always fairly good in elementary school and simply said that I was at least smarter than her. I'm off to a good start. I somehow know that this is a holding area and not any kind of permanent environment for my thoughts, but never really leave throughout the dream. The walls were lined with books and upon inspection, and discussion with some guy there, I learn that the collection of books is determined by the population in the room. Every book you ever read, or knew about, was on the shelves. Since there are other people, there should be some new books. I notice a book by Isaac Asimov that I hadn't seen (and illogically wonder why it was there) but being even more bothered because this picture book I saw once that had images of fractals, biological tissue, natural landscapes, and astronomical images wasn't there. I was pissed because I really wanted to look at that book. Moving along, every person was represented by a colored liquid. This representation wasn't visual (everybody looked normal) but you sortof knew the color and texture of everybody's fluid. There were also bottles of colored fluid on some shelves. You could drink the fluid and it would mingle with yours producing a new color (closer to brown) and the closer to brown you got the closer to hell (not like the hell you've read about, just a sort of dead end, an analogy I like more and more every time think it.) There was an advantage to drinking the fluid, something having to do with experience or sacrifice, but it's hard to put into words. There was also a bottle of clear liquid you could drink, and while it seems to be that drinking it would dilute your liquid and bring further from this hell, it really just reincarnates you (when you drink it you get sucked towards this pure white space.) There are a few hallways connected to this room, but what lies in them, and what it all means, wasn't represented in any kind of spatially or verbally expressibly way. We weren't supposed to go in them, but only in the sense that you aren't supposed to wander the halls during class in public school. If you get caught you may get scolded, but in this environment where there really isn't any authority you can just scoff at the scolder and carry on. At some point things get more interesting, I make some friends (that, or some of my friends also died) and we wander around. I get into an argument with a dead cop about him telling us we can't do something. I bring up the point that while he may have been a cop in life, here we are all equals. I felt so rebellious and cocky it's pathetic. Standing up to the man and all. Anyway we all start exploring and discover that there is an outside world with what seems to be vegetation and landscapes, but to try to describe any of it would be silly. I really wish I could explain this better or make a movie out of it or something, since it was probably the most interesting dream I've had to date. Oh well, I'll have to settle for this. I've decided that now I want to dream about driving. I don't like video games because the input and output interfaces are poor (2D vision, buttons and knobs) and I don't want to drive crazy in real life because, come on, I don't want to die just yet. The only real option here is to dream about driving. Sounds fun to me. I think I'm going to go try to do that now.

carry on.

I know it's fake

...but I'll probably vote for him anyway. I consider fame to be a qualifying feature and am easily persuadable by seemingly well intentioned political speech. If nothing else he'd make for some very creepy State Of The Union addresses.

=AMENDMENT 2005.09.22-12:46=

It has come to my attention that I am nothing but a hack producing duplicate posts derivative of Annas blog from weeks past. I apologize for any time wasted on this.

Periodic bleeding

No, I'm not menstruating. I donated blood again, as today was conveniently both the first day I could donate since I last donated as well as the day they were running a blood drive just off campus. I'm pretty sure it's intentional since I donated there last time, and the next time they're holding a blood drive is the first day I can donate again. I didn't sleep well last night so I felt a little tired all day, and figured I'd get light headed while giving blood. Like last time, however, I didn't get light headed when they were taking blood. I guess I'm getting used to it. Unlike last time, however, as soon as they pulled the needle from my arm I did. They tipped my chair back and gave me a soda (which reminds me, I need to marry the red cross. I get tired, and they bring me a drink and try to make me more comfortable.) Ever since then I've been tired and cold. I've been sleeping since I got home, and just got up to make myself dinner. I should be back to normal by tomorrow.

I'm a bit disappointed by the stuff I got in return for my blood. Last time I got a T-shirt. This time I got a magnet I can stick on a refrigerator (I'd say my refrigerator, but alas, I lease.) Don't get me wrong: I like helping people. I just figure I gave them my blood; the least they could do is give me a boat or something.

Jeremy's eyes

Here are some pictures of Jeremy's eye troubles. Since you don't get to see him move his eyes, the look isn't quite what it is in real life, but this is the best I could do with no real effort. I've included a normal picture to compare to.



Creepy.

I'm quitting

This relationship I had with *name removed* was too much, too fast, so I ended it. I probably wasn't going to do it for a while, since until today I was just a little worried, but we got into a discussion about it and it became evident, to me at least, that it wasn't good for me. I'm going to stop dating for a while, since I seem to have a nasty habit of hurting nice girls (which hasn't ever been the intention.) I should have known better than to get into a new relationship so shortly after the last one. I'm thinking that until I can figure out what I want in a relationship, it would be a good idea for me to not be in one. So yeah. If you see me in another relationship just come up and smack me. I have it coming.

updates

Well, it seems that everything is coming up Ducore. First, for Jeremy, the doctors said that it's just brain bruising (probably from hitting his head on hard things) that's causing the symptoms and that if it doesn't go away in a couple weeks he should come back to the hospital. This is a relief, since if they couldn't figure it out he would probably worry a lot, increasing his heart rate and blood pressure, making things worse. I guess he'll just have a lazy eye for a while. Secondly, for me, my LING311 professor emailed me and said that I could just bring him the oversubscribe form and he would sign it, so I am taking the two linguistics classes this semester instead of zero. Also, there's a party at the old place (in Berwyn Heights) on Saturday, and everybody should come. Well, everybody but you. We're throwing a big "Hey, <your name>'s not here, lets party" party. So come and the party won't be about you, or don't come and rest easy knowing that people are having a great time with you in mind, or do some third thing. It's really up to you.

Oh, and Will, if you're in town, there will be girls at this party. Girls and booze. You had better brush your teeth and wear clean clothes. Just watch out for my brother because he may be there too, and will be getting all the "brain bruising" sympathy which should easily cancel out any "hey, is that a lazy eye you've got yourself there?" turn offerery.

To the hospital

My brother has been having eye problems since Tuesday. Apparently his left eye is a little blurry and doesn't move in unison with the right eye. Really, I guess, if one eye doesn't move in unison than they both don't. Anyway, his left eye's been giving him trouble. He went to the health center on campus yesterday and they took his blood pressure, which was really high, and his pulse, which was also really high, and they couldn't figure out what would be causing it. He had been hit on the head a couple times but nothing recent enough to be a likely causal candidate. They said he should go to the hospital, so I picked him up from the health center and took him to Holy Cross. Other than being a little light headed (probably from the blood pressure and pulse rate) he said he felt fine. Our mom met us there and the nurses took his blood pressure and pulse again, and they were still bad. He didn't seem like he was going to die or anything, so *name removed* (who came with) and I left and got dinner. Mom said she'd call if anything developed. I got a call from my sister later that night and said that she heard from them and that it wasn't a brain tumor or hemorrhage or something that would show up on a CT scan. He's spending the night at home and he's going to see more doctors today. I think I remember hearing "oncologist", but I think it's much more likely that my sister said "opthamologist," since he's having eye trouble and his knee tumors are both benign and probably unrelated. I'll post an update once I hear more about his condition. My current guess, as neither a doctor nor a psychologist, is that it's related to stress from moving out and not having any friends near him on campus, or to getting bumped on the head a few times last week. I hope he gets better.

work, school, future plans

At work the (metaphorical) dark and musty cave in which I have been struggling is now lit and mostly clean of debris. For the past year I have been writing, on and off as other projects permit, a server for providing organized datasets for download in a variety of formats. When I started I was given a toolbox full of nifty tools and parts. Unfortunately the documentation did little more than simply name these tools and parts, and it was my job to build something out of it. Lots of effort was poured into deciphering what I could from the documentation, emailing the designers of this project with questions about what various tools did, and what the overall server should do, and I was almost done. Then I got a phone call. They wanted to know why I was asking all these questions, and why I was writing the server. Apparently there is a server already assembled, available for download. So what should have been a one or two day project became a year long struggle. It's like you go to get a car, and the dealer shows you the room where they keep all the parts, and leaves you there to figure it out. You read up on what you can about the parts, study other cars out on the road, and are finishing up the paint job when the dealer comes back and asks why the hell you didn't just go to the show room and purchase a prebuilt car, like a normal person. A failure of communication this was, on both ends I believe. So now I have a hand-built car sitting in the garage while I'm taking the factory-built car out for a test drive. Then I get another call. Apparently the car I just got is, let's say, a 2005 model, and they've just released the 2006 model. Two more days down the tubes. But it's all good; I know who to talk to when I have trouble, and if anything on my car breaks down I don't have to take it to the dealership since I know how the thing works inside and out. There are too many analogies here. Suffice it to say that I am no longer confused as to what I should be doing on this project.

Classes have also started, and the situation there is also somewhat muddled. I'm trying to take LING410, which has LING311 as a prerequisite. I'm also trying to take LING311 but am on the waitlist. I've talked to the LING410 professor and he says I can take LING311 as a corequisite since I have enough math background (predicate calculus.) My LING311 professor is a little more reserved. It seems the class is already oversubscribed and all the linguistics majors were allowed in. Since I'm not a linguistics major, or even an undergraduate, I'm last on the list. I may be able to just sit in on the class, but I'm not sure that my LING410 professor will let me do it that way, since I wouldn't technically be subscribed to LING311. Depending on what happens over the next few days I may wind up not taking any classes this semester, which I think would be a shame, since they're free.

I've been dating this girl, *name removed*, for a couple weeks now. I met her right after I broke up with Tracey and initially wanted some time to just be single, but we get along really well and I figure I can have some single time if and when I screw up this relationship. I am feeling a little rushed, though, since we started out rather quickly. I'm going to need to find a good balance of alone time and relationship time, but she says she's the same way as far as independence goes so I don't think it will be a problem.

I donated electronic green paper to the Red Cross but I would have rather been able to donate blood. The soonest I can do that is the 14th since I gave blood recently, but I'm not type O (I'm B+) so my blood isn't in huge demand. I'm curious to find out how much of what they say is happening down in New Orleans is factual and how much is just rumors being touted by the news media as factual. I suppose these things take time, but I'd bet when all the facts are on the table, it'll still be really shitty. I'm just a little skeptical that the police are being as brutal as they're being made out to be. This is probably the only time you'll ever hear me giving the "man" the benefit of the doubt.

I could do better in my sleep

I'm sure those who lived with me in college are less than impressed by these Germans. I like to think of my days in the commons more as training than a waste of natural resources.

Prelude to a new car.

Fixing my dads Honda Prelude (red, early 90s) is too expensive to be worth doing, so he's decided to sell it for parts. If anybody knows someone who is interested in buying either the whole thing, or pieces of it, let me know. I think this Saturday I am going up to New Jersey with him to pick up one of the cars my grandmother owns but isn't using, so he'll have a (relatively) new car soon enough.

I'm an asshole...

Stop acting surprised, you've been telling me the same thing for years. I broke up with Tracey today. It just didn't feel right, and I didn't want to drag things out any longer (honestly, she could do better anyway.) I realized that the only real thing holding me back from doing it was not wanting to hurt her, which is a horrible reason to stay in a relationship. I wanted to just drive up to her place and do it, but mitigating circumstances prohibited that and she wound up driving down. I did not want her to have to drive for a half hour just to get dumped, which made me feel like even more of an ass. I'm not asking for sympathy for feeling like an ass; I just thought you all should know that I finally agree with you.

South Carolina... a southern state with South in its name.

Thursday evening I went home and picked up my brother, then started heading south. We hit the tail end of rush hour but since we were driving like 600 miles it didn't wind up making a huge impact on our trip. The drive down to S.C. wasn't that bad, once you get past the fact that you're driving longer than the typical work day. We mostly listened to music and watched with childlike amazement as the odometer hit 100 miles, 200 miles, 300... you get the picture. We got to the house at around 2AM, which wasn't that bad when you consider that we had planned on leaving later and driving through 'til morning. The house we were staying at was nice. It was right on the tidal basin and they had kayaks. It was maybe a 10 minute walk to the beach, but the waves stank so there wasn't much incentive to go there anyway. Unlike Duck, N.C., however, there was also nothing to do in town. Actually, there really wasn't a town. I spent most of my time kayaking around the tidal basin, reading The Traveler, sleeping, and eating. A couple times I managed to kayak down to the inlet where the tidal basin meets the ocean. That was a fairly long trip to do on a kayak, and getting into the ocean wasn't easy. It reminded me of a canoe trip I took in Maine the summer after 9th grade. One day we had to canoe across a lake against a strong headwind that was kicking up waves. Kayaking against medium sized waves wasn't impossible, but it did throw me around a little. Did I mention that there were dolphins? They'd tail me when I was kayaking some of the time, but never get too close. Also, there was a shark a couple feet from me at one point. Probably a sand shark or something, not huge but probably big enough to hurt me if it really wanted to. Good thing I had those dolphins to protect me. One night I played poker with Jeremy, my dad, and this guy Cliff who along with his wife is a friend of my parents. Jeremy went out, but I couldn't take all the chips before my dad and Cliff decided it was getting late. Still, I could have taken them out. I wonder if this was one of those situations my dad always worried about. It was obvious growing up that I wasn't going to beat him at sports any time soon. For some reason I keep getting full houses when I play. Probably luck, or cheating, or some third thing.

Sunday morning I kayaked down to the ocean one last time and pulled the kayak onto the shore. Well, it wasn't exactly the shore, or a sandbar. On the northern side of the inlet, at low tide, the ocean floor became half exposed for maybe 100 meters out from the normal shoreline. Since the ocean floor isn't smooth, but is choppy like rough water or an english muffin, all the nooks and crannies were filled with water, and the ridges jutted above the water. Combine that with a low sun, and it's a pretty amazing sight. I wandered around there for a while, then walked out into the water. For another 200 meters or so the water wasn't even ankle deep. I started to think that maybe people on the shore would think that I was walking on water, like Jesus, and thought it might be cool to be mistaken for the messiah. Then I remembered how that story ends and ran back to the kayak. The trip back to the house was tiring. I was hot, my muscles were starting to get sore, and I kept laying back on the kayak and letting the tide carry me back. Unfortunately the tide couldn't have been moving much faster than a quarter mile an hour or so, so I had to keep paddling. I got back, had breakfast, and then Jeremy and I left to come back north. It's funny. I consider Maryland to be, in most respects, a southern state. Cite the Mason-Dixon line, that mess with the state senate during the civil war, or the fact that Maryland is more than just the DC-Baltimore corridor. Coming up from South Carolina, however, I feel like I'm entering Canada by the time I cross the Potomac.

So anyway, I'm back. I came into work this morning and debugged a RAID array and NFS locking issues, and now I feel like I could use another vacation.

Automotive not so motive

Today has been a day of cars. I went to get the oil changed in the Prizm, and on the way back from my parents house the Prelude starts to overheat. I pull off and see the radiator spewing a brownish liquid all over the engine. This liquid reminds me of what comes out of crabs when you crack them open, and that reminds me of the fact that I hadn't eaten anything all day. This liquid is then evaporating when it hits the engine block, making a nice smell and causing the car to look like it's going to explode. I take it to a service station, only to be told that they can't service my car. I guess typical cars don't have radiators these days, because I had to take it to a special service station. I take it there and wait for a couple hours, only for them to tell me that it will be a thousand dollars to fix because they have to overhaul the whole thing. I give my dad, who's in South Carolina at the time, a call asking him what he wants to do with it (it is his car, and he can be picky about things.) He says to take it to the Amoco station on New Hampshire Avenue because he knows them and they don't seem to be cheats. Now, rather than wait around for hours for a tow truck to show, I drive back to the place in Laurel to wait for a tow truck there. It's not a long drive, and whenever the car seems to get a little too warm, I pull over and stop the engine and wait for it to cool down again, as to avoid further engine damage. So that's what I'm doing now. I'm waiting for a tow truck, at which point I'll go back to the station I was at earlier to have my oil changed, with a new car and a new set of troubles, Including not having a ride from the station until my sister or brother get off work. It may be late before you hear back from me, though hopefully not.

Why does everybody think it's personal?

My friends say it pisses them off when I argue a point. Arguing pisses me off too, but I think for a much different reason. When I argue I feel like 99% of my effort isn't going into explaining what's wrong with someone else's premise, but into explaining my point. I think most of what I say isn't understood, or is understood poorly, and the arguments I get into are because people either don't listen, or assume I mean something that I never actually said. That I can handle; it doesn't annoy me. What starts to annoy me is when people get the idea that I think they're idiots because they don't agree with me, that I argue because I think I'm better than them. They seem to take it personally that I hold different opinions, and that I'll try to explain what I mean when people say I'm wrong. Things I say are twisted around into personal attacks. What really pisses me off is that well into the argument people start to get mad at me for arguing, as though I were the only one talking up to that point, and always change the argument from whatever it was to "you're a jerk for arguing about this." It's never "we're idiots for arguing about this." It's always all on me.

I'm going to say this once. If I thought you were stupid, I wouldn't argue with you. I probably wouldn't talk to you either. If I thought I were so much better than you I probably wouldn't care when you didn't understand me; I would generally take it as a given that you couldn't. If you hate arguing so much then don't get started; don't contradict what I say if you don't agree. It doesn't mean you're wrong and I'm right if you let what I say stand. But if you reply to what I say and expect that to be the end of it, if you always want the first thing you say to be the last word, then you're as much at fault as I am when we argue, so stop blaming me.

no title, only kalkalash

I really don't know why I'm writing this, since most people who read my blog already know all this. Anyway, here goes.

Friday, at work, I presented what I've been working on for the past year or so. My boss wasn't happy with the capabilities of the framework I was developing under (not my fault) and I'm unhappy with the documentation on the framework. Either way, it wasn't a success, and when I go back to work I'm going to work hard to make this all right; my fault or not. The problem was that we weren't sure what this thing would do, and it took me a long time to figure it out and implement it using the tools provided by JPL (I went to CA for this thing.) I'm actually looking forward to this, since it means I'll be getting to do some fun programming. I almost regret taking this week off, but I need a break.

Friday night I went down to Ben and Annas to hang out. Nick (bens brother), Tim, and Parker were all there too. Anna and I went shopping for booze and food first, then ben and nick got back and we got food. Then Tim and Parker came, and we hung out in Ben and Annas appartment. Saturday was slow, from what I remember. I cleaned a lot, played a little piano (which I haven't done in a while). Then Crystal came over for her birthday with a few friends. Slow but enjoyable night. Today I went to the pool with Kevin, then went to see Wedding Crashers again, with Tim and Parker. Came home, cleaned up some, and now I'm writing this post.

Next weekend I'm going down to South Carolina with my brother, maybe sister, and probably this kid Chris whom I've known for about as long as I can remember. His parents and my parents are already down at the beach, and they've known eachother since college. They have a daughter Allison, who'se between me and my sister in age, but we're not sure she's coming, so we're not if my sister is coming either. We all used to go to the outer banks (N.C.) for 2 weeks every summer, but haven't in a few years. I like the beach.

This week I don't have much planned. I have to get my oil changed, and I'd like to read some more and play more piano. We'll see what happens.

Sorry this post sucks. I'll do better next time. promise.

one month and counting

Tracey and I don't go on many dates. Well, not many real dates. You know: dinner, movie, something private. There's always family around, or some of our friends. Yesterday we managed to go out and see Wedding Crashers: the third time in the past month that we've done something just the two of us. (That sentence sounds right, but I can't figure out linguistically why it works. Any help?) Rather than just repeat Kevins blog, I'll let you read his review. Good movie.

My brother has orientation today and yesterday. He spent Sunday night at my place and I drove him to campus in the morning, which meant I got to work around 7:30. I should really start showing up earlier. I'm much more productive (when I'm not posting to my blog.) He spent the night on campus and I'm taking him home this afternoon. Then I get to try to fix his computer again. We're going to try an IDE hard drive and see if that helps. Even though it works fine with Linux, he's a gamer so he wants Windows.

As for Friday, rather than me keep changing times... Ben, Anna, would you come over if we started earlier? and if so, how early do you think is good? (most people probably won't show up until later, but that'll just mean it will be less noisy and crowded.) Will, I'm assuming you're not going to be in town, even though it usually works out so that you are. Anybody else reading this is welcome too. Everybody but Will.

This doesn't belong here

I should probably post this on codemill, but it barely qualifies so I'll leave it here. My brother got all the parts to his computer and set it up. I think he fiddled too much with it before giving me a chance to look at it, and we're having trouble booting the windows install CD or running the mobo driver's install CD (bootable). The Windows install CD freezes after saying something about checking the system configuration, and the mobo boot CD says the hard drive (SATA) is not HPA compatable, which I believe it is (apparently it's some problem with some BIOSes not reporting HPA compatability for HPA compatable SATA drives.) The funny part is that Linux installs and boots just fine. This is one of those rare occations where Linux is compatable with a setup while Windows is not. Even the hardware drivers don't like the setup, but Linux copes. I'm guessing it's because Linux doesn't use bios any more than it has to, while Windows relies on it. I think we're going to play with some IDE drives to see if that helps. Apparently Kevin ran into a similar problem when he made his computer.

Oh, we're having a party Friday night. We'll probably be playing poker earlier, so if you want to play (or if you don't feel like staying out late... ahem... ben and anna...) show up earlier, around 7ish. That's right... not around 7, or 7ish, but around 7ish. I'm going to be that vague.

Renaissance Man

I'm having more and more trouble making up my mind lately, entering some sort of superposition of grad school decision eigenstates, if you would. This happens to me every now and then; I start getting interested in some new field, and find the resources needed to educate myself. Right now, it's physics and chemistry. I've spent a few days reading about molecular orbitals, and I think I'm starting to grasp the concepts in chemistry that I couldn't, or didn't, get in high school. Either way, having too many interests beats the hell out of having no interests, or no resources, so I'm not complaining. I'm just stating an observation.

I just finished reading Angels and Demons, and it was basically The Da Vinci Code with the details shuffled around a little. Still a good read, but I think I'm done with Dan Brown for a while. I got a copy of The Traveler, by John Twelve Hawks, and read a review comparing it to, and elevating it above, The Da Vinci Code. From what I understand it's written in the same style, and does to a big brother government what The Da Vinci Code did to the Catholic church. I'll probably read this later, since I'm in the mood for non fiction (see 1st paragraph.) I started reading the first volume of the Feynman Lectures On Physics. It's an interesting book, even though it's basically just a collection of his lectures, because it's so old. He was talking about subatomic particles, and his list was missing a lot of new particles (I didn't even see the word quark) and when he spoke about biology, he mentioned DNA and RNA, but said that nobody knew how proteins were made from RNA. Also, he labeled the base pairs A, B, C, and D. On the subject of books, does anybody know a good chemistry book they would recommend?

My brother's an eagle scout now. He outranks me, but I earn more than he does, so it all balances out. This is a short paragraph.

Tracey met my family on Saturday. She and my Mom got along well together, and both said privately afterwards that they thought the other was nice. This can mean only one thing: this relationship has got to end, now. A girlfriend who gets along with your mother is dangerous. They'll talk.

I'm getting addicted to playing Poker. Texas Holdem, international rules. I finally won a game last week, then promptly was the first one out in the next game. You win some, you lose some horribly due to going all in on a straight draw. I'm also getting addicted to Beaver. No, not the animal meat, nor the sexual reference (though both are nice), but the water sport (once again, not the sexual reference.) Some people call it Sharks and Minnows, but Stonegate Pool doesn't do that for some reason. As far as I can tell the rules for the game are the same.

Time for some blatant ego stroking/whoremongering. I've been told this picture is sexy by both Leonard (Tims little brother) and Kayla as well as some girls up in Vermont who go to school with her... If anybody can think of a funny caption, I'll upload it to my friendster account with that caption, attributed to whoever came up with it.

Deep Impact a success

So, the Deep Impact mission was a success last night. It was fairly suspensfull leading up to the impact; for about a minute or so the entire auditorium was silent, the projectors displaying images from the impactor as it approached, and shots of nervous rocket scientists from JPL headquarters. All of a sudden, the teleconference with JPL showed NASA team members jumping up and down, hugging like long-lost family, shaking hands, and so forth. The mood lightened on our end too: mostly laughter at the behavior of the rocket scientists. Now, down to the science. No, I'm not involved in any of the science myself, but I am very close to all the scientists, so I get better access than most. One of my bosses being the principal investigator and the Santa-Clause-looking guy here.

The theories leading up to the impact led us to believe that the ejecta cone would be somewhere from 10 degrees from the normal vector to 45 degrees from the normal. All the images streaming down sofar make the ejecta cone look like it's the full 90 degrees; there's no real cone structure. I haven't seen any data about the crater yet, and it's likely to still be forming as I write this. That comet has some weak gravity, so everything runs in slow motion. Everything has been running smothly on the UMD end; my website (password protected, unfortunately, so I can't show off) has been running smothly, allowing scientists from around the world to upload their findings and search through other peoples findings. All the servers are happy. It seems as though I could have gotten much more sleep this weekend with the end result being the same.

Anyway, I shifted my hours with a coworker so I'm working from 8:00 am to 1:00 pm instead of noon to 5:00 pm, so at least I'll have this afternoon off.

Expect a lot of these

It's 2:42 AM and I'm sitting in my office, waiting for something to happen. If the building burns down or floods, I get to go home and other people have to deal with that mess. Unfortunately, the risks of getting caught and the desire to stay employed are preventing me from taking things into my own hands. So I sit here, while all the servers run smoothly. I am the failsafe, the plan that everybody needs to have, but nobody thinks they'll need, because in all likelihood they won't. I am reminded of a day at my old job, where I showed up to work at 9 and it got started like a regular day. Then, all of a sudden, the company was getting kicked out of a colocation facility because of spam complaints (I'm still not sure if it was legitimate or not, but who cares), and I had to stay until 5:00 in the morning driving servers around the great state of Virginia. Today feels like it's going to be like that day, only more so. I got to work at 8:00 am today, and stayed until noon. I had a whole 12 hours off, and spent most of it with Tracey painting, or stripping wallpaper, and meeting a lot of her family. I got no sleep, but it was my choice so I can't complain too much. Anyway, I'm here until 6:00 in the morning. I expect that by the end of my shift I will be quite delusional, and writing much more fanciful posts.

Women and Ice Cream

Good, glad to see I got your attention. Please, if everyone would be seated we can get started. I've recently come to the conclusion that too many of my posts have been narcissistic, detailing my comings and goings as though I live an interesting life, a life worthy of a best selling autobiography. So I'm going to try, at least in part, to give you something interesting to read.

Those electrons up in the sky have been up to it again. They've gathered forces and in about a day, struck a girl sleeping in bed, a boy through his video game controller, and a worker at the National Weather Service facility. I for one welcome our new electron overlords. Partially because if I try to get rid of them, I'll die. I'm especially fond of the last one, since they were tracking a severe weather system at the time.

Back to the shameless self promoting that we've all grown to expect. I saw The Eels at the 9:30 club on Tuesday. My sister wanted to go, but didn't want to go alone, so she got me to go. She thought they'd be on later, for whatever reason I'll never know, so we didn't get there until 9:15ish. Unfortunately, they started around 8:15, so we missed a good portion of their show. We still got to see a good set, and they did three encores. A couple of which contained multiple songs. They'd disappear, and people would start to leave, or bang their hands together violently, and the band would eventually come back. My sister had some doubts each time that they'd be coming back, but if there's one thing I learned from working stage-crew in high school, it's that that whole fat-lady-singing thing is a myth; it's not over until they bring up the house lights.

I'm working some great hours this weekend. Here's a quick run down:

day	begin	end
Saturday	8:00 am	12:00 noon
Sunday	12:00 midnight	6:00 am
Sunday Night-Monday Morning	10:00 pm	3:00 am
Monday	12:00 noon	5:00 pm
Tuesday	6:00 am	12:00 noon

The actual encounter with Tempel 1 will be at 1:52 am EDT Monday morning. I'll be working at the open house then, but I've been told that I'll be able to see the data as it comes in. If you're bored, here's the UMD website for Deep Impact.

Waste some time, why don't you

Because we all like science.

It's Monday

And that means that I'll post to my blog instead of doing actual work. I love having a job where I sit by a computer all day long.

Last week was good. I thought I was coming down with a cold in the beginning of the week, but it passed quickly. Boxing on Tuesday was mediocre. There were an odd number of people boxing, so I had to group up with the newbies and help the instructor demonstrate. That meant that I didn't get to do much actual boxing, but I won't complain too much since I was getting over the aforementioned cold. Wednesday afternoon I donated blood. I didn't wind up getting light headed like I usually do when I lose that much blood, so that's a plus. After work I went up to Paul's house and we then went to his pool. Wednesday nights at his pool are 21 and up, and you don't have to be a member (though a member does have to let you in.) So we hung out with his brother, this guy Dylan, and Tracey's sister (a lifeguard) would occasionally sit down with us. Tracey got there a bit late, since she had field hockey that evening. Not much to say here; we went swimming, then we left. It's a pool. What do you want?

Thursday I went up to Tracey's house with the intent to watch a movie, which never happened. I got there as she and her brother were making dinner, then we all got in their hot tub. (Just once I would like to live in a house with a hot tub.) At some point whilst hot tubbing we heard some voice calling for help. It was one of their neighbors; he had fallen down a few stairs and couldn't get up. This guy was old, feeble, and from what I'm told not too mentally stable or nice. Still, Tracey's brother and I hopped the fence and helped him up. This was a long and arduous task; this guy seemed pretty shaken, and didn't want to move that fast. Two middle aged men came by to help, and we got him on his way. Only afterwards did I realize that one of the men who came to help was Tracey's dad; he had just gotten home. I'm not sure what kind of first impression I made there. On one hand, I was helping someone who had fallen. On the other hand, I was in a bathing suit, as was Tracey, and the hot tub was on. I hope that the fact that Tracey's brother was there, and was also in a bathing suit, convinced him that we weren't fooling around in his hot tub.

Friday I went up to Paul's to play poker. Tracey and Danny are good at poker. Paul and I lack skill. I should read up on poker strategy some time before the next time we play. My only real consolation is that we don't play for real money.

Saturday Tracey and I went to the pool in my new neighborhood. I'm not sure how I feel about this pool. On the one hand, it's fairly large, and close. On the other hand, there's no grassy area (it's all concrete,) and there's little area to sit. Later that evening we got dinner at Ricciuiti's and then went to Cold Stone for ice cream. Cold Stone is an interesting place. They follow the logic that people who want ice cream also want to get it at some goofy place... a place that Willy Wonka would design if he were lazy and didn't feel like breeding more Opmpa Loompas. For starters, the people working behind the counter have to sing a little song, of which there appear to be many, every time you give them a tip. From what I can tell the song they choose is mostly random, but I think they may have special ones when the tip surpasses a dollar. Also, they are too crazy to follow conventional size names. Small, Medium, and Large are too straightforward. They don't even go with the big American trend of forgoing Small and having Medium, Large, and Extra Large. They avoid that whole mess and have names like "Like it", "Love it", and "Gotta have it" which make ordering, in my opinion, almost too stupid to be worth the ice cream you get in return. "Hi, I'd like a gotta have it of lobster cheesecake ice cream." Okay, the flavors aren't that bad, but they are somewhat goofy too. One last rant with this ice cream establishment: the actual portions. The bowls they have on display for the various sizes look like they differ by about 25% at the most. I figure, I'm in the mood for ice cream, I may as well get the large, um, "gotta have it." So I get it, and the thing is huge. From what I can tell they fill up the smallest bowl half way for the smallest portion, and for the largest portion they fill up the largest bowl so that you have a 50-50 chance of spilling the thing before you leave the store. I couldn't finish mine, so I threw it out. I was half tempted to drop it in their tip jar just to see if they'd have to sing.

I took Tracey home, then headed down to Laurel. Kevin and I shower (he was coming from work, me from a hot day and a chlorinated pool), separately, and I drive us down to Santa Fe where people were, get this, drinking. Only Kevin forgot his ID and we had to drive back up to Laurel, then down again to the bar. I have a few beers, but don't get shitfaced since I'm the designated driver, and eventually we leave. I'm growing less and less fond of bars, not that anything particularly bad happened there. It's just not my scene.

I'll have to have Tracey come down to the place in Laurel more often, so more of you people can meet her. She's only met Kevin so far, and I'd like her to see the whole spectrum of assholes I hang out with.

Another weekend

Another two days without work. Really, I consider my weekends to begin Friday nights and end Sunday afternoons. What was that? You don't care?

Friday night Paul and Danny (Pauls brother) and Tracey all came over to play Poker with Kevin and me. Tracey is a friend of Pauls that I met at his graduation party. We played a couple games with no buy in, and one with a $1 buy in. We're big spenders over here. I won no game. I didn't even come in second place in any game. I suck at poker, but I'm learning. Slowly. We'll probably try to play again on Friday, but we'll see. All are welcome, anyway. Before she left I asked Tracey about seeing a movie, but I'm going cronologically so we'll get to that later.

Sunday began slow. I went home to trade cars with my dad so that my brother could have a car to drive that wasn't standard. There's something seriously wrong with my dads car. When you run the AC it smells like something died, and some clear nonalcoholic liquid drips from inside the dash onto your ankles. Still, if you don't run the AC and just roll the windows down instead it's quite the nice ride. I went to the liquour store down the street and customized a couple six pacs for my dad, picking beers I've had at some of these beer tasting festivals. He's been asking me a lot about all the beer we've been brewing and the odd beer we've been trying at the house, so I figured it would make a good fathers day gift. Then, I went up to Catonsville to pick up Tracey. We got diner and saw Batman. If any of you out there haven't seen Batman, see it. Not because it's a great movie; though it is quite good. But rather because it's the first batman movie I've seen that isn't laced with mind-numbingly idiotic conversations between unconvincing characters. It's a real movie. Honest-to-god. Someone's finally done a batman movie well. Anyway, it was a good evening.

Sunday I went home. I wanted to go to the pool, but it didn't get hot enough for me to feel like it was worth it. I didn't go. I did go to Best Buy with my dad so that we could look at routers. They're getting fiber optic internet at the house sometime next month and he's trying to understand what he'll need to do various things. He wasn't to clear about the whole wireless-wired thing at first, nor about the differences between hubs, switches, and routers, but he's a quick learner with computer stuff. I'm not sure why he wanted to go to the store, instead of just talking about it at home. Maybe seeing the products in his hand while I described it made it easier. Around 5 I headed back to the place in Laurel (the town) so that I could give Kevin my pool pass so he and Laurel (the girlfriend) could go to the pool. Kevin's not a member, but he looks enough like me to get by with my pool ID. I doubt they care that much anyway. I came back to my parents place and we had dinner. After dinner we played some poker. Once again I didn't win or come in second, and with only 4 of us playing I guess I should be happy that I didn't lose entirely. I did beat my dad... I guess we're not that nice, my family, not letting my dad win on fathers day. I went out shortly after him, and Jeremy and my mom decided to quit then, my brother having more chips.

I'm probably going to see Tracey again this week. Wendesday or Thursday or something. Who wants to start placing bets on how long I take to screw this up?

Modest Mouse Concert

I went down to D.A.R. Constitution Hall last night to see the Modest Mouse concert with Tim, Parker, and Leonard. We took the Metro downtown, and on the way there we shared a train with Chevaun, a woman I know through some friends I used to get high with. Haven't seen her in years, though. She seems to be doing well, still talks to Leslie every now and then.

There was some confusion with our seats when we got there (the usher working by us didn't know Section L from her ass, and it was dark so don't blame us) but it got cleared up before Modest Mouse came on. The concert was good, but not great. I felt they had a lot of energy, but didn't channel it well so it just sounded unproduced (yeah I know, it was a live show) and the lyrics were unintelligible. Lots of screaming, which doesn't work well with their style of music. Still, I would see them again. The opening band, whose name I cannot recall but I'm sure Tim could tell you, was also fairly good.

On the way back to Greenbelt, on the green line, I bumped into some guy whom I apparently went to elementary, middle, and highschool with. I can't remember his name, but I don't think I ever hung out with him anyway so I'm not too concerned with that. Nothing interesting to note here, the conversation was that kind of forced you get when you throw two people together who should know each other, but have nothing in common. The more I talk to people who I went to school with, but never hung out with, the more glad I am that I chose to hang out with the people I did, or glad that they chose to hang out with me, or glad that none of the cool people would hang out with me, or something else like that. Highschool cool doesn't really translate to real world cool; I'm under the impression (delusion?) that I am real world cool. Hell, people even read my blog. I'm a celebrity.

having trouble with the whole "title" thing

<disclaimer-speak>
Damnit. I just wrote a huge post, but the keybindings in Firefox are different from Safari and I just erased the whole damn thing. If this post doesn't seem up to par, blame it on that.
</disclaimer-speak>

This weekend went quite far in bringing me back to my normal happy self. I should probably be less dramatic in the future.

Friday night a bunch of us were planning on going out to Santa Fe. Kyle and Katie were coming up from D.C., and I hardly get to see them so I was looking forward to that. Kevin and Laurel were also planning on coming, and so was Karen and some of her high school friends. Everybody but me takes longer than expected to get there, and Kevin called on the way to tell us that they were bringing Amy, Laurels sister, who is 19. That means, of course, that we cannot go to a bar since all the College Park bars are 21 and up. I start thinking that the night is going to suck, because things aren't going according to plan and I like plans. Plans make doing things easier. Breaking plans is worse than not having plans. I need to lighten up. We go to Town Hall to pick up some booze and come back to the old house. We stay in and drink there. After a few beers a bunch of us decide we're drunk enough to walk down to 7-11. I zip up a beer in one of those huggies and we start walking. At the store Laurel buys a couple cans of that aerosol whipped cream, so she and her sister can fight later. I don't know whose idea that was, but I want to shake their hand. When we start walking back Kyle tells me to run to the house, then back to them. I drunkenly oblige. It was about a half mile to the house, and I got there sweaty and hot, so I drop off my shirt figuring I don't want it any more and it will serve as proof that I got to the house. I then run back to everybody. Man am I suggestible while drunk. Later at the house, we're hanging out on the deck, and Laurel and Amy start fighting with the whipped cream. For some reason they decide to attack me, still shirtles. It wasn't a fair fight, but I wasn't so drunk that I would demand a friends girlfriend and her little sister to take their tops off. I am a gentleman. So this gentleman takes those whipped cream cans and start spraying back. It gets messy. At some point during the brawl a can gets launched off the deck. Amy goes for the stairs and Kevin, in his constant attempt to get my pants off, is pulling on them partially to keep me from going over the side of the deck. The only way for me to get that can is to take my pants off and jump off the edge, so I do it. I know it wasn't a good idea, but at the time the 5 beers in me were doing a good job convincing me. So I get the can, and the fight continues. At some point my pants get thrown in a tree, then lost. The party slows down after that, and around 5 in the morning I drive Kyle and Katie up to my place in Laurel (the town, not the whipped-cream-wrestler.) By the way, if you get covered in whipped cream and sweat, take a shower. It will dry and smell like vomit. I took a shower and went to sleep.

The next morning after we all get up I drive Kyle and Katie to Rockville so they can meet up with a friend, and I head home to switch cars with my dad so my brother has a non-manual car to drive over the weekend. I hang out at the pool some trying to get a tan, then head home and get ready for Paul's graduation party. His party was pretty good, lots of people and the conversations were engaging. The party starts to dwindle but stays interesting. We start a couple poker games. I came in third out of five the first game, and the second game I won. Winning at Texas holdem was a new experience for me. We decide we should make it a regular event, poker night, and I hope we manage to do it. Paul's friends seem like decent people.

Today was uneventful, relaxing, and I heard back from my uncle, the physics professor, and he says that he doesn't think the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment has been verified. He sent me to these two pages:
http://www.bottomlayer.com/bottom/kim-scully/kim-scully-web.htm
and
http://www.tardyon.de/ko2.htm

That's all for now. I'll probably have more by the end of the week.

Time Machine

So, back to my crazy self, I've been thinking about physics. Mainly, quantum physics. I think I've found something wrong with either the theory, or my understanding of it. However if I'm right about this, then we should be able to setup a very simple experiment that violates causality. Still there? Okay, first, some background...

The double slit experiment is fairly simple and has been tested and confirmed. There're details here, and wikipedia does a much better job at explaining it than I could. There's something interesting to note, now. If you place something in front of each slit that sets the spin of the photon (don't worry if you don't understand spin, just accept that it can be set, and then determined later,) and make sure that the spin set by one slit is around a different axis than the spin set by the other slit. Have the detector modified so that not only can you determine where on the detector the photon hit, but also its spin. Doing this will get rid of the interference pattern. The photon can't have two different spins when it's detected, so is must have gone through one of the slits, but not both. Here's the weird part: If you place something after the double slits but before the detector that sets the spin of every photon to be the same, regardless of what it was before, the interference pattern will come back. The reasoning behind this is that since the detector can't determine which slit the photon passed through (the spin set by the slits has been erased by the new spin-setting filter in front of the detector), the photon actually passed through both, and therefore will produce an interference pattern. Oddly, it seems you can erase information, and in doing so you can erase the fact that the information ever existed and any affect that information had on a system.

There's a way to modify the experiment where rather than using a laser and two narrow slits in an otherwise opaque barrier, you split the laser into two beams using a double mirror, then recombine the two beams on the detector. I'll try to describe this process now, since it will make my next suggestion easier to follow:

Imagine you have a square. The top left corner has a laser beam directed at it from further left (the laser is pointing to the right, and is located to the left of the top-left corner). This top-left corner has a half-mirror slanted at a 45 degree angle, so its two sides are facing up-and-right and down-and-left. This mirror will split the laser so that half of it continues along it's original path heading towards the top-right corner of the square, and the other half will be reflected down towards the bottom-left corner of the square. Now, at the top-right and bottom-left corners you place mirrors that redirect the photons to the bottom-right corner of the square. To sum up, the laser starts at the top-left corner of the square and can either go right then down, or down then right, and ends up either way at the bottom-right corner of the square. You place the detector at the bottom-right corner, and you get an interference pattern. This is really the same experiment as the double-slit experiment, except that the paths that the photons can take are more widely separated.

Like in the first example I gave, with photon spin being used to detect which path the photon took, you can place a device called a downconverter along the two paths the photon could take. A down converter converts a photon into two photons with half the energy of the original. One of these photons (called the signal) is sent on the path the original would have taken, and the other (the idler) can be detected. Thus, we can listen for idlers coming from the two downconverters and determine which way around the square a photon went, and in doing so we destroy the interference pattern. That happens because information about which way around the square a photon went is recorded. The photon can't go both ways at the same time since it had to decide at the downconverters if it was either 100% on that path, or 100% on the other path. The downconverter makes the photon decide before the detector which way it went, so its wavefunction can't wait and recombine later at the detector. No wavefunction recombination = no interference pattern.

Here's the odd part: What if we take the two idlers and send them to a double mirror. You can set up the experiment so that once an idler passes through or is reflected off of the double mirror, you have no way of telling which downconverter produced the idler. When you do that, the information about which way the photon went is irrelevant. It could have gone either way around the square, and the results would be the same. When this happens, you get the interference pattern back. That's pretty cool. Even though you know the photon passed through one of the downconverters (earlier, we knew it had some definite spin), it doesn't matter since the path information held by the idlers is erased (earlier, the spin was set to be the same for all photons.) Erasing which-path information can affect the signal photons, even if you don't touch them after the downconverters and only look at the idlers. Somehow the idlers can tell the signal photons whether or not they can act like they took both paths and produce an interference pattern, or if they have to decide one way or the other, and produce two bright spots (one for each path.)

That's weird enough, but it's not that bizarre if you accept quantum entanglement or "spooky action at a distance" as Einstein called it. The real problem is when we start to look at this from a causality perspective. Imagine that we send the idlers along some path that takes a very long period of time, like a second or two. Lets setup a lab on the moon that can either accept the idlers from earth and pass them through a double mirror, or if it wants it can detect each idler independently. If it passes the photons through the double mirror we should see an interference pattern develop back on earth, and if it detects each idler (and the path it took) without erasing the path information, we should just get two bright spots on our detector here on earth. What's wrong here is that we made the observation (interference pattern or no) more than a second before the idlers are detected. Someone on the moon, a second from now, could thus send information back to earth using the photons the earth sent it. The information would travel backwards through time. Increasing the distance a light year or so, and sending a bunch of idlers, we could use Morse code (or any binary language) to send messages from the future when the idlers are detected back to the present when we conduct the experiment.

What if we set up another experiment where the people detecting the idlers have a separate interference-pattern detecting device that sends its idlers back to earth. It'll take a year to get here, and when the idlers do we can decide if we want to produce an interference pattern or not on the detector a light year away and a year in our past. Assuming the people a light year away are nice enough, they could in theory copy the message we sent them and send it back to us. They would do this by looking at the presence or absence of an interference pattern on their end, and combine the idlers we sent them when they detect an interference pattern at their end (thereby inducing an interference pattern at our end), and when they don't see an interference pattern on their end they could detect the idlers we sent them independently (thereby preventing an interference pattern at our end.) This would, in effect, allow us to send messages 2 years into the past.

This, obviously, violates causality. So what's the deal? What don't I understand here? Is it actually possible to send information backwards through time? I'm betting that this is like the perpetual motion machine I designed years ago: it looks good on paper to novices, but once you really understand what's going on it's obvious why it won't work.

Jeremy's Graduation

Jeremy just graduated from Springbrook yesterday, so I took off work to go to the ceremony at D.A.R. Constitution Hall. Once we got there and sat down, the Ralphs sat down next to my family. My sister was good friends with Colleen, and they also have a daughter older than my sister, Bridget (my age), and one my brothers age, Emily, who walked in the procession next to my brother... coincidence? I think so. The ceremony was typical for a highschool graduation. Uninspiring speeches by people who will soon probably be flipping burgers at Taco Bell [sic]. At seemingly random points throughout the event people from the crowd would yell their friends names, and sometimes someone on stage would do a little dance or pimp walk or something. Also, people would clap during a musical performance, rather than after, which is typically expected. So people don't know how to act in public: no news here, and nothing changed from 4, 5, or 7 years ago, when I attended other highschool graduations. One thing I thought was funny was that my dad and sister would comment on how rude people were being, and then when they were reading out the names and the graduates were walking across the stage my dad tried to go to sleep. Now, being disrespectful like that is nowhere near the kind of inconsiderate hooting and hollering while whoever's talking/performing on stage that other people were doing, I still found it ironic that he would do it after being so critical of everybody else. Ah well, that's my snobby hypocritical family for you. After the ceremony we went out to dinner at a French bistro, "Mon Ami Gabi" in Bethesda, and not only did I work on a group project in my U.S. government class a year or two ago with the hostess, but I also knew our waiter from a few years back; I used to get high with him. It was kindof awkward being waited on by a guy I'm used to thinking of as a friend (or at least a friendly acquaintance, since we typically only saw each other through mutual friends.) At least he hung out by the table every now and then so we could catch up, and not about the specials they had that day. I was just worried that my parents would make a scene and I would have to wind up apologizing for them at some random party in the future. They behaved. Now I just hope they tipped well.

Pissed off

I'm not sure how to go about describing my current state of mind, but it's not good. I've been pissed off at a lot of people lately and I'm not sure if it's something wrong with me, or them, or both. Most of this has happened since moving into the new house, but I think the roots of it go further back. It's a shame that I don't understand this better. I have a couple guesses as to what's going on. First, it's some kind of hormonal thing, possibly brought on through to my newfound addiction to swimming and lifting weights, that is making me notice things now that would have previously gone undetected, or at least ignored. I'm not so sure that's it, though, since my malaise seems to be directed at specific people, not everybody I see. I guess I could have also hit some kind of tipping point where I'm just tired of ignoring all the stupid shit I have to put up with. An alternative is that I am, in fact, surrounded by people who aren't as decent as I thought. Now I'm not saying that I'm some kind of saint, nor that I'm any better than any of you. I know I can be a jerk sometimes, and I'm working on that. I'm just used to feeling like I'm surrounded by smart, honest, decent people, and now I'm getting the impression that I'm not and it's frustrating. I think this is all compounded by the fact that everybody whom I think really understands me isn't ever around, or even in the state. This isn't the first time I've felt this way, but usually it only lasts a day or so before I revert to my indifferent, coping self. This time, it keeps getting compounded by my interactions, so I'm going to actually try to do something about it. What, I'm not sure, but I'm going to need to affect major change in the way I live my life if I'm ever going to get out of this rut.

Drinking at the zoo, round two

This 3-day weekend just past wasn't as relaxing as it could have been, and I'm not sure why. I did all the stuff one would usually do to relax (I drank, I slept, I saw a movie,) but for some reason it just didn't click and now I feel like I should take the rest of the week off too.

Saturday morning Tim and I went to help Karen move some china cabinets from her aunts house to her parents house. Barbara brought her Suburban and Tim, Karen's dad, and I hauled these cumbersome wood-and-glass boxes down some stairs and into the SUV. When we were unloading the heavy one we failed to notice that the rear gate of Barbara's Suburban wasn't straight on top (due to one of those center brake lights,) and this put a lot of pressure on the cabinet, breaking the mirror set in the back. Luckily it looks like it will be easy to replace. After this, Karen, Barbara, Tim and I went to Le Madeleine for lunch, then Tim and I drove back to the place in Laurel, picked up Kevin, and headed up to Baltimore to pick up Nina and go to the Baltimore Zoo. This was the second Brew at the Zoo I've been to, and the first trip was much more successful. I was worried that the weather would be bad, but we lucked out there. Unfortunately we got there a little late, so a lot of booths ran out of their beers before we could try them. This wouldn't have bothered me so much if we hadn't been waiting in line at two of these places when they ran out. We all came back to Laurel to hang out, and on the way there we saw Parker coming home from work. She honked, we flipped her off, then she somehow passed us. I blame Tim's driving. The five of us (Parker included) went to Olive Garden for dinner, then hung out at the house for a while before I drove Nina home.

Sunday I went to the gym, then took a nap. This somehow took up most of the day. At around 9 we headed up to Nina's for a party she was having. Now, I'm not saying the party sucked (because it didn't, really,) but for a while thefacebook.com and Nina's computer were jointly the most popular person there. Parker drank too much and passed out on the futon (at least she didn't vomit) and Tim dragged me out of there before I could make a huge mistake. I must learn to limit my alcohol consumption when I'm around former girlfriends.

Monday I went to the gym, then went to my parents for the afternoon to see my family and eat dinner. Jeremy and I talked Becky into coming out to see Star Wars III instead of working on her resume (res-um-AY, res-um-AY, it still sounds weird.) I wasn't impressed with the film. Sure, the graphics were cool, and Yoda and R2-D2 kicked ass, but the dialogue was horrible, and in the last 10 minutes of the movie it appears that they lost all the futuristic looking technology from episodes I, II and most of III, and decided instead to go with 1960s style British military uniforms and huge rectangular plastic buttons. I guess maybe the retro look was coming back into style.

So that's that. Maybe it sounds like a fun weekend, and maybe it actually was and I just had too much on my mind to appreciate that, but for whatever reason today feels like a Friday, or a Thursday at the earliest. Tonight I get to go to this Boxing club, so I guess I'll figure out if it's something I want to do all summer.