weblog dealy

Codemill

2009-04-09T14:29:00.003-04:00

Codemill has a new post, on paging in the 32 bit x86 architecture. I know you're all dying to read it.

Vote

2009-02-24T12:41:00.003-05:00

532,668 people reside in Wyoming (2008 estimate), and they get 2 senators and 1 representative. Washington D.C. has 591,833 (2008 estimate) residents, no senators, and one non voting delegate in the House. A population over 11% larger than that of the entire state of Wyoming, and no vote in Congress.

$20 billion have been paid in federal taxes in 2007 by D.C. residents: the highest per-capita in the U.S. On average D.C. residents paid over $34 thousand compared to the runner-up, Delaware, at less than $20 thousand per resident. Wyoming pays on average less than $10 thousand per resident. (FY2007 Federal Tax Revenue)

Depending on which polls you go by, anywhere from 61% to 82% of Americans support D.C. voting rights.

Let's hope this is a good week.

Israel

2008-06-20T13:47:00.002-04:00

Short post. Going to Israel for a little over 2 weeks. Will travel all over the country. There will be a wedding. Leaving tonight. Returning on the 7th. On the way there and back, I get some time in London to wander around. Let's hope this cease fire sticks. Will take pictures.

Left v. Right

2008-01-15T13:23:00.000-05:00

We've all probably heard the concept that different people may experience color differently. Maybe what I see as yellow looks, in my mind, like what the color blue looks like in your mind. There's no real way to answer that question definitively using modern technology and our limited understanding of how the brain works, but in theory with sufficiently advanced technology and a sufficiently advanced understanding of the brain, one could answer that question. Of course, there would be no 'right' or 'wrong' way to perceive colors, but one could at least agree that two people either see things the same, or differently. That said, I've heard somewhere (it could have been through my dad, who as a lawyer, is not an authority on the matter) that we all probably see colors the same way.

The other day I was thinking along similar lines about the whole left/right distinction. The decision of which goes where is arbitrary. If everything in your head were a mirror image of what things were like in reality (we'll come to reality later), then you wouldn't have any problems getting around in the world. You would have learned to read 'backwards', drive on the 'other' side of the road, etc. However, everything would be flipped, so everything would still agree internally. Still, just like the color example we're more familiar with, it's possible that what 'left' feels like in your mind may be what 'right' feels like in my mind.

Now, if two people really do disagree in their minds of where 'left' goes and where 'right' goes, and we somehow figure out a way to study the brain enough to discover when that's the case, who would be considered to have a mirror-image view of reality? I don't believe that we could say either way, since each person's views of reality are internally consistent, and would make all the same predictions about reality. There's just no way to determine if the universe is actually this way or that way. Construct a model of the universe, and look at it through a mirror (don't try this at home, it's far too big.) Everything still works normally, since you're looking at the same thing, but certain rules are changed. The right-hand-rule for vector multiplication in electromagnetic interactions would become the left-hand-rule, the parity violation of weak interactions would cut the other way (I think that's how it works), etc. The question instead becomes whether the universe makes a choice here, or if reality doesn't actually have a preference in the left/right placement decision, and outside of our minds the structure of space is something bizarre and foreign.

Tech-savvy districts in NH like Clinton

2008-01-10T14:08:00.000-05:00

While not being definitive proof of fraud on the part of either the electronic voting machines used in New Hampshire or the human ballot counters, it seems like there is a general discrepancy in the percentage of votes won by senators Clinton and Obama in the primary. In towns that use electronic voting machines, Clinton experienced an advantage, and in towns that hand-count their ballots, Obama experienced an advantage. The other candidates also experienced advantages in one type of voting machine or the other, but the percentages were much closer to zero. I haven't figured out the statistical significance of these numbers, so it could be attributed to random noise. However, I am skeptical of that since the candidates with a higher overall vote count experienced higher discrepancies between electronic and hand-counted ballots, whereas I would think the reverse would hold if it was simply 'background noise'. All the more reason to insist that all electronic voting machines implement a voter-verified paper record of votes.

2008 New Hampshire State Primary Results

Update:
After doing some very simple analysis on the numbers, I've found the following:

Of the 135 towns that used paper ballots, Clinton beat Obama in 47 of them (~35%)
Of the 100 towns that used electronic ballots, Clinton beat Obama in 59 of them (59%)

So, in districts that use electronic ballots, Clinton beat Obama almost twice as often as she did in districts that use paper ballots.

iGoogle

2008-01-09T14:26:00.000-05:00

Despite the fact that I started using Google as my homepage because it was little more than a search box on a plain white background, I've been using the 'iGoogle' homepage for a while now. It lets you customize the page somewhat with themes, but almost all of the themes are cutesy: little cartoon animals doing something different depending on the time of day, making tea, gathering berries, what have you. Google is finally trying to break into the adults-who-don't-have-hello-kitty-pencil-bags market, and added a 'Solar System' theme. Different picture depending on the day, quite tasteful in my opinion. They have images of the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. No Pluto, no asteroids or comets, none of the jovian moons (or any moon other than THE moon for that matter,) but still a nice spread. They have 10 images, but there are only 7 days in the week, and I'm guessing that some of them are either unused, or not every day of the week will be the same from week to week.

Maths

2007-11-07T11:34:00.000-05:00

I've been digging around some, and have failed to see this information demonstrated, at least not in a way that I could identify, so...

I propose the following:

For all p, p being a safe prime (with a corresponding Sophie Germain prime s,) implies that for all y in [2, p-1], y^s mod p is either 1 or p-1.

Furthermore, a discrete logarithm only exists under the following circumstances:

0^k = z mod p is only true for z = 0, with k in {1, 2, 3, ...}
1^k = z mod p is only true for z = 1, with k in {1, 2, 3, ...}
(p-1)^k = z mod p is only true for z in {1, p-1}.
(p-1)^k = p-1 mod p for all odd k values, and
(p-1)^k = 1 mod p for all even k values.
Otherwise, let y be in [2, p-2]:
- if y^s = p-1 mod p:
  for all z in [1, p-1], there is some k such that y^k = z mod p.
  Let the set of all such y values be represented as Y.
- if y^s = 1 mod p:
  y^k = z mod p has a solution k if and only if p - z is in Y.

I have managed to show that this is true for all safe primes under one thousand, I just need to figure out how to prove it for all safe primes. Hopefully there will be more to come here.

For a follow up, here's an interesting chart showing this information for the safe prime 11. The columns represent the y values, the rows represent the z values, and the numbers in the cells (if present) represent the k values. The relevant Sophie-Germain prime powers are highlighted in green.

A			5				5	5	5		1
9			6	2	3	4	4	8	2	1
8			3				7	9	1
7			7				3	1	9
6			9				1	7	3
5			4	3	2	1	6	2	8	4
4			2	4	1	3	8	6	4	2
3			8	1	4	2	2	4	6	3
2			1				9	3	7
1		1	A	5	5	5	A	A	A	5	2
0	1
	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	A

2007/11/08: Here's a similar chart for the safe primes 5 and 7:

4			2	2	1
3			3	1
2			1	3
1		1	4	4	2
0	1
	0	1	2	3	4

6				3		3	1
5				5		1
4			2	4	1	2
3				1		5
2			1	2	2	4
1		1	3	6	3	6	2
0	1
	0	1	2	3	4	5	6

Compare these against a non safe-prime (not even prime) base 12:

B												1
A											1
9				2						1
8			3						1
7								1
6							1
5						1
4			2		1				2		2
3				1
2			1
1		1				2		2				2
0	1						2
	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	A	B

I've written a program to show these tables, available here

I'm going to start solving all my problems with violence

2007-10-15T10:59:00.000-04:00

My phone was working for the most part, but the memory card I got for it wasn't being recognized. The card worked in other phones (same make and model) and other memory cards also wouldn't work in my phone. Seems my phone was the problem. Then, on Friday, I stepped out onto my balcony to make a phone call, pulled out my phone, and flipped it open. Here, my toddler-like reflexes got the better of me and the phone went sailing off the balcony. I watched as it fell down seven floors, and hit a tree. It made a nice loud crack as it hit. Figuring I was fucked, I ran downstairs to collect the pieces, and found my phone sitting on the ground, seemingly unaware that it just fell a good 70 feet. Later on during the weekend I tried the memory card again, and it works fine. So from now on, when something or someone doesn't do what I want, I'm going to throw it, or them, off my balcony. Just a heads up.

Bad time to upgrade

2007-09-11T13:58:00.000-04:00

Step 1: Get a new iPod, one of the latest-generation "iPod classic" ones.
Step 2: Realize that, while compatible with my iBook, it's not compatible with the OS I was running (10.3.something)
Step 3: Decide that, since I was planning on upgrading anyway, now would be a good time to do it.
Step 4: Go out and buy OS 10.4.
Step 5: Realize today that OS 10.5 is due to come out in a month, and is also compatible with my iBook.

I wonder if I'll be able to upgrade to OS 10.5 at a discount since my purchase of 10.4 was so recent. Google hasn't been much help on that end, so I guess it's "wait and see" for the time being.

Bored

2007-09-06T12:37:00.000-04:00

I'm bored, so I'm going to bore you with some computer stuff...

When working in any programming language that supports C-style commenting (both /* */ and //), there is a simple way to have a large block of code that can easily be commented and uncommented. You start the comment block normally: /*, but you end the comment somewhat differently: //*/, with no code following on the line of the end-comment code. To un-comment the block of code, type another / before the opening /*, resulting in //*:


// Commented out:
/*
foo("bar");
...
//*/

// Not commented out:
//*
foo("bar");
...
//*/

Okay, back to work.

Stardust

2007-09-04T13:05:00.000-04:00

So last night I saw Stardust: that new movie based on the novel by Neil Gaiman. The movie was excellent; on par with Pan's Labyrinth, with the added bonus of me not having to read subtitles or learn Spanish (which, really, I should learn anyway.) This post is not, however, going to be a review of the movie. Just go see it.

A little later that night, I was standing outside with my field of vision unintentionally pointing upwards, when I saw a meteor (more precisely, a fireball, boldie, or detonating fireball.) Now, I've seen meteors before: individual unexpected meteors, meteor showers I've decided to go outside and watch, I've even briefly owned a couple meteorites. This one was a vibrant green, a color I've seen before in meteors, and lasted a good two to three seconds. Towards the end of it's path it slowed down and disintegrated into several smaller chunks, some falling behind to make a short trail of meteors. One of the more impressive displays I've seen. I'd guess it's apparent magnitude was at least as bright as -5.

Statistical Linguistics + Music

2007-02-20T15:34:00.000-05:00

A class I'm taking this semester on computational linguistics, which is a continuation of the one I took last semester, is covering statistical analysis of linguistics. The subject covers everything from calculating how often specific words occur by simply counting them and dividing by the total number of words, to automatically grouping words by grammatical class and determining simple rules of grammar, to determining the author of unknown works by comparing them to samples of works by known authors. It's not what I thought the field would be when I started taking the course, but it's extremely interesting (to me, at least.) I've been wondering what else you could do with this, and then it hit me.

What if, instead of words, letters, or sounds, you used musical notes. You could create, more or less, the same type of analysis for music as you can for language. Some applications could be interesting, like determining the composer of unknown works, but the same tools that allow you to describe language, or in this case music, allow you to go the other way: you can create random variations based on what you've seen and analyzed. I tried this a while ago with my blog, and while a lot of the text it produced is garbage (you need a ton of sample text to get consistently good English, and my blog isn't that large), there were a few gems. Like "Tim can confiscate your property if he wants to." I'm looking into what's necessary to do this with music. I have a ton of Scott Joplin sheet music that I could run the analysis on, create a model, then generate novel music from. Chances are a lot of it will be crap, but with a basic understanding of music theory I could add some assumptions on how music is structured that could improve the results.

The only thing holding me back is that, while I really want to do this, I would have to translate all the sheet music into something a program could understand, which will involve a ton of typing. I could also do it on waveforms taken from MP3s on my computer, but that'll add an extra layer to the problem: figuring out the notes from the sound, which seems trivial but is actually fairly hard, especially with all the distortion used in a lot of my music. Maybe if I stick around another 4 years after I get my linguistics degree and get a music degree it'll all come together.

If I pull my act together and do this, I'll post some MP3s. Just don't hold your breath.

Wait, teenagers know about sex? When did this happen?

2006-11-29T10:32:00.000-05:00

The Bush administration has been focusing on abstinence as the only one hundred percent effective way of preventing unwanted out of wedlock pregnancies. Spending federal tax dollars on preaching this message to minors is bad enough, in my mind, and the 18-29 year old crowd is being added as targets of this message since the problem of out-of-wedlock pregnancies for that age group is large. I see two logical flaws with this approach. One is that if abstinence is the only 100% effective way to prevent unwanted pregnancies, and pregnancies are a risk one takes when choosing to take part in unnecessary and risky behavior (sex, that is, if you don't remember what you learned in middle school health class), what is preventing that logic being applied to other unnecessary and risky behavior. High school sports come to mind. Any kind of contact sport (though according to my brother, dancing is a contact sport, football and lacrosse are impact sports) carries a risk of injury. If the only 100% effective way to prevent unwanted concussions and broken bones is to not take part in sports, why are these sports encouraged? I guess team-building and physical fitness are some of the benefits of doing sports; however, there have been a few studies showing that encouraging aggression on the field translates into more aggression in other aspects of life, so there is at least some detrimental social impact from sports like football, etc. In addition, frequent sex has been linked to improvements in mood and mental composure. What it seems to boil down to is that society deems sex out of wedlock to be immoral, while sports to be wholesome, to hell with the evidence. This argument could be continued indefinitely, it seems, and probably neither side would be able to convince the other. So even though the internet is the perfect place for such an indefinite argument, I'm not interested in having it. So on to my main objection (math warning).

In practice, abstinence is 100% effective, while contraceptives vary in effectiveness, but tend to be good and can be combined (if a condom is 90% effective, and the pill is 98% effective, a combination of the two should be 99.8% effective.) Abstinence is in the lead. However, public policy is not directly tied to sexual behavior. There is a barrier: the effectiveness of education. Assuming that abstinence only education is 90% effective, and contraceptive education is 95% effective (both probably off, but in my mind fair guesses), then we have to tie in these numbers to get the actual expected risk to the population. With these numbers, abstinence only education would be, in the end, 90% effective (90% of the time it works every time, 10% of the time it never works), while contraceptive education would be 94.81% effective (95% of the time it is 99.8% effective, 5% of the time it never works.) While touting the message that abstinence is the only 100% effective behavior to prevent unwanted pregnancies, it may be the case that contraceptive education is more effective than abstinence-only education (using my numbers and a slew of other assumptions.) So until we know the effectiveness of the various methods of education, relying on the assumption that people will behave in accordance to whatever way we educate them is unfounded, risky, and may lead to a less effective public policy towards sex.

Time Machine, revisited

2006-11-17T10:25:00.000-05:00

In June of 2005, I posted about an idea I had about sending information backwards in time. This morning, I got IMs from Tim and Ben pointing me to this article in which John Cramer, a physicist at the University of Washington, is performing an experiment testing what I proposed. It's not the exact setup I described, but the basic idea is the same: you perform an observation at some point in the future on an entangled photon which will determine how the entangled photons pair behaves when you observe it in the present. If you do one thing to the future photon, the present photon behaves like a particle (the superposition collapses before observation) and if you do something else to the future photon, the present photon behaves like a wave (the superposition collapses at observation). My first reaction was that he stole my idea, which is obviously not likely. I then found this article, written in 1997, describing the foundation of the experiment. So he beat me to the punch, but I still feel good about getting the idea in the first place.

California

2006-10-17T14:23:00.000-04:00

My job sent me to California again. This is the second time I've been sent out on business, and the second time it has been to Pasadena. And guess what? Next week, I'm going back for another meeting. Three business trips, three times to Pasadena... At least the weather this time was much better; the last time I went it rained the whole time. This was much more like how I would expect southern California to feel.

I went for the 38th annual DPS meeting. I sat behind a table, talking to the occasional passers by, but mostly took advantage of the fact that a bunch of other people from the PDS, not just the SBN, who work elsewhere in the country were there, and I got a bunch of good ideas for my search engine.

Thursday night I went out with my boss, Bill Knopf, the head of the PDS, and a few other coworkers. We went to pick up Bill's friend, Rob, who has a recording studio on Los Angeles, and while we were at his house Stevie Wonder came by to pick up a hard drive (Rob handles Stevie's music hardware.) Stevie Wonder was suprisengly interested in astronomy, and we were all trying to figure out in our heads the math for the distance, speed and time of a few space probes. After Stevie left we got a tour of the recording studio, which was in this guys house, and it was impressive. I didn't bother counting how many computers, keyboards, sequencers, mixers, etc. he had there, but there were a few rooms full of the stuff. After the tour, the executive vice president of Sony came by to pick something up, and we talked with him for a while about the computer animation software they're using, particularly the "fur algorithm" used in open season. Unfortunately he didn't reveal any trade secrets I could go sell to their competitors. After he left the rest of us went to dinner, a good restaurant but an anticlimax from the rest of the night, and talked mostly about music... turns out basicaly everybody I work with either plays some instrument, conducts, or in some way does music-stuff in their free time. Go figure.

Friday afternoon before my flight I went to visit Allison, a childhood friend (her parents and my parents are friends, and we used to all go to the outer banks every summer when we were kids.) She's going to law school at UCLA. We got lunch, caught up for a while, then I had to go catch my flight.

I got sick at some point on this trip, and flying with a cold did a number on my ears. I'm just getting over it now, so I'm not looking forward to next weeks trip.

Glossary:
DPS: Division for Planetary Sciences, a part of the AAS
AAS: American Astronomical Society
PDS: Planetary Data System, a division of NASA
SBN: Small Bodies Node, a part of the PDS
ME: trying to sound important

Dinosaurs had scales

2006-09-06T10:15:00.000-04:00

I was bored, and remembered back from my days of music theory that there are a bunch of different 7-tone scales, more than just Major, Natural Minor and Harmonic Minor. I don't really care about all of them, so here's the short list of ones I was thinking of. On a piano, starting on the following notes and hitting the 7 following white keys (no sharps or flats) gives the following scales:

C Major

D Dorian

E Phrygian

F Lydian

G Mixolydian

A Natural Minor

B Locrian

Now on to dinosaurs...

In my psychology class, the teacher was talking about evolution. The first thing that caught my attention was his discussion on heart disease (we'll get to dinosaurs in a minute). He said that the reason humans are susceptible to heart disease now is that for a long period of human history we weren't living very long. The average lifespan was probably somewhere in the 20s or 30s. If heart disease doesn't set in until the 50s or 60s, then nobody would be living long enough for that to be a problem, so we never bothered evolving to be less vulnerable to such a fate. But, now that we are living to be old enough to encounter the problem, humans may wind up evolving wider coronary arteries that are harder to clog, or something along those lines. (He didn't mention that, while we weren't living that long, we were also much more active and probably ate less fatty foods, but that's not a big deal.) What bothered me is that, while yes, people are dying of heart attacks, most people have them when they are old and have already had children, so the genes are already passed on. This sort of thing is called a selection shadow, and it sort of shows that he should stick to psychology and stay away from biology.

The other thing he said, that really got me, was about how human memory evolved. He said that our early ancestors probably had worse memory than us today, and our memory today still isn't perfect (though, his idea of perfect is also flawed, ignoring the concept of efficient storage of relevant facts instead of brute-force perfectly-photographic memory.) He then, in his infinite wisdom, went on to say that a probable reason for this was that humans with better memory could remember where dinosaurs tended to hang out and avoid them. My professor suggested that humans had to avoid dinosaurs. DINOSAURS!

And people are surprised that, in the beginning of a college evolution class when the teacher asks for a show of hands who thinks that humans and dinosaurs coexisted at the same time period, a significant portion of students raise their hands. (true story)

I'm going to go drink heavily and hope to forget this.

Theft

2006-08-24T11:11:00.000-04:00

I saw a few articles recently that I find somewhat disturbing. The gist is that the police can confiscate your property if a crime might have been committed, even if the courts find you innocent.

Police property: It’s finders keepers in NH

Federal Appeals Court: Driving With Money is a Crime

Any lawyers feel like weighing in?

Shitty Birds

2006-08-22T22:47:00.000-04:00

So I need one of those fake decoy owls, or a real owl that I can keep on my balcony. Birds seem to think that the railing and chairs on my balcony are good places to perch and expel waste, and I disagree. It hasn't been a problem until now, so my only guess is that the birds are coming back to College Park for spring semester classes... because birds never migrate or anything.

Lazy like a fox!

2006-08-17T16:54:00.000-04:00

So I haven't posted in a while, nor am I going to post much here. I'm starting a blog for beer recipies, food recipies, and really, recipies for anything you consume. My figuring is that between Tim, my Dad, and me brewing beer, me trying to learn how to cook, and (from what I hear), Tim's dad developing an interest in wine making, we should be able to get a decent number of posts... better than codemill at least. I need a better name, since now it's only beerandfood.blogspot.com, but all of the simple names I could think of were taken (by people who had one post, total, back in 04 or 05.) So, if you're interested in getting setup as a contributor, let me know and I'll try to figure out how to do all that.

I'm making the blog on the new blogger (beta.blogger.com) since, for a while, that was the only site I could access. See, my blogger and gmail logins were the same, so when I went to log into blogger it found a gmail account with that login/pass and figured I was logging into the beta site. That meant that I had no way of logging into the old site, which meant I couldn't post here. I just fixed it, so I'm back. Hooray!

Beer and Cheese

2006-05-30T11:32:00.000-04:00

Went to the Baltimore Zoo on Saturday with everybody, and most of the beer I had was of good quality. I, uh, entered a cheese eating contest. Only because Tim and John were doing it and I didn't want to appear weak... and I'm stupid... and I like cheese. There were 10 guys on stage and we were each given a block of cheese (me? Pepper Jack) and two minutes in which to eat it. One guy launched his cheese into the crowd while trying to open it. I tried to stay calm and not stuff my face, and my approach worked: I won... two tickets to Six Flags... and the free block of cheese I just ate. I almost lost it twice but managed to keep everything down. I got passing comments for the rest of the day from strangers... things along the lines of "This guy likes cheese!" and such. My parents should be so proud.

grocery list: sponges

2006-05-10T12:37:00.000-04:00

Moving out of the old place was quite the ordeal. Having the keys to my new place for a couple weeks before moving out of the house in Laurel made the move easier than it could have been; I got to move a lot of my stuff (books, clothes, etc.) before the actual move. On the Friday before the move I brought as much of my small furniture as I could, leaving only my bed, a couple couches, a table, and a book case for when we had a moving truck. Saturday morning Tim and I went to pick up the U-Haul and first loaded my stuff. Parker and Tim then came down with me and helped move stuff up to my apartment. A couch and the book case proved difficult to fit into the elevator because Tim and I, the people carrying the heavy furniture, couldn't figure out how to get a couch that is too long to slide in the elevator upright, and too long to just tilt and slide in to fit into the elevator. Parker (the nurse and, in my mind, less mathematically/geometrically inclined, suggested we slide it in upright and then stand it on its end once it's in. This, in hindsight, should have been obvious to Tim and me, but we're dumb, and Parker is smart. Once we got all the furniture moved in my brother called. He was supposed to help out, but didn't think we would start as soon as we did, so he came back to Laurel to help move Tim and Parkers stuff. They had a lot more stuff than I did, probably because there is two of them and they weren't moving as much stuff beforehand. We filled up the U-Haul, and two vans, and drove up to their place in Columbia. They have a 3rd floor apartment in a building with no elevators, so we had to move everything up two flights of stairs. Pushing a couch up two flights of stairs is hard, and it's even harder when you try it after spending most of the day tiring yourself out. Either way, everything was moved up, and Tim, Jeremy and I went back to Laurel to deal with the carpet people.

We have to get the carpet cleaned before leaving since there were animals in the house, but I didn't do anything with the carpet cleaners; Tim took care of that and can write about it on his blog if he pleases. If not, you'll have to be content with just the knowledge that we got the carpet cleaned. I know, I know, you want to read more about it. "Write a book!", you say. Perhaps some day, when I'm old, I'll write a memoir with a title like "Having the carpet in my old house in Laurel cleaned." or "What it's like to have a roommate talk to carpet-cleaning people." but until then, rest easy and know that, somewhere, a carpet is now cleaner than it once was.

Once the move was complete (more or less) a bunch of people came over to the house for a party. Keep in mind that there was no furniture, and we couldn't walk around on the carpet. We hung out in the kitchen mostly, and somewhat on the deck, then slept on the floor in sleeping bags.

Sunday, after cleaning up the rest of the house, I drove down to my new place in College Park and started unpacking and arranging furniture. This has been going on since, and I'm more or less happy with how I've arranged everything. I still need to get a coffee table (I think I can take my grandfathers old one that my parents are holding on to), a TV (assuming I get one) and a few more things for the kitchen. I've gone out and gotten a lot of things for my kitchen, both food, and tools for working with food, and at this point I'm only in want of some knives and maybe a mixer. I still haven't cooked a real meal. I've made dinky things like omelets, grilled cheese, and soup-from-a-can, but maybe this weekend I'll bake some bread or have my family over for dinner.

I have no internet at my place yet, and if I wasn't so busy shopping for the kitchen (damnit, I need sponges), this would mean that I would have time to read. Maybe now that everything is more or less taken care of I can read. Or maybe I can call the cable people and get some cable-tv and internet setup.

I'm probably forgetting things here, but chances are that the things I'm forgetting to write about, much like the things I have written about, aren't interesting enough to expect people to read about.

Oh, one other thing, people need to come see my place. I have food, and alcohol, and places to sit. What more could you want? Maybe after finals are over (so, next weekend) I'll have a small party where people can come over and make comments like "dude, where are your sponges" or "you should get a coffee table."

Chris Bliss

2006-04-28T16:51:00.000-04:00

Do you like juggling? How about just watching people juggle? How about watching someone do an impressive juggling routine to the tune of "Carry That Weight" by The Beatles? Most musical-juggling-link salespeople would charge $50 for such an offer, but for a limited time, it can be yours for $20. Too expensive? How about $10? Ok, ok, it's yours for free. But the next one's going to cost you. How does your first born sound? Ok, ok, second born.

Stress

2006-04-24T16:56:00.000-04:00

This week is not going to be fun...

I have a paper due tomorrow for my Philosophy of Language class... about ambiguity. It's about half done, and I'm not too worried about getting it finished on time. After class I have a teleconference with some people out at JPL, maybe my old boss at Goddard, and maybe a boss or two here in CP. It's about the status of this project JPL's working on that they want us to develop. It meshes well with my search engine, but I haven't had much time to work on it. It's been on the back burner partially since I've had a presentation to prepare for.

Oh yeah, I have a presentation on Thursday for my search engine. I've been putting some finishing touches on it, and trying to get the database it pulls the results from filled with good data, so it'll probably be ready. I still have to prepare a presentation, though, which means that some poor sap (tim?) is going to have to sit through a dry-run.

Friday, I have a meeting with the people I work with. This meeting doesn't scare me. It'll basically be a recap of the earlier meeting and my presentation, and other people talking about what they've been up to.

Then, this weekend, we're moving, which sounds relaxing. We're having a "no-furniture" party on the 29th, then I'll be living in CP again.

Ponies

2006-04-19T13:18:00.000-04:00

So on my way to work this morning I hear a rhythmic fapping sound. It's tempo is directly correlated to my cars speed. I have a flat tire.

I pull over, get out, and it's my rear-right tire. Ok, I can do this... go to the trunk. Shit, it's a mess, and the board covering my spare and the tools is covered in stuff I should throw away, and the board is stuck to boot. I should clean out my car. Anyway, I pry the board out and get the tools. After taking off the wheel cover, I loosen the nuts. It's much easier to get the nuts off than I expected it to be; last time I had to jump on the wrench to get some of the nuts to come loose, but this time it's like some bad analogy involving hoola hoops and traffic cones... I haven't lost you, have I? I jack up the car, and pull off the tire. Well, that was the plan at least. The tire doesn't budge. All the nuts are off, but it feels like someone welded my wheel to the hub. I put all my weight into it, and still nada. I pick up the phone and call AAA.

After maybe 20 minutes the guy shows up, on the opposite side of the building I'm next to, and I direct him over. He gets there, can't do anything about the stuck wheel, so he gets this green slime in a bucket and pumps some of it into my tire. This is supposed to seal the hole. He then pumps up the tire and it keeps its pressure. Hoo-ahh. Since this is only a temporary fix, I have to take it to a service station and get it done right, so I drive up Rt. 1 to the nearest station, where the mechanic is out. I'm told he'll be back in a half hour, so I figure screw it, I'll just go to the next one up the road. There, the mechanic is there but won't get to it for a while. I'm asked if I can leave the car there. I don't want to deal with any of that... I just want my car fixed... so I drive back to the 1st station and wait.

There's a guy there trying to get his car inspected, and we chat a little waiting for the mechanic. Some other guy (not the mechanic?) starts inspecting this guys car, and I sit... and wait... it's almost noon now. Eventually the mechanic is there and tells me to pull my car up. I drive it over to where he told me and he comes to take a look. First, he notices that my front-left tire is wearing out badly (the inner-tread is gone) so my alignment is probably off. After taking off the nuts from my back tire, and whacking the thing with a sledge hammer (I wonder if that's also bad for my alignment?), the tire falls off. The spare gets put on, and I get to work. I'm going to keep a sledge hammer in my trunk from now on in case this happens again. That, and road-side street-fighting (road-side-fighting doesn't sound as cool.)

I'm taking my car to the Amoco station in Colesville tonight. I think it's a BP now, but I'm still going to call it the Colesville Amoco. I need a couple new tires, my alignment checked, and a general tune up. I also think some belt in my car is wearing out and should be replaced because whenever I drive the car I remember being told by a mechanic some time ago that a belt will need to be replaced soon. What? Did you think I could actually tell that kind of thing based on how the car drives? Hell, I still think there're little ponies under the hood. I'm guessing the belts are there to keep the ponies pants on. Why ponies have to wear pants while powering an automobile, I'll never know: I don't know much about cars anyway.

New Place

2006-04-17T10:55:00.000-04:00

On Saturday I got the keys to the apartment I'm going to be living in. It's on the 7th floor, has a balcony, and I believe I was told that I may paint it. I haven't moved into it yet since we still have a couple weeks left at the place in Laurel, but I took a shower there this morning after going to the gym with Jeremy. I'm going to have to invest a lot of money (thank gov for tax returns) into kitchen appliances (microwave, blender, some cooking instruments), a television (maybe), a coffee table, and probably other odds and ends.

We're having a moving-out party on the 29th of April (about 2 weeks from now.) The house in Laurel will be empty other than the drinks, probably something to eat, and something to play music. Oh, and people; there will be people.

BBQ

2006-04-14T13:07:00.000-04:00

I know, I know, this is late notice, but we're having a BBQ tomorrow (Saturday) at around 6pm. You should get your arse over here. Also going on that day: I'm getting the keys to my new appartment, and I may go Tuxedo shopping with Tim.

On a semi related note (related in that I'm thinking of it, and I was thinking of that earlier stuff earlier,) google has a calendar application now; www.google.com/calendar. I like it.

Bush bad, Feingold smash!

2006-03-15T13:23:00.000-05:00

Saw this on Katie's blog, passing it on. Not much to say about this, just looking forward to quantum cryptography, when it might be possible to communicate and know that it's physically impossible to intercept the message.

Creative writing

2006-03-15T12:57:00.000-05:00

I'm going to get started fairly soon on a website idea I've had for a while now, and would appreciate any input from anybody who would be interested in using it. The purpose of the website will be to allow people to compose, share, and critique works of fiction. The writing will be done one page at a time (this is all electronic, so there will probably just be a word or letter limit), but you will be free to use as many pages as you like. I know, this idea is groundbreaking... I'm getting there.

It will be possible to take a partial story (say, pages 1-3 of a 5 page story) and pick up on page 4, following whatever plot line you like. The original story doesn't need to be yours, and anybody can pick up on any page of your new plot line and proceed as they like. The original 5-page story will remain, but at the bottom of page 3, rather than a single link like "go to next page" there will be the option to go to any of the tangential plot lines. You may think of this as just a web-based choose-your-own-adventure authoring tool, but that's not entirely accurate. For starters, there won't be options like "Does Jim open the box? Click here for yes, click here for no." Since this site is meant partially to provide feedback to the authors, pages will be critiqued with both written comments from other authors (assuming people actually do this) as well as numeric scores in a variety of fields (like plot consistency, writing style, etc.) and the links at the bottom of any page will have this information. All the critiques and scores will be provided by the community of writers using the page and the readers. Think of it as peer review. So, to use the above example, someone reading the story, upon finishing page 3, will be given two links, one for page 4a (the first written), and another for page 4b (the new plot line). The links will have the numeric scores displayed, to facilitate the decision of which page to move on to.

Did any of this make sense? If I wrote this would anybody be interested in using it? Any ideas that you think would make it better? Please comment; I'm going to try to get started early next week.

I'm not sure what to do with this.

2006-02-23T11:15:00.000-05:00

I wonder if this means that I can be more productive at work without actually showing up, or if I can get into better shape without actually working out. Or if I can tell you about this without actually writing this post. Maybe this post was written without me actually doing it... I'm going to go look at my lunch and think about it.

Intersection!

2006-01-30T00:44:00.000-05:00

We're having a party, I guess you could call it, to watch the Maryland vs. Duke game on February 11th. The game's at 1:00 so this won't be a late thing. If you're reading this (no text-to-speech fans welcome) and will be a reasonable distance from our place that weekend, I would highly recommend coming. I can't promise to try to keep my misspoken play-by-plays to a tolerable minimum, but I'll try to try.

Illness

2006-01-23T21:53:00.000-05:00

So it seems like I am sick. Actually, it's seemed that way for over a week now. I think I'm getting to the end of it, but it's hard to tell. This started last Saturday after I got my ass handed to me by a black belt. And by ass I mean nose. And by handed to me I mean kicked hard enough to make it bleed. That afternoon I started out with a slight stuffy nose that could have just been blood. That night there was a party at Craigs and I drank, not a lot, but perhaps more than I should have if I was sick. That lasted 4 or 5 days, then progressed into a sore throat with the occasional sinus congestion. I was actually happy with that; cough drops solved most of that problem. Today I woke up and felt much better. I went to Tae Kwon Do tonight for the first time in over a week and my stomach/intestines started hurting. My theory is that it's from the dinner I made earlier: both the bread and the cheese were suspect, but I was hungry. If that's the case than I'm pretty much finished being sick. If it's not food poisoning then I have some bizarre disease that migrates from one symptomatic collection to another. If that's the case, I'm going to bet that it will progress to a horrible flesh eating skin rash. That'll be a fun way to go.

Math question

2006-01-03T20:51:00.000-05:00

I'm having some trouble with this math problem Leonard and I are working on. Does anybody know how to derrive the cardinality of an n dimensional real space where n is the infinity representing the cardinality of the real numbers? When n is one, the cardinality of the real space is the same as the real numbers for the trivial reason of them being the same. When n is 2 the cardinality of the 2-dimensional real space is still the same as that of the real numbers (I don't feel like doing a full derivation here but I think I've got that much down sofar). The same holds when n is any natural number, and also when n is the infinity representing the cardinality of natural numbers. But what about when n is the cardinality of the reals?

Or, you could do something at the opposite end of the 'smart' scale...
and see what our friends across the pond have been up to. Related, I saw this a while ago and found it somewhat ammusing, somewhat a batshit stupid waste of my time.

Maryland: atheists and agnostics need not apply.

2005-12-30T12:54:00.000-05:00

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...

2005-12-15T19:42:00.000-05:00

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

2005-12-15T11:58:00.000-05:00

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

2005-12-12T09:40:00.000-05:00

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

2005-12-08T16:15:00.000-05:00

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

Pictures from Utah.

Machines that pump blood

2005-12-02T12:40:00.000-05:00

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

2005-11-08T14:46:00.000-05:00

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

2005-11-08T08:07:00.000-05:00

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

2005-11-08T07:59:00.000-05:00

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

2005-11-03T15:22:00.000-05:00

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

2005-10-31T20:00:00.000-05:00

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

2005-10-31T16:06:00.000-05:00

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.

2005-10-30T23:23:00.000-05:00

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

2005-10-21T10:37:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-16T23:07:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-10T16:07:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-30T14:59:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-28T15:31:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-25T02:11:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-22T12:23:00.000-04:00

...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

2005-09-14T22:47:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-14T12:29:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-09T23:40:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-09T14:31:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-09T11:06:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-07T15:38:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-02T12:53:00.000-04:00

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.

2005-08-28T14:46:00.000-04:00

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...

2005-08-20T05:18:00.000-04:00

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.

2005-08-16T14:09:00.000-04:00

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

2005-08-09T17:40:00.000-04:00

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?

2005-08-09T00:42:00.000-04:00

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

2005-08-08T02:51:00.000-04:00

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

2005-07-19T10:59:00.000-04:00

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

2005-07-18T09:07:00.000-04:00

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

2005-07-12T14:31:00.000-04:00

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

2005-07-04T09:26:00.000-04:00

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

2005-07-03T02:41:00.000-04:00

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

2005-07-01T11:50:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-28T15:34:00.000-04:00

Because we all like science.

It's Monday

2005-06-27T14:05:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-19T22:46:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-17T10:55:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-12T21:53:00.000-04:00

<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

2005-06-10T13:57:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-08T11:48:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-06T14:08:00.000-04:00

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

2005-05-31T12:47:00.000-04:00

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.

Codemill

2005-05-26T13:54:00.000-04:00

Since it gets posts so rarely, I'm following Bens lead and posting an alert here. There's a new post on codemill.

New house

2005-05-26T11:20:00.000-04:00

We've all moved in to the new place in Laurel. I've been sleeping in the guest room since my room had no bed, but my bed was delivered yesterday and I am quite happy with it. We're still in the process of unpacking our shit and figuring out where to put our various pieces of furniture, so the place is still in a state of disarray. Once the place is cleaned up and we're ready to trash the place again we'll have some sort of house warming party, probably in mid June. This will probably be the venue my brother and I use to decide who is stronger and, therefore, a better person.

On another note, Becky is living at home this summer, so I'll actually get to hang out with my sister from time to time. This is nice now that we get along; when we were teenagers I would have sold my left nut to get her out of state for a couple months. My whole family has the same insensitive, dark, sarcastic sense of humor now, so we all have been getting along quite well.

I've been talking to some people about going to grad school for meteorology and the general consensus is that I shouldn't go to UMD since their program has gone down the tubes, and should look to either Florida or California. Florida has the National Hurricane Center, which I think would be fun to work with, so that will probably be my first choice. I just signed on for another year at the department of astronomy so this is still another year off, and I may still decide to do linguistics instead; I'm having trouble deciding.

Man, I am not feeling this post. I guess that means I should stop wasting your time.

hit me

2005-05-16T10:44:00.000-04:00

Friday afternoon after work I decided to go for a bike ride to prepare for a longer bike ride on Saturday. I rode on this trail I ran on a week or so ago when I was looking for the pullup bars I was told were on the trail. When I ran, I stopped just a little past Paint Branch Parkway, turned around, and ran back up Route 201. Had I gone a quarter mile further, I would have found what I was looking for. When I rode, however, I went way past that. I think I did about 15 miles all in all, stopping at the pullup bars and dip bars to mix things up. This was all, however, a poor decision because the next morning I was riding 31 miles for the American Diabetic Association and my legs could have used a day off. Either way, I finished the ride on Saturday with little soreness and got a free lunch from Outback Steakhouse. By free, I mean free once I paid $40 to register. I also got a water bottle and a star-shaped cookie cutter. What a weird goodie bag.

After the ride, Tim and Parker and I went back to Parkers place to shower, and Paul came up and we all went out to Frederick for the Maryland Brewers Festival. I don't know much about Frederick, but apparently there are a lot of hicks there. The beer was good, it rained a little but not so much that we couldn't enjoy ourselves, and I got a t-shirt from the DuClaw brewing company that says "drink naked" on the front. I thought Hey, what a novel idea: A shirt that advertises something you cannot do while wearing the shirt. How dumb, but apparently they brew a beer called Naked Fish, and the back of the shirt explains it all, thus destroying an otherwise ironic joke.

After that we came back down to the house in College park for a BBQ (I took a small detour to pick up Jeremy). It was raining, but we did it anyway, and a modest number of people showed up. This was good, because I really didn't want to deal with a ton of people in my house. I was tired, sore, and had already gotten drunk once that day. I was in no mood to party, and went to bed shortly after midnight.

Sunday I got up early: 9:00. I wasn't even aware that Sunday had nine o'clock in the ante meridiem. I drove Jeremy back home and we had breakfast with dad. Eggs I think. Then Jeremy and I went out to Seven Locks (near where 495 hits River Road) to pick up his uniform for his lifeguarding job this summer. I dropped him off at home, went to swim and lift weights. The last couple times I've gone to the gym I've run into Katrina, whom I know from S.S.D.P., and have been talking about joining the boxing club at Maryland (of which she is a member.) Fortunately she says the club doesn't have permission from the school to spar yet, so I won't get my ass beat quite yet. Still, I would like to learn how to throw a punch. After working out I went back and we went to Ricciuti's for dinner, then I came home and did laundry. That's right, I'm ending a blog entry with laundry. Deal with it.

Lying is fun

2005-05-12T22:09:00.000-04:00

So we're having a BBQ on Saturday. Ben, Anna, whoever else reads this: you should all come. I know I said our last party would be the last, but either I was lying then, or am lying now, or some third thing, probably involving quantum mechanics. I'm not sure when this shindig will be, but it should be early evening/late afternoon. I'll post a time once I know it. Show up early and enter the drawing for a free BBQ 2005 t-shirt. Offer void where applicable.

This is why I need to post more often...

2005-05-12T15:08:00.000-04:00

So it's been a while since my last post, and this has come to bite me in the ass since I have a lot to write about. I'll go chronologically because it beats alphabetically or longitudinally. Prepare yourselves for a Kaylaesque post.

Two weekends ago I went home and did some construction for the garden my brother and I are building for my mom for mothers day. Our back yard is a big hill, and the southwest corner was just dirt. No grass, no nothing. So we build some retaining walls out of railroad ties so we could create a stepped garden. Not having dirt or mulch to put in, however, meant we had to stop there.

Last Friday I went to Art Attack but missed the Gin Blossoms. I don't know if that's a bad thing or not, but Chevelle was better than I thought they would be and Guster was, if nothing else, better than that Bruce Willis CD I have. During Chevelle Tim and I hoisted Paul up to crowd surf after telling him that he should give us his glasses. He didn't, and he lost them. Luckily someone found them and held them up, and Tim saw that and got them back. Tim was the next to go up and had the foresight to give me all his crap first. I was the last to go up, and made it all the way to (and over) the front fence keeping the crowd a few feet back from the stage. Along the way I crossed paths with some girl who was also crowd surfing and she got dumped in my lap. We were carried as one big mass for a while, which was kindof weird. There were also some mosh pits breaking out, which was fun because I like to shove people.

Saturday there was a toga party, and rather than just don a bed sheet I did a little research and figured out how much fabric I would need to do it right. Turns out I needed a piece 18 feet (roughly 3x my height) by 4 or 5 feet, so I went out to the fabric store to get some. Paul came along because he didn't think he had a white bed sheet, but decided to just get 1.5x his height. Why he did that, I don't know; I told him he wanted three times his height but he didn't seem to think I was right. I also picked up 18 feet for Tim. I'm glad I didn't get less than I did, since when I was putting on my toga I had just enough to do it right. Paul was having some trouble putting his on, and when Tim got back he got his on fine. Parker did the whole bed-sheet thing. We got to the party (with the obligatory 40oz bottles of malt liquor) and there were so many red-necks, republicans, military personnel, and die-hard Christians that I had to finish my bottle quick and start a new one, or I wasn't going to be able to have a good time. I still got into a lot of arguments, but at least I was drunk. I lost my drivers license and the $20 bill it was wrapped in, but some nice person found them and returned both. We stumbled back to the house at around 5 and I went to sleep.

Sunday morning I got a call around 10am from my mom asking if I was coming home for breakfast, so I got up, took a shower, and headed home. When I got there my Dad's car was gone, and when I asked where he was my mom told me that he went up to New Jersey because my grandfather was having health trouble again. He had died earlier that morning. I was fairly close with all my grandparents, especially my dads parents (since not only would we see them when we went up to New Jersey where all my grandparents lived, but they would also came down to visit; my moms parents, on the other hand, didn't travel very much) and this all happened so fast that I didn't really know how to react. So my brother and I went to work in the backyard (after all, it still was mother's day) wheelbarrowing mulch and dirt from the huge piles on our driveway to the garden in the backyard, and trimmed some trees in our backyard. I think neither of us really shows our emotions that much, and we were keeping busy, so we didn't end up talking much about it. I think my dad took it pretty hard, and my sister took it even worse.

Monday, after work, I packed my bags and headed home. My sister had driven up from school in Virginia that afternoon, and she and my brother and I were driving up to NJ Tuesday morning. We got to my grandparents house early afternoon and got to visit with our cousins from California whom we rarely get to see. The service was later that afternoon, and a lot of people came, both family and those people who aren't blood related but may as well be. During the service my grandfathers business partner spoke, as did all three of his sons. I was surprised to hear my Dad talk about the McCarthy hearings; my grandfather was discharged from the military as a result of his investigations and wasn't reinstated, despite not actually *being* a communist. I think I understand my families political opinions a lot better now. After the service most of us went back to my grandparents house. It was nice to see so many people I rarely get to see, I just wish it was under better circumstances. I had a nice long conversation with my grandfather's friend Jack Okun about working out. This guy is almost 90 years old and is partially paralyzed from having polio as a child, but he has got to have the best outlook on life out of anybody I know. He's starting to get movement back in his leg which has been more or less dead for most of his life, and I think hearing him talk about lifting weights, considering his age and history, is going to help me keep exercising after my brother and I have this brawl in a month or so. So far I have just been exercising so that I don't wind up getting beat up by my him.

Wednesday afternoon I drive back with my brother and sister, drop them off at my parents house, and go home. I wasn't really in the mood to go out at first, but when it became obvious that I wasn't going to do anything else that evening, I met up with Karen and her friends from class at Cornerstone. Not much to speak of there; I drank some, I bumped into Laura (a girl from my art class), the place got real crowded, Karen's friend Kathleen (sp?) tried to freak dance with me but, as you all know, I do not dance. Paul drove me, Karen, and Kathleen back to our house some time between 1:00 and 2:00. Karen and Kathleen and I stayed up a little longer talking about stuff, then went to bed.

Today I went to my art class and found out that I got an A for the semester. I'm not that surprised, since the teacher liked all the work I did and was always commenting about how hard I worked. All my work is now sitting in my car.

Party

2005-04-20T19:03:00.000-04:00

So, broadcasting this on the interweb may not be the smartest thing to do, what with anybody being able to see it, but whatever. Nobody reads my blog anyway. We're having a party Saturday night. If you read this blog regularly, and will be a reasonable distance from our place this weekend, you should come. This may be the last party we have at this house.

Yes, but are they networked

2005-04-15T10:14:00.000-04:00

If you watched Minority Report and noticed the technological flaws instead of the plot, you may find this funny. Too bad I used my only good(?) joke about this in the title.

A Room with a View

2005-04-11T11:26:00.000-04:00

Saturday morning I went to the Humane Society facility in Rockville to help build benches, mulch the area around some sidewalks, and do whatever else they needed done. It was for the community service project Jeremy needs in order to get his eagle badge. This is probably the first scout function I have been to in quite a while. I think the last time I did something with my old troop was when Tim and Kevin and I rode along with them for a while when they biked the C&O cannal a couple years ago. Before that your guess is about as good as mine. Saturday was a nice day to spend outside: a clear sky but not too hot, so I didn't notice the amount of sun I was getting. Since I was looking down most of the time, the back of my neck got a nice red hue by the end of the day. When I got back home I tried to combat it by sitting outside with no shirt on for a while, and it's starting to even out. The last thing I want is to have a beat-red neck and pasty white abdomen. I think I'm going to spend a lot of my weekends outside since I spend most of my time during the week inside an office with no windows.

Speaking of my office with no windows; I spoke with one of my bosses the other day and I will be staying on with the Department of Astronomy another year. Next year I am going to take classes that I hope will help me figure out what I should do about grad school. My current feeling is that I should go for meteorology, but not broadcast meteorology; I don't want to be a weatherman. As far as teaching, you all have made yourselves very clear as to your faith in my teaching ability, and it has finally sunk in. I would be a horrible teacher, so I have scrapped those plans. I may take another linguistics class, but I'm not sure I would be cut out to do that for grad school. I could see it being a hoby, but I can't see myself going for a career in it. Staring at clouds, on the other hand, would be an excelent way to fill both of my job requirements of 1) getting paid and 2) staring at clouds all day. I could do that now, if only my office had a window.

Alcoholistic Medicine

2005-04-04T11:01:00.000-04:00

What a week. So many people died, and the only one I really cared about was Mitch Hedberg. The rest really didn't effect me. As far as the Pope goes, I'm betting that, like all U.S. Presidents, he will be another white Christian male. OK, so the Christian part is excusable.

I'm turning into an alcoholic, but at least I'm surrounded by friends whose drinking problems make mine look less raging. I've been to a bar 3 times in the past week. The same bar, too, so I'm a boring alcoholic. Wednesday we went to Santa Fe for cheap Yuengling and buffalo wings, but they were all out of buffalo wings so really it was just for the cheap beer. I met up with Laura from my art class there, and she seemed to get along well with all my friends, so that's cool. Friday night Karen, Nina, Paul and I all went to Santa Fe because we had nothing else to do. Then Saturday night after we got dinner Laura and I went to Santa Fe again with a bunch of her friends. I'm starting to recognize waiters there. Is that a bad thing? Also, Tuesday night Tim and I bottled the beer we're making (an Irish stout), so that should be ready for consumption tomorrow. At least some studies support the claim that drinking in moderation is good for you. I didn't get shitfaced any of the times at the bar, so really I'm just drinking for my health.

Sunday afternoon I went home to hang out with Jeremy for a while, then when our parents got back from NJ we went out to Red Lobster. I'd never been to a Red Lobster before and probably won't ever go again. The food wasn't horrible, but it wasn't particularly good either.

I've started lifting weights at the gym on campus, and it is pathetic. The first time I went I could hardly lift anything. I blame that on running since it purportedly decreases muscle mass. I couldn't even lift what I usually start out with after having not exercised in a while. I've gone a couple more times since then, once with Jeremy, and he can definitely lift more than I can. I'm still not worried about our post graduation brawl, but I am going to have to prepare for this. He's benching a good 40 pounds over me. I'm beginning to notice a slight difference in strength, and I think that within a month I should have caught up with him. I just need to stop running so much and maybe swim or something. I tried swimming Saturday morning, and did a 250 before deciding to quit. Anna, what do you know about combining swimming with weight training?

ramblings from the past week

2005-03-28T15:36:00.000-05:00

My heath is improving, but I'm not entirely over this cold yet. I still have a sore throat and a cough, but no more swollen gums and I finally managed to pop my ears. All in all I'd give my current heath a solid B. I feel pretty good other than the throat, which I would give a C, independent of the rest of my body.

I took Monday and Tuesday off last week, and came in for a half day on Wednesday and Thursday. I spent most of the time I wasn't working either sleeping or eating. It was boring, but relaxing.

I played basketball with Kevin on Thursday last week. I started out horribly, and worked my way up to mildly miserable; basketball is not my thing. Friday night I went out to Santa Fe with Kevin, Karen, and Nina. It wasn't as weird going out to a bar with Kevin and our exes as I had originally thought it would be. Saturday Tim and Parker and I went up to see some more houses. I liked the first one more than the second, but everybody else liked the second more than the first and it looks like we're going to apply to the second house today. Oh well. Saturday evening a bunch of us went to a pool hall and played a few games. I want to get a pool table for our house when we move in. Skip the next paragraph if you don't care about computer crap.

That night my computer crashed, and wouldn't boot up normally (I kept on getting a kernel panic, if you know enough to be curious.) I first tried burning the install CDs for FC4 test release 1, but the 1st CD disabled IRQ#9, which meant my keyboard wouldn't work, then asked me to press enter to continue. I get the same problems whenever I try to use an updated kernel in FC3. So I re-burned the FC3 install CDs on my mac and tried doing a linux rescue, but it couldn't find my partition table; however, it found it fine doing a full install. So after a couple errors on disk 2, and some media checks (all coming back OK,) I re-burned the second disk and, after a few crashes during the install, I finally got FC3 reinstalled. By this point it was well into the morning. Once my system was booted it ran fsck, which kept on crashing and dumping me into a shell, which would restart the computer when it was exited. I ran fsck manually on / and /boot, which came back fine, and didn't feel like doing it on /home (my 200 gig drive) so I edited /etc/fstab to have /home not automounted and rebooted. I still got the same error and shell, so I ran fsck on /home which, after a couple dozen errors, finally finished. I restarted my computer and it booted up fine. So now I have to download a couple hundred updates from the RHN and reinstall all my custom packages, the sources/rpms of which I keep on /home so that when I format my 40 gig drive for a new OS I don't lose the install files for programs I install.) Skip the next paragraph/sentence/whatever if you read all that.

Summary for those who skipped over that last part: I stayed up all night fixing my computer.

I tried to get about an hour of sleep around 2 in the afternoon, but it didn't really catch, then went to my parents for dinner. Upon coming back to the house, I felt like going for a run. Now, it was raining outside, and I was sick and going on no sleep, but I still managed to run the whole 3 1/2 miles without stopping. I've found I'm getting much better at pushing myself lately, and I don't know why. I got back to the house and felt like I do every time I get back from running: tired. I expected to feel a lot worse, but I didn't. Maybe this is a sign that I should start running farther.

Sick of being sick

2005-03-21T14:27:00.000-05:00

So it would appear that I've got the flu, or something like it. I spent all weekend sleeping, trying to sleep, or eating. I'm starting to feel better today but I'm not going to bet that will last. It also seems that this cold has gotten backed up into my inner ear because everything sounds like I'm underwater. For an ear infection, though, it doesn't hurt, so I've got that going for me. I think Nina had the same problem for a while, but I doubt I got it from her. The back of my mouth/throat is swelling up a little, which is bad news for my wisdom teeth. My mouth has just enough room for them, so with the slightest bit of swelling I start to chew gum. It hurts, but not too bad. Both Kevin and Jeremy tried to get me to drink pickle juice to help my cold. Both were doing it just to see if they could get me to drink pickle juice, and both came up with the idea independently. I almost did it when Kevin told me, since he has a bit of medical training. Man are my friends assholes.

Friday night a bunch of us went up to Craig's (of Maria and Craig) for a day-late St. Patty's Day party, which was nice. Craig's basement is set up well for parties, and his friends were cool. Not being able to speak very much (no voice) limited my enjoyment a little, but it was still fun. I also got to practice massaging with Parkers sister, who never complains when I do that.

On Saturday we went back to the house we were trying to rent but it doesn't look like we're going to get it. The landlord is being nice and is giving us a lot of other leads in the area. I slept the rest of the day and that night, and went to visit my family Sunday afternoon. I slept a lot there too. I did my taxes and it looks like The Man owes me a couple grand, so that's cool.

All in all, quite the uneventful weekend.

St. Patrick's Day

2005-03-18T10:59:00.000-05:00

Yesterday we went up to an Irish pub near Nina's apartment in Baltimore. Nina was meeting a few friends there first and Tim, Parker, Paul, Kevin and I were going to meet her. Crystal wound up coming too. The bar was very crowded when we got there, so we couldn't find Nina. We got corned beef sandwiches because, I believe, none of us had anything to eat for dinner. Tim and Parker were coming up separately so we had to wait for them to find us too. Eventually we all met up. I have to admit that it felt weird to be around Nina in this environment. I try not to be a jealous person, and as long as I'm actually in a relationship I'm fine. It's when I'm out of one and see some guy talking to my ex that I get uncomfortable. So that sucked. Later on we all got a table in a quiet corner of the bar, and continued with the drinking. Nina seemed depressed but I didn't know what I could do to help her, or if I was even in a position to help. I think she's just been depressed in general, but I think it's possible that she also could have thought something is going on between me and Crystal (nothing is), which may have made things worse. Or, I could be way off. Either way, she didn't seem too crazy about Crystal. I'm beginning to see why dating friends is a bad idea, I hope Nina starts feeling better (if she actually is depressed), and I really want to stop feeling so weird about it all. Later on that evening Kevin and Crystal and I went to pick up Jillian, a girl we went to high school with, and came back to the bar to hang out for a little longer. Some time around midnight we left, dropped off Jilian and drove back to the D.C. area. We then dropped Crystal off and headed home.

This morning, I woke up and couldn't speak; it would appear my cold has taken a turn for the worse, so I'm not going to work today. I also haven't run in a few days, on account of my cold. I want so very much to be healthy again, so I'm going to sleep all day.

3 posts in 3 days? Don't get used to it.

2005-03-15T16:30:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I went running after work. I have had a sore throat and an on again/off again mild headache, so running may not have been the best idea. I don't feel that much different today and I've been eating a lot of zinc cough drops which are supposed to help with colds, so I'll probably continue running until I really feel like crap. Running has been great incentive to not smoke. I tried to quit on New Years but that didn't last. It's funny; I managed to quit smoking pot but not tobacco. Anyway, it's been a while since I've had one and I'm feeling a lot better. Just in general, I feel more alert, articulate, happy, and in better shape than a few weeks ago. Now all I have to do is start eating better and going to the gym to lift weights, and my brother won't stand a chance when we fight this summer. For those of you whom I haven't told: my brother is taking weight training this year, and after he graduates he wants to "throw down." Now, I'm 5 years older than him and haven't had much trouble keeping him down in the past, but he is getting stronger and now I am starting to worry. Still, I think I'll have better technique than him. Plus I will be intimidating since I've always been able to beat him up. Either way, this should be interesting.

Closure

2005-03-14T22:05:00.000-05:00

This is going to be another short post. I told Nina we needed to talk face to face and she came down tonight so we could do it. I had a lot I had planned to say, and said very little of it. It's what I expected to happen; I usually get nervous doing stuff like this and forget a lot of the things I had planned, so at least I remembered a little: the important stuff. We walked around the neighborhood because I didn't want to do it in the house. I wanted some place that was neutral, and wandering around felt good. I'm not getting into details because I honestly can't remember a lot of them, but the summary is: it just didn't work. No rebound, no deception, at least not in large portions. It just wasn't going anywhere. I agree that it wasn't really anything serious by the time she broke it off, but I would have been fine keeping at it. She didn't want to do that, which I guess is well in her right, and it's good she did it before I actually got attached. So it's back to being friends, only this time with a hint of awkwardness and uncertainty, with no hurt feelings. Hopefully something will happen to make things comfortable like they were before, but I'm not sure what that would be other than just the slowly passing time.

Weekend goodness

2005-03-13T16:54:00.000-05:00

First, to wrap up old stuff. I'm not upset Nina left me. I'm pissed she ever dated me. I feel like she used me as a rebound, and that's not something you do to friends without at least telling them first.

Thursday night Kevin comes over to watch the softcore porn he got for his birthday: "The Kama Sutra." This thing is rated R and despite a little nudity, sucked both as a film and as porn. I learn some things from my friends later about theories as to what Nina thought was going on while we were "dating" or whatever, which pissed me off, but like I said above, I'm not upset. Just disappointed.

Friday night we all went out to Santa Fe. Tim, Parker, Paul, Kevin, Crystal, and Shari and I got a table near the entrance, opposite the stage, but the music was still so loud we had to lean in and yell to understand each other. Karen, Nina, and some of Karen's friends went to Corner Stone and everybody had a good time except Nina, who wanted to go to Santa Fe but was prevented by Karen. It sucks, but it happens. Turns out Crystal went to college (in the real Santa Fe) with a good friend of Karen's who comes to parties time to time. Small world. I learned a lot about what people actually though of me in high school, as opposed to what I thought they thought about me, particularly my ass, but also me as a person in general. No wonder my self esteem has had such a troubled history. People say bad things about me to me as a joke. I am not quick to pick up on these things. We left and went to Wawa to get food, because drunk people like food. While in line a couple barely dressed girls tried rubbing their breasts up against me and dropping things in front of me, but Crystal (and unintentionally Parker, who wasn't aware of this at the time) were giving them dirty looks and Crystal was pulling me away from them. I was hardly aware that any of this was happening, but not completely oblivious. We went back to the house and despite my previous rule that my bed not be used to host parties, everybody piled in. My bed is comfortable, they say. Eventually Tim and Parker go to bed, and I just lay in bed with Crystal and Shari with Kevin and Paul sitting at the foot. Karen comes home and hops in, and we all probably annoy the housemates across the hall with how loud we're being. No, nothing like that, just sitting around talking. Eventually Kevin sobers up and takes Crystal and Shari home, then comes back and goes to bed.

Saturday morning Tim, Parker, Kevin and I go up to Savage Mills to look at a townhouse. We liked it a lot, and want to move in this Summer very much. I hope we get it. Tim will probably post pictures of it eventually, if he hasn't already, but if we get it we will throw a party when we move in and all you can see it in real life. 3 stories, 3 and 1/2 baths, 4 bedrooms, a couple living areas, deck, woods/field/high-voltage-powerlines behind the house. It was well decorated when we saw it, but I'm sure our ugly furniture will detract from the architectural pleasantries of the place. We drive around the area a little, and it looks nice. Howard County, if you're curious, just south of where 32 hits 95. Later, after we get lunch and go back to the house and Kevin leaves to go do stuff, Tim and Paul and I go for a run. I've been running about 3 1/2 miles every day this week, walking for one stretch of road maybe an eighth of a mile long a couple miles in to cool off, and Tim didn't think he could do it. Motivated to not lag behind, or to prove he's a big man, or something, he kept up the whole time, even on the half mile hill at the end that gets steeper and steeper the closer you get to the top that usually kills me. So that's good. We hang out some before going up to Columbia Mall (yeah, I know, going to a mall on a Saturday Night is lame middle school stuff, but we were just getting dinner with Parker who works there for the time being. We go to Parkers house later that night and watch Donny Darko, which I had been wanting to see, and liked it very much. Kevin and Karen came up to watch too. Went back to the house in Karen's car, and we bitched about some stuff. Went to bed.

Got up this morning intending to run before going to my parents for breakfast, but decided to sleep in instead. I still got home before breakfast, and got to hang out with Becky who is almost always in another state/country going to school or working in some national park, and Jeremy, who is almost always there. We had bagels, salmon, and whitefish (whatever that is, i'm not sure, but I didn't have any so it's okay that I'm unclear as to it's source,) if you're curious. You're not, are you. Too late, you read it. I came home at around 2 and went for what is becoming my daily run to, around, and back from lake Artemisia (sp?). I then ripped my new Modest Mouse CD "Building Nothing Out Of Something" and listened to it. And it was good. Then, I decided to post to my blog, and actually write something. Now, I am finishing it, staring at the monitor, waiting to go up to Duclaw up in Arundel Mills with Paul, Tim, and Parker. I'll talk to you all later.

It's starting to feel like Spring, both in the weather and in my head. This makes me happy.

3 months gone

2005-03-09T20:14:00.000-05:00

short post, Ninas gone. Apparently she wasn't ever there. I'll be fine eventually, it's just the shock from being rejected (you'd think I'd be used to this sort of thing by now) from a relationship I thought was going somewhere. I hope we manage to stay friends since most of our friends are the same people. For the time being, however, I am going to be hurt, bitter, and avoiding her so I don't act like a jerk. We all know it's in me.

Ski trip

2005-02-01T14:38:00.000-05:00

On Sunday, Paul, Tim, and I went skiing at Liberty. I was worried that morning because it was snowing, and the road was already covered, but the major roads were fine and we got there a little before noon. Rather than renting skis, I borrowed Tims dads skis, which just barely fit. They were big enough to get on, but they were a little narrow at the balls of my feet. Uncomfortable, but not bad enough for me to want to pay to rent skis. I hadn't been skiing in about 6 or 7 years, and I've only been skiing twice before, so I wasn't a "competent" skier. Still, I managed to go down every slope that wasn't a black dimond or, god forbid, double-black dimond, and wasn't constantly falling down. Tim is a much better skier than I, but I was doing a little better than Paul, so that's good. I watched Tim go down a black dimond which was covered with moguls, and he made it look almost easy enough for me to try. I didn't. Chock that up to cowardace or knowing my limits, your pick. All in all, I fell down a lot, but I didn't hit anybody.

We're going to try to go on another trip sometime in February or March, so if you want to come along let us know so we can try to go when it's convinient. I may try snowboarding, or I may just stick to skiing and hone my skils, because girls only want to date guys who have great skills.

Luck ran out

2005-01-24T16:29:00.000-05:00

Saturday morning started out well, then quickly deteriorated. I woke up at Ninas, and left to go help Ben and Anna move in, or so was the plan. I got to the parking garage and went to pay at the machine (before returning to my car.) The machine took my ticket but wasn't accepting cash. I tried to put my credit card into the machine, and it took it, but didn't register anything and refused to give me my card back. I tried to cancel the transaction and the LCD display would lead one to think that everything was fine, but nothing came out. No credit card, and no ticket to use to get out. So after calling every phone number in sight, I called Nina thinking I could get the credit card out if she brought down a pair of tweezers. No dice; the tweezers wouldn't fit in the slot I put my credit card in. We checked the whole garage to see if the attendant (who if there wasn't at the booth by the exit) but found nobody. We checked the lot next door, managed by the same company, but nobody was there either. Eventually Nina just let me use her pass to get out (she has one of those monthly passes you just have to wave near the reader to get out.) On the way home, I tried unsuccessfully to get in touch with Ben and Anna to figure out when/where we should meet them, but they were already down at their new place, and weren't answering their cells. Maybe we can help you next weekend if you still need it. I canceled my credit card when I got back to the house, and I should be receiving a new one in the mail shortly.

We went grocery shopping before the snow got really bad, and picked up some sleds from The Sports Authority in Beltway Plaza. Later, we went sledding on the hill outside the elementary school across the street. At some point, while I was running with Angel, I heard what sounded like keys falling out of a pocket. I checked, and my pockets were empty. After looking around a little and finding nothing, I figured what I heard was just Angels leash jingling while we ran. Upon getting back to the house, I found out that my keys weren't in my room, so they were somewhere in the field across the street. I went back later that night with a flashlight and spent about an hour wandering around, not finding anything. The next morning I went back, and was looking for about a half hour before asking our neighbors if they had a metal detector. Pauls dad suggested it earlier while I was leaving the house to go look, and I had thought about it earlier as well. I was in luck (this guy has everything) and after another half hour of digging through the snow only to discover that somewhere under a half dozen spots on the ground there were probably coins, or iron-rich rocks, I found my keys.

That afternoon we watched The Lord of The Rings, all three movies, extended edition. Got started around 1ish, and wasn't done until after midnight. I spent most of the time in the kitchen washing various pots, pans, cooking utensils, plates and bowls in a pot of hot soapy water on the stove and a rubbermaid bin of rinse water on the floor. The pipes in our kitchen have frozen, so this is how dishes must be done, with water taken from the faucet in my bathtub (but not bathwater, that would be gross.) It's like I'm camping or something. We ordered pizza and I sat down to watch the last movie. Tim cleaned any cups or silverware that needed washing at some point, so we now have clean dishes.

How was your weekend?

Dryer details you probably could live without

2005-01-20T15:04:00.000-05:00

So, Tim broke the dryer the other day. His load had finished and he was taking his dry clothes out, but some articles were hanging on those shelf-like protrusions that help spin the clothes. He spun the cylinder manually (as so many of us do) and heard a loud snapping sound. Then, the cylinder wouldn't move when the dryer was on. Great.

Yesterday we disassembled the thing and found the problem: the belt that spins the cylinder wasn't connected to anything. We also found a pulley unattached, lending one to believe that this was somehow the problem. Here's the catch: The belt is, topologically, a donut. As is the pulley (with a slight fuzziness applied to forgive the fact that it's a wheel attached to a axle with a little space between, and probably some bearings. The point is, the axle forms a loop with the mounting bracket, so there's no way to get the belt to go around the pulley. It's like trying to do that magic trick where you take two separate rings and transform them to be interlocked, like links of a chain. Now, I know how that works, but this belt wasn't designed with magicians in mind. We figured out how it worked: and I will try to explain this without using pictures. Good luck understanding it. You can skip the rest if you don't care how our dryer works.

First, one should note that there was a motor near the cylinder (but not touching) with an extended drive shaft (connected to the motor at one end, but left free on the other so the belt could be attached.) It was clear that the belt should go around that. The belt should also go around the cylinder. So the only question is what the hell to do with the pulley.

There were holes near the motor, on the inner surface of the bottom of the dryer body (not the cylinder) to attach the pulleys' mounting bracket, and what you're supposed to do is push a loop of the belt through the space between the pulley and it's mounting bracket, and have that loop go around the drive shaft connected to the motor. Since the pulley is close to the motor this takes very little length from the belt. The rest of the belt (on the other side of the pulley) goes around the dryer cylinder, and the tension is enough that of the loop that got threaded through the pulley and it's mounting bracket, only one direction actually touches the pulley. So to clarify: imagine you're looking at the dryer from the front. You have a large circle (the cylinder you put clothes in), and outside it, below and to the right, there's a small circle (the drive shaft connected to the motor.) Closer to the bottom of the cylinder (to the left of the drive shaft) there's a pulley (a circle larger than the drive shaft but much smaller than the dryer cylinder.) The belt, starting from the top of the cylinder and going clockwise, goes around the right side of the cylinder until you get near the bottom Let's say 4:30. There, it departs on a tangent from the cylinder and wraps around the pulley, heading right again. This begins the loop that was pushed through that I mentioned earlier. The belt then goes around the drive shaft in a clockwise fashion (let's say from 11:00 to 6:00) and departs on a tangent from the drive shaft, now heading left. Now, this part goes through the loop formed by the pulley and its mounting bracket, but doesn't touch anything there, finishing the loop that was pushed through. It then continues to meet the dryer cylinder at around 6:00, and stays on the cylinder the rest of the way up.

Aren't you sorry you read all that?

Anyway, that fixed it, and the dryer now works. Plus, we somehow wound up with an extra screw after reassembling the dryer. That's probably not good, but I doubt one screw is going to make that much of a difference. Unless, you know, that screw was holding down the "do not randomly detonate" button.

Deep Impact

2005-01-12T14:09:00.000-05:00

I just got back from watching the launch of the Deep Impact spacecraft. That's probably the last we'll hear about it until July 4th 2005 when it impacts the comet Tempel 1. That should be exciting, since it will be the first time we (humans) intentionally impact a body other than earth (excluding landings.) I just posted a story to slashdot about it, so we'll see if they pick it up. It's times like this that I find my work exciting. I have nothing to do with the mission yet, but once the impact occurs, astronomers from around the world will upload their findings to a collaboration site I built. I'd show you the site, but it requires a login and I can't just give that information out willy-nilly, and it's really not that exciting.

So if this comet is really some extra terrestrial spacecraft, when you find out we did this, don't come to me. Actually, come to me. I know how to find the people who did this to you. In exchange for that information, I expect a few minor privileges when you enslave the Earth.

A			5				5	5	5		1
9			6	2	3	4	4	8	2	1
8			3				7	9	1
7			7				3	1	9
6			9				1	7	3
5			4	3	2	1	6	2	8	4
4			2	4	1	3	8	6	4	2
3			8	1	4	2	2	4	6	3
2			1				9	3	7
1		1	A	5	5	5	A	A	A	5	2
0	1
	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	A

A			5				5	5	5		1
9			6	2	3	4	4	8	2	1
8			3				7	9	1
7			7				3	1	9
6			9				1	7	3
5			4	3	2	1	6	2	8	4
4			2	4	1	3	8	6	4	2
3			8	1	4	2	2	4	6	3
2			1				9	3	7
1		1	A	5	5	5	A	A	A	5	2
0	1
	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	A

A			5				5	5	5		1
9			6	2	3	4	4	8	2	1
8			3				7	9	1
7			7				3	1	9
6			9				1	7	3
5			4	3	2	1	6	2	8	4
4			2	4	1	3	8	6	4	2
3			8	1	4	2	2	4	6	3
2			1				9	3	7
1		1	A	5	5	5	A	A	A	5	2
0	1
	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	A