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Every single Personal page.
I have a new blog for my personal stuff. It’s called something designed to not be googleable back to my name. At some point a random headhunter mentioned my ancient personal page I created in my junior year of undergrad. This freaked me out a little--that people who are thinking of employing me might actually try and find my weird personal ramblings on the internet.
So if you are one of my friends and know my email address, I’ll happily tell you the address of my new personal blog (which currently contains hardly anything.) I’d just ask you pretty please don’t link to it with any personally-identifying links that might associate it with me in a google search.
And if you are, or are thinking about, employing me: I have no personal life, don’t waste time writing a blog, and exist only to work super hard for you. YOU! You are the most important part of my current or future life. Luv ya.
At work the other day, one of the engineers in lab mentioned that braiding power wires was a good way to keep them all together and have any interference affect them all equally, so that the relative voltages would remain constant. It’s a more complicated version of the twisted pair.
Anyway, I realized I had 4 cables, and I only knew how to braid 3 strands. So of course I spent the next few minutes figuring out how to braid more than 3 strands. It turns out it’s easy. You just take the rightmost strand, and moving to the left, weave it over, then under, then over. Then do this process again with the new rightmost strand. And then the new rightmost strand, etc., etc. You can do the same thing with any number of strands, always start with the right and weave to the left. My finely-crafted Windows Paint picture to the right shows the basic idea.
Here’s a new picture of me, on this last day of 2006 (picture taken in the wee hours of the morning.) I know this picture is a bit bizarre, but it’s nothing compared to me as a muppet with orange hair. In fact, whenever I would pull up my blog and see myself as Beaker, it freaked me out a little. To protect my self-image and prevent a tragic descent into an alternate Muppet identity, I decided to post a merely normally-odd picture of myself. Here I am at home in Maple Grove, Minnesota.
This Christmas has been blissfully uneventful--a nice break and time to relax. I got a bunch of awesome presents. Nothing excessive, but just what I needed. I read a lot, a luxury. I usually am able to afford only about 10 pages every evening, but managed to work through a couple of books over the past 10 days. I took time to indulge my addiction to P.G. Wodehouse, which I originally got from my father at an early age. (”I learned it by watching you!”) I can’t think of another author so expertly skilled in the use of the English language purely in the pursuit of mirth and frivolity. Perfect.
I’ve also started a project to gather together all of my old emails from various programs, accounts, periods of my life. I want to put them all together and print them out on actual paper. I have an idea that I periodically like to look at my old correspondence in a nostalgic way. Even if I did migrate all of these emails to a new email program, it’s really not the nicest way to walk down memory lane. Also, I can see the writing on the wall--anything that you really want to be able to see for years to come should be on paper, not on a computer. I already have files from college that I can’t read because they’re in some arcane format for some program that doesn’t exist anymore. I’m sure a computer forensic expert could always read most of my emails, being mostly text, but I want pleasant, easy access to them. I’ve already written a perl script to pull out all the emails and attachments and format them in html. If I manage to make something usable then I’ll write more about it. My goal is to have “chapters” relating to all email traffic between me and each of the various people I’ve written to.
Also, if anybody knows of a program to print out all of one’s emails for browsing, I’d love to hear about it! Tell me now before I go crazy with another project. :)
Happy New Year everybody!
If you’re a hardcore fan of Matt Clapp, you may know that at one point in the near-distant past of graduate school, I dressed up as a certain Muppet with orange hair for Halloween¹. Well, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the effect, and I liked the idea, so I decided to try again.
So I present to you the new and improved Beaker. Hair and nose are more reddish, but much more muppet-like this time around. 
I’ve added a picture of the real Beaker here for comparison. Not bad eh? If you don’t know, Beaker was the assistant to Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, the brilliant Muppet scientist. Beaker’s expression is due to the fact that he has the classic grad student role--the go-to guy for handling dangerous acids, extremely high voltages, or Muppet-eating animals.
At the costume party I went to, old friends and new seemed to receive the costume well. Some commented that my eyes were perfectly Beaker-like with no costume help, which goes along with past comments that I’m like a muppet in everyday life. Notice the classy gaffer tape name tag. Less apparent is the gaffer tape used in place of buttons on the cheap costume-store lab coat. The name tag is covering the original HI-larious silk-screened name on the lab coat, “Dr. Seymour Bush, Gynecologist”. So it wasn’t just that I needed to tell people who I was supposed to be, I needed to, um, change the tone of the costume from the original.
.
¹ Original costume included a valiant attempt to dye my own hair orange (failure, hair was too dark and ended up looking like I was starting to rust.) I also couldn’t find a suitable costume nose, so I used a small Nerf ball with a nose notch cut out. It fell off constantly. This was later put to good use as a cat toy for housemate Peter the Cat. The high point of this costume was “borrowing” a lab coat from a certain professor who shall remain nameless, and then spilling wine on it at the party.
Here’s my bookshelf--nearly finished! Everything’s there except for the head casing and base moldings that will make it a true thing of beauty. An interesting photography note: the slow-sync flash was a nice compromise between natural light and the flash.
And here is a close-up view of the shelves. Not too shabby for pine!
And I can actually use it to hold books now! For the first time! So exciting!
This establishment is nothing if not Pr f ssional.
For a long time, life in my apartment was simple, clean and uncluttered. In short, I didn’t own a couch.
.
This went on for months, until one day I decided that it might be nice if women were to want to visit me in my apartment. So I bought a couch!
Here I am welcoming propsective ladies. Hey gals, look, a couch!
Here I am “taking time out” as we used to say in the yearbook trade. Either that, or it’s an alcohol-induced coma.
That’s one comfortable couch!
Hey all, just thought I’d let you know about my new online photo album at http://photos.itsayellow.com .
Right now there’s just pictures from Barcelona, and no pretty main page. But I guess there’s no reason to keep it a secret. I may still tinker with the theme of the photo pages.
The cool thing about the photo pages is that the cursor keys (left, right) navigate backward and forward through the pictures, so you can flip through quickly.
Enjoy!
“Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve written, but…”
There was some sitcom or book or play or something where the protagonist was reviewing his/her diary and every entry started that way. Well that’s how I feel now. It’s been a very long time since my last Journal entry. I was starting to feel so intimidated by the long pause, like to write something after so long, it had to be really good. Well, I scrapped that plan, and instead decided just to write something, anything, just to break my long online silence.
I got back from an amazing, amazing trip to Barcelona. I have to thank my hosts, Anna and Pau, and their families, and friends. Their hospitality and friendliness far surpassed any tourist experience I could’ve expected. I also was happy to see my friend Ruth, who drove all the way from Paris (not just to see me, but she drove a long way nonetheless!) At the end of the trip, instead of merely being tired from an adventure and ready for home, I found myself sad to go and missing friends.
Here are some pictures!
Anna, Matt, Walky, David at comida at Anna’s family summer beach house in Calella de Palafrugell
Anna and Pau at el far de Sant Sebastià
Anna, Pau, Judit, Matt at the beach in Barcelona. (Our backs are not to the sea!)
Re-enacting some event from the Barcelona Olympics
Matt and Ruth at Cadaques
Matt and Ruth: Wackiness!
Anna and Matt on the roof of Casa Mila
Anna and Pau on the roof of Casa Mila: Picture I: No, no, Pau.
Anna and Pau on the roof of Casa Mila: Picture II: Sigh.
Anna and Pau on the roof of Casa Mila: Picture III: Awwww, but we really like each other.
Hurray for cultural rapprochement!
The best going-away committee ever.
I finally biked all the way to work, on an exhibition trek on Sunday. It took me roughly 50min., and my bike computer said I biked 14.4mph on average, making the trip 12miles exactly. Now, there was still a bit of meandering while I found my way, and I’m a little out of shape, so hopefully in the future I will both bike at a faster rate, and slightly fewer miles because I know my way.
Since I took almost an hour to bike there, I decided to take the VTA Light Rail (now with 30% less Rail!) back. To my surprise, it took almost as long to take the Light Rail to Mountain View as it took me to bike the other way. How is this possible? I wondered?
Well, as the map shows, (thumbnail seen to the right,) the Light Rail route from Mountain View to the Tasman station is 9.75miles. On the official timetable, the train takes 30minutes to get between these two stations, making the average speed of the VTA Light Rail 19.5mph. Not so vastly different from my out-of-shape biking speed. If you add the time for me to get myself to the train station, wait for the train, and go from the end train station to work, you quickly get to at least 40minutes, not so much different from biking the whole way.
So the trade off seems to be biking: more excercise, more need for a shower, train: more sitting around, less stink. I don’t mind the stink, since my goal is still to get some excercise. I’ll probably start half-and-half and then possibly work my way up to biking both ways, especially when it stays light out later in the evening. At least my work has a shower.
I’m going to Barcelona!
For a while I’ve had way too many Frequent Flyer miles with United Airlines. It was making me a bit nervous, because I know that either United will go out of business, or decide that it’s lowly loyal customers don’t deserve such luxuries as free flights. Especially now that you can get miles for anything, including using your credit card, I assume that Mile Inflation has to happen soon, and they’ll be worthless. So I decided to use as many miles, as soon as possible.
But if you actually try to use your miles to go anywhere interesting, you’ll soon find that every time you try to look up a travel date, you will get the message “Date not available” for pretty much every day you look at which is less than a year away. This is really frustrating.
Enter AwardPlanner. It’s a website that’s basically a travel agent that will use your frequent flyer miles to book your flights, (as well as regular paid travel if you want.) The price to have them work for you is a little steep: $100 for a year of their service. They used to have a fee of $40 for one trip, but in the past month they seem to have stopped offering that. Anyway, a trip to Barcelona in April (when I wanted to go) is at least $1000, or $2000 for Business class, so to me $100 didn’t seem so bad if they could get me a roundtrip to Barcelona for only miles. Especially since I couldn’t manage to do it myself. One caveat: they don’t guarantee anything: even after you pay them $100 they might not find you a flight only on miles.
Anyway in the end the nice lady “Janet” got me a beautiful roudtrip itinerary from San Francisco to Barcelona, using only my United miles. First class domestically, and Business class transatlantic. In addition to these great accomodations, she also booked a 3-day stopover in Virginia so I can attend my cousin’s wedding on the way back. It’s possible I could’ve figured out how to book such a complicated itinerary using my miles myself, but I really don’t think I could’ve. I also know I wouldn’t have had the patience to wait with United on hold for as long as it would’ve taken.
So come April, I’ll be in Barcelona for about 11-12 days. My tour guide and gracious host will be my friend Anna, who was a housemate for about 3 months when she was a visiting student in Baltimore. It’ll be great to see her again. Here she is on the 4th of July, embracing America after years of being a self-described extreme America-skeptic. Actually that’s probably a nicer way of putting it than she self-described herself, but it’s ok because she seemed to have a good time and come away knowing that a few of us are actually pretty nice. So now I’ll be able to better appreciate her country, and learn all the wonderful things about Catalunya. (She is “not Spanish but Catalon!”)
In addition, it will be a real post-post-graduate vacation. I had a blast for 4 or 5 days in Mexico for my friend Marcel’s wedding, but I think getting away for almost two weeks is necessary to fully reward myself for escaping grad school. It’s almost like I’m some kind of adult now, what with the travelling and enjoying myself! I can’t wait.
This is an actual ad I saw on Yahoo! Mail. Are these people not the most suburban, creepiest people you’ve ever seen in your life? I do not want to see what this family is hiding in its basement. Makes you wonder exactly where AC Nielsen gets their ratings data…
Party! Without a tripod! While tipsy!
In Zihuatanejo, Mexico. And I got to come too! Thanks Marcel and Jaime, and congratulations!
I can’t resist! Here are pictures of my new car. It’s my first ever new car and I love it. It’s a Titanium Gray Mazda3, it’s fast and nimble and fun. And a manual, of course.
Here I am going, “Check it out! There’s a snazzy looking car behind me!” Or possibly, “Did I touch it? Oh my gosh, is that a fingerprint?”
I really love the instrument cluster. The new Honda Accord is weird and annoying with its split display and digital speedometer. I love the look of the Mazda instruments at night. This picture shows a bit more blue than it has in real life, but it was difficult to take such a low-light picture to look exactly right. Note that 0MPH is at 6 o’clock, and 60MPH is very close at 9 o’clock. Psychologically, that makes it really easy to speed without realizing it. And yes, the mileage does read 425 miles total.
So, almost two months later (after moving to the Bay Area) I decided that I was long overdue for a little physical activity. My preference has always been to excercise in the morning, because I’m too tired and in no mood after a day’s work. Unfortunately, I also am not one to wake up very early. This was perfectly fine in grad school, when I could occasionally show up to work just before noon; however, this kind of schedule is usually frowned upon in most real-world jobs.
I finally had the bright idea to combine getting to work with excercise, finally putting my bicycle, which has been sitting patiently on my porch, to some good use. The problem remained to find a way to bike to work without getting killed by pre-coffee over-aggressive commuter drivers. The last time I tried to bike to work in the South Bay, a lot of my route was on Central Expressway, at the suggestion of my ex-bike-messenger friend Andrew. Frankly this scared me to death, and I was especially eager to find a way to avoid “sharing the road” with cars running at 3-4 times my speed.
With a lot of web searching and assembling various web sources of bicycle-friendly lanes and paths, I found the John W. Christian Greenbelt 1 which lies in a straight line along the path from my house to work, is about 3 miles, and is a bike / pedestrian path only--no cars. Score! The following picture was made with http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/, an excellent website for creating maps with routes using google maps. 
I decided to try biking it today, and it’s a really nice ride. And it appears that any day now, there will be a pedestrian /bike bridge past Manzano Way over Calabazas Creek. (The eastern edge of the greenbelt.)
I’ll leave you with a picture of me enjoying a well-deserved Jamba Juice at the Mercado Center in Santa Clara after almost 10 miles of biking. 
If I look a little bedraggled, remember I am totally out of shape. Also, I was up dancing until 4:30am last night--maybe San Francisco is that much more fun than the South Bay…
(For more Bay Area biking info: http://bicycling.511.org/routes.htm, http://bicycling.511.org/maps.htm, City of Sunnyvale Bike Maps)
Somehow, I think I just moved across the country. It sort of felt like I was taking another vacation to California, but I just realized that I have no return ticket. Huh, I’m in Mountain View.
I start work tomorrow. Yes friends, I live on the edge. No vacation for me! Much-deserved downtime is for wimps!
Seriously, I always intended to do a fabulous vacation, but my new boss needs me, you see. And there’s that whole pesky situation that I haven’t been paid since July. This way, I can become comfortable and prosperous, vacationing on the Continent only after I can properly play the role of bon vivant. See you then, my darlings!
This picture was taken with my fabulous new camera. Thanks to all of those that made it possible! Here is your first piece of documentation of Matt’s New California Life. I’m staying at friends’ house until they return from Europe and kick me out or until the movers arrive with all of my stuff. So no, the beautiful spread you see me sitting at is not an impulse buy after my first few hours in California.
At some point I must go out and eat. And figure out what I wear to work tomorrow. Business casual? Nerd formal? Or the barely-suitable-for-society Nerd casual???
This is the look of a defended Ph.D.
Very few journal entries have showed up here lately because I’m writing my Ph.D. thesis. This is very adult, very responsible work. But I can’t forget my roots: 
Former roommate in the supporting role.
For some reason, I always thought that the standard portrait of President Eisenhower looked exactly like the guy on the label of Elmer’s glue. Then I looked up the picture of the Elmer’s glue “guy” and was a little surprised to find that it wasn’t human. Although I still kind of think they look the same. In a weird way. I’ll let you decide:
I think it’s the ears.
Today I had to deal with the problem that the official channels of buying software at my esteemed university were taking too long. This particular software has a 30-day trial license, which I started using when I initiated my order for the full license. Well, 30 days later, the provisional license ran out, and still no official permanent license from the university. I’m really on a tight schedule, and can’t spare any day to sit around and wait for software to come to me.
So what’s a busy soon-to-be-graduating grad student to do? Well, it turns out that it’s far easier to find programs on the net that will generate valid registration code numbers for programs that use such numbers to unlock important features. If you’re able to find these programs, you will be able to say astalavista to the box you’re trapped in (in Slovakia). Ahem. cough
Anyway… My point is, that when I go to these sites, it’s always about getting just close enough to accomplish your task, but not so close that you pick up some viruses or a million popup windows from the website. It occurred to me that it’s the online equivalent of dancing with a hobo. Now, I can’t say for sure, because I’ve never danced with a hobo, but it seems like a similar situation. I’ll leave it as an excercise for the reader to complete the analogy in all its details. Describing dancing with hobos with too much specifics would merely give those of the base persuasion plenty of fodder for lewd guffaws and knowing glances, and that’s not the goal here. We are in search of intellectual clarity.
To summarize, don’t get software from hobos more than you absolutely have to. It’s a dirty business. Even if it does give you every single toolkit! Every single toolkit! Ahem. Don’t do drugs kids, stay in school.
You’re going to think I’m making this up, but I swear to you I am not. These two pictures were imprinted on plastic bags protecting items that came with a Dell Precision 450 Workstation.
I laughed at them by day, but they gave me nightmares at night.
The first one reminds me of grad school.
If you’re like me, you’ve heard the “Riot Act” referred to, as in “He was so mad he read the Riot Act.” I’ve never known exactly what that meant. I assumed it was some sort of archaic slang describing a riotous situation. Well there was actually a Riot Act, a law passed in 1714 in England. And it’s pretty impressive. The idea was, you read the very specific text in The Riot Act, and if the crowd didn’t disperse, you were free to arrest the whole lot of them or possibly worse. Now, just in case you ever need to disperse an angry mob, here is the text:
You had to read it verbatim, or else it wasn’t valid. You’ve got to wonder if the sheriff had a copy with him at all times in case of emergency, or if he tried to speak it from memory in the face of an angry crowd.
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/R/Ri/Riot_Act.htm
A form of it is still the law in Canada! http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/C-46/41821.html#section-67
Now if you get that mad, you really can read somebody the Riot Act!
I have always loved the SoBe radio commercials with “Freddy”. They’re just random enough, but also funny enough for me to keep clicking on the website to hear them again, because I no longer hear the SoBe ads in my area.
My favorite is about a little bunny. It’s more dramatic to hear it from the radio, where everything else is so run-of-the-mill that an “official espokesperson” talking about Feng Shui really stands out.
I was trying to figure out a very odd Finnish mock-documentary about Finland that I saw on Minnesota Public Television in 1990 or 1991. I remember the odd, dry, but very funny Finnish humor. I wasn’t successful in finding the show but I did find the following:
From http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/prepo.htm
“ Reponen considered Viljo’s friend Heikki as the prototype of a Finnish man - he is dressed in an undershirt and sweat pants, where he has a bottle of Koskenkorva liquor in the hip pocket. He has also old black shoes without socks, a peaked cap, and he smokes a cigar and is constantly searching his mystical friend Viljo, who never appears. The minimalist dialogue and the humor in the character opens perhaps only to Finish television audiences. “
HEIKKI: Have you seen Viljo? LEO: No. HEIKKI: Aha. What are you doing? LEO: Thinking. HEIKKI: Aha. What are you thinking? LEO: This and that. HEIKKI: Aha. LEO: That kind of things. HEIKKI: Well... good luck.
(From "Scrubs")
Cut to…J.D.‘S BEDROOM – EARLY MORNING
J.D. lies in bed, cuddled up to a body pillow.
J.D.'s Narration: As I fondled Katya, my pillow girlfriend, I thought about how things had changed for all of us…
I called Gateway Technical Support because I finally decided to fix my hard drive issues properly instead of with rubber-bands (2005-01-30 Technical).
I call up Gateway, and right off the bat I can tell the guy is a little funky. I tell him what my problem was, (a faulty connector,) and he thinks for a while before telling me that I’ll probably have to send in my laptop for service. That’s ok, I think, because I’m still under warranty. But then he tells me to get my credit card ready, because it’ll be $44 for shipping and handling of my laptop both directions. I freak out a little and ask him why I paid all that money for my 3-year warranty. He replies a little too glibly, “Hey, we’ll get’chya any way we can,” and then chuckles.
He then asks for me to confirm my shipping address. “Do you live on 2222 Some Street?” (Names changed to protect the innocent.) What? I thought. That’s not my address, and for a second I thought it was my old California address. I lived there 6 years ago, before ever dealing with Gateway. “How do you know that address?” I asked in somewhat of a panic. “Oh we know everything,” Tech Guy says. “In fact, I even know the hospital where you were born. Do you?” It must of been a rough day, because, still in shock, I replied, “You mean in <some city>, Wisconsin???” “Yup,” he replies. “Really????” I asked, shocked. “NO!” he laughs back at me. It’s at that point I realize the address he spoke of was actually my parents new address in Minneapolis, where I had my laptop shipped a year ago, and not my old California address.
OK, well, that fun over with, he puts me on hold a while he deals with “a shite-load of paperwork”. Then, coming back on the phone, he informs me, “It turns out, we’re just going to send you a new cable assembly.” Worried about paying $44 for a little cable, I ask him, “Am I going to have to pay for shipping for that?” “Nah, he says, we’ll ship that to you for free.” “Great,” I say, relieved. Tech Guy continues, “The reasons it’s free is, that basically your Gateway 200 is a piece of crap. You wouldn’t believe how many calls like this we get for that model.”
“Oh, good. I guess.” I’m left wondering, did Tech Guy bring a flask of something into work today?
Apparently, Wiha is short for “Willi Hahn” or “Willi Hahn Corporation”. Those wacky Germans! Oooooh, just look at those torx drivers, babeee! That’s what I’m talkin’ about.
I have to publicly thank my generous roommate for bringing XM Radio into my life this Christmas.
I must admit, at first I was a little nervous about the $10/mo. service fee. But after just a short taste, I am so hooked. Not since getting a Tivo have I found a piece of technology that will make my life so much better.
It’s not only that there are 200 channels, in digital quality. It’s that the programming is awesome. There are three different alternative music channels that I actually like to listen to. They have no commercials. They have no DJs. They have lots of music, and as far as I can tell, they don’t understand the conecept of “heavy rotation”. It is like a radio dream come true.
My SkyFi2 unit also has a bunch of cool goodies. Like the “memory” button, which you can push if you hear a song you like, and it will add the artist and song name to a list which you can look at later.
There’s also a whole channel for the BBC World Service, and a Public Radio Channel. There are channels for every decade from the 40s to the 90s. Plus lots of other music that I haven’t had the chance to explore yet. Did I mention that you can always listen to the same radio stations wherever you are in the Continental US?
It is way awesome. You should get one. I’m actually trying to think of excuses to be in my car so I can listen more!
Not very many people know this, but my dad has had the privilege to meet and hang out with many famous foreign dignitaries. Here he is sharing a laugh with a famous World War II ally: (Dad’s friend probably has a lot on his mind--he doesn’t seem so jolly.)
Later, he invited a foreign leader from China to speak at the local Lion’s club meeting, and was lucky enough to have the pleasure of hosting and introducing the distinguished gentleman:
In his later years, as a fair and just law practitioner, he recognized that everyone needs good representation for our legal system to work. He served as pro-bono counsel for many, including a few having problems with the United States government.
I found pictures of all of these famous events, and specially prepared them for my dad as a Christmas present. In an unrelated aside, I should mention that my dad has a very weird sense of humor, and has been pining for prints just like these for years, ever since he realized that such historical prints could be prepared effectively with a computer.
I want one!
That is all.
Update: It appears that iriver is no longer selling the h140. I may have to settle for the gratuitous color screen and no remote of the h340.
I like the fact that “Gasssss” is the international word for the sound that an Illy espresso can makes when you open it.
As Jim Anchower would say, it’s been a while since I rapped at ya.
But that’s ok, since I’ve been living a grad student life, where fun-time slows and my social life runs at half the speed of a normal person. Einstein described this. If I were to go back and meet my friends in the real world after 6 years of grad school, I would find that they would’ve had the equivalent of 60 years of fun, while I would’ve felt like only a few weekends had passed. Yeah, I know, it blows my mind too.
I think I’m going to make a T-Shirt that says “Grad Life” in big stencil-font letters. Although people would either not get it, or get it and think it was really sad. I guess there’s no cause to bum people out unnecessarily.
Speaking of what grad students do for fun, lately I’ve been obsessing about why I can’t install a 60GB hard drive on my laptop, even though the drive works on every other computer, and my laptop is supposed to handle that size hard drive. The BIOS refuses to even recognize that a drive is attached to the computer. I have this psychological problem where I get really upset if I feel as though an inanimate object is beating me in a test of wills. That must be why I’m an engineer. Or maybe it’s because I’m an engineer? At any rate, I find laptop debugging very frustrating because everything’s all sealed up and not available for me to monkey with. The other realization I came to which made me sad was that there was no computer repair outfit I could bring my laptop to who would do a better job of figuring out this problem than me. Here’s hoping that somehow Gateway tech support comes through. I’m crossing my fingers that I’ll find a technician who knows all the secrets, and isn’t constantly asking me if I’m sure that I turned on the computer.
Which reminds me of my plan to issue “Not Technically Stupid” ID cards. You should be able to pass some kind of test and get one. Then when you’re on the phone with Tech support, you can give them your ID number and they can immediately start talking to you as a bona fide knowledgeable person. Instead, most of the time I’m talking to technical support people, they spend a long time going through a series of questions to make sure I’m not one of those people who use the CD-ROM drive as a cup holder. I hate that.
I had my turkey on Thanksgiving with my crazy extended family. It was actually OK, because I was slightly removed from all of the craziest of problems, while still related enough to be sympathetic. The food was amazing, even if all of my relatives are so politically conservative that they serve a dish called “Republican Corn”. Although I must give credit: If there’s one thing those Republicans do well, it’s making a corn dish. Yummy.
I just got back from another wedding. This one was for my good friend Ryan and his lovely bride Kelly. One of my friends remarked that once all of the single people get married off, we’ll have no reason to rendezvous from across the country to the same spot anymore. I hope that’s not true. Hopefully we’ll at least all be a lot richer than most of us are now, so jet-setting across the country for the weekend will be totally possible and fashionable.
For a blessed occasion (and this wedding was definitely the blessed kind, in an actual church) there certainly was a lot of gambling that transpired. Or at least poker playing for plastic chips. It probably depends on your religion to figure how God feels about simulated gambling with no actual money involved. I played more poker in a short amount of time than probably ever before. And I must say that the absence of any real money was very liberating. I think what I learned is that I’m very cheap, because before, even playing with a $2.00 buyin made me nervous about every chip. But with nothing at stake, I could try out different strategies and be a bit bolder. Gone was the awful feeling of losing actual money for no apparent reason other than voluntarily engaging in an activity for which I have no skill. I still wasn’t very good, but at least I think I got better. It helped that we are all intellectual nerds and somewhat systematically trying to learn from each hand. Normally I hate that kind of deconstruction of a fun activity, but in this case I really was trying to figure out how to play better, so it was welcome.
Speaking of deconstructing, I feel the same way about art. After being logical and systematic about my technical job all day, one of the best things about music or movies or plays or literature is that it can be full of mystery and intangibles that feel deeper than mere facts. Which is why I’m always a little bit surprised to find academics or those who fancy themselves academics trying to break down some work of art into little observable, identifiable pieces. It almost seems to me as if they’re trying to pretend that subjective art is objective and scientific. I’m glad I don’t believe that it’s possible, because it would be a shame.
Well, here’s the start of my pale-blue-colored online journal. The color of the background is subject to change, but I thought it was more interesting than white.
Right now I’m trying to write my thesis for eventual graduation in February (knock wood). Which is why it’s the perfect time to avoid writing--I mean, do some serious soul-searching. Yeah, that sounds better.
I’m not sure if I’ll have anything Earth-shattering for the world at large to read, but at least possibly my friends can see what’s going on with me once in a while.
I have friends who are cool enough to have blogs instead of something like this, which is obviously just an online journal. They have pseudonyms for all of their friends to protect their identities. I guess since you all know me then nobody’s secret identity will be protected anyway. So using first names shouldn’t be a problem? Pseudonyms seem like too much work. Then I’d have to remember them. What a hassle. And as my roommate can tell you, I’m bad with names. Which is good because she’s bad with faces. It reminds me of a movie.
Speaking of secret identities, everyone should see The Incredibles. I love Pixar because they were the first people to invest computer animation with heart and soul. And this movie was a lot of fun, and very funny.
By the way, I’m not using Advanced Blogging Software. This is really a wiki. As a person who is a perfectionist to a fault, I love wikis. The whole idea of a community keeping things documented with few barriers between them and publishing is great. I have my own personal wiki to keep track of todo lists, movies to see, things to remember, basically EVERYTHING my feeble brain usually forgets. And it’s nice to be able to add stuff to the same virtual notebook wherever there’s a web browser, which is most places nowadays. So this won’t be a full-featured blog, but I may add capabilities in the future if I’m really trying to avoid work.
OK, sleep is good. Without sleep, you’re as happy as a chicken in a tree. There’s my very first obscure inside reference which maybe two people will get.
