Snakes on a Plane

On Friday night, Katie and I went to see Snake on a Plane. Wow, that was and will become a classic campy horror movie. Go see it. You might thank me later.

happy birthday kt

That's right, happy birthday to me! Brian and I went out for beers on the roof deck and then fancy dinner at the Coast Guard House in Narragansett. Brian was driving, so I ended up with the better 2/3 of a bottle of tasty wine. After a yummy dinner (my Ahi Tuna was good, but Brian's Lobstah Ravioli was deelicious), and an even yummier chocolate dessert, we ran around barefoot on the beach, learned some astronomy, and fell asleep by 10 pm. It was a very good day.

How does Eric know it was my birthday?

Happy Day

It was all setup yesterday. As it was V-Day here in Rhode Island, I decided to fix some stuff in the house, move in a little bit more. I tackled the shower. The shower head that was installed was not the best in the world, it was also using a non-standard pipe. I walked down to the hardware store, got a $2 converter piece and installed the shower head. This morning while taking a shower I noticed the difference. So Much Better. Having a good shower head is incredibly important.

After the fantastic shower, I drove to the main campus to pick up my offer letter for my job. There were some small changes to be made to the letter, but nothing drastic. I need to sign it and return all the forms by Friday. *doing a little happy dance*

Nintendo DS Lite

Weehoo! I got a DS Lite last week. I had to wait for the games to come seperately, but they finally arrived. I spent most of Saturday and some of Sunday sacked out on the couch playing. The controls are great and it is easy to use, but sadly the Wi-Fi feature only works with WEP or no-auth. I may just setup the extra wireless router as WEP for playing the DS through the WISH (Wireless Internet Super Highway) , but not through WDT (Wireless Dump Truck).

Katie found this one. For everyone that is interested, Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy is coming out in mid-September for all systems, including the Atari 400. I think this is just absolutely confusing. Lego Star Wars was from the second set of movies, but named I, II, and III. Lego Star Wars II is the from first set of movies, named IV, V, VI. Why not just name them, Lego Star Wars (Ahh): The Ones You Love and Lego Star Wars (Yak): The Ones Which Weren't That Good. That would make is much clearer.

ANL's albino midget deer

Last Monday, a colleague and I had 24 hours of beam time on the synchrotron at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Lab. While I won't dwell on the nerdy scientific application we were trying out, there are few weird things about APS that are worth sharing. 1) The main mode of transportation inside the synchrotron is the adult-sized tricycle. Fun to ride, but hard to steer. 2) There is a mysterious network of above-ground pipes that goes all over the campus. The pipes take crazy 90° bends have lots of nonsensical twists. An ANL scientst told us that the "local lore" is that these are steam pipes that deliver heat to the buildings, but the fact that that this is "lore" suggests to me that their true purpose must be much more secret. 3) The lab campus is populated by the freakiest deer I have ever seen (in fact, they look more like big goats aside from their huge antlers). Liz and I had a close encounter with two ghostly stags in the middle of the night, which was pretty cool but also kind of creepy.

Moving with TiVo

After moving the TiVo had to be set up. Katie did most of the work and it took her a while, well it took the TiVo a while to determine where it was and get the tv schedules it needed. Cool. it works. Nope, it doesn't. I realized today that the TiVo was doing fine with the cable channels, like Comedy Central and Discovery, but with the local/over the air channels it was having trouble. The TiVo was looking for particular programs on particular networks, like ABC in DC. That was never going to happen. I needed to delete the season pass for each local channel and get the season pass again for the same program. It wasn't all that hard, just a very odd circumstance.

Locale Change

I have fully moved up to Rhode Island. Nothing is left in DC. I still need to unpack all of my boxes and do a bit of organizing but that will come with time. Katie and I also need too figure out what we need to get for the house. She has been waiting for me to move in before the purchasing begins. She has started to get milk delivered weekly from Munroe Dairy.

Bottle Caps

I thought this was pretty neat. Bottle caps as magnets or thumbtacks. It looks so simple, even I could do it. The hot glue gun may be a problem.