Holiday Wrapup

Much traveling and sleeping in foreign beds lately. Last week was spent at AGU in San Francisco. We stayed across the street from the Marriott. It was ok, but the bed was a little hard and there was a TV attached to it. I meet with lots of old friend from grad and undergrad as well as other meeting I have attended in the past.

After the tiring meeting, it was back home for a few days to tie up some loose end, like finals, grades, and reimbursement. Then it was back out to the west coast. We flew through Atlanta. I hate that airport. What kind of airport allows smoking inside. Smoking lounges are "seperated" from the rest of the airport by a sliding glass door. I have seen the doors propped open, people standing in the doors keeping them open, and a cone in front of the door (for what reason, I do not know). I have also walked in front of the door only to have to open and receive a refreshing breath of second-hand smoke. Thanks Atlanta. I would gladly pay an extra $250 per flight to avoid being routed through your smoky facilities. Oh, and don't get me started about the beeping, "beeping", beeping carts.

We finally made it to Oregon and had a nice dinner at the Portland airport. For those not in the know, the Portland airport (PDX) is smoke free, has free wireless, and is rather quiet (as airports go). The last few days have been spent relaxing on the couch waiting for packages to arrive for x-mas. We will be off to California next week for more holiday festivities.

Macy*s Thanksgiving Day Commercial

I cannot seem to watch the Thanksgiving Day "Parade" without getting grumpy. It happened last year and it happened again this year. I think my two biggest problems with the "parade" are it is a kinda half parade, half street show and it is just a big commercial. What commercialism ?: first, it is called Macy*s blah blah; second, the current Broadway musicals put on their numbers to advertise themselves; third, most floats are sponsored by some company with the exception of a few; fourth, the channel covering the "parade" decided to bring on actors from their current crop of shows to advertise them, and not show the floats and balloons. If you are going to cover the "parade", cover the "parade". The funky "parade" structure also bothers me. With the singing and dancing coming before the "parade" starts, actually an hour before it starts. The whole thing just seems a bit stupid to me. But the dog show is on afterwards.

Oh, the markets in The Ocean State and The Turkey State are closed on Thanksgiving. The people here take their Turkey Day seriously.

You Drink, You Type, You Spill

Well, it happened again. I was working at my computer having a nice warm cup o' joe. I turned to my left to look at my laptop, then decided I would do something else on my desktop machine. I am a multi-tasker, you see. I went for the mouse quickly, and without looking. Nothing is *ever* in the way, why look. *Smack* *Clunk* *Clunk* *Glug* *Glug*. There goes the coffee, Nooooo-ooooooo. Sh*t, now I have coffee on my keyboard and mouse. Quick, Clean, Clean, Quickly Clean, Save the Mouse, The Keyboard. Get all the liquid off the mouse, Now the keyboard. Phewww, mostly clean and dry now. Awwww Sh*t, the space bar doesn't work now, either do portions of my keypad and pressing "k" now produces "k;", the "l" key doesn't work either.

I have two choices. Fix the keyboard or get a new one. I didn't have the tools on hand or even at home to completely take apart the keyboard. It would also take a while, probably a week to get it fixed, that is if I could fix it. I give up.

I called up Apple for support. They told me I needed a new keyboard, but it is not covered under my warranty because *I* spilled the coffee. I guess if my computer spilled coffee on its keyboard Apple would replace it. That is fine, it was like $40 for a new one. I was told it was going to be 3-5 business days until I get the replacement. I guess I deserve that too for spilling the coffee.

This has happened numerous times before. Lets see I can add coffee to the ever growing liquids I have spilled on my keyboard:

Coffee - Once
Tea - Like three times and with many more near misses.
Coke (in a real glass bottle, one of those tall ones, not the short ones) - Twice

This morning around 11, my new keyboard got delivered. Wow, that was faster than NetFlix. Sweet. Thanks Apple, you have made my life better once again. Now I need to learn not to put liquids near my arms, hands, and mouse.

CAP Movie Reviews

CAP, what is CAP ? See on boingboing.net and blog.wfmu.org, we have the ChildCare Action Project (CAP) Christian Analysis of American Culture (CAAC) Movie Reviews. Reading throught the reviews are, one might say, hill-airrrr-e-us. South Park and Sin City are great. They also have final scores infleuence density, with the lower the final score the worse and the higher the influence density the worse. South Park got a density score of 10.65 and Sin City got a score of 0.0. Now I am sorry I missed Sin City. Here is a breakdown of the scores in histogram form. The top is the final score and the bottom is the infleuence density. Hmmm, interesting.

Mighty Mouse

This new screen with the mighty mouse is sweet. Not only is the screen big, 23'', it is linked in with all the nifty new OS X features. I can use the button ball on the center of the mighty mouse to task switch or any other task, like expose. The other cool thing is screen zooming. Hold down the control button and then use the scroll ball to zoom into the screen. Freakin' Sweet.

Stuff I forget but need

I am trasferring a whole bunch of files from my old computer to my new one, what a pain. Doing this makes it go a alot faster. Oh yeah, I am putting this here so I know where to find it the next time I need to do this. Hopefully never again.

tar cf - files directories goldfish | ssh savage13@ip.address.schmucky.com tar xf - -C /home/me

Switerland Run Down

My trip to Switerland was great. The first two days were spent in Zurich with Kelly who was esstential in organizing the meeting that was the next 5 days. While in Zurich we took a boat tour of Lake Zurich, bought Chocolate, ate fondue, ate sauerkraut, ate sausage, but I did not buy a time piece or do any banking. While I do have a new job, my resources are not expansive enough to warrant a Swiss Bank account. The next five days were in Pontersina, in the south eastern part of the country near St. Mortiz. Most of time was spent in a conference room discussing science but we did get a one day field trip to the Alps to see some quite interesting yet complex geology.

have you heard about the new pirate movie?

it's rated arrr!

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.

Comics

If you like the comics, and you think those other comics really have no business on the same page as things like this


You will throughly enjoy The Comics Curmudgeon. It takes a stab at all those other comics and makes them worth reading, or at least skimming for idiocy.

brian needs a new post

this video made me laugh out loud. how much fish can *your* cat haul?

Bite My Shiny Metal ...

Futrurama is Back

From the article: "I just have one reaction: Huzzah!"
I agree.

Timbuk2 Weekend Contents

I went to a pool party on Saturday and decided to bring a bit of beer, with thanks to the Monks of course. I had bought two 6-packs for the party but need a transportation device. In comes the Timbuk2 bag to the rescue. I knew I got this bag for a reason. Browsing through the photo set below you can easily see that the beer fits into the bag, plus there is a bit more room for a towel, swimsuit, and some sunscreen. Brilliant. Hmmm, is that what the 2 stands for in Timbuk2.

Apparently, I learned during the pool party Jason Lee will play me in a movie of my life. Maybe it is the beard. Who will play you ?