Les Aventures de Monsieur Stylobien

The quest for car insurance

2008-06-05T16:38:00.002-04:00

You'd think it would be easy, ha you'd think. Well actually in a way it was, but it was amazing not the French bureaucratic system that won the day but their road system and their love to never label anything other than what town you'll get to if you keep following it (even in the middle of a frickin city) Lesson learned, google maps with loads of road names and number mean essentially nothing when your navigating France.

Right so why did I even need to bother with this. Well somehow even after a year of more or less total neglect and CERN site surveillance dragging it across a few parking lots, my BMW actually still runs and not very bad all things considered. The rear rubber edge around the chrome bumper got pulled out but after looking at it, it's not a hard thing to adjust and one of my front tires apparently had a slow leak leading it to flatness, and the battery was at some point (ahem) left connected and totally drained. Thankfully because it was pretty new, it revived itself within a day after snuggling up with a 5 amp charger. Seriously I was expecting much worse, but after driving it around for awhile it basically behaves just like it did a year ago. A true testament to german engineering, as in it still runs even after being left out in an open parking lot for a year.

For now reasons which I can't fully justify either, I've also decided to drop even more cash into it. See I can tell you right now this can only horribly backfire on me and it's more or less the equivalent to just lighting money on fire.... but I'm getting to live out in a way something I've wanted to really do since I was pretty young, being rebuilding an old car. So with this idea firmly jammed into my brain after many years plus the fact that CERN has a pretty bitchin auto repair club, I can assuredly say that I'm not thinking clearly when it comes to what I should do with the car. Alright long story short, the parts are on the way so I can rebuild the rear brakes, part of the front suspension, and more firmly affix the exhaust system to the underbody. I also have delusions of replacing all the hoses in the engine compartment and rebuilding the shifter though I still haven't exactly figured out what that will end up costing.

But this is all just rambling about stuff that in reality is only interesting to me. So the real fun today came when I decided that I should probably get you know some car insurance for this thing, might you know make it kinda well legal. I thought about this a lot the past few days while I've been driving it around un-insured.

Lesson learned from last year, never get car insurance from your bank especially if that Bank if Credit Agricole. Fuck I was paying like 200 a month for that shit, well partially because they did accept any of my american issuance records that show my clean driving record and the fact that they probably sold me a bunch of mongoose coverage to go along with the glass and fire damage and such. Let me tell you I was just kinda pissed when I found out that this isn't what other people were paying, and of course this only became realized right at the end when I started working for IU. Anyhew MAIF is the way to go, they like CERN people and give us reduced rates. Shit I'm paying like 300 now for the whole fucking year. That's it and from the looks of it, I think it has just about the same coverage as I was getting before.

This was all great but the thing was getting to the damn insurance place literally took the whole f-in day. Their office is in Annemasse which is like right next to Geneva which is right next to CERN, but the road to Geneva is totally whacked out from all this new tram line construction, downtown Geneva traffic was just as I remembered it, and well what really got me was at the very end trying to find the place when I got into the town. I had my handy printed out google maps, but with no avail. Usually I'm pretty good at this kinda stuff but today was just a kick in the teeth. I literally spent over 2 hours driving more or less in circles in crazy French traffic in an un insured car mind you trying to find the insurance building. I will say that did get the frustration and anger levels pretty damned elevated. Heh but in the end it worked out, I ended up getting to the place at like 5:15 and thank god they felt like dealing with me because they closed at 5:30. Alas the out of control hot, French, and did I mention that she was like unreal hot, it's like I didn't know figures like that existed in reality, insurance girl was leaving so I spent the next hours going over the paperwork with well not her. Well, the guy I ended up talking to was very friendly and didn't mind my horribly broken French so the actual getting of insurance went without a hitch.

Yay I got to drive back home legally in the end and for cheap! I guess this lets me afford all the "repair" work I'm planning on attempting. I celebrated with a healthy amount of beer at the CERN restaurant before picking up my things and going home.

Ah other double plus good things recently, AT&T unlocked my phone with very little hassle and because IU rocks the new office space we got is like 3x bigger than any of the other new offices being opened up to people. Right now we've got like well 3 people myself included in there and well right next door Yale had to cram in like 8 grad students into what more or less looks like a closet. I also think, but am not totally sure that our office is also bigger than U Penn. But who cares, in the end I've got a window desk seat in a pretty convenient location.

Oh ok now this was great, as I was driving back to CERN I hit the standard Geneva end of the workday traffic and everything was backed up to hell. So in this mess along the way I end up getting in front of a pretty hot woman who was pretty much spending all of her time checking her makeup in the rear view mirror, leading to hear ramming into my rear bumper when traffic stopped. Actually it really didn't damage my car at all and it ended up breaking off her front license plate, but I just kinda had to bite my lip and appreciate the irony that Europe had dealt me. I returned a friendly it's no big deal wave and surprisingly not the middle finger as she apologetically waved and proceeded to speed away on the nearest side road. You gotta pick and chose your battles here, you really have to, and even thought it took the whole day I got my insurance which was enough for me.

I've kinda gone off the radar

2008-06-04T20:18:00.002-04:00

Well lets see there was end parties in Bloomington, adventures in Washington D.C, a stay at home in the Bing, some time out in Boston town and well now I'm back at CERN. Pretty much that's what's happened this past month where I've been really lazy and not written a damned thing on here. Not good, not good at all but I'm working to remedy this so I figured writing something would be better than continuing to write nothing. I should fill in the details more, and I will but not tonight because it's late as hell and I've got work tomorrow.

Things that totally rock though
1) End of M7 BBQ = lots of free edibles and drinkables + many purloined supplies for this weeks TRT BBQ
2) My BMW still running (and not that bad all things considered) after total neglect for a year
3) Super protein bean and rice lunch diet that I've gotten back on

CERN site surveillance has also now surpassed St. Genis kebab guy as my supreme European nemesis. Trying to have my car impounded and crushed is just a touch more infuriating than not being allowed to have fries with my kebab.

The weather has totally sucked. Since I got back to this part of the world it's pretty much been steady rain, well ok there was one sunny day, but yet I still haven't been able to see Mount Blanc or well any of the alps infact. There are a lot of clouds.

I've been doing so little it's absolutely amazing

2008-05-07T00:34:00.002-04:00

No classes, no worries, no nothing.... yeah maybe been doing a bit to much of that nothing category. Actually well lets see, Saturday was mostly spent wallowing in hangover and aimlessly cleaning the place up. That went alright I guess. Yeah that was about it for Saturday. Sunday I pretty much also stayed in the house watching anime. So fantastic, slothed out with no hw due the next day all I had to do was eat food to stay alive, that was it, the only thing I really had to do. Mostly pizza, even lazier I know, screw making food I just have to call the magic number and it comes right to my door! It's a pretty pathetic state I know, but I loved it. Was able to get through all of Code Geass which is an alright show. Its well drawn and there were some good plot twists so I would say I was quite entertained. Even got a hold of all the second season episodes that people have gotten around to subing.

Ok I didn't spend the entire weekend watching anime. I did go to the driving range on Sunday. Yeah that went pretty bad, nothing felt quite right so I pretty much just blew 6 bucks on a whole bucket of balls and looked silly. Monday I was thinking about going into work but well hmmmm, just kinda dicked around the house getting stuff picked up and "organized" in terms of what stuff I want to leave / take with me for the summer. I also decided to revisit the driving rage, that went better than sunday. I got into my typical grove of hitting great with my irons then doing abysmal with the woods and any alternations between the two that you want to make. Hmmmm oh yeah and I watched the Red Sox, gotta throw that in there. Today didn't see anything else very exciting. Went into work for a little bit then pretty much repeated the laziness of the weekend.

Tomorrow though I've got a bit to do, well really later today. Wanna hit up the driving range again (not exactly sure why I'm so compelled to do that recently), would be nice to drop by the art museum, gotta raid my office for stuff to take with me, hmmm need to organize this second BBQ and well I think that's about it. Oh yeah and pack up stuff for the summer. Heh, minor detail and in all reality probably one that will be left for Thursday morning.

Ahhhh how great it is to be done with classes. At some point though I need to motivate and start studying for the quals, but that point is not right now.

The first year

2008-05-03T04:31:00.002-04:00

It's over, kinda hard to believe and to be honest I'm sure I really even do at this point. Sinking in slowly, but yeah definitely there's been the realization since 12:15pm (right after I turned in the Stat Mech final) that damn the first year of grad school is over. It's a pretty damn good feeling and in an odd way even though it's been a frickin long and sleep deprived year, I look back and it still seems like I just got into Bloomington. Eh, but I get that feeling all the time. Looking back it always seems like everything just happened yesterday in an odd way even when that's not the case at all. I'm not sure if that's true for other people or not, well yeah it probably is. Right, where was I going with this?

It's been an interesting year to say the least. Bloomington has been a lot of what I expected (things stemming from that first and very brief visit here) and also a lot of stuff I didn't expect. This town isn't to bad, for being not that large and in the mid-west. That doesn't sound very positive now does it, but then again I still compare everything now to living in Boston and that's just such a damned hard thing to beat that heck if something isn't to bad compared to being in Boston in all reality is actually pretty damn nice. Do I like the change of venue though, yeah in a lot of ways I do because it's good to live in different places but I still can't let go of the fact that I used to live right next to Fenway park, ride around on the T all the time, blow money away on great food in the north end (and at IQ), and I donno just be in a large city. I'm coming to terms that even 2 years after the fact, I'm still suffering from Boston withdrawal. Ah there's no hope now is there.

But I do like being in Bloomington. Shit I can live in a house here, like a real house with a yard and next year a basement! The campus is well actually a campus (and unless you've gone to BU you don't know where I'm coming from with this) but holy crap having a campus is cool. Our quad is a frickin forest, which has actually just started to turn that vibrant green that leaves tend to have when they first come out, so it's quite pretty at the moment. There are animals I see besides pigeons/cockroaches/and rats.... basically just change them to deer/rabbits/and I saw turtle once right next to our department and that owl sitting on my bike that one night.... so yeah I'll have to say Bloomington wins out on that front by a long shot. There's also a pretty damn descent amount of stuff to do around here too, especially for it's size. Bloomington reminds me a lot of being in Ithaca (both have excellent bagel shops among other things) ah but it lacks the lake. Well there are a few lakes nearby which are nice but not anything like Cayuga, but that's getting off topic. I guess I don't have that many specifics about Bloomington in mind, but I'm impressed with the overall feel of the town. I still think it's cool that they have both a national public radio station based here and a community run radio station. WFHB does rock indeed.

The department has been alright too. Still getting a feel for the research group, well ok no I definitely have a feel for them (that sounds dirty doens't it) but well they just operate so differently from what I'm used to that well I'm still adjusting. It's a very different mentality than the way the Super-K group was. They both have parts I like and dislike (won't get into that here) but that's good, that's why one should move around to different universities and work with different people. It's also why it's always a good idea to go listen to talks, because especially with those that after going to way to many for my own good I just have a much better feeling for what I want to do when I actually get the chance, and yeah who knows maybe someday I'll get to do the same with a research group.

I've been pretty satisfied with the classes, for awhile I wasn't to sure about them (in terms of them being as rigorous as other schools and such) but in the end I'd say I learned quite a bit. Mechanics was great, I've actually stopped hating that subject which believe me I never though I'd be saying. Didn't use Goldstien but I thought Fetter & Walecka was alright, I actually really like the way they treated normal modes, and it was a dover book so wonderfully cheap! E&M was of course Jackson, and not only Jackson but problem's of Schaich's own invention which would always leave me wishing we just had more Jackson problems. That class definitely had no lacking in rigor, shit more often than not we'd go into way more detail than Jackson about why things were the way they were, but then again that's what you get when you have a theorist who studies plasma resonances of materials. Quantum was good too. For awhile we didn't seem to be doing much at all, but we got through Sakurai cover to cover (actually we almost got through Jackson cover to cover, only cut out chapters 16 and 8) and we did Spherical tensors, which from what I've heard a lot of other people don't do but damned do they make problems easy. Stat-Mech would be the black sheep in this crowd though, alas it's just not to be that I'll ever get a good stat-mech course. Holy damn was that course useless, I think in the end I unlearned material. Ah, I won't get into that though.

In the end, I got through it, hell I even think I learned a thing or two. I was able to do it pretty much on my own, partially due to having a separate office from everyone else and partially by my own desire. I mean I could guarantee that if I worked with others I would of A) spent less time on hw and B) probably gotten a bit higher of a grade, but I had to prove to myself that I could do it. There was bit of doubt floating around in my mind you know after fucking up the GRE and getting as many rejections from graduate schools that I did, and the following doubt I ended up getting from some people in Boston. It was without question more stress on myself this year, but actually getting through it well is worth it. It lifts any doubt I had and yeah that was something that I couldn't have kicking around up there in my head. That actually more than just finishing the first year is what really feels good. There's still the quals, are those are no laughing matter, but the mindset is there now where I can sit down and study my ass off and that's important.

One causality, well aside from many including what little social life I like to think I've had in the past, I think was my hair. Oh the hairline is definitely further back than when the year started, not so thrilled about that. Eh, I guess there's still some coming to terms with the fact that hair loss is slowly but seemingly inevitably becoming a reality. It's been going on for awhile, but yeah it's on my dads side of the family that's for sure so really I just see it as holding out for as long as possible before I just go out and buzz it down to nothing. My line is when (hey lets be optimistic, if) there's any sign of patchiness, especially on top. It's mostly just been loosing ground in the front, which I've coped with but yeah I like my hair but I won't kid myself at all if it really goes south. Buzzing it down to the point where you really don't have it is far better than holding onto it and it looking like shit. Ah, I don't like this at all, but then again what can I really do.... besides cut down stress because that's never really going away.

Today I finally got the rest of my camera (pre actually receiving my tax refund + super stimulus checks but heck I want to buy it now while I'm out of sate) stuff. I like the 24mm lens, it's in great condition for being used and significantly cheaper than if I bought it brand new. I've got the filters now to do UV photography so I should try and play around with that in the next few days, and ah probably one of the coolest things ever is the Holga camera that I bought. Wow, it's so low tech that is just amazing. I can see why people love this piece of black plastic. I particularly like the fact that it uses 120 film (being of much higher quality than 35mm) it kinda is self contradictory because you use 120 film because it's so large and can produce amazing images but then use it in the most crude and utilitarian of cameras. This thing doesn't even has a glass lesn and at least from what I've read is guaranteed to have a light leak or two or three. It's taking a really lo-fi photo really well in outstanding resolution, that's what makes it great. I think tomorrow which really is latter today, I'm going to play around with it a bit. For as convenient and powerful as digital is, I still love film. Mostly in all the hand labor you have to put into making the photo, which unfortunately I don't have the resources to do anymore. That's actually what got me into photography the most in the first place, all the fun you get to do in taking a undeveloped negative to a finished photo. The various chemical concoctions you apply, hanging around in a room with a dim red light, playing around with the enlarger exposure, making fixes by dodging/burning parts of the image, it's just great. I spent way to much time in high-school doing that and I wish I still could.

But that was just supposed to be an aside from the real event this evening. The hey we're finally done with our first year BBQ. I tired to organize this thing early and for awhile it looked like quite a crowd would show up, but the weather was very much on the fritz so I think that scared people away. It actually turned out to be quite a lovely evening, a few spurts of some sprinkling but we dodged almost all the the major stuff that's been passing through the area. A lot of physics people actually showed up which was great because I don't think we've ever gotten this many people from our year all out at the same time, so that was great. Of course the food purchasing and beer procurement was overestimated, and now my kitchen is under siege by piles of buns, a watermelon, at least one 30 pack of beer, god only knows how much ground beef, and stuff I'm sure I'll remember when I wake up. Actually, there'll need to be another party to finish off the beer bought for this one, but that's ok. I burned my stat-mech book, oh that was great. Really it's like the only book I think I've ever come across that I've felt the need to destroy. Everyone else agreed, and you know I was perfectly alright for accepting the fact that I wasted 50 bucks on a worthless book and I could make peace with it as long as it warmed me for a brief moment with its burning glow..... so lovely, so very lovely. A pretty descent night all around though I would say my opinions towards a few people have shifted in various directions and after thinking about it for awhile, yeah I'm pretty certain I'm standing by my new thoughts. That sounds weird doesn't it, but whatever it's true.

However I must say I've been dicking around writing this for far to long and I must get to sleep before the sun rises up anymore than it already has.

Down in the trenches of finals

2008-04-29T23:38:00.000-04:00

One down and ugh, two more to go. Today was Quantum, and that went well eh alright enough. The test was entirely on scattering which I found a bit strange because we've only done scattering in the last few weeks of lecture and we never had really any homework on it. However, well I guess we did know ahead of time that this is what the test would cover exclusively so the two balance out in a way. Downside, this past month I haven't exactly been making it to class on a frequent basis (50/50 me just being a lazy piece of crap and the other half actually very annoyingly bouts of mono resurgence, it's very odd because for the most part I feel totally fine but every couple weeks I'll still have a day or two where I wake up and have that same feeling like I just got smashed in the head with a bag of bricks.... so I guess it's still in me oh joy) Right so in any case I haven't really been there for well enough scattering lectures to make studying for this test a total bitch. It also didn't help much that this past weekend I found myself highly demotivated to do much of anything.

Ah once again I've lead myself to a one day (yesterday actually) study marathon, and actually managed to cram more than enough scattering equations into my head to write passable answers on the exam. Well it actually went better than I though it would, for the most part I wasn't bull shitting any of my math but well we'll see. Guaranteed not on the high end of the grade spectrum but I rocked the two midterms so as a whole I'm not worried.

Right right, E&M though on Thrusday.... yeah now that's a different beast entirely and not for the better. I really should of started studying for that today, I just couldn't mange to pull it together though. Also, having a Red Sox game on didn't help. I could tell when I clicked buy that MLBtv would be the ruin of me. Ah but it's all good, Lester pitched a fantastic 8 innings and Papelbon came in to shut down the 9th where things were still scoreless and with 2 outs Ortiz and Manny both get singles and set it up for Youk to drive one into shallow center and with a bit of fielder bobbling Papi managed to cross home. Not exactly how you'd picture Papi getting the winning run but hey it's a game ender none the less.

You know it's totally amazing how something so little and for the most part inconsequential can bring up such strong memories that are all in the past... and not good ones either, no no much on the other end of the emotional spectrum. That happened the other day and I just had to catch myself and kinda take a step aside and look in awe at how amazingly powerful, pervasive, and just down right sneaky hard rooted emotions can be. Such is life though, an aspect inescapable but still I think I'm allowed to stand back gawk sometimes at how utterly over the top it can be. Thankfully, fleeting would be the proper way to describe it in the and that I'm most happy about.

I'm finding more anime that looks good to watch, this is bad because I shouldn't spend so much time watching anime series. That and I already have too many series queued up already that need watching. Damn you Japan, damn you.

I've discovered this new, well at least I didn't know about it at all but it's probably not that new in reality, blogging type of thingy called twitter. Actually it sounds kinda neat, you can only give it short updates, 150 characters max and the idea is you randomly throw things up there about what your doing throughout the day and in theory your friends do the same thing providing another endless source of wasted time internet time poking through mundane details about what everyone you know is up to. You have to be pretty committed to updating it though, which I could easily see myself not doing, but in theory I like the idea because I would totally waste my time on that seeing what things people are doing. It would be the new facebook, the embodiment of my daily procrastination. Eh, actually I more like the idea how easy it is to update (you can text messages from your phone that will show up on your page) and well that was enough to get this one guy out of jail when he was arrested in Egypt because he was able to throw up a message on twitter that his friends could see which eventually lead to the American Embassy sparing him from the Egyptian justice system. It was something really silly, like he was doing some photojournalism at a demonstration and he got hauled in by the police when they saw him. I guess I could easily envision something like that happening to me when I'm back in Europe and venturing about, I totally would break out a camera if I could at something like that, so the idea is appealing.

You know it's funny how a totally stupid misspelling years ago has propagated itself to this very day. Back when I was much younger and first got the internet and came up with the oh so amazingly misspelled screen name Rumbelbass (I was shooting for Rumblebass, which was the name of an all tube totally bad ass Fender bass amp, pretty retarded for a screen name but back then I thought something like that was the total shit enough so to use it as an identifier) but I stuck with the name because by the time I realized my spelling biff I already went through the process of switching screen names and getting the new one out to people and such, so for reasons out of sheer laziness I stuck with it. Fast forward to today and it's still there, and propagated through the internet as a username for all sorts of other things. I find it funny, because there's no way at this point that I'd ever change it, but still the letter switch remains hmmmmm probably close to 9 years.

My quest to find shooting ranges around here, especially a trap or hell any type of clay range would be frickin sweet but alas my search has still proved to be fruitless. I say boo to that, actually I'd probably have better luck finding rifle ranges or heck indoor pistol ranges (they almost always have groups that shoot .22 sporter rifle competitions) That would also be pretty fun, I'm not sure why I've been recently so obsessed about getting back into trap shooting. In actuality for the amount I used to shoot, clay shooting was only a small fraction. I pretty much only did sporter rifle, well that and prone/three position shooting for the Empire Games. Actually that would be pretty fun to get back into, but the cost of buying a good 22 target rifle and the other equipment (shit you need the body constricting canvas jacket, shooting glove, sling, spotting scope, mat at the minimum.... the constricting canvas pants and true flat shoes aren't really necessary but do help significantly) on top of a rifle that costs $1300+ In short it's amazing expensive in the end. At times I'm really annoyed that I happen to shoot left handed, because god if a company even makes a dedicated left handed gun it's always in the higher end of the spectrum. Eh I guess that's why I'm thinking a nice over/under for clay shooting, there aren't really any extras you need to on top of the gun and of course shells to go out and do it.

Today I stopped by The Pour House again and again the coffee shop girl is nowhere to be seen. You know I'm getting really sick of this, this is actually the 3rd girl who fits this pattern. There was also art museum girl (holy crap was here accent hot too) and liquor store girl. In all cases I go to said place and seriously it's was in each case like only two times spaced a good bit of time apart and apparently I'm memorable enough where I'm recognized the second time and they get pretty chatty and actually called me a regular at the respective places. So it's after these encounters that alright it clicks that hey there's really no good reason why they should remember me and I'm not a regular, gonna venture a guess that there's could be some interest lurking around and it's probably worthwhile to ask them out, plus they were all pretty damn hot so it's really a no-brainer. Then it's right after that point, they disappear never to be seen again. Seriously, I've gone back at the same time on the same day the following week, tired different times on different days, and no they've vanished. Suffice it to say, John is very very very (continue this chain of very for as long as you like) annoyed.

This link is amazing, I totally want of these things to follow me around and well I donno just float and look cool.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/28/festo-airjelly-flies-through-the-air-with-the-greatest-of-ease/

Where did the weekend go?

2008-04-27T23:55:00.002-04:00

I often ask myself this, and this weekend for sure was one that warrants this question. Depending on how you look at it, actually time and more precisely how the upcoming finals this week go will determine if it was either the best or worst way things could have been handled. On the studying front, I got shit for shit done, hell I probably managed to negative study because I probably ended up forgetting lots of that oh so important stuff that I will soon be asked to regurgitate on paper in a few very short and very soon days. Actually all and all I did very little and in a way that feels so amazingly wonderful. I usually have a let down period like this after the semester wraps up, but usually not until the finals are over so well this next week might prove to be a little dicey. Eh, I'm already in a pretty relaxed frame of mind though, so I doubt even the worst of the worst that Schaich could think up would phase me very much. Wheatear this will work its way to my advantage or my utter defeat I can't say as of now.

So in the wonderfully very little that I did do, what was it that I did? First of all I didn't do a single damn social thing, again along with the period of laziness something that's usually reserved until after finals and when I get back home. I always have a decompression weekend like that, not really sure why but I do and it's nice I like it quite a bit, this semester it just came a week to early. In any case I believe, though I kinda forget what exactly I occupied myself with on Friday, but I'm pretty sure I blew off a lot of time watching the end of Death Note. The ending of the second to last episode, fricking out of control with amount they leave hanging, I really don't know what I would of done if I was actually forced to wait an entire week to send the conclusion. Actually I have some mixed feelings about how it ended, in one way I almost wanted Light to win just because the entire series is focused on him outwitting everyone against him, just overlook the minor detail that he's a total psychopathic manipulative mass murderer. I donno, I just think how it all went down didn't seem like a fitting way to finish things. The setup didn't feel like it was really crafty enough where Light would just utterly fail as bad as he did, that and I really hate Near (to much of a carbon copy of L, but lacking) But it was a pretty spectacular ending, I'll give it that, though it was a very standard anime ending where there's a conclusion but yet so many elements of the story aren't even addressed and left open ended which always annoys the shit out of me. Good show, something worth watching.

Hmmm so that brings us to saturday, and you know I'll retract my earlier statement because I did get a lot done. First, I did some thawcking at the driving range where I became very satisfied with my swing using my irons but still utterly at a loss when it comes to hitting with any of my drivers consistently. I guess that's what hybrid clubs are for, it would be nice to give one of those a try sometime. Going to the driving range is always great though, especially when the weather is nice, because all you really have to do is take your time working on your swing with enjoying the nice weather. Ah and they had the grass open, so much nicer than hitting off those damned nylon turf mats. I really don't understand why I was like one of three people hitting off the equally large grass area while the mats were almost entirely filed. Seriously, why the hell would you ever want to hit off a mat when you can just as easily actually tee off real grass. I'm at a loss on that one, but not complaining to much because you end up with pretty much all the grass to yourself. Easily blew off a few hours there.

Then I did the patriotic thing and voted. Indiana is pretty cool because they have the polls open for early voting like 2 weeks ahead of the actual primary date, and you don't need to have any reason or excuse for showing up early, you can just do it. Got to try out one of these new fanged electronic voting machines for the first time, I miss the good ol' switch and lever voting boxes we have in NY, but really what can I do. Hell I probably ended up voting for Pat Buchanan somehow, but as far as I could tell the machines weren't made by Diebold so that made me feel a little better about using them. I feel bad for the local politicians though, see really all I went there to do was vote for the presidential primary but then it's like demanding me to cast votes for local primaries for stuff like mayor and blah blah blah.... yeah I don't know shit about that so I figured random selection would just count as statistical background noise. Eh, all in all it only took like 30 mins so I was pretty happy about that.

Ah speaking of candidate stuff I was a little ticked because Hillary actually came to IU to speak on friday, which I thought would have been interesting to hear, heh then I could say I saw their entire family give speeches in less than a months time + see the back of Obama's head. But no, instead it turned out the head of the DOE science division, ie the guy whose in charge of the entire arm of the DOE science funding business came to IU and wanted to meet DOE funded students = I had to attend that instead. Not only was that lame, but also the fact that the numerous women they got from like the bio and chem departments were all good looking and all had fucking large rock engagement rings. It was pretty clear early on that this would be a total waste of my time, especially when the guy came in and only wanted to talk about alternative energy topics... yeah like the physics department does tons of that here (or actually not) In the end I was very confused what the whole point of this was, so I just decided to raise my hand at the end and ask him why funding was cut for ITER especially after he came in talking about all the great things happening with new energy research. Heh, I felt pretty damn good about that, it's fun calling out top ranking people on all this whole FY08 funding business. But yeah overall that was pretty damn boring, but I did steal like 10 cookies walking out the door which were enjoyed throughout the rest of the day.

Right back to saturday, so yeah I golfed, I voted, ah then the fun part I went to the gun store. In tossing things around in my head about what to do with all this fun rebate + stimulus cash I was first thinking a super fancy lens or two, but then it also hit me that I've always wanted an over-under shotgun. Actually either of those choice I don't mind throwing money at because shit they'd maintain their value without question while saved money in the bank.... well not so sure about that. Invest in useful high quality material goods, that's my thinking at the moment, so yeah an O/U shotgun would most certainly fit in that category. And thus began the adventure of my first visit to a midwestern gun shop, and hell did they have guns. Not just like normal guns, no no, I mean they have a very nice selection of O/U that I looked at for the most part, and various hunting rifles, and you know also that rack of frickin assault rifles. Didn't expect that, though I am used to looking at guns in NY where the regulations are just a "touch" more strict. Didn't expect to be playing around with an automatic shot gun, I can tell you that much, and also who the fuck needs and automatic shot gun. Or a sawed off "pistol version" of a tried and true kalashnikov. Jebus, did they have a lot of unnecessarily weapons there. I donno, I'm all for people having gun but you know really I just don't think people need full auto shot guns. 50 caliber sniper rifles, well maybe, you know sometimes you just really need to kill a deer from 2 miles... or a light truck (which was what those damned things were designed for)

So suffice it to say I was a bit taken back by the lets say thoroughness of their selection but ok fine I did have a fun time checking out all of the above mentioned items. I discovered that AR-15s just feel really cheap, well that and I'm still a sucker for anything that's made out of wood and not plastic regardless of the greater practically of the latter. I also discovered that Browning doesn't make a single damned gun in Belgium anymore, there all Japanese! I donno, Brownings are so nice but I don't know if I could handle dropping a few thousand on a gun with a big made in Japan banding on the barrel. My cameras and optics, yes those should all be made in either Japan or Germany. Can't really say why I don't feel right about them making guns too, but well yeah I donno. Now a German gun, well that you don't even have to ask the question but I can think of any company that makes an O/U from germany that is remotely affordable (I alas don't have 10 grand to buy a Merkel). Dammit I want my Belgian! Ah but I did discover that Winchesters are now made by FN (well known belgian company for their military rifles) in the same factory that the old Brownings used to be made in. Ahhhh that right there is enough for me to rethink my attitude about Winchester. Turns out Remmington's are made in Russia of all places, yeah that's just a little off the beaten path from Ilion NY (pretty much learned that there's no such thing as an american gun company anymore which was kinda disheartening) Well I guess Ruger still is, but eh I just don't like the action on those at all. Hmmmm, so pretty much that takes me back to Europe and anything out of Italy is to rich for my blood or well I should say wallet, I have heard really good things about Lanbers which are made in Spain but I've never seen one in person. Right So I guess I pretty much want a true Belgian made Winchester or maybe a Lanber if they live up to their internet reputation.

Then the only other minor detail in this whole plan is to find a place to shoot well at least trap, though something with skeet and sporting clays would be fantastic. As usual here I am getting all excited about this when there's a chance it's not even possible to go clay shooting around here. Heh and actually in all practically I could just keep using the A5, though not exactly the best gun, it definitely scores the cool points when I've brought that to shooting ranges. Hell the people with 10,000+ O/U think the A5 is cool, which it is of course, it's only like 80 years old, works just as well as when it was bought, and the ah here the cool part, the entire barrel kicks back like a Howitzer when you fire it. Just believe me that it's cool, because it totally is.

Alright enough gun talk, ah what else came of Saturday. Chatted with the folks for quite some time and I think that led to it getting late enough where I just called the evening a wash and watched more anime and the like. Ah I should of kept reading Moby Dick, I've been slacking on that in the past few days which isn't good.

One point of particular interest, while talking with the folks I could tel dicked l someone was trying to call me but I ignored it until I got done talking but upon inspection of the number well it came as a bit of shock because even thought it's not a number I have or could find easily on the internet I for various reasons have 60% confidence in who exactly it was that tried to call me which well hmmmmm lets just say if it is who I think it is, interesting to say the least. Not exactly sure how to approach that. It would have been nice if they left a message, but ah well most people get scared away from my voicemail when my French ranting kicks in, heh but I love it, keeps people on their toes.

Ah, but again more fun things to keep my mind occupied. Today though was a total waste. I did so little, shit I barely even left the house, I slept in, slacked off, didn't even get my room cleaned, or study or well do anything productive, just around on the internet watching more online TV and looking up reviews for things I probably in all reality can't afford in the immediate future, but I've researched them to death none the less. Oh well, not much I can do about it now. Ha it's even ungodly late, which means tomorrow will not get an early start and really tomorrow must solely be dedicated to studying, and I'm super serial about that (Evidence of too much South Park right there)

Fun fun, fun fun, well at least it was relaxing. I'm pretty damned relaxed right now which is nice.

Ah and you know I forgot to write about the Earthquake, or at least I think I did, but yeah the other week we had and Earthqake! Ha that was fun, it woke me up at 5:40 am and it was funny because I heard the windows rattling, kinda like the sound windows make if a house is close to train tracks and train comes by, so my half conscious mind says oh it's just a train.... then thinking kicks in, oh there's no trains around here and why is my bed jiggling back and forth to? So I sat there for awhile because I wanted to think oh Earthquake, but then again I'm in Indiana there shouldn't be an earthquake! I stopped soon enough though, so I went back to sleep to later confirm I did in fact live through the great Bloomington earthquake of 2008! Well really it was in Illinois, but we were only like 100 miles from the epicenter and it was apparently a 5.2

Eh, this town just keeps having all sorts of surprises.

I have not written in awhile

2008-04-24T01:26:00.002-04:00

Not that I have a really good reason either, can't say I've really been doing that much. Pretty much just winding down the year with a whole pile of "I'm sick and frickin tired of doing HW" Thankfully, that's all over with. What isn't over with though is finals, being next week, being yeah not something I'm looking forward too. Ah but that impeding super-fun time aside, what has really been going on.

Hmmm, that's a good question. Been watching a lot of Red Sox games, A LOT of Red Sox games. Maybe, wait no there is no such thing as too many Red Sox games, but after getting MLB TV so I could watch the opening games in Japan and for when I head over to CERN this summer well damn you know it's right there every night and why not watch it? So yeah there's been a lot of Red Sox, and a lot of me realizing there aren't many red sox fans around here. Well that's not true I do know of at least one, but yeah I think I've already ranted about that before.

So Red Sox, and uhhhh Death Note yeah thats something else I've been watching a lot of recently. That anime got surprisingly good as it went on, still not finished (like 3 more episodes to go) but that's the problem, so close to the end it's like oh yeah I can watch just another episode no problem. Then I realize like 2 hours have gone by and then bitch about where the time goes. All standard stuff, but yeah it's a pretty good show.

Aside from mind numbing video entertainment, I do other things too believe it or not, I've also gotten halfway through Moby Dick. It's pretty good, part of my self prescribed novels that I figure I should read for just general being well readness. I do kinda like the idea of reading the classics, though that is just a pretty vague statement, but still I think it has a certain romanticized aspect to it (That and the fact that a good number of the things I've been reading we're written in the romantic period but that's besides the point) Actually what I really want to do is get through the Three Musketeer series, though I'm only on the 3rd book and of the last three it's something like 2,400 pages of swashbuckeling action set within the historical events of 17th century Europe, that's what happens when you pay the writer by the line, ah but it's good stuff. Though taking a break from the adventures D'Aretegnan, Arthos, Porthos and Aramis (see and if I was really on top of things I'd remember what their actual names are) is good. Moby Dick is pretty far from the streets of Paris. I've been going through that book fairly quickly though, kinda surprised myself, but that book really gets you with it's fairly short chapters so again its often the case where hey the next chapter is only 5 pages, sure I can read that too, and before you know it well a couple hours go by and yeah that's been going on fairly regularly these past few weeks.

Enough with the literature though, it's only good for so much, hmmmmm ah I found a place to habbitate next year. Not that I really couldn't just keep living where I am, but yeah I realized I do kinda have this weird thing about staying in any one place for more than a year. I actually haven't lived in anyone spot for more than a year since leaving home for college. So yeah, after thinking about that I decided why break the trend, and yeah I'm moving across town next August. The house is pretty badass, it's brick, but it's like the only brick house in an area surrounded by the more standard wood and metal siding jobs. It looks very out of place, but then again that adds character. Rooms are smaller than where I am right now, but hell it's like right down the street from Swain which would be kinda nice. Not that I don't mind doing the bike ride back and forth, hell I've been pretty good all year about doing that every day, but it does put me in a position where if I go home then I'm home and not going back to Swain to work = I don't really ever make dinner = spending lots of cash on tasty yet more expensive than self prepared food. The house also rocks as it has an enormous and sketchy unfinished basement that parities will most certainly be held in, so that's cool and the yard is big enough to grill on. Very important things indeed.

Hmmm what else, I've decided that I'm going to start getting into Infrared and UV photography. Not really sure why, but I started reading about it and hey it looks cool as hell and only requires the acquisition of a few fancy but fairly expensive filters. 90 bucks for a 52mm filter is a bit much, especially when you look at how much glass is in a 52mm filter, but then again the pictures you can get I think are worth it. Though for the UV it gets a little tricky because it turns out well pretty much all lenses suck at dealing with it as lens designers have gone very much out of their way to make sure the most UV light gets filtered out even before you get that far into the lens what with fancy super coatings and such. There are two solutions to this problem, one being loaded with cash and just going out and buying a very rare Nikon quartz crystal lens designed to work exclusively in the UV range or do what I just did buy a really cheap and wonderfully simple lens and strip off all the glass coating. I actually just got the candidate lens in the mail today being found and bought on Ebay for $60. It's a nice little lens though, a Nikon E series which they made in the 70s using plastic! god forbid, with a mostly metal body, oh heavens how horrible. See it's funny people got really ticked by that because Nikon was shooting to make them as affordable, lightweight, and compact as possible so the use of plastic made them for the most part un-bought.

Hurah for peoples pickiness back then because now I can get a damn sharp and small, and mostly metal (shit lens bodies are almost entirely plastic today even on the the nice ones, you have to really be in the 1000+ dollar range before your guaranteed a mostly metal construction) lens for cheap. Which is great because I'm totally ripping this thing apart and having at the glass coating when I get back to my parents house in a few weeks. Yeah that has been distracting me a good bit too in the past few days now that I start to think about it. But come on it's UV photography, I donno it just seems cool. Taking pictures of the world in the spectrum just outside of human vision. Flowers apparently look really cool, but so do people wearing sun screen, and I'm sure there's more.

Another fun do it myself project, and aside from the laptop battery rebuild debacle (the damned pice of crap didn't work, the laptop refused to charge it for reasons totally beyond me) and so yeah that was 50 bucks down the drain in an effort to be cheap and save 50 bucks and not by a straight up new battery..... which I did in the end anyways and it works quite well. Right where was I going with this, ah yes so aside from the battery failure most of my do it myself hack jobs have turned out quite well. Fixing the leak and clock in the Subaru, ah and defretting my bass. That actually went way better than I thought it would. The lens, well..... yeah that's a crap shot, only time will tell how good my skills are at stripping the finish off a precision ground piece of glass without totally fucking up the shape. But that's what some jewelers rouge, a polishing cloth and a lot of time to kill at home are good for.

Alright once again it's late as hell, I'm still up, not sleeping, need to get up early tomorrow, but it's late so I'll feel like shit when I do have to get up, still writing after fucking off for most of the evening when I could have been doing just this, but come on why kill a wonderfully well established routine at this stage in the game. It's John's sure fire prescription for first year grad school fun. But I wrote stuff here, yay, and I can feel good that at least my blog I'm not totally ignoring, unlike well pretty much everything else in life, but that's another issue entirely.

So I found out something interesting

2008-04-10T23:54:00.000-04:00

I don't leave for CERN till the 28th! Ha, well that's good to know. It's a good thing Yi was asking me about when I was going over prompting me to actually go online and check my ticket date. Yeah, the 28th is just slightly different than the 22nd. Hoary, props to me for randomly picking that date last July because that gives me like another week in the US to go around and visiting and such. Unfortunately, also poking around United's website I discovered that I am no long a premier member of their frequent flyer club... boooo because I think this drastically cuts down the number of bump ups to business class. Errrrr, well ok that only happened twice but those were the only two times I flew back to the US from Europe on United (there were a few other times last year but not actually on United) so I was hitting 2 for 2 on that one.

Started to get accustomed to the idea of flying back in something other than steerage. You know it's not the extra room or better food that I like about business class to make me miss it so much, it's the booz champagne e. Without even asking on an trans-atlantic flight I was offered like 12 drinks, and no the cheap shit either because it's on take off and cognac after dinner. So very nice, that and they serve your food on actual plates, and I got to sit on the 2nd deck of the 747... ok so there was more than one perk. I need to start flying more to get my status back, on the bright side though I have enough frequent flyer miles for a free round trip to Europe or two round trips in the US, but I go there [europe] anyways so it's another 30,000 or so till I get a free trip to someplace a bit more remote.

On a side note where the fuck did my rolling papers go? Seriously, I can't find them and this is already after I lost my other box a few months ago. Damn there's like some kinda rolling paper eating monster I'm dealing with here. That's no good, also it's not good either to try and substitute cashier receipts for proper thin leaf rolling papers. It worked in a pinch, but ehhh in the end I'd say not worth it. Today tough I pick up a new box of zigs, so back to killing myself slowly the right way.

In light of actually evaluating my financial situation, I've discovered three easily identifiable areas where my money gets wasted
1) Cell Phone: shit I barely ever use this thing. Even with the minimum plan I could have saved out huge by not selling my soul to a two year contract for $40 a month and instead gotten a pay as you go plan.
2) Food: the biggest one by far, eating out twice a day is pretty much how I've lived this year and while doable and tasty, like seriously I could easily feed myself well for under $10 instead of something more like $20 a day if I just cooked my own shit 3 meals a day
3) TV: I never really watch it but fuck roommate lives off it and well I do watch it from time to time but still not really ever so in fairness the utilities are split 50/50 witch probably in the end evens out a-ok but I'd rather not feel like I'm throwing money into something I just don't use at all.
4) This summer: As the chances of finding a subletter look bleak I'll be paying $450/month for a storage room oh goody.

So today we had that E&M test, and yeah that went just as horribly as I figured. Again, studying/not studying, I studied for 2 days straight and did it really make a difference? No, not when 50% of the test was stuff I didn't bother looking over because it was only mentioned in class and we never had any HW remotely related to it. Yeah I just took a look at that sheet and went fuck, looks like I'm shooting for a 50. See I made the mistake and drilled hard into my mind all this funness on relativity (field transforms, every thing that can be made into a 4-vector and your mother, kinematics, you name it) shit that's what we spent the last couple weeks doing and had plenty of HW on.... and yeah any of that on the test? Ha no, how silly of me to think that. In reality it came down to fucking charges flying over thing metals and diffraction (I don't even think we spent half a lecture on that shit). So yeah, dick in the butt, that's basically what it came down to. There's no winning in the class, thank god I've stopped caring.

In any case, yeah that pretty much consumed my last two days of life and led to a shitty evening so in attempts to pick up the remaining pieces of my soul I did in fact look up what was happening at the music school and they actually had a Latin Music Ensemble concert, which was by far what I needed to go and do. Uplifting, upbeat music definitely beats back the E&M blues. It was a cool setup, they spent the evening touring around South America music styles and ended up in Cuba and the guest performer was a Cuban piano player so the last pieces were his own arrangements. I liked it to how they had a lot of classical instruments in on it, they worked in a string quartet for most of the concert.

So yay for that, and yay for also the violinists being pretty damned hot but nay when I looked them up on facebook and found out one is married and the other didn't seem to have any line of her profile not lacking the word or making reference to Jesus. Crickets, foiled again, and in hindsight well shit it's the midwest and I've noticed that some of the the most even keeled seeming people are really really Jesus freaks... I mean it's not like I'd really be bothered by someone being very religious if they were cool otherwise but I mean there's a point between like ok well your religious to every other word you make reference to is Jesus. I draw a line there.... that line gets crossed a lot out in these parts and jebus I'm always told Bloomington is supposed to be the liberal free thinking bastion of Indiana. I shudder on the inside as to the immediate world I'm surrounded by.

One mid term down, one more horrible one to go

2008-04-08T11:27:00.000-04:00

But we'll ignore the impending E&M doom for the minuet and reflect upon the past few days.

Saturday I bought a Shop-Vac, to dry out the damn car some more because of that window leak problem. Oh that and I picked up some metal control knobs for my bass because I added that vartione circuit, which I'm still not exactly sure how I'm supposed to have connected, but whatever... it's now got it's own fancy almost matching chrome knob. That and it gave me an excuse to go and hit up all the music stores in town. Little bit disappointed, on the bass side none of them had anything very interesting to fool around with. Eh I got the knobs though so that was a plus. Then I went to get the shop-vac, which I was kinda iffy about actually getting until I saw they were on sale and shit they also had the wrong price out (which Lowes honored, kick ass) so I ended up getting this thing for like 30 bucks. Didn't get a chance to use it, maybe next weekend. Actually in reality, I don't even really need it anymore because the leak is fixed and I've got up most the water, but hey it's a super vacuum and it was on sale so the reasons for me currently having it should be very obvious.

Sunday was supposed to be a great day of work, a day of no fooling around and hitting the book. Studying up for quantum and E&M and maybe even looking at Stat-Mech before it's due next week.... HA. Yeah let's see, A) woke up around noon B) Got into work to find out people were going to the driving rage C) Went to driving rage and blew off the afternoon in some of the nicest weather we've had in months (no regrets there) D) Went out to casually eat lunch/dinner with a few people outside at Crazy Horse because the weather was so nice and yeah kinda ended up being hammered at 6pm on a Sunday with the sun still up in the sky.... you know the day's over when you're already drunk and the sun is still up. Somehow though, I did manage to get back to the office sober up a bit and get some work done.... let me tell you though I was none to happy to be working on getting this damned TRT monitoring code to work on our local machines, but hey in the end it paid off and I think I blew off a lot of time watching anime or something. Oh yeah Death Note, I watched a lot of that because I'd fallen behind where Adult Swim had gotten to in that series.... yeah that's pretty much how I spend my time.

Well that and somewhere in there I dicked around a lot with my p-bass so it's more or less functional, yet now wonderfully fretless, again. The new pickups are pretty badass, and I like the fact I got them from a guy who self winds them down in Florida. Way louder than the stock ones. Heh my humble mexican p-bass is looking and sounding pretty spiffy now with little mods that I've been making.

Ah that's right and I tried to get ads out to try and find a subletter for the summer. My hopes on that are low though, and I get the feeling I'll be paying a nice $450 a month for storage space while I'm gone. Could be worse, heh I could have to also pay for housing while I'm at CERN. But still, a subletter would be a godsend because saving a couple hundred a month and just throwing my stuff in a storage unit would be pretty nice. Hey I could use all the cash a buy all these frickin camera lens that I have absolutely no time to use but spend all my time looking at. See then at least I'd physically have them, for whatever that's worth. Ah but there is the fact that high quality glass pretty much doesn't loose it's value, or really go bad (especially with Nikon because they never change their mounting system) So sure it's a good investment, unlike finely aged wines/whiskey/beer. Sure they go up in value over time to, but then again I drink them.... :( wait no :) because they do taste wonderful.

On the lens front though, I'm thinking about throwing some cash and getting a few really good prime lenses. Fuck this zoom shit, let's be real photographers for once and start worrying about framing more. That and they're cheap, and sharper, and faster, and smaller than zooms! On the downside though you need a couple to cover the same range but shit I'm pretty much always shooting wide on my 18-55mm so why blow $700 on this 16-85mm Nikon just announced when I can just spend like less than 300 on a 24mm which is right where that zoom lens would be centered around anyways. It is hard though to resist those fun buzz words like VR and the like. Eh, rebate check... gottta wait for the rebate check for any of this funness though.

Yesterday I was supposed to spend the whole day studying for Quantum, well that went more or less true. Again the weather was too damned nice so I found many upon many excuses to go around wandering outside. Hmmm that's a dangerous thing, the weather beingso nice recently. Monday was one of those weird days, didn't bother going to stat-mech and pretty much spent the day studying in the office so it worked out to be a day where yeah I really didn't see anyone which just kinda had a weird feel to it. Didn't really ever get into the full super study mode that I was hoping to, just a lot of the last minuet oh shit there's a lot to know kind business... you know what's going to happen tomorrow with E&M.

But yeah Quantum this morning, I say it went doh. Totally biffed on what was a not so hard time dependent perturbation theory problem.... if only I could remember to add that fucking factor of x to make the applied field really a potential because that's what you actually care about and yeah that would get the fucking integral to not keep going to zero.... ah so much hate. So yeah felt pretty dumb about that, but otherwise I think it went ok, well just as well as any other quantum test I've taken thus far.

Bo Sox totally rocked the house today, which was a pain to take myself away from watching because I had E&M. Oh but it didn't really manner because Dice-K got the job done and the bats were swinging. A fun distraction for the afternoon.

Why are there so many hot girls working at local restaurants/coffee shops. Seriously, where are the coming from? Pretty much every joint on 4th street has really good looking girls working for them, Tibetan restaurant no exception, and yeah today I decided to change things up a bit and get coffee from the Pourhouse instead of Soma which I've been going to recently instead of Runcible Spoon and I was like damn thats right this place is just staffed with hot girls. WTF? Why must they're coffee just not be as excellent as the other places, because on all other grounds I'd much rather frequent there. This is my new moral dilemma, do I sell myself short and just go to the coffee house that guaranteed has at least one hot girl working there or hold up to my coffee standards and keep going to Soma. Ah and they're so close to each other too! After this realization, it will be battle indeed each day for my coffee run. You know now that I think about it, I haven't really gone to the Spoon at all this semester... hmmm kinda funny because there's not really any good reason, just well Soma's closer.

There's also this funny thing that I've noticed about our local bathroom here on the 2nd floor of swain west, aside from the fact that there's always a colorful argument on the walls between frats about which sorority puts out more. It's that someone usually leaves full copies of the local newspaper conveniently left right there for me to read. Now I've thought this out and it's like well granted this newspaper by default is quite disgusting because it's been sitting on the floor here all day, but then I'm like well shit I'm washing my hands anyways before I go so it doesn't really matter. That's my take on it, and also I get to read the news about stuff I could care so so so little about.

Hmmmmm I'm really hungry, guess I really didn't have anything officially as dinner except all this left over chocolate I have lying around the office. Yeah that doesn't really count as nutritional food now does it.

Today is a horrible day

2008-04-04T23:26:00.001-04:00

Very much so indeed, and it's only continuously gotten worse so here's my bithcing rant about it.

So I realized the fantasy easy international banking ain't going to happen. This annoys me, as this was very annoying to deal with last year and apparently will continue to do so for the future. I hate getting hit up for fees just to fricking electronically transfer money between accounts. Ok a small fee for converting currency I can accept but on top of that everyone wants 40 bucks just to go through the trouble of having their computers talk to someone else's across the ocean. Key point, my word of advice to you all, never get yourself in a situation where you're paid by an american university that will only deposit money into a US bank account, reside in france while at CERN so you'll need a French bank account to pay your bills, and have CERN health insurance which will only reimburse you to a Swiss bank. At this rate I should just start a fucking collection of useless bank accounts across the world that refuse to transfer money to each other, because that's pretty much what I have right now.

I was hoping that I could get a UBS account in the US then at least maybe not pay such high transfer fees between the accounts but alas they don't really offer bank accounts in the US just proxy ones that let you use your $100,000+ investments with them
(minimum) as a sudo bank account that has a credit card and stuff but really you're just pulling money out of your mutual funds with them or whatever. Oh yeah and I got my hopes up when I saw HSBC has the perfect thing called a premier account which lets you do exactly what I want, one account and you can access it from any of their branches across the world. So wonderful, that is exactly what I need, oh wait yeah that too has a 100,000 dollar minimum balance to open. WTF

The Atlas TRT monitoring code has not exactly been working very well this week. That alone isn't a big deal but it's a like a small rasp that grinds away each day. Granted we finally figured out why it wasn't working (basically learning that there's multiple copies of the same but not really the same database all over the place and we weren't linking to the right ones) but now to get things working is just going to take a few extra hours to set up which I'm not too fond of.

And in the meantime while I do that, oh yes there are tests all next week. E&M and Quantum, on Tuesday and Thursday anti-respectively. What joy those will bring. That and Schiach wouldn't even tell us what would even be on the test, he just said well everything. So that's only 14 chapters of Jackson to have at my fingertips, oh how wonderfully not trivial.

That status of my dear BMW is totally unknown. I get the feel that people at CERN who promised me they'd start it up and get the engine running from time to time (which is really fucking important since the car is just sitting there) haven't really done that at all. Well at least once, but then they left the battery connected so now it's totally dead and I kinda really need to know the status of how it's running so I can judge A) How much it's even worth it to fix things up on it B) If A is concluded to be true what things need fixing the most so I can buy parts cheaply over here and put them in my luggage to take over. So there's another thing grinding at me.

I also realized that I really only have a month to find a new place to live for next year and to find someone to take over my lease for the summer months while I'll be away. Paying $450 a month for a room that's just acting as a storage space is kinda stupid, self storage units are not nearly that expensive, and that money could be very well spent in other places... like paying off these fucking undergrad loans which just devour my monthly paycheck.

So that's lost of stuff that's been grinding on my nerves to lead me to today...

In cleaning out my room the other day I discovered that I brought my old apple think different watch with me it was just very hidden beneath piles of other more or less junk and nick-nacks in my chest. The watch rocks, one because it's apple and I'm a loyal to the cult by all means, and two it goes counterclockwise. Here's a picture. (except mine had a black faceplate)
http://www.theapplecollection.com/Collection/AppleWatches/001_2lg2.jpg
Oh so that was super cool, I had forgotten about that and just because of it's coolness and the fact that I pretty much wore that throughout middle/high school, and the fact that you can't find them anymore so yeah something I was quite fond of. Now this all goes astray when I try to fix the fact that the faceplate came unfixed and rotated (12 o'clock was no where near the top) That's bad but I figured I could rotate that back into place and replace the battery in one awesome swoop which would then give my Tissot a run for it's money in terms of wearing time. Ah but no, I put a dab of superglue after lining up the faceplate just right and the glue getting itself into position torqued the faceplate out of alignment then dried instantly! Crickets, so then came the dangerous task of undoing super glue with acetone. See that was going great till that leaking into the other side of the watch melting off all the details into a off color goo.

Fucking, fuck, fuck fuck. That's all I have to say about that.

How could this get any better I might ask, oh so finally get an e-mail back from Sabrina's other lighting designer friend Cindy (still have no idea whatever happened with Liz) but my proactiveness in extending a hey I'm interested in you by sneaking a bottle of irish whiskey onto her desk (which I have no idea how able to remember the brand when we were chatting it up at the bar for hours) was very much in vain as I did receive the shortest and possibly coldest I'm going to blow you off e-mail ever. One line, excluding the two words of our respective names bracketing this message, oh and no subject. Not even a real answer, like actually saying yes/no to being interested, just "no time" WTF again? I mean come on, alright not being interested is fine, but being all passive about saying it is annoying as fuck plus at least a hey thanks for this booze. I mean at least in my experience when other people have done stuff like that for me in the same manner and I'm not interested, you know I at least fucking thank them for doing something thoughtful and give straight answer. So that totally blows ass, and put me in a really bad mood, not even from the actual answer but in the most brief and indifferent way in which it was given.

So once again, I've got absolutely zero prospects, piles of work to do, and a level of disgruntles that knows no end.

Ok the one thing that could have turned this day for the better would have been a red sox destruction of blue jays, but no, no that game was blown, which was not at all fun to watch. Well actually it was a good pitcher's battle for most of the game, until the jays got to Wakefield and then the sox bull pen just fell apart. The only good thing to come out of that, was while watching the game I got the electronics soldered back together on my p-bass because last week I finally finished the belated process of defretting and refinishing the neck. So that was alright until I discovered I'd have to carve out a good amount of space in the body to get everything to fit (along with the new pickups I got this kicking varitone switch which turns out to be enormous....) so yeah lots of hack at the body with the chisel and file. None to happy that I had to go about doing that, but well after much stress and hacking things at least got fitting back into place. However, somewhere along the way I wired up things incorrectly as the tone knob really doesn't do it's job anymore. So I need to look into that.

Ok well I guess there was one success today that well was nice but not really of the kind that makes up for all this other shit. I got the clock in the Subaru working again. Heck it did not long after my dad bought it, so he drove it for a long time just as is because the dealer wanted something like 80 bucks to put a new one in. However, as I now drive the car I thought the other day hey it's gotta be something simple on the circuit board and maybe I could find it. Hell it was even easier than that, I googled the problem, turns out everyone has it and it all comes down to poorly soldered resistors. That seemed to easy of a fix (also because at least on this clock the solder job didn't look that bad) but what do you know, I touched up all the resistors and dabbed a bit more solder on them for good measure and it works perfectly.

Ah if only all things in life were resolved that easily and concussively.

Powerbook power

2008-04-02T20:56:00.002-04:00

Ohhhh my mac is back, I can't say it enough, such a great and wonderful and amazing fact. No more dell, fuck I was almost getting used to it's clunky and unthoughtful design spackled with a poorly written operating system. It's like using that fucking Dell for a few weeks then I sit down at my desk and I just look at the powerbook. It's just so sleek and futuristic looking, I love it. Hey isn't that fun, not having it for a few weeks made me forget about how great it was enough to get that fun giddy feeling using it again. The keys are all smooth and in line with the case, ok fine I could go on but I'll spare whomever the reader may be from my powerbook glee.

Ah but my battery hack job seems to have failed :( It won't charge! This is most puzzling. I tried the standard set of incantations (resetting PMU, zapping the PRAM, going into open firmware mode and resetting the nvram, and sacrificing a lamb to the pagan gods) you know standard hmmm why the fuck aren't you working computer stuff. But alas no battery charging. Starting to think there's something stored on the battery circuit board itself that I need to reset, because the powerbook can recognize the fact that a battery is there but still remembers it's been cycled like 500 times or something. I donno, but what I can do is go back to the mac repair store and bitch that it won't charge my battery. Heh, well I am kinda worried there's something still wrong and I don't want to have to swallow my handyman pride (abandon this battery refreshing job, which was supposed to save money) and just by a new battery from apple only to find it wont' charge. So even though the problem is probably on my side, I'll just assume the repair people didn't fix everything and demand that they show me the powerbook can charge a battery.

Heh and if it doesn't raise all sorts of hell because they didn't do a through job.

Other than that though, it seems to run quite well. Nice and snappy.

What else, well Bill Clinton came and spoke at IU on wednesday that was kinda cool. I actually didn't know about it till like a few hours before, as one of my office mates is a very strong Hillary supporter (which is a bit overbearing sometimes as I still really haven't made up my mind about who to vote for in the primary but still he's the guy who tuned me into Chelsea and now her Dad coming to IU which is neat). His talk though wasn't all about supporting Hillary though, which was cool. It was at the end, but for the most part he talked about well just a gamut of issues that the country is facing and need to be dealt with. Of course then at the end he wraps all of his wife's policy views into these issues and connects them together (quite craftily I'll say) to claim why she's the best candidate. He had a lot of good points though, our lack of power to enforce trade laws because were so fucking in debt with the countries we trade with, made a wonderful number of stabs at how there was a surplus when he left office, problems with the educational system, healthcare and the like. He's a really damn good speaker, I wish I could go out a give speeches like that.

There was a good bit of humor in the speech to which I thought was interesting, because he'd sway back and forth between these issues which he's touting as very dire then getting the crowd in a bit better of mood before moving on. Actually at the end he ended with some jokes, one being fucking hilarious. He said after 8 years of being president, well for those 8 years he pretty much walked into rooms all day with hail to the chief playing, so after he left office he said he got bummed out every time he'd go somewhere and there wasn't music playing and it took a few months before he came to terms with that. Again very crafty because here's a crowd of like 8000 people listing to this world figure and at the very end he throws in stuff like that which add a very human element to him, so hey the crowd is left with a feeling of empathy because hell I was thinking too I'd totally have the same thing happen to me in that situation. Good strategy though, because I can see something like that where he pokes fun at himself and puts everyone into a common feeling as a way to make people go hey he's just like us as they walk away so they'll believe him more. But then again that's what good speech giving is.

Shit we had to wait for fucking ever to see him speak though. The claim was it started at 2, so I got there a little before 2 to see this unending line from the stadium but in like half and hour everyone gets in but it wasn't until like quarter after 4 till he got there and this his speech was like and hour and a half. It was like damn there goes my afternoon, but well I thought worth it.

Then upon returning to my office instead of doing quantum like a good graduate student, I blew off time realizing once again how FMA is such a great show. It really is, more people should watch it. 52 episodes, on the longer side for anime (expect for those few ones that just never fucking end and have like 400+ shows) but as a whole the characters are so diverse and dynamic that it's just a good watch throughout the whole series. So yeah there went another few hours.

I'm smoking alot more recently what's up with that. I really don't know. Had a shitty day a bit back and of course my rolling tobacco was not at had (which hey just that alone I'm pretty good about, I'd confidently say I average about 3-4 a week) to just give me that hit of wonderful nicotine which you can't deny works wonders when you want to just calm down and look at something in perspective (for me at least anyways that how it works) But no I had not my pouch of rolling tobacco so I bought a pack of luckies and shit I went through that in no time. Like out of nowhere it would be like 2 a day, for not really any good reason, WTF? I say. Well that was odd so I'm putting myself on a week or so hiatus before I indulge myself in another rolled delight.

I also need to stop dicking around with looking up photo stuff, I do that way to much. Just kind like hey let's research shit. First it's camera lenses (with the wonderful delusion that I actually have money to buy them) then it was filters for the lenses, then lenses again, then again, then medium format film cameras because that would totally be cool to get into (got a chance once or twice before to play around with one), then realizing I'm in grad school and have no time for any of this, then lenses again..... you get the drift.

Recently the research binge has been into photo management software. Now that my powerbook is back and mostly running I need to get my photos back from the backup hardrive and re-archived. iPhoto though has this nasty problem where it throws the pointers to the photos and the meta data into one fucking enormous library that after a few gigs of photos just gets out of control and causes the program to load like shit. That's no good. I've played with Aperture before which is very nice but I really don't like how it goes and hides the actual photo files themselves in an inaccessible library unless your running aperture. So I guess my options then are something like Adobe lightroom or this thing called Bibble which looks really appealing because fuck it's a lot cheaper than Adobe and has build in camera lens distortion correction. They have a whole archive of lenses (all of mine are on the list at least) and so they've got all the correction factors memorized so you just click a button and the program undistortes your image. That's pretty slick. So who knows.

Ah what else, oh finally got my WFHB t-shirt. That only took like 7 months for me to go hey I need to go down to the station and pick that up. It's a cool shirt though.

Hah and today I finally got a haircut, which I was in desperate need of. I went out on a limb and just stopped into one of the local barber shops and it wasn't so bad. The place was run down as hell, but for walking in it was quick, the guy really knew what he was doing, oh and wonderfully cheap. 12 bucks, I love it, and on the first go they guy had it just they way I wanted it.

April fools to ya all

2008-04-01T21:39:00.000-04:00

Can't really say it's been that exciting of an April Fools day, not glitter signs or the like for me so all in all pretty tame. First Red Sox game back from Japan though, that's been pretty fun to watch to yeah hey that right there makes this a great day. That and the fact that Dice-K had one fine outing, and Papelbon looked as sharp as ever.

So the many past odd days in review.

Turns out that 1930s cinema is really frickin great, there's some group that on Friday's plays assorted movies (all generas all vintages) over at the communications building. The 8mm for the evening was an interesting bit from the grad ol year of 1933 call "Gold Digger". Actually it was a sudo musical, but yeah I mean it was pretty funny, and there was just so much stuff in there that is so out of context now that it's just utterly bizarre and un-understandable, it's fantastic. I need to watch more of this kinda thing. Oh and on the plus side, free art gallery food. Ha ha, I had many a chicken quesadilla.

However the shitty part was I couldn't stay out very late on Friday night because Hal more or less conscripted me into volunteering for science Olympiad on Saturday. 8:30 am! they started these shenanigans at. Heh, IU was actually hosting the state championships and this whole business reminded me way to much of those many years in OM. It was alright though, and I got my first real experience at "grading" papers that needed to be turned over on a fairly quick basis. Hey I got a t-shirt out of it and I'll do a lot of things if there's free t-shirts involved.

I guess I did then have the entire rest of Saturday afternoon to do you know useful things like work and stuff but no I spent the day washing the car. I mean like really washing it though that hey it's spring one a year clean out kinda job. I don't even want to think about how many quarters I blew through at the car wash booth, or the amount of cash I dumped into crap like armorall and the like (7 bucker here and there adds up quick) but its lookin pretty snappy, and well maybe it's a guy thing but I do take pride in having a shiny and waxed automobile (heck that I hardly ever drive) but still it's all oooooo pretty now) So that was good, the car wash bay ever let me degrease my engine which I was a little surprised about but hey that's cool, now even my engine bay is a bit less dirt crusted.

The real goal was to find out where this infernal leak is coming from. I forgot if I've mentioned this before but the passengers side floor boards have been completely flooded out and I've been suspicious about the front windshield not being sealed properly (despite what that one auto guy kept telling me that it was the gaskets in the engine bay that were bad) fuck no I blasted them with a high pressure hose and nothing got through. Though I also spent a few minuets blasting all around the front windshield and still couldn't reproduce anything close to what it was like. Before I did this I had to take a shop vac to the car and still I'm trying to get some of that last moisture out from these sheets of foam that sit between the floor carpet and car body. Eh so that mystery still isn't solved, though maybe i did fix it by resealing the top of the windshield with silicone. Well whatever it's been a miserable rainy few days recently and the car has yet to flood again so now I just see it as a damage control process from all the water that go in there before.

So I've decided to be brash about things and test the waters as one might say with a fine bottle of irish whisky. I was all covert and cool sneaking into the theater grad student offices on Sunday to drop that off. Well see well see, I guess this isn't really that far off from Sabrina's anime plan with liz but well. Just replace anime for anime loving lighting designer with whisky for whisky loving lighting designer. Hmmm do I get a sense that this could somehow just all fall apart on me? It's not that anything really went bad at all with Liz but well I donno she either really just doesn't have any time at all (which I've heard is quite possible)or well my take is not willing to make the time for even just a coffee.

It's grad school now, I could easily spend every waking moment of my days doing physics and never get enough done/studied but things take priorities and if there's something worth making time for then fuck you make time for it.

So who knows, I sure as fuck don't, hell I never do, but I just kinda get the vibe of dead end there and I've also coincidentally been introduced to an equally interesting and cool other lighting designer so I see no harm in extending the same sort of "gift of interest" and seeing if that sparks anything, and hey I should totally earn points for something like favorite brand of whiksy while totally hammered late at night in a bar during a drunk conversation. Well at least I think so, and just the general fact that I'd probably go out with just about anyone if they brought me a bottle of whisky to my desk.

Those matters aside, damn that frontline documentary on the Iraq war is really great, plus all the extras they have on web. Hell I spent way to much of my weekend just watching that, and somehow thank god I didn't get suckered into clicking on any other of their links to other shows that they've put up on the web. If you haven't seen it, I strongly encourage it.

I've also recently discovered that by some stroke of luck I did exceptionally well on the last stat mech test. How the hell I did that, I don't know, but I won't complain because that's one step to me getting an alright grade in that class seeing how HWs apparently don't count for shit. None of that class really counts for shit anyways, it's so useless but still I don't want to fail it.

I also need to find a new place to live, told roomate Liz that I wouldn't sign the lease again for next year so the hunt is on for new hovels to habitate. Not really a fan of this enormous TV bill that I rarely get to use though I also realized that I do watch it enough where I couldn't just outright say no I'm not paying for all these crazy cable channels that you want. So yeah getting rid of that expense would be great because upon assessment I don't have that much cash. Fucking rent+utilites+cell phone+LOAN REPAYMENT = not much left over and I realize I've been getting away with this all and eating out all the fucking time because of this nice top off fellowship I got this year. Alas that 5 grand goes away next year, so that's a big deal. No that it's unlivable, our stipend is quite sufficient I just really have to no go off and buy things on a whim as much as I've done this year (I won't even being to list it but there are plenty)

So the new goal is to find someone to take over my lease for May - July then after that well whatever. Moving stuff out of here and into a self storage unit is <<<< cheaper than rent. And there are places close by which is nice, so I could in theory get all my stuff dumped out and into a storage unit in a day. Yeah so finding a subletter is a must I would love to not pay rent for 3 months, though the cell phone I still will be paying which reminds me I need to get that fucker unlocked so I can get a prepaid plan when I go back to CERN.

The hunt is on though for a new place!

On a cool note I got my new fancy schamncy passport back the other day. It's all RFID chipped and everything, plus my picture in it is horrible so it's truly a fine piece of documentation. I lacks cool stamps though, and visas (which holy bejesus I found out I don't need to apply for again, thank you thank you thank you CERN bureaucracy) My goal by the end of my future stay at CERN, among others, is to have visited all the micro nations of Europe and get their passport stamps. It's like going on liquor/beer quests, it's a great way to see the parts of the country that most people just don't ever go to.

To commemorate this new passport, I've decided to chance my signature. My old one was two just scribbly and most illegible, so the other day I really did spend a few hours fleshing out ideas for a new signature and I think I've got it. More on the formal side but nice and I don't think to terribly flashy. So in any case I don't really no the implications of switching something like that seeing how I've signed plenty the old way but from now on it's the new way. Wilson is getting spelled out in full now and I've found a particularly fun way to write the W. The capitol P I think could still use some work, but that's about it.

Today I also finally got that replacement Dell D630 laptop, first ting I did (well throw in the 4 Gigs of RAM) but really right after that wipe windows and put on linux. Though I'm starting to realize that mostly through the fault of CERN scientific linux being not exactly on par with the up to dateness of all other distros it's going to be an uphill battle to get all laptop pieces working. So in short that's a total bitch, and pretty much equals my research until well I get to cern or something. RIght now the graphics card driver is out of date (jips me out of my full 1410x900 resolution), sound doesn't work, wireless doesn't work, well bascially everything except the keyboard and track pad are not functional. Lame, I really just which I could install something modern and then just have a patch that threw in all the necessary CERN programs/filepath dependences to work with AFS and CASTOR.

Hey it turns out Bill Clinton is coming to speak tomorrow, in the early afternoon too so I'll actually be able to go. Should be an event and heck it's a former president that alone is kinda cool.

L.S.M.F.T

2008-03-27T02:24:00.000-04:00

I realized in just finishing this weeks quantum homework that I still don't fundamentally have a solid grip on spin, which annoys me. You'd think at this stage I should be switching between representations and not getting all my quantum numbers in a tizzy, but alas that is how they are. So that's demoralizing, I usually at least feel good during the weeks HW sets that quantum is for the most part understood the best (then it hits me that on such a fundamental thing I'm not so solid) grrr....

Though I can't feel to bad, I'll just quote Feynman "I think I can safely say that no one understands Quantum Mechanics" which I can believe. How good can anyone truly understand a framework that's just out right counterintuitive to every bit of our everyday perception of the world. I think after awhile you just get well desensitized to it being so damned odd, however at time I still catch myself looking at it and going come on that's just crazy. That's why it's so great though, of all the fundamental physics topics it is by far my favorite.

I forgot to mention the other day that on Monday it turned out Chelsea Clinton came to give a rally speech at IU. It was interesting, she's a good speaker I'll give her that. The whole format of the thing, I was impressed in just how well she was able to answer questions on anything/everything about her mother's belief's and policies. I mean damned that's a lot of stuff you'd have to know and not get wrong. So yeah that was alright, though I guess I'll have to write more later on my political take for this round of elections.

In general I keep realizing that my mind has a fundamental need to have controversy, if not in real life then definitely in thought up scenarios that it plays out well very very very often. That's just odd, I don't get it. See this is one of those things where I separate myself from what my mind likes to do, because it really gets off thinking people are out to get me on average or something of that sort. Ah, just a fun background I guess to everything else, and I think explains many of my rantings when I let it get the better of me.

Future classes, I need to figure those out soon. Advising is next week, and hmmm I guess there's still this battle between the group wanting me off to CERN after next year and me well wanting to just get a set of class in that I think give me the most solid base to go on, which of course would end up taking 2 more years. Though I was pretty happy that were open to me going off to other department to fill in my schedule. There's a couple asto classes that look interesting, and tomorrow I'll talk with some profs about this whole PhD minor in scientific computing. That actually sounds really cool, though a bit unrelated to particle physics I'd be doing my thesis on. But still, it would be taking the computational courses here then going off to other departments and taking their computational courses (well especially Math where I'd get to learn why numerical techniques work to give right answer, and CS where you learn how to write good code to do things fast and well good)

Why the fucking hell aren't physicists required to take shit tons of CS classes? They should, I mean it's useful as all hell because you end up writing code at and even the few courses I took as an undergrad at BU at least gave me a good working appreciations for different types of languages, or how the structuring of a program can have such a dramatic effect on it's efficiency.

Anyhew at least I found out there's hope for the powerbook, I got a chance to talk with the guy today who actually looked at it and he told me with a charged battery it booted fine, so it is just probably the DC in board (thank god) Also very much the opposite of what the guy on the phone when I first called told me, he kept saying oh the tech thinks the logic board is fucked so you need to send it in to Apple and get their 400 buck we fix everything service. Yeah fuck that, and on the brighter side they can get a new board for 40 bucks and install it for free. Well not really free but nothing extra than the 90 bucks I'm paying them to give it a go over. So actually that's not very bad at all, because I could only find replacement DC in boards for like 100 bucks online so the cost difference is very reasonable.

Hey there's possibility to go to Italy in May! I just got an e-mail about a "Spring School" in Frascati, which appears to be one open to whoever and geared towards beginning grad students, costs very very little (fuck I could even front the 300 euros to go to it) So I'm excited that it's a possibility, and on the cool side there's gonna be some profs from BU that are giving talks there. Though I would have to get to CERN at like the beginning of May right after finals which would shift my summer visiting/US driving tour to the end of the summer instead of the beginning.

MLBtv a good idea? I donno, I did just spend 100 bucks on it for the year, and now I'm wondering ok great I could watch the Sox open up the season in Japan.... but how much am I really going to use this. A fuck lot that's right, having spent cash already is a perfect reason to spend more time watching the Bo Sox and well every other damned team because I get them all now. Not super impressed with their live coverage, the archived games come in fantastically smooth, but when they're live it is a bit annoyingly choppy.

Hmmmmm I've started to wonder about my fellowship bump up again next year, do I even get it? I'm trying to find this out without coming across to the department that I'm money hungry, but they were never very specific in the details of how long it lasted. It would be nice to know, because that does kinda set how much cash I'd have next year and could factor into me finding a new place to live.

There's a lot of great stuff online now, who needs tv? Dan sen't me this link, which rocks because they have a ton of frontline episodes all primed up and ready to watch (though it is quite angering to watch)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/view/main.html

But it's the new trend now and I like it, TV on demand. Adult Swim has been doing it for a long time, south park now has all their episodes up on the web uncut and open to watch, and even the major networks are starting to up things. I approve.

I shit you not WFHB is playing a whole beach boy style musical ballad about the lord of the rings, apparantly voiced by lenoard Nimoy I fucking love this station.
Even better I've found it on youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQtyJZhV2lQ

I do crazy things

2008-03-25T19:48:00.001-04:00

This morning, waking up around 5am (hmmm not that far after I went to bed after working on E&M) I got into work around 6 to watch the Red Sox open up the season against the A's. Heh, totally crazy and well I think I'm going to do it again tomorrow, hell if nothing else it got me into school on time. Ha! Oh but anyways a win, can't complain about that, though a close one and it got pretty dicey there at the end so... whooo very glad it didn't go the other way because then I would of spent the day disgruntled and paying even less attention during classes.

The sox season is just starting though, so I'll hold my comments on some of the rough edges they seemed to have until they get going. Ah and what a perfect time to try and get together with fellow red sox who happens to be cool and good looking, oh that's right fate hates me. God forbid I should ever have anything work out when it comes to women. Even when there seems to be some hope of getting together with anyone that seems cool, nope the world kicks in and somehow I end up bitching about it for another day. There was like a solid month spent going through Sabrina's little hoops and plans just to even get Liz's number (actually I didn't even get that, just the e-mail which I could have looked up on my own), I played along though because it definitely seemed worth it, finally we got to go out(ish)... well a very extended game of GO at a coffee house which I thought went great with lots of good conversation but apparently no, handing out for over 4 hours and having a good time apparently = never responding to any future proposal for hanging out again, and total loss of contact.

WTF, do I offend that much? I mean I know how I come off some of the time and true I tend to be emotionally detached and such, but still I can even fathom how I manged to fuck things up that much in such a short time.

So there's like shit tons of time and hope down the drain, oh but then hey wait Sabrina has another theater friend Cindy whose also pretty damned cool. We end up spending a whole night chatting it up at the Vid while Lance and Sabrina were doing whatever it is that they're doing. So it's like oh cool, here's another person out of blue who I seem to share a good number of things in common with. Though the night ended with her taking care of Sabrina and me biffing on the chance to see if she wanted to hang out some other time. Ah right so what can I do, because I have no idea how to get in contact with her, oh that's right ask Sabrina who again gives a vague and unanswering response.

I call shenanigans on this whole theater crowd, because it's basically lets just dick John around and well yeah just do that for shits and giggles. Being generally hapless is one thing, but do you really need to parade people who seem genuinely cool in front of me then pull all this smoke and mirror crap, see that's just cruel. I need to come up with a plan, something, well god anything I could think up would probably be better than this.

So what else, not really all that much besides being very disgruntled about that whole debacle and well pretty much doing HW and Atlas crap. Though well I did finally manage to talk with Harold and Hal recently about what the hell I'm supposed to be doing in the group, and yeah that was really good (shit should have done that months ago but still that's besides the point)

You know, I don't really do all that much (besides the fun periods where I get so hyped up about doing things that I can't focus and just end up thinking up shit tons of stuff and never acting on it) that needs to change, because I realized tonight like I'm just kinda sitting around the lab and that's all I do. Not really much point in doing anything else, because fuck it's not like there's anybody to do things with. The physics group has seemed to more or less ostracize me (you know, so fucking sorry that my research group wants me down in a different office so I'm never up with everybody else, what the fuck do you want me to do about it) and shit the only other people I really know are are the theater people but well that just seems to be a continuing debacle.

It's at times like this when I just stop caring, but well I donno a lot of this could just be general sleep deprivation because I have not gotten much of that in the past 4 days. I'll actually bet that's where most of this is coming from, but that still doesn't retract my earlier points, those are things that I'm starting to get highly annoyed with.

These links were amusing, well actually the first one wasn't so amusing and more on the very bone chilling scary. Hmmmmm, yeah that's not amusing at all now is it?
http://blog.kiwitobes.com/?p=51
http://toothpastefordinner.com/032508/motorcycle-chase.gif

I need a cigarette.

I hate having to come up with titles

2008-03-24T01:25:00.000-04:00

(I guess I'll be nice and preface this whole script, that I'm hammered as hell right now while writing it and basically just killing time till I sober up to get my lazy ass back home)

Especially in e-mails, it's like alright I've got stuff to say but come on do I really always have to sum it up with some overarching theme that the subject line demands of me? Fuck no, but sending e-mails without subjects is also not really a good idea. I guess it's just really a form of whit that I am quite incompatible with. Same goes for the blog, it's like damn come on I bitch about all sorts of stuff here and I'm expected to come up with some accurate describing statement of the whole substance. I've run across this problem especially recently with e-mails that are geared towards asking people out.

Ha now I will also quickly rebut that I'm well aware that I've just stated the most lamest way to do such a thing (well possibly, maybe doing it over something like facebook would be even worse, but we wont go there) However, it's what I've recently been stuck with as my connection to the people I want to is all into fucking playing some kinda fuck around games with this, yeah you know I did that and where did it get me? Weeks wasted on plans and schemes (not of my design but of the middleman well really woman but I don't think middlewoman is a word seeing how I just wrote that and my auto spell check is bitching at me, well fuck you auto spell check you're sexist and should go to hell....) to allow me the divine privileged to get someones number. Dude seriously, why the fuck did I even put up with that. The real answer is just give me the god damned number so I can ask someone out without this overdrama setup. Didn't seem to go anywhere the first time, and now oh now I can see it coming up again the second time.

Ha well alright, fuck the these middle games, I'm going out of character and being proactive. Google skills applied to the question equal well at least an e-mail so you know I'm going with it. Why waste a month in middle games when I can find out right off if theres something or not. I figure this direct approach could either best the best or worst way to go about it but in either case I'll get an answer.

I also managed to not accomplish a single bit of useful work today, no book cracked open, no homework page even titled. Wow that's bad, but I did get the e-mail train running not only to the pre-meintioned but as well to others. So in that way the day was amazing useful, though the e-mail train never ceases to stop and while I still feel that I do a horrible job at keeping in contact with people you know here I spend most of a day writing and it really doesn't get a crack into things.

Ah whatever, thank god I got dragged outta the department today to go see the IU orchestra. That was nice, I hadn't been into the IU auditorium before and that place is pretty fancy. Well the music was arlight, first three pieces were passable actually the first one really blew, but whatever at the end they had this piano guy come out who was also a composer and played with the orchestra. That was fucking fantastic. A very interesting blend between classical and jazz, then the guy played two encores by himself and shit I won't even being to describe what it was like because I've never seen anybody play a piano like that. Frickin amazing, which very much made up for the lackluster other 3/4ths of the show. Heh, and gripe like it cost something when it was free to the public so yeah overall good show.

Man then I went out drinking again, but damn that was a good time. I should have been hanging out with the older grad students more because you know my mindset is relay more where's there's is at than people in my year. I know physics exactly for what it is, and there's no way to convince me otherwise, I get how it works and you know it will be great while it lasts so yeah, I'm gonna ride this gravy train till I'm forced into the private sector because academic positions are only awarded to those from a very few ivy/tier 1 schools and those who I like to think nicely of as flavors of the month. And don't even fucking start with me that I'm saying this like I think they can't do physics as well as anybody else, hell they can and I know plenty who are smarter and better physicists than me but still.... I absolutely despise artificial promotion at this stage in the game but you know that's how it works. I'm perfectly fine with the fact that my future is limited unless I hit it big in the ATLAS analysis jackpot, but hey things aren't so bad right now and in a few years I'll be skiing in the alps and sailing while my analysis jobs run. I can't argue that it's not an amazing deal, so you know I'll go with it for as long as I can.

Heh, oh the bitterness was re inspired in me tonight, but still there is a truth behind it all. I don't find it just a coincidence that every higher year grad student shares these sort of views (not only here but back at BU too) Ah, whatever, a good night a bullshitting indeed so in all a pretty good easter.

That and I even got stuff for the Subaru today to fix the water leak. Advanced Auto was open and I was able to pick up a tube of silicone sealant for like 3 bucks. Really after being in Europe there is no end to my appreciation for the prices of automotive parts and selection that we have here. I'm seriously consider buying just a box full of chemicals/lubricants/sealants/pastes/cleaners/what have you put them in a box and ship them to CERN because I'll get a better product here and even with some crazy shipping cost it will be cheaper and easier than trying to find carburetor cleaner at CERN.

Well those things maybe, but parts hell I'm not kidding about those. My luggage bag this summer is going to be stuffed with every type of new bushing/gasket/hose I can replace in my 316. All in total I'll be set back a few hundred, a couple less pairs of pants to wear while I'm over there, and all the parts I need to fix things without having to go through the translation barrier.

You know in a way with a lot of the stuff I griped over a pitcher of beer about, you'd think I'd be pissed as hell, but I'm not. It's a new perspective, that's what it really is. I'm coming much closer to coming to terms with the system, but you know what's great about that, it means I know exactly what I can and can't get out of it. The reality of things isn't that pretty, at least as things look right now (but who knows that could always change) but feeling confident that I'm not delusional anymore abut it is actually more comforting than anything. It's just as bad as anything else where the whole game comes down to who you know and how they like you regardless of the reason. Science is not immune to such ways, and you know I can't bitch to much about it because that has totally worked in my favor before.

Enough with that though, it's work, and there are more important things in life getting that leak fixed in the subaru. Ha, if the internet is good for anything it's car forms where in a few minuets you can find out exactly what your problem is and a whole discussion about how to fix it.

I blew off today, tomorrow is going to be a lot of unpleasant work. But that's ok.

Eventful days

2008-03-22T20:13:00.002-04:00

Sometimes I get a very strong compulsion to play music, not that I normally wouldn't want to play around with one of my guitars in my free time, but damn sometimes it's like the fingers just start to tingle and the sound has to get out. I wish I knew why that happens, heck then I might know how to get in this mood more. It's a great feeling too, the random splattering of notes normally play about incidentally through free experimentation start forming a groove, and once that starts going then all bets are off.

Tonight I took that musical surge out on the squier, which I've been playing way more often since my basses are alas still mostly in pieces (well just one now) and have come to the conclusion (heh after owning that guy for many years) that it's really fun to play. It's good to go outside of my bass world, and after refinishing the neck and polishing the frets for a 100 bucks... you know it plays alright. Ah that and tings I know I want to learn to kick ass in research, but then yeah time... man fuck time, that's the real confinement. But then again that is the universal struggle, I guess I've just realized it more up front for myself.

Heh, my parents are over the top sometimes as I did infact get my easter basket in the mail right in time. I mean it's so unnecessary, but there's a silliness to it that I love. Every year to since I finished high school and moved out. Heh, well I have to wait until tomorrow to open it up.

On a very lame note this spiffy new dell laptop just out and broke on me. WTF? Ruddy piece of shit. My feelings towards non Apple computers was admittedly going well at least less negative, but come on the whole thing outright keeling over after two days of use... that's some sloppiness. Well whatever for whatever it's worth they'll gladly replace it with another one that I'll forever view as equally unreliable.

On a similar vein, I did cave in on Friday and take the powerbook into the local mac shop for a look over. I have a feeling it's the just power board (which is an easy fix and costs 100 bucks) but well it could equally be the logic board and that equals a new computer. So even though I feel like a tool for droping 90 bucks to have it "diaganosed" I'm hopping on Monday they'll be able to give a straight answer about what exactly has gone astray.

The Subaru has sprung a leak, well actually now that I think about it the leack might have been there for quite some time. The front and rear passengers side floor mats are just getting drenched with water, but the rest of the car is bone dry. An online form hinted that a similar scenario was fixed by resealing the top of the front windshield, and after talking with the folks earlier I realized we did have the windshield replaced right before I came out here. So I need to go buy some silicone caulk and get this patched up.

Ah and today was the prospective grad student visit, so funny to think about me being them a year ago. Well that and how my whole life situation in general has changed so much. Helping out is a sweet deal though, free lunch, free wine and cheese reception, just had to wake up ass early after one hell of a good night out at the Vid, I'll save that for the end though. However, yes prospective students heh it was so fun to tell them about how much time get's spent towards work and nothing else, ahhhh I could almost see the will start to crack. They'll still undergrads though, strong in spirit but heh I remember having that too and then loosing it after the first E&M problem set.

What to do about next year? I really need to figure this out. I did have a talk with Harlod but not Hal about my unhappiness with the current research work/expectations vs well what everyone else has to do. Useful and good, but I know I'll need to drive that point home a bit more over the next week. There's just no way I can get useful shit done on ATLAS after all the meetings they make us go to, take classes and pass, and not go fucking mental (the latter of course which has clearly been going on) Eh, I donno, that and they keep pushing for one more year of classes then off to CERN. Fuck man that means I'm taking GR, QFT, and particle all at once (plus I'm sure they''l have even more research work for me in mind) there's no winning, there really isn't because they always pull some kinda well you know you should be able to do this bullshit (rarely directly but always very noticeably subtle) I haven't gotten use to dealing with this group, I'm still in like BU mode, but that for damned sure not how it works out here.

My escape in all this stress cones in the convenient form of the most grand delusions of rebuilding my 316. I blew off a good number of hours today tallying up the cost of materials to totally rebuild the front/rear suspension, put in all new break pads/rotors, new mounts for the motor/transmission/exhaust, get some cosmetic things taken care of like the faded emblems/hubcaps, rebuild the shifter, install all new vacuum and fuel hoses, fix that damed front windshield washer nozzle, new ignition coil, and well if I thew on and extra 70 bucks I could get a whole new set of engine gaskets, perfect to rip off the head and have it cleaned and the valves adjusted.

Just about $1,700 in parts alone. Labor would of course be free cuz I'm doing it and I think the auto club at CERN has enough tools for these projects. Didn't throw in the timing chain, possible repair that will have to happen in the fuel tank, the cost of shipping this shit to euroland, or well any of those little necessary extras like joint grease and the like. Hmmmm alright so for 2 grand and a whole summers worth of weekends, in a very unrealistic way it could happen. The only super sketch element then would be the carb, but I have finally found a few damned manuals for the 2BE.

I'm not sure why I get into this so much, but I have always wanted to rebuild a car since I was a kid (not any specific reason there either I've just always though the idea to be cool) and well yeah right now I've got a simple as hell old BMW that I can do this kinda stuff to. But yeah, at some point reality will set in and I'll have to decide just how much stuff I'll be taking over with me to Geneva this summer. And hey I have mono and have been forbidden under threat of mono reoccurrence that there should be very little physical activity for the next couple moths. Hey that's just the excuse I need to blow off all my time on the car.

Ah but on to the greatest part of recent days, yesterday's excursion to the vid which was pregammed by boxes of cheap wine and battle star galactica at Sabrina's. Such a good call, that and wearing my Green Monstah t-shirt. Funny how things work out like that, something so simple to give a spark. I have good luck when it comes to wearing t-shirts at the right times. Hell that's how the landlords let me sign into living hear on the spot, just happened to be wearing a CERN yatching club shit and the guy was like oh you're from CERN... ok you're a good guy. Heh, you know I won't complain. But all of that isn't relaly to to point that Friday was one strange as always adventure to the vid. Good times, in fact I think I'm smitten. Heh I love that word, it's so underused but there's times when it just fits exceptionally well to the situation. Pro active all the way on this one, no more middlemaning it around only to lead to well exceptionally drawn out disappointment. Pro active on this one, and as always there's a plan brewing in the thinking box.

what compulsion I have tonight to write, I love it even if it well is what it is, the vain attempt to transcribe the unwritable self, to express all when only poor fragments will come across, something that will never work so why not go on some more. As that saying goes "It's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all" heh well that has truth but I holda similar motto "It's better to have written and be totally misunderstood than to have never expressed anything"

Came unexpected
Kind of unreal in a way
A match so well? Hmmmm

Ha there another horrible contribution of mine to the world of tine poetry.

I need to manage my time better, things need to change, there's no questions, they have to. Fuck this mono, fuck this work, I need to just start getting my act together weake up wevery moring and start kcikin ass like I used to.

Think the mono bitched slapped me hard this morning

2008-03-21T00:13:00.001-04:00

Eh just general worn outness, well that and the mono (that sneaky devil) it is really annoying that way. Just wake up certain days and feel like total fucking hell. I'm actually surprised I got into school on time. Quantum didn't get finished, that sucked, but well after getting back from Argonne so late it would have been at that point (especially considering my mental state of being tired and not sharp) an all nighter which there was no way in hell I could have pulled.

Ah rant and bitch, rant and bitch... I know that is what I do the most here which is funny because well that's not always how I'm feeling (though that does fluctuate heavily throughout the day) But thinking about it I guess that's what I do the most here, so it's bad sampling issue. I'm usually writing this like now later at night when I'm not in a very chipper mood to begin with and usually am mulling over future work to be done and what hasn't been done. I wish I could blog on the spot during the day, I do get many better and more well varied ideas and opinions as the day goes on, but that's alas not possible so for now it will have to stick with the evening wrap up which by observation seems to settle as rant and bitch.

Ooooo and the really fun news today is we got our new group laptops in (it's a dell but still well ok it's a new computer I get to play with so I'm excited.... has that new computer smell to it)

Actually that's pretty much what I did today was dick around with that, fuck I even blew off E&M because I was to curious discovering all the fine details and nuances of it's construction. I won't deny I'm a total computer snob, I love my super refined and sexy Apple powerbook with the smooth lines and brushed aluminum finish. Super form and super function, I crave that kinda thing so usually I look very down on any of the boxy slap job laptops most other companies put out. It's like the difference between a well tuned BMW and a fiat.

However, I will say that after thorough review, this new dell has changed my opinion about their quality a bit. I like it's option to have an internal cellphone boradband card(which took me for fucking ever to figure out that it was a sim card slot underneath the battery) I also like how easily swappable the hard drive and DVD drive are while still maintaining a smooth appearance. Actually a lot of it's parts were replaceable even the damned processor, so yeah it got me because I absolutely love things that can be tinkered and upgraded. That is one downside of apple, damned its slick and refined but getting at stuff is a bitch and you can't change much. Ah and though I don't know how useful it is, there's a smart card reader which in a way is kinda cool because you can lock out users in theory who aren't carrying a smart card and know the correct pin number. Not useful for me, but I did think it was a cool feature.

Though I should also balance this apparently blasphemy of approving of anything other than an apple with my gripes about this new machine to. The connectivity ports suck shit, only one mini firewire 400 port, the thing still wastes space with a legacy serial port, the only video output is through a very outdated VGA connector, and while it does have 4 USB ports which is nice (they're very crammed together in blocks of two) The DVD drive isn't slot loading (hey I have a mac I'm spoiled to think that's a must) They put this huge as docking port on the bottom which by itself is ok but they don't give you anything to cover it up with so it will by default get gunked up and nasty over time. Track pad just has a very tacky and cheap feel to it, thank god for the pointing nub. Oh and the RAM slots, they put one easy to get at one on the bottom and the other you have to rip off the entire keyboard (that's dumb)

Oh it's a Dell latitude D630 if it matters. Well the screen is nice and I like the keyboard, so yeah I think I'll get along with it alright for the next couple years despite it's many unrefined flaws.

Got to have my first experince with Vista too, heh it was cheaper to order it with vista than XP! Yeah that says something, but whatever it's getting written over with Scientific Linux in the next day so it won't matter. Though I will admit there are time when windows is needed so thank god I found this wonderful piece of free software called vmware server. It's pretty slick, it's free and I can partition off a space on my drive and install a virtual windows machine that I can run anytime over linux. I was very happy to find that because it's just what I wanted. So getting all that stuff set up and going will take up the next week more or less in between classes I'm guessing. I've never had good luck with getting linux distributions to work right out of the box as you might say. There's fun in tinkering though, and its time well spent because it does lend itself to a deeper knowledge of using linux.

On a good note I found out I'm getting reimbursed for lots of fun things. Well the expenses for the Argonne trip were expected, but in chatting with folk today I found I can get my money back for this webcam the group made me get (though I would equally wish I didn't have it and never endure another EVO video conference again) ah and the price to get my passport replaced. Ha! didn't expect that one at all, but threw it out there and I was rewarded. Couple hundred more bucks for booze and hookers and blackjack I guess.

On the annoying note I found out to be worthy of being reinstated as a member of the IOP I have to mail those bastards a copy of my diploma. Actually I was surprised to find out BU does that for free! Still kinda in disbelief about that, but whatever that's cool. I guess when I was a member before I classified as a student so they didn't give a crap and just mailed me cool magazines. I want those magazines again though so I guess it's worth it.

Heh, even renewed my membership with APS. Oh I have a firm history of hating them, actually the reason why I joined the IOP. APS could never for the life of them actually mail me PhysicsToday, well that was only for a few years when I lived in a dorm so who knows. Now I have a more legit mailing address so we'll see.

Why does my Tissot watch always like to change the date 5 minuets exactly before midnight. In a way that kinda annoys me.

Ha and on a last funny note, apparently the fine infallible and ever wonders Harvard University had their systems hacked and now lots of my personal information they got out of me (social sec # and the like) when I applied has been pilfered. Ah thanks Harvard, not only do you reject me among other things but you have a shit for shit security system and have now opened me up to identity theft. I donno they sent a letter about this, but well hey they're willing to front the cash to pay for credit/loan monitoring for me so actually in the end it's not that bad of a deal. But still I got good chuckle out of that letter.

Back from Argonne

2008-03-19T22:17:00.004-04:00

Wow we didn't get back until pretty late, around 10pm which kinda sucked and all because after I got back to my office and did another round of e-mail checking/sending I realized well it's fucking late, there's quantum due tomorrow that I have no idea how to do upon further inspection and now I realize I've fallen into quite the class work abyss.

It's not as bad as I'm probably thinking it is right now, but god I donno I just feel so far behind in what I should be learning and yeah I feel the grades are starting to reflect that. I seriously need to get this research/hey I'm supposed to be taking classes situation resolved. Problem is research work I do find kinda fun and interesting, classwork is painful (though I know necessary) but easily gets superseded in my task list when there's other physics related work I can distract myself with. This group doesn't help at all either. I mean the Argonne analysis jamboree was alright, I feel I've mastered yet another small portion of data analysis over the grid, but shit there was fuck tons of time wasted in the jamboree in very drawn out EVO video conferences with Brookhaven so overall I'd rate the experience as not so useful and to top if off I missed three days of classes, probably further ostricsed myself even more from the rest of my classmates, and have probably fallen behind in ways I've yet to discover.

Well looking at the quantum HW and going oh fuck I don't know this on all the problems isn't exactly a good sign.

So screwed, that's the general jist of things. On the research front things are alright, but overall I donno this whole setup I got going on with ATLAS/classes has pretty much left me feeling very well missed out on kinda important physics things like reasonable ability to solve E&M and quantum problems. God I'm fucking dumb, I should be able to solve these problems but I got no idea whats going on.

So to sum up mixing a group that thinks I can do full time ATLAS research / first year physics grad overload of class work equals well failing at both because I can't get even a fraction of the ATLAS work that's thrown out there at me (overall feeling of failure) and well I don't have nearly the same time as others (especially during the day) to talk with teachers and work on HW so I'm failing at that to.... pretty much just a cluster fuck of failure. Heh, maybe that's why I've been having so many mental break downs recently.

Eh, apathy it cures all but it cures things to well.

On the bright side I found out my pathena job succeeded and I totally kick ass at using the grid. But well now I get the feeling I'm failing quantum. Do the two even out? NO, not really.

I'm tired, fuck it I don't even care to stay up trying to work on this. I'll just end up pulling a very unproductive all nigthter or something.

Ah so much general hate towards life, not a fan not a fan at all. Fuck this weekend is going to be hell to. There's like prospectives coming that we have to show around, and god I really need to spend time catching up on classwork, and fuck where's the time for any hint of a life. There isn't, that makes me a sad panda. That and well having this constant barrage of feelings of failure from all fronts doesn't exactly lend me to think any of this is worth the time/energy/sanity spent doing it.

Just a bucket full of happy joy right now, heh lets just say it's a good thing there's no glitter and people around because I'm totally at the point where I would start running around throwing glitter on the innocent masses.

Delusions of getting back to CERN to work on my car, that's pretty much the only things that's keeping me motivated to do much of anything right now.

I don't know what I'm going to do, I'm really at a loss

Deep in the trenches of the Argonne Jamboree

2008-03-19T04:23:00.000-04:00

In central time adult swim is on one hour earlier, ha this rocks. And I've spent another many hours drooling over internet page after internet page of camera stuff. Seriously where the hell does this obcesssion come from. God take A) My already bad habbits to get hooked tracking down info through google to kill time B) An activity I really enjoy = damnit that's two nights in a row mostly wasted. I can't afford this shit, who am I kidding. I could blow $700 on this lens but well hmmmmm thank god that reality circuit is kicking in and telling me thats a totally unnecessary thing to get.

Hell actually if I bought anything it should be a lens in a range I don't have (that 10.5mm looks pretty appealing) or like a few nice fixed focal lengths... holy crap why am I going so nuts over photo stuff!?! Damn I even went off on a bing about what cool things I could get if I wanted to start shooting medium format (though that would be very bitchin)

Ah I should stop its very late and breakfast tomorrow is very very early

This meeting thing here has been alright. They've come up with a good setup to go at your own pace and get introduced to using this FDR data. That part I'm alright with, but damn it's just the ATLAS mentality to never not be having a meeting thats fucking kill me. Shit we spend like 3-4 hours a day on a videoconf to Brookhaven through EVO. Totally worthless, but it's ATLAS so it's mandatory. Ah but it has been kinda fun just having a good chunk of our group sitting around in the same place working, heh that's something you don't even get at IU.

So its lookin like ubuntu is the Linux distro I'm going to try and put on these new group laptops, but how bitchy would it be to get Athena running on it? See that's the real problem. Otherwise I guess I'm just fated to Scientific Linux, oh but that's so mundane and non sexy sounding. Oh boy lets use more code written by the fine folks that brought us things like ROOT. See that statement alone should have you running for the hills (though anyone not in high energy physics will for good reasons not have any ideas what that means, I envy those people... I really do)

I need to stop wasting so much time on my laptop and well I donno do my HW or read or smoke or god anything seems like it would have been more productive.

Ah it's late, fuck

Argonne ho!

2008-03-17T23:40:00.004-04:00

Heh it's like playing hookie from school with my group and professors. Were all kickin it up at the FDR analysis jamboree. Kinda funny in a way, but yeah I'm in the mighty fortress of Argonne National Laboratory. Well it does kinda feel a bit like a fortress just because of the legit security guards they have in the front, just a touch more diligent than the folks in blue at CERN.

Drive wasn't that bad either, this place is about 4 hours from Bloomington. Very well sparse. Frickin huge in terms of land space, holy damn they've got space to do well stuff but buildings seem to be clustered around certain areas then vast expanses of bareness in between. Kinda ugly, but well in the summer with all the green I guess you'd get the feeling that you're more in a forest than anything else. They have a lot of exposed pipes running around too, all over the place, yeah that's strange.

Ooooo I found a Whatchamacallit at the gas station today on the drive up. Frickin love that candy bar, but I don't see it too often.

Ah and speaking of randomness, my shins are dry. Dry as hell. It's like the only part of my body that really gets dry skin that bad or well at all. Itchy, itchy, itchy, I don't like it at all and it happens every fricking year when the weather gets dry as hell like this.

On a downer note my little tried and true Nikon Coolpix 3200 I think has started to kick the dust. Its being really finickey when I try and turn it on, sometimes the lens cover won't open up and such. Well hmmm it is 5 years old, I guess that's pretty good for a point and shoot digital. But yeah I need to look into replacing it.

On an up note this hotel room is pretty nice, spacious and I asked for the small ass single. This bed is huge, it rocks. This trip is turning out to be pretty damn relaxing, the whole thing is comped by the school, I get to spend the whole day just sitting around getting research work done around lots of people who know wtf is up, and ahhhhh I can slack off and watch adult swim.

Heh and the TV has a channels about the beam status, too nerdy to even get into.

I also found out we got our new laptos in but theyre back in Bloomington, pretty strict rules about what I can and mostly can't use it for, DOE money was used to buy it = no games and god well not much. But ooooooooh, it's a new laptop which is quite convenient because who knows how long this powerbook is going to be on the fritz.

Overall pretty dull saint patties day, not like I'm really in the position to be getting hammered and whatever eh I wish I could of at least had at least one Guinness today. This damn lab is dry as a bone, make me appreciate that lovely feature of CERN, and yeah the Chinese restaurant we went out to dinner at had nothing but Tingtsao! Ah crickets, I've failed in upholding this wonderful booze holiday.

And the e-mail, ah the only e-mail or message I've love to get but which is elusive as ever. Thank god there's work to distract me from this. Work is great like that, but in reality that a horrible thing.

And it's down to the wire once again

2008-03-16T09:18:00.000-04:00

Ha ha old habits die very very very hard. But I'm pressed for time so I'll just say a few things

My car issues in Europe never cease to end, as it seems my group want to start using it while I'm not there which then gets into this whole entangled mess of me being the only person whose allowed to drive the car because of those so lovely green uhh well green plates (also the fact that I have the registration card and have no idea how they'd swing it to get insurance) and then the issues of cost of use. Hmmm something to debate, because I'm not outright opposed to just selling it to them but if it's still mine then I need mileage well I guess kilometerage compensation. She's a old car, so every kilometer counts and I'm not in the mood for being ripped off her. Eh this shit just came up so I have no idea how it will pan out.

Hey i finally cleaned out my whole inbox that I was ignoring for so long, not really sure why but it's kinda like I just get so many fucking e-mails a day (most are just auto-mailed junk from ATLAS) that really if I don't get on to flagging or replying to useful ones right away they get lost into the swarm. It's bad I know, but still whatever I finally got the box cleaned out. Haven't exactly gotten replies out to all the people needed but thats been lined up too. Heh also finally got this little security deposit debt I had with Michigan over the apartment last sumer taken care of. That made me feel pretty good, because I think right now I'm more or less debt free (aside from the ongoing monthly contributions to the undergrad loan debt heh $20,000 and falling! horay) I donno, it's just nice to actually see my bank account and know I really have all that money to use and blow on black jack and hookers or ummm I donno pizza.... mmmmmm pizza.

On that note, why must all nice Nikon lenses be like 700 bucks, I really need to stop looking at camera stuff. I've gotta bad addiction when it comes to that kinda thing. Oooooooh it's just to much fun to see all the new things people have out there and having delusions of grand grandeur about what I could possibly ever afford or what I even need.

Ok fact is I don't really need anything, I've got all the lenses to cover anything I'd want to take a picture of and a bad ass flash. But well Nikon just make this really slick 16-85mm lens it has Vibration Reduction, it's soooo cool. It's also soo $650 and that's to much. Really thought after wasting this entire day looking at this shit, I've come to a few conclusions on lenses I want / really don't need

- 10.5mm fisheye lens (I remember the staff photographers at CERN really loved that thing) and you can't get much wider than 180
- 16-85mm piece of lovelyness, though it would replace my 18-55mm lens which I'll have to say is quite good and utterly fantastic for how cheap it is
- the older 105mm micro lens, close up photography is cool and it's lots cheaper than the newer VR version and very sharp
- 105mm DC lens, totally unnecessary really because my 80-200mm covers it but come on it's got that cool background defocussing control knob
- 35mm lens, It's a nice focal length and super sharp and tiny
- SB-400 flash, ok ok ok I have an SB-600 which I don't use enough but come on this thing is cheap and so tiny that I would rock.
- Plus lots of fun filter and step up rings and shit I'm on an imaginary spending spree here so Circular Polarizer Nikon filters for everyone!

Ah what fun, my mind had alot of fun throwing these ideas around. Then comes reality, I have shit for none time to ever go out and take as many photos as I'd like. Ah and all this time being delusional put off doing E&M hw which is extra bad... ahhhh bitches.

Speaking of E&M it's kinda funny, it seems like were just skipping all over the latter chapters of Jackson but it was recently realized that were basically just covering the topics Master Schaich has written papers on. Heh so thank god we don't have to do wave guides (I have an unwarranted and unfounded disliking for them) but we get to play with surface plasmons and negative index of refraction metals. Can't say which is really better, oh that's right neither because E&M is and soul sucking devil subject.

I also re-realized my anger and hate towards Duke University, those bastards still owe me $200 in travel reimbursement expensive when I went to visit them a year ago. "Oh don't worry just get here on time and we'll make sure to cover it all" = bull shit. I pulled quite the escape out of JFK that wintery night on a 3 am train to philly and flew out at 6 fucking am to Durham with absolutely no sleep to make it there on time for the tour. I should get my money back.

To make things even more fun the local radio jabber is trying to have a debate over creationists and evolutionist. This is so very tempting to rant about but I must hold strong and restrain my raging anger towards the religious masses, because I really need to get work done tonight.

I don't think I'm going to get sleep tonight. Ooooh that's gonna make tomorrow fun.

I was suspposed to do HW today right?

2008-03-15T23:32:00.002-04:00

Ha I just got some graphs to look a bit prettier, which though is only the very first part of the first problem. Happiness, I've done it again and put it all off to the very last possible minuet. A bad habit, but one that I keep getting away with somehow.

Anyhew last night saw the adventuring off with a group of friendly psychologist grad student comrades to see "Be Kind Rewind" God that was a kick in the balls at how out of touch I am with any movies being released or well anything. This started last year at CERN, I lost most interest in TV (thank god I don't complain a bit about that) but movies too mostly because they were easily available to be seen but expensive as all hell. I think it was something like 15 chiffs! That's not cheap, that's not like the $5 student club they've got going here. Actually now that I think about it I only ever watched 3 movies last year, Miami Vice (which I was heavily talked into), Borat, and The Simpsons Movie. There was also a very failed attempt to see Casino Royal which ended horribly when I couldn't convert 24h time to real time in my head properly.

So that story aside, yesterday I got a kick of my ignorance about the movies to be seen, which is really bad because I like movies and I know there's a whole world of them (not necessarily the ones you hear about) which are top notch and should be watched. My verdict, Ilike it. It's got a really silly premise, but I like how it had a very straight forward simple feel to it. I just like the idea of the whole neighborhood in the end coming together to create something that they could enjoy. Just had a nice feel to it, and ha the parodies they made of movies alone were fucking hilarious.

Eh, then I got bored later and enjoyed a cigar. Something better for sure if there was someone to smoke them with, but hey I've held out enjoying these Swiss acquisitions for so long that I felt I could at least have one. A true Romeo y Julieta, of the Short Churchill variety. I am all about the fucking Robusto, let me tell you. A) They're a very nice size, full but not by any means ridiculous and fits nicely in my hand B) Offers a very pleasant 30+ smoke time. That was nice, very relaxing, just hanging out on the stoop (well I'm not in the city anymore so I guess it's not a stoop) but whatever. Great time to think, there has been a good bit going on recently to think about. Though my final thought was mostly that I should really keep track of what I think of each of these cigars I got, because when I go back to Geneva how the hell am I going to know which to buy again and not.

Why does slowly induced lung cancer have to taste and smell so good.

Bah, what did I do today. I'm not even sure. Dicked around with a lot of tax info, which doesn't add up in the slightest. I've got two forms from IU, one right after the summer, and one for right now. I know what they've been payin me as a grad student and yeah something just isn't clicking there. Super props for the non taxable fellowship I've got. Woooooo!

Yeah so wasting my time doing a lot of crap like that. Finally got around to paying back my parents for some travel expenses, and some folk from Michigan in the fall out from the apartment quagmire from last year. God what annoys me most about that is I know I could easily argue a lot of thing that went down with that whole security deposit business but damn I'm in the US, and I have no time to waste doing that, so fuck it I'm out a couple hundred, and learned some he many lessons about dealing with people. So yea there that's what I've really been doing today, writing checks. Actually after all this settles I'm really interest to see what my back account looks like, you know it's just a touch handy to know what its normalized state really is.

I have yet to hear any reply from my e-mail last Tuesday, and while I know it is break, this does have me a bit distraught. Is distraught the right word, fuck I have no idea, but still something. Guess that's still just a wait and see kinda situation.

Hmmm what else what else, ah I hate it. All these good ideas or just thoughts in general during the day while I'm walking around that I can never put my finger on when the fingers are at the keys. Is this whole thing an effort in futility? Of course, that goes without saying.

I love taking a shower now, I donno after spending all the time on the drain and using powertools no less to destroy that fiendish clog I get such a hmm some kinda gitty hey I did something handy kinda feeling inside while I'm taking a shower. It's like ooooooh look at all that water go so effortlessly down the drain. I enjoy it.

You know also for anyone whose particularity into being a voyeur of my life, because by construction and desire I have more or less no idea who reads this stuff or how often, if you do search around enough you'll find something new and possibly of interest. Heh, I'll just say that much and I'll note it is accessible but not so super obvious.

On a final note today I got shanghaied by Sabrina into going on a very extended Target shopping spree. Shanghaied is a very appropriate term I do say. All starting with a simple food rendezvous, then hey wanna go to Target? Sure why not, but little did I know it was not only to shop for a TV table but fuck everything else. Not going to lie at all, I did feel very awkward hanging around in the bra department while my friend bought underpants, more emasculating that anything else but yea it's like I guess I still have that feeling of being a little kid whose like hey these are bras I have no business being here... run away run away. Not saying that I don't like bras, but well just in that very certain context where there not around for all that long. Not going to lie that's about the only damn time I give a shit about bras. Other than that they're just things that make me happy I only need to have one piece of undergarment to be classified as minimally clothed.

Though because I was infact stuck hanging out in the bra section for such a long period of time, I will say I noticed something odd. Why the hell do they make them two tone? There were frickin racks of them with the cups inner surface a totally different color than the outer. I don't see the point. That actually seems like it would make them more expensive than anything else. Do girls only like certain colors touching their boobs? I have no idea, I just thought it very silly.

Great now it sounds like I have a bra fetish. Which may only mildly be true.

I'll stop now before I dig this hole any deeper

It's Pi day!

2008-03-14T19:04:00.000-04:00

You pi is a great number, quite useful. Always creeping into those physics formuals for reasons sometimes not so obvious (but usually just as a solid angle factor to show that whatever function you have is distributed over all spherical space or something) ah but still Pi is indeed great, mighty, and useful.

Though I do stare the opinion of the "Toothpaste for Dinner" Folk

Though I would exclude anyone who goes as far as the Feynman point just so they can spot off 700 or so digits of Pi hit that string of 9s then assume its just an infinite series of the same.

You know you could also remember it fondly as good ol' 22/7 or apparently what is common in China is 355/113 (both the numerator and denominator have repeated digits so I do say it's a pretty fraction) Ah so many ways to pay respect to Pi

My favorite way is by eating Pi, particularly pumpkin pie because it's easy to carve out a little pi symbol and have that baked on top of the open filling. Alas, no one is around this Pi day and well I've got put off E&M to work on so no kiting slaving for me today.

Ah and as a fair warning to those who can't settle for simple Pi approximations. Better watch out if you calculate Pi out too far because since it's so wonderfully irrational you will have in your hands every possible combination of bit that could ever exist and somewhere in there is kiddie porn and terrorist propaganda you sick shit, so be warned, you can in some very odd way be liable for arrest for calculation to many digits of pi. I forget where I heard that from but it is hilarious, and true, so just stay on the safe side and be happy with 3.14159

I wish other heavy hitter constants like e or phi were easily expressed as dates on the calender. Not really sure how you'd celibate e day but well when all else fails just turn it into a drinking holiday or whatnot.

Hmm what else I discovered Bear's place today has quite a good lunch fair. Granted is a bit further of walk then 4th street but damn for like 6 bucks I did get one damn good burger and fries. My tip of the hat to them, and my wag of the finger to Cafe Django... I donno I had dinner there last night and for like the 3rd time in a row I was left a bit unimpressed with the food. It's not bad but the thing is, it's Bloomington, better places are found in all directions. So no more take out from them, but well maybe dinner just because they do have such a nice place to eat.

I've also discovered recently how great Tea Tree oil is. That stuff is amazing. Last week my face decided to go all teen style on me and all at one decided to be irradiated and pimpled. Yeah that sucked, it hate it when it does that. But through random perusing around the web I read that this stuff kicks pimples in the ass, so I tried it and yeah it's true. Has a very distinctive odor, no bad but unique. Keep my skin at bay so who care, I've got a handy bottle of it now.

Ah what else, instead of doing E&M homework today like I should have well I wasted most of it dicking around of course. Though I did finally manage to beat that Viva Caligula game on adult swim. Not a very good use of time at all.

Wooooo Spring Break

2008-03-13T21:13:00.001-04:00

Which actually this year equals me sitting around sleeping off mono. Kinda shitty, it would be nice to go someplace or at least gas up the car and go on a visiting roadtrip but well a week where I really had nothing to do except sleep has been nice. Mono frickin sucks, I am not a fan of this affliction, though it has been getting better. It's not an everyday thing, but I've still noticed every couple days I just feel totally knocked out of commission. So I figured why waste cash when I know anykind of traveling will just burn me out even more, and in one way it just means more money I have saved up to do stuff in Switzerland this summer when I head back to CERN for a few months.

Heh I can blow it all on buying parts for my car, which I do have plans for. Though this summer I don't think I'll have enough time to do anything really fun. No ripping out the suspension, but I'm guessing I'll have plenty of time to grind out all the rust, bondo the body up, and have fun trying one of these Rustoleum paint jobs I keep reading about. They do sound to good to be true, but with an old car who cares, I hate the color it is right now so much anyways that anything but butt ugly brown, no mattery how poorly painted, will look nicer.

That and it totally gives me the chance to paint Feynmann diagrams all over it.

Eh this week in Bloomington actually hasn't been that bad. Weather has been quite lovely, hell I was walking around today in a t-shirt, and I've gotten the chance to get a few things taken care of.

Passport has been reapplied for, I'm now a registered Indiana voter (ha ha and it looks like we'll actually be important for the primaries), the bathtub drain has been unclogged (though this did require the purchase of a plumbers auger and pulling up some nastyness that I dare don't even speak of because it was indeed quite horrid),hmmmm I had fun hacking apart and resoldering batteries for my powerbook (though it's still quite broke), the subaru has been mildly cleaned, and I was even able to motivate myself to sit down and get all the frets ripped off my p-bass neck (now it just needs sanding and many coats of lacquer)

No body is really around though, that kinda sucks and in hindsight I guess I should have told roommate Liz that I was going be around the whole break because she lined up a whole slew of people to take care of the dogs, and I've felt kinda bad when these people come to the house and feed the dogs and stuff while I'm right there loafing on the couch watching TV. Not my problem though.

Next week my group demandith that I attend this conference at Argonne for a few days and miss out on half a weeks worth of class. Kinda cool, I'm getting permission to not even bother going to two days of usless stat mech which I wouldn't have gone to anyways. Downside, I need to have this E&M problem set finished up by Sunday which of course has not really been started. How fun, it looks like I have something to do tomorrow then. But well I did spend today acquiring access to a copy of mathematica which is very much required to do anything on this problem set.

Numerically simulating wavepackets hitting a metal with a negative index of refraction (oh thank god it's at normal incidence) is not trivial or very fun. Oh and goody, the second problem is another one of these gold nanoshell surface plasmon gems. Oh what fun, it looks like this week we're not making the long time approximation for the golds dielectric function. This is why I wish we had more problems from Jackson. I'll spend all of tomorrow and be very happy if I even get one of these guys finished.

Last Friday I was introduced to the game of GO. That game is pretty damn fun, I can see the strong appeal it has. A good call on Liz's part. Shit I think we ended up playing for well over 3 hours, heh and I even manged to win by two points though I was given a 5 chip handicap, so I guess all that really means is in the rematch I'm worthy of having a slightly smaller handicap. Hopefully, a rematch this weekend... I hope, though that is assuming I didn't screw things up to much last time while being horribly socially awkward in saying goodbye. My inner physicists shines brightly at those moments, and no that's no a good thing.

Ah I'm in a writing mood (mostly because I finally got my hands on a temp laptop that I can work on until those new laptops the group purchased for us get in, or until the powerbook gets fixed which god only knows when that will happen) so I'll say some more.

Now that I think about it last Friday was stuffed the brim with games. Latter that night I joined a game of Arkham Horror which took a good 4 hours or so to play. Yeah, way to much gaming there I think and to top it off we let the world down and lost the game when the the elder god or whatever the hell he is came out and kicked our asses. Now that I think about it the game is pretty complicated so I won't even bother to describe why it's such a bad thing to have that stuff happen.... just play the game, it's good. You can be a gangster, or prostitute (though probably not the one that my fair home state's ex-governor was fond of), and so on. I got to be the sexy scientist (clearly of course she's a biologist because on her character card she's looking through a microscope and well she's drawn to be hot so yeah the hot bio girl stereotype applies to the Arkham Horror world just as well as the real one) and kick ass with a shotgun.

Ah what else, well I guess today was fun, in a way, as in I finally got an official label for my wonderful mood swings of sorts. In general, I'm not so paranoid / disliking of labels as I know many people seem to be. Labels are fine, they help organize things (and I do like things organized), you just can't use them as the end all definition of something. They don't need to have permanence, or be singular. One can have many labels all equally valid at a given time. I see them as useful, giving a base structure to aid in navigation. Actually I don't really understand at all why people get so worked up about them, eh buts that just me. So anyhew my new one is Cyclothymic. I didn't even know that word existed until today. But reading up more about it, well it does fit me to a tea in a lot of ways. Basically it means I do well what I do and flip between hypomanic episodes and depressive bouts.

Eh, just wish it could be like it used to be. It used to be really useful in a way, even a solid week of being in a up swing was usually enough to get some really solid work done, well at least enough to internally justify dealing with the following crashing downswing. That was a long time ago though, and recently it's been too much of the latter and not nearly enough of the prior to continue talking myself into ignoring it.

So throw that one on the pile, actually just kinda knowing that does help put a lot of stuff in context which in a surprising way brings an odd clarity. I don't really understand it, nothing has changed a bit, but somehow there's more inner clarity.

Ah and on a completely random note tomorrow is Pi day, so I strongly encourage all to eat lots of pie (any sort of course, this isn't a holiday to be a discriminating pie consumer) and discuss their favorite occurrence of pi in formula and the like. I had hope of organizing a Pi day pie feast, but alas I think too many people will be out of town. Well I guess I could just run around the streets with pie demanding people eat it, but..... well I might have to think that one through a bit more.

So how do we get away with shooting cruise missles at people?

2008-03-05T00:21:00.000-05:00

I kinda started to think about this today. Apparently the US military fired a Tomahawk missile at a Somalian city the other day, targeted a guy wanted to masterminding some bombings (but he didn't sound like a big shot terrorist leader), and apparently blew up a couple housing killing a bunch of kids (at least that seems to be the concencus of various international news papers) How do we get away with this? I'm curious do we even ask Somalia, hey we want to throw bombs at a populated area because we gotta feeling this guy is wandering around there, or do we just do it and know there's nothing they can really do about it besides bitch to an international organization like the UN which we never pay that much attention to anyways. Just seems odd, and I can't really see how any country would agree to let another country more or less bomb their own people to maybe kill one guy we don't like.

And on top of that cruise missiles aren't exactly cheap. Raytheon sells them for a nice $570,000 a piece and I poked around a bit and read that in total it's like $600,000 in the end to shoot one. That's a lot of cash, not for the military really but seriously we just spent $600,000 to try and kill some guy and manged to kill a bunch of kids. Who the fuck thinks that's good idea. I mean if we really wanted this guy dead that badly, that were willing to blow him up along with all of his neighbors , kinda seems like it would be cheaper and more effective to just send a small group of guys into that town dress them up like the locals and give them rocket launcher and have them drive by the house in car. Seems like you'd kill less people that way, and it's cheaper. Fuck you'd think for $600,000 wed just be able to pay off a group of questionable locals to do the job for us.

I get annoyed that we spend such ungodly amounts of cash on a military that's still organized and run to fight another superpower in an all out throw down. You know that's great and all if the Germans ever decide to get rowdy again or we somehow manage to get into a fight with Russia or China (thought the latter seems highly unlikely just because were economically linked at the hip with them) but I don't see any of that happening anytime soon. The only people it seems like were going to be fighting in the foreseeable future are small/mobile/disperse terrorist groups not affiliated with any government or smaller nations that might think its a good idea to build a few long range missiles and launch a few to later realize oh shit those other guys have a lot more of those than we do. But big military = big money for some, and I guess since were not engaged in any large scale warfare needing shit tons of missiles flying all over the place well gotta use them on something, which apparently equals impoverished African children in this case.

I find it funny in a way that it was not only a long serving military officer but a republican none the less (ironic especially in recent years) who knew this was going to happen and hey guess what...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pWAGgLSCSQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oACur8v1188&feature=related

Oh that's right we were warned, but didn't listen. Seeing how Regan did a bang up job convincing the public that we needed all sorts of missiles and anti-missiles and 40% increase in military spending to keep those damn commies at bay. It's amazing how well fear mongering works. Hell people still buy into it even after they've experienced it before and seen it fall apart. It's sad but true, and well I can't blame people in power for using it because they know from precedent how well it can work.

Remember, if you don't pledge your unwavering support to the US and good ol' G Dubbya and stand behind everything he does unquestionably then your an unpatriotic troop hating traitor that wants the islamofactists to take over this country and so on. Some day people will look back and laugh at this.... I hope.

Oh god speaking about supporting the troops, I get really sickened each time the Republicans and well most people lash out about people not supporting the troops. Oh yes pulling them out would be such a horrible thing, because they of course love being over there so much. It's actually like an amusement park. Come one come all and ride the Iraq tour of duty roller coaster, where you'll be poorly supported in a harsh environment because we've contracted out all the basic services to a company that just wants profit, get shot at and horribly maimed or probably killed because the administration doesn't have a clue how to control this cluster fuck, and be graciously rewarded and honored when you come back by having your benefits cut, signing bonuses taken away, medical treatment sidelined and ill funded, and the like.

It really sickens me how much talk the Republicans have especially against the democrats, how the democrats take it and don't stand up for themselves, and how it seems to go for the most part unnoticed how ill taken care of the veterans (especially the wounded) have been. There's no excuse for not taking care of their medical treatment and lives after they come back, regardless of weather the reasons for fighting are in the end deemed just or not.

Eh, but enough of that rant, only makes me me angry and sickened at how the people who've done the fighting have been treated and how they've been used to destabilize and ruin the lives of others.

It's funny actually going around reading about past presidents and their policies and what they did, I find that there's actually a number of republican presidents I have respect for (cough, pre-Regan) and also a good number of Democrats. It's amazing but ture, there was a time when Republicans cared about controlling government spending (in ways that didn't mean cutting funding to public services while upping the defense budget another 10%) and wanter a smaller more non invasive efficient government, heck there was even a time when Democrats stood up for peoples civil Liberties and the welfare of the lower class. I mean they all claim the same things now, but it's all a bunch of hot air. I don't really respect either party but it's at least encouraging that the Republicans seem to be moving away from the shit headed religious right neocon movement by overwhelmingly supporting McCain and not Huckabee or Romney. McCain is pretty moderate in a lot of ways which is nice.

The Democratic race too is pretty interesting. Checking the polling results, Hilary seems to lined up stop the Obama streak in todays primaries. She's got the lead in Texas and has Ohio, so it looks like she was able to stay alive. I still haven't decided who to support. I haven't really been able to find enough credible material on either candidates stances to my satisfaction. Just in general, I keep getting the feeling that Obama is a lot of talk, though he is a good talker (heh but so was Regan) though if he really does believe in half the shit he's preaching and tries to be a hard pushing progressive president then yeah that would be great. I guess the one biggest thing in my mind that Hillary has going against her in my mind is the fact that if she becomes president then seriously our country will have been run by just TWO families for at least 24 years (28 if she had a second term) I donno, just something about that which I don't like one bit. Though that can be great if the leaders kick ass, FDR rocked it for 12 years and that was great tough so have the Bushes collectively and god that is most certainly not great. Eh I need to figure this out because with the way this primary is going, hell my vote in Indiana might really mean something.

I find it funny and sad how much coverage and excitement this primary is getting. Even the media doesn't give a fuck about what Bush does anymore, were all to excited about who were going to get to choose to replace him with.

This post has greatly sustained my efforts to put off studying for the stat-mech midterm tomorrow (which I care so very very very very very little about) In a way, if I failed, that would just mean I'd have to retake it with another teacher who isn't god awful and I might learn something you know which is nice because that kinda the whole point of this school thing. Eh, it's open book open note = joke. I get the feeling that it's going to be on the have the one necessary formula right at hand to quickly plug and chug your way to academic success side of things. Well whatever, my apathy towards it is unfathomable.

Also of note, the weather has gone from below freezing, to a cool summer day of 70, to a wonderful warm day of light cool rain, to monsoon, to freezing rain monsoon, and now back to snow (all in less than a week) this weather is crazier than the north east.

ATLAS work has actually been progressing along, shocking and absurd to say I know. Though now that I've got my code parallelized to my delight and running 14x faster than the brute force approach, bah I've found inconsistencies between the two results and I'm really hoping that its just a consequence of some ROOT pathology in the hadd function. Otherwise it means I'm totally off on the code itself witch I did spend quite some time convincing myself was right, so that would just be disappointing.

And while all this is fun and great, most attention goes towards the inbox recently in hopes that a plan can be hashed out for latter this week. My introductory idea was shot down, which seems a bit suspicious, but well I guess coffee and GO would lend themselves to more conversation than grilled lamb and that's important. Yeah that's true, I would probably get distracted by grilled lamb and ignore my surroundings. It's kinda like going to IQ, you gotta get any conversation done before the nan and madras hit the table. The next 20 mins are then spent only on contemplating the excellentness of the food and keeping up the capacity to stomach the platter of wonderful flavors and unearthly curry heat. Mmmmmmm.... IQ how I miss thee, and how you did distract me from talking about more important things. So yeah hopefully I'll be out of this midterm rut by Friday (getting back the E&M test today didn't not help) so I can be the charming me and god I hope not the bitter angry physics me.

Lack of laptop is highly annoying

2008-03-01T21:51:00.001-05:00

Anything computer related now has to be done in the office, and well there's very little motivation to sit around here more so than I already do. Eh, kinda sucks because there's more than usual to write about and after ripping apart my laptop this morning and taking a look at the PRAM battery it doesn't look like I'll be finding a replacement anytime soon.

Heh, there is no replacement. I checked the battery model number online and Apple did a bang up job finding and using a battery that nobody else uses or sells. Thanks Apple, thanks a million. I'm still not buying a new one from them for like 80 bucks! That's almost as much as they want for the main battery, total scam. Though after looking around a bit online it does seem that there's a number of very similar Lithium Polymer batteries that I can just sub in. I mean it will be a hack job, but I measured the space and it's possible to fit a slightly thicker batter in there. Plus these things are cheap, like 5-10 bucks at most. Another fun thing to do over break, break out the soldering iron and cross my finger that I don't short anything. I'll need to find a bunker or something before I ever try to start the laptop. Lithium fires are pretty intense, don't want to be anywhere one.

So yeah, had some fun with the screwdriver today.

Also wasted a crap load of time on ATLAS stuff when stat mech should have been the priority. Well to late for that, though I did make some reasonable progress dealing with this monitoring code. It's slow as hell when I tired to run it over an entire dataset, hell its been going for two days and will probably take another if I run it the way it's written to be run where you tell it where all the data files are and it goes of and gives you one huge root file at the end of the day. Thats lame, and slow, and we have a local computer farm so now it's all running in parallel. Coolness it actually is working, at the cost of day and it was a nice day outside.

Eh, I've had enough of the office so all the fun details will have to wait till tomorrow when again I'll want to put off work.

Though I will say I finally got an e-mail today that I was most pleased to get. I should check my other e-mail accounts more often. Cursed powerbook and being broken, if you were still working I would have known about this on Thursday but no you don't work and I have been very lazy about checking all my accounts. I guess it doesn't really matter, not like there's really any free time till next Thursday anyways. Now that's a midterm I am not looking forward to at all.

I need pizza, pizza to to power the thinking so I can start not sucking at stat-mech so much and figure out what the fuck we were supposed to have been learning in this "class" Such a joke, stat mech is seriously ranking up there as one of the worst taught classes I've ever had.

In any case.... To pizza, to pizza, to pizza I go!

173 slides is not an acceptable number for a 1 hour talk

2008-02-27T20:52:00.001-05:00

That beats out the previous record of like 120 or so for a one hour talk which at the time I thought was highly ridiculous, but 173... good lord that's a lot of slides. It was kinda funny, it wasn't like the speaker wasn't good or didn't know what he was talking about, he just had an ungodly number of things he tried to talk about. It would have been a much better colloquium if he had stuck to like 1/10th of the material explained in a bit more slower manner.

Kinda crazy always angry theorist guy was the 4th person today to ask a question after the talk. This guy is such an ass to the speakers I thought it would be funny to start placing bets on how many questions would be asked before he throws his standard "I don't think you know what your talking about, and I hate you" question. He never fails, but today we felt he lacked the endurance to really draw out the criticism like he usually does. Gave up the fight a bit too early, so that was kinda disappointing.

What wasn't disappointing was the large quantity of pizza today at Journal Club. I managed to grab like 4 slices (of the good heart healthy pepperoni/sausage too, none of that veggie lovers crap) I felt entitled to stuffing my face with pizza since last week I got shafted out of any slices by showing up on time and not like 10 mins early to stake my pizza claim for the day.

On a crappy note, the powerbook isn't really working anymore and I suspect a dead PRAM battery. This tragedy happened yesterday, and I've been most distraught at the loss of my trusty sidekick in piracy / blogging / wasting oh so much time in general. Well actually I hope it's just the PRAM battery because if it's not then I'm really in trouble. Getting that battery out didn't look to bad on the few internet sites I glanced over. Granted it does mean pretty much ripping apart the laptop to many easily lost and un-put-back-together-able pieces, but hey where's the fun in having an experienced person do it for money when it's just as easily riskily attempted for cheap by oneself. It's like tearing apart all the LiIon cells in the main battery and trying to replace them for cheap (no kidding its 1/3 cost for a new battery), the cost savings don't nearly cover the risk of explosion but still I'm doing it.

So yeah, no powerbook which means I have to do everything now though this well lets just say aged terminal at the office. Crappy means it's really not convenient to write stuff here and just when there's a good amount of legit stuff to write about.

Oh boy like I didn't need another reason to be sticking around the office more!

Invasive laptop surgery is scheduled for Saturday, which I also learned will be the day right after a toga party so well I'll probably have to pull this off hungover.

Hmmmm, it's late and I really should be studying like made for this E&M pain fest scheduled for Friday night. That and the mono has transformed itself into very random bouts of sleepiness, a ball busting headache, and a mildly sore throat. That's no fun, but I'm also taking a stand that I don't want to hop myself up on prednisone anymore. That stuff was kinda weird, it made me pee a lot, and gave me an unhindered appetite so my food bills have been markably higher which is not really needed or wanted.

Ah I guess the good stuff will have to wait for another day. It's going to take a lot of writing to gripe about many of things I feel like griping about (most notably a sure to be good rant about how I firmly detest being lectured about beer by anyone who drinks some soon to be mentioned brands and deems them quality) So yeah theres that, and some fantastically liberating self realizations that I believe were hinted to before but will be put off again. Figuring out how my mind does things without me being actively aware is quite useful, that bastard is very sneaky in some of the stuff it pulls. So that's been quite great, maybe a bit over a year late (well at least from what I'd prefer in hindsight) but still useful none the less.

I've been going a bit overboard on the beef recently, I should stop that. I need to get back on my bean and oats regimen, I was doing quite good on that for awhile until I started feeling crappy. Kinda killed a lot of the motivation to spend lots of time cooking when I could instead be sleeping.

Sleep is great, it's like the ultimate reset button for me. Very bad moods can be undone completely or at least mitigated by a good nights rest. I think I like sleep to much tough, and mono doesn't really help that, kinda encourages it but I wont argue with results.

Oh and it was great, there was an extra colloquium yesterday which not only was good but made for a 24 hour period in which the IU physics department gave me free cookies not once but TWICE and free pizza. That was great, maybe could have been better but I'd say only with the addition of free Indian food which is kinda hard because the places around here just don't quite cut it on that culinary front. Eh, but I did realize that I should probably go into medical physics. See that would A) Solve the problem of me being on ATLAS and hating it all the fricking time and B) Solve this problem where I also derive hate towards my work because it has essentially zero benefit for humanity, is a horrible waste of money, and effectively will only be appreciated by a very small and mostly elite upper class of highly educated people who I could give a shit less about in the first place.

Well at least on the scale of people I'd feel good about benefiting, they're kinda sitting around the bottom of the list. Building cancer screening tools on the other hand does seem to be a bit more lets just say universal in the types of people it could help, that and the small fact that I'd get to spend lots of time playing around with building detectors instead of a life behind the glow of a computer screen. The prior is by far more fun. Oh and there's also the fact that medical physics means bio people are involved = hot girls. There's no arguing that, it's a fact.

Oh well all of those things and the little fact that I've yet to be convinced that a PhD from anywhere that's not one of like 5 certain schools would get my anywhere in HEP academia positions provided that I don't manage to discover SUSY or something. I've always kinda wondered that, and I feel justified too because all I have to do is look at where all of my profs have ever got their PhDs and it's a pretty damn small pool. I'm not saying a professorship position wouldn't totally rock, it's just that I can't stop thinking I'm running a huge risk of being fated to a life of low paying postdocs and research staff positions (a fate I feel is worse than death) unless I pull something super fantastic at CERN.

You'd think that would motivate me to be studying like mad for this E&M test... you'd think.

I found salt! Salt to salt my driveway with, ha it has been salted with the burning fire of a 1000 suns!

2008-02-26T00:37:00.002-05:00

Stat-Mech is the most god awful class I'm taking or probably have ever took. Well physics class anyways, there's been some equally terrible math classes back at BU, but those aside this stat-mech course is the worst physics course in my education by far. It was confirmed, or so I was told, much to our suspicions that the professor really doesn't even pay attention to what problems he's assigning. He's just been randomly throwing them out of the equally shit-tastic book and yeah he has no idea how they're actually supposed to be solved without looking at the provided problem set write up. God just so fucking bad, I'd take another painful E&M style class instead of this junk. Hell even though E&M is pure suffering at least Schaich is always on the ball and knows what's up, and any problem he comes up with make Jackson's look fun and delightful. See it's like pure suffering, but lots of learning which in the end is good because that's what you really take away at the end of the day. I'd say Quantum has been similar too, class is very through and rigorous though there is much more sympathy on the homework front there.

Bah, it blows. No good at all because this summer I'll have to pretty much go through all the old quals and figure out what minimum amount of stat-mech I'll need to self teach myself to get by. Not that you really need much stat-mech in HEP but still I know there's lots of neat problems you can solve quite effectively with that and that's exactly what I should be developing a fucking appreciation for right now!

Ahhhhh so much anger.

Speaking of ridiculousness what do you get when you combine raging mono having it's way with me in ways I don't approve of, an impending E&M test that I super need to be studying for at the end of the week, and a visitor who needs be to entertained but still despise the most unsubtle stream of hints thought coming at the beginning of the week while I'm in school (still you know have these little things called classes and HW that need to get done) was a good idea.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh soooooo much anger it's just kittens and rainbows for me.

Where the fuck is a valium, where the fuck can I get a valium, I need valium or some kinda equivalent possibly narcotic based non-caring operator style drug, soon! as in now! I guess I have that bottle of half-empty Nyquil, I could chug that I feel better , well I'd probably puke a lot but then yeah this shit would all go away. Wouldn't that be great.

I think it would.

So yes I won't go into my full thoughts on the exact details of how this all went down, oh no I'll save those for when I have much more time to get the angry fingers in motion on the keys.

That and I also missed out on most of the Sexworkers Art Show the University hosted the other day. I had no idea what it really was, just the name seemed to interesting to pass on, so I talked Lance and Sabrina into going though the meeting up at one spot failed in the standard horrible fashion. That aside, what it was as it turned out what different art performances put on by people who make their living by working in some part of the US sex industry. I only got to see the first two, which were monologues (ah I have no idea what I missed, the others could have been quite different!) but they were good, very well different, yeah I can't say its a viewpoint on life that I know anything of or can relate to. Exactly why its so interesting to go and see, ah but that was cut short for reasons related to paragraphs above. Heh just guess which one.

Ah but I suppose I shouldn't bitch quite so much, the aforementioned recent traveler passing by for well ok anyways did force upon a certain subject to be brought back up indirectly once again, front and center, in my mind. Ah I was dreading for awhile what thought cycles that might and ok did ignite. Well again this is something to be written when there's much more time to write than the current hour but for an amazing change the most solid of solid realizations was made and I feel while thoroughly stupid in hindsight quite refreshed in an wonderful unexpected way. I'm a damn blockhead that's for damned sure, but I do learn.... though slowly. The jist of the story is that my mind works in such amazingly convoluted ways it's almost unreal, but I'm getting better and untangling it.

And on a total side note, since we're all willing/unwilling members of the glorious (you can almost cut through the sarcasm on this one with a knife) military industrial complex that is the US... well I figure it's at least somewhat worthwhile as long as there's lots of cool pictures like this.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Iowa_class_battleship_1980s_modernization_schematic.JPG

Remember world, we can blow shit up with the most supreme style. I need to find some stuff on the railguns the Navy is building, those videos rock from not only a holy jebus they really just blew that thing up! but also from a holy jebus they're using some neat physics to do that!

Eh there's a video meeting I need to wake up for in a short number of hours, that makes me most sad.

Salt Quests

2008-02-23T20:46:00.001-05:00

I've found that mono is a particular fan of knocking me out in the early afternoon. Quite strange, I can wake up in the morning well as poorly and lethargic as I usually do and I'll feel great for the whole morning until a little after lunch. Heh, that's when it hits me like a bag of bricks which has now translated itself to mean a good nap is in order (face down on my desk of course, probably drooling with lots of people passing by with all my luck) and then usually latter at night I'm up enough that I'll stay up just late enough that I don't really get enough sleep. It's a great cycle let me tell you.

I've also decided that I need a much more sexy story regarding my contraction of this mono virus. Currently I've worked out that it was contracted after a hot and heavy unprotected make out session with a saucy harlot, as all good harlots should be very saucy. I need a scandalous location though, and amusing circumstances leading up to making out with said saucy harlot. Hmmmmm... yeah that's something much for fun to do than work on stat mech.

So yesterday I did in fact get some work done, research work too that was pretty good. Though I did show up very very late to school, but not without mildly good reasons. Well first I felt like shit so that's gotta count for something, and two the fair town of Bloomington was hit with a nasty little ice storm coating my driveway/street/and car with a coat of ice. Yeah no way in hell I'm gonna deal with biking through that, especially since I've discovered the town just outright ignores most of the streets around my house. Then after sliding down my driveway because it is un-walkable without a good set of crampons, I discovered my car was so very nicely wrapped in a quarter inch of ice. That took for fricking ever to get off, I was really out there for like 30 mins chipping away while blasting the inside with heat. That ice held it's ground, and still is for that matter as my driveway has the appearance of a pending personal injury lawsuit.

Last night a tribute Michael Jackson band was playing at the Bluebird and while I know I shouldn't have gone out at all, well come on, who could honestly pass up on seeing some rockin tribute Michael Jackson. Well, not that I was really that into it but just watching them was pretty entertaining, the whole group and their lead singer without question was quite in character. Eh I didn't stay out that late, I left around 1am but still I think that knocked me out more today that I wanted it too. It was fun, just still kinda sucked because I really couldn't drink, though I did do a good job limiting myself to one beer, and well I guess I'm still infectious so it's not even like a good time to be trying to meet anyone. Mono sucks, that's what it comes down to. Lance and Esra stuck it out for the second part of the show, so I'll have to find out what I missed sometime.

Today well yeah not much has happened, I discovered the entire town and greater Bloomington area is out of salt. Seriously, I was driving around for over 3 hours today looking for a grain and none were to be found. I mean it's not that surprising, what with the recent ice storm and all, but still every place was sold out. Though I guess on the bright side I now know where many of the local hardware stores are. Not a grain though, how crazy is that. Heh, Liz was said today that she needed to get her boyfriends car unstuck from the street and the only thing they could find was a big box of cooking salt at the store. I though I'd have better luck, but no my salt quest of the day failed in misery. Though, while I was out and about I picked up some White Castle which I promptly regretted, but before the internal regret kicked in I was really excited that I got to hit up White Castle for some burgers. They come in those little boxes and stuff, it rocks so much I won't even get into it.

Bah, I haven't gotten any Stat Mech done today. I really needed to do that, or well at least start it. I've decided that I'll just go home (leave the powerbook here at work so I won't be distracted by the interwebs) and at least read what I know wasn't covered in class but we need to know anyways.

Ah but there was a bassoon recital at the music school tonight, which I made sure to attend. It said it was a junior recital, so I guess that means undergrad, but whatever it was quite good. A mix of bassoon and piano from Mozart to well some guy who was composing stuff in the 70s, so it was quite the spread of material and holy crap some of those pieces were all over the place. They were covering the entire playing range in what seemed like only a few measures, and damn I can appreciate that because I know switching from those really fun low end notes that resonate so well to the high end so quickly isn't exactly easy. Hell I sucked at it, but the girl performing tonight didn't so it was fun to hear.

And it's good too, I've finally decided to actually start taking care of a few things that I've been meaning to do since the beginning of the school year. "Mieux vaut tard que jamais" as we had to say if one was ever late to French class in high school. I guess it applies just as well to this situation as well.

Bah I'm hungry, and lazy and tired, I'm gonna get some pizza then go home and loaf about. I get annoyed sometimes that the social circle these days is so sparse and well non existent. Eh, but I feel like crap, no use griping about that now because I'm in no shape to really do anything about it.

One test down, two much worse ones to go

2008-02-22T02:00:00.001-05:00

Well I don't think I'm failing quantum, at least for the moment, which is good enough for me. Midterm season is in full swing now and well at least it didn't start off with the worst, no it's most definitely building up to that. Quantum though, quantum I felt well alright. Few things I felt stupid about forgetting (those damn coefficients to the raising and lowering operators (alright and I know if I was really on the ball I could just write that down from dimensional analysis), and a few spots where some creative improvisation was preformed, but most certain with my feeling of test not failed I am. So horrible lack of recent motivation and the mono have yet to destroy this semester as of today.

Next with with E&M though....... ehhhhh I shudder at the mere thought of how unpleasant that exam will be.

Eh the mono hasn't been so bad, so far it's held itself to just more general tiredness and need to nap in the middle of the day to keep going. Fevers, shakes, chills, sore throat, headache have all subsides or at least been held at bay with the wonderful tag team help of Tylenol. So could be better, but I know could be much worse. I've also discovered this neat effect with all this Prednisone that it removes my bodies ability to feel full after eating. Not that it really makes me hungrier, but I can gorge on a lot of food without kinda that natural hey you should stop signal kicking in. Heh, I've been having fun with it. I totally rocked out a huge dinner of delicious pork rolls and chicken stir fry at Little Tibet the other day. Oh man that rocked, so in a way Prednisone does give me supper powers. The powers to eat even more delicious food. God save Bombay house if I ever manage to make it over to their lunch buffet in the near future.

It snowed today, not much but enough to get packed down and slushy. That frickin sucked, that and the fact this town doesn't know how to clear a street to save its life. My bike ride was all over the place, it was a slip n' slide all the way home. Not that I usually care that much, but today I got to go home early when there was still enough cars out and and about to realize that hmmmmmm.... this situation does lend itself to me getting hit which I can't say I'm a fan of.

Tomorrow, and by that I mean today, I really need to figure out what exactly I'm going to be doing for the TRT and well ATLAS in general research. I guess I need to be move direct with the advisors that this little scheme we've been running off for well the entire year so far is a load of crap and we need to get realistic about what work can and can't be done so don't keep wasting so much frickin time wallowing around in the mess of TRT monitoring. I know they're views are currently not exactly on the same level as mine but still, it seems more and more like I'm really the only person to do the work they keep magically saying will get done and yeah no. Desire to not loose anymore mental stability, keep mono at bay, pass classes, kinda outweigh any research effort that has only historically proven to be a total crock because the people across the pond can never keep clear what were actually supposed to be doing.

And my group should know, if you really want me blindly motivated and a good research slave you gotta throw throw out the most false and unrealistic of promises. BU had that down, not only did I get a good wholesome indoctrination that the only place to go worth anything was the refined and infallible halls of Harvard across the Charles but you gotta back that shit up with empty rethortic of how I'll totally be going there if well then yadda yadda yadda (insert crap you want me to do here) See that's how it's done. My group now could clearly be pulling this with tempting of far off post-doc positions and NSF fellowships and the like and if done correctly I'd even say the chances of success on me would still be non zero.

In a large way that contributed a fair chunk to the loosing of my undergrad life to lab, though I'm not saying there weren't any good or fun aspects to that much lab time, but still a strongly bitter taste left in mouth indeed with that whole matter. I think now I've gone into reactionary mode. Heck nothing short of a cattle prod and a gun to my head will get me really onto the hey lets sit in an office doing research all day mode! Hopefully that will mellow itself out in the future. Right now though, I'm ultra skeptical of the worth of doing any research so I need firm convincing which I also know isn't really in large supply.

Eh, whatever, it's just ATLAS.

Hmmm it's late, that sucks because I'm not all that tired and need to force myself to sleep but I am in that very typing kinda mood. Oh so what else, gotta chance to call Noah up today which was good. God I always feel bad about how badly I drop the ball keeping in touch with, well everyone. Not something I'm very proud of so I like it when I actually have the time to spend awhile talking with folks I wish I could much more often. I should just start looking at my cell phone bill more, that would maybe be a good motivator to pick that thing up more and start talking. I mean damn I pay $40 a month for a "bare bones" plan which never even gets closed to fully used (I rock out hard at racking up the roll over minuets) I should start getting my money's worth outta that thing.

Also, the more I look into it the more economic theory interests me. This year in particular I've been turned onto a lot of well not so great, actually kinda conspiracy theory-ish sources and videos about the current US financial system and well it's definitely raised a flag in my mind. Now I'm not buying into the Ron Paul (well at least he seems to somehow always be involved with or hinted at in this stuff) outlook entirely, but I have realized there's a lot I don't know about what keeps looking like a very interesting system to study. I've also found finding anything credible on the interwebs about the Federal Reserve system, fractional reserve banking, and various theories about money standards is god awful, but there's interesting points being brought up and I'd really like to start sifting through this sea of shit more to get at the good stuff. Money theory looks like a pretty rich topic, it would be neat to study it scientifically so I hope I can find someone whose done/doing it.

Though there are a lot of things wish I could say there are/were actual scientific studies about. Maybe it's just coming from high energy physics, where you don't even really need to be in the system that much to know how self regulatory the system is to filter out the junk, get things right and pretty polished before going out to publication.

So yes, I need to start hunting down economics students around here or heck just join their department. I can do math, well sometimes, but I think I can do enough math to do economics. Hmmm......

Oh but the evilness of the credit card companies I'll totally buy into. Granted there's a lot to be said about just needing a fucking better educated consumer base in the country (it's amazing the sheer number of problems that could be solved through education) but still, I happened across an interesting report about their inner workings and yeah they're not far off from the spawn of evil itself. They just pull some of the lowest shit imaginable, a lot of general confusing/deceitful stuff ok but I really get ticked when I hear about state attorney generals needing to ban together to fight these guys when they do stuff like debit peoples bank account's for the bill payment but then don't apply it to the credit card bill so they can collect a late fee and jack up the rates.

Ah so much to get angry over, but yeah I should get to bed.

Fun fun links!

I won't lie, the military industrial complex can be a very very cool thing to have. I just wish they'd do more cool stuff like this and show it to the public for all the cash they suck up.
http://www.breitbart.tv/html/50894.html

Long story but I stumbled across Mc Donalds corporate photography and got a kick out of how much effort I can imagine went into taking this photo. The subject speaks for itself.
http://www.mcdonalds.com/corp/news/media/multi/Prod/core_menu_items.RowPar.0002.ContentPar.0001.ColumnPar.0002.File.tmp/bigmac.tif

Dan pointed out to me today that people were fucking crafty as hell in the days before the CCD. I agree, anything with tubes and especially this rock.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube

My brain is shot

2008-02-20T01:37:00.001-05:00

Useless piece of junk, I'd hit it but there this damn skull in between me and teaching that lazy mass of useless shit a lesson in being more productive.

I got so little done this week/ weekend it's not even funny. Mono sucks, I mean I was already running low on well just about everything and now to get hit with this. Well, so far not nearly as bad as I could be I guess (sweet wonderful drugs to thank for that) but still all the sleeping I did on Saturday and Sunday came back to trounce me these past couple of days what with Stat Mech and E&M HW due. Now to say it in as few words as needed, I'm left more broken then I think I've been in well a long long time. My mood swings erratically now on a daily basis, my sleep cycle is in shambles, I've started to click myself into anti-social recluse mode again, motivation to do is low, motivation to care about school is scraping the bottom, motivation to do well anything ATLAS related is god can I define a negative motivation because I think it's that bad. Pretty much I've come to the conclusion that everything going on in my life right now is on the wrong path. I'm finding myself sitting back with a blank stare into the nothingness of internet well pretty much all the time. I mean it's gotten so bad that I don't even care anymore, there's not even any anger or hate left about these things it's all reverted into utter apathy.

Heh, and what was it.... Saturday I was gleefully seeing life as a never ending platter of opportunities each one more exciting than the next, ha yeah that switch has flipped. Well now I'd say I've gotten back to neutral but for most of today I became pretty bitter at the notion of existing again where the world shrinks into a box of already played out and known stories that I'm doomed to tragically follow. It's utterly ridiculous, I know but I can't control it. I mean If I could, well for fucks sake I would have been doing that since high school.

Ah but I guess that gets into my view about myself and how my mind works. I've got theories, as usual, and from well 23 years of experience with this body I've come to view what I feel normally would be congealed together as my mind into two separate but related entities. I guess it's kinda a hardware/software model where what I really feel is me are the collective memories and experiences that make my personality. The emergent property of exposing the hardware that is my brain to well everything I've done in my life. But I separate the two. The software has become aware of the framework it was built upon and is forever bittered that it's stuck using it to keep running. It sees the shortcomings, the shitty wiring that only seems to endlessly provoke myself into self-feeding spirals of depression.

It all runs off the assumption that it's not like I want to be so manic all the time, it's neither fun or very useful. It's not I enjoy or wish or can easily tolerate going into these depressive bouts. Believe me just having to wake up one day with thoughts of annoyance that something didn't come thought the night and end my misery isn't disturbing. Yeah do that for oh days, then weeks, then as it starts to grind on you, months where that feeling doesn't go away and you realize you have no control over it and just have to rough it out till the brain gets bored doing whatever chemical games it's doing all while keeping up daily appearances while doing everything you can just muster even the slightest sense of interest in a world that seems to do little more than characterize you as "the grumpy one" laugh some jollies and expect you to move on with a smile beaming on your face. Yeah no picnic in the park on a sunny afternoon there. So unless my personality is just deep deep deep deep deep down masochistic, I can't say I'm a big fan of having to go through shit like that for example on a fairly regular basis. It just feels like a hardware thing, tendencies out of my control that just keep happening no matter how aware I am of them.

Ah, it's something I need to figure out how to put into words better. That and the whole depressive experience, because I've been looking at it now and just in awe at how pervasive it can become in so many aspects of life. The biggest problem is, I find that as a defensive barrier against itself my mind while the needle flips to a more jubilant and unending optimism/ambition mode (or heck even good ol' emotionless neutral) it does a smashing job of forgetting well everything about what the other side of things feel like. I can't say that's bad, but it leads itself to only getting good time to really respect and reflect upon this problem only shortly after it's subsided enough to undertake such tasks.

So yes in short the shits in shambles. Repressed emotional/psychological issues from god all the way back to high school, throughly ignored throughout college though blind dedication to work (which I gotta say worked wonders at the time) despite many warning signs and mini-breakdowns, to utter burn out at the end, followed by a year abroad that hell just made things so much worse on so many levels, to now... where I'm in one of the most mentally demanding workloads I could probably ever manage to get into = my brain just falling apart. I mean it's kinda scary, it just can't think anymore. I know that's weird to say but damn that's how it feels. It's not that it's forgotten things, I can still sit through class and follow a lecture or read my textbooks and follow what's going on, but none of it is sticking anymore. It's like it's just given up, with or without my approval. HW has become all but impossible, these next three weeks of midterms reek of trouble, and damn I just don't know what to do.

To say I've been having second thoughts about physics is an understatement. I mean I'm pretty close to the breaking point just in general where I'm ready to make any drastic cuts in my life that will prevent me from really loosing it. Physics is an easy target for that kinda thing. I can easily throw lots of blame at it, but then again I'm in a totally fucked up mental state so I know I'm not thinking clearly about well anything. I feel trapped, staying with it seems like a choice of failure because I don't get the sense that there's any remorse for the dumb fool like myself whose let all these outstanding issues build up to the breaking point when I need to push and grind my way through the first year. Also, getting out to reassess the situation and possibly save my sanity equals very bad scars on my record and a financial burden that I don't think I bear.

It's all fucked up, that's my conclusion. If I ever manage a way to figure out how on earth to start constructively rebuild my mental state while not doing something drastic, well then I'll be pretty impressed with myself.

Hmmm, I wish there was a better way to get thoughts out on paper. I've been realizing recently, that for ever like half broken poorly said thing here there really are like 10-20 thoughts far more well thought out and self argued in my head. It's quite frustrating, especially when I keep getting the feeling that pretty much everything that comes out here just just overly charged meaningless rabble. I can think much faster than I can type. Is it all for nought though, well I still don't think so. I feel one of these days I'll really start getting out what I want to and that won't happen if I don't just keep writing and banging my head against the wall on the issue.

Like everything though, it will never be good enough for my own standards. There's no end to the level of perfection that I think things should achieve and also no end to the extent that I'll beat myself up for not achieving it. I used to go to a phycologist when I was much younger who kept trying to make that point to me. I stopped going because I got annoyed that that's all he seemed to say, but damn he did have a good point on that. A lot can be traced back to that notion, I wished I could have accepted it then. A self hating die hard perfectionist true and through, a fun archetype indeed.

On a side note I must say I was particularly surprised at how effective zazen meditation is. I did that for two hours last Sunday morning after discovering there is in fact a quite friendly zen community like right down the street from me. Much nicer than when I tried to do this years ago in Boston at the place in Cambridge. These people did not have any edgy vibe, which was nice. It's just sitting and it's good for absolutely nothing, they were quite up front about it, heh I like it when the monks have an easy going but very respectful attitude towards meditation. I should really try to figure out how I can work that into my day on a regular basis, as I do recall most of Sunday was spent in good spirits.

It is most late, and there's studying I need to rally for and classes and free pizza tomorrow.

Ah I it's so simple, it's all Army Boot's fault

2008-02-17T01:49:00.000-05:00

The nonsensical scape goat for my issues will be used once again for this recent bout of viral affliction. I need to throw the blame somewhere and with a lack of any remote idea where it came from I'll just assume my nemesis.

Yeah it sucks, this prednisone stuff does kinda make me feel hyper but then again when I got up and walked around I still felt pretty out of it and tired so it's all a great illusion. On par with the nyquil, in my ever constant praising of that green miracle it did in fact have me out and about with out much thought when my temperature was well over 100. Kinda shocked to learn that when I went into the health center the other day, heh and I was worried that I was feeling to well for them to think I was sick.

I realized today that I can't bike to school anymore for like a fucking month. Damn that sucks. I really don't want to have to drive, not only that but finding a parking space in the morning is none to trivial, so a good time in store indeed.

I sometimes wonder if there's a limit to how much I should bit torrent, but that's a silly question.

My mood has actually been quite perky today even though I overall feel exhausted, must be a side effect form the drugs. I'm in one of those overly optimistic modes though, one where I can't stop thinking about all the stuff I want to get done while constantly realizing and throughly ignoring the fact that there's absolutely no time to do even a fraction of it. Life sucks a lot like that, to many possibilities but such limited time. It's humors that that's usually the mood I switch to when I'm not despising the notion of existence. Completely incompatible and opposite outlooks, why be boring and only settle for something in the middle.

But yes a lot of this thought has come down to what martial art I'm going to pursue in the coming time, basically as soon as I'm over this damn mono enough to start doing active physical actively without the worry of breaking open my spleen and either A) dying or B) Getting emergency surgery neither of which options I see as a very healthy. But yes this is something I've kinda always wanted to do but for well all sorts of reasons gotten distracted by other things and haven't pursued it. I wished it had in high school, there was actually a very well respected karate instructor not terribly far away from where I lived. That would have been cool, especially since damn back then I didn't even realize how much free time I actually had to do things. Eh, I guess I did competitive shooting tough, that took up a lot of time and was really fun. It would be nice if I could keep doing it out here, there's no shortages of places to shoot, but I'd need to have my guns out here and I really don't have any place I could reasonably keep them. So that's out for the foreseeable future.

Good skill to know none the less, good for fighting off scientologists if those crazy fucks ever get their way and start their own little holy war against the unbelievers, or in some kinda Red Dawn scenario which I guess isn't so likely but still, or probably most likely when the US feels like destroying itself through further corporate motivated warfare/conquest and decides to conscript the masses in large to die for Halliburton and overall military industrial complex's profit and I get caught up in it mess before being able to escape to some country that hasn't completely sold out it values to corporate greed.

Fighting a war in true defense of the country is one thing (and is really the only reason we should go to war) and if there was a draft under those circumstances I wouldn't speak against it at all, but when it's only to gain a foothold in a region so we can extend our corporate influence even further well that's just so fundamentally fucked up it's not even funny. It's quite disgusting actually, and even more so that this is can happen without any accountability or much opposition. It's scares me to the core that our country has evolved to such a stage where it's even accepted if not completely ignored by an ignorant and sadly undereducated, unquestioning, and unskeptical mass. There's an idea for a post, John's view on patriotism.

But before I go on and get off this topic and back to what I wanted to finish, I'll point out a few good movies that I found put and interesting spin on all of this "Iraq for sale" "Why We Fight" "Baghdad or Bust". Not to mention the ever popular "Fahrenheit 9/11" God if even a faction of what they all get at is true, there's a lot of people that should be drug out in the street and shot for treason.

Ah but yes, unbounding anger for the current government aside what was my point... oh yes so yeah knowing how to use a gun is useful for that kinda stuff and quite mediative believe it or not, but so are marital arts while also being great way to get the body in overall good shape. There's actually a good number of people around here who are into it to, which I think is another reason my interest has been rekindled. But what to do, this is the question. I start reading about the different schools and the problem is they all sound really neat, what they are designed to train you for and they're associated philosophies towards life in general. That's the problem, which I guess can only really be solved by actually going out and trying them but still my mind like to get as much info beforehand and process it.

So I've got it down to a few things, and it's pretty damn cool that Bloomington has this much in general. So there's Aikido, which I like at first glance because it seems to do a lot of physical one on one training, it's grappling which I don't know why but find in general more interesting than throwing strikes around, and even thought it sounds like it get criticized for not being the most practical in terms of real fighting it does seem to have a very well developed and still taught philosophy to it. I guess that's why Judo to me doesn't seem very appealing at all, I've only seen places now teach it as a sport. Yeah that's nice, you can advance in it, feel good by having a system where you can win and feel superior to others... you know general constructs of any sport, but yeah that's not anything particularly interesting to me right now.

The other would be Kendo, heh which I know is a martial art well developed into a worldwide competitive sport which I know I just said I had no interest in getting involved with... but it also seems around here that the Kendo people also practice Iaido. Iaido being the practice of attacking while drawing your sword on an opponent. It's done individually though, and does seem to have a cool philosophical aspect to it. That sparked my interest, and kendo in general just looks like blast and the two together would mean I'd be learning how to "fight" with a katana. I mean just that is pretty damn cool, for reasons unknown since I was very young I've always thought it would be cool to know how to sword fight. So yeah this definitely has that going for it. Eh I donno, lots of other stuff sounds equally as cool too so it's had to even initially make up my mind.

But then again what do I know, it's all speculation which will hopefully turn into something in I guess about a month or whatnot, whenever I'm told my spleen won't explode on contact.

Damn I've been writing a lot, I do that too much because it's late and I did decided to start doing zen meditation again (all in part of the overall construct to get my mind back together again) after discovering there's a very well developed zen group not far at all from where I'm living. I haven't done this in years, so they have into sessions Sunday mornings at 9 and I need to but up and ready for that no question. It should be fun, and if nothing else relaxing and a good excuse to get me out of bed and out of the house in the morning.

This was a cool map discovered today, it's hard to find an actual map that shows where the T really goes with respect to the physical roads.
http://unmappedcities.com/images/unmappedboston.gif

Oh so this is a good one

2008-02-15T22:15:00.000-05:00

Rants and ravings about school, my oh so lovable group, and physics aside for the moment oh I've got some fun stories to tell today. So in light of me spending such a delightful Valentines Day last night cuddled up in my bed shaking under the influence of some kind of fever accompanied with a pounding headache, sore muscles, and a raw throat. Delightful believe me, actually that shit came out of nowhere. Wednesday night I wasn't feeling all the great, but damn Thursday I woke up feeling kinda down and by early afternoon I was bed ridden. Thank god for Nyquil, it cures all that is wrong with the world and my body. It's a miracle drug I swear. Probably just all the semi-controlled chemicals in there that get metabolized into some pretty hard hitting narcotics. Ahhhh the green refreshing ambrosia of the gods, the taste you have to grow fond of with time but the color is such a pretty green.

I found this recently and I got a kick out of how the body actually does with Nyquil
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/15-11/st_nyquil

Ha! Cannabinoids and morphine derivatives, ah the reasons for fondness for the green wonder are so very clear now. It's no wonder that shit knocks you out and makes you feel great, god it's practically illegal. At least I know what to do now when I'm feeling crappy with the flu and there no Nyquil around, smoke a bowl of greens and opium. Heh, the slightly more illicit way than just asking the pharmacist nicely for the untinkered with Nyquil D formula behind the counter then promising that I'm not a fucking meth head trying to distill this stuff in my garage.

Nyqil I love the so, but still some love you more that I for they've have discovered this
http://www.obfuscated.org/2007/01/07/this-is-what-happens-when-youve-been-sick-for-too-long/

I am seriosly considering going out to the store right now to track down some alka seltzer tablets and do this. It combines two of my favorite things. Drinking via the "bomb" mechanism and Nyquil = super health.

Right so anyways today I woke up feeling not to bad considering how I spent Thursday night in mild convulsions. I was honestly quite impressed, but my wonder drug aside I decided to go to the health center today just because it did seem a little strange how quickly I got hit with the plague. So yeah I go there and the doctors were actually quite nice, they decided to hit me up with a series of fun tests including throat swab for step (ohh so many fun childhood memories with that one, I have no idea why I never had my tonsils taken out I had step all the frickin time), blood and urine sample (though for the life of me I couldn't pee even after drinking buckets of water and pacing down the halls for like 10 mins) So after the poking and prodding the results are in so lets do the rundown

Initially I thought I had something like this
http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/plush/6708/images/770/
http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/plush/6708/images/771/

Through I was claming I was stricken with
http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/plush/6708/images/1797/

Alas, I did not have the plague or the cold or flue for that matter. Lungs were as clear as day if you can believe that though I actually haven't indulged myself in any inhaleable death for at least two weeks now.

Not this guy either
http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/plush/6708/images/773/
Sorry step, I know we were good buddies back in the day but I've moved onto classier diseases

Actually my blood work came back great, except for this minor thing where my atypical lymphocytes were off the frickin charts. Ha ha, so it was ruled to be..... drum roll please

duhhhhhhhhhhhh

http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/plush/6708/images/817/

He's so cute isn't he, and to think they're just multiplying by the hordes inside of me as I type

But yes, I've got mono. Now what a fucking rip off is that. I mean it'd be one thing to get mono after lots of sexy make out parties or something god anything, but no, no make out parities for John as far as John can remember but none the less I've somehow managed to contract mono. I'm pissed, I demand that the universe at least give me a sexy make out party as a reason to get hit up with this kind shit. God next thing you know my bodies gonna start figuring out ways to contract STDs without getting any. I'm onto you universe, I know we're arch-rivals but this is a low blow indeed. Though, it would seem to explain a lot the general crappy feelings I've been having, and the constant desire to sleep and sleep and sleep and sleep and sleep.

Also, for no real related reason, that mono turns out to be a cousin of good ol
http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/plush/6708/images/2358/
Herpes!

Well actually it might not be mono, they did also give me a mono test which I was also informed is likely to give a false negative reading if the infection is in it's early stages. Oh joy, early, what wonderful words to hear. But yeah, according to wikipedia I'm might also have Strep, Syphilis, Hep C, or oooooh Hantavirus boy wouldn't that be great which all apparently have early signs of high atypical lymphocytes counts. Well damn out of that list I better have mono or at lest the Hantavirus. Hantavirus would = no midterms for John but also 50% chance of death hmmmm.... well I guess it's like flipping a coin and go with these round of midterms I donno. 50% is pretty damn good odds.

Heh, but yeah I'm infectious now for those of you who haven't already decided that about me :{P Heh, that's me with a mustache sticking out my tongue in rebuttlement because I haven't shaven in live forfrickinever. On the plus side now I've got this cool bottle of steroids to take so my spleen doesn't swell up like a balloon and pop on me. So yes between my new questionalbe content green magic liquid, these white steroid pills that I'm told make things better, pizza, gatorade, and a lotta beans I'm gonna kick mono's smug pink ass.

Downside, besides being a walking breeding pool, no drinking for the foreseeable future :( and my life will soon become 10x less exciting than it was before since all I'm pretty much allowed to do is do HW and sleep. I can't even bike to school anymore because they said anything besides walking is strongly recommended against if I don't want to end up totally bedridden for 6 weeks.

Bah, this is most annoying.

So in conclusion I'm in the wrong field of science, I kid you not this is true
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1713215,00.html?cnn=yes

Seriously, people going around with cameras taking pictures of Gorillas fucking face to face counts as valid research those sick sons of bitches. What did a physicist do all summer, oh stayed locked up in a room possibly with no natural daylight studying/typing code sometimes in a foreign country. What does the animal behavior scientist get to do, oh run around in the jungle all day probably not doing a hint of math or anything requiring rigor except a nervous trigger finger on the camera to catch Gorillas off guard and uncovered. Unbelievable, this is almost as bad as the people who literally had people sit down a watch porn while they monitored their genitals with an infrared camera.

Well, not that I'd really want to go around taking pictures of Gorilla sex or aroused gonads for a living, but god if that counts as science then Physics has to be a super-science otherwise what the damn point in having to memorize all these wonderful aspects of plasma frequencies, and spherical tensors! Except I don't have any robot friends, or nuclear powered gadgets, clone slugs or well anything else they have in the venture brothers. I call shenanigans on this whole science gig, I feel ripped off. I demand more women in or at least around the physics building or more laser death beams, both would oddly make days more interesting. There I've bitched about physics, I can call it a night.

Bloomington needs to learn how to salt the roads

2008-02-13T22:59:00.002-05:00

Seriously, it's bad enough that the weather is more temperamental than my mood but come on Bloomington you could do something to salt the damned roads and sidewalks when they get iced over. I noticed this a little while ago when I was walking around downtown, pretty much zero sidewalks had been salted and were for the most part ice coved. I remember thinking that was a little odd, also happened to remember that when this morning my bike flew out underneath me when I left the safe confines of my properly taken care of driveway to the black ice ridden street. My right shin and its super cool new battle damage appreciate your diligence in road maintenance so very much my dear city. Well it was kinda funny probably if you were watching as it at least felt like a very theatrical fall. I did a good job of catching myself with my shoulder which actually feels fine but my right leg just couldn't really manage to get up the courage and tunnel through my bike frame and consequently has been sore all day.

So that was a wonderful reward for me tying to bike out of my house and get to Stat Mech on time. Lesson learned, stat mech is such a god awful useless class (which was already well known as both the lectures and book are shit ass useless in learning the material I should be learning) and does not deserve priority over anything. I don't even know why I show up, just spending that same hour reading any other stat mech book than the one used for this class would be time very well spent.

I think my bitterness has concentrated itself into the form of a physical ailment. I've been having that well I've never really known how to describe it but just kinda general icky feeling my muscles and what kinda feels like a fullness in my head which often indicate that I'm about to feel really craptastic very soon. This is what I get for biting my nails all time time on top of having my lip chewed up, that's kinda just like rubbing a bacteria infested rag on a open wound isn't it? Yeah no more of that. But most assuredly more cranberry juice and zinc for me.

Hmmmmm what else, what else what else to say. Well in keeping with the previously set cheery tone of this post I should also note that the colloquium today had to have been one of the worst talks I've ever gone to. Not really because the guy wasn't speaking clearly or fluidly, but god you should seriously be de-PhDed and shot for having slides that bad. 6 slides, densely packed with fine print almost to the point where you could have put up a page from a novel and I wouldn't have known the difference, and just standing there in one place yammering on for fucking 1 1/2 hours is not a good talk. Also when you think describing the history of different theories people have come up with (not even saying what they meant or how the worked just saying their name and who came up with it when) for 50 mins does not provide anything educational to me or anyone else in the room. God, that was such an awful talk. I can't even really begin to describe how poorly done I thought that was. Heh, I did however support one of the theorist in the peanut gallery (also by the end very miserable with the manner in which an hour of our lives was taken) who accused the speaker of not even being a physicists and a liar for saying his talk was going to be about quantum mechanics. Ha! I laughed on the inside from that.

Speaking of quantum, I should be doing that right now but after I discovered a 9x9 matrix all hot and eager to get diagonalized is standing between me and finishing this damned set, well I kinda lost motivation. That was a cruel trick there problem, getting me all incited to solve you with such a seemingly easy question that barely took up a line then getting all kinky on me when I'm not looking and pulling out all this 9x9 matrix crap. I don't want to touch that, I don't want to be anywhere near that, I also don't want to talk about a physics problem in this way ever again as it is grossly disturbing and just not right.

Ah and on that note let me preemptively voice my disliking for the upcoming day which is happening in oh about 10 mins or so. I really do dislike Valentines Day, not only for it's blatant shallow commercialism but also for the fact that its like a day set up to in a very focused manner remind me how I'm not in any situation where I could claim even the most artificial of relationships. Just makes me feel very warm and fuzzy on the inside. Well either that or this plague that I feel like I've caught, but still I despise Valentines Day as it's actually never worked out where I've been involved at the time on any level to be able to "celebrate" it. If the bitterness hasn't become obviously tangible yet then I don't know what to say to make that point clear. If only I could focus it to the point where it would somehow crystalize inside me, then I'd have some kinda bad ass bitterness gemstone inside me that would let me shoot laser beams upon my enemies. Yeah that would be cool and you know it.

Bah, also just generally annoyed on a related topic because there is in fact a phone number I've been trying to frickin get but no fate hates me and it seems that I will never get it. This is what happens when I try this whole getting set up with a friend of a friend business after being told that once removed friend might be interested and also feeling the same way. Having to go through and do things through a middle man is never good, but alas there is no other way to get this number. If there was well then I would have done that weeks a frickin go. I guess there's always tracking down an e-mail address, eh but that's undeniably very lame. But I'm also pushed to that stage, because god knows when things are going to go through with this phone number relay. Fate hates me, there that's my cop out answer to all of this.

Venting, I should do it more often.... but then I'd probably wear out they keyboard. Damn I really need to get this HW done so I can pretend to get some amount of sleep this evening, heh who am I kidding, morning.

Last minuet opperator applies to all

2008-02-13T01:41:00.002-05:00

The blog is being ignored in place of wallowing around in a sea of self-retrospection, lack of motivation, HW I care little about, and OCD anime watching. Damn you bit torrent, damn you to hell and your ability to make new series uhhh appear magically on my hard disk for me to watch then not stop watching because they happen to be pretty good. Why does watching cartoons become so appealing when there's impending problem sets due? Grrrr, well on the up note I guess I have been watching some fairly interesting stuff ah but there's no time at all to write anything tonight because even this I've put off to the last minuet when I did have plenty of time if well yeah. Annoying, annoying, most annoying.

Heeeeyyyyyy its Saturday

2008-02-10T02:40:00.000-05:00

Which means I didn't get jack squat done on really any front for that matter. Yesterday was more or less the same, spent a lot of time in the office, messed around with ATLAS stuff halfheartedly when I should have been working on HW, wasted time on the intrawebs, generic weekday activities. Oooh, I did manage to steal half a pizza from the conference room which was foolishly left unattended and right out in the open. I knew what it was for, some department lunch thing that I had no interest in going to but the fools, ha ha they left the best part just lying right out in plain sight when the meeting was over. It was in fact delicious, even though it was Pizza Hut I think the successful use of grad student scrounging sense made it taste much better. Heh, I was even on my way to go out an pay for food then I just got this feeling of hey there's free food nearby.

So to be cultured and also because I had zero faith (to be proven wrong later) in the social group, I went to a baroqe recital, it was pretty good though I can only stand so much harpsichord. It was like a dual violin harpsichord recital or something, but yeah they had one whole piece that was really heavy on that damn harpsichord. That one I wasn't a fan of but the other three were quite pleasant.

People did get together though last night, we ended up going out to play pool at that billiards hall on the square. The place is alright, you have to rent time on the tables which is a little steep but thats made up for with dollar beers. Of course I overindulged myself on the finest Pabst and Rolling rock my bills could bring me. Poor Rolling Rock, since the Budweiser folk bought out that brewery it just hasn't been the same pale as hell cheap ale that I grew up on. Heh, and by grew up on well it's what my parents usually used to have around = it's what I had available to sneak for myself in those ol' pre 21 days.

Oh, ok and what the hell is it with people remembering me! WTF, I've only been in that pool hall once and I was with the same group of people many months ago, well at least a few. I get remembered though? When you first get there and rent out a table they check everyone's Id and when I went to hand the person mine, they're like oh yeah you've been here before. I'm befuddled, this is like when I went to Big Red liquor a month ago and they didn't even card me because they like oh yeah you've been here before. What like 3 times the hole semester, that doesn't not equal a regular. I mean its not that this is bad or anything, just kinda strange and I can figure it out.

Right so we got drunk, then went to the vid for some more drinking. God I love the vid, it combines so many of the best and worst parts of society all in one well lets just say unique place. There was quite a crowd there, the usual mixing of townies and grad students with everything else in between. A blending of paradigms, that somehow in that one spot can coexist and have a drink together amidst an atmosphere of slight tension. The vid is most certainly an interest place, and I'm glad we found it. It points out everything that makes me feel at odds with society, why I don't ever feel like I fit in with it, and even why it outright disgust me at times, but then again it also brings out all the eclectic oddities about it that I do enjoy so much. A quality establishment, also with dirt cheap shitty beer. It goes without saying that I didn't wake up until well into the afternoon today.

In the post reasonable drinking stupor, I didn't even get into work until like 3. And see this is where things go bad, I mean that's not a bad time to get in and would work out if for like 5-6 hours I could just sit the fuck down and do some damed work. If I did that today that would be amazing and a great help to free up time later, but no I just fucked around on the computer. I don't know why I have this problem, well no yeah I do, but still it's just getting worse. Though I did get some stuff taken care of, a lot of bill crap but even that isn't that much. Not nearly enough to justify the amount of time I had but wasted to meaningless and most mindless follies. I give up, I'm doomed as it is.

See even now it's really late, I should be getting sleep and even though I gave up on work to get back to my place around 9 it's still taken me like 6 hours to do a handful of trivial things. It's frustrating, and it's making me extremely angry with myself. I don't know if this is some kinda of slow break down or what. Almost feels that way. There's no hope, there never is. So much I'm so throughly dissatisfied with and so much that I feel I have no ability to change. Mostly with myself, but then again I've never liked myself very much. In reality I don't even know how other people manage to deal with me, because god I can barely deal dealing with myself.

Bah it's all someone's cruel joke, that's the feeling I've had for a long time. But then again existence is pretty ridiculous as it is, so why should I expect anything less.

And some links for the hell of it:

This picture rocks for reasons which don't need to be explained
http://prikola.net/pic/selection2/44/5.jpg

Though the LSATs don't look to terribly challenging, and in ways it would be an interesting career I'm still not quite sure I could be a lawyer. My suit is not grey, it is infact a lovely navy pin stripe..... but the guy does have a mahogany desk.
http://techlawadvisor.com/Lawyer%20Jokes/Lawyer-Coloring-Book.pdf

This video also does not need any explanation, it just simply rocks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNiX_l-HEGM

Indifferent too much

2008-02-08T02:03:00.000-05:00

I've just been ignoring well pretty much everything recently. The blog, friends, life, physics, HW, well yeah pretty much a universal indifference. I was actually hoping to get the time tonight to sit down and blog things out, ah but I got home and pretty much crashed on my bed and had trippy dreams until like midnight. I have noticed my dreams being well significantly more vivid and lifelike recently. Also, even more lacking in cohesion or logic. Usually their in the real of off beat, but now it's more like I wake up and really start to think holy crap where does my mind get this stuff from. I'll blame that damned fMRI, this did kinda start happening right after it.

Eh I'm going through another disillusionment phase. My level of caring towards physics has hit another all time low after I spent alot of time last weekend doing ATLAS stuff, putting HW really off to the last minuet, only to discover in a very sleep deprived sate that no I was just being dicked around by the people at CERN and really what I spend my time on was meaningless. I just get all warm and fuzzy inside when that kinda shit happens, warm and fuzzy full of physics hate that this. Ah, I hate my life choices. There really isn't much these days that I'm proud of. It's a total wreck right now, hell it's been that way for the past few years. This stuff has roots even before my colorful year at CERN, now they're just deeper and very very firmly established.

This week I started to realize just how burnt out I really am. I mean I was already pretty burned out after BU, for mostly reasons which relate to again making horrible life choices and in my "year off" I went to CERN and managed to burn myself out even more though from a different angle, and now well I really thought just getting myself into a better place and back into the swing of classes would focus me and settle things down but it really hasn't. Fuck, it's just gotten worse actually. My sleep schedule has never been so out of whack. I'm going from sleeping away the day to multi day insomnia then back again. My body is really making a stink about this. It's pretty obvious things have gotten bad when my body seems to be shutting down even though I have been eating an exceptionally healthy diet (oats and beans super team!) and kept up a good amount of activity by keeping up this biking as a mode of transportation habit regardless of the weather.

I really need to do something about this, I know I've been saying that for like over a year now but really I gotta do something before I snap because that's where this is headed. If I was being as rash I as might want to be, I'd drop physics right now no question. Get the fuck out of this major which has only promoted the worst social habits, personal mental state, stress level, and general getting dicked over for a whole slew of reasons that I wont even get into. I'm not happy, not overall or even in the little ways that still always made it seem worthwhile to sacrifice my mental well being. I am unilaterally displeased with almost every aspect of my life right now and angry at myself for not doing something about this earlier.

Ah it's easy to blame physics for a lot of this, as with most things laying blame is probably the most easily done and least thought out part of any reassessment plan. If I had anything even relatively concrete in my mind of what else to do then yeah I wouldn't loose much sleep over just stopping this madness and go off to do that, but I don't. I wish I did, that would really make this whole process a lot easier but I figure there's things that need to be taken care of first and gotten in line before I can really start making decisions about what to do with my current career/schooling hell path. Though, I know I've said very similar statements before which have gone unacted upon. But, I've never hated every waking minuet of my life as much so maybe that will be a good motivator.

Ha ha, depression.

Anyhew, I'll probably have loads of time tomorrow to really rant and flesh things out seeing how after last week the Friday social group has essentially dissolved. It's a shame.

In keeping with the new idea of throwing in interesting links:

Dan pointed this one out to me, notice the current numbers for January under non-borrowed reserves. Not to comforting, though I was reading that this could be an artifact of many banks borrowing against themselves to cash in on a lot of cheap interest rate loans. Still....
http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h3/Current/

This picture is just fucking amazing.
http://www.amasci.com/graphics/tesbeam2.jpg

And I discovered this today, for those of you who ever doubted the obsessiveness of the Swiss with their watches. It's pretty badass, I'd carry it around. How the hell else am I going to be able to know the phases of the moon and the current day easter is going to fall on at the same time?
http://marina.fortunecity.com/westindia/59/ppc89.htm

Ah with my luck

2008-02-03T01:40:00.000-05:00

well it's not so great so in fact it's best that you avoid it. Eh, today I slept in, then slept in some more, then well slept. It was nice, until it got past noon and once again I've realized I started my weekend off to a horrible waste. Spending that much time loafing around sleeping is only a very temporary satisfaction. I mean it's really nice until the realization that it hasn't been at all extra refreshing to the body in anyway and aside from that well many hours have gone by. So yeah late start, but I did get my place cleaned up a bit, gassed up the car and even gave it a wash (though I was mildly disappointed by the quality of the super deluxe extra fun time wash at the Marathon gas station). Something good to know for the future.

The afternoon was still young and the day was exceptionally nice compared to the recent cold streak that we've had. People were out and about, it was a nice day to drive around and explore a bit (which I did) then wander the town and eat bagels. My expectations for HW were drastically reduced but I was able to get some ATLAS work taken care of. That was good, made me feel like there was at least something productive that I've been doing for this group though a bit long and staggering in the actual execution which of course is only partially my fault.

Ah but the night was given away to dreams and fantasy, ideas that I though had become plans but yet were not in any tangible way. My luck at its finest. Slightly covert in nature, for reasons which I will not distract myself with, I wandered over the theatre to try and attend the newest production. I had to fight for tickets, it was pretty brutal too. Didn't think I was going to make it at times but then again I did manage to prevail and with ticket in hand I did attend this evenings show. It was good, though not what I thought it was going to be mostly because I was mixing it up with other shows which I was being told about all at the same time so yeah no angels staging a revolution against god but instead in its place were a sampling of greek mythologies told in a very well minimalist but effective way.

This was all fine and dandy, but then again for me things usually are up until that one critical point when oh right really there was no solid plan, the person who I had been very much hoping to see wasn't at all present, the house of cards falling down all over.... wonderful. Without any uncertainty I was cast into a sour mood and forced to deal with my mind coming up with as always the most ridiculous scenarios for why failures like these seem to be almost inevitable. Ah yeah so my night become relegated to the groups performance after party at a pizza place whose name might be Mother Bear's which only ended up giving us shitty service and fucking screwing us over hard on the bill. Fucking douchebags. Not saying the company wasn't delightful, infact quite fun though still not the exact company I was hoping for (as if I need to state that fact again)

Ah it was alright, and I did learn about a few more events in the future that will be worth attending. And that I apparently need to come up with the most awesome anime series ever to pass along as a gift / proof of coolness token or something. Now that is not going to be easy, gotta think over that for awhile. But it's something fun to think about, that and statmech which needs to be done tomorrow and which is in no way fun.

Crickets, that's all I have to say about it.

Erf

2008-02-02T01:14:00.000-05:00

In short all I have to say is my class is so ungodly lame that it's not even funny anymore. If they're not off WoWing it up, which I'm not even that lame to be doing, then well I donno but they as a fucking whole refuse to be social. WT-Fucking-F, yeah that's right I did just modify the word fuck with fucking. This is a horrible change from the days at BU, damn there well did stuff or at least were open the the oooooooo so scary idea of going out and doing anything! I'm annoyed, plain and simple. I mean the answer is pretty damn obvious, start hanging out with more non-physics people which isn't impossible but still just really annoys the crap out of me that this group of students here are such a dead load of worthless virtual reality fantasy hogs.

Arrrrrrrrr..... so yeah where does this anger come from? Many many many places of course, but mostly tonight where hell I think even if I proposed a game night I would have gotten very if not no takers. So the idea was hey the GPSO is having another happy hour night = free food (see right there, if I was surround by and good red blooded graduate students, which I'm not!, just the mere mentioning of free food should get people showing up in droves) lets try that out. But no, no no no, no my group sucks and I don't feel bad saying that because it's undeniably true. Lance was game, but he's literally the only other person whose ever game to do anything.

But yeah, GPSO thing was kinda lame but did in fact have free food. I was able to grab two slices of pizza and a mozzarella stick. Met up with the psych folk and parasited ourselves onto their group, which has worked well before but they seemed to tolerate our presence tonight though as a whole none to thrilled. Meh, even with that it was the best thing we had going seeing how we've been reduced to looking for any group to adopt us because ours has collectively decided locking themselves in a box is more exciting than going outside. Ahhhhhh, there's no end to this lameness I'm surrounded by.

Right so anyways this was a cool picture I was shown today.
http://www.telegeography.com/products/map_cable/images/sub_cable_2007_large.jpg

The thing I've kinda wondered about is how do you get the cables over the midatlantic ridge? I mean isn't that thing like one huge underwater volcano, like with lava and stuff? Well that was always the image I had of it, I know it doesn't move very much but still I had the impression it was still really hot and well just a general non-friendly area. So yeah how do you get cables over that because, doesn't it go all the way down the atlantic?

I donno, but what I have learned this evening is that German psychology experiments are a bit over the top. What I gathered is that if I did that little fMRI thing in Germany instead of trying to guess where the man had to move to meet the car, well I would have been subjected to like many hours of hardcore porn mostly likely schizer knowing how they like to roll. So yeah I'm glad I didn't have to watch that while trapped in a tube with magnets and stuff.

I need to get my Tee shirt from WFHB for being a member, I've put that off for like hmmm what 5 months now? Yeah, I should go do that tomorrow.

Ah the groups also been annoying but I feel like I've griped enough already today that more griping isn't really warranted... at least for now. Well lets see what positive thing can I say about the day, hmmm well the Tibetan food tonight was in fact quite delicious. They even made it reasonably spicy, and whatever they use is nice. Not quite a full hearty burning of a good curry but also not like straight up massive attack burning of like hot mexican food. I liked it, had some zing right at the beginning with some lovely lingering effects. Present but also not to the point were it washed out the other flavors in the dish. I approved, and I got lentil soup and a salad with it. So there, that's something good, yum yum yum and now I should go home.

It's cold out, my legs are tired and the wolves are chasing me.... up hill, both ways.

2008-02-01T01:52:00.000-05:00

Hmmmm so another day, not much really got done, well I did watch a lot of Ghost in the Shell season 1 but while highly enjoyable I'll count that as more of a bad thing than good. I was really tired this morning, not just sleep tired but my legs felt shot. They have yet to adapt to daily biking in the recent stint of cold weather. Maybe that's from all the weather fluctuations we've been having. I mean damn it was only last week when I could almost get away with wearing a tee-shirt, and now well now I'm in the midst of a severe winter storm / tornado alert (though not going to lie, looking outside you'd never guess it)... hmmm might also stem from the fact that 4-5" of snow is big deal out in these parts. These midwestern folk are a strange bunch indeed.

On another side note, I again managed to do a good job and bring in my lunch to school but totally biffed on bringing those little necessary chopsticks. Annoying, and even more so when I went out this afternoon in search of a fork or something that I could purloin from some eatery only to end up just gorging on oh so delicious greasy pizza and bagels. Yesterday's lunch has now become todays by the magical refrigeration operator.

I remember running across this thing a few weeks ago, but it's cool so you should check it out if you haven't seen it yet
http://www.maniacworld.com/Spinning-Silhouette-Optical-Illusion.html

I actually thought the whole thing was a scam until I got like 3 people in the room with me at the same time watching it to verify that it was flipping at different times for everyone. But yeah after we worked that skepticism out, shit this thing is really neat. I'm not sure if it's good or bad but I guess my brain can't make up it's mind which side to use because I see it flipping back and forth pretty often unless I'm really focusing on it. A creative/logical clusterfuck that is me, makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Speaking of which, I still love my new brain pictures. Hell now I wan some from a different angle or I donno just more of them. I've looked at them for awhile now and I know that if I could I would really spend many more hours just starring at them. It gets bad when I look at the picture go oh hey that's the part that's letting me see this right now, and then fall into an infinite loop of ponderment. I'm kinda getting into this idea of collecting medical images of myself, hell now I can add 155 brain pictures to a couple of X-Rays from last year and some other something-something-scopy photos which I wont get into. Still medical imagining is frickin cool, and medical images of myself is even cooler. Ok what I really want is a life size scan (MRI or CAT they'd both do the job) of my body printed out and hanging on my wall. People would be like oh, wtf is that? and I'd be like Me suckas! It would be cool, yes it would.

Ah I did manage to fill out that extra personality test form I got as a take home and do this if you want an extra $15 from the psych folk. Oh those tests are fun, kinda like to see what the results of it would be because I love going through stuff like that and being dead pan honest and see all the inherent contradictions in many of my answers. Oh they'll having fun going over that.

This weekend I really need to get stuff taken care of. Solid work needs be done on Saturday and Sunday, because I sure all hell know when I get up in a few hours the day will almost immediately wash to meetings and research work stuff, which I've been very unmotivated to do these recent days so yeah tomorrow I should get to it and do something. Saturday night has plans and maybe Sunday too so there that's motivation enough to get my act together and start doing useful things during the day. I gotta break this habit on blasting away all my time on the internet. Another bad habit left lingering from the CERN days with that oh so wonderful Muon group. But lets ignore that horrible stent of my life, and bring it back to today where I might actually get more free theatre tickets! Rock rock on, making friends with other grads students rock. Well not just because I've gotten free theatre tickets but still, that's a definite awesome perk. There's a GPSO happy hour at Nick's this next evening, god now it's just a battle of getting physics people to actually go.

See now really, if you've known me at all you should definitely know that if I'm the one pushing for major social contact and get togethers to meet new people and the sorts, well then something must have gone critically wrong and meteors are about to hit the earth. I sure hope not, but I think you get the point.

WFHB is playing Clapton, rock on. Speaking of guitars, I'm also do refinishing my start and p-bass neck with tung oil. Granted my room smells slightly toxic, which is a bit wired because in a way I kinda like the smell, but I've got something like 6 coats on them already and I'll probably give up at 8 and just bolt the things back on their bodies. And now that I think about it, oiling those guitar necks down is about the only useful thing I've been able to do while back in the house for the past week aside form sleeping. The strat neck looks particularly sharp, because it really didn't have a much of a finish at all to begin with and it's amazing how not much work can make such a visual difference.

Much to late, much to late indeed I should have been in bed 2 hours ago.

Magnetic monopoles scare the crap out of me

2008-01-31T03:14:00.000-05:00

Maybe it's just our prof, he does seem to like them, but yeah last semester we went over many slick ways of deriving the same energy densities for magnetic fields assuming monopoles as the answer you get when you take the long ass way about it and more realistically say they don't... but yeah after that and starting to to go over Dirac's argument for them because they can explain charge quantization (which is none to shabby) well made me start to think ah maybe these things do exist somewhere way out there. Doesn't even need to be nearby because you only need one. Anyways that's alright, aside from mildly unsettling fact that this bastardly shy monopole would be heavy as all hell, but whatever that wasn't enough to make me mortally afraid of them until the other day when we started taking about space/time parity of all the fields and such and realized a monopole would odd under space inversion. No I don't like that at all, now these little bastards or hopefully just one would flip charge on me if I looked at it the wrong way and that I just don't like at all. Now I spend my days in fear, in fear of that damn universal monopole.

Frantic unnecessary panicking aside, here are some gems of links of the not in any way politically correct type
http://www.gilliusinc.com/dropsoap.html
http://www.exile.ru/transient/151/europeans-chart.html

Ha, ha its true. I don't know how Europeans stick together since they all have so many hundreds of years of racial hate built up for each other. But then again like any random collection of people divided among such silly but easily bloodthirsty lines, peace can always be achieved when there's a collective enemy they can all divert their hate to (usually in the form of an overly oppressive and uncaring dictator) Thank god for America. That my new take on it. If we weren't going around being such douche bags to the world and shoving our culture down peoples thoughts (but believe me I've seen them willing lap it up) well Europe would just fall to pieces in an instant and probably Germany would just go and try to take it all over.... again. Ha, ha horrible but yet somehow it seems totally plausible. On a side note I agree entirely with Belgium's views towards everyone else, as any non Belgian beer is horribly inferior gutter wash and should only be drunk in desperate times.

Ah another night that actually had a very easy HW set which of course was put off until well like 10 mins ago. Horrible, just horrible that level of procrastination I've reached. Not very tired though, one of these days I've just been thinking about staying up all night in hopes to bring some kind of normalization to my internal clock.

In recent days I've becomes unquestionably furious with the apathetic flock mentality filled american populace, the corporate media feeding them, all the presidential candidates, and fuck well the whole god damn political system we have in general. Noting new but just a lot of shit recently has really been pushing my buttons.

For Example:
Lets borrow more money to make a horrible attempt to "stimulate" our economy that's gone to the shit out for many reasons but including the fact that we borrow to much fucking money all the fucking time for things that we can't pay for and usually are horrible things to spend our money on in the first place.

What could some of those things be I wonder? I'll leave you to guess, but yeah it's gotten me really mad. Almost as mad as religion makes me and the horrible ways it's trying to take away our collective freedom.... hmmmmm but that's to much for tonight.

Right so what I really want to rant about was how fucking awesome it was today when I whored my body to the psych department but got free, fuck less the free because they paid me and gave me pictures of my brain.

So in short, because it is unnecessarily late, I tired to get in on one of these fMRI studies last semester but they were full. Last week though apparently my name moved up on the list! And it was my turn to get scanned. Fun times, seeing how I got to spend my afternoon doing this though I did miss Journal Club pizza time..... mmmmm a tasty thing to give up. But yeah I had to fill out a bunch of stuff, then they made me spit in a cup and I mean a lot of fucking spit. I was literally standing in this room for like 5 mins or more trying to come up with enough spit to fill up this cup. All while the girl running the lab was siting there waiting for me to finish. That was just weird, not going to lie, and kinda creepy because now somebody is sequencing my genes for reasons they weren't exactly forthcoming about.

Still that I can kinda ignore, because of free brain pictures. Right, so then after I spit a lot I got to go downstairs to the fMRI room where yet another girl (who ran the fMRI, and I won't get into the implications of what I thought about a good looking girl running a cool machine like an MRI, weird form of attraction that's all I'm gonna say) but yeah this is when I realized how many girls that department was loaded with and now I'm thinking WTF why the fuck am I doing physics when I could be fucking with peoples brains (also totally cool research) and have lots of girls around. Alright so lets ignore my application to the Psych department for now, but yeah so like I'm down there and they take me into the scanner, strap me down and load me into what is a pretty damn tight magnet bore. I don't really care but I can see how people would freak out over the small space, actually I just distracted myself with thinking how cool it was that all of my bodies magnetic moment were being aligned and tickled. I couldn't quite remember the formula for Rabi Oscillations, but that is what I spent a lot of time trying to rethink.

Alright so I was in this thing for over an hour. It was quite a bit of time to be locked into a small tube while having to stare a screen through a very small mirror much to close to my eyes. Hell that part kinda felt like something straight out of Clockwork Orange. It didn't seem like I was very far from having my eyelids held open, but yeah there's no way I could have gotten out of that machine easily and they were pretty much free to lock me in there and force me to watch whatever. Ok now that kinda freaked me out, thankfully though all I actually had to do was guess which direction a cartoon car would move (very frustrating because it did seem to be entirely random) for like only 50 mins. Eh, but then I got out.... I was free and they gave a CD full of pictures of my brain!!!!

I was so excited to get out of that place and back to the office to look at them that oh boy I had a fun bike ride back to Swain. So imagine this if you will, here's a guy whose just been locked into a tiny tube unable to move for an hour, rushing out to his bike with shoes in a not so nicely tied state, lots of people walking all over campus because it's in-between hours, and our overly excited hero gets on his bike to zip back to the office when his shoe lace loop gets wound up in the bike pedal, jams up the whole thing, bike stops, and said hero falls to his side that has the foot caught up in the pedal through the shoe. That was a slow motion disaster. I just tipped right over and smashed my side into the ground. People looked, oh did they look. In hindsight I really should have screamed out "There's no time!" and just left my bike lying there and booked it on foot. For the comedic value alone that would have rocked. But no I then took the minute to carefully tie and tuck in my shoe laces then proceeded to suicide bike through mid day traffic back to the office.

In conclusion, I have pictures of my brain now, they rock, and they're on facebook. Go look at them because they're great, since my brain is great. Great great great. Time for bed

The Grid is pure voodoo magic

2008-01-28T02:19:00.000-05:00

That thing is such a frickin spaz ball, ok so for like over a week I've been trying to get a dataset from CERN and it's been giving me noting but useless errors. So then I go around and start talking with my group and a few other people try it and yes run into the same pile of BS that shitty piece of shit shit loves to throw at you. They then get interested and start messing around with it seeing why it hates IU so much, don't get very far, I go in the other day give it another shot for shits and giggles then magically out of the blue I'm downloading straight from CERN at like 8 MB/s. Black voodoo magic, that's all I have to say about it.

New thing I've decided to start doing

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/south_of_scotland/7208505.stm
http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/011708/odyssey-of-the-mind.gif

Some things that I've found generally amusing in the past few days. Though why I will laugh at anything that makes a crack at OM (dear god I don't think I'll ever fully go into how much that damn thing took over my life for like 6 years), but yeah I disagree with the lack of girls comment. That's not true, at least in my school it wasn't. Ah but OM is an evil evil evil evil.... evil evil beast that needs to die.

So this weekend a whole lotta not much happened. Friday was another vain effort to rally the physics crowd, I mean there was three of us that went out but still it would be nice to get more people being well just out and doing stuff. But yeah pregammed at Brad's, went to the Vid, actually ran into psych and theatre people, spent the night knockin back draft PBR and being surrounded by townies, and ate cookies at Baked! before going home. That combo rocks, it's a twice proven fact. Also, learned that next weekend I'm definitely going to see the new theater show opening.

I was disappointed though, the next morning I could barley rally until well into the afternoon. Am I that old, can I not stay out and hit the bed a 5am and after almost no sleep rally for more? Yes, apparently I am. That's kinda depressing. The days of youth gone, crushed by physics and an overly oppressive HW load leading me to compulsive over-sleeping whenever I get the chance. So yeah saturday not much happened, just kinda got up and kept working on my basses. Jazz bass is back together, got the Rotosounds in the mail too and oh god do they rock. You forget how nice a new set of strings sound until you actually put them on, and I'm liking the heavy gauge. The talk of them having better sustain is an understatement. Didn't get the time to really set up the action, so I guess that's for next weekend because I have the feeling it will take a few hours.

Today I claimed to go into work, which I kinda did but really I just ate some lamb (http://www.sheep101.info/lamb.html) you should eat more too, and well yeah didn't get crap done. This is bad, I have shitloads of time on the weekend to get HW done but yeah it's just not happening. Eh,

On a side note today the weather was again manic as hell and took a turn for the lovely. And by lovely I mean it was like 41 degrees outside, but that's enough for my body to feel relatively warm. I get a kick out of my body's very very relative gauge of the temperature outside and how it adjusts thought the year. I know for sure that during the summer when it dipped into the 70s that it felt cooler than when I went out today after it being like zero for a week. Tomorrow it will probably be a blizzard or something.

I cooked today, that was useful, took more time than I thought, but it was useful. Super beans and rice combo is still going strong for my lunch bentos and this week I also played around with some stir-fried/steamed broccoli/cauliflower/carrot combo with mustard seeds. Smelled good, but I'll find out tomorrow. Actually no tuesday because the food I brought into work today for lunch has now become Mondays lunch on account of the minor fact I forgot to bring my chopsticks along too!

In short I did very little of interest overall, aside from working on the basses. What a great escape from HW, but that's besides the point.

Looked out of my car
Interesting, yes very
Zooooom not going to miss

Sleep deprivation is fun!

2008-01-24T23:25:00.000-05:00

Actually no, no it's not very much fun at all though I did have a bit of fun tracking my mental whereabouts while awake. Two days, and two nights of 3 hours of sleep. Well yesterday I also crashed a bit in the afternoon for like an hour at my desk.... but well I wont' count that. So yeah 6 hours of sleep. Then last night after getting quantum taken care of I went home and didn't really wake up until noon this morning. Makes sense, but still I kinda ended up missing quantum. That was probably not a good idea, but actually if I had showed up on time I would have just been falling asleep in class anyways.

Eh, doesn't matter that much anyways....

Now I'm awake, quite awake actually. Still wasting time on the internets, damn people for sending me videos of stuff like Scientology that I have no control over myself from watching then getting very angry at.

I'm in a bad mood. The needle finally swung the other way, that's no good. Last week I was riding a pretty good high. I blame the lack of sleep, that and the onset of reality. Reality sucks, and I have yet to get my Stewmac order so I can distract myself with guitar/bass work. Hopefully that will come by tomorrow so I can get the shielding taken care of this weekend, heh then I'll be able to get at least my jazz bass back together and operational. That would be nice.

Ah I'm just getting fed up with a lot of stuff recently, but really when am I not getting fed up with something. Is it even worth getting into, eh probably not. I love it how I meet someone that from all I know seems really cool, but then of course actually getting any message of interest across is a whole fucking run around, so yeah, that's annoying as hell and have a feeling with just lead to another wonderful debacle. Now it's not that I say that out of sheer pessimism, or from any real facts, in fact I honestly hope that that's what doesn't happen at all, but then again I do know that beyond a question of a doubt (experimentally proven time and time again) I just get myself into the worst of situations when it comes to things like this. Not really sure if it's good or bad but I guess I have the outlook of really hope for the best but expect only the worst.

Eh, I've been criticized before and well many time for being vocal about negative opinions which I've never really understood. In general I can say that I absolute hate it when people hold back things ( (of any nature actually) and it's not like I'm often horribly guilty of this myself but still) but yeah I do like to express myself and usually think it's the negative things that need expressing because clearly they're negative and bad and are things that need to get out and be worked out. Not that there's not plenty of positive things to talk about but those go without saying. Talking about a positive thing I feel doesn't make it anymore positive, but going over the negative seems to have a great effect at reducing it. So yeah, but I can see where people get impressions that are far from the actual mood I'm in.

Their problem though not mine. Except in a few cases, but those for sure are not worth going over. Ha ha, cryptic as hell.... I love it. I'm almost assured that this thing does more harm than good to myself, ah but it's such a fun experiment in living a true 2.0 life that I can't resist to keep on going. It's a totally new concept, just throw things right out in the open, little to no filter the information is free and open to all. It happens a lot here, other people have embraced it, but what would that mean if everyone started doing it. I have no idea, but i think it's a neat idea. People going around the web, you can just come on to something like this and get a heavily unfiltered colorful sampling of thoughts and opinions for free! A whole society of people who know each other in ways that are incredibly close but in many regards not at all, and all anonymously.... heh that's the best part, what makes the whole concept really interesting. I could have close supporters and haters all at the same time, people I know or don't, people who will tell me and those who won't. It's such a wildcard that I haven't even been begun to really think what an effect doing this might have.

In short so much fun, especially since so much here is written without any background that probably a very small handful of people would even know. Heck that and most of these posts are probably just in general rambling and incoherent as hell. Though there is the nice fact that since I am so damned socially inept and and just antisocial in general, hell this things actually pretty nice because I can just say stuff here that you'd almost certainly never hear me say in person. Still I guess that could be a really great thing or horribly bad.

The art museum coffee house was basically a bust tonight, that didn't work out at all like I hoped. I did get free fudge brownieish type cubes though. They were good, but overall I deem that venture a wash.

Fuck it, I'm going home and kicking back some Absinth and Chartreuse. Gotta be classily you know.

It's also freezing cold outside, I need to invest in some form of ear protection/warming apparatus. I'm starting to get annoyed with my ears dethawing like 10 mins after I get into school then hurting like hell.

I am the master of getting lots of work done!

2008-01-20T20:49:00.000-05:00

Ha, but only work that's not related at ALL to actual school work. No seriously this is not good, I shouldn't be getting this distracted this easily but I am and for hours and hours and hours on end! Ah, yeah I'm failing grad school for sure because of this. Well at least on a positive note, I've got a 9.5" radius sanding block in transit from the good folks at Stew Mac. Now I'll actually be able to do this de-fretting job right! Also threw in a big roll of copper shielding tape, so I can get that taken care of on the axes. Shipping was kinda high, frickin 8 bucks which makes me wish I could justify buying a lot more crap from them right now to make it well not so close to the actual price of the thing I'm buying.

Errrrrrrr, oh and I also have new strings on the way. Kinda pissed that none of the local music shops around here carry Rotosound, so I had to fall back to the internets again and stock up on wound metal from JustStrings.com They have a frickin amazing selection, I don't think there's a type of string they don't carry. So yes, I stocked up after discovering last week that the strings on my jazz bass had managed to develop really nasty kinks (??? seriously have no idea how that happened) when I took them off the clean the neck. So I decided to try something new and am stepping away from the DR highbeams to try Rotosound Swing Bass 66. I have no idea what the 66 stands for, and according to the internet they were first released in 1962, so it's not the year. Even more different, I opted for two sets one being heavy gauge and the other extra-light, two sizes that I've also never tried out before... so when they get here it will be fun playing around with that. Also picked up some strings for the strat since A) The old ones broke B) They're so cheap compared to bass strings, I see them as almost free C) Well it's obvious I was buying strings anyways.

Hmmmm, so yeah Sunday was kinda another recovery day after Saturday night. That was a pretty fun time by the way, after finally rallying after Friday night I went out to the hardware and grocery store then went out again for Sushi! Heck that managed to be a pretty diverse crowd too, physics, psych and theatre. Went to a place on Walnut which was quite nice aside from what looked like some sort of after frat/sorority prom party with lots of retardedness and sake bombing. After that we hit up the Video Saloon which was totally awesome. It's like the hideout for grad students and townies with a good heavy drinking bar atmosphere but without the meat headed sloppyness you find at pretty much every other place in town. They had billiards! Plus it's also right near baked, so we could end the night with cookies! Oh, fantastic.

Sunday saw many hours wasted to polishing the frets and cleaning the necks of my guitars. Also did 3 loads of laundry, which are now in a huge pile on my room's floor. Also cooked up some super beans and rice for lunch this week. After reading about it I've decided that I am going to start eating a shit ton of beans on a regular basis for super awesome fun health. That and keep drinking cranberry juice like a fiend, and use olive oil on everything, and eat dark chocolate, and yeah oat and yogurt for breakfast. Haven't quite figured out how to take care of dinner since I'm held up in the office so much and going home for that is kinda a hassle. Eh, if I'm just eating dinner out then that's not bad at all. Twice as good as last semester.

Today I really should have been able to get E&M taken care of early, but nope. I cam in, I sat down and I wasted the whole day fucking around on the internet. I think tomorrow I'm just going to march over to the health center and demand that they give me some kinda of drug to fix this. We live in a modern wonderful pill pushing world don't we? There's gotta be something for that. If not then I'll also accept fun colored sugar pills.

Shit it's time to do something useful.

Sludge cookies are the best cookies

2008-01-19T01:57:00.000-05:00

I forgot to set my alarm last night, yeah that wasn't good at all what with the totally sleeping past class this morning. It gets better though, yeah, better.... pretty much after I realized I totally biffed on class well, you know, yeah I kinda slept in until like 1 or something. No not so good, also seeing how I really didn't get into school around 3. There were looks from the advisor faces, heh yeah. Granted I also missed the meeting which I think happened, but really I haven't got anything worthwhile done besides sending out a lot of feeler e-mails to people in vain efforts to snag a bit of useful info regarding TRT monitoring since our last meeting being yesterday. I really don't why we meet so much, it's kinda over the top, but well would the other extreme be even better? No not really, in fact worse. Seems to be the case with advisors, they're either off in the mythical distance or around all the time. No middle ground, no no. Also not saying that having the advisor faces around all the time either is bad, but damn most of my week is meetings.

Ah, so yeah I was a horrible student today. 5:30 was the GPSO thingy at Crazy Horse, which of course I was really pumped about because I could continue my epic around the world in 80 beers quest, but no I forgot my card in the office. Actually, speaking of which I'm going to right now slap that bad boy into my wallet. I missed out on getting 2 more beers marked off the list! Ahhhhh, this will only lead to failure. But yeah as almost expected even though I did try, rallying the first years to the social cause was a no go. In fact I even managed to run into some hostility, and good god what a horrible thing for me to propose, going out and being social in a place where ooooooo so scary we might even meet people from outside our department! You know it's a sad day when I'm the one trying to rally people to go be social and meet other.

It was an alright time though, ended up hanging with some of the Psych folk with a dash of the English Department. Hung out there for awhile, got dinner at Roots which was an alright veggie/vegan restaurant on the square, ate COOKIES!!!!!! at Baked, and chilled watching some music in the bar next to Baked.... a pretty good night indeed. One can never go wrong with beer, curry, cookies, music and good company. Sludge cookies none the less, as the title implies. The wonderful folks at baked just take all the leftover cookie dough throughout the day and mash into into one wonderful glob and bake that into deliciousness and call it Sludge. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm

Tomorrow I need to motivate early to get shit done, that's a fact. Today was pretty abysmal, but I did get a nice amount of rest . Maybe start getting some of the frets ripped off the bass, and yes defiantly a trip to the hardware stores for supplies. Homework work needs to get started, there's no way in hell I can pull what I did last week again.

On the disgusting side, though I know this I still feel the need to bring it up, this morning I discovered what turned out to be an ingrown hair pimple on my leg. See leg pimple tend to hand out for a long time before I ever randomly discover them, and this one was no exception. But seriously it was like the most disgusting thing ever, like three hairs ingrown in one pore making well I don't even understand how my skin was able produce so much crap and stay plugged up. Narsty, but at the same time while I was going ewwww I was also thinking damn that's impressive for a pimple. Eh, that's all I've got I should bust outta here and get home for some quality napping.

Holy crap where did the day go

2008-01-18T02:33:00.000-05:00

Good lord is it late, really late, how did this day escape me so. I really didn't have anything to do, ah see there now that's the real problem. But still, I really was hoping to maybe get around to cleaning up shit around the house or maybe even read more of the pile of great books I got for Christmas, or even just spend lots of time writing in here about how I've realized what I really must do in life is run off and build basses and maybe guitars and use my super cool phiznics skillz to create all sorts of cool pickup systems and the sort. Oh that would just be so cool.

That's something I've actually really wanted to do for awhile now, build my own bass. Kinda did start that in high school, but alas didn't have the desire that I do now nor the finances to throw into it, really all I was able to do was buy a lot of wood, which is cool because I still have that at my parents house, it's not like it goes bad or anything. But still, that was back in the day where I had piles of free time and the little fact that I could of done the smart thing and gotten pops to go out and show me how to do all that woodworking kinda stuff that I'd need to know how to do, you know to do this. Opportunity wasted indeed, and the access to a whole set of tools. Shit even though there was no way I could have bought all the hardware, I could have totally just spend the time shaping and sculpting the body... same goes for the neck. There's a crap tone of sculpting that needs to be done before you ever have to worry about the really scary stuff like not fucking up the frets.

Damn, damn, damn, now I'm kinda pissed about this because the more and more I look into this, the more and more I want to do it, but damn I won't be able to do this for awhile.

So here's the good things though, I can in theory acquire all sorts of good woodworking skills from dad = being able to get laminated bodies like Ken Smith ( http://www.kensmithbasses.com ) just go there, they're basses are unreal. I got a chance to play one once and yeah they're worth dropping $4000 on, no question. That bass had to have the lowest action I've ever played, fit really well to the body, and even though it was a 5 string it had an exceptionally narrow neck. Ok anyways, so good, that's a good start. Then from mom, I can get some good insight into inlays and oh man I could make shit as awesomly nerdy as this ( http://www.topgearguitar.com/tghome/images/inlay1site.jpg ). Extra awesome point, thanks to learning basically how to be an electrical engineer from working with the BU Super-K group, damn I'm getting way to excited about this, but I realized it's not that hard to make a really fancy and really high end pickup system for the future hand made instruments. I know how to make filters, hell I've done that before, just hook me up with Express PCB and my good friend at DigiKey. It doesn't help either when I found out that it's also not very hard to make your own pickups, that along with the fact that I started toying with magnet to string layouts that would have the highest inductance.....

See now I can daydream in E&M class and still kinda be doing something relevant to the course.

I love building things, heck that is kinda why when I'm not cursing physics I do enjoy being an experimentalist. Well at the moment not so much, but like back at BU when I was building/testing electronics that was so great, and at ATLAS when I just got to run through the detector every day and see how it works and fits together... ok yeah that made up for a lot of other wise shitty experiences that year. I guess I do have a very solid engineer spirt in me, I was taking apart pretty much everything in he house as soon as I could pick up screwdrivers. Hell my parents had to go out and find old broken stuff from friends/family just so they could give it to me to appease my desire to disassemble which also meant I'd stop trying to rip apart the TV.... and this was when I was like 5 years old. I love finding out how stuff works, kinda funny too because I've always known that, but it wasn't until recently until I really realized how much I get off on that.

I hate using or seeing things which I don't understand their innards and at least how they work on a rough conceptual level. Really I don't understand how people can go about life not being annoyed by the same things, but well yeah I don't understand a lot of things. it's not just a want, it's a need... not saying I'm successful in repairing anything or any good at being a mechanic, it would be frickin sweet if I was but I know I'm not, still I've never used that as a reason to not just rip things apart. Hell right now, go in my room and what will you find... all my basses still in pieces and I've been drooling over the possibles of what I can and will do to them. I guess that's also probably one of the main driving reasons why I still like physics, overlooking the fact that I'm usually cursing it, but really physics does what I need to do, find out how the fuck thigns work, but not just a telephone or my bass but the world itself and everything around us. That's cool, I do enjoy that.

It's true, I absolutely abhor and despise things without answers, and this is even after that kind of attitude got me into such a deep self dug ditch that it's not even funny. There's always an answer to everything and if it's not something emerging from relatively simple/single sources I find that people either are just to lazy to think about it or just give up when the number of factors and variables influencing something becomes so large that it's impossible to mentally comprehend how on earth they all merge together to result in what we see. Speaking mostly of human actions, but I love that. Something that I do really know I'll never be able to fully grasp but really, just sitting around and thinking of all the external influences and variables that can affect something like that is a blast.

I'll never be satisfied, I know that for a fact. As long as I retain any iota of mental competence I won't be satisfied with the world around me because there will always be something that needs looking into, until I die then it kinda becomes something that doesn't matter.... but until then, well at least it's something to keep my mind occupied.

So yeah, ranting aside I'm totally going to build this bass. It's been in the works for like what, 6 years now? The body is already glued and rough cut, and I'm not fooling around here either it's a 2 piece solid oak body. This will be my claymore, the body as it is right now is a lead brick but oh man the sustain, this bass will ring. I don't care what people say about oak, it's a perfectly fine wood to work with, has a beautiful deep grain that will stain well and also has that thrill of being highly experimental. For the future, in the meantime I'm going to defret and epoxy my P-bass this weekend ala the bass god himself Jaco.

I blame watching too many videos recently of Victor Wooten funking it up hardcore, yeah that only makes me want to pick up my bass and just play all day. It's like hey I used to have the speed where I could do some of the things he's doing, that's the problem too. It's just enough of a tease where I can go oh well I know I'm capable of that so totally I can work hard and get that good too someday. I need to play, John needs to play!!!!!

Alright I'm going nuts, I should go and get sleep before I start breaking into music stores.

On a sidenote WFHB a little bit ago was playing Tuvian throat signing, how awesome is that.

Oh lots of randomness

2008-01-15T20:03:00.000-05:00

While waiting for Fink to fink around and get me all the python libraries I need to do this stat mech problem, holy crap just getting to this point has been a multi hour adventure.... alright since it's so over the top I'll recount. First to run this python program for stat mech I need a whole load of libraries, libraries are easily downloaded from Fink, so alright not problem I just need to get Fink, ah but wait Fink doesn't have a pre-complied release for OS 10.5 so well darn look around for a bit, ok if I just compile the program from source I can do it and it works, alright no big deal download some source code and open the terminal to run the mythical make command, and nope gcc complier isn't happy because I need shit only found in XCode!, fuck fuck fuck, alright so go to Apples website and find where I can get XCode, duh duh duh hey there it is and holy crap! the XCode disk image is 1.1 gigs! Good god, alright so thankfully the connection with the apple serves is nice and quick so I get XCode in a matter of minutes, then install that, 40 mins later, re-run the Fink makefile, cool that's working an hour later it complies, realize I also need to get the Fink GUI, ok no prob, then then holy damn Fink needs to update it's libraries.... many many many minuets later it does, cool, I find the things I need, I highlight them, tell Fink to do its thing, and well it does but now I'm somewhere in the middle of installing 6 python libraries and it's already been an hour and the status bar has not moved very much... won-der-fucking-ful. I'm in a great mood right now.

Alright so first things first, Scientologists are crazy shit fuck heads and need to die. I've thought about it, and while usually I can tolerate many people's obscene and retarded beliefs, well I usually feel that for most religions the crazy radicals actually make up a small part of the whole and thank god usually keep to themselves in crazy isolated communes out in Montana and whatnot. True some are super militant and I really despise that, but on a whole usually theres enough people doing good charitable work for others and the community that while I feel a lot of the motivation is misguided, the end result is at least positive. See problem is, scientology isn't that way at all. No redeeming / helping / charitable qualities and those fuckers are paranoid and aggressive in attacking people who oppose them. They're fucking scary, and the whole e-meter / auditing business is such a joke that wow I mean if you ever needed one sign that shows people need more basic education in their lives its the fact that people buy into things like that.

Anyways, I've always hated this group and felt well you know they are just so fucking nuts that you know we gotta just get rid of them, all of them, it's like a gangrenous finger... you don't just go well darn and cut it off it will kill you. So why's my hate for this blight so renewed with such vigor, ok just watch this bull

http://defamer.com/344987/the-tom-cruise-indoctrination-video-scientologists-dont-want-you-to-see

Tom Cruise is a fucking wacked out space cadet and somebody just needs to shoot that poor guy before his head explodes from getting any more excited. And before he gets his cult in a zeal war against us non-retarded scientologist haters. They've gotten into the IRS, kidnapped people, taken over anti-cult groups that label them as a cult, and have a hyper active attorney team... they are really really really scary.

Now granted, having Scientologists taking over the country then forming a rag tag team of freedom fighters and overthrowing them in an all out battle royal actually does sound pretty damn fun. Hell just being a guerilla freedom fighter sounds pretty damn fun what with all the satisfaction is destroying a horrible organization and all the super hot freedom fighter fly honeys.
Oh yeah, you'd know they'd be there too. But still while that does seem like a damn good time, I'd still vote for just banning / tar and feathering / whatever to all of them and just be done with it.

So yeah, Scientology started really grinding on me today, but aside from that well things have been hectic as hell as I've lost almost all motivation to get any HW done, I haven't been able to focus worth shit, and well things are just falling apart at the seems in general. Eh what else is really new, but yea it's getting bad again in that kinda wonderful way it always seems to when I least want it. Ahhhhhhhh, fun, and by fun I mean as fun as getting stabbed with a rusty spoon repeatedly in the face.

So in other news I started thinking of some random things that I think would be really cool to learn
- Write with my left hand, not exceptionally well but enough to be legible
- At lest 3 martial arts in the spirit of grappling / striking / weaponry in that order
- Relearn all the instruments I've ever played but haven't touched in years (trumpet, saxophone, bassoon, xylophone)
- Making my own glass photograph plates for use in a large format camera
- Throat singing
- A few more computer languages other than C++ (python, pearl, ruby, lisp come to mind)
- Morse Code
- Actually get fluent in French and learn basic Welsh, Japanese, written Chinese, German and Russian
- Metal Welding
- Cooking Italian, Indian, Japanese, Middle Eastern cuisine

Impractical as hell, I don't think my brain could ever stuff that many things in there well at lest to the level I'd want them to be if I was to ever set out and really do it and feel like I accomplished something. Ah, but things like that are fun to think about.

Heh, these python libraries aren't even half complied.... heh this HW assignment is doomed.

Weekend in review

2008-01-12T17:53:00.000-05:00

So Friday I was actually productive, with work, CERN work none the less! I had a good ROOT coding grove going and I probably would have kept it up too but I left the office around 7:45 to get back to my place before the crowd showed up for game night. That worked out pretty well too. Got eight people over, heck it was enough that we had to split into two groups. I stayed out of the Arkham Horror epic and was on the side of the room that hit up a game of Settlers, Pictionary, and well started but not really a game of Munchkins. Later in the evening there was also an attempt to go out and be social with some Psych folk, but but the time we made it out well it kinda worked out in that funny way where we showed up and most of the group was well just leaving = well maybe physicists are really just that offensive to others... who knows. But yeah kinda at that point we at least had to stick around and watch some sloppiness while we finished our beers.

Saturday I cleaned a bit, or well at least got my room in a more acceptable form. Also decided that it would be a good idea to tear apart my jazz bass to see just how much copper tape I need to get ahold of to shield its innards. It actually doesn't look like that much but kinda in the process well I tore apart the whole thing, no like really every thing into pieces, and cleaned it up. Then as if I didn't have hw I should be doing, heh, I did the same for the P-bass and the strat. Why on earth did I do that? Now I have zero playable guitars because they're all in pieces and I'm sitting around now with delusions of grader about all the things I'm going to do to them.

I want to get new knobs for the jazz bass. I really don't like the rubbery plastic ones that are on there since I put in all the EMG electronics years ago. They just look cheap. I want nice metal ones, and I want to find a way to fit an extra 9V battery in there. Problem is that's going to require routing out some more space because well there's none left! Hmmm what else, oh and I need a new set of strings. Shit the DRs that are on there now are ancient and when I unwound the G string it had all sorts of kinks in it. I'm not actually sure how that even happened.

So plan for jazz bass: A set of Rotosound strings, METAL knobs, copper shielding, extra battery

Holy crap the P-bass is another story all together. I was actually kinda shocked because when I got everything torn apart on that I was holding just the body and noticed it's actually about the same weight as my jazz base body. I would have thought the ash body on the jazz bass would have really outweighed the poplar in the p-bass, but no. Funny too that I've never actually had both of them disassembled at the same time to ever notice that. Anyways in an effort to make the P-bass still useful and fun I've decided to mod it in the direction of an upright. The frets, oh yeah they're getting ripped off. The flatwounds I used to play with on the jazz bass are goin on and it's gonna be nice and smooth. I also want to finally get a tortoise shell pickguard on there, because damn I've never like that white one. 10 years and it still hasn't grown on me one bit. I also thought a real set of good pickups would be nice too.

So plan for precision bass: yeah ripping out the frets its going to be a project, it's not going back together anytime soon.

Right so doing that took up a good amount of Saturday, so you know well no work, no work at all. Went out again Saturday night to Crazy Horse where it was decided that, and I'm serious now, the Round the World in 80 beers will be undertaken and finished! I'm pretty sure Lance is in on this too. Yeah it's going to be awesome, except for the times when we gotta drink shitty beer in this fermented beverage tour but you gotta take the good and the bad and the approximately $350 I'm guessing this hole thing is going to cost me in the end. But! There's a tee shirt and a name on a plaque if you finish. I'm totally doin it for the shirt.

Today also saw little really done, did more stuff around the house, changed lightbulbs and the like, went shopping came here and haven't gotten a single scrap of HW done. Dude I'm telling you right now, I'm fucked. Why do I do this to myself? Really, I don't even know. I'm horrible student, it's a fact. Well whatever, I'm still stuffed with delicious lamb shiskebab and lentil soup so the itus is still keeping all my troubles at bay. Oh but god really how did I get so little done today!!!! Ah, I give up.

On a side note, this week I've been going to Soma a lot and it's an awesome coffee house. Really awesome once the back room became revealed to me.

On another side note, google image search "orbital teapots" and on the second page this site shows up. Ha, I think that's frickin awesome. So just because of that I'll make sure to talk about orbital teapots and their singular friend orbital teapot even more just to promote this fact. Hey I might even start talking the invisible pink unicorn too. I saw her the other day, frickin awesome.

I realized that today, walking to pick up my grilled lamb, really I don't like the majority of the stuff I write in here because its too much meaningless day to day jabber. I usually have a good number of thoughts throughout the day, but with my luck whenever I get a chance to sit down and write well they and/or their arguments for and against usually escape me. What I really want is a an on the spot real time blogger thing hooked right into my brain to get this stuff on the fly. Now that would really rock. I'm all for transhumanism and well anything that would make the world more like Ghost in the Shell. Ah but it's late and my thoughts on the need to rid ourselves completely of any reliance on biological evolution is something for another day. Well yeah that and the fact that humans are so out of the natural selection process that it doesn't even really apply. If it did then basically I wouldn't exist right now as I have shitty eyes, a very disagreeable digestive track and double joints.

We're humans, we can use tools and build thats what takes us out of the loop because we can correct for biological flaws like shitty eyesight and all sorts of other things. That's actually pretty frickin cool that we have that ability, so you know we're out of the loop so lets frickin just get over it and start blending computers in the brain and laserbeams on our arms! Well get those god forsaken bears one way or another! Mark my word.

Ha ha, think about that. Now there's a sign someone needs to get some sleep.

2008-01-10T21:34:00.000-05:00

Tuesdays and thursdays are not fun days, too much class, waaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy too much class. The two hours of quantum I can handel, but damn I just never am in the mood for 2 more hours of E&M after that.

The weather was absolutely beautiful this morning, fairly sunny and cool enough where my fleece jacket and gloves made me comfortable but you could still get that hey it's a little cold out feeling on the face. Well, actually for most of the day it rained I think (never can be too sure when most of the day is spent in a windowless room) but what I can attest for is the morning and soon the evening as I wear down that bike trail between swain and home though in reality the two are more or less interchangeable. I don't think I comment enough on how really nice the weather is out here. Damn I mean 1) there's sun 2) it doesn't get very cold at all 3) it almost never rains when I'm in the process of biking. Actually I've been told this year is a fluke but I'll go with it.

Spent a good chunk of the day dicking around with some cheap webcam too realize there's no way in hell it will ever play nice with my powerbook. Solution, well there's a new fancy webcam on it's way from newegg. Yay! I can have silly looking webcam pictures too, just like everyone else on facebook. Ha, yeah sadly that is exactly what I will be doing as soon as it gets to my house.

Hmmmmm, this evening was kinda a bust. Nobody really available to go do anything and not really that much going on. I check out this coffee house thingy at the art museum. It was cool, well for sure it was cool because it had free food and coffee! What kinda of a grad student would I be if I didn't go just for that reason alone. I mean, I guess I was kinda hoping it would be a bit more populated with people kinda where you had lots of people meeting people stuff going on. You know social and the likes. Well, there were people there but just not a the critical density I guess. At least when I checked it out it was more or less a sparse number of small clumped groups of people checking out the gallery. And what I was really searching for was not found, so try again hmmm this saturday I guess.

Pretty much after that I just walked around the town a bit. Being back in Boston over new years reminded me of how much I really did used to walk on a day to day basis. Shit after thinking about it, Bloomington isn't all that big so yeah I just walked around. Not much of note, except pizza. Mmmmmm.... grease.

Now it's late, I'm still not home, I haven't exactly been good about eating all this food I cooked last weekend. Ha ha you know what I'm totally eating all of tomorrow then? Oooooh you betchums, black beans and fuckin rice.

Hey I need to try and conscript people for a game night, or well something.

I'm falling into the same rut again

2008-01-09T22:07:00.000-05:00

Wasting way to much of my day blasting around the internet going ADD on the information intake and just generally wasting my time. Ahhhhhh, no this ruins my day, makes me nocturnal, and I don't get much beyond the bare minimum done. Eh, surprisingly not an easy habit to change. Well I did break my digg and reddit addiction, so I can break this too. Annoying that's all because it's seems like such a trivial thing I can change to gain hoards of time in my day to get work and well useful stuff in general done.

ROOT is pure evil, more evil than I even thought, it's just down right evil. ROOT is indeed the root of all evil. Today after going over some monitoring stuff, it was concluded that a "simple" root macro would get things taken care of. Well I've never really done much of this, and much to my surprise Hal actually agreed to sit down and show me how to do these kinds of things in ROOT. I say much to my surprise just because I'm still in the Super-K group mentality where such immediate help was totally unheard of. Hell I wouldn't even get that kind of help even after much toiling and begging/annoying. I mean there is something to be said for just forcing oneself to reinvent the wheel and start from the ground up, I did feel like that built up a good sense of self reliance, but damn you know it's just really nice when a little guidance right from the start can really help clear up especially conceptually how things are supposed to go.

Right so anyways, this was just a small program, hell easy job I was told.... yeah this took a few hours to get hashed out. I know agree with what many have told me before. The ROOT c++ interpreter is total shit and should be drug out into the street and shot. On another side not, I'm kinda worried why my X11 environment was acting up and not playing nicely with it's windows and such.

I've started to like the Soma coffee house. In the past couple of days I've gone there because Denver's back in town for a bit from CERN and that's where he apparently used to frequent. Hell that place is like 4x huger that I ever thought it was, well basically the one time I was ever in there before I never noticed the door leading back to the huge back seating area. Well anyways we've gone there and chilled for a bit and it is quite nice. Coffee is just as good as the spoon, well espresso anyways, but today I really liked chilling in their front area that's set up like a living room with couches and stuff plus (this is the best part) a old TV converted into a fishtank. The place seems to have a higher student presence too. Ha and their tee shirts have a blender on them, I have yet to make sense of that.

What what else, I do not know. The colloquium today was a little strange. The guy came in a told us what a horrible job physics does at promoting itself to the public and the government and how our whole education system is collapsing and the energy crisis. Yeah it was a little all over the place, plus the advisor faces brought up a good point after.... getting people into grass roots everybody send letters to your local representatives and try to visit them from time to time is great and all, but really how much does that really help. Do grassroot campaigns ever really work, and if so what factors make one succeed over the other. Kinda questions that yeah make a lot of sense and seems like people should look into and study before trying to start something. Also a good point, lobbying, fuck it doesn't take much effort to guess that real influence on the hill comes with a super team of lobbyists. So why the hell don't physicists take a hint and get some, fuck the religious wing bats, and gun toting radicals, and money hungry pharmaceutical companies have great teams of these guys. Well we need some, lobbyists that wield tesla coils and throw cesium for shits and giggles.

Alright, clearly when I start going into throwing cesium at the children it's time to sign off for the evening. I should go home.

And now for some randomness

2008-01-09T00:47:00.000-05:00

Rain falls, falls around
I stand wet out in the street
Home for a good thought

People read, read on!
Take it all to literal
Go make your judgement
With no background how can you?
I love my experiments

Words written freely
A painting with no canvas,
Novel with no page

Rolling, roll, and rolled
Uncork that bottle right there
The party now begun

For the life of me
I can not find a woman
People say that's bad
Don't they make a pill for that?
Something to make me a drone

I don't fit in well
That seems to be the issue
Among the others...
Ah what a joke, there's no pill
No pill to make me social

I have too much fun
Writing such a bad haiku
Don't worry, there's more

But see there's one thing
I don't like many people
Or the social frame
Too bad, it's what I live in
I'm a shell of apathy

I thought I found you
Yes, it's true I really did
<>
Hah, what self torment I've done
Blindly believing that dream

Run, run to the hills!
I just can't escape my mind
It's started to mull

It's not that bad though
The tone I know may mislead
Things from long ago
But I don't feel forbidden
I write only for myself

I also do know
Such writings stand me to be,
Accused and labeled
But really, you'll label me
No matter what, so whatev

I can't handle me
See that is the real problem
How can I be then?
Too difficult for myself
Too difficult for others

Last year was started
On the wrong foot, oh ho my
Assumptions are bad
Don't ever make them and hold
too dearly for it will hurt

I have a decree
More vegetables in my lunch
Go go healthy food!

New years, new years night
Did I make the wrong choice then
I'm a bad chooser

Someday I will go
Back to that damned museum
Hmmmm, what will I find?

I live in my mind
In a thought much too ideal
Who will join this dream
A dream that sometimes haunts me
I don't care, i'll still chase it

So apparently the people at the beer store know me too

2008-01-08T00:18:00.000-05:00

Ok wtf is up with that? Now the bagel shop, and the coffee house, and a whole slew of other things I can totally see because last semester I was going to them waaaaaayyy to much. Like well every day, but the beer store? Now alright it's not that I never went to it, but really I was only in that place maybe like 3 times ever last semester. Granted those were times when booze was bought in large quantities for parities and the like, but still I was honestly in that store like only 3 times in the very early stages of last semester.... HOW THE HELL DO THEY KNOW WHO I AM! I mean it's cool and all because apparently I'm "known" which means I don't get carded in a place that cards little old guys with grey hair, but still I'm just not seeing the normal trend where I went there a bunch and became friendly with the staff. I donno, just strange that's all, but whatever and hoary for I now have a nice collection of Belgian and Belgian style ales to try over the next couple weeks.

I mean well the only thing I could think of at the beer store was the one cute girl that worked there who I got chatty with before, but she wasn't even the person at the register today. Hmmmm, I'm still stumped.

So what else is wonderful today, seeing how I'm apparently marked as a drunken lush. Now that fact that I'm slightly hammered right now, doesn't prove that point at all, today was wing night at Nick's ye ol' English Pub and the only night us first years will ever be able to participate because it's guaranteed that every week till we keel over we'll being doing E&M till the crack of dawn on Monday nights.

Oh so it turns out I have reason to dislike my group even more, granted there's been a lot of things I've never been too thrilled about but now it turns out that certain people are having fun going behind my back and accusing me of shit that I didn't even remotely do. Ok granted I've always thought we had some strange characters in this group, that can be trying but this is just infuriating. So as it turns out, apparently when I stayed at a certain house while house hunting here I smoked up a storm in the house and dumped the ashes all over the carpet. Now fucking seriously, wtf. Granted I probably was smoking while running around town but let's see well I don't even think about smoking inside my own place because it just stinks up everything and even in my own house I'll go outside, so yes clearly I'm I totally ungracious guest and just decided to light up in their house because I'm a horrible person. God damn, my anger for the fucking retardedness of the people I work with no knows no end. What wonderful people who make this conclusion out of no where, don't say a thing to me, but apparently feel necessary to tell lots of other people what a bad person I am.

Ok see this is why going back to Boston was probably not a good idea. Because going back there meant I was back with my old group, and did lots of remembering about the amounts of good fun we had. Not only do I continuously get the feeling that BU was by far more rigorous with the classes, but people were in general fun to be around. The Super-k group had awesome post docs and grad students and well in alot of ways way more cohesion than what I'll probably ever find in many other groups. And heck the department in general. At least they had a sense of humor. I mean damn I posted things on people's doors, glitter attacked, and the likes but god forbid I even think about doing that here. I don't think anybody would get the joke, or well any joke for that matter. This department has a heavy lameness field around it, and well I donno it's just not BU as much as that weirds me out to say that.

Bitch, bitch, bitch, I know I'm just in a cheery mood tonight. You know it's just a peachy day when you find out your group is full of shit head back stabbing assholes who way out of left field personalities are already trying to being with. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, god I gotta get out of this. I don't know how, but I need to. I don't know if that means throwing around a lot of persuasion and getting back to Boston, where sure there were plenty of well interesting personalities but damn people had fun times or what just getting out of physics in general... but shit this right now is just a madhouse. Nothing I want to be or feel proud being a part of. Or you know it could be just raging suppressed depression or anxiety of another semester of Schaich house of E&M "fun", really I can't tell myself. All I know for certain is that still deep down there's something that's causing me to be way more pissed off and angry than usual, and I worry when it's starting to get to the point where I see opportunities to do very rash things and just drop this physics gig for good and get a totally different job and you know I'm really temped.

Eh, I'll just get some sleep as that usually does a magical mood reversing operation.

Heeyyyy CERN video meeting tomorrow at 9 am!

Part of my new year's resolutions

2008-01-06T22:00:00.000-05:00

New diet, no more eating out fricking twice a day business. Yeah that's just bad, partially because of the large intake of crappy food though not always but also because of how much it's costing me. Good golly, I'm actually not sure how I didn't go flat out broke last semester. But take out no more! This year will see lots of veggies, and olive oil, and beans, and more beans, and rice, and cranberry juice. John's going to a slightly more healthy state of weekly mass produced home cooked food. Cut back on the meat intake, though not entirely... I could never give up lamb, especially such excellently grilled lamb down the street. Ah, but yes more veggies!

2008 Plan more or less goes something like this

Breakfast (not going to skip this anymore!)
- 1 glass whey protein fortified juice
- 1 bowl o' cereal
- 1 apple
- shit tons of vitamins and amino acid pills

Lunch
- whatever I cook up on Sunday and stuff into my BENTO!!!! box throughout the week
- chocolate
- Unnecessarily strong quadrupole belgian beer snuck into my lame ass dry campus with this fancy new swiss army water bottle I got for Christmas
- ONE cigarette, that's my new nicotine ration scheme

Dinner
- pasta (so wonderfully cheap and so amazing that I never get sick of it) w/ various veggies and sauce
- "healthy" glass of red wine

Insert glasses of water / tea / and coffee when needed.

Today I managed to whip up some Dino BBQ inspired black beans and rice, roasted potato and broccoli thingy, and loaf o' cornbread. Soon i'll get to worry about fitting all that in the bento box. Ha, ha, the mighty bento box. If you haven't picked up on it, I'm really excited that I'm going to actually start using this fun little thing I picked up in Japan.

Ah I also discovered today the Scholars Inn bakery while wandering around town. Not that it's hard to discover, in fact it's right in the main square, but until earlier this afternoon I had never been in it. Things to note, decent croissants (however I'm still pissed that I found such a good bakery in Boston the other week that like IQ is sooooo far away), good bagels, and woah they have all sorts of bread. I'm living on the wrong side of town. I need to move west to get this damn place more in line between living space and school space.

Today I also realized the large number of things I need to start taking care of, like getting my washed and beaten up passport replaced, and my loans deferred, and facebook profile overhauled, and the likes.

Yesterday they had a marathon of how it's made shows, holy crap I didn't get out of my seat.... well not for a long while anyways. I frickin love that show, it's really the best. I mean learning how the hell people manufacture stuff is a long standing love of mine going all the way back to seeing similar clips on Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, seriously it was like the coolest thing when I was a kid seeing how crayons and saxophones were made. So yeah, one of those things I honestly don't give a fuck whatever people think about, I am pretty crazed about seeing shit get manufactured. I just looked too there are 117 episodes of this, I need to watch them.

School starts up again tomorrow, that sucks. Classes are evil, E&M is most evil, and stat mech well that's yet to be seen. Eh, I wanted to write in this more and damn I have the whole vacation to write about, another day though.

And the evening goes to wandering

2008-01-05T01:16:00.000-05:00

Flight got delayed in Dulles, not by much tough, but enough to get me into Indi and miss the Bloomington shuttle. Well fortunately depending how you look at it there was another shuttle company there ferrying people down to Bloomington which was 5 bucks more but leaving right away. Shit I would have had wait over and hour for the next Bloomington shuttle, so yeah I hitched a ride from these other folk, and yeah we had to stop for gas along the way... not exactly professional. I felt bad though, I did have some bit of luggage with me and my wallet went bust at 2 bucks when I tried to come up with a tip for the driver. That seemed like it should have been at lest a 5 dollar tip, following Rob's trusty rule of when in tip doubt just give them 5 bucks.... last refuge of a scoundrel indeed.

Finished "Twenty Year After" on the plane. That was cool. I think I'm going to set aside Dumas for a little bit. Take a musketeer breather before trying to tackle the third novel in the series, and by third I mean 3 separate novels that collectively make up the 3rd musketeer novel. I don't know why on earth you'd ever call 2,400 pages or so "one" novel. I side with the publishers on this, breaking it up is a good idea. So yeah no Man in the Iron mask saga for quite some time, Twenty years after puts the story at a nice spot where I don't mind taking a break. Well, I did get a copy of "Moby Dick" recently, so why not.

So yeah got back into town, dropped my crap off at the lab to get later and damn got caught into watching way to much Death Note for my own good. Like I could have been home by now, sleeping, and stuff, but no... watching the anime on the internets, way too much anime. I didn't think much of that series when I first saw it, but damn it's gotten a lot better after a few episodes which makes me hooked. Hooked and still sitting in the lab at 1 am having not even gone home yet. Ha, what a life.

What can I say, I likes the imported cartoons from Japan.

Oh what else. Well the town seemed really dead today when I went out a little while ago to search for food. Ended up doing the whole pizza thing, which wasn't bad, but while looking around it just seemed like everything was closed. Hell it's the Friday before classes start!?! Shouldn't there be people around. Eh, so left to my own devices and with the weather on my side I wandered around the streets thinking about the year. A few luckys and many blocks removed from campus, well I realized I have no plan or idea or well half a clue as to what to do. Maybe I'll get inspiration in sleep, but not too much, tomorrow I do actually want to get things taken care of and not loaf the whole day away on the futon.

Bye Bye vacation, we hardly knew ye

2008-01-04T02:15:00.000-05:00

I figure when it get back to blooming-town that I'll set aside a good few hours to frantically fill in some of the more interesting pieces from the past few weeks. Why bother and even be social when I can blog? Heh, right, blog. I like the word, one of those nice one syllable words. Easy to say, sticks in the mind, and kinda funny sounding.

So topics I promise to cover in the coming day(s).... I figure if I don't write down a list, I'll just forget
- Expedition Boston or how much nan can I really eat?
- New Years resolutions, last year started off on a such a horribly wrong foot
- Things that need to be glitter and in general terrorized by me
- People and why the fuck I don't understand them
- Delusions of leaving physics
- Qualities of the ideal girlfriend, heh and why I'm doomed to be single
- Things I want to to do to my BMW, it's getting some paint this summer
- things I haven't even thought of yet!
- oh yeah and anime, lots and lots of chating about anime
- plus a mega rant on books I want to read but have essentially no time to

Yeah so that looks like enough to keep me busy, hell I think I even have more notes written down for pre-christmas stuff. I fly out tomorrow afternoon, so yeah I should catch some sleep so I'll have time to pack things up in the morning. Overall I'll borrow a word and give this vacation a shmeh rating. I got to see and hang out with a lot of people that I was hoping too, that was great, also on an unrelated note came upon some realizations that were not so great, and well nothing to crazy or exciting really happened, so yeah it was so so. Resting was nice, did that a bit too much though.

Shmeh, sums it up.

Oh god I really don't want classes to start back up again.

I need to update this

2007-12-26T19:53:00.000-05:00

Eating at the Dino, Christmas, high times at the Titty Twister, evening at the Belmar... crap between that stuff and sleep I've been too busy to pay much attention to this. Eh, I jotted down some reminders though for some colorful backposts to be written at a future time though. So now it's just a matter of figure out how the hell I'm going to fit in a family trip down to Pennsyltucky, expedition to Boston, trip up to Ithaca, and hang out with the all the people around these parts that I haven't gotten to hang out with yet all before the 5th. Hmmmm... well yeah so this blog is being ignored until I come across some large swath of free time to fill in the gaps.

So as Milhouse would say "There's no tiiiiiiiime!!"

Eh, need to work on that time machine.

John needs Mochi

2007-12-21T02:17:00.000-05:00

Moooooooochi! Oh, so good. I actually just started to think about it and well damn I haven't had any mochi ice cream in like 2 years now. That's just not right, I need me some mochi and some sushi. More things to do when in Boston town.

But that's not for a little while, right now it's Bingo town and that means well the usual... not much going on at all. I've already been here for a few days and well already seem to have managed to waste away this time sleeping, sleeping and more sleeping. It's just getting really excessive. Hmmmmm, but yeah I can't really complain to much because I haven't done that great of a job re-gathering the cell numbers of the crowd. Those are still unfortunately locked away on the old phone, hard to get at because it lacks a charged battery / charger / or the time hack some wires together and charge the battery myself.

Well there was the beer tasting party the other night, that was pretty bitchin. That's like lots of my favorite things all in one place, beer, beer, and more beer with cheese! Beer and cheese, those go together amazingly well, that much I learned in Belgium. Oh but the the beer and cheese aside it was a good time.

And I guess today was eventful, went with mom to pick up Lee from Amherst. A bit of a drive, and I got to see her school. Damn that place is so tiny, nice but soooo tiny. How can a school be that small?!? Well, yeah I'm just a slightly touched bias on that seeing how lets see BU is only the 4th largest private university in the states at 24,000 and IU is no slouch with 38,000 students. Heh, well the all the small schools repeatedly showed me the hate so super-schools are all I know. Then again, I don't think I'd be able to really handle anything smaller. Eh, but even the entire IU school system is only 98,000 people. Heh, according to wikipedia that makes it the 44th largest school system in the world. Damn SUNY is 7th with like 418,000 people (but there are a hell of a lot more SUNY schools than IU schools) Of course all these are a far cry from some place in Pakistan which at 1.8 MILLION people is the largest in the world. Now ok, I find it hard to believe that's just one school but shit son that's a lot of people, my line is well before the 1.8 million mark. IU isn't so bad, it's huge but spread out over enough space to keep things calm.

Ah but Amherst had an excellent brew pub, with not only a good burger but ooooo an excellent full bodied Belgian Ale. Alas, I don't think Upland or BBC make any belgian ales. A shame, a horrible shame. That's actually what I need to get doing, I've got a brewing setup that's just collecting space. It should be bubbling away right now fermenting another tasty batch of beer. Belgian beer, that's what I need to make. For cryin out loud, I've seen, been at, toured, and tasted the beer first hand. Tricky, yes there's a lot that goes into that style of beer, oh but holy damn if I could make it myself, well that would just kick ass.

My jaw being a bitch. WTF. Stupid thing started clicking after I had my wisdom teeth "removed" or more accurately pulverized and chiseled out of my mandible. That was just annoying but for the last few days the muscles for the joint on the right side have just seized up. Hell, I can't open my mouth fully without this thing trying to pull my jaw shut. Fucking hell, this pisses me off. I get this from getting my wisdom teeth out, then all I get from the dentist is oh well don't worry you shouldn't get any problems, only way in the future when you're older... then we'll have to hack in there and slice and dice your jaw to put it back in line. Wonderful, looks more and more like the future is now. I blame the lower wisdom teeth for all this, them and the fact that they grew in sideways. Pieces of crap, they will rue the day.

In short, I need ice cold mochi. Ahhhhh that would be great.

Home, home, home

2007-12-18T02:50:00.000-05:00

The flights went well enough, no major troubles at either Indy or Dulles, and I took the rough landings well a lot better than I expected all things considered. Holy carp was our prop plane dancing in the sky as soon as we dropped below cloud level, though I was paying enough attention to notice that we pretty much few right next to Crocker Hill (drats not over, which would have been cool to see the house and all) Heh, but yeah cross winds are not fun in such a tiny little plane.

Right but yeah anyways I'm home. Horay for speedies!!! Picked up a few sandwiches on the way back from the airport. Mmmmm... those are always guaranteed to please the taste buds, and yeah pretty much have loafed around since talking with the folks. I'm home for awhile now that I think about it, but thankfully it seems like a enough people will be around that this break won't be going to the shits at all. Well that and the Boston or Bust run in the war wagon after new years. Poor car, it's seen better days, the rust, oh the rust is just terrible, but it's a trooper and I damned well expect a few more road trips out of it.

So it's looking like a Holiday beer party for tomorrow, some more mailing needs to be done, calls need to be made, and yeah my goal for this vacation among many is to finally get my website looking snappy for the IU physics group. And besides, I need a website anyways to promote general Johness among the internet masses, or in more sensible terms a place where I can dump a shit ton of photos, and also throw up stuff like talks and graphs and general pretty science things for the group.

Hmmm, well it's really late. I should get some sleep and possibly make some attempt to get my body back on a more "accepted" sleeping schedule. As it stands right now, if I just went with the flow I'd be sleeping from like 6 am - 2 pm every day. I should just switch to the 28 hour sleep schedule. Heh, damn classes. When I'm at CERN though, I'm totally going to bust that out.

Lame post but it's been a pretty dull and cramped in a very small plane kinda travel filled day.

Getting packed up

2007-12-16T21:30:00.000-05:00

I need to get my act together today and actually get stuff packed up for tomorrow. Still haven't really done that. Did get shopping done though, and stuffed my face with excellent blueberry pancakes at the Spoon, and wasted a crap load of time on Facebook and the internets in general, and yeah I should really start doing more productive stuff right about now.

We do have more snow though, that rocks. Icy but rockin. Although the Subaru doesn't seem to want to work anymore. That's not so great, also because it looks like the starter me be dead and that's a lot more of a bitch to deal with than just a crappy battery. Yeah..... yeah.

Tomorrow it's back to NY via Washington which is really, really really annoying. Can't route my damn flight through like anywhere else but D.C. Damn you Binghamton and your shitty airport and lack of flights to anywhere useful. Meh, you know I got used to living in Boston to much where for $1 I could catch the T to the airport right in front of my apartment door. That kicked ass, and didn't take to terribly long either. Here, well it's $25 to catch a shuttle that leaves at not so convenient times to drive me up to Indy.

Boston after New Years though! Yeah, I've already started to plan how I can hit up all the restaurants I need to eat at. If I do it right I could pull some kinda cool loop starting at BU, going through downtown to the North End, loop back into Cambridge then come back at BU from Allston. Mmmmmmmmmm.... IQ. Seriously I will go on a frickin crazy if I don't get IQ within the next few weeks, and burritos from Anna's, and burgers from Bartley's and... and the list goes on. In hindsight that's actually what I spend a pretty significant chunk of my money on while I lived there. Eating great food, but I don't regret it at all.

Ha, ha gluttony.

Why do my expansion coefficients never evaluate out nicely

2007-12-15T22:55:00.000-05:00

Oh right because I'm retarded. Seriously I think that happened on every single god damned problem on my finals this semester. Graduate school has taught me the solution to everything thing in life is recasting you're differential equation into some infinite series and project you're desired result onto whatever basis functions you feel like playing around with to get those series coefficients. Yeah, sounds easy enough until every damn time they just keep evaluating to zero when I know they shouldn't. Ahhhh, what a drag and probably my ruin on that damned Classical final.

So roids in basebal, ha there were plenty of names on that list that aren't a big surprise at all but well now it makes sense why Eric Gagne is a totally usueless sack of crap who excelled at blowing even the largest of leads for the Red Sox. Damn bastard was all hopped up on the juice when he racked up all that fame. Useless, ha along with the mighty Rocket too. Ha ha, that guys such an ass hole he deserves this kinda public shame. One of the greatest pitches ever just couldn't get it done without the little help of some roids. Kinda like Bonds too, granted there's no way roids or any growth hormone gave them the ability to be good pitches and hitters. They still are regardless of the drugs, you can't question that, but as far as records go if you've been pumping into your body all sorts of shit to prolong your ability to play well then you deserve as many little *s after you're record as they can fit. Plus those guys are just caustic douche bags anyway, so no sympathy here.

I've learned that I really dislike a lot of people in my class and group for that matter. My group has hired some well lets just say very questionable characters who get on my nerve, ha both here and at CERN so there's no escape is there. Same goes for the class too, which really sucks, out of the small number of people who will even attempt to be social well you gotta put enough self centered opinionated blow hards that it's annoying as hell. It's the type of person I really dislike the most too, the one that will always goes out of their way to vocalize an opinion regardless of if you've asked for it or not and just throws it out there like it's the only right opinion to have. Well no I just don't dislike, I hate that shit. Not that I'm not full of opinions myself, but god I'd like to think I hardly ever just go out of my way if I hear something opposite to my own view to start ranting about what I think is the case. Fucking douche bags, and yeah we've got more than enough over here.

WFHB just busted out like an hour of really good music. WTF, I've never heard them play Floyd / Hendrix / Beatles (white album too) at all, let alone all at the same time! Rock on community radio, you provide me with such a wonderfully erratic mix of sounds.

So last night was a total bust. The idea was to go out and celebrate as a physics group the end of half of our year of hell. Sounded good, should of been good, in practice well that fell apart quicker than well I don't want to think of something witty, it just fell apart pretty damn quick. A) people suck for not coming out when they say they will, and B) more people in our class need to be social. It was a numbers problem, you gotta have minimum numbers of people for stuff like that to make it work. So yeah, wandered around, went to bars that weren't great at all, found out I was in the mood where drinking just made it worse and I got grumpy, oh yeah then it got even better, yeah then they tried to drag me into a dance club. You know I've really gotta be in a good mood to want to dance, and also actually not be drunk. I on average loose motivation to dance if I've been drinking. Bah, I was not in the mood. Things have just been to god damn fucking ridiculous and stressful these last two weeks for my mood to snap the opposite in one night and be party party party. It would be cool if it worked that way, but unless you dumped a good amount of mood uppers into my system that's just not going to happen with these recent circumstances.

Right, so again I've managed to do an excellent job at making all the wrong decisions. I do this enough, that you'd think I'd learn just to do the opposite of whatever I think is the good idea. Ha, but no. In hindsight, it probably would have been better to blow off the bar hopping group at the beginning of the evening rather than towards the end and just hung around the hose because the roommate did have a number of very good looking friends over who I was being chatty with until I decided, no clearly I should leave this and go to the questionable end of the year party. No seriously, that was like the biggest possible mistake I could have made at the time. WTF mate, what am I doing. I need to get some kinda shock collar to get some negative reinforcement action to train me right. So to make up for this long standing stupidity a most likely overly restring new position, good looking girls now come before and supersede anything and everything else... including all friends, well maybe if the friends are really in trouble or something ( a lone exception ), but that's it!

I got some christmas shopping done today, that was good. Still more to do though, heh tomorrow will be a busy day.

I give up

2007-12-13T22:32:00.000-05:00

Quantum went pretty well today, fucking E&M though that was just humiliating. I mean, I've never felt so demoralized after a test in my life than after that nasty bitch. Uhhhhh, now I understand why people used to commit suicide so they didn't have to bear the shame of things, like learning they went from an A to an you failed and suck in the course of 2 measly hours. 2 hours!!! Ahhhh, such a joke. In the 13 problem sets taking well over a day to solve, yeah all that hard work to bust ass and get perfect scores yeah that's only 20% of the grade, where you know just an insignificant 50% was on the that damn final! Oh, oh it still hurts. I tried to stuff my body with strombolis and beer and I still feel horrible.

E&M violated my soul, I just spend the last week and well fuck that semester in vain working hard in all the wrong ways. HW doesn't count for shit, I could have just spent this last week studying for quantum and classical, shit I would have done just as craptastically on this E&M test but I'd already be all super studied up for classical tomorrow, which as it stands... I'm not. Putting time into E&M is a lost cause, Shcaich will always come up with something to destroy our hopes with. Ahhhhh, it just ruins everything. I've got no motivation left, fuck I don't want to be in grad school anymore. How can one test make me suffer this much?

Ah, I gotta do something tonight. Go over some classical briefly, get some sleep, wake up earlyish tomorrow and kick and take names or get rapped in the ass again. And yeah, it pretty much summs up to that.

Whatever, there is no hope at this point. Even if Quantum did go as well as I think it might have, damn you a test was horrible when a good chunk of the class is worrying about breaking double digits. That's pretty much how it went down, in a burning heap of crap.

Soon though, soon this semester will be over. I can regroup, figure out how the hell I can justify to myself why it's stupid to take E&M II and how I should just take Field Theory. See even thought that's still overkill in knowledge that I don't exactly need to know, it's just a touch more closer to HEP then Jackson's problems about oddly cut holes in some permantly magnetized blob chaotically rotating by some lines of charge in a dielectric. Yeah see those are just horribly awful boundary value problems, QFT has like fields and particles in fields doing stuff like being Super Symmetric. Bah, it's all pink unicorns on rainbows in the end, that's a well proven fact.

Hmmmmm, ah I guess it would be a good idea to hold off the Seppuku until I actually know for sure how much shame I'll end up with from this finals business. Ah, that and I don't have a tanto stabby thingy, or someone to lop of my head after the fact. Yeah those are probably not the easiest things to find.

Hate, E&M, hate hate hate hate hate hate hate! Shit, studying I should be studying.

In less than 24 hours, 2/3 of my suffering will be over

2007-12-12T19:03:00.000-05:00

Which also means I will have also failed 2/3rds of my classes.

Holy crap I want to cry. I need ritalin or something, I haven't been able to focus at all and damnit I want the quick solution to my lack of focus problems. I'm an American, were an FDA approved pill popping society it's my god given right! It's been suggested that I just go outside and shake down some undergrads, because well it's probably true that they're loaded with the stuff.

Where the hell does the damn day go! Ahhhhhh, well ok I know there was a good 3 hour breakdown in the study effort when I got distracted and derived a new signature for myself instead of good wholesome green functions. I realized that the other day, when I was trying to write some things that A) My cursive is crappy and I shouldn't have to put in so much effort to write passably legible things B) I fuck up my signature and it annoys me. That and well my signature was lame, so I made a new one. Ooooooo it is so much cooler, it's got all sorts of liens that flail around, elegantly mind you, and stuff. I also realized that one of the main problems with all this writing business is my fountain pen is crapping out on me, and when I use something like my good ol' Pentel P205 there's a much better improvement (probably also has to do with the fact that the pencil is jammed in my hands pretty much all the time toiling over E&M problem sets which in the end have effectively zero effect on our grade)

So to summarize, I have no hope on the finals because I spent too much time coming up with a new way to sign my name. However, it really kicks ass so I need to find reasons to write people letters so I can show this thing off. That, and I need a better fountain pen.... or just use my mechanical pencil for everything.

On a side note, there appears to be a bathroom stall well flame war going on between the local fraternities about which sorority puts out better. It's kinda fun to read this stuff because it does get updated pretty frequently and the building staff paints over it often enough, that the walls are only fairly covered at any given time. People have a lot of time to kill if there writing this much on the bathroom walls, and damn it's funny because when I think about it none of the bathrooms around BU had anything close to this much wall graffiti. CERN had a little bit, especially when I was in 180. Ah but those were fun to translate because they were either in Russian or French. That's what I should do, write something in French to tell all the shit head frat guys who are writing all over my floors bathroom walls to, "shut the fuck up about Alpha Omega whatever being a bunch of skanky whores compared to you're favorite sorority because they're all skanky whores and you probably have diseases so stop spreading herpes all over the place you douche bag"

Ok, so I've got some translating work to do. But damn, I need to stop giving up and loosing all hope on this final front. There's still time left and I can prevail... with a gentleman's C, because holy crap Schaich is going to bring on the pain tomorrow. Who want's to be a hero and put me out of my misery. Anyone? Come on....

Ah, and there's still a small thing I have to write for Pauline for this special e-news for Engin and the other Turkish ATLAS collaborators who died. Damn, it's not that I don't want to write something, errrrrr just why does it have to be due on the same day as my finals. It's annoying, because of course I will write something, just that this thing isn't getting published for a few days so why the hell do they need it by tomorrow! Ah, maybe I should just do that now before going back to this study-a-ton so it won't be nagging at me.

Well I didn't make it to the morning video meeting

2007-12-11T10:36:00.000-05:00

Ha, but what else is new. Those meetings are pretty worthless anyways, and you know if those damn people at CERN refuse to push it to a latter time because god forbid it would encroach upon their precious 5 pm quitting time (CERN time the meetings start at 3 pm) you know I have little remorse for missing them to get some extra sleep because I've been pulling oh just a touch more than 8 hours a day for the last semester. Something more to the tune of I get 4-5 hours of sleep a night on average and aside from showering and eating I'm pretty much in Swain the rest of the day.

But anyways upon a brief loafing around this morning (yay for not being as horribly lazy as I usually am), I got up and out of the house and strangely felt really great as I biked into work today. Seriously why the hell can't I wake up and feel like this every morning. I think I'd be a much more pleasant person in general. Actually, I'm guessing it had something to do with the weather. The morning was covered with a thick fog, and the temperature was almost disturbingly warm. Still on the cool side, but with my coat and gloves I felt quite comfortable and the fog gave the air a nice dampness. I really wish I knew though, what exactly I did last night to produce this mornings energetic result.

Meh, but that would be asking too much. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I finally got some things taken care of last night that I've been meaning to do for a long time now, and by a long time I mean August. Doesn't help the study effort one bit, but no doubt it's helped clear the mind, so I can do some last minuet hardcore study-rock-a-ton and kick ass on Thursday and Friday.

Ah kittens, I should get going on that.

Heh, I also learned today that the house is loosing it's washer and dryer this weekend. That's no good. I thought Liz owned those, but it turns out they were what I guess is now her ex or something. I never really figured out what all happened there, I guess I could ask but well just like some of the fun scandal that's going on in the Physics group, why bother with the actual details when it's so much more fun to make up a story in my mind and go with that. Life's too regular around here, and the imagination get restless.

Holy crap I need to study

2007-12-10T14:04:00.000-05:00

Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, damn it, shit. Monday is quickly disappearing, and the study effort is still pretty crappy. Didn't get up early at all today, got into work, got pissed at CERN related stuff, freaked out for awhile, calmed myself down with bagels and muffins, and now well damn it's getting late.

Screwed, screwed, I'm so screwed.

Today I decided that my car in europe needs bumper stickers. Something I realized when I was browsing the Wondermark website. Car's in Europe don't seem to really be affected by the bumper sticker plague, so damn I figure it's my duty to introduce the Canton of Geneva to this wonderful invention. This summer my goal is to pretty up the 316, first it was just going to be spray painted feynman diagrams to cover up the rust spots and to make the car go faster (duh) but now it's going to be that and some good wholesome american bumper stickers or really whatever fun things I can come up with until I go back in May. I will then have the most awesomest car in all Geneva or maybe all of Europe with that one bumper sticker.

I flossed today, I really should be better about doing that everyday.

To work!

Wikipedia will be the ruin of me

2007-12-09T20:34:00.000-05:00

Granted it was a lake waking this morning, and I used the excuse of shaving to waste even more time loafing about in the shower, but still the possible day of doing things which are useful started at 4 in the afternoon. Alas, this has been pushed back by at least 4 hours due to the evils of Wikipedia, well mostly Wikipedia but enough of Wikipedia's fault that I'll just blame it outright.

Videos on youtube are hilarious, but the comments make me sad. Why do people think it's so necessary to get into pointless flame wars over videos or god on most of the internet for that matter. John's being judgmental, but I think I got a point. Also it's funny to see so many people explain physics so horribly wrong, of course while feeling so very confident in their explanation, ah it just makes me want to cry. Oh and the video in question this time was a group of people seeing how a cat tries to orient itself while taking a little ride on the Vomit Comet

On another note, you can see that I've pretty much just been watching internet videos all day, Richard Dawkins is so angry it's amazing. Granted he is a being a total ass and not really doing anything but polarizing people more when he goes into centers of religious wack jobs and tries to talk reason with them, but damn it's so funny I don't really care. Those people are pretty much beyond help anyways so well at least their useful to laugh at. What's not funny though is how many of them there are, and the fact that they have power. That's bad.

OOooo, I'm almost done with Twenty Years After. The main villain has been slain, left to float in the English Channel, the heroes reunited under a re-kindled brotherhood, back in France ready to deal with the Cardinal once again. And by done I mean 100 or so pages left, but at this point I figure most of that will be wrapping things up and possibly setting the stage up a bit more for the young Vicomte de Bragelonne. Yay, almost only three more books to go before the Musketeer series comes to a close. What's that like 2250 or so pages to go? On a side note, I've always thought the title Viscount was pretty cool. Not sure why, just always liked the sound of it.

Heh, it was funny, well still is funny. I've been criticized more than once about the time periods I like to take literature and music from, being the 19th century or actually things based in the 19th century and the late 60s-very early 80s respectively. I donno, I've always gotten the feeling that pretty much all the basic themes and critiques on the human experience and stories that could be made relevant to my life, haven't really changed that much since people started writing stuff down. It's kinda just one big repeating loop, repackaged and told slightly differently each time. Sure the names, and places, and the people change but those are just details. There's always been people struggling, succeeding, finding love, getting heartbroken, making good friends and mortal enemies, and the like. Sure I could read stuff people write right now and find piles of of experiences that I can relate to my life and make part of my perception of the world, but I can do this with literature form any period. The relevance might not be so easy, because it's not just connecting the dots, but I love getting peaks of a society not so long ago that I will never know and seeing all of the same things that happen today.

Eh, also I'm a sucker for the heroic epic with characters that are larger than life, because it also lets my mind wander and be part of a world that I'll never get to experience or well really is just outright impossible to experience because the adventures and feats are far more than any one man could ever accomplish. I like that though, if I wanted to read a story about shit that I could actually be doing, well fuck reading I might as well go out and do it first hand. Literature that holds itself too close in reality I don't have much interest in, because it's too much like life, and that's what I'm doing by default so why waste my time reading it. Not saying that there aren't many good and worthwhile books in this ilk, just not the first thing I'd prefer to spend my time reading. I like stories with a grandiose overtone of the valiant few fighting against all odds to overcome wills of nations and let the more realistic follies in love and friendship provide a steady background to keep the story rich.

I like the classics, because they're written with a skill and perfection that just seems to be lost in the world today. That goes for a lot things actually. People took time to come up with a complex story, something that takes time to think about, something with some meat on it, not just a throw away cookie cutter plot. Well actually I'm sure there was a lot of that too, but of course those are the things that time does an excellent job of getting rid of.

Similar argument goes for music. My first album ever was Abbey Road followed by Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. There's a reason why those are both ranked highly as some of the greatest albums ever made, it's because they are. Holy crap, what a first standard to be set into my mind as a teenager. And still, that's what I expect good music to be. Combinations of good vocals, good instrument playing, good organization, good technical production, and good writing. I don't want to hear some winey ass punk shit head who can only back up his worthless voice with distorted power cords and stage effects. God I fucking hate the voices of the singers for a lot of bands I hear now, and the instrument playing for that matter, because there is none. It's the like the avant guard, without any meaningful critique and just a bunch of who can't really make good music and are only backed by a well turned corporate promotion machine.

Oh and for the record, I fucking hate punk music and it's offshoots with the burning fire of a 1000 suns. You know it's cute and all how you want to express yourself by playing very shallow music, with little depth, that takes no thought to listen to, with a lack of talent covered by effects and screaming and flashy cloths. Yeah that's nice and all, but it sucks and stop actively alienating yourself from society, bitching to no end about it, and going to such trivial ends (mostly in outward appearance) in vain efforts to individualize yourself more because you need to somehow prove you're individuality to others. WTF, I've never understood that. Non-conforming by forming an even more socially critical click that just conforms to itself and has the great benefit that you're actively trying to alienate others out. I donno, that was alway the impression I got from those groups.

Seriously, I feel sorry for them. Thank god that's one thing I've never had to worry about, individuality. Fuck, I've never had a problem questioning my own uniqueness in the world. I've always never felt like I fit in, because well really there is no group that I fit into. My interests span too many areas, and shit I've actually always tried to do the opposite... vainly try to loose my individuality just to maybe once see what's its like to feel like I'm a part of larger group. It's never worked though, and shit I think those efforts have only brought rise to loads of other problems. Actually I think the existential predicament I've found myself in now is a direct offshoot of spending too many years wanting to be less of an individual just to experience the comfort of fitting in with something. Bad, bad, bad, bad, idea, hopefully something that can be recovered from. I guess that's also where I have a problem with finding good friends and like. While it's not hard to usually find one reason the clicks with someone, there's been few and far between people who I've actually felt really comfortable around.

Meh, thank god I don't have individuality issues. I mean the super ego I carry around about myself, the depression, the self hating tendencies, the often self destructive perfectionist drive, the grand delusions about what can and should be accomplished in life, and the manic emotional needle.. yeah those I can more or less deal with but fuck individuality issues, god I'm so glad that I've never had to really deal with those. I've always been glad that I've felt comfortable with my my own individuality, so I guess it's something like depression, just an experience that can never be understood unless experienced. The point where I have to physically alter myself as a reassurance of who I am, yeah somebody please shoot me if I ever do that.

I will say though, that doesn't count for any possible future cybernetic body replacement parts, because those are just so frickin cool not because they would definitely be an individuality statement, but because they would represent people steeping towards a time when we won't need to rely on our biological bodies, and I've always entertained that idea as something just way to cool. Also, maybe just a little bit why I like Ghost in the Shell so damn much.

WFHB is playing Zeppelin at 2:30 AM and I love it, and actually a semi-electronica take on a single twangy guitar lone cowboy kinda tune which I must say is pretty rockin. I've written too much.

Theater day

2007-12-08T20:41:00.000-05:00

So because it's late I'll keep it short, and because tomorrow I really need to wake up early and do something work/study related.

Today, was not a day of work, not a day of study, and not a day of slacking off either. Ha, ha. No infact today I did stuff.... theatre stuff! Which basically means tagging along with Sabrina all day, and being introduced as the physicist all day to lots of people. It's really funny, but actually true, these other theatre folk who I was introduced too seem quite perplexed and/or amazed that a non theatre person was tagging along for lots of theatre fun.

Oh and there was fun, which amounted to 3 bars and not one but two plays throughout the course of day plus a good fraction of cash being burnt on tasty meat (I managed to get a balance my meat intake with chicken, beef and lamb) oh yes and fermented beverages of course, some coming in funny glasses.

Lunch at Lennie's, actually it's a place that's pretty close by and is owned by the Bloomington Brewery Company. Great beer, and the chicken sandwich was also tasty, but outdone by an unexpectedly good sweet and tangy cucumber salad. Interesting conversation, with a point brought up about men having to artificially define the transition to manhood with some kind of blood spilling what-have you because we don't have periods to tell us oh hey you can breed now. I see the point, something I've never thought of so it's interesting to entertain the idea, but then again there are other things that exit the body that I think send off the same message for guys.

Right....

I got a tour of the theatre cubicle farm, and damn they have cool cubicles. Well cubicles that have some personality, not really that surprised but it makes the physics cubicle farm in 340 look that much more depressing. I fell better now that I've stayed the course and manned my desk down on the second floor, and while it is a dungeon, I've got lots of cool pictures up so I should get some credit for that.

Then it was play number one, a thesis script for one of the playwrights in the grad school. I thought it was good, kinda depressing though, actually the end just comes crashing down into a pretty terrible state, but still good. Not saying it was anything like Requiem for a Dream, but I'd say it's of the same ilk where the story is down right horribly depressing but worth a watch. Actually for Requiem, that's a movie I would and have watched a few times.

Ahh, then came bar number two. Scotty's, another new place! Descent burger and I got a black and tan before I realized that they served up sam and tans, fuck me, I dropped the ball on that one. Sam and Tan is a good idea for a drink. Heh, but then I got to see the other theater folk tear apart the play, which was cool. Lines of questioning I'm not accustomed to, because well duh it's not something I do, so I think it's cool to wathc.

Play number two was actually a reading, which was much more enjoyable than I would have ever thought. It was kinda like reading a book, where you get your mind to come up with lots of details, but I liked the actors reading the script because they get into character a bit so its adds a new dimension. The play was actually written by one of the writers for Star Trek The Next Generation, and he was there, how fucking cool is that. Oh I'll tell you, that's fucking cool. It was a Hollywood murder mystery, and very good.

In conclusion, the Irish Lion, a time tested pub and always worth a go. Mutton Stew with a yard of Guinness, oh how wonderful is that, and that's what I ate. Then things got strange, some of the people were actually interesting in hearing me trying to explain wtf the LHC is and general things about how the universe evolved, these people being very good looking girls. See that's why hanging out with anyone outside of the physics department is great, there are women, lots of women who seem pretty well adjusted and look damn fine. Did I hallucinate that or something, that just doesn't sound right, but it was true, but it can't be, but it was. Though, I guess it could be like art museum girl, who almost beyond a question of a doubt was just a hardcore hallucination, seeing how I've never been able to find her working there since.

Ah yes, so in short 12 hours of tagging along with the theatre people fun, one day that might make the difference between horribly failing and passing my finals, but fuck it, running around doing social things was fun. And some Ghost in the Shell, can't have a day without that.

I just watched a movie

2007-12-07T20:58:00.000-05:00

And if you also think that Bruce Campbell playing Elvis who switched places with one of his wannabe impersonators and is now living in a nursing home in texas, is friends with a black guy who thinks that he's John Kennedy, and fights an ass wipe mummy who writes that Cleopatra does the nasty on the bathroom walls, then yeah you'd like Bubba Ho-Tep. Heh, that was a much better movie than I would have expected. We also ordered cookies from Baked! and they were delivered hot and fresh with cold milk, just like they claimed. Damn I gotta give props to the stoners who keep that business delivering cookies till 4 am every day.

Other than that this evening saw the sinking of the biz at Nick's when the GPSO Happy hour night seemed to well not work out at all, lame, but I did run into the bio folks again. That was cool. Ah and pool, we found a not so exciting place to play pool, but they had a pretty respectable selection of beer for $1 a bottle. Now that, that works out pretty nice. Nerf guns also worked their way into the picture a few times, and poker chips and rubber bands for that matter.

So in reading that the CIA "accidently" deleted tapes of their early interrogations of potential terrorists, I once again in awe at how well the tried and true "Oh I can't recall" defense actually works. I'm sorry, it's so amazing that is scary. You can do whatever the fuck you want pretty much and when you catch hell, as long as you've covered up any direct evidence well when people are comin down on you, just stick it right to them and show you're pride in passively admitting guilt but still showing them you can get off scott free. Oh I'm sorry, my memory took a vacation for all those points in time when I might have been up to questionable activity, and ha ha you can't read my mind so fuck you! Ha, I learned the power of that defense at camp, and doing what is a story for it's own post all together, but from then on I've held it in only the highest of regard. Bush and his cronies love it too, I can't blame them because it works so well, and even thought they are lousy shit heads that I'd like to see put in front of a firing squad for shitting all over this countries founding ethics, gotta give them props for knownin what works.

I had a vanilla coke today, haven't had or seen one of those in fountain form in years.

The TRT monitoring code is a pile of ass dripping shit smeared into my day. Seriously, it's like a few hundred histograms in each of the two versions of the code that need to be related to each other. Of course, the naming schemes only sorta but not really at all match, and yeah it's now down to a job of sifting through each one, one by one, comparing their titles to get a rough idea of how to map one to the other. Fun, super fun for that matter, believe me. Oh but I do feel proud for making some crappy hacks in someone else's code to get this list of histogram names and titles without much effort.

You know, falling asleep scares the crap out of me. Now being asleep I love to no end, oh the things my mind comes up with, scary sometimes disturbing, but always satisfying in a way that regardless of what I'm actually dreaming of, I'm usually pretty damned impressed at all the stuff it's able to self generate. Sound it doesn't do so well, now that I think about it, my brain does a shitty job synthesizing background sound for my dreams. But yeah, so while dreaming is cool and loafing on a wonderfully comfy futon is great, falling asleep I loath. Mostly from that fact that I never remember the actual transition between the two, it's like whatever happens gets wiped from my mind, that whole swath of time I know I spent falling asleep becomes a blank void. Actually, maybe it's not that that I hate so much as sitting in bed trying to get to sleep if I'm not really tired and thinking, ok at some point my brain is just going to shut off not do much for awhile, dream a bit, then repeat, and then I wake up with vague notions of what just happened. Not a fan, actually mostly because when I think about it, it kinda seems like a death of sorts, and I wonder is that what it's like? The two seem kinda close, in the way of going between a state of consciousness and inactivity in the brain (just that the latter is a bit more of a permanent switch).

Eh, dammed if I know. But still.... kinda weirds me out none the less, so does life though, and people, so why am I bitching when if I think about it, I should be griping about the things that don't weird me out.

Ha, and the Germans are banning scientology. Good if there's one thing I hate more than organize religion, it's an organized money grubbing cult. Ok granted there's a razor thin line between the two, but for as much as I don't like them, I do respect that fact that most churches do things for the community and help out people who aren't well off. Scientology no, they're just as bad as a fucking hardcore fundamentalist Christian, Muslim, Jew, (insert favorite religion here), ect. Hardcore about some fucked up ideology to being with, but to the point of total delusion about what right they have to impose their wacked out ideas on others, usually giving up any redeeming quality their religion/cult may have had. So good for the Germans, even though I know they'll catch crap for this, but still, Scientology is a blight on this planet. It's sad that people are so easily manipulated, makes me loose faith in humanity a bit but whatever, their leaders deserve no less than being lined up in the street and shot.

Controversial, yeah I know, and I don't even say many of my views here, but then again if you haven't caught on I hate any group, ideology, belief, and creed that limits one's ability to question in this world and hinders the ability to use logic and reason to fight our way though the unknown that has been set before us. And yeah if I had any say about it, oooh boy, you can bet every religious state on this planet wouldn't be around for much longer. Religion that controls a peoples government and laws I find appalling, it's not the peoples fault (they're usually just horribly uneducated) just a sick group of power hungry individuals who don't want to loose their absolute control and will go to whatever measure they have to spread hate and fear, to keep the people in line. It happening here, fuck it's happening everywhere.

The real solution, just throw books at them. Enough so that they won't be able to burn them all and maybe some lucky kid will get a chance to see through the stupidity.

What world, what a world. Heh, you know that even gives me a bit of that deep burning motivation to do whatever I can to change this mess, but yeah then we'd just have something to the tune of "Go God Go XII" and we'd be fighting sea otters. It's a cycle with different faces and different tunes, but the underlying beat is all the same. Pessimistic, well yes but I also believe that it's truth to life that helps guide what things truly merit action.

Ah, now time to bike home and freak out a bit and eventually fall asleep. Maybe read some too, well it's late, probably not.

Being a bum

2007-12-07T06:03:00.000-05:00

Well first of all I gave up on going to my first half of classes today and proceeded to take the extra sleep option, good choice but set a bad precedent for the day's well doing anything effort. Ok, actually not just Quantum but also our group lunch meeting which then pushed back me eating anything until like 5 pm. Yeah I should stop doing that, that can't be good, the whole cramming all my caloric needs into one horribly unhealthy meal of Burger Hell with an additional few delicious procurements from the bagel shop. 2200 calories is 2200 calories but that's gotta be messing me up somehow. Meh, in other news I've actually finally leveled off at my old pre-CERN weight. Hooray 170, no more calorie starved European 150 for me. It's funny 20 pounds you think would seem like a lot but to be honest I have no idea where it goes or came back to. I look the fuckin same, so yeah who knows. Nobody believes me either that I'm 170 either, which I guess I don't really believe either when I find out that people much bigger than me are only like 10-15 lbs heavier than me, but well that's what the scale says.

Ha, 10 more pounds and I'm considered overweight for my hight. Ha, like I believe that. I'm actually kinda curious that if I did try to gain 10 more pounds for shits and giggle to see what I'd look like. Fuck for that matter I should just go on a bender and gain as much weight as I can then just go on the CERN cafeteria starvation diet. That damn thing made me loose 20 lbs and I wasn't even trying. Ha, ha I can have fun with this.

So I pretty much need to spend this next week studying and doing nothing else but studying, and yeah I pretty much hate my life. Tonight's a good example, I don't do anything. I donno, it's like I've gotten so efficient of killing time on the intranets on hell holes like Wikipedia and random site that show Family Guy shows, that well that's pretty much all I do. That's what I did tonight, watched shit tons of Family Guy and waited around for some code to compile and run and crash and recompile and run and crash again and then anger anger anger and then holy crap it worked and now it's midnight kinda thing. Yeah, yeah it's lame. I should go out and meet people or something. Yeah, people there are people around that I could be talking to and conversing with and stuff, and I'm not even in my humanity hating mood either, yeah I should definitely not be sitting around in Swain West right now and should be at a sexy party or yeah sexy party sounds good so I'll stop there.

The terminal application in OS 10.5 rocks. I just realized this recently, because they gave it tabs and they gave it all sorts of cool parameters you could change, but ok here's the best part because I never remember it doing this before now. When I ssh into our cluster and then do something that requires Xwindows like emacs or gnuplot.... something magical figures out that I need X11 running and it automatically opens X11 up just to run that one thing! Sooooo, frickin slick. I love it, and I'm sure I could have had it set up like that before, but never knew how and this does it out of the box so there. OOooooooo, you really don't know how excited I was when I saw it do this for the first time.

Yeah studying, that's not going to be as fun. On the bright side though I found out our Quantum test is not cumulative, plus points for that... but requires mastery of spherical tensors.... ouch, those still exist in the realm of black voodoo theory magic to me. That and well 80% of the shit Schaich does in E&M to do his alternate proofs because he hate's Jackson's hand-waiving and yeah this will totally be on the test next week and I want to cry.

God damn when the fuck am I going to get the time to write those correspondences, I wanted to get out. Time is short for these things though I'm sure I could continue to keep putting it off on account of my mind never finalizing any chain of thoughts.

I couldn't find anybody to go to free decorate and eat your own holiday cookie night tonight, seriously WTF is up with that? FREEE cookies, people should be dropping whatever the hell it is that they think is more important than free cookie time, and gone to get free cookies. Ah, yeah another thing I got disillusioned with and now hey here I sit cookieless in a windowless room at midnight, still being a bum feeling sorry for myself.

Ahhhh, tomorrow, tomorrow for sure this is changing because come hell or high water I'm getting people to go out with me to Grad Student Happy hour at Nick's. That's free pizza and beer. Something to kick off this study marathon with, which coincidentally will also end with a similar and guaranteed much more uninhibited night next Friday around oooooh noon when we get done with our Classical final. Alas, I can't pull the classical gin and tonic for my E&M final but Classical will work just as well. That's a BU tradition damnit, and I'll be damned if I let that die on my watch.

A day of pizza

2007-12-05T21:49:00.000-05:00

Oooo first spam comment, that make me feel special, or I guess somebody in spanish could have really been trying to say something, but it looked like spam so it is no more.

Credit card bills are annoying, and also something at should not be ignored. Fucking hell they collect late fees, and interest, and even more interest when they bitch slap you with the late fees, and yeah mine have been doing both. Well, really it's just my damn BoA account which had a lot of stuff I needed to float some cash for at CERN still on it and some crap that I have to use it for when I moved out here. My currently 4th active bank account (3 different currencies, but hey whose counting) here at IU didn't get set up for a week or so and yeah that damn BoA credit card was my lifeline. Funny how once IU dumped a lot of cash (nice getting all that back pay that they just never gave me while I was at CERN) I kinda forgot about those little things like credit cards that should have been squared away oh so long ago. Heh, $80 in fees latter and a $800 bank to bank transfer and all is better with maybe a lesson learned. Maybe it's bad that doing this all online seems to downplay the amount of cash I'm throwing around , but well it's a phony fiat currency anyways right?

On another side note it's interesting to track the progression of the order of 10 in units of money that I consider acceptable to think in. More like what's the level of cash I have to throw around in theory and is disposable. You know, back in the day having a dollar was the total shit, I mean damn when I was a kid with a buck what kind of sugar infused ice cream treat couldn't I buy at Highland Park in the summer. Heh so yeah, a dollar was a big deal back then so that's what I thought in. Then in high school I'd say that jumped up to the tens, to do things well that usually seemed to cost 10-20 bucks. College we moved into the 100s as that was the scale of my wonderfully tax funded work study paychecks that kept me alive on Indian food and Sam Adams. Now, now were in the 1000s. Though I waste most of it on food, good food but still I could be saving much much much more if it wasn't for my tastes. Isn't the grad student life supposed to be poverty stricken? Fuck I think I've bought more frivolous things this semester than I've ever done. Travel costs a 1000, my car cost 1000, fuck the bills... yeah they're in the 1000s. That's the level my mind works with today, but thankfully it's always seemed to have a good self correcting reasonability factor in there so it seems to always be not too delusional about what's really financially doable and what's not.

Bloomington has so so indian food, this makes me very sad. Granted there's only two places, well the Tibetan places does serve some Indian dishes but if the establishment doesn't also dish out the naan or a wonderfully puffed poori then it's not Indian by my standards. But yeah, both Shanti and Bombay House have both come up lacking in their food offerings. A disappointment, I know, oh but thank god for other ethnic restaurants. John now has strong likings for Burmese, Tibetan, and Turkish cuisine after visiting those places well much more than once. Oh god but I'm not done complaining about the Indian food, both lack any real spicy heat and hell spices for that matter. Shanti's vindaloo was more than edible, and any vindaloo that doesn't burn my mouth to another plane of existence is a failure, a kick so strong that the mind gooos into a happy state. Yeah none of that, and for shit's sake the naan we were served wasn't even fully cooked! Shanti = shit, food looks like shit (now that's normal) but tastes the same too (now that's bad). Bombay house was a bit better, not much cheeper but they did dish out more but yeah their naan was flat and un-pillowy.

Where oh were is my IQ. IQ I love thee so much. For $9 you would serve up a stomach filling serving of all my favorites at whatever level of heat I really wanted to eat that day and with naan so soft it was like eating clouds. You served Chimay beer, ah that right there makes you more than classy. Extra-hot chicken goa (I loved the play of heat and sweetness), garlic naan, ooo and a bottle of Chimay Grand Reserve, and a wonderful post feasting itus... now that's a meal.

Ed came to visit today, that was interesting. People were wondering why I was chatting with him and Mark so much and it's like well I kinda worked for his group for 3 years that's 2 1/2 more than I've worked here. Heh, yeah that really was a long time wasn't it. Talk was good, was a little surprised it was on proton decay and not something like dark matter or neutrino oscillations but hey I liked having a colloquium I could follow all the way through without much effort. Also got a free dinner, being pizza at Mark's house, which was nice but I was kinda hoping that we'd go out somewhere. Oh and it turns out that like Mark lives literally 5 houses down from me. Freaky, because when he was describing how to get there I'm like wait is that right by Maxwell and Mitchell, and he's like yeah, and I'm like ok I can go out into the street from my house and see yours. Ah but in any case dinner was fun and slightly awkward because I'm no longer a neutrino person and there was much talk about neutrinoy things and I only could throw out random comic ATLAS facts.

The group we had assembled was also quite interesting because Ed came to visit IU, but Mark was Ed's grad student, and I was also Ed's student, and it turns out that the other neutrino prof whose name was also John went to MIT and was Ed's roommate for like a year. What an inbreed group we had, hell that's almost as bad as the BU faculty which actually is an easier operation. For that you just apply some kinda cross river operator and funnel people right out of Harvard into BU faculty positions. I never quite understood how that worked out, but yeah it was really creepy how a good number of the faculty at BU went to Harvard... together within a roughly pretty closed timeframe. I guess to really have the circle tonight complete, I'd need to join the neutrino group here, which was joked about and then explicitly forbidden. Ha ha, inbreeding.

Oh yeah there was also pizza at today's journal club, that's why today was in fact the day of pizza.

On a closing note and rant, I just read an article about the teen pregnancy rate in the US going up for the first time in some number of years. Ok now they were rightfully trashing abstinence only education as a cause, because that whole idea is just such a load of shit, but I fond it funny when they kept going on about how kids aren't learning how to use condoms and I thought well really wtf is there to learn. I started thinking about this, and yeah now that I think about it there's always people flipping out about how to use a condom properly, but seriously how the fuck can you get it wrong. It's not hard, and even if nobody ever told you, you'd think from some pretty simple first principles you'd be able to figure it out. I'd think people for a long time got the idea that semen in vagina = kid, so if you're just standing there not knowing what the fuck this little rolled up stretchy thing is exactly, you'd think from that basic idea which you want to prevent you could figure out what to do with that condom and assess if whatever you've done to put it on will achieve the no semen in vagina goal.

For fucks sake it's to a good approximation a linear system, there's only one way that thing could even remotely be unrolled, I don't know or really want to know wtf people are doing to get this wrong, so yeah I have no idea wtf anyone means when they say people don't know how to use a condom. Boggles the mind, and god it even gets worse because these are the people that are going to have the kids! That's like Darwin's rule in reverse, the totally ass retarded are the ones to procreate. Even the whole breaking thing I'm not sure I quite get. If you haven't already shot off, and it breaks, are people just that dumb to notice oh wow this feels totally different all of a sudden, well whatever, just they keep going and uh oh you've got something in the oven now. I think the other thing I've remembered hearing about was condom failure because it was damaged when people open the wrapper, again WTF are people doing!. Are they taking a hack saw to that poor little wrapper or what? It's like a ketchup packet, if you need practice go to McDonalds, learn to tear the corner off and stop being so dumb.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe there's just some totally easy way to fuck this whole thing up, I'm sorry it's lost to me.

In sort people need to not be so retarded as to collectively disappoint me to the point where I start to loose faith in humanity. I starting thinking about this and realize that lack of any resemblance to a reasonable education is probably the main cause of these kinda problems. God forbid people learn how to logically reason their way through life and use first principles about how something works to determine if whatever the fuck they're doing will work or not. Is that too much to ask? No really, basic logical reasoning, just not possible or what? How many problems in the world would be solved, if everyone was able to apply the ideas of logical reasoning in their lives... and not bible logic either, that's an oxymoron anyways.

E&M hurts me in my soul

2007-12-03T20:25:00.000-05:00

I hate you Jackson, all you do is cause misery, making my life a steady state of Jackson induced misery. I get the picture, you really really really like solving things with separation of variables, but you know you could have probably toned that down just a touch. So yeah, when anything else happens it's like E&M misery plus that, and to first order I always have E&M to blame for my troubles.

I noticed today while randomly googling things for my own self-distracting fuck it I don't want to do E&M entertainment, that I finally have a picture of myself as the number one google image hit when you google my name! Still 4th on the websites, but you used to have to go to the second page of results before you got anything that actually related to me. That damn 1864 civil war John Penwell has to take all the glory with the number one spot, I'll show him and he will rue the day he ever had to testify to congress. This winter break I'll make an effort to get my physics webpage made, right now it's a piece of crap, and I'll move right to the fucking top with that. Wooooo, pre-excitement for my future google ranking kick-assingness.

I was a little weirded out though, seeing how that all these new higher rankings are coming from this damn sight. Hell I only used to get hits off of BU newspaper articles that had my name in them, but now the blog is on the up and up. Hmmm, not sure how I feel about that. Seems to imply that this thing is getting read and shit, which often seems to be the case though the audience is to first order a complete mystery.

Ah to celebrate this fact, why not celebrate better then griping right? I'll give this blog a new slogan. Ha ha, hilarity.

So it turns out that the Fung Wah bus drivers are in the worst 2% of all driver in the country. Wow, I mean that's low. Wikipedia told me that today when I was trying to explain the wonder of the funky china town bus from Boston the NYC. Well, I guess I've ridden that enough that I'm not really to surprised, but still that seems maybe not worth the dirt cheap $15 ticket.

I've been informed that there's a sitcom show about about physicists on CBS. I watched it and decided it was immediate bull, with the good looking blond girl that lives near them and wants to hang out. The characters are a bit over the top but still well believable, ah which made me cry on the inside a little bit. Hot blond neighbors don't exist, which I think is an extension of my luck on airplane flights, being I'm always next to and older usually grandmotherish person with the good looking girl like in the seat right over from her or one directly in front or back of me. This is a proven fact, and if I'm not sitting next to grandma well then it's usually some old guy, and I don't find it funny. It's annoying, and true.

However, though it also seems to hold true when I get bumped to business class (happened each time I flew on United back to the states last year what what!) I don't really care because they just keep pouring on the liquor to the point of well I'm surprised I haven't made a scene yet. You know with the pressurized cabin, yeah you feel it a lot more and it doesn't help that without even going out of my way to ask that in Business Class from Europe to the States they'll hook you up with like 10 - 12 drinks if you say yes each time they come around. Oh it's great, that and the movies are better, and seats fucking rock out with all the adjustments.

Big planes I've always been ok with, it's those damn commuter sardine can jets that I can't stand. I'm always convinced that they're going to break apart in mid-air and you know now with all the fuck up shit recently, well yeah now I'm even more convinced that the things are death traps. Fuck, going home for christmas that's all I'm going to be riding. Errrrrrrr, though right now I probably think I'll be ok with it, well we'll see but I won't be surprised at all if I'll be gladly dishing out the $5 for gin and tonics, more than once!, when the snack cart goes by so I can just liquor away any of those worrisome thoughts.

In closing, who the fuck is doing shit in the bathroom here in Swain West? Seriously there is some sick person on this floor, because always, always, always later at night the one toilet in the bathroom nearby is all clogged nasty with someones crap that they don't flush or do anything with except make a mess. WTF, seriously it's really gross. Even more gross than that are the pubes that are always over the one good urinal. WTF is up with that too! I know those things get cleaned every night, and everyday they come back in the exact same place. I'm convinced, there is some really sick shit on this floor that gets off on shedding some pubs all over the one good urinal. I mean at least from my experience, taking a piss doesn't cause that, so somebody is going out of their way. I bet it's the same guy who messes up the one toilet too, but who? I hate them, they are my enemy, and if I ever discover who then I'm totally throwing bleach or something at them. That will clean and burn, so they'll learn a lesson to not be so fucked up and weird in the bathroom.

Flu shots and killer cats are not fun

2007-12-02T20:15:00.000-05:00

Getting a flu shot might not have been the best idea, because A) it made me feel like shit over the weekend, even more so than I already was feeling and B) I really don't think it will spare me from any killer flu pandemic. But yeah, I got one last Friday when I went in to get my Hep A booster. In hindsight I regret that decision, it's made me feel funky this entire weekend, and my arm is sore as hell. So a flu shot is basically like, hey you don't need this so you should totally pay us some cash and we'll jab you with needles and make you feel shitty for a few days.

Like it really made me feel shitty, I didn't wake up on Saturday until 5 pm. Granted I was up pretty late on Friday feeling like shit for some pretty damn obvious reasons, and writing to people, but 5 pm! Yeah even I think that's pretty excessive. Fucking flu shot, and yeah I did not get shit for shit done on Saturday. Well basically that day was wake up after the sun had pretty much set and realize I feel crappy, meet up with some folks, eat overpriced and so-so at best Indian food (seriously if I ever won the lottery I'd buy the chefs from IQ and force them to travel with me cooking me Chicken Goa/Lamb Madras/and Rogan Josh on demand with piles of Garlic Nann) oh and also going off on a tangent about the lack of quality in Indian food around here, they bland it down to some god awful mid-western taste standard = bland as hell. I ask for extra hot, and say ok no serious I want some burn and they might cook my food near a jar of chili powder at best. The mid-west is very lacking in redeeming qualities, and this doesn't help their cause.

Seriously, the first thing I do when I get back into Boston someday is procure a posse of people and hold a feast at IQ where I will demand that they serve me up some Rogan Josh that transcend my tastebuds through time and space... and I know they'll get the job done.

Right so yeah, Saturday basically became Battle Star Galatica marathon night. Sabrina had a marathon going at her place all day and I went there with Lance to catch the end of the festivities, and well we kinda got there after the end but we all kept watching anyways. Drank some vodka, ate doughnuts, almost got killed by the cat (more than once) and watched Battle Star. Tragedy struck though, when it was discovered that the more than essential disk 5 of season 1 was no where to be found. Collective mental stability of the group broke down, heh I wish I had a video of it.

Today, well again woke up still feeling like crap and hoping to god that it's just the flu shot. Got a horribly late start on things, heh big surprise right? Confirmed that my housemate did infact just buy a new BMW. So yeah, I had my suspicions that Liz had some cash to throw around but damn that's a nice car that's sitting in our driveway. Well, I'll be picky about it though since I have a love for BMWs, heh just because I own a very old (but rare model!) E30 316 that's being neglected as we speak at CERN :( So yeah, if I was to blow $40,000 on a BMW A) I would not get the SUV as they are not a true ultimate driving machines since a top of the line 3 series or basic 5 series would be faster and have better handling and B) I would NEVER EVER.... EVER buy a car like that with an automatic transmission.

And yeah after stuffing my face with more delicious lamb, well I realized I can't focus on shit at all and it's taken me till about and hour ago to get a very easy mechanics assignment finished. Fuck my mind is shot, shit is so god damn messed up right no and seems to keep getting worse, yeah I have no idea how I'm going to make it through finals.

Ah and to make things even better after Friday when I really really really needed a fucking cigarette, well damn I was doing so well but shit I had a good reason to have one, now I just need to reconvince myself that I don't need so many. Ah hell today I had three, grrrrrr as I head back home.

A sudden and sad loss

2007-11-30T17:54:00.000-05:00

While many of my other posts reflect a wide gamut of personal thoughts, ideas, and feelings that often come and go on a whim and whose permanence is always open to debate, this post however is as serious as I could ever imagine writing. Good friends of mine just died recently, in one of the most violent and horrible ways I can imagine, and for whatever it's worth in this world which at times like this I just completely fail to understand, I'd like to pay my respects to my friends and colleagues Engin, Berkol, and Professor Arik who where three of the six Turkish physicists who died tragically today on flight KK 4203.

Friendship is a funny thing. Funny in how good friends can develop over a long period of time or just as easily over the most brief of periods. I consider myself very fortunate to have gotten the chance to meet and work with these people last summer while I was at CERN, and they will be sincerely missed.

I knew Engin the best and we worked together for many hours and days down in the ATLAS pit installing and more often battling with the TRT interlock system. It was also through Engin that I was introduced to Berkol and Professor Arik and heck it seemed like the entire Turkish physicist contingent at CERN. A very great group of people, who were always fun to be around, always optimistic, and who I could always enjoy a good coffee and cigarette with to finish off a days lunch at R1. I can think of no words that can even come close to capturing the feeling of loss and the admiration I have for this group of physicists.

I really did admire Engin's sprit. There were many hours in the pit where we got the chance to shoot the shit, and I was really taken back by the optimism he always had. In general, but also for physics in his home country and how exciting it was that his group was getting the chance to collaborate and work on a project like ATLAS. I guess I just often take things like that for granted, because even though the funding is shitty to what it could be, the US physics effort is still very strong and deeply involved with the work going on. He also had a great excitement at the physics projects that Turkey was developing itself, and actually what makes this tragedy even sadder was the fact that this group died on the way to a conference about the development of a particle accelerator complex in Turkey. Heh, and I also really liked the optimism he even had when this last summer we were able to have Turkish, Greek, and Cypriot students all get together be genuinely friendly towards each other and have a good time. He had such hope that things like this were the necessary steps for a better future, and you know what he was totally right.

In short time he was a good friend, and I can honestly say that I think his optimism and general positive nature really had an impact on me, and helped me get through some of those last and toughest months for me at CERN when my own problems with depression and god well basically everything were really grinding down hard me. Only now do I really realize that, now when it's too late to express my thanks.

Many a good conversation we had while crawling around through the innards of ATLAS. About life, politics, and hell probably the best were the gripings about our god awful luck and experiences with the women in our lives and some the happiness and misery that came and went with them. Something I really did appreciate at the time.

I leaned of this tragedy early this morning, and honestly I was in a state of shock and disbelief until later this afternoon when I was finally able to track down a Turkish news site that published a list of the passengers. Actually I don't think things even really hit me at all until I vividly remembered talking with Engin right before he left CERN for Turkey about visiting Istanbul next summer and all the places he had to take me too and the further talk of blowing off work for another week to adventure back up to CERN by train through the Balkans. A trip, that I was very much looking forward too but I guess just wasn't meant to be. I wasn't able to get anything done after hearing that kind of news this morning, I don't know why I just didn't take the day off right then and there.

Death is something that I've never had to experience at this level. I've been there for other people when they've lost a loved one, and for people in my life I've only had the passing of all of my grandparents, though they all lived exceptionally long and full lives and declined very slowly where their death was in a way more of a relief that their battle was over, but loosing a friend and not only that but a friend so abruptly.... god fucking hell.... an experience I hope never repeats itself. Out of all the people in ATLAS, it was some of the people whose company I enjoyed the most and who looked very forward to seeing again. Fuck you life, fuck you and all the fucked up shit that you pull. This pisses me off to no end, at a time when I was already kinda moody to being with. I'm angry, and saddened, and very regretful that I did an ass horrible job at keeping in touch with these guys after we left CERN. Hell, being totally honest out of the many e-mails and phone calls I've been meaning to make, one of them was going to be to Engin telling him about the great Turkish restaurant I found here in town and the excellent lamb dinner I had there.

I make for a shitty friend, I know, but I never though my foolish delusions of blindly assuming that keeping in touch never really mattered so much because shit it's guaranteed that I'd see these among so many other people again in the future. Damn I never thought it would turn back and bite me so hard.

This post has been very difficult to write, more so that I thought, and unfortunately the only thing I can really do right now is raise glass of Raki to those who are no longer with us anymore. Cheers to you, cheers to you. My most sincere condolences go out to the friends, family and loved ones of those who've been lost.