Drink is a robot, right?

grahams - - 1 min read

I applied for a job today at a robotics company.. It was an entry level job, but they wanted people with robotic sensor/motor control experience… So I used Drink as an example, which while limited I believe is apropos, no?

Confusion

grahams - - 1 min read

I sent my resume and cover letter to a company today, and I got two responses: One was an auto-reply saying that my resume was received. The other was a bounce notification saying that the employee’s mailbox was temporarily full. I mailed Postmaster, as the bounce indicated, to ask whether I should resend, which bounced because Postmaster didn’t exist. So my question to you is:

Me want

grahams - - 1 min read

Me Want. I have regretted not buying one of these the THREE chances I had during Mr. Bungle’s last tour…

Curse You, NetNewsWire

grahams - - 1 min read

I have been in PC land for a few days while I played Tron 2.0. It’s strange how I am pretty equally comfortable in Windows or OSX these days, moving between the two with relative ease. The only hangups I have are differences in meta keys between the OSes, and the fact that I don’t have any kind of Pager in Windows. I can’t tell you the number of times I have pressed “Windows-F1” on instinct and gotten the stupid WinXP Help Screen as opposed to another desktop. To be honest, I am more comfortable in OSX these days (much to my “former Apple abuser” amazement)… Of course, I don’t really *use" OSX very much: It is just another conduit to a bunch of terminal windows, a web browser, a few copies of Vim, and an mp3 player. :)

I have been using NetNewsWire to keep track of the non-LJ journals of my friends and Red vs. Blue, and it is always a shock to come back from Windows land to the Mac and see I have 100+ things to read…

Tron 2.0

grahams - - 1 min read

I just finished a 3 day binge of playing Tron 2.0 pretty much straightthrough. The game is beautiful, fun, and pretty faithful to the Tron universe (dropping some of the old corny aspects and adding a few new corny aspects). I reccommend it to any Tron fan just for it’s sheer beauty. It’s awesome to feel like you are actually walking around the film, and the light cycle action is rad.

Friday Five

grahams - - 1 min read
  1. Are you going to school this year? No. Every once in awhile I think about going back, but there are many factors weighing against it.
  2. If yes, where are you going (high school, college, etc.)? If no, when did you graduate? Februray 2001
  3. What are/were your favorite school subjects? CS, History, Astronomy, English, Discrete, Lunch, Study Hall
  4. What are/were your least favorite school subjects? Calculus, Gym (when we weren’t playing dodge ball),
  5. Have you ever had a favorite teacher? Why was he/she a favorite? Yes. I’ve had a few great teachers: Tymann, Vallino, Ken & Margaret Reek, Prof. Daddas, Ed Osolinec… Generally their enthusiasm for the subject is what held my attention and kept me interested. A bored teacher is a shitty teacher.

NationStates

grahams - - 1 min read

Rory pointed me at this awesome web game called NationStates. It is a nation simulation supporting a new book entitled “Jennifer Government”. It seems like it will be lots of fun, in the vein of the turn based doors of yore.

dälek

grahams - - 2 mins read

Went to see the dälek (pronounced dialect) show at T.T.’s with Jon last night, we got there early to interview dälek before the show for the Brainwashed Eye. Guys in the band were cool, and they were as good as always. Their DJ, “still”, is just mindblowing. I even got to chat with the frontman (who’s name “is” dälek) about NJ and Bertrand’s Island and Weird NJ (the band is from Newark). During the interview he mentioned that the bands name has nothing to do with Dr. Who, but added that they welcomed Dr. Who fans and didn’t have anything bad to say about the show. I’m glad that question was answered without being asked, because there is nothing lamer than bringing up Dr. Who in conversation. :P

After interviewing dälek, we went out to the floor for the opening band, Mu zok, which was OK, but nothing too interesting (poor-man’s Boards of Canada). After Mu Zok was finished, we talked with Octopus from dälek, who was super cool… We talked about both cool and geeky stuff (as the band had just switched to Macintoshes 3 days prior to the show). It’s really amazing how prevalent powerbooks are becoming on stage at a modern rock show. The unfortunate extreme of this, however, when a band consists of a couple of guys standing around on stage in front of powerbooks, but it is still an interesting phenonema.

Destructo Swarmbots, a guitar noise group (one guy) who was interesting, but would have probably been not-so-interesting if his set was longer than 15 minutes. dälek was up next, and blew the fucking doors off the place. It was an impressive crowd for a tuesday night, not quite full, but still pretty packed.

Rochester Still Sucks

grahams - - 4 mins read

I’ve been tying up loose ends here in Boston for a few days, which explains why I haven’t yet posted about my trip to Rochester. I left here around 10:30am on Friday and after a very uneventful trip arrived in Rochester around 5pm. I stopped up by CIS to see if anyone was floating around there and ran into Ol’ Man Bodie. We chatted it up for awhile and then he had a phone call so i left him and returned to my car. I drove over to Scoot’s for the Barbeque.

I arrived a bit early, so I helped out setting up the tablecloths. This involved lots of taping and retaping, but eventually everything was relatively windproofed. The barbeque was great, it was awesome getting to catch up with so many friends… It seems that it has gotten to the point where I only see most of these people once a year, so I really look forward to the barbeque each year. Oh yeah, that and the food. The food was completely outrageous, as always… I wish I had a big back yard so I could get a smoker and make pulled pork for every meal. I hung out at the barbeque until like 10:30pm, when I got really tired, so I left and went over Jared, Paul, and Joel’s house (Joel was MIA) to crash. Pictures of the Barbeque are here

I got over Jared’s and really didn’t do much crashing. We stayed up talking until 4am, which should have been expected since I hadn’t seen him in ages and hadn’t really had a good “catching up” session in much longer. I crashed on his super-comfy couch and slept until around noon on Saturday. The two of us went to DiBella’s for lunch and then we walked around the RIT campus. If you ignore the ugly-ass 60’ sculpture, the campus is becoming downright attractive. The school has done tons of landscaping and prettyifing, stuff I wish they had done while I was still attending the damn place. When this work is done perhaps the school will be a bit more enjoyable to attend.

We returned to Jared’s and he wasn’t feeling well, with a stomach ache and all, so we just kind of blobbed around chit-chatting for a few hours. He layed down in his room for awhile and I watched some television. While Jared was laying down I talked to Paul for awhile, which reaffirmed my notion that I should have hung out with him more when he lived on floor. I left for Jan’s party around 9pm, and had a ball there too. It was a pimps and ho’s party, so everyone was in costume. I aimed for a Harvey Keitel “Taxi Driver” pimp, but was a bit off due to being poor and not being able to afford all the costume I wanted. Another night of catching up with old friends was alot of fun, and I ended up leaving the party around 4am. Pictures here

When I got back to the apartment I was supposed to call Jared so he could let me in. I called and there was no answer, so I knocked on his bedroom window. Once again, no answer. I walked up to the front door and saw a note from Paul saying he took Jared to the emergency room at 3:30am! I called Paul and he said they were still waiting in the ER to be seen, and told me where a key was hidden. I let myself in and tried to sleep knowing Jared was in the hospital.

I woke up to an alarm around 9am and showered, shaved, etc. Paul was home but Jared wasn’t. At ~6am Paul left the hospital and Jared hadn’t been seen yet. I left Rochester without knowing if Jared was OK, which really sucked. I stopped by Syracuse on the way back to visit for a few hours. We grabbed lunch at Weggies and she showed me around her house which is finally looking like she lives there. I left Syracuse around 2pm and made it back in Boston at 7:20pm, just in the nick of time for the SNFC meeting which was at 7:30pm! We saw The Weather Underground which was really enjoyable. It’s hard for me to believe that such a significant radical group, one that detonated bombs in federal buildings, was completely ignored by my education to date.

I came home from the club meeting and the apartment was a mess, but I somewhat expected this as the boys went to Foxwoods to play some Poker. I really wish I had a job so i could have joined them, but so it goes.. They came back around midnight and they mostly had a good night. Matt was with them, and I ended up staying up with him until 3-4am because he is moving to Baltimore next weekend. I’m really going to miss him…

Update: I’m a shitbag for forgetting to mention this, but Jared is recovering nicely now after having his appendix removed. He is back in his apartment and healing up.