“Layla” : Music :: “Full Metal Jacket” : Film

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Continuing the “I am a Jackass” theme of late, this weekend I was doing some of the aforementioned home improvement and managed to smash the shit out of my thumb with the hammer… A beautiful blood blister formed but I don’t think I did any serious damage. The trim around the front door looks quite a bit better now, and will look even better once it isn’t Primer White. Next up: Stripping and painting the radiators! FUN!

I’m finally writing code at work again, but only because I am forcing the issue…. I’m auto-generating my ICD/Design document via Doxygen, hopefully that won’t make anyone here blow a gasket.

Me == Jackass

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Hawkeye has had some tar on his fenders for awhile now, and I finally purchased some tar and bug remover to get it off. The can required me to pry the lid off, a task intended for a screwdriver, but since I didn’t have any handy, and I am impatient, I chose to use a key for. And of course, I chose the tiniest, most fragile key I possessed for this task. My mail key snapped almost instantly, and we don’t have a spare… Fortunately, it was a fairly clean break and the hardware store was able to successfully copy the key. I had a spare made as well, banking on the fact that my stupidity knows no bounds.

My leg checkup the other day went as expected… Progress has been great, same ominous warnings as always (i.e. “you can’t do that much damage to your knee and not have negative repercussions later in life”, etc.) He asked to see me once a year to monitor my cartilage and joint spacing. He said that he expected it would take quite a while for this to catch up with me, and worst case if no medical advances were made in the next 10-20 years I would probably need a knee replacement. But I’ll hold out for bionic knee action or at a minimum human-animal hybrid cartilage.

This weekend will involve much laziness as well as some home improvement… In an effort to make the condo sellable/showable, and I have a list of tasks we need to take care of over the next few months… But aside from the relatively small project I picked for myself this weekend I intend on vegging out and playing some Quake 4. =)

Anniversaries out the Ass

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A year ago yesterday I broke my leg! Tomorrow I’m going to see Dr. Schena for a one year checkup, which I presume will probably be my last.. It’s also just about my 2nd anniversary here at Goodrich! And this weekend was the CSH 30th anniversary! All kinds of anniversaries lately..

The 30th was great, mas kudos to everyone involved in planning it… The trip back wasn’t too bad, although it is a grinding trip no matter what way you slice it. As soon as we landed in Boston we drove over to Audra’s to watch the Oscars… Pretty predictable, although I hadn’t seen “Crash”, so I wasn’t able to place it in the categories it competed in… People seemed surprised that it won Best Picture, guess I’d better see it…. :)

Rochester is still Rochester

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In case you were wondering, Rochester in the winter still sucks.. :) Actually, while cold and windy, it is pretty nice out today… You can actually see blue… IN THE SKY!

We’ve just been meeting up with people here yesterday and today… Went to a party last night that was fun, although I was pretty tired from waking up at 6:30am.. :P Today met up with most of the same people and more at DiBellas and then walked around campus checking it out. was finally able to check out the Library, and I got to check out the new offices of , , and Scoot. I finally got to see the sensors they’ve been working on, which was cool.. Talked to Scoot and quite a bit about the cameras and processing they do, it was very interesting.. Now that I have more imaging knowledge I felt like I could actually ask intelligent questions… :)

and I are getting ready for the banquet tonight, which is semi-formal…. Which in CSH terms means business casual, but I’m still wearing a shirt and tie. :)

Phew

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I’ve felt very overwhelmed the past few days… Stopped by Cambridge yesterday to hang out with and , and saw and briefly. It was fun, but when I got home I just felt like I was spinning… Now tomorrow morning we are packing up and heading out to Rochester for the CSH 30th Anniversary! After that I’m going to need to take a weekend or two off and just chill out.

Last night I shoehorned iPodLinux onto my iPod and I’m figuring it out… I’m having some problem getting Podzilla2 working right yet, but that’s because I’ve read the minimal amount of documentation possible.

Armed Audio Warfare

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This weekend was hectic! I left Saturday at 5pm with Jon Whitney to go down to Manhattan for the midnight Meat Beat Manifesto show at BB King’s in Times Square. Jon hosts the official MBM website over at Brainwashed, so we had VIP passes which was cool. We rolled into town and met up with and his roommates/friends, who were kindly letting us crash at his place. Luke and Christina (? God i am terrible with names) came with us to the show, and met up with us as well, which was awesome because I haven’t seen him in like 3 years.

We got to the show just as the doors were opening, god it was cold in NYC… Went backstage to say hi to Jack, but I don’t get off on the whole backstage thing, so I just said hi and then went back out to the room to catch the opening act, Dalek. I guess they split with their DJ (whose name was “Still”). To be honest, without Still I just wasn’t interested in the band.. It’s a shame, because they are really nice guys and I’ve really enjoyed them the other times I’ve seen them… This time I was just waiting for them to leave the stage. When Jack and crew got on stage, though, it was like magic. I saw them back in June and it was amazing, and this was no different… Similar setlist, but the crowd was much larger at this show so the whole room just had more energy… The venue sucked (would have been great for old white people listening to Jazz or Blues), but the show was out of control… After the show we said thanks to Jack and Jon got a live CD for Luke as a thanks for his hospitality and we rolled back to Luke’s place at like 3:30am..

Sunday morning we caught breakfast with Luke a few blocks from his place and then parted ways with him… I’ve got to get down there more often to visit my friends in (or, in Kyle’s case, near) the city.. When I go back to NJ I usually plan on making it into NYC but because I am having so much fun with my friends and family there that I usually don’t make it. I think the plan needs to be seperate trips for NJ and NYC, because otherwise it’s too hectic. That way and I can visit with her friends Sara and Dave, who live there too. Anyway, Jon needed to meet up with his friend, musician Little Annie Anxiety to pick up some material he is releasing on Brainwashed. She was in the middle of packing for a trip, so it was a little hectic, but she seems like a wonderful person and she has a very cute chiuahua. I was even called in as nerd support when she had a problem with her iBook… :) On the way out of town we said hi to Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons fame, who lives in the same neighborhood, and who Jon is also friends with… He had just gotten back from a trip, so we didn’t visit long with him, but he seems like a really nice guy.. After that we hit the road and got back to Boston around 5pm…

Corinna and I immediately turned around to go to the film club to see Kairo (Pulse), which is the original Japanese movie that the upcoming (disaster) Pulse was based on. Oh my god was it terrible… It never felt like it went anywhere, and there were so many unresolved or unexplained plot points.. It seems like they were constantly rewriting the script.. So many things were never paid off… And christ, shouldn’t a horror film be at least SOMEWHAT scary? At some point Corinna gave up grabbing my arm when tension was building just because she realized that nothing was actually going to happen.. But even though the movie was shitty we had a great group of people show up last night, including a few new faces. We’re getting more regulars and semi-regulars coming, which is awesome because it means I’m not scaring people off anymore. ;)

Fun with Potential Criminals

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This AM I was stopped at the intersection near the police station, and there
was this sketchy dude on a bike trying to cross going towards Cambridge
Street. A cop fired up his sirens and lights while this dude was halfway
across the intersection and this dude froze in his tracks, backed back out
of the intersection, and started going up that street that goes towards
Chestnut Hill Ave. Once he realized the cop had no interest in him and was
going somewhere else, he turned around again and resumed his original
course.

Take me back, Journal, I’m sorry!

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I’ve neglected the hell out of my journal lately… Some of that is because nothing is going on… But I have also just been lax, I will try to be better, but… no promises… :)

My sister, came up this weekend for a weekend of frigid Boston fun… We had a few things lined up to do, but we ended up indoors most of the weekend due to the extremely low temperatures.. We hit up Bartley’s, Candlepin Bowling, Pool at Flattop Johnny’s, and the film club. Hopefully she enjoyed herself, and hopefully she will come back when it is warmer out and we won’t be so shut-in.

We caught “Why We Fight” last night, and while it was quite “preaching to the choir-y”, I enjoyed it quite a bit. The discussion after the movie was a bit heated, though, as it tends to get after these political films…

I think I’m finally getting over this cold… I’ve felt good for the past few days, although I am still a little congested, I can at least think, etc. I had my sister bring up a bunch of old CDs because I recently realized that there was a big hole in my email archive from when I was using BeOS. So I got BeOS running on an older machine and restored my old email from backup. I had to go through some hoops to get the BeMail format mail into something Mail.app under OSX could import, but once I figured it out it was a no brainer. It’s amazing what 5 years can do for your knowledge of an OS, it took me quite awhile to get my bearings in BeOS again… I had a little nostalgia, but it is definitely pretty dated by today’s standards.