PC Load Letter

Posted on by grahams

Took care of lots of administrivia this weekend, cleaning the apartment a bit, helping , and doing computer maintenance… I realized the reason I hadn’t been backing up my Powerbook as often as I should was just the amount of time it took to burn several DVDs… I had a 60g IDE drive lying around as well as an IDE to USB2 cable, so I decided that this is now my new backup mechanism. I am actually not very confident in the drive, however, so at some point soon I will probably replace it with a newer drive. Before I did the backup I decided it wouldn’t hurt to scan my system for virii using ClamXav, since I had never actually done that… Amusingly enough, it actually did find a few viruses, but two of them were infecting my VirtualPC “disk file”, and the others were email messages that it identified as phishing attacks, but they were all spam sitting in my “deleted” folder.

Last night I checked out “The Baxter” with the Sunday Night Film Club.. It was written and directed by Michael Showalter (of “The State”, “Stella”, and “Wet Hot American Summer” fame), and while the trailer had me on the fence, the film was really funny and entertaining. It seems to me that for years we’ve had very loud comedies like “Old School”, “Austin Powers”, etc… But this year, with “The 40 Year-Old Virgin” and “The Baxter”, I was reminded that you don’t need to be beat over the head with blunt, abrasive jokes constantly for 90 minutes…

Exuberance!

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Yesterday’s Penny Arcade Lecture at MIT was great. The place was crowded, all 450 seats full with people standing… Gabe and Tycho (Mike and Jerry) answered questions and told stories from 5-6:30p and then from 6:30-7p Gabe drew requests from the audience… The auditorium had one of those “video overhead” things, so we got to see him do his stuff on a very big screen, which was cool… While Gabe was drawing, Tycho took questions and delivered the completed drawings to people in the audience… I was not lucky enough to get one, however… Anyway, it was a really good time, and as funny as the strip/site is, I’d venture to say that they are even funnier in person…

I am absolutely speechless

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Remember this article in The Onion?

Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of shaving in this country. The Gillette Mach3 was the razor to own. Then the other guy came out with a three-blade razor. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Mach3Turbo. That’s three blades and an aloe strip. For moisture. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I’m telling you what happened—the bastards went to four blades. Now we’re standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three blades and a strip. Moisture or no, suddenly we’re the chumps. Well, fuck it. We’re going to five blades.

Well, in disturbing fantasy becomes reality news:

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) – Gillette has escalated the razor wars yet again, unveiling a new line of razors on Wednesday with five blades and a lubricating strip on both the front and back.

It’s even Gillette, for noodle’s sake!

Homosapiens have outgrown their use

Posted on by grahams

Open request to Massachusetts: Fucking finish Route 3 already… The road is completely paved, the lines are painted, and the ramps have been renovated… What the shit are you still working on?

I’m finally shifting further into the “new stuff” here at work… My new cubicle is awesome… It’s a little bigger than usual (it’s at the end of a row, so I got the leftovers) and I’m in a row with all the CAD guys, so the lights above my cube are all turned off… I am not a big fan of fluorescent tubes, so this is a good thing… In addition to the lack of overhead light, this cave is in the middle of the building, so I get no windows either… I have mixed feelings about this… On one hand, I hate glare, OTOH, I have no idea what’s going on outside… There’s going to be a lot of upfront design and documentation to take care of before any code is written (or at least, any non-prototype code).

The aforementioned accident was no big deal… I tapped someone’s passenger side doors, nobody was hurt, and my car only got scraped up a bit… I was stopped at a stop sign, looked left and right, moved forward, and a car I didn’t see was moving in front of me from the left… I haven’t actually heard from the lady yet, she mentioned she was going to be out of town for awhile… Not sure if insurance is going to be involved, she said she would get an estimate first… It was a shitty way to start the Labor Day weekend, though… Other than the bad start, the trip was great… We didn’t hit traffic in either direction, and the weather was great.

CSH Welcome Back Weekend was a ton of fun… Met tons of new people and caught up with lots of old friends. Had far too much to drink Friday night (turns out I was correct to avoid Everclear all these years), enjoyed the picnic on Saturday once we finally figured out when it was, had great food all weekend, and perhaps signifying a trend, we didn’t encounter traffic in either direction. Even made it back in time for the Sunday Night Film Club’s screening of “Le Monde du Silence (The Silent World)”, which was surprisingly amazing… I was never into the Cousteau stuff when I was a kid, but this was really entertaining..

Ok, enough effluvia… This album (Busdriver’s “Fear of a Black Tangent”) is really good, you should check it out…

yawn

Posted on by grahams

I haven’t posted anything in forever…. Well, the past few weeks I have been to NJ, got into a small auto accident, seen DJ Z-Trip, and went to the CSH Welcome Back party… All of which probably merit more details, but I’m feeling
sorta lazy…

I spent all morning moving my stuff from one cube to another…. I’m getting comfortable in my new cube, but someone has to mount my whiteboard to the wall….

The Way Out Is Through

Posted on by grahams

Work has been grinding on my pretty badly lately… I have two projects right now, one is finishing up in the next two weeks, one I am an advisor on to a newer engineer (he’s revving the first big (many month) project I wrote at Goodrich). Mentally (and to a degree, actually), these two tasks are preventing me from switching programs, which is frustrating… The advisor task won’t go away for awhile, but it is only going to be about 5% of my time. The other project finishes up in two weeks, which is really what is holding me up. I’m just impatient.

Heading back to NJ this weekend with … We are going to try leaving pretty late here on Friday in an effort to miss all the holiday traffic… I think we are going to hit the road around 8pm, depending on how bored we get sitting around the apartment friday evening… :P Next weekend is CSH Welcome Back, which should be awesome too. This will mark the end of my travel hell for a few weeks…