Goodrich SRS is having a jobfair tonight (and last night), and I am on the hook to do interviews tonight from 5-8pm. Actually, these are less interviews and more prescreenings, but still, I love meeting all kinds of people, so this should be fun (like how I found intro sheet time at CSH fun). I am spending some time this morning getting myself acquainted with all of the open job reqs we have so I know what we are looking for tonight. Should be fun.

Yesterday, at work, I added some cool debugging code to my project.. It will now spit out a bunch of datapoints to a file that I can bring up in GNUPlot and check to make sure the datapoints in my datafiles “make sense” in real life. I pulled in Steve to help me with some debugging last friday, and this same task took us an hour to mine the data out of my application and input all the formulae into Mathcad to graph it up. Now I can do the same thing in under a minute, plus I don’t have to learn Mathcad… :)

I installed Windows XP Service Pack 2 last night. I had originally planned on waiting until hearing some feedback from those installing it, worried about another MS Service Pack that breaks everything, but then I reconsidered. I figured, this machine, which I just built a few days ago, is about as clean as it’s going to get, so even if the SP completely breaks the machine, it will be an easy enough reinstall to get it back to where I was before I started. Fortunately, it didn’t seem to break anything, and the security improvements alone should make it worthwhile. I still maintain that XP is the least shitty version of Windows to date, even if it is bloated up.

I must have had 20 high pocket pair tonight go down after the flop.  That pretty much sums up my night.

So Alan Keyes is running for a Senate seat in Illinois? I am as weirded out by this news as I was when I heard that Hilary Clinton was running for the NY seat… There’s just something sketchy about running to represent a state you’ve never even lived in. It also seems kinda sad that the Illinois GOP needed to go out of state to find someone to run against Obama.

Went back to NJ this weekend with for the wedding of and . We drove back Friday night, and didn’t do all that much until Saturday. Saturday, I assembled my new computer and built ‘s “new” computer from my leftover parts. Went relatively smoothly, even though there were some minor irritations. Saturday night my parents got Outback takeout to celebrate Corinna’s birthday, and afterwards we went over Johnny’s for some Trivial Pursuit. After we got back from TP, Corinna went to bed, and I went to Doom 3. Man is that game beautiful….

Sunday, Johnny and Chuck came over and we doled out the shopping list for Stellafane, which is next weekend. Corinna made fun of the fact it took so long for us to come up with the list, but we were also making sure we knew what equipment we needed, as well as just shooting the shit. Then they left and we proceeded to the wedding. Let it be known: Tanya and Tom (and their families) sure know how to throw a party. The wedding was beautiful, and I am still staggering over the amount of food there. I mean, sure, Tanya’s family is Italian, but still, everything from Pigs in a Blanket to Caviar? It was out of control The ceremony was very nice, and the Priest was very welcoming, which was nice. It was great to see old friends again, especially , who I haven’t seen since I graduated. was there as well, but I’ve seen him more recently at RIT, plus he is a spook now, so I don’t want to talk to him much. :)

Monday morning, Corinna was feeling the effects of the open bar, so we didn’t end up leaving Hopatcong until 2pm, which gave me plenty of time to play Doom. :) I had presented her with her birthday gift the night before when we got back from the wedding (since it was after midnight), so Monday we just went to dinner to celebrate. She kept flip-flopping as to where she wanted to go, and we ended up at Macaroni Grill, which was less-than-savory. I really think they have gone downhill from what I remember from years ago.

As my dad said in an email earlier today: “The last line should be a bumper sticker or something!“

I ordered some parts to upgrade my PC in anticipation for the upcoming FPS fiesta that is the release of DOOM3 (and hopefully the release of Half-Life 2 as well). I will now have a 3.0Ghz P4 with 1GB of RAM. For the time being, I will continue to use my GeForce 4 Ti4600 that I have in the PC, because with the imminent release of these huge games I feel that video cards are still at gouge prices. After some time passes I will score a ATi Radeon X800. I knew I had to upgrade my machine, and this was a pretty cheap way of doing it. The disadvantage: I hate building machines… It never goes smoothly.

Anyway, my current PC is in NJ, and I will be building it out there while I am home for and Tom’s wedding. I will also be taking the leftover parts from my upgrade and building out a machine for Larissa.

I have just been neglecting my journal completely of late… Here’s the past week in a nutshell, I sucked at poker on Tuesday, and paid the price for it. I slept like crap Tuesday night and on Wednesday when I woke up to take a shower, there was no hot water. This combined with the fact I was a zombie persuaded me to employ some Intermittent Absence as a mental health day. All of the hoopla regarding how the DNC was going to disrupt Boston was complete nonsense, other than some surprise midnight fireworks that scared the shit out of me (thinking they were bombs for the first minute or two).

I caught Bourne Supremacy and The Village this weekend… Bourne was great, and I don’t see what everyone was saying about the lack of steadycam.. Sure it was shaky, but it wasn’t a big deal. The Village was fucking stupid.

I’ll try not to suck so badly this week.

So friday night , Audra, and I went to see Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgandy at the Fenway theatre. First off, nobody bothered to check to see if there was a game Friday night. Not only was there a game, it was a Red Sox vs. Yankees game, so it was a complete madhouse trying to park, etc. in the area. The film was surprisingly good, given how awful the trailers made it look… I thought that all of the humor would have been contained in the trailer, but it wasn’t really the case. Sure, it was stupid, but it was also amusing. And Christina Applegate is a hottie. After the movie we went to Sol Azteca for some mexican, but most of the time was spent by me missing Casa Mexico.

Saturday morning I drove over to Cambridge to pick up and Lund (from work) and driving to Foxwoods. We got there at noon, but it took me 2 hours to get seated at a $4/8 Limit Hold’em table. We played until 2am, and when I had doubled up my buy-in (up 200 bucks). I would have been up closer to 400, but I think I recognized that I was getting tired a bit too late and lost a bunch of money towards the end of the night on marginal play. I had a very fun day at the table though, and I think I am finally getting a little bit better at the pokemon.

Sunday was the SNFC, and we went to see Dr. Strangelove or… at the Brattle. I love that film, and hadn’t seen it in a few years, so it was nice to be able to do so on the big screen. It’s the 40th anniversary of the film, and it does a better job of conveying the cold war tension of the day better than many other documentaries.

Say it ain’t so! I tried to search Google for something and instead of a magical results page I got this:

I have tried searching for different terms over the past 10 minutes or so, but all result in the same error. I have never seen anything like this before…

Regarding SETI’s prediction that we will be able to find ETs by 2020:

…we’ll intercept their communications, and then some alien lawyers will serve earth with a big-ass lawsuit, for illegally downloading bootleg copies of “Frobzug and the Gleems.” This will be a huge cosmic joke, because Frobzug and the Gleems are like, so totally ten million years ago, and anyway you can pick their albums up in the ten-blork bins. Part of the agreement will be that we agree to “uninstall” our illegal SETI programs, and promise to never download illegal communications again. The Sub-Etha net community will, of course, be outraged that the [unpronouncable high-pitched wheezing noise] industry is picking on a planet that’s only 4.5 billion years old.