csh

MovieOS is Universal

Posted on by grahams

The Wall Street Journal is running an article on portrayals of computing and the Internet in film. I had plenty of discussions at CSH about the lame treatment of these topics by Hollywood. We even had a term to refer to the mystical graphical operating systems used in these films: MovieOS. Well, last night, I learned that these gripes are not limited to computer nerds.

was watching “The Ninth Gate” (despite my strong admonition) when I got home from the film club, and she instantly went off into a tirade. Some of the choice highlights were:

  • “No real rare book dealer would smoke around his collection!”
  • “Look at this guy, he’s supposedly the worlds most reputable rare book dealer but his books are piled up next to a live fireplace!”
  • “Come on! Nobody would store a book with it’s spine facing UP! ALL THE PAGES WOULD FALL OUT!”

I was telling this story to this morning, and he told me of a guy who was complaining about the portrayal of lead miniature painting techniques in “The 40 Year Old Virgin”. So clearly, these feelings are universal among geeks, and aren’t limited to the computer variety.

Anniversaries out the Ass

Posted on by grahams

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

Posted on by grahams

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. :)

FUMN the Fifteenth

Posted on by grahams

This weekend was a grand ol’ time… , and I left Cambridge around 5:30pm on Friday and rolled into Rochester around 11:30pm. We checked into the hotel and Matt and I met up with some other CSHers at Nick’s. A few people bitched at me, apparently they felt they needed some golden and lace invitation to Nick’s.. These people need to sack up and stop whining.. I go to Nick’s every time I come to Rochester, and I gave plenty of warning that I was coming up last Friday. I told a few people when we were going to be there, and to spread the word.. If you are offended that you weren’t one of the 3 or 4 people I used to start the “snow chain”, well, get over yourself…

Anyway, after Nick’s I went back to the hotel to sleep, and Saturday was predictably filled with DiBella’s, DinoBBQ, and FUMN. There was also an Alumni Storytelling thing at 2pm on floor… I am not so into them, but organizing them was always a pain in the ass when I was House History director, so I decided to attend just to support my old committee. It turned out to be a fun time… FUMN was a rousing success, I presented 4 films this time, and one of them was rather short (at 45 minutes), so we ended the night “early” at 2am. To be honest, this was probably a good thing, because we still had a really large crowd at 2am, and normally by the end of the night we are down to stragglers, so perhaps I will aim for 2am as the “sweet spot”, but who knows… Anyway, the lineup was:

Weekend et. al.

Posted on by grahams

Had a fairly laid back weekend…. Friday night I just stayed home with , who had a nasty cold (probably the same cold I had, although we had thought she had dodged that bullet). Saturday morning I decided to mount my Sirius radio in the car. It had been flopping around, kind of propped up in the ashtray while I waited for a nice mount to arrive in the mail (the radio came with a suction cup mount as well as velcro, but both those choices seemed ghetto). This mount required me taking the dashboard trim off, which was made easier by employing the dash trim removal tool I got with the new mount kit, but still sucked. I thought I could mount it without removing the car stereo, etc, but that was false hope. With the car stereo removed I was able to hide wires much easier, so they just pop out of the dashboard next to the mount. I also replaced the cigarette lighter adapter that came with the Sirius with some hard-wired power that tied into the car stereo’s wiring harness. I wired so the Sirius always has power, so that if I have to run out of the car quickly but want to finish what I am hearing I can pause the radio (it has a 45 minute live buffer) and shut the car off. I also moved the Sirius antenna from the trunk to the roof, as I was getting annoyed that the wires would move and get tugged whenever I opened the trunk. All in all it took me about 2 hours to finish the job, which includes running back up to the apartment to solder the power leads into the wiring harness, so it wasn’t that bad. The only downside of the experience was that it was pouring rain, so I did a lot of crawling around the inside of the car to avoid getting drenched.

Sunday we caught The Matador with the film club, which was pretty funny. A bunch of us are headed to Rochester after work on Friday for the first FUMN in ages… I’m really looking forward to that (but not particularly looking forward to the drive…).