csh

Captain Jack will cook your fries tonight

Posted on by grahams

Finally starting to feel ‘moved in’ here at CSH. I am not completely done, but I am definately mostly done. The campus is so busy with freshmen and parents that it is almost not worth it to try and move around… :)

I tried to reinstall FreeBSD a little while ago and managed to completely scrog my partition table in the process. I thought I managed to almost completely lose all my data, but some creative fdisking got me back in working order. Perhaps I will use an idiot-proof tool like PartitionMagic to create my FreeBSD partition later.

So I am just chilling now, relaxing after a fairly stressful 24 hours.

See, the Black Rectangle is Removed…..

Posted on by grahams

Scooter’s barbecue rocked, and I feel comfortable saying it was the best barbecue food I have ever eaten. I got to see many faces I hadn’t seen in awhile, and meet many older house members… ‘Twas fun

After sleeping that food off, I headed out to Chez Wronkowski for the rest of the weekend. Matt, Stacey, and their family were hosting me, Garrett, Conlon, and my roommate Jon Parise. After some initial car trouble, I had an awesome time. Once I got there we jumped in their boat for a trip on the Great Sacandaga lake. This lake was huge. Stacey made some damn-fine cookies. It was Matt’s birthday, so we all got to give him a hard time, but we stopped short of telling the waiter at dinner… :)

This morning, we woke up, and we were served breakfast by the lovely Stacey. :) Best Golden Grahams I had ever eaten (in her defense, she made Liquid Chickens, which I don’t eat. Therefore I can’t judge her breakfast cooking). Then we jumped on the Jet Skis for awhile, man those things move…. Serious fun. :)

Mucho thanks to Matt and Stacey, and especially their family…. It was great to see everyone!

Never say you are going to ride in the back of a U-Haul

Posted on by grahams

Ok… So a kind soul decided that they wanted to part with a ‘Double Dragon’ arcade standup, and decided to sell it dirt-cheap to CSH ($100). Adam coordinated this purchase, and rented a U-Haul with James yesterday to bring it home in. The short version of the story is that after we brought the machine to CSH late last night, the freakin’ U-Haul broke down… So today was spent trying to dole that crap out…

I installed my new hard drive yesterday. I was amazed when it all worked the first time around. I moved some shit around today to get all my OSes booting off of the new Ultra2 drive.

Scooter’s party is tonight… After that I am coming home and resting for my trip out to the Adirondacks for the weekend….

I will not buy this record, it is scratched

Posted on by grahams

Made a George Carlin MP3 CD while I was in the shower this morning, but it doesn’t seem to function. The MP3’s ‘skip’ in my Genica, but I am not sure if the fault lies with the MP3’s or the CD. I will have to figure it out when I get home.

I am kinda looking forward to school starting up again, as I am definately looking forward to “Operating Systems 2”. There is so much I need to know about Operating System design, and I am hoping that this class will really help me out. It is being taught by Jim Vallino, who I have had in the past for CS4. He was a good professor then, so I hope that carries through to this class (which I believe he designed the curriculum for).

I am also looking forward to seeing some CSH people, but there are others I wish I didn’t have to see. I hate social politics….

air heated by flames, visualized with single pass Schlieren system

Posted on by grahams

Got belay certified last night at RockVentures, which was fun, but my climbing experience was poor last night; I only made it to the top on one of the climbs I attempted… Perhaps I was just tired.

I received the aforementioned CD’s in the mail yesterday, and so far I have listened to one of the two. I am impressed by what I heard, but I will need a bit longer to form an opinion.

Sean Hammond is coming over and making dinner tonight, and Adam’s girl Molly is going to bring dessert. It will be nice not having to cook at all for a change (even when it isn’t my night to cook, I generally offer my services to help out whoever _is_ cooking).

I am looking forward to my parents visiting tomorrow, ’cause I haven’t seen them since May. They are coming up to plain-ol’ visit, and to check out my apartment in person. Too bad it is only my apartment for a few more weeks, but living CSH isn’t that bad… As I have said several times, my problem with living at CSH isn’t CSH-related, it is dorm-related. I want to live in a slightly larger place, the dorms are so confined. Ah well, it is only for a few more months, right?

Metti una sera a cena

Posted on by grahams

Mike Felice is visiting Rochester for a few days, for the CSH orientations, and he is crashing at our place. This is good because Mike can cook, and he is hooking us up with some Chicken Franchaise (sp?).

Tonight we get to watch Junkyard Wars. Between Junkyard Wars and Iron Chef, I don’t know how much better television can get. I can’t wait until Junkyard is a regular show… :)

Right now I am just chilling at work, working on some DTD’s and listening to some Faith No More. Right now that is the only MP3 cd that I have which functions properly in my player. The rest of my CD’s are older, and I haven’t gotten around to figuring why the older ones don’t work. Perhaps I will look at that tonight.

I am also expecting to get two “Secret Chiefs 3” cd’s in the mail soon (“First Grand Constitution and Bylaws” and “Second Grand Constitution and Bylaws”). I hadn’t heard much of SC3, but I bought the CD’s knowing I like the work of the bandmembers (SC3 is a sideproject of Mr. Bungle members Trey Spruance, Trevor Dunn, Danny Heifetz, and Bar McKinnon, with other talented musicians on more of a ‘rolling’ roster). I never really get nervous when I blindly buy CDs, because even if they suck, they expose me to new music usually, and I can always sell them used. Last night, however, I found a site that was Webcasting a SC3 live performance. Somehow, after seeing/listening to that, I can’t imagine that the CDs will disappoint me.

Perhaps I am not so dorky after all

Posted on by grahams

OK, so yesterday I established that I do have some definite dorky qualities. Last night, I discovered how much dorkier people can get.

So me and the roomies were playing Counter-Strike last night after going over to CSH again for orientations. The introduction of Quake into the gaming world brought about the concept of ‘Clans’. Clans are groups of friends who play together as a team. Unfortunately this devo’ed into a bunch of losers, most of whom suck-ass at the game, but believe that they are the best players ever.

Clans have spread out to many other games, and Counter-Strike is no exception. My roomies and I thought it would be funny to play as “Clan IronChef”, and we renamed our server “Kitchen Stadium”. Now, we aren’t serious about being a clan whatsoever, but apparently other people are.. :) This clan of idiots joined our server last night, and some of them joined our team. One of the members of this clan decided that we shouldn’t take this one particular route through the map. We ignored him, because the 3 of us are pretty decent at the game. Well he got pissed that we weren’t listening to him, so he started publically yelling out our positions to his friends on the opposing team. Now, while I understand that it is just a game, that just seems uncool…

I warned his buddies (and him), that if he kept acting like a flake, that I would ban the whole lot from our server… Then they just turned into 12 year olds (who knows, they might be 12 year olds in real life). It was just really lame… Some people just don’t understand that A) it’s just a game, and B) the game is there to enjoy, so why ruin it?

We kicked their asses without equivocation, so I guess we settled the argument the old fashioned way, but it was still really lame. :)

I’m a dork.

Posted on by grahams

Unlike many things in life, video games are always there for you. :)

This weekend was pretty fun. As I said earlier, on friday Kelly came over to join us for the dinner I made (Sean was busy, and couldn’t come), which turned out awesome, if I say so myself. We all went to see X-Men, which was entertaining.

Adam cooked some wild steak on Saturday, and Kelly and Sean both joined us (Sean was doing a 24-hour experiment the night before, which is why he didn’t come over on Friday). They brought some kick-ass tiramisu for dessert, and we played some Trivial Pursuit. We then began playing Counter-Strike. Now, the past few times Sean and Kelly have come over, we have done this same ritual… They are hooked on Counter-Strike as much as everyone else in my household… We played for quite awhile, trading off computers inbetween maps. It would be cool to get another computer or two in the apartment so we wouldn’t have to trade off, but that would cost alot of coin.

Sunday morning, James made German Apple Pancakes, which were outstanding. I had never had anything like that before, and I have to say that for all the trumpeting James did about the dish, he lived up to his hype. :)

Today has been very slow, I feel like real crap (and have since I woke up). I just have a wicked headache and am pretty tired.. I feel terribly unproductive at work today, and there is another CSH orientation tonight…. Sigh, the burdens of being a man-about-town. :)
I really need to put my nose to the wheel at work this week, I feel like I am behind, even though I am probably fine… This summer has been bizarre…

Stubb a Dub

Posted on by grahams

Today I spent alot of time over at CSH meeting incoming freshman who are moving on floor in the fall… The ones I met seemed pretty cool, but I only met a small subset. I always love meeting the freshmen and learning their various personality quirks, etc.

I got my Portable MP3/CD Player today. While the UI is a bit cumbersome, it is finally great to be able to listen to MP3’s on the road, and the ability to store 10 albums on one CD can’t be beat…. It even supports CD-RWs!

Slowly Recovering

Posted on by grahams

Things are slowly starting to balance out in my life. I still will probably have to widthdraw from Calculus, and I am still very depressed re: that, but so it goes. Chuck visited me this weekend, which was very well-timed on his part. Chuck always does a wonderful job of helping me forget all my worldly troubles and simply making me laugh. Chuck has been my best friend since High School, and I treasure that.

Chuck rides trials, which is a cousin of mountain biking where you hop and ride over all kinds of obstacles. Anyway, Chuck was interested in making a short video of his riding while he was in Rochester. He brought a MiniDV camera, which have restored my faith in videocameras. We probably got down like 45 minutes of footage, which will probably distill into 15-20 minutes once all the bloopers are edited out. He said he was going to continue shooting when he got home too.

Friday night we went to go see “Scary Movie”, which was entertaining. Many of you know that I am a ‘movie guy’, and that I watch alot of horror movies too… This film wasn’t exactly a parody of horror movies in general, instead focusing on “Scream”, “I Know What You Did…”, etc (which were parodies in themselves, to a degree). I guess I enjoyed “Scary Movie”, but a parody of a parody can only go so far.

I also replaced the two blown speakers with a pair of Definitive Technologies satellites, which sound extrodinary. They were much larger (and heavier) than the JBLs that they replaced, but they will also handle the power the Amplifer is tossing out more better. I look forward to settling down a bit so I can really go crazy with my Home Theater setup… :P

Jon (my roommate during the school year) is going to be in Rochester for a one-night limited engagement, this evening. He is up for the Computer Science House orientation party, which I will also be attending tonight. It will be good to see him, but unfortunately he has to go back to NJ tomorrow. He will be coming back later this summer, however, which is cool.

So yeah, while I haven’t yet returned to level, the angle of my life is no longer threatening to dump me off the side. Let’s hope things continue that way.