new jersey

Fun in Northern New Jersey

Posted on by grahams

and I headed down to the family estate on Friday after work and dinner. By leaving at 7pm, we were able to miss all the traffic, but by the time we rolled in around 11:30pm I was really tired… We pretty much crashed Friday night, Saturday morning we woke up rather early.. Chuck came over and we both flew our helicopters. We also both crashed our helicopters, and my crash was the most spectacular of my limited pilot career.. I tapped the blades into the ground a little, which usually isn’t a big deal, but this time the spindle sheared off and the blades went flying off in a very exciting fashion. The first few times you crash the helicopter you get disappointed, but you reach a point where you realize it is par for the course. :P

After the heliflopter activity, Dad and I went down to get fitted for our tuxedos for ‘s wedding. Wasn’t too painful, but I can think of better ways to spend that hour or so… :P For dinner we went to the County Seat in Newton to celebrate me (which is this week) and my dad’s birthdays (which was last week). We were trying to pick a place none of us had been before, and while I had gotten confused and the restaurant in my head wasn’t the restaurant we ended up at, it was a good place, and they made a mean burger. That night Chuck, Corinna, and I went to see Inside Man, which was only OK.

We got back into Boston around 4:30pm yesterday and basically turned right back around and headed out to meet with the film club, which was a great time. We caught Thank You For Smoking, which was great.. The group was rather big last night, with 3 new faces, which are always welcome.. The only disadvantage to a big group is that I don’t endup getting to talk to everyone afterwards because the table is so large, but what can you do… :P

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…

I’m glad I didn’t go to school in this state… :)

Posted on by grahams

There are two funny stories in this newsletter for the The College of New Jersey.

First, the fuzz put a boot on this kid’s car. The guy drives off campus, with the boot on his wheel, gets to a parking lot, and changes his tire. I like the way this guy thinks… :)

Second, an employee of the college reports her office keys stolen, and this stupid newsletter publishes the room number and location. So if you have the keys, now feel free to walk into her office and take what you please.

Yawn….

Posted on by grahams

Greetings from New Jersey.

My back hurts, but things are getting into shape slowly…. I think I might be done unfurling my shit for the night and assume a nice recumbent position on my bed while I relax letting my mind rot with some television…

Of course, we all know that this is simply a pipe dream and that I will not be able to relax until everything is in its place.

Welcome to the next level.

Posted on by grahams

It’s 01-01-01… It’s a binary year, enjoy it…

Not looking forward to going back to Rochester tomorrow… Perhaps it’s just me being bitchy, but I am so tired of being there…

I just made a Taylor Ham & Cheese sandwich, which is damn-difficult to find outside of Jersey (at least, a good one is hard to find).

Should I work on putting more information on my webpage, like bio info, links, and shiz? Does anyone actually care about me that much?

Open the pod bay doors, HAL

Posted on by grahams

Wow…. Another year gone by… And more importantly, the last day on my “Pop-up Video” Day-by-Day Calendar that My Roommate, Jon Parise gave me last Christmas.

I think I remotely finished up my work on Drink for this break… I made quite a few improvements to it overall, allowing multiple client connections at a time, wrote a dirt-simple logging server so we can keep track of what’s going on, tested the latest beta TINI OS (which is way more stable). I am looking forward to getting back and hooking it up to the machine (but that’s the ONLY thing I am looking forward to back there).

Finished up the First season of the Sopranos last night, and I watched an Interview of the series creator that was on the last disc… It was 1:15h long! It was a pretty good interview though…

Chuck called me this morning, we are going to go get him another DVD or so after he runs some errands… He finally has the ability to play DVDs, and he only has one… He is thinking about Willy Wonka, which I think is a great idea… :P

Snow rocks when you don’t have to go anywhere..

Posted on by grahams

I wouldn’t say we are trapped in the house, but the snow (which is currently about 16.5″ deep) is definately good encouragement to stay inside… Luckily Santa Claus left me lots of movies and toys to play with… :P

I ventured out into the wild before to deploy our Snow Cat/Mow Cat, which is a graduated board (in the shape of a cat), which tells you how deep the snow is… Being that the forecast is saying that parts of Sussex County could see up to 30″, it might come in handy!

Another thing that came in handy was my new jacket. It is a Columbia, and replaces my older Columbia, which was getting toward retirement… I got the Ice Dragon Parka, which is crazy-complicated, and has lots of goodies to keep snow out of my arms, chest, and crotch. It is super warm, and has a super-comfy fleece liner…. And it is completely waterproof… :P

Not gonna phone it in tonight…

Posted on by grahams

Today was very productive for me…. I acquired a hub and some 10Base-T so I could start hacking on my TINI, and I did so. I upgraded the TINI OS to 1.02b3 (we are only using 1.01 in drink right now) for testing, and I had to hack the drink source to work on it, since there were some API changes. This version of the OS allegedely addressed the “Telnet Server dying randomly” bug, which will be a major benefit to drink. I fixed another bug in drink earlier tonight regarding refunds if the drop fails, and I am thinking of hacking on multiple client threads for the SundayServer if I really have lots of energy in a few minutes.. :)

After dinner, I headed over to Chris’ place to see her one last time before she returns to CA tomorrow morning…. It really bums me out that we are so seperated these days.. It really depresses me. You never really know how much someone means to you until they are gone. Chris isn’t exactly gone from my life, but I only get to see her every few months, it is really upsetting… She is probably my best friend, and I wish I could spend time with her without feeling that the clock is ticking…. Maybe after graduation..

Ok, now off to possibly work on drink, but maybe to just call it a night and crash… We will see how I feel when I reach my bedroom. :P

Spendin’ time in West Mildew….

Posted on by grahams

I headed over to Chris’ house today so we could exchange gifts…. I gave her a book on OSPF and I also took a Christmas Tape that she loves and put it onto CD (and spent many moons cleaning up the audio) because it is out of print (and was never available on CD in the first place). She gave me 2 DVD’s (Seven and Jurassic Park) and a book on “The Sopranos” (which looks pretty cool, and I hadn’t heard of)..

I am all excited, I have delivered a few gifts now to a few people, and my Christmas spirit is definately in full swing now…

We are going out to see all the family tomorrow, and we are getting to stay in on Christmas day… Unfortunately, this is because my mother has to work on Christmas day… Blow.