rochester

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…).

Homosapiens have outgrown their use

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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…

My favorite animal: Pig

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Went to Rochester with this weekend for Scoot’s yearly barbeque… We left Boston around 12:30pm, but thanks to traffic and other nonsense we didn’t arrive at the barbeque until around 8pm (after picking up )… The food had only been served at 7:30pm, though, so we didn’t miss out on any of the good eats. This year Scoot and company were trying to keep the number of people down as the event had become overwhelming… I didn’t see there, and there were a few other Rochestarians who I usually see only at the barbeque each year that were missing, but it was great catching up with those I did see… Corinna thought it was strange that I would drive 400 miles to a barbeque where I only knew 5-6 people, but I don’t think she understood that A) I only get to see these people once or twice a year, and 2) I really, really, really like pulled pork.

We stayed at James, Jared, and Paul’s… Jared was out of town, so he kindly offered up his room for us to use, which was much better than couch or floor surfing… After the barbeque, we returned to the house and just kind of hung out bullshitting and watching bad broadcast HDTV (the first time I really had a chance to watch HDTV for any significant amout of time)…. There was this documentary on covered bridges on PBS that was painfully boring but trapped us… Saturday morning we hit up Dibella’s for some delicious subs and then headed over to the Eastman House to check out the exhibits and take the house tour. Corinna really dug Eastman House, as I expected she would, so even if she felt bored the rest of the weekend, at least I scored some points there.. :) Saturday night we went to the Old Toad and had some food and drink before retiring with a bunch of people to the house…

Sunday we left early and on the way back stopped by my Aunt Kathy & Uncle Bob’s to visit with them and their menagerie… Both donkeys (burros, donkayas) were present, as was their blind horse who is lead around their field by the two donkey prophets. Their three legged dog (Buster, not to be confused with my parent’s dog), in addition to their more “normal” animals (two more dogs and an annoying bird) were around as well. We chatted it up with them (my Aunt & Uncle, not the animals) for a few hours, checking out my Aunt’s new Vespa and Bob’s MG (or as Corinna called it, his “buggy”). We left there around 2pm, which was FAR too late to make it back to Boston on time for the film club, so I showed up about halfway into Labyrinth (which still gave me plenty of exposure to David Bowie’s bulge).

Back in Beantown

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Getting up this morning wasn’t as difficult as I had expected, I guess my sleep schedule didn’t get too wacked out in Rochester. I had a great time seeing all the CSHers again, and graduation was fun as well. My family came up for the festivities, and they seemed to enjoy getting to finally see me walk across the stage. Many thanks to all the family, house members, and friends who cheered me on as I walked across the stage. The Dean commented on the size of my cheering section as I shook his hand. :)

So that phase is now unarguably complete now; no longer can people argue that “well, you haven’t really graduated yet”… It was nice seeing everyone, but living like a nomad is always a little uncomfortable for me. I am glad to be back in my own place again. :)

Supposedly we are going to hear some “really good” news later on today, which makes me curious.. I hope it is good enough to keep me from worrying about looking at Monster for a year or so. :)

There is a new feature in the Mozilla nightly builds, the “-turbo” command line flag (Win32 only). If you pass this switch, it will start mozilla in a windowless mode, running in the background. The next time you start mozilla, it will pop up almost instantly, since it is already residing in memory. This will be a nice retort to the people that believe that Internet Explorer is so much faster because M$ pulls the browser into memory on startup (since it is “part of the OS”…)

Here? Again???

Posted on by grahams

Let me make a few things clear…. First of all, it is odd to recognize that one day you walk to the store down the street in shorts, and the next day you are dreaming of warm clothes as you wait for your ride from the airport…. Second, I have come to the realization that the human mind simply does not deal well with travelling long distances in short times.

I arrived in Rochester last night, and was ferried to RIT by My Roommate, Jon Parise. I spent most of last night unpacking and trying to force myself back to an East Coast schedule. I finally fell asleep around 2am, and woke up at 7:30am for my Intro to Organic and Biological Chemistry class at 8am. That class is interesting, go over to the page and check out the grading policy… I don’t think it will be to difficult to pass the course. :) Which is good, because that means I have more time to devote to Calculus (again).

Jon and I are heading over to Imaging Science for a little lunchtime showing of Junkyard Wars in the Carlson Learning Center. Word has it that that Bryce will either be showing the “Gliders” or the “Cannons” episode, either of which rock (but “Cannons” by far wins in a vs. match.. :P)

Ornithologists have counted up to 50,000 crows in a single roost

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Went climbing last night. I have to say, there are many attractive females who climb. This is a Good Thing®. I believe I have chosen a good pasttime.

Today is a super-lazy saturday here in Rochester. It is beautiful out, but I don’t really feel like doing anything. The past few weekends have been really busy, and it is nice to do nothing for a change.

We are going to do burgers, dogs, and sausage on the grill tonight. That will get me out of the house…