snfc

catching up

Posted on by grahams

I’ve really been neglecting this here journal, haven’t I? Friday and I went to the Star Wars exhibit at the Museum of Science with Garrett and Steve from work. It was OK, but it was way lamer than I expected. I guess if I was a kid I probably would have enjoyed it more.

Saturday I mostly just hung out around the apartment although Corinna and I took a nice walk to get some lunch and run some errands. Later on I met up with , , , and Sue for some delicious Kelly’s Roast Beef! So, so good.

Tonight is “Walk the Line” with the Sunday Night Film Club. Tons of people have told me they are coming, so it should be a pretty big group tonight.. This has it’s pluses and minuses… It’s great the club is popular, but it’s also tough to manage that many people for the after-show discussion/food routine.

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…

Weekend Update

Posted on by grahams

So was up this weekend for some fun… He showed up at my work Friday evening, and we left his car here (free parking monitored 24h by a security guard is pretty nice) and drove back to Boston. We got home just after and all three of us headed out to the Sunset Cantina for dinner and drinks.. A good time was had by all, and we returned home to chill before beddy-bye time.

Saturday we headed out to Mr. Bartley’s in Harvard Square for delicious, delicious burgers (although Corinna had something non-burgerish). We then tooled around Harvard Square for awhile before returning to the apartment to watch Team America (Chuck hadn’t seen it before) and get some laundry while watching the movie. After the movie (and laundry) were done, we headed out to see Wedding Crashers, which was pretty funny, even if it did have some bullshit moments. After the film we grabbed some food at Legal Sea Foods (after aborting an attempt to drive out to the Wharf)… I had the Grilled Everything Tuna, which is just awesome…

After dinner we went to a party at Gaurav’s (former roomate on Western Ave) apartment downtown.. And when I say downtown, I mean on Beacon Hill next door to the State Capitol. It was a roof party, so we spent the evening looking out over the Boston Common and the city skyline and enjoying the weather. After we left the party, we stopped by Tim’s place for like 45 minutes just to say hello and have a Carbomb… :)

Sunday morning was brunch at ‘s place, and a bunch of people where there including Steve Bower, who I haven’t seen in years (mostly because I thought he left town even though he lives like 2 miles away from our apartment). Well, it turns out he is moving to Australia post-haste, so I guess my prophecy will come true. :) After the fantastic brunch (wtg, gib!), Chuck, Corinna, and I did some shopping at the mall before the Sunday Night Film Club screening of The Aristocrats… Strangely enough, we ran into many of the people from the brunch at the mall… It was very weird. Anyway, Corinna bought some clothes and I finally replaced the rat-ass sandals I’ve been wearing since college..

A first in SNFC history (at least for me), was that due to a projector failure the screening we were supposed to attend was cancelled. Fortunately, someone had the brilliant idea to just eat dinner before the film and attend a later screening (as opposed to our usual discussion and drinks afterwards), so we exchanged our tickets and headed over to Tommy Doyle’s then back to the theatre). I really enjoyed the film, but others didn’t seem to enjoy it as much as me (which is kinda what I expected, as I’m a raunchy fellow). We retreated back to the apartment and crashed. I brought Chuck with me to work this morning to get his car and he was on his way… And that’s the end of a swell weekend.

Random Bits

Posted on by grahams

Did an interview today with Drake Lucas of the Patriot Ledger regarding the Sunday Night Film Club. Mostly questions about the history of the club, where we go to see films, what kind of people show up, etc… Not sure what the focus of the article will be, hopefully she won’t paint me out to be a baby eater.

Chuck is coming up for a visit this weekend, which will be nice. I had the idea that he drive directly to Goodrich on Friday so we can safely park his car for free here at work over the weekend, and he can hitch a ride back with me to Boston. Always a fun time when he comes out..

I asked to be moved to a different program here at work… I’ve been bored for awhile, and I think I will have lots of interesting things to work on where I am going, so that should be a good thing. I just feel like I’ve been assigned to doomed project after doomed project, so it will be nice to work on something that isn’t so doomed.

Land of the Dead

Posted on by grahams

I have had fairly mixed results when picking horror films as the weekly selection for the Sunday Night Film Club, sometimes the turnout is good, but often it isn’t so good. So I’ve been avoiding picking horror films, but it was just too difficult to skip on Land of the Dead this week, so I threw caution to the wind and chose it anyway. We are seeing it tonight at 7:20pm, and I know , Audra, and myself will enjoy it, even if others don’t.

Around noon yesterday, and called us to ask if we wanted to go swimming at Adam’s parents’ house. After Corinna and I beat down our spontaneity avoidance circuitry, we said yes and asked them to pick us up (which had the combined effect of giving us 20 minutes to get ready as well as being able to drink and not worry about driving). We had a great time, along with the aforementioned people, we were joined by , Eric, Linda, Todd, and Katie O. We ended up swimming and some barbecue came to bear as well, and although we were originally planning on only sticking around until the early evening, we didn’t leave until 10pm.. It was a fantastic way to spend a ridiculously hot day. Unfortunately, this meant we missed the party at my coworker Brian’s house, but so it goes..

I have this project at work, which I had started working on a bit before I broke my leg. This project had a deadline of June 30th. This deadline was fixed, and couldn’t change even though I was out of commission for two months. What makes this worse is that nobody else worked on the project at all while I was gone. And I’m not talking about “no coding was done while I was gone”, I mean nobody worked on it.. I had questions out to program managers, image scientists, etc. when I left to go skiing that fateful weekend, and when I came back to work after convalescing nothing had changed, none of my questions had resolutions. It was pretty frustrating… Fast forward a month and change to today, and things are looking fairly OK, but mostly because I stopped waiting on those who were roadblocking me and just “got it done”. Of course, as soon as these individuals see the software I’m sure they are going to gripe and complain that it doesn’t meet the non-existent requirements. Fortunately for me, I’ve kept my boss in the loop of my frustration and have a nice set of “get me some fucking information” email to cover my ass.

Anyway, I employed the services of Tim, who has just returned to the company full-time after a co-op a year or so ago, to help me with some UI stuff just to get it done. We left friday with one outstanding configuration UI to finish, but it shouldn’t be a problem. In fact, I had one of those eureka moments after I got back from Adam’s last night, and quickly jotted down some notes that should help me thrash out this final bit in short time on Monday (after physical therapy, of course).