travel

Turkey Weekend

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and I headed down to Jersey after work on Wednesday.. We waited until 6:30pm or so to avoid traffic, which worked, until we hit torrential rain in New York state. The traffic wasn’t bad, per se, but the rain really slowed us down. We arrived sometime around 11pm, and crashed pretty quickly. Thursday morning I woke up to the turkey preparations, which were already under way. This year, my parents had access to two kitchens, as our neighbors across the street were out of town and we were watching their house. This inspired my mom to pick up two 20lb. birds! This way we were able to feed 16 people with plenty of leftovers! Corinna prepared Alton’s Cranberry Dipping Sauce, which I was always curious about, and was awesome.

Friday was pretty crazy… Corinna and I were planning on traveling into Manhattan to visit her friends Sara and Dave. Corinna decided that she wanted to do something “touristy” in Manhattan, so she plotted out a window shopping route that would take us from the 33rd street PATH station up 5th to 60th St. This wasn’t something that I was terribly interested in, and expressed displeasure, but never really made it clear how little I wanted to do it… When we got there, Corinna witnessed the power of this fully armed and operational battle station. It was a total sea of people, we could barely move, and by the time we hit Rockefeller Center we gave up. We jumped on the subway to head down to Sara and Dave’s (down by the World Trade Center pit). The rest of the night was tons of fun, though, so we were able to erase the bad taste of Black Friday Retail Hell.

Saturday was ‘s birthday, so we mostly celebrated that, going out to the townie bar Tidal Wave to celebrate after cake. It was a really weird bar; They had a football game playing on the big screen and pool tables in the back, but they also had a DJ spinning the worst dance dreck of today. I also, somehow, ended up as DD, so I couldn’t even drink it away. :P

The trip home on Sunday sucked SOOOOOO badly… A normally 4 hour trip took 6.5 hours, and Corinna and I were ready to tear our eyes out by the end of it… I was so freakin’ crabby and just wanted to find somewhere to hide…

Today I had a physical, my first real physical in ages… Apparently I am still inexplicably healthy, although I will have to wait awhile for the cholesterol and other blood tests to come back. My blood pressure was still pretty good at 110/76… Obviously I have to lose some more weight, but my walking to work seems to be helping in that department.

Even if the terrorists don’t win, we still fuck it up

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Last weekend and I headed down to NJ… I was going to Wired NextFest to give a little support to , who was there representing Ensemble Robot. Corinna planned on heading into Manhattan with me so she could visit the NYPL as well as her college roommate and family. Friday night we drove down after work, me driving the whole way, Corinna watching 5 episodes of BSG as part of her massive catch-up effort. I made her watch the 4 hour miniseries the previous weekend, and in 8 days she made it through all of Season 1 and 2. We are going to have some people over this Friday to watch the terribly-named Webisodes as well as the Season 3 premiere. She’s an fracking junkie now.

Saturday, we parked in Hoboken and took the PATH up to 33rd. We grabbed a slice of mediocre pizza (Presto) and split up. I headed over to the Javits Center.. To be honest, NextFest was kind of a bummer.. There were some interesting things, but it really didn’t grab me… After seeing Gib’s panel discussion, I headed over to meet up with Corinna over at Sara & Dave’s place. They live down near Battery Park, so I took the opportunity to head over to the World Trade Center for the first time since 2001. It was really tough for me; I bounced back and forth between sadness and anger. I can’t believe it’s still a fucking hole in the ground. WTC7 has been completely rebuilt, but the crater looks like it hasn’t changed in ages.. I moped my way over to Sara & Dave’s, which gave me time to bounce back, and we hung out with those guys all night, eating some Indian food from Baluchi’s and catching up. We made it back to Hopatcong around 11am, and I passed out pretty quickly.

Sunday we hung out a bit for hitting the road.. Corinna plowed through another 5 episodes… She skipped out on the film club, but I headed over to Harvard Square to catch The Science of Sleep. It was enjoyable, but not great… I think Gael Garcia Bernal is overrated, and kind of annoys me, to be honest..

Warranty Fortune Smiles Upon Me

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I had a great time in Rochester for the CSH Welcome Back Party, but I think I might be skipping future Welcome Back parties… More and more of my friends are leaving Rochester, and I know fewer and fewer people who live at CSH. I think this realization comes to all alumni, but I guess I finally hit the sweet spot. It seems that each year I spend more time in Rochester catching up with my friends who are visiting from out of town, and less time doing anything with the house. It occured to us that if all we are going to do is hang out with each other, we can pick a place that’s a bit more fun than Rochester… :P This decision doesn’t effect Fucked Up Movie Night, however, so I still plan on being at CSH once or twice a year.. Of course, it’s very possible that next September I will change my mind and end up in Rochester anyway, so this could all be bullshit.

I have had great warranty luck lately… First off, Apple recalled both of the batteries I have for my Powerbook. This worked out fantastically, because I was just getting annoyed by the diminished capacity of the two recalled batteries. Around the same time, I got an email from Sirius saying that due to supply shortages, my warranty exchange on my Starmate Replay (for a scratchy 1/8″ audio jack) was being upgraded to a brand new Sportster 4, which is a much nicer radio. I got that in the mail the other day, the only sucky thing is that I have to send back all of the original equipment for the Starmate, so I had to rip out the old antenna and install the new. I had the Antenna wire hid very nicely through the trunk, and under the molding on the passenger side of the car, so I had to reproduce all of that again. Also, the Starmate ran on 12V DC so lopped off the lighter adaptor that came with it and hardwired it into the cars power inside the dash. I can’t exactly return that, and the new radio runs on 5V DC, so I will take some kind of hit on that..

and I have been trying to finish up all of the lingering projects around the house. She started staining the doors the other day, and I masked off the bathroom to finally prime and paint it. After it’s painted, the bathroom needs baseboard and door trim, and all of the old radiators still need to be painted. I want to finish all of the woodwork this weekend so we can finally clean up the apartment fully…

Chillaxin’

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Well, I am technically unemployed until Tuesday… :) My last few days at Goodrich were uneventful, everything went smoothly with the design review, and my last day came and went with little fanfare. I wasn’t very emotional leaving on Friday, I said goodbye to everyone and carried the last box of crap out to my car after turning in my badge. I felt good leaving, so I guess I made the right decision after all… :) I’m really looking forward to starting anew on Tuesday, so we’ll see how that goes.

Friday Night, Aaron was in town, so I hung out with him and Tim. They started at Goodrich as co-ops the same day I started working there, and Tim came back to work there full time after graduation. It was a strange bookending that Aaron just so happened to be in town on my last day at the company. Tim’s brother and another friend from RIT was in town, so we all grabbed dinner and drinks, meeting up with some other friends.. Saturday morning I headed down the NJ to spend the weekend with my Fam. I’m driving back to Boston Monday morning after lunch with an friend from Hopatcong High.

SIGGRAPH 2006 Electronic Theater

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Last night I attended the premiere of this year’s Electronic Theater at SIGGRAPH 2006. It was an expensive ticket, but it was a great time. My favorite shorts were “Doll Face”, “Carlitopolis”, “A Great Big Robot From Outer Space Ate My Homework”, “Growth by Aggregation 2 (the Utah variation)”, “Noggin”, “One Man Band”, and the Best of Show “One Rat Short” (which really deserved the accolades. I appreciated most of these films on both technical and creative merits… Most everything shown, however, was great, so I felt guilty picking the above as my “favorites”. Before the show they had this rig from Cinematrix that allowed the audience to play games on the big screen by holding up a red/green paddle. It was pretty wild, but the actual games were somewhat gimmicky. The best was a game of pong where the room split down the middle into teams and each side had to coordinate moving the paddle by showing the proper paddle color for up and down.

Another highlight of the show was seeing Sony’s new 4k digital theater projector. It was simply astonishing, no two ways about it. I think once Sony can actually make these projectors in quantity and start shipping them to theatres, there will be little argument left for mainstream theatres sticking to film projection. After the credits they did a little demo, showing two renderings of “Growth by Aggregation 2 (the Utah variation)”, one at 2k resolution and one at 4k, and the difference in detail was night and day. The Electronic Theatre itself was pretty impressive, given that it was just a large “ballroom” at the Boston Convention Center. They had a decent surround rig (although it seemed only a few of the shorts took advantage) and the seats were amazingly comfortable. Way better than I expected.

Yesterday was also my first experience with the new Silver Line subway service. For those not “in the know”, the Silver Line is actually a bus service, but with dedicated, (often) underground roads which avoid traffic. I wonder how the cost/benefit breakdown works for bus vs. train as far as subway goes, but the experience was pleasant. One annoyance is that the MBTA is currently in the midst of transitioning to their new automated fare collection system, CharlieTicket/CharlieCard (similar to the MetroCard in NYC). For instance, I have to use change/tokens to board the Green Line trains when they are above ground (like by our house), but once they go underground I can no longer use change/tokens, but instead have to use the new CharlieTickets (which don’t work above ground). It will be nice when the trains are upgraded to take the new cards so I don’t have to scrounge for change when I want to go down town.

Update: Holy shit, I forgot to give props to the short “Flow”, which was a highlight/demo reel of Scanline’s fluid simulations… It’s the best artificial water I’ve ever seen.

Buffer Zone

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Even though the weather wasn’t interested in cooperating, this weekend was fantastic. A bunch of friends from RIT descended upon scenic Lake Hopatcong this weekend for the now annual Summer Outing. This year we actually camped in the back yard, which was rather full (mostly due to my gigantic tent, though). It’s tough trying to figure out who to invite, etc… The boat provides a good upper cap to the number of people, I’d hate to have to leave people on shore because I over-extended… Heck, a few of the people we were expecting were unable to show. But I guess if we grow too much we can always rent a second boat.. :P

Anyway, it was a ton of fun, we boated, swam, caught a flick (Clerks II), and drank. Another highlight of the weekend was tooling around with Air Hogs, which several people purchased… They are neat little toys, makes me want to get a real R/C plane to compliment my helicopter. This was also the triumphant return of my Helicopter, which has been out of commission for awhile due to a bad crash.

Clerks II was fantastic, way, way, way better than I had expected.. Working long hours again this week to make up for Friday, which I am taking off for Stellafane 2006. Then I am going to hide in Boston for a few weekends to recover from all the recent travelling…

A tired morning entry

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A generally fun weekend… and I tidyed up the kitchen and started putting the shelves to use. They look even better populated than they did empty, I took some pictures; I try and get them up later today. We also installed some bifold doors in the closet near the bathroom, which was a bit of a chore.. Corinna thought it would be a simple job, perhaps puffed by the cabinet success last weekend, but I knew it couldn’t possibly go smoothly. We had to remove a shelf and shorten it by about two inches because it stuck out beyond the closet and the newly-installed doors were hitting it. Removing this shelf was a nightmare… There are also ~2″ gaps on either side of doors, which we had planned for and have wood to fill, but nothing is true in our apartment, so it is going to require some planing.

Sunday we went to Duxbury to swim in ‘s pool.. It was such a perfect day to spend in the water, we always have a great time out there, many thanks to Sir Adam.

The contractors are apparently going to start our bathroom renovations tomorrow, which is exciting… Even though they were supposed to give us 1.5 weeks notice, yet they called Corinna at 5pm on Friday saying they were starting Tuesday… So we had to have a mad scramble to get the tile and sink… On top of all that, I have to pad hours in the beginning of the week, as I am taking Friday off to go to Jersey for some boating with some of my friends..

Fun in Northern New Jersey

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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

Anniversaries out the Ass

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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…. :)