work

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.

We rock.

Posted on by grahams

From MSNBC:

Not only are satellites being called into action. Dispatched from Beale Air Force Base in California on September 1, a U-2 Dragonlady aircraft conducted a surveillance flyover of hard-hit areas due to Hurricane Katrina.

During a six-hour mission, the piloted U-2 put to use an Optical Bar Camera (OBC), hardware ideal for photographing very large areas with high resolution. The OBC, or film-based imagery equipment utilized, can collect imagery over 90,000 square nautical miles.

Film taken during the high-altitude run by the U-2 is in support of FEMA to assist in disaster relief efforts, according to a U.S. Air Force press statement.

From ACC:

Personnel at the 548th IG’s 9th Intelligence Squadron have processed more than 3.5 miles of Optical Bar Camera, OBC, film from U-2 aircraft missions to help aid FEMA and humanitarian relief efforts.

“The film covered approximately 130,000 square miles of area providing imagery of nearly all of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and parts of Florida and a few other states in the area,” said Lt. Col. Christopher Kubick, 9th Intelligence Squadron commander.

The squadron scanned and digitized more than 1000 images from the OBC film at USNORTHCOM’s request since operations began over areas ravaged by Hurricane Katrina last week, Colonel Kubick said.

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…

yawn

Posted on by grahams

I haven’t posted anything in forever…. Well, the past few weeks I have been to NJ, got into a small auto accident, seen DJ Z-Trip, and went to the CSH Welcome Back party… All of which probably merit more details, but I’m feeling
sorta lazy…

I spent all morning moving my stuff from one cube to another…. I’m getting comfortable in my new cube, but someone has to mount my whiteboard to the wall….

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).