less radiation than a cross-country flight

New Theme

2007-05-31T20:25:05Z

So this lady at the santa fe ski area sorta explained the yellow equals thing to me as it being for equal rights for all people, everywhere. I assumed this was some sort of human rights/amnesty international thing. Being sorta contrarian to mistreated peoples abroad is something we can still do and be funny about. But it seems the lady at the ski hill had no idea what she was talking about in regards to her trendy little bumper sticker.

In no way did i want to come off as being somehow discriminatory with my cute little symbol. When i started playing around with the idea I thought it looked pretty cool on a t-shirt and that maybe i could leverage other people's confusion about the bumper sticker to sell some shirts.

!= is still cool looking, so i've changed the product line up a little.

Bang Equals

2007-05-31T05:03:06Z

How many times have you seen that square bumper sticker, be it on the back of a new audi A3 wagon, or the back of some old pick-up. What the fuck does it mean? Why do they have it?

Well get back at those fuckers with a yellow comparison operator of your own. Only not yet available in bumpersticker form, curses. Let people know that they and you, you're not the same while at the same time making them wonder just what the hell you're saying isn't equal.

Such a simple logo with nearly infinite meaning, order yours today and let the mass confusion continue.

pre/post 9/11 airports

2007-05-18T02:23:29Z

Nearly all airports were designed and built pre-9/11.

in pre-9/11, anyone could go to the gate area in airports if they went through the metal detectors like all the passengers, it was a boarding pass that got you on a plane. The one time in my life i flew alone pre-9/11, my folks went with me to the gate to see me off. That was 3 people sitting there for 1 traveler. This had to have happened millions of times a day, people seeing friends and family off right there at the gate.

Today, there's hardly ever anywhere to sit in most gate-areas at airports. take albuquerque for example, the seating for the gates is pathetic, especially when multiple neighboring gates are waiting for planes to come in or take of at similar times which happens more often than you'd think for some reason.

So if there's no where to sit today in our post-9/11 travelers-only airports, where in the hell did people sit in the pre-9/11 airports?

Seriously, where? I really want to know.

Pharmacological Study 2

2007-05-08T13:19:14Z

Since i use this stuff on a regular basis for concentration and mood enhancement, I'm starting to think I can't use it to stay up all night.

So Yesterday at 7:30pm, 12 hours after my morning 100mg dose, I took a full 200mg dose, figuring I'd keep the party rolling all night with a super charged dose. I then went to the gym though and sorta put in a hard workout. I really need to be more scientific about this and not change so many variables. In an attempt to trick myself into being able to stay up, i had virtually every light on in my apartment. I had recently bought some bright-assed halogen bulbs for my lamps in my living room and had them cranked.

Anyhow, I was really tired at 1am. I was trying to do homework, paper summaries, and I would literally read a sentence on the end of one page, flip to the next page, and not remember (in a meaningful way) what it was that I had just read. Not good. I also found my self zoning out a lot, like mid paragraph. The last time I remember it being that bad was a long time ago, like, when i was little.

I went to bed at a little past one. It took a while to actually fall asleep. My heart was pounding really hard. I'm gonna blame that on the provigil and the fact i was on twice what I'm normally on. It's weird though that it almost had no effect on keeping me awake. 1am? I mean, I can stay up till 1 pretty easily on my own. What the hell.

I think I'm just too used to sleep. This is sort of a sad realization. This means I have to be responsible with my time in the future and not put stuff off till the last minute. I sorta liked the idea of being a last-minute machine that was unstoppable.

Well there you have it, I think i'm gonna stop trying to stay up all night with this stuff. If a double dose taken before the first does has even begun to wear off can't do anything, I don't know what to do, aside from not try to stay up all night by taking it.

The sucky thing is, I was gonna do a lot of homework, and in the event I got bored with that, I was gonna put in some quality time video gaming.

Pharmacological experiments and stuff

2007-05-02T04:31:19Z

I now have a data point that says if i take a second dose 17 hours after the first dose, it probably won't work out that well and totally wreck me for the next day. So while the last 22 hours has sucked, it's been educational. I ended up only sleeping for 4 or so hours, from 5am to 9am, or 9:30 i guess. took me a while to get out of bed though.

I actually got my second wind around 5pm tonight and stopped being hella tired. Which was good, as i had ridden my motorcycle into work right before lunch (i took a half day of sick) when i was feeling ok, then i crashed for a while but came back around.

I like knowing the oil in my bike is new. I don't feel bad now hauling ass, which makes riding my motorcycle all the more enjoyable. I managed to not get rained on very much on my way home tonight. Just a little coming down the truck route. I probably set a record for the shortest time in getting home. i was trying to time my trip so that i'd miss most if not all of the rain and i wanted to keep ahead of stuff.

I should really pull the spark plugs out and see if they don't need replacing, and maybe get a new air filter.

I think in a week or two i'm gonna try the all nighter experiment again, but this next time the second dose will come 12 hours after the first, so i can keep a descent level built up in my system.

For Science, part... umm, C?

2007-05-01T11:02:07Z

So, something's not working here. I'm dragging ass. I'm gonna go take a nap i guess.

For Science, Update 1

2007-05-01T09:48:31Z

I took some Aleve when i got home to help with the shitty way i was feeling. It seems to have helped. I don't feel as sleepy as i did during my first post this morning. I get these moments of "oh man, i should go to bed" sorts of tiredness, but its pretty easy to shrug those off. I should try this experiment again but take the second 100mg dose 12 hours after the first, i can tell i waited to long and now my Circadian rhythm is all effed up. I think in 4 more hours It'll go back on track, when the sun comes up and everything.

As far as being able to study all night goes, I'm about to get down to some homework and see what i can really do. I remember being at least this tired if not more so during late night study sessions in college, and i wasn't all hopped up on something then either, it was just pizza and mountain dew.

give that its now a quarter to 4am, and i'm not half asleep and all droopy-eyed and wishing to god i was asleep, i think it's a safe assumption that this stuff works better than not using it at all.

For Science!

2007-05-01T08:01:26Z

So I have a prescription to a really bitching stimulant. The french military did some tests with it at one point i guess, they could keep helicopter pilots alert and functioning normally for like 88 hours straight on a couple hundred milligrams spread out over that time. I've only been taking like 100mg a day. I took it for a while before my anti depressant built up in my system because this stuff works instantly. Anyhow, this is the stuff i wish i had in undergrad, when i needed to pull an all-nighter. it's like speed with out any of the nasty side effects, like your heart exploding or whatever. It's not even amphetamine derived like most stimulants. It's totally different.

So tonight we went and saw mc frontalot in albuquerque. the show rocked, but didn't end till 11. we were gonna hit the frontier before heading home and i really need to do laundry and stuff tonight still. So i decided it would be a fine time to take another 100mg in place of sleeping. The problem is, i think i waited too long since my first dose this morning. The half life of this stuff is like 15 hours, i think had i taken it right at that point, i could have kept the wave of alertness going, but i let it dip too low and now i'm yawning and all tired and shit. So i might be totally wrecked come morning. I should have taken that 100mg before we went into the concert. oh well.

Dave and i agreed that i need to try pulling an all nighter with this stuff before i try to do it when i return to college this fall. Undoubtedly I'll slack or put something off or need the extra time before a due date and I need to know that this stuff will actually keep me awake in a normal fashion.

I'm just worried I'll be really bored by like 4 or 5 am. Dave pointed out that that's what books are for, and we do have an assignment I could be working on for school.

Fuck, it's 2am, 5 hours to go before I would have gotten up anyhow. I really hope the stuff i took just under 2 hours ago kicks in soon so i can stop feeling tired.

To Laundry!

New camera

2007-04-08T20:41:40Z

Dear faithful readers of my journal, I am in need of a new camera. My old camera chews through the AAs like no body's business, and the pictures it takes aren't even that great. It's a 3.1Mpixel Sony. I'm not too attached to the memory stick format as i've only ever owned 2 sticks, a 16mb that came with the camera and a 128 that I bought when i bought the camera.

I have 3 requirements, relatively small, good battery life (i don't care if it's AAs or some proprietary form factor as long as it's good), and has the ability to correct for an unsteady hand. I was looking back at an early batch of pictures i took with the camera and most turned out like shit. Even now they turn out like shit if conditions aren't just right.

Anyone got any recommendations? I haven't done a lot of research because this stuff changes weekly but website reviews don't keep up. The Cannon Elph was a good sized camera that I had heard good things about. I don't think they make it, or name it that anymore, and i'm not sure how the battery life was or if it took a sharp picture in spite of the operator.

My price range is like sub $400. But if there's an undervalued model somewhere that someone knows about for $169 or whatever, i wouldn't rule it out.

So give forth, oh wise Internet, what do you recommend.

UPDATE:
I bought the powershot sd1000, which is in the elph form factor i'm into, and was only $258 on amazon. I sprung for a 2GB highspeed SD card to go with it. All in all, it will be less than my 3.1Mp camera and the 128MB stick back in 2003 (yeah, i realize 4 years will do that technology).

300

2007-03-18T03:03:33Z

300 was an excellent movie. It's a dude movie, lots of biology 101 quality cross sections during the battle scenes. But what would you expect from a movie with it's title written in blood and is rated R? There are some nice breasts in the movie as well, natural. The cinematography was really well done as well. In all I found it to be a great movie.

There were several little kids in attendance at the movie. Who brings their 10, 7, 3 year old kid to a movie that's rated R and whose title is written in blood? And you know, has been advertised as a movie about a group of warriors fighting. There were kids behind us laughing at every breast on screen, little kids asking for popcorn as the title fades away. I normally don't want to question how people raise their kids, but seriously, baby sitters were invented so you can go to a rated R movie with your significant other. When i was little i had a hard enough time with scary previews, I couldn't imagine being brought to a movie with very graphic, very realistic dismemberment scenes at age 7.

I really wanted to stop some parents and ask them what the fuck was wrong with them. And that was before the movie started.

Anyhow, the movie was good, my faith in humanity has been weakened.

Where have all the clustering live CDs gone?

2007-03-10T04:56:00Z

A couple of years ago, everyone and their mom was making their own live CDs, normally with knoppix as the starting point. Live clustering CDs got some press, a bunch of people got together in some gym somewhere a couple of years ago and all booted the same Live CD and ended up with a "super computer" that wasn't really impressive from a performance stand point, but from a "a bunch of people showed up with laptops and desktops and we ran a job or two across all of them" stand point, it was neat.

Mosix, or open mosix anyhow, had an RPM a couple of years ago that allowed you to install that RPM on a bunch of redhad boxes and after a reboot and some config file modifications, bam, you had a neat little cluster that you could run lots of processes on, and they'd be pushed out to idle nodes.

Regular Mosix has some weird license that lets educational institutions and research facilities use the userland tool set for free, but they charge commercial entities 1000 bucks for the first 10 systems and 50 bucks a system thereafter.

I've been wanting to build a cluster along the mosix lines at work. Something dead simple that allows me to run a bunch of processes on. I don't want to write parallel applications, because most of the stuff i want to do zero data dependancy. And it's normally just a while loop i want done faster. Xargs has made this super simple with the -P flag in a lot of cases.

Open mosix has some gpled tools, the kernel patch for mosix support is gpled in either case.

Where in the hell are the live CDs though? For that matter, where in the hell is the 2.6 kernel support? I don't want to have to install an OS on each machine that I may end up doing this with. There were a couple of live CDs that claim to turn the machine booted from the CD into a server that would support pxe booting from other clients, it already had images ready to go. Now that's what I'm talking about. Sadly that project seemed to die like 2 or 3 years ago. Most of these clustering live cds seemed to have died that long ago. I'm sure the isos can still be downloaded, but i haven't explored that and i fear the age of the packages and stuff and the continued lack of updates.

Where's my ubuntu CD that allows me to install one sort of master server, and apt-get install clustering-made-easy or something. The lab, or even just my group, has a lot of hardware slated to be salvaged that could really be use for something like this.

The art of shell scripting

2007-03-07T05:07:35Z

as i've progressed through my journey as a computer scientist, i've had many perceptions about the art. At first i thought anything could be done with C (which, you know, is technically true). Then i thought anything could be done in C++ in a more sane way then C (you can tell i didn't really explore languages outside of what we were being forced to learn). My only real experience before college with languages were basic and perl. I thought that producing something meaningful was dependent to the difficulty of the language.

That thought processes finally ended and as i was discussing with neale today at work. The more stuff i end up writing for work, the more i turn to bash scripts first. If i have to do something that isn't easily done in bash, i turn to python. If i can't get it to work the way i want in python (at this point, it's usually a performance issue) i get neale to write me a python module in C.

In that sense i feel that getting something to work properly, actually getting something done, is like a martial arts film. In crouching tiger, hidden dragon, that dude totally took the chick to town using a branch when she had the green destiny. Effortlessly.

I think every language has it's utility. But there's something so elegant about a system of simple commands strung together with an easy syntax. Unix was pretty well thought out, what with the philosophy of doing one thing really well.

fuck!

2007-03-06T04:49:24Z

I've known for a while, deep down, that the mac wasn't case sensitive. I knew it, because one time i didn't tab complete a path, but i didn't type it right either, it was like /users, not /Users. I knew how it worked i just didn't realize there was a term for it, "case preserving." if you 'touch skank' and then touch 'SkAnK' you only end up with skank, the second command just touched the first file.

But my mac runs unix! or so I screamed in my thoughts today, reading the cvs error, complaining that Index.html was in the way of index.html. I looked to the server initially, asking the guy who maintains it to look at the directory, but both files were in there. These weren't my files, they were someone else's in our team's repository. cvs on the command line didn't seem to care when i updated, although it did, it just flashed by so fast i never saw it. It wasn't a fatal error, i just wasn't ever getting the second file. So how'd this come about? Eclipse. Eclipse is pretty neat. It's probably like emacs for a gui age. Only with a gui i don't have to know what the hell a meta key is; is it alt? ctrl? just tell me! Eclipse is all sexy with plugins and syntax highlighting and repository tie-ins. I love vim... sorta, if i were a better man i'd rewrite vim to not suck, but that's not here or there. I like using eclipse and i'm getting into it (and i don't even write any java, just python and bash scripts and LaTeX).

Eclipse would freak out about this damn index.html case conflict. And i can't tell it to not worry about it, or skip that subdirectory. I get this big dialog box every time i update, or commit to the repository.

Right, so the problem isn't eclipse's fault, it's the Mac's fault. No one remembers if they had the choice of selecting the case sensitive file system when they installed their mac fresh. I googled a bit this afternoon and while nothing said out right "yes you can with 10.4" or "no you can't with 10.4" it seems that up through 10.3, you couldn't have the boot partition be a case sensitive file system. so what, do i have to make a little disk image with the right file system and do my work in that?

I don't feel that having file names that only differ by case is necessarily a good idea, and in the year and a half i've had my mac it's never come up. I normally will make a skank2, or skank3, or whatever [for those that can't tell, i default to skank in place of foo, or bar, or whatever ancient gayness has been passed down through the ages in CS, although i do end up using foo and bar if i need more than one name]. The file's belonged to this cool old guy at work who hates macs, he even has one and he hates it, and i knew if i asked him to not have 2 files with the same name differing only by case that he'd flip out, and rightfully so. Case sensitivity is something any real computer should have, and if you don't like it, you're not using a real computer.

So that's my story. I'm really saddened by this. If anyone knows or has a link to some proof that there is a way to make my mac case sensitive, that'd be super. I'm not gonna reinstall with linux or anything insane, i don't know what i'm going to do.

old people and instant messaging

2007-02-28T07:38:03Z

I have two great-aunts that, when they're about to finish up their business and sign off, will tell me that they're about to head out, and then sorta sign their last message before disconnecting.

for instance "I'm off to bed, have a good night. Auntie Alice" I just think it's funny that they consider IM to be more of a written medium such as a normal letter and they they treat it as such, where as i think of IM as more of a text based phone call, or even more casual than a phone call. Either way, I know who i've been talking to so the 'signature' part gets me every time.

racing

2007-02-19T05:25:40Z

Racing is lame. Like, Nascar, or anything that restricts the field such that it's just about the skill of the drivers.

Why? If it's just about the skill of the drivers, lets sit them down in a big arcade, and have them race it out that way. No fuel tanks, no tire-wear, no pit stops, just drivers racing laps. Aside from the possibility of these guys dying and spectators being blood-thirsty savages, that's how mundane the 'sport' is becoming.

Restrictor plates? innovation being "too competitive?" what the fuck? It's been said these restrictions are necessary to keep the drivers safe. Cars running 220mph around the track would probably kill the drivers.

In nascar, i think you get the choice of a couple approved body shells to put your headlight and grill stickers on, and i know that nascar has one manufacturer make all the engines and the team's aren't allowed to even check the timing.

There is another dangerous profession where the person is being removed from the seat, and that's pilot. UAVs keep pilots safe by keeping them thousands of miles away.

There are two possibilities i see here to make racing interesting again. Take the person out of the car and put them in a little cockpit somewhere else at the track, or, you take the person out of the car and you put the best AI money can buy in the car.

the darpa grand challenge required all sorts of obstacles to be navigated. Racing requires 3+ left turns (in nascar anyhow). Yes it's a gross over-simplification, but turning left, right, optimizing speed and avoiding other cars can't be any harder than avoiding barriers, traversing dirt roads and driving through tunnels.

And that's the thing, innovation is being stifled in racing right now. Audi puts a deseil engine in a race car at la mans and now the rules are being changed next year because they did too well.

Racing, in the past, produced great innovations that eventually made it's way into cars. Lets get back to that, where are the hybrid race cars with big capacitors that charge as they enter the corner and the electric motors used to shoot them out the other side?

if we go with autonomous race cars, there would be all sorts of advances in automated driving. Money would be poured into these endeavors, more than a couple million darpa comes up with, more than the research institutions can raise to compete in a darpa event.

It would be like battle bots, only at 250mph.

If i had crazy amounts of money, i'd totally try to start something like this. Some sort no limits, autonomous racing. Nothing new is ever going to come out of cookie-cutter racing.

not so deep thoughts from someone who can't sleep

2007-02-18T08:19:21Z

The final track on the Offspring's Smash album has 5 parts to it. There's the song one hears from the start of the track to a couple minutes in. There's the guy who you hear in track one bringing the album to a close. And then there's the third part.

The third part, after listening to the whole album straight, sounds a lot like the music that would be played after beating the game. That is, if this CD were a game, this third part - which is just an instrumental piece of a different song on the CD played in a more subtle style, would be playing as the credits scrolled by and you breathe a sigh of relief and realize you just spent the better part of your weekend button mashing.

I really like it though. Maybe i just like beating video games, but after listening to the CD from start to finish, this little instrumental section does sort of convey the sensation of an accomplishment just by the mood it has, not unlike credit music in video games.

I first got this CD when I turned 13, I'm not entirely sure I'd even beat any video games aside from Contra at this point (no, i hadn't beaten super mario bros yet), I wasn't to familiar with end-game credits/music. But then again 12 years ago, video games were just a waste of time, and not some piece of culture to be studied. I was also 13, who the hell notices this kind of thing at that age. Moral of the story: I re-bought this CD this week (my original copy has long since been scratched, taken and destroyed), and when I got to that part, it was just a funny realization.

The last 2 parts of this track are several minutes of silence, and then the riff from the keep 'em separated song sorta done in a weird Egyptian/Middle-eastern sort of style. Again, no vocals. I could probably do without them.

Politically Incorrect and highly offensive

2007-02-14T01:20:20Z

When someone is retarded, often their cognitive levels are likened to that of a child.

Does this mean children are retarded?

I came up with that on my own, but I wouldn't doubt it if a much more clever comedian hasn't already asked this question.

ubuntu edgy 6.10 gaim no audio fix

2007-02-13T05:51:43Z

A couple of weeks ago, audio quit working on my edgy install of gaim. I'm not all that thrilled that edgy uses beta versions of gaim and firefox and whatnot, i mean, i keep up to date, but i just wish they updated the betas as the betas are updated, and not leave us with crap versions.

Anyhow, I tried using the aplay %s option to play audio, it works on the command line, why wouldn't it work in gaim. Then again, all other audio works except gaim.

as it turns out, in the prefs.xml in my home directory's .gaim dir, there's this "mute" option down around all the sound options. Everything else in that section has some checkbox, or drop down in the GUI preferences panel, but not fucking mute! Mine was set to 1. Once i changed it to 0 and restarted gaim for good measure i once again had audio. FUCKING REMARKABLE.

How did this mute setting get set? Beats the hell out of me, i've googled for "ubuntu edgy gaim no sound" like a dozen times before tonight and no one seems to have had this problem.

Edgy sorta pisses me off in general though, it does network management for shit compared to 6.06. it doesn't want to save locations, or, you know, detect wireless access points or anything. 6.06 worked within acceptable levels of annoyance given it's not a mac. 6.10's answer to networking is like 3 steps back. I wonder of kubuntu users have to put up with this shit.

cybergeak @ 2007-02-12T09:52:00

2007-02-12T16:52:18Z

i slept for shit last night, but i'm not really tired today, i wasn't really tired when i went to bed.

this morning i've had all sorts of random songs going through my head, i find myself whistling them, or humming them. Recently i just had elvis singing viva las vegas, but this morning when i was eating breakfast it was metallica's unforgiven 2, or II, or too, whatever...

It's weird though, i have days like these once every couple of months and i have no explanation for them at all.

Implicit parallelism in shell scripting

2007-02-12T02:30:31Z

At work, I needed to post-process somewhere in the neighborhood of 8700 files. Each file is in the neighborhood of 40megs to 100+megs. They all live out in NFS somewhere. There was some technical difficulty with that somewhere earlier this week. it kept dying. After some tweaks to the server, my machine, and the script that does the processing, it's worked like a champ ever since.

The machine I'm running my script on has 4 processors and lots of ram. I sorta wanted to run 4 files at a time, what with the 4 processors.

I got to thinking that it would be cool if bash, or whatever your shell may be, i like bash, i was thinking it would be cool if you could set PROCS=(number of procs) and then when you run for i in *; do whatever; done, it would bust that loop up and run your 'whatever' by the number of processors you specified in PROCS. I mean, very little of what people do on the command line, or even in scripts they bother to save in a file, there's not a lot of data dependence. People could just as easily run and background a bunch of loops for as many processors they have, right? The only problem you might run into is if your script appends to a file, or prints to stdout/stderr, you'll have to have a semaphore or something for the stdout/stderr and you'll just have to pull your head out of your ass and not append to 1 file.

So; plan A would have been to hack up bash and alter the for loop code to parallelify the code. Plan B was to write a python script to do it up for me. Which i did. you gave it a lot of command line arguments, the number of threads to run, the command to be run, and then a list of all the crap you'd be passing to your command. It worked! It's not super elegant, it's just a wrapper to dole out the argument list to threads that execute the command with the argument. i called it p4.py, you know: parallel for-loop.

Anyhow, It turns out p4 suffered from the too many args problem xargs was used to solve. I could have implemented a stdin reader for the args, the same way xargs does. But i discovered i didn't need to. In ubuntu at least, xargs has a -P option, where you give it the number of processes to run, and it takes care of what i wrote p4 to do in the first place. The mac doesn't seem to have that option, at least my g4 is lacking it.

So, that's my lesson of the day. If you have lots of processors, or lots of processes that sit around waiting, you can run your jobs in parallel with xargs! you know, provided your jobs won't step on each others toes. I guess there are other utilities that do this as well, but i mean, xargs man, why go anywhere else?

Zoos

2007-02-10T06:38:21Z

Phoenix has a zoo. My parents and I went to it last Saturday in the morning. We start off in this little stub of the zoo with indigenous animals i guess. It had coyotes and a bobcat and wolfs and stuff. The bobcat had to have been a 30lb animal. My parents have normal house cats and they have several thousand square feet to roam around in, with furniture and what not to play around. This bobcat had maybe 100 sq ft and nothing so much in the way of 'stuff' in that area. It was alone and I really felt sorry for it.

The coyotes had this really small plot of land, there were a couple of them, i dunno if they were all the same sex or not, but the yard-size plot of area they inhabited was pathetic. They still marked out their territory on a daily basis, you could see the little path between the bushes and stuff. They looked miserable.

This was the first 10 minutes.

It's strange though, typical zoo animals didn't invoke similar thoughts. Like, giraffes, or monkeys, or even zebras. A zebra is really just a horse, so it's weird I didn't think about the size of the area the zebras got. Maybe it's just because they're more zoo-like, and I've grown up with this notion that there are certain animals in 'the zoo' and a zebra is just one of them.

The Phoenix Zoo is also like 2 miles from the air port. A plane took off literally every minute the whole freaking time we were there. And it was pretty loud. Not just some background noise that the wind could cover up. It was audible over just about everything.

The tigers and lions had super tiny areas... you know, considering the area they might otherwise live in normally, in nature.

Sadly, Zoos function as a sanctuary against death for some animals, and i understand that. For some animals, the alternative to sitting around, listening to airplanes day in and day out, not really doing anything is better than death, but how much better?

I sorta wish there was a better way to do zoos.

rejection and the phoenix airport

2007-02-02T20:36:18Z

SO.... I applied to UCSD back in December. Of all the schools i've ever applied to, UCSD is the first one I ever actually wanted to get into. When i went to undergrad i didn't want to go to state really, i just didn't have the energy too look around, i was depressed and didn't care and i knew SCSU would take me based solely on my ACT score. They had normal admissions, but at the time they had this clause where if you scored 25 or better they'll take you with out looking at anything else.

So, based on the subject, you might guess that i've been rejected from UCSD. I mean, i think their acceptance rate is 10% or something, and they get a gillion applicants a year. But i sorta thought my eclictic history would have stood me out in a good way. Apparently not. So that sucks, the U of M was sort of my plan A.2, but i'm not gonna go there unless i get some sort of funding. I was willing to float my education at UCSD on loans if i really couldn't get anything, because i did want to go there, but if the U of M doesn't pony up for me, then I'm not going. It's minnesota after all, cold in the winter, hot and humid in the summer. Shit man, why would i run back to that AND build up all sorts of debt.

I feel a little trapped in life at the moment. At first i wanted to do the japan thing, where i'd teach english there, they'd pay enough for me to live on and i'd expand as a person, learn a language, etc. I fucked that up and didn't get half the shit ready in time. I still had the grad school options, but i only applied to 2 and now one has rejected me and the other one i'm not crazy about. They too will probably end up rejecting me.

So then what? I've joked about becoming a hipster and moving to denver. But i dunno, that seems pretty lame. I feel like i've been regulated to averageness. I'm just suppose to move off into the suburbs somewhere, buy a house and be that guy. i mean, most everyone ends up that way in life. with the house and the marriage and the kids. I'm just not ready for that, I don't know if i ever will be. i had hoped i could have done grad school for a while, try to find something bigger and better there.

I guess my problem is that i'm not willing, or able, or something, to apply myself to anything.

moving on.

this stream of consciousness is brought to you by the phoenix airport. I'm here, waiting for my parents to land. they should touch down in 15 minutes or so. we're here to see the minnesota wild play the phoenix coyotes. It was my dad's idea. to celebrate being 100% debt free i guess. He bought some insane tickets. row 12 behind the coyotes' bench. i think each one was just about what it cost me to fly here and back. i'm told there's a former scsu player for the wild. I'm wearing my scsu jersey.

the airport here is sort of a dump i think. i mean, it was designed before 9/11 and converting it to a post 9/11 airport hasn't been eligant. it's spread out over a couple of terminals and within each terminal they have several security check points. no single point of entry. boggles the mind.

sitting here in the airport i've heard sales people talking to each other. god, what a horrible profession to pursue. it sounds neither easy or honest. it's the honest thing that bothers me more. they're all very smarmy or something, like "i was captain of the football team and i'm overly confident about everything." i really hate that.

if phoenix is anything like this air port though, i'm gonna just say that this town is a dump.

well my folks should be here, time to pack it up

Ski areas

2007-01-27T04:03:52Z

In Minnesota, just outside of St. Cloud, Powder Ridge is the place to go skiing/snowboarding. My first time there, i thought it was a pretty good size. I mean, they had real ski lifts!

Santa Fe ski area is HUGE by comparison, and i'm told its average-sized at best among actual mountain ski resorts.

So, by comparison, Santa fe is like 660 acres, powder ridge is 60. santa fe has 1700 vertical feet from top to bottom, powerder ridge has just under 300ft.

I only ever did powder ridge once. I had no idea what I was doing, thus it seemed daunting.

I was up at santa fe today, it was awesome. i suck a lot less these days.

Oh, one thing you don't get at PR, at 12,000 feet above sea level, you get some great fucking views of like half the state. The only thing PR has that a real resort doesn't is lighting. after all, it's pretty easy to light up 60 acres that are in your full control. it's a little more challenging/expensive to light up half a mountain.

not to brag, just to give the folks back in MN an idea of what it is i live 30 minutes from.

bored

2007-01-20T08:25:15Z

I never feel right playing video games when i have nothing else going on. It makes very little sense on the surface. It stems from the fact that i probably would like to be more social and have shit to do and people to hang out with on nights that sort of stuff would normally happen. I never have anything to do on a friday or saturday night, in fact, i had forgotten that people tend to go out and be social on those nights for the past couple of months.

It's not that i don't have friends, i just don't have many, and they don't stay up late or like being particularly social. When these folks don't want to hang out, i'm left high and dry.

I almost wish i didn't have time to play video games, you know, because people wanted to hang out. I sorta feel like video games are candy these days. If i couldn't ever get any candy and just had to eat normal food, i'd eventually miss candy. If i lived in a candy store and never had to eat normal food, it'd be awesome for the first couple of hours, and then the chocolate flavored puke would eventually happen and i'd wish i could get a bowl of chicken noodle soup and milk or something. Believe me, i've ODed on enough chocolate/candy enough times in my life to know.

This is the worst part about living here. My excess free time.

hard working tax dollars and thoughts on chicago

2007-01-16T16:57:35Z

yeah, i'm at work right now, what are you gonna do about it?

So i went to chicago this weekend to visit ziad. On the flight there, i sat next to a cute girl, she was from albuquerque and going to school in ohio for spanish but wants to go into pre-med. I think we all see the irony of moving to ohio to learn spanish when one came from new mexico. She read and had an ipod for the majority of the flight, i had my DS and laptop. In the end i wish i had business cards or something, so we could have exchanged numbers. I didn't even ask for her number though because i didn't want to ruin the "nice" time we had by making it awkward. What's worse is, the best i could have said would have been "say, why don't you give me a call when you're back for the summer." which i guess isn't the worst thing in the world, but it seemed sorta lame to have this time-delayed thing going on. sorta like, hey, don't hit on me till x-mas, or something.

Traveling always shows me just how many ladies there really are in the world. It started with this girl on the plane and only got better (or worse?) from there. Almost every 5 minutes while out and about in chicago i'd see a girl i wanted to go talk to. Seriously, I was having like 12 micro-crushes an hour. Really cute, well dressed girls in down town chicago. I only see a girl i'd like to talk to maybe once a week in new mexico, maybe more if i go to albuquerque, but not much more.

chicago was pretty fun otherwise, we did a lot of walking and stuff, public transportation. we hit up white castle, that sucked. i don't remember the last time i had white castle and i was expecting it to actually be good for some reason. it was not. but i guess that's part of the appeal... somehow...

Public transportation is fun, but it didn't seem as fun as it was in new york, but maybe that's because it was cold and shitty out in the first place.