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Is is distressing how invisible my tiny white car is. Complicating matters is the fact that the horn is almost non-existent. Thus have I named the car "Squeakachu" because of the squeaky horn and the fact that it resembles a little white mouse. But since the car seems to suggest to other drivers that it violates the Pauli Exclusion Principle so go ahead and occupy the same space-time coordinates as me, I may need to beef it up into the Mouse that Roars. Or something.

I gave Rich his plates back today at lunch. This left me a stone's throw away from the hotdog wagon near tckma's place. Since I never made it during their operating hours and have found that wagon-based food is usually better than expected, I stopped by. I was underwhelmed. The dogs looked like regular ol' out of the package hot dogs, and the bag of chips was maybe 30% full (though that may be true for all bags of Wachusett chips). It was only $6 (I got chili dogs), but it was $6 for $4 worth of food. So I'm glad I never made a larger detour to stop by during their narrow operating hours, and I never need go again.

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In no particular order, I need to:

1. Finish coding project (though bigmusic is strangely silent)
2. Get volta's bike ready for him to ride it home
3. Get car inspected (oh yeah, I have a car) and oil changed
4. Put COBRA check in the mail
5. Pick up dry cleaning
6. Get bike to Crash's place in Acton (somehow, despite lacking my left footpeg) at a mutually amenable time so we can fix it
7. Apply for more jobs, and contact Cornell's career counseling center for any possible assistance
8. Get Rich his plates back, pick up spare key
9. E-mail Dean at Cornell, tell him my grades are in and ask what if anything I need to do to graduate

As plodding and as much of a hair-pulling experience as it's been, I'm going to miss the coding project when it's done. I will definitely need to figure out how to get more little (i.e., low-stress) side projects for pay in the future. The puzzle-solving aspect is definitely my favorite part. Will also have to work my way into an open source project, one where I can do both coding and documentation. Also, like, do my own projects and junk.

To that end, I want to:
A. Set up Ubuntu on the Dell laptop
B. Re-do How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python since it looks like a new edition with better examples.

Oh, and I'm totally driving down to NYC this weekend. Ping me!

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17.09 - for blackacre

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Okay, so I have a macbook now. librarian's old macbook, to be precise. I asked for free software recommendations here. Feel free to add anything to the discussion that you'd like.

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Friend Zone Graph

http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Friend_Zone

P.S. Comment to this thread and I will post a SCREENED REPLY letting you know where on the graph you fall.

ETA: Here is my wangsty "first journal entry" complaining about the great problem of "Just Friends." Loopdy, this is pertinent to our recent Vanessa conversation, in that she was the current object of my affections at the time. Behold the whinery!

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My surgery was June 29th. I haven't ridden my motorcycle since the last sunny day before that one. I anticipated there might be some problems with getting it started, but nothing like this.

Yesterday, the plan was to ride out to Moto Market in Acton to visit lionstar. She's covering the store while the owner is (supposed to be!) on vacation. I was going to work on one of the last two papers I need to finish in order to complete my Cornell degree (really for real this time, they have assured me). Problem? Bike won't start. Okay, it's been sitting. First, check the battery. Well, my plans to jump the bike were ruined by the rain (maybe it's perfectly safe to jump a battery in the rain, but I wasn't about to risk it). I also checked the tank and noticed it was a bit low on gas. So I took Becca's car and got fresh gas while the battery was charging. I added the fresh gas, some Seafoam and Techron, and let it sit overnight.

This morning, I had a freshly charged battery. Connected that to the bike, tried starting it, no good. Called motomuffin. She suggested I pull my air filter. Did. Still nothing. Called milktree. Like Kate, he thought the carbs might be bunged, but I had just had them cleaned right before my surgery. He suggested draining the carb (probably flooded). Bike started, but wouldn't run with even an ounce of throttle. He suggested running the engine with the petcock OFF til the old gas was out of the system, then try it with the petcock set to ON (so it would pull fresher gas than the reserve). Turns out my bike can run for a really long time with the petcock off. Or maybe that's related to what's wrong with the bike. Either way, the bike overheated. Radiator fluid coming out from various places, steam rising off the bike. I was on the left side of the bike, so I turned the key off first (HOT) then hit the kill switch. I let the bike cool down.

So while the bike was cooling, I cleaned up the antifreeze that had boiled over. Once the fan had cut out and the bike stopped smoking, I decided to check the tank to make sure the gas was not draining despite the petcock being OFF. But there was a hissing noise. The radiator, right? No.

Picture a geyser, at least double my height (over a dozen feet) of gasoline. Hot gasoline. Rocketing straight upwards as if it were being sprayed from a firehose. I ran as fast as I could, averting my eyes. The gas came sheeting down, in a wide enough circle that Becca's Scion was completely within the blast radius. I couldn't outrun it. Fortunately, I had the pitcher of ice water I had been drinking from in my hand. I popped open the top and doused my head. My face and neck were feeling hot (though more like a chemical burn than hot burn, if that makes sense). I doused myself with the last of the water and ran inside.

Figuring water and gas immiscible, I ran into the bathroom and grabbed a handful of liquid soap. I soaked my head in the shower (thinking of Dr. Roberts and the high school chem lab the whole time), then lathered up my face and neck in an attempt to get the (still burning) gas off of me. Rinsed once, realized I still had my shirt on, whipped my shirt off, and washed myself with soap again. Fun times. I'm starting to feel better by then, but who knows, with adrenaline and stuff. I figure I'll end up somewhere between mild sunburn and 1st degree at worst.

The landlord took his hose back last summer, so I had to borrow the neighbors. I washed off the driveway best I could, then hosed down Becca's car. At that point, I turned to her and said: "Becca, I'm *that* neighbor."

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I just woke up from the most awesomely realistic dream. I was a NASA employee, living and working on the moon in the early days of civilian colonization. There was only one city (domed, for your breathing convenience) with a smattering of businesses like you might expect in any modern frontier town. There was a gas station with convenience store, where the price of gas was a low, low $3.45/gallon thanks to government subsidy (the real cost of fuel would have been so exorbitant as to prohibit colonization, so it was incentivized).

We were stationed at the base, going over map and survey data, when the call came in. I think it was actually skreidle who gave me and my boss/mission commander the news. They'd found what could be best described as a cave on the surface of the moon, about an hour and a half's moon buggy ride away. It seemed by all appearances to be natural, which was odd, because to my knowledge caves are usually the result of erosion by the kind of natural forces which are absent on the moon. So my commander and I started planning to get out there ASAP. There was no decision; it was a foregone conclusion that we'd go see it in person. At least, that my boss would, since he was the commander. And since regs said no one goes out alone, I'd be going with him.

Here's where some of the most interesting (to me) elements of the realism came in. We had to figure out how much air and fuel we needed to get there. This meant calculating our route. And since we would be traveling on the on the surface, we had to examine topographical maps of all the territory between us and the site. Since it was in a pretty craterous area outside the mare or plain the colony was on, it turned out that the safest and most passable route was basically to travel due north and then dogleg east in an L shape. I was very acutely aware that if we'd just assumed a straight vector to the site we'd not only have run out of fuel and been stranded but also run out of air pretty quickly. It'd be nice just to take as much as possible at all times, but budget constraints and other practical matters limited that. For example, the more food and fuel you take with you, the worse your mileage. We were also limited on how much air we could carry in our tanks, and extra tanks were pretty heavy. So it was all about efficiency, and there was a certain finality about our calculations. We would live and die by the strength of our estimates. There was no protocol to follow; we were the first explorers. We were making the protocol.

I'd only been stationed there for a few short weeks. I remembered my transit to the moon. The in-flight entertainment was a worn and glitchy old copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I'd suggested, half jokingly, that they get a copy of that new movie... what was it... Moon? if it was out on DVD yet, but this was poorly received by my superiors. No, 2001, this beat-up old copy of it, was the tradition, and so it would stay. That aside, I'd integrated pretty well with the rest of the crew (important when stationed in a remote location with a small group). But I definitely remember being the junior man there, out of what I think was 8 low g-men. 2 were asleep, and would stay behind while the station ran itself, and the other four were at the cave site. I definitely felt pangs of jealousy at not having discovered the cave myself, but these were eclipsed by the shadow of the massive amount of work needed to prepare for our trip.

So now came the fun (and less realistic) part. I recall visualizing a two-man rover before some part of my brain went: MOON + DUNE BUGGIES = MOON BUGGIES! Soon, we were suited up and in these two little vehicles that resembled extreme offroad versions of shifter karts more than anything else. Small, maneuverable, and fast. The gas station was across from our building, so we pulled out, zipped across the main road dodging between the normal-sized traffic (incl. in my case an angry 18-wheeler as I struggled to keep up with my maniac hooligan boss who may or may not have resembled volta), and pulled in for the fuel stop. After we'd fueled up, we hit the convenience store and supplemented our rations with some energy bars (pretty much all you could get on the moon aside from freeze-dried meals due to the prohibitive cost of shipping fresh foods) and then set out, with our pedals to the metal, racing headlong towards the wall of the dome where the road ended and our adventure would begin.

Sadly, this is where I woke up. I feel like a tourist who says, "The pictures don't do it justice." I've tried and experienced a lot of things in dreams, but though I've been in space, I've never been on another world before. It really felt like I was on the moon, complete with lower gravity (affecting how we moved around) and the isolation that came with knowing you were the only civilization for hundreds of thousands of miles. I feel like I've come back from an amazing trip or something.

So long, Moon. I hardly knew ye. But I'll think back fondly on our time together, and maybe wave from time to time when I see you.

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I now have light in my garage. When my halogen light burned out its third bulb in a year, milktree suggested I get some cheap fluorescent fixtures from Home Depot. So I did. With a little help from Becca, I got them mounted in my garage and now I don't have to rage, rage against the dying of the light when working on my vehicles. Yep, I can do maintenance after dark.

[00:45] Eideteker is watching Cocoon
[00:45] Eideteker: for the Wilford Brimley, mainly
[00:45] trondant: did Wilford Brimley have teh diabeetus back then?
[00:45] Eideteker: He has always had the diabeetus
[00:46] Eideteker: He is one with the force of diabeetus in the universe

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I wonder if anyone has a tattoo that says "ON THA R." Props for unicode supported tatts that use ℝ.

I'm dealing with insomnia again. Pilotwings 64 seems to be losing its ability to relax me to sleep. The birdman free flight is still fun, though. I have insurance adjusters coming to look at the bike first thing in the morning (i.e., before 9am). It's fun to see what dreams can reveal to us. I spent several minutes in a dream trying to get my schedule straight with Becca. She's going away this weekend (Mother's Day) and I'm going away next weekend, then we have Memorial Day in NYC and my birthday in Vermont. It wasn't quite a lucid dream, but it was definitely productive. It's kind of funny; once you've been doing lucid dreaming for a bit, the whole OMG I AM LUCID OH WAIT NEVERMIND thing wears off. Then it just becomes "ok, shit is weird, probably dreaming, what can I get done?" and you forget about the whole HEY I CAN FLY and whatnot that usually ends up costing you your lucidity.

There's finally news on the Cornell front. I'm still looking to petition for my degree, but if the petition fails, I've got them to agree to letting me finish one incomplete before I am DONE. Graduated. Free. So after I have this insurance and accident stuff out of the way today, I'm going to set to work on that. Once I have my actual degree, I may be able to find a real job again. Whee.

I watched that Family Guy "Bird is the Word" episode like 4 times yesterday. Just the first half. It's fun watching someone else run something into the ground. Made me think how I have certain give-and-take with a few peeps. wimpdork and I have "Are you threatening me?" and "Do what now?" blackacre and I do Surfin Bird back and forth. And baka and I kit-bash old and busted memes into horrifying new states of unlife. Yes, we're still doing "All Your Base Are Belong to Us". Can't argue with the classics. But you can repeat them until they've lost all meaning, melting like some sick parody of a Dali painting. The Persistence of Clever, maybe? I JUST TOOK YOUR JOKE AND WENT POMO WITH IT. DECONSTRUCTIONIST, BABY, WHAT? DON'T BE POMOPHOBIC.

Ok, now I'm just making stuff up. HOW POSTMDOERN, EH? IYKWIMAITYDN!

PS: Solaris. Yum.

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I want this played at my bachelor party.

"You know what? It doesn't matter, because I love you so much that it's time for you to go to sleep."

"What? Are you kidding?! They're my best friends! That's why I married you, so I wouldn't have them anymore."

I've also said to Becca that I think my bachelor party should consist of a bunch of us dudes sitting around and watching John Carpenter movies. There are a bunch I haven't seen with vinz_klortho, and he's probably the best person to watch them with.

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