This weekend is shaping up to be a full one. Six points music festival is going on, but my money is going to the 9:30 Club to see DTB again. I hear they have a whole new setlist and a new CD, so that should be a good change of pace. On top of that: apartment shopping, batting practice, guitar lesson, baking, yardwork, etc. w00t.
++Readings
A great companion to High Fidelity, I just started reading Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman. This is a collection of hilarious essays deconstructing pop culture and its many important implications for us as human beings. Think of it as an embittered yet philosophical X-Entertainment.
I picked this book up because of the title, obviously, but I took it home because a scan of the book found an entire chapter dedicated to “Saved By The Bell.” I’m not sure why I watched this particular bit of inane zeitgeist twice every afternoon after school, except perhaps, as Klosterman says, “because it was on TV.” But there were always lessons to be learned in the glib storylines, such as when Zack Morris bought securities on margin (Screech: “on margarine”) using Miss Bliss’s brokerage account (Lesson: buy low sell high), or the time when Zack beat Jessie on the SATs, scoring 1502 (Lessons: don’t judge a book by its cover and you can somehow get two extra points on the SATs). And people said TV has no value.
Anyhow, the book had me laughing out loud on the bus, so it gets my high recommendation. Unless you’re a hater.
Kites flown
Saturday was perfect weather for the 40th Annual Smithonian Kite Festival. AC and I relived our youth on the Washington Monument grounds, getting my pair of kites up into the air with various levels of success. AC proved superior at piloting, managing to get the hard-to-fly spinning diamond to the end of its tether, 150 feet up, and the froggy kite to somewhere in the 200 ft. range. Unlike our Pakistani counterparts, for whom kites are apparently illegal, we tangled lines with other freedom-loving fliers sporting dragonflies, airplanes, fish, monkeys, boxes, rings, and multifarious other shapes. Much fun was had.
After lunch, we strolled over to the Sackler museum where they are currently hosting a Hokusai exhibit. You might recognize the “Great Wave” (left) from the cover of half a dozen computer science books. If you do, then you are a nerd. Just saying. Yeah, I am.
Mason in the Final Four? Are you kidding me? The ACC sucks.
Blessed Beef
Those who have seen the recorded programs list on my DVR or have seen me in a kitchen store probably know that I am one of the many food geeks who worships upon the altar of the great foodsmith AB. Nice new website, Alton, but I miss the blog. So last weekend, thanks to my wonderful birthday gift of a food processor, I made a pilgrimage to the temple of taste: I built the Burger of The Gods. This Good Eats recipe is pretty simple: a pound of meat, a dash of salt, add fire. But the inventive part is that you start with a couple of steaks, and grind the meat yourself. The idea is that, free of handling and bits of intestine, self-ground meat is a lot safer than the ground meat you get at the store, and consequently cooking it to death is not required. And apart from cleaning the equipment afterwards, chopping up the meat in a food processor is quick and dead simple. The result: heavenly.
I’ve had other favorite burgers in the past: the ones I’d make with butter in the middle, Five Guys, the list goes on. But if one had to annoint a pope of hamburgerdom, this sandwich would get a Habemus Papam from any conclave.
Open sores
Well, as of yesterday, after a long protracted review and release process, several lines of code by me have found their way into an operating system: Linux 2.6.16 includes my Rio Karma drivers. So you can go ahead and blame me if Linux sucks. Then I’ll blame Jeff Garzik in turn, just because.
Last weekend was nice. Angeline and I spent most of it shopping for her DC area apartment for her new job at NIH beginning this summer. If anyone knows of a cheap but nice apartment convenient to Bethesda, let’s hear it.
Note to job seekers: don’t put “career” or “job” in your resume. I keep getting keyword searches in my httpd logs for “objective education experience oracle unix -job -career.” I guess said headhunters won’t see this post, so let me take this opportunity to tell them that they are ugly and they smell. I also get lots of referrer spam from ballsacks.net. Just thought you should know.
Readings
I finally jumped on the Sarah Vowell bandwagon and started reading Assassination Vacation. I’m too lazy to find Amazon links so search yourself if you are one of the three people who hasn’t read it yet. Anyway, so far it’s very amusing, and I can’t help comparing to Mary Roach’s Stiff (4.2 stars), another book by a woman fascinated with death. I give AV 3.9 stars out of five; she loses a tenth of a point for unnecessarily inserting political views, though I generally agree with them. It is nice to know that so many pieces of presidents happen to reside nearby, so perhaps I shall inspect them someday.
Other recent readings include:
- High Fidelity – Nick Hornby ****
- Little Children – Tom Perotta **
- The Smithsonian Institution – Gore Vidal (no stars)
I’ve really been a slacker at reading lately.
Kites
Thanks to all who showed up this weekend and left beer at my house. My 31st year shall begin with much drinking.
Now it’s time to look forward to the next big event… after St. Patrick’s Day… and that is of course the annual Smithsonian Kite Festival. I went last year as a spectator and watched hundreds of people try to get little squares of fabric way up in the sky. This year, I plan to have a square of my own. I have a couple of prefab kites ready to go, and I also have some plain nylon in transit to my house, where, should enough time and creativity strike, I shall try to construct a third. So, on the 25th of March, why not join me with your own sail on the Mall. Or if you aren’t into the whole kite scene, there’s always the enjoyable prospect of freezing in the blustery wind while taking pictures of cherry blossoms.
For myself, this may be the springboard into a new hobby. I still need to do something with my hacked CVS camera, and rigging up a pivacet suspension and a remote shutter trigger to take pictures from the kite’s point of view sure seems like it could waste some time.
Mobile
A few months ago I bowed to peer pressure and purchased a new phone. Prior to that, my antenna had been held on with hot melt glue for several months. So I read the internets, picked out a phone, found an unlocked version (I’m not going to be a serf to the mobile companies!) and plonked down the requisite credit card number into the order form. When it arrived a few days later, my co-workers were mystified. “That’s not a RAZR,” they said, incredulously. “Why get a dumpy looking Nokia [6230 for those who care]? Paris Hilton wouldn’t touch that.”) Well, a few reasons: I get craptastic reception at the house, and Nokias are legendary for good reception. On that front, I’ve been very pleased; no dropouts anywhere in my house whereas I had to stand on the porch with my old phone. Also, it has a decent MP3 player built in with expandable flash memory. I have a real MP3 player already but it never hurts to have a few tunes with you for bumpy places such as the gym where the hard drive is unwelcome. Reason the third: EDGE.
I spend at least two hours every day on a bus getting to work, and it sure would be nice to use the net some during that block of time. So effective today I’m on T-Mobile’s Total Internet thingy. With that, I can connect my phone via a USB cable to the laptop and use it as a modem to connect at a decent speed from anywhere. It works pretty well — better than dialup, worse than anything else. I posted this from the bus.
Speaking of internet, my mom & dad have just joined the 18th century by getting on the DSL bandwagon… sort of: they got the 256k ADSL. Hey, but remember when people were paying $100/mo for ISDN? You know you wanted it. Anyway, I give my parents -5 seconds until their Windows 95 machine is rooted.
Yellow for a day
I decided to put some new color on the walls of my breakfast area before my newly rescheduled party (March 4th, 8pm, be there) and so I hopped on down to Home Depot. Yellow was the decided color, because breakfasts are supposed to be sunny early morning affairs. I spent half an hour pouring over the little cards trying to pick out one that wouldn’t be too bright, too washed out, too dark, or ugly. A tough set of requirements when dealing with yellow. Anyway, picked up the best candidate and headed for home, and spent the day painting. End result: hideous. It looks like a dayglo schoolbus parked in the room. So I get to repaint it a new color. Awesome. I’ll update this with a picture later when I get rejoined with my mini-USB cable.
Those who didn’t quite get my Halloween costume may be pleased to know that the Venture Bros. are back on Adult Swim on the weekends. Set your TiVos. Next episode:
Careers in Science – The family travels to space to repair an orbiting space station.
Cartoon Network, Sat Feb 25, 2006, 11:00 PM (30 mins)
Update:
90% crap
I’m a believer in Sturgeon’s law, but why must bad SF be so very bad? Especially when written by non-scientific sorts, as in my latest literary conquest, The Smithsonian Institution by Gore Vidal. This is a truly lamentable alternate history wherein the main character goes back in time to prevent World War II, all the while cavorting with a President’s wife in Gore’s so-bad-they-are-amusing love scenes which always end, “he entered her.” Now of course time travel is a stretch, yet I didn’t think anyone could do it worse than Michael Crichton. Alas, try this garbage on:
The light string, enormously magnified, could pinpoint any instant in space-time. The theorem that he had devised for Dr. Oppenheimer to keep one detonating atom from setting off random explosions within other atoms could also be adapted to provide sufficient velocity for a human being to go either backwards or forward in time and, once located in the desired space-time, he would be able to synchronize with the speed of those already there for a limited period — the limitation being the amount of power he could produce to provide him with sufficient velocity needed to do what he had to do and return to his home time-space.
Ahh, it is so clear now: use string theory! And um, some theorem, and do something else and go really fast and add power… and you need to use the time-space, or space-time, or whatever that jigger is. Easy.