blogwaffe

I mixed things up a bit today and took a shower in Greg’s today. Wow. That is one tricked out shower. I got in, turned on the water and immediately began twiddling the positioning of the two shower heads. That’s right, two. It really makes for a much different showering experience to be sprayed with water from two angles. What those angles should be is left to the showerer; with four articulating joints and three valves, the contraption offers quite the range of possibilities.

Greg’s also got the shower radio thing going, though it’s a little hard to tune. I turned it on, and what else should be playing but Hollaback Girl of blogwaffe infamy.

Got mah grüv on.

My own personal day of the automobile.

I went to the Saturn dealer today to see if I could score some phat chronic car maintenance. When I took in my car five or six months ago, my brake pads were a healthy 6.5 mm up front and 2.5 mm in the rear, but recently I’ve been hearing some intermittent squeaking and feeling some slight catching, so I had them check them this time around too in addition to the regular oil change and whatnot. The service guy told me the pads measured 9 mm and 2 mm. I blinked. He continued to say that the pads were fine, but that he had sanded them slightly and touched up the shoes similarly to reduces the squeaks and catching. I said “ok, sounds fine” and blinked again.

How did my front brake pads nearly half again in size after five or so months of use? There is some information I’m missing. I chose not to worry about it, and to inquire further if I get more funny numbers next time. Actually, I won’t ask questions. I’ll head to the nearest patent office and make millions.

Stranger than the self generating brake pads, was the appearance of Robert Raussendorf (a post doc in Preskill’s group) at the Saturn dealership. He too was getting his brakes looked at. We chatted a bit until he got driven home by the Saturn people. What a bizarre coincidence. After he left, I sat down to read Herman Hesse’s Demian, which is shaping up to be pretty freakin’ awesome.

What is not shaping up to be pretty freakin’ awesome is the California DMV. I received today in the mail a “Notice of Delinquent Renewal”. This is the first notice I have received; I never got a “Notice of Well-Adjusted Renewal”. This is the second year in a row they have done this to me; I am pissed. Is this some big scam the DMV is running in order to get a few bucks? “Forget” to send a few registration renewal notices here and there and then slap people with a late fee when the don’t (surprise!) pay up on time?

I will be speaking to them on Monday. I have a feeling that’s all I will be doing on Monday.

Somebody out there is having an excellent time and doesn’t even know it yet.

Greg got a nifty puzzle contraption for Christmas which has been sitting out on the coffee table since he got back. If you could combine one of those giant expanding/collapsing geodesic spheres you see all the time (but can never ignore – they just look too cool) in science museums with a seagull, this puzzle and that Frankenstein monstrosity would move in exactly the same way. And if it were a very colorful seagull, it would look about right too.

Anyway, I was spending a good chunk of time poking at it this evening (the puzzle, not the above affront to God’s creation). I was getting annoyed; the puzzle just wouldn’t line up in the way I expected (or should I say “wanted”). I could not figure out what I was doing incorrectly. As it happens, some evil sadist out there (and it was probably one of you) took advantage of a slight breach of the puzzle’s structural integrity to either swap two pieces or flip one. So whomever you were, congratulate yourself; you got me.

Fourty-five minutes of my life gone, and I want them back.

Moral of the story: parity checks are good.

Amazing how quickly one’s outlook on life can change in a twenty-four hour peiod. Yesterday I was so pleased with myself because, for the first week in months, I had turned in all of my homework in on time. It was cause for celebration. I did a bit of work here and there inbetween classes, but overall I was reasonably unproductive.

Today I found out I’m failing general relativity.

To pass (mind you, passing only requires 50%), I need to do better on the remaining two homeworks than I have on any of the previous seven. you might ask how I could be doing worse than 50% so far. Well, I neglected to do the first set until the last (literal) minute (GR was my only class with homework due the first week – I forgot about it), and one set I faithfully placed in my bag but forgot to turn in until a week later, knocking 75% off my score (not to mention things like getting 0/10 for flipping upper and lower indices in a computaional problem and 3/10 for not proving that rapidity (a sophomore level concept) is additive).

Today (which has passed) was drop day. Not that dropping the class is a great solution. I (more or less) need it for degree requirements, plus I haven’t done a lick of research these past months because of my course load. All for naught if I drop. But I’m sure Preskill has been notified already. Looking forward to group meeting on Thursday.

Ass.

A little bird told me the other day Vroman’s coffee shop stocks hot apple cider. Man, I love the stuff. It’s hard to find out here, even in the fall, and I’ve been jonesin’. So rather than do my field theory in the living room as always, I decided to hit it up last night.

No dice. Last weekend was apparently ridiculously busy, and they’re out of cider. You’d think three days would be enough time to restock, but maybe they were so busy that their cider supply went into the red. Ah well, their Star of India tea was good enough to keep me there taking up half of a big table with various papers and texts.

More interesting than quantizing the Majorana fermion theory was the conversation the two girls (one claiming to be 21, the other 17) were having at the table next door. The conversation was politcal, complete with rightist (the older, fashonista, lush, wannabe socialite) and leftist (the younger, product of divorced parents (whoa there – just stating facts), teetotaler (but only after having a bad experience or two with drugs (and their abusers), outwardly extroverted to compensate for fundamental self-confidence/image issues). Neither was making any real argument, each was just spouting off moral judgements or personal theories without any support (other than, “I have seen a homeless person before”, to paraphrase). I’m sure most of what they said was deeply felt, but none of it was terribly well developed. Well, maybe that’s unfair; at best their ideas were poorly communicated.

It was frustrating to listen to these people trying to string together sentences out of but-grasped-for ideas. I think the amount of information conveyed in their hour long conversation was on the order of bits. Clearly a very noisy channel.

But, hell, at least they were talking about the current administration and what they thought could be better with the country. More power to ’em.

Best Sound bites (all by Rightie): “But we need homeless people. We need 18% unemployment [sic] for this society to function.” “Not everyone needs healthcare.” “I like living in the most powerful country in the world. Having that behind me and being able to tell people that.”

I’m wearing a sweater today. My Mr. Rogers Sweater. It is no where near cool enough to warrant such attire, but It’s been a long time since I’ve opened up my warm clothes/electronics trunk for any anything but cables and adapters, so I thought I’d give it a whirl.

It’s comfortable. It’s also funny. I lived in Rochester.ny for four years where it was always a celebration when tshirts could be worn all day long outside during the school year. Different people drew the line in different places, so some people celbrated more often than others. But it was still a source of common ground for everyone: tshirts = happiness.

Now that I’m in .ca, where I wear short sleeves and shorts essentially every day, it’s sort of nice to have an excuse to put on the old Mr. Rogers Sweater. Not that it’s a good excuse: It’s currently 67°F outside. Were I still in Rochester, this would be a day of celebration.

Here in .ca, it sort of still is.

I pick myself off the floor of the living room deciding to try and do the last problem from the set I’m working on in the morning before class. I hadn’t eaten any sweets in O(weeks), and the one milkshake I drank really destroyed my ability to concentrate (note to self: maintain daily sugar intake at the one dozen Krispy Kreme equivalent level from now on). I poke around on the internet a bit and fastidiously avoid updating the ‘waffe. Calling it an early night (1am), I go to my bedroom, shut the door, undress and get in bed next to the pile of clothes I still haven’t put away after doing laundry a few days ago. I bless my Queen Size bed.

The window by my ear is open, and I hear the rain lashing the pane and sounding off the roofs, the wall of the next door parking garage, the balconies, the trees. I think of forests, of parks, mud puddles, and grey skies. Of wet days on wet beaches, tin roofs and wrinkled papers. Flower petals in a stream. Overwrought descriptions.

I close the window but for a crack and dream the rain.

There’s no progress bar.

I’ve been sitting here for the past – I don’t know – 6 hours? installing gentoo on my old laptop (a Pentium II 366). I could have made the process faster, but I wanted everything built from the ground up, specific to my system. So I burned the minimal install CD, repartitioned everything, downloaded an immense package list, and bootstrapped into a base system (that’s right – as few binaries as possible for this install). More accurately, I should say “I’m bootstrapping into a base system” since I’me not now finished. Better yet, “attempting to bootstrap into a base system” since I don’t yet know the outcome. Checking just now, I see that I’m currently compiling glibc stuff. Glibc. Ugh, how many more packages must come after glibc?

Next up: the actual kernel.

Paul.za is back from .za. Claims to have had a lovely time, but I fail to see how he could have what with all the green rolling hills, white sand beaches, dolphins and five course meals.

Immediately after coming into town (immediately as in he and Greg were just pulling into the parking lot), Michelle, Dixie and I accosted him and forced him to go to dinner with us at Father Nature’s (a pretty good Armenian place). Though he had been travelling for 31 hours, we also convinced him to hit up the GSC new student party in the cats:

“Rum and Coke?”
“We’re out of Rum.”
“Gin and Tonic?”
“No tonic. Gin and Coke?”
“Uh… No – Gin and Sprite?”
“Sure”

Ah GSC parties.

The annual Caltech first year orientation pub crawl was last night: Yardhouse, 35er, McMurphy’s, and Jake’s. I picked up some random first years on the way home and dropped them off at the Yardhouse before joining them. They may have thought I was a crack dealer. Oh well – at least they got free beer. Hung out with some cool people – Kristen and Wolf notably – but, as is typical for these orientation events, I will probably never see them again. Graeme was organizing the whole deal. I should ask him how much he ended up spending (and how overbudget that was).

Highlight of the night: At McMurphy’s when “Tom”, the manager for a band which may possibly have been called “Reefer Addicts” randomly came up to Rogier and asked for some “MoTow”. He was told Rogier was the person to see about aquiring such. Neither Rogier nor I knew why Tom was informed Rogier could help him out, nor did we have any idea that the kids these days were using such odd slang.

UPDATE.9.23.2004: I asked – Over $1000 (so about $400). He kept buying until they rejected his credit card.