Kyle Smith

Been a busy frickin’ week. My new Kyocera SL400R camera arrived on Thursday. Thanks to Russ, who brought his SL400R to the Great Wall last week and got me interested in it. Plenty of pictures from this weekend (around 200) should be appearing in the next few days after they’re vetted (including shots from the open house Clarkson held on Saturday).

I’m looking forward to Cinema 10 tomorrow. Last week’s movie, Valentin was good. So good that I preordered the DVD from Amazon yesterday (it’s coming out on October 12th). If you have the opportunity to see it, do.

Picked up a shiny new coffeepot for the COSI Lab tonight with McCabe and Allison. This one has a timer so now coffee will be ready for us in the morning before Tino’s class.

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Drove home yesterday afternoon so I could take the GRE at Lebanon College today. Ended up making it home just in time for dinner. This morning my fortune continued when I ended up having a nice breakfast out at Dana’s by The Gorge.

Managed to make it to the test center a little early and blew through the entire test in 2.5 hours. Found out that my combined scored increased by 190. What did I learn from this? Don’t study for tests and be sure to drink beer the night before.

“You never show your vulnerability; you are always self assured and confident.” — my fortune from Great Wall last Thursday

“Always accept yourself the way you are.” — another fortune from some other Chinese buffet visit

Update: Why is there no new news at 4 am?! I have exhausted the Interweb!

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Been a while since I’ve posted. Plenty of stuff has happened since then, but I haven’t been in the mood to blog it. To briefly summarize the last 12 days:

Thursday 8/19: Took the GRE general test. Didn’t do so well. Finished a bottle of Bushmills Irish whiskey at 3 in the afternoon to make up for it.

Friday 8/20: Spent the entire afternoon regretting having a cavity filled at the dentist’s, as my face was numb for 6 hours. Packed everything in my car.

Saturday 8/21: Got up at 6 am, moved my TV to my car, started to leave and then found that something was smoking and burning in the right-front wheel well. Proceeded to move everything to my old car and then drove to Potsdam.

Sunday 8/22: Drove to Watertown with Randy so he could give his parents back their minivan, which he’d used to get to school. Listened to plenty of Bill Hicks on the way back, and I believe Randy is now a convert.

Monday 8/23: Went to all 5 of my classes. 8 am – 11 am and then 1 pm – 3 pm. All will require me to read or write something for each class. Shit. In the evening a large quantity of beer was consumed. Somehow I ended up thinking it was smart to double fist (and at one point triple fist) cans of Canadian beer. Merriment ensued.

Tuesday 8/24: Recovered from the night before, did a bunch of crap in the COSI Lab, read a ton of stuff for classes, and generally revelled in the fact that I had no classes.

Wednesday / Thursday: Nothing much happened.

Friday 8/28: No afternoon classes so I drove to Swanton, VT to trade cars with my mother. Turns out a suspension spring broke and was rubbing on the tire. And on the way up apparently that fucking tire-pressure sensor shat itself so I’ll have to get it tweaked again. Ended up at Eben’s with Donny, Randy, Alex, Eli, and Allison. Had a good time at our apartment later in the evening. Somewhere around 4 or 5 am Uncle Wang (Jim), Randy, Allison and I decided that we should drive to Montreal later in the day so we could go see Hero.

Saturday 8/28: Left for Montreal at 11 am, arrived around 1 or 2. Parked at the public lot by the RBC building and spent the afternoon wandering up and down Saint Catherine street. No sex shops or clubs were visited, much to the chagrin of Allison. Had lunch at a pretty cool place called Marche Movenpick. Also got to meet Jim’s girlfriend Amy, who seems way too energetic and happy. We did end up seeing Hero, which was good but definitely required caffeination prior to viewing. Jim recommended a restaurant (Baton Rouge) for dinner, which was very good. After that we stopped at a few pubs on the way back to the car. Best news of the day? Not being probed by U.S. Customs on the way back across the border. Some other Clarkson folk right ahead of us were not as lucky.

Today: Laundry and more laundry. And homework. Damnit.

Update: I forgot to mention that if anyone needs anything boiled, feel free to stop by our apartment. It’s consistently 85 degrees or hotter and humid as fuck (read: 75% or more), even with the fans going.

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Finally arrived back in Pok around 9:30 tonight. I’ve spent the last 3 hours doing laundry and catching up on email & news. The family reunion was fun. Got to see a lot of relatives that I either hadn’t seen in years or had never met before. The last Keany family reunion (my mother’s side of the family) was way back in 1988 in Virginia, so I really don’t remember much of it as I was six at the time.

For those of you with nothing better to read, a brief summary of the events since my last post:

Friday: drove to Albany, checked in at the Comfort Inn Airport and Conference Center, visited Crossgates Mall, made some cash when I agreed to help a well-endowed girl by taking a survey, watched the season premiere of Stargate Atlantis (which was excellent).

Saturday: got up at 5:30 am to drive to the airport, park my car, and check in. Flew from Albany to Atlanta, then after an hour layover, from Atlanta to Raleigh-Durham where I met my mother and rented a car for the 4 hour drive to Myrtle Beach. Checked in at the place we were staying and then went to dinner with my brother Darryl and his wife Judy. Was chewed out several hours later for not just taking a brief trip to the grocery store as we had originally intended.

Sunday: slept in and then went to the beach with my brother, sister-in-law, and niece. Later on I went to the nearby mall with my brother to kill time, proceeded to get out of the car in one of the worst rainstorms I’ve ever seen, then went grocery shopping with the family to prepare for dinner (our branches’ turn to make it).

Monday: went and visited my Uncle Pete in Murrell’s Inlet. He broke his femur a few weeks ago but seems to be doing quite well. It’s been a while since I’ve seen him — I forgot that he’s extremely quick witted and has a self-deprecating sense of humor that I enjoy. He’s also managed to manipulate his new diet to include his beer of choice, Budweiser (okay, he does have some faults). Went to dinner at my Uncle Bernard’s condo, discovered that he’s a big fan of Corona and lime. Decided to polish off the majority of a case of it with him and then watched some fireworks on the beach nearby.

Tuesday: got up, packed into cars with 14 other family members and then drove to North Carolina to play golf at a club that my Aunt Wendy’s brother is involved with somehow. He managed to get us a great deal (about a quarter the usual price). Ended up playing 9 holes with my Uncle Bernard and his daughters Bridget and Mary while the 3 other groups played 16 -18 holes. None of us did too badly, including Bridget who had never played before. We definitely took our time though, which probably wasn’t a good idea since it must have been above 90 degrees. In the end Mary became dehydrated and was forced to return to the clubhouse after the 7th hole while Bernard and I finished up the last two holes of the North course.

For some reason at previous family gatherings I was always scared of Bernard’s children Mike, Bridget, and Mary (all of whom are 10 – 25 years older than me), but after playing golf with them I really like them. For some reason I keep thinking of Mary as Phoebe, only with red hair. Which is not to say she is dumb or dense. I’m talking appearance and maybe mannerisms here.

Wednesday: got up at 6:30 am to drive back to the Raleigh area. Checked in at the airport and then went to Durham to visit Duke for an hour or so. Unfortunately I didn’t get to talk with anyone from the Dept. of Computer Science as we arrived there during the lunch hour and I had to get back to the airport for my flight. 7 hours of flying and driving later, I arrive back at Marist to find half a dozen unknowns hanging out downstairs. Apparently the two guys downstairs doing work at Marist have become quite the social butterflies whilst I was gone. Hopefully their newfound status won’t affect Randy’s visit this weekend.

Here are a few pictures I snapped over the last few days. Nothing special. I brought my digital camera as well, but left the photographer duties up to my cousins Jennifer and Teresa.

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I decided to take Bryan up on his challenge today. I initially started hacking on just the CSS stylesheet, but I began to get annoyed at the layout and the messy HTML so I eventually started over (almost from scratch) and ended up with this.

Features include valid transitional XHTML markup and valid CSS. I think the page is also a bit slimmer now (especially the subscriptions list, since it’s now a styled list instead of a table).

Overall I’m happy with the layout, but I’m still not entirely sure about the colors — I don’t know if I like the green on tan (green on white definitely looks wrong), but I do like the two shades of green for the boxes. I was inspired by Zeldman, btw.

If anyone has any better suggestions, send me hex values and I’ll fiddle with it some more. If people do actually like it, I’ll see about shoehorning it into the template that Planet uses when generating the HTML.

Update: Eli suggested lightening the background. This was the result.

Today’s Penny Arcade strip seems to fit very well with this post of mine.

I’m having a decent time at home so far. I drove back from Poughkeepsie last night for the holiday and so I could get some errands done today. Ended up loading up some music on my mother’s iMac, since she’s finally getting to the point where she wants to explore it and came across iTunes. That made her happy, especially when it started cranking out the Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. I’m stuck using the iMac this weekend because my router is in Pok and Adelphia seems to be stricting access by the MAC address. I’m really liking the keyboard on it though. Very easy to type. And the display is frickin’ sharp (it’s the 15″ flat panel model).

It rained pretty hard last night. I’m surprised there wasn’t more damage or downed trees, as it was thundering quite a bit and the lightening was pretty constant (every few seconds) for an hour or two. Luckily it’s cleared up so the fireworks tonight at Hartford’s Kilowatt Field should still be on (the field is named that because it’s adjacent to the Wilder hydroelectric dam). That’s usually pretty interesting, as you usually get a third or more of the (~9,500) people in town showing up and hanging out for three or four hours eating, listening to music, playing games, and socializing.

This morning I ended up going to Springfield (VT) to get a new driver’s license, since my current one will expire at the end of this month. 10 minutes in and out, with a fresh ID in hand. Then drove to Hanover (home of Dartmouth College) to have lunch with my friend Mike at Molly’s — the French onion beef tenderloin panini was awesome. Then off to the car dealer to get them to fix the various quirks with my car while it’s still under warranty.

Tomorrow should also rock, as Mike is having a party at his place. A keg will be present, and I’m sure I’ll do my part to help finish it.

One last aside. I also received an email from my uncle Bernard today, who is arranging a round of golf for those who want to play while at the Keany family reunion in a couple of weeks. The last bit of the email said:

There are coolers on the carts. Tell everyone to put whatever they want in their golf bags and transfer to the coolers once we get out on the course. There is a beverage cart girl on the course and we only sell beer and wine, no hard booze.

That just rocks. I’m debating whether I want to reply and tell him I’m up for a round of drunken golf with 15 – 20 other family members. It rocks even harder that my aunt’s brother runs the club they’ll be playing at so he’s bent over backwards to hook us up.

clarkbw,

At least you have considerate roommates. Eli and I decided that if we’d found you like that we would have dragged you outside, sat you up against the building, and put a cardboard sign on you that involved solicitation by burly men.

dowem’s response to the above: “Indeed.”

Today was the “Fun in the Sun” event for our organization. What is Fun in the Sun, you may ask? It basically means everyone that reports to our particular 2nd-line manager takes off from work at noon to drive to James Baird State Park for an afternoon of free food, beer, and games. Contrary to the picture of Optimus and Jason below, it was actually fun.

After work today I started looking into Cedega. I checked out their free CVS version, but it was the old 3.3.2 release. I also looked up KOTOR in their database and found that it should work reasonably well, so I bit the bullet and bought a Transgaming subscription (just long enough to download it, get it working, and then cancel). Managed to get KOTOR installed using it, but before I can actually play it I need to enable 3D support for my display.

Late last night I conducted my first test of my DVD burner. I selected American Psycho as the test subject, and proceeded to transcode it to MPEG-2, recombine the audio and video, and then used dvdauthor to create the filesystem and growisofs to burn the disc. The audio and video came out, although they were out of sync so I need to try transcoding it again with some different options.

Also went to see Dodgeball with John and Tim tonight after Ozan recommended it. It did have a few hilarious moments and there was a cool cameo by Lance Armstrong.

Click the image above for additional photos from today.

Motherfucker! Epiphany totally trashed this post just as I was about to save it. Let’s try this one last time…

Been a few days since I’ve posted. I would have done so Friday night, but we decided to drink and watch movies, so I was occupied until I crashed at 3 (the evening began with shots of gin). Slept in yesterday and then went to see The Chronicles of Riddick at Roosevelt Cinemas in Hyde Park (the birthplace of FDR, for those of you that don’t know). It was about what I expected — cool effects and some good action scenes, but thin on plot.

On Friday a bunch (Mike, Matt, Eli, Jason H., Jason O., and me) went to Andy’s Place for lunch. While I was sitting there I started examining the abandoned Poughkeepsie railroad bridge. It’s too bad that it’s not open for the public to walk on — seems like a waste of a bridge, although it was apparently quite a fire that closed it back in 1974.

And now I can return to my KOTOR game…