Kyle Smith

I started reading Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons last night after I got home from work. I continued reading until around 1 am when I decided to go to bed. This evening I started reading it again as soon as I got home from work. I have now finished all 569 pages of it. It was good. I think I’ll take a break from reading for the rest of the night.

Tomorrow I start The DaVinci Code.

I was looking at foosball, billiard, and air hockey tables today online and ran across this particular page selling air hockey mallets:

In other news, it will probably be a week or so before my next posting, as traveling to South Carolina (via Raleigh-Durham Airport) tomorrow and will be in SC until Wednesday afternoon. Email will also be spotty until then.

Guess it was a good thing I had my wiper blades replaced just as I was leaving for Pok yesterday. All was well until I reached the Lee service area on I-90 in Massachusetts when it became almost pitch black out and it started raining so hard that I had to follow the hazard lights on the car in front of me. At one point there were a good twenty or thirty cars all lined up in the shoulder just waiting it out. Luckily the storm only lasted the seven or ten miles to the Massachusetts - New York border.

Unfortunately, that was not the end of the trials for the day. As I was getting on the Taconic State Parkway to head south some crazy bitch from Maryland damn near killed me. From now on in my mind, she will be known as The Admiral, because she maneuvered that 21st century battleship like it was the Pacific and she was fucking Chester Nimitz at the bridge of her flagship. I did eventually make it safely back to Marist.

Think that was an interesting day? Just wait, there’s more! Around 8 Eli and I went out to get something to eat and when we returned around 9:30 we found West Cedar blocked off by the fire department. Apparently while we were gone a transformer just past Marist’s Lower West apartments had blown up and set some trees and maybe an adjacent house on fire. Unfortunately it also took out Marist’s network connection (either that or Marist decided that because it was raining and there was a fire that it was an opportune time to shut off some equipment and do some maintenance). Several pictures were snapped by myself, but unfortunately it was so dark that none of them came out.

Something else that may be amusing to those of you that know who Creepy Dave is: one of yesterday’s xorg digests included a message from him. The tool was using the wrong keybindings on his Powerbook and was annoyed that he couldn’t get fancy accents working. Here’s hoping you fucked up your PB in the process, Dave!

Mike’s dog Bailey nosing around

Additional photos from the weekend are located here.

Amen, brother!

Cloudchaser, I believe most of us could use that this week. Thank god for the holiday weekend coming up. One more day of work for me and then I’m done (taking Friday off so I can go home tomorrow night and do errands on Friday).

Note to people using WordPress 1.2 (Mingus): For best results with the RSS feed, go to Options > Reading and change the “For each article, show” option from “summary” to “full text”. No more truncated posts on Planet COSI.

5/2/2003: ‘Baby, I creamed my jeans when you said “Phoenix”.’
6/30/2004: ‘Baby, I creamed my jeans when you said “Go get ‘em, tiger”.’

Occasionally, a movie comes out that sucks you in, keeps you on the edge of your seat for 2 hours, and then leaves you begging for more. Spider-Man 2 is such a movie. Based on the hype alone, I’m quite sure that Sony has already hired a writer to pen the 3rd. I seriously hope that Sam Raimi continues to helm them for the next three installments we all wish they’d make. I’ll be waiting with anticipation until summer 2006.

No, that’s not Peter Parker. It’s Eli waiting in line with me at the Galleria along with Doug and some other IBM interns. Optimus and John also made appearances.

Went and saw The Punisher yesterday afternoon with Optimus and Eli at the second-run theater. Thought it was pretty good overall. Last night the guys next door were having a party so Eli and I went and hung out until people disappeared around 2, and then we hung out with a Marist security guy for a few minutes (it’s amazing that he didn’t bust us for having a party, being loud, or being shit drunk). Instead we shot the shit about baseball until he continued on his rounds. I ended up spending most of today in bed recovering / sleeping (until about 4:30 PM in fact).

Tim and I were interested in going to see Fahrenheit 9/11 tonight at Upstate, but when I called this afternoon they said that they were completely sold out for all the shows today. We’ll probably have to wait until later in the week to go see it.

Since there was nothing else opening this week, I went to Blockbuster and rented Mystic River, which I think is an amazing movie. Of course neither Eli nor Tim believed my hypothesis early on about who actually killed the girl, but in the end I was vindicated. The scene at the end where Sean Penn and Laura Linney’s characters are in the bedroom talking seemed totally pointless. Eli and I both seemed to agree that it would be better for it to end as Penn walks down the street. The final shot of the river was also decent, as it ties in with the line uttered by Penn, part of which I used as the title of this post. The last part is “We wash them clean.” I don’t think I’ll ever rent anything else from Blockbuster though, as a single DVD set me back $4.86 with the tax, which is pretty rewangulous. Hopefully I can find another cheaper place around here, because my interest in seeing as many movies as possible on the IMDb Top 250 has been rekindled.

Not much else going on this weekend. I’ll probably go into work for a few hours tomorrow just to get a few odds + ends done. Tuesday night at midnight a crapload of us are going to see Spider-Man 2 at the Galleria, which should be good.

Fin.

Before I forget… I’ve tried several new beers this week [1, 2, 3, 4]. Most of them were good. The Hebrew Genesis Ale was not so good.

In other news, a fur-bearing mammal was spotted yesterday evening as Eli and I left to get dinner.

Finally, I bought a Sony DVD burner yesterday (a DRU530A specifically). It was on sale at Office Depot. While I realize this is not the Plextor 708A that everybody loves, the principles of least cost and locality won out over performance. It definitely plays stuff properly under both Windows and Linux. Now I just need to figure out how to burn some videos properly.

Didn’t get a whole lot done at work today. Little things kept popping up as they always do. Like Cheesefry stopping by with his Nerf gun (click for a small video of him killing the whiteboard that I took with my camphone). Hopefully tomorrow (later today?) I can minimize or ignore most of the distractions and get the database storage stuff done so I can move on to more interesting things. I suppose I should also start checking junk into subversion. It would be much easier to do if there were a goddamn Eclipse plugin that actually worked with a stream newer than 3.0M7 (and apparently that doesn’t even work).

Stopped at Barnes & Noble to pick up a GRE prep book. After reading some of the reviews online and examining the books for myself, I ended up getting one by Barron’s. Since I have no motivation to write any code for fun these days I might as well study.

Later on Eli, John, and I went to the Coyote Grill, where Eli and I enjoyed vodka martinis.

Ordered Dino: The Essential Dean Martin last night from the iTunes Music Store because it was only $15. Proceeded to listen to it tonight after getting back from dinner. Made me wonder; if I was a member of the Rat Pack, which member would I be? The answer, according to Quizilla, is Ol’ Blue Eyes.

Oh. It’s been decided that 2:08 PM is now the universal time for ham and pomp. Don’t skimp on the pomp either, you cheapskate. Additionally, Doug’s form of justice is stiff but gentle. T-shirts will be forthcoming.

A cornucopia of definitions for those of you that don’t watch Sealab 2021.

Miguel had an awsome quote earlier today:

What I like about this story, is that I could have given up at any point since there was a large problem ahead of me: a problem I had no answers to. And I see this with many free software developers, students and even in normal social situations: people stop doing things because they see a big problem ahead of them that they can not possibly conceive working around. My advise to every young programmer is to start writing code and delay addressing imaginary problems until they become real.

I used to do exactly that all the time. For some reason, I seem to be doubting my abilities these days. Great ideas pop into my head, but when I start to think about them in more detail the tiniest little snag causes the whole process to come to a screeching halt.

I’m not entirely sure how to solve this problem. Perhaps I just have to be more persistant, more willing to take risks since there really is nothing to lose.