| Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 |
| 7:19 am |
Baseball :-(
After a week of regular season play the current AL East standings are as follows: 1st place: Toronto Blue Jays 2nd: Baltimore Orioles 3rd: Tampa Bay Rays 4th: New York Yankees 5th: Boston Red Sox What's wrong with this picture? Why are the rankings backward. Since when have Toronto or Baltimore done well? Both the Red Sox and Yankees sucking? Will somebody put the fear of God into our pitchers and get us playing how we're supposed to be!!!!! end rant. |
| Saturday, November 1st, 2008 |
| 11:06 am |
Whatever happened to Halloween?
Seriously, what happened to Halloween? It's not just that we got no trick-or-treaters... I mean hey more candy for me right. But look at the TV line-up that night. I understand that the newer shows will get their own Halloween specials rather than running old ones. And the discussion of how Hannah Montana, Spongebob, and all the other new kids and tween shows are horrible compared to what we grew up on really is another issue but come-on! No Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown! No Halloween Tree! Not even Rocky Horror! You know what VH1 showed instead of Rocky Horror on Halloween? The Wedding Singer! The Wedding Singer? really? Comedy Central? No Shaun of the Dead, No Army of Darkness... they just had normal programming. Thank God The Simpsons are still having a Treehouse of Horror on Sunday otherwise I might just have to cry myself to sleep. OK magic Halloween chocolate, time to make everything feel better. |
| 10:58 am |
Back in the States
Hi everybody. Thanks to everyone who came to the wedding or sent congratulations. I've been back stateside for a few days now, getting settled in again. Posted some pics of our trip on facebook, still waiting for the pictures of the wedding from the professional photographer but I'll get those up as soon as I can. If anybody has any pictures they took themselves please forward them on to me. And again thanks everyone to making that a wonderful day. |
| Friday, June 13th, 2008 |
| 4:17 pm |
GoodReads
If anyone has a goodreads.com account let me know or friend me from there. Its always neat to compare bookcases and see what other people are reading / have read. |
| Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 |
| 7:45 am |
For all us Band Geeks
I present to you the comic from today's xkcd. I think it says everything we already knew:
You can identify them ahead-of-time -- they lead with their left foot when the music starts.
Current Mood:  sleepy
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| Sunday, January 13th, 2008 |
| 6:31 pm |
The most entertaining thing ever
I just found one of the most entertaining things I've ever seen in a video game. Try playing Arcanum with a character who has an intelligence of 1. On a whim I created a half-ogre who had the background of "raised in the pits" which gives bonuses to strength and dex with massive reduction to int. It is hilarious to see Virgil trying to explain the whole Panarii religion and what not to an idiot. He's all like "YOU... ARE.. OUR.. SAV..IOUR" Give it a try if you have the time. |
| Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 |
| 5:43 pm |
Its all over
As of ten minutes ago I have officially ended my first semester as a grad student. All finals done all projects completed, all papers written (or at least my portion of them anyway). Now I get to sleep, relax, enjoy Christmas and do research. Hmmm... one of these things is not like the others. Oh well 10 hours of research and 1 meeting a week is a lot easier schedule than 3 classes + research. |
| Monday, December 17th, 2007 |
| 9:45 am |
One Down Two More to go
I had my first graduate level final today: Artificial Intelligence. Honestly, I thought the midterm was more difficult (but as we remember that was experiment part one where we study the effects of alcohol on Ben's grade). So just Computer Architecture and Natural Language Processing (plus finishing the paper for each of them) are left. For any geeky person after the cut is an interesting ( question about search algorithms: ) |
| Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 |
| 9:20 am |
A question to ponder for enlightenment
Why is it that my shower only gets good and hot about 5 seconds before I finish? Ok, off to work/school. If I can survive the next week and a half everything will be good. Right now however I have two big projects do where neither of them are working particularly well. And we're trying to get a journal paper off by the end of December. I may be disappearing for a while. |
| Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 |
| 9:45 pm |
An Experiment
I've decided on what my first journal paper will be. It shall be titled "The Effects of Drinking Heavily While Studying on the Grades of the Two Midterm Exams I Have Back to Back Tomorrow" Magically teleported donations of beer are currently being accepted for those of you wishing to aide in this project. Expect a follow up paper on "The Effects of Grades from Midterms on Alcohol Consumption in Computer Science Grad Students" in the comming weeks. |
| Sunday, October 21st, 2007 |
| 12:08 am |
TMBG
Just got back from anabsolutly awesome They Might Be Giants concert. It was Karen's first time seeing them and the show was amazing. They had a brass section with them so they played a lot of songs they normally wouldn't live and they did some others that I've heard live before but are just so much more awesome with the horns. Birdhouse in your soul, Dr. Worm, and She's actual size were on the playlist lots of new stuff, some older stuff that I didn't know but still a lot that I did. Anna Ng was an encore, as was Istanbul. Also if you can find them you should give a listen to their opening act, Oppenheimer, a very cool band out of Belfast. They were so much better than that weird ukelele playing guy who opened for them last time I saw 'em. Alright, I'm too old to be out this late going to concerts and whatnot. Time for this little boy to go to bed. P.S. It is now officially less than a year until the wedding. AAAAA!!!!!!! and AWESOME!!!! |
| Sunday, June 3rd, 2007 |
| 9:47 pm |
Pics and whatnot
First things first, thank you everyone for your little notes and congratulations. I cannot wait to introduce you all to Karen. Plans are just starting to be formed but we're looking at a fall wedding, probably mid October. More info as we get it. Anyway, I've posted photos of our trip on facebook. For those of you who aren't on there let me know and I'll see what I can do so you can see our pics. Thanks again guys, you're awesome. |
| Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 |
| 11:50 am |
My return and big news
Hello everybody!!!! So I have returned from abroad. England was amazing. we had some problems getting there at first... our plane to New York was delayed two hours which made us miss our flight to London... which of course was the last flight of the night. Long story short, we got there half a day after we had planned to. So then we spent 3 days with Karen's brother and went to warwick castle and Cambridge both of which were awesome. Took the train down to London where we did all the basic touristy stuff. I'll probably post some pictures soon, most likely on facebook. Anyway, while that was all fun and what not, I have really big news for you all: in London, I asked Karen to marry me... and of course she said yes! So yeah, we really need to get you far away type people up here or us down there so everyone can meet and have a blast and otherwise just have fun. Between moving, grad school, and engagement this next year is going to be busy, stressfull, but also really awesome and fun. So yeah, that's it. Let the shocked and surprised phone calls commence. Current Mood:  excited |
| Thursday, May 17th, 2007 |
| 10:29 am |
God Save the Queen
So tomorrow I leave for England where I'll be for a whole week. I would have mentioned this before but well... there were some problems with passports. Not mine, mine got here a good month ago. Karen's passport on the other hand... I wont go into detail about all the trials and tribulations but we finally got it... yesterday. Cutting it close? Maybe but we like to live on the edge. Or something like that. So yeah. Hopefully a post and pictures to follow my return. Take care peoples! |
| Friday, February 2nd, 2007 |
| 11:25 am |
Birthdays and Grad schools
Last Saturday Karen and I went up to Boston for an early birthday celebration for me and a real birthday celebration for Mike. We missed the BSO concert we were going to but got to walk around the Museum of Fine Arts for a while which was lots of fun. There's way too much stuff there to do in one day. We're definitely going to go back a few more times. After that we had a nice dinner at an Indian restaurant and met up with Mike, Amanda, Ben and two of his friends for drinks. Overall a very enjoyable day. I've just started to hear from some of my grad schools, I'm hoping the rest will pick up the pace. I just want to be able to make a decision and start the next phase of my life. So on the positive side, University of Florida is flying me down and putting me up in a hotel to wine and dine me into their PhD program. This is very cool and I'd imagine I'd do amazingly well in their program but frankly I'd really like to stay in the Southern New England area. On the negative side, Yale sent me an email today rejecting me. Now, I'll admit that there is an amount of prestige difference between the two schools and UFL is a bit bigger but I still find it funny how one is trying to court me and the other couldn't care. But eh, Yale would have been nice but I'm really hoping for Brown and I still have 5 other schools to hear from. I guess I'll just have to wait and see what happens. |
| Thursday, January 18th, 2007 |
| 12:36 pm |
The most exciting news in the past week
This is mainly for Adam, Colin, Shira, and Caroline and anyone else who's actually read A Game of Thrones (or any other A Song of Ice and Fire books) and if you haven't read them you should go read them now! http://grrm.livejournal.com/11326.htmlThat's right, HBO has bought the rights to turn ASoIaF into a series. One season per book. Now get out there and email/write/phone/anything HBO and tell them to greenlight this project. And Shira, you should go back to working at Tor and get us all info on the next book. Ok, back to real life. |
| Monday, January 1st, 2007 |
| 4:09 am |
2007
I have a prediction for everyone: 2007 is going to be an absolutely amazing and wonderful year. I feel this in my gut with absolute certainty. So I would wish you all a Happy New Year but I feel that such a wish is irrelevant, your new year will be happy if I wish it to be so or not. So enjoy this coming year, ignore the minor annoyances of life that may occur and revel in each and every joyous occasion. Peace. Current Mood: jubilant |
| Thursday, November 9th, 2006 |
| 8:09 pm |
GRE
I take the GRE tomorrow at noon, yeah. I think I'm gonna do pretty well. Math I got down pat, verbal will probably be slightly lower than what I did on SATs but whatever I should be fine. The writing section should be interesting. I think I'll do alright but I think it's really all going to come down to what topics I get. Anyway, wish me luck. |
| Thursday, September 14th, 2006 |
| 10:20 pm |
Dear Hollywood, Americans aren't as stupid as you think (I hope)
I just saw the movie "The Ringer" (Tronster had it on while I was making dinner) which was a movie that, when I saw the previews, I immediately decided I would never see. For those of you who don't remember or never saw these previews here's a little reminder. A guy, Steve, decides that he is going to rig The Special Olympics by entering as a contestant himself (no, he is not disabled but one must wonder if the writers are) the previews then go onto show various innane clips from the movie: Steve's attempts at a retarded charcter, a water balloon being thrown into his crotch and him saying he wet his pants, him fallilng down, etc. Basically giving the impression that this is one of those movies where the humor is far below slapstick and below fart jokes even. Ok, so the actual movie was nothing like that. **spoilers ahead if anyone actually cares** So the real premise of the movie is that Steve's friend loses his insurance (because Steve has to fire him) and then gets into an accident where he looses 3 fingers. Now unable to pay for them to be reattached and unable to work to pay for the procedure things look pretty grim. Steve tells this story to his uncle who comes up with the plan to have Steve enter the Special Olympics and the uncle will bet on him to pay off his large gambling debt and also pay for the operation. Steve hates the idea but is pressured and pressured and eventually gives in. Most of the rest of the movie is about Steve dealing with how bad a person he is for doing that. Some of his fellow competetors figure out that Steve isn't "special" but ask him to continue competing to help put the reigning Special Olympic champ (who's a jerk) in his place. Throw in a touch of romantic comedy as Steve falls for one of the volunteers and you have a movie that really isn't half bad. Very little of the movie is crude humor and none of it is particularly degrading to the handicapped (apparently the real Special Olympics gave their seal of approval or something) and some of the humor is actually more for the thinking person. Steve takes on the persona of "Jeffy" as his Olympic athlete when asked what his last name is he says "Dahmer". You can't be a crude 13 year old to get that joke. So my question is, why is the advertising so different than the actual movie? Are they trying to get a certain demographic (and pushing away others)? The lowest common denominator? Is this particular movie so different or the central plot point so overpowering that no other type of ad would really be feasible? And exactly how often does this happen? I had refused to watch "Anchorman" until the second set of ads came out. The first set depicted it as just a stupid movie hoping to get by on Saturday Night Live talent with a plot line that Adam Sandler would turn down. The second set (and the movie itself) showed it to be more satire and social commentary. In one month the movie went from 13 year old insipid comedy to 30 year old thinking mans comedy. How many good movies have I missed because advertisers market comedies like these in such a miserable way? Maybe I should give "White Chicks" a chance... Then again, maybe not. |
| Monday, September 4th, 2006 |
| 8:58 pm |
Where was I when this happened?
I was discussing movies and movie music recently. Good soundtracks, great composers etc. The thought crossed my mind that Michael Kamen (who did such works as Mr. Holland's Opus, X-Men 1, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves) hasn't really done anything recently. Or at least I couldn't think of anything he's done. So I just went on IMDB to see what he's been doing for the past few years. Turns out not much of anything... as he's been dead since 2003. How did I not know this? That's the sort of thing I would know! Anyway... um that is all. |
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