I saw Avatar last night. Avatar is the kind of movie that I typically have not heard of and pay no attention to until friends invite me to go see it--which is what happened last night. After watching it for three hours, I understand what the big deal was supposed to be. In case you are interested in watching the movie, let me tell you exactly what it is:
Avatar is an expensive and lenthy remake of Fern Gully.
At first I thought only the first half was like Fern Gully because I hadn't seen that since I was little, but then I read the wikipedia page and the two movies are basically the same. I've heard that some people think Avatar is Teh BEST MOviE EVAR!!! But it is not. It does not compare to Star Wars: A New Hope, or Firefly, or The Lord of the Rings. If you think Avatar is awesome, you are ignorant, and will find all of your favorite movies in the next paragraph.
Avatar can be more compared to the Harry Potter movies, the Halo video games, fan fiction taking place in the Warhammer universe, and, most definitely, the animated film FernGully: The Last Rainforest. One nice improvement over the animated version that Avatar makes is that it throws in a lot of military toys, including mechs. Mechs are like dumb toy versions of Gundams, so I enjoy them by association, the same way someone who loves tigers would appreciate house cats, or the way someone who likes enormous slimy fecal-generating monsters would like dogs.
My favorite thing about Avatar is that someone uses the phrase "Death from Above." I'm curious as to the origin of this phrase, if it is something anyone in a real military has ever said, or if it comes from video games, or what. I first heard the phrase playing Dawn of War, an excellent real time strategy game with a gripping story, decent writing and superb voice acting. It is something the Assault Marines say when you click on them or make them attack or something. Wikipedia says "Death from Above" is also a video game maneuver. I don't know what its talking about; the closest thing I can come up with is when you are playing classic UT and you jump on top of someone from high up, raining six rockets on their head. Someone did that to me when we were playing UT in physics class in high school, and the a girl watching me play actually shrieked out loud.
So, in summary, Avatar is not very original but I like it because it reminds me of better fiction that I enjoy.
[Edit]
Lego Gundams!!!
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Monday, December 28, 2009
Welcome Home
Here are some highlights of my Christmas:
Snow: It snowed in philly. Not enough to impress a Subaru-bred Pennsylvanian such as myself, but enough to cause massive delays in air travel to KPHL, or Philly International for you non piloting civilians (I've found the one of the most arrogant things a person can do on the internet is to refer to other people as "civilians" in their blog, while themself having never been in a military). The second leg of my multi-plane journey that I had bought from Northwest airlines was repeatedly canceled. I was told I had to speak to an agent to rebook. I called Northwest well ahead of the time I needed to leave for the airport, but four hours later I was still listening to on-hold music while my first flight departed and while, more importantly, I really needed to use the bathroom. After giving up on my $400 I spent I booked a flight with U.S. Airways and sent Northwest a nastygram inquiring if I would be compensated. I received an automated reply, saying tickets would be credited or rebooked for this weather event, and directed to a webpage that did not mention the current weather at all but instead had lenghty H1N1 Swine Flu event information.
I arrived in Philly, though, after missing only a weekend of skiing that I'd been looking forward to. And with all of my stuff! I had checked a bag containing my super important work laptop. I have since learned that checking a laptop with a commercial airline is regarded by everyone else on the planet as one of the dumbest mistakes you can make. More on that later.
Fire: I did make it up to the cabin at Camelback. I missed Joe, my fellow accomplice of "thats what she said!" jokes, but I was in time to witness last few fireworks. Perhaps, ever. You see these fireworks were advertised as the kind that spin around and shoot up in the air. They were pretty cool even for a person normally desensitized to and unimpressed by pyrotechnic displays. This particular batch, though, seemed to be designed to shoot towards the nearest person. That was also interesting. Then one landed in a bush fragment. The first few seconds of fire were met with laughter. "Haha it started a little fire!" Then in the next few seconds, the fire increased in size, slightly. It was during these seconds that our laughter died off while we all tried to determine if this was going to be a problem. During a couple seconds after that, the fire jumped to the big bush and we began a mad dash to contain it. I grabbed a snow chunk on my way and dropped it onto the flame but that was ineffective.
We spent a lot of time with buckets of water and a dry chemical fire extinguisher. In fact you could call me a genuine bucketeer. The dry chemical part is relevant because Luke got it all over his hands, so we later had to look up the ingredients on wikipedia to see if they would make his hand fall off, or turn him into a zombie. The buckets of water is also relevant because we broke a faucet in the process. The bush may or may not make it. I'm pretty sure no one will ever be lighting fireworks at that cabin again.
Isabel the Impreza and the streets of Philadelphia: I stole my sister's (technically my mother's) car, a Subaru Impreza that I declared should be named Isabel. This Impreza is like an awesome, slightly slower version of my car. The all wheel drive kicked ass and granted me access to parking spots in philly that other people couldn't reach without a shovel. After parking it the first time, one girl asked from across the street what kind of car I had. That might have been simply because I had parked behind her, and she had been staring at my, worried I might hit her.
The entire time I was home I only saw 1 person that lived in philly. One out of like...more than twenty. An unfortunate habit that I'm unsure how to rectify. Perhaps Christmas isn't the best time to see all of your old buddies anyway, but it is frustrating to come 3000 miles and not even call people because you know you won't be able to see them.
Love Story: I performed my version of Taylor Swift's Love Story as best as I could with Kevin's guitar and a mangled, mutant, ginormous triangle guitar pick. Every time I am over at Kevin and Adam's place I harrass Kev for not owning any guitar picks for the guitar he never plays. Kev has repeatedly promised to buy some--this last time threatening to shower me with a hundred thousand of them. I doubt his sincerity, and so will be shipping a set of guitar picks to him. But I digress.
When I originally penned my version of Love Story, I thought it was hilarious. After hours of practicing it I have since realized that is it not funny at all but instead sad and depressing. However, when your audience actually believes that you are about to play the real version, and you start playing mine, it is hilarious. The key to the humor is explaining to your friends that you had to change a couple words because you are a guy, and the rest falls into place.
Sleeping under the stars: My mother has been dying to get me to stay at their place when I visit. I previously always stayed in the city and only made day trips out to visit them. This time, I stayed at home, in my old bed, under a bunch of glow in the dark stickers I slapped on the ceiling a very long time ago.
LEGOS!: Every year my family likes to do some kind of variation on the gifting giving thing. I think it is a mostly practical fix for the expensive and exhaustive task for buying stuff for each person -- what is that an n-squared minus n amount of gifts? I'm sure there is also a conceptual stand against commercialism as well. It kind of sucks when one group of people get all pissy about Christmas being a "Christian" holiday and make signs that say "happy holidays" instead of Merry Christmas, while at the same time malls start promoting an entirely santa-centric, money spending religion the day after halloween. I think we should split the holiday into two: the celebration of mass materialism and spoiled children can stay on the winter solstice, and the politically incorrect "real" or "true" version of Christmas can be swept under the covers sometime in March. All of the lazy people still have their trees up then anyway. The only question is what to do with all of the lame ass tv specials with the inoffensive but fuzzy and warm Christmas morals to preach. I'll leave this decision to others, since I hate watching them anyway. But I digress.
So some years we pick names out of a hat, and you only buy a gift for the person whose name you pulled. Some years we did some kind of thing where you bring a gift, and people take gifts from under the tree and have the option to keep it or steal one from someone else. Some years we do an under $20 variation, but that kind of sucks because its like admitting everyone is going to hate their presents, and we're just trimming our losses. Every year we do the variation where my mom buys almost all of the gifts destined for her granddaughters (my nieces) and I don't even remember what I allegedly bought them until they open it. Its a fun surprise.
This year the theme was you had to make the gifts (excepting members of the family under 10, they still got showered with expensive toys). I did not like this. I was stumped. I have an uncanny lack of knowledge about the other members of my family, and its hard enough to buy something for them, let alone restrict those possibilities to things I'm capable of creating with my hands. Fortunately, the night before the day before Christmas eve, Betsy's friend (whose nickname sounds like a class video game handle) suggested I make ornaments. Ornaments are amazing: they need serve no actual purpose, and its ok if they are ugly, so long as they still look half decent buried in a Christmas tree somewhere. So I made some ornaments out of Legos.
I've never really been a fan of Legos as art. They are quite blocky, and trying to figure out which pieces from my collection to sacrifice for the formation of a replica of some boring inanimate object boggled my mind. I much preferred to build things on the minifig scale which could be brought to life in my imagination: planes, boats, castles, docks, cities and spaceships. And pirates. So this very idea of using Legos to build some kind of non-Lego abomination was new to me.
I stopped at the Lego(TM) Store and found an ornament sized kit plane for my Dad. He was a navigator in the Navy and did a lot of flying on P-3s. The kit plane I got was one of those cheesy you-can-build-three-different-ugly-models kind, and the plane looked terrible. I wouldn't be able to do much better, however, especially not with something ornament sized, so I bought some super glue and added handle piece from my personal collection, and snapped it up:
The airline pilot character did not come with my kit. That was the first valuable piece I chose to sacrifice from my collection. I was going to list exactly which of my Lego sets the little guy could have come from, but wikipedia doesn't list pictures with the town set names, which are often meaningless. That compass is also a valuable piece of mine--probably from the pirates--but I removed it before the final gluing because that plane is just too ugly to be worth it.
For my mom, who has been teaching beginner level piano lessons all of my life (giving me a considerable jumpstart into the world of music) I decided I would make a tiny baby grand piano. The biggest problem, I knew from the beginning, would be the keys. I sulked around the Lego store for quite a while trying to find a way to buy the pieces I needed, but the just weren't there, so I bought some other pieces I expected to need and spent hours late at night combing through the plastic bins containing my childhood lego collection for the elusive little black and white 1x2 tiles. The little bastards were so small they were mostly found at the bottom of the bins, which seemed to carry an inordinate amount of dirt, dist bunnies and decarying insect skeletons, as well as a few substances I didn't care to identify.
After hours of searching and then obsessively compuslively sorting just to enable further searching, I finally found enough tiles to use as keys. Then I figured out a way to arrange. This turned out to be an interesting excercise, because faithfully recreating the exact shape and arrangement of piano keys could not be done at my scale, so I instead opted to arrange the black and white keys in a symmetrical but uneven pattern, hoping it would simply look similar to piano pieces, and it actually worked. Why it worked is something I'm curious about, but I didn't stop to play around. I used a corder piece of an octogonal platform--the kind of thing normally used to construct space stations--as both the tilted lid thing and the base of the piano itself. An ancient looking fence made a music stand, and butchering some otherwise valuable hing pieces made for a good pedal effect, even though, as my father pointed out, I ended up with four pedals instead of the three that would be on a real piano. To which I retorted, I didn't get the keys right either. He may have been jealous that his ornament was ugly. I actually felt kind of bad, but I was really never good at making planes. Not sure why the piano turned out to well, but I certainly sacrificed to make it. If I ever elect to go back to my Lego collection and try to rebuild all of the sets I had, I'm going to be missing some key pieces.
Anyway, here are some pictures of the piano:
I finished it at six in the morning, which caused a little friction when I slept in through half of the next day. I think it was worth it though. My family seemed impressed. I really wanted to write instructions for it but I didn't have the time and, more importantly, I don't know how I made that. I didn't even put glue between all of the pieces because I didn't want to risk taking it apart and being unable to but it back together. Instead I just pulled things off and glued them back on until I was satisfied with its structural integrity.
For my older sister and brother in law, I made a Lego picture frame. It turned out pretty cool, because I found these cool magnet pieces at the Lego store. My younger sister and I (who helped with the construction of the frame) tested it on our parents fridge and it works. Unfortunately I didn't remember to take a picture about this one.
Before we leave the subject of Legos, I am furiously interested in coming up with some business startup idea that would involve me making a lot of money playing with Legos. I thought about maybe selling directions for Legos (could even have Kindle versions!) or creating a picture blog of creations I make like icanhascheezburger. I thought about creating a website similar to MrWong's Soup'Parments but as a Lego city and more similar to The Map of Springfield. I've actually already started such a project, but have been procrastinating ever since I came up against the task of multiplying quaternions against LDRAW's lame ass rotation matrix, which I can never remember its left-handed vs right-handed 'ness. Selling Lego parts by the individual piece crossed my mind--I remember the Lego company trying to do that but backing down because the brick-and-mortar stores threw a hissy fit and threatened to stop selling Legos. This was probably a story on slashdot, though, the very same place wherein theories once abounded regarding an Amazon.com conspiracy against gay authors suffering from a particular brand of melodramatic hubris. So maybe its not true. I've also considered making Lego video games; almost every game can become a Lego game simply by adding Legos to it. I want to aim higher. I want to make Lego Batman but a version with much more depth, and more like Turtles 3, with much larger maps, and cooler ways to interact with the world. Lego movies, Lego comic books, or maybe a Lego tv serious have also crossed my mind, but the tools to do these properly are scare and I would probably have to solve that quaternion problem I just mentioned. Oh, and I also want to invent a programming (or just a markup) language for creating virtual Lego models. Imagine if instead of exhaustively listing each brick in a wall, you simply called a function called Wall() which took two locations and fabricated a lego wall between them. The only practical use for such a language is would probably be a Lego version of Turtle (a.k.a. Logo).
Suffice to say, if you can think of any way a person can make money playing with Legos, I would love to hear it.
Actually, all I really want is infinite resources to create the largest lego world possible, starting with one model the size of the Earth. If your curious, it would take 510.072 trillion Lego baseplates model the Earth to a 6' minifig scale. I'm fairly certain that number of baseplates does not, has not, and never will, exist. Also, I have proven (to myself) using a ball of string, masking tape, and a sharpie marker, that it is impossible to create a decent approximation of a sphere using exact squares (which is what baseplates are) without introducing about 8 enormous triangles to the mix. So that will have to be done virtually. Also, I'm tempted to use a torus instead of a sphere; most people won't know the difference, and most video games that allow seamless wrapping on two axis (such as Zelda and Alien Legacy) are actually torus-like (torrodial? torrodian?) anyway.
ON CALL: Family time was interrupted because I was paged into an emergency during my one on call shift that week (which I was supposed to be using to make up a day of work). They needed someone from my team to sit around and listen to people fret about some misfit database that kept causing problems; I may have been called upon to comment on whether or not my team's software was still running. It was. This "on call" business was the whole reason I had to bring my big clunky Amazon laptop hope. For the record, I hate being responsible for something important that like. In my last job I sleep well at night secure in the fact that if the government projects we were working on "leaked" to the Russians, Chinese, Commists, Terrorists, or whatever enemy of the day it was, that the only thing that would happen is some poor operative would get a massive headache from looking at our disgusting java code. In contrast, that Amazon laptop has information that is actually sensitive, something I do not appreciate. Other people routinely take their laptops home. I normally leave mine in the office (unless I have to take it for on call fun) because if it gets stolen from the office, there's pretty much no way it will be my fault. But I digress.
I get a lot of questions about what I do at Amazon and why I have to go on call. I'd like to share with you some "cool" things a person might be on call for:
Uphill in the snow both ways: The people in charge of screwing up the belowed roads I used to zoom around on have continued their quest to make it as difficult and time consuming as possible to drive an automobile among the towns I grew up in. Perhaps an engineer somewhere fell out of his chair laughing when he realized how many cars would stack up behind a slow driver if they removed all of the extra lanes and passing zones from the road. Perhaps not. All I know is that there is a section that drags on for miles that does not afford a chance to get around slow people--slow as in driving close to the speed limit. When I had my bike I used a suicide lane to pass slow people out of some strange sense of entitlement: "I lived here when this was a passing lane!"
Commercial Aviation: I spent a lot of time fretting about how and what to pack for this trip, and I am seriously getting bored with writing this post, so lets just skip to where I'm standing in the C terminal with my backpack, my sleeping bag, and my suitcase. All carryons. Or so I thought. An announcement came repeatedly over the intercom explaining that according to Federal Aviation Regulations, passengers are only allowed one carryon and one personal item that had to fit under the seat. By the way: all aviation laws that actually matter are Federal Aviation Regulations. Contrast with laws made by the FCC, your local township, and things like seed patents, which are bullshit.
Anyway, I, technically, had three items. Being I good sport I say something to the U.S. Airways gatekeepers about checking my suitcase. I didn't want to check my sleeping bag because it was a bit small and odd shaped for something to be thrown into the cargo hold of an airplane. It would probably get lost. In case your curious, my sleeping bag cost about $120 at EMS, and replacing it is as simple as driving to EMS and buying another one. Or one like it. I'll skip the details, but I left my precious suitcase with my Amazon laptop inside just outside of the aircraft door, in full view of a stewardess. Distance between my "gate checked" bag with a hastily scribbled tag on it and the hull fo the airplane: less then 20 feet. There's no way this won't get to Philly right?
I was wrong. I slowly realized this as I stood resting one leg on the edge of the baggage belt watching the bags, and people collecting them, approach zero. In the process of filing a claim I learned that none of the gate checked bags made it, and it was a Good Thing I happened to know the exact number and color of American Apparel t-shirts in my suitcase, because a giant Dell laptop with a white stick in the corner that says "Amazon" is not a good enough identifier for them. Apparently the shirts were good enough--the guy stopped me before I could mention all of my dirty brown socks. I guess they don't want you to mention the electronics because the employee that finds your bag might happen to find it without the laptop inside. Like that joke "Did anyone lose a roll of money in a rubber band? We found the rubber band...."
Long story short, I got my laptop back the next day, but not before I had to tell my whole team that I had checked and lost my laptop with the airline, which, again, is apparrently the dumbest thing you can do.
This entire incident has further reinforced my desire to fly myself to Philly. Flying a small airplane coast to coast just to get somewhere is expensive and impractacle, however I've found a few factors that make it comparable to general aviation:
Writing: Oh, also, I was reading a lot of On Writing, by Stephen King. If you are serious about writing fiction, or interesting in being serious about writing fiction, or curious about getting interested in seriously writing fiction, I highly recommend reading the second half of that book. He presents an interesting approach to writing, which I have found solves a lot of the problems I've always experienced when I hit dead ends trying to invent a story. I actually spent most of the plane ride back to Seattle furiously scribbling a story into an expensive notebook from Borders that claimed to look just like the one used by some famous writer I don't plan on reading. I bought it because it was black. I didn't get to finish the story, thanks to the case of the missing luggage, but hopefully I will abstain from my computer, tv, guitar and video games to write the ending someday.
In Summary: I spent a lot of money and saw less than a quarter of the people I wanted to see and almost lost my work laptop. In short, I kind of suck at traveling. I get more vacation time next year though....
Snow: It snowed in philly. Not enough to impress a Subaru-bred Pennsylvanian such as myself, but enough to cause massive delays in air travel to KPHL, or Philly International for you non piloting civilians (I've found the one of the most arrogant things a person can do on the internet is to refer to other people as "civilians" in their blog, while themself having never been in a military). The second leg of my multi-plane journey that I had bought from Northwest airlines was repeatedly canceled. I was told I had to speak to an agent to rebook. I called Northwest well ahead of the time I needed to leave for the airport, but four hours later I was still listening to on-hold music while my first flight departed and while, more importantly, I really needed to use the bathroom. After giving up on my $400 I spent I booked a flight with U.S. Airways and sent Northwest a nastygram inquiring if I would be compensated. I received an automated reply, saying tickets would be credited or rebooked for this weather event, and directed to a webpage that did not mention the current weather at all but instead had lenghty H1N1 Swine Flu event information.
I arrived in Philly, though, after missing only a weekend of skiing that I'd been looking forward to. And with all of my stuff! I had checked a bag containing my super important work laptop. I have since learned that checking a laptop with a commercial airline is regarded by everyone else on the planet as one of the dumbest mistakes you can make. More on that later.
Fire: I did make it up to the cabin at Camelback. I missed Joe, my fellow accomplice of "thats what she said!" jokes, but I was in time to witness last few fireworks. Perhaps, ever. You see these fireworks were advertised as the kind that spin around and shoot up in the air. They were pretty cool even for a person normally desensitized to and unimpressed by pyrotechnic displays. This particular batch, though, seemed to be designed to shoot towards the nearest person. That was also interesting. Then one landed in a bush fragment. The first few seconds of fire were met with laughter. "Haha it started a little fire!" Then in the next few seconds, the fire increased in size, slightly. It was during these seconds that our laughter died off while we all tried to determine if this was going to be a problem. During a couple seconds after that, the fire jumped to the big bush and we began a mad dash to contain it. I grabbed a snow chunk on my way and dropped it onto the flame but that was ineffective.
We spent a lot of time with buckets of water and a dry chemical fire extinguisher. In fact you could call me a genuine bucketeer. The dry chemical part is relevant because Luke got it all over his hands, so we later had to look up the ingredients on wikipedia to see if they would make his hand fall off, or turn him into a zombie. The buckets of water is also relevant because we broke a faucet in the process. The bush may or may not make it. I'm pretty sure no one will ever be lighting fireworks at that cabin again.
Isabel the Impreza and the streets of Philadelphia: I stole my sister's (technically my mother's) car, a Subaru Impreza that I declared should be named Isabel. This Impreza is like an awesome, slightly slower version of my car. The all wheel drive kicked ass and granted me access to parking spots in philly that other people couldn't reach without a shovel. After parking it the first time, one girl asked from across the street what kind of car I had. That might have been simply because I had parked behind her, and she had been staring at my, worried I might hit her.
The entire time I was home I only saw 1 person that lived in philly. One out of like...more than twenty. An unfortunate habit that I'm unsure how to rectify. Perhaps Christmas isn't the best time to see all of your old buddies anyway, but it is frustrating to come 3000 miles and not even call people because you know you won't be able to see them.
Love Story: I performed my version of Taylor Swift's Love Story as best as I could with Kevin's guitar and a mangled, mutant, ginormous triangle guitar pick. Every time I am over at Kevin and Adam's place I harrass Kev for not owning any guitar picks for the guitar he never plays. Kev has repeatedly promised to buy some--this last time threatening to shower me with a hundred thousand of them. I doubt his sincerity, and so will be shipping a set of guitar picks to him. But I digress.
When I originally penned my version of Love Story, I thought it was hilarious. After hours of practicing it I have since realized that is it not funny at all but instead sad and depressing. However, when your audience actually believes that you are about to play the real version, and you start playing mine, it is hilarious. The key to the humor is explaining to your friends that you had to change a couple words because you are a guy, and the rest falls into place.
Sleeping under the stars: My mother has been dying to get me to stay at their place when I visit. I previously always stayed in the city and only made day trips out to visit them. This time, I stayed at home, in my old bed, under a bunch of glow in the dark stickers I slapped on the ceiling a very long time ago.
LEGOS!: Every year my family likes to do some kind of variation on the gifting giving thing. I think it is a mostly practical fix for the expensive and exhaustive task for buying stuff for each person -- what is that an n-squared minus n amount of gifts? I'm sure there is also a conceptual stand against commercialism as well. It kind of sucks when one group of people get all pissy about Christmas being a "Christian" holiday and make signs that say "happy holidays" instead of Merry Christmas, while at the same time malls start promoting an entirely santa-centric, money spending religion the day after halloween. I think we should split the holiday into two: the celebration of mass materialism and spoiled children can stay on the winter solstice, and the politically incorrect "real" or "true" version of Christmas can be swept under the covers sometime in March. All of the lazy people still have their trees up then anyway. The only question is what to do with all of the lame ass tv specials with the inoffensive but fuzzy and warm Christmas morals to preach. I'll leave this decision to others, since I hate watching them anyway. But I digress.
So some years we pick names out of a hat, and you only buy a gift for the person whose name you pulled. Some years we did some kind of thing where you bring a gift, and people take gifts from under the tree and have the option to keep it or steal one from someone else. Some years we do an under $20 variation, but that kind of sucks because its like admitting everyone is going to hate their presents, and we're just trimming our losses. Every year we do the variation where my mom buys almost all of the gifts destined for her granddaughters (my nieces) and I don't even remember what I allegedly bought them until they open it. Its a fun surprise.
This year the theme was you had to make the gifts (excepting members of the family under 10, they still got showered with expensive toys). I did not like this. I was stumped. I have an uncanny lack of knowledge about the other members of my family, and its hard enough to buy something for them, let alone restrict those possibilities to things I'm capable of creating with my hands. Fortunately, the night before the day before Christmas eve, Betsy's friend (whose nickname sounds like a class video game handle) suggested I make ornaments. Ornaments are amazing: they need serve no actual purpose, and its ok if they are ugly, so long as they still look half decent buried in a Christmas tree somewhere. So I made some ornaments out of Legos.
I've never really been a fan of Legos as art. They are quite blocky, and trying to figure out which pieces from my collection to sacrifice for the formation of a replica of some boring inanimate object boggled my mind. I much preferred to build things on the minifig scale which could be brought to life in my imagination: planes, boats, castles, docks, cities and spaceships. And pirates. So this very idea of using Legos to build some kind of non-Lego abomination was new to me.
I stopped at the Lego(TM) Store and found an ornament sized kit plane for my Dad. He was a navigator in the Navy and did a lot of flying on P-3s. The kit plane I got was one of those cheesy you-can-build-three-different-ugly-models kind, and the plane looked terrible. I wouldn't be able to do much better, however, especially not with something ornament sized, so I bought some super glue and added handle piece from my personal collection, and snapped it up:
The airline pilot character did not come with my kit. That was the first valuable piece I chose to sacrifice from my collection. I was going to list exactly which of my Lego sets the little guy could have come from, but wikipedia doesn't list pictures with the town set names, which are often meaningless. That compass is also a valuable piece of mine--probably from the pirates--but I removed it before the final gluing because that plane is just too ugly to be worth it.For my mom, who has been teaching beginner level piano lessons all of my life (giving me a considerable jumpstart into the world of music) I decided I would make a tiny baby grand piano. The biggest problem, I knew from the beginning, would be the keys. I sulked around the Lego store for quite a while trying to find a way to buy the pieces I needed, but the just weren't there, so I bought some other pieces I expected to need and spent hours late at night combing through the plastic bins containing my childhood lego collection for the elusive little black and white 1x2 tiles. The little bastards were so small they were mostly found at the bottom of the bins, which seemed to carry an inordinate amount of dirt, dist bunnies and decarying insect skeletons, as well as a few substances I didn't care to identify.
After hours of searching and then obsessively compuslively sorting just to enable further searching, I finally found enough tiles to use as keys. Then I figured out a way to arrange. This turned out to be an interesting excercise, because faithfully recreating the exact shape and arrangement of piano keys could not be done at my scale, so I instead opted to arrange the black and white keys in a symmetrical but uneven pattern, hoping it would simply look similar to piano pieces, and it actually worked. Why it worked is something I'm curious about, but I didn't stop to play around. I used a corder piece of an octogonal platform--the kind of thing normally used to construct space stations--as both the tilted lid thing and the base of the piano itself. An ancient looking fence made a music stand, and butchering some otherwise valuable hing pieces made for a good pedal effect, even though, as my father pointed out, I ended up with four pedals instead of the three that would be on a real piano. To which I retorted, I didn't get the keys right either. He may have been jealous that his ornament was ugly. I actually felt kind of bad, but I was really never good at making planes. Not sure why the piano turned out to well, but I certainly sacrificed to make it. If I ever elect to go back to my Lego collection and try to rebuild all of the sets I had, I'm going to be missing some key pieces.
Anyway, here are some pictures of the piano:
I finished it at six in the morning, which caused a little friction when I slept in through half of the next day. I think it was worth it though. My family seemed impressed. I really wanted to write instructions for it but I didn't have the time and, more importantly, I don't know how I made that. I didn't even put glue between all of the pieces because I didn't want to risk taking it apart and being unable to but it back together. Instead I just pulled things off and glued them back on until I was satisfied with its structural integrity.For my older sister and brother in law, I made a Lego picture frame. It turned out pretty cool, because I found these cool magnet pieces at the Lego store. My younger sister and I (who helped with the construction of the frame) tested it on our parents fridge and it works. Unfortunately I didn't remember to take a picture about this one.
Before we leave the subject of Legos, I am furiously interested in coming up with some business startup idea that would involve me making a lot of money playing with Legos. I thought about maybe selling directions for Legos (could even have Kindle versions!) or creating a picture blog of creations I make like icanhascheezburger. I thought about creating a website similar to MrWong's Soup'Parments but as a Lego city and more similar to The Map of Springfield. I've actually already started such a project, but have been procrastinating ever since I came up against the task of multiplying quaternions against LDRAW's lame ass rotation matrix, which I can never remember its left-handed vs right-handed 'ness. Selling Lego parts by the individual piece crossed my mind--I remember the Lego company trying to do that but backing down because the brick-and-mortar stores threw a hissy fit and threatened to stop selling Legos. This was probably a story on slashdot, though, the very same place wherein theories once abounded regarding an Amazon.com conspiracy against gay authors suffering from a particular brand of melodramatic hubris. So maybe its not true. I've also considered making Lego video games; almost every game can become a Lego game simply by adding Legos to it. I want to aim higher. I want to make Lego Batman but a version with much more depth, and more like Turtles 3, with much larger maps, and cooler ways to interact with the world. Lego movies, Lego comic books, or maybe a Lego tv serious have also crossed my mind, but the tools to do these properly are scare and I would probably have to solve that quaternion problem I just mentioned. Oh, and I also want to invent a programming (or just a markup) language for creating virtual Lego models. Imagine if instead of exhaustively listing each brick in a wall, you simply called a function called Wall() which took two locations and fabricated a lego wall between them. The only practical use for such a language is would probably be a Lego version of Turtle (a.k.a. Logo).
Suffice to say, if you can think of any way a person can make money playing with Legos, I would love to hear it.
Actually, all I really want is infinite resources to create the largest lego world possible, starting with one model the size of the Earth. If your curious, it would take 510.072 trillion Lego baseplates model the Earth to a 6' minifig scale. I'm fairly certain that number of baseplates does not, has not, and never will, exist. Also, I have proven (to myself) using a ball of string, masking tape, and a sharpie marker, that it is impossible to create a decent approximation of a sphere using exact squares (which is what baseplates are) without introducing about 8 enormous triangles to the mix. So that will have to be done virtually. Also, I'm tempted to use a torus instead of a sphere; most people won't know the difference, and most video games that allow seamless wrapping on two axis (such as Zelda and Alien Legacy) are actually torus-like (torrodial? torrodian?) anyway.
ON CALL: Family time was interrupted because I was paged into an emergency during my one on call shift that week (which I was supposed to be using to make up a day of work). They needed someone from my team to sit around and listen to people fret about some misfit database that kept causing problems; I may have been called upon to comment on whether or not my team's software was still running. It was. This "on call" business was the whole reason I had to bring my big clunky Amazon laptop hope. For the record, I hate being responsible for something important that like. In my last job I sleep well at night secure in the fact that if the government projects we were working on "leaked" to the Russians, Chinese, Commists, Terrorists, or whatever enemy of the day it was, that the only thing that would happen is some poor operative would get a massive headache from looking at our disgusting java code. In contrast, that Amazon laptop has information that is actually sensitive, something I do not appreciate. Other people routinely take their laptops home. I normally leave mine in the office (unless I have to take it for on call fun) because if it gets stolen from the office, there's pretty much no way it will be my fault. But I digress.
I get a lot of questions about what I do at Amazon and why I have to go on call. I'd like to share with you some "cool" things a person might be on call for:
- Hospital Helicopter Pilots
- Search and Rescue Pilots (Coast Guard, Civil Air Patrol)
- In case of Zombie Attacks
- Reporters that need to race to a disaster so they can be first to announce they're standing right in front of it
- Gundam Pilots
- Snowplow drivers
- EMTs and Paramedics
- Guy with dog that looks for disaster survivors
- The President
- Firefighters. Have you noticed no one hates firefighters? No one calls them pigs, or shows up at riots looking to fight them like with cops and army people.
Maybe arsonists hate them. Or Fire Elementals.
Uphill in the snow both ways: The people in charge of screwing up the belowed roads I used to zoom around on have continued their quest to make it as difficult and time consuming as possible to drive an automobile among the towns I grew up in. Perhaps an engineer somewhere fell out of his chair laughing when he realized how many cars would stack up behind a slow driver if they removed all of the extra lanes and passing zones from the road. Perhaps not. All I know is that there is a section that drags on for miles that does not afford a chance to get around slow people--slow as in driving close to the speed limit. When I had my bike I used a suicide lane to pass slow people out of some strange sense of entitlement: "I lived here when this was a passing lane!"
Commercial Aviation: I spent a lot of time fretting about how and what to pack for this trip, and I am seriously getting bored with writing this post, so lets just skip to where I'm standing in the C terminal with my backpack, my sleeping bag, and my suitcase. All carryons. Or so I thought. An announcement came repeatedly over the intercom explaining that according to Federal Aviation Regulations, passengers are only allowed one carryon and one personal item that had to fit under the seat. By the way: all aviation laws that actually matter are Federal Aviation Regulations. Contrast with laws made by the FCC, your local township, and things like seed patents, which are bullshit.
Anyway, I, technically, had three items. Being I good sport I say something to the U.S. Airways gatekeepers about checking my suitcase. I didn't want to check my sleeping bag because it was a bit small and odd shaped for something to be thrown into the cargo hold of an airplane. It would probably get lost. In case your curious, my sleeping bag cost about $120 at EMS, and replacing it is as simple as driving to EMS and buying another one. Or one like it. I'll skip the details, but I left my precious suitcase with my Amazon laptop inside just outside of the aircraft door, in full view of a stewardess. Distance between my "gate checked" bag with a hastily scribbled tag on it and the hull fo the airplane: less then 20 feet. There's no way this won't get to Philly right?
I was wrong. I slowly realized this as I stood resting one leg on the edge of the baggage belt watching the bags, and people collecting them, approach zero. In the process of filing a claim I learned that none of the gate checked bags made it, and it was a Good Thing I happened to know the exact number and color of American Apparel t-shirts in my suitcase, because a giant Dell laptop with a white stick in the corner that says "Amazon" is not a good enough identifier for them. Apparently the shirts were good enough--the guy stopped me before I could mention all of my dirty brown socks. I guess they don't want you to mention the electronics because the employee that finds your bag might happen to find it without the laptop inside. Like that joke "Did anyone lose a roll of money in a rubber band? We found the rubber band...."
Long story short, I got my laptop back the next day, but not before I had to tell my whole team that I had checked and lost my laptop with the airline, which, again, is apparrently the dumbest thing you can do.
This entire incident has further reinforced my desire to fly myself to Philly. Flying a small airplane coast to coast just to get somewhere is expensive and impractacle, however I've found a few factors that make it comparable to general aviation:
- Around the holidays, tickets to Philly get up to $1000 ($1400 for business class), especially if you are lazy like me and wait until a week before your trip to book your tickets.
- Once you book your tickets with commercial aviation, it is difficult to reschedule your flight and impossible to switch airlines without loosing the money you paid, even if you buy that worthless trip insurance. If you fly yourself out, you can leave whenever you damn well please.
- The 1 - 2 hours you allocate for security theatre at the airport are unecessary when flying yourself around. Also subtract at least half an hour for baggage claim on longer trips.
- If you remember to put your suitcase in the airplane and then take it out of the airplane, you don't have to worry about it somehow getting lost between Seattle and Philly. And if you forget to take it out of the airplane, you can go back to where you parked and take your suitcase out of the airplane. Furthermore, you can use whatever combination of bags and packing materials you like without worrying about overhead bins and under the seats. You could really just pile your clothes in the back seat if you wanted. The only new constraint is the weight and balance issues, which I solve by kicking out all of the fat passengers (during taking ground lessons for weight and balance, most sample problems involve a 350 lb passenger in the back seat of a Cessna, which always gaurantees you will need to remove some of the fuel).
- If Philly International gets shut down because of a bit of snow on the ground, you can still fly near Philly, with the possible options of driving the rest of the way, etc, instead of waiting the storm out in some city. Similarly, and in good weather, if there are ATC delays resulting from too much traffic, a private pilot can just go behind their back and fly under Visual Flight Rules (go around all the clouds).
- You can avoid Philly International on purpose and fly directly towards a smaller airport closer to your actual destination. This could save you a long trip down highway 95 in Philly or 5 in Seattle.
Writing: Oh, also, I was reading a lot of On Writing, by Stephen King. If you are serious about writing fiction, or interesting in being serious about writing fiction, or curious about getting interested in seriously writing fiction, I highly recommend reading the second half of that book. He presents an interesting approach to writing, which I have found solves a lot of the problems I've always experienced when I hit dead ends trying to invent a story. I actually spent most of the plane ride back to Seattle furiously scribbling a story into an expensive notebook from Borders that claimed to look just like the one used by some famous writer I don't plan on reading. I bought it because it was black. I didn't get to finish the story, thanks to the case of the missing luggage, but hopefully I will abstain from my computer, tv, guitar and video games to write the ending someday.
In Summary: I spent a lot of money and saw less than a quarter of the people I wanted to see and almost lost my work laptop. In short, I kind of suck at traveling. I get more vacation time next year though....
Thursday, December 17, 2009
We "fixed the glitch"
Someone at work just discovered that a number of people, including me, are currently NOT getting paged for--let me back up. At work, here, we have a ticketing system. That's pretty bland; I'm sure I'm allowed to mention that. Anyway, tickets can be assigned directly to people. This is frowned upon, because tickets are supposed to go to the team, not some random person on the team. Also, if you do assign yourself a ticket, to let people know you're working on it, you start getting annoying emails about "SLA breach"es. Our ticketing system thinks its a problem that I have a bunch of tickets assigned to me and I haven't touched them in a month. Oh, also, some tickets, that are important, "escalate" to your manager if you don't work on them in time. I am nobody's manager. I have no underlings. Consequently, tickets don't escalate to me. Only from me, which makes my manager really happy.
Ok, now that we've gotten that all cleared up: someone, who...how do you say it...outranks me...discovered an error in our paging system that affects a number of people, including me. This error prevents us from getting paged about nonevents like "SLA breaches" and "escalations" and being directly assigned tickets, but still allows us to be paged for real problems. Unfortunately the content of the email was not so much focused on how lucky we were, but how we needed to log in and fix the glitch. I was about to Reply-All with a snarky comment, but after rewriting it ten times I realized there is no way I could say anything and not get in trouble, and since I plan on skipping some bullshit meeting about "intellectual property" tomorrow, I should probably pick my battles. Let me remind you, I work for the company that patented clicking on something to buy it.
I have to admit I was mostly scared, though, and I have this rule where I (often) have to do things I am afraid of, especially if those things include confronting people or talking to girls, however I was then presented with a better option--one that requires my silence on the matter: deliberately setting the wrong value. My paging "alias" for events I don't care about now reads something like "dont-page-dave@". The bonus here is that now I won't even have to delete those emails anymore! Its a perfectly good excuse to not send an insubordinate email, since if I said something, someone would be more likely to notice my awesome solution.
Oh s#!$ my boss just found out.
Ok, now that we've gotten that all cleared up: someone, who...how do you say it...outranks me...discovered an error in our paging system that affects a number of people, including me. This error prevents us from getting paged about nonevents like "SLA breaches" and "escalations" and being directly assigned tickets, but still allows us to be paged for real problems. Unfortunately the content of the email was not so much focused on how lucky we were, but how we needed to log in and fix the glitch. I was about to Reply-All with a snarky comment, but after rewriting it ten times I realized there is no way I could say anything and not get in trouble, and since I plan on skipping some bullshit meeting about "intellectual property" tomorrow, I should probably pick my battles. Let me remind you, I work for the company that patented clicking on something to buy it.
I have to admit I was mostly scared, though, and I have this rule where I (often) have to do things I am afraid of, especially if those things include confronting people or talking to girls, however I was then presented with a better option--one that requires my silence on the matter: deliberately setting the wrong value. My paging "alias" for events I don't care about now reads something like "dont-page-dave@". The bonus here is that now I won't even have to delete those emails anymore! Its a perfectly good excuse to not send an insubordinate email, since if I said something, someone would be more likely to notice my awesome solution.
Oh s#!$ my boss just found out.
Monday, December 14, 2009
House Arrest
I was on call this entire weekend. With the holiday schedule, it started at 5am friday monrning, and ends sometime tomorrow (monday). I only have fifteen minutes to repond to a page, so I pretty much set up my laptop and don't leave my apartment (and if I do, I stay within a 15 minute walking distance). Because of the holiday schedule, my shift lasted even longer this weekend, and after so many days of it I realized it is a lot like house arrest--I can't really go anywhere or do anything. And most people don't understand my reluctance. I think in their mind me being on call for work is like when a firefighter is on call for work--no one actually expects something to happen. But I do. I'm actually suprised when I make it through a shift and don't get paged. So when people tell me to just bring my laptop to a restaurant, or over to their house for a party, I try to imagine myself plopping my laptop onto a sushi counter and phoning in to the emergency call.
Kinda sucks though...I'm basically stuck at home all weekend with my friends thinking I'm blowing them off, doing nothing but cleaning my apartment and getting paged for other people's problems. On the bright side, Firefly Girl came over tonight to watch the next disc of Castle season 1. Castle is, in my mind, a completely unrelated continuation of the amazing Firefly series, the primary reason I will hold a grudge against Fox forever. I hope, very much, that all of the other Firefly characters become guest stars in various Castle episodes.
Kinda sucks though...I'm basically stuck at home all weekend with my friends thinking I'm blowing them off, doing nothing but cleaning my apartment and getting paged for other people's problems. On the bright side, Firefly Girl came over tonight to watch the next disc of Castle season 1. Castle is, in my mind, a completely unrelated continuation of the amazing Firefly series, the primary reason I will hold a grudge against Fox forever. I hope, very much, that all of the other Firefly characters become guest stars in various Castle episodes.
Friday, December 11, 2009
In my defense...
Half of them were there when I got here:
Also that laptop screen is practically worthless. When I was in high school, and regularly hauling my computer to scheduled events to play video games, I remember lusting after having as much desktop space as possible. Throughout college I spend a great amount of time (when I should have been out drinking or something) entertaining a dual monitor configuration. It wasn't until I got here, though, that my love affair with screen real estate realy blossomed. You see, the marginal value of adding a monitor decreases--every monitor you add is less of a benefit than the last one. One way to deal with this fact is to realize when enough is enough and stop adding monitors. Another way is to just add a lot more monitors. As you can see I'm a fan of that second school of thought. The tiny monitors on the left are held up by a quad monitor stand that I purchased from a certain online retail giant.
If you are wondering: yes, I have actually used all of them at once, with the exception of the laptop screen, which as I said earlier, is basically worthless. In the world of display devices, size does matter--unless you have a screwy display ratio that doesn't play nice with X.org....
Another question you might ask me, is how much did it cost? Well, the answer is about 2 to 2 and a half hours in a Cessna, or 25 lunches. I used to pretend this kind of thing was an investment; my parents can offer a basement full of obsolete computers and an attic full of ikea furniture as proof.
Who the hell is Sarah Woodson?
Some hot girl friended me on facebook. Her name is Sarah. I seriously have no idea who she is. I worry that I should know, that she is some close friend of mine, or a customer from Neoquest, or a girl I dated, or one of the colorguard girls in high school whose name I couldn't remember. Or one of madison's roomates, some girl I met salsa dancing, someone from Drexel cru. I mean, I don't know. The possibilities of me forgetting people are endless. I'm pretty sure she's not one of the cute girls that drove by that one time when my motorcycle broke down because I rode the rear tire down to the cord, and I'm pretty sure she's not one of Katie's friends. I met a sarah last night, but I'm pretty sure she never went to Drexel. I've heard that all you need to do to make a fake facebook account is slap on a picture of an attractive girl and friend a bunch of guys at some school. So maybe "Sarah" is just a front for some loser reporter/stalker/13 year old. Her picture does look really familiar though. If she is a fake, I'm pretty sure there is a girl out there to looks just like her that I did know at some point. The next time I feel like my life doesn't have enough mystery, I will log onto facebook and stare at her picture for a while.
Ironically, I did meet a Sarah last night, but with a different last name and a ring on her boyfriend finger. She stopped by with Bridget, which is the first time I've seen her since she moved here. Bridget told me that her friends here know about her blog--an extremely scary thought. How could I talk about people when I know they might read it? I would be constantly evaluating every sentence, judging whether or not it would hurt or improve my chances of hooking up with various ladies. I know, because I've done that. And I'd have to like watch how much ridicule my guy friends. Yeah...I'm pretty much keeping mine under wraps from western eyes. And if people around here find out about it, I'm going to have to have adventures elsewhere. Like Vegas. What happens in Vegas gets posted to the internet.
Last night also, like every night I have people over, reinforced my theory that having two stacks of tires sitting around your apartment, because of along story involving "summer" and "winter" tires and buying rims and tires, does not make a good conversation piece. Also I'm told that my living room smells like rubber, which is odd because I don't smell it anymore. By the time I get these winter tires on Jessica it will be summer again anyway and I'll have to switch them back.
AnthroPC
This one girl out here--we'll call her Firefly girl--got me interested in Questionable Content, which is one of my new favorite comics along with Penny Arcade, XKCD, Three Panel Soul and a whatever I'm forgetting right now. I don't know how I missed Questionable Content. There was a point in my life, when I didn't have a lot of friends, and Mac Hall and PBFComics were still being written, and PVPOnline was still funny sometimes, that I took it upon myself to scour the internet for all of the funny webcomics. I didn't find many. Most were either not funny, or had way too many words crowding out the panel. But I digress.
One of the characters in Questionable Content is apparently an anthropomorphic computer. It got me thinking: what would it take--actually, no. What it got me thinking was "I want one." Then I started wondering what it would take to make one. I think it would make a nice pet. It would have to be done right though; that's the kind of thing that either makes you super interesting or super nerdy. I suppose I could give it a cell phone interface, and just text it when I'm bringing girls over, and it would then hide in my closet. That would be pretty cool.
Possibly not so Expensive
I am going to re-evaluate my conclusion that flying myself to the East Coast would be too expensive. I never factored in the holiday prices. Some of the flights back home for Christmas are $1000. With commercial aviation that high, flying yourself there becomes a lot more affordable by comparison. I still have to find a plane that can to faster than 150 knots (172 mph). That may sound fast, but its not.
Also that laptop screen is practically worthless. When I was in high school, and regularly hauling my computer to scheduled events to play video games, I remember lusting after having as much desktop space as possible. Throughout college I spend a great amount of time (when I should have been out drinking or something) entertaining a dual monitor configuration. It wasn't until I got here, though, that my love affair with screen real estate realy blossomed. You see, the marginal value of adding a monitor decreases--every monitor you add is less of a benefit than the last one. One way to deal with this fact is to realize when enough is enough and stop adding monitors. Another way is to just add a lot more monitors. As you can see I'm a fan of that second school of thought. The tiny monitors on the left are held up by a quad monitor stand that I purchased from a certain online retail giant.If you are wondering: yes, I have actually used all of them at once, with the exception of the laptop screen, which as I said earlier, is basically worthless. In the world of display devices, size does matter--unless you have a screwy display ratio that doesn't play nice with X.org....
Another question you might ask me, is how much did it cost? Well, the answer is about 2 to 2 and a half hours in a Cessna, or 25 lunches. I used to pretend this kind of thing was an investment; my parents can offer a basement full of obsolete computers and an attic full of ikea furniture as proof.
Who the hell is Sarah Woodson?
Some hot girl friended me on facebook. Her name is Sarah. I seriously have no idea who she is. I worry that I should know, that she is some close friend of mine, or a customer from Neoquest, or a girl I dated, or one of the colorguard girls in high school whose name I couldn't remember. Or one of madison's roomates, some girl I met salsa dancing, someone from Drexel cru. I mean, I don't know. The possibilities of me forgetting people are endless. I'm pretty sure she's not one of the cute girls that drove by that one time when my motorcycle broke down because I rode the rear tire down to the cord, and I'm pretty sure she's not one of Katie's friends. I met a sarah last night, but I'm pretty sure she never went to Drexel. I've heard that all you need to do to make a fake facebook account is slap on a picture of an attractive girl and friend a bunch of guys at some school. So maybe "Sarah" is just a front for some loser reporter/stalker/13 year old. Her picture does look really familiar though. If she is a fake, I'm pretty sure there is a girl out there to looks just like her that I did know at some point. The next time I feel like my life doesn't have enough mystery, I will log onto facebook and stare at her picture for a while.
Ironically, I did meet a Sarah last night, but with a different last name and a ring on her boyfriend finger. She stopped by with Bridget, which is the first time I've seen her since she moved here. Bridget told me that her friends here know about her blog--an extremely scary thought. How could I talk about people when I know they might read it? I would be constantly evaluating every sentence, judging whether or not it would hurt or improve my chances of hooking up with various ladies. I know, because I've done that. And I'd have to like watch how much ridicule my guy friends. Yeah...I'm pretty much keeping mine under wraps from western eyes. And if people around here find out about it, I'm going to have to have adventures elsewhere. Like Vegas. What happens in Vegas gets posted to the internet.
Last night also, like every night I have people over, reinforced my theory that having two stacks of tires sitting around your apartment, because of along story involving "summer" and "winter" tires and buying rims and tires, does not make a good conversation piece. Also I'm told that my living room smells like rubber, which is odd because I don't smell it anymore. By the time I get these winter tires on Jessica it will be summer again anyway and I'll have to switch them back.
AnthroPC
This one girl out here--we'll call her Firefly girl--got me interested in Questionable Content, which is one of my new favorite comics along with Penny Arcade, XKCD, Three Panel Soul and a whatever I'm forgetting right now. I don't know how I missed Questionable Content. There was a point in my life, when I didn't have a lot of friends, and Mac Hall and PBFComics were still being written, and PVPOnline was still funny sometimes, that I took it upon myself to scour the internet for all of the funny webcomics. I didn't find many. Most were either not funny, or had way too many words crowding out the panel. But I digress.
One of the characters in Questionable Content is apparently an anthropomorphic computer. It got me thinking: what would it take--actually, no. What it got me thinking was "I want one." Then I started wondering what it would take to make one. I think it would make a nice pet. It would have to be done right though; that's the kind of thing that either makes you super interesting or super nerdy. I suppose I could give it a cell phone interface, and just text it when I'm bringing girls over, and it would then hide in my closet. That would be pretty cool.
Possibly not so Expensive
I am going to re-evaluate my conclusion that flying myself to the East Coast would be too expensive. I never factored in the holiday prices. Some of the flights back home for Christmas are $1000. With commercial aviation that high, flying yourself there becomes a lot more affordable by comparison. I still have to find a plane that can to faster than 150 knots (172 mph). That may sound fast, but its not.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Open for Business
"My instructor would be so mad if he saw that." I said that at least once, and thought it many times, as I took my first passenger since getting my pilot's license. After immersing myself into the training for so long, I had this irrational fear that I would forget how to fly after I shelved my textbooks and took all of my handwritten notes off the walls. Fortunately, it seems that I still remember all the important things. My skills did slip a bit. A few flights over the winter should be enough to maintain them though.
Then I got the rock band drumset for $20. I'm pretty excited. That's basically the cost of two lunches out here.
Then I got the rock band drumset for $20. I'm pretty excited. That's basically the cost of two lunches out here.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
I'd like to share a revelation I've had
If you get on the elevators here, at night, and press a button, the button will flash briefly instead of remaining lit until your floor is reached. Also you will never reach your floor. The elevator will go to the second floor, and remain there without opening the doors. All of the buttons will be nonresponsive, or flash briefly, like they are broken. You can hold a button, and it will flash a couple of times, but still nothing. Just about when you are beginning to think you are trapped, and you start examining the ceiling for a way out, the elevator will take you back down to the first floor and spit you out.
The first time this happened to me, I had failed to find an emergency exit and I had my phone unlocked, ready to dial either 911 or my boss (whichever involved talking to fewer people) when the elevator released me. Another few minutes and I probably would have walked away with some kind of elevator phobia.
The second and third time it happened, I began to realize that something was up. This took a long time, because I almost always take the stairs, and every time an elevator failed me I immediately reverted to taking the stairs. The stairs, by the way, have no access control mechanism. This will become important shortly.
I recently discovered that the reason the elevators do this is because they are "locked." They don't take you anywhere unless you scan the same badge that opens the building doors. Potential burglars are thwarted because they have no way to reach any floor of the building unless they just take the stairs. So I guess our physical security threat model is based on fat people. Idk.
Speaking of Fat People, I think we should change the security b.s. at airports by narrowing the width of the metal detectors, such that, if a person is too fat to fit through a metal detector, they are too fat to fit on an airplane seat. To board they must posses two adjacent tickets. Then they can use the double wide metal detector.
The first time this happened to me, I had failed to find an emergency exit and I had my phone unlocked, ready to dial either 911 or my boss (whichever involved talking to fewer people) when the elevator released me. Another few minutes and I probably would have walked away with some kind of elevator phobia.
The second and third time it happened, I began to realize that something was up. This took a long time, because I almost always take the stairs, and every time an elevator failed me I immediately reverted to taking the stairs. The stairs, by the way, have no access control mechanism. This will become important shortly.
I recently discovered that the reason the elevators do this is because they are "locked." They don't take you anywhere unless you scan the same badge that opens the building doors. Potential burglars are thwarted because they have no way to reach any floor of the building unless they just take the stairs. So I guess our physical security threat model is based on fat people. Idk.
Speaking of Fat People, I think we should change the security b.s. at airports by narrowing the width of the metal detectors, such that, if a person is too fat to fit through a metal detector, they are too fat to fit on an airplane seat. To board they must posses two adjacent tickets. Then they can use the double wide metal detector.
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