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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Tuesday, May 17, 2005
10:59 p.m.
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Grr... I've spent two days hanging round the telephone, checking e-mail, and generally waiting for a call about a research project from a professor at Carnegie Mellon, and now it turns out I'm right back where I started from! It all started while I was on the bike trip last week. Prof. Lori Levin, of the LTI, where I'm going to grad school in the fall, e-mailed me last Tuesday evening saying that she had an opening on one of her research projects and wanted to know if I was interested. If you are, she said, let me know when a good time to call you would be. I came home on Wednesday night; on Thursday morning an affirmative reply was dispatched saying that I would be available for the rest of the week during the afternoon at my school number, and then from Monday onward at my home number. So I waited relatively close to the phone during the next two days, minus packing, eating dinner, etc., and other activities mentioned in previous entries. No call. I sat around the house on Monday while everyone else was off at work and school, but still nothing. In the afternoon I looked up Prof. Levin's phone number and called her myself. There was no answer at her office, so I left a message saying that I was around and could be reached at home. Later I checked my e-mail and found that she had already sent me a message saying that she would call that evening if I was going to be around. I answered that I would and logged off. With parental permission, the entire house was put on an online embargo for the next several hours, and all users of the phone were requested to answer the call waiting if it beeped during a conversation. But still no call. This morning I found an e-mail timestamped 1:12 a.m. in my box containing an apology for not calling. The attachment coming with it, at least, contained two documents relating to the research project that she wanted me to read. I spent the afternoon paging though the project descriptions, feeling like this was something pretty cool that I'd like to be a part of. Around 4:00 I finally called Prof. Levin's office again and left another message. At last, just after 9:00, the call came. The news: the position that she'd been talking to me about, and about which I'd read 30 pages of formal writing, was actually not the one that would be open. Probably. It turns out that an LTI staff member will probably be taking that job, and the one that is really open for a student is something completely different. If nothing else changes. She described it to me, but it wasn't nearly as cool sounding as the first. I have a feeling that, as a consequence, I represented myself rather badly over the phone and we didn't really get anywhere. The best part is that they won't even know which job they need filled until this Thursday, which is the date currently set for the start of a week-long backpacking trip I'm planning to go on. I mentioned this to Prof. Levin, and she said that it shouldn't upset anything at her end if I disappear for a week — but now, instead of having a cool job rather locked up (the state I thought I'd be in by this time), I won't even be finding out if I have a possibility of a not-so-exciting job until almost Memorial Day. That's all the news from this quarter so far. My bedroom here refused to accomodate any of the stuff I brought home from school, and my mom refuses to accomodate any of it in her living room after I leave for the camping, so I think I'll have to work something out during the day tomorrow. I say, one of the best parts about getting an apartment in August is that I won't have to box up all my crap every nine months and live like a nomad the rest of the year. I can hardly get in the mood to scatter CDs, notebooks, desk implements, paperback books, and so on across the house if I just have to re-collect them in 10 weeks to haul them off somewhere else. The common sensical — or perhaps it's the lazy — part of me says that it would be easier to leave them in packing boxes and just live out of those for the time in question. My parents, however, can't be persuaded to see things this way. |
Thursday, May 19, 2005
10:53 p.m.
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A lot of running (driving) around in the past two days. Yesterday featured a jaunt with Sonnie down to the First & Main shopping area in Hudson for some ice cream and browsing in the book shop. Sonnie had described First & Main as a miniature Legacy Village, which is rather correct, but at least Hudson had an authentic downtown shopping area to start with. Legacy Village is just a monstrosity of shops and expensive places trying to look like an old neighborhood. (It fails.) But to move on. Today I spent about half the day in my car, leaving on a series of stops around 2:15. These included the bank, the library, the gas station, the gas station down the road that was 10 cents cheaper, and then up to the movie theatre at Severance. I wanted to meet Erin and Ben when they came out of the Star Wars movie. Erin had a backpacking backpack to give me and I had stuff to give both of them; they're also planning out the trip that was supposed to start today but is actually taking place tomorrow. I must have missed them by about a minute at the theatre, because after that I waited for almost a half an hour without seeing them come out. Since I'd gone that far, I decided to continue on to Ben's house off Coventry — they were both there, continuing their Star Wars binge with a video game. And since I'd already gone that far, I pulled up on campus to see if Mark or someone was around for dinner. I didn't get any answer when I called Mark and Jeremy's suite in Howe, so it was a pretty quick detour. I suppose everyone was probably still at work since it was just a few minutes after 5:00 when I got there. Back home in traffic, which got me home just in time for dinner. I also had to run out tonight to get some things for the camping trip: two-gallon Ziploc bags, a new cup and dish to replace the old ones that disappeared on our Cedar Point trip, and some food for the car rides. It was the first time I drove in the suburbs at night and in the rain, which led me to realize how much darker things are away from the city. The Wal-Mart out here in Bainbridge is pretty nice — as far as big-box suburban blights go, at least — but it's organized completely differently from the one in Cleveland Heights. For a while it seemed like I'd never find where they'd hidden the Ziploc bags. All the signs above the aisle, where you usually see a concise description of what's in the aisle, were instead filled with idiotic things like "Save! Save! Save!" and "Always Wal-Mart!" But I got out eventually before the store closed. That's essentially been my last two days. The camping précis for those who care or for those who might check this in the next week and wonder why there isn't anything new: We leave tomorrow morning at 10:30 from Erin's house — the starting point of so many of our adventures — and arrive at Ben's house near Columbus for lunch. Then it's south to Shawnee State Park in extreme southern Ohio for the night. Tomorrow we'll make it the rest of the way down to Great Smoky Mountains National Park (on the Tenn.-N.C. border), spend tomorrow night near the car, and then launch a multi-day hike that will last from Sunday until Tuesday, when we'll camp back near the car again. Wednesday night should see us in Boone National Forest in Kentucky, and on Thursday we'll either be back here or at Ben's house and then here on Friday. Should be a fun experience... my first real backpacking trip! |
Friday, May 27, 2005
10:42 p.m.
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I'm still alive after spending seven days in the woods without a shower or shaving. The backpacking trip was pretty cool, and I took notes during most of the trip, so I think I'll package them into a separate web page, which will be up soon. In the meantime, an additional development — For some reason known only to them, my 88- and 86-year-old grandparents decided to buy a new car recently, and consequently now want to get rid of their old one. My uncle's taken up that responsibility, and decided to call various family members first to see if they wanted it, and one of the people he thought of was me. So my parents and I ran out to my grandparents' house this evening to have a look at it. It's the classic grandma car: a 1996 Buick Skylark, only 46,000 miles, no rust, no body work, etc. Taken out on nothing but short trips to the store, church, and hairdresser for at least the last five years and probably more. Price: as low as $2000 because my grandpa wants to get rid of it. Sounds like an ideal situation to be in, but I'm not so sure. My parents and I agree that it's impossible to find that much car for that little money anywhere else and that it would be worlds more reliable than my current mode of transport. (I could actually take it on camping trips, drive between home and Pittsburg, etc.) The problem comes in with the timing, though. Pittsburgh is a hilly city, and I don't know where I'm living yet — I may need to parallel park on a side street every day, and this would be a whole lot easier with my blue Sardinemobile than with this outsided purple hulk. It also gets pretty rotten (by my standards) gas mileage: my grandpa, who is just as compulsive as I am in keeping track of these things, has generally gotten between 20 and 22 miles per gallon with the Buick. My car, by contrast, is usually over 30 in the summer and around 25 during the winter. The best part is that I have to let my uncle know by tomorrow if I'm interested, or else he's going to put an ad into the papers to sell it that way. The rational part of me says that I'd be really really dumb to pass this car up and that I'll just have to take what I can get until I've enough money to buy the sort of car I really want. It may be the beginning of the end of the Sardinemobile, then; I'll let you guys know what happens. |
Monday, May 30, 2005
9:44 p.m.
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I think I'll start off tonight by tying up the loose end about that Buick that I left hanging: my dad decided we were going to buy it, so I'll eventually be getting a new car as soon as my grandpa and my dad make all the necessary insurance arrangements and we go to register the thing and get license plates. I'm not sure how long that's going to take, so for now the Sardinemobile reigns supreme in my world of automobiles. Some of you pointed out some good things in your comments to Friday's post, chief among these being the rational thought that I'll be taking the car on longer trips than my grandparents ever did and consequently can expect better gas mileage. When I was driving around town Saturday morning I felt like I was being hunted by giant sedans (by seeing them everywhere and thinking how annoying they would be to drive), but in the afternoon, after I'd read the comments, I felt a lot better. If I can learn to drive on a minivan (and I did), I should be able to re-learn to maneuver a grandma car or else there's no hope left for me as a motorist. And that's that. I talked to Mark on IM Saturday night for the first time since coming home, and he said he was interested in seeing the Phillips Collection exhibit at the art museum again if I was planning on coming up to do the same. We got it worked out yesterday, so I hopped into my car around 1:30 and met him across from Fribley at a bit after 2:00. The exhibit was pretty good, but it was mobbed by one of the stupidest crowds I'd ever seen. Large masses of people are all right in front of rides at Cedar Point and outside of movie theatres, where there isn't much for them to get into, but in an art museum there are too many ways they can quickly become hyper-annoying. If it wasn't leaning (repeatedly, mind you!) over the electric eyes near the paintings and causing the alarms to go off, it was clustering in immobile clumps around the works of interest so that no one else could get near anything. I managed to look at the exhibit's centerpiece, "The Luncheon of the Boating Party" by Renoir, but Mark and I had to give it up after about an hour and make good our escape. Interestingly enough, although the Renoir in real life is much more vivid and colorful that I was expecting, the two things I enjoyed the most were by an artist called Oskar Kokoschka (I think), who I had never heard of before. He had done a portrait of a young lady — leaving her figure mainly while while surrounding it with yellows, reds, and blues — that gave the overall impression of a thermogram a good many years before any such thing existed. His other was a sort of ultra-impressionist landscape, from 1930, composed in large slashes of paint and color. Spent the rest of the evening on campus with Mark. First back to his suite in Howe to talk a bit, then over to the grocery store, then dinner back in Howe and more talking before I finally decided I should be heading home around 9:30. A thoroughly enjoyable evening swapping P.G. Wodehouse quotes and sharing bits from Dave Barry columns. A group trip to Half-Price Books seems indicated for a near-future date once Nicole gets back to Cleveland. Today was Memorial Day, and friends of the family (the Vargos) lost their heads to the point that they invited all six of us over for dinner and such, beginning around 2:00. My mom spent most of the day baking a coffee cake and arranging vegetable trays, so we at least carted the world's supply of appetizers over with us instead of dropping in like a pack of hungry wolves. It was good to see Liz and hang around Twinsburg again — she's most properly my sister's friend, but that's sort of spilled over into me considering her a friend of mine as well since we all used to do things together back in high school. Dinner was outside around 5:00; after that the four of us (me, Chris, Katie, and Andrew) plus Liz decided to go for a walk. Our first port of call was the swings and the animal statue-things at Glenmeadow Park, and then we continued on to Idlewood for more little-kid-style fun. On the way back we were overtaken on the bike path by Sonnie, who was out for a ride. Eventually got back to Liz's and then home by 8:45. Which essentially ends my summer break. I start work at Rockwell tomorrow, and expect to be there right up until I move out to Pittsburgh in mid-August. I've finally got my parents committed to a day trip to that city next Sunday to look at apartments, which already makes me feel more excited about having a place to live and a life of my own in a few months. My sister is also moving into an apartment for the next school year at Akron, so the furniture-collecting has started in earnest at my house in the last week or so: we've so far collected a dresser and a rather nice twin bed that will become the property of one or the other of us when the actual moving occurs. |
Thursday, June 2, 2005
9:29 p.m.
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Two days of work so far, and the boredom has already set in. I started off the job at 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday — they were just carting a computer into my new cube, so I got to hook it up. Then Jack, the guy I mainly worked "under the direction of" last year, took me back to the development lab and started going over the things they'd been doing recently. It's still the same project that I was on last year, and not even as far along as I thought it might be after a year. Some of the code and GUIs I wrote last year have been shipped out and are now available online, and that was a pretty nice feeling. It looks like I'm going to have two main jobs this year: a little bit of writing help files for the stuff I developed last summer, and then most of the summer will be developing new code and GUIs (a "profile") for a different series of third-party products ("modules"). (I'm keeping this description rather vague because I'm not sure if it's still proprietary knowledge or trade secret or any rot like that. Also because most people will find it boring. If you actually care, say so and I'll explain a lot better.) The boredom set in this morning, after I'd spent an hour talking to the IT help desk to get my e-mail client up and running and to be able to change my network password away from the default. I used up the next two hours until lunchtime by reading a user manual for the next module I'm going to be working on, but after that I came up empty on the to-do list. So I made the mistake of wishing that something interesting would happen — I was momentarily woken up by my phone ringing, but the fact that no one was on the other end started me going along the "interesting" line. This, in retrospect, was a very bad wish to make. I went back to the lab around 3:30 and tried to open a profile — it crashed. So I opened the code and rebuilt the projects — an error in the build and the same crash as before. Jack and I couldn't get it figured out by 4:45, so now it looks like I don't have to worry about finding stuff to do tomorrow morning at least! At home this evening, I finally pulled myself together and made some phone calls I'd been meaning to put through for about a week; there are now three apartments in Pittsburgh awaiting my perusal this Sunday. That, and a run around the neighborhood, completed the day. |
Tuesday, June 7, 2005
9:28 p.m.
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The moment you've all been waiting for! I spent some time on Saturday night working on my site, and I can now announce that the long-promised Smoky Mountains Backpacking Trip Page is finally completed and online for your viewing pleasure. In addition, the main page of my site has been slightly redesigned to keep things a bit more organized. I would have announced these sooner, but I haven't had a chance to sit down and write for a few days. |
Tuesday, June 7, 2005
9:33 p.m.
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Two entries tonight, mainly because I didn't want the Smokies trip page announcement to be lost among all the other things that have been going on in the past week. I was expecting to post Saturday night, after I finished uploading my site updates, but it was getting late to the point that I needed to be going to bed. (The next day, as I menioned before, was our day trip to Pittsburgh for apartment hunting.) Lots of stuff to write about, so I'll try to keep each one rather short. We start with a bit of physical exercise that took place on Saturday afternoon. I decided to go out for a bike ride, since I'd promised Erin I would look for routes between campus and Dover Lake or the towpath running though this area. When we were all at Dan's grandparents' house in Moreland Hills the night before graduation, I remarked that Lander Road had nice wide lanes and not many cars, so Saturday I headed out that way to see how I could do. Then I just kept heading north, without any real plan in mind, and when I was almost to Chagrin Road a thought struck me: I'm probably already more than halfway to campus; why not finish the job? So I did. I arrived in front of Fribley around 2:00 after having left my house at 12:30 saying I was going on a "short" ride. A quick phone call home explained the situation, and then I went over to Howe to hunt up Nicole and Mark. Success, followed by surprise and disbelief on their part that I'd just biked 22 miles and was planning on going back the same way. Saturday night was website updating, which brings us to the apartment hunting trip on Sunday. My parents and I left here around 8:45 and got to Pittsburgh about two hours later. The drive between here and there is pretty nice and straightforward, until you actually get into downtown Pittsburgh and are driving on bridges and crossing rivers and merging with other roads on sharp turns. The last time my family drove there was when I visited Carnegie Mellon five years ago when I was looking at schools for undergrad; the trip Sunday was a lot easier because I'd at least been there twice since then, most recently for the LTI open house back in March. We looked at six apartments from three renters in four buildings, so I'd call it a pretty profitable day — got to see a good chunk of the city as well. The best part of the day was discovering, almost immediately once we started driving around, that there are a lot of neighborhoods in Pittsburgh that look like Cleveland Heights or University Heights here. Every time I bike or walk through the streets off Cedar-Fairmount I always feel horrible that I won't actually get to live there; now at least I can live somewhere almost like it. The winning apartment, out of the six we saw, was one rented by an Italian couple about a mile and a half north of CMU who live in the bottom of the building and rent three units on the second and third floors. They made a point of showing us all three, plus the two floors they keep for themselves, giving us a full run-down of the people who currently rent one of the second-floor units, and presenting us with a bottle of wine that the husband makes in a little room in the basement. Quite a nice set of people, but they also made it clear by inference that they're pretty no-nonsense when it comes to renting. There's an application process, and they're pretty picky about who they take on. Price of the one-bedroom apartment: $550 a month plus electricity; free parking off of a little stable-lane behind the building included. I'll probably make one more trip to the city to see a few more places, but this one was by far the nicest and cleanest, and perhaps even the biggest as well. The price, though about the same as the others I saw, was still a bit higher that I thought I'd be able to find. Tying up another loose end, the Grandma Express finally made its arrival here yesterday evening. My dad and I spent two hours during the day buying insurance, dealing with the insurance people, and running down to the license bureau to get the title transferred so that we could all go over to my grandparents' house after dinner and collect the goods. It was my mom's birthday, so we had gone out to the Olive Garden on Chagrin Road and then had to drive all the way to Brecksville. (Between the car stuff and leaving early to get home in time to leave for dinner, I ended up owing work an hour and 20 minutes!) My grandpa had made a big stink Sunday evening, when we were there to do the same, that we couldn't take it until we had the insurance and title properly transfered and all that because he didn't want a black mark on his insurance if we crashed on the way home. I drove it to work today and washed it this evening, so I hope to compose a complete post some time this week explaining what I think of it so far. I think this one's gotten long enough! |
Wednesday, June 8, 2005
8:11 p.m.
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Here's a fun tidbit from work today. Right after it happened I had to stop for a minute and e-mail an account of it to myself for inclusion here. I was copying some text from one help file to another, and came across the sentence "This module must be returned to vendor for firmware updates." I was about to add a "the" between "to" and "vendor" to make it a bit easier to understand, but then realized there was a bit of a British-English pun going on with the phrase "return to sender." This immediately got the Elvis song of the same title playing in my head -- we sang it as part of a medley back in middle school choir -- and then my brain dug up one of the clues from the New York Times crossword I was trying to do two Sundays ago. It was asking for an Elvis hit from a certain year, and I couldn't find anything that fit. Now, of course, everything becomes clear: the theme of the puzzle was "You've Got Mail," so I'll bet anything "Return to Sender" would have been it! That was a bit before lunch. In the afternoon, I had to read through a pretty rotten user manual in order to find work to do for the next few days. Very badly written, punctuation errors, confusing sentences, topped off by the absolutely apalling "The same applys for the the gain settings, etc." in Chapter 5. Not much else to report, sadly. The Smokies trip page seems to have been well-received, and now two more people are on record as wanting to go camping sometime this summer. (I count this as amazing progress. There probably aren't more than eight people who actually read my stuff, let alone react to it!) Some canoeing down in Hiram might be nice, and it's close enough to make an excellent weekend trip without any bother of leaving early on Friday to get there in time to do anything. It would also, I assume, be pretty low-key camping, since anyone who gets fed up can get back to my house in about a half hour and back to Cleveland in certainly under 90 minutes. Let me know if you're interested and we'll make an official party out of it. |
Random Stuff #11
Thursday, June 9, 2005, 7:46 p.m.
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Here's a topic that's been on my mind a bit recently: punctuation and grammar. I've been reading over a lot of documentation for work these past two weeks, which as many scientists can tell you is an exercise in maximum stupidity, and then I've been complementing it with an excellent book called "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" by Lynne Truss that's all about — guess — punctuation and grammar. So it was only a matter of time before the following was presented to the world: Where's a Red Pen When You Need One? Another user manual leads off tonight's three finalists for the prize of dishonor. I came across it this morning at work, and it almost made me say "Wait a minute..." right out loud: Read this chapter to: Further reinforcing my theory (to be explained later) that the Buick Skylark was designed, marketed, and sold exclusively for those over 65, here's an excerpt from the owner's manual where they try to explain cruise control — evidently to someone with the mental capabilities of a kindergardener: Remember, if you hold the switch at R/A longer than a half second, the vehicle will keep going faster until you release the switch or apply the brake. You could be startled and even lose control. So unless you want to go faster, don't hold the switch at R/A. I thought the capstone of this foray into unreadability was going to be that gem with the misspelled word and the double "the" that I posted in yesterday's entry. But then I actually remembered something even worse: this is from the instructions that came with a small radio my grandparents gave me a number of years ago. I've been saving it (the instruction sheet; the radio died) ever since in the hopes of using it for something like this. Your radio is equipped with a built-in ferrite bar aerial for improved AM(MW) reception, and a telescopic rod antenna (8) for improved FM reception, As the built-in ferrite bar aenal is directional, rotate the radio slowly to find the position which gives optimum recpetion on MW(AM). When listening to FM broadcagts .extend the telecopic rod aerial (8) to its full length ,for best reception and clarity. |
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