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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Sunday, June 12, 2005
3:13 p.m.
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Another moment you've (probably not) all been waiting for: I'm finally going to get around to explaining my theory, expressed in Thursday's "Random Stuff" entry, that the Buick Skylark was designed, marketed, and sold exclusively for those over 65. This journal has been getting pretty boring recently, and I think it's about time to do something about it. So I've put myself on a heavy prescription of Dave Barry columns from the late '80s and forced myself to stop writing until there was something interesting and funny to write about. I drove the Buick to work three times this week and twice around town, mixed in with a few days of driving my old car, so I think this subject ought to have something interesting I can say about it. Let's first review the evidence in support of the over-65 theory. The first thing I notice about this car, when I get into it, is that all the numbers on the speedometer and on the clock are approximately eight inches high: clearly designed for people have trouble telling a "1" and an "8" apart when they see them in smaller print. I say this is the first thing I notice when I get into the car, but the mere process of getting in reveals another bit of evidence. I wouldn't call myself a tall person (about 5'10", probably), and most of my height is in my legs, but when I sit in the driver's seat of the Buick my head brushes the ceiling! This makes looking out of the windshield a bit different because the sun visor thing is in the way and the rear-view mirror is a bit lower than I'd like it to be, to the point that it keeps me from seeing some of what's ahead of me to the right. The ideal occupant the Buick people must have had in mind was probably only about 5'6". So assume I somehow get into the thing and start to drive it away. I feel myself to be going rather fast, but the outsized numbers on the speedometer tell me I'm only going 30 m.p.h. This is because the speedometer is preset for your stereotypical old-person style of driving, wherein the speed you drive at is found by taking the posted speed limit and subtracting a reasonable value, like 55, from it. The good guys at Buick, in an effort to curtail this kind of traffic-clogging nonsense, have conveniently set the dials on their cars to tell you that you're going about 5 m.p.h. slower than you actually are. This way, someone who doesn't feel they can handle going 35 on a 35-m.p.h. road can think they're driving at a safe and reasonable 30 when, in reality, they're actually keeping up with the speed limit. (I found this out when I first drove the car home last week by following my usual rule of taking the posted speed limit and adding five to it: I took off down the road at what turned out to be 45 m.p.h. and left my dad, who was driving behind me, unusually far behind. If you know my dad, this is saying something.) Then, of course, we've got the owner's manual. As you've seen, it's mainly written in the sort of style you use when you're explaining something complicated to a very small child. My previous car manual tried to scare people by printing a few dozen safety warnings ("CAUTION!") on every page; this one by contrast makes you think the car is secretly trying to throw you off the road unless you're very nice to it and take things one step at a time. So those are all the reasons why the car is annoying to drive. For completeness (and fairness), I should probably say a bit about its good features, because it definitely does have some. Being able to take long freeway trips without exploding, for one, is certainly a plus, and so is the nice suspension. When it's driving on well-paved roads, it has this smooth whooshing sound going on that you might expect to come from a spaceship gliding along through the outer reaches of the galaxy. The engine, though it sucks up a lot more gas than the one in the Escort, is consequently more powerful, so going up hills is much easier. And I'll bet my brother, as a back-seat passenger, will say that he, at least, prefers the Grandma Express over the two-door Sardinemobile. The conclusion: it's going to be very nice having a way to get from city to city and make long-range trips, but for most of my running around within Pittsburgh I'll probably opt to walk, ride a bike, or take a city bus. |
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
8:57 p.m.
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An interesting two days at work so far this week. The supreme boredom of last week, at least, has been replaced by dealing with third-party companies that do stupid things because the technology we give them to work from is doing pretty dumb things itself in the first place. Probably nothing unusual in the tech business world. The angst is being caused by a company called Advanced Micro Controls, Inc. (their shipping boxes say "makers of advanced control devices"!), known to everyone as AMCI for short. This has given me enough trouble right from the start: it took me the whole first week to rid my brain of the networks poison that was making me say "AIMD" instead, and even since then I want to write American instead of Advanced half the time. Probably because of that "M" hanging about in the acronym's second position. But that's just my own stupidity and not the company's fault, really. So these AMCI people made a module a few years back — something that controls a stepper, which seems to be some kind of motor that you can program with moves — and to make it compatible with Rockwell's line of automation controllers and such they licensed our technology. The total specification runs to something like 1100 pages. In this great massive system, every module produced gets assigned a vendor ID, product type, and product code. Vendor IDs are how you tell Rockwell modules apart from Hardy's or Spectrum's or AMCI's, naturally. The product types, the next level down, are under rather strict control: if you want to make something with a type of 0 through 99, your device has to conform to a certain set of services provided and objects created that is defined specially for each type. Seems like it's clear enough, but this week has been so interesting in part because yesterday morning I discovered two AMCI modules using wrong product types — like I said, they're stepper controls, but their product type of 32 decodes as "RF Power Generator". As a quick-thinking college-educated intern, I did what made the most sense: ran post-haste for the guy I've been working the closest with and told him what was going on. It turns out — here's the stupid part coming in — that at the time the AMCI module was built, type 32 hadn't yet been assigned to RF power generators even though it's well within the range that you can't use without conforming to a certain spec. Instead of picking some type in the 100+ range, like they were supposed to, the AMCI people just used 32 anyway and started pumping modules out of their factory. That would have been enough excitement for all involved, but then today I tested two more modules that had the wrong vendor ID. I ran for Jack again, and this time he unearthed an absolutely smack-your-forehead bit of dumbness that might explain why AMCI's modules are telling everyone they're Honeywell hardware. In that original technology package that they got from us, there's a mistake in the chips somewhere that prevents the module's processor from writing to certain bits within the vendor ID, product type, and product code registers! In the vendor ID location, for example, everything is locked to zero except the 0th, 1st, 4th, 13th, 14th, and 15th bit of the 16-bit field! And third parties were actually paying money to get this from us! At the time, apparently, no one thought it would be a big deal because the only vendor ID that mattered in any software was Rockwell's, which is 1, so you can write it just fine with the six bits you have control over. Now, of course, we want to write software that makes use of the vendor ID field in general and not just for the 32 IDs you can both read and write correctly. [Groan.] |
Thursday, June 16, 2005
6:58 p.m.
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Some interesting work-related thoughts to start this entry off, since my life seems to consist of nothing else currently: 1. At work, we always seem to talk about Rockwell products (the ones we make) and "third-party" products (everything else). As Bertie Wooster would say, where's the party of the second part? 2. Why do business e-mails have to be so boring? Just about everything I write ends up with a bland subject line like "69 AOPs" or "1756 profile development" or "Another AOP question," so it's sometimes hard to tell them all apart in my in-box. I came so close today to calling my e-mail to another developer "Revenge of the floating-point numbers!" just to see what would happen, but it seemed to be crossing some kind of professional decorum line. If I were writing to someone my own age I would have done it without a thought. The best I could do in the end was (of course) "AOP floating-point numbers," but I made up for it by starting the first line of the body text with "The ghost of one of last year's problems is coming back to haunt us again." And it was answered just the same! 3. Do we expect office workers to start work early and do we have negative impressions of them otherwise? There's a guy in my group that is rarely in before 9 a.m., and to me it always seems to conjure up images of laziness and not caring about the job that much. Which is absolute rot, because he's been with the company for more than 20 years, does (as far as I know) good work, and still gets an eight-hour day by staying until 6 in the evening. For some reason it makes more sense in my warped college-student mind that regular professional-style adults wake up at something insane like 5 a.m., are at work by 7:30, and dash for the doors by about 4:30 in the afternoon or 5:00 at the latest. (Although the traffic in Solon at 6:00 would prove otherwise.) I'm much more set up around the 9-to-6 schedule myself since I still like getting at least eight hours of sleep and not going to bed while it's still light out. Well, that's that. Throw in your thoughts via a comment if you feel like it and have the time. I thought I would spit these questions up here tonight since there's not much else to talk about except the drive home this evening. I came in rather late today (8:45), so I didn't leave my desk until 5:45 and didn't leave the parking lot until after 5:50. When I escaped from my interior cell, I noticed that the sun was shining, there were big puffy white clouds in the sky, and it wasn't 90° either. The traffic north of Solon was also wonderfully light, so I ended up coming home in a really relaxed mood for the first time in a while. If I'm even 15 minutes earlier leaving the office I get held up in Solon for something on the order of 10 minutes, just sitting in my car amid hundreds of others listening to it waste gasoline and pollute the air. |
Monday, June 20, 2005
9:03 p.m.
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I suppose it's been a rather productive, and at least varied, couple of days. I put gas in the Buick for the first time on Saturday morning (27.1 mpg — not too bad) and drove about 50 minutes south to the small town of Seville, Ohio, because the entire city was having a massive community garage sale. I got there around 11:30 to find cars parked along every inch of the main street through the town and stuff spread out on lawns all over the place. I eventually paid the Boy Scouts $2 to put the car on the grass in the city park, then headed out to see what I could find. Not much, actually, in the way of nice country furniture; most of that had probably gone the day before, and the stuff that was left wasn't really what I needed. The total useful haul, after almost three hours, was a simple tall table about 18 inches square, three and a half feet high, and with a shelf about halfway up. It's probably destined to replace the two TV trays and bit of floor space where I currently keep my record player and collection of 78s. In addition to that $10 purchase, I came across two records for $2 each that looked worth buying and then a very nice portable typewriter in a case for $15. The typewriter actually belonged to my cousin's aunt on the other side. My cousin lives right on the main street in Seville, and I was browsing along through random sales when I heard someone call "Hey, is that Greg?" and I looked up and said it was. She showed me the inside of her really cool old house, which I hadn't seen yet, and then I bought the typewriter before continuing along my way. My mom wanted to have a Father's Day cookout on Saturday evening, which meant she expected me to somehow accomplish the grilling of three steaks and three pieces of chicken. My total grill experience to date has been holding tongs and saying things like "It looks like it's cooking" while other people attend to the actual work and decision-making, so I said that this would be impossible. Since my mom didn't know what to do either, my dad ended up taking over the outdoor cooking for his own dinner! Yesterday (Sunday) was Part Two of the Great Pittsburgh Apartment Search. I didn't want to go at all at first, but it was a really good thing my dad and I did because we completely blew every other place we'd seen out of the water. The morning featured five places that were pretty cheap and ratty, plus one that was mammothly expensive because some kind of Amazing Super Deluxe Platinum Plus cable package was built in. In the aftenoon, though, we looked at two apartments that were in excellent condition, had a good landlord, and were going for pretty nice prices as well. They took over the #1 and #2 spots on my list, and I'll probably end up signing for one of them within a week. More details when it happens, of course, but I'm pretty excited to be so close to having an address for the next year. Now if only the research job would work out, I'd be all set! Today was pretty annoying by contrast. I found stuff to keep me busy at work — some new coding in the afternoon that's going to take at least another day to figure out — but this evening I had to waste 40 minutes in driving my little sister to the barn 10 miles away where she keeps her (our family's?) horse. (Warning: <rant>) She used to board at a place quite near here, but then from what I can understand she behaved pretty rudely towards the lady who owns the place to the point that a move was rather strongly indicated. I suppose Katie's been around horses enough to know what's good and bad to do with them, but she has an annoying tendancy to act like no one else has enough brains to fill a bucket of water the right way, and this doesn't go over well when the people she criticizes are the ones in charge. So now the rest of us get to take turns shuttling her to Valley View and back a few times a week, though I fully intend to have as little of this as possible since I already spend an hour in my car every day just getting to and from work. </rant> |
Random Stuff #12
Monday, June 20, 2005, 9:55 p.m.
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Do As I Say... I have to add this: "Greg, you've got tennis shoes and a pair of sandals here. You'd better move them before you get yelled at by your mother," said my dad, standing by the garage door. "I looked over at the five sets of footwear scattered about the area. "What about all these other ones?" "No one else is around to take care of those," said my dad, taking off his own shoes and lining them up right next to mine. |
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
5:29 p.m.
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As if I don't have anything better to do than spend more time in this awful dungeon of an office building, here I am staying at work (after my eight hours for today) to write a journal post. The reason is, of course, that here I've got my own computer (two, actually, if you include the one in the lab that no one is using but me) with a dedicated Internet connection, while at home I have to fight out hordes of siblings who have nothing better to do than look up guitar tabs online or talk to their friends on the phone for several hours at a time. Plus I want to hear BBC news at 6:00 on my way home, so I have to leave late enough for it to come on during my half-hour drive. I've actually not got much to say except that I sent off my second application today for an apartment in Pittsburgh and that today was one of the most boring days at work yet this year. It featured a giant meeting, held from 9:30 until 11:00 this morning, that one of the company vice presidents "strongly encouraged" every employee to attend. So I went, figuring that the subject wouldn't have one bit of effect on me (it didn't) and that it was at least something that would take up a lot of time (it did). Unfortunately, it wasn't very interesting. The presenters drew way too much on the style of the infamous Prof. H. Andy Pod "Crazy Man" Gurski, which is to throw up an endless progression of slides while filling approximately 95 percent of the vocal part with meaningless business-world phrases and unintelligible acronyms. Several people got up before it was half over, and I sneaked out at the beginning of the Q-and-A session at the end. I suppose today also saw a bit of mental anguish (for me) caused by a help file that one of my co-workers wrote up and asked for comments on. Now, as all of you know, you can't give me a written document and ask me to read it without me going instantly into Alert Copy Editor mode. Before I started, I made myself promise to go easy on this guy's help file and just mark out the big stuff like double periods or subject-number agreement, but it was no use; the number of "big" mistakes just kept getting higher and higher until the pages started to look like Observer copy on a particularly bad night. This is the dilemma: I refuse to allow something to go out in which Regular common words are given Initial Capitals for no Reason at all and in which perfectly good machine-sewn clauses are tacked together like afterthoughts by a three-year-old kid using a needle and thread with his left hand. At the same time, though, I don't want to return this edited, ripped apart document to a guy who's probably two and a half times my age and insinuate that he can't construct a simple sentence properly. I've put off giving the thing back to him until tomorrow, by which time I'll hopefully think up a middle ground that won't insult my co-worker, but that also won't allow him to capitalize words like Tags and Factory. |
Sunday, June 26, 2005
8:21 a.m.
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It should be illegal to be awake before 8:00 a.m. on the weekend, but in that case I'd have to arrest myself twice. It doesn't make any sense that I can go to bed at 10:15 on a weekday night and still have trouble getting out of bed 30 minutes after my alarm goes off at 6 the next morning, but then on the weekends I go to bed past midnight and wake up at 6:15 naturally, but that's what happens. Yesterday, at least, I was able to recognize the stupidity of this and force myself to go back to sleep until 8:30, but today the world was conspiring against me to keep me from having any sleep. I went to bed around 12:30, and was rudely awakened at 6:15 by my sister's alarm going off — she's at a horse show for the weekend and forgot to turn it off. Eventually I got up and tried to shut the thing off, but I only succeeded in replacing the annoying beeping sound with an even-more-annoying country music song that was being broadcast over the radio. I couldn't find the radio off button on her stupid clock, so I just unplugged it. Unfortunately, this was enough to convince my cat that it was time for someone to get up and feed her, so she started her morning ritual of meowing mournfully in the hallway for 15 minutes straight until I got up again and brought her into my room to sit on my bed. That kept her happy for maybe another 10 minutes, and then it was back to the Feed Me wail. I had to get up. At least, if I'm going to be getting up during what should be the middle of the night this weekend, there are fun things to do. I hauled myself up to campus yesterday after lunch to join Nicole and Mark in a trip to the West Side Market, and that turned into marketing, talking, cooking dinner, eating dinner, more talking, gelato, even more talking, looking at fun mini-Gnome pictures, etc. until I finally realized that it was after 11:00 and that I should go home! In our many conversational rambles, we touched on some interesting musical topics, plus a good retrospective on the early days of the Internet and home computing. There may be future posts on this topic, but the computer part of the discussion came up because I recently came across, in our basement, a set of books called "My Fun With Learning" that I used to love when I was little. My favorite, the second of the set, has a whole section devoted to Numbers and Discoveries that I used to read over and over again, and one of the subsections in called "The World of Computers." The sentence that really got us going was the one where it says that the most well known computer programming language in use today is BASIC. This got us into the gorilla exploding-bananas game and other similarly hilarious memories. Today features — aside from a second day of 90-degree heat — orienteering and probably swimming out at Hinkley Lake with some more fun Case people, so it's going to be an all-around excellent weekend. I mentioned the orienteering to Nicole and Mark yesterday in case they wanted to come along, but they're driving to Toledo for hot dogs and will probably be gone most of the day. |
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
5:26 p.m.
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So... yesterday was a day of interesting little things happening. It started with my parents finally scooting off to some Amish place about an hour south of here for two days of private parent vacation time. We tried to get them to go away somewhere for their 25th anniversary in October, but their excuse always was that they felt bad spending a lot of money without taking all of us along. Fortunately, this point was rendered academic by my aunt and uncle giving them a nice gift certificate for a one-night stay at an Amish inn, and they're off right now enjoying that. Alone. I read the paper over breakfast, and found the following two headlines under the "Deaths Elsewhere" column: "John Fiedler, voice of Piglet in Pooh films" and "Paul Winchell, famed as voice of Pooh's Tigger." If that's not horribly odd I don't know what is. Perhaps a murder-mystery novelist would concoct out of this some sort of psychopathic Pooh-hating criminal, driven by insanity to murder all the people who ever did voices for that cartoon because his parents made him watch it too much when he was a kid. In lieu of that, though, it's a bit sad that the classic Tigger and Piglet "sound" that I remember is officially part of the past now. (By the way, that Piglet voice we all know does seem to be... to have been... John Fiedler's actual voice. I've seen him in "12 Angry Men" and "A Raisin In The Sun" playing as a normal person, and he sounds the same.) Then, on my way to work yesterday morning, WCLV played the overture to a Dvorak opera — something I'd never heard of called "King and Charcoal-Burner" that probably failed just on account of the title alone — from 1874 that, even to my untrained unmusical ear, contained some elements that show up in his "New World" symphony about 20 years later. I'd never be able to tell if it was note-for-note or anything, but there were certainly a few snatches that sounded pretty close or that at least put me very strongly in the mind of the "New World" work. Definitely an Interesting Thing, even though I'll probably never find a copy of this charcoal-burner piece to compare with again. I guess that would be enough fun stuff to point out for one day, but I want to briefly add that I was able to bike 3.6 miles (16 minutes), then run 4 miles in great shape. I didn't time it, but I'd suspect the running part wasn't much — if at all — than it would have been without the biking preceeding it. This we definitely like, as it is now less than four weeks until Triathlon Sunday. |
Friday, July 1, 2005
8:58 p.m.
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It's Canada Day, in honour of which I'm going to type this entry with British/Canadian spelling! (If you're reading this to yourself, you should try to assume a Canadian accent as well.) That's not the news of the day, though; just after lunchtime I found Mark's post that Sandra Day O'Connor was retiring from the Supreme Court, and that's (I suppose) been the top story since then. It even led off BBC news on the radio this evening. I don't want to get into politics here, but I do have to say that I'm a bit afraid of what President Bush is going to try to dish out in terms of a replacement. Probably someone who thinks we ought to attack Spain for legalising gay marriage. As you might suspect on a holiday weekend (now I'm talking about Independence Day in the U.S.), not too many people were at work today, especially after 3:00. I had saved up an hour of time over the past two weeks, so I slipped out at 4:35 and got home a bit after 5. It was a nice day for it, with the sun out and the breeze blowing and everything. Hopefully it stays that way for the next few days: my weekend is going to be rather taken up with various parties and get-togethers all over the place. It'll be really fun to see lots of Case people and such, but the minor drawback is that I'll be doing a lot of driving. I've already put almost 1100 kilometres on my car since I got it, and on Monday morning I saw the highest gas price in my life when the BP in Solon was selling regular unleaded for $2.299. So I'd sort of like to avoid driving to Strongsville and back twice, but I don't currently see a way out of it short of skipping someone's party, and that wouldn't be very nice. Nothing else to report, really. I consider my current life rather boring, with the endless cycle of the waking up and the goings to the work and the comings home and the eatings of the dinners and the goings to bed and the things of this nature.... |
Tuesday, July 5, 2005
6:03 p.m.
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Not a bad weekend, overall, though perhaps not as good as it could have been. The three days off, at least, were very nice. I think I mentioned all the get-togethers I was supposed to go to. Saturday turned out to be a perfect day, and it featured an afternoon Fourth of July party at Mike and Zara's house on Grandview. The weather was so nice that I was seriously considering biking the 20 miles from my house to theirs, but that would have forced me to turn around (after arriving at 3 p.m.) and be on my way out by about 7:30 in order to get home before the sun went down and it got too dark. But what if I didn't want to leave at 7:30? The bike-loving side of me had to see the logic of this point, so it worked out a compromise of me going biking for 11 miles around Solon before taking a shower and driving up to Mike's. A good idea in the end, because after dinner we all went out for gelato and I didn't leave until quite close to 11:00. One of the people I met there was one of Zara's friends called Zev — a theatre major at Northwestern who's from Cleveland Heights. After he kept re-naming Zara's stuffed lizard from Iggy to Ziggy, we decided to see how to smuggle a "z" into everyone's name. I was in favor of only doing it for names beginning with vowels (think of "Zandrew" or "Zerin"), but was in the end forced to adopt the sort-of Russian or Czech-sounding "Gregorzy" as the transformation of mine. I spent a good chunk of the day Sunday cleaning out my closet in a sort of desulatory fashion: I would work earnestly for about three minutes, then come across some old toy or paper of mine that would distract me for half an hour. Katie and I put a new battery into a combination voice amplifier and siren noise maker gadget (I used to have it on my bike when I was about six or seven) and took turns using it to say weird things to each other. I said the two lines of French from "Casablanca" pretty slowly, and Katie actually was able to figure out the meaning of more than half of it after two years of French class. (The lines are approximately: "Les troupes françaises ont abandonné leurs positions. Les Allemands seront demain dans la ville.") Around 5:00 it was off to Strongsville for Erin's graduation party. Ben and his mom were there until 9:00, Boy and Amber stopped in around 8:30, and then Susannah arrived probably sometime after 10:30. We all ended up sitting around in Erin's basement-ish room talking until past 12:45 — by then even the circle of high school kids clustered round Erin's sister had given it up and gone home! Part of our discussion at that party involved arrangements to meet up the next day (i.e. yesterday) in Lakewood for a free outdoor band concert and the city's fireworks. Liz's family was over at my house, as per our usual tradition, but I didn't get to do much with them because I had to be on my way around 5:45 in order to be sure to make the 7:00 concert in Lakewood. (Future note: it only takes about 45 minutes to get there from Twinsburg!) After meeting up with Boy, Amber, and Erin, we sat down just in time for the start of the music. We were served forth helpings from The Lakewood Project, a sort of combination rock/orchestral outfit leading heavily with drum sets, guitars, and electric violins, plus a normal string section bringing up the rear. Their stuff wasn't too bad — to me they seemed to lack a certain tonal depth by tending too much towards really high and shrill violin sounds, but that might have just been the amplification and sound mixing. Towards the end they balanced out a bit better. One kid who played the drums was particularly fun to watch and seemed to have a pretty good skill for crazy spasms of whacking the tar out of everything within reach and making it sound good. Gave me at least a temporary fascination with learning the drums, despite the widespread sterotype about that being the idiot's instrument of choice. (To illustrate, one of my friends back in high school filled in on some sort of drums during a pep band season. He insisted that he was not a drummer, but rather a "part-time percussionist." Becoming a drummer, he said, automatically dropped your IQ 20 points.) Falling asleep last night, though, I came to the disappointing conclusion that my time for actually learning musical skill ends in about six weeks, since I'll no longer have access to a piano nor money or time to work on anything else. At 8:30 they announced an intermission and said there would be a second set, but by then I think we had all had enough: we got up to walk around a bit. But then Erin's parents decided to leave, Erin followed suit, and Boy and Amber said they would rather leave as well, so I was sort of left at the park by myself. I thought about sticking around for fireworks because Lakewood is apparently known for the excellence of their displays, but that would have meant leaving no earlier than 10:30, plus traffic and a 45-minute drive, all with work the next morning. I gave it up, got home before 9:30, and went running instead. Everyone else had gone to Solon fireworks so the house was empty. Went to bed at 11:00, still before anyone else except my brother had gotten home. Finishing up quickly, since this is already so long— Work in due course today. Found myself pleasantly busy, with enough things to do to carry me into tomorrow and perhaps even Thursday morning as well. Last night ended with a plan to actually see some fireworks at the free orchestra concert downtown this evening, so I'm supposed to meet Amber and Erin at the Great Lakes Brewing Company at 8:15. That should give us time to walk across to Public Square in time to hear the Cleveland Orchestra at 9 and then watch fireworks after. We shall see, but this time I'm not leaving early unless something really strange happens, even if it means hanging out alone in the middle of 90,000 people. |
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