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Monday, March 24th, 2008
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6:48 am
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| Wednesday, December 5th, 2007
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9:44 pm
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So I haven't posted in a good long while, and I don't think I will again. The recent sale of LiveJournal to SUP makes me feel uneasy.
As far as I can tell, they haven't done any serious dissent stifling on the Russian side of things since they took over last year, and they probably won't substantively change the privacy or censorship policies for english-language blogs now, but I just don't trust SUP with my data.
So I'm not quite sure how to proceed. I try to keep in mind the null-privacy principle with regard to posts and comments, friends-locked or not, but I don't like the feeling I get from LJ's new parent company. I like reading and keeping up with y'all, so I'm not planning to completely drop the account, but I should ask ... is there another social networking site I should join?
current mood:  restless
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, February 10th, 2007
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8:31 pm
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Apparently, my daughter really enjoys swing dancing to "There ain't nobody here but us chickens."
Go figure.
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, December 31st, 2006
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10:57 am - FS: 27" TV
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So I've come into criticism from some corners for not posting anything for the last four months since Miss C arrived. Amid the cries for a birth announcement, I offer this:
For Sale:
Panasonic 27" CT-27SX10B Flat screen tube TV. In good condition, about six years old, but we're upgrading and need to find a place for our old TV.
27"; 1 component, 2 S-video, 3 composite inputs; cable-ready.
Asking $75 /OBO. I cannot deliver, but I will gladly wrap in plastic and help you load it into your zipcar / truck / hatchback. We live on the ground floor in Cambridgeport, near the river.
and FREE: Booze*
~1/3 bottle DeKuyper peach schnapps
~1/2 bottle Hiram Walker triple sec
~2/3 bottle Brugal Rum
unopened bottle Jagermeister
*must be 21 blah, blah, blah.
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(comment on this)
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| Saturday, September 2nd, 2006
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5:34 am
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Sue's water seems to have broken. No particular hurry, but we're on our way to the hospital shortly. See you back here with news when available.
current mood:  excited
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(6 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, May 26th, 2006
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6:32 am - recommendations
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Hi all,
I've been sick the past three days. I'm thinking of going to a doctor, but since I left MIT medical for Blue Cross about two years ago, I haven't had a good primary doctor. Does anyone out there have a good doctor that is or might be on Blue Cross?
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, March 1st, 2006
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6:58 am
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| Wednesday, October 19th, 2005
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4:43 pm - Anyone want a TV?
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So I have this small TV collecting dust and taking up space. A month or so ago, I tried to sell it with no success. Sometime in the next 24 hours or so, I was going to put up this TV on the MIT reuse list (Rules: first one here gets it). But it just occurred to me that I'd rather that you, my friends, get first crack at it before hundreds of random strangers.
Toshiba 13" TV/VCR combo. Includes the manual and remote. I used it with a PS2 for the first six months, then rarely in my next apartment, then not at all for the last year. Similar models go new for ~$120.
So, anyone want a TV?
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Saturday, October 1st, 2005
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10:21 am - Serenity
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Adapted from a response to friend's negative review of Serenity:
I saw it last night with a large group of rabid fans. They even brought extra Jayne hats, so they could lend some to those without.
( I guess there are some minor spoilers in hereCollapse )
In general, I thought it was a good, enjoyable movie. I will likely borrow the DVDs and watch the series. It isn't the "godsend of modern filmmaking," but it's a damn sight more entertaining than the majority of dreck that hollywood is putting out: I dare anyone to say with a straight face that Deuce Bigelow 2 was better than Serenity.
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(comment on this)
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| Tuesday, September 20th, 2005
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9:37 pm - blah
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Feeling a little ... empty tonight, or something.
Stayed up late last night getting the first big problem set of the year done. After I turned it in, I had that "I'm done, now I can do anything" feeling, but it faded and now I can't seem to summon interest in any diversions. Not reading, music, anime or video games. At least I got a load of laundry out of the way.
The research hasn't really taken off yet, since I'm still stuck in the neverending cycle of alignment hell. I'm just not excited about anything right now. Maybe I should have played a little clarinet tonight, since I'm trying to pick it back up after a seven year dry spell. I offered to play in the pit orchestra for an upcoming show, but I'm guessing that they're getting offers from students or better clarinetists, both categories preferred. The activation energy for anything seems to high tonight.
current mood:  blank
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Sunday, July 17th, 2005
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8:31 pm - QOTD
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| Saturday, July 2nd, 2005
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8:51 am - Playlist update
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| Thursday, June 30th, 2005
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8:19 pm - Memage -- Are you 'nadsy enough to guess my playlist?
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Rules
1. Put your playlist on shuffle.
2. Post the first lines to the first 25 songs to come up (along with these instructions).
3. Have people guess the songs and artists in comments to the post.
4. Post the answers to the ones people guessed correctly. A couple of days later, post the first two lines of the ones no one got and get people to guess again.
5. Repeat, adding the next line to the unguessed songs each time, until they're all guessed/you've posted the whole song/you've gotten bored/no-one's going to get the damn thing if you don't tell them.
Some are easy, some are hard. I did have to throw out a lot of these, and there's some definite artist grouping.
EDIT:I deleted anything with the title in the first line, like most of the others
( Cut for brevityCollapse )
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(14 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, May 26th, 2005
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8:15 am
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From questions to ask your (lying) Chemistry teacher at re-discovery.org:
1. LEWIS DOT STRUCTURES. Why do chemistry textbooks represent electrons as black ink dots, bonds as lines and atoms as letters, when the Schrodinger equation shows that electrons are not black ink dots, bonds are not lines and atoms are not letters.
2. THE FIRST LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS. Why don't textbooks admit the truth about energy? Whenever the first law gets broken, new forms of energy are invented to preserve the appearance of conservation of energy.
3. THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS. If this phony law doesn't apply to one atom, how can it apply to lots of atoms?
4. THE THIRD LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS. Who ever uses this one?
5. QUANTUM MECHANICS. For anything interesting it is impossible to find an exact solution to the Schrodinger equation, so isn't quantum mechanics just a lot of useless guessing?
Teach the controversies! Don't let Mendeleevist propaganda into our schools! Print out this Periodic Table and show it to your colleagues. Keep in mind that chemical periodicity is only a theory, and keeps changing.
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(5 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005
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11:36 pm
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It's late again and I should go to bed for the sleep. I was there already, reading the Hitchhiker's Guide to Melody, and nearly fell asleep then, but got back up to do a few chores that I wanted to finish before the end of the day.
The reason we started reading HGG at bedtime was for its obvious merits: Lack of need to follow the plot when dropping off, lovely British cadence, and the fact we saw the movie this weekend, and thoroughly enjoyed it. To repeat a popular sentiment, it was very in keeping with the spirit of the books except for the romantic subplot. Guys who are likely to have read the books can forgive this slight distortion of the spirit because all geeks at one time or another have harbored a secret desire to get it on with Trillian, and are glad to give Arthur Dent the chance. That and the dialog was excellent, and a well-written but slightly cheesy movie relationship can actually be enjoyable (you listening about the well written part, George?). I can't speak for the female part of the human race's acceptance, but I suspect it has to do with the second reason more than the former.
In other news, we got a nice small outdoor table for the back porch this weekend, and I spent about an hour coaxing it together this afternoon, enjoying the breather from academic pressure. I was thinking as I was doing dishes tonight that I'm being paid to do nothing but study interesting things, and all I can seem to do is keep up with the problem sets. Sometimes not even that. Which is kind of depressing, really. I might be able to bring the blame on a small set of very smart, but perhaps narrow-minded people (I suspect Fermi to start) who decided that to do physics one needs to know a certain set of things, mostly how to solve certain classes of problems on bits of paper. This isn't true in chemistry or most other fields. The only other discipline I can think of off the top of my head that has a more stringent requirement for knowing a specific set of facts is medicine, whose initiation process I suspect is as much about keeping the riff-raff out as giving each practitioner a specific mental reference.
Do you know a secret colon or semicolon abuser? Or perhaps he's a parenthesis over-user? It's more common than you might think; your next door neighbor could be gratuitously twitching his right pinky at this very moment, and you would never know.
current mood: punchy
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(comment on this)
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| Tuesday, April 12th, 2005
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5:12 pm - Noooooooooo!
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That is not snow falling outside the window.
It's... It's... nightmarish.
current mood:  distressed
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, March 29th, 2005
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7:21 pm - Glum
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Quantum midterm today. Didn't do as well as I would have liked, so I'm feeling kind of down. Melody is off at rehersal, so I'm home alone. I really want to do something to make me feel better for a few hours, but can't think of anything except chores.
Also: isn't it aggravating when someone is pushing some emotional button, and after the fact you can't rationally articulate what the button is to yourself, much less the other person?
I know! I can spend some time reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, one of Melody's gifts for my b-day. Ah, sweet historical fantasy.
current mood:  glum
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Thursday, March 24th, 2005
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10:58 am - The Universe tastes like chicken
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Coming out of Quantum Mechanics today, I came up with that quote. I was very amused.
(The short explanation: The harmonic oscillator is quantum mechanics' chicken. Everything is kind of like a harmonic oscillator. We quantized the EM field today, and the creation and annhiliation operators for photons turn out to be like the harmonic oscillator raising and lowering ones. Hence, that whole EM interaction thingy is like chicken.)
I guess gravity doesn't necessarily taste like chicken, though.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, March 22nd, 2005
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10:29 pm - Adventures in Home Repair, part eleventy-seven
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The painters were here today to repair and repaint our kitchen ceiling after some water damage from a certain incident in the fall. They're going to be back on Thursday and Friday morning for the last few touch-ups.
While they were up there, we asked them to find the studs and put in some hardware for a potrack, and take down the old feeble 60W kitchen light, and make the space around the electrical box clean so that we could put up some new bright track lighting.
So they very nicely put up the base for us -- the part that attaches to the electrical box -- more than we expected, for sure. I'm all excited about this when I get home from the department colloquium, and decide that I'll put up the track and get some light in there finally. So we design a little layout, bend the track, mark the secondary supports, then I screw in the supports, attach the rail, assemble a couple of lights, flip the breaker on, come upstairs flip the wall switch and...
nothing. I sigh heavily, turn it on for a bit, check for bad contacts, and decide it's got to be up in the ceiling. I take the lights off, the track down, finally get the base out of the painted on rim, look at the connections, and they're not very good, especially the ground. So I take out the razor blade (since it's only as I'm writing this that it occurs to me I have a stripping tool downstairs -- heh, I said "stripping tool") and the sandpaper, strip out a reasonable amount of insulation and clean off the cruddy old house wiring, and conclude that I lack sufficient coordination to simultaneously hold up the heavy base (it has a big ol' transformer in it -- halogen) and work the wire nuts (heh, I said "wire nuts"). So I'll have to wait 'till morning and Melody's help, who is abed with a nasty headache until she has to start an experiment. Time to wake her up.
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, March 19th, 2005
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9:42 pm - Maybe it was a migraine
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So this day has been unproductive. I dropped of Melody for orchestra practice, then proceeded to read most of Dragon's Egg by Bob Forward.
(Mini review: You can tell it was written by a physicist. Really interesting concept and physical ideas, simplistic biological and social ones. Still, if you're in the mood for geek-out SF, then it's a good pick up.)
My head started to hurt, I then snarfed a burrito for late lunch, and I felt slightly nausiated (not nauseous, thank you very much OED), so I closeted myself in a dark room for a little while, which turned into about five hours. Melody found her own way home and kindly foraged for pizza (kind for me, not the pizza), which I gingerly emerged for, and went back to bed.
She went to bed early -- partly for my sake, 'cause having someone around when I'm feeling bad makes me feel less bad, and fell asleep. I didn't, and now my headache has largely fled, and I couldn't get to sleep, so I'm here. I was just tossing and turning. I didn't think it was a migraine (I had one on Thursday with all the classic signs), but the way it disappeared suggests otherwise. We'll see if I get that slightly woogy post-migraine feeling.
So what's new...
We got a rug! The front room is nearly ready for inmat-- er, guests. It's the nicest piece of floor covering I've ever owned. That's not sayin' much, tho. Soon painting of the main (piano, dining & kitchen) room will commence.
Speaking of which, is anyone interested in any of the following:
Really comfortable, but worn green leather loveseat
European-style nice (that is to say real wood veneer) dresser and chest of drawers. Brass hardware and dark walnut finish
We're going to try to sell them cheap soon, and thought I'd ask...
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