The following is a quick little tale from my freshman year at Cal.
One night, my roommates had a party in our room. It was a fine party, although I don't remember much of what happened up till about 3:30am. At that point, my roommates were asleep, but there were a couple of other guys still hanging out in the room when I decided to take a shower. Unfortunately, I neglected to bring my room key with me, and upon exiting the bathroom, I discovered that the door to my room was closed and locked. I knocked on the door for an extended period of time to no avail. My roommates were out like a light, and apparently those other guys who had been in the room were long gone.
I pondered going down the hall to try and wake up the RA (Resident Assistant), who has keys for people who get locked out of their rooms, but it was 3:30 in the morning, and I thought I could get in some other way. So I cued up the Mission Impossible music in my mind and got to work. I knew that there was a big balcony that connected to a window in the room of one of my roommates, so I figured if I could get to that balcony, I'd be golden. To get there, I walked over to the main stairs, which run right up the middle of Bowles Hall towards the back. It turns out Bowles has windows inbetween floors, and one of these windows led to a balcony that I followed right to the balcony I needed to get to.
The only problem was that the two balconies were separated in height by about 9 feet. Fortunately for me, there was a chair lying around that I dragged over to the edge of the balcony, climbed from the chair to a ledge that barely jutted out halfway up the high balcony, then from there pushed myself over the top and onto the promised land. It ended up being strangely fun, doing it at 4am and all. Oh yeah, I was also fortunate that my roommate's window was unlocked so I could actually get in that way. Of course he didn't wake up when I came in---nor did any of my other roommates, who were all surprised when I told them of my Mission Impossible-esque break-in into the room the next day.
I have finally updated the picture gallery links on the right, so that they are all accessible from here. I've also started work on allowing the user to select the style or "skin" they want for the website. That will take a bit more programming than I'm currently capable of, however, so it could be awhile before that happens. For now, enjoy the pictures and this white "skin" I just made.
Normally, I enjoy Kettle Krisps potato chips because they taste good. However, I recently bought a low fat mustard & honey bag of chips by them, and it's absolutely awful. I don't know if I'll be able to finish off the bag. Thankfully, it's only 4 oz. I don't know whether it's that it's low fat or the mustard and honey, but whatever it is, it's truly gross.
I often find that the most interesting people are the ones who do not know what they want to do with themselves.
The following three events are occuring this weekend: the second ever astronomy department poker tournament friday night, my Dad's birthday Saturday, and the superbowl on Sunday at 6pm. But that's looking ahead.
Today, I am glad to be back at work for awhile. It was good to able to put in the amount of time in one day necessary to make some progress. There are a lot of little things I need to iron out though.
I'm going back to Berkeley today, and I have no creative thoughts whatsoever right now.
I went out with my family to breakfast with my cousin's family at a restaurant on a golf course near where they live. It was a nice place to eat and it was fun to eat breakfast with them. I then went with my Dad to my Aunt Ginny's house to see her one more time before I go back to Berkeley. I was intending to do things like clean my room and do laundry today so tomorrow morning I wouldn't have as much to do, but based on the title of the post we can see that did not occur. Thus, tomorrow morning will be fun!
I played a lot of Neverwinter Nights today, meaning that I haven't gotten around to anything on my website. I did, however, find time to go to the mall to get a new battery for my watch as well as some accessories for my ipod that will allow it to play music in an automobile equiped with a tape player.
Motivation has been lacking today. I'm going to see Big Fish tonight at 7pm, meaning that the odds are low I'll work on my website today. Maybe tomorrow though. I've got a couple of errands to run though...
I've nearly uploaded all my pictures. Captions are another story. I'll do caption for new albums I post, but I think everything up to this point will just have to do without captions. Unless I get motivated somehow.
Tomorrow I'm going to attempt to make a few more skins for the index page of my weblog.
I shot a 93 at San Jose Muni today. That was a few strokes better than I was hoping for, so I would say I had a good day on the golf course. The weather was great and I had a good time, so it was cool.
I've put a number of galleries up, including pictures from a few snowboarding trips in the past, a camping trip to Point Reyes with Tiffany, and other various stuff. Go to the main gallery page to access them, or wait till tomorrow or the next day when I'll update the links on this page.
I'm also planning on making a few changes to this page related to the look of the page. Maybe it will raise traffic. Or not. After all, nobody ever comments anymore....
Well, after two round-trip airplane flights in a span of two weeks I've had enough travel via plane to last me awhile. It was a great trip to Colorado though and I'm really glad I went. I spent four days snowboarding at Vail and one day at Beaver Creek. These are mountains in Colorado, by the way. Anyway, they were both good, although pretty much everyone in Colorado agrees that Vail has far more to offer than Beaver Creek. The only problem with the snowboarding was that it hadn't snowed there in two weeks, so were were a bit short on snow. Nonetheless, it was good. It helped that my season pass at Heavenly made the five days of snowboarding totally free.
The rest of the eight days that I was there I hung out with Tiffany's family. Saturday night we went out to dinner for Tiffany's Mom's birthday and then went back to her house to play games and watch the San Jose Sharks dominate the Colorado Avalanche (er, actually it was the Avalanche who were in control for most of the game, but somehow the Sharks did manage to win 2-1). We also played a game of Clue that night, which I somehow managed to win.
The next night I was head chef in the creation of a baked pasta dish. After a brief commotion involving the non-vegeterian nature of the meal, we got our act together and everyone ended up happy. After dinner we played three games of Old Maid. In the first game, I had the distinguished honor of holding the Old Maid for the entire game. With six players in the game, I had six cards until I made a pair halfway through the game. Estimating the total number of chances Tiffany (who was on my left) had to draw the Old Maid to be about 20, the probability of this occuring was about 1 percent.
I'm going to work now on posting the pictures.
I have posted 10 pictures of Tucker, our 4 month old golden retriever puppy in my gallery. Enjoy!
I'm going to Colorado to visit Tiffany for a week and do some snowboarding at the resorts there. It should be a good time.
In other news, it seems Trent Dupuy now has his own website with bigwhoop.org. I can't wait to see what sort of awe-inspiring statements Trent is going to do with his new website.
The AAS conference is over. At the end of it, I pretty much have to agree with my advisor, who told me that going to the conference would only be marginally useful. The thing is, most of the people there don't care about doing astronomy at the South Pole, and those are the only people who would be interested in my research project. So, there was really just one person who held any sort of status in the astronomical community and saw my poster. It was a faculty member at the University of Hawaii who is also on the graduate admissions committee, so it was a fairly important person to talk with, so that was good. But still, he was the only guy the entire time. I talked with handful of other people about my project, but they were all just undergrad friends of mine who were just being nice. Which is fine, don't get me wrong, it's just, you know...
The best time I had the entire conference was probably the party we had in my hotel room with a bunch of other undergrads the last night after the conference had ended (that'd be last night). We had plenty of beer plus some vodka, cranberry juice, lime, and sprite. People seem to like the vodka + lime juice drink, so I think I may have finally settled on it as "my drink."
The AAS conference is in its third day. Yesterday I spent the whole day listening to people talk and looking at people's posters, and I think I had a little too much astronomy for one day. Today, however, I didn't wake up till 11am and missed the first half of the days meetings, so I should be able to go a little bit further today. I haven't been able to take too many pictures unfortunately either...
I am now at the AAS conference, typing from one of the terminals they have available here. It is now time for the undergraduate reception, where all the undergrads schmooze around. At least there's free food.
I saw the Return of the King today. It kicked ass. I think it was my favorite of the three, although I'll need to see them again to really know. The most important thing is that all three were excellent.
After Trivial Pursuit finally ended, we played a couple games of Clue from about 2-5am. It was actually a lot of fun, and actually requires some degree of thought process, unlike Trivial Pursuit. And we finished the second game in much fewer turns because we all took better notes and improved our detective work.
Today I slept from 6am-12pm and have done pretty much nothing all day.
Words fail to describe the hatred that I have for Trivial Pursuit. We just spent two hours playing that god-awful game. During that entire period, I managed to know the answer to one question that nobody else in the room knew (out of 11 people). The question was, 'What acronym do scientists use for weakly interacting massive particles and massive compact halo objects?' Naturally, they stand for WIMPS and MACHOS, as any self-respecting astronomer or physicist knows. And this was the very first question of the whole game. So for the next two hours I made absolutely zero contributions. Sure, I knew that Indiana named it's NBA team the Pacers according to their desire for their team to keep pace with the rest of the league. But then, so did everyone else in the room... Yeah, so basically playing Trivial Pursuit means I'm going to be a completely useless commodity for one to two hours.