With laptop in lap, I will jot down some notes on 24. All times local.
8:25pm: I think Beirus is a dead man (or boy, whatever).
8:26pm: Erin's daughter is going to kill herself. While I'm on the subject, I think Erin is a prime candidate for being an evil terrorist.
8:27pm: Obviously, Secretary Heller's son is a terrorist.
8:28pm: Paul's clearly a terrorist.
8:31pm: Beirus's Dad is certainly no Jack Bauer.
8:38pm: Ok, so the doctor "accidentally" gave her the wrong drug. The doctor is probably a terrorist. Or incompetent. But on 24, nobody is incompentent. Terrorist then!
8:40pm: Yes, let's scan through ALL the people.
8:41pm: Jack Bauer knows it's a trap. BAM!
8:42pm: Ah, the dying man's last gasp.
8:44pm: Who can Jack Bauer trust?!?! Honestly, who? Is it Chloe? Heller? Who??
8:49pm: Touchy feely Erin-Heller moment.
8:50pm: And down goes another terrorist thanks to Mr. Bauer
8:52pm: How did Beirus get in the driver's seat??
8:55pm: Nuclear holocaust? I don't think so.
Trent got the correct answer to my Pop Quiz question, "What english word have I hand-written more often than any otherword?" The correct answer is sin. Yes, as in the short form of sine, the trigonometric function. Let the firing of the rotten tomatoes commence.
In other news, I am in the process of uploading pictures from the past month.
I also just got back from a three day observing run at the SMT Observatory. I went with a fellow graduate student, Desika Narayanan, to observe ULIRGs, or UltraLuminous InfraRed Galaxies. Due to bad weather, we were able to obtain good data on only 1.5 sources (out of about 11 objects on the source list). However, I feel like I learned a lot about ULIRGs and observing in general, so it was a successful trip for me.
I watched the Australian Open men's final. Live. I.e., I stayed up till 4:30am to watch Marat Safin finish off Lleyton Hewitt. I was rooting for Hewitt, since it's been so long (29 years) since an Australian won the Men's singles title. Unfortunately, Safin was just too good. He did beat the best player in tennis (Roger Federer) in the semi-finals though, so Safin certainly deserved the title this year.
Imagine for a second that you are Jack Bauer, all-star hero of the FOX TV series '24'. You can do no wrong, at any time or under any circumstances. You are THE BEST counter-terrorist operative alive, and you face a life-or-death situation where you absolutely HAVE to extract certain information from an evil terrorist. What do you do? I'll tell you: get out your dentist kit and start scraping away at the evil terrorist's teeth. In no time at all the terrorist will divulge any and all heinous secrets that you, Jack Bauer, desire to know. How can I be so sure? Yesterday, I visited the dentist for the first time in a couple of years. Now, my teeth are in fine condition (no cavities, luckily), but the scraping was still so freaking painful! I just wanted it to stop, at any and all costs. And that's someone with good teeth. I guarantee you the terrorist has a shitty health insurance plan and hasn't been to a dentist in decades; his (her?) teeth are going to be awful. So much more effective than drugs, and so much cheaper. I can't wait to see it on the next episode of 24 when Jack Bauer steps in to extract information from Secretary of Defense Heller's disreputable son.
This post contains two components: a potentially--depending on what type of person you are--boring update on the progress I've made as far as installing linux on my laptop and; a hopefully less boring entry related to The Sandman.
Configuring fvwm will probably take a long time simply because it's so flexible and I don't know anything about it yet.
And now, for the moment you've been waiting for... A discussion related to The Sandman. First off, I figured out what my costume will look like next October (see the three panels on the right). Second, I finished the fourth book of Sandman comics, Season of Mists. It was really really good. Quoting from the introduction, "Possibly the only dismaying aspect of excellence is that it makes living in a world of mediocrity an ongoing prospect of living hell." Agreed, to a certain extent. But then, without the mediocrity, there would never be excellence, right? More quoting of the introduction: "Sadly, most lives are fashioned on that pattern. Settling for what is possible; buying into the cliche because the towering dream is out of stock; learning how to avoid taking risk of the dizzying leap." Very much in agreement with this statement. Nevertheless, the dizzying leap is SO SO terrifying! I don't think we can blame anyone for shying away from it. After all, you don't even know beforehand if your dizzying leap will produce anything worthwhile; you must do it ready to accept the possibility of failure.
After roughly 7 hours of frustrating failure, wireless internet is set up on the linux partition of my laptop! YES!
What english word have I written most often in my life? Hint: it is comprised of only three letters.
Caveat: Let's say we're only counting hand-written words. That should make it trickier and clearer at the same time!
I'm playing in a poker game with some friends tonight. It's a no-limit Texas Hold'em tournament witha $5 buy-in. Looks like there will be about 10 people, so it should be a good time. It will be my first time playing non-internet poker in quite a long time (and, consequently, my first time playing for money in a long time).
I have also started to hear from various other people that are interested in playing some poker, so I think there are good prospects on the poker front for the near future.
Matt Jankowski has just updated the publishing platform that nearly all of us at bigwhoop use to the latest version, and all I can say is it kicks serious butt! It's easy to delete spammer comments now, and the whole interface is streamlined and improved. Bitchin'!
Have you ever wondered what it would sound like if you were to land in a spaceship on Saturn's moon Titan? Well, now you can listen in and find out for real! The Huygens' probe aboard the Cassini spacecraft has just completed a flawless landing on the surface of Titan. One of the instruments on the probe is an acoustic sensor, which recorded the sounds that someone would have heard on board the probe. You can listen in by following this link. Another interesting sound byte from the same webpage is radar echoes from Titan's surface. It's actually pretty cool because the pitch and intensity of the echoes increase as the probe falls towards the surface. So check it out.
I had two of my three classes this semester. The early reports are in, and they're good!
My class at 9:30am TuTh is ISM (InterStellar Medium). Although it seems the lectures might be a bit, er, dull at times, the content seems to be real good with lots of important stuff.
My second class is at 2pm TuTh and is on gravitation (i.e. general relativity). The professor seems excellent and I've only heard good things about him, so I'm sure I'm going to be looking forward to this class all semester long.
It's a good thing that classes are better this semester, because last semester's classes sucked!
I've uploaded 13 new picture galleries.
1) Eric Watching TV - My roommate watches TV. Not the most exciting series of pictures ever.
2) Seven Falls Hike - A great hike in Tucson I did with some friends from Steward.
3) Sub-mm Mixer - Pictures of the heart of the instrument that I am working on at Steward as part of my research duties as a graduate student.
4) Pre-Thanksgiving Pictures - I went home to San Jose for Thanksgiving to hang out with Tiffany and my family in the bay area.
5) Christmas Tree Hunting - The annual tradition of hunting down a christmas tree in the Santa Cruz mountains.
6) Pictures from Marin County - The region north of the Golden Gate offers some beautiful views of the bay area. From the day after Christmas tree hunting.
7) The Dirty Kitchen - Back in Tucson on the first of December, I recorded this incredible spectacle of just how bad things can get when you have a dishwasher.
8) Anime Night 12.18.04 - Eric and I had some friends over for Anime night and a potluck dinner that turned out great.
9) New Laptop - A couple of pictures of my new laptop.
10) Pre-Christmas with the Piambos - Back in the bay area, I went with my family to hang out with our friends the Piambos on the eve of Christmas Eve.
11) Christmas Eve - My family went up to my Aunt Ginny's house in Sunnyvale for the annual Christmas Eve get-together with my Dad's side of the family.
12) Bashed - I probably should have posted about this earlier. Some jackass broke into my car in San Francisco one night and stole the ipod that I foolishly left inside the glove compartment. It sucked, especially because the insurance didn't help that much. On the other hand, it was just an ipod. Easily replaceable at some point in the future. It could have been a lot worse.
13) First Snowboarding of '04-05 Season - I went up to Lake Tahoe to snowboard at Heavenly with Tiffany and our friend Marek. We got there just after a huge snowstorm so the snow was awesome. Since it was my first time this season, the first day was a bit rough, but the second (and last) day was much better. I brought my camera along the first day and took a bunch of pictures, including a couple of movies of Tiff and I snowboarding down the mountain.
Ok, that's the news in picture gallery format for the past couple months. Last weekend Tiff and I drove from San Jose to Tucson, stopping along the way at Joshua Tree National Park. It was cool. In fact, now that I think of it, I have pictures from Joshua Tree too. Aye, it never ends. Oh well. By driving back, I transferred a bunch more of my stuff from San Jose to Tucson. I've spent the past couple days finding places to put it and taking care of various errands. I drove Tiffany to the airport this morning, so she should be back in the bay area this afternoon.
Classes start tomorrow. January 13th is so soon for classes, yuck. At least classes this semester should be more interesting: Cosmology, General Relativity, and InterSteller Medium.
Justin Aclin is next up on the Bigwhoop Interview list.
At some point I'm going to post a bunch of pictures from my laptop on this website. That will give you a nice quick way of catching up on most of the stuff that's been happening in my life. For now, there's not much for me to say.
