So, eventually Charlie did have to leave. That ended up being around 13 on Friday. I had him take the defective cell phone back to New York with him and drop it off at my mom's house, since I really didn't want to deal with it myself, and figured that she would take care of it.
Mark and I finally started Distributed some time around this, and Shion and I started Databases. Mark ended up writing the bulk of the code for Distributed - the protocol I implemented was much simpler than Mark's, and Mark also ended up doing most of the framework for testing and writing our report. Shion and I did the Databases, though. It seemed much easier than we had feared when we first started. Shion was actually quite helpful, having read pretty carefully over the code and giving me something with which to work.
I finally got a bit less lazy (and a bit more willing to reboot) and installed the new hard drive Charlie gave me. I mentioned to Mark that the ratio between my successive hard drives had been getting smaller and smaller (that is, I had been upgrading sooner and sooner) and he pointed out that it was quite unlikely that that trend would continue, since it would mean that my next hard drive would actually be smaller than this one. Heh. It's always nice to have a backup, though.
Slightly later, I went with Mark to Yum Wok. I got a raspberry iced tea and pad thai, and while they were both good, I think 3 refills on the iced tea may have been a bit much - not to mention that pad thai is a fairly sweet dish itself.
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Priya's actual birthday was 3/5, but on 3/6 she had a big bunch of people go to Buca di Beppo to celebrate. I rode in Jeff's car with Alex - Alisa was supposed to join us, but she wasn't able to make it. We got slightly lost, but managed to arrive in one piece despite Jeff's daring (and possibly foolish) turn-around maneuver through a space where cars were only supposed to go the other way.
I had a good time at the party. I mostly talked with Jeff and Alex, since I sat at the same table as they did, but people drifted around somewhat, and I yelled over to Ed every once in a while. Most people didn't want to order vegetarian food, but I managed to get some eggplant parmigian, ravioli, and mashed potatoes. I didn't exchange two words, or even a glance really, with Alison. I know that I probably don't occupy her thoughts much any more, and neither does she mine, but every time she comes up in my journal, I seem to go off on one of these long self-referential rants about what she might be thinking. One interesting thing I've noted is that, although for a very long time I had a slight inverse reaction to entries in her journal (i.e. I was slightly pleased when she was upset, and slightly displeased when she was happy), that seems not to be the case any more. In fact, my reactions seem to have tipped very slightly towards positive correlation again. If I had to describe my reactions so far they might look roughly like a function oscillating above and below the x-axis more and more slowly, both in amplitude and in frequency, tending towards zero, but I suspect the actual valuation is more complex than that.
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The Distributed project that Mark and I ended up handing in totally sucked - we didn't do nearly the amount of analysis that Greg wanted us to, and there was a bug in Mark's algorithm that we couldn't find, which fortunately only triggered on even numbers of hosts (when tie-breaking came into play), so we turned in one data set of all even numbers of hosts and one of all odd. I wonder if Greg will notice that - I think definitely yes. Nevertheless, we managed to get something and turn it in, and I suppose that was good enough.
This whole situation was massively exacerbated by the fact that Mark's hard drive decided that right after the power had gone out on my birthday was a good time to become extremely flaky, probably on the road to death. I lent him the spare 45G drive I had lying around, which wasn't even plugged into anything (yeah, I know, one of the inevitable results of riding near the top of the storage curve is that I have drives lying around which are still bigger than some people's main drives...) and he managed to recover most of the critical data and install a temporary system on that drive. Then he ordered a new 80G Seagate drive with FDB - pretty similar to mine, although smaller and I think a generation earlier (and also much less expensive).
Databases turned out not to be quite so easy as we thought - the scripts that they gave us with which to test it were very broken, and it ended up taking us nearly as long to get them to work as it had to actually write the code. Eventually I ended up leaving Shion responsible for preparing the report and turning the project in.
The new cell phone I received actually works. I can receive free text messages on it - send email to my number (without any punctuation) at vmobl.com. That number, should you wish to call me, is (412)657-1395. (I'm avoiding putting the email address in copy/pastable format because as tolerant as I am of spam, I really don't wish to attract it on my cell phone.) Be aware, however, that the first 10 minutes a day (i.e., effectively all of my calls) cost $0.25 a minute, and that if you block caller ID or I don't recognize your number, I may choose not to answer. Send me a text message, and if I feel like replying, that only costs me a dime. The plan is pretty good for casual use, since it has a minimal charge of $20 every 90 days, but I think I'll probably eventually end up replacing it with something that comes with a few "free" minutes.
Inspired by my newfound contactability, I made a trip to Squirrel Hill, but unfortunately I don't remember anything about it, although I think I went to Panera and shopped at Giant Eagle. That's what happens when you don't write out actual entries for over 2 weeks.
Laura's new iBook already arrived. I am annoyed, and annoyed that I am annoyed.
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On Friday the 7th, I grabbed Mark's huge stack of movies on CD, picked out the ones I had seen but didn't have copies of or that I thought would be worth seeing, and copied all of them onto Laura's hard drive. (Ah, the luxury of 120G of storage...) Anyway, I ended up staying up the entire night. At some point in the early morning I watched Urban Legends Final Cut. I had been trying to download Urban Legend off of Gnutella for weeks if not months, but this was apparently the sequel to it. It was very definitely a horror movie, and I'm not a huge fan of the horror genre, but within that paradigm I suppose it was decent.
I got a ton of music for my birthday - Lateralus, the Final Fantasy 4 OST, Anthem, Happy 2b Hardcore, and Plays Metallica by Four Cellos. They are all very good, but for the past few weeks I've been obsessing mostly over Anthem. There's one song on it in particular - the last one, Heaven - which is a new version of a song on his first CD and which I find absolutely stunning.
I've considered using LiveJournal for my journal, or posting my entries there as well as here, mostly to get a wider and more consistent readership, many times. One reason for not doing so is laziness, of course, but I think that I could overcome that were it not for other factors. I like the aesthetics of having my own site, of being my own authoritative source for information about me. I like being able to maintain a low-key watch over who's reading about me (my techniques for tracking my readers are far from perfect, but they're adequate). But one other reason which recently occurred to me is that, although in the abstract the concept of people being able to comment on my posts might sound cool, in practice I've found that most comments on LiveJournal are so intolerably trite and involve so little thought I'd be half offended if people made similar ones in my journal. I hope people don't take offense at this - LiveJournal makes it easy to leave comments without thinking too much, perhaps a little too easy, and I too am guilty of leaving a few comments I myself would consider excessively shallow. Still, it's yet another nail in the coffin of using LJ, although I would eventually like to make it much easier to leave me feedback. I guess I'll have to think about this.
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On Saturday night, James wanted me to go out drinking. We went to The Sharp Edge first. We took James' car and Lei rode with us. We met Shion and Dave and Gessner there. I only actually ended up having one beer. We played darts there, at which I sucked horribly. Still, I enjoyed myself. Afterwards Lei had to go home, so she took James' car, and the rest of us all piled into Dave's car (rather small, but oh well). I was the driver since I hadn't been drinking much. We went over to Fatheads next, but the kitchen was already closed, so then we went over to Blues Club, where they had decent live music and a crazy-looking bartender. The whole time I avoided my typical pattern of loneliness in social situations.
I've been noticing a new pattern that I can sometimes follow in social situations - when I know a lot of people reasonably well, and don't feel like I need to monopolize any one person's attention, things go more smoothly. I'm able to relax and not worry so much about not being the focus of any one person's attention. I still prefer high-quality one-on-one or very small group interaction, though.
On Sunday, James took Mark, himself and me over to some Giant Eagle that's not the one in Squirrel Hill nor the one at the Waterfront, but intermediate in size between them, and has an underground parking lot, which I don't think I've ever seen at a grocery store before. I bought a lot of heavy stuff, especially liquids, since we had the car to help carry it back. That evening I first met with my Networks partner, but we didn't actually start the project, just begin to organize it. Then I went back home to watch TV.
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After the KGB meeting on the 13th, Ed was going to be in somebody's film project, so I didn't get to meet with him. I don't remember anything about Tuesday the 14th at all.
On Wednesday, I met with my partner Ankur for the first time to actually start the Networks project. I wondered as I walked away from the cluster, sick of Networks, whether Laura would be there at the Fence, which KGB was taking. I wanted to talk to her due to a Livejournal entry she had just made. Answer: yes. When I saw her, I walked up to her and she immediately gave me a hug. I told her that I had wanted to talk to her, and we walked off and talked. We went through CFA while I tried to get it through my head that her goals could actually be very different from mine. In particular, she wants to be and feels like she is a "part" of the world, whereas I set myself aside from it. It's very difficult for me to apprehend this at an intuitive level. Anyway, this explained why she thought that using Widow's Son to help out poor kids might be a good thing to do with it once her use for it had been exhausted (which turned out to be very soon - I didn't realize just how fast insurance money could be). We tried to analyze the situation and eventually Laura took me into a hypothetical that involved me losing Pandora and her and Ed teaming up to buy me, say, a Palm III - a huge gesture, but still not even remotely equivalent to what I had lost. I replied that it would tear me up inside due to the tension between ungratefulness for the gift and desire to have back the thing I had lost, but I decided that in the end I probably would have lived with the gift and found something else to do with the insurance money, and Laura interpreted this as an explanation of why I was disappointed.
We eventually got back to the Fence, which KGB was taking. I think that night was the night we Astroturfed it - apparently an original idea, although from a distance, a lot of people thought we had just painted it a flat green color. Ed and others had erected a temporary structure out of boards of wood, plastic bags, duct tape, and two Booth wall sections as a ceiling. We put a bunch of blankets, pillows, futons and so on inside, and about 13 people eventually crowded in.
I started out standing along the side with Misha. Eventually that got tiring, so I squatted on the side. When even that got too tiring, I lay down and put my arms around Julie, who was the only female nearby. (I kept having trouble remembering Julie's name. I had to use the mnemonic device that it was similar to Juliet from Romeo and Juliet. I don't seem to be having that problem any more now though.) I would have been distinctly uncomfortable cuddling up with a male, I'm pretty sure. The thing is, it was totally non-sexual (okay, so it took a tiny bit of doing to keep it that way mentally on my part, but not all that much, really), but we were in constant physical contact for the entire night, and this had a huge effect on my psyche - like it was the only thing I could possibly want at the time. I almost feel like I'm temporarily transformed into a different person by physical contact - like it reduces me to wanting nothing else, not even to think, really. Anyway, we rested in very close proximity to one another for the whole night - we didn't actually get any sleep, and I don't think most of the other people in the structure did either. Those of us who were there took a purity test as a group, but it mostly ended up being the Laura-and-Misha test (Misha due to his whole losing-his-virginity-in-an-orgy thing). I think our score overall was 32% or so, which apparently is still higher than Alisa's individual score.
Eventually those of us who were still there (about 7, I think) went to breakfast at Pamela's. We actually arrived before they opened and had to wait for a few minutes. When that was over, we came back. Julie had to go to class pretty soon. I think I slept for a while in the structure. After class, Julie came back, and we lay together some more. I think that contact of this type may be "bad" for me, in that it totally demotivates me to do anything else - but on the other hand, I was already pretty demotivated about other things. I guess that in order to figure this out, I'm going to need a clearer definition of my goals.
It was raining quite a bit, and was pretty cold, and the structure wasn't exactly watertight. I was also exhausted due to not sleeping the night before. I went back home to warm up. A package containing Pandora's 802.11b card had arrived, but I couldn't use it until I got the driver installed, and for that I needed a Windows computer with USB, which wasn't handy at the moment. When I came back to the structure, I brought a whole bunch of socks, and lent a pair to Alisa, since her feet were very cold. Then I pretty quickly had to go work on Networks.
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I stayed an entire night more at the Fence. Nobody else was in the structure most of the time, although I think there was someone outside. It was very cold (although not wet any more, fortunately) and although I was dressed for outdoors, my clothes were really only intended to be worn on 10-minute walks between buildings, not for an entire night. I was bored and lonely, and spent most of the night curling up beside a space heater which I think belongs to James and which practically saved my life, although I had to contort myself quite a bit to get it to keep both my face and my feet warm at the same time. I'm not really sure why I stayed. I guess I was hoping (against hope as the night wore on, but still) that more people would show up, and by early in the morning I was just too lazy to move, besides which I guess I felt some vague sense of obligation to the KGB, who took down the astroturf, leaving behind the original announcement for Capture the Flag with Stuff, which was that evening.
Eventually Ed showed up and we hung out for a bit. His laptop, Aureliano, has Windows, so that enabled me to get Pandora's 802.11b card installed. The wireless reception at the Fence seems to come from CFA and is terrible, but it's still incredibly cool to be able to access the Internet from my PDA (and yes, I admit that probably a large part of the value is just that it's so cool). Her 256M Secure Digital card arrived as well, and I stored Anthem (the whole album) and a few other songs on it in relatively short order so that I could listen to music. I've never had a Discman and I've never really used a Walkman or a portable radio much, so this is the first time I've been able to listen to music while walking to class and such, which is pretty cool. Unfortunately, I discovered that there don't seem to be any free SSH clients for Pocket PC. It seems that almost no one writes free Pocket PC software at all, actually. Currently I'm using PockeTTY, which has a demo version with a 5-minute time limit, which is good enough to do short tasks. So far I haven't needed something better badly enough to actually pay for it or try to crack it, heh.
In the evening I worked on Networks again, of course. We're progressing reasonably. The socket, routing and UDP layers should theoretically be done, so next we have to tackle IP and ICMP.
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I've been doing Networks and going out for food nearly every night.
On Monday Distributed didn't meet (I think I needed the extra sleep anyway, so that was a good thing), and I skipped Databases as well, meaning the only class I attended was Linear Algebra with Ed. I got a good chance to talk to Ed about some pressing issues on my mind at the time. He went to the publication center during our lunch time to get Pravda? printed. After the KGB meeting, a few of us met over in one of the Mudge lounges and made plans for crashing the pro-war rally at noon the next day. Basically, we decided to make totally irrelevant and unrelated picket signs and have a bunch of us head over. I was feeling relatively uncreative and not coming up with any ideas, and then the thought "Free Kevin Mitnick" came to my mind - this being doubly ironic because not only has he been free for some time, but he was scheduled to speak at CMU that very evening.
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When it was about noon, I headed over to the pro-war rally. Ed was there carrying the "Free Kevin Mitnick" sign of which I had thought, so I demanded that he let me carry it. The KGBers there almost outnumbered the actual pro-war rally people. Ed was interviewed by local newspeople and gave his name as "John Balthazar", his alias. We KGBers marched around singing "The Ants Go Marching" and "Yankee Doodle". I kept the sign to bring to the actual Kevin Mitnick talk that night, hoping to look delightfully foolish by carrying a picket sign to free someone who was very clearly already free. (Incidentally, the responses I received from people who saw me carrying the sign were invariably of two types: "Who's Kevin Mitnick?" and "Don't you know he's already free?" I found the first more excusable than the second, frankly. If you knew who Kevin was, how could you not get that the sign was a joke?)
The police wouldn't let me bring the sign in at the beginning, unfortunately, but when the talk had wound down to about 20 people sticking around to ask personal questions or get autographs, they were nowhere in sight, and I went to get the sign from where I had stashed it upstairs. Everyone still there got a good laugh out of it, including Kevin. Steve Wozniak (who I saw speak last year, and who introduced Kevin this time) asked to take my picture with the sign (he had one of those ridiculously small digital cameras which put even my Elph to shame as far as size, although I don't think they can zoom), and a bunch of other people also took pictures with me holding the sign standing behind Kevin. In the pictures I was very clearly wearing the MSDN t-shirt Mitch gave me when Mark didn't think the joke was funny enough to take it. Heh.
Then, the sweetest part: I got Kevin to actually sign the sign. I'll post a picture of the signature some time, if I think of it. The sign is still sitting in my room at this point.
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The KGB, and I in particular, made the local newspaper. I'll try to remember to archive that story on my own site so it remains available, but for now just know that the guy carrying the "Free Kevin Mitnick" sign in the picture is me. This is really, really amusing.
The Linear Algebra exam seemed much easier than the previous one, which was a big relief. Unfortunately, it turned but that the previous one was graded what seemed to me to be very leniently, and this one ended up being graded much more strictly, so I only came out with an 82 this time as compared with a 77 last time (still both well above the class mean). I asked the professor to take another look at one of my problems, though, so although I understand after his explanation why I lost points on it, I may get a few of them back.
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On Thursday, I went to Exec, basically so that I would run into Laura and we could hopefully walk to Squirrel Hill (which is indeed what ended up happening). After Exec, Laura was concerned that I hadn't eaten anything yet the whole day and that it would be a bad thing for me to try to walk all the way to Squirrel Hill in that state. This fear was not unfounded, so we headed over to Skibo and I got a "red meal" - red tea, a cranberry scone, and tomato soup in a bread bowl. I didn't even deliberately choose all red items, it just ended up that way.
As I sat there eating, we looked at pictures, first of art (she had recently made a trip to the Carnegie Museum of same) and then old pictures she had taken. When I was done eating and it was about time to get going so that she would arrive on time to her role-playing session, she posted links to some of them to LiveJournal and we left.
On the way, we talked about how I was going to try to find something to do in Pittsburgh after graduating so there would be some people I know around. Laura's going to California with Erik after she graduates. She's worried that she's going to need to fall back on a network of friends other than Erik there before she's able to form one.
I mentioned to Laura how I remember people's birthdays well (I actually remembered hers - December 4th - but wasn't confident enough in my memory of it to just say so), but now that I rethink that, I think it may just be that I have a good memory for numbers or other seemingly "meaningless" sequences of data. For example, I still remember both my dad's old license plate (X46-9ZF) and his really old one (F57-6XU). Still, it's true that remembering someone's birthday takes the level of perceived importance the person has to you to another level.
I also mentioned to Laura that I'm not good at being another person, but I'm reconsidering that statement now too - although in context it made sense. I think that I can act like just about anything I need to for a short while if I determine that it is absolutely essential to do so. Other than that, I seem to form what I would probably describe as new personalities (although obviously with many common elements from one to another) on a weekly to monthly basis, sometimes even more frequently, but I don't seem to have a huge amount of conscious control over the process. It just happens on its own in response to the primary issues with which I'm dealing.
The biggest topic we discussed was probably how she's going to deal with the situation with Matt (who I think of as mkehrt, his Andrew user ID). She sort of ended up making out with him in the temporary structure, and according to her his appraisal of her and Erik's situation is that she does what she wants, and he thinks he's going to get laid, and she really doesn't want it to happen. She seemed to be leaning towards letting things taper off. I told her that it would be my preference, at least on aesthetic grounds, for her to actually discuss it with him, but that I wasn't sure of the utilitarian aspects of the situation.
I'm really scared of losing touch with Laura once we graduate. Since we're not (I think) really all that close as is, I don't see either of us making huge efforts to keep in touch on a regular basis, and given that we don't, I don't think that even occasional contact is very likely. I've tried to understand why I care so much about this, but I keep drawing blanks. Yet I can't deny that I do care. I'm going to have to work both on figuring out a way for us to keep in touch and figuring out why I want to.
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Yesterday I met with Ankur one more time to finish up Networks. There was one problem we couldn't find, when you tried to run both a reader and a writer on the same system (either a bug in their simulator (not impossible since there were other bugs in it earlier) or some subtle concurrency issue we couldn't figure out). Nevertheless, I think the project was decent overall. After we finished, I was too tired and lazy to do much of anything. I just lay or sat around all day Saturday waiting for my dad to arrive.
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I seemed to keep missing talking to Charlie over the past week, since the only time he seemed to be around was while I was in the cluster doing Networks homework, but since Networks was finally done, I managed to talk to Charlie on Saturday night. We made plans to see each other Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning.
I only slept for about 3 or 4 hours on Saturday night. I went to sleep at around 3 or 4, I think, which ordinarily wouldn't be all that bad, but then my dad woke me up at 6:30 or something. I drove for a bit, then needed to sleep, and when I woke up and looked at the odometer, I asked my dad just how fast he'd been going, since it seemed like we'd gone over 200 miles in only 3 hours (although I could easily have these numbers a little wrong). Anyway, despite stopping at Sheetz twice (pretty good food, and Pennsylvania has cheap gas as well compared to New York), we managed to get home very quickly. I think we arrived between 17 and 18.
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Charlie left me a message on my cell phone, and when I called him from my mom's house, he told me that our visit would be cut short because he had an appointment that evening from 6 to 8, he had to work the next day in the morning rather than the evening as he had originally thought, and Dan and Josh had said that they might be doing something that night (in which I was welcome to join). I wasn't thrilled, but didn't see a better time to reschedule, so I decided to go ahead with what would still work.
In Borders, I walked over the the place where they always kept whatever Happy 2b Hardcore CDs they had, and was surprised to see both Happy 2b Hardcore 6: The Final Chapter and Happy 2b Hardcore 7: A New Beginning. I hadn't known the latter existed at all, so I bought them both, as well as a copy of White Oleander, all of which were for Charlie for his birthday.
Tuesday morning, before going to my appointment with Tony, I drove around for about 2 or 3 hours with the goal of at some point going to Borders to buy the rest of Charlie's birthday present (a hardback copy of Lolita), at some point going to Best Buy in Crossgates to pick up Meteora, and at some point after that arriving home. Due to my not really caring how long this took as long as it was semi-reasonable, I learned a lot about how the roads in the Capital District are interconnected and how to get from one place to another.
My grandparents are both sick with some sort of cough and so on thing. It doesn't appear to be pneumonia, and my grandfather is taking it pretty well, but my grandmother has sort of a negative attitude about it. I hope they get better.
The 23rd was my uncle Ken's birthday, so Betsy and I drove over to their house to deliver cookies to him. We stayed there to talk for a while.
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At my appointment with Tony, I actually had an answer to his stereotypical "Where would you like to start?" with which he starts each appointment. I had decided that we would talk about the anti-control mechanism I have. He thought that it derived from my childhood, and although I agree, I'm pretty sure that it's not because of one specific incident, but rather because I was a very unusual child who felt a strong need to preserve his identity against social pressure and especially against pressure from adults / authority figures. He thinks that I shouldn't try to eradicate it at this point, but should develop a consciousness of it (which I've already been doing over the past year or two) and then work to defuse situations in which it is triggered, which have been fairly rare anyway lately.
This discussion veered off into one of how I hate any type of maintenance-type task. Specifically, anything that has to be done on a recurring basis and that doesn't have pretty immediately noticeable effects on my physical comfort level is very hard for me to keep up. I said that I don't really have a plan for making myself better at doing that type of task except to make them eaiser, which will be the case to some extent once I graduate - I won't have to go up and down three flights of stairs to do my laundry or cook, primarily.
When I arrived at Charlie's after the appointment, I immediately gave him his present, and soon after that I found out that our visit actually wasn't cut short after all. Charlie was unable to attend his meeting due to his car insurance having expired (without anyone bothering to notify him) and he was indeed working the next day in the evening, rather than in the morning as he had thought.
Dan and Josh did, however, have plans to go out for Charlie's birthday. We went to the Wine Bar in downtown Saratoga. It's a very nice place, but caters to people who aren't exactly connoisseurs - in particular, they have "flights" of wines, which consist of three glasses, each of a different red wine (if you get the red flight) or white whine (if you get the white), with a little label. Charlie and I both got flights of white wines. Three glasses of wine was definitely enough to make me tipsy, although not drunk. I was still able to grab control of myself when I thought to do so (somehow I doubt I'll ever lose this ability no matter how much I drink), but I didn't always think to do so (and I suspect it's this part which would become worse and worse with more and more intoxication, if anything did). My motor control was also very slightly diminished. Fortunately, I wasn't the one driving home.
I'd only had Meteora for under a day, but I'd already listened to it like 5 times. I've decided that, even if I can't share my experience of Linkin Park with most of the people I like or care about, they are an absolutely amazing band, mainstreamness be damned. I just wish their albums weren't so damned short, or that they had more of them. All in time, I suppose.
Charlie in particular seems to still be against Linkin Park on grounds of the image they project. I'll admit that that image is not exactly what I'm looking for, but I don't buy into image much anyway - it's all about the music. As I responded to him, even if Linkin Park donated all of their profits to the Communist Party or the put-babies-on-spikes foundation, I'd still buy their CDs.
Around midnight, Ed called me on my cell phone, and we made plans for Thursday. Ed said that he needed to get out of the house, so we decided that he would drive down to Catskill some time in the late morning and leave when I had to go anyway to see Betsy's concert. I'm sure that we'll find plenty of things to talk about and/or do.
Charlie and I stayed up pretty late discussing stuff. We mostly discussed the same issues as I had with Tony. We also discussed why losing Laura would be bad for me - he thinks the Laura relationship is very "healthy" for me, not in the new-age sense but in the sense that it's beneficial to the overall atemporal entity of me. This ties into another thread which ran through the discussions during our visit, which is that of person-slices versus atemporal person-entities. Charlie tends to value and perceive things from an atemporal perspective, which seems very odd to me. This is not the time or the place for an in-depth examination of the issue; suffice it to say that we have a difference of opinion which I will discuss later.
I only slept about 5 hours that night. I never seem to get much sleep when I'm at Charlie's - it's not that I go to sleep all that late so much as that I seem to wake up at 8 or 9 and not be able to go back to sleep. As such, I was tired for most of the day. Due to Charlie's car insurance situation, I drove him and Dan to Best Buy where Charlie bought a hard drive, but found neither a VGA to RCA adaptor nor a laptop hard drive.
We tried to install the hard drive when we got back to Charlie's place, but Phoenix refused to boot with it installed. I thought it might be power-supply issues, since Charlie has a P4, 512M of RAM, and 2 CD drives in addition to the hard drive, and only a 300-watt power supply, but as he pointed out, he had disconnected his other hard drive while we tried to get this one to work, so that seems unlikely. In any case, we were unable to solve it before Charlie had to leave for work, and I left at the same time and dropped him off there.
After that I drove home. I've driven about 200 miles these past 2-3 days. While driving, I listened to Meteora at a very high volume, singing along very poorly with it.
That evening, there was a birthday party for my uncle Ken and for me as well (although I was not pre-informed of that fact) at Ken & Sue's house. They had artichokes for dinner (my favorite) and I received 3 cards (one each from Brian, Tasha and Ken & Sue) and a gift from them.
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On Saturday afternoon I wasn't doing much of anything, so my father took me over the penny social at which were Nance and my grandparents. The drawing had already started, so it was too late for me to buy any tickets, but that's okay - I wouldn't have wanted almost anything there anyway. I learned how they work, though.
I've been thinking lately how nervous I am when I don't have my phone with me. I want certain people to be able to get in touch with me in minutes rather than hours if need be. Well, those fears were borne out when Mark sent me several urgent text messages saying that Ragnar had been cracked. I called him and we discussed it for a few minutes, and I left a little early that afternoon to go to my mom's house and shut him down remotely before the concert.
I've noticed that, in stores or on the street, I nearly always smile at children and babies when they're looking at me. I'm kind of wondering why I do this. I don't generally do it to adolescents or adults. Do I want the children to think more of me, when they have no idea who I am and will in all likelihood never see me again? Am I trying to make their lives better? Is it just some sort of reflex? I really don't know.
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I woke up Thursday morning at something like 4 due to the cats, but there was no point in getting up then, so I kept going back to sleep and waking up. Eventually I think I shut them out around 8 so I could sleep undisturbed. The next thing I knew, Ed was standing in my room saying hi. I had known this would likely happen, so I wasn't altogether surprised.
We went down to the second floor after he had played with the cats a bit. I played Meteora for Ed while we hung out. Ed has DVD copies of one season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, so next we decided to watch one of those. He couldn't get a DVD player to work in FreeBSD that didn't either go horribly slowly or squash the video (or both), so he eventually just booted into Windows and we watched Frame of Mind, the episode where Riker goes crazy. Aside from being one of my favorite episodes of ST:TNG, that episode goes along with a thought that I've had for a long time, which is that it would be interesting to be crazy. (Well, crazy in a way which distorts my perception of reality, for those of you who think I'm already crazy - for example, if some of my friends turned out to be imaginary.)
When that episode was done, I felt like getting out of the house too, so we got in Ed's car and went over to the grocery store. We each got a pastry, and I got some vegetables with dip. Then we got back in his car and drove down to the point, where we walked through the woods by the water talking. We made some effort towards clarifying what exactly makes us different from other people, although this is difficult to explain to people who don't know me well. Eventually, at just the right time to meet my dad without being too late in Delmar, I thought to check the time, so we went back to Catskill and Ed followed me onto the Thruway (and stayed right by me through the whole trip).
The concert was pretty good. Each of the 4 orchestras there (all from different grade levels) only played 2 songs, and one of the ones for the high school was composed especially for them. It was more "modern" in style, and I didn't think it was all that great. At the end, all the orchestras played an arrangement of the Ode to Joy together, which I liked a lot.
The next morning, I went to the dentist and got my crown fitted. Already I can barely tell it's there. After that I went with my father over to my mom's house to pick up the other car, and then we went to the diner to get breakfast. Next I drove to Crossgates and wandered around for about 3 hours, during the course of which I bought a silverware set from Mikasa with 3-tined forks (I would have bought more than one had they not cost $25 a set), 100 blank CD-Rs for $15 (a spindle of 50 + buy one, get one free) and a Linkin Park t-shirt which came with a free poster. I also entered a contest to win 2 tickets to a Linkin Park concert in Wichita, Kansas (including round-trip airfare, and I think a hotel as well). I don't expect to win, but I do definitely want to see Linkin Park in person at some point. It's weird, though, because I feel like sort of a sucker for buying the t-shirt and poster. Even though Linkin Park make amazing music in my opinion, I still can't really justify buying into their image. Maybe it's just a conforming-to-what-Charlie-thinks issue. I can't really understand it myself.
Leaving Crossgates, I headed downtown to visit the DMV. I was worried I'd have to parallel-park, but I found a spot directly in front of a fire hydrant (and thus very easy to pull into) with barely any looking. Everyone at DMV seems to be retiring - I happened to visit on Judy's last day. Ginny told me that they've even now got me on the payroll as an hourly worker who just happens not to have any hours, and that I can probably come on again as an intern after I graduate if necessary.
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That evening, I stayed at my mom's house until my sister arrived, and then we very shortly had to go over to Ken's house to leave. He drove us all ("all" being me, my sister, himself and Brian) up to Troy, where we arrived about half an hour early for the concert.
I was very hungry, so first we went to a pizza place, where they had a slice of cheese pizza for $1.00 and a slice of cheese and a soda for $1.50. They were huge pieces, too. I stuffed myself and then we headed over to the Dogs of Desire.
The Dogs of Desire involves essentially the first chair of each orchestral instrument in the Albany Symphony Orchestra, plus a couple of vocalists and other random performers, doing avant-garde music. This particular concert was a "best-of" concert featuring eight different songs from the several years they had been in existence. As one might expect from a concert with eight different pieces by eight different composers, the quality varied widely. Nevertheless, overall I felt that the concert was worth attending. After we finished, Ken took us back to his house, and I drove myself and Betsy back to Catskill.
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Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Fri May 9 19:16:38 2003