To celebrate, here’s some awesomeness from Mobile, AL:
Archive for the 'General' Category
Finally caught up with going through my photos and uploading to Flickr. Katie was in town visiting this past week (Spring Break). Aside from the holy week activities (choir tired now), one afternoon Amanda and I took off work and all three of us went to the Space & Rocket Center. Lots of interesting historical NASA stuff (early V-2 rockets, Saturn V/Apollo stuff, etc), but I have to admit some of it felt a bit slapped together. Amanda’s description of the presentation in the new Saturn V building: “high school science project… factually accurate, but looked like it was printed up on the parents’ inkjet printer and put in a cheesy plastic picture frame.” Since they only opened that recently, I can only assume it was a rush job and they’ll hopefully gloss it up a bit as time goes on.
The older part of the museum could definitely use a revamp though. Didn’t seem to be organized in a way that someone without a fair bit of previous rocket/NASA knowledge would get much out of it. Felt like what you’d get when you ask a bunch of scientists to design a museum. Again, factually correct, but rather dry and lacking the polish you’d hope for in a museum that was aiming to appeal to the general public. The multimedia parts felt really dated. While they’d spent the bucks on upgrading to nice fancy plasma TVs, they were still obviously playing videos produces back in the ’80s that were being played back on VHS tapes that dated back to the same time period. Ignoring the crappiness of ’80s production values, the audio and video quality were pretty lousy to the point where you were glad they had the closed captions turned on everywhere so you had some idea what they were actually saying. I distinctly remember one video that had some cheesy ’80s music that sounded like a bunch of kids singing at the bottom of a well…
Ran across this site recently, and I’m not sure I could describe it any better than the site itself does:
Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.
An occasion like Hallowe’en, April Fool’s, or Father’s/Mother’s Day. Though not categorized as an official holiday, is often used as a good occasion to get a good drunk on with friends.
“Shit dude! It’s Hallowe’en, my favorite alcoholiday! Let’s get done up as Zombies and get druuuuunk!!!”
[Source]
We were in CU this past weekend to close on the sale of our old house (yay!). Seems we hadn’t realized it was “Unofficial” St. Patrick’s Day at the UofI. If you aren’t from the CU area, you’re probably not aware of this particular alcoholiday. Seems several years back, Cochrane (the beer baron of campus, owning 10 of the major campus bars) decided he was missing out on a lot of income since St. Patrick’s Day typically fell during spring break and thus students weren’t taking that opportunity to drink heavily in his establishments. So he instituted “Unofficial”, which comes a couple of weeks before spring break so that students can ditch class on a Friday and get trashed all day long.
In some sense, stuff like this just seems like it’s part of the college experience, but it makes campus a little crazy for those that aren’t choosing to partake. For example, Amanda and I wanted to go to Papa Del’s while we were in town because you just can’t get anything resembling good Chicago-style deep dish pizza in Huntsville. I’d talked to some folks about meeting there on Friday night, only to find out it was Unofficial. Since we didn’t really want to fight our way through all that, we figured we’d go to Pasha for some Mediterranean and hit Papa Del’s up on Saturday night. Talking to some friends, we found out Cochrane realized he was still not making enough money, so he went ahead and extended it a two day party starting this year. So Saturday was out too. Fortunately Sunday night worked out though, so we did get our pizza fix. I’m waiting for the day I hear they’ve extended Unofficial to be a week-long thing like Mardi Gras.
Sample coverage of this year’s activities: Not everyone celebrates alcoholiday… (News-Gazette)
To be honest, this isn’t the first college-wide booze party I’ve come into contact with. While I was at the University of Rochester, there was a day-long party known as Dandelion Day, or more commonly D-Day. Another example of students getting up earlier than they normally would in order to get thoroughly trashed by 10am. Managed to dig up a History of D-Day that gives a bit more background than I can. Talks about how things were substantially toned down during the 90′s with stuff about no open containers. As things typically work, this translated into “you can’t walk around the quad with an open beer bottle in your hand, but if you pour your beer/hard liquor into a plastic cup, you’re good to go.”
It’s that time of year. Time to watch favorites like “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (the real one, not that live-action debacle starring Jim Carrey and directed by Ron Howard) and “A Christmas Story” (they looked at me like i had lobsters crawling out of my ears!). Seems like Christmas has rushed up to me before I had a chance to notice. Fortunately I was able to get the little bit of shopping I wanted to do done yesterday, and no it wasn’t nearly as bad as I had feared. The week or so after Thanksgiving was much worse, although I’ll admit I didn’t bother with any insanity like Target or Walmart which can be a little crazy all the time. I was disappointed if not surprised to see that CompUSA has yet to be really marking anything down by enough to make it interesting. 5-10% off does not a chain-wide store-closing make. Perhaps after the holidays they’ll get more desperate.
Anyway, the real reason I started this post is to write about a couple of entertaining tidbits I heard kids say in church this year. The first dates back to Westminster in CU when Pastor Laura was asking the kids about communion, what’s the significance, what do we do, etc. One rather astute child stated quite plainly that “we drink blood.” I suppose that about sums it up. Wasn’t sure whether her grandma was going to laugh or cry after that one. Second one happened a couple of weeks ago here at Grace in AL. Some of the youth from the church were leading children’s time and trying to contrast Jesus with the images the little kids associate with other kings. Instead of jewels you have the crown of thorns, etc. When they asked what kings ride, the kids piped up with a horse. But when they asked what Jesus rode, the kids were a little stumped. Finally one of the more vocal youngsters announced that “Jesus rides a monkey”. He was quite adamant that he has seen Jesus ride a monkey.
Not sure where else to go after that one, but I hope this finds everyone in good spirits and I’ll wish everyone happy holidays!
We’ve been here in Alabama for 2 weeks now. Things seem to be going pretty well so far. We somehow survived the move and I don’t think left anything too critical behind. The truck full of half our stuff (and pulling the Civic), the CRV full of cats and guitars, and all the occupants got down here safely and relatively uneventfully. The POD full of the other half of our stuff arrived this past Thursday and we’re slowly working on unloading it. Moving in and unloading the POD has been a little slow since it’s been 100+ just about the whole time we’ve been here. For an idea of just how hot it is, the TVA shut down one of the nuclear plants near here due to the heat/drought and apparently that’s a first for the US (article). Otherwise, things around the house have been slowly progressing:
- All utilities are set up, but we’re still waiting on a replacement garbage can and a recycle bin
- Got bundled cable internet, digital cable tv + HBO + DVR, and phone service
- (dvr was a free screwup on their part)
- Ordered and received a new fridge, washer, and dryer
- (seems the outlet for the dryer probably wasn’t wired up right, so an electrician is coming on Monday to check it out)
- Already made use of the home warranty to get the downstairs AC fixed this past week after the fan motor quit
- Amanda put up curtains in most of the windows and has them ordered for the remaining windows
- Amanda has started the complex task of planning and installing shelving, hanging rods, etc in the closets
- Did I mention not a single closet had any of this when we moved in?
- Did I also mention most of the closets are REALLY WEIRD shapes? I’ll have to remember to scan the floorplan Amanda drew up for the master closet and post it…
I’m enjoying the new job, and they’re definitely keeping me busy. Seems like I’ve gone pretty quickly from manual lackey (help load these new drive trays into the rack) to taking the lead on new projects (go figure out how to set up grid computing so we can jump jobs between the supercomputers here and the clusters down at UAB). I’ll probably go into more detail about what I’ve been up to at work, and what I will be getting up to in another post.
I think Amanda’s settling in to doing her old job at the new location. Things haven’t been entirely smooth, but she can finally get into the building without needing the secretary to buzz her in. Amazingly enough, her computer made it to the local office for her first day here, but they’ve still got some technical issues to iron out if they want her to actually be productive. Unsurprisingly, shuffling lots of data from Huntsville to Bloomington across the internet is 4-5x slower than moving it within their intranet in Bloomington. But at least she can access data in Bloomington and get work done, even if it isn’t efficient.
Since we didn’t have a fridge till this past Wednesday, we’ve been eating out a lot so we’ve had the chance to sample several local restaurants and have found a number of good places to eat. I’ve also picked up some Southern slang that I may have to document for everyone’s amusement. 
Amanda and I are buying a new house. In a land far far from CU… Huntsville, AL to be exact… or technically Madison, AL to be even more exact (suburb to the west of Huntsville).
No, Derek didn’t graduate. While one could ask “why is he leaving sans-degree”, a better question might be “why is he referring to himself in the third person?” To put it simply, I just got fed up with how things have been going (or not going to be more precise) and decided it was time for a change. And what could be a bigger change for me than to get an actual job-type job and leave academia behind. I ended up taking a job at the Alabama Supercomputer Authority in Huntsville, which sounds like it should be a great place to work.
I’m not sure how to describe Joost aside from on-demand, internet tv clips from the crew that put together Skype and Kazaa. A while back I managed to land an invite from Joost for their private beta test, and have enjoyed running it on my Macbook Pro (they support Windows and Intel Macs at this point). Very little lag when you first fire up a program, and haven’t had any issues once a show starts. They seem to be landing more and more content every time I check in with it. They’ve got all sorts of channels:
- news – CNN and Routers
- sports – soccer, indy cars, hockey…
- music – more than I care to shake a stick at
- movies – an assortment of indie stuff, some less than popular stuff from Paramount, “The Really Terrible Film Channel”, and a channel full of Godzilla movies
- tv – a variety of stuff past and present – sci-fi stuff like Babylon 5, crap like Charlie’s Angels and Starsky & Hutch, stuff off Spike/Comedy Central/MTV/VH1/National Geographic
- misc. animation – adult swim, old school transformers/gi joe, rocky & bullwinkle, anime, and assorted stuff from production companies like aardman animations (makers of Wallace & Grommet)
Anyway, it’s turning into a pretty cool source for free tv goodies as long as you’ve got a decent net connection. Some stuff relies on advertising, but it hasn’t been as obnoxious as what you’d find on regular tv so far (e.g. 10 minutes for ads in a 30 minute show on real tv).
Since it’s still in beta, you need an invite to get in. They’ve apparently scaled to the point where they can handle faster growth of their user base as they’ve given everyone “unlimited” invites at this point. So if anyone wants and invite, let me know.
So the Simpsons are headed for movie theaters everywhere toward the end of the month. Supposedly it’s good, but I think I’ll wait for the rental. What prompts me to write this post however is one of the features available on the movie website… create your own Simpsons avatar! Reasonably well done Flash affair where you select body type, hairstyle, eyebrows, eyes, nose, mouth, etc. There’s of course only a limited number of each of these, but you can achieve a fairly reasonable likeness and save it out as a jpeg. I took a stab at making mine and here it is:
To be honest, I think it’s pretty cool and might use the head as my new IM icon and maybe slap it at the top of the right column of the blog where people sometimes put a “photo of the author.”
In case you’re wondering, I didn’t select the blowfish due to its connection to the Simpsons (does it have one? many of the shirt options seemed to, but I don’t know what it is for that one). In fact, I selected it because I the other choices didn’t “speak to me” and cartoon blowfish always make me think of the OpenSSH mascot.
And yes, Virginia, I realize I’m a dork.