Index:
2006-01-XX||2006-02-XX||2006-03-XX||2006-04-XX||2006-05-XX
2006-06-XX||2006-07-XX
2006-08-XX|| Back to the Vault Main Page
Another week has flown by.
I beat Prey this week. It was pretty sweet. I don't really get the negative reviews I've read. I thought it was thoroughly engaging and decently lengthed/paced. But anyway...
We went and saw 'Beerfest' on Saturday. If you liked Super Troopers, you'll probably like this one. I thought it was better, actually. But I wasn't that impressed with Super Troopers. Beerfest will likely make you want to drink, though. So be forewarned.
We went to the observatory/planetarium on Saturday night, which was fun as usual. Got to see a pretty sweet full dome show on black holes narrated by Liam Neeson. It was cool.
Anyway. I'm off to get more work done and then go home.
Your mission for the immediate future: go see Snakes on a Plane.
Trust me. It's Starship Troopers level.
In other news, we went on an impromptu hike up to the East Summit of Mt. Tamalpais (which is right across the bay; just north of the Golden Gate bridge in Marin County). There are pictures up in the 'Sights' section. I also put together a panorama from the Summit, which you can find down at the bottom of the 'Sights' page, with the other panoramas. SF is buried in the fog bank on the right.
You can see Mt. Tam from the other Bay panorama I have (from Wildcat Canyon...it's the big peak) which was on the Berkeley side of the Bay... the spot I took that picture from should be on the left hand side of the Mt. Tam vista panorama. It was quite a good hike; I think I would have enjoyed it much better, had I planned ahead and hydrated/fed myself.
Anyway. We're going hiking on Angel Island next weekend, so I'll take pictures from there, too.
I'm off to bed now, though. Later.
We went and saw 'Little Miss Sunshine' on Monday night. You should all go see it. I think it's getting a wider release this Friday.
In other news, not much else is going on. I made another batch of wintergreen candy last night... mostly to play around w/ the new silicone baking mat thing I had... it worked pretty well as a quasi-insulated, free-form, non-stick manipulation tool. The final product was a bit more brittle than I had planned for... kind of like a green glass that somewhat resembles kryptonite. Tasty, though.
Fun stuff is on the horizon. I think we might BBQ this weekend before summer ends, and the weekend after we're planning on taking the ferry out to Angel Island to go hiking.
I am quite excited about both prospects.
Through a chain of world-wide travel and shipping, I received some paprika from our family in Pincehely, Hungary. I can tell already (just from smell, color, and from the bit I tasted on my finger after I transferred it into a jar for safekeeping) that this stuff is really good.
I've got enough for at least a few dishes, so I'll be goign through my Hungarian cookbook quite soon to find a few new recipes to try (and likely some old favorites).
Anyway... there've been quite a few PC video game demos released this week, so I'm off to play for a few then get some sleep.
Man. I'm getting really bad about keeping this thing updated as often as I'd like.
Hmmm... what's happened since the last post... I started a new short story.. it will likely become the framework for a new claymation. I'm thinking: film noir; episodic content.
Other news: I've just been hanging around the house for the most part. We went out to the city on Friday and had dinner at this tapas place (Andalou). It was phenomenally good. I had some great food there, and their speciality cocktails were quite good as well (I'd whole-heartedly recommend the pomegranate manhattan to... anyone, really)...
Brian and I went and saw Talladega Nights this morning. It was...Ok... I was quite underwhelmed by the majority of the movie...though the non-sequitur jokes featuring Sacah Baron Cohen were quite hilarious. Other parts we're quite funny, but it was also overwhelmingly silly for the most part.
Not nearly on par with Strangers with Candy or Clerks 2 for pure laughs.
In other movie news, I finally saw Hedwig and the Angry Inch last week. It was quite good.
Anyway. I'm keeping busy at work. I feel like I'm getting stuff accomplished, so that's good.
My younger grad student friends are getting ready to take their qualifying exams in the coming weeks, so good luck to all of them.
I will endeavor to make another post before next weekend. Cheers.
Today was a good day.
Megan, Brian, and I went into the city to grab a beer at Toronado which, as always, was quite excellent. I managed to find New Belgium's 1554 Black Ale there, which I first had in Colorado a few months ago.
This afternoon/evening, I made a huge batch of chicken paprikás and fed my friends:
Anyway. We hung out for a while afterwords and made s'mores for dessert and played some board games and watched TV, etc.
Currently, I am full and tired, so I'm off to bed. Hope everyone has a good rest of the weekend.
2006-07-XX|| Back to the Vault Main Page
Well, the party we threw was a success.
Pics are up in the 'sights' section of the site.
Enjoy.
In an odd turn of events, I somehow actually got our MythTV box to work this evening! Huzzah! (that's our home-made, open-source, linux based 'tivo' for those of you out there not familiar).
There are still some niceties that need to be implemented (IR Remote, actually hooking it up with TV out, etc., etc.), but all the basic functionality is now in place and it seems to be running quite nicely with our current level of testing.
In other news, I guess it's after midnight, so I'm like, 26 now or something. Hooray.
I don't have anything too exciting planned for today, but our party is Friday. So that should be sweet. We started decorating. It's creepy. If you're on the fence about coming or not, you should... just to see what wacky design choices we've made. (Oh, I guess I haven't metioned on the site...the theme is 'Party in our Pants' ... so everyone is going to be wearing their wacky pants.) I'll have to post some pictures of the house once we get all the decorating done.
There will be pics from the event as well.
Anyway. I'm just waiting a few more minutes for my laundry to come out of the dryer, and then I'm off to bed.
Later.
Well, Christine has moved out. Brian starts moving in on Saturday.
I'm going to miss Christine. But I'm glad Brian will be here.
Also, my birthday is coming up next week.
It's a melange of emotions.
At any rate, in order to tidy up after all the wacky stuff that's going on, we're throwing a party next Friday. If you read this site and live close by, then you likely already received the Evite. If you didn't get it due to my negligence, or you're miraculously going to be in the Bay Area next weekend and want to hang out... just email me and we'll see what we can do.
Well, it's late. I'm going to bed. I will try to post those aforementioned pictures later on.
Well, the AIDS walk was this morning:
The weather was great, so the walk was quite enjoyable.
Thanks again to everyone who helped out with a donation! Our team of 4 (The Berkeley ChemEs!) raised almost $700.00!
Anyhow. I came home afterwards and took a long nap, but I'm still tired, so I'm off to chill out for a bit and then get some more sleep.
As a parting note, also in attendance today at Golden Gate Fields were quite a large number of gophers:
I have a few more pics to post from today and the 4th of July yet, so I'll try and get those up this week.
Well, this weekend will be eventful, I think.
Johno and I are heading into the city tomorrow night for a Consumeeting @ Zeitgeist... which should be cool... I haven't been to that fine establishment yet, but I hear good things.
Saturday, we're taking a private tour of the Scharffen Berger chocolate factory. I'm anxious to see if there are Oompa Loompas, because they were conspicuously absent on the 2 previous, public tours I've been on. In preparation, I made another batch of brownies with the Scharffen Berger baking bar/recipe tonight. This batch turned out even better than the last, and is pretty damn good.
Saturday night, the Minibosses are playing a matinee show at the Hemlock Tavern (also in SF), which I am super stoked about.
Sunday, of course, is the AIDS walk. Thanks again to everyone who donated, and if you'd still like to drop a few $$ for a good cause, feel free to do so here.
Anyway. I've got a teleconference early tomorrow morning, so I'm going to shower and get some sleep.
Later.
It was a nice and relaxing weekend.
Friday night I went and hung out over at Dustin's house and ate dessert, drank some champagne, and played a handful of board and card games.
Johno, Christine and I went and got some 'Pizza' over at Cheeseboard and had lunch in the park on Saturday.... I went to the movies and saw 'Strangers with Candy' and Pirates 2... both I found to be very enjoyable. I never really watched Strangers when it was on Comedy Central save for a few episodes, but the movie was pretty silly and hilarious.
Pirates was a little cornier than the first one, but I still feel enthused enough about the franchise that I am eagerly awaiting the 3rd. Other than that, not too much else has been going on as of late. We fixed an oversight in our previous installation of the new garbage disposal, and I watched a handful of other movies on DVD and *cough* VHS over the weekend, too.
Well, I think the perfect cap to the weekend will be a good solid night of sleep before work starts up again in the AM. Lates.
Happy 4th of July!
This has always been one of my favorite holidays of the year! What better way to start off our 230th birthday than with the successful launch of the space shuttle. Huzzah!
Anyway. I'm about to head out to a BBQ and then watch Fireworks.
The necessary annual paint touch-up to the Patrihat went off without a hitch this morning:
Hope everyone has a safe and fun holiday.
Wow. Massive update today. I've spent the past several hours posting all of my pictures from Colorado.
The links to the six galleries of photos are on the 'Sights' page. Overall, it was a very relaxing and wonderful trip. We had a memorial service for my Aunt Pat and spread her ashes, we went to the top of Pikes Peak, visited family in Denver and Colorado Springs, went to Casa Bonita, Guiseppes, Fargos, and Red Top for some grub, bought some Colorado Wine, drank some Colorado Beer, hiked about 11 miles over the course of a week, did some gambling in Cripple Creek and went to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo.
Phew.
Anyway. Pics are up. Enjoy them. I'm going to take a break and move from in front of my computer for a while.
2006-06-XX|| Back to the Vault Main Page
Well, I'm back.
I'm pretty exhausted from the trip back, but I have a *ton* of pics to post in the next few days.
Until then, here's a teaser:
Many more vistas will follow.
Later.
Busy. Very busy at work.
I am leaving for Colorado in the morning, so I won't update for a week or so (not that that's unusual).
Hope everyone has a good week while I'm gone.
In other news, I'm going to do the SF AIDS walk this year, so if anyone would like to help me reach my fundraising goal, you can go here: http://aidswalksanfrancisco2006.kintera.org/joevegh
I will bring back lots of pictures from Colorado.
Later.
Ugh.
My friend (and research mentor, as it were) Dave told me once: 'Joe, never stop coding.... just, code stuff all the time' (or somesuch). I'm totally feeling that today; I'm writing a new bit of code for my simulation stuff here at work... taking a lot longer than I had hoped.
It's actually pretty straight forward, but having not written antyhing this complicated in C++ in a while, I'm continually revising what I had planned, etc., etc..... That, and I'm driven to procrastination as a result of the lack of robustness in my coding ability after so long a period of minor maintenance-only type stuff....
Plus, I'm also sitting here thinking how much easier the data outputing would be in PERL (at least from the standpoint that I know how to do it in PERL without have to look it up in reference manuals)....
But, enough of that.... Diplomacy is still moving along. I haven't updated that page in a while... but whatever. I'm quickly tiring of the game, but it should be over before too awful long.
In other news, I want one of these:
I should have traded in my old DS last week (there were some crazy deals at EB and gamestop for an extra $20 credit, etc.) but I was kinda strapped for cash this month... Now I'm debating waiting for the new colors to come out in the US... who knows how long that will be, though.
Kasi and I went and saw 'Cars' the other night. It was really good. I really don't agree with anything negative I've read about it in the media.... But, then again, most of the negativity seemed to have to do with the similarities to 'Doc Hollywood'... which I haven't seen in who knows how long... so I guess that wasn't really an issue for me at all... but... whatever.
Well, I should get back to work. I want to have an actual prototype code running this afteroon so I can debug and finalize tomorrow.
I am getting super stoked about this Colorado trip.
Lates.
What's up, yo?
Not much has been going on here. I'm getting ready to go to Colorado on vacation the 22nd-29th. That should be a lot of fun; unfortunately I have a bunch of work to get done before then, so I've been pretty busy on that front.
In other news, I finally managed to get the other mc chris cds for Johno. So... we're enjoying those now.
Other than that, I've just been going nuts playing Heroes as of late. I'm thoroughly enjoying the campaigns thus far, though I've had it crash on me a few times now that I've installed the first patch, but it's still a good time.
Anyway. I guess I'm going to get back to chilling out for the rest of the day. The weather here is kinda 'blah' today. Maybe I'll get out to the movies and see 'Cars'.... We'll see.
Happy June Everybody.
We had a blast today. I borrowed the projector from Lab (yet again) and we spent a good 4 hours playing a hotseat game of 'Heroes V'.
Here's me adjacent to the setup doing a quick demo of the 'Sin Episodes' for some friends:
Anyway. We rounded out the evening with an hour or two of Worms 2. Old-skool style.
Also, my housemates were gone, so I felt it was the perfect opportunity to put new zany items into the microwave. I was recently tipped off by the internet about the whole Ivory soap thing... It hought I'd try that. Just take a bar of Ivory soap, dip it in water, then set it on a paper towel inside the microwave and let her run... after about 1:15 in my microwave, this is what you get. Good times:
In other news, the custodians of joevegh.com, Dot 5 Hosting happily informed me that they've increased my storage to 10 Gigs and upped my bandwidth to 250 GB a month at no extra charge. I'll have to start uploading stuff that's BIG.
Well, I'm off to catch some shut-eye. Adios.
2006-05-XX|| Back to the Vault Main Page
Hope everyone has had a good Memorial Day weekend.
I went and saw 'X-men 3' on Friday. I really enjoyed it. Quite action packed.
My sister was apparently quite upset, but that's because she's a total fan-girl.
Anyway.
Ryan sent me a bunch of pictures he took at Boonville. I went ahead and posted them in the 'Sights' section.
I didn't remember him taking many pictures, but as it turns out I'm not in any of them... so maybe that's why.
In other news, I'm thoroughly enjoying Heroes V thus far.
Good Times.
Well, the season finale of Lost just ended. Yup.
I saw the 'DaVinci Code' last night. It wasn't as bad as 78% of the critics are saying....But I was constantly reminded about how much better 'Angels & Demons' was.
I nearly forgot that I hadn't taken any pictures of my other Star Trek swag from Vegas!:
And they were only $4.99 for the set! Talk about reasonably priced!
Anyway. I got Heroes of Might and Magic V today. So I'm going to go play that for several hours now.
Later.
Well, Vegas was a blast. I've tried to tell the story via pictures in the gallery, so it's probably easier to just read that.
Anyway. We went to that buffet 'Cravings' at the Mirage. We had heard about it through 'Unwrapped' on Food Network. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't nearly as spectacular as they had led us to believe. There were some TVs on the wall that were showing Food Network, though.. so it made us wonder as to whether or not they were in cahoots or somesuch.
I don't think I'll be able to trust Marc Summers any more.
I didn't really gamble much. I think I broke even or came out one or two bucks ahead... but all in all it was a really fun road trip.
Over the weekend, one of my blades at work (i.e. one of the computers in my cluster/server) went down... I tried powering it back on this morning and it literally fried a chip on the mainboard....so that sucks. But I got a bunch of other managerial type stuff finished while I was waiting on our tech coordinator to come down.
Anyway. That is all. Hope everyone had a good weekend.
Also, I'm going to borrow the projector from work to watch the season finale of 'Lost' on a wall... If you're bored Wednesday night, come on over.
T-minus 2 or 3 hours til we are officially headed to Vegas.
I bailed out on work a little early to come home and finish packing... I've gotten a lot better over the years, I think... as far as freaking out about trip preparations....
Granted... I still only have ~10 minutes of packing left to do... but... I'm not really obsessed about it, as much as I am overly-prepared.
But, anyway. I was just cleaning off my camera before I left... I forgot I still had pictures from the Consumating thing last week. I only took 3 of them...this one was kinda cool.... long exposure hula-hoop:
Well... we'll catch you on the flip-side. Here's to Vegas... woo!
PS, Pants Pants Pants is playing at Bottom of the Hill on June 2nd. You should come.
Well, it's Sunday again.
I've given up on doing a full update of the Diplomacy page... I've updated it with our latest positions. I'd go back and add images/commentary on the previous moves, but I just really don't care enough about it to do so.
We went and saw Pants Pants Pants last night in the city at the MakeOut Room. It was a good show, as usual.
Johno and I went out on Thursday to a Consumating.com 'consumeeting' to mingle with some of the other online folks. It was fun.
Johno took this picture of me, Katie, and Ben:
I insisted that my eyes were closed, but Johno told me it was fine. so... anyway....
Our friend Mary is having a graduation party tonight, so I guess that's the other thing on our weekend schedule.
We leave for Vegas on Thursday! Should be a bunch of pictures from that....
Later.
The Boonville pics are up in the 'Sights' section.... Be sure to check out the full gallery for comments.
Diplomacy will have to wait for a page update. I'm behind enough now that I might as well wait until the next turn, and therefore probably won't update 'til the weekend.
My housemate Christine and I made dinner earlier... it was like squash au gratin, more or less. Kind of scary in the execution, but it tasted good. Anyway.
I could spend hours blogging about Nintendo's pre-E3 press conference; you should just go check stuff out for yourselves. I guess here is as good a place to start as anywhere.
Have fun.
Boonville was fun. I have pictures, but I probably won't get around to posting them for a few days.
Anyway. I haven't updated the Diplomacy page for a couple of turns now, either, but some interesting things have happened (I guess).
I will update that soon, as well.
But, for now, I'm going to bed.
Happy May. Boonville is coming up this weekend...so I'm sure there'll be some preparation and whatnot during the week.
Not too much else has been going on. I'm waiting around for Episode 1 of the new 'SiN' to come out on May 10th (I've preordered). Should be sweet.
Well. I can't think of anything else to say right now....
Man... what a pointless and boring post....
2006-04-XX|| Back to the Vault Main Page
WEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
The Nintendo Revolution is now officially the Nintendo Wii!
So, that's like... cool, I guess. Still makes more sense than '360'.
At any rate, E3 is just around the corner. I'm stoked to see what all they have to offer.
Boonville is coming up next weekend. We're going... you should come too.
Diplomacy rages on.
In other news, I picked up 'Brain Age' for Nintendo DS. My first test indicated my brain was 71. I tried it again later with the TV turned off (the sound was apparently interfering with the DS understanding the word 'blue'). I took another test later, and my age was down to 36.
Seems like this will be entertaining and worth the $19.99...
It also includes Sudoku... so I finally did one of those... apparently I finished with 'the speed of a car' on my first try... I guess that is...average?...
Japanese games are fun.
Well, we went to wine country yesterday. It was much fun. There is a (albeit short) photo gallery of our excursion located on the 'sights' page. The full gallery has comments on the various places we visited.
As promised, I have started to put together a page about our ongoing diplomacy game. There is a link to it on the 'Miscellanea' page, or you can link directly to it here. It should be up to date in a few hours (I'm still working on it at the moment), and I'll try to keep it updated as best I can.
I also made a new test Claymation to check out this new AC adapter I got. You can download it if you want (~14 megs)... (right click to save as...) It's in quicktime only right now, but I will post a permanent link to it in the sights section once I rip it to a less bandwidth consuming format (probably divx).
Today was Dustin's birthday. As the lab birthday schedule is set up, I was in charge, so I made this crazy awesome chocolate chocolate cake from scratch yesterday. The frosting was a cup of cream, a stick of butter, a cup of sugar and a cup of cocoa, basically.... I used dark cocoa, too, so the cake looked jet-black.
I was impressed.
Kasi took some pictures, so I'll have to post them later when I get them from her.
In other news, the Diplomacy game continues. I think this weekend I may put together a page devoted to the game so far. Tomorrow, it looks like we're heading up to Sonoma to take advantage of the nice weather and to grab some wine. Should be a good time.
Johno cooked for us last night... it was a pretty impressive meal...he seemed very happy with it:
Speaking of which... I'm in the midst of cooking an artichoke for dinner tonight, so I ought to run... it wasn't quite done last time I checked:
No, but seriously, I was just taking that stupid picture for some other, unrelated reason....
...yes, that's how I prefer to spend my Friday evenings.
Happy Easter, Folks.
We had a pretty good time over at AJ and Richelle's today; ton of food and board games.
We had these animal cakes:
...which I guess are traditional in some circles. Tasty, regardless.
I also had my yearly quota of Peeps (i.e. one Peep).
There was also an egg hunt, so I'm stocked up on candy. Marie pointed out to me the lack of licorice jellybeans, which I also noticed, but that's cool... I bought some twizzlers nibs last night... so I'm good to go for at least one more licorice-fix.
As I mentioned in my last post, the HOMM V demo is out. I'm really getting into it now. The graphics and play dynamics are pretty impressive; It's nice to see that a completely new development house can pick up an IP and preserve the overall feel of what made the past games so good.
My only hope is that they'll include an easier difficulty setting in the retail version...
Yes, I realize this is kind of a lame request, but I really do suck at turn based strategy (this probably speaks ill of my future in the Diplomacy game we just started). One of my favorite things in previous HOMM games was to crank down the difficulty and then raise some ridiculous army and totally smash the competition.... but... whatever. I'm sure I will get better at it over time, and I'm realizing now how helpful documentation will be; I'm still tyring to figure out what skills are the best to get/etc (and what abilities the creatures all have)... anyway.
I am super exhausted for some reason, despite the fact I got a decent night's sleep last night and I drank like, 1/2 a pot of coffee at the Easter shindig.
Well...Later.
Well, I'm back.
Yup, I left.... Sadly, my Aunt Pat passed away, so I was in Texas last week for the memorial service.
It was a very nice service, and it was a good trip home to visit with the family.
Anyway. I just got back into Berkeley last night, so I'm trying to get back into the swing of things now, remembering where I left everything in a rush last week...so....
To change the subject to something more light-hearted.... the 'Heroes of Might and Magic V' demo came out today. I'm reasonably pleased so far, though I am a little irritated by the lack of smoothness in the graphics thus far.... especially considering the quality vs. performance as per previous Ubisoft games I've run in the past.
**************
I got an AC adapter for my digital camera while I was back home, so that should come in handy for future animations and such....
**************
Well, anyway. I'm going to get some sleep. Here's the obligatory new pic of my sister's dog:
Sorry for the massive delay in updates. My aunt Pat has been in the hospital the past week, so I've been pretty distracted. Things aren't looking too good, but today she actually was doing a little better, which is great. At any rate, my future updates may continue to be sporadic until we know more one way or the other.
In other news, April is here already. The weather out here in Berkeley has been terrible.
Where the hell is spring?
Jeff and Marie had a housewarming last weekend; that was a lot of fun; This past week was spring break... though I pretty much just went to work as per normal for the majority of the graduate student community.
I just finished reading 'V for Vendetta' it was quite good. I could see why Alan Moore would be pissed off. The movie is still highly enjoyable and recommendable, though.... just not if you're Alan Moore.
Every few days I've been devoting some play time to the second Prince of Persia (Warrior Within)... I'm pretty close to beating it now, I think... it's definitely the most challenging installment of the trilogy.
Today I'm updating the 'Vault' page to include the first couple months of 2006, so this page is cleaned up a little bit.
To continue with the random tidbits, Tax season is upon us. I think I'm ready to file now...I wasted a few hours yesterday digging through the IRS document pages; I had to file a 1040 this year and a couple of extra schedules because of the way this monetary award I won in November at our research conference was reported. I also had to pay extra tax on it, which sucks. But...whatever.
Anyway. I'm going to continue to chill out for a while now.
Catch you guys later on.
2006-03-XX|| Back to the Vault Main Page
Howdy.
It's been a slow week; I haven't done much other than work, work out, watch TV, and sleep.
We're working on our 2nd publication at work, and I've spent an inordinate amount of time in the past few days playing around with visualization crap.... I can't decide if that's been proportionately productive or not.
Oh well..... the pictures are coming out well, and I should be able to settle on something tomorrow and get the first draft finished before my advisor returns on Monday.
Anywho.
In the world of Animal Crossing... I had my first flowering Bell Tree. That was exciting. Hopefully this will provide a much quicker route to wealth; I'm getting to the point where I could see not playing every day and still find it fulfilling, but I would like to finish upgrading my house before then.
In the world of the internet, I've been getting into the whole podcast scene. TMBG has a few online now; they're all pretty good if you're a fan. Lately I've been listening to the Ken Plume/Dana Snyder podcast while I've been working on graphics stuff in the lab.... which is just silly enough that I don't really have to pay that close attention to it to find it entertaining.
Anyway. I saw 'V for Vendetta'; it was sweet...I'm waiting for the graphic novel to arrive at my house shortly (I ordered it online a few days ago)... since I'm anxious to see what Alan Moore found so wrong with the movie vis-à-vis his original version.
Well, back to work I go.
Hope everyone had a happy St. Patrick's Day. It was all good here:
Awesome Corned Beef & Cabbage and fun night with some friends.
Also, since my last post, the Ags won their first round NCAA tourney game!! Gig 'em, Aggies! A-WHOOP!
Happy Birthday, Kienitz.
In other news, things are going pretty well here. We went out on Friday night to check out this DomeFest thing at the planetarium. It was pretty sweet. Digital Full dome projection could prove to be quite a useful tool for scientific visualization purposes; I find myself sincerely intrigued with how awesome it would be to give my pre-graduation departmental seminar in such an environment.
In addition to the domey goodness of our outing, there was actually snow on the ground that high up in the Oakland Hills, so that was neat.
Kasi and I went and saw 'The Libertine' on Saturday, which I enjoyed. It was pretty sexual in tone... I guess.... in the same way that 'Quills' was sexual in tone... but anyway....
Yesterday, I went over to one of the theaters on Shattuck 'cause they were showing the Oscar nominated animated shorts... unfortunately this didn't include the one from Pixar....which I assume is some sort of totally lame Disney copyright BS, as per usual. They did screen Bill Plympton's latest though, which was an enjoyable substitute.
I think my favorite of the 4 Oscar noms I saw though was Shane Acker's '9' which I'm pleased to see Focus will be making into a full length feature.
*****
It's been raining here now for the past week and a half or so, which I'm getting pretty tired of.
Oh well. Staying inside on the weekends has given me some time to catch up on video-gamage... I beat F.E.A.R. yesterday; I would recommend it to anyone who's PC can handle it (and I think it will be out for 360 at somepoint).
Well, anyway.
I'm going to bed now.
Hooray for Canadian online Pharmacies. They could very well save me from extreme financial burden.
Permit me to rant for a few:
Back when I was on the 'Bovay Ethics Team' at A&M in undergrad, one of the ethics cases we examined for the 'Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl' was about the University of California's student health insurance plan....
UC mandates that all students have health insurance, and they're forced to pay for UC health care (which for me is included in my graduate student 'package'...so it's not really an issue for me, per se...but read on) unless they can prove they have 'better' insurance. If I recall the case study, that 'better' criteria was pretty hard to meet, which I guess was the point of the 'ethical dilemma' of the University requiring students to spend X amount of dollars on a quasi-voluntary service.
Anyway, I think our main arguement for the policy at the time was that the services provided by the UC health plan were very reasonable for the price, and since the overall goal was to keep students from having to leave due to health-related financial issues, it wasn't so much an ethical issue, as it was just a mostly beneficial (albeit irritating) policy.
I can say at this point though, the case file we had glossed over some important shortcomings of the plan.
For example, we have a $2000 per year max benefit for prescription drugs.
While this may seem like a lot, keep in mind that prescription drugs here are on the rise (the one I just got filled today is up $15/30 days vs. the last time), and the damn base prices are pretty ridiculous in and of themselves.
For most, I'm sure this level of coverage does the job. What irritates me is that the overarcing goal of the whole student health plan system was to prevent students from having to undergo exterme financial burden. If the percentage of students overshooting this $2000 cap is small (which I would assume it is), then I don't see how increasing it to, say $5000 would be a huge increase in end cost to the insurance providers. Moreover, shooting past this max benefit puts the student direclty in that realm of extreme financial burden, as they're suddenly stuck with huge monthly bills to keep on the drugs they need (assuming they were spending at a rate coinciding with meeting that $2000 cap).
Granted, I'm arguing this from the point of view of someone who's about to already blow by that $2000 cap for this academic year (August-August).
From one standpoint, I can't really complain too much, since as I mentioned, I'm not paying out of pocket for my premiums; On the other hand, If I were paying, I would really be pissed off at the amount of coverage I actually recieve.
As it stands now (due in part to the additional $200 annual deductible for 'outside specialists' i.e. my cardiologist, who is pretty much the only doctor I see), I'm currently looking at less than 50% of my medical expenses being covered by this supposedly 'good' plan.
Lame.
Enter the Canadian Pharmacies. I can get this one stupid drug I'm on (and it is stupid, considering it's basically time-released Vitamin B, which is available OTC in normal form for pennies a gram) that's currently costing me about $5 a day for a 5th of the price.
In fact, it's so cheap, it will cost me less to have it filled with no coverage than it would to have it filled here with the standard co-pay (which is 30% w/ UC for prescriptions filled at an outside pharmacy). So, I guess that's good. I just have to cope with the quasi-gray legal area of ordering this stuff from across the border, and repress my further irritation that prescription drugs in the states are so ridiculously expensive to begin with.
But, whatever.
Enough of that.
In other news, I made a new batch of rootbeer candy yesterday... turned out much better than the last batch. Pretty tasty. I have some down here in my office if you're on campus.
Well. I'm back off to work.
Lates.
Well, the Oscars just got over.
Having still not seen 'Brokeback', 'Good Night & Good Luck', or 'Munich', I was pleased with 'Crash' taking best picture.
Also, way to go, Philip Seymour Hoffman.
In other news, We just fried up a ton of good Southern style food earlier... fish, hushpuppies, okra... mmmmm. I'm quite full now, though.
At any rate, just thought I'd do a quick update post before I went back downstairs to watch Iron Chef.
I also saw 'Dave Chappelle's Block Party' and '16 Blocks' this weekend. I would recommend them both.
Later.
Happy March.
I'm finally through the hectic part of the week. I gave that talk yesterday, and I had to present during a conference call this morning. Now I'm trying to figure out what I want to accomplish (if anything) this afternoon.
The new batch of prospective grad students got here last night; We're having free lunch in a few minutes up in the conference room. Fortunately the daytime weather has been cooperating, despite the nighttime storms the past few days.
I guess I could spend some time recruiting and whatnot, but I don't really know the first year students very well (who are in charge), so I haven't been asked to do anything yet. Oh well.
I suppose we'll be taking a new student in the fall to replace me (since I should be done the following year), which I guess means I should be around to talk to people that might be interested.
On the other hand, I really don't want to have to show up on campus at 8 am tomorrow.
Anyway. I should get some work done and go to the gym or something. Later.
2006-02-XX|| Back to the Vault Main Page
Ok, so I've fallen into a terrible non-posting rut. Sorry.
I've been pretty busy at work, and I've spent pretty much all of my time at home lately playing video games and cooking.
I'm currently splitting my time between Prince of Persia: Warrior Within on the Gamecube (I beat the 3rd one; I'm finishing the trilogy, albeit out of order), Animal Crossing on the DS, and F.E.A.R. on the PC.
They're all pretty engrossing.
I spent most of today making a pizza from scratch. I was really pretty happy with it, but the dough recipe is still not 100% to my liking. The sauce turned out well, though.
On the work front, I have to give a talk to another research group this Thursday, so I've been spending some time trying to come up with pretty pictures. This one looks cool, although it's not at all instructive:
Hooray for ray tracing.
Oh, and I also rented 'Domino' this weekend.
Announcement: Keira Knightley is still incredibly hot.
That is all.
Another hectic week has flown by.
I had my first jury duty on Thursday.
Very fortunately, I didn't get selected, as the trial in question was going to run for several months at the beginning of the summer.
On Friday, I called and found out that my replacement radiator hose had come in, so I'm going in to the dealership again early tomorrow morning to have that replaced. Hopefully this trip will be a much speedier affair.
I made a batch of root beer barrels on Friday night, but I ran into some issues with sugar recrystallization, so the final product has an odd crumbly texture in places... I'm not sure what I did to screw that up, as I followed my now standard hard candy procedures.
In other news, we went out to the Make-Out Room in the Mission last night to see Pants Pants Pants play the kick-off show for their 'Internet Famous Tour', which was very enjoyable as usual.
We also hit up Cancun Taqueria for burritos, which I hadn't done in quite a while. That was also quite pleasurable.
It's been cold here all weekend, so I've been trying to avoid going outside as much as possible; I'm about to head out here soon, though, as Johno and I have plans to eat at Tony Roma's tonight, for no real reason....Other than the fact we both want ribs.
So, anyway... I took my car in this Saturday for a 10:15 am appointment. I think they finally got it up on the rack around 3:30 pm.... great.
Turns out it was my lower radiator hose that had the leak (like I thought), but unfortunately the dealership I took the car into didn't have one in stock. I guess the nearest unit is in Antioch... but they only have one in stock and thus don't have to sell it to the dealership in Pinole if they don't want to.
I will hopefully hear back today whether or not they got the one close by, or if I'll have to wait for a week to get another one sent from someplace farther away.
In other news, we spent some time last night helping our new roommate Christine move in. It was relatively quick with 4-5 people unloading vehicles.
I guess she moves in officially on the 15th, so that will be cool.
Uh... otherwise, nothing else too exciting has been going on. I made pizza last night that turned out pretty well....
Dustin went to Wisconsin this weekend, and he brought me back some root beer flavoring from Amish country, so I guess I'll have to make a new batch of candy before too long.
And take more pictures of stuff....
Well, I haven't accomplished much on the update front. My car has recently been doing some odd overheating maneuver... initially I wasn't sure if it was even overheating, but a check under the hood revealed my coolant level was low... I fixed that yesterday, and did a brief test while the car idled in my driveway... everything seemed to be in working order (i.e. no leaks, fans came on when they were supposed to, etc.)... however, after a short trip on the highway tonight it bumped right back up to the cusp of the red-zone... oddly enough, though, this wasn't while I was on the highway... the temp indicator seemed to say everything was great while I was trucking along at 65 mph, but on the several blocks drive home through the 25 mph zones with frequent stops, the needled inched upward, and then eventually spiked right as I was turning on to my block...
Unfortunately, we have no outdoor lighting in the carport area, (and my recent experience at Walmart was not conducive to a new flashlight purchase) so I haven't checked on the fluid levels again yet... but the fans were all on when I pulled into the drive.... so.... who knows.
I'm taking a trip to the dealership on Saturday anyway, since I need an oil change... so I'll be sure to have them look everything over.
In other news, I still haven't put all of the photo stuff back on my new windows install... but to tide you over, here is one of the 3 or 4 decent pictures I took back on the last weekend of January, of Dakota making Adam feel uncomfortable at Ben's place.... :
I will get the rest of everything put into a gallery as soon as I get around to it.
Yes... I already know that I should get a flickr account.
Let me apologize now for the impotence of my previous few posts.
I have been pulling stuff back together after reinstalling, but it just occurred to me I have neither my convenient camera software installed (which let me do batch renames) nor PERL (which precludes the use of several scripts I wrote for photo gallery generation, etc.)
Anyway... I will have to post pictures later, but today I made a new batch of candy. It was a second attempt at salt-water taffy that ended up more like now n' laters.... which is fine with me. They are acutally pretty tasty.
In other news, I spent some time at the movies today. I saw Underworld: Evolution this morning... it was pretty entertaining... much more so than the first one.
This evening, I went and saw Capote.... I would recommend this to everyone. It was really good.... I am currently on track to try and see the rest of the Oscar noms before the big day, but so far this one is on top of my list for best picture... although the only other of the nominees that I've seen thus far is Crash, which was also excellent.... so...only time will tell. I'm planning on going to see The Matador in the morning before the Super Bowl, which I am also excited about; I realized this weekend I haven't gone to nearly as many movies as I am normally compelled to see.... I guess having been pretty busy at work lately has made me lazier on the ol' weekends.
Well... I am now tired. I will post more tomorrow or the next day. Lates.
Happy February.
emacs is driving me nuts. Apparently the fact I no longer have a c: drive is causing it to beep and tell me 'permission denied' every 0.5 seconds.
ugh.
I will update more tomorrow when I get this fixed and/or don't need to have my sound on for other reasons.
Good Lord.
2006-01-XX|| Back to the Vault Main Page
Well... it was a fun weekend.
Dakota was in town to hit up this party for Ben and Adam's dating site, Consumating.com.
It was quite enjoyable; This was the first time I've been to a party at a bar where the drinks were all on the house.
The music last night was provided by Ghostland Observatory from Austin...a band that I quite enjoy and was very happy to have the opportunity to see out here in the bay area.
In other music news, I'm seriously considering taking a road trip to Austin in March for SXSW... Dakota's band, Peel, is playing a show or two, and I hear there's a BBQ. Hooray for BBQ!
Ugh... anyway... the weather here today is quite horrible... cold and rainy... I did not want to get out of bed this morning for that walk to work at all...oh well.
I took a handful of pictures over at Ben's place and in the city on saturday, which I'll have to eventually post at some point in the near future....
This is a very disjointed post.
I am going to do more work now.
Well..... to cap off my previous post....needless to say we won't be having a Super Bowl Party at our place this year.
Oh well.
In other news, I got my new XP install up and running on my machine at home. It seems to be much smoother than the previous install (which I think was due to a coupling of it's age and the fact that the crappy drive that came with my comptuer was only 5400 rpm).
Well... I got into the Heroes of Might and Magic V open beta; I haven't really played it that much yet (it's multiplayer only, at the moment), but it looks pretty damn nice.
The guy I was playing last night had set the server options to include like a 1 minute turn time-limit, which is just ridiculous. I mean, certainly there were times back in the day, playing HOMM 3 in the dorm when Mase would decide to take a shower during the middle of the game and we'd have to wait 25 minutes before he started his turn, that we really could have used some sort of time-limit feature... but this ultra-short turn mode was really pissing me off because it basically destroys the whole atmosphere from the original (i.e. all 4 previous) versions of the game.
At any rate, I can't wait for the full version to come out, and I'm sure I'll enjoy the Beta-test experience much more when I can get some friends online to play with.
Well....I'd best be getting back to work; Dakota is coming in to town for a few days to visit his friends out here, so I wanted to get home relatively early tonight to try and take care of some of the household crap I was going to put off 'til the weekend....
Later.
Ugh... The Broncos aren't doing so hot here at the half. Let's hope they go old-school and make a crazy comeback in the 2nd.
The work week flew by; I've just been chilling out this weekend. I picked up a new hard drive over at CompUSA on Friday, but I haven't gotten around to installing it yet. I did a BIOS update earlier in the week, which has done wonders... I'm glad there are other people out there with Emachines comps that know how to hack BIOS files.
In other news, I made some salt water taffy yesterday:
It turned out ok... but I'm not 100% happy with the recipe... it tastes a little too buttery and a little too salty to me.... but oh well... we can only improve from here.
Anyway... i'm going to grab a bite and hunker down for the rest of the game. Let's hope it goes better.
Happy Tuesday.
Things are picking up at work, which is cool. We're starting to look at some significantly different simulation systems, which means that pretty much anything new I can work on is progress, in a way. This leads to a lot of dead ends and tedious small tasks, but it's necessary to make sure the stuff we end up with after all is said and done is actually correct.
At least it's keeping me busy. (And yes, I realize that was probably the most vague description I've given of my reasearch to date).
In other news, I'm pretty sure I've become hooked on 'Animal Crossing: Wild World' for the Nintendo DS. This is how I've been spending my nights and weekends since I got back from Corpus. While in many ways the game is completely objectiveless, it's also a lot of fun, and I'm not finding myself as rapidly frustrated with it as I was with 'The Sims' back in the day....And the aforementioned wi-fi compatability adds quite a bit.
Well. I was just taking a 15 minute break after finally getting my code recompilied and my simulations restarted... so I guess I'd better finish up a few more things before I head out for the day.
Later.
Today a few of us went to the SFMOMA to check out the Chuck Close paintings on exhibit. It was totally awesome.
I had seen several of his paintings in books, etc, but to see the scale of these things in person is overwhelming. Johno made a comment that it was easier to see the pixels in one of the large format inkjet prints of one of the self potrait source photographs than it was to distinguish the brush strokes in the final, huge (~7x6 ft) watercolor paiting.
Pretty impressive.
In other news, the Broncos won tonight, so they're on their way to the AFC championship.... let's hope that the Steelers win tomorrow so that we don't have to a.) play the Colts or b.) give up our homefield advantage.
...Well...I'm off to chill out for a bit and then probably go to bed quasi-early--Jeff and Marie are moving in to thier new place tomorrow, so I'm planning on lending a hand with that...
I'm getting back into the daily grind, I guess...
although there is certainly some vacation-inertia going on...oh well... I'll start getting out of bed before 09:30 starting next monday.
We've pretty much just been chilling out in the evenings... playing 'Puerto Rico' and 'Age of Steam'... I also just recently picked up Animal Crossing for DS... so that's been an intriguing time-waster over the past few days. I know a few people that have it, so we'll have to get on the wi-fi connection and check it out at somepoint.
In other news, Marie is moving out this weekend. It will be sorta weird with her gone, I think...but she'll just be down the street, so perhaps it won't be all that different.
Anyway... I've got to get back to work....and the first years need some additional quizzing before their prelim exams tomorrow....
Well, the return back to the West Coast was pretty uneventful. I've just been chilling out the last few days. I feel like my vacation was too long and too short at the same time; I don't really know what that means, though.
Anyway. I've got a pretty huge update for today. I've added around 100+ pictures to the 'Sights' section, along with a short video I shot of a tiny fracas between my sister's and Julie's dogs.
Anyhow. I just spent a while adding comments to the photos, so I'm pretty wiped for now. I'll have more to discuss later, I'm sure.
Happy New Year!
Hard to believe that it's 2006 already.
I hope everyone's celebrations went well last night, and that everyone was safe. Vicky and I went over to our friend Malak's cousin's place, for a ton of illegal fireworks and good food and fun. I have a handful of pictures and a video that I'll post once I get back out to Berkeley.
Anyhow, my aunt Pat and uncle Jim are in town; I think we're going out to Red Lobster tonight before they head back tomorrow. Should be a good family get-together. I'll probably take a few pictures there, too... so more updates later.
Have a good one.
