Saturday, May 21, 2005

Last week I changed the oil in Jenny's Civic. The oil filter was in a really hard place to reach, so I had to go buy some jack stands and lift the car up and crawl underneath. I suppose it's worth it in the future just to pay a mechanic to change the oil. But on the plus side, I now have a pair of 2-ton jack stands, which could be useful for future projects.

Yesterday I saw Star Wars Episode III, which I thought was not bad, and much better than I and II. There was a guy in the audience in a full on Darth Vader suit and carrying a light saber, which was kinda funny.

Hopefully Jenny and I will get to go down to Indy and visit Wes this coming week!

I fixed my RSS feed (see link on left) to automatically turn relative urls into absolute ones, so now images and links should work.

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

A couple of weeks ago:

l2oyk: happy 05/05/05 05:05:05!

Yep, it was my birthday. As most of you know, I received an awesome gift which was a scrapbook type thing that Jenny made and which many of you contributed to. It was really hilarious and good... undoubtedly one of the most enjoyable birthday presents ever. So thanks to Jenny, (and, in order of appearance) Mike, Alan, Ed, Celine, Alen, Ian, Eugene, Jon, Leon, Erin L, Roy, Mike 2, Erin C, Kristin, Katie, and Bill. And thanks to anyone else who considered contributing something! I was going to say which one was my favorite, but (and I know this is a cop-out) I couldn't decide. They were all good. And each one very much had the voice of the person or people who wrote it, so I think it would have been an interesting challenge if Jenny gave it to me without names and I had to guess who wrote each story/list/haiku/mad-lib. I'm gonna bring it with me next time I go to LA so you guys can see it. Except Ian, I guess you'll have to use your imagination.

The other day someone brought up how my desk and my room are so messy, yet my car is unusually clean. I thought this was an interesting observation. I was trying to figure out this seeming inconsistency, and there are really only two possibilities. Either I am strangely obsessive about keeping my car clean, or else keeping a car clean does not require any effort. I'm leaning towards the latter, since I never actively clean up the inside of my car... it just never seems to get cluttered. I think this makes sense, because the only time I ever bring anything into the car is when I'm taking that thing somewhere. And when I get there, I'm going to remove that thing from my car so I can use it. So my car never gets cluttered because I am too lazy to bring anything into the car that I don't need at my destination. So I've found the consistent theme and it is laziness. =)

I've been reading a couple of books lately. The first is The Fabric of the Cosmos, by Brian Greene. This one's a physics book, and the author talks about special and general relativity, string theory, and the origin of the universe. Interesting stuff but it reads really slowly, I guess because there's a lot of information to take in. I've been reading it for over a month, I think, and I'm still not done. The other book is Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief, by Bill Mason, and it's also non-fiction. Bill Mason was a thief who stole millions of dollars worth of jewels in the 70s and 80s (and who looks sort of like George Carlin, judging from the book jacket photo) and this book is about some of his heists and stuff. It's quite interesting although he also gets into his legal fights and feuding with the police department and the justice system, and his family problems, and all of that is less interesting than the actual thefts. But I guess it paints a more complete picture. This one I finished reading in a few days.

Leah told me about her trip to Florida and her Daewoo rental car:

Ch9rM3D1: it was great on gas and all
Ch9rM3D1: but for some reason, the gas floater thingie was acting up on my fill up
KeFanMan: oh
KeFanMan: it was saying the wrong amount?
Ch9rM3D1: i hade to make numerous left uphill turns
Ch9rM3D1: to get the full tank
KeFanMan: hahaha

I'm coming home next month! I'll be around from 6/22 to 7/6.

Tuesday, May 3, 2005

Only one post in April... It's because I've been working on yet another paper. So first there was the one at the beginning of April, and at the last minute the deadline got postponed for a week. After submitting that one, we tried submitting another paper to a conference whose deadline was around the end of April, but we didn't make it... so now we're going for one that's due this weekend. So basically it feels like I worked on 4 papers in the past month. Not fun, I tell ya.

Mike already blogged this, but Jenny showed us Su Doku some time last month. It's fairly addictive and has temporarily replaced the crossword puzzle as time-waster of choice in the lab. It's also a nice little programming project: two people in my lab have already written Su Doku solvers.

There were some warm days (in the 70s) early in April, but it's gotten cold again. The past couple of days it's been below freezing at night... and it snowed a little bit this morning. The heck? It's May! Sheesh.

We had a little get-together on the porch, and someone shoved the pumpkin off the ledge and onto the driveway:

It was actually rather difficult pushing the pumpkin off the rail since it was pretty well stuck... in fact, you can see that the seeds and the internals of the pumpkin are still there.

Pumpkin trajectory:

Ok, enough of that... back to work on the paper. =)