Monday, July 24, 2006

Ok, monster update coming. It's been a while since I updated, and I've actually done stuff since last time. So first I'll recap (hopefully the interesting parts of) what I've been up to. Then if I have any random stuff left to talk about, that'll come afterwards.

So first off, my Mom came to NY to visit. This was end of June/beginning of July. She was here for about 10 days... two weekends and the week in between. So she spent the two weekends with me and the weekdays with her friends in the city. We actually did a lot of stuff. The first weekend we went hiking, visited the Rockefeller estate, and visited Washington Irving's house. The second weekend we went up to the Catskill Mountains and stayed at a bed-and-breakfast which was right by a waterfall, which was cool. We also went up in a little old Cessna 172 for a scenic tour of the area. The pilot let me fly for a little bit, which was cool. Also we went to this place where a falconer (guy who hunts with birds of prey) was describing his craft and showed us his hawks and falcons. Pretty interesting. Oh yeah we also visited the town of Woodstock (yeah, the one the concert was named after) which was kinda cool; there were a lot of people around and there was a mini-concert going on in the village green. We also stopped in a few other towns that were on the way of our mini-road-trip, including New Paltz and Hudson.

Then, after my Mom left, it was July 4. Manjunath and I went to Coney Island and saw the hot dog eating contest, did some random stuff like visiting the new Apple store and biking around in Central Park, and saw fireworks down in Battery Park. Pretty cool. Although there were so many people at the hot dog eating contest that I couldn't really get close enough to see anything. Actually there were tons of people everywhere in NY that day, which is not really that surprising.

The weekend after that was when I flew to California for a day to go to Wes and Kristin's wedding. It was great, congratulations to them! Here's our silly wedding pic.

That brings us up to a couple of weeks ago. I donated blood for the first time. It turned out to be pretty uneventful; I didn't pass out or anything, which is always a good thing. Afterwards they wrapped a red bandage around my left arm where they took the blood from, and someone remarked later that it made me look like a Nazi. Heh.

That Friday a lot ended up happening. First, after work I went to a Yankee game with some officemates. We didn't have tickets so we had to find a scalper, which actually worked out quite well, as we got seats right behind home plate (although in the highest deck) for a reasonable price. The view was pretty good. The game was pretty good too, the Yankees were up by 3 in the ninth but the White Sox made a good run... they scored 2 and had the tying run on 3rd, but Mariano got the save. After the game we had dinner in the Village, and we were going to go to a blues club but it was getting too late for that. So we went to a lounge, then to a couple of bars, and finally to Tom's Restaurant (the diner from Seinfeld), and I didn't get home until 6 in the morning. I tell ya, it's been a long time since I've been up until 6 in the morning.

Then that Saturday I saw the movie A Scanner Darkly. It was a pretty interesting movie... it's an animation, but it's in the visual style of Waking Life, where they film the scenes with live actors and then digitally draw over them to make the movie appear animated. And the story was by Philip K. Dick, so there were some sci-fi style twists and stuff.

This past weekend, Jenny came to visit and so did Celine, Ed and Mike. Let's see, what did we do... hung out at Times Square, saw Clerks II, went to Central Park, went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had dinner at Nobu and dessert at Serendipity. Good stuff. Then on Sunday Jenny and I went to Bear Mountain, which is a bit north of here; it's a recreational area with some nice views of the Hudson River, and there's a lake where we rented a rowboat. The weather that day was great (in contrast to the rain, heat, humidity, tornadoes, heavy thunderstorms, flooding, and mudslides that have been happening in this area lately), so that was a bonus.

So, that brings us up to date. I have some photos of various stuff that happened in the past month, so I may get around to posting them some time.

Ok, so that was my recap. Now for random things.

I bought a 20" wide screen LCD monitor. It's nice. And it was cheap, I think it was the cheapest 20" wide screen that I found, at $279. So it's missing some features like a DVI input. But it works... I was glad that I got my video card to display the wide-aspect resolution in Linux on the first try. So even though it's cheap, this monitor is a huge improvement over my previous CRT.

I bought Tetris for my Nintendo DS. Kept me busy on the plane ride back from California. Now I'm just waiting for Zelda to get released.

Some car notes... My car passed 100,000 miles last weekend. Woo. Unfortunately, along with age comes problems. First, my "service engine soon" light came on a couple of months ago. The computer code said it was a problem with the rear oxygen sensor. According to the factory service manual, this sensor is not actually used during normal driving (since the car has 2 front oxygen sensors that do all the real work). So I'm going to hold off replacing it until I get back to Michigan, since I have tools there (specifically, jack stands) that I can use. The other problem I ran into is, last weekend, horrible scraping, grinding noises started coming from one of my wheels whenever I drove really slowly, like when coming to a stop or when accelerating slowly from a light. I took a look and saw that my left rear brake pads were worn almost to nothing, meaning that caliper is sticking or something, since I replaced those pads at the same time as all the other pads, and the others have plenty of life left. Anyway, today I bought new pads and installed them, which fixes the noise, but it's only a temporary fix. Turns out the inboard pad was worn all the way down to the backing material and tore up the rotor pretty badly. So I'll need to get a new rotor (probably after I get back to Michigan), and probably a new caliper too. Oh well.

Lately I've been listening to Guster. I like them. I remember my old roommate Bill used to talk about them a lot, and now I regret not having gone to see them. Oh well, I suppose they (and other bands) will be around again. I should start going to more concerts in general.