Posts from — November 2006

I have a couple of non-trivial posts I’ve been meaning to write here, but I can’t quite justify the time yet, hopefully I’ll get to it next weekend. I’m giving a lecture at 7:55 am on thursday, I’m sure it will be delightful. I’ve got a project due the night before, plus a lot of coding and research to do for that lecture, plus I really need to get some stuff done for work, too. I’ve spent over a week on the same bug, and I still can’t figure out why the memory is getting corrupted. I really hope I don’t have to go to my meeting on Wednesday and report I’m still working on the same thing.

I got sucked in to watching Heroes (“thanks” to Jon Howard), and now I’m sorta hooked, but I seem to hate approximately half the show. Maybe it’s the way they throw around all sorts of pretentious psuedoscience in all the narrator voice-overs. I don’t mind stories that go on for seasons (I’m a big fan of The Wire), but I don’t like it when everything seems to be a cliffhanger all the time. It just feels manipulative and makes me angry. Example: 24.

Product placement in The Office seems to cheapen it a bit, I think. Those new HP monitors they got for season two screamed placement as soon as I saw them (I was right, as far as I know). Lame.

30 Rock is sometimes really funny. Nobody believes me, but that’s ok. It’s not great, but it has some good parts.

Enough about TV, I’ve gotta get some sleep. 4 more 7:55 classes left…

Yesterday, I ran the Manchester Road Race for approximately the 10th time (I only remember missing it once since 8th grade, but perhaps I got that wrong). It’s a 4.74 mile race that happens annually on Thanksgiving morning at 10am, with between 9,000 and 13,000 people running each year. I somehow managed to enjoy it despite the fact that it was about 40 degrees out, raining, and I hadn’t trained. I actually felt pretty good most of the race. I started out too far back, so I got slowed down a lot by other runners for the first two miles.

Reading cookbooks is making me hungry, but I’m too tired to cook anything, so I should just go to bed.

After preparing a pretty good waffle breakfast Sunday morning, Dave and I decided that we should make a Thanksgiving dinner. We put together a menu and invited a bunch of people (the usual Ogontz crew + Klump, Lisa, Andrew, and Josh ended up attending, 10 people in all). I hadn’t cooked in a long time, and it was fun to do again. Dave and I worked on the turkey and cheesecake the night before, then Sarah and Joe helped us put everything together in time for dinner that day. Everything came out really good, from what I could tell. Brining the turkey the night before seemed to affect the cook time, since we cooked an 11 lb bird in 2 hours (and it was more than hot enough). Dave and I used the markerboard to plan out exactly when everything could be made so that it was all ready at about the same time. Not to micromange the process, but mostly to prove that it would be feasible.

It was a good night… we were even regaled with some classic “Klump Tales”!

Saturday’s game was pretty bad, obviously, but this weekend was a good one in general. The band had a very good performance (I’ll comment further later). Lots to do tomorrow (aka today).

Chris Klump is now known as “Lehigh’s Second Oldest Tradition”. Fact.

I played my last kickball game at Lehigh tonight (most likely). I played my first game in August 2001. Tonight was a good night, hopefully to be followed by several more.

Instead of writing an angry post about why I’m still up and hating it right now (hint: see my previous post), I’ll post this picture to hopefully brighten your day:

(let me know if nothing’s showing up on your end)

The best thing about image processing is that when you make mistakes, you can sometimes accidentally create cool-looking things:

(a fourier transform gone bad)

This image is indicative of how well this assignment is going for me.

After a few of the most challenging school days in a long time, I woke up with a fever this morning (an hour before my 7:30 alarm for some reason). I made it through the day and I’m feeling better after getting a lot of rest this evening, so hopefully I’ll bounce back tomorrow. Ryan, Peyton and Jim are visiting this weekend, so I’m looking forward to that.

I was thinking the other day about how surprisingly unique blogs and journals are as a communication medium. For example, I almost never talk about politics with people in real life, but I don’t feel inhibited to post my self-righteous rants here. I guess a little bit of indirection can go a long way in saying things that need to be said.

I don’t have much time to write about the election, but I’ll quote Doc Searls’ post-election thoughts:

“This guy [on conservative talk radio] was yelling about The Democrats, and how the [K]arl Rove was wrong to not make the president fire Rumsfeld before the election, when it was clear somebody needed to go. And how “The Democrats cleaned our clock”.
The Democrats didn’t clean anybody’s clock. The voters did.
I’m not hoping for an end to partisanship. I am hoping for an end to the toxic antagonisms that have harmed political debate for the last couple decades.”

OK, time to get to work. Hopefully it’ll be a productive for a while.

“VOTE.”

My schedule for tomorrow is daunting… 40 minutes total free on my calendar between 7:55am and 5pm. I’m giving a lecture on RSA tomorrow, and I’m not ready, so hopefully that’ll come together really soon.

And I don’t want to hear anything from people who “work” “real” “jobs” and say that isn’t a lot of stuff, because I have to do work for my actual job after I vote at dinnertime, then I get to work on homework. So there.

My weekend schedule for the past couple of weeks and for the next couple of weeks is great, but it doesn’t leave much time for project work. I’ve stayed on top of everything so far, but things will be getting harder as the semester draws to a close. I can’t believe Lehigh/Lafayette is next week.