It snowed:

And then this morning it was so cold when I left to touch up my project at CS, that I had to call Dave and have him bring me a hat to CS 552. Incidentally, I did get the project done, though it kept me up until 3:30, and saw me back in the lab from 9:10 to 9:35 and 10:45-10:55. (CS 537 runs 9:30-10:45, with CS 552 [project due] 11:00-12:15.)

Tim asked me how long I thought something he was waiting for would take today. My reply was “54 nanofortnights,” which sounded a lot wittier before I ran the math and found out I had just specified 0.06 seconds. Oops. Then we learned that I can’t round, since 0.0653184 is typically rounded to 0.07 seconds. Yikes. Look what this “new math” has wrought upon us…

Just a quick shout-out for the UW Campus Map, which is pretty awesome. I don’t know when this latest version went live, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t look like this at the end of last year.

In other news, Wells Fargo will be building a new ATM in the campus area, at (if I remember right) approx 500 University Ave. Good thing, too, or I would probably have switched banks to avoid having to drive 15 minutes to an ATM.

Also, we got internet & digital cable hooked up in our apartment on Tuesday. Now I’m thinking about buying an HDTV, as we can get HD content to match our current lineup for only $3 more per month. Anyone have advice on HDTVs?

A lot has happened since the 15th of August, a mere week and two days ago.

In brief:

• I completed my internship at Microsoft. Everything seems to have wrapped up fairly well, though Paul says that one of the bugs I worked on (for three weeks) may actually have been in vain. I sincerely hope that is not the case. Please don’t tell me if it is, Paul, or Allen.
• I shipped all my stuff home to Green Bay, via Fedex this time, to attempt to avoid previous misfortunes
• I moved home, only arriving some 2 hours late courtesy of a minor fuel leak in the left wing of the MD-80 plane we were flying from Seattle to Chicago.
• I helped my parents set up a “home office”, which basically means combine the following items into one of the new rooms in our basement:
  • My desk
  • My old stereo
  • My old server computer
  • My sister’s 15″ LCD monitor
  • My networking cables
  • My 8-port switch
  • My second-best spare keyboard & mouse (well, best until my new wireless set gets here on Friday)
  • My spare USB cable

  It turned out pretty nice:
  

• I went down to Madison to visit Jeni & Dave and drop off a vanload of stuff for my apartment.
• I lost the key to said apartment, within 30 minutes of getting it from Dave, and before even setting foot in the new place.
• I received the first 6 boxes of stuff from Seattle, in relatively good shape, though I have yet to open my computer box up and assess any damage.
• I joined MySpace… On the upshot it only took 5 visits to the same page before “Sorry! An unexpected error has occurred” stopped blocking me from confirming my registration, and only 10 clicks on the link to add Jeni as a friend before it actually sent the request.
• I submitted my request for a replacement battery in Apple’s battery recall. I should get my new battery in 4 to 6 weeks. What happens if it blows up between now and then??

Going by local (Pacific) time, it’s 5:54am. I haven’t actually bothered to find out if this is a fact or not, but this is my earliest blog post ever. From work. Before 6am.

I dropped my parents off at the airport for their 7am flight home about 30 minutes ago, and just came straight to work, where I plan to sleep for an hour or two on our couch. Driving up to Microsoft from SeaTac Airport was pretty awesome: the sky changed from pitch black to the first colors of sunrise as I was driving.

Work is going very well: I have one more bug to finish up before the end of my internship, and I have been making good progress on it, now that I can actually get the hardware to demonstrate the bug I’m trying to fix. (That was a frustrating 2-week ordeal.) The process of fixing it will take a giant leap forward today, enough to give me credit for the bug on performance numbers, and hopefully by the end of my internship on Friday, it will be all solved!

And now I will sleep, since I got up at 4:15.

Jeni and I took a pretty crazy bus ride from Renton to southern Seattle to see the Blue Angels perform for Seattle’s SeaFair this past Saturday. It was pretty awesome. So awesome that I went back again with my officemates on Sunday. Unfortunately, we left too late to get all the way over to Southern Seattle, so we caught the second show from Mercer Island.

I brought my camera with me both days, but neglected to charge it before Jeni & I took off on the bus… The two pics of the Patriots and the two before that are from Saturday near Genesee Park, and the remaining are from Sunday on Mercer Island (with a charged battery) Too bad I didn’t think ahead the first time: it would have been cool to get both views.

Trying something new for these pictures, let’s see how it works:

The following pairs of items are not equal, quantitatively mismatched, or otherwise inappropriate to equate.

1 package of hamburger (1.2lb)	≠	1 jar of Ragu spaghetti sauce
0.5 box of spaghetti noodles	≠	1 jar of sauce + 1.2 lb hamburger
quality green beans	≠	fred meyer produce dept.
12-week internship	≠	long enough to do everything in Seattle

Seafair this weekend, with the Blue Angels performing an air show. Should be awesome!

Connection. In an isolating age…

This afternoon on the way home from work I heard Chicago’s 25 or 6 to 4 on the radio, which naturally brought the associated quad/tenors groove to mind. Then I came home and decided on a whim to look through my Bookmarks folder of friends’ blogs and journals, revisiting some places I haven’t been in weeks or months. That was a cool experience in and of itself. And then out of the blue, another tab pops up in Adium, and there’s my fellow drummer and one of those very journal authors, one Joel Liberski.

It had been far too long, but it seems Joel is doing quite well, as the Poetry editor for the UWGB literary journal Sheepshead Review, and a near-future English major graduate. He has a way with words that I have only been able to regard in continued amazement since I first read his writings.

I can’t even believe that over 4 full years separate the present from the last time we were in class together, that it has been 5 since dashing across the practice field to beat the marching band out from behind the school in Joel’s car, 6 from a certain freshman showing up a certain junior on a rudimentary (ha ha) paradiddle lick, and 7 or 8 from a terrified middle schooler listening to an intimidating high schooler tell every one to be quiet because the audience could hear us at the Bay Port percussion night.

It was excellent to talk with him again, and to read a bit of what he’s been up to. Incidentally, he’s published now: UW Green Bay Spring 2006 Sheepshead Review

Thank you, as always, sir.

Holy crap:

http://www.channel3000.com/weather/9586944/detail.html

That’s insane. Makes me glad to be living above the ground, though I don’t think my buildling for this upcoming year would have been affected anyway. A bunch of my friends live on that floor though, and their apartment was flooded up to the door handles. Crazy.

In other news, Jeni & Lauren & I went to Vancouver, BC, this weekend. We spent a total of 1.75 hours waiting in line to cross the border. We also walked around downtown Vancouver for about 5 hours. We did not stay for the fireworks, but watched all the people up until that time.

Lauren is headed home on Tuesday… I hope her new apartment is ok! (Not sure where you are located, Lauren…)

I’m sorry Jeni… I said that the weather in Seattle was always great and comfortable, and then the weekend Jeni moves up here, we have a record heat wave. Of course, since Seattle “never gets that hot,” people here [read: my apartment complex] have no air conditioning. My roommate tried to buy a fan today, but apparently all the places he stopped were already sold out. We went to play racquetball this evening. It was a good time, except for the fact that it was definitely over 100° in the court. Yuck.

In other news, Jeni & I still managed to tour around Seattle a bit this weekend. We checked out REI, Fremont (including the troll, see pic from my cell phone below), and Gasworks Park yesterday. Then today I showed off the Microsoft campus, and we went to the Factoria mall and Frys. I’d never been in a Fry’s until today, and let me just say: it was cool. Not as cool as the fact that Jeni lives right down in Renton now, but pretty cool. Speaking of which, we also drove past Jeni’s house, down near the Sam’s Club, Walmart and Starbucks. It looks good from the outside, but it might’ve been a bit weird for me to be there when she was moving in, so I’ll have to visit at a later date.

Schedule for the remainder of the summer:
This week: Lauren comes to visit on Thursday. Saturday & Sunday Lauren, Jeni & I are going up to Vancouver.
Next week: a week of work, with an as-of-yet undetermined weekend.
Week after that: My parents come to visit, maybe we’ll go somewhere on the weekend.
Week after that: My parents go home, I work for a week, and I go home.

I can’t believe the summer went by so fast…
[time to see what we have time to see…]