Wow. I finished the first season of Battlestar Galactica about 10 minutes ago, and let me just say: awesome.
Anybody who likes Sci-Fi should definitely check it out. Simply incredible.
Now for some racquetball, then maybe I’ll clean my desk off finally, or label all some pictures (I have a lot to sort through… best I can promise is you’ll see them when you see them…), or figure out how to use Quicken, or cook some supper, or maybe I’ll just start in on season 2.
Seriously, it’s the worst possible place for an accident.
Here’s the situation. 3 lanes comprise 520-W. The rightmost is the carpool lane. 520 crosses a bridge, at the end of which the carpool lane becomes an exit lane for the interchange with 405. Then an on-ramp comes up from the right, which has a carpool lane on the left and a normal car lane on the right (2-lane on ramp). Those merge into one lane, which comes up next to the aforementioned 520 carpool lane-turned-exit lane. Now there are 2 normal lanes, then 2 exit lanes. The rightmost exit lane is 405-N, and the next inward is 405-S.
Seems vaguely reasonable. But then consider the traffic patterns.
First, you have carpool people barreling down the right-hand carpool lane of 520. Now that lane becomes an exit lane for *everyone* going to 405. So all of a sudden a quarter of the highway merges into the carpool lane.
Next, from the right, you have ordinary traffic, most of which is not interested in 405, because they want to take the 520 bridge over to Seattle. So all of these people need to cross from the right through the over-stuffed carpool/exit lane to get to the left.
Plus, all the people in the carpool/exit lane that want 405-N (me) are trying to merge farther right *into* the on-ramp traffic.
Now throw in rush-hour traffic in Puget Sound, and you’re looking at a grim interchange.
Then, for the icing on the cake, toss in a weekly accident complete with 2 cops, a tow truck, and 4 lanes of gawking idiots.
…
Estimated transit time from Microsoft Building 28 to The Park @ Forbes Creek:
with no traffic: 15 minutes.
rush hour traffic: 35 minutes.
minor accident + 4 lanes of gawking idiots: 1 hour 5 minutes.
Why oh why do they all have to break down right there!?
For the 4th of July, I took a long-weekend trip to Crater Lake & northern California.
Jeni & I went to Grants Pass, OR, Friday night, and then down to Redwoods National Park on Saturday, where Jon joined us in the afternoon. We checked that out through Sunday, staying in Crescent City, OR, overnight. Then we went back to Medford, OR, stopping at Oregon Caves National Monument en route, where we took a tour through the cave led by a pretty crazy dance major tour guide. Monday Jeni had to work, and Jon and I explored Crater Lake and a few scenic pullouts nearby, including the Rogue River Gorge and Mill Creek Falls. Monday night we all stayed in Medford again, and discussed Minnesota sales tax code. Then Tuesday we all went back to our summer residences to get back to work.
Tuesday night in Seattle I made it back in time to catch the fireworks at Gas Works Park. Pretty awesome… synchronized with music, well choreographed, and even some sweet new ones I’d never seen before, like smiley faces, cubes, and some sort of “Italian Electric Show” that involved dozens of little explosions from one shell.
All told it was a pretty awesome weekend.
More pictures to come when I find my camera’s USB cable, but here’s one that I uploaded on the road (it’s deceptive because of the shadows, but there is exactly ONE tree in this photo):
The trees were large.
Just had to make a quick post from Klamath, CA. It’s a tiny little town near the Redwoods National and State Parks, but they have a gas station with free Wifi. So while Jeni is inside getting her coffee, I had to say hi.
(In explanation, Jeni & I are down here in Cali meeting Jon for a short vacation over the holiday weekend)
My roommate and I watched that movie tonight. Pretty crazy.
I was only 45 minutes later than usual to work today, but ended up staying almost 2 hours extra. It was pretty cool, I actually felt like I got some real work done, from submitting the last of my contribution to the project I’d been working on for the first two weeks to starting my debugging with a pretty interesting/intense hour-and-a-half long hands-on tutorial.
Then to top off a night that went considerably better than the end of last, we have a racquetball court in our apartment complex’s office! Plus, my roommate has all the requisite gear, when you add in my safety glasses. That should make for a pretty fun summer. He’s a little bit better than I am, but not by so much that its unbalanced or not fun. It’s pretty awesome.
In other news, I now also have a wlan card for my desktop, so I can finally get this thing back on the internet. All around a good night. Definitely beats spending 3 hours trying to get home because you were too stupid to get back on the right bus and too trusting of the idiot that told you these other buses would be fine.
C-O-L-I-N
It’s 2:38 am. I just got home from a concert. The story in brief:
Eric and I went to a Counting Crows / Goo Goo Dolls concert in Auburn tonight. He had had two tickets to the show and two tickets for a shuttle from the Azteca in Bellevue & back.
We went to the Azteca, got on the shuttle, and set off.
Thanks to traffic, we arrived 40 minutes after the show started.
Thanks to the opening act, we didn’t miss either band.
Fast-forward through a pretty good concert. (sorry, it’s late, I don’t have time to describe more than that)
Colin & Eric exit the amphitheater, and follow the sign marked “Shuttles/Taxis”
We arrive at a huge lineup of buses, thinking we may be in the wrong place, since we need one particular bus back to Bellevue.
We ask the guy doing crowd control if these buses take us to the shuttles.
He says “Yes.”
We get on the bus. 15 minutes later we’re at the Supermall in Auburn, WA, with no bus in sight.
The bus driver lady starts to take us back up to see if our shuttle might still be there, but she is radioed that a) the shuttle is gone, and b) she has to take us back to the Supermall.
We call my roommate (who’s a saint, btw) at about 12:25am and beg for help. He drives down to Auburn to pick us up, getting there at about 1am, and saving us probably $100+ in taxi fares.
Two side notes:
1) My cellphone battery had just died on the shuttle going out to the amphitheater from Bellevue, so I couldn’t do much calling. I never realized how inconvenient that is.
2) You cannot place an order at the Wendy’s so-called “pick up window open late” unless you are in a car. This has been observed experimentally.
We get back to the Azteca around 1:30.
I drive Eric home, and then myself. And now it’s 2:45.
What the adventure.
Good night.
[Update]: Well, it seems I’m actually rather stupid. Tim solved it in less than half an hour… over 5x faster than me 🙁 [/Update]
So I’ve been working this puzzle from the Google homepage ever since I noticed it (which would probably have been the day it came out). It looks like this:
The idea is to fill in 14 of those cirles with the numbers from 1 to 14 (inclusively), such that the distance between 1 and 2 is strictly less than the distance between 2 and 3, which is strictly less than the distance between 3 and 4, etc. (Distance is taken from the center of the circles, so assume the distance between two centers in the same row or column is 1, for simplicity’s sake.) You’ll note that there are 18 circles. You must leave 4 unfilled.
I’m pretty sure I worked on this puzzle for 2½ hours. Here is proof that I completed it. Note that I have blurred out the distance values calculated automatically by the puzzle, because it would be a huge clue as to how the solution works. [SPOILER WARNING] clicking this image will show you the solution. You have been warned.
It was a lot of fun, and I was pretty ecstatic when I solved it.
In other news:
I got to see Katie Roarty tonight! She was in town visiting her brother Matt, who (if I correctly understood) just graduated from college. Hurray for Matt, and for seeing Kate again (do you go by Kate now? sorry for not being sure…). I witnessed an intense nerf war and was nearly killed in the heavy crossfire. Fortunately the only true casualty of the night was a bit of free time when I got lost twice on the way home. (Yeah, so I wasn’t actually supposed to follow you quite that far, Kat[i]e… more like I should have veered left to end up on 520 again. Oh well, not like I was really going to break a record and make it home without turning around tonight, in a new place, in the dark!)
I also reinstalled Windows Vista as a clean install this time. Some fun statistics:
Installation time required for upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista, which resulted in a lot of broken or otherwise dead drivers & hardware (like my sound card): 2 hours and 20 minutes
Installation time for a clean install of Windows Vista onto a newly-formatted partition: 37 minutes.
Much nicer.
Here’s a fun UI bug: before activating Windows, this dialog box was exactly the right size. But now that I am reassured by the “Genuine Windows” emblem, it no longer fits, and thus I cannot see the whole emblem. Lol.
From my desktop, reassembled, restored to working order, and ready for the adventure of conversion to Windows Vista Beta 2, occurring live tomorrow at 9:00 am Pacific at the Windows Vista Install Fair in Building 33.
Problems I anticipate tomorrow:
Problems I never dreamed of that happened today:
All I can really say is UPS must have dropped this at least 3 times to pull this off:
“Please remain seated at all times while the vehicle is in motion”
You’ll note that that audio card WAS screwed in when it left Green Bay. So where’s the screw? Oh! There it is! Shorting out the video card! (Sorry, you can’t see it in this pic… bad angle) Good Lord.
But, since I had my camera handy, here’s a happier bonus picture of my office at Microsoft:
The two boxes at the left are mine. One’s a decent Dell, the other’s a 3.00 GHz Pentium D with 2GB RAM. It’s fast. You’ll see I’ve also got a pretty nice 19″ LCD (You have to be an FTE to get dual monitors), a wireless keyboard and mouse (though the “ergonomic” keyboard took some getting used to… even Enlight didn’t prepare me for using one full time.), a little 5-port switch and a 4-port KVM. I pretty much showed up on the first day, they handed me boxes with all this new stuff in it and said “go nuts!” It was cool 8-). Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the Microsoft cup, which I think at the time was just water, but could also have been free coffee, tea, hot chocolate, flavored carbonated water (“Sparkling Rain” or something like that), or almost any Coca-Cola product.
I’ll have to post another picture of my office next week, as I’m actually going to be moving offices into an “intern bay” with 5 or so other interns… that should be interesting.
lol. you have to love musicians for not being afraid to call it like they see it:
JPB: I’ve got good news and bad news and good news. And the good news is that you guys have managed to buy every major legislative body on the planet, and the courts are even with you. So you’ve done a great job there and you should congratulate yourself.
But you know the problem is – the bad news is that you’re up against a dedicated foe that is younger and smarter that you are and will be alive when you’re dead. You’re 55 years old and these kids are 17 and they’re just smarter than you. So you’re gonna lose that one.
But the good news is that you guys are mean sons of bitches and you’ve been figuring out ways of ripping off audiences and artists for centuries…..
– John Perry Barlow, one-time lyricist for The Grateful Dead, and co-founder of the EFF
Well, I’ve been in my new apartment in Seattle for a week, but my stuff only recently caught up with me. (Via 6 boxes from UPS. 6!) As you can see, it’s still a bit of a mess:
All of my cords & electronics that I couldn’t live without. (Ok Jeni, now I’m a bit pathetic)
All this junk is also mine, including the speaker precariously perched on the armrest of the couch, with the sole exception of the No Fear energy drink. That’s my roommate Casey’s.
More pics of the apartment to follow… after I do a bit of cleaning.
Meanwhile, I didn’t get home to make myself a delicious bowl-of-soup-from-a-can supper until 7:45 tonight, because I made a detour through Goodwill on my way home. The mission? Find a desk/work surface that I can a) set up my desktop on, b) build electronics on, c) get for very little money, and d) transport in my rental car. Well, for $25, I found exactly what I needed to fit the bill:
The only catch is, I forgot about requirement (d) until actually trying to fit it in my car. Let’s just say, it technically fit, but merging onto the highways around Seattle with no ability to see out your left back seat window nor the left half of your rear view mirror is Dangerous. DO NOT ATTEMPT. I will be disassembling the desk/counter before donating it back to Goodwill in August.
Check this out, it started at Goodwill the same day I started at Microsoft:
Now for some updates. For real. Just not as much as I promised. Yet.
I posted a bunch of pictures from this past weekend on my new photo gallery site. You should all go check it out, and bookmark the site for future reference. I’ll be putting up a lot more pictures as I find time between setting up computers, work, and hopefully some travel in the near future. (I would have used flickr, but this one gallery = 56MB zipped, and flickr limits you to 20MB / month. Here I’ve got 20GB storage and 1 TB / month bandwidth.)
Alright, that’s it for tonight. Must go to sleep now so I can go in to work early, so I can leave early, so I can catch a movie at a reasonable hour tomorrow night, so my roommate can invite his friend Kate, who must work very early on Friday.