2.28.2006

Oh, There She Is

This is really cool to me because I am such a geek. I was just sitting here wondering if I have time to eat lunch before I have to pick up Rachel from the airport. She's coming back from her Vegas trip today. I looked up the status of her flight and it gave me the same old list of arrival and departure times. It also had a button that showed me this:
How cool is that!?!? I've picked her up so many times from the airport, I have it down to a science, and that was before I could figure out her precise location, ETA, speed and altitude. I want to get to the point where I don't even have to park anymore. I could just drive through the terminal doing about fifty miles per hour and it would be precisely timed so that she could leap onto the safety of the hood without wasting anytime stopping. That would be awesome!!

2.26.2006

Think About It

"If a man comes to you with the obvious intent of doing good, flee from him"
-Henry David Thoreau

2.24.2006

Happy Friday!


FRIDAY!!! Hope everyone has a good weekend planned......I'm off to math class and then I'm free!

2.22.2006

The USS Neversail

I have been crazy busy still. Rach and I had a very productive weekend. Moving furniture, painting furniture, boat shopping, and doing a lot of stuff to get the house in order again after Mike and Brett moved out and Rach found out she didn't really own enough furniture to fill her house. On a side note, I can tell ts nine o' clock now because Rach and I are sitting in the dining room and the movie we left on in the other room just switched over to soft-core porn with the volume up nice and loud......nice! It's kind of like a sexy kookoo clock.

Anyway.....I've been doing tons of research over the past few days to find out if I have what it takes to restore an old wooden boat. The boat is one that I looked at last year and almost bought. The only difference this time around is that it has no engines and is now $3,000 instead of $30,000. I love, LOVE LOVE this boat. It is an old 1957 38' Chris-Craft Corsair woodie. If I was considering at the higher price, then it should be a no-brainer as to what to do now, right? Well, I've given it much thought and wandered around the docks and Fishermen's Terminal talking to the Old Salts enough to realize that this boat is a little out of reach of the college students' salary. Basically what it boils down to is: Nobody will insure it(big problem), its too ugly for most marinas and they won't let me do the kind of repair work it needs anyway and I would probably end up needing to retire the old gal and that would be mighty pricey. The way one of the crusty sailor types put it "If there were a briefcase with $20,000 dollars inside that came with the boat, then.....and only then.....it might be worth your trouble." So, I'm sad, but have not given up hope, I WILL LIVE ON A BOAT SOMEDAY(again). Here are a few pictures of my lost love:
Note: These are the "nice pictures," the ugly pictures show the real reason why I'm not buying this boat....


The Helm:

The Beauty:

The Galley:

Best part about it?

The Boat:

2 bedrooms, 2 bath

My Apartment:

1 bedroom, 1 bath

2.15.2006

How Cool Am I?

This cool, shortly after the previous blog I decided to do my laundry while finishing up homework. I sorted my clothes and began to head out the door when I decided that I wanted to wash the clothes I had on so I could wear them again soon. So I emptied the pockets of my phone, keys, wallet, etc. and threw the clothes on the pile. We have a shared laundry room in my apartment building right next to my front door so I decided I could just throw on some lounge pants and go barefoot and shirtless to throw in a quick load. I gathered my clothes and walked out to the laundry room, doing a little dance on the cold pavement the whole way. Once I got there I put the clothes in the wash and realized I had left my detergent over at Rach's house. I remembered possibly having some of the little single serving detergent dealies from my days on the ship so I did the cold-feet dance to my front door again and turned the knob and......damn thing wouldn't budge. I had taken my keys out of my pants so I could wash them and locked the door behind me out of habit because I always have my keys. So now I'm barefoot, shirtless, without phone and the sun is going down. My neighbors have always been kind of shady to me and showing up to their door like this would probably not win them over so I went back to the laundry room to see if I could find something to help me Macgyver my way in. Here are the tools I found:
A bracket from the landlord's maintenance room, a piece of thick wire from my beer fridge on my deck and an old ball-point pen outside my window from a previous time I locked myself out.
So, long story short, I spent the last hour sneaking around my apartment building half-naked tampering with every entry to my house and walking through the pine needles in barefeet, I finally gained access at one of my windows and did a cool ninja-flip maneuver(fat boy style) to get through the window........FUN! I don't know why my neighbors are so scared of me! Anyway, I'm off to have a copy of my key made now...........

Poor Bastard

Have you ever messed up and then just waited for it to blow up in your face once everybody finds out? You have that impending-doom sort of feeling because you know that there is nothing you can do but face the music. Dick Cheney finally went public today about his hunting accident this weekend. I can't imagine what that must be like, well maybe I can..... He shoots a guy in the face and then has to sit around for a few days, probably curled up in the fetal position on his couch just waiting until the shit hits the fan when the press finds out. I bet when his buddy initially went down after the blast Cheney was probably thinking "Oh man, this is going to look bad in the papers.......oh yeah, are you ok?" I watched David Letterman the other night and they had Biff Henderson running around the studio shooting dummies out of the rafters. It has to be surreal to have your mistakes shoved in your face in front of a nation-wide audience. I hope to be the butt of a late-night joke someday, that will be #532 on my list of things to do before I die.

Words I live by:

"What have I got myself into now....?"

2.14.2006

Long Time No Blog!!!

I finally got around to cashing in on my Live365 membership that my dad sent me for Christmas and I LOVE IT(Thanks pops)!! For those of you unfamiliar, it's kind of like blogging but it's a music service. Thousands of people set up their own radio stations and broadcast whatever the hell they feel like. Its a great way to find new tunes, I found a couple stations by bands that are just getting started and haven't cut any albums yet. It's a great to get away from some of the crap-ola they play on FM.
On another musical note ;) I went to see Fiasco on Friday night with Rach and they were really great. For those of you in the Seattle area, they play the Owl N' Thistle every now and then but are at the Paragon every Tuesday night. Go check 'em out. Those of you not in the Seattle area, visit their site and buy their music, I guarantee you won't be let down. Their myspace page even has a couple downloadable songs if you wanna try it first. It's hard for me to define their music, a lot of soul, the vocals are awesome, it's all acoustic with a little funk influence. Keith on the guitar is amazing, he's got all kinds of peddle-y doodads hooked up to that thing and the way he plays makes you duck for cover every now and then for fear his guitar will explode!

I haven't blogged in a while because I have been very busy with school, last week was pretty crazy. Also, I GOT A JOB!!! I applied for a job working with Northrop Grumman at the Department of Homeland Security and got it. I'm pretty excited, it is an ideal job for a college student, flexible hours around my classes, full bennies, GREAT pay and the people are all a lot of fun. I have to go through a month or two of background checks and stuff but should be working sometime this spring.

Another thing that's been occupying my mind a lot is this, its a long read, but I've come up against the concept of infinity a lot in my math class and I am having a hard time pinning down a way for me to put it into context. My brain keeps rejecting the idea. Check this out if you have time:

The Paradox of Tristram Shandy

This paradox, formulated by Bertrand Russell, is based on the 18th century novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne. Here is Russell's statement of the paradox:

"Tristram Shandy, as we know, took two years writing the history of the first two days of his life, and lamented that, at this rate, material would accumulate faster than he could deal with it, so that he could never come to an end. Now I maintain that, if he had lived for ever, and not wearied of his task, then, even if his life had continued as eventfully as it began, no part of his biography would have remained unwritten."

Suppose Tristram Shandy continued at the painfully slow rate at which he started, so that he took a full year to write about each day of his life. In spite of this, there is a one-to-one correspondence between each year that he writes in and each day he writes about. Therefore, no matter what day of his life you care to consider, there will eventually come a year in which he will be able to write about it. There is no part of his life that can never be written down. Nevertheless, he gets further and further behind!

It's interesting to reverse this paradox and consider what would happen if Tristram had already been writing for an infinite amount of time. It at first may seem that the two temporal directions might be mirror images of one another. In that case, just as he might begin to write at time t in the original paradox, in the reversed version it would seem he might have finished his task at t. But a little reflection shows that that is impossible. If he had just finished writing his autobiography, then he would have just written about the most recent day of his life. But since it takes him a year to write about each day, he would have had to start writing about this most recent day 364 days before the day started! Thus, unless Tristram can foretell the future, he cannot have finished writing yet, even though he has already spent an infinite amount of time on the task.

Suppose Tristram has in fact been writing forever and has just finished describing another day. When might have been the day he just finished writing about? As we've just seen, he could not have been writing about today, for he would have had to start writing about it a year ago. So it seems that the most recent day he could have been writing about is a year ago today. But then what was he writing about in the previous year? He would have been writing about a year ago yesterday. But that too is impossible, for he would once again have had to start 364 days too soon. Repeated application of this argument shows that, no matter what date in the past one chooses, Tristram could not already have written about it. He therefore can only have finished writing about a day that lies in the infinitely remote past!