Today I received a postcard from the daily version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.  They accepted me into the contestant pool and more likely than not they will call me in the next month or two and give me a tape date.  The daily version has no Fastest Finger, so if I got on I would be directly in the Hot Seat.

The synth project goes well.  We should have a final product ready in a week or two.  The last few days have been slow, but today something clicked and both Tucker and I made incredibly impressive progress.  The sound quality has increased tremendously and our product has a lot of potential, in my humble opinion.  OK, maybe it’s not as humble as possible.

The other day the entire ISE office went to Mama Mexico, a fairly good Mexican restaurant:


My boss Chris is on the left.  He’s gotten me hooked on the egg and cheese sandwiches with Tabasco sauce that they sell on the street corner by our office.  It tastes better than it probably sounds.

Lately, some of the workers in the office have been clearing out old equipment and files to put in the dumpsters.  I snapped a quick pic of some vacuum tubes in one particularly old piece of equipment:



The next book on my reading agenda is Mind at Light Speed: A New Kind of Intelligence by David D. Nolte.  Every book I’ve read this summer has tied into cognition, how the senses work, or quantum theory.  This book manages to tie all three concepts together and draw even more links between the variety of new things I’ve learned about in prior books.  I’m surprised how in what I thought was a seemingly random assortment of books I have happened onto the same major concepts three or four times now.

I have now covered the paranoid angle, the medical angle, the artistic angle, and finally the scientific angle of such things as neural theory, quantum physics, and how we perceive images.

I spent Monday in Hoboken, NJ, with my old friend Emily.  She’s a photographer so as soon as I got there we went to a shoot she had been hired for.



She captured the essence of a Wall Street entrepreneur’s million dollar apartment.  I chatted him up on wine and travel and he predicts that Argentina will be the next great wine producer in the next decade or so.  I’ll keep an eye out.

Afterwards, we went to the Stevens Institute of Technology bowling alley, and I rolled a series of three bowling games.  Although I threw some great balls, I tended to step over the foul line and this particular alley made sure not to count two of my strikes and one seven pin frame, so I didn’t even break 100 on my first game.  I plan on going bowling more this school year.

Tomorrow will be Shakespeare in the Park in Central Park (if we can get tickets this time) and Saturday will be my second short story event at Columbia.  The short story events involve a bunch of people (who I met through Tucker) collecting together and reading aloud their favorite short stories.  It’s simple, envigorating, and human to listen to others tell stories.  Lately, attendees have been encouraged to write their own short stories to tell at the next session.  I might attempt to bring this concept to Olin.