Grant Hutchins

Quick post to keep my streak alive…

I have an 8:00 am class today!  It’s 3:52 am so I better run off to sleep.

Yesterday was extremely busy, but worthwhile.

Have a nice day!

Today is my Xanga’s 250th day.  That’s right, it’s the “quarter mille”.

I finally did my laundry today.  I’ve been keeping myself busy enough that I have been way behind.

For my student government position I often administer surveys to various groups of students.  The other day I made three different mockups of a single survey I’m about to give to the entire student body.  I presented these mockups to my Human Factors: Interface Design class to let the students test them out.  I learned quite a lot from the process, and now I think the survey should be quite easy to take (once I implement the best suggestions from the class).

This monday, the Data Destruction Tour is coming to Boston.  The Data Destruction Tour is the only tour I know of that specializes in the tiny little subgenre of music known as lofi or 8bit or chiptunes or gamemusic or about a million other things.  The idea is to use 1980s computer technology or video game systems or similar sounding synthesis techniques to make music.  Hear some at micromusic.net.  I have considered burning a few CDs of a some songs I have written in this style and giving them around to the people involved to sorta jab myself into the scene a bit.

From a micromusic.com email:

Mar 14th 2005 Data Destruction Tour 2005
artists: Nullsleep, Bit Shifter, Covox
venue: The Enormous Room, 567 Massachusetts Ave., Boston, MA, USA
start:  9:00pm
fee: 21+ no cover
more info:  http://www.enormous.tv/

I wonder if it will be a snow day.  The weather is completely horrible and miserable.  If it’s a snow day, it will have no impact on me, however, because I have no classes on Wednesday.

A snow day on any other day would help me catch up so much, but a Wednesday snow day does nothing for me.

I say “catch up” but I’m not too far behind on things.  I certainly have a lot going on, but when I sit down and think about it, they are moving along fine.  Some of my things could use some more enthusiasm, and the occasional jolt back into action, but really I am on top of most stuff right now.

We made a transistor radio in Analog and Digital Communications, hard-tuned to WEEI 850 AM sports radio.  The class is really starting to make a lot more sense these days.  It only makes me wish I could spend more time designing circuits or software for processing audio.  Designing audio filters, in hardware or in software, is one of my favorite activities.  Luckily, I’m majoring in the right thing, Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Grant: “Why is J. Lo a popular singer?"
Dan: “Cause she’s got a nice ass."

Wow, thanks Dan.  Really classy.  That wasn’t what I meant.  Jennifer Lopez has an annoying nasal voice.  Her latest song has an annoying sax line.  I… secretly wish that I didn’t like it in a disturbing way.

I’m going dogsledding for the first weekend of Spring Break up in Maine.



I came up with a new way to make my todo list.  I put todo items up on Post-It notes on my wall.  The higher notes represent more important things I need to do, like get a job for summer.  The bottom notes are not important, such as fixing my digital camera.  That way I still see everything I have to do, but I don’t forget the important stuff.  I’ll tell you how it goes.  I think this will finally be the method I keep.

Today I stopped doing things for an hour.  It was splendid.  Since last Thursday, I hadn’t stopped for even ten minutes.  Constant activity, moving from class to party to class to meeting to meeting to the candidate’s weekend and back again.  Finally I can get some sleep.

Starting this Friday I will have an 8 am class, Complex Variables.  I’m actually really excited about Complex Variables.  They really come in handy for messing with audio signals.  But anyway this means that my first classes each day will look like this:

Monday 2 PM
Tuesday 8 AM
Wednesday (no class, nothing until CORe meeting at 6:30 PM)
Thursday 2 PM
Friday 8 AM

It doesn’t get any weirder than that.

Also, elections are going to be soon for CORe (The Council of Olin Representatives), so I will sadly give up my post as Vice Presdient of Communication.  I might run for another executive position, but I haven’t decided yet.  The CORe Digest is my baby!  I will miss it!

Someone needs to tell Google that their stuff isn’t in beta anymore.  Napster killed that word forever, and now Google is desecrating its coffin.

If you find yourself in a slump, as I have, then clean up your room!  It does wonders for the psyche!  Throw away lots of stuff.

Tucker IMed me today and we talked through some programming issues on our software synthesizer.  Good news!  It works on my computer for the first time!  Now we can finish up the GUI and we will have a product that is ready for real-world beta testing!  Keep posted.

The check came in the mail to Oklahoma yesterday!  I will probably cash it while I’m home for Spring Break. 

I remembered what I was going to blog about last night, but forgot to.

Yesterday my professor didn’t show up for my class Synchronization.  There are 6 students in the class, but only 5 showed up.  We waited for a bit and then one of the staff came in and told us the professor wasn’t coming.  We then spent the entire remainder of the class period going over the homework, writing stuff up on the board, and debating it.

I love this school.  The subject matter is interesting enough that we don’t even need a professor to hold class!

Back to blogging!  A lot of people are getting involved on the Olin College blogring these days.

We just had the first Candidate’s Weekend of the year.  It went very well.  The students are getting inspired again to be at Olin.

Today I put a bunch of pictures up on flickr.  Just go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/nertzy for more.

Today the rest of the CORe E-Board and I went to the senior administration meeting for Olin.  We gave student feedback to the President, VPs, and heads of various departments.  I think it went well.  I got to learn a lot of details about running a new school.

I got my camera back today in the mail.  I’d left it in Drew’s car in LA.  It reminds me of all my broken items.  My camera’s flash doesn’t work.  My palm’s screen doesn’t work.  My next palm’s screen cracked.  The face broke off of my nice watch.  If only I weren’t so lazy I would fix them all.

Now all I really need is a summer job.  A nice internship.  I have some wonderful contacts lined up so I guess I should start asking them for advice.

The new Chemical Brothers album, Push the Button, is very nice.  I like the first two tracks best, “Galvanize” and “The Boxer”.  I didn’t like “Galvanize” the first time I heard it, or even the second, but now it’s one of my all-time favorite Chemical Brothers songs.  It’s interesting to note that I also didn’t like “Block Rockin' Beats” the first few times I heard it.  I still haven’t figured out how the Chemical Brothers are able to evoke this initial disinterest.

Well I shall try to get into a better habit of posting on here.

Today.
Check local listings.
Interview with the Edmond Sun.

Hello everyone.  It’s been too long since I’ve posted.  The next installment of the Innermost Cabin stories is “Not a True Story”.  Enjoy.

I’m about to embark tomorrow morning on a grand trip from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles, for 22 hours.  I’m going with Drew, who lives out there with my friend Jon.  I will be flying back to Oklahoma City on the 18th.  I hope to bump into as many people in LA as I can.  I went last year but only knew three people from LA.  This year I know at least ten.

Other than that I’ve been reading V. by Thomas Pynchon.  I’ve finished The Crying of Lot 49 and will then move on to Mason & Dixon before tackling the grand-daddy Pynchon book of all time, Gravity’s Rainbow.  Wish me luck, this is not an easy task.

Austin and I continue our work on Gamecube games.  I have ordered the hardware that will allow me to load my code from an SD card, so everyone at Olin will finally get to see Snowlords in action!

Other than that I applied to some jobs at The MathWorks and Apple.  I will apply to some less ambitious places too so that I don’t yet again come up empty-handed.

My next computer will be a Mac, perhaps a G5 tower.  Mmm.

“Not a True Story”
Amanda Deinstadt
Kristina Putnam
1/3/98

This is not a true STORY
At ten of ten p.m. Me and my friend were eating raisins we both chocked!!
Lucky we didn’t die.
After that the disidid to go play and feed the brids. Then they went for a walk
in the woods They saw more brids. So they fed them. Amanda and Kristina both goth a big brid It bit off there hand! They still did not die.
They saw a werewolf. They both ran and ran. The werewolf finally goth them. He ate them!  In  15 years there were two girls the same age the died to the Same Way.
The End

I’m back in Oklahoma City for Thanksgiving.

Last night I went to Rima’s birthday party and saw some old faces.  Afterwards we watched Spongebob Squarepants: The Movie, and I believe I was the only person to laugh at the fact that the boss’s name is Eugene Krabs.  Eugene Krebs was a perrennial Socialist presidential candidate back around the 1920s.

Today we had early Thanksgiving in Enid.  We had some good lasagna.  Also, my grandfather gave us his 1985 Toyota Camry, which hit exactly 100,000 miles on the drive home.  I am considering taking it up to Boston, but it’s not looking too up to that task as of now.

Time for part two of the Innermost Cabin series.

Nature
Greg Miller
no date

The cabin is great, small, warm, quite, and peacefull. The trails long and spooky! nature just singing birds, the ruffles of the water the trees swaying back and forth, the wind blowing, deer running, and frogs jumping from lilypad to lilypad. Nature is great. Till the one eyed deer hunts you down and craps on you. So be aware of the dunt dunt dunnnnn the One Eyed Deer

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while.  To tide things over, I’m going to start posting some of the Stories from Innermost Cabin.  Freshman year, 4 of us stayed at the Innermost Cabin at the Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary.  In the guestbook, we found a bunch of stories written by schoolchildren that had stayed before us.

Now, get ready for the first installment, “The Coyote Man”

2/23/01
Greg Miller
The Coyote Man

Walking down the icy path to get to the cabin I saw a coyote but it didn’t look like one eather, and then I saw it a Coyote Man we were all scared to death, so we ran to the cabin, we were safe. When we got to the cabin me and my friend Justin wrote in the Jurnels and and Started to make a fire. Then we started to burn up from the fire so we took a walk out to the bathrooms to cool off a little and then it Happend Coyote Man jumped out and pit a piece of Justin’s arm then Justin got eatin It was grose. I was running realy fast to get to the babin then Justin’s dad tripped and Coyote Man eat the whole half of his body now I was scared. Walking down the path hearing footsteps all the Sudden it happend Coyote Man bit my head right off.

Eyedropbc58: hey, is this grant?
Grant: yes this is
Eyedropbc58: thats good
Eyedropbc58: uh hello? hwy aren’t you talking?
Grant: I’m busily putting together the CORe Digest
Grant: who is this
Eyedropbc58: is there something u want to know about me?
Eyedropbc58: Please talk to me
Grant: Prove to me that you’re not a bot
Eyedropbc58: i thought so
Grant: Who programmed you?
Eyedropbc58: haha, FunnyMuffin.com has really funny pictures. have you ever been there?
Grant: oh yeah all the time… I go there to get my bikini line waxed.
Eyedropbc58: my name is ashley
Grant: Hello ashley, so what do you get accomplished by talking to me?
Eyedropbc58: me? no
Eyedropbc58: You have been talking to a computer! One of your friends is reading the whole conversation and laughing it up right now! GET EVEN! Have the bot talk to all your friends by visiting chattingaimbot.com
Grant: oh you don’t say

October 19, 2004 - Tape date
January 26, 2005 - Air date

Hello everyone.

So it’s been awhile since my last update.

No photos today.  I’ve taken a lot in these last ten days or so, but those will come later.

I’m back home in Oklahoma now.  Nothing much going on here.  In fact, I’ve seen much fewer people than I usually would have since I’ve gotten back.

Last weekend I stayed with my roommate Dan at his house in Somerville, Massachusetts.  On the days while everyone was working at their internships, I wandered down Highland Ave. near Davis Square and snapped a ton of pictures of typical Americana.

While in the Boston area, Dan, Tommy, and I went to the Skellig bar in Waltham and competed in the trivia contest.  We started strong, but ended with a fairly miserable showing, coming in dead last.  One round left us with zero points earned.  Unfortunately we will be unable to show them what we really are capable of because Dan and I will have a Mathematical Analysis class in which we will prove the calculus from scratch on Mondays from 9:30 to 11:30 pm this semester.  What better way to pass the time.

I started and finished Fermat’s Enigma, a book on solving the most famous mathematical problem of the last few centuries, Fermat’s Last Theorem.  Since then I’ve completed the first four chapters of the 9/11 Commission Report.

The last few nights have seen countless hours spent on trying to get multiplayer Red Alert, Red Alert 2, Quake II, Quake III, or Warcraft III working properly.  Our best successes have been cross-platform, ironically.

I will take a picture of my family’s new poker chips for the next post.

Last Wednesday Cagle and her friend Erin came from Alabama to visit for three days.



We wandered around the Big Apple and hit a lot of cool shops in Greenwich Village, where I snagged some good vinyl and a really cheap  hardcover copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon to add to my to-read list.

I found this picture on the wall at Famiglia’s Pizza, a nice New York pizza joint.  My brother will appreciate it.



Tucker, Cagle, Erin, and I went to Jacques Torres’s chocolatier in Brooklyn for my third time.  I found these chocolate sculptures in the back room:



We walked back over the Brooklyn Bridge, for my fourth time.  I found this spray-painted into the concrete of the bridge walkway.  I hate it when people spray paint messages on stuff using stencils.  It’s tacky and rude, but at least in this particular case it supports my political cause, albeit to an extreme.



We ran into a b-boy posse breakdancing for the crowd later that day.



The next day we ran into a large group of firefighters and police unexplainedly axing their way into a Borders bookstore which otherwise seemed fine.



We ate at a nice little Greek restaurant in the Village, and I ordered pastichio, a traditional Greek dish that my mother and grandmother make every once in a while since my grandfather has full Greek blood.  The pastichio was excellent, the salad was wonderful in its feta glory, and the baklava was just what I like, proving that I do indeed have Greek blood running in my veins.

On Saturday after the two girls left Tucker, Mara, and I went kayaking in the Hudson River.  If you go to the end of Riverside Park by 72nd Street, they have a little platform set up where you can hop on a kayak for free for up to 20 minutes, or up to 2 hours on Fridays.



The journey offered a wonderful view of Manhattan, dominated in this particular area by a series of Trump condominium buildings.

Dan drove down from Boston later that day and stayed the night.  We ran around town some more and ended up in Hoboken, NJ, for my final trip to visit Emily at Stevens.  Dan grabbed some of my belongings to help me in my upcoming move to Boston for the weekend before my flight home next Wednesday.

On the way back from work on Monday, Tucker and I ran into a strange sight:



Sorry for the gruesome imagery, but whatever got to this bird left the wings and only the wings entirely intact.  Very strange.

Today Tucker, Mara, and I ate at an Afghanistan restaurant.  I loved it!  I didn’t expect to, since I had nothing to base expectations on.  I am now convinced that orange rind should be put into every dish.

After putting in a little more work on the synth, Mara and I watched a bootleg copy of Fahrenheit 9/11, which I found to be suprisingly devoid of any real argument or fresh, important details about its title disaster.

I highly recommend the 9/11 Commission Report for anyone who wants a serious look into the reality of the situation.  You can grab a recording of an executive summary free on iTunes right now.  I much prefer to read it, however, and want to buy a copy sometime soon.  It’s now on my Amazon wish list.  Go be curious and poke around on it if you like.

My luck continues to rise.  When I walked home from work today I found a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer with 61-key keyboard lying against a trash can to be thrown out.  I snagged it and left a note behind in case the person didn’t mean to throw it out.



However, the state of the keyboard suggests it was ready to be thrown out.  For example, the power cable has come loose.



I am an electrical engineer, so this does not faze me in the slightest.  Soon I will grab a soldering iron and make it work to the best of my abilities.



The Yamaha DX7 was a popular synthesizer of the 1980s, and make a lot of the defining sounds of eighties music.  Its quality isn’t wonderful, from what I’ve heard, but it’s a synthesizer nonetheless and I’m sure I can find good uses for it, especially as a keyboard controller for my computer music setup.

After I had spent hours waiting in the rain to get tickets to the Shakespeare in the Park show in Central Park, and after the rain fully cleared up, they cancelled the show.  However, before I got in line for standby tickets, I did manage to snap some pictures of a completely burnt car on the side of the road.



The flames completely destroyed the interior, leaving a metallic shell.



Today I ate dinner outside on patio seating at Max SoHa, a most wonderful Italian restaurant less than a block from my apartment.



The food is excellent and the atmosphere very comfortable and familial.

“SoHa” stands for “South of Harlem,” and we’ve similary named our startup synthesizer software company SoHa Sound Design, in reference to where the development actually took place.  We’re hoping to finish up a release candidate of the final synthesizer by the time I leave New York on August 11, and have a final 1.0 version ready for sale a few weeks thereafter.

Cagle and her friend come up to visit me for a few days on Wednesday and Dan comes up on Saturday, so my week should be filled with plenty of excitement.

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.

I have spent the last few days with little social interaction.

Today when my friend Mara came to my room I started blabbing about a million different things, because I had saved up stuff to talk about.  I must have appeared quite manic.  She seemed OK with it though and manically spoke back so I guess it was fine.

Over the course of the last two days I have decided that the world is starting to fall apart.  Here is my evidence:

• New Zealand, of all places, caught Israeli spies trying to falsify their passports, and has starting cutting off a lot of the diplomatic ties it has with Israel in response.
• The police in Palestinian cities have been doing nothing lately, allowing anarchy to run rampant and leading to mob rule, as several of Yasser Arafat's top deputies resign left and right.
• The Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, informed all Jews in France that they "must" move to Israel to escape French anti-Semitism, which supposedly is on the rise.  France is not happy with these statements.
• The 9/11 Commission is set to report that Iran was helpful to Al Qaeda prior to the September 11 attacks.
• Iran has halted the trial of an Iranian intelligence agent who murdered an Iranian-Canadian photojournalist, tearing apart whatever diplomatic relations the two nations held.

• Both play chess incredibly well.
• Both have plaintext websites with gobs of links as to why they have been persecuted by forces all over the world.
• Both scan pictures of checks and all sorts of paper documents as evidence.
• Both completely reprint news articles to support their causes.
• Both attempt to completely libel individuals who they believe victimized them.
• Both have spent time in East Asia fleeing some type of authority figure.
  

Hello everyone.  I have several important Grant updates for the last couple days.

Last Tuesday, July 13, 2004, I went to the free Fountains of Wayne concert at the World Financial Center downtown.  The World Financial Center is right across the street from the World Trade Center site.  I snapped this pic of the new WTC station that opened up earlier this year:



Anyway I made my way to the back side of the big huge indoor Winter Garden at the WFC, where all sorts of people started crowding around the stage outside.



They played a good set and poked a little fun.  At one point, the lead singer changed around some lyrics to Radiation Vibe for old diehard fans like me to pick up, since parents and kids made up the majority of the audience due to the newfound recent success of their latest album.  They came out for a double encore, which now marks the second time I’ve seen them do a double encore, although both times it seemed like they weren’t planning to.



I was worried I wouldn’t hear “The Biker Song” this time, but they finally played it in the double encore, so this concert marks the first time in a while that the band played every song I wanted to hear.  Hmm, well all except “Troubled Times” I guess.  The band hails from New Jersey, and many of their songs deal with places in New Jersey or New York City, which made the show even better.  My favorite song by them right now, “Sick Day”, takes place on a PATH train from New Jersey, so after the show I got them to sign my PATH Quick Card, although they seemed confused at first as to the reference.  On top of that they seemed a little drunk and partially deaf, unfortunately.

The lead singer, Chris Collingwood said that he used to work in this building on the 35th floor (he’s the one on the right):



On Thursday I again tried out for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, the daily version.  This time I passed the test and got to the interview process.  They took a Polaroid of me and the interviewer seemed pretty interested in several things that I had to say, so in three or four weeks I will know if I am eligible to be on the show.

After that, I met up with Leighton and we went to the lounge of the new Mandarin Oriental hotel up on the 35th floor.  Here was our view of Central Park:



After that we had lunch at a wonderful restaurant called Eatery with prices much lower than the quality of the food.  After that we went hotel lobby hopping and ended up at a really posh lobby at W Hotel in Times Square and the incredible world’s largest lobby at the New York Marriott Marquis:



Yes, this picture was taken indoors.  To give a little perspective, those are balconies off of each floor which face down into the atrium.  Leighton took a business call, and I relaxed and almost fell asleep:



After that I returned to the apartment and fell asleep for six hours.  I have ruined my daily schedule entirely, so now I’m going to go program some more for the software project Tucker and I work on all the time.

Ciao.

Saturday the fabled trip to Staten Island finally took place.  We hopped on the red line subway and transferred to the Staten Island Ferry, a big free boat.

Standing at the extreme front of the ship offered this view:



I have now seen both Statues of Liberty.  After the French donated the statue, they erected a smaller copy in Paris, which I saw by chance out of the side of a train car during my trip there two years ago.

Upon arriving on Staten Island, we proceeded to the New York Chinese Scholar’s Garden at the Staten Island Botanical Garden.  For everyone less familiar with New York City, Staten Island makes up a large portion of New York City, and is one of the five boroughs along with Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn.  Staten Island is mostly surburban as opposed to the other boroughs, featuring malls instead of skyscrapers.

However, the Chinese Scholars Garden, the first of its kind in the United States, offered an escape from the trappings of city life:



OK, this first picture wasn’t from the Chinese Scholar Garden per se, but instead from a smaller garden within the botanical garden.



This mosaic was made by a traditional Chinese scholar garden artist who uses materials around him.  The white parts were rice bowls he broke from the kitchen without asking and the green parts are Heineken bottles.



We continued to a blatant “secret” garden, which was closed.  Since we had paid for admission, we felt it acceptable to hop onto the wall and sit for awhile.  As the photographer, I do not appear in these photos.



Afterwards Tucker impressively hopped onto a nearby and somewhat inaccessible tree:



We ended the day by watching King Arthur, which not unlike Lord of the Rings did not strike my fancy.  I did manage to stay awake for this one, fighting hard at times.  I did enjoy the show for what it was, but I could not suspend disbelief long enough to really care about what was going on.

Today at work during my lunch break a bird flew over and perched on my outside table in the rain:



He rejected my offer of a small morsel of tomato (the red spot in the picture), but violently grabbed Tucker’s offering of a little piece of bread and cheese and flew away fast enough that he could be sure we couldn’t reconsider.

Hello everyone.  Today I didn’t take any pictures, so I will pull some from my summer archives.

On June 26, 2004, several other Olin students and I toured the city.  I snapped this picture of the Empire State Building while laying down on the sidewalk:

To appease all of my kitchen ceiling’s fans, presenting the final installment of the Kitchen Ceiling Chronicles:



She’s a beauty.  The kitchen has returned to normal, except that now the gas range and stove do not light themselves.  Therefore, we our celebratory tuna sandwiches went uncooked.  However, all was not lost.  I discovered the new entry to our kitchen today, a mirror nailed to a cabinet door:



This mirror reflects a style found throughout the apartment.

Today I did laundry at B. Bubbles, Inc.



While there, I snapped a picture of a man lugging far more cans down the street than I could ever hope for, a commonplace occurrence in a big city such as this one.



Today I finished a book I had borrowed from Tucker called The Evolution of Useful Things: How everyday artifacts—from forks and pins to paper clips and zippers—came to be as they are.  I’ve finished two books so far this summer.  The first was The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, which I found very captivating, despite its immensely obscure references and themes.  One of my life goals is to finish Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, a most dense and unfriendly book which introduces ridiculous characters nonstop and shoots around from the history of plastic to political theory to differential equations to German folk songs often within one sentence.

But for now, the next book on my list is the Olin College summer reading, Phantoms in the Brain, by V.S. Ramachandran, M.D., Ph.D. and Sandra Blakeslee, a book concerning cognitive syndromes and how they reveal insights into our own mental functions.

Hello everyone.  Time for the daily kitchen ceiling update.  My cell phone alarm did not go off because I had it set to “Ringer off”.  Personally I’d rather have the alarm go off regardless of the ringer setting.  However, my late start this morning meant that I was fifteen minutes late to work today, allowing me to witness the arrival of three painters.  Here is their ladder:



The kitchen ceiling now looks like this:



Certainly not as nice as before but now the kitchen is usable again.  Tomorrow we will make tuna sandwiches to celebrate.

Here is my itinerary for next week:

Ceiling update:  The waterproof latex paint that caught the water and sagged down off of the ceiling has mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind dripping scars.


Other than that, a most uneventful day.  I got a new assignment at work, which will be my first PHP + MySQL web application ever.

Some pigeons:


And finally, a picture of the Guggenheim that I took on June 20, 2004:

Hello everyone and welcome to New York City.

You’re on 123rd Street between Amsterdam and Broadway:


You approach 522 W 123rd St., affectionately known as “The Lorraine”


Why it’s named The Lorraine I will never know.  No other building anywhere near has a name.  After going up a couple flights of stairs you find yourself in Apt. 3W and enter.

You stop by the kitchen:


You look up at the ceiling:


You notice that something doesn’t look right, and it’s not just that the light fixture is an uncovered power-saving fluorescent bulb that is connected by thinly insulated wires which go right behind the electrical sockets and are held to the side of the wall by metal screws through the insulation which are painted white.  Those bulbs are in the other rooms.  The kitchen has a problem all its own.