I’m going to make a new blog soon. Keep watching in the next few days for the link.

For now, check out nertzy.com which is a placeholder.

We’re about to leave for New Mexico on a family cartrip. We’ll be going by the Los Alamos National Laboratory pretty much 60 years to the day Hiroshima was bombed, purely coincidentally. I wonder if we’ll see anything going on there. Protests? Solemn reminders? Nothing?

Anyway I’ll be back in five days and I’ll update you guys on how I’m doing, since I have so lazily neglected doing so for several months now.

Update: so yeah I haven’t posted again, as has been pointed out. Maybe once I’m more settled in back here at Olin.

Today I happened upon the Paseo Arts Festival.


That picture doesn’t really do it justice.  Anyway, I sneaked around as it was closing and as the band played “Inagaddadavida”.  The Paseo is a small street off the beaten path in Oklahoma City where a ton of artists live and have studios.  I saw a scultpor’s studio, photographer’s studios, and a lot of closed Indian Taco stands.

Lately I haven’t been up to too much.  The friends and I have resolved to watch all of the Star Wars movies in order.  I’m not the hugest fan but it’s a good source of trivia for who knows when.  (Jeopardy!, here I come)

I hope that my other blog doesn’t wither and die.  I’m not entirely convinced that I will have enough sources of logical fallacies in news articles to make it interesting.  I will keep looking though.  Feel free to contact me if you find some.  I’m trying to stick to reputable sources.

My new phone has better text messaging and photo mail abilities, so I’ve been sending dog pictures out to Carrie and posting cameraphones pictures on my Flickr site.  They are decidedly low quality but fun nonetheless.  One of these days I’ll get my actual camera fixed.

Meredith’s father brews beer (and wine, actually) at home.  He keeps track of every batch in a notebook.  Right now he’s working on his 57th batch.  Seeing all of the handwriting made me wish I had something to keep track of longterm like that.

For those of you who don’t know, I am obsessed with typography these days.  This isn’t just a passing thing, like my cryptography phase or my oscillating interest with Thomas Pynchon.  I’m downright obsessed.  My two favorite fonts of the moment are Incognito and Dolly, both available from Veer, the design company famous (in my eyes) for employing Grant Hutchinson.

Dolly is “a book typeface with fluorishes”.  I love book typefaces, and every time I read a book I spend about as much time admiring the letterforms as I do reading the actual content.

Incognito is based on the fancy writing of old maps.  When I was a child I would peer into maps endlessly.  The best part about this font is that each capital has a swash variant that goes in one of four different directions, named after the Latin for North, East, South, and West.  Very elegant, albeit a bit overused in their type specimens.

I realize what I’ve been missing from Oklahoma.

The smell of the air at night after a hot day.  I can’t describe it, but it’s so crisp and rich and at the same time not at all thick.

And I also miss being able to see at night because the businesses keep their lights on in the parking lots.  The light pollution in Oklahoma City is incredible.  When you drive towards Oklahoma City at night, you can see the entire horizon lit up from tens of miles away.

We watched Loser at Meredith’s house.  The movie is cute and well-made.  It reminded me of summer in New York last year.

My girlfriend is really wonderful.  She came over to Olin while I was packing and kept me company even when it was about the most boring thing ever.  Never once complained even if I had to run off for an hour or two to go put stuff in storage while she waited and napped on a bed without sheets on it in the bright light while Dan also packed.

Time for a couple of updates from the Grant Hutchins camp.

First off, I’ve started a new blog, Grant’s Take, where I will post my skeptical analysis of articles that I read.  I have no agenda other than the new blog’s motto, “Question everything you read."

Second off, I just put the finishing touches on the three latest games on my Grant Bowls! page.  I have a new personal best!

Last, but not least, I randomly searched my name using Google Suggest today.  It turns out that as you type Grant Hutchins, the form autocompletes with “grant hutchins millionaire”.  I guess enough people have searched me looking perhaps for the video.  E-mail me if you want the link.

The second hit I got was my recent mention in Prism, the American Society for Engineering Education’s monthly journal.  I highly doubt that being on a has-been television show is some of the biggest engineering education news for April (especially considering the show aired the beginnning of February) but who’s counting?

I still don’t have a job but I’m trying several different ways to get the attention of employers.  I haven’t been outright rejected yet, but I’ve only received one actual offer, not really for a job but instead for volunteer work to do a new PBS show’s website.  I’m not really sure if doing that would be a horrible waste of my time or a great resume builder.

Here’s my profile on LinkedIn.  Please add me as a contact if you know me or have worked with me in the past.

Ten years ago on this day I sat working on an assignment for my math class.  I had tested out of a chapter of work and was working by myself on a project to present to the class.

Sitting in the independent project classroom, we felt the building shake.  At first the teacher told us it was probably a sonic boom.  She used to live near an air force base, and recently on the news people had talked about the possibility of stationing B2 stealth bombers at Tinker Air Force Base.  I thought it could have been an earthquake.

We looked out the window and saw a plume of smoke, like a brush fire, about 10 miles away.

Around 9:00 am on April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh drove a Ryder truck full of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and nitromethane racing fuel in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City.  At 9:02 am the truck detonated, ultimately killing 168 people, from ATF agents to children in a daycare center.  At the time it was by far the largest terrorist attack on American soil, and to this day it remains the largest domestic terrorist attack.  The death toll came out to approximately 13 times that of Columbine, the school shooting that would take place exactly four years and one day later.

Reports came back to school slowly.  We didn’t really know what was going on, but over time it became clear that it wasn’t normal.  Some students were told that their parents were OK.  Something had happened downtown, and everyone was waiting on more information.

My mom ran outside, thinking that a plane had exploded in the air.  She had her window open and could hear the blast from 15 miles away.  She later went to the local Wal-Mart and saw a photographer run in to get pictures developed.  They need to get developed now!  They need to get to the media…

That day was the first day my aunt was to do court reporting for a federal trial, instead of the local and state trials she had been doing before.  She sat in court in the Federal Courthouse, immediately behind the Murrah building, certainly on the side one would rather be on.  Her cassette tape recording of the trial caught the blare of an enormous explosion, following by frantic voices and the judge ordering everyone to immediately leave the building because a bomb had gone off.

When I got home CNN was showing the same thing as the local news, and every other channel for that matter.  Bulletins were put out for “middle eastern terrorists” that never panned out.  A white supremacist Gulf War veteran named Timothy McVeigh was arrested for excessive speeding going north on I-35, away from the blast.

Once everyone figured out that it was a truck bomb, and the dust settled, people began the rescue effort.  From all over the country, and indeed the world, firefighters, police, medical personnel, and volunteers poured in to help.  Some of these officials would later die in the September 11 attacks at the World Trade Center.  Robots were used to dig through the rubble in the hopes of finding survivors.  After a few days, these hopes were dashed and families had to admit defeat.

On Thursday, my parents took me and my brothers downtown to catch a glimpse.  We weren’t going to get close, just get within eyeshot.  It was a media circus.  It seemed like every local news station in America had a van parked there.  Police lines were everywhere, blocking square miles of downtown.  Some extra line was hanging off of a tree and I cut off a piece of it, which I have to this day.  You could see the damage clearly from a mile away.  The mood was somber and quiet and people were moving about matter-of-factly.

A week later, once all hope was lost, and to further protect the immediate area by preventing an imminent collapse, the Murrah buidling was imploded and cleared away.

April 19.  The date doesn’t mean much outside of Oklahoma, but there it automatically means the bombing.  A nameless federal building housing seemingly unrelated federal offices that I had never heard of was attacked by a man who wanted to avenge the botched siege by federal agents of the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, TX, two years earlier.

No one really knew why Oklahoma City should be a target.  Everyone in the nation started talking about the “heartland”.  It was “terror in the heartland”.  Where you’d least expect it.  The governor of Oklahoma was on national television constantly, and each day the police would report to the public the updated tally of those who had died.  It ended at 168.

Months later, the State of Ohio donated some trees to plant at the State Capitol, one each for the people who died.  I was a Boy Scout, in Troop 78, and I volunteered that day.  I was up on stage during the dedication holding the Oklahoma flag up so that it wouldn’t fall over in the wind.  That was the first and only time that I heard the names of those killed read aloud.  It took about 45 minutes.  Many if not most of the survivors were there, as well as families, planting trees for the people they knew and loved.

Just over six years later, terrorists attacked four planes, New York City, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania.  Perhaps the worst part about that day was knowing how it would play out, what the aftermath would be.  First off, remember the date, September 11, we’ll be hearing about this for some time, just like April 19.  Second, there will be a relief effort.  People will come from all over to dig through the rubble in order to find survivors.  Third, the time will come where no one could be expected to live under this rubble.  People will still want to search, but they need to stop sometime.  People will fight to keep looking, but realistically it’s already too late.  And there will be a few key images that people remember.

For Oklahoma City, it is usually the firefighter holding the baby, who would die in the next day or so.



Ten years later, things are going a lot better in Oklahoma City.  The other day we were featured on the front page of the B section of the Wall Street Journal in a glowing article talking about the urban development, increased tourism, and how well the city had moved past the stigma of being a victim.

Read more about the bombing:
| Wikipedia | CNN | Oklahoma City National Memorial | Yahoo! |

Hello everyone.

I'm in Oklahoma City, about to head back to Boston.  I didn't get to see too many people this time around, because I was only here for three non-flight days!

American Airlines cancelled my reservation because the lady at Chicago didn't scan my ticket when I got on my flight, so they bumped me to a later one.  What a bunch of hoodlums.

Other than that, I went dogsledding last weekend.

That's me on the right in the ridiculous sunglasses.

We're on a frozen lake in Maine.  We slept outside on the lake itself.

Here's one of the dogs (and Carrie too).  The dogs obsessively pull when you put them on a leash.  They are certainly bred for pulling sleds.

Yesterday I bowled the best game of my life, a 162.  My dad didn't beat it, but his three-game series still won.

Anyway, I'm gonna go back to waiting for my new flight.

My streak ended.  No, not that streak.  Maybe later for that one.

But anyway I forgot to post last night.  Yesterday I went shopping for some major school supplies, on the halfway day of the semester!

I also had my first 8 am class, which was wonderful!  I’m so excited about complex numbers.  I simply adore them.

Anyway, I went to the special collections at the library of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.  Before we got into the library, we saw the best working environment I’ve seen in my life, a giant stairway of desks where people design architecture.  Imagine a grand staircase of open cubicles, with the newbies on the bottom and the PhD’s on top.  After we went into the library we saw a ton of stuff, such as hand-drawn plans for the St. Louis Arch and Gropius’s clipboard.  I held Gropius’s clipboard.  I simply love clipboards!  I bought another one at Staples today so that if I lose my current clippy I don’t have to fall behind in my classes!

And today I went to parties at Wellesley and briefly at Babson.  Had a lot of fun.

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.