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.

This morning I was awakened by two Chinese men asking me if I had a “twisted pair wire cutter thing”, which meant an ethernet cable crimper.  One was the landlord and the other was the father of the two high school kids who will be moving into our apartment.  We networked the entire house today.

After that, Tucker baked some cookies using his old recipe from his mother.  We noticed a large bulge in the ceiling.



Looks like a leak from the floor above somehow.  Our apartment used to be three bedrooms, but two of the bedrooms were split with cheap fake walls, which were put right on top of the carpet.  Tucker slid a wire under the wall between our rooms when we wired the house up.  It’s nice to know that we can slide things to each other under the wall at any time.

I had a great Fourth of July!  I tagged along with Tucker and his friends and went to DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge) to watch purportedly the largest fireworks show in the nation.



You can see the Brooklyn Bridge right in front of the fireworks, which were a couple miles from us just south of the tip of Manhattan.

We were on some rocks right next to the Brooklyn-side pylon of the Manhattan Bridge:


The skyline looked like this:


Today I downloaded Fahrenheit 9/11 after I read that Michael Moore doesn’t care if people pirate his movie.  I will watch it soon, probably with my friend Mara from downstairs.  I previewed the first few minutes and found a lot of hype without a lot of argument, as I expected.  You can download Fahrenheit 9/11 too, while supplies last. (UPDATE: you will need BitTorrent in order to download it, and this version is missing about 20 minutes concerning the Patriot Act)

The only things I ate today were several of Tucker’s cookies and a bowl of Chilled Gazpacho soup from Josie’s.  Tomorrow might be another Taco Bell day.

Hello again everyone.  I have just returned from Spiderman 2, and I loved it.  I am a big sucker for comic book movies.  I read a review today on Yahoo! Movies:

In a time when losers decide to profit off dead Americans and reek propaganda unseen since the fall of the Soviets, comes a movie worth every penny! A movie that assumes that we’re not all brainless idiots! However, just people looking for a solid sense of entertainment in contrary to hidden issues masking political bloopers, infamous outtakes, and puppetry of audience perception.

i hate to see your broken face
this world would give you anything
as long as you will want to
as long as you will want to
i hate your state of hopelessness
and that vain articulateness
your loser type wreck wanna be
not a pretty sight really
in another world it'd be funny

i hate to see your broken face
a lazy life of fatal waste
of fashionable cynicism
the poison they want you to drink
oh no man that's too easy
oh no man that's too easy
we weren't talking bout happiness
apply your leading potential
to be useful to this planet
the world would give you anything
as long as you will want to
as long as you will want to

I told myself I would never stoop to such a level as having a website I didn’t code myself.  But then I succumbed.

Dan told me that in order to have a good blog I can’t just talk about what I’ve been up to.  I need to talk about the ideas I’m having and try to make my blog something worth reading.  Challenge accepted.

My first big idea:  I’ve tried to eliminate my usage of exclamation points recently.  I realized that if what I’m saying needs an exclamation point in order to get its point across, I haven’t written it effectively.  I often catch myself putting exclamation points on every other sentence of emails I write, especially the CORe Digest.  I might leave them in for the CORe Digest since I’m not exactly going to take the trouble to strip them out by hand from what people send me.

If you’re not from Olin you probably don’t care one bit about the CORe Digest.  For the curious, I put out a weekly email newsletter to the campus as part of my role on the student government.

Too much going on!

So far this week, I have slept through my business class, I have prepared and performed PCR to sequence my own DNA, I have been trained by an improv comedy professional, I have gone to a class at an all-girls school, I have visited a sleep lab and tried on equipment, I have given a presentation at the faculty meeting, I have participated in a discussion about the entire curriculum of my school, I have chatted at length with the CEO of a small biotech company, and I have run a planning meeting for the student politics organization of my school, of which I am the president.

This school has to be the strangest place on Earth.

I should be working on my Circuits lab to make white noise, or writing an article for the school newspaper, or writing some reflections for Business, or for Design, or I could finally get around to declaring my major, which I decided on years ago, or I could...

go to sleep.

And yes, this webpage does still exist.

Tetris!

I remixed the Tetris A theme from the Game Boy. “Tetris A (Filter House Remix)” is now available on the Grant Music page.

Life is good.

This weekend will be very busy, however. Tomorrow I am booked straight through from 9:30 am to 6:00 pm. I will have a couple hours to breathe, followed by the MCM, which will claim most of my life until this upcoming Monday. As for everything else, life is good.

BSE will live on!

BSE has one fewer member, as you may well have heard. Chris, you will be missed, but we will keep in touch and the Chris spirit will still be with us this semester. Stuff happens. Time is always a good thing. Oh, and I'm in no way implying that you are no longer part of BSE. The Best Semester Ever will live on.

Tomorrow is my first Wellesley class! I can't wait to see the reaction of all the girls. This shall be interesting.

I'm reading The Double Helix by James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA. Re-reading, that is. My Biology class at Olin requires it, but so did my AP Biology class, so I've read it before.

I just watched the Olin Challenge PBS spot and I must say things have changed dramatically since Partner Year. I'm listening to "Kernkraft 400" by Zombie Nation. Man things have changed. Right now I am in a nest of social conflicts of interest, but don't worry, I will take each of my friends at face value and well consider why I ever became his or her friend in the first place.

If this post sounds cryptic, that's because it is. Lately I feel like a changed man, ready to take on the world and what it has available for me. I'll give you a status report after this weekend.

BSE!

This webpage is officially back in action! That's right, Brian and Sheeva, this page is turning over a new leaf and providing actual content starting right now!

I wrote a Gamecube game with tkcne, also known as Austin. It is called Snowlords and it is based on the Atari 2600 game Warlords. The release was made official in #gcdev on EFNet and spread to websites such as gcdev.com and dextrose.com. Maybe one of these days we'll get a screenshot. Today I searched for Snowlords on Google and found that there are two different French-language sites featuring our game! Check them out here and here! Each has its own translation! A longer translation from the second site can be found in the Google cache.

BSE stands for Best Semester Ever and is the club that Dan, Chris, and I started. It essentially involves getting out of Olin more often. I'll try to keep up with pictures. We went to the Lovewhip show at Bill's Bar and had a grand old time. Lovewhip features Olin's own AV Technician Warren Jones (alias "Wojo") on saxophone, keyboards, and telephone rap. I earned the nickname "John Travolta" over at IT.

My Wellesley class starts on Friday. I can't wait! I have Cognition with visiting professor Jesse Hochstadt. It's in the same room as Dan's Japanese class, and starts five minutes after he is let out.

Normalform is back up! Check out the new sections! Jon is leaning on my shoulder in the second T-shirt pic. You can see the "Do Something" Olin T-shirt's sleeve.

My sophomore design group will be researching people who suffer from sleep disorders and the people who treat them. Tomorrow we're going to visit a sleep center nearby and ask some questions and observe.

I bought the Spike Jonze DVD. More on that later.

What's new?

A lot of changes for me lately. Tonight I'm singing up for my new courses. I'm excited about the new Circuits course that will be offered. I've also just started in Amateur Radio club, which fits pretty nicely with the whole circuits interest and everything. Other than that I think I'm going to take a class at Wellesley, although I haven't decided on one yet.

I've recently been hired to do the Research Working Group website. It's nice to actually have content and a goal for making a webpage. Maybe somewhere in the process I'll get some ideas for this page.

I'm coming home for Thanksgiving! I'm pretty excited, since I've really wanted to see my family lately.

Change of plans

In order to rescue this page from its abysmal status, I am now announcing that Grant Page Central will soon move to a static content format with a new design. For now all news updates have been pushed into Grant News Archive. Thanks for your patience.

It’s April!

And there is snow outside. It doesn’t feel like the end of the school year is near. I bet if I were in a warmer climate I would have that great feeling I remember from Oklahoma that summer is coming soon.

The results are in for the MCM. Kathy and I received an Honorable Mention for our paper. The paper had some holes in it for sure but I think our approach was well thought out.

Dean Kamen is coming to town soon. This Wendesday Olin will be holding its Big Conversations day. Some students will be presenting to him some business ideas revolving around the dynamic balancing technology of the Segway. Just this week I found out that Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple Computer and general cool guy, will be coming for the next Big Conversations day in the next fall semester. I couldn’t be more thrilled.

More to come...

What about last month?!

OK so that last update didn’t say a whole lot. I know, I know. Well here is an update on what's been going on in Grantland since I talked to you last.

I took the Mathematical Contest in Modeling with Kathy. The MCM is a mathematical modeling competition in which you get a few days more than a weekend to research, create a mathematical model, and write a paper about some system. This year we did Problem A, in which a motorcycle stuntman jumps over an elephant for a movie and lands in cardboard boxes. Our mission was to describe how cardboard would cushion his fall, although I would say our paper's strength was less in answering that question and more in considering a lot of different external factors that other groups may not have considered. Like, for instance, how to set up the shot so that it looks interesting in a widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio frame.

A week later was St. Valentine's Day and I started it off right by losing the ability to run Windows. I then ran off to Hillside Elementary and taught some fourth-graders about electricity and shocked them with a Van de Graaff generator. Sometime I might go visit the world's largest Van de Graaff at the Boston Museum of Science.

Speaking of Van de Graaff generators, my current project for my Project class is to build one. Que Anh, Sharon, Sutee, and I have almost finished making a clear handheld Van de Graaff that aims to make it more apparent to kids what is going on inside. It looks really swanky. We ordered our sphere from a backyard/pool decoration company, of all places, so ours looks the best in my opinion.

Well anyway after all that mess it was time to go to the Valentine dance. Beforehand my two dates, Clara and Janet, and I went with Dan and Frances to a pretty good Italian restaurant, Appetito, in Newton Center. From there we returned to Olin and the dining hall where a multiple-story cardboard Eiffel Tower had been constructed. The dance was somewhat fun and now Clara is my girlfriend. You might be asking, “What about poor Janet, your other date?” Well it turns out that now she is Dan’s girlfriend, creating the odd situation where one pair of roommates is dating another pair of roommates. Strange.

As if that wasn't enough, the next weekend I went to the 2003 Stanford Graduate School of Business Entrepreneurship Conference in Palo Alto, CA. We made some good connections and hopefully I’ll be emailing one of the graduate students I met that was helping to run the show so that Stanford and Olin can have some sort of officalized relationship. This is the strange stuff that goes on when you attend a brand new college.

Fast forward another weekend, and it’s once again time for an Olin College Candidates Weekend. This year we held two weekends, each with about seventy-five students. I must admit I wasn’t so involved this time around. Candidate weekends are quite impressive. The concept is that you apply to Olin, and then a certain number of students are invited to interview and interact with the students, faculty, staff, and administration of Olin. Out of those who attend, the entire class is selected with no regard given to the test scores, essays, or anything in the submitted applications. In other words, the admission staff wants to meet everyone and make sure they are Olin material and also that Olin is the right place for them. Candidate Weekend I ended with the Franklin W. Olin Players performing “The Foreigner”, which received a standing ovation. I wonder how much easier it is to get a standing ovation when your audience is filled with candidates who really want to get in? The second weekend ended yesterday with ExpressO, which was an open-mic talent show event culminating in a little mini-dance-party involving us, the faculty, prospective students, their parents, and the staff and adminstration. I don't know of any other school where this might happen.

Quick and dirty and lazy update

deklab: yo
deklab: whats the latest
nertzy: yo
nertzy: hmm
nertzy: I'm going to www.econference.org
nertzy: in a couple weeks
deklab: cool
nertzy: and the valentine dance is in a week
deklab: rock
nertzy: oh boy a valentine dance with 75 people
deklab: picked out the lucky lady?
nertzy: hehe not yet
nertzy: we'll see
nertzy: so many options
nertzy: you know the thing you touch and it makes your hair stand on end?
nertzy: electric big zapper deal
deklab: haha yeah
nertzy: Van de Graaff generator
deklab: sure
nertzy: well my class project right now is to build one
nertzy: after that we'll do some simple circuits
nertzy: then after that... we're supposed to design a product that uses wireless
         technology
nertzy: oh and it appears I'll be teaching electricity stuff to like 4th and 5th
         graders for community service every other week or so
deklab: hahaha
nertzy: hmm what else
nertzy: tomorrow is the big math competition
nertzy: from thurs to mon me and the other girl on my team will get a problem of
         the world and we have to solve it with math
nertzy: and write up a paper
nertzy: last year one of the problems was "fix airlines overbooking"
deklab: :)

Linux! I finally have windows again!

Yes I started this post with “Linux” and then followed up with “I finally have windows again!”

For the last three weeks I have been unable to run my Windows 2000 partition. I have therefore been (somewhat willingly) stuck in Gentoo Linux, an up-and-coming Linux distribution that makes people like me quite happy.

Longer two weeks.

I apologize for the lack of updates. I've been swamped with work and maybe I'll toss up some new content after I finish my math homework tonight. Anyway I wanted to make sure everyone knows I still exist and still plan on updating.

Oh, and I rode a Segway. Pictures to follow shortly.

If you're bored check out Taxi 2000.

Long week.

This week, I

• worked on a film crew for a live telecast to the Undersecretary of the Army and fourteen other VIPs.
• bought approximately thirty CDs for a dollar each.
• found out my friend Jon is going to the Sundance Film Festival.
• renewed the registration of a domain name.
• rearranged the furniture in my new room.
• baked a pizza.

Last Saturday I woke up nine hours earlier than usual and went to the Oklahoma National Guard 45th Infantry Brigade headquarters with Jon to pull cable and do other grunt work for a live broadcast (narrowcast?) to fifteen VIPs from Washington, including the Undersecretary of the Army. The troops were engaged in war games, teamed up with the Little Rock and Tulsa National Guard brigades to do tank battle against a common enemy simulated by computer. The point of the whole deal was for a fiber-optics company to show its worth to the higher-ups and get a hefty government contract to fiber up the country. And I made fifty bucks off of it.

CD Warehouse, based out of Oklahoma, is going out of business. They have to clear out all their merchandise so the CDs were only a dollar each. Jon Denmark, Jon Hutchins, and I cleaned out the place. Actually some other guy helped clean out the place when he bought nearly three hundred Latin albums. Anyway, I now have thirty discs more than before.

Jon is headed to the Sundance Film Festival! On two days’ notice, he’s headed to sunny California to meet with Jesse and drive to also sunny Utah. There he will watch several independent films and attend several parties and just in general do a lot of schmoozing. I know it will be great and he’ll have plenty to talk about.

Stargate, Inc. sells domain names for only eight dollars a year. If you want one, they’re so cheap it’s almost worth grabbing a couple. Jon nabbed normalform.com again. I’m mulling over getting one myself. The other Grant lists several interesting domain names that have no owner.

My room now has the bed and television switched, among other things. Right in time for me to fly home this Monday! Now I can finally finish setting up my new room and sit back to enjoy it for an hour or so.

Austin and I made a pizza at Jon's house last night. I said “bake” and he said “broil”. The jury is still out on that, but I still think that it came out well after being baked for about eighteen minutes. What do you want on your Tombstone? We had pepperoni.