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:

On July 4, 2003, I found this abandoned building or parking garage in Brooklyn:



The weather was beautiful today when I emerged from my apartment for the first time at about 8:00 to eat Subway sandwiches at Grant’s Tomb.  On the way to Subway, I passed the General Grant Houses, which this picture from July 8, 2004, showcase in front of the elevated subway train just south of 125th Street and Broadway:



Tucker and I cook many of our meals, including this Thai chicken dish that Mara from downstairs helped us out with on June 16, 2004:



Hopefully once the burners start burning again we will make some more meals, but the cooking has slowed down considerably in recent weeks.

Today I thought about how I don’t watch much television and how many of my hobbies involve creating things.  I considered how much more fulfilling I find life when I have something concrete to reflect on from my past.

My friend Jon often complains that he has trouble finding things to do which don’t involve “consuming”, be it food or media or just generally spending money on useless things.  He genuinely means what he’s saying, but more often than not he brings the concept up in a ploy to get the gang to do something we never would have otherwise, from inviting fifty people to a marshmallow roast in his backyard to Pong tournaments (with commentary from the announcer, of course) to a rousing game of croquet right before I left for New York City.

So my charge unto you the reader is:  go do something you haven’t done before.  Make a kite and fly it.  Go shopping for antiques.  See if bread really does land on the floor butter side down every time.  Plant some flowers.

And please tell me what you did so that I can have more ideas.

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.