It’s funny how when you learn something new, it seems to open a floodgate for similar information that you’ve never noticed before. Since I wrote about my feelings about diamonds a while ago I’ve since discovered this article, which talks about some amazing advances in diamond fabrication(Note, not fake diamonds, but man made real diamonds.), saw Eugene write about it and then noticed the Simpsons mocking the diamond franchise in the most recent new episode. (picture on the left.)

Good times.

In contrast with my Photo 1 teachers stiffness, my Photo 2 teacher is outright amazing. I think he can speak for himself (All capitals indicates raised voice):

“Are there ANY males in this class.”
-Professor Jones, First thing he said to the entire class

“If an assignment is worth 100 points and you turn it in late…. You get ZERO. If you don’t turn it in at all, you get MINUS ONE HUNDRED. I’m serious.”
-Professor Jones, Explaining his late policy.

“My only rule is there’s no porn… If you don’t know what POR-NOG is, come to my office and for TWENTY BUCKS I’ll show you my video.”
-Professor Jones, Explaining what we can and cannot shoot for our final project.

“First off, I’m head of the department, so complaining about me won’t do no good. Secondly, I have Tenure, which, if you don’t know, means you CAN’T make me work, and YOU CAN’T get me fired.”
-Professor Jones, on his many years at the College

Interesting Revelation:

In Season 3, disc 2, of the Simpsons, there is an episode called “I married Marge.” In this episode there is a flashback to the time when Bart is conceived inside of a miniature golf Castle. The interesting part is that this flashback is dated, 1980.

This means that Bart was most likely born in 1981, making him a full two years older than me. I wonder if the writers had known how long the series was going to last if they would have left that out.

My Photo 1 class ended 26 minutes ago and I thought I’d put my thoughts down while they’re still fresh.

The building that this class is being held in is off the main campus and completely new to me, and so far I’m more than impressed. Ample free parking, air conditioning, and plenty of study room are only the first three things I can think of that the main campus lacks and this building has. I’m only annoyed I haven’t had a class in this building before now.

The teacher is an interesting character. Caucasion Female in her late thirties, her sense of fashion chronically stuck in the early to mid eighties and personality borrowed from a saltine, she nonetheless quite obviously knows her stuff, and is very good at being able to show what she’s trying to teach.

The class I have already mentally divided into three groups: Those serious about photography, those interested in the concept, and those who view it as a romanticized world of travelling the world and taking pictures of babies, bands, dandelions, and aging houses with the paint peeling off. The first two groups I have no problem with, but the last group doesn’t really care about anything this class has to offer. They want to take pictures, and hearing about the chemistry of film, metering, aperature, shutter speed, and focal length almost killed them as their heads hit their desks like prisoners striking anvils in unison.

“I’m going to order desert, just so you know,” Lauren said as if I planned to put up a fight about it. She makes this statement with confidence and without making eye contact, so that my response won’t affect her resolve. As my employer had decided to detain me on February the 14th, we agreed to go out to dinner the day before, California Pizza Kitchen being our destination.

My dad’s father worked at a heavy machinery dealership while my mother’s father worked as the manager for the produce department in a grocery store, so neither of them really went out for dinner all to often and desert, well… desert was not in the cards. So it’s understandable that my parents view getting desert as an extravagance on par with personally embroidered toilet paper. On the other hand Lauren’s family has taken to looking at me as being a little bit “funny” when saying strange things such as “I’m full” when the desert menu comes around.

“Just so you know, I AM going to order desert,” she says, again without eye contact, preferring to keep her eyes on the prize, reading and re-reading the descriptions of the Apple Crisp and the Chocolate Souffle on the menu hung on the window as we wait to be seated. We were already hungry when we left the apartment and the drive over in addition to the half hour wait at the restaurant had us half way between ravenous and cannibalism.

We agree on tortilla soup as an appetizer as waiting for food was not an option; I’m sure that we are entering stage 3 of starvation, our fat reserves completely gone and our bodies beginning to digest our muscles as the only remaining source of energy. Consumed by hunger we down the soup, the complimentary Pita bread, and several refills of Strawberry Lemonade and Arnold Palmer tee, respectively. Our cravings are only sharpened by this tease of a meal, and upon their arrival I begin to barbarically inhale my Shitake Mushroom Pizza with a honey wheat crust while Lauren lay siege on her Fettuccine with shrimp and garlic sauce. About three quarters through our respective meals our will begins to falter. We try to force each other to finish what was too small to take home in a box, “Here, you need to try some of this, it’s amazing.” Gradually, painfully, sloooowly we finish each others meals in an exercise that becomes more and more akin to packing gunpowder into a musket.

Content, I lean back in my chair and enjoy the afterglow of a good meal as Lauren sits hunched over the menu again, her eyes lacking the confidence they once carried. She reads aloud the descriptions of the deserts, after each one asking “Doesn’t that sound gooood,” her eyes pleading, begging me magically remove the last three fork fulls of pasta from her stomach and make room for what she could no longer back down from. “It’s not that big…” she tried to convince herself, referring to the size of the chocolate souffle a la mode, her preference in portion size having reversed in the past hour.

She orders the Chocolate Souffle and makes me eat half.

On the ride home, I just made sure my chair was leaned back. I am uncomfortably full to the point that I can’t get to sleep till two in the morning.

“The last couple weeks I’ve been waking up in the 7-8am timeframe every day; tomorrow I have to do the same. It almost feels normal… I haven’t really done this since high school.”
–Havoc Pennington, head of User Interface Design at Red Hat Inc.

Man, a programming job where it’s abnormal to have to wake up early in the morning. Yet another reason to be involved with open source software.

It’s been such a long break that I’m actually looking forward to school starting again. I’d like to think this is because my classes are just brain candy, but deep down, I know it will be nice to have some short term goals forced upon me and it will be refreshing to have that little bit of stress that will make me put off my school work while doing everything else that much more effectively. It’s called productive procrastination, and it’s my lifestyle of choice.

If you’ll remember in a previous entry an individual who regretted he hadn’t registered onelast.com himself contacted me to communicate his story of woe and I posted that if anyone could think of a better domain name then I’d gladly sell him my domain name for what I paid. Well he posted a list of very decent domain names in the comments of that entry, my favorites being pointabout.com, pastfive.com, and endpost.com, but in the end I decided they weren’t really for me. However, he also pointed me to nameboy.com, a website that gives you suggestions for domain names based on two words you feed it. Now, unlike some sites, it doesn’t just combine these two words together (though it does that too), but also looks for any words that might be vaguely related to what you entered. For example if you enter “failure” and “giant” you’ll get all the obvious domains, but you’ll also get failuretocomply.com, failurenow.com, phailure.com, or backslidingbrute.com. Through nameboy.com, I discovered the domain name watchred.com by searching for “red” and “technology” and immediately felt I’d found my domain name. The whole time I was looking for a domain name I was looking for that one combination of words that would leave me with that “Eureka!!!” feeling that would generate the confidence of knowing I made the right choice. Watchred.com is that domain.

I’m going to contact Haydur today, and if he still wants the onelast.com domain name, I’m going to transfer it to him probably near the end of the month and watchred.com will be the new domain for this site. I’ve already registered it as of this writing, I’m just waiting for it to propogate through all the DNS servers, which should take somewhere between 12 and 36 hours.

I’ve got more to write about, but as I don’t have the time right now I’ll just wish everyone a happy v-day. It’s a very corporate holiday, but celebrating love, plutonic or otherwise, can’t be a bad thing. You just better hope you had reservations about three months ago or that you celebrated a day early like some people.

I just bought a canoe off of ebay. You can check it out here. It didn’t come with paddles or anything, but it did come with a case and a tripod, so I figure that makes up for it.

I’m probably just going to resell it on ebay for more than I bought it, so if anyone is interested in a canoe with no paddles, just let me know.

“there’s only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.”
– David Sedaris, from Naked

I was in line to enter what any passing tourist would assume are sacred doors at the DMV this morning and though I attempted to suppress it, I was actually laughing out loud in line at 7:45am. Now, they say misery loves company, but what’s left unsaid is it really hates people enjoying themselves in it’s presence. In the words of Piebald, “If looks could kill, I would’ve never had a chance.”

I’d forgotten how well earned the DMV’s reputation is. Arriving a full thirty minutes before the doors open at 8:00am, the line already wrapped half way around the building. It was 8:38am when I hit the information desk and was given a number, 9:55am when my number was called, and 10:07am when I started my car in the parking lot. I started my book on page 128 that morning and left on page 234. At that point I was almost annoyed they couldn’t let me finish my book before calling my number.

This week, Lauren has gone to practice from 10pm-12am every evening as well as attended a practice on friday, all just to be ready for the Grammy’s. That’s 16 hours of her time, all for a cause which they were not even paying her for.

Then, at the climax of the eight hour long practice on friday, Lauren was informed that the woodwinds had been cut from the gig. There will be no performance with Outkast, the ultimate prize for her time and effort simply pulled out from under her.

I hope Mr. Andre “Ice Cold” 3000 cries himself to sleep.

When Eugene removed the domain names he was thinking about using from his blog to make sure people didn’t steal his ideas, I thought maybe something in his car had fermented to the point he was suffering delusions from the fumes. But as it turns out he might have been on to something. I got the following email earlier today:

Hi there,

Haydur.

I would honestly give this guy my domain for what it cost me if I could just think of a better one. If anybody thinks of something they think would be perfect for me, check if it’s available through register.com and let me know.

I’m not a big name dropper, but, well, let’s be honest here, I’ve never really had any names to drop. But now I sorta do and well, I’m gonna. Let’s just get right to the meat of this post:

Lauren will be performing “Hey Ya” on stage with Outkast at the Grammys this Sunday.

Well, she’ll be with forty other people from the marching band wearing funky green outfits out of focus in the back. But she’ll be there, and that’s all that matters. If you don’t recognize her by her funky brown hair or her towering height, just remember she’ll be one of the two girls with a clarinet.

When Lauren emailed her teacher, Trixy Sweetvittles (I swear on all the people who died of the plague that I am not making that name up) to ask if there’s someway she could miss class for a rehearsal, she got the following response:

OH MY GOD!
You definitely get excused for a rehearsal with
Outkast! That’s awesome! I’ll leave the
assignment hand-out and materials with Greg. You
can pick them up later.
I hope you get some polaroids!
Trixy

Everyone just rolls out the red carpet when you know the right people.

I was looking at photo.net when I saw a picture I very much admired. The crazy thing is, I’m looking at a picture on a website that people post to from all over the world, and this particular photo was taken at Quimby Middle School in San Jose, California. Somewhere I’ve been before.

Just kinda random.

So how many low fat cinammon graham crackers am I holding up? Yes, only in the visible hand. No, I’m not hiding any from you. Yes, the graham crackers in the picture are of the low fat cinammon variety.

Though you and I may only see two Keebler low fat cinnamon crisps, according to the good people at Keebler, I’m actually holding eight. They tell you on the box that there are only 110 calories per serving and there are eight crackers in a serving. I thought this was rather impressive until I did some simple math and discovered that they’d been misleading me. What convention told me (one object, therefore one cracker) was twisted into a reality that the Keebler company prefers (indentations denote the beginning of an entirely separate entity, therefore one object can be four crackers.). This in itself it isn’t too disturbing, but if they really care enough to trick us into thinking a graham cracker is 13.8 calories, what else aren’t they telling us? It’s not like anyone would really want to eat 8 graham crackers at one sitting just to get the full serving in.

Blah. Endings aren’t my specialty.

I set my sister up with a weblog. She’s currently trying to decide between the site I set up for her, which can be found here, or a xanga site that has been lost in the teeming masses of identical sites. Though I will point out that this site looks a bit familiar.

She only has a few entries, and two of them are already worth quoting, so:

“School today was like any other school day, that is, until 5th period. I have drama 5th and today we had a sub. Now first off, having a sub in a drama class is never a good thing. The plan was to just spend class watching a movie, but that never happened. Daniel has a watch that is a universal remote control and he started playing with the movie, rewinding, fast forwarding, stopping, etc. Almost everyone in the class knew what was going on but still decided to play along offering to help “fix” the VCR. “Don’t worry, I can fix it, my dad is a mechanic” Noah said that, silly for two reasons 1) it’s his dad not him that fixes things and 2) mechanics don’t fix VCRs.”

and

“Ok, so most of you have heard my “xangas are creepy” speech, and I always vowed that if I were ever to have a xanga, that my first entry would be about how creepy xangas are. Last night, I wrote that speech. It was brilliant and I accidentally deleted it. I now not only think that xangas are creepy, I think they are mean spirited, because I believe my xanga deleted my beautiful entry on purpose. Stupid xanga. I haven’t decided whether or not to rewrite the entry, for I feel it could never truly have the same gusto as it did before, thats right, gusto.”

Kelsey W, from here and there, respectively.

As she is currently on the fence as to which blog she’s going to use, I suggest you place a comment on either of her pages and let her know which one you like.

Yesterday was not the best day I’ve ever had. I wasn’t able to get to the gym because I slept in too much. Not a day ruiner, but definitely disappointing. The day still had plenty of potential for recovery.

Then I had to ruin everything by showing up for work. Yesterday I did something impressive at work. Most days I’m underpaid, but that just wasn’t enough for me on that particular friday afternoon. No, no, NO! On THIS particular friday afternoon, I managed to actually achieve a NET LOSS by showing up for work. Financially speaking, lying on my couch and timing how long I could hold my breath without passing out would have been better than showing up for work.

“Now, Red/Brian,” you might be telling your monitor, “that’s simply just not possible. If you show up for work, they pay you. Bingo, better off than before.” And normally this is the way it works. But that’s when you don’t have a car. That’s when you don’t get a parking ticket for sixty five dollars.

So here’s what really happened: I walked up to an apartment building with a pizza in hand, and someone on the steps yells at me “Hey Bro, they’re gonna give you a ticket!” I rush out to the curb and inform the parking officer politely through a series of exaggerated gestures and raised voice that I’m just trying to deliver a pizza, but the parking office just hissed through her split tongue that “Itsssss a no ssssstoping zone, Honey.” Which is kind of ridiculous, I’ve never had so much trouble finding a place to park in a supposed “no stopping zone.”

The rest of the day at work wasn’t much better, but I went over to Eugene’s and watched a movie, had fun, and generally deepened the debt I had created earlier that day by deciding to show up for work. This didn’t end my distaste for the traffic officer, but at least I degraded it from a Hate 1 “I’m going to find her and carve ‘I love Michael Jackson.’ into the hood of her car.” to a Hate 3 “You are officially OFF my christmas list.”

But anyway, today I got to the gym, finished some laundry, and things are looking up.

Recently I’ve a had a bit of an obsession with auctions, so when I turned on the television and they “just happened” to be talking about a public auction of items that were confiscated by US customs, I knew I had to go.

Since I had some previous experience with auctions, I walked confidently into the auction hall feeling I would crush other bidders with my passive gaze while swooping in and getting everything I desired for less than the cost of the gas I used driving there. Then I actually got there. There were upwards of 1,500 people, and they were not the spectating type. These people are SERIOUS, dealing with tens of thousands of dollars of merchandise without even blinking. They buy and sell people like me on ebay as a novelty.

I stayed for about twenty minutes, long enough to see a semi go for thirty nine grand and a yellow plate go for about twenty-five hundred. At that point I realized the twelve dollars in my wallet wasn’t going to get me further than a stale donut at the roach coach.

The Navy’s new slogan is “Accelerate Your Life.”

Am I the only person who finds that to be an incredibly morbid slogan for one of the branches of the military?

Seth Nickell is regarded as a pretty darn smart User Interface designer for operating systems. He’s known well enough that I regularly read his blog to see what he’s up to and what he has to say. His blog is also where I got the idea to put my head in the upper corner of my blogger site. In my humble estimation he’s a pretty smart guy.

But in his most recent entry, he used the word frigidity to describe the harsh cold he is experiencing in the Northeast corner of our country.

In the words of Indigo Montoya (from The Princess Bride) , “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

According to this, although frigidity is related to the word frigid, it actually means:

1. sexual unresponsiveness (especially of women) and inability to achieve orgasm during intercourse
2. a lack of affection or enthusiasm syn: coldness, coolness

Which is why I cracked up when I saw the title of his blog was “More Lessons in Frigidity.”

P.S. This is my two hundreth entry. Wow.

Today I attended my first day of traffic school where I heard an interesting but alarming story. Most of the time you don’t learn anything at traffic school except how to look interested while paying no attention at all, but today was an exception.

There’s a law that says semis have to stay in the two right-most lanes on a four lane highway. If your highway should merge with another highway, they have a specified distance within which they have to change to the correct lane.

One Trucker who our teacher had before was there for this very ticket. That is, he didn’t get over within 200ft of the highways merging. He’d had his blinkers on the entire time, but there was a lot of traffic and nobody was willing to let him in. When told why he had been pulled over, the Trucker appealed to the officer’s common sense, “What am I supposed to do when they won’t let me in?”

The police officer responded, “Put your blinker on, count to three, then bring it.”

Appalled, the Truck Driver contested the ticket and asked the judge the same question, “What am I supposed to do when they won’t let me in?” The judge told him, “Put your blinker on, count to three, then bring it.”

Needless to say that I’m going to be more considerate to truck drivers, especially when you consider this particular ticket is in excess of $300. Besides that, I don’t know how fast your average truck driver counts to three.