Insignificant Bits

The heroes are vanquished. The evil Tech won last night.

I showed up to Bailey’s around 7pm, only to discover there was already a line to get in. There were about 20 people in front of me so I waited it out. Behind me the line gradually grew until it no doubt numbered in the hundreds. Most of these people, I imagine, were turned away. When I finally got into the door I realized why the line-up: half of the place was closed for a private Halloween party. Hey, that’s a great idea, Bailey’s management: turn away many thousands of dollars in alcohol sales on a game night. It’s not like there would be a huge crowd of Virginia Tech football fans here in… where do I live, oh yeah, Virginia. Not to mention it being the official meeting place of the GT club. On this night Bailey’s was quite the debacle. I watched the first quarter there in standing room only while drinking down a tall Bass Ale. Having only seen about 4 or 5 other GT fans and none whom I recognized, I decided to catch the rest of the game at home.

GT’s defense played well most of the game, including a pair of turnovers that led to GT’s only touchdowns. However a comfortable lead at the half was whittled down to embarrassment at the end. Reggie Ball, who wasn’t getting much traction in the second half anyway, threw a couple of picks and temporarily forgot to stay on the downfield side of the end line to seal the loss. Say it with me, “it’s an inexperienced sophomore mistake.”

Hey, I hear our basketball team might be good this year.

Today marks the third straight day that I’ve arrived at work before sunup. This is quite an accomplishment for me as I believe the last time I was anywhere before 8 AM was to attend my freshman chemistry class. Well except for that time when I woke up in a SoHo (South Herndon) diner at false dawn after a night of heavy drinking. Anyway, today while I was eating my Corn Pops at my desk, I thought to myself, “I wonder how they make Corn Pops.” The internet to the rescue! (Engage popup blocker.)

Tonight Tech plays Tech in the first in-conference game. I went to the last meeting of the Techs at the start of Michael Vick’s last college season. It got canceled before the kickoff because lightning blew up Lee Corso’s rental car. (I was very wet.) So I will be at the game watching at Bailey’s tonight and rooting for the good Tech to prevail over the evil one. Let’s raise a whiskey to all the good fellows.

So I finally finished Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle over the weekend. I have to say the final book, The System of the World, is several notches above the first two. The first didn’t seem to be going anywhere, and the second was half pirate story from which the best parts were omitted and merely alluded to, and half love story concerning a heroine whom you would love to see fall into a pit full of pointy spikes.

With System, the action is nonstop. The all-too-perfect Eliza makes only a token appearance. Isaac Newton is a crazy bastard. Leibniz is building computerized killing machines (except for the killing part). Stephenson restricts himself to using the adjective “Gordian” only six times – unfortunately all in the same chapter. There are assassins, duels, bombs, jail breaks, riots, zombies, hookers and beer. The ending, often a sore spot among Stephenson’s fans, even manages to tie up the loose ends. In all this one made it worth the other 6 months of reading.

This guy is stupid.

Yesterday I was a slug for the first time.

To the confused, allow me to explain. On the NoVA side of the Potomac, the main way into the city is via I-66 which is two lanes and HOV only. As a commuter, your choices are either to ride a bus (which I do most of the time), buy a hybrid, or carpool. At some point some smart person came along and said, “hey wouldn’t it be nice if some of us bus riders just form an ad-hoc car pool instead of waiting for the bus out here in the cold?” The driver gets to use the HOV and the riders get a free trip to a metro stop. Thus, the slug line was born.

So yesterday, some guy, named either Jim or Tom (yes I’m a jerk), asked those of us in the bus lineup if anyone wanted to go to Rosslyn Metro. I gave it a shot. It took longer (the bus gets to use the airport road) but was cheaper by a buck so maybe I’ll do it again some time. We talked idly about Bossa Nova, Paco de Lucia, guitar, and Brazil.

The only downside is having to converse with strangers.

Back when I was a kid, we always did the triangle-eyed, leering-with-insanity variety of Jack-o-lanterns. Sometimes, we’d cut a little circular eye in there, or give him a tooth, but generally they were of the ‘ten minutes of carving time’ school. I haven’t made one since I was around 11, but for some reason got it in my head that I had to make one this year. And I wanted to do something fancy but something that made a statement about me and all that. So I give you the Jimi-o-lantern (click the picture for step-by-step pictures):

The basic process is this: first I took the Electric Ladyland cover from Amazon as the source picture. This is a nice image to use because it is already high contrast and lends itself well to being represented with two colors. The next step was to reduce that picture down to a two color image that I could use directly as a pattern for carving the pumpkin. I wanted to leave pumpkin where there were dark spots, and carve out the part where the image is light. So I brought the image into GIMP, used the threshold tool to get a black and white image that looked about right. I also scaled it up so it wouldn’t be too blocky when printed. The edges of the image were pretty noisy, so I cleaned them up by tracing them with paths and filling the interior white and the exterior black. In a couple of places I connected black areas together to keep them contiguous lest the carving require pieces to float in midair. Finally I added a highlight along the left side to bring out the silhouette of the jaw. So here is what my template looked like when I was done with it:

I printed the negative of that (no need to waste a whole ink cartridge on it) and pinned it to the pumpkin with thumbtacks. There’s a little hole-poking tool that comes with the pumpkin carving kits that you can use to trace your design onto the pumpkin. This is a somewhat tedious process and it gave my hand a cramp towards the end, but when finished it’s pretty easy to see where to cut — just connect the dots. Which I did with a tiny saw that also comes with the kit (I swear this stuff is made for kids hands or something). In all it probably took around 2 hours (hard to tell as I made a lasagna at the same time… which tasted oddly pumpkiny…)

So if you live near me, I invite you to drop by and check it out, and if you dress up as something I’ll give you some M&Ms. If I haven’t eaten them already.

Yeah, it’s a Joe job (i.e. don’t call the poor guy whose phone numbers/ICQ they listed) but I think this spam I received is pretty funny. All my buddies at the school or college think so anyway.

Work is slow today.

So I donated to the alumni association. Yep, I’m a mark. I received a card yesterday from a new GT student, a President’s scholar, gushing with praise about the school and giving effusive thanks. I’m guessing they force the PSes to do this (Len?). It’s a nice feel-good heart-strings sort of thing; here’s an excerpt: Because of your donation I was able to attend Tech, my first choice in schools. This school is absolutely wonderful and has given me so much already…I am proud to be a Yellow Jacket!

Dear Student,

Sincerely,
bluesterror
CMPE '98

One thing I find rather annoying: finding out about friends’ life changing events by reading about them on the net. Therefore, let me just tell the internets that the thing I heard recently is really neat.

Another new badly mixed creation from your friends at SounDriver: Brandoncerto (OGG). I play rhythm mostly in this one. True story: we named it “Brandoncerto” because we are too uncreative to think up a title and Brandon wrote the music. Clint came up with the lyrics, and consequently, some guy told us he really digs our brand of Christian rock. Heh.

Recent music acquisitions: Velvet Revolver (yeah I ripped it anyway) and Parliament. Tear the roof off this mother sucker.