i slept for 11 hours. i didn't wake up until 1:30 when the cleaning lady wanted to clean my room. i told her i didn't need it, because i hadn't messed anything up yet. there's no maid over the weekend, so that was my only chance. but it's ok.

busy day today. i went in to physics and had to wait for my presentation hardware to show up. the laptop and projector were en route from the administration office. it didn't show up until 3:30, which was annoying because i was supposed to play frisbee at 3:30.

i spent an hour making sure i could get the files from my box at MIT, and that the projecter was working. by that time, there was no ultimate game going on so i went back and changed into my nice clothes to go to christine's art show.

there were a lot of people at the show that i hadn't seen yet. unfortunately, i had to leave early and i missed aaron and jason.

i went back to physics so doc could give me a ride to the kernels' game (coe night at the kernels). doc was given the honor of throwing out the first pitch, which was a riot. a side benefit of this is that he got a shitload of box seat tickets. so we sat right in the front, behind home pate.

doc's pitch actually made it to the catcher, which was a matter of some debate. but it was a ball...

one of the events of 'coe night' was a drawing for prizes. lucky for me, i was sitting right next to the platform where they were giving away the prizes. by-in-large the prizes were weak, but i wanted one. i knew one of the girls giving away stuff so i asked her if she'd put me on the winners list.

i "won" a broken plastic cuckoo clock. woo. but it was fun pretending to be surprised and everything. i gave the clock to dan.

there was a bench-clearing brawl, dan got an outfielder to throw him a ball, and he mooned the field. it was a fun game.

kelly gave me her phone number along with a note that said "i love you." that was weird... ??

i went home with dan and dawn, and we played some more mario kart with nialle and charlie. we were trying to find lynda because she wanted to play but she was nowhere to be found.

i went home after awhile because i got sick of playing. eventually, i wandered out again to look for people. i got into murray and found setzler and sarah atencio. we went to beth's room where taylor, jana, katherine, and a couple of people i hadn't met were just chillin.

i was trying to find coleman and kottke, who i knew were here. so after an hour or so i left to find them. they were in the cosmos office, where another crowd was hangin out. it was about 95 degrees in there.

i convinced everyone to get the hell out of there and come to the alumni house where it's air conditioned. we found charlie on the way who was drinking a 40 out of a paper bag. he was quite over the limit.

we hung out in the swank library until the crowd broke up. lynda, matt, charlie and i went back to dan's place to play more mario kart. kottke went to bed; he was bushed.

went back to bed at 3:30am. so much for "vacation," i'm not resting at all.

so getting up at 6:00am was supposed to be unbearable because i went to sleep at 2:30am. i guess i was anxious, though, because i woke up on my own at 4:30 and couldn't get back to sleep.

so yeah, two hours of sleep. ouch.

these e-tickets rock. i just walk up to the counter, show them an id, give them my bag, and i walk on the plane. i love technology.

the flight to minneapolis was on 2 hours and 10 minutes, which is really fast. i had a 2 hour layover in MSP, so i hung out in the airport with my mom who had come out to say hi. airport food court orange juice is not good.

i love flying, but landing makes me nervous for some reason. landing in a DC-10 (capacity 350) is smooth and hardly noticeable. landing in a RJ-85 (capacity 50) is creepy.

doc said he'd send someone out to the airport to get me. i was sorta hoping it would be someone that i was friends with or at least had hung out with before. but he sent chris ma, who i've never really been friendly with.

so the ride into cedar rapids was sorta uncomfortable, not to mention the classic smell of cedar rapids that pervaded everything.

chris dropped me off at peterson and there i ran into ehsan hoque wearing a suit. probably the last person i expected to see first... but whatever.

i walk into peterson and immediately, the mini-reunions start. everyone wants to know "how's MIT?"

when i went into doc's office with a "yo!" he shook my hand and immediately said "you owe me ten bucks." "what for?" i ask. "you're buying a physics club T-shirt."

he's shameless. the purchase ended up being a good one, because i didn't bring a shirt that i wanted to play ultimate in.

i checked into the alumni house, then went back to physics and met a lady who was a class of '48 physics major. doc and i took her on a tour of campus to see the new buildings. she was there when old st. clair burned down and the 'new' one was built. whoa.

i wandered around campus for awhile and found more people and told them all that MIT is difficult and i enjoy it, etc. i should have just made a recording of it.

saw lots of old friends and got a few dirty looks from some jocks coming out of greene. oh well. ended up in dan & charlie's apartment (which incidentally was dean and i's apartment after freshman year) playing mario cart on n64. charlie and i went out for taco bell. yum. haven't had taco bell in a year or so. no bell in cambridge.

when i finally went to bed, it was 2:30am, and i was so out of it. i was awake for 20 hours today after only 2 hours asleep last night. ouch.

as predicted, i met several people that i knew and they said hi to me but i couldn't remember their name.

spent most of today working on the presentation which really should have been done a long long time ago.

i'm off tomorrow morning to go back to coe for the first time in nearly a year. i leave at 6:30am. ugh.

nonetheless, i'm really excited about my trip. it will be great to see everyone, and it's so weird and fortuitous that evan and jason and aaron will be there too. fun.

and of course, staying in the alumni house isn't bad either...

but enough of this typing, i have to get up in 5 hours and i'm not packed.

i went downtown this morning to buy some new clothes. all my pants are ratty and stained, so i figured i could use some new stuff.

so i'm at macy's and i'm trying to buy three items, when the retail clerk tells me i can get 10% off if i sign up for a macy's card. so i fall for it, because 10% is going to be like 8 bucks... i never should have done it.

not because those cards are a rip, but because the clerk was a moron. i fill out my little info card and give it to him, he calls up someone on the phone and starts giving them my info. then he accidentally sets the bag of clothes down on the phone and disconnects himself. so he calls back and gets someone else. instead of just starting over, he goes through this 10 minute ordeal of trying to get the other lady back, which fails, and eventually just starts over.

so meanwhile i'm standing there in the tommy jeans section feeling out of place and very annoyed. tommy jeans actually makes one pair of pants that i saw that i liked, but (like every other piece of their clothing) it a huge walking billboard. if they'd stop putting their brand name all over their shit, i'd buy it.

i bought bright orange socks.

i had to go into molvig's office today to FTP something for him. he's been trying to do it for the last day and failing. i wasn't there for more than 2 minutes. i don't get it. the guy is supposed to be a reseracher in computer simulations, so you'd think he'd know the ins and outs of simple computer applications...

i had to do it anyway because the files were for my presentation. speaking of which, i'm leaving the day after tomorrow and the presentation is only half done!

...so i spent the rest of the day working on it.

so i guess the most exciting thing that happened today was when i was almost killed.

i'm walking home from my radio show at about 2:20 in the morning, and there's no cars out at all, so i walk across mass ave towards ashdown. about 10 seconds after i passed the median, just as i reached the far side of the road, a little blue oldsmobile came speeding down memorial going the wrong way, crashed into the 1-foot tall median right where i had been a moment ago, flew over the median, and smashed into a cab passing on the other side of the street.

the cab was totaled, the driver was injured. the oldsmobile, now sans-bumper, swerved around the cab and sped off, squealing around onto amherst and disappeared. i was standing there on the curb, about 15 feet from the whole thing.

i went to make sure everyone in the cab was ok. the fare was fine, the cabby had injured his arm on the crash but it was nothing serious. the cops showed up in about 2 minutes.

there was car bits all over both sides of the road. the oldsmobile sedan was not built to leap tall medians in a single bound. half a hubcap rolled right over next to me. one of the front blinkers was in the middle of the road, and the entire bumper carriage was lying in the far lane of the road.

the cabby tried to start his car, but the tranny was busted or something because it just made a lot of noise.

the cops detained the cabby, the fare, and myself for statements.

the things that kept me amused during all of this were that the hit-and-run car disappeared, but he left his bumper on the road including his license plate. also, the poor guy in the cab was held up for an extra hour. i hope he didn't have an meeting to get to (at 2:30am...)

i had lost all interest in sleeping; i was filled to the brim with adrenaline. had i been 10 seconds later leaving WMBR, i'd have been on that median, right when and where the car went through it.

study-o-rama. i woke up late, at about noon, and by 12:45 i was in my office studying.

i came home at 5:00. this is probably the most continuous studying i've done all semester.

i walked to burger king for dinner. i can't explain why, but for some reason i had this craving for crappy fast food. i really wanted some taco bell, but i don't know where the nearest one is. so it was a burger king bacon double cheeseburger.

and while i was in central square, i stopped by blockbuster and picked up PCU and what's up, tiger lilly?

tom and nancy and i watched PCU over dinner. he thought it was hillarious, as predicted.

ok, i need to vent about another conversation with yang.

ME: are you cooking your watermelon in the microwave?

YANG: yes.

ME: why??

TOM: it's frozen.

ME: is it frozen?

YANG: no, my father commands me to.

ME: what?

YANG: he believes, though i do not, that eating cold watermelon makes me cough.

tom is laughing

ME: do you like it warm?

YANG: no, i do not like it warm. but i do what my father commands.

ME: but you eat warm watermelon every night and you still cough. if you don't like it, and it obviously isn't working, and your father will never know, why don't you just eat it cold?

YANG: it's not a matter of what he sees, it's a matter of whether or not i listen. sometimes i don't do what he asks me to do, but i always do what he commands me to do. and he commanded me to eat my watermelon warm.

ME: i give up.

tom is still laughing

i skipped paintball today for the MIT 'spring carnival' out on the kresge quad. it was a lot like coe's 'block party.'

there was sumo wrestling and the velcro race and stuff like that. it didn't have the velcro wall, which was a bummer, but it did have the bungee run, which kicked ass. you put a harness on with a bungee cord running out the back, then you run as far as you can down this inflated path. when the cord stats to stretch, you can't move forward anymore and you rocket back through the air and slam into the inflated floor. it's more fun than it sounds.

it's also more tiring. i did it three times then had to sit down for about half an hour.

from noon to four was the battle of the bands. the first band was abie's band, haptic. i'll be honest... i didn't much care for it. abie's part of the music is really good, but then there's this guy called rob who sings and plays bass. it doesn't fit together very well, i think. but they covered a kraftwerk song... and that's good enough for me.

the rest of the bands were standard guitar fare, none of them particularly good. WMBR had the remote broadcast unit out there and was broadcasting the contest live. i got to be on the air a bit. it was a good time.

i'm gonna be sore tomorrow, though. too much bungee run for me.

went to go see 'waking ned devine' at the MIT theater. a lot of people pumped that movie as ultra-hillarious, so it's mildly funny status was sort of a let down. it was funny, but not that funny.

tonight was also the MIT-DMC "bassix" party in lobdell (the cafeteria). the setup was nice and the DJs were good, but no one came. at the peak there was probably 25 people there. the spring weekend committee was supposed to publicize for us but never did, so the only people that knew about it were the DMC members. oh well. the music was still good, even if i was too tired to dance due to bungee-run...

no class today, and molvig's still out of town, so i took the opportunity to go downtown and buy a nice outfit for my talk at coe.

see, i only have one nice outfit, and coe has already seen it. actually i have two but one of them is old and ratty, and coe has see it as well. i figured i'd come back with some new material.

i discovered that i have a 15.5" neck, and a 35" arm. i have no idea how that compares to other people.

anyway, as i was searching, i found the tie of my dreams. yellow. solid deep yellow.

i'm not really much of a tie man, but this tie was great. so what if it said ralph loran on the back and had a $50 price tag, i wanted it.

so i set out to find a shirt that would match it and my black pants and my olive drab doc martins at the same time. i probably failed, but the shirt matches the tie at least. the really cool part is that the $37 shirt and the $50 tie somehow cost me $41. i don't know if that's like an amazing sale that macy's was having, or if i just lucked out.

i think it was luck because tonight the cashier at leverdi's only charged me $1.79 for a $3.89 pizza. it was a good day for buying. i should have bought more stuff.

the 6.270 organizers had a meeting today with the department head of EE/CS, guttag. it was really cool because only five of us showed up. the fact that i'm the only organizer that isn't in the EECS department became a discussion topic and i ended up talking to this guy for a long time.

and it's worth pointing out that he's the department head of the biggest/most prestigious department at MIT, which makes talking with him for an hour something of a novelty. i guess he's a busy guy.

the best part is that we weren't sure if he'd be as supportive of 6.270 as the last department head, but he turned out to be more. the last guy, apparently, took the position of "if you need something, come to me." while this guy was like "how can i help you guys?" it was pretty uplifting. we gave him a 6.270 shirt and a tape of the contest.

it's kinda weird having a 2-day week. but no friday class + this weird patriot's day holiday = no argument from me.

in a week, i'll be at coe. my presentation is hardly started. i spent a fair amount of time on it. i'm learning lots of interesting things about thermonuclear weapons. it's humorous that most of the stuff i'll be giving seems like it ought to be classified, but it comes largely from the web.

turns out there are two people that bid on that farm near los alamos before abie did, so our chances of getting it are basically nil. but we're keeping our eyes open for new stuff.

i picked up my fellowship check today. i tripled my bank account in tax-free mooolah and that felt pretty good. i'm finally not strapped for cash.

abie found someone in los alamos that is renting their farmhouse for the summer. it's four acres of land with a river that goes through, and a 3 bedroom house that we could split for only $800/month. we're going to get guy in on it as well.

this beats the $500/month efficiency apartment that guy and i were going to have to split otherwise...

the final day of break.

helen and i have been trying to go to the gardner museum for about a month and finally today our schedules were in synch. when i went out to meet her for the walk over, jen from pika was there as well. she had to go to the MFA for a summer internship interview thing which is right next to the gardner so we all went together.

we stopped off at the other side which was on the way for some food. i had the mandatory fruit cheese and bread plate.

i have never walked into the south side past comm ave until today. berklee college of music and the boston conservatory of music are both over there, so everyone we past seemed to be carrying a instrument of some kind.

i also saw the fenns for the first time today. reeds there grow to about 3 meters tall. it's impressive.

the gardner museum is bizzare but interesting. originally we had wanted to go because of a temporary glass-blowing exhibit. this turned out to be about six pieces in a tiny room, so it really wasn't the nexus of the trip. the coolest thing about the museum is the central atrium, which is four stories tall and has a fancy garden at the bottom. there's a mosaic tiled floor and a fountain and interesting flowering plants. also, from three stories up, there are potted flowers with bright orange blossoms on long dangling vines that hang down into the garden.

surrounding this atrium on the lower three floors is the museum which is a random art collection of mostly furniture and furnishings from all over the world. the collection was not as cool as the achitecture and the garden though.

on the way out, i was telling helen about the "rock which resembles a grotto" in the MFA. we decided that since it was right there, and we get in for free, that we would go and look at it.

we got sidetracked immediately because the museum's outdoor japenese rock garden was open. neither of us had seen it before. rock = water, says helen. strange garden, but very pretty. i'll have to incorporate one in my underground house when i'm rich.

we went in and saw the grotto-rocks, and then we walked home. helen cut my hair. it's pretty short. not pre-college short, but it doesn't touch my shoulders and only hangs just below my ears. i love it.

i spent a lot of today enjoying the fact that i didn't have to go to class. i sat around and watched the marathon, and i read a book for fun.

i probably should have been reading my physics book, but i wasn't motivated.

helen stopped by my radio show tonight and we chatted about rubik's cube strategy and assorted other nerd topics. kept me from having to talk or anything like that on my show which probably would have been a disaster since i sound like a person who has a cold right now.

i played the entire howard zinn lecture CD. jason told me about his book, "a people's history of the united states," and it sounded really good. turns out he's a prof across the river at BU. his lecture is a lot like the stuff noam chomsky gives - anti american policy, anti plutocracy. good stuff. i'll have to read that book... eventually.

today was the third sunday of the month, the sunday after the friday before the third sunday of the month which strangely enough always lands on a '-teen' day, and is therefore called "friday the eenth" or "frideen" or "teen friday."

anyway, it means that today was the electronics swap meet over at the parking garage. rolf and i went and did the rounds. we saw the nerds, we oogled the junk, and i bought a 540 MB SCSI HD for my mac for $30.

we were both looking for vintage audio gear... i found half a patch bay which i didn't buy because it was rusty and had solder lugs at one end, and we saw a casio drum machine of questionable worth for $100 that we also didn't buy.

rolf came away empty-handed.

i had to spend the rest of the day doing 22.55 problem sets with evan and ben.

i stayed up late working with this harddrive and the damned SE/30. a note to people who work with the guts of an SE/30: that hard drive rail, when you dismount it, can't be reattached unless you have a magnetic screwdriver and iron screws - neither of which i had. i managed to get the new harddrive in and one of the mounting screws back in place after about 25 minutes.

of course the thing won't boot. i imagine it's a SCSI problem or perhaps the drive just won't work in a mac. after all, it was manufactured by IBM...

today i got mail from colin kilmer, who i haven't seen since coe. he had the following to report:

"Oh, and today I had a physical science student set fire to his pants. On the bus on the way to school. When I asked him what he was doing, he said that he was trying to light a cigarette in his pocket so that the bus driver wouldn't see it."

the one good thing about this sickness that i've had is that it has reset my sleeping schedule. i slept until 9:30 and that was sleeping in really late. it's wonderful. i can get up when tom goes to crew at 6:00 and not feel like a wreck.

the research meeting today was something i didn't want to have to deal with at all. i hammed up the illness a little and managed to get out of there without him noticing that i hadn't accomplished anything since monday because of my plague.

i am feeling much better though. still coughing, but better.

april 15. the ides of april. didn't the titanic sink today? anyway, tax day and like 100 million other lazy asses i mailed in my forms this morning.

today was the first day all week that i've actually done anything. i don't know if i feel better or not, but i'm feeling more active at least.

so i went over to payroll today to find out why i wasn't getting paid for my fellowship that i've had all semester. turns out they layed down a $4500 lump sum check for me back in january that never made it to me. so they traced it, now they've cancelled it, and in three to five business days, i'll be a rich man. word up.

it'll be cool to have income again...

i found out that i have to give a 20 minute oral presentation on my turbulence term project in a month. this is bad. i was hoping to be able to get away with a good paper that i didn't really understand. now the truth will be out, i don't know shit about turbulence.

my mom was asking me ebay strategy questions today. whoa.

big day, i went to class!

why!?

i still felt like ass, so i didn't want to go... but i reasoned that i couldn't afford to keep missing lecture. so i dragged my plague-ridden ass over to class...

...and today's a lecture by the TA.

moogly oogly wasn't even there (it's miguiolo, "me-olo", for reference) i was tempted to just drag myself back home. but i stayed for the whole thing and let ben beat me at chess on my calculator. don't play chess when you're high on robitussin.

i gave up my rook.

dad helped me do my taxes today over AOL instant messanger. that was interesting... i'd send him something like capital dividends? and he'd send 0.

i bought this nighttime cold medicine hoping it would help me get to sleep. this is not the case. however, i do sleep like a rock with this stuff. it just still takes me two hours of tossing, coughing, etc. to get there.

i almost went to class today. i was planning on it an hour before. but common sense grasped hold of me when i stood up to get my bag and my vision went out...

still sick. skipped class, research meeting.

did my radio show, but didn't talk or mix. i just played two CDs straight through.

that sucks because today i was going to do my radio response to MIT's "jesus week" last week. now i'll have to do it next week and by then it will be sort of non-topical. it was going to be cool, though. i haven't done anything really controversial since i got here. haven't felt the need. but jesus week at #!*@$ MIT certainly fueled the fire.

tylenol PM does not put you to sleep.

i'm still sick as hell.

i still can't eat or go to the bathroom, and i'm tired all the time.

i only left the house to go buy some robotussin today.

dad helped me get my taxes done; it's nice to be through with that. guy saw the matrix and loved it. yay. i want to know what nichol thinks of it. she knows more about what makes a movie good than anyone i know. or at least, what makes a movie good to people that make movies...

i did a lot of TV watching today... this new show, the family guy, boggles me. i find every character in there shallow and annoying. but the random jokes are hillarious. today's best two were when the family was preparing for a picnic, and the dad was trying to lay out a bright red blanket for everyone to sit on... when a bull charges him and knocks him off-frame. the other one is when they're watching star trek, and captain kirk is explaining to the bridge crew who will be on the away team:

KIRK: the away team will consist of me, mr. spock, bones, and ensign rickie.

ENSIGN RICKIE: oh crap.

what sucks about TV on weekends is there's no NASA TV.

ok, what is the world coming to? my mother put in a bid on ebay. i don't get it.

also, today marks the 365th day i've done this journal. yep, one year. woo. i was going to spend the weekend making some cool redesign or something for it, but i'm too sick for that. oh well.

WARNING: vivid description of a physical ailment i'm suffering from below. don't read if you're turned off by talk of "poop."

i've contracted a weird sickness again. i don't get it. this one is weird.

i'm suffering from all the effects of malnutrition because i can't bring myself to eat. i can't eat because any food i put in my stomach makes me feel like i wanna puke. this is probably because i haven't pooped in two days. ugh.

i've been pretty much bed-ridden all day. i can't stay awake for very long. i've lost all temperature control of my body; i go from sweating buckets to shivering in a matter of seconds. my blood pressure is really low; every time i stand up, i get tunnel vision and my head starts hurting really bad. i'm really woried that i might pass out. i've started standing up in a really slow manner which looks ridiculous. i can't go to the bathroom - or at least not #2. i don't know what's going on in there. i don't feel constipated or anything, i'm just empty which is odd because i do keep forcing bits of food down...

wow i feel like shit.

svicha and vanja made a video tape for me and gave it to a friend of theirs who is going to BU. he (boris) wrote me an email today. i guess he just arrived back from zagreb recently. i'm going to pick up the tape tomorrow morning.

i'll have to have it converted from PAL to NTSC, but i found a place nearby that will do it for me. i'm excited to see it. really excited. i miss them a lot.

guy and i had our regular molvig research meeting. guy is kinda foobared with his classes. he's taking 3 comp sci classes this term and one nuke-E. if he wants to continue with his doctorate, the navy demands that he pass his qualifiers by next december. this means that he would have to take all of the required classes next term, and some of them aren't offered.

so there's no chance of guy getting a doctorate in nuke-E. his only chance is to get one in comp sci, but molvig is making him drop one of his comp-sci classes... so that probably won't happen either.

so i think guy'll be out in a year. this means that molvig will have to train another person in on kinetic theory, etc. etc. ugh.

molvig said some interesting things about how america has been politically complacent recently with all this business of reducing the nuclear stockpile. i guess he's really pro-nukes. i still don't know where i stand on it. it's a lot more complex that i understand.

so the bursar's office writes me an email, indicating that my funding has come through, and that my late fees have been reversed. i still have to pay for housing, though, which is a big ugly $2000+.

i don't have this kind of money; i'm not going to get paid until april 30, and their deadline is the 19th. ugh.

i'm going to a drag party in bexley on saturday. abie and helen are going to help me get dressed. (literally)

ok, greg is weird. the guy acts like an assholio to me most of the time, but today he asked me if i wanted to get an apartment with him. i played the los alamos card and got out of just having to say "no, you're a big jerk."

so i'm sitting at lunch with evan and i was telling him about going onto the dome the other night. in typical impossible to interest evan style, his response was "why?" i told him it was fun and that he should try it. he said, "i'm not the kind of person who climbs the mountain because it's there."

i had no response to that.

no class today. it was moved to tomorrow. that's good for today, but bad tomorrow. i have 2 two-hour classes in a row, which equates to torture.

classes suck. i can't wait until it's all research. at least that i can do on my own time.

i bought lottery tickets for the first time ever. i'm not sure why. even with the current jackpot of $200,000,000 (!!) i feel like it's ridiculous to try. the jackpot is so high that all but the most sensible people are buying tickets.

i only bought 2, which cost me a whopping $2. still, of my 12 numbers, i didn't get a single one. that should tell me something about the odds. but if no one wins this week, i'll probably do the same thing again.

i'm convinced it's becuase the computer picked my numbers. the numbers i picked weren't there either, but sometimes i wonder if the computer just picks a combo that hasn't been choosen on purpose. well, not really, i trust it... but it's more fun to think that.

makes me feel like i stand a chance or something...

jen (neighbor jen, a.k.a. "no-cal") and i went out to dinner tonight. i haven't talked to her in a long time. she's cliquing-out with ronak and manish, and i never leave my room, so we never seem to hang out anymore.

she's starting to get excited about her wedding, i explained the whole situation about jen (x-gf, a.k.a. "penji").

we went to the other side, which jen declared was good. she even ate that spooge-smelling cheese that i avoid.

when we got back, i took a little nap. it was about 7:30 when i went to sleep, no problem.

so i wake up at 1:00am, and i've slept through my radio show. !@&$%%!@#

jen and i decide to go hang out on the dome. we didn't go to the very top, because the dome is actually very steep when you get right up to it, but we were on the curvy part. fun.

my enormous nap made me lie awake until 8:00am. how obnoxious. and then i woke up at 10:30 and felt like nothing was amiss. weird.

a random email from helen today indicated that she had found another roof access for us. this time, it was on the main campus complex, between buildings 7 and 9. getting to the top of main campus means that you can get almost anywhere. the main dome building blocks passage to the "even numbered side" of main campus, but we had free access to buildings 1, 3, 5, 7, 7a, 9, and 11. we only went on 7 though.

7 is the building with the minor dome. we walked around the base of the dome, which sits on a 7' tall platform. the roof of 7 is equal in height to the top of ashdown, so it is about 7 stories tall.

i couldn't see any way to get inside the dome from outside. there is a large space inbetween the interior dome at the top of lobby 7 and the exterior dome on the roof, but i can't figure out how to get there. the floorplans for 7 don't reveal it, and i didn't see any exterior doors.

there was a window in the side of the 7' dome platform which revealed the elevator pully room, and the floorplans indicate that that space should have a corridor into the intra-dome space. however, looking through the window revealed that the corridor had beed sealed shut with bricks.

there must be another way in, but i suspect it is from the ceiling of the fourth floor.

i went back to the roof later tonight, and went on buildings 3 and 5.

*

quotes for the day:

"you obviously arent experienced in the art of weirding people out over the internet."
-Rolf

"you're black, and i want to be black...
i want to be a black jew."
-Lynda

after hearing a bunch of good reviews from various people, i decided that i want to go see the matrix. as much as i hate keanu reaves, the reviews seem good.

so guy and i went to see it tonight. but it was sold out at the cheri so we opted to see 'ed TV' instead. it was surpsingly funny. the movie had a few goofy parts that were annoying, but overall i wasn't disappointed. i'd stall rather have seen the matrix though. i'm gonna go tomorrow for the matinee tomorrow.

it was funny watching ed TV and seeing how making his life public fucked up a lot of relationships he had with people. not too disimilar from my journal, and how people have gotten pissed about it.

brian and i both wanted to go see the matrix today, so we went to the early 1:00pm matinee.

i was just thinking to myself a couple of days ago that it's weird how much i enjoy the old TV show called 'the wild west.' i love jim west, with all his kung-fu and hidden weapons. he's james bond from the 1840s. one of the previews at the matrix was for a new movie called, 'the wild wild west,' starring will smith(??). so now jim west is black, and there's a giant mechanized town-crushing spider to boot.

not much resemblance to the original series, but like all will smith movies it has a catchy rap anthem.

they also played the new starwars trailer, which is even cooler on the big screen with the big sound.

so, the matrix. here we go: these special effects are great. if you like that gap swing commercial where the dancers freeze and rotate in midair, then you'll love this movie. cause they use that shot a lot. bullets freeze in mid-flight, actors pause in the air while kicking ass, etc. lots of freeze and rotate.

but it's cooler in the matrix because it's not just a neat way to film fighting, it's supposed to be an actual effect on the world caused by the characters.

yeah, so anyway, the effects are great. it's probably in my top 2 or 3 effects movies ever. and i'm a big fan of SFX, so that alone was worth the $5.25.

next, it was cheesy but in a funny way. i'm not saying this is a 'good' movie, but it is definitely funny to watch and very entertaining. the spoon kid and a few other scenes could be done without, but it's still a fun movie.

another thing that i noticed and appreciated was the heavy use of reference in the movie. there's a lot of paraphrased bible quotes. there's scenes seemingly taken out of other movies. it's uncanny.

anyway, i came away from this movie wanting to see it again.

i had a slow day, so that's just what i did. i walked my dumb ass back to the theatre at 7:00pm for another showing. the second time was that much better.

the first time i thought it was just cheesy, the second time made it clear to me that this was intentional and that it was a satire on this sort of action/thriller movie. the first time i saw some religious quotes, the second time i saw more and it seemed to be religious satire. this is a good thing. also, i picked up even more references to scenes from other movies.

the wired review is right; the movie draws - nay, steals scenes right out of movies like superman, the truman show, the terminator, men in black, the good the bad and the ugly, bladerunner, alice in wonderland, total recall, the x-files, the lawnmower man, and a bunch of christian mythology. but it does it in a good way. it's a good thing.

some were blatant, like the standoff in the subway where the newspaper blows acorss the set just like the tumbleweed in 'the good, the bad, and the ugly.' some were more subtle like the choreography of some of the kung fu, taken from 'enter the dragon.'

it was so much better the second time because i didn't come away feeling like it was inherently a bad movie. i thought it was clever, if somewhat purile on the surface. there's certainly more to this movie than it seems.

my conversation with yang:

[TV weatherman indicates that the temperature this week will drop back down into the fourties. yang raises his arms as if to cheer.]

MOUSER: what, you're glad it will be cold?

YANG: i prefer colder weather, yes.

M: you wouldn't rather it be comfortable and warm?

Y: no.

M: why not?

Y: when it's warm females wear less clothing.

M: everyone wears less clothing when it's hot. why is that a problem?

Y: i find it difficult to control my eyes.

M: so? [at this point i'm egging him on]

Y: i don't want to just stare at someone's breasts.

M: why not?

[ yang leaves the room.]