MOE seminar: Indoctrinating the next generation of MIT miscreants with our knowledge and skills.

Afterwards, several of us went to E10 and E20, the two buildings slated for destruction to make way for the new Media Lab addition. E20 is completely gutted. The inside was suffering from several months of unuse.

E10 is in the process of being vacated. Many of the rooms are empty, some of the faculty offices are still occupied but they don't have long to go. The building has a great vertically-situated mechanical room with many grill floors separated by ladders. A playground for UE dorks.

Right now, as i type this, the NEAR spacecraft is at its point of closest approach to the asteroid Eros. It's about 5km above the surface - closer than any spacecraft has ever been to another body without landing/crashing. Images returned should reveal sub-meter features. I don't know about you, but this is just fantastically amazing to me.

And, in other news, it turns out that the sport... of Dwarf Tossing...

Dwarf Tossing. yes.

...is dealing with some legality issues. Apparently some people find the idea of tossing midgets for fun to be offensive.

I'm not prepared to think about such issues, I'm still back on comprehending the idea that dwarf tossing is a sport.

Sweet! Turns out I'm a breast surgeon.

Elevator surfing. Green building. Wow.

Draining was fun. It was good to see Peter, it's a shame I couldn't show him something more spectacular in return for the stuff he introduced me to in Minneapolis this past August. His friend Aaron was also really cool.

I slept through the morning session of Mars Week. The afternoon talks were really great. The space artist guy was talking about our early missions to mars where he commented that "Mariner 3 sampled the Atlantic ocean." Nyuk, nyuk.

The flight surgeon guy was even funnier. He opened up his talk with a slide that had an equation like delta = 2 f omega pi. He said, "Now, I don't know what this means - I just made it up. But this is MIT and you're all engineers, and I wanted you to know that I'm sensitive to your needs."

The banquet was far better than expected. I sat next to the keynote speaker, a woman named Penny Boston. She's doing research into how to determine the existance of microscopic living organisms in extreme environments like Mars, thermal vents, the arctic, and... caves! She's a professor at the University of New Mexico, spearheading the microbiology research movement at Lechuguilla! She had all these great photos to show and we talked about caving a lot, etc.

And as we left for the night, she said, "maybe we'll go caving sometime!"

WH00T!

Coffeehouse was ok. No interesting locales, but good people. Oh, and I won the contest for Worst Pool Player at Coffeehouse by unanimous popular vote after a game against Mike.

I remember when I was celebrating my 10th birthday. My father was saying something about my having graduated to double-digits. I crumpled up a piece of wrapping paper and threw it onto the pile of ribbons, boxes, and paper that had accumulated beside the dining room table. Misty, being the feisty youngster, was occupying herself with a valourous battle against the ribbon monster.

The ball of wrapping paper just happened to come down right on her back. In her agitated state, she saw the light tap on the back as a sneak attack by some hidden minion of the ribbon, and proceeded to jump a good four feet into the air.

Her less-than-graceful landing was followed by a mad dash across the wooden floor, blazing a trail through the wrappings. As she got to the hall, an attempted left turn into the living room ended in failure as her extended claws couldn't grip the floor. Her run turned into a roll and then a slide, ending with a crash against the bathroom door.

I've never laughed so hard in my life.

So at 11:15 this morning, they euthanized my cat, Misty. She was having kidney trouble and a some sort of neurological problem that prevented her from moving properly. Looked like she was in a lot of pain.

She lived to the heroic age of 20.

So the shuttle finally launched last night, and it was one of the best launches I've ever seen. There were light clouds with removed the corona from the view of the rocket exhaust. As a result, you could see details of the turbulent gasses shooting out of the solid rocket boosters. It made it look even more powerful. In addition, they mounted a camera in the flight deck looking over the shoulders of the astronauts and out the front windows. It allowed me to see the strong vibration of the main engines coming online, the shock of the SRBs activating, the rocky first two minute ride, then a blinding flash when the SRBs separate. For the next six minutes, the view out the window gets considerably less blue and more black, just like I imagined it would. As it gets darker, the bright flashes of the RCS jets firing can be seen at seemingly random intervals. By the time of main engine cutoff, it is very dark in the cabin and the RCS flashes are like lightning. It was a very odd view. Surreal. Having seen it, I feel like I know what it's like to launch.

After watching the launch replays, I went to my first radio show of the season. I had a great lineup of MP3s to play from my laptop, but the damn thing is still gimped up. My MP3s skip when played from the laptop. I don't know where the problem is. I copied the MP3s from my NT box, where they play fine. Winamp plays CDs and .WAVs fine, so it must be the OS. Bill Gates, you are the eternal pain in my proverbial arse. I was subbing for the show before me, so I did a four-hour super show. It was a good one. The new Underworld live album (Everything, Everything) is great!

On the way home, I met Rob and we checked out the Mass Ave. construction. There's a 5'6" drain that they're laying down the middle of the street. Currently, it goes from in front of Necco to Albany St., where it ends in a brick wall. Presumably, it'll eventually connect to the big 10' square conduit that is being layed down Mem Dr.

So apparently, ever since I posted My sister's URL, she has been getting email from peOple looking for me. Is my email address Unbearably hard to find? It's linked from the linkS page in the old interface. It's also linkEd from all of the megaball pages, each of the bomb descRiption pages, and @ the main beeps & whistles page.

I guess soMe AOL users named Amy dOn't like to dig for it. Well, just for her, I've inclUded the address somewhere in this poSt...

Anyway, an Exciting day in the news! Looks like the middle east is going to go to waR. A war between Israel and various Arab nations would be a bad thing for us. Without our assistance, Israel is screwed. With Our assistance, OPEC hates AmeRica. I'm sure Glad I'm not running for president... And to boot, a terrorist attack on a US military vessle, and one of the fifth-largest drops in the stock market ever. Pop some popcorn and fire up the CNN.

I don't believe it; my sister has a website. Ha!

Last night was the L0pht party at Dildog's place. Several interesting things of note. He built a MAME ("Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator") machine, in an arcade cabinet. The screen is actually a huge monitor and there's a computer in there with emulators for everything from atari to super-NES to arcade vids. It has real arcade-style joysticks and pushbuttons. I spent a little too much time playing Rampage with Jim.

One of the reasons for throwing the party was Dil's new video projector, which was playing Geiss along with the music for awhile. Wow. I've never seen a sharper projcetor; it kicks ass. Hobbit got Dil's old crufty camcorder, hooked it up to the projector, and we took turns making amazing video feedback. Similar to the old Jeff F stuff I bought when I was in high school, so many years ago.

If you've never spent an hour or so discovering how to make video feedback images move and change at your will, I highly recommend it. It was amazing. It looked so good, in fact, that a good portion of the party got involved in helping make the images transform on the wall. Fun party activity.

So yesterday lots of wacky stuff happened. Rob and I went to the boston public library, which, by the way, is in an awesome building. We went to the government documents section and researched drainage plans for the greater boston metropolitan area. We found a goldmine of information and made copious photocopies.

I went to Hani's party at the Arsenal. Gif was sporting his theatrical contacts (w/ little swirlies) and lots of medieval weaponry. He even had my personal favorite knight-in-shining-armor-implement, the morning star. Very cool. He said that I give off the aura of someone who would work in a rennesaince festival. I'm not sure how to take that.

I started taking pictures of people wearing Hani' s fez. And I had a couple white russians and started getting silly.

I left to go to coffeehouse. Don't drink and hack, kids. I wasn't really drunk so I went out anyway. We climbed around in the subbasement 9 jungle gym and then to the E40 chiller. I got to show off the lockpicking a little, opening one lock in two strokes. Woo!

Lots of good stuff happened to day: Molvig went to Los Alamos, leaving me alone for awhile. I got Aaron's Photo Trust Project camera and some assorted other goodies - this CD rocks!! Much progress was made on the railgun.

I guess the only part that sucked was getting up at 5:00am to finish my homework. That's never good.

Oh, and I almost forgot. This guy is coming to visit, and we're going to go do some serious drain exploring. woo! Rob and I went out and scouted around the norther suburbs for good drains, and found a great drain entrance.

'm sitting on the student center steps eating my lunch and throwing bread at pigeons. Next to me in the courtyard is a display of alternative-fuel cars featuring a pickup truck that says "Fueled by Natural Gas" on the side.

This construction worker walks up to me and sits down next to me with his lunch box. He starts talking to me like he knows me, and he sounds annoyed.

"What the hell would I want that for? A truck powered by natural gas? That costs more than regular fuel!"

Somehow I think he might be running on a lean mixture, himself.

pick, slide, pick, unscrew, pull, trace, strip, clip, strip, screw, probe, screw, glue, test, screw, close, activate.

Project Hemorrhoid successful.
Begin Operation pool party.

So the technician is down replacing the magnetic strike on the front door of our building. I hang around to watch. After determining that the device was broken, he removes it and puts in a new one. He hands me the old one and says,

"I was just over at another MIT building replacing the fire control panel, and the kids there asked for the broken one and took it apart right there on the floor. Let me guess, you want this thing."

"You're damn right."

So. The Nader rally. The entire arena smelled like pachuli (sp?), I shit you not.

Michael Moore was hillarious, Howard Zinn was great, Ralph Nader is a very good public speaker. Phil Donahue, well... he needs some work. Especially after saying this:

"Canada pays billions less, per capita, than we do on health care."

Well, if that's the case, then I don't think I'm getting my multi-billion dollars worth of health care from the US, something must be wrong.

Anyway, the green party has some good points and a refreshing honesty that I enjoy but there's several key issues I don't agree with and so, even after the rally, they don't get my vote. Sorry, Ralph. It's like Donahue said, "You should vote for Ralph because he believes what you do. And that's the only reason to vote for anyone for the president of the United States."