The last post of the year. Been feeling like crap lately. Watched 15 hours of DVDs yesterday; did nothing else. My eyes hurt.

My new years extravaganza was predictably sub-par, though it did involve playing a lot of Marble Madness and Tempest on vintage vids, learning what a tensegrity sphere is, and making drunken plans to go to a junkyard and buy parts for the recumbant computer and turbojet.

The Boston police are out en force this new year's on Segway Human Transporters. Makes me want to make a police show like CHiPs except I'll call mine SHiTs.

So my 2 weeks of boredome won't be so lonely afterall, Albert came back today.

And with his return came... a DVD player for Cruftlabs! woo! Which is good, because I still have 25 24 23 more DVDs that I've never watched. This is mostly due to the arrival of my Macross boxed set [9 discs] and the recent acquisition of Robotech boxed sets #2, #3, #4, and #5, which are 3 discs each. hehe I'm a whore for this crap.

And Star Trek 1 is every bit as cheesemonster as I remember it. And who knew that the music from it is the same as the music from ST:TNG?

OK Bean is a huge nerd. She's in Brazil, and writes to tell me about what? That she has found an Attack From Mars pinball machine there and an analysis of how it differs from the machines here.

The MFA has removed the samurai swords and armor from their display. They put up a cool Netsuki display in its place, but still... the swords ruled. And my Mark Tansey painting is still gone. Grumph.

And my linux box is in its death throes. Debian time?

Think positive. Payday: Monday.

Bean was in town this morning before getting on a plane for Brazil. She's so lucky... She's just cruising around the country for a month by herself. We went to lunch at a Tibetan place in central square I had never noticed before. Very authentic.

The only other event of note today was the arrival of my birthday presents (finally! they were marked as arriving at MIT on the 22nd, delivered to my office this afternoon. Thank you MIT mail). My sister, who has a long legacy of giving me silly gifts, gave me a "Kung Fu Hamster." This consists of a stuffed hamster in a martial arts outfit with some nunchuka, and when you press its paw, it starts singing "Kung-Fu Fighting" and dancing around. Wow.

Also in this year's haul were some DVDs (October Sky, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture), a James Gleick book I've been wanting to read forever, and some great coins for my collection. Wh00t! Go fam!

I think the reactor cops are getting really weirded out by my coming in to work at 2AM on Christmas.

Just this evening, as I came in to work at about 2:30AM, I was accosted by a reactor tech who had never met me before. I told him "I work here" and he said, "well I work here full time and I don't think I've ever seen you before." I've had my office here longer than he has. But I didn't mention that.

So tonight Alex came back from Rhode Island to spend a couple days here before leaving for France and his great sailboat-buying adventure. He promptly discovered that mice had found their way into his camping food supply. They ate right through his backpack to get to it. Caused about $400 in damage to various camping implements.

After cleaning the partially-eaten trail food and mouse turds off his gear, we heard a mouse in one of the boxes in The Pile™ and Alex went after it with a crowbar. He was not pleased. The mouse got away, but only via a heroic leap through the air and into the side of a desk.

Erin called today from the airport during a layover she was having between Maryland and Las Vegas. I don't know how she ends up with these monsterous layovers. This one was five hours, she had one in Albuquerque this summer that was ten. Anyway, I went over to the airport and hung out with her for a little while and saw her new hair, or lack thereof! She really chopped it. It looks cute but apparently her family went totally ape.

Now she's off to Las Vegas for a month of rock climbing. There aren't any rental cars there right now (why? I have no idea, that's just what she said) so they are going to try to buy some $300 beater and drive it into the ground while they're there. I wish I was having wild adventures like that rather than spending my holiday hanging insulation and bothering reactor techs.

Well my birthday was basically a total wash as far as entertainment goes. I slept for most of the daylight hours, and spent the rest of the night working on the warehouse.

So Rob gave me this pack of little mini-puzzles that need to be colored and some crayons for my birthday. The puzzles are all of "space scenes." I don't know who designed these things, but perhaps they should have included some images that aren't of black and white objects for their coloring puzzles. Saturn V: black and white. Lunar surface: gray. Space Shuttle: black and white. VLA antenna: white. Geez!

Alex and I suspended his loft last night. It hangs from the ceiling at a height of 7' and weighs about 100 kg, so getting it up there with just the two of us involved three mechanical advantage systems and all of our climbing ascenders. Once the airline cables were attached and the turnbuckles load-balanced [by listening to the frequency of vibration - very cool], the loft was exceptionally sturdy. For as cheap as it was, I am very impressed.

Now Alex is gone, and I think he was the last of my friends to leave town. So it's all me for the next two weeks. Woo! Bean called from California today to inform me that I really shouldn't be in my office, and she's probably right. She told me that a proper birthday should actually be celebrated over the course of five days. A Birthday's Eve Eve, a Birthday's Eve, the Birthday proper, the Birthday Boxing Day, and the Birthday Boxing Boxing Day.

We decided that I should really choose a new birthday, as the one I have is no good. It should be during the school year when my friends are around, and not near any major vacations. The weather should be nice, etc. We decided that maybe two birthdays would be better. So I'm going to have one in October and one in July. Exact dates TBA.

Until then, today is my Birthday Boxing Day. And I should go out and celebrate!

But instead I think I'll go home and work on the heating ducts.

Well, happy birthday to me.

I am 26 years and seven minutes old.

I went to Jeff's party last night and picked up on all the latest Dave gossip, learned how to make mulled cider, and showed Jeff how to melt pennies with household materials.

After only a few hours of sleep I got up to go catch the morning show of Lord of the Rings. Having a swank theater across the street is such a perk. Especially when the daytime shows aren't $10. And when they accept credit cards from my still-as-of-yet broke ass.

I was very entertained by LOTR. In particular, I liked how they handled how Frodo sees the world around him while invisible, how the ringwraiths look when he's got the ring on, and most of all, I loved the damn balrog. Hot shit that thing was cool. Having read the book several times, the creature I had developed in my head as what a balrog would look like was wimpy and unimpressive in comparison. I think my mind's eye's balrog was a lot more like the cave troll in the movie. ...weak...

I'm also glad to see that Jackson tossed Tom Bombadill, which I always looked at as a scene tagged on to the book for no apparent reason other than to deliver the fancy knife to Merry for use in Book 3. Not sure how this possible continuity problem will be solved in Movie 3, but not having to deal with Bombadill's sing-songy dumb ass was a welcome surprise.

Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.

Oh, and the Balrog could totally kick Sauron's ass. Sauron only has 2 arms, is a mere 10' tall, his eyes don't glow, and he isn't follwed around by a black fog. Oh and no glowing whip. I hope, come Movie 3, they improve the Look&Feel™ of Sauron when compared to the opening scenes of Movie 1. Otherwise, he's toast. Oops I hope I didn't just spoil it for everyone.

So, anyway, I am still broke. MIT won't recut the check - get this - because Fleet told them that I had cashed it. So when I talk to Fleet, they can find no record of it. But it took MIT about 10 seconds to get them to find some record somewhere of the transaction.

But this doesn't change the fact that the money still isn't there. So Fleet is doing a "deep search" which takes 3-5 business days. I think maybe they should upgrade from the PDP-11 that is currently running this 3-5 day search, and maybe run it on a solar calculator instead for improved efficiency. Meanwhile, MIT is producing a photocopy of the cashed check for me [3-5 business days]. When I get that, I'm going to march it over to Fleet and raise hell. Should be fun. Details to come.

Until then, I'm living off a credit card and getting really tired of eating at LeVerdi's.

So good news and bad news. First and foremost, I did a lot better on my plasma final than I was expecting. I got lucky on the hard question and had most of it on my allowed one page of notes. This is not to say that I did well; I would estimate a grade of not more than 50%. But seeing as how a 35% on the midterm was still a B, I'd be more than happy with a 50%.

I don't like classes where everything is so difficult that no one does well on any of the problems. I leave every test and homework feeling like an idiot and assured of failure, only to find that I did quite well in terms of grading. As a result, I don't know where I stand in terms of grasping the material. Was the class intentionally designed to cover material we were not expected to understand? Or have the grades just been inflated and standards lowered?

Anyway, I won't let myself get too worked up over that... I'm done with classwork until February. No more class, no more finals. *sigh*

I was so exhausted after the class that I went home and crashed out for awhile. A long while. I slept from 3:30pm to 9:30pm, basically constituting a full night's sleep and leaving me at the beginning of the evening with no hope of ever sleeping. I went back over to campus and hung out at the Thirsty Ear with some people from the class. We got to witness a very uptight and abnormal desk worker at Ashdown yell at us for attempting to cut through the lobby to get to the car with less rain. It was very humorous and made my night.

So. I went to my office and discovered the bad news. Apparently the salary advance that MIT gave me for my missing October paycheck never appeared in my account. I had the check and I deposited it as usual at the bank, but it's not part of my balance. And as a result I am now $900 overdrawn. Shaz. And I've racked up $100+ in overdraw fees. So this is not good, and it's not my fault. So now I have to spend most of tomorrow probably doing legwork on this.

And I have a stinking suspicion that I'm going to have to eat some of those charges despite my innocence here.

So we finally picked up our fridge this morning. Full sized, ice maker, practically new. Rich people who renovate rule. It wouldn't fit inside Alex's wonderwagon so we had to strap it on top with some spare webbing we had in the back. It was precarious at best. And every bump we went over caused the ceiling to make forboding noises.

Yesterday I saw an enormous falcon sitting in a tree near the reactor. It must have had a four foot wingspan. It was just sitting on a branch, looking very warm with a thick coat of white feathers with little brown spots. It was casually surveying everything that went on around and totally ignoring a pair of seemingly miniscule crows that were highly aggrivated by its presence. Despite all their scquaking, they kept a very safe distance, harly willing to be in the same tree with such a magnificent animal. They're all talk.

So I got Molvicized bigtime yesterday. I got up at six to get extra work done for my big meeting, only to get an email at two telling me that he was in Detroit until Wednesday. That induced sufficient frustration to justify taking the rest of the day off. Planning a climbing trip proceeded immediately.

Mikkel and Bean and I headed off to Dracut, a 45 minute drive, only to find that Mill City Rock Gym is closed on Mondays (and only Mondays). Frustrato-tron! And none of my friends who I invited to come (and who climb there regularly) warned me.

So that was a long trip for basically nothing. But spirits were high and I got to listen to a lot of Mikkel's new Monolake disc which is quite good. Bean and I went and rented "What's Up, Tigerlilly?" when we got back; she's a big Woody Allen fan and hadn't seen that one. Aah, fat Lithuanian midgets, beard-eating moustaches, and very real-sounding but nonexistant countries. I love 'em.

Get the recipe, ass!

So it turns out that, compared to me, rich people have a very different conception of what constitutes being worthless. This, I presume, is the reason that this guy Alex posted a mostly brand-new electric range to reuse which we now have in our warehome. And he threw in the microwave/hood as well. There is actually evidence of them having been used, but not much. Now he's trying to get us to take his refridgerator. Must not suck to have oodles of cash and be able to afford "designer appliances."

But whatever his reasons for giving away perfectly good kitchen hardware, we now have everything we need to construct a functional kitchen with the exception of plumbing.

Kabacon is working towards becoming the next Greddy. He recently built a catapult out of PVC and bed springs, which he then converted to a mangonel. Today he launched a water cooler bottle down the hall with isopropel alcohol and spent all night trying to get advice from me on how to make a flaming-tennisball mortar out of one.

As I was falling asleep, I heard him clicking a piezo-electric sparker out in the hallway. Then he said, "Whoa! My hand was on fire! It worked!"

Holly and I have been skirting the issue of hooking up the power bus to the railgun for about a year, and we've finally done it. And it turned out not to be the big problem we thought it would be.

Drilling all the original alignment holes was a real bitch, but now that we can just clamp it all together and drill straight through the whole rail stack, alignment is easy. And we went way overboard, as is our habit, with the bus bar. It's 3/4" diameter solid copper rod. Probably enough to comfortably carry 1,000,000 Amps. Sadly I don't think we'll get quite that much.

In other news, I did a bunch of electrical work on my room over the last two days. I'm epsilon away from having working outlets in my room. It's exciting. However, home depot was out of the insulation I need, which is holding me up from finishing the job. Next delivery: Dec. 11.

Oh, and my hair is short now. Shorter than it has been since my freshman year of college. The residents of 3E had varying responses from saying "It's pretty" to falling over on the ground crying and wiggling.

I wasted two hours yesterday watching shuttle prep only to have it scrubbed at a T-5 minute hold. Today everything went perfectly and there was a beautiful launch. The sun had just set and launch complex 39-B was in shadow. But just after the roll maneauver, the shuttle passed through the terminator and the exhaust plume changed from a deep grey to a bright sunset orange. Really cool. It almost looked like the boosters had changed propellants or something.

So I'm sitting here waiting for Helen to get home from work because she has offered to cut my now very long and nappy hair, and asked if there was some silly neumonic that she could use to remember my office number. I had never thought about it before, so I looked over at my phone to discover that my on-campus extension is....

DUM-ASS

The wide-ranging implications of this I don't yet fully comprehend.

Update: It's also FUN-ASS; no comment.

I went hiking in the White Mountains with Mikkel and some friends of his today. Climbed two mountains. It was just what I needed.

My feet hurt. And I'm feeling down. And because I know that if I don't include this caveat, you'll do it: Rob this isn't an invitation for you to ask me questions about my mood.