Checksum Arcanius

Yesterday was a sunny and successful day. I woke up to my phone-alarm at 5:50 and showered, then had breakfast with Dan at Chaces’ Pancake Corral. After this, I headed home and switched the Highlander for the Truck and my bike. The next stop was Ian’s house for the TRC leadership meeting, which I thought was pretty productive. I had to leave that about 40 minutes early to make it to the South Bellevue Park & Ride, where I met up with Dan and biked West across the I-90 bridge. We made it to the Mercer Island-Seattle bridge deck around 11:40, and the Blue Angels arrived a bit after noon. The show was quite good – better than last year’s, if I remember correctly. It was fairly long – over 30 minutes – and displayed a good number of tricks, including four or five at the end of the show with all six planes working together. It was a good time. After the show, we ate at Subway on the island, then headed back to my truck which we took into Seattle to search for housing for me. We found a number of nice and a few sketchy places that I’m looking into, then enjoyed some Jamba Juice before heading back. I had dinner with the Marshes, excellent ribs by Jay and a great supporting cast including beans, vegies, salad, and bread by Kay. The Parkins were also in attendence, and the conversation was good. The night was wrapped up by watching fear.com, a pretty ridiculously bad movie, but, as I was explaining to Jason, not as bad as some films I have seen. It kept me up a little longer than I would have liked and then I compounded the problem when I stayed up and chatted online. The result is this – although I woke up at 5:50 to my phone alarm, I went back to sleep and only became cognisant around 9:00am. So that didn’t work so well. However, I should be back in my own bed tonight – when I visited yesterday to pick up some stuff, the toxicity part II was mostly dissipated, and the ventilated rooms, including mine, were quite nice to be in. Many thanks to the Marshes for letting me hole up here in the meantime. I enjoy avoiding affixiation.

I’ve been on a recent binge of room cleaning, inspired by everything getting rearranged while I was gone as part of the ongoing remodel. The result is that I’ve found some worthwhile old stuff that, frankly, I hadn’t even thought of in years. Most of it was not quite valuable enough to sell, but I also wanted to overcome my pack rat tendencies and jettison the excess. So what does one do in this situation? Freecycle!

Freecycle is a worldwide movement aided by the rise of the internet. Basically, online freecycling communities for geographic areas are formed and are linked to from the freecycle website. I signed up a while ago after I learned about the concept from Jason, who is someone that I don’t remember how I know. Regardless, I started receiving the emails and even put in a request for a few of the items, though I was always too late. But getting stuff isn’t even where Freecycling is cool. Where it gets cool is giving stuff away.

For example, during the aforementioned cleanup, I found an old Rio 600 32mb MP3 player that I haven’t used in ages. I had mostly forgotten that I even had it. Well, its not useless – but since I have an iPod, I would never use it again. And if I were to go to the trouble to sell it on eBay, I MIGHT get $5 out of it. Not even worth the time. But… when I Freecycled it, I got the following response:

thanks a bucnch!!!!!! i loooooooooooove it! it is sooooooo awesome! thank you thank you thank you thank you THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Which to me, at least, is worth a lot more than $5.

My friend Creighton has been putting out a web comic for a while now called Trivium Entertainment. It is quite a good read, and much of the humor is quite fabulous, if I could say so myself. Even if web comics aren’t your thing (they aren’t mine), this one’s worth a gander, especially if you are tech-savvy, but even if you aren’t.

Go take a look!

FYI, its worth starting at the beginning to get a better understanding of the characters.

My recent favorties are #88, #91, and #97.

Finally getting back to the bike trip theme, here is a synopsis of our goings-on in the nation’s capital. We arrived Saturday morning via train from Hartford, Connecticut at about 2:00 am. Lew Cramer, who is by all accounts an amazing man, proved again that he is a superhero by picking us up at the train station at that early hour AND giving us a guided tour on the way to his house. We slept in the next day before being dropped off at Ballston Mall, where there is also a Metro (Suway) stop. At the mall, Scott got shoes (his cycling shoes were less comfortable than mine) and I got backpack, shorts, and shoes. We then headed out on the Metro for the Smithsonian stop, and began the grand tour. We visited a lot that afternoon, including the National History and Natural History museums, a good look at the Capitol, the FDR, Jefferson, and Lincoln Memorials, and the Vietnam, Korea, and WWII memorials. By then it was getting late, so we headed back to Ballston where our gracious hosts picked us up once again.

Sunday, we repeated the procedure, but this time at the West Fall’s Church stop. The line to the National Archives was longer than it had been before, so we skipped it agian and instead hit up the National Galleries and the Air and Space Museum before enjoying a wonderful meal with the Cramers that evening and vegging out to Star Wars: A New Hope that night.

On Monday, the Cramers left for the week, so we let ourselves ou of the house, caught the bus, hooked up with Tim, took the Metro to his place where we dumped our stuff for the day, returned to the mall to chat, drink, and have fun while waiting for the fireworks to begin. The fireworks where on the wrong side of the National Monument, and we couldn’t hear the music at all from where we were sitting, but it was still a pretty good show. Not quite to the standard of a multi-trillion dollar government budget though, in my opinion.

After the show, we braved huge crowds to make it back to Tim’s place, where we picked up our stuff before heading back to the Metro for the ride into Union Station, where we were catching a 3:00am train for New York. Unlike in NYC, where the traisn run all night, WDC’s system shuts down around midnight, so we had to hustle to make sure we would make it, which we did, but just barely. At the train station, we snoozed some before making our way on to the train where we snoozed some more and the train slowly got more full. We arrived in New York before Maneesh left his apartment, and made our way to his location that morning. But that, as they say, is another story.

Heed these writings, both on politics and society. Powered by a keen mind that processes a lot of information, the Well of Mimir seldom fails to provide exceptional reading.

Some of my recent favorites:

• Review: Joel’s Interview
• Why an Inheritance Tax is a Bad Idea
• Cracks in the facade

Recent events

85/100 on Circuits test… Not exactly what I would have hoped for, but better than I was expecting after I screwed up the op-amps. I’ve gotta kick it into a higher gear here soon, if I want to pull out of the mid-B rut that I’ve gotten myself into in the class.

Started building an ROV with Dan Marsh and the TRC. For more, see Dan’s post about it.

Collecting parts for a future SRS Robo-Magellan entry. Recently picked up a GPS reciever module (thanks to Dan for the tip). The module requires an active antenna, so I went looking for a good one, and settled on the Mighty Mouse II, a high gain, low power active antenna that rocks my socks. An especially big shout out to Tri-M Systems for working with me to help get the unit from Canada to the TRC quickly and efficiently. Go buy their stuff, yo!

Saw Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy twice in two days. Once was plenty, but a combination of circumstance and commitment led me to watching it a second time. Suffice it to say that it’s not one of those movies that gets better the second time through. I didn’t hate it the first time, though, and the second time, though not anywhere near wonderful, was not bad, and the company (Shai and Beth) was good too.

Installed a 9-in-4 card reader in my desktop computer. The unit was recieved from Dan along with a wired USB optical mouse in exchange for a Microsoft Wireless Intellimouse Explorer that wasn’t well-suited for gaming due to miniscule but noticable start-up lag times, and wasn’t well suited for a laptop due to its battery requirements. I think the trade was mutually beneficial. Everyone shoudl trade more, its good for everyone involved (but if I went too much further down this line of thought, I’d have to add this to the political category as well).

Began helping Erik set up his new dedicated server. Debian Linux is a good distro. It should go back to #1, yo. Silverfir.net, and perhaps TitanRobotics.net, will host some of their websites on the new server as well. The server is from ServerPronto, and its a good price for a dedicated server with the specs it boasts. We’ll see how it holds up once Erik’s proxy servers get going.

Played Ultimate Frisbee at the UW’s intramural field 1 on Friday with the team of Bobby, Jake, Joe, and others. We lost by a point to an evenly matched team, which seems to be the story of my ultimate life. It was good fun, however. Afterwards, we hung out at the UW until seeing Hitchhiker’s for the first time.

Went to a doctor Thursday morning. I have low blood pressure. Nothing too serious, though, apparently. I can eat more salt. Is this a good thing?

Talked to Scott about the upcoming bike trip.

Last Saturday, Theo and I went to Wade’s Gun Shop & Shooting Range in Bellevue to discharge some firearms. Theo brought his 9mm Star pistol, and I paid the $12 to rent any gun from Wade’s case. In all, we shot maybe 600 or 700 rounds – 400 from his gun and the rest spread between a variety of 45 ACP (Kimber Custom II is a very nice operating gun), 40 S&W (The S&W itself was pretty nice, but I was getting tired by that point, so its hard to tell how nice it really was), and 9mm Luger pistols. The thing I really learned is that I am a pretty terrible marksman. In fact, as the day went on (we shot for about 4 hours), I got worse as I came to better anticipate the hammer coming down. The anticipation led to a twitch that pretty much destroyed my aim. When the firing comes more as a surprise, as Theo mentioned, accuracy goes up. So I have some work to do. But fortunately, it all ended well, as I placed the last bullet stright through the bullseye (maybe my only one of the day) while holding the gun with a single hand. Woohooo! Go me!

All in all, I had a great time and would like to go back to improve and get a better feel for what gun I would want to eventually own.