Category Archives: lists

General, lists, The Singularity, Uncategorized

Some Notes for Thursday

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Couple random items from around the web for you this morning:

First, a short Obama ad about a summertime reprieve from the gas tax, with a good point:

Second, I do enjoy lists. New Scientist offers a list of the Top Ten Fictional Scientists in popular culture.

Finally, it’s exciting that Kyle and Robin will be headed to Thailand next month to pick up Thanu, but I’m a little conflicted on their plans for conditioning him to accept the reality of the coming robot menace. I guess it will be up to MY children to lead the resistance.
Thanu's robot overlords
And a PS, not from the webs, but from the real world– today is Grandma’s birthday. She is 77!

General, lists, Uncategorized

Made it home. Stop.

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Sorry for the telegram-style post. Busy @ work. Made it to Sioux Falls by 1AM Monday. Forgot that it was bike week, South Dakota overrun w/ bikers. Don’t like Sturgis. Deadwood seems kind of neat, if not for 3000 Harleys parked in a 6-block downtown area.

Rapid City likewise overrun. No bikers panning for gold, so that was OK. Met a western film vet/quick-draw record-holder. Accidentally saw Mt. Rushmore in passing. All heads intact. Rapid City-area is marketed almost as heavily as WI Dells. Drove through Custer State Park in SD, but had a hard time enjoying it w/ very heavy motorcycle traffic/noise. Saw a herd of buffalo. Bikers not very conscientious of their highway crossing.

Wall Drug same as ever. Michelle bought souveniers. We ate ice cream. Motel 6 in Sioux Falls cheap, adequately comfortable. Minnesota boring. Played a lot of the Yes & Know book games on Monday.

Also went to state fair on Monday night back home, consumed the following:
– two 20-oz. beers
– corn, 1 cob
– bratwurst, 1 (with sauerkraut)
– spiral-cut potato chips (one heaping plateful)
– half a thing of cheese curds
– a few bites of Michelle’s elephant ear
– half a cream puff
– butter pecan ice cream cone

General, lists, Uncategorized

Present, If Not Accounted For

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Lemme just break down the high-level stuff for you this morning:

– Memorial Day: good. Drive was OK. Tough getting out of town on I-43, but it loosened up sooner than I thought it would. I got about 42 miles/gallon on the trip. Helped Dad with splitting/stacking wood on Saturday, then on Sunday, the splitter puked. Dad’s afraid he needs a new engine or something. That could suck. Sunday, I met Petters out at the T-Bird. It was my first time there since Knitt was drinking, but pretty much all the same people were there. I think I even saw one of Knitt’s uncles or cousins or whomever.

– Work: fine. It’s all the same crap that I was doing before, but with less hawking. I’m starting to get a sense of the office cliques and figuring out who-hates-who. I was recruited for one of the groups and shot down membership by effectively stating, “I don’t give a good goddamn about any of that shit. I work, I go home, I come back.”

– Apt search: sucks. I passed on a 2-bdrm on WI Ave after Michelle talked me back into my actual price range. I also have no chance of purchasing a home for the foreseeable future. Not that I was really desperately itching to do either, but that revelation also made me realize that I probably won’t be able to afford getting married or having a kid any time in my 30s.

– Brewers: on notice. Went to the game last night w/ Lorch for zero monies (he had vouchers for free tix from eating pizza). It was nice to see them finally get a win, but one cannot escape the fact that in any other division, this team would have squandered a substantial lead.

– Time: out for now.

lists, Uncategorized

Enumeration

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One of the things that goes along with getting my new job (and goes along with getting any state job these days, actually) is a criminal background check. The paperwork has been a little challenging for me so far.

I’m certainly not concerned about what will come up on this check, but the first thing they ask you to do is “list all addresses at which you lived in the past seven years. Continue on back, if necessary:”

Oh, and I continued.

What I thought was interesting as I made the list was thinking back to the days that I moved in and the days I moved out of all these places. I can remember each one. God-DAMN I have moved a lot in a short period of time. Seven years feels like it was a century ago. Here’s my list:

DATES STREET CITY STATE ZIP
7/1/06-present 661 Division St Oshkosh WI 54901
7/1/04-6/30/06 470 N Main St Oshkosh WI 54901
11/1/03-6/30/04 2080 Dickinson Ave Oshkosh WI 54904
6/1/03-10/31/03 2716 Woodridge Ln Waukesha WI 53188
1/20/03-5/31/03 606 Nelson Story Bozeman MT 59715
8/30/02-1/19/03 Johnstone Hall, Rm 4415 Bozeman MT 59715
7/21/02-8/29/02 3520 Shangri-la Rd Eagle River WI 54521
1/15/02-7/20/02 6140 S 18th St Milwaukee WI 53221
6/1/99-1/14/02 456 High Ave Oshkosh WI 54901

Wow. Maybe next place I go, I’ll try to settle in a little while.

Hollywood, lists, Uncategorized

3 Stars

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I was looking through my Netflix queue yesterday, filling in “rating” holes for movies that I watched but never made a call on (I know– really stressful, exciting stuff). But I noticed that a large number of these movies got 3 out of 5 stars from me. In the Netflix vernacular, this means “I liked it,” as opposed to 2 stars (“I didn’t like it”) or 4 stars (“I really liked it”).

I dunno, this is surely a case where my anal retentiveness and desire to over-quantify something as unimportant as a list of movies, is tripping me up, but I really wish there were half-star marks you could make on this thing. There are movies that I gave a 3 just because I couldn’t say “I didn’t like it,” and others that got a 3 just because I didn’t “really” like it. I mean those are 5’s and 7’s out of 10, respectively. There’s a net difference of a full star there, but the system doesn’t let me account for it.

Well, really, though, who gives a shit? On the Netflix scale, I would give this post 1 star (“I hated it”).

lists, Uncategorized

Distracted

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I’ve got a bunch of things on my mind this week, and it’s complicating my work and my blog. There’s also the fact that I’m out of coffee at work, and keep forgetting to bring in more. I get caffeine headaches now, which I never used to, and it’s quite a bummer when I’m off the stuff. But I digress.

So late last week, I ran the following numbers:
DATE I ENTERED UW-OSHKOSH AS A FRESHMAN: 9/3/1997
DATE I LEFT UW-OSHKOSH w/ A BACHELOR’s DEGREE: 12/15/2001
TOTAL ELAPSED TIME: 4 YRS, 3 MONTHS, 12 DAYS

DATE I ENTERED MSU-BOZEMAN AS A GRAD STUDENT: 8/26/2002
DATE I TRANSFERRED TO UW-OSHKOSH AS A GRAD STUDENT: 2/2/2004
TOTAL ELAPSED TIME SINCE GRAD STUDIES STARTED (degree incomplete): 4 YRS, (and very nearly) 8 MONTHS

One of my master’s program colleagues was in the office the other day to talk to my boss. He started after me, and he’s defending his thesis this month. That really sort of put some stuff in perspective for me and made me realize I need to quit dragging my feet.

So my plan for this week is to get done with the paperwork that needs to go through in order to start on my thesis. Rindo seems to think I could still get out even as early as the fall. Personally, I don’t know how that would happen, but spring suits me fine, too.

I’ve gotta get back in a writing mode and scrape some rust off my brain so that what I do in the fall is actually worth something. I’ve been so goddamn tired or making excuses for why I can’t work. I really need to kick myself in the ass.

There are some professional distractions hovering around my mind this week, too, and hopefully I’ll have more to say about that by next Monday. Things are coming to a head, I think you could say.

I also totally flaked on the Netflix subscription coming out of my bank account this week, so I’m goddamn overdrawn, and what that basically means is that the sandwich I had for lunch last week is gonna cost me 40 dollars. Stupid, stupid bullshit.

I gotta try to concentrate. If I manage to formulate a coherent thought, you mind get wind of it.

lists, Uncategorized

Constant Updates

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I’m really tired and I should have been in bed an hour or so ago. I had to finish a movie first.

I haven’t had much that was very blogg-o-riffic the last couple weeks. Work has been really busy. I haven’t done much in the evenings, and I probably oughta change that.

Here is a quick list from the weekend:
– I saw the Brewers loss on Friday with Dave, but they did have a winning weekend
– I had to go to work for a while on Saturday. It was OK.
– I went to Kilian’s 3rd birthday party, but since my ‘work’ had run late, I rushed over there without my card or my camera. A couple pics from my phone are on the Flickrs.
– I slept way too late this morning after not being able to sleep last night
– I have converted the last Windows holdover that I had in my house (the laptop)– I am now a linux-only sorta guy (which was a long time coming), and only interesting to the geekiest among you, I’m sure
– I started reading John Hodgman’s book, The Areas of My Expertise. It is funny.

OK. Bed time.