maggied’s blag

I’ve been keen on going to more concerts now, because despite the fact that I live close to New York City, I never made it to many. Vinayak, Capen, his brother, and I all went to Ozzfest yesterday. Vinayak and I took the commuter rail over to Mansfield where, after getting lost for a little while, we met up with Capen and his brother, Aiden. The Tweeter Center in “Boston” (aka 37 miles out of Boston, but whatever) was even larger than I expected. The vendors on the sides of the seating seemed a lot like those you would find at an amusement park or equivalent. The prices were around the same there, too. It was 7 bucks for fried dough. What the heck.

We arrived at Ozzfest around 5:10pm, just in time to see Black Tide start performing. The singer seemed really young, so I looked up the band members on the internet, and lo and behold:

Gabriel Garcia (age 14) – Vocals/Guitar
Alex Nunez (age 17) - Guitar
Zachary Sandler (age 18) - Bass
Steven Spence (age 19) - Drums

Google also mentioned that the sponsor of the second stage didn’t even want to let them play because they weren’t old enough to drink alcohol. I liked Black Tide a reasonable amount, although there were not many people there until the last three bands, so it wasn’t as fun as it could have been.

Lordi was very hit or miss. Capen, for example, knew all the lyrics to their songs, but Static X fans didn’t even want to hear the band play at all. They also had a lot of trouble getting the crowd into it. I personally felt underwhelmed by the band, and kinda liked Black Tide a bit better. Static X was pretty solid, and the crowd really started getting into the music after this point. Their songs are a lot of the same though, as is the case with a lot of bands, so I was getting kind of bored towards the end. Lamb of God was really awesome, and although I couldn’t see it, they incited what Capen referred to as a “maelstrom” circle pit on the lawn. Of all the groups, they are probably the most blasphemous, so I really love their choice of a name.

We stayed around for the first two of Ozzy’s songs. While he was setting up, they played a video of Ozzy taking the place of various characters in movies (Jack Sparrow and so forth). This movie alone was probably worth going. He had a throat infection, so he sounded even more croaky than usual. Everyone was so pumped up that they hardly seemed to notice, though. I concede that Bark at the Moon was awesome, but I didn’t mind leaving.

Overall, I’d mark it as a fun experience, even though I didn’t know any of the bands well (if at all) before attending.

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Well, I was alone in lab until about 9:20. I mention it mainly because I’m typically the last person to arrive in lab during the day, and therefore the last person to leave. This week, though, the trend will probably be reversed.

I was originally going to take this week off to focus solely on rush stuff, but since I missed about 3 weeks worth of work over the course of the summer, I decided to work 20 hours this week. My plan is to work from 9am-1pm, which is convenient because we have a few scans in the morning this week. Once I get out of work, I’ll be able to go home, have lunch, and then everyone else will be getting out of bed to start building. Forcing myself to wake up at 8:15am every morning was something that I tried to do during the summer, but failed miserably. Now that term is around the corner, and I know I have morning classes, it is time to start getting used to waking up early again.

Hopefully my grand plan will not be thrown off as rush stuff really gets started, although according to a few upperclassmen, it probably will be. I’m not one to miss sleep though, no matter the cost, so I guess we will see.

Speaking of rush stuff, progress is already being made. We moved all the wood on Saturday, which proved to be a bit more of a bitch than expected. Home Depot brought a forklift to help move the lumber, but couldn’t comfortably get it into the courtyard, and refused to move the rest of the order anywhere near. So we got out whatever we could and hauled/drove the rest of the wood over near Talbot.

Yesterday, the tour guide cage was built, and Vlad made a pogo stick again. Raphael, Vinayak, Anthony and I set up the speakers and the courtyard got its supply of AC/DC, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Queen, Cake, and Dropkick Murphys. Hopefully we’ll get some Flogging Molly going later today. Two bigger projects also started building. For the Hamster wheel vehicle (James O.’s baby), both wheels are finished, and preliminary testing of the differential drive system have been conducted. Moving the two wheels together proved really difficult, but playing around with them individually was actually really fun. Olga’s rotating seesaw project also made a reasonable amount of progress. There was a significant bottleneck due to the fact that she needed to dig a 3-foot deep hole in rocky soil with nothing but two mediocre shovels and a crowbar. After that was done, the supports for the seesaw were installed, and there was lots of dancing and photos taken on top of the main beam.

It’s almost time for scanning, but I’ll post more in the upcoming days about rush including links to pictures if there are any. People probably won’t post any pictures until the end of rush, though. Vinayak and I are going to Ozzfest later today (lolz), so I will comment on that, too.

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People who were away are starting to return to campus (yay!). Sean Kruzel got in on Tuesday, and Vinayak is getting in later today (eeee). All the early returns should be arriving in the next few weeks, and we already have a frosh on hall.

Today I probably had the most expensive meal that I have personally paid for ($35). A few of us went to The Elephant Walk as part of Summer Restaurant Week in Boston. It was delicious. The meals were three courses; an appetizer, Cambodian or French entree, and a dessert. I had a tomato/feta cheese salad, a beef dish with vegetables, and what they called a chocolate truffle, but was more like an extremely rich piece of cake. The restaurant itself was nice, and they were very serious about the whole “Elephant” theme.

I’m excited for this weekend and the week prior to rush. Plans for tomorrow include seeing Superbad. Seeing George Michael (Michael Cera) on the big screen should be awesome.

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I felt pretty tired Monday and Tuesday of this week, but things picked up today when the lab took a trip to Professor Corkin’s sister-in-law’s summer house on Canobie Lake. The house was beautiful, and because it was older and then renovated, it was right on the water. Current zoning restrictions would prevent newer homes from being built that close to the lake.

We left the lab at around 9:15am (I actually woke up at 8am, I’m proud of myself), and arrived at the lake around 10. There were lots of munchies to eat, so I snacked on tortilla chips and chatted with the other UROPs that had come along. A whopping 4 UROPs were in attendance this time, so it wasn’t really awkward. Around noon we decided to sit in the sun outside the house, because the wind coming off the lake was pretty chilly. I found a really comfy lounge chair and fell asleep in it for a little over an hour. Unfortunately, I rolled over on my side while I was napping, and I was lying there just long enough for half of my face to get sun burned. It looks pretty silly.

About a half hour after I woke up, David (a grad student in the lab), was finished grilling and we had a very nice lunch. Navine (a UROP in the lab) made cake for Bettiann (the lab admin) because it was her birthday. The cake was pretty awesome; Navine made it from scratch. I ducked out from the party around 4:45pm with David because I was pretty tired from the whole ordeal.

When I came home, a bunch of us went out to play soccer. I hadn’t played in a while; although we only had a handful of people, we still passed the ball around and it was a good time. I think I got a little bit more burned, so it’s starting to balance out the whole “two-face” thing I had going on earlier.

Overall, things seem to be getting better than they have been over the course of the past month; it’s just too bad that the Summer is almost over.

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It has been about a week since the doctor gave me the “okay” to go back to work. I had the follow up appointment last Monday and all the doctor said to me was “Be sure to wash your hands.” Great, I’ll be sure to wash my hands. The visit was not particularly useful, but they had me sign up for PatientOnline, which doesn’t seem completely retarded.

I went back to work Tuesday, and worked pretty much as usual through Friday. During the week I played more Chrono Trigger, and watched Futurama. Nothing too exciting, as exercise still makes me exhausted. I’m close to the end of Chrono Trigger now, so it will be fun to wrap that up later in the week.

Rush is getting closer. As I realized Saturday morning, there is only one more weekend before all the freshmen arrive, and many even start arriving on the 15th. Our new GRT Harold has already started moving in. I’m excited about term and new freshmen, but I’m also a little sad that the summer is almost over.

On an unrelated note, I found this Firefox extension called PermaTabs on the interwubs after I saw Sarah Hopp using it. I think it’s pretty neat, and a feature that I find particularly useful as I tend to use only one Firefox window, and like to keep certain sites open at all times.

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A few days I found an awesome article over at Lifehacker that introduced some new neat features to do with Launchy. It uses curl, which is a neat program that interacts with applications on the web. Basically, you can set up a short batch script that uses curl to communicate with the twitter server. If you’ve added the different services as “friends” on twitter, this will act as sending a direct message to the service via twitter. As it turns out, I’ve mentioned the lovely integration of these different services — Remember the Milk and Google Calendar with Twitter, in the past. If you want to set any of this stuff up, feel free to ask me and I can help you it. It was fairly straightforward, although the actual Twitter interface is not as easy to interact with as it would seem.

The fact that you can do so much with Launchy is really awesome and exciting. There’s a link at the end of the article for even more things that you can use it for, although this application seemed the most useful for my personal purposes. Being able to abstract away from the web interface at whatever level a user desires, be it the command line in Launchy, SMS text messages, or Instant Messaging, is very neat, and something that more sites are starting to offer. In my opinion, this is starting to redefine ways in which people can manage their lives and productivity.

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It’s been a long time since I last posted. To sum it up briefly: I’ve been sick. I haven’t been to work in about two weeks because of it, but it’s hardly felt like a vacation. I think it probably all started with some bad Chinese food on the 23rd of July. I threw it all up, and then couldn’t keep anything down for the next 40 or so hours. Friends pretty much dragged me over to Medical, where they gave me an 2L of saline solution to get hydrated. I was still pretty sick at this time, though, and I wound up staying there until Saturday the 28th. After that, I came home and tried to recover.

I realized that being sick while away at college (particularly when you aren’t dating someone), kind of sucks a lot. You have no one “designated” to take care of you, and so while you are miserable you kind of have to fend for yourself. I never realized how much of a luxury having mom or dad around to make you chicken soup was. I felt guilty asking friends to get me Gatorade or food, and I owe a whole bunch of people money and/or a favor for taking care of me. I felt awkward asking the nurses to help me out while I was sick, because needing help to get changed is a real blow to one’s dignity. It is a nurses job to help me out, of course, but it’s still weird.

When I came home, forcing myself to eat when my body was hardly capable of digesting it was pretty hard to do, and I wound up eating very little and being extremely weak for the time that I’ve been home. Today was the first day that I went outside since I got back from medical. It felt pretty good, but I was really exhausted afterwards. It was worth it, though. We went to see The Simpson’s Movie and it was excellent.

People keep asking me what it was that I did while I was sick, so I’ll share: I watched all of Coupling, a British comedy that aired a few years ago. I really enjoyed it and would highly recommend it. I also watched all of Heroes, despite my previous subconscious decision not to get mixed up with all the hype. I think the series was enjoyable, and I’d probably tell others to watch it, but it’s not all that ZOMG as some treat it. I watched two movies, American Beauty, and Thank You For Smoking. Both were movies that people were excited about and recommended I see, so it was interesting to finally sit down and watch them. American Beauty was pretty crazy; I think Kevin Spacey did a really great job. The movie was not what I had expected in the slightest, but was incredible nonetheless. Thank You for Smoking was funny. I feel really bad for someone whose last name is “Naylor.”

Other than watching movies and such, I haven’t really been up to anything at all. I’m looking forward to going back to work on Monday. I think I will start reading Satanic Verses and/or playing Chrono Trigger sometime in the near future.

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