Long overdue

Hello readers; I realize that it’s been almost three weeks since I’ve posted, since exciting things like meteor showers, drastic concentration changes, and creepy conversations online with strangers aren’t things that happen to me. But the rest of the Blandfill has been good to me and hasn’t heckled me for not posting, as I have done to them many times. So here’s my update.

Will Ramsey bit me today at the hockey game. It was refreshing and terrifying. (more…)

Blogs are wonderful means of procrastination

This has been a pretty fun weekend.  I’m going to tell you about it.  Lucky you!  As an aside, everything I’ve done in the following had the effect of postponing the completion of my CS50 problem set that was due 26 hours ago (as of yet uncompleted).  But I digress.

This turned out to be Freshman Parents’ Weekend, which involved some fun awkward gigs for band, and a great Glee Club concert.  We went to Sanders Theater and played some fight songs.  They had a very strange panel table, and two comfy red chairs enclosed by two coffee tables with water jugs and glasses on them.  Obviously, when it come time to play Ten Thou, Ed and I sat in those chairs.  I had a good time with that.  Then there was a rehearsal from 4-6, which made getting to Sanders in tails at 6:30 a bit of an issue, but an easily resolved one (and resolved it was, by leaving the rehearsal early).

The Glee Club concert went fantastically.  It was great to be on stage in front of an almost full house, although I had forgotten how much I sweat while under those bright lights.

Everything you just read was written about a week ago, mostly because I got tired of blogging and stopped.  Then I felt guilty for not blogging in three weeks, so I’m going to finish this now.  Isn’t that fun?  Since the last time I posted, my cell phone has been acting strange.  I woke up about 6 hours after going to sleep Sunday morning and discovered that my cell phone had a funny colored bar on the left side o the screen.  I was perturbed, but not too worried; I could still use it, right?  Well.  As the day went on, I found that every other row of pixels had turned white, so I could only half see what was on the screen.  Again, not a huge deal, I could see what I was doing, but I was beginning to get a little worried.  By the time I went to sleep that night, my cell phone screen had turned completely white, and as of right now it has a lovely crack across the screen from me banging it to see if that would make it work better.  Turns out it didn’t.  Regardless, my phone still works, but now I just don’t text, and I have to hope that whoever calls me is someone I actually want to talk to.

Oh yes, the HUB 90th reunion was this past weekend, and it was fantastic; I’ll be posting the video of it as soon as it goes online.  It’s worth a watch.  Granted, there are bands that are 300+ without alumni, but something about seeing 40 years worth of crusties and undergrads scramble on a field is very impressive; it’s like Brownian motion, but with a purpose.  Pretty cool, eh?  That in itself makes this post a science post.  I’ll link to the wikipedia article on Brownian Motion as well.  Now this post can be about the Internet as well!  Fantastic!

Birthday post

Hey guys.  My birthday was this weekend, but thanks to great roommates and the band, it sort of lasted the entire 3.5 day weekend.  I had a good time on the noisy [read: something else] bus on the way up, and there was a really fun party once I got to Cornell.  Actually, part of it was really confusing.  This one guy in the Cornell band wanted me to play this game called “lumberjack”, a mercy game.  It wasn’t going so well, because he really wanted to hit me hard, and I didn’t have much feeling in my hands, so the game wasn’t going anywhere until they wanted to get a bunch of Harvard bandies to play this game called “Three Man”.  Here are the rules:

http://www.webtender.com/handbook/games/threeman.game

I’m pretty sure they were making these rules up to screw with us.  Also, they didn’t tell us the rules ahead of time, they just yelled at us when we didn’t know them.

Anyway, on a more wholesome note, when I arrived back home on Saturday night at 10:30, the rest of the blandfill greeted me with a Razmatazz birthday cake from Finale, and we ate it while watching an episode of Firefly and the newest episode of the Office.  I think the most exciting part of the weekend was last night, when we all went out to an Ethiopian restaurant, called Adis Red Sea.  It was fantastic; Tom found it over the summer from the Unofficial Guide to Harvard (who knew it was useful?).  They didn’t really have plates, in the traditional sense; the food was placed on pieces of bread that could be used to eat the food in lieu of utensils.  It was also surprisingly filling, considering the food seemed to be all contained in bowls the same size as small cereal bowls.  I’m a bad food writer, clearly, considering that’s all I can think of writing.

Right now we’re waiting for Tom to come back so that we can eat the birthday cake my mom ordered for me while we watch the next episode of Firefly.  Life is good.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1169#comic

Winning the bet dollar

About a year ago, I was playing a word video game on facebook, which involved shooting electronic birds and then obtaining a letter.  It was like hangman, except you weren’t allowed to run out of bullets.  At one point, I decided that the game was too taxing on my fragile brain to attempt it by myself, so enlisted the help of the rest of the Blandfill.  At one point, there was a word that had me completely stumped; Tom assured me that it was in fact a word that is so ridiculous that I wiped it from my memory.  I said to Tom, “I will bet you a dollar that you are wrong.”  It turns out that he was right, and despite it just being a dollar, I felt obligated to make good on my bet, so he received the dollar.

Now, a year later, I received the dollar for being the first to perform a mildly creepy task for Charles (I won’t repeat it here or anywhere, in case you’re wondering.  And no, it was not sexual).  As the owner of the dollar, it was necessary for me to make another bet so that someone else could receive it.  This time, I offered the dollar to the first one of us who posted a new blog.  It’s been 3 days since anyone’s posted, so I’m going to think of a new bet.

I used to think I didn’t need mail goggles.

Last night, at around 4:36 A.M., after drinking more than I’d care to remember, I got back, and decided what I needed more than anything else was a copy of Windows 7.  Tom told me the best thing to do was to e-mail sysadmin@cs50.net and ask whoever was on the other line to send me a username and password.  Here is how I went about doing that.