Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Note to self: it might be time to stop trusting the WSJ as a reputable newspaper.

Monday, July 30, 2007

It was a pretty good weekend all around. Saturday we went to the Kiwk-E-Mart in the ghetto on our way to Camden Yards. Why you would put a KEM in Bladensburg, MD and not Springfield, VA is beyond me. All I know is that the community around the former 7-Eleven has certainly never seen so many rich white people in their neighborhood before. But the store was fun, and unlike Apu, we didn't get shot. Besides KEM smocks and character cutouts, there were also some good jokes around, like Jasper the Freezer Geezer and the reminder on the bakery case that candies are not sprinkles. Anyway, here's some pictures from KEM (there's some other I put up on Facebook):




After the Kiwk-E-Mart it was up to Baltimore to see the Yankees take on the O's. Because I'm dumb, I got us seats on the 3rd base side in the Yankees section. We had some other Orioles fans around us, and even the Yankee fans around us were pretty well behaved. Except the two kids in front of us. One of whom had Jeter shirt on and I swear spent the entire game cooing to Mr. Jeter about how great he was. I think this kid (he was probably 19) would have made Derek's every fantasy come true if given half the chance. Terrifying. But at least Jeter only got on base once and A-Rod never did and was charged with an error. Even Clemens didn't look that great. By comparison, the Orioles starting pitcher, who was demoted to AAA earlier this year and then brought back up after an injury to another player, looked awesome for all 6 innings he pitched. The relief and closers were awful and allowed what shoudl have been a 7-1 game to become a 7-5 game. But whatever, the home team won, and we had a good time. Really, nothing makes me happier than seeing a team I hate lose and do it in a completely undignified manner.


Then on Sunday I went to church for the handbell reunion and ASP reunion, which was really nice. Although it was sort of sad to see Olen ringing the big bells without Andy at his side. But to see 7 octaves of bells take up the whole church and see all the kids up there was great, and a real testament to Nancy. The ASP lunch was fun too, and it was nice to catch up with some people I haven't seen in a long time. People are going back to school for their Masters degrees, people are changing careers, people are having kids, buying houses, getting married, finding the love of their lives, and so forth. It's awesome to hear that someone is really happy with their life when you haven't seen them in a long time. And of course, I had a few of these conversations:
"I heard somewhere you were getting married, that's not true is it?"
"Yes indeed I am, in March, we'll have been dating 4 years in August, we met at school."
"Wow. You? Married? That's just bizarre. I mean, I'm really happy for you, just, I dunno, surprised I guess."
"It's okay, I get that a lot. Did you hear I work for a defense contractor?"
"WHAT???"

Good times! =)

It occured to me this morning that today marks the beginning of my 4th year at General Dynamics. Apart from being somewhat amazing that I've been working for 3 years at the same company, which means I've been out of school for even longer, it also means that I'm offically 100% vested in company contributions to my 401k! With 3 years here under my belt, it's probably time to take a pretty serious look at where I want my future career to be headed and be sure I'm getting all my ducks in a row to achieve that. Certainly something I'm going to have to give some thought to in the latter half of the year before my performance review cycle.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

While Emily was down in Savannah over the weekend, she got our rehearsal dinner site squared away and Emily sounded very excited about the space. Wedding stuff is really coming together. I know there's still a lot of work to get done, but I think most of the major components are now covered. We still need to figure out what we're doing for our honeymoon, and I think we're really leaning towards Malta. It'll still be a little cool in April, but since Tim's wedding is the weekend after our's, it'll be at least mid-April anyway. And then with Kenneth graduating from Tech on May 3, we're even considering leaving after that, so it'll be early May by the time we get there. Still early in the tourist season so it shouldn't be real busy yet, but the weather should be nice. We both kind of think that we should do something exotic for our honeymoon, something we're not likely to do again as part of a regular vacation (like Hawaii, or the Bahamas, or something of that nature). And speaking of exotic, you may remember a while back that I was talking about renting exotics. In general, it doesn't seem very practical, but I was thinking that perhaps for the wedding, it might be doable. Instead of the traditional limo, we could have any number of cars from Precious Metals, like the Lotus I talked about before, or a Bentley GT, or a Ferarri 360 Spider. Come on, tell me it wouldn't be awesome to roll up to the rehearsal dinner in a Ferarri, or leave the wedding in a Bentley, or even to just be running a couple last minute errands in a Viper. Definitely something I'm going to give some thought to.

Note to self: using dd to copy a dying disk is a good plan. Using dd to copy a dying 36GB disk 1 byte at a time is a bad plan. It took about an hour yesterday to dd the disk at the default rate of 512 bytes per read/write. But because the source disk is damaged, it's got some bad sectors, so the new disk was missing some boot sector information, leading to a kernel panic on startup. I decided to dupe it again with a lower read/write block size to hopefully avoid this problem. Unfortunately, I didn't do the math first to realize that copying 37580800000 bytes, one by one, was just going to take a damn long time, even with 15000 RPM Ultra2 Wide SCSI disks. Oh well.

Monday, July 23, 2007

I came across something amusing in an old notebook last night while I was looking for something to scribble in. Here's a fun word: GHOTI. Go ahead and see if you can pronounce it correctly. Doesn't look hard, does it? Now go to your local pub and ask for ghoti and chips and see if your waiter/bartender gives you a bizarre look. If you've got that same look on your face right now, let me explain: Pronounce the GH like it sounds in cough. Pronounce the O like it sounds in women. And finally, pronounce the TI like it sounds in motion. I don't know about you, but I could really go for some ghoti and chips. Silly English language...

It's been a long time coming, but while Emily was gone this weekend, I finally got a storage unit. We've gotten to the point where we just didn't have places to put things anymore and so boxes have been sitting around the living room for weeks (months). Things that haven't been opened since we moved in or seasonal items all are going into storage. Yes, it's an added expense, but having a neat apartment is worth it. The place looks so much better already. And it is nice to have a place to put all of our (mostly my) stuff that we don't need regularly but still want to hold on to. I opted for a slightly bigger unit than we really need, but it has made loading stuff in a lot easier and when we need to go in and find stuff it should be a lot easier too. Not having to unpack and subsequently repack the entire corrugated aluminum box to find a specific box is well worth an extra $10/month. Right now it looks eerily like a dorm room. There's a desk on the back wall and a shelf and a lamp (that doesn't have anywhere to plug in). All it needs is a prison-issue cot and it'd be just like college!

Friday, July 20, 2007

At long last, here are a few pictures from our trip to Maine! I'm trying to upload the entire thing somewhere else so you can see all of them, but nowhere is cooperating with me at the moment.









Thursday, July 19, 2007

Mmmm, trail mix. =)

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

I stopped taking my allergy medication a couple days ago. Since pollen is all but gone from the air, I only have to contend with mold and ozone these days, which are pretty bad by themselves, but not things I'm any more allergic to than anyone else. The first couple days I felt pretty good, but this morning I almost called in sick. I feel a lot better now, but waking up it was like someone had stuffed all the cavities in my head full of gauze. Blech. Hopefully once my system adjusts to the lack of loratadine intake, the mornings shouldn't be so bad.
In other news, I was tempted this morning, for perhaps the first time in my life to quote from the bible. Genesis 4:9 specifically. A couple phone calls from Grandma and my parents much earlier than I was really prepared to deal with phone calls from the same wondering about the location of my brother. Um, pardon? He doesn't live in my house. I know my parents are on vacation and Ben was off to Pittsburgh last weekend, that's it. Apparently there was some miscommunication involving the date he'd be back. This is pretty typical and I'm sure the blame is anything but singular. I'm really not sure I needed to be involved in this particular non-incident. Don't get me wrong, if he's actually truly missing, I very much want to know. But before we all fly off the deep end, let's do some fact checking first.

Friday, July 13, 2007

Living where I went to high school is strange sometimes. Every so often I run into someone from once upon a time. The encounter is usually the same: "You went to Woodson, right?" "Oh yeah, I think we had _______ together. What have you been up to?" "Not much, graduated from ________, worked at _______ for a while, decided that I was ready to get married/go back to school/get out of that area, now I'm here doing _______. What about you?" "About the same. Graduated from GT a couple years ago, been working at GD ever since, getting married in March." "Cool, cool, well, we should catch up some more, here's my card/number/email, get in touch, we'll have dinner or something." "Sounds good, here's my card/number/email as well. Catch you later." Said catching up never occurs. These are typically people I only knew peripherally, and the above conversation is bordering on the longest we've ever had. Every once in a while I bump into someone I knew a little better, but the conversations usually go much the same way and we go on with our lives never really thinking about the other person again.
Today I was at Best Buy and the girl at the register looked really familiar. This came as no immediate surprise since I frequently recognize the people who work at Best Buy as I'm in there generally once every 2 weeks. But her nametag said Emily and somewhere in the deep recesses of my rarely accessed memories, something started clicking. She was a friend of Alaina Blevins that I met at the Tibetan Freedom Concert and we flirted like crazy pretty much right from the get go, much to the annoyance of my friends who almost left me stranded at awful awful RFK Stadium as a result. We went out once after that, but there was really nothing there and so we went our separate ways even back then. I later found out she was pretty heavy into drugs, and looking back on that event of 10 years ago, I'm now fairly certain she was on then-very-popular ecstasy when we first met. Especially considering that when we had something very similar to the above conversation, she didn't really remember me. Now in fairness, if you'd asked me about her this morning, my response would have been a blank stare of befuddlement. Obviously, our date was even less memorable for her than it was for me. *shrug* No big loss there. We said goodbye and I fully expect to never see her or hear from her again.
Situations like these make me excited about my high school reunion. Two years from now I expect to have received another promotion at work (and/or likely changed jobs). Emily and I will be married. There's a good possibility I'll be a homeowner. It'll be fun to see some people I haven't seen in 10 years and find out how many inside jokes they remember and see if we were right about who wasn't going to amount to anything and who was going to take over the world. So far I've been right about everyone I've run into over the last few years. Not that I want to gloat about how great my life is (although is is pretty awesome), but I think it's interesting to see how little most people change from high school onwards. Bring it on 2009!

Monday, July 09, 2007

We returned from Maine safe and sound. We had an awesome time and great weather almost the whole time. And we didn't really get prevented from doing anything by the rare bad weather, so I consider our trip a complete success! I did manage to pick up some sort of cold/infection late Friday night/early Saturday that hampered my ability to navigate home on Saturday. I don't feel any worse now than I did over the weekend, but I don't feel any better either. *shrug* I took 650 pictures in Maine, so I'm trying to sort through those the next couple days and post a few of the better ones. All the animcals survived the vacation with no problems, although the plants on the porch didn't fair as well. I don't think they got watered, so I'm trying to revive them. We'll see how that goes. Otherwise things are fine back at home and here at the office. With a holiday last week, it doesn't seem like much got done in my absence, so I picked a good week to be out of town. I do have a few things to get caught up on though, so back to work!

About me

  • I'm Rev. Adam
  • From Oakton, Virginia, United States
My profile

Twitter Updates

eXTReMe Tracker