Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Last night I was looking for a new ring tone for my phone. I'm getting tired of the A-Team (blasphemy, I know), so I decided that the Blues Brothers theme would be a good replacement. Apparently, the majority of the internet thinks that the main theme from that movie is either Someone to Love or the Peter Gunn theme. And when I finally did track down the correct music, it sounded terrible as a MIDI. *sigh* Guess B.A. and I will have to tough it out a while longer until I can find something else.

Monday, February 26, 2007

It's been a busy past week. Last week I was just busy non-stop at work. Even at home I felt really busy though I can't honestly remember what it was I was doing. I barely saw Emily all week since she went out Tuesday and Thursday, I played poker Wednesday, and she had to work late Friday. I guess I wasn't the only busy one... Friday I had the day off and spent the day running errands and trying to get some things taken care of for our new apartment. Turns out you can't do that more than 30 days in advance. That doesn't mean you can't make a request, it'll just get denied. How dumb is that? Why would you even accept my request if you know what date I was asking for and you know it's more than 30 days out? Grr... I also had a shopping list of things to pick up at the wine store for my aunt. I swear I doubled (or maybe even tripled) my lifetime expenditure on alcohol by picking up 3 bottles of wine. *shrug* Saturday morning we headed down to Charlottesville for the Tech/UVA basketball game. We should have won. But some coaching decisions I don't understand cost us the game. The officiating was inconsistent. They called things both ways, but one minute something would be a no-call, the next it would be a foul. Regardless, we had that game wrapped up and just let UVA take it away from us. Reynolds and Singletary are a formidable duo, but if either one has a bad night, gets in foul trouble, or gets injured, UVA is done. Hopefully after the ACC tournament, they'll still be fresh enough for the NCAA tourney. Tech meanwhile would have to win the ACC tournament to get into the NCAA, but that's fine by me. We're still too inconsistent to expect to be rewarded that way, and we'd be much better off in the NIT anyway. Nancy and Phil took great care of us and made some awesome pizzas for dinner on Saturday and pancakes on Sunday. We decided we needed to get a pizza stone so we can start making our own pizzas. Then it snowed and rained and sleeted overnight, but by the time we left at 12:30, the roads were plenty clear. We hit up Jersey Mike's for lunch and were on our way home. Everyone get warning us that the roads were terrible up here and there was 8" of snow. I've concluded everyone's on crack. A 1/4 mile strech of 29 was closed for some unknown reason, but that was a simple detour and didn't delay us any. There were two nasty accidents on 66 that also didn't delay us more than a minute or two. Just because the roads are driveable doesn't mean you should be doing 80 and be swerving between lanes. At any rate, we had an pretty uneventful day yesterday despite the weather. We also finally watched The Illusionist. It was a good movie, though perhaps a bit over-hyped. I love Edward Norton though, and the plot had some nice twists to it that all get wrapped up pretty well at the end. Busy week, busy weekend. We're going to be busy pretty much every weekend from now until mid-April, so hopefully we'll be able to get everything packed and ready to move without any major issues. We get our keys 4 weeks from tomorrow!

Monday, February 19, 2007

I've been thinking about Andy a lot recently. I'm not really sure why. I find myself wondering what he'd be up to today if he were still around. Did he and Lori ever get married? Did he ever finish school or did he drop out like he always talked about doing? Did he start his own tech company or is he toiling away in the server room at some Fortune 500 where no one appreciates him? Obviously, we'll never know, but I like to think that whatever is it he might have done would have at least made him happy. I miss you buddy.

Friday, February 16, 2007

Nothing says Happy Valentines Day like the stomach flu... Tuesday I didn't feel so hot, but mostly I was just tired and still felt maybe 75% well. Wednesday I spent most of the day in the bathroom, and I was bascially completely incapacitated all day long. I'd say I felt maybe 10% well. Between that and the snow/sleet/ice mess outside, V-Day was pretty much cancelled for us. =( Yesterday I felt a lot better. Very dehydrated and quite tired, but probably 50-60% well. So I tried to go work, but after deicing off my car, I quickly realized escape was impossible as there was a 2 foot high ice wall behind my car. Somehow I've managed to misplace my snow shovel as well, though it wouldn't have helped much anyway. My mom was nice enough to come over and bring me a new snow shovel and let me borrow a flat garden shovel to use as an ice pick. After 45 minutes of digging, we managed to get my car out. I decided to go back inside and thaw for a few minutes before heading into work. So I lay down on the couch and woke up 4.5 hours later. So much for work. I guess when your entire calorie intake over a 48 hour period is limited to 3 Triscuits and whatever might be in tap water, doing any sort of manual labor is bound to wear you out. Anyway, I'm feeling probably 60-70% again, and I'm back at work today, finally. I thought I might pass out this morning around 10:30 after standing up for an hour straight, but it seems that my breakfast of a bottle of Gatorade is keeping me more or less sustained. I'm pretty sure I'll be going home early today, but at least I'm in the office and out of my apartment.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Grrr... It sure is hard to sleep with all this sleet noisily bombarding all my windows. It sounds like... I dunno. It's much too late/early to come up with a witty analogy.

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Time for adventures in real-life physics! Led by the man who shouldn't have passed Physics II in college and (Brian and Tim should appreciate this) was "taught" Physics I by Jario. Brace yourselves for lots of wrong assertions and frequent formula jockeying! We all know TV lies, especially in commercials. But my new favorite commercial is the Lexus IS where they assert that a vehicle dropped from over 4000 feet can be outrun by a car on the ground. Every time I've seen it, something just doesn't seem right about it. Tonight I busted out my calculator and tried to make myself feel better. I knew that their claim just didn't sound right (according to the fine print, they never attempted it, but in simulations it supposedly works out). Okay, so the falling car has a roughly constant acceleration of 32 ft/s^2 from gravity. My initial calculations told me what I expected, that at impact the car would be travelling about 500 ft/s (340 mph) and the drop would take about 16 seconds. This is ignoring any wind resistance of course. According to Lexus's website, the IS 350 has a top speed of 142 mph (electronically limited). It also can run a quarter mile (1320 feet) in 14.2 seconds, giving it an average acceleration of 13.1 ft/s^2 over that time. Obviously, there's no way that this car is going to travel an additional half mile in less than 2 more seconds. Certainly, wind resistance must play a role here, but even a falling car that's slowed down surely can't fall slower than an accelerating vehicle on the ground. I was ready to call up Lexus and tell them to go to hell. Then I saw the commercial again and it states in fine print that their simulation is for a horizontal drop only. At first this made no sense to me, since clearly things don't drop horizontally, they drop vertically. But when I thought about it some more, I decided they must mean dropping the car wheels down and body parallel to the ground. This would create a lot more wind resistance than nose-first and substantially raise the drag coefficient of the falling car. I had to kind of guess at some parameters (specifically, I used a Cd of 1, though this might be somewhat low), but if you use this new piece of info to calculate terminal velocity of the car, it comes out to somewhere in the neighborhood of 140 mph. So I suppose that when you drop the car that way, and if it doesn't turn over at all, yes, it might be possible to out run it on the ground. I still feel like the falling car will reach its terminal velocity before the driving car reaches its top speed, but I don't have math to back that up. In any case, certainly for this to even be remotely possible the car has to be dropped as non-aerodynamically as possible. Dropped nose-first however, where the Cd is 0.28 (again, from the Lexus website), the car would reach a terminal velocity of 260 mph and hit the ground long before the vehicle travelling parallel to the ground. Even though some crude math proved that least their simulation seemed plausible, the commercial still bugs me every time I see it. Stupid Lexus.

Monday, February 12, 2007

Okay, okay, so it may not be Kevin Ross like I had hoped, but I'm still very excited about hiring John Bond away from NIU to be our new OC. He's a well-established, running-back-friendly, quarterback-proficient coach who knows how to recruit at a school with tough extrance requirements. Bring on the fall!

I've been teetering on the edge of "sick" for at least 2 weeks now and I don't feel really any better or any worse. Usually, for me at least, any illness that persists this long has turned into a sinus infection by now. But so far no signs of infection. Just congestion and runny nose, the occasional lack of energy and very mild headache. So, I did a bit of research and decided, thanks to my extensive medical background, that I have vasomotor rhinitis. Although I do have mild-to-moderate allergies to pollen, it's certainly not pollen season yet. I don't have hay fever, or I would have had issues with chinchillas a long time ago. This is something that just started a few weeks ago when the temperature really plunged. Sneezing fits occur when I first walk in the door at home (cold to hot) and when I move from one room to the next (temperature change). And, best of all, it's incurable! Yay!

Friday, February 09, 2007

So much for all my errands today. I slept 12 hours straight last night and only just got out of the shower. Oh well. I'll just do my chores around the house instead. Right after I eat the rest of this yummy white cheddar macaroni. Mmm.

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Adam's pet peeve of the day: People who point out my (admitedly very frequent) spelling errors incorrectly. I'm a poor typist. This should come as no shock to anyone, especially you loyal readers who regularly have to wade through Adamese to decipher my posts. Perhaps even more annoying than spelling corrections are people who try to point out my occasionally poor grammar by using even worse grammar, but that's a whole different story. Anyway, this pet peeve is about people trying to tell me about a spelling mistake which I can only deduce based on contextual clues. "The 9th sentence 'desired' is spelt wrong." I wasn't sure what spelt meant, but I sure as hell knew it didn't mean the same thing as spelled. As it turns out, spelt is an ancient ancestor to what we now call wheat. Apparently, in my hastily written ninth sentence, I accidentally typed "desierd" instead of "false old grain." Boy is my face red! I'm sure what my would-be editor meant to tell me is that I had spelled "desired" incorrectly, especially since the surrounding text has more to do with a Sonar display than medieval farming. Grrr...

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

No sooner than that stupid P-word Phil "predicts" that we'd have a short winter did it become ridiculously frigid. I can't remember it being this cold here in a long time. It's not so bad when there's no wind, but when the breeze picks up, it's pretty brutal. Oh well, at least it will all be over soon, right Phil? I swear, if that fuzzy moron is lying to us, I'm going to drive up there and give him a piece of my mind.
In other news, I made yummy tacos on Friday but had no one to share them with besides Keanu Reeves and Crispin Glover (I watched River's Edge - weird movie). When it ended at 10:30, I was ready to pass out, which I promptly did. This 9/80 schedule is taking some getting used to. Saturday I got up a bit on the early side (something like 9 am) to head down to Fairfax City with Emily for the Chocolate Festival. We got there just in time too. We got our chocolate chip pancakes (which I smothered in chocolate syrup) and drank our hot cocoa and said hello to Tom Davis. The line to get in for breakfast was getting pretty long by the time we left. We mooched some Starbucks samples and free Hersheys kisses as we viewed from afar the entries in the cake competition. Then it was off to the old town hall for the chocolate bazaar. Mmmm. The whole place just smelled so good. We picked up a few samples of things (so far they've all been delicious) and all in all had a pretty good time. We tried to have dinner at the Cheesecake Factory with my Dad and Ben that night, but the 2 hour wait sent us to Uno's instead. Then we swung through Macy's because I needed more sweaters to cope with this weather (I feel like I've been wearing the same clothes almost every day for the last 3 weeks).
Sunday I was very lazy, even though I woke up kind of early again. I opted to stay in bed for a good long while and only got up in time to get ready to head out to Dave's for poker and the Super Bowl. Both were fun, but watching the Bears was like watching Georgia Tech the second half of this past season. Whatever, it's not like I really cared who won. It's just that now I don't get football again until September. Now I can switch fully to basketball, just in time for things to head up heading into conference tournaments and then March Madness.

Friday, February 02, 2007

What crappy weather we're having today. Is it raining, snowing, sleeting, hailing, or what? I think at some point today I've seen all of the above, and as it gets later, darker, and colder, it's only going to get crappier outside. Good think I'm already at home (I skipped out early today since I had some extra time time built up from earlier this week). Now I can sit here and sip my hot cocoa and laugh at the suckers I see outside. Or at least I can as soon as I finish the 15 minutes of work I still need to do today. "Telecommuting" rocks.

So my grand plan to lure Bobby Ross back to Tech appears to have fizzled since his retirement from West Point sounds like a retirement from football all together. But wait! His replacement relieved his son Kevin Ross of his OC duties! Last time I checked, Tech was without an OC since Patrick "Suckotron" Nix left for Miami. Hmmm... He may not be the coach who took us to our last National Championship (like Bobby), but surely the apple can't have fallen far from the tree with Kevin. Plus, his background is as a running backs coach, and since Tech relies so heavily on the run, I think he'd slot in well. Then we'd just need a separate QB coach, but that shouldn't be that difficult. Hey Dan Radakovich, get on the horn. Kevin, if you want revenge for the unexpected firing, I thought you might want to know that Army visits Georgia Tech on October 20th, probably for Homecoming. Plus, how happy could you have been there anyway as an Annapolis graduate?

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