Weekend Updates

Post-wedding, it was time to really have some fun. Bryan and his band, formerly known as Bender, but due to copyright limitations are now searching for a new name, performed. The gig was their second ever, and a bar in Arlington allowed them to perform in the afternoon. They played a great arrangement of a song from Kill Bill as well as many other fine songs. Also, I helped Bryan serenade his new wife by accompanying him on piano.

A while after the band stopped playing, many of us headed over to the Lucci House for some more socializing. These DFW people are great. I’ll miss them as I find myself back in New Jersey.

I traveled to Washingon this weekend to spend time with Barb and Carrie, and to see the Cherry Blossoms in D.C. We also met up with Steve, Dave, Amber, Jody, Lucy, Brent, and Katie at various times. We watched movies, played Clue, Apples to Apples, and Guillotine, ate out in restaurants, and had too many penis discussions. Good people. Thanks to Barb and Carrie who hosted me for the weekend!

I’m on my spring break from school this week. I’m taking the opportunity to go back into my old office, where they agreed to keep me on the payroll as a part-time employee, to make a few extra bucks. Not much has changed around there in the last three weeks, but I wasn’t expecting much change.

I better not get used to this. I had another great weekend over the past few days. Barb came up to visit and we walked around New York City a bunch. We had lunch at Hakata and caught great seats for Fiddler on the Roof (TKTS didn’t have anything interesting). Afterwards, we walked up to Ellen’s Stardust Diner and enjoyed the entertainment provided by singing waiters and waitresses.

It’s going to be dangerous if I get used to having great weekends.

Unfortunately, I went into work today for about four hours. It was convenient though, as I needed to drop my father and his girlfriend off at the airport so they could catch a flight to Paris and London.

Here’s a quick update to my weekend review, with some things I learned this weekend.

• A semi-drunk stranger on the train can make you feel like crap for the rest of the weekend by saying, “You’re pretty smart. You should be doing something more than xyz.”
• Same semi-drunk stranger can be clueless when he suggests I go into politics due to my ability to use “doublespeak.”
• I need to discover a more regular sleep pattern.
• The golden ratio (Φ) is a constant (not a variable) with a value of approximately 1.61803399, and its value is neat because Φ – 1 = 1 / Φ ; and Φ + 1 = Φ². A rectangle with the aspect ratio of Φ is the one people find most pleasing and approximates the ratio of anamorphic wide-screen film. It also appears in nature a whole lot and is tied directly into the Fibonacci (Leonardo, Filius Bonacci of Pisa) series. That’s just an overview and I’m sure some mathemticians would split (intersect?) hairs. Here’s some really detailed information.
• This doesn’t really count as something I learned this weekend. It is more something I did when I should have been sleeping. I rearranged my photograph album again. I think I’ve found a format I like, but I still need to tweak it.
• Let me go back to the “most pleasing rectangle” thing. People have actually done surveys on this, asking a wide variety of subjects to point out “the best rectangle” from a number of options. When the results are graphed, there’s a huge peak as you get close to Φ. By the way, this can all be related to music, too, but that’s another story for another day.
• Oh, almost forgot. In fact, I did forget, so I’m adding this several hours later. Georgia Tech invented (or first utilized) the forward pass. That’s football. That’s American football. And I’m not sure if this information is true, but it was the opinion of a very obstinate train passenger.

It’s the future, future, future! This weekend I decided to take a trip to New York City to meet Amy and catch an improv show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. The group we saw is called Mother, and they did two sets. The first was a “Harold” long form and the second was a series of scenes based on music brought in by the audience. The CD I contributed was a Marine Drum and Bugle Corps CD of which, for some reason, I had two free copies.

It was fun, and now I’m considering taking classes at the UCBT Improv School. It’s only $300 for eight weeks of classes. I seriously doubt my employer will reimburse me for these expenses the way they do for my MBA degree, though.

The lesson I learned this weekend is that I should be spontaneous more often. I decided that I wanted to go some place warmer since I had access to a car for the weekend. Driving to Washington, D.C. seemed like a good idea. The weather forecast placed it as being five degrees warmer than New Jersey throughout the weekend.

So I asked Barb what she was up to for the weekend. She told me she had no plans, and that was probably her first mistake. I told her I was thinking about driving down to the city, so she offered me a place to crash. That was the second mistake.

I took the three-hour drive, heading towards the warmer weather. I met Barb at her apartment and we set out for the Metro. We visited a couple of museums on Saturday and then a couple more on Sunday. We had dinner at Buca di Beppo, which our waitress Marie, informed us loosely translates to “Big Joe’s Basement.” It was some of the best Italian food I’ve had lately. We also had dinner — on a different day — at a Hibachi restuarant, where I met Steve. The food was really good there, as well.

I also finally saw Return of the King with Barb and Carrie, which was fantastic but a little long with the various endings, as well as The Blue Lagoon and I Want to Marry Ryan Banks, an ABC Family Channel Sunday Night Movie.

Now back to reality: food shopping and laundry.

This weekend was for cleaning and working on a new project. My new computer is getting some good usage.

… because that’s all there is. I borrowed my old car for the weekend. It hasn’t been taken care of well over the past year, which is unfortunate. It still runs alright with only 133,000 miles. The car allowed me to do some shopping. In fact, I finally picked up a scanner to replace my ancient one that stopped working a few years ago. It’ll scan slides and negatives as well as photographs and documents.

I also started looking for a new computer case in which I will build my new system. Unfortunately, the ones in CompUSA were overpriced and ugly and Best Buy had nothing good in stock. I’m trying to find something interesting to look at, pleasing and aesthetic, because I’m going to keep the basic system for a while and just make lots of upgrades as time goes by. I hope to pass it along to my kids someday.

(Then again, at the rate I’m going, by the time I have kids they will come equipped with factory-installed computer chips in their heads and desktop computers will run on organic human-cloned brains. Then who will be slave and who will be master? It’s like the dip-switches are reversed… Anyway, where was I?)

Speaking of the new system, this is what I’m thinking of getting:

• Case (obviously)
• Motherboard: Soyo Dragon KT-600 Platinum Ultra
• CPU: AMD Athlon XP 1800+ with the plan to upgrade after the holiday season
• Memory: 1 GB DDR SDRAM PC-3200 (2x 512 MB chips)
• Hard Drive: 180 GB ATA/133 7200 RPM
• Optical Drives: DVD+RW/-RW 4x and DVD-ROM
• Monitor: 19 inch SXGA (or UXGA if available) flat-panel LCD monitor with high contrast ratio
• Graphics: nVidia 8x AGP with 128 MB video memory (I’m not a gamer)
• Approximate total cost: $1,385

Am I forgetting anything? (Don’t tell me I should buy a Mac. Someday I might get a PowerBook to replace my current notebook, but I’m not ready for a quantum leap in that direction.) The good news is I don’t have to get all of that at once. I have a fully functional 10 GB hard drive (yes, that’s less than most iPods, don’t bring that up) which I can use to get started, and I can borrow a monitor from a coworker.

I headed to the Verizon Wireless store this weekend to have my phone’s software upgraded. I took Denise‘s phone with me, as well, so I could get it all done at once. At 2:30, I handed them the phones (Motorola T720s). The helpful girl at the service desk said I should come back in one hour because each phone took twenty minutes to reprogram. This interesting interpreation of mathematics should have alerted me right away. I shopped a little, and I later came back at the prescribed time. At 3:30, I was told that I should go away for another hour and then come back. More shopping ensued. I headed back at 4:30, with the hope of finally being able to pick up my phones. Yes! They were finished.

But there was a problem. Although Denise’s phone was fine, my phone wouldn’t “take” the new software. I don’t know what they did to it, but it’s gone. So they replaced the phone with a refurbished T730 — a model up from my T720, but otherwise an identical phone. They weren’t able to salvage my telephone number directory or illegitmate ring tones (MIDI files) that I loaded to the old phone by hacking into it with Motorola’s own PST software, so when I got home, I reloaded everything back in.

When I woke up the next morning (okay, close to noon, I guess — I have to make up for all the sleep I miss during the week doing homework) I discovered the phone was screwed up. The screen stayed garbled, even after removing the battery and replacing it after a few minutes. I convinced Darren to take me to the Verizon Wireless store to have them take a look at it. They ended up replacing the phone again. It seems to be working now, but I’ll have to see how it holds up after being charged overnight.

All this was just to have my Motorola T720 upgraded to the less-buggy T730 version of the software. I wish I could have just done it myself.

I apologize for not writing much, dear readers. This graduate school thing is kicking my butt. I just have to keep reminding myself that (as long as I keep working at my current job) it’s practically free and it’ll be worth it in the end.

I saw Lost in Translation, which was a little slow, but very sweet and fun. That’s about all there was to my weekend. Like I said, classwork is consuming my life. It’s not like the regular classes I’m used to, where you attend a few days out of the week… I have to keep up with discussions, do research, and write every day.