Random Drivel

Today marks the second day in a row that I’ve biked to campus. I’m begining to enjoy the ride, and its a very good chance to exercise. Yesterday we rode up to the SRC to do some lifting, and I brought a football that Jon Kau and I tossed around on the football field. Today we rode up to the lake to shoot some fireworks and ride around campus. Jon and I rode back to the house on Wabash, and stopped at Wendys for dinner on the way. We had to wait for a train on the way back, and it got pretty dark because we didnt’ get home until almost 9. I would like to get to the point where I can ride every single day without my legs being sore, and also be able to do it quicker and quicker. Hopefully by the end of the summer I get really good at making it all the way over there.

For lunch today, we went to Wendys. My 3/4 pound burger was freaking huge and fell apart on me, and yet I enjoyed every bite. Very tasty.

We saw a rice car in the parking lot. We think its a mazda, but it was yellow and the hood and front left panel were primer color. I guess the guy didn’t have the money to pay for the rest of the paint job. It also had some crazy exhaust pipe action going on, and wings. I hope the car doesn’t take off flying when it reaches top speed of 37 mph. We took some pictures on my phone, maybe we’ll post them to a ricehaters website, like laugh at rice.

When we got back to work, we had a few extra minutes, so we shot some fireworks off in the parking lot. Very entertaining indeed. Fireworks are awesome. I wish we’d have thought of that when we were still at the Wendys… we could have shot them at the rice car.

Saturday, Kau and Arjun and I drove to Cincinatti for Rob’s birthday. Everyone was there. There were about 13 of us in total. We went out to dinner at this place in Newport called The Tropicana, and it was very expensive. The food was good, and so was the atmosphere. I had a 14 oz strip steak and potatoes, and Phil and I split this bruschetta. Afterward, a few of us went to this bar across the street at a brewhouse. They had these mugs of beer that held a liter… and everyone was walking around with one. I didn’t get one, but everyone else did and those liters looked amazing. We went back to his house and played some card games for a while until everyone passed out and went to sleep. We had a lot of fun hanging out with the guys we haven’t seen all summer, and it was good times.

We drove back early this morning because Arjun had to leave to go back to Chicago, so we took off at about 8:30 in the morning. When we got back, we went to Whitecastle in Indy. The pool is leaking because a rock broke through the bottom (just as I predicted…), so we hope we can fix it. We shot some fireworks that we got. Fireworks are truly awesome.

I went to the driving range with Kau to hit some balls. That was a lot of fun. Sometime this week, we’re going to try and do a course. That would be fun, I’ve never played golf before.

I took a nap today because I was so tired. Have work tomorrow… going to Chicago on Friday. So very tired…

This is slightly time-shifted (by over a year), but here is a link to the mirror:

http://www.monhaut.com/campaign/

This is the campaign website we wrote last spring (Spring 2004) for my presidential campaign in RH399: Election Rhetoric. I never liked the policy on Education, but the Social Security policy and the (not included on the website) Tax Reform policy regarding a flat-tax national sales tax where awesome. Enjoy the website, its completely unmodified from the version that we published. Maybe one day I’ll update it for my current political views. In that class, our group wasRepublican, however I ran the campaign as a Libertarian-Republican. Most of the planks are Republican stance, but you can see an injection of Libertarian philosophy in many of them!

The “I’m bored at work” Random Drivel forum is alive and kicking… Since we started it last week, it already has 11 members and over 800 posts. That is a lot of posts. People must be seriously bored at work. The forum makes the 3rd subdomain of monhaut.com I’ve set up (not counting mailboxes and webmail, but those are only for people with an @monhaut.com e-mail address, so it doesn’t really help anyone but me).

Now that we’ve got the super awesome Sixth Street pool in the backyard (which we swim in daily, because its just that awesome), we need to set up a webcam. I was thinking of calling it poolcam.monhaut.com or something similar. Roser suggested shrinkage.monhaut.com, which is kinda funny. Having a poolcam would be awesome. I gotta figure out how I’m going to hook up the webcam, because if we mount it outside its not going to be anywhere near a computer… any suggestions?

Every summer, Rose-Hulman hosts “Operation: Catapult”, which is a camp for high school students the summer before their senior year. So we just had a group of Catapult campers come in to visit our work place here at Ventures. Mostly, we were supposed to explain the projects that we are working on so that they can get a feel for what it is that Rose-Hulman students are capable of, and to see if they want to come to Rose when they graduate.

The first two groups came in, and I explained the beam profiling project that we are working on. Which, even though its cool, I got the impression that my description went WAY over the heads of these poor kids. So, the third group that came in, instead of telling them about my beam profiling project, I decided to steal a line from Office Space:

It’s pretty brilliant. We’re working on this computer software that will make us a lot of money. What it does is where there’s a bank transaction, and the interests are computed in the thousands a day in fractions of a cent, which it usually rounds off. What this does is it takes those remainders and puts it into your account. So when the subroutine compounds the interest, right, it uses all these extra decimals places that just get rounded off. So we just simplify the whole thing and we just round it down and drop the remainder into an account that we own. Yeah. They did this in Superman III.

I thought it was pretty funny, and these kids probably deserved a good laugh considering they’d just come from like 8 other labs where they learned about boring shit like “Inhilation Exposure System” or some other random crap like that.

Today for lunch, Chad, Eric and Scott and I went to Pizza Hut and got the Super Über Pizza Fantastic Meal Especial again. Man, that meal freakin rocks. That brings us up to 4 Jeff Gordon Posters now.

After work today, I went to the bike shop and had them put my new pedals on. Then Brian, Jon and I rode to campus, which is about seven miles or so. It takes about forty minutes or so, which is pretty good time. We took the Heritage Trail through ISU campus and it comes up behind Rose-Hulman, and rode through to the SRC. One of the pedals came off right when I got to campus, so Jon and I took it up to the Super Milage room in Myers and put it back on with a socket wrench. I guess the guy at the bike shop didn’t tighten it all the way.

On the way back, we saw a lot of joggers and bikers, and outran a train that was off in the distance to get across the tracks. Would not have been fun to get stuck behind the train. When we got back to the house, we drove up to Taco Bell for some dinner, and now it is time for sleep… So exhausted. I need to keep working out and getting in shape because my metabolism is definitely slowing down as I get older. I’m not in that same old high school football shape that I used to be!

So recently I’ve added these little 80×15 buttons to my site. I’ve added some of the important ones to the left (you can see that firefox and thunderbird are the first two, and other important ones follow it, although not in any significant order).

Most of these buttons go to actual websites other than my own. The paypal one goes to another page that tells you how to donate to my site, but its still off site. All the buttons serve some purpose, linking you to pages in the internet about me or this blog.

Recently, I’ve discovered that there is a complete internet underworld for these buttons, where people make them and put them on their sites. There are hundreds of them, if not thousands. They have all sorts of different ones; They have them for every month of the year, or for zodiac signs. They have them for all the instant messengers, and for Coke or Pepsi. They have them for almost anything you can think of. And if they don’t have one for something you think of, there are generators to easily make them.

I’m rather addicted to looking at all these buttons, but I can see how they’d quickly add up. So rather than add all the buttons that have anything to do with me to that list, I’ll probably make a second list that goes on the bottom of the page. I’d hate to clutter my site with these, but they are cool and they are a quick way to show your personality. Eventually I need to make a profile page for the site, and I can put all of them on there. So if you want to, click on any of the links on the side and they’ll take you to new and interesting places.

I installed a new theme for the blog today. When I wasn’t running errands (i’ve been up since 6 am), I was working on getting the new theme working the way I like it. I had to change a lot of things, and also make a lot of edits to the different templates. The theme is laid out very nicely, I applaud the author (credit given in the footer), but there were several bugs and missing items that the author forgot to fix. I went through just about every line trying to get it to work right, and then changing the colors to get it to match my logo. I checked, and the site isn’t XHTML 1.0 valid right now, which really bites but some of it is my fault. I’ll probably run through the site tomorrow and try and fix the errors, there are only 28 and I know how to fix about half of them right now.

Update: Fixed the errors this morning, didn’t take more than a half hour. Fixed the CSS errors, too. Sorry if this post went over anyone’s head.

I got dissatisfied with my desk placement today. I obtained a second (unused) desk from the room and adjoined it to mine to form an L shape and moved my monitor to the corner of the desk. I now have a practical office with a lab bench and plenty of desk space for testing and reports (to look busy).

My project partner also moved his desk to be in-line with mine, with a space seperating them, and perpendicular to the wall. This creates an enclosure with his desk and the wall being one corner and my desk in the L shape being the other corner, with a walkway between them. It looks very intimidating for anyone, which will likely prevent our lab equipment from being liberated to other projects (they have to get past us in order to get to our bench!!).

As an added bonus to looking really cool, this also wasted about 30 minutes of time.