Pam

zwol and I are in San Diego (well, Del Mar) now in our shiny new apartment!  Well, we have been since Saturday, but we only just now got internet for me to tell the world about it.  All in all it hasn't been as successful as one might hope, due to dirty things and broken things an the "augh! no internet!" but we're getting there.  I like the apartment, the area is beautiful, and we can easily walk to the beach and to the shops and restaurants in Del Mar.  I think it will be good here.

Our stuff and my car arrived on Tuesday on their respective trucks.  The truck *just barely* fit into the apartment driveway, and it's a good thing the driver was good at what he does or it wouldn't have fit at all, with the super-narrow street and large van parked across the way.  But it did fit!  And then we found out that the movers we hired in Atlanta hadn't packed things in right.  We had rented a certain number of feet in a large truck which would then (probably) hold other people's stuff in front of that, with everyone's stuff separated by wooden partitions.  Stuff should be tied down securely so it doesn't all go tumbling down and crushing someone when the bars holding the wooden partition are removed.  The movers hadn't done that, even though we had given them bunjee cords to do it with and offered to get more if necessary.

Fortunately we had hired some guys here at no notice to come unload things for us.  They lowered the partition some so that one of them could climb over and hand things back and straighten things up so they wouldn't come crashing down and crush people.  We never could have done that ourselves.  Even so, some things were damaged, like my (expensive new) office chair and the small bookshelf.  Also, nothing was covered, so the couch and some other things are really disgusting and dirty and we have to get them cleaned :(  But we have stuff now!  We can do things like cook!  And tomorrow the couch gets cleaned, after which we may actually be able to *sit* on it.  Whoah.

The car arrived in good shape, but quite dirty.  Zack took it to a car wash yesterday and got the super-expensive car wash for a nice (birthday?) surprise.  It came out all shiny and nice except for the windshield, which was cracked >_<.  The manager claims that the windshield probably had a small chip in it that cracked with the cold water after sitting in the heat.  Personally, I doubt this, having looked the car over closely after it got off the truck and then having the opportunity to look it over again when cleaning the windshield with a squeegee so I could see where I was going.  There is an obvious impact point on the windshield that I think I would have noticed.  Also, it was not actually hot yesterday.  More like overcast and foggy.  *sigh*  But the manager did find a place to fix it for us and is willing to pay 2/3 of the cost of that, probably because Zack *did* get the super-expensive car wash.  He's also throwing in some expensive car washes for free, but I'm not inclined to take my car back there.  But it's here, in one piece, and drivable, and the shiny new bumper hasn't fallen off, so that's something.  And the repair guy comes to our apartment tomorrow, so I'll be able to drive to work Monday.

Being that we are moving in and our stuff has just arrived and no one I know in San Diego knows I'm here, my birthday was not an exciting affair.  I spent most of it washing dishes and finding cupboards for them.  We did go out to dinner last night, tried to watch Indiana Jones but arrived at the theater at just the wrong time (no internet to check times), and ended up at the fancy desert place in North Park where there was tastiness and Charlie Chaplin films.

You need a check for $1800 for an apartment deposit.  You just barely have enough money in your account to cover it, congratulations!  Unfortunately, your checkbook is on the wrong side of the country, but a money order will do.  Problem:  it is Saturday evening of a holiday weekend and the banks will not open until Tuesday.  Your plane leaves tomorrow afternoon, so you're going to have to get a money order somewhere else.  These places only take cash.  ATMs have varied and unspecified withdrawal limits, so you will probably have to visit several.  You have slightly less than one hour including travel time.  Go!

I am now a Master of Science.  Hooray!  Don't ask me about the graduation speeches, though, I could not hear them.  The only way we could tell that the speakers said something funny was the people in the stands started laughing--there was a terrible echo for those of us on the ground (i.e., the graduates) making it impossible to make anything out until they fixed the sound most of the way through the (4 hour) ceremony.  Gah.  But I have a shiny piece of paper with a picture of Tech Tower on it!  And a masters graduation robe and hood that I don't know what to do with.

I'm also very tired, but will hopefully be feeling more awake before long so we can drive up to Della's.

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. Add (*) beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read 'em for school in the first place.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell*
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights*
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera (I mean to finish this one at some point)
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo*
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (I think this is one I've started, anyway)
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere*
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon* (read it ages ago, though, I'm not sure I'd still recommend it)
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down*
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit*
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers


Most of the ones here that I haven't read I really don't intend to, which makes the list less interesting.  I don't really know how LibraryThing works, are these things that people actually own but haven't read?  Or just haven't read?

Zack and I are playing Shadow of the Colossus. For those who haven't heard of it, think of an RPG-type game stripped of all the random monsters spread throughout the world, just boss fights. Also, no stats or levels, I think. You're playing a character who brings his dead girlfriend to this ancient temple at the end of the world and bargains with a god to kill all these colossi in order to get her soul back, or something like that.

We're on the third colossus right now, and I keep feeling bad for them. They're just minding their own business, doing whatever it is they do and suddenly you show up and kill them. The second doesn't even really try to hurt you, it basically just postures like an animal trying to scare you off when it's perfectly capable of serious injurring you with very little effort. The first and third genuinely are trying to kill you, but I'm willing to attribute that to intruding on the first one's territory and the third one probably being part of some sort of defense system for the temple.

I actually really like the third one, it learns from its mistakes, which makes it even more sympathetic a character. I don't know if feeling bad for the monsters is part of the intent of the designers yet, I suppose it depends on the backstory, if any gets revealed.

And there are pictures!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pamgriffith/tags/newyork/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zackw/tags/newyorkcity/

zwol and I spent the last week in New York meeting up with old friends and seeing the sights. solconeja was there too for the beginning of the week, and all three of us somehow managed to cram ourselves into elisaana's rather small apartment. (And many thanks to Betsy's roommate for putting up with it!) After that we stayed with some friends of Zack's from Berkley.

The week is a bit of a blur now, but highlights include the St. Patrick's parade, Avenue Q, the superhero store, Chinatown, and Little Italy (with rice pudding!) with Betsy and Mindy, dinner and the elephant walk with Betsy and Zack's old friends from Columbia, the Frick museum, the Cloisters, MoMA, dinner and a commedy club followed by Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (a "neo-futurist" show) with Betsy and Sumana, a ferry ride past the Statue of Liberty, an abortive attempt at seeing the Old Merchant's House Museum (we ran late and it closed early) then a walk and some tea with Betsy and some of Zack's friends, dinner with Zack's uncle and family, and a walk on Roosevelt Island with Sumana. (Phew!)

It was really great seeing/meeting people there, though I may owe Betsy and Mindy an apology for not being as energetic and enthusiastic as usual--I've just been so tired lately, so everything seems more difficult. I think I need to get some more vitamin B12.

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind and the elephants were really awesome random things to run across. Too Much Light... is a show where the performers try to do 30 90-second plays in one hour in a random order chosen by the audience. The price was randomized with a 6-sided die, and every week between 2 and 12 plays are discarded and replaced with new ones. Some of the plays were good, some not, but it was a really cool show.

The elephants were in Manhattan for the circus. Apparently they cannot bring the train with the animals all the way in, so it is a yearly ritual that they walk into the city every year. It happens late at night so they can close down the entire street. We had to wait for a while, but then suddenly Elephants! In Manhattan!!

MoMA had a great exhibit called Design and the Elastic Mind full of the sorts of things I see all the time at various department demo days here or at conferences. There were a lot of very cool things there, but it was a little weird seeing them in a museum setting where one Does Not Touch. There were so many things just begging to be messed with, all with security people hovering over them to make sure that didn't happen. I can see why they wouldn't want people to touch stuff that's going to be there a while and is probably a pretty fragile prototype not up to the masses of people, but it just feels wrong. They also had an exhibit about color, which was rather less interesting; I kind of wish I'd skipped that and gone down to see the main collection, which I would have liked to spend more time in but we were all getting tired at that point.

I totally recommend the Frick and the Merchant's House as interesting small and less well-known museums. The cloisters were also very cool, though Zack says he found the building built out of the skeletons of other buildings kind of creepy. All of those are the sorts of thing that you can see all of in a few hours, unlike MoMA or the main part of the Met, which is nice.

Dear internet tutorial writers:
It would have been really nice if you'd told me that when using rewrite rules in an .htaccess file to make ugly php urls into pretty html urls with directories instead of all the punctuation marks, the rewrite rule uses the local path instead of the http path, and that the way to solve this is not by using an absolute path to the server but to use RewriteBase. Using absolute paths makes the server think you're redirecting to another server, so it tells the browser that the page has moved and does a forced redirect, rewriting the url in the browser to the new one and defeating the entire purpose of having the pretty url rewriting in the first place. This caused me to spend forever trying to figure out where the 302 redirect was coming from when I didn't have the R flag in there. Bah. (Incidentally, using [R=200] is kind of interesting--you get an OK plus a server error)


It also would have been really nice if my voice recorder had actually recorded that interview I did this afternoon for my project.

It's zwol's birthday today (omg, he's 30 O.O), so we celebrated by cleaning the apartment. Oh, and then we went to hear Kim Stanley Robinson talk, which was interesting. I haven't actually read anything he's written, but he's a good speaker. He talked about politics, climate change, etc. etc., and while I don't necessarily agree with all that he said (e.g. while we may have evolved on the savanna, not everybody enjoys camping....), it was a good talk. Then we wandered off and tried the fancy four-course fondue restaurant on Peachtree. We actually skipped the desert this time for lack of room in our stomachs, but we're planning on going again at some point after seeing something or other at the Fox Theater. And now he's helping me transcribe my interviews. Have we mentioned that I have the best boyfriend ever? I have the best boyfriend ever.

Ocean beach is not nearly as fun with no one to share it with, especially at night :\

Also, this is a really horrifying picture.

But this one made me laugh.

What happened to stores carrying cheap off-brand CRT TVs for under $50? Three years or so ago I got a 13 inch tv for about $20. Today zwol and I went looking and couldn't find anything even of that itty bitty size for under $150 or so. Are we really the only people interested in super-cheap, non-lcd, non-flat-panel, non-gizmoed-out tvs? I'm sure there's a market here, what happened?


In other news, the photocopy filter in photoshop is my new best friend. It's fantastic at turning photographs of line drawings that have irritating shading back into line drawings. But I still hate making posters.

Had the best hot chocolate ever today--really rich hot chocolate (good by itself, Zack had that) plus butterscotch. Mmmm....:) And it was for class! For my project studio, we have these environmental sensor device that detects air quality, humidity, sound, barometric pressure, and tempeature. We've been discussing various places we might take the devices to see what kinds of things might be interesting to put into a visualization. One of the suggestions that came up was comparing measurements in restaurants to restaurant ratings, so Zack and I wandered around Atlanta coffee shops all day. We found some good places, too, and some fun-looking neighborhoods. More stuff to explore at some point.

Also, Zack has internet now! No more attempting to steal the neighbor's wireless! And it works! It did take a while to remove all of the junk that got installed on my computer during the registration process--they installed weird programs, active x controls that can't be removed, and rebranded IE to Internet Explorer Provided by Comcast (wtf??)--but I did eventually get it mostly fixed, except for that (improperly signed) active x control that can only be disabled, not deleted for some reason.

This all had a coherent point to it, but now I can't remember. So, um, that's what I did today. And tomorrow is board game day, hooray! And thursday, more phone interviews!

It snowed today! Lots of big, slow flakes. They melted when they hit the sidewalk or the street, but there was enough on the grass for snowball fights. Everyone was excited and dancing around in it when we came out of the Interactivity information session--though the novelty did wear off quickly when we started feeling cold and wet. Later this evening it started raining, which may melt it or turn it into ice, but it was pretty while it lasted. Also cold, but not as cold as it seemed it ought to be.

zwol and I have been pretty sick lately (the 6-hour delay followed by the 5-ish hour flight last friday did not help), but we're both in Atlanta now and Zack has an apartment that he still isn't quite moved into yet because the crate hasn't been delivered. The place is right next to the train tracks, which is interesting but not great for sleeping--not that either of us has been doing much of that, what with the sniffling and coughing all night long. Tuesday I went to the doctor, and with the drugs I'm feeling much better. Benedryl is the best stuff ever. I suppose prednisone is ok too in small doses to prevent me from getting pneumonia or other respiratory ailments, but the long-term side effects are scary.

I've been told that I only need one class plus my masters project to finish, which is pretty cool. I think I'll end up taking the computer-supported cooperative work class too, even though it's a lot of work, just because that's exactly my area of interest. I might be able to use my masters paper for the class paper, too, which would be cool--more eyes to critique it, less work overall = good times :) The other class is a project with the google maps api and environmental sensor data and maybe some data visualization stuff. Should be fun.

I also contacted the manager of all campus housing about the leak in the ceiling that's been there since August. He was really appologetic about it, and more importantly the leak got fixed today. He was here in person and told us that the holes in the ceiling would probably be repaired tomorrow. I finally get to put the bucket away.

My attempt to repair the window was less successful--I got Zack to help me open it, but loosening the screws did not actually make it any easier to open as I had hoped. Oh well.

Also, via zwol:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The article title is the name of your band. (If it's the entry for a real musician or band, cheating with a reload is probably a good idea.)
2. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.
3. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4. Use your graphics program of choice to throw them together, et voilà.

( Paper from the state by Regnier I, Count of Hainaut )

I don't really know what kind of music that would be...

I feel like sharing some choice quotations from the reading for class tomorrow.

The signifieds of this third message are constituted by the real objects in the scene, the signifiers by these same objects photographed, for given that the relation between thing signified and image signifying in analogical representation is not 'arbitrary' (as it is in language), it is no longer necessary to dose the relay with a third term in the guise of the psychic image of the object.

No longer necessary to do what, now?

...the discontinuous world of symbols plunges into the story of the denoted scene as though into a lustral bath of innocence.

I like the phrase "lustral bath of innocence," but uhh...what?

No, seriously, what??

My mom has just forwarded an email to me via the post office.

*facepalm*

Because a couple of you said you wanted to see it. An explanation for the rest of you: it's a 3d illustration/interpretation of a city from Calvino's Invisible Cities. This one in particular is a city that is under construction, and according to the inhabitants the blueprint for the city is the stars. It's modeled in Maya, then stuck into the Blender 3d game engine. It's also unfinished: due to the very quirky, poorly designed, and extremely unstable nature of the blender game engine, I didn't have time to get collision and gravity working, so it's not possible to wander around the second floor as originally intended. So you can just wander around on the ground (but you can go through posts! And through the sky and out of the world!).

Use arrows to move, page up to look up, page down to look down.

Windows version
Linux version

Disclaimer: I make no guarantees that these will work. At all. Probably the sound won't work on linux because of a blender bug, anyway. They may make your video card explode.

Bruce Mau's manifesto for growth
Meant for designers, I think, but worth a read even if you're not.

Ok...now back to the invisible cities project. Almost done! I've got motion and lighting, now I'm adding sound. I don't think I'm going to manage to get collision and ladders working by tomorrow, which is disappointing, but that's ok. Expect an update some time with either screenshots or an executable game file :)

Georgia tech student health insurance does not cover dental at all. One would think it would, being that there is a dentist's office in the student health center, but no. This is bad because I suspect I may need expensive dental work.

The college of computing says they overpaid me and wants me to return over $4200. That one sets off alarm bells for me, especially since my checking account records suggest that if I owe them anything it's quite a bit less.

I think Georgia Tech might hate me. The good news, though, is I can still get a loan for next semester.

Also, while I no longer have a hole in my ceiling because maintenance came and filled it with plaster, they did not fix the leak that caused the hole. I may have a new one that's even worse very soon.

I can tell people what the company I worked for last summer actually *does*! Hooray!
http://www.metaplace.com/

There's really nothing else exciting going on here.

I installed the Vista driver for my graphics tablet and all of a sudden I have handwriting recognition software! It's pretty good, too - it's recognized some really atrocious handwriting. I won't write much more, it takes too long, but I think it's really cool! Yay new toys!