a8a0r8on

"Meanwhile, my ass is one the line so your fat butt can go to the mall and pick up the latest copy of Computer Gaming Monthly without getting jumped and sodomized in the mall bathroom."

Random Purchase #40

Superman #676

"Memorial Day"

Writer: Vito Delsante
Artist: Julian Lopez
Inker: Bit
Colorist: Marta Martinez
Letterer: Comicraft

One of the most daunting tasks in comics these days comes from keeping a book fresh and interesting.  How much harder that must be when you are working with Superman or Batman, one of the big icons. Add on the fact that all of space-time stands on the precipice of being rent asunder for DC’s Final Crisis and you wonder what you could do with Superman right now that might be interesting.  Surprisingly enough, a well-timed story on Superman’s first Memorial Day in Metropolis, innovatively mixing in some ‘first-meeting’ between characters, gives us a very relaxed, enjoyable story.

Click here to continue reading this article on Popsyndicate.com!

Not-so-Random: Guardians of the Galaxy #1.  What a riot! First issue and I think I am already in love.  The most unlikely team ever: Adam Warlock, Quasar, Drax, Gamorra, Rocket Racoon, Starlord and Mantis, Groot and Cosmo (a talking soviet era dog!).  If they don't end up destroying the galaxy by the 3rd issue, I'll be impressed!  Project: Superpowers #3.  All hell breaks loose.  Digging this book more and more.  Each month just adds another layer of craziness to an already crazy book.  Green Lantern Corps #24.  Mongul Jr. has some nasty plans for his Black Mercy flowers.  And who know they were semi-sentient?  Thunderbolts #120.  Warren Ellis is painting a superb picture at the stupidity of the Thunderbolts program run by the Green Goblin.  Its almost like he went 'really, someone tried to say that the government trusts Norman Osborne? Okay, let's make sure they regret that mistake in every conceivable way. What a wonderful comic.

It is almost impossible for me to correctly express how important College was to me in my life. I tend to think of Oswgo as the best four years of my life, and that's true. It was also, paradoxically, the worst four years of my life. My mother was arrested due to an old drug abuse problem and my blood family that was never quite strong to begin with, fell to pieces while I was in College.

Still, you only remember the good things, I guess, and for years I considered Oswego the closest thing I ever had to home.

As I begin this missive, I sit in the east section of the 2nd floor of Penfield Library, a place where I camped out for several weekends during the toughest semester of my undergraduate academic career. To my right rises Funnelle and Hart Halls conected by Cooper Dining Hall. Directly ahead of me is the new Swetman/Poucher bulding - the only thing I can see that really is totally new in the last 25 years. It occupies the same site as the old Swetman/Poucher building, but is at least twice its size. Not only is it a new building, but it has revamped the land around it. The street that I used to cross every day to go from my dorm to Snygg Hall is gone. The fountain - a gift from the Class of '83 if I remember correctly - that they placed in between Snygg and Funnelle Halls is also gone. Slightly to my left rises the Twin Towers of the power generation plant just off campus - the towers named by the students Big Dick and Little Dick. Little Dick has had its top repaired and painted white in the last few years.

You know, the saying is right, but the song is wrong: You can't go home again. And that's not necessarily a bad thng.

The last time I was here, probably about 10 years ago the ghosts flew thick and heavy around me. It didn't end up being a good visit. I'd come wanting to come home, but the home I'd come back to didn't exist anymore. Yes, you could take the boy from Oswego, but you couldn't take Oswego from the boy. The problem was that the Oswego in the boy didn't quite exist anymore, and it was a shock.

I was worried about the same thing happening this time as I drove up playing REO Speedwagon and Air Supply - the very songs that I'd heard 25 years ago on this very campus. Sure, I was tempting fate.

But it didn't happen. On one level I felt like an intruder. Sure with the clothes and the backpack and the hat hiding my balding head I looked like a student, perhaps, but I wasn't one. The students around me taking finals hadn't even been born yet when I originally walked this campus.

Oddly, but perhaps appropriately, the visit turned into a professional networking event.

=======================

Especially during finals week you really never know who you'll catch or not. That was one of the reasons I knew yesterday was the very last day I could do this.

I caught Dr. Susan Fettes as she was letting out a final. She barely recognized me, and to be fair, I would have had a problem picking her out of a street crowd. As we talked and I let her in on some of the maths I was attempting now-a-days (Fourier transform power functions), she mentioned some of the work she was doing, via students, in the Physics department programming Fourier transform functions in Java to facilitate Cephid variable research that a member of the Physics faculty was doing. She said the Java method would be posted on her web site soon and I should check it out.

Susan was the first person I managed to find, but she let me in on the secret that Doug now semi-hid in his office by closing the door, and I should knock.

I did so. And Dr. Doug Lea opened the door utterly shocked to see me. Doug looks very much the same as he did 25 years ago, save that his hair, including his moustache is now a very light tan. While he was shocked to see me, he knew what was going on with me. Interestingly enough I had updated my CS Alumni page for the first time in 10+ years a couple of weeks ago. When that happened, Randy Odenhall, who I'd remembered, sent out an email to the rest of the CS faculty updating them about me.

I learned a few things during our conversation. Turns out that Doug was born and grew up in Somerville, just a few blocks from where I'm trying to get a flat. He knows the area well. He goes back about 4 times a year, once to see a Red Sox game. I told him about my sticker shock at a $90 ticket and he agreed. However, he noted that Addison-Wesley gets four season tickets a year, and if you write books for them and are very nice to them, they give you one to use for a day! Aaaahhhh! So that's how you do it! :-)

Doug gave me a small tour of the CS Wing. The offices have not moved from where they were, but most of the classrooms across the hall are now thin-client computer labs. With the Java research that Doug continues to do for Sun, Sun donates gobs of hardware to him. So much so that he has quad-processor machines he doesn't know what to do with. "Really?" I said. "I may be contacting you about those!"

Then, completely independently, he mentioned the students that Susan had mentioned working with the Physics Prof on computational astronomy research. Turns out these students are going to Brazil this summer to work on a robotic telescope installation and he introduced me to them. Then he took me to the other side of the building to see if he could introduce me to their Prof (see how this was turning into a professional networking event?). Unfortuantely Dr. Shashi Kanbur wasn't there, but Doug told me to note the name. I did, and later looked him up.

Dr. Kanbur turns out to be no slouch! While in the Physics Department, he teaches all the Astronomy courses, and actively recruits undergraduates in research projects which include observations of Cephid variables in the LMC as well as hydrodynamical models of RR Lyrae stars. It turns out that the robotic telescope installation in Brazil is part of an American Astronomical Society Chretien International Research Award in collaboration with the Brazilian National telescope facility to do long term observations of Cepheids in the Magellanic Clouds and to develop the robotic telescope. Would that I had had such opportunities when I was an undergraduate!

Doug and I also talked about old classmates and he brought me up to speed on a couple of my classmates who had "made it." The most interesting of these was Mark Fedor.

Mark was one of my very first supervisors. He was a student Senior Operator when I was hired by the Instructional Computing Center in my Junior year. It was Mark who gave me my first big assignment - gather source, figure it out, compile it, and install the college's first DNS server in 1985. It was a big deal back then.

Turn out Mark had gone from Oswego to NyserNet and then PSI. There he'd created or co-authored such landmark protocols as GateD and SNMP. Doug said after PSI exploded Mark took a decade off and bought a vinyard in VA. At the beginning of the millenium he went back to work.

Where'd Mark go back to work? Again, its a small world! Mark turned out to be the CTO for Sunrocket, the VoIP company that Arc found and signed us up for two years ago. They exploded within the year, but not because of technical problems, but a business model that was so bad even I couldn't figure out how the company was going to remain afloat.

I wandered to central campus and went through Hewitt Union. They have public kiosk Macs sprinkled about, but they're the "gooseneck" iMac models with old OSes on them. It all seemed sort of empty with no student organizations I could find save for the Women's Center. The TV and the radio station areas were empty which concerned me greatly.

I went to Mahar to look up Dr. John Kane, but he wasn't in. I found out from the directory that Dr. Dave Bozak who had been my vector graphics Prof was now heading up Sociology from the rarified air of the 6th floor of Culkin Hall, the Administration Building. He was at a conference.

It was about 1500hrs and I was about done. I went back to Snygg Hall to try two more people, Craig Graci and Paul Taylor. I went down to ICC and found that Paul's office was open, but he wasn't around. He had to be somewhere. I waited for a bit and wandered into the "terminal rooms." There was not a single VT220 anywhere! :-) Mostly PCs with a few Macs sprinkled about. There were no carrols anymore, the ones that Ed Beadle, the first director I worked under, called TARDISes. That was how I'd gotten my name. I was standing in the room where my name had been given to me... probably for the very last time!

Paul never returned, and I knew that Craig was gone for the day so upon having a last look through the door window into what had been the original Machine Room holding Natasha and Boris and all the other PDP-11/34s, 73s, and VAXen I'd grown up with, I walked out of the basement NE door.

There at the curb was Doug Lea talking to someone. As I got closer I realized it was Paul. As I approached Doug motioned Paul toward me. He turned around and said, "Dude! My God! How are you?!"

Thus became what turned into a five hour visit.

Paul Taylor had been an Operator at the ICC when I was a Sophomore. He was due to graduate, and me, always hanging out at the ICC (I was a CS major, after all) always said, "Paul! I want your job!" After awhile Paul said, "You're one of the few people I'd give it to." Paul graduated and I ended up applying for one of the open positions for Student Operator and got it. The next semester I walked into the building for my first day at work and Paul walked in right beside me!

"What are you doing here?" I asked, seeing my job melt away in front of me.

"They hired me as Systems Programmer," Paul said 25 years ago, pulling out his Faculty/Staff ID.

The plan in my head for two years then was that we'd work together for two years, I'd graduate, Paul would move on to the Presidency of IBM and I'd get his job. That was my post college dream. I told him that yesterday. Paul laughed and said, "Well, they didn't offer me the Presidency of IBM..."

"What?" I said.

"Around 1987-88 IBM tried to recruit me for the AIX division. I decided that I didn't want to go into that type of environment." It was downright eerie how close my post-college dream had come to being a reality.

We talked for about a half hour and I said, "By the way, what the hell happened to Swetmen/Poucher?"

"Heh. You don't know the half of it," Paul said. He went to his desk and brought out plans detailing a $0.5bn expansion of the Piez Hall Science Building that would mean the destruction of Snygg Hall. I scanned the plans. Yes, while it would be moved, my Planetarium would still be on the 3rd floor, and there would be an astronomical observing platform on the roof.

"You really couldn't have walked around that much," Paul said. "We have a lot of differences. Let's take a tour."

We went through the new Swetman/Poucher Hall. To say that its huge is an understatement! It is here that they moved both the campus radio and TV stations. And its more than the old Swetman/Poucher. Tacked onto the west end of the old complex, in the very center of campus, is The Arena, a replacement for Romney Field House! There it was, the huge arena, all set up for the upcoming graduation. My eyes went to the left and I saw, labeled in huge letters, the "Steve Levy Press Box!"

Now, those of you who follow sports, and who watch ESPN, especially, apparently, hockey, might recognize Steve Levy. He's a sports anchor for the network and apparently he's pretty popular. But I knew Steve 25 years ago when he was Friday Night Sports anchor for campus TV station WTOP-Ch10. And ya know, I got more mail than Steve did as the Friday Night Weatherman. Of course, in my case they were death threats, but I still got more mail than he did! I told Paul it would take me a bit to "digest" the "Steve Levy Press Box."

We walked through Sheldon Hall, which had largely been abandonned six months after I got to Oswego. It now houses languages, admissions and other things - a full campus building.

We went back to Paul's office and talked some more. He showed me pictures of his two boys. Jason has been born the year I graduated. I remember Paul holding him in his office one day as a newborn. Now he's 21, bigger than his Dad, with long hair, but otherwise a dead ringer for his father.

Paul's phone rang. He answered it, said a few things, and then said, "Guess who dropped by to see me? Doc Kinne. Yea, we've been reminicing." He looked at me, "What are you doing for dinner?"

"Nothing. Is that Kathy?" I asked. Kathy was Paul's wife.

"Yea. You wanna come to dinner?" Paul asked.

"Great!" I said.

"He's coming," Paul said back into the phone as he ended the conversation and hung up.

"My God1 That's amazing that Kathy remembers me so well," I said.

"Why?"

"Well, its been at least 21 years since we've seen each other."

"Well," Paul said, "You have some...physical characteristics that tend to make you rather memorable, and you also tended to accent them while you were here."

"How did I accent me being short?"

"I said, 'physical characteristics.' You were the only person on campus who wore a 20' long multi-colored scarf...no matter what the temperature. There was that battered Fedora you always wore. And your nosewarmer pipe. So, you tended to be somewhat memorable."

I laughed so hard I almost choked. Paul was right, of course.

We went to his place and Paul introduced me to his boys. During, and after, dinner we talked about everything: the economy, our medical issues, car crashes we'd been in, Scouting, dumb school boards, crime, computers, servers, visual over CCD variable star data gathering, numismatics, guns, karate, cats, Boston, the metro, the World Trade Center Towers. It went on and on. Halfway through, right after dinner, Kathy had to leave with Scott, Paul's younger boy, and go to a Scouting function. Paul, me, and Jason went to the porch. The only thing that stopped us, coming up on 2000hrs was the fact that Paul and Jason had a World of Warcraft battle schedule for the hour.

It had been an amazing visit, and a fantastic end to an amazing day!

============================

The ghosts were gone. They were just...gone. It hadn't ended up being about me once again reaching into the past, but enjoyng the present and looking toward the future with relationships that were no longer Teacher-Student, but entirely peer-based. Yea, you might not be able to take Oswego out of the boy, but the Oswego that the boy knew no longer exists. It has changed as everything does, and everything must.

And so, I left the City and came home, no longer playing Air Supply and REO Speedwagon, but again listening to Astronomy Cast and the BBC NewsPod.

Somewhere, in another dimension and in another time a brown-coat, scarf, and Fedora-wearing boy with hair on his head stood on the roof of Piez Hall and leaned against the curved wall that was the top of the oldest Planetarium in Central NY and smiled as he sucked his pipe and worked on his smoke rings.

His work here was done...

( My Mother's Ashes )

I can't remember a day that had as much national good news in a long, long time.

A judge orders the obsolete RIAA to pay opponent's legal fees after failing in one of their harrassing lawsuits!

Judges are battling a thousand today!!! Today I have hope in America!

... what?

YAY!

We've just heard from Mazz that she's in talks with the BBC for a whole lot of stuff, including to get her pattern licensed for use on the website and in a BBC magazine. She's also got a whole lot of opportunities ahead of her (including knitting for and meeting Team Cardiff).

WOW.

I am so happy and pleased and I think that it's a huge win for Who fandom knitters.

(While I knew this was going on, thanks to JC for letting me know.)

CA Supreme Court Fixes Faulty Voter Decision!

Hopefully it happens rarely, but it does happen - sometimes voters are wrong. And in this case, in passing Prop. 22, the CA voters were wrong. Fortunately, more and more, we have "activist" judges who know right from wrong.

For now, CA now joins the "Enlightened Club," a wonderful club that now includes Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, South Africa, the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec and the Great United States Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

But its not over. While losing, the bigots will not give up. An appeal to the US Supreme Court is expected.

today is the last day of my 30s.



i just cannot believe it.

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

i know many of you like those places -- they're cheap and you usually get a decent massage. but they're extremely exploitative of the therapists, in my opinion. massage envy here pays $15 an hour for work that is so hard on the body that the average massage therapist only stays in business about 6 years -- most of us develop repetitive stress injury of some kind and have to stop.

if you must go to one of these places, please give your therapist an enormous tip. i know massage envy has been good for some experienced therapists -- they get their laundry and taxes taken care of, and all their regulars come and see them there and give them $30 tips. but most of the folks working at such places are being taken advantage of, in my opinion -- wearing out their bodies for a mediocre pay rate. i suppose it's not so bad if you're right out of school and consider it a paid internship, but if i ever work for such a place, it will be out of desperation.

i would rather you all found a therapist in private practice who will negotiate with you. some of my friends give sliding scale rates for artists, students, and other low-income people. some will give deep discounts if you buy a bunch of massages at once. and that money goes into their pockets, not into the pockets of the owners of massage envy.

i hope that it's true that because massage envy and other such places offer cheap massage, more people will try getting massages and then will be willing to pay a little more in order to offer a fair rate to more skilled private practitioners and folks who work at spas that give them a decent commission. but i think paying a massage therapist $15 an hour -- and then usually nothing at all if an appointment time happens not to be booked -- is unethical.

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

from galateadia



ya gotta do this meme!
click on the 'Get your own' link and pick the photos that most appeal to you
at the end, it gives you an 'album' of yourself (see 'Read my' link)
this meme describes me more accurately than any other

enjoy!

Documents show Rumsfield stating the President is a victim of his own success and everyone could benefit from another terrorist attack so we'd appreciate him more - in response to Democrats being brought back into congress in 2006.

I guess I shouldn't be mad. It's one of the only honest political moments in the last sixty years.

The news has finally made the BBC.

So far, it's the article that has had the most statements from the BBC that I've seen, but there are a number of things that bug me about what they've written.

"BBC Worldwide said it acted because finished figures were being sold by others on auction website eBay." (Emphasis mine.) They also repeat this later in the article "This lady, with the best will in the world, wanted to share with friends, family and fans. But there were some unscrupulous people taking these patterns and using them on eBay to make profit for themselves. Unfortunately, we had to get to the source of the patterns - and that was her website." That's something that I don't understand. Why penalize the person who is distributing the pattern (and by extension the rest of the knitting community) and not just the people who were selling the pattern or finished knitted objects? And why just HER and not other people who have distributed other patterns and have sold finished knitted objects?

When Mazz informed the BBC that she took down the patterns, she wrote a really great email that attempted to inform and appeal to their sense of fairness, and hoped that she wasn't being singled out. Their response implied that she was the one that was preventing profit from genuine merchandise and read like a canned response: it was two sentences long.

Also from the article: "It [BBC Worldwide] also denied threatening legal action and said it had offered to consider marketing the designs itself." I am working to confirm this, but reading all correspondence that Mazz has shared so far, BBC Worldwide has NOT indicated to Mazz that they considered marketing the design.

The BBC spokesman has said, "It's not that we don't admire creativity from fans - most of the time,we take the view that if it's small-scale and not for profit, then weturn a blind eye." I wish they made that policy all of the time, because Mazz was small-scale and not for profit. She was even working hard to STOP the ebayers by reporting them! (And enlisted a whole bunch of us to report them as well. I know that I have reported three listings by the same ebay seller who still has an active ebay account last I checked.) When he said "Mazzmatazz was still welcome to get in touch with BBC Worldwide to discuss the issue.", she HAS. She has sent them two additional letters, the first arguing the case that she is small-scale and not-for-profit and the second with a number of different ideas on how to resolve this issue. Like I said, I'm working to confirm if they have continued correspondence with her... and I'll keep folks updated on what I know.

Thanks to everyone out there who has taken some form of action, by either writing to the BBC or spreading the word. Here's hoping that in the semi-near future, there will be knitted adipose (and others) for all!

So...

• Refreshed and priortized my professional To-Do list.
• Did more SSL research.
• Wrote up my VO Summer School application.
• Updated various systems.
• Mowed lawn
• Fixed toilet
• Garbage & recycling put out
• Installed and compiled the MySQLdb-python module for Python DBI programming on Ananda (after making sure it was on all my other systems)

Also, I'm going to take a "vacation day" tomorrow and go up to SUNY Oswego to say goodbye and thanks to a few people. I realized this will be the very last chance I have to do that before I go to Cambridge. I'll also take the opportunity to visit my father in Syracuse as well.

• Dr. Doug Lea, for being my undergraduate advisor, for putting up with all the practical jokes I played on him and not killing me (or failing me) for them, and for saying that I'd never get my Masters if I didn't start it within five years of leaving Oswego. I had to prove him wrong.

• Craig Graci, for recommending that I legally change my name to "Doc." He'll be amazed how far that name has gone. And for just being Graci-space.

• Dr. Sue Fettes, for being one of those who proved to me I can do math when I need to.

• Dr. John Kane, for putting up with the antics that enabled me to get the highest grades in the 1984 Principles of Economics courses.

• Paul Taylor, for recommending me for my first computational position and then mentoring me through it.

• Dr. David Thomas, for giving me my first astronomical position. I only wish someone hadn't had to die in order for me to get it. Dormu Pace, Doktoro Jerred!

There are some people I don't expect to see. Joanne Kossegi, another of my very important math profs, has retired. Dr. Brindle, who was the Computer Science Department Head for awhile while I was there has also retired.

Most unfortunately, I've found out that Dr. Ronald S. Chaldu, my undergraduate Astronomy Prof, retired in 2004. I did a literature search for Dr. Chaldu and came up with nine entries. Well, Ron never struck me as a research scientist - he was a teacher, and a good one.

I keep saying that the astronomical community is small. How small is it? Take a look a this entry:

1971IAUC.2340....1K Nova Cephei 1971. 1.000 00/1971 C U
Kuwano, Y.; Ishida, K.; Ichimura, K.; Mattei, M.; Ashbrook, J.; Seslar, M.; Bortle, J.; Honeycutt, R. K.; Chaldu, R.

There's my Prof at the end of the author list. Variable star astronomers will recognize, at least, one other name on this list: Mattei, M. - husband of Dr. Janet Mattei, the immediate past Director of the AAVSO, and himself a long time Clerk to the Assocation!

Last week, I went to see Iron Man.

I won’t go into any spoilers in front of the cut. I’ll just say that all of the positive things I’ve seen about the movie are spot on. It’s easily one of the better superhero movies that’s come on in the last few years. Robert Downey Jr. really did nail the Tony Stark character.

The only thing I had a hard time getting past was Jeff Bridges. He’s The Dude. His mannerisms and the way he delivers some lines just reminds me of The Big Lebowski. Which is strange because not all of his post-Lebowski appearances remind me of The Dude.

( Read more... )

( a distraction from )corwinok

I tag all of you!

we looked everywhere for a place near jorge's family (which is also near everything else in our lives) but couldn't find anything that was safe and affordable. so we are moving to a house way across town. it is in a safe neighborhood. but the transportation will be horrible; the choices are: expensive or dangerous. the house is less than what we pay now, but with transportation, it will probably work out to be the same or more. and it doesn't have a phone. (it takes an average of four years to get a phone put in here so no point in trying.) it's super expensive to use cell phones here so that's really not a means of communication other than very brief calls. and there's no internet, either. we are going to be isolated. isolation + depression = not good.

also, here i walk at least three miles every day or every other day, because everything in our lives is within a 1.5 mile radius. but over there, while our street and the immediate area are safe, shortly outside of the area is not. and so no more walking for me. goodbye exercise and sunshine therapy.

we are also already having problems with the landlord and we haven't even moved in yet. supposedly she sent her daughter to change our deposit (paid in dollars) into Cordobas and the daughter was supposedly robbed. the landlord called me asking for more money so they could eat for the rest of the month. it's the whole taking-advantage-because-i'm-a-gringo routine. *sigh* the house is kind of rundown and sad, and our agreement was that she was going to have the inside painted and repaired before we moved in. but "the money was stolen" and so that's probably not happening now. *sigh again* the landlord and her daughter live in a little casita behind the house we are renting, and so they are going to be right there with us. jorge is afraid they are going to bug the hell out of us. i am, too.

:(

i know i should be grateful that we found something safe and focus on that. but right now i don't feel happy about this move at all. i don't want to leave where we are. this weekend when we have to go, i am going to cry and cry and cry. i started days ago.