Ray Strode

Okay so it’s been a long while since I posted. ummm, I guess it’s cause I still don’t have internet at home. Hopefully, the DSL modem will be arriving in the mail any day now.

So, my job rocks. My coworkers rock, my boss rocks, my work is quite fun, and it’s just all around a great thing. I like New Hampshire/Massachusetts a lot, too. A few things I’ve noticed tho:

- There is a dunkin donuts at /EVERY/ gas station, and most grocery stores (not that I eat a lot of donuts).

- There is at least one Mom-and-Pop pizzaria in almost every single strip mall and shopping center (and I love pizza, yay!)

- All the little towns in Massachusetts have roads that lead to all the neighboring towns and those roads are named after the town they go to.

- The street signs very rarely tell you the street you are on–only the intersecting streets.

- The street you are on can change names at any time (and if you want to stay on the same street name, then you sometimes have to make turns).

- The asian food is better (?!) here than in Hawai`i

- All the bars and clubs have to stop serving drinks at 1:30am (Some remnant Purtian hold-over law).

- Goth is much bigger here than in Hawai`i.

Okay, so those are my observations. Now the particulars of current events…

I had a date planned with a very attractive female today, named Schenley, but that got pushed off til Wednesday (bleh). If I had to describe her, I think I’d say she 1) is very liberal 2) likes being her own self 3) values people that like being their own selves 4) is smart in the awake-and-aware sort of sense, 5) and is a small bit insecure (possibly a side effect of 2). Oddly enough, one of her friends, Jay, is a lead computer programmer for a famous company named Numega that wrote most crackers favorite windows debugger, and another one of her friends, Valerie, was studying to be a computer programmer in college (and Valerie’s brother and dad are both computer programmers).

In other news, I’m going to be having a bbq with some of my coworkers tomorrow–just a few of them, though. Most everyone else is in Europe right now, attending a GNOME conference. One of my coworkers who didn’t go to the conference, Rik van Riel, is going to be bringing some sugarcane vodka to the bbq, which sounds interesting. Of course, next week is going to be very interesting because the office which normally has like more than 50 people in it or something, will only have less than half that (I think).

Okay, let’s see….hmmm. Oh my apartment is completly awesome. It is a one bedroom, 800 square feet, and it is on a beautiful estate (88 acres in all). The place has two pools, several tennis courts, basketball courts, a health club, and massive amounts of parking, which is nice. It’s also close to the biggest retail district I’ve ever seen, and there is no tax in New Hampshire, so it’s sorta the shopping mecca for everyone from neighboring states. The only thing that my apartment is really missing is a bed, but I think that I will wait a while on that. I have this unbelievably comfortable and cool looking softa that has a queen sized sleeper bed hidden inside it which seems to be fine for me.

Okay, not sure what else to write, so I’ll just post more later.

I need to register my car. I was given a temporary 20-day, cardboard license plate, which has now expired and also deformed from the rain that happens every week or so. I’m going to do it first thing monday morning.

I’m typing this from the 3rd floor of the Red Hat headquarters in Raleigh. I am here for “Employee Orientation”. It was a day and a half of powerpoint slides on where the company is at and where they want to go. I love the whole mentality around this place. It’s very alive. As an example of what I mean, they gave us all red fedora hats (which is their logo). They also have a fitness center, game room, and (free) cafe in the building. I hope the Boston office is like this, too.

Speaking of Boston… I found an apartment in New Hampshire, instead of Massachusetts, but it’s only 10 miles from work. A few other people from Red Hat live there too, so we are going to start a car pool, I think. Should save on gas, which is absurd right now.

well gotta go. They are going to use the lab now for a class. I don’t have a computer right now, so may be a few days before I come around again.

Tomorrow I leave for boston. Hopefully, I’ll be able to find a place to live quickly. Chris Lee told me that a lot of people at Red Hat live in an apartment complex in Nashua, New Hampshire, so I may live there.

I woke up this morning in aina haina covered in regurgitated crown royal and heineken with my pants unzipped and I was wearing someone else’s shirt.

Update: They found my wallet. The keys and my shirt are still missing. One of the guys has a blurry memory of a chick walking up to him, pointing at me and saying “I have Ray’s keys”. He’s going to make some calls and see what he can find out.

One of the guys in one of my classes last semester threw a graduation party last night. It started really early because he’s got a pool and it is really clear and sunny nowadays. One of his roomies is a cook at duke’s so the food was really good: prime rib, lasagna, mac nuts, hot dogs, burgers, and a cooler keg of beer. I brought a styrofoam cooler full of beer and hard lemonade, too.

One notable thing was the “ice luge” which was a gigantic block of ice–probably 1 foot thick, 4 feet tall and 3 feet wide. Large canals were carved into this block of ice. The ice block was put up on an angle and we would take shots of whiskey, tequilla, vodka, etc.

At any rate, I got way too drunk, started to make a bit of an ass out of myself, threw up, and passed out on the couch. The guy who threw the party gave me a fresh shirt and took me to the couch. ugghh

When I woke up the next morning my fly was strangely unzipped. Anyway, I got up, wrote a thank you note to the guy on the top of the cooler i brought, stripped off his shirt, and went to my car. That’s when I discovered that I didn’t have my wallet or keys. I’m hoping one of the room mates there took my stuff so I wouldn’t try to drive drunk, but I think they were probably stolen. *sigh* I’m going to call their house soon to find out.

D’oh. Somehow I lost my sharecheck debit card in the last coupla days. I probably dropped it after getting gas. :-(

I had to call and report it lost. They’re going to send me a new one, which is scheduled to arrive somewhere between the 2nd and 5th. I’m moving on the 1st, though, so that’s pretty sucky, indeed.

*sigh*

Of course I’m going to need access to my account when I move to pay for things like food, hotel, apartment deposit and rent, rental car, etc, so I may just withdrawl it all and carry cash. I’m going to be getting a boston bank account when I get there, so it was going to get withdrawn eventually anyway.

ah well.

---

Spent the morning working on a file parser I’m coding for GTK+ a Linux widget toolkit. I started on it some time ago, but school pulled me away from it (a couple times actually). People were poking me about it today, so I figured I’d get back into it. It’s definitely a fun project.

I just ate more than half of a box of mac nut cookies after eating a plate lunch at the NEX. I’m a bit stuffed :-/. I think I’m going to go lounge on the beach for a while and then hit the gym for an hour or two.

Every time I post a picture or image, my web server logs are immediately overrun with dozens of entries like this:

[www.halfline.org] 137.186.164.231 – - [21/May/2004:22:30:05 -1000] “GET /luau/luau3.jpg HTTP/1.1″ 304 – “http://www.eden.rutgers.edu/~mdaddyz/ljfun/lj.php” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8″

When I visit the URLs specified in the referrer portion of the log entries (in the example above the url with the student page at rutgers), I am confronted with hoardes of pictures from anon-posts from random people. That’s right, people have LJ image aggregators setup to display all the images everyone shows in their anonymous posts. Furthermore, there are a lot of different aggregators and there are a lot of people viewing each one.

It seems that LJ is a voyeurs’ hotspot, so everyone should be careful of the pictures they divulge.

wow, I had a really fun dream last night. I’ll spare the details, but let’s just say i’m in a pleasant mood.

I just got back from the gym on Hickam AFB. I burned about 1000 calories on the elliptical crosstrainer machine. I’m not trying to lose weight or anything, though, so I downed a mocha shake w/ whipped cream at a starbucks wannabe place in the NEX mall on my way back :-).

I really do like how I feel after doing the elliptical thing for an hour or two. Everything seems to move so slowly for the first few minutes afterward–very calming and pleasant. I also like the feeling I get in the middle of a workout after pushing my speed up as high as I can go for about minute or so, and then settling back down to ~60-70 rpms. I like the elliptical thing better than the treadmill, too, because it’s easier to maintain a good rhythm.

The luau was fun. It was very, very tourist-driven.

<– click
(The front sign)

<– click
(Me jumping into a shot right before the camera went off)

While there, my bro felt the uncontrollable need to do the hula.

<– click
(I know he knew what he was volunteering for before he went up)

I found out that one of the hula girls knew me. We took a couple spanish classes together at UH and did some presentations together before. I don’t know how she saw me out of the huge audience.

The view was really quite amazing.

<– click
(a rainbow)

Drinks were good. I tried as many different kinds as I could before the evening ended..blue hawaii, tequilla sunrise, mai tai, greyhound, sex on the beach (irish style). I also bought a souvineer glass to put the drinks in, so that I got more, and I didn’t have to drink out of little plastic cups.

(a rather cool beer glass with an ugly endorsement on it)

Overall, it was fun night.

---

Below are some pics of the family in waikiki a couple of days ago.

<– click
<– click

Speaking of waikiki…I just ate at the “top of waikiki” revolving restaurant tonight. I had the chicken linguini and a “supreme salad”. The salad was probably one of the best I’ve ever had.