Ray Strode

Well, the weekend was pretty fun I think. I went down into boston/cambridge twice. Once on the 3rd and once on the 4th. I have a friend from Hawai`i who used to live in Boston many years ago and had really fond memories of extremely good fudge from Quincy Market at a shop by the aquarium. So, me and a few of my friends from work went on a hunt for fudge. So we get there and eat at a cheers theme restaurant and then go in search of ice cream for dessert. Low and behold: a fudge shop materializes right in front of us. Could this be it? I wait in line for like 10 minutes or so and order 3 bricks of fudge (one for me and the people who came with me, one for my Hawai`i friend and one for his wife) and some ice cream. After I got them I asked the cashier if this was the only fudge shop around, and she said “basically yea, there used to be a shop that made really, really good homemade fudge, but they’re closed down now”. Bah! What a bummer. Ah well, at least I tried.

So then we decided to walk to a Pops concert which is like orchestra instrumentals of pop songs from the 1930s up to now. On our way there we walked past a performance going on at City Hall by a startup band called “On the Drop”. They were a really neat ska/rock band, so we chilled out on the steps for 45 mins or so and listened, then we went back to our trek across town to the park to listen to pops.

A weird coincidence is, Pops was playing about a block away from the original Cheers building (This is a coincidence because we ate at a cheers theme restaurant on the other side of town earlier that day). We still had about an hour to kill, so I went with one of the guys to the Cheers bar and checked it out. Only the outside looked the same. The inside was cramped, loud, we had to get our hands stamped, and it took a long time to get our beers.

Anyway, so we meet back up with the rest of the group and a few minutes later one of the guys gets a phone call…from me. Err, what?! Well, apparently I dropped my phone by a burrito stand as I was walking back and so the stand owners hit redial when they found it to try to find someone who knew who the phone belonged to.

So I get my phone back and finally the show starts. We listened to about 30 minutes of it and realized it wasn’t all that good. Right around the time David Lee Roth got on stage and started singing beach boys songs we left and walked to CBC, a microbrewing bar. There three of us ordered colored beer. I got red, John got white, and Dan got blue, in honor of the 4th of July.

The next day I went with one of the guys to an Eric Clapton concert at the Tweeter center. We wore our red fedora hats (we always do) and we were walking toward the center when this dude on a bike rides past us and says, “I like your hats”. He was wearing a similar, but black hat, so the dude I went with, Chris, yelled back “I liked yours, too”. This wouldn’t be that particularly interesting of an event (similar things happen all the time when we’re wearing our hats because they are so … different) except for the fact that we later found out that it was the lead dude in the opening act for Eric Clapton. I think his name was Robert Randolph or something.

Anyway, the concert was good, the fireworks after were really close and cool, but we were hoping to make it to Harvard Square or the river in time to see a more elaborate show. We arrived around 11:30 to Harvard Square and nothing was going on. By the time we walked to the river it was done, too, so we finally just called it a nice around 1:30 or so.

Yesterday, I bought a digital camera (a canon powershot A75), so maybe i’ll post pictures of my apartment and the area soon.

Well the DSL modem came in, so I have internet at home now (besides the various neighbors’ unrealiable, noisy wifi access). Yay.

Hmmm, what else…I took today off work and went and got my drivers’ license. Interestingly enough, I think I am the only person in New Hampshire with my birthday and a New Hampshire license. I say this because my birthday is 04/27/83 and my driver’s license number is clearly based on my birthday: 04SER27831. I’m assuming the next person with my birthday to get a license will be 04SER27832. Anyway, that’s kind of weird.

Another strange oddness is, I found out a couple of days ago that one of my old friends from Illinois (his name is Tom) is temporarily assigned to the same base as an old friend from Hawai`i (his name is Sage). So I told Tom about Sage and they might meet up :-). Such a small world…What’s even stranger is they aren’t even in the same branches of the military. Tom is Army Reserve and Sage is Navy.

Okay, i’m going to close with a quick rant about Fahrenheit 9/11. First off, let me just say that I am a very liberal guy. I’m not going to go into my political views too much, though, because everyone’s views are different, and there isn’t anything particularly useful about my political views that would aid me in my ranting.

Now the ranting…

The movie content was bad. It was really, entirely Michael Moore pushing his political agenda. It was completely unobjective and entrenched with out of context video clips, sound bites, and dubious presentations of evidence. Even the title was manipulative: Fahrenheit 9/11. The movie had very little to do with the 9/11 attacks, and instead was almost entirely focusing on Bush bashing (<– again, remember that I am a liberal guy saying this). That’s not to say it wasn’t funny. It really had some amazingly clever and funny parts to it. Also, the filmography and editing was very nice.

Anyway, I’m getting a bit tired to finish this movie bashing, so let me just close with a quote I made up early that I liked:

My point is I can’t in good conscious sum his facts together because they are like puzzle pieces that have been given some retrofitting with an exact-o knife–they may fit, but that doesn’t mean the picture they make is accurate.

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.