Kablammo!

To begin, I present a few observations.

First among them is that it’s probably not very good that I’ve pulled four ‘all-nighters’ in the past week and a half in vain attempts to reset my sleep cycle to something approaching sanity. The way it’s supposed to work is like this: you woke up way too late to accomplish anything or to be tired enough to go to sleep at anything approaching a reasonable hour. OK, no biggie, you just stay up until a reasonable hour tomorrow, by which point you’ll be hella tired and have an easy time falling asleep. Then you just sleep for a bit and wake up at a reasonable hour and presto, you’re back to a good regular cycle. Unfortunately, I think I’ve accidentally turned my sleep cycle into the worst possible thing ever: regular sleep (at godawful times) interspersed with all-nighters at frequent intervals. Fcuk.

In other news, I recently discovered the wonders of the Family Guy drinking game, which works thusly: each player chooses (or is assigned) one (or more) characters on the show. Every time his character(s) speak a line, he drinks. Having partaken of this game while watching “I Never Met the Dead Man” and drinking for Brian and Lois (splitting Lois with the Cos), I made the following discovery: this game keeps you drunk. I’d have said it “gets you drunk” if not for the fact that I can’t vouch for the validity of that statement, seeing as I began the game after staying up 30 hours (see above) and consuming 3 pints and a six-pack. Further testing is necessary.

Two weeks ago, or thereabouts, I downloaded the mp3s for Radiohead‘s new album, Hail To The Thief. There I was, listening to the stuff, when it occurred to me that it was good shit. “I like this music,” I said to myself, “It’s simultaneously reminiscent of all of Radiohead’s previous work, much of which was absolutely phenomenal. Also, they decided to play some damn guitars on this album, which is a nice change of pace for them.” Having listened to the album in mp3 form repeatedly, I resolved to buy the CD the day it came out (today, June the 10^th). You see, Kazaa did what it is very good at doing: acting as a giant advertisement for music and other electronically-transferable data.

So that brings our tale to earlier today, when the album was released. Being a lazy sack of crap, I didn’t pick up a copy until 6:30 as I was heading to my Colour class. I just hucked it in my bag and didn’t look at it until later, when it turned out it was the Canadian version of the CD. No problem, right? Yeah, except for the fü¢kïng copy protection on it, which politely crashed Explorer on my computer when I put it in my drive to listen to it. Maybe I wouldn’t have cared, if it hadn’t turned out that the mp3s I’d downloaded previously were a different mix from what was on the CD proper (judging from the first 10 seconds of the first track, which managed to play successfully before all hell broke loose). Since the store I got the CD from was already closed, I ran to my local Virgin Oligopoly Store to get a copy of the US release, ostensibly free of computer-breaking crap. Success! You know what? There’s a surprising amount of people at the Virgin Records in Union Square at 11:00 on a Tuesday night. Surprising to me, at least.

All is good now, basically; I’ve got a working CD and it’s already been ripped to mp3s which are residing in my giant winamp playlist. Too bad I had to spend $30 on a $15 CD for that to happen. I’d better be able to return the shite copy tomorrow… I’d be happy to accept store credit, even, since there’s bunches of other music I need to buy. But damn, I’m incensed about this copy protection bullshit. E’en more incensed than I was yesterday and earlier, hard to believe as that may be!

What does it mean when your armpits cry stinky tears?

As I was sitting on the fourth floor of the Engineering Building today, trimming the corners off of two duplicate copies of a preliminary lab report and pasting them into a notebook, it dawned on me just how fucking demeaning and degrading the past few semesters have been.

I mean, having Grossman and Lam in all their unable-to-teach glory is one thing, but realizing that I’ve spent a decent amount of my junior year doing kindergarten-level cutting-and-pasting work — and realizing that this kindergarten-level work has been some of the most productive and satisfying work I’ve done — really gives me something to think about.

Fuck, before this year the last time I handled a glue stick had to be at least 12 years ago. Look at me now, gluing shit into a notebook every three weeks. Don’t I deserve a gold star?

In other news… Thermo take-home final is basically done, all that remains is to copy it over neatly. Two things in particular about this exam horrify me:

• First, that I started it this past week-end, days before it was due. That’s not my M.O. at all. Maybe I’m sick.
• Also, that the first two of the three problems were simple and straightforward enough to be questions from last semester’s midterm. Is this a junior-level Advanced Thermodynamics class or just some big joke? I suppose I shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth but I can’t shake the feeling that there’s some kind of poison needle stuck in this that I’ll notice down the road a ways.

OK, I know it’s old news by now, and I’m not a smoker anyway, but dammit, the “2002 New York City Smoke-Free Air Act” is pissing me off. It’s a public health hazard to allow people to smoke in bars? Why not get rid of all the alcohol in bars too? Studies have shown that alcohol use is linked to delinquency, unprotected sex, boorish behavior, and public urination and/or vomiting, after all. It’s not as if removing cigarette smoke from NYC’s air will even make it worth breathing; what with all the trash, cars, sewers, buses, subways, hippies, and other sources of noxious fumes, there are days when the smog is so bad you can’t see the Chrysler building from Hoboken.

“Career bartenders” and other such people allegedly complained heavily, and for years, about the allegedly ungodly work environments they had to put up with. I hate to say it, but that’s an occupational hazard that comes with the territory, guys. Nobody held a gun to your head and forced you to serve drinks in a bar, for Christ’s sake. Don’t run to the fucking government crying about a risk inherent in your career path; if a bar owner wants to make his bar smoke-free that’s one thing, but instituting quality-of-life legislation so that smokers can’t smoke near you is unreasonable.

There are plenty of jobs in NYC that are free of cigarette smoke. Bartending is now apparently one of them. There are also plenty of jobs where you get no tips from customers. Bartending is now one of those as well, since when smokers are made to feel unwelcome in bars they end up staying home and drinking and smoking freely in their apartments, wondering where the hell the strip clubs in Times Square went. Well, bartenders, you got your smoke-free workplaces by managing to greatly reduce demand for the services you provide. Funny how that works.

UPDATE — I apologize for not thinking about how this law would affect bouncers, especially since those effects are fatal. It looks like smokers who decide to go to bars anyway, and can’t smoke, become very very irritable. I’d have never guessed…

Saturday night with nerds, pizza, and D&D: does life get any better? It certainly does, when you spiff the hell out of your blog comment mode. Yess… the style of this blog is steadily improving. Mexcellent!

Ah, life is good. I’m finally out of the stone age; I gots me a cell. Not only that, but I gots me a cell with the Ghostbusters theme as a ringtone… Alright!

Well, it appears that tonight will be spent chez Paul, with a motley crue of friends and acquaintances (including such notables as Asshole, the drinking game). Hooray for science!

Also hooray for progress, like the progress of this shitty blog which now has comments enabled. I’ll have something meaningful on here eventually, I promise…

Note to self: Ten beers on Wednesday night = sleep through Grossman on Thursday.

Herr Kurrik was in town today, and we discovered that the bar in the Eesti Maja isn’t open at 4 PM for some reason.

I started playing FF Tactics again, this time with the restriction that all my characters are thieves and will remain so for the entirety of the game. Plus they can only use thief abilities. It’s pretty fun (and looks gorgeous thanks to the magic of ePSXe) and plays quite differently from a regular game.

Tomorrow I’ll be sending in résumés and cover letters for a bunch of NYC internships; hopefully one or more application will be successful so I can be making a cool 3 Benjamins a week this summer.

Ugh, writing résumé cover letters is such a damn pain in the ass. So is handing in labs when the prelim for the lab is in the apartment of some of your Korean partners, and you have no choice but to hand in a faulty final report. ::sigh::

Well, I spent more time than I should have redoing the layout of this crappy blog; it’s not near done yet but at least now it’s slightly niftier. Bits of it are still pissing me off, but at least I can get a nice chuckle from the random FFTactics messages that are presented in all their incoherent glory.

Stuff that happened today (yesterday?)…

Heat Transfer exam, for which I studied not at all. Got it graded that same period, since our hippie professor doesn’t like giving exams and, instead, has the most insane system ever. Before an exam, the class is split randomly into a few groups, each of which writes an exam and hands it in. Then when the exam period rolls around, each group is given copies of another group’s exam, which they then proceed to take. Groups grade the exams they wrote, most everybody gets an awesome grade, and everybody’s happy, if slightly bewildered.

Since I have no credit history and don’t want to pay a $400 security deposit, no cellphone for me for the moment. Will rectify somehow.

Saw school’s play: Picasso at the Lapin Agile by Steve Martin. Funnier than I anticipated, plus simply a better play than I anticipated. Not to mention better acting, A/V, and stage than I anticipated… All in all, worth the price of admission ($0). A bargain at twice the price!

Trigger Happy TV is the funniest show ever. I’ve seen a lot of shitty hidden-camera TV shows in my day, and I’m happy to say that this hidden-camera TV show isn’t shitty in the least. The stuff they do is genuinely funny (often hysterical), occasionally thought-provoking, and always well-executed. Plus there’s no downtime, it’s just one gag after another; it’s the comedy equivalent of an all-cumshot porno.

So there you have it; A-B-C-D-P-G-C.