The man child inside of Matt wants a Christmas tree really bad so I agreed to go get one (since I figured that if I didn't, he would get an 14 foot monster tree). Being the logical minded person I am, I suggested we get the Christmas tree stand before getting the tree so that we can stick it in something before letting it die a slow death in my living room. So we went to WalMart and they were either completely sold out or didn't understand English; I'm not sure which, but either way we weren't getting a tree stand there. I suggested we go to BJ's and maybe they would have one there because you gotta be a member and they don't just let any person in there to buy a Christmas tree stand. We go in and there's a lot of security detail working. I ask an employee where the Christmas tree stands are and he says he doesn't know if they carry them in stock, but Sarah Palin was there. This was an even less comprehensible response than the woman at WalMart, but sure enough, there was Sarah Palin, all going rogue in the paper towel aisle, signing books and such. So I say to Matt, Matt I got an idea, let's get in line and get and get a signed copy. So the line actually went out the door and it's snowing in Fairfax, but I promised Matt's inner man child that we would get a Christmas tree if he stood in line with me to get a book for my mom because she has a huge Sarah Palin shrine.
So we're in line and the woman in front of us is freaking out because she's so damn excited that Sarah Palin is there and she won't shut the hell up. I'm carrying a big bag of bagels because we went out to get some bagels and lox earlier and I have to hand it to the security guard. What's in here, he says. And I say Bagels. And then the bag breaks because it's so wet from the snow. But the BJs employees get me a new bag because I'm a member and they are required to treat me with the utmost exclusive privileges. Oh, and Todd Palin was there which kinda made me laugh because no one wanted to see him even though I peed myself laughing at him in the Sarah Palin SNL rap. So I got the signature (made out to my Mom) and Sarah Palin seemed to be pretty energetic despite being stuck in the paper towel aisle of a BJ's Club Warehouse for the past 6 hours surrounded by sweaty gross people who came in from the snow. I gotta thank Sarah for automatically making me the favorite child of the holiday season once I drop this sucker under the tree. I guarantee my Mom is going to cry. It's going to be awesome. They wouldn't let me get a picture on my crappy Blackberry camera phone, but there was a professional photographer there taking pictures of everyone getting a book signed so I'm probably going to wind up in a Palin/Beck 2012 campaign ad. One of those ads where they try to appeal to the middle class people who are neither good looking nor have asymmetrical looking faces or scars from prison knife fights; good hard working folks who have good tastes but still get excited about going to Applebees for supper.
And BJ's didn't have Christmas Tree stands either.
Posted by austin :: Permanent Link
Hypothesis: Ice cream makers are the ultimate re-gift. Do you own an ice cream maker? Ask yourself 2 questions.
In my professional experience, 100% of people answer yes to both of those. Ice cream makers are pretty shitty presents, but they're incredibly easy to pawn off on other people. The first thing you think of when you get one is "hell yes, I'm going to make so much ice cream. I'm no longer slave to those pretentious dicks at Dairy Queen and their no-shirt-no-shoes policies." Then you actually try to make ice cream for the first time and you discover it takes 45 minutes of time and $5 to make a half gallon of boring ass vanilla, which is exactly 22 minutes and $2 more than it would take you to go to Food Lion and buy a carton. Eventually, the ice cream maker just takes up space and everytime you see it, you think about making more ice cream, but no one has the time and patience for this. Ice cream is a very spontaneous thing. You can drive around in a truck and sell it to suburban kids. There are not a lot of products on the market that have this kind of market posture.
I was cleaning up my kitchen when I found my roommate's ice cream maker. I also found a yogurt maker (think Indian or Greek style yogurt) which kind of resembles a piece of lab equipment; in fact, since you have to incubate some bacteria, it's probably a pretty close estimate. I would not eat homemade yogurt for the same reasons I wouldn't eat someone's homemade mayonnaise. There's just some stuff better left to the professionals. Making milk turn all thick and sour is one of them.
Posted by austin :: Permanent Link
Someone broke into my car and took some stuff. I think I left the passenger side door slightly ajar and the thief was able to get in. Yes, I already I'm a retard for leaving nice things in the car. List of stolen property along with how much I care:
Posted by austin :: Permanent Link
Went to Cyber Dawn yesterday; a 2-day red v blue computer hacking competition outside of DC. I didn't compete because I signed up too late for a ticket, but I went as a spectator and to scout out putting a team together next year. There was a big red cell this year; about 30 professional hackers. There were 4 universities there along with 2 military academies (West Point and Air Force Academy). George Mason U was there with a big team, although they looked pretty rough. University of Maryland Baltimore County campus was there too, although they only had 2 guys trying to defend their network. Some corporations also sent teams. AOL, ITT, and BAE were both there. When I left yesterday, Air Force was in the lead with Westpoint in second place and BAE in third. No huge surprises there.
I'm probably going to go back later today to watch things wrap up and see if I can get some access to the red cell room. They've been pretty protective about what goes on back there, but I'm guessing it's mostly Metasploit, Nessus, some random open source toolsets and malware along with a few copies of Core Impact.
Posted by austin :: Permanent Link
A college friend of mine got a job in DC working as a graphic designer. Since I'm in the area, I offered to go help her look at apartments. Being an engineer, I'm typically out in the Dulles tech corridor and not actually in the district, so I have no clue what the DC real estate market is other than the obvious (Nothwest DC = nice, expensive, gentrified. Southeast DC = ghetto, high crime, murder is possibility).
The first place was in Georgetown, which is an area I like. There's the university, a lot of bars, and those steps from The Exorcist. The landlord was a guy in his late 40's, balding, but with enough hair left over to form a pony-tail in the back. The house was in pretty bad shape and the room for rent might have been a storage closet at one point. Two other girls lived there, in addition to the landlord himself. Something about that whole living situation reminded me of a really creepy version of Three's Company.
"These Asian girls," he said, referencing the two other roommates, "they are so subservient in their home countries. Then they come to America and expect to be 'liberated'. They just don't like to clean. Do you like cleaning?"
He continued by telling us about how he used to work in telecommunications and pioneered the cell phone industry in the late 1980's. That was before the big phone companies moved in and nudged him out. He now is professional dog walker. I suspected he was attempting to supplement his dog walking income with some rent checks.
Rent was $750/month. A parking space was $100/month. Utilities were another $120/month, plus another $20 for 'house fees'. The cost of living in a Georgetown utility closet with a dog walker was now $990/month.
Alright, apartment #2. This one was outside of DC in Rosslyn, just across the Potomac. This one was being sublet by a 35-year-old Asian woman from Mongolia. It appeared to be a 1-bedroom 1-bathroom unit, but thanks to a draped curtain, the living room became an extra bedroom. The Chinese built a Great Wall to keep the Mongols out, but really a beaded curtain could have probably worked. The room was bigger but simple and only $750. The college friend wanted to commit right away, but I reminded her that we still had another place to look at.
Apartment #3 was back in DC in Van Ness. I've never been in that neighborhood before because it's out of the way and I've never heard of it being a big night scene. We got off the metro and it was very quiet with little traffic. Lots of small shops and single family houses. Kinda quaint.
The woman renting out the room was a tenant of the apartment complex and had just lost her job as an art gallery manager. "The gallery owner is a bit eccentric," she told us, "and despite being a millionaire heiress, she let me go when the economy went bad. I used to sell million-dollar artwork in Georgetown!". Now she is riding her bike to the local Peace Corp office and using their resources to do job seeking (she had connections). The apartment was immaculately decorated with artwork and small sculpture pieces. Photography seemed to be her thing. There were four portraits of old people on the wall. "These," she said proudly, "were from an exhibit on the elderly in Germany". Old people from Germany really don't look much different from those in the US. The apartment had one bedroom; which she was renting out. She was sleeping on the couch in the living room; I presumed she was renting out the room to keep the rent flowing so she wouldn't have to move out. The recession was hitting some of these people pretty hard; I guess the middle management of art galleries in particular.
"If only the government wasn't spending so much on the toys for the military. Then we could have funding for the arts and health care." I got a nudge from my college friend, which the tenant picked up on. "Oh no, you're not one of them, are you?"
Afraid so. Things got awkward then. This escalated when she asked where I was living and I told her Fairfax. "Oh, a commuter," she said smugly. Yes, a commuter to my job where I make money. College friend ended up going with the Mongolian woman's offer, which is good and pretty exciting for her. This recession is making people do crazy things and sleep on couches. That reminds me that I still have 2 bedrooms I'm not using. I was going to turn one into a home gym and the other into a reading room, but damn, I could be making an extra few hundred. Not for the room, of course. You just get futon next to my Bowflex.
Posted by austin :: Permanent Link
Since the verizon guy still hasn't come yet to FiOS me up, I'm still doing most of my studying and online stuff at Starbucks. It's all come full circle now. I used to work at starbucks and it was kinda fun but kinda sucked to have to deal with customers. Now I'm the guy in the corner with a power outlet drinking the cheapest cup of coffee and basically hanging out for the 2 hours of free internet they give you.
Graduate school is having its way with me. One of my two classes is Cryptology and the math is a lot harder than I remember. I'm currently studying linear cryptanalysis of block encryption ciphers; it's fascinating in a morbid money and mind wasting kind of way. So the United States Government invested god-knows-how-much money and math standardizing crypto to use DES encryption only to have it broken in a few years by some really smart people at IBM in the late 1970's, and then again in the 90's. Do you know how you break complex mathematical models? With even more complex math to get around the first math. Most of the homework involves being given a cipher and asking for it to be cracked.
My other class is basically web design. I write some HTML and call it a day.
Posted by austin :: Permanent Link
My radiator exploded on my way to grad school last week. I can't access my online class because the fios guy hasn't arrived yet. My textbooks haven't arrived and it's a 3 day weekend so they probably won't get here until half-way through next week. I'm basically really sucking at this whole grad school thing.
To get on the internets, I've been going to starbucks where I discovered one of my old starbucks cards will get me 2 hours of internet access a day. I actually have a box full of these things and if I register each of them at a different email address, I should be able to get free access for longer (maybe some MAC address-based authentication to work around? I dunno. Hopefully I'm not here longer than 2 hours to figure it out).
Some people actually like working like nomads at coffee shops. I dunno why. Even with my iPod, it's still loud. I've got kids hyped up on frappuccinos screaming and blenders and coffee grinders going constantly. I can also overhear most of the barista. Most are (or plan to be) psychology majors and are discussing their future in the hot field of psychology. The psych majors I knew only got that major because the university wouldn't let them major in "UNDECLARED".
My roommate wants to landscape our meager plot of land that the townhouse sits on. The backyard looks awful because I don't have a trimmer yet. He's got grandiose plans to install something (I dunno what yet) but keeps coming back from the hardware store with pieces of wood of various sizes. My neighbors yard looks worse than ours because they covered it in blue tarps and then left it to breed mosquitoes in the standing water (hello, west nile virus).
Posted by austin :: Permanent Link
Classes start up again in a few days. I'm not ready to fork over another 5 grand for two classes, but I guess I could go for a change of pace to the usual Mon-Fri. Plus, one of my classes is in cryptology, which is pretty interesting stuff. I'm currently reading Simon Singh's very excellent The Code Book. It's not so much about cryptology, but about the circumstances and effects of cryptography on history.
Posted by austin :: Permanent Link
other things i like.
the elegant universeFree PHP hosting provided by FreeHostia.com
