All Dressed Up With Nowhere To Go

     I’m going to take a break from the insane task of merging duplicates in my genealogy (I’m down to ~25 pairs left to investigate!  Then it’s on to my cousin-ish’s file which has ~225…) and briefly talk about my experience with speed dating.

     What’s that?  Shaun and dating?  I thought that just didn’t happen!  Well ha ha, but I do have something of a social life.  Now to be honest, I didn’t leave my home that night with the intent of speed dating.  For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it’s a recent trend wherein a group of singles get together and pair off for no more than five minutes where they try to get to know each other.  Obviously this activity has an equal numbers of guys and girls and is usually orchestrated by a third-party so that the individuals don’t know everyone already.  When time is up, you move on to the next person and begin again.  Often each individual will “rate” their speed date with each person, either at the end of the date or the very end of the activity, and list things they enjoyed, whether they felt a connection with the person, and whether or not they would be interested in going on an actual date with them.

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At least, I ‘R’ ‘B’ employed on the 9th.  Starting then, I will be proudly flipping burgers at your friendly neighborhood Wendy’s.  I have gone from being an owner of the company to employee.  So sad.  So very sad.

Ha ha, I jest.  Not that the work done by the fine employees at Wendy’s is something to laugh at or anything.  It’s just not for me.  I actually will be working at myFamily.com in their tech support starting at $10.00/hr (with room for growth).  I even got a nifty parking pass, which I would display here in picture form were I not so limited in computer access.

So finally, the long job search is over.  I don’t even go in to work until 11am!  Of course, the catch is that I don’t get off until 7pm, but it’s not like I had much of a social life anyway.  So yeah, yay for me.  Also, happy belated birthday to me.  Thank you all for your phone calls, e-mails, and…Facebook messages.  Those especially were touching.

     So you know, the IAU decided today to boot Pluto from its standing as a planet.  It is now a dwarf planet, something entirely different.  Thus, the planets are now just Mercury through Uranus.  Pluto, Ceres, and 2003 UB313 are the first dwarf planets in this new categorization.  I am very pleased for an outcome that not only gave us a concrete definition of a planet, but also ejected Pluto from its status as a planet.  In short, I think the IAU General Assembly was a success.

     Just a quick note to let the world know my roommates have arrived.  I no longer have the house to myself, but the new guys seem pretty cool.  They’re a little crazy, but then again, most people are compared to me (this is not to say that I’m “normal”, mind you).

     I’m actually looking forward to the year as I think I’ll get along with them well.  They’re quite friendly, if a little loud as is sometimes common with college males (hence my comment about my normalcy).  A couple of them drink O’Douls, which is a non-alcoholic beer.  That made me do a double-take when I first saw that in the fridge!  I thought the only reason people drank malted barley/hopps was because of the alcohol.  Blech!  Anyway, they’ve opened up to me surprisingly and I’m hoping we’ll have fun.  They brough in a big 29in TV, so video games are almost certainly back in the picture.  Just what I needed…

     On a side note, I’m coming along on my little project.  I’ve decided on a range of temperature devices, all coming from Dallas Semiconductor and I’m learning about wireless emitters.  It looks like I’m going to have to learn assembly.  REAL assembly, not this LC-3 stuff I learned in my EcEn-124 class (though they are similar).  Oh joy…

     Before I get started, I want to point out that the entry before this one was posted just last night.  I’d hate for any of you to miss any of my wonderful writing when coming here to get the latest.

     My very excited mother just served us nine pizzas.  Or is it pizzas nine?  This mnemonic has served countless children in their quest to cram more knowledge into their already overflowing minds.  Here, it serves to remind them of the names of the planets and their order by using the first letter of each ordered planet as the start of a word in a sentence.  Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. 

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OK, so it’s a little corny, but NASA public TV!  You know it’s good.  It’s NASA-good!  It seems to be geared for school-age kids (middle-school, elementary school, extremely boring physics class high school).  You can watch it online with today’s Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD):

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060529.html

According to APOD, it’ll also show rocket launches, images, and other cool science stuff.  I really didn’t need something else to watch, but I may be hooked.

So what appears to be an Apache helicopter is hot-rodding over my house. At first it was kind of cool. I mean, how often do you get to see a military helicopter so close in action? It’s probably not more than a hundred feet above the ground. Not only can you hear the general roar made from it, but when it passes directly overhead you can hear the “swiff-swiff-swiff-swiff” made by the blades. For whatever reason, they’re just doing circles around the area of my house, sometimes ascending at an impressive rate, and sometimes descending, sometimes turning almost on its side.

As I said, it was pretty cool at first. But now the noise made from this thing as it grumbles around in my airspace is getting annoying. Does the military honestly have such free-reign that they can go gallivanting around in civilian airspace at will? I’m not sure how I feel about that.

So you know when you’re sitting at home alone on a Friday night and you’ve called/tried to contact a bunch of people in the hopes you can go do something with at least one of them only you can’t get a hold of anyone? And how much that sucks? Yeah.

Also, have you heard about the net neutrality issue going on in Congress right now? If you haven’t, I’m not surprised, it’s been very low key and has received almost zero coverage except for a very brief blip I heard on NPR a week or two ago and a few Internet personalities whose sites I frequent. Basically, the phone companies are wanting to give preferential treatment to certain entities on the Internet in exchange for fat stacks of cash. I’ll give a more fleshed out version rather than the cynical version, but this really sums it up pretty well.

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Wow, this just takes the cake.  Sounds like someone is having second thoughts now that he can’t face a martyr’s death and must spend the rest of his natural life in solitude and obscurity.

Zacarias Moussaoui was formally sentenced today to life in prison. You should all know that name, but I also know that not all stay up on current events. Moussaous is the only person to be charged for taking part in the September 11 terrorist attacks. He was indicted on December 11, 2001 and his trial began in October of 2002.

Once it started, his trial had an initial burst of coverage and then largely faded into the background. I don’t know why, the proceedings were rather comical, in an offensive manner, due to his frequent outbursts and attempted belittling of various US figures, including his judge, John Ashcroft, and of course President Bush.

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