That is all.
Archive for the ‘Fun’ Category
Red Sox Win the Pennant
Monday, October 22nd, 2007Titles are Hard, I Give Up
Sunday, October 14th, 2007So the Red Sox lost, It was such a close game, until the end, and I drove home during that (when it went to 9-6) so it seems even closer. But both of the ALCS games so far I’ve actually watched instead of just happening to be able to see the glow from fenway. Tonight I was even out, at Emily’s apartment condo warming party. It was a fun party other than the game. Actually it was more interesting, in that 4 of the girls who at first sight appeared to be single were actually lesbians, lowering the number of single girls there by a large fraction :-/. There was some public girl on girl make out action, I suppose that can make up for the lack of singles.
There was good news in the sports world for me today though (just in the games I didn’t watch). That being:
- #3 Ohio State won as expected without me even so much as checking to see if the game was going to be on TV here, although I doubt it was. With the rest of the results, it looks like OSU is once again going to be #1 in the AP poll, but I doubt the BCS will be that kind to us.
- #17 Kentucky helped OSU out by knocking off #1 LSU. Seems like this game was awesome and well deserving of being watched. I’ve got a cousin at Kentucky now, so theres an official reason to pull for them. Last week I pulled for LSU against those evil Florida Gators, even though a Florida win would have increased OSU’s ranking; its nice to see a team I actually kind of like knock of OSU, it feels better than if we’d needed the Gators to do it.
- #2 California lost to Oregon State also helping OSU out in the rankings. I must say these Oregon teams are making me happy this season, with this, and Oregon’s win over Michigan in week 2.
- And the last one is just spiteful: Louisville topped #15 Cincinnati. I am by no means a UC fan, so keeping them in the rightful place and out of the top 25 is appreciated.
So where was I instead of watching college football? Well, at another activity 2002 me would not have guessed, playing board games. I arrived at the Game Until You Die party later than I wanted, but just in time for the 5th spot in a game of Puerto Rico, which I came in 3rd. It was good to play with new people, as I saw 2 new strategies that I can try on my usual play group, who was in the other room playing power grid. I’ve played Puerto Rico more times than I can count at this point, and I’ve never won, but I’ve placed 2nd many times, so I feel that I could be good, but it really is a great game, its so much fun and interesting even when 4 of you have accidentally let the 5th person run away with the game. So now that I’m remembering board games and football and not baseball I can goto bed smiling, which is exactly what I set out to do with this 2:20am post.
Mario Kart Double Dash
Tuesday, October 9th, 2007
Remember, my room mate Sririam got a Wii not too long ago. Now, my primary interest in the Wii is as a 250% more expensive than it should be Game Cube, so that I can once again play the aforementioned game. Mario Kart is my game, so much as I have one. Last time I seriously played Double Dash was when I was living in Morrill Tower with Chris, which was sophomore year of college…. 2004. Its been 3 years; I’m not as rusty and I expected to be. I was pretty bored over the long weekend (I got Columbus Day off) so in addition to starting Arrested Development (now in season 2), I unlocked everything you can with the 4 non-all-cup-tour cups on 50, 100, and 150cc cups. I’ve never actually unlocked anything on the game before, as Chris came to me with everything already unlocked, so that was fun.
Wavebirds, thats what you call those wireless game cube controllers. They are ridiculously difficult to acquire. It seems Nintendo stopped producing them, and demand is way up because no one wants to use the plain old wired controllers with the wii (that just seems wrong). The only place I could find any is ebay, and the go for ~$45 a pop on there regularly. I got lucky though, so I thought. I found someone selling the game and 2 wavebrids (all separate auctions but the same seller), and I won all of the auctions. That saved me ~$12 in shipping, which made things more reasonable, and the game went for way less than retail. Anyways one of them was missing a part that was clearly pictured in the image. The seller has agreed to let me return that one, and 2 pristine controllers arrived today from another auction. I’m only 1 short now, and then, once my room mates get up to speed, the tournaments will commence.
Erik’s Deck Party
Monday, October 8th, 2007Because of the unseasonably warm, wonderful weather on Friday one of my coworkers, Erik, had an impromptu dinner party on the roof deck of his apartment, which is at the base of beacon hill. I had never been to his place before, because he only hosts board gaming when I am unable to do so, which usually means that I am out of town. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a dinner party where the dinner was delivered Thai food before, but it worked. I got there just in time to provide input into what to get for dinner, but I didn’t, as I’m a Thai food novice still. I was late because there was a fire in the park street T station, which well, that just screws with everything. Being late also means I missed the last bit of daylight with which to get some nice skyline photos from a new vantage point. The view from his roof deck is pretty unique. The images are situated clockwise from left to right:
The party was a lot of fun. There were only a few people from work there, most of the people where from Community Boating. Erik is always telling us stories about these people so it was interesting to meet them. It was pretty dark up on the deck, so dark I’ve no idea what Thai dishes I actually ate, or what was in them, but they were yummy. We were also, very surprisingly, able to see 3 shooting stars. Yes, in the city, so they must have been amazingly bright. I only saw 2 of them. One went from north to south right over the middle, and darkest, part of the sky. The other a few hours later, went from north to the south west, directly into the lights at Fenway, but we were still able to see its last bright explosion through all the light pollution.
xkcd Meetup – Dream Girl 2007
Monday, September 24th, 2007This Sunday was Spetember 23, 2007, so naturally I was here:
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And so were hundred of other loyal xkcd fans from all over the world. There was a guy from Russia, and from The United Kingdom. My friend and board gaming buddy, Post, hosted a group of his friends from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and even my college and robotics buddy Josh drove up from Jersey to attend. Oh, and collect on one of his two free meals because the Red Sox came up short against the Yankees. At least the Sox have locked a playoff spot. Ok back on topic.
Post, and his crew arrived shortly after Josh and I did. They planned a head and brought stuff, including two of the best costumes there. They also brought a conversation topics list, and a poster for people to sign. They eventually
gave the poster to Randall (that’s the poster back there to the left getting signed.), who promised to scan it in in high res.
Other Impressions
There is just so much to talk about, I’ll be telling stories from this weekend for a while, but I want to hit on some big things I can think of now:
- There were a lot of hot girls[1, 2] [3, 4, 5] [6] there, hot nerdy, possibly lesbian girls. Well the last part is wishful, but I did read on the comment white boards that “The Dream Girl went home with a Wellesley Woman.” I mean, maybe not a lot compared to the general population, but compared to the expected audience, wow. Also of interest is how little photographic evidence of this there is, its like there was something more exciting that hot girls there ;-).
- I didn’t get anything signed, I didn’t bring anything to get signed, and random bits of signed paper, well those seem lame, but I did stand in mob (thats kind of like line) to get Cory Doctorow’s blog signed.
- Afterwards Josh, Post, his friends, me, and some random other people, including the guy from the UK went and had dinner downtown at Quincy Market. This was my first time eating there. I got some New England Clam Chowder, which was not as good as it should have been in the touristy part of town. The guy from the UK, Alex, was interviewed, and had his musings included in this article on the event. I was also interviewed, the reporter girl was riding in the subway car with us down to dinner, at least as far as Harvard Square. My contribution was a musing on “where are we going to do this next year!”
I guess that is it for now, nothing is sparking any stories. I did take some video’s while I was there, which went a long way towards filling up my 1GB SD card. The best of them are up on you tube now, and embedded below:
Randall Munroe Enters and the Dream Girl Countdown
Sorry, this one is a bit sloppy with the camera work.
Xkcd Meetup Conversation Game
Randall Munroe on being a Roboticist
This one follows the previous one by maybe 10 seconds.
Randall Munroe on Early Advertising for Xkcd
Later on, the crowd has gone down a lot so now you can hear him talk about interesting stuff
Sriram’s Birthday
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
So, I’m a little late here, I’ve been busy, and then lazy. Last Thursday was my room mate Srirams’ birthday and one of his friends organized a celebration dinner at Addis Red Sea, an Ethiopian restaurant, in Cambridge. This was the second time I’ve been to an Ethiopian restaurant. The first was with Paul and his friend Kate at OSU. North of the OSU campus on High St. was a hole slew of ethnic restaurants and the Ethiopian one is the only one I ever went too, and that only happened because Paul and I let Kate pick the place. Given recent love affair with Indian food I should totally have tired more of them. Anyways, this experience taught me that Ethiopian food a very communal thing. Everyone eats from the same central dish, and spongy bread is used as both plate an utensils. Addis was much the same, but I was surprised to see a whopping $7 “plate” charge for sharing an entree. Mind you, there are not plates, just spongy bread. I know its Cambridge, but to me it just flew in the face of what little I know of Ethiopian dinning. The service wasn’t very good, it took over an hour for us to get our appetizers, and then another half hour for the main course. Granted, there were maybe 11 or 12 of us, and each of us ordered an entree (to avoid the plate charge and increase variety), but that is a long time. The food was pretty good, but not worth that kind of wait.
The long dinner cut into playing with Srirams’ new toy afterwards. His new toy is a Nintendo Wii. He managed to find a split second when Amazon.com had them in stock and swooped on right up with free Amazon Prime shipping that got it to our house in < 24 hours. He only has the games Wii Sports and Wii Play for now, but everyone in the house is eying new games to get. I am eying Mario Cart Double Dash, which is a game cube game, but the wii will play it if you have all the old game cube controllers and memory cards to use (which I don't). I've been trying to locate a not outrageously expensive way to get this stuff, the hardest part being finding 4 of the wireless controllers. Luckily, I think we'll be satisfied with Wii Sports for a while. Everyone loves tennis, but I alone seem to be enjoying baseball.
Hog Island 2007
Saturday, August 25th, 2007Hog Island is a small island in Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. One of my room mates, Brian’s, extended family owns about half of the island. Its a very unique place with no roads or power running to the island. There used to be a daily ferry out, but that has since stopped. So one can only get there by personal boat. Brian hosted a party there a week ago, which was a blast. Although, I was embarrassingly sore from a ~6 inning whiffle ball game that ended tied 7-7. Below is a map of some of the pictures I took to try out the new camera. Click on the pictures for a bigger view (you’kll want to use the larger map for that), but note that they have been compressed to save on bandwidth, you’re welcome Chris.
Fires and Bar Trivia
Tuesday, August 21st, 2007Yesterday marked my one year anniversary in Boston, so now that that is done with, I can finally get around to seeing Emily. Emily is the one person I knew in Boston before I moved here. She’s a college friend of a high school friend of friend from back home. She’s also his x, I told her not to date him (some friend of friend I turned out to be), but I was right, we bonded. We’ve been trying to meet up for a year now, and well, since I couldn’t make a concert Saturday night due to being in Rhode Island (post coming), Bar Trivia it was. Our team, comprised of Emily, her BF, and some other guys won! I contributed two things:
- Whole Foods is the grocery store under SEC investigation.
- Sao Paulo is most definitely in the Southern Hemisphere.
Which means they all knew their stuff. It was a fun time, and on the way back I drove right past a house fire in progress. Well the first cop pulled up a few car lengths behind me while I was stopped at a light. I had pulled well over to let him pass and he stopped, and then I heard more sirens (upon closer inspection fire truck sirens) so I started looking around and low and behold the back side of the house nearest the corner was in flames. I wasn’t there long enough to grab a picture so you’ll have to settle for a map (its the one the arrow is pointing at).
It looked like everyone was out of the house, and well The rest of the drive home I was seeing trucks headed that way, so hopefully it will all turn out alright. I was just really surprised to turn my head around and see a fire not 25 meters away. One of the things I never considered about actually living in a city is the increased frequency of emergency vehicle sightings, but I guess it makes sense, more people, more stuff to go wrong. Also, I live 2 blocks from a fire station and a hospital, so that may be inflating the numbers a bit.
Perseids 2007
Monday, August 13th, 2007Sunday night, for the peak of the Persied metor shower two of my room mates and I drove out to Nahant, MA to watch. Nahant is this little outcropping of rock connected to the north shore by a causeway. It had a good, dark, northeasterly view, and it was close. It was amazing how many more stars were visible even just an hour out of the city. Of course being on the beach helped much. Unfortunately the Northeastern research center out there has some bright lights that were hard to avoid.
We first tried to avoid the lights by heading down a forested path, it abruptly ended with a huge, imposing door built into the hillside. We turned back, and headed up a trail that went up to the top of the hill. We were almost at the top when I came within a foot of running into a perfectly constructed spider web spanning the path. It had about a 1in square spider chilling in the middle of it. It seemed as though it’d worked pretty hard on the web so we turned back.
We took all our gear, blanket, flashlight, water, and binoculars up the road a bit to the next beach down the road, again on the northeast facing side of the island. There was a guy with a laptop out on the closed trunk of his car. He told us he’d seen a bunch while he was on the beach, some 25 feet below the road. On his suggestion we ignored the barricaded stairs and went down. We saw maybe 15 meteors total during the hour plus we laid down there. Two or there of which were very bright, and left some impressive streaks. Eventually some little critters found us and we broke camp.
When we got to the top of the stairs the laptop toting stargazer had been replaced by a somewhat inebriated “on vacation” girl from down the street, who claimed to be a lawyer in Boston. She had her sister and a cute dog with her, and we chatted for a bit, mostly about how we didn’t have any drugs. While we were chatting possibly the best meteor of the night crossed my eye. I pointed and spoke and we all caught a fading glimpse. All and all one of the most successful meteor shower watchings I’ve had in recent memory.
Desitnaton: Ohio
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007
The My Maps version of my Ohio trip. It includes:
- A mini review of Pirates 3
- Cedar Point’s brand new coaster Maverick
- Beth’s Wedding