By
anders pearson
12 Jan 2003
i have a better understanding of where that phrase came from and what it really means.
since about thursday, there’s been some kind of rodent trapped in the wall in my apartment. from the amount of noise it creates, i’d guess it’s a rat. naturally, the wall it’s gotten itself trapped in is the one that my bed’s headboard is up against. thursday night, i was kept awake all night with a constant barrage of scratching, pitter-pattering, and squeaking coming from the wall inches from my head. friday night and last night, the noise was still there but getting much less frequent. tonight, i’m still hearing the occasional scratch but very infrequently.
i wish there were something i could do to get it out of the wall. it’s not my idea of a fun time being kept awake at night thinking about some animal that’s trapped in a small, dark place, slowly starving to death.
it’ll probably stop making noise in the next day or two. then i get to hope that whatever material my walls are made out of (probably drywall or sheetrock; pretty hard stuff: it’s difficult to drive tacks into) contains odors well.
By
anders pearson
06 Jan 2003
being home in maine, i didn’t have much preventing me from getting a little further down my reading list.
what i finished during vacation:
The Tipping PointEmergenceAn Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and NoiseMathographics
and i made it a ways into <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0486600882/“>Euclid’s Elements</a>.
i’ve been getting really interested in math again lately and i must say that <a href=”http://www.doverpublications.com/“>Dover Books</a> have been a godsend. if you go to the Mathematics section of a bookstore and start looking at prices, you’ll notice that most books on math are <em>really</em> expensive. but the Dover books mostly seem to hover around $10-12. they tend to be older but still are often of decent quality. when you <em>think</em> you might be interested in tensor analysis but aren’t really sure, spending $10 on a Dover book is a reasonable investment.
on a related note, does anyone have a good introductory calculus book they recommend? i can <em>do</em> most calculus that comes my way but i haven’t actually <em>studied</em> calculus for 5 or 6 years and i’d like to brush up and fill in the gaps in my memory. i have a bunch of books on vector calculus and differential equations left over from my college classes but i did all my intro calculus in high school and they take the books back at the end of the year.
By
anders pearson
05 Jan 2003
in attendance this year: jere, raim, myself, nigel, teri, nigel’s little brother sasha, matti, jesse, anthony, heather, tasha, and emile.
some highlights: - presenting jere with the eMac that we'd all chipped in to get her.
- emile brought his homemade didgeridoos and showed us how to play them.
- tasha cooked nature burgers and some fantastic indian stuff.
- after running entirely out of alcohol, heather, tasha, and i drive all over massachusets at 1am looking for beer only to discover that it's illegal to sell alcohol in mass. after 11pm.
- then we get back and discover 4 beers, 2 bottles of wine and 3 bottles of champagne hidden away in the fridge and the cellar.
- lots of card games
By
anders pearson
03 Jan 2003
things were down here for a while. they had to do some electrical work in our office so they shut the power down. then, when the power came back, one of the IDE drives in the server decided it was time to breathe its last breath. luckily, it was just a drive that we use to do backups; the root filesystem was fine. but, fsck wouldn’t get past that point in the boot sequence. normally this would take me 5 minutes to fix. but… it’s a little more difficult to debug and fix a hardware problem from a few hundred miles away.
thank god we’re moving to the new server with RAID drives soon.
By
anders pearson
27 Dec 2002
i thought i’d be clever and took an overnight greyhound from new york back to maine on saturday night. i thought “no one else would be crazy enough to get on a greyhound at midnight so i’ll be able to stretch out and maybe get some sleep.” hah! never underestimate the insanity of holiday travellers. the bus was packed. it was a miserable 11 hour ride and there was no sleep for me.
my parents picked me up at the bus station and we headed over to my aunt’s for the big family gathering. i somehow managed to retain consciousness through most of it but i was pretty much dead by the time we got back to dexter.
spent the first part of the week just hanging out in dexter with my family, doing the christmas thing, playing with the pets, etc.
on thursday, my friend kat came and picked me up. we were close friends in junior high and at my first high school. i hadn’t seen her for about 4 years. she has two daughters now. i still have a hard time accepting that people my age are actually even capable of having children. anyway, despite the difficulties of being a young single mother, she seems to be doing ok. wednesday night it had snowed pretty heavily so the roads were nice and slippery. on the way to bangor, we managed to do a nice slow motion sideways slide off the road and into a ditch. luckily some kid coming the other way had seen us slide off and he pulled over and called a tow truck for us. the entire accident happened at about 2 miles an hour so no one was hurt and the car wasn’t damaged; the ditch was just steep enough that we couldn’t get the car out ourselves. so we sat in the car in the ditch for about 40 minutes waiting for the tow truck to come pull us out. didn’t really matter much to us; we’d just planned on getting together and talking anyway. in a ditch was about as good a place to talk as anywhere else. there was only one real downside. people in maine are very friendly and helpful. to the point of being annoying. every single car that drove by felt it necessary to pull over and ask us “is everyone ok?” “yes, we’re fine, thank you” “do you need a cellphone?” “no, we’ve already called a tow truck, and we’re just waiting for them now, thanks.” i had that exact conversation with about 30 different people.
By
kurtis
24 Dec 2002
Well I read this on slashdot and it got me thinking so now I’m curious what the folk of thraxil think of the concept? The way I see it … you have a long slippery slope between freedom and safety. Absolute safety allows for no freedom … thought police and such. Absolute freedom allows for no safety … true anarchy. Before 911 civil liberties were doing really well but these days it seems that people are willing to give up freedoms in order to be (or feel) safe.
<p>So which is it? I imagine people in manhattan probably have a significantly different point of view on this than crazy anarchist types like myself … but it seems the government is only going to use our national tragedies to further its own grip on our personal freedoms … which is a tragedy in itself. I believe that if the founders of this country (who were the anarchists of their time) knew just how much control our government had over us or could even conceive of how much privacy we have given up … they would be disgusted. </p>
<p>However people <span class="caps">ARE</span> terrified and I do admit terror can inhibit freedom as much as government control can … so I find myself unsure of how to stand on this. My instincts tell me that freedom is more important than safety … that I’d rather be dead than be a slave. Anyone?</p>
By
Chris Williams
23 Dec 2002
R.I.P. Joe…
<p>(more as I leave work/get drunk…)</p>
By
anders pearson
21 Dec 2002
i’m heading up to maine now.
my plan:
maine - tomorrow through the next week. visiting the family. hopefully making contact with pat, venice, robin, and anyone else in the area i can track down.
jere’s - new years +/- a few days on either side
prasanth’s house party the weekend after new years
back in nyc on the 6th
By
jp
20 Dec 2002
Shu sighting:
<p>“Let it been known once and for all that Sydney</p>
<p>Australia is home to the blandest, two cent,</p>
<p>uninspired, and definately not yo mama’s food of all the planet. Damn that <a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/~jconnoll/images/album">turducken</a> looks good”</p>
<p>I guess he and Liz made it the land down under safely. If I’da known when I was in <a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/~jconnoll/news/robot.html">Japan</a> this summer I mighta popped down to see the kids.</p>
By
anders pearson
19 Dec 2002
saw Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers last night. definitely not a let-down. i will probably go see it again tonight.