rool skool

By jp 10 Apr 2001

so I just finished up at the old high school — they had me come back and talk to kids about what it’s like to be getting an advanced degree in the sciences, which I guess is what I’m supposed to be doing.

gave a speech to the entire high school, and visited some classes. what I didn’t know until today was that they were paying me a small lump reward for my “troubles”. uh, BSing about science and getting paid for it. sure.

bottom line — they covered the plane tix too, so all in all it was a nice chance for me to come home for free and drink a yard of beer at the owl bar with some old friends.

tesla

By anders pearson 06 Apr 2001

i went to a lecture on Nikola Tesla given by John M. Cohn from IBM today. i’ve been mildly obsessed with Tesla since early highschool when i read Man Out of Time so i didn’t really learn anything new about him but i enjoyed it anyway. at the end of the talk we got to play with a big tesla coil though. enormous high voltage arcs. wirelessly powering flourescent lights from a few meters away. vaporizing the aluminum in CDs leaving the plastic around it intact. too cool.

death and taxes

By anders pearson 01 Apr 2001

i just wasted the last two hours trying to do my taxes online. i gave up eventually because the site was so frigging slow and poorly done. i’m on a fast connection but i had to wait a good 2 minutes for each page to download. and it just went on and on. i don’t have any stocks or bonds or other weird crap going on; i have one job; i’m single; no dependents; no weird deductions. it ought to take no time at all to do my taxes. but i had to go through answering one question at a time (almost always answering ‘no’ because i didn’t fit into some bizarre category (no, i’m not a nun, i don’t generate my own electricity using an alternative power source, and no, i’m not an independant llama farmer)) waiting 2 minutes each time for the next stupid question to come up so i could say no to it too.

what i’d like to see is ‘taxes for average people.’ it would have a form where you enter your name, check if you’re single or married, and enter your credit card. then the next page is a form that mirrors a standard W-2 that you just fill in the boxes with the info from your regular W-2. at this point, you can either let it calculate stuff and be done with it, or go on and answer other questions if you do happen to have a more complicated situation.

and just when i was getting really despondant and fed up with the whole thing i learned that even suicide wouldn’t get me out of doing my taxes. damn. there goes that idea.

underdog

By tuck 25 Mar 2001

i think the most upsetting thing about sega calling it quits in the console market is that it is just another reminder of how retarded most people are.

sega has always had the most innovative, creative and unusually fun games- ever since the Master System in the 80s. but the masses always, without fail, respond best to hype and glitter. thusly, the dreamcast’s recent demise based on slow holiday sales. the truth is that no one- not even sony loyalits, argue the fact that the dreamcast’s game line-up was the best in the world.

what good is a system that only has a small handful of great games, compared to one that has countless epics and more on the way? it is the latest, sleekest, shiniest and most expensive things that turn americans on- regardless of functionality.

it is sad.

but, of course, now sega will basically do what it always did do best, which is make games. it’ll be hard to see sonic-team or the Phantasy Star logo appear on the game-cube or ps2- but i suppose that it’ll be a good way for sega to begin slow domination of the world through third-party game producing.

tiger: 1, zookeeper: 0

By anders pearson 22 Mar 2001

i went to a couple zoos when i was in china.

i don’t recommend that anyone who shares any degree of western society’s views on cruelty to animals do the same. animals kept in unsanitary concrete and iron pens barely big enough to hold them. miniature stallions made to fight each other for onlookers’ amusement. a black bear being led around by a ring in its cheek, being beaten with a stick and made to do tricks for the crowd; its entire nose shredded from where the ring used to be but obviously tore through the flesh too many times. not for the weak-stomached.

hence, this makes me happy.