Quarterly Post

That seems to be what it's come to, huh? Perhaps I'll be better. Actually, it's occurred to me that November is NaBloPoMo, which I almost successfully completed last year, so perhaps I'll do it again.

So, since our last episode, I think all of the effects from my bike crash have healed. I went to Chicago (pics), visited with the fam, ran the Chicago Triathlon (pics), saw some peeps. Emily and Josh visited Chicago also while I was there. We went on a boat tour w Sarah, Tomas, Janna and some others. Stayed w George the day before my tri. Marty came down from Milwaukee a couple times. Saw Harold. Hung out w Christine, Matt and Owen. Owen is seriously cute. Also hung out w Gillian, Mark, Ellie and Jen. Ellie is seriously cute. My dad and I went to the Shedd Aquarium to view things, and University of Chicago to buy a book. Attempted to fly a kite w dad and Alexis, but not enough wind. That's the gist of the trip. Busy.


My bike was apparently tousled around a bit by UPS during its trip back to DC. The box was beat to shit, and some tubes were sticking out of the box and such. This after they told me I couldn't insure the bike unless it was surrounded by 1 inch of cardboard. Kind of bullshit, because when I shipped the bike from the Alexandria bike store to Chicago, UPS insured it, picked it up in the same box I used to ship it back, and it arrived in pristine shape. Seems like they take care of your stuff if you're a bike company shipping a bike, but refuse to insure it and beat the hell out of it if you're just a civilian shipping a bike. Of course, I only have two data points, but that's never stopped me from drawing conclusions before.

Started school. Just when I thought work couldn't reach any insaner levels of insaneness, it has.

Before all of that school and Chicago craziness, I went with Amanda, Gordon and a posse of others to stay in Doyle's River Cabin in Shenandoah.

It was pretty much awesome. The group was all of my biking buddies, and they all wanted to bike Skyline Drive, but I had just crashed my bike and hadn't fixed it yet, so I went on a long hike by myself instead. It occurred to me in the middle of the hike that maybe that wasn't the smartest thing to do, when I ran into an enormous rattlesnake, and saw lots of bear tracks. Although I wasn't completely alone... I brought Charlie's dog, Mojo, who was a pretty awesome hiking partner. We did a not un-difficult 8-mile hike. I'm not really a dog person, but he nearly changed my mind.

I could go on and on about the trip. Super fun. But I won't.

Also, Doug, Kim and Sidra are moving to San Francisco. Doug is gone already and started his new job, and Kim is here with Sidra until the house sells and such. But should be gone within a few weeks. Before Doug left I went with all of them to the Potomac Boathouse so I could watch Sidra while they went out rowing for the last time before the move. Sidra is seriously cute, and that's even after considering that she yacked on me a couple times and came within inches of pooping on me yesterday.


Well, that's enough for now, don't you think?

Spoiler Alert!

Once again it's been a while. But I have an interesting story.

Had a pretty violent crash today on my bike. I was passing a runner on the GW Parkway trail, about halfway to Mount Vernon, and yelled out "on your left." So what does the guy do? Well, naturally he immediately jumps into the lane that I"m passing him in. And I hit him head on, going at a pretty good clip (19.3 mph). I remember only a few distinct moments. I remember yelling to him that I was passing. I remember yelling again when he jumped in my lane (like 0.01 seconds before impact). I remember lowering my head so I'd hit him with my helmet (also about 0.01 seconds before impact). And I remember lying there on the pavement after the crash.

I was in pretty good shape. I lost a chunk of skin from my finger, but pretty small. I got a bloody nose, but managed to not get too much blood on me. That made it look kind of bad at the time... And... well, I think that's all I suffered. This poor guy was not in such good shape. My aerobars hit him right in the chest. Oh, and my helmet hit him right in the chest. He swore he was ok, but I think he broke a rib. He wasn't walking very well.

The bike suffered an injury also. Broken aerobars. They're bent up at a pretty severe angle, which make me wonder why I didn't realize this until like 5 minutes after the crash. Also, somehow my bar tape on the right side came undone.

For you voyeurs, here's some pictures...

The bike...


Ok, for those of you who don't bike, those bars sticking forward and up from my handlebars should really be going straight forward. The dude's chest bent them up. Pretty obvious, right?, but I didn't realize until I was about a mile down the road after the crash.

Blood on helmet (not MY blood)...

I don't know where this blood came from. I don't think it was me... I only had a bloody nose, so not sure how that would get on the top of my helmet, and I did pretty much impale the guy with my helmet, so I'm pretty sure it was him. Although after the crash he wasn't obviously bleeding. I dunno...

Ouwie on my finger...


Luckily I had my gloves on, or this would have been much worse. There are some pretty good scuff marks on the glove palms, which I'm sure would have been my skin all over the pavement.

Well, that's all... for now...

Highly Recommended

Hi again...

I'm getting sick of making excuses for my long gaps in posting, so I'll just fess up... I haven't felt like it. That's how I roll sometimes.

Let's see, lots happened. Liz and Jesse had a wedding that I attended. Very nice. My first time to Florida. A little touristy for me at first, but we found our place lounging around sipping drinks by the wedding party's pool.

I bought a sinfully large flatscreen monitor. 22 inch widescreen. My whole world looks different now.

Heard from Mason. They denied me to their PhD program, but then offered me a masters slot. It seems that there is a whole series of macro/micro classes that I'd have to basically repeat if I wanted to go on to a PhD AFTER doing the masters, so I'm seriously considering rejecting the offer. I feel like I'm getting old enough that I just can't waste that much time taking useless classes they'll make me repeat for no reason whatsoever. On the other hand, I don't really want to sit around for the next year. A quandary. I suspect I'll talk to my profs and see if I can continue my research for a year... hopefully get a chunk of what I would have to do for a PhD thesis done, and then apply again.

Speaking of Mason and rejection, I got a little story for ya. So we have these student seminars once a week. At each one, a grad student presents their research and usually some data. And they're usually packed. Except for the last couple weeks, the others this semester have been standing room only. So I was scheduled to give a seminar on April 6. I bust my arse, get some stuff together to present, stay up late the day before getting everything ready. Time of my seminar comes along.... zero people show up. Zero. Actually one dude came in about 10 minutes after it was supposed to start and asked if I was giving a seminar. I was like "Uh, I guess. Yeah, come on in," to which he replied, "Oh, no... I just want to use your projector when you're done. I'll be in the lobby. Can you let me know when your through with it." Turns out there was some big shot economist who came in from Caltech to participate in a big seminar somewhere in another building that day, and they emailed everyone to reschedule the April 6 seminars EXCEPT the guy scheduled to actually do the seminar that day (me). I kinda figured something was up, because it wasn't just that no one showed up to my thing... The whole department was empty. It was clear that something was amiss.

My sisters and mom came to visit me last weekend. Went to FDR memorial and Washington Monument with Alexis, and took the whole crew to Eastern Market Saturday morning. And dinner w Mary, Partha and Pia.

OK, must go...

More notes on my blissful life

My long lost blog friends... It's been a while, I know.

First, I want to say how I just set up my Google Reader with RSS feeds from all of my friends' blogs, only to have them post at a underwhelming rate since then. I wasn't even sure it was working for a while. So go forth and post blogs, if for no other reason than to boost my confidence in my RSS feed reader. And I don't want to hear about how hypocritical I am that I scold you for not posting, but don't post myself. We're talking about you here, not me.

I feel like several things have happened since last time I posted that, at the time they were happening, I specifically thought that I had to do a post about them. But now I can't remember. I'll do my best.

First a non-event. I still haven't heard from GMU about my admission to grad school. Hoping to hear soon. In other school-related stuff, my research stuff is coming along very nicely. I have a programmer for my reactive power thing. I had a project status report today with my advisors at GMU. Good news all around. They're buying me some expensive software that I need. (Win.) They're giving me server space. (Win.) They had lots of good feedback on what I have so far. (Win.) They agreed to let me out of a commitment I had to do a seminar on my experiment in four weeks, which is good because I won't have any data by then. (Win.) Is anyone keeping track? That's win, win, win, win, right? Yes. So, a good day. For the last week I've been so stressed about this crap that I haven't even been sleeping very well, but today I feel much better.

I had a raccoon living in my rafter space. But I called the man, and they seem to have come and trapped it. I wonder where Rocky is living now? Do you think if they let it out like a mile away that it will find its way back to my apartment building, like those dogs that find their owners from halfway across the country, and I'll soon be hearing Rocky sharpening his claws on my ceiling joists at 4AM once again? Perhaps.

I go to Florida next week for the first time to see Jesse and Liz get married. I'm looking forward to it being warm enough to play tennis. I need to get a new racket before then.

That'll do, blog. That'll do.

Snowy Sunday

Went for a hike today in the snow. Have been cooped up for several days with bad cold, but felt much better this morning. I decided I wanted to get out of the house, especially to try to see outside for a while before it gets colored slush by all the salt. So, I walked to Old Town, had lunch, hung out at a cafe, went to a couple bike stores that both closed because of the snow (wimps), walked along the riverfront, bought some bread at TJs, and walked back home.

I took this at the river. It was really really cool. The ice on the river was flowing by really slowly, and the ice by the edges gets all crumpled together. It looks like this.


Also figured out that I can video conference with my new computer using Skype. My dad has a USB camera too, so I talked to him and my sister with video for a little while. It's pretty nerdy, but pretty fun. And it really is good to actually see people. Kind of like in 2001: A Space Odyssey when Dave talks to his daughter over the video phone. It was just like that.

OK, so I also feel that the first picture that my mac MADE me take was kind of sketchy. Remember that I was sick. So I took a new one. I'm not sure it's any better, but at least my sinuses aren't 100 psi and I am smiling. Oh, I took it while I was talking to my dad and sister, hence the headset.
OK, I'll end with a (slightly) funny story. So I've been kind of blowing my nose about 600 times a day, and it gets where it kind of needs some moisturizing. So instead of my normal light face wash, I thought I'd switch over to something with some moisturizing stuff in it. I knew that I had an emergency tub of moisturizing cleanser somewhere. Dug it out of the closet, and have been washing with my Oil of Olay cleanser for a few days. Well, today I look at the bottle closely, and it isn't cleanser at all. I've been "washing" my face with straight up lotion. I *thought* it was pretty effective at moisturizing.

Oh, one more (slightly) funny story that's (slightly) related. I went to CVS the other day to buy some stuff, including a bottle of moisturizing body wash. It's really f-ing dry around here. Anyway, I find the aisle, go to where the body wash is, and ALL OF THE MOISTURIZING BODY WASH IS LOCKED UP. Yep, behind glass, just like it was a shelf of prophylactics in 1980. The weird thing is that it isn't even any more expensive than the regular body wash. The only thing I can think of is that there is some new fangled way to make crystal meth out of moisturizing body wash, so they're locking it up like the pseudophedrine hydrochloride. Seriously I have no idea what the hell they're thinking. Could the loss rate of moisturizing cleanser really be so much higher than that of regular cleanser that they have to lock it up? Crazy.

Oh Beautiful MacBook

New MacBook came a day early. I had to drive to FedEx to get it, but now I'm hanging at Elmo's drinking tea and playing. It really is quite a beautiful machine. It already froze up though, not even having been out of the box an hour. I'm not sure what that was about, but we're hoping it was a fluke.

MacBook has a camera built right in. When you're as ugly as me, maybe that's not good. Anyway, here's my first pic. (The very first thing it asks you to do is take a pic of yourself!)


I seem to have gotten a cold. I'm basically a snot-producing machine right now. Stay away for a bit, I recommend.

Spent the day at the Renaissance Hotel, for the National Electricity Delivery Forum. VERY exciting. OK, not really, but was a day out of the office. Tomorrow is day two of the forum, so more to come. I don't want to give you too much information, but I may or may not have had a snot-related incident today at the hotel. If I did, I don't think anyone saw.

Troll City USA

Just returned last evening from Atlantic City, where I joined Partha, Vinod and several of Jesse's other friends for Jesse's bachelor party. I have to say that we had a pretty good time, especially considering I slept on a floor. I can't say that I was optimistic before we left, and actually my skepticism was well-founded. Over all I have to say that casinos are thoroughly repulsive to me, not because I'm morally opposed or anything, but just because they seem slimy. And oh was it slimy. When we were at the casinos, I mainly kept myself busy observing things. Below are some of my observations.

The first observation I had I am calling the Slot-Troll Hypothesis. This hypothesis holds that the appeal of playing slot machines is heavily biased towards those people who look like trolls. I couldn't really find a picture online that accurately depicted the full trollishness of your typical slot machine player, but the images below give you some idea of what I'm talking about.


The second observation is also about slot machines. All slot machines look exactly alike, and it isn't completely obvious why this is. I mean, I understand that your average trolly person is mesmerized by shiny flashy things, and so you would want to have a lot of shiny flashy slot machines, but why make every single one like that? Aren't there any people that would prefer a more sensible-looking slot machine? I know I would. I would have expected more variety in the design of slot machines, with maybe 20% of them being less gaudy.

Being an economist, I also thought quite a bit about the games themselves. To get too into this would break my initial pledge not to wax philosophic in my posts, but suffice it to say that the existence of casinos (and particularly games where you play against the house at known odds) raises interesting questions about incentives, rationality of players, etc. There are only a few options for why gamblers do what they do, and I was curious what the dominant motivation really is. Is it (1) that gamblers just don't understand that they (most of them) are risk averse, (2) that gamblers really do get a sufficient amount of enjoyment or satisfaction from playing the game itself to make up for their expected losses, (3) that gamblers *think* that they really get sufficient enjoyment or satisfaction from playing the game itself to make up for their expected losses, even though they don't, or (4) that many gamblers actually are not risk averse? Or is it (5) that gamblers are simply irrational, and aren't making the decision to gamble or not to gamble in the way that many of the rest of us would? I dunno.

While the slots and to some extent the other table games where you play against the house were trolly, I noticed that the poker area was not trolly. That, by the way, was where most of my friends were playing. I was actually going to play some poker with them, but I never got around to it.

Atlantic City is not the place to go for Indian food. Aloo gobi is $18, and doesn't include rice. If you want rice, that's $8 more.

There are feral cats all over the f-ing place in Atlantic City. Seriously, we walked down the boardwalk and saw like fifty of them. It was really really cold too, but they didn't seem to mind.

I did do a small amount of gambling. Partha and I wagered on a few games of skee ball. That was about it though.

What did I learn? Poker wasn't quite as repulsive as I thought, but the rest of Atlantic City was thoroughly stomach-turning. But even so, it wasn't a bad experience. I had quite a bit of fun hanging with the rest of the group, and observing the trolls.

Important People

So yesterday was a busy day at work. We have been working for a little over a year on reforming some of the main electric power market policies in the US, and issued those rules yesterday. Well, the rules were voted out anyway. They haven't shown up on our webpage yet.

Anyway, we had a long public meeting in the morning, at which the Commissioners voted out the order, and then the partying began. Among other things, there was a little reception in the Chairman's office where we got awards and pictures taken with the Chairman and Commissioners. I haven't met the Commissioners before really. They seem like nice enough people, but I noticed something interesting yesterday. Important people really are walled off from the rest of the world in some ways. You could tell just by watching the interactions, or lack thereof. One thing I noticed was that, for the most part, people do not initiate discussions with important people. A couple of times the discussion came to a pause, and it just was quiet until one of the important people said something else. A bit awkward. Now, imagine that all of your professional interactions were like that. I guess I'm not sure that's how it is all of the time, but if it was, who would want that job?

Anyway, that is over now. Now I have to focus on some school stuff for a couple months, but hopefully shouldn't be as annoying.

I'm going to Atlantic City this weekend. It's Jesse's stag party. I dunno. I'm looking forward to it just because of the people, but I'm not much of a gambler. I come back Sunday, then I have Monday off for Washington's Birthday.

New MacBook arriving soon...

Need Vacation

Seriously. Life’s crazy.

Got my application in for grad school. We’ll see. They’ve been a little weird lately about me having to skip class and seminars because of work demands. I’m a little worried they are ticked at me. As part of this whole thing I had to take my GRE a couple weeks ago. It was a bit of a hellish experience. I even seriously considered voiding my exam before I got my results, but I didn’t have time to retake the test. Turns out I did just fine, with the possible exception of writing. That is strange, because I write for a living pretty much, and tend to think that it’s one of my things, but lately stress has seriously messed with my head and sometimes it’s hard to think straight... like when you’re told to write an essay in 30 minutes about one of two really horrible topics. Anyway, I didn’t do that horrible on the writing. I got me a 4, which as I understand it is what a lot of people get.

Anyway, back to the verbal and quantitative. So quantitative is kind of my thing, you know. So I was expecting to kind of kick its ass. But during the exam I was seriously like “WTF? I have to answer that in one minute? Impossible.” And then I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I tell you that I knew only a handful of verbal vocab words for sure, had an educated guess on a handful more, and then the rest I had absolutely no idea whatsoever. So, after feeling defeated and seriously considering voiding my scores, I finally pushed the button to see them, and was pleasantly surprised. Didn’t get the writing score til this week. I was somewhat less pleasantly surprised by that one when I saw that it was 29th percentile, but less annoyed when I read that the next 50% of test takers get a 4. So I was 29th percentile, but only a little bit away from 80th percentile really. And my height percentile is over 90%. Too bad they don’t ask for that on the application.

So, in addition to applying for school, I also am in another class this term. I’m trying to hire a java programmer to make the graphical user interface for my experiment. If you know java (well), are able to make me a kick-ass GUI and are interested, I’m paying $300. I have to get serious about finding someone to do that this week. Someone else in my class hired a guy from India. I might try to do that.

So someone is charging stuff to my debit card fraudulently. I was on the phone with Bank of America for about an hour today. They forwarded me to three different people to take essentially the same information. I was quite irritated by the third transfer. Anyway, I have to get a new debit card, and they credited all the stuff back to my card. It’s a bit of a pain in the arse, just because a number of things (Netflix, Flexcar, iTunes, Fotki, AA, etc.) use that card, so I have to change all of that until I get my new card.

Oh, what else... Saw a midget band last week at Iota. Saw the Societe Anonyme exhibit at Phillips Collection a couple weeks ago. Went to party in Baltimore. I can’t think anymore. Going home.

Colon

Emily and I just took a coffee break at Union Station, and in the process discovered an enormous, inflatable colon in the main hall. It's really something to see.

My Whirlwind Life

Hey. Back after a bit of a break. It isn't just me being lazy. Rather it is a combination of me being busy with stuff (see below) and not having any internet. Magic internet is completely gone now. I've already decided to actually get internet and cable, but I'm waiting for my phat cost-of-living adjustment to kick in. I also just passed my 3-year FERC anniversary on Friday, so I'll have a promotion coming in the next few weeks that will make affording internet/cable a little easier. In case you're keeping track, 3rd anniversary is the "leather anniversary." I'm not sure if that is leather as in "small, leather Coach clutch" as a gift for her, or "assless leather chaps" for him. With this leather anniversary, I'll also now get 4 weeks of vacation a year!

Other fun developments at work that I'm not sure I'm allowed to legally talk about yet, but which may make my life much saner in the foreseeable future. That will be a change after 18 months of craziness. What will I be doing with my new free time? Well, I start another class tomorrow. (Yes, it meets on MLK day!) Then I'm applying to actually get into the grad program that I've been freeloading in for a while. As some of you have already heard, I had a little confusion about when the application was due. Last year I looked into applying, but decided to delay for a year. But last year the application was due mid-April. I just discovered that this year's application is due February 1! Yes, that gives me all of a couple weeks to write statements, get additional recs, take GRE (I do that next Friday), and otherwise finish my application. All while dealing with the final period of insanity at work. Far from ideal, but at least this deadline will make me get through the application quickly. I'm not particularly happy about the GRE rush. I had hoped to take a few weeks with a GRE book first.

Just signed up for Chicago Triathlon. It's August 26, 2007, in case any of y'all are feeling frisky. You can register here. They have a kids triathlon too. Alexis has run the kids' race for the Shamrock Shuffle before, so I'm thinking maybe she'd wanna do the kids' tri. It's a bit longer than the kids' Shuffle though. The kids' race is 100m swim, 4k bike and 1k run. I think she could probably do that. Of course, that would mean my mother and/or sister back in Chicago would have to facilitate some training. That may be unlikely. I noticed that the kids' tri is sponsored by McDonald's! WTF?

I leave you with this...