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.