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Below are the 19 most recent journal entries.

	2009.03.04  00.39 "" On Saturday, Kelley and I went to see Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds with Don and Laura. Afterward we all went to Mary's for dinner. At the end of dinner we got fortune cookies of course. I broke mine open and accidentally dropped half on the floor. No one at the table would let me eat the half that fell on the floor, and my rule is that every fortune cookie opened must be eaten. In order to avoid the temptation of eating it, I crushed the half that had fallen on the floor and tossed it in a glass. Then I had to decide what to do with the fortune. Should I read it? What should I do? So I ripped up the fortune into small pieces and tossed it in the glass with the broken cookie. Don poured it into a tea cup and tried to read what it said, but I asked him not to. "If we can't eat the cookie, no one is allowed to know what the fortune is." He looked like he was trying to read tea leaves. So that is the lost fortune cookie. No one will ever know what the fortune said.

	2008.03.09  21.06 There appear to be many clouds; but they quickly pass. After posting last night, I headed to choirgeek89's house to pick her up to go see Fiddler on the Roof at Ashland High School. It was raining, and I was thinking about big numbers, so I decided to figure out how many raindrops fell in Boston yesterday. Assuming a maximum raindrop size of 5mm (after that, they fall apart) and a vaguely spherical raindrop, I calculated that at least 90 trillion raindrops fell on Boston yesterday. I don't think you're going to be able to count them all. Amusingly, looking at the weather records for yesterday, it turns out that it was a record rainfall for March 8, beating the old record set in 1933.

	2008.03.08  17.02 There is beauty in simplicity. I think it's amazing how we throw around data. I've got a huge bittorrent download going (17GB) and it was originally downloading at 3KB/s. I thought, "man, that's slow." But then I thought about how much data is 3000 bytes. It's not a huge amount of data, but for a human to give that much data to another human would take a lot longer than a second. And that's what we consider slow. And so far I've downloaded 3.0 gig. 3 is a small number. We just forget how big a gig is. 3 billion bytes is just a portion of my download. 3 billion seconds is 95 years, an entire lifetime. I was complaining last week because it took me 10 minutes to burn 700 million pieces of information to a small plastic disc. Every so often I contemplate the fact that we can take a blu-ray disc, burn 50GB of data on to it, send it around the world, and retrieve all that data. We took 50 billion pieces of information, put them on a small piece of plastic in the palm of our hand, subjected it to shock waves, bumps, trucks, planes, automobiles, and every single piece of information is still available to us. Do you know how big 50 billion is? 50 billion seconds is 15 hundred years. And the amazing thing about sending 50GB around the world? It's an every day event. Not even special. Do it all the time. Ten bucks on ebay. I love the universe. I love technology.

	2007.08.15  17.35 Accept yourself. This weekend was great. Saturday was Unity Games which went excellently. Many fun games were played. Sunday was even better. gethen SMSed me on Thursday asking if I wanted to go to a Great Big Sea concert with her boyfriend's friend who was visiting from out of town. So I said yes, of course I would. We went to Northampton and the concert venue was tiny. There were maybe a hundred people there. One cool thing was the dancing. When I went to a Celtae concert with ostraya a few years back, I couldn't participate in the jumping up and down part of dancing to the music. I just ran out of steam after like one jump. I had to just watch her and others dance. Well this time, I jumped up and down and danced and had a great time. I think all the contra dancing I've been doing has been increasing my stamina. I noticed when I played Ultimate over the last month that I could run a lot more than I expected I'd be able to. I still need more stamina to be good at Ultimate, but it's improving. The concert was great. GBS put on a great live show. They continually banter and joke and kept putting in little bits of other people's songs during the breaks as jokes. I would buy a cover album of other people's music in their style in a microsecond. I tend to like cross genre music anyway though. Monday's contra was excellent. We went out to Chili's afterward, which always makes me happy. We may go to Chili's again after tomorrow's dance as a Chili's lover is coming back from a trip to Spain. Yeay!

	2007.05.14  11.31 How can you have a beautiful ending without making beautiful mistakes. Tomorrow, Tuesday, I'll be calling a couple dances at the MIT contra. If you want to come, it's from 8 to 10:30 at the MIT student center in room 491. I hope to see y'all there.

	2007.04.13  01.10 You will find great contentment in the daily, routine activities. I think that may have just been my best parking job ever. This afternoon, I parked a bit close to the car in front of me, trying to make it so that six cars could park in the row of spots I was in. Unfortunately, someone decided to park right on my bumper. I had about 6 - 8 inches in front of me. At first I wandered around, talked to a police officer to see if anything could be done. In the end I decided to just try to get out and it went quite well. Just now, I was looking for a spot, and someone had parked even further forward. I don't know what I was thinking, but I decided to try parking there. Somehow I hit just the right angle, and even though it took a few back and forths, I got myself parked. I decided to check how much space I had. The car behind me was close enough that I could just fit my flat hand between the cars. The one in front of me was a bit further away. I could fit my four fingers in between the two cars, but my thumb made my hand not fit. Checking my hand now, I think I had about 5 inches. The thing is that I'm totally used to not being very good at parallel parking. In fact, I'm quite good at fixing bad parallel parking jobs. I'm a much better parker now that I have a Civic with its awesome turning radius.

	2007.03.27  00.32 There is no mistake so great as that of being always right. Last night I was chatting with a friend about cross walks. She was pointing out that obeying cross walks is a part of the social contract. We can tell cars not to run red lights because we wait for the walk signal. However, I feel it is more okay to cross against the light, whereas it would be quite hard for me to run a red light (I would wait a fair long while before deciding a light was broken if it never changed.) I thought about this for a little while and tried to figure out my reason. Part of it is that I'm much much more likely to get a ticket and get hit with fines and higher insurance rates if I run a red light. However, that's because society views it as a much worse ill to run a red light than a Don't Walk sign. I think the reason is one of power. As a driver in a car, you have a lot of power. It's quite scary how much potential power you have that you could accidentally misuse. Because the driver is in the position of power here, it's the pedestrian that needs protection. I think that this is both why my internal ruleset suggests it's worse to run a red light and also why it's more highly regulated by lawmakers and enforcers. I suppose the result is that I don't feel guilty about jaywalking, as long as I do it very carefully and don't put myself or others at risk.

	2007.03.26  23.34 You begin to appreciate how important it is to share your personal beliefs. Last night I went to a benefit concert for Darfur. It was a jazz concert. I particularly liked the second act. I even bought CDs with a couple of songs they did. I decided I should post about it. It's an amazingly horrible situation over there, and I think it's important to push our government to continue applying pressure in the region. There's a website you can use to find out how your legislators measure in working on the problems in Darfur. All of my legislators get A+s. I'm probably going to email them thank you notes anyway, and I think I'm gonna check out my parents' zipcode and see what their legislators are like.

	2007.03.19  23.27 You will step on the soil of many countries. So, if you're reading this, you probably know that I went to Canada. It was a great trip. I drove up on a Thursday two and a half weeks ago. It was a good drive. I listened to the first third of the Silmarillion on audiobook. I would have listened to more, but I was tired, so I needed something rocking to keep me alert. I estimated the trip at 8 hours and the freeway entrance to exit time was 8 hours and 2 minutes. I was overly proud of my accuracy. Friday, ostraya moved apartments, so I helped with packing and moving. For packing the truck, I mostly ferried stuff from the elevator. For unpacking the truck I was in the kitchen unpacking boxes. ostraya's new place is very nice. I like the neighborhood too. Saturday was Contra dance. It was nice dancing with ostraya and elira and seeing some of their friends. I feel bad for the Ottawans considering that they have around 2 dances a month within a 2 or 3 hour drive, as opposed to the 5 or so a week within an hour of here. Sunday kenky and I played some Curling. We only had 5 people total, so the other 3 played on both of our teams. It went fairly well. We finished 3 ends and I won about 5 to 1 (he won the next Saturday by a similar difference.) It was great fun. During the week I moved to a hostel so that ostraya could work. I worked from there and got a lot of work done during the week. Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, I went to kenky's to watch the Brier and play some video games. I bought SSX Blur for Wii the first weekend I was there, and I got to try it on Saturday. I also played the new Karaoke Revolution that I bought. Friday, I had dinner with TN. After hanging out at a coffee shop for a while, I went to the swing dance where I met TN last summer (she was a bit sick and not up to dancing.) Swing dance was great fun. Every time I go, I'm afraid that I've forgotten how to swing dance, but it goes okay in the end. Almost time to go to bed, so I think I'm gonna post about the second week tomorrow.

	2007.03.19  14.06 Everyone has the right to choose one's own lifestyle. Had some interesting ideas this morning, so I thought I'd post about them. The first was an idea for a video compression method. Instead of looking at blocks and wavelets and such, what would happen if you looked at arbitrary polygonal shapes with different kinds of fills and transparency? It would be kinda like automatic svg creation based on the video. And then you could show the changes of the shapes from one frame to another and have backgrounds be static and things like this. Then, the decompressor just renders the vector data. I have no idea how much work it would take on the compression side or even whether you would get good results with low bandwidths, but it seems like a neat idea to me. Then that got me thinking about what it would take to get me to work on such a thing. I thought of course of what it would be like to live forever. Specifically I was thinking of a world where I wouldn't age, but where death was still possible. I decided that I would probably be much more careful and patient when crossing the street or driving somewhere. I think I would learn a lot of things. I would probably devote myself more fully to each task and then switch tasks every decade or two. That's just a guess though.

	2007.03.15  01.25 A journey must begin with a single step. As many know, I'm in Canada right now and am having a great time. I'm staying in a hostel in an old jail. It's pretty awesome. I'm playing in a Curling tournament this week, and so I thought I'd post my results. This afternoon, we lost badly at RCMP curling club. In the evening, we squeaked out a win at Carleton Place. Unfortunately, I didn't get enough sleep last night, so I had a pepsi right before the game, and around the fourth end, it kicked in and I got all nervous. I think I would have played better tired than on caffeine. Lesson learned. We have at least 4 more games, but hopefully even more than that (you play more if you win than if you lose.) The bonspiel we're in is vaguely huge, so there's a sizable spreadsheet showing all the games. There will be 900 games played total. To simplify usage of that spreadsheet, I've written a program that will scan for games that your team could possibly be in and only list those. I also added a feature where you can figure out which games you and a friend could both play in. K and I will only be playing against one another if we both make it to Sunday and happen to be in the same event (we could still play one another in the final game to determine the entire winner of the bonspiel, but we'd both have to win all our games up to that point.) Yeay python! I will write more about the trip when I get home, but my pizza is done (overdone actually) and I'm hungry.

	2006.10.25  22.26 Let the spirit of adventure set the tone. One of my animal crossing natives just asked if I came from the country. I said no, so he said something along the lines of, "It must be hard for you, living here. Only the one store, and not a pirate-ninja in sight."

	2006.08.04  17.06 A lifetime friend shall soon be made. When I was younger, looking up at the moon, I didn't see a man in the moon; I saw an energizer bunny. I've made an image to help you find the bunny next time there's a full moon. Let's start with the image: It's easiest to start with the drum. I rotated and scaled the bunny so that the drums would line up. The feet and body also basically line up. The head of the bunny on the moon is a bit up and to the right of the head of the bunny made of plush. The ears of the bunny on the moon point down and a bit to the right instead of up and right. Apparently, I once indirectly ruined the moon for someone. I told her boyfriend about the energizer bunny in the moon. He told her, and now when she sees the moon, she can't help but see that bunny going and going and going. She says it kinda ruins the romantic mood. Here's a side by side if that's easier for you to see:

	2006.05.15  23.56 Worry not that no one knows of you; seek to be worth knowing Well, it's been a while. Since my last entry, I got a new job. I work at the Participatory Culture Foundation working on the Democracy internet video player. It's a non-profit company making free software in defense of free speech in internet video. I like it a lot. Very cool people, and I get to work in linux on free software that I think is worth writing and which is not a clone of anything non-free. It's awesome. www.getdemocracy.com Life is going well. I've been taking ice skating lessons, which I'm liking. I've been hanging out with friends, going out. I've got my French final on Tuesday, which means that hopefully I'll have more time for other important things in my life. I still haven't been sailing; I'm not sure why. I really should go out there. Maybe after Tuesday. I guess we'll see.

	2006.02.25  01.59 Sever the ignorant doubt in your heart with the sword of self-knowledge. Today was awesome. I started out relearning some C++ and eating lunch. Worked on the C++ for a while and watched some Olympics. Around 6 Ronald came over and we watched a couple of curling games on my excellent Tivo. During curling Ronald helped me fix up my Magic Online league deck. We decided to switch to my green/blue/red splash deck because of the draw I got this week. I then lost two matches pretty badly and then won a match because the opponent disappeared after 2 turns. Around this time, Maria messaged me and then she and Pete came over. The four of us watched the end of the US/Russia women's curling match. It was awesome listening to the Russians shout stuff since I understood half of what they were saying. After curling, we decided to play video games. Karaoke Revolution was in, so I decided to play some Karaoke first. Since I was showing them the game, I got out my DDR pad out and played Sing and Dance. I tried to beat a song with the dance section set to "expert", but that was a disaster, so we decided to try cheating. First Ronald played using the standard controller, but that was still too hard. So we tried with Ronald and Maria each taking two buttons on the dance pad. Closer, but still tough. Finally we had each of the four of us take a button on the dance pad (I was "up".) We got a platinum which gave us the award I was going for. The main thing I have left to unlock on KR is 8 or so more diamond records. I can do it on "easy", but it's still going to be very difficult. Then we played Guitar hero. I made corn. While the others were eating, I got 5 stars on Cowboys from Hell which completed unlocking things on Medium. We played a bunch of Guitar hero. After Ronald left, we switched back to Karaoke Revolution and Maria and I sang together. After Karaoke, Pete and Maria left. Now I'm watching the US women's hockey semi-final game. I hadn't watched any hockey so far this year. I forgot how cool it is. I should have recorded more hockey. Of course, then I would have had to record less curling. It would be a hard decision now, but it's already made, so it's not that hard. I think lots of people know already, but I got a Tivo to record the Olympics. I upgraded it to a 320G hard drive and have recorded as much as I could. I also got a cable upgrade so that I could record the stuff on MSNBC, USA, and CNBC. I'm over a week behind because I'm watching absolutely everything I recorded. I've been trying to avoid news of what's happened, so please don't talk in comments about results from after Thursday Feb 16. Now I'm gonna head to sleep. I'm going to go to a curling open house at Broomstones, so I hope I get up early enough. I set my alarm, and when I need to get somewhere, that usually works.

	2005.09.06  20.06 Hope springs eternally in the human heart. Biking home from rigging today, I took the esplanade. There were all these little tiny bugs. Icky. I'm enjoying teaching rigging. Sometimes I forget something, but all in all, I think people get the idea. Been hacking in C# the last few days. It's kinda cool to finally be working on a project using it. My labor day weekend was good. I taught mainsail on Sunday. Went to the aquarium on Monday. Hacked on Saturday. Had people over for Karaoke Revolution on Sunday. All in all a great weekend.

	2005.06.20  00.51 Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening all at once. Reporting live, from the end, of another very good week. This week was great. I didn't play WoW every night, I went and hung out with people, it was awesome. Work is going well. I'm working on adding search, printing, and a better table of contents to yelp. It's nice to have a project I can code on consistently instead of doing packaging work. I do like changing what I do, but just like I like changing projects every day in packaging work, I also like changing whether I change projects every day. Friday, I actually did play WoW. It was fun, we tried to beat Majordomo. We improved as we went, but we didn't quite get there. Saturday was awesome. I woke up and started combining my different lego train tracks together. After a number of sessions, I now have what I consider to be a fairly interesting track layout. Of course, because it's interesting, I can't explain it easily here. It has some wiggly bits and some big curves and some bits where tracks run right next to one another. I like it a lot. Then I called people to go with me biking. I got Ronald to go and we did the Minuteman trail. I think I'm going to make it a policy to go every week weather permitting. After that, we went to dinner at a restaurant called Magnolias, in Inman square. I was intimidated by the food, but I got the Glorified Barbeque Chicken (without the barbeque sauce of course, don't be ridiculous.) It was amazing. I also tried Christine's Tuna. I've never had cooked tuna before and it was delicious. They even make their own vanilla ice cream, which was of course excellent. I will not hesitate to go there again. Finally, we went to see Batman Begins. This is an excellent movie and if you are even vaguely interested in Batman, or just like good movies, I suggest you go. It explores the psychological basis of Batman's character. I won't say more to avoid spoilers. Just go see this movie. Today I got up at 10 and somehow stayed awake despite the late night Saturday. After breakfast, some eye drops for my allergies, and then soup at Mary's, I went to the hardware store to get a replacement filter for my air purifier. Unfortunately, they don't sell them there, but I did somehow end up buying a Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine (in white, though I considered the indigo.) I haven't had a chance to use it yet as I didn't have anything here that it would prepare, but I'm going to pick some stuff up at the supermarket on the way home tomorrow. Next, as planned, I went to see Into The Woods again. I liked it a lot when I saw it last week so I decided to see it again. It was a good choice. This was an excellent production. If it weren't for the fact that this was the last show, I would recommend it to you all. My favorite was definitely little red riding hood. She played the part very silly. Someone I chatted with at the show that had also seen it before used the word psychotic, which is probably accurate. She was very funny. I then rushed home to see if they needed another healer for Molten Core, which they did. We killed through Garr. I watched Honeymoon in Vegas. I'm almost a third of the way through watching all of my movies in order. Then I'll start on the TV shows which I think will take longer. An excellent week all around. Time to sleep!

	2005.06.12  23.17 To effect the quality of the day is no small achievement. This was a great great weekend. Friday, I hosted my birthday party. I put so much work into cleaning my apartment, and when I was done, it was clean. Both the living room and the bedroom are presentable and usable. About 11 people came. I think it was a successful party. At one point, I noticed multiple conversations going. Success! mirthmonkey was itching to go out somewhere, and eventually we thought of going to one of the attendees houses to watch So I Married an Axe Murderer. His wife couldn't come to the party because someone had to watch the baby, so we took the party to her. I had never seen the movie, so this was a real treat for me. It's a very cool movie. Saturday, I got up at 10, read my current book for a little while, then went back to sleep. I got back up, went for breakfast, and then went and sat on the lawn at city hall for a while reading again. After that I came home, watched Gremlins, and played some WoW. Then, at 7, I went to Dom's house for his barbeque. We hung out, had shish-kebobs (I tried both the chicken and the beef but I didn't like either of them (I'm a very picky eater,)) and then watched The Critic. It was an excellent party. Today was best. I got up at 9:30 and went to breakfast. After that I went out to the minuteman trail to meet Dom & Ruth for a bike trip. Last time we biked together, I couldn't keep up at all and eventually just had go ahead cause I didn't want to slow them down. Today I kept up the whole way except when I slowed down cause other people were. It felt great. When I got home, I built the coal car and the passenger car for my new Lego train set. Next Ronald and Christine came over and we watched Grosse Pointe Blank, an excellent movie. I accidentally used the term romantic comedy and we had to convince Christine that it wasn't a normal romantic comedy before she would watch it. Finally, after dinner at Mary Chung, we met laynamarya and went to see Into The Woods at the New Repertory Theatre in Newton. It was amazing. I already knew I loved the show, but the performances were amazing. My favorite was the comedy from Little Red Riding Hood. Other great performances came from Cinderella and Jack. All in all, a great weekend. I'm going to remember it for a long while.

	2005.05.31  02.08 When you learn to be flexible, amazing opportunities reveal themselves! Happy Birthday to me. I'm really working on cleaning up my apartment for my party in a couple weeks. Today I went to the UHaul place to look into renting storage for all the books from my parents' house. I play too much WoW. Today (Monday), I farmed for Long Elegant Feathers for a birthday raid I'm going on on Tuesday. Gordo made me a bunch of pirate hats. I'm going to make the people on the run wear them. Unfortunately, a minute before I handed the Long Elegant Feathers to Gordo, my computer rebooted spontaneously. After that, it would reboot spontaneously on boot. I had to call up Kaelin and tell her my password so she could log in and give the feathers to Gordo. I just hope my video card doesn't overheat tomorrow during the run.