A Veritable Cornucopia of Useless Information

My attempt at blogging on a more frequent basis lasted for about 3 weeks. I’m kinda amazed that it lasted as long as it did. So, what have I been up to lately? Not a whole lot…classes, Design Studio, and TA stuff keep me busy.

In the past two weeks, I’ve:

• Filed my state/federal income taxes
• Taken a brewery bus trip to Columbus and Kearney with Lincoln’s homebrewing club
• Toured Empyrean’s brewing/bottling facilities
• Had a mild cold
• Tagged along on Mandy’s bar crawl
• Wasted much of my time playing Dragon Warrior III
• Begun finding an apartment for this summer/fall

This weekend has been blissfully relaxing.

Today was a typical Valentine’s Day for me. My mom sent me a card, I watched the History Channel special on the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, and for the third consecutive year, I didn’t do anything remotely romantic with anyone.

In any case, there’s always next year.

My apartment has what I call a “hands-off” heating system; there’s a single pipe with hot water/steam that runs from the floor to the ceiling. The heat came on back in October, and I don’t expect it to be turned off until sometime in April. This always-on, uncontrollable heating system combined with my apartment’s ovenlike heat-trapping capabilities ensures that it’s always quite warm in here. Usually, I can open my window and manage to make it bearable, but in the past few days, it’s been warm enough during the days (and more importantly, during the nights as well) that it’s been next to impossible to cool off my apartment.

I’m running the air conditioner at the moment. At night. In February. Wow.

For reasons unknown to me, I woke up extremely early for no apparent reason both days of this weekend (9 yesterday morning; 7:15 this morning). Due to my busier-than-normal schedule this semester, I’ve been waking up/going to bed somewhat earlier than my historical average; apparently it’s become more ingrained into my biorhythms than I would have expected.

We’ve had a constant 40º and drizzle since yesterday morning, and it looks like it’ll continue all day today. While this kind of thing is expected during winters in Seattle, it’s quite unusual for a February weekend in Nebraska.

Random NAVE-related shout-out:

In a Slate article about BSE, the author thanks Gary Weber from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association for providing information. I met with him during the trip Tom and I took to Washington, D.C. in January 2004. Yep, it is a small world after all….

Occasionally, I’ve had people ask me why I don’t have any particular fondness for programming. The longer I think about it, the harder it is for me to offer a reasonable answer. My thought process is often excessively logical, I pride myself on using spoken/written language correctly and precisely, and well, I do enjoy using computers a lot. I’ve decided it’s largely because I’m too impatient/lazy to take the time to learn a particular language to some absurd level (if I can’t do something well nearly instantly, I rarely keep doing it) and to a lesser extent, that I’ve never found a language that I’ve enjoyed using. In any case, it’s a shame, because if I did enjoy programming, I’d probably be employed by a real company right now.

Sometimes, cultural “moments” seem to converge from multiple, diverse areas of interest. Today, there were mentions of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking on both Slashdot and ESPN.com (which included an interview with the author). From what I’ve read about this book, it seems like a fascinating read. Here’s a quote from the author’s ESPN interview:

I use “momentary autism” to describe those moments when otherwise normal people become autistic — that is, like people suffering from that disorder, they lose the ability to mind-read, to make sense of the intentions of others. An autistic person can follow the literal meaning of words, for instance, but cannot interpret gestures. They can understand flirting, in other words, only if one party says to another “I’m flirting with you.”

Make of that what you will.

Today, my Apple whoredom became complete; I bought an iPod shuffle. At least I can (more or less) justify it by the reasonable price and that it works quite nicely as a USB drive. I guess no one can resist Steve Jobs’ Kool-Aid forever…

Today was a very pleasant day in Lincoln, sunny and mild. Even though spring is still six weeks away, it’ll be here before we know it. It’s a good thing.

In other news, being a TA has been more time-consuming than I had thought it would be. Between TA stuff, classes, and Design Studio, I’m just a bit more tired than usual. Oh well…only 3 more months of being a full-time student. I’ll manage.

From the depths of my hard drive (vintage November 2003):

The first person to guess what this graph displays wins a prize.*

http://www.nebraskaroads.com/images/chart.png

*Prize will be non-tangible and will also lack monetary value.