Things is goods, dey is.

Wassup? How you been? I'm happy to hear that you're doing well enough to still be able to read my blog, being that you have the time, the money to pay for internet access(or at least can get to the library for a while), and the ability to read English is still with you. (Hi Lars/Melanie/Elena/Satomi/Igor/Irina!)

So I've been doing a lot lately. Really, I have. Shut up! I am not lazy! You are such a liar! Friendship discordancies aside, I have been busy.

My mentor at work has left the company on a Leave of Absence of Unknown Duration. Is he going on a cross-country trip to discover himself, an African safari, what?

He's gonna spend the summer with his wife(a teacher) and his kids. Then... he's gonna find work somewhere else. He's a pretty cool guy and has been trying to teach me stuff for a while now. He commented Friday night at the bar that I have noticeably shaped up and started figuring stuff out in the last few weeks before his departure. This is certainly true, but mostly has to do with beginning to understand, and realizing what a valuable resource I'm losing. I'm going to have to pick up the slack for him, and the other guy that already left in our area. I'll be doing the work of two senior software engineers. This may be a bit of a problem because I'm some newbie who has got rocket science on the brain and knows enough Fortran to optimize a trajectory to the moon, but next to no understanding of how the damned computer works! Arg! So anyway, now I'm in charge of wiring the test rig as well, and I have no idea how that fell to me except that the mentor used to do it and nobody else was really listening when he was talking. It's weird suddenly having responsibility, and especially weird knowing that I can handle it easily.

Other things that have happened... I went out on the mentor's boat with him on a beautiful boat on a Sunday a little while ago. It was just great. The sun was passing over light clouds with an otherwise blue sky, just warm enough to be comfortable when we got to skipping over the waves. I also have been hanging out with my friends a lot more, which is cool and all. I've been doing some pleasure reading and forgetting about grad school for a while. I really need to take the GRE, but I also need to figure out which program to which I should apply. That sentence was difficult to write in proper English, I'll have you know. I'm pretty sure I got it wrong anyway.

Down to business. You should check out my friend's fledgling clothing shop. She's got an eye for fashion if you ask me, and would like you to be seen as fashionable as well. I personally like the skull butterfly and the omaha skyline shirts. Now that Omaha has a skyline, we must pimp that shiat out!
Next, I think you may like I Can Has Cheezburger. This is the ubiquitous "captions glued onto your cats" website that some of you may have heard of on that Internet to which you kids seem to have developed an addiction. Then, there is Daily Puppy. I have vomited blood twice as a result of the cuteness of some of those puppies, but I really should stop OD'ing on puppy cuteness. Finally, you should have been listening to SomaFM while you were looking at all these sites. I personally love their GrooveSalad channel, but rock whatever you can, while you can. Apparently internet radio is going to be all but decimated by some new bill in the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Apparently they're supposed to start paying huge royalties to somebody because of how many people could be listening to their stations, instead of the same ones that satellite radio pays. This could easily kill the last safehaven for independent radio outside of college stations, and we all know how much that sucks.

Alright, that's pretty much what I've got for you. I hope you have a good one.

Suicide Pill and the Opposite of What It Brings

My sister knows me a little too well, I think. She sent me this:

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

This is almost exactly how life is right now, except minus the actually being an astronaut thing.

After three months, I finally got around to actually to replacing the fuse in my car that allows me to use my car lighter/auxilary power. Now I can have fully inflated tires whenever I want! ...or at least when I get around to it without much extra effort, as I keep the car lighter powered air compressor in the trunk. Gas is expensive, and I like to bitch, but my newly reinflated tire will help me to get better gas mileage, w00t!

I am currently eating a bologna sandwich, if that pleases you to know. If not, I have no idea why you're reading this. Unless you're my friend and just decided to click the link that says I've got something to say. Thanks for being my friend. You know, we never talk anymore. I should really call you. Oh man though, I think I lost your number when I changed phones. Maybe you could call me? That'd be great! Then we can talk for, like, ever!

*whispered* Did they notice the thinly veiled attempt to get them to call me? No? Good, good.*/whispered*

My SE class is almost done, and I think I'm done with that Master's program. I don't feel like being ridiculously bored for the rest of my life by what I do. I'm looking into some more technical graduate studies now, like Plasmadynamics and Orbital Mechanics. Doesn't that just sound more awesome than Systems Engineering? Also, systems seems like something I could do after about 20-30 years of experience in engineering when I was tired of being in the lab. At this point though, I don't think I'll ever be tired of the lab time. It's even better to be in the lab when you're doing computer programming!

On that note, I leave you now. Please have a nice (insert period of time between blogs here.)

19 Rubber Duckies Down, 1 to Go

So I've been learning a bunch in Russian. In fact, I could say that in Russian. That's probably better than what I could do in Spanish right now. That's 6 months of Russian vs. 5 years of Spanish. Public school is at a severe loss compared to direct government education. I really hate the ads on myspace, and the webcam girls, and the idiots who add them as friends because, and I quote, "Daaaaaaaamn biatch! Ya the hotest shiat up in dis bizzzzzitch Holla bak atcha boi! and chek out these RINGTONES!!!!!" The existence of myspace is proof that God exists and that He HATES US WITH A FIREY PASSION! I'm pretty sure Benjamin Franklin said that... or something like it.

Next item on the list: Work. It's going alright again. I'm learning, and applying my knowledge, and all that. It's awesome. I'm beginning to understand why I ever felt smart in the first place. This is probably one of those good things, because you don't want unsure idiots programming your spaceships. Speaking of spaceships, this makes me sad. This is mostly because I didn't find the Battlestar Galactica on it, and complained about it to a friend. This was before she pointed out that it was there, which actually made me feel a little relieved. That is how you know I am a nerd.

I've got a couple of friends who have just gone live with their website, AnswerPond.com. You ask questions and can offer up a reward for a thorough answer. At the same time, you can earn money by answering questions. You should check it out. I already earned some cashola myself, and am going to be lobbing some easy ones out there to try to get some action going on the site. While you're at it, check out those GoogleAds on the side. Click if you find something even mildly interesting.

Finally, you might want to know that I was nowhere near any shootings at JSC. I was about 6 miles away at my office building. As it was a Friday, I wasn't even going to go there for my Russian class. I do know a guy who works in the same building, but he was off in another building running an errand.

What was kind of eerie about the whole incident is that up until the Monday after this happened, there was a sign up on the fence next to each of the entrances onto JSC. The sign said something along the lines of, "Are you being safe? April is a high injury month at JSC. Please be careful." That wasn't the exact wording, but it was definitely close. Also, they had to change out the 'days without a time lost injury' numbers too. Those won't even start to be updated again until next week.

The culture here is weird about it too. I don't know anyone who knew any of the people directly involved. The people that I do know were all at least semi-sensitive about it, because nobody knows whom anybody else knows. This was also the last day of work for a few hundred people at my site for the company. Layoffs. The managers were all going through a sort of nervous laughter stage about the incident, which we were initially told was a 'domestic dispute'. None of these managers wanted to fire anyone, but they had to. My boss had to let his friend and coworker of several years go. At least everyone in my team had somewhere to go this time.

To return to the original point, the people were weird about it. One of my friends/colleagues ranted about the news coverage of the event, like CNN was being particularly unfair to NASA. They were, if you view NASA as a company. They weren't when you view them as a gigantic, lumbering government pork barrel project. Nancy Grace made wild claims that NASA burns trillions of dollars. This isn't true. NASA is granted less than one percent of the national discretionary budget annually. That's about $0.37 to you and me.

Again, I steer from the main point. People here seem to forget that two people died, and something went terribly wrong, long before anyone picked up a gun. There's something broken here when we start seeing people as cogs in the machine and not for what they really are: people. Living, breathing, feeling, fearing, joyful, real people. I am afraid for us.

What to do tomorrow?

I've got it! I'm going to go North! and East! I'm gonna go hang out in Philadelphia and New Jersey and New York City. Why? Because I hate my fucking job. and I need a change of scenery. and I've never been there before. (With all these I's it would seem this writer is very selfish.)

The only reason I kept doing it was to make money. I have now made enough to finance this trek. When I get bored, I will come back. Maybe. If I can find a way. Chances are that if I am bored it means that I am broke. That will make it hard to fly. or drive. or do much more than breathe in this day and age, pardon my colloquialism. (This writer obviously loves his little colloquialisms. Do they keep him warm at night when the cold air of loneliness is upon him?)

One problem with my plan is that I have work. and homework. and class. and people who will worry about me quite a bit more than is truly necessary. (This writer is an obvious narcissist.)

I will take pictures, and probably post them. sometime. somewhere. (The vanity and self-love is deep in here.)

Thank you. and goodnight. (Afterthoughts. my. ass.)

The lover and dreamer. (The psychoanalyst and spell checker.)

Inspiration and Imagination

I have utterly thorough inspiration for this post... and I lost it. Therefore, I must imagine myself an emotional roller coaster for my intellectually famished audience. Thus, I will tell you about a dream I had this morning just before waking, as it appears that is how all dreams happen.

I awake, in my bed, here in Houston, hearing the college radio station I left the radio on upon going to bed. I realize I need to go. This is one of the stupidest dreams I have ever had.

Maybe it's because my mother is in the hospital right now after having surgery. I talked to her today, whilst inquiring what room she was in so I could send flowers. I would be in town right now, had she not told me this just Sunday, 2 minutes before ending the telephone conversation. She said she is doing fine, and that she will be strong like her son. I told her she ought to be, for only the strongest women can give birth to sons of my caliber(of which I meant actual size. I was huge.) She chuckled, and I only wish that she had seen 300, so that I could tell her that she must be a Spartan woman, so that she could understand what my pop-culture-movie-quoting-lame-ass is talking about. I may be strong, but original... that's for the ages to decide.

Speaking of 300, it was good. It's awesome for guys, because there's lots of awesome fighting action of awesomeness! It's great for girls, because as my friend(Amanda) and her sister(Stephanie) giggled about throughout the movie, "Could they have amassed a hotter army?" I have to admit that, no, they probably could not have. Those dudes made me so ridiculously jealous that I've been hitting the gym again, eating salads, and even foregoing the dressing. Stephanie informed us ahead of the movie that she would most likely be covering her face three-quarters of the time in squeemishness for all the blood this film was rumored to fling about. In the end, she admitted to only doing this for a grand total of two minutes. The bloody mess part was well done with silhouetting and computer graphics, showcasing the blood as simple circles of dark red ejecting artistically from the fallen. If you are adamantly aghast of beheadings, you might want to leave this one alone though.

That is all the imagination I have for tonight. Good night, Shelbyville! There will be no encore!