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October 19, 2004 – Tape date
January 26, 2005 – Air date

Hello everyone.

So it’s been awhile since my last update.

No photos today.  I’ve taken a lot in these last ten days or so, but those will come later.

I’m back home in Oklahoma now.  Nothing much going on here. 
In fact, I’ve seen much fewer people than I usually would have since
I’ve gotten back.

Last weekend I stayed with my roommate Dan at his house in Somerville,
Massachusetts.  On the days while everyone was working at their
internships, I wandered down Highland Ave. near Davis Square and
snapped a ton of pictures of typical Americana.

While in the Boston area, Dan, Tommy, and I went to the Skellig bar in
Waltham and competed in the trivia contest.  We started strong,
but ended with a fairly miserable showing, coming in dead last. 
One round left us with zero points earned.  Unfortunately we will
be unable to show them what we really are capable of because Dan and I
will have a Mathematical Analysis class in which we will prove the
calculus from scratch on Mondays from 9:30 to 11:30 pm this
semester.  What better way to pass the time.

I started and finished Fermat’s Enigma, a book on solving the most
famous mathematical problem of the last few centuries, Fermat’s Last
Theorem.  Since then I’ve completed the first four chapters of the
9/11 Commission Report.

The last few nights have seen countless hours spent on trying to get
multiplayer Red Alert, Red Alert 2, Quake II, Quake III, or Warcraft
III working properly.  Our best successes have been
cross-platform, ironically.

I will take a picture of my family’s new poker chips for the next post.

Last Wednesday Cagle and her friend Erin came from Alabama to visit for three days.

We wandered around the Big Apple and hit a lot of cool shops in
Greenwich Village, where I snagged some good vinyl and a really cheap 
hardcover
copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon to add to my to-read list.

I found this picture on the wall at Famiglia’s Pizza, a nice New York pizza joint.  My brother will appreciate it.

Tucker, Cagle, Erin, and I went to Jacques Torres’s chocolatier in Brooklyn for my third time.  I found these chocolate sculptures in the back room:

We walked back over the Brooklyn Bridge, for my fourth time.  I
found this spray-painted into the concrete of the bridge walkway. 
I hate it when people spray paint messages on stuff using
stencils.  It’s tacky and rude, but at least in this particular
case it supports my political cause, albeit to an extreme.

We ran into a b-boy posse breakdancing for the crowd later that day.

The next day we ran into a large group of firefighters and police
unexplainedly axing their way into a Borders bookstore which otherwise
seemed fine.

We ate at a nice little Greek restaurant in the Village, and I ordered
pastichio, a traditional Greek dish that my mother and grandmother make
every once in a while since my grandfather has full Greek blood. 
The pastichio was excellent, the salad was wonderful in its feta glory,
and the baklava was just what I like, proving that I do indeed have
Greek blood running in my veins.

On Saturday after the two girls left Tucker, Mara, and I went kayaking
in the Hudson River.  If you go to the end of Riverside Park by
72nd Street, they have a little platform set up where you can hop on a
kayak for free for up to 20 minutes, or up to 2 hours on Fridays.

The journey offered a wonderful view of Manhattan, dominated in this particular area by a series of Trump condominium buildings.

Dan drove down from Boston later that day and stayed the night. 
We ran around town some more and ended up in Hoboken, NJ, for my final
trip to visit Emily at Stevens.  Dan grabbed some of my belongings
to help me in my upcoming move to Boston for the weekend before my
flight home next Wednesday.

On the way back from work on Monday, Tucker and I ran into a strange sight:

Sorry for the gruesome imagery, but whatever got to this bird left the
wings and only the wings entirely intact.  Very strange.

Today Tucker, Mara, and I ate at an Afghanistan restaurant.  I
loved it!  I didn’t expect to, since I had nothing to base
expectations on.  I am now convinced that orange rind should be
put into every dish.

After putting in a little more work on the synth, Mara and I watched a
bootleg copy of Fahrenheit 9/11, which I found to be suprisingly devoid
of any real argument or fresh, important details about its title
disaster.

I highly recommend the 9/11 Commission Report for anyone who wants a
serious look into the reality of the situation.  You can grab a
recording of an executive summary free on iTunes right now.  I
much prefer to read it, however, and want to buy a copy sometime
soon.  It’s now on my Amazon wish list.  Go be curious and poke around on it if you like.

My luck continues to rise.  When I walked home from work today I
found a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer with 61-key keyboard lying against a
trash can to be thrown out.  I snagged it and left a note behind
in case the person didn’t mean to throw it out.

However, the state of the keyboard suggests it was ready to be thrown out.  For example, the power cable has come loose.

I am an electrical engineer, so this does not faze me in the
slightest.  Soon I will grab a soldering iron and make it work to
the best of my abilities.

The Yamaha DX7 was a popular synthesizer of the 1980s, and make a lot
of the defining sounds of eighties music.  Its quality isn’t
wonderful, from what I’ve heard, but it’s a synthesizer nonetheless and
I’m sure I can find good uses for it, especially as a keyboard
controller for my computer music setup.

After I had spent hours waiting in the rain to get tickets to the
Shakespeare in the Park show in Central Park, and after the rain fully
cleared up, they cancelled the show.  However, before I got in
line for standby tickets, I did manage to snap some pictures of a
completely burnt car on the side of the road.

The flames completely destroyed the interior, leaving a metallic shell.

Today I ate dinner outside on patio seating at Max SoHa, a most
wonderful Italian restaurant less than a block from my apartment.

The food is excellent and the atmosphere very comfortable and familial.

“SoHa” stands for “South of Harlem,” and we’ve similary named our startup synthesizer software company SoHa Sound Design,
in reference to where the development actually took place.  We’re
hoping to finish up a release candidate of the final synthesizer by the
time I leave New York on August 11, and have a final 1.0 version ready
for sale a few weeks thereafter.

Cagle and her friend come up to visit me for a few days on Wednesday
and Dan comes up on Saturday, so my week should be filled with plenty
of excitement.

Today I received a postcard from the daily version of Who Wants To Be A
Millionaire.  They accepted me into the contestant pool and more
likely than not they will call me in the next month or two and give me
a tape date.  The daily version has no Fastest Finger, so if I got
on I would be directly in the Hot Seat.

The synth project goes well.  We should have a final product ready
in a week or two.  The last few days have been slow, but today
something clicked and both Tucker and I made incredibly impressive
progress.  The sound quality has increased tremendously and our
product has a lot of potential, in my humble opinion.  OK, maybe
it’s not as humble as possible.

The other day the entire ISE office went to Mama Mexico, a fairly good Mexican restaurant:

My boss Chris is on the left.  He’s gotten me hooked on the egg
and cheese sandwiches with Tabasco sauce that they sell on the street
corner by our office.  It tastes better than it probably sounds.

Lately, some of the workers in the office have been clearing out old
equipment and files to put in the dumpsters.  I snapped a quick
pic of some vacuum tubes in one particularly old piece of eqiupment:

The next book on my reading agenda is Mind at Light Speed: A New Kind of Intelligence
by David D. Nolte.  Every book I’ve read this summer has tied into
cognition, how the senses work, or quantum theory.  This book
manages to tie all three concepts together and draw even more links
between the variety of new things I’ve learned about in prior
books.  I’m surprised how in what I thought was a seemingly random
assortment of books I have happened onto the same major concepts three
or four times now.

I have now covered the paranoid angle, the medical angle, the artistic
angle, and finally the scientific angle of such things as neural
theory, quantum physics, and how we perceive images.

I spent Monday in Hoboken, NJ, with my old friend Emily.  She’s a
photographer so as soon as I got there we went to a shoot she had been
hired for.

She captured the essence of a Wall Street entrepreneur’s million dollar
apartment.  I chatted him up on wine and travel and he predicts
that Argentina will be the next great wine producer in the next decade
or so.  I’ll keep an eye out.

Afterwards, we went to the Stevens Institute of Technology bowling
alley, and I rolled a series of three bowling games.  Although I
threw some great balls, I tended to step over the foul line and this
particular alley made sure not to count two of my strikes and one seven
pin frame, so I didn’t even break 100 on my first game.  I plan on
going bowling more this school year.

Tomorrow will be Shakespeare in the Park in Central Park (if we can get
tickets this time) and Saturday will be my second short story event at
Columbia.  The short story events involve a bunch of people (who I
met through Tucker) collecting together and reading aloud their
favorite short stories.  It’s simple, envigorating, and human to
listen to others tell stories.  Lately, attendees have been
encouraged to write their own short stories to tell at the next
session.  I might attempt to bring this concept to Olin.

I have spent the last few days with little social interaction.

Today when my friend Mara came to my room I started blabbing about a
million different things, because I had saved up stuff to talk
about.  I must have appeared quite manic.  She seemed OK with
it though and manically spoke back so I guess it was fine.

Over the course of the last two days I have decided that the world is starting to fall apart.  Here is my evidence:

• New Zealand, of all places, caught Israeli spies trying to
  falsify their passports, and has starting cutting off a lot of the
  diplomatic ties it has with Israel in response.
• The police in Palestinian cities have been doing nothing lately,
  allowing anarchy to run rampant and leading to mob rule, as several of
  Yasser Arafat’s top deputies resign left and right.
• The Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, informed all Jews in
  France that they “must” move to Israel to escape French anti-Semitism,
  which supposedly is on the rise.  France is not happy with these
  statements.
• The 9/11 Commission is set to report that Iran was helpful to Al Qaeda prior to the September 11 attacks.
• Iran has halted the trial of an Iranian intelligence agent who
  murdered an Iranian-Canadian photojournalist, tearing apart whatever
  diplomatic relations the two nations held.

In addition, I have found myself reading all about Bobby Fischer,
perhaps the world’s best chess player ever, and certainly the chess
world’s most outspoken anti-Semitic anti-American reclusive
nutcase.  Bobby Fischer praised the September 11 attacks on a
Philippines radio broadcast and went against a presidential order in
1992 to play a chess game in Yugoslavia.  He was found the other
day at Narita International Airport in Japan and is in the process of
being extradited to the United States to stand trial.  His website is a hilarious mish-mash of misplaced criticisms and paranoid banter.

But they hauntingly reminded me of the website of a certain Sam Sloan.  Here is a small list of similarities:

• Both play chess incredibly well.
• Both have plaintext websites with gobs of links as to why they have been persecuted by forces all over the world.
• Both scan pictures of checks and all sorts of paper documents as evidence.
• Both completely reprint news articles to support their causes.
• Both attempt to completely libel individuals who they believe victimized them.
• Both have spent time in East Asia fleeing some type of authority figure.

However, Sam Sloan is not a wanted criminal and is instead running for
the House of Representatives in the Bronx.  He also is the last
person to have represented himself to the Supreme Court.  He won
his case 9-0.  By the time the decision was rendered, it seems he
was in a prison in Afghanistan, which he escaped from soon thereafter.

Anyway my current theory is that the “savant syndrome”, which I am reading about in my book Phantoms of the Brain by
Ramachandran, is at play.  Both of these men are great chess
minds,
yet both seem horribly paranoid, constantly reinvent their lives, and
proselytize their bizarre and specific views through verbose text-based
websites.  Socially I think their lives are completely complex
messes, and yet they maintain a careful constant determination to
succeed in whatever they do above all.

So, yeah, that’s what I’ve been up to.

On Saturday, after a failed attempt by Tucker and Mara to get us
Shakespeare in the Park  tickets, I wandered alone through the
streets of the Morningside Heights district of Manhattan, between 123rd
and 110th Streets.

This view shows the red line of the subway as it becomes an
elevated train.  I live on the street right where it comes
out.  122nd St. goes over the subway, 124th Street goes under the
elevated track, and 123rd St. runs right into the point of intersection
and abruptly ends.

My weekend also involved a lot of reading.  I finished the final half of the Ramachandran book and read some of Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing,
which I borrowed from my Biology (and Art) professor Helen
Donis-Keller.  This book ties right in with the Ramachandran book,
expanding on the cognition of seeing and applying it to the world of
art.

I am enrolled in a three student course with Prof. Donis-Keller for
this fall semester called The Intersection of Art and Science. 
Personally, I cannot wait.  I have always obsessed over the senses
and the function of the brain, and the small size of the course means I
will get a good chance to explore with a lot of guidance from my
professor.  I often disagree with her, both politically and
artistically at times, but appreciate her perspective because it often
catches me off guard and forces me to reconsider what I am doing.

Tomorrow I go bowling in Hoboken, New Jersey.  Soon I will have an update for the Grant Bowls! page of my sister site Grant Page Central,
which is in dire need of an update.  My plan is to convert Grant
Page Central into a static content site of my musical works, some
writings, and of course bowling scores, while letting this page, Grant
Page X, be my blog.

Hello everyone.  I have several important Grant updates for the last couple days.

Last Tuesday, July 13, 2004, I went to the free Fountains of Wayne
concert at the World Financial Center downtown.  The World
Financial Center is right across the street from the World Trade Center
site.  I snapped this pic of the new WTC station that opened up
earlier this year:

Anyway I made my way to the back side of the big huge indoor Winter
Garden at the WFC, where all sorts of people started crowding around
the stage outside.

They played a good set and poked a little fun.  At one point, the
lead singer changed around some lyrics to Radiation Vibe for old
diehard fans like me to pick up, since parents and kids made up the
majority of the audience due to the newfound recent success of their
latest album.  They came out for a double encore, which now marks
the second time I’ve seen them do a double encore, although both times
it seemed like they weren’t planning to.

I was worried I wouldn’t hear “The Biker Song” this time, but they
finally played it in the double encore, so this concert marks the first
time in a while that the band played every song I wanted to hear. 
Hmm, well all except “Troubled Times” I guess.  The band hails
from New Jersey, and many of their songs deal with places in New Jersey
or New York City, which made the show even better.  My favorite
song by them right now, “Sick Day”, takes place on a PATH train from
New Jersey, so after the show I got them to sign my PATH Quick Card,
although they seemed confused at first as to the reference.  On
top of that they seemed a little drunk and partially deaf,
unfortunately.

The lead singer, Chris Collingwood said that he used to work in this building on the 35th floor (he’s the one on the right):

On Thursday I again tried out for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, the
daily version.  This time I passed the test and got to the
interview process.  They took a Polaroid of me and the interviewer
seemed pretty interested in several things that I had to say, so in
three or four weeks I will know if I am eligible to be on the show.

After that, I met up with Leighton and we went to the lounge of the new
Mandarin Oriental hotel up on the 35th floor.  Here was our view
of Central Park:

After that we had lunch at a wonderful restaurant called Eatery with
prices much lower than the quality of the food.  After that we
went hotel lobby hopping and ended up at a really posh lobby at W Hotel
in Times Square and the incredible world’s largest lobby at the New
York Marriott Marquis:

Yes, this picture was taken indoors.  To give a little
perspective, those are balconies off of each floor which face down into
the atrium.  Leighton took a business call, and I relaxed and
almost fell asleep:

After that I returned to the apartment and fell asleep for six
hours.  I have ruined my daily schedule entirely, so now I’m going
to go program some more for the software project Tucker and I work on
all the time.

Ciao.

Saturday the fabled trip to Staten Island finally took place.  We
hopped on the red line subway and transferred to the Staten Island
Ferry, a big free boat.

Standing at the extreme front of the ship offered this view:

I have now seen both Statues of Liberty.  After the French donated the statue, they erected a smaller copy in Paris, which I saw by chance out of the side of a train car during my trip there two years ago.

Upon arriving on Staten Island, we proceeded to the New York Chinese
Scholar’s Garden
at the Staten Island Botanical Garden.  For everyone less familiar
with New York City, Staten Island makes up a large portion of New York
City, and is one of the five boroughs along with Manhattan, Queens, the
Bronx, and Brooklyn.  Staten Island is mostly surburban as opposed
to the other boroughs, featuring malls instead of skyscrapers.

However, the Chinese Scholars Garden, the first of its kind in the
United States, offered an escape from the trappings of city life:

OK, this first picture wasn’t from the Chinese Scholar Garden per se,
but instead from a smaller garden within the botanical garden.

This mosaic was made by a traditional Chinese scholar garden artist who
uses materials around him.  The white parts were rice bowls he
broke from the kitchen without asking and the green parts are Heineken
bottles.

We continued to a blatant “secret” garden, which was closed. 
Since we had paid for admission, we felt it acceptable to hop onto the
wall and sit for awhile.  As the photographer, I do not appear in
these photos.

Afterwards Tucker impressively hopped onto a nearby and somewhat inaccessible tree:

We ended the day by watching King Arthur, which not unlike Lord of the
Rings did not strike my fancy.  I did manage to stay awake for
this one, fighting hard at times.  I did enjoy the show for what
it was, but I could not suspend disbelief long enough to really care
about what was going on.

Today at work during my lunch break a bird flew over and perched on my outside table in the rain:

He rejected my offer of a small morsel of tomato (the red spot in the
picture), but violently grabbed Tucker’s offering of a little piece of
bread and cheese and flew away fast enough that he could be sure we
couldn’t reconsider.

Hello everyone.  Today I didn’t take any pictures, so I will pull some from my summer archives.

On June 26, 2004, several other Olin students and I toured the city.  I
snapped this picture of the Empire State Building while laying down on
the sidewalk:

On July 4, 2003, I found this abandoned building or parking garage in Brooklyn:

The weather was beautful today when I emerged from my apartment for the
first time at about 8:00 to eat Subway sandwiches at Grant’s
Tomb.  On the way to Subway, I passed the General Grant Houses,
which this picture from July 8, 2004, showcase in front of the elevated
subway train just south of 125th Street and Brodway:

Tucker and I cook many of our meals, including this Thai chicken dish
that Mara from downstairs helped us out with on June 16, 2004:

Hopefully once the burners start burning again we will make some more
meals, but the cooking has slowed down considerably in recent weeks.

Today I thought about how I don’t watch much television and how many of
my hobbies involve creating things.  I considered how much more
fulfilling I find life when I have something concrete to reflect on
from my past.

My friend Jon often complains that he has trouble finding things to do
which don’t involve “consuming”, be it food or media or just generally
spending money on useless things.  He genuinely means what he’s
saying, but more often than not he brings the concept up in a ploy to
get the gang to do something we never would have otherwise, from
inviting fifty people to a marshmallow roast in his backyard to Pong
tournaments (with commentary from the announcer, of course) to a
rousing game of croquet right before I left for New York City.

So my charge unto you the reader is:  go do something you haven’t
done before.  Make a kite and fly it.  Go shopping for
antiques.  See if bread really does land on the floor butter side
down every time.  Plant some flowers.

And please tell me what you did so that I can have more ideas.