Blog

To appease all of my kitchen ceiling’s fans, presenting the final installment of the Kitchen Ceiling Chronicles:

She’s a beauty.  The kitchen has returned to normal, except that
now the gas range and stove do not light themselves.  Therefore,
we our celebratory tuna sandwiches went uncooked.  However, all
was not lost.  I discovered the new entry to our kitchen today, a
mirror nailed to a cabinet door:

This mirror reflects a style found throughout the apartment.

Today I did laundry at B. Bubbles, Inc.

While there, I snapped a picture of a man lugging far more cans down
the street than I could ever hope for, a commonplace occurence in a big
city such as this one.

Today I finished a book I had borrowed from Tucker called The Evolution of Useful Things: How everyday artifacts—from forks and pins to paper clips and zippers—came to be as they are.  I’ve finished two books so far this summer.  The first was The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon, which I found very captiving, despite its immensely
obscure references and themes.  One of my life goals is to finish
Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,
a most dense and unfriendly book which introduces ridiculous characters
nonstop and shoots around from the history of plastic to political
theory to differential equations to German folk songs often within one
sentence.

But for now, the next book on my list is the Olin College summer reading, Phantoms in the Brain,
by V.S. Ramachandran, M.D., Ph.D. and Sandra Blakeslee, a book
concerning cognitive syndromes and how they reveal insights into our
own mental functions.

Hello everyone.  Time for the daily kitchen ceiling update. 
My cell phone alarm did not go off because I had it set to “Ringer
off”.  Personally I’d rather have the alarm go off regardless of
the ringer setting.  However, my late start this morning meant
that I was fifteen minutes late to work today, allowing me to witness
the arrival of three painters.  Here is their ladder:

The kitchen ceiling now looks like
this:

Certainly not as nice as before but now the kitchen is usable again.  Tomorrow we will make tuna sandwiches to celebrate.

Here is my itenerary for next week:

On July 4, 2004, I found this stairway in a subway station:

Have a nice day.

Ceiling update:  The waterproof latex paint that caught the water
and sagged down off of the ceiling has mysteriously disappeared,
leaving behind dripping scars.

Other than that, a most uneventful day.  I got a new assignment at
work, which will be my first PHP + MySQL web application ever.

Some pigeons:

And finally, a picture of the Guggenheim that I took on June 20, 2004:

Hello everyone and welcome to New York City.

You’re on 123rd Street between Amsterdam and Broadway:

You approach 522 W 123rd St., affectionately known as “The Lorraine”

Why it’s named The Lorraine I will never know.  No other building
anywhere near has a name.  After going up a couple flights of
stairs you find yourself in Apt. 3W and enter.

You stop by the kitchen:

You look up at the ceiling:

You notice that something doesn’t look right, and it’s not just that
the light fixture is an uncovered power-saving fluorescent bulb that is
connected by thinly insulated wires which go right behind the
electrical sockets and are held to the side of the wall by metal screws
through the insulation which are painted white.  Those bulbs are
in the other rooms.  The kitchen has a problem all its own.

This morning I was awakened by two Chinese men asking me if I had a
“twisted pair wire cutter thing”, which meant an ethernet cable
crimper.  One was the landlord and the other was the father of the
two high school kids who will be moving into our apartment.  We
networked the entire house today.

After that, Tucker baked some cookies using his old recipe from his mother.  We noticed a large bulge in the ceiling.

Looks like a leak from the floor above somehow.  Our apartment
used to be three bedrooms, but two of the bedrooms were split with
cheap fake walls, which were put right on top of the carpet. 
Tucker slid a wire under the wall between our rooms when we wired the
house up.  It’s nice to know that we can slide things to each
other under the wall at any time.

I had a great Fourth of July!  I tagged along with Tucker and his
friends and went to DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge) to watch
purportedly the largest fireworks show in the nation.

You can see the Brooklyn Bridge right in front of the fireworks, which
were a couple miles from us just south of the tip of Manhattan.

We were on some rocks right next to the Brooklyn-side pylon of the
Manhattan Bridge:

The skyline looked like this:

Today I downloaded Fahrenheit 9/11 after I read that Michael Moore
doesn’t care if people pirate his movie.  I will watch it soon,
probably with my friend Mara from downstairs.  I previewed the
first few minutes and found a lot of hype without a lot of argument, as
I expected.  You can download Fahrenheit 9/11 too, while supplies last. (UPDATE: you will need BitTorrent in order to download it, and this version is missing about 20 minutes concerning the Patriot Act)

The only things I ate today were several of Tucker’s cookies and a bowl of Chilled Gazpacho soup from Josie’s.  Tomorrow might be another Taco Bell day.

Hello again everyone.  I have just returned from Spiderman 2, and
I loved it.  I am a big sucker for comic book movies.  I read
a review today on Yahoo! Movies:

In a time when losers decide to profit off dead Americans and reek
propaganda unseen since the fall of the Soviets, comes a movie worth
every penny! A movie that assumes that we’re not all brainless idiots!
However, just people looking for a solid sense of entertainment in
contrary to hidden issues masking political bloopers, infamous
outtakes, and puppetry of audience perception.

So
as all of my more liberal friends groan, I want to touch on why I love
the concept of comic books and superheroes.  I feel that the
classic characters, from Spiderman to Batman and everywhere in between,
represent a lot of what goes on in American life.  Watching Peter
Parker not meet rent while I’m paying rent for the first time, and
seeing him go around New York, my current home, and Columbia
University, my current employer, bring reality into such a fake movie.

And one of the classic Spiderman messages is so uplifting in my
opinion.  It’s not that doing the right thing will get you
ahead.  It’s not that being a superhero will make everyone love
you, or even give you self-confidence.  The main message I heard
from the movie is to work, work, work.  When you know what you’re
doing is the right thing, work at it.  When you’re not sure, keep
on working.  Just get through it all and leave it better than you
found it.

One of my favorite songs is The Noise of Carpet by Stereolab. 
This song rocks way more than the remainder of their often-mellow,
always obscure fare.  Somehow I love the mix of the unabashed guitar-driven music and the deadpanned yet quite firm lyrics:

i hate to see your broken face
this world would give you anything
as long as you will want to
as long as you will want to
i hate your state of hopelessness
and that vain articulateness
your loser type wreck wanna be
not a pretty sight really
in another world it’d be funny

i hate to see your broken face
a lazy life of fatal waste
of fashionable cynicism
the poison they want you to drink
oh no man that’s too easy
oh no man that’s too easy
we weren’t talking bout happiness
apply your leading potential
to be useful to this planet
the world would give you anything
as long as you will want to
as long as you will want to

Some might see a few of those lines as being bitter. 
Sure, they are, but what better thing to be bitter about than the
cynics who are not willing to work to improve their situation? 
Don’t get me wrong, I think cynicism is incredibly important in life,
but the next time you’re down, just do something to make things better.

I told myself I would never stoop to such a level as having a website I didn’t code myself.  But then I succumbed.

Dan told me that in order to have a good blog I can’t just talk about
what I’ve been up to.  I need to talk about the ideas I’m having
and try to make my blog something worth reading.  Challenge
accepted.

My first big idea:  I’ve tried to eliminate my usage of
exclamation points recently.  I realized that if what I’m saying
needs an exclamation point in order to get its point across, I haven’t
written it effectively.  I often catch myself putting exclamation
points on every other sentence of emails I write, especially the CORe
Digest.  I might leave them in for the CORe Digest since I’m not
exactly going to take the trouble to strip them out by hand from what
people send me.

If you’re not from Olin you probably don’t care one bit about the CORe
Digest.  For the curious, I put out a weekly email newsletter to
the campus as part of my role on the student government.