Will Slusher.net

Well… my first vacation of the summer is officially over and now, I guess, it’s back to work for me… Luckilly, things seem to have been fairly quiet while I was gone, so it hasn’t been too much of a struggle to catch up… I’m still struggling a bit to catch up on sleep, but I think another night or two of going to bed somewhat early should help…

Anyway, the point of this post is to relate the somewhat amusing, somewhat frightening story how my sleep last night was interrupted….

While visiting with Scott at the beginning of ABW, his roommate offered me the remains of his old PC. He had just built a new one and was just going to toss the old parts… it was missing a few pieces… hard drive, video card, etc, but all in all it wasn’t too bad of a system… My plan was/is to get it running and replace my parents exceptionally old PC…

So anyway, after getting back from ABW, and graduation, I started tinkering with the PC. I filled in the missing parts, added some more ram and fired it up… once I got the p-ide and s-ide connectors right it booted, but one of the CD drives wasn’t recognized… it may just be a master/slave thing (altho I’ve tried it as both), but I’m not sure…

Anyway, using the working drive, I kicked off a windows XP install… when it got to the GUI part, it kept throwing up a CRC check error and suggested that my CD was defective…

Yesterday evening, I tried a copy of XP from work and got the same error… I then swapped out the OTHER CD drive with a spare and BAM! everything worked like a charm… So, it looks like both CD-rom drive are on the fritz…

It gets better though…

So, I get XP installed, install some apps, and then leave things running when I went to bed… about 2AM I kinda stir and wake up a bit and hear this weird noise coming from the desk area… I look up, half asleep, and see an orange glow coming from the PC (luckilly I’d left the side of the case off)… I quickly jump up and run over to find the power supply filled with sparks… So I yanked out the power cord and everything quieted down… but the whole upper part of my room was filled with that nasty, burning electrical component smelling, smoke….

Anyway, I forced the AC on (to suck in and filter the air), popped open the window, and turned on the fan, and the smoke cleared out pretty quickly… it’s still kinda frightening though… I’m really glad I woke up… :)

On the up side, I have a spare power supply in a case I’m not using. I guess tonight I’ll swap parts around again and hopefully get things working… I’m just hoping that when the power supply blew it didn’t fry any of the other parts…

Ah well… :) as I said, you get what you pay for…

Winding down….

Compared to the whirlwind adventure of the past couple day, today has been pretty quiet… and that’s just fine with me…

We woke up around 9:30 this morning, ’cause Shane had to head back to Pittsburg so he could pack and prepare to move out to LA for his summer internship with Disney Imagineering (lucky bastard)… After that, we all just kinda hung around and chatted (and checked e-mail and looked for lightsabers online) while everyone showered and got dressed and stuff…

Matthew left out a little later on to go visit some family… he said he may or may not be back depending on how the visit goes… :)

After everyone got ready, we headed out for a little lunch, then to Wal-Mart to pick up a copy of “Team America World Police” on DVD (JR wanted to add it to his collection… Sadly, since we went to Wal-Mart, we ended up with the regular version, not the unrated, uncut version with the full puppet sex scene… oh shucks…). We then returned to Scott’s, baked some brownies and spent the evening watching, laughing, and eating…. it was much much fun…

Anyway, I think that probably just about wraps it up for ABW:IX. I guess I’m going to end up crashing here tonight, then heading down with the crew here tomorrow… All in all it’s been a pretty amazing week. I’ve had a heck of a lot of fun, but I must say I’m kinda looking forward to getting home… and, of course, seeing Kris, whom I’ve definitely been missing all week… :)

Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh…. :)

Hello from the line!

Just a quick post while we’re sitting here waiting to get in… We’ve been here since about 1:30 and, consequently, have a pretty good place in line… Currently, we’re sitting out from of the Starbucks next door to the Uptown…. we’re hoping they’ll follow the pattern from the previous screening and will let us in to the theater in about an hour…

So far, no sign of “Comic Book Guy”, but there was a Darth Maul with a boom box… pretty, um, sweet… yeah… :)

Ok, back to waiting….

Update:

Whoa… That was pretty cool… :)

I don’t want to write too much about the actual content of Episode III (last thing I want is for someone to actually stumble upon my site and get all spoilered), but all in all I thought I was pretty awsome… There were of course some things that were a little _too_ convenient and contrived… and the dialog was, well, it was very George Lucas… but I think it was easily the best of the new trilogy….

and there were wookiees!!! … and they pronounced Kashyyyk correctly…

After the movie (and an emergency bathroom break… doncha hate it when the moment the movie starts you realize you have to pee… yeah, me too), we headed back to Scott’s place… the drive back was kinda interesting… we had four cars, none of which really knew the way back, trying to caravan through downtown DC in the rain… yeah, that was fun… :) But we made it, and that’s the important part…

And that’s more or less it for Day 4… after we got back we kinda chilled and watched “Return of the Jedi” then crashed pretty quickly…

And thus was the beginning and ending of the fourth day…

Let me explain… No, there is too much… let me sum up… there will be more later…

• Cedar Point – Kicks ass
• Shane’s Ass – apparently not too big for Millennium Force after all… and there was much rejoicing…
• My Belly – Definitely not used to so much eating out… especially when a lot of that is amusment park food
• Me – tired after a lot of driving… but, really, really having a good time… and, I must say, really, really missing my amazing girl friend (who e-mailed me from Beach Week today, YAY!).
• The rest of the party and I – Tired… but ready for some kick ass Star Wars action tomorrow (fingers crossed that the lightsaber t-shirt guy is there tomorrow)

And now… the sleep…

Update:

Well, after a decent night’s sleep, I thought I’d put up a little more detail account of yesterday’s events while everyone else is in the shower (consecutive, not concurrent)…

We started the day around 9:00 when everyone finally got up… after the usual morning getting ready type stuff, we checked out of the hotel and headed back to Cedar Point for our second day of coastering.

After parking, Scott, Matthew, Shane, and I (Doug had to stay in the car for a while to catch up on some work) headed in. We decided to begin the day by catching some of the rides we missed yesterday… We started with the “Demon Drop”, your basic 4-person-car-take-you-to-the-top-of-a-tower-and-let-you-free-fall kinda ride… It actually turned out to be a pretty good way to start the day…

Next, we hit CP’s newest ride, the “Max Air”… The Max air is basically a wheel of 50 people on the end of a gianormous pendulum… and, it turns out, a hell of a lot of fun. :)

After that, we hit the “Wicked Twister” and waited the extra couple minutes for the front of the ride… The Twister is, as I believe Shane and/or Scott observed, basically all the best parts of a coaster put into one ride with all the “filler” cut out. Basically, from the gate, it shoots you via linear induction moters out at a high rate of speed and up a twisting spire of track… after getting up as high as you can go, it reverses, takes you back through the gate, and backwards up an identical spire on the other side… then it repeats faster and higher… :)

After that Doug joined us and we set off to enjoy the rest of the day at the park… We hit most of the quality rides again, had a decent lunch somewhere in the midst of that, played some new and old school games at the arcade, and generally had a kick ass time…

Towards the end of the day we decided to give the “Millennium Force” another try… as you’ll remember, for some ungodly reason, Shane didn’t fit when we tried to ride on the first day… So, after waiting the required 45 minutes to get to the gate, we took our seats… After a brief moment of fear when Shane’s seatbelt would buckle and was quite snug, there was much rejoicing when the attendant checked it, proclaimed it “ok” and sent us on our way…

As it turns out, the attendant yesterday was checking the WRONG SIDE of the belt… The belts have red loop at the end and the requirement is apparently that there been 1″ clearance between the red and the buckle… the thing is, on one side, the the loop is all the way to the buckle, there’s no black… on the other side however, there’s 1″, 1.5″… Grrrr…. but, in the end, we all got to ride and that was happy…

We finally ended out day at the park around 6:30-7:00… After dinner and gassing up, we made the long, somewhat boring (lots and lots of interstate) 3-hour drive back to Shanes and promptly crashed…

Anyway, that, more or less, brings us to right now… Time to hit the road again… next stop, DC and Episode III….

Well, one day of coaster excitement down… All in all, I think it was a pretty good day…

Things did get off to a bit of a rocky start however… After getting a bit of a later start than we had planned, we arrived at the park around 11:00 or so… Per a recomendation from one of Shane’s friend, we headed straight for Millennium Force, which, I believe, the the highest, fastest coaster in the world… being such, it is also the most popular in the park… Luckilly, the park wasn’t hugely crowded, so we only had about a half hour wait… Anyway, when we finally get to the gates and tried to take our seats we ran into a problem… Shane tried to buckle the seat belt but it was, well, rather snug… apparently not only are the belts remarkable short, but there has to be at least an inch of extra pulled through…

Now, Shane is not, by any streatch of the imagination, a oversized fellow… in fact, I’ve always though of him as smaller than me… but for whatever reason, after about 45 seconds of trying to work get things to work, the park person who checks the belts decided that Shane just couldn’t ride…

The rest of us were kinda locked in to going through with the ride, and, in all honesty, it was a pretty sweet ride, but all in all it was kind of a downer way to start the day…

Anyway, we then hopped in line for a couple more coasters, which were also pretty sweet, and that brightened the day up again… Until we tried to find lunch… Shane’s friend had recommended an “out of the way” place… However, when we finally found it… it was closed… we then tried a couple other places that looked just as good… and the were also closed… Finally we ended up at one of the random places that served cut rate pizza and the like… it was, at best, mediocre… but ah well…

Anyway, post lunch, we continued to hit coaster, after coaster, after ride, after coaster, after ride, after ride, after weird paddle boat ride filled with animatronic hillbillies and bad puns, after ride, after coaster, after… well, I think you get the idea… :)

Finally, after hitting all the major coasters, we decided to call it a day and get some dinner… luckilly, on the way in we had noted that our hotel was in very close proximity to the neighborhood Cracker Barrel! Needless to say there was much feasting… :)

After dinner we checked into our hotel… It’s a pretty neat place… there’s a big main hall in the middle of the rooms with an indoor pool and hot tub… all the rooms around the edge of the main hall are designed to look like exterior walls rather than interior… it’s kind of “quaint”…. :)

Anyway, after getting settled in we hit the hot tub/pool/hot tub/pool/hot tub/pool… in that order… definitely a relief to our tired backs and musles…

And that’s about it for today… On tap for tomorrow, a lot more riding of coasters, then a somewhat long drive back back to Shane’s place… Should be fun… :)

Viva La Revolucion! :)

Well, today the first leg of the epic ABW:IX saga began… Matthew met up with Scott and I this morning around 10:00 and soon we were on the road for Pittsburg… The drive up was pretty uneventful… traffic was fairly light and the only wrong turn we made was, in all honesty, quite justified… freaky round-about 7 way intersection…. :) Luckilly, my navigation system routed us around the maze of one way streets that is Pittsburg and back on the right track pretty easilly…

Anyway, after the rest of the party (IE Doug) arrived and we had visited a bit (which, considering we’re engineers, either real or honorary lasted about 5 minutes or less) we headed off for a tour of the ETC… The first time through we got the basic tour, including a nice demo of Shane’s semester project, the The Interbots Initiative and Quasi 2… It was pretty neat, but there were several other people around so I didn’t feel comfortable asking to play with the robot… I did get a Quasi “Revolucion!” t-shirt though…

After the tour, we then headed down to “The Strip” for dinner and a really good sandwich place (I have no idea what the name was)… After dinner, we did a little driving tour of downtown Pitt. including the University and the main CMU campus… We then headed back to the ETC so that Shane and Doug could print out tix for Cedar Point…. This time around the place was deserted, so we fired up robot (pronounced ro-bit, like Asimov would say… long story) and I got to play around with the tablet driven puppeteering system… it was, I must say, the highlight of my day… :) Soooooooo cooooooool!!!!!

Anyway, after playing around quite a bit, we headded back to Shane’s place… Doug took off on a little side trip to the airport to pick up his cell phone (left elsewhere in the US and luckilly recovered and sent here), and the rest of us stayed behind to watch Shane play “God of War” for a bit, then to run to the store for refreshments… After Doug’s return, we settled in and watched the DVD edition of “A New Hope” and picked apart all the “enhanced” scenes… like true fans… :)

And that, more or less, brings us up to now… which, is bedtime…

Tomorrow, Cedar Point!!!!

Well… the unofficial first day of my ABW:IX journey is over and done with.

After running some last minute errands this morning (picking up travel shampoo, etc), finishing up some last minute repacking (apparently it’s not quite as warm in Ohio as I was hoping), and killing some time in C’ville throwing darts and staring at the wall, I hit the road and headed up to Manassas to my friend Scott’s house…

After a brief tour (some technology upgrades had to be shown off… I’m quite impressed with the RF remote extender that Scott found… I’ll have to try and find a link to some specs… [update: here's the link: http://www.bluedo.com/bluedocgi/product.cgi?model=RR-X300]It’s really cool though… the transmitter part actually replaces one of the batteries, so it’s completely stealth) and some catching up, Scott, his roommate and I decided it was time for dinner…

At Scott’s suggestion we decided to go to a place call the Sweetwater Tavern… We called ahead, but it’s apparently a very popular place, so we still had a 20-30 minute wait before we were seated… After our pager went off, our hostest attempted to take us to our seats… However, when we arrived at the table, it was already occupied… So, she lead us around to the other side of the restaurante and set us up at a larger booth type table…

She also offered us some free appitizers for our “inconvenience”… and that’s where the trouble began… :)

We each ordered our own appitizer. Scott and I had their special “firecracker shrimp” and Scott’s roommate had the southwest eggrolls… After we were mostly finished, a server brought out a second plate of eggrolls… apparently there had been a mixup in the kitchen or something… so, we ended up diving those between us as well…

Then came the salads…

Then the entrees… Scott and his roommate both had the 12 oz. prime rib… I opted for the pork chops… the portions were huge but somehow we all managed to clean our plates…

There was also bread…

At this point, I was pretty well into the “pleasantly full” stage and bordering on the “oh my God what are you doing to me” full stage… and then for some reason, we decided to needed desert…

I got the apple pie, Scott the chocolate waffle, and his roommate the key lime pie… All three were, I believe, more or less amazing… but holy crap, by the end of the meal I honestly felt like I was about to explode…. :)

Anyway, five hours later, I’m still really, really full… but at least the feeling of impending poppage has subsided…

And so, I believe it is time for bed… Tomorrow we head for Pittsburg to visit Shane and his robots… :)

Ah, I can almost taste it…

Just a couple more hours…. then the weekend… then BAM! ALTERNATIVE BEACH WEEK IX: REVENGE OF THE COASTERS!!!!

OMG, if you can’t tell by my ever so annoying use of all caps and ignorant netspeak abreviations (or the fact that I have all of next week highlighted in bright orange on my calendar at work) I’m really excited about this trip… :) I think I’ve already posted the basic plan, just to recap:

Sunday, May 15: Drive up to Scott’s place in Manassas
Monday, May 16: drive to Pittsburgh to visit Shane and tour the ETC
Tuesday, May 17: Cedar Point
Wednesday, May 18: Cedar Point
Thursday, May 19: Back to the DC area for RotS at the Uptown
Friday, May 20th: Back to C’ville

All in all, it should be one hell of a trip… and, I must say, one hell of a much needed vacation… Not that work or life or anything has really been all that horrible lately… actually, life is pretty darn good (aside from being sick last week) and work’s been busy, but not as crazy as it sometimes gets… But I really could just use a week not not have to think about anything other than relaxing and having a good time… ya know…

Well, I should probably get back to work… there are are still a couple of things that I need to get done before I can run off for a week… Apparently though, we have wireless in our hotel in Ohio, and I’m guessing Shane will have the same at his place, so you can probably expect some “play-by-play” updates of the week as we go along…

not that anyone actually reads this thing… :)

It’s been a while since I posted anything, so it’s time to play everyone’s favorite game…. Catch Up!

Let’s see, since my last post….

• FYP did it’s spring show, Godspell… All in all I think things went pretty well… It’s not my favorite show in the world (decent music, no plot), but I thought we did a really good job with it… All the tech stuff went really well I though (despite the usual drama) and the cast did an excellent job… For some reason it seemed a lot more religious than it did last time FYP did it… I’m not sure why… but still, I thought things went quite well…
• In the midst of that, my total badass of a girlfriend totally kicked the ass out of the Charlottesville Marathon… :) She was (as always) amazing… :) You can check out some pics here: Marathon Pics!
• Let’s see… things are gearing up for the 9th installment of “Alternative Beach Week” (I don’t know if we have an official name, but I’ve Christened it in my head “ABW Episode IX: Revenge of the Coasters”), which is really exciting… this year, rather than the usual day at Busch Gardens followed by a movie premier at the Uptown, we’re opting for an all out, two day extravaganze at Sandusky Ohio’s famous Cedar Point, followed by the premier of Star Wars: Episode III, Revenge of the Sith… All in all, it should be a very exciting week… We’ll be crashing with my friend Shane in Pittsburg before and after Cedar Point which should be cool… and which will hopefully include a tour of the ETC program at Carnegie Mellon and a chance to meet Quasi the robot… :)I’m also really excited about Episode III… The previous two prequals were somewhat of a let down, but I’ve heard from a number of sources that this one is good enough to make up for that… There are definitely enough early reviews of it that call it extremely dark and “a bloodbath” to give me, at the very least, a faint glimmer of hope… :)
• I had some problems with my laptop since my last post, but those have been resolved… actually, with much priase to be handed out, both to the Apple support folks, and a couple of delivery guys…The basic issue I was having was that, all of a sudden, the battery in my laptop wouldn’t charge… It was getting power from the adaptor, but the LED on the plug wouldn’t come on and the battery would never gain charge… After a couple weeks, it finally gave out completely, which meant the laptop would die if the cord came unplugged… I tried a couple different adaptors, but none worked… I assumed it was the battery….Finally, Kris and I took a road trip to Richmond to the Apple store… After a brief scare (we had tix to a movie at 4:00 and because of some glitches with the Genius Desk reservation system I though, for a moment, they wouldn’t be able to see me) I got someone to help me out… We tried a new battery, but that didn’t work… Turned out to be the DC board in the laptop, so they sent it off to Apple for repair… they told me to expect a 7-10 day delay, but, on the up side, they were able to have it shipped back directly to my Apt…

  In the mean time, I had preordered a copy of OS X 10.4 from Amazon (they were offering a rebate). I was expecting that early this week and, sure enough, on Tuesday I came home to find a UPS shipping attempt notice on my door… I’m always a little pissed when they don’t leave the package (though, I can also understand why people don’t want them to), so I resigned myself to waiting until the next day for the package… However (and here comes the praise) not half an hour after I got home I heard a knock on the door… it was the UPS guy (same one I’ve had for years… really great guy)… he had seen I was home and redelivered the package on his way back in… I LOVE it when that happens…

  Anyway, on Wednesday (a full 24 hours BEFORE I even got the e-mail notice from Apple saying my laptop had arrived at their repair facility) I came home to find a delivery attempt notice from DHL on my door… It didn’t list what the shipment was, but since DHL and Airborne Express merged, I had high hopes that it was my laptop… Anyway, I resigned myself, again, to not getting the package until the next day… but then, again, not more than half an hour later, there was the DHL guy, making one more delivere attempt on his way back in…

  So, short story long… my laptop is back, good as new and upgraded to “Tiger”… and, the UPS and DHL guys who handle my route have my thanks and praise…

• As I mentioned, while in Richmond, Kris and I saw a movie… the movie in question was “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”… I have very mixed feelings about the movie… All in all, I liked it… there were some very wonderful things about it (the “So long and thanks for all the fish” into was brillient… Alan Rickman’s voice work for Marvin was dead on… I really liked how the movie looked visually… the vogons, the ships, Deep Thought), but, at heart, I think it was missing some of the magic that made the books so great…Oh, and I was really dissappointed in Sam Rockwell as Zaphod… that had such potential, but it was just… wrong… ugh…but yeah, anyway… for the most part, thumbs up…
• Also, as I mentioned, I upgraded this week to OS X 10.4… “Tiger”… So far, so good with that… It’s got some pretty neat new features (probably a lot that I haven’t discovered yet) and overall I’m happy with it… I don’t know that it was worth the $94 I’m going to end up having paid for it, but ah well… :)

Anyway, I suppose I should probably wrap this long, pointless, rambling post up and get back to work…