blah blah blah

Next year

We officially now have a place to live next year. The lease was signed this afternoon. The kitchen is still in the process of being remodled, but theres no way that it could possibly be worse than the one this year (plus it has a gas stove which is sooo much better to cook on).

the count next year will be:
7(?) bikes
1 TV
8(?) computers
3 cars
1 motercycle
3 renters
1 PhD student
2 MS students
1 cat

Options

Option1: Alaskan Huskey

Option2: Black Lab

Option3: Golden Retriever

Option4: Alaskan Malamute

All of these will probably get me into loads of trouble, but in the immortal words of Bret(?) Butler in Gone With the Wind "Quite frankly Miss Scarlet I don't give a damn."

Places you will

Confirmed places you will see me working in the next 2 weeks
Senior Celebration
Commencement (I gotta be there at 730am)
Sat Mat 1st from 4-10pm

more dates to be added

Billy Joel: Only The Young Drive Good

Since this weekend saw Long Island hero Billy Joel's third car crash in two years, Lasagna Farm thought it might be time to revisit Mr. Joel's back catalogue:

· New York State Department of Transportation of Mind
· Scenes from an Italian/Jew Driving a French Car into a Colonial House
· We Didn't Start The Fire, But Did Take out a Row of Hedges
· Movin' In (Hydroplaning Citroen's Song)
· Say Goodbye to Bayville Avenue, Say Hello to Someone’s Living Room

curtosy of Gawker

Run #2

I learned where the VA was today. Despite its reputation, the ER seemed to be pretty nice and it had a great view of the sunset. Note To Self: Go to the gym more often. I had to help lift a person who was way over the amount I should have been lifting and now I’m paying for it. Ill be calling the massage place tomorrow to see about an appointment.

The fire chief wrote me an email back today saying that he wasn’t able to offer a position this summer. Note to chief: when writing a rejection email, at least try to get the persons name CORRECT, especially when their name is in 3 different places in the email you are responding to.

Last 5 songs

(1) J.S. Bach - Brandenburg Concerto #1 in FMajor (adagio)
(2) The Muffs - "Kids in America"
(3) Corrs - "No More Cry"
(4) Sugarbabes - "Hole in the Head"
(5) Ghetto Boys - "Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta"

For the Record

For the record, last year I voted AGAINST the proposal to close the school of nursing at Syracuse.

SAR

One of the people I know through SUA said he was trying to find volunteers to help with some Search and Rescue Training for a couple of different counties (I think). Any way I volunteered and got the flatmate interested and out we go on Friday to Highland Forest.

This is the view from Skyline Lodge

The view from where I was hiding this morning. btw, at this point I wasn't covered with the camouflage yet.

I'm a good dog

I did good. I found the hidden person.

My nose itches

Walking back to base camp.

For the record, the area that the dogs were searching was roughly 160 square acres and the dog was able to find me in a little over an hour. Other fun facts I learned while talking to the trainers, walking through water will not help you evade the dogs. The only part of the tea that dosn't like going in the water are the handlers. Some of the SAR dogs are specifically trained for searching water and occasionally have found bodies (that are dead) that have been located in water with a depth of 100+ feet (granted the dog didn't get the body they just indicated where the body is to the handler. So those of you who think that walking up a stream is going to disguise your scent, think again. Also while many people purchase dogs for outrageous prices (5,000+) there are also people who go to the local pound and pick up a dog there and train it for SAR. So there isn't any real reason other than personal preference to get a purebread.

This week has pretty much been perfect. With the possible exception of one project. How do you make a perfect week better you ask, here is how

information recieved tonight:
PETA is coming to campus this weekend. Appearantly they have had protests which have gotten out of hand in the past. They will be here all of Saturday and sunday...

Heee heee. I am so looking forward to Saturday night when I am on duty. My guess is that it is going to be the Biological Research Facility. I know Pubic Safety and SPD were already beginning to go nuts over this. Speaking of nuts the Pubic Safety just got a new vehicle, a 2004 Crown Vic Police Interceptor. I’m guessing that this was in preparation for their enhanced peace officer status that will be granted this summer, meaning they can now carry guns, make arrests and generally make students lives more miserable than before. Back to the car, the whole reason for the car in my opinion was probably so that they could put lights and sirens on it and have a gun rack hanging in the front seat.

Yesterday was cool, drove around in A1 for a while. Today was even better, drove around A1 and then stopped for ice cream on the way back to quarters.

Summer stuff

Ok. I have definitely found out I’m not going to get an internship ANYWHERE this summer so I sent in my application to Northeastern to join the EMT course. I know I am going to get in because the lady said that they never fill up the courses. Because of this lack of full-time employment I decided to search for a place that would accept a volunteer (unpaid). I sent off a letter to the Concord Fire Department to ask them if they would be interested in a volunteer for the summer (They manage the town EMS). Oh yea the other reason behind doing the EMT course was that when I graduate from Syracuse with my Masters and have no employment prospects, atleast I will have some real skill to fall back upon.

I’m really hoping that they will accept a volunteer. If they don’t I am completely fucked. Perhaps Ill actually take some rowing lessons (when I saw rowing I mean sculling/crew). Update my parents have said I can come home again this summer

In honor of the wonderful weather we’ve been having lately below is a picture of my Basil plant.

Your text here

Friday Five

ok FF is on hiatus so I have randomly picked one from a few years ago that I havn't done.

1. What time do you wake up on weekday mornings?
T/Th usually around 8am
M/W usually around 1130ish.
F It depends on whether or not I feel like going to meetings.

2. Do you sleep in on the weekends? How late?
This is a trick question. On atleast one day during the weekend I usually don't get to sleep until around 5 or 6am. If this is the case I usually sleep until around 3 in the afternoon. Otherwise I get up whenever my body tells me its had enough sleep, most likly around noon though.

3. Aside from waking up, what is the first thing you do in the morning?
Newspapers, e-mail, shower then the blogs I read on a regular basis.

4. How long does it take to get ready for your day?
As stupid as this sounds, I like to have about 1h30m to get ready and to my first appointment. However if needed I can get up 10 minutes before my class/meeting and be there on time (or close to on time)

5. When possible, what is your favorite place to go for breakfast?
Around syracuse, probably Starbucks. I love the people who work there. if I am at home it would definitly be The Cheese Shop.

Overnight

Interesting weekend, but then again most of my weekends usually are interesting lately. Friday evening was low-key. Did some more driver training for SUA then off to OT to a pledge event. It was interesting and brought back some fond memories of pledging. The Saturday overnight was a lot more eventful. There were two calls, one at 4am and the second at 5am. I gotta say the first one was a lot more ‘fun’ than the second one. Layla (I think that’s how her name is spelled) from RMMS is a hoot. I also learned a couple of tricks to try and get responses out of unresponsive patients. The second call came after we dropped off our first ‘customer’ at the hospital and were sitting outside filling out paperwork.

So today I’m running on about 6 hours of sleep; from 630 until 10 and then from 11 until 2pm. On the upside I’m learning how to sleep in the rig and I can fall asleep o a dime when not on the rig. I’m still thinking about the prescription of Ambien I have lying around here somewhere but it hasn’t proved necessary lately though.

Crazy

I went nuts in the kitchen today. Lunch was a baguette sliced and then toasted with olive oil and garlic and topped with chopped fresh basil and tomatoes. Technically I guess its just bruschetta, but none of the recipes I have ever seen have the olive oil and garlic thing done to the bread. Dinner was a fresh melon and prosciutto salad and some tuscan bread.

I think this change in weather is definitly going to bring about a massive amount of cooking, I just wish that there was a larger counter space to work with. Next year though. The kitchen in our apartment is being renovated so its goign to be nice.

I think the flatmate took a picture of the bruschetta as it was coming out of the oven and perhaps if you pester him enough he will post a picture of it. Did a lot of spring cleaning this afternoon (again I think it sthe weather). Im outta here thisevening to work a shift with my car/company leader. its probably going to be his last shift (he is graduating this year) so look out Syracuse...

The last 5 songs that have been played:
(1) Something Corporate - Konstantine
(2) U2 - Where the Streets Have no Name
(3) Coldplay - Clocks
(4) Gareth Gates - Spirit in the Sky
(5) Paul Oakenfold - Southern Sun (Tiesto remix)

Choose Your Own

Empty Entry

make up your own entry.

back

After some domain problems which were fixed by Reid I'm back

Shitty

This day can't possibly get more shitty. I was getting some new boots at the uniform store and I come out and ive got a fucking ticket. I mean I was in the store less than 5 minutes. I swear to god I am gonna dro pkick that fuckin metermaid bitch into the next county if I ever see the fucking cunt.

No boots in my size. I've got small feet. No like really effing small. The store dosn't normally even carry boots in my size. Fuck this means Im gonna need to place an order with GALLS in order to get some boots. Further this means that im going to need to wait another week or so until I can send my normal boots in for repairs.

Its raining. 'Nuff said.

I still don't have a job or any idea wtf I am going to be doing this summer. Northeastern is offering a few interesting courses, but I don't really want to go for more schooling.

Car was keyed. Actually this happened about a week ago, bu im still pissed off about it. Not really sure what I should be doing. I have touchup paint but perhaps this should be a sign to get rid of the fucking beast.

Thanks for listening to my complaining. Check back tomorrow to see what else has happened

My life and other random shit

This is going to be a rather disconnected entry.

(1) I just found out that the full name for Boston's airport is General Edward Lawrence Logan International. I always knew it as Logan International or just Logan.

(2) Im still waiting to hear back from MSFT

(3) I was denied another internship essentially because I knew too much. "perfect candidate with an amazing background...sacrifice my intern position in order to hire someone with a BS without your background as a full time employee..." WTF??? Im being punished because im doing an advanced degree. Ingrid suggested that I should call them up and tell them that Ill work fulltime and postpone finishing my masters

(4) I just finished making a tiramisu for the weekend. I accidently added milk to it instead of doubling the amount of alcohol I normally put into it...crap

(5) Seattle has awesome radio stations. I highly recomend c89.5. They have an audio stream that cna be opened in Microsoft Media Player at http://www.c895fm.com/live/knhc.asx

(more tonight)

Oh yea

Oh yea, im still waiting to hear back from them. Hopefully tomorrow will be the day....

Seattle II

Thursday morning (April fools no less).

I was up at some ungodly hour, like around 6 so I took a 2 hour drive around the deserted streets of Redmond/Bellvue caught the sunrise and saw some awesome houses. I ended up returning to the hotel around 8 for breakfast and off to the interview at 930.

The first building I went to was 19, which apparently is their main recruiting building which every applicant goes through when they first arrive. The interview went pretty well apart from the fact that it started 30 minutes late (not my fault). The guy and I really connected cause we share some of the same interests (ex: EMS stuff and outdoor activities). I found out that I would only be having 3 interviews after this and none of them would be in a group setting.

First interview went well. I was telling Wayne about how I would test the search function in TextPad. I think I scored some points by talking about internationalization and how to test that. My next interview went even better. Rather than any sort of technical questions it was a behavioral interview. We ended up going out for sushi for an hour, which was cool. I haven’t had decent sushi in a few weeks so this was a treat.

The 3rd interview I have no idea how it went. The guy had been working at Microsoft for the past 14+ years after graduating with a degree in Physics. I was told to write a program that would take in an array of number and produced an ordered list of them. Upon questioning I was able to dig up that I was allowed to make the function call with a pointer to the array and an integer that was the length of the array. With this information the problem was a lot simpler.

That’s it. The interview with Microsoft is now over. Time for some play time. I drove around taking some more pictures, took a swim and headed into Seattle for Dinner. There was this really cool place I went called “Fire and Ice” (no relation to the Boston restaurant) which served Northwestern cuisine. Dinner consisted of a chilled Tomato and Cucumber soup and for the main course duck with a peach/fig sauce….yummy. The restaurant overlooks the harbor on 1st and you can see the ferries leaving for the different islands, its rather relaxing. Walked around taking a look at a couple of different clubs and there wasn’t anything spectacular so back to the hotel for some sleep before up at 530 to make it to the airport for the flight home.

A special thanks go out to: Microsoft for paying for this 3 day vacation from reality, the cute Hostess at Fire and Ice, Robitussen and NyQuil for giving me my voice back in time for the interview and for Continental for actually making me reach the airport in time to make my connecting flight.

Seattle Part 1

Things started off shittily. The plane was 45 minutes or so late taking off from the Syracuse Airport. This didn’t bode well for me because there was an hour between the arrival of my plans and the time my connecting flight took off for Seattle. This lateness combined with the fact that those remaining 15 minutes didn’t take into account the taxying time and my needing to get from one end of the airport to the other = BAD.

Anyway I ran through the gate and ended up making the flight. I was seated next to two of the most obnoxious people. For lack of a better way to describe then they were JAPS and should have been from Long Island rather than Seattle.

The Approach to SeaTac was beautiful. I had a window seat and was looking at green mountains poking through clouds with snow on them. When we finally got over Tacoma all of the clouds disappeared; I wish the picture I took of the city turned out a little bit better, but oh well Ill just blame it on the dirty windows.

I ended up being given a Chevy Tracker. I figured I was going to get a normal 4door type car or a 2 door. Not a sub-suv type thing. It was different from driving my Jimmy and I must say that the Jimmy beats that hunk of shit hands down.

At this point Henry has completely lost his voice. This doesn’t bode well for the interview the next day (which incidentally happened to be April Fools Day). Stay tuned for what happened…

Pictures

ill post the text that goes along with these pictures in a bit.

The approach to SeaTac on a nice day

And you thought your commute was bad

Heading into Seattle for dinner

Relaxing

Between the cloud decks on the way home

Yes I really was there for an interview

I think the supermarket mislabeled the SODA isle

Presentation is everything folks

Not sure what happened here, but the effect was cool

Warm weather ahoy

As soon as I figure out how to enhance dark images ill post the real one, but this is where the duck came from.