July 2004

I invited a few close friends to open Gmail accounts, which is Google’s new web-based e-mail service that allows users to have 1 GB of e-mail/attachments in their account.  For most people that is more e-mail than they will ever receive.  Anyway, I have some Gmail invitations left that I would be happy to provide on a first-come, first-served basis!

I did donate a couple of invitations to Gmail 4 Troops which helps match troops with these very large, donated Gmail accounts.  I think it’s a very interesting cause, and I’m all about spreading the Gmail love!  You can read the Stars and Stripes article about this effort, too.

So again, if you want one they’re hot!

Monday night I exercised my rights as a local resident and went to my neighborhood Blockbuster to get a membership and to rent Butterfly Effect.  I have to admit that when the movie first came out and I saw the previews, I was not impressed to find Ashton Kutcher in the lead role, but after reading a very positive review from I decided to go rent it.

Further thoughts about how this movie touched me are available to friends (if you’re not on my friend’s list, don’t hesitate to try to get added!).

One final thought about the movie… I’m also a sucker for happy romantic endings, and was really moved back when at the end of the film they walk past each other on a busy Manhattan street, without giving any sort of glance.  A very stunning moment, and one that left a lasting impression on me.

So apparently down at Duke University the new students are going to get iPods, preloaded with course content, campus calendar, and contact info.  It sounds kinda lame to me, a waste of an otherwise cool piece of entertainment technology.

The Guinness keg finally kicked last night. I say finally because it has been pouring very slowly for the past few days. I had just returned from Quiznos with warm food in hand, and went to pour my dinner Guinness when all the came out was spattered liquid and lots of gas.

I’m going to return the empty keg on Monday or Tuesday, and in the meantime I have put the raspberry wheat (that I picked up from Iron Hill Brewery back in May) back on tap. That should last another week or two, who knows!

Are there any requests for the next beer? I want something that’s a bit of a crowd pleaser (because I sure as heck can’t drink that much by myself!), something that has a bit of novelty (microbrews and higher class commercial beers fit this bill), and something that can be pushed with CO₂ (at least until I get the leak in the nitrogen tank fixed). I was thinking about sampling some beers out at Old Dominion, drinks I’ve had there have always been good. I could always put their Old Dominion Root Beer on tap!

Last night while playing some Wolfenstein Enemy Terrority with John, my laptop threw the dreaded Blue Screen of Death complaining about a failure of disk.sys, and upon reboot reported “Operating System Not Found”. My laptop is pretty much out of commission until tomorrow when I get get a hold of the Windows XP CD to make use of the recovery utilities. It might be as simple as a problem with the MBR, or something worse.

It’s times like these that I wish I had a more recent backup of the data on that drive! I would probably feel a lot easier if I knew I wouldn’t be losing so much stuff.

Didn’t the old joke go: “… but I thought Al Gore invented the internet?” So what’s up with this guy Tim Bernes-Lee? I think we’re going to need clarification from Al on this one.

And as a further note, I thought the guy who spoke at RPI’s commencement this year invented the internet. To sell the idea of having some old guy bore us for 20 minutes, they told us that Robert Metcalf was a pioneer in the Internet. Maybe we can get comment from Dr. Jackson on that?

Last night after a long day working with one of my company’s clients downtown, Chris (a co-worker and fellow alum of RPI) and I stopped in for dinner and brew at The Brickskeller, a bar near Dupont Circle that serves up more than 1000 different brands of beers from all over the world. They have a lot of micro brews from this part of the US, and they have an even larger international selection. I had a Drax, bottled in and imported from Romania. As you can imagine, there was a picture of a vampire on the bottle. I also had an Oxford Raspberry, which I had first sampled at the Old Dominion Beer Festival earlier this month.

According to their website, the founder of the establishment was tired of going into commercialized bars (in hotels, etc) and getting snubbed when he asked for a slightly atypical beer. Also, if it’s distributed in the area, he will put it in stock. The display of beers in the glass coolers as you walk in the door is quite impressive.

As a funny side note, while I was searching for the website for The Brickskeller, I found a website about a fort that some kids made in a spring bed during the summer of 1995. The last line on the page is classic: “someone had nothing better to do named their bar after our fort we though this was funny they have lots of beer”.

If you like shisha, you might be interested in reading about this machine called AWOL (Alcohol Without Liquids), which vaporizes alcohol and mixes it with oxygen to produce a hookah-like infusion of America’s favorite drug.  It’s interesting enough for a quick read, and after I finished, I had to ask myself “Is this for real??”

I’ve always maintained that computing represents only one of my interests, that I would never give up on fostering the others as I started my career. Also, I realize that with the career field I’m in now, there isn’t a lot of room for advancement unless I branch out into management-level work, or find a different career field.

That said, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to pursuing a graduate program at a local university here in Virginia. I went to the DMV late last week and got a VA drivers license and registered my car, so I guess for college tuition purposes I’m considered in-state. The other requirement for selecting a school, besides having decent programs, would be that they offer these decent programs in the evenings to people who work full-time during the day. It would also be cool if the campus was metro accessible, though if I can stop in on the way home from work in the evening that would be fine too.

I’m also thinking about which programs to pursue, trying to find something that really does interest me (enough to write papers, research heavily, and get stressed about) that would also be beneficial for a career someday. I’ll mull this over some more and post my finalized, well thought out ideas sometime in the near future.

I came across this quote today, and I think it totally fits in our current political climate:

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” – Theodore Roosevelt (1918)