harpojaeger.com

It’s been a little while since I posted here, due to the end of school and associated craziness.  I’m going to be taking next year off from school to work and travel, and another one of my goals is to write much more regularly, and to start making money, or at least breaking even, on this site.  I’ve been accepted as a Project Wonderful advertiser, so you should start seeing some interesting ads on this site soon.

I’ve also finally gotten around to ditching GoDaddy.com as the host of my website and the harpojaeger.com domain name.  I’ve never particularly liked their backend and other user tools, and they have some rather sexist and objectifying advertisements that I objected to.  A while back, my dad came across a blog post regarding similar issues, which he passed on to me.  I read it at the time (3/9/09 [and it's been in my Gmail Starred items since then]) and decided to switch, and it’s now done.  I also moved renaissanceboy.org over from directNIC, for simplicity’s sake (it redirects here).  I’ve opted to use BlueHost, which is completely awesome so far.  The backend is way better than GoDaddy’s (none of that ASP-and-glitzy-web-2.0 junk) and as an added benefit they don’t rely on sex to sell their products (there’s much more where that one came from).  It’s also a completely reasonable price – slightly more than what I was paying before, but totally worth it so far.

Another project I’m hoping to take on this summer is a total redesign of this site.  I’m thinking of writing my own WordPress theme from the ground up, which should be a pretty interesting project.

Today was the Northampton Pride march and rally.  I took a longish lunch break to march with my school’s GSA, and then got some excellent food, including deep-fried cheesecake, which a friend and I sampled simply so we could say we had.  It was not very good.  The fried plantains and rice were, however.

And now, for the homework.

I am working on a pretty excellent shell script that resets a Mac OS X computer back to factory defaults.  This is useful for when I do a clean install at work and then need to install after-market software.  I create an initial user account, install the software, and then run the script to remove the user, leaving the installed software in place and ready to use when a new account is created.  As it is right now, the script does what it’s supposed to do.  I think I will give it a few more features and make it a little prettier, and then put up a link to it here, as it could be pretty useful.

We have an ultimate tournament on Saturday at NMH.  We are in the A division, which is cool because it will be really competitive and awesome, but not cool because a lot of our newer players will not get much playing time.  That is a bummer.  I went to the Y tonight and am going again tomorrow, so I will be in excellent shape on Saturday.  I think it is important that I have been exercising regularly when the tournament comes around, so it is not a shock to my muscles to suddenly be doing work.  I had an awesome workout tonight and am looking forward to another tomorrow.  And now, sleep beckons.

I dug three holes, each three feet wide, and one-and-a-half feet deep.  Two and half hours of work for a total of thirty dollars gives me twelve dollars an hour (not bad).  But I wanted to calculate how much I was paid per volume of dirt (disregarding the rather substantial rocks I had to dig out and move).

So:

Three holes, with a radius of one-and-a-half feet, and a depth of three feet.

πr²h = π(1.5)²1.5

3π/2 ft.³ dirt per hole.

Thirty dollars for three holes is ten dollars per hole.

10/(3π/2)=20/(3π) $/ft.³ dirt ≅ 2.122065907891938 $/ft.³ dirt.

I bought David Byrne’s new album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today online.  So far, it is pretty awesome.  I wish I had noticed the option to buy it in FLAC as well as MP3, seemingly for no extra charge, but I didn’t.  Oh well.  I did buy the vinyl package, so in a few days I will receive the album on vinyl, which is going to be great.

Chinese food approaches.  As does bimetallism.

Of course they would be closed on Easter Sunday.  Why on earth didn’t I think of that?

I had planned my whole day around going to the Y in the morning, then work, then a mock trial meeting.  But it turns out that the Y is closed, work is closed, and the meeting is not happening.  It looks as though I will be going up to Ashfield to dig some holes in the morning.  Then I will do homework before meeting with a friend to work on our honors project.

Man, what an exhausting couple of days.  Between two full time work days (another tomorrow), Mock Trial, and the first episode of Joss Whedon’s new show, Dollhouse, I am wiped out.

Recently I have been doing a lot of thinking about what the purpose of blogging is.  I am still not sure.  I know that I find it interesting because of the potential to act as both an extroverted and introverted journal simultaneously, but there is a lot of other potential, and a lot of other considerations.  For instance, does one target the entries towards other people, or should it be more of a picture of what the author is thinking?  Are they mutually exclusive?  Ultimately I don’t think they are, but there’s a fine line between revealing your thoughts and acting like other people don’t exist.

I think I will probably write some more about this topic in the future.

This has been an exhausting weekend, and it is not over yet.  Yesterday I was at work all day, and was fortunate enough to have someone bring in a computer that had been dropped repeatedly, and, I kid you not, had port spilled over the keyboard.  Last night we cooked a sumptuous Valentine’s Day meal, which included steak, sweet potatoes, and other such awesome things.  Then we watched The Truman Show, with Jim Carrey, which is officially one of the best movies ever.  It is transcendently beautiful and astute, especially because it was made before the era of reality TV.

I discovered a fabulous article on the BBC.  My first name is Rafael.

Today I went to Costco in the morning to pick up my new glasses, which are very subtle.  Then I worked from 12-4.  Now I am home.  My family is on their way back from a show at my school (M. Butterfly [which I was REALLY bummed to miss (they sold out of tickets to last night's show [we got tickets to the matinee today (which I couldn't go to [because I was at work (but last night my friend told me that there were in fact seats available at last night's show [so I could have gone (which makes me pretty angry)])])])]), and we are going to go to dinner at our friends’ house in Conway.  I have not seen this family for a long time, so I am looking forward to it immensely.

As I got my requisite slice of pizza for lunch it occurred to me that I have been eating junk food all day.  I had pie when I woke up, a hot dog at Costco, and then pizza for lunch.

Pizzazz (Gonna Give It To Ya!) is a video made by two of my coworkers when they were in college.  It is one of the funniest things I have seen in a long time.

We are having a Mock Trial meeting at my house tomorrow.  I will be bedinnering the team.  Pesto.

Over and out.

I am leaving the house in a little while for some freelance work.  School was tiring today, but very productive, especially Mock Trial.  We debriefed (a rather silly word) about yesterday’s trial, and we are working on our plans for meeting several times over next week’s vacation.  I have also almost finished working out my work schedule for next week.

I ended up not going to New York this morning, so I am home for the day.  I think I will see if I am needed at work, which opens at noon today, and I am planning to go see Brett Dennen this evening.

I spent the better part of the day at work moving things around.  We are in the middle of a giant reorganization of  the Service Department, and there is much to be done.  We deconstructed and moved tables, lugged around heavy old computer equipment, organized hundreds of component screws, and more.  Okay, maybe screw organization isn’t terribly physically taxing, but it was a long day.