Silverware

While preparing a tall mug of tea, I had some interesting thoughts about silverware. We have a bunch of different sets of silverware all mixed up in my house, so when using utensils one is presented with a conundrum. Do we specifically select which utensil from which set is preferable, or do we surrender ourselves to random chance and just grab one? I would argue that it is best to choose, as I have discovered that the different sets tend to be useful for different things.

First of all, some of the sets are simply bigger and bulkier than the others. These tend to be good for serving food. However, the spoons from one of the thicker sets are also my first choice for cereal, soup, yogurt, and almost all liquid dishes. The exception is hot drinks, which need to be stirred. Tea requires a long-handled heavy teaspoon. It is important that it be a teaspoon to allow for the proper amount of honey. And if it is not long-handled and from one of of the heavy sets, it will overheat quickly and become useless for stirring, as it will be too hot to touch. Other hot drinks do not necessarily require a teaspoon, as they usually just need to be stirred. But it is still important to use a heavy set, as the same thermal restrictions apply.

The various butter knives are entirely interchangeable. However, we have two sets of sharp table knives, one that is distinctly steakish, and one that is sort of para-steakish. The steakish set is sharper and more heavily serrated, so I find it especially useful for bagels, where I can use the same utensil to first cut the bagel and then spread cream cheese. This then requires the invocation of a fork for lox and onions, but this is a matter I will deal with shortly. The para-steak-knives are somewhat jacks-of-all-trades. They can be used as butter knives in a pinch, but also work fairly well for cutting, especially fruit.

Forks are somewhat more straightforward. I always prefer the smallest forks from one of the light sets. The heavier ones are just not accurate enough to be used when eating. I find it difficult to eat anything with anything as large and non-dexterous as these. Good for spearing potatoes, perhaps, but not for the delicate task of conveying food to my mouth.

Clearly, there’s a lot of depth to this topic. It seems petty, but I think that my thought process on this matter represents a lot of the way I think about things like efficiency. I.e. is it useful for me to use a specific type of silverware over another in a certain situation, or is a waste of my time to even be thinking about it?

Perhaps I will continue in the future with a discussion of our similarly fragmented glass, plate, and bowl populations.

Nope

Currently Physics is being accomplished. Napping was not.

Nap time

I may take a nap. I have not taken a legitimate nap in a long time.

Triumph

We won! WAHOO!

I didn’t get home until about eleven last night, and I have been getting sicker and sicker since yesterday morning. I only got out of bed about forty-five minutes ago. Today I am going to be catching up on my independent study work, which I have greatly neglected in recent months. After that, I will be going to Costco to get new glasses. When I return, I will do more homework.

No rest for the weary.

Also, this is the best headline ever. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7853564.stm

Droundhog Gay

In honor of one of the strangest “holidays” in existence, we are watching the movie Groundhog Day tonight.

Tiring

What an exhausting week. We have been working very hard at school, and combined with the fact that I’m getting very little physical exercise in the winter, I have been both physically and mentally worn-out. It will be good to have a calming night tonight.

Tomorrow I will be in Boston all day at the Berklee High School Jazz competition. This will be a ton of fun, especially if we win. It will be fun even if we don’t, though; we will get to see a ton of really good music, and generally have an exciting time.

I have been working on a really cool piece of code that I hope to finish soon. When I do, I am going to put it up in the Projects section. It is based on software that I saw demonstrated at Olin College of Engineering when I toured there. I will say no more until it is finished, but it is really awesome.

"Work"

Because of the snow, very few people were able to come to the meeting, so it quickly degenerated into watching The Daily Show, and snowball fights. We walked over to a nearby friend and teammate’s house with a ladder, intending to lay siege to his bedroom, but since he was downstairs, we had to settle for a gigantic snow battle, after which we drank a great deal of hot chocolate, ate popcorn, and watched Firefly.

All in all, a successful afternoon.

Snowed in

A significant portion of the Mock Trial team will be descending on my house within the hour. It is a snow day and our trial has been cancelled, so we are making up the lost work time by working here. We are preparing great quantities of food, and steeling ourselves for the reality of having no fruit left for the next week.

Trial?

It looks as though school may be cancelled tomorrow. If it is, our trial will be postponed until the designated make-up week. This would be disappointing, but not terribly unwelcome; I suppose it would be nice to have some more time to prepare.

Full

Today was my first full day of school since I returned from DC. Since the Mock Trial team had scrimmages on Thursday and Friday, we were only there for the morning.

More to the point, we are in the three-week long break between semesters called Paidea that happens at my school. Although this began last Tuesday, I was not there, and today was my first full day of it. During Paidea, you choose one activity or group-type thing, and you do it all day everyday. There is everything from rock climbing (which my sister is in) to conspiracy theories, to Mock Trial. This is when the team does most of its work; we essentially do nothing but Mock Trial from 8:30 to 2:30. It is intense. I got a whole lot done today.

Our first trial is on Wednesday. Tomorrow after school I am going to get a haircut with a bunch of other people from the team. Now that the season is beginning, we have to trim up.

Basically, the way the competition works is that the state is divided into sixteen regions. We are in #15. There are three weeks of regional trials, during which you play other teams in your region. At the end of the three weeks, the team in each region with the best record (percentage of trials won), is declared the winner of that region. If more than one team has the same record, there is a week reserved for tiebreaker trials. Then the sixteen regional winners play each other in the playoffs, which are elimination; if you lose a trial, you are out and done for the season. The state winner goes to the national tournament.

Within each trial, though, things are more complicated. Every team receives the case materials; signed affidavits, exhibits, rules of evidence and procedure, and applicable case law. Then, they must prepare both sides of the case; since it’s a criminal case this year, that means both prosecution and defense. In the regional trials, the sides each team will present are predetermined. However, in the playoffs, the two teams arrive at the trial and flip a coin. The winner of the coin flip decides which side their team will present, thus forcing the other team to play the opposite side. For this reason, everyone has to be ready to go at any given trial. Our first two regional trials are our prosecution, and the last is defense. I have parts on both sides, but I am focusing on my prosecution roles at this point.

This year’s case is first-degree murder with an insanity defense. The defendant is an ex-Marine who came home from Iraq and shortly thereafter killed his childhood rival. He claims innocence by reason of a PTSD-induced hallucination, contending that the military failed to diagnose him. On the prosecution side, the witnesses are a close friend of the victim who was present at the shooting, the detective in charge of the investigation after the shooting, and the military psychologist who approved him for discharge. On the defense are a friend of the defendant, also present at the shooting, the defendant, and a psychologist whom he met before the shooting, and was evaluated by afterwards, who claims that he does in fact have PTSD. It is a fascinating case, probably the best I’ve seen in the four years I’ve been on the team. It is not quite as applicable to real life as last year’s case, which was a civil suit involving a sexually hostile work environment, and retaliation by the defendant, but it is very demanding legally. This looks to be an excellent competition season.

Early

Bed is nigh. I am going to get a lot of sleep tonight and tomorrow night in preparation for our trial.

Dumb Slog Nilly O'Mare…

…is a fabulous movie. After our Mock Trial meeting today, I went to see it with two other friends.

It has been a busy day. I didn’t go in to work, so Will and I worked on the LC(A) website until about two forty-five. The meeting was very productive, but tiring, and I was glad to get to let of some steam. The movie was not terribly relaxing, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. The main character’s brother Salim looked strikingly like Michael Jackson.

I am now officially a denizen of the Intertubes. I have a Twitter. I’m only using it to track my blog posts; whenever I post, a new Twitter with a link to the post is automatically created. Still, though, I feel as though I have sacrificed a little bit of my Internet individuality. On the other hand, Twitter is a widely used tool, and if it can help me get my content out to a wider audience, it is rational for me to use it. We shall see.

M.I.A.

I have been extremely busy for the past two days with Mock Trial. We had scrimmages both yesterday and the day before with Holy Name and Newton South, respectively. Both were extremely productive, and exhausting. On Thursday I didn’t get home until after ten.

In other news, my iPhone is, as the name of this post implies, missing in action. It may have been stolen at school, or it may be in the locked lost-and-found, or it may be in the maintenance supervisor’s office if the cleaners found it. I will not know for sure until tomorrow or Monday. Until then, I am rendered iPwnageless. I have deactivated my cel service and changed all of my passwords, and now I just have to wait.

Happy birthday, Macintosh

Today is the 25th birthday of the Macintosh Computer. I am thinking of baking some cupcakes, and I may set up our old SE, which is in the closet upstairs.

Review

I am home. I got here just before 4, and had to run out immediately for an eye exam. Now I am back, unpacked, settled, etc. We had a rather smooth drive home, except for when we stopped at a rest area in CT. We managed to lose the car key inside of the dashboard, and the driver and I spent about half an hour disassembling the dashboard before I was able to fish the key out.

DC was a fabulous experience. Overall, the city was in the strange state of limbo; everything had sort of stopped, and yet there was a feeling of great motion within the city. This may have been due to the literally millions of people in the streets.

We had tickets to the Silver area for the inauguration ceremony, which was closer to the Capitol steps, but when we got there, the ticketholders’ line was about five or six thousand people long, and growing longer, so we decided not to risk missing the ceremony standing on line and to go in the general admission, which didn’t have any security, and thus no line, just a whole lot of people. A whole lot. I have never in my entire life seen crowds this size before. We ended up on the National Mall at around 9th street. We watched the inauguration on gigantic screens, which realistically is probably what we would have been doing if we were in the Silver area.

One thing that pissed me off was that the sound and video were out of sync. The sound was live, but the video lagged about one second. I do not understand why they didn’t fix this; it seems like it would have been fairly simple to jump forward in the feed by a second; certainly easier than jumping the sound forward if it had been lagging. Oh well. We could hear the proceedings, and that’s what counted.

Back at the apartment on Penn. Ave. (when we finally got there), it was a mob scene. Everyone was jubilant, and there was an enormous quantity of most delectable food. Once the parade started, we trooped out to balconies and roofs to watch. At first, it was rather boring; imagine about 50 consecutive motorcycles driving at five miles an hour. But then Obama’s motorcade came along, and we saw him! Him and Michelle got out of the car, and they walked and waved! I got some pictures, but the iPhone camera is not very good, so it’s hard to see who’s where. Some of them give a pretty good image of the parade overall, though.

We came back inside and watched coverage of the parade for a while. It lasted for many hours, and if we opened the door, we could hear it outside; marching bands galore.

We also saw some footage of the Obama’s special presidential limo. It was a rather unremarkable black hulk, until I saw them open the door. The door must have been a foot thick. This thing is apparently bullet-proof and bomb-proof, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was mortar- and apocalypse-proof. I have never seen such a beefy car. It must get awful milage.

In terms of current happenings related to the inauguration, the Obama administration appears to have gotten off to a flying start, ordering Guantanamo detainee trials frozen as part of a broader effort to shut the place entirely, and making some excellent statements about transparency, as well as sining executive orders to this effect. And John McCain, ever the honorable man, has urged fellow Republicans to work with the new administration and Congressional Democrats to move forward. This is truly a new era for cooperative and constructive politics.

On the road again

We are on our way back out of DC. It is going to be a long ride home.

Security tunnel

Photos: Inauguration

Data networks were down earlier today, so here are the rest of the photos, including ones from the National Mall, the collossal crowds on the way back, and the parade, which I watched from a roof.

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Ocean

Walking the opposite way through crowds of people. It is difficult not to be batted around. I’m like a leaf on the wind.

Crowds

Sniper everywhere. Blockaded streets.