Night life it's 11PM. I'm sitting on the window frame of my friend's guestroom, now my home for the summer. WPLN (our local NPR affiliate and my new employer) is playing a great jazz set out of a decrepit old radio I found at home in the attic. Little dell is glowing in my lap, attracting all forms of flying insects. With the brightness turned all the way down I can still see the setting mood and a few stars glittering bright overhead. I don't have an air conditioner in the guest room window yet (this is an old house), so it's cooler out here than inside. It smells like summer. Wet, humid, grassy, fresh. A little pavement. A lot of pollen and other things to make people sneeze. I love watching the lightning bugs and soaking up the night air.
I love summer nights.
It seems like so many of my memories take place at night. Sometimes they were snowy winter nights, other times they're the muggy evenings that make tonight seem like winter. When I was tiny, mom used to drive to get me to fall asleep. Something about motion and babies. It worked. Then, when I got older, the trips became journies into other worlds, accompanied by night-time music. The factories off Briley parkway were great smoking dragons at night. They guarded a hoard of "treasure," piles of glass that would sometimes look like gems, other times like silver or gold.
Nights like this make me think back on nights like that, and on nights out in the backyard on the phone or talking to the neighbors. Nights catching dozens of lightning bugs, nights watching for meteors. Nights and nights and nights outside.
"Fried Pies" by Wes Montgomery was the tune on the radio. Deceptively upbeat, with that leaned-back edge only jazz has. Upbeat, but still with the downside. That's life. Especially life at night.  ¶   0 comments

  WKMS Having a radio-station job was never really on my ideal career map. My perception of the job mostly involved images of hot, crowded vans and equally cramped studios. I certainly don't have a voice for radio. But as I spent the morning building new graphics for the website, I realized I couldn't have picked a better job for the summer. I get to manage a site, send out a newsletter, develop graphics, and listen to a station I like all day long. I'm hooked.
I'll be posting some stories from the newsletter here, most likely. I'm hoping to write 5 articles a day for Casteele, which means that will be my second job. 2000-2500 words a day on personal finance. I guess that balances out the awesome job, doesn't it? At least I get to make my own hours.
I'm also workshopping a new short story with some fellow writers this summer. Maybe it'll get to a sharable-caliber.
So that's my summer in a nutshell. Actual posts forthcoming, once I figure out a normal schedule for the day.  ¶   0 comments

  As if the Honda Robot wasn't awesome enough already... ...it can now read brain waves.

Japanese automaker Honda said it has developed a technology that uses brain signals to control a robot's very simple moves.
...
In a video demonstration in Tokyo, brain signals detected by a magnetic resonance imaging scanner were relayed to a robotic hand. A person in the MRI machine made a fist, spread his fingers and then made a V-sign. Several seconds later, a robotic hand mimicked the movements.

(full story here)

Now, before everyone starts screaming about "irobot" or other technology-gone-crazy stories, picture the medical uses of something like this. Most any physical disability could really benefit from a interfacing like this. Honda's also talking about use in Automotive safety measures, which would be pretty remarkable too.

For more on Asimo and other Honda robotics, check out Honda's Asimo site  ¶   0 comments

  Lost finale goodness Just reflecting on Lost's season finale again. Absolutely awesome episode. If you don't watch this show, grab a couple of the catch-up episodes like the one they aired last night (my bet is you can find someone with them on VHS or, if you have less scruples, via p2p) and watch the season finale. It's a good time to be a fan.
I'll spare you all the geeking-out that you can get from most of the fansites. Those of you that follow the show already had similar moments, the rest of you probably don't care. Instead, I'll just share this amusing tidbit from the finale:



how else would you pick up an attractive female prisoner?  ¶   0 comments

  TOWEL DAY! I almost forgot, it's Towel Day!


Explination from the nice people at http://www.towelday.kojv.net/ :

What do I do?

Carry your towel with you throughout the day to show your participation and mourning.

When do I do it?

May 25th.

Where do I do it?

Everywhere.

Why a towel?

To quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical
value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

The FAQ section's a riot. Since I live in Murray, the hour-from-anywhere college town, I'll probably not be the wierdest one out there. Besides, if anyone decides to make fun of me, I can just hide behind my towel until the offensive people go away. "(These people are mindboggingly stupid animals, they assume that if you can't see them, they can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous)."
So long, and thanks for all the fish.  ¶   0 comments

  Summer Update I'm surviving Summer-Murray nicely. The websites I'm working on right now have kept me busier than I thought they would. One's about finished, the other's gotten pushed onto the backburner for too long. Both need to be done by next week.
Living with TJ and Keeli is working out nicely. I love all 5 of their cats, and with 4 little kittens just getting big enough to run around, the cat-farm will only get livelier. I miss being at home, especially during the day. Since I don't start my job until next week, I'm home alone until about 4 every day. Finding food has been interesting. I can cook hamburger helper, spaghetti, any meat-on-a-grill, and not much else. John, a friend down the road, has been on a cooking binge lately, and has a book that will help teach me more.
I'm starting to read Robert Heinlein books, just because he's one of the few remaining Sci-Fi authors I haven't read much of yet. I'm finishing CJ Cherryh's The Deep Beyond. It's a 2 book collection, Cuckoo's Egg and Serpent's Reach I've enjoyed Serpent's Reach more than Cuckoo's Egg, but both were pretty entertaining. Watch the little "what I'm consuming" on the right. It'll probably be scrolling by quite often with new updates. Maybe. If I get up the motivation to update it.  ¶   0 comments

  For those of you who didn't know... ...I'm still in Murray. It's been a little exciting this week, and I'll hold off on all those details until they're finalized, but I am working up here, and I am living up here. All summer. Sorry to disappoint.

Oh, and Happy Mother's Day and all that stuff. I was actually quite a good son, and came in and had a present and everything, but it's been a long few hours since then, and now tomorrow's approaching rapidly, so goodnight.  ¶   0 comments

  Midnight Breakfast Tonight's our semesterly Midnight breakfast. At least 1000 students, many of which haven't set foot in Winslow Dining Hall all semester, pile in to try and win door prizes, sing Kareoke, and, most importantly, stuff full of incredibly unhealthy breakfast food. It's all in the spirit of the all-nighter, and because they know we're going to be up anyway, Student Affairs staffs the event. It's not every school that has a Vice President of Student Affairs, his co-workers, and the College Heads (well, they don't all have those anyway) like this.
Tiff and I sat with one of our Clark friends, and reflected on how much larger our table used to be. Other Clark people who weren't there, ya'll suck. The event's gotten larger every year, which is why some didn't come, but they handled it well by starting at 9 instead of 10, so the people just after the food were well out of the way in time for us to come in and actually sit down.
It was a nice chance to see some departing seniors again. Oh, and I won a T-shirt.
Sorry, there was insight, but I lost it somewhere after paragraph one. if I find it, I'll try and lead it back here later. If not, then consider this another my-schol's-better-than-yours post :P.  ¶   0 comments

  Rainy Day Today was the Senior Breakfast. It's a MSU tradition that's been going on for something like 60 years. The faculty and staff, including a lot of the big names on campus, get up and don their aprons to serve all the seniors breakfast. The rest of them show up 5 minutes after it starts to eat.
I don't remember if I wrote about it or not last year, but this was my first real initiation into the RCA President Office. I didn't do anything but sit at the little SGA table and feel awkward, but I remember the outgoing SGA president getting choked up behind the mike. It was, for me, the big reminder that (1) I was stepping up to one of the few really representative positions in Student Government and (2) my time here at MSU was ticking down.
Looking back, I feel like I've aged 5 years in the last 2 semesters. There's so much I still had left to do, so much that I'm hoping Alan, the new RCA president, will get a chance to do. I feel like we've changed, and grown, but that every step taken put 3 more further up the road.
And today, as I was handing out awards to the outgoing seniors, many of which came in when I did, I realized that I'm not just seeing the horizon on my college career, I'm standing on it. I have a certificate sitting in the corner, along with the others I have nowhere to put yet. I handed the gavel over on monday, and I have closed my last meeting. My time as RCA President has come and gone.
And, like I said, I didn't do enough.
I don't know if Alan reads this blog. If he does, he might be too sidetracked by my mispelling of his name (I never can remember if it's one "l" or 2). But if you are out there reading this, don't think for a second that you've got enough time. You don't. Everything is the same mad rush that you're going through now. If you take a breath, you're in the dust, and you'll spend too long trying to catch up to ever get back to where you could be.
So I'm on the Judicial Board now. It's another branch of SGA, and I hadn't tried it yet. I know a couple of the guys on there, and may know more once the remaining chairs are filled in the fall. It's a new thing, another change of pace. You know me, I couldn't extract myself from this stuff if I tried. So, I may not be Exec, but I'm still around. And I may not be changing the face of MSU, but at least I'm still part of it.  ¶   0 comments

  18-24 age group proves themselves dumb again CNN just ran a story on this, so I went and pulled up the following:

Thirty-three percent of respondents couldn't pinpoint Louisiana on a map.
Fewer than three in 10 think it important to know the locations of countries in the news and just 14 percent believe speaking another language is a necessary skill.
Two-thirds didn't know that the earthquake that killed 70,000 people in October 2005 occurred in Pakistan.
Six in 10 could not find Iraq on a map of the Middle East.
Forty-seven percent could not find the Indian subcontinent on a map of Asia.
Seven-five percent were unable to locate Israel on a map of the Middle East.
Nearly three-quarters incorrectly named English as the most widely spoken native language.
Six in 10 did not know the border between North and South Korea is the most heavily fortified in the world.
Thirty percent thought the most heavily fortified border was between the United States and Mexico.

Source: The Associated Press

Is it really that difficult, or is there more to the fat, dumb american stereotype than I'd thought? Over half of the people 18-24 couldn't find INDIA? It's a SUB-CONTINENT! That's like saying, gee, where's central america?
And that last one is just hilarious. Yes, our border is the most fortified in the world. That'd be why thousands slip through it daily.
Maybe I don't want to go into education.  ¶   1 comments

  Thanks for that... No electricity here since 9:50 (so much for the last 10 minutes of Gray's Anatomy!). What's more, I'm working on a paper due tomorrow. I think this is the second or third all-nighter that's been disrupted by a power outage. How can I put stuff off til the last minute if that minute's going to be taken away from me? :(  ¶   2 comments