Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Q but no U's LiveJournal:

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Friday, April 11th, 2008
9:21 pm	Finally, more concerts 4/12 Neko Case Carnegie Hall, Homestead 8pm 4/13 Mike Doughty Mr Small's 8pm 4/25 Matt Pond, PA Diesel 7pm 5/10 Tegan and Sara Palace, Greensburg 8pm 5/23 KT Tunstall Carnegie Hall, Homestead (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 6th, 2007
10:03 pm	One step closer to being done ... Though there's still that ton of work and actually writing the bloody thesis anyway. The plan is to walk in May 2009, which for those keeping score, would be 7 years of grad school or 10.5 after taking the first required course. CS proposals are public and one of the ex Mach guys I was working with in 1999 stopped by, which was just "holy crap that was a long time ago." (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007
3:41 pm	Spring Concerts 4/19 Great Big Sea The Rex 4/20 Spoon CMU 4/23 Loreena McKennitt Reading 4/24 Vienna Teng Club Cafe 5/2 My Chemical Romance Petersen Center 5/7 Duncan Shiek Club Cafe 5/9 They Might Be Giants Mr Smalls 6/4 Charlie Daniels Band Star Lake 6/25 Rush Star Lake 7/19 Neko Case Byham (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 16th, 2007
9:22 pm	We're famous ... Most of our lab is at a conference that we're very well known for, and the highlight is this : For those who don't know, one of these guys is in the cube next to deathb and I. You can figure out who asked about what was under the labcoat ... (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 20th, 2006
12:05 am	A day for the unexpected The good : The motorcycle no longer has a top speed of 35mph. Though the only thing wrong with it that I fixed shouldn't have been able to cause that problem. The bad : The answer to "why do I have a bloody glove?" is "because you ripped off part of your thumbnail." At least it didn't hurt. Until the alcohol. Ow. The ehh : The lyrics to the title song for the new James Bond are not on the Internet, nor is it on the soundtrack CD !? (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 28th, 2006
8:45 pm	I don't want a pickle ... I now have a fully functional motorcycle. Though I only managed a grand total of 1 mile before the thunderstorm got here. Discoveries : it feels really weird not to be able to see the car directly behind me. And three-dimentional hills suck. (Comment on this)
Saturday, October 7th, 2006
1:48 am	Aargh, I've been thinking of replacing my driver's side mirror, which has been somewhat floppy ever since an unfortunate incident in a carwash a couple of years ago. Today some idiot decided for me by ripping it off along with most of the paint on that side of the car. And I thought Forbes was safer in light of all the windshield smashings on Darlington. Whoever you are, may you forever be hounded by an army of rabid ants. Odds are it was a PAT bus and most of the damage is plastic from its bumper that's melted to my car and will clean off with a lot of gentle scraping. Not what I had in mind for this weekend. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006
11:42 pm	Athens-Atlanta 87 miles, 5600 vertical feet in a little over 8.5 hours, and I'm never doing the full thing again. Turns out the second 52 miles of the course that I've done before is a lot harder if you have to do the first half to get to it. The 86 degrees, sun harsh enough to give _me_ a farmer's tan, and 10mph headwind screwed a lot of people into dropping out or taking 25% longer than usual. Despite the wet first half to Dacula at 38 miles, it looked like we'd make our target of 6.5 hours, until half the team dropped out at that point. The three remaining would have to be lucky just to finish. Joe dropped at mile 65, and I got to the checkpoint at 71 with the intention of quitting, and only left after realizing that it'd take 4 hours to get to the hotel if I waited for the shuttle bus and only 2 if I kept going. Those were seriously the most miserable 2 hours of my life, and I wouldn't have made it if not for a lot of help and encouragement from John. Never before have I come to a hill and found myself actually unable to go up it. Strangely, I didn't feel as bad as I expected the next morning. Though I'm either getting another cold or I did in fact fry my brain. Now off to bed where the electric blanket set to max is almost as good as a full-body heating pad. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 30th, 2006
12:37 am	NYC 100k About half as hard as I expected, but only because I did half as much as I was supposed to. Actually, my race was pretty much over before it started. First I get woken up before my alarm by _thunder_, and then on my way around the half of the course between larrygreenfield's apartment and the start, I become the first person to discover that the low point is full of a 20' diameter puddle deep enough to contain a submerged speedbump. The start gets pushed back an hour to wait for the rain to lighten up. Meanwhile, the rest of my team decides there's no point in risking a wet race, except for the two only signed up for the marathon, and I figure I'll join them and take it easy, since I've already trashed a set of bearings and have nothing else to do. Apparently at least half the non-pros either didn't start or switched to a shorter distance, which makes for a harder race since there are fewer people going any particular speed to form draft lines. The organizers tried to compensate for it by changing the start spacing and drafting rules at the last minute, but the end result was that nobody knew what they were. Thus, when they started the 42k, I don't think half the people in front of me realized the pro division was starting at the same time and took off much too quick for the first lap. Teammate K later told me he was shocked I didn't try to keep up, since I easily could have on the uphill. I instead was what had happend to M who'd been right behind me until then. Turns out she, along with most everyone else behind me, was having more trouble with the slippery road than I was. So I figured I'd try to make up the 200 yards or so between me and K. Took 2 laps by myself to do it, largely because I'd lose on the downhill half of what I'd gained on the uphill. Replacing the oil in my bearings with muddy water probably had something to do with that. That and the downhill wasn't steep enough in most places to be really useful. The 21k leaders caughte up after their delayed start, and I managed to fall in with them until they finished at which point I took it easy until the group behind caught up. They somehow thought they'd lapped me since they had the lead woman, and I was pretty sure they hadn't, but when we all lapped M the corner before the finish, I figured I do another lap with her just in case I'd miscounted. And now the slackers who've been sitting out the race, not knowing that I'd already planned to do an extra one as M's windbreak, tell me (falsely) that I do in fact have one more, which means 2 more for M. By this point the road is starting to dry out, so 2 more doesn't sound too bad. Of course, their deceit is revealed the next time around when the officials tell us we're done, but by then I'd gone past the exit, so I do one more cooldown lap to make it over 50k. I thought about trying for the full 100 again, but I'd have been dead tired when I finished, and I didn't really want to be one of the last people going around by myself. Turns out there would have been plenty of others, just spaced out enough never to see each other. The 42k time was 1:54.44 for not really trying that hard. The kicker is, if I'd planned to keep up at the start and risk wiping out, I'd almost certainly have finished no worse than 4th. Oh well. (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 13th, 2006
4:56 pm	Updated concert schedule 8/18 Duncan Sheik/Vienna Teng Station Square free 8/19 The Brain Surgeons (ex Blue Oyster Cult) 31st St Pub $7 9/9-10 Gaelic Storm Station Square 9/10 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young Star Lake 9/12 Kyler England (a zephryite's ex) Club Cafe 9/24 Roger Waters (ex Pink Floyd) Star Lake 9/30 Blue Man Group 10/4 K.T. Tunstall Mr. Smalls sold out early last time (1 Comment |Comment on this)
3:44 pm	It lives ! With a little fiddling, I even managed to get the bike started last week. Though when I went to turn if off, the switch went past the off position and straight into "short-out-and-blow-all-the-fuses" oops. Thankfully, I have a spare switch. Less usefully, the last owner broke the head off the drain screw for the brake system, so now I must thorougly confuse the parts department woman in finding the brake that will fit with with the spare front suspension that's currently in pieces in my kitchen or the one on the bike, neither of which are as old as the rest of the bike. As a bonus, CCAC had a power failure, so they cancelled the class robots_suck & I were supposed to take, so now I have to wait until October to get my license. Ie: just in time for it to start snowing. (Comment on this)
Thursday, August 3rd, 2006
12:20 am	Some Zen required ... I finally got around to acquiring a motorcycle last weekend. A Kawasaki KZ400 22 months older than me, to be exact. It's not exactly working, which is all well and good since I won't have my license for another month. Actually, given that all my weekends until mid-october are booked, and the list of things to fix is longer than I expected, I'll probably get it done just in time for winter. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 15th, 2006
11:15 pm	Friends don't let friends dial drunk ... I got home from the concert last night to discover that [redacted] broke up with my machine. Trouble is, I have no idea who [redacted] is or why she hates me. I am, however, pretty sure that I'm not Steve. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 29th, 2006
12:10 am	Race Report Badger State Games in 1:30:41.7. The race managed to just fit in between two lines of Midwest thunderstorms, which left the road damp at the start, and probably scared off the less-serious crowd, leaving most of the same faces as last week. Unlike last week, everyone took off at the start before things settled down after the first few miles and I ended up in a nice group for 24 miles until they upped the pace after the last hill to end a minute ahead The hills were surprisingly sucky since they were big enough to notice, but just short enough to sprint up. And while the middle half of course was amazingly smooth pavement, the ends were foot-numbingly coarse. Though that might have been a bonus since it was quite grippy even when wet. It felt a lot faster than last weekend, but given that this course was supposedly slightly under-distance, there's almost no difference. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 21st, 2006
1:37 am	Race Report Big Granite in 1:32:05.7, good for 59th of 150 overall or 9th from my wave. Stupidly I let the only other guy in my age bracket beat me by 2ft at the finish. None of us expected to do so well on a slow course on a mid-90s & humid day - if we'd known how close we were, we might have tried to break 1:30, but that might have resulted in flying off into a cow pasture on the last downhill. And since the local cows are apparenly unhappy that they have to wait until the race ends to cross the street, it might be best not to tempt fate. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006
11:05 pm	May's a bad month for machinery Or maybe it was just yesterday. First my answering machine gets stuck in a loop. Thankfully turning it off for a while fixed it. Next, I try to set my VCR to record ABC's Desperation (why they're trying, I don't know - it's one of the least suitable for TV of Stephen King's books), and it's the same time as House so the computer can't do it. I try to eject the tape that's been in there for months to see how much is left. The cassete ejects. With the little plastic lever that pulls the tape out tangled in the tape. So much for that. And before, on my way home, my clutch pedal repeats its trick of sticking halfway down when I step off of it. Since the pedal only has any effect in its last inch of travel, it shouldn't matter, except that it confuses my foot, causing me to drive like an idiot. It goes back to normal if I pull up on it, so the first time I figured it snagged a floormat. Turns out it merely ran out of fluid, which should never happen. It's not clear where it all went, since nothing should work if it is leaking. Fortunately, I haven't gotten around to cleaning out my trunk, so there was a handy container of hydraulic fluid. Which makes me very itchy. Which is pretty light for something that eats paint and plastic. The first time I had to deal with the stuff was when the clutch in my parents' old car stuck together after a summer of disuse. This was in pre-interweb days, so nobody around knew there was a simple, if insane, solution to this problem : put car in gear, step on clutch, turn key, pump gas, hope it unsticks before you run into something or the driver's head falls off. We eventually gave up and junked it 2 months before I learned to drive. Probably for the best since that car was 8 years older than me and would have turned into a pile of rust if it hit anything. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 17th, 2006
12:38 am	Travel Plans I haven't gone further from Pittsburgh than Ohio or Ohiopyle all year. However, now I get to do something about it : 5/27 Detroit 6/15-6/27 Milwaukee 8/25-8/27 NYC It'll be nice to see my parents again, though I'll be spending most of the time refinishing their kitchen. The rain is playing hell with my plans for the Wolverine Marathon or Big Granite. On the up side, it's at least screwing everyone else too. Since I have no fixed dates to be there this year, I suppose I should figure out when to fit in visits to the Boston & DC contingents when they'll actually be there. (Comment on this)
Monday, May 1st, 2006
1:07 am	Buggy buggy buggy Now that I got a chance to listen to the WRCT recording, I should take this chance to record any snarky comments while I remember them. I suppose I could be much snarkier, but I don't exactly want to piss off too many musclebound men (or women). Actually, it's the unstable alumni who break into their opponent's buggy room and piss on everything that worry me more. But don't say I didn't warn you. ( Read more... ) (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 27th, 2006
3:05 pm	Bring me ... a shrubbery ! My balcony plant (originally from zyrain's basement) finally leapt to its doom one too many times. Anyone want to help me figure out what I should replace it with ? (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 19th, 2006
10:30 pm	Almost, but not quite, Carnival The air is warm, the sky is sunny, there's no parking on campus, and I'm short on sleep, so Carnival must be just around the corner. Unfortunately, this time, it's work that's keeping me up late, so I'm going to be happy to get away long enough to just see buggy and get dinner with whoever is in town. Of course, the forecast calls for thunderstorms _both_ mornings. At least it has stayed nice long enough for me to find out exactly how out of shape I am. Which is not as bad as I was afraid of, but not as good as I'd hoped for. Though the insane winds on the trail last week might be responsible for some of that. (1 Comment |Comment on this)