shuffle, shuffle...

This little old lady asked me to help her cross the street today. She was worried about all the ice and snow. Despite my initial reaction (”What the fuck is this? 1955?”) I helped her across the street. How nice of me, right? I was feeling pretty charitable and gracious afterwards. That lasted for about 30 seconds until some old guy with a cane wound up in front of me on a crowded sidewalk, walking at about the pace of Tim Conway in those old Carol Burnett Show skits.

”MOVE IT, PAPPY!!

My charitability and graciousness come in very tiny, well-defined “bursts”!

d.

maybe it's one of those cool 'mission impossible' face masks...

There is this student in my Astronomy class today, sitting all the way in the back who looks more than a little like Tom Cruise. A youngish, pre-braces, post-Risky-Business... pre Nicole-Kidman but post-Top-Gun Tom Cruise. And when I say "more than a little" I mean...well... a LOT like Tom Cruise. Enough that when we make eye contact during class it kinda freaks me out.

"Oh SHIT... Tom Fucking Cruise is in my Astronomy class!!"

I find it terribly distracting. I mean, imagine how bad it would be if I was a WOMAN. (Or gay even.)

D.

re: glistening white stuff....

I will say one thing about my iPod... it sure makes shoveling snow a lot more pleasant. Good LOUD music... I was able to do the whole driveway, with 12”-14” of snow, without even taking a break. I usually take at least one break, sometimes two. It’s a long, steep driveway, and I’m old and out of shape. So it was nice to have a little added source of energy.

I love my iPod, but there is one thing about it that bugs me...

Earbuds.

You know those things... the minimalist evolution of headphones... little padded speaker doohickers that you cram in your ear? I hate those fucking things. I always have. I can NEVER get them to stay in. I twist them and turn them and tilt them... nothing works. Do I have, like, a weirdly shaped earhole or something? Can other people wear these things without CONSTANTLY fucking with them? It drives me crazy. And even worse, the right one falls out WAY more than the left one. Is it because I move my right arm more than my left? Or is it because my ears are asymmetrical? It could be. I’ve never actually SEEN my ears... you know... “head on”. I’m tempted to grab my digital camera, photograph both of my ears and compare them in Photoshop – just to get to the bottom of this thing once and for all.

And you might ask – well, Dave... why the hell don’t you just chuck the earbuds and plug in your old headphones to your iPod? Because it’s an iPod! And the way you know that someone has an iPod are the little white earbud cords coming out of their pocket. And I’m far too appearance-conscious to abandon the status factor that accompanies iPod ownership. I know... it’s sick.

One other winter-related-iPod story. I was walking from my office to the subway on Monday, and I put on my iPod for the short (one long-block) walk. And how cold was it in Manhattan on Monday? Well, during that short walk, the rubber insulation of the cords to my earbuds FROZE and lost all their elasticity. You could bend the cords and they would hold their shape. This is what happened to the O-rings in the space shuttle Challenger’s solid rocket boosters, by the way... the 18th anniversary of that was yesterday or today or something. Just a bit of frozen-rubber trivia.

Anyway... I think that’s all I have to say on that matter. I’m on the train, Thursday morning, heading in for my first Astronomy class. It meets once a week, Thursday mornings from 9:00 to 11:40 or something crazy like that. It’s fucking insane. It’s like planning for three classes all at once. It’ll take a while to get used to feeling out that much time and planning for it. Right now I’m just treating it like it was TWO classes, with a brief “interlude”. I should also probably try to t-a-l-k... m-o-r-e... s-l-o-w-l-y... than I usually do.

The thing that’s bugging me today is that I didn’t get a chance to check out the classroom yesterday, and it’s a classroom I’ve never taught in before. I hate going in blind like that. I don’t even know the board situation as far as wipe-vs.-chalk. It’s this kind of uncertainty that unsettles me. Yet another tiny glimpse into my neuroses...

All for now. Time to decide on a HW assignment to go with the first lecture.

D.

snowstorms and stupidity...

The University is open today. Fuckers. I don’t know WHO makes this decision, but I’m gonna find out and send them a letter. EVERY public school in the city is closed... the buses, subways, and trains are ALL experiencing delays, but....eh... let’s just let classes run as scheduled. Well... fuck them, I stayed home today. I feel bad for all the students who are going to see that school is open, trudge their way to class, and see that it’s cancelled, but... you know what? The last time this happened, only half of the students bothered to show up anyway. But I am not risking my ass driving in a foot of snow. What are they gonna do, fire me? Go for it. I’ll move to Alabama right now. (Today’s high in Mobile... 50º)

D.

that’s the news and i am outta here...

I TiVo’d the new Dennis Miller show on CNBC last night, and watched it today. And what I’ve discovered is this – if you take Dennis Miller and take away the “funny” and put him in charge of a news show, what you wind up with is an obnoxious Libertarian prick, and an excruciating hour of television. Even during the little middle section where he comments on the news in the style of his old SNL news or his HBO show... without a studio audience even the GOOD jokes fall flat, and the BAD ones hit the floor with an embarrassing THUD and a trickle of nervous laughter from the crew. Painful.

And that’s not even to mention that his politics have drifted far enough to the right that I no longer agree with much of what he says. Shit, if I want to watch somebody unfunny spout politics that I disagree with, I’ll watch the fucking O’Reilly Factor or something.

The Doc's advice...? For fake news that is topical AND funny... stick with "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart".

D.

today's email from the sysadmin...

Security ALERT - 1/27/04

W32/MyDoom Worm

Considered to potentially be one of the worst and quickest spreading threats in recent months, MyDoom should be addressed immediately.

OVERVIEW: MyDoom is a virus that spreads both by email and over the Kazaa file-sharing network. The mass mailing version spoofs the sender name of its messages so that they appear to have been sent by different users instead of the actual users on infected machines.

While the body of the email varies, it usually includes what appears to be an error message, such as: "The message contains Unicode characters and has been sent as a binary attachment." The icon used by the file tries to make it appear as if the attachment is a text file that the users' machine seems unable to read

IMPACT: W32/MyDoom drops itself to the System folder under the name taskmon.exe. It also drops a file named shimgapi.dll, which is a backdoor keystroke program loaded by the worm to record everything being typed, including username and passwords. The backdoor allows outsiders to connect to a user's computer.

PREVENTION: Windows users should check for a file named shimgapi.dll in the system directory, and update their AV software.

No... Windows users should buy a fucking MAC! Case closed, says the Doctor.

Dr. D.

on the right foot...

I always like to start of the semester by making a good, positive first impression on my students by arriving to the first class 20 minutes late. It happened last semester too. It’s never my fault... it’s the damned train, and the fact that there is no “wiggle room” built into my schedule in the morning... I leave the train, hop the subway, walk to work with maybe 5 - 10 minutes to spare. Which means that if the train is 15 minutes late, then *I* am 15 minutes late.

Or in the case of today... even longer.

And the reason for the delay was what they kindly call a “pedestrian accident”. Which of course means that some poor guy got killed by a train. Not MY train... but a train up ahead of ours. Which meant we had to stop for about 10-15 minutes, then BACK UP for about 10 minutes so that we could take another track.

And I always think when I hear about train accidents like that – “Shit, I hope that a train that *I* am on never hits and kills anyone.” Because I know exactly what will happen. Despite the tragic nature of the event, the only thing I’ll feel is irritated and inconvenienced, and then I’ll have to deal with the self-loathing that comes from being disgusted with myself for having such a reaction.

I was right.

D.

no field lubrication...

That phrase has been hanging around in my weblog “notebook” – the MS Word document where I write all of my entries before transferring them to my various journals – waiting for a chance to be a title. I don’t know what it means, but I like the way it sounds. I saw it on a sign on the machinery underneath one of the commuter trains I ride every day. I suppose it means that you shouldn’t lubricate that particular part of the train while it’s in a field. I dunno. What I’m trying to say here is that I’m back on the train (“yeah...”) on my way to work for the first day of a new semester. Modern Physics in the morning... Applied Calculus in the afternoon. Two and a half hours of Astronomy on Thursdays. It’s hard for me to get excited about any of it. Like I said before... part of my brain is already outta here... living down in Alabama where it’s nice and warm.

The weather there... oh... I didn’t talk much about it while I was sending my little travel updates, but... oh my GOD. One night while we were there the temps dipped down to something that felt almost like winter and made you want to put a jacket on. But the rest of the time...55º... 65º... 60º. In JANUARY, people! The Home Depot “garden center” was open... with flowers BLOOMING outside of it. We actually saw azaleas blossoming. In JANUARY!!

Oh... I am going to like it there!

Especially given what the weather has been like HERE lately. It snowed like 4” – 6” while we were gone, and that melted and refroze a few times before we got home, leaving us with what is essentially a GLACIER where our driveway should be. And the temperature hasn’t gotten above 20º since we got home, so there is NOTHING we can do about it. You put salt on the fucking thing and the crystals just burrow little individual tunnels down into it, but not enough ice ever melts to fucking dissolve the salt so it can do more than that. So now we have a glacier-with-little-holes-in-it where our driveway should be, and we have to get a big running start with our car from the street and just kinda crash into the driveway and slide up the hill to park. Great fun.

Anyway... I could go on like this forever. I was just astounded by the weather down there. Somehow I never knew... or never really thought that much about it. I mean... I knew that the South had mild winters, and that it never snowed there... it just never occurred to me how... tropical it was down there. Flowers! Palm trees! It was like I was in the Caribbean or something. You know what it was like... it was like Gilligan’s Island. Think about Gilligan’s Island for a minute... the weather was like... it was like they didn’t even HAVE weather. Don’t you get the idea that Gilligan’s Island was always the same temperature... the temperature of the inside of a TV studio? Maybe it rained now and then, but when it did, it was still 72 degrees.

And people keep saying – “Oh, but you just wait until the summer... ooh you’re going to be miserable.> Yeah... you know what? Bring it on. Turn it up. I got the central air... I got the sunroof... I can take whatever you got. And you don’t have to fucking shovel “hot”... y’know?

Enough about the fucking weather, yeah? I have WORK to do people!

Later...

Dr. D.

last day...

nine days with these freaking KIDS and not a single break. i forget what it's like to THINK, y'know? i enjoy thinking... i get PAID to think. and i think it's been more than a week since i've had a complete thought begin and end in my head without being interrupted by something.

anyway... classes start tomorrow, which means that i'll be able to sit on a train in the quiet and write and work and THINK.

whoever invented 'vacations' clearly did NOT have kids.

d.

a good thing gone bad...

I headed over to the iTunes music store to download snippets from Ani DiFranco’s new album “Educated Guess” and I have to say... I don’t think I’ve ever heard such a talented musician produce an album that was such unmitigated crap from beginning to end. I mean... I know this is only based on 30 second excerpts of each song, but unless the album consists of 14 awesome songs each of which has 30 seconds of crap in the middle, I stand by my assessment. She’s apparently given up playing chords on her guitar in favor of jerky, unmusical, dissonances... and she seems to get far too big a kick out of singing harmony with herself at some unpleasant interval three octaves above the melody (if you can call it a melody) in EVERY song. The only thing that breaks up the monotonous unpleasantness of the songs are the three “spoken word” pieces. And aren’t THOSE always excruciating!

Anyway, thank you Apple and the iTunes music store for saving me $13.99 on THAT stinker.

Dr. D.