Archive for What am I doing?

Random gifs

February 19, 2009 · Filed under Cool videos, Funny, What am I doing?

I have to admit that it’s a bit harder to find joy throughout the day lately.  That’s not to say I’m entirely depressed; I’ve experienced the end of a relationship before.  I think I’m more mature in my way of handling it by now, too.  We still speak, we still try to enjoy eachothers company.  It’s difficult in a time like this to fully accept that you still care for eachother, but the relationship you’ve come to accept as a rock in your life is changing in a significant way. I don’t know what’s going to happen between us… I’d be pretty sad if we didn’t keep some kind of relationship.  For now we are just taking some time off to sort things out.

With that I will add that it’s nice to be with myself.  It’s been a long time since I’ve allowed myself to feel lonely. I think it’s healthy.

As Vonnegut would say, “so it goes”.

Here’s an idea.  Surely you’ve heard of memes.  You know, internet memes.  Like rickrolling, star wars kid, and charlie bit my finger.  Well a lot of these memes are generated through well known internet communites like digg, reddit (what I use most), delicious, twitter, etc etc.

You’ll see people mention another community, in these sites.  They’ll say “4chan” and it almost always is regarding some mildly objectionable content.  Cruise over to 4chan.org.  They’ll be some funny stuff, some weird stuff, some awful stuff.  But no matter what, there will be stuff.  And porn, they’ll be some porn probably.

Anyway, I was cruising around this site and I found some ridiculous stuff that I’m going to share with you.  In the animated gif section.  Keep in mind, 4chan is by no means an ‘organized’ site.  It’s random, very random. Things have no explanation.

In fact… let’s make it a top ten. Actually, a top nine (cause some are too graphic to put on here). Let’s make it all official-like, too.  I’m not going to comment on them because they should be delivered to you almost exactly as they were delivered to me.  Without context.

Top 9 Random 4chan gifs

9.

spidermanfalls

8.

micah

7.

dontstealmyfood

6.

treadmill-girl

5.

throwexplode

4.

bloodsport

3.

happybirthdaykid

2.

wtf

1.

ridingaligator

Hahaha. WTF?

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Welcome to the video blog, bitches

February 8, 2009 · Filed under video blog, What am I doing?

Yesterday was a really fun day.  Half way through yesterday, I bought something I’ve been wanting for a little while.  It’s the flip. A simple, compact, awesome camera.  I can be up and shooting within like 4 seconds.

Anyway, I recorded lots of things yesterday.  I missed out on a few really neat things that happened earlier and I left out a few videos that are too personal for me to share with the world.  But I shared enough of them for you to enjoy yourselves probably.

Expect more videos outta this guy. Outta this blog. ’cause now my right pocket is dedicated to the flip.

Let’s start with the very first video, the maiden voyage. Featuring my good friend peter.

We were on our way back home after spending most of the day walking around church st (it’s winter fest, so there were people carving ice sculptures, hoola hoopers, and other entertainment on the street). Unfortunately I got the flip after spending the day on church st. Anyway, we went home and played some tiger woods for the wii, here is me setting up the wii and us lounging a bit.

“the fish” is this god awful ice sculpture some guy was doing.  I’m telling you, it was awful. most ice sculptors were really talented, making somewhat elaborate sculptures very meticulously.  The fish was absolutely horrendous, done by some 25 yr old kid who had no idea what he was doing.  I think he must have lost a bet or something.  It was pretty funny though.

So later we went to this place called rueben james or “rj’s”.  Free wings on friday and saturday.  So we had some free wings.  My friend patrick is the cook so he made us one batch of super hot wings.  Peter and I had them… observe.

Oh right, then a little bit later I introduce myself to the camera.  Start our relationship off on the right foot, y’know?

Lots of other stuff happened but I’m not uploading those clips.  Eventually I ended up at this place above nectars (in burlington, vt) called club metronome.  Saw some friends and danced with them.

Just some good honest fun.  That might have been painful to watch but to be honest I don’t really care.  It was a jolly time.

Which leads me to my next video. The musical stylings of the psychadelic condom.  Most condoms are born for sex.  Some condoms have other plans for their life.

He had big dreams. High hopes. A soul that wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t rest. He just wanted to dance. And dance he did.

And finally, john dennison, malcolm thayer dennison, and some other dude from union attacked peters house at around 4am.

it was the perfect snowball snow, with plenty of ammo all around.  They threw those things really hard too.  Broke the screen right off the window.

Anyway there are other videos and maybe I’ll share them. But this is the first of many posts.  There shall be more!

Peace

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But you have to call me dragon

February 5, 2009 · Filed under Cool videos, Thoughtspam, What am I doing?

Yeah yeah yeah! How are my little girls and boys tonight? That’s pretty nice. I’m glad to hear you are alright.

I’m feeling pretty good. Watch this. It does an excellent job explaining exactly how i feel.

“I’m derrreeeekkk, and I can highh like thiiisssss, and I can sing hhhhIIIIiigghh”.  So anyway, things are going well over on my end.  My research is really starting to click, I love my architecture CAD class, my room is super clean, and I’m feeling healthy.

Can’t ask for much more than that.

Except maybe a funny clip.  You can always ask for a funny youtube video. And lucky you….you’re going to get it.

Watch that one twice. It’s way better the second time around.

Speaking of which, you know what else is much much better the second time around? Slumdog millionaire.  Great movie. Excellent movie.  There was so much to like.  I even really liked the dance scene during the credits, which some people are critical about.

I liked it.  And the movie was better the second time around, I caught things that I hadn’t noticed before. The relationships between the characters expose themselves very early on in ways that I had overlooked the first pass through.

I’ve started keeping a wooden box near the door to my room.  I put my pockets in there. What do I keep in my pockets?

  • Pen – micron (its a sweet artists pen but it writes so well its the only thing I use)
  • Cell phone (doesn’t go in the box but sometimes flirts in the area)
  • Knife
  • wallet
  • keys
  • car key

Pretty laid back pockets.   Change goes into the change cup.  I raid it sometimes when I pre-meditate a vending machine trip or something else of a known quantity under 3 dollars.

American change really needs to get on the ball.  Ditch the penny and the dollar bill.  I want $1 and $2 coins, damnit.

Oh, you guys will probably like this.  Check it out.  It’s kind of nerdy but, lets be serious, you are reading a blog right now (so you’ve come to accept the nerd within you)

Pretty inventive gizmo he created.  I like how he begs developers to use the software at the end.  I stumbled across that video from this blog, Giantmonster.  It’s got some good stuff on it… unfortunately he hasn’t updated in a little while.

So I’ve got some good news!  I found some old organic chemistry lab notebooks with some pretty sweet illustrations in them.  I’m going to upload them tomorrow.  I think you guys will really like them. I carried them in my backpack all day but didn’t approach a scanner.  Tomorrow I will cross paths with the scanning one and I will conquer it.

-session terminiated-

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The post that got cut short because my landlord is inconsiderate

January 24, 2009 · Filed under Cool videos, Funny, School, Thoughtspam, What am I doing?

Rub my hands together really fast and eventually they’ll be hot and I’ll gather dead skin cells between them. Dispose of the exterior; welcome the interior with open palms.

Speaking of open palms. Barack Obama was recently welcomed into the United States most exclusive clubs. We all remember where we were when we watched his inauguration.  I’ve been watching CNN every morning and every night since Tuesday. Gotta follow the new guy, see what he’s up to. I’ll tell you what, I’m impressed so far.

I’m not going to tell you all the things he’s done since he’s been in office, you probably know.  But I will tell you a few neat things.

For starters, he is trying to usher in a new era of government transparency. I agree. Especially considering the last administration’s sneaky games. But seriously, check out whitehouse.gov, it’s pretty awesome. In his first weekly address, the president brought up a new plan he has.  “We’ll launch an unprecedented effort to root out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending in our government, and every American will be able to see how and where we spend taxpayer dollars by going to a new website called recovery.gov.” Pretty awesome.  I’m excited.

I watched some clips of his first flight on Air Force one.  He ordered a cheeseburger with “lettuce, tomato” and some dijon. Why no onions, Mr. President? We’ll see. He got fries as well.

cadillac-one_011

Did you know they keep two bottles of the President’s blood in Cadillac one a.k.a. “the beast”.  Pretty rad.

Have you looked at videos of Bush’s inauguration?  It was a very different scene than this President’s. Check it out.

Not quite the same scene.

Enough about politics though, I could go on and on.

Have you ever read the ingredients in a slim jim?  Well one of the ingredients, the first ingredient, is “mechanically separated chicken”.  Would you like to see what, exactly, mechanically separated chicken is? Observe.

mechanicallyseparatedchicken

It’s also in chicken nuggets. Who woulda thought! It’s mostly skin and bone stuffs from chicken. Kinda looks like bubble gum or taffy.  …It’s not.

So chris schleicher was on jeopardy (Hyde, 2009). I didn’t watch it. But I do have a video response.  Or rather, I’d like to respond with a video that will make you cringe in disbelief. You might even say OMG LOLz.

Come on!

Oh and you should look forward to a post coming up that explains in detail how to perform a rat tail vein injection.  We had to perform a tail vein injection for my research but there is basically no information online about how to do it, and we had a lot of trouble.  I eventually dissected a rat tail and took a look inside to see what the best way would be to approach it.  It helped out a lot.

Oh oh! I can’t believe I didn’t mention this earlier. I have the most kickass schedule this semester and I’m taking an AWESOME class. Seriously. It’s an architecture course where I use CAD software to design houses and so on.  The software is called archiCAD and I’m really pumped.  My teacher is a Vermont architect and encourages the class to just play around with the software.  Which is right up my alley.  The first assignment was to write your name using the wall tool.  Check it out below (I made a house around it, playing around with the software).

mark_day11

Fun stuff.

You know what show you should check out? The soup.  I don’t watch many TV shows, except CNN and stuff like that.  But I have the soup recording.  It comes out once a week and the host is really funny.  He makes fun of all those stupid talk shows, reality shows, and wahtever else shows that I don’t watch.  But the clips he plays are really funny, let me see if I can find a clip on youtubezorz.

And one more, because you probably enjoyed that. And you can’t have one without the….. other.

Okay there are people walking through my house now getting shown stuff.  So i’m cutting this short.  Talk to you later, kbye!

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Back in school

January 12, 2009 · Filed under Awesome things happening, Funny, School, Thoughtspam, What am I doing?

Hey guys (and gals), I’m back in the library. Day one, semester 8. Just about done with this thing they call higher education. Except for all of those educations that are higher than undergrad, of course. Which I’ll probably be involved in.

So I think it is fitting to at least somewhat discuss how college has been, seeing as it is coming to an end. I did pretty well, not incredible, but pretty well. My GPA doesn’t exactly represent how well I did, and I’ll explain why.

You see, when I first came to school I thought smoking weed would make me study better. I would only smoke before I studied bio or chemistry, figuring it allowed me to better visualize the material. Or some other equally heady rationale. Anyway, it worked. Well, I studied and I got pretty good grades, made friends, blah blah freshman year first semester. Then second semester rolled in.

And I thought, “Oh last year I smoked allll the time and I did well, lets smoke” kind of thing. That was second semester. Before I give away the ending, I should tell you that I have a graph of my GPA on my resume. Yes, I have a line graph that shows how I did over the years here at UVM. On my resume I think it shows that I’m pretty consistent. Except for one semester. Can you guess which one, yet?

To make it easier, I superimposed a graph of my marijuana consumption on top of my semesterly GPA.

The green line is my GPA, the red is my marijuana consumption. They are indirectly proportional to eachother. Needless to say, I pretty much don’t smoke anymore.

When you come to college you make lots of friends. You also make lots of facebook friends. These are not one in the same. A facebook friend comes in many shapes and sizes. Let me name a few.

OMG I’m a freshman LOLz friends – These friends are anyone you meet when you first get to school. These people also occupy your cellphone under ridiculous aliases. Examples include “Brett from under tree”, “Susie who is hott”, “Big boob girl”, and then illegible drunk lettering/notes to yourself that make no sense tomorrow. These numbers are never called and rarely recollected. At first its some sort of race, how many facebook friends can you get?

The hot girl/guy – This person is hot. You love it when they put up an album from a sunny vacation spot, because they look good in their bathing suit. You convince yourself you arent creeping. You probably messaged this person once, said happy birthday to them on their wall, and don’t have a class with them anymore. By most accounts, you arent friends. Facebook thinks otherwise.

Who the…? <accept> – This person probably knows you. I mean, why would they friend you if they didnt? I guess we have a few friends in common, sure, why not. I won’t invite you over or lend you money or recognize you when I see you, but we’re facebook friends.

The acquaintance – probably the most promenent facebook friend of the bunch. The acquaintance is pretty much everyone you see from time to time. You have most of their numbers but you don’t call them too often. You see them at parties and you roll within venn diagram-esque circles of friends. They bridge the gap between facebook friends and friends.

Actual friends – These people leave their dirty dishes scattered around your apartment.

I mention this because burger king is really badass. They’ve got a great thing going on. Have you ever heard of whopper sacrafice? It’s pretty friggin cool. Its a new ad campaign where if you delete (sacrafice) ten facebook friends you get a FREE whopper. That’s right. A free one. You need to install their application and use it to sacrafice friends for a whopper.

You have a list of friends to the left. The ones who dont make the cut are burned and notified. “Your friendship with billy has been sacraficed for a whopper”. It shows up on your news feed. Once you remove the friends, you can’t have them back… or at least, not until they ship you your coupon for the whopper.

Mine is in the mail.

So being back is pretty decent. i don’t have class monday, wednesday, or friday. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to do shit those days… I am going to use those days to finish up my research and get on the ball for next year. The future. It’s coming.

In other news, Brad Pitt once said that of all the mattresses in the world, the most comfortable one is just a normal mattress with a few inches of memory foam on top. I believe brad pitt. he wouldn’t lie to me. I’ve been rocking a feather mattress since ’82. Not really. I was just an unfertilized egg and some precursor sperm cell at that point.

So I got some little brookstone 1″ memory foam mattress for christmas. It shattered my dreams. It was too thin, too hard, and wouldn’t retake its shape. Fuck you brad pitt. I take it back, i can’t stay mad at you.

I was just informed that we have this coming monday off! Unfortunately I already had monday, wed, and friday off… so I’m less than excited. And thats no way to feel upon hearing the news of a long weekend. *sigh*

Alright brothers and sisters. That’s all she wrote. And by “she” I mean “I” and by “wrote” I mean “felt like typing”.

Peace.

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Boot up the brain

January 8, 2009 · Filed under Random analysis, Thoughtspam, What am I doing?

7AM: if my brain had a boot screeen, multiple user login page, that’s where i’d be. ill tell you why. for starters, I’m awake.

I woke up in a foggy haze at 7am, pre-emptively (and correctly) anticipating my dad barging into my room saying get up. luckily i had the lights on and pandora going, to slowly lull me awake.

not a bad wake up tactic. why am i bootng up? well for most of break i’ve been up at 11 or so. the joys of a break. i’ve got a doctors appointment now… and now i’ve got to go. i’ll save this for later. by that time i’ll be running markOS v22.0

2:37PM: we meet again. this time my brain is shutting down. for a while there i was running… but i think i overclocked it and now im passing out. always remember Nap + Pandora = Win. and so this will be a day long chronicle of the things i do and the thoughts I have, minus all of those in between.

interesting things happened today.i wont talk about them, but as an example, a lady who was listening to music in another language, seemed like haitian or something, sounded awful, stabbed me in my arm with a catheter really quickly then took my blood and put it into little tubes. not your everyday event. also i peed in a cup and i was afraid i wouldnt fill it. instead i ended up being the man and having to stop myself mid-pee and finish in the toilet. interesting stuff. naps happen now.

reese

6:07PM: Well the nap was excellent, and so was the post-nap internet surfage. But now something else awaits. I’m going to shower, have some food, and go up to cambridge to play a little pub trivia. it’ll be an easy night for me tonight, going to take it easy. the weather outside is shisty/frightful. But listen. hey you, listen up. this is a day long post. a chronicle even. Sure I’m leaving things out. I almost woke up from my nap to tell you what the dream was.

11:37PM: So that whole thing, what you just read. That was the pre-post. This, on the other hand, we should refer to as the post-post. Meaning: this is my post, starting now.

So let’s go through a short course of events. Things I wanted to mention but didn’t and will have to sum up briefly, instead.

I went to New York City during new years. Also known as Coruscant (come on, star wars? really?). It was awesome. The subways are excellent and traveling through a new city is even better.

You know what I did last night? I went to Jillians and bowled. First off, Jillians really dropped the ball by removing all of their badass videogames. Bowling and pool are sweet, but WTF jillians, honestly. That aside, I had fun. I literally dropped a bowling ball on the floor by accident and it made a loud noise.

When I got back outside, though, guess what was sitting on my car? For real. Guess. I’m going to give you a hint because there is little to no way you’ll guess. The hint: there is no way it could have got there by itself.

Guess and tell me in the comments. because I care. Your call is important to us.

Okay I’ll show you a picture and let you guess again.

any ideas?

Okay okay I’ll show you a close up picture of it.

yeah thats right. It was a dead rat. I don’t know how it got there, but foul play is suspected.

Anyway you wouldnt believe how difficult it was to get those pictures rotated and non-sideways. I’m almost completely burned out from blogging. But I owe it to the sphere. I owe it to the sphere.

I have some other pictures to share with the class too. These are all of times past. Unfortunately my new york pics disappeared tragically. But check out some other cool stuff from boston. At the boston public library there is some exhibit upstairs that I checked out. It was a 3d sculpture behind a glass that was made to look like a scene. there were a number of scenes. First come pictures of the scenes I decided to share….

and finally

But see this scene? I took some pictures froma few other angles to give you an idea of the depth.

Pretty cool right? yeah I thought so too. Each angle looks like a separate picture. If I were you, and walking by the boston public library, id run in quickly to check it out. its worth 5 minutes. Plus there is an exhibit of yousef karsh.

Insert picture of the courtyard in the middle of the library…

I went to a coffee shop on newbury st called trident. It was pretty nice… observe mocha.

It was a sweet place. You could read any magazine you wanted and not pay for it. Pretty radical. Left wing hippy coffee shops. I ended up reading wired until i realized it was a bad issue with a cover that felt really neat to the touch. I wonder what kind of paper it was.

Then I read some architecture and design mags for shiggles.

But I did see something really … uhh.. i dont know. It was somewhat aggressive, somewhat offensive, someone inspiring, but altogether thought-provoking. So it wins todays “most unique shirt” award (as if there were many previous and many to come, which there arent).

without further adou…

You should have seen me stealth that picture. Pretended like I was texting and/or couldnt get service.

Okay, tis late now. And I’m excited for sleep. Sorry I didnt take more pictures of events today. I could have. No new ideas for you. I want to read science fiction books, I want to read the diamond age by neal stephenson.

alright guys its time for me to go so I’m going to hold the power button for seven seconds. did you know if you hold the power button for seven seconds on any machine it will automat-

SESSION TERMINATED

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Rain blog

December 27, 2008 · Filed under Cool videos, Funny, Thoughtspam, What am I doing?

Hey team.

My christmas present to you is a few pictures I like.

photoshoped-2dmovies-2d9

fail-owned-homework-stripper-shovel-fail

withoutlovejpeg

I hope you guys had a merry merry christmas. Mine was pretty great. ‘Twas the first times i spent christmas without any family members, though.

So here’s what I did. I spent christmas in beautiful vermont right around killington. I was with Shane’s family. there was a lot of snow, so much heavy snow that I built an igloo around a fire. well, i guess it wasnt techinically an igloo because there was no roof, but i did cut bricks out of snow using this old tree cutting saw taht doug (shane’s stepdad) found in the woods.

I also shot this rifle that doug had built with his friend. he’s pretty much a mountain man… always has a gun by his side. This is a picture of the gun he keeps by his side, PS. It’s called ‘the judge’ (it’s written on the side of it)

img_0084

That thing shoots shotgun shells, too! Anyway the gun he built with his friend is a replica of a Hawken .50 cal from 1840. That’s the kind of rifle you need to fill up with black powder and pack a led ball into it… old school style. They built it using only the techniques they would have had available to them in 1850.

So i shot that thing and it kicked a lot of ass. Shot a diesel lead ball.

But that was christmas, let’s talk about something else. Specifcally, let’s talk about Terminator.

Have you heard of the new Terminator? Let’s just say its going to be way more badass than the last sequel. remember the beginning of terminator 2? It was like this awesome battle between humans and robots in the future?

The whole movie is going to take place during that war! So sweet. Plus I think its going to have christian Bale as john connor. So that’ll be sweet.

Which reminds me, have you heard of “sweded” movies? Let me explain if you haven’t.

Sweded movies are movies made by complete amatuers, using the most simple of props they can find (because they are operating on a budget that is like… I dont know, 20 dollars or something) and they try to remake classic movies.

The Terminator 2 one is really funny. Terminator 2: Low Budgement Day

Hahah the guy who plays sarah connor is so funny.

Also, Jurassic park is worth checking out.

Alright, well that’s it for today’s episode. I’m really sorry my friend pete is a deusche bag. I’ll try and get him to blog and when he does… I’ll let you know about it. And if you comment on his blog he’ll definitely blog more often cause he’s on the computer a lot, has a lot to say, but needs the confidence boost of some comments to keep his spirits up.

With that said, Dave hyde nabbed a picture of my christmas cookies off of facebook and put it on his blog! Get him!

Happy holidays everyone.

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Face spam

December 10, 2008 · Filed under Cool videos, Thoughtspam, What am I doing?

Hello friends and colleagues. Let’s not discuss how long its been.

mccain-fail

Today marks the first day of the end of the first semester of the last year. You follow that? What I mean is that I handed in a final paper, tomorrow is the last day of classes, and I only have two exams until this semester is over.

Senior year, semester 1…. coming to an end. Now the future looms like some kind of predator with dynamic camouflage and I can’t help but notice three red dots on my chest.

Where am I going? What will I do? We’ll leave those subjects aside and we’ll talk about whats happening right now.

Well for one, I finally painted. For the first time in my life I painted a picture on a big canvas and it was a lot of fun. It was kind of relaxing, theraputic, cleansing, and rewarding. See I took this theater class this semester… for most of the semester I helped build the sets for the plays, but towards the end I’ve just been painting. I took to it like some kind of animal that takes to things pretty well.

Here’s a picture of the picture I painted of a picture I found online. Picture.

img_0183

Right now I’m in a coffee shop, blogging. I don’t have anything specific I’d like to talk about and I’m not going to tell you what I’ve been doing. But I will tell you that I’ve had a lot of trouble injecting stuff into rats, except for today when I finally succeeded. It was a bloody victory.

You know what a really funny show is? The soup. I don’t watch reality tv or any of the shows they talk about, but they make fun of things really well on the Soup. I bet you’ll laugh once or twice. And that’s all you can really ask for.

With that said, I’m going to take you along with me as I travel the interwebs. Please keep your extremities within the vehicular at all times or else you will automatically be removed from this blog and sent somewhere terrible.

Oh by the way last night when I was writing my paper I was also eating lasagna. In all of my haste I somehow managed to splatter sauce on my glasses (which I didn’t notice until it hardened) and ate an entire loaf of bread. I’m surprised I haven’t purged myself of any of the aforementioned fiendery yet. Let’s hope things work out.

I’m not taking you with me on my internet travels yet. I want to tell you how awful my trip was back from North Carolina after thanksgiving. So I spent something like 4 days sleeping in the same bed as my brother. Dave, my brother, was sick the whole time and it was only really bad the night before I had to wake up and fly home. It was really bad that night. You know how I know? Becuase he puked all night. I eventually decided to sleep on the floor, wake up, and pound orange juice and water until I felt like my immune system was chill.

Driving to the airport I realized it wasn’t. So did the side of the road, because it was coated in mildly digested orange juice. In terms of euphamisms, let’s just say my funds were liquid. And the market was crashing. I squelched a few throw up attempts and used the airplanes restrooms more times than anyone would like to. I had a connecting flight. When I eventually got home, I slept under my blankets with my coat on. It sucked. The next day I drove back to school and wrote a paper for class. Win.

But now its all celebration, or anticipation of celebration. For one, you are still reading this. For two, I’m still writing this. And for three, I pretty much don’t have anything to do tonight. Huzzah!

I’m going to continue painting though, for sure. I want to paint this picture. You may recognize it. If you don’t, you should really get on my level.

at-at1

Which brings me to this. Are you hungry? Watch the food network for some delicious (and healthy!) snacks like this one.

mmmmm, cheeseburger, egg, bacon, donuts. Fucking gross.

You know what else kind of blows my mind? People are obsessed with finding life on mars. I mean, its super cool and all that for many reasons, but some people are more interested in seeing a tiny maybe-bacteria fossil that might not be anything when there is some truly alien shit going on right here.

For example (of course I’m going to give you an example), look how ridiculous this looks. These things are aliens. They are absurd. Just look!

Those crazy things.

Alright, lets hope for my sake, your sake, and for the sake of everyone who ever lived (did you know that there are as many people alive right now than there ever were alive, ever?)(did you also know that I just looked up the validity of that statement and its completely false? sick.)

Cheers people, now I need to go back and insert pictures.

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Captain’s log, stardate: October 19th, 2008

October 19, 2008 · Filed under What am I doing?

Greetings and salutations.  It is more than likely that it will be quite some time before the masses (mini-masses) realize that I’ve posted here.  I can’t say I blame you.  I abandoned you for two months.

So let’s get caught up, shall we?  I mean the last time we talked it was mid-august.  What have I been doing? What am I doing? What will I be doing shortly? All that and more in today’s edition of welcome back blog.

First off, my immediate surroundings. I’m on my last sip of medium dunkin donuts coffee, one cream no sugar.  It’s luke warm now and I’m pretty sad about the whole thing.  Lucky for me, I went to cosco yesterday and bought two huge-mongous bags of dunkin donuts coffee grounds.  So I’ll be refilling soon.

I’m in my kitchen listening to NPR.org 24hr streaming radio, “wait wait don’t tell me”.  I’ve been listening to NPR a lot these days.

I’m wearing moccasins, sweatpants, and a lumberjack plaid button up (only 13 bucks at cosco, sick).

So what have I been up to?  Definitely a few things.  Pause for making coffee….

Okay… brewage.  Well let’s go through the list, shall we?  Mopeds come first.

As you probably know I’ve been getting into restoring old mopeds.  It’s really fun, not too difficult, and awesome cruising around on them.  I’ve got 3, one is running great the other two are neglected a little bit, cause I’ve been harvesting them for parts.  I bought a new top end of my engine, though, which means I’m putting in a new cylinder so Its gonna go super fast.  Very soon I’ll be taking apart the engine, putting a new cylinder in, and grinding away at the engine case to make the thing really fly.

Also, I fixed a kid’s moped for him.  I was all professional about it, made a spreadsheet and gave him an invoice.  Sick.  Made some nice cash.

Next up, school. Escuela. I’ve been kicking ass, so its pretty cool.  First three tests, 100%, 96%, 98%.  Normally that would be awesome and I’d be all relaxed.  But I’ve got some other crap thats on my mind.  I’m graduating really soon, which means the future is approaching fast. Resume needs to be revised and sent out.  Insert stress.

I’ve been crushing the election campaigns, debates.  I’ve been trying to ignore the fact that mccain is a gremlin and try to give him a fair chance.  But there is a lot workign against him, ie: Palin. Oh yeah, and his history… graduating from the bottom of his class? Come on, bro. Oh, coffee is ready. Pause.

Back.  God damn.  I need some pictures in this post, don’t I?  I’ll find some and add them later.

I actually wish I had pictures of this next topic… LEDs.  So if you know me you’ll know that I’ve got a lot of projects going on, all the time.  Well this new project of mine is really sweet.  I ordered LEDs (light emitting diodes, small lights that are pretty bright, come in many dif colors, and use up very little electricty) from hong kong.  It was like 10 bucks for 100 of them.  Never having really played with circuits, I’ve been playing lately. Its really fun, and I’ve been making some really sweet shit.  The first thing I made was a strip of lights for my room. I got this projector for super cheap and hooked it up in my room, looks great.  But I wanted ambient lights (to make it more movie theater esque) so I bought that wood trim you find between your ceiling and walls (its called “crown molding”).  Drilled holes in it and wired up the LEDs to it.  Sauldering iron, hot glue, and a switch from radioshack… now i’ve got sweet lights in my room that are pretty slick and a little button next to my bed that controls them.

Cell phone pictures, bleh. I need a real camera.

So I’ve been making a bunch of those types of things, anything I can strap an LED to, I do.  I made a sweet one for Shane and Tory yesterday.. battery powered, put the switch in the wall.  I’m getting better.

Let’s see, what else.  Oh! cooking.  I decided I wanted to make more dinners and learn how to cook better.  Everyone knows sandwiches are my steez, but I want to expand my horizons. I’ve been working with pork lately.  The other night I braised pork.  It was friggin delicious. I braised it in apple cider for ~ 3 hours. My parents came up for dinner that night and both liked it so much they tried to make it the next night.  I wish I had pics for you.  Macklin, start braising stuff. I also tried my hand at roasting.

Now that’s pretty close to catching you all up to speed.  A few other things… I’m making a halloween costume again this year (I want to be maximus decimus meridius), I’ll show pics when I take them.  I’m taking theater class this year where I’m building the sets for the plays.  I’m a TA for solidworks.  I’m the micro CT administrator in the vermont lung center and I’m doing undergraduate research.

Okay. That’s what I’ve been up to.  But you know what I haven’t been doing?  I ahven’t been waking up early, working out, or blogging.  That’s gotta change. I’ll see what I can do.

But perhaps the biggest news we’ve got has nothing to do with me.  Tully is coming back. He’ll be on american soil really soon, Tuesday I think.  He won’t be in boston for a while, a couple weeks.  But I’m excited to see him.

The foliage is friggin GROYT. Vermont is beautiful.  Yesterday I went apple picking at Shelbourne farms in South burlington.  I’m telling you, it was gorgeous.  Overlooking the lake, the adirondaks, and being surrounded by mountains that were just lit up with colors was really awesome. Unforunately, I have no camera to take pics for ya’ll.  But suffice it to say, pictures wouldn’t do it justice anyway.

But the other weekend I went to Athol mass.  You say it like “asshole” but with a lisp.  A lithp. I like to call it buth-hole. Anyway, that was probably the first time this season that I really got to take in the colors of autumn. My friend charles gill lives on a farm, the farm school.  I won’t tell you about it, but it was huge, huge. there were pigs, dogs, and fires overlooking great views in the woods. Lots of fresh food, the best bacon in the world. It was great and it really made me proud of America, we’ve got some great land here. We really do.  I’m excited for Tully to get back and see it.

Well thats it, you are somewhat caught up now.  By the next post I should be able to comment on things other than myself.  It wont be baseball, but it might be other things. It wont be baseball because no matter how hard I try, I dont care.

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Liquid Nitrogen

May 31, 2008 · Filed under Uncategorized, What am I doing?

Hey everyone. Have you ever played with liquid nitrogen? It is really…..really….really cool. Literally, its cold. Really…. really cold. Colder than ice. Colder than dry ice. Colder than anything you would ever want to be surrounded by.

Why am I talking about liquid nitrogen? Because I’ve been playing with liquid nitrogen. And now for hte pictures. One moment please….

your call is important to us… please stay on the line…

Ok. great. They are uploaded. Where was I? Oh right, shits wicked cold. Super cold. And its really fun to play with.

So you can’t go and carry it in any old container.. you need to use this super insulated metal thing, and you get the good from this giant tank of compressed nitrogen. There is this super intense metal tube that you unlock and then put into the container and then you turn the knob. It makes really intense noises and the gas starts pouring out. This shit is so cold and so compressed that it wants to be a gas really badly, and if you put something in it, it turns to vapor and boils.

wicked sweet.

In that picture there is a bunch of cold gas all over my feets.

Ok so walking back I clearly picked flowers and such to dip into the liquid nitrogen.

Here is a little slide show of that.


So I put it in and it started boiling all badass like. Then I dropped it on the ground and it shattered. Sick

Oh yeah, I also took a straw and filled it with water. Then dunked that in (partially) with my finger over the top. About 10 seconds later…

Ice water baby.

True or false: it is completely safe for you to stick your hand into liquid nitrogen quickly and then pull it out?

…. true. Its not a big deal as long as you don’t leave it in there, because it evaporates so fast. Its a weird feeling too.

Okay enough of that, let me show you some more cool stuff. So I work with this thing called a micro CT machine.

Basically, it shoots tons of xrays at stuff, but it does it from all angles, every 0.5 degrees. What you end up with is a super sweet image. It can zoom into 27 microns… the human hair is like 60-100 microns thick. So it can zoom in a shit ton.

Basically you scan something and it poops out this awesome image that you can see in every way. Anyway you can slice it, you can see it. You can slice through the thing from every direction. On top of that, you can generate a 3d image of the thing and move around it. Insert nerdgasm.

Here are some pictures I took of rat spines.

Sweet right? So do you see that space in between the vertebrae? Well thats where the intervertebral disc is. Its like jelly. Mostly water. So it doesn’t really show up. But you are probably asking, Mark.. I see some stuff there. It looks like a little white cloud. Whats that?

Thats what I’m doing. See when people look at the intervertebral disc, they usually use an MRI, which isn’t as badass. They do it because you can’t really see the disc with a micro ct. But what I’m trying to do is see it. **CONTENT REMOVED… apparently people might steal my methods** check this out.

[There was a sweet youtube video here but I had to take it down. I guess scientists can be sneaky and might take it. Oh well, it was pretty cool looking too]

Pretty friggin sweet. Nobody’s done thing before with spines. So I’m pretty excited about it.

Ok. enough science. I have some social commentary to send you off with.

I was at this bar downtown and I was looking at this table, 3 girls and 1 guy. It was so ridiculous that I took a picture. They werent speaking to eachother. They were… well, just look for yourself.

Three girls, three little screens in front of their faces.

It was pretty weird, right as soon as I took the picture some guy flew down from the ceiling, or up from under the table. He just swooped in, “DID YOU JUST TAKE A PICTURE?!”. Uh, yeah? “YOU CAN”T TAKE PICTURES”. Okay, bro.

Oh yeah, go see iron man, it rocks.

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