July 2005 Archives

I just emailed in my last assignment for Advanced Oceanography so I am officially declaring it summer finally. Three more classes added to the rolls of courses completed (Field Geology of the Northwestern US, Urban Geography, and Advanced Oceanography) and now I get a whole 3o days off until the Fall '05 semester begins. Let the good times roll!

Yes, by jove, my laptop has arisen from the dead. After several months of borrowing Mary's laptop and being too busy to even work on the beast, I finally got tired of not having it (and tired of saying that Mary's laptop was not my laptop. It is a mixed bag, though... The good news is that it is running. The bad news is that I had to basically take the hard drive to zilch and start over again. The good news is that I actually had a fairly recent backup of all the important stuff! The bad news is that I have to reinstall every thing from scratch. The best news is, though, that it is like having a brand new laptop since I haven't crapped it up with excessive junk (read: install, try once, hate it software). The only real casualty is the battery which seems to have died and is beyond rescue. So, until I get the cash together, it will remain a tethered laptop. Back to getting it filled with all my stuff (and getting used to the keyboard again - much bigger than Mary's Vaio).

Having lived in two major, distince places in my lifetime, I seem to have an identity crisis. I came across You Know Where You Come From... When... on Blogthings. Take a look at my modifications to the entries from Philly and DC.

You know I am from Philly because...

• You punctuate every sentence with, "You know" at least twice.
• You want olive oil, not mayonnaise on your "hoagie".
• You hate the Redskins. IGGLES!
• You hate Dallas.
• You realize that your favorite dessert is "wooder ice".
• You find yourself using "yo" and "youse guys" when talking long-distance to family members.
• You know how to spell Schuylkill.
• You pronounce ACME "ACK-A-ME". Only in jest :-)
• You think that $2,500 a year for insurance on a 1977 Toyota Corolla is a bargain.
• You find youself at a nice restaurant thinking "I wonder if they have cheese steaks?"
• You sleep soundly through gunfire and ambulance sirens.
• You visit New York and are impressed by how clean it is.
• You can't eat french fries without Cheese Whiz.
• You call sprinkles on top of your ice cream cone "jimmies".
• You don't think Wawa sounds funny.
• You snub a cheese steak that isn't on an Amoroso roll.
• Your parents, brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles all live on the same block. Not mine since I am a transplant.
• You know who Jim O'Brien is and how he died.
• You can't imagine lunch without a Tastycake. The hell with lunch, anytime is Tastycake Time!
• You're still not sure about Jerry Penacolli.
• A vacation at the Jersey shore (pronounced "Down the shoore") is better than going to an island (there's more stuff to do, plus you know everybody.)
• You know where to find the Rocky statue.
• You know that only tourists go to Geno's, Pat's and Jim's for authentic cheese steaks. Boo! I love Jim's steaks!
• You only go if you're drunk and it's 3:00 a.m. Well, yeah...
• You can make a cheese steak and you've never been taught.
• You've never been to the Liberty Bell, or the only time you were there was on a class trip in third grade. Not!
• You know what and where "Boathouse Row" is.
• You will buy a pretzel from anyone, anywhere without even thinking of where it was - or where his hands have been.
• You can't imagine a breakfast without scrapple. Not!
• You don't know what a sub is, but you think they are trying to describe an imitation HOAGIE.
• You aren't a bandwagon Sixers fan - you loved them when they sucked, and before they had A.I.
• You go to The Gallery or South Street in the summer time just to chill. Hate the Gallery, but used to live right off South Street and loved it!
• You have the pizza place on speed dial.

You know I am from Washington, DC because...

• You say you're from DC, but you actually live in VA or MD but are too tired to explain where. Yep, from Arlington, VA, born in DC
• You don't consider exploding man hole covers to be an unusual occurrence. Been there, seen one!
• You know where the Pentagon really is but never bother to correct anyone about its location. It is in Virginia, dammit!
• When it takes you 45 minutes to drive 3 miles on I-66, 95, 395, 495, 50, 123, 29, or 270, it's a pretty good day.
• There are at least fifteen ways to get everywhere and you know which way to go based on the weather, time of day, current political climate, terrorism road closures, and whether you are coming or going.
• You pay more money in parking tickets in a year than you do in medical bills, college costs and rent combined.
• You know that driving through Georgetown, you will hear the music of the car next to you louder than you can hear your own.
• "I got stuck behind a motorcade" is a common and real excuse for being late.
• "Finding a parking space" actually becomes an appointment on your calendar. (E.g.. 7:00-8:00 Gym, 8:30-9:00PM - find a parking space, 9:00-10:30PM - Dinner reservations.)
• You've never once been to Wal-Mart and don't even know if there is one.
• When you say you're going to the mall and you don't mean shopping. That big grassy area...
• You never refer to the 'Metro' as the 'subway'.
• You elbow tourists out of the way on the Metro escalators to "gently" remind them to WALK LEFT, STAND RIGHT.
• Going to work early means being there by 9:00AM.
• You don't bat an eye at 500 politicians and businessmen in suits running like their lives depended on it just to catch a Metro that will be followed by another in 90 seconds.
• You call it Targ?t, not Target, and are well aware that the one in Alexandria is just a "tad different".
• When Washington National Airport is and will always be "WASHINGTON NATIONAL", not "Reagan National". They should have named the garbage dump after him :-) I still call it the airport at Gravely Point...
• You can tell by people's cars where they live and maybe even what neighborhood.
• You've claimed that there's nothing to do on a weekend night even when you have the entire nation's capitol to explore. So you go to Georgetown...
• You have the Metro map memorized, yet act like you don't know when someone asks you how to get to Metro Center.
• You meet someone else who says they're from the DC area and you realize they live two hours away from you.
• You notice that there's been construction on the same stretch of highway for the past 5 years and you've never see anyone working on it.
• You know you've crossed into Northern Virginia, without ever seeing a sign, only because your speedometer goes from 60 to 0. It's called Roslyn.
• You know that Vietnam is no longer in the South Pacific, it's now been re-located to Seven Corners. And Clarendon, too.
• The few times you have gotten lost in DC you have somehow ALWAYS ended up in Anacostia and every road out somehow leads back to Anacostia. Been there, done that a dozen times.
• You realize that I-395 is Northern Virginia's version of NASCAR.
• There is no such thing as North, South, East, or West on the beltway, it's just go "that" way! (Inner circle / outer circle)
• You go anywhere on the Eastern Shore, Rehoboth, Dewey, Ocean City, Skyline Drive, or the Outer Banks for vacation and everyone you meet is from DC. Been true for my entire life!
• Snow means rain to you.
• Ice on the roads just means that you pay more attention to other cars, but still go 75 mph on the highways.
• You can see the National Cathedral from almost anywhere. It kind of looms on the horizon.
• You know at least 2 rowers. I know about a dozen!
• You know that Georgetown is NOT only a school.
• You consider Northern VA to be in no way similar to southern VA.
• You know which bridges to cross to get to Maryland or VA.
• You actually know what goes on in Dupont circle.
• You can't go to Tysons Mall without seeing someone you know! Even after 35 years, it is still true!
• You have a few friends who don't know what their parents do...It's Top Secret government work. Was formerly married into a family of them!
• People don't ask you if Chevy Chase is named after the actor.
• You can harmonize perfectly with the alert for "Doors Closing" on the Metro.
• 50% of your senior class went to Mason, JMU, Tech, VCU or UVA. Actually, more like 90%

Originally from You Know Where You Come From... When... at Blogthings.

A very disturbing article of the New Scientist about a study done by a US scientist that it appears that we are entering a dark age of innovation. From the statistics gathered, there are fewer and fewer new patents. Could it be we have discovered everything that there is to be found or is it that we have gotten lazier and lasier with a iPods and couch potato accessories?

Bookmarks have been the biggest pain in my butt since the start of browsing the web. In my case, I have always had multiple machines - at home, at work, at school, and elsewhere - and have been constantly looking at ways to keep them either in sync or in one location. Over the past year or so, I have been using Furl and been very happy with it. I did try del.icio.us but just couldn't find a happy harmony. I also loaded up SiteBar, a way to host individual and team bookmark libraries. With the latest release of SiteBar, there are some very nifty new features (RSS, link activity, etc.) that I really like. One major advantage in my own life with SiteBar is that I know where my links are hosted and who can see them and who cannot. So for the moment, my main repository is Furl with a backup on my own SiteBar server. Oh, and another nifty feature with Furl is that it saves a snapshot of the page, a great feature for grabbing ephemeral news items off the media web sites.