OMG this is awesome.

Current Mood: amused

I started the weekend out by going and seeing "Star Trek". I have to say that I liked it and I am excited about seeing the future movies. Most of the cast has already signed three show deals.

Now I have to say that At first I had some reservations. I heard several disturbing things about the movie.

First I heard that Lenard Nimoy would be playing the role of Spock Prime. That just sent chills running down my spine as to how bad I think that this could have been. But actually the role was a good tool to connect the previous show and this one. It also connects the previous time line to the new time line created by this movie.

Secondly I heard that Black holes and time travel were also involved in this one. This is a tricky issue Some times this can be done well like when saving the whales or stopping the borg from assimilating earth after world war three. Though more often than not this fails, as shown as in the continuously disappointing time war plot from enterprise. Though I find that in this movie it was used in an appropriate and somewhat silly way. Characters in the show travel through time by entering a black hole. Now even though this is utterly ridiculous and shows a total lack of understanding of what a black hole is, its not so bad on the scale of trek silliness. Also they left themselves a way out, which they have yet to use and I expect to here how red matter made a black hole with an exit.

All that being said it was really a good movie. I enjoyed it a lot and I think that it was put together very well. The interplay between Spock and Kirk is excellent. The other characters are very enjoyable to watch and they do well when they bring life back to the characters that have been unused for so long.

The action scenes were fantastic and it definitely has a future life in the realm of the trek.

Now I say this because I am not tied to the time lines developed in the previous series's. This movie does change the history of the star trek universe and causes the plot lines of all the star trek series's [save enterprise] to change if not outright disappear. Now I can understand how some trekkers and Trekkies might not like this.

For all we know that could set into motion a chain of events in which Picard never captains the enterprise. OR it could also set into motion a time line where Wesley Crusher is far less annoying. It mostly means that the writers of future shows can be unencumbered by the volumes of trek material of the past. This is not to say that they should go and destroy it but I fully expect that they will use the previous material to continue to tell new and interesting stories.

Well enough said. I loved the film and hope that it does well.

P.S. Hulu has a saturday night live sketch up that is funny in relation to the new movie.

Current Mood: optimistic

I had just failed two of four PhD Exams. I will have to see what comes up with the next two. I intend to review QM to perform admirably.

On other topics I intend to post a little bit on a lot of the pseudoscience surrounding those who are still denying the facts. look for more to come.

I am here sitting in my office waiting.

Waiting for a lot of things.

Things that will change my week.

Weeks may go by while I am waiting, I won't know.

I won't know.

After much consideration Sokka is my favorite character. Its ironic that I don't talk much about him. I would have to say that anyone who really knows me would pick that he is my favorite character. This is because he is honestly the one I relate to the most. He is a thinker and tactician. He also is unsure of himself for much of the show, something that I have in my life been able to relate to. I also imagine that he reminds me when I was a teenager, awkward geeky and generally out of place. Unsure of myself and doubting oneself. As seen in the invasion, Sokka is harder on himself than he is on others. Sokka has higher expectations for himself than he does for others and he expects that he should be able to do everything and in that set an example for other. Though he also is greatly worried that he would let others down. This was also seen in how he reacts in the first episode.

Sokka can also get carried away when he sais (or tries) things that ultimately bite him in the end. He had to learn these lesson's the hard way. Saying things that have alienated people I cared for and talking to much in the moment. We both tend to plan things down to a microscopic scale and then screw it up with our words. This of course happens in many situations relating to his sister, his girlfriends and friends. Often this is seen in his complaining about problems that upset his plans. I can somewhat relate to that. Though I like to think that I have gown through my experiences over the past few years. Just as Sokka's adventures helped him, my recent teaching adventures may have helped me.

His comedy is one of his most entertaining values. Although his clever wit often gets him into trouble it does provide relief to his friends and acquaintances. This is bluntly shown in Sokka's Master where he is missed by his friends and they lamely try to cover for his absence, but this can also be easily seen in many other episodes.

Finally his is two most memorable values are ones he shares with his sister. The first is empathy.

While Katara has shown time and again that she is directly empathetic with others in a very direct way. Sokka has the same empathy although it does not manifest itself in the same form. He has a tendency to repress it for his more strategic and practical goals. Sokka tends to have a have a more complicated world view. Though, he has been shown time and again to choose to recognize his empathy. One such case is his attempt to repair the relationship between Katara and Toph.

The second trait is curiosity. Katara and Sokka are also both very curious people. This, like empathy, manifest itself differently in the two characters. In Sokka, curiosity manifests directly in more traditional ways. Everything from eating hallucinogenic cactus and his scientific pursuits. Meanwhile Katara's curiosity relates to her interactions with other and taking on the unknown. Her curiosity deals with people and the need to help others. Together the two of them use these different facets of these traits to compliment each other over the run of the show.

Naturally as you might expect Sokka's Master is my favorite episode. It really like how it shows how much Sokka has grown throughout the series and how generally cool his master is. I believe in personal growth. A person can become more than they are and to me Sokka demonstrates this.

Current Mood: chipper

Reflection on the end of Avatar: the Last Airbender:

Well it has been some time since Avatar ended. I think that there are a lot of things that I need to discuss. I think this will take a lot more than just one post to resolve and to complete. I will have to start with my favorite characters and how the evolved into the end and why I liked the show so much.

I will start with my favorite characters and why they are my favorites.

(I do make the assumption that you know something about avatar in this conversation.)

Homecoming Weekend 2008

My sister and I had decided to go to homecoming at Valpo this year. This year was Valpo's 150th so it was pretty big deal. I had know idea at the time how much fun I would have this weekend. I thought that I would say hello to some professors and go to some events. Not much more.

I could not have been more wrong.

Lori and I arrived about 40 min before colloquium. Valpo usually tries to have a special colloquium given by one of its alumni. I showed up and went to the colloquium. It was a presentation on the state of high school physics education and what colleges to do about it. The presentation was good and I enjoyed it very much. About half was through the presentation Justin and Jon came into the room and sat down. Later Ben and Dustin also showed up. I was not expecting my old friends to show up. It was awesome.

After the colloquium I ditched Lori, whom did not mind at all, and went to dinner with the guys and some alumni who graduated in the few years before us. We had a very good time. After dinner we went to the homecoming fireworks. They were awesome, I could feel the shock waves from the explosions on my chest.

Lori had arranged for us to stay with friends of hers who had recently married and the husband (Dan, I think) worked for the university. He and I talked quite a lot. Dan is a board gamer and we talked a lot about it. He showed me a fascinating game called War on Terror. It is a game of fighting terrorism and it looks very cool.

The next morning, Lori and I went to the Biology, Chemistry & Physics meet and greet. It was a lot of fun I talked with a lot of alumni and professors. Paul Nord showed us around and told us of some of the changes that had taken place. My friends and myself then went out for Chinese and met up with some more classmates. There were some 9 of us and it was great. I made fun of Ben because he still eats Pizza with a knife and fork. I also warned Justin that He was not much better for eating mac and cheese. Remember this was a Chinese restaurant.

Afterwards we went to the art museum and palled around their until the play started. Around then Dusting invited me to see the play because he had an extra ticket. Dustin works for the university so arranged for some free tickets. It was my lucky day. We then went to see “The Importance of Being Earnest”. It was flippen awesome. I was laughing like there was no tomorrow. This play is awesome and I loved it. I will not discuss the play now but might at a future time.

After the play I talked for a little while, called Lori and arranged to meet her at the book store. I said goodbye to my friends and rushed off to the bookstore. Lori and I did a little shopping and we then came home.

It was a great and memorable trip. I had a great time.

Current Mood: cheerful

It has been quite some time since I have posted here.

I have returned to graduate school with moderate success.

I have made progress on my masters thesis. My adviser expects me to be done by the end of the month.

I have been working with Dave on a number of projects relating to our game we are setting up.

I have seen the end of avatar. I will have to give a commentary on that.

I have been to a nutritionist and Have decided to get a personal trainer. Yes that is right I am going to loose weight. Comments to come soon. I hope to have progress.

To accomplish that I have also been walking to school. I have lost about 7 lbs on that alone. Much more is to come. Maybe I can agian become that skinny guy I was when I first went to college.

I am excited about some new movies and look forward to a number of things.

My students are doing well this semester. I have a 73% average and I hope to keep that .

Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries, Is awesome.

I will be voting for Obama this coming fall.

That is all for now. I have a lot of plans.

It has certainly been a while since I last posted on this blog. In that time many things have happened to me. I have decided to quit teaching. It was a tough decision but everyone sais that I seem happier. I know I am personally happier.

I have decided to go back to graduate school. I do enjoy teaching, I hope someday to end up as a college professor. Maybe in alaska or the Pacific northwest. It will be hard to stay in the same region of the country because I have to take the job where it is.

I managed to pull a teaching assistantship out of my butt. I was really worried that I would not have a position next year. In fact they want me to start this summer. It is going to be a wild ride. I have not responsibilities to tie me down so I figure I might as well take it.

I have learned so much in the last three years about life and all its accompanying foibles. I have learned about physics, people and goals. O Well.

Well it has certainly been a while since I have last posted. Must have been around the time my work got me an actual laptop to use. Since then I have used my personal laptops much less. (Thats right I have two working laptops, one linux and one winblows.) It is sort of funny they are sitting in a pile. STARING AT ME.

Since that time I have taken on additional responsibilities at work and I have also started running the local game store L5R game. Things seem to be going well their. I am having more fun running it than I have had in a long time. It is set in the Burning sands but that will soon be coming to an end.

I will likely post more on that in the future. Tomorrow I will be hosting a party. Colorphorms decided to not come which of course kept Magic from coming too. Colorphorms is officially being ignored until after the holidays. He probably won't even notice. Though I will try to include him with the arangments that I have been empowered (by Magic) to make regarding hanging out with Ardweden while she is back after the holidays.

I wonder if anyone actually reads this.

I wonder if I could be more disconected

Current Mood: blah

Well itis 4:30 in the morning when I start typing this post. I have been up since 8 in the morning. THis is long. Very long for me. Why might I be doing such a silly thing and why might I not be trying to sleep.

Well today I went to Milwaukee to see Jon. We saw transformers the movie. Which is so much better than I thought it could have been. If you intend to see it at all see it in a movie theater. It will be no good on the small screen. There are some very memorable lines and some that are so bad that lucas could not even have written them. The movie is not a transformer's movie though. In that it is not starring the transformers. It is a movie with the transformers. It was fun.

After that we met up with some other people and went to summerfest. It was gloomy out so I suggested that Jon grab his umbrellas. We went to a chille place and I had some medium chille. It was more mild than medium and was not that powerful. not really ranking a medium definition in my opinion. We then all wandered over to summerfest.

We got into summerfest and meandered over to our show it was on the other end of the part and it started to rain. It rained for the whole evening. It did not start till we got to the location of the show. then it rained on and off the whole night. It even lightninged. But it was so worth it.

Around 10 PM [maybe 10:30], Weird Al walked onto the stage.
It was a great show even though I was entirely soaked through. I was as wet as a otter who had just gotten done playing in the water and as happy.  He played parts of so many songs that I can not even count them all in my head. He did both Yoda and Episode 1. He also did an oncore with Albuquerque that was really long but it was so good. One of the interesting songs of the night was Technical Difficulties. THey were having some technical dificulties and Weird Al and two of his guys cam back on stage and sang a song about it while they fixed the problem.

Well I can not talk about everything that happened at the concert because it is simply not possible. It ended up running till 12:30 when the summerfest people kicked us out. We then walked to one of Jon's friend's house and played some Wii, I ended up leaving Jons at about two in the morning.

When I left I stopped by a gass station and got a huge can of jolt. Drank it and drove back. This must be what it is like ardweden when she drinks caffeine I was all twitching at fist and that is starting to were off but I still can not fall much asleep. It is about 5 AM and I am going to finish this and try to get some sleep.

finished

This last weekend I had a party for Jameela's Going away. If you don't know she will be going to Japan with the the Jet program for a year while Matt starts his PhD in Iowa. Don't know what school he is going to.

We had Chinese food, Strawberry mango smoothies and unset moose. Other than the Moose the Food turned out really well. Chinese was a last minute decision but turned out pretty well. It was a lot of food pretty cheep. A lot better than pizza would have been.

People showed up over a large period of time and we played a lot of games. We played Messopotamia and Ticket to ride. I think I ended up playing ticket to ride about 4 times with a number of different players. Pretty much everyone played but all that changed was who was avaliable. besides those two games we also the people game. I have no Idea what it is called but everyone had a cool time.

I have recently discovered a very enjoyable new rum. Sailor Jerry's. We had it during our first few games. I warned Katie that it was 92 proof and was strong. By the time Jameela arived everyone present at least had a buzz. It was very good and I love the stuff. It was also on sale, the reason I bought it in the first place. Unfortunately, because of this Bert and Katie went home earlier than everyone else.

One of the coolest things was that Jon Thoms came to the party. I have not seen Jon in Many years. We used to go to college together. He brought with him his remote control gocart. For those I dragged out to see it it was a blast. Jon always builds the coolest stuff. The gocart has a lot of throw to it. You had to hang on like their was no tomorrow. I have a video of Jameela trying to get out of the Cart. [It was not easy.] As allways Jon's appearance was awesome.

The party was excellent and their was much gaming and fun. Good luck to Jameela and have a good time in europe too.

Well it is here I just found out. THis will be horrible for me getting things accomplished.

http://www.starcraft2.com/

I found this on the Dune page of wikipedia and even though it might not be true I love it.

In an interview with Frank Herbert published in Omni Magazine in July 1980, the author said:

"Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero... Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe. The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster."

I have found the coolest new story.

http://www.kgw.com/news-local/stories/kgw_060407_news_fossil_find.153c9882.html

I here these kids dug up a mammoth tooth. That is the coolest thing that any little boy could dig up. I did a fair amount of digging when I was a kid and if I only had been so lucky.

Current Mood: giddy

Summer began a while agog for me. THis is my second week of summer and I have been relaxing. A lot of relaxing.

In between all this relaxing I have started reworking my thesis. I will complete it by the end of the month. The best reason for that is that I should still be able graduate this summer. I think that 6 years in graduate school is a bit much and that a seventh is not really necessary.

I have also taken and rearranged my apartment.I took and switched my office and bedroom. The main reason for the move was that my office was allready getting very full and my bedroom was not seeing very much use of late, mostly sleeping.  I still have to tidy  it up a lot in the two rooms but I am very sure that it will free up a lot of space.

One of the things that I have had to get used to is not having a TV in my bedroom. Actually it has been pretty cool. my sister has recently lent me her boom box. It is the most sophisticated boom box I have ever owned. It has a remote control. I have to figure out how to set the presets. When I am getting ready for bed NPR has its nightly world news shows. It is really great listening to it. though I do miss watching Adult swim in bed.

I have also noticed that one side of my apartment gets Chicago NPR and the other Wisconsin NPR. It is really annoying when I am wondering around cleaning. So I have to really crank one up to get something coherent.

well got to go

Current Mood: chipper

    I have started working on my thesis again. It has been some time. I traveled to NIU this last weekend and met with my advisor. I hope to finish the thesis soon.

    Also I had a party this last weekend. It was mildly successful. Rick, Bert and Katie showed up around 2-3. We played settlers and Ticket to Ride: Europe. Jameela called and said something was up at some point. after TtR Bert and Katie left and Jeff and Derek showed up. Jameela said she would call back when she ound out what was going on so we waited a while to see if she would call, during this time we talked about some stuff. Eventually we turn on young Frankenstein.

At this point things start to get foggy for me. I was tired and in the Fog of Mel we finished the movie. Someone proposed calling Jameela a couple times. Eventually I through them my phone and I told them, half asleep, to call her. Rick did and evetually put her on speakerphone.

Besides that I think I left my cell phone charger in california. Bought a new one today.

Well that is about it.
 

I have not posted at all regularly in a while. Nothing much has happened. recently. I purchased a new laptop and have been installing software on the machine. I have been loading extensions into firefox. Its so fun finding new things for firefox. though I am somewhat bumbed that I can not load the physics preprint archive.  It was so cool searching the archive from firefox. Ya I could take and actually go to the website and search it that way. BUT that is not nearly as fun as doing it from firefox. I did find a lot of new plugins to play with at the same time though. So I guess it all even's out.

It has been a long time since I have posted this is just a test of Deepest Sender to see if it is working properly. I will post later to see if it is working properly.

Current Mood: amused

I can' wait till Friday. It will be the season finale of Avatar the Last Air bender. Work has been tiring lately.

On thanksgiving, I went to my parent's house for dinner. We had dinner with my parent's friends the Katcuses. It went relatively well. My father was annoying and my mom was getting all stressed out and thought she asked me to do things she did not. I tried going to costco to get a TV the next day. I arrived their at 4 in the morning and there were already more people in line than had TVs. I left.

On Sunday I had my second annual, after thanksgiving part. It is a no turkey allowed party. I bought salmon and prepared it with a caramelized marinade and a pineapple and orange salsa. It tasted pretty well. I also had kanolies and Ice cream, mashed potatoes and salad. I also had 2 types of bear, an ale , eggnog, and milk to drink. Unfortunately, Jeff was the only person to show up. I was not sure about Jameela coming. She told me that she was not sure she could come. I also talked to Bert a number of times. I even talked to him that day. He said he was coming and he never showed up. Jeff even picked up a bar from Bert's for me and Bert told Jeff that he would be coming. I am quite annoyed that I never even got a call from him.

I saw Wicked last Sunday. Wicked is a retelling of the story of the wizard of ozz from the point of view of the wicked witch of the west. It discusses what drives her to become wicked and in the play it is the oppression of others including the alienation she gets as a young girl. It is a really good and enjoyable show. I saw it with Arwen and some of her friends. It was a good show.

Well I am now going to consider when I want to have my holidays party. Later