= Such Stupid Things =

I forgot - I really should thank my brother once again for his incredibly generous Christmas gift:

It may take me a while to spend it all.

Posted by Jeff at 09:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I rolled a 207 today in Wii Bowling.

Even if I do nothing else, this vacation will have been a success.

Posted by Jeff at 08:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My brother drove up from Atlanta yesterday for the Xmas season. When I got home today I went down to the basement to find him lying on the couch playing Pilotwings on our old SNES. I had foolishly left my laptop running, and my blue desktop background had mysteriously been replaced with this bitmap:

In case you can't tell, it reads, "I'm Jeff. I'm stupid."

It's good to be home.

Posted by Jeff at 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

All the bloggers I know Everyone I know has been complaining about Pitchfork's list of top albums of 2006, and then offering up lists of their own. (I won't bother linking to all the posts. You know where they are.) Now, I certainly don't have anything novel to contribute to the dialogue - I usually use this time of year to furiously download all the albums I should have been listening to - but I'm still a little surprised that people are all so suprised about Pitchfork's choices. I'm not saying that the albums are good or bad or what have you, because frankly I haven't heard of most of them. But I had a question... This may betray my deep misunderstanding of the world of popular music, but shouldn't you guys all have heard of all the bands on Pitchfork's top 50 list because... you all read Pitchfork?

Though, I was happy to see that Danielson made the list. Not because I like their music, (which I don't), but because Pants Pants Pants opened for them once. It was sweet.

Posted by Jeff at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's not that I bear my parents any ill-will, but I can't help but to get a kick out of giving vaguely inappropriate Christmas gifts to my little siblings, (now ages 10, 11 and 13). I don't mean to encourage any particularly dangerous activities, I just figure it's my job to give them the kinds of "shoot-your-eyes-out" presents that the old folks wouldn't. Some of this year's possibilities include Swiss Army knives, foul-mouthed South Park DVDs and possibly a propane-powered camping latern. Henry's a boy scout, so I figure he can handle it.

Really, I'm just spinning my wheels until it's time to fulfill my real older-brotherly duties and buy them all beer. But that will have to wait awhile. It's really more of a birthday present, anyway.

Posted by Jeff at 09:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

How adorable is this drink calculator, brought to you by the fine people at Evite? I've half a mind to click around until I've figured out the algorithm they use. Makes for a good applied algebra-type problem.

So thank you, Evite, for demystifying my upcoming holiday party. I now know that my four heavy-drinking friends and I will need a six-pack, one bottle of wine and one bottle of liquor in the first hour of party to remain satisfied. But if one more heavy drinker shows up, he better have wine bottle #2 in-hand, or Christmas is ruined!

Posted by Jeff at 06:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Things have changed here in Arlington, Virginia, and it's got me a little freaked out. For one thing, the Gray family's kitchen has doubled in size. It was a little jarring at first, but I knew the change was coming, and I've had time to prepare for it. But it's the changes at home that have me on-edge. Deep down I never really believed my dad when he told me that he was rennovating the basement, but sure enough. The room where I spent the better part of high school is no more. Well, it's still there, just, different. And if that weren't enough, the kitchen is now also mid-renovation. It'll be nice in the long-run, but for now the only cooking we're capable of is on an electrical skillet in the living room. Preparing the Christmas ham will be a challenge, no doubt.

And change is good, and I'll get used to it and embrace the new everything and all that good stuff. BUT, having my jet-lagged ass woken up this morning by a bunch of contractors hammering a new window into a brick wall eight feet above my head is *not* something I'm going to get used to. And apparently it's going to be happening everyday this week, so I might need to rethink the whole vacation sleep schedule, to which I was so looking forward.

Posted by Jeff at 03:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm going home tonight, woot. I haven't been back to DC in a whole year, so I'm pretty excited. And apparently it's going to be, like, seventy degrees on Monday. So it will be warmer in Virginia than it is here, which is - as we Californians might say - hella depressing.

Anyhow, it also seems like my RSS feed has stopped working again for some reason. So that'll give me something to tool with while at home. Also, re-learning Matlab! Excitement!

Posted by Jeff at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't know if this is just a local thing, but Elsevier has been running a series of radio ads on NPR in the morning, talking up the fact that they've made a series of articles by Nobel Laureates freely available on their website. That's all well and good, but they seem to neglect the price tag associated with the thousands and thousands of other articles published their journals. The cost is, as you might guess, prodigious, which hardly seems in line with the "brining science to the masses" mission that they claim to champion. Hearing these ads right alongside ADM's misleading ridiculousness is enough to get me pretty riled up in the morning.

To avoid further rambling, I'll just say that I hope to one day see a world where academic journals can be both well-regarded and cheaply available. Go PLoS, go.

Posted by Jeff at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I do so enjoy the ridiculous text of spam messages these days... some computer program / third world hacker-type has really got my number: just now I got a message with the subject line "The chloride and hydroxide anions are disordered and they interact, along with the uncoordinated water molecule, with the polycationic chain to form a three-dimensional, hydrogen-bonded network."

It went on to say...

"O hydrogen bonds stabilize the crystal packing. The piperazine ring displays an almost-perfect chair conformation, with the tricyclic nuclei assuming a pseudo-equatorial orientation. The morpholine unit adopts an almost ideal chair conformation. O hydrogen bonds, which link the molecules into chains running parallel to the c axis."

And so forth. This is totally unfair... how can I not follow this guy's super-hot stock tip?

Posted by Jeff at 04:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've neve liveblogged anything in my life, so I wanted to take this opportunity to tell everyone that I'm playing Diplomacy... right now. And oh man am I losing.

I should have moved my fleet in the Tyrrhenian Sea into the Western Mediterranian way back in 1903. Not doing so let Italy get a foothold on the Iberian and that's when everything fell apart for poor old France. Effing eff!

That is all. Thank you, wireless internet.

Posted by Jeff at 07:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Why is every store within walking distance of campus sold out of ipod-USB cables? And why does it have to coincide with me losing my ipod USB cable? I was hoping to take care of this unfortunate errand at lunch one day, but fate seems to be conspiring against me. Christmas, needless to say, is ruined.

Posted by Jeff at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

But while I'm on the subject, I'd have to say that the most entertaining movie I've seen this winter has been the Bollywood blockbuster, Dhoom 2. Not because it was particularly exciting from an action movie standpoint, but because over-the-top musicals are, I think, the logical extension of the ridiculous buddy cop genre.

Jeff Nye enthusiasts know of my weakness for the Big Musical Number. It's a shame that Hollywood relegates them to... you know... musicals. But your standard buddy cop movie is already so far extended from reality that epic song and dance seem to fit right in. What better way to keep things light-hearted, what with all the killing and explosions? I mean, would it seem any less silly for Will Smith and Martin Lawrence to finish Bad Boys 2 with a sweeping chorus across the Cuban countryside? They're fighting crime in Cuba for crying out loud. Why not cram in as many base, guilty pleasures in there as possible?

But in this particular aspect, Dhoom 2 doesn't back down. Not one bit. So, if you have access to a South Asian movie theater, check it out.

Plus, there are surprise identical (and super-hot) twins.

Plus, it reminds me of this guy:

Posted by Jeff at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

And to follow up on the previous post, the whole reason I saw the movie was because just a few days prior I had had my socks totally and completely rocked off by Tenacious D in concert at the Billy Graham. I thought the price was a little steep, but I drunkenly promised Joe that if he purchased tickets, I'd pay him back. So he did, and I did, and it was definitely worth it in retrospect. The whole scene was just... fun. Really, really fun.

ADDENDUM: What's up with the D's love/hate relationship with Satan? They happily attribute their skill and success to his teachings, but like petulant children they won't hesistate to challenge him to a rock-off whenever he asks something in return. Such ingrates!

Posted by Jeff at 03:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm a little late with this, but after I seeing Tenacious D's adorable, but somewhat depressing appearance on the Daily Show a couple nights ago, I figured I should say something about the Pick of Destiny...

It's not that bad. Actually, I thought it was pretty darn good. Granted, I've been in the D's thrall for many years now, but I still had a nagging fear that the movie would be completely underwhelming and serve only to undermine my love of the whole franchise. But I guess I should have had a little more faith in the Greatest Band on Earth. Granted, the movie pales in comparisson to the old-school HBO shorts, but as a ridiculous comedy it definitely holds its own. So... don't be afraid. Check it out.

And to any skeptics who may have heard some of the new songs, the accompanying album is considerably better as a movie soundtrack than a stand-alone piece of music. As it turns out, the line "deactivated lasers with my dick" wasn't a euphamism, like I initially thought.

Posted by Jeff at 03:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)