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Well, I am off to Montreal and then CT until the end of the month. Have a good time, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!
To leave a smile on your face, I will list some of my favorite "facts" about Chuck Norris that were found in a link my dear buddy Russ sent to me:
- Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.
- The chief export of Chuck Norris is pain.
- If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can't see Chuck Norris you may be only seconds away from death.
- A Handicap parking sign does not signify that this spot is for handicapped people. It is actually in fact a warning, that the spot belongs to Chuck Norris and that you will be handicapped if you park there.
- Chuck Norris does not hunt because the word hunting infers the probability of failure. Chuck Norris goes killing.
- The quickest way to a man's heart is with Chuck Norris's fist.
- Someone once tried to tell Chuck Norris that roundhouse kicks aren't the best way to kick someone. This has been recorded by historians as the worst mistake anyone has ever made.
- If you ask Chuck Norris what time it is, he always says, "Two seconds till." After you ask, "Two seconds to what?" he roundhouse kicks you in the face.
and my personal favorite:
- Chuck Norris is currently suing NBC, claiming Law and Order are trademarked names for his left and right legs.
Later!
Yes, what you've all been waiting for...
It went well. I should probably be happy that it was positive and they told me that I should aim to start writing within a year. However, I am a bit tired, emotionally and physically, after busting my butt for the past two weeks. I am sure that I will be happy come tomorrow. :)
In general, they told me that I should write up a plan, i.e. a list of experiments that I should try to get done in order to have a minimally publishable thesis. This plan should not depend on any experiments yielding useful data, only that they should be carried out. Sounds like major publication material in only the most well-regarded academic journals, huh? ;) Well it will be, naysayer!!!
So that's it in a nutshell. Now I am off to have dinner with my lovely girlfriend whom I have woefully been neglecting. Tomorrow night we will go see Handel's Messiah at the Riverside Church, and then it's the midnight express bus to Montreal!
Since my committee meeting was postponed and I plan on leaving the country at the end of this week, I got to relax and spend the weekend Christmas shopping. (That was supposed to be funny: Christmas shopping in NYC is anything but relaxing.)
Friday night Yilin and I had dinner at Miracle Bar and Grill, which isn't too far from her apartment. (You can read the review here.) It is a decent Southwestern restaurant, and I am glad that I tried it out. On the way, we saw what Yilin perfectly described as "somebody got rejected":
Nothing says "I don't love you and don't ever talk to me again" like throwing a gift of roses onto a manhole cover in the middle of the street at the feet of your would-be suitor. The guy must've been clearly heartbroken, as he made no attempt to pick them up. Well, at least there were no visible stomps or trample marks. Of course, that would've been comic gold.Saturday morning I met Yilin at Claude's for breakfast, and then I headed off to the climbing gym, where I took the routesetting course. FInally! The course was offered, I attended, and now I can set routes in the gym. I met up with YIlin afterward near the EMS at Columbus Circle and we (she) did some shopping. (On the way she saw Jean George driving his Mercedes SUV; I missed him, nor would I have recognized him.)
Yilin has professed the desire to snowshoe. Great, I say, as that way she can venture up north with me. While I haul my butt up frozen pillars and waterfalls she can tromp and frolic on the trails. Naturally, I would snowshoe with her if no vertical ice were around. But only then. ;)
We outfitted her with appropriate clothing, winter hiking boots, and a daypack that actually has straps on the back to hold a snowboard (which is the perfect size to hold snowshoes, too). We had a sales rep take the pack off of the wall, as it was part of a display and was the only one left in the store. Let me tell you, at $19.98 (sale price from $50), this pack was the steal of the day. In fact, anything that had GoreTex was 20% off; most EMS brand outerwear was 30-40% off. She made out like a bandit.
While near Columbus Circle, we had lunch at Sarabeth's Bakery (I review it here), which lived up to it's hype, I think. We stopped into the mall at CC while the sun was setting, and I managed a snapshot of their Christmas decorations.
After that we went back to my place, had dinner, and watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and then A Christmas Story, as she had never seen either. (Shocking, yes, but if you were born in Taiwan and moved to Montreal when you were 12 you probably wouldn't have seen those movies either.) We laughed a lot that night, for sure.
Sunday I met up with Yilin again and we did some more shopping. She had to exchange a pair of waterproof pants at EMS because she accidentally bought the "short" size instead of "regular". I used the opportunity to offer her one of two Christmas presents: on the one hand, she could choose a new pair of snowshoes (that way she wouldn't have to borrow any), and on the other hand she could go with the "surprise present" that I was originally going to get her. She is very curious and couldn't stand waiting around to see what this mystery present might be, so she went for the snowshoes. Of course, she asked me a few times the rest of the day about what the present would've been. I only answered, "You'll never know. Hahahaha!" Aren't I hilarious?
After that we went into Prada and Yilin looked over the "sale" racks. (Haha, sale. Right.) I convinced her to try on a $5200+ coat, that was 40% off! What a bargain! Anyway, the only sizes left were slightly too small for her, so there wasn't even an option for temptation. As we were walking out, she confessed in a hushed tone that she had never tried anything on in Prada before.
After that we got lunch at the amazing Italian restaurant Po (you must read this review). Go there if you are in the mood for Italian food whilst in NYC. We fought our way back through the crowds to shop for nasty clothes for The Annual Nasty Clothes Christmas Challenge.
For those of you unfamiliar with this challenge, allow me to describe the event. It all began when my brother and I were in college and saw an ugly shirt at a store while our mom was intent on buying us new clothes. We then went around looking for the ugliest shirts that we could find. Somehow it turned into a matter of bragging "who could pick out the ugliest clothes." So the gloves were thrown down, the date of Christmas was set, and the Challenge was to buy the other person the "nastiest outfit" you could. The rules:
1. The clothes must be men's clothes.
2. The clothes must fit. Tight and baggy are ok, but circulation can't be cut off, nor can the wearer be swimming around in yards of fabric.3. Clothes can be made or modified by the buyer in anyway, and clothes must be worn by the recipient in a manner that the buyer chooses.
4. The clothes had to be worn everywhere on Christmas Day.
Our mom tried imposing the rule that the clothes couldn't be secondhand, but we blatanly rejected that suggestion, as it became not only cost prohibitive, but prevented True Nastiness from being exhibited.
After several years of horribly ugly Christmases, the contest expanded from me and my brother to us versus our two younger cousins Ritchie and Russell. These foolish upstarts thought that they could compete with The Brothers Nasty, and were proven wrong last year. Again, they think that they can find nastier clothes, but they will be proven wrong.
Lucky for them, I can't afford to drop $300 on two outfits, or they would cry themselves to sleep. (NYC is a very expensive place to buy clothes secondhand. I wish I could though, because I found the best store for it.) Instead, I bought some cheap slightly less nasty clothes, and with some fabric from Yilin, sewed clothes for them. Yes, I am a master tailor. You will see my handiwork posted on this blog post-Christmas, I promise. Your eyes will burn out of their sockets, too. ;)
On the way to shop for said nasty clothes, I thought I saw Johnny Depp. It turns out that it wasn't Johnny Depp, but some guy named "Brian" who was rolling his own cigarettes and listening to tapes on his boom box. He wasn't selling anything, or begging for money. He was just hanging out. Pretty interesting character, nonetheless.
We went back to Yilin's for dinner, and I did some sewing on her sewing machine. That was my weekend, and you can view the slideshow here.
Well, it looks like my thesis committee meeting will be postponed for the 4th time. Hahaha...aha... yeaaaahhhh, great. My advisor is quite ill with the flu, and can't make it. So it looks like my meeting will be next Thursday. There are positive and negative aspects about this. On the plus side I have plenty of time to prepare. (Things were getting tight; you know me, I am a procrastinator extraordinnaire.) On the other hand, I really wanted to get this over with. I will focus on the positive and keep on truckin'.
In other news, I just bought myself a Christmas present: a point-and-shoot 35mm camera. Why?
- I really would like a camera to take with me whilst ice climbing and mountaineering.
- My kick-butt Canon Powershot S500 Digital Elph has terrible battery life in cold weather, as do many digital cameras.
- For my price range, film is superior in resolution to digital.
- While climbing/belaying/shouting through high winds and heavy snow to your partner to turn back, you don't have time to focus, select a shutter speed, and select an aperture. You want to live.
- Point-and-shoot cameras are smaller and lighter than SLRs, TLRs, or rangefinders anyway.
- I don't have a point-and-shoot 35mm camera.
That's my logic, more or less in some progression. Besides, the camera I got is regarded as one of the top 3 cameras to take while climbing/mountaineering as it is small, compact, and has one of the best lenses ever made. If I am going to buy a camera that suits my purpose, I might as well get the best one that I can reasonably afford, right? (This is the cheapest of the three.)
Speaking of price, even though this camera was discontinued more than a year ago, it often sells for higher than the original MSRP on eBay. Higher! I got mine for substantially less, as I spotted a just-posted auction with a very reasonable "Buy It Now" option. No doubt it would've went soon at that price.
By the way, if you are in the market for a small point-and-shoot digital camera (as opposed to a digital SLR), I highly recommend getting the (I think discontinued) Canon S500 ($228 reconditioned or $384 "new"), or better yet, its successors the SD500 or SD550. They are virtually identical 7.1 megapixel cameras, slightly smaller and lighter than my S500, except that the SD550 has a larger LCD and takes MultiMediaCards as well as SD Memory cards. No, I am not sponsored or endorsed by Canon USA in any way, but I might be if I showed them some of the photos I have taken with their camera. ;)
Of course, if you are in the market for a digital camera, I would stop by Digital Photography Review, Steve's Digicams, and Imaging Resource. Those are the sites I use/refer others to when shopping for a digital camera. DPR has a buying guide that lets you search for digital cameras based on the exact features that you want. They also have in-depth reviews. Steve's and IR also have great reviews. I recommend these three sites because if you read one of their reviews, there will no longer be any questions in your mind about the performance of that camera. Besides, at these sites you can also download actual photos from that camera and judge for yourself.
josh out.
I don't mean to start rumors here, but I suspect that my girlfriend, Yilin, likes me a lot.
I haven't been updating my blog as often as you would like, I am sure, because I have been working in lab quite a bit in preparation for my thesis committee meeting tomorrow afternoon. (Now, since I have mentioned it 3 times, I suppose I have no choice but to inform everyone of the outcome.) As a result, I haven't seen much of Yilin, or anybody outside of my lab and my roommate.
So imagine my delight when she offered to come all the way up to the nether-realm of Washington Heights (often affectionately referred to as the 'boondocks' of Manhattan) and make me dinner!!! Delightful it was: she made macaroni and cheese (from scratch), hamburgers (using aged ground beef from a steakhouse/butchershop in her neighborhood), and brussel sprouts prepared with garlic and butter. We topped dinner off with half a bottle of red wine. Mmm mmm! Isn't she the best?
In other news, my beard is coming along nicely. It is due for its first clean-up (neck, cheeks, etc) this weekend. I've got at least a third of an inch going. It will keep me nice and cozy while I bash away at ice with my axes 100' off the deck in freezing cold Vermont this February. :)
Let's get interactive since I have been out of touch lately. You, the reader, tell me what you would like to happen on Christmas Day. I will start:
I want to wake up to a foot of freshly fallen snow with 2 more on the way, big fat ice pouring off the cliffs and mountains of upstate New York and New England, and no school. ;)
Now it's your turn. Don't be shy. I know there are many lurkers here who do not post comments. Go ahead, grant me that instead of my actual Christmas wish.
Wednesday afternoon I hopped on a Chinatown bus bound for Boston, transferred to the Commuter Rail to Worcester, and hung out with my brother until 3am while he prepared for his thesis defense.
Thursday morning we got up, showered, ate breakfast, and then Jay masterfully defended his thesis, earning him the title of... well, Master. His thesis work was on the detection of gaming in computer assisted learning. (Well, that is my summary; it probably is not entirely correct.) Master Jay and myself went to lunch with some of his friends/fellow students. We then went and had a few more beers before dinner. Then it was beer until 11pm.
Friday was Master Jay's birthday, so it was a day of beer, naturally. Wait, we did stop into his lab for about 30 minutes, at which point he told his advisor that he was done for the day. The other 23 hours or so were consumed by beer consumption.
Saturday I witnessed Katamari Damacy. I won't go into a lengthy explanation of this PS2 video game, as it wouldn't matter. I will just say that I interpreted the storyline as this: the King and Queen of the Cosmos order you to roll a little ball called the katamari around. It picks up objects through gravitational mass, so the more objects you pick up, the bigger the ball gets, the greater the mass, the larger the objects you can pick up, etc, etc, repeat ad nauseum. You can end up picking up people, cars, buildings, and so forth, bringing about a wake of destruction. The whole time, up-beat Japanese pop music plays in the background, over the screams of the terrified citizens. I know that the concept makes no sense. Heck, I saw the game and the concept still made no sense, but trust me in that it is the epitome of Japanese video games.
Saturday evening I finally got to see Yilin again after about 4 days. I did miss her, and I told her so.
Today, I work. This coming Friday is my annual thesis committee meeting, and there is a lot I would like to get done before then. As a result, my updates will be short and sporadic until sometime this weekend. Wish me luck!
