gwax's rumblings

I had for­got­ten how very pleas­ant Woods Hole, MA really is. There’s some­thing about the place and the atmos­phere that has a sooth­ing effect on me. I think that I am going to try to make a point of max­i­miz­ing the time that I spend here. Maybe I’ll see if I can spend my week­ends here as well. If that ends up being the case, appolo­gies will be in order for those friends of mine that will see less of me as a result.

Haven’t really got much to say, but I try not to go too long with­out post­ing some­thing, so I’ll just dump a few things from my brain to my blog.

I’m in Woods Hole (Southwest tip of Cape Cod, MA) for my job right now and I’m plan­ning on being here for the major­ity of my sum­mer, namely Monday through Friday of most weeks. I may decide to some week­ends long and some short, at least with respect to my phys­i­cal loca­tion, but that’s some­thing that will be worked out on a week-to-week basis at my discretion.

I am find­ing that Woods Hole is qui­eter, as a place, than either Concord or Cambridge. By quiet, I mean some­thing kind of vague that should encom­pass quiet, calm, sim­ple and a few other sim­i­lar adjec­tives. All in all, it is very pleas­ant here, though I find myself miss­ing the com­pany of some of my bet­ter friends with whom I would be see­ing or com­mu­ni­cat­ing were I in Concord or Cambridge. Then there are the friends that are gone from Massachusetts for the sum­mer (or longer), whom I don’t even get the chance to see on week­ends. On the other hand, there are peo­ple here whom I have not seen in a long time, whom it is good to see again. It bal­ances out and is, over­all, rather pleasant.

Just this week­end, I pur­chased a new bicy­cle for myself. The last bike I owned was one that I got at some point either in or shortly before middle-school and haven’t used in more than six years. Since my old bike was no longer large enough for me and I am now employed with a rea­son­able wage, I decided to finally buy myself a new bike, one that would last for a very long time and serve all of my bik­ing needs. The bike that I chose to buy is a Cannondale Jekyll 600 in grey and black and I have so far been quite pleased with it. The bike has front and rear shocks, disk brakes and a bunch of other nice fea­tures. Having heard from my friend Riad that rear shocks serve to soak up a por­tion of the rid­ing energ, I was hes­i­tant to get rear shocks, but my par­tic­u­lar brand of shock includes a lock-out fea­ture that allows the shock to be dis­abled in the case that a long ride on flat ter­rain is expected. I’m totally psy­ched about my new bike, it’s pretty much the bike that I’ve always wanted.

The weather was a lit­tle bit too damp (rainy) yes­ter­day but, since today is a beau­ti­ful day and the sun is plan­ning to be up for quite a while, I plan to go out and bike around for an hour or so after din­ner tonight. Woods Hole, awe­some bike, pay­ing job, all in all, things are pretty good for me right now. Oh, and there’s cable at my grand­par­ents house so when I get home in the evening I can catch an hour or so of the History Channel or the Discovery Channel before I go to sleep.

Anyone that’s played much C&C: Generals knows how very amus­ing it is when the GLA work­ers say “Can I have some shoes?” and in the game’s expan­sion, Zero Hour, you can actu­ally get the shoes upgrade, to which they respond, “Thank you for the shoes.” Unfortunately, in the real world, you can’t just click a but­ton and give all of the poor peo­ple in Afghanistan shoes, which many of them need, espe­cially chil­dren. As an attempt to rec­tify this prob­lem, some kind hearted mem­bers of the US Air Force have started what they call Operation Shoe Fly. Quoth Sgt. Hook:

Just about every flight engi­neer and crew chief has noticed over the course of fly­ing across this place called Afghanistan these past months that a large per­cent­age of the chil­dren have no shoes to wear and of course, almost all of the girls are shoeless.

So my esteemed friends of the blo­gos­phere, in the spirit of Chief Wiggles and mind­ing the words of the infa­mous Steve Miller Band, I announce the begin­ning of Operation Shoe Fly in an effort to shoe the chil­dren, with no shoes on their feet. If you can col­lect the shoes, used or new, boys’ and girls’ (age 14 and under), and send them to me, my crew­dogs and I will fly them out to the Afghani kids who so des­per­ately need them.

Please send your shoes to:

Operation Shoe Fly
B Co, 214^th Aviation Regiment
Bagram, Afghanistan
APO AE 09354 – 9998

Another way to help is of course by get­ting the word out on Operation Shoe Fly. I would be most appre­cia­tive for any and all help in spread­ing the word on our endeavor, includ­ing any­one who might be will­ing to make a but­ton or ban­ner to post around the blo­gos­phere. Thanks.

In addi­tion to pro­tect­ing the feet of these young inno­cent chil­dren, we might even win some hearts and minds among their par­ents and who knows where the shoes might take these kids. This place is on the dawn of a future, deter­min­ing how bright it will be rests on the shoul­ders of these kids with no shoes on their feet. What say you? Sgt Hook out.

<dork>Shortly after they came into exis­tence, I became a big fan of the col­lectible card game known as Magic: The Gathering. My fond­ness of the game lasted a num­ber of years until the game took what I con­sid­ered to be a turn towards medi­oc­rity, at which point I stopped pur­chas­ing new cards and, hav­ing a size­able col­lec­tion, took up a pol­icy of reusing my exist­ing cards to play with friends that had also once played (this was quite a few years ago, per­haps 1997 or 1998). I still keep up the fun of play­ing with friends every so often. I have had the lucky for­tune of, so to speak, inher­it­ing a large num­ber of older cards from a good friend of mine who has just moved to Texas. I am much appre­cia­tive of the gift, which increases my card stock by 40%-50% and adds some nice rares to my col­lec­tion. Now, hav­ing a rather incred­i­ble quan­tity of cards, I prob­a­bly have enough to allow for quite a few peo­ple to play with simul­ta­ne­ously; myself and at least one other per­son intend to make a few decks using my now even mas­siver col­lec­tion. In the end, hope­fully this will serve to pro­vide cards for the play­ing enjoy­ment of myself and my friends.</dork>

I recently gained access to a whole bunch of episodes of var­i­ous Star Trek show (TOS, TNG, DS9) and have started watch­ing some of the TOS episodes. This admis­sion in and of itself lays a path out for me, but I’ve been find­ing a whole lot of sci­en­tific anom­alies in what’s going on. The errors that I’m find­ing are not the “you can’t travel faster than light” kind, or super fan­tas­tic astro­physics errors, but the sim­ple sci­ence kinds, like how NaCl acts chem­i­cally. On one hand, I feel good because I know all this sci­ence and am a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed that the errors exist in Star Trek, and, on the other hand, I feel like a com­plete nerd for notic­ing things like this.

I guess that it’s a good thing that I don’t really mind being a nerd sometimes.