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[theinevitable]

"Well, dan, if we can't all get tickets maybe we just shouldn't go."

hands ----> face

[wombat]

LOL

It's a happy ending, though. They can't blame you, and you don't have to go.

[pmcd9]

Won't they have like an overflow area where people can go and listen, maybe watch on a screen?

[pmcd9]

Damn, I never want to be the guy trying to hear the show outside the arena while my buddies go in.

(again)

Me either. I'm just trying to make the best of the situation.

[Carlos del Vaca]

As in, shit is going to blow up an hour before you're supposed to head out? I'm familiar.

[theinevitable]

All solved: my brother's flight back home is at noon on the same day as Obama's speech. So we'll drop him at the train station on the way there.

[wombat]

Now it's probably safe for me to say that I never went to a single one of my own graduation ceremonies past grade school. As a professor I went to a couple of the individual college ceremonies to hand out diplomas - the university was too large for them to do this at the ceremony where the famous people give speeches etc. I have never once been to one of those huge university-wide graduations.

[theinevitable]

And just to rub it in, now I won the ticket lottery for another ticket. They were supposed to announce this monday.

...also, graduated classmate who works in NYC government just texted me asking if it's true that I have grant proposal experience and am looking for a job. Fingers are so crossed.

[theinevitable]

The Ironic Outcome might be that I end up going to graduation alone. Sister and parents are worried that President In The Building-level traffic will make them too late to get to their flights home.

Today is the department graduation, though, where I walk across the stage and get a diploma and presumably win all of the awards (no actual awards given).

There is no way to say this without risking sounding full of myself. I think my undergrad institution, which was filled with overachiever nerds, gave me a "I'm smart but NOT SMART ENOUGH and also LAZY" complex. The grad school experience has been pretty good for me, in that I think it's given me a more realistic playing field to judge myself against. Maybe not the hardest working, not the absolute smartest, but doing pretty damn good on both accounts. Got some really nice peer feedback during reviews of my final presentation and research paper.

Next up: please give me a job.

[Carlos del Vaca]

Charleston, South Carolina has a lot of bars, and this weekend I saw the inside of about a third of them.

[pmcd9]

Charleston, South Carolina has a lot of bars, and this weekend I saw the inside of about a third of them.

That sounds like a story I'd be interested in hearing.

[Carlos del Vaca]

I don't know that it's that interesting, aside from the fact that I'm old and don't do this kind of stuff much anymore. We got together some of the old college crew for what was ostensibly a bachelor party (but it's go-round #2 for this guy, so we didn't go to a strip club or do anything overly crazy). Thanks to the miracle of modern mobile phone technology, I can tell you that I drank in eight different establishments on Friday, eight more on Saturday, and two on Sunday (though the last one was an airport bar so maybe it shouldn't count). I also got a badge from Untappd ("Foursquare for beer," which I am overly fond of) for having twelve different beers in a 24-hour period.

I felt surprisingly well in the mornings, and today, all things considered. And I had great foods--barbecue, steak, kick-ass fried chicken with assorted southern sides.

[theinevitable]

After 5 months of looking for jobs, today is the first time I've seen a job opening in St. Louis.

Frankly it's kind of scary. What if I get it and have to decide.

Good news though, I have not had a single interview for a job. So I probably won't get this one either : - p


Spent 2 hours yesterday trying to get sound to work on my Raspberry Pi (I installed a weird different version of linux) and never got it to work. Lots of google results where they just told people to RTFM. Finally realized that under my old installation sound worked fine, and I still had the memory card right there.
Watched some grainy anime with my roommate and ate donuts... a great reward. The subtitles went off the edge of the screen sometimes, but otherwise enjoyable.

[theinevitable]

At my job at school we are finally doing on the ground surveys of the neighborhoods I have been looking at data about for the last year. It's the city where school is so I thought I had a sense of what it's like, but damn, I was way off. It's a small city (5 square miles, 55k people) but twice as dense as St. Louis or four times as dense as Charlotte, and around 2/3 immigrants. Before today I could tell you things like "Census Tract 58 has the largest Black population" but not that the grocery store on Lee St. has iguana meat.

It's really nuts the level of activity a density of 10k people per mile can support. Every corner store had people in it, every block had a stoop with people hanging out on it, endless barbershops and tiny grocery stores.

[pmcd9]

At my job at school we are finally doing on the ground surveys of the neighborhoods I have been looking at data about for the last year. It's the city where school is so I thought I had a sense of what it's like, but damn, I was way off. It's a small city (5 square miles, 55k people) but twice as dense as St. Louis or four times as dense as Charlotte, and around 2/3 immigrants. Before today I could tell you things like "Census Tract 58 has the largest Black population" but not that the grocery store on Lee St. has iguana meat.

It's really nuts the level of activity a density of 10k people per mile can support. Every corner store had people in it, every block had a stoop with people hanging out on it, endless barbershops and tiny grocery stores.

That's too many people for me. Also, I've heard iguana meat is very very good.