infrequent observations

Reflections

2011-05-06T17:01:00.000-04:00

For about 2 or 3 hours today I was occupied with trying to find the long-lost weblog of a friend from high school. A particular entry had worked itself into my memory when it was written long ago, the details of which I could not recall, and I decided that I had to find this blog and read the post in its entirety.

So I looked high and low for this elusive web-journal, using all my Google skills and trying every conceivable channel to get to it. Alas, it was not to be- I threw in the towel when I exhausted the last of my leads. But what I had found from my search was much more valuable than what I was looking for.

A few years ago, I made the decision to delete my old Xanga and Livejournal accounts, a decision that I have come to regret immensely. Trying to find my friend's blog involved clicking through a host of other friends' blog- to attempt to follow a single thread in the intricate social web that was my digital life back in high school. I could not help but take a few detours along the way, perusing the old entries in these virtual time capsules, some dated back all the way to 2002- Junior year.

It is amazing how content we all were in describing our lives in excruciating detail- nearly every inane moment captured for all others to see and reflect on. For the webloging (as it was called back in the day) community was still in its infancy in the early 2000's, not every entry had to contain some existential masterpiece.

I wish I could see my entries again. A visit to my page brings up the following: "This journal has been deleted and purged." Purged? Yikes. This is almost an inappropriate word to use. I struggle now to recall any bits of my old blogs, but I feel as if my memories have been somehow deleted along with the data on those servers.

High school went by so quickly.

I wish I had been able to better keep up with my friends. Our interactions now amount to nothing more than the occasional inside joke or birthday salutation on Facebook. Moving away from New York obviously played a big part in driving a wedge into my social life, but I feel as if I should have done better. Do they still remember all the stuff we wrote about? Do they feel the same sense of sweet nostalgia that I feel? Or have they moved on?

The entries in these blogs start fizzling out as the years go by, and most have become defunct by 2007 as the social networking evolution is further facilitated by Facebook. I suppose this is the new time capsule...

ARES!!!!!

2007-07-12T12:21:00.000-04:00

Here he is!

He's a cutie, and really smart too. I've already taught him to sit, and stay. He also follows me around everywhere. He was really crazy when i first got him out of the crate, but he seems to have calmed down a bit. Hopefully he's this calm all the time.

Ming

Goddamn you MVA

2007-07-11T20:45:00.000-04:00

Today's Topic: Maryland's Motor Vehicle Administration

So today I went to get my car inspected so I can register my car in Maryland. Sounds simple, right? Sure, in every other state maybe. But here in Maryland, your car must pass a checklist of, and I kid you not, about 60 tests. Failing even one of these tests means that you must have your car "repaired" then sent back to the inspectors for a re-inspection that costs more money. Now among the list of things wrong with my car returned to me are as follows:

(1) Bad left tires...now isn't this really my issue? If my car careens off of a highway because my tires explode, shouldn't I be at fault? I guess the state is more concerned with that sort of thing...as long as I pay to fix it. This'll run me up about $200.

(2) Bad right fog light...This light has been broken since I purchased the car, it passed both NY and PA inspections without so much as a mere mentioning of it. But here in MD, your FOG LIGHTS MUST WORK PERFECTLY!!! Truthfully, I didn't even know I had fog lights- only today did I realize what the switch in the middle of my turning signal bar was for- yup, fog lights. This'll cost about another $200 to fix.

(3) One of the bulbs on my license plate holder is out, this one is fine, because it's an important issue, and should only cost no more than $10 to fix.

(4) My alignment is off... again, my problem. If I want to wear down my tires to a nub because they're improperly calibrated, that's my prerogative. I don't want to pay $60 to have that fixed.

(5) CV Joints... this is actually a pretty complex issue- but what surprises me is that this problem did not show up in any of the past inspections I've had of the car. I'm gonna chalk this one up to the anal pencil-pushers at the MVA. Also this will cost at least $500 to fix.

Let's total the numbers shall we? My repair bill, as I predict, will come to a grand total of $970. This is $970 I would not have spent had I lived in ANY OTHER STATE. And it occurs to me that the actual estimate may yet be even higher. Fucking terrific.

But on a brighter note, I visited Baltimore today with Shannon. The aquarium there was very nice, on par, dare I say better than the aquarium at Coney Island, though I haven't been to that one in a while. We had dinner in Baltimore's Little Italy, a quaint little neighborhood right next to the Inner Harbor, a far cry from the crowded alleys of New York's Little Italy. I'd like to explore Baltimore further when I get a chance.

Anyway, that is all. Oh also I'm going to get my dog tomorrow, but more on that later.

Ming

The End of an Era

2007-07-10T09:32:00.001-04:00

I got my Maryland driver's license today, and I noticed that the photo is significantly different from the one on my New York license, and totally different from my PA license also. So I thought I'd take a few minutes here to point out some major differences.

Here is my NY photo

As you can see, this photo was taken when I was approximately 7 years old. Actually it was when I was 18. Some distinguishing features include my awesome haircut, you can tell in particular that I had not taken a shower that morning by the the hair sticks straight up in the front, also by my 'I'm going to fall asleep' face. Also note the collar of the rather large winter coat I was wearing, as well as the massive size of the neckhole of the sweater I had on- a shining example of my fashion sense back in the days.

Now my PA license was taken away from me today, which is stupid because they should just put a hole in it and give it back to you. As such, I could not scan the license photo, but here is one that's pretty much what I looked like in it.

This is by and large my emo days, which didn't last very long. I simply had kept putting off cutting my hair, and this was the result. Of course I am wearing a shirt in my driver's license photo- a green one as I recall, and you could see my eyes, but this is a fairly accurate representation of that photo. Interesting note: literally minutes after I got my license photo taken, I got a haircut.

And finally, my Maryland photo.

This is my favorite of the three- as this time I came prepared. I was not wearing a big jacket or sporting a crappy haircut. And instead I look rather aloof and confused, as per the norm with driver's license photos.

And that concludes our exciting journey through my license photos, I hope you've enjoyed it. I sure did.

Ming

Milk was a bad choice

2007-07-09T21:46:00.000-04:00

I think my air conditioner is broken. It's been going all day but the temperature in here's not fallen below 77 degrees. Heads are gonna roll tomorrow.

Ming

Goodbye Memories!

2007-07-08T17:50:00.001-04:00

I did a rather curious thing today... I went to my old Xanga and Livejournal pages, and deleted them. While I do enjoy the pleasure of going back and reliving my highschool and early college days, I find the degree of my naivety to be too much to handle. Some of the entries were extremely interesting and brought back a lot of good memories, but as a whole those blogs were almost too embarrassing to read. So I am going to try and keep this one going, with perhaps more insightful entries, and perhaps one day- just maybe- I can get mingitup.com back online.

In other news, I drove to Pittsburgh yesterday to pick up some stuff, having finished packing my car at around 10PM, and met up with Caitlin Vince and Sasha at a bar. After chatting for about 2 hours, mostly about how tired we all were, I thought it a wise decision to try and drive back here to Elkton (A 5-hour drive). So off I went into the night. Now I do enjoy driving at night because of the incredibly low number of other vehicles on the road, with the exception of trucks which continue to scare the hell out of me. However, being that I had been awake for 17 hours already before the drive began did not help my concentration one bit. Somehow I managed to make it back here at 5:45 in the AM, and promptly passed out on my new mattress. Did I mention it's made from little baby chicks? Cause it's the softest.

Ming

Splinters are Great!

2007-07-06T19:40:00.001-04:00

Man that was fun, half an hour with a needle and a pair of tweezers later I am 100% splinter-free after being attacked by my new couch with its razor sharp...flanges. This sucker was a good eighth inch under the skin and it was a tough one. But on the plus side, I got a new couch! I pretty much have all my furniture now, save for a few bookcases. I'll be getting my expensive new mattress tomorrow which I believe is made from marshmallows because its the softest. Lookin' forward to that.

Also goin back to Pittsburgh tomorrow to pick up some more stuff that I left there, particularly my good shoes, which I have been without since Solar Splash ended.

That is all.

Ming

My House!

2007-07-02T14:42:00.000-04:00

Here are some photos of my new house, which is amazing.

Here's the house from the outside- I have pretty much the entire upper floor of the square.

The car hole, which is filled with IKEA boxes for now

The stairs up from the door.

The living room from the stairs.

The living room- sans couch and any form of decorations, as per the rest of the house.

The dining area.

The kitchen.

The bedroom.

The study, missing a lot of things as you can see.

Movin' Out

2007-06-28T23:59:00.000-04:00

Well, I move to Elkton tomorrow. I've got pretty much everything I own packed into small paper boxes sitting in our foyer, though there's way more stuff in my room that I won't be taking with me, these being toys I played with as a kid, old magazines I used to read. This way, when I come back a few years from now this place'll be like a museum. Also I'm far too lazy to pack all this crap.

My apartment is gonna be so sweet. It's not like a crappy old building like Catman, which means I'll respect it enough to keep it in good shape. And I'm going to finally be able to buy new furniture, instead of buying crappy second or third hand stuff like the stuff we had in our old apartment.

The next post, if it comes, will be made from Elkton.

-ming

ITALY 2007

2007-03-18T14:51:00.000-04:00

WOW! What a trip! Ruben, Greg and I got back from our trip to Italy at midnight on Friday, and since then I have been trying to recover from traveling. We didn't sleep too much on the trip, so I used most of yesterday and today catching up on some much needed snoozing. Anyhoo, here is the rundown on our various adventures.

DAY 1: ROME
We got into Rome around noon, Greg and I having stayed up nearly the entire 24 hours of flying. Ruben managed to get some rest but we could not sleep on a plane. We decided to take a cab to our hotel since we didn't know our way around the city, and to find a cab we spoke to a man in a suit at the airport who looked official enough. The "supervisor", however, just took us around the terminal speaking to various people who I assumed were cab drivers. We got into a van with a French couple, and paid 45 Euro to be driven to our first hotel. When we had arrived, we had to double check our vouchers; the place did not look anything like a hotel. It was an old, dark building, with an array of buzzers for some rather random businesses at the front door. But once we entered, we found the place to be quite hospitable. The 3 of us stayed in one room with one big bed and one small one.
Greg decided to take a crap before we started exploring Rome. After he had spent more than 10 minutes inside, we called out to him. He would not respond to our inquiries regarding the activities taking place within, the only sound we heard was a slow, steady dripping of water. Eventually, Greg confessed that he was not able to flush the toilet. The small metallic tab next to the toilet apparently would only spray a small stream of water into the bowl, not nearly enough to remove the foul collection of materials inside. However, Greg had failed to discover the rather large button directly above the toilet, that when depressed, provided the needed water to flush the toilet. This would not be the first time Greg would have trouble with our toilet on this trip.
After the toilet incident, we hit the streets. Our hotel was located in the North-East portion of Rome. We discovered this rather quickly after going over some maps. Our first stop was the Roma Stazione Termini, where we would have to catch our train to Venice the next day. After taking a few laps around the huge train station, we descended below the ground and into Rome's subway system, the Metro. We took the subway to Ancient Rome, where we were treated to one of the most awesome specticles I had ever seen: the Colosseum. It was massive, I mean really really big. We then tried to visit Palentine hill and the remains of the Roman forums, only to find that it had already closed (it was around 5PM at this point). We walked from there to the ruins of the Circus Maximus, which was nothing more than a circular grass field, littered with people walking their dogs and garbage. After the Circus Maximus we visited some kind of a pyramid, the history of which I had never heard of.
After all this walking, around 3 or 4 miles thus far, we decided to get some dinner and retire. We ate at a restaurant near the Termini, and had our first taste of Italian Italian food. Our pasta was great, and our wines and beers delicious. With our bellies full, we went to bed. For Day 2 would be a long one- in Venice.

-Ming

meh

2007-02-23T11:16:00.000-05:00

Not much to report. My last weekend was almost entirely consumed with Solar Splash and Baseball, I'm hoping for some more free time this weekend. Actually I'll be going to a John Williams symphony so that should be fun.
Speaking of baseball, as the weather warms up, I cringe more and more at the thought of having outdoor practice where I would have to prove my outfielding prowess by chasing down flyball after flyball. The only problem is of course that I have no such skills. So I'm gonna need a lot of help in that department before I'm comfortable playing in the field and not making an ass out of me and my team.
Also I may have purchased the most comfortable pair of pants I have ever worn yesterday. Dockers you magnificent bastards and your soft luxury pants. I love'em!

-ming

gotcha!

2007-02-17T08:07:00.000-05:00

Bet you thought I was going to stop posting already huh? No, I have been pretty sick for the last week or so. Not much's happened since then, still chugging along until the end of the semester and my life in Pittsburgh.

Went to EOC and spoke to Cory and Connor, it seems everything is going well with my application to ATK and I envision a very smooth move into Elkton. It was odd though, to walk past all the other booths there without stopping to hand off a copy of a resume and brag about myself for 5 minutes to each company. But there was so much of that going on in there. We set up a mini headquarters right outside of Rangos were our friends could drop off their bags and sit and talk while they recover their strength after so much job-searching action, and it was a good time.

Also, last night, Josh, Nat and I made a trip to the Waterfront to buy the raw materials we would need to build several hot-wire cutters to use to cut the foam we need for our new hull for Solar Splash. After much confusion about the type of wire/electronics to use, we managed to buy ourselves what seemed like everything we would need. But when we got started, the outlook was grim; the wire was just not heating up correctly. It seems we underestimated the scarcity of nickle-chromium wire, as it was not carried by either RadioShack nor Lowe's. In fact the employee at both stores seemed rather baffled at the mere mention of the name. Nevertheless, the steel cable we had purchased as a substitute seemed to be an unsuitable material- until Nat, using his superior knowledge of electronics figured out that we can peel apart the cable to separate the strands. With this in mind Josh and I set to work on the base and arm of the cutter. We finished everything around mid-night. I turned on the machine, and Josh slid a piece of styrofoam through the hot wire, and magically it sliced through. We were exstatic, and christened the machine the Foam Master 5000. I am excited to show this prototype off to the rest of CMSS.

End transcription

ming

crap

2007-02-09T18:14:00.000-05:00

Should have put on more layers when I went running with Josh last night. I have a damn cold now. It's the kind of a cold where you don't want to leave the house for anything, which is alright because I've been playing the Warriors all day long. I can finally sleep in tomorrow though for the first time in a long time, it's funny how even with so little work I still can't get enough sleep.

-ming

Shizers its cold

2007-02-08T09:23:00.000-05:00

It's really goddamn cold. My radiators aren't on because for whatever reason the people in charge here doesn't seem it necessary to provide their tenants with a source of warmth, and I'm only delaying the inevitable-taking a shower then instantly freezing when I step out of the tub.

In other news, I screened the Rock last night for AB Films; it met with moderate success- a higher than average turnout for the first showing, followed by a whopping zero patronage for the second. But it is just as great of a film as I remember it to be, at least it drove Darian to quite literally the edge of his seat when Nick Cage was scrambling to light his green flares. Those of you who doubt the power of Jerry Bruckheimer should look to this scene, it's really amazing.

EOC is today. In the past week I've been hearing the nervous murmurs that are usually associated with such an event from the engineering crowd. I don't mean to gloat of course, but it is really nice to not have to worry about this kind of thing anymore. I have a feeling my last semester would have been much less enjoyable had I had the pressure of looking for a job. Since Clyde, Cory and Connor are coming up from Elkton, I will be stopping by to say hello to them- No resume dropping, no networking, just watching waves after waves of suits and ties collide against walls of information packages and free stuff with the company's name on them. (The Eaton lip balm really sucks, though the Lockheed Post-Its and Boeing highlighter are really useful)

Anyway, that about wraps it up.

-ming

RIP Mingitup.com

2007-02-07T16:37:00.000-05:00

Due to some rather unfortunate circumstances (i.e. Dreamhost wanting me to pay for my domain hosting and my not wanting to give them any more of my hard earned money), mingitup.com is now defunct, and with it all traces of my previous blog, as well as my photos and other random things I had there. I did not have the foresight to back up anything from the site, as I really don't consider backing things up a prudent practice in the first place. Nevertheless, this will be my new blog until I become too lazy/boring to continue posting, and let it fade into digital oblivion.

Things have been going rather well. I've landed a job at ATK, and I will be starting in July; I've found a place to live in Elkton, and I am very excited to move there; I am currently an extremely lazy and unfettered student, the way a college student should be. Some engaging courses I am taking at the present moment include the Cold War in Documents and Film, a class in which we watch old black & white films from the 50's and 60's, and occasionally locate obscure nations and cities on a big map; another brain buster comes in the form of American Regionalism, in which I sit back and try to absorb as much information regarding early American Architecture as possible while thinking about how sweet a minor in Architecture will look on my diploma. Then of course there's Engineering Graphics, a drawing class for grown ups , and the ever rigorous Engineering Design.

I've joined the baseball team again, hoping that practices during the week can offer some degree of structure to my attempts at getting into shape. I, of course, am extremely out of shape, as I am still very sore from my last practice- on Sunday. But I foresee another season of sitting on the bench chewing on corn-nuts while occasionally shouting some manly words of encouragements like "here we go, blank", and "hey good eye". Oh and also I will be looking out for those flyballs like the one that caused me so much grief.

I think this is enough ranting for the moment being, hopefully I (we) will be seeing some interesting follow-up posts.

-ming