But I’m gonna mess with my template anyway. Hang on, this page will be messy over the next few days. Edit 1:Alright, I decided to get rid of the red theme, which I wasn’t doing much with anyway. I can’t color coordinate anyway. So I’m back to a nice, somber black, white, and gray. Tell me what you think, and how it looks in whatever browers and whatever resolution you are using. It finally looks correct in IE, but I’d like some feedback for Safari. Edit 2: Meh, I think black and white was too dull. I added a muted red. waddaya think?

The carpet’s intelligence is derived from a layer of silicone rubber with built-in electrodes that measure the changes in electrical resistance and current flow caused by someone walking across it. Testing has produced a nearly perfect record when determining ages between 20 and 60, and gender is identified with about 75 percent accuracy — eerie to say to the least. |link|

Near the end of the session, I found this door and frame sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, outside a theater. I dont know why it was there, but I took a picture.

I took a trip out to Philly this weekend. Apparently some of the other CTY folk went out there for a big group trip, but I couldn’t stand to hang around with these guys all day. Plus, they left at 9am, and I did not want to abide by their schedule. So I left around 11, and hung out at the art museum for most of the day. From out front, you get a good view of the Philly skyline. I was extremely pleased to see the Segway tours held here, too. I’d take a tour on them just for the ride if they didn’t make the passengers wear helmets: The museum is big and beautiful and out in a relatively secluded part of the city. I took the requisite Rocky shot from the top of the steps, but I couldn’t have orchestrated this shot any better if I had planned for weeks. Outside the museum, there is this sprawling metal spider on one side of the steps. And directly inside the building is this guy, by Miro. Harmony and I saw his brother at the MOMA last winter, and I was happy to see him again: I knew the museum was big, but I had no idea what to suspect. I was thinking it would probably be a lot of traditional stuff, so I didn’t have my hopes up. But the collections here were amazing. They have quite a big Rodin collection, and one of the first things I saw was Thinker, which just made my day. Across the gallery, however, was a much better sculpture by Rodin: Thought. I was giddy as a school girl, and it was the first room I had walked in. There was lots of famous van Gogh, and all big impressionists, (Monet, Manet, […]

I didn’t take many pictures on my New York trip, but I managed to snap a few interesting ones. One of the first things we saw in the city was this marquee. Todd had lots of fun at the MOMA, but I think he only looked at maybe 5 things while we were there. We had to tear him away. Central Park was pretty, and there were lots of people boating on the lake, and a barefoot musician with a guitar case overflowing with cash. We ate in Little Italy the day before the World Cup, and it was pretty crowded. The fried mozzarella there was excellent. We were in Little Italy because we wanted to walk around China town, and Little Italy is totally surrounded by China town. We had about an hour before our train left, so at the last minute we decided to run up to Times Square to check it out at night. It was a mad house, and was kind of a crappy way to end the day. But on teh bright side, I saw a Venture Brothers billboard across the street and snapped a picture. That must be costing Adult Swim a pretty penny, I hope it pays off for VB, because this season has been really good so far.

Best use of a disclaimer award, 2006

I’ll post Philly pics tomorrow. I apologize again for the lame cell phone pictures. This was the library/waiting room on the ground floor of the building I taught in. My building was East Pyne, and it was gorgeous. (You can’t see their faces, they could be anybody.) Thats my TA up at the front of the room. You probably can’t tell unless you squint your eyes, but this was during one of our many Heidegger lectures. You can just make out ready-to-hand and present-at-hand on the right, and some stuff about Nietzsche on the left. This was the fancy room we met the parents in on the first day. The picture doesn’t do the room justice whatsoever; it felt like walking into the UN. Each of those chairs are real leather . Here’s some more architecture from Princeton: Drinking on campus was sparse, and we had to make due with what was around. I visited two local bars, one pricey brewery called Triumph: And one local pub called Ivy Inn, that was a trashy frat hang out and smelled of puke and was playing “Sweet Child of Mine” as we walked in. And here are the infamous Tejas pictures. This was on the last Wednesday, I believe, when I finally had enough time to hang with the TAs. Tejas decided we needed a quick lesson in fencing. She fell down after each lunge, got back up, and insisted she could do it without falling. At which point she lunged again and fell back down. I was personally hitting the Old Granddad

Here are the rest of the pictures from the DC trip. After the White house, and walking past the hilarious Office of Thrift Supervision, we walked across the street to the Washington Memorial, which is huge and positioned nicely on the tops of a small hill that looks back over the rest of DC. The White House is dwarfed in the skyline, and the capital building sits majestically down the road. On the other side, towards the river, sit all the monuments, and flocks of tourists. The building was just too big to get in a single shot on my crappy cell phone, so I didn’t even try. In this particular shot, I tried to time it so that the low-flying jets overhead looks as if they were about to crash into the obelisk, but I snapped it half a a second too late. The shot you often see, of the reflecting pool mirroring the memorial, is deceptive. Its a good 200 yards between the Washington Monument and the reflecting pool, with the WWII memorial crammed in between. It was a serious trek to get to the other side, and we were already pretty tired. You can see the capitol building way off in the distance where we started. Directly on the other side of the reflecting pool, however, was the Lincoln Memorial, which Todd insisted we see. You have to remember, Todd is at least a decade older than me, but the cult of celebrity surrounding our 16th president made the poor Illinois boy push ahead. The Lincoln memorial was clearly the tourist hotspot, and there were at least a hundred people resting on the steps outside the building. Around the corner were a few more monuments, including the Vietnam memorial, which I though was really well designed and […]

So I’ve complained about the Lancaster site to a lot of people, but its hard to tie it down to a particular example that really gets across how annoying this place is. But maybe this will drive the point home: The instructional staff here has referenced Simpsons episodes in nearly every conversation I’ve had with any of them. That in itself isn’t horrible- it is exactly the reason I defend pop culture, after all. But what is horrible is that every one of these references begins with the question, “Do you watch The Simpsons?” It makes me want to bash someone’s skull in.

In case you haven’t been keeping up, all the interesting stuff is going down on the HTEC page right now. I’ll probably stay there until I return to Illinois, when I can fix the formatting issues on this page and get back to my regular posting schedule. Until then, there is plenty of robot stuff on HTEC to satisfy your inner robot enthusiast.