Geeking, Drinking, and Family (a weekend)
Sometimes its hard to find something everyone wants to do, so you just have to throw a party!
Justin and I had people over Friday night to hang out and socialize. The evening started out pretty interesting when Katie showed up with her ham radio. I’m not too familiar with amateur radio (Katie has a transmitter license), but it was still pretty excited. Apparently there was broadcast that night and as soon as she got to our place. So as soon as she got here we all grabbed beers and went out to her car to try to set up her gear before it closed. Putting the thing together was almost as fun as listening to the broadcast, Justin wouldn’t let me post the picture of him holding his ‘rod’ (even tho *I* took it), so you’ll have to wait until he puts it up on his blog to see it. It was my first experience with such a high altitude broadcast, there was even a reply from the International Space Station.
Tailgate party for a broadcast, hells yeah. We had a few neighbors stare at us on passing or through open windows, it probably was a bit strange looking for a bunch of kids (well, I guess were not really kids) to be hanging out in a parking lot drinking beer and putting a giant antenna together.
More people began to show up a bit later for a good night of hanging out, snacking, and playing some weird card game I think Brian just made up and isn’t really real. Justin also got people in to playing a dice game called Three Man. Overall it was a great time with some people I haven’t seen in a bit.
A party Friday night may not have been the smartest thing to do for wanting to wake up and drive to Pittsburgh early the next morning. Needless to say we didn’t leave first thing in the morning, and got up to Justin’s parent’s place a little after noon. Luckily the family party we were going to wasn’t early that evening, so his dad helped him work on his taxes while I watched (I’ve never done my own taxes before and I think I messed them up when I tried to do them myself). Let me just say that without the aid of software (that is fairly usable, but it still had its moments) I don’t know how normal people do them right. They’re so ambiguous and unless you know about a certain thing, you would never be able to figure it out yourself.
Afterwards we headed to his family’s party for a bunch of cousins who are having birthdays in March. I did a good job of hurting myself after slipping down some carpeted stairs, that night my tailbone hurt and now I have a painful knot in my side under my ribs (I have no idea how I even hurt my side, I landed on my ass!). The Penguins game made up for it thought, we won 6 to 3 (New Jersey) with 2 of the goals in the first two minutes of the game! It was also a nice way to start the night out on the town as we met up with some friends at the bar (some of which are going to Vegas with us next weekend).
Today on our way home we stopped home at my parents for lunch. We had some great chicken and stuffing along with my mom’s famous apple pie. My dad was in story telling mode (when is he not?) and told us some old stories about the crazy time he had in Venezuela a while back. They like to travel a lot and are going to Puerto Rico this weekend. They have friends they wanted to ship wine to there, but after shipping and taxes it would be over $100 to do so. What do they do instead? Book a flight and decide to just take it to them. I don’t know how cost effective that is but it sure sounds like fun.
Finally after our long trek back, I had a great suprise in the mailbox. My copy of Interfaces from the British HCI group had arrived with the article Jan and I wrote. I have to say I’m a bit excited about this, I haven’t had an article published in such a well known magazine.
Alas, now it is time for homework. I have a midterm due Tuesday as well as some other things I must catch up on for school and work before I leave for the west coast. Buzzy, busey :)
seele :: Mar.12.2006 :: Geek, General, Life, Open Source, Parties :: 4 Comments »
To clarify the ham radio stuff: we heard somebody mention the ISS, but it was a different satellite — AO-51 Echo — that we were tracking. (One of the astronauts aboard the ISS frequently makes ham radio contacts with hams on the ground; I think the gist of what we heard was that one of them heard the other making contact with that astronaut recently.) You may have heard recently about SuitSat, an expired Russian space suit that the guys on the ISS stuffed a radio transmitter into and threw out of the space station. The idea was that hams could listen for its signal in the few weeks before either its battery is spent or its orbit decays enough for it to burn up in the atmosphere.
Nertz
hehe, thanks katie. you space nerds are sometimes over my head (as i probably am when i start ranting about interfaces) :)
haha…that’s definitely not the rules you gave us brian ;p