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People hereabouts have enjoyed this story so I thought I’d make a minor post of it.

There is a cute but pretty damn stupid girl at work who sits a few seats from me. She was looking around kind of lost one day and I asked her what was up. She asked me what 337 + 15 is. I had no idea why she would need that but told her 352. She thanked me and walked away. Then I turned around, kept going and kind of forgot about it.

Then today at around the same time I heard her ask someone what 328 + 15 is. They told her 343, and she started to walk away from her cubicle again. But this time, someone asked her why she wanted to know. She said she needed to know what time to come back from break.

It’s a flash game. It’s the “prequel” to the internet masterpiece Defend Your Castle.

Pillage the village

As always, you can find great stuff at jayisgames.

Yesterday I competed in the Buck Creek International Triathlon. An International triathlon is double the distance of the sprint triathlon. My training focused on preparing me for the international distance. But when I finally came time to do it I was nervous that I was unprepared. I had nothing to worry about though. I had a great race and preformed as well as I hoped. My goal was to finish in double my sprint triathlon time plus 10 minutes, i.e., under 3 hours and 10 minutes. My times were:

Swim (1500m)= 00:45:39

Bike (40km)= 01:20:50

Run (10km) = 00:51:30

Total = 03:02:52

You can see how everyone else did at the Race Results Page. Out of 90 people in the race, I finshed 79th. I was a little surprised by that. I expected to be middle of the pack, especially since I met my target time. I guess that the field of people doing the international triathlon is much more competitive than the people doing the sprint.

My advisor, Richard, ran in the race with me (pic). We took the pic after the race. He looks like he’s about to start the race and I look like I just got my ass kicked. Richard’s going to do an ironman on September 9th. I was really excited to have him at the race with me. It meant a lot because he’s the one who got me started on this whole thing.

I plan to take about week off then switch some off-season training like weights and easy biking. I’ll try to beat my times next summer.

The Kenyan village of Nachu is under seige by monkeys. The monkeys are stealing their crops, killing their livestock, and sexually harrassing their women. They even have lookouts when they break into people’s homes.

Monkeys!

Well, I finally made it to Ozzfest and, thanks to the wonderful voyeuristic society in which we live, can now write a live review using not only words, but also uploaded videos from the same time (8/20) and place (Tweeter Center, Mansfield) none of which I had any hand in taking. Sweet!

The full-day festival had several bands of import on the list. The Showdown stayed largely under the radar except for when they switched from Metallica ripoff songs to a medley of Metallica covers, thus keeping the stage warm for Nile. I was disappointed that Nile had lost their impressive bassist/vocalist from the last time I saw them, but one of their guitarist/vocalists did an apt enough job in center stage. The bad news is that they could only play 4 songs in their set. The good news is that one of these was Sarcophagus, a surprise pick that really stood out as their best song.

After them came Ankla, during which time co-voyager Michael and I wandered about exploring our surroundings, which included an old-fashioned freak show which the midget out front asserted was fantastic and a hustler lingerie show (non-nude). However, Michael had a wife to get back to and I some porno, and since we both distrust midgets we steered clear of these attractions.

Taiwanese black metal band Chthonic impressed us a bit, and their onstage banter (anti-China) begun a political theme which would continue through out the night (Daath, anti-marine recruiters 100 yds away, and Lamb of God, anti-everything). Nobody impressive came on for a while so we took more time to admire the scenery. We returned for Behemoth’s show, which was quite good despite the Polish band’s inability to speak understandable English when trying to get the crowd riled (worked anyway).

We ditched at the beginning of Hatebreed’s set to go find our seats at the main stage. On the way, we had the good fortune to run into an old school chum of ours whom we lost track of after he tried to kill his family. Apparently, in the meantime he has figured out what really happened on 9/11 and spent the next 20 or so minutes lecturing us on this as well as experimental physics and aliens. A charming fellow.

Anyway, our seats were pretty good except for the fact that we were seated near the lawn area, which is farthest from the stage. As anyone who has attended a concert here knows, during shows the lawn people rip up grass and throw it at the people in the seats. Luckily nothing came within 6 or so feet. Anyhoo, after sitting through some crap group Black Tide, Eurovision 2006 winners Lordi [scroll down] came on stage and did a pretty damn good job. The crowd was rather split on them, though. Their music is very pop-metal, and their very theatrical performance may have thrown people off as well. However, Michael and I were both very impressed and cheered for them despite the inherent embarrassment. Static X then played, and though I enjoyed the songs they recorded while I was in high school I was very disappointed with their newer material. We then sat through Lamb of God’s act. Neither of us liked them a bit, but it was amazing how popular they were for a fairly heavy band. I’m still shocked at the response they got. Unfortunately the music bored rather than shocked.

Lastly, of course, Ozzy came on. The dude is indeed old, and spent most of his time on stage at a doddering to and fro at high speed, stopping in the middle, and doddering again. His voice started out horribly, but he eventually warmed it up, and the other band members were lively enough. My only real complaint was the setlist (no Shot in the Dark, No More Tears, Perry Mason, Diary of a Madman, etc.) and the incredible amount of (admittedly cool) guitar soloing, which nevertheless gets boring after several minutes. War Pigs does not need multiple solos, and don’t add more to Crazy Train, it’s perfect already, thank you.

Best Performance: Lordi
Best Song(s): Hard Rock Hallelujah, Crazy Train, Sarcophagus, Conquer All
Most Memorable Sight: A large, shirtless man walking away from the pit with a ring in one nipple and a stream of blood from the other.
Most Memorable Quote: “Even the conspiracy theorists think I’m crazy.”
Grade: !!!METAL TRIPLE-PLUS!!!

Book by lego-designers with recipes for lego-fun that “that your parents warned you about“.

From the article: Youtube video of Lego gun in action

Thanks for Jay, Shaun, Losure, and Pete for keeping the blog going during my summer work. Unfortunately I still don’t have an Internet connection so I’m not really back to blogging. I’ll have plenty to say soon, though I did take the time to make a quick post on the travel blog. Thanks and see you soon.

The Higgs Boson is the last unobserved particle of the standard model. We searched for evidence of the Higgs in data taken at CDF since 2002. We haven’t collected enough data to see the Higgs as predicted by the standard model. Our goal was to set a strong constraint on the rate of Higgs production. We set a limit of 8-12 times the standard model in the regions where we are most sentive. The interpretation of the limit is “if the Higgs were present in the data at 8-12 times the amount we expect, we would have seen it.”

Check out our results here .

The search for the Higgs is an exciting project. I’ll update the search with new strategies and more data over the next year and a half, then write it up for my thesis. When I get more time I might write a longer blurb about motivation for existence of the Higgs and some other generic particle physics things.

Reasonably good BBC documentary/interviews with varying persons from the Westboro Baptist Church, they who gained some publicity/blogtime a ways back for picketing soldiers’ funerals. It’s fairly interesting and reasonably disturbing. Some of the parts with the younger generation were rather interesting, and I must admit I find it fairly perplexing that unlike any other cult/religion I’m familiar with they seem completely uninterested in actually gaining members or support, but rather revel in being disliked. Very odd.

Gamespot has a bunch of videos up from Blizzcon and so forth demoing parts of SCII. I’d check out the Terran race demo first, then maybe the single-player campaign. They’re doing some dang fantastic stuff with both, but I must admit to being particularly surprised at the lengths they’ve evidently gone to to improve single-player campaign experience… instead of simply receiving new units and upgrades at certain points you have to purchase them, and the mission selection is no longer strictly linear. Anyhow, check it all out here.