Rewards Points + Black Friday = Awesome

Today was like early Christmas for because all of these things arrived in one box:

And I didn’t actually pay for them. Turns out my credit card rewards points can magically be turned into Amazon gift cards which (on black friday and the following weekend) can be turned into a whole bunch of stuff! All told about 50 bucks of stuff pictured.  So why is this stuff cool enough to blog about? (and why am I showing you junk I bought like it defines me or makes me cool?)

Marx Brothers Collection: talk about physical comedy, I’m so excited to see that scene in the state room on a ship in the Night at the Opera.  The rest of their stuff is really solid too.

Uncle Tupelo CD: This is the band where Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy got his start, they’re alt country.  I don’t like country (excluding the old you done me wrong my dog got ran over my truck blew out a tire my dad gave me a girls name kind)  anyway these guy were doing some really cool stuff back in the early 90s before breaking up and leaving my hometown of Belleville, Il.  (Lead singer Jay farrar started up Son Volt which i tried and failed to like) The album pictured is their third (of four) “all acoustic” album and it pretty good so far.

A post about being burned by Pandora and the Amazing Ben Gibbard

Yesterday I had a fight with a Pandora station I created from a Bloc Party song, and it didn’t end well.  It started out alright, held on to the upbeatness of the better Bloc Party stuff, and I told it to add little bribes by Death Cab for Cutie.

Which is really an amazing track, the rhythm is really basic, but solid, it took me a couple listens before the lyrics clicked – The Eiffel tower built to smaller scale… I tapped a bottle against the safety rail killing time – and I was awash with memories of two adventures in Vegas with my college friends.  Their lyrics are poetic and biting – The hidden cameras on the casino floor/and what gets paid behind hotel doors…They’re all hoping for a wish fulfilled/in the desert for a dollar bill.  And I feel like Ben Gibbord really captures the mood of the city and how I felt 5 or 6 am in a casino on the shadier end of the strip – The never ending twilight/in a basement where the sun has never spilt.  He captures the mood perfectly of this enigmatic hedonistic fantasy world flanked by desert and neon lights.   Still, my favorite lyric is just a little absurd and quite clever (kindof like Vegas actually) – Pretend every slot machine is a robot amputee waving hello.

As amazing as this song is, apparently it was a mistake to add it too the station.  Turns out I only like 4 songs by Death Cab: Soul Meets Body, Cath…, the long version of I will posses your heart, and Little Bribes, and Hate everything else the band does.  But Pandora was dead set on putting more death cab and a lot of other quiet uninteresting shit and I hit thumbs down so many times, that it wouldn’t let me fast forward anymore.  I had to shut it down and walk away.

ACL:Three days in Paradise – Part One

I was in Austin over the weekend for The Austin City Limits Music festival and it was the best couple days of my life in recent memory. At the end of the first night I wrote about my the best parts of the day in my notepad app on my phone before sleeping on the floor of a hotel room. The only catch was that the notepad has a word limit, which is ridiculous. In hopes of capturing the flavor of that moment, i’ve left the text the way it is in my phone now with limited inserts (for clarity) and random bolding for emphasis. (and now i’ve added pictures!

Dr.Dog was everything i could ever hope for and then some! I got chills I loved every minute of it! Phoenix was fantastic, they opened with lizst and the lead singer got a little emotional after saying that this is the largest crowd he’d ever played for, it was heartwarming

I want a Shawshank Redemption

So I just finished watching the Shawshank Redemption for the first time

yes I know that movie is awesome, yes it is ridiculous that I’ve never actually seen it before, yes I’m not as cool as you thought, yes the big reveal on the 4^th or 5^th reel actually caught me by surprise, yes I like how the name of the movie plays into Red’s character.

Anyway in the entire last scene as Morgan Freeman is making his journey south, I had this terrible, uncontrollable sense of dread.  He’s going to have a heart attack and die inches away from Tim Robins, or never even make it out of the country alive.  This had me almost off of the couch.  And when nothing terrible happened, and there was this happy ending (albeit after years of wasted life inside) – I could not deal with it.  It didn’t feel like a familiar ending.  It felt wrong, nobody ever gets a happy ending, we all get screwed. And I don’t know why I feel this way. Somewhere along the way I’ve become this sarcastic swirling mass of negativity.

Beach house day 1 late concerns over broken phones and predestination

So the 4^th of July weekend is finally here and with it comes the beach house, or something I’d like to refer to as real world: Galveston.  What happens when people stop being engineers and start being real?  Right.  So.  Evening one, already some excitement, Charlotte’s car stuck in the sand, Ben with a bad ankle pushed it out, with his Hawaii skills.

My trip here was quite the bucket of stress;  not only was my car up to its usual hijinks (the transmission and several other things are at deaths door I believe) but my phone died.  I was attempting to charge it from the usb cord in my car, but something was off with the connection.  While using it for GPS on my way to the beach house, it wasn’t charging correctly, and I’m pretty sure my rough treatment of the connections only helped expedite its demise.  What am I to do with 4 days sans phone, and no internet available.  Good thing I worked out my FCAB logistics and called my family today.  Should give me a few days of lee-way to figure out what the fuck to do to fix it.  Without my phone I don’t have an alarm clock, a camera, or a way to talk to friends.  Anyway.  Tomorrow is to be awesome

My 5 days with out Iced Tea

or holy crap, caffeine addiction is for real

Sunday afternoon I had a lot of iced tea at a late lunch, and it was glorious as always.  Spend 5 minutes with me in a restaurant and you’ll understand the depth of my obsession with iced tea.  Sunday was a good day, but it was all downhill from there…

Tuesday I wake up and I’m so uncomfortable. Every joint, every muscle is unhappy, and I have no idea why.  As the day continues, I start to develop a pretty serious headache.  I give in and take some advil at work, and it takes the edge off but it doesn’t finish the job.  I had a short verbal checkout over a training segment and I just felt completely off.  I’m really surprised the instructor didn’t give me more things to fix. By the time I got back to my desk, I flatly could not focus.  I was starting to realize that something was very, very wrong.  My next thought was – shit when’s the last time I had caffeine?

When I was 24, it was a very good year…

I wrote this on my 25th birthday back in May and forgot about it completely, I think it’s still worth a read.

It was a pretty good year all things considered.

Things I did when I was 24:

1. got turned away for a job by NASA
2. graduated with a masters degree
3. saw radiohead for the first time
4. went camping with PDP
5. lived out the end of college with my 4^th summer in champaign
6. saw Darwin and Jess get married, best reception ever.
7. went to Ireland for two weeks with my family
8. Was offered a job at NASA
9. Discovered Chuck Klosterman

“Do the interns have a gun?” “No they share one.”

As I continue to try to meet more of the young people at NASA I’ve started to encounter an entire group of people that bother me on a very basic level – multi-tour co-ops.  I met a girl who is 23, on her sixth co-op tour, still not done with undergrad, intending to do grad school, and planning a total of 9 tours before it’s all over.  She says things like “oh I don’t know the younger co-ops” and “I’m only 23, I’m too young to settle down”.  I wanted to just shake her and tell her to fucking grow up.  Younger co-ops?  All co-ops are young!  They’re in fucking college. 

What If?

What if Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong hadn’t made it off of the moon on Apollo 11?

Richard Nixon was ready with a speech just in case…

“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

Node 3 and Stephen Colbert

Last night on the Colbert report, Sunita Williams announced the public name for Node 3 – Tranquility.

Colbert was the winner of the write in vote for the naming contest, so NASA named a new treadmill destined for node 3 after him.

The COLBERT: Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill

Suni told Colbert that astronauts would say “I’m jumping on the colbert” over the S/G loops every day.

And this patch will be placed on board:

Colbert’s a space fan, so he’ll probably be talking about this on his show for awhile, it’s some good PR for the ISS!