feelin' breezy
Mood: relaxed
Posted on 2006-09-06 15:44:00
Words: 529

So things have been going relatively well up here in Maryland (motto: "manly deeds, womanly words") - there are just a few boxes left around and the place finally feels like a "real" apartment. Which means I need to take pictures soon!

I've really been enjoying the weather up here - it's been cool, although somewhat rainy (which is novel!), so we've ended up walking around town some, even if only across the street to the mall. We made another trip to Baltimore today to see the National Aquarium in Baltimore (which we had planned to see on Sunday, but didn't because it was ridiculously crowded what with Labor Day weekend and all) - I'm not a big fan of zoos and aquariums in general, but it was quite impressive. Got some good pictures too that will go up at some point :-) Anyway, by the time we got done it was 3 PM, so we just headed back home for a relaxing afternoon/evening, which I'm now having! Before Baltimore we went to the National Cryptologic Museum which was very impressive as well - lots of important stuff there. There was even an Enigma machine you could use! They also had on display some of the computers the NSA used to use, including one that went into service in 1993 and had 64GB of RAM, which impressed me! (also impressive was the fact that it went out of service in 2000 but has apparently been declassified, which sort of makes sense: not a huge secret that the NSA has fast computers...)

Anyway, I'm really getting used to this whole not working during the day thing just in time for it to run out. But we did get most of the apartment setting up stuff done - the only major things are driver's license and license plates, which we might be able to squeeze in on Friday but we'll see.

Columbia's also starting to feel a little more like home - I know the layout of the town center decently and I'm fairly comfortable with the highways around here, and have found a few shortcuts that shave time off of trips :-)

I do miss human contact, though (other than djedi of course! It's been nice spending a lot of time with him) - the idea that we could just call people up and have them over/go out with them is sorely not available to us. There's a Games Club of Maryland that has a game night in Columbia Friday night - I'm making myself and djedi go to try to meet people. And starting work will help, too, but I'm trying to cast my net as widely as I can.

Ooh, pest control is here! Maybe our ant problem will disappear (although it's gotten a bit better in the last few days)

With some of my spare time, I wrote a little web app to query my Auctioneer data so you can find out approximate prices when you're not in WoW. I'm not ready to officially announce it yet (because it doesn't work in IE for some stupid reason...grrr IE), but if you're interested let me know and I'll send you a link :-)

Hope everyone's having a nice week!

6 comments

Comment from djedi:
2006-09-06T15:39:11+00:00
You did'nt say much about the Aquarium. :) We saw dolphins which were really cool and they talked a lot about how they train them and such (rather than just showing the usual tricks). We also saw some really neat fish, electric eels, colorful frogs, cute puffins, actual coral and sea anenomes (they look SO cool and fake) and a few other noteworthy things that I can't remember any more. We spent 3.5 hours there without really getting bored, so it was fun.

Comment from wildrice13:
2006-09-06T15:49:53+00:00
They have what, 5 levels? The top one isn't even fish, iirc, it's birds and sloths and stuff, right? Or am I thinking of somewhere else? I guess I don't remember it all that clearly, but I do remember that I liked it a lot.

Comment from gregstoll:
2006-09-06T15:52:28+00:00
Yeah, the top level is all rainforesty. Actually, they have an Australia exhibit that has a fair number of birds, too.

Comment from cifarelli:
2006-09-06T16:18:44+00:00
I wanted to go to the Atlanta Aquarium while we were there this weekend, but we didn't end up having time to fit in a visit. I LOVE aquariums, zoos, etc. When I started college, I wanted to be either a marine biologist or an animal behavior researcher, but cellular/molecular biology/chemistry really aren't that interesting to me, and I had to get through a LOT of that before I could take courses on the topics I was really interested in, and sad to say I gave up before getting very far. I do occasionally contemplate going back to school and getting a biology degree, but I doubt that it's really feasible at this point in my life.

Comment from wildrice13:
2006-09-06T15:52:32+00:00
Wow, now that I think about it, that mod could be the start of something pretty massive. If you did release it, then had it report back data (voluntarily, so people wouldn't be worried about automatic services like with the GuildInfoTable) then you could g4t recent data from all kinds of servers, and post the compiled data... that could become quite popular. Such that you might need quite a bit of bandwidth, but might also be able to get quite a bit of money if you did GoogleAds or the like. Just a thought...

Comment from gregstoll:
2006-09-06T16:50:02+00:00
Hmm, interesting. The problem is that as it is right now it's kinda slow, so aggregating data would definitely be even slower (although lookups would, conceivably, not be any slower than they are now). Also, duplicate entries might be a significant problem - auctions active at night (when presumably more people scan) would get weighted higher. Of course, that's when more people are on, so maybe that does make sense...

Anyway, I'm officially announcing it - see my next post :-)

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