Monkey Made of Drugs

Sitting in the Marrakesh airport, I decided to kick out a post here.

There were four of us: me, David, Gabi, and one of Gabi's acquaintances, Peter. It never ceases to surprise me how many people he knows. Peter was a giant man, pushing 6'5" from Holland. He made all his wealth in the states, but now rents his house and just travels.

After we landed, Gabi and Peter went through one line at customs; Dave and I went through another. Each official blazed through the disembarked passengers with unbelievable speed, as it took about 15 minutes to move three spots in line. Peter and Gabi beat us by several minutes, and as David reached the front, the officer asked for the address where we would be staying. We didn't have it, so we had to find Gabi outside the exit and get back in to tell him. If you've ever tried to go back into the secured part of an airport after leaving, you can begin to appreciate the difficulty involved here. The whole thing was an ordeal that shouldn't have mattered, let alone happened.

As we approached the curb outside the airport, the Gabi Oanţa bartering began. We found a bus outside that would take us pretty close to the hotel. It would cost us €3.50 each, summing to €14.00. Gabi started haggling with a taxi to do it for €12, but the guy would drop below €15, claiming that the bus was going to drop us a ten minute walk from the hotel. Gabi said the stop was 2 minutes away, the guy argued, and we ended up getting on the bus right as it pulled out.

The bus did drop off pretty close to the hotel, so we saved a couple of euros between the four of us. It really came down to a matter of gabi's pride rather than the actual cost of the trip.

Upon arriving at the hotel, we had to change rooms because ours smelled faintly of smoke. Quickly became apparent that exactly zero crap would be tolerated here. Gabi tore his way back down to the front desk and demand us another room but it would not be available until the following day. He responded by saying that we would change hotels and wanted a refund. After they heard this, the room suddenly vacated and cleaned itself, making it free for us to move in. The hotel was nice with the pool located within jumping distance from our second story window.

After dropping off our stuff, we decided to head over to the center of the old city. Peter offered to sit this one out and take a nap instead. Having only one key to the room, we told him we would be gone for an hour, locked him in, and went on our way. The older part of the city consisted mostly of narrow, cobblestone streets. Survival Marrakesh requires constant attention to traffic coming and going from streets, sidewalk, alleys, shops in doorways. Everybody and their mangy dog owns a little two stroke scooter with bike pedals. They use these to zip around the 1.6 million residence town, all the while missing you by no more than 5 inches. While walking around, and Gabi kept looking for a specific barber that he used when he was there before; David and I just looked in little shops. We encountered a man who made small, wooden necklaces with a manual lathe. He had a bow he use to spin the wood while he used a chisel to carve it. It being difficult to stabilze any sort of woodworking tools with one hand, he used his foot to hold it in place. It seemed to work well for him. We got a few and went on our way. Among other things, we saw a man hacking the horns off a goat's head. It was here that we learned that we arrived on day two of Morocco's three day Christmas-like festival. As we continued to explore the winding streets, we saw a fellow cleaning out a traditional brick oven they use to make bread. As one of his friends explained what he was doing, he walk inquired if we had enjoyed the local hash. We politely declined and left. Upon realizing we had been gone for well more than the promised hour, we returned to the room to find Peter awake and frustrated we had locked him in. He told us he wasn't feeling too well, so he slept a bit more and the rest of us fell asleep in turn before heading out for the night.

To be continued...

What's This?

September 11, 2011

Last week I went climbing seven times in seven days. Today, it feels like my fingers are broken. I'm thinking it comes from hitting the same 11.a twice in two days and not being used to it. That, however, won't be much of a deterrent from going this week. It is about all I do anymore.

Work has been work. Some days are better than others. Some days feel like weeks, others feel like minutes. There is plenty to do, but often it is just that after a whole day of working, there isn't a lot of visible progress. At that point, you just have to step back and say, "I swear I worked all day, even if I don't have much to show for it." 

David and I went shooting on Saturday, and the surprising lesson of the day was that the AK-47 can easily pinpoint a tiny cup from 20 yards. Dave and I played "Top Shot" and through a series of challenges, I prevailed. Luckily, there was no shotgun challenge, otherwise I would have been annihilated. 

September 16, 2011

Today, no work. Instead, David and I worked on building a floating candelabra for my madre's haunted house. 

System Restart

So when blogging from das iPad, it it doesn't like to allow text in the compose field, so welcome to HTML zone.

I didn't go to work today because I didn't really have to. I worked ten hours on Monday and about eleven hours yesterday, so it left me pretty close to forty for the week without going in. I was planning on spending at least a few hours there this morning, but then decided against it because sleep was just too awesome. That seems to be the trend of my weeks as of late. Instead of saying, "I could easily get overtime today," I say, "close enough." That, and I've been dealing with some other stuff today.

Don't get me wrong: I've got a great job and I work for a great company. I enjoy what I do and I wish I could be there longer than just the summer. I mean, they're giving all of the employees iPads, just for being awesome. I shall sell mine to recoup the costs of Master Control. Everything went better than expected.

What's that? You want to know the nomenclature of my electronics? Well then, here you go...

1. 80 gb iPod: îPod (named this because I had recently returned from my mission where the I-hat is used all the time)
2. MacBook: Mactop (Mac + laptop)
3. iPod touch: (-1)^(1/2)Pod (the square root of -1 is i, I was spending a lot of time in school at the time)
4. Nexus One: GLaDOS (you get it or you don't)
5. iPad: Master Control (this was after I decided that all future electronics with names are denoted by robots and AI from movies and games)
6. Netbook: HAL-9000 (same as above)

By the way, this is front porch bloggery. As I've told many folks , you don't know what you'd do with an iPad until you have it. Then you don't know what you did without it. I am hoping that the AYCJ comes back into existence again this year and I can take it with me on my journeys.

This just in: cream soda looks like beer.

Cindy speeds down the road in the neighborhood. Just saw it with my own eyes. No pics, although it did happen.

Despite having not finished my regular season shows, I am excited for summer season. Mostly for Burn Notice, but whatever.

Just a quick thanks to everybody who helped me deal with my crap last week. You all know who you are, even if you don't know exactly what you did.

It's More Than Just a Free Minor

So now that May is almost over, I suppose that it is time for another blog post. Again, apologies to all that actually check this.

So here is something that I have been thinking about recently: Math. But you might be saying, "Brian, you just graduated. Why in the world would you be thinking about math?" and the answer to your question is simple: Math is everything.

Music is math: When you convert the frequency of equivalent notes between octaves, they are an exact double of the lower octive. For example, if you were to take the A note just above middle C to be 440 Hz, then the A below it would be 220 Hz and the one above it would be 880 Hz. Each note is thusly proportionally spaced (A to A# to B to B# and so on) to be 2^(1/12)x the note preceding it. All of this is simply boiled down to the rate at which waves propagate through matter, but then there have been numerous papers written on the rhythmic patterns of Chopin, Motzart, and Beethoven, one of which takes Beethoven's fifth and pulls the raw equations out of it using Fourier transforms and demonstrates the mathematical soundness of the entire thing. If I could find the link on it right now, I would link it, but I'm not in the mood to go digging. On a less classy note, there's auto-tuning of today's horrible pop stars that makes their voices more tolerable: also math, but just less classy.

Weight loss is math: when you're trying to lose weight, it is going to come down to one thing: calories. A calorie is defined as the amount of energy it takes to heat one gram (which is also conveniently one milliliter and one cubic centimeter) of water, one degree C. This is stored energy and equal to about 4.184 joules. When you are actively using up this energy, you can express the rate of energy consumption in watts, or joules per second. So if the average person takes in 2000 dietetic calories (or 8.368 MJ) per day, they would have consumed enough energy to power a single 100 watt lightbulb for almost an entire day. Now, this really isn't all that much, but bear in mind that there are people that are consistently getting fatter, which means that they aren't using all the energy that they take in, and there body has to store it somewhere. Basic universal laws state that you can't create or destroy energy, only convert it between forms. So they are taking it in, nit using it, and then converting it to fat. Yup. So if you want to lose it, you have to use more energy in a day than you consume. E_out > E_in. Simple as that.

Motion is math: say that your standing on top of a building and drop a baseball off the top. The representation of the acceleration of the ball will just be a = g. Then to find the velocity at any given time, this is simply v = g*t, and then to find the position of the ball, you can integrate once more to find that x = .5 g*t^2. this is neglecting any drag forces that the air exerts on the ball and also just a simple drop. If you were to throw the ball with an initial velocity of 65 mph at an angle of 35 degrees from the horizontal with a cross wind of 30 mph off a 75 foot tall building, you could effectively calculate almost exactly where it would land. This same principle relates to anything that moves. You can use math to explain the lack of friction on old shoes coupled with a diagram showing the unequal forces causing one to slip while walking, or to show the devastation between a head-on collision between an F-150 and a smart car. In that scenario, you can guess who the victor is going to be, but can you explain why? Well, math can.

There are plenty more examples, but these are just a few that I could think of off the top of my head. So every time somebody says to me, "math is hard" I like to interpret this into "understanding everything is hard." Granted, you don't have to understand the math behind everything to do it, it just makes it a lot better.

(And this is what happens when I don't use my brain for a month after being out of school.)

Denim Chicken?

Check out the six day turnaround on blog posts. Not bad, eh?

I am mostly writing because I forgot a very important even in the last post. I went to Disney World. (Hey, I was rushed...)

It was pretty awesome; here are some pictures,

Awesome Castle Show (Forgot the name of it...)

Untouchable Buzz Lightyear Score

Derek Enjoying an Epic High Five Adventure

Umm.... Zebra Man?

Jeniece went to every length to ensure that Derek and I had a great time, and she did very well. Hopefully it was enough to pull through to the end of the semester.

Meltdown Imminent

It has been well over a month since I last posted anything on here, so I will give a quick recap of what has happened since February 3rd.

• I got into ASU.
• I went to Wyoming for a job that is in the middle of nowhere, that would be interesting, good experience and pay well. However, it is in the middle of nowhere.

That is about it. I have also assembled a really sweet gun. It is a .308 and I haven't taken it out yet. I plan on eventually hitting something at 1000 yards. Just for a point of reference, if you shoot completely horizontal, it will take the bullet more than a second to fly that distance and will drop more than 35 feet. It will be a challenge, but I have 40 rounds to try and pull it off. If I can't do it with those, I will just buy more.

I have also spent a liberal amount of time this past month playing a game called "Fallout." It is set in post apocalyptic Washington DC and is massive. I have been checking some walkthroughs on the internet as I go mostly because I don't want to waste exorbitant amounts of time doing things that don't really matter. Fun game overall. I think that if I do decide to go up to Wyoming, I will buy the next one to spend my free time on this summer.

Derek is currently on "operation: don't look so damn fat" and I've decided to join him. Mostly because I feel like crap and don't exercise and I'm gaining weight. I ran a mile and lifted a bit today, but not a whole lot. We'll see how long I keep it up. I figure that if somebody else is doing it as well, I might be more motivated to actually keep up with it instead of quitting like I do every time.

Thanks to my geophysics class, I know exactly how many Joules of energy were released in the 9.0 Japan earthquake from a few days ago. Correction: I know where to look up the equation. I don't have it memorized. I have better equations to memorize to be honest.

There remain 36 days between me and the end of my BYU career. I am very excited to finish up and get out of there. Overall, they have been really good to me. I am just sick of the SSDD outine that I go through there. I am hoping that by not spending much time at ASU, I don't develop the same feelings for that university.

Current shows:

Dexter: Just finished season 4.

Rescue Me: Middle of season 4.

There really isn't anything else on right now. Everything is taking sporadic breaks and I never know when it is on. I think that I am going to start saving entire seasons until they are done. I will definitely burn through them faster but I think that I would enjoy them more. I will likely still acquire them as they come out though.

Anyway, my room looks like total crap and I have resolved to clean it today. Something smells like fire. Better check it out.

HaHA!

For some reason, whenever I'm bored, I never think to post to this thing. Except for right now. Right now I just remembered.

Dave sold Derek and I some cards for a nursing thing fundraiser. Last night we went to Trafalga with them and each got two free games of mini golf. We didn't play our games sequentially, we played six balls at the same time. These were the rules:

1. If you were playing on an odd-numbered hole, you shot one ball, then the other. After you, somebody else did the same thing and the hole was played in this fashion.
2. If you were playing an even-numbered hole, you shot one ball, then the next player went, and the loop continued in that fashion.
3. If you were playing a prime-numbered hole (and later perfect squares as well) you had to shoot both balls at the same time. This rule supersedes the previous rules when determining the style of hole.
4. If somebody gets a hole-in-one on a prime-numbered hole, they got to shoot all six balls simultaneously on the next prime-numbered hole.
5. Bad-Ass points are awarded for doing something awesome.
6. Dumb-Ass points are awarded for doing something stupid.
7. Dick Treason can be called if you rob somebody of a shot within 6 inches of the hole.
8. The 18th hole is treated as prime if a hole-in-one is made on the 17th hole.

It seems like there were a few more rules that were made up, but you get the idea. Also, if you're reading this, you were also likely there...

This semester sucks. Capstone needs to go away. It is one semester too long. I've been spending a lot of time down at USS and we had a design review last week where we were told "you should be afraid of not finishing." I don't really care.

Geophysics isn't too bad. The teacher isn't too spectacular, but she does try to make it interesting. The class's redeeming quality is that the class number isn't preceded by "ME EN" making it a change from the standard I've been experiencing for the past four years.

Tonight, Dave is hosting "Geektober" which is odd, because it is February. "Geekuary" really doesn't have the same feel to it though.

The distributor that I use for my weaponry is currently out of stock of anything and everything that interests me. It is a bit of a pain in the ass. I can't say that I am overly pleased with the fact that I have no guns to sell right now. I have my AK, but as indicated, it is mine and I won't be selling it anytime soon.

I have posted a picture of a magazine that I created. The last gun that I sold initially came with two mags and a hard case. I sold it with one mag and no case, but for less than I initially intended. I did this to one of the mags and quite enjoyed the project.

Yes, you could hide amongst a herd of zebras and nobody would even know you were there...

Also, I've decided to post a picture from last September, when Derek and I went off on a grand adventure around the world. It is entitled "Derek Picked Horrible Breakfast, So He Can't Criticize Brian For Horrible Dinner"

This was at breakfast. Derek carried a similar expression at dinner.

Bombachus

• I'm gonna live forever!