Pictures are worth 1000 words… i don’t have the paint skillz so this will do for now.

Kurt’s interpretation:

Sander’s guess:

Ben’s image of mike d:

Mike D Loves His Steel Drum So Much He Married It

What do you think mike looks like with a steel drum?

What a weekend. Friday I had the day off from work and I went outdoor rock climbing with Jesse and Mike Caouette. Please note the amount of vowels in Mike’s last name. FIVE. That’s 62.5% vowels. Can anyone top that?

The rock climbing was amazing. It was so peaceful, with the sky stretched out above us and the 85 foot rock face in front of us. Jesse and I both did 5.9- and it wasn’t too much of a challenge. We will definitely go again to push our limits.

Saturday I drove back to Mass to visit Jill. we made a delicious curry dinner and watched closer. I will refrain from making any comments about Natalie Portman’s exciting character.

Sunday I spent some more time with Jill, we went to Hammond Castle. It was great, and if you ever happen to be in Glochester, check it out. It was built by John Hammond, the inventor of remote control. Post Castle, we saw star wars and ordered out from a Chinese Restaurant. I will refrain from making any comments about Natalie Portman’s exciting character.

And yesterday, yesterday I bought some steel drums. And with this single purchase, The House of Rock got just a little more Reggae.

Mike’s the worst blog operator ever. I logged in and there were 32 comments in moderation. Yes, they were all spam but what if someone had something good to say and it got caught in the gears of justice?

Anyways, Mikedidonato.com is now running on WP 1.5.1.2. As usual, report problems to Mike and he’ll forward them to me to deal with.

Last night after an exciting evening rock climbing with Jesse and Sander, Jesse and I jumped into his Audi and started the ride home. As we were getting close, I asked Jesse to drop me off at the carpool lot because my car was there. The stop light next to the parking area was red so I jumped out of the Audi early so that Jesse wouldn’t have to pull into the commuter lot.

“do you have your keys?” Jesse asked as I bounded out of the vehicle.
“yup.” I shouted back.

So, wearing sandals, shorts, and a t-shirt, I ran into the lot as Jesse drove off towards home. It was cold. Mid to high 40’s and the rain was really coming down.

I jogged around the parking lot. “where did I park… where did I park…”
After making a full loop, I realized my car wasn’t there. No no, it was back at the House of Rock. Drenched and cold, I tried to find shelter under some trees, called Jesse and asked him to turn around.

“jesse! come back!”
“you don’t have your keys?”
“I don’t have my car.”
“okay, I’ll turn around.”

after much laughter, we decided that I’m an idiot.

My favorite economist is back!

Check out his article on tomatos here.

I love this stuff.

This is a picture of Jill’s sister’s hair spliced together.

check out this week’s “TOPSITE” icon (upper right of the screen) to get a preview of the GUERNICA MSPaint image that I’m working on.

This weekend was a great one. It started with a trip to worcester where I saw my vegetarian friend, Rick Richter, and installed a meat shower curtain in his bathroom. (photos to come)

This was followed by a trip to the Sole with Jon Abad, who returned to New England for his sister Jessica’s graduation. There were many laughs. It was great to see my favorite texan once again. He really should return perminantly to New England. It’s tragic that he’s gone.

Saturday was Jill’s graduation. yay jill! she graduated as one of only twelve honors students (out of about 300 total students) and graduated with Cum Laude honors. It was a really wonderful ceremony. I’m proud of my girlfriend.

We returned to Jill’s home post-graduation, and watched the Sox game. As we were sitting, Jill’s older sister Steph decided to braid Jill’s younger sister Linda’s hair. As she finished she proclaimed: “wow, Linda’s hair is as strong as rope.” to which I replied, “I wonder if you could splice hair together.”

Jill then slid over and braided Steph’s hair and then spliced the two braids together, resulting in a hilariously strange siamese hair connection between Jill’s sisters. (photos to come)

Sunday I relaxed, played some catch with Jill, and returned to the House of Rock where the rocking continued where it had left off.

The Question

ben Says:
March 1st, 2005 at 11:21 am
Shaun,

The water in the water cooler at work is from Nestle. It says that it’s been filtered through a “Reverse Osmosis” process. What does that mean, to me the consumer, and is this better than other filter methods? Should I prefer it over Brita filtered water?

(more…)

I found THIS via jefte’s site. And I love it. The poem, the music, everything. Jill wasn’t as impressed, and thought the repetitive animation was slightly distracting.

What do you think?

Pam found this tragic, yet somehow awesome, story..

4 gold stars for Pam.

I am slightly disappointed in myself because I definitely found this story entertaining. 28 people were killed, but the fact that they were challenging a lion makes it seem more stupid than tragic. The fact that they were midgets is irrelevant. I think I would be equally intrigued if they were Canadians.

I happened to be reading the news this morning, and headlines stated that there was a high potential for domestic terror from two main groups: the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front.

ALF and ELF.

I suspect we may see an influx of new terrorist organizations over the next few months. Including:

1. Societies Mourning Urban Refining Factory Syndocates
2. Parties Against National Security Yachts
3. Beijing Arboretum Loving Linguistic Earthen Rich Interacting Natural Activist Society

I had to extract a bunch of Winzip files. As I was waiting, I concentrated on the animation of the paper flying through the air into my folder.

“what’s happening there?” I thought. So I picked up a piece of paper and tried to copy the motion.

Unsuccessful. The paper on the screen was moving WAY too fast for me to copy.

So I took a bunch of screen shots and edited them together with MSPaint to try and figure out exactly how that paper turns and twists into its final destination.

I am proud to say that I am now able to mimic the motion of the extracting paper with a real life piece of paper. Can YOU think of anything less productive to do while you wait for files to extract?

The last one went really well. So I’m doing it again.

You request it, I draw it.

I’ll probably only do the first two or three requests. Anything too tricky will likely be skipped altogether. But I’ll do my best.

This is for Tim Baird. No one I know slacks off more than he does, and this tool will let him do it better.

movies I’d like to see, but haven’t yet.

1. kill bill vol. 2
2. matrix 3
3. sin city
4. lost in translation
5. supersize me
6. suicide kings

For all those graduating seniors, check this out.

It was a busy weekend at the house of rock. We had tons of visitors including Tim Baird, Tom & Mykal, Chad, James, Arianne, Charolette, Dave, Ben, emma, Joel, and Amy.

We did lots of rock climbing, and I’m excited to report that Jesse and I got first and third place in the rock climbing promotional contest, thus securing us over $800 in prizes.

Friday night Tim Baird came. it was good to see the dude and I learned that comedy central’s daily show webpage has hundreds of free videos online. We had some good laughs.

Saturday Tom and Mykal came and we cooked up a storm. 8 pounds of sloppy joes were made, as well as this amazing chocolate dessert:

appreciate the wonder.

Sunday, we had even more visitors. and more good times.

And just now, I got a call from my co-worker pete. who asked me to look out my window. And there was a giant turkey waddling by my window. I considered going to and chasing it to see if Ben’s claims are true… but I decided to just watch from a distance.

One of the guys here figured out how to apply images to the background of our 3D modeling software. now, I’m proud to say that all my models will be generated in deep space.

My job just got 10 times cooler.

there is now an official advertisement on my webpage. Call me what you will: sell out, cheap, whatever. This is simply my method to try and defray some of the costs of running the webpage.

So, if you’re bored. follow the advertisement on the bottom right of this page and buy stuff. I have no idea how much of your purchases will help this website, but we might as well give it a go.

Depending on what sort of successes I see over the next month, I may remove the ads. Right now it’s simply a trial.

Back in high school when I was playing with the tennis team, there was one particular time when I was really thirsty but I had forgotten my water bottle. So, as any intelligent tennis player would do, I emptied the tennis balls out of my plastic tennis ball holder (much like this) and proceeded to fill it with water.

Off I went out to the courts, played my game and went to drink the water. But it had the oddest taste. It kind of stuck in the back of my throat. Burning and itching just a little. The uncomfortableness lasted for quite some time and then faded.

For whatever reason, the water I’m drinking right now out of my water bottle has that exact same taste. But there’s no sign of tennis balls anywhere nearby. I can’t explain it.

I was chatting with the head of finance and happened to tell him about how the production manager sat me down for a quick how to on accounting so that I could better understand why they were throwing out a certain set of parts.

mike d: “I learned some accounting from Larry today.”
Jim: “oh no. what’d he teach you?”
mike d: “Just general stuff. perhaps I should just leave it at that.”
Jim: “that’s like my saying that I learned electrical engineering from my Bazooka gum comics.”

Mark: Carlos supposedly got the scar on his nose from being hit by a bat.
Jesse: That doesn’t suprise me.
Mark: Yeah, Carlos is a rough character.
Jesse: Though, he seems kind of fluffy. Do you know what I mean?
Mark: yeah, he does seem fluffy. but he’s definitely not fluffy.
Jesse: he’s got fluffy hair.
Mark: he grew up in the hood. he’s not fluffy underneath it all.
Jesse: well, it’s the kind of fluffy hair that you could hide a switchblade in.

This past weekend the boiler at the house of rock died. It met its watery doom late friday night, and today the sales guy came to try and sell us a new one.

New furnaces/boilers cost between 4 and 5 thousand dollars.

So, that puts a good dent in the piggy bank. Thankfully, we think that the new heating system will improve the value of the house by at least that amount.

Today, as one of the inspector guys was leaving, he noticed that our front screen door doesn’t have one of those slow down cylinders to prevent the door from whipping out in a violent spastic manner.

“you know you can get one of those at a hardware store.”
“yeah, we’ve just been busy with other stuff. It’s not high on our list”
“it would probably take 45 seconds to put on..”
“yup.”
“it’d cost you, like, three bucks.”
“probably.”
“It’s certainly better than breaking your door.”
“thanks.”

he’s right. but really, I tend not to worry so much about dampening the swing of the front screen door when the boiler is busy flooding the basement with furious angry water.