Last week's spinning wheels have been broken

So I was supposed to go out with coworkers tonight to watch the Red Sox. Unfortunately only a few people were in, and most of those that were backed out at the last minute so it got cancelled. Also, because of the Sox loss last Tuesday, they location was changed to somewhere on the Lower East Side, so the ease of bar hopping would have been greatly reduced. Oh well.

I suppose this could end up being ok since instead of eating greasy food and drinking lots of beer I came home and worked out. I thought my roommate might be coming home this evening so I elected to use my computer to play my workout music, which today was Bush's "Sixteen Stone." (Dave and I have pretty different tastes in music so I try to be nice and not subject him to my angry music if and when he's around.) For some strange reason, Media Player didn't recognize the file types on the CD. I'm hoping that in an effort to keep up with modern formats, I've updated Media Player to a point where it can't decode the files on the cd that is *cough*12*cough* years old. This seems unlikely to me however. Further investigation will occur this weekend.

Unfortunately, since I was planning on going out, all the meat I have in my apartment is frozen solid, and I hate using the microwave to defrost things so I decided to order pizza since I skipped my weekly Friday ritual of ordering pizza since I expensed dinner in CT. Later I think I'll go to Brother Jimmy's again for some karaoke, and drink beer. Let's consider the working out I did "preventative maintenance" for the greasy food and beer that I will be having anyway this evening.

Odds and ends.

Something else I forgot to mention about my road trip. I really like the atmosphere of the Bristol office and how much more laid back it is. People there just aren't that concerned about their perception of themselves and don’t worry about doing things like watching Star Wars at work or talking about things like cats ‘n’ racks.

I was planning on strolling around central park yesterday, just for the purpose of exploring, but then it occurred to me that I'm going to a wedding next weekend, and that it is generally the social custom to buy newly weds a gift, and not just to show up to congratulate them and get free dinner and drinks. (Speaking of which, I need to acquire wrapping paper since slumming it with newspaper I think would be a little tacky for a wedding.)

This led to my first trip to the Bronx (lets ignore the fact that I drove through the Bronx Friday) for a visit to Target. Later in the day I went out to Astoria to hang out a new friend of mine for a few drinks, making three boroughs in one day. I also discovered that the D train runs express late nights, which means I didn’t have to sit around and wait forever for the A train. Very convenient.

This morning I decided to rock the Starbucks breakfast. How far do you think you could walk with a frappachino in hand without taking a sip. Honostly, I barely got out the door, but then I resisted taking a nother sip until I was in my building. That's an 11 block walk resisting java chip goodness. Talk about an exercise in self conrol.

Bristol Road Trip

I wish I could do this every day!

Well my trip started this morning, thankfully what seemed to be after the main morning rush hour, so traffic was pretty light. I actually go lost leaving New York, for reason I will explain later, but I ended up getting lost in Yonkers (ha ha), but did the guy thing and didn't ask for directions, and ended up getting back to the highway I needed to be on. Hooray for having a good sense of direction (a rental car with a compass is also a plus). I ended up getting to Bristol a little early and stopped up by Building B where all the .com peeps are and making rounds and saying hi to everyone who hasn’t quit.

I was really looking forward to being able to expense my lunch; of course this just happened to be the one-day out of the year that the cafeteria in Bristol was free. This was due to Marriage Madness that was going down on campus. (For those of you who haven't turned into old men, there is an explanation of this here.) Anyway, I got my free lunch, and got to see the Gin Blossoms perform live. If you're saying "What? They're still together?" you're not alone. I said the same. I was actually more shocked when they announced a song as their "new single." Sure guys, good luck with that.

Anyway, my purpose for going to Bristol was a 4-hour orientation follow up meeting. I thought it was going to be a complete waste of my time like my first orientation meeting (because those are so useful when you're already worked for the company for a year and a half), but it was actually pretty good. The best part was when they asked about the pro's and con's of the hiring process. Oh wow was that a can of worms. I think almost everyone in the room hand good stuff to lay into HR about. My own personal disaster of getting hired coming just before I started blogging. They also gave out good practical career advice on how to do things like get raises. Very good all around.

Unfortunately, people weren't available to hang out with after work, but at least there was some interest from people. I can't get New York people to do tat unless I request that from everyone like a week ahead of time. I do miss working with people who you could jsut ask "hey, want to get a drink after work?" and actually get people to participate.

The drive back was very smooth, and I did it by reverse following the directions that got my lost on the way up to Bristol. I discovered the reason I got lost was that out of nowhere Parkway names just change, for no real apparent reason, which is why I got confused and lost. But at least it was a simple drive.

Now if only I knew people in NY I could go out and be social.

I can't think of a title

Ok, if you don’t care about web development, you may want to skip toe the second half of this blog.

So I've been teaching myself JavaScript so that should my boss a) quit or b) die I can be qualified for his position. I'm currently one chapter in my JS book away form legitimately putting JS and DHTML on my resume. Anyway, while doing one of the exercises, I ended up creating a page that worked fine in Firefox, but showed up as blank for some reason in IE. Now, something working in only one of the two browsers is fairly common. If something works in IE but is jacked in Firefox, it usually means you have sloppy code and IE is forgiving you for something like not closing a tag. If something works in Firefox and not IE, it usually means you wrote technically accurate code, but IE is trying to be "helpful" and ends up breaking itself because it's a shitty browser. Anyway, after this is done, one must find a way to make the give page look accurate in both browsers. So while debugging I cam across something that I had never seen before. I was importing an external JS file and neglected to close the tag, which apparently Firefox accepted, but broke IE. Of course, it's not like IE threw any specific errors, I just got a blank page which wasn't helpful and this took a few minutes to track down, but I digress. This is like a sign of the apocalypse or something. Sloppy code ALWAYS breaks in Firefox. This is a first. I just don't know what to say. Ok, enough technical babble.

Speaking of trying to make myself qualified for my boss' job, I am at a weird point in my life. I have less career direction at 24 than I did when I was 20. Maybe I was just naive then, but this is annoying, and I don't like it. I like a solid direction. We'll see what my feelings on this are when I start up actuarial studying again in the summer.

Tomorrow I'm taking a field trip up to Bristol for a follow up to orientation. I have a feeling this will be more or less completely pointless, but it will be nice to do something different besides hardcore studying of JS like I've done for the past 2 weeks. It'll be nice to see some of the people I used to work with in Bristol. I might even hang around and have a drink with them after work, because unlike my New York coworkers, they find it socially acceptable to hang out with each other outside of work.

I'm also looking forward to driving for the first time in 2.5 months; at least I will be once I get outside of the city. I'm also excited because I get to use my corporate card for the first time. Yay!

I just missed a great picture today when crossing the street on the way to Columbus circle. Both the stop and walk signals were on for the crossing signal. I crossed the street and then said, "Hey, I have a camera phone! This would make a good picture!" Of course when I crossed back to the other side it had been fixed and only one of the signals was on. Grrrr.. So close, yet so far away.

A momentous day

This is the first day of the year that I went to work without a jacket. This means that 3 weeks from now I'll be sick of summer and want it to be cold again. Of course, it is awfully convenient to nto have to carry a jacket around anywhere.

The wheels in my head are spinning

So I deleted my weekend's glorious post. It was a good one, but my roommate wanted me to take it down, even though he thought is was funny. I decided I should since a.) I'll be living with him for at least a year, and b.) he's the one I pay rent too, and who could legally throw me out if he had a halfway decent reason, so offending him isn’t too close to the top of my list of bright ideas.

Anyway I went to karaoke tonight; not at the local Coogan's, but at Brother Jimmy's which was recommended to me like a month ago by Kat. This was far superior to Coogan's. Better song selection, and a younger crowd. The average age of Brother Jimmy's was like only a year or 2 older than me, as opposed to at least 10 at Coogan's. This is also about 4 blocks up form where I watch Red Sox games every Tuesday with Coworkers. So, Tuesday's are going to become very expensive nights. Downsides were, every girl there seemed to either smoke or be gay, which pretty much kills either my desire to hit on them, or any chance I would have if I did. Of course, picking up a girl at a bar is not now, nor has it ever been my game. At least I wasn't hit on by any guys this time.

I hate you Time Warner

1 out. Runners on 2nd and 3rd. Big Papi at the plate. The cable cuts out, and my cable box has to reset. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR......

The return of Pascal!

Before I get started, I love the smell of spring rain. It's not quite as good in NYC as it was in CT, but I still love it.

Moving on.....


sober...

After recovering from my hangover yesterday (thankfully I drank a lot of water before I went to bed so it wasn't too bad), I went out with an old friend/acquaintance I knew from high school. We discovered each other through my space, and after about 8 years of pretty much forgetting the other existed we went out and had dinner and several beers. It was good times. Particularly since we both claim each other as our own friends and not friends of friends, or friends of coworkers etc. because mooching other people's friends just kinda sucks. Also, this is far and away the best reason to get a myspace account as far as I'm concerned. I'll admit now, that resisting for so long was just a silly idea.

In other news I'm getting a cold, probably because of the absurd amount of alcohol I consumed on Tuesday.

Speaking of Tuesday, it's good to see that drunken Garrett is a great entertainer. If you live in NYC, you need to bring me out, as I am a never-ending source entertainment (for better or for worse). I was thrilled to see new people posting comments. It makes me happy.

Workout music of the day: Tool - 10,000 Days

I need to bcome less metroe

Ok, from the start, this si s a less than sober blg. Maybe its just that gay men are more agressive. maye it jsut that i'm accepting of their lifestyle. but this needs to end. myabe its that fact that pokcets are right at another mans' cratch. It's now that i'm oposed to meetin other gusy, tis' just that i'd rather mmeet femalts. Or perhaprs haps stright guys that woudl at least have most of the smae intersts i do. OK, ;ets try psotive thinking. hokking up woudl nto be in my bewt interest because i need to get my ass up and go to work to mrrow.


fuck yo all. this unedited bgo has been brought to yo by, drunken nehteahnetn.

The girl next door

This is one of those fantasies/situations I think almost every male wishes he could just have the opportunity to be in at some point in his life. Well, guess what, it seems I am in said situation. I have now run into this girl twice, both times being just after either her jog or workout, so pretty much her most unattractive time, but she seems like she's be pretty cute. She also is apparently not the exhibitionist I am since her windows have blinds. Of course, by looking out my apartment window, it seemed my apartment was the only one within eyeshot that lacked blinds of any kind when I first moved in. I'll probably have to run into her a few more times before doing something like knocking on her door in order to not appear stalker-ish. Of course, my living room is set up in such a way that it looks straight into her apartment.

In other news, I'm actually doing something intelligent. Great, hopefully you've stopped laughing long enough to read the rest of this. I've been really tempted to start playing lacrosse again, but in an unusually high amount of reason, I have elected to wait for softball season, and make sure my shoulder is completely comfortable with a non-contact sport before I upgrade.

Also, for those of you interested in people WAY off the beaten path (literally), check out my friend Tim's blog. Tim is currently in Tanzania "learning Swahili and teaching English" while he waits to hear back from grad schools. Despite being close friends all through high school, we are horrible at keeping up with each other, so I just learned about this today. We're tight like that.

The quest for Shake and Bake

I probably just haven't been looking in the right places, but it does not seem possible to acquire shake and bake in New York City. My local Gristedes doesn't have it, but that's not really saying much. They usually only have about 85% of what I want, though over the course of a month I think that goes up to 90%. Whole Foods is off in the own little "au naturale" world so that's pretty much out of the question. I decided to take a little subway trip to the Food Emporium to see what results that could yield, but also no luck there either. However, I do believe that the Food Emporium will become my grocery store of choice, as it was large enough to have 95% of everything I could want, plus it was clean, and easier to move around in. Unfortunately I will be bound by old fashioned marinade (not that much of a sacrifice), and the quest for shake and bake will have to continue on.

Eliminated

It looked like it might be close, but alas, UVa was too much for the Irish Lacrosse team. We had too many unforced errors, and couldn't match the physical play of Virginia in out 14-10 loss. The game was not as close as it sounded, as we managed to add a few goals late after the game was pretty much decided. Though it was kinda nice that the other 5 people in the bar all seemed to be rooting for ND. Anyway, I really liked the way Virginia played. There were very physical and knew when to take shots, and always seemed to create quality scoring chances. Oh well. Hopefully the women will advance and they'll be on later in the tournament, even though women's lacrosse pales in comparison to men's.

Unfortunately its 7 on a Saturday night, and my evening is done :-(.

In other news, I still have yet to go to the 81st street subway station completely sober...

I need Domers and LAX fans now!

So I was checking the non main stream college sports today, and discovered that both men's and women's ND lacrosse teams are in the NCAA tournament. The men's game is even on TV this Saturday on ESPNU @ 3:30. Apparently ESPNU is like the one channel Time Warner decided not to pick up. So, I figured I'd finally get around to checking the local ND club in hopes that maybe there is some sort of game watch scheduled somewhere. Unfortunately this seems to not be the case. So, we try to google New York, Notre Dame, and bar. Nope, to many f-ing lawyers. Citysearch on sports bars. 2 results. OK, WTF? Sports bar? Nope. Sport Bar? Ah 20 results, now we're getting somewhere. Also, placed a phone call to Amy to see if she knew any good sports bars. Unfortunately she said no, but she did give me the name of the bar that apparently the ND football game watches are held at, so that is a viable option. Unfortunately Amy is unavailable to watch this with me. The only other domer I know in the city is the $4 girl so hopefully she can lend a hand.

People are strange creatures.

...they're probably even stranger in New York.

I'm taking the C train home, and I actually got to sit down. Rock on. The bench across from me has 2 people sitting on it. One to my far right, and another more or less in the middle. A woman gets on and starts by sitting at the far left, a logical thing to do. It keeps the bench balanced, and it allows everyone the maximum amount of personal space. Apparently however, this woman was not satisfied with this location, and slid about one body space to her left, putting her about a foot away from the woman in the middle of the bench. The slider seems to be looking at the middle woman's newspaper. However, the middle woman catches on to the encroachment upon her personal bubble and turns to give the slider a look of "what the hell are you doing?" The slider simultaneously starts looking off into space like she's been on the train all day long. The woman reading the newspaper then does a slight to her left to regain an acceptable amount of personal bubble.

I love people watching. They're so bizarre.

I need to stop watching baseball

This is painful to admit, but I'm afraid it must be done. The Red Sox are now 1-4 when I watch them on TV. 0-4 when I watch them in my apartment. This is not a good trend.

I am not original.

If I was capable of lots of original clever thought, I wouldn't have majored in math.

So without further ado, a blog with hardly anything I thought up on my own.

...brought to you by, Tanyon Sturtze (1).

So I was going to secure my loserdom and go to an event for new New Yorker’s I found through meetup.org, but backed out at the last second because a bunch of coworkers were getting together to watch the Sox vs. the Yankees. I must say I am pleasantly surprised by the solid contingent of Red Sox fans that I work with.

Quote of the night - "Oh yeah, she's came straight from a pole" - a coworker (name escapes me at the moment) in reference to Johnny Damon's current wife (2). That came before even started drinking.

Anyway, it was a good game to watch, particularly since the Sox crushed the Yankees. I also may need to retract a statement I made in a previous blog that everyone I work with sucks (sorry for not linking to it, but I don't remember which one it was, and I’m not about to read 2 months worth of bogs to find it). Perhaps I just need to find the right crowd who appreciates ridiculous drunken revelry.

I have been to the 81st station on 8th avenue 3 times. Not once have I been completely sober.

Before I forget, I need to post this link which I stole from my friend Lisa's profile (3). Uh, I guess honesty is the best policy?

OK, that was only 3 things that weren’t actually mine. That wasn't as bad as I thought.

Time management

So I got home form work today and read a few blogs and noticed I had a voicemail. I might have noticed this sooner, except that for some reason I only feel my phone vibrate like half the time. Anyway it ended up being one of my mother's friends. Uh, ok, I'll return this to figure out where the hell this is going. Turns out her daughter who is about to graduate wants to work at ESPN, and she wants general job advice blah blah. My job title shortens to Ass. Prod. I have no pull anywhere, so I gave her the "suck it up and tough it out for a while" message and that seemed to satisfy here. I was going to work out afterwards but I discovered my gym shorts were buried in my laundry bag because of my failed attempt to do laundry yesterday. Feeling too lazy at this point in time, I elected to start my TV dinner and get the laundry going. I also wanted to play video games because...

I also got my old school dark forces video game today. I used to have it back in the day when my parents had an uber shitty Mac that couldn't handle the game. The version I got is for playstation. Its a bit quirky with the PS2 but it works. It is amazing how far graphics have come in 10 years though.

Also, because I'm a klepto, I'm stealing this from Carolyn's away message. Consider my employer, I probably shouldn't post this link, but meh, its funny, and I probably find funnier because of who I work for.

"I broke your heart. Here's 4 dollars."

So I contacted my ex-girlfriend Kat today and asked her if she wanted to go out and grab a cup of coffee or something. I did this for a couple of reasons. First, to stop stalking her through her blog and actually have real contact with her, and second, to make sure I didn't come across her some time I was drunk, since there was a possibility of me (albeit undeserved 2 years later) tearing her a new one. Anyway, we hung out for a while, and then decided to go to a wine bar, where we probably both drank the equivalent of an entire bottle of wine.

Anyway, I think we done with blog stalking, and will be able to talk to each other like civilized adults henceforth. Also, for those of you wondering, when we were paying our bill at the wine bar, that is what she said to me. We found it absolutely hilarious, but maybe you had to be there for it.

Loose Ends

Ok, the Thursday review. "A City by the Light Divided" is another solid effort from Thursday. My biggest complaint is that it sounds a little too "produced" which seems to have taken off a little bit of the edge Thursday normally has had. I also feel that it takes away some of the raw emotion that past albums have, which is what really draws me into a CD. However top to bottom it is a very good disk. Overall, I say 4 stars out of 5.

There is something oddly alluring about riding in the front of a subway train and watching everything the train conductor sees. On a related note, I'm going to be really disappointed when the trains return to "normal" and the C doesn't run express from 59th to 145th street anymore during week.

I got a new router today, so now I can actually use my laptop in my apartment. Yeah!

After reading away messages today (because despite being 2 years removed from college I still can't stop reading everyone's) I remembered the Kentucky Derby is today. There is a very high probability of me missing it. Particularly since I hate the pomp and circumstance before hand, and I would need to time things just right to look at the horses run in a circle. Rah.

Bad Hair

There is a security guard in my office that could quite possibly have the worst hair of all time. Unfortunately I don't have photo evidence (I'll try to sneak a camera phone shot of it next time), so I will have to do my best to describe it. Lets start with a base of long an frizzy. Now, flip it over head Flock of Seagulls style. Now, at your forehead, flip it back over towards the back of your head, and just start layering it back and forth until you run out of hair. I really just want to go up to this woman and put my hand on her shoulder and say "Listen honey, at no point in human history has your hairstyle ever been in fashion. In fact if you want my advice, I'd say shave it off and start from scratch, because something clearly went horribly wrong during your hair's history."

On a related note, I need to get a haircut. There's is a salon right across the street form my office where I got it done the first time in the city, and I was satisfied with the results. Unfortunately, I'm incredibly absent minded, so I may have to go another week of forgetting before I actually get this done.

New Music!

Ok, if you don't like my taste in music, you can probably skip this entry.

First up: Tool - "10,000 Days" Since Tool is arguably my second favorite band I am a little biased, but I am impressed, but not wow-ed...yet. This album seems a little less melodic than past albums, and a little bit darker (if that's possible). I do like that they have not tried to copy their past sound, and they just keep moving forward. I give it 4 stars out of 5.

Second up: Avenged Sevenfold - "City of Evil" They definitely released the two best tracks of this CD ("Beast & the Harlot" and "Bat Country"). I just started getting into them recently. More or less a straight up metal band, but their lead singer can actually sing, and well, I'm a sucker for that. I was hoping there would be some more tunes that were as catchy so the 2 I previously mentioned, but none seem to be. Its definitely not a purchase I'll regret, but I'll probably stick to mp3's for these guys in the future. I give it 3 stars out of 5.

On a side note, I need to find a mom and pop record store. I had one in CT that was very loyal too. I've walked past a few in my neighborhood, but they don't exactly specialize in CD's in English. I also don't think there are too many rock kids in the Dominican and Puerto Rican communities.

Third up: Thursday - "A City by the Light Divided" #@$%$#@%$#@%$ CD wouldn't play in my laptop. I initially ripped it to my work computer (since it's an enhanced CD and I just prefer to avoid the autostart feature enhanced CD's have) and it sounded all scratchy. I then listed to the disk directly and it had the same problem. I listed to a bit on a coworker's computer and it was fine. I'm listening to it on my roommate's stereo now and it is playing fine, so I guess it's just my laptop. Very annoying. I'll review this in a few days when I've had a chance to listen to it a couple times.

...and a good week continues

Day started for me at about 9:15 when I, uh, woke up. (Way to set the alarm shithead). Threw myself together and managed to make it to work by 10.....ish. Had lunch with my "mentor" which is really just a good excuse to get to know someone else in the company and then pass off lunch as a business expense. The downside of waking up late for work (besides having to skip breakfast, yeah, I have my priorities straight) is that I was hoping to get to the record store and buy new music and rock out all day long to new Tool and new Thursday. Unfortunately this didn't happen so I figured I'd pick them up after work. However, someone in my office actually remembered by existence and invited me to come out with a couple other Red Sox fans to watch the Sox/Yanks game. Unfortunately it got rained out, but it was nice to go out to dinner (2 nights in a row bitches!). Again, where is this on the weekend? In the long run it was better for the game to get rained out since the Sox got their asses kicked last week against the Indians when I watched them. Also, I actually met and had a conversation with the one other guy in my office the lives up near my neck of the woods.

Let's keep this train rollin'!

It's sad when Monday blows away your entire weekend.

Yup, today pretty much blew my weekend out of the water. It's kinda sad when Monday turns into a good thing. Anyway, the first high point of the day was when several coworkers and I went to check out David Blaine doing something stupid in Lincoln Center during lunch. While we were walking there, I happened to catch my freshman year roommate as he was about to get on a bus. Talk about random, but cool. So he ended up saying screw the bus and we hung out at lunch. In more good news, I have someone I can hang out with in the city. Sweet.

The second high point happened when my SMC friend called me back (only took 3 days) and asked if I wanted to go out to dinner. Given the choice between working out and rocking the TV dinner, and going out with Amy, this wasn't a hard decision, so I took a trip out to Brooklyn for a meal. Good stuff.

But damn, why can't this shit happen on a weekend?